“How far did I fall? I feel like saying that I fell through time itself, through lives, deaths, and centuries past, but in terms of actual measurement the drop was no more than twenty feet. At least, that is what they say. They also say that, fortunately for me, it was neither rocks nor demons that caught me as I came tumbling into the underworld. It was the ancient river that wakes you from dreams, and which few people have ever been allowed to find.

Her name is Diana.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (JUL 29, 2011)

Hands up anyone who doesn’t know the story of Romeo and Juliet. No-one? Thought not. Chances are you cut your literary teeth on it, and it probably holds some special associations for you. That’s why it’s such a good subject for a modern/historical parallel romance story with sinister overtones.

Julie Jacobs is the quasi-eponymous heroin of the novel. Orphaned as a very young child, she has been brought up by her Great-Aunt Rose along with her twin sister Janice… who is as like to Julie as a marble is to a strawberry. Great-Aunt Rose has brought the sisters up in the States, but when they are in their mid-twenties she ups and dies, leaving Janice the estate and Julie (rather inconveniently) merely a letter and the address of a banker in Sienna. A heartbroken and down-at-heel Julie makes the best of a bad deal and packs her unfashionable bags for Sienna.

Matters get complicated almost immediately with a chance befriending by the glamorous Eva Maria Salimbeni – and that’s before Julie ever even reaches Sienna. The narrative rapidly develops distinct fairy-tale colours, which grow richer by the page. Julie soon discovers that few things really happen by chance in this neck of the woods. What with Julie’s historical trouble with the Italian police (don’t ask) and Eva Maria’s handsome nephew Alessandro being Captain Santini of the Sienna police, a certain amount of intrigue becomes inevitable from the word go.

The mystery trail of the letter leads from the bank, to a box, to clues, to the Pallio, to museums and clan rivalries, to subterranean passages and clean through to the 14th century. Sienna, it seems, not Verona, is the original location for the historical characters that inspired Shakespeare’s tragedy: a story already two hundred years old and re-told countless times by the time he got to it. To gain the treasure that the historical Romeo and Juliet supposedly left behind, Julie must immerse herself into her own past, which extends far beyond what one would think reasonable in chronological terms.

Fortier displays brilliant craftsmanship in weaving the multi-faceted timelines of her story into a cohesive narrative. She intersperses new mystery, romance and violence at a pace which will leave no reader able to resist the next page. But above all, she really loves her Shakespeare. This work has obviously arisen from a love of the original text. The imagery of warring opposites, fire and ice, danger and beauty that characterize Shakespeare’s work have given birth here to whole neighbourhoods, new characters and impassioned landscapes. This is no half-baked, ill-fadged limping mess that so many supposedly more straightforward “historical” novels fall into. It’s an inspired work of art with a backbone not only of research but of understanding, one could almost say sympathetic resonance. It’s so clever one wishes it were true.

However, not everyone will like it. Readers often divide into camps between the two sisters Julie and Janice: some finding the latter two-dimensional, many considering the former mawkish and generally kickable. The main plot is pretty easy to guess from the start, which is perhaps not ideal for a mystery. I didn’t find this a problem at all, as there were so many details in between A and B that just because one knows the outcome it doesn’t make the journey any less pleasurable.

Possibly its main detraction for many might be that it’s essentially chick lit. Let me qualify this swiftly: I don’t read chick lit and I found Juliet thrilling. It’s the sort of thing you put down with a glow and wonder whom to tell about it first; and then possibly consider that boys might not be so keen on it. I hate to say it, but with 80% of serious readers being female, I still think it’s got a pretty good market. Chick lit it may be, but very good chick lit. As I read it, I was taking notes on structure and tactics, thinking, “if only I could write more like this.” I’m not sure what higher form of admiration one could offer.

If you like your stories well-written, exciting, properly researched, and you have a tendency towards things pre-1400s with a dash of the paranormal and several cask-fulls of romance, don’t delay in reading this especially now that it is available in paperback.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 159 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ballantine Books (July 26, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Anne Fortier
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Romeo & Juliet tales:  Beautiful Malice by Rebecca James Brazil by John Updike And another Julia on a quest through the past: The Giuliana Legacy by Alexis Masters

Bibliography:

• Juliet (August 2010)

 

“You of all boys should know that Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood. Do rats tell tales? Do porpoises have narrative purposes? Do elephants ele-phantasize? You know as well as I do that they do not. Man alone burns with books.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (NOV 18, 2010)

What a father Salman Rushdie would make! Imagine being read to from a book that opens with “a boy named Luka who had two pets, a bear named Dog and a dog named Bear.” And then to learn that the former “was an expert dancer, able to get up onto his hind legs and perform with subtlety and grace the waltz, the polka, the rhumba, the wah-watusi, and the twist, as well as dances from nearer home, the pounding bhangra, the twirling ghoomar (for which he wore a wide mirror-worked skirt), the warrior dances known as the spaw and the thang-ta, and the peacock dance of the south.” For Rushdie is a wizard with words, taking us in a sentence from ordinary to exotic and back again. This is a book for children to hear with wonder and for adults to understand, for Rushdie’s range of reference (and fondness for erudite puns) is immense.

Luka Khalifa is the much younger brother of the title character in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Rushdie’s earlier fantasy for the child in all of us. His father, the great storyteller, the Shah of Blah, is in a coma and Luka must journey into the Magic World to steal the Fire of Life before his being is sucked away by the spectral Nobodaddy, who becomes more and more visible as he empties the dying man of his substance. The quest involves the assistance of elephant-headed Memory Birds, a shape-changing dragon called Nuthog, and the benevolent but fierce-speaking Insultana of Ott, who provides a magic carpet to take Luka much of the way to his destination. But Luka is no shrinking violet himself. He started the whole chain of events by cursing a cruel circus-owner so effectively that the animals revolted, and he can hold his own in a battle of riddles with a terminator-blasting Old Man of the River, or in a rigged trial presided over by the god Ra, who speaks only in Egyptian hieroglyphics. This is not a book to read in a single sitting; the point is less the journey than the encounters along the way, each chapter having its own atmosphere and treasure-trove of wonders.

Here, for a quieter interlude, is part of Rushdie’s description of the Lake of Wisdom: “Shining schools of little cannyfish could be seen below the surface, as well as the brightly colored smartipans, and the duller, deepwater shrewds. Flying low over the water’s surface were the hunter birds, the large pelican-billed scholarias and the bald, bearded, long-beaked guroos. Long tendrils of the lake-floor plant called sagacity were visible waving in the depths. Luka recognized the Lake’s little groups of islands, too, the Theories with their wild, improbable growths, the tangled forests and ivory towers of the Philosophisles, and the bare Facts. In the distance was what Luka had longer to behold, the Torrent of Words, the miracle of miracles, the grand waterfall that tumbled down from the clouds and linked the World of Magic to the Moon of the Great Story Sea above,”

I don’t know if I was simply in a more receptive mood, or if it is actually the better book, but I enjoyed this a great deal more than its predecessor. I remember thinking that HAROUN suffered from being too close to a video game such as Mario Brothers, but here the connection is quite explicit and oddly enough it works even better. Luka is a modern boy, quite at home in the electronic world; he is hardly surprised to find a life-counter in the top left-hand corner of his vision, and he knows which objects to punch to replenish his store. The modernity helps to anchor the book, to bring the vaguely Indian setting closer to home — as does the fact that Rushdie is no longer confined to his own mythology, but freely references Greek, Norse, Japanese, and other cultures as well. Indeed this is the point: in a modern world, where the old deities no longer wield their power, stories are the only means of giving them life. As Luka explains to the dilapidated deities in their broken-down pan-cultural Olympus: “Listen to me: its only through Stories that you can get out into the Real world and have some sort of power again. When your story is well told, people believe in you; not in the way they used to believe, not in a worshipping way, but in the way people believe in stories — happily, excitedly, wishing they wouldn’t end.” He might have been describing his own book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 63 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House; 1 edition (November 16, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Salman Rushdie Wikipedia page on Salman Rushdie
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Enchantress of Florence Shalimar the Clown

Bibliography:

• Grimus (1975)
• Midnight’s Children (1981) 
• Shame (1983)
• The Satanic Verses (1988) 
• East, West: Stories (1994)
• The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)
• The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)
• Fury (2001)
• Shalimar the Clown (September 2005)
• The Enchantress of Florence (May 2008)

Children (of all ages):

• Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
• Luka and the Fire of Life (2010)

Other:

• The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987)
• Imaginary Homelands (1991)
• The Wizard of Oz (1992)
• Conversations with Salman Rushdie (2000)
• Step Across the Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002 (2002)
• Joseph Anton: A Memoir (September 2012)