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.