The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish Allan Stratton 9781525236433 Books
Download As PDF : The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish Allan Stratton 9781525236433 Books
In Dirty Thirties London, Ontario, Mary Mabel McTavish resurrects a dead boy, becomes famous as "The Miracle Maid," and gets involved with William Randolph Hearst and the movie business in Hollywood.
The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish Allan Stratton 9781525236433 Books
Didn't enjoy this book. It was written like a vaudeville story - promoted as humorous, but it just didn't catch me at all.Product details
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The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish Allan Stratton 9781525236433 Books Reviews
'Rollicking" is a word often thrown around indiscriminately. Finally a new novel that earns the term. Stratton's authorial voice is individual, vibrant, and powerful in creating a comic and crazily satirical Canadian Tall Tale. Clever comic novels are pretty rare, and ones that not only amuse, or make you chuckle ironically, but actually surprise you into laughing out loud, are rarer still. I found myself laughing out loud over and over, making my wife wonder what the heck was going on.
Mary Mabel McTavish (channelling Jane Eyre at the beginning, Aimee Semple McPherson in the middle, and Marian the Librarian at the end) almost commits suicide, resurrects an impish boy, hooks up with a pair of scheming evangelists, befriends Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst, falls in love with a newspaper reporter who loves his Mum, escapes the clutches of a killer taxidermist, yet manages to hang on to her teenage purity and faith in her own dear dead mother. You have to read it to believe it. Who's the worst villain? Brewster? Floyd? Percy? Baroness Bentwhistle? Slick Skinner? This ripping yarn skitters from London (Ontario!) to Los Angeles so fast it will make your head spin. Stratton's word play is raucous, his sex scenes are lewd, and his characters' devious scams are as twisted as their motives. A must-read for Mother's Day.
Utterly intriguing and wholly frustrating by halves, my reaction to this book was also mixed, although I will give great kudos to Allan Stratton for the clever arguments against hypocrisy that he managed to pull off to great effect.
Unfortunately, the title character, Mary Mabel McTavish was not a character that I could even like only the fact that throwing electronics under a passing bus is harmful to the electronics kept me from bouncing my eReader all over the place when her peculiar brainless complacency got to be too frustrating. But, she was the one hiccup in an otherwise clever and engaging book, rife with humor, pointed satire and cleverly plotted schemes all unmasked to their agendas by the writing and twists used to move the story forward.
The early chapters of the story are slow and serve to set the background for the fast-paced character laden moments that come later. Mixing slapstick humor without turning it into a panto, adding a tinge of darkness and irony, and keeping a vulgar sense of honesty that imbues a sense of anger to the revelations of various behaviors rooted in hypocrisy that are unearthed, Stratton takes on media, religion, society and government the perfect setting for an overreach into conspiracy theory. Yet, what emerges is a smartly crafted, with the exception of the title character, the unwitting and often oblivious pawn to the machinations of those who seek control, power and influence.
As a fan of history, the story is set in the 1930’s – heyday of Hollywood and with the popularization of the radio, an era where media and news became available quickly to a large audience. Add in the struggles of the Great Depression, and people were desperate for quick cures, diversion and a possible chance to get away from their own issues. Not unlike the culture of fear created since the advent of 9-11, media and governmental manipulations of the population need a figurehead that is willing or complicit, to aid in spreading the message and achieving the goals of those behind the scenes. Getting to see the agenda behind the stories and manipulations was revealing and gives readers the opportunity to apply answers received in this book to events in current day.
I received an eArc copy of the title from the publisher via Edelweiss for purpose of honest review. I was not compensated for this review all conclusions are my own responsibility.
The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish is an odd sort of creature, rather like the result of some mad gene splicing experiment combining DNA from Nathaniel West, Carson, McCullers, and Horatio Alger. It is at once innocent and deeply cynical, a romance that litters the road to true love with all sorts of wreckage.
Mary Mabel, stuck with a drunken, uncaring father, and living at the finishing school at which he serves as handyman, is both unhappy and genuine dreaming of a different life, while seeing both the best and the worst in the world around her.
The characters in this novel are types most readers will recognize, but they’re painted with enough detail that at their best moments they transcend stereotype. Besides Mabel’s father and the woman who runs the school (and later poses as a titled gentry) we have a half-crazed, going on fully crazed revivalist preacher; a sanctimonious con man; a newspaper man who will do anything for a story, and who hides a a streak of decency beneath his opportunism. There’s also the ghost of Mary Mabel’s mother.
The story opens with a resurrection. Mary Mabel impulsively lays hands on and reanimates a boy struck by lightening during a revival held in a tent that was previously the site of an adultery-inspired double murder. And the story goes on from there complex, ridiculous, mocking.
At its best moments Mary Mabel is humorous and engaging, but at other times (those most West-like) it feels heavy-handed and deliberately provocative. The characters are never quite fleshed out enough to carry the weight of the narrative. Instead the author gets by keeping readers off balance and throwing one knuckle ball after another their way.
This isn’t a book to read when you’re hungering for a narrative you can get lost in, but when you’d like some narrative pyrotechnics you may find it amusing.
Didn't enjoy this book. It was written like a vaudeville story - promoted as humorous, but it just didn't catch me at all.
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