★★★★★ 5
Pamela reimagined
Format: Kindle
Having just read (and enjoyed) Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Shamela cleverly and wickedly reimagines that novel, while compressing the original’s 500 pages into 30 or so.
Shamela the main character is a conniving and loose woman, a master manipulator who spends down her husband’s fortune while cuckolding him. She is as different from Richardson’s heroine Pamela as the town of Pottersville is from Bedford Falls ( the latter is Jimmy Stewart’s idyllic home in the movie It’s a wonderful Life, and the former is the dystopian place it would have been without Stewart.)
Shamela reminded me of Frank Capra’s movie, where characters notable for their decency and kindness are transformed into their opposites, in this case for satirical purposes. Shamela can only be enjoyed after reading Richardson first and even in the right order it is something of a guilty pleasure.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2022
