Solsbury Hill by Susan M. Wyler
My rating: 2/5 cats
let’s call this a 2.5.
i really wanted to love this book, and it definitely has an audience, but it didn’t work for my particular tastes.
this is like a romance novel version of Wuthering Heights. which is not a pejorative statement, but one of classification. the core of this book is a woman finding love, and coming to terms with herself and what she wants out of a relationship. it isn’t deeply psychological, and while there is a central conflict to her relationship, as in any romance novel, it doesn’t have a great deal of narrative tension. it’s a frothy “retelling” of wh with some shaky writing, but as long as you read it in the spirit it is intended, you’ll probably enjoy it as a little piece of escapist fun. me, i feel wh in my bones, so i have certain expectations when reading a book marketed as a wh companion, and my standards are sky-high, so this one just didn’t do it for me.
wuthering heights is more than just a story of a woman torn between two men. living in an isolated region, in a time where women didn’t have many options for financial stability and social status except through birth or marriage, catherine’s decision to choose linton over heathcliff was never an emotional one. it was calculated in order to ensure stability both for herself, and in her position as linton’s wife, for heathcliff as well. marrying for love was a luxury she didn’t have. and she never actually did choose between the two. she manipulated the situation to her own best interests
but here, it’s not like that. and the roles of the two men are not the roles from wh – they are mixed up, like stephenie meyer did in Eclipse. there’s the childhood friend who has become her lover and then cheated on her, and a new man who is of the moors and should therefore be fulfilling the heathcliff role, but he is too “new” to become “her soul.” it’s just a regular love triangle, without all the gravity and emotional weight of the situation of wh. you can squint and see the wh in there, but it’s a much more shallow situation, although it definitely does veer into the melodrama, like wh.
so it’s not a real retelling, and i don’t think it is intended to be, not really, so you should probably ignore all the above blather. it’s more of a story inspired by wh, that uses the novel as a narrative prop while taking some real liberties with the facts of emily bronte’s life.
i did not cotton to the main character at all. in the very first scene, where she is in a cafe and takes off her ballet flats to put her bare feet on the seat, she lost me. and it’s totally unfair of me, i will grant you, but i hate both ballet flats and people who disregard the health code. i know that this is unreasonable, but it’s not just that. she catches her man in bed with another woman, goes home and breaks a ton of dishes, and then leaves the country, angry enough to not answer his calls and emails, but not angry enough to not fall into his arms when they eventually get in a room together again, refusing to talk about the situation and pretending that everything is fine. she’s over at someone’s house, pours herself a cup of tea, and then leaves two seconds later, with no provocation. wasteful! and why does a woman who takes cabs everywhere and wears chanel live in a six-floor walk-up? and if you live in a six-floor walk-up, your leg muscles are probably developed enough to not be much affected by walking the moors, no matter how wild and broad. and who packs that many fancy clothes to go tend to a dying aunt in the middle of nowhere? i know – i am being unreasonable. this is a romance novel, so it is supposed to be a fantasy, but i just got caught up in questioning the details, which soured the experience for me. i do not understand this woman.
there’s no tension in the book. eleanor goes around getting everything handed to her; nothing seems to touch her emotionally. yes, she breaks some dishes, but after that she just seems to coast. she isn’t shocked by the discovery of ghostliness, she is so instantly loved and accepted by everyone she encounters, she inherits a house and jewels and lands huge business deals without batting an eye, and she is incredibly slow to understand things that are telegraphed right at her. it’s just a little frustrating, but again – this is romance, this is fantasy, and i don’t read widely enough in the genre to just lose myself in the fantasy. those muscles are weak in me.
i read the arc, so i assume some of the shaky bits of writing still have an opportunity to be fixed – like how a character who is described as wearing a t-shirt could have her bare shoulders covered in the next paragraph. or how the journey from one place to another seems to have such flexible driving-time estimations. and the british expressions and sentence cadence of both eleanor and miles.
it’s not a disaster of a book or anything, it’s just something that would appeal to someone more able to lose themselves in a story, who has a romance reader’s fondness for the HEA. sadly, i am not that reader.
