Book Review: If I Were You

Title: If I Were You



(Original British title: Deception; the U.S. edition shows a silhouette of a girl's head, rather like the one below, colored in, with another silhouette showing behind it, to show that this is a story about doubles.)

Author: Joan Aiken

Date: 1987

Publisher: Doubleday

ISBN: 0-385023964-5

Length: 336 pages

Quote: “Certainly no longer than a year...At the end of such a period I must...be able to discover whether I have the necessary talents to pursue a literary career.”

Joan Aiken dedicated this piece of gentle fiction to “all female writers past and present.” Of all her dozens of novels, in some ways this is her best one. Never before and never since have introverts, and especially the kind who become female novelists, been so delightfully vindicated. Female writers should thank Aiken for such a gift.

In 1815 Alvey Clement, American orphan, and Louisa Winship, third of nine children in a rich English family, complete their education in an English boarding school where everyone has always guessed they must be twins. (They may be distant cousins.) Extrovert Louisa can’t bear the thought of settling down in her quiet country home, and urges Alvey to go home in her stead and use the opportunity to finish that novel Alvey has been wanting to write for all their teen years. Alvey reluctantly lets herself be tempted to use her education to tutor Louisa’s younger siblings (Aiken’s trademark pair of gifted children) and nurse Louisa’s elders, in a prettier place than she’s ever dreamed of finding, while Louisa, well, behaves like an extrovert. By the time they’re twenty-one the girls’ caper has a happier ending than it deserves.

Meanwhile...before there were nonfiction studies like The Introvert Advantage and Quiet, there was this novel, in which, one by one, Louisa’s family realize they enjoy Alvey’s company more than Louisa’s. In the 1980s it was balm for the much-abraded introvert soul.

Written without the fast-paced adventures and overt comic touches of Aiken’s earlier fiction, this mellow novel should appeal to those who like Jane Austen, Regency romances, or Victorian family stories. How is it possible for a double to replace a person in that person’s family of origin—even for a few months? It’s possible because each of the Winships has his or her own personal drama going on, such that most of them aren’t paying much attention to the others. Alvey, observing them as material for a novel, listens to them and brings some degree of comfort to each one.

What’s not to love? Well...some readers might mind that it’s not a romance. In the 1980s many female writers were tired of the cliché that every happy ending had to involve romance, and so, although If I Were You includes three weddings and an illicit affair, it contains no conversation that can really be called a love scene between a young couple, and ends with four attractive twenty-somethings still single. I find this refreshing; you might find it disappointing. Cynics might say that, like the unsatisfactory end of the budding romance in The Embroidered Sunset, the end of If I Were You amounted to promotion for a follow-up story. If so, the promotion failed and the follow-up story wasn’t written.

In any case, if you like gentle fiction and don’t already have If I Were You, run don’t walk.

To buy it here, send $5 per book, $5 per package (up to three more books of this size will fit into that package), and $1 per online payment to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or the e-mail address you get from salolianigodagewi, as explained in the Greeting post. Joan Aiken no longer needs the dollar she'd get if this were a Fair Trade Book; feel free to scroll down and find Fair Trade Books to add to the package.