book reviews

Ivor Noel Hume, Civilized Men. I like Hume's writing - he's one of my favorite archaeology/history writers - so I was interested when I saw he'd written a fiction novel. I later discovered that apparently it was originally a screenplay, so the book is more a novelization, which shows. Also, the production budget for the book was very, very low. The typos and lack of copyediting made some passages really painful to read. But I got through, and I did enjoy the story. I thought a bit too much time was spent on all the high muckety-mucks of Jamestown and their political machinations, and not quite enough time spent on the two young men whose experiences in the New World are ostensibly the focus. I'd have liked more detail on their lives in and around Jamestown. Altogether it was a good story, but not one I would be able to get through again, thanks to the cheapo publishers.

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles. Since the base premise of this novel - that a woman is placed beyond the pale by being the victim of a sexual assault - is such an outdated concept, I had little patience for the ramifications of the event. Why should the man who married her think her seducer was her "real husband", while he doesn't feel the same about the woman he slept with before marriage? Why doesn't she realize it? Tess's self-effacing ways are unbelievable, her husband unworthy of the name, and it's all told in such tedious prose that I'm amazed I made it all the way through the book. Sorry, Mr. Hardy, but you don't fit in the modern world.

L. M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island. Well, how much is there to say, really? Anne Shirley goes to college - it's a fun book, I love Aunt Jamesina and Patty's Place, and it's L.M. Montgomery, whose style is simple and lovely.

Anne Perry, Pentecost Alley. I think this one does a good job of drawing in some of the secondary characters while also advancing the metaplot. (I'm not a fan of metaplots, and you'll hear more about that as I get further into the later works in the series, but in some cases it's kind of inevitable that your characters advance in their lives and the lives become more complicated. This book fits those complications into the underlying mystery fairly seamlessly.) Altogether, a solid entry in the series ... and it's been long enough since I read the last one that I'm not so burnt out on Perry's style.