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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Pay absolutely no attention to the back of the book, January 9, 2008
Whoever was hired to write the back cover book blurb (which tells what the book is about) should be fired because it's obvious that they never read the book.
The back of the cover-well you can read it yourself on Amazon- basically describes a young girl going to her apprenticeship slightly before "tulip mania" strikes and talks as if the whole book is about this young girl and her apprenticeship. This is wrong in so many ways. First of all, all the primary characters in the book expect for two were born after "tulip mania" was over. And secondly, this book is about three sisters, not just one girl and last of all, the apprenticeship around which the blurb makes it sound the book revolves doesn't even take place until about 1/3 of the way through the book. So completely disregard the back cover.
This book is about the Visser family, a fictional family living in Amsterdam AFTER "tulip mania" and before the war with Louise IXV, which is lead by a fictional artist named Hendrick. In the beginning of the book Henrick's wife Anna dies, leaving him and his three daughters, Francesca, Aletta and Sybylla, all alone. Francesca and Aletta are determined to be artists like their father but their dreams seem unlikely to come true since Hendrick is also a habitual gambler whose painting sales often do not cover his debts, let alone leave enough to apprentice them. Until the day he paints Francesca as the goddess Flora and catches the eye of a wealthy business man.
Unfortunately this painting, while it brings in a lot of money, brings only bad luck to the family. The man who buys it, Ludolf, becomes obsessed with Francesca and cheats Hendrick into debt so he can have her for his wife, despite her growing attraction to a young tulip grower. Naturally, she knows nothing of this. When Francesca leaves for her apprentice with Johannes Vermeer she finds her father has given the widow she is staying with rules that seem absurd to her, including a rule of no contact with her tulip grower or time alone with any man.
Soon Francesca and her sister Aletta, through twists of fate are in a place to help weed out French spies and Dutch traitors for the invasion by the French sun king, which is immanent.
This is kind of an odd novel because it seems to keep changing genre. At first it's historical art fiction, then a romance, then three romances, a story of a murdering fiend, a novel about overcoming adversity and then an intrigue of spies and princes. Somehow in the end it does all kind of blend into one story with the overwhelming theme being a portrait of Holland before the disastrous and pointless French invasion.
Along with the confusing and seemingly pointless story shifts there are huge character problems. With the exception of Hendrick and Ludolf, every character is so selfless that they aren't believable. Especially the three sisters-I have a brother, not a sister, but I don't think any group of siblings is as loving and non-combative as three. And their father! Maybe it's a historical message about how women had to live with a man no matter what he was like but I can't imagine any woman putting up with him! He's extremely selfish, self indulgent, has a god complex, and doesn't seem to really care about anyone's feelings or problems but his own! I hated him at times but I guess in times past if you were a woman, you had to put up with having a bad father or husband with no recourse but what can be worked out with the man.
And I'm never going to like the love at first sight or love without actually knowing the person aspect that Rosalind Laker seems so fond of. I like love that comes through knowledge and friendship in my books.
Also the way she writes is very....I don't know. The only way to describe it is to say that it's not high class lit, writing but more like typical romance style writing. Nothing to write home about although there are a lot of little historical tidbits. Still, the first almost two hundred pages could have been cut from the book to no loss.
Anyway, I didn't like this book at first because of the constant story focus shifts and the characters that just made me want to kick them, and a very boring begining but I did get into the story and liked the ending quite a lot. So overall, three stars.
But remember this book has nothing to do with tulip mania!
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The tale of three sisters in the time of Rembrandt and Vermeer, January 12, 2008
I first encountered the novels of Rosalind Laker back in the 1980's, and rather enjoyed her blend of romance and history. Her historical research was solid and interesting, and while sometimes the characters were a bit off the mark, there was enough in them to interest me. Then I stopped seeing her works on the shelves and I moved on to other writers. Now Three Rivers Press is bringing her backlist (previously issued books) back into print, and I scooped up The Golden Tulip on a recent excursion into a bookstore.
Set in Holland during the seventeenth century, this tells the story of the three daughters of Hendrick Visser. Hendrick is an artist painting in Amsterdam, and is a broad fellow in his desires. He adores his wife and children, and while he's very competent at what he does, money just seems to flow through his hands. His wife Anna is more than a little fed up with his behavior, but she loves him very much, and manages to keep their household together. Of their three daughters, the eldest two, Francesca and Aletta, have the most artistic talent, while the youngest Sybylla, is a cheerful butterfly of a girl, dreaming of a life of leisure when she snags a rich husband of her own.
But unexpected tragedy hits when Anna dies giving birth to s stillborn son, and Aletta suffers from a violent encounter in the street. The family is badly scarred by this -- Hendrick focuses more on gambling and drinking, Francesca takes on the chores of mothering her family, Aletta withdraws emotionally, and only Sybylla seems to remain unchanged. But as the three girls mature, we get to see them moving into the wider world of Amsterdam and Delft.
Most of the story centers around Francesca, and her growing talent as an artist. She seems to be unaware of her own beauty, and wants to excell and make a name for herself as an artist. But it seems that her father Hendrick is reluctant to see her skills improve and have her apprenticed, either to herself or someone else. When one of the rich merchants of Amsterdam, Ludolf van Deventer, sees a painting of her as the goddess Flora, he offers to help the Visser family, including seeing Francesca apprenticed to none other than Jan Vermeer in the town of Delft. Francesca faces a long separation from Pieter van Doorne, a young farmer of tulips, but she is also certain that one day she and Pieter will be together...
The other two sisters are not neglected as well. Aletta decides that to trust in having her future in anyone else's hands is too dangerous, and so she struggles to master her artistic talents by herself, and sells her own paintings secretly. When her father discovers this, he destroys her work, and banishes her from the house to fend for herself. Sybylla is the bit player in this threesome, and unfortunately doesn't get much of the story for herself.
Set against the world of art, with Jan Vermeer as one of the main characters, and with appearances by Rembrandt, this makes for a very satisfying read for me. Laker knows the world of the Dutch artists and merchants well, and manages to weave in the history of the time as well. There's all sorts of little snippets about daily life, the customs of the time, the arrangement of the guilds. For those who don't think that women could work and live on their own, I'm happy to say that Laker didn't make her story up -- women were a growing force in Holland at the time, enjoying more economic freedom than most women in Europe at the time. Her knowledge of art really glows here, and I was easily able to identify the works of art that she describes. But with freedom also comes the darker side, especially with one of the villains of the piece, Geertryd, who is one of the nastier characters that I come across in fiction of late. What finally sold the book to me as a 'keeper' was the rich depictions of the story, and the fact that Laker makes her characters very human and ordinary -- everyone has flaws here, from ego, pride, jealousy and then mixes it all in with ambition, talent, love and generosity.
The biggest problem that I have with this one is that some of the main characters are a bit flat. Sybylla, especially, isn't much more than a gadfly, even towards the end of the novel, and with her two sisters so richly fleshed out, it was a real disappointment. Another problem that I had was with the description of the Prince of Orange, who makes a brief but important appearance -- he's shown as a tall, commanding man, when in reality he was a short, pretty ugly man with a brilliant mind for generalship and a wise sense of politics. It's a minor point, but it's still annoying to find a lapse in research. Another problem was that every now and then the writer breaks off to explain something in terms of action, instead of incorporating it into the story, and it gets jarring after a while. It was these mistakes that kept the novel from being a five star work, and dropped it down to a four star read overall.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Blooming Good Read, January 13, 2001
The Golden Tulip is set in 17th Century Amsterdam and deals with artists guilds. The heroine, Francesca Visser, is a talented and inspired young artist who finds her life turned upside down when her mother dies. When Francesca's father loses a small fortune gambling, he affiances her to a ruthless and diabolical merchant, Ludolf van Deventer. First, though, she is allowed to complete an apprenticeship with the Delft painter Vermeer, where she perfects her skills and meets famous Flemish artists. Along the way, she meets her true love, Pieter van Doorne, a tulip-grower. Together, Pieter and Francesca find a way to defeat the evil van Deventer. The story also features Francesca's two sisters, Aletta and Sybylla, who have their own adventures and love affairs. The Golden Tulip is a superbly written novel from an extremely gifted story-teller. The story offers history, romance, and a solid plot. It is also emotionally sweeping - drifting between red-hot passion, touching devotion, dark hostility and obsession. The black under-currents, accurate historical details, and sizzling romance in this novel help it to fall into several different categories: thriller, historical, romance.
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