- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Anchor; Reprint edition
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0307388050
- ISBN-13: 978-0307388056
- Product Dimensions: 13.2 x 1.5 x 20.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 159 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
`It was a dark and stormy night in Elizabethan England ...',
By J. Cameron-Smith "Expect the Unexpected" (ACT, Australia) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Reavers (Paperback)
Spoiled, arrogant, filthy rich and breathtakingly beautiful, the young Lady Godiva Dacre is exiled from the court of Good Queen Bess [who can't abide red-haired competition] to her lonely estate in distant Cumberland. Poor Godiva. The turbulent Scottish border is no safe place for an Elizabethan heiress: ruthless reivers; black-mailing ruffians; fiendish Spanish plotters intent on regime change. What's a girl to do? She has no-one but Kylie, her blonde school chum. Or does she? What about the dashing highwayman, and that rugged English superman? Hmmm.From its taut [!] opening sentence [over300 words worth] this [moral] tale is a totally frivolous nonsense. It is, as George MacDonald Fraser firmly stated in his foreword - completely over the top and written for the fun of it. If you can't read it in the same vein, then pass it by. I think that George MacDonald Fraser had a lot of fun writing this book (his last) and I certainly had a lot of fun reading it, notwithstanding my concerns about Frey Bentos and the European Union. Perhaps the last word belongs to the author's statement from the foreword: `If we seem to treat history lightly in this regard, that is not to say we are false to it; mad fancy may go hand in hand with sober fact, as long as the two remain distinct.' Indeed. Jennifer Cameron-Smith
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
3.9 out of 5 stars (17 customer reviews) 20 of 21 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Funny, but not his best,
By Richard Quarles "Rich Quarles" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Reavers (Hardcover)
The Reavers is very much in the style of Fraser's "Pyrates" but, in my opinion, not as successful. For those of you more familiar with the Flashman books, both The Reavers and Pyrates are more over-the-top, more fantastic, and the narrator is constantly interjecting with a wink and a nudge.Pyrates is probably my all-time favorite Fraser novel-- but The Reavers felt more like a rehash. Even so, I definitely enjoyed it. If you haven't read Pyrates yet, I'd recommend reading it instead. 12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Imagine an Explosion in the Library . . .,
By T. Berner - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Reavers (Paperback)
. . . and a volume of SJ Perelman smashes through the collected works of Sir Walter Scott and takes a corner off a Harry Potter tome before plunging into a history of Hollywood swashbucklers. That will give you a flavor of the late great George MacDonald Fraser's last work.Fraser wrote five kinds of books in his illustrious career. There were his peerless Flashman books, of course. There were his solid histories - A Hollywood History of the World remains the best and most engaging study of the subject matter ever written. There were his two volumes of memoirs - Quartered Safe Out Here is easily one of the five best firsthand accounts of World War II, a classic which should be on every shelf of military history for the next millenium. There was Fraser's other fiction, ranging from the comic McAuslan novels to the dark and brooding Candlemass Road. Then there were his two nonsense novels: Pyrates and this, his valedictory novel. Personally, I've never cared for this sort of humor. It is too loose, too many word plays, no structure to hold on to. I've never seen the point of the Marx Brothers or Perelman. Nevertheless, this is a superior example of this sort of fiction and I found myself laughing out loud far more often than I ever had while watching Duck Soup or reading Westward Ho! And as someone who read the first, newly published Flashman in high school, I have received a lifetime of enjoyment from the author. If as his last work, he chose to write a book which gave him the undoubted pleasure The Reavers gave him, then I say, bravo, Mr. Fraser. Now if only his publisher can convince Fraser's daughter - a fine writer in her own right - to resume the Flashman novels, all will be well in the world. The literary world, at any rate. 6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Farcical Farewell,
By A. Ross - Published on Amazon.com
Like most others who will pick up this final book from Fraser, I am a longtime devotee of his Flashman series. And the sheer pleasure of reading that series has driven me to seek out and read most of his other fiction and non-fiction over the years (including this book's ancestor, The Pyrates). Of these twenty or so books, this one is clearly the silliest of the lot, and anyone picking it up should be ready for a pretty heavy dose of wink-wink, nudge-nudge.The book is essentially a farcical rewriting of his earlier novel, The Candlemass Road, complete with many of the same characters and situations. The story is set in the same 16th-century Scottish/English borderlands that Fraser wrote a history of under the title The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers. It concerns a Spanish plot to kidnap King James and replace him with an impostor (and if that sounds familiar, it's because Fraser used the device in Royal Flash). Seeking to foil this plot are an Elizabethan secret agent, a Scottish highwayman, a stunning English noblewoman, and her saucy sidekick. If this sounds like a delightful historical thriller, well, be warned that Fraser wrote this one with his tongue even more firmly planted in cheek than usual. It brims with modern pop culture references, anachronisms, authorial asides, and over-the-top renderings of thick Scots dialect. None of these bothered me, but plenty of other readers seemed to find some or all of these elements annoying. However, in the preface, Fraser is pretty clear that the book was primarily written to amuse himself, so I'm willing to go along with the ride. Especially since it's the last we're likely to get from such a great storyteller. (Unless, that is, a literary executor manages to uncover one last packet of Flashman adventures....) Ultimately, a pretty minor and self-derivative work from a very entertaining writer. If approached in the right frame of mind, it should provide a few hours of very light entertainment, and possibly spur the reader to check out some of the true history of the setting. |
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
