I’m always keen to read retellings of myths, legends, and fairy tales, especially ones that place a feminist slant on stories that might originally have read as misogynistic.
Young Adult Mythological Ficton published by Bloomsbury YA 11 Jan 22 To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at ‘s review of Medusa by Jessie Burton and Olivia Lomenech Gill The House of Fortune by Jessie Burton is published by Pan Macmillan (£16.99). What’s cheering is that, after a host of adventures, Thea and Nella are left staring out on a new world, suggesting there is more to be told of this boldly unconventional Dutch family. In The House of Fortune, Burton has done that rare thing, following up a successful debut with a novel that is superior in both style and substance. The titular Miniaturist of Burton’s debut makes a return here, leaving gifts that point to a supernatural ability to see past facades to deeper truths – a conceit that always seemed to gesture towards the power of the author. Thea is wilder and more wilful than Nella ever was and, despite the financial troubles that dog her family, this is a book with a warmer heart than the slightly chilly original. With Burton, though, you get the sense of a writer far more comfortable in her skin, one who in Thea has found a character to reanimate the physical and emotional landscape of early modern Amsterdam. The failures tend to outnumber the hits – for every The Testaments there’s two or three Imperial Bedroomsor a Fight Club 2.
It’s always interesting when a writer returns to the storyworld of a book after some time away. Let us say that The Miniaturist ended with a birth and two deaths, and a new order imposed on the Brandt house on the Golden Bend of the Herengracht Canal. It’s always tricky to review a sequel without spoiling the first book for those who are yet to read it. Objects illuminate the rooms around them she is brilliant on the way that dress and decoration speak loudly of the personality and aspirations of those who possess them.Īfter two more or less contemporary novels, The Muse (2016) and The Confession (2019), and two books for younger readers, The Restless Girls (2018) and Medusa (2021), Burton has returned to the world of The Miniaturist for her fourth novel for adults. Her writing is both removed and dignified, although this coldness is counteracted by an almost obsessive intimacy with the physical world. That atmosphere of severity and opulence seems to have fed through to Burton’s prose at a formal level.
It’s interesting that she should have started her career – with the million-selling The Miniaturist (2014) – in Amsterdam during the last years of the Dutch golden age, when the wealth of the Calvinist Netherlands was matched only by its thrift and industriousness. T here’s a peculiar austerity to Jessie Burton’s writing.
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