Laura Blundy

Rating:
Summary: Crime of Passion in Dickensian London
Review: After reading Thomas Mann's 'The Magic Mountain' it was a relief to get back to a book with a little action and pace to it. The book is about a woman in Victorian London (here's a bit of backstory: Laura is born into a well-off family, L's father has debts, L's father dies, L is on the streets looking after children while the mothers work, L falls under a carriage, L has her leg amputated, L marries her surgeon -- so far, so like most kinked romance novels). Unfortunately, L then falls for a navvie building the new sewer system in London and decides that the best course of action is to kill her surgeon husband by battering him about the head with a poker. This is where we come into the book. The tale is told well -- Myerson has a gift for the grotesque and the sense of squalor and misery abut to finery and wealth. The plot unfolds in a cut-up series of flashbacks where we can be put down in a new section anywhere in the last ten years of Laura's life. An older woman's lust for a young man is touchingly portrayed, as are Billy's feelings to Laura (although L's point of view is used throughout). On the whole, a good read, although not one for the squeamish.

Rating:
Summary: 3 years later, this story still haunts me
Review: I feel obliged to write a review of this book, 3 years after reading it, because it made such a strong impression on me. Laura Blundy is a mysterious Victorian-era London woman in this novel that is part period piece, part psychological thriller. The language is beautiful, reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, and the narrator unreliable yet fascinating, both to her acquaintances and to me as the reader. As a period piece, the novel shows a city with extremes of wealth and poverty, and everyone does whatever they need to get by, trading what they can offer for what they need.

But the lasting strength of the novel lies in its masterful depiction of a narrator whom the reader comes to understand with much more clarity than Laura has toward herself. For a gripping read, this one can't be beat. I probably would have given it only four stars when I first finished it, but now I consider it a five-star novel due to the lingering reverberations and the many times I've thought of it since reading it.

Rating:
Summary: 3 years later, this story still haunts me
Review: I feel obliged to write a review of this book, 3 years after reading it, because it made such a strong impression on me. Laura Blundy is a mysterious Victorian-era London woman in this novel that is part period piece, part psychological thriller. The language is beautiful, reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, and the narrator unreliable yet fascinating, both to her acquaintances and to me as the reader. As a period piece, the novel shows a city with extremes of wealth and poverty, and everyone does whatever they need to get by, trading what they can offer for what they need.

But the lasting strength of the novel lies in its masterful depiction of a narrator whom the reader comes to understand with much more clarity than Laura has toward herself. For a gripping read, this one can't be beat. I probably would have given it only four stars when I first finished it, but now I consider it a five-star novel due to the lingering reverberations and the many times I've thought of it since reading it.

Rating:
Summary: A great book that is more than it seems
Review: In Victorian London, LAURA BLUNDY's merchant father owned a successful store that allowed Laura to live in a beautiful house, wear expensive clothing, and have a decent education. When Laura was fifteen, her father died. She quickly found out that he owed more than owned. When her aunt passed away, the Church inherited everything and Laura was unceremoniously dumped on the street. She became a nanny to the children of many hard working mothers.

While walking, a carriage runs over Laura's leg, leading to her hospitalization. Her surgeon Evan comes to care for his patient. However, in spite of his efforts to save her leg, Evan amputates the extremity. After the hospital discharges Laura, Evan begins taking her out and shows her a good time. They marry, but Laura fails to provide what Evan wants from her. She meets a street person and decides to leave Evan for him, but her spouse refuses to free her. Tragedy appears the only possible outcome.

LAURA BLUNDY is a surreal atmospheric historical story told in a non-sequential manner that adds to the foreboding feel of doom that haunts the plot. Readers have a rare opportunity to glimpse at the residents of the London slums during the reign of Victoria. In some ways, that look appears more dreadful than the frightening main story line because most novels have ignored the abject conditions preferring the aristocracy or rising middle class. Though nightmarish in many ways due to the lead character's ability to manipulate events and people, Julie Myerson has written a period piece that will please historical fiction fans with a dark Dickens twist.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: none
Review: Laura Blundy is an engrossing and engaging excursion into the dark side of total and haunting love; complete with gritty and an atmosphere that Dickens and Jack the Ripper comfortable in. A terrific and compelling, shocking and unforgettable. Gary S. Potter Author/Poet.

Rating:
Summary: MYERSON IN TOP FORM WEAVES A HAUNTING SPELL
Review: Set amidst the gritty poverty of Victorian London Laura Blundy is the mesmerizing exploration of a lost soul, a journal of obsessive love, and a harrowing tale that haunts.

The author of three critically acclaimed novels, most notably Me and the Fat Man (1998), Ms. Myerson has now created an otherworldly protagonist, an enigmatic woman capable of both nefarious acts and abiding devotion. It is appropriate that Laura Blundy's life, which is related in flashbacks, unfolds at a time when illness pervades; cholera takes its toll. London's city sewers are being built so that the city "will have a proper sewerage system and lives will be saved." Yet now the "normal stink of Thames," the dank sewer tunnels and the debris ridden river banks anchored by the Baptist Chapel with its forlorn, broken windows mirror Laura's murky thoughts, which are disseminated by Ms. Meyerson with candor and clarity.

Dickensian woes pale beside the travails of Laura Blundy; Dickensian villains are pussycats compared to her.

Once an educated daughter of privilege, her father's death and financial reversals have forced Laura onto the streets. She sleeps among the crawlers and dowsers on the steps of the workhouse with only a stained tarpaulin for shelter from the rain.

We learn that while imprisoned in Tatum Fields she was made to wear a thick foul smelling veil. When she protested that she could not see, the reply was, "There's nothing to see...This is it. This is the punishment - darkness and solitude - the best way to contemplate the errors of the soul."

She is 38 when we first meet her, "but my hair," she discloses is "mostly black and the teeth I had left still had their whiteness and though my waist measured a little more now than the curved gap of two men's hands, I still had a lot of my young girl's punch."

More than punch is needed when she is run down by an errant carriage, and "her woman's bones are crushed like eggshell" beneath the iron wheels. Ginger haired Dr. Ewan Lockhart anages to save her life, but not her leg which he amputates.

Eventually, Laura marries the surgeon, a "carrot-nob" as she calls him and goes to live in the home that he shares with his mother, Eve. The older woman is a harridan who makes no secret of her distaste for Laura, and demands attention from her top floor room by rattling "a tin of barley sugar."

But Laura pays no heed for her mind is consumed with thoughts of the child she bore when she was 15, earning a penny an hour making party streamers "whenever the work happened to come along." Unable to feed the baby she had taken him to an orphanage to which she returned each week, asking to see Child Z as he was known, until the day she was told he was no longer there. She pined, she yearned, she ached to find her lost boy.

"......the truth is you carry a child in you and it seeps into your bones," she says, "and infects you for ever and you spend the rest of your life trying to get it back...." She feels a similar addictive emotion for her lover, Billy, a married sewer worker some 17 years her junior. And, Billy, for reasons he cannot fathom is inexorably drawn to her.

Determined to be with Billy Laura commits a crime of unspeakable horror, which Ms. Myerson describes in grisly detail. However, this act is only prelude to an even more shocking denouement.

Laura Blundy is not a book for the faint of heart, but it is an unforgettable story propelled by currents of foreboding, and delivered with sinister, stunning panache. Ms. Myerson knows how to weave a spell and she weaves it mightily well.

Rating:
Summary: MYERSON IN TOP FORM WEAVES A HAUNTING SPELL
Review: Set amidst the gritty poverty of Victorian London Laura Blundy is the mesmerizing exploration of a lost soul, a journal of obsessive love, and a harrowing tale that haunts.

The author of three critically acclaimed novels, most notably Me and the Fat Man (1998), Ms. Myerson has now created an otherworldly protagonist, an enigmatic woman capable of both nefarious acts and abiding devotion. It is appropriate that Laura Blundy's life, which is related in flashbacks, unfolds at a time when illness pervades; cholera takes its toll. London's city sewers are being built so that the city "will have a proper sewerage system and lives will be saved." Yet now the "normal stink of Thames," the dank sewer tunnels and the debris ridden river banks anchored by the Baptist Chapel with its forlorn, broken windows mirror Laura's murky thoughts, which are disseminated by Ms. Meyerson with candor and clarity.

Dickensian woes pale beside the travails of Laura Blundy; Dickensian villains are pussycats compared to her.

Once an educated daughter of privilege, her father's death and financial reversals have forced Laura onto the streets. She sleeps among the crawlers and dowsers on the steps of the workhouse with only a stained tarpaulin for shelter from the rain.

We learn that while imprisoned in Tatum Fields she was made to wear a thick foul smelling veil. When she protested that she could not see, the reply was, "There's nothing to see...This is it. This is the punishment - darkness and solitude - the best way to contemplate the errors of the soul."

She is 38 when we first meet her, "but my hair," she discloses is "mostly black and the teeth I had left still had their whiteness and though my waist measured a little more now than the curved gap of two men's hands, I still had a lot of my young girl's punch."

More than punch is needed when she is run down by an errant carriage, and "her woman's bones are crushed like eggshell" beneath the iron wheels. Ginger haired Dr. Ewan Lockhart anages to save her life, but not her leg which he amputates.

Eventually, Laura marries the surgeon, a "carrot-nob" as she calls him and goes to live in the home that he shares with his mother, Eve. The older woman is a harridan who makes no secret of her distaste for Laura, and demands attention from her top floor room by rattling "a tin of barley sugar."

But Laura pays no heed for her mind is consumed with thoughts of the child she bore when she was 15, earning a penny an hour making party streamers "whenever the work happened to come along." Unable to feed the baby she had taken him to an orphanage to which she returned each week, asking to see Child Z as he was known, until the day she was told he was no longer there. She pined, she yearned, she ached to find her lost boy.

"......the truth is you carry a child in you and it seeps into your bones," she says, "and infects you for ever and you spend the rest of your life trying to get it back...." She feels a similar addictive emotion for her lover, Billy, a married sewer worker some 17 years her junior. And, Billy, for reasons he cannot fathom is inexorably drawn to her.

Determined to be with Billy Laura commits a crime of unspeakable horror, which Ms. Myerson describes in grisly detail. However, this act is only prelude to an even more shocking denouement.

Laura Blundy is not a book for the faint of heart, but it is an unforgettable story propelled by currents of foreboding, and delivered with sinister, stunning panache. Ms. Myerson knows how to weave a spell and she weaves it mightily well.