Rutherford Park By Elizabeth Cooke
I want to start out by saying thanks to Goodreads and Berkley Books for selecting me to read an ARC copy of Rutherford Park through the First-read giveaways. I regret that I did not get to reading it closer to the original publish date; however I have to say that it is a thoroughly enjoyable read.
Brief summary: Rutherford Park is a timeless, lavish estate owned by Earl William Cavendish (the eighth Earl of Cavendish) and his wife Octavia, whose family money was made in the wool factories and is the only thing keeping the great estate in tact. As the world begins to crumble into the first world war, the last acts of a desperate girl sets in commotion a string of events that could destroy everything at Rutherford Park, both upstairs and downstairs.
If you read many of the other reviews here, one of the most common remarks is that if you love Downton Abbey, you will love Rutherford Park. I totally agree with that statement, but I don't think that is the only appeal of the book. As I was reading it, other stories like Kate Chopin's The Awakening and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby also sprung into my head. Like all those references, Elizabeth Cooke has really captured what it was like to be in England at the very cusp of World War I - with those of privilege wanting to keep their blinders on as to what is really happening around them and those who work for the privileged realizing that inevitable change is on the horizon.
The author, Elizabeth Cooke chose to have the story narrated from multiple points of view. Most characters have at least one chance to have at least one chance to tell the story, with William and Octavia getting the opportunity most. While this makes it difficult in the beginning to keep track of who is telling the story and who they are talking about, it also really gives a good 360 view of what is happening. The other thing Cooke has done very well is used pacing to really portray the urgency of the characters. While slow at first (a few months have passed between the first and second chapter) the pace quickens to the point where just a few hours pass between the end chapters. As a reader, I began to feel time begin to collapse on me, just as I'm sure the characters were feeling.
This book is really well done. I give it 5 solid stars.
Rutherford Park Rutherford Park, the elegantly rambling estate of the Cavendish family in the Yorkshire countryside of England, seems a dream to those looking at it from a distance. Money and manners nearly ooze from its well-tended walls and gardens and the family is delightfully steeped in the traditions and rules that govern those of the elitist class. But just peek a little more closely at the inhabitants of Rutherford Park and you will see that not everyone is happy in this long standing status quo and just about everyone under its roof are hiding secrets.
As the lives of the Cavendish family are exposed along with those of the servants that live below stairs the reader is able to see just how twisted and complicated their lives can be, regardless of rank or money. If the family is to have any chance of surviving they must be able to bend the traditions binding them together and learn to adjust to the ever changing world swirling around them, even as eminent war threatens to change their lives once again.
Any fan of Downton Abbey or Upstairs/Downstairs will love this glimpse into a privileged yet highly fractured family. You have the strict, unbending traditionalist father, the stifled wife longing for some freedom of her own, the more modern children ready to break free from the binding responsibilities of the class they were born into, the servants who dutifully serve those beyond the green baize door while being divided between those wanting to stay true to their never ending duties and those that believe they deserve more; everyone is here.
The story ends only slightly settled and with enough left unanswered that I can only hope Elizabeth Cooke will provide a sequel that shows how the characters have moved on and grown after the events in Rutherford Park. Did William learn to loosen his hold on tradition and show his wife that he does in fact love her? Will Harry serve his country well and learn to take responsibility for his actions? What kind of woman will Charlotte grow up to be? I only wish I knew!
Rutherford Park The world he understood, the world he thought he knew, was blowing away like husks blown from corn in a mill. Each one of them was inside the mill, and the grindstones were rapidly turning.
This particular passage reminds me of Bob Dylan. How can you *not* hear his guitar in the background? 😶 The image also stands out in its context: this isn't tied to the hotheaded young son of the house, but rather the staid patriarch, a man locked in a role both governmental & social which carries the weight of unwanted knowledge that things are a-changin' ...& a man who that very day took his shoes off to walk barefoot through his garden for the first time in his life.
It's no secret that upstairs-downstairs books don't generally agree with me, but I really cottoned to this one. Taken as a whole, I'm not sure why; it's essentially the same soapy drama that you find in others of this ilk. But I genuinely liked the characters with all their foibles, & the prose itself is well done -- clearly this wasn't Cooke's first rodeo, & it shows. Everything flows smoothly, but still has a personality & presence on the page (unlike most of this genre, where the text is so dry & stiff that it will practically blow away in a gentle breeze). These people are very much of their time; they rarely stand around wrestling with anachronistic concepts to placate a modern reader's sensibilities. Yes, some are more socially aware than others, but awareness of your surroundings' pitfalls isn't the same as being a 21st-c mouthpiece in beautiful vintage shoes.
I also thought the author did an excellent job showing the casual thoughtlessness that was bred into this era -- tiny cruelties between the rich & the servants, the rich & the rich, or the servants & the servants -- to indirectly highlight flaws that are inherent to a system that was doomed to collapse under its own weight. Kate Furnivall's blurb from the flyleaf teasers says it best: Cooke portrays an aristocratic dynasty that, in 1914, was poised on the brink of extinction, as ponderous as the huge dinosaurs but just as magnificent.
Solid 4 stars, & I'll definitely read the sequels. :) Rutherford Park This book was very choppy. Several story lines were started, and then abandoned. It was an overall enjoyable read, but I wish that some promising situations had not fizzled away into nothing.
NOTE: The book mentioned the first time that the expletive “bloody” was introduced to the public, in an English play, and how it brought the house down. Of course, I had to find out which play!
On the opening night of George Bernard Shaw's comedy Pygmalion in 1914, Mrs Patrick Campbell, in the role of Eliza Doolittle, created a sensation with the line Walk! Not bloody likely! - Wikipedia
Rutherford Park This is a wonderful book! There is something special in this book that really drew me to it. On the cover there is a quote that fans of Downton Abbey will love this book, and I certainly fell into that category. I was worried that the book would be lacking, or written quickly to gain on the fame of Downton Abbey, but I could't have been more wrong. This book had me laughing and in tears, it was fascinating and interesting.
Here is the Publisher's synopsis:
Snow had fallen in the night, and now the great house, standing at the head of the valley, seemed like a five-hundred-year old ship sailing in a white ocean…
For the Cavendish family, Rutherford Park is much more than a place to call home. It is a way of life marked by rigid rules and lavish rewards, governed by unspoken desires…
Lady of the house Octavia Cavendish lives like a bird in a gilded cage. With her family’s fortune, her husband, William, has made significant additions to the estate, but he too feels bound—by the obligations of his title as well as his vows. Their son, Harry, is expected to follow in his footsteps, but the boy has dreams of his own, like pursuing the new adventure of aerial flight. Meanwhile, below stairs, a housemaid named Emily holds a secret that could undo the Cavendish name.
On Christmas Eve 1913, Octavia catches a glimpse of her husband in an intimate moment with his beautiful and scandalous distant cousin. She then spies the housemaid Emily out in the snow, walking toward the river, about to make her own secret known to the world. As the clouds of war gather on the horizon, an epic tale of longing and betrayal is about to unfold at Rutherford Park…
The Cavendish Family is hard to like, but impossible to hate. They are rich living off the back, sweat and labor of the poor. Their charity is not very expansive and is only just the minimum required to keep things moving along as they have always been. Since this is a historical fiction, we already know how that works out for them.
This period in English history is a fairly new one to me, as I am a snob that thinks that history has to be much farther back to qualify. This book, and another called An American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin, have made me excited to have a new category to look for. The pulls of the aristocracy to stay the same on one hand, balanced by new technologies and wars on the other. It is a heady combination.
The father in this book, William is my favorite character. He is greatly flawed. He holds on to the old ways and wants nothing to change except in minor ways, preferably just replacing with exact replicas of the old. As the book moves on, we learn that it is his great love and pride in his home and family that motivate him to do this. Ironically, his very stoic nature is what damns him. He ruins relationships instead of nurturing them, and he expects others to fit into his idea of what a relationship should be. After he realizes what his distance has done to his family, he has an epiphany and starts to mend the breach with his son:
I am sorry, he said in a whisper. I am sorry for your loneliness, I am sorry for the poor girl.
But more than those things, I am sorry that you could not come to me.
When he realizes what he has done, he immediately tries to change his ways and move forward with his family together. That is why I admire him. Of all the characters in the book, he started out as the most entrenched and least likely to change. By the end, he was the change that they need to survive as a family.
The other characters in the book are equally well written. Harry, Louisa, Jack, Octavia and a few others all come alive for me. The dialogue in this book is mostly internal, which helps gain a sense of how they each feel in their respective stations. This novel leaves us on a tipping point for the family, servants and England and I ache to learn more about them and see how they are affected by what we all know is coming.
I am looking forward to the next book in this series, The Wild Dark Flowers: A Novel of Rutherford, which I have on pre-order and is currently set to arrive July 1, 2014.
Rutherford Park
Elizabeth Cooke À 9 Download
Snow had fallen in the night, and now the great house, standing at the head of the valley, seemed like a five-hundred-year old ship sailing in a white ocean…
For the Cavendish family, Rutherford Park is much more than a place to call home. It is a way of life marked by rigid rules and lavish rewards, governed by unspoken desires…
Lady of the house Octavia Cavendish lives like a bird in a gilded cage. With her family’s fortune, her husband, William, has made significant additions to the estate, but he too feels bound—by the obligations of his title as well as his vows. Their son, Harry, is expected to follow in his footsteps, but the boy has dreams of his own, like pursuing the new adventure of aerial flight. Meanwhile, below stairs, a housemaid named Emily holds a secret that could undo the Cavendish name.
On Christmas Eve 1913, Octavia catches a glimpse of her husband in an intimate moment with his beautiful and scandalous distant cousin. She then spies the housemaid Emily out in the snow, walking toward the river, about to make her own secret known to the world. As the clouds of war gather on the horizon, an epic tale of longing and betrayal is about to unfold at Rutherford Park… Rutherford Park
This book was just okay for me (2.5 stars, but I'll round up). I think part of the problem was that I wanted it to be Downton Abbey, and it just wasn't. I can't say that I actually liked any of the characters, so it was hard to care what was happening to them. I'm not sure if I disliked the characters because of their actions or because they were all written in a very flat way. I never got the sense that I was allowed to know the characters outside of the appearance they wanted projected to the world. Even when the facade was broken, I didn't think any of the characters reacted in a way that showed any real emotion. Also, the jumping between stories created even more of a disconnect for me. I felt that it often took a while to figure out which character I was reading about and what was happening (sometimes the story would shift time a little, making it somewhat difficult to follow along with). Overall, it was just slow, lacked likable characters, and just didn't have a spark. Rutherford Park This historical novel set when England was right on the brink of World War I has far more depth than I initially expected, there are the expected emotional moments, but more than that, it is a book that looks at the lives of women at different levels of the social scale.
Rutherford Park is the stately pile that is the home to William and Octavia Cavendish and their three children Harry, Louisa and Charlotte and of course their entourage of servants. As the book opens on Christmas Eve 1913, we meet Emily Maitland, a shy young girl from the nearby mill town who is laying fires early in the morning a sharp insight into the world of a young servant girl of this era, but Emily has a bigger worry than carrying out her chores this cold day.
Meanwhile Octavia is expecting the house guests including a woman she has feared for the entire span of her marriage, a distant cousin of William’s the alluring Helene. It isn’t only the servants who have to abide by the rules of the house though – Octavia feels that her life is similar to that of a bird in a gilded cage, she is bored and feels her character has been stifled by living in the big house. She feels that she is looked down upon by her peers and servants because her money, money which was needed to keep the house going, is comes from the wool mills she approaches the new year with a yearning to do something more than escort the beautiful and outgoing Louisa as she embarks on the season.
The author has obviously, sometimes too obviously, done her research and there are plenty of authentic references to clothing, political views and expectations of this time, however at times, especially near the beginning of the story I felt that modern perceptions were heavily imposed on the characters thoughts rather than them being displayed in their actions. As the book progressed with its many secrets and dramas, the characters held their own as the paced picked up.
This is a book told through multiple viewpoints which gave a rounded picture of the goings on at Rutherford Park with the timelines overlapping at some points to give extra depth. The downside of this was sometimes it was hard to follow who was who until the plot had progressed and the characters became far more distinct.
I enjoyed this sumptuous tale and it was pleasing that it covered men with some real emotions, this wasn’t a female only cast, dealing with woman’s issues, no-one escapes the drama in this book! If you like a happily-ever-after, this may not be the book for you although since this book was first published in 2013 I am pleased to see that we have the opportunity to find out more, and maybe tie-up some of the loose ends by reading The Wild Flowers and I am going to have to buy a copy to find out exactly what life has in store for this family who has faced more challenges than they could ever have imagined.
Rutherford Park It you are a fan of Downton Abbey and are jonesing for a Grantham family-like fix until season four premieres next January on PBS, Elizabeth Cooke's latest novel Rutherford Park might be just the ticket. Set during the Edwardian era at the eponymous estate in the Yorkshire countryside, the Cavendish family are as wealthy, titled, and drama-filled as the Grantham's, yet we are privileged to be reading a book, as opposed to watching a screenplay, so the author's historical detail, characterizations and compelling narrative make this even more intriguing.
Rutherford Park is the seat of the Cavendish family who live their lavish lives by strict rules and obligation. Not surprisingly, the beautiful Lady Octavia Cavendish is lonely and bored, even somewhat envies the servants for their work. Her husband William, bound by the obligations of his title and his vows, unknowingly feels a similar discontent. They saw him as some sort of fixed being, a symbol, a caricature. Octavia too, perhaps, in her great wool-and-velvet shawl with her pretty little straw-colored boots under a cream dress. They were both a sort of monument, he supposed: not real in the same way that the laborers were real... p. 52. Later when Octavia suspects William of an affair with a longtime family acquaintance from Paris, the last remnants of a charmed world seem to disappear.
The son and heir Harry, has his own dreams of flying aeroplanes but with the tragic death at Christmastime of a housemaid, those dreams might quickly disintegrate as well. With a house full of guests for the holidays, suspicions are evoked, while expectations and beliefs are shattered. A sort of crazed idea rattled in his brain, pressed down on his tongue as if it were going to leap out of his mouth. He realized that he was shaking not from cold now, but from the sensation of standing on the edge of a precipice where everything hinged on his next reply. p. 69. Within months all the family is in London, attempting to move on from the shocking events and discoveries at Rutherford. Louisa Cavendish, the innocent and naïve daughter, is preparing to make her Presentation and seems the most unlikely candidate to engage in a tryst with a mysterious stranger. Wearied in spirits, Octavia escapes to the country to wallow in her own self-pity, leaving her daughters in the care of friends.
While secrets and fidelity remain in question, William departs for Paris to attend business and settle personal accounts, leaving the family adrift. Meanwhile John Gould, a handsome, rich American houseguest comes to study the history of the Cavendishes and becomes more than a distraction to Octavia. He hadn't come to England to fall in love with someone else's wife. Especially not an unhappy wife. A carefree woman who yearned for a little affair - maybe... maybe he could have happily got himself embroiled for a few weeks, though carelessness with a woman was not his nature. But this. This bloody fever. This was what the English would call it: bloody. And it was. p. 189
Fast on the heals of other Edwardian England series like T. J. Brown's Summerset Abbey and Phillip Rock's The Greville Family Saga, I was somewhat reluctant to read this latest by Elizabeth Cooke. As much as I enjoyed the aforementioned series, I was skeptical about reading another book seemingly riding the Downton Abbey wave of success. But my concerns were for naught--Rutherford Park: A Novel is an unreservedly, gripping drama. The strained relationship of Lord William and Lady Cavendish are put to the ultimate test while their children scramble to find how they too fit, and the staff and surrounding villages dependent on Rutherford Park toil away with their own struggles. Likening to the inevitability of the WWI rumblings in this epic tale, could this stand-alone novel be the start of a veritable series? My source tells me, yes! Elizabeth Cooke is currently working on a second Rutherford book. A must for your summer reading as Rutherfold Park is a regular stunner! Rutherford Park I give this 3.5 stars which rounds up to 4.
This is your typical historical fiction novel about family drama caused by secrets. I happen to like books like this so naturally I liked this. It wasn’t the best one I ever read, but it was still good and entertaining for the most part. It took a while for the story to actually get going. What I really liked was how it took place just before World War I broke out. It captured a really interesting time in England and France. Rutherford Park TURN BACK NOW!! IT'S A TRAP!!
And boy, oh boy did I fall into the trap. The dazzling cover, the promise of something akin to Downton Abbey, the lure of some sort of Austen-like scandal, defined and in-depth characters, a 'cozy read for a fire front and winter night', glowing reviews...
Yeah, this book failed at any of that. Too many trees probably died for this book.
I can't even properly review it for all its badness, because I just don't care for it one bit. Lord and Lady Cave-in-dish? Er, I mean Cavendish? You both are harboring some secret scandal, probably, and secretly are not happy with each other. Big whoop.
A little scullerly maid that is secretly pregnant, and is probably doi'n it with one of the royalty of the household?
Whoever said that this book is a good Downton-Abbey hangover book to read, or the next Jane Austen?...You sick F***ers. Why would you put me through this torture?
I have standards, people. STANDARDS.
And this book, this book doesn't meet any of 'em.
I've watched all the Downton Abbey episodes over a hundred times. I've bought all editions of the original manuscripts. Done research and studies on life back then, how families and servants were like back then. And I love it. I know the real deal when I see it, you know?
This book was piss, piss pissy pissant poor attempt to mirror it.
Maybe my taste for books are changing. Who knows, maybe I would have enjoyed this book a few years ago. Maybe before I met the Gratham family, or before Elizabeth Bennet became my hero. Who knows. I was more immature and hadn't gotten a sip of the glorious matured wine-like goodness that classics are supposed to be. Cuz that what this book is trying to be; a classic. And babe, it just ain't. Not even close. Nope.
Goodbye, Rutherford Park. May I hope to never have to come to your horrid grounds again.
Rutherford Park