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
The Adventures of Mary Darling by Pat Murphy DNF 42%
I hate books of fiction that attempt to educate me. I don't like being treated like an idiot. I love to learn about the past through works of well researched fiction, for example the Patrick O'Brian novels or the Georgette Heyer romances, but I hate it when the author basically steps out of the story to lecture the reader on some aspect of the historical time their story is set in. There is fiction and there is Wikipedia. Both have their uses, but different uses.
I didn't start reading The Adventures of Mary Darling to learn about some quack doctor's treatment of rich women with nervous conditions in the late Victorian period, one of several pages long mini-lectures in this book. If the information was woven into a conversation or actions relevant to the plot, fine. Bring it on. But in this case, the author brings the doctor into the story simply as an excuse to launch that mini-lecture on the horrible treatments, and the utter lack of agency women had in the matter. She simply stopped telling the story, and turned to the reader to tell us all about this monstrous evil. Nothing comes of it; it's just an excuse to lecture us. Oh, and where you ever curious about the ABC Tea Houses in London? She has you covered there as well.
This book, as far as I got into it, seemed to be written more as vehicle for education about the various evils of the world a hundred years ago than an "adventure". She highlights such subjects as the treatment of women and non-white races in the late Victorian period, issues that I, and I suspect most, of not all, of the potential readers, are well aware of. Moreover, since they are historical ills, they can not be retroactively cured. So what's the point, then? With "Adventure" on the tin, this tin is, in my opinion, clearly mislabeled.
Murphy has been writing for 40 some years and has won awards, and yet this story has far more "telling" than it has showing. I found it tedious reading, even without the lectures. Moreover, in the modern style, she has taken her story, and, with a hammer, smashed it into little crumbs. She then tells the story using those little crumbs; constantly jumping between POVs, time, and space in scenes often just a few pages long. Everyone seems to have secrets that are revealed in the small crumbs throughout the part of the story I read, more than that I can't say, since I didn't get further.
Usually, in a mystery story, the mystery is unraveled by the main character(s) in a sequence of discoveries. In this story the reader is told bits and pieces of each of the secrets well ahead of the main characters, with no coherent sequence or timeline, just to keep the tedious story seemingly moving along one tiny step at a time, I guess.
The many points of view characters come and go so fast, and so inconsistently, that I, at least, found it impossible to care about any one of them.
Not that we are meant to, except for perhaps the title character, since the author seems to have set out to deconstruct the familiar characters, tarnishing or destroying the magic of the stories that this novel is a rift on in the process. Which seems to have been her intent.
"Stop ranting, Chuck! What about the story?" you yell.
Right. Well, the story is about Mary Darling, the mother of Wendy, John, and Michael who went off to Neverland with Peter Pan, and her efforts to recover her children. In this novel, she happens to be the niece of Dr John Watson, so that Sherlock Holmes is brought in to investigate their "kidnapping." What follows, in the first 126 pages, is that we are introduced to Mary, her husband, an iffy old friend of Mary's in the rat-skin glove making business, Mrs Hudson, Watson and Holmes, Peter Pan, and various crumbs of their backstories. My reading ended with Mary, disguised as a man, sets sail to Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean - where have we heard of that island before? - because of a leaf found on the windowsill. And maybe because of a crumb that hasn't been revealed yet. Who knows?
It sounded like a charming idea for a story, which is why I rushed off and ordered it up from the library. However, as you will likely have noticed, I had a few problems with this book, on many levels, not the least a resentment of its attempt to drain any and all magic out of the stories it is based on. I found it a great disappointment, actually annoying, hence my ranting about it. A charming idea, but a book with a very clear agenda, no charm, and no magic.
However, given my negative views on this book, here is the link to the much more positive Rich Horton review. While he notes the same tendency as I did to teach us things, he didn't mind it half as much as me.
While I really disliked this book, and thought it very poorly written, your milage may vary. It is fairly well regarded on Goodreads.
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