Flight into Fantasy

Title: Tipping the Velvet
Author: Sarah Waters
Genre: historical fiction
Source: Bookshare
Reason for Reading: I’d actually been wanting to read this for a while, but recently Kailana and Nymeth were discussing the awesomeness of the author on Twitter and I decided I needed to check her out and see if the hype was true.
Synopsis from Fictionwise, where you can buy this book for a whopping $16 in ebook form, if you’re a masochist and really want to pay that much):

“Lavishly crammed with the songs, smells, and costumes of late Victorian England” (The Daily Telegraph), this delicious, steamy debut novel chronicles the adventures of Nan King, who begins life as an oyster girl in the provincial seaside town of Whitstable and whose fortunes are forever changed when she falls in love with a cross-dressing music-hall singer named Miss Kitty Butler. When Kitty is called up to London for an engagement on “Grease Paint Avenue, ” Nan follows as her dresser and secret lover, and, soon after, dons trousers herself and joins the act. In time, Kitty breaks her heart, and Nan assumes the guise of butch roue to commence her own thrilling and varied sexual education-a sort of Moll Flanders in drag-finally finding friendship and true love in the most unexpected places. Drawing comparison to the work of Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters’s novel is a feast for the senses-an erotic, lushly detailed historical novel that bursts with life and dazzlingly casts the turn of the century in a different light.

My Thoughts: This book was absolutely beautiful. The writing was lovely, and the voice felt authentic. I had to check the copyright date to make sure the book hadn’t actually been written in 1898, because the voice felt very old-world-y and Victorian. Waters takes her time to introduce us to the characters in Nan’s life, and in the end they all felt real to me. Nan especially is quite likeable, and I enjoyed getting to know her over the course of the story and watching her grow from a shy, awkward girl to a confident and out (at least as out as the times would allow) lesbian. Horrible things happen to her along the way, and she makes some decisions that were hard for me to accept as a reader. (At one time she lives as a kept woman with a rich older widow, and for most of that section I really wanted to smack her hard and make her get out of that particular situation.) But in the end, she’s a stronger and wiser person with a definite sense of who she is and what she wants out of life.

One of the things that most surprised me about this book was how plentiful and how graphic the sex was. This, of course, doesn’t bother me, as long-time readers can attest, but for a novel that felt fairly literary, I was kind of surprised by some of the detail. Again, though, Waters does a good job of imbuing all of the sex Nan gets to have with genuine emotion. It all served its purpose, and some of it was raunchy and dirty while some of it was sweet and tender and some was furtive and hesitating.

While this book is not a romance, I think many romance readers would like it. The historical detail is lush and vibrant, and there’s a lot of character growth, and in the end, the courtship between Nan and the woman she ends up with is lovely, and the two of them together left a smile on my face.

Final Thoughts: I adored this book. Usually, I am quick to find flaws and little things that bothered me, but this book was damn near a perfect read. I highly recommend it for lovers of historical fiction, and think it would be a great book for people wanting to read more GLBT fiction.

Final Grade: A

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P.S. They made this book into a miniseries. I’m not a big TV watcher, but I have to admit this would be fun to see.