It’s been an interesting month of reading in the retreat. I’ve read some historical mysteries with some added romance, a retelling of Wuthering Heights, a speculative gothic novel that has elements of The Turn of the Screw, and a beautiful literary fiction book. I finished four books this month. I decided this year that instead of a yearly goal of so many books, I would set monthly goals, usually four to six books a month, depending on the length. That way, if I chose a longer book, I wouldn’t feel so bad about not reading enough to accomplish a one-hundred-plus yearly goal. In a way, setting that yearly goal was a lot like the old Accelerated Reader program many elementary and middle schools use to encourage students to read more; it became more about achieving the numbers than really settling into a book and reading for pleasure.
I also decided to focus more on one set of book challenges than trying to cover multiple challenges. I settled on the Book Lovers Challenge from the Book Girls Guide. The March challenge is to read a retelling of a classic. Wuthering Heights has become one of my favorite books, and I guess in the last forty years or so, I’ve read it six or more times. Each time it is something new. I read it last year again with my book club; they weren’t as excited by it as I was. I still champion it, though! I noticed the setting more this time around as I read Emily Brontë’s work and how the setting so often reflected the characters’ actions and emotions–the pathetic fallacy.
One of the options on the Book Lovers reading list this month is The Favorites by Layne Fargo. Set against the world of competitive ice dancing and figure skating, the novel is a retelling of Wuthering Heights. Fargo names her characters after Brontë’s characters but with enough variation that Fargo’s characters are not Brontë’s. Fargo uses the first-person point of view with Kat (Katerina) Shaw as the narrator. Interspersed with Kat’s narrative are interviews with other characters. The reader is left with the question of reliability. Some of the other characters are less reliable than others as each one gives his or her interpretation of the events of the story. The one thing all the characters agree on is the obsessive relationship between Kat and her partner Heath, who, like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, is a foster child raised in Kat’s family.
The competitive skating world acts almost as a character in the novel as it influences Kat’s and Heath’s decisions. Kat is already driven to be a champion, and she drags Heath into that world. Heath comes across as more sensitive than Brontë’s Heathcliff, and the skating world nearly destroys him. Kat, too, is affected by that world, and while it doesn’t destroy her, it breaks her. In the end, though, it also softens her. Whereas Brontë’s novel always leaves us questioning what we read, The Favorites resolves some of the ambiguities. We never learn where Heathcliff went when he left the moors and returned as a “changed” man, but we do learn where Heath went and how he was transformed into a powerful skater. And whereas it takes multiple generations to break the cycle of obsession and destruction in Wuthering Heights, The Favorites ends almost as a classical comedy (though not with the laughs, jokes, and pranks that define comedy today). Fargo’s novel ends with order restored and conflicts reconciled, if not completely resolved. The characters in Fargo’s novel find their way to contentment and peace, whereas Brontë leaves us questioning how “unquiet slumbers” can possibly exist in the quiet earth that Lockwood observes.
The Retreat is open, even though it is an imaginary bookshop. I will be filling the April Retreat with more books as I finish out the month of March. Unfortunately for me, there are more books on my shelf than I have time to read. One of my books for April is The Count of Monte Cristo as I watch the PBS Masterpiece Theatre presentation/adaptation over the next several weeks. I’ve been looking forward to that series for a few weeks now.
I hope you will join me in The Retreat with your own recommendations. There is an open coffee and tea bar with some tasty pastries as well as comfortable chairs for reading and conversation. See you soon!
Telling Stories 