My Review:

When I saw this available as an ebook through the library, because it had just been announced as a finalist in 2016 RITA awards (which it just won!), I decided I really needed to give it a shot—both for personal interest and for market research, since I’m also currently writing something set during the Napoleonic war and dealing with spies.

While I was able to zip through this book in just two sittings, after I put it down, I had a hard time remembering much about it. Technically, it’s well written—the tone and the prose were well done. I just never really connected with either of the main characters much beyond the surface level. My one status update while reading this which warranted the addition of a note was “ugh–another book with the characters dancing a waltz in 1812!” While, yes, technically the waltz had been introduced in England by 1812, it was still considered vulgar in polite society, especially outside of London; and even in London, one had to have gained special permission from the matrons of the Ton to dance it.

(This was once again a reaction I had to a scene in a book I read shortly after this [Mary Balogh’s Only Beloved], which is set a few years later . . . but then, shortly thereafter, Balogh has the characters discuss this very thing—that in 1816/17, it was still not common/done).

I will probably pick up at least the second book in the series to see if I connect with other characters of Hunter’s any better, because she is a good writer.

And just in case you’re questioning my reaction to having characters dancing a waltz in 1812, here’s an excerpt from Cheryl A. Wilson’s article “The Arrival of the Waltz in England, 1812”:

This should have been a fun, quick read—actually, it should have been a novella. There was so little story/plot in this category-length romance that there were no fewer than six viewpoint characters (possibly seven—I think I’m forgetting someone) and three romances! And the big conflict between the main couple, Ellie and Roy, was one of my pet-peeves in the genre: the Big Misunderstanding Based on an Initial Falsehood. There’s an assumption made of who she is/what her background is before she arrives in “Paradise, Nebraska,” pregnant and penniless (though Roy and his brother initially don’t know either of those facts)—that she’s a wealthy widow from New York instead of a housemaid who got pregnant from being seduced by her employer’s son. The premise wasn’t the problem. It was how the characters dealt with it that became problematic.

Roy doesn’t like women and plans on never marrying because women are nothing but trouble—a lesson he learned from his mother who walked out on him and his brother and father when he was a small child. So nothing Ellie says or does will ever convince him that she doesn’t have an ulterior motive.

Ellie, of course, is practically perfect in every way with some Manic Pixie Dream Girl characteristics.

As already mentioned, Ellie’s and Roy’s viewpoints aren’t the only ones, and theirs isn’t the only story in this short novel. We’re also given the POVs of Parker (Roy’s brother) and Clara (the girl he’s in love with) and Isabel (Roy and Parker’s wayward mother) and Uncle Ed (their father’s brother/Isabel’s actual lifelong love). Because Roy’s distrust of women and Ellie’s false identity are the only sources of conflict in their plotline (the main plotline of the book) and because he overcomes his conflict until he learns the truth about Ellie right as he’s about to propose to her, there isn’t a whole lot of tension or conflict in their relationship . . . nor a lot to their relationship at all. Which, I’m sure, is why there are two other, more poorly developed, relationships in the story to fill out the required word count.

There isn’t much to get excited about with either Ellie or Roy—although Roy does a pretty good impression of an alphahole a few times—so rather than sighing with pleasure by the time I got to the HEA at the end, I was just relieved the book was over.

And, one last thing, this would have been much better off as a sweet/clean romance. The two “sensual” scenes in the book were uncomfortable at best—especially given that Ellie is around seven or eight months pregnant during both of them. That’s not to say that pregnant women shouldn’t have/enjoy sex, but the entire pregnancy thing wasn’t well incorporated into her characterization, movements, internal life, actions/reactions, etc.—nor was it apparent in Roy’s relationship to her, whether emotional, visceral, or physical.

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And now, a few words about that cover image. Roy meets Ellie at the train station, not 200 yards away from it. And the book very specifically describes the black “widow’s weeds” Ellie is wearing when she gets off the train—including being covered up with a shapeless cloak that disguises the fact that she’s six months pregnant. It’s also very specific in describing Ellie as a “tiny thing”—meaning she isn’t nearly the same height as Roy, as shown on this cover.

And, finally, this book is set in 1892. The style of her dress is almost forty to fifty years out of date (see these images from the 1840s/50s:

• 1845ish “fan” bodice with dropped waist
• mid-1850s dropped waist, button-up bodice with attached lace collar
• 1845 dropped-waist bodice with narrow pagoda sleeves
• late 1850s ruffled bodice and pagoda sleeves

While they didn’t have to put her in something like this, which is much more period appropriate (1888) and closer to what’s described in the book, and I know she was supposed to be lower/working class and the black dress she was wearing was her old maid’s dress, they could have at least tried to find a shape a little bit closer to what was in style in the late 1880s and early 1890s.

Of course, I think I found the actual inspiration for the dress they used on this cover. You can see it here.

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This was a LOOOOONNNNNGGGGG look at the life of the Nine-Day Queen, Jane Grey, the traitor queen of England who was forced to take the crown at age 15/16 by men who wielded power like bludgeons during one of the most chaotic times in England’s history.

I enjoyed this book much more than I did The Lady Elizabeth, Weir’s novelization of the childhood and youth of Elizabeth I. While that one betrayed Weir’s experience as a nonfiction writer, this one read more like a Philippa Gregory novel—with multiple first-person viewpoints (much like my favorite, The Boleyn Inheritance). And, much like the audio version of that Gregory novel, this one featured a different narrator for almost every viewpoint.

Because Jane Grey was so young for most of the book, it actually worked better to have the multiple viewpoint characters, since she was a passive player in most of what happened to her. It was good to get into the minds (in a fictional conjecture, of course) of the people behind the machinations that led, ultimately, to Jane’s execution as a heretical traitor in February 1554.

Though I knew the story from the “outside”—in that I knew the timeline and details of the historical occurrences—it was interesting to get an “inside” look at the characters who are usually brushed aside as bit players in the transition from King Edward VI to Queen Mary I. Especially since I’ve recently read The Tudor Secret and The Tudor Conspiracy by C.W. Gortner, which is a complete fictionalization of these events (experienced through completely fictional characters interacting with the historical figures/events).

There isn’t much in fiction that covers the lives (and reigns) of both Edward VI and Jane Grey, so the subject matter was what drew me to this book. It was Weir’s surprisingly deft handling of all of the characters that kept my interest throughout the 18+ hours of this audiobook (though, as with The Lady Elizabeth, I found that when she was unable to characterize Jane’s youth through the prose—even at four years old, Jane came across as an adult, with an adult’s vocabulary, reasoning, and understanding).

The only narrator I had any issue with was Stina Nielsen, who was the voice for Jane Grey’s viewpoint. She had a tendency to pause at odd/awkward places in the middle of sentences, which made me have to run it back to figure out what the sentence was actually supposed to be saying, since the pauses chopped up the flow/meaning. She also had a tendency to mispronounce things/pronounce them oddly (such as saying tutor for Tudor). While this was annoying and would start getting on my nerves, invariably just when I was getting ready to turn it off, the viewpoint would switch to another character which meant another narrator.

Martin and Dozois, and whoever else helped come up with the idea for this anthology, had the fantastic idea of picking authors from a wide variety of genres—from high fantasy, urban fantasy, and distopias to hard and soft science fiction to historical fiction—to pen short stories in their beloved genres (and sometimes within their existing series) about women, good and bad, trying to break the stereotype of women as “the weaker sex.”

Story 1: “Some Desperado” by Joe Abercrombie, read by Stana Katic

Story Summary from Goodreads:
As the sizzlingly fast-paced and action-packed story that follows demonstrates, sometimes chasing a fugitive can be as dangerous for the pursuers as for the pursued—particularly when the quarry has no place left to run….

This apparently fits within Abercrombie’s First Law series, which, according to Wikipedia, is a fantasy series “set in an epic fantasy world at war, reminiscent of medieval-era Europe and the greater Mediterranean world.” I personally would have guessed that it was a western series set some time in the 1870s in west Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, etc., and populated by somewhat stereotypical male outlaws and a kickass female outlaw.

While it was well-written and engaging, there was no point to it. I never really knew who the main character, Shy South, was, what she had done, why she was on the run, and why I should care if she lived or died. There was really no arc to the story. Shy had a goal (survive) and plenty of conflict, but this could have been a chapter lifted out of the middle of a novel—because there was no actual plot to it. It seemed to be moving some larger storyline forward without ever truly becoming a standalone story in its own right.

Stana Katic (from Castle) did a great job with the main character’s narrative and dialogue, not quite as much with the men’s voices—though she did keep it highly entertaining.

Story 2: “My Heart is Either Broken” by Megan Abbott, read by Jake Weber

Story Summary from LA Review of Books:
A pretty young mother, Lorie, falls under suspicion for killing her baby daughter, who has gone missing. This psychological thriller unfolds from the perspective of Lorie’s husband, who first defends Lorie from the scourge of public opinion but over time finds himself questioning her innocence as he observes her behavior: is her crazed partying indicative of her grief, or a celebration of freedom from childrearing? Every memory and event from her past begins to take on ominous significance in his mind.

Read Part 2 here (covering By the Shores of Silver Lake and The Long Winter)

Part 3 (covering Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years):
I only posted one status update on Goodreads while reading the part of Pioneer Girl that is covered in Little Town on the Prairie and These Happy Golden Years . . . mainly because these are my two favorite books in the series.

05/12 Little Town on the Prairie marked as: currently-reading

I love Little Town on the Prairie (second-favorite in the series) probably for the very same reason that Caroline Ingalls was so adamantly opposed to moving again once they’d settled in De Smet—because there was a town and a school and a church and society and a social life for the characters to be involved in. While the pioneering stuff in the earlier books is interesting, and the whole “triumph of the human spirit” thing can be inspirational, the constant struggle, even when presented gently as in the earlier novels, gets wearing. Plus, as I started reading these books on my own, as a middle-grade/tween reader, I was closer to the age Laura is in LTOTP, so I found the depictions of school and town and the social events she was starting to take place in much more interesting. From a character-development standpoint, it’s also where we start seeing Laura truly develop relationships with others outside her family. Ida Wright (Brown) and Mary Power and others whom she knew from school bring out aspects of Laura’s personality and development as a person that we don’t get to see in the earlier books when it’s just the Ingalls family out on their own and with no one else but the immediate family around to see how this character develops different types of relationships.

As mentioned, for someone who was reading romance novels at a very early age, things started getting much more interesting when Laura started noticing (and being noticed by) the opposite sex in Little Town…—and there’s even more of this in Pioneer Girl.

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05/15 Little Town on the Prairie marked as: read

05/15 These Happy Golden Years marked as: currently-reading

There are quite a few details that were changed from the memoir (or apparently remembered incorrectly) in the “Brewster School” sequence that happens in the beginning of These Happy Golden Years, some of which were left out of the novel and which were surprisingly worse than what actually made it to the fictionalized version. It’s amazing to me how Hill and the researchers at the Pioneer Girl Project were able to track down so many of the people that Laura mentioned in her memoir, given that many times she was going off of childhood memories for names and spellings of names—even to tracking down the students/families who lived in the Bouchie (a.k.a., Brewster) settlement where Laura taught her first term of school.

It’s also my least favorite part of my favorite book in the series . . . except for, like Laura, looking forward to those Friday afternoons and hearing the jingle-bells on Prince and Lady’s harnesses when Almanzo arrived to take her home for the weekend.

05/16 These Happy Golden Years marked as: read

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As evinced in the portion of the memoir that became Little Town on the Prairie, Laura had a crush on Cap, even though he was going with her friend Mary Power for a while. And while she managed to keep most of that out of the novels, she was much more honest about it in her memoir, to the point that this passage made me giggle aloud when I read it:

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05/16 on page 297 of Pioneer Girl (74.0%): “I had not seen Manly since the sleighing had gone, nearly three months, but he had come as soon as he could buy a buggy. I hadn’t known that I missed him, but it was good to see him again, gave me a homelike feeling.”

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I credit These Happy Golden Years with being one of the first romance novels I ever read and fell in love with. So one might think that reading the “real” story behind the fictionalized courtship might take some of the sparkle off of it.

As the annotations point out, the memoir does end on the somewhat same “happily ever after” note that we get at the end of THGY—with Laura and Almanzo almost literally riding off into the sunset together to their happy little gray home in the west. Even though we know what happened next—and that it wasn’t “happily ever after”—it’s nice to see that Laura could find a way to give herself, both in the memoir version and in the fictional version, and all of those who would read it, a hopeful, happy ending. Which is exactly how I like my books to end. (Which is why I never read The First Four Years, either).

Part 2 (covering By the Shores of Silver Lake and The Long Winter):

05/07 By the Shores of Silver Lake marked as: currently-reading
05/07 at 4.0% of By the Shores of Silver Lake: I’d forgotten how the beginning of this book makes me bawl my eyes out for good, faithful, loyal Jack, the brindle bulldog.

05/08 at 40.0% of By the Shores of Silver Lake: There was a lot of skipping over of the many pages of explanation/description of the work in the railroad camp that just happened.”

05/09 on page 201 of Pioneer Girl (50.0%): While I don’t think the section of this book that coincides with By the Shores of Silver Lake was actually any shorter than those that came before it because, just as with the novel, I found myself skimming over a bunch of the descriptions of the railroad camp and the process of building the RR track. Which, in this book also means I was also skipping many of the annotations, which add to the reading time.

05/09 on page 201 of Pioneer Girl (50.0%): This autobiographical picture of Laura’s life growing up also is much more honest when it comes to realistically portraying the family’s bleak (many times dire) financial problems—so much so that Pa would leave the table after eating just a little bit to go back out to the fields to work just to leave more food for his wife and daughters. Laura noticed, so she started doing the same.

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05/10 By the Shores of Silver Lake marked as: read
05/10 The Long Winter marked as: currently-reading

Apparently I don’t have many thoughts about Silver Lake or The Long Winter as I didn’t really post many text updates while reading these two. In fact, Silver Lake is my least favorite of the series (not counting Farmer Boy, which I don’t even really think of as being part of this series), so I read it mainly to see how things changed from the memoir to the novel . . . and to be honest about saying I’d re-read all of the books. But for me, like them, it’s just a quick stop while waiting for the best part of the story to come along.

An interesting thing that LIW did in the novels (possibly at her publishers’ request???) was to make Almanzo younger—closer to her own age. IRL, he was 10 years older than she and already old enough to file his own claim by the time he came to De Smet. In the novels, she shaved about five or six years off and had him lie about his age so he could file a claim. This makes sense for the audience she ended up writing for—by the time the novels in which he features as the romantic interest came out in the early 1940s, society had already moved away from the idea that it would be appropriate for a 25-year-old man to be paying romantic interest to a 15-year-old schoolgirl.

05/11 on page 227 of Pioneer Girl: (56.0%): Whew! The long winter is over—at least this version of it. In this memoir, LIW did not commit to nearly as much detail or description to remembering the hard winter as she did with any other section that became its own novel. It’s obvious, even without the annotations, that Laura really had a hard time writing about it.

05/12 The Long Winter marked as: read