- Paperback: 400 pages
- Publisher: Hutchinson; Airport / Ireland / Export ed edition (7 Feb 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0091921147
- ISBN-13: 978-0091921149
- Product Dimensions: 13.6 x 1.9 x 21.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 4,883,739 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Audrey Niffenegger
Funny and tender ... a chance to see Scarlett O'Hara and Emma Bovary off duty
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Book Description
A stunning debut novel, funny and off-beat, for fans of Audrey Niffenegger and Diane Setterfield
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
Its a lovely idea to have fictional heroines, heroes and villains (we can't always quite tell the difference between the categories!) escape from the pages of their fiction and infiltrate the 'real' world. Favourite writes well, imagining such events befalling a couple of generations living through a couple of decades of 'The American Dream' from the early 60's to the 70's, Watergate and Nixon. So a time when America's view of itself begins to sour a little. I think perhaps a little more could have been made of the whole Watergate unravelling, it runs side by side with the story of the pre-pubescent Penny, but doesn't quite spark it enough. The young girl and her mother have an interesting relationship with escaped and escaping literary heroines. Favourite has a light, deft and playful touch, and there's some lovely angsty flouncy on-the-verge-of-puberty, young girl humour and histrionics.
I couldn't award as many stars as I'd hoped as I felt a little as if the author's wonderful premise hadn't quite given the fully rounded story it promised. The plot founders and indeed flounders a little. Without wanting to give 'spoilers', the setting in the second half seemed a bit too easy to predict, the clash of worlds a bit uneasy, and the eventual end scene in the woods a bit too much 'how on earth do I tie up these disparate ends?'. I'd certainly read more by this author, if only to see how she might develop in future as a storyteller and fine creator of plots.
Having prior knowledge of most of all of the referenced literary texts will of course add a sense of playful humour, for the reader, but I think it could still be enjoyed if the reader wasn't an Eng. or Amer. Lit graduate!
I couldn't award as many stars as I'd hoped as I felt a little as if the author's wonderful premise hadn't quite given the fully rounded story it promised. The plot founders and indeed flounders a little. Without wanting to give 'spoilers', the setting in the second half seemed a bit too easy to predict, the clash of worlds a bit uneasy, and the eventual end scene in the woods a bit too much 'how on earth do I tie up these disparate ends?'. I'd certainly read more by this author, if only to see how she might develop in future as a storyteller and fine creator of plots.
Having prior knowledge of most of all of the referenced literary texts will of course add a sense of playful humour, for the reader, but I think it could still be enjoyed if the reader wasn't an Eng. or Amer. Lit graduate!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
30 reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
great weekend read on the couch
23 Jan 2008
Format:Hardcover
When I pick up a novel, I want to go somewhere else. Completely. Ensconced in Favorite's midwestern B&B/heroines world right from the start, I found I didn't want to leave this place until I turned every last page of plots within plots, savoring lovely writing all along the way. Penny has a strong narrative voice--in turns witty, troubled, introspective, defiant, vulnerable--that's easy to hitch onto. Anchoring lively scenes with just the amount of detail that makes the fantastic believable, Favorite maintains a seamless line between reality and unreality. Reading this novel reminds me why I stopped with a Master's in English and didn't continue on with a soul-killing Ph.D: Postmodern scholarship sucks the magic out of literature, out of stories, out of imagining. The Heroines is a good, strong story, but also playful metafiction, an antidote to dusty notions of what stories are and should be. This one is a book-lover's delight. And it was such fun seeing Scarlett O'Hara and Blanche duBois again I had to rent the movies the next weekend to continue the escape.
17 of 21 people found the following review helpful
This Isn't Your Usual Retreat
12 Jan 2008
Format:Hardcover
The whole time I was reading this book I kept thinking that I was missing something. There is something here that I'm not seeing. Well, there was, but it wasn't what I was expecting, which is what kept me reading even though it was a little too late.
13 year old Penny Entwhistle is growing up in a Illinois prairie bed and breakfast with her mother Anne-Marie and housekeeper Gretta This isn't your usually retreat, this is the place that literary heroines such as Emma Bovary, Scarlett O'Hara and Catherine Earnshaw go to regroup when their lives are in distress. They come to Anne-Marie who strengthens them and encourages them back to their lives without interfering with the eventual plots of each story.
Anne-Marie is very strict in her belief that the heroines are not to be told the truth about the outcome of their fates in the book. But then one night a hero appears and thus changes the whole routine. What will have to be sacrificed to make the dangerous man return to his world? What truths will have to be told about the past?
What started out as an interesting plot turned me off when it branched into a sudden trek into Girl, Interrupted. That part which takes up a good portion of the book, just was lost on me. If Favorite had just stuck with the sudden arrivals of the Heroines and their stories it would have been, in my opinion, a much better book.
13 year old Penny Entwhistle is growing up in a Illinois prairie bed and breakfast with her mother Anne-Marie and housekeeper Gretta This isn't your usually retreat, this is the place that literary heroines such as Emma Bovary, Scarlett O'Hara and Catherine Earnshaw go to regroup when their lives are in distress. They come to Anne-Marie who strengthens them and encourages them back to their lives without interfering with the eventual plots of each story.
Anne-Marie is very strict in her belief that the heroines are not to be told the truth about the outcome of their fates in the book. But then one night a hero appears and thus changes the whole routine. What will have to be sacrificed to make the dangerous man return to his world? What truths will have to be told about the past?
What started out as an interesting plot turned me off when it branched into a sudden trek into Girl, Interrupted. That part which takes up a good portion of the book, just was lost on me. If Favorite had just stuck with the sudden arrivals of the Heroines and their stories it would have been, in my opinion, a much better book.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Not the story that was advertised ...
14 Mar 2008
Format:Hardcover
I was so disappointed in this I hardly know where to begin.
This mess of a book, though well-written, tried to do too many things at once. It begins with a charming concept: Heroines from famous books suddenly appear at the bed & breakfast run by 13 year-old Penny Entwhistle's mother, Anne-Marie. While Anne-Marie coddles and comforts the Heroines, being careful not to divulge their ultimate fates or plot lines to them, Penny rages and rebels over her mother's neglect. When a Hero arrives to reclaim his Heroine (a very unusual event), things start to get interesting. This was a grand start to what I imagined would be a wonderful romp of a story, but then the book suddenly veered into (as another reviewer here so aptly described it) 'Girl, Interrupted' territory, sending Penny into a horrifying psych ward for no apparent reason. The story just gets more and more jumbled from there.
Is this a fantasy about literary Heroines appearing in real life? Is it a gritty girl-trapped-in-the-looney-bin drama? Is it some sort of Freudian tale meant to have Serious Deeper Meaning (images of fatherless girls, forests, and puberty abound)? Why are there every-other-chapter references to Nixon and Watergate that do nothing to move the story along? Are the brief appearances of the Heroines real or imagined? The final straw for me was the tale of Penny's real father, which just tipped the whole thing over the edge into a complete muddle.
Worst of all, however, is the incredibly misleading story synopsis on the back of the book. I just felt cheated. This would have been a much better story if the author had just stuck to her original idea: the mayhem -- charming, chaotic or otherwise -- that results when figures from famous books come to call.
This mess of a book, though well-written, tried to do too many things at once. It begins with a charming concept: Heroines from famous books suddenly appear at the bed & breakfast run by 13 year-old Penny Entwhistle's mother, Anne-Marie. While Anne-Marie coddles and comforts the Heroines, being careful not to divulge their ultimate fates or plot lines to them, Penny rages and rebels over her mother's neglect. When a Hero arrives to reclaim his Heroine (a very unusual event), things start to get interesting. This was a grand start to what I imagined would be a wonderful romp of a story, but then the book suddenly veered into (as another reviewer here so aptly described it) 'Girl, Interrupted' territory, sending Penny into a horrifying psych ward for no apparent reason. The story just gets more and more jumbled from there.
Is this a fantasy about literary Heroines appearing in real life? Is it a gritty girl-trapped-in-the-looney-bin drama? Is it some sort of Freudian tale meant to have Serious Deeper Meaning (images of fatherless girls, forests, and puberty abound)? Why are there every-other-chapter references to Nixon and Watergate that do nothing to move the story along? Are the brief appearances of the Heroines real or imagined? The final straw for me was the tale of Penny's real father, which just tipped the whole thing over the edge into a complete muddle.
Worst of all, however, is the incredibly misleading story synopsis on the back of the book. I just felt cheated. This would have been a much better story if the author had just stuck to her original idea: the mayhem -- charming, chaotic or otherwise -- that results when figures from famous books come to call.
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