Customer Reviews

Grace Hammer: A Novel of the Victorian Underworld

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"Hammer," a novel of the Victorian underworld of London, is the debut of Sara Stockbridge, starlet-actress, model, and well-known muse of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood during the 1980s. Stockbridge, who strongly resembles the late Marilyn Monroe, has produced a fast and fun book for her first effort.

It's a lusty tale of crime, set in London's 19th century, poverty-stricken East End. "Hammer" introduces Grace Hammer, who leads a comfy and cozy life on Bell Lane with her four children, as they thieve from wealthy outlanders foolish enough to venture into the dark and dirty world she inhabits. She keeps a clean house, and has trained her clean and amiable children well: they lift only wallets and pocket watches, the bread and butter of the thieves' trade. Grace does, of course meet a seductive man, one Jack Tallis, who unfortunately likes to spread his attentions around, but, still, she can cope. Until, that is, a not very seductive man, from whom she stole an outstanding piece of jewelry 17 long years ago, comes looking for her.

We're told that Grace, unusually enough for her sex and class, can read, and that her favorite reading material is by Charles Dickens, fittingly enough, as it is a Dickensian world that Stockbridge is giving us here. (See, perhaps, Oliver Twist, by the master.) Mind you, Stockbridge is a great deal more terse and witty than Dickens ever was: I don't suppose he was going for terse and witty. In fact, Stockbridge writes quite well, with a great deal of brio, and has a distinctive voice. Although, of course, you'd have to characterize this effort as chick lit lite. In addition, as Stockbridge is telling us about Whitechapel, Limehouse, Shoreditch, some of the worst of London's dank slums, in the late Victorian era, she's able to bring in Jack the Ripper, who was occupied there at the time. A really racy and entertaining read, for wherever you happen to be, be it the cleanest and sunniest of beaches.

It is 1888, and Grace Hammer is a thief, living in London's Whitechapel. The area is a hotbed for squalor and criminal activity, and is populated with all kinds of unseemly characters (including a serial murder called Jack the Ripper). Grace lives here with her four children, making a decent (but not honest) living picking pockets. In the countryside, a man named Horatio Blunt sits, waiting for the perfect moment to enact his revenge on the woman who stole something valuable from him many years previously.

I loved the premise of the novel, and I enjoyed the setting. Victorian England is one of the time periods I enjoy reading about, in fiction and nonfiction, and I was looking forward to settling down with a good, creepy read. Grace is a plucky heroine, smart and resourceful, and the plot is, indeed, creepy indeed at times. But the plot also has some major holes in it. For example, if Grace knew she was wanted for theft, then why didn't she take an assumed name when she moved to London? For someone who was apparently such a great thief, she didn't cover her tracks very well. Why did Horatio Blunt wait seventeen years to get revenge on Grace? And the ending was anticlimactic, with everything neatly wrapped and tied with a bow. The writing style is a little uneven, too. The first twenty pages or so are written in the present tense, but then the rest of the book is written in past tense. It's almost as though the author changed her mind partway in.

But really, I thought that the characters were the best part of this novel. Grace is, as I've said, a plucky woman, one that the reader really roots for as she tries to beat Horatio Blunt at his own game. Some of her other characters truly gave me the creeps while reading this book. I just wish the plot lived up to the promise.

Grace Hammer is a very unusual Victorian heroine, a jewel among the unpolished stones of late 19th century London, particularly in the East End, where streetwalkers rub elbows with pickpockets and reprobates of every ilk, where vice is profitable and life is cheap. Grace has made a niche for herself in this aberrant society; a thief, she has created a comfortable home for four children (by different fathers), a natural survivor ever on the lookout for opportunity. Unfortunately, Grace's past is just as checkered as her present, as, across the miles, an evil man "dreams, with pleasure, of slitting her throat". For Grace has stolen his most precious jewel from under his nose, disappearing into London, lost among the crowds of miscreants and grifters, the ugly underbelly of poverty in Queen Victoria's England.

While England is enjoying an unprecedented expansion of Empire, the colonization of India and the first fruits of the Industrial Revolution, the poorer citizens suffer the ravages of poverty and crime, the East End a hotbed of exploitation, thievery and madness. Undaunted, Grace glides through life, teaching her children the tricks of the trade, attracting the attentions of Jack Tallis, a handsome roué who falls under her spell. But Grace attracts the attention of another in a vast network of spies, each greedy for information to line his pockets, bartering as necessary. Word reaches Horatio Blunt, Grace's nemesis and master thief, who rolls out of his lair, his heart beating a steady drumbeat of revenge.

Stockbridge has already salted her Victorian novel with the fascinating details of Grace's fringe existence in the East End, but now the novel ratchets into a sense of urgency, Grace barely escaping the greedy, searching eyes of the crude man who has never forgotten her. The fate of Blunt's stolen jewel is of little significance, albeit some, while revenge dominates his every move. For all her friends, Grace has an equal number of enemies who hope to profit from the clever woman's appointment with the past. Mother and children on the run, Blunt closes in; at the same time the East End is terrified by a spate of brutal murders, anxiety fueled by newspaper accounts of the exploits of Jack the Ripper.

Stockbridge delivers a beautifully written period piece that captures a country caught in the changing gears of history, great opportunities accompanied by immeasurable human suffering as evidenced on the bleak streets of London's poorest neighborhoods. Regretfully, Grace briefly loses her heart to handsome Jack Tallis, has more at stake than the fruits of a heady romance. No shrinking violet, the lady proves her mettle and her moxie as she evades the evil that pursues her, a raft of unfortunates strewn in her wake. Luan Gaines/2009.

This is, unfortunately, simply not a very good book.

The characters are essentially lifeless and two-dimensional. We never really get to know them because they are superlative in every way: attractive, healthy, fit, well-read. Despite living in one of the most squalid parts of London during one of its lowest points (the short reign of Jack the Ripper), we never get the impression that the surroundings have much impact at all on any of the characters. Peripheral characters are described by their attributes (one is described ad nauseum as charming, although he acts anything but, another is primarily distinguished by her drunkenness, another by her lack of discrimination in partners).

Even the most dramatic section of the book is set apart by its dullness. They travel, they meet people, there's drama, they eventually go back home.

Had I not promised to read and review it, I probably wouldn't have made it past the first few pages. I certainly wouldn't have made it past one of the many poorly-constructed sentences. One sentence at random: "She rode thereafter into Chichester every fourth Tuesday for fresh books, and her family thought her quite mad, though this did not diminish their enjoyment of her fireside readings -- furnished as they were with different voices for each character (their favourite being the odious Uriah Heep, for whom Grace contorted her elastic face into an alarming mask, tiwsting her handsome features beyond recognition and frightening the dog) and piles of hot toast -- which they ate in perfect silence, ears cocked, eyes wide, pausing mid-chew as Mr Bill Sykes battered Nancy to her dreadful death or poor Mr Guppy shone his lamp on Krook's grim remains." Pity, too. It sounded so much more interesting when described by the publisher.

On the other hand, it's relatively short at 277 pages and a fairly quick read. If plot and characterization aren't that important to you, and you're simply interested in dipping into a period piece, you may enjoy it.

This may be the first book I've read which referenced the Ripper murders that didn't annoy me. The weird irony of this book is that the Ripper murders are going on and our Heroine, Grace, considers them a tabloid annoyance, wrapped as she is in her own problems.

I'll save you the suspense: none of the characters named in the book are the Ripper. It's just a contemporary event that Stockbridge threw in there to lend verisimilitude.

Now that that's out of the way, Grace Hammer is a cool, collected lady who knows what she wants and goes after it. She's not perfect--she has a "magpie heart" that prompts her to steal bits of glitter, she makes a living by petty theft, and she has a weakness for handsome wastrels. Buts she's a good mother, a loyal friend and a cool reliable witness to the events around her.

Briefly, Grace is being hunted by a man she robbed 18 years ago. The cast of characters she meets and interacts with along the way are deliberately Dickensian, all drawn in brief, memorable sketches and tending to be larger-than-life. In some cases they are more caricatures than characters, but since those are mostly secondary characters or walk-ons who move the plot along, the device works.

In fact the whole plot works, together with a handful of subplots woven in. Nothing really changes by the end of the book, our heroine goes back to her cheerful daily grind, but one has the impression that such was the point of the story--life goes on as before in Whitechapel.

But what really shone for me, in this book, was the writing. It's quick, dry, frequently witty and occasionally poignant. It's a refreshing bracer against the self-conscious, bloated tomes I've encountered in the last year. Even if the book is a deliberate aping of Dickens, it's a successful and worthy homage.

There are a few books which I can say that the negatives and the positives are in almost complete balance. Grace Hammer: A Novel of the Victorian Underworld is, for better or worse, one of those books.

Sara Stockbridge's writing reminds me, in some ways, of Victorian writers . . . full of complex sentences, an intimate narrator, and lengthy, blow-by-blow scenic descriptions. The problem is, however, that the complex sentences are often needlessly so and, although complex they are not always well-written; the intimate narrator is an interesting but not always welcome (or well-understood voice#, and the description, though accurate, is something Victorian writers employed because they knew they had captivated audiences. Stockbridge, with her lengthy descriptions beginning before even the plot has started, does not have that guarantee. Had I not been reading this to review it, I'm not sure if I would have kept reading past that first description because Stockbridge had not yet hooked me.

I am glad, however, that I did finish the book because there were some really unique aspects to Grace Hammer. Stockbridge writes from a completely fresh angle. This is not the typical Victorian story of a well-to-do aristocrat (or perhaps more hackneyed, the poor girl who doesn't know she's actually an aristocrat.) Grace Hammer is the meat and bones of Victorian society, part of a social class that though infrequently written about in fiction is just as fascinating as those most written about. Furthermore, Stockbridge's creation of characters who, though working class are well-read, fits in nicely with recent historical and literary studies into 19th century working-class scenes of reading. Stockbridge's facts are both accurate and insightful, offering a delightful way to learn for the first time #or to be reminded again# that much of the Victorian working class considered books to be treasures that shaped their very foundations. Stockbridge also manages to subtly weave other critical Victorian popular culture references into her work, including #but not limited to# Jack the Ripper. In that respect, this book is a gem to both those who know nothing about Victorian cultures and those who secretly wish they'd been born a few centuries earlier.

To conclude, Sara Stockbridge is not the best writer that I've ever encountered. Nor am I sure if I will ever read this book again. Yet with an avid interest in the historical and literary facets of Victorian culture, I am glad this book fell into my lap, for it is indeed well-researched. And for any who, like myself, remember history (and other random facts) better through the guise of fiction, Grace Hammer: A Novel of the Victorian Underworld is a delightful spoon full of sugar to help the medicine go down.

I was less than impressed with this book, which makes me very sad because it had the potential for great fun. A strong, female lead, the Victorian time-period and London as the perfect setting.. everything should have added up to a fantastic little story about pickpockets and knaves.

I think the combination of Stockbridge's writing as well as the lack-luster character and world building really just turned me off on the story and I had to force myself to finish it. I kept hoping at 50, 75, 100 pages in that it'd pick up, that there would be a big climax that would make it all worth while, but instead the story just sort of limped along and felt so disjointed that I felt lost most of the time.

This is one I was sad I didn't take off the TBR list without bothering to read it. I remember vaguely thinking about how much fun this would be - I'm glad I waited to read it rather than be even more disappointed then than I am today.

Grace is the single parent of 4 children. She makes a nice living picking pockets in 1800's London, during Jack the Ripper's rampage. Years ago, she stole a really valuable necklace and the thief she stole it from wants her to pay. Through a cast of characters straight from a Charles Dickens novel, he starts hunting her down.

Really atmospheric read... if you liked The Dress Lodger, Slammerkin, Fingersmith, then try it.

"It does not get any better than death and intrigue in Victorian England. We can't wait for Stockbridge's next book - she is sure to be a star!"