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kestrell_Arcadia Falls_ by Carol Goodman (Ballantine Books, 2010) [Bookshare.org]
Description: A widow with a teenage daughter gets a job at an isolated boarding school in the Hudson Valley, and soon becomes drawn into both the mysterious death of a female artist who founded the school and the recent death of one of the students.
Things I liked about this book:
* the descriptions of the Hudson Valley landscape and folklore, including references to the Dutch moss maidens and wittewieven (white women)
* the bits about women as artists and the discussion of the Arts and Crafts movement and the art nouveau style
* the references to feminist fairy tales (favorite quote: "You'll find nineteenth century children's literature good preparation for this place: it's mad hatters and goblins all around.")
Things I didn't like about this book:
* the superficial research done about paganism, i.e., the book store owner of a pagan shop who recommends Margaret Murray's _The Witch Cult in Western Europe_ as a scholarly text, when it hasn't been considered robust scholarship for decades.
* the totally humorless emo-mom protagonist who keeps the story well within the parameters of the "woman in peril" cliche.
It's this last element which persuades me that this book is an example of what I call the pseudo-gothic, or gothic-lite. It uses the earmarks of the gothic genre--the isolated setting, the preoccupation with history, the mysterious murder from the past--but it never seems to quite dig into the deeper, more fertile psychological aspects of gothic literature.
As an example, the female protagonist is supposedly a scholar of the fairy tales of Angela Carter. Those fairy tales often featured women who managed to hold on to a certain aspect of wildness, they refused to be fully domesticated by traditional female roles. The author herself claims to be a fan of such stories.
And yet...by the end of the story, all the good women turn out to be those who are mothering and nurturing, and all of the bad women are those who either rejected becoming mothers by not having children (more specifically, daughters) or who abandoned their daughters. All these bad women come to bad ends sooner or later. Even the student who dies is characterized by her (unnatural?) preoccupation with her academic and professional ambitions. So much for the subversive aspects of gothics and feminism.
Description: A widow with a teenage daughter gets a job at an isolated boarding school in the Hudson Valley, and soon becomes drawn into both the mysterious death of a female artist who founded the school and the recent death of one of the students.
Things I liked about this book:
* the descriptions of the Hudson Valley landscape and folklore, including references to the Dutch moss maidens and wittewieven (white women)
* the bits about women as artists and the discussion of the Arts and Crafts movement and the art nouveau style
* the references to feminist fairy tales (favorite quote: "You'll find nineteenth century children's literature good preparation for this place: it's mad hatters and goblins all around.")
Things I didn't like about this book:
* the superficial research done about paganism, i.e., the book store owner of a pagan shop who recommends Margaret Murray's _The Witch Cult in Western Europe_ as a scholarly text, when it hasn't been considered robust scholarship for decades.
* the totally humorless emo-mom protagonist who keeps the story well within the parameters of the "woman in peril" cliche.
It's this last element which persuades me that this book is an example of what I call the pseudo-gothic, or gothic-lite. It uses the earmarks of the gothic genre--the isolated setting, the preoccupation with history, the mysterious murder from the past--but it never seems to quite dig into the deeper, more fertile psychological aspects of gothic literature.
As an example, the female protagonist is supposedly a scholar of the fairy tales of Angela Carter. Those fairy tales often featured women who managed to hold on to a certain aspect of wildness, they refused to be fully domesticated by traditional female roles. The author herself claims to be a fan of such stories.
And yet...by the end of the story, all the good women turn out to be those who are mothering and nurturing, and all of the bad women are those who either rejected becoming mothers by not having children (more specifically, daughters) or who abandoned their daughters. All these bad women come to bad ends sooner or later. Even the student who dies is characterized by her (unnatural?) preoccupation with her academic and professional ambitions. So much for the subversive aspects of gothics and feminism.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-29 01:14 am (UTC)Do you think this squeezing out all the wildness is driven by marketing or the author herself?
(Our book club just read Jacqueline Carey's recent _Santa Olivia_, which is lovely (but not a horror novel). Unsurprisingly, the cover bears no relationship to the content of the book, and I was reminded of how often the publisher's marketing folks reshape the books to what they perceive as the best sale.)