Scarlet, A.C. Gaughen

I wanted to love this. It’s Robin Hood, and it puts a female character at the heart of the band, working directly with Robin as capably as any of the guys. In fact, she is one of the guys — she’s Will Scarlet. The idea of a woman becoming part of the band in disguise isn’t a new one — Marian has joined the band in the disguise of a page, there’s Djaq in the BBC’s Robin Hood series, etc. I’m not sure if it’s ever been Will Scarlet before, but it’s a known and loved trope.

Honestly, I’m not sure how well it works here. Everyone and their mother seems to know that Scarlet’s a girl, and it isn’t hard at all to guess about her past and her real identity — even for people within the story. I know this is YA, but I’d still hoped for a bit more subtlety, if not mystery. I was pretty uncertain about the Robin-John-Scarlet love triangle, though it does have its interesting moments.

(And horrifying ones. There’s a scene where Robin calls Scarlet a whore for basically no reason. I couldn’t believe in the fascination of him from that point on. I’m also really over the abusive relationship between Scarlet and a character from her past.)

There’s also interesting stuff about Scarlet’s character: her difficulty with eating when people around her are starving, her coarse ways contrasted with her care for the people around her, her prickliness at the same time as she badly wants to belong.

What really killed it for me, though, was the narration. Given her actual identity, there’s no reason for her to talk like a commoner… and she doesn’t even talk like a commoner. Some of it doesn’t make grammatical sense in any dialect I know. Instead, it’s just faux-vernacular that might fool someone with no experience of dialect, but doesn’t fool me. And the other characters, for all that they have lower born backgrounds, don’t talk like her at all. It sticks out like a sore thumb.

Overall, I just couldn’t settle in and enjoy it, even if I tried to keep in mind that it’s YA, I’m rather over-versed in Robin Hood lore, etc, etc. I’m not going to continue the series. I’d probably give this one star, but I was curious enough to finish it.

Rating: 2/5

Augustus, John Williams

It’s amazing the range of opinions you can find on Augustus Caesar. Some think he was the saving of Rome, a morally upright man who revitalised his country. Others think of him as a traitor, and a hypocritical one at that. I don’t know exactly what I think; I guess I probably think that he was a complex person who ultimately did what he thought best, like most of us. This book goes with the latter view, with a fairly sympathetic eye. It took me a while to decide whether I really enjoyed it: it’s slow-paced, and sometimes the timeline is difficult to follow, as people are writing from one point in time about an earlier point in time, but then the next letter might be from the earlier point in time, but portraying the next set of events. Did that make sense? It sort of does in context, but it can make it a bit more difficult to follow.

I did enjoy Williams’ decision to examine a central issue of Augustus’ life: his moral reforms, and then the fact that his own beloved daughter fell afoul of them. He had her banished from Rome, for all that he spent a great deal of her life watching over her and guiding her in a way many men didn’t bother with for daughters. And Williams does some interesting things with unreliable narrators: we get several different perspectives on the same people and events. Was Julia kidding herself, or was Augustus right — did she plot against her father?

It is rather slow, as I said, and the epistolary format combined with the complex timeline doesn’t help. I enjoyed it as a sort of thought experiment, but I’m not sure how much I enjoyed it as a story, if that makes sense.

Rating: 4/5

The Ides of March, Valerio Massimo Manfredi

I’ve been meaning to try books by this author for ever so long (at least the last six years), so it was a little disappointing to finally get round to it and find it falling rather flat. It might be partly an issue of translation, but it just doesn’t read well to me — it feels choppy and overly filled with exposition; to be all about actions rather than thoughts and emotions — I guess what I mean is that it doesn’t seem to have any emotional life. If someone is worried, the reader is told they’re worried; there’s no need to guess at it, no attempt to show their worry through their actions or reveal it through dialogue.

The writing style honestly sucked any possible enjoyment out of this for me. I don’t know how you can make Caesar’s death boring — there’s so much you can do with signs and portents, with the unrest of the people around him. Instead, it just felt flat, and I didn’t believe in the cause of any of the characters. It’s a fairly standard thriller with historical trappings without that, which is not my thing.

Rating: 1/5

Fever, Mary Beth Keane

Fever is a novelisation of the life of Mary Mallon, the famous ‘Typhoid Mary’. It attempts to dig into why she didn’t stop cooking for people despite knowing the risks; it also tries to provide her with inner life and give the reader someone human to sympathise with. It works relatively well; Mary emerges as a hard-working woman who doesn’t want to believe that something she loves could be making people sick, who struggles with the idea that maybe she is to blame, who has to find a way to get along with the skills she has. It also includes other characters around her who support her and share her views, to remind us that this is a world where germ theory is in its infancy.

It mostly does a good job of making Mary sympathetic, though it has a tough job considering her carelessness. Sometimes she does come across as lacking empathy, and of being too intelligent to miss the implications of what’s happening — so it seems as if she’s stubbornly going through with something she knows is actually a bad idea, potentially dangerous for those around her.

The most emotionally engaging thread is perhaps that of her partner, Alfred. I don’t know how much basis in reality he has, but it provides some emotional handhold throughout the book. They have an on/off relationship as he struggles with addiction and she struggles with her diagnosis as a typhoid carrier. They’re separated and yet come together again and again; there’s something engaging in the way Mary slowly accepts what he is and just works with it, and something pathetic in the way her proudness is worn down.

It’s not very sympathetic to the medical community — Soper seems like a glory hound, for example, who hunts Mary for his own fame — but that’s probably to be expected considering this book tries to see things from Mary’s point of view.

Overall, I think it’s pretty successful, and the historical details seem to be right. It’s very easy to read; the style is relatively simple, but Mary’s voice is strong.

Rating: 4/5

Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein

I really liked Wein’s books about Mordred and his children, at least as far as I remember them (it was a few years ago), so I was quite hopeful about this one. I’ve tried to read it once before, actually; I think I even got a review copy from Netgalley. But I really didn’t click with it. For one thing, the tone is too casual, Verity’s gambit too obvious. Parts of the unreliable narration are done really well, but it remained impossible for me to imagine that a German officer trying to get information would really allow Verity to keep writing about picnics and the exact details of civilian life in such a mundane way.

I ended up skimming this a lot, so any emotional impact was also lost on me. I know a lot of people really loved this, but it did not work at all for me. And I couldn’t really imagine a young female spy in WWII saying things like “dead embarrassing” about ending up crying.

Rating: 1/5