When the protagonist says, "Next I know, I'll be calling myself the queen of Romania...," it's not so different from "Marie" that I can trust that the author wasn't purposefully paraphrasing Dorothy Parker.
Libba Bray's attempt to capture the era felt a lot like Tracey Chevalier's Falling Angels and plotwise it bore some resemblance to Down a Dark Hall and lots and lots and lots to The Secret History. Plus it owed a minor plot point to Ghosts I Have Been, not that the point originated with Richard Peck either, and another to The Cat Ate My Gymsuit although it was better handled in And Both Were Young.
The book's main action is set in 1895, but enough seeming anachronisms jolted me out of whatever suspension of disbelief I could manage when I wasn't thinking of Lois Duncan or Donna Tartt. Possibly they weren't anachronisms but only seemed so to someone who has only enough trivial knowledge to think she has more, but the seeming so was enough for me.
Men wear "tuxedos" (p. 229) and while the word for the suit maybe does date to 1886 in time to fit in the book, it was in Tuxedo Park in the United States that a man first wore one. Since even Usan Miss Manners thinks the term is slangy, I wonder if the Brits would have accepted it as quite the thing that fast, and quite enough of the thing to wear instead of white tie and tails, which is what should be paired with a woman's opera-length gloves.
Although the disease influenza dates to the twelfth century and before, I never think of its being widespread or well-known until the 1918-19 pandemic. So while an outbreak in 1890 could account for one detail, again it sounded odd.
On page 233, someone refers to an allegedly proper married woman Mrs HerFirstName MarriedLastName. When did the early twentieth-century etiquette that that form indicated a divorced woman (a married one being Mrs HisFirstName MarriedLastName) come into being?
Another datum in my wildly unreferenced trivia bank is that Dickens, while immediately popular, took some time to become respectable. So it seems unlikely that, as on page 265, the headmistress of an 1895 finishing school would read David Copperfield to her charges.
Overall I wish I liked it as much as I expected and wanted to. I'm getting nowhere with The Stone Raft, which lack of progress disgusts me; and I'm zero for three with the YA books I used to leapfrog back into this reading thing I've heard so much about. To be fair I should say zero for two, since I expected nothing from the Ellen Conford, but zero for two is still zero.
Of all the movies and books I've mentioned to Intern in the past seven months, such as Egg and I acting out "Philadelphia Story" for him and all three of us reminiscing about "Breakfast Club," the one I thought he really needed to see was, of course, "Harold and Maude." He saw it, and he liked it. The only one he's recommended is "Red Dawn."
It's not a fair trade, which both of us knew going in it wouldn't be; still somehow I expected it to be more intelligent than, say, dirt. Alas, it's stupider than "War Games" and lacks that movie's charm. Intern described it being as fundamentally '80s as "Weird Science" and "Some Kind of Wonderful," but I just painted my bathroom pink, for pete's sake. (Maybe that makes me a pinko?) I knew it wouldn't be my type of movie but I didn't expect to be bored. Well, maybe the time and my age are wrong: I was devastated by the equally bad, and made for TV, "The Day After," which I saw in 1983 at age 15. (I realized it was bad when I rewatched it many years later. "Threads," though, I bet is still effective.)
I suspected this movie when I learned that the operation to capture Saddam Hussein was called "Red Dawn." And yes: the possible locations were called Wolverine.