A Most Intriguing Book

I came across the review of a very intriguing-sounding book a few days ago.  It is called The Heroines by a woman named Eileen favorite, a Chicago lit teacher.  The basic premise of the novel is that a young girl growing up with a voracious reader of a mother regularly encounters the heroines of great works of literature all in the climax of their troubles.  The mother is hospitable to them, but always careful not to reveal their endings.  However, the daughter’s jealousy grows as her mother seems to attend more to the heroines needs than to her own.  I am quite ready to read it.  But I don’t like to buy knew books until the news books I’ve already bought have been read.  So, it’ll have to wait until I’ve gotten through Wicked.  Besides the retail price is now $24.  There aren’t many books worth paying that much for… But here’s the review from the Chicago Sun-Times if you’re interested in further information:

In the Chicago suburb of South Holland, Eileen Favorite grew up in a house brimming — bulging is not too strong a word — with books.

“I was one of the youngest of nine children, so all my siblings’ books were all over the house,” recalls Favorite, who had five sisters, all older, and three brothers. “We had these credenzas, and you’d open them up and books would just come tumbling out. And my brothers always got to watch the Cubs, which meant they dominated the TV. So I would be upstairs reading books.”

And so it was only natural, if not inevitable, that Favorite’s first novel should be not just about books, but about being quite literally caught up in the world of fiction. In The Heroines, 13-year-old Penny is a feisty, impatient young girl who not only reads the novels that she and her mother, Anne-Marie, keep in the attic of their rangy bed-and-breakfast in the Illinois countryside; she finds herself in a series of uncomfortably close encounters with the lead characters, who regularly, inexplicably appear in the flesh.

From Rapunzel to J.D. Salinger’s Franny, the Heroines tend to arrive just after they’ve suffered romantic disappointments or other setbacks before disappearing back into their stories. Emma Bovary drops by, bemoaning her fate after being dumped by Rodolphe. A wild-eyed Scarlett O’Hara sashays in, as does Catherine from Wuthering Heights. (Anne-Marie is careful not to reveal anything to the Heroines that might alter their fictional fates — a lesson that Penny learns through trial and error.)

For Penny, who resents the amount of attention that her mother gives the Heroines, it makes for a tricky childhood, to say the least. But when a Celtic heroine named Deirdre is followed into Penny’s everyday reality by a cloak-wearing, intoxicatingly masculine warrior-king named Conor — wreaking general havoc and, in the process, stirring Penny’s budding sexuality — things get considerably more complicated.

“At first I was thinking about writing a novel about what happened when a saint came to America,” says Favorite, 43, who teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “How would he or she function? But then I realized, saints would always do the right thing — they’re saints. And then I thought how much more interesting it would be if flawed people came. Our flaws are more interesting than our perfections, and certainly the heroines are flawed. So that’s where the idea came from.”

This concept had the added advantage of allowing Favorite to draw on her childhood — especially the reading, some of which was admittedly over her head at the time. “My sisters introduced me to Catcher in the Rye when I was 10, just to see what I’d get out of it,” she recalls. “I loved it, but I didn’t get that Holden Caulfield was having a nervous breakdown. I thought he made perfect sense.”

And as a metafiction, The Heroines allows Favorite to spoof the conventions of fairy tales and 19th century women’s literature; the prairie around Anne-Marie’s house shares distinct characteristics with the moor in Wuthering Heights, while the nearby forest, where Penny first encounters Conor, feels soaked in the mystery and enchantment of the Brothers Grimm.

But for all Favorite’s literary game-playing, she never lets it turn The Heroines into anything less than a good yarn. “I’m using postmodernist aspects by appropriating all these other characters, but at the same time, I’m writing a page-turner, something with a plot,” she says. “I want to grab the readers by the lapels and pull them through.”