The Heroines: A Novel

By Eileen Favorite

Book Overview

Heroines from literature come to life and visit Anne-Marie's bed and breakfast, where she tries not to interfere with their lives in fear it will change the outcome of their novels. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416548106
• ISBN13: 9781416548102
• Release Date: December 2007
• Publisher: Scribner
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Good book

I loved this book! While the ending leaves you wondering "how would that happen" the whole book is based on a fantastical premise anyway - so why not! Penny lives with her mother in their bed and breakfast in rural Illinois. She has never known her father but is told he was a high school football star who died at 17 never knowing he had a daughter. Hard enough for a young girl but her life is further complicated by the unusual guests of their bed and breakfast -- heroines from various novels throughout history. While the mental hospital scenes are disturbing, it was necessary to provide some fragility to Penny's character. Penny is - in effect - one of the heroines who visit the house. And aren't all heroines at some point driven to brink of sanity? She stands in strong contrast to her mother who seems to be a passive bystander of all the events. (Except, of course, until the end when the reasoning for her passivity is explained.) A lot of reviews I read complained that the heroines weren't utilized enough. I say hogwash. Their presence was there to merely further Penny's story. She is the heroine of this novel, not them. I say if you want to know more about them, read the original books in which they appear.

Can't wait for the movie

This was an awesome book that I couldn't put down, I loved the characters and the plot. As I was reading I kept thinking what a great movie this story would make.

Terrific

I loved this book. Unlike so many authors nowadays, Favorite assumes that her readers are not only literate but intelligent. Beginning with the idea of a boarding house occasionally visited by literary heroines taking a break before their turnaround moment, Favorite steers the story toward the coming of age of Penny, a confused teen living with her mother in the house. With a steady and subtle underpinning of Penny's story by metaphorical relationships with the heroines, Favorite asks us to make judgments and decisions without signposting everything. I constantly felt as though I was being asked to participate in the story rather than sit back and let everything be told to me by an overbearing and omniscisent authorial voice. By the end I was moved because I related to the characters, not because I was pummeled into "feeling."

great weekend read on the couch

When I pick up a novel, I want to go somewhere else. Completely. Ensconced in Favorite's midwestern B & B/heroines world right from the start, I found I didn't want to leave this place until I turned every last page of plots within plots, savoring lovely writing all along the way. Penny has a strong narrative voice--in turns witty, troubled, introspective, defiant, vulnerable--that's easy to hitch onto. Anchoring lively scenes with just the amount of detail that makes the fantastic believable, Favorite maintains a seamless line between reality and unreality. Reading this novel reminds me why I stopped with a Master's in English and didn't continue on with a soul-killing Ph.D: Postmodern scholarship sucks the magic out of literature, out of stories, out of imagining. The Heroines is a good, strong story, but also playful metafiction, an antidote to dusty notions of what stories are and should be. This one is a book-lover's delight. And it was such fun seeing Scarlett O'Hara and Blanche duBois again I had to rent the movies the next weekend to continue the escape.

Wonderfully imaginative story

This story offers a fun romp through classic literature through the eyes of a young teenage girl. When heroines appear at the family's bed and breakfast, Penny has to learn to adapt to their storylines and adjust her own. Her mother keeps all of her books under lock and key in the attic lest one of the heroines discover her true fate. This book blurs the lines between fiction and real life. It is destined to become a huge hit with book clubs and avid readers. You heard it here first!