This is a small signed watercolour, of which I could find almost nothing in public documents. It is a bit a-typical for the other paintings that Waterhouse made in this period, but the subject, being a character in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”, could indeed have been painted by Waterhouse.
Touchstone was the jester (or joker) in the play. He fell in love with a peasant’s girl: Audrey and marries her, only to find out that she used him to get an entry to the court of his master. Another tragedy lies in the fact that people hold him for the fool that he is playing. The tragic clown was already a theme in Shakespearian times!
I didn’t want to read The Kitchen House. I loathed the idea of spending any time in a fictionalized world built around slavery and southern plantation living. But reader after reader praised the novel, so I downloaded the “preview” before splurging the $1.99 on a title I was determined not to like.
By the time I tore through the first few chapters, the limited time sale was over and the book was $11.99. I didn’t care. I bought it immediately so I wouldn’t have to stop.
The Kitchen House follows the story of Lavinia, an Irish immigrant suppressing a terrible past at the tender age of 7. Purchased by a Virginian plantation owner, she works and lives in the Kitchen House, the slave quarters that serves the “Big House.” With a name like Lavinia, I was concerned for her well-being from the get-go. (See Titus Andronicus; Season 2 of Downton Abbey). But Lavinia turns out to be plucky, curious and extremely loving.
Lavinia has a unique perspective as both an indentured servant to the Big House and as a white girl in the south. While the Kitchen House inhabitants become her family, the Big House tenants also have their eyes on her. And though she crosses many of the divides established as a result of slavery over her lifetime, in a way, she is the most isolated of all the characters. She doesn’t truly belong anywhere.
What’s interesting in my reluctance to read the book is that it directly mirrors Grissom’s reluctance to write it. While restoring a plantation tavern in Virginia, she happened upon a location in the plans called “Negro Hill.” It haunted her so much that one day journaling, a fictional story about its legacy poured onto her paper. Even Grissom herself was disturbed by the tale, but it, like the book’s heroine, was stubborn, and would not be altered.
The Kitchen House has heart smeared across every page. It’s laden with tears and tragedy, buoyed by stubborn determination and an inextinguishable need to survive. It hurts right below the sternum, like a punch to the gut that allows you to take bigger, fresher breaths.
The reluctant reader of a reluctant writer, it strikes me that perhaps the stories we avoid writing are the ones that most need to be written; and the stories we avoid reading may be the very ones we need to read the most.
“The most important places on a map are the places we haven’t been yet”
The story of two girls living eight hundred years apart—a modern-day Syrian refugee seeking safety and a medieval adventurer apprenticed to a legendary mapmaker.
It is the summer of 2011, and Nour has just lost her father to cancer. Her mother, a cartographer who creates unusual, hand-painted maps, decides to move Nour and her sisters from New York City back to Syria to be closer to their family. But the country Nour’s mother once knew is changing, and it isn’t long before protests and shelling threaten their quiet Homs neighborhood. When a shell destroys Nour’s house and almost takes her life, she and her family are forced to choose: stay and risk more violence or flee as refugees across seven countries of the Middle East and North Africa in search of safety. As their journey becomes more and more challenging, Nour’s idea of home becomes a dream she struggles to remember and a hope she cannot live without. More than eight hundred years earlier, Rawiya, sixteen and a widow’s daughter, knows she must do something to help her impoverished mother. Restless and longing to see the world, she leaves home to seek her fortune. Disguising herself as a boy named Rami, she becomes an apprentice to al-Idrisi, who has been commissioned by King Roger II of Sicily to create a map of the world. In his employ, Rawiya embarks on an epic journey across the Middle East and the north of Africa where she encounters ferocious mythical beasts, epic battles, and real historical figures.
This book. Oh my God. I don’t know how to write a review for this book where I am not just gushing about how much I loved it. It felt like this book was written for me. It beautifully married the genres of fantasy and historical fiction, and reminded me of the young Meher, who would just sit in one corner with a book and read it like nothing else mattered in the world.
Zeyn’s storytelling is beautiful, its lyrical, and it is magical. You really do get lost in his world, and he manages to tell the stories of Nour and Raiway in a way which does the characters and their journeys justice. They are so easy to fall in love with and to root for. I really felt that I was right there with them, feeling all the emotions they were feeling. I was scared for them, I cried with them, and I was smiling with them.
The pace is a bit slow, and I would say that you should read at least a couple of chapters to really get into it, to give it a fair chance, but once you are in, you are in. I don’t think it would have worked well at any other pace than what it was.
I do not want to give too much away in my review, because I want you to go in as I did, with some awareness of the setting and the plot, but then just let the magical storytelling carry you away.
Easiest 5 stars ⭐️ I could have given out this year.
I was thinking about the Abhorsen trilogy today, and then had the thought that Sabriel and Geralt would probably get along fairly well, what with their similar monster hunting occupations.
And of course Jaskier and Touchstone would totally bond over gushing about their mutual monster killing, magic wielding sword swingers.
(Geralt probably tries to take a swing at Mogget the first time though x)
