As Sabine de la Tour tosses piles of forged banknotes onto a bonfire in a Paris park, she bids a reluctant farewell to her double life as a notorious criminal. (BookSends)
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. (Albert Einstein)
Like the challenge that guest chefs appearing on Chopped on the Food Network Channel are given when they are asked to prepare a winning dish with a number of wildly disparate ingredients, one of my tongue-in-cheeks delights is to relate anything to anything. (This will be a very familiar behavior to all students used to BS-ing their way through assigned papers, and is a questionable gift acquired by those who stayed in school too long.). When I read the above description of a book kindly recommended to me by my Kindle, I chuckled, and my Uncle Waldo popped into my head.
Uncle Waldo was a wonderful old guy, about as tall as I was as a child, with an amazing mustache whose curling edges always made it appear as if he were grinning. Add a somewhat role-poly figure, and he became for me a character out of a fairytale. Like SnowWhite. Squeeze-able, like a (short) Disney character today. He had a great booming laugh that always made me happy.
Sabine de la Tour and Uncle Waldo. How would they relate? Would they be lovers? Enemies on different sides of the law? Brother and sister? Would she perhaps be his moll, and he the mob boss? Did they even have a Mob in Paris in those days? Maybe he could be her clergyman; she would likely need one after all that nefarious activity. Or maybe he could be her forgery teacher — surely one needs a teacher to learn how to forge.
So many possibilities! Have some fun; create your own story — who would you put into a scene with Madame Sabine?
I’ll likely never order that book. The reality could never measure up.