Michaela MacColl

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September 2011 Archive

Archives for September 2011

The Bookslut Gives Prisoners in the Palace Some Love!

September 21st, 2011, 10:06 pm

Colleen Mondor, Bookslut in Trainig, wrote this thoughtful review of Prisoners in the Palace!

Michaela MacColl carves out a delightful notch in historical fiction with her look at the surprising life of future Queen Victoria in Prisoners in the Palace: How Princess Victoria became Queen with the Help of Her Maid, a Reporter, and a Scoundrel. I never thought much about teenaged Victoria, assuming her life was similar to anyone else destined to rule and filled with many dull moments of pomp and circumstance, but as MacColl explains in her lengthy (and valuable) afterword, Victoria was not actually supposed to be queen, and when her destiny became more apparent due to deaths in the line of succession, her weak mother and the machinations of a man seeking to be the power behind the throne left her with a childhood that was miserable. MacColl tells the tale through a fictional character, Liza, who is forced to be a lady’s maid after the sudden deaths of her parents, instead of a debutante. With little knowledge of life “below the stairs” and a healthy amount of arrogance and righteous anger, Liza is the perfect foil for the frustrated Victoria and her retinue of servants (dedicated and not) and hangers-on (devious one and all). That there was a very real plot to wrest control of England going on in the background ups the stakes of what would otherwise still be a compelling read.

The plot for Prisoners is fairly straightforward: through family connections, Liza is able to apply for a job with Princess Victoria’s staff. She obtains the position largely because of her ability to speak more than one language and thus serve as a spy for the princess and those loyal to her (not including her mother). Stuck between the royal bedrooms above and the gossipy center of the house below, Liza is woman without a country in many respects and quickly decides to throw her loyalty in with those who side with the princess — on the hopes that when she becomes queen she will gain a reward and thus alleviate her severe financial position. Soon enough she is swept along by history, however, and while MacColl had plenty there to keep the narrative going, she expands the story to include a fascinating peek at the powerless lives of women during the mid-nineteenth century, a view that includes everyone from maids to royalty. (The portrayal of the sitting queen, Victoria’s aunt, is particularly heartbreaking.) While I am never interested in limiting a book’s audience to any one gender, I have to say that Prisoners will especially appeal to young women because it shows so effectively how much times have changed. While we all chafed under parental rules as teens, our complaints were nothing compared to what the women in this novel have to go through. The stark difference between opportunities for men and women is staggering, and while MacColl firmly keeps Prisoners of the Palace a book of household intrigue (and spying) with a sweet touch of romance, it was the social history that gave me pause. In many ways, this is a consciousness-raising read; the fact that it is does so in such a subtle manner just makes it that much more of a winner.

Categories: Blog, PRISONERS IN THE PALACE, Reviews

A Star, A Star!!!

September 19th, 2011, 6:26 pm

Every good review makes you feel great — but something about those stars makes me giddy!  Partly I think its because in a world with so many reviews (bloggers, Amazon, BN, Goodreads, etc), the reviews at the traditional journals carry a little more weight… gravitas if you will. By traditional, I mean Kirkus, Booklist, School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly and Horn Book.  And when one of these journals gives you a star, it means that not only did one reviewer really like it, but several other reviewers agreed. So you can imagine how delighted I was to see a starred Kirkus review for Promise the Night!

PROMISE THE NIGHT (reviewed on October 1, 2011)
MacColl’s second novel brings to life the childhood of future aviator and writer Beryl Markham (Prisoners in the Palace, 2010).
Born Beryl Clutterbuck, she moved with her family to the highlands of Kenya as a toddler. Not long after, her mother and brother returned to England, abandoning her with her rough though loving father. MacColl’s account begins when a leopard steals into Beryl’s hut and attacks her dog—the child leaping from her bed to give chase. Though she loses the leopard in the night, the next morning, she and her new friend, a Nandi boy, Kibii, find the dog still alive and save it. Later she insists on being part of the hunt for the leopard. Young Beryl wants nothing more than to be a warrior, a murani, and to be able to leap higher than her own head. Her jumping skills progress apace, but young white girls, no matter how determined, cannot become part of the Nandi tribe. Her relationship with Kibii’s father, the wise Arap Maina, along with a growing awareness of the consequences of her actions, help lead her into a more mature—though still wildly impulsive and daring—life. MacColl intersperses her third-person narrative with faux news reports and first-person diary entries of two decades later, when Beryl Markham became the first person—let alone woman—to fly a plane west from Europe to America.
Fluid prose elucidates a life much stranger than fiction. (Historical fiction. 9-12)

Categories: Blog, Reviews

And the review is in… Booklist likes Promise the Night

September 14th, 2011, 4:04 pm

I love my new novel, Promise the Night. Beryl is probably the character I’ve enjoyed writing about the most — she’s wonderful, exasperating and a thrill a minute.  But that doesn’t guarantee anyone else will like her!  The advance review copies have been out for a few months and I’ve been waiting, with that sick feeling you have when you think maybe you bombed the test or maybe you didn’t. for the first review.

It’s here -whew. It’s a good one. Thank you Booklist!

Promise the Night.
Maccoll, Michaela (Author)
Nov 2011. 264 p. Chronicle, hardcover, $16.99. (9780811876254).
In Beryl’s view, she should have been born to the Nandi tribe in east Africa, preferably as a boy. Nothing infuriates the headstrong, fearless youngster more than rules of ladylike decorum, a tame housebound existence, and the cruel, racist attitudes of British colonials toward Africans. In this fictionalized account of British aviator Beryl Markham’s childhood, the heroine runs with African children, even to the point of going on a lion hunt; exasperates her horse-trainer father; and crashes up against nearly every convention in the narrowly constrained world of colonial Kenya in the 1910s. Maccoll vividly portrays her headstrong protagonist, abandoned early by her mother and left to thrive as she could on her father’s ranch, with fierce, exuberant spirit. Interspersed between the chapters are documents (also fictionalized, but based on fact) pertaining to Beryl’s later career as a famous female aviator and her harrowing east-to-west crossing of the Atlantic in 1936. Readers who choose to interrupt the story and read the history will find the same spirit there.
— Anne O’Malley

Categories: Blog, Reviews

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