Bourland autopsies princess myth
It’s about time someone took the princess story that’s normalized to girls and autopsied it with absolute precision.
“The Force of Such Beauty” opens on the night of Caroline’s second attempt at escaping Lucomo, the small European country in which she became a princess. But author Barbara Bourland quickly jumps back in time to reveal every excruciating and exhilarating detail that led to this moment. Once caught up, the story sadistically marches on to the end of Caroline’s breathtaking story.
Caroline is from South Africa. Her first race was two months after Nelson Mandela became president in 1990. Her white parents volunteered their time and limited resources to ending Apartheid. Then they threw themselves into Caroline and her burgeoning running career, which brought her all the way to gold at the Olympics.
But that was before the fall that ground her running career to a shattering halt. And it’s not for the faint of heart; Bourland holds no punches with absolutely gruesome descriptions of medical trauma.
The silver lining? This life-altering tragedy leads our heroine directly to a prince through a meeting of happenstance at a glitzy medical recovery center.
The red flags are there from the beginning. The stage is set for misery. Bourland reveals from the first handful of pages that Caroline is trapped at wit’s end on display as lover Finn’s gleaming jewel sequestered in the castle. Yet the writing is smart enough, the story good enough, to get swept away in their chemistry until reality comes crashing back.
Carefully crafted wordplay flits through the pages. And despite the
narrator Caroline supposedly being uneducated, Bourland’s immense vocabulary still ekes through.
“The Force of Such Beauty” grips with the strength of an Olympian and holds it with the endurance of a marathoner. Bourland’s passionate storytelling transmogrifies into an insatiable urge to keep reading Caroline’s story even after its end — an ending that actually caught my breath, not once, but twice in quick succession.
Stacey Stevens’ old college roommate,
now working at a bird sanctuary off the Maine coast, is in a panic. Lobstermen who have made a habit of harassing the facility’s staff are growing more aggressive, and now her boss has gone missing.
“Can you please come out here tomorrow with Mike?” she begs Stacey. “Make sure he brings his badge and gun.”
The Mike in question is Maine game warden Mike Bowditch, now making his 13th appearance in a series of crime novels by Paul Doiron. Stacey, the love of Mike’s life, has been his on-again, off-again
girlfriend for years, and fans will be pleased that in “Hatchet Island,” their romance is on again.
When Stacey’s friend and another member of the small sanctuary staff are brutally killed, Mike has a complex murder case on his hands. Among other things, it involves the sanctuary’s desperate financial situation, a mysterious trespasser, a violent Marine Patrol officer, a pair of suicides, sexually abused teenagers and a famous artist who takes photographs of people posed as corpses.
In the previous novels, Mike solved his cases by doggedly assembling evidence until the truth gradually emerged. This time, however, he uncovers a bewildering collection of puzzle pieces.
Stepping out of character, he assembles them in Sherlockian fashion to identify the killer, turning “Hatchet Island” into an old-fashioned puzzle mystery rather than the hard-boiled crime fiction Doiron’s readers have come to expect. Although Mike is ultimately proven right, those puzzle pieces could have been assembled in a myriad of other ways. As a result, the conclusion feels contrived and somewhat unsatisfying.