"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.
The House at Pooh Corner
A.A. Milne
As discussed last week, I recently read Julia Quinn's The Lost Duke of Wyndham with not a little pleasure, in large part due to my anticipation of reading the same events in Mr Cavendish, I Presume from the (more interesting it seemed, as I read Grace and Jack's story) perspectives of Thomas and Amelia.
Anticipation is a great part of reading pleasure. It's a skill to build it, and a crime to fail to deliver.
I'm afraid that MCIP did not live up to my hopes. I looked on Quinn's website and it seems she originally intended to write this as a single book and then split it into two. It seems from the various reviews I read when the book came out, as well as from comments on my last post, that some readers felt shortchanged in reviewing the same events again through different characters' eyes. I found this difficult to understand before I actually read MCIP. I was looking forward to getting the new POV on these scenes. What I didn't realise was that these revisited scenes were going to read identically to the same scenes from TLDOW. As though Quinn literally took the scene and just cut and pasted parts of it.
I was so disappointed.
I expected to see Amelia with her family. I expected to get to know and understand her relationship with her parents and siblings. Similarly, I expected to get the inside track on Thomas' relationship with his grandmother and Grace. But there was nothing of this. Instead, we got literally the same scenes (complete with the precisely identical dialogue) as in TLDOW along with a few extra scenes between Thomas and Amelia - which rather failed to smoulder, I regret to report.
This really did just read as if Quinn had tried and failed to write this as one book and then decided a solution would be to split her one effort into two books, rather than her having come up with this as a genuinely interesting and novel way to write two love stories with a single plot.
I kept wondering, why didn't she try to make MCIP more of its own book? Really write the scenes again. Yes, use some of the same dialogue but not all. We all know different people will have different recollections of conversations. I wanted it to be subtler and better and more interesting than it was.
There were some nice bits and pieces. I rather liked some of the parts where Thomas deals with his feelings about losing a dukedom and becoming Mr Cavendish and what that meant/ who he really was. The epilogue that (SPOILER HERE) gave him a new windfall peerage disappointed and irritated me. Thomas had reconciled himself rather beautifully to his new status as Mr Cavendish - why take that achievement away from him?
So, all in all, the anticipation was better.
Can you think of any books in which the anticipation has been great but not satisfactorily actualised?
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5 comments:
This was my problem with Ward's series. Each of the main stories was a disappointment to me, but I always felt sucked into the next book.
Another set of two romances which are linked like this (i.e. their time-lines overlap, and some conversations are repeated) but which, judging from what you write here, turned out rather better than Quinn's, was Sylvia Andrew's Rosabelle (1998) and Annabelle (1998). [That's a reprint I've linked to, which contains both.]
Maybe you'd not agree if you read them, and maybe I'd think differently if I'd read the Quinn romances, but I wonder if Andrews' novels work better together because most of the time the two couples are separated, so there isn't as much repetition as there seems to have been in the Quinn novels.
I forgot to tick the box to get follow-up comments.
Pity. It could be such a clever idea. (And thank you for the review: I'll continue to give it a miss.)
There's an Agatha Christie, where Poirot solves a murder by having the four suspects recall the evening - which makes the point that character can be revealed in just the subtle way that you describe.
Or she could have just played it for laughs: I've a vague recollection that Steven Moffat wrote an episode of 'Coupling' that way, with the same time period shown from different povs. (Mind you, I think he's a genius: I'm so in love with 'Sherlock'.)
I have The Lost Duke of Wyndham but not the other. Or, otherwise, I have Mr. Cavendish I Presume and not the other - I forget. I haven't read it because the reviews were so poor that I was "scared". Same with The Secret Diary of Miranda Cheever. I listened to What Happens in London on audio and I have 10 Things in my TBR too (two copies in fact - I bought one and then a surprise gift came in the mail with a book I'd won and some extras - this one included, so I have the UK and the US versions... sorry, rambling...) Anyhoo, it sounds like it was an interesting concept that didn't come off very well. I would have thought the same as you and when I read reviews that it was basically the same story, I thought - pass.
As for most anticipated but let down in the actuality? Counting only recent reads, it'd be a tie between Rachel Gibson's Nothing But Trouble and Erin McCarthy's Hot Finish - both were okay but not what I'd hoped for.
I do love the Winnie the Pooh quote - AA Milne was a genius IMO!
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