Heroines, the [Paperback]

Eileen Favorite (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2008

Up in the dusty attic of Prairie Bluff Homestead, Anne-Marie keeps all of her beloved books locked safely away. For her treasured novels - and the tragic heroines who make them so irresistible - have a way of hitting too close to home. To the Homestead itself, actually...This otherwise ordinary boarding house has become the favoured refuge of the great women of literature, who descend on Anne-Marie and her daughter Penny - at all hours, and in all manner of distress - as their storylines are unravelling. And the last thing Anne-Marie needs is an emotional Anna Karenina accidentally discovering she is bound to take her own life on the railway tracks. The Homestead has played host to a heartbroken Emma Bovary, a distraught Scarlett O'Hara, a weeping Catherine Earnshaw - but this extraordinary literary education will teach Penny as much about herself, her mother and their destinies as it does about the heroines...

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

On a picturesque acreage near Prairie Bluff, Ill., 13-year-old Penny Entwistle, and her mother, Anne Marie, run a retreat where literary heroines seek temporary refuge from their tragic destinies. Franny Glass, Madame Bovary, Scarlett O'Hara, Catherine Linton and others find respite from their varied crises, but must return to their books eventually and suffer the fate that awaits. Penny, in the first throes of teenage rebellion, has little patience for her mother and the heartbroken or otherwise distraught women Anne Marie refuses to counsel (lest she change the course of their stories). And Anne Marie lavishes on her heroine lodgers the attention her daughter longs for. But when a mythical Celtic knight arrives, searching for his lost heroine Deirdre, Penny gets caught up in a web of deception that lands her in the loony bin. While the staff diagnoses her fabulous story as an attempt to deal with the long-ago death of her father, her mother commits Penny as a means of protecting her from peculiar goings-on at the house, and Penny must rely on the very fictional characters her mother favors to help her. Favorite offers a fun take on the impact literature can have on our lives. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"On a picturesque acreage near Prairie Bluff, Illinois, thirteen-year-old Penny Entwhistle and her mother, Anne-Marie, run a retreat where literary Heroines seek temporary refuge from their tragic destinies. Franny Glass, Madame Bovary, Scarlett O'Hara, Catherine Earnshaw, and others find respite from their varied cries, but must return to their books eventually and suffer the fate that awaits...Favorite offers a fun take on the impact literature can have on our lives." -- "Publishers Weekly" --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Random House; Airport / Ireland / Export e. edition (2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0091921147
• ISBN-13: 978-0091921149
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great weekend read on the couch, January 23, 2008

By 

Gayle (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Heroines: A Novel (Hardcover)

When I pick up a novel, I want to go somewhere else. Completely. Ensconced in Favorite's midwestern B&B/heroines world right from the start, I found I didn't want to leave this place until I turned every last page of plots within plots, savoring lovely writing all along the way. Penny has a strong narrative voice--in turns witty, troubled, introspective, defiant, vulnerable--that's easy to hitch onto. Anchoring lively scenes with just the amount of detail that makes the fantastic believable, Favorite maintains a seamless line between reality and unreality. Reading this novel reminds me why I stopped with a Master's in English and didn't continue on with a soul-killing Ph.D: Postmodern scholarship sucks the magic out of literature, out of stories, out of imagining. The Heroines is a good, strong story, but also playful metafiction, an antidote to dusty notions of what stories are and should be. This one is a book-lover's delight. And it was such fun seeing Scarlett O'Hara and Blanche duBois again I had to rent the movies the next weekend to continue the escape.

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This Isn't Your Usual Retreat, January 12, 2008

By 

Nancy "Stepfordmomto2" (CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Heroines: A Novel (Hardcover)

The whole time I was reading this book I kept thinking that I was missing something. There is something here that I'm not seeing. Well, there was, but it wasn't what I was expecting, which is what kept me reading even though it was a little too late.

13 year old Penny Entwhistle is growing up in a Illinois prairie bed and breakfast with her mother Anne-Marie and housekeeper Gretta This isn't your usually retreat, this is the place that literary heroines such as Emma Bovary, Scarlett O'Hara and Catherine Earnshaw go to regroup when their lives are in distress. They come to Anne-Marie who strengthens them and encourages them back to their lives without interfering with the eventual plots of each story.

Anne-Marie is very strict in her belief that the heroines are not to be told the truth about the outcome of their fates in the book. But then one night a hero appears and thus changes the whole routine. What will have to be sacrificed to make the dangerous man return to his world? What truths will have to be told about the past?

What started out as an interesting plot turned me off when it branched into a sudden trek into Girl, Interrupted. That part which takes up a good portion of the book, just was lost on me. If Favorite had just stuck with the sudden arrivals of the Heroines and their stories it would have been, in my opinion, a much better book.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not the story that was advertised ..., March 14, 2008

By 

A Nora Fan (CT, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Heroines: A Novel (Hardcover)

I was so disappointed in this I hardly know where to begin.

This mess of a book, though well-written, tried to do too many things at once. It begins with a charming concept: Heroines from famous books suddenly appear at the bed & breakfast run by 13 year-old Penny Entwhistle's mother, Anne-Marie. While Anne-Marie coddles and comforts the Heroines, being careful not to divulge their ultimate fates or plot lines to them, Penny rages and rebels over her mother's neglect. When a Hero arrives to reclaim his Heroine (a very unusual event), things start to get interesting. This was a grand start to what I imagined would be a wonderful romp of a story, but then the book suddenly veered into (as another reviewer here so aptly described it) 'Girl, Interrupted' territory, sending Penny into a horrifying psych ward for no apparent reason. The story just gets more and more jumbled from there.

Is this a fantasy about literary Heroines appearing in real life? Is it a gritty girl-trapped-in-the-looney-bin drama? Is it some sort of Freudian tale meant to have Serious Deeper Meaning (images of fatherless girls, forests, and puberty abound)? Why are there every-other-chapter references to Nixon and Watergate that do nothing to move the story along? Are the brief appearances of the Heroines real or imagined? The final straw for me was the tale of Penny's real father, which just tipped the whole thing over the edge into a complete muddle.

Worst of all, however, is the incredibly misleading story synopsis on the back of the book. I just felt cheated. This would have been a much better story if the author had just stuck to her original idea: the mayhem -- charming, chaotic or otherwise -- that results when figures from famous books come to call.