Book No. 83 of 2020
I had no idea Eva Ibbotson wrote non-children’s books, so I am deeply indebted to @cozyreadingclub for bringing my attention to this delightful, grin-inducing read.
It would be difficult for me to list all the elements I loved in this story (even if I kept it to the high-minded literary stuff and didn’t mention the screamingly good thirsting and banter 👀), but here are some of them: a bookish, intellectual heroine who wants to be good and go on adventures, a love letter to the passion and discipline of the performing arts, lush descriptions of gardens and gowns and jungle rivers, earnest and precocious little children, cartoonishly villainous grown-ups with no imagination, a hot brooding love interest, a simpleminded suitor in clumsy pursuit, a dramatic diva, many hilarious intrigues, and one very enthusiastic stagehand who just wants to make more mist, dammit.
(There is a wee bit of old-fashioned colonial racism in here—ah well, nothing’s perfect, and I still very gladly took this over today’s news cycle.)
While the story hews very closely to your standard romantic adventure, I thought that the whole thing had a wonderfully insidious feminist bent—so many passages carried, to me, very obvious “this is why we need feminism” subtext. I was extremely delighted by the sendup of the purity trope—Ibbotson snubs the Madonna-whore dichotomy and boldly (and deliciously) shows that sexual agency is not incompatible with goodness and morality, and that “ruin” is nothing compared to the sins of cruelty and greed.
Similar Reads
This was strikingly similar in character, tone, and arc, to L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle.
A lot of intentional “classic lit” vibes here—Frances Hodgson Burnett, Jane Austen, etc.
While very different plot-wise, three particular characters and the super-charged vibes reminded me of Yangsze Choo’s Night Tiger.