Edward Meopian’s life is never easy. His mother dies before he goes to high school and his father has a hard time expressing his love. Edward is uncomfortable at school and it only gets worse when his father enters him into a prestigious private institution with the kids of famous people, especially given that he doesn’t even know how to tie his tie. Edward learns, though, and through this book we follow his life, through college, love affairs, strange jobs, and even fatherhood.
One thing I have loved in reading many of Mr. Meeks’ stories is the humanity of his characters. You can always feel for these people. In this novel, Edward is no exception, and in fact, he echoes the experience of many. He remains in the background for most of his early years, struggling with bullying and confusion over girls, especially given his raging adolescent hormones. Through college, he decides what he wants to be, but the path there isn’t easy or conventional. While on his unexpected detours, Edward figures out who he is and begins to achieve, but he still isn’t perfect, because no one can be. This book echoes the unpredictability of life in a way that will resonate with anyone who has ever been a little lost. I also think the time gaps were handled very well in this novel. For obvious reasons, we skip ahead every so often, but it was very easy to know how much time had passed and I never felt I was missing out on anything.
I think I was most amused by Edward’s adolescent years, particularly his struggle with girls. He doesn’t understand them at all but is mainly fixated on sex in a very believable teenage way. I’ll admit that I found this section hilarious. I can’t know what goes in the mind of a teenage boy, but I suspect the author has a better idea.
Overall, I enjoyed very much reading about the ups and downs of Edward Meopian’s fictional life. Christopher Meeks captures life’s unpredictability while retaining a message of the hope that inspires us all. I’m very pleased to say that I highly recommend this book. I think we can all find a little bit of ourselves in Edward.
“On June 9, 1865, while traveling by train to London with his secret mistress, fifty-three-year-old Charles Dickens – at the height of his powers and popularity, the most famous and successful novelist in the world and perhaps in the history of the world – hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever.
Did Dickens begin living a dark double life after the accident? Were his nightly forays into the worst slums of London and his deepending obsession with corpses, crypts, murder, opium dens, the use of lime pits to dissolve bodies, and a hidden subterranean London mere research … or something more terrifying?”
First off, I love fiction featuring my favorite authors. Considering I don’t like to know much about their lives, that’s probably weird, but I find it gives me a bit of an attachment to them right before I start off, and there’s something about watching them live again that makes it all very enticing. This is even more the case in the Victorian period because this is my absolute favorite point in literature and it just doesn’t get any better. Even more exciting, this book is narrated by Wilkie Collins, who is sadly left off many curricula because I don’t think he’s enough of a “classic” for most teachers. Regardless, I loved The Moonstone AND The Woman in White, so I was all set for this book, and it didn’t disappoint me.
I found the mystery really intriguing. Obviously, there are no ghostlike guys named Drood walking around in actual London, but this works very well as a spooky, supernatural thriller which makes you wonder what parts are real and what parts are made up. At one point, the novel moves seamlessly into a dream and had me going, “OMG!” until the author stepped back a bit and made just what was going on a little bit clearer. I thought the plot was very well-crafted, especially for such a long book. This one clocks in at 773 pages, which is much bigger than anything I’ve read in a while. I will admit that I felt sort of bogged down by its length, but I think that’s more down to my anxiety towards slimming down my TBR pile than anything wrong with the book.
I really enjoyed the characterizations as well. One can easily imagine poor Wilkie standing in the shadow of the mighty Charles Dickens, one of few brilliant authors to achieve greatness while alive, feeling sorry for himself while still admiring his talented friend. I loved describing Dickens as “the Inimitable” and overall I felt that his fictional character here was about how I’d imagined him in my head. Also fascinating were the descriptions of his readings. I’d be really intrigued to know how close these depictions are to what really happened. We must have accounts of them somewhere. I think it would be truly amazing were he to be so active despite his advancing years.
This novel is just so huge that it’s very difficult to review! I would certainly recommend it though. It’s engrossing and a fabulous way to spend some time. I’d particularly say that you should read it if you love 19th century fiction, though.
I do tend to think I collect books. I like to own them. I think it’s because I’m a re-reader at heart, even if I don’t have much time for doing so these days. I might want to read them again, and then I will have the ones I liked nearby. As for the rest, I’m not too picky about what exactly I’m collecting. I don’t keep a special edition of certain books just to have a good one. My mother does this and I’ve never quite understood. Books are made for reading, not sitting prettily on a shelf. I even prefer paperbacks because they’re easier to read. Hardcovers may look nicer, but I want to be able to enjoy the story. I love older books, but at the moment I’m happy to let them exist in the library where they belong, unless of course they are being sold for 20p, at which point I consider it my duty to save them from recycling.
I do love books that are signed by the author, though. I’ve only been to a single book signing and it was a mandatory one of a book I didn’t like in college. Every year, they send a free book to all incoming undergraduates to read and then have the author speak at orientation. Great idea, and the book wasn’t that bad, but the fact that the author’s presentation consisted mostly of him reading the book over again in a monotone voice put me off ever looking at it again. I have a number of books and ARCs that have been signed by authors which I received in the mail, though, and I love those. It’s one of my favorite parts of book blogging, especially when one of those authors is one of my favorites.
In a naturally beautiful town in Pennyslvania, the steel industry has fallen. Factories are abandoned everywhere and jobs are scarce, providing only minimum wage in a place which was once booming with unions and families. Many people have moved on. For the ones that stay, things aren’t so easy. Enter Isaac English and Billy Poe, who both nearly escaped but then chose to stay in their unhappy, small-town poor lives. Both harbor hopes of escape despite doing nothing to act on them, until one evening when violence changes everything.
I’ve seen this compared elsewhere to The Grapes of Wrath, and while I’m not sure this guy is going to be the next Steinbeck, I do think the comparison is valid. This is a picture of an economy falling down, with people trapped in lives that no longer function the way they’re supposed to. Rusting factories feature prominently in the text and are foci for major plot points. It’s very easy to see how the loss of American industry deeply affects those who rely on it most and what those same blue-collar workers now have to do just to support their families.
The narrative is split between several characters – Isaac, his sister Lee, his father Henry, Billy Poe, his mother Grace, and the policeman Bud Harris. I didn’t realize that at first, but did not find it disorienting as I sometimes do. Each character had their own voice, so to speak, despite the novel being in 3rd person, and you could tell whose head you’d landed in without looking at chapter headings. (I almost never look at chapter headings. I have no idea if that’s weird, but I never know what chapter I’m on. I always know what page I’m on, though.) Some of the chapters are extremely introspective and you can almost tell the education level of the characters by how they’re thinking. Thoughts in real life almost never come in complete sentences and I really enjoy how Meyer moves from subject to subject so abruptly, almost like Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway but without the connections between people that Woolf excels at there. It’s definitely stream of thought, but usually in a way that is easily followed, with sequences of proper well-constructed prose to balance out the novel and keep it from being too experimental.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I felt that it elucidated the difficult situation going on in many of our old industry towns and as such is a really valuable insight into a part of society that no one cares to think about these days. It forces us to think about the consequences of moving jobs overseas and leaving many Americans without a living wage. This is the best kind of fiction, to my mind; it is not only a deep and significant story but it also reveals an aspect of our country that is perhaps not politically correct to express otherwise. I highly recommend it and I do suspect that it may become a classic in its own time given what a picture it is of that rusting world.
When the Roman empire withdraws its troops from Britain, they leave a land in chaos. Vortigern, a name meaning “proud tyrant”, seizes control of the land from Uthr Pendragon, who is banished to Brittany. When Uthr returns, he is killed in battle, leaving his son Arthur as heir to the throne of Britain. Previously, Arthur had imagined himself as an insignificant bastard, but learning that he is Uthr’s son gives a whole new dimension to his dreams. Newly included in those dreams is Gwenhwyfar, the young daughter of his father’s ally Cunedda. Gwenhyfar pledges herself to him when he accepts the throne as heir. Winning Britain back is destined to be an uphill battle, but Arthur shows strength, tenacity, and smarts in his attempts to educate himself and get his legacy back.
Helen Hollick has made it pretty clear that she’s thrown out the Arthurian legends and attempted to re-imagine this as it really would have been, using the original Welsh poems. I think that’s awesome. Don’t get me wrong, I love Arthurian literature, but it’s not actually ever historical fiction, it’s just a literary tradition. I think it’s neat to put Arthur in a rougher context, and since there are so few sources relating to this period, the author has free reign and she really uses it to her advantage.
I liked this story. It feels huge. The book is long and many, many events occur within its pages, but it felt like an epic and I love epics. It’s a great mix between battles and more intimate goals and dealings of the heart. Tons of scheming goes on and I think Hollick gets across the nature of the changeable early middle ages especially well. I loved that some of the Britons thought that the Romans were coming back especially. They must have thought that given that the Romans had been ruling in Britain for hundreds of years. Who was to guess that the abandonment would have been so complete? The mixture between Christianity and paganism was interesting. Christianity didn’t “arrive” in Britain for several hundred years after this, but I’m sure there must have been devotees left from the Roman occupation. Overall, I think the stage is set very well for this sort of story. No one quite knows what to do, but they know they want power, and they’re all fighting for it.
When you throw Arthur and Gwenhwyfar into the mix with real figures from history, however shadowy, it makes for a fantastic story like this one. Both the protagonists go through a lot just to be together and their dominance is hard-won. I love the interpretation of Arthur as a tough guy, not a gentle chivalric knight who turns the other way when his wife starts cuckolding him (there is no Lancelot here, fyi, if you’re looking for him). He fights for what he wants, I’m sure this Arthur would have had Lancelot’s head rotting on a stick. And as for Gwenhwyfar, she is a powerful and inspiring woman in her own right here who grows from a lovely tomboy into a woman who isn’t afraid to defend herself and her family. They both have their moments of weakness, but it makes those moments of strength even stronger.
I do recommend this. It’s a fascinating re-imagining of Early Medieval Britain and gives the Arthurian legend a boost. If you enjoy historical fiction, I think you should read this. I for one am looking forward to the next two installments of the trilogy.
The Kingmaking comes out on March 1st. Preorder it on Amazon.
(As an addendum, I would just like to say that I don’t believe King Arthur actually existed – if he did, he wasn’t a king – and thus historical fiction written about him is free from all accuracy requirements I normally apply to historical figures. I can just enjoy it as a good book like this one!)
If you want to hear more opinions and read more interviews and guest posts from Helen, check out these other blogs throughout this week and next:
Helen Hollick is the author of The Kingmaking which will be released on March 1st by Sourcebooks Landmark. Today, her blog tour stops here at Medieval Bookworm. I’ll have my review of this book up a bit later, but you should know that I really enjoyed it! For this guest post, however, I asked:
How do you see yourself following in the Arthurian tradition with this trilogy? What are you adding? What are you making better?
So, please welcome Helen!
—
I do not, in fact, follow the Arthurian tradition – not the Medieval tales of Knights in Armour, that is.
I had never liked the traditional Arthurian stories. I could not accept that the King Arthur of those Medieval tales was such a poor King. He fought long and hard to become King, managed to obtain a beautiful wife – and then promptly disappeared in search of the Holy Grail, abandoning his Kingdom and his wife. Surely he would have foreseen the Lancelot/Guinevere affair. I’m afraid I also had no time for Lancelot or those other too-good-to-be-true knights – none of it seemed real history.
I wanted to write what might have really happened.
The familiar stories of the Round Table, Holy Grail and Knights in Armour are all Medieval tales told in the 12th Century. If there was a real Arthur he would have lived circa 450 -550 A.D., – the Dark Ages, at the time of the departure of the Romans, when there was a power vacuum for supremacy and Britain was being settled by the Anglo Saxons – who thus created ‘England’.
I wanted to write my version without the myth, magic or fantasy. There are no knights in armour in my story, no Lancelot or Galahad. There is no magic, no Merlin, no magical sword or ethereal Lady of the Lake.
Instead, there is the passion of a man who fought hard to gain his Kingdom – and who had to fight even harder to keep it. A man who found the woman he loved, but who had a hard job keeping her as well, for passionate people live passionate, highly emotional lives, where ‘true love’ never runs smoothly.
I researched the early Welsh legends of Arthur – and I discovered a very different version of events that turned out to be far more emotionally exciting and entertaining than the tales we are familiar with – for the very reason that possibly, what was told in those early tales, really did happen!
When I first started investigating those early legends they thrilled me. The Arthur of these early tales was so different to the Knight in Armour one. He was far more “earthy” – a rogue, a rebel. Nor was he the chivalric Christian King of the later stories. This Arthur was a war lord who put his Kingdom and his men first (and yes, himself) as it would have been in the Dark Ages when the Christian Church was still newly emerging and Paganism was very much to the fore.
This Arthur also had several sons – but I’ll not tell you any more detail for it might spoil the books!
Thank you so much for stopping by, Helen, and for answering my impertinent question!
You can also check out and preorder The Kingmaking on Amazon. Please come back later for my review as we continue the blog tour for this new and exciting book!
The women in Amy’s family always end up raising their children alone. Almost without exception, the men leave. Thus Amy finds herself in a family full of women, yet still hopeful that her marriage will be better than all the rest. She moves to London with her journalist husband and they have a child together. Amy misses him, but thinks everything is okay until he leaves her and she discovers that he has a girlfriend. Amy flees to the bosom of her all-female family and sets about getting her life back together.
I thought it was really sad that their marriage didn’t work out and that they used their family histories as an excuse. To me it seems fairly obvious that a job like his would be a strain on any family, especially a couple that wasn’t used to dealing with it. With Amy all on her own as a single mother in a foreign country with a single friend, what were they expecting? I also expected this to be a bit more about Amy’s family, and while they were on the fringes of the story, they were certainly secondary to Amy’s main struggle to figure out how to be a single mother. She and her daughter have a wonderful relationship and it’s nice to see a teenage daughter not hating her mother for once (although tantrums come with the territory). Amy’s rise to fame as the new “Ann Landers” is anything but ordinary, but this is still a sweet story of a mother’s attempt to come to terms with her life, get on her own two feet, and alternately help and be supported by her family. Oh, and I loved the ending, very cutely done and its brevity was appreciated.
Overall, recommended if you like memoirs or heart-warming stories about families. I’d put this as a solid “good”. You’re not going to regret reading it, but it isn’t going to be your favorite book ever.
My reading this Sunday has been all academic. I’ve been reading articles about bastard feudalism and two books under the same theme. My presentation on this topic is finally ready to be presented and I can put them away. On my trip to the uni library, I also discovered that my request for Anne Neville by Michael Hicks had come in. I have to say, on a brief glimpse I’m absolutely dismayed by this work. Michael Hicks is my favorite historian and I’ve frequently been very pleased by his even-handed treatment of Richard III and the many magnates that surrounded him. I find he agrees with me on many respects, at least from what I remember of reading most of his publications in 2007-2008.
So, here he is writing a biography of Anne Neville. I have a number of problems with it and I’ve only just skimmed a bit of it. Firstly, biographies of women in the middle ages are difficult business. They’re inevitably about their husbands, fathers, and sons, because that’s who we know most about. This woman has a controversial father and husband, but Hicks has done biographies on them before, so we can assume he knows his stuff. At least, my past reading has suggested that this is so.
Here, though, I’m a bit perplexed by several things, mainly relating to a suggested divorce:
He had her crowned with him. Who on earth would do this if planning divorce eventually? This woman is queen of England now! She might not have power, but that is a political statement. Notice Henry Tudor didn’t crown his wife, Elizabeth of York, for some time, possibly as a “just in case”.
He suggests that Richard may have wanted to divorce or poison Anne, but on the same page we learn that they were still sleeping together (he later argues that Richard spurned her bed – what?? Make up your mind! Or was he finally listening to the doctors who ordered him to do so?) and that she was ill before this, possibly at their coronation. He obviously wanted an heir, but their son had just died and as the chroniclers say, they were both grieving and she was ill! There were rumors that he poisoned her at the time, but Hicks dismisses these (and rightfully so). No English king had set aside his wife in recent history and I think it’s horribly anachronistic to say Richard was thinking to do so. He must have realistically considered that she might die and he might marry again, but poison is pushing it. The chronicles say he was thinking of divorce, but again, he never did anything to make this happen. Perhaps she died too fast, or perhaps he didn’t think of it at all. Rumors were flying and some of them did make it into chronicles.
Hicks then uses all of this to argue that Anne Neville was convinced when she died that her whole life had been an incestuous lie. If so, she probably chose it, because according to Hicks, everyone knew this was incest and they both knew their dispensation wasn’t quite good enough. Secondly, if this is as outrageous as he suggests, why on earth don’t we have the protests the suggested marriage to Elizabeth of York caused? Maybe this suggestion of incest would have made Anne unhappy, but it’s her own fault and she had to have known it the whole time.
Maybe Richard did want to marry his niece, but he did not do so. Even if the letter cited showing Elizabeth’s enthusiasm did exist, there was no marriage and he denied the plan. You seriously can’t call a guy a “serial incestor” if he never actually committed incest. (I don’t think two brothers marrying two sisters is incestuous and even in a contemporary context, his first marriage was accepted). That is unnecessarily harsh language, especially for something that did not happen. Hicks also argues that opposition wouldn’t have stopped Richard, but obviously it did as no marriage took place.
He then takes issue with her lack of a will. It was not unusual for high-born women to have wills, but Anne was perhaps a special circumstance. One, Hicks takes great care to explain that Anne had pretty much nothing. Richard could have retained all of her inheritance even under a divorce. So first we have to wonder what she’d be leaving to someone. Secondly, who would she leave things to? Her niece and nephew, perhaps, but her nephew was again under control of her husband and I’m not sure where her niece was, probably the same. She didn’t need to give them anything if she didn’t have anything and they were under her husband’s protection. It seems a bit pointless, particularly given how sick she was and her age. Most people gave things to their children and asked for alms to be given to the poor. I don’t think it’s exceptional that she doesn’t have a will if she had no need for one, and we can also note that it may have been lost. As Hicks himself states, we don’t even have the records for Anne that we do for some of her contemporary women, but he suspiciously leaves this idea out here.
I don’t know. He uses facts, but he twists them, and I hate when they do this. The whole biography feels very anachronistic. He refers to Anne as “past her sell-by date” when she was only 28 years old. He then refers to her as a housewife and assures us that she had a full life with lots of sex. I’m left wondering what happened to the historian who even-handedly assessed Richard’s ambition in light of his good lordship and attempted to reconcile the Ricardian Richard and the detractors’ Richard. He painted a compelling picture of necessity there and I think got the closest to a real fifteenth-century person I’ve ever seen. And now he calls Richard’s queen a housewife who “shacked up” with then-Duke Richard and argues that the fact that nearly all of her close relatives died during her lifetime probably didn’t affect her because that was normal at the time. Her father, son, sister, first husband, grandfather, and brothers-in-law all died in her lifetime and some violently. Are we to assume fifteenth-century people didn’t feel grief even when we have evidence that Anne grieved for her son? After he chides historians for forgetting that love matches occasionally existed earlier? I’m so perplexed by this biography. Am I crazy? This review on LT shares some of my confusion at least.
Okay, that’s my rant over. Apologies for hijacking my own blog! Someday soon I will give this book a proper read and review. For now, I think it’s time for some pleasure reading. I’ll be starting with The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende for the Book Club Girl radio show on Wednesday. I’m excited about it! Here is the link if you’re interested.
Sorry if this was a boring Sunday Salon for you, I’ll do my best to return to normal bookish programming soon. I’m sure I’m driving my subscribers away in droves.
Princess Lissar grows to womanhood forgotten in a corner of a large castle; the focus is firmly on her beautiful parents. Only after her mother dies does Lissar gain attention, and not in any way that she wants. Lissar is forced to flee for her own safety with only her dog Ash at her side. Forgotten and lost in the woods, Lissar must learn how to stand on her own two feet, with the help of a little magic.
I love Robin McKinley. I’ve said in my reviews of her other books that she has a prose style that reminds me of fairy tales and puts me far, far back into my own childhood. I knew that “something horrible” happened in this book which may not be appropriate for small children to read, but it wasn’t really enough to put me off it even after I realized what it was – what it had to be. I loved Lissar’s transformation, her struggle to find herself, her slow journey towards recognition, and definitely her relationship with Ash, who was a great character all on her own. I especially loved the end.
So, recommended? Definitely, although not for squeamish or those averse to violence; I don’t think this is actually a YA book, although correct me if I’m wrong, someone!
So, back in my crazy romance reading teenage days*, I recall liking this author. When I saw this book at my favorite charity bookshop, I thought 10 cents was a steal. And then I read it.
Portia Cabot has loved Julian Kane for at least five years before this story began. During some mysterious business in a crypt, Portia nearly died to save him and has been repaid by abandonment. Julian is a vampire and feels he must leave her to save her from his fate. In this book, he’s back, and their love story gets an ending.
I guess I don’t really like paranormal romance. I also know that I missed out on a lot of back story here which occurred in some of the other books. Still, I didn’t really like the characters and I wasn’t really interested in them. I think people like paranormal romance because it adds this element of excitement and lust – oh no, he might kill me! Dangerous men! Oooh! And so on. Well, maybe I’m wrong (tell me if I’m wrong!). I don’t really fall for it though, having never fallen for a dangerous man (apparently I am unusual in this) and one of my big things about romance is that I have to find the love bit believable. I find that difficult here, probably because I’m missing out on the actual falling in love. I like series romance, but not when I can’t pick up one of the series and “get it”.
That muddle cleared up, I rather liked the ending. So it wasn’t all bad anyway! I think the rest of the series should be read before this one. Just in case you’re interested, though, here‘s a handy Amazon link.
*Yes, I am reading it now, but I have been sticking to favorite authors and really highly recommended books since I decided to try the genre out again in 2008. I don’t like the run-of-the-mill bodice ripper, I like well done, believable, clever romance.
Edward Meopian’s life is never easy. His mother dies before he goes to high school and his father has a hard time expressing his love. Edward is uncomfortable at school and it only gets worse when his father enters him into a prestigious private institution with the kids of famous people, especially given that he doesn’t even know how to tie his tie. Edward learns, though, and through this book we follow his life, through college, love affairs, strange jobs, and even fatherhood.
on Amazon.
Hardcover? Or paperback?
on Amazon.
on Amazon.
on Amazon.
on Amazon.
‘s a handy Amazon link.
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