Merry Christmas! (+ Trelawny)
Dec. 25th, 2014 10:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerMerry Christmas, fellow Christmas celebrators!
And in celebration of Christmas, I am posting my review/crazy theories about Isabelle Holland's Trelawny, because this book is filled with sweet, sweet madness and I can think of no better gift than to share it with you.
The kicks off when the narrator, Kit, inherits Trelawny, her distant cousins' big fancy East Coast house. She spent a week there as a child and was scarred for life by the snobbish unkindness of her twin cousins, Giles and Nicolas, who are fraternal twins and don’t look alike at all, except most people think they're identical and sometimes they actually do seem to look alike and it's confusing.
So Kit goes to Trelawny and naturally discovers that one of the supposedly dead brothers is actually living in the attic (no Gothic house worth its salt is without a mysterious denizen in the attic), and also someone on the estate is trying to kill said supposedly dead brother for, like, reasons.
It turns out that the would-be murderer is the friendly local doctor, who has been courting Kit because he is madly in love with the Trelawny estate and wants to live there. He wants to live there so much, in fact, that before Kit came along he was encouraging the illegitimate fourteen-year-old possible heiress to fall in love with him, and then he accidentally fell in love with her back.
(Before Kit realizes that this is part of his evil plan to attach himself to the house, she thinks his crush on the fourteen-year-old is kind of sweet. It was the seventies. Clearly feelings about the age of consent were different then.)
Anyway! The doctor's crush doesn't stop him from trying to murder the girl when Kit comes along because, obvs., he doesn't want there to be any collateral heirs who might get in the way of him inheriting the estate full and intact. So naturally he has to kill the one surviving twin, Giles, except then Nicolas shows up suddenly, so there are two twins to get rid of, and Kit can tell them apart because Nicolas is a little shorter and slimmer than Giles...
Except it turns out that actually Giles was pretending to be Nicolas in order to confuse the doctor and foil his plot. How did he make himself shorter? you ask. Pah, who cares! The book is ending, it's time for Giles to ask Kit to marry him, even though they barely know each other. I think he just wants to keep Trelawny in the family, but this possibility doesn't occur to Kit, despite how suspicious she's been of Giles for the entire book.
I actually have a theory to make sense of all this! Both the death grip that the Trelawny family puts on everyone who comes in contact with them and the fact that Giles and Nicolas are fraternal but also sometimes identical and somehow Giles made himself look shorter and slimmer in order to look like Nicolas. Are you ready for this?
Fairy blood. Clearly the family intermarried with the fairies at some point in the past, and their fairy glamour attracts and repels humans in equal measure. The Trelawnys fill humans with fury and hatred and yet also a burning desire for their approval.
And, of course, even much-diluted fairy blood is enough to make fraternal twins seem identical at need.
And in celebration of Christmas, I am posting my review/crazy theories about Isabelle Holland's Trelawny, because this book is filled with sweet, sweet madness and I can think of no better gift than to share it with you.
The kicks off when the narrator, Kit, inherits Trelawny, her distant cousins' big fancy East Coast house. She spent a week there as a child and was scarred for life by the snobbish unkindness of her twin cousins, Giles and Nicolas, who are fraternal twins and don’t look alike at all, except most people think they're identical and sometimes they actually do seem to look alike and it's confusing.
So Kit goes to Trelawny and naturally discovers that one of the supposedly dead brothers is actually living in the attic (no Gothic house worth its salt is without a mysterious denizen in the attic), and also someone on the estate is trying to kill said supposedly dead brother for, like, reasons.
It turns out that the would-be murderer is the friendly local doctor, who has been courting Kit because he is madly in love with the Trelawny estate and wants to live there. He wants to live there so much, in fact, that before Kit came along he was encouraging the illegitimate fourteen-year-old possible heiress to fall in love with him, and then he accidentally fell in love with her back.
(Before Kit realizes that this is part of his evil plan to attach himself to the house, she thinks his crush on the fourteen-year-old is kind of sweet. It was the seventies. Clearly feelings about the age of consent were different then.)
Anyway! The doctor's crush doesn't stop him from trying to murder the girl when Kit comes along because, obvs., he doesn't want there to be any collateral heirs who might get in the way of him inheriting the estate full and intact. So naturally he has to kill the one surviving twin, Giles, except then Nicolas shows up suddenly, so there are two twins to get rid of, and Kit can tell them apart because Nicolas is a little shorter and slimmer than Giles...
Except it turns out that actually Giles was pretending to be Nicolas in order to confuse the doctor and foil his plot. How did he make himself shorter? you ask. Pah, who cares! The book is ending, it's time for Giles to ask Kit to marry him, even though they barely know each other. I think he just wants to keep Trelawny in the family, but this possibility doesn't occur to Kit, despite how suspicious she's been of Giles for the entire book.
I actually have a theory to make sense of all this! Both the death grip that the Trelawny family puts on everyone who comes in contact with them and the fact that Giles and Nicolas are fraternal but also sometimes identical and somehow Giles made himself look shorter and slimmer in order to look like Nicolas. Are you ready for this?
Fairy blood. Clearly the family intermarried with the fairies at some point in the past, and their fairy glamour attracts and repels humans in equal measure. The Trelawnys fill humans with fury and hatred and yet also a burning desire for their approval.
And, of course, even much-diluted fairy blood is enough to make fraternal twins seem identical at need.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-12-25 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-25 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-25 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-25 07:02 pm (UTC)Merry Christmas!
no subject
Date: 2014-12-25 08:30 pm (UTC)And I thiiiink the fairy glamour filter would actually slot quite neatly into the story, although I didn't come up with it till after I'd turned the book in at the library so I can't check.
Merry Christmas to you too!
no subject
Date: 2014-12-25 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-25 08:28 pm (UTC)"And then a giant house was built on a fairy mound, and weird shit happened" makes sense as an unspoken subtext in so many Gothics. It even explains Bertha Rochester! She went to dance with the fairies, and they took her wits away, and Rochester didn't realize that he needed to go all reverse-Tam Lin to get her back and instead locked her up in the attic. :(
no subject
Date: 2014-12-26 02:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-26 04:01 am (UTC)