Two Messiahs, Two Centuries
CHRIST THE LORD: The Road to Cana
Anne Rice, Knopf, 2008, $25.95, hb, 241pp, 9781400043521 / Chatto & Windus, 2008, £17.99, hb, 256pp, 9780701178130
THE MESSIAH
Marek Halter, Toby, 2008, $24.95/£14.99, hb, 485pp, 9781592642168
I found the juxtaposition of these two novels fascinating. Both tell the tale of a man fulfilling prophetic hopes for a messiah. Halter’s “false” Jewish Messiah, David Reubeni in the 16th century, struggles very humanly with using or misusing his persecuted people’s belief in his divinity in order to lead them to return to their lost homeland. Rice’s Christ the Lord (the second in her series) knows he is God incarnate from page one and struggles only with if and how to reveal his dispassionate and limitless self to the agitated and petty world to which he has descended.
Author Marek Halter was born in Warsaw and at age five crawled with his family through the sewers to escape the Nazi extermination of the ghetto. His previous novels, written originally in his adopted French, include Jewish interpretations of The Book of Abraham and the popular Canaan Trilogy (Sarah, Zipporah and Lilah). Usually, Jews tend to distance themselves from the “half-mystic, half-adventurer” who appeared in Venice in 1524 claiming to be the prince of an eastern Jewish kingdom nobody had ever heard of. Recently expelled from Spain and often forced into conversion, Europe’s Jews live as refugees in their native lands. Europe’s Christian princes consume one another with Reformation-religious and more mundane conflicts, allowing Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and his Turks to march unhindered to the walls of Vienna. Wouldn’t it be more reasonable for Christian and Jew to join forces and drive the Turk from the Holy Land in order to re-establish a Jewish homeland in which the Christians, too, could have access to their holiest sites? To this end, Reubeni (whose journal still exists) appears appealing to the pope first and then to ruler after ruler. In Portugal, he causes a young man of converso heritage to reconvert, including self-circumcision—not at all what the Christian monarch wants to see. This zealot forces Reubeni’s hand, complicating what was meant to be a simple military action with divine overtones—and tragic results.
And the saga of Anne Rice—from lush pseudonymic S&M erotica, through vampires and witches given flesh-and-blood reality we common mortals never imagined, now to sparse and born-again Christianity—is a plot worthy of her own hand. The Road to Cana picks up where Out of Egypt left off, covering Jesus’s life in Nazareth, through his baptism to the marriage of Cana which might have been his own—were he not God. In the confrontation with a mirror-image Satan in the wilderness, I found reflections of the deep light-and-dark struggles that characterized Rice’s vampires. And the struggle of the falsely accused Avigail has some longed-for humanity.
Rice’s female characters are better drawn than Halter’s, but all in all this volume may be a third the size of the old Rice because true belief is a third or less of life. The old mouth-watering richness is gone. I found Halter’s the more intriguing work.
Ann Chamberlin
GLADIATRIX
Russell Whitfield, Orion, 2007, £7.99, pb, 320pp, 1905802098
Gladiatrix is set in the 2nd century, at the height of the Roman Empire, whose rulers were a discordant mix of classical learning and extreme cruelty. Under Domitian the spectacles of human slaughter have grown to epic proportions, and
each sponsor of gladiatorial games seeks novelty. Set in the Eastern Mediterranean, Gladiatrix explores the world of female gladiators.
Lysandra is an educated Spartan warrior priestess who is captured by Lucius Balbus, the owner of a school for female gladiators in Asia Minor. Lysandra overcomes the shame of slavery to become a skilled and ruthless gladiatrix. The crowds love her stubborn hubris and she attracts the attention of Sextus Frontinus, the region’s governor. Within the palisade of the school, Lysandra finds the love and hate of both men and women; the resolution of these conflicts drives the plot at a cracking pace.
Whilst Lysander is the dominant voice in the narrative, the story offers several other points of view; this lessens the intensity of Lysander’s emotional turmoil, but does offer external perspectives on her plight. What to us are small acts of kindness are depicted as important in the world of powerless slaves. The portrayal of the training regime, the slums in towns and the crowded arena felt genuine. I sweated and feared in the heat of the day and expired in the cool evenings.
Whitfield adopts a violent vocabulary in keeping with the vicious nature of the gladiatrices’ way of life. Sexual encounters are an escape
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from the imposed external persona, rather than the lynchpins of developing relationships. His descriptions of combat are highly charged and exciting. The violent narrative and brutality of the characters imposes an authentic distance between the present day reader and the 2ndcentury gladiatrix.
Bill Dodds
3rd CENTURY
THE FIRE WAKER
Ben Pastor, Minotaur, 2008, $23.95, hb, 300pp, 031235391X
The second in what, judging by the last page, is intended to be a series, The Fire Waker should have everything going for it. It’s a fascinating period in the Roman Empire’s history. Hero Aelius Sparianus is Emperor Diocletian’s historian (and spy), plus there’s the ‘hunt the Christian’ theme, a mystery of rebirth from death, murders, details of the life of a Roman soldier, and frontier battles. So why did I sigh for a touch of Lindsey Davis?
It’s Pastor’s writing style. There’s an odd choice of words. Our hero smirks and simpers; there are men ‘standing on horseback’. The viewpoint bounces unexpectedly, and Aelius Sparianus is neither outsider-observer giving incisive insights to the reader, nor an emotionally involved, close-viewpoint character drawing the reader to him. He falls between the two and sometimes seems a cold fish. The plot is good, but I couldn’t care for our hero and found the villain a far more interesting character.
I’m sure many people will enjoy this novel, but reading is a matter of personal preferences, and Ben Pastor’s way of writing spoiled the story for me.
Patrika Salmon
4th CENTURY
SONG OF THE NORTH (US) / THE BOAR STONE (UK)
Jules Watson, Overlook, 2008, $24.95, hb, 399pp, $24.95, 9781590200506 / Orion, 2008, £7.99, pb, 416pp, 9780752893389
Roman Britannia, AD 366. Minna, a servant girl of mixed Roman and British blood, feels out of place and discontented with her life. The Romans whisper about her native features and strange visions of the old pagan gods; her brother wants to sell her off in marriage to advance his military career; and her beloved British grandmother has just died, leaving her alone in a world she wants no part of. Hopeless and desperate, Minna runs away to seek her own fortune. On the road she meets Cian, a traveling performer and skilled horseman, who becomes her only friend when they are captured by marauders and sold into slavery north of the Roman Wall, in the vast unconquered land of Alba.
ruler of the western Alban kingdom of Dalriada, and his Rome-loving queen, Maeve. In Cahir’s kingdom, a place of mixed loyalties and intrigues as ancient and mysterious as Alba itself, Minna finally discovers her identity and her destiny, a destiny tied to Dalriada and its gods, its wars, its secrets, and its king.
Song of the North is a blend of fact and fiction, history and myth, love and battle, Scotland and Rome. In short, this book is right up my alley. It’s epic historical fantasy in the vein of Morgan Llywelyn, Marion Zimmer Bradley, or Donna Gillespie, filled with memorable characters, tense action, romance, intrigue, and a little bit of magic all woven into a richly layered plot. The pages turned themselves, and the characters stayed with me after I put the book down. Despite being the third volume in the Dalriada trilogy, it stands alone as its own story. I very much look forward to reading the rest of the series.
Heather Domin
7th CENTURY
CONSPIRACIES OF ROME
Richard Blake, Hodder & Stoughton, 2008, £19.99, 356pp, 9780340951125
608 AD. Young Englishman Aelric is interpreter and secretary to Maximin, a priest, who is part of the Roman mission to convert England to Christianity. But more texts are needed, and the pair travel to Rome to seek out suitable books. Aelric is amazed to find that the Romans don’t appreciate their glorious literature, but he wants to ensure that England is made the intellectual heart of the West. The ambitious plans go awry as murder and violence dog his footsteps. Are scheming politicians and diplomats hindering rather than helping? Is the church being honest? Who is ultimately responsible for the murder?
This is the first in a trilogy. Written in the first person, this book has a strong voice. Aelric is well drawn, and he comes across as quite a vain and greedy person, but someone who ultimately has a sense of fairness. Seventhcentury Rome is a unusual subject for a novel. A great sense of decline and decay comes across. Rome is definitely past her best, and the Church and various factions are jostling for control. Sometimes the digression on religious points can get a bit wearing. However, it’s an enjoyable read, and I will certainly seek out the second part of the trilogy.
S
Garside-Neville
9th CENTURY
SWORD SONG: The Battle for London Bernard Cornwell, HarperCollins, 2008, $25.95/C$34.95, hb, 336pp, 9780061470714 / HarperCollins, 2007, £18.99, hb, 366pp, 9780007219711
of Bebbanburg (Bamburgh) during the wars between King Alfred and the Danes in the late 9th century. As its subtitle proclaims, Sword Song deals with the capture of London from occupying Vikings.
Although a Northumbrian Angle by birth, Uhtred was reared by Danes and remains fonder of them than his own people, preferring their pagan warrior code to the intolerance and greed that he finds in most churchmen. Since he has, however, given his oath to serve Alfred (whom he dislikes), he leads the desperate, but successful, assault upon London and the subsequent daring rescue of Alfred’s daughter after she is captured by the enemy.
The young pair ends up in the court of Cahir, N n N n N n N n N n
This is the fourth novel in The Saxon Tales series, which follows the adventures of Uhtred
Uhtred is a shrewd leader and a formidable warrior, with a fighting man’s scorn for those who shirk their duties and seek to profit from his sacrifices. He is loyal to true friends and generous to brave foes, allowing the latter to die with their weapons in their hands so that they may go to Odin’s corpse-hall to feast and fight in the afterlife. Since he has little time for peaceful pursuits, the story he tells focuses upon warlike deeds: the fierce and confusing struggle in the shield wall, the bitter hand-to-hand fight between crews of warships, single combat between champions. He is protective towards women, but this is typically demonstrated by defending and rescuing them from enemies.
This is a tale of fast-paced adventure, full of vividly described action, and Uhtred’s grim humor and sardonic point of view offer a highly entertaining commentary on people’s conduct. Since the series is ongoing, however, the conclusion leaves many plot threads still to be followed.
Ray Thompson
10th CENTURY
GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD
Michael Chabon, Ballantine, 2007, $21.95, hb, 204pp, 9780345501745 / Sceptre, 2007, £12.00, hb, 224pp, 9780340953549
Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Chabon has “gone in search of a little adventure” in this impressive genre-twisting tale set along the Silk Road of the 10th century.
The two wandering con men of the title— Amram, an enormous, gray-haired African, and Zelikman, a moody scarecrow of a Frank— strike an agreement with a shifty Persian to return a troublesome captive to a faraway city for ransom. But the captive has a bloody history, and is not only adept at escape, but is also hunted by an army of mercenaries. Once the captive’s true identity is revealed, the two men are reluctant to help the youth in his wild and likely fatal quest, but a series of events—a stolen horse, a torn hat, a sudden urge to “see something through”—persuade the travelers to offer up their skills. Soon, the men are embroiled in an unlikely plan to return a child/king to the throne of the Khazan Empire.
Chabon has cooked up a religious and
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cultural stew of a world, full of Vikings and Arabs, Turks and Celestials, clashing both in commerce and in war. Though it’s a cliffhangerheavy, Conan-the-Barbarian kind of plot, the story is salted with chewy archaic words, and narrated in sentences as artfully twisted as a Möbius strip. Gentlemen of the Road is a strange hybrid—pure genre wrapped in literary trappings—and though it takes some hacking through the latter to get to the former, Chabon’s skill with language, artfully mastered scenes, and subtle wit is well worth the journey.
Lisa Ann Verge
VARANGER
Cecelia Holland, Forge, 2008, $24.95, hb, 303pp, 9780765305589
This fourth entry in the Corban Loosestrife saga takes us from frozen Viking trading posts to the outskirts of the Byzantine Empire. The first installment moved from raids on Ireland to conflicts in York and Scandinavia (Soul Thief, HNR 21). The second entry (Witches’ Kitchen, HNR 28) crossed the Atlantic to Vinland and back while introducing Corban’s son Conn and Raef, a nephew begotten when Corban’s sister was raped by a Viking. The Serpent Dreamer (HNR 36) shifted back to Vinland and does not relate much to the work under review.
Conn and Raef ultimately pledge their services to Volodymyr, the leader of the emerging Rus people, a mixture of raiders and traders and locals. Conn charms the scarce women and leads the fierce men, while his brother is more given to introspection and an incipient feminism resulting from empathy for his violated mother. Other characters include a Muslim scholar from Bagdad, a Viking who turned Christian because Christ seemed to be winning over the other gods, a kidnapped princess from the semi-legendary Jewish Khazars, a Hun slave woman, and a sly government official from Byzantium. However, action takes up more pages than culture or religion as our heroes slash enemies and false allies through the ice and snow, navigate their dragon boat down thawing rivers, and sail over Greek fire to capture Chersonese. Volodymyr’s conversion to Christianity and subsequent marriage to the Emperor’s sister can be seen as the founding event of the Russian people, a key turning point in history.
Whether read independently or as part of the series, this novel represents another contribution from one of our finest, best known, and most prolific historical novelists.
James Hawking
11th CENTURY
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Y THE LAST BEAR
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Mandy Haggith, Two Ravens Press, 2008, £8.99, pb, 198pp, 9781906120160
Brigid is the last in a long line of medicine women; she lives alone in the forest since she has been banished from the local community by James, the priest and brother-in-law of the headman, Bjorn.
One thousand years ago, the Vikings are settled in the North West Highlands of Scotland, and the spread of Christianity clashes with the old pagan beliefs; conflicts arise and loyalties become confused. In her forest home, Brigid watches and marks the changes and their effects on the people and their world as the new ways encroach on the community, even into the forest. With the death of the last bear, the world is changed forever. There is no escaping the long-term effects that man imposes on his environment – a theme that resonates today.
Beautifully written, this is a wonderful mix of legend and historical romance: a moving and exciting first novel from a fine writer.
Ann Oughton
THE TEMPLAR
Paul Doherty, Headline, 2007, £19.99, hb, 301pp, 9780755338481
At the end of the 11th century, the Infidels captured Jerusalem. On November 27th, 1095, the call went out from Pope Urban II to the Kingdom of Western Europe to march and
reclaim the city in the name of Christendom. The response was overwhelming, and according to the chronicles of Eleanor de Payens, one hundred thousand men, women, and children joined the Army of God and marched east. The first Crusade had begun. With Eleanor was her brother Hugh and Godfroi of St. Omer, and it was these two who were to found the Order of the Templars with Hugh becoming the first Grand Master.
This is no romanticised notion of what took place from the time the Crusaders left Europe with high hopes to July 1099 and the recapture of Jerusalem. Of those that set out only twenty thousand finally arrived.
Paul Doherty paints a vivid picture of the First Crusade with all its battles, privations, brutality and squalor. You can feel the squelch of the mud, hear the screams and smell the camps along the way. This is history come truly alive. It is a compelling read but not one for the queasy or fainthearted.
This is the first book in a new series charting the history of the Templars, and I can’t wait for the second one.
Marilyn Sherlock
PEOPLE OF THE WEEPING EYE
W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O’Neal Gear, Forge, 2008, $24.95/C$31.00, hb, 400pp, 9780765314383
During the 11th and 12th centuries, the Mississippi River Valley was populated by a number of Native American chiefdoms; this culture was known for its square earthen mounds, pottery and trench-walled houses. This is the story of Trader, a man who has traveled the length of the Mississippi River; Old White, known as the Seeker, who is haunted by visions that keep calling him home; and Two Petals, recognized as a Contrary with strange and exceptional powers. The three meet and begin a quest to return to Split Sky City to right an old wrong.
People of the Weeping Eye and its sequel,
People of the Thunder, due out next year, continue the Gears’ First North Americans series. The husband-and-wife team has fifty years of combined archaeological experience, which is evident in the cultural detail throughout the book. My only reservation is the number of characters and unusual names introduced in the early chapters of the story. After the three major characters meet, the book becomes easier to follow. I’ve read all of the Gears’ novels in the series and enjoy the adventure and page-turning excitement each one brings. Each book stands alone; therefore, reading this book before the others in the series is not necessary.
Jeff Westerhoff
SIEGE OF HEAVEN
Tom Harper, St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2008, $24.95, hb, 518pp, 9780312338725 / Arrow, 2007, £7.99, pb, 240pp, 9780099454755
Harper writes about that charade of religious fervour, the First Crusade of 1096-98, in all its ghastly violence and hypocrisy. The reader is spared nothing of the petty rivalries between the various dukes and warlords, the infighting and power struggles which is all the Crusade turns out to be for these men.
Harper’s research is impressive. I learned a great deal about the shenanigans of the end of the Holy Roman Empire as the main character, a Greek, Demetrios Askiates, is the Emperor’s representative in Antioch. He’s an irritating fellow who just wants to go home and is always falling over his feet or door sills when he fights. However, he cannot return to Constantinople until he has fulfilled his duty to his Emperor, and he doesn’t want to, not with the in-fighting between the lords, the plague among the true pilgrims and the double-crossing dealings his Emperor wishes him to be part of. So through Demetrios’ eyes we stagger along with the thoroughly unholy Crusade and finally reach Jerusalem.
One does not wonder, having read about the main players, why there was no earthquake
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of protest at the useless slaughter and cruel massacre in Jerusalem, but Demetrios survives, finds his family and does return them safely to Constantinople.
The research and writing are excellent, and the history of the whole Crusade is covered from start to dismal end, but it was, for me, grim reading. If you enjoy battles and fighting, politicking of the nastiest sort and hypocritical Christians, then you will enjoy the book. If you want to learn what the Crusades were really about, this is the book to read.
Patrika Salmon
GODIVA
Nerys Jones, Macmillan, 2008, £12.99, hb, 344pp, 9780230530683
England, 1045. Edward the Confessor is on the throne, and the Normans are circling. Everywhere there is rumour, subterfuge and political intrigue. Edward is childless and the succession is in doubt. Caught up in all this is Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and his wife, Godiva, a landowner in her own right and ruling her estates from Coventry. What happens next is known to anyone who has had a half-decent education in history.
Without question, Leofric and Godiva lived at that time and their granddaughter, Edith, married Gruffydd ap Llewelyn, King of Gwynedd. Whether the story of Godiva’s ride through Coventry, naked and mounted on a white horse to save the people from taxes imposed by the King – the heregeld and successor of the danegeld – is true or just another legend like those of Arthur or Robin Hood matters not, but in this book Nerys Jones has woven a powerful story around it. As the Anglo-Saxon age draws to a close, life in what are now called the Midlands is vividly described, and just as in tales of Arthur and Robin Hood, the reader is swept along with the events taking place and made to want to believe in it.
Marilyn Sherlock
12th CENTURY
GENGHIS: Lords of the Bow (US) / LORDS OF THE BOW (UK)
Conn Iggulden, Delacorte, 2008, $25.00, hb, 400pp, 9780385339520 / HarperCollins, 2008, £14.99, hb, 464pp, 9780007201761
By the beginning of the 12th century, Genghis the Khan of the Mongols has united the tribes north of China. Now Genghis’s brilliant, ruthless leadership has forged a force of 10,000 warriors whom he will use to exact vengeance. Lords of the Bow depicts the beginning years of Genghis’s invasion of China, town by town, city by city, not an easy feat as the Mongols face the thick, formidable stone walls protecting each major city.
In this follow-up to the equally suspenseful Birth of an Empire, the Khan’s brothers are adults now, grown to maturity and their own place of leadership as well as loyalty to Genghis.
Temuge evolves from a whining boy to the able assistant of the awesome, deceptive but powerful shaman, Kokchu. But Temuge is more than a trained, loyal servant and sets his sights much higher after a brief, expansive experience within the walls of a modern Chin city. Kachiun and Khasar become military commanders whose unrivaled skill with the bow, fearsome enactment of discipline, and inspirational appeal to succeed in capturing impossible enemy strongholds provide pages and pages of thrilling reading due to the author’s deft skill in maintaining plot tension.
Genghis’s conflict with his bastard son, Jochi, and his wife, Borte, grows after his first successful campaign and taking of a Chin wife. The reader is gripped by the initial surprise and then palpable fear of the Chin leaders, who never imagined the barbaric Northern tribes could mean the end of the Chin dynasty.
If you love plenty of fierce combat scenes, fascinating yet unique characters, and historically accurate descriptions of artifacts and customs, Conn Iggulden’s novels are riveting works that will make you want to read more of this creative and talented author.
Viviane Crystal
13th CENTURY
DEATH OF A SQUIRE
Maureen Ash, Berkley Prime Crime 2008, $6.99/C$9.99, pb, 241pp, 9780425219591
This is the second installment in the Templar Bascot de Marins mystery series, set in Lincoln, England, in the year 1200. Bascot has been living at the castle, providing his services to the castellan, while he tries to decide whether to return to his life in the Templars or to leave their service. When a young squire is found hanged in the forest, Bascot is immediately pressed into service an investigator, as he had recently solved a number of other murders. King John is on his way to Lincoln to receive homage from the Scottish king, so it is critical that this matter be cleared up immediately. Was it the work of outlaws living in the forest? After all, the remains of a poached deer were found not far away. But this answer might be just too easy. The deceased squire, a thoroughly unlikable individual, may have stumbled onto a plot to bring Arthur, King John’s nephew, to the throne in his place, and attempt to blackmail those involved.
Like the first book, Death of a Squire is hard to put down. The historical detail is everpresent, but isn’t forced or didactic. Bascot is an admirable character, and I shall look forward to his continuing tale, particularly given the cliffhanger ending of this one.
Trudi E. Jacobson
disastrous Fourth Crusade forms the backdrop.
After the Musician tries to kill Marquis Boniface of Montferrat, the marquis’ son-in-law, Gregor of Mainz, takes the Musician under his wing to prevent him from committing suicide. Gregor, an honest pilgrim and true believer in the Crusaders’ cause, tries to do what is right and just, with the goal of keeping the army together. Ultimately, the Musician joins Gregor, his brother and their coterie in their holy war, and they set off from Venice for Jerusalem. They never arrive there, because as history tells us, the crusaders get sidetracked at Zara and then Constantinople, where countless numbers of Christian citizens (as well as Jews) are murdered and their homelands despoiled.
The politics of the times – the unremitting control of the Venetians over the purse strings of the Crusade, papal bulls that are ignored and manipulated, the splintering of the army into factions, the wickedness of Marquis Boniface in redefining the goal of the Crusaders, the utter destruction of Constantinople’s Jewish population at Petra – become Galland’s gateway into character development. Using the mechanism of the one unnamed Musician as a mirror from which all around him is reflected is, from my point of view, an act of considerable creative genius. Jamila, the faux Arab princess, is our mirror into the lives of 13th century Jewry. These two characters alone make the book a recommended read. When you add Gregor’s intensity, his ability to learn and change, and his deep commitment to his faith no matter the consequences, the book becomes a must read.
CROSSED
Nicole Galland, Harper, 2008, $15.95, pb, 672pp, 9780060841805
An unnamed British musician is the protagonist in Galland’s new book, in which the
This is a long, sometimes light and humorous, and often profoundly disturbing book which has its forgivable faults. I loved it.
Ilysa Magnus
14th CENTURY
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THE VOYAGE OF THE SHORT SERPENT Bernard du Boucheron (trans. Hester Velmans), Overlook Duckworth, 2008, hb, 206pp, $24.95/£12.99, 9781585679201
In an unspecified year, a Church cardinal sends a letter to a bishop with orders for a special mission. The remote Greenland settlement of New Thule has been out of contact for over fifty years, and now rumors have reached the Church that the settlers have turned to all manner of heresy and paganism. The cardinal sends the bishop to see if the colony truly has gone native and, if so, to restore it to the Church’s control. He is instructed to take inventory of treasure, monitor property, collect tithe, and – oh yeah –see if the people are all right. Ready to eradicate sin and restore order, the bishop heads off to the icy wastelands on a ship called the Short Serpent After a grueling (and gruesome) journey, what the bishop finds at New Thule is more shocking than he could have imagined, but that is nothing compared to what happens next.
The Voyage of the Short Serpent is a short book, but it packs quite a wallop in its few pages. N n N n
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The story is full of historical detail with regard to shipbuilding, navigation, Church policy, local geography, and the horrors of the settler’s life, all told in a literary epistolary style with almost no dialogue. The writing style is somehow both offhand and pointed, describing the most disturbing scenes with a callous detachment that hides what feels like a kind of dark glee. As the story goes on and the bishop’s report becomes less and less intelligible, the sense of morbid amusement grows even stronger. This is not a story for the faint of heart (or the queasy of stomach) -- part literary tale, part historical tragedy, part horror show, it is a book that defies genre and defies expectations. Short, shocking, and strangely celebratory – a dark and definitely recommended read.
Heather Domin
HANGMAN BLIND
Cassandra Clark, John Murray, 2008, £16.99, hb, 307 pp, 9780719522314
This first novel in a new mystery series introduces Sister Hildegard, a Cistercian nun who wants nothing more than to find a suitable grange on which to found her own modest priory. Instead she is dragged into intrigue when she finds five dead bodies hanging from a gibbet in the middle of the woods and a murdered young man in the undergrowth nearby. Later, when visiting old friends at Castle Hutton in Yorkshire, someone attempts to poison Roger, lord of the manor. The offended man plays dead and allows a mock funeral to be performed in his honour whilst Hildegard and Ulf, his steward, struggle to uncover the culprit. Meanwhile two servants are murdered in cold blood; Roger’s ‘widow’ is abducted; and Roger’s brother and sister-in-law attempt to pass off the wet nurse’s baby girl as the new male heir.
This is a fast-paced read with some colourful scenes, although the suspense is somewhat undermined by incongruous intrusions of slapstick comedy, such as a Pythonesque scene in which a house cat savages an armed warrior. The writing itself seems rather weak in places, but it may appeal to those who enjoy their medieval fiction with a generous helping of Castle Anthrax.
Mary Sharratt
CATHEDRAL OF THE SEA
Ildefonso Falcones, Dutton, 2008, $25.95/ C$28.50, 592pp, hb, 9780525950486 / Doubleday, 2008, £14.99, hb, 640pp, 9780385611855
Cathedral of the Sea is a most welcome addition to the growing genre of medieval fiction. It is one of only a few that is set in Spain and available in English. The heart of the story is Barcelona’s Basilica de Santa Maria del Mar which captivates, consoles, and gives meaning to the city’s common people, especially to its bastaix, the dock workers who literally carried her building stones on their backs from the quarry to the building site.
The principal character, Arnau Estanyol, is just such a dock worker. Born in 1321, he is the son of a runaway peasant. He unloads ships and carries huge blocks of stone on his back. He is one of the faceless mass of the city’s poor. From this seemingly dull cloth the author creates an irresistible tale that – unflinchingly - carries the reader into scenes of incredible cruelty inflicted by nobility and clergy on whose whims hang the workers’ lives, into the religious hysteria and the pogrom that came of it, of war, incessant hunger, and the terrors of the Inquisition.
Cathedral of the Sea is, in these respects, a dark story, for one cannot help being overwhelmed with sadness when confronted with the evil men can do. But the story also retells acts of kindness, love, and extraordinary loyalty – with touches of humor provided by Barcelona’s visiting prostitutes. This is a fast paced, page turning story that, in spite of its length, holds the reader’s attention to the very end. I agree with those who compare it to Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. Both are splendid examples of captivating epics grounded in solid historical research. Highly recommended for both historical content and narrative zest.
Lucille Cormier
COMPANY OF LIARS: A Story of the Plague
Karen Maitland, Michael Joseph, 2008, £12.99, hb, 552pp, 9780718153229 / Delacorte, Sept. 2008, $24.00, hb, 480pp, 9780385341691
Midsummer’s Day 1348, and the first victim of the pestilence dies in the English coastal town of Kilmington.
Camelot, a generic title for a peddler or hawker, is the narrator and together with a motley group of fellow travellers, comprised of a conjuror, a musician and his apprentice, a deformed storyteller, an adolescent couple on the run, a midwife and a rune-reading girl, set out on a journey away from the disease-ridden town.
On the way, each member of the group tells a story, and shades of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s Decamaron spring to mind. As they suffer the wettest summer of the century, the spread of plague, the subsequent shortage of food and the breakdown of law and order, the little band is beset by tragedy as one after another of the group suffers a violent end. Only Camelot begins to suspect the strange rune reader, an albino child whose prophecies seem uncannily accurate.
The author has certainly researched her story well and it shows, sometimes too much. There are some exciting episodes, but the pace is unnecessarily slowed by inconsequential storytelling and would be improved by some drastic pruning. Although the book is far too long it is redeemed somewhat by a devilish twist at the end.
Ann Oughton
hb, 9780434015474
The time is September 1373 and the Archbishop of York, John Thoresby, is dying in his palace at Bishopsthorpe. Princess Joan, the fair Maid of Kent, arrives with her entourage. Among the party is Dom Lambert, an emissary from William Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester. As they approach the palace, Dom Lambert’s servant falls from his horse, breaking his neck. Was it an accident or are there darker deeds afoot?
As always, Candace Robb writes a powerful story intertwined with genuine characters of the day. Apart from John Thoresby and Princess Joan there is Geoffrey Chaucer, Lewis Clifford, John Holand (Princess Joan’s son by a former husband) and Alexander Neville, who features prominently while never actually appearing. In between her fictitious characters slip, seamlessly, in and out of the arena.
This is another book in the Owen Archer mysteries, and therefore it can be assumed that the accident was no simple fall, but what is behind it and why? And then another body is found in the woods. Times are uncertain and the question of Thoresby’s successor is ever present. Rivalries, jealousies and intrigue are the order of the day.
I enjoyed this book very much.
Marilyn Sherlock
A VIGIL OF SPIES
Candace Robb, Century, 2008, £18.00, 284pp,
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15th CENTURY
FIGURES IN SILK
Vanora Bennett, HarperCollins, 2008, £12.99, hb, 450pp, 9780007224944
Vanora Bennett’s debut was the fascinating Portrait of an Unknown Woman. In her second novel, she turns her attention to the previous century.
Jane Shore, mistress to Edward IV, is one of the most intriguing of history’s lesser players. However, Bennett relegates her to a secondary character and creates a younger sister for her. This novel is the story of a long-term secret love affair between Isabel and Edward’s brother, Richard of Gloucester, later Richard III.
This affair, as Isabel makes clear, is nothing like her sister’s dalliances; rather, it’s a deep love through which the contradictions that have made Richard such an intriguing and controversial figure are expressed. However, we gain no new insights. Bennett’s Richard is the post-Tey modern manifestation, essentially noble in spirit, well-intentioned and wise but flawed by ambition and a quick temper.
The novel also follows Isabel’s progress from mercer’s daughter to wealthy, ambitious silk merchant. History tells us no silk was woven in England until the Venetian monopoly was broken, but Bennett has written an almost plausible tale of Isabel’s secret venture to weave silk in Westminster. Maybe it is only my cynicism that finds the ready assistance of a young William Caxton a little too convenient in furthering this enterprise.
15th Century-16th Century
That aside, Bennett weaves both fact and fiction into a densely plotted, complex novel. She is particularly adept at depicting the bustle, intrigue and jealousies of the London merchants, and I applaud the way she clearly distinguishes between life in commercial London and that of the royalty and government of Westminster. I found the sections on the history of silk interesting, although sometimes the author allowed her research to hinder the narrative. I wish, though, that the author had either written a novel about Isabel and Richard’s passion or one about Isabel, the successful businesswoman. Somehow trying to do both didn’t fully do justice to either.
Sally Zigmond
THE APOSTATE’S TALE
Margaret Frazer, Berkley Prime Crime, 2008, $24.95, hb, 307pp, 9780425219249
Margaret Frazer improves with each book. This is her seventeenth Dame Frevisse novel, and it has more depth then some of the earlier ones. Here we find Dame Frevisse in her home convent in Northamptonshire in the spring of 1452. The struggle to keep the under-funded convent thriving with such a small population of nuns is just one of the details which make the story seem real.
What happens to nuns at the end of a long and lean Lent, a time of their lowest strength, when an apostate arrives? This apostate was once their Sister Cecely, before she ran off with a man; now she’s back, nine years later, with her son. Her man has died and she is seeking sanctuary from his family—or so she says. But when the family arrives, armed and threatening, it seems there was at least one other side to the story. As the nuns struggle to find time to rejoice for Easter and find the truth about their apostate, Cecely manages to unsettle each woman, filling some with doubt and others with emotions best not let loose in a convent. Then the poisonings begin. It is up to Dame Frevisse to sort it all out, not an easy task.
A well written mediaeval mystery, and a good read.
Patrika Salmon
16th CENTURY
THE SIXTH WIFE
Suzannah Dunn, Harper, 2008, $13.95/C$16.50, pb, 336pp, 9780061431562 / HarperPerennial, 2007, £6.99, pb, 320pp, 9780007229727
Set during the reign of England’s Edward VI, Suzannah Dunn’s fictionalized account of the final two years of the life of Henry VIII’s last queen, Katharine Parr, is a delightful read. Told from the point of view of Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, it follows Katharine’s marriage to Thomas Seymour through to its tragic end.
Catherine is a lively narrator who doesn’t hold back her opinions and finds herself drawn deeper into her closest friend’s life than she ever imagined. Through her, we see Katharine
the Queen and Katharine the woman. But we also learn about court life, political intrigue and about Catherine herself, former ward of Henry’s younger sister, Mary.
Do not let the modern language fool you; this novel is steeped in history, with key period details adding depth and tantalizing glimpses of major historical figures of the era, including both Princess Elizabeth and Jane Grey. The characters are true to their times, drawing the reader into their lives as the story rolls along at a good pace.
It is a tale many readers know well, yet seeing through Catherine’s eyes makes it new and different. It is her story as much as the queen’s. Though not always a sympathetic protagonist, she is an effective one, giving the novel energy without overshadowing Katharine, its true heart. Together they dispel some of the myth of the oppressed woman in history, while at the same time reminding the reader that before modern medicine, childbirth was one of the most dangerous things a woman could experience, whether born well or not.
I found this book hard to put down, so ably did Ms. Dunn cast her literary spell. Readers who love the Tudor period, women’s history or just a jolly good yarn should pick up this splendid example of historical fiction. Teresa Basinski Eckford
THE SECRET BRIDE
Diane Haeger, New American Library, 2008, $14.00, pb, 398pp, 9780451223135
Another episode in today’s Tudormania. The story of Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s younger sister, is relatively unknown to the reading public. She was probably the only woman in the English court able to get the better of her brother and then survive to tell the tale. The love story
of Henry’s best friend, Charles Brandon, and Mary is both touching and romantic.
Diane Haeger’s novel entertains and informs without being pedantic. She writes of objects that I thought were anachronisms, but I later found were facts. For instance, who knew wallpaper was known in Tudor England?
The new viewpoint on the oft-told story of the Tudor family adds to the available history of the 16th century. Haeger’s sensitive treatment of Mary’s ailing first spouse, King Louis XII of France, is among the best characterizations I have read in historical fiction. The character of Charles Brandon grows from that a socialclimbing serial husband to a man with a heart willing to risk all for the woman of his dreams. Haeger’s Mary Tudor develops depth and maturity, going from a spoiled child to a politically savvy Queen who willingly takes risks to follow her own mind and heart, in contrast to the usual destiny of the era’s noblewomen.
The drawbacks of the novel include an overuse of narrative. I wanted to hear more from the characters through dialog rather than description. On several occasions, the author’s head-hopping pulled me out of the story enough to wonder whose point of view I was reading.
I recommend The Secret Bride to lovers of the Tudor era, and for readers looking for a rare happily-ever-ending love story in Henry VIII’s court.
Monica Spence
ELIZABETH AND THE PRINCE OF SPAIN
Margaret Irwin, Allison & Busby, 2008, £7.99, pb, 331 pp, 9780749080860
1554: At the court of Mary Tudor of England, a man and woman are joined in a battle of words and wits. He is Philip of Spain, the Queen’s
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Y MICHAELMAS TRIBUTE (UK) / A SECRET AND UNLAWFUL KILLING (US)
Cora Harrison, Macmillan, 2008, £16.99, hb, 326pp, 9781405092258 / Minotaur, Sept. 2008, $24.95, hb, 336pp, 9780312372682
The Brehon Judge, Mara, returns in this second historical murder mystery set in the Burren in north-west Ireland. It is 1509 and people are gathering for the Michaelmas Fair, but an angry undercurrent is marring the celebrations. Ragnall MacNamara, the unpopular steward of the MacNamara clan, is found murdered and Mara is called upon to investigate. Another death soon follows to complicate the picture. Mara needs all her professional wits about her – especially since an unexpected marriage proposal is distracting her thoughts – to get to the bottom of this knotty case. And, when she finally pinpoints the awful truth, it seems that she must inevitably hurt the person she loves the most.
Once again, Cora Harrison brings 16th century Ireland beautifully to life and her Brehon detective, Mara is a fantastic protagonist – an absolute one-off and yet refreshingly real. Her dignity and intelligence are beacons that guide the reader through a murky story of greed and vengeance.
Sara Wilson
husband and son of Emperor Charles, the most powerful man in Christendom. She is Elizabeth, twenty-one years old, bastardised by her father King Henry and for years a survivor of plots and scandals, each one of which might have brought her to the block. She is now in her greatest danger from the jealousy – political and personal – of her neurotic and capricious half-sister. Philip must bear the extravagant adoration of his ageing, unloved wife and walk warily if Elizabeth’s execution is not to precede Mary’s death. But does he want to keep alive this unparalleled young woman whose fierce intelligence and allure make Philip – soon to inherit his father’s throne – sometimes feel a dullard but at other times capable of extraordinary achievements? For any reader unaware of the ending of these few momentous years this novel will be as suspenseful as any work of imagination. If the true story is familiar it is still riveting.
Elizabeth’s scenes with her greatest love, Robin Dudley, are a poignant delight, and all the great men are here: a procession of popes, cardinals and archbishops plus the unfortunate aristocrats of Philip’s entourage whose loathing of England is enthusiastically returned by its citizens.
I underestimated an author writing fifty years ago by expecting something more heavyweight and solemn. Instead, here is a writer blending compassion with a little irony who entertains readers with vigorous narrative and sprightly dialogue.
Nancy Henshaw
THE GALLIARD
Margaret Irwin, Allison & Busby, 2008, £7.99, pb, 586pp, 9 780749 080730
Young Mary, Queen of Scots, returns to Scotland after years of exile and is immediately caught up in the religious and political power struggles of her turbulent nation. Her cousin Queen Elizabeth of England is fighting for her own survival and sees Mary as a threat rather than an ally. Anxious to win over her people, Mary tries desperately to make friends but gradually discovers there is only one man she can trust, her loyal servant James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, known to all as the Galliard. Bothwell first meets Mary when she is the very young Queen of France, setting the scene before moving on to the main arena for events – Scotland. The principal characters are richly drawn, with Mary growing from a cosseted and trusting child to a passionate young woman, a fitting partner for Bothwell, who is a “glorious, rash and hazardous young man.” The reader might well know that their romance cannot end happily, but there is plenty to keep one’s attention in this action-packed story.
Originally published in 1941 as The Gay Galliard, this is a masterful account of the love story between Mary and the Earl of Bothwell, and Irwin skilfully weaves her tale around the sometimes sparse facts of their relationship. In this wide-ranging novel Irwin is not afraid
Y THE LADY ELIZABETH
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Alison Weir, Ballantine, 2008, $25.00, hb, 496pp, 9780345495358 / Hutchinson, 2008, £12.99, hb, 496pp, 9780091796723
How does a Princess Elizabeth become a Lady Elizabeth within a matter of days, the almost-three-year-old wants to know? Her father, the powerful Henry VIII, beheads her mother, Anne Boleyn, a woman she hardly knows, and has her declared a bastard. She is no longer a princess of the realm now – only a king’s illegitimate offspring. And in this way, Elizabeth, from the earliest of ages, learns what it means to be at the center of a political maelstrom. Always bright beyond her years, Elizabeth gingerly picks her way through one political minefield after another. She chooses her friends wisely and is quick to figure out who her enemies are. She desperately wants to be loved, seeks it from her sister, Mary, from her stepmothers (who often don’t last terribly long) and from her esteemed father. The queens come and go, but Henry remains the bastion of strength in Elizabeth’s eyes. She wants to be the king he is.
Weir, deftly applying historical fact to this wonderful personality, creates a young Elizabeth who is, at the same time, brilliant, aching for love, desperate for acceptance, analyzing her possibilities and ever vigilant. Elizabeth’s growth as a woman, as a warrior and as a politician is the focus of this most formidable book. By the time Elizabeth is prepared to ascend to the throne, she is well-schooled in the politics of manipulation and prevention – learning how to avoid becoming a tenant in the Tower of London or a victim of either Henry or her sister, Queen Mary, or of any number of Catholic or Protestant sympathizers. She has learned well.
This is a highly recommended read. Ilysa Magnus
to move between colourful story-telling and (occasionally) a more withdrawn, biographical style of writing when necessary to maintain the pace without sacrificing historical detail.
This is an excellent novel, well worth republishing, although for me the editing errors detracted slightly from the reading enjoyment.
Melinda Hammond
THE SERPENT GARDEN
Judith Merkle Riley, Three Rivers, 2008 (c1996), $14.95/C$16.95, pb, 449pp, 9780307395368.
Riley’s exquisite tale begins in England in 1514 and follows the life of Susanna Dallet, daughter of a Flemish artist. Susanna is widowed when her unsavory husband is murdered by his lover’s spouse. Before his death, Mr. Dallet was part of a group who recovered a long lost manuscript that threatens to rip apart the French monarchy. Because of her husband’s role, Susanna is unknowingly thrust into peril, caught in the middle of conspirators who will stop at nothing to possess the complete manuscript.
As a widow, Susanna is left to make her own way in the world, no easy feat in the 16th century. She begins by painting less than innocent Biblical scenes and portraits in miniature. Soon she is introduced to Cardinal Wolsey, who employs her and sends her to France with Princess Mary Tudor’s wedding party to paint the festivities of the union of Mary and the aging Louis XII.
Susanna possesses an extraordinary gift for painting in miniature and is welcomed into the French court, a place full of schemes at every turn. Riley adds a good dose of the supernatural
to the story with a demon named Belphagor who was released when the manuscript was unearthed. Belphagor’s goal is to cause chaos, and Susanna becomes a target for the demon’s wrath because of her association with the manuscript.
Riley packs quite a bit into the novel and achieves a nice blend of romance, intrigue, politics, and fantasy. The narration alternates between Susanna Dallet and third- person viewpoints which may take a bit to get used to, but soon readers will find themselves engrossed in the tale. Susanna’s sense of humor and the depictions of the French court are only two of the aspects that make this a novel not to be missed.
Troy Reed
17th CENTURY
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THE PAINTED LADY
Edward Marston, Allison and Busby, 2008, £7.99/$11.95, pb, 288pp, 9780749080778
This is Restoration comedy, the eighth whodunit in the popular Redmayne series. Christopher Redmayne, the young architect, is making his reputation by building new houses for the wealthy in post-Great Fire London. This time it’s a fashionable French artist who is building a home, and Christopher is delighted to design his house as it will be a very lovely building. The artist is pleased too, the money for the house comes from painting the portrait of the most beautiful woman in town. And so the
Y MISTRESS OF THE SUN
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Sandra Gulland, Touchstone, 2008, $26.00, hb, 400pp, 9780743298872 / HarperCollins Canada, 2008, C$29.95, hb, 352pp, 9780002007757
In her first novel in eight years (following the international success of her Josephine B. trilogy), Sandra Gulland has chosen an enigmatic figure—Louise de la Vallière, mistress to Louis XIV and mother of four children by him. Louise has been overshadowed in history by her more glamorous successors and the flamboyance that characterized the later years of Louis’s reign, but in her captivating jewel of a novel Gulland offers an absorbing account of a woman who reluctantly became a royal mistress and paid the price.
Gulland’s Louise has a fey spirit with the ability to enchant horses. In a desperate act of magic to save a feral stallion’s life she sets the course for her own destiny, one that will bring her equal measures of sorrow and joy. Uneasy with the cruel sycophantism of court, caught between her innate spiritual introspection and an impoverished lineage that compels her to noble servitude, Louise eventually catches the young king’s eye. Louis is handsome and vital, poised to assume his later embodiment as the Sun King. In Louise, he discovers incorruptible innocence, and their romance flourishes under a secrecy that continues for years, even as he grows in stature and she wrestles with her conscience and the degradation of her illusions. Scandal ensues when Louise is brought into the open as Louis’s lover; this fateful moment also sets the stage for her decline.
Fascinating details of life at the French court sparkle throughout the narrative, evidence of Gulland’s dedication to research. While Louise may not be as ambitious or clever as those who followed in her footsteps, she imbues an unforgettable authenticity that gives credence to the belief that she was Louis XIV’s only true love.
problems begin. The lovely Araminta is newly and happily married to Sir Martin Culthorpe, but that does not prevent the more unpleasant of her many admirers from plotting to seize her for themselves. When her husband is murdered and the artist accused, Christopher and his constable friend, Jonathan Bale, team up again to find the real villain.
This is a thoroughly entertaining romp, an easy read with nice pieces of period dialogue, amusing characters and a puzzle to solve. Just the book for an evening’s read by a snug fire when it’s pouring down outside.
Patrika Salmon
CONCEIT
Mary Novik, Doubleday Canada, 2007, C$29.95, hb, 402pp, 9780385662055
The Great Fire of London is the framing device for Mary Novik’s insightful portrait of famous and obscure 17th-century Londoners. This novel explores the life and family background of Pegge Donne, daughter of preacher and poet John Donne, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Her childhood unfolds not only in his shadow but also in the one cast by her beautiful, scheming sister Constance. Awkward and precocious, Pegge attains womanhood more slowly than she would like. It is essential for Donne’s many daughters to marry well. Constance, the unobtainable but enduring passion of young Izaak Walton, Pegge’s fishingmad friend, twice succeeds. Pegge, trapped at
C.W. Gortner
home by her father’s last, lingering illness, nurses the man who did not value her and waits for young Walton to notice her.
His physical decline approaching, Donne’s pride, his flaws, and the venialities of his past are revealed. Using the entombed Anne Donne’s viewpoint, Novik traces the scandalous passion that resulted in a well-born young woman’s runaway match with the unscrupulous and sensual upstart Donne.
Pegge’s eventual and less flamboyant marriage to the Master of the King’s Wardrobe removes her to his country estate where she blossoms, romantically and creatively. Her husband Will, while often bemused by the complexities of his wife’s character, capably copes with her many eccentricities. Pegge’s long rivalry with sister Constance endures, but motherhood softens her edges. The fire that consumes London destroys Donne’s great self-designed mausoleum, freeing Pegge from the fetters of her past.
Margaret Barr
THE MERRY MONARCH’S WIFE
Jean Plaidy, Three Rivers, 2008 (c1991), $14.95, pb, 352pp, 9780307346179
The Merry Monarch’s Wife is the re-release of Jean Plaidy’s 1991 biographical novel (originally titled The Pleasures of Love) about Catherine of Braganza, wife of King Charles II in the late 17th century. Since childhood, Catherine has idolized Charles and has dreamt of her marriage to him. Eventually, political events align to bring her the fulfillment of her dream. Once
married, however, she discovers that Charles is not the perfect man, the faithful husband she had dreamt of, and she must adjust her expectations and resign herself to the reality of Charles’s infidelities. She must learn to share her place in his court and in his life with his mistresses. Her life as Queen of England and as Charles’s wife is a difficult and troubled one: not only is she a devout Roman Catholic in a strongly Protestant country, she also has powerful enemies at court who would wish her ill.
This is the first Jean Plaidy novel I have read, and I am appreciative of her flair for historical detail and character development. However, there was a fair amount of repetition and of telling of the story, rather allowing the action to unfold, especially in the second half of the book where the political machinations of Titus Oates and the anti-Catholic movement were in full swing. Those sections read like an historical lecture. The highlights for me were the drama of the Restoration, and of a convent-educated woman’s acceptance of her husband’s love for her, regardless of his continuous infidelities. Overall, I found this to be a worthwhile, informative read. I look forward to reading some of the author’s earlier novels, which I hear are superior to her later works, such as this.
Andrea Connell
18th CENTURY
THEFT OF SHADOWS
Naomi Bellis, Signet Eclipse, 2008, $6.99/ C$9.99, pb, 310pp, 9780451223289
Gabriel d’Aubrigny, Chevalier de Lesgardes, finds himself returning to England after living through the years of the Revolution in France, but unfortunately, things go wrong from the moment his ship pulls into port. When he is robbed of his dwindling funds by a female thief, Gabriel allows himself to be brought reluctantly back into the world of his former mysterious employer in order to spy on the nefarious Sebastian Balthazar, confidante of the Prince of Wales. Only this time, Gabriel discovers that his family’s ancient gift of magic has been roused, and he will have to learn to tame it if he’s to bring the evil Balthazar to justice. In addition, Gabriel must deal with the lovely Anne Tremaine, who just happens to be the thief who took his money, but who also has an agenda against Balthazar.
Set in late 18th-century England, this paranormal romance has it all, and Ms. Bellis keeps her story moving well. While some of the characters are a bit clichéd, the insertion of the paranormal brings vibrant life to the plot. Ms. Bellis is definitely an author to watch, and her novel will satisfy all who like their historical romances with a bit of a supernatural twist.
Tamela McCann
MUTINY
ON THE BOUNTY
John Boyne, Doubleday, 2008, £12.99, hb, 352pp, 9780385611664
In December 1787, a fourteen-year-old boy,
EDITORS’ CHOICE Y BOUND
Sally Gunning, Morrow, $24.95/C$26.95, hb, 307pp, 9780061240256
Gunning’s second outstanding historical novel explores a young woman’s difficult coming of age, a process that teaches her much about freedom, trust, and the responsibilities associated with both.
Sold by her debt-ridden father as an indentured servant upon their arrival in Massachusetts in 1756, Alice Cole grows up knowing abandonment by those she loves. She spends her childhood bound to the Morton family and treated almost like a sister by daughter Nabby, whom she follows to a new household when Nabby marries – which proves her misfortune. Dutiful Alice, fifteen and beautiful, attracts the unwanted attention of Nabby’s new husband. Desperate to escape, Alice flees eastward on foot along the Boston road and stows away on a ship belonging to a sympathetic widow from Satucket, Lyddie Berry, and her companion. Widow Berry takes her in, making use of Alice’s skill in spinning, and they spend silent days weaving wool into homespun as a protest against costly British goods. Alice’s past life catches up with her, but she finds it impossible to trust the widow and her boarder, attorney Eben Freeman, until it’s almost too late.
From here on, the storyline becomes completely unpredictable, yet it’s fully in keeping with Alice’s character and her social milieu. Gunning’s spare dialogue captures the famous “New England reserve” (surely more pronounced in the mid-18th century?); she also painstakingly re-creates colonial Cape Cod, from its clapboard houses, busy wharves, and fresh salty air to the growing political stirrings among its residents. As a standalone novel, Bound will transport you 250 years into the past and immerse you in a dramatic storyline that exposes the injustice of indentured servitude. As a sequel to The Widow’s War, it not only continues but enhances the experience of the original. Beautifully done, and strongly recommended. Sarah Johnson
to Face is a panoramic novel with a large cast of characters, historical and fictional alike. It’s full of intrigue, and Koen handles the complex politics of the day with assurance and depicts this time period vividly. I must say, however, that I never really warmed to either Koen’s prose style, which I often found overwrought, or to Barbara herself, whose admirable qualities and beauty are too often commented on by the author and by other characters for my liking. But this is mainly a matter of taste, and other readers may not be bothered by this at all. I also suspect that I would have enjoyed the novel more had I first read its predecessor, Though a Glass Darkly, which shares a number of characters with Now Face to Face Susan Higginbotham
THE VENETIAN MASK
Rosalind Laker, Three Rivers, 2008 (c1993), $14.95/C$19.95, pb, 453pp, 9780307352569
Originally published in 1993, this novel of Venice is set in the last quarter of the 18th century. Marietta Fontana, orphan of a Carnival mask-maker, is placed in the famous music school for girls, Ospedale della Pietà. She attracts the attention of Domenico Torrisi, head of a prominent Venetian family, whose barren wife has taken an interest in Marietta after hearing her sing. Several years later, widower Torrisi follows his late wife’s suggestion that he choose Marietta as her successor, which causes Marietta to worry that memories of his first wife
may haunt their marriage. In the meantime, her Pieta friend Elena has married (unhappily) into the Celano family, archrivals of the Torrisis. When Elena bears a love-child, she gives the baby to Marietta, who has managed to conceal her simultaneous stillbirth from Torrisi. The switch gives the feud a new dimension, and it’s brought to a head when Elena’s husband trumps up charges of treason.
Laker’s descriptions and period atmosphere definitely transport the reader to a faraway, yet believable time and place. I didn’t know much about Venice’s history and came away enlightened. The main characters are welldrawn and involving, although a few plot coincidences like the baby-switching caused a raised eyebrow. Expect no deep themes or psychological insights in the story, but readers will find a highly entertaining, escape-from-the21st-century tale.
B.J. Sedlock
SOLDIER OF FORTUNE
Edward Marston, Allison & Busby, 2008, £19.99, hb, 331pp, 9780749080525
Edward Marston is famous as a writer of whodunits, which are published under at least three names. For the first time he has departed from familiar waters and struck out for the unknown territory – to him – of military adventure. In the tradition of Sharpe, meet Captain Daniel Rawson who is in turns soldier, lover, spy, and confidant of the Duke
of Marlborough, leader of forlorn hopes and cuckolder of husbands. This has made him a bitter enemy of General Salignac, who has sent two assassins to bring back Daniel’s head so he can show it to his wife. But they will have to catch him first, and when better than at a time when Daniel’s guard is down due to the arrival in camp of an unusual visitor. Meanwhile, Marlborough’s army marches towards Blenheim…
I would award Mr Marston some marks for writing about an unfamiliar time and place instead of the Napoleonic Wars. As usual, this author is at his best writing about amiable heroes and hissable villains having some goodhumoured adventures in an entertaining plot. It is not a boring story for these reasons, but what it does lack – and this is rather serious – is any military feeling whatsoever. The battle is more akin to a damp squib than a soaring rocket, and despite being set in an army camp on the move the atmosphere is absent. If you are reading the book because you enjoy military history (rather than because you are a fan of this writer’s other work) you will be disappointed in this, particularly as there is no crime for Daniel and his sidekick to solve. In common with all his books are those interminable conversations, where the participants bat flat sentences to each other like balls in a tennis match. Yet it still manages to be entertaining enough, and with more than a hint of the sort of swashbuckling classic-era historicals that got me into the genre in the first place. He will need to brush up on his military history, though, if I am going to read another one.
Rachel A. Hyde
ANNETTE VALLON
James Tipton, Harper, 2007, $24.95/C$31.50, hb, 496pp, 9780060822217
Although I’m not a fan of novels written by men from a woman’s point of view, Annette Vallon disposed of this prejudice in a few pages. Born into a wealthy bourgeois family during the last days of the Ancien Régime, Annette is an avid reader of novels, particularly the “dangerous” ones by Rousseau and Laclos. She is also an idealist, a perilous mindset in any age. When she meets the poet Wordsworth, on his free-spirited tramp through Europe, she falls—finally, fatally—in love. She bears him a daughter, but France and England are soon at war and will remain so for a generation. The lovers will never marry.
Tipton’s writing is polished and evocative, his settings a perfect form of time travel, but the novel is broken into two “movements.” I enjoyed the second, which deals with Annette’s lonely struggle to survive and raise her daughter, even more. France is undergoing successive spasms of revolutionary violence. Social reforms lead to the Terror, to which she loses her beloved father and brother. With the bloody logic of many later revolutions, the ever-increasing savagery of “purification” leads to Napoleon’s dictatorship
Y THE BLACKSTONE KEY
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Rose Melikan, Sphere, 2008, pb, £10, 435pp, 9781847441331 / Touchstone, Sept. 2008, $14.00, pb, 465pp, 9781416560807
Mary Finch receives an invitation from a rich, estranged uncle to meet him at White Ladies, his estate on the Suffolk coast. Mary’s own circumstances have been somewhat wanting, so she courageously sets off on her own with her uncle’s letter determined to mend the twenty-year family rift.
In 1795 such a journey is perilous enough for a young woman travelling on her own. However, Mary’s journey will become a greater adventure than she could have possibly envisaged. A roadside accident results in a man dying; he whispers strange warnings to her. Mary also discovers he carries her uncle’s watch. With no answers to her growing number of questions, she is saddened to learn on arrival at her destination that her uncle has already died. She is helped by two men, and confides in both as they try to find out the significance of the Blackstone Key.
Mary is naïve about the world, but intelligent, knowledgeable about legal issues and gifted at analytical thinking. Her determination to solve the puzzle leads her into a lonely place where she does not know who she can trust. Fate draws her into the path of smugglers, and worse, the sinister world of espionage. But who is the traitor? She has stumbled into a world where nothing is as it seems. In the midst of this she has a growing fondness for one of her helpers.
The novel starts off in a gentle manner and increases in pace and action as the story progresses and the mystery builds. Readers who love period detail, whether in costume, fact, language or law, will revel in this book. Although predominantly a mystery, it has the contrast of a gentle romance building within it. Ultimately, it has an exciting, actionpacked and satisfying ending.
and from there to his endless wars.
I don’t know how much of Annette’s counterrevolutionary daring is imagined, but if you like brave, intelligent heroines who aren’t afraid to use a pistol in the defense of suffering humanity, here is one you‘ll never forget.
Juliet Waldron
19th CENTURY
THE STATE COUNSELLOR
Boris Akunin, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008, £12.99, hb, 300pp, 9780297848233
I am a Boris Akunin fan, and the latest in his Erast Fandorin series does not disappoint. Fandorin is a policeman working in late 19thcentury Moscow, and as the title of this novel indicates, his successes have now raised him to the rank of State Counsellor. But as always his worst enemies are not the criminals he tracks down but his own corrupt superiors.
In this novel, Fandorin tackles the War on Terror, in this case the nihilist assassins who are trying to destroy the Tsarist regime. Much of the book is narrated from the point of view of the principal assassin who, like many of Akunin’s villains, gets rather sympathetic treatment. He is evil but we understand why.
Like all Akunin’s novels, this one is beautifully written; light entertainment with a satirical edge which is not irrelevant to presentday Russia.
Edward James
A FATAL WALTZ
Valerie Loh
Tasha Alexander, Morrow, 2008, $23.95/ C$27.95, hb, 304pp, 9780061174223
Vienna! “For the connoisseur of the waltz, there is no better place,” pens Lady Emily Ashton in the very beginning of her sleuthing quest for justice. It’s a place where the aristocrats of Europe and England in the very late 1800s are wining, dining and dancing as furiously as Chartist and other political plots gyrate to destroy tradition. Lady Emily has taken up the task of finding the killer of Lord Basil Fortescue, thus freeing her accused friend Robert Brandon. Her fiancé, Colin Hargreaves, is about his own political secrets and can’t totally protect her against three foes that are quite vocal in their animosity toward Lady Emily.
Another unexpected beauty lies in this story’s beautiful descriptions of the period’s clothing, architecture, art, music and food. Historical fiction readers will also be delighted by the complex depictions of the innocent Hapsburg Empress Elisabeth, far too many questionable political heavyweights on both sides of the Continent, and anarchists deeply committed to remove monarchies and opponents. Lady Emily, however, in face of this whirling dance of intrigue, is a truly cultured detective who knows how to infuse life with gusto. Quite a formidable group of characters, and a terrific story!
Viviane Crystal
THE DARCY CONNECTION
Elizabeth Aston, Simon & Schuster, 2008,
$14.00, pb, 304pp, 9781416547259
Elizabeth Aston is the author of four previous novels about the daughters and other relations of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. In this story, she turns her attention to Eliza and Charlotte Collins, the daughters of Mr. Collins and his wife Charlotte, Elizabeth Bennet’s friend. Mr. Collins is now the Bishop of Ripon and lives in Yorkshire with his family. His daughter Charlotte is a beauty. Eliza is less pretty than Charlotte, but is spirited and intelligent, like her godmother, Mrs. Darcy. The social-climbing Mr. Collins pins his hopes for the future on Charlotte. She is to have a season in London with her godmother in the hopes of making a good match. Eliza is to accompany Charlotte to London to distance her from an attachment to Squire Diggory’s son, which the squire feels is not at all appropriate. Mr. Collins, ever the sycophant, agrees. Eliza doesn’t want to go, but prefers London to the alternative of being sent to Pemberley to stay with the two youngest Darcy children and their governess.
Not surprisingly, Eliza finds London stimulating and quickly forgets her attachment to the squire’s son. At a party, she meets Bartholomew Bruton, scion of a wealthy banking family. She dislikes him intensely after overhearing an unkind remark he makes about her. When he helps her with some family difficulties, she realizes that she has misjudged him and falls in love with him. Sound familiar? Despite the similarity to the plot of Pride and Prejudice, I found the story charming and read it quickly. I felt like I was visiting old friends, and that’s a nice feeling. Austen enthusiasts should enjoy this one.
Jane Kessler
THE WATSONS and EMMA WATSON: Jane Austen’s Unfinished Novel Completed Jane Austen and Joan Aiken, Sourcebooks, 2008 (c1996), $14.95, pb, 240pp, 1402212291
It must be a publishing truth universally acknowledged that unfinished works by famous authors shall be brought to a satisfactory conclusion, no matter the author’s original intention. In this reissue Jane Austen’s fragment
The Watsons was lovingly reconstructed by the late Joan Aiken and re-titled Emma Watson
The reissue also includes the original piece, abandoned when Austen’s father died in 1805.
The plot begins with a reversal of fortune, as sweet young Emma returns to her birth family in Surrey after losing her chance at a fine inheritance from the aunt who raised her. When Emma’s father dies suddenly, the family faces the loss of their home with little income to support themselves. Emma has three sisters: one kind and good, two mean and selfish. All are competing for husbands. In Emma Watson, Emma disdains the tactics of her mean sisters, refusing to play the coquette, but is embroiled nonetheless in a tangled, almost farcical, mating game. Aiken has taken Austen’s characters with their rather bleak premise and created a modern-
style Regency romance, adding a dashing new hero. Austen’s subtle irony and complex characterizations are little seen, but this version is a pleasant, fast-moving read.
Nina de Angeli
SIMPLY PERFECT
Mary Balogh, Delacorte, 2008, $22.00/C$27.00, hb, 343pp, 9780385338240
Simply Perfect is the fourth and final installment in Mary Balogh’s Simply series set in Regency England, where four teachers from Miss Martin’s School for Girls find the men of their dreams. This book is about the schoolmistress herself, Claudia Martin. Ms. Martin is old enough to be considered on the shelf. When the Marquess of Attingsborough arrives to escort her to London, she tries to keep a professional distance, but finds herself drawn to him in spite of her dislike of the aristocracy, and in spite of the fact he has a beautiful, perfect fiancée. Soon the marquess is sharing his deepest secret with Miss Martin and asking for her help. This draws the two even closer together.
Mary Balogh is a skillful and prolific novel writer. Her main characters are independent and forward-thinking for their time. This novel is no exception, and although the secondary characters lack the depth she usually infuses in them, this novel is a satisfactory conclusion to the Simply series.
Nan Curnutt
DISTANT HEART
Tracey Bateman, Avon Inspire, 2008, $9.95/ C$11.95, pb, 264pp, 9780061246340
In this second book in Bateman’s Westward Hearts trilogy set in 19th-century America, exprostitute Toni Rodden has joined a wagon train heading to Oregon, where the 22-year-old Toni hopes to make a living as a seamstress and to put her miserable past far behind her. As the settlers make their way west, Toni and her fellow travelers must cope with increased danger and tension, from forces outside and within, while Toni continues to struggle for acceptance—and with her feelings for Sam Two-Feathers, the wagon train’s handsome scout.
Bateman vividly depicts the hardships and challenges faced by the pioneers, though there’s a welcome note of understated humor now and then. Her characters, particularly the romantic leads and Ginger, a tough-talking, gun-toting young newcomer to the wagon train who befriends Toni, are well realized. In these characters, Bateman brings to life a slice of American history that’s usually relegated to a few lackluster paragraphs in grade-school textbooks.
It probably helps to have read the first novel in the trilogy, Defiant Heart, but this fine inspirational novel stands well alone as well.
Susan Higginbotham
LOVERS AND LADIES
Jo Beverley, Signet, $14.00, 2008, pb, 448pp,
Y THE DARK LANTERN
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Gerri Brightwell, Crown, 2008, $24.95/C$27.95, hb, 320pp, 9780307395344
Brightwell has fashioned a multilayered, Upstairs Downstairs-type mystery that drew me in completely. When I finally paused to reflect, I realized it had everything but the kitchen sink. To wit: a young servant girl moves from the country to London and hides her past from her new employers; the matriarch of this household is on her deathbed while her daughter-in-law longs to return to Paris; and her son is intent on proving that anthropometry is a superior method to fingerprinting in identifying criminals. One more thing—when the eldest son is expected to return from India, what the family gets instead is a woman claiming to be his widow and the news that he has drowned at sea.
The author deftly weaves together multiple plot strands—although on the surface there is no central mystery, there are several smaller ones that come together quite credibly at the end. Characters are unique and engaging, with Jane, the servant girl with the secret, being the most sympathetic. Her experience “downstairs” is rendered with such realism as to make me devoutly wish she would get the happy ending she deserved. Is her gentleman caller too good to be true? Other plotlines are equally engrossing. Even knowing that fingerprinting wins out over anthropometry, I was fascinated by Robert Bentley’s utter devotion to the cause. And now this review has everything in it but the kitchen sink. So many reasons to enjoy this book.
97804512233647
Two classic stories by beloved Regency author Jo Beverley are brought together in this single volume, creating a delectable book filled with all the charm of the London Season. In The Fortune Hunter, Amy de Lacy and her siblings face poverty. Amy, the only beauty in the family, decides to marry a fortune to save her family from destitution. But when she meets Harry Crisp, a seemingly average country gentleman, her heart is torn between duty and desire.
In Deirdre and Don Juan, the dashing Earl of Everdon is most eager to marry anyone who will bear him an heir. But when he meets quiet, well-bred Lady Deirdre, he must resort to an affectionate plot of deception to gain her acceptance to his proposal, since she is determined to marry another.
Both stories are delightful, classic Regency romances written in the best of Beverley’s style. Blending well with one another, the stories mesh to create a lovely volume where the heroes find their hearts and eyes opened to love.
Rebecca Roberts
EMMA AND KNIGHTLEY
Rachel Billington, Sourcebooks Landmark, 2008 (c1996), $14.95/C$17.95, pb, 368pp, 9781402212070
As Emma and Knightley opens, the titular couple has been married for over a year when tragic news arrives: Jane Fairfax, married to Frank Churchill, has died following childbirth. Her demise sends Frank into a Byronic tailspin and back into the environs of Highbury—where his indiscreet and increasingly wild behavior causes Emma much distress. Meanwhile, the finances of Mr. Knightley’s younger
Ellen Keith
brother, John, take a drastic turn for the worse, necessitating a sudden trip to London. Can the relatively new Knightley marriage—already a little tense as the spouses adjust to their new roles and to Mr. Woodhouse’s constant presence—survive these sudden strains?
First published in 1996, this is a lively, absorbing continuation of Jane Austen’s classic, with a plausible storyline and a cast that includes both familiar faces and some memorable newcomers. Billington’s characters are true to their originals, yet stand well on their own, even managing to surprise the reader from time to time. Janeites and non-Janeites alike should enjoy this engaging novel.
Susan Higginbotham
COVER THE MIRRORS
Faye L. Booth, Macmillan New Writers, 2007, £14.99, hb, 318pp, 9780230529663 Preston, 1856, and spiritualism is very popular in Victorian England. Molly Pinner, born into the town’s slums, was orphaned at birth and brought up by her Aunt Florrie, a highly successful medium living in the more prosperous part of town. In growing up, Molly learned all the tricks of the trade and, on her aunt’s death, dons her mantle and becomes very well established in her new life. Her oldest friend is Jenny, a mill girl, whom she befriends. She then meets the wealthy mill owner, William Hamilton, and marries him, but it is not exactly a love match. Needless to say things do not go smoothly and much is to happen before the inevitable conclusion.
I found this an intriguing story with many twists and turns that came largely unexpectedly. The characters are well defined and believable
and the contrast in lifestyle between the two girls is well drawn, with the result that the reader is given a very good idea of what life must have been like for the haves and have-nots in the mill towns of northern England in the 19th century.
Marilyn Sherlock
THE SPIRITUALIST
Megan Chance, Three Rivers, 2008, $14.95/ C$19.95, pb, 432pp, 9780307406118
Middle-class Evelyn’s dreams appear to have come true when Peter Atherton, scion of one of New York’s most prominent families, proposes marriage. Four years later, Evie’s idyll has long since crashed headlong into stark reality, as she makes the empty rounds of glittering social events without her increasingly distant husband. Though an avowed skeptic, Evie accompanies Peter to a séance to contact his recently deceased mother in order to attempt to mend their relationship. Peter introduces her to the seductive, magnetic, and dangerous medium Michel Jourdain, and shortly afterwards, Peter disappears. When his body is discovered a few days later, Evie finds herself under suspicion for his murder, and must delve into the world of spiritualism and its adherents in order to find the killer before she hangs for the crime herself.
Megan Chance has crafted a dark little confection with The Spiritualist, as hypnotic and alluring as the enigmatic medium, Jourdain. It’s not particularly novel in its plotting or “twists”— the reader will probably peg the murderer well before the denouement. But sexual tension abounds, the prose is stylish, and the ambience deliciously gothic. The characterization is strong; both Evie and Jourdain are intriguing individuals, and the subsidiary characters are also drawn with depth. Evie is particularly well crafted—her desire, as an intelligent woman, to have a man love and value her for her intellect rather than merely as decoration, to connect with an intellectual and spiritual equal, ring true. This theme is nicely echoed in Chance’s descriptions of the spiritualists’ belief in a particular soul’s “affinity” for another soul, in this as well as on other planes. Chance’s depiction of antebellum New York and its society are detailed, with only a few false notes, and this makes for convincing period atmosphere. Pick up The Spiritualist for a quick, entertaining read. Recommended.
Bethany Latham
DARK OBSESSION
Allison Chase, Signet Eclipse, 2008, $6.99/ C$7.50, pb, 350pp, 9780451223876
With a title like this, I should have known. The main characters, Nora Thornegoode, ruined for society by her painting teacher, and Grayson Lowell, a pariah for his supposed murder of his brother, an earl, feel sparks whenever they are near each other. Well, lots more than sparks. If only they had been able to think a bit more clearly at times, things would been resolved a lot more quickly. But there was enough in the plot to keep me reading despite their somewhat
overwrought behavior. Nora and Grayson, strangers to one another, marry, to solve his financial problems and her reputation problems. They take off for Blackheath Grange in Cornwall, where Grayson’s great guilt over his brother’s death intensifies, for it is here that he died. Their efforts to determine what happened with Grayson’s brother, and to help the brother’s young son, who hasn’t spoken since his father’s death, are complicated by issues of trust, possible piracy, and a couple of intriguing ghosts. Set in 1830, the book moves at a spanking good pace. Readers who relish the passionate interludes will enjoy it all the more.
Trudi E. Jacobson
YORKSHIRE ROSE
Ann Cliff, Robert Hale, 2007, £18.99, hb, 224pp, 9780709084709
Presumably this will go on the romance shelves in libraries, but it is more a woman’s coming-of-age story than a pure romance novel. It opens in 1890 and tells the story of fourteenyear-old Susan Wood, who is looking after her two younger brothers in a cottage on the Yorkshire Dales after her father has been falsely imprisoned for fraud. She starts working for the neighbouring farming couple, Martin and Ellen Gill, but after Ellen dies, she moves to the Mermaid Inn in Ripon. Feeling abandoned by Martin, she nevertheless manages to make a life for herself, alone except for the occasional Sunday meeting with her brothers, one at school and one an apprentice. Now twenty, she moves to a better position as cook, serving the solicitor who defended her father at his trial. Here she meets Martin again.
Despite the flaws – there are only a few period details, characters come and go, and we do not find out what happened to them all – I enjoyed this novel, with its accurate descriptions of the countryside and farming activities, and I think Ann Cliff is an author to look out for.
jay Dixon
THE PEMBERLEY CHRONICLES
Rebecca Ann Collins, Sourcebooks Landmark, 2008, $14.95/C$17.95/£7.99, pb, 352pp, 9781402211539
Beginning after the double wedding of Elizabeth and Jane Bennet to Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy and Mr. Charles Bingley respectively, this novel follows the lives of these well-loved characters as they marry, have children, and live their lives in 19th-century England. The story is written in the voice of Rebecca Ann Collins, a daughter of Charlotte Lucas and The Reverend William Collins, who was a witness to the lives of the characters portrayed.
Ms. Collins, the pen name of an anonymous author, thoughtfully and realistically portrays historical events of the time and the reactions of the characters to them. Because the story is written like a chronicle, it seems to meander aimlessly through the lives of the Darcys at times. The thoughts and opinions of the main
characters are repeated frequently. However, the characters portrayed are truly recognizable as Austen’s characters, and they act accordingly. Although it may not hold the interest of general readers, this work will be adored by Austen fans. In fact, it has been adored by Austen fans already, as it was previously published in Australia, the first of ten sequels.
Nan Curnutt
WOMEN OF PEMBERLEY
Rebecca Ann Collins, Sourcebooks Landmark, 2008, $14.95/C$17.95/£7.99, pb, 288pp, 9781402211546
Between 1848 and 1858, the characters of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and their many descendants sort themselves out. We have five chapters, each one following a different woman: Emma, Jane Bennet Bingley’s daughter; Emily, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner’s daughter; Cassandra, Elizabeth and Darcy’s daughter; Isabella, Colonel Fitzwilliam’s daughter; and Josie, the spunky proto-feminist writer who is destined to be the next mistress of Pemberley. If you are confused, the list of names and connections at the end of the book provides some help.
As a great fan of the original, I have begged for years, “I’d like some more Austen, please.” Yet I have watched the recent spate of spin-offs filling bookstore shelves with some trepidation. My conclusion is that, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jane Austen needs must have her fanfic. Unlike works still under copyright, however, Miss Austen is not around to sue anyone publishing less-than-standard stuff. If the reader relishes more time in a world where all the people are sensible, this is the book. If, however, a great portion of Austen’s appeal is her sharp humor, social commentary and brilliant characters, this way lies disappointment. The difficult people who provide the whole impetus for the original—or their carbon-copy descendants—are the only glimpses we get of that sort of world. Mr. Collins and Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are sadly departed. Lady Catherine has left Rosings to more deserving hands (never!). Wickham and Lydia had the good sense to have two sons the image of their father (without the charm), but Darcy’s stern oversight and bags of money come along to smooth over every bump far too soon.
Wouldn’t it be more interesting if the Wickham offspring were trying to cultivate some shred of decency in their parents’ shadows?
Ann Chamberlin
SUNRISE
Jacquelyn Cook, BelleBooks, 2008, $16.95, pb, 293pp, 9780976876090
This fictionalization of the life of historical Macon, Georgia, native Anne Johnston presents a faithful depiction of her life before, during, and after the Civil War. The novel portrays Anne’s growing love for her much older husband and details the deaths of several of their infant children. The hardships that the Civil
War brings cause Anne to become increasingly bitter about the loss of their Southern way of life, although her husband’s enormous wealth survives the war. A subplot segues into the life of her friend and fellow Macon native, Sidney Lanier, Georgia’s beloved poet laureate, before the story returns to Anne.
One of the problems of this novel is its faithful adherence to so many of the events in Anne’s life. This robs the novel of any suspense; it dutifully plods from one event to the next like an authorized biography. Another very disturbing problem is the lack of hardly any mention of slaves in the novel. The author glosses over the pesky issue of the owning of other human beings by referring (as the historical Anne presumably did) to the Johnstons’ “servants.” Toward the end of the novel, aided by her faith and by one of Lanier’s inspirational poems, “Sunrise,” Anne sheds her much of her bitterness toward Northerners and learns to forgive. For the most part, the novel seems to have been written as a tribute to that tired mythology of a gracious, kind Confederacy and its vanished way of life. Recommended only for unrepentant revisionists.
Pamela Ortega
A BRIDE SO FAIR
Carol Cox, Barbour, 2008, $9.97, pb, 320pp, 9781597894920
Emily Ralston, a young woman searching for independence and adventure, works in the Children’s Building at the Chicago World Fair in 1893. Stephen Bridger, a handsome Columbian guard, finds a lost boy, Adam, and delivers him to the Children’s Building. Stephen and Emily feel an instant connection and sparks fly. But when a dead body believed to be Adam’s mother is found, danger and intrigue grow. Stephen and Emily find themselves in a perilous mystery, determined to do the right thing, but distracted by their growing romance. Caught in a web of conspiracy and deceit, they must solve the mystery and save Adam from an evil man. Intrigue, murder, and romance are blended intricately with historical details of the World’s Fair to create a delightfully satisfying romantic mystery novel. Cox not only captures the spirit of the Fair, but successfully creates a story with several personable characters, lively dialogue, and a charming end.
Rebecca Roberts
SOULS OF ANGELS
Thomas Eidson, Random House, 2007, $24.95, hb, 287pp, 9781400062386 / HarperCollins, 2008, £14.99, hb, 400pp, 9780007181742
Sister Ria, a young nun who works with the poor in India, is abruptly called home to Los Angeles because her father, Don Maximiato Lugo, is accused of murdering a prostitute. She isn’t sure who called her home—when she fled her psychologically abusive father, she told no one where she was going—but she feels that it is her responsibility to determine exactly what
happened.
When she returns to her home, Sister Ria finds her father in denial that anything happened, despite the fact that evidence of his responsibility was found at the crime scene. Don Maximiato has done so much for the local Mexican community that they treat him as a saint, even though his temper is volatile and his handle on reality is increasingly precarious. When Sister Ria begins to investigate what really happened the night Dorothy Regal was murdered, she sets a sinister chain of events in motion that threaten both her life and the lives of all living in her family’s villa.
The 1880s Los Angeles setting is less exotic than it sounds, and many of the tensions between the Anglo and Mexican communities that Eidson employs to build suspense are still active today, making Souls of Angels seem more timeless than bound to a particular historical period. As the story unfolds, Eidson provides glimpses of Sister Ria’s youth, illuminating the reasons why she fled her comfortable life to serve God as a nun. The mystery was intriguing and the ending was surprising, but the backstory of the troubled and volatile relationship between Maximiato and Sister Ria was what kept me interested.
Nanette Donohue
THE RED THREAD
Dawn Farnham, Monsoon, 2008, $15.95, pb, 328pp, 9789810575670
Charlotte and Robert are sibling orphans, now adults, who initially moved from Madagascar to Scotland and now reside in Singapore in the 1830s. Robert has been fortunate enough to secure a post as head of the police, and sends for Charlotte, knowing their future lies in this exotic but quickly evolving prosperous land. Charlotte quickly falls in love with the town she thinks of as “varied and faceted as a fabulous jewel.” The foreign characters are intriguing as well, such as Coleman, the architect Irishman who has built most of the town in solid, beautiful style to rival any European city yet with its own natural shapes and flowers to enchant every view. Then there is the small group of wives and mistresses who come from their own mysterious Asian backgrounds yet have created an insular camaraderie to strengthen them in the terror-laden moments from both native men and beasts.
But the real threat to their security lies in the slowly emerging love between Charlotte and Zhen, a coolie who also belongs to a powerful Chinese triad group. Theirs is a passionate affair doomed to disaster. Zhen is assisted in attaining this love by his fellow coolie, Qian, a man unsure of where his sexual interests lie. Yet Zhen relies on his faith in Taoist poetry to surmount all difficulties.
How will it all end or begin? The Red Thread is an exceptionally well-written novel whose descriptions and subplots concerning the land, religious beliefs, and relationships are so engagingly presented that the reader is sure
to want to keep this passionate novel, which celebrates meaningful union rather than division. A beautiful story to relish on every page.
Viviane Crystal
THE ANATOMY OF DECEPTION
Lawrence Goldstone, Bantam, 2008, £12.99, 336pp, 9780593058893 / Delacorte, 2008, $24.00, hb, 342pp, 9780385341349
In the autopsy rooms of University Hospital, West Philadelphia, the young physician, Ephraim Carroll, is being taught about death by the famous Dr William Osler. In 1889 medicine is becoming less rudimentary and death more explicable, but doctors still kill almost as many as they cure.
The corpse of a beautiful young woman haunts Ephraim and his investigations into her identity and her fate take him from the seediest parts of the city to the drawing rooms of high society. There he learns to trust no one but himself and to always watch his back.
Every now and then a novel appears that crosses out of its genre and becomes a mainstream hit. The Anatomy of Deception seems certain to do just this. It is a high-class murder mystery that puts character, plot and historical accuracy on equal footings. The mystery is extremely well thought out and involving as demanded of the genre. The intriguing – and frequently gruesome – historical details add veracity and interest, yet are applied with the lightest of touches and never used at the expense of the plot. But it is the characters who reign supreme – they are so realistic that they almost jump out of the pages and start independently breathing.
Lawrence Goldstone has written a wonderful novel and should be justly proud. I, for one, will be looking out with great anticipation for his next work of fiction.
Sara Wilson
EDMUND BERTRAM’S DIARY
Amanda Grange, Robert Hale, 2008, £18.99, hb, 222pp, 9780709084648
Edmund Bertram is fond of his gentle cousin, Fanny Price, who has been taken in by his wealthy parents as a young child. Throughout the years they develop a strong friendship and share many happy times. Then Edmund falls in love with Mary Crawford and his steady life at Mansfield Park is thrown into disarray.
Fanny remains steadfastly loyal, even when Mary turns out to be not all she seems and Edmund finally realises that the one he really loves has been close at hand all along.
The story is well-known from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, but this time it is told in diary form from the point of view of Edmund himself. Amanda Grange has hit upon a winning formula and retells the familiar story with great verve whilst remaining faithful enough to the original to satisfy most Jane Austen fans. Edmund Bertram’s character flourishes, and it’s lovely to read this tender love story from a new, male perspective.
Sara Wilson
FALL OF FROST
Brian Hall, Viking, 2008, $25.95, hb, 342pp, 9780670018666
Robert Frost, the beloved American poet, was born into a long and sorrow-ridden life in 1874. High infant mortality made parents show little or no affection, and children, often bursting to express themselves, were bewildered into silence. Yet Robbie took refuge in words and nature. Both became a necessary balm for his grief and guilt resulting from the tragedies of his life, particularly the death of Elliot, his firstborn. Frost’s struggle for recognition of his poetry triumphed during a stay in England, where he was first published. Soon his own country would honor him with a sincere enthusiasm and awards for his work.
Facts about Robert Frost can be found in any encyclopedia, but Fall of Frost brings us inside the man’s life and mind in a new way. The poet’s “mental narration” leads us into the palpable world of this life-weary but unyielding poet as he darts among his life events not unlike an old man on his deathbed, lost in remembering. Deep slices of Frost’s past are interspersed with the current timeline which begins the novel: Frost’s visit to Russia in 1962 by invitation of Nikita Khrushchev. Nuclear danger lurks. President Kennedy worries. Frost wonders what his flying across the world will accomplish. Arriving to find the Premier rudely absent (on vacation!) he knows it’s not diplomacy. The 88-year-old poet is ferried around Moscow so the Russians can see “the people’s poet” of America.
Among continuous changes of time and place, this book is compelling reading, even the chapters that are as short as a single poem on a page. The reader lives Frost’s life intensely through the pen of Brian Hall in this unique telling of a great poet’s life.
Tess Allegra
A RATIONAL ROMANCE
Melinda Hammond, Robert Hale, 2008, £18.99, hb, 224pp, 9780709084488
Rosamund Beauvais is left homeless when her grandfather loses everything in a card game with Elliot Malvern. As a man of honour, he offers marriage. As a sensible woman, she accepts.
So far, so rational, but then the pair are forced into a perilous adventure in Napoleonic France. Love blossoms, and logic is its first victim.
From its entirely original opening premise to its satisfying conclusion, A Rational Romance is a joy for all fans of historical romances. The likeable hero and heroine take the reader on an enjoyable escapade, and there’s even a spiteful ex-lover to put a spoke in the wheels. Fabulous fun.
Sara Wilson
five nuns exiled from Germany and the English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote one of his most famous poems in homage to their deaths; they were passengers on the Deutschland, which foundered in December of 1875. Hopkins himself was an exile from his family and society when he converted to Catholicism and entered the Jesuit order. The narrative moves back and forth in an oblique parallel between the Sisters’ disastrous adventure, memorialized in the poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” and Hopkins’ own troubled life after his conversion. It also shifts backwards and forward in time to explore the context of the intimate lives of these individuals as they move to a convergence in history.
Hansen’s novel is fiction based on facts, difficult waters to navigate. On the one hand, much is known about Hopkins’ life as one of the most innovative of modern poets; on the other, almost nothing is known about the five Sisters who perished that fateful December. His narrative is a stirring insight into journeys both outward and inward of those exiled because of their faith. In the novel, both journeys are equally distressing. For Hopkins, the novel narrates primarily a personal struggle; for the five Sisters, it tells an exciting adventure. In both cases, the story is an exceptional description of torments that are spiritual, emotional, and psychological. Hansen has crafted an extraordinary work that balances and unites these worlds. He also includes the poem as an appendix, which reflects brilliantly the nature and complexity of not only the characters’ lives but of all lives.
Gerald T. Burke
THE SECOND LADY SOUTHVALE
Sandra Heath, Hale, 2008, £18.99, hb, 222pp, 9780709080909
Washington, July 4th, 1811. Britain is at war with France, America insists on continuing to trade with France, the result being that tensions are running high between Britain and America and another war seems inevitable. The Carberrys are giving the annual Fourth of July Ball, and all is going well until John Carberry, the dissolute son of the family, arrives with Lord Philip Southvale in tow. Lord Philip, a very wealthy widower, is a British envoy sent over on a diplomatic mission from London. The day before the ball he sees Rosalind Carberry driving past in her carriage and immediately falls in love with her. When Rosalind meets Philip their feelings are mutual. What happens next I leave for the reader to discover.
This is a love story set against the background of impending war with America shot through with all the usual ingredients of love, jealousy and betrayal before the ending is resolved. It is well told, with believable characters and good descriptions of the social order of the day.
544pp, 9780061451362
Phyllida Lewis is a young woman of modest means whose distance from the epicenter of the Regency marriage mart has ensured that her choices of husbands have been lousy, at best. When an attractive man named Andrew Carrington visits her Sussex home looking for a bride, she’s suspicious about his intentions, but his frankness and good looks compel her to accept his offer. Andrew wants a marriage based on honesty, and honest he is—he lets Phyllida know that he’s gay and that he has no intention of abandoning the Brotherhood of Philander, the high-class “madge club” that he has belonged to for years. Not surprisingly, Andrew’s sudden marriage is a shock to the ton, and a wager quickly surfaces: will Andrew, despite his disinterest in women, manage to produce an heir to the Carrington earldom?
Herendeen takes many plot devices of the traditional Regency romance and turns them, quite charmingly, on their ear. Phyllida is an independent, spirited heroine who refuses to let marriage change her into a meek, submissive lady, and Andrew is, as you might expect, slightly clueless as to what women want. A highly amusing case of mistaken identity leads Andrew to believe that Phyllida is the author of one of Jane Austen’s novels, and a subplot involving a meddling secretary who seems to be embezzling from the Carrington household adds action and intrigue. The final chapter, which features a play on the marriage scene that typically completes a Regency romance, is the perfect ending for this genre-bending novel. While Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander is enjoyable on many levels, readers of Regency romances who appreciate new interpretations of a classic genre will be delighted with the games the author has played in this novel.
Nanette Donohue
THE GERMAN BRIDE
Joanna Hershon, Ballantine, 2008, $24.95/ C$29.95, hb, 320pp, 9780345468451
It’s Berlin, 1865, and Eva Frank, the romantic daughter of a Jewish banker, falls in love with a handsome painter commissioned by her father to paint her portrait and that of her older sister, Henriette. By the time Eva realizes the painter is not the man she believed, the affair has tragically involved her family. To flee the scandal, Eva quickly marries the merchant Abraham Shein and leaves Berlin, following him across the Atlantic. At home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she feels isolated, Abraham falls woefully short of her expectations, and, eventually, Eva must come to grips with her past.
EXILES
Ron Hansen, Farrar, Straus &Giroux, 2008, $23/C$25.50, hb, 240pp, 9780374150976
Exiles tells the story of a relationship between
Marilyn Sherlock
PHYLLIDA AND THE BROTHERHOOD OF PHILANDER
Ann Herendeen, Harper, 2008, $14.95, pb,
The German Bride is a story about overcoming personal demons. It is an inner journey that shows the protagonist first as an immature, gullible adolescent, then a guilt-ridden, homesick young bride, afraid of everything, and, finally, a young woman who faces her present by struggling foremost against herself. The transformation makes for a readable page-turner. An evocative,
well-paced novel with an elegant style and a cast of believable characters, it spins the familiar Western yarn with an unlikely heroine, a young Jewish woman. It is world full of possibilities and of danger, a landscape where Eva discovers that being different is “both a luxury and a curse,” and where she ultimately forges her own redemption.
Adelaida Lower
LET SLEEPING ROGUES LIE
Sabrina Jeffries, Pocket, 2008, $7.50/C$8.99, pb, 400pp, 9781416551515
Jeffries delivers her fourth installment in The School for Heiresses series with this highly entertaining novel set in early 19th-century England. Madeline Prescott, daughter of a physician, is a teacher and naturalist working at a reputable school. Madeline asks the notorious rake, Anthony Dalton, Viscount Norcourt, to teach the young heiresses lessons on how to avoid rakehells much like him. Anthony is inexplicably attracted to Madeline and agrees to her plan. If his lessons are successful, Anthony will be allowed to enroll his niece in the exclusive school, but he must first return a favor to Madeline.
Headstrong and practical, Madeline is determined not to be seduced by Anthony’s magnetism, but soon finds him irresistible, especially when she gets to know his true self beneath his rakish exterior. The two hide many secrets from each other and both must learn to trust to find the true love that has eluded them for so long.
The plot becomes slightly convoluted near the end through several misunderstandings between the two which distract slightly from the story. Passionate romantic scenes do abound, though, and readers will be kept on their toes with the lively banter of the characters. An enjoyable, quick read.
Troy Reed
ROSES FOR REBECCA
Margaret Kaine, Hodder & Stoughton, 2007, £6.99, pb, 469pp. 9780340923924
At the end of the Second World War, Rebecca Lawson is orphaned and homeless. She goes to live and work with her aunt and uncle in their East End Pub. Romance soon blossoms between her and one of the customers, Ian Beresford. One day he disappears and Rebecca to her horror discovers she is pregnant. Frantic with worry Rebecca travels to his family home in Stoke-On-Trent in search of him. Awaiting her is the news of a dreadful tragedy. Rebecca has to pick up the pieces and makes the brave decision to keep her baby despite her facing scandal and prejudice for being an unmarried mother.
I found this a sensitive and well-crafted portrayal of a young unmarried girl – to get to the stage of wearing a curtain ring from Woolworths to pretend you were married really tugs at the heart. I liked the characters. There was a whole cast of different types, and the story
itself came to life through them. You were made to feel totally on Rebecca’s side throughout and through laughter and plenty of tears you reached a happy conclusion. How true to life it seemed. A good read.
Karen Wintle
HARD TRAIL TO FOLLOW
Elmer Kelton, Forge, 2008, $24.95, hb, 288pp, 9780765315229
In Texas, several years after the American Civil War, former Texas Ranger Andy Pickard volunteers to track down an escaped outlaw named Luther Cordell and his two partners. Andy’s close friend, Sheriff Tom Blessing, is killed in a jailbreak, and Andy seeks revenge. The story follows the pursuit of the outlaws, both from the point of view of the reinstated Ranger and also from the outlaw named Cordell. The reader learns that Cordell isn’t the cold-blooded killer Pickard believes, but actually has many redeeming qualities.
This book is the seventh in the Texas Ranger series. Elmer Kelton knows how to build tension and excitement. His characters are well developed and believable, and his knack for writing Western stories is well known; he has received several Spur Awards and is recognized by many as the best living Western novelist. I enjoyed this tale and had a difficult time putting the book down.
I’ve read all the books in the series and suggest that the earlier books be read before this one. The series as a whole is character driven, and this way you will gain a better perspective of the major characters.
Jeff Westerhoff
THE REBELS: Sons of Texas
Elmer Kelton, Forge, 2007, $24.95, hb, 304pp, 9780765315267
In the 1830s, Texas is becoming a battleground between the American settlers of the open land and the Mexican government, which wants to maintain control of its country. As long as the Americans abide by the laws of the territory, they are allowed to farm and live in peace.
The Lewis family had settled in Texas several years ago. When the Mexican government ordered military units to live near the settlers and impose military law, a few began to rebel against Mexican rule. The Americans who believe in a peaceful solution apply to Mexico City for relief, while there are others who feel that the only way to regain freedom is to rebel and become independent from Mexico.
The Rebels is the third book in the Sons of Texas trilogy. I have read all three books and found them entertaining and basically historically accurate. Seven-time Spur Award winner Elmer Kelton knows how to write an exciting western tale with interesting characters and page-turning action. I highly recommend this book to those who wish to learn more about the days of the Alamo, Santa Anna and how the
Republic of Texas was formed. Jeff Westerhoff
RIDE THE TRAIL OF DEATH
Kenneth L. Kieser, La Frontera, 2007, $19.95, pb, 230pp, 9780978563417
Kieser builds on his ancestors’ experiences in 1870s Dakota Territory for this Western. On the trail to Deadwood, teenager Birch Rose’s family is decimated during separate attacks by Native American Black Moon, and bandit Rico’s lawless gang. Legendary Deadwood sheriff Seth Bullock takes Rose under his wing, teaching him to be a crack shot and giving him a badge. Rose, now equipped to hunt down his family’s killers, must find Black Moon and Rico’s gang before they find him.
I don’t doubt Kieser did his research—he includes some interesting maps and photos of Deadwood, and incorporates historical figures as characters. The book falls short in other areas. It badly needs more editing: I gave up counting after ten instances of “starring,” when “staring” was meant, not to mention howlers such as “shear numbers.” Please, authors! Word processing software is not a substitute for real editing. Furthermore, Kieser blatantly tells the reader that a character is obsessed or mean, instead of letting the reader figure it out from the context. An extraordinarily self-aware villain speaks of another character as “more evil than me.” Several exposition passages are plotdumped, rather than woven smoothly into the story. Sorry, but thumbs down.
B.J. Sedlock
SILK AND STEEL
Catherine King, Sphere, 2007, £19.99, hb, 376pp, 9781847441652
This novel is set in the mid-19th century, in a fictional South Riding, which is quite clearly, South Yorkshire, though that is a relatively recent coinage. The evocation of the region in this period, with its iron works and coal mines, and the description of the change-over which was occurring in the lives of the people from a rural to an industrial existence, is convincing. The heroine, Mariah is the daughter of an iron master who has a dark secret. Mariah has to struggle against the limitations which the attitudes of the time place upon the lives of women The hero, Daniel, is the upwardly mobile son of a miner and the two are, of course, destined to fall in love. So much is formulaic. For although this is not strictly speaking a family saga, we are clearly in saga-country. As is common in this genre, the underlying ideology is one of personal betterment through hard work and capitalist enterprise, with a stress particularly on the enterprise of women - in this case Mariah. With this emphasis on the trials and struggles of the heroine, it is a type of book which appeals mainly to women. But no man should be deterred by that, for there is much of interest for both sexes.
The author’s portrayal of the period is,
as far as I am able to judge, accurate. The themes dealt with, which include rape, abortion and homosexuality, as well as the growing industrialisation of the area and the reactions to the change of the old landowning gentry, are handled in a way which vividly illuminates the attitudes of the time. All in all, a very good read.
Neville Firman
WOMEN OF IRON
Catherine King, Sphere, 2007, £5.99, pb, 453pp, 9780751539073
Set in 1830, during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, Women of Iron depicts a story of poverty, deceit, and revenge. Luther Dearne is rich, powerful, apparently above the law, and has everything he wants—except children. When a woman turns up in a tavern with an orphaned little girl for sale, Luther does not hesitate to buy her, despite his drunken wife’s instant hatred of the child. Lissie grows up to be a great beauty, but her mysterious origins prove to be Luther’s deepest heartache, and eventually his ruination. A young, hotheaded Blake Svenson one day shows up in town working on the barges, with a secret agenda to avenge his murdered father’s death.
A chance encounter brings Blake and Lissie together, and they fall instantly in love, but must confront their differences. When Lissie’s father suddenly dies, seemingly at the hand of Blake, Lissie faces a bleak future. When Blake disappears, and her mother tries to sell her into prostitution, with no one to turn to, Lissie runs away, fearing for her life.
A gritty and realistic tale full of starcrossed love, sexual exploitation, murder, and vengeance, this is not for the faint-hearted, nor for the gentle romantics. Side stories, such as those about the woman who sold Lissie, add to the overall dark outlook. King has created a disturbing, powerfully written story in which only the toughest survive.
Rebecca Roberts
A MENDING AT THE EDGE
Jane Kirkpatrick, WaterBrook, 2008, $13.99, pb, 400pp, 9781578569793
This is the final installment in a trilogy about the life of Emma Wagner Giesy, the first woman of the Bethelites, a communal religious society, to come West to settle a new colony for the group. The group eventually settled in Oregon in 1856 and founded the town of Aurora.
In this installment, Emma is separated from her abusive second husband and is struggling to raise her four children. The community is also experiencing some difficult times. Their leader, William Keil, is distracted by grief when four of his children die of smallpox, and there is a shortage of housing for new arrivals. Some members become disenchanted with Keil, criticizing him for making decisions based on economics rather than religious beliefs. The group left Missouri to isolate themselves from
a corrupt world, but in Oregon, Keil builds a hotel and restaurant and negotiates to have the railroad run through the settlement. In spite of these difficulties and disagreements, the community thrives because of the hard work of the members.
Emma continues to chafe at Keil’s authority and his beliefs about women. Emma is a devoted and caring mother, but she has a curious intellect and an artistic nature that she yearns to express. Above all, she wants to feel in control of her destiny. She tries to live by the community’s Diamond Rule, to make other’s lives better than one’s own life. In this she succeeds, making sacrifices so her son can attend the university and become a doctor, providing a safe haven in her home for other single and abandoned women, helping to arrange marriages, and caring for her aging parents.
Kirkpatrick did extensive research at the Aurora Colony Historical Society and interviewed descendants of many of the Aurora families. She has succeeded in breathing life into Emma’s story.
Jane Kessler
PINKERTON’S SECRET
Eric Lerner, Henry Holt, 2008, $25.00, hb, 352pp, 9780805082784
This novel is told from the point of view of Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton, who became the backbone of Lincoln’s Civil War intelligence operations. His relationship with Kate Warne, the first female detective in the US, forms the spicy focus—if focus there be.
This is a very disappointing book, especially from an author we are told comes off a twentyyear career as a screenwriter in Hollywood. No scene comes to life with any sort of cinematographic clarity. Dialogue is dead and only appears after we get but a cursory outline of what might have been dramatic exchanges. All the famous Pinkerton scenes—including him pursuing his man away from Rose Greenhow’s window in stocking feet—are crammed in such a few pages that we feel or see none. We are told, almost never shown. The scenes are rarely connected and do not build tension. Every name of every coworker detective appears, all the period’s great personalities including John Brown, parade through, but none (including John Brown) comes to life as a character.
An important skill in historical novel writing with real characters is to keep them ignorant of what is to happen, although the history books tell us. Lerner’s Pinkerton never wrestles with anything unexpected. Any well-written biography of Pinkerton would do better— except for the lurid sex. This Pinkerton also has a needlessly—and often too-modern—foul mouth interspersed with jarring effect between passages of the elevated style the old Victorian might have written himself. Beauregard’s in a “snit”? Pinkerton’s eldest calls his younger brother “you jerk” in a “snotty” tone? The famous detective comes off as a thoroughly despicable
man—which he might well have been—but we would rather not spend much time with such a one without fictional plastic surgery.
Ann Chamberlin
THE HARTLEPOOL MONKEY
Sean Longley, Doubleday, 2008, £14.99, hb, 316pp, 9780385612531
The legend of the Hartlepool Monkey is well known in the North East of England in that in the early 19th century, during the Napoleonic Wars a monkey, dressed in French naval uniform, is washed up on the beach at Hartlepool and is taken for a French spy. Sean Longley’s novel is wrapped around this legend and the circumstances that lead to the animal being on that particular beach.
Dr Simon Legris is a French physician living in Paris when he is caught up in the aftermath of a carriage accident and as a result becomes personal physician to the Duc Ladurie de Bretagne. He is sent on an expedition to Africa and returns with a pet monkey whom he names, Jacques. Back in Paris the French Revolution breaks out and Jacques becomes involved in a plot involving Claudette, a prostitute whom Simon knew well in his early days in the city.
Set during the Napoleonic Wars and the French Revolution, the tale is well told with a style of writing fitting the era in which the events happened.
Marilyn Sherlock
COURTING EMMA
Sharlene MacLaren, Whitaker House, 2008, $9.97, pb, 395pp, 9781603740203
Emma Browning, who runs a boarding house in 1896 Little Hickman, Kentucky, can fend for herself, having grown up as the motherless daughter of Ezra, the longtime town drunk. Emma’s childhood has left her without much use for religion, so when Jonathan Atkins, who attended the same one-room schoolhouse as Emma, returns to Little Hickman as the town’s new preacher, Emma is reluctant to rent him a room. When Jon does Emma the favor of hauling Ezra off her premises, though, she relents. Jon decides to redeem what appears to be the hopeless case of Ezra, Soon, he sets his sights on the soul—and the heart—of the prickly Emma.
MacLaren writes in a lively, engaging style, with a welcome dash of humor, and her characters have depth and heart. Especially near the end of the book, her people tend to lapse into jarringly modern lingo such as “role model,” and the author sometimes spells out the psychology behind her characters’ actions more than seems necessary, but these are minor flaws in an enjoyable and moving novel.
Susan Higginbotham
HONORABLE INTENTIONS
Donna MacQuigg, Five Star, 2008, $25.95, hb, 299pp, 9781594146961
Set in the Territory of New Mexico, in 1881,
Honorable Intentions (a sequel to The Doctor’s Daughter) is a thoroughly enjoyable frontier romance. A wanted poster hangs on the wall of Santa Fe’s jailhouse, right beside the prisoner whose arm Lydia Randolph is sewing up. Lydia has no doubt that she is treating the wanted man, but her patient insists that he is Don Miguel Dominguez Mendoza Estrada, a Mexican horse-breeder, and not Antonio Garcia, the notorious bandito. When Lydia is taken captive by the banditos, Miguel takes advantage of his likeness to their leader, and rides with the band to their hideout. Unfortunately, his ruse is so successful that Lydia refuses to believe that he is an honorable man, risking his life to effect her rescue.
A native of New Mexico, the author brings an authenticity to the story that creates an easy flow. After one suspends disbelief that two unrelated men can be so physically similar, the twists and turns in the plot seem perfectly believable. I’d like to say that this book is a keeper but, in truth, it’s Don Miguel Dominguez Mendoza Estrada whom I’d like to keep. Right at my bedside, if you please.
Nancy J. Attwell
THE PRIVATEER
Dawn MacTavish, Leisure, 2008, $6.99/ C$8.99/£5.99/AU$14.95, pb, 325pp, 9780843959819
Lady Lark Eddington, despite being an earl’s daughter, is in Marshalsea prison for debt after her father gambled away his fortune and killed himself. Fortunately, “King” Kingston, Earl of Grayshire, comes looking for a genteel debtor to be his charity-minded mother’s companion in Cornwall. Since anything is better than prison, Lark agrees to take the post. King is as good as betrothed to Lady Ann Cuthbertson, so Lark doesn’t expect to be anything more than a lady’s companion. But when the Countess invites Lady Ann to visit Cornwall, King finds himself more attracted to Lark. Their budding relationship is further complicated by his commission as a privateer to fight both the French and the local smugglers, whom his late father had supported.
Despite the title, very little action takes place aboard ship, and I spotted quite a few historical errors and Americanisms. On the positive side, there are several well-integrated passages of discussion about the state of Regency-era aristocratic marriage, contrasting King’s unhappy parents’ union with the loving relationship the main characters hope for. King and Lark are likeable, and the Countess is a feisty secondary character. These outweigh the drawbacks, and the result is an enjoyable historical romance.
B.J. Sedlock
read independently and indeed this is set chronologically before the first book, which was mostly about Dr Polidori’s relationship with Byron. This story is narrated from the perspective of Annabella, Byron’s muchsuffering wife. Annabella, attractive and highly intelligent, falls for the dashing charms of the famous young poet and accepts his offer of marriage. The story is well known and Byron does not lack a stream of historical fiction writers to tell this tale. Annabella is desperate to do all that she can to make her new husband happy but, from their very first days together, Byron treats his new wife abysmally until, eventually, she is forced to leave him taking their newborn baby, Ada, Byron’s only legitimate child.
Annabella forms a friendship with Byron’s sister, Augusta, and it is the revelation of their incestuous relationship which the author argues is the key to Byron’s awful behaviour and Annabella’s realisation that he could never be tamed and reformed.
The legal battles, Annabella’s somewhat self-righteous attempt to force Augusta to let her brother be and the death of the great poet form the somewhat extended conclusion of the story. The prose is dense and demanding but wonderfully literary and engaging. Markovits has a splendid eye for descriptions of nature and dissects the often complicated layers and patterns of human behaviour. This is fiction that demands an attentive reader willing to work at the story, but it is very much worth the effort.
Doug Kemp
A REASON TO SIN
Maureen McKade, Berkley Sensation, 2008, $6.99, pb, 304pp, 9780425220597
Rebecca Colfax is searching for her husband Benjamin, who abandoned her after losing her inheritance at the gambling tables. Her search brings her to Oaktree, Kansas, and the Scarlet Garter saloon, where she takes a job as a singer and dancer to earn money to continue her search. The Scarlet Garter is a typical frontier saloon, with booze, gambling, and prostitution, but it’s well-run, and Rebecca is treated with dignity.
Though Rebecca is wary of gamblers, she can’t help but notice Slater Forrester, one of the saloon’s dealers. Likewise, he can’t help but notice Rebecca, who’s a fish out of water at the Scarlet Garter. As their attraction grows, a gang of outlaws makes an attempt to extort “insurance payments” from the saloon. Can Slater use his training as a former Pinkerton agent during the Civil War to figure out who’s behind the scheme?
A QUIET ADJUSTMENT
Benjamin Markovits, Faber & Faber, 2008, £12.99, pb, 328pp, 9780571233342
This is the second in the author’s Lord Byron series – though both novels can be
McKade delves into issues of post-Civil War race relations by including two AfricanAmerican supporting characters: Simon, a talented piano player and former slave, and Georgia, a dancer who grew up free in Chicago. The romance between Rebecca and Slater is very sensual, and the suspenseful plot keeps the story moving.
Nanette Donohue
A KINGDOM FOR THE BRAVE
Tamara McKinley, Hodder & Stoughton, 2008, £19.99, hb, 419pp, 9780340924693
A Kingdom for the Brave is the story of a disparate group of people struggling for survival in the early days of the colonisation of Australia. The book opens with the massacre of an aboriginal tribe as part of a policy of land clearance, which while not official policy is tacitly ignored. The only survivors are a small boy and his grandmother who seek refuge with another tribe, and while their story is an important part of the book, this is more than just a tale of what we would now call ethnic cleansing. It is also the story of three families – the Collinsons, Cadwalladers and the Penhaligons, set against a backdrop of raids against the aborigines, convict uprising and rebellion against the Governor.
Well written, A Kingdom for the Brave opens in Australia in 1797 and ends in England in 1813, and brings vividly to life an evocation of what life must have been like in those early days of Australian colonisation. The harshness of the life for both settlers and convicts alike is in stark contrast to the simple, but spiritual life of the aborigines, and makes you wonder who is civilised and who the savage. Recommended. Mike Ashworth
A VENGEFUL LONGING
R.N. Morris, Faber & Faber, 2008, £12.99, pb, 352pp, 9780571232529 / Penguin Press, 2008, $24.95, hb, 336pp, 9781594201806
This is the sequel to the highly acclaimed A Gentle Axe, the first of Morris’s books to feature the investigating magistrate Porfiry Petrovich from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Set in St Petersburg in the late 1860s, a doctor’s wife and son die suddenly, in excruciating pain, at the height of summer. When this murder is rapidly followed by others, Porfiry Petrovich acknowledges that this is one of those rare cases that challenge every ounce of his intellect and where immediate suspects are innocent. It gradually becomes clear that the chain of interlinking facts and circumstances is extraordinarily dense as Porfiry Petrovich tells his young assistant, Pavel Pavlovich, they must delve into every aspect of people’s lives because, like the stinking canals, everything is connected. The trail leads him deep into St. Petersburg’s worst slums and asylums, among the forgotten inhabitants of the city who live in horrendous poverty, stench and squalor, before he is able to glimpse a pattern and the elusive figure of the murderer starts to emerge. Morris has a compelling knowledge of St Petersburg and every page of the story is securely anchored by his brilliant recreation of time and place. But even the most vivid selection of historical detail will pall unless an author taps into the minds of his characters. This is Morris’s great strength: his characters are so fully rounded that you follow their thought processes – or are alienated by them. Porfiry Petrovich displays an understanding of human
psychology that is fitting in view of his origins, and in doing so raises the bar for other writers in this genre. An excellent read.
Lucinda Byatt
THE DARCYS GIVE A BALL: A Gentle Joke, Jane Austen Style
Elizabeth Newark, Sourcebooks Landmark, 2008, $12.95/C$15.50, pb, 176pp, 9781402211317
Queen Victoria is on the throne, and the children of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice are young adults. Their son falls in love with the daughter of the unbearable clergyman, Mr. Collins, and Elizabeth’s dear friend Charlotte. There are other problematic romantic entanglements for the younger generation, eventually resolved at a climactic ball, but the prospect of Elizabeth and Darcy having to adjust to Mr. Collins as their son’s father-in-law is what pulled me into the story.
Unexpectedly, Charlotte is the novel’s most fully developed character, lending depth to what otherwise would be a lighthearted romance. When she chose marriage to the absurd and selfimportant Mr. Collins rather than impoverished spinsterhood, she insisted that her chances for happiness were “as fair as most people can boast on entering the married state.” How does she feel about her bargain many years later? Elizabeth Newark provides a convincing and moving answer to that question. There is, of course, a whole subgenre of Austen sequels by modern admirers. Though I love Pride and Prejudice, this is the first “Jane Austen style” novel I have read. True to Austen in spirit as well as style, it far exceeded my expectations.
Phyllis T. Smith
COMPROMISED
Kate Noble, Berkley, 2008, $14.00/C$15.50, pb, 384pp, 9780425219645
In 1829, having recently returned to London, the two Alton sisters are preparing for the Season. Beautiful, demure Evangeline is quite excited at the idea, but too tall and too outspoken Abigail views the prospect with horror. During a peaceful ride in the park, Gail finds herself knocked into a chilly lake when arrogant Maximillian Viscount Fontaine can’t control his horse. Tempers and passion quickly flare between the two, but when Max is later seen kissing Evangeline, Gail knows trouble is seriously afoot.
Since Max’s father has ordered him to find a wife in three months’ time or be disinherited, Evangeline suits as well as any woman, and the two are soon engaged. But Max finds himself constantly seeking out Gail and her witty, intelligent conversations, and Evie finds herself quaking at the thought of Max as a husband, and does everything she can to avoid his company.
Noble’s first novel is a delightful debut with a humorous storyline, fast-paced plot and satisfying conclusion. Both Gail and Evie find romance in unexpected places, and their escapades in reaching their hearts’ desires are
quite amusing. This lighthearted late Regency romp is an enjoyable read.
Rebecca Roberts
CHANCES
Pamela Nowak, Five Star, 2008, $25.95, hb, 327pp, 9781594146374
Ambitious, intelligent Sarah Donovan is the only female telegrapher in Denver. Though she is skilled at her job, she hasn’t won over everyone at her workplace—particularly Frank Bates, a jealous co-worker who dislikes the fact that a woman can do the job better than he can. When one of Bates’s pranks causes Sarah to misdeliver a telegram, she is forced to apologize to Daniel Petterman, a staunchly conservative undertaker who believes that women belong in the home, not in the public sphere. When Sarah and Daniel are both asked to serve on a committee to help solve the city’s stray dog problem, they discover that they have much more in common than they originally assumed—though it takes them quite a while to admit it.
The backdrop of Denver in the 1870s, with the suffrage movement gaining momentum, adds further depth to this breezy, enjoyable read. Sarah is an openly feminist heroine who is committed to women’s suffrage and to equal rights in general, and she isn’t afraid to be outspoken or politically active. Both Sarah and Daniel learn how to compromise without sacrificing their values or ambitions, and they find love in the process, making for a satisfying ending.
Nanette Donohue
Y SUN OF SILVER, MOON OF GOLD
THE QUIET GUN: A Western Duo Lauran Paine, Five Star, 2008, $25.95, hb, 252pp, 9781594146292
In “Montana Manhunter,” Deputy U.S. Marshal Chad Greene pursues an outlaw to the ranch of a young woman named Margaret Fulmer, whose husband has been gone for several years. A rancher wants her land and will stop at nothing to achieve his goal. The arrival of Greene means the rancher is in for more than he bargained for.
In “The Quiet Gun,” Sheriff Frank Girard is ordered to visit his old friend George Carpenter and order him to remove the young Indian girl he is living with while still married to another woman. Girard feels that this is more a moral issue than a legal one and refuses to obey the order. A young attorney decides to serve the warrant himself and is killed by Carpenter. When the jilted wife returns home to her husband, Carpenter decides to run. Girard must now capture Carpenter and bring his old friend to justice.
Both stories, which take place in the late 1800s, are well written, with strong lead characters and a good plot. Even though both plots have been told before in other Westerns, the author manages to pull a few surprises. Recommended for those who enjoy a light read with action and suspense.
Jeff Westerhoff
A DAUGHTER’S INHERITANCE
Tracie Peterson & Judith Miller, Bethany House, 2008, $13.99, pb, 383pp, 9780764203640
Set in upstate New York (Rochester and
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Maureen Peters, Hale, 2008, £18.99, hb, 223pp, 9780709084440
In 1837, following her father’s death, Flora Scott is not surprised when her family decides to send her to the New World to stay with her uncle Frank. After all, she is already resigned to her fate – ending up as an old spinster. At 27 years of age, she knows the move would rid her family of an embarrassment, and a dependant.
Flora travels to Chicago, secretly hoping for an adventure. While she awaits collection at the coach stop, she encounters an Indian who helps her with her cases. She immediately notices the arrogant behaviour of the white locals towards him. But she has no time to ponder on the injustice yet. Her uncle’s estate manager, Brent O’Brien, arrives to collect her and takes her to her uncle’s manor house.
As Flora settles in, she is confronted with suspicion by her uncle’s staff, Brent amongst them. She is enraged by the white settlers’ arrogance towards the Indians and stands up against what she considers to be a great injustice. She becomes friendly with an outcast, ignoring warnings and snubs. When actions by the local government to relocate a tribe get out of hand, she hatches a plan and receives help from an unexpected source, Brent. As his bloodline is revealed, they decide to face the truth – and the world –together, regardless of consequences.
Sun of Silver, Moon of Gold is a riveting tale of a young woman’s fight against cruelty and ignorance. It shows the hardships the Indian tribes faced at the hands of the white incomers, and the helplessness of individuals against the majority. That, with a dose of romance, makes excellent reading.
Stephanie Hochadel
Broadmoor Island, a fictional island in the Thousand Island region of the St. Lawrence River), this first book in the Broadmoor Legacy series introduces three cousins: Amanda, Sophie, and Fanny Broadmoor. It is 1897, and the family patriarch, Hamilton Broadmoor, has just died. When his will is read, the family is shocked to learn that seventeen-year-old Fanny will inherit one-third of her grandfather’s vast estate when she reaches her majority. Fanny, who longs to renew her friendship with the island boatman, Michael Atwell, is pleased that the family will continue their tradition of holidaying on their private island. While Fanny and her cousins fill their days with picnics and parties, Uncle Jonas (Amanda’s father) schemes to seize Fanny’s inheritance.
The opulent summer homes on the St. Lawrence River, near Clayton and Alexandria Bay, provide a picturesque backdrop for this family saga. Fanny is a delightful heroine, and her relationship with Sophie and Amanda is charming. Be warned, however, that the book ends mid-story, leaving the romance between Fanny and Michael unresolved. If the remaining books in the series are as well-written as A Daughter’s Inheritance, reading the continuation will be a pleasure.
Nancy J. Attwell
DAPHNE
Justine Picardie, Bloomsbury, 2008, £14.99, hb, 416pp, 9780747587026 / Bloomsbury USA, Aug. 2008, $25.00, hb, 416pp, 9781596913417
Here is a novel which combines the life stories and the novels of Daphne du Maurier and the Brontës, a literary mystery centred on the life and possible works of the saturnine Branwell Brontë in whom, we are told, the characters of Heathcliff and Mr Rochester are blended. All this in the hands of a writer – Justine Picardie – of skill and assurance and packaged in the inimitable Bloomsbury way – an elegant cover design, a satin ribbon marker. Just give me a comfy sofa, a roaring fire and the wind snapping around the house and let me indulge myself. Perhaps my expectations were simply too high, alas, I could not get on with this book at all. As Picardie admits in her acknowledgements she became completely hooked on the background story behind Daphne du Maurier’s biography of Branwell Brontë. This shows clearly in the text but not in the right way. Her research feels only partially digested, making for an intriguing and complex read but an arid one. I found it hard to break through her detached biographical style to the emotional core and, consequently, difficult to engage with her characters.
I am sure the book will sell very well. The fashion for novels which unravel literary mysteries set by works such as Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, or Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, is still going strong, and Justine Picardie has a justifiably good reputation as a writer. In this case, however, I
fear success will be a triumph of marketing over reader discrimination.
Sarah Bower
COURTING SHADOWS
Jem Poster, Overlook, 2008, $24.95, hb, 288pp, 9781590200322 / Sceptre, 2003, out of print
One would be hard-pressed to find a more unpleasant protagonist than John Stannard. A young architect commissioned in 1881 to oversee the restoration of a rural English church, Mr. Stannard tells himself the assignment satisfies an old interest in ecclesiastic architecture. In fact, his reasons for escaping his own life and city practice are more complex. As a fuller picture of Mr. Stannard unfolds, a reader might understand him better but is unlikely to empathize with this man without empathy. He is as willfully blind to the suffering of others as he is to the historical and emotional significance of the artifacts that stand in the way of his objective. He can tear apart lives as remorselessly as he breaks apart the ancient church. Courting Shadows is a beautifully written if unsettling study of a man who seems truly incapable of appreciating beauty or understanding love.
Sue Asher
THE THIRD CIRCLE
Amanda Quick, Putnam, 2008, $24.95/C$27.50, hb, 352pp, 9780399154843 / Piatkus, 2008, £12.99, hb, 400pp, 9780749939182
In Leona Hewitt’s desperation to get back the aurora stone, a crystal that was stolen from her mother, she dresses as a male servant and breaks into a museum of paranormal antiquities. There she meets Thaddeus Ware, who is also trying to recapture the stone. They decide to join forces. Before they can get the stone, they stumble across a dead woman and unleash a poison that nearly kills them both. So begins a mysterious chain of events that leads them into an even closer association.
Jayne Ann Krentz has written four novels about the Arcane Society. This story and the novel Second Sight are authored under the pseudonym Amanda Quick and set in the late Victorian era. The other two books are written under the author’s own name and set in modern times. The Arcane Society is a group of people who have special metaphysical powers that pass down through generations. Each book reveals a mystery surrounding members of this society. Although this novel has the trademark Amanda Quick clever plot and fast-paced action, the dialogue between the two main characters doesn’t sparkle with her usual wit.
Nan Curnutt
THE MUTINY
Julian Rathbone, Abacus, 2008, £7.99/C$18.00, pb, 447pp, 9780349119328
India, 1857. Do not be misled by the gentle opening scene where Lady Blackstock entertains officers’ wives. They are about to be overwhelmed by one of the most vicious,
hate-filled episodes in the history of the British Empire.
The East India Company dominates the subcontinent. In London an official hears Azimullah Khan’s submission on behalf of Nana Saheb. As an adopted son of the deceased Maharajah of Bithur, the Nana is refused his inheritance. The wily Azimullah turns to more than kingmaking. The Company’s new rifles’ cartridge cases allegedly greased with the animal fat forbidden to Muslims also means instant loss of caste for Hindus. This is the focus. Backed up by authentic records Julian Rathbone offers his own strong authorial voice plus a modicum of hindsight revealing the complexities behind the tragedy.
The word is sent, the date is set for mutiny amongst the highly trained Indian troops. Once started, the natives have everything to lose, and the British face loss of Empire in the ensuing explosion of merciless atrocity on all sides.
From many memorable characters, outstanding are the indomitable Ranee Lakshmi Bai with her female warriors; beautiful Eurasian Uma Blackstock, who finds her true place in India; dashing Lt William Hodson of Hodson’s horse, with his migraine and understandably foul temper; and unshakeable Sir Colin Campbell, who despises showy gallantry. In extremity the spoilt memsahibs command admiration. But above all, it is the Ayah Lavanya, young, inexperienced and valiant, who leads her little band of British infants through unremitting terror and threat of starvation.
Cawnpore, Lucknow: the names resonate after a hundred and fifty years. This thrilling book is very easy to read. Rathbone has thrown himself a challenge and taken it up with relish. (Ed. note – Julian Rathbone died on 28 February 2008.)
Nancy Henshaw
HALLAM’S WAR
Elisabeth Payne Rosen, Unbridled, 2008, $25.95, hb, 480pp, 9781932961492
The American Civil War looms and then bursts into flame during this debut novel. Initially set on the West Tennessee farm of the Hallam family, the story moves to Charlestown, Richmond, and the battlefields at Shiloh, Manassas and Antietam. Although Hugh Hallam is against slavery on principle, he inherits his wife’s servants upon their marriage and buys several more to help run Palmyra. A northern newspaperman, John Varick is welcomed for a series on the real lives of slaveholders. Before he leaves, uncomfortable truths about the Hallams and their neighbors cause tension and estrangement.
But when Hugh is a Confederate prisoner of war years later in Washington, Varick remembers the family’s hospitality and comes to its aid. Aid also arrives from a more unlikely source, the escaped family slave known as French, who left the farm under mysterious and possibly criminal circumstances.
The Hallams are a dedicated, virtuous crew deeply devoted to each other. They covet neither neighbor’s goods nor spouses. They also suffer from the effects of Hugh’s pride and Serena’s willful ignorance. Neither recognizes slaves as fully human. Caught up in the momentous events of their time, missed opportunities and frustrations compound the story as it gallops to its inevitable conclusion.
Hallam’s War rages within and around its leading couple as it keeps a firm grip on its compelling, tragic time. Characterizations are complex, although sometimes circumspect to the point of sacrificing pace. Battle scenes of the Western theater of the war and its consequences are expertly depicted. The many viewpoint shifts sometimes seemed unnecessary, and the African Americans remained as elusive to this reader as they were to their owners. A promising debut from a gifted writer.
Eileen Charbonneau
THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Laura Joh Rowland, Overlook, 2008, $24.95, hb, 320pp, 9781690300339
Three talented, young sisters are forced to publish under a male pseudonym in Victorian England. Fearing exposure after an accusation of plagiarism, Charlotte and Emily Brontë are traveling to London to solve the problem and perhaps risk public exposure of their true identities. Neither is prepared to cope with the secret maze of crime and evil they experience almost immediately after meeting an almost paranoid fellow traveler, Isabel White. By chance the Brontë sisters actually see Isabel White killed, a horrific crime that initially shakes their sheltered, puritanical world to pieces. But feisty Charlotte, after receiving a secret package from the murdered victim, is determined to solve the mystery.
Charlotte discovers that Isabel’s mother had no idea of her daughter’s strange liaisons with the aristocracy. Add to that the mystery of an inquiring, handsome brother of the victim and her exposure of his secret, and you have the opening setting for a potboiler Victorian mystery in the mid-1800s that spans the world to faraway China. Avoiding an imminent sibling quarrel with Charlotte, Anne and Emily agree to play their fearless part in solving this awful murder that has now put them in formidable danger.
The author describes the sordid city streets of London and just as skillfully conveys the frightening, explosive atmosphere of a torn Chinese empire wanting Western prosperity while desperately trying to maintain its traditional, pure identity. Laura Joh Rowland’s exemplary skills as a mystery writer again thrill readers as we watch this meek, naïve, romantic, idealistic but also incomparably bold character fulfill her quest for justice. The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë is a superb read that you won’t be able to put down once you’ve entered its pages. Wonderful!
Viviane Crystal
THE SILK TRAIN MURDER
Sharon Rowse, Carroll & Graf, 2008, $25.00, hb, 314pp, 9780786719464
The debut of a new historical mystery series featuring English-gentleman-turned-detective John Landsdowne Granville, this turn-of-the20th-century adventure is set in Vancouver, British Columbia, when imported Chinese silk worth more than Klondike gold is rushed across the continent to New York in specially designed trains.
Guarding these trains is a highly dangerous business, as Granville and his partner Sam Scott find out. On their first night they foil a sabotage attempt. And the second night’s discovery is the murdered body of the notorious Clive Jackson. There are suspects galore, as everyone in town seems to have had an altercation with the man, but only Sam is arrested. Granville wants to help his partner, especially when he learns a speedy trail is planned eleven days hence. But he’s new in town, knows no one, and even his partner is not cooperating.
The investigation takes Granville through the city’s brothels, opium dens, gambling joints and burlesque halls. He gets help from a saboteur who becomes a little brother, an opium lord, a medium, and street reporter. By adventure’s end, he might have found something more from the proper but chafing-at-the-restrictions-of-herclass Emily Turner.
The Silk Train Murder establishes its scene and details well, with a good ticking-clock pace and hero haunted by his guilt over a friend’s death as well as his loyalty to Sam and his sense of justice. He grows in character as he unfolds the mystery. Similarly, Emily the “dreadfully bored” heiress grows her own detective team, complete with Bess and George-like pal assistants who haunt tea rooms as Granville haunts opium dens.
Eileen Charbonneau
LISTEN TO THE MOCKINGBIRD
Penny Rudolph, Poisoned Pen Press, 2007, $14.95/C$17.95, pb, 296pp, 9781590583487
Every good mystery begins with a murder, and Penny Rudolph’s Listen to the Mockingbird doesn’t disappoint: a young stranger is gunned down on Matty Summerhayes’ horse ranch, forever changing the path of her life just as she’s decided to sell and move away from the New Mexico territory. Matty’s future depends on the significance of the crude map she finds in the dead man’s pocket. Will it lead to treasure on her land?
Being 1861, the murder is soon followed by the occupation of the nearby town of Mesilla by Texans on behalf of the Confederacy. Later a handsome stranger – a defrocked priest called Tonio Bernini – exacts Matty’s permission to live temporarily in a cave on her land. And Matty’s own mysterious past begins to catch up with her when her friend Winona, a former slave, comes back into her life.
Matty’s past, present and future coalesce to
create a compelling tale. While her ability to find unconventional solutions to problems that would otherwise be insoluble might push the bounds of believability for her time in history, the character makes an outstanding impromptu detective. I highly recommend this book.
Janette
King
THE AQUILA PROJECT
Norman Russell, Hale, 2007, £18.99, hb, 223pp, 9780709084372
London, June 1894. The Prince of Wales arrives to open Tower Bridge; the police discover a bomb in one of its boiler rooms and arrest Anders Grunwalski, brandishing a pistol. After Grunwalski is sprung from custody before he can be questioned, Inspector Box of Scotland Yard and Colonel Kershaw of Military Intelligence set about uncovering a conspiracy among Polish émigrés against Tsar Alexander III. But the Russian autocrat is already a dying man. Is the true prey his heir, Nicholas, or another ruler?
When Frederick Forsyth published The Day of the Jackal he set a high standard for thriller writers plotting the death of a head of state. Alas, Mr Russell has some way to go to match Forsyth’s tour de force. The concept is good, not least because violent death was an occupational hazard of royalty at that time. Tsar Alexander’s father and brother were both victims of assassination, along with the Kings of Italy (1900) and Portugal (1908), along with Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1898), the Portuguese Crown Prince Luis (killed alongside his father) and the Habsburg heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But Russell fails to bring it off. Perhaps the main strength of Forsyth’s novel is that the story never loses its sense of being firmly grounded in reality, as the lone assassin makes his meticulous preparations to murder President de Gaulle, and the police painstakingly find and follow his trail. Unfortunately, The Aquila Project never acquires that sense, remaining unreal throughout. Too, apart from Inspector Box, the characters are stock figures, and far too many of them prove to be double agents.
Ann Lyon
TRAIL OF THE RED BUTTERFLY
Karl H. Schlesier, Texas Tech Univ. Press, 2007, $27.95, hb, 288pp, 9780896726178
In 1807, a Cheyenne warrior named Stone learns that his twin brother, Whirlwind, is missing after leading a raid into northern New Spain. Stone organizes a group of warriors from different tribes, including wives and children, to ride south to locate and bring back his brother. They are traveling into an unknown territory, faced with meeting people who speak a different language, not to mention confronting Indian tribes who could be hostile to their small band.
As the small band of Indians travel in their quest, encountering pitfalls along the way, the author is able to draw on his background in anthropology. He creates a tale of individual
endurance and introduces the reader to unusual characters and provocative landscapes. This is a different kind of Indian story, a time when Indians roamed the Southwest for wild horses and buffalo, before the Americans moved into their territory and took away their hunting grounds and food sources. This novel is not just for those who enjoy a good Western tale. I recommend this book to anyone who likes to read stories of compassion and human ingenuity while embarking on a dangerous and difficult journey.
Jeff Westerhoff
STARLIGHT OVER SIMLA
Deborah Siepmann, Hale, 2007, £18.99, hb, 224pp, 9780709084419
Rose Fielding is bored stiff with the lifestyle that Edwardian London offers her: endless rounds of fancy balls and tea parties. Rose is desperate for adventures and is thrilled when she receives an invitation from a friend of her mother’s, the Vicereine in India. A post of governess has become vacant and Rose would be perfect for the role.
Rose is fascinated by India from her first glimpse of the exotic country. She enjoys exploring the sights, but those outings often lead to exciting – and revealing – escapades. She is flattered by the attentions of dashing Captain Julian Turnbull but also feels drawn to the quiet intelligence of poor artist Peter Woods. She is torn between them and her decision affects the lives of the people around her – her friend Monica, her parents, her employer. But is it the right decision? Ultimately, Rose chooses her true love, but not before she has experienced both happiness and disappointment.
Siepmann writes beautifully about the wonders of India under the Raj – the scents, sights, people and traditions, her style at times reminiscent of the late, great M.M. Kaye. The tone and dialogue fits the era, but it also keeps the characters at a distance. I could not get into their heads, feeling detached from their emotions. Also, one character’s later change in attitude is not quite credible. Rose’s ultimate decision creates a race against time, which should provide a build-up to a great finale. However, the conclusion feels somewhat rushed. And predictable.
Starlight over Simla is an enjoyable read for brightening up a dull winter’s day with a colourful dose of Eastern wonders. Just don’t expect to bond with the characters.
Stephanie Hochadel
VALERIE
Joan Smith, Hale, 2007, £18.99, hb, 223pp, 9780709079224
This is a Regency romp first published in America in 1987 and now published in Britain. Valerie, the eponymous heroine from a genteel, thrifty family, is invited by her rich, widowed aunt to stay with her. Here she discovers her aunt wants her as a model for the heroine of
her latest Gothic novel, which involves Valerie in escapades such as climbing up a trellis to a second floor window with a knife between her teeth, and jumping her horse over a tollbooth, so that she can explain to her aunt what it feels like! At the same time, Valerie, who thinks of herself as a lioness, having more than a Junoesque figure with tawny hair and a liking for the good things of life, meets a man to whom she is attracted, but who seems to be a dependent of Lord St Regis, a situation she disapproves of. And then there is Dr Hill, a close friend of her aunt, and a French cousin who is attracted to her and, it seems, every other woman of his acquaintance.
Written in the first person, this story has a certain exuberance, but contains quite a few anachronisms and Americanisms, and, although it grabbed my interest at first, with its unusually forthright heroine, there were times when I found myself skimming the page rather than reading it.
A slight read which would pass three hours pleasantly, but not a must-have book. jay Dixon
THE CARSTAIRS CONSPIRACY
Wendy Soliman, Hale, 2008, £18.99, hb, 224pp, 9780709084853
As sole heir of the late Duke of Penrith, Abigail Carstairs is the target of many fortune hunters. But it would also see that she is the target of a murderer. In desperation she calls on Lord Sebastian Denver to investigate.
As well as being a renowned investigator, Sebastian is also a notorious womaniser. Even so Abigail is attracted to the handsome nobleman – and he to her. Sadly this growing attraction cannot prevent the murderer striking again. It’s a race against time to find the culprit before he makes another move.
A beautiful heiress, a handsome hero and a perilous adventure – this novel has all the elements of a really delightful historical romance. The Carstairs Conspiracy is such fun and a great way to while away a few hours.
Sara Wilson
ANOTHER COUNTRY
Katharine Swartz, Hale, 2007, £18.99, hb, 222pp, 9780709083856
In the year 1832, young widow Eleanor Crombie is forced to decide. Should she stay in Scotland to live with her stepmother or search for her destiny on the other side of the Atlantic? Her siblings have long since left their home island of Mull for the New World and after contacting her brother Ian, a doctor in Boston, she does not hesitate when he books her a passage.
Caroline Campbell hopes to have a season in London when her uncle, Edward Rydell, pays her a rare visit at the family manor on Mull. He brings Mr Dearborn, an older gentleman, who eyes her a little too closely for her liking. Still, as she is promised a season in Boston – not quite London but infinitely better than Mull – she ignores her housekeeper’s warning and dreams
of balls and parties.
The widow and the spoilt girl are thrown together during a stormy crossing, and form an unusual bond. After their arrival in Boston, they quickly settle into their different lives. Eleanor takes over her brother’s household and meets her elder sister’s brother-in-law again whom she had not seen since their childhood. Will Rupert MacDougall’s curious and adventurous spirit win her heart or should she play it safe?
Caroline hopes for a good match but her uncle and his dubious acquaintance are always watching. Despite her high hopes she begins to feel drawn to Ian Crombie, Eleanor’s brother. As the sinister dealings of Rydell and Dearborn are revealed, Eleanor and Caroline, Rupert and Ian are forced to choose their fate.
Swartz’s second novel is entertaining throughout, bringing to life a young America. The family connections between the characters are a little confusing in the beginning but the story just pulls you in. A great read.
Stephanie Hochadel
THE DISAGREEMENT
Nick Taylor, Simon & Schuster, 2008, $26.00, hb, 360pp, 9781416550655
Framed by the gift of roses, everything in between this debut novel is haunted by the body- and soul-stealing times of the American Civil War. News of the impending hostilities reaches John Muro just as he’s trying to convince his mill-owning family that he’d like to study medicine. Although he had his heart set on studying in the North, John enters the University of Virginia.
There he realizes that “the greatest triumphs come from unbearable pain and exertion, of which I had experienced neither in my short and comfortable youth.” John advances in both his professional and personal life at an accelerated wartime pace as casualties stream in. He is guided by two mentors—instructor Dr. Cabell, who takes special interest in the bumbling young man once his niece Lorrie is smitten, and Lieutenant Stone, a wounded Union doctor who is also a physician and becomes John’s friend.
Meanwhile, the Muro family’s Lynchburg woolen mill fails. When creditors come to collect, John cuts himself off rather than share disgrace. At war’s end he is facing a failing new marriage, shortages and replacement in all medicines, and Yankee troops descending on Jefferson’s university. Thrown a lifeline from the north by Dr. Stone, he hatches an ill-fated plan to escape.
Short chapters and the intimacy and authentic language of its first-person narration enhance this view of the Civil War. Its callow protagonist is reminiscent of David Copperfield. John’s roommate B.B. even has the exuberance and overbearing pride of Dickens’ Steerforth. Like the heroes of Dickens, John Muro is forever baffled by the women in his life; viewed as manipulative mysteries, adornments, or paragons of physical beauty and support. A fine
debut from a gifted storyteller.
Eileen Charbonneau
PRIVATE ARRANGEMENTS
Sherry Thomas, Bantam, 2008, $6.99/C$9.99, pb, 384pp, 9780440244318
In 1893 London, a perfect marriage among the aristocratic elite was hard to find, with one notable exception: that of Lord and Lady Tremaine. However, it should be noted that the couple hadn’t lived together since the morning after their wedding, when Camden Saybrook, Lord Tremaine, walked out on his bride. Now, nine years later, Lady Tremaine, Gigi, has asked for a divorce, and Camden has returned from his self-imposed exile in America. He is willing to oblige with one condition: that she give him an heir first. The story flashes back and forth from their first meeting in 1882 to 1893, but it is done in such a way as to further the plot and explain the past without unwieldy exposition. Ms. Thomas has created a delightful story with a well-developed plot, balanced with the right amount of historical detail. Her characters are complex, and the emotional conflict is believable.
Audrey Braver
SUN GOING DOWN
Jack Todd, Touchstone, 2008, $26.00, hb, 367pp, 9781416550488
This Western saga begins in 1863 when Eb Paint, sick of war, sells his Mississippi River supply boat and lights out for the Dakota Territory to take advantage of free land. He marries a twice-widowed woman who is part Lakota, so their twin boys, Eli and Ezra, are raised to be sympathetic to the Native Americans. Ezra never marries, putting in spells of scouting for the Army and cattle-driving, while Eli and his family settle down to ranch in Nebraska. The story then follows Eli’s daughter Velma, who gets herself “in trouble” with one of the ranch hands, and is exiled from the family. Her trials include a stay in a TB sanitarium, and a second marriage to an alcoholic, before her fate brings the saga to a close in the 1930s.
In his author’s note, Todd states that the title refers to two sunsets, that of the Native Americans as settlers invade the Plains, and the more modern one, in which agribusiness and Walmartization have erased the Western way of life. He drew on family memoirs for the plot, basing Velma’s character on his grandmother. There are moments of happiness, yet Todd doesn’t gloss over the many kinds of pain and suffering settlers of a new country endure. Each generation of the Paint family produces characters the reader will care about. The one thing I objected to was the author’s use of dashes to begin a line of dialogue, instead of the standard quotation marks. But as that seems to be the fashion these days, I suppose I’m an old fuddy duddy for grumbling about it. The story was engrossing, nevertheless.
B.J. Sedlock
A DARK ENCHANTMENT
Roland Vernon, Black Swan, 2008, pb, 539pp, 9780552775007
1869. Young Englishman Godwin Tudor visits Athens intending to photograph antiquities, but soon discovers that modern Greece is far more interesting. He is invited to the remote and beautiful estate of expatriate landowner Edgar Brooke, and is captivated by Brooke’s daughter Lydia. Unfortunately for Tudor, Lydia has other suitors and Brooke’s estate is caught up in political and financial struggles that originate from far beyond its boundaries.
Greece is on the brink of vast changes. If they are allowed to proceed, they will sweep away traditional ways of life – including the power of the local brigands - as surely as they will devastate the local landscape. Tudor’s misguided involvement results in his companions being swept up into an intrigue which threatens not only their integrity but their lives.
The novel conveys a rich sense of 19thcentury Greece, recreating both the magnificence of the scenery and the physical discomfort and danger of travelling through it. The final section tackles the difficult challenge of a change of perspective, giving both a fascinating – and ironic – long-term view and an unexpected plot twist. This is an enjoyable novel that draws on the traditions of Victorian fiction, and offers all the adventure of exploring 19th-century Greece without the discomfort of leaving home.
Ruth Downie
CITY OF THE ABSENT
Robert W. Walker, Harper, 2007, $7.99/C$10.99, pb, 310pp, 9780060740122
If you ever craved the simpler life that was prevalent, say, before the turn of the century, reading this might cause you to think again. Set in Chicago of the White City in the late 19th century, this dark detective series reveals streets no less mean than the worst of today.
During the final night of the Chicago’s World Fair, a beloved and controversial mayor is felled by an assassin’s bullet. At the same time, Pinkerton detective Nell Hartigan is brutally stabbed to death while posing as a prostitute. With the city inflamed by the assassination, Inspector Alastair Ransom is hot on the case of the latter murder, which soon becomes linked to several mysterious disappearances. However, both the Pinkerton’s and his own captain seem to do nothing but impede his investigation. When Ransom himself is accused of an incredibly foul, yet just, deed, it is up to him and the dual identity Doctor Tewes to exonerate him and solve the case.
This novel, the third in the series, continues in the same gritty, yet refined style of its predecessors. If it reads easier than the first, it may be that the author is now more at ease with his characters. Complex to say the least, they are at once strange and compelling. Although it might be difficult to grow to like his Inspector
Ransom, one will never be bored by him, nor the cast surrounding him.
Ken Kreckel
VIRGIN RIVER
Richard S. Wheeler, Forge, 2008, $25.95/ C$31.95, hb, 320pp, 9780765307095
Based upon actual events that occurred in Utah in 1857, Virgin River is the destination for a small wagon train of seriously ill people hoping to be healed by the dry, mild climate of the southwestern desert. Barnaby Skye, along with his two Indian wives, leads these people on a quest to find the promised land. Faced with hardships and distrust, especially from people that fear the contagion of the consumption plaguing the travelers, they must protect themselves from the Mormons, who own the land they wish to occupy, other travelers and Indian tribes they encounter along the way.
Virgin River is the sixteenth book in the Barnaby Skye series. Richard Wheeler has won several Spur Awards for his western writing, along with awards for lifetime achievements in western literature. I haven’t read the previous books in the series, but after reading Virgin River, I plan on adding his series to my reading list. The author’s knowledge of the Western locale, the descriptions of the landscape and, above all, his characterization of Barnaby Skye make for a memorable read. Highly recommended for Western lovers.
Jeff Westerhoff
BEFORE GREEN GABLES
Budge Wilson, Putnam, 2008, $22.95, hb, 416pp, 9780399154683 / Puffin, 2008, £9.99, pb, 480pp, 9780141384122
In 1908 Lucy Maud Montgomery first published Anne of Green Gables, the story of the irrepressible redhead who brings joy to spinster Marilla Cuthbert and her bachelor brother, Matthew, when they adopt her into their home on Prince Edward Island. Now, in honor of the centennial anniversary of this beloved classic, Montgomery’s estate has authorized Budge Wilson to write Before Green Gables, a prequel that relates the details of Anne’s life before she comes to PEI.
Walter and Bertha Shirley die in an epidemic that sweeps through Bolingbroke, Nova Scotia, in 1886. Their three-month-old daughter, Anne, is taken in by the housekeeper, Joanna Thomas, and her husband, Bert, a couple who are sadly disappointed in their hopes to lay claim to the Shirley furniture. By the time Anne is five, there are four more babies in the Thomas family, and her days are filled with the drudgery of dishes and diapers. Although several neighbors befriend Anne, none offer to take her in when Bert dies, so she is sent to live with the Hammonds, a family with eight children under the age of four. When tragedy strikes the Hammond household, eleven-year-old Anne is sent to an orphanage in Halifax, where she stays only a few months before she is selected as a
19th Century-20th Century
“useful and hardworking girl” to be adopted by the Cuthberts.
Wilson’s Anne is precocious, talkative, hardworking, and honest, but lacks the enchanting personality and uncanny propensity for trouble that makes the original so endearing. (What reader could ever forget the time Anne served her friend, Diana, currant wine instead of raspberry cordial?) The older Anne gets, the drearier her life becomes. It is a relief when she steps on the train and heads for Green Gables.
Nancy J. Attwell
THE ABSENT WIFE
Sandra Wilson, Hale, 2007, £18.99, hb, 223pp, 9780709083672
In 1811, Roslyn Meredith is new to London and its Season after a quiet country upbringing in Monmouthshire. At an evening visit to the theatre, she is captivated by a good-looking gentleman in another box, and later is intrigued to find that he is Lord James Atherton, the talk of the ton due to the disappearance of his beautiful – and dangerous – wife.
Thrown together with him in romantic Greece, Roslyn is bemused by the charming Lord Atherton’s changeable moods, but cannot help falling deep in love with him. He, however, is not free: what is behind his wife’s mysterious disappearance? Can Roslyn follow her heart, maintain her reputation in the ton, and be with the man she loves?
The Absent Wife has a compelling plot and a well-drawn main character, whose naivety is well handled by the author. Unfortunately, the other characters in this novel are less well realised, and their motivations difficult to discern. This reader found several of the story’s turning points a little hackneyed, especially where Lord Atherton’s wife was concerned. Overall, the novel could be improved.
Erica Stretton
20th CENTURY
FUNNY BOYS
Warren Adler, Overlook, 2008, $24.95, hb, 320pp, 9781590200346
Mickey Fine and Mutzie Feder dream big in 1920s New York. Mickey is a tumler, an entertainer and host newly hired for a lavish, elegant Catskills resort run by the very criminals who brutalized his family when he was a young boy. Mutzie decides to transform her lackluster personality and prospective future, emulating the renowned, gorgeous actress, Jean Harlow. Their idealistic, glamour-ridden dreams seem to be progressing so easily, as Mutzie imagines, “Who said people can’t live the lives depicted in the movies… Who said it was not possible for a poor Jewish girl from Brownsville to reach such aspirations?”
The real business of the men whom Mickey and Mutzie join is crime—loan sharking, extorting labor union finances, gambling and prostituting needy woman like Mutzie. Once
they begin to realize that they are nothing but pawns in the ever-changing “jobs” of crime, they have been threatened and manipulated into doing far different jobs than they originally believed possible. Will they stay or be eliminated by their new “owners”? Welcome to the world where thugs vie for favor and think nothing of snitching on each other, supplying true and false reports to remove the competition.
Warren Adler accurately and incisively portrays the stereotypical evil and funny mob world that viewers normally admire from the safety of their movie seats. The creator of The War of the Roses novel-turned-movie, Adler here spins a whirling, tense story about a frighteningly dangerous world where one wrong move mandates death or escape. Funny Boy is a great read for those who love the fairly common crime subgenre of historical fiction.
Viviane Crystal
A GOLDEN AGE
Tahmima Anam, HarperCollins, 2008, $24.95/ C$31.50, hb, 288pp, 9780061478741 / John Murray, 2007, £14.99, hb, 9780719560095
Tahmina Anam, the author of this first novel, begins powerfully: “Dear Husband, I lost our children today.” The voice is that of Rehanna, a young widow who has been forced to hand her children to her brother-in-law because she has no money. Fast-forward to years later, to 1971, when Rehanna’s children, Sohail and Maya, are young adults. Rehanna still celebrates the anniversary of their return, keeping secret how she managed to bring it about. Her problem is basically the same: how she can hang on to them. Now,
Y THE ROMANOV BRIDE
however, the world around them is crumbling. Bangladesh is separating from Pakistan, and her children are involved in the separatist struggle. It is a foregone conclusion when they ask their mother to hide a wounded rebel. Their mother can’t say no. More interestingly, Rehanna falls in love with him.
Still, through war, massacres and refugee camps, Rehanna is more a witness than an active participant. Her world continues to be circumscribed entirely to that of her children. The setting is intriguing and the landscape, at times, vivid. Unfortunately, Rehanna’s oppressive relationship with her children overwhelms everything else. “It’s not your fault. Whatever it was, it can’t have been your fault,” Rehanna tells her son at one point. Her tiresome devotion all but drowns A Golden Age. When the climax comes, and she must make a choice, it is predictable.
Adelaida Lower
THE AFFAIR OF THE MUTILATED MINK
James Anderson, Allison & Busby, 2008 (c1981), £9.99, pb, 350pp, 9780749080983
This is a delightful 1930s English country house murder mystery, the second in the series set in the Earl of Burford’s imposing house, Alderley. The Earl, who is an amiable old buffer, invites a number of people to Alderley for a long English weekend house party. These include film actors, directors and a writer, as well as two suitors for the hand of Geraldine, the Earl’s daughter. The tale rattles along at a fine pace with some fine plotting with all sorts
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Robert Alexander, Viking, 2008, $24.95, hb, 306pp, 97806700188199
In the first two decades of the 20th century, two worlds collide in Russia. The fall of the Romanovs and the massacre of Tsar Nicholas and his family make headlines. The Romanov Bride, though, tells the story of another family member, Grand Duchess Elisavyeta (Ella), the older sister of Tsarina Alexandra. Raised to help those in need, Ella finds she must put aside her desires to follow the dictates of her husband. She loves him, but, scarred by the horrors of his father’s assassination, he is unable to return that love. When revolutionists murder Sergei, Ella reexamines her life and gives up her riches and power to become the abbess of a convent that caters to the needs of those less fortunate.
After the tragic and needless death of his wife and child during a peaceful march to see the tsar, Pavel seeks only revenge. He becomes a revolutionary who aids the cause by killing Romanovs and those who work with them. When he agrees to assist in the slaying of Grand Duke Sergei, Pavel’s life becomes intertwined with Ella’s.
What makes this account of the Romanov tragedy so compelling is that the reader lives the events from two opposing perspectives. Alexander brings to life the privileged world of the ruling family and the poverty they refused to see. How different Russia might have been “if only…” is vividly portrayed within these pages. The Romanov Bride is a poignant recounting of tragic and horrible events that will bring tears to your eyes. The ironic twist of fate at the end makes this a tale as haunting as the murders in the “House of Special Purpose” in Ekaterinburg in 1918.
Cindy Vallar N n
Y SKYLARK FARM
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Antonia Arslan (trans. Geoffrey Brock), Atlantic, 2008, £12.99, pb, 275pp, 9781843546733 / Vintage, 2008, $14.95, pb, 288pp, 9781400095674
Arslan’s luminous debut novel tells the unbearable story of the 1915 Armenian genocide in Turkey. Ethnic Armenian Yerwant Arslanian has left his home in Anatolia to study medicine in Italy. He stays on, marries an Italian countess, and lives the life of a privileged Westerner. After forty years in exile, he at last prepares to return to his homeland and visit his beloved brother Sempad and the rest of his extended family. But just as Yerwant is about to leave on his journey, Italy joins the Great War and the borders close. Meanwhile the Turkish regime, bent on cleansing the nation of ethnic minorities, order the gendarmes to round up all Armenian men. Sempad, his wife Shushanig, their family, and friends seek refuge on Skylark Farm, the family’s country house in the hills. But Nazim, a double-dealing beggar, betrays them.
A squad of armed horsemen closes in on Skylark Farm and butchers the men and boys, while forcing the women and girls to watch. The survivors are then sent on a long death march which will end in the southern desert. By official government invitation, Kurdish tribesmen sweep down from the mountains to seize Armenian property and to rape the women and children. Sushanig and her daughters are brutalised and left to die of hunger and disease. Any Turk who helps an Armenian will be punished by death.
Horrified by his deed, Nazim, the betrayer, now seeks to redeem himself in a race against time to save Sushanig and her remaining children.
Arslan does not stint in exposing the carnage, yet there is nothing gratuitous here. Writing about the lives of lost family members she never knew, she gives dignity to the dead and immortalises a tragedy that must never be forgotten. Heartbreaking and highly recommended.
of unexpected diversions and twists. The book plays fair with the rules of the Golden Age of mystery fiction, and is indeed very much an amalgam of the styles of Agatha Christie and DL Sayers with a dash of PG Wodehouse. Indeed, some of the famous fictional detectives of the 1930s are referred to in the tale as real characters. A most entertaining, nostalgic read!
Doug Kemp
THE SERPENT’S DAUGHTER
Suzanne Arruda, NAL, 2008, $23.95/C$28.50, hb, 342pp, 9780451222947
Third in the Jade del Cameron mystery series, this outing finds Jade, a photojournalist for The Traveler magazine, traveling in Morocco in 1920 with her Spanish mother, an uneasy reunion to be sure. In previous books, Jade seemed almost too good to be true, but in her relationship with her mother, she reveals her human side, taking a perverse delight in behaving badly in front of her mother’s friends but having the grace to be abashed at her mother’s displeasure. She soon finds herself longing for even that strained relationship when her mother is kidnapped and Jade frantically searches across the country to find her.
Arruda is fond of mysticism, which comes to the fore here when Jade becomes involved with a Berber tribe, who reveal her to be the direct descendant of a legendary Berber woman, and enlist her aid in returning a powerful amulet to the tribe. The mysticism is leavened with the
Mary Sharratt
more prosaic smuggling of hashish and gold. The smugglers cross paths with Jade, of course to their detriment. Arruda nicely hearkens back to the first two books in the series, as Jade finds herself meeting an old adversary from the first
Y WICKED CITY
book and her would-be beau from the second. As usual, the descriptions of African countries are vivid, and the mystery gallops apace like an old-time serial. I’m hooked—Jade, where are you traveling next?
Ellen Keith
ARROWS OF DESIRE
Emma Blair, Sphere, 2008, £19.99, hb, 341pp, 9781847441263
Life is hard for Beth Somerville in a Glasgow torn apart by the Second World War. Her sweetheart, Teddy, goes missing in action and Beth finds herself falling for his brother Steve. Just before their planned elopement Steve is tragically killed and Beth is left alone with a baby on the way.
Gene MacKay seems to be the answer to her prayers and she allows him to whisk her away to a new life in Canada. But life is not a bed of roses, and Gene’s sister is hardly welcoming. In fact someone seems to have murder on their mind, and Beth turns again to Teddy for help in her hour of need.
Emma Blair has legions of fans and once again Arrows of Desire demonstrates why. There is such a strong sense of time and place that the reader is transported straight to wartime Glasgow and post-war Canada. This is how all romantic fiction should be.
Sara Wilson
TELL ME, PRETTY MAIDEN
Rhys Bowen, St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2008, $23.95/C$29.95, hb, 336pp, 9780312349431
Molly Murphy is back in New York City after doing some detecting in Ireland that almost cost her her life. It is December 1902
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Ace Atkins, Putnam, 2008, $24.95/C$30.00, hb, 352pp, 9780399154577
In 1954, Phenix City on the Alabama side of the Chattahoochee River was often compared to Sodom and Gomorrah. Situated on the Georgia border, Phenix City, nick-named Sin City by the press, was a magnet for the soldiers at Fort Benning. Nevertheless, there were many decent, upright citizens disgusted with the well-entrenched political machine that fed off Phenix City’s profits from gambling and prostitution. One man, Albert Patterson, stepped up to the mat, put his life on the line and was elected State Attorney General. His murder before taking office is the last straw.
The hero is a gas station owner named Lamar Murphy. Lamar seems to be one of those men who, having found themselves in the right (or possibly the wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time, bites the bullet and just gets the job done. He is named sheriff and, along with Patterson’s son, investigates the murder. This investigation causes a rash of cover-up crimes. Despite threats to his life and family, Lamar manages to keep all intact and catch the bad guys in the end.
Ace Atkins has done a superb job with this fictionalized account of a true incident. Wicked City is peopled with both real and invented characters. He successfully employs the style of investigative journalism, and the plot moves along at a rapid, cannot- put-down pace.
Audrey Braver
and she is particularly busy. She’s been asked to investigate the possible haunting of a soon-tobe produced musical, where the leading lady is repeatedly threatened. Then she and Daniel, her police officer beau who is still under suspicion by the Commissioner of Police and hence suspended from working, find a young woman almost frozen to death in Central Park. Molly feels a sense of involvement, and certainly can’t let this enigma go. And then she is called in to investigate the possible involvement of a Yale student in a brutal robbery and murder in New Haven, Connecticut. She also has the excitement of meeting Nelly Bly during this time.
The winter scenes are evocative of the period. We find out too that this is the time when the new Sicilian gangs are making their mark, and bringing a new and brutal tone to the New York underworld. Molly finds herself struggling against some of Daniel’s to-her-mind outmoded views of a woman’s life and how to make it fulfilling. This is an engaging mystery series, best started at the beginning.
Trudi E. Jacobson
SERPENT BOX
Vincent Louis Carrella, HarperPerennial, 2008, $14.95/C$18.95, pb, 464pp, 9780061126260
The author’s debut novel focuses on the Flints, a family of Pentecostal preachers from Depression-era and postwar Leatherwood, Tennessee. The Flints and their friends spend their lives looking for signs and miracles. They risk their lives in witness to the Lord as they spread the Word by drinking poison and handling dangerous snakes. Charles Flint knows in his heart his son Jacob is special, even a prophet. As they preach across the Deep South, they learn about each other and their faith. Jacob ultimately discovers the yearning of the human heart crosses barriers of time and color.
The words on every page of this novel demand you read further for the sheer joy of the prose; the poetry of expression plays counterpoint to the ugliness of the time and place. However, characterization was of secondary importance to beauty of the language.
The entire story is told in the present tense –even the flashbacks. Because of that, the reader is pulled out of the context and the history of the period. The description fails to anchor the reader to the scenes, because the writing style overwhelms every moment of the story. How could these mellow, one-dimensional characters be fired with the Spirit of God?
It was difficult to become emotionally involved with the characters. I found myself reading, not from the need to know what happened to these people, but to see how the author would word it. Even the shocking ending left me unmoved. Carrella has a glorious gift for language. I hope his next book is more character-focused.
Monica
E. Spence
hb, 217pp, 9781590584460
The engaging Oklahoma farm wife and mother of ten, Alafair Tucker (The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, Hornswoggled), is back for a welcome third adventure. August 1914’s pleasant family outing proves fatal to a young brother-in-law and devastating to his brutalized fiancée and wounded niece Mary, the most lighthearted of Alafair and Shaw’s children.
The killer is hell-bent on covering tracks with additional mayhem, so in the middle of their grief the Tuckers and their close extended family go into detective mode to discover the bushwhacker in their midst. Interwoven in the storyline is Mary’s journal entries, in which she tries to pull from her mind how the horrible crimes and the Fourth of July are connected. Neighbors begin to suspect neighbors, families their hired men, and racial prejudice surfaces, heightening the tension. Her mother’s hovering shortens Mary’s temper, but also proves to be life-saving. And intrepid Alafair plumbs every lead including gossip, the “underground network… often much more informative than the official sources.”
Casey provides another excellent mystery, enhanced by telling details of farm life – where animals greet masters by shaking their entire hindquarters and the road to solving a murder is interrupted when a first grandchild must be helped into the world. Though the viewpoint shifts seemed at times disconcerting and unnecessary, this outing is also enhanced by a deft portrayal of trauma, and a pure, homegrown magical realism nested nicely beside Alafair’s recipes for fried okra, cornmeal dumplings and peach ice cream.
Eileen Charbonneau
LAMBRUSCO
Ellen Cooney, Pantheon, 2008, $25.00, hb, 352pp, 9780375424960
Lucia Fantini, legendary singer and widow of Aldo, whose village restaurant was her personal stage, secretly helps her son’s resistance movement by smuggling arms in shopping bags. Unfortunately, her son takes matters into his own hands and blows up a German tank, thus also bringing his mother under suspicion.
Enter an American undercover operative, a tall, angular woman named Annmarie who was a professional golfer in peacetime. Disguised as a nun, she alerts Lucia to the danger of returning to her home. But the dangers are nearer than anyone thinks, and Lucia and her friends are inadvertently bombed by the U.S., causing Lucia a head wound that gives her quest to find her son a dreamlike, surreal quality.
It is the strange relationship of Lucia and Annmarie that provides the true crux of the story. Annmarie, on the surface so different from Lucia, becomes her means of finding her way back to herself in the midst of the chaos of war.
she overindulges by making them a little too obviously Italianate and melodramatic—perhaps intentionally operatic. She most successfully gives Lucia a distinctive voice in all senses, complete with delirious conversations with the three great Italian opera composers, Rossini, Verdi and Puccini. The story is well constructed and draws one through, but the reader’s sympathy is at times attenuated by scenes that start out amusing or engaging and then continue for too long.
Nonetheless, Lambrusco provides a glimpse of a part of World War II with which many Americans are unfamiliar, and believably illustrates the degree to which opera is part of the fabric of everyday life in war-torn Italy, either by its presence or its absence.
Susanne Dunlap
THE KONKANS
Tony D’Souza, Harcourt, 2008, $25.00, hb, 320pp, 9780151015191 / Portobello, 2008, £10.99, pb, 320pp, 9781846271304
Lawrence D’Sai is the firstborn son of a firstborn son, part of a line that stretches back generations. He’s also a Konkan—a member of the Catholic minority of the western coast of India, converted in the 1500s by Vasco da Gama and St. Francis Xavier. When Denise, an American Peace Corps volunteer, arrives in Chikmagalur, Lawrence’s father sees the opportunity to truly transform his son’s life, and plays matchmaker. Denise sees the marriage as a way to keep her love and admiration for India and its culture with her forever, and Lawrence sees the marriage as his ticket to America and prosperity.
When the newlyweds arrive in the United States in the early 1970s, Lawrence immediately begins the slow and often cruel process of assimilating into American culture. He is successful at his job at an insurance company, but despite his ambition and his attempts to fit in, his ethnic background relegates him to outsider status. Meanwhile, Denise realizes that the life of a suburban housewife is stifling her free spirit, and she takes up with Lawrence’s brother Sam, a recent immigrant who still maintains his love and respect for his native culture.
Folklore, history, and family narrative intertwine in this engrossing novel. By using Lawrence and Denise’s firstborn son Francisco as the narrator, as well as a nonlinear style that slowly reveals further detail about each member of Francisco’s extended family, the stories of all of the members of the D’Sai family are revealed through innocent, unprejudiced eyes. Told with warmth, humor, and finesse, The Konkans is a richly-layered novel of the emotional ties that bind a family together—and the inner turmoil that can tear a family apart.
Nanette Donohue
DEATH ON THE HOLY MOUNTAIN
THE DROP EDGE OF YONDER
Donis Casey, Poisoned Pen Press, 2007, $24.95,
Cooney populates her fictional world with colorful and varied characters, but occasionally
David Dickinson, Constable, 2008, £18.99, hb, 312pp, 9781845296032 / Soho Constable, 2008,
$24.95, hb, 288pp, 9781569475034
The seventh Lord Francis Powerscourt murder mystery begins in 1905 with the detective peer returning to his native Ireland to investigate a series of thefts from stately homes. The missing items are all ancestral paintings and their disappearances are accompanied by threatening letters. It would seem that these are no ordinary burglaries but the start of a new style of politically motivated campaign instigated by Irish Nationalists.
The thefts are closely followed by kidnappings, and then a body is discovered at the top of Croagh Patrick, Ireland’s Holy Mountain. Powerscourt needs to act swiftly to avert more bloodshed whilst, at the same time, his patriotism is called into question.
Death on the Holy Mountain is a rip-roaring period murder mystery with a good smattering of historical colour and plenty of political shenanigans. Lord Powerscourt himself is an appealing detective and the story is enhanced by some very vibrant characterisation. The reader is guaranteed several entertaining hours in the capable hands of David Dickinson.
Sara Wilson
THE WHITE KING
György Dragomán (trans. Paul Olchvary), Doubleday, 2008, £14.99, hb, 318pp, 9780385613439
Set in an East European communist totalitarian country in the 1970-1980s, this novel is narrated by an 11-year-old boy known just as Djata. The security police seize Djata’s father one morning for anti-state activities, and he and his mother have to adjust to their changed circumstances. The book is divided into a number of episodes, each one covering the scrapes and adventures that Djata gets into, narrated in a breathless and ingenuous style – the perspective of young boy who does not fully understand all that is going on around him yet observes faithfully the events of his challenging childhood. Djata experiences violence, cruelty, deceit and corruption – all of the stories acting as an allegory for the brutality of the oppressive regime or by themselves amply demonstrating the utter nastiness of the collectivist, paranoid society of Ceaucescu’s Romania. It is a disturbing picture, though leavened by Djata’s native wit and the utter farce of life under collectivist corruption.
Doug Kemp
SCOTTSBORO
Ellen Feldman, Norton, 2007, $24.95/C$30.00, hb, 362pp, 9780393064902 / Picador, 2008, £20.00, hb, 368pp, 9780330456135
In Alabama in 1931, young people hitching rides on a freight train have a brawl. A group of white boys are driven from the train. Nine black youths, and two white females, both occasional prostitutes, remain on board. A posse stops the train. The white girls cry rape. The nine African Americans, who will be known to history as the Scottsboro boys, are automatically adjudged
Y THE MOON IN THE MANGO TREE
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Pamela Binnings Ewen, B&H, 2008, $15.99, pb, 480pp, 9780805447330
Barbara Perkins adores opera. She is a talented singer. When her chance finally comes to work with the Chicago Opera, she finds her husband Harvey, a doctor, has an equal desire to be a missionary to Siam. Barbara must choose between the husband she loves and the musical career she always wanted. It’s 1919, and although Barbara considers herself a modern woman, she is still encouraged by all to accompany her husband and find her fulfillment with him. She chooses to follow her husband despite her budding musical career.
Barbara finds life in a remote northern village of Siam, far from civilization, to be both enchanting and horrific in turns. She makes herself unpopular with some of the missionaries when she enjoys learning about the traditions and religion of the people around her. The primitive living conditions and the deep-seated prejudice of her fellow missionaries make life in Siam very difficult for her, and she begins to wonder if she made the right choice.
Pamela Binnings Ewen wrote this richly detailed novel based on the experiences of her grandmother, who lived in Siam and Europe during the Roaring Twenties. The story thoughtfully and realistically describes the inner turmoil of this young woman as well as the beauty and dangers of Siam. Descriptions of the landscape and the people are so vivid that the reader becomes as enchanted with Siam as Barbara. The subtle inspirational elements enhance the plot without overpowering it. This is a thought-provoking and enjoyable story, difficult to put down. Highly recommended.
guilty, and threatened with death in the electric chair. Progressive lawyers from Northern states, possibly as interested in advancing a political agenda as in justice, flood Alabama, and a mammoth legal battle begins. One of the girls retracts her testimony and says there was no rape.
From this true story, Ellen Feldman has fashioned a novel. Several chapters are told in the first person voice of Ruby, the recanting witness, and they stand out from the rest of the book. Feldman makes us understand how ignorance and a life of deprivation prompt Ruby to falsely claim she was raped rather than admit to staying voluntarily in a compromising situation with black youths. We also see how her battered core of decency, her religious feeling, and her emotional neediness lead her to recant in return for the friendship and admiration the Scottsboro boys’ defenders seem to offer.
Multidimensional and real, neither wholly good nor wholly bad, Ruby is a marvelous fictional creation. By contrast, the young woman journalist who tells most of the story is a less convincing and engaging character, and we never really get to know any of the Scottsboro boys well. This account of a famous court case that exposed the murderous face of racial prejudice is truly gripping. But I wish more of the story could have been told in Ruby’s voice.
Phyllis T. Smith
AFTER OMDURMAN
John Ferry, Hale, 2008, £18.99, hb, 223pp, 9780709085164
It is 1935 and backbench Tory MP, Colonel
Nan Curnutt
Evelyn Winters is fighting a campaign in the House of Commons to prevent a bill which will give India dominion status. At the same time he is writing his memoirs of his exploits as an intelligence officer in the 1898 campaign to retake the Sudan from the followers of the Mahdi. He is assisted by a young historian called Parker who is acting as researcher. The book alternates between the campaign in the Sudan, where he is tasked by Kitchener with finding the saboteur who is threatening the success of the campaign, and the ongoing battles in Parliament, where after some years of silence he speaks out with great, but ultimately unsuccessful, effect against the bill.
Colonel Winters epitomises the culture and manners of Britain at that time without descending into cliché, but I found his adversary’s motivation rather weak. The device of running parallel storylines worked to a limited extent, but it felt at times to be contrived in that it was a device to introduce and involve Parker whose link to the campaign is eventually revealed. An enjoyable read, but I would wait for the paperback.
Mike
Ashworth
SUNSHINE AND SHADOWS
Katie Flynn, Arrow, 2008, £9.99, hb, 486pp, 9780434016235
When her impoverished family is forced from their home, young Daisy Kildare is sent from Ireland to Liverpool to be companion to Cynthia, the niece of her Aunt Jane’s employers. She does well in school and finds a good friend in Jake, the chauffeur’s son, but then tragedy
strikes her family.
Daisy remains strong and is determined to follow Jake to university. Then war breaks out and she goes to work in a munitions factory instead, falling in love with Sean along the way. Then Jake is injured in action and Daisy realises that perhaps she doesn’t love Sean after all.
Katie Flynn writes her Liverpool sagas with so much passion and joy that it is impossible not to be swept along by her enthusiasm. Daisy is a great main character, hard as nails, but with just enough softness to make her vulnerable and likeable. Sunshine and Shadows is another surefire winner.
Sara Wilson
THE RUSSIAN CONCUBINE
Kate Furnivall, Sphere, 2007, pb, 577pp, £6.99, 9780751540420 / Berkley, 2007, $15.00, pb, 528pp, 9780425215586
As one of the characters remarks early in this novel, Russian and Chinese history is of little interest to people living in England. This is 1928, not today, I hasten to add, but it may explain why we are so familiar with the plight of Russian refugees from the 1917 revolution who came to Paris or London but know little about those who went east and arrived in China. Kate Furnivall’s novel, inspired by her own mother’s life story, came as a revelation to me.
Fifteen-year-old Lydia lives with her feckless mother in the international settlement in Junchow. Quick-witted, resourceful and, of course, beautiful, Lydia is also an accomplished pickpocket and it is this which precipitates the novel’s complex and far-reaching plot. This is a huge saga of love and loss, politics and gangsterism, peopled with rich and memorable characters. It is, however, over-long and marred by some sloppy writing in parts – a market stall which shouts, for example, and a stationary engine described as heaving – and those are in the first ten pages. What a pity Furnivall did not have the benefit of a good copy editor.
For this reader, alas, the ordinariness of the writing spoiled what should have been a unique and irresistible read. A good story deserves to be well written, yet I was left with the overriding impression that the author and her editorial team believed its intrinsic strength and originality were enough on their own. The novel has done very well – and I am delighted for Kate Furnivall that it has – but I lament the apparent fact that the more people there are reading novels, the less discerning they seem to be about the quality of the language.
Recommended with reservations. Sarah Bower
KING HENRY
Douglas Galbraith, Harvill Secker, 2007, £16.99, hb, 409pp, 9780436206283
1915. America is debating its response to the war in Europe. Enter Henry Ford, selfmade billionaire and owner of the Ford Motor Company. He is a genius with engines but
curiously blind to human emotions, preferring to ignore them. He’s against war – it’s bad for business. He firmly believes that if cars are cheap enough to enable people to travel abroad, they would see that foreigners are human, too. War would then become impossible.
Encouraged by the forceful peace-activist Rosika Schwimmer, he vows to devote his fortune ‘to get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas’. He charters a Peace Ship, the Oscar, and prepares to take the great and the good of America – all expenses paid – to Europe, to broker a peace deal. To his surprise, the great and the good stay away, but for others it’s the opportunity of a lifetime. Soon, the ship is full of journalists hoping for a good story and cranks and idealists of every persuasion. The Oscar sets sail for Christiania (Oslo), and, inevitably, high-mindedness rapidly descends into farce as the usual murky emotions emerge on this ship of fools.
Galbraith ingeniously tackles this extraordinary episode by having a number of interweaving first person narratives. Some are close to Ford, like his chauffeur-cum-bodyguard Ray, and the redoubtable Rosika. Others are more distant, like Inez, the beautiful journalist. Their differing viewpoints make up a rich kaleidoscope of stories which come together in an increasingly mad cacophony on board the Oscar.
I enjoyed this book – there was some laughout-loud humour, too – but it took too long to get into. There are nine separate stories to take on board in the first seventy pages alone, and I sometimes lost track of who was who. All the same, this is a fascinating look at a bizarre episode.
Elizabeth Hawksley
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING KENNEDY
Laurie Graham, HarperCollins, 2008; $24.95/C$26.95, hb, 368pp, 9780061173523 / Fourth Estate, 2007, £11.99, pb, 326pp, 9780007228843
Nora Brennan, newly arrived from Ireland, narrates her life as nursery and companion servant of the renowned Kennedy family. But reader, beware: Nora’s tale is no sanitized version of the Kennedy family’s pre-Camelot days.
Referring to Joe Kennedy as Mr. K and Rose as “Herself,” Nora reveals the complex side of both. We read how both plotted and planned every second of their children’s lives, from what they were allowed and forced to read, their lack of friends, their fiercely competitive games generating support and animosity, their attempts to warn each other and hide associations that would flip out their parents, and so much more. In multiple comic and also distressing scenes, Nora describes Rose Kennedy as a directive but totally absent mother, frequently leaving her children to go shopping and touring in Europe while her children forged on without her. Nora
is merciless in her descriptions of Rose, deriding her with humor and scornful commentary as well as through dialogue with fellow servants. The novel also spans the family’s slow but steady rise in politics, including Joe Kennedy’s financial support of FDR’s election, his time in England as the U.S. ambassador, the family and servants’ contrasting roles during the long years of World War II when England was often bombed on a daily basis, and of course the all too well-known tragedies of Joe’s and “Kick” Kennedy’s deaths.
As harshly judgmental as this diatribe against Joe and Rose can get, this fictional account is a rousing good read that hits the mark with a comically satirical edge. Very nicely done, Ms. Graham, but, alas, the Kennedys won’t be inviting you to dinner after this one. Bear it like a Kennedy! Hold your head high and smile at all times!
Viviane Crystal
RAISINS AND ALMONDS
Kerry Greenwood, Poisoned Pen Press, 2007, $24.95/C$29.95, hb, 207pp, 9781590581681
This is the ninth installment in Kerry Greenwood’s series featuring Phryne Fisher, a wealthy, fashionable private investigator in Melbourne, Australia, in 1928.
Phryne is dancing with her latest lover, young Simon Abrahams, when his father asks her to investigate the murder of a Jewish student in a bookshop. Miss Lee, the bookseller, has been arrested, but after an interview with her, Phryne can tell that she is innocent. Phryne finds mysterious alchemical symbols in the dead man’s pockets, and she soon discovers that he was involved with a group of Zionists. What is the connection between the symbols and Zionism? Phryne and friends—her maid Dot, her adopted daughters Jane and Ruth, the Communist taxi drivers Bert and Cec, and Detective Inspector Robinson—must find the killer before an innocent woman is executed.
Phryne is a delightful character—clever and independent, with an unconventional lifestyle, and the author gives us wonderful insights into Jewish life in Australia in the 1920s. This was the first Phryne Fisher mystery I’ve read, and, although I do think I have missed something by not having read the previous volumes, I still had no problem sorting out the characters. I am eager to read more of Phryne’s adventures.
Vicki Kondelik
THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE
Andrew Sean Greer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, $22/C$24, hb, 208pp, 9780374108663 / Faber and Faber, 2008, £12.99, pb, 288pp, 9780571240982
This is a book that prides itself on its plot surprises, and begs readers not to give them away. So, to provide the bare bones, the protagonist, Pearlie, is a young woman who considers herself lucky to have married her childhood
20th Century
sweetheart, now back from the war. She settles down to housekeeping and raising a young son in the Sunset District of San Francisco, in 1953. One morning a man appears, an old army friend of her husband, Holland. Or is he? He claims he and Pearlie can help each other. As their strange relationship develops, she begins to question the very foundation of her marriage. She discovers she scarcely knows her husband at all.
The carefully crafted language of this book makes it a pleasure to read. The period details are a treasure. The author does a good job of leading the reader to certain expectations so that plot twists do surprise. My only complaint was that the husband, so central to the book, fell flat as a character. Movie-star handsome he might have been, but I had no sense of any personality, except maybe a faint glimmer toward the end. For me, the greatest mystery throughout most of the book was why the fascinating Pearlie felt such a deep love for so shallow a character.
Sue Asher
THE LAZARUS PROJECT
Aleksandar Hemon, Riverhead, 2008, $24.95/ C$27.50, 304pp, hb, 9781597789884
History and literary narrative are inextricably interwoven in MacArthur “Genius Grant”winner Hemon’s latest work. Two stories are told: one is of Lazarus Averbuch, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant in Chicago, who had lived through the horror of the pogroms and refugee camps in Eastern Europe, only to die at the hand of the Chicago Chief of Police (“Shippy”) in March of 1908. The second story is that of the narrator, Brik, who is also an immigrant to Chicago, arriving in America in 1992 just before war broke out in his Bosnian homeland.
Brik’s obsession with the story of Averbuch— was he an anarchist? Why did he go to Chief Shippy’s house that morning?—leads him to retrace the steps of Lazarus and his sister Olga, as they left behind their disintegrating world for the promise of a better life in America. Brik takes along his fellow-Bosnian friend and garrulous photographer Rora, and they make their way through present-day Ukraine to Chernivtsi to Moldova and on to Sarajevo. During the journey, Rora regales Brik with accounts of the war in Bosnia, the heroes, the escapes, the deaths; Brik pieces together what he feels is the story of Lazarus and Olga, from the fragments he finds (or doesn’t) of their world.
There are layers of echoes between the two narratives: protagonists who will always be treated as perhaps-untrustworthy foreigners, who have hopes of creating better lives; the similarities between the early 20th-century treatment of outsiders and some of the current policies aimed to prevent terrorism in the U.S. also reverberate. This carefully-crafted work, along with its supporting photographs, is at once a fantastic tale of Eastern European life, a lesson in two centuries of (in)humanity, and an eerie reminder that those who don’t learn from past
errors are condemned to repeat them.
Helene Williams
THE MAN WHO KILLED SHAKESPEARE
Ken Hodgson, Five Star, 2007, $25.95, hb, 247pp, 9781594145988
In 1932, Shakespeare, New Mexico, is barely surviving the Depression and quietly, steadily slipping downhill. Lett Halsey has inherited the Roxy Jay Saloon, but he had no expectations as he arrives in Shakespeare to take possession of his legacy. The Roxy Jay’s clientele are almost all out-of-work miners who drink beer on credit. In lieu of wages, the bartender is eating as much food as he can consume. In addition to the saloon, Lett has also acquired several cabins out back, only two of which are occupied. Lett moves into the one that has been his brother’s home. The other is rented by Delight Jones, an aging prostitute. Then Sam Ransom, a con man on the run from a bad deal in San Francisco, arrives to open The Last Chance Mine. He hires a small crew of men, makes Lett his foreman and sets them to getting the old, abandoned mine ready to go into production. No one is more surprised than Sam when they find a rich vein of high grade gold and silver.
Ken Hodgson has written a poignantly funny story peopled with wonderful characters. From the Roxy Jay’s hangers-on to the sleazy con man and pompous, self-righteous bankers who are not above a little larceny to the down-andout miners who have known hard work most of their lives, this novel screams authenticity. It is
Y
Grapes of Wrath and Paper Moon wrapped in a unique, vividly descriptive view of a deserted mining town gasping out its last breaths.
Audrey Braver
BIRDS IN THE SPRING
Evelyn Hood, Sphere, 2008, £6.99, pb, 484pp, 9780751537321
It is 1920 and women are no longer prepared to take a back seat in business. Fiona MacDowell is determined to inherit her father’s furniture emporium in spite of opposition from her half brother, Alex. Whilst Alex’s wife, Rose is running the thriving dressmaking business called Harlequin. Conflict between the women flares, and further trouble brews with the arrival of Irish cabinetmaker, Joe McCart. Maybe the arrival of an unplanned baby will ensure the inheritance goes one way or another.
There is nothing more compelling than a writer describing places she knows well. When Evelyn Hood writes about Paisley, she does so with such obvious affection that it is a joy to read. From her opening description of Hogmanay celebrations the reader knows they are in safe hands. Birds in the Spring is compulsive reading throughout.
Sara Wilson
THE PENNY BANGLE
Margaret James, Robert Hale, 2007, £18.99, hb, 224pp, 9780709083887
It is 1942 and a nineteen-year-old munitions worker, Cassie Taylor leaves Birmingham to become a land girl in Dorset. When she arrives
THE INVENTION OF EVERYTHING ELSE
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Samantha Hunt, Houghton Mifflin, 2008, $24/C$26.95, hb, 272pp, 9780618801121 / Harvill Secker, 2008, £12.99, hb, 368pp, 9781846551925
In 1943 Louisa and her father Walter live alone in a house in Hell’s Kitchen. Louisa is a chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker, and her father is the night watchman at the New York Public Library in Bryant Square. Walter is a dreamer who has spent his life mourning the loss of his true love, Louisa’s mother, who died an indeterminate amount of time before. His one passion is science and science fiction, a passion he shares with his best friend Azor, who has been mysteriously missing for the past two years.
Enter the true hero of the piece: Nikola Tesla, an old, impoverished inventor living on the 34th floor of the Hotel New Yorker (visitors can still stay in that room). Louisa, who cannot resist snooping in the rooms she cleans, finds her way into his extraordinary abode and discovers a remarkable life, written in hidden papers. But things take a strange turn when Azor turns up again out of nowhere, claiming to have built a time machine that gives Walter hope that he can return to the past and have just one more conversation with his beloved wife, Freddie.
To try to encapsulate this remarkable story, how Hunt weaves together the threads of several lives—current and in times past—in a poignant and believable dénouement would be to do this beautiful novel a disservice. From the language that creates a magical atmosphere imbued with longing and possibility, to the perfectly paced, inevitable and yet surprising drama, The Invention of Everything Else is a joy to read.
A word of warning: you may just fall hopelessly in love with the striking Mr. Tesla, with the winsome Louisa, the dreamy Walter, the preposterous and impractical Azor, and the solid, secure Arthur, Louisa’s beau, and possibly find yourself wishing that you could turn the clocks back and enter their world.
Susanne Dunlap
Y THE OUTCAST
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Sadie Jones, Chatto & Windus, 2008, £12.99, hb, 347pp, 9780701181758 / Harper, 2008, $24.95, hb, 352pp, 9780061374036
Set in a middle-class commuter town in southern England in the late 1940s and 1950s, this is a highly accomplished first novel. The story begins with Lewis Aldridge, in his late teens, arriving home on his release from Brixton prison after serving two years for an unknown offence. The tale unfolds of the circumstances leading up to his incarceration and then the disturbing events following his return to home life in fictional Waterford (not to be confused with the town in Ireland). Lewis is a disturbed and difficult young man, but we are taken through the events in his young life, starting with the death of his mother in a drowning accident whilst picnicking. Lewis grows up bereaved in a cold and bleak domestic environment, with his father quickly remarrying. The milieu of harsh home life and culture of the England in the 1950s are pictured with acute and searing honesty. There is the hypocrisy of the small community, churchbased and yet utterly selfish and sanctimonious, and the delights of hidden domestic abuse, drunkenness and repression. Lewis finds some relief in this paean of gloom, notably with his developing relationship with Kit Carmichael, the rebellious and abused daughter of Waterford’s wealthy alpha-male. This is excellent historical fiction, both an engaging story and a work of literary finesse.
at the Denham family’s farm she meets army officer twins, Robert and Stephen Denham who are convalescing at home after being wounded at Dunkirk. At first she is drawn to lively Stephen but then she falls deeply in love with his brother. When Robert returns to active service, Cassie joins the ATS and meets up with him again in Alexandria where Robert asks her to marry him. However, when Robert is reported missing in action Cassie finds Stephen hoping to take his place.
This is a lovely story, and Cassie is a spirited
Y DAY
Doug Kemp
heroine. The love triangle that ensues creates a dilemma that makes you wonder how it will turn out in the end. Being in love with twins may be a familiar tale that has been played out before, but Margaret James’s story holds your interest up until the last page. Good characterisation and a strong story line make for interesting reading.
Karen Wintle
THE DIPLOMAT’S WIFE
Pam Jenoff, Mira, 2008, $13.95/C$13.95, pb, 352pp, 9780778325123 / Mira, 2008, £6.99, pb,
EDITORS’ CHOICE
A.L. Kennedy, Knopf, 2008, $24.00, 288pp, 9780307266835 / Vintage, 2008, £7.99, pb, 288pp, 9780099494058
Alfie Day has been an RAF tail gunner and a starved, beaten POW. Five years have passed, and Alfred is the sole survivor of his bomber crew. He is also among the millions of walking wounded, living in the scarcity and devastation of post-war Britain. A fishmonger’s battered son, he’d half hoped the war would end a life he’d been taught was worthless. Now he endures survivors’ guilt and a swarm of stabbing memories, the agonizing hyper-realities of childhood abuse and twenty-nine bombing missions.
The author’s exquisite prose carries the reader past the near dumb shows of Day’s conversation, deep into the clear, swirling eddies of his mind. This is a man who knows more than he shows, who is frozen by the violence he’s endured. Hoping to find his way out of paralyzing numbness, he travels to Germany to take part in a film set in a death camp. Here the past, both in memory and in the form of an SS man now passing as a partisan, confronts him. He remembers, hopelessly, the few moments of tenderness in his life, a wartime affair with a married woman. Occasionally the stream of consciousness left me behind, but the superb precision of the writing brought a knockout punch to each and every page. Day gives the reader World War II warts and all, stripped of pieties or flag-waving. Ms. Kennedy, who has won prestigious awards for earlier works, again demonstrates a humbling mastery of her art.
Juliet Waldron
416pp, 9780778302001
This is the follow-up to the author’s debut novel, The Kommandant’s Girl, a tale centering on a woman reluctantly thrust into the Polish resistance during World War II. The Diplomat’s Wife picks up the story of a secondary character, Marta Nederman, a fellow resistance fighter. Having survived Nazi imprisonment, Marta embarks on a new life after the war, however one not without tragedy. She endures the loss of a good friend, as well as a passionate American lover, before finally building a new life in London. Now married to an English diplomat, and the mother of a child, she lives a comfortable, if disturbingly sterile, way of life. However, the pull of her past proves irresistible, and Marta soon finds herself on a mission back to Eastern Europe. Only this time the enemy, in the guise of the new Communist masters, is even more cunning and unpredictable.
This novel, a much more conventional romance than the author’s first effort, takes a while to really get going. When it finally does, the plot and pace are much more reminiscent of the earlier book. This is Ms. Jenoff at her best, relating a story of an ordinary woman suddenly immersed in the deadly world of espionage. Plot twists abound in this tale, and to say many of the characters are not who they seem is putting it mildly. However, unlike many works these days, the author ties them all up neatly in the end, coming to an exciting and satisfying conclusion.
Ken Kreckel
THE ANGEL GANG
Ken Kuhlken, Poisoned Pen Press, 2007, $14.95, pb, 226pp, 1590584090
“Turn on the radio, would you, Denny? … Find something loud, with horns.” So begins this Jazz Age crime drama. It’s a time of contradictions, with music blaring out Americans’ emergence from post-World War I senseless chaos and death. Its softer sounds reflect the entire country’s yearning for peace and prosperity.
Tom Hickey, a clarinetist and saxophonist, has found such a place of deep love and contentment with his wife, Wendy. In the final days before their son Clifford’s birth, Hickey gets an upsetting telephone call about an old girlfriend, Cynthia Tucker Jones, who’s been accused of arson and murder. Wendy encourages the caring, capable, former private investigator to use his formidable skills to help Cynthia. But little does Wendy know that his decision will spin him back into a world of enemies, rivals, Mafia-type underworld residents and a multitude of other shady characters.
While this drama plays out, including several kidnappings and violent encounters affecting even Wendy herself, the reader receives a small dose of historical events that weakly tie into the actual story. The Angel Gang is a phenomenal crime novel but very light historical fiction.
Viviane
Crystal
THE WINTER OF THE WORLD
Carol Ann Lee, HarperPerennial, 2007, $13.95/ C$16.50, pb, 319pp, 9780061238819
Love, betrayal, and a terrible debt to pay are the themes of The Winter of the World, the debut novel of biographer and children’s book author Carol Ann Lee. The themes are familiar, but the novel plots a course of its own. It starts with a gloomily subdued narrative, on Armistice Day, November 10, 1920, when Britain communally mourns the Unknown Warrior, a nameless soldier who is about to be buried in the heart of London, in Westminster Abbey, a symbolic ceremony meant to symbolize the bringing home of the thousands of missing young men who have died in the Great War.
The novel then goes back in time, centering on Alex Dyer, a journalist who has made his reputation at the frontlines; his childhood friend, Ted Eden; and Ted’s wife, Clare, a nurse, the beautiful woman they both love. Sweepingly dramatic and mysterious, The Winter of the World is told mostly from Alex Dyer’s point of view, with Clare bringing here and there a balancing counterpoint.
Carol Ann Lee manages and succeeds with difficult narrative approaches. She can paint with an epic brush and meticulously describe apocalyptic battles, sounds, sights, and particularly smells. The landscapes too, both before and after the war, are gripping—first the nightmarish craters and thickets of barbed wire, and then the wastelands populated by ghosts and mourning families on “battlefield pilgrimages.” She can also be eloquently, poetically intimate when summoning the heartache of a forbidden encounter “in a small hotel room illuminated by remote gunfire… [when Alex] passed through the looking glass of war into another world, one that haunts him still.” There are poignant allusions to Brooke, Owen, Remarque, McCrae, and Rilke, and of a whole generation of young men sacrificed and left disabled on the fields of Flanders. Absorbing, to the very last line.
Adelaida Lower
THE END OF EAST
Jen Sookfong Lee, St. Martin’s Press, 2007, $23.95, hb, 256pp, 9780312379854
Lee’s book, first published in Canada by Knopf as a “New Faces of Fiction” novel, is her first novel, full of promise. Perhaps the story of three generations of the Chans, Chinese immigrants to Canada, is autobiographical, but it’s not a happy read. The cultural isolation caused by racist governments never is.
Seid Quan arrives in Vancouver in 1913 at eighteen hoping to make a good life for himself. He begins his life in Canada, returns to China to find a wife, spends a few happy weeks with her, then it’s back to Canada to scrimp and save so that he can pay head tax to bring her and his son to live with him. Quan dreams of his family being together, but when his son finally arrives, aged fifteen, they are two strangers. It’s heartrending to read that passage.
As he works and waits, Seid Quan lives like a hermit in China Town, and his steady habits and determination find him working his way into a barber’s shop. He remains there for the rest of his life, saving for his wife and son, earning enough for a little house and garden away from China Town. He is respected for his determination and his discipline, but he is lonely, for his wife and son will always be close, and the family he longed for will never be his – those years apart prevent it.
The book has a present-day narrator, the mixed up young Chinese-Canadian granddaughter, who takes us between the past hell of her dreadful family life, her present hell of a life and of her grandfather’s and father’s lives. The weave didn’t quite work for me; I ended up with little sympathy for anyone except the grandfather. However, it’s a fascinating book and worth reading.
Patrika Salmon
COME WITH ME TO BABYLON
Paul M. Levitt, Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2008, $24.95, hb, 240pp, 9780826341785
This is not a typical, endearing Jewish immigrant story. In 1908 it was Esther’s Cohen’s dream to leave Russia and go to America. She is certain that it is the best opportunity for her family. Her husband, Meyer, who is something of an armchair Socialist, dreaming of his family’s property that had been confiscated by the Tsar, reluctantly complies, although his heart is with their older, estranged, revolutionary son, Jacob. The Cohens are headed for Vineland, New Jersey, to become farmers. While they await the construction of their farmhouse, they stay in New York City. Fanny, the daughter, gets a job as a seamstress with the Triangle Shirtwaist Company and, although injured, survives the infamous fire. Ben, the younger son, meets, befriends, and becomes a minor associate of Arnold Rothstein. While this friendship often provides Ben with the wherewithal to come to the financial rescue of his family, it also causes him to resort to a marriage of convenience and forsake his dream of being a miniaturist.
Mr. Levitt has written a poignant tale, possibly a more realistic account of the immigrant experience than is often seen. Although the story unfolds in the first person from the points of view of the different characters, it is not in the least distracting; in fact, it keeps the reader always in the picture. Come with Me to Babylon is rich, earthy, and entertaining.
Audrey Braver
IN THE MEANTIME
Robin Lippincott, Toby, 2007, $22.95/ C$20.95/£12.99, hb, 170pp, 9781592642007 Kathryn, Starling, and Luke meet as young children in small-town America in 1931, and become fast friends. In this novel, we follow their intertwined stories for seventy years, until just one is alive and the other two exist only as memories.
Though Starling is so light-skinned many people assume he is white, he is in fact part African-American, which means he, Kathryn, and Luke must preserve their friendship in face of societal prejudice. As adolescents, Luke and Starling have a drunken sexual tryst. Afterward, Starling, a homosexual, for the first time reveals that he is in love with Luke. Luke, who is sexually repressed, recoils. Eventually the platonic friendship is repaired and the three seek new lives in New York City, where they will again confront racism, and will find unequal measures of success, love, and disappointment.
The story is told mainly through exposition, which is beautifully crafted but results in our viewing many events from a distance. There is little dialogue, and few fully developed scenes. History provides a backdrop: World War II, the execution of the Rosenbergs, and finally 9/11. The friends see Billie Holiday perform at her best, and then after drugs have shattered her. At one point, the action abruptly shifts to Hiroshima on the day the atom bomb is dropped, and we glimpse Japanese friends not very different from Kathryn, Starling, and Luke. The Japanese and American characters never meet. Later, we are told about friends who were sent to Auschwitz. At times the author strains too hard to hammer home a lesson about people’s common humanity. But this brief book conveys a poignant sense of the fleeting joys and sorrows of ordinary life.
Phyllis T. Smith
THE MISREMEMBERED MAN
Christina McKenna, Toby, 2008, $24.95/C$29.95 /£14.99, hb, 303pp, 139781592642199
I could never laugh at “Fawlty Towers.” John Cleese’s performance as a man falling apart was painful for me, not funny. I found this book the same. I think others may well laugh at Jamie McCloone’s struggles to find a life and wife. But the chapters between Jamie’s current struggles tell of his past struggles as an orphan in the 1930s, in one of Ireland’s dreadful Catholic orphanages. I found the story of his upbringing too horrifying to laugh at, and saw his struggles as a man were not about finding a life, but about finding the love he’d never had. That anyone could simply number children (Jamie was number 86) and visit the sins of the parents upon them in such a grim style appalled me. That this novel is soundly based on research and tales from the orphans made me shudder. That any of those children actually survived the physical and mental cruelty, never mind the lack of love, seems a miracle.
One can see why Ms. McKenna would tell of Jamie’s bumbling attempts to find a lady friend through the local newspaper’s Lonely Hearts Column with a lighter touch, and the ending is delightful. However, the book is not a pleasant escapist read, but more a book to ponder.
Patrika Salmon
SHADOW WALTZ
Amy Patricia Meade, Midnight Ink, 2008,
$13.95, pb, 240 pp, 9780738712493
This is the third in a series featuring mystery writer and amateur sleuth Marjorie McClelland. It’s 1935 in Ridgebury, Connecticut, and Marjorie is happily planning her wedding to wealthy and suave Creighton Ashcroft III. Her bliss is disturbed by a distraught young wife and mother, whose husband is missing. The police have dismissed her concern and have made no attempt to locate him. Sympathetic, Marjorie and Creighton agree to take her case.
They quickly discover that the uptight, ambitious husband, an insurance claims adjustor, had a mistress. Things become very serious when they discover the mistress’s dismembered body in the cellar of her home. Everyone assumes that the husband is guilty, but Marjorie has her doubts. It turns out that more than one person had a reason to want the mistress dead. Marjorie’s former beau, Detective Jameson, is assigned to the case, and she and Creighton bet him that they can solve the murder and locate the missing husband first. This was a light and breezy historical mystery, with a likeable heroine, that was lots of fun to read. I wish I had read the first two!
Jane Kessler
THE HOUSE AT RIVERTON
Kate Morton, Atria, 2008, $25.95/C$28.99, hb, 473pp, 9781416550518 / Pan, 2007, £7.99, pb, 599pp, 9780330448444
In the halcyon days before the First World War, Grace Bradley goes to work as a maid at Riverton House and becomes inextricably involved with the Hartford family, especially the two diametric daughters, intelligent Hannah and beautiful Emmeline. Later, in 1924, a young poet commits suicide, and only three people know the truth behind the events—Hannah, Emmeline, and Grace. Fast-forward to 1999. A movie is being made about the poet and Riverton House, and Grace, now in a nursing home, is consulted for “historical accuracy.” In flashback form, Grace slowly tells Hannah and Emmeline’s real story.
The blurbs with this novel bill it as “reminiscent of the romantic suspense of Daphne du Maurier,” and there are elements of this, but it also smacks heavily of McEwan’s Atonement and Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day in the ambience and some of the characterization, as well as incorporating elements of other works. The overall effect of the novel is… derivative. It also lacks the sharpness and polish, respectively, of these two authors, but Morton’s prose is well-written—often attractively evocative and the imagery vivid. She valiantly attempts to impress the upstairs/downstairs dynamic on a modern audience to which it is alien—to illustrate the mindset of those who took pride in subservience, rather than be constrained by it. Most of the characters are archetypes, but they fit in comfortably with the story, which is itself a familiar construct. Occasionally the dialogue rings false for English society of
the time period, and this may spring from the fact that Morton is an Australian native. The atmosphere is the strong point of this tale, as the storyline of betrayal and secrets, though interesting enough to pull the reader along to the end, is not particularly gripping. On the whole, a comfortable read, if a bit overlong.
Bethany Latham
IT’S ONE OF OURS
Joan M. Moules, Hale, 2007, £18.99, hb, 224pp, 9780709083627
This is a story that begins on the day of the first air raids in London, 1939 and weaves a story that surrounds the life of four women, Anna, Queenie, Rosie and Liza, living in the same street during the Second World War, finishing in 1945 after Germany’s surrender. We enter into their lives and each has their own story but they all circulate around a single street.
This is a story of love lost and love found. There is a lot of tragedy but also joy, especially at the end of the tale. What makes this book more interesting is not so much the story it tells but how a community comes together and adapts during war, and it makes it more realistic because the author lived through the war herself.
I’ve been reading a lot of World War II stories, and they all seem to follow a regular pattern, the lives of those left behind. This is one in the same mould – it centres around one street and the lives of the inhabitants there, all scarred by the war. It is well written, sometimes sad but all through there is a spirit of hope that at the end of the story peace has been declared and this sense of community will survive.
Karen Wintle
WAVE OF TERROR
Theodore Odrach (trans. Erma Odrach), Academy Chicago, 2007, $19.95, pb, 350pp, 0897335627
Like much of what went on in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist years, Wave of Terror is a revelation. Odrach experienced the upheavals of the time, then emigrated to Canada where he wrote about the terror of that time, his work largely unknown and unread.
I was quite taken with this novel, the story of a schoolmaster who views up close the coming of the Russian “liberators” into Belarus in 1939 and the chaos that follows. Anyone who knows the history of the time will know that the people of Eastern Europe were caught between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army for six years as the two grappled for the continent. But Odrach’s canvas is a village where the dramas of the era are played out in the lives of its inhabitants. Kulik, the main character, muses early on that the lives of people rise and fall only to be forgotten instantly. This takes shape when a horse thief becomes the party exemplar for the Bolsheviks, and the townspeople vie for pieces of the carved-up farm they have coveted for years. Though they expect to enter a paradise of equality and abundance, instead they find their
lives spiraling out of control.
When I put this book down, I found myself curious not only about the other works of this author, but also his life. Much of the novel, like others of its kind, gives one the impression of an eyewitness who, to paraphrase Malraux, has not come back from his time in hell with empty hands.
William Thornton
THE LAST STATION
Jay Parini, Canongate, 2007 (c1990), £8.99, pb, 372pp, 9781841959672
This ambitious book sets out to give an account of Tolstoy’s final year (1910) that blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. Parini was inspired to write it after finding a diary by Valentin Bulgakov, who acted as Tolstoy’s secretary during the last months of his life, and wherever possible Parini quotes directly from the writings and reported conversations of Tolstoy, his wife and children, as well as from descriptions left by Tolstoy’s circle of friends and attendants. In doing so, Parini has to achieve that tricky balance between authenticity (especially when dealing with literary figures of Leo Tolstoy’s calibre) and the need to sustain the narrative. That he succeeds is indicative of Parini’s skill as a writer. Interestingly, Parini once claimed that he makes “few distinction between straight biographies and novels. They both are works of fiction. Fiction means ‘shaping’ in Latin. I shape reality in both genres.”
The novel explores the growing conflict between Tolstoy’s worldly success – notably the luxury he and his wife and sons have grown accustomed to – and his spiritual convictions. Inevitably, his wealth also gives rise to the question of who will inherit the right to publish his works – his wife or the Russian people. The final circumstances of Tolstoy’s death are quite extraordinary, and the portrait of this great author so revealing that, like me, you’ll be compelled to re-read some of his earlier works.
Lucinda Byatt
THE LAST COWGIRL
Jana Richman, Morrow, 2008, $24.95, hb, 294pp, 9780061257186
Seven-year-old Darlene (Dickie) Sinfield’s life takes an altering turn when her teacher father decides to uproot his family from Utah’s suburbs to its ranching mountains in the early 1960s. Thirty years after her escape, she returns for a midlife course correction.
Told in alternating present and coming-ofage ‘60s time periods, we follow a sensitive youngest child of three as her imperfect birth family expands to include widow Bev, who loves her ranch life and Dickie’s mother, and Merv and Stumpy, an inseparable grandfather/ grandson team. Dickie hangs doggedly onto both her longing for the suburbs and her best friend Holly, who betrays her at every opportunity. Traveling from the angst of youth to the darker anguish of adolescence, Dickie resents the
Y KILLING ROMMEL
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Steven Pressfield, Doubleday, 2008, $24.95/C$32.00, hb, 333pp / Doubleday, 2008, £12.99, pb, 335pp, 9780385613880
North Africa, 1942. The British Eighth Army is in trouble. The brilliant and daring tactician, Field-Marshal Rommel, and his Panzer divisions have captured Tobruk, giving them a base from which to capture the vital oil fields of the Middle East. The Long Range Desert Group, a small, heavily-armed yet highly mobile force, is set up to get behind the German lines and cause as much damage as possible – preferably by killing Rommel.
Young Lieutenant Chapman finds himself seconded to this new commando force. Once behind enemy lines, they have only themselves to rely on. Chapman must learn fast if he and his mates are to carry out their objectives – and survive.
In war, a man learns who he truly is. Chapman has this epiphany and learns both his limitations and, paradoxically, that he can push himself far beyond what he ever imagined. At the end of the book he says, ‘I did not go to war gravely and soberly as Lao-Tzu tells us a wise man ought. But I returned from it that way.’
This is a first-class war adventure: fast-paced, accurate without being pedantic, full of danger, chases, and hairbreadth escapes as Chapman and his men in their worn-out tanks and rapidly diminishing supplies somehow manage to keep one step ahead of the Germans. But Pressfield is too good a writer to ignore the brutal realities. He does not allow his readers to forget that soldiers get killed, sometimes agonizingly, and that military authorities can be incompetent. There is chaos as well as quiet heroism. If you want insight into the reality of life at war, as well as thrills, this is the book for you. Elizabeth Hawksley
And for a second opinion…
Up until now I never believed it would have been possible to have a story featuring Erwin Rommel and the Long Range Desert Group leave me begging for those two critical words “The End.” Steven Pressfield has done the necessary spadework: he can write with authority on the LRDG warriors, their equipment, and their missions, and he has a definite feel for listing the dangers of life and war in the desert. The problem is, he simply can not make his characters seem as if they are anything but a list of names. They never are fleshed out enough to give them that life that is so critical for a work of fiction. Anyone could have written a story like “Journey’s End.” Could anyone other than R. C. Sherriff have made the central figures live and breathe?
Pressfield’s tale focuses on the British need to assassinate the “Desert Fox.” If the brilliant and unorthodox panzer officer is killed, the 8th Army will stand a better chance in the desert fighting. A British tank officer finds himself seconded to the larger-than-life special operatives of the LRDG in this long-range and hazardous journey behind Axis lines to find and kill Rommel. Ride along if you are more patient and forgiving than I.
ranching life even as both the life and Stumpy embed themselves into her being. As soon as she comes of age, she heads for Salt Lake City and her career as a journalist.
But the landscape of her youth and the deep emotional life she’s left behind exerts its pull when the tragic death of her brother brings her home. The circumstances of the death mirror a government cover up of a nerve gas accident years before, aided by a town “proficient in forgetting inconvenient facts.” But her brother’s death triggers personal reflection as well, for
John R. Vallely
this woman who can only cry in the desert and who’s finally decided that thirty years is long enough to let things go unsaid between herself and the love of her life.
Lyrical and heartbreaking, The Last Cowgirl’s climb back home is sure to please readers of Pat Conroy and Barbara Kingsolver.
Eileen Charbonneau
2007, $25.00, hb, 560pp, 9780151015429
In the wake of 9/11, American journalist and travel writer Andromeda Romano-Lax asked herself: if I could write about or do only one more thing with my life what would it be? Longing to immerse herself in beauty and hope – the sound of which had always been the cello –she began work on a biography of Pablo Casals, the anti-fascist cellist. As the work developed, fictional protagonists claimed centre stage, in post-colonial Spain lurching towards civil war, 1930s Berlin, and Nazi-occupied France. The result is this remarkable novel.
In 1898, six-year-old Feliu Delgardo accompanies his mother to a railway station in rural Catalonia. She is expecting the remains of her husband, killed by insurgents in colonial Cuba. In the box that arrives, however, are belongings for Feliu and his siblings. Feliu chooses a cello bow. He is apprenticed in anarchist Barcelona, and then the royal court in Madrid where he is befriended by English-born Queen Ena. Partnership with piano prodigy Justo Al-Cerraz and Italian Jewish violinist Aviva, whom both men love, forces Feliu to confront questions the author was asking herself post9/11: in difficult times, is art an indulgence or a necessity? Must I sacrifice my own happiness to what is going on around me?
The writing is vivid, lyrical, engaging, the fictional characters rooted in their time, perhaps best exemplified by the tragic, divergent lives of Feliu’s two elder brothers. A book to savour, pause over, read a second time. Janet Hancock
AN ATLAS OF IMPOSSIBLE LONGING
Anuradha Roy, Quercus, 2008, £14.99, pb, 346pp, 9781847244789
This a poignant love story spanning three periods of India’s turbulent history between 1907 and the mid 1950s and three generations of Amulya Babu’s family. As she traces the successive waves of love and loss that affect their lives, Anuradha Roy’s female characters loom larger than life: we witness Kananbala’s slow descent into dementia, Larissa Barnum’s fading beauty and the scandal of her long-kept secret, Meera’s imprisonment in traditional widowhood with its endless fasting and denial, and lastly Bakul herself, whose fiery spirit seems doomed to be quenched by the flood of monsoon waters that drowned her mother. But it’s also a true portrait of India and rich in detail and colours: from the exotic plants and flowers collected by Amulya himself and Bakul’s father, to the mysterious ruins of the fort at Songarh, and the noisy stench of Calcutta.
This is a story to be savoured for the beauty of the writing and the excellent construction, and above all because “life is made of brick and stone,” and even the most impossible longings can be achieved “brick by brick.”
THE SPANISH BOW
Andromeda Romano-Lax, Heinemann, 2008, £12.00, pb, 553pp, 9780434017102 / Harcourt,
Lucinda
Byatt
DREAMERS OF THE DAY
Mary Doria Russell, Random House, 2008, $25.00/C$28.00, hb, 272pp, 9781400064717 / Doubleday, 2008, £12.99, hb, 272pp, 9780385614542
Mary Doria Russell takes readers from postWorld War I Ohio to Egypt and back again in this roman à clef of the creation of the Middle East as we (mostly) know it today. Narrator Agnes Shanklin speaks to us from the afterlife, where she is able to overlay her great tale with the perspective of time. Her story is that of a shy, plain teacher in Cleveland, all alone after the mortality of the Great War and the Great Influenza; she inherits a little money and decides to spend it on a trip to Egypt, following the footsteps of her now-deceased sister’s wedding sojourn. One of her sister’s friends from that time turns out to be none other than T. E. Lawrence (“Neddy”), and once Agnes meets up with him upon her arrival in Cairo the action moves quickly.
Lawrence is attending the famed Cairo Conference of 1921, attempting to mediate the politics- and religion-riddled creation and boundary-setting of countries including Iran, Iraq, and Palestine. Agnes meets the aloof, intellectual Gertrude Bell, befriends a young, imperialist Winston Churchill, and is intrigued by Karl Weilbacher, a German “businessman” who Lawrence repeatedly implies is not in Cairo by chance, and who loves Agnes’s dog Rosie nearly as much as she does. As Agnes’s feelings for Karl deepen, so does her understanding of the issues in the post-Ottoman Empire world, and the reader is privileged to sit in on highlevel meetings, experience the heat and crowds of Egypt, and live through incidents revealing the insight and power of Lawrence.
Agnes returns to reality, and the hard times of the 1930s and beyond—about which she moralizes from the afterlife, which is a rather clunky device. However, this is a stimulating read overall, and an excellent fictional supplement to Georgina Howell’s biography, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations Helene Williams
‘All men dream, but not equally,’ wrote Lawrence of Arabia. ‘Those who dream at night awaken to find it vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men …’ The influenza pandemic of 1919 leaves Agnes Shanklin the only survivor of her family, and beneficiary of three legacies. A teacher in small-town Ohio, she takes a Cooks’ tour two years later to Egypt and the Holy Land, arriving in Cairo with her dachshund Rosie as the Peace Conference is getting under way. Here are young Winston Churchill, T.E. Lawrence, Lady Gertrude Bell, inventing the nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, the reverberations of their decisions still felt throughout the Middle East today. Entertained and escorted by both Churchill and Lawrence, and by Karl Weilbacher, a German spy who has shadowed Lawrence since his days as an archaeologist, Agnes is drawn into
geopolitical intrigue and towards a personal awakening.
Told entirely in the first person from Agnes’s viewpoint, looking back on her life in a chatty, confiding manner: ‘Well, my goodness,’ and ‘I’m getting to that,’ and even asking what the reader would have done – and in a bizarre twist in the final chapter, apparently from beyond the grave – the book skilfully blends real and fictional protagonists: the Churchills, Lawrence and Bell are all convincingly drawn. Agnes’ visit to Jerusalem reads like a travel diary, but the details are authentic and add richness and colour to what is ultimately a sad life. I felt rather sorry for her.
Janet Hancock
ON ACCOUNT OF CONSPICUOUS WOMEN
Dawn Shamp, Thomas Dunne, 2008, $23.95/ C$27.95, hb, 320 pp, 9780312379971
In 1919, Richmond debutante Ina Fitzhugh, widowed after just a few days of marriage, decides to make a change and take a teaching job in the small town of Roxboro, North Carolina, “the Courteous City.” There, she meets three other young, unmarried women: Beatrice “Bertie” Daye, who’s campaigning to get women the vote and who’s the only woman in the county with a Model T; Guerine Loftis, Bertie’s stylish cousin, who’s just had her hair bobbed; and Bertie’s friend Doodle Shuford, who tends geese on her family’s farm and harbors literary aspirations. Over the next year or so, the four friends’ lives will take some astonishing turns.
I confess that my heart sank when I saw that Shamp has an M.F.A. in creative writing, because I’ve seen too many literary novels by writing-school graduates written to dazzle one’s fellow students with one’s genius rather than to do something as plebian as please the common reader. I’m glad to say that my misgivings were for naught. This first novel is a wonderfully humorous, humane tale of small-town Southern life in a rapidly changing nation, yet it’s a story that doesn’t sentimentalize its setting or skirt ugly issues such as poverty and racism. Shamp’s characters are vivid, original, and entirely believable. The writing sparkles—there’s a quotable bit on nearly every other page, even in the “Note to the Reader” section. On Account of Conspicuous Women is conspicuously delightful.
Susan Higginbotham
A WARTIME MARRIAGE
Mary Jane Staples, Corgi, 2008, £5.99, pb, 399pp, 9780552150897
It is 1918 and Captain Harry Phillips is a prisoner of war in a Romanian hospital. When Major Carlsen tells Harry that he can go home his joy is short-lived when he learns that one condition dependant on his freedom is that he must escort the Princess Irena of Moldavia safely to England. In order to convince the
authorities she must appear to be his wife, and a private marriage ceremony is arranged. Harry has no taste for this charade, there is a girl back home waiting patiently for his return but Major Carlsen assures him that as soon as they get safely to England he shall be free of this marriage of convenience.
The bulk of the story concentrates on Harry and Irena’s many adventures and narrow escapes before they reach their final destination. After being thrown closely together for many weeks the developing relationship between the two is inevitable, and there is a nice little twist at the end. From the author of the Adams Family sagas this is another entertaining read.
Ann Oughton
A PERFECT WAITER
Alain Claude Sulzer (trans. John Brownjohn), Bloomsbury USA, 2008, $19.95, hb, 224pp, 9781596914117 / Bloomsbury, 2008, £12.99, hb, 224pp, 9780747590231
Erneste is a perfect waiter: now, in 1966 at the Restaurant am Berg; in 1934, at the Grand Hotel in Giessbach, Switzerland; and in the thirty-two intervening years. Shadowlike, he appears to meet the needs of diners and guests before their requests are voiced. Unflappable, impassive, he remains quietly in the background in the lives of all around him—and, it turns out, his own as well. For Erneste is indeed a perfect waiter, not only as one who serves others, but as one who postpones any action on his own behalf.
Where Erneste prefers to linger, mentally and emotionally, is the halcyon period in 1935 when Jakob, a young German seeking to avoid military conscription, arrived at the Grand Hotel and fell under the tutelage of the perfect waiter. For his part, Erneste, while teaching Jakob the skills of diplomacy, averted eyes, and the best way to sweep the stairs in this glamorous hotel, falls under the spell of Jakob. Although their relationship is brief, and Jakob soon leaves Erneste and his quietly broken heart behind, it remains Erneste’s raison d’être three decades later, when he one day receives a letter from his erstwhile lover. Jakob is in America, in some sort of trouble, and he claims only Erneste can help, by approaching the famous author Julius Klinger—the very man who took Jakob away from him.
John Brownjohn’s spare translation is riveting: for a novel in which not very much happens (other than waiting), a lot actually does transpire, in the form of flashbacks and a final confrontation, in which Erneste is forced to acknowledge that the past is over, that all humans are flawed, and that forward movement, while perhaps slow, is inevitable.
Helene Williams
BLEEDING HEART SQUARE
Andrew Taylor, Michael Joseph, 2008, £16.99, hb, 480pp, 9780718153731
Legend has it that the Devil once danced in Bleeding Heart Square and, even in 1934, it
is an unlikely hiding place for genteel Lydia Langstone. Escaping from an abusive marriage, Lydia turns to her estranged father who lives at number seven. There she finds herself drawn into the mystery of the disappearance of Miss Philippa Benlow, middle-aged spinster and owner of her father’s lodging house.
Parcels of animal hearts, a struggling journalist and a plain-clothed policeman all have a part to play in unravelling the truth of what happened to poor Miss Benlow and explaining the sinister undercurrents that swirl around the goings-on in Bleeding Heart Square.
Situated in the Golden Age of the crime novel, this convoluted story, partly based on a real-life Victorian murder case, is told by the various inhabitants of Bleeding Heart Square and through a series of intriguing diary entries. Set against a backdrop of Mosely Blackshirts, political upheaval and social change, Andrew Taylor’s gothic novel grips the reader from the opening pages. This is not just a run-of-themill mystery novel but literature of the highest quality.
Sara Wilson
A PALE HORSE
Charles Todd, Morrow, 2007, $23.95/C$27.95, hb, 360pp, 9780061233562
Tenth in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series, A Pale Horse finds Rutledge searching for a missing man in Berkshire, in whom the War Office takes a great interest. What does this man have to do with a body found in Yorkshire’s Fountain Abbey, wrapped in a cloak and wearing a gas mask? Rutledge makes connections that his superiors would rather he didn’t make. Investigating in the small community, his questions raise suspicions and he is met with hostility (a usual occurrence in a Rutledge investigation).
With each book in the series, Todd (a mother-son writing team) deepens the reader’s understanding of Rutledge, who was shellshocked in World War I, and as a result hears the voice of Hamish, a Scottish soldier whose execution for desertion he ordered, in his head. In this outing, Rutledge’s relationship with his sister Frances is given more play, a comfort to a man who otherwise cannot confide his secrets to others. The mystery reaches back into one of the worst inventions to come from the war, and its devastation extends to the present, affecting more than just those who fought. Todd’s books are always sober affairs but nothing less than absorbing.
Ellen Keith
AN EXPERT IN MURDER
Nicola Upson, Faber & Faber, 2008, £12.99, hb, 292pp, 9780571237708 / Harper, 2008, $24.95, hb, 304pp, 9780061451539
This is the first in a projected murder mystery series featuring the author Josephine Tey. There are now many such published books and series based on writers such as E.A. Poe, Jane Austen
and others – yet this has a mark of sound quality. The writing is excellent and the tale well plotted and effective.
Josephine is in London in 1934 during the highly successful performance of her play, Richard of Bordeaux at the New Theatre. She is involved in solving two murders associated with the play and the theatre; assisting her is close friend, D.I. Penrose of Scotland Yard. It is a complicated tale with many subplots and roseate herrings. The leitmotif of the novel and ultimate solution can be found in the still malevolent shadow of the Great War, which continues to have a malign influence on most of the main characters – battling against the trauma or the grief that ripped so many lives apart and left such a harsh legacy on British society. Josephine, herself a complex character, was also left a spinster after the death of her lover, and she never married.
This is a profound novel, yet with the delights of an intriguing mystery. I look forward to the forthcoming books in the series.
Doug Kemp
BLACK WIDOW
E. Duke Vincent, Bloomsbury USA, 2008, $24.95, hb, 286pp, 9781596913899
Vinnie Vesta left Hell’s Kitchen in 1950 to find a better life. Now post-college, he leads an idyllic life in Jacksonville, Florida, as a U.S. Navy pilot and womanizer far removed from the organized crime of his youth. When one of Vinnie’s copilots dies in an accident, the Navy discovers that he was secretly married, and
Y THE SEVENTH WELL
Vinnie is tasked with escorting the body home to California. Vinnie finds that the marriage had been short and was almost over, so the mutual attraction between widow Caitlin Pennington, a rising starlet, and Vinnie is quickly consummated, and they pledge eternal love. Unfortunately, her mob-affiliated father does not approve and plays dirty to break them up. Vinnie finds his mafia connections are needed to help him keep his dream girl.
While the big names in the 1950s mob scene and events are historically accurate, the premise of the book tests one’s suspension of disbelief. Despite the widow’s impending reasons for divorcing, the rapid seduction seems ill-advised considering the rapid demise of her marriage and husband the last time she hastily hooked up with a pilot. No attraction other than sexual seems to exist, which does not seem to warrant the risks they take to be together, especially considering Vinnie’s past and her quest to be a movie star.
The first book in the series, Mafia Summer, is helpful to read first. Otherwise, the names and relationships do not resonate with the proper significance. The first book deals with the world of organized crime and violence, while the second focuses more on Vinnie’s shallowfeeling relationship with Caitlin. Gangster fiction addicts may want to read the first book in this series. Otherwise, fuggetaboutit.
Suzanne J.
Sprague
PAVEL & I
Dan Vyleta, Bloomsbury USA, 2008, $24.95, hb, 304pp, 1596914513 / Bloomsbury, 2008,
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Fred Wander (trans. Michael Hofmann), Granta, 2008, £12.99, hb, 160pp, 9781847080226 / W. W. Norton, 2007, $23.95, hb, 192pp, 9780393065381
The Seventh Well was originally published in East Germany in 1971, but not until its reissue in 2006 did it begin to achieve the notice it deserves. Its life story is thus not dissimilar to that of Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man, which sank almost without trace on its first publication in 1947 but has gone on to be recognised as one of the greatest works of Holocaust literature. I fervently hope Fred Wander’s novel will achieve the same reputation. Although it is a novel, and Levi’s book is a memoir, there are many similarities between them – their brevity, their anecdotal structure, their memorable cast of everyday heroes, but most of all, their total freedom from judgmentalism. What is the point, they seem to say, in even trying to understand what the Nazis did to the Jews and other ethnic groups? All the writer can do is bear witness, chronicle faithfully and meticulously his experience and those of his fellow prisoners, and let the events speak for themselves. This Wander does, with the same painful honesty as Levi. His narrator is no storybook hero, no beacon of moral rectitude and fearless valour. He is often ashamed of himself for surviving because this involves him in moral abnegation and a narrowing of focus which reduces him, in his own eyes, to little more than an animal. Conversely, he is always compassionate and often very funny about the men with whom he shares his existence in the camps. His humanity is not lost, merely dormant, and triumphs in his writing.
This is one of the best books I have read so far this year, which is a tribute as much to Michael Hofmann’s eloquent and unobtrusive translation as to Wander himself. I cannot recommend it too highly.
Sarah Bower
£12.99, hb, 352pp, 9780747591931
Set in Berlin during the deadly cold Christmas season of 1946, this is a story of intrigue and murder, peopled with armies and spies at the beginning of the Cold War. Pavel Richter is a decommissioned American soldier who, for reasons not made clear, has chosen not to return home. Although he suffers from a kidney infection that could be fatal, he has taken under his wing an illiterate, orphaned street urchin named Anders, to whom he reads Dickens’ Oliver Twist, which at times seems to parallel Anders’ own life. Pavel’s existence is further complicated by feelings for the beautiful Sonia, his prostitute neighbor, whose several lovers include a friend of Pavel’s, a midget who is a Russian agent, and a brutal British general, any of whom may be the enemy.
Dan Vyleta, a Czech, has written a suspenseful novel, rich in vivid description of the challenges and horrors suffered by civilian populations in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when essential services such as electricity, telephone, and water are only sporadically available to the general population. Civilians live in houses, half of which are bombed-out rubble, chopping up furniture for firewood. The true necessities cost a fortune and can only be purchased on the black market. Mr. Vyleta has written this novel in English, his second language, and occasionally there is an odd sentence structure. The story shifts back and forth from straight narrative to first person point of view that, at times, is jarring. Nevertheless, Mr. Vyleta does a superb job of putting the reader in the time and place. Audrey Braver
PICKLE TO PIE
Glenice Whitting, Ilura Press, 2007, AU$30.95, 256pp, pb, 9781921325021
The premise of this “based on fact, veiled in fiction” novel is similar to Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson: an elderly man dying in the hospital, unable to communicate with his children, reviews his life. In Whitting’s case, the narrative is much cleaner, with no confusion as to who is speaking and what time period is being relived.
Frederick Fritschenburg is a secondgeneration Australian who was raised by his Grossmutter and Grossvater after being rejected by his mother. It was Grossmutter who decided she and her family must leave Germany after a family tragedy, and in Australia she mourns the loss of her home country, and who instills in Fredi the ways of late 19th-century Europe: healing illnesses with herbs, reading the Bible, venerating one’s elders. Fredi, however, is confronted by current events, which early on include taunts and beatings from his classmates for being of German descent, his exclusion from his mother’s new family, and later, two world wars and the conflicted emotions surrounding them.
The episodes in Fredi’s life, such as picking herbs by the railroad tracks with Grossmutter,
looking for work during the Depression until his feet bled, and his struggle to unite his upbringing with the present day, are all deftly told. Even though much of Fredi’s life is difficult, with many painful episodes, Whitting maintains a positive tone, showing the reader that Fredi did indeed live, grow, and make peace with his family, both past and present.
Helene Williams
STRATTON’S WAR
Laura Wilson, Orion, 2008, £9.99, pb, 447pp, 9780752872645
This is the first of a planned series of crime novels set in 1940s London. DI Ted Stratton is a decent man in an ever-darkening world, struggling in both his professional and personal life. He is tasked with investigating the gruesome death of silent screen star Mabel Morgan. Despite opposition from his superiors he starts asking questions of this apparent suicide. This sets in train a complex series of murky events and even murkier characters at the top and bottom of war time society. As the city endures its daily ration of bombs, blackouts and watered-down beer, Stratton soon understands that his case is linked to a MI5 investigation into a secretive pro-fascist organization. He must tread carefully as the intrigues of the Secret Service are alarmingly similar to those of wartorn London’s underworld. He is dealing with powerful men who have the ability to destroy his career.
Wilson portrays wartime London with a deft touch, blending contemporary detail with well-drawn characters, especially those from the working class. Stratton’s domestic scenes work especially well with convincing dialogue. Unfortunately the book loses its way slightly over the final third with the plot taking too long to unravel to maintain the tension right through to the denouement.
Gordon O’Sullivan
THE TEARS OF AUTUMN
David Wiltshire, Hale, 2007, £18.99, hb, 224pp, 9780709084068
For Biff and Rosemary Banks, newly wed, their honeymoon in Italy is an adventure, one only improved by the close relationship they form with Konrad and Anna, another couple staying at their hotel. At the conclusion of their holiday, the couples pledge to meet again when possible, but as World War II looms large on the horizon, their goodbyes are tinged with sorrow.
The Tears of Autumn follows Biff and Rosemary’s fortunes as they struggle to come to terms with the war and their roles in it; their concerns for Anna and Konrad in Germany give them a unique perspective—because Konrad, like Biff, is in the military.
Fans of World War II fiction will enjoy this unique tale. Framed by Biff’s elderly reminiscences, the story takes several unexpected twists to reach an unexpected destination, fuelled by coincidence. The author
capably develops the relationships that this novel hinges on, between the two couples and between Biff and Rosemary. A well-researched solid novel for fans of the genre.
Erica Stretton
MY ENEMY’S CRADLE
Sara Young, Harcourt, 2008, $24.00, hb, 384pp, 9780151015375
Cyrla, child of a Polish Jewish father and a Dutch mother, is sent to live with her late mother’s family in Holland on the eve of World War II. It is hoped her Germanic blondness will be enough to keep her safe. She forms a close bond with her cousin, Anneke, who is in love with Karl, a German soldier. Cyrla has the opportunity to assume Anneke’s identity and escape immediate danger by entering a Lebensborn home for unwed mothers in Germany. In these homes, racially “pure” young women receive shelter and fulfill the exalted role of breeders for the master race. Of course Cyrla is not pregnant, but she remedies that with lightening speed, though it is left unclear whether the child’s father is Isaak, her Jewish lover, or a German soldier who rapes her.
At times, the plot relies too much on fortuitous twists. Anneke’s Karl appears at the home, expecting to find her there and instead finding Cyrla. Karl and Cyrla swiftly discover that they love, not, respectively, Anneke and Isaac, but each other. It was easier to believe that Karl was deeply attracted to Cyrla even while he was involved with Anneke than that Cyrla’s feelings would change so quickly. Cyrla’s first-person voice, that of a survivor recounting her tale, often seems absolutely authentic, but she never confronts her feelings about her child’s doubtful paternity in a way that rings emotionally true. However, the chilling depiction of Hitler’s attempt to recreate the world in his own demonic image through selective breeding, and the constant sense of Cyrla’s peril, make this a gripping novel.
Phyllis T. Smith
MULTI-PERIOD
THE LAST GOSPEL
David Gibbins, Headline, 2008, £12.99, hb, 418pp, 9780755335145
1st century CE: the lame Claudius, not yet Emperor of Rome, travels to Galilee where he meets a charismatic young carpenter, Joshua of Nazareth, and is inspired by his philosophy of heaven on earth. Claudius records the carpenter’s words on a scroll that he takes back to Rome. Later, after the Nazarene is crucified, and after Claudius becomes emperor and then fakes his own death, he contrives an ingenuous plan to hide this secret gospel of Christ from those who would destroy it.
21st century: archaeologist Jack Howard and his team of researchers first learn of this last gospel when excavating Claudius’s secret library near Pompeii. Following the trail of
clues Claudius has laid out, their quest takes them from Italy to London, California, and finally Jerusalem. All the while the mafia and elite Vatican henchmen are hot on their heels, willing to stop at nothing to prevent Christ’s true message from being discovered.
This novel suffers in comparison with The Da Vinci Code, which it so clearly emulates. Brown’s book, for all its flaws, inspired a wider debate on the mystery of Mary Magdalene and the divine feminine within Christianity. However Gibbins’s central theme that the historical Jesus would have been mortified by the ungodly deeds of power-mad churchmen through the ages seems rather obvious. Those who aren’t hungry for deeper revelations might enjoy the book as a fast-paced, escapist read.
Mary Sharratt
THE TENTH GIFT (US) / CROSSED BONES (UK)
Jane Johnson, Crown, 2008, $25.95, hb, 400pp, 9780307405227 / Viking, 2008, £12.99, hb, 384pp, 9780670917310
In present-day London, Julia Lovat receives a goodbye gift from her lover: a book of 17th century embroidery patterns which belonged to a woman named Catherine Ann Tregenna. Interested in the book because of her love of embroidery, Julia begins to read. She soon discovers this is no ordinary book, but a secret diary. She learns that Cat and others were stolen from their Cornish church in 1625 by Muslim
Y THE MONSTERS OF TEMPLETON
pirates and taken to Morocco to be auctioned off as slaves. Riveted, Julia decides to escape her heartache by journeying to North Africa, determined to prove the authenticity of the book, and to find out what happened to Cat.
Switching between the stories of Julia and Cat, Johnson captures an exotic, turbulent world in which past and present are smoothly woven into a mesmerizing story. With an unearthing of a romance between clashing cultures, and with a budding romance of her own, Julia discovers herself, what happened to Cat, and how to live happily ever after. Johnson, inspired by her own experiences and ancestral history, has created a tale of mystery, intrigue, and cultural history. Despite a somewhat lukewarm ending, The Tenth Gift is well worth a read.
Rebecca
Roberts
SOUL
Tobsha Learner, Forge, 2008, $14.95/C$16.95, pb, 425pp, 9780765320100
Soul is the story of Professor Julia Huntington, and that of her great-grandmother Lavinia Huntington. Julia, a renowned geneticist living in Los Angeles in 2002, is commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense to research the genetically linked propensity to kill without remorse. She comes to realize that she is linked more closely to Lavinia, a spirited intellectual Irishwoman suffering under the unjust standards of Victorian society, more than anyone could have imagined.
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Lauren Groff, Voice, 2008, $24.95/$27.95, hb, 364pp, 9781401322250 / Heinemann, 2008, £12.99, hb, 384pp, 9780434017843
Willie (Wilhelmina) Upton, a doctoral student in archaeology who has gotten a bit too involved with a married professor during a dig in Alaska, returns to her hometown of Templeton, New York, to recuperate and to figure out what life holds in store for her. While she is moping about, her mother drops an explosive piece of news: Willie’s father wasn’t actually one of three possible hippies in San Francisco, but a fellow resident of Templeton. Willie’s mother sends her on a quest to find her father, giving her just one clue: he was an illegitimate descendant of Marmaduke Temple, the founder of Templeton. Willie begins to trawl through the family history to identify her father.
The author doesn’t hide the fact that Templeton is actually Cooperstown, New York, and the Temple family is the Cooper family, which included the famous author James Fenimore Cooper. A reader familiar with his work will find additional richness in this novel, but even one who does not know the stories will be captivated. Throughout the book, there are chapters written by various members of the Temple family and others who were involved with Marmaduke, giving great immediacy to what Willie is discovering through the distance of time. These chapters sometimes take the form of letters or testaments, and span the late 1700s to early 1900s. Willie manages to uncover a variety of family-related secrets during her search, all the time dealing with numerous stressful life events: the results of her affair, her mother’s new religious mania, her best friend’s illness, and the surfacing of the corpse of the longrumored Templeton monster from the depths of Glimmerglass Lake, which casts a pall over the town for much of the summer.
This multi-period, multi-textured novel is an absolute treat to read.
Trudi E. Jacobson
The book starts off rather jagged and confusing, but finally settles into a strong pace about one-third of the way in. The weaving together – and juxtaposition – of Julia and Lavinia’s stories is engaging, and I found that Lavinia and her doomed husband James jumped off the page.
The writing, in places, is maddeningly uneven – strangely shifting point of view within chapters and lovely description; stilted dialog in the modern-day sections and unique and thoughtful metaphors in the Victorian London sections. There are distracting Britishisms in the mouths of American characters, and odd descriptions of modern life (a firefighter walking into a bar for a drink dressed in full turnout gear?). The bottom line is that Learner seemed to be more comfortable with the Victorian characters and settings, which ultimately is good news for historical fiction fans.
Overall, however, it is an engaging book, and I would recommend it for fans of murder mysteries, psychological thrillers, and those with an interest in the society and sociology of Victorian London.
Julie K. Rose
SEPULCHRE
Kate Mosse, Putnam, 2008, $25.95, hb, 560pp, 9780399154676 / Orion, 2008, £10.99, pb, 560pp, 9780752882949
Sepulchre is a tale of double crosses, murder, and the occult set in the 19th and 21st centuries, the interwoven story of Léonie Vernier in France in 1891, and American Meredith Martin in 2007. Meredith is visiting France for research on her biography of Claude Debussy, and to learn the truth about her mysterious French ancestors. A chance encounter leads Meredith to a piece of 19th-century music known as “The Sepulchre,” and a pack of Tarot cards painted by Léonie Vernier more than a century earlier.
Léonie and Meredith’s paths cross—in time and place—again at the Domain de la Cade, outside the town of Rennes-les-Bains, in the Pyrenees of southwest France. The Domain was home to Léonie in the 19th century, and an eerily familiar grand hotel for Meredith in 2007. The site of a series of tragedies for Léonie, the Domain also houses an ancient sepulchre which Meredith must find and open—to learn the truth of Léonie’s story, and Meredith’s past.
Mosse does an excellent job with pacing: the story, though complex, moves quickly and well. The mystery is unique and the historical detail excellent; she has successfully combined historical and speculative fiction elements into a cohesive whole. And while the language and phrasing can be simplistic, even trite, and the characters somewhat lacking in depth, the concept is unique and story itself still strong. Overall a very enjoyable read.
Julie K. Rose
THE ABYSSINIAN PROOF
Jenny White, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008,
£12.99, hb, 344pp, 9780297851240 / Norton, 2008, $23.95, hb, 384pp, 9780393062052 1453. The eve of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. Isaak Metochites prepares to flee the city with his family, taking with him a reliquary placed in his care. It contains The Proof of God, an ancient document carried from Abyssinia by his ancestors that could bring an end to all religious strife.
1887. Istanbul. Kamil Pasha is a magistrate charged with breaking up a ring stealing antiquities and sacred objects and smuggling them out to Europe. A battered reliquary is among the stolen items. An added complication is a series of murders. The dead are apparently victims of rivalry between gangs of smugglers, as each body is marked with the same four knife slashes.
Kamil’s investigations take him to the Sunken Village, where the descendants of Abyssinian slaves live by barter and fencing stolen goods. The village is ruled by Balkis, priestess of a secretive cult. Kamil believes the Abyssinians and their cult are the key to the crimes. Attracted to Balkis and her forceful daughter, he uncovers through them secrets about his own family that leave him emotionally shattered.
White uses the genre of the period crime novel to present a fascinating picture of Istanbul. The plot may be slow to get moving but eventually becomes intriguing if occasionally predictable. She is an anthropologist specializing in Turkish culture, so we are in safe hands as she leads us from Christian Constantinople to Muslim Istanbul. The 19th-century city is vividly drawn: the crowded streets, the crumbling buildings squatting on centuries of ruins, a colourful population from many races. We sense an empire slowly decaying, a backwater of Europe and not quite Asia. Kamil, an important magistrate and an aristocrat, has the reader’s sympathy when he is patronized by low-ranking officials at the British Embassy. He is an appealing hero. As for the Abyssinian cult and indeed, the Proof of God, real or not, they make a convincing and intriguing base for the plot.
Lynn Guest
slave brought forcibly to the Achaian city of Pylos after Wilusa (Troy) fell, Gull faces an unknown future until Pythia, speaker for the Lady of the Dead, takes her as her acolyte. At age seventeen, Gull becomes Pythia herself, in turn. When nine black ships carrying Prince Neas and his followers land on Pylos, they gather up the women of Wilusa taken prisoner years before and sail off to parts unknown, with Gull’s prescient abilities as their guide. They voyage from Byblos to Egypt to Mount Vesuvius, encountering many dangers—including storms at sea, vengeful Achaians, and a self-absorbed Egyptian princess. Gull must chart her own path, as a young woman hungry for knowledge, romance, and life’s plentiful offerings yet who is obliged to serve Death, and to speak with Her voice.
Graham excels at describing the landscapes of the ancient world and illuminating her characters’ spiritual lives; these passages ring with a pure, otherworldly clarity that evokes a true sense of wonder. Yet she is nearly equally skilled at choreographing action scenes, and the combination of both makes Black Ships a rare treat. Comparisons to The Mists of Avalon are somewhat apt, in that the novel revisits a familiar tale from a feminine perspective, yet it avoids Bradley’s gender-divisive approach. Despite a few modern phrasings, this is a welcome debut, well grounded in archaeological knowledge.
Sarah Johnson
times, repetitious, confusing and inconsistent. The balance of the book is further disturbed as, gathering speed towards the end, the medieval period is curtailed, leaving the reader with unanswered questions. The feeling therefore is of two books pasted together, and the result is overlong.
Gwen Sly
ALTERNATIVE
HISTORY
ROME BURNING
Sophia MacDougall, Orion, 2007, £12.99, hb, 472pp, 9780752860794
This is the sequel to MacDougall’s successful debut novel, Romanitas, but sadly I don’t think it makes much sense unless you have read that book first. Having said that, I thoroughly enjoyed the first book and this one also.
Marcus Novius, the heir to the empire, suddenly finds himself regent, and must cope with conspiracy within the empire from his ambitious cousin Drusus, who is desperate to be emperor, and hostile forces without. But Marcus is not alone, and when Drusus seems to have succeeded, he is aided by his friends as the world teeters on the brink of a global conflagration.
TIMESLIP
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TESTAMENT
Alis Hawkins, Macmillan New Writing, 2008, £14.99, hb, 568pp, 9780230700017
A debut novel for Alis Hawkins, Testament bridges time, beginning in the late 14th century and ending in the present day.
HISTORICAL FANTASY
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BLACK SHIPS
Jo Graham, Orbit, 2008, $14.99/$17.25, pb, 411pp, 9780316068000 / Orbit UK, July 2008, £7.99, pb, 352pp, 9781841496993
With his epic poem The Aeneid, Virgil established a mythological link between ancient Greece and Rome through Aeneas, a prince who fled Troy aboard ship with his fellow exiles, settled in Italy, and founded a new kingdom. Graham retells this ages-old story from the viewpoint of Gull, an oracle who accompanies Aeneas on his nautical wanderings throughout the lands of the Mediterranean.
As the crippled, illegitimate daughter of a
In 1385, master mason Simon of Kineton is given free rein by wealthy London vintner, Richard Daker, to build a college of learning for the common man with English as the medium of teaching – a dangerous concept in a period when the Roman church had the monopoly of knowledge and required prospective scholars to be priests and to acquire their learning through Latin.
Some 600 years later, Damia Miller is appointed to promote the now penniless Kineton and Dacre College. It is the discovery of a grotesque series of medieval panelled wall paintings during renovations that may hold the key to financial survival. She becomes determined to solve the enigma of these paintings, particularly when records show that Simon Kineton and his wife, Gwyneth, who was a master carpenter in her own right, waited twenty years for a son who was born imperfect. Only the unlocking of the mystery will guarantee the future of the college.
The story, when set in a present day full of political correctness, is insufficiently cohesive and jars in transition to the past becoming, at
MacDougall develops the characters she introduced in Romanitas – the story is set three years after that book – and they are growing up fast. They are written with a deft touch that renders even the villains believable.
The background cannot be faulted –MacDougall clearly knows her stuff, but while I love alternate universe novels here, I’m really not sure that I quite buy the vision – I can’t help but feel this is really just ancient Romans with modern technology. However, MacDougall has created a workable and believable alternate history for the world from the time of Marcus Aurelius (her break point with our history) and has written a tense political thriller that I thoroughly recommend.
Cas Stavert
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CHILDREN & YOUNG ADULT
RALEIGH’S PAGE
Alan Armstrong, Random House, 2007, $16.99/ C$21.99, hb, 336pp, 978375833199
Andrew Saintleger is twelve, old enough to be apprenticed. His father writes to a childhood friend, the now-famous sea captain, Walter Raleigh, to ask if he will take the boy as a page. Soon Andrew is on his way from Plymouth to London. Mr. Saintleger calls Raleigh’s London home “The College of the New World,” and so it proves to be. Andrew learns Mercator’s new geography, as well as practical skills such as making medicines, swimming, seamanship, and how to make invisible ink. He also uses knowledge he already has, helping the gardener
maintain a nursery of mysterious New World plants.
As he gains his master’s confidence, he participates in Raleigh’s intrigues, and copies maps “borrowed” from the Spanish ambassador. Their eventual voyage to Virginia is Andrew’s dream come true, but life in the plantation is difficult. The Indians are initially welcoming, so the boy makes friends and learns their language. When greed destroys the peace, Andrew shares in the struggle for survival that follows. Historical fiction like this is useful in a classroom setting, but the sharp contrast between Andrew’s daily existence and that of a modern child’s might be even more instructive.
Juliet Waldron
JOE RAT
Mark Barratt, Red Fox, 2008, £5.99, pb, 312pp, 9781862302181
1866. Joe Rat, a ‘tosher’ who scavenges in the London sewers, is in thrall to ‘Mother’, who controls her patch ruthlessly and claims most of his finds. He is bullied, beaten and half-starved, but he manages to hide what he can in Poundfield, a disused pets’ cemetery backing onto a haunted house belonging to the ‘Madman’, a place feared by all.
Then comes a chance encounter with Bess, a country girl, brought to London by her mother’s fancy man, ostensibly to find her a respectable job, but in reality to sell her into a brothel. Soon Joe and Bess are on the run and the only safe place Joe knows is the Madman’s house – and rumour has it that he’s a murderer…
Barratt’s chosen setting is Shoreditch, in a slum depicted in Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896). Morrison’s ‘Jago’, which he researched personally, is as deprived, criminal and ruled by gangs as Barratt’s, but also a place whose inhabitants unite against the common enemy – the law, and where neighbours don’t ‘peach’ on each other. Barratt’s world, by contrast, is one where dog eats dog and offers Joe nothing: no hope of getting out nor even of having friends he can trust.
I found much of the book depressing. The blurb calls it ‘Dickensian’. Yes, the slums are as bad as anything in Dickens and some of the characters as grotesque, but Dickens’ heroes, unlike Barratt’s, have real friends and there is hope. At the end, Joe refuses the two decent homes he’s offered. Boys from destitute backgrounds could make good – Morrison himself did, as did the explorer Henry Stanley, a workhouse boy. But Joe ends the book as he began, uneducated, homeless and without friends. It will not be long before ‘Mother’ finds him. For 12 plus.
Elizabeth Hawksley
the late 1400s. However, when we meet her, she is toiling in the hellacious atmosphere of a goldsmith’s workshop. Signor Botticelli has come to the store to arrange for a commission, a ring for his patroness, Lucrezia de Medici. But more importantly, he has brought the news that the Pazzi Conspiracy is considered concluded, and the Pazzis are no longer a threat to the Medicis. This leads to Flora’s tale of how she went from being the daughter (though one would hardly describe her as “pampered,” given her mother’s disdain) of such a prominent family to her role as a lowly apprentice. Her enticing story begins, “It was early 1478 when my family’s fortunes ebbed, like the waters of the Arno.”
Because Flora is not considered beautiful, like her sister, or suitable for marriage, she is allowed freedoms that normally would not be possible for a young girl in her situation. She spends time in the kitchen with her nonna, and even has a chance to train with the family guard. Because we see Florence through Flora’s eyes, it is only gradually that we recognize the intrigue that is swirling around her family. When things go wrong, Flora does not hesitate to report on the violent turn of events. While limited, this perspective on the city of the time is vivid. I was completely entranced by this book, the author’s first novel. She has done a magnificent job.
Trudi E. Jacobson
NICK OF TIME
Ted Bell, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008, $17.95, hb, 432pp, 9780312380687
Set in the summers of both 1939 and 1805 in the English Channel, Bell has fashioned a boy’s adventure courtesy of a time traveling orb invented by Leonardo Da Vinci. Twelve-yearold Nick McIver, growing up in a lighthouse family with a view “the most splendid in all of England,” is visited by a mysterious sea chest with his name on it: a call for help from an ancestor in Nelson’s navy.
Nick is soon up against both the vile timetraveling, dog- and children-napping pirate Billy Blood and a Nazi U-Boat and its mad captain and SS spies. Nick receives help from master British spies Lord Hawke and Commander Hobbes, who live on Greybeard Island’s mysterious lair. Soon Nick, Hawke and innkeeper Gunner are off to aid his ancestor in 1805 while his little sister Kate joins forces with Commander Hobbes to turn the tables on their Nazi captors.
PRIMAVERA
Mary Jane Beaufrand, Little, Brown, 2008, $16.99/C$19.75, hb, 260pp, 9780316016445
Flora Pazzi is the youngest daughter of the second most illustrious family in Florence in
Once it overcomes a slow start, the story is full of pirates on top of the water and Nazis below. Nick lassoes the U-Boat for a Nantucket Sleigh ride, and flies from the masts of his ancestor’s vessel. Plot-driven excitement, with moments that were, as Nick describes time travel, “magic itself,” the tale also suffers from sloppy editing and wooden, cliché-riddled dialogue. These lead, despite the novel’s formidable length, to an unfinished, inauthentic feel. Although its young readers are sure to enjoy Nick of Time, they deserve better. Ages 8-12.
Eileen
Charbonneau
THE TIME THIEF
Linda Buckley-Archer, Simon & Schuster, 2007, $17.99/C$21.00, hb, 512pp, 9781416915270
Second in the The Gideon Trilogy, The Time Thief also works well as a stand- alone novel. As a fan of time travel books, I was eager to read this one and am glad that I did. Twelve-year-old Kate has just arrived back from 1763 England, where she and her friend Peter were trapped. Though happy to be home, she is torn by the fact she promised Peter she’d never leave him. But he was left behind when the evil Tar Man hitched a ride with her to the 21st century.
Determined to rescue her friend, she convinces his father to help her and together they journey to the 18th century. Unbeknownst to them, the settings have been changed and they end up in 1792, encountering a grown-up Peter, who hides his identity from them. Even worse, their time machine has been damaged, and the one man who can help them is in Revolutionary France.
Adventure and intrigue abound as Kate, Peter, and his father set out to find and ultimately rescue the scientist they believe capable of mending the machine even as the Tar Man adapts quickly to the 21st century and discovers the means of his transport from the past. Soon he schemes to use it to his advantage, putting into motion a series of events that threatens not only Kate and Peter, but their entire world.
Replete with historical detail and flavour, this book certainly does take the reader back in time. Kate is the heart of this story and will appeal to both girls and boys, while the plot twists and turns, keeping the pages turning at a remarkable pace. Readers young and old will thoroughly enjoy this rollicking tale of hide-and-seek through time.
Teresa Basinski Eckford
FREEDOM TRAIN
Evelyn Coleman, McElderry, 2008, $15.99, hb, 140pp, 9780689847165
Clyde Thomason has everything to live for and plenty to escape! His brother is serving as an Army Guard of the famed Freedom Train. Touring the United States with its 127 historic, patriotic American documents, the train’s passage through large and small American cities and suburbs is inspiring a people exhausted from the suffering of the recent Depression and World War II. As the date for the Freedom Train’s appearance in Clyde’s hometown approaches, one student will be chosen to stand on stage and pronounce the Freedom Pledge. Will it be Clyde, who is more often than not the victim of bullies’ words and acts, or Phillip Granger? And what will Clyde do with his thoughts and feelings that both compel him toward and away from William Dobbs the Third, the different newcomer boy who might turn out to be friend or just another enemy? Freedom Train is a young adult story that has several great historical plot lines eventually joining to create a believable, appealing ending.
Viviane Crystal
IN THE HEROIC AGE OF BASIL II:
Emperor of Byzantium
Penelope Delta (trans. Ruth Bobick), 2006, Peter E Randall, $18.95, hb, 343pp, 1931807523
Set at the end of the 10th century and the beginning of the 11th, this story is about two young men during the struggle between the people of the Greek-speaking Byzantium Empire and the Bulgarians.
The story begins with sack of Adrianople by the Bulgarians. Constantine and Michael, his cousin, see Constantine’s parents slaughtered. They themselves are taken prisoner and are made personal slaves to the Tsar Samuel of Bulgaria. But Nikitas, who is living with the Bulgarians but who is actually a Greek spy, secretly teaches the boys his craft, and when they grow up Constantine and Michael become spies for the Greeks too.
On one level this is an exciting historical adventure story as we follow the exploits of the two young men. And there is also the hint of mystery. Who is the strange mute Bulgarian girl? And for whom is Father Gregory searching?
But the story operates on another level, a psychological one dealing with the themes of revenge and forgiveness and of divided loyalties. Father Gregory tells Constantine that he should forgive the murderers of his parents, but Constantine says that there are some things that cannot be forgiven. Later Michael does manage to exact a dreadful revenge but afterwards he is plagued by shame and remorse.
This book also clearly illustrates the cruelty and brutality of the times. There is the description of the Bulgarians killing the unarmed inhabitants of Adrianople and tossing the bodies of babies in the air. There is an account of the Emperor Basil ordering 15,000 prisoners to be blinded. And there are details of the slow death by impaling.
It comes with are maps, historical notes and a glossary. This book was first published in 1911 and is a modern Greek classic. Young Adult.
Mary Moffat
BATTLE FLEET: Trafalgar – 1805
Paul Dowswell, Bloomsbury, 2007, £12.99, hb, 291pp, 9780747883967 / Bloomsbury USA, 2008, $16.95, hb, 304pp, 9781599900803
In this third Sam Witchall adventure, Sam and his friend Richard have to work their passage home from Sydney to London on the merchant ship, Orion. In spite of the attractions of Miss Lizzie Barrow and her maid Bel, who are passengers on board ship, and a friendly cockatoo, all is not plain sailing. The passage though the East Indies is notorious for its fierce tropical storms and equally ferocious pirates and Sam and Richard encounter both – not to mention a hungry tiger who gives Sam and his friends a dangerous hour or so up a tree when they stop at one island to replace a broken mast.
Further dangers await them in London. Napoleon is intent on invading England and the pressgang are looking for suitable recruits
for the navy and Sam proves to be a prime target. Fortunately, he re-meets Robert Neville, whose life he saved in an earlier adventure, and Robert’s father, Lord Neville, offers to be Sam’s sponsor. Sam is ambivalent about going back to sea, but Lord Neville’s offer would make him a midshipman – a junior officer – something he could never have achieved on his own and the chance to go right to the top.
Sam and Robert find themselves on board HMS Victory, Nelson’s flagship, sailing towards an historic, and deadly, encounter with the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar… I enjoyed this. There are plenty of adventures to keep the readers turning over the pages. Dowswell gets across the hardships and brutalities of life on board ship, and in early nineteenth century London, as well as all the excitement of life on board the Victory at a turning point in our national history.
Boys (and some girls) of 10 plus should enjoy this book.
Elizabeth Hawksley
Battle Fleet is a chaos-filled book and is very interesting. It’s interesting because of the way Paul Dowswell describes the emotions of the main characters. The one thing I didn’t like was that he lingered too long on the descriptions of scenes instead of just describing it and then getting on with the next event. I particularly liked the parrot called Sydney who was a very appealing and cheeky character. He’s funny and gives very rude answers to anyone who annoys
Y BEWITCHING SEASON
him.
The book is set in 1805 on a battleship. The story is about two young boys who join the crew and face difficult times. All the crew on the ship gives the two a hard time just because they’re new. Eventually the crew begin to like them because they see that the boys are just like them.
I think it is an excellently gripping story, and Paul Dowswell is a fantastic writer.
Hal McNulty, age 10
QUEST
Kathleen Benner Duble, McElderry, 2008, $16.99/C$19.99, hb, 240pp, 9781416933861
Quest is the story of the fourth of Henry Hudson’s voyages to try to discover the Northwest Passage to India, which took place in 1610. However, those left at home play as prominent a part as Hudson and his 17-year-old son, John, who accompanied him on the voyage. The novel is composed of sections focused on four characters: John Hudson; Richard Hudson, his younger brother who was left at home with their mother in London; Isabella Digges, whose father is partially financing Hudson’s voyage of exploration; and Seth Syms, a young man who has taken his cousin’s place as a seaman on the Discovery to avoid a duel with an outraged husband in England. The Discovery makes it safely across the ocean, but trouble soon sets in as the weather gets colder: Henry Hudson is obsessed with finding a route to India and ignores the need to return home. Seth had no
EDITORS’ CHOICE
Marissa Doyle, Henry Holt, 2008, $16.95/C$19.75, hb, 352pp, 9780805082517
This delightful debut by Marissa Doyle bodes well for her career as a writer of young adult novels. Set during the months just prior to Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne, Bewitching Season follows the adventures of apprentice witch Persephone Leland and her twin, Penelope.
The girls’ governess, Miss Allardyce, a powerful witch, disappears the week before the London Season begins, leaving the girls without her guidance during their coming out. Determined to find her, they join forces with their younger brother Charles, family friend Lochinavar Seton, and the Allardyce family, on a search that leads them into the depths of Kensington Palace, where they encounter an evil courtier with nefarious plans for Princess Victoria.
All the elements sure to appeal to teenage readers are here: a handsome young man, pretty dresses, balls, and a mystery to solve. Add the historical setting, beautifully drawn with just the right amount of detail, and the romance, with the aforesaid handsome young man, and it’s a hard tale to resist. The plot rolls along, alternating between the debutante balls and the gloomy palace.
Persephone is a wonderful heroine. Though talented at her studies, she lacks the confidence of her sister. Throughout the story she learns much about herself and those around her. This coming-of-age aspect adds depth to an already charming romp, broadening its appeal. The other characters are equally appealing and well defined, firmly rooted in their era. I especially liked young Charles, who bounded along with just the right combination of enthusiasm and boyish charm.
From the very first page, this book had me hooked, and it will join other favoured novels waiting to be shared with my nieces when they’re older. Very highly recommended. Teresa Basinski Eckford
idea what life would be like at sea, but strikes up a friendship with John, and finds a measure of peace that his rough life in London did not afford him. Isabella is having quite an adventure— spying for England in a Dutch household rich in maps—maps giving information that England does not possess.
The sections of three of the characters are written in the first person, making them very vivid and also quite distinct. Young Richard’s sections are equally engaging, though written in the third person. Using the multiple narrator technique adds richness to the novel. There is an illuminating author’s note that indicates what is true. It also provides information on what happened to several of the characters in later life. Highly recommended. Ages 10-14.
Trudi E. Jacobson
and into a re-imagined tale of adventure and intrigue. Nobody’s Prize, the sequel to Nobody’s Princess, tells the tale of young Princess Helen of Sparta, who refuses to be left behind by her older brothers who head off to join Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece. Disguised as a boy, Helen joins the crew as a weapons bearer, and her adventure begins. Battles ensue, a murderous princess is encountered, her life is threatened, and only through a treacherous escape can she return to her home.
Esther Friesner’s tale is as imaginative as the legends that inspire it. It is a thrilling comingof-age story that will undoubtedly please fans of Nobody’s Princess and garner new fans of the original timeless tales. Ages 12 and up.
Nancy Castaldo
HAZEL
NOBODY’S PRINCESS
Esther Friesner, Random House, 2007, $16.99, hb, 305pp, 9780375865281
Helen of Sparta is in many ways a typical young girl: she dislikes learning the boring carding and spinning that all women are expected to learn. She wishes she could do all the things that her brave, warrior brothers do. And although still very young, she is beginning to feel the stirrings of womanhood with a combination of fascination, fear, and awe. What she does not realize until her mother finally decides it is time to tell her is that she— not either of her brothers—is the heir to the Spartan throne, which always descends through the female line. Although she has a twin sister, it was Helen who first saw light.
With prescience and sensitivity, Helen’s mother turns a blind eye when Helen sneaks off to train in the arts of war with her brothers, and gives her more freedom than her younger twin sister Clytemnestra, who is soon to be married to a prince from Mykenae.
Friesner’s spirited imagining of the beautiful Helen’s youth is full of adventure and many realistic touches that bring to life the times of the ancient Greeks. From her ability to situate the gods and goddesses in the doings of everyday life, to her thoughtfully realized characters as seen through the eyes of someone who is still technically a child, the reader is drawn quickly into and through this excellent young adult novel.
In true Greek narrative fashion, though, it ends at a beginning—with the promise that a sequel is on the way. I, for one, cannot wait to see what happens next to young Helen. Ages 12 and up.
Susanne Dunlap
NOBODY’S PRIZE
Esther Friesner, Random House, 2008, $16.99, hb, 320pp, 9780375975318
Readers may be familiar with the legends and myths of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Medea, Hercules, and Helen of Troy, but Esther Friesner weaves these characters together in a teen novel that lifts them off those dusty pages
Julie Hearn, Oxford, 2007, £5.99, pb, 362pp, 9780192792143
London, 1913. Thirteen-year-old Hazel MullDare is being brought up as a young lady – in careful isolation from anything which might offend her ‘delicate senses’. But everything changes when, on Derby Day, she sees suffragette Emily Davison fling herself in front of the king’s horse. Why has she done it? And why does her father disappear the following day? Could it have anything to do with his gambling?
Then Gloria, a worldly-wise new girl at school, decides to educate Hazel and her friends in the ways of the world. Her plan involves a naive Hazel in an act of vandalism. Hazel is hastily packed her off to her grandparents, whose sugar plantation in the Caribbean is the source of the family fortune. Here, too, Hazel has things to learn: about the long shadow cast by slavery and her family’s part in it, and, above all, to question her own values.
I found this a curiously disjointed book. I wasn’t convinced by the first half. Hazel veers between being a ninny and implausibly ‘knowing’, and the well-endowed Gloria with her louche boy-friend comes straight out of St Trinian’s. Furthermore, a reputable school in 1913 would have used Dr Bowdler’s expurgated Shakespeare – an error which affects the credibility of a major plot strand.
Once we are in the lush, tornado-swept Caribbean we are in Jean Rhys territory, where the Blacks and their ex-masters live in an uneasy symbiosis. Here, Hazel’s ignorance is entirely credible and her gradual understanding far more convincing. I like the way that Hazel’s state of the art typewriter is used by a mysterious well-wisher to leave messages, exactly as the cockroach Archy contacts Mehitabel the office cat in Don Marquis’s Archy and Mehitabel (1916). A nice period touch. I enjoyed this second half of the book. For 14 plus.
Elizabeth Hawksley
I loved this book, although I have to admit the beginning did not immediately captivate me. However, taking time to read past this was
definitely well worth the effort. Julie Hearn has managed to piece together a book that keeps you on your toes throughout! It raises important issues of the time it is set in, such as class division, slavery and women’s rights, as well as more personal problems for Hazel, such as the trials, maliciousness and hierarchy of the playground that every thirteen-year-old must face. Once in, I found it near impossible to put this book down, hanging on to each word whilst desperately willing Hazel not to make mistakes that she seemed blind to. An amazing read covering themes as varied as a Britain torn asunder by the suffragette struggle to a Caribbean, racked with racism and the misery surrounding the slave trade.
Rachel Chetwynd-Stapylton, age 15
YOUR OWN, SYLVIA: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath
Stephanie Hemphill, Knopf, 2007, 15.99, hb, 272pp, 9780375837999
Stephanie Hemphill, a poet in her own right, has fashioned a book of verse worthy of her subject. In chronological poems, she tells the story of the life of poet Sylvia Plath through the eyes of those who knew her well. Readers discover Sylvia’s life as experienced by her college boyfriends, roommates, friends, doctors, and her husband, Ted Hughes. Firsthand we see the struggles she faced juggling her life as a wife, mother and artist. The resulting poems comprise an intimate portrait of her life. Readers cannot help but feel Hemphill’s passion for her subject in what seems to be a work of reverence for her fellow writer. Brief notes offer helpful details to fill in Sylvia’s life. Your Own, Sylvia will find a place beside The Bell Jar on your shelf. Ages 12 and up.
Nancy Castaldo
IN THE HOUSE OF THE MAGICIAN
Mary Hooper, Bloomsbury, 2007, £5.99, pb, 232pp, 9780747588863
1570s, Elizabethan England. When country girl Lucy flees from her drunken father and sets off to London to find work, she has no idea how far it is. The first day’s walk leaves her exhausted and hungry. The chance rescue of two small girls leads to her becoming a maid in the spooky house of real life Dr Dee, the queen’s magician and astrologer, who, it’s said, conjures up spirits of the dead.
Lucy, whose besetting sin is curiosity, cannot resist poking her nose into what Dee’s up to. Soon, she gets more than she bargained for. She overhears a discussion between Lord Vaizey and Dr Dee concerning young Alice Vaizey, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting who has died tragically. Vaizey begs Dr Dee to raise his daughter’s spirit from the grave and promises him thirty guineas. Later, Dr Dee asks Lucy to pretend to be Alice, and promises her two guineas. Lucy, who has just had news that her family has been left destitute by her father’s gambling, has no option but to agree. But now
the dead Alice begins to haunt her dreams, begging her to ‘save the queen’. What does Alice mean? And what can Lucy do?
This lively first person narrative illuminates both Lucy’s intelligence and resourcefulness and the superstitious fears of the time. The credulous Dr Dee is well-drawn, too. The court’s anxieties about the threat posed by Elizabeth’s cousin, the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, is well brought out, as is the affection which Elizabeth inspired in her subjects.
It is full of fascinating historical detail, not only about life in the Elizabethan court, but also more homely things, like what people wore and ate and how they behaved. Generally (apart from some anachronistic tomatoes) the book would flesh out a study of Elizabethan England. I enjoyed it.
Elizabeth Hawksley
This is an adventure story with a hint of romance, set in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The author manages to engage you right at the start by telling you about Lucy’s rather violent father. It is quite exciting because you never know what is going to happen next. The characters and the setting are very good. The plot is imaginative, although the lead up to the climax isn’t as dramatic as it could have been.
I would say this book would interest girls more than boys, and would be a suitable reading age for 11 to 14 year olds. If you have read any other books by Mary Hooper you will know that they are very good and this is no exception.
Rachel Beggs, age 12
HEALING WATER
Joyce Moyer Hostetter, Calkins Creek, 2008, $17.95, hb, 217pp, 9781590785140
Imagine being fourteen and diagnosed with a deadly disease. Now imagine being torn away from the loving arms of your family and sent alone to an unknown island to live with others who share your disease, where you must learn how to survive by whatever means necessary, knowing there is no hope that you will be able to leave. This is the setting of Healing Water, a young adult novel based on the real leper colony of Molokai in the late 1800s.
Filled with bitter anger over his abandonment by his beloved friend Kamaka, Pia allows himself to turn to the seamier side of the island’s inhabitants. Working for the evil Boki in order to keep a roof over his head and food in his stomach, Pia keeps mostly to himself and hates what he has become. His life takes a dramatic turn, however, when first Kamaka and then Father Damien, a Catholic priest, arrive on Molokai. Pia must either face his demons or find himself truly alone.
Healing Water is an engaging story that left me wanting to know more about Molokai and its unfortunate inhabitants. I found Pia both tragic
and believable, and my heart broke for all those who found themselves ignorantly exiled there. This book made a definite impression on me, and I can highly recommend it to readers of all ages.
Tamela McCann
THE BEGGAR OF VOLUBILIS
Caroline Lawrence, Orion, 2007, £8.99, hb, 253pp, 9781842551899
March, 81 AD. The emperor Titus is desperate to find the lost emerald, known as Nero’s Eye. According to prophecy, whoever possesses it will rule Rome – and rumours abound that the dead Emperor Nero is very much alive. Titus sends the four friends Flavia, Jonathan, Nubia and Lupus to Volubilis in Roman North Africa to find the emerald.
There is another reason for the friends to go: Flavia’s missing Uncle Gaius was spotted aboard a ship bound for Sabratha, a city on the North African coast. Can they find him and persuade him to come home?
But when they arrive in Sabratha, disaster strikes. The ship, which was to have taken them on to Volubilis, sails without them – taking all their belongings. Somehow, they must travel several thousand miles with no money. They join a pantomime troupe and begin the long trek across the desert –a place full of dangers from slave traders, sandstorms, thirst and mirages. And there’s more: the leader of the troupe, Narcissus, has a hidden agenda – and one which could be politically explosive. The four friends will need all their courage as well as luck to find Gaius and reclaim Nero’s Eye for Titus.
I enjoyed this glimpse into Roman North Africa, called at the time ‘Rome’s bread basket’, though in places the plot was unnervingly reminiscent of Lindsey Davis’s Last Act in Palmyra, complete with travelling theatrical troupe, the hunt for a missing person and people pretending to be who they were not, all in a desert setting (though admittedly a different one). Caroline Lawrence has many young fans and I’m sure they will enjoy this latest adventure – and, at the same time, pick up a lot of information about this less well-known part of the Roman Empire.
Elizabeth
Hawksley
This is an adventure story, set in Africa in AD 81. It is very interesting because you honestly don’t know what is going to happen next. The descriptions are very good, and like the rest of the series, it has an excellent plot which, at points, is very dramatic. The author does a very good job of getting you into the story from the very first page. The ending is also very good, because it relates to things at the beginning that I had completely forgotten, such as Flaccus proposing to Flavia. It is a nice surprise.
I don’t think it could be read without reading
the previous book in the series, because it keeps referring back to when Miriam died. Also there is no description of the main characters.
I would say this book would appeal to both boys and girls aged 11 to 14.
Rachel Beggs, age 12
THE CASTAWAYS
Iain Lawrence, Random House, 2008, $15.99, hb, 253pp, 9780385730907
In this third novel in the early 19th centuryset Curse of the Jolly Stone series, Tom Tin and his four companions are lost at sea in a rapidly disintegrating steam boat. The boys face extreme trials until an unmanned sailing vessel appears to save them. Midgley, Tom’s faithful blind companion, thinks it’s the fabled Flying Dutchman, but it soon proves all too real and even more sinister.
The boys rescue two men from an iceberg. Beezley and Moyle teach them how to be sailors, but also plot to kill the too curious Tom and sell the remaining boys into slavery. That plan is thwarted in the Caribbean, where the ship takes on the slave trader a mother and daughter team.
Back in England, Tom hungers for an exchange with the villain Mr. Goodfellow once he unearths the buried Jolly Stone. But one more trial awaits as another adversary takes on a new life that’s out to extinguish both Tom and Midgley’s own.
The Castaways is fast-paced, rollicking adventure with life-threatening dangers in every chapter. Grim and at times surreal, this is Treasure Island meets Lord of the Flies. Ages 12 and up.
Eileen Charbonneau
THE JOYS OF LOVE
Madeleine L’Engle, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008, $16.95/C$18.95, hb, 272pp, 9780374338701
Twenty-year-old Elizabeth Jerrold, an aspiring actress, spends the summer of 1946 as an apprentice with a summer theatre company in a town by the ocean. She has never been so happy in her life—she had dreamed of being an actress since she was a child, and she soon falls in love with Kurt, the company’s handsome director. But her happiness is shattered when she realizes that Kurt does not love her as much as she loves him. Meanwhile, Ben, another apprentice, loves her, but she treats him only as a friend. In addition to these romantic complications, Elizabeth is disappointed when her role in Macbeth is taken away from her because of the machinations of a jealous older actress. And, her Aunt Harriet, who has raised her after the death of her father, has always opposed her wish to be an actress and demands that she come home before the summer is over. Eventually, Elizabeth uses her experiences over the summer to learn more about the theatre and life—and herself.
I have been a fan of Madeline L’Engle since I was a child, and was glad to see one more book of hers published after her recent death. As her granddaughter reveals in the introduction, this is actually a very early work of L’Engle’s which went unpublished for many years, and it is probably the most autobiographical of her novels. It was a pleasure to read. L’Engle gives us a very sensitive portrait of life in a summer theatre company, with all the friendships and rivalries between the actors, and it is an excellent coming-of-age story. I am only sorry that this is her last book. Ages 12 and up.
Vicki Kondelik
THE GLASS WORD
Kai Meyer (trans. Elizabeth D. Crawford), McElderry, 2008, $16.99, hb, 282pp, 9780689877919 / Egmont, 2007, £5.99, pb, 288pp, 9781405216395
This third volume of Meyer’s Dark Reflections fantasy trilogy takes place in an alternate universe where the Egyptian Empire, with its armies of mummy soldiers, has conquered most of the world. Two teenage girls from Venice, Merle and her friend Junipa, who was born blind and has mirrors for eyes, travel to Egypt, which is covered with snow in a new ice age. With them are Vermithrax, the powerful flying stone lion, and the Flowing Queen, the spirit that has protected Venice for many years. With the help of the disgraced High Priest of Horus, they reach the Iron Eye, the great fortress of the sphinxes, which holds the secret that can help them defeat the Egyptians. The Flowing Queen must battle with the Son of the Mother, the fearsome forefather of the sphinxes, who has been reawakened by powerful magic. At the same time, Merle’s friend Serafin, formerly a master thief, also travels to the Iron Eye with the mermaid Eft and the beautiful sphinx Lalapeya. When the two groups eventually meet, Merle learns the secret of her parentage, and what the cost will be if they want to defeat the Egyptians once and for all.
The Glass Word brings Meyer’s trilogy to a satisfying—if heartbreaking—conclusion. This is one of the most inventive fantasies I have read in a long time. In addition to flying stone lions, a mermaid with legs, personifications of Winter and Summer (who must meet again in order to end the ice age), and powerful sphinxes, Meyer creates the fascinating mirror world, which Junipa has the power to enter when she speaks the glass word, and which leads to other worlds, including, presumably, our own. I highly recommend this book, but readers should definitely begin with the first volume, The Water Mirror. Ages 12 and up.
Vicki Kondelik
This powerful novel brings to life the Kenya Emergency of the early 1950s, when a group of freedom fighters brought fear to white settlers on isolated farms and provoked a terrible backlash.
The story centres on two boys. Elevenyear-old Mathew Grayson, the bwana’s son, and Mugo, the kitchen toto, are friends. They play together, build a hide, and exchange small treasures. But Mathew and Mugo are both always conscious of their difference in status – and their lives are about to change forever.
The Kikuyu freedom fighters – the Mau Mau – want justice: the return of those farms where their families had lived for generations until the British government sold the land to white settlers and reduced the local people to the status of servants working for the new owners. They are pressuring these servants to join their secret society. Mugo’s own elder brother joins, and because of this all members of his family become suspect. As fear and anxiety spreads, the settlers soon don’t trust even their most loyal servants.
Beverley Naidoo paints a devastating and totally realistic picture of life in Kenya at that time. She shows the harshness of the settlers’ lives – the guns, fences, dogs – but also the beauty of Mount Kenya and the closeness of the Kikuyu people to their land. Mathew’s father is a good man who feels betrayed by the servants he has cared for; he in turn betrays those who might have helped him. There is a sense of escalating horror as more and more innocent Kikuyu people are sucked into the emergency. Wisely, the author does not suggest a possible reconciliation in the future, or a happy ending of any kind. A moving and detailed Afterword explains the background.
Ann Turnbull
BLUE SKIES AND GUNFIRE
K.M. Peyton, Random House (Definitions), 2008, £5.99, 264pp, 9781862301573
Set in World War II, the story begins with Josie’s final term of school being interrupted when she is evacuated from her Wimbledon home to the supposed safety of her aunt’s in the country. Separated from her parents and a difficult relationship with her mother, and parting from her first boyfriend, Sidney, she starts an emotional and life-changing journey that explains and expresses the effect of war upon individuals. The biggest threat is that of invasion and the shadow of death, which falls across those who risk their lives fighting in a battle not of their making. The daily existence of people trying to carry on as ‘normal’ in anything but usual circumstances, is shown with great skill as the war disrupts every aspect of their routines and relationships.
the inevitable hurt caused between two brothers who both want the same innocent girl, perhaps for very different motives. The crippled, goodnatured Jumbo and his ace fighter-pilot, Chris, both love each other dearly, yet the pain caused between them is almost palpable.
Josie is only a growing girl in a world which is changing all too fast, in uncertainty, like her own love for the brothers. The story has a dramatic plot as the Battle of Britain unfolds, and a very poignant ending. I think this book is a very good read and a lesson in life and the complicated relationships that people can unwittingly find themselves in. Young Adult.
Val Loh
ROSEMARY FOR REMEMBRANCE & RUE FOR REPENTANCE
Felicity Pulman, Random House Australia, 2007, AU$17.95, pb, 271pp & 290pp, 9781741662511
A reprint of the first two titles in the popular Janna Mysteries, this “bindup” edition of Rosemary for Remembrance and Rue for Repentance sets the pace for this medieval crime series for teens, currently four in number and counting. Set in 12th- century England during the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda, the novels follow Janna’s quest to uncover the secret of her birth and investigate her mother’s mysterious death.
A Children’s Book Council of Australia Notable Book for 2006, Rosemary for Remembrance establishes Janna as a young woman forced to flee her home when her mother dies and their dwelling is burned to the ground. A perfect example of the quintessential heroine— spunky and strong-willed—Janna must survive alone in the harsh world of 1140s England.
While novice readers may find these stories appealing, those who are more experienced will likely prefer something fresh and new. Janna’s mother was an herbalist and healer, so the villagers suspect both women of sorcery. Naturally, someone kills Janna’s beloved black cat—and in a particularly gruesome manner. Janna’s first suitor is the plain yet noble serf Godric (who in the opening pages of Rosemary for Remembrance saves her from a wild boar). Will Janna choose him—or the dashing stranger, nobleman Hugh fitz Ranulph, who rides a handsome black horse, has a scar down one cheek, and secrets of his own? Rue for Repentance continues Janna’s story, with Janna taking refuge at a manor farm—disguised as a boy. The book includes an enlightening glossary and author’s note, describing the history of the times. Ages 13+.
Alana White
BURN MY HEART
Beverley Naidoo, Puffin, 2007, £5.99, pb, 193pp, 9780141321240
This is a very tender love story. Love in its many facets is exposed and weighed against
THE REDHEADED PRINCESS
Ann Rinaldi, HarperCollins, 2008, $15.99/ C$18.99, hb, 214pp, 9780060733742
In this novel, young Princess Elizabeth tells
the story of her life from about the time of Henry VIII’s marriage to Katharine Parr to the day she becomes Queen of England.
Rinaldi writes well, with vivid scenery and lively dialogue, and the novel moves quickly, but I found it to be somewhat disappointing. The author depicts most of the well-known episodes of Elizabeth’s life before she becomes queen and introduces us to some of those who will play an important role in her reign, like her childhood friend Robert Dudley. As she does so, however, characterization suffers: for the most part, people come and go in Elizabeth’s life without us getting to know any of them that well. Elizabeth herself is tough, smart, and resourceful, but I never felt a sense of her inner depth. Nonetheless, this novel serves as a good introduction to Elizabeth’s early life for young readers and will likely inspire some to read more in depth about her.
Susan Higginbotham
SHELTER FROM THE STORM
Jennie Walters, Simon and Schuster, 2007, £6.99, pb, 0689875282
This final instalment of Jennie Walters’ Swallowcliffe Hall trilogy tells the story of Isobel, the daughter of Grace from the second book, and granddaughter of Polly, who worked at the Hall as a maid in the late 19th century. It is 1939, the eve of World War II, and Polly, now old and frail, is still employed at the Hall. Fifteen-year-old Isobel is sent to stay with her while recovering from tuberculosis. She rapidly regains her strength and begins helping her grandmother with her work, during the course of which she becomes involved with the family at the hall, the servants, and the people in the village – among them a German Jewish boy, Andreas, to whom she becomes attracted. Andreas has been sent to England for safety, but his mother and cousin are still in Germany. With the increasing danger of war comes the realisation that many Jews will be trapped in Europe if they are unable to leave soon. Although she faces opposition in the village, Isobel feels compelled to speak out for work to be offered to refugees so that they are able to come to Britain.
Meanwhile, she begins to uncover longburied secrets: both her mother’s, and a secret involving her grandmother which began in the first book and which is now resolved in a moving and satisfying way.
Relationships are handled sensitively, and there are no falsely happy endings, either on a personal or wider scale. Jennie Walters’ research is excellent, and she brings the period to life with just the right details, creating an enjoyable and true-to-life story.
Although the three Swallowcliffe Hall books can each stand alone, a thread of mystery runs through them, and ideally they should be read in the right order.
Ann Turnbull
NONFICTION
DIGGING UP THE DEAD
Druin Burch, Vintage, 2008, £8.99, pb, 276pp, 9781845950132
This is a life of Sir Astley Cooper, whose accomplishments straddled the 18th and 19th centuries. He was Britain’s foremost surgeon of his day and this biography covers his rise to eminence. But it is more than just a standard life. The writer is a medical doctor, and the book is also a fascinating study about the level of medical knowledge (or, rather, ignorance would be a better description) and the treatment of those unfortunate enough to require surgery. Cooper mostly developed his expertise by either dissecting illegally harvested corpses or experimenting through vivisection techniques. These, together with the toe-curling descriptions of the surgery performed on trussed-up and terror-struck un-anaesthetised subjects can be challenging reading! Like many prominent people, Cooper was a mass of contradictions, but there is no doubt he should be admired for his tenacity in advancing the boundaries of medical awareness. This is also a most useful source for any writer wanting to understand and include medical subjects in historical fiction.
Doug Kemp
THE SPARROWHAWK COMPANION
Edward Cline and Jena Trammell, MacAdam/ Cage, 2007, $14.00/C$18.00, pb, 147pp, 9781596922617
This companion to Edward Cline’s sixvolume Sparrowhawk series contains seven essays, by the author and others, which nicely round out the reader’s understanding of the author’s motivation in undertaking such an epic task. Also included is an exhaustive list of characters, ships, and locations to aid in keeping track of all the details of the story. This list is followed by copies of the various speeches included in the series and a chronology of the relevant Acts of Parliament between 1650 and 1775. Finally, there is a list of British currency, a glossary, and a bibliography.
Cline is not only an historian, he is a storyteller with a deep understanding of the turmoil that the idea of breaking away from the British homeland raised in those undertaking this feat. This turmoil is conspicuously missing in historical education in American schools. We grow up believing that the American Revolution consisted of speeches and a few battles and Valley Forge and then victory. We were never really taught about the gut-wrenching decisions and agonizing debates through which the Continental Congress had to suffer. We never discuss the awful dichotomy of loyalty to one’s country versus loyalty to one’s self that many of the colonists had to face. The excellent essays in this companion volume shed
new light on this most important facet of the Sparrowhawk series.
Mark F. Johnson
LUCIA: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon (US) / LUCIA IN THE AGE OF NAPOLEON (UK)
Andrea di Robilant, Knopf, 2008, $24.95/ C$27.95, hb, 350pp, 9781400044139 / Faber & Faber, 2007, £20.00, hb, 304pp, 9780571233175
Lucia, daughter of a Venetian diplomat, is married off at sixteen to nobleman Alvise Mocenigo. Lucia loves her husband, but her many miscarriages and the death of a small son threaten their future. Alvise takes care of his many estates, neglecting his wife. When Napoleon storms into Italy in 1796, Alvise aligns himself with the French general. Lucia learns to manage through the fall of her beloved Venice under French rule and assists her husband in his agricultural interests. When France signs a treaty with Austria, Venice comes under Austrian rule, and Alvise is ostracized as a collaborator. Lucia has an affair with an Austrian colonel and bears his son. When Alvise finds out, desperate for an heir, he legitimizes the boy. In Vienna, Lucia works hard for Austrian favor, but alliances shift again. Napoleon is now Emperor of France, and Alvise rises in his regime. Through war and hardship, Lucia struggles to keep her family together.
Lucia, an ancestor of the author, experiences firsthand the great events of her era. She befriends Empress Josephine, and is in Paris when Napoleon falls. Despite a few incorrect historical dates (e.g., Napoleon’s coronation was in 1804, not 1805), her life and times are fascinating.
Diane
Scott Lewis
THE QUEEN’S KNIGHT
Martyn Downer, Bantam, 2008, £25.00, hb, 452pp, 9780593054857
Sir Howard Elphinstone distinguished himself as a hero of the Crimean War at the early age of 29 for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross. As he recovered from his injuries Queen Victoria and Prince Albert chose him to be governor to their son, Prince Arthur. Although the Queen did not approve of Elphinstone’s use of corporal punishment she was persuaded that her favourite son’s best interests were being served.
After Albert’s death in 1861 Elphinstone became closer to the royal family, acting as surrogate father to Arthur and his siblings but especially, he became a close friend and ally to Victoria.
Martyn Downer is married to Elphinstone’s great-great-granddaughter and this excellent account is the result of his being able to access hitherto unseen documents.
Ann Oughton
HOW TO WRITE KILLER HISTORICAL MYSTERIES:
The Art and Adventure of Sleuthing Through the Past
Kathy Lynn Emerson, Perseverance, 2008, $14.95, pb, 224pp, 9781880284926
This book presents an overview of the entire process of writing historical mysteries. It covers subjects from research, plotting, and language through to marketing and publicity. It is written in a straightforward style, and each chapter is subdivided into easy-to-digest segments for those who want to dip into various topics, all of which are indexed in the comprehensive table of contents. Emerson includes plenty of examples and advice from mystery writers, and a detailed case study of the writing process for one of her own Face Down mysteries. Through it all, as the subtitle suggests, she manages to convey the thrill (or compulsion?) that keeps writers going, paycheck or no. I actually had to remind myself to write a review of this book, as I was so busy putting it to use. It is an excellent introduction for writers starting out in the genre as well as a handy reference guide and encouragement for the more experienced.
Susan Cook
THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: Death and the American Civil War
Drew Gilpin Faust, Knopf, 2008, $27.95/ C$33.00, hb, 346pp, 9780375404047
Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard University, provides us with an extraordinarily well-researched and superbly written scholarly treatise on the disposal of the dead during the American Civil War. The topic is obviously a bit out of the ordinary and is, astonishingly enough for an event that has inspired thousands of books, one that has never been previously discussed. Faust, a gifted writer and a superlative historian, answers the question of how the North and South coped with 620,000 military and 50,000 civilian deaths through analyzing diaries, newspaper accounts, and memoirs. These records give this topic the power to move a reader 143 years later. The attempts to cope with the unexpected numbers of dead forced the government to intervene. This was the beginning of national cemeteries (including Arlington), military pensions, and improved military medical services. Reading of New Yorker Amos Humiston dying at Gettysburg while clutching images of his three young children to his chest and the North’s subsequent search to find his family reminds us that 620,000 is not a statistic, but 620,000 unique national tragedies.
John R. Vallely
THE FIRST SAMURAI: The Life and Legend of the Warrior Rebel, Taira Masakado Karl Friday, Wiley, 2008, $24.95/£13.99, pb, 220pp, 9780471760825
Taira Masakado, a fifth-generation descendant
of Emperor Kashiwabara, is a cultured aristocrat whose response to attack prompts an appropriate response. From that point, his actions border on outright rebellion where he ultimately claims he is the New Emperor. Masakado’s meteoric rise to infamy is quickly snuffed out and would seem no more than a footnote in 10th century Japanese history. Yet Karl Friday provides a prodigious amount of scholarly, textual support to demonstrate how Masakado truly represents the very first samurai whose loyalties and insurrections represented the drama that would inevitably recur in Japan’s rapidly evolving military, political and social structure of later centuries. Drawings, as well as extensive notes and a lengthy bibliography, accompany this indepth, fascinating study of this first samurai’s world. Anyone interested in writing fiction about this Japanese period would do well to carefully read and fully appreciate this excellent, scholarly and frequently surprising work.
Viviane Crystal
THE GRAIL ENIGMA. The Hidden Heirs of Jesus and Mary Magdalene
Laurence Gardner, HarperCollins, 2008, £20, hb, 448pp, 9780007266944
The theory that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and founded a dynasty inextricably entwined with the search for the Holy Grail shows no sign of abating. In his latest and highly readable volume, Gardner claims to reveal in detail the historical sources which ‘prove’ the progress of the ‘bloodline’ from Jesus and Mary Magdalene down to King Arthur.
Now I don’t doubt for one minute that such documents exist. If, however, like me, you view Jesus as a person of historical fact clouded in centuries of half-truths, convenient concoction and fanciful elaboration, it all seems perfectly reasonable, if somewhat pointless.
The whole point about mythology is that it taps into mankind’s needs for neat solutions to unanswerable questions by giving life a meaning beyond mere existence and survival; that something of significance is just beyond our reach. And if Gardner makes a living from it, who can blame him? But believe it? Not me. And I don’t think he does either but never mind. It’s a highly readable book and all good clean fun.
Sally Zigmond
WAS NAPOLEON POISONED? And Other Unsolved Mysteries of Royal History
Peter Haugen, Wiley, 2008, $15.95/ C$18.99/£8.99, pb, 247pp, 9780470041260
If King Tut was murdered, why? Did King Arthur really exist? Compelling evidence suggests a Roman general may have been the basis for the Arthurian myth. Were the little princes in the Tower ordered murdered by their greedy uncle, Richard III? He did have the most
to gain. Who was the Man in the Iron Mask? We are given several intriguing possibilities. Did Elizabeth I have playwright Christopher Marlowe killed for being a heretic, or did he escape to Italy and ghost-write Shakespeare’s plays? Was Napoleon poisoned on the remote island of St. Helena? Or does a recent document uncovered in Ireland finally point to the truth? Edward VIII abdicated a throne for plain Wallis Simpson. What was her allure that ensnared a king? Even Princess Diana’s death is examined here: accident or not? Conspiracy theories abound, but in some cases, plausible explanations are given.
These mysteries and others are presented in a wry style by author Haugen. After each chapter, he provides a list of books for further study. I found myself fascinated by some, and laughing at others. An entertaining look into royal history.
Diane Scott Lewis
A VOYAGE LONG AND STRANGE: Rediscovering the New World
Tony Horwitz, Henry Holt, 2008, $27.50, hb, 448pp, 9780805076035 / John Murray, 2008, £25.00, hb, 464pp, 9780719566356
Tony Horwitz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist with a penchant for history. He also likes to re-examine all things American. Here he looks at the general population’s accepted facts about the founding of America and turns them upside down. The publishers have great hopes of this book and have launched an expensive PR campaign; I can see why. It’s well written, with a clear readable style and nice prose, by an intelligent man who thinks around things and ponders the quirks of humanity. His book will infuriate and inflame many as their “known history,” which was taught them in school, is shown to be merely myth.
Horwitz isn’t just a stirrer, though; he journeys along the trails the earliest American explorers made and researches, in depth, the many books and original documents about each man. He travels to Newfoundland to the Norse settlements, probably the earliest settlements in America; he traces Columbus to the Dominican Republic and then tramps across America from Mexico northwards following the early Spanish and French settlers. It seems it was not a case of “Go West” that opened up America, but of “Go East”! He is a history graduate himself, but knew little of this “lost century” until he researched it. Yet he is not unkind to all those cherished beliefs about the Pilgrim Fathers. “History is arbitrary, a collection of facts. Myth we choose, we create, we perpetrate.” And what a people choose and create is of as much interest as the real facts.
This has been one of my best non-fiction reads for a while; really thought- provoking.
Patrika Salmon
THE GHOST MAP: A Street, A City, An
Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks
Steven Johnson, Penguin, 2008, £8.99, pb, 299pp, 9780141029368
In 1854 a cholera epidemic broke out in London’s Soho district. Until that time the popular belief was that such infections were the result of miasma or bad air. Dr John Snow discovered that it was a waterborne infection. No great surprise in an age when there was little or no sanitation and drinking water was frequently contaminated by raw sewage.
This is an in depth account of social history as well as an historical account of the beginnings of epidemiology.
Ann Oughton
COMMONWEALTH OF THIEVES: The Improbable Birth of Australia
Thomas Keneally, Anchor, 2007, $15.95/ C$21.00, 385pp, pb, 9781400079568 / Vintage, 2007, £8.99, pb, 528pp, 9780099483748
Novelist and historian Keneally (Schindler’s List) takes on the inauspicious early years of white settlers in his homeland in this denselypacked narrative, which recounts Britain’s Transportation Act of 1760 and the events surrounding the first few flotillas of convicts and military troops sent to New South Wales in the 1780s and 1790s. Based on journals kept by sailors, convicts, and settlers and supplemented with other contemporary sources, he paints a grim picture of life aboard the floating prisons, the tortuous and often-deadly journey to New South Wales, and the unfriendly conditions awaiting those who survived the trip. Although not an apologist, Keneally does try to balance the Euro-centric view of the settlers with that of the Eora natives. The book follows the original landing party, led by colonial governor Arthur Phillip, through their first seasons of drought, hunger, disease, rebellion, and growth, with an epilogue tracing the lineage of some of Australia’s first political and economic leaders. The narrative is a fascinating read, and there are notes and a bibliography for readers wanting more details. Maps of the entire transportation trek, rather than just the two small maps of the immediate settlement area, would have been useful.
Helene
Williams
GEORGETTE HEYER’S REGENCY WORLD
Jennifer Kloester, Arrow, 2008, £8.99, pb, 382pp, 979099478720
I would not call myself a Heyer fan as such, but a book on Regency life made an enjoyable prospect for a review. On receiving the book and noting that Georgette Heyer’s Regency World is by an Australian academic and based on a Ph.D. thesis I wondered whether I had jumped to the wrong conclusion; as an academic myself
I know full well that theses tend to be dry and earnest (after all, I have written one).
But I need not have worried. Jennifer Kloester’s book is, quite simply, great fun, full of interesting details, and written with both style and aplomb. If you ever wanted to know what a Regency gentleman wore beneath his breeches, or what fashionable society did at morning calls (which usually took place in the afternoon) this is definitely for you.
Ann Lyon
I WANT TO LIVE
Nina Lugovskaya (transl. Andrew Bromfield), Black Swan, 2008 (c2004), £6.99, pb, 377pp, 9780552772907 / Houghton Mifflin, 2007, $17.00, hb, 304pp, 9780618605750
This is the diary of a girl in her teens, writing during the mid-1930s under Stalin’s Soviet Union. Nina’s father was classified as a counterrevolutionary and exiled from Moscow, and so the rest of the family lived under the threat of the NKVD (the forerunner to the KGB). The diary is a mélange of typical teenage angst about school, personal looks and relationships, interspersed with some lucid and dangerous criticism of the Soviet regime. It was these diaries seized in a NKVD raid which supplied the “evidence” to exile Nina and her immediate family to the Siberian wastes in 1937. Nina survived this harsh incarceration, and became an artist, dying in 1994, having seen the end of Communism. A sobering first-hand account of growing up during the start of Stalin’s Terror.
Doug Kemp
THE GREAT WALL
John Man, Bantam, 2008, £20, hb, 335 pp 9780593055748
Man doesn’t mince words. This is another author anxious to show that well- established ideas are more historical myth than fact. Combining travel with history he treks the length of the Great Wall of China, and shows that it is not one wall, but a series of walls built by different peoples with different purposes. Looking at the Great Wall of China from the so called ‘barbarian’ point of view is just one of the many topics he covers in this well written and illustrated book. It’s a big topic, covering the history of such notables as Genghis Khan, those mysterious Romans in China, and the complex intricacies of Chinese Dynasties, but Man enjoys his work and conveys much of this to the reader. As an introduction to the Wall, its history and particularly Mongolian history, this book is a clear and concise read and enjoyable too.
Patrika Salmon
ANGEL OF VENGEANCE: The “Girl Assassin,” the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia’s Revolutionary World
Ana Siljak, St. Martin’s Press, 2008, $24.95/ C$31.00, hb, 354pp, 9780312363994
This volume focuses on the life of a woman revolutionary in Tsarist Russia, Vera Zasulich, who in 1878 shot the governor of St. Petersburg in retaliation for the flogging of a political prisoner. The trial of the would-be assassin (the governor survived) received worldwide attention, and the Russian regime was found guilty in the court of public opinion. Zasulich was set free and treated as a heroine. Her action inspired other revolutionaries to embrace terror, martyrdom, bombing and assassination as viable political tactics. Indeed, in 1881, the Tsar himself was murdered.
The trial scenes and vivid characterization of a large cast of characters is as absorbing as a superb historical novel. The author excels in painting a picture of Russia in upheaval, spawning violent political sects with visions of utopia. We get a sense of a motley stew of true idealists, disturbed revolutionary “saints,” and Manson-like psychopaths, and see the beginning of a progression that ended in Stalin’s gulags. When the October Revolution occurred, in fact Zasulich herself was appalled by the regime her actions had helped pave the way for.
Phyllis T. Smith
THE TROJAN WAR: A New History
Barry Strauss, Arrow, 2008, £8.99, pb, 258pp, 9780099474333 / Simon & Schuster, 2007, $15.00, pb, 288pp, 9780743264426
In this most interesting book, Barry Strauss, an expert in ancient military history, places Homer’s The Iliad in its historical, cultural, economic and topographical context, without losing sight of its importance as a historical document as well as a literary masterpiece.
He uses all the tools of modern scholarship, for example, newly-translated Hittite texts, which confirm Troy’s importance in the Bronze Age and reveal it to be a Hittite ally. He compares Homer’s account with contemporary Bronze Age evidence, both written and archaeological, from Egypt, the Middle East and as far as away as Assyria.
This approach illuminates everything, from the way the combatants fought, to their customs, their assumptions, their relationships with the gods, as well as the economic reasons why the Greeks were interested in Troy in the first place. What’s more, in a stroke of inspiration, he uses Pope’s 1720 translation of The Iliad which captures something of the poetry and grandeur of the original. He is refreshingly unsniffy about Achilles, Hector, Odysseus and the rest, arguing that they behave and act in ways which are demonstrably Bronze Age.
The writing is lively and accessible without losing its scholarly credentials; I found it unputdownable. Highly recommended.
Elizabeth Hawksley
Historical Novels Review
ISSN: 1471-7492
© 2008, The Historical Novel Society
