Forging an Art

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.

Mancusi‘s latest was my treadmill book last night, and for a short time afterwards.  Cute, fun, not too much work, especially considering that my other read at the moment is Lewis’s Arrowsmith, although he’s not exactly James either.  High schooler Maddy moves, reluctantly, with mother and younger sister into grandma’s after messy divorce issues, and has problems at her new high school.  She doesn’t quite fit in with the Aberzombie crowd and goes quite awhile without friends, miserable and angry, bullied and frustrated.  She finds companionship and romance online playing Fields of Fantasy as beautiful Elfin magician Allora, but realizes that reality doesn’t suck too much when she reaches out to find other students who share her interests and will stand with her against the Haters who rule the school.  My only issues with this quick, feel-good read are: this is A Cinderella Story – the Hater-SirLeo-boyfriend is named Chad Murray; and, the manga magazine referenced is actually Shojo Beat, not Sojo Beat.  I hope that this is a typo, but it occurs more than once.  Not good for the street cred.  I must say that the cover (illustrated by Elise Trinh) is way cool.

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.