Madensky Square

Written by Eva Ibbotson

Narrated by Juanita McMahon

Susanna Weber is the best dress maker in Imperial Vienna. Through skill and hard work, she now owns her own dress shop, looking out over the beautiful Madensky Square. To do so, she has left her past behind, if not without regret, at least resolutely. Looking around her, at her customers and friends, Susanna is aware that she has more than most - but a few small changes cause her to realize just how precarious her situation is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: W. F. Howes Ltd
• Release date: Jun 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781471235955

Eva Ibbotson

Eva Ibbotson was born in Vienna in 1925 and moved to England with her father when the Nazis came into power. Ibbotson wrote more than twenty books for children and young adults, many of which garnered nominations for major awards for children's literature in the UK, including the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize and the Whitbread Prize. Eva's critically acclaimed Journey to the River Sea won the Smarties Gold Medal in 2001. Set in the Amazon, it was written in honour of her deceased husband Alan, a former naturalist. Imaginative and humorous, Eva's books often convey her love of nature, in particular the Austrian countryside, which is evident in works such as The Star Of Kazan and A Song For Summer. Eva passed away at her home in Newcastle on October 20th 2010. Her final book, One Dog and His Boy, was published in May 2011.

Reviews for Madensky Square

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Eva Ibbotson is known for her charming tales of romance set in a simpler time and place and Madensky Square certainly seems to follow this format. Set in Vienna just before World War I, she details the daily life in and around the small Madensky Square. But if one looks a little closer you’ll find that her observations reveal the darker side of life as well.The main character, Susanna Weber is known as the fashion designer and seamstress of choice as she produces elegant clothes for the women of Vienna. Her profession gives her open access to a number of lives and she becomes the matchmaker, comforter, confidante and lover. While we, the readers, are aware of the upcoming war that will change their lives forever, Susanna and her friends are more concerned with the daily events in the idyllic Madensky Square.I actually found Madensky Square to be rather dark and depressing. The secret lives and hidden actions of Susanna and her neighbours were slightly distasteful. Many of Susanna’s friends and, indeed, Susanna herself, are the lovers of married men. Their wives are treated with disdain and mockery and beauty seems to be the goal. Beauty in appearance, clothing or surroundings were important but internal beauty was dismissed. While the writing was light and her descriptions were gorgeous, this story just didn’t have the charm I was expecting.

[jennybeast · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's more of a romance with Vienna and a time of beauty than a romance of persons. Tragic and beguiling. Quietly told and measured in pace, beautifully told.

[fionaanne · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Such a wonderful sense of time and place, and I do love how Ibbotson delivers such a pretty ending for all but the most beautiful thing about this book is the narrator's connections to other human beings.

[soraki_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Susanna keeps a diary for a year documenting her life as a dressmaker in Vienna in 1911. She documents the joys and tragedies of her own life and also of her friends, employees, and customers. Susanna has a married lover who cannot be seen with Susanna publicly but Susanna has long since made the decision to stay with her lover rather than marry someone that she does not love. Her shop assistant Nina is an anarchist who vehemently denies that she has fallen in love with an American capitalist.This is a charming, beautiful slice-of-life book about the imperial city of Vienna in the last days before WWI.

[herenya_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Madensky Square is a gentle, slowly-unfolding story set in Vienna, 1911. Each month, Susanna writes about her life and the people around her - her neighbours, her employees and her customers, her friends. I enjoyed it.What I had come to expect from Ibbotson's historical romances was “a strong-willed, hardworking, impulsive heroine who befriends everyone and has a particular artistic passion; entertaining characters, interesting settings, misunderstandings and miscommunication”. And that description does apply to Madensky Square. However, what I found myself noticing was how Madensky Square is different.It isn’t a coming-of-age story. Susanna is not an inexperienced young woman poised at the beginning of her career. Instead she’s is in her 30s. She is a dressmaker with her own shop. She has old friends, and a lover, and unhappiness in her past that leads to fits of depression. I really love coming-of-age stories, but I also like reading about people who are in different places in their lives.(The other way Madensky Square differs is that it is told in first person. And thus it avoids something I usually dislike about Ibbotson's novels - the small scenes which do not include the main characters but show how ridiculous the "unlikeable" characters are. There's an unnecessary meanness to those scenes, and they reinforce a rather two-dimensional portrayal of the "unlikeable" characters.Susanna knows some unlikeable and ridiculous people, but she can't follow them into private moments, so she has fewer opportunities to mock them than an omniscient narrator does. And if she has a black-and-white view of certain people, it doesn't mean that they're lacking in depth - just that Susanna doesn't see it. This feels more convincing.)

[yarrow_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really really loved this book. I found it by chance in a charity shop, and bought it because I'd enjoyed the other adult romances by this author. However, while her other books were sweet romances with almost identical plots and far-too-perfect heroines (those have been republished for teenagers, and this one hasn't, and I can see why), this one had real depth. I loved Susanna, and her observations on life and those around her. There's a lot of love in this book, and hardly any of it is conventional, which I liked a lot. Susanna's guilt about giving up her daughter leaves a thread of real poignancy through the whole story, which perfectly counterbalances the more saccharine stuff going on around her. I also liked the way that both Susanna and Alice were grateful for the love that they had, whilst living their lives for themselves the rest of the time. Mostly, however, it made me want to move to Vienna in 1912 and waltz around in beautiful dresses! Knowing that all these lives are headed towards catastrophe in WWI (this is hinted at a bit in the book, but not expanded) only adds to the sorrow.

[peptastic · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The book description and other reviews for this book were misleading. It wasn't at all charming, delightful or romantic. It was deeply depressing actually. Looks matter and nothing else. Women are entirely to blame for a bad marriage and men are virtuous and deceived by ugly wives.The icing on the cake was the story Susanna shares with her friend Alice about a buck-tooth girl who tricked a poor guy into being saddled with her. They bemoan the fate of the poor men with bad wives.Right. I think it's time to put that myth to bed. Some men cheat on lovely, honest and decent wives who are often pretty. Even the villainous Egger's wife wasn't spared despite his "Nasty habit", bad business practices and other despicable qualities. She was ugly and plain! Even if the wife is "plain" by Susanna's eye people do honestly have a myriad of reasons for being married.This was the two women's nasty way of excusing that they are other women without showing in the novel that most "kept woman" aren't really loved by these men at all. It reminded me of two different miniseries about hookers, Band of Gold and The Secret Diary of a Caller Girl which pity the poor men whose wife won't do this or that. In this case the wife is just ugly or has interests outside of her husband.I don't fault that Susanna wasn't perfect [her petty feelings for a rival dressmaker] since Ibbotson's other heroines are ridiculously forgiving... but Susanna placed too much stock in people's appearances. For a thirty-six year old woman she ought to have learned her dead mother's remark "Pretty equals goodness" is not true. She never sees beyond that even after her 'match-making' of poor Edith and Herr Huber. He wasn't a good looking bloke but spent the majority of the book expecting to get the hot girl. Magdalena.The Magdalena/Edith storyline contradicted her argument with Huber. Magdalena wanted a sexless marriage but was sooo pretty. Now there was a marriage that would have ended in infidelity had it happened.Susanna should at least hold men to these same standards. She does tell him off but only for thinking he could have a marriage without sex. It could just be that people end up not being compatible but the poor men who have wives that don't understand them. She also picked on the women for having ugly daughters. Gasp, the worst thing a wife could do to her man.This book was filled with women hating other women. It didn't have a cozy, magical and feel goodness when the book lambasts you with appearances are all that matters in a relationship when the book is a romance. Connections with people for more than surface reasons are what sells a romance or makes you give a damn what happens to them.This read like a kiddie pool version of Nancy Mitford's "The Pursuit of Love". Only partly none of the good stuff of that book. That book was sublime and true to real romance in that most love is all in ours heads and how we ourselves feel about the other person is what most love is. There could have been a way to tell Susanna and Alice own romances without blaming women in general for not understanding poor men. This book was just all the lies women in affairs tell themselves without exposing the lies.It failed as a romance for real life love for failing to expose those as lies and it failed as a fantasy because it was too cold. This is a book written for adults unlike Ibboton's other novels but with the exception of her heroines and their love interests the other novels involved complex characters. This book might be for immature adults who don't understand how bad these sort of relationships are for everyone involved. At best it's just someone who doesn't know what they want and flitters between two women who offer something of what they want but not the complete package. Some men have a Madonna/Whore complex and want two women.Not this line from the book that had me laughing a loud. "It isn't warm, passionate women like you who make the Great Lovers of this world. It's coldhearted devils like me who are generally bored or discontented and frequently both."How charming.This is why this failed. He was bored. I was bored as a result. That was all her Field Marshall ever got across was boredom.The first few pages were the old stock unrealistic "Those flowers are so beautiful la di da".The best aspect of the book was her pain over giving up her daughter but then she experiences no growth whatsoever. She learns she's pretty and is happy.That was all that mattered. Not who she was a person. No relationship forged.

[wyvernfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A story about Susanna Weber, who is a dressmaker, set in 1911, before the world was consumed by World War I but where sabre rattling was already starting to be heard. Anarchism is seen as an interesting hobby and life is interesting. Susanna has carved herself a life in Madensky Square, knows the people there and where she works and lives. This is an interesting time in her life a time of love and sorrow; of change and trials but overall a story of a life well lived. It's not quite a romance, it's a light book that shines with a love for the location and the characters and a gentle humour for what's going on in people's lives. I really did like the read and look forward to hunting up more by this author.

[books_ofa_feather · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Eva Ibbotson's love for Vienna is undeniable in most of her works. Madensky Square is no acception. Lovely descriptions of this far off place, make me long to visit. The authors ability to paint a picture of the clothing was beautiful. My only dislike of the book was the presence of mistresses in the story, otherwise wonderful as always!