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Blue Asylum (2012)

by Kathy Hepinstall(Favorite Author)

3.59 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0547712073 (ISBN13: 9780547712079)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

review 1: This novel intrigued me because it is about a plantation wife from Virginia (where I live) during Civil War times whose husband ships her off unjustly to an insane asylum on Sanibel Island, Florida in the Gulf (where I long ago vacationed a couple times and loved) because she defies him and his cruel treatment of his slaves. In those days, a woman who didn't know her "place" had to be suffering from a mental defect. The heroine, Iris, is smart and well-educated, and her every thought upon arriving is on how to escape. Along the way she makes friends and allies, particularly with Ambrose, a Confederate soldier suffering what we now understand as PTSD, and Wendell, the 12 year-old son of the asylum's administrator, Dr. Cowell. The narrative voice jumps among these and a coup... morele more characters, and several backstories are told in flashback and revealed slowly. I would say one of the main characters is the island itself, with its mangrove swamps, lapping waves, maddening mosquitoes & midges, heavy summer humidity, anhingas drying their wings in the sun, and fish leaping in the lapping waves (much like I remember it). I thought the ending was a little trite in one aspect, but overall made sense. Occasionally, the author closes a paragraph with a particularly well-put, beautiful observation or turn of phrase that made me smile at the profundity. This is not a piece of romance fiction but literary fiction. There is much discussion of war, the state of mental health treatment in the 1860s, gender roles, the meaning of society, sanity, sexuality, etc. in Victorian times. All in all, a good summer read not because it is light reading (it's not) but because of it's brevity and the summery island setting.
review 2: The premise behind this story is very interesting; the idea of a wife being declared insane for rebelling against her husband is shocking to us modern readers and is what led to me picking up this book. I thought a lot of the secondary characters were quite interesting, especially the doctor and his son. I enjoyed the relationship between the main character and the doctor and liked how each character's past was revealed slowly throughout the story. However, there was just something missing in this book for me that prevents me from giving it 4 stars. I didn't ever really get emotionally invested in the characters and thought that despite weaving an interesting story, the author somehow didn't give it a lot of depth. less

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