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A review by corrie
Spring Flowering by Farah Mendlesohn
4.0
Spring Flowering by Farah Mendlesohn.
Wow, ok… so it was really in the last 20% of the book when we started to get to the meat of the story. Before that it was as someone aptly described “this-is-a-story-of-what-Ann-did-next”. After what you may ask?
Well for that we better start at the beginning.
Ann Gray is the bookish daughter of parson William Gray and we enter the story as Ann is sitting at her father’s death-bed reminiscing about the people she lost in her life - her brother John died at Waterloo when Ann was 16 and her mother died 4 years ago of fever. After her father’s death this life in the small village will come to an end as she is going to relinquish her independence to live with her Uncle and Aunt James in Birmingham. Ann is also saying goodbye to her closest childhood friend Jane who is about to marry.
The story is all about how Ann works through her grief, the loss of her home, her life in Birmingham, coming to terms with her sexuality (eventhough there was no real acknowledgement for that back then), to find out what she wants to do with her life and who she wants to share it with.
It’s well written and historically informative, you can tell the author is an academic in that field. But the pacing is not really what you expect in a romance novel. There are gorgeous historical details about how people ran a household, their customs, how they occupied themselves, what they ate and how frugal they were. At the 60% mark of the book there is still plenty of exposition about the city of Birmingham (where the author grew up) and its new building development. And all I wanted at that point was to spend more time with Mrs. King (sigh).
Spring Flowering reminds me of Jane Austin and the whole situation with the new parson Mr. Morton made me think of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Collins (although maybe less bumbly). I like Ann Gray. She is kind, sensible and has a good head on her shoulders. She reads Euclid and solves mathematical problems. A good heroine for this story.
I don’t want to spoil the romance in this book because there are some nice twists when we finally come to it. Most of all it’s a well written novel about family life in Regency England. If you love the period and women loving women in a historical setting I can really recommend this book.
f/f explicit
Themes: keeping it in the family, the girls did more than braid each other’s hair, we are not in Warwickshire anymore, Oohh… Mrs. King has a roving eye, why are we talking about state of the soil around Birmingham when we can explore what Mrs. King wants to do with Ann?, I love historical exposition as much as the next girl… but…, Mrs. King only seems to want a pillow princess, kissing cousins, those crafty Georgian women were so handy with needle and thread, I mean… making a ring out of a lock of hair.
4 stars
Wow, ok… so it was really in the last 20% of the book when we started to get to the meat of the story. Before that it was as someone aptly described “this-is-a-story-of-what-Ann-did-next”. After what you may ask?
Well for that we better start at the beginning.
Ann Gray is the bookish daughter of parson William Gray and we enter the story as Ann is sitting at her father’s death-bed reminiscing about the people she lost in her life - her brother John died at Waterloo when Ann was 16 and her mother died 4 years ago of fever. After her father’s death this life in the small village will come to an end as she is going to relinquish her independence to live with her Uncle and Aunt James in Birmingham. Ann is also saying goodbye to her closest childhood friend Jane who is about to marry.
The story is all about how Ann works through her grief, the loss of her home, her life in Birmingham, coming to terms with her sexuality (eventhough there was no real acknowledgement for that back then), to find out what she wants to do with her life and who she wants to share it with.
It’s well written and historically informative, you can tell the author is an academic in that field. But the pacing is not really what you expect in a romance novel. There are gorgeous historical details about how people ran a household, their customs, how they occupied themselves, what they ate and how frugal they were. At the 60% mark of the book there is still plenty of exposition about the city of Birmingham (where the author grew up) and its new building development. And all I wanted at that point was to spend more time with Mrs. King (sigh).
Spring Flowering reminds me of Jane Austin and the whole situation with the new parson Mr. Morton made me think of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Collins (although maybe less bumbly). I like Ann Gray. She is kind, sensible and has a good head on her shoulders. She reads Euclid and solves mathematical problems. A good heroine for this story.
I don’t want to spoil the romance in this book because there are some nice twists when we finally come to it. Most of all it’s a well written novel about family life in Regency England. If you love the period and women loving women in a historical setting I can really recommend this book.
f/f explicit
Themes: keeping it in the family, the girls did more than braid each other’s hair, we are not in Warwickshire anymore, Oohh… Mrs. King has a roving eye, why are we talking about state of the soil around Birmingham when we can explore what Mrs. King wants to do with Ann?, I love historical exposition as much as the next girl… but…, Mrs. King only seems to want a pillow princess, kissing cousins, those crafty Georgian women were so handy with needle and thread, I mean… making a ring out of a lock of hair.
4 stars