I'm a reader who holds grudges. Disappoint me, and it's likely that an author will get cleaned off my shelves and dumped in the donation bin because if I try to read another title by them, the bad experience keeps lingering and trashes the current read. But Philippa Gregory has been the exception.

After two rather blah reads (A Respectable Trade and Fallen Skies, the latter which I will certainly re-attempt), this hefty saga was recommended to me by the awesome Sarah, whose similarly awesome review told me that I would most likely love the notorious Wideacre. Incest, depravity, murder, gloomy Gothic dysfunction, and a totally unlikable protagonist/antagonist? Sign me up!

Three times was the definite charm with Gregory. I'm hooked, and I will probably one day consider myself a fan. I loved it. This was the first book in a long, long while that I could say had me riveted from first page to the last. I can't think of any dull spots. It was gripping, turgid melodrama with the plot taking twists and turns that had me flipping pages and perched on the edge of my chair.

Sorry for using such lame clichés, but it was true. Could Beatrice become any more obsessed and amoral? Who else would fall under her dogged steamroller of psychoses? I had to keep reading and reading, and the ending.... What a grim climax it leaves to the imagination. It's left up to the reader, and their own feelings about Beatrice, as to how that little scene plays out when Beatrice meets her Maker (both the Divine and the Temporal one who started her on her path). It can be as merciful or merciless as one wishes. Do we get more details in the sequel?

I hope not, but at the same time I'm dying to know what Gregory thought up for one of the most memorable characters I've ever read.

Even though Beatrice is a very loathesome character, I found myself able to see things from her point of view, warped and void of morality as it was. She despises the prospect of being kicked out of her home and her land upon marriage, just because she's not male. Her feckless brother, Harry, has no feel for the earth and true traditions of Wideacre. All he knows, and cares about, are the perks of the position. But for what Wideacre is, Beatrice feels true kinship that becomes a demented fervor.

And, like that village so often quoted about, she has to destroy it in order to save it. The process is an inevitable, continual decline over the years. As Beatrice falls, so does Wideacre. Or was that blissful utopia of Nature only beautiful on the surface and it was the one rotten to the core? Was Beatrice the fertile soil that made Wideacre realize its destructive, soul-sucking potential?

Throughout the book, Beatrice refers to Wideacre in terms of a living thing, a thing with a heart, a pulse, and a soul that only she can sense and communicate with. It's a symbiotic, parasitic relationship, evoking the best Beatrice has to offer while at the same time consuming it and leaving nothing but the husk of a mad woman with absolutely no scruples or morals.

One can be squicked by the incest and never venture into the water, but there is plenty going on under the surface.

I loved Gregory's writing. Beatrice's voice is so cold and selfish all the while she insists she's giving up everything, including her soul, for Wideacre. She's a total sociopath, and it really took me by surprise how much I still wanted to read about her when I've wanted to tear books in half because of heroes and heroines that did much, much less. Since the story is told from Beatrice's point of view, we watch her mental gears turn and crash as she frantically justifies her actions to herself and the reader, as her entire world is seen through her twisted little mind.

Brilliant and engrossing. Meaty gothic melodrama the way I love it, and I haven't been so absorbed by a dark, demented family since Marilyn Harris' Eden series. Like Beatrice, the anti-hero Thomas Eden and his grandson John Murrey Eden were formed by long aristocratic traditions, a remote and self-contained world, and a desire to control absolutely everyone and everything in their lives. Wideacre is a natural companion piece to Harris' morbid, melodramatic saga.