Sunday, September 7, 2008

The Heroines by Eileen Favorite

from Publishers Weekly: On a picturesque acreage near Prairie Bluff, Ill., 13-year-old Penny Entwistle, and her mother, Anne Marie, run a retreat where literary heroines seek temporary refuge from their tragic destinies. Franny Glass, Madame Bovary, Scarlett O'Hara, Catherine Linton and others find respite from their varied crises, but must return to their books eventually and suffer the fate that awaits. Penny, in the first throes of teenage rebellion, has little patience for her mother and the heartbroken or otherwise distraught women Anne Marie refuses to counsel (lest she change the course of their stories). And Anne Marie lavishes on her heroine lodgers the attention her daughter longs for. But when a mythical Celtic knight arrives, searching for his lost heroine Deirdre, Penny gets caught up in a web of deception that lands her in the loony bin. While the staff diagnoses her fabulous story as an attempt to deal with the long-ago death of her father, her mother commits Penny as a means of protecting her from peculiar goings-on at the house, and Penny must rely on the very fictional characters her mother favors to help her.

The reviews on Amazon were mixed - some loved - some, well, didn't.
I loved it. Tore right through it. Wished I wrote it.

This got me thinking...What fictional heroines would I like to meet?
I would like to have tea with, Scarlett O'Hara, Joe from Little Women, and Marguerite from the Scarlett Pimpernel.
I would like to have a beer with Stephanie Plum.

How about you? Which fictional heroine would you like to have tea with? Or a beer?

3 comments:

  1. Oh my. Ok, I'll add Becky Bloom and Bridge Jones to that list and Nancy Drew. I'm sure there are others!

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  2. Clarese Starling from the Hannibal Lecter books. Oh, the stories she could tell.

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  3. Yup, Jo for me too, and Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice. Oh, and Ma from the Little House books (even though she wasn't fictional) - what a cool, strong woman to bear all she did.

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