Book Review: The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope

Title: The Perilous Gard
Author: Elizabeth Marie Pope
Published: New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001 (1974)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 280
Total Page Count: 153,557
Text Number: 449
Read Because: discussed on this fantasy of manners reading list*/interest in fairy tale retellings
Review: Banished to a remote estate, ungainly Kate finds herself in a place where old magics linger in the form of fairies and deadly teinds. The Perilous Gard surprised me: it's fantastic. Its Young Adult trappings are unfortunate, making the book accessible at the price of caricature, forced humor, and predictability—it feels a little slight. And more's the pity because, at its heart, the book is anything but. This is the character development I long for in female protagonists, based on coming of age rather than the discovery of unseen beauty. The fairies are subtle and superb, and rather than retelling Tam Lin directly it sets itself as a distant sequel, avoiding much redundancy while maintaining the ballad's themes.

What lingered in me was the conflicting emotions that linger in Kate, an awe and a fear, a complex desire, a stubborn practicality; a glimpse of inaccessible magics tempered by a vivacious, mortal humor. Pope's love for this book rings off the pages, a heartfelt intent and a lively engagement, and it resonates. The Perilous Gard is certainly flawed, but I forgive it that; what it does right is so good, so important, and frankly a pure pleasure to read.

* Unsure that I'd class this as fantasy of manners, however: the historical setting rings true, but this isn't setting-as-story; the conflict has social ramifications, but is more self-against-other than it is self-against-peers or elsewise primarily political/social.

Book Review: So Brilliantly Clever by Peter Graham

Title: So Brilliantly Clever: Parker, Hulme and the Murder that Shocked the World (Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century)
Author: Peter Graham
Published: New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013 (2011)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 384
Total Page Count: 153,943
Text Number: 450
Read Because: interest in the subject, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: Only the ebook's new title is exploitative; Graham is even-tempered and moderate. Extraneous information is burdened by excessive detail while the limited number of quotes from Pauline's diaries goes unexplained, but on the whole: well-grounded and informative, thoughtful and respectful. But what makes this book fascinating is purely its content: not the fact of a murder, but the circumstances surrounding it.

It's startling how similar So Brilliantly Clever is to Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures—which says something flattering about the research that went into Heavenly Creatures, but says something more significant about this book's tone and, perhaps, the Parker-Hulme murder. Graham takes a broader and more critical view that Jackson, and yet there remains something beautiful, enviable, and utterly convincing in the relationship between Juliet and Pauline; Graham refuses to condone the murder, and yet—in a way he struggles to adequately explain—it feels entirely logical, even justified—yet, still, harrowing. So Brilliantly Clever is exactly what I hoped for, flawed perhaps but more than adequate as a study of something I find entirely compelling.