The Invisible Woman by Erika Robuck

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

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

It is a riveting read. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Readers will be gratified by the ending.

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

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

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

from the publisher

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

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

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

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

Covid-19 Life: Books, Quilts, & News

 

I finished the Rebel Girl quilt top! It was a lot of fun to make, especially going into my stash of vintage novelty fabrics. You can find the free pattern by Lisa Flower at PB fabrics

Winter has finally hit for real. We even had to shovel snow this week. We had two days close to forty degrees, which meant long walks, then it has turned bitter cold. Luckily, we have lots of lap quilts in the house.

Sunny is really happier snuggling in bed than on the field. Especially in this cold weather! After Ellie's overnight vet stay last week she had to wear a cone. She kept walking into things, so the kids bought her a toddler shirt to wear!

I feel bad for the robins that returned too early. This one has enjoyed the heated water bowl. 

Last August was to be the 50th class reunion for my high school class. This week we learned that our class president had passed. We were in Seventh Grade together. In art class, I told him about my imaginary friend Homer the Ghost. I said he followed me to school and was sitting in the room. Shaken, he asked the art teacher and she said I was "pulling the wool over his eyes," a saying I had not encountered before. Until the day we graduated, every time he saw me in the school hallways he would greet me with "How's Homer?" In retirement he created digital photographic art.

New books in the mail include Brooklyn On My Mind: Black Visual Artists from the WPA to the Present by Myrah Brown Green from Schiffer Publications. 

And from Amazon Vine I got The Arsonist's City by Hala Alyan.

I am currently reading Silence is a sense by Layla Alammar from Algonquin Books.

Last week our library book club Zoomed with Karen Dionne to talk about her latest thriller set in Michigan's Upper Penninsula, The Wicked Sister. We can't wait for her new book set near Grand Marias on Lake Superior!

The quilters had a Zoom tea party with fourteen in attendance. Only two ladies have received the Covid vaccine, and one is in Florida. We are waiting for notification that our hospital or the county or the local drug store has vaccine and appointment openings.

Its good weather for hibernating, like Sunny and Ellie! Stay safe. Stay warm. Find your bliss.

Jane Austen's Best Friend: The Life and Influence of Martha Lloyd by Zoe Wheddon

 

Jane Austen was especially close to her older sister Cassandra. She had mentors and friends. And she had Martha Lloyd, who was a 'second sister', and who lived with Jane, Cassandra and Mrs Austen.

They became friends when Jane was yet a girl. Although ten years older than Jane, Martha had much in common with her. 

"Martha was a strange mix of...amusing and highly sensible, experienced yet not educated into a forced air of formality," Wheddon writes. She held a deep Christian faith. 

She loved being outdoors, she loved to laugh, she was efficient and calm and she adored Jane's writings. The two friends shared in-jokes.

I did enjoy learning about Martha, her family history, her relationship to the Austen family, all that she contributed to Jane's happiness.  But, Wheddon's writing style felt wordy, long passages of imagined delights, descriptions of what Jane and Martha's relationship was possibly like, and then quotes from letters and other sources upon which her imaginings are based. I wanted to rush her along. The breezy, conjectured passages of what their friendship was possibly like became weighty.

But it seems I am in the minority, as better lights have awarded this biography 5 stars--Lucy Worsley Dr Paula Byrne, Natalie Jenner, Rose Servitova.

Chapters consider aspects of their life, including Fashion, Frolics, Charity, Love Lives and more, to Martha's life after Jane's death.

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

Jane Austen's Best Friend: The Life and Influence of Martha Lloyd
by Zoë Wheddon
Pen & Sword History
Pub Date 28 Feb 2021
Hardcover £19.99 (GBP)
ISBN: 9781526763815

from the publisher

All fans of Jane Austen everywhere believe themselves to be best friends with the beloved author and this book shines a light on what it meant to be exactly that. Jane Austen’s Best Friend; The Life and Influence of Martha Lloyd offers a unique insight into Jane’s private inner circle. Through this heart-warming examination of an important and often overlooked person in Jane’s world, we uncover the life changing force of their friendship.

Each chapter details the fascinating facts and friendship forming qualities that tied Jane and Martha together. Within these pages we will relive their shared interests, the hits and misses of their romantic love lives, their passion for shopping and fashion, their family histories, their lucky breaks and their girly chats. This book offers a behind the scenes tour of the shared lives of a fascinating pair and the chance to deepen our own bonds in ‘love and friendship’ with them both.

Land of Big Numbers: Stories by Te-Ping Chen

Te-Ping Chen's debut story collection Land of Big Numbers started out strong and ended with a mind-blowing parable that knocked my socks off. 

I read the first story through BookishFirst and put in my name for the ARC. Set in China, twins go on separate life paths, the bright and driven girl challenging government repression, the boy excelling in competitive video gaming. A reversal of expectations challenges our values.

The stories are revelatory about life in modern China and the expat experience. I was unsettled by the portrait of life in China, seemingly normal people doing seemingly normal things, and yet so much at odds with American expectations. 

The generational divide shows up clearly. The older characters had lived hard lives of manual labor and poverty. Some hold onto fantasies of achievement and acceptance into the Party. Their children become teenage factory workers in the city or hope for a rich benefactor or play the stock market dreaming of easy money.

It is a world at once very familiar--and very alien. The details are different, but the human experience universal.

All around Zhu Feng, it seemed, people were buying, buying, homes and stocks and second and third houses; there was a whole generation who'd gotten rich and needed to buy things for their kids, and the same dinky things from before didn't pass muster: penny rides on those plastic cartoon figures that flashed lights and gently rocked back and forth outside of drugstores; hawthorn impaled on sticks and sheathed in frozen yellow sugar casings, a cheap winter treat. They needed to buy because they had the money and that's what everyone else was doing...Also, the government said it was the buying opportunity of a generations...China was going up and up and nobody wanted to be left behind."~from Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen

The last story Guebeikou Spirit is amazing, a parable that reaches past it's setting to alert against the lure of complacence that can become complicity. Characters are stranded on a new high-speed train station after trains pass them buy. Regulations state that passengers must depart from a different station than they entered, and so they remain.

Every day they hear the announcement that the train is delayed. The guards reassuring,"we'll get there together," as they bring in food, blankets, personal health supplies, and as weeks go on, televisions and coloring books. 

The stranded people become a media sensation and the organize to represent 'Gubeikuo Spirit.' Several dissident young men try to follow the train tracks to another station, but always return and finally give up. The outside world's hardships come through the television news. They become comfortable so that when a train finally stops, they are unwilling to leave.

Obedience to an illogical rule, becoming comfortable, leading to the loss of volition and self-determination--it's a powerful message. 

Te-Ping Chen is a marvelous writer and I look forward to reading more from her pen.

I received an ARC from the publisher through BookishFirst and an egalley through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Land of Big Numbers: Stories
by Te-Ping Chen
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books
Pub Date: February 2, 2021
ISBN: 9780358272557
softcover $15.99 (USD)

eBook $9.99

ISBN-13/EAN: 9780358275039

ISBN-10: 0358275032

from the publisher

A debut collection from an emerging “fiction powerhouse,” vivid portrayals of the men and women of modern China and its diaspora that “entertain, educate, and universally resonate” (Booklist, starred review).

Gripping and compassionate, Land of Big Numbers traces the journeys of the diverse and legion Chinese people, their history, their government, and how all of that has tumbled—messily, violently, but still beautifully—into the present.

 Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chen’s stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited. Twins take radically different paths: one becomes a professional gamer, the other a political activist. A woman moves to the city to work at a government call center and is followed by her violent ex-boyfriend. A man is swept into the high-risk, high-reward temptations of China’s volatile stock exchange. And a group of people sit, trapped for no reason, on a subway platform for months, waiting for official permission to leave.

With acute social insight, Te-Ping Chen layers years of experience reporting on the ground in China with incantatory prose in this taut, surprising debut, proving herself both a remarkable cultural critic and an astonishingly accomplished new literary voice.

About the author

TE-PING CHEN's fiction has been published in, or is forthcoming from, The New Yorker, Granta, Guernica, Tin House, and The Atlantic. A reporter with the Wall Street Journal, she was previously a correspondent for the paper in Beijing and Hong Kong. Prior to joining the Journal in 2012, she spent a year in China as a Fulbright fellow. She lives in Philadelphia. 

John Keats: Poetry, Life and Landscapes by Suzie Grogan

I will never get to England. I had dreamed of it when I was in my twenties and thirties. I wanted to see the places that inspired the literature I loved. Now, I am content to remain an armchair traveler. 

Suzie Grogan's biography John Keats is a real treat, a wonderful way to meet John Keats and learn about his life and work and travels. Grogan discovered Keats as a teenager, memorizing his poetry and studying his life. She makes readers love Keats, too.

I will admit that I had a limited knowledge of the Romantic writers, a deficit I have tried to make up for in my mature years. I had come across Keats while reading about other Romantic era writers. It was time to become more familiar with his poet. 

Keats studied to be a doctor but decided to dedicate his life to poetry. As a teenager, Keats had nursed his mother who was dying from TB. And he had taken care of his brother who also died of TB. As a physician, he knew he had tuberculosis, and it drove him to give up the woman he loved. Keats himself tragically died of TB at age 25.

Severn's portrait of Keats dying of TB

Before his death, he managed a strenuous walking tour, although troubled by a sore throat. Grogan follows Keats's walking journey across north England and Scotland, describing what Keats would have seen and the modern view of the same scenes. The tour helped to inspire some of his best poetry. 

Illustrations enrich the book: Keats's beautiful, refined face, the houses and cottages where he lived or visited, the cathedrals and the streets he knew, statues and art portraying him.

Grogan includes the iconic poems she discusses in the volume, and reading them was an important part of my appreciation.

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

John Keats: Poetry, Life and Landscapes
by Suzie Grogan
Pen & Sword History
Pub Date: January 31, 2021 
ISBN: 9781526739377
PRICE: £19.99 (GBP)

from the publisher

John Keats is one of Britain’s best-known and most-loved poets. Despite dying in Rome in 1821, at the age of just 25, his poems continue to inspire a new generation who reinterpret and reinvent the ways in which we consume his work.

Apart from his long association with Hampstead, North London, he has not previously been known as a poet of ‘place’ in the way we associate Wordsworth with the Lake District, for example, and for many years readers considered Keats’s work remote from political and social context. Yet Keats was acutely aware of and influenced by his surroundings: Hampstead; Guy’s Hospital in London where he trained as a doctor; Teignmouth where he nursed his brother Tom; a walking tour of the Lake District and Scotland; the Isle of Wight; the area around Chichester and in Winchester, where his last great ode, To Autumn, was composed.

Far from the frail Romantic stereotype, Keats captivated people with his vitality and strength of character. He was also deeply interested in the life around him, commenting in his many letters and his poetry on historic events and the relationship between wealth and poverty. What impact did the places he visited have on him and how have those areas changed over two centuries? How do they celebrate their ‘Keats connection’?

Suzie Grogan takes the reader on a journey through Keats’s life and landscapes, introducing us to his best and most influential work. In many ways a personal journey following a lifetime of study, the reader is offered opportunities to reflect on the impact of poetry and landscape on all our lives. The book is aimed at anyone wanting to know more about the places Keats visited, the times he lived through and the influences they may have had on his poetry. Utilising primary sources such as Keats’s letters to friends and family and the very latest biographical and academic work, it offers an accessible way to see Keats through the lens of the places he visited and aims to spark a lasting interest in the real Keats - the poet and the man.

Important Blog News— Leaving Bloglovin

 Dear Readers,

I need to opt out of Bloglovin.

I was badly impacted when Goggle+ closed a few years back, when 90 people followed me on that medium and I lost followers when they shut down. I hate to lose my 34 Bloglovin followers, too.

The reason why I want to exit Bloglovin is because it is used by sex trafficking! And there is no way to block them. These accounts don’t show up on my list on the blog. But on my Bloglovin account I see tens of foreign followers with links to sex sites.

So please, readers, change to email following of my blog! Or you can find me on Twitter @NancyAdairB and Instagram @NancyAdair where I share links to my blog. I also have a Facebook page for The Literate Quilter.

In a few weeks I will exit from Bloglovin. 

Thank you!

Nancy

Covid-19 Life; Quilts, Books, and Grandpuppies

I have finished Hospital Sketches, the Block of the Month by Barbara Brackman inspired by Louis May Alcott's time as a nurse during the Civil War. There are many amazing versions of these patterns. Everyone finished them off differently. I made a floral vine based on the applique templates, in the style of 19th c. quilts. The quilt is hand appliqued and hand quilted.

I have started the Rebel Girl quilt. But...I decided to applique the records and not piece them. 

I did thread work on the Michigan lighthouses. I need to size the blocks still. And I am looking for the right sky fabric for the central block of the Mackinac Bridge.

New to my NetGalley shelf are:

• Buses Are a Comin': Memoir of a Freedom Rider by Charles Person and Richard Rooker from St. Martin's Press
• Silence Is a Sense by Layla AlAmmar, a Kuwaiti-American writer, from Algonquin Books

New books 'in the mail' include:

• Brooklyn On My Mind: Black Visual Artists from the WPA to the Present by Myrah Brown Green from Schiffer Publications

• A Shot in the Moonlight by Ben Montgomery from Little, Brown and Company

My father's sister, my Aunt Alice, celebrated her 85th birthday party...in isolation. We sent flowers and many friends sent cards. I wrote a blog post about her birthday a few years ago, found here.

Our grandpuppies go to doggie day care a few days a week. Both their parents work from home. Sunny is still very energetic at a year old and needs lots of play. They have their photos taken there.

Ellie is learning to socialize with the other dogs. Sadly, this week she became ill with gastroenteritis and spent an overnight at the vet's. With medicine and fluids, she is back home and doing well. 

Ellie was thrilled when her mom came to pick her up and take her home.

And Sunny eagerly awaited her fur-sister's return.

We do not know what Gus the cat thought about the incident. He keeps his thoughts to himself.

It finally snowed here! We even had to get out the snow blower. 

This photo is from before the snow. For several winters we have put a heated water bowl on the patio for the animals. Usually squirrels come to drink, but this year we have seen many Blue Jay and Cardinals come.

We are still waiting to be contacted about our Covid vaccination. We are signed up through our hospital and our county health department. 

We are a week away from a milestone: it was one year ago on February 2 and 3 that we had family gatherings to celebrate my husband's birthday. Four households met for a dinner one day, and the next day we dined with Gary's brother and wife and our son. 

We know that even with the vaccine we will not be back to old normal again very soon. Especially with new virus strains emerging. I wonder what  the new 'normal' will be like when it comes? One friend suggested she would continue to wear a mask all the time as she has not even had a cold this year.

So many social media friends are writing about burning out, the isolation and loneliness wearing on them. Even for introverts with rich inner lives, a year in isolation is too much. We want to hug our family and friends. We want to share a meal and laugh loudly into the open air so that our joy rings and echos through crowded rooms. 

It is hard. Life is hard. Everything is worth doing is hard. It takes courage to be in this world, and patience, and faith.

Stay safe.

Find your bliss.