Karen EssexCritiques

'Cisnes de Leonardo' é a história das poderosas irmãs d'Este - Beatrice, duquesa de Milão, e Isabella, marquesa de Mântua - e de sua competição pelo amor de um dos príncipes mais influentes da Itália, Ludovico Sforza, e pelo prêmio maior - ser imortalizada em um quadro a óleo pelo pintor e engenheiro da corte de Milão, Leonardo da Vinci. No livro, Leonardo da Vinci aparece como homem de carne e osso que, a despeito de sua inegável genialidade, precisa lutar para pagar as contas e sustentar a família. Cada capítulo começa com um diferente trecho do diário que o mestre italiano escreveu ao longo da vida.

Very enjoyable novel shifts between Mary, wife of Lord Elgin (you know, the one who nabbed the Elgin Marbles) and Aspasia, companion to Pericles, who built the Parthenon.

I wanted more of both stories -- which I think is a good sign, and there were a few details that didn't really hang together for me, but there are two really interesting women here, treated with thought and compassion in two spots of history that haven't come across my radar much.

I received this ARC from Doubleday just in time for a trip to the beach, so I dropped it in my beach bag and hopped on my plane.

This is being billed as "the novel for Twilight's grown up fans," but I don't know how accurate that is. It has more sex, that's certain, but the romance element is lacking. The framework is there---Mina Murray is faced with an impossible choice between the immortal Dracula and hunky Jonathan Harker (who is not re-imagined here as a werewolf, TYVM)--but the love story isn't convincing. Mina says over and over that she can't understand why anyone would choose other than to become immortal with Dracula, but we don't actually see anything to recommend him to her except that he plies her with good, supernatural sex.

Harker is just creepy and vacant throughout. For the entire book, Harker defers to the thoughts and wishes of whatever character is standing closest to him. I mean that literally. His entire mindset changes from page to page depending on who he's been talking to most recently. Essex may have built this into his character deliberately, but it makes one wonder what on earth Mina could possibly want with this guy.

Mina and her friend Kate Reed are almost comical foils. Mina can't understand why women would want the franchise while Kate prances around sans corset and writes for the newspaper. Mina's other friend, Lucy, is much more three-dimensional with her psychopathic lust and love for Morris Quincey (they have much more of a Twilight romance---she stops eating or sleeping due to her obsession with him, while he makes some very Edward-esque moves later on in the story).

The most interesting parts of the book revolved around a Victorian-era mental institution and the patients and treatments therein. The book most closely approaches horror not when Mina is being fed upon by Dracula but when she is being "treated" for her hysteria and "erotomania." (Actually, that could have been a book on its own without the Dracula connection.)

Three stars---not bad enough to stop reading, but not good enough to read again or recommend. If you're looking for something Twilight-esque but for a more mature audience, try Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries instead.

A very "okay" historical novel. (You'd think a Tulane graduate would do better.)

Very boring. I love the idea of structuring a novel to highlight the parallels in the lives of two women separated by two thousand years, but Essex apparently does not have the skills to white such a novel.

Strange and charming book where the paranormal is the "normal" and the horror is the real life. A book about power plays more than love.

I stopped worrying about historical accuracy or purple prose writing @ p.100 and gave myself over to the book which was just good, old-fashioned fun. Spoiler: Lord Elgin was a shit.

IF it was not for the lovely scenery then I would have given up on this book a lot sooner. I found Mina to be meek and when she got really scared her voice would grate on my nerves. I only could put up with this and the lack of character interest until about 4 chapters into part 2. In this time there was hardly any interaction between Mina and Dracula. This book did not do anything for me to make me fall in love with Mina as a person.

Reading this recent historical fiction novel was a very strange experience – it's based on the same historical facts as another book, ‘Duchess of Milan' by Michael Ennis – which I love. So reading this book was almost like re-reading ‘Duchess'... but feeling that everything, has, somehow, changed... Although, I believe, factually accurate, Essex's book is much less flattering to her characters, I believe. Both focus on the two sisters, Beatrice and Isabella d'Este, who were prominent players in the Renaissance courts of Italy's late 15th century (and were patrons to Leonardo Da Vinci and many other artists of the day.) But while Ennis portrays these women as the well-educated, powerful, and savvy politicians that they likely were (without sacrificing a strong element of personal drama), Essex has the women be much more motivated by personal jealousy and vanity – their connivings are shown as more petty games than far-sighted political moves. They are constantly worrying about who is more beautiful than whom, who their husbands are sleeping with, and even Isabella's main goal of being painted by Da Vinci is equal parts vanity and desire to ‘get one over' on her sister. Isabella came across as shallow and irritating – which, I'm fairly sure, historically, she was not.
The other annoying thing about this book is that Essex obviously did some of the research for this book by looking at existing portraits and carvings of her characters, an she spends a great deal of time in the book describing in great detail her personal interpretations of these artworks. OK, so she got me to do a Google image search for some of the works she described, so I guess she succeeded in getting me to want to look at them. But it got to the point where at times I felt like I was reading a museum didactic, not a novel.
Overall, this wasn't bad – but I would definitely recommend ‘Duchess of Milan' over this book any day!

Had a blast with Mina Murray in Karen Essex's Dracula In Love This book was written wonderfully...It was a bit draggy in some parts...so all in all I give this book a 4 star rating...a great rec though....if you like a Bram Stoker's Dracula with a twist! :)

Ayer, en vez de seguir resumiendo y estudiando me puse a ver "Bettie Page Reveals All", la primera vez que escucho la historia de la insuperable pin-up no habrá ninguna igual, no habra ninguna desde su propio punto de vista, sus propios recuerdos.



Y wow *aúlla como lobo de dibujito animado y se golpea la cabeza con un zapato* Que mujer! Una de las pocas estrellas auténticas, de esas que eran más personas que mitos; una mujer real, no una mera fantasía. Una persona,tal cual se la veía en las fotos: Pura libertad, pura sonrisa...



(Bue, al menos hasta sus años posteriores y lo que le pasó después.)




Siempre que escuchaba hablar de ella- del mito de la modelo furor- lo dicho, las interminables alabanzas, me sonaban a exageración, a pura fantasía alrededor de alguien que en realidad era misterio. Pero no, la adoración y la fascinación son bien merecidas. Es imposible no enamorarse de Bettie Page. Es imposible no sentir esa fascinación. Y no por una mera cuestión de belleza--la apariencia y ese flequillo icónico cualquiera puede imitarlo. Tiene más que ver con la autenticidad que mencionaba previamente, el juego, la felicidad casi inocente que radiaba en las fotos.

Su vida es digna de repaso, sus palabras entristecen, emocionan y fascinan.

The first thing I want to write is that nobody in this book sparkles. I was worried about that as some tout this novel as being intended for the grown-up Twilight fan. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. It's a retelling of Stoker's Dracula including the same characters, but told entirely from Mina Harker's perspective. She divulges to a private diary the truth behind her love affair with Count Dracula, and the explanation behind who and what he really is. While Essex's novel is far more erotic than it's Victorian counter-part, it's well-researched, and she paints a very accurate scene of Victorian Europe, pulling the reader in to Mina's world with every detail

Read during Summer 2007

Not very good. I must get back to my own books and leave Bookcrossing for the short term, I'm getting really annoyed to not enjoy what I read. This was not a total clunker, well, maybe. Essex just seemed in way over her head. She was trying to make some grand statements about the works of Leonardo da Vinci via the d'Este sisters, Isabella and Beatrica, but it just didn't work. There was high flown prose about art tossed in with crude sex and debauchery scenes. Isabella was supposed to be the smart one but was mostly pretensious and Beatrica was more wild than spirited. Not a satisfying read, esp. after Beatrica dies suddenly and the whole thing just grinds to a halt but has to drag out for page after page after page. Also, I don't care if smug little Isabella thinks she is the model for the Mona Lisa, a point Essex has clearly been working up to for about 339 pages.

Superb blending of existing 19th century myths and folklore present with the exploration of the effects a male dominated society had on women, this retelling of Dracula from Mina's pov is smart, sexy and fascinating.

If you loved reading the original Dracula, you will really enjoy this book! The author keeps to the original atmosphere and doesn’t disappoint. The style of writing used by the author is so similar to that used in Dracula, with overly detailed explanations and almost excessive use of adjectives that it almost feels as if Mr. Stoker wrote the works himself!

Personally, I find books written in a past time period to be rather stuffy and hard to identify with; however, I was pleasantly surprised buy the engaging and identifiable characters as well as the unexpected path this story took.

I don’t know if I will read it a second time or not, but I’ll gladly keep it on my shelf.

BTW… I’m happy that I won a free copy of this book, as anyone who has enjoyed Dracula and enjoys paranormal romance are sure to agree.

**Warning**
I’m not a literary major & the above review is just my personal opinion. Anything that I may have said that offends you, your intelligence, your profession, or beliefs is unintentional and irrelevant to my personal review. If your opinion differs from mine, please, feel free to make your own comments and disagree.

Set in the court of the Duke of Milan during the stay of Leonardo da Vinci, the first half is more fun with sexual and political intrigues and insight into some of Leonardo's more famous works; the last half focuses on the fall of the city to the French. Fun way to encounter facts from a period of history I have always found fascinating.

I've given this a good college try, but I'm giving up. The sexual assault on page 7 that had no emotional/psychological ramifications turned me off from the start. Then the soft porn on page 46 was my breaking point. I'm embarrassed to even give you a quote. Let's just say that she wakes up from an erotic dream feeling "full" in a place that had never been full before and she set out to explore that area herself.

I'll be fair and say that the tone of the book does match the tone of Dracula very well. I was originally interested in this because Mina had been such an angelically good and exalted woman in the original. I thought it would be fun to see her let her hair down a little. I got more than I bargained for, to say the least!

I felt like I was reading Danielle Steele with a dash of history/art history thrown in. It made for a good discussion of daVinci and Renaissance art at my book group meeting, but the writing was lacking. I think I adore half of the picks from my book groups, and I really don't enjoy the other half.

An interesting concept for sure: the Dracula story as told by Mina, and of course everything is quite different from what one's been led to expect. And some good sequences of writing. But holy cow melodrama & Mary Sue-ism! It was actually a pretty decent read for laying sick in bed, but I can think of better.

didn't finish

A retelling of the classic vampire tale. Karen Essex draws deeply on the suppressed Victorian mindset in creating the elements of this gothic novel. Mina Murray is engaged and set for a conventional existence when she is disturbed by strange dreams, the adventures of her fellow female friends, and her fiance's descent into madness. While predictable at times, Mina's journey results in an awakening of her own power and discovery of her own past and provides a unique take on the Dracula legend. While not completely satisfied with the ending, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and would definitely recommend it!

Dracula in Love is basically the sub-conscious story told by the original. Instead of Dracula “possibly representing a fear of independent and sexually liberated women”, he is exactly that. And Mina has to decide if she wants the life she has always imagined for herself or if she’d rather be with Dracula. This book is her story, setting the record straight for those of us who have only read the story told by the men. This is a bit of a coming of age story and a lot of that is her sexual experience, so thing get pretty explicit at times. Never anything I found offensive though, except of course for some of the male characters incredibly Victorian views of women and sex.

This was by far the creepiest of all the dracula re-tellings I read and like Dracula: The Un-Dead it wasn’t at all what I expected. I expected a romance. What I got was a crazy hodgepodge that included a coming-of-age novel, a romance, border-line erotica, horror, paranormal elements, and a mystery. Sometimes it was a bit too much and I wished the book would make up its’ mind! The author also went a little overboard introducing mythologies. We got explanations of vampires as traditional vampires, saints, the Sidhe, and as a medieval cult. We do eventually get to the heart of things and it wasn’t too confusing, but again I think the book would have been better had the author just picked one thing to do. Finally, the ending, especially after Dracula: The Un-Dead, really disappointed me. This one wasn’t just depressing, it was needlessly depressing because of choices our protagonist made. Despite my other critiques, I think I could have liked this book much better otherwise. Depressing endings can really ruin a book for me and this one was no exception.

This review first published on Doing Dewey.

Perché prendere un opera come il Dracula di Bram Stoker e riempirla di pezzi inutili e scritti male? In pratica il libro è stato riscritto per adattarlo ai gusti odierni, stravolgendo a caso alcuni personaggi (Quincey e Van Helsing) ritenuti forse troppo rigidi, aggiungendo scene gratuite di sesso, riempiendo quei silenzi narrativi suggestivi che di solito il lettore riempiva con la propria immaginazione. Non capisco il bisogno di scrivere tutto, di riempire ogni momento narrativo, come se il lettore dovesse essere salvato dal rischio di dover usare le proprie capacità per collegare un evento ad un altro. Ci sono stati numerosi adattamenti del Dracula dal 1897, l'ultimo tentativo anche del pronipote di Stoker, ma questo libro rispecchia in modo preoccupante un abbassamento della qualità e delle aspettative dei lettori di genere, sempre più mentalmente giovani ed abituati alla pigrizia narrativa. Se l'autrice voleva creare una storia d'amore immortale poteva almeno fare lo sforzo di attenersi ai personaggi originali o di crearne di suoi senza prendere in prestito solo quanto le faceva comodo. PS. Non tirate in ballo la scusa degli young adult: è un'etichetta di comodo che troppo spesso giustifica una qualità narrativa discutibile; un lettore anagraficamente giovane non giustifica una qualità narrativa inesistente, anzi, dovrebbe essere educato ad una narrazione che lo aiuti a crescere nelle proprie future scelte.

My favorite thing about this book is that it exposed me to some very interesting people who lived in 15th century Italy. Without it I may have never heard about the incredible Isabella d'Este, may have never looked up the paintings mentioned in this book, may have never thought about Leonardo da Vinci as a man outside of his work.
Ms. Essex did a great job of getting into the women's heads and showing us what they thought and felt at the most important times of their lives. I preferred Isabella not because her character was easier to relate to but because her sections were deeper, more intimate. She was a woman of great intellect, an art connoisseur, a formidable opponent for any man in the political arena as well as a woman of great beauty, grace and charm. It was fascinating to learn about her and I intend to read more about her in the future.
Leonardo da Vinci is a prominent character in this book but we never get to hear about the events from him. He is always talked about by either Esabella or Beatrice and while their descriptions paint an interesting portrait (no pun intended) it would've been very interesting to get his take on the events of the time and the people with whom he was in such close contact. Throughout the book there are excerpts from Leonardo's notes that are both his reflections about the subjects of his studies and to-do lists that give us a glimpse into the mundane part of his life. These excerpts are not invention of the author, they are actually taken from da Vinci's notebooks and effectively bring the reader closer to the time and the characters of the book.
As impressed as I was by the characters this book fell a bit flat for me because of the writing. The narrative went from lively scenes that were very engaging to sections that read more like a chronicle and back. Because of this the novel didn't hold my interest as much as it could have and I had no trouble setting it down and sometimes even found myself zoning out during the accounts of who invaded whom and who was suspected of whose death. The fact that the narrative often changed between past and present tense from one paragraph to the next didn't help eather and even though eventually I managed to ignore the back and forth between the "is" and the "was" the challenge of having to do it detracted from the enjoyment of the book.
I would recommend this novel to those readers who are interested in learning about Italy at that tumultuous time in history, enjoy fascinating characters and feel they'll be able to ignore the inconsistencies in tense and less than stellar bridges between the scenes that actually had some life to them.

The idea that a well known story is not the way things really happened is not a new concept for a book, but in Dracula in Love Karen Essex manages to make the idea seem quite fresh and creative. Retelling Stoker's classic from Mina Murray Harker's perspective, Essex reveals a Count Dracula who is perhaps more akin to Shakespeare's Puck than Bela Lugosi's movie monster stereotype.

Mina herself is entirely reinvented from the original book. She is not the helpless victim of a terrifying fiend but rather a strong willed woman with unexplained and somewhat mystical secrets from her childhood. Dracula is not out to destroy her but rather to awaken her own supernatural side. He is her soul mate, who has sought her through multiple lifetimes, rather than a predator intent on her demise. All of the details of Stoker's work fit within the context of Dracula in Love but the expansion and explanations of these details - especially Lucy Westenra's tragic role in the story - provide a thoroughly engaging new perspective on the well known events.

Equal parts chilling and romantic, this is definitely a book for fans of the original, and especially for fans of the original who thought Stoker's female characters needed a bit more moxie.