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Summary
Summary
I would like to make myself the heroine of this story and my character to be noble--an innocent victim led astray. But alas, sir, I would be lying...
In prison, accused of murder, Tully Truegood begins to write her life story. A story that takes her from a young girl in the backstreets of 18th century London to her stepmother Queenie's Fairy House--a place where decadent excess is a must...
Trained by Queenie to become a courtesan, and by Mr. Crease--a magician who sees that Tully holds similar special powers to his own--Tully soon becomes the talk of the town.
But as Tully goes on a journey of sexual awakening, she falls in love with one of her clients and the pleasure soon turns to pain. Especially when the estranged husband she was forced to marry by her father suddenly seeks her out. Now Tully is awaiting her trial for murder, for which she expects to hang...and her only chance of survival is to get her story to the one person who might be able to help her.
Delaney's incredible tale of a young woman's journey out of the depths of despair is shocking, haunting and evocative. Part historical fiction and part magical realism, this juicy, jaw-dropping story will linger long after the last page is turned.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this page-turning tale of one woman's quest for happiness, Delaney takes readers to 18th-century London, opening with a framing scene in which Tully Truegood, a courtesan with magical powers, awaits trial for a murdering her husband. In the first person, Tully details her difficult upbringing with her dreadful father, who treats Tully as more of a servant than a daughter as she is forced to clean up after her father's drunken friends. Mr. Truegood further proves his evil nature when he forces her to marry when she is only 12. As Tully grows older and her absent husband leaves her without money, she meets Mr. Crease, who recognizes her powers, and Queenie, who runs a brothel and grooms Tully to become her latest courtesan. Tully has the misfortune to fall in love with Avery Fitzjohn, who makes love to her and then leaves her to marry a French heiress in order to save his destitute family. When Tully finds a new protector in Lord Barbeau, she learns about her power as a woman and her fortitude to make her way in the world. Despite being charged with the murder of her husband, Tully continues to hope that she will avoid being hanged. Delaney's novel is rich with historical detail, eroticism, and magic. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
A sexual odyssey across 18th-century London has shades of Sarah Waters and the Brothers Grimm I have long believed that there is a strong link between the world of childhood imagination and that of adult erotic love. Bear with me on this one. When you're a child, the realms you create in your head feel so vivid that they're often more electrifying than anything experienced in the everyday. Like Peter Pan, children take refuge in their own Neverlands and, fearing this avenue of magical escape will be lost to them, often dread growing up. When Pan steals the hidden kiss from Mrs Darling's mouth it's his revenge on the grown-up, sexually awakened world, which robs children of flight.At adolescence the enchanted forest begins to fade. But, bit by bit, an equally compelling world opens up in its place: the realm of the erotic imagination. To become passionately entangled with another human -- or even to think about it in depth -- involves a similarly highly charged, fantasy world: an enchanted glade that no one, except the beloved, can enter with you. There is a familiar enraptured sense of being overwhelmed by the narrative in your head. Angela Carter recognised this, which is why her sexualised updates of familiar fairy stories in The Bloody Chamber made so much sense. It's also true that many of the best children's writers explore the burgeoning sexuality that's a key part of the teen years. So, it seems entirely logical that Carnegie medal winner Sally Gardner has made the bold decision to write an erotic novel for adults, under the pen name Wray Delaney. An Almond for a Parrot takes its title from a tract by the Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe, but is more obviously inspired by Daniel Defoe and John Cleland. In this instance, thankfully, the saucy heroine, Tully Truegood, is very much the product of a woman's sensibility. The narrative opens in Newgate prison, 1756, where a pregnant Tully is being held for attempted murder. She tells the reader: "This whore is gallows-bound." The rest of the novel is a meandering, thrills-and-spills-filled explanation of how Tully arrived at such a predicament. There are shades of Sarah Waters ' Victorian novels in the vivid telling of this sexual odyssey, but the fantastical elements owe much to magic realism and the Brothers Grimm. Tully has uncanny talents, including a "pearl hand" (gentlemen swoon at its touch), the ability to see dead people and, more perturbingly, to enable others to see ghosts, too. The parrot of the title is a deceased bird in a cage -- a metaphor for the bejewelled courtesan that Tully becomes -- which she learns to resurrect to bursts of flight. A far darker and persistent vision is the child Pretty Poppet, whose every utterance is a stark warning of the perils of the sex trade. Rarely have Eros and Thantos been so aptly coupled. There are two tales here. The first involves Tully's progress from innocent to willing voluptuary, to woman of means and then felon. The second concerns her quest to discover the true identity of her husband. She is married, aged 12, at the dead of night in the Fleet prison to a masked young gentleman, at the instigation of her debt-ridden father. (A preface to the novel explains how "dissolute clergymen" would perform such services "at a minute's notice.") The reader infers that Captain Truegood has been offered a great sum for the match, but we have no idea why until the book's end. Tully is then kept prisoner in her widower father's home in Cheapside until the age of 16, when the retired sea captain suddenly acquires a glamorous new wife, Queenie, and two stepdaughters, voluptuous Hope and handsome Mercy. The marriage vaporises, like one of Tully's ghosts, but it marks the start of her real life and education. The sex scenes revel in their period parlance -- there are more mounds and maypoles than on any village green Before you can say "strumpet!" she has been won by a young rake in a game of cards and dispatched across London to the Fairy House in Lincoln's Inn Square, a mansion that will shortly host its opening night as London's most glittering brothel. There the one-legged conjurer Mr Crease, whose "painted" eyes tattooed on his eyelids allow him to see what others can't, recognises Tully's unique talents. For starters, she can see his dead fortune-telling dog, Shadow, trotting behind him. Crease recruits Tully to assist him in the brothel's enchanted entertainments: "'Come,' he said. 'Let us dazzle London.'" This is not a novel you read for its plot, so much as for its detours and set pieces, such as the resurrection of the dead during Tully's trial. Chapters often start with exotic recipes, such as "Virgin eggs" or "Pike in the form of a dolphin". It's a rococo affair, with Scheherazade-like diversions, much cross-dressing and rags-to-riches scenarios. But any student of 18th-century literature will be familiar with a shaggy harlot story. The sex scenes are plentiful, unabashed and delivered in period parlance. Tully's pleasure in her awakening body and ability to pleasure others is infectious. By the end of this novel you will have glimpsed more mounds and maypoles than on any village green, while Delaney's portrait of gossipy, decadent coffee house London is a pleasure in itself. Historians estimate that one in five women worked as prostitutes in 18th-century London. As Tully says to a vindictive parson: "Women have no money in their own right and many are subjected to the tyranny and cruelty of neglectful fathers and husbands. If a woman leaves this so-called protection, she finds the road to virtue closed to her by poverty and necessity. Her body is the only currency she possesses." Delaney takes care to outline the abuse, assault, disease and abandonment that are also often the courtesan's lot. This novel is, above all, an irresistible erotic fairytale. Those who know Gardner's YA novel Tinder (based on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Tinderbox") will marvel again at the soaring flights of her imagination. When Mr Crease asks Tully where she thinks her power to call the dead resides, she has no answer. He tells her: "It comes from within. You believed in Shadow and the power of that belief pulled his ghost through, made him visible to others." Which seems as good an explanation of the art of storytelling as any I've yet heard. - Rowan Pelling.
Booklist Review
Tully Truegood was born in the backstreets of eighteenth-century London. Abandoned by her father, Tully becomes a courtesan and later falls in love with a client. She is now awaiting trial for murder, where she expects to be found guilty and hanged. She is writing a letter about her life, and what led to her being on trial for murder, to the only man she has ever loved. The story line focuses on major events that shaped Tully's life, which leads to some jumping around on the timeline, which is, at times, difficult to follow. And this remains entirely her story: Other characters are not as developed as they could be; information to explain character motivations is dropped; and background is very limited. This can affect the tone of the book, as it makes it hard to relate and understand why characters do what they do. Still, as historical fiction with elements of fantasy (Tully sees and interacts with ghosts), this could appeal to readers of both genres.--Troemel, Victoria Copyright 2017 Booklist
Library Journal Review
As the only child of a drunken, widowed brick merchant Tully Truegood is left to raise herself; her only human contact is the cook-small wonder that a solitary, imaginative child becomes fanciful. Even Tully's sudden marriage to a masked stranger at age 12 brings no companionship as her "husband" is immediately sent to sea and, as the cook prophesies, with any luck Tully will be a widow before she ever sees him again. This gray existence ends abruptly with her father's second marriage, bringing vivid life and love in the form of a colorful, ebullient stepmother and two intriguing stepsisters who vanish as quickly as they come, only to reappear in mysterious circumstances as owners of Georgian London's premier brothel. There Tully is trained as a courtesan; a magician recognizing her otherworldly gifts, turns her into the toast of London, pursued by a series of men who bring love, enlightenment, degradation, and confinement in Newgate Prison on charges of murder. VERDICT This richly imagined, bawdy, and beautifully written debut is Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders with a touch of magical realism, an intricately crafted mystery, romance, and adventure in one superb package.--Cynthia Johnson, formerly with Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, MA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.