Weaving fact with fiction I found this book hard to put down, it was realistic and stirring. An emotional tale of hardship, struggle to survive but also of love, commitment, family bonds and faith. I love the author's writing style, easy to follow with vivid descriptions of life in that place and time period. This book will appeal to those that like a good historical fiction story with depth and new beginnings. (Read more.)Now on sale at Amazon. Share
Lettice Knollys was 29 when her husband disappeared into the Irish fog and – lacking evidence notwithstanding – one has the feeling she soon remembered her exciting experience with Robert Dudley and perhaps sought his company for consolation. She visited London regularly, staying at Durham House, not far from Leicester House.3 Unremarkably enough, Leicester sent her a present of venison in 1573 from his seat Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, where she went for hunting visits in the following years. Lettice was also present in July 1575, when Dudley entertained the Queen with a 19-days festival at the castle in what arguably was the most elaborate show event of the reign. A few weeks later the Countess of Essex was host to Elizabeth, Leicester, and the rest of the court at Chartley in Staffordshire.4Share
During the summer progress Elizabeth ignored any scandalous talk, though she may have sensed that love was in the air at Kenilworth. Meanwhile some of the Warwickshire gentry voiced the opinion that their lord was a ‟whore-master“, and when Walter Devereux returned to England in December 1575 the Spanish agent in London, Antonio de Guaras, reported:
As the thing is publicly talked of in the streets, there can be no harm in my writing openly about the great enmity between the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Essex, in consequence, it is said, of the fact that while Essex was in Ireland his wife had two children by Leicester. … Great discord is expected in consequence.Nothing spectacular ensued, but it is interesting that Essex kept himself away from court over the Christmas festivities, while his wife apparently attended them; Leicester certainly did.5 The street talk about two children born to the supposed lovers was certainly just that – street talk.
In July 1576 Walter Devereux sailed back to Dublin; allegedly Leicester had pushed for his return to Ireland, yet the evidence in council papers is contradictory on this issue.6 Even before Essex had left England his wife travelled to Buxton in Derbyshire – Robert Dudley was there, taking the baths.7
At Buxton Lettice engraved a most interesting line onto a window pane, on which many prominent guests immortalized themselves: Between the contributions of Mary Queen of Scots and the Earl of Leicester we read: ‟Faythfull, faultelesse, yet sumway unfortunatt. Yet must suffer. L. Essex.“8 Obviously, Lady Essex thought the gossip about her relations with the earl to have no basis in fact; Leicester was of similar opinion, although he admitted that he might be living in sin when lectured by a Puritan friend about the certainty of hell fire, should he not immediately repent of his lifestyle:
I will not justify myself for being a sinner and flesh and blood as others be. And beside, I stand on the top of the hill, where I know the smallest slip seemeth a fall. But I will not excuse myself; I may fall many ways and have more witnesses thereof than many others who perhaps be no saints neither, yet their faults less noted though someways greater than mine. … And for my faults, I say, they lie before Him who I have no doubt but will cancel them as I have been and shall be most heartily sorry for them.9The earl’s chief problem was that his love life became increasingly complicated, all because Queen Elizabeth would not allow him to enter into a permanent bond with any other lady – that would lead to his ‟utter overthrow“, he was convinced.10 (Read more.)
ShareNo matter the quality of your prose, the act of writing itself leads to strong physical and mental health benefits, like long-term improvements in mood, stress levels and depressive symptoms. In a 2005 study on the emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing, researchers found that just 15 to 20 minutes of writing three to five times over the course of the four-month study was enough to make a difference.By writing about traumatic, stressful or emotional events, participants were significantly more likely to have fewer illnesses and be less affected by trauma. Participants ultimately spent less time in the hospital, enjoyed lower blood pressure and had better liver functionality than their counterparts.It turns out writing can make physical wounds heal faster as well. In 2013, New Zealand researchers monitored the recovery of wounds from medically necessary biopsies on 49 healthy adults. The adults wrote about their thoughts and feelings for just 20 minutes, three days in a row, two weeks before the biopsy. Eleven days later, 76% of the group that wrote had fully healed. Fifty-eight percent of the control group had not recovered. The study concluded that writing about distressing events helped participants make sense of the events and reduce distress.Even those who suffer from specific diseases can improve their health through writing. Studies have shown that people with asthma who write have fewer attacks than those who don't; AIDS patients who write have higher T-cell counts. Cancer patients who write have more optimistic perspectives and improved quality of life.So what is it about writing that makes it so great for you?James W. Pennebaker has been conducting research on writing to heal for years at the University of Texas at Austin. "When people are given the opportunity to write about emotional upheavals, they often experience improved health," Pennebaker writes. "They go to the doctor less. They have changes in immune function."Why? Pennebaker believes this act of expressive writing allows people to take a step back and evaluate their lives. Instead of obsessing unhealthily over an event, they can focus on moving forward. By doing so, stress levels go down and health correspondingly goes up.You don't have to be a serious novelist or constantly reflecting on your life's most traumatic moments to get these great benefits. Even blogging or journaling is enough to see results. One study found that blogging might trigger dopamine release, similar to the effect from running or listening to music. (Read more.)
I'd expected the mall smell as we entered: that temperature-controlled hollowness. Instead, I smelled old grass and dirt, the scent of the outdoors inside, where it had no place being. The building was heavy-hot, almost fuzzy, like the inside of a mattress. Three of us had giant camping flashlights, the glow illuminating jarring images. It was suburbia, post-comet, post-zombie, post-humanity. A set of muddy shopping cart tracks looped crazily along the white flooring. A racoon chewed on a dog treat in the entry to the women's bathroom, his eyes flashing like dimes. ~from Gillian Flynn's Gone GirlThe New York Times bestseller Gone Girl is now a major motion picture. I just got around to reading the novel, which is, as I was told it was going to be, a page-turner. This is due to the skillful build-up of suspense by author Gillian Flynn and the way she weaves surprises all though the novel. I found the book an intriguing portrait of modern marriage in which a couple, who are bound together by nothing deeper than sex and pleasure, along with money and pleasure, find themselves in a nightmare of their own making. Another major plot element, along with the shallowness, is that one of them is a sociopath. The way the author builds characters is awe-inspiring as is the general assessment of life in a Missouri town in financial hard times. The scene at the deserted shopping mall is absolutely apocalyptic, symbolizing the end of western civilization as we know it. Since marriage is the building block of Western civilization, the dead mall reflects the demise of the most basic of human relationships on its most basic level of sacred commitment. The book does not leave us without hope, though, for in the end, the last thread binding the couple together is the promise of a child.
“Gone Girl,” directed by David Fincher, starts with Nick (Ben Affleck)—in his own words, “a corn-fed, salt-of-the-earth Missouri boy.” He used to live in New York and write for magazines, but the work dried up and he returned home, to the uneventful town of North Carthage, with his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike). According to your point of view (and the film is all about viewpoints, and the urge to shuffle them around), Amy is one or more of the following: the inspiration for the “Amazing Amy” series of children’s books, written by her parents; a flat-out dazzler, too cool for the neighborhood; a rich kid, spawned by a snotty family; the original desperate housewife, becalmed and unadored; or a heap of trouble—the Clytemnestra of the Midwest. Oh, and another thing. She may be dead.
Nick owns a bar with his twin sister, Margo (Carrie Coon), and he stops there one morning for an early Scotch. He then drives home to find the front door open, a glass table smashed, and no sign of his wife. Their cat is a witness, but, if it knows anything, it’s not coughing up. The police arrive, and Detective Boney (Kim Dickens) declares a missing-persons case; before long, Nick is knee-deep in press conferences, candlelit vigils, and public appeals, flashing a polite, reluctant grin that is parsed, by tabloids and TV hosts, as proof of guilt. (You can’t blame them. The Affleck smile, from the dawn of his career, has looked more creepy than consolatory—softening that firm, all-American jaw but never quite reaching the eyes.) Suddenly, after an hour, we flip to Amy, and to her version of what happened—so different, and so close to wacko, that it seems like another story altogether. I would happily unveil the rest of it, but, in deference to the twenty-one people who have yet to read the novel, I will say nothing more without a lawyer present.
At first blush, “Gone Girl” is natural Fincherland. Not geographically; he seems less absorbed in North Carthage, described by Amy as “the navel of the country,” than he was in the California of “Zodiac” or the Harvard of “The Social Network.” Those are his masterpieces: the two movies that I can’t not watch when they turn up on TV, and the two occasions on which his pedantry and his paranoia have fused together, engrossing us in a crazed aggregation of detail. Nothing could equip him better for the coiled and clustered goings on in the new film, and, for good measure, he has hired Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, whom he last used for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” to compose the score. They don’t let him down. “Gone Girl” boasts one major act of savagery, drenched in a downpour of blood, and what we hear during it sounds like the wah-wah pedal of Satan. So why doesn’t the movie claw us as “The Social Network” did? Who could have predicted that a film about murder, betrayal, and deception would be less exciting than a film about a Web site?
The glum fact is that “Gone Girl” lacks clout where it needs it most, at its core. We are accustomed to Fincher’s heroes being as obsessively smart as he is, if lacking his overarching patience, whereas Nick remains, to put it gently, a lunkhead. Amy has twice the brain, and ten times the cunning, but, despite the best efforts of Rosamund Pike, her character, onscreen as on the page, feels cooked up rather than lived in. That can work on film, as shown by another beauty, Gene Tierney, in “Laura” and “Leave Her to Heaven,” but the scheming of Tierney’s heroines was matched by a rare, ornate febrility in the movies themselves. Fincher’s method, on the other hand, is dogged and downbeat, so that Amy sticks out like a cartoon in a newsreel. (One expected the same of the title character in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” who was equally extreme, but somehow Rooney Mara gave her life—all drilled intensity where Pike offers elegant drift.) “Gone Girl” is meant to inspire debates about whether Amy is victimized or vengeful, and whether Nick deserves everything he gets, but, really, who cares? All I could think of was the verdict of Samuel Butler on Thomas Carlyle: “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four.” (Read more.)
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| Now a major motion picture starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike. |
Most scholars agree that it was not Anne's physical looks so much as her charm, her intelligence, her accomplishments, her wit, her fiery nature, her uniqueness, in short, that captivated Henry VIII and kept his attention for the best part of 10 years. Bordo thinks our fixation with Anne's physical appearance in popular culture may lie in twentieth- and twenty-first century limits of the concepts of attraction, 'fixated as they are on the surface of the body'. Henry VIII certainly wasn't fixated on the surface of Anne's body. By all accounts, he was completely taken with her in a way he never was with any of his subsequent wives or mistresses. There was, in short, something special about Anne that cannot be restricted to her body.Share
Looking at Anne's portraits in an attempt to discern what she really looked like is a futile exercise. As mentioned earlier, none of them are contemporary to her, the earliest ones being produced something like fifty years after her death, and many of them later. Lacey Baldwin Smith, author of books on both Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, wittily quipped: 'Tudor portraits bear about as much resemblance to their subjects as elephants to prunes'. (Read more.)
Mayapple Books announces the publication of The Paradise Tree: A Novel by Elena Maria Vidal. The Paradise Tree grows from the maxim “in every Eden, there dwells a serpent . . . .” The year is 1886 in Leeds County, Ontario. The O’Connor clan is gathering to mourn the loss of its patriarch Daniel O’Connor, an Irish immigrant. The story of Daniel and his wife Brigit is one of great hardships, including illness, ill-starred romances, war and political upheavals, as well as undying love and persevering faith. As Daniel is laid to rest, his grandson Fergus receives a piercing insight into what his own calling in life will be.The novel includes adult themes of struggles with addiction and depression, as well as the ordinary trials of parenthood and married life. The author took care to insure historical authenticity in portraying the way of life of early settlers in Ontario. Illustrations, an index, and a bibliography are included.
The early reviews:“With this marvelous immigrant saga, Elena Maria Vidal reminds us why our forebears left the Old World for the New: for Faith, family, and freedom! Through three generations of an Irish clan in Canada, she invites us into their home for struggle and triumph, celebrations of joy and sorrow, music, feasting, and dancing. The Paradise Tree makes ‘the past and present mingle and become one’ for the reader’s great delight.”
~Stephanie A. Mann, author of Supremacy and Survival“Elena Maria Vidal’s latest book, The Paradise Tree, is the fictionalized true story of the author’s devoutly Catholic ancestors who immigrated to Canada from Ireland. It is filled with rich detailed history recounting the hardships and joys of the 19th century O’Connor Family. Beautifully written with great attention to historical, geographical and religious accuracy, this fascinating and moving family saga is a treasure that I highly recommend!”
And here is a full length review from the Midwest Book Review:~Ellen Gable Hrkach, award-winning Canadian author of In Name Only and other novels
“The Paradise Tree opens in 1886 Ontario, where a clan mourns the death of family patriarch Daniel O'Connor, an Irish immigrant who has lead a tough life peppered with illness, battle and many struggles. Through it all Daniel and his wife have kept their faith and passed it on to a new generation; and now it's up to grandson Fergus to take these family values and move on.
Readers seeking a spicy immigrant saga replete with Catholic faith and the search for spiritual and social freedom will find The Paradise Tree is just the ticket: it's historical fiction writing at its best, bringing alive not just the events of one man's life, but the underlying motivations, perceptions and struggles it embraces.Through Elena Maria Vidal's descriptions, the beliefs and driving force behind a devout Catholic immigrant's experiences comes to life with driving passages of color and passion defining the forces that ultimately compel an immigrant to leave his homeland for the unknown:
During the night, the crash of the waves sounded through the chambers of Daniel's mind, speaking to him of another place, a faraway place mentioned in one of the old songs. The words urged themselves back into his memory:
'There is a distant isle/Around which sea-horses glisten;/Let not your intoxication overcome thee; Begin a voyage across a clear sea...' Daniel thought of the legends of the western seas and the Blessed Otherworld, which even holy monks like St. Brendan had sought to find. An inexpressible yearning welled in the depths of his being, as if something indefinable called to him from far away.Poetic, lyrical passages skillfully capture these motivators, which range from social and political change to failed crops and specter of starvation and a clan's survival. No punches are pulled: this is also a story of addiction and depression: facets that many immigrant stories leave out when recounting struggles.
In order to appreciate the present-day events, the past needs to be thoroughly explored. The Paradise Tree does an outstanding job of creating this link with its a history of an Irish heritage, passed on from a grandfather's tales to his young grandson:
'...So harsh were the laws that many Protestant authorities would not enforce them, and looked the other way. The religious orders, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Carmelites did not abandon us, but kept the faith of our people alive. They built tiny chapels, but those were few and far between. In my grandparents' day, Catholics went to Mass in private homes, at the back of the pub, or in the open fields at places called scathlans or Mass rocks. My parents went to hedge schools in the countryside, and the brave Presentation sisters taught many Irish children in and around Cork.' 'I suppose it would have been easier for the Irish if they had all become Protestants?' Fergie wondered. Now that he was going to school, he was acutely aware that not everyone in the world was Catholic. The grandfather chuckled at the idea, so unthinkable that it was humorous. 'Aye, easier to live, Fergie lad. Easier to live, but not easier to die.'As the lives of Daniel and his wife Bridget come to life, so are readers steeped in the culture, influences and motivations of a family unified by forces that invade their close-knit world and change the course of their lives.
The Paradise Tree is a solid example of historical fiction at its best, illustrating the circumstances affecting its protagonists and capturing the drama of lives well lived. The fact that it's all based on the author's own family heritage ("...elements of The Paradise Tree were gleaned from private family papers and unpublished or privately published works, including assorted letters, newspaper clippings, and legal documents."), documenting how the author's family emigrated from Ireland to Canada, just makes it all the more compelling.
~ D. Donovan, eBook Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
Due to the harsh penal laws imposed in 1695, Catholics could not own land, hold a public office, or receive an education. The O'Connors defied the laws to the best of their ability, and, according to Daniel's daughter Ellen, he and all of his siblings received a liberal education in spite of the prohibitions. (Read more.)
The novel opens in 1887 in Leeds County, Ontario and finds the O’Connor family mourning the loss of the family patriarch Daniel O’Connor. Although the story opens here as remembered by Daniel’s grandson Fergus the real story started many years before when Daniel immigrated to Canada to make a better life for himself. He does just that and even though it’s a struggle he eventually prospers and builds a good life for his family. It is in those years he meets his wife Brigit and they build a family but these years are not without struggles and hardships. The family deals with many illnesses, new love, marriages, and grandchildren. What always stayed constant was the faith and beliefs that held the O’Connor family together and it is these values that both Daniel and Brigit made sure to pass down to all of their children. Daniel was such a strong man with a wealth of determination and despite a rocky start with Brigit she proved herself to be the perfect wife for him. They were a family that valued their faith and education. They worked hard and continued to prosper and gained the respect of those around them. As we journey through the years of the O’Connor family the author brings alive the joys, triumphs, struggles, and sorrows in such a vivid way that often you feel as though you are experiencing them yourself.Available from Amazon. Share
I love stories that tell of the Irish immigrating to Canada because I get to look back into the history of my own country. The Paradise Tree is rich in historical detail and beautifully written and I enjoyed the trip back in time. I think it’s wonderful that the author has family papers, letters, etc. that enabled her to create this richly told story of how her ancestor’s lives may have unfolded. Recommended for fans of historical fiction and for those who love stories of people who have immigrated to new countries as much as I do! (Read more.)
