The Wives of Los Alamos by TaraShea Nesbit

Historical fiction comes in two basic flavors: the kind that teaches you about history as you read it (e.g., The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, 1008 pages about building a 12th century cathedral), and the kind that is more opaque, where the history, while important, is not so spelled out. I like both kinds, but I often get more of a kick out of the second type, especially when the historical details intrigue me enough to go off and read more on my own, later.

The Wives of Los Alamos is definitely in the second category. In spare prose, author TaraShea Nesbit tells the story of the community of scientists and their families who lived and worked in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the 1940’s, where the scientists developed the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Most of the scientists were civilian men, formerly university professors, many of them with families and children. The U.S. government moved them to New Mexico where they worked for years under top secret conditions. Their families were kept in the dark about the nature of their work, and everyone’s contact with family members and friends from outside the community was strictly monitored. In some cases, where a scientist was well known within the field, names were changed as well. The restricted nature of their lives meant that the women, especially, formed close bonds with one another as they attempted to create a semblance of normal life in the isolated desert community.

Nesbit reinforces the women’s closeness by writing this novel in third person plural, which I thought would bother me, but which didn’t. The wives speak as a group, about their children, the landscape, and the difficulties of being cut off from extended family. They reveal both the petty (whose government- issue house has a coveted bathtub) and the frightening aspects of their lives (what, exactly, are their husbands working on? Something very dangerous.).

Real historical figures inhabit this novel (Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr) but their influence is minimal. It’s not the kind of historical novel where you play “guess who this character is?” It’s more diffuse than that, because of the third person narrative voice and also because it’s mostly about the wives, whose names we don’t know anyway. After I finished reading it I read the Wikipedia articles about the Manhattan Project. On her website, Nesbit recommends another book, The Girls of Atomic City, by Denise Kiernan, which is nonfiction, about the women who worked in the secret Oak Ridge, Tennessee uranium separating plant. Now I want to read that, too.

(Book 19, 2014)

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

This is a big sprawling book that reads like classic literature. In fact, maybe someday it will be classic literature. Elizabeth Gilbert has written an old-fashioned historical novel that has more in common with works by Rebecca Stott (Ghostwalk) and Andrea Barrett (The Voyage of the Narwhal) than it does with Gilbert’s most famous work to date, her memoir Eat, Pray, Love.

The title refers to German mystic Jakob Bohme’s belief that every object in the natural world contains some hidden meaning, put there by God to help people make sense of the universe. And indeed, this book’s protagonist Alma Whittaker, is searching for meaning. But she’s not waiting to hear it from God; she’s going to try to figure it out for herself. Alma has very little time for God and a lot of time for scientific analysis, specifically botany. And human nature. And world exploration. All of which she engages in over the course of her long life.

Alma is the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia botanist and plant collector Henry Whittaker, who makes his fortune developing a method for manufacturing quinine, and whose story takes up the first quarter of the book. Henry and his Dutch wife have unorthodox ideas about women’s education (the book is set in the late 18th and early-mid 19th centuries) and they train Alma to manage their vast pharmaceutical empire, botanical collections, and gardens.

Considered physically unattractive (tall, big-boned, with unmanageable hair), Alma eschews traditional women’s pursuits and spends her time at her parents’ sides learning both business and science. She devotes years to studying various plants before happily settling on mosses (bryology) and becomes the world’s leading expert in this field. (Note: historians tell us that botany was actually rife with women scientists in the 19th century as it required little more than a notebook, pencil, magnifying glass, and long walks in the woods, all of which were more available to women than, say, a laboratory filled with chemicals or a surgery for dissecting things.)

Tragic events, including a failed love affair and her father’s death, upend Alma and force her to step outside her tiny moss world and embark on her quest for meaning in the universe. This section of the book (especially the long middle section about her voyage to Tahiti) reminded me of those books by Victorian women travel writers like Isabella Bird, who stoically endured shockingly harsh conditions aboard 19th century sailing vessels and lived rough among the natives. Alma’s journey echoes her father’s earlier explorations, but while he was singled-mindedly focused on plants, Alma remains open to discoveries about all aspects of the world and about herself. And it’s while she’s in Tahiti that she hits upon her own theory of the signature of all things, the pursuit of which takes up the final part of the book.

What a great novel! Carefully researched, ranging among a huge variety of historical and scientific topics, and intensely personal, this book is unique and delightful.

(Book 15, 2014)

Wake by Anna Hope

Wake tells several stories at once, some very personal, and some public. Set in England in the years immediately following World War I, it follows several characters whose worlds intersect, and uses a real-life event as an anchoring device to bring the stories together.

Running throughout Wake is an account of the 1920 state funeral of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey in London. Author Anna Hope follows the anonymous soldier’s body from its exhumation from an unmarked grave in France, to its burial alongside kings on November 11, 1920. Hope’s report is well researched and well told. As we know, the British excel at pageantry and they pulled out all the stops for this event, providing the poor unknown soldier with a battleship escort on the journey from France, and a Field Marshall’s funeral, complete with a 19 gun salute.

Intertwined with this narrative are several fictional stories of women who could be the wives, mothers, or sisters of the unknown warrior, and the men who escaped that fate, but whose lives were nevertheless ruined by their experiences in the war. Their tales are dark and brutal and the women, especially, rail against the futility of their losses. The funeral of the unknown warrior was in part designed to help British citizens start to heal; this book shows how impossible that process was for many people, and how little the men in charge understood that. This book is extremely sad, but it's beautifully written and very moving. Don't be put off by the topic--Hope's characters are compelling and I love how she mixed the fiction with the nonfiction.

I’ve read a lot of Second World War fiction, but not as much about the First World War. A lot of World War II fiction focuses on the victims of the war—on those oppressed by the Nazis or on the civilians who were collateral damage. But it seems to me like World War I fiction often focuses more on the soldiers themselves. Wake joins books like My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, by Louisa Young, the Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker, and even the Ian Rutledge mysteries by Charles Todd in identifying the soldiers themselves as primary victims. Wake especially continues this approach.

(Book 14, 2014)

The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway

World building is one of the trickiest aspects of writing fantasy and science fiction. Books are often front-loaded with detail—sometimes this detail is essential for understanding later plot developments but sometimes it’s just there because the writer was so enamored of her own creativity that she wasn’t a good judge of which elements were ornamental rather than strictly necessary. It’s no wonder that some readers find navigating a fantasy world off-putting or not worth the trouble.

Bee Ridgway, in The River of No Return, walks a fine line between these two extremes but in the end succeeds nicely. The book (a literary time travel feminist romance mashup) throws a lot of detail at you right out of the gate and I found myself, in the first 50 pages or so, thinking “Do I have to remember all this?” (Kind of the reader’s version of “Is this going to be on the test?”) The answer is yes, but it’s worth it: Ridgway’s details are all crucial to understanding what happens to Nicholas Falcott, Marquess of Blackdown, when, just as he is about to die in the Battle of Salamanca in 1812, he jumps forward in time to 2003 where, with the help of a mysterious organization called the Guild, he lives for the next ten years as Nick Davenant, a hipster organic farmer in Vermont. It turns out Nick has a special ability that enables him to swim around in the river of time (while the rest of us idiots are just carried along in the current). This skill qualifies him for admission to the Guild, a super-secret club for time travelers.

Threaded throughout Nick’s story is that of another time traveler from Regency England: Julia Percy, ward of the recently deceased fifth Earl of Darchester. Julia’s powers exceed those of all but the most practiced Guild members. Not only can she swim around in the river, she can stop it from flowing all together. But in the beginning of the story Julia is untrained; she uses her nascent skills mostly to fend off the unwelcome attentions of her new guardian, the Earl’s foul and abusive nephew. Julia and Nick meet when Nick is drafted by the Guild for an undercover operation wherein he must return to his old life as the Marquess to discover who is threatening the Guild’s sovereignty. Romance ensues but with a twist: Nick is now a 21st century guy who finds the societal strictures on women to be degrading and counterproductive. When protofeminist Nick meets superpowerful Julia, sparks fly. I loved it.

Ridgway includes all sorts of wink-and-nod references to traditional Regency romance tropes while turning the whole genre on its head. If that isn’t enough, she also offers sly interstitial commentary on the time travel conceit. If you’ve read/watched anything else in the genre you’ll pick this up. She even takes on that well-worn cliché about using time travel to change the future (all discussions of which now include killing Hitler), in this delightful conversation between Nick and some Guild leaders, when they warn him that he won’t be able to alter anything important when he returns to his own time. Alice says: 

“You will only be able to change the smallest things, things that get subsumed back into the big push of the river without making a difference.”

“No killing Hitler,” Nick said.

“No killing Hitler. No giving Queen Liliuokalani back her Hawaii, no saving Malcolm X, or Joan of Arc, or the princes in the tower. But smaller things—things that are just normal, everyday stuff of life? Those things are perfectly possible.” …

Arkady slammed his hands down on his thighs. “Why when we talk about time travel do we always have to kill Hitler or not kill Hitler! It is to make Hitler a commonplace! The point is this. You are small and the river is big. Live, love, die, my priest. The river will roll on.”

Ridgway has recently released a prequel to The River of No Return, available as an e-book from Penguin and Amazon. It's called The Time Tutor and is only 90 pages and costs $2.99. I'm definitely going to read this. I'm not surprised to find this—it was clear from the ending of The River of No Return that Ridgway was setting us up for a lot more to come. Which of course takes us back to the world-building discussion. After all, if you go to all the trouble to construct a world where the rules about time are all different, it seems wasteful not to keep using it, no?

(Book 6, 2013)

The Ghost of the Mary Celeste by Valerie Martin

Is this genre-bending book a ghost story? (There are lots of ghosts.) Is it an investigation of a real historical mystery? (What happened aboard the brigantine Mary Celeste in 1872, and why was it found floating derelict near Gibraltar, its crew and captain missing, but with no signs of a struggle and all the cargo intact?) Further mixing fact with fiction, it’s also the story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s sensational account of the Mary Celeste that he wrote anonymously for a British literary journal, and a straight historical novel about a female journalist who investigates the Spiritualist movement in upstate New York (hence the ghosts). And I’m omitting a few other threads that wind their way through this intricately plotted, beautifully written novel.

Sometimes books like this, that lack a defined main character, can be difficult to connect with, and a reader can find herself trying to pin that role on someone specific. John Vernon, writing about this book in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, assigns that role to Phoebe Grant, the journalist, whom he says is “at the novel’s heart.” I disagree. Grant may be the intellectual center, but the woman at the heart of the book is Sarah Briggs, the wife of the Mary Celeste’s captain, whose story opens and closes the book. She may get less ink than Phoebe Grant but her bittersweet tale (and her links to many of the other characters) help bind everything together into a coherent whole.

Confused yet? Don’t be. Martin is in complete control of all this material. She never loses her forward momentum, and never derails us with too much emphasis on one thing or another. It’s really brilliant and we all know how geekishly enthusiastic I get over complicated books that don’t disintegrate under their own weight. I don’t really understand why Valerie Martin isn’t more famous. Her book Property won the 2003 Orange Prize and her subsequent books have been positively reviewed, but I don’t see her name come up in the discussions where I’d expect to see it. Perhaps it’s because Martin never writes the same book twice--maybe it’s her versatility that makes her difficult to track.

(Book 5, 2013)

The Red Queen and The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

Notice the queens are color coded (okay, there is no yellow queen)

The White Queen was a 10-part BBC production about the War of the Roses that was recently broadcast in the US on the Starz network instead of on PBS or BBC America, the more typical destinations for their costume dramas. It featured the usual assortment of British actors and stunning locations. I really enjoyed it, and was not bothered by the historical inaccuracies and anachronisms--it's TV, not a history lesson. Some critics compared it unfavorably with Game of Thrones, which I also love, and they are right, this wasn’t as good. Who cares? It was still fun, though apparently no one watched it except me. Maybe no one gets the Starz channel; I’m not even sure why we get it.

I had not read the Philippa Gregory books on which the series was based because I usually think her books are dull and repetitive, but in this case I was intrigued by her approach to this material. She wrote four different books from the points of view of four different women who all lived mostly concurrently; these books relate the same (or interconnected) events from each of the women's (often conflicting) perspectives. The BBC took all four books and combined them into one narrative, but I was curious about how Gregory did it so I read two of the four books. The White Queen is about Elizabeth Rivers, wife of Edward IV, and The Red Queen is about Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry Tudor (Henry VII; and she never was a queen so what’s with that title?). The other two books are The Lady of the Rivers (about Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta Rivers) and The Kingmaker’s Daughter (about Anne Neville, wife of Richard III, shown above in yellow). I doubt I will have the stamina to read either of these. Of the two I read, The Red Queen was a lot more interesting. Margaret Beaufort’s shocking confidence in her own ability to converse with God, and her singled-minded obsession with getting her son onto the throne made her a much more interesting character than Elizabeth Rivers, whose primary attributes seemed to be her looks and her fertility. Gregory has entitled her series The Cousins War, and a fifth and final volume is coming out soon. Called The White Princess, it's the story of Elizabeth of York, daughter of Elizabeth Rivers and wife to Henry VII. While I probably won't read that either, I like the fact that Gregory has taken on this era and story, which is usually overlooked in favor of the Tudors. 

I read both books simultaneously as I watched the show, so I would watch an episode, then read up to that point in both the books, then watch another episode, etc. The show tracked the books pretty closely and the chapters are helpfully titled. I enjoyed myself, though my reading experience is inextricably linked to the viewing experience, so it's hard to comment only on the books. I would venture to say that, without the added fun of the good looking actors, and great costumes and locations, the books would be bland. But you should try it my way: the DVDs are available in the UK now and will be soon in the US, and the books are in the library. 

Tom Hiddleston as Hal. Sigh.

And speaking of the War of the Roses, PBS just finished broadcasting new productions of the four plays that make up Shakespeare’s take on this war, including my favorites Henry IV Part I, and Henry V, starring (among others) Jeremy Irons as Henry IV and Tom Hiddleston as Hal/Henry V. I loved watching these too, though eventually I started having dreams where I tried to construct Lancaster and York family trees in my head. Chronologically these plays come before the events of The White Queen. I wish the Shakespeare series had included Richard III, the events of which do overlap The White Queen, though apparently that play is no more historically accurate than Gregory’s books. So I guess if Shakespeare could tinker with the facts to make a better story, why should anyone criticize Philippa Gregory and the BBC?

(Books 29 and 30, 2013)

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh writes huge sprawling historical novels about India and South Asia. I read The Glass Palace last year and loved it. Sea of Poppies is the first volume of a trilogy set in India in the early 19th century, during the first Opium War. It tells the story of the owners, crew, and passengers of the Ibis, a former slave ship which has been retrofitted to carry indentured servants (“coolies”) from India to Mauritius where they will work on the sugar plantations. It seemed to me like Ghosh was using the Ibis as a metaphor for India itself: a melting pot where disparate cultures, religions, castes, and classes are thrust together and where the ensuing conflicts are brutal but where some people also find hope and at least a chance of happiness.

Ghosh populates the Ibis with a fascinating crowd of characters, including several I really got attached to. Despite the cast of thousands I never had trouble keeping track of them, though I did sometimes struggle to understand them; Ghosh has researched and recreated the slang and sometimes entire dialects of the time period and there were pages of dialogue of which I could barely understand a word. Note to readers: Ghosh is a good enough writer to craft the action and subsequent dialogue in such a way that you can always figure out what is happening in the dialect-laden scenes. Just forge ahead with confidence and you won’t miss anything.

India in the early 19th century was disease-ridden and perilous. Society was repressive, punitive, and unjust. And what the British were up to with the opium? Absolutely beyond shameful. The stories in this book made me rageful, even if it was over events that occurred almost 200 years ago. I can’t wait to read the next volume, River of Smoke. Ghosh is still writing the as-yet-untitled third volume.

(Book 19, 2013)

The Kashmir Shawl by Rosie Thomas

This book was a breath of fresh air after weeks of reading several dark things in a row. Sometimes I just need to escape, preferably to someplace far away. The Kashmir Shawl tells the story of a young woman’s trip from Wales to India and Kashmir to discover the answers to some mysteries from her grandmother’s past. The narrative shifts back and forth between the granddaughter Mair in the present day, and the grandmother Nerys, in World War II era India. Thomas’s research is top notch. I loved her descriptions of both time periods and she did a great job evoking the tattered luxury of British Raj-era Kashmir, and contrasting it with the current troubled political situation there now. The two women’s journeys mirror one another’s but never to the point where you feel manipulated by the author. Both Mair and Nerys encounter birth, death, religious strife, romance, poverty, war, and the Vale of Kashmir, which sounds just awesome. Now I want to go to Srinagar and stay on a houseboat on the lake. 

This book reminded me a bit of The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton, which I read in 2010. Both books use the grandmother/granddaughter construct and jump back and forth in time. In both books I sometimes had a little trouble keeping the secrets straight but that’s a small problem. Kate Morton (who is Australian) has been getting a lot of good press recently and I have her latest book on hold at the library. But I hadn’t heard of Rosie Thomas before. This was a random library find on the new fiction shelf. A little Internet research reveals that she is much more popular in Britain than in the U.S., where her books are bestsellers and she wins awards, but maybe that will change with the release of this excellent book.

(Book 13, 2013)

Lady of the English by Elizabeth Chadwick

I’m on a historical fiction mini-bender and thought I would try one of Elizabeth Chadwick’s newer offerings. I’ve read a lot of her earlier stuff but kind of went off her when she switched to writing only about real historical characters (instead of pure fiction set in medieval times). As I’ve complained before, being forced to stick to the historical record limits the choices an author can make, dramatically speaking. Like this story about Matilda, who ought to have been queen of England after the death of her father Henry I, but who was denied the throne by her scheming male cousins and their pals. The story would have been much better if Matilda beat those jerks at their own game and got the throne anyway, but alas, it didn’t happen that way so Chadwick can’t write it that way. Bummer for me, the reader.

And then there’s the temptation to short-circuit the whole reading experience via Wikipedia. After a while I just really had to know whether Matilda would triumph so I looked it up. (To be honest I sort of already knew, never having actually heard of the great Queen Matilda* of England.) Then once I had read the whole article on Wikipedia, the rest of the story became kind of anticlimactic. Another battle for the men, another death in childbirth for the women, ho hum.

To be fair, Chadwick writes well and creates fully realized characters. Matilda and her husband Geoffrey of Anjou had a tumultuous marriage--she was ten years older and they married when he was still a teenager and she already a widow. Chadwick brings these characters to life; we cheer for Matilda, we have a love-hate thing with Geoffrey, and the supporting characters are quirky and memorable. If you like Philippa Gregory (who also is constrained by the historical record) then you should try Elizabeth Chadwick, who I think is a more interesting writer, and who writes about a less familiar period of history (okay, less familiar to U.S. readers).

*Matilda’s cousin Stephen, who stole her throne, was married to a woman named Matilda (so technically she was Queen Matilda) but that is a different Matilda. Apparently it was a very common name in the 12th century.

(Book 7, 2013)

The Ruins of Lace by Iris Anthony

Score! Another random library find! I had just seen the movie Les Miserables and the idea of historical fiction set in France appealed to me. Did you know that the wearing of lace was outlawed in 17th century France by the king, who thought people should be concentrating on more important things? Of course the ban had the opposite effect, and lace smuggling became big business. This novel is about the trade in banned lace and is told from the points of view of several different characters who are involved, starting with Katharina, the Flemish peasant girl who is going blind from working in the lace factory, and including the people who smuggle it and those who will do anything to get their hands on some. Iris Anthony successfully weaves all the disparate story lines together to a lovely conclusion (dare I say it, like the individual threads that form the lace design?)

And it was fun to read this having just seen Les Mis, even though I do know that Les Mis is set almost 200 years after the events of this novel. Still, I could easily imagine Katharina looking just like Anne Hathaway in her blue headdress toiling away with all the other female workers. And in case you thought Les Mis was just a downer, you should know that in this book Katharina fares better than Fantine did.

(Book 6, 2013)

Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

I could go on about how much I loved this, but I won’t. I don’t want to embarrass myself with my breathless fangirl adoration. And Mantel has received enough accolades from the public and the literati to more than convince you that it’s not just me who loved it. But what I will do is urge you to read it.

Maybe you aren’t interested in British history and don’t know Thomas Cromwell from Oliver Cromwell. Maybe you are afraid the books are too long and you will lose steam and want to read something else. Maybe you feel like you’ve read too much Philippa Gregory or you watched all of The Tudors on Showtime, and you simply can’t hear another thing about Anne Boleyn. To all this I say phooey, don’t let these fears get in your way. Be brave! Just start reading it (well, technically, start with Wolf Hall, if you haven’t read that). Because if you skip these books it means you won’t get to meet one of the most compelling characters in modern fiction: Thomas Cromwell, Minister of Everything (according to Mantel), loyal, shrewd, witty, sexy, dangerous, resourceful, patient, and wise. And you will miss Mantel’s brilliant writing, writing that can make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. As an example, here is Cromwell’s advice to his nephew about how to get the best of one’s opponent:

Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand. 

Okay that just gives me chills. This is the best book I've read all year.

(Book 31, 2012)

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

In The Postmistress, Sarah Blake contrasts the life of wartime radio journalist Frankie Bard, broadcasting live from London in 1941, with the peacetime lives of several of her listeners, residents of a small town in New England. Blake’s goal is to remind us how the horrors of war can go on just out of sight, just beyond our borders, and how difficult it is for people in each environment to understand the experiences of others. Frankie sees unimaginable horrors; Iris (the Postmistress) and her fellow Americans, not yet at war, are deeply disturbed by Frankie’s broadcasts. Frankie can’t imagine why no one is acting, why Americans aren’t getting involved; some of her listeners just wish she would tone it down a bit.

How do I know this was Blake’s point? Well first, because Blake is a good writer and I’m a good reader, so through the miracle of fiction, I picked up her message. But in case that didn’t work, the book contains an odd afterward, written by Blake, where she tells us that this was her point. I am mystified as to why the publishers thought this essay was necessary. Must authors now include these sorts of crib sheets, in case the reader is out to lunch? Blake also uses the essay to explain a historical shortcut – Frankie uses a kind of recording device in 1941 that wasn’t actually available until 1944 – who cares? But I guess some people might. I was mildly interested in the information she included about Edward R. Murrow and the few women radio journalists working at the time, so I guess the essay wasn’t a total waste.

Finally! I finished a book! A lot of people responded to my last post about not being able to sustain an interest in anything; apparently this condition is going around. I am half way through The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, and then it’s back to Bring Up the Bodies. I’ve got a couple of things queued up that sound good too, so maybe I’m getting back on track….jinx.

(Book 27, 2012)

The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman

Another name for this book could be The Mists of Avalon for Jews, with Shira, the Witch of Moab, standing in for Morgaine, and Eleazar ben Ya’ir as Uther Pendragon. Not really, it’s not an exact matchup, but I couldn’t help but be reminded of Miriam Zimmer Bradley’s book (about the Arthurian legend) as I read this retelling of the Masada story from the points of view of several women, some of whom have more than a passing familiarity with witchcraft and all of whom endure great sorrow and hardship, only to end up on the wrong end of a Roman battering ram.

Like The Mists of Avalon, The Dovekeepers could have been about 25% shorter. I thought it featured a bit too much symbolism (Yael’s red hair, the flame tree, the lion’s mane, I get it) and it was a bit repetitive. But it’s also a story of great beauty, lyrically written and very moving, and you can skim over the annoying parts without losing anything.

Does everyone know the story of Masada, the mountain fortress where 900 Jewish zealots held out for three years against a Roman legion determined to conquer them? When faced with certain defeat the men, women, and children committed suicide rather than submit to Roman domination. The Dovekeepers is the story of four women who work together in the dovecote during the years of the siege, and whose fathers, brothers, and lovers are among the men who defend the fortress. The story features as much in the way of bloody childbirth as it does bloody battles, and while it’s clear that Hoffman did a huge amount of research, the exact details of the military operation take a backseat to the shifting relationships among the women. Though now that I think of it, we do get the obligatory “girl disguised as a boy warrior” subplot, something that is almost de rigueur in contemporary epic fiction.

My book club members liked this book more than I did, though I came away from the meeting with some newfound appreciation for the structure and the writing. Alice Hoffman is a prolific writer of popular novels that feature elements of magical realism. The Dovekeepers is far more ambitious than anything else of hers I’ve come across and it works well despite my few quibbles.

(Book 15, 2012)

The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh

Where has Amitav Ghosh been all my life? To my chagrin, I discover that he’s been writing since the early 1990’s, garnering praise, winning literary prizes, all right under my nose but heretofore undetected by me. I hate when that happens. But lucky for me other people are paying attention. My aunt Elaine gave me Ghosh’s 2000 book The Glass Palace when I was visiting her a few weeks ago and I loved it.

The Glass Palace is the story of Rajkumar, an Indian man whose life spans a turbulent time in India and Burma, from the fall of the last Burmese king Thibaw in Mandalay, through the height of British colonialism and then World War II and Indian independence, up through the end of the 20th century. Rajkumar arrives in Burma as a young sailor on a merchant ship, and stays to make his fortune in the timber industry. He marries Dolly, a servant girl, and together they raise sons with whom the story continues. Like The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, this is another tale of an average person who witnesses historic events. However, unlike Harrison Shepherd of The Lacuna, Rajkumar is more than just an observer, and the whole tone of this book is much more urgent and forceful. With Rajkumar we visit the timber encampments where teak is harvested by elephants, we see the vast rubber plantations where the British colonials make fortunes and the Burmese workers toil like slaves, we survive the Japanese invasion of Burma and become refugees who return to India. With Dolly we live in exile with the deposed Burmese king and queen, and befriend Uma who becomes a force for change in post-colonial India. One of the most compelling subplots is the story of Uma’s nephew Arjun and his batman Kishan Singh, soldiers in a British regiment that defects during the war. This strand examines the complex relationships between Indian soldiers and their British commanders, as Arjun and his compatriots are forced to think about who and what, exactly, they are fighting for.

In a blog post from earlier this month I referred to “my current fascination with epic drama.” I just seem to be in the mood for books with lots of characters, history, and action. Explosions! Revolutions! Runaway trains! (only kidding about the trains). I can’t wait to read more by Ghosh, who has just released River of Smoke, the second book in a trilogy about 19th century Canton and the opium wars. Here is a link to his website which gives you a good idea of what his books are about.

(Book 13, 2012)

The Oriental Wife by Evelyn Toynton

I swore I wasn’t going to do this: pick up random books at the library. This was what got me into trouble last year; most of the books I found this way proved dull or annoying, and I wasted several days on each one. However, I can’t seem to resist the habit, and this time it paid off. I found The Oriental Wife on the new fiction shelf and gobbled it up in a few days. The story was haunting, the writing elegant and spare, the pace perfect. I have to remind myself that I have discovered many great authors through my random shelf pillaging. Just because I had a bad stretch doesn’t mean it doesn’t sometimes work out.

I can’t find much information on Evelyn Toynton on the Web, or any mainstream press reviews of The Oriental Wife. It seems to have slipped in under the radar. Toynton’s writing style reminds me a lot of Anita Brookner whose books are similarly graceful and traverse a similar landscape; the postwar years in London and Europe, and lonely people attempting (but usually failing) to make connections with others.

Louisa and Rolf are children together in Nuremberg, Germany in the 1930’s. As young adults both manage to flee to New York and are later joined by their parents—while the war is a backdrop to this story it’s not omnipresent. Louisa and Rolf marry, but shortly afterward Louisa suffers a traumatic brain injury which drastically changes their lives. Rolf proves not to be the man we had hoped he was and Louisa’s deterioration is saddest part of the story.

Okay, this description makes the whole book sound like a complete downer. While that’s one way to describe it, another way is that this is a serious book about the ups and downs of people’s lives. You can escape from the Nazis and still end up with a brain tumor. You can start out loving someone and then that person changes and you can’t love them anymore, even if the change isn’t their fault. And if the author delivers all this in a way that is measured and thoughtful and insightful, then even better.

(Book 2, 2012)

All Other Nights by Dara Horn

Last year I read Horn’s book The World to Come and I loved it. All Other Nights is nothing like that book and indeed if I didn’t know they were written by the same author I would never have guessed. All Other Nights is straight historical fiction with a linear plot. It completely lacks the whimsy and playfulness of The World to Come—All Other Nights is an easier read but not nearly as much fun.

This book tells the story of Jacob Rappaport and his experiences during the American Civil War. Rappaport is Jewish, from New York, the son of a wealthy businessman. At the beginning of the book he joins the Union army to escape from his overbearing father. Recruited as a spy, Jacob must constantly navigate the gray areas of conflict: his first assignment is to travel to New Orleans and assassinate his own uncle, who is plotting to kidnap Abraham Lincoln, and things get even trickier from there.

In my last post about The Cookbook Collector, I said that a book can have imperfections and still be a good read. That was true for TCC and it’s true for All Other Nights as well. Horn’s depictions of Jacob’s struggles (both physical and moral) are engrossing to read but Jacob himself is flat and unremarkable. He’s someone to whom things happen, but I don’t think that was Horn’s intention. It’s like she tried to make him interesting by putting him into interesting situations but that wasn’t enough to overcome his essential torpidity. Some of the secondary characters provide much needed punch, but often they just seem strangely out of place, like the girl who speaks only in palindromes; she could have wandered in from The World to Come, now that I think of it.

(Book 38, 2011)

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

In the Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris, Ernest Hemingway talks in clichés as he tosses his lovely hair out of his eyes. In The Paris Wife Hemingway also speaks in clichés, but whereas in the movie you know it’s all a joke, in the book it’s supposed to be serious dialogue. The Paris Wife and Midnight in Paris have a lot in common; both describe Hemingway and his circle in Paris in the 1920’s through the eyes of outsiders. In the movie, the outsider is the time travelling writer Gil. In the book, it’s Hemingway’s first wife Hadley Richardson.

Hadley Richardson was Hemingway’s starter wife and they divorced after seven years of marriage and one child. Hadley was frumpy and domestic and she married Hemingway when she almost 30 and he was only 21. They seem mismatched from the start though you do get the sense that Hemingway, fresh from WWI, needed nurturing and Hadley was a nurturer. The book covers Ernest and Hadley’s years together and ends when he leaves Hadley for wife #2 (with a short epilogue that tells us that Hadley later found happiness with a man who was far more reliable than Ernest). Even though this is a novel it apparently sticks closely to the facts and uses characters’ real names.

It’s the atmosphere that makes this book fun to read, in the same way that Midnight in Paris was fun to watch even though the premise was just dumb. I pictured all the characters in the book as they looked in the movie. Thus in my head Gertrude Stein looked like Kathy Bates, and the Fitzgeralds looked like those two lovely actors whose picture I’ve posted on my Pinterest board. Unfortunately there wasn’t complete overlap and the movie never shows Ernest with Hadley. Nevertheless I pictured her looking like Mariel Hemingway, whose real-life grandmother was Hadley Richardson.

(Book 32, 2011)

Nemesis by Philip Roth

Leah Hager Cohen, writing in the New York Times, says that she always thought Philip Roth’s books were “for boys.” Then she goes on to say how much she liked Nemesis. Why? It’s just as boy-centric as all the others. I managed to get through it only because I was interested in two things: the topic (polio), and the setting (the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, NJ in 1944, where my mother-in-law [and Philip Roth] grew up).

Roth’s alter ego, Bucky Cantor, is a young gym teacher and playground director. At the beginning of the summer of 1944 he organizes pickup baseball games for his young charges, who are mostly 12-year-old boys. But as the summer progresses he watches in horror as several of the boys fall sick and die, turning what should have been an idyllic summer into a nightmare. At the urging of his panicked fiancée, Bucky leaves Newark for a job at the more bucolic (and ostensibly safer) environment of a summer camp in rural Pennsylvania. But polio emerges there, too, and Bucky must face the question of whether or not he brought it with him.

Of course because this is a Philip Roth book we must spend a lot of time considering Bucky’s masculinity. He is strong and fit and handsome but to his deep disappointment, his bad eyesight has kept him out of the army. His buddies are invading Normandy, but he is supervising children. Ah, the contradictions! I cannot tell you how many pages are filled as Roth explores this issue, over and over and over again. And if I was looking for any insights into what it was like to be a 12-year-old girl in Weequahic in 1944 (which is EXACTLY the age my mother-in-law was) I certainly didn’t find it in this book, where the only female characters are some nameless girls who jump rope in one corner of the playground (and apparently never contract polio; did only boys get it?), and the fiancée who does almost nothing but whine. To quote my mother-in-law, oy vey.

Apparently there was no polio epidemic in Newark in 1944, but there was one in 1952, and each mid-century summer brought polio scares around the U.S. until the polio vaccine was made widely available in the late 1950’s. I recently asked my father what he remembered about polio as a child in the 1940’s in West Philadelphia and he said he mostly remembered his mother’s anxiety. “We used to swim in Darby Creek and she was terrified that we would catch polio from the creek water. So we just lied to her and told her we weren’t swimming.” So clearly in his case the anxiety was confined to the adults. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my grandmother to be constantly worried that her children could catch a fatal disease just from playing outside. For me that’s a much more interesting topic than whether or not Bucky Cantor is real man or not.

(Book 31, 2011)

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

As a girl I was obsessed with books about Anne Boleyn and her daughter Elizabeth I (and indeed about all the queens and princesses of England). My favorites were by authors like Margaret Campbell Barnes (whose 1944 classic Brief Gaudy Hour is still in print) and Jean Plaidy, whose Tudor Saga and Stuart Saga kept me occupied for one entire summer when I was about 12. More recent entries to the canon include books by Alison Weir and Phillipa Gregory. I am not sure why, but I haven’t liked these as much. Maybe I just got tired of them all after a while.

But now Hilary Mantel has given us Wolf Hall, which tells the story again from an entirely new and fresh angle, through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s most trusted advisor throughout the English Reformation, the man who oversaw Henry’s divorce from Katherine and facilitated Anne’s ascension to the throne. “Facilitated” is the operative word here, for, as Mantel depicts him, Cromwell is a master at the game of thrones: a skilled negotiator, a lawyer, a financier, and most interesting of all, a virtuoso at empathy, at figuring out exactly how to convince each player to go along with Henry’s plans. He is also, surprise surprise, extremely funny, with a dry wit that carries him through all kinds of challenges.

Cromwell was never a central character in the books I read as a girl. Along with Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey he was one of the boring old men who filled in the background. But Mantel has turned Cromwell into a fascinating character and dare I say it? I now have a crush on him. Mantel’s Cromwell is a warm, sensitive man who for years mourns the death of his wife and daughters, who fosters several young nephews with wisdom and affection, who works the system (such as it is) to arrive at the fairest settlement he can for Katherine and her daughter Mary, and who never forgets (or tries to hide) his humble origins as the son of a blacksmith.

Mantel writes the whole book as if we are observing from a camera mounted on Cromwell’s head. The narrative hews so closely to his perspective that she simply refers to Cromwell as “he” throughout the novel, sometimes causing confusion, until you understand what she’s doing. It’s very effective in making the reader identify so closely with Cromwell’s point of view. Know also that this book is very very long and slow going. It took me months to finish it, though I confess to occasionally cheating on Master Cromwell with various other (less demanding) books.

(Book 30, 2011)

My Dear I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young

This book starts out so gently: it’s the story of Riley, a sensitive working class boy in pre-WWI London, taken in by an aristocratic (but non-conformist) family, educated beyond his station, treated with kindness and encouragement, until he embarks on a “thing” with the family’s daughter Nadine, at which point he is banished; turns out they are only so liberal after all. This part of the story fills the first third of the book, and you’d be forgiven for thinking the rest of the book would concern itself with the sweetness of the young couple’s triumph over class-based adversity.

Well guess again. Riley, in a fit of pique, joins the army and is quickly shunted off to the trenches of World War I--we all know what happened there. And Young doesn’t spare us any details. In the turn of a page the book transforms from a pleasing love story into one of the most brutal war stories I’ve ever read. We watch Riley change from a green boy to a ravaged bitter man who endures horrific battles and eventually winds up with a gruesome injury. Young doesn’t spare Nadine either. To spite her parents, Nadine joins the VAD and suffers her own form of hell as she is sent to the front as a battlefield nurse.

Both Nadine and Riley (and several other secondary characters) are suffering from serious cases of PTSD by the end of the book, and I thought I might be too. I haven’t cried this much while reading a book in a long time. It’s horribly sad and beautifully written and a really great read, if you have the stomach for it. I loved it.

(Book 29, 2011)