Silhouette of a Sparrow

By Molly Beth Griffin
✭✭✭✭✩

Four Things I Liked About Silhouette of a Sparrow:
1. Setting/time period
2. Character-driven plot
3. Garnet’s silhouettes
4. Coming of age

I felt an affinity for this book before I even read it. For one, it’s published by Milkweed Editions, a non-profit publisher in Minneapolis, close to where I go to school. I like that Minneapolis has such a rich and productive literary community, all too uncommon outside of NYC. For another, the author and I share the same first name. According to a recent psychology lecture I attended, we are naturally predisposed to prefer things that even contain the letters in our name. So can’t blame me for liking something that contains the whole thing! ;)

It’s 1926 and Garnet Richardson is being exiled to the lake to limit her exposure to the polio epidemic endangering the city. Unlike many a disgruntled exiled heroine before her, she thrills at the freedom the lake resort and its nearby amusement park offers her. She dreams of a summer of fun and independence before she returns to an engagement and her final year of high school in the fall, after which she’ll be expected to settle down with her nice but bland boyfriend and surrender her passion for ornithology and learning to the demands of keeping house. Everything is not as she dreams, however. The watchful eye of her aunt cum chaperone compels Garnet to seek independence and excitement where she can, in a new job and a clandestine friendship with a flapper who makes life just a little brighter and Garnet herself a little more bold. But Garnet cannot escape the looming shadow of fall, and before the summer wanes, she will be forced to face challenging dilemmas about identity, loyalty, and what it means to do the right thing.

Garnet is such a charming protagonist, guys. I love her bookishness, her independent streak, her loyalty to the people she loves, her sense of self, her willingness to take a chance, and, of course, the silhouettes of birds she cuts out of fabric for fun. The 1920’s setting – featuring the requisite flappers and dance houses and bootleg liquor, despite taking place in the countryside – is always fun, and Griffin uses it to its best advantage, painting its trappings as quintessentially embodying the vivacious and rebellious spirit of youth. Though the 1920's may seem like an obvious setting for this kind of story (for the very reason of its devil-may-care metaphorical resonance with young adulthood), details like Garnet's interest in ornithology keep it quirky and fresh. The amusement park was a fun addition, too, being something new and controversial that we take for granted as being universally accepted and approved of today. I like how Griffin tackles GLBT themes without making them The Issue, rather weaving them as one thread into the complex web of identity discovery that takes place at Garnet’s age; it comes across as a forward-thinking lesson to be learned from a book that takes place almost a century ago. And, indeed, that’s one of the things that ultimately makes Silhouette of a Sparrow so compelling – the way Griffin crafts a tale as rooted in its historical setting as it is resonant with contemporary adolescents. That, to me, is the beauty of historical fiction at its best, when it connects the past with the present and reminds us how little we have really changed.

Books Read This Year: 19
Top 100 Progress: 50/100

The Three Musketeers (Top 100 #45)

By Alexandre Dumas
★★★★☆

Four Things I Liked About The Three Musketeers:
1. D’Artagnan
2. Paris
3. The valets
4. Intrigue! Sword fighting! Plotting!

I generally try to start my reviews with a little bit of backstory, but in this case, there isn’t really any backstory to give. The Three Musketeers was one of those books that ended up on my “Obviously I’m going to read this” list rather by accident. It’s one of the Top 100, I liked Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, and it’s fat – perfect for my summer of brick-thick books (previously: Atlas Shrugged, up next: War & Peace and East of Eden).

Considering what a fixture The Three Musketeers is in our working cultural knowledge, I’d wager that very few people are actually familiar with the story. For example, contrary to what you might assume from the title, The Three Musketeers stars one recklessly brave young man named d’Artagnan, who is in fact not a musketeer at all – at least not at the beginning. D’Artagnan comes to Paris with a letter of introduction from his father to M. de Tréville, captain of King Louis XIII’s musketeers, seeking to make a place for himself in the world. Having lost his letter in an altercation en route to Paris, the interview fails to install him as a musketeer, but does earn him a position as a guard, as well as facilitating his fateful first meeting with the three musketeers who become his most faithful friends: Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. D’Artagnan quickly adapts to city and military life, and in almost one fell swoop manages to fall in love and become embroiled in the rich political turmoil of the time, caught between the king, the queen, the cardinal (Richelieu), and the beautiful but deadly Lady de Winter.

The Three Musketeers is, more than anything else, a tale of adventure. But it is not just a tale of adventure. For us, it serves as authentic historical fiction, though it was not written as such at the time. It’s also part romance, part political portrait, and part 17th century chivalric code. But my favorite aspect, I think, was the characterization. As canned as the expression sounds, d’Artagnan really does jump off the page. He’s impulsive, passionate, loyal, and eager to prove himself. His friends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are equally well developed; none of them are simply stock soldiers. Athos harbors a dark past, Porthos is a good-hearted hedonist who revels in good wine and good company, and Aramis continually professes that he “is only a musketeer temporarily” until he takes his monastic orders. The four friends also each have a personal valet, none of which fade into the background of the story but have their own distinct personalities and roles to play in the novel. That can be said of just about every character in The Three Musketeers. Even when someone only appears in a few scenes, and with minimal physical description, it is very easy to imagine them as a real character, in the dictionary definition sense of the word: “the combination of traits and qualities distinguishing the individual nature of a person or thing.”

Reading The Three Musketeers, it was easy to picture it as a movie, especially the summer blockbuster/family action flick variety of humor, romance, good-hearted bravado, and lots of sword-fighting fun. Of course, I’m not the first to have this impression – The Three Musketeers has been adapted to the silver screen any number of times, the most recent of which is coming out this fall. I’m not sure how high my hopes are, though, even though I think Logan Lerman – who I cast as Jacky Faber’s beau, Jaimy Fletcher, in an earlier post – makes a perfect d’Artagnan. I mean, there’s a clip of boat flying over the Louvre. How true an adaptation can it really be when there are flying boats involved? Also, it's in 3D. I like 3D about as much as I like Kindles.

Random fact: The novel takes place back when the Louvre was still a palace, and I constantly had to remind myself of that as I read. Nowadays, it’s really weird to think of the Louvre as anything but a museum, and stranger still to think of anyone actually living there.

Books Read This Year: 52
Top 100 Progress: 45/100

The Orchid Affair

By Lauren Willig
★★★☆☆

Three Things I Liked About The Orchid Affair:

1. Reappearance of old characters.

2. Von Trapp syndrome.

3. (Double-agents)²

The Orchid Affair gets two stars for overall quality – in comparison to, you know, the rest of literature – but three stars for improvement on the Pink Carnation installment, The Mischief of the Mistletoe, which I reviewed back in December. My previous sentiments still stand: I continue to enjoy the premises and new installments, but the series without a doubt peaked at book two and Lauren needs to learn how to retire a good thing before it goes sour. She’s really starting to grasp at straws to keep the series going. For the first time, neither one of the main characters in The Orchid Affair has made even the smallest cameo in a previous Pink Carnation novel; they’re tied to the series with tenuous threads. You have to push through the first chapter of the book on faith that the relevancy will soon be made clear. It is, but that doesn’t mean Lauren shouldn’t wrap this series up with expediency and start looking for a new topic.

Also, if this book is any indication, the Pink Carnation covers, which used to be quite elegant and pretty, are taking a turn toward mass-market paperback romance gaudiness that I really can't support.

Miss Laura Grey has been a governess for 16 years and she’s sick and tired of it. In an attempt to seek adventure before the last bloom of her youth fades into middle age, she enrolls in the Selwick Spy School (which readers will recall our original Pink Carnation heroine, Amy, founding back in the first book) and 6 months later is pronounced ready for her first mission. Much to her dismay, it requires her to go undercover as none other than a governess, a position even her new nom de spy “the Silver Orchid” does little to glamourize. In the household of André Jaouen, right-hand man to Delaroche, Bonaparte’s sinister minister of police, Laura puts her newly honed skills in subterfuge and intrigue to the test, to some far-reaching and surprising (to her) results.

The Orchid Affair doesn’t quite hold a candle to the first two Pink Carnation books, but I consider it a step up form recent installments. For one thing, there were no secret messages conveyed via Christmas pudding. The plot also had its finger back on the pulse of the political intrigue surrounding England and French relations in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which had been at the heart of the original Pink Carnation novels. Furthermore, Laura was the right blend of acerbic humor, independence, and sentimentality that Lauren Willig employed so well in crafting my two favorite Pink Carnation heroines, Amy and Henrietta. For another, André’s affection for his children, his still heart-felt loss of his first artist wife, his double-agency, and, yes, even his spectacles, gave André a sort of vulnerable and heartfelt quality that has been lacking in Lauren’s recent male leads, who’ve all been a bit too Dashing White Horse and Manly Heroics for my taste. I enjoyed their romance, too, as reminiscent of Von Trapp syndrome – governess falls for the father of her wards – which I may have a particular weakness for, having spent countless hours memorizing the script and score of The Sound of Music during my formative years. Finally, The Orchid Affair saw the first on-screen cameos of the Pink Carnation herself since Book 1, as well as appearances by other original characters such as Miss Gwen, The Purple Gentian - Lord Richard Selwick, and Whittlesby, brilliantly undercover as a vocal and atrocious poet.

On another note, the Eloise Kelly and Colin Selwick (great grandson of Lord Richard Selwick and bearer of the Selwick archives) frame-story gets more and more far-fetched with each book. Thos time, their main conflict involved permissions to film a Shakespeare-goes-rap musical at the Selwick estate – really???? 

Books Read This Year: 37
Top 100 Progress: 42/100

The Mark of the Golden Dragon

By L.A. Meyer

★★★☆☆

Release Date: October 3rd, 2011

Three Things I Liked About The Mark of the Golden Dragon:

1. Higgins

2. Ravi 

3. The Black Highwayman

The Mark of the Golden Dragon is the 9^th installment in a series I’ve been reading since I was about 11. Unofficially dubbed ‘Bloody Jack’ (after the title of the first book), the series follows Mary “Jacky” Faber, a girl who started her illustrious (and sometimes infamous) life at sea as a woebegone London orphan who, desperate for steady food and a safe place to sleep each night, disguises herself as a boy to take up as a ship’s boy on the HMS Dolphin. Since then, Jacky’s adventures have earned her numerous nicknames (Puss in Boots, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, & etc.), taken her all over the world from the Cape of Good Hope to the northern Atlantic, and required such flexibility of loyalties that they’re blurred almost beyond distinction. Over the course of 9 novels, she’s defeated pirates and dabbled in piracy, won a medal of honor at Trafalgar, attended the prestigious Lawson Peabody School for Girls in Boston (briefly), traversed the Mississippi on a river boat, swum for shipwrecked treasure in the Caribbean, served as a spy on the French lines, met both Napoleon and George III, and been the protégé of a fearsome Chinese pirate queen… just to scratch the service. Nonetheless, though her predicaments and allegiances vary by book (and sometimes even by chapter), Jacky has always endeavored to remain true to two things: Her betrothed, Jaimy, whom she met on her very first voyage and hasn’t spent a consecutive five chapters with ever since, and doing what’s right by her friends. And she’s mostly succeeded. Usually. And she fails with the best intentions.

The Mark of the Golden Dragon sees Jacky safely rescued from a lifetime sentence to the penal colony in Australia and reunited with Jaimy, only to be washed overboard with Ravi in a typhoon off the coast of Southeast Asia. Presumed dead by her crew and loved ones on board her beloved ship, the Lorelei Lee, Jacky and Ravi manage to stay afloat until they wash up onshore. After a few months of navigating the foreign world of the East Indies followed by a fortuitous rescue by trusty ‘ole Higgins (I’m not spoiling anything; readers of the series will know Jacky is ever indefatigable), Jacky hastens back to London, where she infiltrates the London ton with the goal of procuring full pardons for both she and Jaimy (who was wrongfully convicted in the previous novel and sentenced to the same penal colony as Jacky herself), as well as rescuing Jaimy from the life of madness and revenge he has descended into since her presumed death.

Speaking of Jaimy, his vendetta against the two men he holds responsible for Jacky’s putative death has earned him a place on my list of favorite things in The Mark of the Golden Dragon, as well as the nickname “The Black Highwayman” for holding up carriages in search of his quarries, robbing rich occupants Robin Hood style. With his billowing black cloak and mask, and tortured obsession with avenging his (presumed) lost love, he cuts a very dramatic and romantic figure, quite a departure from the relatively unexciting upstanding Lieutenant of the Royal Navy and – pardon my French – whipped fiancé of Bloody Jack, infamous on both sides of the Atlantic, he’s dutifully been for the last few books. It was refreshing to see him break lose.

Jacky has personality and charisma in spades, which enthralls readers and fellow characters alike, and is one of the many reasons I’ve stuck with her for 8 years, in spite of the fact that the recipe for the books grows a bit more stale and contrived with each installment. Yes, the constant cat and mouse game between Jacky and her betrothed, Jaimy, is getting a little tiresome, as are her incorrigible flirtations during their periods of separation. Not to mention her necessary but increasingly implausible resilience and ability to worm her way out of the most dire of circumstances. But on the whole, these are flaws I put up with the way you ignore or tolerate the quirks of an old friend – because you love them, because you’ve known them forever, because their good qualities more than make up for the less so.

Read this book, I say. But first, start at the beginning. (It’s a very good place to start…*)

Conversation Starter:
Which Jacky installment has been your favorite, and what do you think of how the series has developed? How many books do you think she has left in her?

* Forgive me, I watched The Sound of Music on a daily basis as a child.

Books Read This Year: 36

Top 100 Progress: 42/100