Hester - Laurie Lico Albanese

Author: Laurie Lico Albanese

Narrator: Saskia Maarleveld

Genre: Historical Fiction

Rating: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: Supposedly a story that sheds light on the “real inspiration” behind Hester Prynne of ‘The Scarlet Letter’. Great potential, shoddy execution. Farfetched in its reach, too neat in its ending. This is an outlier review.

Story Synopsis:

1829. Isobel Gamble is a nineteen-year-old Scottish seamstress who has newly landed in “The New World” along with her older husband Edward. Edward, an apothecary who has gambled his way into trouble, seeks a fresh start and soon after their arrival, he joins a departing ship as a “doctor”, leaving Isobel behind alone to fend for herself. Penniless, Isobel decides to make use of her talent with embroidery to survive.

When she meets young Nathaniel Hawthorne, there is an instant connection. Hawthorne seems to be battling with the demons of his family’s past, and is a recluse, but he can’t resist Isobel. How will this ill-matched relationship work? If you have read ‘The Scarlet Letter’, you can take a guess and you wont be wrong.

The story comes to us mostly in the first person perspective of Isobel.

✔ The book starts off well and I was hooked until about one-fourth the way in.

❌ After this point, the story becomes stuck in a quagmire of repetition, with abrupt plot changes that come out of nowhere. The ending ties things too neatly and forcibly establishes the final connection with ‘The Scarlet Letter’. It was overdone.

✔ Isobel is portrayed as a strong and resourceful young woman who doesn’t resort to desperate crying when she discovers her husband has left her alone and penniless. She uses her skills in the best way she can and is actually proud of her talent rather than faking humility. She is shown to be a very practical person in her approach to her work.

❌ Contrarily, Isobel has neither judgement skills nor pragmatism in her personal life. She marries and falls in love for the silliest of reasons and continues to pine for Hawthorne even after it is clear how their relationship is going.

✔ Isobel’s character experiences synesthesia, whereby she associates letters and sounds with colours. Thus there is focus on her unusual synesthetic abilities and how it enriches as well as impairs her work. Through this ability, there is also an indirect reference to the fae world and how it may/may not guide Isobel.

❌ This focus gets repetitive after a while. Even after it is clearly established how synaesthesia works in Isobel’s life, we keep getting detailed descriptions of it. The magical fae elements remain just a potential that are ignored for most of the narrative.

✔ Isobel is shown not just as practical but also as a woman with an empathetic heart. She fights against the bias against her as an “outsider” (Doubt #1: Evidently, being a Scottish in the US was almost as bad as being a Black slave. Can someone confirm if this was a fact? I couldn’t find anything to substantiate this claim.); she has “slave” friends and does her best to help them when she can and even treats them as equals; she doesn’t understand why people had slaves.

❌ In other words, Isobel is too “woke” for her time. Her portrayal seemed very unrealistic.

(Doubt #2: Can someone also please help me understand: if Isobel is poor and viewed as an outsider, how is she invited to all these fancy gatherings with the elite?)

✔ The book is written in dual timeline, with the other timeline going two hundred years back to Isobel’s ancestor, also named Isobel. This Isobel stood trial as a witch and her experiences form this timeline. Her story is intriguing and stresses on how barbaric the belief system of that age was.

❌ I have no idea why this timeline was necessary in this book. How were the stories of the two Isobels relevant to each other except that one was an ancestor of the other and both apparently had the same synesthetic abilities? There was absolutely no connection between the events of the 17th centry with those in the 19th century. It seemed like a way of extending the book to a respectable length of 300+ pages. The back and forth between the timelines also breaks the flow on the “contemporary” timeline of the 1829, making the narration very choppy.

✔ This is marketed as the story behind Hester Prynne. There are thus many nods to the classic, including a repeated mention of the scarlet A, and in the circumstances of Isobel’s life that mimic that of Hester Prynne to a great extent. Knowing the original classic isn’t necessary to get this story, but it will make you appreciate the links better.

❌ The way in which the story is written—Isobel’s first person that continues even after Hawthorne goes his separate way—makes the entire idea of Isobel’s being the “inspiration for Hester” implausible. Moreover, I did not appreciate the portrayal of author Nathaniel Hawthorne in this work. It's not like I'm a fan of Hawthorne but portraying his character in a negative way seemed a bit disrespectful. In realy life, he seems to be an interesting person with a strong opinion on morality and social constructs. In this book though, he is depicted as a weak-willed character who cannot escape his past and manipulates Isobel as per his need. I don’t mind real people being inserted in fiction but the portrayal must be true to their original personality.

✔ There is a wide range of “important” themes in the story: slavery, slave hunts, witch hunts both in Salem and in England, women empowerment, male domination, racial discrimination, subservience of wives in a marriage, adultery, pre-marital pregnancy, immigrant experiences, and so on.

❌ Wasn’t it just supposed to be about Hester Prynne? Why so many other, irrelevant topics?

(On an aside: Weren’t Black people called the N word in that era? If the narration had to be faithful to the time, it had to use the slur, even if the word is inappropriate today. How and why are they being called ‘Blacks”?)

✔ There are some memorable secondary characters though their role is quite minor in the overall story.

❌ The overall character development is very flat. You barely get to see any side of Isobel other than her feelings for Nathaniel and her talent with the needle. Nathaniel’s character changes direction as per the whim and fancy of the author. The connection between Hawthorne and Isobel seems shallow; you barely feel their emotions beyond a surface level.

✔ I love the cover. It incorporates the Scarlet A as well as Isobel’s embroidery skills.

The audiobook experience:

The audiobook, clocking at almost ten hours, was a good way of getting through this book because I just might have DNFed or skimmed through it otherwise. Narrator Saskia Maarleveld gets the pulse of the characters and reads them well. At the same time, there are plenty of flashbacks in the story. Though these are made clear by the mention of the year at the start, they are still tricky as the main character is of the same name in both the timelines (though one is in third person and the other in first person). If you are the kind of listener who gets confused easily, better opt to read this if you want to give it a go.

Basically, I liked the idea behind the novel but am not at all impressed with its execution. It reaches much beyond it ought to have attempted, vilifies an author without any justification, and tries too hard to create social awareness though the main plot didn’t need most of those subthemes.

This might work well for those who don’t mind OTT historical drama that spouts social commentary at regular intervals. The heroine having synesthesia is definitely a USP. If you pick this up, read it with your logic kept aside. I forgot to do so.

My thanks to St. Martin's Press for the DRC, Macmillan Audio for the ALC and NetGalley for the opportunity to read “Hester”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook.