On "Little": A Book Review

Title: Little
Author: Edward Carey 
Genre: Fiction, Historical Fiction

About the Book...
In 1761, a year a great many things happened, tiny Marie Grosholtz is born in Switzerland to a loving mother and an absent solider father. At age six, though, things change when an accident brings her father home, ultimately leads to his death, and her mother is forced to take a job with a Doctor Curtius, a man who makes wax figures of organs for the hospital. When her mother unexpectedly dies, she finds herself an assistant to Curtius whose interests are steadily shifting away from working for the hospital to sculpting wax heads, which takes them to Paris, where her life plays out among the a widow and her son, those living in the royal palace, the tumultuous French Revolution, and, of course, figures of wax.  

What I Think...
The idea of a fictional autobiography of Anne Marie Grosholtz, better known as Madame Tussaud, was incredibly appealing to me and this book did not disappoint.

While I know this wasn't all that historically accurate, keeping in mind that the author himself mentions how little information we do have on certain things, I still  found the story engaging from start to finish. It was well written and the narrative came across in a natural manner. I thought Carey did an excellent job of conveying Marie's growth as a person throughout her life and the various tragedies she endures. An aspect pertaining to this that I really liked was how much of the text consisted of reflective observations about her experiences and those she interacted with, in the vein of the unreliable narrator, rather than relying on a more straightforward narrative. The emotional shifts in the character as she comes to understandings on certain aspects of her life were also well done.

Included among the text are "Marie's sketches" that she mentions in the narrative, which I thought were a nice touch.

To Sum it All Up...
An absorbing and unique book that left me wanting to learn more about the real Madame Tussaud! ♥

On Some Paper Pleating

Despite having a number of posts in draft state, I haven't really felt like posting lately, but I wanted to share pictures of something new I learned how to do this week.

Over the past few days I attended the free virtual conference Form & Function From Afar being held by Book Paper Thread, which focuses on paper and book arts. It consisted of nine presentations (three per day), along with multiple discussion areas, including places to share tips, discuss the presentations, and a virtual book sale (which featured some gorgeous and whimsical artist books!).

On the second day, I attended an interactive webinar called "Cut Pleat Twist" given by Gina Pisello, which walked us through the steps of a basic project using an 8 1/2 x 11 paper. While I had seen things here and there in relation to the particular method shown, I had yet to actually try it and, having found it to be fairly quick and easy to do (and that it nicely complements my origami and kirigami skills), I have to say I'm now imagining all sorts of possibilities of how to use it in making artist books and cards! 

Anyway, that being said, after a little bit of experimenting with magazine pages to make sure I understood how to get the right part of the paper as the "outer frame" portion, these are my first attempts at doing something more artsy with the technique. 

I cut a 12 x 12 piece of one-sided scrapbook paper down to fit in the printer, selected a few images from The Floral Magazine (1861) on the Internet Archive to print on the blank side, and then cut it in half to make two tiny folded papers. For the larger one, I used images from the same book, but just printed it two sided. 

After I finished folding them, I used decorative scissors to to trim the edges of the small ones and added leaves sticking out the folds. For the large one, since I the cuts I made when doing the folding ended up looking a bit like a shield, I cut the ends to be pointed in the center and then used one of the cut pieces along the top. 

Front

Back

 

As a side note, the presentations were recorded and, while currently only on the conference site, are supposed to eventually be viewable on the Book Paper Thread youtube channel. I will update this post with the link to the webinar for this when it becomes available for those interested.♥