Forging an Art

Review of Julie Berry’s The Amaranth Enchantment at BSCreview.

Sarah MacLean’s debut is just the thing for those girls who have been sneaking peeks at Mother’s regency romances, but aren’t quite ready for some of the more adult themes and details many of them carry.  Three friends enter the social season together, determined to maintain their independence in spite of the pressure to marry the best prospect as soon as possible.  Meanwhile, a Stephanie Laurens-esque mystery, replete with murder motivated by treason, greed, and jealousy, keeps the story, and romance, brewing.  My only issue - Alex’s lady’s maid, Eliza, has a strange accent that comes and goes.  Is it an Essex (as one might expect, considering the setting and facts of Eliza’s upbringing) accent, and if so, why does it follow only certain trends of such an accent, and not others?

I read this in one evening, bowl of popcorn and large, warm cat friend at hand, and went to sleep with pleasant, Austen-inspired dreams.  Here’s to hoping Ms. MacLean lets readers in on events that lead to the happy marriages of the other two heroines left single at the end of this title.

Ellen Hopkins’s Identical should appeal to her entourage of teen fans because of the edgy (that might be putting it too mildly) subject matter and trademark verse format.  Dramatic is one thing, but this is really over the top.  An exploration of family dynamics and a potentially interesting protagonist are suffocated by the multitude of problems this poor girl carries.  She is a surviving twin, an incest victim, a drug and alcohol abuser, sex addict, bulimic – I’m not sure I covered it all, but I might be close.  A couple of the issues/situations would be plenty.  Some of the poetry is trite, but there are lines every few pages that speak to the author’s ability to turn a phrase, albeit inconsistently.  I just finished reading Girl, Interrupted for the high school book discussion group next week, so this was an appropriate companion piece that took me under two hours to read, which was not too much of an investment – still, it kept me from moving on to the McCullers essays I’ve been craving and picked up as soon as I put Hopkins in the ‘library return’ pile on the kitchen table.