Book: Something Dangerous
Author: Penny Vincenzi
Published: 2001 (Overlook)
Pages: 710
This is Downton Abbey in book form, minus the vast majority
of the servants’ part and set a World War later in a family that still has ties
to what made it rich (publishing). It starts out you know it’s like a soap
opera but with way better production values and characters that are archetypes
rather than flat-out stereotypes and that tells us a little at least about the
general human condition, right? Sure. Plus she’s totally sleeping with the dude
who’s terrible for her!
But that’s not an endorsement. It’s a warning about how
utterly dull wartime declarations can get when everyone’s intentions are noble
and all tension is eased within a couple pages of bringing it up in the first
place. And all the ladies take back their men after declaring them scoundrels
and getting pregnant like every other day seriously they even talk about birth
control and how they should use it and apparently that doesn’t happen because
every other major plot point is “[Female character. Any of them. Seriously.] is
pregnant!” Because it’s ALWAYS A SURPRISE and there’s 700 PAGES of that.
Plus there’s a sheen of historical irony that just gets more
and more annoying as the characters worry about and hope for events that
everyone damn well knows the outcome to by now. And the matriarch, who in my
head was totally Maggie Smith even though she was actually the mom in the book,
starts out admiring Hitler and his revolution but you know what changes her
mind? The same arguments against fascism that she’s been hearing since he
started out. The arguments just suddenly work somehow around the time he breaks
the glass of every Jewish shopkeeper he can find.
It’s that kind of weak convenience that drives all the
character changes, and I just couldn’t like it nearly as much as I thought I
was going to in the first hundred pages. Donate.
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