Recent reading
Dec. 5th, 2020 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaSir Isumbras at the Ford by D K Broster (1918)
Oh, this was quite enjoyable! It's a typical Broster book with her usual lovely writing, though with no slash this time: instead the misunderstandings and hurt-comfort and dilemmas over honour are in the het relationship. I quite liked Raymonde (the woman) as a character! She definitely got to have her own dilemmas and choices, though I wish she had had a larger role in the book.
I think it would have been a stronger and more interesting book if, like Flight of the Heron, there had been characters on both sides of the war (the French revolution). There's Mme de Chaulnes, who is a Republican, but she only gets a very brief exchange about politics with the main character. But even though all the main characters are Royalists, Broster does not exactly paint a very flattering picture of their cause. I mean, yes, the main characters are all very noble, but their leaders are all incompetent and are clearly using the Breton peasants as cannon fodder, to the point where you wonder why the main characters still stay loyal! Of course, all this is in the service of putting the main characters through angst. Wow, so much feinting as to whether various characters will live or die.
There's also an important child character, and while he is rather precious (Broster's strength is not writing children...), I did quite enjoy all these men (his father, his grandfather, La Vireville, to a lesser degree Lt Tollemache) falling over themselves to take care of him and be good father figures to him.
Oh, this was quite enjoyable! It's a typical Broster book with her usual lovely writing, though with no slash this time: instead the misunderstandings and hurt-comfort and dilemmas over honour are in the het relationship. I quite liked Raymonde (the woman) as a character! She definitely got to have her own dilemmas and choices, though I wish she had had a larger role in the book.
I think it would have been a stronger and more interesting book if, like Flight of the Heron, there had been characters on both sides of the war (the French revolution). There's Mme de Chaulnes, who is a Republican, but she only gets a very brief exchange about politics with the main character. But even though all the main characters are Royalists, Broster does not exactly paint a very flattering picture of their cause. I mean, yes, the main characters are all very noble, but their leaders are all incompetent and are clearly using the Breton peasants as cannon fodder, to the point where you wonder why the main characters still stay loyal! Of course, all this is in the service of putting the main characters through angst. Wow, so much feinting as to whether various characters will live or die.
There's also an important child character, and while he is rather precious (Broster's strength is not writing children...), I did quite enjoy all these men (his father, his grandfather, La Vireville, to a lesser degree Lt Tollemache) falling over themselves to take care of him and be good father figures to him.
