HearingBooks

BUY DIGITAL BUY PHYSICAL

"Falling Angels" by Tracy Chevalier Length: 7 hours and 49 min. ISBN: Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

After reading The Lady and the Unicorn I wanted to read more of Tracy Chevalier’s books. This is also a well written book, but in a very different time and setting. I like the fact that Tracy Chevalier’s story writing sometimes is “dark”, life isn’t a dance on roses, there are struggles for both low and high. She paints credible lifelike portraits of her different characters.

Falling Angels is set in Victorian England, two young girls meet at the family cemetery and become friends, and also befriend the young grave digger who is socially below them. This somber environment becomes a meeting place and playground for the friends, and is central in the novel: the maid meets her lover there, one of the mothers has a romantic interest in the cemetery’s governor, and we learn about the lowest of them all, the grave diggers.

The two girls’ families are both of good social standing, but one is richer than the other and the poorer girl (who’s also the prettiest) compensates for this by being the more traditional and perfect little lady. The rich family is not a happy one. The parents have a complicated relationship, the mother doesn’t want more children and avoids her husband, who, in turn, to “get his wife back” does all sorts of things to make her jalous. He’s a very good father though, and attends to his daughter’s needs and education much more than the seemingly egocentric mother who in reality is very unhappy and unfulfilled. When at a turning point in her life, she becomes involved in the women’s suffragette movement, she finally finds a meaning to her life but at the expense of her daughter who feels even less loved by her mother then.

The poorer girl’s family on the other hand is happy and loving, and this contrast between them doesn’t escape any of them. One is jealous of the other’s intelligence and money, and one of the other’s beauty and happy family… Add to this relationship that there are secrets not to be told unless a family will collapse and people be ruined…

The story is told through several voices, all the members of the families, but also people around them. When listening to the story, it’s enjoyable to have different narrators portraying the different characters. When the maid is telling her story, she does so in her dialect, the girls and their mothers all have distinctive voices - reflecting their social classes and ages. Unlike in The Lady and the Unicorn, where two narrators read all the male and the female voices, here you have a whole host of actors - actually 11 of them! - giving life and color to the story.

I liked the book, I thought it portrayed the relationship and the dynamics between the two girls very well, and it was interesting to get a glimpse of women’s position in society and their struggle at this time to gain control over their own lives and to fight for the right to vote.

Tags: falling angels, tracy chevalier, audiobook, fiction, historical novel, victorian, england

• Lady and Unicorn
• Burning Bright