Tooth of the Covenant by Norman Lock

 

I hope to expose both the moral horror and criminal injustices of the age and to speak to their persistence in our own. ~Norman Lock interview

As a genealogist I have uncovered things about my ancestors that were meant to be kept secret, things no one ever talked about. 

There are the usual crimes--sneaking out of Russia to avoid serving in the Czar's army, marriages soon gone sour and the divorces never spoken of, children born out of wedlock. And some that are disturbing, like a beloved grandparent who admitted to a crime and was jailed, which was kept secret from his children.

I found the newspaper articles, first downplaying that anything would come of the charges, then his admission of guilt, then the ad where my grandmother sold off furniture. She moved the children to her parents home and they never knew their father spent three months in jail. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne's ancestor's sins were not hidden. They were in the history books. His great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was a Puritan judge in Salem, Massachusetts, who sent women and girls to their deaths, accused of witchery. To disassociate himself from this heritage, Nathaniel changed the spelling of his name.

Tooth of the Covenant, Norman Lock's eighth book in his American Novel series, places Nathaniel back in time, planning to arraign his ancestor and prevent the deaths. Framed as Nathaniel writing a story, using the persona Isaac Page, his journey through time alters his perception.

Salem in 1692 was a dangerous place. Isaac/Nathaniel uses his woodworking skill acquired at the failed idealist Brook Farm community to earn his bed and board on the fringes of Salem.

He drinks at taverns where men ignore the 'one and no more' mantra of the Puritans, and dangerously discusses theology condemned by the Puritans. Married in his own time, Issac/Nathaniel finds himself attracted to a pretty indentured servant. 

As Issac delays his mission, his resolve weakens, and fatally, he is able to see through the lens of the past and becomes allied to his detested great-grandfather.

We can judge the past, and yet we cannot escape it. We carry the prejudices and legacy forward, sometimes unthinking, sometimes purposefully. Our legacy insidiously skews our world view, distorts our perception.

"What are we if not our stories," Hawthorne/Lock writes early on, and he ends, "If there is witchery, it is in the stories that we tell, their power to enthrall, transform, uplift, and corrupt. A scarlet letter or a great while whale--what are they if not figures in a tableau behind which lie truths that can crack the foundation of the world and let the angels or the devils out into broadest day!" 

The American Novel series enthrall us as they break open the veneer of righteousness we sometimes claim for ourselves. We miss the log in our own eye when we think only of the sins of the past, for the past remains with us. 

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Tooth of the Covenant
by Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press

Publication July 6, 2021
Trade paper
ISBN: 9781942658832
Ebook US $16.99
ISBN: 9781942658849

From the Publisher

Best known for his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne was burdened by familial shame, which began with his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne, the infamously unrepentant Salem witch trial judge. 

In this, the eighth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, we witness Hawthorne writing a tale entitled Tooth of the Covenant, in which he sends his fictional surrogate, Isaac Page, back to the year 1692 to save Bridget Bishop, the first person executed for witchcraft, and rescue the other victims from execution. 

But when Page puts on Hathorne’s spectacles, his worldview is transformed and he loses his resolve. As he battles his conscience, he finds that it is his own life hanging in the balance.

An ingenious and profound investigation into the very notion of universal truth and morality, Tooth of the Covenant probes storytelling’s depths to raise history’s dead and assuage the persistent ghost of guilt.

-

The Cape Doctor by E. J. Levy

I read this novel in one day.

It was a windy, gloomy day. But that is not why I read it in one day. I read it in one day because I did not want to stop reading. 

I loved the narrative voice, the feeling of being transported back several centuries, the knowing wink to the style of the early 19th c in lines like "No one who had ever seen Margaret Brackley in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine (or so Jane Austen might have written of her..."

I was interested in the questions the narrator struggled with, about choice and chance, gender identity, the gap between male and female autonomy and self-determination.

Which of us is undisguised, after all? Which of us reveals himself truly to the world. ~from The Cape Doctor by E. J. Levy

 

The Cape Doctor is based on the true story of a woman who posed as a man to gain an education and become the first female doctor. She performed the first recorded, successful Cesarean operation.

portrait of Dr. James Barry, inspiration for The Cape Doctor's protagonist

Levy's character is inspired by the historical Barry, but Levy gives her own spin to the story, concentrating on the feminist issues. Her Dr. Perry lives as a man, but identifies as female. (Another character is hermaphrodite, which some believe Barry was, while others believe Barry was transsexual. Those controversies do not affect my reading of this novel, as this is historical fiction inspired by true events, and not a biography.) 

Under Levy's hands, the imagined character Margaret Brackley becomes Dr. Jonathan Mirandus Perry. She tells her story of transformation from a subservient and invisible female to an authoritative and competent professional man of society.

In dire poverty, Margaret's mother sends her to beg aid from her uncle. There, she meets General Mirandus, who takes an interest in her brilliant mind. After her uncle's death, the general sends her to be educated in Edinburgh's esteemed medical school with plans for her to become his personal physician in Caracas.

Margaret cuts her hair and binds her breasts and dons a boy's clothing. She learns to lower her voice, to change her actions and her attitude, to mimic. She learns how to masquerade, how to pass.

As Dr. Perry, she becomes a successful army doctor in Cape Town, with at least one young lady falling in love with her.

When her true sex is discovered, she has a love affair and must chose between love and her career, and more importantly, "the right to think and speak and move as I chose, not as others bade me. To experience life on my own terms."

I thought of Mary Wollstonecraft, another brilliant woman who was also against marriage, whose love affairs were scandalous.

As a first-person narrative in the style of the early 19th c, Margaret/Perry speaks to issues of identity and freedom, often in pithy epigrams. And most are quite timeless. Including, "You can judge a culture by its medicine, by how it teats is most vulnerable--the ill." 

It is interesting to learn that the Cape Doctor is the name for a strong wind that today blows away the pollution over Cape Town and provides waves for perfect surfing, but which was believed to also blow away bad spirits, healing the town. And that fair weather comes after the blow. 

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Cape Doctor

by E. J. Levy

Little, Brown and Company

Pub Date  June 15, 2021

ISBN: 9780316536585

hardcover $28.00 (USD)

from the publisher

A "gorgeous, thoughtful, heartbreaking" historical novel, The Cape Doctor is the story of one man’s journey from penniless Irish girl to one of most celebrated and accomplished figures of his time (Lauren Fox, New York Times bestselling author of Send for Me).

 

Beginning in Cork, Ireland, the novel recounts Perry’s journey from daughter to son in order to enter medical school and provide for family, but Perry soon embraced the new-found freedom of living life as a man. From brilliant medical student in Edinburgh and London to eligible bachelor and quick-tempered physician in Cape Town, Dr. Perry thrived. When he befriended the aristocratic Cape Governor, the doctor rose to the pinnacle of society, before the two were publicly accused of a homosexual affair that scandalized the colonies and nearly cost them their lives.

 

E. J. Levy’s enthralling novel, inspired by the life of Dr. James Miranda Barry, brings this captivating character vividly alive.

Among the Beautiful Beasts by Lori McMullen

Marjory Stoneman Douglas loved her new home in Florida and her job writing for her father's newspaper. She arrived in 1915, a crucial time when developers were dredging up the sea bottom to create coastal retreats, destroying the ecosystem of the unique habitat known as the Everglades.

Marjory's adored mother was mentally ill, causing her father to leave them when she was a girl. Her mother in an asylum, Marjory was cared for by grandparents and an aunt who supported her college education. She found work writing for a newspaper. 

Marjory considered herself to be plain; then she met a man who swept her off her feet and she leapt into marriage, learning his true history and nature too late. To escape, Marjory joined her estranged father in Florida, writing for his newspaper.

Waiting for her divorce to be granted, Marjory falls in love. WWI separates them, and when he returns, she must decide between marriage to a wounded soul or a career and work as an activist to protect the Everglades.

The imagined early life of Marjory Stoneman Douglas is a story of a woman rising above the limitations of family and social constraints. The novel is in her voice, and told in alternating time lines of her early life within a suspenseful frame story. It is a page-turner.

The novel offers a vivid portrait of Florida, Miami Beach merely an idea, Coconut Grove isolated cottages. Marjory witnesses how a sand bar and mangrove swamp was drained and filled in to create Miami Beach. 

He was stealing the land--changing it, moving it, using it--but unlike a common thief, he felt no need to hide.~ from Among the Beautiful Beasts by Lori McMullen

Now, I want a second volume that tells the story of her life's work as a writer and activist! Marjory lived to be 108 years old! 

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Among the Beautiful Beasts
by Lori McMullen
She Writes Press
Pub Date 01 Jun 2021 
ISBN: 9781647421069
paperback $16.95 (USD)

about the author Lori McMullen

I grew up in unincorporated Dade County, outside of Miami. My father was a Vietnam vet who supervised a soda bottling warehouse, and my mother was an aide in the public schools. As a family, we took one trip each year — to the west coast of Florida. The best part of this trip was the drive along Route 41, a two-lane, pot-hole ridden stretch of road that bisected Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve. The vast, wild space enthralled me, and as I got older and began to write fiction, South Florida found its way into my stories again and again. My short story “Gringa” appeared in the Tampa Review, and my short story “June Bug” recently appeared in Slush Pile magazine. Among the Beautiful Beasts is my first novel.

I left Miami to attend Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. Currently, I live with my husband and three daughters in Chicago. My passion for horseback riding is nearly as great as my passion for writing, and any free time I have is spent riding and jumping my horse.

from the publisher

Set in the early 1900s, Among the Beautiful Beasts is the untold story of the early life of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, known in her later years as a tireless activist for the Florida Everglades. 

After a childhood spent in New England estranged from her father and bewildered by her mother, who fades into madness, Marjory marries a swindler thirty years her senior. The marriage nearly destroys her, but Marjory finds the courage to move to Miami, where she is reunited with her father and begins a new life as a journalist in that bustling, booming frontier town. 

Buoyed by a growing sense of independence and an affair with a rival journalist, Marjory embraces a life lived at the intersection of the untamed Everglades and the rapacious urban development that threatens it. 

When the demands of a man once again begin to swallow Marjory’s own desires and dreams, she sees herself in the vulnerable, inimitable Everglades and is forced to decide whether to commit to a life of subjugation or leap into the wild unknown. 

Told in chapters that alternate between an urgent midnight chase through the wetlands and extensive narrative flashbacks, Among the Beautiful Beasts is at once suspenseful and deeply reflective.

A Hundred Suns by Karin Tanabe

A Hundred Suns by Karin Tanabe caught my interest for it's setting in 1930s Indochine (later, Vietnam) under French colonial rule. 

Tanabe's protagonist Jesse plotted a life to escape the crushing poverty and abuse of her childhood. She achieved an education and became a teacher, then travels to Paris. When she catches a wealthy relation to the Michelin family, she is set up for life. They are in love and have a daughter.

She has kept her past a secret, so when a woman from her previous life shows up in Paris she is desperate to flee and convinces her husband Vincent to request a position overseeing the Michelin Indochine rubber plantations.

Tanabe's portrait of Indochine's beauty, tropical climate, and decadent expat society is vivid and beautifully rendered. High society--white and rich only, of course--has a veneer of respectability. The men indulge in sexual freedoms with the local women, the women indulge in leisure and alcohol, and everyone uses cocaine freely. 

Vincent's success depends on keeping production high and expenditures low. He works to improve the quality of life for the local workers--the 'coolies.' But overseers deal out cruel punishment to any who try to unionize and fight for humane treatment, the leaders tortured or murdered.

Jesse is taken under wing by the beautiful French woman Marcelle. Marcelle has an agenda. She is a communist and hates colonization and the Michelin family, who were responsible for killing the Indochine man loved by her best friend. Her Indochine lover Khoi is wealthy and gorgeous; by law, they are not allowed to marry. The couple lure Jesse into compromising situations. Marcelle plots to drive Jesse and Victor back to France.

Jesse strives to help her husband in his work, but also experiences strange psychotic episodes and struggles with self-doubt. 

I enjoyed reading the novel for it's setting and the suspense kept me turning pages. As readers come to understand the characters and their motivations deeper, the delineation between good and evil become blurred. 

Colonization and unbridled capitalism are shown to be the true evils. The 'coolies' are virtual slaves, contracting to work for three years in brutal conditions. When workers strive to organize for better treatment they suffer dire consequences, while the French are given lenient punishments for crimes. A corrupt system corrupts those who participate in the system. 

There are scenes of sexual activity and a glimpse into the torture of communist leaders on the plantation, and stories of abuse suffered by Jesse and her siblings. 

The novel will appeal to a wide range of readers--historical fiction, women's fiction, suspense and thrillers, and those who enjoy exotic settings. It is the perfect beach read.

I received a free book from the publisher through Book Club Cook Book. My review is fair and unbiased.

A Hundred Suns
by Karin Tanabe
St. Martin's Griffin
On Sale: 03/16/2021
ISBN: 9781250231482
$17.99 trade paperback

from the publisher

On a humid afternoon in 1933, American Jessie Lesage steps off a boat from Paris and onto the shores of Vietnam. Accompanying her French husband Victor, an heir to the Michelin rubber fortune, she’s certain that their new life is full of promise, for while the rest of the world is sinking into economic depression, Indochine is gold for the Michelins. Jessie knows that the vast plantations near Saigon are the key to the family’s prosperity, and though they have recently been marred in scandal, she needs them to succeed for her husband’s sake—and to ensure that the life she left behind in America stays buried in the past.

Jessie dives into the glamorous colonial world, where money is king and morals are brushed aside, and meets Marcelle de Fabry, a spellbinding expat with a wealthy Indochinese lover, the silk tycoon Khoi Nguyen. Descending on Jessie’s world like a hurricane, Marcelle proves to be an exuberant guide to colonial life. But hidden beneath her vivacious exterior is a fierce desire to put the colony back in the hands of its people––starting with the Michelin plantations.

It doesn’t take long for the sun-drenched days and champagne-soaked nights to catch up with Jessie. With an increasingly fractured mind, her affection for Indochine falters. And as a fiery political struggle builds around her, Jessie begins to wonder what’s real in a friendship that she suspects may be nothing but a house of cards.

Motivated by love, driven by ambition, and seeking self-preservation at all costs, Jessie and Marcelle each toe the line between friend and foe, ethics and excess. Cast against the stylish backdrop of 1920s Paris and 1930s Indochine, in a time and place defined by contrasts and convictions, Karin Tanabe's A Hundred Suns is historical fiction at its lush, suspenseful best.

About the Author

Karin Tanabe is the author of The Diplomat's Daughter, The Gilded Years, The Price of Inheritance, and The List. A former Politico reporter, her writing has also appeared in the The Washington Post, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, and Newsday. She has made frequent appearances as a celebrity and politics expert on Entertainment Tonight, CNN, and The CBS Early Show. A graduate of Vassar College, Karin lives in Washington, DC.

Early Morning Riser, The Chanel Sisters, and News of the World

 

Last week I read two library books from my local library. 

Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny had glowing reviews about its humor. The novel is set in the Up North city of Boyne City, Michigan. Our library book club read the author's novel Standard Deviation a few years ago. I thought it would be a welcome bedtime read.

And it was that! I laughed out loud. Heiny knows the Up North culture, and through her character Jane, a young teacher new to the area, provides some very pointed humor. She mentions the iconic Kilwin's ice cream and places Michiganders will know.

It seemed to Jane that people who lived downstate had cabins in Northern Michigan, and people who lived in Northern Michigan had cabins in the Upper Peninsula, but where did people who lived in the Upper Peninsula have cabins? Canada? And where did Canadian people have cabins? At what point did there cease to be an appeal in going north and people gave up and bought time shares in Florida?

I loved the wacky, likable characters that surround Jane. Her love interest Duncan seems to have slept with every woman she meets. Duncan was burned by his first marriage to a beautiful, but controlling, woman. He still mows his exe's yard and fixes things at her house, although she has remarried; her husband is eccentric with endless special needs.

Duncan has taken under his wing Jimmy, a mentally challenged man. A tragic accident changes Jane's life and she assumes care for Jimmy along with Duncan. 

This charming novel has great heart and warmth. 

Available now

from the publisher

A wise, bighearted, boundlessly joyful novel of love, disaster, and unconventional family

Jane falls in love with Duncan easily. He is charming, good-natured, and handsome but unfortunately, he has also slept with nearly every woman in Boyne City, Michigan. Jane sees Duncan’s old girlfriends everywhere–at restaurants, at the grocery store, even three towns away.

While Jane may be able to come to terms with dating the world’s most prolific seducer of women, she wishes she did not have to share him quite so widely. His ex-wife, Aggie, a woman with shiny hair and pale milkmaid skin, still has Duncan mow her lawn. His coworker, Jimmy, comes and goes from Duncan’s apartment at the most inopportune times. Sometimes Jane wonders if a relationship can even work with three people in it–never mind four. Five if you count Aggie’s eccentric husband, Gary. Not to mention all the other residents of Boyne City, who freely share with Jane their opinions of her choices.

But any notion Jane had of love and marriage changes with one terrible car crash. Soon Jane’s life is permanently intertwined with Duncan’s, Aggie’s, and Jimmy’s, and Jane knows she will never have Duncan to herself. But could it be possible that a deeper kind of happiness is right in front of Jane’s eyes? A novel that is alternately bittersweet and laugh-out-loud funny, Katherine Heiny’s Early Morning Riser is her most astonishingly wonderful work to date.

*****

I read and enjoyed Judithe Little's historical novel Wickwhythe Hall, and a number of years back read Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History by Rhonda K. Garelick. I was interested in Little's new novel The Chanel Sisters, the story of Coco's youngest sister, Antoinette. 

The Chanel sisters Julia-Berthe, Adrienne, Gabrielle, and Antoinette lost their mother and were abandoned by their father, growing up at a convent orphanage. 

The Chanel sisters seek a path out of poverty through work or romance. Antoinette is essential to Coco's design career but she dreams of marriage. Little imagines a love interest that predates her historical marriage, and which explains her death in Argentina.

Readers will love these characters determined to rise above the circumstances of their birth, not only challenging social norms but changing them with fashions that freed women from constricting, ornamental clothing. 

Available now

from the publisher

A novel of survival, love, loss, triumph—and the sisters who changed fashion forever

Antoinette and Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel know they’re destined for something better. Abandoned by their family years before, they’ve grown up under the guidance of pious nuns preparing them for simple lives as the wives of tradesmen or shopkeepers. At night, their secret stash of romantic novels and magazine cutouts beneath the floorboards are all they have to keep their dreams of the future alive.

The walls of the convent can’t shield them forever, and when they’re finally of age, the Chanel sisters set out together with a fierce determination to prove themselves worthy to a society that has never accepted them. Their journey propels them out of poverty and to the stylish cafés of Moulins, the dazzling performance halls of Vichy—and to a small hat shop on the rue Cambon in Paris, where a business takes hold and expands to the glamorous French resort towns. But when World War I breaks out, their lives are irrevocably changed, and the sisters must gather the courage to fashion their own places in the world, even if apart from each other.

***** 

News of the World by Paulette Jiles is my library book club choice for May. I had a copy on Kindle, but when my husband tried to read it, he was frustrated by the lack of quotation marks. So, he purchased the audiobook.

We listened to the audiobook over three nights, two hours at a time. We were mesmerized by the characters and gorgeous writing. The narrator, Grover Garland, was terrific.

We both exclaimed at passages of great beauty; one became my #SundaySentence on Twitter.

With the release of the movie based on the book, starring the wonderful Tom Hanks, I expect most people have heard of this story of a Civil War veteran and the girl captured by natives and their fraught travels across Texas.  Capt. Kidd is to return to her extended family members, but becomes attached to her, and he has a deep understanding of the challenges she faces in reassimilation.

My fifth great-uncle Michael Rhodes, whose family were some of the first settlers in the Shenandoah Valley, was captured by Native Americans and taken to Ohio for three years before being returned in an exchange. I thought about him and wondered what his life was like. He saw his parents scalped, his siblings murdered. Characters in News talk about how quickly white settlers became acclimated to native life and have trouble reentering their old life.

I previous read Jiles's Simon the Fiddler, and was happy to meet him again in this novel. And early in my Kindle days, I read Jiles's novel The Color of Lightning. I have her Stormy Weather on Kindle waiting to be read.

from the publisher

In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.

In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence.

In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna’s parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own. Recently rescued by the U.S. army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows.

Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity, throws away her shoes, and refuses to act “civilized.” Yet as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forming a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land.

Arriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy nor welcome. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember—strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden. A respectable man, Captain Kidd is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become—in the eyes of the law—a kidnapper himself.

The Engineer's Wife by Tracey Enerson Wood: Based on the True Story of the Woman Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge

 

When engineer Washington Roebling's father died, it fell to him to build the Brooklyn Bridge, an unprecedented engineering feat. Luckily, Wash had married a woman of intelligence and strength, because when he fell victim to caissons disease (decompression sickness), Emily became his link to the outside world. Eventually, her understanding of engineering brought her to be the de facto engineer in charge of the bridge.

Tracey Enerson Wood's historical fiction novel The Engineer's Wife imagines Emily's story from girlhood, as a young wife, and finally as an engineer. 

Wood does a splendid job of incorporating how the bridge was literally built and the risks it incorporated. That alone is an amazing story that sweeps across the heights and depths of human emotion and scientific progress. 

Wood makes the story universally appealing by turning it into a romance as well, with Emily's love for Wash turns to despair when his illness leaves her without his support, emotionally and intimately. She struggles to find confidence, leaning on P. T. Barnum, their fictional relationship not based on history, but delineating how the real Emily may have struggled without an involved husband. 

I would have been kept interested strictly by Emily's personal growth and ability to meet challenges usually given to men. But the romance angle will appeal to many historical fiction readers.

It is an absorbing and interesting novel. 

I received a free book from the publisher. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Engineer's Wife
by Tracey Enerson Wood
Sourcebooks Landmark 

Publication Date April 7, 2020
ISBN-10 : 149269813X
ISBN-13 : 978-1492698135

Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge

 

"Their need was monstrous." 

It wasn't only the barn cats that frightened Libertie by their demands and needs. Every one seemed to want something from her. 

First, her mother, a free, black, homeopathic doctor who determined that Libertie would follow into her career. Her mother was deemed a saint, caring for the whole world, secreting slaves into freedom, and healing black and white alike.

Libertie was overwhelmed by the diseases of the body, but it was the diseases of the mind that most troubled her soul, including the unrequited love of a newly freed slave, and the broken people who gathered in a back room, free but never safe from the trauma of their past. Her mother's cures could not heal broken spirits.

Libertie's light-skinned mother was allowed to touch the white women's bodies, but they flinched at Libertie's touch. She was Black Girl. How could her mother minister to the people who hated them for the war? How could her mother ignore history for the sake of money?

During the Civil War, the women gathered to create a hospital, and Libertie felt the power of their communal energy. She learned from their example how to scheme to right a wrong world.The world felt full of possibilities and Libertie marveled over her choices.

Libertie was sent to college where she first experienced the world outside of her mother. She hoped to forge her own path. She hated the medical coursework, and her classmates were 'colorstruck' against her. 

Music saved her; hearing two girls singing, she presents herself as their pupil.  Singing, her soul soared. But she discovers the girls have a special relationship that can never include her.

Returning home, Libertie meets the recent medical school graduate working under her mother, the light skinned, straight haired, Haitian, Emmanuel. He weaves stories of a beautiful country ruled by Negroes, a place where blacks can be truly free. 

Emmanuel enchants Libertie with his stories of the Haitian African gods still worshiped, although attacked by his Bishop father. He proclaims to believe in 'companionate marriage,' a modern understanding. She accepts his marriage proposal. She had failed as a daughter, as a medical student; perhaps she would find herself as a wife and mother.

Haiti is beautiful, but is not the paradise she had imagined. Emmanuel's family resents her, and she discovers a double standard that her husband is complicit in maintaining. 

In her quest to discover who she is, to find real freedom, Libertie finds herself boxed in by expectations and limited choices, until she finds the courage to take control of her destiny.

Every generation must find its own way, every woman pushes against the societal, familial, and political forces that bind her. Libertie's story is set in the past, but her story will be recognized by young women today. What does it mean to forge your own path, to be free to be yourself? How do we discover who we really are in a world of demands? 

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Libertie: A Novel
by Kaitlyn Greenidge
Algonquin Books
Pub Date: March 30, 2021
ISBN: 9781616207014
hard cover $26.95 (USD)

about the author

Kaitlyn Greenidge's debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, was one of the New York Times Critics’ Top 10 Books of 2016 and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times, and her writing has also appeared in Vogue, Glamour, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Greenidge lives in Brooklyn, New York.

from the publisher

The critically acclaimed and Whiting Award–winning author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman returns with Libertie, an unforgettable story about one young Black girl’s attempt to find a place where she can be fully, and only, herself.

Coming of age as a freeborn Black girl in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson is all too aware that her purposeful mother, a practicing physician, has a vision for their future together: Libertie is to go to medical school and practice alongside her. \ 

But Libertie, drawn more to music than science, feels stifled by her mother’s choices and is hungry for something else—is there really only one way to have an autonomous life? And she is constantly reminded that, unlike her mother, who can pass, Libertie has skin that is too dark. 

When a young man from Haiti proposes to Libertie and promises she will be his equal on the island, she accepts, only to discover that she is still subordinate to him and all men. As she tries to parse what freedom actually means for a Black woman, Libertie struggles with where she might find it—for herself and for generations to come.

Inspired by the life of one of the first Black female doctors in the United States and rich with historical detail, Kaitlyn Greenidge’s new and immersive novel will resonate with readers eager to understand our present through a deep, moving, and lyrical dive into our complicated past.

The Invisible Woman by Erika Robuck

The publishing world is saturated by WWII novels. And yet there always seems to be one more story to be told, a story unlike the others we have read. The Invisible Woman offers readers a character so amazing that it is hard to believe she is based on a real woman. 

In The Invisible Woman, Erika Robuck brings to life Virginia Hall Goillot who went into occupied France as a "pianist," coordinating and supplying the Marquis as they sabotaged the Nazis. She was the only civilian woman to be award the U. S. Distinguished Service Cross, and one of the first women to work for the C.I.A.

It is a riveting read. 

The average lifespan of a pianist was six weeks. "You will receive no praise or accolades for your service," Virginia was warned, "Without military uniform, if captured, you will not fall under Geneva protection." 

She would starve. She would feel guilt over the deaths of those involved in her work. She could be jailed, raped, tortured, or put to death.

Virginia accepted the challenge. She had a debt to pay.

Virginia wore a prosthetic leg but it did not stop her from her work. Masquerading as an elderly woman, she rode a bicycle for hours, trekked through deep mountain snow, endured danger and grief, gained the trust of the boys and men she worked with, and was aided by women and children. 

The "nameless and faceless" army of common folks were true heroes, enduring suffering and loss. A village of pacifist Christians hid thousands of evacuated Jewish children. 

Virginia struggles with what she has seen. How do men become monsters? Is humanity redeemable? Can small acts overpower it? Was resisting worth dying for? Will her humanity be another victim of the war?

Readers will be gratified by the ending.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

I previously read and reviewed Robuck's novel House of Hawthorne.

The Invisible Woman
by Erika Robuck
Berkley Publishing Group
Pub Date: February 9, 2021  
ISBN: 9780593102145
hardcover $16.00 (USD)

from the publisher

In the depths of war, she would defy the odds to help liberate a nation…a gripping historical novel based on the remarkable true story of World War II heroine Virginia Hall, from the bestselling author of Hemingway’s Girl

France, March 1944. Virginia Hall wasn't like the other young society women back home in Baltimore—she never wanted the debutante ball or silk gloves. Instead, she traded a safe life for adventure in Europe, and when her beloved second home is thrust into the dark days of war, she leaps in headfirst.

Once she's recruited as an Allied spy, subverting the Nazis becomes her calling. But even the most cunning agent can be bested, and in wartime trusting the wrong person can prove fatal. Virginia is haunted every day by the betrayal that ravaged her first operation, and will do everything in her power to avenge the brave people she lost.

While her future is anything but certain, this time more than ever Virginia knows that failure is not an option. Especially when she discovers what—and whom—she's truly protecting.

The Children's Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin

I had not yet read Melanie Benjamin when I heard her talk about her new historical fiction novel The Children's Blizzard on Karen Dionne's Back Room author series. 

I had read David Laskin's nonfiction book The Children's Blizzard in 2005 and knew the story of the 1888 weather event that hit the upper Midwest prairie, devastating immigrant settlements and killing children coming home from school.

Benjamin talked about her writing on the Back Room, how she was an early reader, the pressure to be commercial, and her desire to write about something different, not about a specific historical figure. 

Knowing the tragic stories that arose from the 1888 blizzard, I was curious about how Benjamin could spin a story that avoided being a complete downer while staying true to history.

Benjamin sets the story in several homestead communities with families that represent the different situations people were in when the weather turned abruptly from balmy to a monstrous snowstorm.

She centers on two sisters who become teenage teachers, hoping to raise money for college and a teaching certificate. When the blizzard strikes, one sister's leadership brings notoriety and the other sister becomes a media darling. Neither could prevent the deaths of students, and both faced anger from family members who held her responsible for the loss of a child. How their stories were spinned by the news media made all the difference. One sister thrived, and the other escapes into obscurity.

The girl teachers illustrate the limited options available for women and their students. Boys also had limited choices; the inquisitive and intelligent farm boy Tor is tied to the land to support his family.

Underlying the tale is how boosters falsely portrayed life in the plains to lure homesteaders to settle there, appealing especially to Norwegian and Swedish immigrants, those whose homeland could not offer the farmland they longed to own. 60% of these homesteaders gave up and left; most of those who remained lived in poverty or on the edge.

And of course, settlers were wanted to spur economic growth and to hold the land from the Native Americans who had been dispossessed, removed, and killed. 

Words and promises lure those who long for a better life, spurring people to leave their homeland and families, and in one case almost luring a young teacher to run away with a married man.

I became emotionally invested in these characters, propelled to read on. After the storm, the intensity did not abate as alliances and friendships shifted and, finally, new opportunities arose. These families lost so much, and yet they forge on.

What a read for a pandemic! Determination, strength, fortitude, community, charity, pull these characters through tragedy. 

I especially appreciated the portrayal of the communities, offering me a better insight into the character of the Midwest plains. In the Author's Note, Benjamin wrote, "Considering the era in which we live, I was intrigued and moved by this tragedy involving immigrants, who were welcomed to this country, without whom American would not be what it is today--and who were lured here, in many cases, by outright falsehoods masquerading as news and fact."

She points out that the plains was a dry and unsuitable environment for farming the crops these immigrants knew. When the Ogallala Aquifer was taped as a water source, it became the 'breadbasket' we grew up with, but over-farming is depleting the resource. Some day, it will be a desert again, especially with climate change complications.

And once again, people will be on the move, seeking out new settlements to support them.

Now, I wonder why I waited so long to read this author!

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Children's Blizzard: A Novel
by Melanie Benjamin
Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine
Delacorte Press
Pub Date: January 12, 2021  
ISBN: 9780399182280
hardcover $28.00 (USD)

ebook ISBN 9780399182297 $13.99

audiobook download ISBN 9780525492771

from the publisher

The morning of January 12, 1888, was unusually mild, following a punishing cold spell. It was warm enough for the homesteaders of the Dakota Territory to venture out again, and for their children to return to school without their heavy coats—leaving them unprepared when disaster struck. At the hour when most prairie schools were letting out for the day, a terrifying, fast-moving blizzard blew in without warning. Schoolteachers as young as sixteen were suddenly faced with life and death decisions: Keep the children inside, to risk freezing to death when fuel ran out, or send them home, praying they wouldn’t get lost in the storm?

Based on actual oral histories of survivors, this gripping novel follows the stories of Raina and Gerda Olsen, two sisters, both schoolteachers—one becomes a hero of the storm and the other finds herself ostracized in the aftermath. It’s also the story of Anette Pedersen, a servant girl whose miraculous survival serves as a turning point in her life and touches the heart of Gavin Woodson, a newspaperman seeking redemption. It was Woodson and others like him who wrote the embellished news stories that lured northern European immigrants across the sea to settle a pitiless land. Boosters needed them to settle territories into states, and they didn’t care what lies they told these families to get them there—or whose land it originally was.

At its heart, this is a story of courage, of children forced to grow up too soon, tied to the land because of their parents’ choices. It is a story of love taking root in the hard prairie ground, and of families being torn asunder by a ferocious storm that is little remembered today—because so many of its victims were immigrants to this country.

Better Luck Next Time by Julia Claiborne Johnson

I had heard good reviews of Julia Claiborne Johnson's debut novel Be Frank With Me. I was intrigued by the cover of Better Luck Next Time, the vintage photo of women at play. I am so, so happy that I put in my name in to win an ARC. This was a bright, warm, and happy light in the midst of Michigan's dismal winter and COVID-19 self isolation.

I laughed out loud, starting with the first page with the narrator's epigram, "Some men are born gigolos; others have it thrust upon them." 

In 1988, Dr. Howard Stovall Bennett III (Ward) tells his story to an unnamed interviewer, recalling six weeks in 1938 that changed his life. 

He took any job he could find during the Depression after his family lost their wealth and home. A Cary Grant look-a-like, he leaves his manual labor work to become a fake cowboy on a Reno dude ranch that offers wannabe divorcees a six-week residency to qualify for a quick divorce.

Ward was hired to perform ranch chores, provide eye-candy, and to "squire rich, brokenhearted ladies around Reno," which he proclaims was good experience for his future career as a doctor.

But that career was far in the future in 1938 when Nina and Emily arrive at The Flying Leap ranch. Nina is a 'repeat customer' with all the vibe and audacity of a Flapper, and she determines to help Emily loosen up and live a little.

OK, actually live it up a LOT. Like teenage schoolgirls, they go on larks and involve Ward as their chauffeur and partner in crime. Over-the-top scenes involve skinny dipping and Bottom's head and fairy wings from the theater department.

I loved all the women at the ranch, and the other cowboy Sam, and the ranch owners, and even the husbands and insolent daughter; it's an ensemble that lends itself to insight and humor.

The writing is so clever, the setting so unique and bizarre, the characters flawed and zany but human and lovable. 

Warm and generous, with a heartwarming twisted ending, this was a real delight. 

I received an ARC from the publisher through LibraryThing. My review is fair and unbiased.

Better Luck Next Time

By Julia Claiborne Johnson

ISBN: 9780062916365

ISBN 10: 006291636X

Custom House

On Sale: January 5, 2021

hardcover $28.99

from the pubisher

It’s 1938 and women seeking a quick, no-questions split from their husbands head to the “divorce capital of the world,” Reno, Nevada. There’s one catch: they have to wait six-weeks to become “residents.” Many of these wealthy, soon-to-be divorcees flock to the Flying Leap, a dude ranch that caters to their every need. 

Twenty-four-year-old Ward spent one year at Yale before his family lost everything in the Great Depression; now he’s earning an honest living as a ranch hand at the Flying Leap. Admired for his dashing good looks—“Cary Grant in cowboy boots”—Ward thinks he’s got the Flying Leap’s clients all figured out. But two new guests are about to upend everything he thinks he knows: Nina, a St Louis heiress and amateur pilot back for her third divorce, and Emily, whose bravest moment in life was leaving her cheating husband back in San Francisco and driving herself to Reno.

A novel about divorce, marriage, and everything that comes in between (money, class, ambition, and opportunity), Better Luck Next Time is a hilarious yet poignant examination of the ways friendship can save us, love can destroy us, and the family we create can be stronger than the family we come from.

Sergeant Salinger by Jerome Charyn

The inimitable Jerome Charyn has turned his pen to probe the transformative war experiences of one of America's most famous writers, J.D. Salinger. Like so many of his generation, WWII left its indelible footprints on Salinger, as manifested in his stories and his troubled life. 

Charyn begins with Sonny Salinger as a love-struck Park Avenue boy with a few stories under his belt. Sonny was smitten with teenage vamp Oona O’Neill (daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill), but Oona had big plans; he was merely a pleasant diversion. 

The army decided to overlook Sonny's heart murmur and called him to duty. Sonny went overseas, a secret counterintelligence agent whose job was to seek out and interrogate Nazi collaborators. 

Oona went to Hollywood where her life plans were altered by Charlie Chaplin. In England, the heartbroken Sonny frequented a local pub, scribbling a story about Holden Caulfield at war.

Sonny experienced the most atrocious killing fields of WWII.

There was Devon's Slapton Sands where 1700 GIs rehearsing for Utah Beach were killed by friendly fire. He was at Utah Beach on D-Day, and at the Battle of the Bulge, and he saw the first liberation of a concentration camp.

Sonny was tasked with sniffing out Nazis and Nazi collaborators in every hamlet. He knew that the people he interrogated were as broken by the war as he was.

The depravity and waste of war was overwhelming. Sonny became a ghost. Frayed, he secretly checked into a German civilian hospital.

Back at work as 'the grand inquisitor,' one of the doctors who had nursed Sonny was brought before him for interrogation. He married her, and with fake papers, brought his German Nazi bride home to America to meet his Jewish family.

The marriage failed.

Charyn includes images from Salinger's fiction, especially the Nine Stories--an Eisenhower coat, Sonny at the beach making sand castles with children and remembering Bananafish, hanging in British pubs to write. Salinger's Glass family are referenced, and the carousel in Central Park. Guest appearances are made by Hemingway and Teddy's son General Roosevelt.

In 2018 I reviewed Eberhard Alsen's book J.D.Salinger and the Nazis. When I last read The Catcher in the Rye for book club in 2016, I considered how PTSD influenced the novel. 

Charyn  draws readers on a journey into the darkness of monstrous carnage. As I read, joy was sucked from my world, colors faded, I felt cheerless. Sonny's disillusion and trauma leaves him a tin man, and we understand, because we feel it, too.

A glimmer of hope comes at the end."Whatever music he had lost in the carnage at Slapton Sands, at Hurtgen, and among the smoldering corpses at Kaufering IV had come back."

We know the books that Salinger would write and their impact. Instead of Holden Caulfield's war death, he wrote a novel about a teenage Holden who dreams of protecting children from the adult world. He had seen the devaluation of human lives sacrificed to false gods. And we know how damaged he was, how he became an unsettling, mysterious hermit. Charyn's novel leads us to understand the forces that shaped Salinger and inform his writing.

I was given an ARC by the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Read Charyn's article J. D. Salinger The Lost Bar Mitzvah Boy here.

Sergeant Salinger
by Jerome Charyn
Bellevue Literary Press
Publication January 5, 2021
Trade Paper US $16.99 ISBN: 9781942658740
Trade Cloth US $28.99 ISBN: 9781942658825
Ebook ISBN: 9781942658757

from the publisher

J.D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn’s Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war—from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood.

After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed. Maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a “spook,” with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell.

Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.

Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce by Nuala O'Connor

"To Jim I am Ireland."~ from Nora by Nuala O'Connor

In her novel Nora, Nuala O'Connor channels Nora Barnacle as she tells the story of her life with James Joyce. Warned against him as a wild and savage madman, Nora affirms that part of him, for she also has a wildness inside.

I was drawn in by Nora's distinct voice and her unorthodox, independent character.

The novel covers Nora's entire life, from the workhouse to meeting Joyce, agreeing to go abroad with him without marriage, their rise from poverty to Jim's financial success, and their marital and family troubles. 

Warning: The novel begins with a sexual encounter and there will be more later in the novel.

The novel begins on Juneteenth 1904 when a young Jim Joyce walked out with twenty-year-old Nora Barnacle. She understands what he wants and they have their first sexual encounter. Jim had found someone adventurous and sensual; no one of 'his class' could be so open and willing. They stayed together until Jim's death. 

Jim worked uninspiring jobs to support them as he wrote his stories and worked on his novel. He drank too much and spent too much. 

Nora was left alone too much and had to scramble to put food on the table and raise their children. Like the wives of so many writers, Nora's fidelity and support required her to take on the greater part of providing for their basic needs. She found allies and friends, including Jim's brother.

The early part of the novel is wonderful. It has a nice continuity and I felt immersed in the story. The later part of their life jumps across time, hitting on important events. The story of their daughter's mental illness could merit a novel all its own.

This is the story of an independent, strong woman who defies social convention for a relationship that evolves and endures over a lifetime. The novel will appeal to readers interested in Joyce but also to the broader readership of women's fiction and even romance.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Find a Reading Guide here.

Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce
by Nuala O'Connor
Harper Perennial and Paperbacks
Pub Date: January 5, 2021   
ISBN: 9780062991720
paperback $16.99 (USD)

from the publisher

Acclaimed Irish novelist Nuala O’Connor’s bold reimagining of the life of James Joyce’s wife, muse, and the model for Molly Bloom in Ulysses is a “lively and loving paean to the indomitable Nora Barnacle” (Edna O’Brien).

Dublin, 1904. Nora Joseph Barnacle is a twenty-year-old from Galway working as a maid at Finn’s Hotel. She enjoys the liveliness of her adopted city and on June 16—Bloomsday—her life is changed when she meets Dubliner James Joyce, a fateful encounter that turns into a lifelong love. Despite his hesitation to marry, Nora follows Joyce in pursuit of a life beyond Ireland, and they surround themselves with a buoyant group of friends that grows to include Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, and Sylvia Beach.

But as their life unfolds, Nora finds herself in conflict between their intense desire for each other and the constant anxiety of living in poverty throughout Europe. She desperately wants literary success for Jim, believing in his singular gift and knowing that he thrives on being the toast of the town, and it eventually provides her with a security long lacking in her life and his work. So even when Jim writes, drinks, and gambles his way to literary acclaim, Nora provides unflinching support and inspiration, but at a cost to her own happiness and that of their children.

With gorgeous and emotionally resonant prose, Nora is a heartfelt portrayal of love, ambition, and the quiet power of an ordinary woman who was, in fact, extraordinary.