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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
great weekend read on the couch, January 23, 2008
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.
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17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
This Isn't Your Usual Retreat, January 12, 2008
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.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not the story that was advertised ..., March 14, 2008
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.
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