Friday, July 06, 2012

Blue Asylum - Kathy Hepinstall

Blue Asylum - Kathy Hepinstall (2012)

Iris is  the wife of a Virginia plantation owner, who in the middle of the civil war diobeys her husband, is taken to trial and then sent to a lunitic asylum on a sunny island.  Once there she forms friendships with a woman who eats everything, a depressed soldier and the superintendents confused young son.

I know the author has done a stellar job, when I can picture the characters and the scenery in my head, and I could visualise the  poor women in their big hooped dresses wilting away in the heat in their rooms with barred windows.

It is challenging as a reader, to think of a time when as a woman you had no say in what happened in your life.  That you might be married off to someone your family approved of, and that would then make you the property of your husband, and that you may have no say in what goes on around you.  You can't help but feel for Iris, and how trapped she was, and how hopeless she feels being sent away.

A 4/5 - I am so glad that I found this book on my library shelf.


1 comment:

Leanne said...

Drat not on audiblt.com - just checked.
Love Leanne