The Winter Sea

The Winter Sea
By Susanna Kearsley (527 pages)
Published by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Bookish rating: 4

The Winter Sea is a quasi-historical novel, jumping between 18th-century Scotland and the Jacobites aiming to restore King James to the throne, and current-day drama in the same place--a castle, Slains, on the Scotland coast where an author, Carrie, researches her next novel. As she dwells near Slains, she finds herself writing her novel as though she has her heroine's memories.

Kearsley gives an absorbing sense of time (both time periods, that is) and place, and you can just hear the cadence of a Scottish accent (and not just from the SUPER Scottish folk) in her writing and dialogue.

The drama is broad and sweeping, and the romance avoids total cheese. Plots twists genuinely surprised me, and the last quarter of the book was particularly well done.

Not a perfect novel, though: Carrie's voice was a tad generic for me, and there were A LOT of information dumps, where modern-day historians and experts just "dumped" massive amounts of history and context on the reader, in the guise dialogue and conversation. Kearsley could've gotten away with some of this and flown under the heavy sigh radar, but it happen so often that I got kind of annoyed. These information dumps also made it difficult to stay connected to the story and determine which historical details I needed to remember.

But a very good, read-by-the-fire sort of book. This was my first Susanna Kearsley novel, and I plan to read others. Recommended.

Envy

Envy
By Anna Godbersen (432 pages)
Published by HarperCollins
Bookish rating: 4

Envy is the third book in Godbersen's Luxe series, a historical young adult series that I'm a little embarrassed to enjoy to the extent that I do. The story is bubblegum, the characters are jerks and seem to be modern-day folks put into pretty ball gowns and white ties with tails, but you know what?

I totally love reading these books.

Envy is, actually, very well written. Godbersen conveys a very clear sense of time and place, from Manhattan to Florida (our characters take a little jaunt south in book 3.) True, I'm not super comfortable with the "young adult" designation, as the characters, three books in after all, deal with marital strife and their conniving reaches new levels usually saved for your grandma's soap opera, but at the same time, it being 1900 in Manhattan, the characters are, well, teenagers. Folks got married off very, very young.

The fact that the series ranks among the New York Times bestsellers tells me that, pragmatically,  the young adult genre has plenty of room for the Luxe series. So there's that.

One quibble: In Florida, Godbersen makes much of the fact that on the beach, people wear their historically accurate "swimming costumes" with chaperone patrolling the beach for any impropriety. And yet, after evening drama, there two separate instances where a heroine runs, angst-filled, onto the beach or grass, and Godbersen describes sand or blades of grass between toes.

Proper attire, I assure you, demanded stockings. Even in Florida. This was 1900, y'all.

The series includes one final book, and you're kidding yourself if you think I don't have book 4 on my nightstand. Envy is a strong third book, easily carrying us with lots oomph to book 4. Recommended.

The Winter Palace

The Winter Palace
By Eva Stachniak (440 pages)
Published by Batam
Bookish rating: 4

If you're a fan of royal intrigue but a smidge tired of Henry VIII and his merry wives, The Winter Palace delivers an entertaining story of Russia's (German-born) Catherine the Great's rise to power.

Told through the viewpoint of an orphaned palace spy, young Varvara, we see Catherine's story, and Varvara's story, too. This was a book club book, and some group members got miffed that the story was really Catherine's and thus told too distantly by Varvara, and they also argued that the relationship between the two women wasn't believable (for the record, I bought it as believable).

As I told the groupies, I didn't have much of a problem with these two (potential) flaws, and maybe it's the fact that I have so little time to read these days (5-month-old, 3-year-old, and a full-time job--need I say more?),  so temporary imaginative flights into imperial Russia with its sleighs and ornate gowns and spies were enjoyable enough for me to overlook possible shortcomings (and if this is the case, my literary criticism quality just plunged). Or, maybe I just disagree with them.

Overall, a good book. Yes, it gets a little aimless as we wait for the coup, and this novel being steeped in an actual royal coup means we have a lot of history to get through, which doesn't always lend itself to the most desirable plotting or pace. But the novel is written well, the language is lovely, and aside from some of the "then this happened" aspect of the history, I found The Winter Palace absorbing and worth reading.

So there.