Will o'the Glen on Books

I was hesitant to write a review of  Becoming Duchess Goldblatt , because, in all honesty, I was uncertain that I could do justice to this coruscant jewel of a book, which is equal parts autobiography and the history of a whimsical, but meaningful, social-media phenomenon. For readers who are unaware of the backstory, Duchess Goldblatt is the fictional persona behind a pseudonymous Twitter account, cast as an 80-ish author of world renown, a self-described great beauty, once a resident of the real town of Klein, Texas, and now abiding in the fictional ( and appropriately fanciful ) town of Crooked Path, New York. In real life, however, the mind behind the Duchess is that of a woman, whose real identity is a closely-held secret, who created the Duchess alter-ego as an escape ( dare I say it ) from her life’s unfolding tragedies. Shaped by a dark childhood, with a distant mother who quite frankly disliked her, an ineffectual father whose grounding in a seminary education car...

( On hearing that the second book in the planned Lost Queen  trilogy, The Forgotten Kingdom,  was due to be released in September, I felt that I owed it to the reading public to revisit my review of the first book, The Lost Queen , from January 2019—as a warning. ) A former acquisitions editor at Random House and Penguin before leaving to write her first book, Faery Tale: One Woman’s Search for Enchantment in a Modern World, Signe Pike has, in The Lost Queen , intertwined a storyline with a vague connection to Arthurian legend with a teenage girl’s romantic fantasy of a mystical Celtic queen. The Lost Queen  has been compared to both the Outlander saga and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon , and is supposedly based on historical information positing a 6th-century Brythonic poet/sage who is the basis for the Merlin character of Arthurian legend and the misty legend of a near-mythical queen of the same era. Unfortunately, the book bears a stronger resembla...