Judith Lennox, All My Sisters
Judith Lennox is the author of entertaining and well-written family sagas usually taking place in the 20th century (Lennox likes to set her backgrounds during the first and second world wars and the time in-between).
All my sisters spans over about ten years, before and during World War I. The Maclise sisters, like the Little Women, are four sisters, with very different tempers, dreams and ambitions. Iris is the eldest, and the most beautiful of the Maclise daughters, at least in her opinion. Although we will discover in the course of the novel that she is much less shallow than she thinks, her ultimate goal is to find a rich husband and enjoy a wealthy life. But fate has something else in store for her. Rejecting her suitors, never good enough, she ends up proposing her friend Ash, the only man who resists her, and meets his rejection. Out of spite, she becomes a hospital nurse, far from the easy life she had dreamt for herself…
Marianne is the romantic one: she reads novels all day long and dreams of true love. She finally meets the one, Arthur, a wealthy and gentle man, who loves her as she loves him. But unfortunately, the fairytale does not last, and soon Marianne will find herself in a dreadful situation, isolated and threatened, far from her beloved sisters…
Eva is the artistic one, she is also a feminist, who has friends amongst the suffragettes. Despite the initial reaction of her father, she finally attends and Art school in London but after meeting Gabriel, a married man with a passion for his female models, she loses her ambition and her faith in herself as an artist…
Clemency is the discreet one. The one without talent or beauty but the real pillar of the Maclise family. She tries to soften the rivalries between her three brothers, the tempestuous temper of her father, and the pains of her mother, a hypochondriac woman who tries to make her feel guilty about her own small aspirations. But even Clemency will end up finding happiness in life, after years of sacrificing herself for her family.
All my sisters is a novel that, despite its length, keeps the reader interested and entertained until the end. The narration focuses on each of the sisters in turn, and all their stories are equally enthralling. The historical background is accurate and always well integrated in the story: Judith Lennox never makes too much of a digression, as many authors inserting history in fiction do.
All my Sisters is good old-fashioned storytelling at its best…
Rating: 4/5
The best of 2010
Here is the top 5 of the novels I read this year (regardless of when they were written). I was going to make it a top 10, but I realized that there was a huge gap between the first five and the rest, so I only kept the best!
1- Paul Auster, Moon Palace
2- Kate Morton, The Distant Hours
3- Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry
4- Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know
5- Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio
Happy reading and a happy new year 2011 to all!
Kate Morton, The Distant Hours
All true readers have a book, a moment, like the one I describe, and when Mum offered me that much-read library copy mine was upon me. For although I didn’t know it then, after falling deep inside the world of the Mud Man, real life was never going to be able to compete with fiction again.
Edie Burchill works in a small publishing house. Her boyfriend recently left her, and she shares her boss’s sofa with his dog, because she does not want to disappoint her parents with the news of her breakup. She has always had an uneasy relationship with her mother, who one day receives a letter which had been lost for 50 years. The letter brings her mother to tears, but she is unwilling to talk about it with her daughter. Edie only knows that it is a letter from a young woman named Juniper, who welcomed her mother to live in her castle in the English countryside when she was a teenage evacuee from London.
One day, Edie finds herself in the neighborhood of Milderhurst Castle and can’t resist visiting it to learn more about her mother. Juniper, now about 70 years old, still lives with her elder twin sisters. Edie learns that she has lost her mind after a fateful night of 1941, when her fiancé, who was supposed to be introduced to her sisters, never showed up. The three women, Persephone, Seraphina and Juniper, are the daughters of a writer, Raymond Blythe, well known and appreciated for his famous tale The Mud Man, a story that enchanted Edie’s childhood and was at the root of her love of books and reading.
To Edie’s surprise, when a new edition of The Mud Man is about to issue, Percy Blythe, the twin who struck Edie as the dominant one, asks for Edie to write the introduction, wanting nobody else to undertake the task. Edie hopes that this opportunity to approach the sisters once more will enable her to solve the mysteries that have been intriguing her ever since her mother got her belated letter: what the inspiration behind the Mud Man’s story was, why Juniper’s fiancé did not show up all those years ago, and why Edie’s mother is so secretive about her time as an evacuee…
Kate Morton, author of The House at Riverton and The Forgotten Garden, had us readers getting used to her wonderful, enthralling, beautifully-written stories. So the expectations were high for this one, and once again, Kate Morton does not disappoint. The Distant Hours is a story with gothic undertones, owing its inspiration to such works as The Mysteries of Udolpho, Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. The plot is suspenseful, intricate and well crafted and, as the narration switches between past and present, we are kept guessing until the very end. Due to the fact that the novel is also a wonderful tribute to books, and a celebration of reading and writing, The Distant Hours might even be my favorite of the three…