Review: Finding Emilie by Laurel Corona

Spirited, unconventional, brilliant. We generally think of these as compliments but when applied to a young woman during the French Enlightenment, no matter that she was the intellectual superior of many of the leading minds of the day, these were not compliments. Indeed, they were thinly veiled insults. Luckily there were still women who ignored the whispers and mutterings, driven to use their brains and defy convention. This historical fiction posits one such woman, Lili du Chatelet, the daughter of noted French philosopher and intimate of Voltaire, Emilie, the Marquise of Chatelet. Historically Emilie died not long after giving birth to her last daughter and that daughter, Stanislas-Adelaide, called Lili here, died as a toddler. Corona has taken the opportunity to wonder what would have happened if Lili had lived and been gifted with a brain as fleet and adept as her mother's.

Told in two narrative threads, this is both the story of Lili and her desire to be allowed to exercise her intelligence even if she had to stand outside of the norms of the time to do it and of her mother and the circumstances surrounding a brilliant life cut short. The latter storyline shows in brief snapshots between the more detailed tale of Lili's life. After her mother's death, she was raised for a few years by her father's strict, unbending, authoritarian, and unimaginative sister-in-law. Luckily the Baronne's health forces her to turn Lili over to Julie Bercy, a friend and confidante of Lili's late mother Julie's own daughter is Lili's age and the two girls grow up as sisters under the kind and loving tutelage of their Maman. Even luckier, Julie Bercy is an intellectual herself, holding salons and encouraging the girls to think for themselves, nurturing the spark she sees in Lili. She is also an accomplished hostess and able to model for the girls a way in which to live in the world as it is and to still satisfy their curiousity, shine, and find happiness.

The girls are charming and their growth, especially Lili's, from naive children to intuitive adults, is well limned. The difficulty of trying to fit into a society that only wants women to be ornaments when the woman in question wants to match wits with the men had to be incredibly disheartening and Corona does a wonderful job capturing Lili's frustration as she learns to work within and around the constraints placed on her by her sex. The addition of short snippets of Lili's fictional creation, helps to underline the life lessons the girls learn as they grow and also offers them a fanciful escape from their reality as well as hope that they might ultimately escape for real.

Pre-Revolutionary France is fascinating and quite detailed in Corona's presentation here. The minutia of the court and the social niceties are accurately and carefully depicted. The weaving of historical figures with fictional characters works seamlessly and Corona's version of what could possibly have happened to a brilliant daughter of Emilie du Chatelet is entirely plausible. This was a very satisfying read combining both the realities and restrictions of the times with the courage and convictions of a smart, strong-willed young woman who is ultimately encouraged and allowed to thrive.

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

Review: Alice I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin

When my dad gave eight-year old me a red leather copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I treasured the beautiful book both for its physical appearance and for its fantastical story. As I grew older and visited Wonderland again in a kiddie lit class in college, I learned a bit about the story behind the story. Alice Liddell. The girl for whom Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland. The waif in many of the decidedly un-Victorian photographs that Charles Dodgson took. A hint of impropriety. And really that is the sum total of what I knew about "the real Alice" before I started Benjamin's fascinating novelization.

Opening with an aged Alice, immediately after the sale of her original manuscript, reflecting on her life as the inspiration for the famous nursery tale. How it has been tiring to be the object of such speculation. From thence, traveling back in time, Alice narrates her life starting with her early childhood in Oxford where her family was intimately acquainted with mathematics teacher Charles Dodgson. Alice's childhood and relationship with Dodgson are drawn in shimmering, sympathetic detail. The friendship between the adult Dodgson and the child Alice starts off innocently but eventually becomes fraught and captured through innuendo, causing a shiver of distaste, worry, or foreboding to travel down the reader's spine. The break between the Liddells and Dodgson comes without explicitly speculating on the reason behind it but suggesting, as the rumors of the day did, that there was ultimately an inappropriateness to Dodgson's relationship with Alice.

Whatever the cause, Alice Liddell did not forever remain the child Dodgson immortalized but indeed grew up and lived out a life that was certainly not the stuff of fairy tales. Benjamin chronicles Alice's adult life, the disappointments and losses as well as the late dawning realization of love and what it has meant to her to be, her whole life, "that Alice."

Using what is known for certain about Alice's life and adding in reasonable speculation, Benjamin has created a nuanced and beautifully written story. Alice is a sympathetic character. Dodgson comes off as somehow both innocent and lecherous. And the tale as a whole is not only readable but fascinatingly addictive. Having Alice narrate her own life gives a poignancy, bittersweetness, and retrospective feel to the novel as it retains the Victorian sensibility that was likely a cornerstone of the real Alice Liddell's entire life. Beautifully rendered, if you've ever wondered about Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, wondered what life was like on this side of the looking glass, this is the book for you.

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

Review: Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi

I read the first Persepolis in an effort to overcome my dislike of graphic novels. And although my opinion of the genre didn't change, I decided to go ahead and read the second of these memoirs (mostly because I already had it waiting for me in the house). It also didn't change my opinion of graphic memoirs. I think I'm just not destined to like them much. It's not a snobbery thing. I appreciate how difficult it is to be succinct, draw aesthetically pleasing pictures, and manage to marry the two in such a way that they tell a complex and nuanced story. I just don't enjoy the result. A personal failing perhaps, but there you have it.

Persepolis 2 tells Satrapi's story from her early teens when she left a war torn Iran for Austria, through her unsettled and rootless life in Vienna as she faced culture shock, experienced racism, and rebelled against so much, to her eventual return to Iran and her family, her education once home, her marriage, and her eventual decision to leave Iran forever. As in the first book, the heavy, dark illustrations underline the bleakness of Satrapi's experiences. She endured much at an age long before anyone should be asked to shoulder such responsibility and the unsophisticated, simple artwork conveys that.

Her tale is a wrenching one but for me, the drawings detract from the sympathy I should have been feeling. And I couldn't shake the feeling that there was much left out, especially anything positive, at least in part because of the constraints of graphic novels. Overall, everything about the story felt detached to me. I know that both Persepolis and Persepolis 2 have earned much acclaim but they just didn't move me. Whether I would have appreciated the story told in a more traditional novel format I can't say, but I definitely think that graphic novels are not for me.

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.