I can’t believe how much I liked this novel! I also was surprised that some of themes addressed in The Dirty Girls Social Club overlapped with this novel since two characters in this novel have similar issues to two characters from my previous read. Then again, both novels have what could be considered stock characters but imbued them with enough life and personality to make them feel original and interesting so it shouldn’t be that big of a surprise. Another discovery I can blame on […]
Scandalous!
I don’t remember how I discovered Anne Helen Petersen’s Scandals of Classic Hollywood series over on the Hairpin. But I do remember devouring the latest entries during downtime at my job as a secretary. Petersen let contemporary fans like myself experience the restrictive glamour of stars under the old studio system. She did it with a clever, confidential voice that benefitted from hindsight, and I found the results fascinating. Her blog was a weekly read. The book is more of the same, which feels familiar […]
Gothic crime and Victorian intrigue
A Victorian novel in the form of an epistolary, this is the supposed journal of 17-year-old Richard Shenstone, who has just been sent home, or “rusticated,” from Cambridge because of misdeeds that are only slowly revealed in the course of the novel. Richard has recently learned that his father, once a respected deacon of the church, has died of a heart attack while under suspicion of embezzlement of church funds–and worse–and that his mother and older sister are living in dire circumstances in a delapidated […]