The Giver of Stars - Jojo Moyes

[watervole]

 This is a gentle, but very well-written historical romance.

 

Moyes has a really subtle writing trick that's hard to analyse.  When introducing the love interest, there are no major heart palpitations, no 'he was so gorgeous, he took my breath away', etc. but you still know that this is the person the protagonist will eventually fall in love with.

 

It's very skilful, and I prefer it to the school of "he's really hot, but I hate him".

 

There's also some really great historical stuff.  I thought at first that the author had invented the packhorse library, with women on horseback delivering books to remote, rural areas during America's great Depression, but it really did happen, and it fits brilliantly well into this novel. (See https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/horse-riding-librarians-were-great-depression-bookmobiles-180963786/ for both history and photos)

 

The only thing I didn't like was the use of the 'non-consummated marriage trope'.  I know it's the only clean way for writers to get a character out of a marriage, but annulments were incredibly rare in reality and very difficult to obtain.

 

Overall, it's a book I can happily recommend, both for the quality of the writing and the interesting historical setting.

Comments

[eledonecirrhosa]

Agree wholeheartedly. A friend recommended this to me and it is lovely. Must investigate more of Moyes' books.

I utterly loathe the "he's really hot, but I hate him" trope. Especially in rom-coms where you have to suffer an hour and a half of two people screaming insults at each other, then the woman has a radical personality change between scenes, and we stampede to Happily Every After. WTF?

I like to imagine there's a deleted scene where the woman is replaced by a Stepford Wife. :-)

[igenlode]

In America as in England, it looks as if annulment on the grounds of non-consummation required evidence of *physical incapacity*, not merely of failure to take the opportunity: https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1261&context=faculty_scholarship (p15: B. On What Grounds? 4. Physical & Mental Incapacity. 'Despite doing "all that woman could do to assist him," they were never able to consummate their marriage' -- the wife had to testify on the state of her husband's private parts before receiving the annulment!)
It's a favourite romantic-novel trope that is used to provide a convenient get-out without reflecting historical reality.
(It also sounds as if divorces were historically relatively easy to get in America, which makes the trope even lazier :( )

[watervole]

That's a very interesting article.

"Annulment was possible in case of any of six "defects": bigamy, physical incapacity, mental incompetence, infancy/lack of parental consent, fraud or force."

(That's a quote for California, but I'll assume it's fairly typical.)
Non-consummation isn't even on the list, and annulments were pretty rare anyway as divorce became easier to obtain.

[watervole]

I suspect the frequency of annulments in romantic fiction is the desire for the woman to still be a virgin for her eventual 'true love'.

Me, I prefer something I can believe in.

[igenlode]

Apparently -- and I wasn't aware of this until I started checking to see how the American annulment situation differed from the English one -- there is a whole trope in romance novels known as the Virgin Widow, where the heroine is conveniently available and yet untouched, either because her husband was a doddery old man or (in modern fiction) because he was a secret homosexual...

[watervole]

Yep, I think I've come across that one...

[igenlode]

As I understood it, non-consummation *is* what was meant by the term 'physical incapacity' in this context -- that is, you had to prove that you were physically incapable of consummating the marriage despite having made reasonable attempts to do so.

(That's a quote for California, but I'll assume it's fairly typical.)

I'm not sure one can rely on things like annulment/divorce laws being at all consistent across US state boundaries, to be fair -- 1920s Hollywood had people 'going to Reno' all the time for a quickie divorce because the rules there were notoriously more lenient. It was pretty much the reverse equivalent of Gretna Green :-D

[watervole]

But there's a big difference for a guy between saying "we never consummated the marriage" and "I couldn't get it up"

I think most men would refuse to admit that.

[igenlode]

Yes -- which is why the use of the trope as an 'easy out' in historical fiction is unrealistic at best. I mean, you *could* have the husband being all noble and self-sacrificing for the sake of his wife's future happiness (just as English husbands in the 1930s were expected by convention to produce hotel bills and chambermaids to demonstrate that they had committed adultery with a 'hired nobody' in order to set their wives free, rather than suing their wife's lover for 'crim.con.' -- the disgrace was much greater for a woman than for a man, so it was up to the man to provide suitable evidence so that his wife could divorce *him*, even if she was actually the guilty party. Which led to some interesting arguments in court if the judge suspected that you were providing *fake* evidence, since colluding with your wife to obtain a divorce under 'false' pretences was not supposed to be allowed; adultery was an acceptable reason for divorce, a mutual desire to exit the marriage was not!)

But so far as I can see, in order to get an annulment on the grounds of lack of consummation you were expected to produce evidence that you had at least tried. Unless you play the Henry VIII defence and complain that your wife was so unattractive that nobody could be expected to do the deed with her :-p