A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, Eliza Potter

Camille Silvy, Sarah Forbes Bonetta (Sarah Davies)

(July 16) This one came to me via A Dress a Day, whose Erin mentioned it because of all the descriptions of 1840s and '50s clothes, particularly ball gowns.

But I got interested in it because of the cool time-travel effect of reading the memoirs of a woman who had a unique vantage on the aristocracy of her day, and who had travelled a lot and seen many things. She didn't have much school -- she started dressing hair and nannying at a young age -- but, despite a certain amount of disjointedness in her narrative, she was able to tell a good anecdote and make acute observations, and was fun to read. "Good on her that she wrote a book," I was thinking.

It was then a shock to find out when I was already about 50 pages into it that Eliza Potter was black! This made her abolitionist stance and her many descriptions of herself challenging slave-owners all the more heroic, and I’d been convinced of her courage already.

It was also surprising to see how different racism was at that time. Iangy (Potter's name for herself as narrator) and other black people consort freely in white company (Iangy was often at high-society parties as a guest on top of peeking in on them when she was dressing hair) and that is OK because they are free people. However, slaves were not allowed to sit at the same table as free people (although Iangy makes a point of challenging this several times and kind of shames some conservatives).

There was a surprising amount of interracial marriage -- white men marrying black women mostly -- and not infrequently it was a slave becoming the wife of a plantation owner or a well-to-do householder. Iangy reviews a good number of these instances, because she always found ex-slaves to be the cruellest slave-masters.

Also, slavery was not always wretched abuse, according to some of Iangy's stories. Sometimes the slaves are able to require conditions when they are bought and sold, and these are always honoured.

Next most cognitively dissonant: the rampant adultery. People were always cheating on their spouses and carrying on, at least in the upper classes, and quite often with little damage to their social status. In the Victorian Age! Why do we think people are more "immoral" today??

So, yes, it's a gossip-fest.

Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen

Hong, Elephant

(July 15) This was a great story -- it had animals, a great love story, a great murder mystery, fascinating information about circuses in the 1930s, some surprise twists and turns, and she's a good story teller... everything I could want in a book.

It didn't even need the memoir part, in my opinion -- but Gruen did some clever things with the transitions between modern Jacob and '30s Jacob, and the device creates a cool mobius-strip effect at the conclusion.

My only quibble with it, and this is just minor, would be that in the sections set in the '30s the people sound modern, rather than like they're living and speaking in the '30s. I'm basing this only on impressions of '30s movies and books I know of so it's not a well-informed opinion. I didn't expect to see expressions like "you shred it, wheat" or "hoo-ha" every two sentences but I did expect there'd be a little of that. Anyway, it certainly didn't detract from a great read.

A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, Merryweather, Fauna and Flora

(July 7) I had seen this on so many top-100 fiction lists, and so many people whose taste I respect have said they loved it, and it was so reverently discussed on my favourite website, that it seemed like A Wrinkle in Time would be pure rapture... like it would open up whole new universes of imaginative inventions, memorable characters, and thrilling action, à la the Harry Potter series or The Golden Compass.

Alas, no. I was disappointed. And I don't think it was because my expectations were so high they could never be met. The story didn't seem well thought out; it rushed disjointedly from one strange event or bit of science to another, and it couldn't decide whether to have the style and tone of a '60s sci-fi TV show or a Grimm's fairy tale. I kept checking my copy of the book to see if a folio was missing or something.

The point-of-view character, Meg, is little more than a collection of geeky quirks and she's often unappealingly crabby for no good reason. L'Engle seems to set up her impatience and stubbornness as virtues -- as though blind anger will save us all. Hmm.

The book touches on big topics in philosophy, physics, classics, politics, etc., and lovers of the book cite this as L'Engle's great contribution to children's literature, but to my mind these historical touchstones are simply thrown in randomly, sometimes oddly, and never developed or properly interwoven into the action or the characters' motivations.

Also, I don't think that my disappointment was caused by reading this with an adult's jaundiced eye -- I am certain it would have reminded my 10-year-old self of those Saturday-morning “filler” cartoons we barely tolerated while waiting for the “good” cartoons to come on, back in the day -- the ones full of unsympathetic protagonists running back and forth in front of half-sketched, endlessly repeating backgrounds.