Reviews for Our Mexican Conflicts: Including A Brief History of Mexico from the Sixth Century to the Pre...

The average rating for Our Mexican Conflicts: Including A Brief History of Mexico from the Sixth Century to the Pre... based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-11-14 00:00:00 Carol Gardiner This is a very good 18th century epistolary novel. The prose is precise and elegant, the voices of the various letter writers are well delineated and individualized, and the author makes us admire the heroine and fret over the difficulties which obstruct her happiness. The two lovers—the naive Evelina and the elegant Lord Orville—exhibit sentiment and good sense even in the midst of misunderstandings in a way that looks forward to Austen, and the misunderstandings themselves are both credible and interesting. The novel is, however, not completely successful. Some of the comic characters—Captain Mirvan and Madame Duval, for example—are so crude in conception and so coarse in their behavior that they appear to have traveled here from a very different novel, making the charming Evelina sometimes look like a Disney princess surrounded by escapees from a Warner Brothers’ Looney Tune. These zanies soon take a back seat, however, and the novel resolves itself in a way that is both harmonious and satisfying. ("Evelina" is clearly within the tradition of the "sentimental" novel. Characters are continually commenting on the delicacy of sensibility that may serve to distinguish the superior person from the ordinary one. It is easy to make fun of this literary fashion, but some of the events in the novel--I'm thinking of the abduction, terrorizing and humiliation of the middle-aged Mme. Duval as a practical joke and the wager of two respectable noblemen on a race between two infirm old ladies--are treated in such a cavalier fashion by even this well-bred young female author that I have become convinced that eighteenth century society desperately needed the sentimental impulse--and its embodiment in popular fiction--as a civilizing force.)

Review # 2 was written on 2017-11-20 00:00:00 Michael J. Chapinski Once upon a time in a rural home, many miles from any city lived a girl of seventeen of exquisite beauty with a country parson the humble Reverend Arthur Villars, a kindly old man of the cloth, her foster parent; Evelina of obscure birth, the rest of her name in doubt, maybe Anville...no, it's as good as any, besides one is required... she loved and knew no other guardian... from an epistolary novel of 1778. This lady needless to say unsophisticated in the ways of the world is about to set hearts beating faster when she makes a visit, her first to the great metropolis of uncountable attractions,( none better than she) London. A crisis before that though , her sleazy grandmother, Madame Duval a woman who abandoned the orphan girl, is arriving from France, to take over from the parson, the old lady smells money, the reluctant Rev. Villars dreads the change. Scared , uncomfortable more child than an adult brought there by a family friend Mrs. Mirvan, and her daughter Maria almost a sister to the uneasy Evelina. Another element to put in the pot and stir the plot, Mrs. Mirvan's husband , a rough, salty sea captain is returning after seven long years, the uncouth man, no gentleman, likes causing trouble...and does..Grandmother and the captain spark trouble, more like a forest fire, when they meet in the city .The nightmare begins... every man whom she sees, wants to seduce her, especially the bored rich, powerful Lords and Sirs , an a very elegant, but quite irritating fop too, Mr. Lovel, well dressed , much better than the ladies... Blushes are common on the pretty face of the girl, tongue -tied, feeling faint, she runs away but gets further into the trap ...The wealthy privileged men think they're entitled to all of the lower classes. Young gangs of boys are tormentors of Evelina when she is out in the streets with her friends, viewing the sights... Sir Clement Willoughby doesn't know the meaning of no, always trying to make Evelina do things not in her nature...besides hating this arrogant aristocrat who follows her from the city to the country , even to the seaside town of Bristol. The girl in only six or seven months finds herself becoming very well educated...knowledgeable of high society and trying to defend herself, against the pretensions of members who in reality are not the best of the nation. However there is another Lord, young , good-looking, manners that never offend, a charming, debonair man Lord Orville, but can he be trusted or is he just another phony? This surprisingly well written, biting satire, nevertheless an entertaining book by Fanny Burney, as she dives deep into the upper crust and shows its shortcomings, warts and all, and the people of 18th -century England , they reveal a complex society of good and bad...like everywhere and every age.