The Gown by Jennifer Robson

Subtitled, A Novel of the Royal Wedding, Jenifer Robson's novel The Gown imagines the women who embroidered Princess Elizabeth's 1947 wedding gown.

Heather is surprised when she inherits samples of embroidery from her grandmother. She had no idea her grandmother could do such beautiful work. Discovering that the samples match the embroidery on Princess Elizabeth's wedding gown, Heather goes on a quest to resurrect her beloved grandmother's buried past.

Alternating chapters tell Heather's story and that of her grandmother Anne and her friend Miriam Dassin. The reader is returned to 1947 London and the lingering effects of the war. Patriotism and support for the royal family were at a high and the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth filled the people with expectation, brightening the country with joy.

The winning wedding gown design went to Paul Hartnell, a favorite designer of the queen. The women created the elaborate applique and embroidery under strict orders to not talk about their work.

Ann Hughes was a lead embroiderer when Miriam Dassin is hired and put under Ann's tutelage. Miriam worked for a prestigious French fashion house before Germany took over her country. The women become roommates and fast friends. Miriam holds her past and Jewish heritage a close secret.

One fatal night Ann and Miriam join their coworkers at a dance where they meet the men who would change their lives--for better or worse.

I enjoyed the detailed descriptions of the actual work process of appliqueing the satin on the tulle. 

Ann holds Harnell's pattern to the window and traces the design onto a piece of onionskin paper. She then cut the design out and aligns it with the drawing to check it is true. The pattern is placed on the satin fabric and using a needle with its blunt end set into a cork, Ann punches the needle into the fabric along the edge of the pattern piece, the needle separating the weave of the satin to mark the perimeter. With sharp scissors, Anne cuts along the perforated lines to make the applique shape. To attach the applique to the tulle she needle-turned the edges, the tip of the needle turning under the edge of the shape, and with tiny stitches and silk thread, sews it into place onto the silk tulle. After the applique was completed, the embroidery with pearls and beads and diamonds began.

As a needle-turn appliquer, I am familiar with the process. Thankfully, I work with easier materials. 

Silk thread is fine and results in near-invisible applique stitches, but it is challenging to work with. It is so fine I can hardly see it and it easily slips out of the needle eye. The satin used for the gown has a dense weave but was resistant to taking a crease. So she could not prepare the applique shapes with one of the many methods I use, resorting to needle-turn. This means using the tip of the needle to turn under the very edge of the shape, working in extremely small increments. The seamstress must be careful not to fray the edge of the applique shape, rolling threads under to be caught.

Using tulle as an applique base is also difficult. I am used to a woven fabric as an applique base and the needle gently separates the threads. But tulle is not a densely woven fabric, but a net or mesh fabric. The openings in the tulle gives the needles less to anchor to. I tried to applique on nylon tulle and could not get a smooth edge to the applique!

Not only where these materials challenging to work with, but the physical demands of the work had to be exhausting. The eye strain from hours of close work, the fabrics and threads all the same color, the reaching to work on a tambour frame, I can imagine the resulting muscle and joint pain! 

That the ensemble was completed in such a short time is amazing.

The novel will appeal to readers of historical fiction and women's fiction, Anglophiles, and anyone interested in fashion history. 

I won a book from the Book Club Cookbook.

Learn more and see photos of the gown at

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/27/the-queens-wedding-and-coronation-dresses-to-be-displayed-togeth/

Read an article by Jennifer Robson's at

http://time.com/5457007/queen-elizabeth-wedding-dress/

The Gown: A Novel of the Royal Wedding
By Jennifer Robson
William Morrow, 9780062884275, 400pp.
Publication Date: December 31, 2018
List Price: 26.99*

The River Widow by Anne Howard Creel

"Over the course of her life, she had learned that people could hold inside the brightest peaks and the darkest pits, and there were those who straddled the break--half of them drawn to evil, half drawn to beauty. Those people could step from one side to the other and back again as if the line were as thin as a hair. Her husband had been one of those people. Was she one of them, too?"  from The River Widow by Anne Howard Creel

In 1937 Paducah, KY as the Ohio River was flooding, Adah's husband Lester once again lost his temper and began to beat her. In desperation, Adah grabbed a nearby shovel and lashed out at Lester, striking him in the head. 

Horrified by what she had done, she dragged his body to the raging river, desperately hoping it would carry away the evidence of her crime.

Adah's guilt is heavy, but she has the motivation to carry on.  She loves Daisy, Lester's daughter from his first marriage.  Lester's family insist that Daisy and Adah stay with them. 

The Branch clan is feared for their violence and imperious disregard for decency and the law. They suspect there is more to the story of Lester's death. Adah works on the tobacco farm like an indentured servant and hires herself out to do laundry to add to the family's income. She is unable to protect Daisy from the harsh punishments and rough treatment meted out by her father's kinfolk, but at least she can comfort and love the child.

As the months go by, Adah struggles with one question: how can she get Daisy out of the Branch family's clutches? In the meantime, she learns more about Lester and his family--and meets a man who offers her an alternate future.

The River Widow by Anne Howard Creel has an almost Gothic atmosphere, the story of a woman isolated and held against her will, powerless and unprotected. The bulk of the novel is psychological and internal. The suspense comes not in action as much as through emotion and insight. At times I was reminded of Jane Austen's character Fanny from Mansfield Park, a girl completely dependent, suffering, without any power for self-determination, but with a moral clarity that sets her apart.

I learned that one of Creel's books had been made into a movie, The Magic of Ordinary Days, had been made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie. We watched it and enjoyed it very much.

Learn more about the author and The River Widow at
https://www.annhowardcreel.com/about

I thank the author for a copy of her book and other gifts, a win through the American Historical Novels Facebook Group.

from her website: 

Ann Howard Creel writes historical novels about strong female characters facing seemingly impossible obstacles and having to make life-changing decisions. In her new novel, THE RIVER WIDOW, a former tarot-card reader turned widow and stepmother must escape the clutches of an evil family while also facing the crime she herself has committed. In THE WHISKEY SEA, a fierce young woman becomes one of the only female rumrunners on the Atlantic Coast during Prohibition. And in WHILE YOU WERE MINE, a New York City nurse must give up the child she has raised as her own during World War II.
​
When asked where she gets her ideas, Ann answers, “From history.” She doesn’t know when the muse will strike, but often while reading about history, she sees an image in her mind. The spark for THE RIVER WIDOW came while learning about The Great Flood of 1937 along the Ohio River. Ann immediately saw a woman dragging her abusive husband’s body to the river to let floodwaters take it away. Rather strange, she knows.
​
In the works are new novels about an American horsewoman joining an all-female group of doctors, nurses, and ambulance drivers during World War I and a tale of an American teacher needing an escape who inherits a Paris nightclub just as Europe is steadily marching toward war.
​
Besides writing, Ann's other interests include old houses, new yoga routines, red wine, and all things cat.  For book clubs, Ann will visit you via Skype. Contact her through her website: www.annhowardcreel.com.

The Falconer by Dana Czapnik

Sometimes a book finds me that I would not have found by myself. That is how The Falconer by Dana Czapnik came into my life--as an unexpected package from the publisher.

Reading it was about a seventeen-year-old girl in 1993 New York City whose passion was basketball and who has a crush on her best friend Percy, I wondered if I would care for the book. Sure, there was advance praise from Column McCann, Salmon Rushdie, Chloe Benjamin--but could I relate to the story?

I opened the book and started reading. The opening scene finds the protagonist, "pizza bagel" Lucy, playing basketball with Percy. I've seen basketball games. Only when the tickets were free. But the writing was so good, I found myself drawn into the scene, turning pages. There was something about this book, about Lucy's voice.

On the surface, I had nothing in common with Lucy. And yet Lucy felt familiar, her concerns and fears universal.

In telling the story of one particular girl from a particular place and time, the author probes the eternal challenges of growing up female: conformity and acceptance by one's peer group while staying true to oneself; crushes on boys who don't see you; concerns about our attractiveness; what we give up for love; is the world is chaotic and without order, or can we find joy and hope?

There was a multitude of lines and paragraphs that I noted for their wisdom, beauty, and insight. I reread sections, scenes that elicited emotion or thoughtfulness.

I felt Lucy was channeling Holden Caulfield, who I met as a fourteen-year-old in Freshman English class in 1967. The Catcher in the Rye was life-changing for me, a voice unlike any I had encountered in a novel. The New York City setting, the wandering across the city, the characters met, the rejection of the parental values and lifestyle, Lucy's misunderstanding of a song line--Lucy is a female Holden, updated to the 1990s.

Lucy tells us that in Central Park is a statue of a boy releasing a falcon. She loves this statue but resents that only boys are portrayed in the way of the statue, that girls are shown nude or as children like the Alice in Wonderland statue. She sees in the joy and hope in The Falconer.

The Falconer, Central Park

Lucy experiences many things in the novel, including some pretty bad stuff. But she is resilient, holding to the joy and beauty she finds around her, the "the perfect jump shot" moments. She will inspire young readers and offer those of us whose choices were made long ago a journey of recollection and the affirmation of mutually shared experience.

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

The Falconer
by Dana Czapnik
Atria Books
Publication: January 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9322
$25 hardbound

The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg

The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg is a charmer of a novel that will capture the hearts of readers.

At 96, Doris is frail and bears the marks of her age, the wrinkles and the thinning pure white hair. But Doris knows she still has something to offer--her story--and with the aid of the red address book her father gave her as a child, Doris writers her recollections on her laptop, a gift of love to her grandniece Jenny.

Hearing that Doris is hospitalized, Jenny leaves behind her husband and two children to manage on their own in America, taking their baby with her to Sweden. Jenny won't let the woman who saved her die alone.

Doris writes about the early death of her beloved father, her time in service, her life as a mannequin in 1920s Paris. She tells about her loves and losses, the devastation of WWII, her struggles to survive in America and eventual return to Sweden. Her story is rife with losses and hardships that show #metoo is born out of a timeless and universal concern.

The secondary plot line of Jenny's life, born to an addict mother and her struggle with feelings of being unloved, brings to the novel another relatable layer for contemporary readers.

The Red Address Book has been an international best-seller and I expect it will meet with huge success among American readers. I would recommend it to book clubs as an easy to read book with likable characters, interesting historical settings, an engaging plot line, and as a heartbreaking romance story.

I received an ARC through BookishFirst in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Find a Reader's Guild at
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fRtiOeqE4mDEtrvnSErr7rL4Ih1ALKLS/view?usp=drive_open

The Red Address Book
by Sofia Lundberg
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Hardcover $25.00
ISBN-13/EAN: 9781328473011
ISBN-10: 1328473015
Publication Date: 01/08/2019

Twisted Tales: Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller and Siracusa by Delia Ephron

On Halloween, I started Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller. It was described as atmospheric and was compared to Daphne du Maurier's classic Gothic romance/psychological thriller Rebecca.

I had to set the novel aside for a day because I was having trouble with my vision. Meanwhile, we took a trip across state and while driving we listened to the audiobook Siracusa by Delia Ephron. I have been waiting for this chance to listen to it ever since I won the audiobook from First Look Book Club several years ago!

The novel is told in four voices so an audiobook was a terrific way to 'read' the book. Talia Balsam, Katie Finneran, Darren Goldstein, and John Slattery were the readers. They did a great job! Each character was distinct in personality.

Two couples take a joint vacation trip to Italy including Siracusa. New Yorkers Michael (a Pulitzer-winning playwright) and Lizzie (a magazine writer) and Taylor and Finn, Lizzie's ex-boyfriend who runs a restaurant in Portland, Maine, and their beautiful and strange daughter Snow.

The relationships are revealed to all be troubled. Taylor has boundary issues with her daughter and has frozen Finn out. Michael is a natural charmer (and womanizer) whose attention to Snow results in a crush. Lizzie loves Michael but feels he is married to his work.

Creepy! Addictive! And I had to laugh out loud as these characters reveal their pettiness and limited self-understanding and lack of understanding of their partners. The foreshadowing was quite strong and we had a hunch about the ending, which turned out to be on target and quite shocking.

But what a perfect book for an eight-hour car trip across back country roads and expressways in November. It was entertaining and had us discussing the characters and plot.

Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller 

Back home, I picked up Bitter Orange again. I ended up reading half the book in one evening. Yes, I stayed up too late but had to finish it.

On her deathbed, Frances Jellico believes she is being pressured by a Vicar to tell the truth of what really happened over a hot summer in 1969 when she was hired to evaluate the gardens of a crumbling 1740s c. English country house.

At thirty-nine. Frances had led a narrow life caring for her incapacitated, critical, and recently deceased mother. Grateful for the work, Frances arrived at the house to discover a man about her age and a younger women already staying there. Peter was hired to evaluate the house and furnishings. His companion Cara is beautiful and emotionally unstable. Frances is curious about their lives.

"I know of course right from wrong. My father, Luther Jellico, had instilled it into me before he left and then Mother had continued in her way: payment will always be due for any wrongdoing, don't lie or steal, don't talk to strange men, don't speak unless spoken to, don't look your mother in the eye, don't drink, don't smoke, don't expect anything from life." from Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller

The house showed abuse and destruction from the soldiers stationed there during WWII, rooms empty and everything in disrepair. Strange things happen in the house, including the interactions between a protective Peter and volatile Cara.

Peter and Cara draw Frances into their carefree existence, setting aside their work for picnics with wine and smoking cigarettes and even a nude swim. Cara tells Frances her tragic story while Peter asks Frances to help him keep tabs on the mercurial Cara.

The local Vicar warns Frances to escape their influence.

It is too late, for these people are caught in a web of lies and fantasy that unravels with fatal consequences.  And Frances accepts that "Payment will always be due."

Read an article by Fuller on Haunted Houses in fiction at
https://clairefuller.co.uk/2018/10/31/a-spine-tingling-reading-list-of-haunted-house-novels/

Florence Gordon by Brian Morton

I read Florence Gordon by Brian Morton for book club this month.

Florence is strong and sure and unmovable, so imperious in the surety of her superior understanding that she is hard to be around. She is also single-minded, unable to small talk or socialize, wasting time on trivialities.

At 75 years old, she is trying to write one last book before the inevitable. Her granddaughter Emily helps her grandmother by doing research. Emily ends up learning about her grandmother's life and achievements, her iconic books and essays. And in the process is able to find her own path.

The son/daughter-in-law thread was not necessary; their story was inconclusive and did not seem related to Florence. Unless the daughter-in-law was supposed to be a foil for Florence, showing her opposite, so granddaughter Emily has two role models to choose from. Her mother worships Florence but she is not much like her; she is a good enough mom, although not so good a wife.

I hated the short episodic chapters, they did not draw me to keep reading, each a self-contained scene.

You expect to love your children; it brings a different kind of joy to realize you admire them.

Florence is an interesting character whom one admires more than likes. I especially appreciated Emily's struggle to understand her grandmother and the Feminist movement and how it helped her make a choice about a former boyfriend. The book was written in 2014. In the book, Emily has taken a year off from college.

Emily wasn't particularly political, and she had no idea if she was a feminist. She knew she was a beneficiary of the women's movement--she'd read enough novels, she'd seen enough episodes of Mad Men to know what life before the women's movement was like--but at the same time, the word "feminism" didn't have great associations for her. The feminist girls she knew at Oberlin, her roommate among them, were the kind of people who made you feel bad for liking what you liked. 

Emily wondered whether your identity has less to do with anything inside you than with the time in which you happen to be alive. 

The novel has high praise from critics and readers and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.  But the book club members did not give high ratings to the book. Some admired Florence. We did fill an entire hour talking about the book. But the open ending was not appreciated.

I have read several books recently about older women who came to age in the 1960s. I am sensing a trend here of people who want to explore a politically active generation of women. These women end up being failures as wives and mothers.

I am getting irritated by that generalization, and hope that in the future writers will explore how women can be political, interacting for the common good, while still being loving parents. Perhaps the 'latch-key' generation wishes they had June Cleaver moms.

All We Ever Wanted by Emily Giffin: A Mother's Crisis of Values, Familial Ties, and Sympathetic Understanding

"Finch is either completely innocent or a total sociopath. He's either more like his mother or exactly like his father. I have no clue which one it is, but I will find out." from All We Ever Wanted by Emily Giffin

There is a reason that Emily Giffin's novel All We Ever Wanted is on the bestseller list immediately upon publication. She is a fine writer who delivers defined characters caught in a complicated knot of the "he said, she said" variety, and rolls out the plot so the reader is hooked and, as the story progresses, can't resist being sucked into the current of ever-deepening revelations.

She incorporates issues of #Me Too, class, and race into the central story, along with youth issues of social media and peer pressure, so the novel feels relevant.

The plot revolves around Finch Bowning, just accepted into Princeton, whose family is extremely wealthy. His mother Nina came from modest roots, while his father Kirk was from one of Nashville's elite even before he became even wealthier. They seem to have everything.

Then there is Lyla, raised by her single father Tom. Lyla is on scholarship at a private school where kids like Finch are clearly from another world.

Then at a party one night, a photograph is taken and circulated, bringing crisis into all their lives.

Nina's own experience offers her insight into Lyla's situation and she wants justice for Lyla. Nina must consider the values her husband has brought into their family, where money is more important than people and anything can be bought. She is forced to evaluate her entire life as she seeks to walk the fine line between what is right and the bonds of family.

I had not read Giffin before and was very pleased with this book.

I won an ARC through LibraryThing.

Read an excerpt at
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/550983/all-we-ever-wanted-by-emily-giffin/9780399178924/

All We Ever Wanted
Emily Giffin
Hardcover | $28.00
Published by Ballantine Books
Publication June 26, 2018
ISBN 9780399178924

The Red Thread by Ann Hood

The Red Thread in Ann Hood's novel title refers to a Chinese saying that an invisible red thread links people who are destined to be connected.

The novel is about a group of American couples who hope to adopt a Chinese child, as well as the stories of how those children came to be relinquished by their mothers.

After Hood lost her own child she and her husband adopted a Chinese child. The novel was inspired by the experience.

I first read Hood when the publisher sent me her memoir Morningstar: Growing Up with Books, which I devoured in one sitting. 

Hood creates amazingly realistic characters. I thought about a couple I know who went through years trying everything to get pregnant before adopting two children, one from Korea.

Maya runs an adoption agency to connect American parents with Chinese orphans. Beneath her professional and competent veneer she hides a painful past that won't allow her to move on, a guilt so deep she can't share it with her closest friends.

Chapters explore the couples who have come to her, each with their personal needs and fears, with strong or fragile relationships. Some have step-children and natural children who are disappointments. Their lives become emotional roller coasters of expectation, second thoughts, and marital stress.

Poignant stories of the Chinese children imagine mothers unwilling to give up their girl children; they are heart-breaking. China's law allowing families to have one child became relaxed to two children. It still meant that families could only afford to have one girl child.

Knitting figures into the stories; Maya knits as therapy, expectant mothers knit for their imagined children.

The Red Thread would make a wonderful book club pick.

I purchased a book at my local bookstore.

The Red Thread
by Ann Hood
W. W. Norton
$14.95 paperback
ISBN: 978-0-393-33976-5

How to Walk Away: Finding a Perfect Life When Perfection Fails You

My husband read How to Walk Away through BookishFirst and raved about it. Publisher's Weekly gave it a 'thumbs up, buy it' rating. I grabbed my hubby's ARC and dove in.

Katherine Center's novel begins with Margaret living the dream: she has the perfect boyfriend, Chip, and the perfect job lined up.

Except Chip isn't so perfect. He knows Margaret is terrified of flying when he decides to get his pilot's license. And he is positive he can cure her fear by proving his skill as a pilot. Chip cajoles Margaret into joining him on a surreptitious night flight before he passes his last test, intending to propose to her during the flight. Margaret gives in.

But perfect fiancee' Chip can't handle the plane during a gust of wind and the plane crashes.

Chip walks away with some scratches. Margaret is trapped in the plane, her legs pinned, the jet fuel burning.

I would call the novel a romance and women's fiction, a page-turning beach read, except for one little thing: the theme is really about overcoming life's challenges, rolling with the punches, and flourishing when you have lost everything.

For Margaret, it is her disability and scars and the realization that Chip can't commit to 'better or worse.' Margaret's estranged sister Kit shows up to be her cheerleader. Kit must hash out some unfinished business with their mother, which leads marital stress for their parents. Love blooms and is repressed and blooms and, well, there are happy endings for all.

I found Margaret to be a little too chipper and perky in light of her injuries, and her attraction to a new man in her life suspect. Because I would be depressed and mean and hating all men in her shoes. But that is the point: Kit finds research proving that we are happy or unhappy regardless of what life throws at us, according to who we are. If we have courage and spirit and attitude we make it through anything. The rest of us get drunk, like Chip, or depressed and suicidal, or mean and angry.

How do you walk away from a crushing defeat?

Read a sample from the book at https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250201553

How to Walk Away
Katherine Center
St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 9781250149060
Hardcover $26.99

The Welcome Home Diner: A Taste of Detroit

I was attracted by the cover, and then intrigued by the story line of The Welcome Home Diner, which is set in a nearly abandoned East Side Detroit neighborhood.

Cousins Addie and Samantha are part of the influx of idealistic young people flocking to the city with visions of being part of its comeback. They buy a long abandoned diner and serve up locally sourced foods, using heirloom recipes from their Polish grandmother.

The book is packed with Detroit references from the Packard Auto Plant to the Detroit Zoo, the Eastern Market to Holiday Market.

The characters are optimistic and excited about Detroit's future, and happy to be part of its transformation. They hope that the Welcome Home Diner will become a neighborhood gathering place. But the locals are fearful: gentrification brings higher taxes, and those who have stayed can't afford to pay them.

Addie and Samantha both struggle with guy problems that require a need for self-understanding and personal growth. What they learn is good advice for all.

They take huge risks beyond investing in a decimated neighborhood. They hire an escapee from human trafficking and a young man whose tragic teenage mistake landed him in prison.

Behind the hard work, flirtations and commitment issues, and endeavoring to bring locals into the diner and not just suburbanites, they are being stalked by an unknown person who is trying to destroy all they are building.

I don't read a lot of 'women's fiction' or romance or 'foodie' books with recipes. This novel certainly will be enjoyed by readers who love those genres. I do read books that incorporate social and political issues into entertaining stories. This book certainly hit that mark for me.

Book Club Discussion Questions are included as well as recipes, including Greens with Turnips and Potlikker, Cabbage Rolls,  Lamb Burger Sliders, Ginger-Molasses Bundt Cake with lemon Curd, and Heartbreaker chocolate chip cookies! Yum!

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

The Welcome Home Diner
by Peggy Lampman
Lake Union Publishing
ISBN: 9781542047821
PRICE $14.95

Author Peggy Lampman was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama but attended the University of Michigan, After working as a copywriter and photographer fin New York City she returned to Ann Arbor and opened a specialty foods store, the Back Alley Gourmet. Later, she wrote a food column for the Ann Arbor News and MLive. Lampman’s first novel, The Promise Kitchen, published in 2016, garnered several awards and accolades. She is married and has two children. She also writes the popular blog www.dinnerfeed.com.

From the publisher:
Betting on the city of Detroit’s eventual comeback, cousins Addie and Samantha decide to risk it all on an affordable new house and a culinary career that starts with renovating a vintage diner in a depressed area of town. There’s just one little snag in their vision.

Angus, a weary, beloved local, is strongly opposed to his neighborhood’s gentrification—and his concerns reflect the suspicion of the community. Shocked by their reception, Addie and Samantha begin to have second thoughts.

As the long hours, problematic love interests, and underhanded pressures mount, the two women find themselves increasingly at odds, and soon their problems threaten everything they’ve worked for. If they are going to realize their dreams, Addie and Samantha must focus on rebuilding their relationship. But will the neighborhood open their hearts to welcome them home?