The Gentleman Poet

The Gentleman Poet: A Novel of Love, Danger, and Shakespeare's The Tempest
By Kathryn Johnson (324 pages)
Published by Avon
Bookish rating: 3.75

Bookish ethics require me to disclose that I took a writing course with the author of this novel, which may have affected my impression and subsequent review of it.

Set in 1609, our heroine Miranda--a servant of a bitchy lady--is thrust into a storm on her way to Virginia. (The storm scene is fantastic.) They end up in the Bermudas, and there she takes on the role of cook for the stranded, making the most of her cookery knowledge and the stuff the islands contain.

Meanwhile, she is wooed by a guy named Thomas (whom she shuns), and she develops a friendship with a poet traveling under a different name but whom she learns is Shakespeare.

The Shakespeare aspect is a central part of the novel, but the reader is already completely aware that this man is Shakespeare, so it seems like forever until Miranda figures it out and following her train of thought when you already know where she needs to get to gets a little tiresome. The same issue occurs for her romance with Thomas, but hey, that's just the nature of romance.

That said, the stranded-on-a-deserted-island idea is extremely common, but Johnson's version is genuinely original. The characters aren't stereotypical, the language has a historical cadence without old timey cheese or being overdone, and the text is obviously carefully crafted (if a tad on the bland side) and well researched.

Recommended for anyone with an interest in Shakespeare who is seeking a fun what-if sort of read.

Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne

Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne
By David Starkey (400 pages)
Published by Harper Perennial
Bookish rating: 3.75

One can't spend all her reading time consuming fiction, even if it's literary (or not). No, one must occasionally read nonfiction and glean a fact or two, a sense of a historical era, a grasp of how many freaking people Queen Mary burned for heresy.

Like most, this Protestant ain't a big fan of Queen Mary.

But Elizabeth? Oh, we all love Elizabeth, don't we?

This biography of Elizabeth I is smart, a tad spunky, and deeply researched, but it's also intended for a non-academic audience. It's not a textbook. It does not have the logo of a university press on its spine. It's price point is that of your average paperback.

The text is well written and Starkey successfully gives us a non-romanticized glimpse of Elizabeth. He portrays her as the historical evidence reflects her, which is hugely intelligent, politically calculating, genuinely religious, and probably insanely intimidating. We get a sense of her childhood and relationship to Henry VIII, and even her mother Anne Boleyn. Before, you know, her dad had her mom's head chopped off.

As the book's subtitle suggests, the vast majority of the biography focuses on Elizabeth's path to the throne, which was exactly what I was looking for. Her coronation wasn't easy--or a given, that much I knew. But all that in-between stuff, from Henry VIII's death to Elizabeth's rule was unclear to me. So, I got filled in.

The text isn't a fast read--history rarely is, at least for me--but I'd recommend it to anyone who fancies all that is Elizabethan.

All Souls

All Souls
By Christine Schutt (240 pages)
Published by Harcourt
Bookish rating: 4

Set in 1997 at a prestigious private girls' school in Manhattan, the senior class of 40 girls, plus some teachers, cope with a classmate's rare form of cancer, along with their own angst.

Yes, this is yet another prep school drama, but who doesn't love that genre? This is a very carefully crafted novel--the writing is original, pitch-perfect, and just disjointed enough to make exactly the right point in a non-cliched way. One of my favorite lines was: "Lisa Van de Ven said, 'I can't wait to get out of here.' Then she said college as if she were making a wish, and she shut her eyes" (p. 207). I mean, public or private school, who among us didn't imbue that blessed word with such hope and importance her senior year of high school? Hmmm?

We meet a wide cast of characters, each believable and uniquely drawn. The insecurity of girls is presented in a fresh, poignant way, along with their teachers. Ultimately, the novel feels as though it's written from the teacher's point of view, for better or worse. I think it works, though some of the girlishness and spurts of playfulness that make these girls likeable is portrayed in a sort of wry, distanced way---like: oh, those naive girls listing their inside jokes in the yearbook and getting all emotional at the end of the year, so sweetly silly.

Overall, a huge contribution to the prep school drama genre. Recommended.

The Woman in Black

The Woman in Black
By Susan Hill (164 pages)
Published by Vintage
Bookish rating: 4

I managed to squeeze in one more spooky book before Halloween. The Woman in Black is a the best, most classic type of gothic chiller. The creepiness occurs less in what we see and more in what we don't. Like our narrator, Hill lets our imagination get the best of us--in a very good way.

Arthur Kipps must tend to the estate of an old (now dead) woman who lives way past civilization in a mansion on some goopy marshes. Hauntings begin, of course. Sounds, sightings, general dread and creepiness.

During the book's climax, I was reading while feeding Lorelei in a dimly lit room, as wind and rain pelted and rattled the windows. It was dark outside. Chris had gone to the store with Charlotte, so we were alone and. . . . I might have had to set the book down once or twice to settle my nerves. That's awesome writing, my friends.

This is the perfect sort of pre-Halloween read to get you in the mood for stormy weather (oh, hello, Hurricane Sandy) and spooky autumn atmosphere. Recommended!

The Leftovers

The Leftovers
By Tom Perrotta (355 pages)
Published by St. Martin's Press
Bookish rating: 4.25

This is my first Tom Perrotta novel, and I'm a fan. The Leftovers sort of satarizes a typical suburban family after a rapture-like event takes over the globe, in which people just vanish. Of course, it's not the real rapture, as a bunch of good Christians are left behind, scratching their heads. Nobody can explain it, oodles of cults pop up, and the world sort of kind of moves on. Or tries to.

So, we meet Kevin, the patriarch of his little family who later becomes mayor of Mapleton; mom-and-wife Laurie, who abandons her family to join a wacky cult; older child Tom, who drops out of college and joins the following of a questionable, self-proclaimed prophet with a penchant for child brides; and Jill, the straight-A student now struggling at school and doing charming things with guys in dorm-drama-like scenarios.

We also meet Kevin's love interest, who lost her entire family in the non-rapture. She's by far the msot interesting and heartbreaking character.

Perrotta has an amazing ability to sum up the complex, layered, and often ridiculous nuances of suburban family life--such as the mom who views each task in her day as grains of sand, taking up time, rushing her to uncomfortable efficiency, whether she's vacuuming or having sex, or a 4-year-old's insistence on drinking apple juice in a cup without a lid, letting her, and then going nutso with a touch of profanity when she inevitably spills it--and nobody makes a move to clean it up, assuming Mommy will do it. At the same time, the novel is most definitely comic, poking fun at suburbia with such tiny details as a mom exaggeratedly waving her hand in front of her face near a smoker.

This tension between satire and heart creates a fascinating result: a novel simultaneously deeply amusing, insightful, and utterly heartbreaking. I don't quite know how Perrotta did it--the writing is unlike anything I've come across in a long, long time---perhaps ever.

Highly recommended.

The Hangman's Daughter

The Hangman's Daughter
By Oliver Potzsch (448 pages)
Published by AmazonCrossing
Bookish rating: 3.25

I read this book for two reasons. First, the premise seemed interesting: a series of murders in a small, 17th-century German village lead to accusations of witchcraft. Second, this was a wildly successful translation (from German) that Amazon's international publishing imprint, AmazonCrossing, bought and published. Since much of what Amazon publishes is cheaply (or freely) acquired, I was super interested to gauge the quality of  a bestseller.

Meh. The plot is good enough and the idea of humanizing and going into the head of a hangman is an interesting approach. Potzsch gives a good flavor of the town and its politics, and overall the novel isn't bad. However, the writing is bland and often cliched, which could be partially due to the translation. Hard to say, since I didn't read the original German version. Plus, you know, I can't read German. An excessive! use! of! exclamation! points! often makes the novel seem overdone, with a Batman-like (wham! bang!) cheese factor, especially with dialogue.

Some scenes are genuinely scary, such as when the so-called "devil" sneaks into a sick child's room to kill her (she escapes), and the "witch" torture scenes are blessedly not needlessly gratuitous--torture for the sake of drama and gore instead of plot movement is one of my pet peeves. Potzsch balances this very well, considering the village hangman (who's in charge of getting confessions via torture) is the main character and accusations of witchcraft abound.

In short, the novel is okay. Not bad, not great. I doubt I'll read the sequel.

Book of Shadows

Book of Shadows
By Alexandra Sokoloff (320 pages)
Published by St. Martin's Press
Bookish rating: 3.75

Well, it's October and that means it's time for spooky, scary stories, no?

I discovered Sokoloff's thriller and somewhat demonic writing while at a huge publishing expo I attended for work. In the exhibition hall, publishers literally hand you books (ahead of print). I was wandering along and a marketing guy literally pulled me aside and said I looked like their demographic (I was youthfully in my mid-20s at the time) and said I should read this spiffy new book, The Harrowing. The author, Sokoloff, was there and she signed the book for me. I was too shy to explain that thrillers ain't really my thing, so I left with the signed book and it sat on my shelf for a year or two.

For whatever autumnal reason, I got in the mood for something dark, picked the book and loved it. It was bubble gum entertainment, but well done spooky bubble gum entertainment. A win.

So, I picked up my second Sokoloff novel, Book of Shadows. In Boston, a wealthy college girl is murdered in what seems like a satanic ritual. Ruh-roh. We get the story from the point of view of one of the embittered detectives, which works fine. The plotting and pacing are very good and the writing is tight and not cheesy. (I hate cheesiness when it comes to whodunnits or thrillers or investigative whatever--I can't even be in the same room as an NCIS episode because I roll my eyes and editorialize too much, driving Chris batty).

The book is dark, gruesome, genuinely scary, and engrossing. Everything you'd want from a mid-October read.