I Read a Lot of Books

This book was SOOOOOO bad. Ugh. Really. It was awful. My baby brother (who turns 32 this year!) got this for my birthday last last year. Correction, he got the first four books in the series (more about this series later) at a used book store for a dollar. He had the gaul to leave the price tag and when I called him on it he said he just wanted to show me what our friendship was worth. Thanks, Jason. In retaliation, I didn’t get him anything for his birthday, so there is that.

Let me give you a bit of history about this series of books. They are gothic romance, other novels that fall into this category could be some Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, or even the Bronte sisters. The novels all deal with your standard gothic tropes, the supernatural, dreary settings, curses. This particular series was written by John Kimbro who wrote under various pseudonyms in his life but really hit on market success with the Saga of the Phenwick Women starting with Augusta, The First and carrying on for forty books.  According to his obituary each book took him two to four weeks to write! And it shows. SO BAD. More on that in a minute. I have no problem with men writing from the female perspective or vise versa. I feel if you are creative, empathetic, and a talented writer you should have the ability to cross gender, race, religion, social class, culture etc and still create compelling writing. Kimbro, cracking out his novels a month at a time, just didn’t take the time or have the ability to write women.

Lets talk Augusta. I know I am supposed to feel like she is this amazing feminist type of woman taking control of her fate and sexuality in 1742 (when the book begins), but Augusta is a trope. The modern woman acting in the not so modern world. She is the first of many cliche Phenwick women. Well, perhaps that is unfair, she is the first of four, the books that I have read. She manages to marry advantageously and disguise the fact that she is already pregnant when the wedding takes place. Augusta also gets her husband to expand his shipping company into Boston where she is, of course, charge. Not content with Boston, Augusta wants to look for some buried treasure that her Uncle Ben gave her the clues to find when she was just a child. She takes lovers, does business, buries a husband, marries again, builds a house called Greenfield, loses it to fire, rebuilds. In the midst of this her son gets kidnapped and she manages to get him back again, oh, and let us not forget that she vows to haunt all future Phenwick women to make sure they are strong or some such nonsense. Really it is tragically bad. The characters are underdeveloped and only serve to have dialogue with Augusta.

Save yourself a few hours and don’t read this book. Just don’t do it.