Comments on: Book Review: The Actor and the Housewife

By: MoJo

MoJo — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:48:54 +0000

Heathen.

By: Wm Morris

Wm Morris — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:47:20 +0000

Yep. I prefer the term Postum table, though. That’s what we use in our house. 😉

By: MoJo

MoJo — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 19:28:27 +0000

I don’t think you had to have read Byuck to get it. I heard it just a couple of years ago, used in Relief Society by a woman who had issues with “coffee cake,” too. It could just be complete and total immersion into Mormon culture, but maybe going to BYU is a component.

Wm., did you get “hot chocolate table”?

By: Th.

Th. — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 04:30:55 +0000

If only my book were in print and Wm could possibly decipher that cryptic comment….

By: MoJo

MoJo — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:12:52 +0000

Three words: “hot chocolate table”

By: Wm Morris

Wm Morris — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:10:30 +0000

The more I think about the “edges” in Angel Falling Softly vs. Twilight and The Actor and the Housewife, the more confused I get.

By: MoJo

MoJo — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:43:22 +0000

Also: wow is the Mormonism glossed over.

I thought it was barely adequate, but served the book, such as it was. As you know, I want to see our culture and jargon out there for public consumption and familiarity/comfort (a la Catholic/Jewish vocabulary and most customs). This wasn’t the book that’d do that, for sure.

I sent my copy to Th., although I’m not sure he’s that eager to delve into it.

I haven’t read Austenland. I’m not a fangirl, for one thing, and genre romance bloglandia is lousy with Austen and has been for the last two years. I’m sick of her and I’ve only ever read Pride and Prejudice. Once. Believe me, this isn’t just a Mormon-woman thing. Alas.

where you could balance the Hawt Husband vs. the Witty Brit

Exactly. There were about 6 different things she could’ve done to make it a wonderful novel, and she didn’t do ANY of them.

down-note ending of this novel

Thing is, it came across to me as a happy-happy-joy-joy two-hour Youth Conference fast-and-testimony meeting, all that religious ecstasy and orgasmic righteousness.

Romance Mormon Style

*sobs*

And besides, “subversive” is frowned upon. Muchly. It’s that “how close to the edge/the farther back from the edge the better” pseudodoctrine.

By: Wm Morris

Wm Morris — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:32:06 +0000

Just finished this earlier in the evening. Here’s the thing: if you could take some of the angst and down-note ending of this novel and graft it on to Austenland, you’d have a pretty good, interesting, subversive novel. The problem with Austenland is that the heroine in the end gets Darcy and succumbs to his weak sauce pleas (and in a chase to the airport scene). If we’d taken elements to the Felix/Becky ending and used it there instead, then Austenland would have been a devastating take down of Romance Mormon Style or rather that whole thing so many Mormon women seem to have with Jane Austen. Instead, we get the happy ending where the heroine never really has to give up her hope of The Perfect Man. Not really.

On the other hand, as you’ve documented, The Actor and the Housewife is rife with problems (one of the major ones being that the Actor gets all the best lines and the husband gets non-explicit, vaguely asserted sex — if there was ever the time for a bit more explicitness, it’s with this novel where you could balance the Hawt Husband vs. the Witty Brit) and so the ending is just about as weird and anticlimactic as you can get and anticlimactic would have been good if the had been more depth to the characters.

Also: wow is the Mormonism glossed over.

By: Kate R

Kate R — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:20:39 +0000

Awww BUGGER. I like Shannon Hale. I got a big kick out of her book Austenland and I like her YA fantasies too.

Damn damn damn. But this sounds beyond the pale.

By: JenB

JenB — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:08:50 +0000

WOW. I don’t even know how you made it through the whole book. I’d have had it soaking in the fish tank by the third chapter.

I wonder though…maybe it still does work for a woman of faith.

[Disclosure: I was raised in an ultra-conservative Southern evangelical Christian home. I’m no longer part of a congregation, but my upbringing is still very much a part of me today. While LDS and my denomination differ greatly in specific theology, many of the attitudes and practices are historically similar.]

Maybe it’s deeper than you think. I obviously haven’t read the book and now I never will, but I think deep down it does carry a very old, very deeply ingrained message of punishment for sins. Not punishment for the man, mind you (they never get punished, you know), but a very profound punishment for the woman. She did cheat on her husband emotionally. She did carry a torch for another man while her husband needed her.

So the lack of sparks and connection with the new guy is a direct result of her SKANKY BAD GIRL WHORING (!!!!!!!) when her husband was alive.

And the woman shall forever live in shame and misery because she dared to humiliate a man. The end.