The Bride's Farewell
The Age
Saturday September 5, 2009
The Bride's Farewell Meg Rosoff Puffin, $19.95 PELL Ridley is a country preacher's daughter. She has watched her mother condemned to the difficult fate of having far too many children and decides, on the eve of her own wedding, to escape. Pell is good with horses and she gallops off, though at the last minute she is forced to take her mute younger brother Bean along with her. Pell's intention is to ride to Salisbury Fair and find work with the horses she loves, but fate has other intentions. An adventure involving gypsies and poachers and wanderers awaits, and as misfortune strikes, Pell misses her home and the lover she left behind. Meg Rosoff's The Bride's Farewell is nominally set in the mid-19th century, although the novel is slight on detail, striving for an ethereal, fairytale-like quality. This slightness, however, infects the narrative, with not much happening, and what does happen doesn't resonate. Horse-mad teenage girls might enjoy the novel but it isn't sufficiently complex or realistic to fully divert a more mature audience.
© 2009 The Age