Category: Books for Adults

I really enjoyed The Queen of the Tearling.  It has a heavy basis in fairy tale—the young princess hidden deep in the woods, the evil queen, the magical jewel—but it is fairy tale in a Snow White and the Huntsman meets The Hunger Games kind of way.  The adventure rolled along from page one, and I had trouble putting it down.

Amidst revolution and political strife, Princess Kelsea is hidden away in the woods until she reaches the age of nineteen, when she is to ascend the throne as Queen of the Tearling.  But first she has to reach the castle alive, then overthrow her nasty uncle, the prince regent.  On her nineteenth birthday, the Queen’s guard, formerly sworn to protect Kelsea’s mother, arrives to escort her to the land of the Tearling.  Kelsea endures the guards’ disrespect, treacherous travel conditions, and the constant threat of ambush and assassination to reach the castle and face her uncle, the fawning puppet of the powerful and nasty Red Queen of neighboring Mortmense.  With the help of some allies (and the aforementioned magic jewel), but mostly by her own wits and courage, Kelsea comes into her own.

This gothic-tinged historical opens in 1687 with a mysterious woman secretly observing a funeral.  Her identity is the first of many compelling mysteries that propels the reader through The Miniaturist.  The story then backshifts a few months to 1686, when young Petronella (Nella) Oortman Brandt arrives, for the first time, at the doorstep of her new husband’s Amsterdam home.  He isn’t present, and she is greeted by Marin, his chilly, imperious sister and their servants.  When Nella’s merchant husband, Johannes, finally arrives, he treats Nella with an almost brotherly respect, eventually even affection, but with no trace of the passion for which Nella has braced herself.  Layers of chiaroscuro mystery obscure Nella’s—and the reader’s—understanding of her new life and role in her new household.  Why doesn’t Johannes consummate his marriage?  What is Marin’s past and who is she really?  What is the Brandt family’s connection to Johannes’s associate Frans Meersman and his wife Agnes?

The next mystery is the grand arrival of Nella’s wedding gift from Johannes.  It is a miniature house, an exact replica of their own home in dollhouse proportion.  Nella feels belittled.  But she is fascinated by the precision of the replica, and commissions a miniaturist to furnish the house.  When her pieces arrive, she is surprised to receive several unrequested items: a baby’s cradle, and miniatures of Johannes’s two dogs, rendered in detail that could only come from close, keen observation.  Who is this strange craftsman to know such detail, and to make such presumption as to include a cradle?  Did the miniaturist know how that item would sting Nella, who is receiving clear messages from Johannes’s avuncular behavior?  Nella is astounded to then receive an uncommissioned package from the miniaturist, containing an impossibly realistic set of figures: herself, Marin, Johannes, the servants, and the Meersmans.  Her discomfort grows, but she’s unable to reach the miniaturist for an explanation.  As Nella’s miniatures begin to take on peculiar characteristics and as dangerous missteps and misfortunes befall the Brandts, dread over their fates grows, and an inevitable question rears: whose funeral is described in the opening epigraph?

I loved how well Burton evokes 17th century Amsterdam— its architecture and furnishings and fashions as well as its political and religious climate, its racism, sexism, and intolerance.  Nella is a compelling heroine whose growing maturity through the course of the story is deftly portrayed . I didn’t always like Nella, but by midway through the book she had earned my respect; by the end my unreserved admiration.

As much as I loved Nella’s miniature house—the description of it as well as its symbolic power in the story—and the mounting suspense over the identity of the miniaturist, in the end, the miniaturist’s presence and role didn’t gel for me.  Still, many parts of the novel kept me enthralled, and there is much to enjoy in this suspenseful, engrossing, historically authentic novel.  Very highly recommended for historical fiction readers.

Norman Lock skillfully reworks Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn, allowing Huck a more intimate narration of his and Jim’s journey down the Mississippi River, which, as Huck tells it, actually spanned 1835 to 2005.  The timeless duo drift languid decades at a clip on the sempiternal river, witnessing history’s milestones from afar as they pass — the Civil War, Lincoln’s assassination, Indian removals, electric lights, the Great War, jazz music.  They re-engage the world on the occasions when they pull ashore.  And sometimes the world engages them, as when, in 1903, a Western Union messenger hails them from shore yelling “If you’re Huck Finn, as I suppose, and you want to see Tom Sawyer before he departs this world for the next, then you’d better hurry.”  To which the young-old Huck follows the boy ashore to his elderly friend’s apartment for a final goodbye.

Huck is conscious of the strangeness of his atemporal voyage, and of Twain’s version of his story.  He narrates his adventure in 2077 as an old man, having begun aging again only after his river journey ends in 2005.  His narration is often interrupted by asides to the reader:  “You want to know where this is leading,” or, “You’re about to object that it didn’t happen this way. . . Does anyone really know how it happened?  Do you?  Did Mark Twain?  Did it really happen at all?”  It must have, because Jim, now long gone, and the river infuse the remainder of Huck’s existence — as a boat salesman, as a husband, as an Internet surfer, as an old man.

Hazy, beautiful, soul-filling.  I loved this book.