Book Review: Dear Mr. Knightley

Posted on August 7, 2014 by Barbara Harper

The cover and title of Dear Mr. Knightley almost makes you think it will be a cute modern takeoff of Jane Austen’s Emma. But it’s far from that, and, oh my, so rich on so many levels.

Samantha Moore (known as Sam) has spent most of her life in the foster care system. Because of her past and being so often moved about, she finds it hard to relate to people: to protect herself from being hurt she hides her true self. She confesses, “I let go of people and relationships to protect myself, and then I detached so completely that I lost the ability to relate.” At one foster care home she discovered classic books. She became fast friends with Jane Eyre and loved the “safe, ordered, and confined” world of Jane Austen. Classic books became her refuge, and in many cases she responds to people by quoting them, thus hiding her real self.

When presented with the opportunity to receive a grant to go to graduate school, she decides to take it. One unusual stipulation is that the grantor wants to receive “personal progress letters” from her on a regular basis. To preserve his anonymity and give her more freedom to express herself, he goes by the pseudonym George Knightley. Sam accepts the conditions and finds school much harder than she thought and trying to open up and relate to people even harder. He letters to Mr. Knightley become “one-sided soul purgings,” made possible because of the anonymity and because she is sure they will never actually meet.

Much of the book unfolds her growth as a person and in her relationships, including one with a young hostile 14 year old who comes to the group home where she lives and with a couple of new friends at school. When she (literally) runs into her favorite contemporary author, who is speaking at a class in her school, she introduces herself and is invited to coffee, and so starts a tentative friendship with him. But just when she is learning to trust, will a betrayal set her back?

I don’t want to say much more about the plot than that, but I loved watching Sam’s growth. A quick glance at some reviews at Amazon and Goodreads showed that some readers thought she was “a jerk” and didn’t like her. But that’s the whole point: she comes across that way (not in her letters, but to her potential friends) in the “I’m going to drive you away before you drive me away” stance that many people who have been deeply wounded take to protect themselves. Watching the ups and downs of her beginning to realize how she’s been coming across, open up, take risks, learn to trust was full of pathos. Similarly, her naivete, which some criticized, was, I thought, quite understandable since she hadn’t been in any kind of a setting where people tried to teach her about life, the world, and relationships until she came to Grace House, a group home, as a teenager. She eventually learns that “self-protection keeps you from love.”

I also loved the multitude of classic book references and quotes, not only from Austen and Bronte, but also Dickens, Dantes (The Count of Monte Cristo), L. M. Montgomery, and C. S. Lewis. I especially liked a passage where Sam reads about Eustace becoming a dragon in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and realizes her own dragonish tendencies and her need to be delivered from them. Sam (and Reay) loves many of the same books I do. We became friends when she wrote that “George Knightly is a good and honorable man – even better than Fitzwilliam Darcy, and few women put anyone above Mr. Darcy. Yes, Darcy’s got the tempestuous masculinity and brooding looks, but Knightley is a kinder, softer man with no pretense or dissimulation. Yes, he’s a gentleman. And I can write with candor to a silent gentleman, and I can believe that he will not violate this trust.” Yes! I’ve always liked Knightley better than Darcy.

I appreciated the way the faith element was brought in very naturally. Sam isn’t open to it at first because she thinks “He doesn’t pay attention to me. But…I want to badly to believe that God cares, that all of this matters to Him, that all this pain has a purpose and that none of it tarnishes me forever.” After her encounter with a couple who show her Christ’s love, who “drop hints and hope like bread crumbs for me to follow,” she writes, “How can I not believe that there is a God who exists and loves, when the people before me are infused with that love and pour it out daily? I still can’t grasp that it’s for me, but what if it is?”

I’m normally not a fan of epistolary novels, because not many people really write letters at all these days, much less letters full of plot points and dialogue, but I could easily set that aside and just get into the story and its telling in this way. Even though I think such letters are still probably unrealistic, the style fit this story well. This is the first novel I have been this wrapped up in in a long time, eagerly looking for ways to get in more reading throughout the day (the Kindle app on the phone is nice for that: it’s a little harder to read on a small screen but handy if you find yourself with a few minutes to spare here and there).

I had gotten this book when it was either free or very inexpensive for the Kindle app, and then had forgotten about it. I’m thankful the Austen in August reading challenge reminded me it was there. Katherine Reay is a favorite new author. This is her first novel, and I eagerly await more.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

Book Review: On Stories and Other Essays on Literature

Posted on August 5, 2014 by Barbara Harper

Someone recommended On Stories and Other Essays on Literature by C. S. Lewis some time last year. I asked for and received it for Christmas, but then set it aside when I entered a number of reading challenges for this year. But something in How to Read Slowly touched off a train of thought that reminded me of Lewis’s book, so I was happy to pick it up recently. Then realizing it could qualify for Carrie’s Narnia Reading Challenge for July made me push a little harder to try to get through it by the end of the month.

Nineteen of Lewis’s essays were compiled for this book by Walter Hooper, one of his biographers, his private secretary for a time, and eventually the literary executor of his estate. The last selection in the book is a transcript of a discussion recorded with Lewis and two colleagues. Many of the essays were previously published in magazines or in Lewis’s books: others had been unpublished until this book. Some are Lewis’s thoughts on fiction, science fiction, writing for children, etc., while others are critiques of other writers’ work (Dorothy L. Sayers, Rider Haggard, George Orwell, Tolkien, and others).

There is no way to really review a book like this, so I am just going to share some observations.

I hadn’t known and was fascinated to learn in Hooper’s mini-biography which introduces the book that in Lewis’s time “the most vocal of the literary critics were encouraging readers to find in literature almost everything, life’s monotony, social injustice, sympathy with the downtrodden poor, drudgery, cynicism, and distaste: everything except enjoyment. Step out of line and you were branded an ‘escapist'” (p ix). I’m glad Lewis not only stepped out of the box but succeeded and made it okay to enjoy stories as stories.

Lewis states many times in various essays that he did not write the Narnia series or his science fiction trilogy with morals or symbolism in view, as many people in his time and since have thought. They started with certain pictures in his mind (a faun carrying an umbrella) and developed from there. “Never…did he begin with a message or moral, but…these things pushed their own way in during the process of writing” (p. xv). He says in the transcript at the end, “The story itself should force its moral on you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story” (p. 145).

Reepicheep and Puddleglum the Marshwiggle were his favorite characters (p. xi).

He decried the kind of fiction where “the author has no expedient for keeping the story on the move except that of putting his hero into violent danger. In the hurry and scurry of his escapes the poetry of the basic idea is lost” (p. 10). Of course he had no problem with putting the hero in danger, as you know if you’ve read Narnia or the Space Trilogy: sometimes that’s a necessary part of the plot. But if that’s all the story is, it might be enjoyable to some, but there’s no deeper meaning.

He also believed that the “marvels in a good Story” should not be “mere arbitrary fictions stuck on to make the narrative more sensational” (p. 12). In other words, the story itself should be intrinsic to the “world” in the story. A story about pirates should have a different feel and problems than a story about giants and dragons. The plot shouldn’t be such that it could be stuck into any setting.

He quotes Dorothy L. Sayers as saying, about the assumption that she wrote to “do good”: “My object was to tell that story to the best of my ability, within the medium at my disposal — in short, to make as good a work of art as I could. For a work of art that is not good and true in art is not good and true in any other respect” (p. 93).

When asked what he thought of a certain book, he replied, “I thought it was pretty good. I only read it once; mind you, a book’s no good to me until I’ve read it two or three times” (p. 146).

I found his thoughts on critiques and book reviews quite interesting in “On Criticism” and in his answering of some criticisms of his work in “On Science Fiction.” Then to see/read him “in action” critiquing other books was enlightening. He didn’t pull any punches, but he wasn’t mean or belittling, and he complimented and praised the good while sharing honestly what he thought was bad. He made a strong case for truly evaluating what was good and bad and not deeming a book bad just because one doesn’t like a particular genre.

He thought The Lord of the Rings would “soon take its place among the indispensables” (p. 90). He was right. 🙂

I didn’t look up every word I didn’t know in this book, but I should have, especially with a dictionary app at hand on my phone. I eventually started doing so partway through the book.

Though Lewis has such a wealth of knowledge, I found him very readable and not hard to follow for the most part. I’d love to have sat in on one of his classes.

And here are some of my favorite quotes:

“It might be expected that such a book would unfit us for the harshness of reality and send us back into our daily lives unsettled and discontent. I do not find that it does so….Story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion into the preposterous [speaking here of The Wind in the Willows] sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual” (p. 14).

“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty – except, of course, books of information” (p. 14).

On the topic of frightening elements in children’s literature, he agreed that “we must not do anything likely to give the child those haunting, disabling, pathological fears against which ordinary courage is helpless,” but to withhold “the knowledge that he is born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil…would be to give children a false impression and feed them on escapism in the bad sense. There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the Ogpu and the atomic bomb. Since it is so likely they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making destiny not brighter but darker. Nor do most of us find that violence and bloodshed, in a story, produce haunting dread in the minds of children…Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book…I think it possible that by confining your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing at all alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable” (pp. 39-40) (emphasis mine).

On The Lord of the Rings: “Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; this is a book that will break your heart” (p. 84).

“‘But why,’ some ask, ‘why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?’ Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is that of mythical and heroic quality” (p. 89).

“The value of myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the ‘veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse,apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book [LOTR] applies the treatment not only to bread and apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly” (p. 90).

I love that – that by seeing truth in stories we sometimes see it more clearly than we otherwise would have.

If you like Lewis or like literature, I highly recommend this book to you.

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

Book Review: Just Jane

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Barbara Harper

Just Jane: A Novel of Jane Austen’s Life by Nancy Moser caught my eye when it came through as free or inexpensive for the Kindle app because I so enjoyed How Do I Love Thee?, her novelization of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life.

The novel is written from Jane’s point of view beginning when she is in her early twenties. She’s the seventh of eight children, the youngest of two girls. She enjoys writing and her family enjoys hearing her stories, but there doesn’t seem to be much thought of publishing yet. She has had some encounters with a Tom Lefroy to the point where she believes they have an understanding. While he is away at law school she cherishes hopes of their coming union. But, if you know her life story, you know she never hears from Tom and he marries someone else.

She continues at home doing all the things a single woman in the 1800s would do, with the addition of writing, until her family moves to Bath. She not only doesn’t want to go, but she is furious that the decision was made without even consulting her. She has lived in the rural village of Steventon all her life and hates Bath. She has no choice but to move with her family, but she does not write during the years they live there.

Though she has another romantic encounter or two, she never marries. When her family moves again to more commodious accommodations, she is inspired to pick up her pen again. Her first novel is rejected, which may be an additional reason she stops writing for a while, but eventually, as the world knows, she is finally published. She writes anonymously at first but eventually her secret comes out.

The book ends some years before her death, but the author provides a postscript with details of her remaining years. I much appreciated a section at the back where Moser tells what is fact and fiction in the book. Unfortunately, many of Jane’s letters were destroyed, and though Moser drew from them and even seamlessly wove some into the story, she had to fill in the best she could with what she knew.

I thought I would really like this book since I liked the earlier book of Moser’s and since I generally enjoy Austen’s books. I didn’t dislike it per se, I just didn’t love it as much as I thought I would. Sometimes when you approach a book with high expectations it makes it especially hard for it to live up to them. I felt there was too much information about her family: by the time she’s in her mid-twenties, most of her brothers have either already married or are getting married, and the drama of their relationships wasn’t really what I was reading the book for. Then again, I’m sure she and her parents and sister would have been involved and interested, so it was definitely a part of her life and I can understand its inclusion. I missed her humor: some of her writing has been described as “biting satire” (some of the “bite” goes a little too far for me sometimes), but some of it has a lighter touch. I just finished listening to Northhanger Abbey and loved some of the humorous interchanges with Henry especially (also the name of her favorite brother) and the way she subtly gets across to the reader some of the things naive Catherine Morland misses in her first foray away from home. I also thought she came across as somewhat negative (downright grouchy sometimes), but near the end she did say that she wrestled with discontentment and was guilty of “the unforgivable act of complaining. For what good comes from that particular vice – for the complainer or her unlucky listener?” Moser says in her afterword that Jane was “witty, wise, discerning, creative, loyal. She was also stubborn, judgmental, insecure, and needy. She was…a lot like us.” She did learn along the way that she could “wallow in unhappiness or make a determined choice to leave it behind and move forward. Life is not fair – nor often understandable. But it is ours to live to the best of our ability.”

I did empathize with what seemed to be an inclination towards introversion: though she loved visiting family and having them visit, there were times she declined certain activities because she just needed some time alone. She “embraces silence and solitude.” Though she attended balls in her younger years, she seemed to be more of a homebody later on.

So…upon reflection I guess I did appreciate more from it than I thought. 🙂 That’s one thing reviews are good for – going back over the story and trying to put it all into perspective. I did enjoy her more at the end of the book than at the beginning or middle and appreciated what she learned about contentment and life and finding one’s place.

And I loved the cover!

One last note that I especially liked: when one reviewer seems to portray Jane’s work as “educational,” she says, “I didn’t mean for it to be educational…at least not with any conscious intent.” Her sister Cassandra replies, “Your stories portray true life. In that there is always education.” Amen to that. I think that’s what resonates with us in the books that most appeal to us, no matter the setting: when they depict something of real life and touch our hearts with truth.

Linking to the Austen in August challenge:

(This will also be linked to Semicolon‘s Saturday Review of Books.)

Friday’s Fave Five

Posted on August 1, 2014 by Barbara Harper

It’s Friday, time to look back over the blessings of the week with Susanne at Living to Tell the Story and other friends.

I didn’t think I’d get to a FFF today – it has been a busy day, plus at first I just couldn’t think of anything to mention that I haven’t mentioned before. But it is ok to be thankful for things again/still. 🙂 This is where the value of an exercise like this manifests itself: after just a few concentrated minutes of thinking it over, I found that there were more than five, as usually happens. So here they are:

1. Another ladies’ newsletter completed. Some months I pretty much know what I am going to include in it, so it is just a matter of getting it down and formatted. Some months I have no idea, and this was one of those. But after praying for the Lord to direct me in what to put in, it’s so neat to have different things come to mind and then see it all come together.

2. Cake pops. I was craving something caky, but I don’t dare make a whole cake for just three of us. I was in Wal-Mart and remembered these (that’s the only place I have ever seen them):

Fit the bill perfectly!

3. Face Time with Jason, Mittu, and Timothy. We don’t see Jason and Mittu as much as we used to since they have a new baby in the house and their own washer and dryer now. 🙂 And we got so used to seeing Timothy several days a week while he was in the hospital, that to go a couple of weeks without seeing him seems like half of forever. I was craving a visit and texted to ask if they wanted to Face Time, and we did. It was nice to catch up and fun to see him almost in person, though I enjoy pictures, too. It was nice, too, to talk to him a bit – don’t want him to forget Grandma and Grandpa’s voice! 🙂

4. An appointment deferred, or actually not deferred, but I thought I had an appointment for my physical Thursday but was relieved to find it was actually scheduled for next Monday. It was just a busy week, and though I could’ve worked around it, it was nice to discover I didn’t have to after all.

5. Take-out a couple of times this week. My husband brought home Chinese food Saturday night, and then one night when he had to be out of town Jesse and I got take-out from Ruby Tuesday’s.

Other little blessings: I’ve enjoyed our hummingbird visitor coming more frequently, bringing his mate, and getting a little less skittish about seeing us through the window, plus seeing a baby rabbit in the back yard (we’ve seen adults plenty of times but this is the first baby we’ve seen). I’ve also made some more progress on my stitching during the evenings and my new project last weekend. Here is a sneak peek: