A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson

Rating: 7 out of 10
Summary: For nineteen-year-old Harriet Morton, life in 1912 Cambridge is as dry and dull as a biscuit. Her stuffy father and her oppressive aunt Louisa allow her only one outlet: ballet. When a Russian ballet master comes to class searching for dancers to fill the corps of his ballet company before their South American tour, Harriet’s world changes.

Defying her father’s wishes and narrowly escaping the clutches of the man who wishes to marry her, Harriet sneaks off to join the ballet on their journey to the Amazon. There, in the wild, lush jungle, they perform Swan Lake in grand opera houses for the wealthy and culture-deprived rubber barons, and Harriet meets Rom Verney, the handsome and mysterious British exile who owns the most ornate opera house.

Utterly enchanted by both the exotic surroundings and by Rom’s affections, Harriet is swept away by her new life, completely unaware that her father and would-be finacé have begun to track her down. . . .

Commentary: This is what I call a Wish-Fulfillment Novel. Our heroine goes through a great struggle, she’s valiant, she’s humble, she’s likeable and we want her to win! And in the end, she does, and everything works out just great. She has a happy ending. All the right things happen in all the right places. There’s a lot of “coincidences”… but the kind of coincidences that just work out perfectly. Gives you a nice, warm feeling after you finish. With this kind of thing, it’s very easy to slip into stuff that’s too cliche, where the heroine becomes too good, and the happy ending is too happy. Sort of like a campy romance novel.

However, Ibbotson did a good job of not falling into that trap. I read a lot of Ibbotson’s work when I was younger, namely Which Witch? and Island of the Aunts and all those other good childhood classics. When I first this picked this up I thought it was something she’d written more recently for young adults, especially since the cover looked so new and modern. But in fact she wrote it all the way back in the stone age of 1985–which was long before I was born. She’s still got stuff coming out though, which is nice. I get so depressed when authors I like die and inevitably stop writing because they’re… dead (Madeleine L’Engle is a good example).

Back to the book. It was good. Entertaining. Not too sugary. In fact, it woke in me an interest in ballet–I’ve never seen a real production, and I’m determined to catch the next performance of Swan Lake that my city’s ballet company puts on. Ibbotson seems to have done her research well.

Youthful, romantic, interesting… good read.

Soul by Tobsha Learner

Rating: 8 out of 10
Summary: In nineteenth-century Britain, young Lavinia Huntington’s older husband appreciates her lively intellect and seems eager to extend his wife’s education from his study to their bedroom. Lavinia absorbs all he has to teach and glories in the birth of their son.

In twenty-first-century Los Angeles, Julia Huntington studies the human genome, seeking the origins of human emotion. As passionate about her marriage to her beloved Klaus as she is about her life’s work, Julia is delighted to discover that she is pregnant.

Separated by nearly 150 years, Lavinia and Julia suffer the same shock when their men abandon them. Their powerful love becomes painful hate; their intense passion transforms into icy logic. The genes of the Huntington women have formed their emotions–now their life experiences drive them to make decisions that they, and those they love, may long regret.

Commentary: I started reading another of Learner’s novels quite awhile ago, The Witch of Cologne, but I never finished it. However, I really enjoyed Soul–finished it in a day. Learner did a great job of interweaving two stories and two conflicts, transitioning well between one narrative and the next.

I think the best part about this book was the emotion and intensity involved–Learner takes the reader through a whole rollercoaster of ups and downs, and you can feel every single thing that happens to both Lavinia and Julia. I don’t want to reveal too much, but I’m not sure I would have been as strong as Julia, strong enough to hold back from dealing revenge at such a horrible betrayal.

Usually a novel with two narratives can become unbalanced–I’ve read books before where I become far more interested in one story than the other. But Learner did a good job of paralleling Julia’s and Lavinia’s stories.

The one thing I can really pick on is Learner’s central, scientific idea that supposedly tied the two stories together–the question of nature vs. nurture, of whether or not our DNA and basic genetic makeup can determine our behavior. It may be because I am personally so biased (I favor nurture over nature) but I felt that the scientific arguments and evidence presented in Soul were weak and not particularly engaging. The science and genetics weren’t what linked these two related women–their situations and decisions did.

Maybe in the end, especially considering the climax, that is what Learner intended to prove.

Great read, fast-paced and very, very interesting.