Leona Francombe
Auteur de The Sage of Waterloo: A Tale
A propos de l'auteur
Crédit image: Leona Francombe
Œuvres de Leona Francombe
The Heron Legacy 2 exemplaires
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- USA
Belgium - Lieu de naissance
- England, UK
- Lieux de résidence
- Brussels, Belgium
- Études
- Bryn Mawr College
Yale School of Music - Professions
- pianist
Membres
Critiques
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 4
- Membres
- 76
- Popularité
- #233,522
- Évaluation
- 3.4
- Critiques
- 6
- ISBN
- 9
- Langues
- 2
There is no story in this book. Or rather, the story in this book is only about Waterloo, the battle and the slaughter and the loss and the impact on the surrounding countryside. The rabbit (who might also be the sage, though I suspect that role is meant for his grandmother) doesn't really add anything beyond the tale of Waterloo, itself.
Instead, he proses on and on about his younger days (learning about Waterloo) and his old home (at the ruins of the chateau near Waterloo) and leaving home (where he misses Waterloo) and the horrors of humanity (and what they did at Waterloo) and his family and other animals (and how they were impacted by Waterloo). Whenever his narrative brushes too close to anything approaching an actual story of his own, it skitters right back inside the story of Waterloo---just as a rabbit frightened of the unknown flees back to its hutch.
This entire book is an exercise in anticipation and disappointment as, over and over again, the story promises to appear only to dissipate once more into the never-ending drone about Waterloo.
There are moments of what might be considered wisdom, but the wisdom is so tired and specifically sized for rabbit consumption---"If something bad happens, William, chew through the problem methodically, as if it's a long, hard carrot"---that only the most untried or inexperienced or determined of readers would find it novel or helpful.
The book also contains something that could possibly be seen as a ghost story, but the rabbit spends so much of the book harping on his grandmother seeing things and animals learning to "read the air" and all the pointless, violent death at the battle that the final ghostly reveal feels expected and anticlimactic. There's nothing spooky about it, just something obvious that the rabbit could've shared to greater effect 200 pages earlier.
Francombe clearly has strong feelings about this battle and the lives lost and how we've written the history after the fact, but I would've appreciated reading her thoughts far more in a medium designed for just such a purpose. Encountering them through the underused and irrelevant mouthpiece of a rabbit renders the entire piece toothless and pedantic. I shrug at the tragedy of the battle instead of weeping at it.… (plus d'informations)