Oh Dear

For anyone interested in Polish poetry, Bogdana Carpenter's Monumenta Polonica is the perfect introductory volume. This bilingual anthology spans four centuries of Polish literature, from the 14th century to the 18th century, introducing readers to poetry from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque, and the Enlightenment. For the reader who is unfamiliar with the culture and history of Poland, Carpenter opens each epoch with a brief history, giving some historical context to the poems. She has also provided a brief biographical sketch of each of the known authors as well as some analysis of their styles. All of the poems presented in this volume were originally written in Polish, Carpenter chose not included any poetry written in Latin, which may have eliminated some important works. However, despite the omission of Latin works, Carpenter's anthology is still a rich collection that illustrate the wide spectrum of poetry produced during the first centuries of literature in Poland. Of particular note are the Laments of Jan Kochanowski for his beloved daughter Orszula, which were especially touching given the depth of the authors obvious grief. His poems and others within this text are ones that I will return to again and again.

Before watching The Making of a Lady on PBS I had no idea that Frances Hodgson Burnett had written for adults and curiosity drove me to purchase and read The Making of a Marchioness. It bore little resemblance to the film, it lacked the romance and the action that a film requires to capture the attention of a broad audience. The book was much more sedate, in my opinion. There was still a threat to Emily's life and she was desperately in love with Lord Walderhurst, but all of the elements required to make a modern period film were gone and instead the book was "diluted with unromantic realism" (1). And that wasn't a bad thing.

In The Making of a Marchioness Burnett develops a group of interesting and complex characters, and who can't appreciate that. While Lord Walderhurst is reserved and, dare I say, repressed the reader often catches glimpses of a softer side, unlike his heir Alec Osborn. Osborn is lazy, violent, and cruel. There is little doubt he is a true villain. His wife Hester definitely competed with Emily for my favorite character. She was pretty and clearly more intelligent, she at the very least had life intelligence. She struggled internally with her desire to have more in life with doing the right thing. She could be cruel and mean-spirited but at the same recognize what was being done for her and be thankful. I really admired Hester as a character, it was curious to watch her development throughout the book. But, ultimately, Emily was the heroine of this story.

Emily Fox-Seton is an interesting character in that she is a very atypical heroine. She is neither very pretty nor very bright and typically a heroine will be one or the other or both. She doesn't even have youth. As of writing this review I'm finding it difficult to come up with another character that doesn't have either intelligence or looks. Emily is naïve, extremely suggestible, and as many characters point out, not very intelligent. But she is a sensitive creature, she lives for others, she's dedicated to seeing to the happiness of others before herself. Like Hester, Emily's development was also a very curious thing to watch.

I feel that all too often we don't think people like Emily are worth writing about, they're not interesting enough for most writers or even for most readers. But characters like Emily are human too. They're humans who experience life just like those characters who are brilliant and/or beautiful and their stories can be just as touching to read.

However, it wasn't Emily's story, or Hester's, or the plot that made this book very interesting, rather it was the frank assessment of late-Victorian/early-Edwardian courtship and marriage. The relationship dynamics between Lord and Lady Walderhurst and the Osborn's, according to Gretchen Gerzina who wrote the afterword for the Persephone edition, was a reflection of Burnett's own marriages and marriages similar to hers during the period. Additionally, the book also provided a fascinating look at class and race relations, that at times proved difficult to stomach, historically accurate or not.

In the end I have to say that while I did enjoy the film a bit more, the book has definitely earned a place among my favorites as I appreciated viewing the world at the turn of the 20th century through Burnett's eyes and I look forward to reading more of her adult centered works.

(1) Marghanita Laski, from the back cover of the Persephone edition.

Diane Setterfield is the Vida Winter to my Margaret Lea. Just as Miss Winter's books ensnared Margaret Lea, The Thirteenth Tale ensnared me, however I didn't have the luxury of doing nothing but reading this enthralling book. Unlike my counterpart, Miss Lea. When I did have time to read I found myself pulled into the mysterious world created by Ms. Setterfield. Where secrets existed in abundance, where books are a central element, where words were chosen with obvious thought, and I lost track of time.

At the beginning of the book Vida Winter makes one request of Margaret, that there is no "jumping about in the story." She mustn't cheat or skip ahead by asking any questions, "everything in it's proper place," start to finish. And while Margaret was dependent on Miss Winter to finish the story, the reader doesn't have any such restrictions and is free to jump to the end at any point in time. I must admit that there were points in the story where I was tempted, but when Margaret agreed to Miss Winter's conditions so did I and anxiously I waited to find out if my theories were correct.

They were.

While this book is incredibly well crafted, the mystery at the center of this tale was obvious to me, although it did not under any circumstances detract from the books enjoyability or the suspense that built over the course of the story. Ms. Setterfield obviously has a knack for the Gothic genre. There were also questions I accumulated throughout the book, some were tied up neatly at the end, other not so much, but I'm one of those people who doesn't favor a tidy little bow at the end. Because I'm still left wondering, the book hasn't ended for me yet and probably never will.

This was and is a book that I hope never ends, that I hope I'm always left wondering about. Toward the end of the book Margaret is lost in her thoughts after being summoned to Miss Winter's side and I feel like her musings perfectly describe how I feel now that I've finished the last page with the prospect of starting a new book.

"Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes-characters even-caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you. Well, it was like that."

Warning this review contains spoilers.

I was set to give this book three, possibly four, stars but the last chapter forced me to give it only two.

There was a lot that I liked about this book, it was a light easy read that had interesting and complex characters who I connected with. Agatha is a plain, outspoken bluestocking with insecurities that rival her husband's. She was a delightful character, who approached the danger she faced sensibly. Magnus, her husband, was horribly scarred in a fire and he proved to be an extremely sympathetic character. His self-confidence was severely damaged not only due to his scarring but also a first wife who degraded him prior to the fire. It was pleasant to read a male character who wasn't completely confident in his appearance. Additionally, the secondary characters were also very entertaining and endearing, with the disappointing exception of Katherine Reynolds, who may have come into the story too late and had too little character development to really become attached to. She read as a carbon copy of the heroine.

The plot felt slightly rushed at the beginning, for example the wedding felt quite abrupt, there was no explanation or reasoning from Magnus as to why he chose to marry Agatha, it just suddenly happened. However, the pace evened out a little more as the book progressed.

Overall, I enjoyed this book a great deal, right up until the last chapter. The character Beatrice was introduced very early in the book and it was quite clear to the reader that she was the one attempting to kill Agatha. My initial assumption was that Beatrice was in love with Magnus but that he never returned or recognized her affection and when he married his first wife, Elizabeth, she became angry. This was not the case. Instead Beatrice turned out to be in love with Elizabeth, who did not return her affections.

I found the use of the Psycho Lesbian trope to be unnecessary and slightly offensive. If this book had been written in the 80s I might (might) have understood, but in the second decade of the twenty-first century we should be moving past such outdated, harmful stereotypes such as the deviant homosexual. Again unnecessary and offensive. It also appeared slightly ironic given the otherwise progressive, at times anachronistic, treatment of women.

I want to give Nothing to Commend Her only one star, but I won't, I'll be generous, since I did like most of it, and give it two stars and block out/ignore the ending. However, I'll hesitate before attempting another one of Jo Barrett's works.

In The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman presents an intriguing alternate version of the myth of Jesus Christ, in that he approaches the duality of Jesus Christ, who was alleged to be both man and god, literally, splitting him into two entities. In his version Pullman makes them twin brothers, Jesus and Christ, who are both tragically human.

In Pullman's work, Jesus represents the uncorrupted teachings of the Biblical Jesus Christ, who preaches about aiding the sick, the poor, the down trodden, and who loves all the little children. Jesus as a human is deeply sympathetic and this is especially clear in the chapter Jesus in the Garden at Gethsemane. Matthew 26:36 notes that Jesus and three of his disciples go to the garden where Jesus tells them to sit while he prays but we have no notion of what his prayers are about. In The Good Man Jesus experiences a lapse of faith and questions the existence of God and his own mission to announce the coming of the Kingdom. This chapter ends with perhaps one of my favorite quotes from this book:

'From time to time we'll remember you, like a grandfather who was loved once, but who has died, and we'll tell stories about you; and we'll feed the lambs and reap the corn and press the wine, and sit under the tree in the cool of the evening, and welcome the stranger and look after the children, and nurse the sick and comfort the dying, and then lie down when our time comes, without a pang, without fear, and go back to the earth.

'And let the silence talk to itself...'

Jesus stopped. There was nothing else he wanted to say.

Christ on the other hand is portrayed as a literal representation of the Christian Church, in all of it's glorious corruption. Christ, in Pullman's version, is the author of the Bible, instead of the unknown figures who finally wrote down the gospels decades after Jesus supposedly lived. In The Good Man Christ alters the teachings of Jesus to better suit his own agenda, this is done at the urging of a mysterious figure who is either Satan (which the figure denies) or a very good conman, likely the latter in this scenario.

Pullman heavily criticizes the Christian Church throughout this book, even taking a shot at the sex abuse scandals that have been exposed in large numbers. However, Pullman doesn't criticize the essential teachings of Jesus, in fact he does the opposite and praises them. He deliberately separates them from the pernicious influence of the church by creating two different manifestations.

More than anything The Good Man is a brilliant illustration of how myths emerge, which according to Pullman was one of the goals he set out to accomplish with this book. It also connects nicely with the first book written in the Canongate Myths Series, A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong which set out (but failed) to explain the origins of myths. In Pullman's work we see how a story which may or may not have been based in truth is elaborated on and changed to suit the needs and the desires of the myth makers. If this isn't clear throughout the book, Pullman makes it explicit in the last chapter as Christ mentally outlines improvements to the many scrolls containing the life and teachings of Jesus that Christ wrote. And he is not the only one who revises his brother's story, Jesus' disciples also add a few things including the story of Thomas the Doubter.

Myths are not born over night, they're carefully constructed over years or decades and they can have many authors. They've been handed down one generation after another until they were finally written on paper and a deeply rooted part of our lives. Pullman has done an amazing job of depicting part of that development here and has provided a fascinating read for anyone interested in that process.