Reviews with content warning for Confinement - Le confessioni di Frannie Langton

not sure how i feel about this. the writing was very easy to read and made the whole reading experience quite easy, which is a huge plus, since the subject matter was quite hard. i thought the idea of the story really interesting and there were some interesting moments. the plot was completely wild and unpredictable. but i felt like the character was not well fleshed out, which made some of beliefs/actions just seem unrealistic/out of character/just random? i don't know how to explain it but i didn't really believe the character at times.

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msradiosilence's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This book was really hard to read, and not because of it’s content, but because I wanted so badly for Frances to get her happy ending. But that’s not the kind of story this is, and it never promised to be.

By all accounts, Frances’ story is a tragedy, and not necessarily of her own making. She’s a strong woman prone to making choices everyone warns her against, but their her choices to make. She did the best she could in her situations, even if the best was something truly horrific.

There can be some interesting speculation on whether Frances is a reliable narrator or not, considering the story is from her point of view, but I think a woman

sentenced to death

has nothing to lose. Why would she garnish the truth?

Anyway, as much as it hurt me, I did really enjoy the book. One of the only 5 star reads from 2021.

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amberinbookland's review against another edition

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medium-paced

2.75

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marieketron's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Review also featured on the Lesbrary This is not a happy book. It tells you that in the title already: the ‘confessions’ refer to Frannie’s written musings that she notes down while she is on trial for the murder of her employer and his wife–the latter of whom she happened to be in a romantic relationship with. Make sure to take note of the content warnings, and be ready for some gruesome scenes. All of this grimness does make for an appropriate setting to the troubles that Frannie is dealing with in the present moment of the story, but it can be overwhelming.

As Frannie recounts the events of her life that have led her to her current predicament, it takes a while for her supposed victims to take the stage, to the point I was becoming slightly impatient with the pacing. It opens with her life as a slave at the Langton plantation in Jamaica (which gave her the name she bears), where she was forced to serve her master as he carried out pseudo-scientific experiments with the aim to prove that African people were not human. That in itself is extremely horrific, and almost numbed me to the further events in the story. Of course, this history is important to understand–both in terms of general history and specifically for Frannie as a character. Still, even knowing that we are learning this history through the writings of Frannie herself, I couldn’t help but wish she would hurry up. Her lingering on this earlier part of her life creates a tense atmosphere, preparing the reader for all the awfulness to come, but this is an approach that either doesn’t work for me or I simply wasn’t in the mood for at the time.

Once Frannie arrives in London, her life becomes even more complicated. She is changed from a slave into a maid, as officially slavery was illegal in England at the time (ca. 1820). This is one of the main moments on which the story turns, where her plantation master gifts her to be employed by his friend, a practice that was still legal and is based on historical fact. It is in this position that she joins the Benham household and meets her employer and his wife (Madame Marguerite or Meg), as well as the other staff, who receive her with mixed feelings. It is also in this position that Frannie grows closer to Madame.

While I believe they both love the other at certain points in the narrative, I couldn’t say that they loved each other at the same time or even in the same way. Their relationship is so inherently shaped by inequalities: Frannie is black, of mixed race, a former slave, a maid, and on top of all that she is educated–which occasionally forces her into the position of sideshow. Madame is wealthy (through her husband), pretty, and of high society, though her being French seems to count as much as a mark against her as in her favour depending on the situation. Most complicated of all though, is the fact that the Benham wealth is generated through slavery, and this cannot ever be removed from the relationship between Frannie and Meg.

On top of all that, Meg has an opium habit that worsens over the course of the book, and she involves Frannie in covering it up so her husband won’t grow aware. There are so many secrets in this story, and the opium secret is an early indication of the bleakness that lives in the Benham marriage, creating another layer to the women’s relationship. It presents a theme often explored in historical fiction: while Madame seemingly has everything she could ever want (husband, wealth, beauty, youth), she either holds these things through her husband or her own age–which of course only ever advances in one direction. She is isolated and even needs drugs to numb the loneliness of her life. In one moment, Frannie suggests that white women are also the property of white men. Still, that doesn’t mean Meg and Frannie suffer the same pains, but the story does a good job of suggesting that the rules of society can protect as much as they can hurt and trap someone. Frannie and Meg just happen to be trapped in different ways.

In the end, these entrapments lead to the death of the Benhams and the imprisonment of Frannie, who is trying to figure out what happened that fateful night. The later chapters where she notes down the proceedings of her court case (all her writings are addressed directly to her lawyer, in the hopes that he can either figure out a defense or share her words, depending on the outcome of the case) come closest to feeling like a murder mystery. There are witnesses, evidence, a judge, and lawyers trying to make the best of it all. This is also where Frannie has a chance to figure out what she did (if anything), as her trauma seems to have blocked her memory. As she unravels the various threads being spun by the background characters in the court case, it becomes clearer to the reader how many more secrets lived in the Benham household, and you begin to question ever more what is and isn’t true.

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bodiesinbooks's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

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rorikae's review against another edition

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emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

In 'The Confessions of Frannie Langton' by Sara Collins, Collins weaves one woman's story set against the murders she has been accused of committing. We meet Frannie Langton as a condemned woman but there is far more to her story than what it appears. We follow Frannie from her childhood on a plantation in Jamaica to how she came to London and to serve the very people she is accused of killing. Through Frannie's story we begin to unravel what actually happened as well as getting to know her personally.
Collins does a great job of setting up the mystery of what actually happened to Mr. and Mrs. Benham and then pulling the reader back through time to explore Frannie's life. She paints a frank picture of what it was like to be mixed raced in the early 1800s from life on a plantation to life in London. Collins never shies away from exploring the brutality but also the joy that Frannie finds in her life. I came to care for Frannie just as much as I wanted to understand what had truly happened in the present day of the novel.
'The Confessions of Frannie Langton' is a very good historical mystery with fascinating but flawed characters and an engaging mystery at its core.

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