This is the third book I've read by Jean Webster. Let's see how this one fares.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
Dear Enemy by Jean Webster C
This is not a book I would recommend, unless you are interested in children and orphanages. Though it offers a detailed glimpse of the treatment of a hundred plus orphans, some with various disabilities, as practiced a hundred and twenty years ago. I read it out of curiosity, but I found it rather dense reading. Not without its charm, but, not a page turner either.
This is the "sequel" to Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs, which I greatly enjoyed. She uses the same format here as in that book; a collection of letters. In this case written to a number of different people, including Judy Abbot, the hero of the Daddy-Long-Legs story, now married to a wealthy husband. The writer of these letters is an old collage friend of hers, Sallie McBride, who she has talked into becoming the director of the orphanage that Judy Abbot grew up. Sallie is given in the mandate and money to modernize the orphanage to make it far less grim place than it had been when Judy was raised in it. Funded by money from Judy's husband, Sallie sets out to do just that, making a more cheerful and healthy place for the children. The long series of letters relate her struggles over the course of the better part of a year. to do just that.
Whereas the letters in Daddy-Long-Legs were bright and interesting, these are often highly detail accounts of her effort and of individual children, one letter after the another to various people. While the content of the letters are varied and often laced with humor, I still found reading this story pretty heavy going, perhaps because there were so many letters, and so detailed.
Webster was social active, not only in the suffrage movement but the reform movement to improve orphanages and the plight of the poor. She uses this story to highlight the challenges and possible solutions. My wife Sally was a special ed teacher, both in grade schools and high schools, and I recognize some of the issues this Sallie faced dealing with some of the children, brought to them, often out of poverty. Everything now has a name and some sort of classification, and some sort of treatment. But not back then. It was interesting to see how they approached these issues 120 years ago, how the approach and understanding changed, and how such things have not.
There are various storyline running through this novel, with a variety of characters, so you shouldn't come away from this review thinking this is a dry, dreary book. It is not, I just found it, well too dense, as in the Gutenberg copy I was reading had virtually no breaks between letters, so one tended to run into another, from one end of the book to the other, which made it for me, rather tedious reading. As always, your mileage may vary.
No comments:
Post a Comment