Genre: Historical Fiction
“So there I was with two pens, my two titties, Charles Dickens, two slice of bread and a blank book at the end of my first day in the middle of nowhere. Except as it turned out it wasn’t quite the end.”
Scotland, 1863. In an attempt to escape her not-so-innocent past in Glasgow, Bessy Buckley—the wide-eyed and sharp-tongued Irish heroine of The Observations—takes a job as a maid in a once-grand country house outside Edinburgh working for the beautiful Arabella—the “missus.” A city girl accustomed to other ways of making a living. Bessy lacks the necessary scullery skills for her new position, but as she finds out, it is her ability to read and write that makes her such a desirable hire. Bessy is intrigued by her new employer but puzzled by her increasingly strange requests and her insistence that Bessy keep a journal of her most intimate thoughts. And it seems that the missus has a few secrets of her own. Nevertheless, Bessy is committed to starting a new life and devotes herself to her post, and to the missus.
Despite their insurmountable differences in class and comportment, Bessy and Arabella develop an affinity for each other, one that soon becomes tinged with dependence and mutual suspicion. As is usually the case in isolated Victorian houses, all is not as it seems. Curious to a fault, Bessy soon makes a troubling discovery about the missus and the maids who have come before her. And when a childish prank enacted out of revenge spins out of control, Bessy realizes she’s fled one difficult past only to arrive in an even more disturbing present. – Penguin Group
Image courtesy of BN.com
I have mixed emotions about The Observations simply because it’s not what I thought it would be. The secrets mentioned in the synopsis aren’t so huge that they’re shocking. What her employer has protagonist Bessy do isn’t all too strange. What is strange is Bessy. She’s not at all what she seems, and we don’t know why—at first. When we initially meet Bessy, we’re thrust into a carriage with a young teenage girl travelling to a new town in search of a job. She finds said job but it’s not exactly what she is looking for. Then the oddities begin with her employer, the beautiful Arabella Reid (or “missus” as Bessy continues to call her) who requests Bessy write her daily activities in a journal. Okay, not too eccentric. But the way Arabella watches Bessy is out of the ordinary. So we get past that and then find out what Arabella’s big secret is. I won’t tell you here, but it’s shocking for the time period because it’s something women aren’t encouraged to do. Mysterious enough for ya?
As you can tell from the quote above, Bessy has a certain affinity for slang and a huge prejudice against punctuation. (The editor in me was having an all out panic attack reading Bessy’s story. And don’t get me started on her name for breasts. *shudders* I hate that word so much I can’t bear to repeat it. Again, see the above quote.) The Observations is Bessy’s account of her life, written in her own words. You see the change in Bessy through each passing chapter, which ends up being a few years—the length of time it has taken her to write everything down. Her speech in the beginning is almost incomprehensible, sloppy and surprisingly hilarious. I wasn’t expecting her to be so funny, but when you consider she’s 14, immature speech isn’t too far-fetched. Not only that, she’s a troubled girl. Her mother, Bridget, isn’t the best influence or model mother. She’s a prostitute so you can guess what that means for Bessy. I still cringe when I think about the things Bridget has Bessy do at the tender age of 10 or so. If I could, I’d take a scrub brush and bleach to my brain. Yes, it’s that bad. Bridget is a deplorable character and doesn’t deserve any of Bessy’s love, but she is her mother and children always love their mothers no matter what, especially when they have no one else in their lives.
The writing is good for what it is. And I did laugh quite a bit, but not enough that I can remember what was so funny. I enjoyed the book to a point. Once I neared the ending, I got a bit bored and didn’t really care too much about what happened to any of the characters. It might be because Bessy was speaking proper English by then and the giggles I got from her descriptions of people waned quite a bit. I can’t say I’d recommend The Observations because it didn’t leave an overwhelming positive effect on me. I won’t be reading it again, that’s for sure.
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