Preliminaries: I just wanted to extend a quick apology for the dreadful amount of time I’ve taken to write this post. I have a pile of books I’ve been meaning to blog about, but life has gotten the better of me lately. I’m about to move across the country, which involves a hundred tiny details that I’ve been attempting to cross off the world’s longest to do list. Believe me when I tell you, though, that I’ve missed writing these posts as much or more as you’ve missed reading them. Things are finally starting to come together, so I hope to get back to a more regular posting schedule.
Backstory: This memoir was recommended to me by a loyal blog reader and good friend. She’s a bit of an Anglophile, so I immediately knew why this book appealed to her. She’s also a smart girl with great taste, though, so I figured I was in for a fun read.
One-Sentence Plot Summary: Stuck in Colorado with her hippie parents, Jerramy Fine has fantasized about being a real princess for as long as she can remember, and she works her way to England to try to make her dream come true–kissing the requisite number of frogs along the way.
Review: This book is both hilarious and ridiculous. Fine begins her memoir by her discovery at age six of Peter Mark Andrew Phillips, a member of the Windsor family about her age, whom she proceeds to fixate on for the next 300 pages and 20-odd years of her life. Every life move is designed to get her closer to her goal, from her choice of college, to her study abroad program, and her eventual (inevitable) relocation to England. Reading the book takes a certain amount of acceptance. When I first started reading, I wanted to find this girl, shake her, and yell, “SERIOUSLY???? You need a mental health evaluation!” But if you can get over that and approach the story with a light heart and an open mind, you’ll be thoroughly entertained by Fine’s attempts to weasel her way into the upper echelons of British society. Her writing is clever and readable; you’ll get sucked in quickly.
The only significant problem with this book is perhaps an inherent problem with memoirs: life is messy. What I mean is that a novel imbues every moment with significance and is able to resolve situations with a neat bow where appropriate and leave dramatic cliffhangers in other moments. A memoir is necessarily limited, however, by what actually happened, and sometimes things don’t work out the way a reader, or author, would wish. So there were several key moments in the book when I thought, “Aha! Things are coming together,” only to have them unravel again. But when I reminded myself of the genre, it actually made Fine far more relatable than the fictional heroines for whom everything works out perfectly. On a more minor note, the numerous footnotes, most of which contained fairly obvious information, were annoying, though largely ignorable.
Conclusion: An amusing (if slightly odd) quick read. It must be said, though; it’s the rare man who would appreciate it.
Available at: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s. Also available in Sony eBook and Kindle formats.
NB: You can find out more about the book and author at Fine’s blog.
