Review: Devotion by Katherine Sutcliffe

An historical romance with incredibly dark overtones, this novel opens with Maria defying her abusive and quite possible mentally deranged father and accepting a position as nurse to the Duchess of Salterdon's grandson. In accepting this way out of her father's home (and hopefully the means to earning enough money to save her mother as well), she doesn't inquire too closely into her charge and his malady. And it turns out that she is not to be nurse to a sickly child but to a very virile, by turns comatose or violent adult man who has been retreating into his own world ever since he was beaten badly during a robbery a year or so prior. Trey had been a man about town when he was set upon by thieves and paralyzed and he has slowly been slipping into insanity, abandoned by the same society that once toasted him. But with the advent of Maria, there is something that pulls him back from the edge. And he's not happy about stepping back from the brink, thinking, no knowing, that he's not a complete man. Maria masters her fear of the mercurial and dangerous Trey, proving incredibly devoted in nursing him back to health and ultimately falling in love with the man she knows instinctually is in the shell he so despises.

Sutcliffe tells a different story than so many, making her characters work incredibly hard to overcome their tortured pasts and then still putting the stumbling block of being of different classes in front of them. That she doesn't completely resolve the plot in the end is frustrating but if it had stood alone, that wouldn't have been as infuriating as it is to find that you must read a later book in order to find out how Trey and Maria's desire and devotion are rewarded. This is the second book in the series so perhaps I would have been happier having read the first one before this. As it is, the ending felt hurried and unfinished and left me feeling unsatisfied with the book as a whole.

Review: Swift As Desire by Laura Esquivel

A tribute to her telegraph operator father, Esquivel's novel about Jubilo, gifted with the ability to hear more than just the words that people say, and his wife and daughter, this doesn't compare to her famous Like Water for Chocolate. Jubilo lies blind, incapacitated by severe Parkinson's Disease and dying. His daughter Lluvia, in whose home he is, brings his friends in to try and entertain her father and in so doing, uncovers the reason why her two very passionate parents haven't been speaking to each other since before her birth. Jubilo and Lucha led a turbulent life with each other, complicated by the fact that Jubilo's second sense about people failed him at crucial times with his wife. The story of Jubilo's life, especially after meeting Lucha, is alternated with his present and his daughter's careful caretaking. Uncovering the mystery that drove her parents apart and helping them to repair their hearts before Jubilo dies is part of what drives Lluvia as she bustles around her father's bedside.

Unfortunately the writing here is choppy and lackluster and it takes a real effort for the reader to continue along with the storyline. The mystery itself isn't alluded to until quite a ways into the story and still isn't compelling enough to make the pages turn quickly. Lucha as a character is a rotten, whiny, spoiled brat and there's little to no explanation as to why she would be so appealing to Jubilo and to other men around her. Jubilo as a character is gifted with his almost magical powers (more a heightened sensitivity) and yet Esquivel doesn't choose to show him using this intuition much at all and refers to it most only when it fails him, which makes his character feel more allegorical than real. There are plot lines that seem as if they should be major themes but they peter out for lack of life. All in all, this was a disappointment.

Review: The Bloody War, Mate by John Mantle

This book has been on my shelves literally for years. And I think the reason it languished there for so long was that I didn't really have a proper idea of what it was about, having been handed the book at a bookcrossing meet-up so many years ago. But I am grateful that I had not yet learned self-preservation in regards to turning books down back then because this turned out to be an entirely worthwhile and appealing reading experience despite my years-long reservations.

Based on many events that Mantle himself witnessed as a boy in London during WWII, this is the story of John, a young boy on the cusp of growing up who becomes a teen and then an adult through the terrible years of destruction and deprivation. Childhood during war is still childhood but it has a gruesome backdrop no child should have to endure. John lives with his mother and his older sister in a sort of shabby section of London. His father is generally missing from their lives even before the war comes, causing them financial hardship. When the war starts, his mother takes in relatives as boarders to help them survive. But young John seems generally untouched by the war and the new circumstances at home because he is smitten with his neighbor Sheila. And the two of them grow up together as the war pounds on, coming closer, becoming more personal, and finally obliquely tearing them apart.

The characters here are compelling and real. And Mantle has drawn a very clear and detailed London, before, during, and after the Blitz using sight, sound, and smell all to good advantage. He has carefully drawn John and Sheila's relationship and then offered the reader the perspective of both characters through the use of different narrators for different chapters. John narrates the bulk of the story but other characters do get their say and help to flesh out the story. What Mantle has done so very well is to capture the everyday horror of living with a war and the sheer mundanity with which life must go on even while bombs are dropping all around. John and Sheila are engaging characters for whom the reader roots, even as their differences become clearer and clearer. Their story is touching and the plotline will carry the reader along happily. Readers who enjoy immersing themselves in WWII will thoroughly appreciate this smooth, evocative slice of historical fiction.

Review: Divided Lives: The Public and Private Struggles of Three American Women by Elsa Walsh

Walsh has chosen three American women on the cusp of major decisions in their lives to represent all women and the challenges facing them personally and professionally in the late nineties in the US. I have had this book on my shelf probably since the time about which Walsh was writing but never made the time to read it until now which is a shame.

In the introduction, Walsh details her belief that there are six different areas in which women need to find balance in their lives in order to be happy. Happiness is not having it all or balancing merely the personal and the professional but must also take into consideration a sense of self, a sense of place, and time for self in addition to the more obvious feelings about her job, relationship with a partner, and relationship with children.

To illustrate her point, Walsh followed and interviewed three succesful women over several years: Meredith Vieira, Rachael Worby, and Alison Estabrook. A chapter is devoted to each woman, her challenges, the roadblocks she faced in trying to balance family and work, and the resolution of the major decision facing her at the time of the interviews. Each of these three women are incredibly talented and from the outside they seem to have everything they could ever want. But each of them sacrifices something of herself in pursuit of the perfect life. Walsh's descriptions of the women is in depth and sympathetic. Some of the references are a bit dated given when the book was written. For instance, we know far more about Vieira's tv career now than when she agreed to be Walsh's subject. And a little bit of research will tell the reader that all of these women have gone on to become even more respected and celebrated than they were during their tenure as Walsh's interviewees.

Walsh offers no quick answers to the balance it takes to make a woman's divided life whole but her examination of these three women's lives highlights the difficulty everyone faces in trying to do so. This was a pretty easy and quick read with the interviews being straightforward narratives and only the introductory note to readers and the concluding chapter trying to tease out the deeper meanings in the particular stories. And interesting read, I'd be curious to know if women are still facing the challenges that were the hallmark struggles in this book.

Review: Firefly Cloak by Sheri Reynolds

Tessa Lee and her little brother Travis are abandoned by their mother and her current boyfriend in a campground near the home of grandparents they've never met. Mom Sheila writes her parents' phone number in permanent marker on little Travis' naked back and leaves the firefly housecoat under which the children were sleeping when she and her boyfriend light out. The story then jumps about eight years to when Tessa Lee is 16 and she decides she must go to the touristy boardwalk a few hours away where her mother was last seen working so that she can tell her the terrible thing that happened to Travis. As Tessa Lee makes this journey, and is confronted with a truth she never wanted to face, much of the backstory also becomes clear. As you'd expect, Tessa Lee loses some of her innocence, although she is extraordinarily lucky on her journey as well but the largest growth in a character somes to her grandmother, who has tried very hard to recognize the ways in which she alienated her own daughter, Tessa's mother Sheila, and to change that in her treatment of Tessa Lee. The ending has a few too many coincidences but Reynolds resists the urge to unveil them all to the characters, even if the reader sees them, which is a bit of a help. There are several extended scenes that are completely gratuitous and offered nothing to the story, despite the desperate attempts at connecting them through the reader's guide questions. And the ultimate end to the book was too easy, unrealistic, and clearly incomplete.

This was a book chosen for my bookclub based on one member's strength of feeling for a previous book of Reynolds' and she spent most of the meeting apologizing as not one person particularly enjoyed this one. It was hard to sympathize with the characters, even as they changed, they stayed strangely flat. There were instances of lovely writing but even that couldn't save the book from mediocrity, unfortunate since everyone had wanted to enjoy it so very much. An interesting premise, it fell short of its promise.