Book Reviews: Through the Shadowlands, Rehmeyer; The Tenant..., Brontë; Tipping the Velvet, Waters

[juushika]

Title: Through the Shadowlands: A Science Writer's Odyssey Into an Illness Science Doesn't Understand
Author: Julie Rehmeyer
Published: Rodale Books, 2017
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 290
Total Page Count: 243,870
Text Number: 776
Read Because: reviewed by rachelmanija, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: One woman's decade-long struggle with ME/CFS, and her efforts to mitigate and understand her condition. Rehmeyer manages to balance the compulsive readability of a memoir against the grinding frustrations of a chronic illness, her personal experiences against an impassioned overview of the condition's social/institutional status, and woo-woo/emotional aspects of treatment against a healthy skepticism. This could be navel-gazey or depressing (and some of the non-medical bit are still tedious, to be sure), but manages to avoid that—and feels, instead, productive, without attempting to offer answers it can't provide. The respect and compassion that Rehmeyer affords her body (and herself) is what really sells this to me.


Title: The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall
Author: Anne Brontë
Published: Gutenberg, 2010 (1848)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 450
Total Page Count: 244,220
Text Number: 777
Read Because: reviewed by Rosamund, ebook free from Gutenberg
Review: A mysterious female tenant moves into abandoned Wildfell Hall, sparking rumor in a small farming community. It feels like a gothic novel in those first few chapters, but resolves into something less genre which maintains tropey hallmarks, like a strong atmosphere and emotive, overbroadcasted resolution. At heart, this is a book about sexism and misogyny, about marriage and women's lives. It reflects its historical setting but doesn't feel restricted by it—I was anticipating a certain amount of reticence on account of the time period, but there's little of that here; instead there's profound anger and grief, and resignation but also valuable defiance. It's not didactic; all the characters are complex, complete people and the protagonist's situation isn't overdramatized; it's not even exceptional. Not always enjoyable, sometimes clumsy, but it's aged well and I'm struck how accessible, and still relevant, its social commentary is.


Title: Tipping the Velvet
Author: Sarah Waters
Published: Penguin Group US, 2000 (1998)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 470
Total Page Count: 244,690
Text Number: 778
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A girl from a working-class Victorian family falls in love with an actress and follows her to London. This is Waters's first novel, and feels like it; it has her hallmarks but little refinement. The period setting is lovingly and playfully rendered, and the sapphic view of the time period is invigorating. But the picaresque format betrays Waters's immaturity; the component acts are disconnected, the foreshadowing repetitious, the end predictable. It has the scope and flawed narrator that I love in Waters's later work, but lacks her ambitious plotting. This was the first Waters novel I ever heard of but one of the last I'm getting to, and at this point feels disappointing: decent, but unremarkable.

Comments

[rachelmanija]

I also liked Shadowlands. I had a similar reaction to Tipping the Velvet. I think it's actually a reasonably good book, just a let-down because her other books are better. The opening paragraph is great though.