What Would Scarlett Do?

A few months back, a new release by Leila Meacham called Roses caught our attention and we rushed to download the book on to the nefarious Amazonian Devil Device.  A Reader's Respite then promptly forgot all about it.  We do this far too frequently these days.  Perhaps it's the booze a degenerative brain disorder caused by mold and dust in old books.  Whatever the cause, the result is dozens and dozens of books purchased and then forgotten about, unread, until we stumble across them months - even years - later and find ourselves scratching our head and wonderding, "Now why the hell did we buy that?"

Anyhoo, we recently stumbled across Meacham's Roses and figured we'd better read it quick before Amazon comes up with some small print that allows them to randomly delete unread books from the Kindle.  (We're pretty sure that's coming, but we'll save our rant for another post.)

The story is one of those big ol' family sagas that cover a few generations of the same families.  Set in Texas (isn't it an obscure literary rule that family sagas MUST take place in Texas?) in the early 1900s, the story follows three families in a small town --- their fortunes, their losses, their loves, their tragedies, two world wars (and one in Korea thrown in for good measure).  You get the picture.  We've heard it compared to The Thorn Birds and Gone With the Wind.

Meacham gets the saga part right, no doubt about it.  Mary Tolliver, Percy Warwick and Ollie DuMont make for a perfect love triangle as the saga plays out....affairs, misunderstandings, untimely deaths.  Meacham writes supremely well and gives us no cause for complaint.

So why didn't we like this novel?

Mary Tolliver.  We hated her.  It's impossible to like a character who makes stupid decisions for stupid reasons.  We wanted to crawl into the pages and slap that woman silly.  And all her descendants, too.  The Tolliver Curse we kept hearing about throughout the book?  We'll tell you what that curse was:  stupidity.

Like Scarlett O'Hara, Mary had a love of the land and her family plantation...a love that eclipsed all common sense and rational thinking.  So why did Mary drive us crazy and Scarlett endear us?  Because Scarlett had a compelling reason - twisted, but compelling - for every action she took.  We understood Scarlett.  We may have been frustrated, but we always understood her.

So what would Scarlett have done in Roses?

She would have dumped the cotton as soon as it was no longer profitable, turned the plantation into a money making machine, shot Percy's dumb-ass wife to get her out of the way, married him and then made his sorry-assed life miserable while she reaped the rewards.  No whining.

Scarlett rocks.

New American Historical Fiction

A Reader's Respite struggles with American historical fiction.  Let's face it, 233 years isn't very much to draw from.  So historical fiction set in America is usually lumped in the Western genre or tends to romanticize the Civil War.

Author Kathleen Grissom, though, chose to set her novel entitled The Kitchen House on a small Virginia tobacco plantation in years 1791 through 1810, which we found unique and intriguing.  The story is told from the point of view of two women: Lavinia, an Irish indentured servant girl, and Belle, the mulatto daughter of the plantation owner.

Grissom opens the novel with a terrifying prologue, then skips back ten years to recount the events that led up to the prologue.  She tells the story via Lavinia and Belle in alternating chapters.  A Reader's Respite enjoyed this technique for the most part, although we soon were keenly aware that Belle's chapters were significantly shorter than Lavinia's chapters - and for no discernible reason, which gave a slightly one-sided feel to the novel.

The great crux of the story is one giant family secret that leads to assumptions which leads to tragedy.  While that is a fantastic premise, the principle characters had 384 pages and countless opportunities to correct the wrong assumptions.  Of course they didn't and that's what furthered the plot, but this became slightly frustrating after 200 pages or so. 

Aside from that, Grissom clearly excels at characterization.  Motivations are key to understanding characters in this novel and the development of each character pushes the plot along at a nice pace.

Don't look for national politics or events of the time to play a large role in this story.  Rather, it is a microcosm of a society that justifies slavery of fellow human beings and the unavoidable fall-out that must follow.

Not a great novel, but a good one and we do recommend it.

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Sound like something you'd be interested in reading?  Leave us a comment and on February 23rd, we'll draw one random winner to receive our every-so-slightly used copy, which came to us from the publisher.  And that, my friends, is a FTC disclosure and a giveaway in one sentence.  A Reader's Respite excels at multi-tasking.

Witchy Woman

Witches. Salem. It all just is so Halloween-ish, we can hardly stand it.

Back at the beginning of June this year, the publisher Voice released this Katherine Howe book called The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, a competent novel about a New England graduate student in history who stumbles upon a reference to a heretofore unknown book of spells from the era of the Salem witch trials.

The novel fluctuates between the present-day digging of Connie, the likable graduate student in question and flashbacks to Deliverance Dane, the colonial author of this book of spells.

Now we've read some "meh" reviews of this one, but to tell the truth, A Reader's Respite really enjoyed the novel. We recognize that it won't be winning the Booker Prize, but the story was engaging and plausible. We especially enjoyed Howe's treatment of the Salem "witches."

The paperback version of this book is due to be released on April 5th. In our opinion, if the publisher had any sense at all, they'd wait until October 1 of next year for that release. But what do we know?

Anyway, if you're in the mood for a non-gory, Halloween-ish, witchy, American historical fiction read this holiday, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane might just fit the bill. Keep it in mind.

Review: Etta

Etta: A Novel, by Gerald Kolpan


American historical fiction is a tricky genre. For one thing, there isn't too much American history to choose from. Two hundred years is a relatively short time frame and when much of that period was taken up by western expansion, you end up with a lot of novels grouped under the Western genre heading.

Not that there's anything wrong with westerns, it's just that rarely do historical fiction fanatics make this crossover. (Although if you ever decide you might want to give it a try, just ask A Reader's Respite and we'll be happy to recommend a couple that might just change your persepective!)

So what makes a novel a western and what makes a novel American historical fiction? Not simply the setting, that's for certain. After all, you can take a story about a lone woman trying to make it on her own on the American frontier, throw in a handsome guy and bingo, it becomes a romance.

Gerald Kolpan's debut novel, Etta, might have been just another western or frontier romance book but for one thing: Etta Place was an actual person.

Those of you familiar with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are bound to recognize her: Etta Place was Sundance's girl (possibly wife?). One thing is for certain, Kolpan couldn't have found a character more laced with possiblity.

Try not to lament over how young Newman and Redford are in this shot.



Very little is known about the real Etta Place, other than she did indeed exist. There's even a photo of her and Sundance. We know she was a member of Cassidy's Hole in the Wall Gang and a pretty darned good outlaw. But eyewitness accounts of the day also say that she was an incredibly refined woman with the manners and bearing of a well-bred young woman of wealth.


Sundance and Etta


But aside from this, nothing is known about Etta. Readers had to wait for Kolpan to come along, fill in the blanks with his rich imagination and give us Etta's story.

The story is beautifully presented and Kolpan's suppositions are surprisingly plausible. The journey from Etta's priviledged upbringing to a tough Hole in the Wall gang member is seamless and her great love with Sundance is both delicate and gritty, befitting the times.

If we had any complaints, it would have be the brevity of Butch, Sundance and Etta's time in South America. As the story drew to a close, it's as if Kolpan wanted to fit too much information in too few pages and the result was a slightly hurried ending that could have been more fleshed out.

But that complaint shouldn't stop you from reading Etta. It is a fabulous example of just how good American historical fiction can be....even if the cover suffers woman-with-her-head-cut-off-syndrome.



Want to read it? Leave me a comment saying so and A Reader's Respite will draw a random winner on Sunday! (International entrants are just fine by us!)


Title: Etta: A Novel
Author: Gerald Kaplan
ISBN-13: 978-0345503688
336 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Date: March 24, 2009


More reviews for you to peruse:

Literary License, On My Bookshelf, Exiled at the Beach Book Reviews,Worducopia (with My Friend Amy), Medieval Bookworm, Book Lites, mybookdb, On the Same Page, stitch and bear, Literate Housewife Review, Breaking the Fourth Wall, The Right Book at the Right Time, Booking Mama, Book Chase, Somewhat Bookish, The Printed Page