I recently finished The Gilded Hour, Sara Donati’s wonderful doorstop of a novel following two female physicians (who are cousins) working and living in 1880s Manhattan. It’s 700-plus pages, so I lingered in “the middle” for a week or more, happily following narrative threads about medicine and orphans and finding love in a New York I both recognize and don’t.
I first read Donati’s work several years ago, when I reviewed Where the Light Enters for Shelf Awareness. It’s the sequel to The Gilded Hour, though it stands on its own. I loved meeting Anna and Sophie, the main characters, plus their aunt, Anna’s husband Jack, and all the people who make up their world.
I didn’t seek out The Gilded Hour then, but about a month ago, I read and reviewed Donati’s latest, The Sweet Blue Distance, which is set just before the Civil War and follows Carrie Ballentyne, a relative of Anna and Sophie, as she makes her way out west to work as a midwife in Santa Fe.
The book reminded me of two things: how much I enjoy Donati’s big, juicy historical narratives, and how I’d been curious about her sprawling family of characters. So I checked The Gilded Hour out from the library, and happily dove into doing medical rounds with Anna, sitting in the garden with her and Sophie, and following the plight of several orphaned Italian children who end up joining their family on Waverly Place.
It’s the second time lately I’ve read an author all “out of order.”
This winter, I read Natalie Jenner’s latest novel, Every Time We Say Goodbye, a story of love, cinema and betrayal in post-World War II Italy. I missed Jenner’s debut, The Jane Austen Society, when it came out in 2020, but last year I picked up (and devoured) Bloomsbury Girls, her second novel set in a London bookshop. Those books aren’t a series, but they do all bear certain connections to one another. Reading the third one first gave me a few (mild) spoilers when I finally got around to reading The Jane Austen Society, but it (fortunately) wasn’t a big deal, plot-wise.
Similarly, having read Where the Light Enters, I had an inkling or two about certain plot points in The Gilded Hour, but that didn’t preclude me from enjoying the narrative: the rich historical detail, the familiar NYC streets, the characters’ sharp intellectual sparring and deep compassion for the poor. And The Sweet Blue Distance gave me a bit more context about Sophie and Anna’s extended family, though now I’m wondering if I should eventually go back and read Donati’s earlier six-book series following the lives and fortunes of the Bonners and Ballentynes.
This is different than reading a proper series, of course: I’d prefer not to read Maisie Dobbs or Mary Russell or Armand Gamache out of order. (In the non-mystery realm, series like The Lord of the Rings or Anne of Green Gables or even Mrs. Tim are more enjoyable in the proper succession.) Especially in the early books, every installment reveals important aspects of the main characters, and the plots often build on previous books, making it clearer and more satisfying to read them one after the other.
My natural instinct, as a straight-A people-pleasing rule-follower, is to read an author “in order” and experience the books in the way the author wrote and/or intended them. But I’m finding sometimes that it’s okay to relax the “rules” and read an author a little out of order. It can spoil a few plot points, sure, but also simply underscore the enjoyment of spending time in the world another writer has created.
What do you think? Do you read authors out of order, or would you never dream of it?
Yeah for Natalie Jenner! I’m so looking forward to her book next year about two JA fans from Cambridge who visit Sir Francis Austen(based on actual events)
I recently read Katie Oliver’s modern JA three part cozy series out of order. It would have been better to read them in order but it was ok to do that.
Oh, I didn’t know Jenner had another book coming! So fun.