Reviews and Comments

I read some other Howatch that's more intellectual than this, so I was a bit disappointed to find it's not much more than a well written family saga. The Cornish setting and class/gender conflicts were interesting though--dated views of women's and gay men's sexuality but a lot of underlying sympathy for both the terrible and predatory heirs, and the people they trample on. Page-turning certainly.

Poldark fans may be interested in the lengthy mining subplot.

Kind of like slightly blander Barbara Pym, but interesting for middlebrow post-war fiction.

This was disappointingly not that well written, although it's a pretty interesting story. The mini-series did a better job, I thought, of digging into how stifling marriage and work expectations for women were and how big a step it was to question employment conditions.

I can see why this was a bestseller! Lots of reversal of fortune, mistaken identity, deathbed repentance, and so on, very page-turning. If you hate pious books it will annoy you, but as someone who likes Charlotte Yonge et al, it's pretty low on the gratuitous churchiness scale. There is a lot of good nasty class-based family drama, and some romances, even a satisfying boat accident, and it's interesting to get an American version of the plots you find in popular Victorian fiction with the educational concerns and the rich but judgy relatives and the European tour and so on, long before James and Wharton got there. (The writing is nowhere near them, though.)

The love interest is regrettably unable to speak without going on for a page and a half at a time. Our otherwise sensible heroine should have rejected him on that account.

I liked Michelle and enjoyed reading the book but it's rather guarded, perhaps expectedly. The picture is of a deeply relatable family woman and community member, never an intellect (and one knows she must have been, to have reached the educational and professional heights she did).

I don't read many political memoirs, so I suspect but don't know that this is all intentional and for all I know she's much more open than average.

As another reviewer said a whole book of these is a bit much at once, but they're good rollicking stories about an otherwise dull pleasant English village where the Armitage family matter-of-factly deal with witches, ghosts, baby griffins that need raising, the demands of pet unicorns, and so on. They're in that unthreatening sweet spot where you have only the tiniest worry the magical problem won't get solved, and there will be something nice for tea.

Very engaging rework of fairytale ideas without ever strictly retelling source material. The main character's magical arc is a tiny bit Mary Sue but there's so much else going on (predatory forests, possession, court politics, Eastern European village customs) that it's forgivable, and the whole thing is beautiful, harsh, and immersive.

Read right after re-reading her earlier fairytale novel, Uprooted, and this one is better and more complex, both more historically specific (the status of Jewish moneylenders as related to the Rumplestiltskin myth, the class dynamics of various towns and villages in an alternate Eastern Europe) and more conventionally fairytale-ish, with actual faeries (not called faeries, but a kind of wintry fae called the Staryk) and a cranky demon.

Couldn't stop reading.

I read five of this series in a week and they were lightweight but comforting insomnia companions. Feminist, sex-positive, realistic depiction of modern women with lives and body image issues that nevertheless don't slow them down. They're quite sexually explicit. Moreover, everyone has the sense to use condoms. I wasn't expecting to see that in romances (not my genre).

Yep, I'll probably read #6 when it comes out.