Book Review: Small Deceptions by H. Linn Murphy

Book:  Small Deceptions
Author:  H. Linn Murphy
Pages:  288
Format:  Paperback, Kindle/ebook
Publisher:  Xlibris
Book Source:  Personal Purchase
Category:  Regency Romance
Style:  "A novel after the style of Jane Austin," archaic language poorly interpreted

Synopsis from Author's Blog:

Francesca Kennington merely wants to be left to her studies, despite her mother's best efforts to saddle her with a rich husband. Then she meets a mysterious gentleman, who leads her on a romp through the ballrooms and countryside of Georgian England. Their romance blossoms but secrets cause Francesca's house of cards to tumble. She must find a way to put her life back together, while still following her heart.

My Take:  

Ms. Murphy has created an interesting premise with a great deal of promise: a bookish girl, frustrated with her mother's harping, decides to pretend to bow to her wishes in an effort to get what she wants, i.e., more time to herself and her studies.  Said girl gets caught in her own trap and begins to enjoy herself as a faux society maven.  Romance ensues.

Enter the mother, pleased with her daughter's transformation but insistent she wed a gentleman other than Francesca's choosing.  The two clash.  The truth about the mother's resentment comes to the fore, including the father's absentee parenting and obvious favoritism for Francesca.  The crisis reaches its peak.

Francesca's true love clues in the absent father about the goings-on between his wife and daughter.  The father returns to restore Francesca to grace, address the mother's issues, and establish the true love as his daughter's rightful suitor.

Note to Self: Perfect Is Boring

I have a confession.  I have already mentioned that I actually finished my manuscript for The Famous Mrs. Darcy and was in the editorial process before I gave it up as a lost cause.  The truth is, I didn't give up because my writing was terrible, or even that my plot had grown so complex that I had no idea how to work myself out of it.  My brother/editor maintained that the reader may very well throw up their hands in disgust because it got so confusing, but not even that was enough to murder The Famous Mrs. Darcy.

The killing blow came as I penned the last compelling, heart-rending chapter and I  realized that anyone looking for a sequel to Pride and Prejudice would absolutely HATE this book.  My Mr. Darcy had demons and passions and deep and treacherous crevasses in his soul.  He battled to retain his sense of self.  He had developed evolved to such a degree that he had become unrecognizable.

Plagued with jealousy, torn loyalties and problems without solutions, my Mr. Darcy turned to alcohol.  The greater the stressors of honor and duty, the more intense the conflict between loyalties, the more volatile became his temper.  My Elizabeth threatened to become a cipher in his shadow.  She suffered indignities and made certain choices that would cause Jane Austen to turn over in her grave. My detractors would be screaming "anachronisms" and "social consequences" even louder than myself.

Note to Self: Face the Consequences

"The good ended happily and the bad ended unhappily. That is what fiction means." —Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

It happened like this:  my current work in progress, My Father's Son, has a strong backdrop of true history, but I'm not certain if it can be classified as historical fiction.  I haven't taken a real person and true circumstances and humanized them out of the history books as did MM Bennetts in Of Honest Fame, or, created characters to orbit around historical figures as in Georgette Heyer's An Infamous Army.

Rather, I've come up with my own cast of characters caught up in sometimes fictional events (a brigade of black-ops attempting to broker a treaty with French Royalists), but real events in others (the Vienna conference, Napoleon's 100 days, the battle of Waterloo).  They stumble over, evade or work with Fouche, Talleyrand, Metternich, Castlereagh and Wellington.  Does that still qualify as historical fiction?  Or, would it be more accurate to call it historical romance?

And, then there's this whole other genre that I've been hearing more and more about:  Regency romance—"Regency" referring to the era when the Prince of Wales ruled in the stead of Mad King George, his father, from 1811 to 1820.  My series of stories centers in England, begins in 1809 and stretches out from there.  Would it be accurate to classify My Father's Son as a Regency romance?  Danged if I know.

Note to Self: It's the Story, Stupid!

Recently I've been asking myself this vital question:  am I a writer? or a storyteller?  I think the answer at this point is writer.  I want to be a storyteller.  But primarily, I want to be both.  Not all authors are.

One of my favorite adaptations of
Dickens' Oliver Twist

Let's face it.  Some of the best storytellers in the English language were deplorable writers.  Charles Dickens could not structure a sentence properly to save his life.  As an editor, I writhe in agony reading his grammar. I marvel that he got away with structuring his story arcs as he did, writing for periodicals notwithstanding.  But, as a storyteller, he was second to none.  He knew how to captivate, to compel, to reach into a person's gut, grab hold and twist—and leave them begging for more.

Now, That's Poetry

Hey! yo! It's really not funny yo
That our favorite heroines who had such gumption
Most likely would have died from consumption.
Hey! yo! It's really not funny yo
That us ladies would rather lose our hair
Than miss watching a show about class warfare. 

Thanks, Pretty Darn Funny videos.

—A Chaotic Mind

Tidbits: Francesca's Garden

Here's a bit of The Famous Mrs. Darcy that will never make it into print.  Still, it's worthy of a Tidbit.

[Location:  Longbourn garden---a joyous celebration for Jane & Bingley within; time:  evening after Elizabeth accepts Mr. Darcy's proposal; setup:  Elizabeth's pre-Pride & Prejudice history includes—among other things—a physical assault by a spurned suitor from which she was narrowly rescued from a terrible fate by a mysterious stranger, with his best mate hard on his heels.  The incident was the talk of Meryton.]

Francesca's Garden

by Penny Freeman

              Behind the house at Longbourn, behind the carefully groomed lawns and gardens meticulously planted to reflect its tasteful fashion, marshaled into order for inspection by the neighbors, behind a long and tall stone wall and through a little arched door which guarded the breach, tucked neatly out of sight where it could bring no shame to its betters, a small patch of dirt had been given over to the whims of little girls. To mark the distinction, because it was so marked and so distinct, they called it Francesca’s Garden.
              Had any outsider been allowed to frequent that garden (which rarely happened), initiated to the secrets beyond that curious door, if they were familiar with the Hermitage, a quaint little cottage on the grounds of a local abbey, they would suppose that the Bennets copied their more prosperous kin. They would have been mistaken, for it was entirely the opposite. The Mastersons, especially the gardeners of Oakhaven, knew that such as Francesca’s Garden grew from within. Anything else, no matter the grandeur of the scale, was simply a monkey aping the actions of a man.
              Once, when Elizabeth was just a girl and still unafraid of approaching her mother, she asked her why they called it Francesca’s Garden. Her mother’s eyes turned soft and sad. She attacked the soil beneath her spade until she had dug up enough courage, then leaned back on her haunches and looked to her daughter, her eyes shimmering with tears. When Elizabeth considered her mother’s timeless beauty, she thought of that day in the garden as she knelt in the dirt surrounded by a riot of blooms.
              Her mother told her that her father used to call her as much once, her name in a tongue strange and foreign. They had been young, before the hardships and disappointments of his life had ground all the romance out of him. But that was long ago. Before she broke his heart.

Note To Self: Ambiance, Ambivalence or Ambush?

"My dear fellow, there are in fact only so many notes the ear can hear in the course of an evening."  Emperor Joseph to Mozart in Amadeus (Orion Pictures 1984)

The same can be said of words.

While this particular post is part of the "Lessons Robert Jordan Taught Me" series, my reading of the Wheel of Time has primarily reinforced what I've already learned on my own: sometimes, there is just too much information.

I first started writing The Famous Mrs. Darcy out of sheer boredom.  The problem was, I didn't really have a plot in my head, so I decided I would make up for Miss Austen's lack of contemporary detail and historicity.  I would make my story about the difficulty Lizzie had adjusting to her new life and Mr. Darcy's unyielding family and fill up my tome with lots of luscious locales, grand palaces and fancy clothes beautifully illustrated in a vivid pallet of words.  The end result was a disaster.  The atmosphere was so thick, you had to use a machete to hack your way through it.

Novel Sequels: the possibilities are endless

Jane the Negligent.

Writing a sequel is a pretty simple business.  Your characters are all set up for you.  The conflicts, the impediments, the wild tangents, red herrings, and extraneous characters are all there.  One need but follow the path that is already laid out for them.  It is also rather important to stick to that path lest you lose your way altogether.  Writing a collateral sequel (or whatever they call telling the same story from a different character's point of view) is much the same.  When you decide to do such a thing, you have found another character at least equally if not more intriguing than your original protagonist.

Both endeavors are also expressions of dissatisfaction.  "Oh!  I love that book!  I think I'll write a sequel," isn't really accurate.  You love the characters, you love the plot line or the situation or the environment or society.  You love all those things, but you believe the author fell a bit short in the treatment of it.  You'll just tweak it a bit.

I am a pathologic malcontent when it comes to reading.  Nine times out of ten, a book finishes before I do.  I have been known to stay up the entire night reading, or losing an entire day immersed in some kinder, gentler, more civilized place (or, at the very least, more romantic).  I devour books that interest me like a starving man at a smorgasbord.  Then, I delve into the what-ifs and if-onlys scattered about in the debris.

Laura the Prolific

I believe since I was old enough to read more than Dick and Jane (which was pretty early), I have lulled myself to sleep at night continuing stories that ended too soon.  Little House In the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder was probably one of the first and only partially sated my thirst.  I thought she stopped just when things really got interesting.  Laura, by the way, published her first novel at the age of 65.  There is hope for me yet!

Altered state of consciousness

“A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.”     —W. H. Auden

“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.”    —Neil Gaiman

When I was writing a sequel, I knew who my characters were.  At the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, the wonderful Mr. D. is reserved, silent, and rather contemptuous of his surroundings and the people in it.  A pretty easy write-up.  All he has to do is stand around looking hunkilicious and disdainful, and shoot off a few zingers at our heroine once in a while.  And, since I was writing pretty much from her perspective, I really didn't have to do that much to change it.  (Which actor did delicious and daunting best on the screen is a topic for another day).

Even though I was writing a prequel as much as a sequel, it was pretty simple.  Little Miss Put-Upon went through her trials year after year after year, and the white knight popped in on occasion to ruffle her feathers by being the man of mystery who refused any intimate acquaintance.  He gets a few of his own scenes, but they are only snapshots, as opposed to Miss PU's live satellite feed.  Then, voila!  The next time he appears, he's all soft and gooey, giving into his lustier more tender inclinations and marrying her.  The biggest problem I had was keeping on the path.  The more I wrote, the less the love birds resembled Jane Austen's characters and became more my own.

Before I decided to abandon the sequel idea altogether, I had brought the first novel to submission stage.  The one-edit run-through I began with my brother did the dastardly deed, it died an ignominious death, and the manuscript was declared dead in the water.

There is no new thing under the sun

Didn't Shakespeare pen that?  Isn't there something somewhere in one of his plays that he uses that phrase?  I mean, after all, as Jane Austen says in Mansfield Park,

 Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. . . . His celebrated passages are quoted by everybody; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions . . .

Well, if the Bard did use it, he borrowed it from Ecclesiastes 1:9, which was penned at least a couple of thousand years before his time.  Thus, my argument that there is no such thing as original thought.


The ultimate proof of my claim: 



This is a very, very funny comedy bit about how Pachelbel's Cannon in D has permeated modern music.