The Book Report

The book Report

A Bae Hel

A tale of two mothers.  In honour of this recent Mother’s Day, I read books about mothers and their relationships with their children. Two very different mothers in two very different times.

Yesteryear

By Caro Claire Burke (Audiobook)

I have often avoided books with massive marketing hype, at least until years later. Because, well, I am not entirely sure.  

This book is enjoying a bit of hype currently – already sold to Amazon studio with Anne Hathaway to act and produce, it is satire of Moron Wives, a feminist work of biting critic of paternalistic national religious fanatics, and it had only been out a few weeks. 

Goodreads has 17,000 reviews and 80,000 ratings, 80-% are a 4 or 5 and only 4% are a 1 or 2. The 1-star review spend a lot of words explaining how the story doesn’t work and billed it as a “mean-spirited revenge fantasy”.  The 2-star reviews mostly also used a lot of words which really left me wondering if those readers could fail so spectacularly to understand.  

This work is written in easy-to-understand language. The narrator, Natalie, a Trad Wife Influencer is deeply unlikeable on pretty much every level.  Her internal monolog is on display and even as she is deep in post partum depression you can’t feel any sympathy for her, she is so unlikeable. Unlikeable narrators are risky for authors. On some level you want your readers to identify and connect in some way with your story.  To build a not only unlikeable narrator and also spend the entire book revealing just how horrid she really is is a gamble, because some people will hate the book because they hate the character. 

Some of the hoopla over this book is because it takes a bright light and shines it on the Influencer culture of religious zealots. That particular brand of cult does not like exposure, though to be sure, given their tenets, I am not sure they will ever read this book given they will class it as sinful.  I expect it is already on several banned book lists. Erika Kirk must hate it. And that is reason enough to read it.

As I said, Natalie is horrid, but cloaks her ugliness in Christian virtue and godliness. Her wildly successful Trad Wife perfect world starts to fall apart. Some of the decisions made seem a bit contrived to be sure, after all we have seen a current culture where enough money can silence any accusations. Enough money and press and YOUR mob will forgive you anything. There is no accountability for crimes, unless you are poor or brown.  I think it could have gone either way, but when Natalie wakes up to find herself back in the olden days, she is profoundly useless despite all her Traditional farmwife façade. But given I didn’t like her anyway, it seemed just.

Natalie is the isolated yet yearning to be included. The damaged and traumatized, yet we do not discover what created her damage, her isolation and manipulation of others for her own gains – attention. Perhaps she is just a narcissist.

I recommend this book, BUT if you are offended by exposure of the hypocrisy of Christian National cult or Influencer cult or swearing, then you may not like this book. However, if you are looking for an engaging story about family dysfunction then this might be for you. I give it 5 star and it definitely kept me up at night to finish the book. 

Lady Tremaine

By Rachel Hochhauser

Of all the fairy tales from childhood Cinderella was probably my least favourite. Beauty and the Beast was my favourite, because being hidden away in a remote castle with all your favourite things at your finger tips seemed pretty magical to me. Marrying a prince cause your foot fit in the uncomfortable shoe didn’t really appeal.

However, I do like retellings of all fairly tales, in particular those told from the perspective of another character. Lady Tremaine is Cinderella’s step-mother. Painted for all time as evil, she offers us another view of what could have been the actual situation.

Lady Tremaine is caught in a time when women are goods and the best they can hope for is an advantageous marriage to lift them from genteel poverty. Poverty brought on by a man’s failure to anticipate consequences. Lady Tremaine loves her daughters, even Cinderella and would do whatever society deems necessary to save them from the fate of undesirable women.  

The story of Cinderella is not what you were told, and like fairytales of old, offers a moral. That which we think we know may very likely not be the true story. Given our age of influencers and alternative facts, this seems like a good lesson to keep in mind.

Definitely another 5 stars.