More Historical Novels

Four novels, set in four different periods of the twentieth century. (To read additional reviews of historical novels, click here and here.)

• The World War I Era

The Bookbinder     Pip Williams     (2023)  I’ve been avoiding novels set in the trenches of World War I because the blood-and-guts horrors are just too much for me. But The Bookbinder takes place in placid Oxford, England, focusing on the women left behind, with a few letters from a nurse in France. Peggy and Maude are twin sisters who work in the bindery of Oxford’s highly respected university press. Maude has disabilities that make this repetitive work ideal for her, but Peggy is bored, wishing for much more intellectual stimulation. When Belgian war refugees arrive in Oxford, a romance element to the plot emerges, to intersect with the story of Peggy’s quest to attend university. The pace of this novel is slow, with descriptions of the minutiae of daily life and details of hand bookbinding, but hang in there. The action picks up, and weighty themes (women’s rights, the morality of war, the treatment of the disabled) emerge. A companion novel to The Bookbinder is Pip Williams’s bestselling The Dictionary of Lost Words. Watch for a review of the latter in an upcoming post on this blog.

• The World War II Era

Beyond That, the Sea     Laura Spence-Ash     (2023) First, my minor quibbles: a few language inaccuracies and a lot of coincidences. Those noted, I really liked the unusual plot and the well-drawn characters in this novel. At the start of World War II, Beatrix Thompson, age 11, is evacuated from war-ravaged London. Unlike some British child evacuees who ended up in rural England with exploitative farmers, Beatrix is sent to Boston to live with the kind and welcoming Gregory family. One of the Gregory sons is two years older than Beatrix, and one is two years younger. Can you foresee a love triangle forming?  She ends up staying with the Gregorys until the end of the war, when she reluctantly returns to her London family. The story travels on until 1977, as Beatrix (“Bea” in the US, “Trixie” in the UK) tries to find her place in the world.

• 1959/2018

Homecoming     Kate Morton     (2023)  You either love Kate Morton’s novels or you gasp, “No way am I slogging through 544 pages!” I slogged through Homecoming, letting myself become fully immersed in the exceedingly complex plot, chock full of Morton’s characteristic flashbacks and secrets and instances of doubtful paternity—and more secrets. Here is the basic outline: In December 2018, Australian-born Jess Turner-Bridges, who has long lived in London, receives word that her beloved grandmother has been hospitalized in Sydney. Jess flies to Australia and accidentally learns about a terrible family tragedy that occurred on Christmas Eve of 1959. We’re off and running! Morton often anchors her novels’ extravagantly wide-ranging plots in spectacular landscapes and/or houses—here it’s the Adelaide Hills and magnificent houses there and in Sydney. Most people have room for at least one Kate Morton novel in their lives. You could read this one, or you could check out my reviews of two of her other family-saga mysteries: The Clockmaker’s Daughter and The Lake House.

• The Turn of the (Most Recent) Millennium

Attachments     Rainbow Rowell     (2011)  Remember the Y2K scare back in 1999? Media hype had us all worried that computers around the world would crash on January 1, 2000, because of the use of two-digit abbreviations for years. Attachments takes place in the years 1999 and 2000, with this Y2K angst as a backdrop. Lincoln, an introverted computer security specialist at a newspaper in Nebraska, is charged with following up on employee emails that have been flagged as possibly inappropriate. He reads lengthy personal exchanges between the newspaper’s copy editor (Jennifer) and entertainment writer (Beth), and he falls in love with Beth, whom he has never met. The pop culture references from the turn of the millennium are nostalgic, and the circuitous route by which Lincoln and Beth eventually get together is hilarious. As I raced through this novel, Rainbow Rowell had me laughing out loud at hundreds of witty emails.   

Three Contemporary Novels

Recently my longsuffering husband has hauled home large stacks of novels from our local library for me. Most of them have headed right back to the drop box. But I’ve found a few great titles about contemporary life, reviewed here for your consideration!

The Marsh Queen     Virginia Hartman     (2022)  Bird artist Loni is settled in Washington, DC, working at the Smithsonian, when she gets word that her mother has dementia and must go into assisted living. Loni drives to her home town in northern Florida to help her brother clear out the family home. What she thinks will be a two-week stay keeps getting extended, as she reacquaints herself with the flora and fauna of the marshes, swamps, and lakes of her childhood and tries to unravel the secrets around the death of her father, which occurred decades in the past. The action in this novel, told in first-person narration, builds to a startling (and, fair warning, violent) denouement. I found the descriptions of steamy, lush, leafy wildernesses to be suggestive of Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing (reviewed here), and indeed, like that novel, The Marsh Queen is a complex mystery tale that also features a romance subplot. Thanks to Meg McCarthy for recommending this book!

Take What You Need     Idry Novey     (2023)  Two voices speak in first-person in this novel. Leah describes her car trip to the home of her estranged stepmother, Jean, in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia. In alternate chapters, we hear from Jean, who lives in a ramshackle house filled with the unusual metal artwork she’s created. Time moves back and forth, enlarging the reader’s understanding of these two characters, as the storyline progresses toward Leah’s confrontation, after Jean’s death, with Jean’s house full of sculptures. What I found much more intriguing than the plot, however, was the depiction of the difference between the two women in their attitudes toward the political divide in the United States. Jean is surrounded by people scratching out a precarious existence in a blighted town, and she treats her neighbors with kindness, even as she disagrees with their devotion to Trump. But Leah, removed from her comfortable urban milieu, is disgusted by the poverty of Appalachia and is terrified of its inhabitants. Does Leah change her views at all? Read this novel, and see what you think.

Godspeed     Nickolas Butler    (2021)  I’ve reviewed two of Butler’s previous novels, The Hearts of Men and Little Faith, so I know that he’s not afraid to tackle tough issues in his fiction. In Godspeed, he lays bare unchecked capitalism, income inequality, and addiction. The three main characters are partners in True Triangle Construction, in Wyoming. Cole is the competent, take-charge businessman, though his personal life is a shambles, since his wife has left him. Teddy, on the other hand, has a loving marriage and four kids. He’s a solid citizen and a committed Mormon, but he doesn’t always follow all the rules of his religion. Bart—well, Bart is the one with the addiction problem. All three men are skilled carpenters and contractors, but they’re barely getting by financially on small-scale renovation jobs. Then an ultra-wealthy woman offers them a chance to build her a magnificent house high in the mountains. The catch is that they have four months to complete the project if they want the substantial bonus she’s offering. As the clock ticks, more and more details of the unusual project, and of the characters’ backstories, emerge. I stayed up late into the night to finish this stunning novel, so I’ll warn you that there are some graphic scenes of violence that may give you nightmares.

Breezy Beach Reads, Part 3

Just what is a Beach Read?

When I’ve posted before on this fiction sub-genre (here and here), I’ve characterized Beach Reads as novels that won’t demand much strenuous thought. A Beach Read is usually light on troubling themes about the state of the world; disasters can crop up, but a happy ending for at least some of the characters is required. The plot moves along quickly, and the pages seem to turn themselves, so that you still have time to gaze out at the body of water adjacent to your sandy perch. The setting for Beach Reads is often the summer, often at a tourist-attracting seaside town, but this setting is not mandatory.

The Beach Read reader is likely to be female. My informal sampling indicates that many men veer instead toward nonfiction for their vacation reading—maybe biography or social science or sports history. Perhaps because of its predominately female readership, the Beach Read is akin to the Chick Lit novel and the Reunion Romance, as well as to Hallmark Christmas/holiday movies. (For a great Reunion Romance, try Kate Eberlen’s Miss You.)

Certain authors excel at Beach Reads. Elin Hilderbrand really rises to the top, especially with her novels set on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket. Hilderbrand’s Beach Reads are strong because she draws her characters with finesse and creates mostly plausible plot components. She carries some of her characters from book to book, following their life trajectories and encouraging her readers to pick up the next offering. Members of Hilderbrand’s fan club, the Hilderbabes, are seriously devoted, as recently documented in the New York Times.

One of my favorite Hilderbrand novels is 28 Summers, published in 2020 and reviewed briefly on this blog. 28 Summers borrows its structure from Bernard Slade’s Same Time, Next Year, with two lovers meeting secretly each summer, starting in 1993, on Nantucket. You can take 28 breezy seaside vacations with these characters.

I don’t pretend that my take on Beach Reads is definitive. Some readers will say that a Beach Read is any work of fiction that they save for reading on vacation. They pack the titles that they’ve been anxious to read but haven’t had time for during the rest of the year. Fair enough. Other readers love to settle in under that sun umbrella with a good mystery or thriller that provides page-turnability similar to that of a Beach Read. In any case, if you borrow a Beach Read from your local library, try to keep it out of the water!

Here are reviews of three Beach Reads that I recommend.

Rock the Boat     Beck Dorey-Stein     (2021)  Hallmark movies often feature an unhappy single person who leaves the big city for a quaint small town and finds love very unexpectedly. Take this trope and cross it with a Beach Read and a Reunion Romance, and you get Rock the Boat. When public relations exec Kate Campbell gets dumped by her wealthy Manhattan boyfriend of 12 years, she quits her job and moves back in with her parents in the small coastal tourist town of Sea Point, New Jersey. This is a major reversal for Kate, especially since New Yorkers really look down on New Jersey (even though those same New Yorkers flock to the Jersey Shore every summer).

In Sea Point, Kate reunites with two of her childhood friends—Ziggy Miller, a local plumber, and Miles Hoffman, a real-estate developer who has himself returned to Sea Point to re-engage with the family business. The past mistakes of Kate, Ziggy, and Miles are resurrected in brief flashbacks, and several sub-plots weave through the narrative. Don’t worry about keeping track of all the minor characters. Just watch Kate as she reinvents her life.

Summer of ’69     Elin Hilderbrand     (2019)  [A revised repost from this blog.] In the Author’s Note at the back of Summer of ’69, Elin Hilderbrand explains that she was born on July 17, 1969, six minutes before her twin brother entered the world. Fifty years on, Elin revisits the momentous events of the summer that she herself was born. She includes in her fictional narrative such actual occurrences as the spellbinding Apollo 11 mission to the moon; the tragic death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick that derailed Ted Kennedy’s presidential hopes; the fabled rock ‘n’ roll encampment at Woodstock; and the continuing slaughter of troops and civilians in Vietnam.

Hilderbrand’s main characters are the Foley-Levin family, who summer on Nantucket, the small island off Cape Cod. Blair, the eldest of the offspring, is recently married and is diagnosed late in pregnancy as carrying twins. Kirby, the rebel sister, takes a job on the nearby island of Martha’s Vineyard, where she is almost a witness in the Kopechne/Kennedy case. Tiger, the only son, is off fighting in Vietnam, driving his mother to drink. And 13-year-old Jessie, the youngest, gets invited to Woodstock. Hilderbrand takes us back to 1969 in all its glory and horror through the experiences of this family. Some of the plot twists will be obvious to any avid reader of mystery novels, and a few anachronisms crop up. But, despite the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Summer of ’69 is mostly brisk and cheerful, with wrap-ups of most of the plot lines by the final pages. You can have that second margarita and still be able to follow the story.

Endless Summer     Elin Hilderbrand     (2022)  This collection of nine short prequels and sequels to several of Hilderbrand’s novels is for her diehard followers. Of special note are the sequel novellas, Summer of ’79 and Summer of ’89, that are included. These novellas follow the Foley-Levin clan ten years out and twenty years out from the novel Summer of ’69, with emphasis on the various romantic entanglements that were introduced in the novel and that play out in sometimes unexpected ways as the decades unfold. The pop culture references that Hilderbrand tosses in to her narrative to set the decade can be heavy at times, but I love epilogues, and these two novellas are, in a way, highly extended epilogues.

Short, Short, Long

Two short novels, both from Ireland:

Foster     Claire Keegan     (2010, 2022)  This gem-like novella is already part of the school curriculum in Ireland, and now, twelve years after its initial publication, the full version is finally available in the United States. Keegan compresses an enormous amount into 92 pages, as she did with her acclaimed novella Small Things Like These. In Foster, a young Irish girl is taken to live with relatives at the beginning of summer. It’s unclear if the arrangement is permanent or temporary, and the tension of this uncertainty hangs over the narrative—as do mysteries about the girls’ birth parents and about her foster parents. Keegan is able to evoke panoramic scenes with spare sentences like this one, on the first page: “It is a hot day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish, sudden light along the road.” The dialogue is similarly spare but revealing of character. Don’t miss this book. (The movie version, The Quiet Girl, is also excellent—in the Irish language, with subtitles.)

The Queen of Dirt Island     Donal Ryan     (2022, 2023)  In rural County Tipperary, widow Eileen Aylward shares her modest house with her daughter, Saoirse (pronounced something like SUR-sha), and her widowed mother-in-law, Mary. Their story spans the mid-1980s to the early 2010s and includes feuds, romances, deaths, and run-ins with the Irish Republican Army. Through it all, they hang on by loving each other fiercely, even though they yell at each other a lot. You might classify this book, which is divided into two-page mini-chapters, as a very long prose poem—the language is that rich. And toward the end, a delightful element of meta-fiction also enters the narrative. For another exquisite piece of writing from Donal Ryan, check out his linked short stories in The Spinning Heart, which I reviewed on this blog back in 2018.

And a long novel, from the United States:

Commitment     Mona Simpson     (2023)  Walter, Lina, and Donnie Aziz are teens in California in 1972 when their struggling single-parent mother, Diane, becomes severely depressed and is institutionalized. Walter, who is starting college at Berkeley, leaves Lina and Donnie in the care of a devoted family friend, Julie. The novelist tracks the lives of these five people over the next decade and a half, delving by turns into decisions by each of Diane’s three children, often in intricate detail. The narrative structure made me want to know what would happen in the next chapter—and the next—but  this long novel does require (ahem) commitment on the part of the reader. I think it’s worth the time to observe how bravely the characters face adversity.

Author Focus: Curtis Sittenfeld

The sophisticated and sassy author Curtis Sittenfeld burst onto the scene in 2005 with her novel Prep, about life in an elite East-Coast boarding school, and she’s been going strong ever since. Sittenfeld has a knack for naturalistic dialogue and page-turning plots. Here are my reviews of five of her books; two of the reviews are reposts.

The Man of My Dreams     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2006)  This early work by Sittenfeld (right after the blockbuster Prep) explores the fears and fantasies of a young woman, from high school into her late twenties. Hannah Gavener is not a very likeable person, but the reader develops sympathy for her because she’s so self-doubting. She desperately seeks a male partner, hoping that marriage and children and domesticity will solve all her problems, but the men in her life either smother her with care or don’t care for her enough. I found the ending of this novel structurally unconvincing, but the insights into a young woman’s mind are worth the read.

Eligible     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2016)  Part of the propulsiveness of this novel lies in its being a retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Set in Cincinnati in 2013-2014, Eligible follows all five of the Bennet sisters (Jane, Liz, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia) as they pursue or fail to pursue multiple romantic options. Their father is as droll as Austen’s Mr Bennet, their mother as ditsy as Austen’s Mrs Bennet. I gulped down the chapters, anxious to learn how Sittenfeld had transformed the next bit of early-18th-century narrative to 21st-century sensibilities. (One major approach: lots more sex.)

You Think It, I’ll Say It     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2018)  The ten short stories in this collection reveal Sittenfeld’s wide-ranging understanding of women’s roles in romantic relationships, in parenting, in the workplace, and even in volunteer activities. As each story presents a different set of characters, human foibles are certainly on display, but so is human compassion. I especially like that many of the offerings are set in non-coastal places such as Houston, Kansas City, and St Louis, underscoring the ordinariness of the plots, even though some of the plots are pretty zany. Of course, zaniness is a characteristic of twenty-first-century life.

Rodham     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2020)  What if Hillary Rodham had not married Bill Clinton in 1975? This alternate version of Hillary’s life starts out hewing pretty closely to well-known facts—Hillary goes to college at Wellesley and then to law school at Yale, where she meets Bill. But at that point the novel follows a different trajectory, with Hillary as an unmarried law professor and politician (and Bill on another path also). Throughout, the portrayal of Hillary is, for me, totally believable, and the dialogue is especially realistic. Sittenfeld takes readers on a fun ride through the ”what ifs” with Rodham.

Romantic Comedy     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2023) Go behind the scenes in 2018 at The Night Owls, a not-very-disguised version of Saturday Night Live, to meet Sally Milz, a comedy writer in her late thirties who has often been disappointed in love. Meet a guest host of the show, pop star Noah Brewster. Watch Sally develop a crush on Noah and then accidentally insult him so that their light flirtation ends. Next, skip to the year 2020, in the depths of the COVID pandemic, and read emails between Noah and Sally. Speculate on whether this romance will re-blossom. As befits a late-night comedy show, the scripts that Sally writes can be raunchy, but Sittenfeld’s depiction of modern America is spot on.

Short Stories

When you’ve had a long day but want a mental getaway before your head hits the pillow, consider turning to a collection of short stories for a quick dose of fiction.

• First, two books of regular short stories:

Blank Pages and Other Stories     Bernard MacLaverty     (2021)  MacLaverty now lives in Scotland, but he grew up in Northern Ireland, and his fictional characters live on both sides of the Irish Sea. As I’ve noted in my review of his novel Midwinter Break, he focuses on the intricacies of ordinary domestic life, among people of the middle class or lower middle class. Some of these stories are set in the present day, and some reach back into the 20th century. There are no wild rides here, but there are plenty of introspective observations, in spare and lovely prose.

You Think It, I’ll Say It     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2018)  These ten stories reveal Sittenfeld’s wide-ranging understanding of women’s roles in romantic relationships, in parenting, in the workplace, and even in volunteer activities. As each story delves into a different set of characters, human foibles are certainly on display, but so is human compassion. I especially like that many of the stories are set in non-coastal places such as Houston, Kansas City, and St Louis, underscoring the ordinariness of the plots, even though some of the plots are pretty zany. Of course, zaniness is a characteristic of twenty-first-century life. (For a Sittenfeld novel, see my review of Rodham.)

• Next, some short stories that are put together as a novel:

The Seamstress of Sardinia     Bianca Pitzorno     Translated from the Italian by Brigid Maher     (2022)  Although this book was published as a novel, it’s more a series of interlinked short stories about a young woman who lived at the beginning of the 20th century on an island off the coast of Italy. Pitzorno evokes Old World charm while detailing the extreme social and financial stratification that the unnamed seamstress faces as she hand-crafts clothing and household linens for her wealthy clients. The female supporting characters are mostly competent and feisty; the male characters are mostly corrupt and lecherous. The seamstress is advised by one woman, “Don’t ever let any man be disrespectful to you.” (138)

• Finally, short stories that are sort of essays, too:

How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership     Wendell Berry     (2022)  This book is the 14th in a series of novels and short-story collections that celebrate rural life in the American South. In this collection, Berry further fills in the cast of characters from his fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and environs. Central to the stories is Andy Catlett, who, like Berry himself, was born in 1932. The narratives cross the border to essay form, and often to threnody, as Berry laments the industrialization that has nearly obliterated the old agrarian ways. I had not read any of the previous Port William books, but I easily picked up the threads, and I treasured Berry’s majestic and evocative prose, which is also in evidence in his acclaimed nonfiction on environmental issues.

A Grab Bag of Novels

Historical Fiction, Medieval Variety:

The Maiden of All Our Desires     Peter Manseau     (2022)  We can’t escape our involvement in planetary calamities, as the 14th-century inhabitants of a small, isolated convent in the north of England discover. This novel is set on a single day, during a fierce December blizzard, twenty years after the peak of the Black Plague. (There are multiple flashbacks to the plague years, including one very violent scene.) Several lives and past lives intersect, including that of the abbess, the former abbess, the resident priest, one of the nuns, and a young woman who lives in the nearby forest. The novelist evokes the period effectively, with gorgeous descriptors. I predicted the denouement early on, but I couldn’t help wondering how the nuns managed to brave the blizzard without cloaks!

Modern Families:

Hello Beautiful     Ann Napolitano     (2023)  William Waters had a terrible childhood in Boston. When he goes off to Northwestern University in Chicago on a basketball scholarship, he meets Julie Padavano and her gregarious Italian American family, which includes her three sisters. He begins to think that his life is turning around, but his dark past is only temporarily tamped down. All sorts of trouble ensues. The novelist echoes some of the themes of the four sisters in Little Women, however it isn’t necessary that you pull out your tattered copy of Louisa May Alcott’s classic to appreciate the well-drawn characters in Hello Beautiful. The Padavano sisters’ love for each other—and for William—shines brightly as they work their way through the decades of their lives to the chapters that conclude in 2008. And you don’t have to understand basketball, either.

Story of a Bad Guy:

The Complicities     Stacey D’Erasmo     (2022)  How might the people who surround white-collar criminals, such as the charismatic con man Alan, be complicit in their crimes? Readers get insights into several of Alan’s relationships. When Alan goes to prison, Suzanne, his first wife, divorces him and tries to reinvent herself. Lydia, his second wife, has survived a terrible accident and is a recovering alcoholic. Sylvia, his mother, is an aging free spirit who wants to reconnect with her estranged son. Noah, Alan’s adult son, always remains loyal to him. I found the shifting narrative viewpoints sometimes hard to reconcile, but the characters here are well developed, and the moral issues are thought-provoking. Oh, and a beached whale plays a major role.

Dystopian Fiction (Story of Extremely Bad Guys):

The Testaments     Margaret Atwood     (2019)  Dystopian novels and movies creep me out, but I had to read Atwood’s Booker-prize winning sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (published in 1985), which I reviewed recently. For decades, fans begged Atwood to explain how her fictional society of Gilead (theocratic, brutal, corrupt) finally fell, leading to the restoration of the United States. The “testaments” of the sequel title are documents written by three women—two of them are within Gilead, and the third, though in Canada, is unknowingly linked to events in Gilead. The narrative moves from one testament to another at a brisk pace, so I kept turning those pages even as I shuddered at the gruesome atrocities depicted. The highly skilled Atwood has written this sequel with meticulous care, offering truly sobering parallels between Gilead and the United States of the early 21st century.

Contemporary Novels by Reliable Authors

Lucy by the Sea     Elizabeth Strout     (2022)  Pulitzer-winner Strout has helped her readers examine many of the complexities of the human condition in her eight previous highly acclaimed books. Now, in Lucy by the Sea, she looks at the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, through the eyes of Lucy Barton (a character she’s developed in My Name is Lucy Barton, Anything is Possible, and Oh William). Lucy’s ex-husband, William, is a scientist who sees how dangerous the coronavirus is. In early March 2020, he insists that Lucy leave New York City for a rental house on the coast of Maine. In first-person narrative, Lucy details the interactions she has with family and friends during 2020 and early 2021. Lucy by the Sea is the first discussion of the pandemic I’ve read that truly captures the sense of desperation and loneliness that the pandemic has wrought. One quote: “I could not stop feeling that life as I had known it was gone.” (245)

The Master Bedroom     Tessa Hadley     (2007)  Kate Flynn is brilliant, brash, and beautiful—never boring. She takes a leave from her teaching job in London and goes back to her home town in Wales to care for her elderly mother, who has dementia. Kate’s entanglement in the lives of old friends allows the author to explore the complexities of desire, ambition, and generational ties. I’ve been bingeing on the well-crafted books by Britain’s Tessa Hadley; they are among my favorites, as you can see in this recent post.

The Sweet Remnants of Summer     Alexander McCall Smith     (2022)  In this 14th offering in the Isabel Dalhousie series, it’s a warm September in Edinburgh. Isabel and her “dishy” husband, Jamie, get themselves involved as mediators—or possibly interveners—in two interpersonal dramas in the worlds of art, music, and wine. Glimpses of Isabel’s personal life, and of her job as editor of a philosophy journal, punctuate the gentle, easygoing story. I’ve reviewed novels in this series previously. The setting and the characters rank high for me in McCall Smith’s voluminous catalog of titles.

Historical Fiction, 7th Century to 20th Century

Haven     Emma Donoghue     (2022)  A priest and two monks in seventh-century Ireland seek to escape the evils of civilization on a rocky island, uninhabited by humans, in the North Atlantic. Like Robinson Crusoe, that granddaddy of all survival fiction, this novel keeps you turning the pages to find out how the characters stay alive in a very challenging, isolated environment. I caught a few historical inaccuracies, but never mind those. For a couple hundred pages, the narrative is a slow burn, with vivid descriptions of the natural world. Then comes the devastating conclusion, which will leave you holding the book (or Kindle) in stunned silence.

The Prophet’s Wife     Libbie Grant     (2022)  In the early-19th-century, a wave of religious fervor swept through America, marked by revival meetings, emotional fervor, and belief in supernatural events. Several religious movements emerged, including the Latter-Day Saints, also called Mormons. The author here, herself a former Mormon, presents a fictionalized version of the development of this church, through the life of Emma Smith, wife of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith. Emma’s questioning of the authenticity of her husband’s mystical visions, though speculative, is fascinating. (The historical Emma’s opposition to the church’s practice of polygamy, however, is documented.) I found the narrative somewhat long-winded, but every few pages a passage of startling beauty stopped me in my tracks. And I learned a lot about the Latter-Day Saints.

The Sleeping Car Porter     Suzette Mayr     (2022)  Climb aboard the train that will take you across the vast expanse of Canada in the year 1929. Meet your porter, the mild-mannered Baxter, a closeted gay black man who is brutally overworked and constantly deprived of sleep as he serves the passengers in his assigned sleeping car all day and all night on multi-day runs. (He gets so tired that he hallucinates.) Baxter has been fascinated with people’s teeth since he found an abandoned dentistry textbook. He’s saving his wages to go to dental school, but he constantly fears dismissal from his job for minor infractions. I’m the granddaughter of a railway engineer. I love trains, and I couldn’t put down this inside look at the passengers, the crew, and the world teetering on the Great Depression.

The German Wife     Kelly Rimmer     (2022)  Historically, when WWII ended, hundreds of German scientists were quietly resettled in the US under a program called Operation Paperclip. By 1950, Huntsville, Alabama, had become a center for the development of American space technology, which was greatly advanced by these German scientists. The German Wife is a fictional exploration of how two families—one German, one American—were affected by Operation Paperclip. How did ordinary German people, especially Jews, live day-to-day during the period 1930-1950? What was it like to work for the Nazi rocket program? What decisions did German scientists make to save themselves and their loved ones? Was it right for the American government to grant the scientists immunity from prosecution? Some choices in life are ethically very clear. The other choices are the ones that this novel probes. For another take on post-WWII Germany, see my review of The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck.

Strong Women of Yore

By chance, I recently checked out from my local library three very different novels, all of which featured smart women who refused to be pushed around.

• In sixteenth-century Ireland:

My Lady Judge     Cora Harrison     (2007)

Mara is a “brehon”—a combination of investigator, prosecutor, judge, and law professor—in the west of Ireland in the sixteenth century, when the ancient Celtic laws have not yet been obliterated by English law. With loving detail, Harrison presents the rocky terrain of the area called the Burren (near Galway) and the complex kinships of the inhabitants. The huge ensemble cast moves through a murder-mystery plot that is full of red herrings and that resembles a modern police procedural. This is the first of the Burren Mystery series, which stretches to 14 books; I plan to read more.

• In 1946 London:

The Unkept Woman     Allison Montclair     (2022) 

As I’ve noted in my review of the first book in this historical mystery series—The Right Sort of Man (2019)—Montclair’s dialogue sparkles and moves her plot along at a brisk pace. Once again with The Unkept Woman, we’re in post-WWII Britain. Two enterprising young women, Iris Sparks and Gwen Bainbridge, run a marriage bureau, but they get themselves involved in murder investigations much more often than they’d like. Iris was a spy for Britain during World War II, and her past associations keep intruding on her postwar job. Gwen is a grieving war widow trying to rebuild a life for herself and her young son. See also my reviews of A Royal Affair (2020) and A Rogue’s Company (2021), and please read these four books in sequence.

• In 1950s and early 1960s California:

Lessons in Chemistry     Bonnie Garmus     (2022) 

In this bitingly satirical page-turner, Garmus re-creates a time period in America when women were expected to be compliant housewives who produced plenty of offspring. The lead character in Lessons in Chemistry, Elizabeth Zott, will have none of it. She’s a brilliant chemist at the (fictitious) Hastings Research Institute, where she’s treated like shit by all her male colleagues save one: Calvin Evans. Calvin is also a brilliant chemist, and the two fall in love. I can’t tell you more of the plot without spoilers, but I can assure you that the incidents of discrimination and harassment that Elizabeth endures are not exaggerated. Garmus deserves all the good reviews she’s received.

Two Historicals, Two Contemporaries

So that I don’t get too mired in the past with my reading material, I like to alternate historical and contemporary novels. First, reviews of two historicals:

The Giver of Stars     Jojo Moyes     (2019)  I’m late to the parade of Jojo Moyes’s bestselling popular novels, but I blazed through this one. The fast-moving plot is drawn from the actual existence of a cadre of women in Depression-era Appalachia who rode on horseback to deliver library books to people living in isolated cabins, a project of the federally-funded WPA. In her fictional take, Moyes deposits an outsider into rural Kentucky—the English bride of a mine owner’s son—and tells the story mainly through this woman’s eyes. There’s small-town gossip, domestic violence, religious fervor, racial animosity, moonshinin’, patriarchy, friendship, union bustin’, political corruption, and some true love.

The Cloister     James Carroll     (2017)  In NYC, the Metropolitan Museum’s medieval art department is housed in The Cloisters, which resembles a medieval monastery. On a rainy day in 1950, a Catholic priest ducks into The Cloisters and meets a docent who is a Holocaust survivor from Paris. Before WWII, she worked at the Sorbonne with her father, researching the 12th-century philosopher-monk Peter Abelard’s opposition to the Catholic church’s anti-Semitism. Carroll’s novel pivots back and forth between the 12th century and 1950. You’ll settle in more easily if you know a little Latin and if you know about Abelard’s love affair with the philosopher-abbess Héloïse d’Argenteuil. Even without that knowledge, you’ll find both stories powerful.

Next, two contemporaries:

Groundskeeping     Lee Cole     (2022)  Owen and Alma are both aspiring writers in their late twenties who meet at a small college in Kentucky. He’s a groundskeeper, and she’s on a one-year writing fellowship. They fall into a fraught relationship that is made more difficult by issues of social class and privilege. I didn’t recognize most of the music that they listen to, but the writing here is very fine—complex plotting, deft character delineations, rich setting descriptions.

Joan is Okay     Weike Wang     (2022)  All of us know what’s going to happen in the intensive care units of hospitals in New York City in the spring of 2020. We know that ICU physicians like Joan are going to be in the thick of the COVID pandemic. But in 2019, Joan can’t predict this. She’s dealing instead with the expectations of her boss (who rewards her workaholism) as well as the expectations of her Chinese American family (who want her to get married and have kids). She also has a strangely intrusive neighbor and an oddball work colleague. Still, Joan is okay, even when COVID hits. This short novel packs a punch. And don’t miss my review of Wang’s previous novel, Chemistry.

Two Fiction + Two Nonfiction

First, two works of fiction, both about financiers:

Trust     Hernan Diaz     (2022)  Diaz explores the trustworthiness of narrative through four different takes on the same story, about a fictional early-twentieth-century Wall Street financier. First, a novella captures the style of Edith Wharton, then an unfinished autobiography reveals its author’s vanity and arrogance. A memoir by the autobiography’s ghost writer gives another perspective, and finally the diary of the financier’s wife provides a new twist to the tale. Diaz navigates these disparate genres with stylistic ease, as he asks, Whom do you trust to tell you the truth?

The Magnolia Palace     Fiona Davis     (2022)  I reviewed Davis’s 2016 novel, The Dollhouse, on this blog in 2017, and The Magnolia Palace is the fifth novel that Davis has churned out since then. Her signature formula includes an actual iconic building in New York City as the setting and two fictional young women, living decades apart, who are involved in a complicated mystery. The Magnolia Palace is a lightweight, entertaining romp, set in the Frick Collection, a fine art museum that was formerly the home of Henry Clay Frick’s family. The two women are models, one in 1919 and one in 1966. Brush up on your art history!

Next, two collections of essays:

These Precious Days     Ann Patchett     (2022) Patchett provides plenty of  insights into her family background and her fiction-writing process in these essays. (See my reviews of her novels Commonwealth and The Dutch House.) The title piece, and the longest, starts with Patchett reading Tom Hanks’s short story collection, Uncommon Type. She admires the book (as did I; see my review) and, through a series of coincidences, gets to know the actor and his assistant, Sooki Raphael. Sooki ends up as a long-term houseguest of Patchett and her husband at the beginning of the pandemic. Patchett writes a moving account of their unexpected and rewarding friendship.

Happy-Go-Lucky     David Sedaris     (2022)  For fans of David Sedaris (count me in), every new collection of his essays means a couple of evenings of sure-fire good reading, unveiling the vagaries of family relationships. (See my previous commentary on his body of work.) Happy-Go-Lucky focuses quite a bit on the last years of David’s nonagenarian father, Lou, and on the impact of the COVID pandemic. The stories are honest, touching, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes disturbing. There is simply no other essayist who is as irreverent and candid and downright funny as David Sedaris.

Sure It's [Fill in the Blank], But . . .

Sure it’s alternate history, but . . .

Rodham     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2020)  What if Hillary Rodham had not married Bill Clinton in 1975? This alternate version of Hillary’s life starts out hewing pretty closely to well-known facts—college at Wellesley, law school at Yale, where she meets Bill. But then it takes a different trajectory, with Hillary as an unmarried law professor and politician and Bill on another path also. Throughout, the portrayal of Hillary is, for me, totally believable, and the dialogue is especially realistic. Take a fun ride through the ”what ifs” with Rodham.

Sure, it’s time travel, but . . .

This Time Tomorrow     Emma Straub     (2022)  On the day that Alice turns forty, she’s reassessing her life goals—and getting very drunk. Unexpectedly, she’s transported back to her sixteenth birthday, in 1996. I don’t usually read time travel novels, but Alice is so endearing that I went with the premise. And Straub is writing a love letter to New York City as much as she’s exploring family bonds and the quandaries of aging.

Sure, it’s melodramatic, but . . .

When We Were Young     Richard Roper     (2021)  Two men who are turning thirty get together fourteen years after an acrimonious argument separated them. Joel is a successful TV comedy writer in London, with a glamorous actress as his girlfriend. Theo considers himself a failure, both in his career and in his relationships; he lives in a shed in his parents’ back yard. The melodrama and emotion are heavy here, but the insight into the hearts of these two young Brits is worth the read.

Sure, it’s got lots of tragedy, but . . .

Count the Ways     Joyce Maynard     (2021) 

The many sad and shocking events that punctuate Eleanor’s life are traced here from her childhood in the 1950s and 1960s up to nearly the present day. But I didn’t find this book depressing. Eleanor balances her career as an artist and children’s book author with her role as wife to her woodworker husband, Cam, and mother to their three children. Her musings on motherhood, in which she delights, touched me profoundly. The characters surrounding Eleanor are also deftly portrayed.

Fiction, Again

The Gravity of Birds     Tracy Guzeman     (2013)   An art history professor and an art authenticator in New York agree to search for missing works by a renowned painter and end up involved in a cross-country missing persons mystery. They discover that the two sisters depicted in the paintings had a troubled relationship with the painter thirty-five years in the past. I stayed up until 2 am to finish this poignant and complex novel.  Thanks to Cinda Hocking for the recommendation!

The Great Passion     James Runcie     (2022)   No, it’s not a love affair between two people but rather Johann Sebastian Bach’s “St Matthew Passion,” one of the greatest of all choral compositions, premiered in Leipzig in 1727. In this novel, the fictional Stefan Silbermann, as an adult, looks back on his year as a boy soprano and aspiring church organist studying with Bach. He narrates his experiences with the boisterous Bach household and with the brutal boarding school where he lives. Musicians should especially appreciate the details, but all fans of historical fiction should appreciate the portrayal of eighteenth-century Germany and of “The Big Guy,” JSB.

We Are the Brennans     Tracey Lange     (2021) Moving the plot along mostly through convincing dialog, Lange creates a vivid picture of the present-day Brennan family, pub owners in a town north of NYC. An estranged adult daughter comes home to recover after a serious car accident and gets retangled in family life, with some mystery and some romance enlivening things. The character names are odd, but the story is a winner. 

Whereabouts     Jhumpa Lahiri     (Written in Italian and translated by the author)            (2021)  Lahiri delivers a powerful if unconventional short novel, about an unnamed middle-aged single woman in an unnamed European city. Each of the 46 brief chapters is a precisely rendered, first-person vignette of some aspect of the woman’s daily life—she’s in her office or at the museum or on vacation or at the coffee bar. Altogether, the vignettes give the reader amazing insights into her personality and her life’s trajectory. 

The Kindest Lie     Nancy Johnson     (2021)  The racial tensions that trouble the US play out through the stories of two families in the months near the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Ruth Tuttle, a successful Black engineer, can’t move forward with her life in Chicago until she finds the baby whom she was forced to give up when she gave birth at age 17 in an industrial town in Indiana. Her search reconnects her with her family and with the family of a young white boy nicknamed Midnight. The author tackles difficult issues of race, class, poverty, and social justice forthrightly and eloquently.

French Braid     Anne Tyler     (2022)  Meet four generations of the Garrett family, from 1959 to 2020, mainly in Tyler’s favorite locale, Baltimore. The Garretts exemplify what families ideally do for one another: in the words of one character, “. . . ‘hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions.’” The family members are convincingly portrayed and their stories are memorable. Hang on through that first chapter, which seems slightly disjointed. This is a splendid book.

History and Mystery: Short Reviews

First, a few historical novels.  

Free Love     Tessa Hadley     (2022) You can rely on Hadley’s novels to unflinchingly probe the dynamics of modern British family life. In this one, she travels back to swinging 1967 London to observe the conventional Fischer family falling apart in the wake of the sexual revolution. The shocking liaisons and their aftermaths drive the plot, but I found myself lingering on the evocative metaphors in Hadley’s descriptive settings. Who knew that British weather could be so beautiful?

The Sense of an Ending     Julian Barnes     (2011)  Tony Webster, a retired Briton who is amicably divorced, receives an unusual legacy that brings to mind painful scenes from his time in secondary school and at university. This ruminative short novel about memory, regret, forgiveness, and revenge was made into a movie in 2017.

Violeta     Isabel Allende     (2022) Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle. The prolific Allende has been criticized in some reviews for lack of character development in Violeta. I don’t agree. Violeta Del Valle tells her captivating life story in first person, from her birth in 1920 during one pandemic to her death in 2020 during another. The backdrop is the political upheaval of this century in the history of an unnamed South American country that is very much like Chile. See also my review of Allende’s In the Midst of Winter.  

Next, some mysteries, one of which is a historical mystery and two of which take place at weddings! 

A Comedy of Terrors     Lindsey Davis     (2021)  I’ve reviewed the Flavia Albia mystery series as among my favorites, and this entry is no exception. Although the novels have more violence than I usually tolerate, the first-century Roman ambience is irresistible, the rapid-fire dialog brings the characters fully to life, and the plots will challenge the most sophisticated mystery reader. As an added treat, A Comedy of Terrors, set during the celebration of Saturnalia (the winter solstice), features the holiday revelries of private investigator Flavia Albia and her extended family.

The Guest List     Lucy Foley     (2020)  A British power couple are staging an elaborate wedding on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, but this is no rom-com. It’s a cleverly plotted murder mystery that unfolds with a see-sawing narrative from the standpoints of the wedding planner, the bride, the best man, the sole bridesmaid, a plus-one guest, and the groom.  

Destination Wedding     Aaron Stander     (2020) This is the eleventh of the Sheriff Ray Elkins mysteries set in the northwest of Michigan’s mitten. On the shore of Lake Michigan, severe weather causes havoc for the wealthy guests at a wedding and almost conceals a concurrent suspected murder and art theft. The local color can’t be beat, and the copyediting problems that marred previous titles in the series (as noted in my review) have been mostly resolved.

Just Fiction

A Town Called Solace     Mary Lawson     (2021)  Step back in time to 1972, and head to a small town in northern Ontario, Canada, for a tender story of loss, loneliness, and hope, told from the perspectives of three characters: a hospitalized elderly woman, an eight-year-old girl whose older sister has run away, and a thirty-something man facing divorce and joblessness.

Five Tuesdays in Winter     Lily King     (2021)  I usually prefer the expansiveness of the novel format, but each of these ten stories creates a universe of characters and life experiences. Settings range from New England to the North Sea, from the 1960s to the present. See also my review of King’s novel Writers and Lovers. 

Crossroads     Jonathan Franzen     (2021)  In 1971-72 Chicago, middle-aged clergyman Russ Hildebrandt and his wife and four children come under the microscope as they struggle with faith, sex, drugs, Vietnam, and rock ‘n’ roll for 580 detail-heavy pages. This is classic Franzen, with unforgettable characters, and it’s the first book of a projected trilogy.

Small Things Like These     Claire Keegan     (2021)  With prose reminiscent of the early work of James Joyce, Keegan’s novella fictionalizes a piece of the history of the Irish “laundries,” where unwed pregnant women were enslaved by the Catholic Church until 1996. In rural Ireland at Christmastime in 1985, a middle-aged family man stumbles upon evidence of such abuse at a local convent.

Fresh Water for Flowers     Valérie Perrin     Translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle     (2020)  This European bestseller is part mystery, part romance, part memento mori. Violette Toussaint, a cemetery keeper in a small town in Burgundy, provides informal grief counselling to mourners as she looks back on her own life and tries to fashion a future for herself. The translation is awkward at points, especially because of the British slang, but the meandering story is heartwarming.

Wish You Were Here     Jodi Picoult     (2021)  Are you ready for a novel set in New York City (and Galápagos) in 2020, right when the coronavirus pandemic breaks out? The societal details are all too familiar, but the story takes unexpected turns, yanking the reader along. The disjointedness of alternate realities reflects our times.

Fiction and Nonfiction: Brief Reviews

Every week, the fiction that I check out from the Ann Arbor District Library gets ruthlessly culled. By the time I’ve read twenty or thirty pages, I know if the story is too violent, the prose too banal, or the characters too obnoxious for my taste. Less than a quarter of my weekly haul ends up being reviewed on this website; reviews of three novels that passed my tests are below.

In this post I also offer three nonfiction titles. I read less nonfiction, and it’s usually in the categories of biography, memoir, cultural studies, or cooking. Here I’m branching out with a book on gardening, one of my passions. Happy reading!

Fiction

Matrix     Lauren Groff     (2021)     In the second half of the 12th century, in England, the bastard daughter of royalty is banished to an impoverished convent. Groff conjures up this life story for Marie de France, about whom very little is actually known—except that she is the author of highly influential surviving medieval poems. The constructed milieu of this novel is believable, the tale mesmerizing, the language incandescent. See also my review of Groff’s Fates and Furies.

The Other Bennet Sister     Janice Hadlow     (2020)  Plucking Mary, the middle of the five Bennet sisters, out of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Hadlow imagines how her adult life might have played out. The probings of Mary’s emotional struggles are beautifully rendered, and tone is totally Austenesque. But you don’t need to be an Austen fan to enjoy this gentle, lovely story.

The Vanishing Half     Brit Bennett     (2020)  In this complex exploration of connectedness and concealment in late 20th-century America, light-skinned Black twins go their separate ways as teenagers. The twist here is that one twin decides to pass for white and marries a white man, while the other marries a Black man and remains within the Black community. Each has a daughter, and the paths of these cousins cross in unexpected ways.  

Nonfiction

Bloom’s Best Perennials and Grasses:  Expert Plant Choices and Dramatic Combinations for Year-Round Gardens     Adrian Bloom     (2010)  The title says it all, and the photos are magnificent. This is the book for the gardener who wants to move from ordinary garden-center plants to the next level of gardening, selecting specific varieties based on growing conditions and design preferences.

Hidden Valley Road:  Inside the Mind of an American Family     Robert Kolker     (2020)  Between 1945 and 1965, Don and Mimi Galvin produced twelve children, six of whom were eventually diagnosed as schizophrenic. This exhaustive chronicle of their family life in Colorado, against the backdrop of shifting treatments for schizophrenia, is both heartbreaking and riveting.

The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet     John Green     (2021)  These essays, adapted from the acclaimed podcast of the same title, explore and rate wildly diverse aspects of our geological era, the Anthropocene, including teddy bears, sunsets, Indianapolis, plague, and sycamore trees. John Green bares his soul with humor, intelligence, and compassion. Thanks to Vera Schwankl for recommending this extraordinary book!

More Reads for a Persistent Pandemic

Beheld TaraShea Nesbit (2020) The Mayflower passengers who founded the Plymouth Colony were not all religious dissenters. On the ship there were also indentured servants and craftspeople who did not hold with the puritanical ways of the leaders. Nesbit takes us inside the thoughts of two very different women of Plymouth, in the troubled year 1630. (Ignore the author’s failures in archaizing language.) 

A Rogue’s Company Allison Montclair (2021) First, read the previous two entries in the Sparks and Bainbridge series, reviewed here and here. Then dive into this one, which is another rollicking, intricately plotted mystery set in London immediately after World War II. The two protagonists run a staid marriage bureau but often end up in back alleys with desperate criminals.

The Last Garden in England Julia Kelly (2021) Three women interact with the elaborate fictional garden of Highbury House in three different time periods. In 1907 Venetia Smith designs the nontraditional landscape. In 1944, Beth Pedley is a farm worker—a land girl—during World War II. And in the present day, Emma Lovell is hired to restore the site to its long-ago glory. Several romances ensue in this pleasant novel.

My Kind of People Lisa Duffy (2020) Melodrama oozes off of every page of this novel, set in the present day on a fictional island off the coast of Boston. And you may protest that young architects and freelance journalists are really not as financially solvent as portrayed here. But I came to love the characters, especially Sky (a newly orphaned 10-year old girl), Leo (an architect, her unlikely guardian), and Maggie (a helpful neighbor, with her own troubles).    

The Children’s Book AS Byatt (2009) Sussex (and some London, Paris, Munich), 1895-1919. Socialists, anarchists, suffragists, libertines. Potters, silversmiths, museum keepers, puppeteers, poets, playwrights, scholars, physicians, tellers of dark fairy tales. An old-fashioned, languorous, discursive story with dozens of characters and lots of historical context.  

The Lincoln Highway Amor Towles (2021) Fans of Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, reviewed here, will find much of the same verve and strong character development in his new offering. In 1954, two young brothers set out on a road trip to find the mother who abandoned them, but they have to take many detours. The ending could have been stronger, but this one is still entertaining.  

Reads for a Persistent Pandemic

Well, the pandemic keeps resurging, and with many activities again restricted, I’m doing a lot of reading.

The Mission House Carys Davies (2020) In 2018 Davies took us to the early-nineteeth-century American frontier with her brilliantly plotted novel West (reviewed here). The Mission House is set in contemporary India and features more of Davies’ unconventional characters:  a disabled orphan, a barber who aspires to be a country-Western singer, and a depressive Brit taking a rest-cure. Don’t miss this one.

The Pull of the Stars     Emma Donoghue  (2020) If you can bear another pandemic story, The Pull of the Stars is the one. Julia Power is a nurse working in a maternity ward in Dublin during the 1918 flu pandemic. She contends not only with an invisible virus but also with lack of supplies, women oppressed by the strictures of the Catholic Church, and her own sexual awakening.

The Goldfinch Donna Tartt (2013) This winner of the Pulitzer Prize is a Bildungsroman, a mystery, a thriller, and a wild drug-fueled ride through a speculative alternate history of New York City. But you can read its nearly 800 pages solely for Tartt’s extraordinarily lush vocabulary and sympathetically drawn characters. I’ve finally caught up with my 2013 must-read list.

Beautiful World, Where Are You Sally Rooney (2021) We can all speculate whether the character of Alice, a bestselling novelist, shares personality traits with Rooney herself, but all the characters in this novel are deftly delineated. Many struggle with how personal fulfillment intersects with global trauma and strife. This is Rooney’s third exploration of the existential angst plaguing Generation Z; her Normal People (reviewed here) is another winner.

Busman’s Honeymoon Dorothy L Sayers (1937) I hadn’t read this Golden Age classic detective novel in decades, so I’d forgotten much of the plot and was once again surprised by its ingenuity. However, for fans of the romance between Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, the murder investigation is definitely secondary to the tender scenes between the honeymooners. (Note that in dialogue there are some ethnic stereotypes, common in this era, that are repugnant.)