Reviews
PREHISTORIC
PEOPLE OF THE NIGHTLAND
W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O’Neal Gear, Forge, 2007, $27.95/C$34.95, hb, 474pp, 0765314401
This is the 14th in this series of novels about American prehistory. Written by a husband-andwife team of archaeologists who specialize in the history of the first North Americans, and have written 33 novels covering this period, People of the Nightland demonstrates the extent of their specialization in detailing what life may have been like 13,000 years ago in the Great Lakes region.
Ti-Bish, known as the Idiot, kicked out by his own Nightland people, has a spirit dream. Raven comes to him and tells him he is to lead his people through the hole in the ice back to safety and the paradise of the Long Dark. But he is weak and naïve. Nashat, a power hungry Nightland warrior, uses him to reach the position of head of the Council and once there, the trouble begins.
It’s a violent story with lots of gruesome deaths and tortures as the Nightland people under Nashat try to kill off the Sunpath and the Lame Bull People, because they are not followers of Raven but of Wolf. The plot weaves between Sunpath warriors, Dreamers, rebellious or power-hungry Nightland warriors, and strong Lame Bull and Sunpath women all struggling to make sense of the violence and the order to leave their homes. In the end, their fight to survive becomes a fight against earthquakes and the great flood.
Fans of Jean Auel’s novels will enjoy this book.
Patrika Salmon
ANCIENT EGYPT
NEFERTITI: The Book of the Dead
Nick Drake, HarperCollins, 2007, $24.95, hb, 352pp, 9780060765897 / Bantam, 2006, £12.99, hb, 352pp, 9780593054017
Queen Nefertiti, wife of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, has disappeared right before the allimportant Jubilee celebration. Theban detective Rai Rahotep must travel to the new capital of Akhetaten to investigate. To provide him with sufficient motivation, Rahotep and his family will be executed if he does not locate the queen within 10 days.
a novel is here: plucky protagonist, politics, villainous superiors, bureaucratic red tape, and the artificially imposed deadline. Though Drake makes much mention of the setting (unfinished buildings, the nouveau riche scrabbling for power, religious unrest), it all feels contrived, like a painted drop-cloth set. The mystery itself is handled implausibly, with the villain’s actions being antithetical to his stated goal, and the resolution of the queen’s disappearance handled in a completely anticlimactic manner. Though Rahotep and his sidekick are well-developed, the rest of the characterization is over-the-top and borders on caricature at times. The pacing makes this novel readable, but overall the story is handled clumsily.
Bethany Latham BIBLICAL
THE GARDEN OF RUTH
Eva Etzioni-Halevy, Plume, 2007, $14/C$17.50, pb, 293pp, 9780452286733
In the small town of Bethlehem, Osnath, niece of the prophet Samuel, finds an old scroll purporting to be written by Ruth the Moabite, a woman who followed her mother-in-law Naomi (“wither thou goest,” etc.) from Moab to Israel, married the wealthy Boaz, and became greatgrandmother to King David. Curious, Osnath tries to learn the whole story, but David’s brother Eliab blocks her research into the past. Although she is strongly attracted to Eliab, Osnath refuses to abandon her attempts to learn the truth about Ruth’s life.
Weaving Osnath’s tale with Ruth’s own account of what really happened when she came to a land strange to her creates an intriguing novel. Unfortunately, Ruth’s diary is far more compelling than Osnath’s story, so the book feels unbalanced. And there are a couple of things that are totally out-of-period: kings in the ancient Middle East did not have “castles”; if anything, they had palaces. And an “iron carriage” is whoppingly unlikely. In addition, I found the casual and apparently acceptable premarital sex rather odd for the time and place. But I enjoyed the book, if only for its portrayal of a truly human Ruth.
India Edghill
1st CENTURY
JOHN’S STORY: The Last Eyewitness (Book One of the Jesus Chronicles)
Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Putnam, 2007, $24.95, hb, 320pp, 0399153896
Polycarp records. There are no reconsiderations of words, no “strike out that portion,” no moments where John pauses to consider a word. One sometimes wishes something like that had happened with some of the dialogue. People in the 1st century, let alone the 21st, didn’t talk like a few of the passages. At times, I found myself enjoying the reprinting of the Gospel more than the moments when John pauses, only for Polycarp to tell him how “great” the book is. Surely the last two thousand years have rendered that verdict.
Despite all that, the novel does its job well enough, summing up with John’s stay on Patmos and the vision that is “Revelation.” I did wince a bit when John refers to the Second Coming as Jesus’ “Glorious Reappearing,” which, strangely enough, just happens to be the title of a “Left Behind” book. Funny how that happens. Still, LaHaye and Jenkins aren’t interested so much in art as much as evangelism. For the curious reader, John’s Gospel, his epistles, and Revelation are printed in an appendix following the novel.
PILATE’S WIFE
William Thornton
Antoinette May, Morrow, 2006, $24.95/ C$32.50, hb, 368pp, 0061128651 / Pub in the UK as Claudia, Daughter of Rome, Orion, 2007, £18.99, hb, 384pp, 0752886606, also £9.99, pb, 0752886614
Young Claudia, distant relative of the emperor Tiberius and eventual wife of Pontius Pilate, is a dreamer prone to prophetic visions. She is troubled by what she sees, and steals away from her parents while they are in Alexandria to become a devotee of the Egyptian goddess, Isis.
With this earth-mother goddess as her guide, Claudia discovers love and endures tragedy during the latter days of the Roman Empire, more a spectator of than a participant in the cruelties of the era during which Jesus was alive. Full of vivid descriptions of villas, banquets, temple rituals and more, Claudia’s story provides a provocative glimpse into what life in Rome’s upper classes might have been like for a sensitive, impressionable young woman. With an undercurrent of mystery and unfulfilled longing, Claudia encounters a succession of legendary figures during her years as the wife of the ambitious Pontius Pilate. Among those she befriends is Miriam Magdala, a courtesan, who becomes a follower of Jesus—and, according to May, his wife.
This mystery reads like a typical police procedural/suspense novel which has been ripped out of its contemporary setting and plunked down in ancient Egypt’s turbulent Amarna period. Everything one would expect from such
This latest novel from the authors of the “Left Behind” series floats an interesting premise: a novel about the writing of a book. If it were any other book than John’s Gospel, that might make for a less inspiring read.
The results are sometimes mixed. Long sections of the book are merely dictation: the Apostle John saying the words that his disciple
The way Claudia’s life and visions intertwine with the historical events of her time is the primary interest of this novel. The story pulls you along, and the extensive research into the period is evident. Yet May has set herself a difficult task that doesn’t quite succeed. In choosing the peripheral Claudia as her voice, May furnishes the reader with only a third-hand glimpse of the earth-shattering events that occur around her, including everything from the assassination of N n N n N n N n
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Germanicus to the crucifixion of Jesus. While this makes for an engaging story, Pilate’s Wife remains more of a romance than a historical epic. Nonetheless, the prose is smooth and the characters engaging. Pilate’s Wife is a good escapist, summer read.
Susanne Dunlap
THE EAGLE’S PROPHECY
Simon Scarrow, St. Martin’s Press, 2006, $24.95, hb, 310pp, 0312324545 / Headline, 2006, £6.99, pb, 512pp, 0755301188
The first US edition of the sixth novel in Scarrow’s epic series of the Roman army begins in Rome, in the year AD 45. Centurions Macro and Cato are back from Britain, waiting for the results of an official investigation in the death of a fellow officer. Living in the slums, with no money and no prospects, the two friends have no choice but to accept the dangerous mission that Imperial Secretary Narcissus forces upon them. Macro and Cato are to rescue an imperial agent captured by Illyrian pirates, and the prophetic scrolls the agent was carrying when seized. No less than the future of Rome depends on their success.
Structurally, the novel is divided into short, fast-paced chapters with a good mixture of dialogue and action. Scarrow is clearly in familiar territory, perhaps too familiar. Though this new installment yields a major character insight, Scarrow seems to be in a hurry, neglecting foreshadowed plot lines. Much is made, for example, of Macro’s dislike of Marines at the onset of their mission, but the reader doesn’t learn whether he changes his mind or is proven right.
An easy read, written with gusto, but somewhat predictable.
Adelaida Lower
characters speak in 21st century idiom. There is an odd sensation that the characters could as easily be contemporary Americans as ancient Romans.
Still, if you love history and appreciate the historian’s trade you will enjoy The Water Thief. Highly recommended!
Lucille
Cormier
THE BOAR STONE
Jules Watson, Orion, 2007, £18.99, hb, 499pp, 9780752856889
This is the third book in Jules Watson’s Dalriada trilogy. AD 366: Britain is ruled by the Romans. Minna, a Roman serving girl, runs away from her home on a villa estate near Eboracum (York) to avoid marriage to a man she doesn’t love. She meets Cian, an acrobat, and together they set out to find Minna’s brother, who has enlisted in the Roman army, and been posted to Hadrian’s Wall. But things go wrong, and the two are enslaved and sold to the household of the king and queen of Dalriada. There, Minna is set to tutor the king’s children and Cian is sent to the stables. They plan to escape, but when Minna meets Dalriadan King, Cahir, everything changes.
This is the story of what the Romans called the Great Barbarian Conspiracy but told from the Dalriadan view. Watson gives her main characters great motivations for their actions, which makes for a strong story. She is less assured when handling other cultures such as the Saxons, and in particular the uniformly nasty Romans. However, the writing is smooth and pleasing. If you like your Celtic historical romance well written and constantly interesting, this book is for you.
S Garside-Neville
5th CENTURY
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4th CENTURY
THE WATER THIEF
Ben Pastor, Minotaur, 2007, $24.95, hb, 348pp, 0312353901
The Water Thief is a puzzle within a conundrum – an academic mystery turned deadly. In 304 C.E. Aelius Spartianus, commander in the army of the Emperor Diocletian, is commissioned to write the biography of Hadrian. Diocletian is specifically interested in the death of Hadrian’s favorite, the boy Antinous. As Aelius reconstructs the events of the boy’s death in Egypt, the mission takes a distinctly non-academic turn. Two murders and a personal attack lie behind him as Aelius follows the dead Antinous’s track to Rome… and more savagery. Hadrian sent not only his favorite’s remains to Rome but also a letter whose contents are so volatile men will kill to prevent its coming to light.
The story moves at a fast pace and has some great twists and an excellent climax. The author’s expertise in historical research is evident throughout. A disconcerting feature of the story is its narrative style. Both narrator and
ATTILA: The Gathering of the Storm William Napier, Orion, 2007, £12.99, hb, 400pp, 0752861131
This is William Napier’s second part of his Attila trilogy. The novel is set in the 5th century, with the Western Roman Empire ruled by regional warlords who owed nominal loyalty at best to the emperor in Rome, and an eastern emperor whose authority centred on the eastern Mediterranean. Sub-titled the ‘Gathering Storm’, the novel tells of Attila’s powerful ambition to reunite the dispersed tribes of Huns and Scythians, which drives him and his chosen men to fight bandits, other Huns, a mountain kingdom and the Chinese until he has a strong enough army to lead the Huns into the Roman Empire.
Told from a mixture of viewpoints, the dominant voice is the imperial official and historian Priscus, who holds the narrative threads together. Attila stars as the hero archetype, who had been exiled, gained guile and strength, and returns to lead his people. The ruthless
barbarism of the Huns is emphatic, and Attila is only distanced from them by his supreme force. Whether one accepts this unrelenting picture is open to debate. Napier’s stark characterisation of the Huns extends to other 5th century peoples: the Vandals are destructive, the court in Constantinople obsessed with ceremonial and theological disputes, and the Goths are living the good life in southern Gaul.
Napier uses a sparse vocabulary and muted imagery to successfully convey the vast seemingly unending steppes, its emptiness and hostility to man and beast. His descriptions of battles and conflict are highly charged, and an exciting read. The novel is a boy’s own adventure for adults. If you are expecting the earlier Julian by Gore Vidal or the later Belisarius of Robert Graves, you may be disappointed, but if you want an action-packed, eventful historical novel you should enjoy this book.
Bill Dodds
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8th CENTURY
DREAM OF THE DRAGON POOL: A Daoist Quest
Albert A. Dalia, Pleasure Boat Studio, 2007, $18.00, pb, 335pp, 9781929355343
“There is another Reality – not of the human realm.” Shame and anguish haunt Li Bo, the famous Tang Dynasty poet. After he is exiled by the Emperor Xuan-zong, a mysterious dream changes his sorrow over losing his poetic gift to the quest of reaching Mount Wu, where he is told he will both serve the mythical Rain Goddess and have his poetic muse restored. But little does Li Bo imagine what his quest will really involve. On the surface it appears he is to find the mystical Dragon Pool Sword as he encounters various persons of human, divine, and ghostly natures. Through his journey with Ah Wu the warrior, Old Zhou the boatman, Luo Jhu-yun the Shamaness, the Lady of the Purple Vault or “Purple Immortal” of Daoist fame, Ma Ssu-ming the swordsman, Lao-hunag the drunken monkey, and so many more mysterious characters, Li Bo is gradually purified of selfinterest and becomes the true heroic character of Taoist legend. The powers he must face are quite formidable, including The Blood Dragon and his minions who shape-shift, plot, and kill in myriad ways that never become dull with repetition.
Albert Dalia is a writer to watch if you love Chinese fiction or drama. His purpose in this novel is to firmly establish the traditional Chinese wuxia literary genre within English language fiction, and he admirably succeeds in that venture. Never confusing the reader with the multitude of characters, Dalia masterfully develops Li Bo’s character so that his eventual immersion into immortality while remaining in this world is smooth, credible and exciting to follow. Readers will recognize the stock characters of Chinese tradition while enjoying the unique qualities of each person who alters
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and is altered by sharing Li Bo’s journey. Remarkable, accurate, and well-written, Dream of the Dragon Pool is a delightful read.
Viviane Crystal
9th CENTURY
LORDS OF THE NORTH
Bernard Cornwell, HarperCollins, 2007, $25.95, hb, 336pp, 9780060888628 / HarperCollins, 2007, £6.99, pb, 400pp, 9780007219704
This is the final book in the Saxon Chronicles trilogy. It begins in 878 AD, shortly after Alfred’s victory over the Danes at Ethandun. Uhtred, the hero, is disgruntled with Alfred’s paltry reward for his service in battle. So, he is going back home to reclaim his lands and title that were stolen by his uncle. His journey is fraught with obstacles and delays. At York, or Eoferwic as it was then known, he encounters Danes who have sacked the city and taken slaves. One of the slaves he frees is Guthred, the rightful king of Northumbria. Before continuing his journey home, Uhtred helps Guthred regain his throne, falls in love with Guthred’s sister, and is sold by Guthred into slavery to a Viking trader. After two years Uhtred is rescued and again finds himself in service to Alfred while his own personal quest to regain his rightful inheritance remains elusive.
Cornwell has taken characters from the 9th century who are often no more than a few sentences in written history, or represented only as a stone effigy in an early Christian burial
site, and brings the reader beside them on the battlefield, in the slave galley on a Viking trading ship, walking the muddy roads of Alfred’s kingdom, or taking a fortification. The novel contains all the excitement, danger and bloody battles that are Cornwell’s forte.
Audrey Braver
12th CENTURY
BETRAYAL
Karen Fenech, Five Star, 2007, $26.95, hb, 311pp, 1594145237
In the year 1122, Lady Katherine Stanfield’s husband, William Norris, is murdered. Heavy with child, Katherine does not grieve for her detestable husband, and soon gives birth to twins, a boy who lives and a girl who dies. Ranulf, a cruel and ambitious lord, invades Stanfield Keep to wed Katherine and bring Stanfield under his control. She gives her surviving son to her maidservant and commander, Sir Guy, to hide and then flees to her former betrothed, De Lauren, for help.
Still embittered at not knowing why Katherine broke off their betrothal to wed Norris, De Lauren insists she must marry him. He then sends a small army to recapture Stanfield Keep and discovers the brutal massacre of its inhabitants. While Katherine and De Lauren rediscover their love for each other, Ranulf plots to murder De Lauren with poison and makes it appear as if Katherine is guilty. Secrets long buried are revealed as Katherine desperately tries to protect
EDITORS’ CHOICE Y SAND DAUGHTER
Sarah Bryant, Snowbooks, 2007, £7.99, pb, 496pp, 9781905005222
In the late 12th century the Islamic world is in turmoil, torn apart by the Crusades, and the Holy Land has fallen into the hands of the Franks. Under the leadership of Salah ad-Din the Muslim peoples are preparing to fight off the invading armies.
In the desert an uneasy relationship exists between the two clans of the Hassan, a Bedouin tribe. Reconciliation is offered by the proposed marriage of Khalidah to her cousin, Numair, but her agreement will sign not only her own death warrant but also that of her tribe. Offered the chance of escape by the mysterious minstrel Sulayman, the young noblewoman doesn’t hesitate to ride with him to the homelands of her mother – the legendary Qaf – to seek the help of the mysterious Afghan warriors known as the Jinn.
She leaves behind her childhood friend, Bilal, who throws in his lot first with Numair before being recruited as a spy by the Templar Knights and becoming the lover of Salim, the Sultan’s sixth son. They will be reunited on the battlefield when the fight will be for more than local politics – it will be for Islam itself
Sand Daughter is a fascinating snapshot into the world of the Crusades. 12th century Arabia is beautifully recreated, but this is ultimately a story about people and not places. Thankfully, Sarah Bryant provides characters to care about a-plenty. Not just a love story, a thriller, or a straight historical but rather an impressive blend of all three.
The author’s research is impeccable and applied with the lightest of touches. This is an epic filled with emotion and rich with atmosphere – as heady as the hashish smoke swirling around the desert tents.
Sara Wilson
NSTAFF PUBLICATIONS:
Sarah Bower’s The Needle in the Blood
Sarah Bower’s interest in the Middle Ages began in her teens when she first saw the film The Lion in Winter, and watching Simon Schama discuss one of the Bayeux Tapestry’s most famous images, that of a woman and child fleeing a burning house, later sparked the idea for her novel, The Needle in the Blood (Snowbooks, £7.99, 9781905005390).
The Needle in the Blood is nominally a tale of the Tapestry, but it is more the story of the people responsible for bringing it into existence, including the Saxon queen’s handmaiden, Aelfgytha, and Odo of Bayeux, brother of the William the Conqueror. Though she originally intended to focus on the women who stitched the Tapestry, Sarah shares, “I quickly became aware of the impossibility of tackling the Tapestry without telling the story of Odo, its probable patron — charismatic, flawed, torn between the spiritual and temporal aspects of his life.” The story is also one of passionate love, lies, and survival because, “Although I enjoyed speculating about the many puzzles hidden in the Tapestry, what matters to me most as a novelist is people and how they live their lives,” says Sarah.
The Needle in the Blood is painstakingly researched, and includes lush details about life in 11th century Britain. Though “the historical novelist’s task is always made easier by a lack of hard facts,” Sarah says, “I decided not to move away from the received wisdom about the Tapestry’s origins and its multi-layered meanings, but to concentrate on the characters and their conflicts.” This resulted in a novel set against the background of the Tapestry, but vivdly portraying the lives of two compelling characters crafted from historical people.
Sarah found her publisher through her work with HNR While she was serving as HNR’s UK Co-ordinating Editor, Snowbooks sent Sarah a title for review, and she decided to look into them as a possible publisher for her novel. “I sent them some chapters,” Sarah shares, “my editor came back and said she loved it, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
© Martin Figura
the lives of her son and husband.
This is a fast-paced medieval tale that keeps the reader riveted until the very last word.
Mirella Patzer
14th CENTURY
THE MALICE OF UNNATURAL DEATH
Michael Jecks, Headline, 2006, £19.99/$24.95, hb, 399pp, 0755332768
Exeter, 1324. When the body of a local craftsman and a King’s Messenger are found murdered, Sir Baldwin de Furnshill, the Keeper of the King’s Peace, and his friend Bailiff Simon Puttock are asked by the Bishop of Exeter to investigate. However the investigation is complicated by lethal national politics in the form of a plot to murder the King. John of Nottingham, a necromancer in Coventry, had been hired to use magic to kill the monarch and his allies the Despensers. However, the plot is uncovered, and the necromancer flees to Exeter to escape justice and to ply his black arts against the king once more. Throw in a serving girl who is infatuated with her master, the Sheriff, and a dangerous secret which the Bishop is anxious to retrieve, and you have a satisfying mixture of medieval mayhem and murder. Mr Jecks is an expert on Devon’s medieval social history, and as with all his books he writes about the period and the area with sufficient detail to evoke a picture without overpowering the reader with huge, superfluous descriptions. Fans of medieval mysteries will undoubtedly enjoy this, the 22nd book in the series.
Mike Ashworth
A MASS FOR THE DEAD
Susan McDuffie, Five Star, 2006, $25.95, hb, 241pp, 1594144893
Y THE MERCY SELLER
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Brenda Rickman Vantrease, St, Martin’s Press, 2007, $24.95/C$31, hb, 422pp, 9780312331931
Anna Bookman and her grandfather, Finn, make their living illuminating precious books in early 15th-century Prague, a hotbed of religious change. Jan Hus, a Lollard follower, is challenging the Church’s authority, spreading the word that the religious texts should be available to people in their native language. The Church takes the position that religious texts must only be written in Latin and that those who copy and spread religious texts in native tongues are heretics subject to the most horrible punishment.
After one of many religious purges, Anna attempts to commit suicide but is saved by a gypsy, Jetta, who has a profound impact on her life. However, it becomes clear to Anna that she must leave Prague or face possible persecution. She travels to England, Finn’s final wish for her, carrying her most prized possession – a Wycliffe Bible, written in English. Anna later learns why Finn has chosen England for Anna as her safe haven.
When Anna stops in Rheims to sell her work, she meets and falls in love with a rich, young merchant. She does not know that this is Brother Gabriel, a friar previously engaged in selling pardons, sent on a mission by Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, as a Church spy.
What could become a soap opera is a beautiful, complex love story in Vantrease’s talented hands. Although some of the Anna-Gabriel plot is predictable, how they come to understand their destinies, confront their greatest fears and deal with the very terrible reality of the Church’s power – represented marvelously in Arundel who is frighteningly real – is lovingly drawn by an author whose has a unique ability to build a story and develop characters.
A highly recommended read.
equivalent of Scottish vernacular and clichés, is a distraction. I found myself becoming bored and wanting Muirteach to find the killer and have it done with.
Ilysa Magnus
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In McDuffie’s first mystery, set in Scotland in 1373, the author looks deep into the glass of her own ancestry to find a prior’s killer. Crispinus is dead – strangled and battered with his mouth stuffed with sand. Head of the priory at Oronsay, Crispinus has been a man of power, a man who has used that power to manipulate people. The Lord of the Isles assigns Muirteach, the Prior’s bastard son and scribe to his uncle, the island’s chieftain, to uncover the murderer.
Muirteach is an interesting fellow. He lives in a miserable hut with his mangy dog and a fellow who helps him. He has little to eat and whatever money he has, he spends on drink. To say he is bitter is putting it mildly. During the investigation, however, Muirteach is confronted with himself, and with people who believe in him and his mission. He also begins to understand the deceit and treachery which surrounds him in his small, closely-knit community. Naturally, Muirteach uncovers the blackguard and all is well in Oronsay.
While McDuffie creates a believable atmosphere and characters, she tries too hard. The language, filled to the brim with the English
15TH CENTURY
THE SEMPSTER’S TALE
Margaret Frazer, Hale, 2007, £18.99, hb, 220pp, 9780709081784 / Berkley Prime Crime, 2007, $7.99, pb, 322pp, 0425210499
This is the latest in Margaret Frazer’s Dame Frevisse mystery series and is set in London during the reign of Henry VI. Anne Blakhall is a widow, supporting herself as a sempster or seamstress, and London is in revolt against the ineffectual king and his hated lords who rule the kingdom through him. The Earl of Suffolk is exiled, taking most of his gold with him. But he is murdered on the way and somehow the gold has to be brought back, secretly, into England and restored to his widow, the Lady Alice, whose cousin just happens to be Dame Frevisse of St. Frideswide’s nunnery. Dame Frevisse is sent to London to bring the gold back to Lady Alice, her contact being Anne Blakhall, but it is not long before she is also embroiled in the finding of a body, left in a Church crypt in very suspicious circumstances.
15th-century London is vividly brought to life in this book. The characters are fully threedimensional, and the identity of the killer is a
well-guarded secret until the final chapters. A book which I very much enjoyed reading. Marilyn Sherlock
THE TRAITOR’S TALE
Margaret Frazer, Berkley Prime Crime, 2007, $24.95/C$31.00, hb, 372pp, 9780425213704
In 1450, England had been warring with France for almost a century. But the English were now on the losing side. There is evidence that the Duke of Suffolk and others close to the king decided to end the war by breaking the truce and surrendering shamelessly. Suffolk left a list of their names; a list of traitors.
And so The Traitor’s Tale begins. In her trademark style of even-paced, characterdriven storytelling, Frazer weaves a tale of assassination and political intrigue. Dame Frevisse, confidante and cousin to Suffolk’s widow, combines forces with Joliffe, once a jongleur and now one of Richard of York’s most trusted men. Together they unravel the plot to assassinate the men who have seen the list. There is action aplenty as Joliffe crosses swords in street battles and against hired assassins, and intrigue in abundance as Frevisse navigates the court of Margaret of Anjou.
The story closes – prophetically – at St. Albans, where Frevisse and Joliffe present York with the list of traitors. Who among them ordered the assassinations? The Traitor’s Tale is another fine read, a must-have volume in the collection of Dame Frevisse mysteries.
Lucille Cormier
16th CENTURY
MASQUE OF THE GONZAGAS
Clare Colvin, Arcadia, 2007 (c1999), £7.99/$13.99, pb, 285pp, 1905147260
This panoramic epic of the Italian Renaissance is set in the court of Vincenzo Gonzaga, 4th Duke of Mantua, who has devoted his life to the pursuit of art and pleasure. The story begins in 1589 when the young and handsome Vincenzo seems to have everything. The young Monteverdi is his court composer and Pieter Paul Rubens, his court painter. He is blessed with both a fertile wife and an enchanting mistress, whose own court is a centre of culture. The Duke’s darker side emerges in a string of rape-like conquests as he preys on the maidens in his court. Monteverdi’s betrothed is included in this gallery of bruised young womanhood. Brimming with hubris, the Duke squanders his fortune on gambling, mistresses, spectacular festivals, and foreign wars. His death in 1611 signals the end of the dream of the Renaissance itself. While his corrupt sons squabble over the spoils of debt-ridden Mantua, the exuberant humanism of Renaissance Italy gives way to an age of religious intolerance and Inquisition.
The author is at her best when describing the mirage-like beauty of Mantua, the beautiful city perched on an island in malarial marshland. An opera critic, she brings the music of the period to life and does a fine job portraying the court’s intrigues and splendour. Her narrative authority is undermined by certain anachronisms: a servant wears a dress of “sprigged cotton” in an age when cotton was more exotic and expensive than silk. The main flaw is that there is just too much story crammed into 285 pages and too little character development. The only fully realised character is the Duke himself and when he dies on page 198, the rest of the book feels like padding and anti-climax. Ambitious but uneven.
Mary Sharratt
SISTER TERESA
Barbara Mujica, Overlook, 2007, $24.95/ C$31.00, hb, 383pp, 1585678341 / Duckworth, £14.99, hb, 383pp, 0715636723
Sister Teresa is the compelling story of a young woman of renowned beauty who became the beloved patron saint of Spain, St. Teresa of Ávila. During the Spanish Inquisition of the 16th century, Teresa, the daughter of rich parents, lives a life of comfort and wealth. For young noblewomen, there are two possibilities to choose from: marriage or the convent. When Teresa begins to take an interest in a handsome young man and romantic books of chivalry, her father takes offence; such passions would only diminish her value as a potential bride. During this time, her mother dies. At the age of eighteen, her father sends her to board with the Augustinian nuns at Santa Maria de Gracia
Y BLOOD ON THE STRAND
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Susanna Gregory, Sphere, 2007, £17.99/$24.95, hb, 457pp, 9781847440020
Spring 1663, the eve of the third year of the Restoration, but all is not well in the capital city. Wealthy merchant Matthew Webb is murdered, his blood staining The Strand. Elsewhere a vagrant is shot during a royal procession. The two incidents seem unconnected until intelligence agent Thomas Chaloner is sent to investigate.
His enquiries lead Thomas towards the powerful Company of Barber-Surgeons and their work in Public and Private Anatomies. They are also complicated by the bitter feud raging between Thomas’s master, the Earl of Clarendon, and the Earl of Bristol. If Thomas cannot uncover the real murderer, the life of an innocent man is at risk.
This is the second novel in a new series to feature Thomas Chaloner and is written by Susanna Gregory, well known for her medieval detective, Matthew Bartholomew. The two series share some common elements – in-depth historical research, a basis in factual historical incidents retold in a lively and witty narrative, and devilishly complicated plots.
Fans will be pleased to hear that Susanna Gregory has yet again hit on a winning formula of taking a likeable main character, involving him in gripping plot, and setting them within a commendably realistic setting. It is another bravura performance.
for guidance and discipline. She is not happy to be there, and ill health soon forces her to return home.
Under her father’s roof, Teresa once again faces her previous choice. One night, she runs away to the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation. While there, Teresa discovers piety and becomes a nun, but ill health continues to plague her. During one bout of illness, she falls
Sara Wilson
into a coma so profound that all believe her dead, but she comes back to life just before her burial – but is paralyzed in her legs for three years.
The story unfolds through the eyes of Teresa’s childhood servant and friend, Sister Angelica, who follows her mistress throughout her tumultuous life as a mystic, her religious fervors, mysterious illnesses, sexual scandals, and the founding of convents. Barbara Mujica
Y THE SOLITUDE OF THOMAS CAVE
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Georgina Harding, Bloomsbury, 2007, £12.99, hb, 237pp, 9780747587002 / Bloomsbury USA, 2007, $23.95, hb, 256pp, 1596912723
Set in the first half of the 17th century, this is a poetic and highly literate novel that has as its themes the nature of mankind and our impact on the environment. Thomas Cave is a whaler on Arctic expeditions collecting whale oil and associated products, which in the early 1600s was a highly hazardous though lucrative occupation. Cave accepts a wager that he would be able to survive an Arctic winter alone and is left behind by his ship with provisions and shelter as the summer conditions begin to give way to the icy temperatures of winter.
The long months of utter isolation and privation are recorded in his journal and by the author as narrator. As the reader soon grasps, there are reasons apart from monetary gain why Cave has taken up the challenge. He is a bereaved widower and seeks out silence and loneliness to be with his grief and despair. Cave reflects on his brief marriage to Johanne and her death in childbirth. In his privations he hallucinates and feels haunted by his dead wife and child.
The novel is not primarily plot driven, so nothing is given away by revealing that Cave survives the long, desperately hard winter: but he is a changed man. The young ship hand, Thomas Goodlard, records his friendship with Cave both before and after the latter’s experience and, many years later, he seeks out Cave as an old man.
Thomas Cave developed an innate empathy with the fauna of the Arctic and regrets mankind’s vicious depredation to extract profit and ruin their teeming environment. It is a message for the modern world with the fast disappearance of species and man’s increasingly clumsy and destructive footprints on the world. It is also a wonderfully delicate novel, not one to be rushed but savoured and reflected upon. Doug Kemp
16th Century-17th Century
brings this tumultuous time in history to vivid life. A very interesting and compelling novel which focuses more on Teresa’s entire life rather than simply her religion.
Mirella Patzer
INNOCENT TRAITOR
Alison Weir, Ballantine, 2007, $23.95/C$29.95, hb, 416pp, 0345494857 / Hutchinson, 2006, £12.99, hb, 416pp, 0091796628
This riveting, richly descriptive novel chronicles the life of Lady Jane Grey. For those unfamiliar with British royal history, fifteenyear-old Lady Jane was named queen of England for nine days in July 1553. She was well-born, highly educated, and a devout Protestant. As the great-niece of King Henry VIII, it would have been customary for her family to forge a marriage alliance with one of the first families of the realm. Her parents have royal ambitions, however, and that is what precipitates tragedy. Weir, a noted historian, parcels the story out by means of multiple narrators, the primary voice being that of Jane herself. Next is her selfabsorbed, spiteful, mother, Frances Brandon. Adding a much-needed dose of tenderness are her nurse, Mrs. Ellen, and Queen Katherine Parr, who becomes a sort of foster mother to Jane. Lady Mary, later Queen Mary, also shows a level of sympathy for the girl, even as she despises her religion. Of the male narrators—her father, Dorset, and John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, later Duke of Northumberland—neither views Jane as anything more than a means to an end.
Of course, the 21st century reader can feel nothing but pity for Jane and contempt for her conniving guardians, as well as for a social system that treated women as property. The religious struggle that looms in the background is another source of frustration. Weir tries to present Jane as a character with a will to reject all that is forced on her. But sadly, the truth is that as a woman, she had little say in the matter of her own destiny.
Alice Logsdon
17th CENTURY
THE PERFECT ROYAL MISTRESS
Diane Haeger, Three Rivers, 2007, $13.95/$17.95, pb, 400pp, 9780307237514
The subject of Diane Haeger’s latest historical novel is “pretty, witty” Nell Gwynn, the lowborn actress who became a mistress of King Charles II, and outlasted many others. Born in poverty, and raised in a brothel by an alcoholic mother, Nell catches the king’s eye while working in the theatre selling oranges. It is only a year since the terrible fire in London, and only two since the plague, so life is precarious for the young Nell. One of the King’s ambitious advisors, wishing to displace Charles’ powerful mistress, seeks Nell out and tutors her in courtly ways. Gifted with a merry disposition and a quick wit, Nell becomes the perfect companion
Y THE SUN OVER BREDA
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Arturo Pérez-Reverte, (trans. not credited), Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, £9.99, hb, 276pp, 9780297848646 / Putnam, 2007, $24.95, hb, 288pp, 9780399153839
This is the third in the adventures of Captain Alatriste in 17th century Spain, following Captain Alatriste and Purity of Blood. In 1625, Captain Alatriste has rejoined the army and left the dangerous streets of Madrid for the war in Flanders. He is accompanied by the young Íñigo Balboa, who narrates the novels. The Captain Alatriste series is the kind of adventure that Alexandre Dumas and Rafael Sabatini used to write, and it delivers. The battle scenes are appallingly vivid, as is the exposition of how Captain Alatriste and his close companions fight on from duty and loyalty.
Íñigo Balboa also relates the scenes in which Alatriste is on his own, trusting the reader to infer that Alatriste would have told Íñigo about them at some unspecified later time. Alatriste and Íñigo are kept informed of events back in Madrid by letters from Alatriste’s friend the poet Quevedo, and from the beautiful Angélica de Alquézar. Íñigo has a lifelong passion for Angélica, while also deeply hating and fearing her, for good reasons.
As in the two previous novels, Pérez-Reverte gives the reader a bonus in the form of poems, extracts from a play, and a lengthy editor’s note. If this evokes memories of Flashman, be assured that the Alatriste novels have a much darker tone, with no trace of humour. If you want to try the Alatriste series, and you should, you might be better off reading at least one of the two previous novels first, but The Sun Over Breda can stand by itself, and will introduce you to a world where heroes are heroes, and honour is defended by immediate recourse to sword and dagger.
Alan Fisk
Arturo Pérez-Reverte is a bestseller in the Spanish speaking world. His books, among them The Club Dumas, The Fencing Master, Queen of the South and The Flanders Panel, have been translated into twenty-nine languages. His creation, Captain Alatriste, is a cultural icon, and The Sun Over Breda is the third part of the captain’s continuing story. It is set during the counter-reformation, as Spain attempts to maintain control over an empire that is full of heretics and brimming with nationalist fervor. Their bloodiest struggle during the early part of the 17th century was with the Dutch, and this novel concerns one of the many Flemish campaigns waged by Spain, in particular the siege of Breda. Alatriste, a canny professional soldier, is accompanied, as always, by Íñigo Balboa, who also functions as the narrator for the stories. (This is just as well, as Alatriste is a man of action and few words.) Fifteen now, Íñigo has become a mochilero. His job is to carry ammunition for Alatriste’s harquebus, as well as water and spare gear. With others like him, he scours the war-torn countryside for supplies. Although he is unpaid—and his master isn’t paid often—Íñigo is put in harm’s way as often as any regular. His dagger is frequently put to use.
In short, think of the Sharpe series, but add a literary dimension, with quotations from Spanish poets and the elegant circumlocutions of period language. As expected with a writer of this caliber, the characterizations are complex, and each scene is as exquisitely detailed as any Velásquez. If, like me, you only know Spanish history from an English speaker’s perspective, Pérez-Reverte will be happy to escort you toward a deeper understanding of an old enemy. Recommended, but do begin with the first of the series, Captain Alatriste. Juliet Waldron
for an easily distracted king: She shows no jealousy, she remains perpetually jolly, and she accepts with humility all the king offers. Ms. Haeger depicts Nell as a girl fully in love with the monarch, even though he keeps other women, abandons Nell for months at a time, and gives honors to his highborn mistresses that he doesn’t offer her—until she finally presses him to do so. Yet Charles is characterized as the kind
of man a girl could love in spite of his kingly ways, for when he’s with Nell, he is fully “with” Nell, and thinks of no other.
Brava to Ms. Haeger for a rousing depiction of Restoration England, and for bringing to life a plucky young woman who through wit and tempered ambition rises far above her station.
Lisa Ann Verge
THE PAINTED LADY
Edward Marston, Allison & Busby, 2007, £18.99/$25.95, hb, 279pp, 0749081627
London, 1670s. To aid their seduction of the beautiful Araminta, four of London’s most dissolute rakes have set up The Society for the Capture of Araminta’s Maidenhood (sic), complete with a financial prize for the victor. They continue their pursuit, even when she marries the staid and ugly Sir Martin Culthorpe, believing that the marriage isn’t consummated.
Then Sir Martin is murdered, which brings the rakes to the attention of Constable Jonathan Bales and his amateur associate, the architect Christopher Redmayne. At first, suspicion falls on another admirer, Villemot, who is painting Araminta’s portrait. But the rakes, too, have a motive: they are all bent on attending Sir Martin’s funeral to pursue the widow. Then, one of them, Christopher’s brother Henry, is seen skulking around Villemot’s studio, and later, Araminta’s portrait goes missing. Can Christopher persuade Henry to co-operate in his investigation? Or does Henry have something to hide?
This is the sixth in the popular series featuring Christopher Redmayne and Jonathan Bales. Restoration London is vividly evoked, and I particularly enjoyed the contrast between the Puritan Jonathan Bales raging against the ungodly, the more tolerant Christopher, and the rakes, who obviously model themselves on the notorious Earl of Rochester.
Caveats: the press release emphasizes the ‘authentic detail’, but, at this period, funerals were ‘male only’ affairs – it is unlikely Araminta would have attended. Furthermore, the name Araminta is anachronistic. It was invented by the playwright Congreve in The Old Bachelors (1695). Still, this is an easy, escapist read and I enjoyed it.
Elizabeth Hawksley
THE WINTER PRINCE
Cheryl Sawyer, Signet Eclipse, 2007, $14.00/ C$17.50, pb, 400pp, 9780451220448
Sawyer delivers up a broad canvas of love and war set against the backdrop of the early years of England’s Civil War. It’s 1642, and 20-year-old Mary Villiers, Duchess of Richmond, and adoptive daughter of King Charles I, becomes involved in a plan to avert a potentially disastrous confrontation between the king and Parliament. Meanwhile, the young, charismatic and impossibly handsome Rupert of the Rhine arrives in England to lead his uncle Charles I’s army. Mary, along with her husband James, forms a triumvirate of sorts with Prince Rupert, but there is also an undeniable attraction between Mary and the dashing prince. Ever mindful of her husband and public censure, their relationship is one of lingering touches, longing glances, stolen words, unexpected meetings, and secret correspondence. As armies engage in battle and the queen flees to Europe for aid, Mary realizes her secrets could spell treason for those she loves.
The author includes a wealth of historical details of a country torn asunder by religious and political strife. Her scenes of military drills, pitched battles, ship crossings, and Stuart period court life, while informative, sometimes slow the narrative. Her characters of Mary and Rupert are superbly etched: principled, courageous, loyal, passionately flawed, both in dreadful conflict with their feelings for each other and for the intensely devoted and perceptive James. Even her secondary characters are fully realized: the ultimately doomed Charles I; the fiery Catholic queen Henrietta-Maria; Rupert’s mother, the spectacular Elizabeth, the Winter Queen, and the iron-willed Earl of Essex, who is determined to win at all costs. Meticulously researched and well written, this will appeal to readers who enjoy large dollops of history along with a simmering romance.
Michael I. Shoop
Thomas, the father, is a furniture maker who finds work with Philip Astley’s celebrated circus in Lambeth. His son, Jem, an innocent abroad if ever there was one, makes friends with Maggie Butterfield, whose family are typical Londoners, sharp, resourceful and not averse to a spot of criminality to make a living. Maggie represents both experience in her street-wise demeanour but also innocence in her youth and the way she is forced to work in a mustard factory. The couple find Blake a strange, but kind man, but he is merely an observer and we are to believe that Jem and Maggie were his inspiration for his Songs of Innocence and Experience.
18th CENTURY
N nA TREASURY OF REGRET
Susanne Alleyn, St. Martin’s Press, 2007, $24.95/C$31.00, hb, 288pp, 9780312343712
When investigator Aristide Ravel enters the office of his local police commissariat, he’s met by Laurence Dupont, a young woman determined to clear the name of a family servant. Jeannette Moineau has been arrested on charges of feeding her bourgeois employers poisoned food— fatally, in the case of the family patriarch, the miserly moneylender Martin Dupont. Ravel’s ensuing investigation, conducted in the tense, economically troubled atmosphere of 1797 Paris, turns up no shortage of suspects—and a surprising link between Ravel and Laurence.
A Treasury of Regret combines the best in history and mystery. Rather than treating revolutionary Paris simply as window-dressing, Alleyn makes good use of the historical setting, both in creating her plot and in creating her characters, several of whom have lost loved ones to the guillotine. The mystery itself is artfully plotted and compelling; I was in due suspense as to whodunit.
This is Alleyn’s second mystery featuring Ravel, though it’s not necessary to have read the previous book, Game of Patience, to enjoy A Treasury of Regret
Susan Higginbotham
BURNING BRIGHT
Tracy Chevalier, HarperCollins, 2007, £15.99, hb, 390pp, 9780007178353 / Dutton, 2007, $24.95, hb, 320pp, 9780525949787
The novel takes its title from what is probably William Blake’s most famous poem, and its premise is the contrasting, but closely allied, human conditions of Innocence and Experience, which again brings us back to Blake.
However, he has very little part to play. He is merely the eccentric neighbour of the Kellaway family, who have moved from Dorset to London.
There isn’t much in the way of plot and character development, and I do think the author has lost an opportunity in not giving William Blake a greater part to play in what is a somewhat predictable tale. However, great pleasure is derived from Chevalier’s vivid sense of place. In her hands, late 18th-century London and Lambeth in particular spring to life, and you see a city teetering on the brink of the rapid expansion and industrialisation that is about to change it forever.
Sally Zigmond
THE NATURE OF MONSTERS
Clare Clark, Viking, 2007, 382pp, £16.99, hb, 978060915323 / Harcourt, $25.00, hb, 400pp, 9870151012060
This is Clare Clark’s second novel and, like her first, The Great Stink, it is immersed in the filth, chaos and downright nastiness of a London of olden days.
Set in around 1720 the story is narrated in the first person by Elizabeth Tally, a young, attractive and determined woman who is despatched to London as a menial servant following a marital indiscretion. She is sent to the house of an apothecary, Conrad Black, and his wife and assumes that she is to have her unwanted pregnancy aborted. However, the reader is given more information than Eliza, and it is soon clear that Black’s intentions are far more malign. Eliza slowly becomes aware of what is transpiring, and her efforts to escape the Blacks’ evil machinations, together with a growing friendship for her mentally disabled fellow servant, Mary, is the core of the tale which follows.
The plot rattles along at a fine pace, and the terrors of early 18th century London are wonderfully and vividly evoked. But, occasionally the descriptions and similes are rather overwritten and stretched as if the author is trying just a bit too hard. Eliza, in her narrative, shows a depth of articulation and learning that does not seem convincing for a barely educated country lass, even with the benefit of hindsight from her more mature years. Nevertheless, this is an entertaining novel and an enjoyable read.
Doug Kemp
NAPOLEON’S PYRAMIDS
William Dietrich, HarperCollins, 2007, $24.95/
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Y BLUEBIRD, OR THE INVENTION OF HAPPINESS
Sheila Kohler, Other Press, 2007, $24.95, hb, 444pp, 9781590512623
Upon occasion a reviewer is familiar with the source material for a fictional biographical novel, and therefore dreads the transformation from actual to imagined history. Readers of Madame La Tour du Pin’s magnificent memoir need not be concerned, for Kohler exquisitely and creatively depicts Lucy Dillon’s life and times, tracing her history from the Court of Versailles to a humble farm in America.
A descendant of the Catholic Irish Wild Geese who sought refuge in France, Lucy is raised by her cruel grandmother. During her early years she lives on the periphery of the French court—maturity thrusts her into that scandalous world. A matrimonial pawn, she has the good fortune to marry an admirer of her soldier father. Frédéric is a nobleman, one capable of appreciating and adoring his bride. But for this hopeful couple there can be no happily ever after—married life begins as the sparks of revolution begin to flare. The riots, the executions, the loss of friends are revealed through Lucy’s perceptive and pragmatic mind. When her husband goes into hiding, she disguises herself as a citoyenne in a rural area, bearing a daughter while a suspicious mob rages on her doorstep, carefully planning an escape.
With their son and infant daughter, Lucy and Frédéric sail to America on a dodgy vessel to embark upon an uncertain and unfamiliar life. Lucy rises to the occasion, stocking and managing the Hudson Valley farm that her husband eventually purchases, proudly marking her butter molds with the family crest. She thrives on exile, but it reduces her loving Frédéric to a nostalgic, displaced aristocrat. In the aftermath of domestic tragedy they embark on yet another journey, each harboring different feelings about it.
their own sake, and with Nelson’s death at Trafalgar, she loses her country’s affection and respect.
Emma Hamilton is a historical novelist’s dream subject, and her fictional voice is as entertaining as it is convincing. Elyot is a rising star in the realm of biographical fiction, and to me To Great a Lady is as good as anything Margaret George ever wrote.
Sarah Johnson
VALLEY FORGE: A Novel of the American Revolution
David Garland, St. Martin’s, 2006, $24.95/ C$33.95, hb, 312pp, 0312327226
Anyone seeking quality historical fiction will welcome the publication of this poignant, powerful novel.
C$29.95/£14.99, hb, 375pp, 9780060848323
American expatriate Ethan Gage wins an ancient and possibly cursed medallion in a card game in revolutionary France. Threatened by the powerful Count Silano over the possession of this item, rumored to have belonged to Cleopatra, Gage is framed in the murder of a prostitute with whom he spent the night. To escape prosecution, Gage joins Napoleon’s savants on his expedition to Egypt. Once an acolyte of Ben Franklin’s in his electrical experiments, Gage ingratiates himself with Napoleon to decipher the mystery of the great pyramid. When Silano arrives in Cairo and attempts to murder him to retrieve the medallion, Gage discovers this trinket is linked to the Masons and may be the key to a treasure trove buried in the pyramid. He meets a beautiful Macedonian slave girl, Astiza, who both helps and hinders his efforts, spinning the magic of the ancients. Caught up in the fight between the French, the Mamalukes and the English over Egypt’s conquest, Gage uses mathematical calculations and with Astiza rushes to discover the secret before the vicious Silano.
Careening from volatile France to primitive Egypt to the battle of Aboukir Bay, this novel is nonstop excitement. Gage is a wry though naïve hero and the novel borders on fantasy with many coincidences. But you won’t care as you enjoy the exotic, heart-stopping ride.
Diane
Scott Lewis
TOO GREAT A LADY
Amanda Elyot, New American Library, 2007,
Margaret Barr
$14.00/C$17.50, pb, 412pp, 9780451220547
Elyot (the pseudonym used by actressnovelist Leslie Carroll for her historical novels) presents a sweeping, emotionally intense portrait of Emma, Lady Hamilton, half of one of the most famous romantic couples from history. Emma tells her life story in the form of a fictional confession, which she writes from a London debtors’ prison in 1814, less than a year before her death.
For readers not familiar with Emma Hamilton, Elyot recounts everything here, in lush and magnificent detail: her povertystricken childhood in North Wales; her time spent as mistress to several wealthy aristocrats; her marriage to the much older Sir William Hamilton, England’s ambassador to Naples, a love match in truth; her close friendship with Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples and Sicily, which made her an important yet unofficial envoy in the war against France; and her allencompassing love affair with Horatio Nelson, England’s greatest naval hero. Although beautiful, witty Emma continually reinvents herself as she ascends society’s ladder, changing her name several times and improving her education, her irrepressible, saucy attitude remains, along with her unfashionable country accent. Rather than simply disobeying society’s rules, she ignores them altogether, and – for a time at least – people love her for it. Yet despite all the glory, her story is ultimately tragic; she renounces parentage of her two daughters for
British Army Captain Jamie Skoyles marches on in author David Garland’s successor novel to Saratoga. Captain Skoyles had been taken prisoner along with the rest of “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne’s ill-fated expedition in 1777. Imprisoned by the rebellious Americans outside of Boston, the intrepid Skoyles escapes with his love, Elizabeth, and the faithful sergeant Tom Caffrey, and Tom’s wife. Blessed with an officer’s keen mind and a common soldier’s skill with weapons, Skoyles will reach British lines only to find he has been selected to serve as an intelligence operative. His task is to embed himself within the American forces in their winter encampment at Valley Forge and keep Sir William Howe in occupied Philadelphia informed of Washington’s status. Skoyle’s friend from pre-war days, the rebel Ezekiel Proudfoot, is also involved in intelligence service as an American agent assisting in propaganda work against the British. Skoyle’s abilities are tested at every turn and are complicated by his growing doubts about his country’s role in America and his sympathy for the American rebellion. His loyalties to his army or his conscience are tested in a final confrontation with his enemy, Major Harry Featherstone, and Skoyles decides to exchange his red coat for an American blue.
David Garland has, once again, done his homework. His treatment of Washington and his spy service, and the enigmatic Howe and the British forces is on target. But while Garland’s principles are interesting, they still seem to lack the personality and life one looks to find in a second novel in an ongoing series.
John R. Vallely
THE CHATELET APPRENTICE
Jean-Francois Parot (trans. Michael Glencross), Gallic Books, 2007, £11.99, pb, 343pp, 9781906040000
Paris, 1761. A senior police officer disappears and raw recruit, Nicolas Le Floch, is instructed to find him. When unidentified human remains come to light in macabre circumstances, the young Breton seems to have a murder investigation on his hands. Against a background of Carnival debauchery and the glittering, doomed court of Versailles, le Floch’s investigations bring him into conflict with the highest in the land.
18th Century-19th
Gallic Books is a new kid on the block, an independent devoted to bringing translations of modern French literature to a British audience, and I would like to be able to report favourably on this new title because I am committed to independent publishing and to the rare and intriguing skill of translation. Alas, The Chatelet Apprentice was a bitter disappointment. As I have not seen the original French text, I cannot comment on the translation, which may well be excellent, but I could find nothing to commend in the novel itself.
Its structure frustrates all reader expectations of a murder mystery by opening with a brief, occluded account of something unspecified being dumped by persons unknown. We know it’s ghastly because of the reaction of an aged prostitute straight out of Central Casting, but it is more than fifty pages before we return to it after an unforgivably long flashback into Le Floch’s childhood. Le Floch and his colleagues have the shallow, chippy eagerness of a bunch of public schoolboys, and 18th century Paris is lazily depicted through the usual range of sewage in the streets and whores plying their trade in tavern doorways interspersed with lists of street names which sound more like directions than passages of fiction. By the time I finished the book, I felt the Revolution couldn’t come soon enough!
Sarah Bower
A FAMILY OF STRANGERS
Sanchona, Five Star, 2006, $25.95, hb, 371pp, 1594145431
Young servant Kate O’Neal is transported to Botany Bay from England in 1793 after injuring her wealthy rapist. To survive the dangerous crossing she becomes the mistress of Lt. Kendrick. In Australia, the volatile Kendrick’s fortunes rise and fall with his incessant gambling. After he beats Kate in a drunken rage, she begs him to take her to his farm, where ten convicts linger. With Kate’s knowledge of farming from her Irish childhood, she inspires the hostile convicts and turns them into friends. Kendrick soon loses all he owns and for protection, Kate becomes the mistress of his superior, Captain Spencer. Spencer indulges her in her wish to run a store. As she battles the merchant community for her place, she struggles to hold on to Spencer’s love, until her past comes back to haunt her.
I found the writing awkward, the characters histrionic and unbelievable. Kate is someone just passed from one man to another, with little backbone of her own. The dialog and actions are too modern, so there is little sense of time and place. On the ship sailing to Australia, everyone cooks in their cabins as if they have hot plates. This dangerous act would not have been allowed on a wooden ship of this era. Every other word out of several characters’ mouths is “bastards,” used in the modern form, not for someone who is illegitimate. Except for the sex and violence, with its simplistic language and lack of detail,
this novel seems written for teenagers. It’s an interesting plot with poor execution.
Diane Scott Lewis
BROKEN HARMONY
Roz Southey, Crème de la Crime, 2007, £7.99, pb, 280pp, 9780955158933
This is the first in a line of historical mysteries to be published by Crème de la Crime. The scene is Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the 1730s, where the musician Charles Patterson is locked in a feud with his rival, the Swiss Henri le Sac. There are not many novels that combine history, mystery, and quantum mechanics, so one must award points for originality. Patterson’s Newcastle is not quite in our world: the spirits of the dead converse all the time with the living and share their lives. This point of this supernatural element does not appear until the end of the novel, so this reader was puzzled and distracted by it nearly all the way through. The crimes worsen from theft to murder, while Patterson is intrigued by the aristocratic Lady Anne and her cousin Mrs. Jerdoun, and by the strange visions that he experiences at their house. The author is a musicologist, so music plays an important role in the story, but I felt it would have been kind to have offered a few more clues to give the reader a sporting chance of solving the mystery before Patterson does. This novel is different, absorbing, and with an unhackneyed setting and background.
Alan Fisk
body count is high, but the story is told in the measured prose of a 19th century novel. Read on!
Edward James
SISTER PELAGIA AND THE WHITE BULLDOG
Boris Akunin (trans. Andrew Bromfield), Random House, 2007, $9.95, pb, 266pp, 9780812975130 / Pub. in the UK as Pelagia and the White Bulldog, Phoenix, 2007, £6.99, pb, 352pp, 0753821575
Philologist, critic, essayist and translator from the Japanese Grigory Chkhartishvili adopts the pen name of Boris Akunin for this anticipated mystery trilogy, the Mortalis series, set in a remote province of Russia in the late 19th century. This is the first installment.
The quirky star of the series is the clumsy, irreverent, bespectacled Sister Pelagia. Let us just say that Pelagia is much more complex than she initially appears. Sent off by her bishop, Mitrofanii, to solve the murders of the white bulldogs raised by his great aunt, Pelagia uses her considerable powers of observation to see through to the true natures and motives of the great aunt’s guests, relatives and hangers-on.
19th CENTURY
N nPELAGIA AND THE BLACK MONK
Boris Akunin (trans. Andrew Bromfield), Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, £12.99, hb, 416pp, 9780297858061
Did you know that Boris Akunin writes detective stories as well as thrillers? Neither did I, but the first two of his Sister Pelagia novels have now been translated into English. If you enjoyed the Fandorin thrillers you will not be disappointed in Sister Pelagia.
Like the thillers the Sister Pelagia novels are set in late 19th century Russia. Pelagia and the Black Monk is the second in the series and concerns strange goings-on in the monastery of New Ararat, a thin disguise for the Solovetsky monastery in the White Sea (known here as the Blue Lake). But do not expect to learn much about the Orthodox Church under the Tsars. The plot is timeless, totally absurd, wildly complicated, with enough red herrings to sink a fishing fleet and immensely enjoyable. I suspect there is a satire hidden in here about the eagerness of modern Orthodoxy to embrace capitalism, but English readers do not have to understand the private Russian jokes to enjoy the tale.
Sister Pelagia is a gentle creature, but she can handle a Smith and Wesson and does not shrink from violent show-downs with the villains. The
Akunin has an interesting, albeit difficult, style. There are so many characters that it is difficult to separate many of them out until late in the story. There are chapters of digressions about the politics, religious beliefs and social lives of the people of the Zavolzhie region. Frankly, with the amount of detail and meanderings, it became difficult to pay attention to the plot at certain points. Once the story got going though, and I could figure out who was who, I discovered that Akunin has a very dry, tongue-in-cheek style that was worth initially struggling through. And Pelagia is quite a woman and a tip-top detective!
Ilysa Magnus
COMPANIONS OF PARADISE
Thalassa Ali, Bantam, 2007, $14/C$18, pb, 332pp, 9780553381788 / Headline Review, 2006, £11.99, pb, 352pp, 0747269815
Continuing the saga of A Singular Hostage and A Beggar at the Gate, Englishwoman Mariana Givens has been separated from her Punjabi Muslim husband and the mystical child they have adopted. With her aunt and uncle, Mariana is part of the English expedition to Afghanistan (1840-42) – an expedition that will end in disaster for the occupying force. In Kabul, Mariana watches helplessly as the British military fails to the fierce, freedomloving Afghans. There, too, she finds spiritual solace in a Muslim mystic. And when the British expedition ignominiously flees Afghanistan, it is Mariana who arranges for the escape of her relatives – and whose hard-won inner strength reunites her with her beloved husband Hassan Ali Khan. (Note: of the approximately 16,000 people -- military and civilian; English and Indian; men, women, and children, who
retreated from Afghanistan at the end of 1841 – a disorderly rout through some of the worst mountain passes in the world in the depths of harsh winter – one man survived to reach India. A few others were taken hostage by the Afghan tribes and later ransomed.) An interesting and evocative book.
India Edghill
HEYDAY
Kurt Andersen, Random House, 2007, $26.95, hb, 640pp, 9780375504730
For those who enjoyed Kurt Andersen’s Turn of the Century, with its picture of New York City around the year 2000, his historical novel set in 1848 isn’t that much of a change. Someone wanting a charming, evenly-paced novel is in for a shock. The narrative flits at music-video pace from New York to London to Paris and points beyond, skipping ahead and back, taxing a reader who would occasionally like to know just what is going on. The pace seems more suited to our own age of the mousepad, rather than one of mousetraps.
Which is probably Andersen’s point. In the midst of revolution in Europe and gold rushes in America, Benjamin Knowles falls for Polly Lucking, a prostitute who poses as an actress, or vice versa (so to speak). Along the way we become acquainted with Duff Lucking, Polly’s brother, and various other characters of dubious morality and story value, all the while learning as much marginalia about the world as Andersen wishes to cram between his covers. A trip through utopian communities on our way out west gives us a diversion on our way to a diversion.
This makes for entertaining moments of happenstance, such as when Frederick Engels wanders onto the stage, or Darwin, or Stephen Foster, or other showy celebrities for the benefit of the reader. However, that same reader often finds himself scrambling toward some perceived point in the story hoping that there is a point. The novel’s mad ushering of ideas on and off for our amusement is enough to recommend this busy novel, but surely there is more here than that most familiar theme of the historical novel: that things are more like they are now than they’ve ever been before.
William Thornton
THE TRUE DARCY SPIRIT
Elizabeth Aston, HarperCollins, 2007, £6.99, pb, 341pp, 9780007241491 / Touchstone, 2006, $14.00, pb, 352pp, 0743274903
Cassandra Darcy is disgraced, penniless and an outcast from her family. She is determined to earn her living in Regency London by using her talent as an artist and trying not to fall prey to the dangers that beset attractive, unchaperoned young women. Horatio Darcy, Cassandra’s stepfather’s lawyer and Lord Usborne both set out to challenge her ambitions for very different reasons.
The author has interwoven the Darcy family
and other characters such as Bishop Collins from Pride and Prejudice seamlessly with her own. Miss Griffin, the writer, Petifer, Cassandra’s loyal maid and the dashing Horatio Darcy are examples of the lively characters, which dovetail exactly with the historical background. The delightful description of what is on offer for three shillings and sixpence at the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall, and the scene at the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket are captivating.
This novel is written with grace, charm and wit all the qualities that were prized during that period. It is an entertaining, engaging and engrossing romp through Regency London that sparkles like the champagne which is opened at the end of the novel.
Myfanwy Cook
SIMPLY MAGIC
Mary Balogh, Delacorte, 2007, $22.00/C$28.00, hb, 326pp, 9780385338233
Written by one of the acknowledged queens of the regency romance genre, this book is a simple delight. The third installment in a series dealing with four teachers at a girls’ school in Bath, its heroine is Susanna Osbourne and hero, Peter Edgeworth, otherwise known as Viscount Whitleaf. Susanna is beautiful beyond compare but tries to hide her looks and passion behind the veneer of a prim and proper schoolmistress. Viscount Whitleaf is godlike in appearance, wealthy, and in need of a wife so he can get to the business of breeding an heir. He’s smitten with Susanna at first sight. She has a scandalous secret in her past—a stumbling block to any decent marriage but an insurmountable obstacle to forming a relationship with Whitleaf. If you think you’ve read this book before, the plot elements are, admittedly, formula stuff. But Whitleaf’s true strength and biggest weakness turns out to be kindness. And Susanna is a pleasantly mature heroine. Balogh’s skill in portraying the couple as they court, discover each other’s secrets and, finally, figure out how to overcome those insurmountable obstacles is why this book succeeds so well.
Sue Asher
A GIFT FOR A RAKE
Ann Barker, Robert Hale, 2006, £18.99, hb, 224pp, 0709081847
Eleanor Carruthers’ coach overturns in the snow on her way to relatives and she is forced to take shelter at the home of an ex-hell raiser, Charles Christian Hurst. Left wheelchair bound by an accident that killed his wife, Hurst is curmudgeonly and reclusive until Eleanor’s arrival. Gradually the two become friends and through this loving friendship Hurst finds his way back to health.
Eleanor departs, leaving Hurst in the company of Patricia Reynolds, an old flame. But when Eleanor discovers that the death of Hurst’s wife may not have been his fault, she realises that not only does she need to return to tell him the truth,
but also that she is in love with him.
A Gift for a Rake is a tender tale, featuring a hero who is not obviously the stuff of romance, being scarred both mentally and physically – an added dimension which lifts the story from the commonplace. A touching romance and well worth the read.
Sara Wilson
NORTHFIELD: A Western Story
Johnny D. Boggs, Five Star, 2007, $25.95, hb, 236pp, 1594145040
Few American criminals enjoy the attention paid to Jesse James and his gang of Confederate guerrillas and post-Civil War bank robbers. He has gone from widely respected folk hero in earlier treatments to the contemporary, and more historically accurate, view as a man who habitually lived outside the law. Western writer Johnny D. Boggs is one of those writers who has little trouble placing his characters in their historical settings. He has performed all the required research but has also kept the dialogue and points of reference true to the time period.
The story unfolds as the Jameses and Youngers are talked into raiding Minnesota, a Union state during the war and one that has thus far not been the target of ex-Confederate brigands. Bill Stiles is new to the gang, and he is the one who portrays the Northfield bank as an easy target. While some of the robbers mistrust Stiles, a decision is made to leave Missouri for Minnesota. September 7, 1876, turned out to be a very different day than the one Jesse had expected. A courageous bank employee refused to open the vault. This gave the aroused citizens time to arm themselves against the gang. The resulting gun battle sees the robbers shot down or captured. Only Jesse and his brother Frank escape.
Boggs tells the dramatic story through the voices of several of the gang members and the Minnesotans they encounter. This can test the patience of the reader who wishes the author had been more conventional. But patience does offer a reward, and the tale unfolds in a more interesting fashion thanks to Boggs’s innovation.
John R. Vallely
THE WAR OF KNIVES
Broos Campbell, McBooks, 2007, $23.95/ C$28.95, hb, 320pp, 1590131045
The year is 1800, and the Haitian revolution has become a brutal civil war. Lieutenant Matty Graves of the U.S. Navy schooner Rattle Snake is ordered ashore to gather intelligence vital to American stability. The rest is pure action as Matty turns guerilla soldier, is captured, escapes, and returns to free his friend, the revolutionary soldier, Juge. But the action doesn’t end there. The best is yet to come as Matty, sans culottes, takes command in the final sea battle that sees the defeat of two enemy vessels and the sinking of the Rattle Snake
The War of Knives wants to be a funny story
EDITORS’ CHOICE Y LISZT’S KISS
Susanne Dunlap, Touchstone, 2007, $14.00, pb, 336pp, 0743289404
Paris, 1832. A cholera epidemic rages, and Anne de Barbier-Chouant has lost her beloved mother to its deadly grasp. Alone in the crumbling family mansion but for servants and a remote, menacing father, Anne seeks solace in the keys of her mother’s Erard piano — until the marquis angrily locks it away. The marquis may have dark plans for Anne, but Marie d’Agoult, patroness of the arts and friend of Anne’s mother, adopts Anne’s cause and arranges lessons for her with the celebrated Hungarian pianist, Franz Liszt. Both Anne and Marie fall under Liszt’s sensuous spell, and Anne faces intrigue and danger as she stumbles upon long-hidden secrets which could be as deadly as they are devastating.
Dunlap has done it again. Her 2005 debut, Emilie’s Voice, was a skillfully rendered tale of intrigue, love, and music, and in Liszt’s Kiss, she has applied this formula with equal success. This novel has a more gothic feel, which adds to the delicious tension and foreboding which Dunlap expertly conjures. She masters the zeitgeist of 1830s Paris under the pall of an epidemic, from the camphor sachets to the misery of the Hôtel Dieu hospital. Dunlap’s characterization is well-realized, and her examination of her characters’ feelings and motivations is spot-on. This is especially true of Liszt, who is not the villain of the tale — just supremely egocentric and intense, like many great musicians, but rendered completely compelling by his art. Dunlap’s prose is expressive, but it becomes vividly evocative whenever she describes music and the effect it has on those who populate her story. Like Anne, the reader is easily immersed in “that other realm, where nothing mattered except music, and the closeness of two human beings.” Add this one to your “to read” pile; Liszt’s Kiss, an engrossing mixture of history, suspense, and music, is highly recommended.
with a likeable, truehearted, and bumbling hero. And if the reader can overlook the hideous atrocities that stamp the war for Haitian independence – which the author represents accurately – they can keep a smile for Matty’s misadventures. You need an appreciation for gallows humor and slapstick to really enjoy this tale.
A troublesome aspect is the narration. Matty tells the tale, yet he seems to have two voices. As narrator he speaks grammatically, is articulate, and has an extensive vocabulary. Yet when he speaks aloud his speech is rough, ungrammatical and colloquial. His actions are characteristic of his bumpkin self, though sometimes he acts like a competent sailor. The split makes for confusion and takes some of the enjoyment from the story.
Nonetheless, Campbell’s history is sound and woven smoothly into the story – which is peppered with Creole and French phrases. He is at his best in naval battle scenes, where his knowledge of sailing ships and nautical dialogue shines. In the end The War of Knives is a rollicking good yarn that makes you laugh and cry – a slice of life, one might say.
Lucille Cormier
COLD CACHE
Tim Champlin, Five Star, 2007, $25.95, hb, 226pp, 1594144974
Kent Rasmussen, an officer of the North West Mounted Police, is leaving the force to return home to his mother and sister in Minnesota.
Bethany Latham
While withdrawing his final pay from a bank in Windsor, he encounters Nellie Newburn, who is trying to withdraw the outrageous sum of $347,000. She approaches him and offers to pay him a large sum of money if he will escort
Y THE MESMERIST
her and the money safely home to her family: a lucrative offer he cannot refuse.
As they begin their travels, he learns about the cold cache – a vast sum of money and gold buried somewhere in New Mexico Territory by a group known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, who want the money to fund the creation of a new nation. Knowledge that Jesse James and other outlaws added to treasure with their ill-gotten gains piques Rasmussen’s interest even further. A short while into their journey, much to Rasmussen’s embarrassment, Nellie’s $347,000 is stolen. Rasmussen is soon caught up in the midst of a violent feud between the Claytons and the Newburns for possession of the cache.
This is an excellent novel that abounds with action and suspense.
Mirella Patzer
THE GOD OF SPRING
Arabella Edge, Simon & Schuster, 2007, $24.00/ C$28.99, hb, 340pp, 074329484X
It is 1818, and French artist Théodore Géricault is in danger of becoming the 19th century equivalent of a one-hit wonder, unable to produce anything creative following his gold-medal-winning painting six years earlier. Stymied artistically and romantically (an adulterous affair with his young aunt cannot possibly continue), Géricault must find a new subject to inspire him. A few years earlier, the French frigate Medusa ran aground in Africa. A raft was built to tow the ‘overflow’ passengers, but this raft was quickly set adrift on the open sea instead, leaving only fifteen people alive
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Barbara Ewing, Sphere, 2007, £18.99, hb, 400pp, 9781847440655 / also £11.99, pb, 9781847440228
As Queen Victoria comes to the throne, the mysterious Mrs. Cordelia du Pont begins her meteoric rise to fame and fortune as a lady Phreno-Mesmerist. Although her career begins as a money-making scam hatched by two aging and out-of-work actresses, Cordelia Preston (aka Mrs. du Pont) and Amaryllis Spoons, things soon take a darker and more serious turn. Cordelia’s success is challenged by a painful past which threatens to overwhelm her, and what began as her last, great theatrical role gradually becomes real as she discovers in herself a genuine talent for mesmerism. The foundation of her popular success, however, is the advice she gives to young ladies of good breeding about “the gentle intricacies of the wedding night”. When a member of high society is brutally murdered in Bloomsbury Square, Cordelia’s past comes back to haunt her with dramatic results.
As with all her fiction, Ewing uses historical stories to address issues of continuing relevance – women’s rights, the balance of power between the sexes and, in this novel, the debate between conventional and alternative medicine, and the pernicious power of the gutter press. This is a much stronger novel than Ewing’s previous book, Rosetta, perhaps because it is set almost entirely in London. Ewing writes with great verve and confidence about 19th century London, bringing its crowds and smells and dank basements wonderfully to life. As an actress herself, Ewing also shows a sure hand when describing the theatre of the time.
A gripping and entertaining read. Recommended. Sarah Bower
when rescued. Survivors spoke of government incompetence, and their stories were hushed up.
Intrigued, Géricault contacts two survivors, offering them lodging and care in exchange for their tale, certain that herein lies his next masterpiece. But his guests are increasingly reluctant to give a true account of what happened on the raft, just as Géricault becomes increasingly determined to faithfully recreate the disaster. He painstakingly builds a raft replica, buys cadavers with which to people it, and worries over every minute detail of the shipwreck. His obsession will eventually result in one of his best-known paintings, The Raft of the Medusa. In the process, though, Géricault gives his own health, his whole life, over to his work, driven by a mania that parallels the experiences of the raft survivors.
Edge’s award-winning first novel, The Company, was based on the shipwreck of a Dutch ship in the 17th century. She returns to nautical disasters with her second novel, but more than this, she gives careful insight into the process of creating a work of art. Géricault is passionate, artistic, flawed, selfish, and sympathetic; Edge makes the tale of his painting as compelling as the story which inspired it. Recommended.
L.K. Mason
THE DEVIL’S DANCE
Joanna Erle, Robert Hale, 2006, £18.99, hb, 224pp, 9780709081586
Timothy Ryland stands accused by his father,
Y ABRAHAM’S
WELL
Josh, and his father’s best friend, Nick Marriott, of a terrible deed. Nick’s teenage daughter Rebecca is pregnant and claims Timothy is the father. Timothy knows this to be untrue, yet without hesitation, agrees to Nick’s demand that he must marry Rebecca. His cool demeanour make his seeming betrayal all the bitterer to his accusers. Outrage made all the worse by the fact that Timothy has known Rebecca since a small girl and is now a lawyer in his first legal practice. With her lie, Rebecca has spawned anger enough to rip the Rylands apart, laying Timothy open to contempt from those he loves.
Told largely from Timothy’s point of view, this is a gripping tale of love, deceit and the tangled lives of two families. It is a credit to the author that though its subject is occasionally melodramatic, it never appears overly so. Instead we are given a richly sympathetic treatment of some of the less savoury aspects of sexual behaviour in early Victorian England. Timothy is a thoroughly engaging and likeable character, noble but flawed. I found the minor characters well drawn, especially Timothy and Rebecca’s respective mothers. Well worth reading.
Fiona Lowe
A WICKED GENTLEMAN
Jane Feather, Pocket Star, 2007, $7.99/$9.99, pb, 416pp, 1416525513
This is the first book in Feather’s new Cavendish Square trilogy, which features three friends who come to London to escape the countryside. Lady Cornelia Dagenham has two
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Sharon Ewell Foster, Bethany House, 2006, $12.99, pb, 335pp, 9780764228872
Until she is about seven years old, Armentia never knows she is a slave. She grows up in the southern Appalachians of North Carolina, watched over by loving parents, her older brother, Abraham, and Mama Emma and Papa, a married couple of white and Indian blood who treat her almost as a daughter. But an act of childhood mischief, and the arrival of whites who want the Indians’ land, makes their true relationship painfully clear. In 1838, Armentia’s family, along with thousands of other Black Cherokee – African Americans of mixed heritage, both slave and free – is forced westward on foot, accompanying their owners and other Indians along the Trail of Tears to what is now Oklahoma.
Foster writes in the honest, direct, occasionally folksy style of a slave narrative, recounting Armentia’s journey from innocence to resigned wisdom in the first person. Time and again, Armentia sees others trade her friendship, love, and trust for material gain. Neither her child’s viewpoint nor the reader’s foreknowledge of her survival into old age lessens the impact of the heartbreak she experiences. Foster also proves descriptions of graphic violence unnecessary in conveying the unexpected horrors that shape a slave’s existence. Elements of her Christian faith, which gives Armentia hope in the hardest of times, are woven into the narrative in a natural, historically appropriate fashion. But Abraham’s Well is not only a powerful indictment against slavery, it’s also a revelation of the hidden history of the Black Cherokee, who know the shame of both cultures but belong fully to neither, not even today. The concluding author’s note, in which Foster explores her own perplexing family history, makes her tale even more meaningful. An impressive, impeccably researched novel that deserves to be widely read; highly recommended. Sarah Johnson
children, and while she has custody of them following her husband’s death in battle, his father controls the purse-strings and expects her to do no more with her life than bring up his heir. Cornelia’s sister-in-law, who was widowed in the same manner, and Livia Lacey, who has unexpectedly come into a house in London, complete the trio. Livia is approached almost immediately by a prospective buyer of the house, who offers a sum far beyond its worth. Why? And why do people keep breaking in?
When Viscount Bonham, the prospective buyer, appears on the doorstep and mistakes Cornelia for a maid, the stage is set. The misunderstanding is put right fairly quickly, but the tension between them grows, as do other feelings. While I am not sure I am convinced by Cornelia’s willingness to make love with Viscount Bonham as soon as she does, I did find the story a delight. The espionage that Viscount Bonham is involved in accentuates current events. The conventions of London society, while highlighted less than in some other Regency-era novels, give just the right historical touch.
Trudi E. Jacobson
THEN CAME FAITH
Louise M. Gouge, Emerald Pointe, 2006, $14.99, pb, 381pp, 097851372X
Juliana Harris arrives in New Orleans to do her part in helping to rebuild the South at the end of the Civil War. She plans to help her friend open a school for black children. She soon finds herself encountering Andre Beauchamp, formal naval officer for the South. His father and fortune are gone, his mother barely alive, and he must care for her and the former slaves that have remained with him. He has no use for Northern abolitionists who are coming to change the way he lives. Andre finds himself drawn to this kind and good Northern woman, despite their differences, as she tries to make him understand the error of his ways.
History buffs may not enjoy this story’s simple portrayal of the South as evil and the North as good, where the only issue of the war is slavery. However, romance readers will enjoy Ms. Gouge’s special gift for plot and character development. Her characters are complex, with rich emotional lives. The fast-paced plot is full of surprises, both pleasant and unpleasant. This is Ms. Gouge’s first book in a series that will explore the impact of slavery.
Nan Curnutt
STORMCROW CASTLE
Amanda Grange, Robert Hale, 2007, £18.99, hb, 224 pp, 9780709082019
Helena Carlisle arrives at Stormcrow Castle in search of her aunt who is housekeeper there. However, Helena’s aunt is absent in mysterious circumstances. When Helena herself is mistaken for the replacement housekeeper, she plays the role and sets out to discover what has happened to her relation. The staff obviously knows
something that she does not and some of them, such as the dour Miss Parkins, are openly hostile. The lord of Stormcrow Castle, Simon, Lord Torkrow, is a brooding hero of the Mr Rochester school, and although he exhibits moments of warmth towards Helena, he is guarded and withdrawn concerning a tragic happening in his past. To get to the heart of the mystery, not to say the heart of Lord Torkrow, and find out what has happened to her aunt, Helena will need all her courage, cunning and fortitude.
This is a brooding Gothic novel in the classic tradition, replete with strange noises in the attic, secret rooms, sinister nocturnal forays into graveyards, a masqued ball and the lowering wilderness of the moors presiding over all.
A thoroughly enjoyable page turner and well worth the read.
Susan Hicks
PATRIOT HEARTS: A Novel of the Founding Mothers
Barbara Hambly, Bantam, 2007, $25.00/ C$30.00, hb, 431pp, 9780553804287
Patriot Hearts tells the stories of four women: Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Sally Hemings, and Dolley Madison. It opens in 1814, with Dolley Madison getting ready to escape from an about-to-be-burned President’s House and cuts back and forth in time and between the four central characters, who are linked to each other in a number of ways.
Hambly’s characterizations are vivid, and she writes exceptionally well, with a wry sense of humor that made me chuckle aloud at times. She’s obviously done her research, and she handles the delicate issue of slavery deftly and sensitively.
Nonetheless, I found this book to be somewhat frustrating, for several reasons. The constant leaping back and forth between characters and times, while certainly an authorial tour de force, made it difficult for me to maintain my focus and to keep my interest. Also problematic is the swarm of minor characters. Sometimes, as with Sally Hemings’ family, they play a useful role, both in the plot and thematically, but in other cases, they served only to bog the reader down in minutiae. Martha Washington in particular was lost to me, at least in the early chapters, amid an ever-shifting panorama of friends and relations, many of whom make only one appearance, and only as part of the landscape. Finally, Hambly’s stylistic choice to make all four women central characters, while it did have the advantage of showing their interconnections and their shared struggles, ultimately prevented her from developing each of their individual stories as much as I would have liked.
Despite these reservations, Hambly vividly brings these four very different women to life. For illuminating a side of the presidency that often gets neglected by textbooks—the domestic—she is to be commended.
Susan Higginbotham
AN IMPOSSIBLE CONFESSION
Sandra Heath, Robert Hale, 2007, £18.99, hb, 223pp, 9780709080879
Helen Fairmead first meets Lord Drummond in slightly risqué circumstances and finds it impossible to confess her true identity to him. Soon afterwards she is shocked to discover that he is at odds with her sister and brother-in-law over a scandal involving horse racing – her brother-in-law’s passion. Not only that, but her sister has also selected a potential suitor for Helen, a man named Ralph St John. How can Helen let her family know that Ralph is not all he seems and at the same time tell them that she is in love with a man they dislike and who does not even know her real name?
An Impossible Confession is yet another sparkling romance from Sandra Heath. She certainly knows her audience and crafts her novels with great care to keep her readership satisfied and wanting more. Her books are light-hearted reads perfect for filling in a spare moment.
Sara Wilson
A PERFECT LIKENESS
Sandra Heath, Robert Hale, 2006, £18.99, hb, 223pp, 0709080867
Sir Sebastian Sheringham agrees to marry Bryony St Charles after seeing a miniature portrait of her and to honour an ancient agreement made by his late father. Bryony agrees to marry Sebastian to save her father’s estate. It is not a sound basis for an engagement, and events are complicated by the intervention of a mysterious “well-wisher” and the ill-will of arch villain the Duke of Calborough. Misunderstandings abound before a happy ending can be achieved. This is another jolly read from Sandra Heath, who appears to be specialising in writing joyous period romances, full of wit and passion. Her prose is sparkling and her characters spiky. She also includes an element of mystery to create a pleasing piquancy to the whole affair.
Sara Wilson
THE WAYWARD MUSE
Elizabeth Hickey, Atria, 2007, $24/C$28.99, hb, 272pp, 0743273141
In every era, artists have naturally banded together—the Bloomsbury Group in the 1920s, the Rat Pack in the 1960s, and even the Brat Pack in the 1980s. The Wayward Muse looks at the Pre-Raphaelites of the Victorian era and takes a different angle, seeing it through the eyes of one of their wives. She was Jane Burden, and although she fell in love with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, she had to settle for marrying his friend William Morris. Born into a poor Oxford family, Jane was discovered by Rossetti at a play, and he appealed to her venal mother by paying Jane to pose for him in a mural he and his friends Morris and Edward Burne-Jones were painting.
Hickey meticulously recreates this
community of artists, down to their pecking order: Rossetti is king of the roost, while poor Morris is teased and called Topsy. Still, Morris wins the girl because Rossetti is engaged to frail Elizabeth Siddal. And yet, it is inevitable that Jane and Rossetti should be drawn to each other again. What follows is the story of their love affair, with Morris an unhappy yet complicit bystander. He even removes himself to Iceland so Jane and Rossetti may keep house together for a summer.
The interaction between the Pre-Raphaelites — their work together, their relationships as friends and fellow artists — is much more interesting than the relationship between Jane and Rossetti. The inevitability of that affair means that there is no tension: Morris was always second best.
Ellen Keith
THE MOONLIT CAGE
Linda Holeman, Three Rivers, 2007, $14.95, 496pp, pb, 9780307346490 / Headline, 2006, £6.99, pb, 512pp, 0755328566
In 1846, eleven-year-old Darya is on the brink of womanhood. Her dearest companion, her Circassian grandmother, regales Darya with tales of her own past as an Ottoman concubine, and the Englishman who was her true love, before ending her life as an Afghan widow. For Darya her grandmother predicts a destiny far across the ocean that brings only discontent and rebellion as Darya tries to make sense of it all. Darya’s odd behavior and a curse of barrenness make her a village outcast. The only husband her father can find for her is the second son of a nomadic tribal leader. Her husband beats her because she has not conceived. Learning of the curse, he threatens to kill Darya, and she flees. She spends several days scavenging for food before David Ingram, an enigmatic Englishman, finds her. He takes her to Bombay, where she finds employment with an English family. Another Englishman offers to take Darya to London. Mindful of her grandmother’s prediction, she agrees. Life in London is far worse than she had imagined: dangerous, even life-threatening for her. And once again, it is up to David to rescue her.
Holeman has written a suspenseful, entertaining novel. The portrait she paints of Afghanistan and tribal life in the time of the British Raj is brilliant. Her complex characters are likeable and easily capture the reader’s interest. She has created a heroine of immense inner strength and self-knowledge unique for a Muslim girl of her background.
Audrey Braver
MURDER ON THE EIFFEL TOWER
Claud Izner (trans. Isabel Reid), Gallic Books, 2007, £7.99, pb, 286pp, 9781906040017
June 1889. The Eiffel Tower is the most popular exhibit of the Paris Exposition and thousands flock each day to climb it. These include Victor Legris, owner of a bookshop.
There, in the crush of people, he bumps into his friend, Marius Bonnet, and his employees. Marcus is the editor of a newspaper that thrives on scandal and spectacle. Victor is immediately attracted to the beautiful Tasha Kherson, a Russian artist who is the paper’s illustrator. While they are on the tower, a woman dies suddenly, apparently as the result of a beesting.
Such a death at the very top of the Eiffel Tower is strange enough but when other such deaths follow randomly and both Victor’s partner and mentor, the enigmatic Kenji Mori, and the intriguing Tasha seem to be closely linked to the victims, Victor sets out to discover the truth.
This is an old-fashioned crime novel in both style and substance. The pace is slow. Victor spends an awful lot of the time wandering aimlessly about the streets of Paris. Although he eventually identifies the killer, it takes a written confession by the latter to explain the reasons behind the apparently random choice of victims. It may be intentional on the part of the author (who is in fact two people) to re-create the style of a 19th century crime novel, but I’m not sure it works because readers today expect more sophistication. Both the plot and the killer’s motives had as many holes in them as Monsieur Eiffel’s tower itself. As a Francophile and a lover of the 19th century I began reading with high expectations and perhaps it’s my fault I was disappointed.
I liked the portrayal of the little bookshop, its customers and its apple-munching assistant but felt there should have been more about the impact the tower made on the city and its people. I had also expected something with a little more panache, in which, judging from the French reviews of the original Mystere rue des Saintes-Pierres, I am not alone.
Sally Zigmond
KISS ME, ANNABEL
Eloisa James, Harper, 2006, £6.99, pb, 357, 9780007229475 / Avon, 2005, $6.99, pb, 400pp, 0060732105
The Essex sisters, beautiful Scottish orphans, are the toast of Regency London. The second sister, Annabel, intends to use the Season to find a rich Englishman, marriage to whom will rescue her from poverty and Scotland. Enter the Earl of Ardmore, handsome, apparently poor and Scottish. A scandal forces them to elope to the dreaded Highlands where she discovers the Earl is not what she supposed.
An admitted Georgette Heyer addict, James has created appealing modern versions of Heyer heroines: beautiful, intelligent but naïve, and feisty. She throws in the usual Almacks and an exquisite, sardonic rake with gleaming Hessians. Ardmore is nicer than Heyer’s heroes but gorgeous and also with gleaming Hessians. The dialogue is sparky, if more 2006 than 1817. The novel is long. The “romance”, i.e. sex, is
explicit and a bit repetitive; a far cry from Heyer’s chaste clinches in the final chapter.
Lynn
Guest
VOICES OF THE NIGHT
Lydia Joyce, Signet Eclipse, 2007, $6.99/ C$9.99, pb, 310pp, 9780451220776
Former pickpocket and secret murderess Maggie King has run afoul of London’s most notorious criminal. She and her “chavies,” the motley group of young slum-dwellers she lives with, are in peril, and her voice, she hopes, will be their salvation. Opera-lover and would-be Pygmalion, Charles, Lord Edgington, is present at her audition. He seeks a willing and trainable woman of common origins who can dupe his snobbish sister into believing her a true lady. Impressed by Maggie’s histrionic talent and bravery, he proffers a persuasively large sum.
When the powerful nobleman whisks her off to a furnished house in Chelsea to make her over, Maggie assumes that becoming his mistress is part of the bargain. She will do anything to protect her charges from her enemy’s gruesome threats. As her mutually pleasurable and emotionally revealing relationship with Charles intensifies, so does her dread of reprisal. By the time she arrives at his ancestral home to makes her debut as a lady, she is determined to take bold action. And does.
Along with edgy, compelling characters, Joyce offers taut plotting and a dark, richly detailed Victorian setting. A reliance on stereotypical minor characters and a few lapses into American idiom are minor faults in an otherwise impressive historical romance.
Margaret Barr
A TENDERING IN THE STORM
Jane Kirkpatrick, WaterBrook, 2007, $13.99, pb, 400pp, 9781578567355
This book continues the story begun in A Clearing in the Wild. Both novels are based on the true story of the utopian community founded by William Keil in Bethel, Missouri, in 1844. Now it’s 1856, and Emma Giesy has convinced her husband, Christian, to settle in the Willapa Bay area in Washington territory with a few others from the Bethel community. They had traveled to Washington to find a new site for the community, but the site they chose was rejected by Keil, who preferred a location in Oregon. Emma is different than many of her fellow women – she is headstrong, opinionated, and questions the value of communal living. She is happy to be living apart from the community and in particular, to be away from the authoritarian Keil. She is determined to make a success of their homestead and works alongside her husband enthusiastically. Emma is a capable person and enjoys learning new skills from the Indian women in the area, such as farming oysters.
Tragedy strikes when Emma’s husband dies suddenly in a boating accident, leaving her
a widow with two small children and another on the way. Emma wants what’s best for her children, but her fierce independence causes her to reject help from almost every quarter: her inlaws, brother, and neighbors. She loses her faith and makes some poor choices as she struggles to take care of her children and survive in the wilderness. Ultimately, her independence is tempered, and she learns how to receive as well as to give.
Kirkpatrick does an excellent job describing the challenges and rewards of settling a new area. If you’re like me and find the topic of 19th century utopian communities fascinating, you’ll like Emma’s story.
Jane Kessler
CORNERED TIGRESS
Jade Lee, Leisure, 2007, $6.99, pb, 337pp, 09780843956894
Little Pearl, Taoist mistress of the sacred arts, believes that a perfect balance of yin and yang is vital to reach Nirvana, achieved through sharing sexual energy. After Little Pearl’s master is kidnapped, a Chinese businessman and a foreigner “devil” arrive, the first to grasp what is not his to take and the latter to collect what is rightfully owed him. How is she to protect the Tan estate until her Master returns? Should she trust either visitor? Just how much should she trust the instincts honed by her Taoist priestess practices?
One of the visitors, Captain Jack Storm, is brutally beaten by Little Pearl’s neighbors, a harbinger of the Boxer bloodbath which will occur in the late 19th century. Little Pearl begins her healing by releasing Jack’s yang, but Jack awakens and is horrified. Jack may be bold and adventurous, but underneath lies his puritanical background. His inexplicable reaction is explained by letters from his minister brother in England, who preaches to Jack to forsake his wild ways.
Revealing a small part of the plot in no way detracts from the mystery and erotic romance of this novel. Jade Lee knows how to spin a yarn to keep the reader flipping the pages and one learns quite a bit about the Taoist viewpoint about sex and life-enhancing instincts arising from the beautiful blend of yin and yang. Light, pleasant, and interesting reading here!
Viviane Crystal
HIS BOOTS UNDER HER BED
Ana Leigh, Pocket Star, 2006, $6.99/C$8.99, pb, 356pp, 9780743469975
1867 California: Rory O’Grady tartly informs Garth Fraser that, unlike the other saloon girls, she doesn’t take men upstairs to her room. Yet she finds she likes Garth enough to help him escape a shanghai attempt. Furthering their acquaintance becomes complicated, however, because Rory leaves town in a hurry when her father Paddy “finds” Garth’s map of his uncle’s gold mine. Garth is determined to follow them
of his various characters, which leads to many different plots—Burns’s attempts to define freedom to the free Negroes of Virginia; Radcliff, who goes through a transformation of army medal of honor winner to Indian “brave” to army scout; Duncan Gatewood’s move from Virginia to the western plains to raise horses; Samuel Duncan, the former plantation owner who must build a new life for his family; and young Pauline, who marries a New York businessman with ties to the greedy tycoons of the 1870s.
This is a sequel to Jacob’s Ladder, written several years ago about the Civil War in Virginia. Even though there was no single protagonist, I thought the author wove the storylines of the characters together very well. I would recommend this book to those who, like me, enjoy a factual, well-written post-Civil War novel.
Jeff Westerhoff
RESURRECTIONIST
James McGee, HarperCollins, 2007, £10, hb, 472pp, 9780007212699
The setting is Regency London. Robbing fresh graves to supply the city’s anatomy schools and hospitals is a profitable business; illegal, reprehensible, but necessary if medical knowledge is to advance. Gangs competing for control of the trade are not above murder and mutilation to warn off rivals. Bow Street Runner Matthew Hawkwood is ordered to probe into just such a vicious killing. On the same day, he is sent to Bedlam Hospital in order to investigate an equally monstrous murder. His inquiries lead him to respected citizens as well as brutal resurrectionists and their women in the vilest stews of the city.
McGee’s medical research is thorough and fascinating. Nor does he neglect the moral ambiguities of the resurrectionist’s crime. In the first chapters, the plot’s threads seem irreconcilable but with quickly paced action and many a twist and turn, he draws them skilfully together. The characters are three-dimensional as is London’s underbelly in all its squalor and stinks. Hawkwood is an enigmatic hero; hard and ruthless, yet he wins the reader’s respect.
This is not a novel for the squeamish but it is thoughtful, colourful and very readable.
Lynn Guest
LANDSMAN
Peter Charles Melman, Counterpoint, 2007, $26.00, hb, 320 pp, 1582433677
In 1861, an orphaned Jewish son of an indentured servant joins the Third Louisiana Infantry. Elias Abrams is on the run after participating in the murder of an old man. As a young gang member in the Cypress Stump Boys, led by a psychopath named Silas Wolfe, he learned how to harass and steal from the citizens of New Orleans. After his first battle, Elias is persuaded by an officer to correspond with a young Jewish girl, Nora Bloom, from that
city. After corresponding with her over time, he falls in love.
His past life in New Orleans continues to haunt him as he tries to deal with his longdistance relationship. Events occur that not only complicate his ability to stay alive during the war, but also prevent him from meeting the young girl of his dreams. He also realizes he must clear his name of the horrendous crime that caused him to leave the city. Only his friend John Lee Carlson, a fellow soldier-in-arms, manages to provide Elias with the proper advice to help keep him out of more trouble.
The author is very graphic when describing sexual encounters, and the language can be coarse at times; therefore, this book may not be for everyone. Also, the story is not written to be politically correct, but told as the people actually talked and behaved during the American Civil War. I enjoyed this novel and would recommend it to readers interested in reading about how people raised under difficult circumstances can rise above their current situation and try to improve their chances for a better future.
Jeff Westerhoff
THE MESALLIANCE
Fenella-Jane Miller, Robert Hale, 2007, £18.99, 224pp, hb, 9780709082248
St Osyth Priory, 1811: Lady Allegra Humphrey is devastated when her father, the Earl of Witherton, shoots himself.
1812: terrible news is delivered at the hands of two lawyers—a cit now owns the family’s ancient ancestral abode. Allegra and her twin brother Richard must quickly adjust to this shattering blow, or all they hold dear will be lost to them forever. Change is not at all an easy matter for Allegra, who is most proud of her ancestry and her place at the top of the social ladder. How will she cope with this threat?
When new owner, self-made and incredibly wealthy Silas Tremayne, along with his daughter Demelza, promptly arrive at the Priory, then events unfold with almost indecent speed. Silas has an extremely clever plan to win a place, for himself and his daughter, in that very haut ton which has so far effectively shunned him. What will Richard and Allegra make of this plan?
Doubt, danger, romance and adventure follow.
Silas Tremayne is a thoroughly likeable hero; Allegra, once she thaws out, improves tremendously. This tale of Regency social snobbery and its attendant hypocrisy fairly rattles along and is charmingly done.
Fiona Lowe
THE LAST EMPRESS
Anchee Min, Houghton Mifflin, 2007, $25/ C$33.95, hb, 352pp, 9780618531462 / Bloomsbury, 2007, £10.99, pb, 9780747578505
Set in the twilight days of Imperial China, The Last Empress continues the tale begun in Empress Orchid: the life of Tzu Hsi, best known to Western histories as a manipulating,
murderous “Dragon Lady.” But the real Tzu Hsi was a passionate and intelligent woman trapped in a system that allowed no one – man or woman – freedom. Telling her own story, Tzu Hsi reveals herself as a brilliant politician, balancing warring factions and attempting to hold strong against the foreign powers seeking China as a prize.
The Last Empress tells of the poignant life of a woman swept up in the massive changes of the late 1800s; a dedicated ruler who nevertheless knows herself doomed to fail in her increasingly desperate attempts to keep a dying way of life alive. A fascinating book, granting us a window into a past we can barely imagine, and making a tumultuous time period come to vivid life.
India Edghill
VASHTI
Maureen Peters, Robert Hale, 2006, £18.99, hb, 224pp, 0709080395
When two assistant curators die unexpectedly of gastric influenza, Tansy Clark’s retired policeman father asks her to investigate, and she quickly becomes embroiled in a complex mystery involving the exotic Vashti. Vashti is both the errant wife of a reclusive millionaire and a fabulously valuable statue of a biblical queen.
As Tansy becomes involved in the case her life is put in danger. As shocks follow shocks, it also seems that her late fiancé may not have been all he seemed.
This is the second novel to feature Tansy Clark, and she is shaping up nicely as a liberated Victorian lady investigator. Being genteel, with a moderate independent income and a bold outlook gives her character plenty of chutzpah. She also wrestles with personal demons, making her appealingly flawed. The plot is pretty good too – with plenty of red herrings, thrills and spills to keep the action racing along.
With her past put to rest and a love interest in the offing further mysteries featuring Tansy and company are definitely on the cards – fingers crossed.
Sara Wilson
ANGELICA
Arthur Phillips, Random House, 2007, $24.95, hb, 352pp, 9788140062515 / Duckworth, 2007, £10.99, pb, 320pp, 0715636553
Nothing is as it seems in internationally bestselling author Phillips’ third novel. Set in Victorian England, this tale of the disintegration of a family that could be haunted by a malevolent spirit is told from four points of view: the fragile and potentially hysterical mother, whose obsessive love for her daughter becomes a tormenting, suspicious fear of her husband; a medium who attempts to console and assist the mother and sets off an horrible chain of events; the father, a man of science and reason whose stolid view of the world cannot overcome the tumultuous emotions unleashed in his home; and lastly by the title character herself, the
daughter, over whom her parents wage an eerie and ultimately tragic battle.
The period is brought cunningly to life via the perceptions that each of these characters has about the events unfolding around them and the possibility that a sexually manipulative spirit has infiltrated the household. Despite its outward premise, the novel is less Victorian gothic than a psychological meditation on the ways in which the characters misunderstand and emotionally constrict each other, as well as the falsehoods they construct around their circumstances in order to find meaning. Of all the voices, the most brief yet most interesting is that of the medium—a stoic, capable woman fallen down in the world, whose alleged supernatural gifts are most often peddled for profit, and who sees in the crumbling family an opportunity.
Fans of depictions of the inner Victorian world will enjoy this intricate, literary novel of mystery and deception.
C.W. Gortner
NEVER TOO LATE
Michael Phillips, Bethany House, 2007, $13.99, pb, 318pp, 0764200437
Josepha Black is a young slave, living in Louisiana, who decides to protect herself from the pain of loss by hardening her heart to love. Her determination never to marry leads to such a desire for freedom that she seizes a chance opportunity to “ride the railroad” to the North. But, instead of traveling to freedom, she ends up enslaved by a new master in North Carolina. Years pass, and when the end of the war brings emancipation, Josepha is forced to learn that true freedom only comes when one is willing to unbind the chains around one’s heart.
Unfortunately, the storytelling falters when Josepha makes the near-miraculous discovery that an ex-slave, Mayme, is comfortably established with a white father and his extended family. Readers who have read the rest of the Carolina Cousins series may excuse the lack of explanation for Mayme’s astonishing transformation, but their pardon may be weakened by the heavy doses of italicization and the unwarranted repetition of entire paragraphs of text. Nevertheless, Josepha is an intriguing heroine and, despite the flaws, readers who have enjoyed the series should also appreciate her story.
Nancy J. Attwell
THE RIVER KNOWS
Amanda Quick, Putnam, 2007, $24.95/C$31.00, hb, 368pp, 9780399154171 / Piatkus, 2007, £12.99, hb, 320pp, 0749937890
It’s late in the reign of Queen Victoria when a young businesswoman decides she must make herself disappear. Fortunately, there have been quite a few young women committing suicide by throwing themselves into the Thames lately. It is relatively easy to write a note, then disappear. No one recognizes the missing woman in the plain, drab widow Louisa Bryce, companion to
Y THE TERROR
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Dan Simmons, Little, Brown, 2007, $25.99/C$32.99, hb, 769pp, 0316017442 / Bantam, 2007, £20.00, hb, 784pp, 0593057627
In 1845, two ships of the Royal Navy, the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus, led by Sir John Franklin, attempted to sail through the Arctic Circle looking for the Northwest Passage. This novel is a fictionalized account of the actual expedition. The ships would become trapped in the Arctic ice for several years. The men were faced with rancid food, freezing temperatures, and a creature that stalked the ships looking for human food.
When Franklin dies, Captain Francis Crozier takes command. An alcoholic, he tries to maintain discipline aboard the two ships while the men continue to die from both the predator and scurvy. A mysterious Inuit woman is captured and becomes a hostage. Because her tongue had been removed prior to her capture, she is unable to speak, but forms a relationship with members of the crew. Several men feel she may know the secret of the terror that lurks in the snowscape that has enclosed the two vessels in this land of ice and snow.
Dan Simmons kept me on the edge of my seat with suspense and his chapter-ending cliffhangers. He does a marvelous job describing the land, the misery and the fear felt by the sailors caught in a frozen land. As a reader, you’ll become attached to certain characters and hope they will survive the ordeal.
This is the first historical horror novel I’ve read, and Dan Simmons pulls it off with exceptional flair. If you enjoy reading novels that tend to cause the small hairs on the back of your neck to rise, you will want to read this extraordinarily well-written work.
Lady Emma Ashton. In fact, no one pays any attention to Louisa at all, which is exactly as she intends. This allows her to gather information for the sensational news stories she is writing. That is, until Anthony Stalbridge takes note of her. He can see past her drab appearance to the intelligent, fiery lady underneath. He also sees that every time he investigates Mr. Hastings, the man he believes killed his fiancée, he finds himself tripping over the enticing widow. Soon, these two strong-willed individuals realize it would be expedient to join forces.
Amanda Quick pens another magical romantic suspense where two dominant, intelligent individuals forge a business union that becomes much more. The romantic tension sizzles as the plot thickens. Amanda Quick’s witty dialogue and complex plot that make this book very hard to set down.
Nan Curnutt
THE BLACKEST BIRD
Joel Rose, Norton, 2007, $23.95, hb, 475pp, 0393062317 / Canongate, 2007, £12.99, hb, 480pp, 1841959219
On a July Sunday morning in 1841, Mary Cecilia Rogers left her mother’s house on Nassau Street in New York City and was never seen alive again. A few days later, some boys scavenging on the Weehawken banks of the Hudson River recover what they had first thought to be a bundle of rags but which was later identified as the remains of Mary Rogers. She had been beautiful, much admired by many men who knew her from Anderson’s tobacco shop where she once worked.
Jeff Westerhoff
Edgar Allan Poe, Mary’s former lover, is the prime suspect. He wrote about her murder in The Mystery of Marie Roget. Other murders occur at the time of Mary’s disappearance. One is that of Samuel Adams, a printer, who was hacked to death by John C. Colt, brother of Col. Samuel Colt, the inventor. The other was a triple murder of a pretty young “hot corn girl,” her daughter, and the man who had been her former lover. Her husband, Timothy Coleman of the Forty Thieves gang of Five Corners, is convicted of these murders. His cell is opposite that of John Colt’s. High Constable Jacob Hays is determined to solve the murder of Mary Rogers. In the meantime, however, there is a fire in the prison, during which Coleman escapes and Colt apparently commits suicide. At this point, the story diverges, centering on Poe’s tragic life, and loses momentum.
Joel Rose has written an intriguing story that would be a riveting mystery, except for long passages of exposition that go beyond color and background, and do not advance the story. The Blackest Bird, a work of fiction that does not solve the mystery, will appeal to history fans with its rich descriptions of 19th century New York, sprinkled with real characters and events.
Audrey Braver
ALL WILL BE REVEALED
Robert Anthony Siegel, MacAdam/Cage, 2007, $24.00, hb, 290pp, 9781596922051
Verena Swann mourns her late husband, Captain Theodore Swann, who died during an Arctic expedition, by channeling his spirit and acting as a medium to help others contact their deceased loved ones. Her brother-in-law,
Leopold, was tasked with caring for Verena. He does so by encouraging her psychic work, even when her abilities ebb, and by cultivating her cult of overwrought clients, who leave Verena disillusioned by their gullibility.
Wheelchair-bound Augustus Auerbach is a wealthy, successful man determined to revolutionize the pornography industry through his business, Rive Gauche Photography. He caters to the “John Smiths” of the world, who rely on him to abate their hungers with increasingly innovative exotic photographs.
These two damaged individuals operating in equally seedy trades meet when a skeptical Auerbach attends one of Verena’s séances. Leopold targets Auerbach as a potential mark, but Verena sees past Auerbach’s wealth and infirmity. Neither Auerbach nor Verena seems to recognize the parallel nature of their professions, but both feel a peculiar attraction.
The author’s point-of-view changes are unobtrusive as we eavesdrop on the motivations of Auerbach and Swann, the main characters, as well as of model Jane LaRue, Leopold Swann, and a “John Smith,” who puts a face on Auerbach’s previously interchangeable and anonymous customers. The corrupt culture of 1896 New York exposed by Auerbach’s relationship with the city officials provides historical context.
As disheartening and smutty as this novel could be, it is not. Auerbach and Verena are in their own flawed ways trying to match services with those in need. Their journey to transcend their stagnant and unfulfilling lives is one that should not be missed.
Suzanne J. Sprague
AURORA
Joan Smith, Robert Hale, 2007, £18.99, 223pp, hb, 9780709079231
Aurora’s sister, Lady Raiker, is widowed. Lady Raiker is not happy to be confined to the Dower House, whilst that thieving, no-good upstart, the Dowager Lady Raiker, married – disreputably of course – to Lady Raiker’s father-in-law lives in style at Raiker Hall, her young son installed as the future Baron. Ah! But what about Lord Kenelm Raiker, Lady Raiker’s brother-in-law, who mysteriously disappeared years ago after a row with his father? Shouldn’t Lord Kenelm be the baron? And then there’s the mysterious business of the gypsy fortuneteller who tells Lady Raiker to prepare for the arrival of a handsome dark stranger in need of help. A possible suitor for the hand of the widowed Lady Raiker? What about me, asks Aurora – not unreasonably – she is merely told she’ll have to wait many years before a lover claims her hand. How vexatious! Of course, when said stranger turns up in the woods near Raiker Hall, tall, dark and extremely handsome, precisely as foretold, then Aurora quite naturally finds his seductive charm difficult to resist. She soon begins to wonder about the identity of this stranger. A
delightful Regency romp, one to curl up with and simply enjoy.
Fiona Lowe
ENDURE MY HEART
Joan Smith, Robert Hale, 2006, £17.99, hb, 191pp, 9780709079200
When gently born Mab and Andrew Anderson’s father dies leaving them penniless, brother and sister are forced to sell the family home. Andrew is a scholar, and no practical use whatsoever in an emergency such as homelessness. Mab, fortunately, is a brighter spark and soon finds the means to set up home in the rectory with her brother as Parson. All well and good, but the living is a poor one. Mab turns her hand to teaching. Then lo and behold, one winter’s night the local smuggling gang asks Mab to store their stash of brandy casks. In a cat’s whisker, she’s head of the smuggling gang and pitting her wits against the forces of law and order, the local customs officer being a bit of a booby. This, whilst satisfying, at first proves ultimately unchallenging. Then a handsome young government officer turns up in the village, and things heat up again nicely. The novel is written solely from the point of view of Mab, who provides a delightfully quirky commentary on her adventures, amorous and otherwise. Thus, we never gain great insight into other characters and consequently they, particularly said government officer, remain sketchy. This, nonetheless, is an entertaining romp. Enjoyable reading.
Fiona Lowe
THE SOCIAL OUTCAST
Wendy Soliman, Robert Hale, 2007, £18.99, hb, 224pp, 9780709082392
Surrey, 1820: Eloise Hamilton, the 17-yearold illegitimate daughter of a wealthy banker, knows that she can never aspire to a life of social acceptance – the ton will never acknowledge her in the same way they’ll gladly open doors for her legitimate half-sister Charlotte. Charlotte is about to be presented. Not so Eloise! Her friend from childhood, the rakehell Harry BensonSmythe, is summoned home by his father to be told in no uncertain terms his bachelor days are over. His father quick to point out there’s no point Harry looking in the direction of Eloise – she’s beyond the pale. Harry quickly becomes jealous of the attention Lord Richard Craven lavishes on Eloise. Still at least there is something Harry can do. He enlists Eloise’s help with solving the mysterious disappearances of young local girls; that these unfortunate girls have been ill-used by men is clear. The girls themselves retain no memory of their abduction. Eloise is eager to help. Adventures ensue. The mystery is eventually solved and a resolution to Harry’s dilemma reached. A charming, likeable enough tale, throwing the spotlight on the social prejudices and sometimes appalling treatment meted out to women in an earlier age.
Fiona Lowe
BLESSINGS IN DISGUISE
Jessica Stirling, Hodder & Stoughton, 2007, £6.99, pb, 394pp, 9780340834916
When Nolan McKenna brings his sisters to Glasgow they are penniless. They pretend to be the long-lost relatives of Cissie Cassidy, a middle-aged childless widow, and the lonely woman is only too pleased to take them in. The room they inhabit in the tenements is bare and cold, but within days Nolan is working as a labourer and putting money on the table. Evie, sharp-witted and pretty, finds herself a job as a bar-maid which leaves trusting Clare to fall for the wrong man. Russell Blackstock, land speculator and builder is attracted to Evie, and soon the lives of the wealthy Blackstocks and penniless McKennas are set on a collision course.
This is a fast-moving, well told story of Victorian Glasgow and its many inhabitants. It allows the reader a brief glimpse into the teeming world of slum dwellers and their betters. The rich cast of disparate characters brings this book alive. When the McKennas have sufficient funds to put a fire in the grate and food on the table, the reader rejoices for them.
This novel will be enjoyed by Stirling’s existing fans and will, no doubt, earn her many more.
Fenella Miller
A… MY NAME’S AMELIA
Joanne Sundell, Five Star, 2007, $26.95, hb, 295pp, 9781594145650
At the age of twelve, Amelia Anne Polley, a victim of “brain fever,” lost her hearing. Her parents, unable to care for her, abandoned her at the Colorado Institute for the Education of Mutes in Colorado Springs and haven’t been in touch since. Now it’s 1880, and 18-yearold Amelia proudly works among the hearing world at the local newspaper office. One day Aaron Zachary buys a classified ad requesting a mail-order bride, and the handsome rancher piques Amelia’s interest. After a little creative scheming, Amelia answers the ad herself, and the strangers become husband and wife. Yet communication becomes a major barrier to their relationship, for not only can’t Amelia hear, but Aaron can neither read nor sign.
Sundell excels at creating frontier romances with unique situations and characters (her first, Matchmaker, Matchmaker, featured a female Jewish doctor). The plotting here is occasionally awkward – Aaron doesn’t discover Amelia’s hardship until after they’re married, which is a tad unbelievable – yet the novel is worth reading for its depictions of deaf culture in the 19th century West. Gracie, Amelia’s five-yearold ward from the Institute, is a particularly adorable character. A sweet romance about how the power of love can help two people overcome all other communication problems.
Sarah Johnson
Y LUNCHEON OF THE BOATING PARTY
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Susan Vreeland, Viking, 2007, $25.95, hb, 448pp, 97806700385
Paris, 1880. Pierre-Auguste Renoir is thirty-nine, his enchantment with the revolutionary Impressionist style is fading, and the movement threatens to splinter. Renoir paints society women for money, but longs to produce something monumental, a tableau of la vie moderne which cannot be ignored by critics and will cement his career. He settles on the theme of a boating party luncheon, set on the terrace of the Maison Fournaise, a hotel/restaurant on the banks of the Seine.
Vreeland, known for her other novels based on art history, has crafted another masterwork. Her expressive, enviable prose vibrantly imbues both Renoir and his models with life. These are all captivating people, and as Vreeland follows each against the background of Renoir’s art, she uses words to paint la vie moderne through their eyes. Paris and the banks of the Seine come alive, as do the models, from the feisty actress Angele to the tragically selfless widow Alphonsine. Renoir is obsessed with his art and is, in modern parlance, a player, for which his excuse is that he must love a woman in order to paint her. This loses him sympathy points, but like all the historical figures Vreeland has characterized here, he is refreshingly human and strikingly real.
Vreeland’s other masterstroke is her absorbing portrayal of the progression by which great art comes into being. Like Renoir’s Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, Luncheon of the Boating Party may look like a spontaneous moment frozen in time, but this effect is the result of months of consideration, posed models, and homage to classical paintings such as the Marriage Feast at Cana. From her vivid description of colors to the play of light to the minutest of brush strokes, Vreeland shows the inspiration and technical knowledge behind the process of painting—all without devolving into a dry art history lesson.
This novel is a beautiful, lyrical, fascinating portrait of painting, personalities, and a particular moment in the river of time. Very highly recommended.
Bethany Latham
FAR HORIZONS
Katharine Swartz, Robert Hale, 2007, £18.99, hb, 224pp, 9780709082583
Early 1800s: the tale of Harriet Crombie and Allan MacDougall begins as Allan declares his love for Harriet on the eve of departing for Nova Scotia. Sadly Harriet must remain on the Isle of Mull. The lovers face a long spell apart whilst Allan establishes himself in the New World. Harriet and Allan face doubt, difficulty and much pain in the time ahead. Margaret and Robert MacDougall, Allan’s sister and brother, remain on Mull living with Harriet at Achlic Farm. With Margaret desperate to learn, her wishes are soon in jeopardy. Meanwhile in the New World, Allan MacDougall finds himself increasingly torn between duty to his family, especially his father, and the understandable desire to be his own man. On Mull, Harriet faces up to the fear of desperate poverty, whilst struggling to keep her family together. At times Katherine Swartz’s writing aches with profound bittersweetness, though personally I found Margaret’s tale a distracting annoyance and the canvas of this novel sometimes so broad that not enough attention is given to the two, more interesting, main characters. A pity, for this separation of lovers and families must have been played out many times during the Highland Clearances. An enjoyable read.
Fiona Lowe
KEPT: A Victorian Mystery
D. J. Taylor, Morrow, 2007, $24.95/C$31.50, hb, 480pp, 9780061146084 / Vintage, 2007, £7.99, pb, 416pp, 9780099488743
A young landowner is thrown from his horse and killed. His widow, already unbalanced from the loss of their child, is whisked out of society and into the care of a guardian with a passion for collecting. A debt collector entangles a socially prominent lawyer as well as a destitute grocer in his schemes, while a housemaid at the guardian’s home in the country follows the former footman to London. Although seemingly unrelated, these characters all converge at the end, and if you think this sounds Dickensian, Taylor acknowledges the influence of Dickens and other Victorian authors in his end notes.
Kept is a densely plotted book that at times requires patience as when chapters begin with new sets of characters, plunging into their stories with little background. Keeping up with the debt collector’s machinations required concentration, but such is the case in any great 19th century novel. Rather than be a pastiche of those books, Kept pays homage to them. Taylor is a worthy successor to those he honors, and although some plot strands are resolved less than satisfactorily, this remains a book to settle in with and savor.
Ellen Keith
$29.95, hb, 347pp, 9780813124230
The 19th century media mislabeled M. Jerome Clarke female for their own purposes as well as because of his youth, clean-shaven face, and long hair. Richard Taylor imagines the real Confederate soldier-turned-guerrilla fighter from the time he follows an older cousin into the Civil War until he was hanged as a renegade at the war’s end, while he was still shy of his 20th birthday.
Enduring deprivation, capture, and imprisonment, “Jarom” and his older cousin make a daring escape from Camp Morton. But his cousin is soon seriously wounded in an atrocity that Jarom is on fire to avenge. He joins the Tenth Kentucky Calvary, part of General John Hunt Morgan’s infamous brigade. When Morgan goes down, his raiders scatter, some choosing a renegade route that wreaks havoc on innocents and Union sympathizers alike. Although a Unionist, editor George Prentice makes Jarom Clarke into the she-devil “Sue Mundy” to discredit the draconian rule of military governor General Stephen Burbridge.
Sue Mundy chronicles a young man’s descent from fighting under a flag to fighting for selfgain and violent whim, until he becomes the hunter hunted, captured, and hanged.
Jarom Clarke’s decent into terrorism is well researched and told, although the character of this young man drawn by “casual momentum” into a life of violence remained elusive for this reader. Yes, he’s an orphan who has a number of father figures shot out from his sphere of influence, but Jarom’s rage at his cousin’s fate abates, and that very cousin’s advice to change course is not heeded. Another intriguing question – how a man turned female by the press of his day felt about the transformation – is not explored any more than why Jarom Clarke chose to remain peach-faced and long-locked.
Eileen Charbonneau
THE LIMEHOUSE TEXT
Will Thomas, Robert Hale, 2006, £17.99, hb, 224pp, 0709082320 / Touchstone, 2006, $14.00/ C$19.00, pb, 338pp, 0743273354
Thomas Llewelyn works for the Victorian enquiry agent Cyrus Baker, a mysterious man versed in the Oriental arts, with links to London’s Chinatown district of Limehouse. In the course of their work, they come into ownership of a pawn ticket and then a book stolen from a Chinese monastery, outlining a secret and lethal form of martial arts.
A killer is on the loose, intent on tracking down the book and prepared to eliminate anyone who gets in his way. To complicate matters further, a local gangster and a government official become embroiled in the mystery and the lives of both Llewelyn and Baker are put at risk.
SUE MUNDY
Richard Taylor, Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2006,
The Limehouse Text is an entertaining murder mystery and provides plenty of twists and turns before the final denouement. Victorian London’s Limehouse makes for an unusual and colourful
setting, whilst the array of exotic characters adds extra vibrancy to the story.
Sara Wilson
THE TRUTH ABOUT LOU: A (Necessary) Fiction
Angela von der Lippe, Counterpoint, 2006, $24.95/C$30.00, hb, 283pp, 1582433585
In late 19th-century Germany, the passionate Louise “Lou” Salomé, writer, seeker, and friend to Nietzsche, Freud and Prague poet Rilke sought a utopian world of philosophy and intellectual freedom for all. Despite a traumatic preteen “crush” on her Confirmation minister, Lou was drawn toward male company, seeking beyond the physical, despite living with friend Paul Ree and bruising her reputation. Her reverence for great philosophers did not prevent her from refusing two offers of (temporary) marriage from Nietzsche himself. Convention and security won out eventually when she agreed to marry Fred Andréas but only with the proviso of an unconsummated arrangement. Her heart (and body) would not surrender until Rainer Maria Rilke’s youthful ebullience and poetic words took hold in her psyche.
Lou’s story is a storm of passionate ideas and opera-sized emotions in a time when intellectual women were viewed with scorn. “Lou” herself narrates this novel, but there are “interludes” from modern (fictional) writer, Anna Kane, investigating the provenance of a gift from her dying grandmother: a first edition of Rilke’s The Book of Hours, inscribed “To Lou...from your old Rainer.” Lou’s story overpowers the modern thread until the very end, where it satisfies at last. This is an imaginative and ambitious work, although possibly overwhelming for readers hearing of Lou for the first time.
Tess Allegra
IN PURSUIT OF GLORY
William H. White, Tiller, 2006, $29.95, hb, 352pp, 1888671165
In 1807, the fledging American merchant marine and naval ships continued to be harassed by the British Royal Navy in search of British deserters or sailors of British ancestry. Young Oliver Baldwin served as midshipman under Captain Stephen Decatur, the American hero of the Barbary Coast wars fought several years earlier. This book is second in the series of tales that follows the adventures of Baldwin, from the time he joined the American navy as a midshipman when he was twelve years old through the War of 1812.
The story begins with the true account of the court-martial of Commodore James Barron, who, aboard the USF Chesapeake, surrendered his ship to the HMS Leopard of the Royal Navy without much of a fight. After the trial, Baldwin is caught up in the fight to stop the impressment of American sailors and enforce the U.S. embargoes in retaliation for the British navy’s actions, which leads to the early days of the war
between Britain and the United States in 1812.
This is a well-written novel by Mr. White, who uses actual and fictional characters to follow the American struggle for the right to sail the ocean unimpeded against Britain and its larger naval force. A lifelong sailor, the author knows his history and the language of the men who sailed these glorious ships in the early 19th century. I recommend this novel to those who enjoy a good sailing yarn.
Jeff Westerhoff
THE GENTLE WIND’S CARESS
Anne Whitfield, Robert Hale, 2007, 18.99, hb, 224 pp, 9780709082286
Orphaned Isabelle will do anything to escape her Halifax, Yorkshire workhouse, where she is harassed by Neville, the matron’s son. She enters a marriage of convenience with Farrell, a moorland farmer, and she and her little brother move to his shambles of a farm near Heptonstall. The marriage quickly sours when Isabelle discovers Farrell resorts to crime to pay the rent. Soon she falls for Ethan Harrington, the handsome landlord, who is also trapped in an unhappy marriage. Meanwhile Farrell abandons her, Neville starts stalking her, and much high drama ensues, culminating in a surprisingly bittersweet ending.
Romance fans will find much to enjoy. Isabelle, though appealing, is not quite convincing as a woman of her place and time, however. It seems unbelievable that, past the age of eighteen, she was not yet employed. As a penniless orphan, she would have worked in the mills from a very young age rather than wait till her late teens to marry a failed farmer and then bake pies for pin money. Aside from the resident lecher, the workhouse itself doesn’t seem bleak enough to justify her unlikely marriage. Perhaps the realities of the industrial North don’t make for very romantic fiction.
Mary Sharratt
LAST STAND AT MAJUBA HILL
John Wilcox, Headline, 2007, £19.99/$24.95, hb, 308pp, 9780755327188
Inside John Wilcox is there a factual historian struggling to get out?
In their fourth outing, Simon Fonthill and 352 Jenkins take part in the brief and inglorious First Boer War, which began with a Boer foray into Natal and ended two months later in Boer victory at Majuba Hill, as the British made the cardinal military error of underestimating their enemy.
Mr Wilcox’s historical grasp is excellent, his fiction laboured. To produce a novel of reasonable length he resorts to padding; a 58page digression to Egypt is only the worst example. Then our heroes make a diplomatic mission to the Orange Free State, where Fonthill falls foul of a mysterious Prussian and meets the inevitable beautiful and enigmatic woman. Here factual errors creep in. The
NSTAFF PUBLICATIONS:
Sally Zigmond’s Chasing Angels
When Sally Zigmond’s husband took up mountaineering, she began immersing herself in the history of the pastime. While scanning the shelves in her local library, she came upon the English translation of Henriette d’Angeville’s My Ascent of Mont Blanc, an account written by the first woman to reach the summit of Western Europe’s highest mountain of her own accord. That date was September 4th, 1838, a time when mountaineering for men was still in its infancy. Henriette was forty-four years old. This remarkable yet little-known woman inspired Sally to write her novella Chasing Angels (Biscuit Publishing, £7.99, 1-903914-29-9).
Through a series of vignettes, Sally describes how – and why – the daughter of one of France’s great aristocratic houses transformed herself into a mountaineer. “I was immediately captivated by her,” Sally says. Although many books about pioneering male mountaineers existed, she found that Henriette was mentioned only in passing, usually unfavourably. “She was classed as an eccentric spinster with an ego as big as the mountain she climbed. I was incensed on her behalf and knew I would have to write about her one day.”
Sally relates episodes from Henriette’s life story in lyrical fashion, imagining how Henriette affected many of the people whose lives she touched. These characters, all fascinating and unique, include her thoughtful father, the Count d’Angeville, broken by years in prison; her overbearing, resentful mother; a priest at Chamonix who observes her preparations for the climb; and her protégée, Jeannette, whose jealousy strains their relationship. Readers also experience Henriette’s gruelling expedition up Mont Blanc through her own eyes. An accomplished short story writer, Sally won the International Short Story Prize organised by Biscuit Publishing in 2005. Along with a generous cheque, she received the chance to write a novella with publication guaranteed. However, as she soon discovered, her characters began to take over, and before long, “her” Henriette was straining against the word count. “She still tugs at my sleeve,” Sally admits. “One day, I will write that full-length novel.”
19th Century-20th Century
German representative in Bloemfontein was a minister, not an ambassador, his headquarters not an embassy but a legation. Up to 1914 German officers wore, not field grey, but the famed Prussian blue. I was relieved when we got to Majuba and the author could give effect to his undoubted skill in battle description and depiction of terrain.
Ann Lyon
NOBODY’S CHILD
Valerie Wood, Bantam, 2006, £17.99, hb, 365pp, 0593055834
Valerie Wood is very good at what she does, with a specific style which permeates all her books.
Nobody’s Child is again set in Yorkshire, Ms Wood’s home county. Holderness is in the East Riding where in the 19th century there was a continuing battle with the sea. Land was being reclaimed for farming, the manor houses were moated in defiance of the impertinent waves which wanted to take back what they had lost.
Laura Page comes to the remote village of Welwick attempting to discover the mystery surrounding her mother’s past. Now an adult, she has been recalling events from her childhood which identify how little she knows; and her grandmother is only a name, Mary-Ellen.
The author meticulously describes the downtrodden women of the newly industrialised nation, mostly misused by their men folk, living
Y HOUSE OF MEETINGS
in poverty, dressed in inadequate clothing for the harsh northern winters and burdened by too many children. Slavery came in many forms and not all victims lived in constant sunshine.
This is a story of passion, adversity, heartbreak and enduring love. The Yorkshire dialect is well written; there is a waft of the history book when the town of Hedon is being described, but otherwise this novel touches the reader in the right places.
Gwen Sly
N20th CENTURY
STALKING IVORY
Suzanne Arruda, New American Library, 2007, $23.95/C$30, hb, 340pp, 9780451220264
American Jade del Cameron returns in her second mystery, following Mark of the Lion In her first adventure, Jade, who had served as an ambulance driver in the Great War, had gone to Nairobi to find the half-brother of her dead love. Jade has stayed on in Africa, working as a writer and photographer for The Traveler Accompanied by her good friends Beverly and Avery Dunbury, she’s on assignment, photographing elephants. Discovering a nest of elephants slaughtered and a soldier in the King’s African Rifles murdered, she suspects poachers and indeed finds suspects close to home in a safari led by her nemesis, Harry Hascombe.
As with Jade’s first outing, the charm of the
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Martin Amis, Knopf, 2007, $23.00, hb, 242pp, 9781400044559 / Jonathan Cape, 2006, £15.99, hb, 208pp, 0224076094
Written as a confession, House of Meetings is the story of two brothers—the unnamed narrator and Lev—and the beautiful, free-spirited woman they both love, Zoya. But this, in Amis’s own words, is not an equilateral triangle. The narrator is a handsome World War II veteran, “ruthless, shameless, and faithless,” who raped his way through East Germany. His younger brother, Lev, is a stuttering, pacifist, “asymmetrical little chap.” When the two meet in a Siberian prison camp after the war, however, Lev announces that he has married Zoya. The narrator is stunned. How can Zoya love such a pitiful man? At the prison camp, their relationship becomes strained as Lev recoils from the violence that for his brother is “currency, like tobacco, like bread.” Then, Zoya comes to visit Lev, and they spend a night together at the House of Meetings. What becomes clear that night will haunt Zoya and Lev the rest of their days. Lev explains it in a letter that his brother will carry unread for the next twenty-two years.
Though slim, House of Meetings reaches out beyond the love story, taking in its setting, Russia, in all its tragic grandeur. The novel feels immense in scope and gravity. With allusions to Conrad and Dostoevsky and a somber, bitter voice, perfect in tone, Amis threads back and forth from past to present, grabbing the reader from start to heartrending finish. The prose is unflinching and raw. “Here be monsters,” warns the narrator broodingly when describing the Arctic landscape, the brutality of life in the gulag, his own amorality, or the horrors endured by the schoolchildren at Beslan when Chechen terrorists take over. The narrator can’t forgive himself, or Russia. In House of Meetings Martin Amis presents us with an unforgettable portrait of a troubled nation and of the lives of two men crushed under its weight. Indispensable reading. Adelaida Lower
book lies in its characters rather than the mystery itself. When the villain is finally revealed (and his identity telegraphed itself well before the denouement), I had lost track of who had done what to whom. Still, Arruda creates a credible (if a little too perfect) heroine in Jade and gives her several good foils in her friends, not the least of whom is Jelani, a Kikuyu boy who deals with scrapes by thinking “what would Tarzan do?” And, the plight of the elephants is certainly moving, prefiguring a concern that remains to this day. What will Jade do in her third adventure? I look forward to finding out.
Ellen Keith
SKYLARK FARM
Antonia Arslan (trans. Geoffrey Brock), Knopf, 2007, $23.95, hb, 275pp, 9781400044351
Skylark Farm is the Arslanian family’s country retreat. The life of this prosperous Armenian family is touchingly centered on the brothers, sisters, and children, all of whom live together in a loving, caring environment. We see the family in Anatolia preparing for a visit from Yerwant, the oldest brother who, as a teenager, left home to study medicine. He has become a well-respected, prosperous doctor in his adopted country of Italy. His brother, Sempad, became a pharmacist and returned home. Much of the story revolves around the happy preparations and joyous anticipation for a long overdue reunion with Yerwant and his family. This visit does not come about, unfortunately, because Italy has joined in the war and travel into the Ottoman Empire is no longer possible. This is a beautiful account of Armenian life cut short by the horrible slaughter of most of the men and boys by the Turks in 1915, and the enforced march of the remaining elderly, women and children across the Syrian desert. These people suffered starvation, robbery, constant violent attacks, rape, and mindless slaughter; very few survived.
Despite the horror that ends the story, Dr. Arslan has written a poetically beautiful account of her family’s travail. Their deep affection, generosity, the enduring tragedy and the miracle of survival by a few are uplifting. Translated too literally, there are some awkward sentences as well as some abrupt switching points of view, but they do not detract from the suspense and drama of the narrative.
Audrey Braver
HARPSONG
Rilla Askew, Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2007, $24.95, hb, 235pp, 9780806138237
Novelist and short-story writer Rilla Askew converts a wandering troubadour-thief into an American icon in Harpsong, a bittersweet tale set during the Great Depression. Handsome half-breed Harlan Singer took to wandering early in life. Blessed with a musical ear, he uses his harmonica to charm his way into the good graces of those willing to give him a meal, a place to stay, and a little work. Coming
upon an Oklahoma farm one day, he falls for a fourteen-year-old “possum-haired” girl, Sharon Thompson, who he steals away to marry. But the world is changing; bankers are foreclosing on farms, drought is destroying the land; factories and mines are shutting down. The ranks of the hobos riding the rails swells, and “bulls” are hired to beat them away. The couple struggles to survive in a world gone hungry and violent. Harlan’s music falters along with his hope. When Sharon discovers she’s pregnant, she insists they head back to her home, only to discover that “home,” as she knew it, no longer exists. She and Harlan must renegotiate what is sinful and what is survival, and accept the terrible consequences of their actions.
Steinbeck had his Joads—the Oklahoma dustbowl farmers who moved to California in search of a better life. In Harpsong, Rilla Askew has written the other side of the tale, showing with heartbreaking tenderness the fate of the poor souls left behind.
Lisa Ann Verge
A WOMAN’S PLACE
Lynn Austin, Bethany House, 2006, $13.99, pb, 446pp, 0764228900
An unlikely quartet of women finds their lives irrevocably altered when they take Rosie the Riveter jobs at a local factory in a small Michigan town, in support of the World War II effort. A mouthy city girl desperate to flee her in-laws’ rules, a farm girl determined to go to college, a spinster schoolteacher trying to find hope in a world conflicted with hatred, and a bored housewife longing to reconnect with an emotionally distant husband become fast friends as their lives, and dreams, change forever.
In a heartwarming, yet wrenching story, Austin describes life in a factory, the difficulties facing women workers, and the transformations that took place during the war. Readers will be drawn immediately into this eloquent story that explores each woman’s beliefs, struggles, and dearest wishes. The pages turn quickly as each character finds out what it means to be a woman in the early 1940s, how to deal with a world at war, and how to survive with their men far away. Sure to provoke a tear or two, this is a beautiful, touching read.
Rebecca Roberts
BAND OF EAGLES
Frank Barnard, Headline Review, 2007, £11.99, pb, 374pp, 9780755325573
Summer 1941. Malta is held by the British and is strategic for supplies and defence in the continuing war effort. Englishman Kit Curtis and American Ossie Wolf are both flight commanders and seemingly complete opposites, the one fair-minded and chivalrous, the other implacably ruthless, but they are both striving to prevent Malta falling into enemy hands. The pilots dream of Spitfires but manage with Hurricanes that their ground crews keep going with a cheerful philosophy of make do and
mend, salvaging what they can from old planes to keep the pilots in the air.
This is Barnard’s second novel, and it gives a vivid picture of the RAF’s struggle to defend Malta. There’s enough technical detail to give an authentic feel to the art of flying ageing Hurricanes, but it never gets in the way of the story. Barnard’s short, snappy style gives pace to the narrative and excellent scene-setting takes the reader into the hot and uncomfortable world of the besieged island, while flashbacks to give the reader some insight into the characters’ former lives. A fascinating story told with verve and affection.
Melinda Hammond
THE WHITE MARRIAGE
Charlotte Bingham, Bantam, 2007, £12.99, hb, 366pp, 9780593055953
Sunny Chantry is on the verge of adulthood when she crosses paths with the handsome and glamorous socialite, Gray Wyndham. His proposal of marriage, a white marriage at that, takes her by surprise but, for various reasons, she agrees to a twelve-month engagement. Little does she know that he is using her as a means to an end.
Meanwhile, her childhood friend Arietta goes to London to work and once there discovers Gray’s secret. Sunny soon decides to join Arietta in London and complicates everything by falling in with a young musician named Hart in spite of her prior engagement.
The White Marriage is a coming of age story set against the backdrop of the postwar years when society was undergoing great changes and the era of the ‘teenager’ was about to begin. Sunny is a terribly naïve heroine and almost unbearably jolly and bouncy. This could so easily cross the line into parody, but Charlotte Bingham cleverly avoids this sin by keeping her character grounded and funny in equal measures.
A light-hearted read that pulls no great punches but is none the worse for it.
Sara Wilson
THE UNNATURAL HISTORY OF CYPRESS PARISH
Elise Blackwell, Unbridled, 2007, $23.95, hb, 240pp, 9781932961317
Hurricane Katrina’s bearing down on New Orleans and the apartment of 90-year-old Louis Proby. The authorities are saying it’s going to be a massive storm, but Louis can’t help remembering an earlier disaster – the Great Flood of 1927 – and its impact on the course of his life. Set in a fictional Louisiana parish, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish takes readers on a journey of a young man’s growing awareness of his own desires and an even stronger awareness of how a moment’s decision can alter one’s life. As floodwaters are bearing down on Cypress Parish, Proby finds himself pulled between the beautiful Nanette, his family
and father, and powerful men intent on changing things.
The story is written in such a lush, lyrical style hanging heavy with detail such that readers can almost feel the humidity in the air. As Proby narrates the story and lets readers in on the machinations he witnesses, readers can’t help ruminating on events in the lead-up and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They’re also left to ponder those events and wonder if those affected will write similar stories. The talent in this book rests on the fact that it pulls readers into a wonderfully told story while at the same time inspires them to look hard at what has happened to those still living with the aftermath of Katrina.
Overall, Blackwell has produced a wistful, thoughtful book. For lovers of Southern fiction, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish is definitely recommended. It’s also recommended for most everyone else who appreciates a welldone story.
Dana Cohlmeyer
THE COMMUNIST’S DAUGHTER
Dennis Bock, Knopf, 2007, $24.00, hb, 287pp, 14000044626
Canadian writer Bock’s first novel, The Ash Garden, stunned the literary world, and his second only enhances his reputation. Here he writes about Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor who earned the status of hero or villain, depending on one’s personal politics, through his work in the Spanish and Chinese civil wars. Bethune, like his New Zealand counterpart, Rewi Alley, is revered in China today, yet little known in his own country. Bock has effectively changed that.
The Communist’s Daughter, and it is a work of fiction (there is no proof Bethune had a daughter), shows Bethune in his last days, struggling to evaluate his life while acting as Chief Medical Officer to Mao’s Red Army. Working appalling hours, Bethune uses any scrap of time to write to the daughter in Spain he’s only just learned exists. In short episodes, he tells of his life with her mother, Kajsa, in Spain; his family; his politics; and China.
Bock’s Bethune is not a cocky bravado hero. He is full of doubts and regrets, wishing he could have done things differently, and deeply afraid that he has become his father all over again. The book is a wonderful insight into the mind of a man who says of himself that he has “always had purpose. What I never had was peace.” His poor relationship with his father left Bethune filled with anger. Anger, disappointment and the firm belief in a God-given-purpose to his life drive him. His love for Kajsa, and his desperate words to his daughter, makes us wish that Bethune had been able to make other choices.
This novel is poignant and powerful, leaving the reader with a real sense of the man and the horror of war.
Patrika Salmon
FANDANGO’S GOLD
Captain Robert Louis Boudreau, Tiller, 2006, $16.95, 256pp, pb, 188867119X
Jack Carlton isn’t really looking for adventure, but as captain of the Caribbean charter schooner Fandango, an adventure of some description can only be a matter of time. Jack’s chance find of a few gold coins during a dive seems jinxed from the moment he shows one of them off at an Antiguan bar. Their significance is deliberately withheld from him. Suddenly he has a new charter booking, money no object.
Though set primarily in 1967, the main events of Fandango’s Gold are put into motion by the wreck of a Spanish ship in 1653. Loaded with gold, silver and emeralds plundered from Cartagena, Eduardo Henderson and his colleagues intend to acquire San Idelfonso’s treasure by any means.
The author’s own experience with boats, diving and fishing in the Caribbean are invaluable in bringing that locale to life. For me – knowing nothing of boats – it was great to finish the book and feel that I’d learned a little something. His characters are engaging, mostly, and the conflict between the crew and the treasure seekers seems realistic. Boudreau’s tale of ill-gotten Spanish treasure, romance and the glimpses into the past makes for a fast-paced, entertaining adventure.
Janette King
THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS
John Boyne, Black Swan, 2007, £6.99, pb, 214pp, 9780552773805 / Pub. in the US as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, David Fickling, 2006, $15.95, hb, 224pp, 0385751060
The story opens in Berlin during World War II and is told through the eyes of nine-year-old Bruno who lives with his parents and older sister. His father is something important in the government and one day, on returning home from school, he is told by his mother that, due to his father’s work, they must all leave Berlin and move to a place called Out-With. The new house overlooks an area populated by hundreds of people separated from Bruno’s house by a wire fence.
One day Bruno wanders away from home and meets a boy who always wears blue striped pyjamas, and they become firm friends.
What follows is simply but powerfully told. John Boyne’s style of subtle understatements is enough to describe the horrors of war without having to resort to any descriptions of actual violence at all, but it is all there, and the final chapters leave you reeling. It is a book that, once read, will never be forgotten. Personally speaking, I couldn’t put it down.
determined to avenge his parents’ murder and find his abducted twin sister, pursues Viktor Polyak, the Bolshevik agent who destroyed his family four years ago. Finding himself in Paris, Alexander miraculously reunites with his sister, Katerina, and together they flee for Shanghai aboard the China Star. Polyak ruthlessly chases them across three continents, sending vicious thugs after the siblings in numerous attempts on their lives. Despite all this, Alexander still finds time for a passionate affair with the striking wife of an English tea planter, while Katerina reacquaints herself with upper-class pursuits.
Filled with stereotypical and ridiculously evil men, unnecessary violence and innumerable sex scenes, China Star is most definitely a potent book. While the story may lack believability, the vivid descriptions of the various exotic port cities, the interesting history lessons, and the colorful characters make for an intriguing read. However, despite its action packed plot, the raunchiness leaves a bitter taste, and much to be desired.
Rebecca
Roberts
THE LOVERS’ ROOM
Steven Carroll, Mira, 2007, £6.99, pb, 296pp, 9780778301462
It is autumn 1945 and Allen “The Spin” Bowler, an Australian in the British Army, is sent as an interpreter to work with the American occupying forces in Tokyo. Shy, retiring and bookish, Allen is attracted to Momoko, a young Japanese woman who is also working as an interpreter for the allied forces. They soon begin an intense love affair and Bowler finds himself shedding his bookish outlook as his love deepens. However, as time flows by Bowler begins to doubt Momoko’s love and commitment, and their love affair ends brutally in a single act of mindless violence. They meet again in London many years later, and Momoko forces Allen Bowler to face the consequences of his actions. Switching between 1973 and 1945, the book is well written and avoids the obvious cliché of a “Pinkerton” style relationship. Momoko is a strong, independent woman whose loyalty to Yoshi, a former Japanese soldier, is the spark which ignites the flame that destroys their love, while the flowering of Bowler’s feelings lead to his growing self- development, but not necessarily emotional maturity. Fans of historical romantic fiction will enjoy this tale.
Mike Ashworth
THE SONG BEFORE IT IS SUNG
CHINA STAR
Marilyn Sherlock
Bartle Bull, Carroll & Graf, 2006, $28.00, hb, 442pp, 0786716770
It is 1922 in this sequel to Shanghai Station, and Russian Count Alexander Karlov,
Justin Cartwright, Bloomsbury, 2007, £16.99, hb, 274pp, 9780747583417 / To be pub. in July by Bloomsbury USA, $24.95, hb, 288pp, 97815969126879
The steady flow of literary interest with Nazism and its impact upon history shows no sign of abating. This is, perhaps, not so surprising when there is still so much to understand about this dreadful period of depravity that seized an
otherwise highly developed society.
This intelligent novel concerns the essential impossibility of both absolute historical knowledge and of the ability to completely understand another human being. The book is set both in 1930-40s Europe and in present-day London. Conrad Senior, a rather disorganised writer in his mid-thirties, has been given papers and documents by his All Souls College professor, Elya Mendel (based on the philosopher Isaiah Berlin), relating to Mendel’s friendship and subsequent estrangement with Count Axel von Gottberg (Adam von Trott).Gottberg, an aristocratic member of the resistance to Hitler, was executed after the failure of the July 1944 assassination plot. Berlin represents the English attitude of empiricism and pragmatism while Gottberg is in thrall to the idea of a German destiny and ultimate guiding spirit and, at first, sees the Nazis as just a bad lapse in taste but, later, a pernicious threat to its very existence.
Conrad, engaged in the pursuit of truth and the lives of these two men, also suffers the disintegration of his marriage to the clinically efficient Francine, a doctor who is frustrated at Conrad’s vague disorganisation and disinclination to follow a successful career. Eventually, Conrad comes to the understanding of the emotionally complicated motivations and relationships of the two men and their friends and lovers in the singular milieu of Nazi Europe. It is a moving and profound tale, thoughtprovoking and complex in its message.
Doug Kemp
THE MIDWIFE OF ST. PETERSBURG
Linda Lee Chaikin, WaterBrook, 2007, $13.99, pb, 352pp, 9781400070831
This story takes place amidst the turmoil of 1914 Czarist Russia. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Serbia has recently been assassinated, and war is imminent. Karena Peshkov is the daughter of a Jewish midwife and a Russian Orthodox Christian wheat farmer near Kiev. Karena isn’t sure if she’s a Jew or a Russian Orthodox Christian. She has worked alongside her mother and desperately wants to attend the medical school in St. Petersburg, but due to a quota for Jewish applicants, has been turned down twice. Karena has also been helping her uncle, a professor, who is writing a book on the Jewish Messianic texts.
While on a visit to wealthy relatives in St. Petersburg, she meets and is attracted to the dashing Cossac commander Colonel Aleksandr Kronstadt, who is all but engaged to her cousin Tatiana. Kronstadt has been assigned to the Okhrana, the Russian secret police. When Karena’s brother’s Bolshevik activities plunge the family into danger, Kronstadt comes to their aid.
While I enjoyed the setting of this story, there were too many plot lines that weren’t fully developed. Karena’s conversion to Christianity is especially unconvincing.
Jane Kessler
FOR FREEDOM
Joy Chambers, Headline, 2006, £19.99, hb, 582pp, 0755309383
It is 1941 in Hong Kong, and the Japanese are gearing up for invasion. Four people, whose lives are intertwined, are caught up in events which will change each of them forever. Lexi Robinson, an English doctor, is married to John Drayton Whitby, but loves Hank Trapperton. Kathleen Leigh is Lexi’s childhood friend, but is hiding a secret love for her husband.
Lexi and Kathleen board a ship to take them to safety but the enemy has other ideas and their survival is in doubt. Meanwhile Hank and John become friends in spite of their mutual feelings for Lexi. As the action crosses the whole of South East Asia so the four characters come to realise their happiness lies in telling the truth.
For Freedom is a great rollercoaster of a novel, with plenty of fierce fighting, thrilling exploits and tender romance. It has a very filmic feel – hardly surprising since Joy Chambers is also a well known Australian actress – and would make a wonderful mini-series.
The main characters are not simply cardboard cut-out war heroes, but well-rounded and full of flaws and complexities. The exotic backdrop is well depicted – you can almost feel the humidity of the jungle at times. It is a lengthy read, but one that definitely repays the effort.
Sara Wilson
A WHISPER OF LIFE
Gloria Cook, Severn House, 2007, £18.99/$27.95, hb, 220pp, 9780727864512
Hennaford, a Cornish village, is the setting for the sixth book in the Harvey series. It is 1948 and Jonny Harvey relegated to training pilots after a flying accident is visiting his hardworking farming relations. He is disillusioned with his life and even his success with women no longer holds any charm. His only remaining interest in life is photography. Jonny’s stay coincides with the arrival of Abbie Rothwell, a young artist, and Tess Viant. Tess, who is nearly sixteen and crippled by polio, has a powerful and unforeseen impact on the lives of all those that she comes into contact with, especially Jonny. It can often be difficult to become absorbed in a story that is part of a series, but Gloria Cook has overcome this pitfall with vivid characters. Tess Viant with her auburn hair and fairy-tale background and her brothers Sidney and Tom are particularly engaging. From a historical point of view details such as Tess’s longing to buy a wrist watch on her visit to Truro add an authentic late forties atmosphere to the novel. This will be a popular addition to the reading list of lovers of the Harvey family and of novels set in Cornwall.
The one drawback from the point of view of the first-time reader of the series is the cover design. The clothes worn by the characters in the illustration are too contemporary and unlike those worn during that period.
Myfanwy Cook
BROTHER FISH
Bryce Courtenay, Michael Joseph, 2007, £20.00, hb, 842pp, 9780718151423
This is the story of three people thrown together through circumstances beyond their control and the friendships that develop through the years of adversity.
Jack McKenzie is from a small island in the Bass Strait and he meets Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan when, as a five-year-old she sees in him a promising scholar. However, Jack is destined to become a fisherman like his father before him until the Korean War intervenes. In a prisoner of war camp Jack meets Jimmy Oldcorn, an African American Private soldier who in his youth was a gang leader in New York, and a lifelong friendship is forged.
Inspired by real events and characters, this is an Australian saga that spans eighty years and covers four continents. All three main characters, from vastly different backgrounds, have but one thing in common, a tough start in life. Through these characters we see an indepth portrayal of racism, bigotry, love and the power of true friendship. Courtenay’s historical research is impressive, and there are back of the book detailed acknowledgements, list of sources and maps. It is a memorable work.
Ann Oughton
FORESTS OF THE NIGHT: A Johnny Hawke Novel
David Stuart Davies, St. Martin’s Press, 2007, $23.95, hb, 224pp, 9780312360009
This first book in a new series set in World War II-era London features ex-cop Johnny Hawke, who has just started a new career as a private investigator after a misfiring gun costs him an eye and a career in the army. As 1940 draws to a close, Johnny must solve the murder of a missing young woman, who has been leading two very different lives. He also becomes involved in the plight of a mysterious runaway boy, who witnessed something terrible.
Wartime London makes a satisfactory backdrop to this crime novel, adding intrigue to the overall mystery. While rather predictable, with a mundane ending, this is still a fine story and good murder mystery. Even when bravely facing danger, Johnny still finds time to help people in need, resulting in a likeable and caring hero who uses his wits and brains to solve the case. Davies’ debut will have mystery fans eagerly awaiting more Johnny Hawke novels.
Rebecca Roberts
THE SHOE QUEEN
Anna Davis, Doubleday, 2007, £12.99, hb, 426, 9780385609913 / Pocket, 2007, $14.00, pb, 416pp, 141653735X
In Art Deco 1920s Paris when it was a second home to the Americans, the City of Lights was a cheap place to live and decadently Bohemian. The ‘Queen’ of the title is Genevieve, the Honourable Genevieve Shelby King of
Suffolk, married to a wealthy sewing machine manufacturer who really should return to Boston USA. In her fashionable apartment on the Rue de Lota is a room filled with hundreds of boxes of shoes: worn, new, covered in sequins, ribbons, buttons and diamonds, with glass heels, gold heels, low heels and four-inch heels. She, however, becomes obsessed with having a pair of shoes made by Paolo Zachari, the creator of the world’s most expensive footwear, and her desire for the initially unobtainable shoes becomes a passion for the shoemaker. The vicissitudes of the brief love affair make her face up to the hollowness of the life she leads on the fringes of Montparnasse café society.
Anna Davis has an excellent knowledge of Paris and does not put a foot wrong on her heroine’s perambulations but, it is a city rooted in the present. There is no real sense of the twenties, those hectic and crazy days of jazz, literature, modern art and drinking. It is a frothy book with no great depth and the characters are stereotyped. Simply dropping famous names from the past into the text does not make an historical novel.
Gwen Sly
DEATH ON THE NEVSKII PROSPEKT
David Dickinson, Constable, 2007, £18.99, hb, 326pp, 9781845293604 / Carroll & Graf, 2006, $24.95, hb, 256pp, 9780786718979
Russia, terrorist capital of the world at the beginning of the 20th century.
In St Petersburg the body of an English diplomat has been discovered on fashionable Nevskii Prospekt; it is Christmas 1904 and he was on a top-secret mission. Tsarina Alexandra will soon become enamoured of the disreputable priest, Rasputin, which will seal the fate of the Romanov royal family, and the country is on the brink of revolution.
It is into this melting pot of indiscriminate massacre, sadistic torture, unrelenting poverty coupled with fantastic wealth that David Dickinson introduces us to his intrepid investigator, Lord Francis Powerscourt, late of the Indian Army Intelligence, who is sent by the Prime Minister of Great Britain to solve the mysterious death.
The author captures the twilight years of imperial Russia; his turn of phrase and descriptive talent draw the reader into the period setting, and the novel is intelligently written with a great deal of historical content.
This is a disquieting book in the sense of time and place, describing how the Russian autocracy will bring disaster upon itself. The Bloody Sunday Massacre by the Tsarist troops outside the Winter Palace is vividly described with all its attendant horrors of bloodshed and mutilation.
Lord Francis is a formidable character even if he seems to share his information too readily; the story inclines at times to repetition but is skilfully told and has a depth of research not
usually found in this genre. It held me fascinated to THE END.
Gwen Sly
DEATH CALLED TO THE BAR
David Dickinson, Robinson, 2007, £6.99, pb, 247pp, 9781845293826 / Carroll & Graf, 2005, $25.00, hb, 288pp, 0786716967
In February 1902, during a feast at the Inns of Court, a senior barrister mysteriously dies. When a second man is shot dead, Lord Francis Powerscourt is called in. As the trail leads to a boarded up country house, Powerscourt realises he is in grave danger.
The author not only recreates the atmosphere of the period but also, to some extent, the style of the late Victorian novel. Lord Francis Powerscourt overshadows the Chief Inspector nominally in charge of the investigation in the manner of the older detective novel. Lord Francis is well drawn and we are introduced to his wife and family in their opulent town house. However, I felt that his explicit conversations with his wife and his hands-on relationship with his children, whilst rounding out his character, were not quite in period. On the other hand, there is a romantic sub-plot involving two well-drawn younger characters ending in a conventionally happy engagement which is absolutely right.
I can recommend this novel to the reader who likes historical detective fiction as much as for the period feel as the actual murder mystery.
Ruth Nash
THE EARTHQUAKE SHACK: A Sausalito Love Story
Gary Diedrichs, Two Bridges Press, 2006,
Y THE SECRET
$15.95/C$19.95, 340pp, pb, 0972394796
It’s 1959 in Sausalito, California—right across the water from San Francisco, but with a culture and personality all its own. Characters abound, from Will Dumont, recent transplant from Ohio; to his artist girlfriend, Maggie, who has an incredible sense of smell; to Varda the Greek; Buck Buckworthy, the rich Texan interloper; Mephisto, his motorcycle; his sidekick bird, Marilyn Macaw; and many more.
The main character of the story, however, is Will’s residence: the so-called Earthquake Shack, a quickly-assembled squatter’s residence built just after the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, which was then ferried over to a Sausalito inlet as the City rebuilt and prospered. The various residents of the Earthquake Shack have all left traces of themselves, including the two spirits, Mi-Wash and Malachy, whose dialogue frames the narrative. The story is straightforward: boy (Will) meets girl (Maggie); boy has commitment issues; girl risks life trying to prevent capitalist developers from building a cruise ship dock on the waterfront…well, perhaps there are a few twists and turns which barely hold together as a story. However, the many character sketches— see motorcycle-riding bird, above—along with a lot of local history (most of it true) provide some quite entertaining moments.
This is Diedrichs’ debut novel, and much of it reads like a writing-workshop opus; it feels as if he shoehorns in every possible name, place, and character in case he never gets a chance to publish anything ever again, leading to reader overload. There’s enough Sausalito history for more than one novel, and there’s more than one novel in this book. For those seeking historical
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Philippe Grimbert (trans. Polly McLean), Portobello, 2007, £12.99, hb, 154pp, 9871846270437
This autobiographical novel tells the story of young Philippe’s childhood in post-war Paris. The sickly only child of glamorous, athletic parents, the boy worries that his own inadequate body is the source of his father’s unspoken disappointment. He senses a shadow hanging over his family. His parents never speak of the past and have altered their surname to hide their Jewish identity.
After discovering a toy dog in the attic, lonely Philippe dreams up an imaginary big brother who is everything he is not: fit, healthy, his father’s pride. The ghost brother overshadows Philippe’s existence until Philippe turns fifteen and sees a film about the Holocaust at school. When a classmate makes a vicious anti-Semitic jibe, the ‘weakling’ Philippe, overcome with a force and fury he has never known before, beats the much stronger boy bloody. Then Louise, a trusted family friend, takes him aside and tells him the truth about his family’s past, a story so harrowing that his parents are unable to face it. His imaginary brother was, in fact, a flesh and blood boy who died in Auschwitz years before Philippe’s birth, and his parents’ marriage is rooted in adultery and devastating betrayal.
No plot summary can quite do justice to this hypnotic, deeply moving novel. This deceptively slender volume can be read in an afternoon, but will haunt the reader for a lifetime. The author, a psychoanalyst, delves deep into the dark abyss of human loss and repression. His spare, luminous prose is beautifully rendered in this fine translation by Polly McLean. A gem of a novel, very highly recommended. Mary Sharratt
tidbits, dive right in, while the rest can wait for Diedrich’s next, perhaps less frenzied, tale.
Helene Williams
THE MOON IN OUR HANDS
Thomas Dyja, Carroll & Graf, 2006, $14.95, pb, 356pp, 0786717076
In the aftermath of a brutal lynching, bystanders begin sifting through charred ashes, taking a ring, scraps of the victim’s clothing, even his remaining fingers, as souvenirs. It is unthinkable that anyone could stand by while someone they have known all their lives is tortured and burned, much less rifle through the remains. However, this is rural Tennessee. The year is 1918. And the victim was black.
Walter White volunteers to travel south from New York City to investigate the crime for the NAACP, hoping to find justice for the victim’s family, and possibly generate enough outrage that the rest of the country will take notice. Posing as a white man and a salesman, he travels by train to Sibley Springs, Tennessee. After only a few hours, he believes he knows the identities of the men who killed Cleon Quine. Over the course of the following two days, he tries to prove, or disprove, his suspicions, all while looking over his shoulder. Should his secret be exposed, his chances of escaping a similar fate are slim.
This is the fictional retelling of actual events. Walter White, an exceptionally light-skinned, blond-haired, black man, investigated numerous lynchings and played an important, though largely forgotten, role in the burgeoning civil rights movement, eventually as acting secretary of the NAACP. Using White’s notes as his starting point, author Dyja successfully recreates the atmosphere of tension and oppression as the story unfolds. This is a suspenseful, engrossing novel, exploring the motivation of evil as well as the complexities of racial identity.
Alice Logsdon
THE SECOND OBJECTIVE
Mark Frost, Hyperion, $24.95/C$34.95, hb, 336pp, 140130222X
Mid-December 1944 was not a good time for the American forces fighting the Germans on the Franco-German borders. The seemingly defeated Germans unleashed a deadly surprise offensive on December 16, 1944, in a previously quiet sector in the Belgian Ardennes Forest. The German attack was a desperate gamble that included one incredibly daring plan— infiltrating English-speaking soldiers behind Allied lines to both disrupt Allied rear areas and to assassinate General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Allied commander-in-chief! Operation Greif is commanded by SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, the SS units are sent on their missions. One young German soldier, Bernie Oster, is placed in a unit under SS Hauptsturmführer Von Leinsdorf. The anti-Nazi Oster has no desire to play any part in a Nazi victory but must follow along or risk death at Von Leinsdorf’s hands. Pursued by an American team led by civilian policeman Earl Grannit, the assassination team’s progress is certain to grab, and hold, the reader’s attention. The action is fast-paced, the
story is exciting, and Mark Frost’s settings are believable. While Von Leinsdorf seems to be a stereotype of the Nazi thug found in hundreds of other World War II historical novels, Oster and Grannit are much better developed character types. The Second Objective is a fast-paced historical adventure about a relatively littleknown event.
John R. Vallely
THE DYING CRAPSHOOTER’S BLUES
David Fulmer, Harcourt, 2007, $23.00, hb, 305pp, 0151011753
David Fulmer’s 1920s Atlanta is a city torn by racial and class strife and patrolled by a poorly managed and corrupt police department. This Atlanta is a dark and hopeless urban landscape from which escape is, at best, uncertain. The story begins with the murder of an African American gambler by an alcoholic white policeman. Joe Rose, by profession a thief but one cursed by a sentimental streak, quickly finds himself entangled with a brutal police captain, Grayton Jackson, in an investigation of a jewel theft from a prominent family. The homicide and the jewel heist dominate Joe Rose’s life as he attempts to keep himself free of Captain Jackson while simultaneously providing for the dying Jesse (who is Jesse?), a blind blues singer named Willie, and Pearl, the woman Joe loves and the one human being who scares him. As if his life weren’t complicated enough, Captain Jackson’s sex-crazed wife is also in pursuit of this thoroughly unlucky thief. Subplot is heaped upon subplot in settings populated by characters every bit as finely crafted as those in Fulmer’s Rampart Street, Jass, and Chasing the Devil’s Tail. One hopes the author, a resident of 21st century Atlanta, will bring Joe Rose back in follow-up stories of 1920s Atlanta.
John R. Vallely
NOW IS THE HOUR
Hilary Green, Hodder & Stoughton, 2007, £6.99, pb, 310pp, 9780340898970
This is a mixture of life on the home front and the front itself. It concerns the lives and wartime experiences of four friends, known as the Fairbourne Follies. While her friends enlist, Rose joins a group entertaining the troops in France. Soon all of them find themselves in terrible danger. As they are struck by the brutality of war they realise who is most important to them and despite some terrible circumstances, they determine to find each other again. This is a book of spies, dangers, forbidden love, disappointments and friendships.
Be warned. This is not a ‘stand-alone’ book. It is the beginning of a saga and for the story to be rounded off you will have to stay tuned because it does leave you up in the air a bit. That said, it is an enjoyable story, the characters are likeable, and you care enough about them to want to know what happens to them. This is my first ‘World War 2’ story and it won’t be my last. It deals with an otherwise well-documented period in a fresh sort of way because we see the war from a different perspective.
Karen E.
Wintle
SOME SUNNY DAY
Annie Groves, Harper, 2007, £5.99, pb, 582pp, 978000720965
Set in the early days of World War 2, this novel adds to Annie Groves’ growing reputation as a storyteller. It features Rosie, who has grown up in Liverpool’s Little Italy, with the Italian neighbours her best friends. But when some of these men are interned, and the women depart to live with families in Manchester, Rosie feels deserted. When she loses her mother to a bomb, and her father to an accident at sea, Rosie is thrown out of her unpleasant aunt’s house and joins the Women’s Land Army. There she makes friends, but also falls in love, with a man she can never marry.
This is an absorbing story, with a delightful heroine, and plenty of tragic detail about the wartime suffering in Liverpool, and the resilience of its inhabitants. It will please the many fans of Liverpool sagas.
Marina Oliver
FEVER MOON
Carolyn Haines, Minotaur, 2007, $23.95, hb, 304pp, 312351615
A feeling of profound sorrow permeates Carolyn Haines’ latest novel, Fever Moon. Set in the 1940s deep in the Louisiana bayou, the story follows Deputy Raymond Thibodeaux as he struggles to prove the innocence of a young woman blamed for the gruesome murder of New Iberia’s richest man, Henri Bastion. Found standing over Bastion’s mangled body, howling at the moon, Adele Hebert is suspected of being that most fearsome of creatures, a loup-garou, or werewolf. Wrestling with his own demons and just home from World War II, where he witnessed his brother’s death, Raymond fights against time as Iberia’s frightened residents go on a witch-hunt for Adele, who is missing.
Lyrical and thought-provoking, Fever Moon captures beautifully the passions of this small Cajun community and the tragedy of war at home and on the battlefield. Love and hate abound. The many characters are various and rich, the swamp threatening, and the story complex with a nice sense of closure at the end. In Raymond Thibodeaux, life’s fragile nature is sharply underscored: wounded on the battlefield, he suffers daily from the shrapnel in his hip and lives knowing that he will be paralyzed if the tiny bit of metal ever shifts.
Alana White
A STRANGER IN BURRACOMBE
Lilian Harry, Orion, 2007, £12.99/$24.95, hb, 312pp, 9780752867212
This sugary saga, set in a Devon village, opens in February 1952 with the arrival of a young woman, Jennifer Tucker, who it later transpires is looking for her unknown father. It then follows the villagers through the course of the next six months or so, picking up where the earlier novel, The Bells of Burracombe, left off. It really doesn’t matter if you have read the first one or not as there is plenty of ‘catch up’ material throughout.
The view of village life seems somewhat rosy
tinted, but perhaps that’s just my 21st-century cynicism and it really was like that.
Harry deftly weaves the various sub-plots to a satisfying, if not entirely unexpected, conclusion. I could have wished for the identity of Jennifer Tucker’s father to be a little less obvious – it was clearly signalled almost from page one, and the behaviour of one of the romantic heroines was practically guaranteed to send her swain packing, but these are minor points. This is a well-written novel that will no doubt enthral Harry’s numerous fans.
Cas Stavert
FOOTSTEPS IN THE DARK
Georgette Heyer, Arrow, 2006, £7.99, pb, 328pp, 978099493693
Brother and sisters, Peter, Margaret and Celia, inherit The Priory, a rambling ancient house, from their uncle. Celia and her husband Charles, along with Margaret and Peter, decide to spend their summer holiday getting to know their new home. They soon become acquainted with the legend of the ghostly monk that haunts the house as well as the ancient ruined priory in the grounds, from which, of course, the house gained its present, quaint name. No-one believes in the ghost, not even after the first haunting occurs. Reason tells Peter and Charles, even if Celia is more than half ready to believe in the truth of the apparition, that ghosts cannot exist. Doubt notwithstanding, the hauntings continue, and soon the men are convinced that someone is using unscrupulous methods to persuade them to sell their home. They determine to investigate. Murder ensues.
A charming tale told by the master storyteller of Regency romances, conveyed with Heyer’s trademark panache and wit. Set in 1930s high society, this novel has a haunted house, cunning mystery and murder to solve. What more could anyone in search of a pleasurable read ask for. The veriest hint of romance? This is Georgette Heyer, so you won’t be disappointed. Most enjoyable.
Fiona Lowe
PENHALLOW
Georgette Heyer, Arrow, 2006, £7.99, pb, 431pp, 9780099493686
When a crime novel begins with the immortal words “Jimmy the Bastard was cleaning boots …” then the reader can be certain they are about to be entertained! Adam Penhallow is hated and despised by just about every member of his family, with good reason since he enjoys nothing better than playing one warring family member off against another. Well, when said Penhallow winds up missing his birthday party by a whisker because of a brush with a poisoner it’s really no surprise at all. Indeed as the police inspector aptly declares the wonder is it hadn’t happened before!
This is a clever little crime novel. It’s not a whodunit in the traditional sense at all, as the murder is not the focus of the plot but the psychology of the Penhallow family. With an extensive list of characters each manages still to be perfectly drawn.
And as for Jimmy? In the opinion of the children of Penhallow Jimmy’s name is more than appropriate, and not just because he was born the wrong side of the sheets as Heyer herself would say.
Written in 1942 and set in a rambling Cornish country house near to Liskeard, this is an intriguing and pleasurable read. Recommended.
Fiona Lowe
THE UNFINISHED CLUE
Georgette Heyer, Arrow, 2006, £7.99, pb, 306pp, 9780099493730
The scene is 1933: a weekend country house party at The Grange, courtesy of General Sir Arthur Billington-Smith and his good lady wife Lady Fay Billington-Smith (who is a good deal younger than the General). And is the son and heir Geoffrey Billington-Smith really due to arrive with his extremely unsuitable fiancée in tow – Miss Lola de Silva – a Mexican cabaret dancer? Horror of horrors darling! Tongues wag of course – they always do! Then when the host is inconveniently found murdered in his own study no less, questions arise as to who did him to death. Enter Inspector Harding of the Yard, tall, handsome, former Army officer – a thorough gentleman in fact. His problem is not lack of motive or opportunity, oh no, quite the reverse. The General was not a popular man. The case bowls merrily along and a satisfying conclusion is reached. Along the way a charming romance flourishes.
A pleasing evocation of a lost, more glamorous world: of cocktails on the terrace, tennis or billiards to while away an idle hour, dinner at eight - strict dress code naturally, one would not want to wear the wrong dress!
Pure escapist entertainment. Loved it.
Fiona Lowe
WHY SHOOT A BUTLER?
Georgette Heyer, Arrow, 2006, £7.99, pb, 312pp, 9780099493723
When barrister Frank Amberley, who happens to dabble in amateur detection, comes upon a dead body in an abandoned car, furthermore finding a young lady at the scene acting in a highly suspicious way; all manner of interesting events follow. Frank informs the police of the location of the body, naturally, but neglects to tell them about the young woman found by the dead body’s side. Why you may ask? Even Frank is shocked at his behaviour. He is after all a barrister. In his defence Frank doesn’t think the young woman did the foul deed, however the police would undoubtedly jump to the wrong conclusion. It is therefore his moral duty not to inform the police. Well that’s alright then. However when it transpires that the victim was a butler from nearby Norton Manor, Frank and the police, are intrigued. What could be the possible motive?
The inimitable Georgette Heyer here gives us a murder mystery stuffed with family secrets and dark doings, with sinister servants and a host of humorous characters and situations. As it was written in the 1930s, I think a frightfully clever barrister joining forces with a slow
but dedicated police sergeant is perfectly permissible. Thoroughly entertaining.
Fiona Lowe
SEASON OF THE BURNING SOULS
Ken Hodgson, Five Star, 2007, $25.95, hb, 235pp, 1594144826
If most historical fiction is a glass of milk, Season of the Burning Souls is a tiki drink made out of 150-proof rum with an umbrella on top. This unique historical mystery takes place in 1943 Silver City, New Mexico. Amidst wartime shortages of sugar, tires and gasoline, Sheriff Sam Sinrod and County Coroner Bryce Whitlock try to solve several cases of spontaneous human combustion. The unlikely array of victims who erupt into flames – from a banjo player in a medicine show to the state arson investigator – defy their efforts to find a link between the fatalities. But that doesn’t stop them from trying, with dialogue reminiscent of M*A*S*H and plot twists that would be at home in Catch-22. Are the Nazis engaged in secret germ warfare? Has a Jap submarine unleashed a new biological weapon? This wildly imaginative story mixes historical fiction with mystery and a dash of science fiction. It may be an acquired taste, but it’s a lot of fun.
Chuck Curtis
THE LONG WAY HOME
Margaret James, Robert Hale, 2006, £18.99, hb, 224pp, 0709081715
Daisy Denham is young and naïve, but that does not stop her from embarking on a career on the stage, in spite of the disapproval of her adoptive family. The theatre during the interwar years is not a lucrative calling but encouraged by her boyfriend and fellow thespian, Ewan, Daisy joins a small provincial company. There she meets the glamorous Jesse and, seduced by his charms, heads off with him to London.
Down on her luck and with her emotions in turmoil, Daisy is further confused by the unexpected arrival of her birth mother from the USA. Faced with several choices, Daisy must decide where her heart really lies.
The Long Way Home is a classic coming of age story. Daisy is an attractive character whose basic naivety is her greatest strength and weakness. The 1930s theatre scene is particularly well recreated – the left wing theatricals that Ewan joins are a hoot. By the end all the main characters have grown and developed in heartwarming ways.
Sara Wilson
THE KOMMANDANT’S GIRL
Pam Jenoff, Mira, 2007, $13.95/C$16,95, pb, 395pp, 9780778323426 / Pub in the UK as Kommandant’s Girl, Mira, 2007, £6.99, pb, 400pp, 0778301443
Emma Bau has been married only a few weeks when the Germans smash into Poland. In a short time, her husband Jacob disappears into the Resistance, leaving her and her parents to try to survive in the city’s Jewish ghetto. Eventually, the Resistance smuggles her out to live with Jacob’s Catholic cousin, Krysia. Taking
the new name of Anna Lipowski, she and Krysia together assume the care of an orphaned Jewish boy. A chance meeting with the local Nazi governor, Kommandant Richwalder, results in a disturbing offer—personal assistant to the most powerful man in the city. Urged to take on the job by the Resistance, Anna begins a new life, one that will lead her into a dangerous game of espionage. Worse, her new position soon causes intense personal conflicts over all that she holds dear, especially her marriage vows to the absent Jacob.
Told in the first person, this is a story of the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of a young, naïve girl. Forced to grow rapidly in this new, hostile world, she not only survives, but courageously fights the Nazi oppression as best she can. It is a tale not only of heroism, but of humanity, in all its complexity and ambiguity.
The author does an outstanding job of avoiding the clichés and caricatures sometimes endemic to this topic. Her characters experience real emotions, from Anna’s feelings of attachment for her boss, to the Kommandant who appears conflicted about his own role. As the author is a historian who has lived and worked in Poland, her descriptions of occupied Krakow likewise ring true.
Although primarily a compelling romance, the novel stands as a fitting testament to the real people who struggled and died during those most troubled of times.
Ken
Kreckel
WINTERING
Derek Johns, Portobello, 2007, £7.99, pb, 199pp, 9781846270239
In the late 1950s, bankrupt Jaguar salesman, Jim Parker must start his life over again in a village near Glastonbury. He grudgingly accepts employment in a relative’s clothing store. Meanwhile his two children attend a tiny rural school and his long-suffering wife sets up house in a primitive farm cottage. While Billy, his son, dreams of the mysterious Glastonbury Tor, Jim secretly sells Billy’s toys to fund his adulterous rendezvous with a teenage waitress. Jim’s meek wife, who knows of the affair but says nothing, tries to fulfil herself through amateur dramatics. Billy comes to learn of his father’s guilty secrets and eventually confronts him. Ostensibly this novel is about how young Billy’s coming of age intertwines with his father’s dawning realisation that he, too, must grow up and stop acting like such a feckless, self-pitying prat.
Apart from a few throwaway references to Teddy boys and the Suez Canal Crisis, the historical time period feels incidental and undeveloped. Some of the events feel completely incongruous to the setting. Would a teenage girl in a small, close-knit community in the 1950s so easily compromise herself by having an affair with a married man—and a bankrupt loser at that—having sex with him in her parents’ house? The book is peopled by stock characters: the crazy incontinent cat lady with a heart of gold, eccentric schoolmarms, the racketeer/ paedophile, the school bully, and the insultingly caricatured “Only Gay in the Village.” Shallow. Mary Sharratt
THE SOUND OF BUTTERFLIES
Rachael King, Picador, 2007, £12.99, hb, 354pp, 9780330449168
Set in 1903 the book follows the adventures of Thomas Edgar, collector of butterflies, during an expedition to the Amazon, the effects on him, of what happens there and how his wife, Sophie, deals with the changes in him on his return.
This is a beautifully written book with vivid prose and some startling, apt but unusual imagery. Rachael King describes with equal effectiveness the staid life in England, the beauty of the colourful butterflies of the Amazon and the horrors and brutality of the rubber magnates towards their people, whether slave or supposedly free.
The author shows great insight into the relationship between Sophie and Thomas and their feelings while they are apart. I was less happy with Sophie’s relationship with her father. He was a shadowy figure, unconvincing in his actions and motives which made the ending of the novel unrealistic in some respects. The other minor characters were all well-drawn and believable.
This is a compelling read, both for the story and the lusciously rich language.
Marina Oliver
LIPSTICK AND LIES
Margit Liesche, Poisoned Pen Press, 2007, $24.95, hb, 322pp, 9781590583203
Pucci Lewis, a young Women’s Airforce Service Pilot doing home front service during World War II, needs Amelia Earhart’s saddle shoes for luck as she emerges from her B-24 and stumbles onto a corpse. Her first undercover assignment in the Office of Strategic Services is underway.
Pucci goes to jail to get close to a famous triple agent who led a German spy ring that operated in Detroit: the bogus “Countess” Grace Buchanan-Dineen. Our heroine’s ally is dreamboat FBI agent Dante, who ratchets up her assignment to include breaking and entering an aircraft factory and infiltrating a posh women’s club to investigate two wealthy sisters and their connection to the infamous countess. Everyone isn’t what he or she first appears, and Pucci gets her perceptions shaken and her loyalty betrayed as she approaches closer to the plot to bring down America from its heartland.
Liesche’s confident heroine and breezy style both start strong, but later become enmeshed in an over-complicated plot suffering from too much back story and a series of unfortunate anachronisms in period detail, like clear plastic containers, makeovers, and being told to “remain together on the same page” and “watch body language”.
Eileen Charbonneau
filled with possibilities, Consequences is the book for you. Written in spare, clear prose, the saga begins in 1935 with Lorna, who rejects the strictures of her conventional, English uppermiddle class background for love and a bucolic life in a country cottage with her gifted artist husband, Matt. When their daughter, Molly, is just a toddler, Matt is killed in battle during World War II. The young Molly exhibits the same independence in her restless life as she rejects marriage to her wealthy, older lover and chooses instead to raise their daughter, Ruth, as a single mother in the 1960s and 1970s. It is not until she reaches middle-age that Molly permits herself to fall in love and marry Sam, a poet (and mechanic). Ruth, the third generation, marries conventionally, but with a very different outcome.
All the generations remain within the sphere of the creative arts – wood engraving, publishing, poetry, journalism, and finally, an art gallery. The book itself covers seventy years in 258 pages, with world events always in the background and affecting the participants as each woman grows up and struggles to find her way in the world within the context of societal changes. The relatively short length of the book leaves less than ninety pages per generation, however, so this reviewer was left wanting more depth, more narrative and more character exploration. However, the story does come full circle, with the possibility of love for Ruth with the current owner of her grandparents’ cottage. Recommended for the author’s fans.
Pamela Ortega
THE ENGLISH HORSES
William A. Luckey, Five Star, 2007, $25.95, hb, 232pp, 9871594145094
The English Horses is subtitled “a Western story,” and that is what we have. This is the tale of Gordon Meiklejon, a younger son sent from England with his family’s financial support to make his life in America. The story is told by Meiklejon as he looks back on 1912, his first year in New Mexico. That was where he found land with promise, a place where he could raise good beef cattle. The problem he ran into was that whilst he was accustomed to fenced grazing where he could control the breeding of his cattle, the ranchers owning the land around him had been used to letting their livestock range freely across everyone’s land. Meiklejon used barbed wire to fence his property and than had to live with the problems it caused, particularly with Burn English, the stranger, who made his living trapping mustang. Meiklejon is determined, but so is English. In this novel there are no open gunfights or heroes riding into town, which one associates with the western genre, just people in conflict, living with consequences of the fences and the choices they make because of them.
of four women’s awakenings to love, death, and truth. With the able-bodied men at war and the onslaught of the 1918 influenza outbreak, life often seems bleak. Morag and her daughter Wallis work at the local jute-weaving factory, with hundreds of other women who endure long hours, brutal conditions, low pay, and almost certain death from either respiratory illness or the carding and weaving machines themselves. At home sits the lovely, lively Caro, Morag’s other daughter, and young cousin Imogen, who was abandoned by her father and orphaned by her mother’s desperate death.
All four women dream of escape to a better, brighter life; for Morag, this would mean no more nightmares about her mother’s and sister’s senseless deaths, a man who doesn’t abuse her, and good futures for her girls. Wallis secretly dreams of migrating to Ireland, to rejoin her childhood friends Rosemary and (especially) Paddy Hennessey and all that the Catholic, rather than Protestant, way of life embraces. Caro schemes to use her looks as her ticket to a rich husband and a nice home, far from the tenement house, not understanding that men can use her to their advantage, as well. Imogen imagines a full life, which would contain her adored father, Oliver, and complete memories of her mother, rather than the dreamlike fragments which trouble her now.
War, politics, religion, and discrimination by gender and class are all interwoven by MacPherson (When She Was Electric) into an entrancing tale in which the reader experiences the pivotal year of 1918 through these four lives and their loves. At times enchanting, at times gritty, this novel bustles with realism yet still provides many uplifting moments.
Helene Williams
THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST
Norman Mailer, Random House, 2007, $27.95, hb, 496 pp, 0394536495 / Little Brown, 2007, £17.99, hb, 496pp, 0316861332
Mailer never rests on his laurels and never fails to shock and surprise. In this novel, the 84-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner describes the family that he imagined sired Adolf Hitler. He tells his tale through the words of a satanic angel who was assigned by the Devil to nourish the sociopathic seeds planted in the infant Hitler by the incestuous mating of his parents.
CONSEQUENCES
Penelope Lively, Viking, 2007, $24.95, hb, 258pp, 9780670038565 / Fig Tree, 2007, 16.99, hb, 320pp, 0670915831
If you like your multi-generational family sagas breezy and easy to read, and with if not a happy ending, then at least a hopeful ending
BEYOND THE BLUE
Patrika Salmon
Andrea MacPherson, Random House Canada, 2007, C$29.95, 346pp, hb, 9780679314226
Industrial Dundee, Scotland, is the background for this hauntingly beautiful tale
The story is more about where Hitler came from than about Hitler himself. That place, according to Mailer’s imagination, was a home despoiled by incest, adultery, child abuse, animal cruelty, drunkenness, premature toilet training and peasant self-loathing. However, Mailer does not believe this is enough corruption to produce a man as evil as Hitler. He adds the personal attention of the Devil himself, who assigns an underling to monitor and encourage Hitler’s taste for megalomania and mass murder.
This story begins three generations before Adolf’s birth and ends when he is 16 or 17. Hitler’s father, Alois, emerges as the main character of the story. Although more successful than many of his peasant contemporaries, he’s the type of brutish man from whom you would
expect a dysfunctional family. Yet Mailer needed more than Alois to explain an evil as powerful as Adolf Hitler, so he adds direct intervention from the Devil. It’s up to the reader to decide if the Devil made him do it.
Chuck Curtis
THE FLIGHT
Bryan Malessa, Fourth Estate, 2007, £12.99, hb, 246pp, 9780007241064
This is a powerful story of a rarely told episode of World War II. Early in 1945, Ida and her younger son, daughter and nephew flee their village on the Samland peninsula on East Prussia’s Baltic coast to escape the advancing Soviet Army.
The book’s details are authentic, a documented account of some 12 million central and east European ethnic Germans forced to make such a trek on foot, by boat and rail, to the assumed safety of Berlin. As fiction, however, I do not feel this works. I wanted to know what these people looked like, how old they were, the smells and colours of village life. The flight of the title only takes up the central third of the book. The first third skates over the years 19415: the children’s childhood adventures; Karl’s friendship with Mr Wolff, an educated Jew; Karl’s induction into the Hitler Youth; the last third, the family’s journey south of Berlin to the forests of Thuringia, where they settle into a village little touched by the war. The author tells the reader what happens, pages without dialogue, slipping in and out of different characters’ viewpoints before returning to his own. Dramatic, appalling events, such as Ida’s treatment by Russian soldiers, are so underwritten as to convey little meaning, let alone feeling. Karl’s struggle with what he did in the Hitler Youth is moving but hurriedly told in retrospect at the end. I wanted to know what the leader screamed and ranted at Karl. Ida’s husband is a shadowy figure: the reader learns little of his experiences during the war and it was difficult to feel sympathy for her concerning him.
A disappointing book which does not do justice to the harrowing events it sets out to portray. It would have been better as nonfiction.
Janet Hancock
THE REBELS
Sandor Marai, Knopf, 2007, $24.95, hb, 278pp, 9780375407574
The Rebels tells the story of a group of young men on the eve of their graduation from a boy’s academy. Unfortunately, the year is 1918, and the place is a small town in provincial Hungary. All that awaits them is service at the front, a fate that already has taken nearly all of the men from the area. In a bid to escape the future of a likely death on the battlefield, four of the boys retreat into a world of their own, one filled with games and small thefts of an increasingly serious and bizarre character. Add in a traveling actor, and these activities soon spin out of control.
This literary work, the third of the “rediscovered” novels of Sandor Marai, is technically, perhaps, not a historical novel at all. Written in 1930 in Hungary, it is a story of a
more contemporary nature. Its Hungarian author, who was the same age as his characters in 1918, provides a brief glimpse into the lives of young men born into the dissolution of an empire. The novel itself is written in narrative form. Within its pages there are essays on a variety of subjects and passages of haunting beauty. The prose is elaborate, given to long flights of fancy and introspection. Its tone is moody and its pace ponderous. It can be described as either brilliant or lugubrious. Its meaning, however, often gets lost in the many pages of this burdensome volume.
Ken Kreckel
ZOLI
Colum McCann, Random House, 2007, $24.95, hb, 336 pp, 9781400063727 / Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006, £12.99, hb, 320pp, 0297847597
“Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do. Seventy-three years have passed now across my brow. I have often settled by your bed and whispered to you of distant days…” So Zoli Novotna, a Slovakian Roma (gypsies, as they are known to enemies and those ignorant of their unique culture), reminisces about the cycles of her life as little girl, poet-singer, lover, exile, and finally famous poet.
Although a great deal of her story deals with the pro-Nazi Hlinka terrorists and the introduction of the Communist bloc, Zoli’s tale conveys the boldness and inspiration of her people. One of the few Roma to learn to read and write, Zoli begins to put her people’s historical tales to music. Those who hear her sing are mesmerized by her passionate expression, though they little understand the world of caravans, constant movement, and protective nature of her family and friends in the Roma community. Marrying outside of her community and used as a tool to segregate the gypsies, Zoli is exiled from her people and journeys to America in a long, painful journey.
While the story is about Zoli, Colum McCann exquisitely depicts the Roma people in an exotic yet poignantly real way that will fascinate every reader. Laced throughout Zoli’s search for meaning in her poetic gift is an accurate and vivid account of the cause of true art, a people who are willing to suffer and rejoice in the face of the most formidable prejudice and fear. Their independence and ardent love of life is Zoli’s true story, “since by the bones they broke/We can tell new weather.” Zoli is an amazing story you will want to read and cherish.
Viviane Crystal
GHOST OF A CHANCE: A Marjorie
McClelland
Mystery
Amy Patricia Meade, Midnight Ink, 2007, $13.95, pb, 310pp, 073871092X
Marjorie McClelland, the mystery writer, her fiancé police detective, Robert Jameson, and Creighton Ashcroft, her wealthy English editor, are all at the 1935 carnival of the First Presbyterian Church of Ridgebury, Connecticut, when there is an unexplained death of a man
on the Ferris wheel. The murder investigation that follows takes them to Boston, and reunites Creighton with Vanessa, his old childhood flame, and owner of the chemical firm Alchemy. Murder, love, industrial espionage and bigamy are the ingredients blended together in this well-devised mystery story. The combination, though, is more explosive for Marjorie and her planned marriage than she expects.
The plot has all the Agatha Christie hallmarks of twists, turns and dead ends that are needed for an effective murder mystery. The characters are believable: sixteen-year-old Herbert Nussbaum, with his ambitions to become a criminologist being one of the most original, along with overweight Miss Schutt, who is hunting for a husband. Creighton Ashcroft is particularly endearing, especially in his willingness to part with a one-dollar bill to buy twenty kisses from a young blonde woman whom he assumes is the object of his affections.
This novel, which is the second in the series, will undoubtedly be welcomed both by readers who enjoy novels set in the 1930s and murder mystery lovers.
Myfanwy Cook
A TROPICAL PLACE LIKE THAT
Baker H. Morrow, Univ. of New Mexico Press, $16.95, pb, 164pp, 9780826339379
This book of short stories is set in the mountainous part of Michoacan in the 1960s. Lou (Luis) Becton, an American living temporarily in the area, ties the stories together. In “Middle Class,” Becton discovers that the reason he’s been invited to dinner in an upwardly-mobile family’s home is that the parents want the children to observe how a middle class person eats, with utensils instead of tortillas. In “When Warriors Danced,” Becton and girlfriend Annabelle take a bus to a town where Tarascan Indians are giving a dance performance, and candles on the stage nearly cause a disaster. “The Red Kite” has Becton and Annabelle visiting a mill in a remote valley, and watching children fly kites. In “The Flat,” the mechanic who fixes Becton’s flat tire begins to wish he and his wife hadn’t prayed so hard for children.
The stories are a bit desultory, which doesn’t allow for a lot of character development. Becton is more of a catalyst than a protagonist the reader gets to know well. The tales aren’t plot-heavy; they give the most pleasure as experiences in local color. Morrow is adept at depicting the rural scenery and its appealing inhabitants, giving the reader a vivid impression of the Mexican countryside. I especially enjoyed the food references. His use of Spanish expressions, explained in context for English-speakers, adds to the atmosphere. The book has potential to be used as supplemental reading for those studying 20th century Mexican culture.
B.J. Sedlock
THE MOMENTS LOST
Bruce Olds, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, $25/C$32.95, hb, 462pp, 9780374118211
Olds (Bucking the Tiger, Raising Holy Hell), turns his stylish prose toward turbulent American
Y KILLING CHE
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Chuck Pfarrer, Random House, 2007, $26.95/C$34.95, hb, 512pp, 9781400063932
Bolivia, 1967: Paul Hoyle, an ex-CIA paramilitary with experience in Laos, Vietnam and various Latin American hot spots, is now employed as a “contractor.” The problem? A dangerously effective group of rebels, perhaps Communists infiltrating from Argentina, have ambushed and destroyed a government convoy traveling in a more than usually inhospitable and poverty-stricken part of central Bolivia. The CIA, in an all-too familiar role (protecting multinationals and propping up a corrupt but pro-American regime) is immediately interested. When it becomes clear that this is not a home-grown operation, but is led by the formidable, charismatic Che Guevara, their interest turns to passion.
Killing Che is a gut-wrenching tale of espionage, betrayal and military adventure. Terrifying firefights and numbing slogs through the jungle feel like the real thing. What makes this novel exceptional—besides the author’s brilliantly evocative descriptions of land and people—is the effortless telling from multiple points of view. Besides the burnedout career soldier, Hoyle, there is Tania, an East German-Cuban triple-agent and one-time lover of Guevara’s. There are many other characters, too, all complex and fully realized. The masterstroke, however, may be the portrait of the heroic true believer, Che Guevara. The author, Chuck Pfarrer, has several successful action screenplays to his credit, but it is his resume as an ex-Navy SEAL (as well as the mountains of research that so obviously went into this novel) that makes him absolutely qualified to handle his subject. Don’t miss this one, or start it at night, as I did. Killing Che is almost impossible to put down.
Progressive Era history in The Moments Lost
He traces the life and times of Franklyn Shivs, a Wisconsin farm boy based loosely on reporter and activist Frank Shavs.
Leaving for Chicago with his mother and his
Y APRIL IN PARIS
lover’s blessings, young Franklyn works his way from newsboy through some hard drinking and the ranks of a right-leaning Chicago daily until he stumbles onto his big break—covering the horrific Iroquois Theater fire of 1900. The
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Michael Wallner (trans. John Cullen), John Murray, 2007, £14.99, hb, 246pp, 9780719568664 / Doubleday/Talese, 2007, $21.95, hb, 256pp, 9780385519144
Don’t be fooled by this book’s unfortunate UK cover. This is not another romantic wartime saga, but a powerful study of a young Wehrmacht corporal in occupied Paris who yearns to shed his German identity and become a French civilian.
Michel Roth’s extraordinary command of the French language enables him to avoid the “real war” on the Eastern Front and while away the months translating in Paris, the city of his dreams. His life seems like a cakewalk until he is transferred to the SS and ordered to transcribe the confessions of Partisans while they are being tortured in front of him. Unable to stomach his daytime occupation, he takes a huge risk, donning civilian clothes in his off-duty hours and becoming his alter ego, Antoine, a Frenchman who can stroll through the streets and chat amiably with the locals. As Antoine, he meets Chantal, a bookseller’s daughter, and falls deeply in love, only to discover that she is a Resistance leader and a far more effective warrior than he could ever be. Chantal is not fooled by his disguise, and her copains regard him as the crazy Boche. More dangerously, his commanding officer begins to see through him, too. Soon Michel will be forced to make a choice and the ultimate sacrifice.
This can be no simple tale of love conquers all. None of the characters can emerge unscathed. Nor is this a revisionist attempt to exonerate Germans of their war guilt. Wallner’s descriptions of SS brutality are as uncompromising as Michel’s epiphany that he should have been as brave as Chantal and resisted his own regime from the very beginning. Though marred by a clunky translation (Lebensraum becomes “breathing space”), this novel is searing and unforgettable, as true as fiction can be. Mary Sharratt
unnecessary tragedy that killed a matinee crowd of mostly women and children is told as Shivs witnesses it, in exact, graphic detail. Overnight, a struggling reporter who can’t write tight turns into a “crackerjack.”
Later, an excursion into riotous labor politics of 1913, featuring Big Bill Haywood and Mother Jones, puts Shivs on the scene of a violent strike. Love affairs, including one with activist Ana Clemec that leads to her pregnancy, entangle Shivs’ life with his work and politics and lead to the novel’s climax.
Olds’ character development suffers next to the intense sight, sound, and scent presentation of the events of the time. Part of this may lie in Shivs’ own dispassionate nature, the rest in the wild and dense way his author has with the English language. Always challenging, The Moments Lost is at times dazzling, but at other times Olds’ inventiveness and relentless irony gets in the way of opportunities for compelling storytelling.
Eileen Charbonneau
A DEAD MAN IN ATHENS
Michael Pearce, Carroll & Graf, 2006, $25.95, hb, 221pp, 9780786718283 / Constable & Robinson, 2006, £17.99, hb, 256pp, 1845293444
Athens in 1912 combines goat herds parading through dusty streets, Balkan political tensions, threats of war with Turkey, Bleriot flying machines in the air, and of course the eternal Parthenon majestically crowning the Acropolis. Scotland Yard detective Seymour arrives and asks British Embassy staff why he was summoned from London to investigate the mysterious poisoning of an exiled Turkish sultan’s pet cat. Seymour, a multilingual secondgeneration Briton from an East End immigrant neighborhood, is an outsider at the Yard – not quite English enough – but useful for foreign assignments. For this one he speaks Greek learned from an East End neighbor.
Embassy instructions are designed to cool the Greek-Turkish conflict. Is the cat’s death part of a harem power struggle, or a dry run for a political assassination? And what about the young men and their flying machines, threatened with sabotage and murder? Pearce gives Seymour much of the world-weary wit and irony of the Anglo-Egyptian detective in his Mamur Zapt series, producing a breezy, touristy read with a low-key mystery. Third in series.
Nina de Angeli
WE SHALL NOT SLEEP
Anne Perry, Ballantine, 2007, $21.95/C$27.95, hb, 292pp, 0345456602 / Headline, 2007, 19.99, hb, 320pp, 0755302923
This is the fifth and final volume in Anne Perry’s series of World War I mysteries about the Reavley siblings: British army chaplain Joseph, Secret Intelligence Service officer Matthew, and ambulance driver Judith. They have been trying to discover the identity of the “Peacemaker,” the mastermind behind a secret treaty between Britain and Germany which would have betrayed Britain’s allies. The Reavleys’ parents were murdered in 1914, on their way
Juliet Waldron
History, Dark Intrigue, & Cheese
EDWARD TRENCOM’S NOSE
Giles Milton, Macmillan, 2007, £7.99, hb, 392pp, 9781405090803 / St. Martin’s Press, 2007, $24.95/C$29.95, hb, 304pp, 031236217X
Prepare yourself for olfactory gastronomy in the cheese department. Milton’s first novel provides the brain with stimulation of an extraordinary kind, particularly centred on the most unusual nose of one Edward Trencom. We discover that the purveyor of some of the finest cheeses from all corners of the globe has a family lineage which has been documented since the Great Fire of London.
There is a mystery attached to the demise of the eldest male in each of the previous nine generations, and Edward finds that the solution may lead him along similar paths. When his olfactory senses start to become unreliable there are fears for the future of his business and personal life.
Giles Milton’s descriptive novel takes us through a tour of history and cheeses together with some smells we might prefer to avoid and, although offering an enjoyable tale, the plot is rather far fetched.
Cathy Kemp
to deliver a copy of the treaty to Matthew and expose the plot. Now, in late October 1918, as the war draws to a close, Schenckendorff, the Peacemaker’s German counterpart, offers to betray the Peacemaker if the Reavleys will take him to London. But, before they can leave, a nurse is murdered and Schenckendorff is arrested for the crime. The Reavleys have only a short time to clear his name and get to London before the Peacemaker can dictate the terms of the armistice.
We Shall Not Sleep brings the series to a satisfying conclusion. I have come to care about the Reavleys, and I will miss them. But it is very important to start with the first book, No Graves as Yet, and read the books in order.
Vicki Kondelik
WHISPERS OF WINTER
Tracie Peterson, Bethany House, 2006, $13.99, pb, 380pp, 0764227750
Alaska of the World War I years is the setting for this mix of adventure, romance and religious faith, the last of Peterson’s popular Alaskan Quest trilogy. The story opens with intrepid friends Jacob and Jayce trapped with a madwith-grief captain and fellow crew members after their ship was stuck in Arctic ice floes. Their women, Leah and Helaina, spend a year in Last Chance Creek hoping and praying for their safe return as Leah’s twin babies grow.
Once the men are rescued and the romantic dispute settled between Jacob and Helaina leads to a quick marriage and pregnancy, the foursome face new challenges as friends die, sickness visits, faith is tried, and the saga rides to its conclusion.
Edward Trencom is the tenth-generation proprietor of Trencom’s cheese shop in London; with cellars full of the world’s finest cheeses and a royal appointment, the shop is known far and wide. The Trencoms themselves are known the world over, as well, for their famous noses which are able to discern where and when a specific cheese was made, and even the cow which provided the milk for it. They are also known for the distinctive appearance of their noses: long, aquiline, with a circular bump on the bridge. These noses made Trencom’s famous, and they also have caused trouble in every generation. Beginning in 1666, with Humphrey Trencom’s fateful voyage to Constantinople, up to 1969, when Edward Trencom realizes it is indeed odd that the Trencom males all suffer ghastly deaths abroad—in Greece, usually—the tale of the Trencom nose unfolds.
Giles Milton, known for his non-fiction writing (Nathaniel’s Nutmeg) is witty, Wodehouse-like, and very wryly British in his fiction debut. Though the international intrigue may be far-fetched, Milton’s matter-of-fact recounting of Edward’s adventures as he meets a mysterious stranger, which then leads to a desire to learn more about his family history, and in turn to a very dangerous trip abroad—to Greece, no less—keeps readers engaged and entertained. There’s a lot of (cheese) name-dropping and some well-placed ribbing of the snobbery inherent in the artisan cheese industry, to boot, so it’s best to read this with some snacks handy, and I’m not talking about Velveeta on a Ritz.
Helene Williams
Although rife with incident and remembered incident from the previous two books, because there’s plenty of telling and talking but little showing, characters and plot tend to remain flat on the page. Sloppy editing leads to oft-repeated phrases and words. This story of good people who trust in their faith and “are always there for” each other might become tedious, even in its dramatic setting.
Eileen Charbonneau
THE QUALITY OF MERCY
David Roberts, Carroll & Graf, 2006, $24.95, hb, 229pp, 0786718404 / Constable & Robinson, 2006, £17.99, hb, 256pp, 1845293169
The Quality of Mercy is the latest entry in the mystery series featuring a seemingly unlikely pair: British aristocrat Lord Edward Corinth and Communist journalist Verity Browne. In 1938, Verity is on assignment in Austria, but Hitler’s takeover of the country forces her to leave. Before her departure, she and Edward help a young Jewish man, Georg Dreiser, escape to England. Georg knows of German plans to build an atomic bomb, and intends to report to the British government. But he is found dead at Lord Mountbatten’s estate, Broadlands, not long after Edward’s nephew had found the body of a painter during a weekend party there. The police treat both deaths as accidents, but Edward and Verity are not so sure. While they investigate, Verity finally realizes what her friends have known for a long time: that she loves Edward.
This is the first book I had read in this series, and I found it delightful, although one scene is perhaps more disturbing than you would expect to find in a light mystery. Roberts depicts the attitudes of the times, especially the sympathy towards the Nazis among certain members of the British aristocracy, very effectively.
Vicki Kondelik
PAPER TIGER
Olivier Rolin (trans. William Cloonan), Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2007, $17.95, pb, 203pp, 9780803289994
Paper Tiger is the first English translation of acclaimed French novelist Rolin. The past becomes present over a night when a survivor of the 1968 Paris uprising takes his friend’s (known as “Thirteen”) now 24-year-old daughter on an odyssey of the heart, mind and spirit of “The Cause,” the radical group to which they both belonged.
On their journey, the narrator struggles to explain who the members of “The Cause” were, what they thought they were doing, and what happened to each over the years. On the way subjects as wide apart as how the nature of beauty works inherently against equality, and how the young radicals were fueled by tragic images (“Making the Revolution was not so much preparing to take power as learning to die”) surface, as the unlikely pair visit old haunts and attend a gathering of The Cause.
Told in an impressionistic, existential, stream-of-consciousness style, Paper Tiger’s not always coherent or sober narrator presents a challenge that not every reader will have patience to endure. But for those who do, rewards of brilliance in imagery, characterization, and style emerge occasionally.
Eileen Charbonneau
LOCKE 1928
Shawna Yang Ryan. El Leon Literary Arts, 2007, $15.00, pb, 230pp, 9780976298397
“…Even with her hands over her ears, Poppy hears voices…Through her twenties, the other abilities had intensified: now she can hear the people crying out from their graves or back from the future, and can sniff out a person’s secrets.”
Welcome to the wistful, image-ridden, seductive, inspiring, and destructive world of Chinese immigrants living in a small California town in the early 1900s. Meet characters who dare to dream big and find pleasure only in ephemeral moments, such as sexual connections or the drama following the arrival of two strange Chinese women. Each character’s story weaves between the past and present, such as Richard Fong’s vision of starting his own gambling business. How surprised he will be by the arrival of his wife, Ming Wai, whom he has not seen in many, many years? Chloe, a teenage white prostitute, describes the horrific outcome of a New York visit and the acceptance she found here. Or perhaps one might be intrigued by the preacher and his wife who shelter the Chinese newcomers and hear their “stories,” knowing well that who they are in this town is all that really matters for the well-being of all. And
what does a terrible disaster mean for those who died and those who survive?
The stories in Locke 1928 are uniquely portrayed by this very talented writer. Vivid and surreal imagery of water, fire, and air parallels the changing world of Chinese immigrants trying to forge a new world that entices and frightens them by turn. Ryan’s evocative descriptions are poetic, elucidating how these proud, strong men and women see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and dream America. A beautiful first novel.
Viviane Crystal
COLD SKIN
Albert Sánchez Piñol (trans. Cheryl Leah Morgan), Canongate, 2007, £7.99, pb, 233pp, 9781841959009
Just after the Great War, a man arrives at a remote, sub-Antarctic island where he is to be a weather observer. He finds no sign of his predecessor, but only meets Gruner, a deranged castaway inhabiting the lighthouse. Although the small island appears to be the site of an unsolved crime, the unnamed protagonist blithely tells the ship’s captain to leave him there. On the first night, his cottage is stormed by humanoid creatures who emerge from the sea. He barely survives their siege. The next morning he begs Gruner for asylum in the fortress-like lighthouse, but Gruner refuses—until the protagonist kidnaps Gruner’s female humanoid ‘mascot’ and holds her captive. Thus the two men begin their uneasy truce, banding together to fight the monsters’ onslaught and battling each other over copulation rights with the ‘mascot.’ Slowly the protagonist begins to see the human in the coldskinned enemy and the monsters become noble savages in his eye. Meanwhile Gruner plots the creatures’ destruction.
In the hands of someone like Stephen King, this might have been an entertaining, if farfetched, caper. However, this is meant to be literary fiction, and it takes itself far too seriously. The result is, in turns, clichéd, nauseating, and unintentionally hilarious. A lurid, overwritten cocktail of rape, zoophilia, gore, and macho posturing.
Mary Sharratt
THE INNOCENTS
Caroline Seebohm, Algonquin, 2007, $23.95/ C$31.95, hb, 288pp, 1565125002.
Sensitive, sheltered twins Iris and Dorothea Crosby are deeply affected when circumstances lead them to help in the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. They are reclusive, poetic characters who shun the parties and glitter of New York society and have always turned to each other for comfort and company. When the Great War breaks out in France shortly after the fire, the twins seek to bring meaning to their lives by volunteering as nurses at the front. The horrors they witness change them forever, and make returning to their former life impossible.
Seebohm’s slim, haunting book is more than a chronicle of American upper-class guilt over the suffering of humanity. It is a searing glimpse into the effect that a senseless war can have on susceptible human beings. Through
clever manipulation of voices and point of view, Seebohm lays the souls of the twins bare, drawing the reader into the vortex of their tragic world view.
The author’s clear, elegant prose is at first somewhat distancing, as she lays out the setting from which the twins depart. But as the reader progresses through the novel, the quickly sketched-in opening with its reportage style is reinterpreted—like the exposition of a symphony—by what follows.
So often, historical novels that focus on minor characters in great events can seem peripheral and contrived. But Seebohm succeeds entirely in giving us a unique perspective on a tragedy of vast proportions in human history.
Susanne Dunlap
THE VISIBLE WORLD
Mark Slouka, Houghton Mifflin, 2007, $24/C$32.95, hb, 256pp, 9780618756438 / Portobello, 2007, £14.99, hb, 9781846270857
This is a book about a love triangle, one woman loved by two men. It should be tense and fraught with conflict. Instead it is a gentle, lyrical read, the story told by the now-adult son as he struggles to understand, to find out what was the one secret his parents kept from him, that so affected them all. He grew up knowing that his parents fled the German invasion of their country. He knew the myths and songs of their Czechoslovakian homeland and spoke the language, yet he had no idea that his parents had been involved in the Resistance assassination of the Nazi Butcher of Prague, Reinhard Heydrich. Not only that, but his mother loved one of the assassins and was loved in return. That was a simple explanation for her grief. There was so much more to discover.
The story weaves its way through the son’s childhood recollections, visits to Prague as an adult, and the discovery and retelling of his mother’s love story up to the assassination. His father, the other man, stands on the edge of the story waiting until, finally, the girl he loves returns.
The novel has autobiographical elements. Slouka is Czech himself, and his mother did indeed love and lose a resistance fighter during the Second World War. His father and grandfather were also involved in the Czech resistance, but this is not autobiography, it is fiction. For those who do not know the story of the Czech resistance, then this novel is a good introduction. For those who like to try and fathom human relationships and that powerful emotion, love, this almost dispassionate retelling of a special love story is well worth reading. Patrika Salmon
THE BLANCHARD BROTHERS FILM COMPANY
R.D. Snowcroft, Hampshire House, 2007, $21.95/C$29.95, hb, 208pp, 0963681478
It’s hard to imagine a time when box office numbers for the weekend didn’t dominate Monday’s news and movie stars’ lives weren’t obsessively chronicled more than those of world leaders, but The Blanchard Brothers Film
Company reminds the reader that there was indeed such a time. In 1911, Estelle Harrison, a stage actress down on her luck, answers an ad to appear in a moving picture. So embarrassed is she at this supposed comedown that when she runs into an acquaintance on the way, both pretend they are on their way to other errands.
Estelle and her acquaintance, Margaret Eagan, soon become players in the film company and enlist, respectively, one’s lover and the other’s husband to join them. Movie making at the beginning of last century was a far different proposition than what it is in this century. Everyone—actors, actresses, directors, and even seamstresses—joined in creating story ideas, directing, and camera work. This was the likely precursor to later movies whose theme was “hey kids, let’s put on a show!”
The book follows the various actors and actresses and their rise and fall in this new medium, and while no character stands out among the rest, Snowcroft deftly evokes the various portraits of film industry “types.” There is the dissolute leading man whose career dries up when he loses his looks, the ingénue who snags him but can’t keep him, the actress who approaches her career with more consideration—all are recognizable without being stereotypes. As another reminder of how much has changed since film’s early days, the industry was first located in the Northeast rather than on the West Coast. Although set a mere one hundred years ago, this book reminds us that the movie industry has changed so dramatically as to make this ancient history, and I mean that as a compliment!
Ellen Keith
A FALSE MIRROR
Charles Todd, Morrow, 2007, $23.95/C$29.95, hb, 372pp, 9780060786731
Ninth in Todd’s series featuring Inspector Ian Rutledge, a Scotland Yard inspector and shellshocked veteran of the Great War, this outing finds Rutledge in Hampton Regis, summoned by a fellow veteran who is under suspicion for savagely beating the husband of his former love. Mallory, the suspect, is not a friend, though, earning Rutledge’s scorn for having used family ties to get mustered out of the war.
Rutledge’s cases are usually in country settings where he is alone, without the backing of Scotland Yard, and viewed with suspicion by the locals. But, he is never really alone, having the voice of Hamish, a Scottish soldier whose execution for desertion he had ordered, in his head. Rutledge has resigned himself to hearing Hamish for the rest of his life and fans of the series see Hamish as an integral part however much Rutledge may wish otherwise.
I was utterly engrossed in this mystery right up until the end, where the revelation of the murderer (there are two murders in addition to the beating) felt rushed and unconvincing. Still, the strengths of the series are in full view: tormented but sympathetic characters, a perfectly rendered illustration of a community, and more discoveries about Rutledge himself.
Ellen Keith
BROKEN JOURNEY
Janet Woods, Severn House, 2007, £18.99/$28.95, hb, 231pp, 978072786956
The story begins in 1944, when Jilly makes friends with evacuee Alec who lives on a farm in their Dorset village. When his father dies he is sent to an orphanage, and then to Australia, while Jilly grows up with a feckless mother and a father damaged by wartime service. When she becomes pregnant at seventeen she has no option but to give the baby boy for adoption. Secretly she longs to find her lost son, despite her otherwise happy marriage.
Janet Woods writes with gentle sympathy for her characters. They suffer but surmount tragedies, without the unrelenting angst we find in some sagas. It is a delightful, quiet but convincing love story.
Marina Oliver
THE SEVENTH GATE
Richard Zimler, Constable, 2007, £7.99, pb, 577pp, 9781845294878
Set mostly in 1930s Berlin, Richard Zimler’s latest novel charts the experiences of Sophie Reidsel, a thoroughly likeable and feisty young woman maturing in the nasty hothouse of National Socialism. It is a very familiar tale as the Nazis and their increasingly rabid supporters turned the screw on those not seen to be suitable for a part in the new One Thousand Year Reich – these included disabled and Jewish people. Sophie’s autistic brother Hansi and her Jewish friends, sooner or later, come under the chilling attention of the Nazi rulers and their unpleasant adherents.
Sophie’s friendship with an assorted bunch of outsiders and her love affair with elderly Isaac, a Jewish man concerned with investigating essential and arcane Kabbalistic truths, place her firmly in the centre of the resistance to Nazism. The alienation she feels towards her parents and in particular her father’s Damascene conversion from Communism to Nazism pushes her further towards the dangerous margins of the new Germany. Eventually, she leaves and finds a new life with some of her more fortunate friends abroad.
Sophie is an engaging creation but somehow just not really believable as a young girl and woman in 1930s Berlin. The plot chugs along at a fair pace and the tale is moving but I certainly did not feel that I learned anything new or different about Nazi Germany, and the Kabbalistic elements seem unnecessary. An easy and entertaining read despite its length, but it is not literary fiction.
Doug Kemp
SOMEWHERE IN GERMANY
Stefanie Zweig (trans. Marlies Comjean), Univ. of Wisconsin/Terrace, 2006, $24.95, hb, 261pp, 9780299210106
This is the sequel to Nowhere in Africa, which told the story of the Redlich’s family’s flight from Nazi Germany to the relative safety of Kenya. Here the Redlichs return to their home city of Frankfurt after nine years of exile, only to find that as Jews and refugees they are doubly
unwelcome. The novel follows the development of husband Walter, wife Jette, daughter Regina and son Max over a period of several years as they adjust to postwar life and slowly growing prosperity, though the shadows of the war and the Holocaust continue to haunt them.
The trouble with autobiographical novels is that they tend to follow the patterns of real life, and can end up as slow, repetitive, mundane and frustrating as real life as a result. Especially in the beginning, it’s difficult to get a clear sense of each character’s voice and personality. The rotating points of view help somewhat, but there’s no central conflict driving the action, and little suspense or tension to be resolved. Things simply happen and are described with a minimum of showing and a maximum of telling. Some extremely long and/or convoluted sentences make the narrative feel terse and plain (“The Maases’ daughter, robust, athletic, and sociable, was unable to relate to Regina’s reserved behavior, her seriousness, and her concern for her little brother, a feeling that was unfamiliar to an only child”). It’s hard to identify with any of the characters, or care whether they get what they want. Still, it’s an intensely vivid portrait of an era, and the time and place easily eclipse the characters. Worth reading as a historical study, if not a gripping family saga.
Val Perry
MULTI-PERIOD
THE PHYSICIAN’S TALE
Ann Benson, Delacorte, 2006, $24.00/C$32.00, hb, 514pp, 0385335059
The Physician’s Tale is the last entry in a trilogy spanning seven centuries and two continents (14th century Europe and 21st century North America). Linked by the plague and the journal of a medieval physician, the two storylines alternate by chapters. The historical part centers on Alejandro Canches, a Jewish physician who must leave his practice and his loved ones to travel incognito from France to England to free his foster daughter from the clutches of King Edward III and reunite her with her young son. The modern tale focuses on the aftermath of two waves of the plague that have decimated mankind and left pockets of survivors struggling to cope in a post-technological world while trying to ward off the threat of a third plague caused by ‘the Coalition’, a group of religious extremists.
Both worlds come to life because of the vivid and well-detailed settings, but mostly because they are peopled with interesting characters, including a few historical ones: King Edward, Chaucer, and Guy De Chauliac, all of whom act in a credible manner. The plots unfold seamlessly and bring insight to medical beliefs and practices, both then and now. People struggle in their social and physical prisons, whether a royal palace or various enclaves where they’re forced to let go of their previous lives and careers to cope with basic survival. Salvation comes through a child, Alex, a product of both eras, so that the past holds the key to the future.
The book stands well by itself, but I can’t
help but feel, through multiple allusions to what has happened earlier, that my pleasure could have been heightened by reading the trilogy (The Plague Tales and The Burning Road were the first two volumes) in order. But don’t let the subject of the plague deter you from such a rich and rewarding read.
Nicole Leclerc
THIS BREATHING WORLD
Jose Luis de Juan (trans. Martin Schifino and Selina Packard), Arcadia, 2007, £11.99, pb, 238pp, 190085080X
This novel encompasses two mirrored stories: one set in 1st Century Rome, the other in 1950s Harvard. The Roman narrative tells of Mazuf, Syrian slave and “lover of boys,” who rises from being a lowly scribe to a celebrated man of letters. He makes his mark by manipulating the texts he is transcribing, surreptitiously editing and correcting them, becoming a ventriloquist and secret author. He is also a murderer who is never punished for his crime. When he gains his freedom, he trains his young lover-apprentices to correct and edit the works of such authors as Ovid, Virgil, and Herodotus, as a reminder that history itself can be rewritten and transformed.
The theme of pederasty continues in the Harvard narrative as 19-year-old Laurence becomes the lover and protégé of a powerful older man in the university library. He also becomes obsessed with Jonathan, a brilliant young man his own age, who is driven by masochistic desires that Laurence is only too willing to fulfil. Jonathan attempts to alter history by cutting apart and reassembling the pages of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Then Laurence murders him.
The author’s unflinching examination of the dark side of male homoeroticism is the novel’s strongest point and brings to mind the work of Alan Hollinghurst. Unfortunately, on a literary and philosophical level, the novel falls flat, at least in this particular translation. The firstperson American narrative for the Harvard sequence reads very obviously as a translated text, featuring such howlers as, ‘He didn’t have an Arizona accent.’ The author tends to indulge himself: his characters converse in flowery speeches and there are so many library orgies that one grows bored. An ambitious novel, nonetheless, that might have been much more powerful in the original language.
Mary Sharratt
MURDER, ’ORRIBLE MURDER
Amy Myers, Crippen and Landru, 2006, $18.00, pb, 243pp, 1932009515
Victorian English detectives have their place in history, but what about the other end of the social spectrum, a chimney sweep who finds clues where others are afraid to look? Or a Greek goddess as sleuth? And who better to see the low deeds of high society than the vigilant master chef attending to details of his haute cuisine? All are present in Amy Myers’s delightful book of short stories, written with historical detail as well as a magnifying glass put to human foibles.
After her ebullient introduction, the reader might be tempted to swallow the book in one gulp, but resist! Each story must be savored. Master chef Auguste Didier, apprenticed to the great Escoffier, solves puzzles within the upper classes with the care he takes for a perfect soufflé. Goddess Aphrodite exerts cleverness and sexy powers to reveal murderous culprits on Mt. Olympus. Yet all is not merely fun and food. Chimney sweep Tom Wasp and his “chummy” Ned, who work the sordid side of London, use their unique perspective to reveal clues among the poor when murder stymies the disinterested “pigmen” (police). The author makes this book a contagious delight. Tess Allegra
THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE HOLY SHROUD
Julia Navarro (trans. Andrew Hurley), John Murray, 2007, £10.99, pb, 399pp, 9780719562532 / Bantam, 2006, $23.00, hb, 416pp, 9780385339629
Modern-day Turin. A fire breaks out inside the Cathedral but is quickly extinguished before it can do much damage – but it happened dangerously near to the Turin Shroud. Marco Valoni of the Art Crimes Department is called in to investigate, as this is not the first unexplained incident to threaten the Shroud. Woven into the 21st century story, the Shroud’s history is traced back to its earliest time when it was believed to have been used to wrap Christ’s body after the Crucifixion. After the Resurrection, it was taken to Edessa, to King Abgar who was suffering from leprosy but cured by touching the Shroud. When Abgar eventually died, it was hidden away since his son had threatened to destroy it and stayed hidden until it was taken to Byzantium around 944. It finally ended up in Turin in the 19th century. Also involved in the tale are the Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud and the Templars.
I enjoyed it very much, but it does have marked overtones of The Da Vinci Code.
Marilyn Sherlock
CONSOLATION
Michael Redhill, Little, Brown, 2007, hb, $24.99, 340pp, 0316734985 / William Heinemann, 2007, hb, £15.99, 480pp, 0434011797
Consolation revolves around a set of glass photographic negatives (and their prints) that bear images of early Toronto. The glass plates were being returned from an exhibition in London when the boat they were on sank. These plates may or may not exist...
The narrative alternates between two different times, present-day (1997) Toronto and Toronto in the mid-1850s. The characters involved are all prevented somehow from doing what they feel they were meant to do with their lives. Different as they are, the two sets of characters form integral parts of the story that parallel and mesh across their chronology. Marianne Hollis and John Lewis know they must witness the test of her late husband’s theory because— even if David’s supposition is true—present concerns may prevent the plates’ existence from
ever being properly verified. In the storyline involving the past, former apothecary Jem Hallam and widow Claudia Rowe take over the work of photographer Samuel Ennis by several accidents of fate.
Author Michael Redhill has fashioned a story that shifts easily between past and present, though his novel’s finest moments are found within the 19th century passages. His characters suffer the absence of family yet manage to find strength beyond. Through the book’s fascinating journey, Redhill shows us that how we look at the past can tell us much about ourselves.
Janette King
TIME-SLIP
WHISPERS FROM THE GRAVE
Kim Murphy, Coachlight, 2007, $15.95, pb, 276pp, 9780971679054
Chris Olsen arrives at Poplar Ridge, a rambling Virginia plantation house, for a visit with her best friend, Judith Cameron. During the Civil War, the mansion had operated as a Union hospital. Chris soon discovers that a mystery and ghosts from that era still haunt the mysterious mansion and its residents. During her stay, Chris develops a strong attraction to Judith’s brother, Geoff. She also begins to experience visions of the past that include an angry woman named Margaret and a black stallion with a star on its head.
As Chris and Geoff grow increasingly fond of each other, more secrets are revealed. The ghosts of a one-eyed scout and a Confederate soldier with a strong resemblance to Geoff become more and more persistent. Chris and Geoff fall deeply in love, but Chris is faced with a dilemma: can she give up her life as a Boston attorney to move to rural Virginia? Gradually, through the ghost of Margaret, Chris unravels the dreadful mysteries and secrets of the plantation house’s dark past.
The author has skillfully woven this dangerous love triangle with elements of the paranormal and the brutality of America’s Civil War. Although the story is more contemporary than historical, it is well written and captures the reader’s attention from the very start. I highly recommend this novel to anyone who is an aficionado of the Civil War era or who enjoys a gut-gripping, heart-wrenching ghost story.
N n N n
Mirella Patzer
ALTERNATE HISTORY
PEARL HARBOR: A Novel of December 8th Newt Gingrich and William R. Fortschen, Thomas Dunne, 2007, $25.95/C$31.95, hb, 384pp, 0312363508
First in what is sure to be a great series, this alternate history tale starts way back in 1934 at Etajima, the Japanese naval academy. It poses the question: what if Yamamoto himself had led the attack on Pearl Harbor and decided to press his luck with more than two attack waves? The answer to that question and the basis for Yamamoto’s presence are influenced by events
Alternate History-Children & YA
which happened during the previous decade: the internal struggle that brought the military into power, the development of naval air power even as the United States and Great Britain sought to limit Japan’s naval strength, and Japan’s own growing imperialism.
This is alternate history at its best, although I use the word “alternate” lightly, as this tale, much like this duo’s previous Civil War series, really only tweaks history in one small way and then develops an entirely plausible scenario from there. The subtitle gives a hint of one such tweak. And while the authors use most of this book to build the background for this alternate view, the dénouement is well worth the wait. I’m sure the remainder of the series will be equally so.
Mark F. Johnson
CHILDREN & YOUNG ADULT
KILLING MISS KITTY AND OTHER SINS
Marion Dane Bauer, Clarion, 2007, $16, hb, 176pp, 9780618690008
Five short stories about Claire, an adolescent in a northern Illinois mill town in the 1950s, make up this book. With brief, powerful strokes, Bauer outlines pivotal moments in Claire’s life. She befriends the town’s only black girl and has her eyes opened to northern segregation. In navigating a new school where her only friend is a fellow misfit, she has a brief flirtation with being “saved.” In the title story, her mother proves to be much less sentimental about pets than she is. She learns that confirmation into the church does not absolve sin. And finally, at fifteen, she experiences her first crush… on a female teacher.
Bauer writes in a completely authentic
adolescent girl’s voice and notes in the afterword that the stories are drawn from her own experiences. The first story, the befriending of Dorinda, is especially poignant as Claire not only faces the town’s bigotry but her own unwitting racism. The book touches on very serious subjects, subjects that are not inappropriate for young readers but will make them think. And, adults will find themselves riveted—I was! Ages 11 and up.
Ellen Keith
THE RISING STAR OF RUSTY NAIL
Lesley M. M. Blume, Knopf, 2007, $15.99/ C$21.00, hb, 288pp, 9780375835247
Poor Franny Hansen. It’s 1953, and she’s ten years old and stuck in Rusty Nail, Minnesota. Already known as a gifted pianist, she fears, however, destined to live life performing only at church events and school assemblies as nothing good ever happens in her dull and boring town. Dull and boring, that is, until a real live Russian Commie moves there! Thinking this woman could be her ticket out, she soon finds herself at odds with her official Number-One Class-A Enemy: Nancy Orilee. Things get even worse when she ends up fighting with her best friend, Sandy, too. All Franny wants is to have something interesting happen to her. Oh, and beat Nancy Orilee at playing the piano.
The Rising Star of Rusty Nail is simply fun, overdramatic, and laugh-out-loud funny. For its intended audience of children ages 8-12, the opening segment where the best friends drop water balloons on townsfolk is enough to keep the pages turning until they get to the juicy part of the story. Then, they’ll get to the end and realize that they learned something about stereotypes and standing up for what’s right. Adult readers will even find themselves laughing (quietly, of course) and probably
Y MAGDALEN RISING: The Beginning Elizabeth Cunningham, Monkfish, 2007, $24.95, hb, 404pp, 0976684322
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Raised on the mythical Isle of Women by eight weatherwitching mothers and no father but the sea god, Maeve the Red first catches a glimpse of her cosmic twin in the reflection of a pool. Caught disturbing the scholars in Jerusalem’s temple with his impertinent questions “about my father’s business,” the boy of her vision is told by the old prophetess Anna to leave his people and seek wisdom among the distant Keltoi. Pursuit of their conjoined fates brings them to the druidic school, where ancient wisdom abounds, along with dark violence erupting from a hidden past.
This novel is not for everyone. Strict Christians may want to stoke the bonfire to Fahrenheit 451 at the very notion of Jesus of Nazareth meeting Maeve—to become his lover Mary Magdalene—while at druid school on the sacred Isle of Mona. Historical novel purists may bang the far wall with the book at the constant, conscious anachronisms, which are a fair part of the book’s charm and easily explained by reincarnation.
For me, however, this is the best book I’ve read in a decade: beautiful, witty, wise, fearless in facing the hardest issues. The poetry on every page is all we’ve ever imagined of bards who could reportedly turn the tide. The magic is visceral and as earthy as roasted hazelnuts. Cunningham has written Celtic circles around Marion Zimmer Bradley. Ann Chamberlin
keeping two fingers crossed as well that Franny finds a way to finally beat her archenemy! (If for no other reason than to know that it can happen – even if it didn’t for us.)
In fact, as readers of all ages will be cheering for Franny, one can almost picture mothers and daughters (or dads and sons) snuggled up on the sofa taking turns reading chapters out loud and giggling together. Find a copy (or two) and start reading with your kids today!
Dana Cohlmeyer
JOURNEY TO THE ALAMO
Melodie A. Cuate, Texas Tech Univ. Press, 2006, $15.95, hb, 138pp, 9780896725928
Seventh-grade teacher Mr. Barrington proffers a trunk full of historical artifacts to help Hannah Taylor write a report on Texas history. The trunk magically transports Hannah, her brother Nick, and her friend Jackie back in time to the 1836 siege preceding the Battle of the Alamo. The children meet David Crockett, William Travis, Susannah Dickinson, and other major historical figures on the Texian side of the conflict. As the day of the battle dawns, they realize they must find the missing trunk and return to the 21st century, or risk being trapped inside the Alamo when the battle is lost and slaughter begins.
Cuate is capitalizing on the current popularity of magic in children’s fiction to stimulate interest in history for middle-level readers. She succeeds in creating excitement during the climax, when the children can’t find the trunk and risk their lives. The rest is less successful. The plot tugs the children from one personage to another in succession, without giving the reader more than a superficial introduction. Hannah is supposed to be the protagonist, but Nick is the one who performs the crucial actions. I hope future volumes of Mr. Barrington’s Mysterious Trunk series will take more time to develop the characters.
B.J. Sedlock
PRISON SHIP
Paul Dowswell, Bloomsbury, 2006, £12.99, hb, 314pp, 0747577056 / Bloomsbury USA, 2006, $16.95, 300pp, hb, 1582346763
1803. In this second Sam Witchell adventure, 15-year-old Sam is an experienced ‘powder monkey’ aboard HMS Elephant. The battle of Copenhagen is imminent and Lord Nelson himself is on board. In the heat of battle, Sam and his friend Richard are set up for a crime they didn’t commit. Narrowly escaping hanging, they are sentenced to transportation and find themselves on a prison ship heading for Australia.
At first, convict life isn’t too bad, especially as they are both literate, a rare skill in the penal colony. But then an old enemy appears and, suddenly, their future becomes very precarious indeed…
Paul Dowswell has the ability to tell a rattling good story and, at the same time, give the readers a real feel for what life must have been like at the time: the terror of being in the middle of a 19th century naval battle, especially as Sam’s job involves carrying highly combustible gunpowder; the filth and corruption aboard the
notorious hulks; and the horror of being lost in the outback with dwindling food supplies, etc., all brought vividly to life.
This book would, in fact, make an excellent introduction to the early settlement of Australia, life in Nelson’s navy, or the brutal punishments of a period when an 8-year-old child could be hanged for a minor theft.
My one niggle is that occasionally Sam seems more a coat hanger on which to hang various adventures than a real person. I know it helps the plot, but, all the same, I couldn’t quite believe in Sam and Richard’s stupidity in the penal colony. I’d certainly like to see more evidence of Sam maturing as a person and learning from his mistakes.
Still, this is a terrific read which should appeal to boys (and some girls) of 10 plus.
Elizabeth Hawksley
WILLIAM
HENRY IS A FINE NAME
Cathy Gohlke, Moody, 2006, $12.99, pb, 250pp, 9780802499738
This young adult novel follows the comingof-age story of Robert in the summer of 1859. His best friend, William Henry, a freed black boy, and both of their fathers are involved in helping escaping slaves on the Underground Railroad, something they have tried to keep Robert from knowing. Robert slowly comes to understand not only the dangers they face, but the opinions of his mother and her family who are slave holders. When William Henry sacrifices his own life to keep the Railroad safe, Robert has to decide if he is brave enough to help one of his own grandfather’s slaves to freedom.
The inspirational elements may be a bit much for some secular classrooms, and I have to say I didn’t quite buy why a white boy had to go along on the trip. A black point-of-view would certainly be more intensely life-and-death, but also, perhaps more commonly executed. The moral dilemma slavery presented to white people of conscience could use this exposure.
Ann Chamberlin
SNAKEHEAD
Ann Halam, Orion, 2007, £9.99, hb, 224pp, 9781842555262
This is a stylish and fascinating retelling of the Medusa myth. Ann Halam has given the ancient Greek story a thoroughly modern twist, with Perseus speaking like a teenager of today and the introduction of a host of deliberate and amusing anachronisms. For instance, the God Zeus, Perseus’s father, appears as captain of a sleek modern yacht and orders a meal of fish and chips (though I was glad to see that he ate it with a healthy side salad).
On the island of Serifos, “Papa Dicty”, elder brother of the wicked king Polydectes, runs a taverna, and this is where Perseus lives with his mother Danae. One day, on the seafront, he meets a beautiful and enigmatic girl, Andromeda, who will join with him in a quest that fulfils both their mythic destinies. Ann Halam follows the original myth fairly closely in its essentials, but the main difference is in the character of
Andromeda. She is no helpless victim, but a proud and powerful Ethiopian princess. The story unfolds at a fast pace, and all the different parts of the Medusa and Pegasus myths are tied up in a satisfying way by the end. Those who are familiar with these myths will be intrigued to see how they have been used and re-interpreted; but it is not necessary to know the originals at all in order to enjoy this exciting, mysterious and unusual story.
Ann Turnbull
CRACKER! THE BEST DOG IN VIETNAM
Cynthia Kadohata, Atheneum, 2007, $10.99, pb, 320pp, 9781416906377
Cracker, a failed show dog, can no longer live with the family of her eleven-year-old master, Willie. Desperate to keep her alive, Willie spies a newspaper ad telling of an urgent need for dogs in Vietnam. Harboring a dream of Cracker becoming “the best dog in Vietnam,” Willie convinces his parents to donate her to the Army’s dog training program. Once there, Cracker languishes, until meeting her unlikely new master, a gung-ho young soldier named Rick. Together they set out, in Rick’s words, “to whip the world.” That’s quite all right with Cracker, who considers herself all-powerful, and acts accordingly. Man and dog go through a rugged training, where they progress as a team from the worst in the group to nearly the best. Once in ’Nam, the pair excel. Cracker proves to be proficient not only at finding mines and booby traps, but enemy fighters as well. In mission after mission, the pair proves their value, saving countless lives in the process. Finally they earn a dangerous assignment with the Special Forces. Rick has his chance at last to “whip the world,” with the “best dog in Vietnam” at his side.
This is a quality story, at once heart warming and realistic. The author does a superb job of telling it from two perspectives, that of both Rick and Cracker. The dog’s viewpoint is particularly effective—one begins to feel like Rick, who is as one with his dog. The author’s research is such that the reader will come away with an excellent appreciation of the work of scout dog teams in Vietnam, particularly a clear understanding of their life saving abilities in the middle of a devastating war. Recommended for middle-grade through adult.
Ken Kreckel
THE LAST GIRLS OF POMPEII
Kathryn Lasky, Viking, 2007, $15.99/C$20.00, 192pp, 9780670061969
The Last Girls of Pompeii is set, as the title implies, in 79 AD, during the final days of the ill-fated Roman city. Julia is the privileged youngest daughter of a wealthy and influential patrician family, yet her deformity – a withered arm – means she is at best an embarrassment, at worst, cursed by the gods. Her best friend, Sura, in contrast, is beautiful and confident – and also her personal slave. However, their discovery of the terrible plans that Julia’s parents have for both of them brings home the point that no
young woman in Roman society is truly free. And in the background, Vesuvius, waking from centuries of sleep, is about to teach every citizen of Pompeii that no one is master of his or her fate.
Lasky’s choice of subject for the period is original, though the fact of Julia’s deformity is at times overplayed. The life and culture of Pompeii are recreated in detail; she manages to take us through almost every aspect of daily life in the course of the novel without her descriptions seeming overly contrived. The complex relationship between mistress and slave is also particularly well elucidated.
The conclusion to the novel moved a little too swiftly, and I felt that at least some of the characters deserved the possible happier endings implied by the storyline. However, it was a hit in my house; my daughter, whose review is below, read it through twice in one go. The novel’s historical accuracy would make it an entertaining supplement to a classical or history curriculum.
For advanced readers aged 10-11, and young adults. Parents of younger readers should be advised that it contains a few references to sexuality.
Susan Cook
The Last Girls of Pompeii is a very good book. It told me many things I did not know about the Roman culture. I have read other novels set in the Roman times, and this was by far the easiest to understand. Julia is my favorite character because she is strong and determined. I would certainly recommend this book for people interested in reading Roman novels.
Magdalen Dobson, age 10
THE SIRENS OF SURRENTUM
Caroline Lawrence, Orion, 2006, £8.99, hb, 259pp, 1842552554
AD 80. Italy. In this, Lawrence’s eleventh Roman Mystery, Flavia, Nubia, Jonathan and Lupus, are invited to the Villa Limona on the Bay of Naples by their friend, Pulchra. There is a mystery she wants them to solve: who is trying to poison her mother, Polla?
They arrive to find a house party is planned. Three attractive widows and three young bachelors are coming – all guests the last time Polla was poisoned. This time, Flavia vows, they will discover which of them did it.
The Bay of Naples was notorious for its loose-living reputation, and Villa Limona fully lives up to it. Soon the four children succumb to the sexually-charged atmosphere. Flavia, rising eleven, sighs over Pulchra’s father, the handsome Felix; the widows sunbathe in the nude and the boys sneak off to catch a glimpse; Felix’s beautiful slave girls eye him lustfully and several of the child slaves look suspiciously like him. Felix may be handsome, but, as Flavia learns, his infidelity is making Polla very unhappy. But would he, or one of the widows who fancy him, poison Polla?
This series, aimed at 8-12 year olds, is widely used in schools. In previous books, Lawrence explores various aspects of Roman life, e.g.
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Y LETTERS FROM A SLAVE BOY: The Story of Joseph Jacobs
Mary E. Lyons, Atheneum, 2007, $15.99/C$19.99, 198pp, hb, 9780689878671
Having reworked the autobiography of Harriet Jacobs (escaped slave turned abolitionist and once as famous as Frederick Douglass) in Letters From a Slave Girl, awardwinning author Mary E. Lyons turns her pen to telling the story of Harriet’s son, Joseph. Beginning in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1839, Joseph secretly writes letters to his recently-escaped mother and others who are lost to him sharing the day-to-day details of his life. He soon learns hard lessons as his white friend, Josiah, is forbidden to see Joseph. Slowly realizing the stark reality of the world he inhabits, Joseph dreams of life with his mother up north. Lyons’s poignant handling of such emotional material is masterful. Readers are drawn into the drama of Joseph’s life and kept on tenterhooks wondering what crisis or adventure the next letter will bring. Imagining Joseph’s thoughts based on the scant letters and writings that survive, Lyons manages to convey the fear and uncertainty as well as the quiet dignity the Jacobs family embodied. At times both sad and humorous, Letters From a Slave Boy (as well as Letters From a Slave Girl) is an intriguing addition to the world of AfricanAmerican fiction for young people, with its portrayal of fighting against all odds, and is highly recommended.
the gladiators’ world. Here, it’s the Roman attitude to sex. I wouldn’t like to be the teacher explaining, ‘It wasn’t a child crying with pain. It was a woman crying with pleasure’ to a class of 8-year-olds.
I suspect that Lawrence is attempting a Jacqueline Wilson, but, sadly, it is beyond her power. Her forte lies in making Roman history accessible within a simple story, but, in my view, characterization is not her strong point. She lacks the skill to deal with children’s emerging sexuality, not to mention the adult ‘bedwrestling’, as she puts it. I cannot recommend it.
Elizabeth Hawksley
THE SILVER CUP
Constance Leeds, Viking, 2007, $16.99, hb, 224pp, 9780670061570
Anna lives in a small village between Speyer and Worms along the Rhine, and the time is 1095-96. Anna’s father is a trader, and when Anna accompanies him on a trip to Worms, she encounters Jews for the first time. Anna’s father is trading with a rich Jewish merchant, and Anna does not know what to make of this family who look so happy and so prosperous. Doesn’t everyone say Jews aren’t really human?
When Anna and her father return to Worms months later, they find that Count Emich and his marauding group of would-be Crusaders have just come through, slaughtering the Jews. Anna finds Leah, the Jewish girl she first saw in her happy family home, hiding and cowering in fear. Anna insists on bringing her home, lest she be sold into slavery, despite her father’s protests. Anna is ostracized by her entire village, and she and Leah fear for their safety. A way must be found for Leah to rejoin Jews elsewhere, as Leah refuses to convert.
The author has done a good job of recreating the time and the villagers’ attitudes, though as
Dana Cohlmeyer
she notes, this was hard, as the 11th century was a largely illiterate time. The dialogue is often wooden, but the story was engaging enough to carry me along. A glossary and list of foreign phrases is included.
Trudi E. Jacobson
LETTERS FROM A SLAVE GIRL: The Story of Harriet Jacobs
Mary E. Lyons, Simon Pulse, 2007, $5.99/ C$6.99, pb, 176pp, 0689800150
Through compelling letters to relatives and friends, Mary Lyons tells the story of Harriet Jacobs, a slave girl in the early 1800s. Harriet is a young girl at the start of the book, wishing and hoping for freedom as her mistress lies dying and promises to free her. The promise goes unfulfilled, and Harriet finds herself with new owners and new hardships. Lyons poignantly reveals the struggles of a slave girl and her journey to a free life in letters written in a southern black dialect and spelling patterns of a self-taught girl. Readers might just feel as if they’ve stumbled upon a journal in their attic, revealing a treasure left long ago. At the end of the book Lyons finishes Harriet’s story after she reaches her freedom. Photographs, bibliography, and a glossary further bring Harriet’s actual story to life. Ages 9-12.
Nancy Castaldo
DUCHESSINA: A Novel of Catherine De’Medici
Carolyn Meyer, Harcourt, 2007, $17.00, hb, 272pp, 9780152055882
Carolyn Meyer’s “Young Royals” series offers its readers the opportunity to both learn and be entertained by history’s most fascinating personages. Though geared toward a female audience, her books are accessible to both boys and girls, and she does an excellent job of not
deliberately omitting the less salutary aspects of life in a different age. In Duchessina, the fifth in the series, she brings to life young Catherine de’ Medici. Catherine became infamous for her alleged dark deeds in her later life; Meyer has elected to show us the forgotten duchessina in her formative years, which were full of tumult and drama.
From the deaths of her parents shortly after her birth, to the fall of the Medici in Florence and her captivity, followed by her arranged marriage to the son of François I of France, Catherine de Medici never knew a moment when her value as a political pawn was not integral to her survival. Meyer offers a touching look at Catherine in her childhood, when she spent two years as a hostage in besieged Florence, and illustrates her burgeoning attraction to an unattainable cousin as well as her awareness of her own importance and impotence when Pope Clement VII, a Medici relative, arranges her marriage and sends her to France. Her friendship with other girls in her retinue and candid maturity help carry the latter part of the book, which tackles the challenging subject of Catherine’s union to a man infatuated with his mistress.
This is an intelligent introduction to the life of a woman who became one of history’s most famous queens. Ages 14 and up.
C.W. Gortner
THE STONE LIGHT
Kai Meyer (trans. Elizabeth D. Crawford), Margaret K. McElderry, 2007, $16.95, hb, 350pp, 0689877897 / Egmont, 2006, £5.99, pb, 304pp, 1405216409
This second volume in the Dark Reflections Trilogy begins as teenage Venetian orphan Merle, bearing the mysterious Flowing Queen— Venice’s protecting spirit—and the powerful winged lion Vermithrax descend into Hell to seek help from its ruler, Lord Light. After thirty years of siege, Venice has been conquered by the Egyptian pharaoh and his army of mummy warriors, who have been raised from the dead by the priests of Horus on powerful, pyramidshaped machines called collectors. Now that the entire world, with the exception of the Czarist kingdom, is in Egyptian hands, it seems that only Lord Light will be able to save Venice. But, before they can reach him, Merle and Vermithrax must contend with the fearsome inhabitants of Hell, known as the Lilim. A further surprise awaits as they discover Lord Light’s true identity.
Meanwhile, Merle’s friend Serafin, formerly a master thief, has stayed behind in Venice and joined a group of street boys led by the beautiful sphinx Lalapeya in an attempt to break into the Doge’s palace and assassinate the pharaoh. But all is not as it seems, and Serafin will have a hard time distinguishing between friend and enemy.
The Stone Light is an excellent continuation of Kai Meyer’s inventive, fast-paced trilogy. But you should read the first volume, The Water Mirror, first, or you will be hopelessly confused, especially since Meyer puts us in the middle of the action at the very beginning and does not waste time explaining what has happened
before. Fans of the first book will welcome the return of old friends—not just the spunky main characters, but also Eft, the mermaid with human legs, and Junipa, the girl with mirror eyes who can see into other worlds. I cannot wait for the third installment. Ages 12 and up.
Vicki Kondelik
EDENVILLE OWLS
Robert B. Parker, Philomel, 2007, $17.99/ C$22.50, 224pp, hb, 9780399246562
Robert B. Parker, author of the best-selling “Spenser” series, has finally plunged into the world of young-adult fiction with Edenville Owls. Set in a Massachusetts coastal town just after the end of World War II, it tells the story of 14-year-old Bobby, his basketball team, the Edenville Owls, and his new (and very pretty) teacher, Miss Delaney. Having witnessed his teacher fighting with a mysterious man, he soon finds himself uncovering clues and working towards solving the mystery with his friend, Joanie (a distraction to be sure). What follows is oft described as a coming-of-age story. As Bobby and his teammates battle on – and off – the court, they all find themselves drawn into finding out the identity of the mystery man. Given Parker’s reputation, it’s hardly surprising to have such a well-crafted story with insightful characters. Fans of his Spenser novels could almost find themselves fighting the feeling that they’re reading a story from the famed detective’s youth. His incredible talent for setting a scene shines as always – one can almost smell the ocean and hear big-band music in the background – and his characters seem wise beyond their years. It’s so well-done, in fact, that one can practically hear the cameras rolling!
Intended for readers aged 12 and above, Parker fans would definitely enjoy Edenville Owls. The intended readers, however, could easily overlook this little gem as a quiet period piece. Hopefully, they’ll find it in later years after they’ve devoured his other books.
Dana Cohlmeyer
TAMAR
Mal Peet, Candlewick, 2007, $17.99/C$22.50, hb, 426pp, 9780763634889 / Walker, 2006, £7.99, pb, 1406303941
In 1944, two Dutch SOE agents return to occupied Holland on a mission to help the resistance. They are soon immersed in the daily drudgery of the spy trade, existing in a curious state composed of equal parts of fear and boredom. One, with the code name Tamar, renews a love with a beautiful farm girl named Marijke. The other descends into a drug-induced unreality. The lives of all are soon torn by secrets and betrayal.
In 1995, an English teenager named Tamar inherits a strange treasure from her granddad. It holds a stack of money, Nazi identity papers and a myriad of enigmatic clues, including some maps of the River Tamar in Cornwall. Hoping these items will explain her grandfather’s suicide, Tamar begins a quest which takes her not only across England, but back a half century as well, a journey which will change her life
forever.
Although this is a novel for young adults, there is nothing juvenile about it. Dealing with themes of passion and jealousy, love and possession, it crawls its way into the reader’s soul. Set against the backdrop of the terrible winter of 1944-45, when the Dutch literally starved while awaiting a liberation that refused to come, the tale centers on the ultimate tragedy of lives wasted. The injustice assaults the characters’ very humanity. As Marijke remarks, you can take anything unless you start to hope. Still, a glimmer of hope remains, in the form of a child yet unborn.
I wholeheartedly recommend this well written, meaningful tale to adults of all ages. Ken Kreckel
COME JUNETEENTH
Ann Rinaldi, Harcourt, 2007, $17.00, hb, 246pp, 9780152059477
Juneteenth is an official holiday in a number of U.S. states, commemorating the June 19, 1865, announcement in Texas that slavery had been abolished. White Texans had managed to keep the Emancipation Proclamation secret from 1863 until that day, when forced by the occupying Yankee soldiers to reveal the truth Come Juneteenth depicts events on one Texas plantation in 1865. Luli Holcomb is 14, youngest child in the family, and the story’s narrator. She shared her childhood with Sis Goose, three years older, a “high yellow” daughter of a riverboat captain and a slave, who could pass for white. Technically Sis Goose belongs to Luli’s Aunt Sophie, but the Holcombs raised her as if she were their own daughter. When Yankees troops take over the Holcomb house, Luli’s father is forced to announce to the slaves that they are free. Sis Goose feels betrayed by the family when she realizes they kept the secret from her also. Matters become complicated when the Yankee commander deserts, taking Sis Goose with him. Luli’s brother Gabe is in love with Sis Goose and the father of her unborn child. He asks the remaining soldiers to be allowed to take Luli along to search for the pair, with tragic consequences.
I didn’t know a great deal about Juneteenth before I read the book, so I appreciated the author’s note, discussing the historical background and the problems she had devising the story, and the 14-item bibliography. I question Rinaldi’s choice of making Luli the central character. The story would have had more emotional power if Sis Goose had been the protagonist. I had some trouble in the beginning trying to keep the characters’ relationships and the plot sequence straight, so this may be more appropriate for advanced readers in the ages 10and-up set.
B.J. Sedlock
HAYM SALOMON: American Patriot
Susan Goldman Rubin, illus. David Slonim, Abrams, 2007, $16.95, hb, 40pp, 9780810910874
Susan Goldman Rubin does it again. The author of favorites The Cat With The Yellow
Star and Fireflies in the Dark, among other notable titles, has continued to bring fascinating people to life for children. Her focus on littleknown Jewish subjects led her to the tale of Haym Saloman, a Jewish immigrant who was a member of the legendary Sons of Liberty and was given the honorary title of “Financier of the American Revolution.” Rubin’s well-written picture book narrative is the perfect addition to an elementary school unit on the American Revolution. Following the story Rubin provides a detailed author’s note and a glossary, which further the book’s classroom appeal.
David Slomin’s cartoony illustrations, although fun, might deter older readers from picking up the book. Ages 4-8.
Nancy Castaldo
I AM THE GREAT HORSE
Katherine Roberts, Chicken House, 2007, £6.99, pb, 543pp, 0781905294275 / Chicken House, $16.99, 2006, hb, 416pp, 0439821630
This is the story of Alexander the Great as told by his warhorse, Bucephalus. It is also the story of Bucephalus’s devoted groom Charmides – or Charm when she is pretending to be a boy – and the special bond between them.
Although told in the first person by Bucephalus, the author keeps humanisation down to a very minimum and much of the narrative is taken up with things which really matter to a horse, such as a stallion dominating other horses and his feelings for his mares. And Bucephalus describes what he sees without giving any analytical explanations. After each battle there is a list of the numbers of horses and people killed or enslaved but there is no attempt to answer the questions which most readers would inevitably ask as to what was all this about. What was the reason for all this bloodshed?
The gentle Charm cannot answer these questions either, but she is quietly shocked by all the cruelty and carnage. She also fears for the safety of her beloved charge and on several occasions tries to prevent him being sent into battle – on one occasion with disastrous results.
The characters of Charm and Bucephalus are very sympathetically drawn, but it is a different matter with Alexander. He comes across as a perfect monster. Massacring prisoners, torturing them, having their hands cut off, and sometimes even crucifying them. Enslaving whole populations of towns and then having the buildings razed to the ground.
The author knows both her history and also all about horses. (She worked for ten years as a groom in a racing stable.) This book has been very carefully researched and there is a comprehensive bibliography. There is also a historical note and a map of Alexander’s campaigns.
The novel clearly illustrates the cruelty of the age and shows that while Bucephalus was certainly a great horse, Alexander himself does not deserve his title of ‘great.’ Young adult.
Mary Moffat
THE WEDNESDAY WARS
Gary D. Schmidt, Clarion, 2007, $16/C$21.95,
hb, 272pp, 0618724834
As the only Presbyterian in his seventhgrade class in Long Island in 1967-68, Holling Hoodhood has to spend Wednesday afternoons with his teacher, Mrs. Baker, while his Jewish classmates go to Hebrew school and his Catholic classmates to catechism. Mrs. Baker, whose husband is fighting in Vietnam, has Holling pass his Wednesday afternoons reading Shakespeare. It’s an assignment that will lead to the unfortunate Holling meeting Mickey Mantle while dressed in yellow tights, but that also leads to Holling gaining insight about life and love—and about Holling himself.
Narrated by Holling, this is a fast-paced book with appealing characters, particularly Holling himself. (I did find it unlikely, however, that a seventh-grader named “Holling Hoodhood” didn’t spend more time fending off bullies.) Though the tone is primarily humorous, Schmidt skillfully blends in the more serious aspects of the story, such as the effect of the war on several characters and the upheavals within Holling’s own family. The end result is a funny, touching novel of one boy’s journey toward adulthood. Ages 10-14.
Susan Higginbotham
RESISTANCE
Craig Simpson, Corgi, 2007, £5.99, pb, 357pp, 9780552555715
Set in Nazi-occupied Norway during the Second World War, this novel tells the story of two brothers, Marek and Olaf, who join forces with the Resistance in Norway.
On returning from a hunting trip in Hardanger, they see their father being arrested by the Gestapo. Set on revenge against the force that has taken away their father, the two brothers set about planning a cunning plan. When this plot goes disastrously wrong, they are forced to flee into the wilderness and are discovered days later by members of the MILORG, the Norwegian Military Organisation, having nearly perished from the extreme cold. From then on they unsuspectingly find themselves caught up in cunning but extremely dangerous plots to disrupt Nazi activity, culminating in plans to destroy trains and German U-Boats.
Having no previous knowledge about the Norwegian Resistance, I found the story a little confusing at first. Narrated by Marek, a fourteen year old with an extremely mature head, the novel interestingly explores how he changes during the war, as well as how the dynamics of his relationship with his brother, Olaf, alter. I found it fascinating to watch as Marek steps out from behind his older brother’s shadow and finds his own talent for engineering. As Marek stated ‘the world has changed. I’ve changed. Life’s different now and there’s simply no going back. War does that.’ I found the ending of the novel gripping and extremely unpredictable as it contains several twists in the plot.
Charlotte Kemp
stay with her cousin Edith in Chelsea, she is glad to start a new life. Back home, everyone knows that her pacifist brother Ted refused to join up, and she is taunted about it at school. When she starts at Edith’s school, she is desperate to fit in and get the approval of Edith’s friends.
Edith is also something of a rebel. After school, she takes Josie to play illegally on a bomb site, where they meet three local lads, one of whom, Vic, loots bombed-out homes. Josie enjoys the boys’ attention, but is shocked by the looting. When they all tease the school swot Alice, Josie feels sorry for her – she knows what it’s like not to fit in. She is torn two ways, she longs to speak out against Vic and to stand up for Alice, but, if she does, will Edith give away the secret about Ted?
Ann Turnbull’s theme is peer group pressure and how difficult it is to resist – and she doesn’t pull her punches. The tension is notched up by the gradual escalation of the bullying of poor Alice. It tightens even more when Josie learns a secret about Alice which, if she told the boys and Edith’s friends, would guarantee her own popularity but make Alice even more unpopular. Will Josie betray Alice or her own conscience? It is a dilemma most children will recognize: how to resist peer group pressure without being made a scapegoat oneself.
This book would also be an excellent introduction to a study of the Home Front during World War 2. The research is impeccable, and Ann Turnbull gives us the zeitgeist as well as illuminating the ups and downs of everyday life during the Blitz. Highly recommended for girls aged 8+.
Elizabeth Hawksley
This book was really well written. The description was very good so you felt that you were there, and the characters were vivid and drew me into the story.
For me, the plot was a little too simple. Nothing really happened. The climax was when the children thought a lie was the truth. The only thing that kept me hooked was Ted’s story.
I learnt a lot about the Second World War – I didn’t know that pacifists went off into the fields to do work for the war. I learnt that children weren’t allowed to search for valuables in the bombed-out buildings. I also didn’t know that people got bullied in the 1940s.
I don’t think this is really a boys’ book for two reasons. First, there are only two main boys in the book; second, there is barely any action. I would say that girls would enjoy it more than boys. I think that the age range for this book is 9-11 because it isn’t very advanced. I would give it 6/10.
Rachel Beggs, aged 11
detective, and his friend Lord George FoxSelwyn are on the track of some rare animal specimens stolen from a naturalist’s collection. But what starts off as a simple task soon takes a dangerous turn. Lord George’s nephew Frank, who is with them, becomes involves with some anarchists whose aim is the violent overthrow of society in order to create a more just world. Frank, born to wealth and privilege, but now seeing the wretched lives of the poor for the first time, cannot help sympathizing with the anarchists’ viewpoint. Montmorency, once a criminal himself, understands the lure, and is worried by Frank’s growing estrangement from his friends and family. Sympathy is one thing, but would Frank support the violent deaths of hundreds of innocent people?
The problem is that, if Montmorency and Fox-Selwyn are to uncover the threatened assassination plot, they need Frank to infiltrate the anarchists’ cell…
In the 1890s, the anarchist threat was very real and, as the historian A. J. P. Taylor points out, their ‘bag was considerable: a Tsar of Russia, a King of Italy, an Austrian Empress and a French President.’ Eleanor Updale’s story excitingly uses this now-forgotten menace. In many respects, this is a typical late 19th century Boys’ Own Adventure, which I rather enjoyed. In places, it reminded me of John Buchan –plucky British men unmasking devilish plots set up by unscrupulous foreigners, not to mention the female characters having mere walk-on parts. Another feature typical of the 1890s is that it is a children’s book featuring mainly adult characters – even Frank is in his late teens.
As far as 2007 is concerned, this is a terrific, pacy read, and should appeal to both sexes. For 13 plus. Recommended.
Elizabeth Hawksley
I did like this book but it didn’t get me hooked. This is because the genre (period detective novel) didn’t particularly interest me. The beginning is very clever and deceptive – it makes you think that there’s a skeleton lying on a bed moving, but it’s only someone under an X-ray machine.
The writer uses lots of settings – first Montmorency and George Fox-Selwyn are in London, then in Italy, then on the unknown island of Tarimond, then London again – it’s quite hard to keep up.
The characters are described well – for example, Montmorency has a mysterious history and is very secretive, whereas Frank is loud and bubbly, and always wants to be the centre of attention.
JOSIE UNDER FIRE
Ann Turnbull, Usborne, 2004, £4.99, pb, 164pp, 0746060327
London 1941. When 12-year-old Josie goes to
MONTMORENCY AND THE ASSASSINS
Eleanor Updale, Scholastic, 2005, £12.99, hb, 357pp, 0439963753 / Scholastic, $6.99, 2006, pb, 416pp, 0439683440 1898, Italy. In this, the third of Montmorency’s adventures, Montmorency, the thief turned
My favourite part is when they are performing a play on Tarimond. The writer describes it as a ‘sweet play’ – I felt as if I was there. My least favourite part is when they are in London trying to fit in with the Italian crowd. I found it boring because nothing really happened.
I think it is written for people who like history. Even though it is fiction it has a lot of fact in it, and some real characters, such as Edison, King Umberto, and Queen Marguerita.
I would say that the audience for this book is 13+ and it would help to have read the previous
Montmorency books. I give it 6 out of 10.
Rachel Beggs, aged 11
HOUSE OF SECRETS
Jennie Walters, Simon & Schuster, 2005, £5.99/$9.99, pb, 217pp, 0689875266
This is the first book in a trilogy about the lives of servants and masters at a great house, Swallowcliffe Hall, from Victorian times until the Second World War. It’s set in the late 19th century and follows the fortunes of Polly Perkins, a 14-year-old girl from a very poor family who finds work as a maid at the Hall. There she gets to know the other servants, and also interacts in a limited way with the family, becoming a confidante of the youngest daughter of the house, who is about her own age. She gets into various troubles through her spontaneity and ignorance of how to behave in the selfeffacing way expected of a servant. At one point she is almost dismissed but her resourcefulness and courage win her a reprieve. However she is unable to prevent the tragic events that lie at the heart of the story.
Each chapter is headed with a quote from one of a variety of Victorian books on the duties and management of servants. These are entertaining and also point up the difference between then and now. This is a first person narrative, and Polly’s voice, with its rather staid asides to the reader and use of homely aphorisms, rings very true. All the characters are rounded and convincing, and although there are few real surprises the story is gripping because of the emotional dilemmas involved. Jennie Walters has created a well-researched and warm-hearted story with several interesting plot developments to carry forward to the sequels.
Ann Turnbull
RESURRECTION MEN
T. K. Welsh, Dutton, 2007, $16.99, hb, 224pp, 9780525476993
In the midst of a storm, a carriage careens along a mud-choked road. The coachman doesn’t see the lad until it’s too late. Against his employer’s wishes, he takes the injured boy to a nearby physician, whose ministrations bring to mind another boy whose story begins in 1830 Italy. Twelve-year-old Victor witnesses the brutal slaying of his parents by soldiers, who sell him to a ship owner. Life at sea is different, but Victor quickly learns the ropes. Danger threatens once again, and in trying to escape, he tumbles from a mast to the deck. No longer able to walk, the captain orders him thrown overboard. Victor washes ashore in England where a kind old shepherd nurses him back to health. Unable to support another mouth, the shepherd sells Victor to two men who transport him to London atop a corpse inside a coffin. Victor never forgets this harrowing experience, but it is the first of many lessons he must learn, for these men are body snatchers. The friends he makes as a street urchin and the doctor who treats him after a severe beating provide Victor with hope. His greatest trial comes when his friends mysteriously disappear, and he must overcome his fears to rescue them.
Welsh doesn’t sugarcoat this Victorian
world, and while the story may be unsavory and disgusting, he expertly weaves hope throughout the tale. He introduces the reader to the reality of living in the streets during a time when medical experimentation required bodies no matter what the cost. Resurrection Men demonstrates the cruelties of life and how children learn to cope, to adapt. It is not a tale for the faint of heart, but those who venture into its darkness will be richly rewarded for daring to do so.
Cindy Vallar
RED MOON AT SHARPSBURG
Rosemary Wells, Viking, 2007, $16.99/C$21.00, hb, 240pp, 9780670036387
Noted children’s author Wells takes on the Civil War in this coming-of-age novel set in the small town of Berryville, in the northern end of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. India Moody, the green-eyed, black-haired 12-year-old daughter of the town harness maker, is a tomboyish girl who is good in school and yearns to go to college. With war on the horizon, school closes, local young men march off to fight Yankees, her best friend Julia’s Quaker family moves to Ohio, and India is sent to neighboring Longmarsh Hall to be tutored by young scientist Emory Trimble. Strongly interested in Emory’s knowledge, she is encouraged by him in her pursuit of an education. Their relationship slowly blossoms, first into mutual respect and then into romance. When Emory leaves to aid the wounded in Richmond, India resolves to change her destiny, but it’s not until after the fateful Battle of Sharpsburg, with her father dead and her mother distraught, that the resourceful India comes into her own.
Wells does a fine job of portraying the anxiety, anguish and heartbreak of the American Civil War in a small but heavily fought over area of Virginia. Vivid details of bloody battles, bad food, endless flies, dirt, bravery, brutality, and the utter destruction of a way of life in a peaceful valley provide an excellent sense of time and place. Her colorful and varied characters are drawn as realistic individuals, coping in different ways to the unimagined horror brought to their very doorsteps. Wells’ knack for storytelling, combined with a spunky, smart, and appealing heroine, makes for a good read.
Michael I. Shoop
SOMEONE NAMED EVA
Joan M. Wolf, Clarion, 2007, $16/C$21.95, hb, 208pp, 9780618535798
‘Remember, Milada. Remember who you are. Always.’ Those are the words Milada’s grandma said to her the night the Nazi soldiers appeared at her house in Czechoslovakia. Someone Named Eva tells eleven-year-old Milada’s story after she’s separated from her family and closely examined by Nazi doctors who find she fits the perfect Aryan ideal. As a result, she’s sent to a Lebensborn center in Poland, renamed Eva, and trained to become the ideal German citizen. During months of sometimes brutal “education,” she finds herself struggling to remember details about her life as Milada. Or to remember what her grandma had told her to remember.
This book was inspired by accounts of children across Europe who were kidnapped from their families and sent to Lebensborn centers for re-education during World War II. Wolf’s imagining of one such young woman’s experience is a touching and at the same time chilling account of the vulnerability of the mind to be manipulated. This young adult novel is recommended for its telling of a heartbreaking experience endured by thousands of children during the Nazi reign of terror, one rarely put forth in books. Ages 4-8.
Dana Cohlmeyer
NONFICTION
ADOPTED SON: Washington, Lafayette, and the Friendship that Saved the Revolution
David A. Clary, Bantam, 2007, $27.00, hb, 592pp, 0553804359
This is one of those stories where life is stranger than fiction. A young French nobleman is orphaned by a British bullet that kills his father in the Seven Years War. A childless American leader becomes a surrogate father to the orphaned boy, and sends him on a military mission against the British officer who killed his father. You can’t make this stuff up.
Even Americans familiar with George Washington will find new perspectives in this history of Washington and Lafayette. Clary does an excellent job of describing the strategies and battles of the American Revolution and the French Revolution. He also adds a new insight through his examination of the close father-son relationship that grew between Washington and Lafayette.
This relationship provided one of the major keys to America’s success. During one year of fighting, ninety percent of the powder and shot used by American soldiers came from France. Though always anxious to twist the British lion’s tail, French support for America was qualified. It was Lafayette’s unceasing lobbying that provided the extra French help America needed.
Chuck Curtis
CONAN DOYLE, DETECTIVE: The True Crimes Investigated by the Creator of Sherlock Holmes
Peter Costello, Carroll & Graf, 2006, $15.95, pb, 326pp, 978786718559 / Constable, 2006, £7.99, pb, 320pp, 1845294122
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the legendary detective, didn’t confine his interest in criminology to the pages of his fiction. Though much has been made of Joseph Bell, one of Doyle’s medical school professors, as the real-life inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, Costello illustrates that Conan Doyle, while being part the plodding, faithful Watson, was also part Holmes—he possessed a keen intellect, deductive skills, and a passionate interest in solving crimes.
Holmes fans will enjoy reading about Doyle’s deductive exploits and searching for traces of their appearance in altered form in the Holmes stories, but there is more here—a panoramic look at crimes and criminals famous in the 19th and
20th centuries. Conan Doyle applied his theories and skill to everything from the Dreyfus Affair to Jack the Ripper to the disappearance of Agatha Christie. Costello’s tale is well-researched and written in a down-to-earth style which makes for quick reading. Since this is reality and not a detective story, Doyle is not always right, not all the cases have a pat solution, and the malefactors, even when known, are not always brought to justice. Though Holmes would find this state of affairs intolerable, it still makes for an entertaining, informative read.
Bethany Latham
FOUR QUEENS: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe
Nancy Goldstone, Viking, 2007, $24.95/ C$31.00, hb, 334pp, 9780670038435
Four Queens is the fascinating story of four 13th-century sisters, all destined to become royal: Marguerite, Queen of France; Eleanor, Queen of England; Sanchia, Queen of the Romans; and Beatrice, Queen of Sicily.
Goldstone depicts these four very different women, the men they married, the society they lived in, and the many other players on the European and Middle Eastern stage in a lively, readable, and highly accessible style. As someone who was familiar with some of the events of the time, but not at all with others, I found this to be an excellent introduction to them. (For those wishing to delve further into the period, Goldstone provides a helpful bibliographic note.)
Four Queens is also impressive for what it doesn’t do. Though we never lose sight of the limitations gender imposed upon these women’s lives, Goldstone doesn’t belabor the point, as a lesser writer might have done, for instance, in the case of Sanchia, the sister who was the least successful at influencing events. Her treatment of her subjects, female and male alike, is sympathetic yet clear-eyed, a characteristic especially apparent in her summing up of the careers of Louis IX of France and Henry III of England.
This was one work of nonfiction I would have been happy to have lingered over longer.
Susan Higginbotham
ROME & JERUSALEM, The Clash of Ancient Civilisations
Martin Goodman, Allen Lane, 2007, £25.00/ C$49, hb, 638pp, 9780713994476 / To be pub. in Oct. by Knopf, $35, hb, 624pp, 0375411852 Up until 66 CE, the Romans displayed a unique tolerance towards their Jewish subjects. The Jews were exempted from the cult of emperor worship imposed on the rest of the Empire, their dietary and other “eccentricities” were treated with affectionate bemusement rather than hostility. But, in the year 66, a war broke out which would lead ultimately to the total destruction of Jerusalem, the banishment of the Jews from their own land and the renaming of Judaea as Palestina to expunge all reference to the Jews from the region. We know, of course, that the Jewish people did not re-establish a state in the region until the foundation of Israel
in 1948.
In this scholarly yet eminently readable account, Goodman examines what led up to this clash of cultures and how it underpins centuries of European anti-Semitism. His history also encompasses the emergence of Christianity from its beginnings as a Jewish faction into a major religion. Goodman is one of the world’s leading scholars of the ancient Roman and Jewish worlds. He is also a marvellous stylist, giving an account of the destruction of the Temple which is as gripping as fiction. A book not only for the specialist, but the generalist with an interest in the origins of Europe’s troubled relations with the Middle East.
Sarah Bower
ELIZABETH & LEICESTER
Sarah Gristwood, Bantam, 2007, £20.00, hb, 406pp, 9780593056004 / To be pub. in Nov. by Viking, $27.95, hb, 416pp, 0670018287
There have been so many books written about Elizabeth I and her relationship with childhood friend, Robert Dudley (later Earl of Leicester), that one wonders if there is a need for more. Sarah Gristwood’s detailed and engrossing biography certainly makes for an interesting return to the eternal question as to whether or not there was a sexual relationship between them.
Elizabeth seemed to enjoy toying with the emotions of the young men she singled out as her favourites and tantalising all with her catand-mouse machinations regarding marriage. Surrounded by intrigue and faction Elizabeth understood only too well that any marriage would undermine her status and, unsurprisingly, she chose spinsterhood ‘as a price she was prepared to pay for power.’
At the height of her flirtation with Dudley his wife, Amy Robsart, died, fuelling rumours that Robert might somehow be responsible. It would certainly free him to marry Elizabeth, but she wisely retreated into the background; for a while.
This well-written account is a joy to read although it offers nothing new. Although the man Elizabeth called her ‘Sweet Robin’ enjoyed the best rooms adjacent to the Queen, and was given estates in more than twenty counties, there is no hard evidence that Elizabeth allowed him into her bed. Gristwood maintains that Elizabeth saw the ‘games of courtship and foreplay as fulfilling ends in themselves.’ And that is all we need to know.
Ann Oughton
ELVES IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND
Alaric Hall, The Boydell Press, 2007, £45.00, hb, 226pp, 9781843832942
This is the eighth volume in the Boydell Press’ Anglo-Saxon Studies series and is an unashamedly academic book, a valuable contribution to the publisher’s aim of providing ‘a forum for the best scholarship in the AngloSaxon peoples’. Along with its careful linguistic and historiographic analysis, however, this book offers some intriguing fodder for the imagination. There are chapters on the concept of elf-shot and its perceived role in illness and healing,
on the allures and dangers of beautiful female elves and the place of the elf in Anglo-Saxon perceptions of gender and its transgression. Hall re-examines the evidence for elves in AngloSaxon lore with an open mind and a scholarly eye, taking nothing for granted and exposing all received wisdom to new analysis. The result is a fascinating study which enriches our understanding of this sophisticated culture and its unique relationship with aelfe.
Sarah Bower
THOMAS CROMWELL: The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII’s Most Notorious Minister
Robert Hutchinson, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, £20, hb, 360pp, 9780297846420
Thomas Cromwell and his first master Cardinal Wolsey had much in common: both were commoners whose loyalty lay entirely with the Tudor crown rather than with any one noble faction, but they were also supremely adept at lining their own pockets in order to fund a magnificent lifestyle. Of the two, however, Cromwell was the more politically adroit, and in 1529 he successfully avoided being dragged down by Wolsey’s fall and, with single-minded energy, clawed his way up the slippery slope of Tudor power politics to become Henry VIII’s chief minister for little over a decade.
Hutchinson’s intimate knowledge of the period is compelling, but I found this book less satisfactory than his previous works. Cromwell is described as having “low animal cunning, a capacity for raw deceit”, while “scruples was a word unaccountably missing from his vocabulary”. This was no doubt true, but it seems too easy to compare Cromwell’s nascent civil service and accompanying legislation to the present introduction of ID cards, or the techniques he used during the Dissolution of the Monasteries to the treatment of political prisoners by 20th-century totalitarian regimes. However, this portrait offers a minutely detailed picture of a corrupt and bloody period of Tudor history dominated by religion and vicious power struggles, and fuelled by venality and the King’s desire for an heir.
Lucinda Byatt
FOR LUST OF KNOWING: The Orientalists and Their Enemies
Robert Irwin, Penguin, 2007, £9.99/C$22.00, pb, 409pp, 9780140289237
Orientalism has become a problematic scholarly discipline since Edward Said published his Orientalism in 1978. According to Irwin, Said accused Orientalists of imperialism, colonialism and distorting history in the way in which their focus of study defines the Orient in opposition to the culture of the West. He has a point. To lump the cultural history of peoples from the Turks to the Chinese together under a single heading seems, on the face of it, to betray a staggering level of ignorance and patronisation. On the other hand, as Irwin argues with great verve in this book, if it were not for enthusiastic European Orientalists from classical times to the early 20th century, we would know and understand a great deal less
about our neighbours to the East than we now do. From Marco Polo to T.E. Lawrence Europeans have, for whatever reason, become curious about the Orient and have hugely enriched our understanding with their writings, pictures and collections of objects. Motives have often been suspect and most of our great museums have been founded on plunder but our knowledge has been undeniably increased.
Irwin defends the position of the Orientalists with gusto and intellectual rigour and his book, first published in hardback last year, is an excellent read, packed with glorious eccentricities and tremendous learning. An excellent overview of a complex and controversial subject.
Sarah Bower
STANLEY, The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer
Tim Jeal, Faber & Faber, 2007, £25.00, hb, 570pp, 9780571221028
There are many false beliefs about the man known as Henry Morton Stanley. Born in 1840 in Denbigh, his real name was John Rowlands, the illegitimate first child of Elizabeth Parry who abandoned him. Until he was five years old John was cared for by his maternal grandfather, Moses Parry. After his grandfather’s death he was abandoned once more and consigned to St Asaph workhouse. At seventeen he went to America where he took the name of a New Orleans cotton merchant. Throughout his life, haunted by insecurity, Stanley lied and invented to maintain the charade. He is remembered for that famous meeting with David Livingstone and reviled for his record of brutality in his dealings with the people of the Congo, enabling the Belgian King Leopold II to establish a flourishing slave trade.
With access to a previously closed family archive, Tim Jeal examines anew the case against Stanley and succeeds in absolving him of many of the crimes wrongly attributed to him. Whether this excellent account will succeed in changing the long held opinion of Stanley as an avaricious racist remains to be seen.
Ann Oughton
WOMEN IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND REFORMATION EUROPE 1200-1550
Helen M. Jewell, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, £52.50/$89.95, hb, 208pp, 9780333912560 / also pb, 2007, £17.99/$29.95, 9780333912577
This concise and comprehensive study of women’s lives and society’s expectation of them covers every aspect of women’s life in the high Middle Ages; how the late medieval reformation world fitted together and how women fitted into that world. Women’s place in the family and society was determined largely by gender, the rules made by men and the overweening influence of the church. Boccaccio, Chaucer, Petrarch and others, in portraying women in literature, reflected the attitudes of the time as well as helping to reinforce those same attitudes. Nevertheless, many strong women stood out from the crowd, Margery Kempe, Joan of Arc, Blanche of Navarre, Margaret of Denmark and many more.
Lucidly written, this gem of a book is packed with information and sources for further reading. It is an invaluable research tool for any student of women’s history as well as being of interest to the general reader.
Ann Oughton
INFERNO, The Devastation of Hamburg 1943
Keith Lowe, Viking, 2007, £25.00/C$39.00, hb, 489pp, 9780670915576
In the summer of 1943 British and American bombers launched an attack on the German city of Hamburg. For ten days the city was pounded with 9,000 tons of bombs; the fires they created burned for a month and were visible for 200 miles. A devastation with a loss of life that was on the scale of the death toll of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and yet today the event has been almost forgotten by the collective consciousness.
Leaflets warning of the impending air strike were dropped days before, but the people of Hamburg believed that they were well prepared and the British and Americans would want to preserve buildings and positions that might prove useful to them like the harbour. Hamburg had not seen any bombing since 1940, and whatever happened it surely could not be too bad.
The use of eyewitness accounts from the bombers and the bombed brings home to the reader the full extent of human suffering and gives a balanced account of both sides. The British and Americans thought, erroneously, that such all-out air strikes would hasten an end to the war, but the survivors of Operation Gomorrah were resilient and the war was eventually won by slow fighting across land.
Inferno is the first exploration of the Hamburg firestorm for almost thirty years; it is a well researched, well written account of the human face of war.
Ann Oughton
THE DEATH OF GLORY
Robin Neillands, John Murray, 2006, £20, hb, 298pp, 0719562449
1915 was a tough year for the British in France. The battles fought by the British army were either disasters or inconclusive; but the real reason for despair was that this war, entered into for the liberation of Belgium, has lost its moral argument and had descended into bloody, senseless slaughter. The Death of Glory is an account of the situation on the Western Front in 1915. The battles of Neuve Chapelle, Second Ypres, Aubers Ridge and Loos are covered in detail in a factual, but informative, easy to read way. The role of the military leadership is discussed in detail and Mr Neillands challenges the commonly held view that the British army were “lions led by donkeys.” The book is well researched, and while the arguments he puts forward are cogent and plausible, this book is balanced. The deficiencies of the High Command, as well as the political decisions which led to the carnage of 1915, are discussed fully. Readers must decide for themselves
whether his argument is sustainable. This is a thought provoking and highly readable book. Mike Ashworth
THE
LINCOLNS IN
THE WHITE HOUSE:
Four Years That Shattered a Family
Jerrold M. Packard, Griffin, 2006, $14.95/ C$19.95, pb, 290pp, 0312313039
Like most American schools at the time, mine spent a lot of time on the Civil War, but concentrated on causation and battles rather than personalities. In The Lincolns in the White House, Jerrold Packard takes a different approach. While politics, battles, and key administration figures are not neglected, Packard’s main focus is on the Lincolns as a family.
Packard deals with varied subjects like Lincoln’s relationships with his sons, Mary Lincoln’s out-of-control spending and growing eccentricity, the nature of the relationship between Lincoln and Joshua Speed, and Mary Lincoln’s post-White House life. Drama, however, does not get sacrificed in the process: Packard’s account of the last days of Lincoln’s life, foregone as its conclusion is, nonetheless had me on the edge of my seat.
The author paints vivid pictures of 19thcentury Washington, DC (hot and humid in summer, cold in winter, and unhealthy all year round), of the shabby White House, and of the Soldiers’ Home where the Lincolns found a welcome summer retreat. There are also tidbits here that I found fascinating; one, for instance, being that the Department of the Treasury employed female clerks.
Though I suspect that nothing in this book will be new to Lincoln scholars, for a general reader, The Lincolns in the White House tells a compelling story.
Susan Higginbotham
ROGUES, WRITERS, & WHORES: Dining with the Rich & Infamous, or A Stock of Scrumptious Stories from the Centuries
Daniel Rogov, illus. Yael Hershberg, Toby, 2007, $24.95/C$32.95/£14.99, hb, 323pp, 1592641725
“I hate people who are not serious about their meals,” quips Oscar Wilde in the introduction of this delightful collection of anecdotes and recipes whimsically illustrated by Yael Hershberg and compiled by food and wine writer Daniel Rogov. The motley protagonists of these tales however do not take fine dining frivolously; they inspire, enjoy, or create the famous dishes. “Gastronomy,” Rogov writes, “ranks with all of the social sciences as a means of defining the culture of a nation or a community.” As the collection of stories spans centuries, Rogov provides an overview of the changes in the European culinary habits and tastes. The past is indeed a foreign country as the list of ingredients—camel hooves, nightingales’ tongues, beef marrow—demonstrates. With unflinching humor, the tales pose and answer questions. Were Europeans really afraid of eating potatoes? What would have happened to Marcel Proust if it had not been for a madeleine? Best of all, Rogues, Writers & Whores succeeds as a
cookbook since the tales are trailed by original recipes and modern adaptations.
I recommend trying the Leek Tart. After your guest has eaten, admit it is a Borgia recipe, and watch his/her face. Scrumptious, unadulterated fun.
Adelaida Lower
BLOOD AND THUNDER: An Epic of the American West Hampton Sides, Doubleday, 2006, $26.95/ C$35.95, hb, 461pp, 0385507771 / Little, Brown, 2007, £20.00, hb, 480pp, 0316027456
When one considers the central role the West played in the development of American history and popular culture, the relative paucity of historical accounts of this region is surprising.
Yale-educated Hampton Sides’s aptly titled Blood and Thunder is a stunning history of white versus red that concentrates on the American war against the Navajo as the template for numerous other campaigns. Kit Carson’s career as frontier scout and Indian fighter plays a prominent role in this brilliantly written work. The book begins with the coming of the Americans to the lands of the Navajo Indians at the start of the U.S. war with Mexico in 1846. The Navajo did not have the reputation as being as warlike as the neighboring Apache, but this would change under the pressure posed by Carson and the U.S. Army. Carson, despite his sympathies for Native Americans and his two Native American wives, would bring massacre and deprivation to the Navajo and destroy their civilization. The Navajo, Kit Carson, John Charles Fremont, President James Polk, and others bring this saga of one peoples’ fight for survival to life in the author’s carefully crafted prose.
John R. Vallely
THE FRIENDSHIP: Wordsworth and Coleridge
Adam Sisman, HarperCollins, 2006, £20, hb, 480pp, 0007160525 / Viking, $27.95, hb, 512pp, 9780670038220
The book’s title undervalues the scope of the book, for Adam Sisman has written more than an intricate description of the relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth during the short period of their intimacy. The book, which is really in three parts, begins with Wordsworth’s first trip to France in 1790 and ends with Coleridge’s death in 1834.
The early chapters trace their intellectual and emotional development from the early 1790s to their first meeting in 1795. Both were young men of their time, enthused by the principles of the French Revolution, politicised in their thoughts but never active in radical politics, always wary of where that might lead them and committed to their poetry. Both men find their first loves which prove doomed for different reasons. To readers familiar with the intellectual and political thought of the time, much of these chapters is commonplace, but to those new to the period it forms an indispensable background.
The chapters that cover the period of greatest friendship are fascinating. Adam Sisman describes their closeness, whether in
the Quantocks or the Lakes, as emotional and intellectual. He documents the ways in which their poetry was influenced by the other’s ideas, often developing the other man’s early thoughts into poems.
Adam does not neglect the complications of their personal lives. Wordsworth seems to have been resolved these more successfully than Coleridge, and this may have contributed to his estrangement from Wordsworth. ‘The Friendship’ finishes with Coleridge’s death, and although there is some logic to this ending, I felt that that the actual scope of the book demanded consideration of the fates of the other players.
Bill Dodds
EDWARD VI: The Lost King of England
Chris Skidmore, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, £20, hb, 346pp, 9780297846499 / To be pub. in Nov. by St. Martin’s Press, $27.95, hb, 385pp, 9780312351427
The ‘tagline’ of this work is ‘the struggle for the soul of England after the death of Henry VIII’. This is important because this book is so much more than a biography of ‘the Boy King’. Both accessible and academic, the strong presence of contemporary sources and eyewitness accounts contributes to a greater understanding of the Tudor world view. In addition Skidmore introduces rich contemporary detail such as the medicament used on Edward’s troubling eyes (probably a result of measles), or the suppression of the traditional pre-Reformation practices to celebrate Candlemas, Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday and its effect on the ordinary parishioner. Such details flesh out the context of the reign and give the reader insight into the lives of those who were not part of the Court and its intrigues; the often overlooked ‘ordinary’ citizens, whose lives during these times are frequently unrecorded and unremarked. This is a biography that provides a political, religious and cultural context to the life of its subject, particularly important in the case of Edward’s youthful and short reign. It is, in addition, a superb source book and of interest to those with specialist knowledge of the Tudor period as well as those seeking to improve a more general understanding.
Geraldine Perriam
TRIPOLI: The United States’ First War on Terror
David Smethurst, Ballantine, 2006, $7.99, pb, 308pp, 9780891418597
Problems in the Middle East are not new to the U.S. Tripoli: The United States’ First War on Terror chronicles the first U.S. military involvement in the region. Though an interesting account in its own right, the light of current events makes this history particularly intriguing. Although called “pirates,” the Barbary pirates were in fact military arms of the governments of Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli. Their activities were in part to extract “protection money” from countries to ensure the safety of their shipping in the Mediterranean. When Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain was asked the reason, however, his response was the same
mandate for jihad that we hear today. Other similarities include the facts that Congress did not authorize the military actions; there were many problems in the conduct of the war; the strategy included regime change, and some factions favored military action, while others favored meeting rising demands for tribute. The author does not point out any of these similarities, but they are striking. The book is basically non-fiction, with some fictional details and dialog added to make it a more enjoyable read.
Sue Schrems
DONNE: The Reformed Soul
John Stubbs, Viking, 2006, £25.00, hb, 565pp, 0670915106 / Norton, 2007, $35.00, hb, 576pp, 9780393062601
John Donne needs no introduction, yet this book reveals his life in such detail that I felt I had discovered a new man. The scope is extraordinary and stems from Stubbs’ determination to find coherence in a biographical life by ‘putting that life off-centre, placing the subject back in the crowd as well as picking him or her out from it.’ This approach is particularly apt for two reasons: Donne’s own life spanned a period of such momentous change, political, religious and social that the historical background must be allowed, as Stubbs writes, ‘to swarm back into the foreground’. Second, and more importantly, Donne himself was acutely conscious of being part of the bigger picture, ‘part of the Maine.’
This illuminating study focuses on Donne’s constant transformation and his ability to keep step with the changing world, evolving from papist to Protestant, from adventurer to courtier and finally clergyman, while always remaining, above all, a poet. Likening himself to a clod, he famously declared, ‘I am a man, I have my part in the Humanity.’ By the time of his memorable Lenten sermon of 1625, the worn figure that Donne had become was the last of many transformations, many ‘reformed souls’, a man whose articulate commentary on the dilemmas of his time is of timeless significance and relevance. This is a brilliant portrait of a unique figure.
Lucinda Byatt
REBEL CHIEF: The Motley Life of Colonel William Holland Thomas, C.S.A.
Paul A. Thomsen, Forge, 2006, $14.95, pb, 304pp, 0765309599
Adopted by the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indian tribe in North Carolina in the early 1820s, William Holland Thomas used his entrepreneurial ability to negotiate with Washington lawmakers to help the tribe obtain federal recognition as a separate entity from the Cherokee Nation, which was ordered west in the 1830s by the Jackson administration. While the Cherokee were forced to leave – their exodus has become infamously known as the “Trail of Tears” – Thomas was able to keep the Eastern Band in the Carolinas.
As a merchant, Thomas owned his own general store, also becoming a land speculator and slave trader. Upon the death of the eighty-
year0old chief who had adopted him, Thomas was named Chief of the Eastern Band, selected over the Chief’s own son. During the American Civil War, Holland became a colonel and led a unit of Cherokee to fight for the Confederate cause. The book follows his leadership of the small unit of Cherokee soldiers until his death years later.
The book is well researched with many endnotes, a bibliography and a list of his primary sources. William Holland was a different and fascinating kind of hero, brought up with antebellum Southern values yet managing to help people of a race different than his own. Holland is said to have been the model for the protagonist in Charles Frazier’s most recent novel, Thirteen Moons.
Jeff Westerhoff
CHRYSALIS: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis
Kim Todd, Harcourt, 2007, $27.00, hb, 328pp, 0151011087 / I. B. Tauris, 2007, £16.99, hb, 272pp, 1845114310
Maria Sibylla Merian was born in the mid17th century in Germany into a family of printers. When Merian was a young girl, her mother remarried, to a man who was a painter and art dealer. This background helps to explain the astonishing life and accomplishments of Merian, who was fascinated by caterpillars and their metamorphosis into butterflies and moths. She began her studies of these creatures while she was quite young, and published several volumes of her artwork. In later life, she spent a couple of years in Surinam, painting the diverse forms of creatures found there, then returned to Amsterdam to produce another volume of her work. The author situates Merian in the churning milieu of observation and increased knowledge by collectors, naturalists, and scientists of the time. She also records how posterity has treated Merian (often unfairly, working from altered and inferior copies of her work). “Merian’s greatest contribution to both science and art was her sense of ecology, the tracking of plants, seasons, parasites, predators...” Todd has written an engaging account that allows readers to follow this remarkable woman who lived in exciting times.
Trudi E. Jacobson
THOSE DAMN HORSE SOLDIERS: True Tales of the Civil War Cavalry
George Walsh, Forge, 2006, $27.95/$C37.95, hb, 438pp, 0765312700
Those Damn Horse Soldiers begins in 1862, when “Jeb” Stuart is entrusted with the Rebel Cavalry. In spite of perennial lack of fodder and mounts, and inferior weaponry, the Rebels have the upper hand. Behind the lines, John Hunt Morgan, “the quintessential guerrilla,” specializes in raiding train stations and tapping telephone lines. The Union horsemen are paralyzed, suffering from lack of leadership and imagination. Exasperated Union general William Tecumseh Sherman huffs, “The young bloods of the South… are brave, fine riders, bold to rashness… [They] must all be killed before
we can hope for peace.” But it is not until 1863 when Philip Sheridan is named Commander of the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry that the Union begins to succeed.
George Walsh, author of other Civil War books, proceeds towards Appomattox with enlightening quotations, larger-than-life characters, and short, action-packed chapters full of gallantry, humor, tricks, and hardships. This is a very readable, highly entertaining account of a subject that has been overlooked in the Civil War bibliography. Walsh makes it a thrilling ride.
Adelaida Lower
A SHORT HISTORY OF SLAVERY
James Walvin, Penguin, 2007, £9.99, pb, 258pp, 9780141027982
Published to coincide with and celebrate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the English Atlantic slave trade in 1807, this is the kind of concise and readable history which could only have been produced by an historian who is completely in command of his subject. Walvin surveys the history of slavery from classical times to the present day with a timely reminder in his final chapter that London-based AntiSlavery International, the modern inheritor of the Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1839, is as busy today as it ever was, campaigning against slavery all over the world. The book contextualises the Atlantic trade and offers a cogent explanation for the apparently sudden change of heart in England which transformed this country from being a world leader in the trade to pioneering its abolition all over the Empire. It also looks at social and working conditions in slave communities.
A readable and accessible introduction to a complex subject, whose barbarity is matched only by the huge legacy it has left, nothing less, one might argue, than the western capitalist economic system which at least one academic has held responsible for the end of history. Discuss!
Sarah Bower
SPARTACUS: Film and History
Martin M. Winkler (ed.), Blackwell, 2007, £19.99/$27.95, pb, 267pp, 1405131810
Martin Winkler is the editor of 11 essays on various aspects of the making of the 1960 film of Spartacus. Also included are the source texts from Roman writers, which shows how sketchy the details are for the historical Spartacus, and how the film differs from them.
It is clear that the version we can now see of Spartacus, even the restored film, differs wildly from the story as envisioned by the writers of the book and the script. Both novelist Howard Fast and scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo saw Spartacus in a much wider context, as a hero who could reflect their communist outlook. The film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, wanted to make the film bigger too, including showing the slave army’s victories in many battles. There was, then, a ‘big’ Spartacus, but what survives is the smaller, more intimate Spartacus, emphasising the man and his family life, rather than the slave
army which nearly conquered Rome. This book ably explores the contextual aspects of the film of Spartacus, including Roman slavery, production, censorship, film guide, ideology, cultural significance, and marketing.
S Garside-Neville
SAVAGE KINGDOM: Virginia and the Founding of English America
Benjamin Woolley, Harper Press, 2007, £25, hb, 467pp, 9780007131693. Pub. in the US as Savage Kingdom: The True Story of Jamestown 1607 and the Settlement of America, HarperCollins, 2007, $27.50, hb, 496pp, 9780060090562
A brilliant book, researched in great detail. It paints a picture of the life of the early settlers who arrived in Virginia in 1607, fourteen years before the Mayflower set sail. They were a mixed group who had good reason to flee their own country and they set about creating the settlement known as Jamestown on a small island in the James River.
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Sir Walter Raleigh established the small settlement of Roanoke on the Carolina Banks and when King James came to the throne Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, recognized the economic advantage of a new colonial adventure. Spain’s wealth had resulted from her speculative ventures in South America, which profited King Phillip.
Jane Hill
POSITION VACANCIES
MEMBERSHIP SECRETARY, United Kingdom
The Historical Novel Society is seeking a volunteer to serve as membership secretary for the United Kingdom and Europe. Volunteer must be located in the United Kingdom and have easy access to email. Duties include:
Receiving and processing membership applications and renewals
Depositing funds in the Society's UK bank account
Coordinating in a timely manner with the Society Publisher, other membership secretaries, and Managing Editors on membership issues
Preferred Skills:
Basic computer skills, including working knowledge of Microsoft Excel
If you are interested in learning more about this position, please contact Richard Lee at richard@historicalnovelsociety.org.
OUT OF PRINT BOOKS
The following deal in out of print historical fiction:
Forget-Me-Not Books
11 Tamarisk Rise, Wokingham, Berks RG40 1WG, UK
Judith_ridley@hotmail.com
Karen Miller
Church Farm Cottage, Church Lane Kirklington, Nr. Newark, Notts.
NG22 8NA, UK
Karen@Miller1964.freeserve. co.uk
Rosanda Books 11 Whiteoaks Road Oadby, Leicester LE2 5YL, UK dbaldwin@themutual.net
David Spenceley Books 75 Harley Drive Leeds LS13 4QY, UK davidspenceley@email.com
Boris Books
Market Place
Surnminster Newton, Dorset DT10 1AS, UK www.borisbooks.co.uk
Diaskari Books 7 Southmoor Road, Oxford OX2 6RF, UK chris.tyzack@btinternet.com
