She Rises
Written by Kate Worsley
Narrated by Clare Corbett, Multiple Narrators and Thomas Judd
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Kate Worsley
Kate Worsley was born in Preston, Lancashire, and studied English at University College London. She has worked variously as a journalist, a massage practitioner and follow-spot operator, and has an MA in Creative Writing (Novels) from City University London. She Rises, her first novel, was published to critical acclaim and won the HWA Debut Crown for New Historical Fiction. She now lives on the Essex coast.
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Reviews for She Rises
46 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/53 stars only for the plot twist, the rest was okay
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5She Rises is a book that draws you in from the very first sentence. Much like the young protagonist, Luke, you feel a touch off center and confused at first but as you follow his story and that of the second character, Louise. The two stories get told side by side until it all comes together in a most surprising way - no spoilers from me!Each story is compelling with richly drawn characters and plots that slowly draw towards each other. Ms. Worsley has a way with descriptive prose; I don't know if she ever went to sea but she sure knows how to make her readers go there with her words. Not to mention into the sails! The sections involving Luke's travails were both the ones I liked least and most - sort that out if you will. They were the hardest to read due to the way he was "offered his position" in His Majesty's Navy and yet the most thrilling.Louise's side of the tale took a bit to get going but once it did it too, was a joy to read. Her story did not take off as quickly as Luke's but it became - after a bit - just as enthralling. As the book came to its conclusion I was turning the pages as fast as I could. I'm keeping this for a second read. I think Luke and Louise will give me further entertainment and insights upon a calmer go-round with foreknowledge of the ending.A very diverting, fascinating, well drawn historical novel.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/52021. Set in the 1740s, a dairy maid goes into service to be a ladies’ maid to a captain’s daughter in Harwich, England. The two begin a steamy, tumultuous affair. Meanwhile her brother Luke has been press ganged into the navy, or is it her brother? The plot thickens. Loved it.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It started off promising ... and then it kind of fell off the rails for me. I didn't care much at all for Luke's story and couldn't for the life of me figure out how it was relevant. Until the end, anyway; the twist/reveal itself was extremely confusing and could have been handled better. The switching from second to third person POV certainly helped to muddle things and felt wholly unnecessary.
I found Louise to be a rather unlikable character. She just didn't seem to *get* it.
Worsley was apparently mentored by Sarah Waters during the writing of this -- and it showed. This book had more than a few shades of Tipping the Velvet in it. Considering I never cared for TTV, it's unsurprising I didn't like this book very much either.
That being said, Worsley also apparently adopted Waters' exquisite world-building, which was one of the better (if not the best) aspects of the book.
I just feel like this book could have been so much better instead of the mediocre offering I found it to be. The beginning was very promising and throughout the book there were spots of brilliance, but the twist and everything that came after was just ... meh. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Initially, I got very caught up in this book, but it took a turn in the last quarter that just didn't work for me. Set in the 1700s, the chapters in the first 3/4 alternate between two narrators. Louise Fletcher is a dairymaid who is hired to learn to be a ladies maid to a sea captain's daughter. The two women form a special bond. One of Lou's hopes is to find out what has happened to her brother, whom she assumes has gone off to sea, and to send the news back home to her mother. The alternate chapters are told by Luke Fletcher, who was conscripted into His Majesty's navy. The descriptions of Harwich, the shipping town, and of life aboard a merchant ship are detailed, vivid, and often harrowing, and both the main and secondary characters are intriguing. I can't explain what happened near the end that disappointed me without giving away a big part of the plot; I just felt it was a bit gimmicky and unrealistic, and Lou's final actions seemed out of character to me. However, on the basis of very fine writing and the first 3/4 of the novel, I would probably read another by Kate Worsley.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Georgian naval fiction and lesbian costume drama are two of my favourite genres, so I pretty much had to read this book, which sets itself up as the love-child of Fingersmith and Billy Budd (with a few touches of Patrick O’Brian and Orlando thrown into the mix). And Worsley makes a pretty good job of it. It's her first novel, and maybe it's a bit too obvious that she has studied with Sarah Waters (quite apart from the fact that she has a ringing endorsement from the prof. on the front cover...). But it's lively and entertaining in a Moll Cutpurse kind of way that makes us forgive the occasional bit of detail that doesn't quite ring true. So why not?I was nearly derailed at the beginning of this book by a couple of dreadful clangers that should have been sorted out during editing (did Waters actually read the book before endorsing it?). For a start, alternate chapters have A Village Milkmaid and The Smartest Lad in all the Fleet as their protagonist. You don't need to be a diehard Savoyard to see how that brings up a completely different set of cultural associations from those the author intended. We're all sitting there waiting for gondoliers, bad baronets and Japanese officials to appear (they don't, of course, but it makes it very hard to take the story seriously). And then, just a couple of pages in, a seafaring character uses the word “bint” with a great deal of emphasis. Which would be fine if this were Tipping the Velvet: it's a coarse, offensive term men use to refer to women, and it nicely establishes the theme of unequal relations between the sexes. But we're supposed to be in 1740, over a century before this word entered English from Arabic (FTR: it's first recorded in the OED in 1855, but it didn't really become current until it got into army slang in the Middle East during WW1). And a lot of readers are going to spot that. No-one expects the language of an historical novel to be 100% period-authentic, but at the very least it should be plausible: the author should do some research before using a word that she wants to draw to the reader’s attention. It's not as though there's any shortage of offensive terms for women in 18th century English.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I read the inside cover and decided I wanted to read this book. The inside cover did not mention that this book was a lesbian love story. At first I wasn't sure I wanted to continue reading, but the book was very well written. I continued reading enjoying the story but also a little nervous. However the characters and the story won me over, and by the end I rooted for these two characters to end up together as much as I root for the heterosexual characters in other novels. Yes the romance is not the traditional one. However, I don't want any one who likes literary fiction to miss this novel because of the lesbian romance plot. This is an excellent book, and the author has carved out a place for herself among her literary peers. People who like historic fiction will enjoy this book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5She Rises is a book that draws you in from the very first sentence. Much like the young protagonist, Luke, you feel a touch off center and confused at first but as you follow his story and that of the second character, Louise. The two stories get told side by side until it all comes together in a most surprising way - no spoilers from me!Each story is compelling with richly drawn characters and plots that slowly draw towards each other. Ms. Worsley has a way with descriptive prose; I don't know if she ever went to sea but she sure knows how to make her readers go there with her words. Not to mention into the sails! The sections involving Luke's travails were both the ones I liked least and most - sort that out if you will. They were the hardest to read due to the way he was "offered his position" in His Majesty's Navy and yet the most thrilling.Louise's side of the tale took a bit to get going but once it did it too, was a joy to read. Her story did not take off as quickly as Luke's but it became - after a bit - just as enthralling. As the book came to its conclusion I was turning the pages as fast as I could. I'm keeping this for a second read. I think Luke and Louise will give me further entertainment and insights upon a calmer go-round with foreknowledge of the ending.A very diverting, fascinating, well drawn historical novel.