Reviews for Opal

The average rating for Opal based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-02-16 00:00:00 Brian Freund If you have never heard of Opal Whiteley than this book will have little relevance for you. To want to read a book about the life of Opal pretty much requires that you bring to it at least a marginal pre-existing knowledge of either her or her famous diary. To approach the subject "cold" is probably not going to appeal to the casual reader except maybe in this case where one is a fan of the author's previous works. This might have been the book that "explained" Opal Whiteley. The author appears to have done the research; she appears to have interviewed the right people. The promos looked like this might be the book that gives the needed and missing insight into the eighty year old mystery of Opal. This isn't that book. First off, the tone of the text gives away the author's sympathies mere pages in. The book has a point of view and no saccharine summary on the last page is going to undo proceeding chapters of caustic verbiage. The book purports to offer an exhaustive examination of the life of Opal, and it may well have except the reader will never be able to verify most of the research because there are no footnotes. There any many statements enclosed in quotation marks, and some are even sourced within the text, but you are going to have take most at face value, or for whatever value the author has given them, because the normally expected notes citing sources doesn't exist in this narrative; and this is a novel-like narrative rather than a normally constructed biography. The other major lacking feature is an index. Unless you have an elephant's memory you are going to have trouble placing a name noted on an early page to one that turns up later with no connective reference. I personally can not conceive of a biography of any value that does not have either footnotes or an index. However, the biggest flaw in this book is that the author gives many reasons why Opal's famous diary could not have been written by the Opal of childhood but she never gives any clue or hint as to how this fraud was pulled off; the "when" maybe, but never the "how". Where was the diary before it was sent for? Who and where were the co-conspirators that would have been needed to pull it all off? How did they even know there was a market to sell the scam to? The author ends the book conceding that the mystery of Opal is just as secure as when the book was began. The book actually offers quite a bit of new biographical information that doesn't appear to have been compiled in a previous volume before, at least not in this detail. A lot of it is very interesting but what to make of it all? The author poisons her own well by the hostile tone of her writing. Opal is a schemer, Opal is a parasite, Opal is an adventuress, Opal is crazy. Compassion or insight seems to be in short supply in cataloging the described events of Opal's life. This is an interesting book and probably will be of great interest to "Opalites" as they are called in the text, but the mystery, and maybe the wonder, of Opal's diary is still secure.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-07-08 00:00:00 Guy Thibault I suspect this book could of been better, but it did lead me to find out more about the lovely & strange Opal Whiteley! So yay for that!