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The Remarkable Journey of Miss Tranby Quirke is the kind of book you need a few days to think about before you understand if you truly like it or not. I guess that sounds a bit bizarre or indecisive, but the truth is Elizabeth Ridley's period piece, while extremely well-written, deeply touching and downright beautiful at times, leaves me a bit uneasy.

Tranby and Lysette, surely two of the most unlikely women to ever fall in love with each other, are each so severely messed up emotionally (in their own unique ways) that I'm not sure either should be seeking any relationship, much less one with each other. They are both also wonderful and caring, but it is 1909, after all, and so much is already on their plate that time and circumstance threaten to crack it beyond repair.

Maybe I'm reading way too much into everything that happens, but I also question what is real and what is not and if our narrator Miss Tranby can even be trusted. Things are so wispy and fragile by the end, the reader cannot help but feel sad rather than hopeful. The Remarkable Journey of Miss Tranby Quirke is definitely a solid read...whether it's a solid romance is an entirely different matter.

 

There are some sweet passages within the novel that I just had to highlight in Kindle. The first section is a scene where Miss Tranby is bound and determined to deconstruct her feelings for Lysette and make them go away. As you can see, she's not doing too well with that:

 

If only you could see the sadness, the loneliness, the lies and the compromises…myself, and attempted to reduce to ordered terms this unsettling development.

 

DIAGNOSIS: Love. No. Not possible.

 

SYMPTOMS: Giddiness, shortness of breath. Urge to gather flowers. No. Lips that long to kiss. No. No. Tremors in hands and knees. Flightiness and his twin pain, optimism. General soreness in thorax. Rash on neck. No. Soft tissue breaks out in hives, in the pattern of the rose bush raising thorns. NO. My heart hurts. Poked and nibbled by plush, carnation-flavored lips. NO!

 

PROGNOSIS: Poor. ANTIDOTE: Lysette. A last desperate bid to live: Lysette. CURE: Unknown to man. Lysette McDonald. Yes. Only Lysette. Lysette Lysette Lysette.

The second is more of a general observation that most any gay woman would probably tell you is all too familiar. At this point, Miss Tranby is thinking of how nice it would be to have someone to talk to who knows exactly what she has gone thrown as an "invert" (a term often used well into the 20th century to describe gays and lesbians):

 

 

We would have spoken honestly about the beauty of women, and the wild emotions they sometimes engendered, and what it was like, as an invert, to feel so odd, so stricken by strangeness, and yet so deeply wonderful, both at the same time. She would have known and understood all those feelings, and neither one of us need have felt lonely.

 

This is a second cover for the novel...and much more in keeping with how Miss Tranby is described within its pages. The inner turmoil she experiences, though, is better captured in the gestures of the woman on the first cover. It kind of bugs me when a cover goes for a more "traditionally" attractive woman instead of how she actually looks. Sometimes you'll read a book only to discover the artist most likely either didn't bother to read it at all...or just didn't care.