Green Books Campaign: The Players

Title: The Players
Author: Margaret Sweatman
Published: September, 2009, on 100% post consumer-fibre
Number of pages: 320
Rating: 4 out of 5

This review is part of the Green Books campaign. Today 100 bloggers are reviewing 100 great books printed in an environmentally friendly way. Our goal is to encourage publishers to get greener and readers to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books. This campaign is organized by Eco-Libris, a  a green company working to green up the book industry by promoting the adoption of green practices, balancing out books by planting trees, and supporting green books. A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on Eco-Libris website.

I turned the creamy pages of this historical saga slowly. I dwelt within them as surely as the characters did, who struggled to survive the winter snows which blew through Hudson Bay in the early 17th century.  It reads like a poem. The images resemble an impressionist painting, impeccably recreated according to the artist’s eye.

Lily, who’s lost her mother in her late adolescence, befriends Bartholomew in the tavern where she’s found retreat. He teaches her the skills of an actress, which she perfects to such a degree that she becomes the favorite mistress of King Charles. When two French explorers arrive in his court to request ships from the King, and succeed in their persuasion, Lily smuggles herself on board; she is one woman among a crew of men. They set sail for China, but end in the Hudson Bay, where they make the acquaintance of Cree Indians with whom they barter for beaver pelts, food and the grace to help deliver Lily’s baby. I felt as if I was on the voyage enduring their struggle for survival, and relationship, with them.

We see Lilly content to be King Charles’ lover:

“Lilly had never before experienced such generous admiration-taking into account that she hadn’t quite reached her seventeenth birthday. In the sweet surfeit of the hours, she drifted down into nearly trusting desire, to the place Charles invented or knowingly sought out, where she, with the last shreds of separate mindfulness, thought, I will be what you like, let you do what you like: I’ll even like what you do.” (p. 119)

compared to Lilly’s desire for another:

“In the gallows garden below, there was a huge cry over her absence-Charles sent attendants back to fetch her and to bring the new overseas Governor of the Voyage to Hudson Bay. Lilly Cole waited for them. It had been a dream, these past months. This prison cell, the beatific bulk of Magnus Brown, here was the hinge to the future. The voices below grew louder. They were coming, all the more insistent because they’d forgotten about her. She watched Brown. He obviously heard but didn’t respond. These were the last few minutes of what now seemed to Lilly to have been a pretty play, borrowed for a time, then stripped away.” (p. 156)

With whom does Lilly find herself at the end of the novel? It is, perhaps, the least important question in her search for survival.

Find other works, reviewed by other bloggers, in this iniative to buy books which have been made ‘green’ by using recycled paper. You’d never guess a tree didn’t die for this.