Minneapolis Bars & Books - The Flight Of Gemma Hardy
In the attempt to be social, I joined a book club. I found the Minneapolis Bars & Books group through the Meetup website. What I liked about it was that it was geared specifically toward 20s and 30s ladies (hooray)!
The Place:
We met up at 6:30 at Aster Cafe, which is a very charming cafe in St. Anthony Main, right by the Mississippi River.
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The Book:
The general consensus among three groups:
- If you had read and loved Jane Eyre, this was a terrible knockoff and pretty much an example of blatant plagiarism. It cannot even pass for AU Fanfic.
- If you had tried to read Jane Eyre but failed to get through it in high school English class, you appreciated the 1960s version aka This Book.
- If you had never read Jane Eyre, this was an alright story and people from group 1 (see above) kept telling you to read The Original for it is much better. Like, by a thousandfold.
I have never read Jane Eyre (I know, I know, shame on me), so I was in the third group. I found it hard to believe that it was the 1960s because Gemma didn't know how to use a telephone, people still had servants, and the Scottish village felt very cold and victorian (I don't know how else to describe it). The novel had an overly dramatic Cinderella-type of beginning with her cruel aunt and cousins ordering her about. She manages to "escape" by getting a "scholarship" to boarding school. Except "scholarship" means cooking and cleaning as a servant to the other girls, who punished her using really archaic methods (I'm not sure she did this "escaping" thing correctly). I had difficulty equating all of this to a "modern" 1960s era. What was even the point of setting it in 1960s?
Then she becomes an au pair (okay, believable), falls in love with her employer who is more than twice her age (unbelievable?), is shocked by his secret (super unbelievable), and runs away when she finally admits: "I don’t think I can go forward until I know what lies behind me" (okay). Pushing aside those credibility issues, I still became engrossed in reading about her endeavors to find friendship, her trial and error way of learning what it means to trust others, and eventually understanding what it means to forgive and love.
My takeaway from this is I need to read Jane Eyre because the original is always better.
I can't remember when in the 1960s this book was set, but the two ends of that decade were vastly different. And, of course, social movements tend to come later to both small town and the better-heeled citizenry.
ReplyDeleteI really liked this book, particularly for the way it evoked Iceland and the Orkneys, which have always seemed impossibly exotic to me. It's an homage to Jane Eyre, and some folks will like it and others won't, but I don't understand the vitriol that some people have for this book when presumably they don't have a problem with the movie Clueless, or Margaret Atwood's Robber Bride, or any number of other books/films that take their entire premise from a previous work.
Emily, you do bring up really good points, especially how the 1960s didn't "happen" at the same time everywhere.
ReplyDeleteReading this book made me want to hop on the next plane to Iceland! Livesey was incredibly descriptive of the landscape and the small little towns (that I very much want to visit one day)!