Good Golly Day

“To love anything once extremely well made you vulnerable to another loving attack.”  Truth.  But not so much here.

2.14 Flowers in The Attic

I saw a lot of people rereading this book in preparation for a new movie adaptation coming out on the Lifetime channel.  The movie promised to “go there” and so I saw a lot of readers my age going back to read something we had read as teens to see exactly where they were going to go.  I remembered reading this book and the rest in the series, but I mostly remember liking the Heaven series more.  So I decided to dive in and see how the book compared to the very vague memories – Just an FYI; making the movie for Lifetime should have been all I really needed to know.  Turns out I do remember some parts of the book vividly, mostly the talk of living so lavishly; and the romantic parts I remember turn out to be from the original film adaptation and not the actual book.  But what I really didn’t remember, but very much assumed, was how bad it all was.

The writing is plain bad.  Who says, “Good-golly day”? And quite frankly the dirty parts kind of run the gambit, all the couplings are questionable, not just he obvious, and the fact that the grandmother is set up as the villain is kind of ridiculous in light of the mother’s behavior.  Honestly, the whole thing is totally bizarre and I can’t believe it goes on for three more books.  I can’t even really imagine what I liked about it as a teenager, other than the fact that everyone was reading it.  But now I certainly know why my mother evoked the one piece of literature for every three pieces of trash policy in regards to my book buying.

Historical FanFiction

“It made him vividly aware that nothing was for ever; that pain had its tides, its pauses.” Truth.

1.14 Longbourn

I loved this book.  Reading it with my mom really helped me to get through and stick with it. making it the quickest I have finished anything in months.  And maybe that’s why I loved it so much – I really needed to read again. 

It is a retelling of Pride and Prejudice through the eyes of the downstairs help – basically a fancy fanfiction that falls into all the rage of the recent Downton fad.

I admit that the first third of the book felt like a pretty simple retelling:  We have a maid who likes two men, one who would be the “Wickham” and one who would be the “Darcy”, and so she must make the choice to stay in service or follow her dreams to travel and live unencumbered.  But then the story shifted away from all my assumptions and became a wonderfully heartfelt story about sacrifice and true family.  The additional details to the Pride and Prejudice characters were seamless and the two very different worlds of characters all living in Longbourn seemed perfectly placed and interestingly juxtaposed.  For all the pomp and circumstance of P & P you never really slow down to think of how all those balls and dinners are put together and it was nice to see that being slogged down by all those details didn’t make the characters doing them any less interesting, in many cases they were the better by far. 

If anything, this story was a bit harsh on our dear Bennets, but isn’t that the way life works?  No one really sees anything the same way.  Hence, fanfiction.  And boy oh boy, is the publishing world taking notice.