Skip to main content

My Review of "The Tea Planter's Wife"

Dinah Jefferies' The Tea Planter's Wife is a fun novel that vividly depicts the 1920s.  Gwendolyn Hooper, her 19-year-old heroine, speaks for an empire-branded breed of gutsy young British women who left the security of England to embark on extraordinary adventures abroad.  Not the back-packing, "lonely planet" travels of today, gap-year kids constantly connected with the folks back home via internet and smartphones, and usually safely and predictably back home for good inside a year.  Girls like Gwen married men who made their living and fortunes out in the colonies -- or what until very recently had been colonies -- and went out to join them, standing shoulder-to shoulder with their husbands to face down hardship, danger, disease, monsoon, drought, and not least the simmering and sometimes murderous resentment of locals.

That makes The Tea Planter's Wife so much more than a love story -- it's a recognition that girls like Gwen had guts, and commitment, and a willingness to take risks.  They were deeply impressive.

And Jefferies' telling of Gwen's story is an impressive novel that you won't want to put down.

I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.

Comments

  1. llenadebellezaSeptember 24, 2016 at 12:24 PM

    I'm glad to hear that you liked this book, it encourages me even more to purchase it;)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Review of "Come as You Aren't"

Come as You Aren't: A Role-Playing Game for Adventurous Couples is a simple role-playing kit for couples who want to explore and experiment in ways to seduce one another that they simply wouldn't have imagined otherwise.  The set is meant to offer one partner who draws a Who, a What, and a Where card at random and places them in an envelope for the other partner.  From there, it's up to them to enact the scenarios as they see fit. The instructions are printed on the back cover of the box and the deck comes with a few blank cards for couples to customize. This is a fun little gift for couples -- and just in time for the holidays. I received a free copy of this game from the Blogging for Books review program in exchange for my honest review here.
Post a Comment
Read more

My Review of "Inside the Criminal Mind"

Samenow's Inside the Criminal Mind is an odd book to review.  Samenow, a research psychologist, says criminal behavior is 100% voluntary.  It is a product of disordered thought patterns that are almost entirely congenital.  Poverty doesn't cause crime, Samenow claims.  Nor do bad parenting, peer pressure, drug use, or any of the other "standard excuses".  Some kids are born anti-authoritarian thrill seekers and will remain so pretty much no matter what.  The only hope is to get criminals to intensively examine their thought patterns, and change them through sheer force of will. Originally written in 1984, I have to wonder:  Is this book merely a product of its time?  That is, does it represent the best of the cultural thinking that went into personal responsibility and individualism that was so rampant in America in the mid-1980s? Because, let's be honest:  Inside the Criminal Mind has a glaring problem.  To quote another 19...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Review of "The Heist"

Chris Durso's The Heist: How Grace Robs Us of Our Shame is an amazing book! Sin, as Durso is right to insist, can only be understood in the light of grace.  We cannot know our sin until we know God's grace.  And that grace is known as it overcome and vanquishes our sin.  For Durso, our shame and our brokenness rob us of the life God, in Christ, makes for us.  And, like the Prodigal Sons, God's grace can only be made known because God has come to us in our own squalor and gifted us with more, so much more, than anything of which sin has robbed us. This is the great "heist" of the Gospel -- that God in Christ takes back what the Enemy has stolen. This is a book that easily change melt even the hardest heart, because it places the emphasis where the Gospel places that emphas is -- on God's love. I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.
Post a Comment
Read more