Bad Juliet by Giles Blunt
Reviewed by Emily Weedon
Everyone has their beach read recommendations ready to fly this time of year. And it is manna from heaven for an author to be declared a beach read. Deemed worthy of taking away to the beach, so vacationers can read and allow their brain to detach and their cares to melt. There’s a suggestion in the moniker that a beach read is not going to be a challenge or shake up the world. While Giles Blunt’s Bad Juliet, out in August from Dundurn Press doesn’t seek to shake up some status quo, it is just too immersive, too classical, too beautifully told, too interesting a read to be merely classed a beach read. Let’s say Bad Juliet is a gracious “Lake House Read”. Something to really savour when you have time and the need to dissolve completely into another world. Something to keep reading after one of those long summer days has finally let go.
“It’s a whisk-you-away, stir up your senses, actual story.”
Giles Blunt takes his readers away to Lake Saranac, where it is 1917 and tuberculosis grips its unfortunate victims, relegating them to cure cottages and all too likely, to death. How tragic to think of those lost who could so easily have been saved by antibiotics. One of Blunt’s characters consistently makes reference to her ‘colleagues’ who are the residents of the graveyard across the street, with gently dark banter, which is typical for the book. Bad Juliet unfurls in what I am starting to think of as the ‘grand fashion’ of past tense, first person. We’re reminded it’s a story we are reading. It’s a whisk-you-away, stir up your senses, actual story. Blunt remarked in conversation to me that a story is healing to the soul, the way sleep is healing to the body. Bad Juliet may be the cure what ails many of us these days, grabbed by the throat by too many fears.
Young New Yorker Paul finds himself cast out of a university career and a relationship and washes up in Lake Saranac where he can make use of his way with English and poetry to tutor tuberculosis patients languishing in beds and chairs. His mission is to distract them, whiling away time until they might be able to be among people again. Puckish humour abounds: Paul remarks: “I refuse to describe the outrageous marrow biting cold of the winter” he writes, while describing… the marrow biting cold.
Blunt uses the older, wiser narrator retelling his own story to make plenty of self-deprecating pokes at the ego and airs of a callow, young writer. Paul meets a beautiful patient, Sarah, who we will understand as the titular Bad Juliet, who has suffered greatly in her life in all manner of ways. Being a tuberculosis patient is only her most recent trouble. She pines for love as she recuperates, and she is full of secrets and contradictions. She is, therefore, irresistible to Paul as a moody, aspiring young poet.
The reader is expertly situated in the spirit of a hundred years ago when it wasn’t COVID-19 stalking people, it was tuberculosis. Blunt drops his New York fish onto the shores of the Adirondack treatment town and lets the reader wonder from page one how a 22-year-old, pompous would-be English Literature Professor might fare.
The lush setting of the book is a sure device to whisk readers away to another time and place. The 1920s that Blunt captures feel at once romantically distant and yet modern at the same time. There is a sense of the bristling industrialization about to come, but it is a twilight time when things were still old-fashioned. Blunt appears well aware that under the gauzy patina and romantic lure of the olden days, there lurks villainy. These were the times when families harboured dark secrets, and no one would rescue those traumatized by their own families. There was no believing women.
I found It fascinating that Bad Juliet evokes the image of the sculptor Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina. The sensual nature of the piece, along with its overt violence serves as a key to themes in the book. So much of the book centres on what Paul believes, or allows himself to believe, about what Sarah has to say about her life. His judgments of her, his “magnanimous” decisions about what to believe and the reveal of what she has endured speaks to our modern stance “Believe Women” without making Paul seem anachronistic. As feckless as Paul’s aims could be, as ill-advised the choices the characters make, Blunt crafts a story that makes you hope along with Paul and Sarah that they achieve their heart’s desires.
I loved the way Blunt expertly weaved imagery of water and death through the narrative and how water frequently functions as a transitional point. I loved the classical touchstones and the references to literature throughout the book, fleshing out Paul’s world, where English Departments are new fangled, and the idea of being a novelist is utterly garish. Blunt related to me how he’d visited Lake Saranac many times, fascinated by the cure cottages there. He was drawn in by the world that developed in that town, where the disease struck regardless of class; baseball players, entertainers, gangsters. No one was immune.
While reading Bad Juliet and taking my time to enjoy it and settle into the world he deftly built, I was thinking how good storytellers take pains with their work so that the reader doesn’t have to. They take pains that readers are equipped, carried through plot, wrapped in a glow of suspended disbelief. They are concierge to the reader’s anticipated needs and qualms and anxieties. They take care of business so that continuity, balance, taste, stakes, rising action, detail, nuance, theme, and poetry are all present, accounted for and ideally, artful. All this so that the reader can take it all in, and enjoy themselves.
Giles Blunt takes pains, and it shows in every sparkling sentence of Bad Juliet.
About the Author
Giles Blunt was born in Windsor, Ontario, and spent his teenage years in North Bay where he attended Scollard Hall. After studying at the University of Toronto, he moved to England to write his first (unpublished) novel. He spent twenty years in New York City, working variously as a bartender, a copy editor for BusinessWeek, and a screenwriter for Law and Order and other TV shows. When the success of Forty Words for Sorrow allowed him to write novels full-time, he moved back to Toronto, where he lives with his wife and two cats. He is the author of six crime novels set in the fictional northern city of Algonquin Bay, featuring John Cardinal and Lise Delorme. Cardinal, the TV series adapted from these books, has aired to large audiences in more than 100 countries. Blunt's other novels include Cold Eye (psychological suspense), No Such Creature (a picaresque "road novel"), Breaking Lorca (political thriller set in El Salvador and New York), and The Hesitation Cut (a tale of romantic obsession). These last two books signpost his turn away from crime fiction and into the literary arena. His next novel will be published in 2025.
About the Reviewer
Emily Weedon is a CSA award-winning screenwriter and author of the dystopian debut Autokrator, with Cormorant Books. Her forthcoming novel Hemo Sapiens will be published in September 2025, with Dundurn Press. https://emilyweedon.com/
Book Details
Publisher : Dundurn Press
Publication date : Aug. 5 2025
Language : English
Print length : 352 pages
ISBN-10 : 1459755723
ISBN-13 : 978-1459755727