A TASTE OF BETRAYAL
Julie Bates, Level Best, 2022, $16.95, pb, 240pp, 9781685121402
In 1775 Williamsburg, the colonial capital of Virginia, tempers flare between loyalists to King George III and patriots craving independence. Tavern keeper Faith Clarke, a widow who is raising her young son alone, walks a cautious line between the two camps, knowing that her business might suffer should she “dally in politics.” But her world is thrown into chaos when her father-in-law, a prominent local businessman and patriot sympathizer, falls sick from apparent arsenic poisoning, and her mother-in-law becomes the chief suspect.
Soon her love interest and two more members of her extended family show symptoms of poisoning, leaving Faith no choice but to investigate. Did tainted madeira from the colonial governor play a role, or did Faith’s mother-in-law, a skilled herbalist and healer, slip something into the drinks for private gain? With the help of a daring patriot spy, Faith unravels the mystery and accepts a challenge that will propel her into new adventures in the future.
A Taste of Betrayal is the second in the Faith Clarke mystery series, and the setting of colonial Williamsburg springs to life. Those unfamiliar with the first volume, however, may be confused by the lack of backstory to ground them and the large cast of characters. The plot sometimes spins its wheels, offering too little new action, a scarcity of clues, and repetitive scenes. Anachronisms crop up, with dialogue such as “Good luck with that” and the depiction of slaves whose perspectives seem more 21st century than 18th. In addition, careless editing—especially repeated sentences, missing punctuation, and other typos—may frustrate readers.
Paula Martinac
THE COUNTERFEIT WIFE
Mally Becker, Level Best, 2022, $16.95, pb, 276pp, 9781685121587
Following on her award-nominated debut, The Turncoat’s Wife, this is volume two of Becker’s Revolutionary War Mysteries series. The setting is Philadelphia, the summer of 1780, in the midst of the War for American Independence. Our heroine is Becca, the young, blue-eyed, Benjamin-Franklin-quoting widow Rebecca Parcell. She has been enlisted by General George Washington for a secret mission to track down the traitors who are flooding Philadelphia with counterfeit paper money.
Becca is paired with her spying partner, Daniel Alloway. Maimed earlier in the war while imprisoned on the infamous prison ship moored in New York Harbor, the Jersey, Alloway’s former life as a colonial printer serves the pair well in this case. The book’s fictional characters interact with several historical ones. Along with Washington are Sally Franklin Bache (1743-1808), Benjamin Franklin’s politically active daughter, and English-born Esther de Berdt Reed (1746-80), author of
Sentiments of an American Woman (1780) and an insistent fundraiser for the Continental Army. Reed founded the Ladies Association of Philadelphia, with which Becca becomes involved. Others making cameo appearances include Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush (1745-1813) and founding mother Martha Washington (1731-1802).
The characters roam 18th-century Philadelphia’s streets and visit famous locations like City Tavern, Christ Church, Walnut Street Prison, and the Pennsylvania State House (Independence Hall). The plot is believable in other respects too, as the British did in fact flood the American market with counterfeit paper money in an effort to disrupt the colonial economy with rising food prices and runaway inflation while soiling America’s fiscal reputation in the world. This is a solid and amusing mystery with many scattered allusions to 18th-century authors and books, all delivered with sharp prose in short, smoothly flowing chapters. Those seeking entertainment in fiction with an American Revolution bent will not be disappointed.
Mark Spencer
THE CONTRABAND KILLINGS
Lucienne Boyce, Wulfrun Press, 2022, £8.99, pb, 276pp, 9781999723682
As the 18th century draws to its close, Bow Street Runner Dan Foster and secondin-command Constable Evans are sent to Anglesey, North Wales. A Revenue Officer has been brutally murdered by smugglers, one of whom, Watcyn Jones, has been arrested and housed in Beaumaris Gaol. Foster’s mission is to transport Jones to London for trial and subsequent deportation, but the convoy is hijacked and Jones disappears, inadvertently responsible for another murder.
Magistrate Sir Edward Hyde and Captain Williams of the Anglesey Volunteers lend their local expertise. When a second Revenue Officer is found with his throat cut, Foster surmises it’s an inside job. Perhaps someone with access to the patrol rotas is diverting officers away from smuggling operations? Two more murders occur, muddying the investigative waters. The closed-mouthed silence of the island residents shunts the investigation into low gear. Smuggling is in their blood, whether they partake or not, and they protect their own. But policing is in Dan Foster’s blood.
Boyce possesses a sharp visual descriptive power which evokes strong emotions of landscape, the Welsh people, poverty, filth, starvation, and copper mining. Is it possible to feel wet and cold during a fictional storm or to feel flustered at the coaching depot departure stand? Apparently so, thanks to evocative writing! Foster is an intuitive cop, brave, honest, and intelligent, and a good mentor to the wavering Evans, who isn’t sure why he chose policing. Over the course of the book Evans learns to trust his instincts, becoming an invaluable second-in-command. Foster’s
unusual family dynamics add to his likeability. The frustrations of an investigation where no one is willing to talk is well-thought-out, and evokes understanding of what the police face every day. An interesting read, which gives the mystical isle of Ynys Môn a new dimension.
Fiona Alison
SAILOR OF LIBERTY
J. D. Davies, Canelo, 2023, £18.99, hb, 315pp, 9781804360873
1793: France is in the grip of a fanatical regime and the age of Madame Guillotine as terror rules and heads fall. Philippe Kermorvant, son of an English aristocratic mother and a French nobleman, arrives in his father’s homeland, touching Brittany soil for the first time. He has been serving as a successful officer in the fledgling United States and Russian Navies. Kermorvant’s ideals align with the new French Republic. However, seeing their justice put into macabre reality challenges his acceptance of their methods. His loyalty to the republic leads him into a life-and-death battle on the high seas, which ends in a dramatic cliff-hanger, a decision that will change his life forever.
Kermorvant is an appealing action-hero who will take the reader on a politically sensitive path from his toxic homecoming on French soil to brilliantly described battles on the high seas. His troubled family background provides tense inner conflicts as he strives to follow loyally the republic ideals as held by his father. I liked the determined character of his sister-in-law, Leonore, who gives so much of herself to hold the family and their lands together. She is just one example of the complex family relationships his life is filled with. The author conveys a vast amount of knowledge about this period of French history, refreshingly told from the French perspective. The action at sea and naval history is revealed at a pace, never drowning out the excitement and drama of the unfolding action, and is easy to visualise. An excellent, opening book to this thriller series from a master storyteller. I look forward to reading the next in this series and following Philippe as he takes the next step. Highly recommended.
Valerie Loh
THE WEATHER WOMAN
Sally Gardner, Head of Zeus, 2022, £20.00, hb, 496pp, 9781786695253
Neva, a Russian girl, has a gift—she can predict the weather. In January 1789, the
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Thames is frozen over, and London is enjoying a Frost Fair. Three-year-old Neva mimics the sound of ice melting, but the adults don’t heed her warning. She can also read ‘the weather inside people’. Her mother, fiery red, and her father, ice-blue, fight constantly, and she lives in terror.
An accident kills her parents, and Neva takes up with Victor Friezland, a clockmaker, who is also Russian. She wears boys’ clothes, puts on blue-lensed spectacles, and calls herself Eugene Jonas. People are noticing that her predictions about the weather always come true. Victor fears for her safety and builds an automaton to have her speak through. Neva then meets Henri Dênou, Lord Wardell’s nephew. He bets on her forecasts and wins. In the guise of Eugene Jonas, she goes to a club with Henri and has a whale of a time.
Though this isn’t a comedy, there are errors of miscommunication and misunderstanding. Mix-ups arise when lovers don’t declare themselves, complicated by them dressing up as the opposite gender. Letters remain unsent. Victor’s death—and his surprising will—brings all the characters into conflict.
Any period would love to have a magic weather-predicting machine, but there’s a quirky Regency feel to the story of Neva’s special power. This is a period when people were fascinated by magicians and mesmerism. Modern readers can appreciate a tale of female empowerment, and there’s a climate change message in Neva’s predictions. The early chapters, and the three-year-old voice, are very good, and Neva’s voice is strong throughout. The interplay between characters is full of love, jealousy, greed, and skulduggery.
Susie Helme
THE CURIOUS LIFE OF ELIZABETH BLACKWELL
Pamela Holmes, Bloodhound, 2022, £8.99/$15.99, pb, 280pp, 9781504080149
Aberdeen, 1730: the cultured, restless Elizabeth Blachrie resists her parents’ attempts to marry her to a dull but suitable man, for she is in love with Alexander Blackwell: attractive, engaging, but not evidently reliable.
They elope, but instead of returning home as she expects after a wedding in Edinburgh, the new bride finds herself with her husband in London. Based on the true story of this talented botanical illustrator, Holmes’s thoroughly researched novel tells of how the practical, hardworking Elizabeth came into her own when Alexander was thrown into debtors’ prison, mainly as a consequence of setting up a printing business when he had not served a guild apprenticeship.
The plucky woman who succeeds despite a feckless and sometimes exploitative husband might be a familiar trope in historical fiction, but this tale is imbued with verisimilitude; I could almost feel the burin between my fingers as I read of the engraving process. Details like Mrs Salmon’s wax works and the presence
of bear-baiters in the streets immerse the reader in Elizabeth’s world. The horrors of the debtors’ prison are told unflinchingly but make one flinch—as do the instances of poverty and degradation on London streets.
Through her association with the collector Hans Sloane, Elizabeth has access to all the specimens she needs. Her sister, a tutor, is a follower of the ideas of the proto-feminist Mary Astell. Language is sprightly, as in “Betty Callow could stop bread rising with one look,” and characterisation is convincing. Despite all Alexander’s disdain for his wife’s talents, and his jealousy at her success, the reader cannot help but feel compassion for Alexander at his terrible end and will share Elizabeth’s desperation at being unable to save him.
Katherine Mezzacappa
THE SECRET DIARIES OF CHARLES IGNATIUS SANCHO
Paterson Joseph, Dialogue Books, 2022, £16.99, hb, 432pp, 9780349702391 / Henry Holt, 2023, $27.99, hb, 432pp, 9781250880376
There is much to recommend in this debut novel by the writer and actor, Paterson Joseph. The book is in many ways a labour of love for Joseph, who has long been absorbed by the story of the writer and composer, born on a slave ship, whose life he has previously presented as a one-man show. Charles Ignatius Sancho burst into being in 1746, and Joseph tells his extraordinary story, a “quest for freedom”, vividly, through a mix of letters to his son Billy, letters to and from his wife, and diary entries, jumping back and forth through time.
On occasions, this feels confusing, and although signposted with dates, more editing could have pared this exhilarating read down, reducing the need to refer back and forth between different timelines and writing styles. Sancho, in real life, was the first Black man to vote in the UK; he mixed with high society, whilst at the same time fleeing from the slave catchers who lurked on London streets. Real characters from the time, including the artist Thomas Gainsborough, who painted Sancho, and the actor David Garrick are also brought vividly to life. But its key strength is the raising of the forgotten voices of the many Black and dual-heritage Britons who should be far better foregrounded in literature. Here, Sancho, his future wife and other Black Britons live again as complex and real people, neither victims nor saints.
This is a long overdue re-framing of Georgian society. This is a must-read for those who enjoy historical fiction that foregrounds forgotten people. Joseph gives us back the glorious—and rotund—figure of Charles Ignatius Sancho, and we are all enriched by this portrait of a man who deserves to be far better known.
Katherine Quarmby
JAMIE MACGILLIVRAY
John Sayles, Melville House, 2023, $32.00/£25.00, pb, 720pp, 9781612199887
Scotland, 1746, and Jamie MacGillivray, shivering in the rain, brings a message from France to Lord Lovat, the Auld Fox, his Hogarth portrait vividly animated by the author. Jamie, of Clan Chattan, escapes death at the Battle of Culloden. He shelters with crofter Jenny Ferguson but is captured by the English. Hence, we are thrown into the complex and brutal politics of the 18th century. Jamie becomes far-travelled: first taken to Inverness, then to Edinburgh, London, Maryland, and onward. Jenny too is captured by the English, her punishment long on revenge and short on truth.
This is a book that rewards the reader for perseverance. We are shown everything, either richly imagined, meticulously researched, or probably both. Vast numbers of characters come and go, some of them known historical figures, others fictitious. We are mainly with Jamie, or Jenny, but from time to time, the author flits to other people, other places.
Much of the dialogue is written in a rich Scottish brogue, or in French. It took me a while to “get my ear in” to follow the Scots dialect, intended to illustrate the language of the Scots. That, and French, the language of their allies, reflects the truly multicultural world that Jamie inhabits.
Reflecting reality is a strength of this book. But reality is complicated, and, in the context of 18th-century English expansion, extremely bloody. Squeamish readers might find this reality a step too far. I felt that Jenny’s story, while interesting to read, could have been cut from the book without losing its main thrust. It would be a spoiler to reveal the ending, but I thought it was a poignant twist. After living with Jamie for over seven hundred pages, I was sad to part with him.
Helen Johnson
A WILD AND TRUE RELATION
Kim Sherwood, Virago, 2023, £18.99, hb, 528pp, 9780349015361
Sherwood quickly captures the reader’s imagination in this blistering tale of early 18thcentury love, betrayal, murder, and revenge, wrapped up in a novel of smuggling, piracy, shipbuilding, and a girl who is not as she seems. The prose is superb at times, rightly earning the praise of the late Hilary Mantel. However, this novel is not without its issues. Many scenes change rapidly and without warning, sometimes even within the same page, so that the reader is left grappling, wondering who is talking and where this scene is set. The same goes for flashbacks between the book’s present and characters’ memories. This creates a dissociative experience, pulling the reader out of the story each time.
The main character is Molly, also known as Boy or (in a nod to Virginia Woolf) as Orlando. Whilst her character arc is well developed as the novel progresses, the earlier chapters
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see her acting unrealistically, her actions and thoughts calling into doubt her authenticity as a character. Her fluidity, switching between male and female, and the crew’s readiness to see her as one or the other, lacks credibility. The main male character Tom West’s inner motivations also felt sorely lacking at times.
The framing device for this novel is clever and absorbing, using real female authors of the past who gradually discover more of Molly’s story and let her voice speak out. This conceit may not please purists, and again it pulls the reader abruptly out of the action. But it does, without doubt, reinvigorate the genre. Sherwood should be applauded for her originality. For the subject matter alone, this is a welcome and refreshing book, but it won’t suit everyone. Give it time and careful attention, however, and expect to be rewarded.
Katharine Riordan
19TH CENTURY
ANANGOKAA
Cameron Alam, Blackwater Press, 2023, $20.99/£13.99, pb, 285pp, 9781735774787
Travelling to Ontario in 1804, the MacCallums and fourteen other Scottish families have great hopes for a new life. They are ill-prepared for Baldoon, an unstable tract of land on the swampy north shore of Lake St. Clair featuring downpours, flooding, malarial fever, and only three half-built cabins. Mother, father, and sister succumb to sickness, leaving five ill-equipped MacCallum children to eke out existence in a tent. Hugh, eighteen, is now head of the family and Isobel, a sixteenyear-old, de facto mother to three girls. But this is fourteen-year-old Flora’s story, and the author delves deep inside her adolescent mind, revealing hopes, fears, and heart-breaking loneliness. Life is perilous and cold, food is scarce, but Flora finds solace in the rugged beauty of the wilderness and the abundance of wildlife.
Niigaani, a young Ojibwe emissary, befriends Hugh, and tribal permission is granted for the family to overwinter in a cabin on Indian land, dry at least. Niigaani teaches Flora the Anishinaabe language, telling of his culture, way of life, and a history that echoes with years of lies, empty promises, confiscated land, and broken treaties. Similarities between the Scots and their native counterparts are startling; the marked difference is that the Indians have adapted their nomadic existence to climate, environment, flora and fauna. Although Niigaani’s visits are purely innocent, Flora’s request that he not tell Hugh sets off a chain reaction, putting the family at odds with each other, the settlers, and their Indigenous neighbours.
Flora’s coming-of-age is a gold mine of splendidly researched information about the hardships presented by a feral land, and native tribal customs and culture—a must-read for everyone interested in Canadian Indigenous history. A specific map of the region would be welcome. The Baldoon experiment was a
historical disaster, but the author ends her tale on a hopeful note. A remarkable love song to Indigenous peoples.
Fiona Alison
RAWHIDE JAKE: Learning the Ropes
J. D. Arnold, Five Star, 2022, $25.95, hb, 273pp, 9781432889197
RAWHIDE JAKE: Lone Star Fame
J. D. Arnold, Five Star, 2022, $25.95, hb, 245pp, 9781432895877
From prisoner 1080 in a jail on the Kansas plains, to a noted stock detective tracking down cattle rustlers and bringing them to justice dead or alive, Jonas Broughton epitomizes the Wild West in the 1880s. In his series, The Life and Times of Detective Jonas V. Broughton, J. D. Arnold fictionalizes the backstory of the man most famous for gunning down Ike Clanton in Arizona (still to come in Book Three).
Jonas intended to save up to buy the mules his partners stole, but he is jailed as an accessory for their crime, and is released early for good behavior despite killing a fellow inmate in self-defense. With his jail earnings from blacksmithing and wagon-making, he follows a newspaper story and joins up with a female detective who has made a name for herself. They are successful until Jennie runs off with a former boyfriend and Jonas is left to fend for himself. To escape time for mail-tampering to solve a case, he agrees to be jailed with the infamous Frank James in an unsuccessful attempt to get James to confess to his crimes.
Jake’s real break comes from a handbill: James Loving needs detectives to chase down cattle rustlers in Texas. Taking advantage of Jake’s ostensibly lawless past, Loving hires him for undercover work among the rustlers. He also apprentices Jake to Wes Wilson, his best detective stationed about 30 miles west of Loving’s ranch between the Chisholm and Dodge City Trails. Jake quickly absorbs Wes’s wisdom, and takes to range work despite hardships like snow squalls. He tames the toughest horse on the ranch (sharing some of the hard candy Jake craves) and, with Wes’s help, tracks down and captures his first thieves.
Once Jake goes undercover, he employs bravado to start a side business installing barbed wire on the Texas prairie. He makes friends with all manner of people, talking their language and feeling their pain. This leads him to employ Chinese labor on his wire gang while recovering 700 head of rustled cattle and escaping death at least three times.
Arnold’s storytelling style is as rough-andtumble as his hero. Jake can adapt his language and demeanor to his audience at the drop of a hat, lending him a level of authenticity that makes his deeds seem easier than they are. This ability strains credibility at times, but Arnold has created an endearing character, and I look forward to his Arizona adventures.
Tom Vallar
CASHDOWN’S FOLLY
Stephen Preston Banks, Five Star, 2022, $25.95, hb, 348pp, 9781432895129
In the 1880s, Hamish Musgrave looks for land in Washington Territory and finds what becomes his stake in what was then called ‘Palouse Country’. He settles north of Colfax, in what is now the eastern part of Washington State. Fighting off claim jumpers, he establishes his family on land close by a steepsided mountain that fires his imagination. He calls it Pyramid Peak.
Together with his wife, Libbie, and their many children, he builds first a sod house, then a farmhouse and later an inn. Known as ‘Cashdown’ because he chooses to pay cash for his purchases, Hamish becomes part, with other settlers, of developing the region from open grassland to farmland and from casual settlements to organized towns. This novel portrays the disappearance of native people, the issues fought between settlers, and the occasional ‘get-rich-quick’ arrival. It shows the coming of railroads and the increasing influence of bankers and railroad owners.
The author gives insight into this progress along with the meetings, the disputes, and the alliances that went with them. All these are shown through Cashdown Musgrave’s experiences, including becoming a prosperous influential farmer, head of a happy family, then a slightly deluded old man living in his grand hotel on top of his mountain—no longer called Pyramid Peak, but renamed ‘Steptoe Butte’ by an incomer.
While this is a novel with a protagonist and a rich cast of supporting characters, its main strength and purpose is to share the author’s research and knowledge into the history of this region of eastern Washington. He has pulled apart each step in its progress and shown how those involved came up with the idea, fought for it, and put the pieces in place. It is an entertaining look into one area’s history.
Valerie Adolph
A WICKED GAME
Kate Bateman, St. Martin’s, 2022, $8.99, pb, 304pp, 9781250801586
Captain Morgan Davies returns to London from the Napoleonic Wars seeking to punish the cartographer whose map was responsible for his shipwreck and imprisonment. This, however, turns out to be none other than Harriet Montgomery, the young woman with whom he has been in love for years. Once the circumstances are explained, the focus switches to their increasingly torrid romantic relationship.
The reliability of naval maps at this time is an interesting subject, but here merely serves as a plot device to bring together two lovers whose public bickering disguises a powerful mutual attraction. Nor is there much information about the procedures for operating on the cataracts which impair the vision of Harriet’s father. The former French officer who stalks them is a stereotypical villain who is easily disposed of after he provides an opportunity
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for the hero to demonstrate his protective credentials.
Those looking for a Regency romance with progressively steamy encounters will not be disappointed, but the potential for more is neglected.
Ray Thompson
SISTERS OF CASTLE LEOD
Elizabeth Hutchison Bernard, Black Rose Writing, 2023, $22.95/£14.95, pb, 310pp, 9781685130626
Many people know Castle Leod as the Mackenzie stronghold in Gabaldon’s timeslip Outlander series, but the castle has a factual history, a part of which is explored in Bernard’s novel.
Sibell Mackenzie was in her teens when, upon her father’s death, she became Countess of Cromartie in the 1890s. The entirety of titles and wealth reverted to her, causing contention and frustration with her sister, Constance.
Their mother’s remarriage shocks the girls and, with family members pushing for Sibell’s marriage, the responsibility of duty weighs heavily—towards her sister, her father’s memory and towards her tenants and crofters. As is often the case, the sisters are from opposite ends of the spectrum. Sibell is steadfast, loyal, writes romance novels, is superstitious, and fascinated by reincarnation (after the death of her twoweek old daughter) and the supernatural, which she believes to be grounded in ancient wisdom. Her claim to have a Phoenician spiritguide is interestingly fleshed out in the novel. Conversely, the supremely athletic Constance is stunningly beautiful, flirty, gregarious, and a flamboyant spender who draws people like moths to a flame.
I really enjoyed this book. Bernard’s style is descriptive without being pretentious as she explores what we know of the sisters’ relationship, including thoughtful explanations for outrageous behavior, such as Constance’s insistence upon dancing halfnaked and barefoot in public, which got her struck from the ‘royal list’ for her troubles! There’s an eerie similarity to Elizabeth and Margaret—the former’s obligation to duty and responsibility and the latter’s flair and flashy joie-de-vivre, at least that which she showed the world. I love the way Bernard dips in and out of events in the sisters lives without overwhelming the narrative with too much information, which she sometimes then layers over several sections. This is TV
costume drama material and comes well recommended.
Alison
IF A POEM COULD LIVE AND BREATHE
Mary Calvi, St. Martin’s, 2023, $27.99, hb, 320pp, 9781250277831
Death in childbirth used to be horribly common, even up to modern times. In the historical example that inspired this romantic novel, it changed the course of history.
Emmy-winning journalist and Inside Edition anchor Mary Calvi has followed up her first novel, Dear Mary: A Novel of George Washington’s First Love, with this touching, dramatically fictionalized history of Theodore Roosevelt’s first marriage. Alice Hathaway Lee married Roosevelt in 1880 at the age of nineteen, following an ecstatic courtship that began with love at first sight on his part.
She was a Boston Brahmin and debutante, a tall, blond beauty whose sweetness of character gave her the nickname “Sunshine.” When they met, Roosevelt was a Harvard student who immediately set out on a career in New York politics. The young couple anticipated a long and productive life together. Then on Valentine’s Day of 1884, Alice died following the birth of their first child, also Alice.
As if this were not enough to devastate her bereaved husband, his mother died the same day. Although Roosevelt immersed himself in politics, made a life-changing excursion to Dakota Territory, eventually remarried, and, of course, became an outstanding president, he never fully recovered. To the end of his life, he refused to mention his late wife’s name. The loss turned him into a different man—and president.
This, although true, is the stuff of sentimental romance and melodrama, and Calvi does not always avoid either pitfall. But she has done extensive research in Roosevelt archives and successfully weaves quotes from the couple’s actual love letters into her text, producing an entertaining novel to devour with tissues nearby.
Susan Lowell
MRS VAN GOGH
Caroline Cauchi, One More Chapter, 2023, £8.99, pb, 480pp, 9780008524524
A tour de force of research, this biographical novel about Vincent Van Gogh and the life of his pictures beyond his own short span is told from the point of view of Johanna Bonger, who becomes the wife of Vincent’s brother, Theo. Most people know a certain amount about Van Gogh, but his copious surviving letters provide more information. Cauchi very skilfully integrates quotations from these letters with imaginative recreations of scenes from Johanna’s life. Johanna is given a very compelling voice, making her a vivid observer
of the Montmartre scene—and a fair reporter of Vincent’s loutish, lecherous behaviour.
The artist, brilliant but anti-social; his devoted exasperated brother; Johanna’s urbane brother Andries; other artists such as Rodin and Gauguin; and the women whose lives (despite artistic talent) are lived at these men’s bidding—all are depicted with immense skill. The short-lived love of Johanna and Theo is shown with great poignancy and conviction. Other scenes show flashes of humour. All the characters jump off the page.
My only reservation is that, in this book with much good dialogue, the language being spoken is seldom specified. I was doubtful that Johanna, whose first foreign language was English, could arrive from the Netherlands and immediately follow demotic Parisian French. Only near the end is the distinction between French and Dutch mentioned, and then with an assumption of mutual fluency. The use of some American phrases—drapes, groomsman—reminded me unhelpfully of those Hollywood films where characters’ different nationalities are denoted solely by the accents with which they speak English.
However, what we have here is by any standards a very fine novel. The book is arranged in only four chapters, but each has numerous shorter scenes, all named after pictures by Van Gogh: I did wonder if an illustrated edition might possibly be produced.
Ben Bergonzi
THE GIRL AT CHANGE ALLEY
Joanne Clague, Canelo, 2022, £8.99, pb, 312pp, 9781800329508
Louisa Leigh reluctantly scrapes a squalid living through prostitution but inadvertently goes further to the bad because her friend Ginny fancies Louisa’s neighbour, handsome Joe, bully-boy for a top union boss. Joe’s Mafia-like job is to ‘persuade’ employers in the proliferating, dangerous yet lucrative steel industry to hire union workers, pay well, and protect them; defiant employers become targets of extreme threat. On one such retaliatory night mission, Louisa insists on taking Ginny’s place as lookout; thus she’s the last person to comfort an innocent victim dying from the bombing. Now deeply traumatised, guilt gnaws incessantly, although the police have no leads. Worse, her burgeoning, unwanted pregnancy demands desperate measures. Despite the loving ministrations of old friends and a kind new suitor, she feels she must brave it alone.
Set against real events (the 1860s Sheffield ‘Outrages’), this tale embodies several struggles: that of Louisa, workers’ rights, and the then not-legally-recognized unions. Clague’s well-researched, competent storytelling raises the bar with depth of character, narrative simplicity, and scenic portrayals. She continually mentions the daily grime, street filth and sooty air from a smoke-belching multi-chimney skyline which obscures clean fields and better lives
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beyond. Quotidian 19th-century life is central, steel workers’ conditions and equipment are accurately detailed, and for those who also enjoy Yorkshire dialect, it’s a must.
Simon Rickman
THE DRINKER OF HORIZONS
Mia Couto (trans. David Brookshaw), FSG, 2023, $27.00, hb, 256pp, 9780374605537
Couto’s Sands of the Emperor trilogy explores the destruction of a nation and subjugation of its people. This third book relates a journey of individuals crushed by the Portuguese military takeover of Mozambique in 1895. It takes place on a steamship sailing from Maputo to Lisbon. Amongst others on board the vast iron coffin, ironically named África, is the vanquished warrior king, Ngungunyane—once the oppressor, now the oppressed—and seven of his 300 wives. Leaving her white lover, Germano, in Africa, the pregnant Imani is forced to travel as interpreter and spy serving the Portuguese crown. Ngungunyane sinks into delusions as his hopes of recognition by Dom Carlos I as a fellow king are dashed.
The voyage has varied meaning for all who embark upon it—the imprisoned Blacks journey to the ends of the earth; Imani sails to eternity, through her unborn child; all trudge barefoot and humiliated towards total submission. The narrative is timeless, poetic, often conveying more than the words say. Queen Dabondi, a nyamosoro who hears the dead, tells of the origins of wind, rain, river and sea, suffusing the novel with a dreamlike quality.
I was entranced by the diversity of people immersed in the hellish conditions aboard ship, loving the lush vibrancy of an innocent Africa. This is not a standalone, but is so heartbreakingly tragic, I believe readers will return to the beginning. Germano’s letters to Imani, relayed through a third party and remaining just out of her reach, poignantly foreshadow later events. The ending is unusual, as though the full impact can only truly resonate with those who have read all three books. The Mozambiquan author writes with heartfelt tenderness about his country’s brutal history and has crafted a powerful story of humanity and survival that resonates long beyond its pages.
OBLIVION: The Lost Diaries of Branwell Brontë
Dean de la Motte, Valley Press, 2022, $37.50, hb, 800pp, 9781912436781
In Oblivion, Dean de la Motte offers us the perspective of the Brontë sibling from whom the most was expected and by whom the least was accomplished: Branwell, the family’s only son. The novel spans Branwell’s life from 1840 to a few weeks before his death at the age of only thirty-one.
Taking the form of the “triple-decker” (three-volume) novel that was ubiquitous during the 19th century, Oblivion is clearly a labor of love, meticulously researched and encompassing seemingly every person who passed through Branwell’s adult life. It’s well written with believable dialogue and vivid characters. De la Motte even takes on the challenge of writing dialect, though he uses it sparingly. The author knows the Brontë oeuvre thoroughly and borrows from it liberally, with, of course, due credit to the originals (some of the best scenes concern Branwell’s discovery of what his sisters have been up to in their spare time). Those who enjoy author’s notes nearly as much as historical novels themselves will find an illuminating one here.
Oblivion does have one thing going against it in this soundbite age: its length. Even I, who am partial to sprawling Victorian novels, wondered if Branwell’s company would be enough to carry a reader along over so many pages. However, Oblivion is well worth the journey, so pluck up your spirits and dive into it.
Susan Higginbotham
HOLDING THE LINE
Jennifer Delamere, Bethany House, 2022, $17.99, pb, 368pp, 9780764234941
In 1881 London, widowed Rose Finlay is assistant manager at a London post office. John Milburn is a single businessman enmeshed in a world of family problems. He has reluctantly taken over his deceased brother’s business, his widowed sister-in-law indulges in unwanted flirtation, his widowed sister’s health is failing, and his niece, Sophie, is about to make the mistake of her life. A chance encounter puts John and Rose on the same path to protect the naïve Sophie from her romantic fantasies.
This novel becomes two stories: that of John and Rose’s gradual affection for each other, and an exposé of the ton, with Sophie front and centre. It’s also a cautionary tale about rakes! Delamere writes with confidence, her characters come alive on the page, settings are detailed, and the reader is bustled about the London ballrooms amidst the inevitable bowing and scraping. Even without a complex plot, the author does a masterful job at creating an immersive read. I’m not a usual fan of inspirational romance, but I thoroughly enjoyed this one and I’d recommend Delamere to readers who love the genre. And bravo for British tea shops!
Alison
LAY THIS BODY DOWN
Charles Fergus, Skyhorse, 2023, $26.99, hb, 312pp, 9781956763447
Gideon Stoltz is the sheriff of the southcentral Pennsylvania town of Adamant. In the spring of 1837, 24-year-old Gideon—who is fairly new in his job—suddenly faces three separate problems. The editor of one of the town’s newspapers, Phineas Potter, is found dead, apparently murdered. Free Blacks are mysteriously disappearing. And a pair of slave catchers arrive in town, in search of a teenage escapee. Are the three issues related? And whom can Gideon trust? These questions play out in a well-constructed plot that leads the reader not only to the solutions to the mysteries but also through the fraught politics of a border state in the slaver era.
Gideon is an appealing character. He earnestly desires to do the right thing, and desperately loves his unusual, headstrong wife, True. Like many ordinary people in times when great issues disturb their lives, Gideon’s feelings about slavery evolve as he faces its impact on his friends and neighbors.
I am often disappointed in mysteries. I tend to feel that the setup is contrived and the solution so convoluted that a main character must explain it to the reader in a long paragraph of dialog. That was not the case with this story. The crime wave feels urgent, and we unravel the mysteries alongside Gideon, no explanatory exposition required. The author clearly did thorough research, bringing the time and place to bright life. A Pennsylvanian myself, I was especially delighted with the touches of authentic Pennsylvania dialect.
This book is one in a series of Gideon Stoltz mysteries. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to readers who like literary fiction, with lots of deep character development. But it’s highly recommended for anyone who enjoys appealing characters, a tight plot, good historical detail, and a lot of action in a historical mystery.
Kathryn Bashaar
SECRETLY BOUND TO THE MARQUESS
Diane Gaston, Harlequin Historical, 2022, $6.75/C$7.75, pb, 281pp, 9781335723505
In 1810 England, Lady Eliza Varden, trapped in a sexless marriage, meets Nathaniel Thorne, captain in an infantry regiment. They have one passionate night together and then part, leaving Eliza to cope with a pregnancy and raise their little girl. Fortunately, Eliza’s husband is delighted with the situation, and doesn’t ask any questions. Seven years later, Eliza and Nate meet socially in London. She is now widowed, he has unexpectedly become the Marquess of Hale, and Natalie is a happy, healthy little girl. Nate realizes that he is the father, and he longs to become a family with Eliza and his child.
The villainess, Lady Sibyl, and her nasty father, Lord Crafton, exhibit almost cartoonish “bad guy” behavior, as they coerce Nathaniel to make Sibyl his marchioness. Eliza’s first
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Fiona Alison
Fiona
husband had been homosexual, a capital crime in those days, but the threat of scandal does not deter an eventual happy ending for Nate and Eliza.
The Regency world has been done to death, I suppose, but having said that, I enjoyed this light, entertaining read. It moves along quickly, and young Natalie is enchanting.
Elizabeth Knowles
OF MANNERS AND MURDER
Anastasia Hastings, Minotaur, 2023, $26.99/ C$35.99, hb, 304pp, 9781250848567
In Victorian London, Violet Manville and her younger half-sister, Sephora, are living with their Aunt Adelia after the death of their father. Before Adelia leaves for a trip to the Continent, she gives Violet a task—to take over for her as London’s wildly popular but anonymous Agony Aunt, Miss Hermione. The first letter Violet receives in her new role is not concerned with manners or wayward loves. Rather, the author of the note believes someone is trying to kill her. When Violet tracks down the young woman and discovers that she has, indeed, died, she sets out on a mission to discover the truth, placing her own life at risk in the process.
This is the first book in a new series by Hastings, and a very fun diversion it is! The writing is crisp and witty, and the plot wonderfully intertwined with all the characters, with nothing superfluous.
The interactions between the characters are all relatable. The friction between Violet and Sephora is an especially nice touch and makes them seem more real. The only issue I had was with a character introduced late in the book. He is clearly being set up as a love interest in future installments, but his part of the story feels a bit rushed. Overall, though, the characters are developed well and have their own distinct voices.
While there may be some raised eyebrows over lack of accuracy regarding Victorian social mores, specifically the ability of unmarried women of any rank to go gallivanting unsupervised about the country, I prefer to think of it as social commentary. This novel would make a fun choice for a book club, partly for that reason.
Kristen McQuinn
THE DUKE IN QUESTION
Amalie Howard, Sourcebooks Casablanca, 2022, $8.99, pb, 384pp, 9781728262635
Lady Bronwyn Chase enjoys her undercover role as the Kestrel, but when she sails to America to deliver a sensitive document involving President Abraham Lincoln, she’s rattled to encounter Valentine, Duke of Thornbury and former spy. Thornbury is tracking the dodgy Kestrel and doesn’t have time for games with his friend’s vapid sister. But when he tails Bronwyn in Philadelphia and catches her at a dangerous assignation, their shared escape turns steamy. Loyalty to
the British government demands Thornbury turn the Kestrel over, but the voyage back to Europe gives Valentine opportunity to discover the sharp mind beneath Bronwyn’s alluring beauty. Thornbury realizes he’ll have to work harder to stay a step ahead of Bronwyn and her pursuers, and even if he does manage to save her life, he may not win the stubborn, wily lady’s heart.
Howard’s diverse cast of characters is well-drawn, and the spy games provide a lively impetus for the sexual attraction and growing emotional attachment between the leads. Tropes abound, but not at the expense of character development, and banter flies amidst the bullets and sure, engaging prose. Valentine and Bronwyn are the most fun pair in the Daring Dukes series thus far.
Misty Urban
late 19th century, both born to the Bavarian royal House of Wittelsbach, although Sisi comes from a junior branch. This Ludwig is known primarily for building Neuschwanstein Castle. Sisi, more formally known as Empress Elisabeth, was arguably the Princess Diana of her era; indeed, after reading about Sisi’s life, the comparison seems very apt.
Ludwig views the crown as a job he doesn’t want and avoids as much as he can (while feeling entitled to the privileges), struggles with homosexual desires as he pursues Richard Wagner, and builds castles. Sisi becomes the wife of the Habsburg emperor almost by accident, but her alienation from her family and role makes her unable to be at home anywhere. The two protagonists are thoroughgoing narcissists, making it difficult to sustain any sympathy for them despite the tragedies that befall them. Few of the ancillary characters evoke much sympathy either.
RADICAL WOMAN
Maggie Humm, EER Fiction, 2023, £19.99/$28.95, hb, 274pp, 9781915115027
London, 1897: Gwen John’s work as an artist was for many years overshadowed by that of her boisterous and domineering younger brother Augustus, though he prophesied that one day she would be rated the better artist. At the centre of the novel is John’s relationship with the considerably older Rodin, whom she refers to as “my Master” in more senses than the artistic, and to whom she writes using the formal “vous”. John herself is gauche, with a penchant for saying the wrong thing, revealing her feelings in ways that render her vulnerable. The more she is in thrall to Rodin, the less good he is for her own art.
Humm writes beautifully, with compassion as well as with a considerable erotic charge in handling Gwen John’s affairs with both sexes. The phrase “[my] passion for Rodin is restrained by my dress buttons” encapsulates the constraints of her life – at the Slade School of Fine Art, sexes were segregated. Her early passion for a fellow artist, already engaged, is described thus: “[he] always seemed to see happiness as if on the far bank of a river. On this bank is the McEvoy I love, and there across the water, deep and unreachable, is a mirage of our future”.
Radical Woman is full of vivid portraits of John’s contemporaries, Grace Westray, Ursula Tyrwhitt, Hilda Flodin and a kind Rainer Maria Rilke amongst them. There is an odd slip concerning Mère Poussepin, who appears as a contemporary in the book; the multiple portraits of her have all the vivacity of having been painted from life, but they are posthumous. That aside, Humm’s research is impressive and her ability to get inside her protagonist’s head in this first person telling even more so.
Katherine Mezzacappa
EMPTY THEATRE
Jac Jemc, MCD, 2023, $28.00, hb, 464pp, 9780374277925
Ludwig and Sisi are cousins living in the
On the other hand, each character has moments of grace. Ludwig resists buying into Wagner’s notion of a master race; Sisi visits orphanages and asylums with genuine concern for the inmates. Each affects the histories of their respective kingdoms. Ludwig’s inattention makes him a target for Bismarck’s unification; Sisi’s interest in Hungary promotes the interest of that part of the Habsburg Empire.
Jac Jemc approaches the story of the cousins in a staccato and anecdotal style in the present tense. The narration is curiously remote from the characters. As a result, the story doesn’t become a cohesive narrative, although it is obviously well researched, and the content is often absorbing. King Ludwig and Empress Sisi are fascinating, and their lives merit the attention Jemc has lavished on them. Though they are largely unsympathetic, the novel provides an interesting study of the consequences of hereditary monarchies.
Jodi McMaster
MURDER AT AN EXHIBITION
Lisa M. Lane, Grousable Books, 2022, $12.99, pb, 245pp, 9798985302745
London, 1863: a corpse is discovered amongst the paintings destined for the Royal Academy exhibition—at this date, the building on Trafalgar Square housed both the Academy and the National Gallery. This dramatic start is somewhat dissipated by a lengthy flashback, and events only catch up again about a quarter of the way through the book. Though the novel is billed as a ‘Tommy Jones’ mystery, that small, clever boy isn’t the sleuth. That is Jo, a young magazine illustrator. Lane weaves real people into her story: Sir Charles Eastlake, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Fanny Cornforth, Thomas Henry Huxley, Hannah Cullwick, Giovanni Morelli, and Joseph Bazalgette, amongst others. In the world of Victorian periodicals, Lane gives proper place to hitherto unsung women. The engraving firm, the Dalziel Brothers, includes a Dalziel sister and the formidable Ann Little
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publication of the Historical Novel Society
We learn quite early on who committed the murder; the real mystery is who commissioned the crime and why. Devices like a titled lady writing to men to ask if they’d bought semipornographic images and Jo having keys to the National Gallery strain the plot somewhat. There are occasional misspellings of proper names (Carnforth for Cornforth, Berberini for Barberini, Henry rather than Herbert Ingram) and odd slips, such as the note describing the Veronese Morelli as German or having him use the familiar tu when he is first introduced to someone. Jo’s visit to the sewers with Bazalgette is informative but doesn’t move the plot along.
These grumbles aside, Lane’s research is thorough; one learns a lot about the periodical trade and photographic techniques of the time—and how the latter business could encompass under one roof both respectable studio portraits and ‘boudoir pictures.’ The resolution to the mystery is satisfyingly unexpected.
Katherine Mezzacappa
THE GLASSMAKER’S WIFE
Lee Martin, Dzanc Books, 2022, $16.95, pb, 248pp, 9781950539482
The Glassmaker’s Wife is a novel of murder by arsenic, an illicit paramour, religious zealots, bewitched cows, and revenge. The murder is based on the true story of the Betsey Reed case in 1844 Illinois. Eveline is a hired girl for the Reeds, caught up in the fallout following the murder of her master, Leonard, and the implication of her mistress, Betsey. She was devoted to both and yearned for their familial love and affection. Leonard was a glassmaker, and Eveline’s happiest times were in the glass house, assisting him craft beautiful and functional glass objects. She also enjoyed her time with Betsey, reading lovelorn letters in the Godey Lady’s Book together. When Leonard becomes ill and dies from a stomach complaint, Betsey is accused of his death— primarily because the villagers believe her to be a witch. While Betsey is imprisoned, Eveline is called before the coroner’s jury to testify to the events of that day. She testifies that Betsey put a white powder in Leonard’s coffee. The author is able to make the reader question the truth of Eveline’s testimony while still convincing us that she is truthful because of her agony over betraying Betsey.
Also featured in the novel is the Millerite movement and their belief in a Second Advent when Christ will return for the faithful on October 22, 1844. Eveline is a devoted member of the group, but when the highly anticipated Advent doesn’t transpire, she questions her beliefs. The author incorporates Christian beliefs into this novel. As Eveline’s faith dies, Betsey becomes a devoted believer as she awaits her trial and judgement. The suspense of not knowing what really happened to Leonard keeps the pages turning. This is an absorbing read of small village life and the
people with their intertwined lives full of gossip and superstition.
Janice Ottersberg
FLORA FLOWERDEW AND THE MYSTERY OF THE DUKE’S DIAMONDS
Amanda McCabe, Oliver-Heber Books, 2022, $9.99, pb, 200pp, 9781648392757
Flora Flowerdew is a semi-legitimate spiritual medium making a living conducting séances in London in 1888. She is good at reading people, and her dog seems to be a little clairvoyant. But the séance held for the Duke of Everton and the Petrie family goes dramatically wrong. An apparently genuine spirit, angry and accusatory, takes over the séance designed to promote the marriage of young Maud Petrie to the Duke of Everton. The spirit demands that the Everton family jewels be found before the marriage can take place.
Flora and the duke (who happens to be young and handsome) decide to work together to discover whether the angry spirit and the jewels are real or an elaborate fake. Their hunt takes them to the South of France and to Cornwall. Along the way, Flora falls in love with the duke.
The title and the cover art tell you all you need to know about this novel. It is a quick holiday read, somewhat weak in characterization and plot development. But if you like charming, stylish people in equally charming, stylish locations, you might enjoy this novel.
Valerie Adolph
THE WINTERING PLACE
Kevin McCarthy, W.W. Norton, 2022, $27.95/ C$36.95, hb, 288pp, 9781324020486
The unforgettable tale of two Irish brothers fleeing the Indian Wars with the halfNative American woman they love continues in Kevin McCarthy’s The Wintering Place, the sequel to his impressive Wolves of Eden. It is 1867 in Dakota Territory, and brothers Michael and Thomas
O’Driscoll are on the run with Tom’s lover, Sara, from the scene of a gunfight at a local canteen where Sara and other Indigenous women were held as sex slaves to a soulless army camp sutler and his evil wife. Michael, gravely wounded at the scene of a Sioux massacre, is rescued by Tom and Sara, who soon put miles between their former lives and the uncertain future ahead of them in a harsh wilderness. As winter descends, they find shelter in a natural cave of sheltering rocks and nurse Michael back from
the brink, but trouble has a way of sniffing out the O’Driscoll brothers. Seeking only peace from the wars of their pasts, the trio must ward off both man and beast as they try to build a home for themselves.
McCarthy’s incandescent prose moves easily between third-person chapters and those written from Michael’s perspective, which mimic a certain grammatical and linguistic style of the era. In these chapters, Michael directly narrates events as part of a journal he keeps, confessing and justifying the brothers’ actions to those reading—and which are the most beguiling and nuanced parts of McCarthy’s two books. His characters are well-drawn and memorable—for good and bad—in a land where survival is the only goal. The Wintering Place is a superb and stunning Western novel that approaches fine literature, and it behooves readers to pick up Wolves of Eden first, if only to spend more time in the brothers’ company.
Peggy Kurkowski
THE SUN WALKS DOWN
Fiona McFarlane, FSG, 2023, $28.00, hb, 352pp, 9780374606244 / Sceptre, 2023, £18.99, hb, 416pp, 9781529389821
A six-year-old boy disappears from his family farm during a dust storm in late 19thcentury South Australia, and the community rallies to the family’s aid. With a keen wit, the author impressively develops the searchers and interested others to reveal their essences. The boy’s grieving mother and indefatigable searching father. An imperious but bungling lawman who leads the search. The farmer with the “befuddlement of the blue blood who comes out to the colonies and finds himself on a level with every other man.” A drifting Swedish painter and his illustrator English wife. The new bride of the local constable, “the kind of woman who, in loving man, loved all men.” A pathetic vicar; misunderstood and demeaned Indigenous peoples; and Afghan cameleers.
Misperceptions, idiosyncrasies, petty jealousies, suspicions, superstitions, fears, prejudices, and lusts are woven into a tapestry of memorable characters and dark suspense as the search continues day after day, and fears for the boy’s safety mount. The story seems perfectly set in a harsh, arid land that is filled with “saltbush and dry soil and every fly that ever bothered God,” and where visually striking sunsets dominate the horizon. It renders a convincing portrait of a hardscrabble environment that was probably quite different in reality from romantic visions
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Ingram is at the helm of The Illustrated London News
of the fair-weathered Australian colony back in Victorian England.
The reader is left to consider some hardhitting parallels of Australian settlement to American westward expansion and its dark chapters of subjugation of native societies. A very impressive second novel from a prizewinning Australian author who has also published a collection of short stories.
Brodie Curtis
COLD BLOWS THE WIND
Catherine Meyrick, Courante Publishing, 2022, $12.99/£10.99, pb, 423pp, 9780648250852
Cold Blows the Wind by Catherine Meyrick is an atmospheric historical set in the wilds of late 19th-century Tasmania. The characters and story are based loosely on the author’s great-grandparents, with extraordinary facts deftly woven together with the daily minutiae of living in a former British penal colony.
It is 1878, and Meyrick’s great-grandmother, Sarah Ellen Thompson, is the unwed mother of a son when the novel opens. She lives in Hobart Town, the capital of Tasmania, and is a member of the tight-knit Thompson clan, a delightful group of rapscallions known for their hard-living ways. She dreams of a proper man to love, and when she meets Harry Woods, newly arrived in town and willing to overlook her dubious reputation, Ellen believes her future is secured. Love proves to be a complicated proposition when Harry’s past catches up to him. Women have the hardest lot in Tasmania, a fact exemplified by the events unfolding in Ellen’s life. She is repeatedly betrayed by the men in her life; it is heartbreaking to know that this was the reality endured by many women of this period. Yet Ellen emerges triumphant in the end, rewarded by her refusal to play the victim.
Meyrick has conceived a well-researched rendering of the conditions endured by the settlers of Tasmania. Hobart Town and the wider Tasmanian wilderness are vividly depicted, and reminiscent of the American West, also being settled during this period. The novel’s characters are well-drawn and sympathetic despite their foibles. At times, the pace of the novel slows to a crawl with descriptions of daily events; a thorough editing would have introduced the climax sooner and perhaps left space for more interesting events. Nonetheless, readers of both historical and women’s fiction will find much to enjoy in Cold Blows the Wind
D. Wilson
TO THE GATES OF HELL
David Nix, Sourcebooks Casablanca, 2022, $8.99, pb, 384pp, 9781728239729
Jake Paynter is a Civil War soldier turned Wyoming lawman with cold eyes who nevertheless inspires loyalty and devotion from those on his side. Jake has forged bonds with his deputies, former Buffalo soldier Gus, and Gus’s love interest Stacy, who is half Shoshone and has a firecracker personality, as well as
with Shoshone elder and expert tracker Beah Nooki. Now the merciless Van Zandt gang has brought their thieving ways and tyranny to Jake’s town in the Wind River region. The Van Zandt threat compounds when the gang abducts the object of Jake’s unexpressed affections, schoolmarm Rosalyn, along with four of her young pupils. Jake and his posse set out in doggedly relentless pursuit through western Wyoming to Yellowstone, forming an uneasy alliance along the way with Rosalyn’s ambitious but duplicitous brother and his evil henchmen who have deeply held scores to settle with Jake.
The pacing from scrap to scrap is pleasingly fast. Jake is righteous in his pursuit of justice and respectful of the native ways, conveying a sense of spirituality in him that is perhaps rooted in religion, since “most folks who rode with Death at least learned to pray.” While the formula of a larger-than-life alpha male taking on the bad guys in rugged western landscapes with a blaze of gunfire for the love of a woman may be well-trod, this third book in the Jake Paynter series is written by an author with roots in the region who is well-versed in its geography and history. This book will appeal to readers seeking constant forward momentum and explosive action sequences in a familiar Western novel storyline.
Brodie Curtis
A SINISTER REVENGE
Deanna Raybourn, Berkley, 2023, $27.00/£24.99, hb, 320pp, 9780593545928
1889: Lepidopterist Veronica Speedwell and natural historian Stoker TempletonVane are ‘bribed’ by Stoker’s elder brother, Tiberius, to discover who is sending him death threats. Twenty years before, Tiberius had belonged to the Seven Sinners, not that (he claims) they did much sinning. But as young, landed Cambridge gentlemen, the group did undertake a Grand Tour to round out their education, culminating at the TempletonVane ancestral home of Cherboys. As it’s situated on the Devon Jurassic Coast, the same coastline (in Dorset) which made Mary Anning famous for her ichthyosaur discovery, it wasn’t surprising that the crumbling cliff coughed up a dinosaur skeleton. Lorenzo d’Ambrogio, one of the Sinners and a natural historian, thought the bones were his claim to fame but, sadly, the ocean laid claim to them and his life.
Now, someone wants revenge and has already murdered two of their compatriots. Tiberius arranges a reunion at Cherboys for the remaining two members and their spouses, with the aim of confronting the killer. And the carrot dangled in front of the understandably reticent Stoker who has, during various investigations, been stabbed, shot, garrotted, drugged, and half-drowned? A gift of the life-sized model of a Megalosaurus, originally built for the Great Exhibition. And predictably, what Stoker won’t do for his brother he will do for a dinosaur!
My first meeting with Veronica Speedwell
was everything I expected. I devoured Raybourn’s Lady Julia Grey novels, most particularly the series’ sultry male protagonist, and Stoker comes a close second. At his brother’s behest, he lovingly repairs the Megalosaurus in order to hold the reunion dinner, and it was a strange feeling indeed, to be dining inside the belly of a dinosaur. Settings are well drawn, dialogue is spot on, humour intermixed with the seriousness of the crimes. I look forward to the next adventure.
Fiona Alison
THE ELOPEMENT
Tracy Rees, Macmillan, 2022, £20.00, hb, 432pp, 9781035006953
London, 1897: In the Blythes’ palatial Highgate home, Pansy, a 23-year-old maid, loathes her job but stays because she is in love with John the footman, who in turn is hopelessly smitten by the spoiled and beautiful daughter of the house, Rowena. Then the handsome artist’s assistant Bartek Woźniak comes to plan a portrait of Rowena, and she makes a drastic choice that her background and upbringing have done nothing to prepare her for. Rees’s compelling story is told through three female voices: Pansy’s, Rowena’s, and the unconventional, thirtyish Olive Westfallen, a sort of Octavia Hill with a sparky sense of humour, the adoptive mother of a small girl.
Rowena and Olive tell their stories in the first person and, perhaps appropriately, as she is a servant and thus virtually voiceless, Pansy’s voice is relegated to the third. This novel is a love story—or more accurately, several—interwoven with themes such as the struggle for female education (Eliza Orme, the first woman to qualify in English law, has a cameo part) and the merciless exploitation of working-class children (the paper flower factory scene could have been engraved by Doré). Female choices are limited and threatened by marriage. When a woman ‘falls’, that fall is precipitous. Rees’s prose is assured and appealing: I particularly liked phrases like ‘they are all over Hampstead like a smattering of cheerful freckles’ (of a numerous family).
Her minor characters occasionally have something of Dickens (especially the urchin-like Jem) but without his whimsy and condescension. Repeated references to ‘Cumbria’ are anachronistic; that entity came into being only with county boundary reorganisation in 1974. Pansy and her sister leaving school as late as sixteen seems a little unlikely for girls in straitened circumstances. However, this is an absorbing read with a finely interlaced plot.
Katherine Mezzacappa
THE LAST SECRET
Pam Royl, Blue Denim Press, 2022, $20.00, pb, 224pp, 9781927882733
In 1860, sixteen-year-old Sarah is thrilled to accompany her affluent parents to an event in their small colonial town on the north shore
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of Lake Ontario, describing it as “the day the Prince of Wales came to visit, [and] I met my first husband.” Although Joseph Drury is the son of Scottish farmers and immensely disliked by her social-climbing English mother, Sarah marries him. They move to a farm and are blessed with five children. While another one is on the way, a disastrous event occurs, and Sarah discovers a terrible secret her husband is keeping from her. Sarah is at odds with how to provide for her children and herself. Although Sarah’s mother wants her to remarry and presents a wealthy suitor, Sarah defies the Victorian era’s norms and wishes to start a business of her own. It seems the whole town is against her venture, except for her well-off sister.
Pam Royl describes herself in her author biography as “a writer of women’s stories, inspired by history.” A resident of Ontario’s Northumberland County—the novel’s setting— Royl was motivated by an ancestor’s story, which she used in plotting this novel. Hence, it’s no surprise that the narrative reads as true to life and transports us to town and farm life during that period. Sarah’s tribulations well portray the limited options to progress for young women at that time. These might surprise some readers. Family secrets, and their devastating effects on the unfortunate upon their reveal, play a vital role in this novel. Royl’s choice of writing in Sarah’s first-person voice seems appropriate, for it brings us close to her feelings and makes withholding secrets seem plausible. The novel is an informative and pleasurable read. Highly recommended.
Waheed Rabbani
WILD, BEAUTIFUL, AND FREE
Sophfronia Scott, Lake Union, 2023, $16.99/£8.99, pb, 335pp, 9781542036061
Set in the mid-1800s, this compelling coming-of-age novel explores the life of mixed-race Jeannette Bébinn, the love child of a Louisiana plantation owner and an enslaved woman, as she seeks to find her identity in a world filled with prejudice, hatred, and Civil War violence. While her father is alive, she and her white half-sister, Calista, are raised as equals. When he suddenly dies, her genteel life is thrown into chaos. Jeannette’s vengeful stepmother denies her rightful claim to inheritance and sells the twelve-year-old into slavery. Jeannette’s perilous journey takes her through Mississippi to Philadelphia, New York, and Ohio as she searches for freedom, love, and purpose, confronting cruel injustices. Through a series of dramatic events, Jeannette secures a teaching job at Fortitude Mansion, a sanctuary for enslaved people, where she meets the landlord, Christian Robichaud Colchester. Although they are immediately attracted to one another, Jeannette feels unworthy and unready to mix in Christian’s privileged white society.
She flees. Broken-hearted yet determined to live an independent life, Jeannette becomes
embroiled in the Civil War, experiencing the devastation to both sides while serving as a Union nurse. Try as she may, she cannot forget Christian Colchester, nor can he forget her.
Throughout this skillfully crafted tale, the backdrop of Southern landscapes and cultures are vividly portrayed by beautifully detailed descriptions and thought-provoking dialogue exchanged by a robust cast of welldeveloped characters. Jeannette is the heart and soul of the story, an unforgettable heroine endowed with dauntless integrity, courage, and resilience. This evocative novel brings full circle the power of love and forgiveness. A worthwhile and insightful read that lingers in the mind long after the last page is turned.
Marcy McNally
RIVER SING ME HOME
Eleanor Shearer, Headline Review, 2023, £18.99, hb, 374pp, 9781472291363 / Berkley, 2023, $27.00, hb, 336pp, 9780593548042
1st August 1834: slavery is abolished in the British Empire. What happens next? For most slaves, 2nd August is much the same as the day before. Slavery is replaced by a six-year ‘apprenticeship’, to prevent an immediate exodus from the plantations. River Sing Me Home is the story of a ‘freed’ slave, Rachel, who decides to leave on the 2nd nonetheless, setting out on a journey to find her children, who have been successively sold off to other slave owners.
Her journey takes her from rural Barbados to the capital, Bridgetown, and then to Demerara in British Guiana, then into the forest hinterland and finally to Trinidad. She finds each of her children, or at least what happened to them, and we learn the different ways that they found or failed to find freedom.
The book is about slavery but even more about freedom. We are reminded that by 1834 there was already a large population of ‘free blacks’ in the West Indies: shopkeepers, pedlars, prostitutes, tavern keepers and runaways living in the forest. Slavery brought them to the West Indies, but they found their own ways to shape their lives.
This is Shearer’s debut novel, written in homage to her ancestors. It is written with feeling: resentment against the injustice of slavery, pride in the resilience of her people, and delight in the variety and beauty of the Caribbean.
Edward James
YANKEE MISSION
Julian Stockwin, Hodder & Stoughton/ Mobius, 2022, £20.00/$28.00, hb, 369pp, 9781473699137
The 25th book in the Thomas Kydd series is set at the time of the United States’ declaration of war with Britain in 1812 and opens with the frigate USS Constitution capturing HMS Java in a ship-to-ship engagement. With his ship HMS Thunderer in the dockyard, Captain Kydd is relieved of command and despatched to the
east coast of the U.S. in his previous ship (the frigate HMS Tyger). His goal, as a renowned frigate captain, is to engineer a victorious engagement with one of the powerful American frigates, creating some good news for the English public and the Royal Navy. The story brings themes and characters through from the earlier books, and while this is the first book in the series that I have read, I was soon immersed in the plot. Julian Stockwin produces a thoroughly enjoyable tale, with some unexpected twists against the background of the condition of the U.S. Navy in 1812, some Admiralty bureaucracy, and an early look at the use of steam power for the Royal Navy.
Sean Churchfield
IN THE UPPER COUNTRY
Kai Thomas, Viking, 2023, $27.00/C$36.00, hb, 352pp, 9780735243460
In 1859, in an all-Black town in Canada West (modern Ontario), a hub for the Underground Railroad, a female journalist agrees to interview an old woman runaway who was imprisoned after killing a white slave catcher on her trail. Their conversation reveals much in the way of unexpected history.
A writer for The Coloured Canadian, Lensinda “Sinda” Martin doesn’t know what to make of the woman, who speaks in riddles, or her perplexing situation. The old woman and her companion, a young seamstress named Emma, had been hiding at a farmer’s cabin when a white man and his Indian partner showed up, claiming the pair were fugitive slaves from Lincoln County, Kentucky. Strangely, the woman was seen talking to the Indian and somehow convinced him to back off. Profoundly frustrated (“Would I ever get anything of value from this woman?” she wonders), Sinda proposes a “tale for a tale,” bartering her own stories for the woman’s revelations about the past. These tales involve love, family, painful separation, and multiple quests for freedom—and the drastic lengths people will go to obtain it.
Stretching from 1795 Montreal through the pivotal War of 1812 to the characters’ present day, this debut novel paves a previously uncharted path through North America, uncovering deep affinities between Black and Indigenous peoples, who shared the pain of bondage and “quietly celebrated each escape; it mattered not whence they fled.” The writing isn’t uniformly fluid. Some pages move speedily, while others require careful, slow perusal in order to make connections with earlier events. Many of the secondary characters—including Sinda’s employer and landlady, an abolitionist speaker; the seamstress Emma; and Sinda’s father, Dred, who can “talk Indian”—are intriguing enough to potentially carry their own novel. While In the Upper Country isn’t an effortless read, it makes a valuable contribution to CanLit and the historical fiction genre.
Sarah Johnson
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THE SECRET OF THE LOST PEARLS
Darcie Wilde, Kensington, 2022, $26.00, hb, 400pp, 9781496738011
Genteel but impoverished Rosalind Thorne has made her reputation solving delicate problems in a discreet manner, which is why her friend Bethany asks Rosalind to discover how a necklace of valuable black pearls went missing from her dressing room. But when Rosalind embeds in the household to find the thief, she uncovers a host of tensions among the colorful personalities in Bethany’s family and that of Bethany’s husband, Douglas.
When the man Bethany’s younger sister eloped with returns alive and not dead as presumed, he blows the lid open on all manner of deceits, subterfuges, plots, and scandals. And when he dies in truth, with signs of foul play, Rosalind confronts a tangled web that she must patiently unravel—with the assistance of handsome Bow Street runner Adam Harkness—to determine what justice is due.
The book’s callouts to Pride and Prejudice in its chapter epigraphs, social tone, and character eccentricities are a source of delight, explaining Rosalind’s great reserve as she probes family secrets that savor of unpleasant odors. The prose is assured and confident, at times entering other points of view to convey information Rosalind doesn’t know. The story is well plotted, and the suspense builds in a slow but beguiling fashion, with hints that draw the reader in and twists that leave them guessing. Fans of female-led historical mysteries will delight in the way Rosalind traverses both the respectable drawing rooms and the seamy underside of Regency London hidden beneath the manners and tea.
Misty Urban
QUEEN OF THE WEST
JR Zink, ZOTR LLC, 2022, $15.00, pb, 274pp, 9798986305301
Annie and Max meet on the Ohio River on a steamship bound for Cincinnati in the 1850s. Annie is extremely upset about being forced to move from her beloved New York, but her mother has remarried to a man in Cincinnati. She feels she is entering the wilds. Max is an immigrant who lives in Cincinnati and is returning home. Despite their differences, they begin to bond. When their paths cross again in the city, Annie is even more miserable because her feminist views are looked upon as dangerous by her mother’s new friends. She and Max begin a romance, which is opposed by Annie’s family from the start.
This book provides some great history of pre-Civil War Cincinnati as it was really growing into its name of “The Queen City of the West,” now shortened to “The Queen City.” The author uses Max to describe the city’s history as he takes Annie and the reader on a tour of its many now-historic places. The character development of Max and Annie is a bit slow, but this is the first of a trilogy, so it’s possible that more character growth will come later. We are made aware of Annie’s feminist views immediately, but for much of the book they seem to be used mainly for shock value against her upper-crust family and their acquaintances. When Annie finally truly gets
involved in the women’s movement, the novel takes on new life. I am looking forward to the next book in the series, which takes us to the Civil War. Fans of Ohio history and women’s fiction will enjoy this book.
Bonnie DeMoss
20TH CENTURY
WHAT THE WALLS KNOW
Skye Alexander, Level Best, 2022, $16.95, pb, 234pp, 9781685121860
In October 1925, four musicians called the Troubadours have a week-long engagement at the castle home of Duncan Fox on the windswept coast of Massachusetts. They entertain guests gathered to celebrate Duncan’s 50th birthday. On the first morning, Fox’s longtime friend, Natalie Talbot, lies dead in her cozy guest bed with no signs of disturbance. A local police autopsy concludes Natalie died of a drug overdose, whereupon the police order everyone to stay. Except for the Troubadours, all the guests have an interest in seances, tarot cards, and other occult ways to divine the future. Natalie had earned a nice living using seances to comfort relatives of the dead—but made enemies, too.
The leader of the Troubadours, smart and beautiful Lizzie Crane, thinks Natalie’s death most peculiar. Was it suicide, murder, or just an accident? Lizzie and another Troubadour hear voices from their bedroom walls. Feisty Lizzie can’t help exploring the castle’s many rooms and passageways, grounds, and rocky shore. She follows her instincts to clues that put her in great danger, but also help solve the mystery.
The basic plot of acquaintances gathered, the sudden death of one or more, and the quest to find a killer is common. This rendering sets itself apart through the charming Troubadours and the setting. As the title suggests, Duncan’s castle has astounding features that fit the story well, among them an electric elevator, main gates that are opened and closed by buckets hanging down into the ocean tides, a secret sea-level dock, hidden dormitory rooms, and walls that are no mere walls. Recommended for readers wanting a cozy mystery a bit off the beaten path.
G. J. Berger
SECRETS OF THE NILE
Tasha Alexander, Minotaur, 2022, $27.99/ C$36.99, hb, 320pp, 9781250819697
Secrets of the Nile, the 16th book in the Lady Emily Mysteries series, takes Emily and husband, Colin Hargreaves, on a cruise up the Nile to visit Luxor in 1904. There, they stay with Lord Bertram Deeley, a collector of antiquities who, for hidden reasons, has an uneasy relationship with the local archaeologists. Colin’s mother accompanies them on this trip, introducing a source of tension, since the formidable Mrs. Hargreaves, in her youth, turned down Deeley’s marriage offer.
On the first night in Luxor, at the end of a sumptuous meal with lots of guests, Deeley collapses. Colin, a trained agent of the Crown, smells cyanide poison. The Egyptian police immediately accuse one of the servants, but
Emily and Colin know that’s too simple an answer. Unfortunately, their investigation uncovers a long list of people with motives for the murder, including Colin’s mother.
Alexander has created another twisty plot with plenty of surprises and familial complications for Emily. This “homage to Agatha Christie” will please both ongoing fans and new readers. Alexander’s portrayal of Lady Emily’s chafing at the strictures placed on women adds a witty undertone to the narrative voice. For example, when the self-righteous Lady Wilona lectures Emily about the proper “method by which society operates,” including denying women the vote and ignoring the poor, Emily reacts with this thought, “Trying to enlighten her would be futile and gripping her shoulders to shake her until her teeth rattled impolite. I steeled myself…”
Alexander’s latest offers a delightful trip to a troubled Egypt during British colonial rule and a whodunnit that’ll keep you turning pages.
Judith Starkston
CLARA & OLIVIA
Lucy Ashe, Magpie Books, 2023, £16.99, hb, 352pp, 9780861544080
Clara and Olivia are twin sisters, ballerinas with great talent who have worked hard to win their places at Sadler’s Wells in 1933 London. But while they are identical in appearance, they are different in character. Olivia is absorbed in rehearsals, stays in, and has early nights, while Clara knows the value of relaxing. She enjoys wining and dining with other cast members, including Nathan, a former child prodigy who is now a pianist at Sadler’s Wells. Another person in their orbit is Samuel, who makes bespoke dance shoes for the ballerinas. As rehearsals for their next production, Coppélia, get long and arduous, both twins are aware of being watched. But by whom, and what do they want?
Lucy Ashe’s debut novel is a clever thriller set in a world which she knows so well, having trained at the Royal Ballet School and being a twin. It’s a story of sisterly love, ambition, and obsession. I particularly liked the inclusion of real-life characters, such as Dame Ninette de Valois and Alicia Markova, and discovering Sadler’s Wells really did have a well in it. The novel was written from several points of view, and while that can be a difficult format for the reader, it works as the characters are compelling. Take a bow, Ms Ashe.
Kate Pettigrew
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THE MAGIC KINGDOM
Russell Banks, Knopf, 2022, $30.00, hb, 352pp, 9780593535158 / No Exit, 2023, £9.99, pb, 320pp, 9780857305473
The quest for a perfect society is woven into the American experience. Through his bittersweet novel, Banks explores the flaws in the design of an early 20th-century utopia—and by extension, perhaps all utopias—through one man’s mournful regrets.
The premise is that the author discovered a collection of reel-to-reel tapes in a dingy Florida library basement and transcribed and edited their forgotten narrative: the confession and catharsis of Harley Mann, an elderly real estate investor, who speaks in 1971 about his long-ago past.
As a twelve-year-old boy in 1902, Harley is eager to please but has an independent mind. After his father dies, his mother moves the family from their secular Georgia commune to a plantation whose cruelty becomes apparent. Rescued by the charismatic Elder John, the Manns head south to abide with the Shakers in his community, New Bethany, in central Florida. The children, too young to formally become Shakers, all learn the ways of the oddly compelling religion. Harley trains in beekeeping and becomes Elder John’s protégé, though his obsession with Sadie Pratt, a tuberculosis patient seven years his elder, threatens his devotion to his Shaker family—who are celibate—and the group’s very stability.
The Shakers are industrious, but their focus is neither charitable nor commercial, and the plot evokes these tensions. While The Magic Kingdom is an engrossing morality tale, Banks is equally concerned with how the characters live day-to-day alongside their beliefs and nature. The land and waters—which intermingle in this swampy country—are gloriously described, as are the native birds and other animals. Contrasts with the profitable artifice of the Walt Disney Company, which we’re told eventually purchased the Shakers’ land, quietly underlie the entire novel. It all leaves the reader, like Harley, yearning to return to this unspoiled, vanished paradise, imperfect as it was.
Sarah Johnson
THE MITFORD AFFAIR
Marie Benedict, Sourcebooks Landmark, 2023, $27.99, hb, 352pp, 9781728229362
Bestselling author Marie Benedict is back with a compelling novel about the real Mitford family in pre-WWII England. Cousins of Clementine Churchill, the Mitfords are a family of six sisters and one brother, all in their teens
and twenties as the 1930s begin in London. The family has recently descended from greater heights, downsizing their home more than once in an effort to remain in wealthy circles while actually affording their lifestyle.
The Mitford sisters could probably each carry their very own book, as they are all so bold in their unique ways, but it’s perhaps more fun to see them interact with each other here. The focus stays primarily on Diana, Unity, and Nancy, who are all learning a bit about fascism and having responses ranging from turning away from it to falling in love with Hitler. The sisters clash with history as it’s being made and with each other, noting early in the book that “We Mitford sisters never forget. Only pretend to forgive,” clearly foreshadowing the adventures to come. Benedict pulls no punches here, and is even bold enough to make both Churchill and Hitler characters with dialogue outside of speeches or other recorded history. Most fascinating is the organization of chapters, with one from Nancy, one from Diana, and one from Unity, always one after another in that order, almost always recording their thoughts and actions on the exact same dates, but with only Nancy’s chapters written in the first person. It may sound confusing, but readers will likely find it quite captivating.
Amy Watkin
whether a country of mixed cultures, races, and religions can survive and thrive. Not a light read, but a profound one. If a reader is willing to take time with every sentence and every thought, they will come through the experience pondering the big questions, realizing how hard it is to answer them. An impressive work.
Elizabeth Caulfield Felt
BELIEVING IN TOMORROW
Rita Bradshaw, Pan, 2022, £7.99, pb, 462pp, 9781529049862
Rita Bradshaw, an author whose name on the cover appears in larger print than the rather non-descript title, has established a reputation as a purveyor of sagas with a Gothic edge. In this case the female protagonist, Molly McKenzie, is unusual, as we are told that despite her blonde hair and blue eyes, her mother is of Romani extraction. Less unusually, she is also feisty: ‘a tigress under that pretty exterior.’
SHAF AND THE REMINGTON
Rana Bose, Baraka Books, 2022, $24.95, pb, 240pp, 9781771862950
In the first main section of this book, the story is told by twelve-year-old Ben, a boy living in an unnamed town in an unnamed Balkan state in the 1940s. War rages in the mountains and countryside outside of town, but Ben’s attention is on his tutor, Shaf, whom he idolizes. Shaf appreciates Ben’s sharp mind and curious spirit and answers his questions seriously, expounding on physics, politics, art, history, culture, philosophy, and nearly everything else with passion, knowledge, and words sometimes lyrical, sometimes impenetrable.
The next section is narrated by Shaf, who becomes a partisan leader in the war, using guerilla warfare to attack German troops. When the war is over, Shaf eventually lands in the United States, where he lectures for a while but then ends up homeless. Shaf’s brain is on fire, thoughts jumping between topics. His narration can be beautiful, mystical, incomprehensible, scientific, and crazy, but always passionate and with a deep sense of right and wrong and relativity.
In the final section, Ben looks for Shaf, trying to find and help the tutor who was such an integral part of his childhood.
At first, I found this book frustrating because of Shaf’s odd thought processes. Eventually, I came to realize that Shaf is symbolic, as is the Remington which features in key moments in the story. This is a book about ideas, about the Baltic States pre- and post-Yugoslavia, about
Our story begins in 1900 as abused child Molly sneaks off to the fair to have fun for once in her life. She gets beaten to unconsciousness and runs away from home after her father has already killed her sister. Found almost dying, she is taken in by a fishing family. For a few years normal life follows, then in a whirl of forbidden love, death, and murder-suicide, all is unravelled. Working in a canning factory, Molly makes some friends, one of whom teaches her to read, and then offers classes on being a lady. Molly then poses as middle class, to become a governess for the children of a widowed doctor.
There are graphic descriptions of injury and death—drowning, burning. As the men suffer, Molly shrewdly seizes her chances and rises to become a factory owner. Of course, this is not enough. Will she manage to find the right man in a world where so many are worthless?
Consistently fast-moving, with each new chapter putting the reader into the thick of the action, this book offers vivid escapism, though I did notice awkward flaunting of research and some ungainly explicatory dialogue. Still, it is without doubt a worthy addition to Bradshaw’s body of work and will find a ready audience amongst her readers.
Ben Bergonzi
A MANSION FOR MURDER
Frances Brody, Piatkus, 2022, £8.99, pb, 325pp, 9780349431970 / Crooked Lane, 2023, $28.99, hb, 320pp, 9781643857602
1930: Kate Shackleton, war widow and private investigator, comes to Saltaire, Yorkshire to meet Ronnie Cresswell, a 22-yearold mill worker who has written that he has something to tell her, a story about the past that he knows will be of interest to her. Before they are able to meet, he is discovered drowned, and it soon emerges that he was murdered. Kate is soon caught up in the affairs of the dead man’s family and friends, while his employer, Mr Whitaker, enlists her help both to prepare the abandoned mansion of Milner Field for auction and to discover who is
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conspiring against him to undercut his prices and put him out of business.
Kate, her assistant, Jim Sykes, and housekeeper, Mrs Sugden, soon discover that Ronnie’s is not the first mysterious death associated with Milner Field and that the house is locally regarded as cursed. The investigation becomes more complex as they are caught up in a web of deception and deceit. Brody skillfully weaves all the threads, past and present, into an intricate pattern where, ultimately, all secrets are revealed.
The setting of 1930s Saltaire, a UNESCOdesignated World Heritage Site, and the insights into the Yorkshire Wool Exchange of the past add to the charm of this novel. Although one of a series, A Mansion for Murder can be read as a stand-alone mystery. Recommended.
Catherine Kullmann
SOMEBODY’S BUSINESS
Irene Bennett Brown, Five Star, 2023, $25.95, hb, 218pp, 9781432895433
Look through a stack of vintage postcards, and find the intriguing ones that show automobiles and horse-drawn carriages sharing the downtown roads: That’s the 1906 world of farmer Jocelyn Pladson. But at the Kansas frontier, there aren’t yet abundant horseless vehicles, or even gas stations—which is just as well for Jocelyn, who’s especially fond of mules and horses. When she decides that livery stables will continue to have a future for years to come and purchases one from an elderly friend who badly needs to leave town, her husband Pete’s cheerful support of the venture should make it all work out well.
But Jocelyn hasn’t factored in the malice of other speculators. Her new livery stable is under attack before she even holds the papers for it—so she’ll have to round up political support, as well as local law enforcement. In Irene Bennett Brown’s Kansas, that’s made much easier by a friendly marshal and his wife, Cora, who serves as deputy. Overall, the town of Skiddy seems to agree with Jocelyn’s position, but the pair of villains involved, dedicated to their own hopes of profit from flashy motorcars, are willing to take drastic action to separate Jocelyn from her dream.
A gently told tale filled with loving families, sturdy friends, and ideals of honest success, Somebody’s Business offers warmth and promise in an all-American manner, where losses are compensated for by integrity, and affection and loyalty win the day.
Beth Kanell
OPERATION BLACKBIRD
Ellen Butler, Power to the Pen, 2022, $16.99, pb, 334pp, 9781734365047
The war in Ukraine has rekindled memories of the Cold War between West and East. In Ellen Butler’s Operation Blackbird, we are drawn back to that time and place when Berlin was divided in half, the Allied West and the Communist East. Operation Blackbird is a
tale of espionage in that moment in history just after World War II when antagonists in the brewing Cold War were trying to entice German scientists and spymasters to choose sides in a high-stakes and dangerous game of geopolitical one-upmanship.
Miriam Becker is her real name, but she adopts many others. It’s part of her job as an undercover agent for the OSS. Danger comes with the territory, and she is a highly regarded agent. When a prized Russian scientist, coveted by the West, lets it be known that he wants to emigrate to the United States, Miriam is recruited by childhood friend Jacob Devlin to sneak him out of East Berlin, through enemy lines, to freedom. Of course, things never go as planned.
Author Butler knows her stuff as if she herself has served with the CIA. Her attention to detail befits a spy who must be observant of human nuances to survive. Miriam is no James Bond, which is a good thing. She comes across as a regular person, yet one who is blessed with bravery, innovative smarts, and the instincts of a trained operative. She has her allies who will protect her and her enemies who would kill her. Her team is betrayed. The man she is coming to love disappears, and she must act and survive on her own wits.
I recommend Operation Blackbird for those who envision themselves as Miriam Beckers: a modest young woman who will do whatever she must to serve her country.
Peter Clenott
HEARTS OF STEEL
Elizabeth Camden, Bethany House, 2023, $16.99, pb, 336pp, 9780764238451
With her third in the Blackstone Legacy series, Elizabeth Camden brings the handsome and highly competent steel magnate Liam Blackstone to Gilded Age Manhattan in 1902. Almost immediately, he sees Maggie Molinaro in action, as the young woman tackles the city’s great scoundrel Charles Morse over nonpayment of her invoice for ice cream. When Liam opts to show Maggie how to maneuver in the city’s political morass, he’s heartened by her quick success as well as her admiration for him.
But success is short-lived, as Morse prefers his revenge piping hot, and Maggie faces a combination of supply chain issues, labor loss, and deliberate damage to her dreamedof ice cream factory. Meanwhile Liam’s clever scheme to remove Morse’s influence from the steel company board also focuses this powerful enemy on him.
With a delicate hand, Camden paints a gradual awareness of the Holy Spirit growing in Liam, as he pursues a true partnership of both heart and strength. If he and Maggie can handle the powerful enemies of their time, what else might they forge together?
Camden writes with abundant detail of this exhilarating and complex time in the nation’s industrial revolution, and with insight into how friendship and joy can deepen into love. She even tackles how forgiveness may
blossom despite, or because of, adversity and loneliness. Hearts of Steel has only slight connections to the two earlier books in this series, but the pleasure of this action-romance should draw readers to these novels featuring other members of the Blackstone dynasty, Carved in Stone and Written on the Wind (both opening in 1900).
Beth Kanell
THE PORCELAIN MOON
Janie Chang, William Morrow, 2023, $30.00/£20.00, hb, 352pp, 9780063072862
This elegantly written novel follows the travails of two young women in France as the country is torn by World War I. Pauline is Chinese and is in France with her cousin Theo to support the family’s porcelain trade. When the family arranges a marriage she is desperate to avoid, she sneaks out of Paris to obtain Theo’s help. He is a volunteer with the Chinese Labour Corps in France as a translator. In her search for Theo, Pauline finds refuge with Camille, a Frenchwoman married to an abusive man. The two women become friends, each one discovering bit by bit the pain the other is hiding.
The Porcelain Moon skillfully draws the reader into the intense feelings of each character as they plan their escapes from the shackles that trap them. We eagerly follow the developing comradeship of the women, experience the love among the main characters, and applaud their developing bonds as a new family.
The rich descriptions of the settings in the story enliven each page: the darkness of Paris in wartime, the exquisite porcelain on display in the family’s store, the muddy trenches on the front lines in which bodies are entrapped, and Camille’s small cottage filled with anger and fear. And in the unfurling of the story, we learn about a little-known aspect of World War I, the critical role of Chinese workers in supporting France in this war.
Lorelei R. Brush
THE LAST CAROLINA GIRL
Meagan Church, Sourcebooks Landmark, 2023, $27.99, hb, 320pp, 9781728278049
Leah Payne lives with her widowed father in a hamlet in North Carolina, close to the ocean. The shack that serves as their home is owned by the Barna family, her lumberjack father’s employer. When the novel opens in 1935, thirteen-year-old Leah enjoys the nearby woods, tolerates school, and chums around with the Barnas’ son Jesse. Her
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peaceful life soon ends during a devastating storm. The state of North Carolina places Leah with a foster family, the Griffins, far from the shore. Leah hopes the Griffins will incorporate her into their lives. Instead, Mrs. Griffin refuses to send Leah to school and treats her as a servant. Though pining to return to Jesse and the Barna homestead, Leah tries to make the best of her situation, until Mrs. Griffin arranges for a medical procedure that alters the course of Leah’s life.
Megan Church chooses to tell Leah’s story in the first person, capturing her spirit and pulling us into her struggles. Although we suspect that disaster awaits Leah, Church wisely understates foreshadowing. Only halfway through the book do we begin to guess at the specifics, and only toward the end do we learn of the secret the Griffins harbor.
Readers may occasionally wish for more about motivations, particularly about why the Barna family does not keep Leah with them and why Mrs. Griffin grew into a meanspirited woman. Fans of historical fiction, while appreciating the context relating to an appalling aspect of medical history, may expect more about the Great Depression. Most of the action of the novel occurs in 1935, yet the Griffins own two cars and nice clothing. These are minor matters in a riveting and wellcrafted novel.
Marlie Wasserman
A SPYING EYE
Michelle Cox, She Writes, 2022, $17.95, pb, 256pp, 9781647425005
1930s Europe finds Chicagoans Clive and Henrietta Von Harmon returning to London, where they encounter an old friend, Inspector John Hartle. Hitler’s top men are purloining artwork for the Führer’s collection. They are seeking the missing panel of the Ghent Altarpiece, “The Just Judges,” stolen from St. Bavo’s Cathedral in Belgium. A second storyline ensues: Chicago’s Oldrich Exley, Henrietta’s grandfather, disapproves of Henrietta’s sister Elsie’s plans to marry her love interest, impoverished German custodian Gunther Stockel, a former professor she met while a student at Mundelein College. If the union goes forward, Exley will cut off Elsie’s allowance and withdraw her dowry. Gunther is caring for a little epileptic girl, Anna, who has been left in his care, and a generous Henrietta has employed a nurse to look after the child. Meanwhile, Heinrich Meyer appears, claims to be little Anna’s father, and threatens to take her away with him. His grasping wife, Rita, attempts to extort $3000 from Elsie’s family in return for allowing them to keep Anna.
The main storyline returns to Clive and Henrietta at Château du Freudeneck, the ancient seat of the Von Harmon family. Events turn dark as Nazi officers arrive at the castle, searching for the missing panel. After Henrietta learns some shocking information, she and Clive trust a French servant who offers to help them escape. The story of Clive and Henrietta’s
search for the missing Ghent Altarpiece panel is compelling and appropriate to the time when the Nazis conducted ruthless operations to fulfill Hitler’s lust for artwork all over Europe. The second enjoyable feature of this novel lies in the love story binding Clive and Henrietta, who display a humorous yet profound rapport with one another; their romance is a mix of intelligence and sensuality. Sixth in the series.
Gini Grossenbacher
THE WOMAN WITH THE CURE
Lynn Cullen, Berkley, 2023, $17.00, pb, 432pp, 9780593438060
In 1940s and 1950s America, polio is destroying lives, causing paralysis and death, especially to children. Some of the world’s best researchers are racing to find a cure and the scientific glory that comes with that. This is the story of one of those researchers, who happens to be a woman. Dorothy Horstmann, unlike the others, is not concerned with fame or glory. She is an epidemiologist who just wants to find a cure. Her race to prove that the polio virus exists in the blood will be an important step in finding that cure.
Told from the points of view of Dorothy and other underappreciated women in this fight, such as a nurse, a secretary, a mother, and a wife, this novel looks at Dorothy’s efforts in a unique way. The way the top male scientists are portrayed is shocking, as many are not only looking for a cure, but for money and celebrity. The opportunity to follow Dorothy’s work and her travels to various polio hotspots is fascinating. Dorothy herself is such an intriguing study. She truly wants a cure and knows as a woman she is not going to get accolades anyway. Her fight to be heard in a career field that dismissed women at that time is inspiring. The inside look at all of the science and politics involved in developing a vaccine is still relevant in the present time.
This is a well-written, captivating look at a woman who would help find a polio vaccine and would eventually be the first tenured female professor at the Yale School of Medicine. Fans of science, history, and women’s fiction will love this fictional look at a real-life figure in medicine and science.
Bonnie DeMoss
THE TROUBLE WITH TIGERS
Roxane Dhand, Orion, 2022, £9.99, pb, 410pp, 9781398710665
India, 1902. When Lilly Myerson is sent by her controlling husband, Royce, to the hill resort of Nainital to join her mother, Binnie, for the hottest part of the summer, she is reluctant to leave her five-year-old son, Teddy, behind. But away from Royce’s bullying, Lilly begins to rediscover who she really is and make friends, especially with brother and sister Noel and Conti Moore and their houseguest Duffy Putnam, a tiger tamer from Tiffert’s Circus.
When her mother’s reckless actions put Lilly in danger from Royce’s vengeance, the circus seems the only place to hide—though right from the start Lilly knows it can only be a temporary solution to her problems…
This is a highly accomplished novel, peopled by complex characters, most of whom are hiding secrets about themselves. Even Royce avoids being a cardboard cut-out villain because it’s clear many of his problems stem from being mixed race and therefore repeatedly rejected by the white society into which he wants to integrate himself. The setting is vividly evoked, whether it is the closed British expat society in the Himalayas or the tumultuous life of the circus. There is a clever twist in the tale about three-quarters of the way through that made me want to reread the book and find what clues I had missed.
Only occasionally there are snatches of dialogue that feel a bit modern for the period, like Lilly describing her separation from Teddy as being ‘beyond hard’. The District Superintendent of Cawnpore should be addressed as Sir Penderel (first name) rather than as Sir Rivett-Moon (surname), and British people play draughts rather than checkers (the same game under a different name). But these are minor blips and didn’t detract from my thorough enjoyment of this novel.
Jasmina Svenne
THE STRAWBERRY FIELD GIRLS
Karen Dickson, Simon & Schuster, 2022, £22.00, hb, 448pp, 9781398503670
Dickson is garnering an ever-increasing fan base. Her novels weave family lives and dramas, connected by a backdrop of the two World Wars. This fourth book, following hard on the heels of A Songbird in Wartime (2021), tells the story of a seemingly idyllic summer for friends Leah, Alice, and Dora. They agree to spend their time on a farm helping the harvest. But the summer is long, romance beckons for Leah and Alice, and steadfast Dora is left trying to manage it all whilst also caring for her ailing father. Yet for this trio, and the world, a much bigger threat is looming—the threat of war.
With her well-drawn characters and a pullyou-in plot, this is sure to be another hit. The plot and pacing move along consistently, and the world-building is particularly good. The Strawberry Field Girls is packed with courageous characters and interweaves family sagas with all their inherent difficulties. This keeps the reader turning the pages. It’s a big warm-hearted book to lose yourself in on a dark winter’s day curled up with a blanket and a hot drink. The ideal nostalgic comfort read, this will no doubt be a welcome new addition to Dickson’s portfolio. If you haven’t yet discovered Karen Dickson but are fans of authors such as Rosie Goodwin, Val Wood, and Kitty Neale, then this comes recommended.
Katharine Riordan
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THE BALLROOM BLITZ
Anton Du Beke, Orion, 2022, £18.99, hb, 348pp, 9781398710085
Bombs are falling on London, the blackout is in full swing, and Londoners are making for the shelters as soon as the sirens sound, but life for the gentry and others with money to spend hasn’t changed too much. Large hotels in the city still hold their balls, and catering does not seem to be much affected by the rationing. People like professional dancer Raymond de Guise, home recovering from the aftereffects of Dunkirk, are doing their bit as ARP Wardens while others do what they can, on the side, operating the black market.
This story revolves around the people who work and play within the confines of the Buckingham Hotel, one of the top hotels in London. The tale is interesting as it does not concentrate on the war itself but uses it as the background to life in the city at the time. Characterisation varies from those at the bottom of the ladder to those at the top, as they engage in some activities of which I, for one, had no previous knowledge. The characters themselves are well portrayed, and I was soon swept along with all that was happening. The book should appeal to a wide selection of readers, but more especially to those not so interested in the familiar wartime dangers, as it focuses on those who operated in one way or another behind the scenes.
Marilyn Sherlock
ONE PERSON’S LOSS
Ann S. Epstein, Vine Leaves Press, 2022, $17.99, pb, 308pp, 9786188600218
Young and newly married, Erich and Petra have been sent to New York to escape the worsening conditions for Jews in Nazi Germany. Their parents are reluctant to leave the life they have known and are sure that matters won’t come to the unthinkable, but Erich and Petra are their hedge against that bet, the children who will carry the line of two separate families into the future.
When their first hope is dashed by a miscarriage, Petra lets her already precise and slightly obsessive nature take over, convinced that maintaining order down to the placement of shoes on the mat is the only way to keep her world from tilting further. Erich becomes convinced that they should not have children at all in that tilting world. As matters worsen in Germany, they begin a frantic effort to get their parents and siblings out. Throughout, bedeviled by the twin demons of survivor guilt and what would come to be known as PTSD, Erich and Petra struggle to keep their marriage intact through the arrival of one and then a second child.
In sections alternating between their points of view, Epstein paints a skillful picture of the tragedy of the Holocaust mirrored in miniature within each person. The use of a present-tense narrative voice in close third person for each of them gives an immediate sense of the looming and unstoppable horror of the war as each suspected loss is confirmed. The ending is
hopeful if somewhat ambiguous, a reminder that nothing is certain but there is always promise for the future somewhere.
Amanda Cockrell
PAPERBACK JACK
Loren D. Estleman, Forge, 2022, $26.99, hb, 240pp, 9781250827319
Paperback Jack is a love letter to the paperback publishing industry that blossomed in all its tawdry glory after World War II. Jacob Heppleman comes home from the war with a grimmer and grittier knowledge of violence than he had when he wrote short stories for the pulp magazines. He finds that the magazines are dying, to be replaced by the new pocketsized paperback books that sell in drugstores for a quarter, and his name has been changed to Jack Holly—according to his Jewish agent, Heppleman is too Jewish for the times.
As Jack Holly, he writes a book called The Fence and, seeking verisimilitude, scrapes an acquaintance with an actual fence. The book makes money, and Jacob is threatened when it is sold to Hollywood and the fence wants a cut.
Ironically, a worse danger comes from his own government when he is subpoenaed to testify before a Congressional committee investigating the paperback industry. This is the era in which the House Un-American Activities Committee has set its sights on everything from Communists to comic books and the “degenerate” influence of lurid paperback novels with even more lurid covers. They pry into the politics of those testifying before the committee but also into their personal and sexual lives, at a time when to be homosexual, or even thought to be, is to be shunned. The cover artist of The Fence is also caught in their net, accused of leading young men astray.
Written in the (almost) unvarnished vernacular of the late Forties and early Fifties, Paperback Jack is both an affectionate portrait of the book and movie business and a cautionary tale for our times about the dangers of censorship, literary and otherwise. Thoroughly enjoyable and thoughtprovoking.
THE SUNSHINE GIRLS
Molly Fader, Graydon House, 2022, $17.99/ C$22.99, pb, 368pp, 9781335453488
When legendary movie star Kitty Devereaux appears in Greensboro, Iowa, at the funeral of small-town nurse BettyKay Beecher, she shocks not only the close-knit community but also BettyKay’s daughters, Clara and Abbie. If BettyKay had known a famous movie star, why wouldn’t she have told her daughters? BettyKay is not the only one with closelyguarded secrets, though. Not as close as they once were, Clara and Abbie fight more than they confide in one another, even as they struggle with their mother’s death. As the three women grieve, Kitty tells her story, from
a friendship forged in the 1960s at a Midwest nursing school to a testing of that friendship amid the drug-fueled parties of 1970s Los Angeles, from a divergence—as Kitty finds fame behind the cameras and BettyKay finds satisfaction in the Army Nurse Corps—to a shared secret that binds them across the miles. While Clara and Abbie learn more about their mother’s history, their growing relationship to Kitty gives them room to mend their own estrangement.
Fader has packed a lot of heart and history in this novel. From small-town Iowa to the big lights of Hollywood and the battlefield hospitals of Vietnam, Fader explores the tumultuous Sixties and Seventies through the friendship of two strong yet dissimilar women standing firm against the era’s challenges. Clara and Abbie are as fully realized, grappling with their own fragile secrets and fraught relationships in the present. With narrative alternating between the past and the present, interspersed with BettyKay’s diary entries, The Sunshine Girls is a satisfying story of friendship, family, and the lengths we’d go to in order to preserve them both.
Jessica Brockmole
THE MITFORD SECRET
Jessica Fellowes, Minotaur, 2022, $27.99, hb, 291pp, 9781250819222 / Sphere, 2022, £18.99, hb, 384pp, 9780751580679
Louisa Sullivan, former maid for the Mitford family and current private detective, has been invited to stay at the Mitford home in Chatsworth by the youngest daughter, Deborah, for the 1941 Christmas holidays. Though unhappy to leave her husband Guy, home-guard member and head of their detective agency, for a few days, Louisa does not miss the shrill air raids, bombings, and need for carrying gas masks on the streets of London that threaten her and her young daughter, five-year-old Maisie.
Soon after arriving, Louisa is pressed into applying her detective skills when an older woman visitor is found dead: Mrs. Hoole has returned after 25 years, seeking information about her friend, Joan Dorries, another maid who disappeared in 1916.
The Mitford Secret is the sixth and final book in the Mitford Murders series that began in 2017. The books are based on historical texts and memoirs from the eccentric and highly political six daughters of Lord and Lady Redesdale—Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah.
Author of companion volumes to her Uncle Julian’s Downton Abbey series, Jessica Fellowes is a well-regarded author of upstairs/ downstairs society. Though redolent of life among the landed gentry and their servants, The Mitford Secret is slow to get going. Readers become acquainted with the characters over 80-plus pages before even a whiff of the secret materializes. But clever red herrings add spice, and layered revelations top off the bouquet. Striking this reader in particular are the callousness and impatience
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Amanda Cockrell
of the to-the-manor-born toward children as well as staff. A tragic death and the need to investigate it mustn’t interrupt the workings of the household or tarnish the reputation of the landholder. Indeed.
A full-bodied blend of manners and mystery. K. M. Sandrick
THE WINTER ROSE
Katie Flynn, Penguin, 2022, £7.99, pb, 448pp, 9781529135428
A second in series after The Rose Queen, The Winter Rose continues the story of Cadi, now enrolled in the WAAF, and Jez, a mechanic in the RAF. Jez, unbeknown to Cadi, has volunteered to go to the Middle East and pretends he’s been ordered there. The nasty Daphne gives away his secret, meaning that on his return, in time for Christmas, he and Cadi are estranged. In the meantime, Cadi is involved in trying to reunite her friend Izzy, who she’s rescued from an abusive father, with her long-lost mother. The mother has got herself involved with some very nasty characters, and Cadi, Jez, Izzy and a number of others eventually discover where she is and effect a rescue.
I hadn’t read the first in series and found the number of plotlines and characters from book one quite difficult to follow. The story of itself has plenty of twists and turns; however, it would have been good to have more of a sense of the impact of war beyond the difficulty of making a phone call without the operator cutting you off and the crowded nature of the trains. Cadi is promoted to corporal in the WAAF, and a more in-depth description for what that role might entail and insight into Jez’s life in Africa, and the travel to and from there (which seemed to be accomplished with surprising ease), might have given a greater feeling of place and time. The characters themselves are kind, thoughtful, and caring people, apart from the baddies, and overall the story is suitable for a warm Christmas fireside read.
V. E. H. Masters
THE FORGET-ME-NOT SUMMER
Katie Flynn, Penguin, 2022, £7.99, pb, 434pp, 9781787468405
This tale runs along the lines of a Second World War-time Cinderella who is reluctantly taken in by her aunt and first cousin when young Miranda is left without any other relatives to care for her. The saving grace for young Miranda comes in the shape of a neighbour’s son, Steve, with whom she strikes up a close friendship, giving her the opportunity and confidence to escape the subservience of her position in her adopted home. Between them, these children grow into adulthood through many shared adventures and challenges, crossing the divide into a class system they would not otherwise have been welcomed into. This gives Miranda patronage, too, to better herself through work, which leads to her ability to live independently from her difficult relatives. The rigors of living in a war-torn city, target of the Luftwaffe air raids, brings much
sadness and hardship to further the obstacles these young people endure.
The mystery surrounding the disappearance of Miranda’s mother pervades this storyline, but it doesn’t seem terribly plausible throughout the years that follow. Allied to the fact that the title given refers to one summer rather than the many years covered to the book’s ending, the reader is left feeling somewhat misled.
Cathy Kemp
DAUGHTER DALLOWAY
Emily France, Blackstone, 2023, $27.99, hb, 381pp, 9798200813377
Although Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway provides an intriguing frame for Daughter Dalloway, France’s novel stands quite well on its own.
Daughter Dalloway does not have Woolf’s narrative sophistication in manipulating time and place, nor does it have Woolf’s stream-ofconsciousness finesse. However, Woolf would appreciate France’s novel because it, like Mrs. Dalloway, explores the same existential question: how should we live our life? And it analyzes this question in the persons of two immensely interesting young women in what British history has labeled “the bright generation”: Elizabeth Dalloway and Octavia Smith, Septimus Warren Smith’s younger sister who comes to London to find her brother.
The plot action moves between December 8, 1952, and summer 1923, fragile times in the history of the British, as they are still trying to recover from the aftermath of two major world wars and build a stable society where personal goals like meaningful careers and domestic happiness are achievable.
Elizabeth is a young innocent who represents the sophisticated political London gentry. Octavia is likewise a young innocent who represents the rural lower class. They are the major narrators of this novel, and their voices and experiences are complicated and compelling. On the periphery of her plot, France resurrects some of Woolf’s memorable people like Peter Walsh, Sally Seton, Miss Kilman, and, of course, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus and his Italian wife, Lucrezia. In so doing, France provides subtle texture to these characters. She even leavens her novel with a mystery that the reader will find satisfying.
Joanne Vickers
SBS: SPECIAL BOAT SQUADRON
Iain Gale, Head of Zeus, 2022, £20.00, hb, 385pp, 9781801101318
Iain Gale is a military historian, and he assures his readers that Special Boat Squadron is ‘based on historical fact’. However, I am unconvinced that when the British evacuated Crete in 1941 they left behind the plans for the Anglo-American invasion of Italy in 1943 in a safe at the Heraklion air base and that this was never discovered by the Germans. Yet the premise of this book is that the British sent a
mission into occupied Crete in 1942 to retrieve the lost document.
On the other hand, I am sure that the account that Gale gives of the organisation, recruitment, training and operational methods of the Special Boat Squadron (a special section of the Special Boat Service) is fully authentic. So, if you can suspend disbelief as to why all this is happening, you are left with an exciting military action/adventure story.
The debt to the James Bond novels is fully recognized, and Ian Fleming himself has a cameo role. There is even a token Bond girl in the last few pages, although Gale admits that women do not figure greatly in the annals of the SBS. The action is brisk and tense, but it takes a while to get going. The mission does not land in Crete until page 142, but from then on it is a rattling good yarn.
Edward James
A CONFLICT OF INTERESTS
Claire Gradidge, Zaffre, 2022, £8.99, pb, 382pp, 9781838776640
Romsey, Hampshire, 1944: in this third novel in Gradidge’s Josephine Fox series, Jo’s philandering husband, Richard, has briefly reappeared in her life, having escaped from a POW camp. Then he abruptly disappears again. A burning car is discovered with a corpse inside; Richard appears to be implicated in what proves to be a murder, though we are deep into the story, with the tension building continuously, before the identity of the corpse is revealed.
Jo works as assistant to a local solicitor who also acts as coroner, a role which enables her to be the astute but often outspoken detective she naturally is. She is in love with her boss, Bram, the wearer of a partial mask to disguise the mutilation he suffered in the Great War, but he keeps her at a distance (this is 1944, when a separated woman was seen as at least morally ambiguous, if not an actual danger to society).
Jo is both patronised and pursued by the missing Richard’s suavely sinister colleague, Alec Corby-Clifford, and regarded as meddlesome by the local police. But when with the help of a local poacher, she finds evidence they have overlooked, both her life and Bram’s are endangered.
Gradidge captures vividly the impact of war on a rural community, with shortages, privations, and the mixed blessing of the presence of men in uniform. Verisimilitude is enhanced by reference to a real burning car murder, that of an unidentified man in Hardingstone in 1930. This is a cracking read, with a prickly, flawed, believable heroine at its heart.
Katherine Mezzacappa
THIS OTHER EDEN
Paul Harding, W.W. Norton, 2023, $28.00, hb, 224pp, 9781324036296 / Hutchinson Heinemann, 2023, £16.99, hb, 224pp, 9781529152548
In 1793, when Benjamin Honey, a former
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slave, and his wife Patience, an Irish immigrant, arrived at an abandoned Penobscot island off the coast of Maine, it was to escape intolerance and cultivate his dream of an apple orchard – an Eden of his own. Through the decades, his mixed-race descendants became more isolated, only allowing the few to join the community who would work together for survival and protect their peaceful existence.
Harding takes time to lay down the foundation of his story, but the flow picks up when the narrative refocuses on 1911 and the primary storyline of Benjamin’s great-granddaughter Esther, her son, her grandchildren, and the other inhabitants of the island. Harding treats his characters with such compassion and respect that the reader can’t help but fall in love and admire their strength of spirit when we learn of their extreme poverty, hardscrabble existence, quirks and oddities, and heartaches. They know nothing of the world outside their community and have minimal contact from the mainlanders except for Matthew Diamond, a retired schoolteacher, who comes and provides education for the children. His good intentions to make life better for the islanders has increased the attention from the mainlanders, who are appalled and judgmental of these mixed-race people, the inbreeding that has resulted from generations of isolation, and their living conditions. Disastrous and heartbreaking consequences will be the result.
This Other Eden is based on a true story of Malaga Island off the coast of Maine when, in 1912, the government evicted the islanders, eliminated all trace of their existence, and sent some to institutes for the “feeble minded.” The power of Harding’s writing is unequalled as this powerful story will break your heart, and the inhumanity inflicted will haunt you long after the book is closed; but it is a story that must be told.
Janice Ottersberg
THE AFFAIRS OF ASHMORE CASTLE
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, Sphere, 2022, £20.99, hb, 438pp, 9781408725306
England, 1903. Harrod-Eagles’ second novel in the Ashmore Castle series has all the ingredients an assiduous follower of Downton Abbey could wish for: a dowager with her nose seriously out of joint, gossiping servants jostling for position in the belowstairs hierarchy, burgeoning romance across the class divide, and some rather splendid
clothes, even if Ashmore Castle itself has seen better days. The dramatis personae that prefaces the novel itself is essential, especially in keeping track of all the servants, for like any major Edwardian establishment, this one needs a staff to keep it going that outnumbers the resident family. Giles, Lord Stainton, has married money. His young wife loves him, but his heart yearns for another woman and for the freedom to pursue his other passion, Egyptology. Amiable Uncle Sebastian has an unconventional marriage project of his own. The Countess Stainton’s best friend has married an older man, an industrialist and so not quite acceptable amongst old money— though King Edward is quite happy to borrow from him. In the servants’ hall old allegiances and rivalries play out in a suicide and what looks as though it may be a murder, whilst on a cottage on the estate dwells the handsome Axe Brandom, who is shaping up to be the Ted Burgess of the situation.
Harrod-Eagles writes engagingly of a world in which if a lady does not ride sidesaddle, she is a source of scandal; speech and manners are pitch-perfect. The novel is not quite stand-alone. Reading it is a little like watching a television series; plot strands are not so much resolved as left to be tied up in a future novel.
Katherine Mezzacappa
GOODNIGHT FROM PARIS
Jane Healey, Lake Union, 2023, $16.99/£8.99, pb, 413pp, 9781662505294
In 1939 Paris, attractive 36-year-old American actress Drue Leyton bicycles down the boulevards to a café to meet her agent. She had recently married a Frenchman, Jacques, who is away at war. Wanting to remain in France, she’s anxious for a job. She is told of an opening at the French Ministry for a broadcaster to do English-language radio programs aimed at getting attention and help from the U.S. Knowing that the Germans would be listening, Drue is advised not to get too specific in her reports. However, she cannot help but broadcast the truth of Nazi atrocities. She might have been fired, except for the U.S. Ambassador mentioning that President Roosevelt liked what he heard. However, Drue is noted by Hitler and earmarked for execution. When Paris is occupied, Drue hides in the countryside and joins the resistance movement. Using her acting skills and ingenious methods, she continues to support secret agents and downed airmen.
Jane Healey came across actress Drue Leyton’s story while researching another novel and was fascinated by her courage and determination. Although Drue could have escaped to the U.S., she chose to stay in France. Written in Drue’s first-person voice, the intimate narrative makes us feel as if we are alongside the heroine, experiencing her joys, fears, pains, and setbacks. The detailed descriptions of the scenes transport us to WWII-era France: not only Paris, its suburbs,
and the countryside, but also Vichy France. The creative means Drue used to evade the Nazis would have seemed far-fetched in a fictional story, but they are true and remarkable. We also meet several notable real characters, such as Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company. An inspirational story for those who chose to fight evil rather than flee. Highly recommended.
Waheed Rabbani
COMING APART
Karen Heenan, Independently published, 2022, $15.99, pb, 400pp, 9781957081090
This well-written and engrossing story revolves around two sisters whose lives have taken very different paths, and what happens to them as the Great Depression takes its toll. Ava lives with her husband, Daniel, and their five children in a leaky house in a small Pennsylvania mining town. Another child is on the way, but they can barely feed the ones they have. Life gets even harder when Ava’s beloved mother dies. At the funeral she must face her glamorous sister, Claire, who left their hardscrabble existence in order to marry a wealthy man. What Ava doesn’t realize is that while Claire’s life looks perfect, she is an outcast in her own home, resented by her overbearing mother-in-law and relegated to being a mere decoration for her husband. She’s also heartbroken by her inability to bring a child to term.
As the two sisters work to heal the breach between them, Ava’s pride constantly gets in the way while Claire’s inability to stand up to her mother-in-law prevents her from living a fulfilling life. Exacerbating the situation, Daniel leaves on a fruitless quest to Washington, DC with other veterans to demand their promised payment from the government, and a lecherous man won’t keep his hands off Ava’s eldest daughter. Eventually, the sisters realize they must change their ways in order to give the next generation a chance at better lives. Heenan has done her research. Filled with rich details of the lives of coal miners and the many hardships and indignities they suffered at the hands of government officials and mining bosses, the story is also one of resilience, hope, and familial love.
Trish MacEnulty
THE WORLD AND ALL THAT IT HOLDS
Aleksandar Hemon, MCD, 2023, $27.00, hb, 352pp, 9780374287702 / Picador, 2023, £18.99, hb, 352pp, 9780330513326
The narrative territory of The World and All That It Holds stretches from modern Ukraine to Shanghai and encompasses armed conflicts from the Great War to the Second SinoJapanese War. Making his way through this combat-riven wasteland is Bosnian-Jewish everyman Rafael Pinto, displaced from his home in Sarajevo by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the ensuing cataclysm. He encounters a world where
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war has become normal, as an ever-renewing cycle of violence proves devastating to both humans and nature.
A pharmacist turned army surgeon, Pinto knows no respite from the killing, apart from hallucinogenic drugs. But something marvelous happens when he falls in love with handsome Muslim soldier Osman Karisik, who uses his talent for sex and storytelling to draw Pinto under his spell. However, since death conquers every obstacle in this novel, Pinto soon learns to do without his beloved—or does he? In any case, he looks after Osman’s daughter Rahela, whom his friend has asked him to bring to safety. Other stories intertwine with Pinto’s, such as the memoir of Major Moser-Etherington, who appears straight out of Kipling’s Kim
Finally, the idea emerges that this could be a China-box of a novel, a clever, literary puzzle. In a historical novel that invites comparisons with the 20th-century classics The Magic Mountain and Ulysses, Hemon’s superb, challenging technique evokes the stream-of-consciousness tradition, where the narrative voice issues from the depths of the experiencing psyche, rather than from the reasoning, ordering mind. Feelings and sense perceptions take precedence over the sober recounting of events, and instead of a coherent plot, the reader is confronted with a fascinating, Bosch-style canvas depicting the vast Eurasian battlefields, contested grounds long before, and after, 1914.
A tour de force that places Hemon among the greats.
Elisabeth Lenckos
THE KUDZU QUEEN
Mimi Herman, Regal House, 2023, $19.95, pb, 320pp, 9781646033102
Mattie Lee Watson is the charming narrator of this rich and evocative story set in 1940s North Carolina. When Mr. James T. Cullowee arrives in Pinesboro, touting the economic wonders of growing kudzu, teenager Mattie is captivated. She and her younger brother Joey set about planting their own secret crop of kudzu, a fast-growing vine, promoted for its soil rejuvenating properties, but now regarded as an invasive weed. She also finds herself drawn into the competition to be crowned “kudzu queen,” hoping to impress Mr. Cullowee, a handsome charlatan whose true character is gradually revealed.
All the characters, major and minor, in this novel are richly drawn. Much of the drama involves Mattie’s best friend, Lynnette. Lynnette’s mother is dying, and her father is a drunk, leaving Lynnette and her younger sisters
vulnerable. The story touches on some difficult issues including physical abuse, sexual assault, and racial inequality, but with Mattie at the helm telling the story, the mood remains light. Smart, caring, and good-hearted, Mattie can be naïve and indecisive, but as a heroine she proves up to the moment in the end.
Herman has created a memorable and believable world in Pinesboro. This is a story full of humor and tenderness that celebrates family and hard work while acknowledging the challenges life can bring.
Kate Braithwaite
IN THE FALL THEY LEAVE
Joanna Higgins, Regal House, 2023, $19.95, pb, 300pp, 9781646032983
Marie-Thérèse Hulbert is starting her third and final year at nursing school at a small hospital in Brussels, Belgium. Having failed in her previous attempt to become a concert pianist, she is afraid of failing her nursing studies, too, and is desperate to earn the approval of the matron of the hospital. It is August 1914, and the Great War is about to begin. Her city will be occupied by the German army and her hospital used for treating injured German troops.
But she finds that the matron she so much admires has a secret. Hidden away in an unused area, she is also treating wounded Allied troops and helping them to escape to safety. Marie-Thérèse, struggling to cope in a city occupied by the enemy, becomes deeply involved in nursing these troops and helping them on their way.
The subtext beneath this novel is the truth that the matron (never named in the story) is in fact the famously tragic British nurse Edith Cavell, executed by the Germans for nursing these Allied troops. This novel of the young nurse is a carefully wrought portrayal of those times and the heroism of Edith Cavell and others like her.
This concept unfolds beautifully in this wellpaced and vivid novel. Characters are skillfully developed, from Marie-Thérèse herself to the elderly gardener with his pigeons. Even the enemy is shown in some cases to display deep understanding and humanity. And yes, there is an element of romance both subtle and realistic to the time and place.
A powerful and moving novel, this is very hard to lay aside. The story and its characters remain in the mind and imagination for a long time.
Valerie Adolph
THE CAMDEN MURDER
Mike Hollow, Allison & Busby, 2022, £19.99, hb, 384pp, 9780749028749
This is the seventh in the Blitz Detective series set in London in World War Two, featuring Detective Inspector John Jago of London’s East End police. Seconded to work in Scotland Yard, Jago and his ever-present young assistant Peter Cradock are summoned to attend the death of a chocolate salesman
Les Latham, whose charred body is found in a blazing car in Camden, in north London.
This is an excellent police procedural, authentic and detailed in historical context. The emphasis is on uncovering evidence through interviews and solid police work rather than the construction and solution of a convoluted whodunnit. As Jago investigates Latham’s life, all sorts of skeletons come clattering out of his and other people’s cupboards. Latham was hugely ambitious, a trait which led to his murder. Detective Constable Cradock seems to be still just a little too naïve in his role as the Watson-like foil to Jago’s wisdom, experience and superior detection—the author uses Cradock’s banal questions and analysis to allow Jago to amplify his thinking for the reader to assess the evidence. And Cradock’s continual yearning for food does get a little monotonous as a long-running gag. Nevertheless, this is excellent historical fiction, and Jago is a fundamentally decent, likeable sort of chap, and the reader is always wholly on his side in his battle to maintain law and order in war-torn London.
Douglas Kemp
A DAUGHTER’S WAR
Emma Hornby, Penguin, 2022, £7.99, pb, 314pp, 9780552178112
Bolton, England, 1939. Nasty brute Ivan Rushmore keeps daughter Renee, aged 17, on such a short lead that she hardly knows what day it is, having neither newspapers nor radio in the house. Mam fled long ago, thus Dad has had all of Renee to himself since she turned 14. The poor lass is only allowed out to the local shops, and woe betide her if there’s any dillydally or chit-chat. Despite Ivan’s threats, she befriends an aunt-like neighbour who knew her Mam. Then war is declared. At breaking point, Renee successfully executes an escape plan but, even in her new happy life, feels so tainted that she cannot accept boyfriend Jimmy’s proposal. His reply brings another of several ‘aah’ moments but, just when she’s feeling safer, Jimmy is conscripted and more worryingly, her letters to him go unanswered. Further twists reawaken her nightmare, and she must again dig brave and deep to extricate herself.
From incestuous rapes to an inglorious yet fitting retribution, the narrative nips along in this story full of local knowledge and dialect. The rape scenes themselves have a credibility that only a female writer could bring, as Renee seeks out her go-to happy head space to numb the continual grotesque physical interference. The perils, chaos and terror of a night-time bombing raid are excellently conveyed, and the denouement isn’t certain until the very end. A tale of violence, love, and friendship, well worth a read.
Simon Rickman
HUNGRY GHOSTS
Kevin Jared Hosein, Harper, 2023, $30.00, hb, 352pp, 9780063213388
Trinidad in the early 1940s is no place for
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the weak. Never-ending heat and humidity spawn nightly thunderous rain storms. Ants, flies, mosquitos and scorpions pester constantly. Indian immigrant families get by on backbreaking farm labor, low wage jobs in town, or scavenging. Fathers often succumb to cheap rum and abuse their women. Tropical diseases take a heavy toll. The local police are inept, and don’t lift a finger for anyone of a Hindu background.
This story centers on the struggles of two families. Wealthy Dalton Changoor and his beautiful wife, Marlee, own the region’s only estate. Their head groundskeeper, Hansraj Saroop (Hans), and his wife and son live down the hill in a one-room space next to other poor families also occupying leaky “barracks” rooms. One day Dalton leaves quietly in his pickup but does not come home. Marlee cajoles Hans to spend nights in the estate for protection until Dalton returns. As wealthy Marlee and the barracks families intertwine even more, their already hard lives spin out of control. Hans’s wife gets a nasty splinter infection. Their son spies on his father. Ransom demands tied to rocks smash through Marlee’s estate windows. Gruesome backstories are interspersed throughout the main story.
In opening notes, Hosein explains the influence of Trinidad storytelling on this work. His lyrical prose does flow like someone just talking about former times and people. The characters’ dialogue and deeper thoughts unfold with an authentic blend of English and the local patois. Morbidly detailed resolutions of many subplots will not appeal to readers sensitive to over-the-top violence. But the land, the food, and the hard lives portrayed in Hungry Ghosts will stay with those who finish this saga.
G. J. Berger
THE SECRETS WE KEEP
Theresa Howes, HQ, 2022, £8.99, pb, 343pp, 9780008547882
It is 1944, and artist Marguerite Segal is working undercover for British Intelligence in the south of France. Her work brings her into contact with the enigmatic priest Etienne Valade, to whom she is instantly attracted. But is Etienne a Nazi sympathizer? Can she trust him, and can she persuade the local townspeople that she herself is not a collaborator? At the same time Marguerite is guarding secrets of her own, and as her past starts to catch up with her, she comes to realise that no-one is what they seem.
The Secrets We Keep is the story of a town living in fear, a place where suspicion is rife and where people will betray their neighbours to protect themselves and their families. The reader feels a real sense of menace as a small community—half-starved due to a lack of rations and subjected to random punishments by the occupiers—starts to turn in upon itself. The tension is ramped up as the Germans tighten their grip, knowing that they are losing the war. And, as Marguerite’s friends start to disappear, she is left not knowing which way to turn. I found this a page-turning portrayal of the stark realities of living in Occupied France.
Recommended for anyone who enjoys wartime novels.
Karen Warren
SOMEWHERE TO CALL HOME
Elizabeth Jeffrey, Canelo, 2022, £1.99, ebook, 293pp, B0BBL92WWV
Stella Nolan gets off the train with a valise in her hand and a black armband on her sleeve. The Great War is over; the world is finally at peace, yet the people seem tired and warworn. Meeting her at the station is Henry Hogg, Major Anderson’s handyman. She is going to meet the family of her deceased husband, John. In the kitchen, the servants, including day worker Emma, discuss the young widow. Emma has a drunk, unemployed husband and a sick child, dying of consumption, at home. Stella’s reception is not as warm as John had led her to expect. In fact, his sister Rosalie is blatantly hostile. Stella discovers she is pregnant, and despite frostiness, motherin-law Doreen invites her to stay with them permanently. Henry drives her and Rosalie’s paraplegic husband Philip into town, and Philip insists on hosting his sister-in-law and his servant in a tearoom. Doreen is not best pleased with the town gossip, but Stella stands up to her bravely.
Tragedy hits the downstairs staff, and the Missus is only concerned with who will set the table. Doreen fusses intrusively over the ‘precious bundle’, interfering with Stella’s capable parenting. Tensions never get better with her mother-in-law, though Stella defends herself better than I could ever do. Finally, when Doreen creates a ‘scandal’ out of nothing, Stella has had enough. Family snobbery and social conventions overcome, Stella finds her way into a new life with her son, and finds new love, too.
The tender ways in which people, surviving the war, appreciated one another are heartwarming and intimate. Doreen is just too horrid to be credible. It ends happily ever after. This post-war family saga is a lovely story of postwar Britain. It would suit the YA readership, I think.
Susie Helme
BLUE DESERT
Celia Jeffries, Rootstock Publishing, 2021, $16.95, pb, 301pp, 9781578690442
Blue Desert is a hauntingly beautiful novel about Alice, a young Englishwoman whose family moves to Morocco in 1910. After a car accident, she is rescued by the Tuareg, a nomadic tribe of the Sahara. As she travels with their caravan, Alice learns to love the freedom of their lifestyle, so different from the constricted upper-class British society she knows. Then she falls in love with Abu, the leader of the caravan, and bears his child.
As World War I rages, Alice is forced to return home, leaving her son behind. She has a hard time adjusting to her former lifestyle, and she never speaks of her experiences in
the Sahara to anyone, not even her husband Martin, a prominent diplomat. Then, in 1970, Alice receives a telegram saying Abu is dead and her son is coming to England. As her past catches up with her, she begins to tell her family about her life in the desert, and Martin pieces together what she leaves unsaid.
Celia Jeffries’ prose is lyrical, almost like poetry, and she makes you feel the heat of the desert, see the colors of the sand, and even taste the Moroccan food. You feel as if you are in the Sahara with Alice. Alice is a strong, independent heroine who rebels against conventional society as a young girl and embraces the freedom of the desert. Abu, her Tuareg lover, is an enigmatic figure, obviously drawn to Alice, and yet he has a violent side, which you glimpse in one shocking moment. I was fascinated by the Tuareg society, where the women hold power and property, and the men wear blue veils, from which they earn their nickname “the blue men of the desert,” and travel across the Sahara in caravans. I highly recommend this book.
Vicki Kondelik
THE HOUSE OF EVE
Sadeqa Johnson, Simon & Schuster, 2023, $27.99, hb, 384pp, 9781982197360
The House of Eve explores culture, class, and the sometimes-heartbreaking complications of motherhood within the contrasting worlds of Black families in Washington, DC, and Philadelphia in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. Eleanor is the first of her family to go to college, but she comes from a loving, middleclass family determined to push her upward. It isn’t until she arrives at Howard University that she realizes there is a whole other Black world (called “Negro” in this novel in deference to the polite term of the time) of light-skinned, wealthy professionals who are less than pleased when their medical-student son, William, brings Eleanor home.
In contrast, fifteen-year-old Ruby has one shot out of the poverty that has been her family’s permanent birthright, a scholarship to college, but when she falls for the son of their Jewish landlord, the consequences upend her life. Told in chapters alternating between Eleanor and Ruby, we follow both women as Ruby tries to fight her way out of her world and Eleanor to find her place in William’s. The author’s choice to cast Eleanor’s voice in close third person and Ruby’s in first gives Ruby’s chapters a physicality and grittiness that contrast with Eleanor’s more interior upheavals.
At the center, almost from the beginning,
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is the question of motherhood. Eleanor and Ruby and most of the women surrounding them wrestle in one way or another with what it means to be a mother, to raise a child, abandon a child, to long for a child you can’t have, or to raise someone else’s. The answers they come to are fraught, even at the end, with potential anguish; as with every other mother in the novel, they do the best they can with what they have.
Amanda Cockrell
THE LOST ENGLISH GIRL
Julia Kelly, Gallery, 2023, $28.99, hb, 416pp, 9781982171704
This story is set against the backdrop of World War II and the eventual evacuation of thousands of British children from the cities to safe havens in the countryside. It tells the tale of Viv Byrne, who makes the agonizing decision to relocate her only child, with catastrophic consequences.
Viv grows up in a strict Catholic family in Liverpool. After two dates with Joshua Levinson, a handsome Jewish musician, Viv finds herself pregnant—the worst possible sin for a good Catholic girl. Marriage takes place, but Viv’s mother offers Joshua money to go to New York and walk out of her daughter’s life. Joshua agrees, believing the situation will only be temporary. But four years later, Viv is, for all intents and purposes, a single mom to daughter Maggie when the Germans begin heavy bombing in Liverpool.
Believing that Maggie will be safer with another family in the countryside, Viv allows the local priest to relocate her daughter, utterly unaware that the priest is giving her to his sister, who can’t have children. Then the Blitz intensifies, and Maggie becomes lost.
How Viv copes and what happens to Joshua provide the remainder of the story. Well-paced, highly emotional, and laced with enough historical details to make the reader feel the effects of war, this novel is an excellent read with a satisfying ending. I particularly liked learning about Britain’s massive relocation of children during the war. A list of one or two nonfiction books on this effort would have been a helpful reference.
Linda Harris Sittig
WE FLY BENEATH THE STARS
Suzanne Kelman, Bookouture, 2022, $11.99/ C$15.99/£9.99, pb, 376pp, 9781803143811
Inspired by the true story of the women’s combat unit of the Soviet Air Force during World War II, Kelman’s version centers on two relationships: Luca and Tasha, childhood lovers; and Tasha and her unhappily married older sister, Nadia. When Stalin’s call to defend the homeland against the Nazi invasion is extended to women, a female unit of flyers is created, one which becomes known as “The Night Witches.” Tasha joins immediately, mostly in the hopes of seeing Luca, already enlisted in the regular air force. After Nadia’s
dour husband is called up, she joins also, and there Tasha resumes her competitive relationship with her older sister.
Life within the unit, the training, and the aircraft is mostly well-researched, as the reader follows the maturing of these young people. Flying elderly and ill-equipped cropdusters is life-threatening during their nightly combat missions, during which the deaths of comrades and friends mount. This same basic story was very well-served by Kate Quinn’s excellent historical novel, The Huntress, which does not contain the distracting writing sometimes found in We Fly Beneath the Stars Here, characters fall into American modern turns of phrase, such as “make it happen,” or “have your back”; an overabundance of stomach-clenching and tightening, whether in romantic or combat situations; and the use of Hollywood movie-speak in their declarations of love, even during bombing runs. In addition, Tasha improbably gropes her young man, whether impossibly in a two-seater biplane, or during what should have been a moving farewell in public. However, the many fans of Kelman’s romantic historical fiction will not be disappointed by We Fly Beneath the Stars, and its tale of love and sacrifice.
Constance Emmett
THE STONE MAIDENS
Ioulia Kolovou, Blackwater Press, 2022, $19.99, pb, 288pp, 9781735774763
In 1948, a schoolteacher comes to Milagros Riquelme’s dusty village in rural Argentina for the first time. The young girl, whose family had once only aspired for her to work like her mother as a maid in the Big House, flourishes under the teacher’s instruction. Milagros studies and excels, and she has a chance to earn a scholarship to Buenos Aires. The wealthy family that dominates the town, however, does not embrace First Lady Eva (Evita) Perón’s public school plan, and Milagros’s pretty figure catches the eye of the family’s handsome young son. When Eva dies unexpectedly, the echoes resonate all the way to Milagros’s small town, changing her life forever.
The novel begins with the epigraph “At the end of the day, history is no more than an infinite succession of personal histories,” and Kolovou holds true to that promise. Milagros’s story winds through and between nearly a dozen other characters’ tales, some of whom flit onto the page for mere paragraphs, others who join her narrative for decades. Together they combine to paint a moving portrait of 20th-century Argentine life, with barely any references to headlining political events. This is history as lived by mere humans, each with their foibles and distractions and heartbreak.
Kolovou has chosen to skim over her characters’ headlining events, too, skipping the assaults and arrests and reunions. Instead, the story focuses on the before and after, the ripples glimmering across the pond, not the stones thrown. The result is an intimate, bittersweet journey—much like life.
Carrie Callaghan
THE COUNTESS OF THE REVOLUTION
Lana Kortchik, HQ Digital, 2022, £8.99/$16.99, pb, 352pp, 9780008512613
Countess Sophia Orlova sometimes wishes her dull life was alleviated by some adventure. The March 1917 revolution in Petrograd is not quite what she has in mind, but the irony is not lost on her. When the revolutionaries take up residence and lay waste to the grand mansion she has shared with her husband, Dmitry, Sophia is equally outraged and afraid. One particularly cruel man threatens their lives, but they are saved by the sudden appearance of Dmitry’s brother, Nikolai, a respected Bolshevik leader and medical doctor. Sophia admires Nikolai’s strength of purpose, gradually falling in love. He turns their home into a makeshift hospital, and she finds new meaning in her life while acting as his nurse. Under his protection she braves the streets, seeing firsthand the destruction, poverty, starvation, and bloodshed. As the balance of power shifts, Nikolai is arrested and sentenced to death. Having lost everything important to her, Sophia and Dmitry leave Petrograd for Kislovodsk, scraping by peaceably for a while. Nikolai unexpectedly avoids his fate. The refugees trek into the mountains with the retreating Cossacks, who vow to reinstate the monarchy. Then comes July 1918, and news from Ekaterinburg.
Part one is a compelling read, filled with research on the cause and effect of revolution, offering insight into its many complexities. The author symbolically addresses the rich vs. poor debate. Nikolai is committed to his Bolshevik calling but accepts there will be inevitable upheaval and bloodshed. Juxtaposed against his idealism, Dmitry seems changeable and purposeless. Part two is less convincing, leaning towards romantic sentimentality in places, which slowed the novel’s momentum for this reader. Still, this is an interesting look at one of history’s watershed moments.
Fiona Alison
JUST MURDERED
Katherine Kovacic, Poisoned Pen Press, 2023, $16.99, pb, 288pp, 9781728260136
The lively spirit of the Adventuress Club, Phryne Fisher’s group of admirable and courageous women in Melbourne, Australia, would be instantly recognized today—just as Peregrine Fisher, Phryne’s niece, takes it all in, as of 1960. Katherine Kovacic’s lively first-inseries follows what Kerry Greenwood presented as the “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” books (and a TV series via public broadcasting). As Peregrine meets the club members, Phryne has been missing for six months, so a special letter was dispatched. Nobody, least of all Peregrine, expected it to connect with a penniless young woman ready to hitchhike for several days to reach the group that has summoned her. But she embraces the challenge!
Peregrine demonstrates her resolve by breaking into the club, and cheerfully attempts to take her aunt’s seat. But a gasp of horror
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from Phryne’s friends (who hope she’s not dead) leads to an explanation: If Peregrine wants to join, she’ll have to prove her mettle. Happily, she opts to become an investigator on the spot, since one of the club members stands accused of murder.
High-society barriers and police corruption stand in Peregrine’s way. However, as she begins to learn the skills that her noted aunt delivered and adapt them to her own much younger style, she’s also clearly a chip off the block, so to speak: happily driving Phryne’s fancy car, uncovering the secrets of Phryne’s home, and maneuvering through obstacles even when a second murder pushes the stakes higher.
Lighthearted and well written, Just Murdered offers an enjoyable portrait of friendship among women who are smart, savvy, and often highly educated. Peregrine fits in after all—and the as-yet unexplained disappearance of her aunt suggests good sequels to come.
Beth Kanell
CODE NAME EDELWEISS
Stephanie Landsem, Tyndale, 2023, $15.99, pb, 432pp, 9781496460677
In summer 1933, beautiful and talented Liesl Weiss works for MGM as a typist and stenographer. All studios are laying off, and MGM lets her go. Liesl’s husband and the father of their two small children recently walked out, leaving behind a goodbye note and a week’s pay. Hitler is on the rise, and his influence has reached California. Liesl’s Jewish friends and neighbors are mistreated by local shops and at school. Liesl’s brother, a newly hired cop, has joined a pro-Nazi group. Liesl’s widowed German mother runs the house and watches Liesl’s children.
Desperate to find work, Liesl hires on as a spy for powerful real-life lawyer Leon Lewis. He sees the Nazi infiltration into Southern California and tries to thwart it. Liesl volunteers as the all-around staffer at a local German office, where she fits right in—tall, blonde, able to speak and write fluent German. There she learns of plans to oust American Jews, kill Jewish Hollywood producers, and install Nazi loyalists to take over Hollywood movie productions. Lewis hires other spies, notably shadowy Agent Thirteen, a former private investigator and Pinkerton detective. Liesl and Agent Thirteen work together, but few others can be trusted. The local police, the FBI, studio staff all have Nazi loyalists. Honest law enforcement people don’t yet believe the threat.
The impact of the Great Depression on Hollywood and WWI veterans with no jobs is well done, and Hitler’s influence rings true. Liesl and Agent Thirteen are engaging characters. Though well-paced from the first pages to the helter-skelter ending, the story’s many plot lines seem unresolved. The story might have worked better if split into two novels with parts of this one saved for the sequel.
G. J. Berger
PRIZE WOMEN
Caroline Lea, Harper Perennial, 2023, $19.00, pb, 464pp, 9780063244344 / Michael Joseph, 2023, £18.99, hb, 448pp, 9780241492987
Poverty may strip a woman of basic support, and abuse can take her self-esteem as well as her safety. But if she has children she loves, she’ll fight for them. That’s the premise Caroline Lea offers across a decade of two women’s lives, beginning outside Toronto, Canada, in 1926. Lily di Marco, an Italian immigrant abruptly widowed after her husband’s violence cost her pregnancies and threatened her life, has little awareness of the world beyond her home. But when she seizes her chance and runs away with her young child, fate crosses her path with that of the glamorous Mae Thébault, who lives in the bewilderingly large city of Toronto under conditions that look unbelievably elegant to Lily.
Yet Lily readily senses Mae’s tormented emotions and offers the tender caring that Mae needs so badly. The two women become interdependent and stronger—until a contest posed by a dying childless millionaire, leaving his fortune to the woman who bears the most children in the ten years after his death, pits the two against each other. Under the tumult, the true enemy for both women as they struggle through the Great Depression comes in the accusations of men who accuse Lily in particular of manipulating the contest. Her insight, through her grief, is this: “To make someone understand, she would have to starve them, and then give them nine children to look after.”
Lea’s writing, deceptively straightforward in phrasing and pace, lays bare the true costs of poverty, bigotry, and misogyny. Prize Women offers heartache and tragedy—only the bonding of two women who come to understand sacrificial love between equals can provide another resolution.
Beth Kanell
THE BOOK OF GOOSE
Yiyun Li, FSG, 2022, $28.00/C$37.00, hb, 348pp, 9780374606343 / Fourth Estate, 2022, £16.99, hb, 368pp, 9780008531812
Two teenage friends in 1950s rural France navigate a stultifying existence. Fabienne is original, bright, and unpredictable; Agnès follows her lead. The friends conspire to publish a novel, deciding that Fabienne will write it, while Agnès, who is more photogenic, will claim authorship. The ensuing events take Agnès away from France and away from Fabienne, changing their friendship forever.
The novel shares elements with Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend series, but this is a much sparer depiction of an intense and formative female friendship. The novel opens with Fabienne’s death, leaving Agnès to ruminate over the past, including the ways in which Fabienne did not really know her. As the narrator, or writer, of the book we are reading, Agnès pours her memories, love, and
bitterness into what seems like a defense of herself to the late Fabienne.
The title is a subtly drawn metaphor that Agnès uses to explain her slower, less demonstrative intelligence when compared to Fabienne’s obvious brilliance. Her in-laws call her “Mother Goose,” and she remembers, or imagines, Fabienne calling her a “silly goose” and deriding her dullness. But geese, Agnès thinks, are “tranquil… If [they] ever dream, they alone know that the world will never be allowed even a glimpse of those dreams, and they alone know the world has no right to judge them.” She grapples with who she is and who she was, making for an atmospheric and evocative coming-of-age story.
Elizabeth Crachiolo
THE SNOW HARE
Paula Lichtarowicz, Little, Brown, 2023, $29.00/C$37.00/£16.99, hb, 384pp, 9780316461351
As Lena, the heroine of The Snow Hare, lies dying, her memory travels from the peaceful hills of Wales to her native Poland, a country riven by the tragedies and injustices of occupation and war. Although she has made a life for herself and her family on a British farm, Lena is, in these final days, transported back to her Polish youth when she dreamt of studying medicine and becoming a doctor. A shocking accident put an end to her ambition, and Lena allowed her parents to bully her into marriage with Anton, a soldier. Anton swears never to touch his wife, but he breaks his promise, and Lena soon discovers that she is pregnant. Although she never wanted children, she turns into a devoted mother after giving birth to little Agatha.
All too soon, the Soviet occupation of Poland upends her newfound happiness. After the Russians arrest Lena’s husband, she, her child, and her family are deported to a Siberian labor camp where the conditions are so desperate, inmates regard death as a release. But unexpectedly for Lena, the surrounding woods turn into a place of enchantment, where she encounters the love of her life. When her lover falls gravely ill, she uses her medical knowledge to nurse him. But far greater trials await Lena, and tragedy strikes just as the Soviet government decides she is no longer considered an enemy of the state.
The Snow Hare is a moving portrayal of the plight of the Polish people in the 20th century, a story about the human capacity for hope, love, and redemption in the direst circumstances. The parts of the novel taking place in snow-swept Siberia are spellbinding. A soul-stirring novel, despite the horrors depicted on its pages.
Elisabeth Lenckos
PARIS REQUIEM
Chris Lloyd, Pegasus Crime, 2023, $27.00, hb, 352pp, 9781639362660
Paris, 1940. The Germans have occupied the city. First-person narrator, Eddie Giral, is
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an intelligent, sensitive police inspector who describes his situation as “a world on borrowed time.” The son of a book dealer, a veteran of the Great War, former German prisoner of war, and a man who has deserted his wife and son as well as significant friends, Eddie is emotionally and morally conflicted.
The plot follows Eddie as he tries to solve a significant crime: the mysterious release of career criminals into the population, where they continue to perpetrate crimes of ugly theft and grisly murder. His work is hampered by the interference of the Abwehr, the Gestapo, the German intelligence service, and even his own police force. At the same time, Eddie feels he must make amends to the people he has hurt in the past; his attempts to do so put his life in danger from many sides. He must continually attempt to determine whom to trust, whom to suspect, where to hide, where to seek answers.
Lloyd paints a vivid picture of Paris: the lines of people trying to buy highly rationed food, the jazz clubs where they try to escape their miseries, and their persistent attempts to block out the brutal facts of the occupation. The plot action is suspenseful and intense. The characters—both heroes and villains—are vividly drawn. This is definitely a captivating read!
Joanne Vickers
THE LAST RUSSIAN DOLL
Kristen Loesch, Berkley, 2023, $27.00, hb, 416pp, 9780593547984
The Last Russian Doll is a dual-timeline novel set mostly in Russia. In 1991, Rosie (Raisa) is engaged to be married and taking care of her mother in London. When her mother dies suddenly, she leaves Rosie a key and a mystery. Rosie applies for a job in Russia, hoping to take that key and answer a lifetime’s worth of questions. In 1915, Antonina (Tonya) is trapped in a loveless marriage as the Bolshevik revolution is beginning.
This is a gorgeous saga, filled with mystery and Russian fairytales. The history of 20thcentury Russia is told through the eyes of two women. The story encompasses many devastating events: the 1917 Revolution, the Russian Civil War, Stalin’s purges, and the siege of Leningrad during WWII. Rosie arrives back in Russia as the Soviet Union is nearing its end, determined to make sense of her past. The weaving together of the stories of Rosie and Tonya is a perfect tapestry of tragedy, romance, and survival. Fairytales and porcelain dolls add another intriguing layer. This magical but tragic blend of history and fiction transports us straight to Russia during
many turbulent periods in its past. It is an absolutely mesmerizing read.
Fans of Russian history and folklore, and anyone who just wants to read an amazing novel, should pick this one up immediately.
Bonnie DeMoss
THE WHISPERING WOMEN
Trish MacEnulty, Prism Light Press, 2022, $17.99, pb, 387pp, 9781737575177
MacEnulty has created an unusual and thoroughly engaging new partnership in this, the first installment of her mystery series set in Gilded Age New York City.
Louisa Delafield is the only surviving child of a once-prominent member of the upper echelons of New York society; the scandal which resulted in her father’s destruction has stripped almost everything that remained to the family and has forced Louisa to step up and become the breadwinner. A talented writer, Louisa becomes a journalist with a regular society column in one of the city’s newspapers. But that’s not what the increasingly insightful and independent Louisa wants to write about, and being forced into that socially approved box is infuriating.
Ellen Malloy is a lady’s maid in the household of a family well-known to Louisa. Recently arrived from Ireland, Ellen befriends another maid who has been impregnated by the master of the house. In witnessing the botched abortion, Ellen’s life is in peril.
How these two women join forces to confront their mutual lack of equality and power in this dramatically changing society is a well-plotted and marvelous journey. The critical issues of women’s suffrage, contraception, abortion, and living in a closeted world—all issues still in play more than 100 years after MacEnulty’s narrative—are all focal to the character development and point of view. It’s also a glorious trip through 1913 New York City, and traveling around Manhattan (and getting to attend the opening of Grand Central Station where I commute to and from) was utterly enjoyable for this New Yorker.
I highly recommend The Whispering Women and am anxiously looking forward to MacEnulty’s next installment in the series.
Ilysa Magnus
MOTHER DAUGHTER TRAITOR SPY
Susan Elia MacNeal, Bantam, 2022, $28.00, hb, 320pp, 9780593156957
June 1940 has been a momentous month for Veronica Grace, who graduated from college and lost her job at practically the same time. She and her mother, Violet, seize the opportunity to move from New York to Los Angeles and start fresh with help from Violet’s brother, Walter.
Determined to move forward and be independent, Veronica takes a job as a typist but quickly learns that she is working for a strident Nazi propagandist. Violet and Veronica are dismissed by the FBI when they
bring them this information, so they begin working undercover with spymasters Ari Lewis and Jonah Rose. Action ensues as the bombing of Pearl Harbor approaches and Veronica and Violet find increasingly clever ways to infiltrate the California Reich and thwart their plans.
The novel is well-paced and the characters feel real without being overly serious. Moments of levity around Violet’s menopause, for example, add depth without weighing the book down. Readers will also enjoy the way MacNeal weaves in figures such as the Roosevelts and Herbert Hoover.
Veronica, Violet, Ari, and Jonah are all based on real people, as are several other characters in the book. MacNeal provides a brief but helpful foreword to explain a bit about who the four main characters in her novel actually were. There’s also an afterword that details who various characters are based on and gives a bit of information about them. Acknowledgments, sources, and historical notes sections are very gratifying for history buffs looking for glimpses into the historical figures behind these escapades.
Amy Watkin
THE VIENNA WRITERS CIRCLE
J. C. Maetis, MIRA, 2023, $27.99/$34.99, hb, 410pp, 9780778333715 / Penguin, 2023, £8.99, pb, 400pp, 9780241998892
The German annexation of Austria in 1938 plunges its cosmopolitan European capital into the nightmare of authoritarian restrictions and genocide that had already gathered efficiency in Hitler’s Reich. Men of various backgrounds try first to negotiate and then to survive the regime and save the ones they love.
The author has chosen to write under this pseudonym to celebrate his Lithuanian Jewish victim ancestors. He is well-known British thriller author John Matthews. This led me to expect a tighter, more compelling plot.
The Circle of the title evokes Freud’s famous Circle of Viennese luminaries, but again this lure disappointed me. A nod was given to the institution: photos incriminating Jews who belonged to this salon are destroyed or hidden to throw the SS off the trail. Crime novelists, such as two of our heroes are portrayed, almost certainly did not find a place in Freud’s “gentlemen’s room.” Indeed, I find it difficult to imagine that there were, in fact, any making a living at such a craft in war-torn Austria. Of course, the Nazis burned books, Freud’s and those of other literary lights. But this rendition makes no mention of the paper shortages. And crime novels are the most seditious thing you can come up with to write?
It is a potentially tension-raising fact that many Jews, whole families, resorted to taking on new identities and lives. Still, when we add these new names to an already poorly differentiated cast, hopeless relinquishment overcomes the reader.
Page 232 is where the first indication of “writing to save my life” appears. In fact, it is not writing; it is editing. And when the work
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and corrections are so mundane, the author is best warned away from including them in his work, lest the fictional editor’s complaints tempt the reader to unfavorable comparisons with the real work she holds in her hands.
Ann Chamberlin
THE BOOK OF EVERLASTING THINGS
Aanchal Malhotra, Flatiron, 2022, $29.99, hb, 480pp, 9781250802026
In 1937 Lahore, India, ten-year-old Samir, a Hindu boy, begins an apprenticeship in his uncle Vivek’s perfumery. Vivek had served with the British forces during WWI in Europe and arrived home with a box of perfume vials. In 1938, nine-year-old Firdaus comes to the shop with her father, a Muslim calligrapher. When Firdaus meets Samir, it’s love at first sight.
Wanting to print better labels on perfume bottles, Samir takes the calligrapher’s weekly lessons, also attended by Firdaus. Over the next seven years, while WWII rages, and with the Indian independence movement gathering momentum, Samir writes secret letters weekly to Firdaus. In 1947, when a Muslim homeland, Pakistan, is partitioned, bloody violence between Hindu and Muslim communities breaks out. Fortunately, Samir escapes, and while Firdaus remains in Lahore, Pakistan, he travels to Delhi in India. Both must make crucial decisions about their future.
Aanchal Malhotra, it seems, has relied on her research for her two award-winning nonfiction books on India’s Partition. But the inclusion of perfumery must have required more in-depth investigation. Exciting details of both Western and Eastern perfumes are illustrated, such as the origin of the Arabian Rose, whose petals were brought to Mecca on camels’ backs for distillation with sandalwood oil. While the events leading up to, during, and following the Partition are central, the inclusion of Vivek’s, Samir’s, and their descendants’ time in Europe make it a long novel. While these chapters, particularly those of the Indian soldiers’ service in WWI, are interesting, some readers might find themselves skimming them.
Malhotra’s depiction of the love affair between a Hindu and a Muslim, and their separation, is an allegory for the present situation between Indian and Pakistani citizens. A sentimental story and an informative read.
Waheed Rabbani
SCATTERLINGS
Rešoketšwe Manenzhe, HarperVia, 2022, $26.99/£20.00, hb, 275pp, 9780063264113
The Immorality Act of 1927 has just been passed, criminalizing interracial relationships and the children born of them, and many South Africans are troubled over how this will affect their families. Abram, a white man from Holland, and his wife, Alisa, a Black woman from the Caribbean, are caught in this legal
quagmire and take very different approaches to protect themselves and their two young daughters.
Both Abram and Alisa are outsiders in South Africa, relying on their nanny Gloria from Transvaal, who follows the ways of the ancestors and does her best to keep the family from being haunted while trying to help them feel at home in her country. The tale is simultaneously heartbreaking and soothing, as the villain assemblyman Daniel Ross persists in investigating these rumored law breakers and Abram makes a hard decision best encapsulated by one line about his eldest daughter: “I think it best to keep her loved.”
This is a thoughtful, character-driven book, full of fairy tales, weeping willows, fire, clan histories, and ancestor practices to convey the tragedy of this one family and explore how they might move forward. Manenzhe unearths several themes and topics that will resonate with readers long after they’ve closed the book: empire, belonging, identity, love and hate and how similar they can be, who we belong to versus who we choose, what we owe ourselves, what happens when we die, and what the truth actually is.
Amy Watkin
THROUGH A DARKENING GLASS
R. S. Maxwell, Lake Union, 2023, $14.95/£8.99, pb, 335pp, 9781662501067
In winter 1910, Phineas Greenwich sees a girl floating face-down in the murky water of a kiln in Wolstenholme Park on the outskirts of Martynsborough, but no one believes him when the body disappears. In 1940, Ruth Gladstone joins her grandmother and greataunt in Martynsborough as an evacuee after a bombing run makes it unsafe for her to continue residing and studying at Girton College. Ruth soon becomes captivated by the 30-year-old story and recent sightings of a wraithlike figure on the Wolstenholme grounds. She decides to find out about the ghost and solve the village mystery.
Through a Darkening Glass is a mysteryromance set among the casualties of war—a young boy who has been separated from his family, a man and wife who must deal with both physical and psychological war wounds—and men who take advantage of the turmoil to further their own interests or bolster their egos.
The mystery wends its way through some often-tantalizing tendrils, but the unraveling and subsequent resolution take too long, getting hung up on side-tracks that do little to propel the story along. The romance is also slow-moving as several characters tentatively test one another and possible relationships.
While the ending is inventive and satisfying, the storytelling path is often jolting as obstacles pop up and then just as quickly are cast aside, conversation mires in irrelevant discussions of classic literature or art, and description takes the place of action and dialogue. As a result,
the reader does not see or feel the story but is told all about it.
K. M. Sandrick
SELL US THE ROPE
Stephen May, Bloomsbury, 2023, $18.00, pb, 239pp, 9781639731435 / Sandstone, 2022, £8.99, pb, 240pp, 9781913207885
Russian revolutionist Josef Stalin (Koba) has come to London to attend the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in May 1907. Also attending are renowned reformer Rosa Luxemburg and Finnish activist Elli Vuokko. At the conference, delegates hope to resolve differences between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Outside the meeting rooms, delegates seek to raise money for their cause, and operatives from the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, look for informers.
Sell Us the Rope is May’s first historical novel. He is author of four other novels and several plays. In this work, May provides a complex profile of Koba as a young man. While Stalin is remembered as an uncompromising brute, May presents a man sensitive to others. In May’s rendering, Koba notices the desperate living conditions of the lower class in London. He feels for the men who must wander across neighborhoods at night because they have no lodging—law prevents them from sleeping openly on the street—and the children who do the work relegated to serfs and slaves in other countries. Koba develops emotional connections to the lad who manages the rooming house where he is staying, as well as a romantic relationship with Elli.
May does not spend much time at the congress itself, nor on the fictional plan to implicate gunrunner Maksim Litvinov as an Okhrana operative. And he admittedly includes errors of fact. But the strength of the novel is not Koba’s actions but his observations. Koba recalls and appreciates the presence of a butterfly in the drear surroundings of a factory, contrasts the swirls of script from Georgia’s “magical alphabet” with the “blocky shapes” of Cyrillic, and notes that “parliaments rarely deliver real change” and rich men rarely laugh. Evocative and thought-provoking.
K. M. Sandrick
THE SLEEPING CAR PORTER
Suzette Mayr, Coach House, 2022, $17.95/ C$23.95, pb, 224pp, 9781552454589
Baxter desperately wants to go to dental school, but he still has $101 to go before he can afford the tuition. To earn the money, he works one of the best jobs available to Black men in 1929 Canada: a sleeping car porter on a train that crosses the continent. But the work is hard, especially on the long run from Montreal to Vancouver because the sleeping car porters don’t get to sleep. Answering to “George” regardless of their real names, the porters have to be at the ready twenty-four hours a day to tend to the white passengers.
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And as luck would have it, this particular run gets stuck in the mountains for days. Baxter must fight through his fatigue to manage the passengers’ fragile egos and emotions all while hiding an illegal photograph of two men locked in an intimate embrace.
Written in a dreamlike style, the book is an illuminating glimpse into the experiences of both sleeping car porters and queer Black men in late-1920s Canada. Baxter’s desire for romance with other men could not only get him fired but also arrested. Being forced to stay awake for several days straight while eating little food—porters had to buy their own meals on board, and Baxter is pinching every penny— makes staying in the closet even more difficult. And on top of all that, he has to be careful not to upset any of the passengers for fear of earning the last ten demerits that could get him fired. Readers will in turns be horrified by the porters’ working conditions, heartbroken for Baxter’s lovelorn heart, and charmed by the connections he makes with some of his passengers.
Sarah Hendess
WINDSWEPT
Annabelle McCormack, Independently published, 2021, $29.99, hb, 410pp, 9781736809525
A wounded ally working undercover; a coded message; a traitor in their midst. Intrigue and sleuthing are not what Lady Virginia Whitman signed up for when she happens upon a stranger in May 1917. Against social and parental expectations, she forgoes her title and works as a nurse at a British field hospital near the front in Palestine. Her compassion to help others often conflicts with regulations. She renders aid to an injured man, which involves her in a covert operation where the stakes are harsh. She must find a lieutenant she doesn’t know and hasn’t a clue where to find. Although warned to trust no one, she seeks help from her brother who works for Cairo Intelligence.
Three men arrive in response to her summons. Charming, but intolerable, Major Noah Benson knows her secrets and treats her more like an enemy than a friend. Captain Stephen Fisher, an arrogant manipulator, has been infatuated with her since childhood. And her brother, whom she trusts implicitly. They question her incessantly but refuse to answer her questions or put her in contact with the lieutenant. The more they misdirect, the more committed she becomes to learning the truth despite the danger. When a confrontation comes, murder ensues, and she flees into the desert and is captured by the Ottomans. One man is bold enough to follow, but is he the traitor or her savior?
McCormack spins an intricate, serpentine thriller set against the backdrop of World War I. Historic details and stakes are skillfully woven into the story, while her description breathes life into the gritty reality of desert living. Her characters are multidimensional, the interrelationships are complicated, and the consequences are lofty. Secrets, lies, and betrayals heighten the suspense. Like
wind sweeping across the desert, Windswept ensnares readers in a vortex of subterfuge and romance.
Cindy Vallar
ATOMIC FAMILY
Ciera Horton McElroy, Blair, 2023, $28.95, hb, 263pp, 9781949467949
In 24 hours in 1961, everything changes for the Porter family. Dean, an agronomist, works at a nuclear bomb plant, testing soil, groundwater, and even collected baby teeth for evidence of nuclear contamination. His wife, Nellie, is discontent with her role as a housewife and mother and with the growing distance between her and Dean. Both stumble under the weight of expectations but have lost the words to tell one another.
Ignored, ten-year-old Wilson has convinced himself that he’s the only thing standing between communism and the safety of his small town. The day after a failed Halloween party, the Porters go about their day, Dean distracted, Nellie unhappy, and Wilson determined to root out neighborhood communists. A new report on the plant’s waste storage lands on Dean’s desk, and he struggles with whether to risk his job by revealing the results. Nellie, bored and feeling cut out of Dean’s work, spontaneously joins an anti-nuclear protest, not sure she agrees but desperate to believe in something. And Wilson, sure that a communist attack is imminent, climbs the town’s water tower to watch for planes. Though they go their separate ways in the morning, by nightfall an unspeakable tragedy has brought the family together.
Atomic Family is an intensely moving and emotional book. The characters are imperfect and, as we see each through one another’s narration, worthy of both condemnation and sympathy. Ciera Horton McElroy wraps their unhappiness in stark and lyrical prose. Her use of the tight timeline is neatly done and effective, giving a snapshot of the nuclear family and the nuclear age through a single day’s events. It’s 24 hours of expectations and shocks, of unwelcome knowledge and unfounded paranoia, of memories, grudges, and guilt. A 24 hours where, for one family, everything implodes.
Jessica Brockmole
LESSONS
Ian McEwan, Jonathan Cape, 2022, £20.00, hb, 494pp, 9781787333970 / Knopf, 2022, $30.00, hb, 448pp, 9780593535202
Roland Baines, aged 11, arrives in England with his parents. Having lived in Libya, his father in the British army posted there, Roland has had little experience of life in the UK before. It is 1960, and he is to attend a private school in Suffolk. There he suffers sexual abuse from his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, which has a major effect upon his life. The narrative is not linear and jerks around from the past to Roland’s present in 1986, when his wife, Alissa, has unexpectedly left him and his baby son in London to live in mainland Europe,
where she becomes a renowned writer. There are accounts of times before Roland’s birth, in particular experiences of his wife’s mother, who travelled to Munich in 1946, with the aim of writing a paper on the anti-Nazi White Rose resistance group and ended up marrying one of the survivors of the movement, Heinrich Engelhardt, who had a marginal role.
It is difficult to resist the temptation to see elements of Ian McEwan’s own life in the story (with his father a Scotsman in the military and his peripatetic childhood spend abroad, as well as attending a private boarding school in Suffolk) and wonder how much of Roland Baines’ emotions and feelings reflect those of the author. Baines is also a writer, albeit a comparatively unknown and unproductive poet, and the story takes the form of reminiscences as Baines reflects upon his life in the second half of the turbulent 20th century. At times, the narrative appears to be a resumé of social and political history, as global events are tied closely into Roland’s life, which can read a little pedestrian at times in the middle part of the book. The pace picks up again as Roland enters old age. McEwan is a highly talented writer, and this novel is certainly worth reading.
Douglas Kemp
DEATH IN A TIME OF SPANISH FLU
Frances McNamara, Rudiyat Press, 2022, $14.99, pb, 267pp, 9781956978186
This ninth Emily Cabot mystery opens in October 1918 in Chicago. Emily is married to Dr. Stephen Chapman and hasn’t really caught up with how independent the couple’s two children have become. This moment, among the many deaths of the Spanish flu epidemic, is a terrible time to realize her family won’t do what she says—or even inform her who they’re doing things with. To Emily’s horror, both the grown children seem romantically involved, in a setting that features both poetry and political revolution.
Her discovery of her children’s newly “adult” lives takes place in the shadow of a trial: Flora Murphy, young second wife of notorious gambling king Big Mike Murphy, is charged with murder in the death of a young man who had a passion for her. Emily’s friend Fitz can’t bear the situation Flora’s in: “She’s a victim, not a villain, Emily,” he pleads, hoping she’ll come and talk sense into her other friend Detective Whitbread and perhaps even derail the court proceedings. When Emily joins the hospitalroom trial, she discovers her son is involved with the grieving family of the dead man. Her own efforts to help on the case may imperil him. To her added dismay, she finds her daughter, a sculptor, also embroiled in the case, as well as in a politically left-wing club offering both poetry and union organizing, where both crime bosses and police patrol.
McNamara brings a multitude of artistic, literary, and political figures of that time into both the club and the story, which makes the book a lot of fun. The challenging chaos also
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helps explain why Emily loses track of what threatens her husband. Smooth writing and careful history add to the pleasure of the mystery.
Beth Kanell
A WARTIME SUMMER
Rosie Meddon, Canelo, 2022, £8.99, pb, 380pp, 9781800326613
1942, Exeter, England. World War Two is raging. The Luftwaffe has reduced the 21-year-old May Warren’s home to rubble. She has no relations, nowhere to go, and two younger sisters to see settled. Several weeks pass, and the only job she’s offered is that of housekeeper to the grumpy elderly farmer, George Beer of Fairmaid’s Farm—still, it’s one step up from a land girl, and the pay is fractionally better. There’s more than a touch of Cold Comfort Farm about the Beer farm: it’s filthy and nothing works properly; May has her hands full embarking on a massive clean and insisting that Mr Beer and the two land girls keep their muddy boots out of her kitchen and wash their hands before meals. One of the land girls, Nessa, a knowing young woman with an eye on the American military camp nearby, has no objection to accepting silk stockings in return for ‘favours’. Fortunately, May’s other neighbours are friendly—or are they? Mr Beer’s attitude to the War Ags (Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries) orders for growing vegetables to feed Britain, rather than making cider, reminded me of Amos Starkadder’s determined recalcitrance. Could Mr Beer really lose the farm if he refused to do as the War Ags demanded? Then, one night, a fire breaks out—or is it sabotage? Things look up when May meets the attractive Dan, who obviously likes her, but can she trust him? And what is Mr Beer trying to hide?
Once I’d got over the Starkadder-like melodrama, I enjoyed Rosie Meddon’s story; I, too, had a country childhood, and I liked the way May set about identifying the country flowers and birds. The author is good at capturing the privations of country life in wartime, and I read A Wartime Summer very happily.
Elizabeth Hawksley
MURDER AT THE THEATRE ROYALE
Ada Moncrieff, Vintage, 2022, £8.99, pb, 256pp, 9781529115314
Christmas 1935 in London, and Daphne King, aged 37, and a rather unsatisfied reporter who hitherto has to be content with being the popular agony aunt with the Daily Chronicle, is given a different assignment to write a piece on the staging of a new performance of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol at the Theatre Royale. But when she goes to meet the director, the elderly Chester Harrison, the actor playing Ebeneezer Scrooge, Robert Stirling, keels over during rehearsal and dies on the spot. Daphne senses that something is
not right with his death, while the police are initially keen to see it as a simple case of heart failure. Her instincts are correct, and Daphne seizes the opportunity to investigate Stirling’s death to provide her with a more challenging and engaging role with the newspaper. The story is told entertainingly with humour and brio, but the characters and plot lack that essential credibility; the book seems more of a poor pastiche of Golden Age Detective fiction. Certainly, Moncrieff does not play fair with the reader by introducing a key character right at the conclusion of the story, so that the reader cannot be reasonably expected to identify the murderer.
There are some anachronisms: the term ‘bimbo’ to describe a female in derogatory terms in the 1930s was not in usage—this only became popular in the 1980s. And surely any British writer should know that Daphne waking in London at six in the morning of 23rd December would never be disturbed by piercing sunlight through the curtains! Furthermore, a double murderer who had planned their revenge could not expect a prison term in the 1930s, but would definitely be facing the gallows. In general, the novel was a disappointment.
Douglas Kemp
MY FATHER’S HOUSE
Joseph O’Connor, Europa, 2023, $27.00/ C$39.95, hb, 368pp, 9781609458355 / Harvill Secker, 2023, £20.00, hb, 288pp, 9781787300828
A black Daimler races through the wartorn streets of Rome for a hospital on a dark December night—sleet and rain, car swerving, breaks squealing. So begins this breathtaking story of subterfuge and resistance against Rome’s Nazi occupation in 1943.
Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty is smuggling escaped Allied prisoners of war and refugees through neutral Vatican City onto freedom. He has gathered a diverse group of seven operatives to assist him. These are his choir members, he is conductor, and rehearsals mask their secretive meetings. A special mission, the Rendimento, is planned on Christmas Eve. The injured passenger in the Daimler is not able to fulfill his critical role for the Rendimento, so the Monsignor must; he knows the streets and alleyways of Rome like no other. Hugh is also the nemesis of Obersturmbannführer Paul Hauptmann, Gestapo chief of Rome, which places his life in greater danger. With intense pressure from Himmler, Hauptmann must find the person assisting the escapees, and he is sure it is Hugh.
HOMESTEAD
Melinda Moustakis, Flatiron, 2023, $26.99, hb, 272pp, 9781250845559
Anchorage, 1956. Marie is looking for a future, and Lawrence has a parcel of 150 acres from the State of Alaska. Both are aching for a home, and they decide to marry with little more than that between them. As they begin to work the land to earn the deed to their homestead, there is much they must learn. They not only have to carve a homestead out of unforgiving tundra, but they must also learn to know and love each other.
This is a saga of a man and a woman fighting a frozen land to claim a home for themselves, but it is so much more than that. We watch Alaska move toward statehood, and we see the sheer size and harsh realities of the territory. As Marie and Lawrence attempt to make a home, it is evident that there are problems even greater than the snow, cold, dark days, and wolves. As we watch them fight all these things, it becomes clear that there is a territory even bleaker than Alaska, and that is Lawrence’s heart.
The writing is sublime, and the reader is instantly transported to this dangerous land. But the human struggles are where this book really shines, as Marie and Lawrence battle loneliness, numbing cold, loss, and the one big lie that threatens to destroy everything. This is absolutely remarkable historical fiction that fans of Alaskan history will enjoy.
Bonnie DeMoss
Moving between the chapters that countdown the hours and minutes until the Rendimento —where we follow the planning and learn the purpose of the mission—and the chapters of post-war interviews and memoirs of the “choir” members, we get a full picture of Hugh and his remarkable life. Hugh O’Flaherty is based on a true-life hero responsible for saving countless lives. The Vatican’s role during Nazi occupation gives another view of WWII, proving there are numerous facets to this war. The reader is side-by-side with Hugh from the beginning to the conclusion of the Rendimento—timed to the minute, unforeseen diversions, heartstopping moments, danger at every turn. This is not only a novel of peril and secrecy, but a thoughtful portrait of many brave people who stepped up to save their fellow man.
Janice Ottersberg
FLIGHT TO FREEDOM
Anthony Palmiotti, Fireship, 2022, $19.99, pb, 254pp, 9781611794007
Lieutenant Commander Terry Cook is skipper of the USS Tanager, an obsolescent minesweeper in the wrong place at the wrong time. The place is the Philippine Islands, and the time is on the verge of Pearl Harbor. The Tanager is a happy little ship with an experienced crew that works well together. Things change overnight when the United States is plunged into war with Japan, and the Tanager transforms from a pleasant duty station in a tropical paradise to a target for any stray Japanese warship or aircraft that happens by.
As the Tanager, by process of elimination, becomes one of the few remaining U.S.
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warships in the region, she becomes more valuable as a combat unit and a potential avenue of escape from the coming inevitable defeat. Nurses being evacuated before the Japanese victory and merchant sailors stranded in the islands hitch a ride on the minesweeper and become indispensable members of the ship’s company as Terry Cook tries to keep half a step ahead of the invading Japanese.
Palmiotti captures not only the facts of a wartime navy, but also the feel of that desperate few months at the start of the war when American forces in the Philippines faced a skillful and ruthless enemy but had little hope of the reinforcements they so badly needed. As Terry Cook and his crew weave through the vast tropical archipelago, the reader probably wouldn’t be surprised to run into John Wayne and Donna Reed and the other expendable American service members who faced death or captivity but still fought on. For those like me who love tales of World War II in the Pacific, this book delivers.
Loyd Uglow
centric perspective on the rise of Nazism and Jewish persecution. Recommended.
Kate Braithwaite
DOUBLE THE LIES
Patricia Raybon, Tyndale, 2023, $15.99, pb, 416pp, 9781496458438
Double the Lies is the sequel to All That Is Secret, featuring fledging detective Annalee Spain. Annalee is bright, energetic, and determined, much like her idol Sherlock Holmes. In this mystery, set in 1924 Denver, she gets caught up in the murder of a wouldbe barn stormer pilot.
anonymous narrator tries to make sense of all these experiences and put them in perspective. He recognizes some of the things they do are crude and what would be called “insensitive” today but feels they never cross the line excessively. The boys are both in awe of and often amused by the girls they meet and spend time with.
NIGHT ANGELS
Weina Dai Randel, Lake Union, 2023, $16.99/£8.99, pb, 379pp, 9781542038003
Vienna, 1938. Austria has been annexed by the Germans, and anti-Jewish laws gradually take effect. Chinese Consul General Ho Fengshan and his wife, Grace, both have close friends in the Jewish community. Fengshan has been befriended by Mr. Rosenberg, a prominent lawyer, and introvert Grace’s only friend is Lola Schnitzler, a Jewish violinist and language tutor. When Rosenberg’s business is taken from him, and Lola’s brother is arrested, everyone hopes the 32 nations attending the Evian convention can offer hope to Jews seeking visas to rebuild their lives outside Austria. But when that comes to nothing, Fengshan decides to take matters into his own hands, making a powerful enemy in Adolph Eichmann, who will stop at nothing to end Fengshan’s unofficial Chinese visa program.
Skilfully blending complex international history and politics with characters caught up in the plight of the Austrian Jewish population, Randel brings this fact-based story of courage and resistance to vivid life. Both main characters are well-developed and influenced by their upbringing. Fengshan’s Confucian principles are tested when he’s order by his superiors to stop giving visas to Jews. Grace, a mixed-race American, damaged by her mother’s rejection but bolstered by her love of poetry, yearns for a child. Wartime demands that both characters grow and adapt, and the pressure on their marriage takes its toll.
While I turned the pages quickly to find out what would happen to Fengshan and Grace, my greater take-aways from reading Night Angels were the insights on China’s position leading up to World War II, and the focus on the effects of the Anschluss on everyday life in Vienna. Night Angels offers a fresh non-western-
The first clues in this story appear in the too-obvious person of an adolescent boy, but Raybon’s plot picks up at a quick pace with interesting twists. She introduces several appealing characters like librarian Mrs. Quinlan and friends from Annalee’s church group, all of whom root for Annalee’s success. The plot has its fair share of despicable people, like the Denver police and the devious brother of a Jewish investment banker. The threats that Annalee and other characters must contend with from the Ku Klux Klan are painted with realistic, insidious horror. The identity of the murderer is hidden until the end of the novel and comes as a satisfying surprise.
The story also includes a charming romantic subplot between Annalee and her young pastor. To complicate the romance, Raybon introduces another, unexpected contender for her heroine’s affections, which forces Annalee to think seriously about her professional and personal goals. Annalee’s firm Christian faith is of note. She has left her teaching position at a Bible college in Chicago to embark on her detective career, but she keeps her faith in front of her in all that she does.
Remaining unsolved is the mystery of the heroine’s birth and abandonment, surely a good reason to anticipate a third novel in this series.
Joanne Vickers
PIANO DAYS
Don Reid, Mercer Univ. Press, 2022, $18.00, pb, 352pp, 9780881468694
Small-town life in America for teenagers in the late 1950s and very early 1960s may seem a world away to some, though there are some universals which recur through time and place. Still, despite many faults, it was unarguably a more innocent time as displayed on the pages of Piano Days. This is the story of three boys growing up in that time, and the girls, cars, music, teachers, dances and sports with which they interacted, for the most part, gleefully.
At that age, everything new seems an adventure for the boys, who revel in immersing themselves in it all. One universal is pulling juvenile pranks. The chubby, bumbling and ultimately loveable character, Toby, is the undisputed master of such mayhem. His ability to pull things over on adults and other teens, called “punking” today, will leave readers laughing long after reading this book. The
Though this novel is set a generation before me and I grew up in a large city, not a small town, I could still relate to almost everything the boys experienced. I feel most readers, even women, will find something to relate to and laugh over as well. The author is an experienced vocalist and songwriter, the nowretired award-winning lead singer for the Statler Brothers and a television series writer. His Piano Days is a pleasure to read and will linger in the reader’s memory after finishing. Strongly recommended.
Thomas J. Howley
THE JEWELER OF STOLEN DREAMS
M. J. Rose, Blue Box Press, 2023, $15.99, pb, 345pp, 9781957568270
1942: Innovative jeweler Suzanne Belperron secretly collaborates with the Resistance while still maintaining her career as designer in occupied Paris. When her lover and former business partner is captured by the enemy, Suzanne tries to arrange his escape, and schemes with an American socialite to sell jewels in the U.S. to facilitate the escape of Jews from Nazi-occupied France.
In 1986, Violine Duplessi possesses the uncanny gift of psychometry, the ability to sense the story of an object by simply handling it. A mystical inheritance from a 16th-century ancestor, Violine’s heritage as a “Daughter of La Lune” has at times brought her trouble, and she has attempted to abandon it. She works as an appraiser for a boutique auction house and at times collaborates with the Midas Society, an international society that attempts to return stolen works of art to their rightful owners. While assessing a vintage Louis Vuitton trunk, she and the current owner, handsome senatorial candidate Paul Osgood, come across a hidden trove of vintage jewels. Violine’s gift returns with a vengeance; she senses extreme pain and trauma resonating from the hoard.
What is the connection between the innovative jeweler and the secret treasure found by Violine and Paul? This intriguing dual-timeline story, told through Violine’s first-person voice and Suzanne’s diary entries, reveals unexpected connections between Paul, Violine, and Suzanne, and provides Paul and Violine an opportunity to right past wrongs. Belperron was an actual jeweler who designed for Schiaparelli, Arletty, and the Duchess of Windsor, among other celebrities. This novel shines light on the jeweler and her work while providing a satisfying read full of romance and mystery.
Susan McDuffie
48 REVIEWS | Issue 103, February 2023
ONCE WE WERE HOME
Jennifer Rosner, Flatiron, 2023, $26.99/ C$35.99, hb, 288pp, 9781250855541
Once We Were Home is based on the true stories of hidden Jewish children, the youngest survivors of the Holocaust who eluded the Nazis by hiding in convents, orphanages, and other places. Jennifer Rosner tells the stories of Mira and her baby brother, Daniel, from a Polish ghetto; Renata, moved to England without explanation by her mother to hide German bloodlines; and Roger, concealed in a Catholic monastery in France. The children must at times hide in plain sight, so Mira becomes Ana, and Daniel, Oskar. Rosner creates dialogue laced with candor and reality as Roger masks his confusion with endless questions, riddles, and jokes. She continues themes from her previous novel, The Yellow Bird Sings, by exploring the longing for connection and finding one’s roots.
By 1968, the paths of the young adults intersect in Israel. Rosner sinks readers into each of their adult worlds as they navigate the past; filled with distress and torment, overcoming tribulations and sorrow. Like Renata’s matryoshka dolls, nesting one inside the other, Rosner slowly unveils the familial connections and roots of the four hidden children. She also treats readers to the return of a beloved character from The Yellow Bird Sings
Rosner’s novel reflects personal interviews and in-depth research of those involved in the redemption of Jewish children. She illuminates the complex and opposing political and religious viewpoints of the adults and organizations involved in the kidnapping, or considered by some to be reclaiming, ransoming, or redeeming the children. Representing thousands of Jewish children saved, Rosner’s heart-wrenching revelations in Once We Were Home will persist in readers’ minds for seasons to come.
Dorothy Schwab
THE SECRET SOCIETY OF SALZBURG
Renee Ryan, Love Inspired, 2022, $16.99/ C$19.99, pb, 368pp, 9781335427564
This novel is set in the period before and during WW2 in England and Austria, as Hitler initiates and increases his persecution of Jewish people. Hattie, a typist in a government office in London, hears a recording of the acclaimed opera singer Elsa Mayer-Braun and, through Hattie’s expressive painting, she and Elsa become friends.
As the sense of oppression increases, Hattie and her sister Vera join with Elsa to rescue Jewish families and bring them to safety in England. Elsa’s new husband, the famous conductor Wilhelm Hoffmann, discourages this, but Hattie’s new friend, art dealer Sir Oliver Roundel, understands and assists. As he appreciates her painting, he spreads the word and makes Hattie a renowned artist. The fame and friendship of the two women
form the basis of a very small, select society that rescues Jews from impending death or imprisonment in concentration camps.
The dangers inherent in this create a tension that is well maintained throughout the novel, relieved occasionally to reveal a growing but uncertain romance between Hattie and Sir Oliver. The glamorous world of opera in Salzburg and the far less glamorous world of London during the Blitz are well researched and vividly portrayed, as is the deepening hatred towards Jewish people in Germany and Austria.
The characters of Elsa, Hattie, and her sister Vera are satisfyingly complex, and the theme of friendship between two women of very different backgrounds is clearly portrayed. The male characters, however— Wilhelm and Sir Oliver—are not only too similar but disappointingly one-dimensional. Still, this is an enjoyable novel that adds some depth to our understanding of an agonizing event in history.
Valerie Adolph
THE WINTER GUEST
W. C. Ryan, Arcade Crimewise, 2022, $26.99, hb, 336pp, 9781956763164 / Zaffre, 2022, £8.99, pb, 352pp, 9781838772307
Even before a mystery is established in his most recent novel, W. C. Ryan creates a suspenseful mood with the description of a grand old house that is falling apart. The setting is Northern Ireland shortly after World War I, when Irish soldiers returned
home to find another war waiting for them. The “Auxies,” a branch of former British officers, now at loose ends, have been set upon the country, keeping a brutal rein on the rebels. This war is on a different scale, but “the killing is the same.”
A former British officer and current IRA member, Tom Harkin sets out from Dublin to investigate the killing of his former fiancée, Maud Prendeville, during an IRA ambush. He has no idea whom to trust but learns early on to be wary of the leader of the Auxies, who is sure to be suspicious of an Irish Catholic. As Harkin pokes around, he agitates both sides of the conflict, and bodies soon pile up, intensifying the trauma of his wartime experiences. Fortunately, he has allies—Bourke, who looks like a prize fighter with “hands like shovels,” and Moira, a monocle-wearing woman he knew at university, who hopes to rekindle an old flame.
While The Winter Guest is a first-rate historical murder mystery, it’s also a ghost story with characters who are haunted by a
past that has been erased by war. Additionally, a lyrical sensibility informs the writing so that the book’s imagery lingers long after the last page. Sensory details, such as a mist that “clings to his face and clothes in a cold, damp sheen” and a foghorn that sounds “muffled and lonely” help make this an immersive read and confirm the place of Irish writers at the pinnacle of evocative literature.
Trish MacEnulty
DEAD OF NIGHT
Simon Scarrow, Headline Review, 2023, £20.00, hb, 420pp, 9781472258588
No other occupation so fascinates the public as the police or has given rise to such a prolific and popular literary genre as the ‘police procedural’. It follows a strict formula: a senior police officer tracking down and confronting violent criminals. In the search for originality authors have set their police/crime novels in a huge variety of settings.
Simon Scarrow is not the first police/crime author to choose Nazi Germany, but he has chosen a less-explored moment in its short history, the first winter of the war, with war declared but hostilities yet to begin in earnest. The attraction of Nazi Germany is, of course, its moral ambivalence: who is the criminal when the state itself disregards the law and all moral standards?
The central character is Inspector Horst Schenke of the Berlin police, a zealous policeman but no Nazi. While investigating a murder he stumbles upon Aktion T4, the secret Nazi programme to ‘cleanse’ the German race of mentally handicapped children. The murderers he must hunt down are the children’s vengeful parents.
This would be a good police/crime novel in any setting, but the moral ambiguity gives it a very especial edge. It is a tense, fast-moving story with plenty of action, culminating in a vividly described shoot-out. As good a police procedural as you can get, but with a difference.
Edward James
GOOD TASTE
Caroline Scott, Simon & Schuster, 2022, £16.99, hb, 432pp, 9781398508217
In the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1932, Stella Douglas is a jobbing writer for a women’s magazine and the author of a poorly selling biography of Elizabeth Raffald, an 18thcentury cookery writer. She’s staying near her father after the loss of her mother, and both are grieving. When she gets summoned to her
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publisher in London, she fears her plans for her next book on another cookery writer will be scuppered—and they are. Her publisher wants her to write a wide-ranging history of English food.
Stella realises that it’s very hard to define English food, as it’s very influenced by other countries and (in 1932) it’s pretty beige: bread, oatcakes and potatoes. She hopes for help from her friend Michael, a chef in London towards whom she is attracted. But it appears there is competition for Michael’s affections from his flatmate, the handsome Lucien, and from a former life model, the glamorous Cynthia. But on a fact-finding trip to Banbury Stella’s car breaks down and she is rescued by the improbably handsome Freddie.
How these characters’ lives meld, and how Stella comes to terms with the choices she makes for her future, are the subject of Caroline Scott’s delightful novel, a great snapshot of life at a time of recession. I particularly enjoyed the humour of the letters Stella is sent after advertising in newspapers for local dishes and the poignancy of her reading her late mother’s cookbook/diary. A wide-ranging book, as sweet as hot chocolate, sharp as gin and tonic and rewarding as a good Sunday lunch.
Kate Pettigrew
ON THE ROOFTOP
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, Ecco, 2022, $28.99, hb, 304pp, 9780063139961 / Magpie, 2022, £16.99, hb, 304pp, 9780861546275
Near the end of this outstanding historical novel, an outsider says, “…amazing…the way you take care of each other.”
On the Rooftop is, above all, about how one family, one community, takes care of each other. Set in the Fillmore District of San Francisco in the 1950s, then a self-sufficient Black neighborhood, this superbly written novel of love and caring centers on a family of women: matriarch Vivian and her three daughters, Ruth, Esther, and Chloe.
Stage mother Vivian has turned her girls into an accomplished singing act, The Salvations, who with great professionalism perform the jazz and pop tunes of the day. When not practicing on the rooftop, the young women perform at local nightclubs and at their version of a pop-up supper club in their basement. Vivian makes clear her aspirations for The Salvations and pushes hard to achieve them, ignoring her daughters’ desires.
The four women work ceaselessly, but beneath the constant motion, rebellious thoughts grow. The two older sisters veer off their mother’s path, Ruth by choosing family
life with her boyfriend, Esther by choosing to work as an activist songwriter organizing demonstrations against the buyout of all the homes and businesses by the groups of middleaged white men, suddenly seen everywhere. Chloe, the youngest, is secretly choosing a different life also, but one that includes singing.
Sexton creates the place and era, with its sights, tastes and sounds, and writes the feelings and thoughts the four women have versus their behavior with brilliant insight and perfect pitch. Everything between the family members and within the community comes to a head, but the love and the caring remain, as all four women find their own voices.
Constance Emmett
GIRL FLEES CIRCUS
C.W. Smith, Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2022, $19.95, pb, 216pp, 9780826364074
When Katie Burke crash lands her biplane in the tiny town of Noname, New Mexico, her arrival is a catalyst for change for several of the inhabitants who rush to her aid. It’s the late 1920s. Noname has no hotel and only one main street, but it does boast a school and a lonely schoolmistress, Mabel, and the Owl Café run by Otis Jefferson, rumored to have been born a slave, and a younger white woman, Wally, who may or may not be his wife. Katie also meets Howard and his wife Louise, a couple paralyzed for the past three years after Howard’s teenage daughter ran away from home, and Leonard, a handsome young man with a talent for fixing things. Katie’s arrival shakes up these warmly rendered, complex characters and as the story behind her sudden appearance is revealed, her new friends find themselves protecting her, even as she plans to move on and leave them behind.
Girl Flees Circus is a literary, characterdriven tale that evokes past times and societal injustices with subtlety and finesse. Each character grows and changes as the story unfolds, and C.W. Smith blends sharp dialogue and interior monologue to bring each person to vivid life on the page. Humorous, optimistic, moving, and believable, Girl Flees Circus portrays an America full of hard work and struggle, but also invention, hope, and human kindness. It should appeal to fans of Lynda Rutledge’s West with Giraffes
Kate Braithwaite
GUARDING WHAT REMAINS
Ida Smith, Independently published, 2022, $19.99, pb, 378pp, 9780997653045
Teddy’s incessant barking alerts Eleanor Cruthers to possible danger, but she can’t convince anyone in her family of eight to investigate. While they tend their fields, a suspicious fire sweeps through the house and barn. With everything gone, including Teddy, the 10-year-old blames herself for the losses, a guilt that only deepens when the family has no choice but to move west from Idaho to
Spokane, where her aunt lives. The farm is all Eleanor has known. She wants to rebuild, but they can’t. Her father reassures her that this is a new adventure, a chance to try a new way of living, but it’s 1931. Businesses have shuttered. No one is hiring. Everyone wants them to go home, including her aunt. Instead of a sturdy house, warm clothing, and good food, the Cruthers are forced to live in a shantytown, a dangerous place for children and women left alone where desperate men who ride the rails prey.
Loss is life-altering, which Smith deftly demonstrates as readers experience a gamut of emotions from despair to hope as this story progresses through the first half of the Great Depression. By setting the story in Washington, instead of California, she demonstrates the devastating reach of the economic downturn. While there is no answer to why God permits these experiences, each character grows and changes in different ways, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The predicaments they face – hunger, disease, harassment, greed, intolerance, mental illness, brutal cold, tragic accidents – are realistic and haunting. Despite these adversities, this historical novel is more than a struggle to survive. It is a story of love, redemption, and resilience and readers will readily identify with the experiences the characters face.
Cindy Vallar
SKELTON’S GUIDE TO BLAZING CORPSES
David Stafford, Allison & Busby, 2022, £8.99/$12.95, pb, 374pp, 9780749027247
This novel starts with a bang—literally. As indicated by the title, the action centres around the discovery of a blazing corpse in a car. The time is 1930 and it is Bonfire Night, so an appropriately grisly death to suit the day. The man is presumed to be Harold Musgrave, a travelling salesman with a track history of success with the ladies. A usual suspect is rounded up and charged with the crime. Arthur Skelton, barrister and veteran of Stafford`s two previous novels about detection and murder, believes the man to be innocent and puts his energies into proving this, helped along by his sidekick Edgar who among other talents, has an unusual penchant for Czech cubist furniture.
The story is well-plotted and well-written with a real sense of the era. If you like Agatha Christie, Wodehouse, and Horowitz, this will become an instant favourite. It is the third in the series, the first one being Skelton`s Guide to Domestic Poisons but can also be read as a stand-alone. I have had the first one on my toread list for a long time, but now having finally been formally introduced to the character, I have already raced out to buy the first and the second books. There is nothing better than discovering a new series of this quality. When is the fourth to be released?
Ann Northfield
50 REVIEWS | Issue 103, February 2023
BLOWN BY THE SAME WIND
John Straley, Soho Crime, 2022, $27.95, hb, 216pp, 9781641293815
John Straley writes really good novels with a crime inside. This one, Blown by the Same Wind, is the fourth book in his Cold Storage series, and it’s a stunner. Straley weaves his wonderful, idiosyncratic characters into a twisty plot and a beautifully rendered setting: coastal Alaska in 1968. Moral and mystical complexities center around a finely rendered, deeply personal portrait of the great Catholic author and theologian Thomas Merton (1915-1968), who was also a Trappist monk and a social activist. Extraordinary as it may seem, the real Merton (also known as Brother Louis) did visit Alaska in 1968, under the surveillance of the FBI because of his peace and race activities. But beyond that, the novel is fiction, although the attentive reader will learn something about how to manage a floatplane and a boat in Alaska weather, among other solid pieces of information. Straley’s detailed picture of the summer of 1968 is utterly convincing.
Cold Storage is a tiny fictional village containing a cannery and a set of Alaskan eccentrics who’ve become mostly middleaged characters since the series began—with the fabulous exception of a flower child called Venus Myrtle and Glen, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD. Straley does a masterly job of differentiating his characters, often moving from one point of view to another. These characters include an outstanding dog named Dot and two loony racists obsessed with John Wilkes Booth, whose mummy has supposedly ended up in Cold Storage (really), and who are both evil and funny. There are also a lot of bears. Alaska is itself a character, achingly beautiful and deadly. The atmosphere starts out serene and homey but soon darkens as the plot begins to spin. Before long, blood will spill… Bravo!
DEFENDING ALICE
Richard Stratton, HarperVia, 2022, $28.99, hb, 564pp, 9780063115460
The story behind this book is nearly as intriguing as the novel: Filmmaker Richard Stratton seized a 1925 divorce trial, Rhinelander v. Rhinelander, to explore the parameters of class and race in America’s Roaring Twenties. The case pitted the young son from a wealthy high-society family against the dark-skinned woman he’d fallen in love with and eagerly
married—a situation forced by the powerful father of the groom and his legal team. The actual case was scandalous in many ways: for its social flair, its depiction of interracial love, marriage, and sex, tabloid newspaper attention, and even the partial disrobing of the heartbroken bride, as testimony to the court that her race was unmistakable.
Stratton, a white author with a background of edgy productions, tells the trial almost entirely through the eyes and thoughts of Alice Rhinelander’s trial lawyer, Lee Parsons Davis. His maneuvering is complemented in the story by fictionalized diary entries from the wife and husband. Maneuvering both an investigation and a lengthy court case, Stratton sustains tension well throughout more than 500 pages. Using the trial lawyer’s point of view, he asserts repeatedly that the trial was never about the young couple: “it was always about the Rhinelander family name; it was about race and class relations in America.”
The book can readily be accepted as courtroom fiction; it is less successful as a love story (violating the “show don’t tell” recommendation often), and when it presents the voice of a young Black (or mixed-race) woman of the time, it is often not convincing. Yet that can be overlooked for the sake of exploring this significant case and viewing American class relations of the period.
Beth Kanell
THE SOUND OF LIGHT
Sarah Sundin, Revell, 2023, $17.99, pb, 384pp, 9780800736385
Most of this novel takes place in Germanoccupied Denmark in 1943. For the first years of the war, the Germans have not displayed cruelty to the Danes, as with other occupied countries, but this leniency is about to end.
The main characters, an unlikely pair, are Dr. Else Jensen, a young physicist working with Dr Niels Bohr, and playboy Baron Henrik Ahlefeldt, aka shipyard worker Hemming Andersen, who becomes known as the Havmand (merman) who secretly rows across the strait to Sweden with clandestine information valuable to the Allies. Else meets Henrik at their boardinghouse in Copenhagen.
Neither knows the other is working for the Danish resistance, Else printing copies of an underground newspaper while Henrik becomes a hero in his countrymen’s eyes for his work. As they understand each other better, romance blossoms. But when the Germans suddenly turn against the Jewish people of Denmark, it becomes necessary to organize the escape of thousands to safety in Sweden. Henrik and Else are separated as they work on the logistics of this migration.
This is one of the most thoughtful, yet dramatic, novels set in WW2-occupied territory. The combination of early research into nuclear fission with the mystique of the Havmand traveling across the stormy strait is developed with sensitivity. Research into
both areas is comprehensive and adds to the novel’s credibility and immediacy.
This story will appeal to both those who are familiar with Sundin’s wartime romance novels and to those who appreciate immersing themselves in an exciting, true-to-life tale. The linking of a nuclear physicist with the mythical Havmand—the strong, brave, masculine equivalent of Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid— makes this a unique and engaging read.
Valerie Adolph
THE LIGHTHOUSE SISTERS
Gill Thompson, Mobius, 2022, $14.95/ C$19.95/£8.99, pb, 433pp, 9781472279958
The Lighthouse Sisters is a well-crafted novel set on the Channel Island of Jersey between June 1940 and December 1946, from the time when the German invasion is imminent until after the native inhabitants have been freed to put their lives back together.
The plot focuses on Alice and Jenny Robinson and their family, as well as their close friends and neighbors. Except for an occasional brush of sentimentality, Thompson’s characterizations are deft, and the reader is easily drawn into the lives of these two different sisters. Alice is the practical one serving as a nurse at the island hospital, and Jenny, a brilliant mathematician, plans to go to Cambridge to advance her education. The occupation disrupts everyone’s lives.
Alice continues her nursing under the threatening German command but falls in love with a German doctor who shares her humanistic values; the consequences of this love are costly. In spite of the dangers, Jenny joins the resistance and uses her analytic and language skills to design codes and translate messages for foreign prisoners.
The German occupation is threatening on many levels, and Thompson does an excellent job of describing the hardships and brutality the inhabitants face every day, from extreme food shortages to the horror of slave labor imported from Spain and Russia to the persecution of Jews. The plot twists involving the Robinson sisters and their circle charge the novel with sustained, realistic tension. At the same time, Thompson paints the beauty of the island, the surrounding sea, and the lighthouse with a poignancy that illuminates the tragedy of this episode in English history.
Joanne Vickers
CITY OF FORTUNE
Victoria Thompson, Berkley, 2022, $27.00, hb, 320pp, 9780593440575
This entertaining novel revolves around horseracing in New York City in 1919 and the cons pulled off by a circle of family and friends. Elizabeth Bates, the intriguing character at the center of Thompson’s Counterfeit Lady series, befriends socially awkward Irene Nolan, daughter of a seemingly wealthy man who owns a stable and racehorses. To improve Irene’s romantic life and help her achieve financial independence, Elizabeth seeks assistance from her own father, a
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Susan Lowell
lovable fraudster. Together, Elizabeth and her father develop a complex scheme involving a fabulously rich Spanish widow and her associates. The con they pull off is predictable, but readers, guessing that the central con may not be the only one, will be in the dark until the very end about the nature and number of others.
Thompson excels at strong characters and complex plotting. Readers will enjoy all the characters, particularly Elizabeth’s motherin-law, a respectable society lady who loves participating in questionable behavior. Thompson excels too at connecting the novel to the previous books in her series while minimizing references to the other five so that City of Fortune can function as a standalone. The novel slows down a bit when the action depends on conversation at a dinner party, but otherwise moves at a good pace. Those wanting the flavor of the period may feel disappointed there are no references to the Spanish Flu and little about the end of World War I but will admire the fascinating material about the history of horseracing.
Marlie Wasserman
THE SHADOW OF THE MOLE
Bob Van Laerhoven, Next Chapter, 2022, $36.49, hb, 422pp, 9784824126450
In February 1916, French infantrymen digging tunnels in the Argonne woods find a man, unconscious and covered in dirt. When he is unable to tell physicians who he is or where he came from, he is named the Mole. His doctor, Michel Denis, believes the man is an example of an emerging neurological theory: brain injury from trauma at the frontlines. The mystery deepens when the Mole begins writing in a grey notebook. While insisting he is irrevocably dead—and that someone he calls the Other is pulling his strings—the Mole pens details about a French diplomat, spies among the Prussian empire, and interactions with scientists on the cutting edge of discoveries about the workings of the human mind, including Freud’s teacher Dr. Josef Breuer. In trying to solve the enigma of the Mole, Denis must confront his own trauma—the recent loss of an arm because of shrapnel injuries.
This latest novel from Belgian/Flemish author Van Laerhoven is more than a standard, pulse-pounding page-turner. It takes time to appreciate underlying themes: the brutality of war, the effects of trauma on mind and heart as well as body, the recognition that WWI did not end with armistice but planted seeds of future conflict. It also takes time to share the observations of characters as they witness the tragedies of mental illness and learn how the events of their own past shape what they see and feel. Phenomenal.
K. M. Sandrick
STEALING
Margaret Verble, Mariner, 2023, $27.99, hb, 256pp, 9780063267053
This short, compassionately written, and powerful novel is told in the unquenchable voice of Karen “Kit” Crockett, who is raised by her white father in the 1950s South after her Cherokee mother’s death. At nine, Kit spends much time alone, fishing in the bayou and eagerly awaiting each bookmobile visit; she has an abundance of sorrows but knows her family loves her. When she spies an unfamiliar car at her late Uncle Joe’s cabin, Kit grows intrigued. Her attractive new neighbor, Bella, is divorced and has two “boyfriends” she doesn’t much like (“Kit, you won’t understand this yet, but they pay the bills,” Bella says). Despite the age difference and the hostility of a reclusive old woman down the lane, the pair become good friends.
It isn’t to last. From the beginning, Kit makes clear that she’s no longer home and is setting her thoughts to paper years later, after being taken (stolen) from her family and enrolled in a religious boarding school, where other schoolkids are cruel, and teachers lecture them about original sin. Even worse, the director, Mr. Hodges, is an unctuous hypocrite who saves his worst punishments (sexual abuse) for the Indian students.
An enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation and a Pulitzer finalist, Verble is a magnetic storyteller – the book is difficult to put down – who has created an indelible heroine in Kit, who gradually unspools the tragic backstory of how she landed in such a despised place. The themes of prejudice and of religion as a controlling force are strongly felt. Kit’s personality bursts through every line: vulnerable, traumatized, honest, scrappy, and resolved to survive and escape. While she’s raised to be respectful to adults and doesn’t always understand their world, she can tell in a second if they’re lying. You won’t forget meeting her.
Sarah Johnson
LOST IN THE LONG MARCH
Michael X. Wang, Overlook Press, 2022, $28.00, hb, 352pp, 9781419759758
Lost in the Long March follows a family across the middle third of China’s 20th century. It’s a lovely example of bottom-up historical fiction. But the story could have been even better if it had done more to integrate the big-picture events it seeks to interrogate.
Part of the issue is a jumbled chronology. Wang cuts back and forth across the period he’s covering, jumping from the 1930s to the 1970s, then rewinding to the 1940s, then returning to the 1970s. The non-linear framework creates mystery, but it also glosses over key events that seem pertinent to Wang’s central message, which is a shame as the novel is hugely successful thematically.
The main characters all suffer personal losses during the March. One loses a leg. He also literally loses his way and nearly starves to death in the woods. A couple gives up their son
so they can stay in the fight. The boy is robbed of a normal childhood.
Wang seems to be arguing that the Communists’ famous retreat began an ideological journey that took China decades to recover from, a trek that kept much of the nation in a disorienting, radicalized mindset. That fervor might have been necessary to stave off the Japanese, but the cost to further progress was high—and paid for far too long.
The symbolism is powerful; I’m glad I read to the end to see how Wang tied everything together. But even just a little extra context— and perhaps a less fragmented narrative— might have helped make Lost in the Long March more accessible to the wide audience it deserves.
Nick Wisseman
STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT
Heather Webb, William Morrow, 2023, $19.99, pb, 432pp, 9780063004184
Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra’s first meeting in 1946 lit a dual spark. He, already a singing sensation from New Jersey on his way to stardom in Hollywood, was married with two young children. Ava, a movie starlet under contract to MGM, was unusually beautiful, smart, and ambitious. After two marriages and divorces, she vowed to not take up with a married man. Yet each could not leave the other alone. This somewhat fictionalized treatment takes readers on a four-decade roller-coaster ride of their careers and tempestuous love affair. We journey with them from New York theatres to Hollywood studios and Las Vegas nightclubs, to cities in Europe and the lion country of Africa. The romance culminated in their marriage and nearly wrecked both careers, but also provided the love and support only they could give each other through the hardest times.
Author Webb grabs hold of the reader and does not let go. Told in intimate firstperson chapters from both Ava’s and Frank’s viewpoints, their many spats, breakups, and reunions feel honest yet not overdone.
Lana Turner, Howard Hughes, George C. Scott, Grace Kelly, Humphrey Bogart, Mia Farrow, various studio heads, musicians, and publicists add context to the main story. Ava and Frank drank and smoked too much, loved many others too easily, craved stardom too strongly. They did crazy things, often drunk, just because they felt like it. But through the highs and rock-bottom lows, they remained soul-mates and cared about the other more than anyone else. One would fly halfway round the world when the other called. Altogether, a rousing and well-done, probably mostly true, romantic novel.
G. J. Berger
DECENT PEOPLE
De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Bloomsbury, 2023, $28.00, hb, 272pp, 9781635575323
In March 1976, Josephine Wright returns to West Mills, North Carolina, after spending
52 REVIEWS | Issue 103, February 2023
most of her life in Harlem, New York. She’s relocating to the city of her birth to marry Olympus “Lymp” Seymore, a friend from her childhood she’s only recently been reacquainted with and come to love deeply. After three members of Lymp’s family are shot dead in their family home, Lymp is considered the prime suspect. When law enforcement seems too complacent to fully investigate, Jo sets out to uncover the truth, in the process revealing actions others have taken to protect secrets or perpetuate racist and homophobic attitudes.
Decent People is the sequel to In West Mills, the award-winning first novel for author Winslow. It submerges readers into the claustrophobia of rural small-town life where everybody knows everyone else and people are quick to pass judgment on those who appear to be different. It traces the sometimes-desperate steps people take so they and their loved ones can be like everyone else or hide that they are not.
Decent People instantly connects readers with West Mills in time and place. It resonates, capturing the individual rhythms and sounds as each character speaks in his or her own voice. It engages you, revealing the complexities of each character’s relationships and the choices he or she makes, and draws readers into a community they want to learn more about.
K. M. Sandrick
THE ORPHANAGE GIRLS REUNITED
Mary Wood, Pan, 2022, £7.99, pb, 370pp, 9781529089684
The second instalment of Mary Wood’s The Orphanage Girls series spans from 1910 to 1919 and follows Ellen and Ruth as they navigate their new lives after leaving the London orphanage in which they grew up together. The first five years centre solely around Ellen, the youngest, who is placed in the care of her wealthy, long-lost grandmother. Now living in the countryside near Leeds, Ellen is loved and educated, though this alone cannot free her from the trauma her childhood inflicted. So, when she discovers that Ruth is making a living as an actress in the West End, Ellen knows she must make her way back to London to reunite with her. The two must face the ghosts of their pasts together. But with World War One looming on the horizon, it is not only the horrors of yesterday which loom over the girls, but those of tomorrow too.
In only 370 pages, Wood succeeds in offering readers an extensive overview of the troubles plaguing London—and, indeed, Europe more generally—during the buildup to, and throughout, the First World War. Through the eyes of the two young orphans, readers bear witness first to the poverty and destitution rife in the English capital, before travelling overseas with the pair when they volunteer as nursing staff with the Red Cross to support the war effort and witness firsthand the death and devastation of the front
line. While Wood’s ambitious plot does at times result in some issues with the pacing of the narrative, she nevertheless succeeds in delivering an incredibly emotional account of the heightened experiences of love and loss which accompany war. A bittersweet tale that will have readers smiling on one page and crying on the next.
Athena Heavey
MULTI-PERIOD
THE ASHMOLE BOX
Michael Anson, Page D’Or, 2022, £12.99, pb, 346pp, 9781913825584 1646, Lichfield. Elias Ashmole returns exhausted to what was once his home town, humiliated by the defeat of the Royalists at Worcester. Ashmole is an intellectual and a scientist, but he also dabbles in alchemy and mysticism. Ashmole is approached by an unsavoury character, who claims to have discovered treasure in one of the tunnels dug during the last siege of Lichfield. Ashmole is lured by the possibilities of treasure, but the two men’s attempt to recover it has catastrophic and far-reaching consequences. 1776, Lichfield again. Richard Greene, a 60-year-old apothecary and surgeon obsessed with his renowned collection of antique relics and curios, is presented with a carved wooden box discovered by Greene’s close friend Lionel Blomefield, a retired clergyman. The box contains two handwritten sheets, signed by Elias Ashmole, along with a number of mysterious artefacts, none of which offers an immediate explanation as to the message the long-dead man wanted to convey. While Greene tries to unravel the mystery of the box, he faces his own challenges of corruption, deceit, greed and untold cruelty, which he does with his usual integrity, compassion and passion.
What I enjoyed most about this book is the characterisation of not just Greene, but also his long-suffering but loyal wife Theodosia, along with the Blomefields, Greene’s cousin Samuel Johnson, Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward, to name but a few of the dignitaries who Anson brings to life with such panache.
This is book three in the Apothecary Greene trilogy and can be read as a standalone.
I said in my review of The Bishop’s Grimoire (HNR 99) that I couldn’t recommend the book enough. I have no hesitation in repeating that for The Ashmole Box.
Marilyn Pemberton
PATTERSON HOUSE
Jane Cawthorne, Inanna, 2022, C$22.95, pb, 344pp, 9781771339391
In 1873, Maudie, a young and pregnant maid at Patterson House, a sprawling mansion on the shores of Lake Ontario, Canada, struggles up the back stairs to her third-floor room. While shocked to see her
master William Patterson’s body hanging by the rafters, she spits on it for his past abuses.
In 1916, young Alden Patterson, William’s granddaughter, sneaks out of the servant’s entrance of Patterson House to attend a march for the temperance movement. However, after finding a baby in a trash bin, she is compelled to return home since the authorities are busy controlling the parade. Alden’s stern father instructs her to take care of the baby and names her Constance. When her father succumbs to cholera and her brothers die in WWI, Alden is left with large debts. She takes in boarders, and moody Constance assists in the housekeeping. A former gardener, John, returns and takes over the maintenance of the crumbling mansion. But the crash of 1929 and the strange behavior of a tenant—Carling, Maudie’s son—threaten Alden’s survival.
As stated in the acknowledgements, award-winning author Jane Cawthorne writes about “women in moments of crises and transformation.” She does remarkably well in narrating the development of this novel’s two main characters, Alden and Constance. Cawthorne, a former resident of Toronto, provides interesting details in the settings and scenes around the city. While Patterson House is fictional, its vivid description likens it to any of the rambling mansions in The Beaches neighborhood. The norm for women to play a subservient role in that era are aptly demonstrated in the impediments faced by Alden and Constance in attempting to lead a respectable life. While Carling’s misogynistic behavior, in contrast to John, is somewhat exaggerated, it nevertheless highlights his deplorable character. Few readers would consider him excused by his unfortunate upbringing. The introduction of a ghost adds appeal to the novel—an informative read.
Waheed Rabbani
THE SECRETS OF ROCHESTER PLACE
Iris Costello, Penguin, 2022, £8.99, pb, 352pp, 9780241994405
Corinne is a present-day emergency call handler who is phoned by a woman named Mary, who says a girl is buried in rubble after an explosion at a house called Rochester Place in Tooting, south London. When ambulance crews arrive, they find the house does not exist. The call is put down as a hoax, but Corinne is not so sure. Intrigued, she starts investigating and uncovers a secret family history which envelops her own. The story is written from the point of view of Corinne; Mary, who travelled to London from Ireland in the 1920s; and Teresa, a young Basque girl who escaped the 1937 Guernica bombing.
It’s a poignant story of migration, racism, love, and mystery. While the times and characters change, the one constant is Rochester Place and the secrets behind its doors. Costello ties up the interconnecting stories neatly, and there is a clever plot twist at the end. She writes with passion about the migrant experience, bringing many cultures
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and customs to life and intertwining them with tales and myths that have been handed down through the generations. A good, gradually unwinding historical puzzle to curl up with on winter evenings.
Kate Pettigrew
is strangely reluctant to talk about the past. Eventually, Gracelynn realizes that a demon in the form of a traveling preacher comes back to their village every fifty years searching for something. When Gracelynn figures out that the demon comes back in search of a child, she is determined to save her village once and for all.
secret about the titular painting emerges to bind all three sections tightly together.
Very difficult to praise adequately in a short review, this was one of the richest and most rewarding books I read in 2022. However, I would have appreciated it if the cover had featured an impression of the ‘Merrymount’ picture.
ISTRIA GOLD
Mike Downey, MPress Media, 2022, £20.00, pb, 416pp, 9781739890629
London, 2019. When undercover policeman Marco Mihailić’s cover is blown, he loses his job and the woman he loves. There seems only one solution: to return to his birthplace in Croatia and reconnect with his family. But his grandfather is keeping dangerous secrets.
Istria, AD 81. Dog-handler Lucia is desperate to find a way out of the circus for herself, her dogs and her adopted father, the gladiator Severus. Her dogs’ sensitive noses might be the key, but her family has a powerful enemy.
1943. Brutalised by their father, brothers Nino and Pino Mihailić join Tito’s Partisans in their quest to rid Istria of fascism. But as Pino grows more devoted to the Party, will there be room left in his life for familial affections?
I really wanted to like this debut novel, not least because of its unusual setting. Clearly the author knows Croatia well, but unfortunately, he makes the rookie mistake of trying to include every piece of research he has uncovered, with the effect that it slows down the pace of what is billed as an adventure story. So, for instance, instead of ratcheting up the tension when Marco is searching for his missing grandfather, Downey gives us a lecture about the history of olive oil production. The characters are fairly well-developed, but their names are so similar (Nino, Pino, Vito, Marco, Mario) that several times the author calls them by the wrong name. It’s unfortunate, too, that the biggest twist in the novel occurs four chapters before the end, meaning that what follows is a bit of an anticlimax. I was also baffled by the random shifts from present to past tense that seem to serve no grammatical or dramatic purpose. Overall, a frustrating read, because I could see how much better it could be.
Jasmina Svenne
THE WITCH OF TIN MOUNTAIN
Paulette Kennedy, Lake Union, 2022, $16.99/£8.99, pb, 348pp, 9781662507625
This novel with a LGBTQ theme is told through the perspective of three women of the Ozark Mountains who are bound together by family ties and unspeakable evil.
Anneliese is burned to death as a witch in 1831. It is she who writes in the Grimoire, a book passed down through generations of women. The book is part diary, part recipes, and part spells and curses. Fifty years later, in 1881, Deirdre has become a young woman in the village of Tin Mountain. She adds to the book. Then in 1931, Gracelynn finds the Grimoire and reads the history of Anneliese. She asks Deirdre about Anneliese and the book, but Deirdre
The narrative is well paced, and the characters are crafted with such unique stories that it is impossible to confuse them. The antagonist, the demon, goes by three different names and is incredibly real. So real, that images from the novel lingered for days in my mind. A word of caution to the reader that there are scenes or references to sexual assault, violence, sex, incest, abortion, murder, and demonology. I would list the genre as historical horror.
Linda Harris Sittig
MOLLY AND THE CAPTAIN
Anthony Quinn, Abacus, 2022, £16.99, hb, 415pp, 9781408713211
This book takes its name from a picture of his two daughters made by the 18th-century painter William Merrymount. The other daughter in the picture is actually named Laura, but family lore gave her the nickname of ‘Captain’. It is the history of this picture and its owners that Quinn depicts with immense care and accuracy.
Firstly the diaries and letter of Laura Merrymount recount events mainly in the 1780s. Whilst Merrymount is imaginary (inspired by Thomas Gainsborough), the voice of Laura is utterly convincing as she describes her own career as an artist, an unfortunate marital rivalry with Molly and then a period of caring for her, as spinsters together in Kentish Town. The style is impeccably 18th-century epistolary.
Secondly we are in Chelsea in the 1880s with artist Paul Stransom and his sister Maggie. Reminiscent of the ‘New Woman’ heroines of that era’s novels, she has missed out on the chance of going to university due to having to nurse their mother. Through friends of her brother, she happens to acquire a picture with strong connections to the famous Molly and The Captain
The final section in Kentish Town in the 1980s recounts artist Nell and her daughter Billie, the latter a film actress appearing in what sounds like a British version of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, as they both vie for the affections of a young pop star, Robbie. This is all very enjoyable, by turns comical and poignant. A
Ben Bergonzi
STARS IN AN ITALIAN SKY
Jill Santopolo, Putnam, 2023, $28.00, hb, 336pp, 9780593419175
With a dual timeline, Santopolo weaves a sweeping story of romance between two starcrossed lovers in war-ravaged 1946 Genoa, Italy, a place divided by family loyalty, politics, and class, and connects them to a couple in present-day New York City. Her inspiration came from a honeymoon trip to Italy, visiting family and learning of the 1946 referendum that abolished the monarchy and nobility and created a republic.
Vincenzo, a painter and son of a count, falls in love with seamstress Giovanna. We delight in their blissful moments of first love as he courts her, paints her as his muse, and invites her to the bottling of 1944 vintage at his father’s vineyard, Villa Della Rosa. With vivid language and compelling characters, we are drawn in and chagrined to see the couple torn apart by misunderstanding, class, and the effects of the referendum. Meanwhile, back in New York, an up-and-coming artist, Luca, and a fashion designer, Cassandra, are living through the tension of wedding planning, trying to keep both their families happy. Family is a huge theme in this novel. The close and tender relationship between Cassandra and her grandmother is rich and strong.
What if you are forced to choose between your sweetheart and your family? Do you remain true to yourself or bow to family pressure? When Luca arranges for his Nonno and Cassandra’s Gram to meet at their apartment to pose for his painting, the two stories collide. Will this conflict be resolved? How will this affect Cass and Luca’s relationship? After engaging us with passion, turmoil and emotion, there is an unexpected yet satisfying ending. Recommended.
Gail M. Murray
THE EDINBURGH SKATING CLUB
Michelle Sloan, Polygon, 2022, £9.99, pb, 308pp, 9781846975950
The story recounts how poet Alison Cockburn accepts a challenge from philosopher David Hume and his sister Katherine to bring her intellect to bear on the many clubs and societies of 18th-century Edinburgh – all of which are open only to men. Hence Alison transmogrifies into the popular man-about-town Francis Pringle. Her impersonation is aided by an unusual authorial stratagem – the consistent use of male pronouns. This is disconcerting, but it renders just-believable the scenes where Alison-as-Pringle mixes undetected with such
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historical personages as Adam Smith, Allan Ramsay and Robert Burns, who all knew her as Alison. I felt that applying the maledress masquerade trope to a historically real woman was pushing the conceit a little too far.
Mirroring the historical friendship between middle-aged women Alison and Katherine is an amusing modern couple, university historians Clare Sharp and Jenny Brodie. They are drawn into a strange conspiracy to prove that the famous picture by Henry Raeburn, The Skating Minister, is in fact by another artist and of another subject. Outside Scotland, not everyone knows that there has been a real controversy over the authorship of this picture. Once I had learned of this, I further enjoyed Clare and Jenny’s detective work in museums and archives. But these scenes would be better if some conclusions had been left implicit, for the reader to draw.
The best aspect of the book is the way Sloan incrementally builds up a plot of some complexity and provides an enjoyable symmetry between period and modern scenes – for example, where the two modern historians see the small Edinburgh wall plaque dedicated to Cockburn and declare it a very inadequate memorial.
Ben Bergonzi
CHILDREN & YOUNG ADULT
DRAWING OUTSIDE THE LINES
Susan J. Austin, SparkPress, 2022, $12.95, pb, 216pp, 9781684631599
The opening of the magnificent Brooklyn Bridge in May 1883 meant more to elevenyear-old Julia Morgan than to anyone else in her family—although in her California home, she and Papa have pored over every report of the design and construction. A train excursion to New York City, to help her grandmother pack for a move West, connects her with both the bridge and her parents’ adult cousin, “Pierre LeBrun, the architect.” As her passions coalesce around design, engineering, and the marvels of architecture, Cousin Pierre’s support of Julia’s path becomes essential. Can she resist her mother’s determination to have her enter society and make an early marriage? Is there room for her in a career where men expect to dominate, and a clever woman is both a competitor and a target?
Susan Austin’s writing, accessible to middlegrade reading skills yet rich with detail and motion, carries Julia’s story adeptly through high school challenges, negotiations with her mother, and eventually college years with attacks from many of her fellow students, all men. The engaging novel explores Victorian expectations and conditions, and the essential role of mentors and protectors for women reaching for new roles. Based closely on the career path of the real Julia Morgan, an award-winning designer, the book is also rich with Austin’s imagined life of emotions and challenges for this young woman whose personal life was not recorded.
Differing from many works of historical fiction that explore girls becoming women, Drawing Outside the Lines only brushes lightly across themes of romance or imagined homemaking. Instead, Julia’s passion for the elegance of math and architecture takes center stage in this highly satisfying narrative.
Beth Kanell
PHALAINA
Alice Brière-Haquet (trans. Emma Ramadan), Levine Querido, 2022, $18.99, hb, 320pp, 9781646141821
Narrated by both human and animal, Phalaina tells the story of Homo sapiens and what has been lost in the quest to dominate the world. In 1881 London, Manon is an orphaned girl with red eyes who doesn’t speak and who has never fit in with the world around her. But wherever Manon goes, death seems to trail her. Little does she know the lengths some people will go to acquire and study her. She’s a new branch of humanity: a race possessing powers for healing and telepathy, gifts one scientist believes will bring him fame and fortune. However, he and his nefarious henchmen must catch her first.
The book is an examination of the world beyond the human senses, what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost. It’s a melancholy view of progress and its cost, not just to nature but to the essence of humanity. Chapters are short,
A
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publication of
Douglas Kemp
often only a couple of pages, resulting in rapid scene and narrative changes. Interspersed between the chapters are faux letters from a professor to Charles Darwin examining the living world and humanity’s place in it. The narrative style is very ‘tell’ heavy, so it’s hard to empathize with the characters. Of note: there are gruesome and explicit mutilations and death, so I would suggest caution regarding the middle-grade classification. There’s also fat-shaming of one character whose kindness doesn’t seem to be mentioned as much as her weight. She’s referred to as fat poetess and fat loon. Even in a chapter introducing us to the character, it states: “She had the memory of an elephant. The hips and butt too…” Including such comments in a novel about the beauty of diversity is both distasteful and counterintuitive to the overall message.
J. Lynn Else
THE TALE OF TRUTHWATER LAKE
Emma Carroll, Faber & Faber, 2022, £12.99, hb, 295pp, 9780571364428
In the too-hot, climate-changed summer of 2032, Polly and her brother are packed off to a favourite aunt who lives by an artificial lake, a reservoir which flooded the Devon valley and village of Syndercombe in 1952. Polly fears deep water, but when she ventures out into the hot night for a cautious swim, she finds an old door handle at the lake’s edge. As the latch turns, she is dragged down into the lake and into 1952 to relive the last months of the drowned village. She becomes Nellie, a foster child, whose dream is to swim the English Channel.
Nellie’s life changes—but not in the way we expect—when a swimming celebrity arrives at the Syndercombe Lido to select a young swimmer for a media-sponsored Channel swim. Nellie and her best friend Lena must plot and plan to help the chosen swimmer achieve the Channel swim and make all their different dreams come true. The weight of the storytelling is with Nellie, as she also negotiates different kinds of separation and loss, trying to keep Lena with her as Syndercombe collapses into water. When Nellie’s story arrives in 2032, Polly’s story reasserts itself. We understand the lessons she has learned from being Nellie and about different kinds of courage.
The thread linking Polly and Nellie is the confidence to be where it feels lonely and dangerous. Nellie’s story gives life to a community which lost its home in the creation of a reservoir, so the irreversible consequences of environmental change also link these children past and present. The main characters are from dissimilar cultures, but their stories tell how their dreams and vulnerabilities are the same. This is relevant storytelling about children’s resilience, which conveys the magic of time travel and of true friendship.
Louise Tree
THE FAITHFUL DOG
Terry Lee Caruthers, Black Rose Writing, 2022, $19.95, pb, 223pp, 9781684339785
Bärchen is Louis Pfeif’s hound. When Louis leaves for the U.S. Civil War, Bärchen refuses to remain home and escorts his master to war. Together, they survive train rides, long marches, bad food, no food, boredom, and skunk attacks. Sergeant Welhelmi, “The Bone Man,” becomes one of Bärchen’s favorite men after Louis, because he always brings the one thing Bärchen cannot resist—soup bones. At the Battle of Shiloh, Louis is killed. A grieving Bärchen will not leave his side, fighting off wild animals, as well as shirkers and thieves intent on stealing personal belongings from the dead of both sides. Not even Louis’s friends can get close to retrieve the body. They are forced to wait until Bärchen trots off to relieve himself. Taking advantage of his absence, they retrieve Louis and bury him nearby. Bärchen scents his master to a freshly dug grave and resumes his steadfast vigil until Mrs. Pfeif arrives two weeks later. Bärchen has caught her familiar scent and lopes into camp to find her and lead her to her husband’s grave.
Told from the perspective of Bärchen, the story fits the tone of a middle-grade reader. Writing from the point of view of an animal can be problematic, but Caruthers pulls it off. There are points where, by necessity, she switches to the human perspective to move the story forward. In those moments there is a bit of understandable head-hopping. The depth of emotion is a delightful surprise. As I read about Bärchen’s refusal to leave his master dead on the field, I found myself welling with sadness and compassion. The Faithful Dog is a wonderful read. I’m looking forward to more by this author.
Angela Moody
nothing left,” like she is supposed to do all the giving and none of the receiving.
On a visit to the eye doctor’s office, the doctor’s daughter, Marny, makes friendly overtures towards Lamb, as Lamb is carrying a book they both like. While Lamb is leery of mixing with white people in any form, she is lonely, naïve, and eager to read the sequel Marny promises to lend her, and agrees to meet. Their secret meet-ups lead to the worst kind of trouble, when Marny’s brother makes unwanted advances to Lamb. The Jim Crow code gives Lamb few options to resist, and the consequences become tragic when Simeon vows to somehow avenge Lamb.
The author’s note gives information on which items from the historical record ClineRansome used in her story, plus background information on lynching. Every character has multiple dimensions. The reader’s patience is rewarded by waiting to have the characters’ background stories revealed gradually. Plot threads involving sexual assault and lesbianism are handled with sensitivity. Despite a tragic event, the book ends with a degree of a hope. This story and these characters will haunt me for a long time to come.
B. J. Sedlock
MY NEST OF SILENCE
Matt Faulkner, Atheneum, 2022, $18.99, hb, 384pp, 9781534477629
FOR LAMB
Lesa Cline-Ransome, Holiday House, 2023, $18.99, hb, 304pp, 9780823450152
Wow, wow, wow! This is one powerful book. If you thought you knew from history class about the Jim Crow conditions African Americans had to endure in the South, this heartbreaking story will immerse you in that world like no textbook could.
Lamb Clark lives with her mother, Marion, and brother, Simeon, in 1930s Jackson, Mississippi. Their father deserted the family, or so the children are told. Simeon is extremely intelligent and ambitious—he’s saving money to attend college up North. But shy and reserved Lamb feels “like the meat in a sandwich, with everybody taking a bite out of me till there isn’t
Mari might be living behind barbed wire, but she takes solace in drawing and in her older brother. But when Mak decides to join the U.S. Army in 1944, Mari makes a vow of silence. No matter what happens to her in the Manzanar internment camp where the U.S. government has sent her family, Mari swears she will not speak until her brother returns. Swallowing her words will keep him safe, she thinks—just as he thinks that hiding the truth about his difficult time as a Japanese American in the U.S. Army will spare his family some pain.
The novel alternates between Mari’s innocent narration, told via text, and Mak’s difficult wartime experiences, portrayed in illustrated panels. Mak’s is probably the more compelling of the two stories, made even more so by author/illustrator Matt Faulkner’s beautiful art. Mak and his comrades come to vivid, intimate life in the detailed illustrations, and the chaos of war is touchingly portrayed. The stakes in Mari’s story are lower, though readers will be caught up in her efforts to learn how to draw and the mysterious illness she contracts. This book will probably appeal most to readers on the younger side of the middlegrade cohort, at least judging from the simple, straightforward narration and the limited market testing of the two young readers in this reviewer’s household.
Carrie Callaghan
SAFE
Vanessa Harbour, Firefly, 2022, £7.99, pb, 224pp, 9781913102937
A sequel to the author’s first novel, Flight, this novel continues the quest of Jakob, a Jew,
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and Kizzy, who is Roma, to find refuge for both themselves and some of the famous Lipizzaner stallions of the Spanish Riding School during the final chaotic months of the Second World War.
Taken in by an Austrian countess, they are currently safe, but Kizzy resents the Countess’s attempts to turn her into a ‘lady’. Heinz, their adult friend and protector, is injured and cannot accompany them when another mission to save valuable horses arises. Worse, their informant, and a man they must trust, is no other than the one who betrayed them to the Nazis in the previous book. Betrayal after betrayal follow, and Kizzy and Jakob find themselves behind enemy lines and responsible for not only fifty horses but a band of lost children. Battling many dangers, from both the troops and the wild, mountainous terrain, they succeed in returning home to finally form what Kizzy calls ‘one, big, safe family’.
The included first chapter of book three in the series, however, indicates that safety may not last forever…
This is a simply-written, adventurous tale of children working alone to save themselves and the animals they prize and love. Descriptive prose is minimal, with instead a concentration on the emotional relations between the children and the empathy which they feel for the horses. This creates a warm atmosphere despite the story’s setting in the confusion and violence of war.
Dialogue and spoken monologue are used to propel the plot, and the subject of displaced children struggling to survive is an issue of as great a relevance today as ever.
This book would encourage useful discussion in schools, and would also be perfect for pony-mad girls of 8 – 12 years.
Jane Burke
THE MIRACULOUS SWEETMAKERS: The Frost Fair
Natasha Hastings, illus. Alex T. Smith, HarperCollins, 2022, £12.99, hb, 399pp, 9780008496050
Thomasina’s enchanting story is set against the dramatic backdrop of the Great Frost Fair of 1683 when the River Thames froze over. The daughter of a sweetmaker, her mother and father were devastated when tragedy struck their small family. Her adventure begins when she is drawn to a mysterious conjurer and shown the enchanted Frost Fair, but the world of Father Winter threatens her and everyone she holds dear. With the help of two new friends her quest begins.
This unique story conveys the depth of love, resilience, and determination between friends to overcome threats of danger. The historic backdrop supports this brilliantly researched novel. The mystical and impossible are made credible as the plot and pace pick up. Never lagging or lacking in drama, the reader is swept along into a world driven on one hand
by deep grief and love, and on the other by deceit and cunning.
Touchingly, subjects that are in focus today such as mental health are covered in the context of ignorance and the treatment they received back in the 17th century. The lack of knowledge at the time concerning the debilitating physical effects of asthma also feature in a way that conveys the seriousness of attacks and management of them by sufferers.
This is a beautifully written and presented book that informs, challenges, delights, and mystifies. Above all, it is a story of hope and forgiveness—perhaps the hardest kind, to forgive ourselves our shortcomings. There are plenty of illustrations throughout to add to its appeal. Excellent lessons delivered through an enchanting story. Suitable for 8+.
Valerie Loh
STRIKE THE ZITHER
Joan He, Roaring Brook, 2022, $18.99, hb, 368pp, 9781250258588
In the year 414 of the Xin Dynasty, three major factions struggle for control of a fictional version of China in this retelling of the 14th-century historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms attributed to Luo Guanzhong.
Joan He’s sparkling style draws you in from the first two lines, introducing the narrator Rising Zephyr. The engaging Zephyr is strategist to Xin Ren, the underdog challenger to prime minister Miasma. Ren, a compassionate leader, frustrates the more calculating Zephyr, who must also contend with Ren’s two sworn sisters, warriors Lotus and Cloud, who don’t take kindly to the 18-year-old genius.
The use of “lordess” and the like underline the fact that most of the powerful figures are women, in direct contravention of expectations, and there are only a handful of male characters who influence the story. The novel not only passes the Bechdel test, it laps it a few times. The novel also explores themes of belonging, loyalty, and ambition through Zephyr’s desires and motivations.
The publishers have designated the novel as YA, but aside from the ages of some of the protagonists, there’s little that feels “YA.” However, it’s a slippery category. The novel also feels very realistic until halfway through, at which point some fantastical/supernatural elements are introduced. Overall, those elements work, but it is a jarring transition. My biggest complaint about the book is that it ends rather abruptly, with a note “To be continued in the next volume.” The story doesn’t feel completed, but it isn’t a cliffhanger, either.
All in all, Joan He has an excellent command of storytelling, and the first installment indicates this series should be a joy to read.
Jodi McMaster
THE SECRET OF THE TREASURE KEEPERS
A.M. Howell, illus. Rachel Corcoran, Usborne, 2022, £7.99, pb, 336pp, 9781474991117
In A.M. Howell’s fourth historical novel, each of which has been set in a different year in the 20th century, she takes us to February 1948. While waiting for her mother, who is a volunteer at the British Museum and keen to get a paid job there, Ruth takes an urgent phone call from a woman in the Cambridgeshire Fens claiming a precious archaeological find on her farmland.
Ruth and her mother decide to investigate for themselves. What they discover relates to more than one mystery around human relationships as well as the origins of the treasure. Their actions stretch credulity just a little (recognised at one point in the story by Ruth herself!) but, placed in the context of their determined characters, the reader is swept along with them and anxious to see how matters will be resolved.
Period detail is woven in well—life during the war in country and city is compared and contrasted during conversations between Ruth, who remained in London with her mother for the duration, and the people she meets at Rook Farm, one of whom is a Land Girl. The circumstances of the lives of individuals in the story are very much related to the specific time at which it is set due to the changes in society wrought by the recently ended Second World War. Reference is made to the imminent arrival of the NHS when discussion about paying for medical treatment arises.
The novel was inspired by the author’s own interest in archaeology and in particular by the story behind the discovery of the Mildenhall treasure in Suffolk in 1942, and in an afterword she provides links for readers to follow up any interest they have in further digging and delving. These are supplemented by related weblinks compiled by the publisher.
Ann Lazim
BENEATH THE WIDE SILK SKY
Emily Inouye Huey, Scholastic, 2022, $19.99, hb, 336pp, 9781338789942
This young adult book addresses the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II from a different angle: what life was like in the months between Pearl Harbor and being rounded up and sent to internment camps.
Samantha Sakamoto’s family farms on an island in Washington State. Her widowed father is struggling to pay off the loan for their farm, taken on crushing terms because of their ethnicity. If they miss a single payment, they will lose the farm and their money. Sam’s older brother Charlie has to work to help pay off the loan instead of going to college, and sister Kiki is mainly interested in boys and the upcoming school dance. Sam wants to become a photographer. Her school friend gives her information about a photo contest;
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if she wins, the money could help pay off the loan.
Once war is declared, their troubles increase: taunting at school, Charlie is fired due to his race, and several men from the Japanese community are sent to prison. Government agents come to the Sakamoto house and confiscate their radio and Sam’s camera. Some sympathetic white neighbors try to help them, and several Japanese Americans courageously protest their treatment. A crisis comes for the family when Sam and Kiki attend a bonfire after a school basketball game, where Kiki and her white boyfriend are attacked.
Many readers will know how the story must end, with internment, but the plot’s details of how Sam and family survive the interim, and even find ways to defy the authorities are fascinating. Sam’s budding romance with Hiro, son of a family friend, is touchingly developed. The author’s note tells of her own family’s experience of being sent to a camp during the war. An excellent story about a shameful episode in U.S. history.
B. J. Sedlock
RUST IN THE ROOT
Justina Ireland, Balzer & Bray, 2022, $18.99/ C$23.99, hb, 439pp, 9780063038226
Ireland’s website tagline does an excellent job of introducing her fiction: “Let’s change the system via the lens of compelling fiction.” Rust in the Root, set in 1937 New York and Ohio, builds an alternate United States with widespread magic of various brilliantly imaginative kinds. In this fantastical version of America, Ireland brings into stark (and sometimes literally horrifying) focus the racial injustices that are the poisonous legacy of slavery and its aftermath, but she does this through the separate and not equal treatment of “colored” mages and their magical traditions.
Industry and science—as a tool of business and powered by White mages—join forces with the Klan as the government turns a blind eye. Into that toxicity, Ireland adds a nuanced blend of mythic traditions from Norse to African. This is sophisticated world-building that requires an attentive reader.
The two main characters, a young queer mage, Laura Ann Langston, and her mentor, the Skylark, must stop the killing of their fellow Black mages inside what is called the Great Ohio Blight, an area drained of life and productivity. The magic practiced by Blacks is blamed for the “Blights” and the Great Rust, a magical equivalent of the Great Depression. The two women work their magic by “raveling” seeds such as okra or jacaranda into thorny warriors or other “constructs.” For example, Laura helps a bum: “I shake the sesame seeds in my hand, cupping them loosely, and call on the Possibilities.… each seed hits the ground with a hollow sound, like popping corn, raveling into a bottle of beer.” In the end, Laura and Skylark face general annihilation or saving the world from the cataclysmic effects of endemic hate that pervades America.
Judith Starkston
JOURNEY BACK TO FREEDOM
Catherine Johnson, illus. Katie Hickey, Barrington Stoke, 2022, £7.99, pb, 120pp, 9781781129227
In 1756, an 11-year-old African boy is on guard in his village while his parents go to market. He spots slave traders who terrorise the area, snatching people to sell and runs into the fields with his sister. Despite their desperate attempts to flee, they are captured and separated, and so starts the ten-year journey of Olaudah Equiano, now a slave. The trials and tribulations of the real-life boy who becomes a man are the story of Catherine Johnson’s book.
Olaudah sails from what is present-day Nigeria to Barbados, America and the UK, in what were amazing journeys for those times, and is bought and sold by various masters, facing cruelty along the way. However, he is clever and survives by his wits, including buying and selling goods he picks up on his journeys. He earns enough money to buy himself freedom at twenty-one.
The story is based on Olaudah’s own biography and is written in the first person in simple language ideal for eight-year-olds and above, whom the book is aimed at. There are some instances of violence which might be difficult for younger readers, but the book is a searingly honest insight into a boy’s survival.
Kate Pettigrew
THE BATTLE OF CABLE STREET
Tanya Landman, illus. Sara Mulvanny, Barrington Stoke, 2022, £7.99, pb, 113pp, 9781800901087
In Stepney, London, in 2020, Elsie looks back on her youth in the 1930s, when Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists were on the rise. This retrospective device allows for the inclusion of historical details and hindsight and conveying complexity that would be more difficult to achieve if it were presented as a contemporary account written by a young girl. Through Elsie’s eyes readers see how political views evolved among people living in London’s East End during this period, particularly the Jewish and Irish communities, to both of which she belongs through the respective heritages of her grandparents.
Shifting loyalties are shown and charismatic local characters introduced, including Elsie’s close friend Nathan Cohen, a member of the Young Communist League, who becomes a leading local anti-fascist. Using the strong voice of Elsie, Tanya Landman evokes a vivid picture of the East End in the build-up to the events of Sunday, 4th October 1936, when local people courageously banded together, despite opposition from police and politicians, to prevent the fascists from marching through their area.
Both the author and the narrator realise that, while the fight was won then, the danger from fascism is raising its ugly head once again
in current times. The author comments in an afterword that, while she was taught about Hitler and the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy at school, she was not made aware of the threat it posed within Britain at that time and recognises the importance of making this story more known.
This is an accessible short novel aimed at readers of 12+ from a writer who has a good reputation for bringing working class and Black history to life, including her 2015 Carnegie Medal winner Buffalo Soldier
Ann Lazim
MIDWINTER BURNING
Tanya Landman, illus. Tom Clohosy Cole, Walker, 2022, £7.99, pb, 256pp, 9781406397185
Alfie Wright is a young boy in Britain in 1939. He is, unlike many children, pleased to be evacuated as the reader gets a sense that he has a negative relationship with his mother. He is evacuated to a remote farm with the immensely kind and understanding ‘Auntie Bell’ and her husband, Ted.
Alfie and Bell’s relationship is one of the most poignant in the book. From Bell, he learns how to milk a cow, and he is given more freedom than he has ever experienced before.
On one of his roams, he meets a boy called Smidge, who could be said to have a learning difficulty, and he doesn’t communicate in standard language. He and Alfie communicate mainly through gestures. Both the boys, who have never experienced strong friendship before, derive much from each other’s company. It transpires very gradually, that Smidge is a time traveller from the Stone Age. This part of the novel is not completely convincing, though is enjoyable when you realise. This does not become clear until the denouement. Alfie is the only one who suspects Smidge is different throughout the novel. This suspicion leads to Alfie worrying that he will be labelled crazy like the WW1 veteran, Mr. Moore, who Alfie lives next door to in London. Mr. Moore was ostracised by most of the community for what we now know as PTSD. Alfie does not ostracise him, and their relationship is another major strength of this book. Mental health is not often well handled. That is not the case with Landman’s novel.
YOSSEL’S JOURNEY
Kathryn Lasky, illus. Johnson Yazzie, Charlesbridge, 2022, $18.99, hb, 48pp, 9781623541767
Yossel’s Journey by Kathryn Lasky is a beautifully illustrated historical fiction book for children aged 5-9 years. It is a story about an eight-year-old Jewish boy named Yossel who must leave his home and friends in Russia to emigrate to New Mexico. He overcomes language and cultural barriers to become best friends with Thomas, a Navajo boy his age.
The story teaches important lessons of how you can bridge differences to form new friendships yet maintain family traditions in a new country while respecting the customs
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Rebecca Butler
of others. The scene, when a Navajo baby laughs out loud for the first time at Yossel’s joke and the family celebrates, is endearing. This book could be read in a classroom and discussed as students explore their family ancestries. The illustrations by Johnson Yazzie reflect the rich traditions of the Southwest and add to the story’s theme of how cross-cultural friendships uplift and unite us in a diverse society. Yossel’s Journey would be a valuable addition to a child’s bookshelf.
Linnea Tanner
OUR STORY STARTS IN AFRICA
Patrice Lawrence, illus. Jeanetta Gonzales, Magic Cat Publishing, 2022, £12.99, hb, 40pp, 9781913520588
Paloma lives in England and is visiting family in Trinidad. While she and her cousins ostensibly speak the same language, they find it difficult to understand one another and the cousins comment that Paloma cannot be family because she speaks differently from them. Paloma’s Tante Janet takes this opportunity to reveal the history which has led to the African diaspora. She introduces this by explaining the similarity of the comb they are using to those found by scientists on the banks of the Nile.
Paloma and Tante Janet talk about warrior queens, the library of Alexandria, African kingdoms, slavery, and colonialism, and there is an appendix to the story with more details and some further reading appropriate to the age group at which this picture book is aimed.
Patrice Lawrence is an award-winning author of children’s and YA novels, many of which have contemporary settings but are increasingly having historical settings, such as Diver’s Daughter: A Tudor Story. In an afterword, she describes how this current book is inspired by her own childhood experiences.
In her first children’s book, illustrator and designer Jeanetta Gonzales demonstrates her love of nature and bold colour in portraying the fruit and flora of the Caribbean. An especially effective illustration shows Tante Janet’s hands cutting a lime into pieces while she speaks about how ‘They cut Africa into chunks. Our lands were chopped up, mixed up and squashed together’. For clear contrast, scenes that are set in the past are in sepia tones.
While painful aspects of African history are not glossed over, the atmosphere created overall by this book is positive. A complex, multi-faceted story is told skilfully, simply without being simplistic, raising questions that will encourage children to find out more.
Ann Lazim
SPARROWS IN THE WIND
Gail Carson Levine, Quill Tree Books, 2022, $17.99, hb, 340pp, 9780063039070
A powerful retelling of the fall of Troy, Sparrows in the Wind brings readers into the
world of Cassandra and her hope to save Troy and prevent its destruction. Written with the target demographic in mind (grades 4-6), Levine expertly omits much of the sordid details of the original myth but turns the story into a coming-of-age journey of love, gods, friendship, adventure, and danger. Blessed (and then cursed) by Apollo, Cassandra turns her attention (and affection) to Eurus, the god of the wind, who helps her at crucial junctures.
An exciting twist occurs when the narrative shifts from Cassandra’s vantage point to that of an Amazonian warrior. The Amazons answer the plea from Troy to come to their aid, and one of the young warriors, Rin, joins forces with Cassandra. Together they save Troy and forge a strong lasting friendship. Levine does a superb job of maintaining the god’s capriciousness and personality, while exploring what a relationship with a god would entail. Indeed, Cassandra eventually has to choose between a life in Troy with a family, or a life married to a god.
Levine is a reputable author, and her confident hand is evident in the pace of the plot and in the voices of the wellcrafted characters. Especially notable is her description of the infamous Trojan horse and the twist at the end, allowing Cassandra and Rin to save Troy using their new friendship. An excellent introduction to Greek myth, history, and Amazons, Sparrows in the Wind is an engaging tale that is absolutely well worth the read with enough action to lure in most reluctant readers.
Shaw
THE KILLING CODE
Ellie Marney, Little, Brown, 2022, $17.99, hb, 369pp, 9780316339582
The Killing Code immediately draws readers into several interlocking conundrums: World War Two code-breaking, a high-jacked identity, intense interpersonal relationships, and murder! Katherine (Kit) assumes the identity of her recently deceased friend. Hoping to change her own social status and even future prospects, she is unexpectedly recruited into an evolving secret group of mostly female codebreakers working tirelessly in a clandestine effort to break the enemy’s encrypted communications.
As Kit settles into the heady cloistered life of wartime Washington, DC, constantly worried about possible exposure, she forms friendships with others who also have pasts to hide and presents to unfold. The secrecy and tensions are further heightened with the apparent random murders of a couple of her code-breaking female colleagues. Kit and a few comrades embark on a dangerous trek to track down the murderer. Using guile and the techniques acquired via their code-breaking efforts, the girls pursue an individual who is also seeking to silence them.
Following the success of her two previous novels, Marney has written a tight and engaging young-adult narrative that is sure to enthrall. The Killing Code explores a socially
charged America at a critical juncture during the opening months of the Second World War.
Jon G. Bradley
THE CHESTNUT ROASTER
Eve McDonnell, illus. Ewa Beniak-Haremska, Everything with Words, 2022, £7.99, pb, 351pp, 9781911427292
The Irish author of Elsetime returns with a second book for children aged nine and above, set in Paris in 1888 as the city prepares for the Exposition Universelle and the unveiling of the Tour Eiffel. Piaf is twelve years old, and she remembers everything, from the day she was born; it’s a gift and a curse as her head rattles with information and never quietens. Piaf works as a chestnut roaster, alone now as her brother is hospitalised and her mother waits by his bedside. A child snatcher stalks the streets, kidnapping gifted children, and an epidemic of forgetfulness makes the people of Paris believe it is still 1887; only Piaf remembers as the wicked Dr Le Chandelier threatens both Piaf and Luc, and they must team up to find the missing children and restore memory to the people of Paris. Their adventure takes them through the streets of Paris and to the dangerous catacombs beneath the city.
McDonnell is a gifted writer who weaves a page-turning tale. Her characters are compelling; Piaf is intrepid, brave, and loyal. Luc is smart and kind, and Madame Legrand is a comic delight. The plot is tightly crafted, and the storytelling, though woven with darkness, is playful and poetic. The Chestnut Roaster has all the hallmarks of a future children’s classic and will be enjoyed by fans of Jennifer Bell, Helena Duggan, and Celine Kiernan.
Lisa Redmond
WE WERE THE FIRE: Birmingham 1963
Shelia P. Moses, Nancy Paulsen, 2022, $17.99, hb, 159pp, 9780593407486
A moving story about a courageous event in the Civil Rights movement that involved thousands of children, pre-teens, and teenagers in Birmingham, Alabama, on a May morning in 1963.
In this story told through the personal narration of Rufus Jackson Jones, Jr., who is Black, the reader quickly experiences life in deeply segregated Birmingham. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. comes to the city with his plans for a peaceful march against segregation, Rufus’s parents and neighbors support the ideals of civil rights. Still, they worry about losing their jobs and the potential violence that might occur at the march.
Despite the adults’ fears, Rufus and his friends decide to join a peaceful protest of their own in the city park. At the crescendo of the event, thousands of children join the march and are met by police and firefighters who turn powerful water hoses on them. Despite their fears for safety, the children persevere, and their actions become known
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as the Children’s Crusade, a significant turning point in the fight for civil rights.
This book should have a solid appeal to middle-grade readers. The characters resonate, the plot is well-paced, and the action is palpable. Laced with concrete details about the event, the novel teaches how courage and perseverance can change the world. Although I wished for a map of Alabama, I highly recommend this book.
Linda Harris Sittig
THE SILENT STARS GO BY
Sally Nicholls, Walker, 2022, $17.99/C$23.99, hb, 240pp, 9781536223187 / Andersen Press, 2021, £7.99, pb, 240pp, 9781839131134
Yorkshire, England, 1919. Just after the end of World War I, nineteen-year-old Margot Allen is working in Durham as a typist but comes home to her family’s village vicarage for Christmas. She had been unofficially betrothed to soldier Harry Singer before the war, but when he went missing in action, she was left in an alltoo-common predicament. Margot’s parents, while not happy that she was pregnant, were reasonably supportive and managed a subterfuge that meant they adopted Margot’s little boy as their own. Margot stayed away and went to work. Now little Jamie’s father has returned and must be told.
This story is bittersweet and hard to pigeonhole. The Christmas story in the charming village setting with the likeable Allens had me half-expecting a saccharine, happilyever-after ending. That did not happen, and while the author leaves the resolution unclear, it does seem to wind the story up satisfactorily for all. There are strong components of the social problems and changes wrought by World War I. Women enter the workforce, returning soldiers deal with physical and emotional problems, and even happy, stable families struggle with the difficult realities of everyday life. This is a thoughtful story that does not follow any formula that I could see. I did not always like Margot, finding her selfcentered, reckless, and headstrong, although it was easy to feel sympathy for her problems. I finished the book feeling as if I would like to read more by Sally Nicholls. If you’re on the fence, I’d give this a try.
Elizabeth Knowles
WE OWN THE SKY
Rodman Philbrick, Scholastic, 2022, $18.99, pb, 208pp, 9781338736298
How can you hate someone so cool?
Rodman Philbrick’s latest novel answers that question with storytelling as graceful and death-defying as the stunts he immortalizes in We Own the Sky. Loosely based on the courageous, record-breaking aviator Ruth Law, Philbrick sets his story in 1924 Maine and follows the fictional Ruthie Reynard and her flying circus.
We learn about Ruthie Reynard and her team of skilled stunt performers through the eyes of her young cousins, twelve-year-old Davy and his big sister, Jo. The pair lost their
mother and father to the terrible conditions at a Biddeford textile mill. Homeless and destitute, they stand at their mother’s grave, desperately afraid, when an elegant Cadillac pulls into the cemetery, and Ruthie Reynard, their future, emerges from the driver’s seat.
Davy and Jo join the flying circus and plunge into a world of excitement. Their new family of kind, talented performers allows them, for the first time, to experience the joy of childhood. However, that joy quickly turns to fear when a large and well-connected chapter of the KKK attempts to drive the circus—and its French and Italian immigrant performers—from Maine.
Philbrick introduces the concepts of domestic terrorism and white supremacy honestly and appropriately for young readers. The author does not gloss over the unspeakable acts of this hate group; he skillfully unpacks these ideas through Davy’s eyes, so young readers can slowly understand the insidious and omnipresent hatred in America. I highly recommend it for ages 8 and up.
Melissa Warren
A SEED IN THE SUN
Aida Salazar, Dial, 2022, $17.99/C$23.99, hb, 272pp, 9780593406601
Sometime in 1964, while working in the California fields, twelve-year-old Lula lost her voice. Now it is just a whispery, scraggly thing that won’t let her say the things she wants to say. In her daydreams, she has a strong, powerful voice that commands attention, like the ringmaster she saw once in a circus.
September of 1965 finds Lula’s migrantworker family in Delano, California, picking grapes. It isn’t long before they learn that they’ve been hired, in part, to replace the Filipino workers who are on strike. Lula’s Papa and older siblings listen to Dolores Huerta, who explains why all the farm workers should strike together: Filipinos, Mexicans (Lula was born in the U.S. but her parents emigrated from Mexico), African Americans, and Okies. Lula and her siblings are convinced, but Papa won’t listen to the arguments of a woman, plus Mama is ill. How can they care for her on the little money the strikers get from the union? Will the family join the strikers? Will Lula get her voice back? Will Mama get better?
This is a novel-in-verse, with Lula narrating. Sometimes her words are lovely lyrics full of color, heat, and longing. Sometimes the verses are merely concise storytelling. Salazar finds a perfect balance. Middle-grade readers will understand Lula, her problems, and her dreams, especially those readers, like Lula, who
are multilingual. Spanish words are sprinkled throughout the text. There are many books about the civil rights movements of the 1960s, but few focus on the striking farm workers in California. Salazar does a magnificent job showing the struggles of the migrant families, clearly showing that children were workers and strikers as well. This is a much-needed addition to any library.
Elizabeth Caulfield Felt
THE HUNGER BETWEEN US
Marina Scott, FSG, 2022, $18.99, hb, 304pp, 9780374390068
A year into the Siege of Leningrad, Liza must decide to what lengths she will go to save her loved ones. As famine stalks the city, the seventeen-year-old is about to bury her mother. But the death of her cherished parent is not the only reason she feels desperate and bereft. Life inside Leningrad is growing increasingly hellish. Cannibals hunt humans for their flesh, and the NKVD, or secret police, terrorize and abuse the residents instead of protecting them. But relief seems in sight—or so Aka, Liza’s best friend claims, since she has heard that girls can eat their fill at the ‘mansion’ if they agree to ‘entertain’ NKVD officers.
When Aka disappears, Liza sets out to find her. On Liza’s search through Leningrad’s violent underbelly, she encounters two girlhood crushes. The first is sensitive Luka, a maimed musician who belongs to a secret community of fellow sufferers that temporarily adopts Liza. The second is handsome Maksim, a member of the dreaded secret police. As Liza stops at nothing to find Aka, she provokes a lethal conflict that puts the lives of her new companions in danger. Will a final act of infinite courage make up for her mistake and redeem her in the eyes of those she has befriended, even as the events she has set into motion take an unexpected turn? Readers will be kept on edges of their seats as they discover Liza’s fate.
The Hunger Between Us is a fast-paced and atmospheric historical thriller. In this rare portrayal of the fight for survival inside the necropolis that was Leningrad between 1941 and 1944, its protagonists and the formidable enemy they face—starvation—add up to a ravishing, unforgettable portrait of an era. Rather than YA, The Hunger Between Us appeals to all ages.
Elisabeth Lenckos
WINTERKILL
Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, Scholastic, 2022, $7.99, pb, 288pp, 9781338831412
This is an excellent and terrible book.
Well-written, it includes convincing and sympathetic characters, and it bears witness to an awful historical event: Stalin’s partially successful attempt between 1930 and 1933 to starve Ukraine to death. Its author, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, is, in her own words, “fierce in her pursuit of truth.”
She skillfully evokes a fictional Ukrainian
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village called Felivka and a farm family who support themselves by raising wheat, vegetables, and livestock on a small scale. The story revolves around a twelve-yearold farmboy, Nyl, and Alice, a CanadianUkrainian who has innocently come to participate in the great Communist revolution. They are both twelve. By the end of the novel most other characters are dead, leaving Nyl and Alice among the few survivors of a genocide.
Stalin’s collectivization and Russification processes were brutal, and Winterkill spares no authentic detail: What’s it like to starve? To be a street child? To step constantly over dead bodies? To watch ravens eat unburied family members? For eight- to twelve-year-olds, for whom the book is intended, these are truly awful events to endure, even in print.
Skrypuch herself is Ukrainian-Canadian, and Ukraine has awarded her the Order of Princess Ohla for her writing. Like the Holocaust, Stalin’s lesser-known genocide, the Holodomor, should never be forgotten. But worst of all—any reader who follows the news knows that many of the same atrocities are recurring in Ukraine: bodies in the streets, forcible loss of culture, violence, orphaned children, hunger, darkness, and cold. Winterkill.
This is a hard book for adults to read, but we know truth is often hard. How incredibly sad will it seem to lucky, unhardened American third to seventh graders who are safe (hopefully) from such horrors?
Susan Lowell
BERLINERS
Vesper Stamper, Knopf, 2022, $21.99/C$29.99, hb, 448pp, 9780593428368
It’s 1961, and twin brothers Rudi and Peter are on the cusp of adulthood in a postwar Berlin, where getting to their favourite record shop in the next neighbourhood means crossing borders. Peter is a budding actor, student leader, and the golden boy of the family. Everything seems to come easily to Peter, except escape from their meagre existence. Rudi, constantly following in the shadow of his brother, yearns for recognition at home and at school.
After years of doing everything together, they start to explore new interests and ideas. Rudi’s photography and interest in the new girl push him to consider new perspectives. Peter finds an unlikely outlet for his acting and budding ideas. When the fissures in their parents’ marriage start to crack wide open, the boys are pulled in different directions until not even their great-grandmother’s steadfast presence can hold them together. Then overnight a wall is built that leaves one behind to a fate made worse by the failings of his family.
This coming-of-age story is layered over the epicenter of the building Cold War and the long tail of WWII. The fates of the brothers illuminate the ways in which propaganda can shape views and distort reality. The story of the brothers and their family is a heartbreaking look at humanity, with depth and nuance rarely portrayed in those on the wrong side of history. Readers who like complicated, ambiguous endings will love this one; those who long for a tidy resolution will be left
wanting. A thought-provoking yet satisfying read for older teens and adults.
Shauna McIntyre
CABBY POTTS: Duchess of Dirt
Kathleen Wilford, Little Press, 2022, $9.99, pb, 252pp, 9781956378047
Money has always been tight for 12-yearold Cabby Potts and her family, but she thought they had finally found a forever home on the Kansas prairie. That was before the grasshoppers and drought ruined their crops. Now, her parents have found her a job earning two dollars a week as a live-in maid at a big manor house. Cabby doesn’t want to go, but her family is depending on her. She might not be the quiet, clean, cheerful girl Lady Ashford wants in her house, but that doesn’t stop her from trying.
That is, until she notices Nigel Ashford take an interest in her sister, Emmeline, and Cabby decides to play matchmaker. She figures if she can get Nigel to marry her sister, it would solve her family’s financial trouble and she would be free to return to her beloved farm. Cabby learns the hard way that things are not always what they seem. As she befriends the other servants in the house, she learns the importance of friendship. Her courage and determination are put to the test when the whole town is threatened first by a land grab and then wildfire. Then she must decide what is most important.
The story deftly weaves in the history of prairie homesteaders in the 1870s, the Kiowa and other displaced people, and the role of British aristocrats in the American West. Wilford manages heavy topics with a light and engaging touch that had my 10-yearold and me enthralled. An adventurous and history-packed story perfect for middle-grade readers.
Shauna McIntyre
HONESTY & LIES
Eloise Williams, Firefly, 2022, £7.99, pb, 232pp, 9781913102999
This story reeled me in like a fish to the world of Queen Elizabeth 1, Tudor London and the backdrop to the Gunpowder plotters. Thirteen-year-old runaway, Honesty, arrives in London on a cabbage cart from Wales. She meets Alice, who works at Greenwich Palace, and soon Honesty is working alongside her, learning as fast as she can, and becoming storyteller to the queen. Through her wide eyes and quick wits, we witness the harshness of the city streets and meet a queen with black teeth and hair that “sings the orange joy of autumn leaves’.
But Honesty is not the only storyteller. Some chapters are told from Alice’s point of view, giving clear insights into the queen’s situation (”Some people do not think we should follow her religion. Some do not think she should be queen at all,”) as well as another side to their own story, as lies and intrigue threaten their friendship.
And there is yet another wordsmith. Eloise Williams (who was the inaugural Children’s
Laureate Wales) spins this entire yarn most wonderfully. The pace is fast yet the girls’ emotional journey is beautifully charted. We see, for example, Alice struggling with her own resentment as Honesty gains favour with the queen. Themes of trust, honesty, trickery and betrayal are explored—between the two of them, and amongst the other characters at court—foreshadowing the treason that is planned. Williams has the power just to charm with a few lyrical words: ‘Dread tingles my fingers…’ or ‘the whispers of night start to purple the sky…’ Her writing also captures feelings, fears, hopes that are timeless and anchors them amidst the putrid smells and silken textures of a different age. Surely this is historical fiction at its best. An illuminating and compelling read for readers of 9+.
Marion Rose
ONE LAST SHOT
Kip Wilson, Versify, 2023, $17.99, hb, 416pp, 9780063251687
The “last shot” of Kip Wilson’s title refers not to a gun but to a camera—though in this context a gun might be equally appropriate. This excellent, innovative young adult novelin-verse tells the poignant true story of Gerda Pohorylle, a pioneering photojournalist and war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).
The daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants settled in Germany, vibrant young Gerda became an anti-Hitler activist in the late 1920s and was forced to flee to safety in Paris. There she became involved in the Bohemian world of Parisian art and journalism, where in 1934 she met and fell in love with a Hungarian photographer named André Friedmann, another Jewish refugee.
By 1937 the couple had both become successful war photographers who published their pictures under the bylines of “Man Ray” and “Gerda Taro.” Their story of art, love, separation, and reunion somewhat recalls the tragic plot of La Bohème. It is difficult for one genre to fully describe another, but Wilson’s verse technique is surprisingly effective and readable, especially when Gerda describes her emotions and her risky work:
I turn … and focus on their faces and click, click, click capture their dread and hope on film.
Wilson’s short, irregular lines of verse add to the sense of suspense and impending doom that darkens the novel. Part of this is political— the war in Spain foreshadowed World War II—and part is personal. Man Ray went on to achieve great fame as a war photographer, but just as her own career was blossoming, Gerda was killed on a Spanish battlefield in 1937.
Susan Lowell
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