Book Review: Joanna Godden
I am quite out of countenance with my coffeepot. Yesterday, as I am batching it (wouldn't that be a feminine in my case? But the word eludes me) I used the french press to make a modest amount of coffee and it was pleasantly mellow, no bitter notes at all. Today, as I anticipate my husband's return to my embrace, I started a full pot of coffee in the coffeemaker, but it takes simply ages to brew, so I pulled an early cup as I got ready to take the daughter to her work... and it is so bitter I may dump it and start over if I have time.
I came to read this book - it is not a new one at all - in a circuitous fashion. Something like the start of this blog post. Both the First Reader and I have been reading DE Stevenson... I should go back further. When I was a young woman, I was introduced to the charming 'light' novels and romances of DE Stevenson, a Scottish writer who brought a human touch to her characters that suited my tastes very well. I lost track of them for quite some time as they were hard to find in libraries and used bookstores, and I didn't have the budget to acquire them through other routes. Just recently, I was pleased to discover her work on Amazon, and some of it very reasonably priced, or available through Kindle Unlimited. So I started reading her again, because she is light fare for a mind that didn't want to fuss over new ground. To my surprise, the First Reader picked up one of hers, and then asked if I would please get the Mrs. Tim books. He was intrigued by the idea of reading the mildly bowlderized diary of a woman married to an army man who served in British Regimentals.
I highly recommend them, by the way, they are pure delights and funny as anything. However, as he was reading, he came across mention of an author the diarist was wanting to read. One Sheila Kaye-Smith, who he then looked up on wikipedia because he wasn't sure she was real, or some penname the author had made up. He read bits of her wikipedia to me, (especially the snarky response to Cold Comfort Farm) and asked if I thought I could find any of her books... I could, and furthermore the price was right to try out a new-to-us author, as Joanna Godden is in public domain.
I don't think the First Reader has yet attempted to read this, but I made my way through the whole thing. It was a bit of a trudge. The book is somewhat relentlessly ambitious, like it's main character. I liked her, sometimes, and really didn't, others. I really despised the ending because it was ridiculous, even for it's time. Perhaps especially as the timing of the end was close to the Great War... It's not that I'm not familiar with the literature of the era. It's different, stylistically, from the modern oeuvre. If I'm not careful, I start to pick up the little mannerisms in my own writing and speaking if I read much of it. But that's a digression... I read the book. I kept thinking that surely there would be some joy in it. It seemed that the author set it up, time and again, for the heroine to have her heart's content, and then with a wrench of violence, the author shatters this frail hope of the reader on the floor and marches onward.
It's not at all my cup of tea. I like happy endings. I really don't enjoy characters the author seems to inwardly despise, and takes glee, it feels, in tweaking savagely. There are characters in this book I really did not like, one or two I did, and the ending... well. The less said of that, the better.
Was it a disappointment? Not really. I had no idea what I was getting into. It was well done. It kept me reading to the end, and there was nothing technically wrong with it. In fact, I'd suggest that as a character study you might want to read it, for the development of an ambitious woman who is almost sociopathic in her single-minded devotion to the one thing she loves best. Her farm. Second to that, her sister, who she spoils, but not quite in the way you might think. I didn't like the character, but she was real.