Congratulations to Kim W, who wins Michelle’s The Warrior’s Touch!

This from Michelle”
“The winner of the blog drawing is comment #12! Kim W–e-mail me your mailing address (michelle At michellewillingham.com) and I’ll send you the signed book. Congratulations, and thanks to all who participated! I had a great time…wish I could have spent a little more time with you. :)”

Thanks to all our blog commentors!

I’ll be back with my blog post later today! Stay tuned!

So, I’ve been having computer woes all week (which explains the plain-vanilla, pic-free post!). Reading email quickly at work, or trekking to the library or my parents’ house to “borrow” computers has shown me how sadly addicted I am to the Internet. But not being able to peruse Go Fug Yourself or The Orlando Bloom Files has given me more time for reading!

And my reading this week took on a distinct theme, though not on purpose–they just happened to be the books I grabbed at the library after reading email. The theme was “Dysfunctional Families in Times of Great Historical Upheaval.” Or “Hoydenish Women From Dysfunctional Families, etc.” Two great books that I was really sorry to see end!

The first was Janet Todd’s Daughters of Ireland: The Rebellious Kingsborough Sisters and the Making of a Modern Nation. This was published in 2003, and I’m surprised I missed it before! I enjoyed Todd’s bios of Mary Wollstonecraft and Aphra Behn, and coming from an Irish family I love tales of Irish history. Margaret and Mary King were the daughters of an immensely wealthy Ascendancy family. Their mother, Caroline. was a great heiress in her own right, and when she married she held her own vast estate at Mitchelstown (it didn’t pass to her husband). Caroline was friends with Queen Charlotte, and lived part of the year at Windsor. The Kings were neighbors of the famed Lennox sisters from Stella Tillyard’s Aristocrats, the Duchess of Leinster, Lady Louisa Connolly, and Lady Sarah Napier. Strangely, considering her conservative leanings, Caroline hired Mary Wollstonecraft as her daughters’ governess for a time, which would have a powerful impact on their future lives.

Margaret, the eldest daughter, married an earl, despite being tall and plain. Mary was growing into a beauty, and all seemed well for the Kings for a while. Until 1798. Margaret was a fervent admirer of the United Irishmen (led by Wolfe Tone and the Duchess of Leinster’s son Edward Fitzgerald), writing pamphlets, hosting meetings, and later hiding fugitives in her cellar. Her brother George, meanwhile, was a loyalist officer known even in those violent times for being particularly atrocious. After the Rising failed, Margaret left her husband and lived with a lover in Italy for the rest of her life.

Mary, meanwhile, grew into more of a, er, domestic rebel. She had an affair with a cousin (a married cousin!), got pregnant, and tried to elope. She was hauled back by her parents and locked away in the country. When her lover came after her, her father shot him and ended up on trial for murder. Shocking!!!

I’ve long wanted to write a story set during the 1798 Rising, but it’s hard for me to see how to make it a romance. How to find a plausible HEA in the midst of so much violence? I’m not sure the King sisters could help me much with that, but they were fascinating.

The second book I read was Adrian Tinniswood’s The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in 17th Century England. Tinniswood also wrote the very good By Permission of Heaven, about the Great Fire, and he certainly knows his time period (I’d also love to write a Restoration story someday…). The Verneys were a large, rowdy, wealthy family who were also (luckily for us!) packrats, who saved over 30,000 letters, documents of the Civil War/Restoration period, which was the family’s heyday. Tinniswood’s style is very readable, and by relating these very complex times to one family, one set of characters, he makes it easy to follow.

The Verneys were also a varied lot. The patriarch, a dashing military officer, died in battle as standard bearer for Charles I. He left a stodgy heir (who waffled between king and Parliament before just running off to France for the duration); 1 ne’er-do-well and very annoying son who spent his life in and out of jail, begging his brother for money and marrying and abandoning women (I really hated him!); and 1 son who died at Drogheda. Plus a passel of unruly daughters.

This book had a little of everything! Pirate uncles, father/son conflict, madness (an heiress wife who started wandering around town taking her clothes off and laughing), dynastic marriages, a wife who fought for her exiled husband’s estate, and sometimes even tender love. Above all, the women were fascinating. There were a lot of them, and few were well-behaved. There were elopements (at least 3), an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, an aunt with a (gasp!) Catholic husband, a marriage in Fleet prison, another aunt who got into fistfights with her husband in public innyards. It’s stories like this that make me dispute whenever someone says “That would never have happened back then!” because it seems almost everything happened to someone at sometime. 🙂

This is a lot of info, I know, but I tend to get carried away by books I enjoy! And I felt like I really came to know the King sisters and the Verney bunch. When I put the books aside, I found myself wondering what they would be up to next! That’s the sign of great non-fiction for me, and I hope I can learn to put in just that sort of humanity and truth in my own characters. Though Margaret King and Tom Verney might be too eccentric to be believed in fiction!!

Who are some of your favorite “characters” in history? Can anyone offer me advice in plotting out a good Irish romance?? And be sure and send Good Vibes to my computer!

The term “beach reads” is a bit of a misnomer as torrential rain early in the week and then record-high temperatures later in the week limited beach activities during my vacation last week. And if anyone thinks rain means more time indoors and more time to read hasn’t been on vacation with 3 kids between the ages of 4 and 11. To avoid too much cabin fever at the cottage we made excursions to local caverns and children’s museums instead–fun places but not conducive to reading.

So I read only about half as much as last year but thoroughly enjoyed what I did get to. I am desperately trying to catch up with my fellow Riskies’ new releases. Though I couldn’t get a copy of Amanda’s A Notorious Woman (had to order it) I did bring along Janet’s The Rules of Gentility. A delightful spoof of a Regency (IMHO the best spoofs also show love for the subject) and had me laughing out loud a number of times. I couldn’t explain it all to my children, of course, but now they want to read it when they’re old enough. 🙂

Next I picked up Pam Rosenthal’s The Slightest Provocation. I’m not surprised it finaled in the RITAs. The characterizations are deep and true, the sex is earthy and more real for not being perfect. Sorry, Pam, I know I’m not doing the book justice here but my brain is too fried to come up with better descriptions. Anyway, I recommend this to anyone who hasn’t read it yet.

On the last day I picked up Loretta Chase’s lastest release, NOT QUITE A LADY. In the flurry of unpacking and such I still haven’t finished it but so far it’s got the classic Chase mix of angst and humor. I can’t wait for things to settle down so I can enjoy finishing it!

As to other vacation activities, I can’t resist talking about roller coasters. Tuesday we had the perfect day to visit Cedar Point: overcast and late in the season, lines were short to nonexistant. It was great fun riding the coasters I rode as a teenager–the Blue Streak, the Wildcat, the Gemini–and taking my kids on them for the first time. Because we had to deal with a lot of different ages in our party I wasn’t able to try some of the new, scarier coasters–like the Top Thrill Dragster, pictured right. I’m told the G forces are amazing. Maybe next year. Maybe.

Bringing this post back to relevance, I couldn’t resist checking out the history of roller coasters. I was delighted to learn that there even were two roller coasters built in France in 1817: the Les Montagues Russes a Belleville (the Russian Mountains of Belleville) and Promenades Aeriennes (The Aerial Walk). You can read more about them at www.ultimaterollercoaster.com.

I suspect it would not have been considered ladylike (particularly for an English heroine) to ride one of these French coasters but wouldn’t it be fun to work it into a story?

So before it’s completely over, what were your best reads and rides of the summer?

Elena, still wrestling mountains of laundry
www.elenagreene.com

Sometimes I wish I read faster.

I had friends in college who could read a novel in an hour. There are times when I sigh, and think how many books I could read if I were like that.

And I don’t read particularly slowly, either — but I have so many books I want to read…and I get further behind every month.

Sometimes, though, I suspect that I get more from a book than those old friends of mine. Maybe they were really skimming the book, and getting the story but missing the details, the setting, the subtleties.

And even if I’m not getting more details of the story than they were, perhaps I’m paying more attention to the prose. (Or is that just wishful thinking?)

How about you? Do you wish you read faster? Or do you think you’d miss too much if you did?

Remember: next Tuesday in the Jane Austen movie club we discuss the Ang Lee/Emma Thompson Sense & Sensibility!

Cara
Cara King, author of My Lady Gamester and writer of silly taglines which no one reads