"I want to keep you innocent. I want to keep you beautiful."

books:


	• Sleep, Pale Sister (P.S.) Joanne Harris Harper Perennial, 2005 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Engrossing Fantasy

I must say, this was one of the best books I've read in a long time. It starts off like a typical historical novel, but soon the story has you enmeshed with more twists and alternate realities! The story was a true cloud of drug induced confusion, and it is a refreshing change from so many novels published today. Plus, the story line is never predictable. I highly recommend this book!

A Wonderfully Ethereal Novel

Effie is a child muse to painter Henry Chester, a religiously devout, yet unpiously checkered man who takes her as his wife and molds her into his pure, innocent, flawless, and unsensual doll of a woman. Growing up in the dysfunctional bubble of Henry's existence, Effie is instructed to quell all creative endeavors, intellectual or otherwise in the name of what is the right and "proper" way for a woman to behave. All the while she is in a laudanum-induced fog forced upon her by her hysteric husband. It is only when Effie is encountered by the sly, womanizing sweet-talker Mose and the sensual, independent Fanny Miller that she begins to realize the extent of her own passion and the extremity of her current, suffocating oppression. Their presence in the novel serves as a catalyst to her escape from her "lap dog" lifestyle and the beginning of her stand against her increasingly unstable husband. Between the painfully growing tension and the mysterious and intriguing laudanum-induced haze, the ambience throughout the novel's course is ethereal, leaving readers feelings as if they too are under the drug's spell.

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"I want to keep you innocent. I want to keep you beautiful."

What seems at first a man's Svengali-like obsession with a pure young woman and another man's seduction that female proves to be but a part of a clever plot that twists and turns in unexpected ways, producing a darkly gothic ambiance that reeks of menace. At the center of everyone's fascination is the ethereal Effie, a frail girl with streaming white-blonde hair, who becomes the singular model for artist Henry Paul Chester. In the Victorian fashion, Chester makes clear moral distinctions, his life well-ordered and constricted by society's tenets, his considerable dark side kept well-disguised. Many years her senior, Chester marries the unassuming Effie, but struggles to maintain the ideal of purity with his wife, exorcised when she turns to him with passion on their wedding night. Repulsed, Chester believes his wife is tainted, ruined beneath the surface of her innocence. To assuage his own needs, Chester frequents a local bawdy house, where he is consistently drawn to a nubile virgin, Marti, provided by the madam, Fanny Miller.

Determined to maintain the façade he requires for emotional equilibrium, Chester doses his wife liberally with laudanum to assure her compliance with his wishes and shelter her from the outside world. Henry has a showing to introduce his work to the public; into this venue steps a roué, Moses Zachary Harper, who is immediately fascinated by Effie, her shy modesty a drug to his jaded senses. Much to Moses' surprise, his seduction is eagerly embraced, Effie desperate to taste the forbidden fruit he offers, her young life circumscribed by Chester's rigid control. Even Moses is out of his depth, anticipating a short, satisfying dalliance, but pulled into an erotic affair that both exceeds his expectations and frustrates his natural inclination to dominate. Manipulating behind the scenes is Fanny Miller, who has plans of her own for Effie and Moses, among them a long-awaited revenge that will not be denied. Once Effie is introduced to Fannie, the die is cast.

What ensues is a complicated brew of obsession, revenge, guilt and the loss of innocence, all laced with increasing draughts of laudanum and chloral hydrate. While Effie drifts through her days and deceptive nights in a drug-filled fugue, Henry is beset with guilt and increasing paranoia, relieved only by furtive doses of chloral hydrate. Fantasy and reality merge as the final act begins, the tortured souls tearing at one another with artifice and deception. In true gothic fashion, the pages are laced with evil intentions, even Effie unrecognizable in the hands of a master. A pawn to Henry, Moses and Fanny, Effie is the key to all, the coin of a terrible misdeed. Henry, the dark master, is ultimately destroyed by his damaged soul, dissembling to the end to avoid the consequences of his sick and twisted existence. Harris defines the powerful subconscious of her characters, a murky underworld of sexual dysfunction and the callous destruction of a defenseless young woman. In true Victorian fashion, the morality play self-destructs, hurling the protagonists into their just rewards. Luan Gaines/2007.

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A Dreamy Drug of a Book!

I bought this book on the advice of a member of my Tarot group. She said that there were several instances of Tarot readings and such. I'm very grateful that she recommended it because it was a fabulous read!

"Sleep, Pale Sister" is a dreamy drug of a book, an ethereally written Gothic sort of ghost story that had me enthralled for several late nights. Magic, Tarot readings and a nice touch of the supernatural add yummy cayenne to this unique story of the wealthy artist, Henry Chester, and his young model, Effie, who becomes his wife at the tender age of 17, although she became his model many years before. Though Henry keeps Effie drugged with laudanum, she manages to find a cad of a lover in Moses Harper, a rival carpetbagger of a painter who introduces Effie to Fannie Miller, the occult madam of a brothel that Henry visits every Thursday. The characters are excellent as is the engaging plot.

I won't give away any more of the plot, but let me just warn you that this book is not for the faint of heart. Try it, you might like it!!!

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

Before the sweet delight of Chocolat, before the heady concoction that is Blackberry Wine, and before the tart pleasures of Five Quarters of the Orange, bestselling author Joanne Harris wrote Sleep, Pale Sister -- a gothic tourde-force that recalls the powerfully dark sensibility of her novel Holy Fools.

Originally published in 1994 -- and never before available in the United States -- Sleep, Pale Sister is a hypnotically atmospheric story set in nineteenth century London. When puritanical artist Henry Chester sees delicate child beauty Effie, he makes her his favorite model and, before long, his bride. But Henry, volatile and repressed, is in love with an ideal. Passive, docile, and asexual, the woman he projects onto Effie is far from the woman she really is. And when Effie begins to discover the murderous depths of Henry's hypocrisy, her latent passion will rise to the surface.

Sleep, Pale Sister combines the ethereal beauty of a Pre-Raphaelite painting with a chilling high gothic tale and is a testament to Harris's brimming cornucopia of talents.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

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