Victoria Holt, Part 1

Eleanor Alice Hibbert (1906-1993) was an English author with several pen names; in 1989, she received a Golden Treasure award from the Romance Writers of America for her contributions to the genre. Eleanor wrote over 200 books (not all romances), and my favorites are the gothic romances she wrote as Victoria Holt and Philippa Carr. I am not interested in the ones she wrote as Jean Plaidy because those are historical fiction. I gobbled up the others as a teenager, and one was available for "free" on my Prime account recently, so I reread it ~ and luckily I had forgotten it all. In fact, I enjoyed this book so much that I ran right over to the Huntington Beach Public Library yesterday (October 19) to renew my card in order to borrow every Victoria Holt book they had on the shelves, plus one Philippa Carr. I shall be reviewing all of them, plus any others I can scrounge up, in bits and pieces.

1. The Secret Woman. Five stars! Victoria really knows how to tell a story. This one stars an orphan, Anna Brett, who is taken in by her crabby old aunt Charlotte. The aunt runs an antique furniture business, and it's very cool to see women in business "way back then" in the 1800s. Gradually, Anna learns the trade with the idea of taking it over one day. In the meantime, she falls for Redvers, their neighbor, who, as it turns out, is married (gah, men, they never change!). Chantal Loman, a nurse, is brought in to care for Charlotte after a fall, and after Charlotte dies, Anna embarks on a series of adventures with Chantal. They end up on a remote Australian island where Redvers' wife is from. There were two shocking plot twists near the end ~ and I loved them both. I also enjoyed reading a romance novel without endless paragraphs about sex. I am tired of that and have been skimming those sections lately in other books ~ it’s always the same old boringness, and I would rather see other aspects of characters brought to life on the page.

2. On the Night of the Seventh Moon. It's weird ~ I remembered some of this book, and I thought it was one of my favorites, but either my memory failed or I've changed... maybe both. The novel is very good, but not great, so I gave it four stars. The characters are interesting, especially the heroine Helena, but the plot is just too crazy and depends on too many ridiculous coincidences/contrivances. That's my main issue with the novel. As a teenager, I would have rooted for Helena to hold out for Maximilian, her prince in the mountain mist whom she had briefly loved and lost when she was a teenager, but now, as an ancient crone, I hope Helena will be practical, forget him, and marry the nice young vicar instead. What the hell is wrong with a quiet, peaceful life in a pretty cottage as a vicar's wife? No reason to go gallivanting back to Bavaria and look for a fantasy man who may or may not even exist. But I guess the story is more exciting the way Victoria wrote it. So far, we have two for two books told in first person past tense straight up narration with no weird POV breaks or stupid time flips, though this particular story was basically told as a flashback. Proper narration shouldn't even need to be mentioned, but alas we know that in newer books it is often fucked up.

3. The Black Opal. Maybe Eleanor was getting tired when she wrote this novel, which was published in 1993, the year of her death. The plot is complex and the characters are interesting, but her writing style is markedly different in TBO than in the previous two (1970, 1972). Her sentences are short and choppy, both in narrative and dialog, with inadvertent word repetition in the same paragraph ~ it feels like she’s simply hurrying through to the end without savoring the details. I do sense a pattern to the love story aspect after reading three of these VH books: the heroine falls for the first man who is nice to her. She may have mixed emotions later on after meeting other men, but she ends up with the first one. I will see if the pattern repeats in the next set. I’m not sure now if it’s worth seeking out more after I finish this library stack, since TBO received only three stars from me.

What’s that about not being able to step into the same river twice? I am wondering if my favorite old books are going to disappoint me the same way my favorite old TV shows have done. Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, eh? I loved The Secret Woman though!