Jeeves and the Leap of Faith: A Novel in Homage to P. G. Wodehouse by Ben Schott

At the best of times I love a comic novel, and these have not been the best of times. I really, really needed an entertaining read right now. And I found it in Jeeves and the Leap of Faith, Ben Shott's second homage to P. G. Wodehouse's classic Wooster and Jeeves novels.

Shott brings Wodehouse's eccentric characters back to life, embroiled in a zany and complicated tangled plot of comedic excellence.

Over the course of a week, Bertie evades matrimony, helps save the Drones club from insolvency, goes undercover for the government, battles fascism, challenges Jeeves choice of bedroom wallpaper, and stands up to his formidable Aunt Agatha. 

Strange things go on. What's even stranger is that they are based on history! Like the annual Boot-Finding in Spitalfields Market and the Pavement Club, a Cambridge society that sat on the pavement on Saturday afternoons, and the Hysteron Proteron club of Balliol College that in the 1920s spent a day living backward. Also appearing are the night climbers of Cambridge and the daring leap that gives this volume its name.

Throughout the novel, Bertie struggles with the Times crossword puzzle, which is included in the endnotes for readers to solve! 

I am fortified with gladness, ready again to face the chaotic world.

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

View the trailer at

https://www.benschott.com/jeeves---the-king-of-clubs.html

Jeeves and the Leap of Faith: A Novel in Homage to P. G. Wodehouse
by Ben Schott
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date: October 13, 2020 
ISBN: 9780316541046
hardcover $28.00 (USD)

from the publisher:

The Drones club’s in peril. Gussie’s in love. Spode’s on the war path. Oh, and His Majesty’s Government needs a favor . . .

I say! It’s a good thing Bertie’s back, what?

In his eagerly anticipated sequel to Jeeves and the King of Clubs, Ben Schott leads Jeeves and Wooster on another elegantly uproarious escapade.

From the mean streets of Mayfair to the scheming spires of Cambridge, we encounter a joyous cast of characters: chiseling painters and criminal bookies, eccentric philosophers and dodgy clairvoyants, appalling poets and pocket dictators, vexatious aunts and their vicious hounds.

But that’s not all:

Who is ICEBERG, and why is he covered in chalk?

Why is Jeeves reading Winnie-the-Pooh?

What is seven across and eighty-five down?

How do you play Russian Roulette at The Savoy?

These questions, and more, are answered in Jeeves and the Leap of Faith — an homage to P.G. Wodehouse, authorized by his estate, and essential reading for fans of The Master.

Tinkety-tonk!

Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman

I came to the Owens family story through Rules of Magic, published years after the first Owens family novel, the immensely popular Practical Magic. I had liked the characters in Rules and realized their story was rooted in the very real struggles of young adulthood. Afterward, I finally read Practical. 

The prequel to Practical Magic, Magic Lessons, begins in 1664 in Essex, England. It is the story of the first Owens witch who cursed all the Owens women's loves.

The teenage witch Maria tragically loses her mentor and adopted mother. Her biological parents send her to the New World as an indentured servant. On St. Kitts, she honed her craft as a healer. Maria falls in love with the New England merchant John Hathorne, who abandons her without knowing she is pregnant. Maria travels to New England to find John.

She finds passage in exchange for nursing and healing the pirate Samuel Dias, whose Jewish family had fled Portugal. He falls in love with Maria.

Her troubles increase when she does find John. Her very life is threatened by the witch hunters of Salem, her daughter stolen from her.

John Hathorne in the novel is based on the actual magistrate who condemned women accused of being witches to death. (Nathaniel Hawthorne, our great early novelist, added that 'w' to his name to disassociate himself with his ancestor.)

Oh! the ways women have been controlled and punished for overstepping the narrow lives men ordained for them. If a woman reads, she must be a witch. If a woman stands up for herself, she must be punished. If a man is attracted to a woman, she has bewitched him and is evil. Bind them in iron and drown them! Nail their feet to the ground and burn them!

And women are still fighting this battle.

Maria understood that a woman with her own beliefs who refuses to bow to those she believes to be wrong can be considered dangerous.~from Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman

The heart of the novel is, of course, love. How women love the wrong men and suffer for it. "Love someone who will love you back," Hannah advises. But how do we know love when we find it? Young people confuse lust with love, always have. We ignore the signs that later seem obvious. Maria rejects her true love, first because of her passion for John, and later because she vows never to love again.

Love was risky, for marriage required women to abdicate all self-determination and choice. Maria's magic helps women from men who abuse them.

I had a neighbor who said, "What goes around, comes around." Hoffman's rule of magic is similar: you get back threefold whatever you do. Best to do good! What magic you bring into the world becomes your responsibility.

Hoffman weaves her stories with flawed characters whose struggles we recognize, for even if they have magic at their command, they are very human. It is no wonder these books are so popular with readers. They offer romance, challenges, strong female characters, life lessons, and in this book a heavy dose of history.

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

Read my review for  Rules of Magic
Read my review for Hoffman's novel Faithful here.
See my review for Hoffman's novel The Marriage of Opposites here.

Magic Lessons: The Prequel to Practical Magic
by Alice Hoffman
Simon & Schuster
Publication Date October 6, 2020
ISBN: 9781982108847
hardcover $27.99 (USD)

from the publisher

In an unforgettable novel that traces a centuries-old curse to its source, beloved author Alice Hoffman unveils the story of Maria Owens, accused of witchcraft in Salem, and matriarch of a line of the amazing Owens women and men featured in Practical Magic and The Rules of Magic.

Where does the story of the Owens bloodline begin? With Maria Owens, in the 1600s, when she’s abandoned in a snowy field in rural England as a baby. Under the care of Hannah Owens, Maria learns about the “Unnamed Arts.” Hannah recognizes that Maria has a gift and she teaches the girl all she knows. It is here that she learns her first important lesson: Always love someone who will love you back.

When Maria is abandoned by the man who has declared his love for her, she follows him to Salem, Massachusetts. Here she invokes the curse that will haunt her family. And it’s here that she learns the rules of magic and the lesson that she will carry with her for the rest of her life. Love is the only thing that matters.

Magic Lessons is a celebration of life and love and a showcase of Alice Hoffman’s masterful storytelling.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

It was time for a new book.

The first book I picked up was full of horrors and war. 

The second book was full of fears of horror and war. And the war was shortly coming.

I could feel my blood pressure shoot up. I am trying to control my blood pressure. I scanned through my hundreds of unread ebooks, downloading anything that might be uplifting, fun, or happy. Beautiful Ruins came up. Why not this one? It had that lovely photo, exotic and unfamiliar. I heard heard great things about it. 

I downloaded it and two days later swiped to the last page, completely content with my choice.

From the opening sentence to the end, Walter weaves a beautiful story about love and doing the right thing and fame and finding true happiness. 

Oh, and my blood pressure has been remarkable.

Jess Walter, I thank you. 

from the publisher:

The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying.

And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot—searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.

What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters: the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the heroically preserved producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion—along with the husbands and wives, lovers and dreamers, superstars and losers, who populate their world in the decades that follow.

Gloriously inventive, constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.

Day of Days by John Smolens: A Novel of The Bath School Disaster

You believe in reward. That's what they teach you in that fancy new school we all pay for. In church, too. They tell you if you work hard you earn your reward...It's a lie. It's all a lie.~from Day of Days by John Smolens

The Day of Days was May 18, 1927. The place was the small farm town of Bath, Michigan. 

Andrew Kehoe blew up the Bath Consolidated School, killing 44 people, including 38 schoolchildren--one of the worst terrorist acts in American history. He murdered his wife and horses and blew his farm and himself up while he was at it.

John Smolens has wrapped this horrific event in a novel of great beauty and wisdom through the experience of surviving school children.

After WWI the chemical companies were left with stockpiles of explosives which they sold to farmers to help them clear fields. 

Andrew Kehoe was smart and inventive. He studied electrical engineering. After an accident left him in a coma his personality changed. His wife inherited a Bath farm but Kehoe found himself in financial straits. He blamed the tax burden for the new school. 

In Smolens' novel, Kehoe hires the boy Jed. He takes Jed with him as he removes tree stump with explosives. Jed was impressed by this farmer who wore a suit. 

Bea, the narrator of the novel, works for Mrs. Kehoe. She tells her story from her death bed, of life before the incident, the horror of that day, and the broken lives it left behind. There is survivor's guilt, broken people carrying on, and eventual healing. 

I first heard of the Bath school bombing when living in Lansing.  Smolens fills the novel with Michigan places and references. Kehoe travels to Lansing and eat at Emil's Italian restaurant, a place we knew well. The children are given Vernors ginger ale. The historical setting is given, the innovative changes happening in science. Electricity. Biplanes. Lindbergh's famous Atlantic crossing concluded while citizens were frantically looking for survivors.

I loved Smolens writing and how he handled this story. Accurate in historical details, Smolens demonstrates the benefit of fiction's ability to delve into the depth of human experience to bring the past to life. 

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

Day of Days
by John Smolens
Michigan State University Press
Pub Date  October 1, 2020   
ISBN: 9781611863819
hardcover $29.95 (USD)

from the publisher

In the spring of 1927, Andrew Kehoe, the treasurer for the school board in Bath, Michigan, spent weeks surreptitiously wiring the public school, as well as his farm, with hundreds of pounds of dynamite. The explosions on May 18, the day before graduation, killed and maimed dozens of children, as well as teachers, administrators, and village residents, including Kehoe’s wife, Nellie. A respected member of the community, Kehoe himself died when he ignited his truck, which he had loaded with crates of explosives and scrap metal. 

Decades later, one survivor, Beatrice Marie Turcott, recalls the spring of 1927 and how this haunting experience leads her to the conviction that one does not survive the present without reconciling hard truths about the past. In its portrayal of several Bath school children, 

Day of Days examines how such traumatic events scar one’s life long after the dead are laid to rest and physical wounds heal, and how an anguished but resilient American village copes with the bombing, which at the time seemed incomprehensible, and yet now may be considered a harbinger of the future.

JOHN SMOLENS has published eleven works of fiction, ten novels and a collection of short stories. He is Professor Emeritus at Northern Michigan University, where he taught in the English Department and served as the Director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing. In 2010 he was the recipient of the Michigan Author Award from the Michigan Library Association.

 

Inheritors by Asako Serizawa

Why do I keep choosing to read such hard books, books that wring my heart, cause my eyes to burn, and challenge my comfort with things I wish I did not know?

In this case, my husband heard of the book on the radio and recommended I look into it. It was publication day, but I was granted my request for the galley.

I really had little idea of the Japanese people's WWII experiences other than America's internment camps and the effect of the Atom bomb. The war divided families, soldiers endured horrors and then were pariahs, women sold their bodies to put food on the table, doctors were forced to perform horrible experiments for the war effort. 

Extraordinary and profound, Inheritors encapsulates a family's history over generations. You won't be the same after reading it.

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

Inheritors

by Asako Serizawa

Doubleday Books

Pub Date  July 14, 2020  

ISBN: 9780385545372

hardcover $26.95 (USD)

from the publisher

Spanning more than 150 years, and set in multiple locations in colonial and postcolonial Asia and the United States, Inheritors paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of its characters as they grapple with the legacies of loss, imperialism, and war.

Written from myriad perspectives and in a wide range of styles, each of these interconnected stories is designed to speak to the others, contesting assumptions and illuminating the complicated ways we experience, interpret, and pass on our personal and shared histories. A retired doctor, for example, is forced to confront the horrific moral consequences of his wartime actions. An elderly woman subjects herself to an interview, gradually revealing a fifty-year old murder and its shattering aftermath. And in the last days of a doomed war, a prodigal son who enlisted against his parents' wishes survives the American invasion of his island outpost, only to be asked for a sacrifice more daunting than any he imagined.

Serizawa's characters walk the line between the devastating realities of war and the banal needs of everyday life as they struggle to reconcile their experiences with the changing world. A breathtaking meditation on suppressed histories and the relationship between history, memory, and storytelling, Inheritors stands in the company of Lisa Ko, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Min Jin Lee.

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue

Having read the galley for Emma Donoghue's last novel The Wonder, I put in a request for The Pull of the Stars before even reading the synopsis. I was not disappointed.

Donoghue revisits some of the same themes in this novel--an unmarried female nurse embracing scientific methods, women's lives in a repressive society, what we will do for family and love.

Set in 1918 in the middle of the Spanish Flu epidemic, in a Dublin maternity ward where an endless round of pregnant women ill with the flu come and go, the novel is a spine-tingling reminder of our vulnerability.

Donoghue began writing The Pull of the Stars in 2018. How chillingly providential that it would be published the year of the novel cornoavirus covid-19 epidemic.

Today as I write this review, violence and protests have been breaking out across America, demanding a just society.  Donoghue's novel depicts a world crushed by WWI, men broken in body and spirit like ghosts of the people they had once been. Unwed mothers are taken in by organizations that demand repayment through a kind of slave labor, their babies becoming trapped in servitude and subject to abuse.

The myth of progress is challenged by reminders of how little has changed in 100 years. War still crushes, the human body still is attacked by enemies large and small, society remains inequitable, ingrained social prejudices destroy lives.

Nurse Julia Powers is dedicated and hard-working, although underpaid and lacking authority. Readers spend several days with Julia at work, the action taking place in a small hospital room of three hospital cots.

This is not a novel for the squeamish. So many things go wrong. In graphic detail, readers endure the female patient’s suffering, the heroic endeavor to save the lives of mother and babies. We learn about their lives, their illness, their deaths.

Every loss is marked by Julia on her silver cased watch, a memorial and reminder to never forget.

This is not a novel to escape, the world too closely reflects what we are dealing with with today's pandemic. Warnings, fake cures, the uncertainty, government endeavoring to play down the threat--nothing has changed.

I finished the novel in two days.

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

Read an interview with Donoghue discussing the novel published in the Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2020/05/emma-donoghue-interview-the-pull-of-the-stars-the-blood-tax/610828/

The Pull of the Stars
by Emma Donoghue
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date: July 21,2020
Hardcover $28 (USD)
ISBN: 9780316499019
PRICE $28.00 (USD)

from the publisher

Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu. A small world of work, risk, death, and unlooked-for love, by the bestselling author of The Wonder and ROOM

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders -- Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police , and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. 

In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.

In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.

This I Know by Eldonna Edwards

I don't think there's a bushel big enough to hide the Knowing. It keeps getting bigger and stronger, like a storm cloud before it grows into a tornado. I've spent most of my life holding it by the tail.~from This I Know by Eldonna Edwards

In 1969, eleven-year-old Grace is heir to special abilities that allows her to know things others cannot perceive.

She communes with her twin brother who died at birth, warns about impending crises, and healed a newborn sister's heart. It has been an unwanted gift passed down through her mother's family--until now. Grace stands up for the goodness of her insight.

Grace's mother is suffering postpartum depression, her eldest daughter taking on her tasks. Grace's father is a non-denominational church pastor with a nominal salary that requires his taking part-time jobs. He does not trust that Grace's gift is godly and commands her to turn from the Knowing.

Grace's life in Cherry Hill along Lake Michigan is filled with the beauty of nature and the suspicion of townsfolk. She befriends a drifter and is taken up by the daughter of hippies. On the verge of becoming a woman, Grace must make the decision to bend to her father's will or suffer rejection and isolation.

Grace's enchanting voice captures the innocence of childhood coming to an end.

I have not read many books with pastors and pastor's kids as main characters. Immersion baptism at the lake, communion and worship services are a part of Grace's life. Edwards, a PK herself, captures the experience.

I got a kick out of "Daddy's talking about idols and graven images, but all I hear is blah, blah, blah." Or about Vacation Bible School, "I think most of the parents send their kids to get rid of them for a while because they're bored and sick of each other."

Grace turns to her predeceased twin Isaac to help her understand the big questions, particularly the nature of God and the source of evil in the world. It is the perennial struggle for people of faith. If God is good, why is there evil and suffering in the world? If God is all powerful, why does he allow it?

Grace's friend Lola introduces alternative lifestyles, a freedom from social conventions. Grace is able to accept people for who they are, to see their goodness.

Edwards has given readers a sympathetic character in a vivid setting on a journey of self-realization, standing up to a narrow world view. 

I received a free book from the author through an American Historical Fiction Facebook Group giveaway. My review is fair and unbiased.

This I Know
by Eldonna Edwards
Kensington
$15.95 paperback
ISBN: 9781496712875

American Follies by Norman Lock

Norman Lock's American Novels have historical settings and characters but they are more than 'historical fiction;' America's character and development is revealed in his books, shedding light on the issues that we still struggle with today, including the treatment of African Americans and women's continuing struggle for equality.

I have been lucky to have read a number of Lock's seven books in this series. His newest installment, American Follies, is startling and disorienting, the characters morphing into action heroes, reality twisting into a nightmare.

A pregnant Ellen Finley seeks employment as a typist for the infamous suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Ellen tells them her husband has gone to California to start a newspaper, but noting their displeasure at her married state, Ellen weeps crocodile tears and admits she is unmarried. The women sweep Ellen into their household as their latest pet project.

Ellen meets Harriet, a diminutive woman from Barnum's circus. Harriet takes a shine to Ellen and introduces her to the other circus performers, contortionists and clowns and sideshow acts whose differences excluded them from society.

After the birth of Ellen's baby, her world becomes unrecognizable. Her child is discovered to be mulatto and the KKK steals the babe. The suffragettes and Ellen, aided by Barnum and the circus folk, set on a journey across the country to save the child.

Ellen's postpartum delirium reveals the sickness at the heart of America. The poor are the enemy, filling the asylums and workhouses. Walls are built to keep out the Mexicans. Women seeking self-determination are to be burnt as witches. And the child of miscenegration is to be sacrificed at the altar of White Supremacy.

History is one smashup piled on top of another, the shards glued together with irony.~ from American Follies by Norman Lock 

"I wrote of the nightmare that was, and is, America for the disenfranchised and powerless," Lock writes in the Afterward.

American Follies takes us into the madhouse that is America, tracing the serpentine and insidious illness of hate that has infected our 244-year history.

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

American Follies
Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press
Publication Date: July 7, 2020
Trade Paperback $16.99 USD, $22.99 CAD, £12.99 GBP, €17.99 EUR
ISBN: 9781942658481, 1942658486

Read Lock on his series here
Read my review of previous books in the series
 A Boy in his Winter here
The Wreckage of Eden here
The Feast Day of the Cannibals here

An Interview with Ashley Sweeney Author of Answer Creek

I am thrilled to share an essay from Ashley Sweeney, author of Answer Creek, a novel about a woman's trip with the Donner Party.

In my review of Answer Creek (found here), I wrote, "I was swept into the novel by the beautiful, descriptive writing. Ada is a strong, appealing character who is easy to relate to. The novel gains momentum, from the early beauty of the plains and the impressive natural formations of the West to the privations and life-threatening brutality of a mountain winter. It was a joy to read."

I asked if Sweeney would write about her novel's timeless theme and message.

***

Navigating Today’s Challenges through the Lens of the Donner Party

by Ashley E. Sweeney

Little did I know when I first started researching the Donner Party four years ago that my newest novel, Answer Creek, would launch smack in the middle of a pandemic with a strict shelter in place order. No bookstore events. No library readings. No live book clubs.

Aside from the scramble to reschedule events and learn creative ways to reach the reading public, the lessons I learned—and continue to learn—from this particular narrative resonate in this Time of Coronavirus.

Many have asked why I chose to tackle one the most difficult and misunderstood narratives in American history, the 1846 ill-fated Donner-Reed westward diaspora remembered in history for one thing only: cannibalism. Rinker Buck, in his 2015 Oregon Trail: A New American Journey, calls the Donner Party “a drama of the mundane gone madly wrong.” That was my challenge. Instead of focusing on sensational and salacious details of the Donner Party saga, I concentrated on the emigrants’ collective humanity on their misguided and horrendous journey through the lens of my protagonist, 19-year-old Ada Weeks.

Nineteenth century journalist Francis Parkman said, “Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than research.” With that in mind, I immersed myself with what Parkman calls “the life and spirit of the times” by spending a month traversing more than 2,000 miles along the Oregon-California Trail from Nebraska to California. I visited countless museums, historical markers, historical societies, newspaper offices, libraries, and bookstores to ferret out information on 19th century customs, euphemisms, transportation, animal husbandry, firearms, and cuisine (if you call salt pork and beans cuisine). But I did not take the trip for my own means and ends. I needed to walk in Ada’s footsteps and ask myself at every pivotal juncture and circumstance: What Would Ada Do?

Standing in the footsteps (and original wagon ruts) of overland travelers is something akin to the sacred. On more than one occasion, my breath caught in my throat. The most memorable experience was at a remote spot off-road near South Pass, Wyoming, where I turned 360 degrees on that treeless steppe at 7,000 feet to see nothing my protagonist would not have seen 175 years ago, no roads or fence posts or buildings—just earth and sky. Ada might as well have been standing next to me kicking at the brown grass and rustling up snakes.

And there were many other remarkable moments. Taking an authentic covered wagon ride. Standing at the base of Donner Hill and wondering how hundreds of cattle and mules and horses—and wagons—could possibly crest such a steep incline. Walking portions of the Great Salt Desert in Utah. And ending at Donner Memorial State Park in Truckee, California, where the historical portion of the narrative ends. Ada was with me the whole time, whispering, nudging, coloring my experience.

Answer Creek is a fresh re-telling of a calamitous mid-19th century disaster, but it’s particularly resonant in this time of COVID-19. Reflect that the Donner Party missed the window to cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains by one day due to blizzard conditions and were forced to winter over near present-day Reno, Nevada for 124 days living in appalling conditions with no food. This, after a fateful decision to take an untraveled “shortcut” that put them a month behind on the trail. At Truckee Lake, emigrants subsisted on shoe leather, blankets, and book covers before some of the entourage felt they had no other option but to eat their dead in order to survive (only 48 of the original 91 members of the entourage lived to reach their final destination near Sacramento, California).

Along the way, Ada doesn’t miss an opportunity to help others, even if she is ill equipped or inconvenienced. And through the ordeal, she evolves from a victim to become an empowered woman living on her own in the wilds of California. Far from perfect, she challenges herself to become a better version of herself because of it.

We may be inconvenienced and frustrated—and legitimately upset— navigating life through this pandemic. Quarantining and social distancing are riddled with issues. Many of us can’t work or go to school. We can’t attend worship or shop. It’s difficult to get a doctor’s appointment or a haircut. And even libraries are shuttered. I don’t diminish the tolls of this pandemic: physical, mental, emotional, and financial. They have been—and continue to be—grave. And we are reminded daily of the many fellow and sister citizens who have lost their lives.

But for the vast majority of us, the shelter in place order has been an inconvenience—nothing more. When we put it in perspective, we are not forced to eat our clothing and shoes and bedding—let alone each other—to survive. There have been snippets of joy during the pandemic as well: Zoom choral concerts, creative art projects, more time for gardening and reading. It’s as if we’ve collectively hit the “pause” button to reorganize, recalibrate, rethink.

It’s also been an opportunity to dig deeper into our own psyches, something we are often reluctant to do (for me, it was the harsh realization that I would not have not survived the Donner-Reed journey as Ada did).

It’s also brought to the forefront two important questions as resonant today as in 1846:

• What are we doing to ease the suffering of others during this time?
• How can our reaction to any given situation evolve from victimhood to empowerment and, more importantly, who do we want to become as a result?

I love when fiction transcends reality to confront us and convict us and change us.

Ashley E. Sweeney is the 2017 winner of the Nancy Pearl Book Award for her debut novel, Eliza Waite. Answer Creek is her second novel and she is at work on a third. Sweeney lives in the Pacific Northwest and Tucson, Arizona. 

Visit Sweeney's website
https://ashleysweeneyauthor.com/

Answer Creek
by Ashley E. Sweeney
She Writes Press
Pub Date 19 May 2020
ISBN: 9781631528446
paperback $16.95 (USD)

Paris Never leaves You by Ellen Feldman

Paris Never Leaves You by Ellen Feldman is a quick reading page-turner filled with conflicted characters who are damaged survivors of WWII.

In occupied Paris, Charlotte runs her family's book shop. A war widow, she struggles to keep her baby daughter Vivi alive. A German army doctor visits the shop and takes an interest in her baby daughter, secreting in food and medicine. Charlotte reluctantly accepts his gifts and trust and friendship grow, putting them both at risk.

Years later, Charlotte's choices come back to haunt her in her new life in New York City where she works for a publishing house. Teenaged Vivi is pressing to know more about her father and heritage. Charlotte's boss, a paraplegic, knows that war destroyed the enlightened man he had been. Charlotte has been trashing the unopened letters from the German doctor.

I appreciated how Feldman incorporated less known WWII history, including the privations of occupied France and post-war retaliation against collaborators. Her handling of the character's moral struggles was of special interest to me. There are several strong romance stories that will appeal to readers of women's fiction.

Surviving the war brings guilt for having survived, their decisions and actions kept secret. Admitting their shameful truths brings healing and the possibility of a new life.

I was given a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Paris Never Leaves You
by Ellen Feldman
St. Martin's Griffin
Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 9781250622778
PRICE: $16.99 (USD) trade paperback

The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner

That there might be a place where people were not constantly competing against each other for their very sustenance, but were instead helping each other survive through war and injury and poverty and pain, seemed as much something out of a Jane Austen novel as anything else she could have hoped to find.~from The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner

Natalie Jenner's The Jane Austen Society delighted this Janite reader!

The village of Chawton after the war is filled with diverse, lonely individuals.

Frances Knight no longer leaves the grounds of the Knight estate. Her father is dying upstairs but still rules with an iron fist.

Adam Berwick's dream of university was ended with the deaths of his brothers during the war, leaving him his mother's soul support. She presses him to find a suitable wife, but love eludes him, and if found, would be dangerous.

Dr. Gray is not coping with the early loss of his beloved wife, even to the point of self-medicating. Adeline Lewis is pregnant and widowed, her childhood sweetheart killed in the war.

And even the visiting Hollywood star, a fading beauty, wonders about the unreliability of her fiance and the future of her career.

Bookended by the two worst wars the world had ever seen, they were ironically the survivors, yet it was beyond him what they were surviving for. ~from The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner

A character talks to another about Jane Austen, and then another pair open up about the books that inspire them. Books and reading and Jane Austen feed their souls. Friendship--and love-- blossoms on what had been thought barren ground.

Their readings are insightful and deep, some even surprising this old reader of Austen. Huh. Why didn't I think of that? It's all delivered through the action and dialogue and a part of the characters opening up to each other.

The idea of saving Austen's legacy gives them a goal and brings something positive and hopeful into their lives. They become a community bound by a common love.

The love stories are inspired by Austen's novels, the quarreling pair who resist their mutual attraction, the couple past their prime rekindling a love squashed by their separation of class.

Reading this book during a COVID-19 lockdown was balm for the soul. These war-wounded people who discover reasons to go on are inspiring.

They turn to books for healing, to "disappear into fictional worlds of others' making," "hoping to find some answers." As we do today, isolated in our homes and searching for community, turn to books.

Books are bridges. In Jenner's story, they bring solace and community and wholeness.

I was given a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Learn about the Jane Austen Society UK here and its formation here
See items from the Chawton House collection here including Jane's ring and topaz cross, which appear in the novel

The Jane Austen Society
by Natalie Jenner
St. Martin's Press
Pub Date May 26, 2020 
ISBN: 9781250248732
hardcover $26.99 (USD)

Answer Creek by Ashley E. Sweeney

Ashley E. Sweeney recreates a cross-continental journey that makes social distancing and being in lock-down at home feel luxurious. Answer Creek is about endurance and survival.

Set in 1846-7 on the California-Oregon trail, the novel tells the story of Ada who travels across the continent with the Donner-Reed party.

Yes, the infamous, ill-fated, starving cannibals of history.

After the tragic death of Ada's parents, she was taken in by a Norwegian family who decide to move to California. Early in their journey, they impulsively drive their wagon into high water and are lost. Ada is next taken in by the Breen family.

Dyin's gonna get us all in the end, one way or t'other, she thinks. But dyin's not the hardest part. Livin's a lot harder than dyin' any day. ~from Answer Creek by Ashley E. Sweeney

Ada, one of the few fictional characters in the novel, has endured a lifetime of troubles over her brief nineteen years. As hardened as she is, she also has a tender heart, caring for children and women and giving medical care to the men.

The tale can rival any story of hardship I have read, from Polar explorers to concentration camps.

Staying home for two months? Running out of toilet paper, milk, and eggs?

This is nothing compared to living 124 days in an overcrowded cabin, buried in snow, starving, without heat or blankets or decent clothing.

Ada experiences the elements' extremes and the daily pain of sore feet, bug bites, sunburn, chapped skin, frozen extremities, hunger, and painful loss.

Ada survives, but what kind of life can she have, linked as she is to the cannibalism of the Donner party? Luckily, a man named Riddle takes her to Answer Creek where she can heal and find a new life.

Sometimes, it's all we can do to hold it together, she thinks. And over and through it all, we've got to forgive ourselves, and others, over and over and over again. ~from Answer Creek by Ashley E. Sweeney

I was swept into the novel by the beautiful, descriptive writing. Ada is a strong, appealing character who is easy to relate to. The novel gains momentum, from the early beauty of the plains and the impressive natural formations of the West to the privations and life-threatening brutality of mountain winter. It was a joy to read.

I received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Answer Creek
by Ashley E. Sweeney
She Writes Press
Pub Date 19 May 2020 
ISBN: 9781631528446
paperback $16.95 (USD)

from the publisher

From the award-winning author of Eliza Waite comes a gripping tale of adventure and survival based on the true story of the ill-fated Donner Party on their 2,200-mile trek on the Oregon–California Trail from 1846 to ’47.

Nineteen-year-old Ada Weeks confronts danger and calamity along the hazard-filled journey to California. After a fateful decision that delays the overlanders more than a month, she—along with eighty-one other members of the Donner Party—finds herself stranded at Truckee Lake on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, stuck there for the entirety of a despairing, blizzard-filled winter. Forced to eat shoe leather and blankets to survive, will Ada be able to battle the elements—and her own demons—as she envisions a new life in California?

Researched with impeccable detail and filled with imagery as wide as the western prairie, Answer Creek blends history and hearsay in an unforgettable story of challenging the limits of human endurance and experiencing the triumphant power of love.

about the author

Ashley E. Sweeney is the winner of the 2017 Nancy Pearl Book Award for her debut novel, Eliza Waite. Her much anticipated second novel, Answer Creek, will be released in May 2020. 

Ashley is a seasoned journalist, teacher, and community activist. She served as a VISTA volunteer in the late 1970s and continues community service today as a member of Soroptimist International, one of the largest women’s advocacy organizations in the world. 

Early in her career, Ashley found an outlet as a humor columnist and features editor for The Lynden Tribune in Lynden, Washington, where she garnered numerous awards for her writing. She has taught English, Journalism, English as Second Language, and GED prep at both the high school and community college levels.

A native New Yorker, Ashley is a graduate of Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., the Stanford Publishing Course, and City University in Seattle, Wash., where she earned a Masters of Education degree.
Ashley spends her time between La Conner, Washington and Tucson, Arizona with her husband D. Michael Barclay.

A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason

Each story in A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth is a masterpiece that vividly conveys a historical person's grappling with life's big questions. Each story transported me into a specific time and place. The characters are unforgettable.

Mason's background as a physician and psychiatry inform these stories, each character grappling with challenges biological or mental.

A reluctant pugilist, the product of the "cursed Gemini of Poverty and Fertility," dwells on the moral aspect of his trade. "You boys go out and think you are fighting a boxer but really you're fighting the world," a philosophical man shares.

Alfred Russel Wallace is driven to search for new species, imperiling his health, and independently developing a theory of evolution. I had read about his collection of birds in The Feather Thief by by Kirk Wallace Johnson. 

An immigrant demonstrates extreme patriotism, chagrined that he was unable to join the army and die for his adopted country.

In the smoke-filled city of London, a mother desperately seeks a remedy for her son's asthma.

A doctor's temporary lapses in memory appears to be caused by an alternate and more appealing personality.

An agent of the telegraph line lives in isolation in the jungle, forming deep attachments to other agents along the line. This was one of my favorite stories.

A female aeronaute investigates a dark line in the upper atmosphere.

A mental patient is obsessed with collecting data--recording the history of the mundane--which he stitches onto cloth. The story is inspired by the art created by Bispo do Rosario. Voices instructed him to catalog all things on earth. His over 800 works of found art are now celebrated.

I had read Daniel Mason's novel The Winter Soldier and the story stayed in my head, a sure sign of a well-written novel.
Mason is the author of The Piano Tuner and A Far Country.

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

A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth: Stories
by Daniel Mason
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date May 5, 2020
ISBN 9780316477635
PRICE $27.00 (USD)

from the publisher:

From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Winter Soldier and The Piano Tuner, a collection of interlaced tales of men and women facing the mysteries and magic of the world. 

On a fateful flight, a balloonist makes a discovery that changes her life forever. A telegraph operator finds an unexpected companion in the middle of the Amazon. A doctor is beset by seizures, in which he is possessed by a second, perhaps better, version of himself. And in Regency London, a bare-knuckle fighter prepares to face his most fearsome opponent, while a young mother seeks a miraculous cure for her ailing son. 

At times funny and irreverent, always moving and deeply urgent, these stories -- among them a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize winner -- cap a fifteen-year project. 

From the Nile's depths to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, from volcano-racked islands to an asylum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, these are tales of ecstasy, epiphany, and what the New York Times Magazine called the "struggle for survival . . . hand to hand, word to word," by "one of the finest prose stylists in American fiction."

The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

I first came across Nguyen Phan Que Mai when she hosted The American Historical Fiction Facebook Club for a week to introduce The Mountains Sing, her first novel written in English. Administrator Kari Bovee interviewed Nguyen.

" I researched for this novel my whole life: first by listening to the elderly Vietnamese people. A lot of Vietnamese history is untold (due to censorship reasons) and I wanted to document it. I spent a lot of time at my parents’ villages talking to people about their personal experiences. I interviewed countless people who fought on different sides of the war. I grounded my research through reading fiction and non-fiction books, watching movies and documentaries as well as visiting museums, libraries, special document archives…"~Nguyen Phan Que Mai

I was quite charmed by Nguyen and I ordered her novel from Algonquin Books.

Through her fictional family, the author takes us into the history of Vietnam across the 20th c. Tragic and heartbreaking losses pile one upon another. At the heart of the story is a woman of infinite courage and resilience who, against all odds, gathers her scattered family home.

"The challenges faced by Vietnamese people throughout history are as tall as the tallest mountain..." Grandma tells her granddaughter Huong. "The war might destroy our houses, but it can't extinguish our spirit."

Grandma is an educated, progressive thinker who is horrified by the extremists and their propaganda. Born to an enlightened land-owning family, under Land Reform she and her children flee for their lives. On the road, Grandma finds places to shelter her children, vowing she will return once she establishes a safe haven.

For Huong and her Grandma, books offer companionship, escape, and enlightenment. From American books Huong learns that Americans were "just like us," people who loved their families and worked hard to earn their food. To understand why the Japanese were so brutal toward her people, Grandma turned to books. "The more I read, the more I became afraid of wars. Wars have the power to turn graceful and cultured people into monsters." She has seen how citizens were "nothing but leaves that would fall in the thousands or millions in the surge of a single storm."

The novel's family are North Vietnamese. This perspective will shake some American readers with references to "American imperialism" and America's Southern Regime.

"I had hated the American and their allies so much before that day. I hated them for dropping bombs on our people, killing innocent civilians," Uncle Dat tells Huong. But after witnessing the massacre of teenaged American soldiers who were bathing and playing in a stream, Dat's hatred turned toward war.

After hearing her uncle's war experiences, Huong thinks, "Somehow I was sure that if people were willing to read each other, and see the light of other cultures, there would be no war on earth."

Nature can also save. The rice plants "rustling their tiny, green hands," the perfume of a rice straw bed, the song of a bird.

The Mountain Sings is the name of a bird whose song can reach heaven and return the souls of the dead through its song. Huong's father and uncle had heard these birds traveling to the front lines, and her father carved a wood bird which her uncle gives her.

It is a lovely image, centering the novel. The novel is a song, an ode to the memory of the millions who died, and a bridge that connects our cultural gap.

Read an excerpt at
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616208189_be.pdf?1584638143

Read the author's essay at
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616208189_ae.pdf?1584637834

Resources are available to help reader, including
The family tree
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616208189_ft.pdf?1587145622

Historical timeline
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616208189_ht.pdf?1587146238

A book club kit is available
https://d17lzgq6gc2tox.cloudfront.net/downloadable/asset/original/9781616208189_dg.pdf?1582824144

Country by Michael Hughes

Fury. Pure fury. The blood was up. Lost the head completely.~from Country by Michael Hughes

Hughes begins his story in the middle of a conflict between two members of an rogue IRA terrorist cell group.

Achill and Pig, the 'trigger man' who killed eight Brits and the Officer Commander of a terrorist cell, clash over a girl whose father wants her back home. She had willingly come to Achill and he won't give her up. Pig insists the teenager will return to her da.

Achill capitulates but throws in the towel. He knows it is his reputation that keep the Brits scared. Let them see what happens without him. He was done. He was going home.

And that was the start of it. A terrible business altogether...Wait now till you hear the rest.~from Country by Michael Hughes

A tenuous truce has brought temporary peace, but the cell group won't give up the fight. This time, they are sure they have the upper hand with inside information about British plans. Independence is theirs, if they have the heart for it.

The tale is violent, gritty, filled with passion and tears. It is an engrossing read, a timeless and compelling story.

I was attracted to the novel as a retelling of The Iliad, Homer's story of the falling out between Achilles and King Agamemnon during the Trojan War. It's been a very long time since I last read Homer. The plotline and themes are there to be found, but readers will enjoy this novel if you don't know Homer.

Hughes novel has the feel of the epic in the narrative voice, the high passions, the rhythm of the language.

I won an ARC from LibraryThing a year ago. After it didn't arrive, I contacted the publisher in the fall and they sent me the published edition.

It was worth waiting for.

from the publisher:

Northern Ireland, 1996. 

After twenty-five years of vicious conflict, the IRA and the British have agreed to an uneasy ceasefire as a first step towards lasting peace. But, faced with the prospect that decades of savage violence and loss have led only to smiles and handshakes, those on the ground in the border country question whether it really is time to pull back—or quite the opposite. 

When an IRA man’s wife turns informer, he and his brother gather their comrades for an assault on the local army base. But old grudges boil over, and the squad's feared sniper, Achill, refuses to risk his life to defend another man’s pride. As the gang plots without him, the British SAS are sent to crush the rogue terror cell before it can wreck the fragile truce and drag the region back to the darkest days of the Troubles. Meanwhile, Achill’s young protégé grabs his chance to join the fray in his place… 

Inspired by the oldest war story of them all, Michael Hughes’s virtuoso novel explores the brutal glory of armed conflict, the cost of Ireland’s most uncivil war, and the bitter tragedy of those on both sides who offer their lives to defend the dream of country.

Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles

She had me at Jock of Hazeldean.

Simon the fiddler had passed for fifteen years old, traveling from Paducah to Texas while evading the Confederate conscription men. People valued his gift of music and protected him.

Simon played Jock of Hazeldean at the barbecue party, a Scottish ballad of a girl who refuses the hand of a Lord to run off with her true love.

He "had a bottomless supply of waltzes, jigs, reels, hornpipes, and slow airs", the last "could bring men and women to a standstill" as the music raised memories of love and homeland, life before the war.

I personally loved the references to the music Simon plays. MacPherson's Lament tells the story of a condemned man who breaks his violin rather allow anyone else to play it. Lorena was a sentimental ballad, the most popular song of the war and was featured in Ken Burn's series. Doris asks Simon to play The Minstrel Boy, an Irish tune beloved by soldiers throughout time. Other songs mentioned include Shenandoah, the slow air Death and the Sinner, The Red River Valley, and Robin Adair (the song that gave my grandmother, mother, me and a cousin our middle names).

It was in the last days of the war Simon was found by the Confederates who take him for the regimental band. At war's end, Simon and other musicians traveled together, "servants of music and not of the state," seeking their fortune.

So it came that Simon played at a barbeque and saw the dark-haired girl in the audience who becomes his lodestar. To escape Ireland, Doris Dillon had signed a contract as an indentured servant to an elegant family ruled by a corrupt Colonel.

Every choice Simon makes afterward is rooted in his goal of becoming a man who can support Doris as his wife.

Texas was a shifting battleground for years, and after the Civil War vast areas were outside the arm of any law. The musicians traverse the state, living in abandoned places while entertaining polite society. They struggle to earn money for essentials and yet Simon saves up to purchase land of his own.

Throughout their adventures, Simon tries to avoid trouble, but he is undaunted in seeking to win Doris's love. He risks everything to save her from the unhappiness of her situation, for the Colonel preys upon the girl, whispering she will succumb to him in the end.

The climax involves music. While Simon is playing the Flowers of Edinburgh a disgruntled former band mate cries out for the lewd Shanty Hog-Eye Man. Simon finds himself in a fight for his life.

Simon the Fiddler is a romantic tale of a knight in homespun who saves an immigrant girl from the clutches of a drunk predator. It is a tribute to the power of music in our national and personal lives. And it is a vivid picture of a world broken by a devastating war.

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

Read a sample and hear an audio excerpt here.

Simon the Fiddler
by Paulette Jiles
William Morrow
Publication April 14, 2020
hardcover 27.99 USD
ISBN: 9780062966742
ISBN 10: 006296674X

from the publisher

The critically acclaimed, bestselling author of News of the World and Enemy Women returns to Texas in this atmospheric story, set at the end of the Civil War, about an itinerant fiddle player, a ragtag band of musicians with whom he travels trying to make a living, and the charming young Irish lass who steals his heart. 

In March 1865, the long and bitter War between the States is winding down. Till now, twenty-three-year-old Simon Boudlin has evaded military duty thanks to his slight stature, youthful appearance, and utter lack of compunction about bending the truth. But following a barroom brawl in Victoria, Texas, Simon finds himself conscripted, however belatedly, into the Confederate Army. Luckily his talent with a fiddle gets him a comparatively easy position in a regimental band.
Weeks later, on the eve of the Confederate surrender, Simon and his bandmates are called to play for officers and their families from both sides of the conflict. There the quick-thinking, audacious fiddler can’t help but notice the lovely Doris Mary Dillon, an indentured girl from Ireland, who is governess to a Union colonel’s daughter. 

After the surrender, Simon and Doris go their separate ways. He will travel around Texas seeking fame and fortune as a musician. She must accompany the colonel’s family to finish her three years of service. But Simon cannot forget the fair Irish maiden, and vows that someday he will find her again.
Incandescent in its beauty, told in Paulette Jiles’s trademark spare yet lilting style, Simon the Fiddler is a captivating, bittersweet tale of the chances a devoted man will take, and the lengths he will go to fulfill his heart’s yearning.

SIn Eater by Megan Campisi

Orphan May stole a loaf of bread and when arrested expected to die a horrible death. The Recorder stared hard at her and sentenced her to be branded as a Sin Eater. The teenager would be shunned for the rest of her life but would never again starve. She was to hear the sins of the dying and eat the proscribed foods to take their sins upon herself. The dead would fly to heaven; a locked collar kept May chained to hell.

Being a sin eater is a constricted life, alienated from society, yet May has unlimited access to the darkest secrets of the human heart for the the dying are eager to shrug off their worst sins before judgement.

The Queen's ladies in waiting are dying. May hears their confession but is given foods for sins never confessed. Something is afoot in the palace, and illiterate, powerless May is the only person who can cipher out the truth. 

Sin Eater by Megan Campisi is set in a familiar Elizabethan-inspired alternative world with the virgin Queen Bethany jealously guarding her favorite while lords present themselves as suitors. 

The stench and inhumanity of the times are vividly described, as are the consequences of the quest for beauty and power.

May is a remarkable and sympathetic heroine whose story arc takes her from powerlessness to embracing her destiny. The story winds up to a tense climax.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Sin Eater
by Megan Campisi
Atria Books
Pub Date April 7, 2020 
ISBN: 9781982124106
PRICE: $27.00/$36.00 (CAD) hardcover
$12.99 ebook/$19.99 audiobook

Johnny One-Eye : A Tale of the American Revolution by Jerome Charyn

"Where should I begin my unremarkable life?"~Johnny One-Eye

Johnny One-Eye proclaims to have led an unremarkable life.

Don't believe it.

Born John Stocking, age uncertain, as is his sire; son of Gert, madame of Queen's Yard, and raised with her nuns; King's College educated and former classmate of 'Ham' Alec Hamilton; lost an eye serving under Benedict Arnold; employed and threatened by patriots and redcoats alike; a scribbler, a pirate, an innkeeper, prisoner, changeling, divil---and "a man who hid beneath a madrigal of words."

"Are you soldier or civilian?" the general asked John when they first meet. John is bound and with a rifle against his side, caught in the act of adding a purgative to the general's soup.

"Both. I'm a secret agent," Johnny quips.

Major Treat, Washington's chief of intelligence, calls Johnny a frog "who leaps back and forth between the royals and us." Which makes him a brilliant character to bring readers behind the scenes, patriot and British.

Johnny is buffeted by the shifting tides of war, depending on which army is in control of New York. He is only loyal to the people he loves.

John loves the king for his education at King's College. He loves Benedict Arnold, even after his acts of treason. He loves Gert. He loves George Washington who finds solace with his beloved red-haired Gert--and in games vingt-et-un at Queen's Yard. And sometimes he finds solace with Johnny, a tenuous connection to Gert.

Most of all, Johnny loves Clara, a foundling octoroon who is more than a nun for hire, even more than an Aristotle-reading uncommon beauty. Imperious and defiant, Clara dominates unforgettable scenes, including ministering to the African soldiers abandoned by the British after the battle of Yorktown.

Charyn's war novel takes readers through history in the style of the 18th c novels with stories adventurous and bawdy, panoramic in scope. Yes, it is "rollicking" and "picaresque" as the cover contends. Perhaps it is this time of Covid-19, but I also felt the hangman's noose and cold rifle against my ribs, the losses and the desperation.

***

Like so many civilians caught up in times of war, Johnny serves at the pleasure of those in power. He is surrounded by men desperate to gain advantage over the enemy. Everyone can be forced to become a spy--an orphan boy, a desperate widow, an octoroon whore.

I think of my own ancestor conscripted into the Confederate militia although he came from pacifist Swiss Brethren who did not believe in oaths to the state. Or my German nationalist Baptist great-grandfather who left Russia to escape serving in the czar's army. The winds of war drove my husband's Palatine ancestors to leave their once verdant homeland, some to England and America, and some to Poland then Russia and finally to America. My ancestor's grave marks him a Revolutionary War veteran, but he was conscripted. We little people are nothing but chaff buffeted by the wind.

Our true stories are about who we love.

***

This 'tale of the American Revolution' includes all the history I have read, Benedict Arnold despised as a traitor by patriots and loyalists alike, John Andre and Lafayette and Alexander Hamilton and Peggy Shippen and the British generals and admirals appear.

As do the major moments.

George Washington, his leadership threatened, shocks and softens the hearts of men when he dons his spectacles and admits, "I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind..."

I get a lump in my throat. He was not perfect. But he did forgo personal power for an idea--a country ruled by the people and not a monarchy. A republic, if we can keep it.

"But this war cannot go on forever. One side will win," Johnny says to Mrs. Loring, 'war wife' of General Howe of the redcoats. She responds, "I am not so certain. Both sides might also lose." Johnny considers that perhaps both sides had already lost, "with killing and plunder as a permanent language."

George Washington won the war and a nation was born. At the end of the novel he is lionized, his errors overlooked. But he is a ghost after seven years of war, wandering his farm, peacetime "but a sweet deception."

Johnny survives the hurricane. He gains the reward of true love. It is all any of us really want in this life. Survive the battle anyway we can and cleave to those we love. 

Emily Dickinson III: The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn

The intriguing title and image (or, should I say the provocative title and image) caught my eye before I had read my first Jerome Charyn novel. I knew I had to read it as I developed my Emily Dickinson quilt.

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is the culmination of Chrayn's life-long love of the poet. "I never quite recovered from reading her," he writes in the "Author's Note".

His portrayal of the poet will shatter your received image of Emily Dickinson. Narrated by Emily herself, the novel imagines the men and women who rocked her world and inspired her explosive output of secret love poetry.

Emily's voice is singular and alive, studded with images from her poems. The poems themselves do not appear, but are clandescently scribbled off-screen, although some were secreted into the public's hands against her wishes. We don't need them much; Emily's voice speaks her poetry.

Solving the mystery of Emily's love life has long baffled her readers. Was she lesbian, her sister-in-law Sue or their friend Kate Scott Turner Anthon her great love? Or was she enthralled by 'her Philadelphia', the Rev. Charles Wadsworth of Arch Street Presbyterian Church? She heard him preach while passing through Philly and corresponded with him. Or was it her mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson who was a rare chosen recipient of her poetry? Or local newspaperman Sam Bowles?

Or someone lost to history? Like a handsome handyman at Mount Holyoke seminary?

She falls for the lowly orphaned handyman (later turned thief and circus clown). She would have eloped with the Amherst College tutor. She wants to hold the Rev. Wadsworth's hands, scarred from the manual labor that paid his way through school. Society--and the Dickinson patriarch--deem these men unfit for Emily's hand.

In the novel, Emily stalks the objects of her desire. She arranges secret meetings and roams the streets. She is wracked with unfulfilled desire, willing to cross Victorian lines of propriety.

The novel is an amazing marriage of fact and poetry and imagination that might just blow the top of your head off.

I purchased a paperback copy.

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson
by Jerome Charyn
W. W. Norton & Co.
Paperback Price$14.95
ISBN: 978-0-393-33917-8

The Girl in White Gloves by Keri Maher: A Novel of Grace Kelley

I am a life-long lover of classic films.

It started when I was a girl watching old movies on our black and white television. In those days, I preferred Gene Autry, Andy Hardy, and Ma and Pa Kettle. When we moved to Detroit I discovered Bill Kennedy's Showtime. I was hooked all summer long. Jimmy Stewart became my favorite actor, but I watched swashbucklers, too.

My folks didn't have money to take us to movie theaters but we did go to the drive-in theater. When the sun went down, I was supposed to fall asleep on the back seat. Instead, I was riveted to the movie. The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Birds, and Marnie were some of the most memorable.

I became a Hitchcock fan, watching his television series, and I even had a book of scary stories with Hitch on the cover. Later in life, I watched every television broadcast of his movies. And that is how I first saw Grace Kelley--in Rear Window and To Catch a Thief.

My husband's favorite movie is High Noon, starring Kelley in her first movie role. And he was a Clark Gable fan back in the day, so I saw Kelley in Mogambo.

It was not until a few years ago that I saw Kelley in her Oscar-winning performance in The Country Girl. There was this beautiful, young actress made up plain and dowdy, her emotion so concentrated I could see the flames shooting from her eyes. Wowzer! This was not the elegant model offering Cary Grant a chance to handle her jewels.

I knew that Kelley was from Philadelphia. We had driven on Kelley Drive. And I knew that Kelley had died in a tragic car accident of unknown origin. And that she had married a prince and had two beautiful daughters who were sometimes the news.

That's it, folks. That was all I knew. And what better way to learn more than by reading Wikipedia and IMBD---kidding. What better way to learn more than by reading a historical fiction novel that imagines the hidden stories?

Several times I skipped over The Girl in White Gloves (PLEASE--no more 'girl' titles, people!) by Keri Maher when I saw it on NetGalley, but each time it caught my attention. I try hard to keep my requests in line as I am committed to doing justice to every title I get. I caved--what's one more book to the pile?

In the first chapter, I learned that Kelley had been offered the title role in Hitchcock's Marnie and was unable to accept! MARNIE! The movie that I watched from the back seat of the car, that disturbed me and made me return to it again and again to 'get it'. I read Winston Graham's Marnie a few years back after a chance to see the movie at a local repertoire theater when Tippi Hendron visited and told the audience about the movie. How could a princess accept a role about a troubled woman leading a double life, with a hatred of men and a penchant for theft? Who was made love to by a young Sean Connery?

Okay. That was enough to keep me turning pages.

In a few chapters, I learned that Kelley had played Tracy Lord in a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story! One of my very favorite movies! How did I get to be in my sixth decade without having seen High Society? Arrggh!

At the end of the story, I learned that at age forty-seven, Kelley became involved with poetry festivals, reciting poems! Including Maya Angelou.

I might also mention that Kelley was a knitter.

Maher admits to a dearth of sources for critical times in Kelley's life, like her long correspondence with Prince Rainier after their first meeting in Monaco. She 'took many liberties' for 'dramatic compression', which translates to providing a 'good read', and she speculates on the details of her relationships with men, her family, and the cause of her death. Hey, it's fiction. Get over it.

The story hits on all of the major events and films of Kelley's career. It also portrays Kelley as a woman driven to achieve excellence but conflicted by parental expectations that a woman's goal is to marry and bear children. You've had a bit of freedom, played make-believe, now it's time to grow up and become a responsible adult as a real June Cleaver, supporting your husband and bearing his children. Well, that role did not suit Kelley; Maher takes us into the marriage bed and it was positively Arctic.

Well, I gave up wanting to be a princess before I was five years old. Between Kelley and Princesses Diana and Sarah, it is quite clear the downsides far outweigh the perks.

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

The Girl in White Gloves: A NOVEL OF GRACE KELLY
By KERRI MAHER
Feb 25, 2020
ISBN 9780451492074