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Original Title: Wise Children
ISBN: 014017530X (ISBN13: 9780140175301)
Edition Language: English
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Wise Children Paperback | Pages: 240 pages
Rating: 3.94 | 7206 Users | 607 Reviews

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Title:Wise Children
Author:Angela Carter
Book Format:Paperback
Book Edition:First Edition
Pages:Pages: 240 pages
Published:January 1st 1993 by Penguin (first published June 13th 1991)
Categories:Fiction. Magical Realism. Historical. Historical Fiction. European Literature. British Literature

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Well, sheeet (that's the way the British say the Americans say it). Back to the library. This has to be one of the most slowest moving vaguely interesting books I've ever read. Or not read. I'm on page 80 after about two weeks of intermittent baths. This is the written version of an oral history told by a seventy-five year-old bastard ex-chorus girl (usually on the left line) about her family and her famous actor father who wouldn't acknowledge her or her twin sister.

As far as I can tell, there is no actual plot. We're just sitting in her house with her twin sister and their not-quite Step-mother, Wheelchair (a nick-name, clearly) and reminiscing on her birthday, the eve of an invitation to a party at her father's house. Oh, and at some point their half-brother comes in to say his lover, their adopted-ish daughter, has gone missing, which gives us a whole new branch of the family to tangent on.

Don't get me wrong; the prose is interesting but dense; it's quite florid, with a few Britishisms and anachronisms to tangle me up. But it's also been charmingly pointless. Not that I object. If I met this woman at work, I'd totally stop into her room and listen to her... if I had time. But otherwise, I'd be edging one foot towards the door.

There are loads of Shakespeare references--and I suspect the whole thing is supposed to be just a bit of a Shakespeare farce--especially as their dad and grandparents are famous actors in their time. And, of course, the sisters are twins, which Shakespeare never could resist, either. The language is ribald, with loads about drunken-but-loving Grandma and knickers and the old knobby bits. Kind of amusing--I guess--but mostly just exhausting.

Here's the beginning of Chapter Two (there are five chapters in the book):

"One, two, three, hop! See me dance the polka. Once upon a time, there was an old woman in splitting black satin pounding away at an upright piano in a room over a haberdasher's shop in Clapham High Street and her daughter in a pink tutu and wrinkled tights slapped at your ankles with a cane if you didn't pick up your feet high enough. Once a week, every Saturday morning, Grandma Chance would wash us, brush us and do up our hair in sausage curls. We had long, brown stockings strung up to our liberty bodices by suspenders. Grandma Chance would take firm hold of one hand of each of us, then--ho! for the dancing class; off we'd trot to catch the tram.

We always took the tram from Brixton to Clapham High Street. The stately progress of the tram, occupying by right of bulk and majesty the centre of the road, not veering to the left n or right upon its way but sometimes swaying every now and then with a sickening lurch, like Grandma, coming home from the pub.

One, two, three, hop."

Rating Regarding Books Wise Children
Ratings: 3.94 From 7206 Users | 607 Reviews

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This is a gloriously ribald carnivalesque adventure, with deeper themes. It is the life story of identical twin musical hall performers, Dora and (Leo)Nora and their complex family, as remembered by Dora on their 75th birthday. Dora is a wonderful raconteur, though hardly a reliable narrator. She's more of a chatty old biddy, rambling away, enthusiastically, and suddenly remembering little asides. She would be great fun to meet, and I really felt I did.There are many twins in the story:

I probably spent the longest time reading this book compared to all the other books I read due to the complexity and complicatedness of its plot and the unsettlingly eccentric cast of characters. What an experience! A clever book deploying magical realism and saturated with parodies that left me feeling accomplished and simultaneously dizzy upon reading it. I despised it so much but I loved it just as much, which was why I had to finish reading it.

I love Angela Carter's prose: the sentences dance together, perfectly matched, creating a sinuous harmony of prose that's almost poetry. Wise Children is no different. In telling the story of the Misses Dora and Leonora Chance, the "Chance Sisters" whose rhythmically clicking heels have lighted up many a music hall stage, Ms. Carter has not spared any expense, choosing to spread the paint in loud, garish brushstrokes. For are they not the twin daughters (albeit born on the other side of the

Fun. Great fun.I bought this book in a Fifteenth-century bookshop. That is what it had painted on the fascia. It did not specialise in books from the fifteenth-century, indeed it did not seem to have any fifteenth- century books, nor any about the fifteenth century. It certain had not been a bookshop since the fifteenth century either, though by the musty smell of old books it was doing its very best to give the impression of a bookshop that pre-dated printing.Having bought it I did not read it

What a joy it is to dance and sing! Twins Nora and Dora Chance turn 75 today; their father, Shakespearean actor Melchior Hazard, who has never publicly acknowledged them because they were born out of wedlock to a servant girl who died in childbirth, turns 100. At the last minute an invitation to his birthday party arrives, and between this point and the party Dora fills us in on the sisters knotty family history. Their father is also a twin (though fraternal); his brother Peregrine was more of a

Well, sheeet (that's the way the British say the Americans say it). Back to the library. This has to be one of the most slowest moving vaguely interesting books I've ever read. Or not read. I'm on page 80 after about two weeks of intermittent baths. This is the written version of an oral history told by a seventy-five year-old bastard ex-chorus girl (usually on the left line) about her family and her famous actor father who wouldn't acknowledge her or her twin sister. As far as I can tell, there

Angela Carter's name came off the magical realism list, however this book does not seem to fall into that genre. As it was not what I expected, the pleasant surprise I felt for the story was a nice bonus.The book chronicles the life of un-parented twin sister starlettes from London in the 40's and 50's as reminisced from the present day. The girls' mother died in childbirth and their father, a famous Shakespearean actor turned cabaret and eventually media star, never acknowledges his children as