Gentle Reads

Longtime followers of this blog know that I don’t select thrillers or horror novels or apocalyptic dystopian fiction for my reading or for my reviews. If an author slips a car crash or a ghost into a good family saga, I’m fine, but if I hit detailed descriptions of World War I trench warfare, I close the book.

In the novels that I call Gentle Reads, the emphasis is on the interactions of well-constructed characters, and the endings are mostly happy. The best of the Gentle Reads avoid sentimentality and have some racy elements.

Thanks to Dorothy Devin for recommending this Gentle Read:

Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting     Clare Pooley     (2022)  On a commuter train in London, a well-dressed businessman chokes on a grape in his breakfast fruit salad. Although the British rarely speak with strangers on public transit, passengers do come to the man’s aid, and a nurse performs the Heimlich Maneuver, saving his life. From this interaction springs a friendship among Londoners from very different stages and walks of life. Iona Iverson, a flamboyant magazine advice columnist, is the catalyst and the central figure in the group, as they navigate major life changes with each other’s help. The story is sweet but not saccharine, offering the possibility of societal healing through friendship and mutual help. A quote from a chapter highlighting Iona: “They were joined together, like it or not, by a brush with death. So, what were the rules now? God, it was difficult being British sometimes.” (35) If you like this one, try Clare Pooley’s previously published Gentle Read, The Authenticity Project (2020), which has a similar message of the transformative power of friendship. And check out my review of a novel with a similar feel:  Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017).  

On a far end of the Gentle Reads spectrum, at the gentlest end, is this recent pick:

The Stellar Debut of Galactica MacFee     Alexander McCall Smith     (2023)  Clocking in at #17 in McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street series is another of his wacky and delightful explorations of the lives of those who live (or used to live) on Scotland Street in Edinburgh. Among the many characters, my favorite is Bertie Pollock, who starts out as five years old and very, very slowly ages to seven years old over the course of the novels. The titular Galactica MacFee is an obnoxious little girl who joins Bertie’s school class and torments poor Bertie. If you haven’t read any of the previous 44 Scotland Street books, my lengthy post about #11 in the series, The Bertie Project, can help you with background. In this latest installment, McCall Smith’s authorial musings on society and politics do seem to have become more crochety, but his underlying message about the importance of kindness in the world shines through. For additional reviews of McCall Smith’s novels, click here and here and here.

On the other end of the Gentle Reads spectrum, with some intense scenes in its fast-moving concluding chapters, is this one:

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club     Helen Simonson     (2024)  In 1919, the British are celebrating the end of World War I but also mourning the immense loss of life, both in combat and from the influenza pandemic. (Contemporary readers who are emerging from the COVID pandemic will be able to relate to the sense of having years stolen from one’s life because of a world-wide catastrophe.) In Simonson’s novel, Constance Haverhill is a young woman at loose ends. She’s spending the summer at a seaside hotel as the companion and assistant to an elderly woman, but she needs to find permanent employment, preferably in the field of accounting, in which she has experience from her job during the war. Also at the hotel is the Wirrall family: the matriarch, a former actress; the daughter, Poppy, who runs a motorcycle club for women; and the son, Harris, a former pilot who lost a leg in the war. Simonson’s drawing-room dialogues may sometimes seem old fashioned, but they build the characters. And hang on for that whiz-bang conclusion.

You may have noticed that all these titles are by British/Scottish authors. While American authors have cornered the market on Beach Reads (click here and here and here), the United Kingdom seems to generate quite a few Gentle Reads!

Historical Fiction Set in the Early 20th Century

This Other Eden    Paul Harding     (2023)  Prepare yourself to be mesmerized by the lyrical language of this short (221 page) novel by a former winner of the Pulitzer Prize (in 2010, for Tinkers). The beauty of Harding’s words contrasts with the sometimes grim plot. Although the book is fiction, it’s very loosely based on an actual historical event: the expulsion of a mixed-race community from a small rocky island by officials from the state of Maine in 1912. Harding paints a picture of life on the island that has idyllic moments but is also hardscrabble, and he doesn’t shy away from describing the genetic consequences of inbreeding and the arguments of the eugenicists of the period. His characters are unconventional but endearing.

The Summer Before the War     Helen Simonson     (2016)  As I’ve noted elsewhere on this blog, I try to avoid historical novels that present graphic scenes of World War I trench warfare. The title of this novel led me to believe that I’d be safe from nightmares. The novel starts in East Sussex, England, in the summer of 1914 (with the best summer weather that anyone can remember), but, alas, toward the end there are disturbing scenes set in 1915 France. By that point in the book, however, I was hooked—and anxious to know what would happen to the characters. Beatrice Nash is an independent, highly educated young woman who comes to Sussex to teach Latin at the grammar school. Hugh Grange and Daniel Bookham are cousins, visiting their Aunt Agatha there—Hugh is a surgeon in training, and Daniel is an aspiring poet. Snout is a local ruffian who is also a brilliant Latin scholar. Surrounding them are an array of often comical English village stereotypes. The descriptions of the far southeastern coast of England are rhapsodic, and the dialog, a la Edith Wharton, conjures up the era.  

The Trackers     Charles Frazier     (2023)  The journey story has been a part of Western literature since The Odyssey, and Charles Frazier is a master of American journeys. (See my review of Varina, and there’s also Frazier’s award-winning Cold Mountain.) The Trackers is set in 1937, with the Great Depression dragging on. Val Welch is a young East Coast painter who, by good fortune, is commissioned to create a mural for a post office in Wyoming. Val’s hosts for his stay in the West are a wealthy rancher and art collector, John Long, and his wife, Eve. Val is busy with the laborious process of painting in the ancient fresco style when he’s enlisted to help find a missing person, and he leaves his art work to travel to Seattle, to Florida, and to California. Trackers feature in Val’s mural, and he himself becomes a tracker. In first-person narration, he recounts getting beaten up (caveat: violence) and also acquiring an education in human greed and passion and struggle. The characters in this novel are exquisitely drawn, and the scenes of the American West are breathtaking. Example: “Wyoming felt clean and brittle, the light fragile as a flake of mica, the high air rare enough to be measured in the lungs and appreciated in its thinness, its lack of substance.” (188) As a bonus, the jacket art, by Tom Haugomat, beautifully evokes the travel posters of the period.