A Coromandel Sea Change into Something Rich and Strange

Many people are bewitched on their first encounter with India. Bewitched or repelled.

Blaise hated the bazaars, the smell of human excrement in the gutters, the cooking smells of mustard oil and ghee, the over ripe fruit with their cloud of flies, the starving children, the cheap, man made goods. But his eighteen-year-old, newly wed wife had spent a lifetime sheltered in school. "I want to see it whole," she insisted. She was tired of club people and westernized Indians.

Blaise and Mary's marriage was perhaps doomed from the beginning. After they had made love, Blaise asked her father for her hand in marriage--because her father was his boss and it was the right thing to do. She had thought she was in love. Their unsuitability is brought into deep relief at the Patna Inn on the beautiful and dangerous Coromandel Coast.

The hotel and city was buzzing with campaigning before the local election, the hotel rooms full. The young couple are given a romantic, open beach house. Mary loves it. Blaise complains about the lack of running water and privacy. When they are visited by a donkey, Mary wants to give it sugar; Blaise wants the dirty beast away.

Wandering alone at night, Mary meets the charming Krishnan, a Western educated candidate posing as Krishna to draw voters to him. He is taking a vow of silence, and dressed in a loin cloth, his lips painted blue, he will parade through the streets, his hand held in blessing.

Remember all is fair in love and war. Politics now are a war, a bitter, greedy war and I have to fight Padmina Retty in every way I can...Indian politics are corrupt, venal..."

Krishnan's idealism and personal charm draw Mary to assist him in his campaign. He sends a message inviting her to be on his lorry dressed as the goddess Radha, a Hindu goddess. The plain Mary is dressed in a gauze and gold tissue sari, her face is painted, and she decked with beads and flowers and bracelets of gold.

"It's this Kirshnan. You're under a spell...Lots of girls go in at the deep end when they first meet Indians....He's using you."

Mary will not behave appropriately as the wife to a man in Blaise's position as a rising young diplomat. In the meantime, the provocative and treacherous dark skinned beauty Kuku has fallen in love with the handsome Nordic Blaise. Things spin out of control, and no one can stop it. But in the end Mary learns how to love--everyone, anyone.

Mary doesn't know, doesn't dream...This isn't England or even Europe. It's such a violent place.

Rumer Godden's dramatic novel is filled with memorable characters with interesting side stories and vivid descriptions of Godden's beloved India.

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

Cromandel Sea Change
Rumer Godden
Open Road Media
ebook
Publication Dec. 20, 2016
ISBN: 9781504042055

My Last Continent by Midge Raymond: Antarctic Romance and Adventure

"Midge Raymond's phenomenal novel takes us on a voyage deep into the wonders of the Antarctic and the mysteries of the human heart...packed with emotional intelligence and high stakes--a harrowing, searching novel of love and loss in one of the most remote places on earth, a land of harsh beauty where even the smallest missteps have tragic consequences." from the publisher

It was World Penguin Day when I started reading  My Last Continent by Midge Raymond. I had not realized how perfectly timed my choice was. Raymond's novel is a love story, the love between star crossed lovers and their mutual love of penguins and the Antarctic.

from the author's blog

Deb and Keller are penguin researchers whose love affair flourishes only during their brief weeks together in Antarctica. Their off-season work is on opposite sides of the county, Driven by their need to make a difference and to save the penguins, both are willing to risk everything, even their lives and each other.

Shadows of Antarctic explorers are seen everywhere, foreshadowing the novel's climax.The ghosts of lonely deaths haunt the desolate landscape. Robert Falcon Scott's hut stands undisturbed. "I may be some time," said Capt. Oates as he left the tent shared with his imperiled Scott expedition explorers. He never returned. Deb's lover in passing, Dennis, likewise wandered off to his lonely death after being left behind by his tour boat.

The solitude of the icy desert, the isolation, soothes Deb. Part of Deb wants and needs solitude. Part of her fears dying alone. The memory of an emperor penguin who died alone haunts her. Female emperors leave their eggs under the male's care while she takes off to fatten up for nursing the chick. The males huddle together during the long months of darkness until nearly starved. Human males aren't programmed like the emperors. Before meeting Keller Deb had been alone, for what male was going to wait at home while she took off every year?

"Great God! This is an awful place," Robert Scott wrote in his journal. Tragedy comes into Deb's life and for the first time she realizes the depth of despair that prompted Scott's desperate cry. Keller's ship has hit an iceberg and is sinking and Deb is compelled to search for her beloved mate in the thrilling climax of the novel.

Antarctica is more than the backdrop for the novel, it is a living character. A hundred years ago the explorers vied to be the 'first'; today tourists tick it off  as the last of continent visited. The environmental destruction and pollution that comes with tourism, overfishing, and climate change all endanger the penguins. Raymond manages to educate readers through the characters and the action.

I loved this book. It is so original in concept and the writing is beautiful.

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

My Last Continent
by Midge Raymond
Scribner
Publication Date June 21, 2016
$26.00
ISBN:9781501124709

The Possibility of Love After War

Everyone Brave is Forgiven, set in London, begins the day war is declared. Nineteen-year-old Mary, wealthy and beautiful, rushes to volunteer. She is assigned to teach, and meets Tom, who falls for Mary. Tom's friend and flatmate Alastair's work evacuating art to safety had ended and he enlists.

The characters endure the Blitz, starvation, maiming, near drownings, and all the horrors of war. I pondered how a writer could put these lovely young men and women, beautiful and witty and charming, through such travails without his heart breaking.

Of course the author's heart broke. Chris Cleave was writing a novel inspired by his own grandparents experiences during WWII. Not that they oft told the stories. Sitting in a movie theater when it is hit by a German bomb and watching your fiance' die is not the kind of memory one willingly returns to.

Cleave visited Malta where his grandfather spent three grueling years slowly starving and watching German attacks kill one friend after another. Cleave was overwhelmed by the sadness of the war. And that emotion carried through in this novel.

There is no nostalgia casting a pretty haze over London during the years of 1939 through 1942. The British are not elevated to an idealized civilization. The pretentiousness of the rich and racism are portrayed. The country folk won't take in evacuated children who are less than perfect. The bureaucracy evacuates the zoo animals before the school children.

We do see the bravery of those at home and in harm's way.

You can read a synopsis of the plot anywhere online. I really don't want to go there. But perhaps if you understand how emotionally this novel has affected me you will understand why you should read it. Scenes haunt me, the beauty of how Cleaves uses words to convey experience is amazing. The story line and characters will catch your attention, you won't want to put the book down. But it is the way Cleave writes scenes that make them memorable.

I will tell you one incident from the book.

At the beginning of the book Tom makes a jar of jam and when his flatmate and friend Alastair enlists Tom gives him the jam. Alastair hoards it hoping to share it with Tom when the war is over. Even when starving on besieged Malta Alastair keeps that jam, a symbol of what life had been and will, hopefully, be again, a concoction of summer and joy and friendship and beauty and all the things that war has removed from life. Alastair's CO Simonson is concerned about Alastair's physical and psychological wounds and sneaks him off Malta.  Alastair give the jam to Simonson.

Malta has been besieged for years. The men are starving in a barren, dry land with scant, foul water. They have no ammunition. Simonson wishes the Germans would just make an end of it all. He stares at the paperwork on his desk when his eyes are drawn to the jam, a deep ruby color in the moonlight. Simonson was to keep the jam to share with Alastair at war's end. If only he could just smell the jam; he opens the jar but could smell nothing. Have his senses become dulled by the dust?He dips the nub of his pen in and tries the jam. He is transported. Suddenly the dry and dessicated island is filled with sweet water and green growing plants, stamens shaking with laughter, finches landed on the stems, and Simonson sees his lover's eyes. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever tasted.

We understand everything. We understand that war takes away our memory of the simple joys life can offer. We understand that the war wounded must find their way through the dark waters that have sucked them under and nearly downed them, find the way back to life and love. Everyone forgiven must also be brave, Mary thinks at the end.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair an unbiased review.

Everyone Brave is Forgiven
Chris Cleave
Simon & Schuster
Publication May 2016
$26.00 hard cover
ISBN: 9781501124372

American Copper by Shann Ray

I won a copy of American Copper by Shann Ray from The Quivering Pen blog by David Abrams. When his review of the book posted, extolling the beauty of Ray's language, I set it on the To Be Read Next pile. Abrams wrote, "If I said just one book can, however briefly, change the way you look at both the natural world and human nature--if I said all that, you'd want to read this book, wouldn't you?"

American Copper is a story of racism and the evil in men, and it is a love story.

In the first decades of the 20th c, automobiles are seen in the Butte, Montana streets but rodeo competitions still run the circuit. Native Americans and Chinese are considered sub-human, and gangs are free to deal out punishments to those who step out of line. Copper has made immigrant Baron Josef Lowry not only rich but the most powerful man around, his arm reaching to Washington, D.C.  He is obsessed with wealth and controls everyone in his life, especially his son and daughter. After losing his wife he commands his children to never marry; he needs them he says, and he intends to pass his copper mines and wealth to their care.

His daughter Evelynne is given everything she physically needs. Her father teaches her about the natural world and gathers her poetry for publication back east. After her brother's death, Evelynne's grief turns her into a recluse. Reaching womanhood, Eve longs to escape her ivory tower and searches for a man strong enough, or audacious enough, to stand up to her father and take her away.

The evil that inhabits men, and the capacity for love is explored in eloquent prose.

I am glad to have read this book.

The book cover blurbs include the marvelous Andra Barrett, whose historical short stories in Ship Fever and Servants of the Map I adore, wrote, "This grave, unusual novel unfolds with a beautiful evenhandedness, balancing the outer world and inner life, Cheyenne and white experiences of early 20th-century Montana.  Ray's feel for the heart and soul of Montana and its people--all its people--graces every page."

And Dave Eggers, author of the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and  A Hologram for a King, called the book "Lyrical, prophetic, brutal, yet ultimately hopeful."

Others compared this first novel's writing to Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plains.

American Copper
Shann Ray
Unbridled Press
ISBN: 978-1-60953-121-8