Shannon Phillips

Cross-posted from my Goodreads account

Below Stairs

I loved this book. I picked it up because I’m going through a bit of Downton Abbey withdrawal, and it supplied exactly what I feel like that show is sometimes missing: a realistic view of the inequalities of the old aristocratic class system. But I didn’t expect that the book would be so fun.

Margaret Powell was born in 1904, took her first job in a laundry at the age of thirteen, and went into service as a kitchen maid a year later. She stayed in service for many years, eventually working her way up to the position of cook. So she’s kind of the “Daisy” of the house, except incredibly bright and incredibly funny. Her memoir is written in a breezy, conversational style peppered with fascinating anecdotes and witty commentary. It’s snappy, smart, and utterly engaging from start to finish.

Murphy’s Law

Mystery’s not my genre, for the most part, but my mom recommended Rhys Bowen to me on the grounds that I adore Dorothy Sayers. (Actually, she recommended a different series, but I got confused and picked this one up by mistake.) The thing is, Sayers was writing her own time period: her books have a marvelous period texture that’s utterly authentic. Below Stairs is wonderful for the same reason. By contrast, Bowen has obviously done some research, but the sensibility of her characters is very modern, and ultimately the historical setting feels thin and unpersuasive, at least to me. Mystery fans might find more to enjoy.

American Savage

And pivoting quite abruptly to the modern day: Dan Savage’s new book is largely a rehash—or a summation—of the themes he deals with in his column and his in blogging for the The Stranger. There are chapters here that cover sexual politics (ethical non-monogamy, the science and activism of bisexuality, sex-ed in schools) and politics-politics (Obamacare, the It Gets Better project, the fight for marriage equality) as well as a few personal essays. The personal material is the freshest, and I found it enormously sympathetic, especially Dan’s account of being at his mother’s bedside during her final moments. Still, there’s not a lot here that will be new to his regular readers.

Cross-posted from my Goodreads account

Unnatural Creatures

I really like short stories. Conventional wisdom in publishing has it that short story collections don’t sell, but personally I seek them out: there are some ideas that aren’t really meant to be novels, and a well-crafted short story can pack a huge depth of emotion and resonance into just a few pages. A short story is just the right length to meet a character, explore an idea, or pay off a simple plot twist. And a short story collection can either show off an author’s versatility, or it can showcase variations on a single theme.

Unnatural Creatures does the latter. It’s an anthology featuring stories by some of the biggest names in fantasy—along with some new-to-me authors—and each story features a different fantastic beast. There are unicorns, dragons, werewolves, and a bunch of less-standard creatures (the dimension-hopping carnivorous plant was rather memorable). The stories were selected by Neil Gaiman and are almost all excellent. In fact, Gaiman’s own contribution (which has been published before in his own short-story collections), while amusing enough, was one of the weakest of the bunch. Taken as a whole Unnatural Creatures is everything a satisfying anthology should be: both broad and deep, and full of characters that are interesting to meet and don’t outlast their welcomes.

The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories

This collection, on the other hand, failed from my perspective. I surprised myself by disliking it as much as I did, since I thought Carroll’s novel Bones of the Moon was haunting and masterful. But these stories were choppy—one ended so abruptly, and with such pointlessness, that I actually wonder if the Kindle edition might not have dropped some pages—and were mostly unpleasant even when they felt complete. I don’t need all my stories to have happy endings, but me to there’s a distinction between fiction that looks at the struggles and sorrows of human existence and finds some kind of meaning or redemption or catharsis there, and nihilistic fiction that simply wallows in unhappiness. These stories felt like wallowing, to me.

Practical Magic

As guilty-pleasure books go, this one is aces: it’s written in a breezy, catchy style that keeps the pages turning, and the plot is loaded with magic and romance. I say it’s a “guilty” pleasure because it’s really a chick lit book at heart—there’s nothing the least bit challenging here, and the male characters especially come across less like believable human beings and more like Love Interest-shaped tokens dropped into the narrative at the appropriate points. But it’s a great beach or airplane read.

It’s coincidence that I read these two books within a couple weeks of each other, but they are in many ways mirror images of each other. Both are stories about stories, and about growing up as the kind of person who is drawn to certain kinds of stories. Among Others is about a geek girl shaped by the science fiction and the fantasy books she reads. She also talks to fairies, struggles against her evil witch (literally) of a mother, and searches to find her a place in a world that’s not really set up for people like her. She’s different—Othered—along a number of separate axes: disabled, geeky, a survivor of abuse, and that’s not even getting started with the witch thing. Yet her inner voice is intensely relatable. It’s funny how she’s given a number of different quests (survive boarding school, save the world, yadda yadda) but the one that feels most pressing is her need to stop being alone. The books she reads give her mind the companionship it needs until she’s able to find like-minded friends. I think for a lot of nerds her inner journey will be very, very familiar.

And You is the mirror image, except instead of being about a girl and books, it’s about a boy and video games. But both books center on the experience of growing up nerdy and finding solace or salvation in a certain kind of story. Among Others touches on a whole library shelf worth of classic texts, and You does the same for classic video games. I was so struck by the experience of recognition, again and again—hey! I played that game!—that I had to look up the author’s biography, where I discovered that he’s worked as a game designer. This probably explains the central plausibility of the genre plot. I mean, it’s not really plausible, but of all the books or movies that offer plots wherein the hero must save the world by playing video games, this one is far and away the least stupid. That sounds like damning with faint praise, but actually I enjoyed this book from start to finish. Not quite as much as Grossman’s first novel, the utterly marvelous Soon I Will Be Invincible, but enough that I’m very much looking forward to seeing what he does next.

(Grossman also has a free short story up at Tor.com, “Professor Incognito Apologizes,” which is in the style of Soon I Will Be Invincible. If you like one you’ll probably like the other!)

It would take a harder heart than mine to resist this short (novella-length) fantasy tale, combining as it does so many of my favorite things: apprentice wizards, lost princesses, plucky runaways, sinister boarding schools, and battles of wits with evil sorcerers. The plot in a nutshell: three teenagers flee from a pair of evil spellcasters (the Ruby Warlock and the Coral Sorcerer), and must learn to trust in each other and their own strengths in order to survive.

Ruby Coral Carnelian proceeds with the logic of dreams, which pays off in lovely moments like the one where the protagonists enchant themselves down to miniature size and catch a ride on the wings of a seagull. At the same time there’s a modern, real-world sensibility at work in the treatment of themes such as abuse or nonconforming gender identity. Borsellino is a fine writer, and the plot unspools at a swift and absorbing pace.

The three protagonists are each likable in their own ways, and while the fantasy setting isn’t very fleshed out, the magic system is given some unique and vivid touches. It’s a world that could embrace expansion: the story is stand-alone, but rich enough to support sequels. A quick, fun read.

This, on the other hand, seems like the kind of thing that ought to be right up my alley—psychic half-dragon heroine! her sassy princess friend! court intrigue!—and yet somehow…it wasn’t. I didn’t like the dragons, I didn’t like the self-hating heroine, I didn’t like the love triangle with the princess’ fiancé, and at the end of the book I mostly felt relieved to be quitting the story of all these unpleasant people.

Speaking of stories that I really like? You can’t go wrong with “plucky orphaned girl swept up into a fairy tale.” And this one has an Appalachian setting, which softens my heart even more (I’m from the Ozarks, which are very similar in terms of folk traditions and culture). The story and the writing are great.

On top of all that, this book is absolutely gorgeous as a physical object. It’s illustrated by Charles Vess, and the art spills around the text in and lush and magnificent fashion, making every page a jewel.

It’s just too bad about the racism.

Not intentional racism. See, Charles de Lint, well meaning Canadian that he is, loves Indian legends…and there’s nothing wrong with that. He wanted to draw from some of those stories in his writing, along with Celtic folklore and so forth. And that’s the kind of thing that can be done well, but it does start to bump into some thorny issues of cultural appropriation. (One example of a white author who draws from Indian traditions in a way that seems respectful and informed is Ursula K. Le Guin.)

Unfortunately, what de Lint decided to do was try and skirt those issues by making up a fake Indian tribe, the “Kickaha,” and making up some legends for them that, you know, seem Indian-like. Never mind if he mashes together stuff drawn from completely different cultures—and I mean like, taking stuff from Great Plains tribes and adding them to an Eastern Woodlands context. Completely different cultures. As a result, the Kickaha don’t feel the least bit authentic. They run around in buckskins and they speak in mysterious riddles and for some reason they have Anansi stories (cause, you know, African folklore is cool too!) and they are a mess. They are a mess. The Kickaha are essentially the literary equivalent of somebody going “ching chong chee!” to represent a Chinese language. They are the literary equivalent of a trustafarian wearing a war bonnet to go clubbing. They are super not okay.

I’m not the first to point this out. De Lint has heard it before, and he feels pretty damn defensive about it, too. From an interview:

The first time I got toured in Canada was for Memory and Dream. And I was very surprised—everyplace I went they talked about cultural appropriation. I was constantly asked by journalists about it. And it really struck me as kind of odd. The whole concept to me is weird. I figure I should be able to use all the colours on the palette. Since that time I’ve seen more of the discussion. Writers like Sherman Alexie. Who I really love as a writer, but I dislike his politics, because he’s so racist—so anti-white. He says you can’t write from Native points of view. Just write what you know, from your own point of view, your own culture. But he has women in his books, and he has white people in his books. What’s the deal here? My background is Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese. So can I only write about characters with that background who are in their 40s and live in Ottawa?

Facepalm. So this is all very Cultural Appropriation 101. Short answer: nobody is saying that authors can’t write outside their own background, just that you will get yelled at if you do it in a crappy fashion. And the Kickaha are totally crappy.

In another interview de Lint showed sliiiiiightly more awareness:

The Kickaha, I made them up because I wanted them to have certain aspects. It’s loosely based on an Algonquin language group, so I leave in certain things specific to that. I just wanted to have that opening to be able to throw in a few other things, like some of the animal people stuff that I didn’t find that tradition. Like Coyote. Now, although coyotes are physically in eastern woodlands, they’re not in the folklore. The tricksters are different. There’s Whiskey Jack and there’s a hare, stuff like that. But I just like Coyote, so I wanted to be able to use him. So it’s not a matter of me trying to marginalize the Native beliefs, it’s more a matter of my trying to use a specific kind of idea but not based on anything that’s real, simply because I wanted the freedom to explore without Native peoples saying “Well you can’t say, that’s not what we believe.” Because I don’t know. I’m not a Native American. I can’t write from that perspective.

Right. You can’t. Or maybe you could, Mr. de Lint, if you were careful and respectful about it, but your fake Indian tribe is every bit as offensive (I’d argue more offensive) than trying to write about a real Algonquin tribe and getting it wrong. And it is marginalizing, it’s incredibly marginalizing to say “well it doesn’t matter what the Algonquin peoples actually believe, I’m going to take what I like from their stories and mix it up with the stories of these other different people over here, because who can tell any of these people apart anyhow.” Ching chong chee!

So anyway, back to The Cats of Tanglewood Forest. I loved everything about this book except for the Kickaha. I really like de Lint as a writer and I think he means well, but his fake Indians are awful.

This review contains mild spoilers.

I’m late to this pop-culture phenomenon, obviously. I avoided the Hunger Games books for a long time because, well, the central premise involves a dystopian future where children are forced to kill each other in an arena, and I didn’t feel like I could handle that. But eventually I had a day where I was feeling thick-skinned, and thought, “what the hey, I’ll read The Hunger Games.”

They are impressively brutal books. I’d say “for YA,” but anybody who reads YA knows that genre doesn’t pull its punches. Adults may like to imagine that teen readers are seeking out nice books with good morals, but the actual audience is hungry for darkness and blood. “Brutal even for YA” would be a more accurate way of putting it. But there’s a few things the Hunger Games books, especially the first one, do to make the premise more tolerable. For one thing, we see the world through the eyes of one of its more hardened and jaded denizens. Katniss Everdeen doesn’t waste sympathy on most of the people around her, and her detachment allows us as readers to remain detached as well. Plus, Katniss keeps her hands relatively clean. She is directly responsible for a few deaths in the arena, but mostly in self-defense, and the opponents who die by her hand are older kids, trained combatants, and particularly brutal and thuggish ones to boot.

The darkest book in the trilogy is the third one, Mockingjay, which has a worldview I found really interesting. It portrays a war that is simultaneously highly glamorized (Katniss is the mascot for the rebellion, so even when she’s placed on the front lines it’s all done for the benefit of the cameras—she has a costume and a team of stylists) and yet in other ways not glamorized at all. The book is ruthless about exposing the civilian costs of warfare, and by the end of Mockingjay any distinction between the good guys and the bad guys has been blurred to the point of erasure.

The Hunger Games holds up a funhouse mirror to modern America. The world of Panem, where kids flat-out slaughter each other for the entertainment of a jaded viewing public, functions as a savage satire of a society that accepts reality programming like “Toddlers and Tiaras” or “Buckwild.” But the war of Mockingjay, which is fought in streets and in neighborhoods and most of all over the airwaves, seems less like satire and more like a fairly straightforward projection of current trends.

Cross-posted from my Goodreads account

Fun sci-fi/dystopian YA! I had some quibbles with the worldbuilding (the hacking sequences are really silly and trite, and apparently in the future all teenagers are super-competent while most adults, especially those in positions of advanced leadership, are incompetent boobs) but the characters are likable and the story engaging.

Reading this book is very much like sitting still while somebody shows you their vacation slideshow. It’s in no way a useful guide to Venice, and even the most avid Judith Martin fans (of which I am one) are likely to find their attention wandering as she recounts the trials and tribulations she went through trying to sublet an apartment. There are certainly flashes of wit and humor, but I have to classify this book as “inessential,” at best.

Cross-posted from my Goodreads account

The rap on this book is that it’s “like Neverwhere, but bleaker and more depressing.” I bought it because I love Neverwhere, and then let it sit gathering dust on my shelf for a year because I didn’t feel like reading a really depressing book.

Now I wish I hadn’t waited so long. The Secret History of Moscow takes its characters on a quest through the underworld of Russian folklore to rescue a stolen sister: I found it beautifully written and, actually, a lot of fun. I wouldn’t call it “depressing” so much as “Russian,” though I know that may sound like a distinction without a difference. Yes, the urban landscape is harsh and the characters all marked by poverty and alienation. But the story is about love, the plot is one of magic and adventure, and the ending is triumphant if not exactly happy. It’s a bittersweet story but I didn’t find it depressing.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the Series of Unfortunate Events—I read the first three and got a little bit bored with the central gimmick. There was plenty to like: they were well-written and amusing little books. But I didn’t feel impelled to read any farther in the series.

Who Could That Be At This Hour lands in a similar spot for me. It was fun—I don’t want my time or money back—but nothing about it grabbed me enough to seek out the sequels.

So here’s what I originally wrote about this book on my Goodreads account:

Louise Erdrich is one of my very favorite authors—I’ll read anything by her. She works in a magical-realist vein informed by her Ojibwe heritage, writing portraits of modern-day reservation life where ageless tricksters and powerful animal spirits move in the margins. She’s also just an immensely powerful writer, creating striking and indelible characters and gorgeous passages of haunting prose.

All that said, I’m going to classify The Round House as my least favorite Erdrich novel (that is, if you don’t count The Crown of Columbus, which I don’t). It’s one part lurid crime thriller, one part “message” tract, and a third part that stands as a companion piece to her other work. I really liked that third part (I always love a Nanapush story) but I was much less taken with the other aspects of the book.

The problem with this summary, or at least the element I’m still thinking about, is the “message tract” aspect of the book.

The Round House opens with a brutal rape that takes place on the boundary of Indian land, and proceeds to illustrate the hurdles that prevent the woman and her family from seeking justice. Essentially, the case can’t be prosecuted until it’s known where jurisdiction lies—with the tribal police (if the assailant is an Indian and if the crime was committed on tribal lands), with the state police (if the crime was committed on non-Indian soil), or with the Feds (if the crime was committed on tribal lands but the assailant was a non-Indian). A lot of the book’s plot basically serves as an illustration of the ways in which violence against Native women goes unpunished under our schizophrenic justice system. One character, a tribal judge, is even given a few pages to deliver a lecture on the legal underpinnings of the tribal court system, and to make the case that the tribes should have the power to investigate and prosecute these kind of crimes whether or not non-Indian offenders are involved.

The thing is, this is kind of clumsy storytelling. Erdrich pulls it off well, but there’s no escaping that this book Has A Message, and at times the story serves mostly as a delivery vehicle for the moral.

On the other hand, I didn’t know about this issue until I read the book, and after reading more about it I realize that outrageous miscarriages of justice very similar to the one depicted in the book are in fact happening all the time. The New York Times today has an article on the problem:

At 26, Diane Millich fell in love with and married a white man, moving with him in 1998 to a home on her native Southern Ute reservation in southern Colorado where, in short order, her life was consumed by domestic violence.

Her story of beatings and threats, reconciliations and divorce—painfully common among Native American women—had a twist. Because her husband was white, the Southern Ute Tribal Police could not touch him, and because she was a Native American on tribal land, La Plata County sheriff’s deputies were powerless as well. She said she tried going to federal law enforcement, which did have jurisdiction, but that went nowhere.

After one of his beatings, she said, he even called the county sheriff himself to prove to her that he could not be stopped. Only after he stormed her office at the federal Bureau of Land Management and opened fire, wounding a co-worker, was he arrested. And even then, law enforcement had to use a tape measure to sort out jurisdiction, gauging the distance between the barrel of the gun and the point of bullet impact to persuade the local police to intervene.

…

“It was just crazy, now when I think back on how insane it was,” Ms. Millich said in an interview.

If a Native American is raped or assaulted by a non-Indian, she must plead for justice to already overburdened United States attorneys who are often hundreds of miles away.

The Violence Against Women Act, currently up for reauthorization in Congress, has added a new section that would allow these victims to seek recourse in the tribal courts, with provisions to ensure that non-Indian defendants retain their rights to representation and to a jury of their peers. But House Republicans are seeking to block it:

“This is a bill which could do so much good in the battle for victims’ rights, but unfortunately it is being held hostage by a single provision that would take away fundamental constitutional rights for certain American citizens,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said on the Senate floor on Thursday. “And for what? For what? In order to satisfy the unconstitutional demands of special interests.”

Unconstitutional demands of special interests. By that he means the right of Indian women—who are disproportionately victimized by rape and domestic violence—to seek justice. They aren’t victims, you see: they are “special interests.” And their attackers are fine, upstanding “certain American citizens.” (The women are American citizens too, of course, but you get the sense that Cornyn doesn’t quite believe it. Certainly not the kind of citizen who has “fundamental constitutional rights.”)

This is revolting. The contempt in those words—unconstitutional demands of special interests—God, it’s sickening.

So, I’m torn. On the one hand, I think Erdrich is bringing attention to an issue that needs attention. She’s created a searing portrait of real-world injustice, and part of me responds with a “sing it, sister!”

But on the other hand, the book is really really message-y, and even though the message is strong and important and moral and timely, I do think it weakens the storytelling. I don’t know if this is inevitable in books that have a political point to make. Trying to think of counter-examples, I flashed to Toni Morrison’s (flawless) Beloved: but that novel doesn’t really have a message so much as a complex emotional truth to convey. Something like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is more of a “message” book, and let’s face it, that was a pretty crappy novel. Strong and important and moral and timely (for its time)—but as a piece of literature, it’s weak.

The Round House, I think, is in a similar space. It’s no Love Medicine. But I am rooting for it to have the same kind of social impact that The Jungle had in its day.

This book was Sam’s Christmas present to me, since I like all right-thinking people was obsessed with Nate Silver’s blog during the election season.

I liked the book a lot better than the title. Well, actually, the title is fine, but the subtitle—Why So Many Predictions Fail…but Some Don’t—is terrible. It makes it sound like you’re in for some kind of dry introduction to the fundamentals of statistical analysis. The book is actually far more interesting than that. It’s about the ways in which the edifices of our society—financial, political, even physical—are built on “knowledge” that in some cases is flawed at the very root.

Just as an example, there’s one part of the book where Nate Silver pulls off one of the strongest gut-punches I can remember experiencing as a reader. It starts off with him discussing, innocuously enough, the science of weather prediction. It turns out that the science is better than you might think, but that local weather forecasters deliberately skew their predictions in order to account for some common biases in the audience. For instance, people want their weather forecasts to err on the side of caution. They would much rather be told to tote an umbrella, and have the day turn out to be sunny, than to be assured their Sunday will be nice and then get caught out on the golf course in a sudden thundershower. So local weather forecasters, understanding this preference in their audience, will routinely inflate their estimates of the likelihood of bad weather. If the weather model says there’s a fifty percent chance of rain, you’ll hear on the news that there’s a sixty or seventy percent chance.

This all seems interesting, if academic: it’s a neat bit of trivia, right? Then Silver sinks in the knife:

The weather forecasters did not make any apologies for this. “There’s not an evaluation of accuracy in hiring meteorologists. Presentation takes precedence over accuracy,” one of them told Eggleston. “Accuracy is not a big deal to viewers,” said another. The attitude seems to be that this is all in good fun—who cares if there is a little wet bias especially if it makes for better television? And since the public doesn’t think our forecasts are any good anyway, why bother with being accurate?

This logic is a little circular. TV weathermen say they aren’t bothering to make accurate forecasts because they figure the public won’t believe them anyway. But the public shouldn’t believe them, because the forecasts aren’t accurate.

This becomes a more serious problem when there is something urgent—something like Hurricane Katrina. Lots of Americans get their weather information from local sources rather than directly from the Hurricane Center, so they will still be relying on the goofball on Channel 7 to provide them with accurate information. If there is a mutual distrust between the weather forecaster and the public, the public may not listen when they need to most.

Ouch.

Silver goes on to discuss Katrina in a lot of detail, and he’s very evenhanded about the multiple factors that made the disaster so awful, but from his perspective the most relevant detail is that it was predictable. We knew what was going to happen in New Orleans, we knew the city had to be evacuated, and yet the evacuation was botched. And one of the factors working against those who struggled to convince New Orleans residents to leave their homes before the flood came was this widespread skepticism about disaster predictions, a skepticism that is in fact rational given the fact that bad weather predictions are routinely inflated and overhyped for the sake of news ratings.

Silver’s book covers a lot of topics. Sports, the stock market, politics, even national security—his comparison of the fields of earthquake prediction and terrorism prediction is really fascinating. At base it’s a book about how we make decisions, how we gain knowledge about the world, how we know what we know. And how our unexamined biases undermine us, and destabilize our society. It’s a great read.

These reviews are cross-posted from my Goodreads account.

The Chukchi Bible

This account of the myths and legends of the Chukchi people (a native Arctic tribe) is written by a contemporary Chukchi author, which sets it apart from a more anthropological narrative in some vital ways. Yuri Rytkheu is telling the history of his own family, and he claims the right to tell it in his own way–which in this case means with a rather modern narrative voice. Though the stories themselves may have been handed down through an oral tradition, this book was written: there’s none of the formulaic, repetitive cadences that you generally find when encountering narratives that are primarily designed for storytellers to memorize and repeat. Instead we are told what characters thought and felt and sensed in each moment, as with a modern novel.

Yet the stories are infused with a more ancient sensibility. There’s an easy interchange between the material and spiritual worlds, and between the animal and human realms. War and rape and murder happen, and are neither excused nor treated as anything particularly shocking. There’s euthanasia of the elderly, harsh treatment of children, and one act of human sacrifice (although that IS shocking, even to the people carrying out what they perceive to be a divine mandate). The most thrilling part of the book is Rytkheu’s account of the life of his grandfather, who traveled the world during the early twentieth century and witnessed the loss of the traditional Chukchi lifestyle at the hands of the Americans, Europeans and Soviets. Rytkheu doesn’t sentimentalize the often-brutal lives of his ancestors, but he’s clear-eyed about what the Chukchi have lost, and he brings that heritage brilliantly to life.

Bloody Fabulous

I bought this collection because it had a Zen Cho story in it, and while her piece (“The First Witch of Damansara”) is my favorite in the book, I enjoyed several of the others as well. As might be expected from a fashion-themed speculative fiction anthology, it’s heavy on the vampires, but there’s also fairies, ghosts, time-travelers, immortal children of an Aztec blood god, and acrobatic mathematicians. (I quite liked the acrobatic mathematicians.)

Washington Square

Spoiler alert!

Henry James is obviously an amazing stylist, and I love the way he excavates the thoughts and emotions of his characters. I love the way the conflict in his stories almost always comes from characters encountering the limits of their own natures, and how he explores the nature of true honor in a world of hypocrisy and sham propriety.

That said, sometimes I can only take James in small doses, and Washington Square exposes some of his more artificial and frustrating traits as a storyteller. I could believe in Catherine to a certain extent, and certainly found her quiet defiance of her overbearing father compelling, but the resolution of the situation seemed forced and hollow. After showing us a character of such unexpected depth and strength, James expects us to turn around and believe that she’s utterly broken forever? No, sorry, I feel pretty sure that the Catherine we met over the course of the book would have been able to find happiness with a John Ludlow. The final image of the spinster alone with her embroidery is meant to be striking, but I just found it false.