#The Memoirs of Jack Chelwood

[isfjmel-phleg]

Since you love Tenthragon, have you been able to get your hands on The Memoirs of Jack Chelwood? Now I want to read it but the printing was so limited I can't find it anywhere and don't know anyone's take on it but I know Savery considered it her best novel!

I did manage to get it through interlibrary loan about three years ago. There are about about ten libraries in the US that own it (not to mention five in the UK, one in Ireland, and one in New Zealand), but not all of them circulate it, and most of them do not typically loan for free, although that might depend on your library and where you are.

My comment on it at the time was "Savery apparently considered this one her best work. I would debate her on that if I could, but it’s certainly the lengthiest and most intricate of what I’ve read of hers." But honestly, I don't remember much about it and can't provide further details.

However, I've put in another ILL request and will give it a reread. Sometimes impressions change the second time around. I had read a lot of Savery around that time, which probably didn't give me adequate space to process the book.

[isfjmel-phleg]

June 2024 Books

I have been tired and unmotivated most of the month, so I ended up mostly rereading random things, including a lot of pretty light stuff.

The Sylvia Game by Vivien Alcock (reread)

Weird story that may not be Great Literature but continues to be Rebekah Bait.

The Lost Years of Merlin by T. A. Barron

Although the second half of the book didn't work for me as well as the first, I did especially appreciate Emrys/Merlin's relationship with his mother and his struggle with fearing his powers.

The Star That Always Stays by Anna Rose Johnson (reread)

The family relationships of this story are its greatest charm. Believable sibling dynamics, especially. The setting and the style and the general feel of a classic children's story are lovely, and the featuring of a protagonist in the 1910s who has Ojibwe ancestry is fresh and interesting. I found this book still enjoyable the second time around.

Thematically, though, I think there could have been some more nuance. At times, it seemed to veer into dealing with serious emotional concerns like struggling with major life changes beyond one's control by advising Just Stop Being So Negative And Choose Joy--a very simplified solution to a complex concern.

A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag by Gordon Korman (reread)

Another one of those early Korman books that make me wonder if he was familiar with Psmith--this story features both the impersonation of a terrible Canadian poet and the desire to avoid working in an uncle's fish business as a plot-driving motivation.

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic by Betty MacDonald (reread)

I did not grasp as a child how very, very 1950s these stories are!

Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery (reread)

I reread this one with the intention of analyzing its portrayal of emotional neglect, and that is indeed very much there, but I got a bit distracted by realizing that there's an argument for Anne's having ADHD. It would explain a lot of her behaviors. (Why didn't the recent adaptation take that route instead of the nonsense they opted for?)

Spineless by Samantha San Miguel (reread)

Heavier on the adventure than the historical fiction side of things, but good fun, with some nice characterization. There's a sequel coming out this fall that I'm planning to read.

Magic in My Shoes by Constance Savery (reread)

Very light compared to many of Savery's other books, but also very rereadable.

The Memoirs of Jack Chelwood by Constance Savery (reread)

I already talked about this here.

The Reb and the Redcoats by Constance Savery (reread)

I have nothing intelligent to say about this one, but it's always a pleasure to reread.

Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster (reread)

The protagonist's engaging voice makes the letters fun to read, but this time I was deeply weirded out by the romance. She's being groomed by an older man who has financial power over her and whom she views in a parental/guardian-like role, he's pulling all the strings and controlling aspects of her life that are none of his business and keeping her dependent on him, and his in-person interactions with her can be unpleasant also. By the end, I was more worried than happy for her. I think the set-up of "correspondent turns out to be someone you've met in real life and leads to falling in love" can be done in a way that's sincerely romantic (more in the vein of The Shop Around the Corner or You've Got Mail), but this particular version of that plot has not aged well.

When Patty Went to College by Jean Webster (reread)

...so as a refresher I reread this one, which features a lively heroine's escapades at college without a creepy romantic relationship.

The White Feather by P. G. Wodehouse (reread)

See the essay here.

Comics

The Ray 1992 and 1994 (reread)

For the sake of analysis for posts this month. This is the one time of year that DC acknowledges that their current version of Ray (who is practically a different character from the 90s version and exists in a completely different continuity) exists, and that version is rather one-note, so I wanted, at least for my own amusement, to delve into the original version of the character, who is rather multi-faceted.

Wayne Family Adventures Vol. 4 (reread)

I read these as they were released, but I own a print copy now.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor Vol. 1-2

A gift from my brother! This was my first experience with DW in comic form, and it was fun. I appreciated the presence of a companion who is a library assistant (not a librarian! there's a difference! and don't I know it).

The Flash Vol. 9: Full Stop

I picked this up at a library book sale quite a while ago when I was still able to go to those :/ This is post-Flashpoint stuff, I think? and I'm very post-Crisis in my leanings, so it was confusing for me without full context.

Superboy Book One: Trouble in Paradise (reread)

This is the only collection of Kon's solo, covering #1-10 and #0. It begins with Knockout and ends with him and Tana starting to officially date. I've read these issues before multiple times, but they will never not be worrying.

Batman: Under the Red Hood: The Deluxe Edition (partial reread)

All the feels. Can I please erase from my brain what happens between Jason and Talia though.

[isfjmel-phleg]

I am rereading Constance Savery's The Memoirs of Jack Chelwood in order to properly respond to someone who asked about it a while back, and I am...utterly baffled as to why Savery considered this her best book.

[isfjmel-phleg]

@healerqueen replied to your post: reblog and put in the tags one fictional character...

@isfjmel-phleg Did you just mention Constance Savery?? I can hardly believe it! I've met so few people who have even heard of her. She is my FAVORITE. Right behind Tolkien and Lewis at the very top. I had NEVER even heard the title of that one. I mostly read her family stories, but even those are so hard to find. Which of hers have you read?

Savery is a favorite of mine too! I’m also on Goodreads and thought I recognized your icon here as the same as that of a reviewer of many of Savery’s books there. 

This website has a lot of useful information about all Savery’s books, etc. including the more obscure ones.

I’ve read (thanks to interlibrary loan, including having to get a couple from the Library of Congress!)

Dark House on the Moss

Emeralds for the King

Enemy Brothers

The Good Ship “Red Lily”

Magic in My Shoes

The Memoirs of Jack Chelwood

Moonshine in Candle Street

Pippin’s House

The Reb and the Redcoats

Redhead at School

Tenthragon / Forbidden Doors

Welcome, Santza

Young Elizabeth Green

@healerqueen replied to your post: Book stack theme: Colors?

Excuse me, I'm having an emotion seeing The Reb and the Redcoats in a stack of someone I did not know liked Constance Savery (until a few minutes ago). MY FAVORITE. One of the biggest books that describes who I am.

The Reb and the Redcoats is so good! Definitely one of Savery’s best.

@healerqueen replied to your post: Title themes: royalty, because I had a lot of...

If the book is the book inside, it's fine. With out of print gems, you gotta take what you can get. Very impressed you found it at all. I didn't like that one enough to NEED to own it, but others...I do and I can't and it's sad. (Still so glad to find you're a Savery fan!)

Most of the Savery books I own were fortunate Ebay finds. I have a saved search for Constance Savery books there and keep an eye out for anything affordable that comes up. Bookfinder is also a useful place to search for any available copies of a given book across various online book vendors, if you’re ever looking.

@healerqueen replied to your post: Book stack themes: siblings?

The Melendys forever!! And most of all ENEMY BROTHERS! You have a first edition! That was my favorite book from the time I read it when I was 10, and it always has been. I think only LOTR and Narnia are above that one, and maybe it's tied with Eagle of the Ninth.

Enemy Brothers is tied for my favorite of Savery’s books. The characters and relationships and the redemption arc are all amazing.

The reissued edition has some (minor) differences in the text from that of the first edition. More about that here.

@healerqueen replied to your post: Title stack theme: "Persons Who Shall Remain...

Thank you! So do you! And our taste overlaps a bit. :) Oh my goodness!! I didn't check my notifications till now, after logging out for a week and then checking my feed first. I did NOT notice Enemy Brothers in the middle! It was camouflaged, and I was looking at the horizontal books.

How did you know that Enemy Brothers is my favorite historical novel of all?? It has been hugely influential in my life and remained in my top three or four favorite authors. I started seeing Savery in your bookstacks today, but I didn't realize I had a chance to see it last time, in this post! I'm amazed that you knew I'd read it, without being told. I'd love to hear more about which Savery books you like and why.

My other favorite, besides Enemy Brothers, is Tenthragon (the revised US edition of the book published in the UK as Forbidden Doors). This is one of Savery’s earliest books, and unusual for her in that it is a book for adults, although the protagonist is a seven-year-old child.

It has a fantastically Gothic premise: an apparently orphaned boy goes to live with his mysterious guardian (an adult cousin) in a large, creepy house with locked doors that connect to an adjoining house. The boy is forbidden to open the doors and comes to imagine that a dragon lives on the other side. Although his cousin is kind (though a bit distant) to him, he’s also nebulously afraid of him and terrified to disobey. But one day he mistakenly knocks on the door of the wrong house, and then his troubles really begin...

Without spoiling anything, this is a story about family relationships, revenge, and forgiveness, and I first devoured it in less than twenty-four hours, on edge the whole time. It does have a very tense, suspenseful tone throughout. The child protagonist seems to have clinical anxiety (for understandable reasons), and Savery’s depictions of the psychological terrors he suffers can be painful. There are themes of physical and emotional/psychological child abuse that are pretty intense too. But Savery’s Christian themes shine through, subtle but clearly present, and there’s a very satisfying redemption arc, although the ending is a bit ambiguous. A conflict between two brothers with wildly differing priorities and mindsets is central, somewhat reminiscent of Dym and Tony’s conflict (minus the political ideology angle, obviously). And the characters are fantastically complex.

It’s very difficult to find, but you might be able to get it through interlibrary loan. There are a few libraries in the US that own it that lend for free. 

[isfjmel-phleg]

Tagged by @thebirdandhersong and @teabooksandsweets. Thank you!

Rules: tag 9 people you want to catch up with or get to know better!

fav colour: Burgundy

last song: “Wonderful, Wonderful Day” from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

currently reading: The Memoirs of Jack Chelwood by Constance Savery. Unpublished in her lifetime and written presumably for an adult audience (unusually for her), although a child is of course very much at the heart of it. The plot’s complex and rather sensational but I’m eager to find out how it ends.

currently watching: Nothing’s changed since last time. The Chosen (as new episodes are released), The Masked Singer, and some occasional Psych.

last movie: The Secret Garden (1993). I’m making a weekend of rewatching the various adaptations.

sweet/spicy/savory: Sweet and savory, depending on the occasion.

currently craving: Nothing, I’ve already had lunch.

tea/coffee: Nether.

[isfjmel-phleg]

Okay, @thelonelybrilliance, I have reread The Memoirs of Jack Chelwood! There is a university library that owns it that was willing to interlibrary loan it to us for free, so if you have access to interlibrary loan, you might be able to obtain it too if you're interested in reading it for yourself. (If you do make an ILL request, maybe wait a little to allow time for the copy I'm about to mail back to return.)

The book is not typical of Savery's work. It features an adult protagonist and a romance, and it is told in first-person in the style of the eighteenth century. The prose is noticeably more dense than in her other works, and there is more emphasis on narration than dialogue. The protagonist, Jack Chelwood, is recounting his life as a young man, starting with his preventing a seven-year-old orphan boy from being executed for a crime he got roped into. This act results in entanglements with the powerful, ruthless family of the governor of a group of islands in the West Indies (I think?), and Jack finds himself kidnapped and brought to the islands where he is held prisoner under a false name for a long time. The plot is quite intricate, with an emphasis on Jack's adventures while a prisoner and on the machinations unfolding around him, and the final quarter or so of the book is concerned with people explaining to Jack everything that has been going behind the scenes--he is quite an out-of-the-loop narrator!

And now for the subjective part of the review...

I honestly have no idea why Savery considered this her best book. It is certainly the most complex in terms of plot. It's clear that she put a lot of work into believably capturing the diction of the eighteenth century. But I personally found that it has less of what makes Savery's books so enjoyable to me.

The dense prose is less accessible. I've found other Savery books to be page-turners, but this one, especially as it progressed, was difficult for me to focus my mind on (and I ended up skimming after a while). The ratio of narration to dialogue is not as well-balanced as in other Savery works, so there's a lot of walls of text from the narrator. And typically I can handle that sort of thing--I've read a lot of nineteenth-century British literature--but for whatever reason, I really struggled here.

The resonant themes are less present, or perhaps are so subtle that I barely noticed. Enemy Brothers is about reevaluating an upbringing in a toxic worldview, choosing to follow a better path even when everything one has ever been taught says otherwise, and the forgiving and self-sacrificial bonds of family. Tenthragon is about the destructive effects of childhood abuse and neglect, the emptiness of devoting oneself to revenge, and breaking the cycle of abuse. The Reb and the Redcoats tastefully addresses relationships between characters on opposite sides of a war, how they find in each other shared humanity and connection while remaining loyal to their different causes. Etc. But I'm really less sure what The Memoirs of Jack Chelwood deals with. Complex family dynamics are present. There are some very evil characters persecuting a protagonist who is a moral and conscientious person, but he ultimately survives and is rewarded with marriage and a good, stable life. At least one person has a change of heart by the end. I am less certain what Savery is saying here; I'm not saying it isn't there--it is very likely that this book was just over my head--but I personally came out of the reading experience more overwhelmed by the convoluted plot than thoughtful about the themes.

And the cast of the characters were harder for me personally to connect with. I liked Kit Vardon, the boy whom Jack rescued from execution. In any other Savery novel, he would have been the protagonist, and I was curious what the story would have been like from his POV. I would have liked to have seen more emphasis on the relationship between him and Jack, since it is in such relationships that Savery tells some of her best stories. But Jack and Kit are often separated, so there's less development of that and other relationships. Jack is frequently separated from anyone close to him, so there was a sense of isolation throughout that left me less attached to Jack's attachments. He is in love with a girl (whom he meets when she is twelve and he is a young adult, and when she's about six years older he views her as a love interest--I personally am not a big fan of this type of romance in fiction), but they don't really have a lot of time to bond, so it was harder for me to get invested. There were some very dislikeable villains, more than is typical for Savery, who tends to see the humanity even in her antagonists, and even Jack's family is harder to appreciate--particularly his rather despicable sister. Of course we're seeing everyone through Jack's lens, which allows for the character's own bias to affect how he portrays the people in his life. But I felt that that left less room for the further complexity that Savery's typical POV choices enable, so the cast seemed a bit flatter to me.

I am not saying that this is an ineffective or poorly-written book. There's nothing necessarily wrong with it. What I am saying is that I found that what draws me to Savery's work seems less present in this one, that what she handles so deftly in other works is less on display here. This is merely a reflection of my personal tastes. Someone else might find, say, the adventure aspects riveting and the machinations of the plot intriguing, and they would be correct. But for me, this is the least accessible of the Savery books that I have read.

Since you love Tenthragon, have you been able to get your hands on The Memoirs of Jack Chelwood? Now I want to read it but the printing was so limited I can't find it anywhere and don't know anyone's take on it but I know Savery considered it her best novel!

I did manage to get it through interlibrary loan about three years ago. There are about about ten libraries in the US that own it (not to mention five in the UK, one in Ireland, and one in New Zealand), but not all of them circulate it, and most of them do not typically loan for free, although that might depend on your library and where you are.

My comment on it at the time was "Savery apparently considered this one her best work. I would debate her on that if I could, but it’s certainly the lengthiest and most intricate of what I’ve read of hers." But honestly, I don't remember much about it and can't provide further details.

However, I've put in another ILL request and will give it a reread. Sometimes impressions change the second time around. I had read a lot of Savery around that time, which probably didn't give me adequate space to process the book.