Allen Bratton's Henry Henry chronicles a year in the life of Hal Lancaster. Readers already familiar with Shakespeare's history plays will immediatelyAllen Bratton's Henry Henry chronicles a year in the life of Hal Lancaster. Readers already familiar with Shakespeare's history plays will immediately recognize the landscape of Bratton's novel in this modern-day queer reimagining of the Henriad. There's Hal, the disaffected, wayward son; Henry, the stoic, dutiful father; Ned Poins, the working class, rowdy youth with whom Hal spends his days; Falstaff, the has-been drunkard who's obsessed with Hal; and Harry Percy, the rival, the golden boy—the dutiful son who exhibits all the ideal aristocratic traits Hal lacks. Readers unfamiliar with the narrative off which Bratton is riffing will lose very little in translation, as Bratton's characters are vividly realized, all authentic in their own right.
You can read my full review HERE on BookBrowse, and you can read a piece I wrote about Shakespeare's Henriad HERE....more
Set in the liminal days following the Trojan War, The Women of Troy follows Briseis, who the reader may have met in this novel’s precursor, The SilencSet in the liminal days following the Trojan War, The Women of Troy follows Briseis, who the reader may have met in this novel’s precursor, The Silence of the Girls. Briseis begins that story as a free married woman in Troy and ends up a captive and slave of Achilles, the Greek fighter to whom she was given as a war prize when her city was sacked. Though Pat Barker begins The Women of Troy right where the last book left off, the sequel reads comfortably as a standalone. The two novels together, however, form a fuller picture of the life of Briseis.
You can read my full review HERE on BookBrowse and a piece I wrote about Cassandra of Troy HERE....more
The Queens of Innis Lear is a fantasy retelling of King Lear, focusing on the young generation characters (primarily Cordelia, Goneril, Regan, and EdmThe Queens of Innis Lear is a fantasy retelling of King Lear, focusing on the young generation characters (primarily Cordelia, Goneril, Regan, and Edmund) in a fictional kingdom called Innis Lear. It starts off as a faithful adaptation (think Lear but with magic)--the titular King is abdicating the throne, and he makes a shocking choice to split the crown equally between his three daughters, provided that they pass the test he sets out for them: to each declare that they love him more than their sisters. Goneril (Gaela, in Gratton's novel) and Regan (still Regan), manipulative and self-serving, both pass his test, but his youngest and most loyal daughter, Cordelia (Elia), refuses to participate and is banished.
To say I love this play is an understatement (hi, if you're new here, King Lear is my favorite play) and I'm finding it nearly impossible to untangle my thoughts on how I feel about this as a novel from how I feel about it as a retelling, so we're just going to go into an aggressive amount of detail and hope something coherent materializes. Mild spoilers forthcoming (mostly about the narrative roles of the characters within the novel, not about specific plot points).
Tonally and thematically, Tessa Gratton accesses a lot of what makes Lear so special and I found that I mostly enjoyed my reading experience for that alone. I always say that Lear is a simultaneously cosmic and intimate play, concerned both with Nature and human nature, and the way Gratton literalizes these themes into her magic system and her worldbuilding is done tremendously well. The writing too has a rich, indulgent quality that suits the tone of the book; it's slowly paced and thoughtful, which felt appropriate to the story, though I imagine others may get bored early on without a love of Lear driving you forward.
Though, that love of Lear (along with how intimately well I know this play) did end up being a double-edged sword. Gratton had my investment from the very first page without really needing to earn it, and that certainly helped me devour this 600 page book in a little over a week. But on the other hand, I started to become more and more frustrated with the ways in which Gratton engaged with this play.
First is a rather specific annoyance, that luckily only occurred four or five times, but it was jarring enough that I have to mention it. The first half or two thirds of this novel follow the plot of Lear very closely, to the point where entire scenes from the play were acted out in this book. In theory that's not something that bothers me; what does bother me is Gratton taking word-for-word dialogue from the play and modernizing it so I felt like I was reading No Fear Shakespeare.
Here are a couple of direct side-by-side comparisons so you can see what I mean. Gratton's sentences are first, Shakespeare's are second:
"He has always loved Astore rather more than Connley." "I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall."
"Nothing will come from nothing. Try again, daughter." "Nothing can come of nothing. Speak again."
"I cannot heave my heart into my mouth, Father. I love you... as I should love you, being your daughter, and always have. You know this." "Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/ My heart into my mouth. I love your Majesty/ According to my bond; no more nor less."
"It is only a note from my brother, and I've not finished reading it. What I've read so far makes me think it's not fit for you to see." "I beseech you sir, pardon me. It is a letter from my brother that I have not all o'er-read; and for so much as I have perus'd, I find it not fit for your o'erlooking."
It's this but it would go on for entire conversations. Here’s the thing: this is pointless and distracting and when you go up against Shakespeare on a sentence by sentence level, you’re going to lose every time.
Now, let's get into the characters, because that's where my real problem with this book lies.
I found Gratton's portrayal of the Edmund character (Ban) endlessly frustrating. You could see her bending over backward to humanize Edmund, making these minor, pointless adjustments (Ban being older than his legitimate brother rather than younger, meaning his bastardy is the only thing standing in the way of his inheritance; Gloucester [Errigal] insisting that Edgar [Rory] inherit even after his alleged betrayal of his father) to amp up the reader's sympathy, but frankly, a lot of Edmund's charm was lost in the process. Edmund is my favorite character and I know I'm not alone in holding that opinion: the reason people love Edmund is because of his complexity and contradictions; he's already deeply human in the play and I felt that Gratton flattened that out of him in an attempt to make his transgressions to come from a play of moral purity.
The parallel/inversion between Edmund and Cordelia in the play is fascinating to me--both youngest children, both loved by their fathers, one good, one evil, their fates intertwined in a chilling way. That Gratton chose to explore this connection was an exciting choice for me, but I felt that turning it into a romance added nothing, and in fact lost quite a bit, especially when it came at the narrative expense of what I think a lot of readers find to be a much more compelling dynamic; that between Ban and Morimaros (the King of France figure). (That's another thing. This book had every opportunity to be explicitly queer, but there were only ever hints and whispers of queerness on the page, which I found frustrating.)
If I were to detail every single character-related annoyance I had we'd be here for a while, so here are some other highlights: I felt that Edgar (Rory) was underutilized and misrepresented when he was on the page. Aefa is the single most pointless character I have read in anything, ever, and the fact that her POV chapters weren't cut suggests to me that the editor just gave up. The old generation characters were all incredibly one-note; if you want to write a retelling focusing on the younger generation, that's fine, but King Lear himself shouldn't need to have a POV chapter to be a complex and interesting character.
But we're getting rather nitpicky now so let's zoom back out. This book was marketed as a "feminist King Lear retelling" and a word that I've seen a lot of people use to talk about it is "subversive." But my issue is that it was not, at all. As I mentioned above, the first half of the book follows Lear with dogged faithfulness, and after that, things start to go off the rails. Which is fine, fun, exactly what I'm here for! If I wanted to read King Lear I'd just read King Lear. But when Gratton started taking control of the narrative, her choices, to me, started to become more and more unwieldy. Nothing she did felt to me like a direct, deliberate subversion of the play; it felt like she had more interest in telling her own story with these characters than doing so as a means to engage with the original text, and that's something that I think makes for an unsuccessful retelling. I don't think you need to have complete and utter reverence for the original, but I think a love for the play coupled with a clear vision for how to engage with it is necessary. I felt--especially after reading an interview with Gratton--that her aim here was as nebulous as 'King Lear but with better female characters', and as a staunch Lear fan, I was rooting for this book but it really let me down in the end.
But I will end on a positive note (sort of): while I felt that Elia was as stiff and uninteresting as cardboard, I thought Gratton succeeded in doing some very interesting things with Gaela and Regan; Gaela particularly. The ways in which Gratton played with gender in Gaela's chapters were dynamic and exciting and I think that along with the aforementioned magic system, Gaela's character is this novel's primary strength.
This is already the longest review I've written in ages and I'm not sure how to end it. Bottom line, do I recommend this book? While I appreciate you sticking with me for this long, probably in hopes of me answering that question, I'm sorry to say that I really don't know. I think you should be interested in Lear but not loveLear, maybe that's the key to unlocking the optimal reading experience. ...more
A Thousand Acres is King Lear meets twentieth-century midwestern farming; oddly enough, a thematic match made in heaven, the mores of the small Iowan A Thousand Acres is King Lear meets twentieth-century midwestern farming; oddly enough, a thematic match made in heaven, the mores of the small Iowan community so richly detailed that the stakes effortlessly mirror medieval English court life. It's told through the eyes of Ginny, the eldest daughter and Goneril figure, who lives on their father's thousand acre farm with her husband in a house adjacent to her sister Rose's (Regan)--the youngest sister, Caroline (Cordelia) has moved away and works as a lawyer. When their aging father announces his retirement and intention to turn the farm over to his three daughters, Caroline admits skepticism and is turned away; Ginny and Rose are then left to battle his cruelty and deterioration into drunkenness while keeping the farm afloat.
While the premise sounds literally transposed from the Shakespeare play, enough details are reinvented to assure the reader that literality is not Smiley's intention. Rose has cancer, and she has two daughters; Ginny has had five miscarriages and desperately wants a child; Loren (Edgar), in my opinion one of the smartest characters in the original play, is here an afterthought and a bit of a sycophantic idiot; Pete (Cornwall) is a recovering abusive husband, his relationship with Rose unhappy and volatile, while Ginny's marriage to Ty (Albany) is placid in comparison; the Fool is omitted; Jess (Edmund) is not a scheming mastermind, but instead an unmoored drifter whose interruption of Ginny's life is unplanned, haphazard.
And as someone who's read King Lear about a million times and has spent countless hours thinking about these characters, if I am actively choosing to spend my time reading King Lear retellings, I can't allow myself to get mired in the details, or else reading retellings just becomes a self-defeating exercise. Half of what I just wrote, what Smiley decided to do with these characters, I don't agree with; it doesn't fit my own idea of what a picture-perfect retelling should look like. So I'm much less interested in the details and more interested in the author's vision, in the ways in which they interact with the original play even--especially--when they choose to deviate. This is where The Queens of Innis Lear, a high fantasy Lear retelling, fell spectacularly short for me, and this is where Smiley succeeded.
Each of Smiley's characters is tremendously well-drawn, none more-so than the narrator Ginny. Ginny is obedient and self-effacing, the modest counterpart to her sister Rose who blows through the story like a hurricane. The dynamic between these two sisters, united against the obdurate front that is their father, yet more severed than either of them realizes, is what makes this book so memorable and horribly devastating. This is a bleak, stark, humorless work, which accesses the tragic inevitability of the original play and refocuses it. This isn't the tragedy of Lear as much as it is the tragedy of Goneril, the long-suffering eldest daughter, and in turning this into Ginny's story, part of the cosmic scale is lost, but the calamity and the creeping dread is recaptured on a smaller, more intimate scale. This is an engrossing, quietly devastating book that deftly examines power, corruption, and betrayal through a melancholic, reflective lens, and I found the result both beautiful and heart-rending.
I prefer to write my reviews without spoilers, but in this case, the spoiler is also a huge trigger, so I do want to talk about that before we go. (view spoiler)[Trigger warning for sexual assault of a minor. The reveal that the Lear figure had raped Ginny and Rose when they were teenagers didn't sit well with me at first; for one thing, I tend to take the opinion that books should not introduce sexual assault as a plot point if sexual assault is not their primary focus; for another, it felt to me like a lazy shortcut to giving Ginny and Rose permission to defy their father, an unnecessary addition when the justification for their behavior is already built into the framework of the story. What I did find interesting, though, was how this related to Ginny and Rose's relationship to Caroline; it was refreshing to see a Lear retelling finally do something interesting with Cordelia, turning her from the archetype of the perfect woman to a stubborn, ungrateful child, choosing not to see the full picture of what Ginny and Rose shielded her from. There's a line toward the end where Ginny is about to tell Caroline the full truth, and Caroline turns away and refuses to hear it; there's an acknowledgement that truth can't be delivered without it being asked for, a shocking subversion from Cordelia's role in the original play that I found tremendously effective. (hide spoiler)]...more
Writing this review hurts me a little because this was easily one of my most anticipated books of 2019, but I'm sorry, this was pretty terrible. The pWriting this review hurts me a little because this was easily one of my most anticipated books of 2019, but I'm sorry, this was pretty terrible. The premise was genius: it's the story of the Greek mythological figure Cassandra retold and set at Hanford, the research facility in the U.S. that developed the atomic bomb during WWII. But I had four main problems with The Cassandra that I just couldn't get over: characters, plot, themes, and its success (or failure rather) as an adaptation, so let's get straight into it.
Every single character in this book was one-dimensional. Within seconds of meeting Mildred (the Cassandra figure), her inexplicably awful mother and sister, her wise and worldly best friend Beth, the charming but cruel Gordon, and the pathetic but well-intentioned Tom Cat, you know what each one of their roles in this story is going to be (which has nothing to do with the myth at the heart of the narrative - more on that in a minute). Every single one of these characters is just pitifully one-note. None of their painfully obvious characterization is developed or explored or subverted, they all just exist comfortably as conduits for the story to advance where it needs to go.
Which brings us to the next problem, how the plot drives the characters and not the other way around. The book starts with Mildred relaying to the reader that she's had a vision which tells her that she needs to go to Hanford, so that's exactly what she does. She gets on the bus to head to the facility and she meets Beth, who shakes her hand and promptly declares that the two of them are going to be best friends, and that's exactly what happens. We're informed that Tom Cat falls in love with Mildred, because he just does, apparently; we don't get to see anything develop in a natural or organic way. There's no rhyme or reason to be found, the story just kind of zips along and you're meant to accept that the characters' actions makes sense even when there's no basis to any of it.
And this would all be somewhat okay if the themes were sufficiently rich and engaging, but they just weren't. Mildred starts having visions that 'the product' being developed at Hanford will wreak havoc and destroy innocent lives, but when she tries to warn the researchers, her concerns are ignored. Mildred then has to grapple with her own role in working for the facility that's developing this weapon: even as a secretary, does she hold some kind of responsibility? There's not... a whole lot of thematic depth to engage with there, despite very obvious present-day parallels, but this conflict is the main driving force in the story. And at another point, about 70% through the book, Mildred is brutally raped (as in, seriously brutal, do not enter into this book lightly), and Shields comes close to making some kind of point about how not believing Mildred about her visions has parallels to not believing women who are assaulted, but not much is really done with that opportunity.
And finally, this has to be one of the laziest myth adaptations I have ever read. There are two recognizable elements from the original story: that Cassandra can see the future and no one believes her prophecies, and that she's raped. One of my favorite things about reading retellings is trying to discern which characters played which role in the original, and of course as a contemporary writer playing with an established story you should be allowed to invent characters and subvert character types and put your own unique stamp on the story, because otherwise what's the point? But in this case, the original myth was such a rudimentary blueprint that it felt like the author wanted to use the myth only as an excuse to incorporate visions into the story without the reader questioning it too much. Mildred is Cassandra, of course (but why does Mildred get these visions in the first place? there's no backstory involving an Apollo figure to rationalize this, it's just another thing we're meant to accept), and the person who rapes Cassandra is obviously Ajax the Lesser, but do not expect many other elements from the original myth to come into play. I certainly admired Shields' research into the Hanford facility, but maybe she should have cracked open a copy of the The Oresteia while she was at it.
So, all things considered this was a pretty big disappointment. If you're looking for a contemporary reimagining of a mythological story I'd suggest Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie or Everything Under by Daisy Johnson, or if you're looking for feminist mythology there's The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker or Circe by Madeline Miller. With so many fantastic mythological retellings published in the last few years, I think you can safely skip this one without missing much.
Thank you to Netgalley and Henry Holt for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review - sorry this didn't work for me! :(...more
This novel was stunning. Everything Under is a retelling of a Greek myth (more on that in a second), set in the English countryside, which follows GreThis novel was stunning. Everything Under is a retelling of a Greek myth (more on that in a second), set in the English countryside, which follows Gretel, a lexicographer, who's recently tracked down her estranged mother Sarah. It's a tricky plot to summarize as it unfolds with a nonlinear chronology, but it ultimately pieces together the fractured narrative that connects Gretel, Sarah, and a boy named Marcus who stayed with them on their riverboat for a month when Gretel was thirteen, before disappearing.
Daisy Johnson's prose is accomplished and lyrical; of the Man Booker longlisters I've read so far, I'd say she's only behind Donal Ryan in terms of prose quality, which is an incredible feat. This book is stunningly atmospheric; the water beneath Gretel and Sarah's riverboat feels like a living, breathing entity, and the whole novel has a tone that's both vibrant and feral. It can be difficult to rework Greek mythology into a contemporary setting, but I felt that Johnson achieved this with aplomb, turning the ordinary into something almost mythical, which perfectly suited the kind of heightened drama that inevitably must unfold in a story like this.
I'm not really sure what's going on with the marketing of this novel, because in some promos I've seen reference made to the myth it's retelling, and in others I haven't. I did know which myth it was going into it, and rather than hampering my experience with the novel I think it enhanced it. But I have seen others say they wished they hadn't known this information ahead of time as the knowledge does naturally give away quite a few plot points. But I don't think it's a novel which endeavors to shock the reader with its twists and turns, and with fate and free-will at its thematic center, I don't think it's difficult to figure out where the story is headed, even quite early on. So, I guess it's up to you whether you want to look up the myth it's retelling, but if you're a Greek mythology lover, I think you'll enjoy knowing ahead of time so you can properly appreciate Johnson's positively masterful foreshadowing and symbolism.
The reason I've dropped it down to 4 stars from 5, which I thought it would be for most of the time I was reading, was that I wasn't very enamored with certain elements of the ending. I have to quote my friend Hannah's review where she talks about the last 20% of the novel: "Here Johnson makes quite a lot of the subtext text" - this was my main issue as well. The stunning subtlety that I had so admired about the first three quarters of this book was sacrificed for a very literal manifestation of one of the novel's themes, adding a sort of fantastical element that I didn't think was necessary. What can I say, I just don't like magical realism.
But ultimately I did think this was an incredibly strong debut (!!) novel. Johnson's prose was incredible, and the amount of thematic depth here really took me by surprise. Johnson provides us with a thorough meditation on fate, agency, breaking and mending familial ties, the role of language in shaping us. I really loved this....more
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