Review: Small Wars by Sadie Jones

Images of torture and terror from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo have slid across our tv screens, jumped out of newspapers and magazines, and peppered conversations over the past number of years. How, we wonder, did we come to this, this unacceptable and horrifying state of affair? Has civilization broken down so badly that we can turn a blind eye to this sort of thing unless, and only unless, it is thrust into our common consciousness? Surely tacit approval was not granted. We can not have so lost our moral compass, especially compared to the civilized and relatively humane generations who have waged war before us, can we? Unfortunately, this isn't the case. Not that we have gone so misguided, but that the generations before us weren't just as ruthless and willing to step over the line. War is hell in more ways than one and its damages can be counted in far more than casualty numbers. Loss of innocence, moral breakdown, and silent complicity are all terrible, soul destroying by-products that have been a part of war as long as war has been a part of mankind.

Major Hal Treherne is posted to Cyprus during the 1950's and is joined by his wife Clara and their twin toddler daughters. His war is not to be the enormous consuming war of their fathers, World War II, instead, his war is to be the small war of waning colonialism on this tiny island so vital to the Middle East. He is mostly happy with his command although he longs for more important action than sweeping the local villages for EOKA terrorists. Eventually this vague dissatisfaction starts to seep into his heretofore charmed marriage. Meanwhile, his wife Clara must master herself and her fears about this posting and perhaps her very unsuitability to be an army wife, only relaxing once the family is safely housed on base.

But isolated, violent events occur to shatter the false sense of security for the Treherne family and Hal and Clara react diametrically opposite to each other in the face of these disturbing happenings. At first Hal is exhilerated and blind to Clara's fear and feelings. As he learns more though, Hal's conception of duty and his sense of right and wrong are tested beyond endurance. He is torn between his duty to his country and the men with whom he serves and his own conscience and as he struggles, his life with Clara erodes and becomes unrecognizable until both halves of him, public and private are at the breaking point.

This is a fascinating look at the psychological strain of war and how essentially good people react to it. It counts the damage to intimacy and goodness. Jones allows her characters to judge the scenes they see and hear about without much authorial intrusion at all. Her characters are strong, even when they are crumbling, and they illustrate the timelessness of those news pieces that reach us and so horrify us today. The writing is tight and well-done. The tension slowly grows as the story continues but it grows unevenly, as it would in war: longer stretches of less watchfulness interspersed with brief bursts of pulse-pounding events. The characters are easy to sympathize with as they wrestle with their duties and desires. All in all, a sensitive and powerful story and one I'd highly recommend.

For more information about Sadie Jones be sure to visit this brief interview with Jones.


Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours and the publisher for sending me a copy of the book for review.

Review: The Crimson Rooms by Katharine McMahon

I generally don't read anything that has a body or blood in it because I am prone to nightmares, coward that I am. So it is probably completely incongruous that I would cheerfully agree to read a book in which one of the first female lawyers in Britain is helping to defend a man accused of murdering his wife. I am nothing if not inconsistent. Then again, I am up writing this review in the wee hours of the night when I am usually asleep because the image of a pink shoe on a lady's foot poking out of the underbrush has crawled into my brain and horrified me beyond sleep. Tame stuff for afficianados of the scary and gory but disturbing and lasting for babies like me.

Six years after her brother's death in WWI, Londoner Evelyn Gifford opens the door to find a small boy the spitting image of her brother standing with his mother on the stoop. There is no doubt that the child is her brother James' son, conceived just before his death. The household has been in a sort of grieving stasis since the telegram announcing James' death six years ago and the presence of small Edmund and his mum Meredith is about about to change everything. And while Evelyn's family life is undergoing this major upheaval, she is struggling in her professional life and opening up to an opportunity in her personal life as well.

One of the first female lawyers in England, Evelyn is still in training and facing the almost inevitable prejudice of being a trailblazer. Her boss has relegated her to mostly unimportant (and non-paying) clients. When he is out of town, by default she is given the case of a poor mother, a bit too fond of drink, who is accused of having kidnapped her own child. Leah Marchant willingly surrendered her children to a charity home while she tried to get back on her feet but in so doing, she didn't fully understand the consequences of her actions or the potentially terrible complications. In fact, neither did most of society fully understand the possible fates for children like Leah Marchant's. A seemingly insignificant case, it blossoms out of control as Evelyn undertakes to reunite the mother with her children.

Meanwhile, she is also called on to assist at a spectacular murder trial where a former soldier is accused of having shot his new wife in the heart while out picnicking and then cold bloodedly heading to a pub for a few drinks. The evidence against Stephen Wheeler is overwhelming if circumstantial and Evelyn may be the only person who believes his innocence. And proving that innocence could be beyond her capabilities.

As I've already mentioned, the murder storyline left me sleepless over the two nights it took to read the book. This is not because it was difficult to figure out who the killer was though. As a matter of fact, it seemed to me to be glaringly obvious from the first. But as the novel is much more than the mystery, this seems less a handicap than it might.

The obstacles faced by women in the time between the two world wars, as they not only entered the workplace but entered in educated professions which had always been the sole province of men, were enormous. And add to that the lack of rights of women in general during this time and it becomes clear the sorts of odds a character like Evelyn faced. She should have been a wonderfully admirable character but I just couldn't warm to her. She was somehow more insipid than I had expected given her drive to become a lawyer despite general public sentiment. Perhaps this was intended to show her complexity and make her multi-dimensional but it left me without a character with whom to identify. As for Meredith, the mother of James' son and the character who stands as a foil to Evelyn, I didn't care for her either. She was flighty and cruel, fickle, inconsistent, and grasping and I suspect she was not meant to seem that way. Evelyn's budding lust for Nicholas, a man who represents everything she abhors, was a distraction given everything else going on in the novel but his very presence was necessary to the meat of the plot, making for an interesting conundrum: how to include him without the busyness of yet another plot thread.

Given the fact that the novel was certainly out of my comfort zone, I probably zeroed in on things that wouldn't have struck other readers quite as strongly. And as evidenced by my lack of sleep, the detail of the story is quite vivid. The touches of historical information, the reaction and prejudice against the first female lawyers, the shipping of children from English charity homes to Canada where they could be ill-used, the toll the war had on the survivors, both soldier and civilian, all of these were fascinating and woven into the novel well. I just couldn't make a connection with the characters that didn't leave me irritated and so my overall enjoyment was lessened. I do think, however, that mystery readers will enjoy the threads of the story that kept me awake and historical fiction readers will find interesting nuggets scattered throughout this post-WWI set novel.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of the book to review.

Review: The Secret Confessions of Anne Shakespeare by Arliss Ryan

In certain circles, there is some debate over who really authored Shakespeare's masterpieces. The contenders are quite a varied lot and I suspect that we'll never be able to say for certain that the glover's son from Stratford-upon-Avon was truly the author of these enduring works of theater, the inventor of marvelous words, and arguably the greatest writer in the English language. The historical record leaves tantalizing gaps in Shakespeare's life, thereby allowing for the possibility that someone else, having borrowed his name, wrote the plays attributed to him. What the historians rarely debate is the place and character of Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway in his life. She is widely considered to have been a less than pleasant soul who, as a much older woman, trapped Shakespeare into an unhappy marriage by falling pregnant. Arliss Ryan takes a quite different view of Hathaway in this imaginative novel, taking on the character of the woman as well as the authorship question all in one fell swoop.

Opening with the aged and dying Anne Hathaway being tended to by her young granddaughter and promising the girl the knowledge of who actually wrote Shakespeare's plays, the novel quickly slides back in time to Anne's childhood and young adulthood. Her second meeting with the teenaged Will Shakespeare and the conversation they have upon the banks of the river offer the first echoes of what will become some of the most famous lines in the English speaking world. And according to Anne, these lines come from her imagination, not his. By her account, their early marriage is a reasonably happy time; she loves her husband and he loves her. But he wants to become more than just a glover like his father and so he hies off to London leaving wife and family behind. Not content to wait years for his return, Anne eventually makes her way to London as well to search out Will. But once she has found him, she has to pretend she is merely his sister come to serve him rather than his wife. She enters the world of the theater through her sewing ability and eventually becomes as caught up in it as Shakespeare himself. As an intelligent and reasonably educated woman (in this fact novelization differs from accepted historical supposition), she eventually comes to help her beloved husband when he suffers from writer's block. And from there it is a short step to half and then full authorship of the most glorious and enduring of Shakespeare's plays, all without ever being able to acknowledge her contributions.

Narrated in Anne's voice, the novel is engrossing and eminently believable in terms of the authorship question. Ryan has drawn a good and full portrait of Elizabethan England, the London of that era, the roles and expectations for women, and allows her characters to know and interact with the major players in the theater of the time in ways that are easily convincing. The insights into the theater world of Elizabethan times is truly fascinating. The Hathaway of the novel, while not found in this incarnation in the historical record (actually, Hathaway is barely found in the historical record at all), is a wonderful creation. She is smart and resourceful, loyal and persevering. She could easily have been the playwright that we so revere today with Shakespeare himself only responsible for the beauty of the sonnets and poetry. Most decidedly a feminist rewriting, Ryan has crafted a well-written and interesting take on the question of authorship, intellectual property, love, and the the importance of acknowledging, rather than hiding, the source of amazing talent. Anne is the most fully constructed character here with all others, including Shakespeare himself, being much less dimensional. But it is, after all, Anne's story, her confession, her claiming, that is so gripping and intriguing. Historical fiction lovers will find this imagined life eminently appealing. And even if Anne Hathaway didn't write Shakespeare's plays, I am quite certain that her fictional character here is a grand stand-in for some other real life woman, brimming with talent and marginalized in her time, her achievements gone unnoticed or claimed by men.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book for review.

Review: The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin A. Hermes

Hamlet is the Shakespeare play I have read over and over and over again. It was a perpetual inclusion on class reading lists from high school all the way to graduate school. I've even seen it performed more than once. And yet I never thought too much about what kind of past would have created a melancholy character like the ever philosophical, strangely stagnant Prince of Denmark. Luckily for me, Myrlin Hermes has thought about that past and written a truly rollicking good novel complete with many of Shakespeare's own crazy conventions to flesh out that topsy-turvy tale.

Loyal Horatio is a poor scholar at Wittenberg University, toiling away for years on a philosophical dissertation that has long since ceased to interest him, chiefly because of his badly concealed agnosticism. Into his narrow world comes Baron de Maricourt, who commissions a romantic play meant to laud his own holdings and flatter those among his friends. Horatio cannot afford to turn down the commission even if he struggles not only with the original source material but also with the increasingly ludicrous additions suggested by the Baron, or rather by his lady wife Adriane. Meanwhile, as Horatio wrestles with what sounds suspiciously like A Midsummer Night's Dream, he meets Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, and in this possibly mad but exceedingly fair wastrel, finds his muse.

Horatio writes for Hamlet, falls in love with him, and devises a way for Hamlet to act in his play. But this brings Hamlet into the sphere of Lady Adriane, the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets, with whom Horatio is also half in love and having an affair. And just as in Shakespeare's comedies, this love triangle becomes confused and befuddling. Add in a late-arrival in the character of a poet called Will Shake-speare, seemingly Horatio's rival both for the affections of both Hamlet and Lady Adriane and for the job of playwright/poet and the plot gets dizzyingly intricate.

Horatio narrates the majority of the novel but occasionally the reader hears from Lady Adriane's perspective when Horatio's limited knowledge of the complicated and carefully orchestrated situation doesn't reveal enough. It can be a little jarring, despite the font difference, the first time the narrator changes but in the end, it works well. Hermes has sprinkled little Shakespeare treats throughout the story and the astute reader will feel little puffs of pride at catching more than simply the most obvious of the allusions and famous lines. Her narrative is madcap and definitely twists Hamlet in ways I never would have suspected but she has done it with such facility that it seems nothing more than entirely plausible to me now having come to the end of her prequel.

It did take a sort of re-alignment of my expectations in order to sink fully into the text but once I did, the comedic twistings and turnings, the bed-hopping and gender identity issues, the nods and curtsies to the Bard, the wild imaginings, and even the sly questions on Shakespeare's authorship kept me reading along at a good clip. It's probably best for a reader to have some knowledge of Hamlet before reading this but those without that grounding might still find the romance and the tragedy of friendship, true love and loyalty appealing as well.

For more, be sure to visit Myrlin Hermes' website as well as her blog.



Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours for sending me a review copy of this book.

Review: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

If you know me at all by now, you know I have a love hate relationship with highly raved about books. I feel like I need to have read them to join the conversation but I am also leery of the heaps of praise, knowing that my expectations for the book are likely to be all out of proportion, making for a cranky reading experience. So it was with a little trepidation that I picked this one up for my book club. I am happy to report that it turned out to be a better book than I anticipated and although I am the last one on the planet to read it, I am pleased I did. It is an outstanding book club book and would have kept a more focused group talking for a long time. But we were unfocused partly because we had more people at book club than we've ever had before, which is a testament to the appeal of the book, even if discussion suffered due to a group too unwieldy to be effective.

Told in various different voices, mainly those of the black help to the elite cream of white society in Jackson, Mississippi during the extremely turbulent period of the sixties, this both rings true and reminds us all of the civil rights struggles so recently fought here in the US. Aibileen is maid and child minder to a young couple and their baby girl. She is still reeling from the senseless death of her son and has come to realize in a very visceral way, the value whites placed on a black man's life and death. Her anger and bitterness (very much earned, I might add) have changed her personality and also slightly what she is willing to risk in her position. Through her eyes, we first see the young white matrons and their unmarried friend Miss Skeeter and it's not a very flattering picture. But we get small glimpses that Skeeter is not quite like the others, even if she seems complicit in their casual disregard and racist attitudes.

Skeeter is freshly home from Ole Miss and still unmarried, much to the chagrin of her mother. She has bigger dreams than just settling into the same life her mother and friends are leading but she tries to not rock the boat too badly, dating when she can. As she has yet to "take" with an eligible man, she also finds herself a job writing a homemaker's advice column. Of course, as she has never kept a home, she needs help writing her replies and she turns to Aibileen for help, hoping that one day Aibileen will also feel comfortable enough to tell her what ever happened to her family's long time maid, the woman who raised her, Constantine who disappeared not long before Skeeter graduated and came home. Through her connection to Aibileen and with her own ambitions, Skeeter starts writing a social history of the help, those black women who work for the local white families. She captures the good and the bad of Aibileen's experience and then moves on to other willing participants with Aibileen's help.

Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is the third narrator in the novel. She has been fired and falsely accused of stealing by the daughter of her last employer and is only hired by a woman who is so new and so far beyond the pale of polite society than she has no idea of Minny's reputation. Minny comes to be oddly protective of her seemingly indolent mistress, Celia. She tries to maintain a "proper" distance, foiled at every turn because Celia, of poor white stock who has unwittingly married into the upper crust, has no concept of where those boundaries are and is starved for kindness and friendship. Minny becomes the second maid willing to help Skeeter with her book, despite the fraught times and danger of being identified as having contributed to this rather damning piece of writing.

Stockett has created credible, very real characters here. They are sympathetic and yet flawed. None of them are too good to be true and none of them have the sorts of flaws that are really only assets in disguise. These could be real people in the 60's in Mississippi. The various plot threads wind together nicely, weaving around the main plot carefully. The tension builds as Skeeter's book forms and anxiety over whether she has done these women a disservice, laying them open to recognition increases as the pages turn. The black community too becomes more and more tightly wound as the narrative goes along and Stockett has done a great job showing that the greater civil rights movement, the murders, the disappearances and the injustices, is a cause of this as much as the incendiary book Skeeter is compiling with their compliance. The revelation of the book and the protections surrounding it are masterful and while the book's completion is not the end of the book, it certainly could be as the rest of the novel has a sort of epilogue feel to it. But even if it is an epilogue, Stockett wisely leaves some threads untied and the potential for disaster, so prevalent at the time, intact. This was certainly worth the buzz it earned last year, a quick, engrossing read, despite the length of the book. Book clubs whish haven't already done it will love it and have much to talk about. Lone readers will also devour it, taken back to a time in our recent past that we tend to want to forget. Stockett has brought not only the time but the everyday reality of it to the forefront of our memories again, for which we can only thank her.

Review: The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

There is no doubt that Salman Rushdie has a way with words. He is capable of writing devastatingly gorgeous prose, but in this offering, despite the wordsmithing, he didn't twine his narratives together well enough to have the whole hang together quite like he's capable of doing. I first read Rushdie when I was in graduate school. Midnight's Children was a complete revelation. It was stunning and impressive and made me rush right out to buy everything else he'd written to that point. Not too long after that came the fatwa over The Satanic Verses and in my usual modus operandi ("if it's causing a kerfuffle or being banned, I must buy it and support the author"), I zipped out and purchased that too despite not being terribly intrigued by the premise. I finally read it last year. And it bored me silly. So Mr. Rushdie had hit both ends of the reading experience spectrum for me, high and low. Perhaps then, it makes sense that this read was middle of the road. He's just covering all his bases.

The novel opens with a yellow-haired traveler making his way towards the great city of Mughal Emperor Akbar. Calling himself the Mogor dell'Amore, this character is the thread that will ultimately weave the seemingly disparate story lines together. There is the storyline of Akbar and his imaginary wife, the story of three boys in Florence, and the story of the eponymous Enchantress of Florence, Qara Koz. In each of the story lines, especially as they come closer and closer to converging, Rushdie is clearly playing with apparent opposites: East and West, real and imagined, history and fiction. But he is also highlighting the similarities among things so seemingly different.

Our yellow-haired stranger in his patchwork coat of many colors tells a tale to Akbar, the tale of a forgotten Mughal princess who left the East for the West and was subsequently scrubbed from history. Is his tale true and if so, what impact will it have on the court of Akbar? There are multiple side narratives threading through the recounting of Qara Koz's life and Rushdie often interrupts his own narrative with asides to pull the reader out of the haze into which our storyteller has carefully led us. These textual interruptions, and indeed the many allusions (many of which I am certain I missed) scattered throughout, bring the reader up short, always pointing to the fictional and illusory nature of both this story and the story within the story.

Somehow, even with all the dazzling sleight of hand by Rushdie, ultimately the story was a little flat. Despite Qara Koz gaining in solidity throughout the telling of her story, she never came across as a fully realized character. She remained transparent, merely showing others through the lens of her actions rather than becoming the focus herself. Was this intentional and I've missed the point? Perhaps. I enjoyed the novel while in Akbar's city far more than I did once the setting changed to Florence and the maneuverings of the Medici family. The Mughal empire was more richly evoked than Florence, at least for me. It was clever to use real, historical people in this fictional investigation into the idea of the real versus the created but perhaps the novel wandered too far and wide to entirely and successfully pull off whatever ambitious intention Rushdie had for it. An interesting read, I was left feeling a bit let down despite recognizing Rushdie's undoubted brilliance.

Historical Fiction Reading Challenge

Historical fiction is another genre that I do really like. Luckily Royal Reviews is running a bunch of challenges fitting most of the things I like to read. So I'm jumping on the bandwagon of the Historical Fictional Reading Challenge.

Challenge Guidelines:
1. Anyone can join. You don't need a blog to participate.
--Non-Bloggers: Include your information in the comment section.

2. There are four levels:

-- Curious – Read 3 Historical Fiction novels.

-- Fascinated – Read 6 Historical Fiction novels.

-- Addicted – Read 12 Historical Fiction novels.

-- Obsessed – Read 20 Historical Fiction novels.

3. Any book format counts.

4. You can list your books in advance or just put them in a wrap up post. If you list them, feel free to change them as the mood takes you.

5. Challenge begins January 1st thru December, 2010.

Since I like to start with the lowest commitment and work my way up, I've committed to the curious level. Here's my list:

1. The Italian Lover by Robert Hellenga
2. Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant
3. The Texicans by Nina Vida