March 2025 - Sweet, Sweet Revenge

“The best revenge is massive success”
Frank Sinatra

Revenge is a strong motivator and authors often use this as a theme for their book or as a driving force for the main character. Gaining payback on someone who affected their life in some way, whether by taking away something precious or holding them up for ridicule, can take a life-time and can help create some very strong story telling. My challenge this month is to read a novel of historical fiction that is based on revenge.

The Count of Monte Cristo is the ultimate revenge book but I have listed a few others to help point you in the right direction.

Please remember to let us know what you are going to be reading and for those who like to list your book on the Wiki, here’s the link: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Reading_Through_Time_Challenge

“A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green”
Francis Bacon

Moby Dick by Herman Melville
True Grit by Charles Portis
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Revenant by Michael Punke
The Tea Rose by Jennifer Donnelly
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Twelve by Stuart Neville
Carrie by Stephen King
Chenneville by Paulette Jiles
The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin

I am going to read True Grit by Charles Portis which has been sitting on my shelf for some time.

Some good suggestions, Judy! Put two on my WL. However, on my shelf is The Contessa's Vendetta by Mirella Sichirollo. I've had it since 2014 and think it's time I read it!

I have finished The Count of Monte Cristo. This is a reread for me, but it had been so long since I read it that I had forgotten more than I thought. You are right, it absolutely is the ultimate revenge book.

I'm planning on Monte Cristo for my Vive la France project, but I think I'm going to save it for the first quarter of next year (19th century Europe) since I've got plenty of Dumas père to read for all four quarters of this year. For this month's revenge theme, though, I'm planning on going French with Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons as my primary read.

I'd also really like to get around to Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind, which I've had in a TBR pile for ages, then see if I want to buy the rest of the series. This seems to be a love-it-or-hate-in for LT reviewers.

For rereads (and it's been years and years on both), Beowulf and John Gardner's Grendel. If I do, I'm planning on combining Seamus Heaney's translation (just cuz it's Seamus Heaney) with the supplemental materials in the Norton Critical in a twofer read that I'll just claim as one book for ROOTing.

Higher priority, though. Cornelia Funke has just come out with a new Inkworld installment, Inkworld: The Color of Revenge, which I just got hold of. I could really do with a reread of the first three books and then go on to this fourth. I really love Funke as a fantasist, and the Inkworld books are my favorite Funke.

I guess I could also do a reread of The Scarlet Letter in the Norton Critical for the sake of the supplemental materials, but as for a Hawthorne reread.... I've read SL so many times that I'd rather do a reread of his other works.

of that list, Id say Atonement is the best, tho i agree about monte cristo. loved Dangerous Liaisons andthe talented mr ripley ; and of course the princess bride also found out that there is a discworld book with revenge: sourcery which I havent read yet

I looked up Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez for the SFFKIT over in the Category Challenge and found out that it also fits the revenge theme, so that's a win win! Especially because I didn't really know what to read for this. My first plan was to read The Scarlet Letter, but I figured it would be too much to tackle that in March since I read that it's a bit heavy going.

I haven't yet checked to see if my library has this one, but I'm hoping for this:
Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso / Kali Nicole Gross

I have completed my read of True Grit by Charles Portis. An excellent read that I have given 5 stars to.

>9 DeltaQueen50: Yes, it is a great one!

I found that L’homme au ventre de plomb fits here, because the murderer is taking revenge for the death of his father. I really like these historical novels set in Louis XV Paris, even if it takes me quite some time to read them.

>9 DeltaQueen50: read that ages ago and remember liking it quite a bit

After a week or two of indecisiveness, I decided that my read for this month's theme would be The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster. This play was one of the foremost Jacobean revenge tragedies, penned by an author about whom little is known; we don't know his years of birth or death, and there is no known portrait of him. Based on historical events that took place in Italy a century before, the plot centres around the eponymous Duchess, who is a widow, marrying outside her social class, and the revenge exacted by her two brothers Duke Ferdinand and the (nameless) Cardinal, which results in a series of killings of most of the cast. It was gruesome and very dramatic in places and reminiscent of Shakespeare plays such as Titus Andronicus, and as such created quite an impact. I would like to see a performance of it.

Cornelia Funke's Inkworld: The Colour of Revenge 3½***, published in the U.S. in English translation last November. Additionally, I reread the books of the original trilogy – Inkheart 5*****, Inkspell 5*****, and Inkdeath 4½****, which were originally published from 2003 to 2008.

The publicity for The Colour of Revenge claims that it's readable as a stand-alone, but I wouldn't try that. As you can see, I also didn't rate this new addition anywhere near as highly as the original trilogy. It's only about half the average length of each of the three earlier books and it really doesn't develop the new premise (power of pictures as opposed to the original trilogy's power of words) with enough thoroughness – to the extent that the conclusion, which is quite a bit hasty to begin with, really produces a deus ex machina result.

The Colour of Revenge would have satisfied the February theme as well as this month's. The entire quartet has revenge themes, the fourth book most obviously but also very significantly in the second book (Mortola's revenge for the death of her son, Capricorn).

I'm going to call this revenge... the "vigilance committee" didn't like the Donnellys for the vandalism, etc. it was thought/assumed they were doing, certainly they were accused of doing many things, probably many things they didn't actually do. So for many on the vigilance committee, it was revenge

As Atonement was one of the suggested books for March I pulled it off the shelf. The story was about a girl misconstruing a scene she witnessed ruining both her sister’s life and that of the young man that she was with. In turn the girl’s life was also affected. Was that revenge or the inevitable result of the actions of all of the characters involved?

>16 Familyhistorian: That seems like it would work for April, also?

This probably doesn't count since it isn't historical fiction, but I read Rapunzel's Revenge. Teen graphic novel. Fairy tale mash-up plus Western. Rapunzel uses her braids like a lasso or a whip to escape her captor, fight off the "bad guys" and rescue her mother with help from her new friend Jack and his (stolen) pet goose. Sort of reminded me of Pippi Longstocking. Jack is a bit shallow, but that allows Rapunzel to be the hero of the story. Some nice tongue-in-cheek humor too. Gets a bit repetitive, but it's short. I also read the sequel Calamity Jack. I did not find this as engaging as Rapunzel's Revenge. We leave the fairy tale forest and the wild west behind, and return to Jack's hometown, which has now been taken over by the giants. We get into a bit of Jack's backstory, and then we pick up with Jack and Rapunzel as they set out to rescue Jack's mother this time. With help from Freddie Sparksmith and his futuristic inventions, we get a bit of a steampunk feel here, but it just didn't have the charm of the previous tale. Add some more talking animals, and the Jabberwock, and it's all a bit too much of a mash-up. I do like Jack, despite all his flaws. This was still a fun little "snack" between more serious books. And kids of a certain would enjoy this.

Some other books I considered and might get to later in the year. We'll see:
The Color of Vengeance
A Knight's Vengeance
God of Vengeance