Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt, Katherine Frank

Jean André Rixens, The Death of Cleopatra, 1874

(October 19) I want to give this high marks because of my great interest in the subject matter (The Mistress of Nothing was meh as fiction, but I could tell the source was fascinating). This biography was fine but I kept waiting and hoping for "the good stuff" and suddenly Lucie's life was over. And she wasn't re-animated at all -- she was still viewed from a distance by a third party. I wanted her to be more reverse-engineered than she was. I suppose (I hope!) I will meet the living Lucie Duff Gordon in the things she actually wrote.

Katherine Frank's search for Lucie Duff Gordon's story produced all kinds of huge mystical parallels with Lucie's life and with the Egyptian-god myths, which is all very cool and everything but really has nothing to do with a biography of someone else (in my opinion). She intrudes a bit with her own life and you have to wonder if her fascination with the numinousness of her research experience played a hand in how she shaped the biography.

But I can nonetheless tell that Lucie's was an interesting life.

Note on the plot choices in The Mistress of Nothing: it's so obvious to me why "Lucie" was harsh with "Sally" -- why didn't Pullinger see this? Or was it too obvious and boring? Or is there no way to work such a thing into a first-person narrative???

Spoiled, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

Pepstar, Dominique: Tonner Daphne Dimples Repaint, 2009-11

(September 14) I wanted to read this because I enjoy Cocks and Morgan's blog -- the Fug Girls have a talent for hilarious one-liners.

But I felt like this was really a draft for a screenplay -- a screenplay that would have led to a funny, semi-believable movie -- but, in the interests of time or money or whatever, the Girls decided to go with a Young Adult novel because that is I'm guessing the easiest thing to publish... and it just makes all the weird plot constraints all the weirder and more constraining, and more artificial.

Or -- maybe in an effort to do something “different” with the genre they felt they had to have all these weird strained plot points.

Basically, there is no true and deep and genuine love for the Young Adult genre here.

But there were lots of hilarious one-liners, which is what I really wanted, after all.

I agree totally with this reviewer on the technical fail of this novel.