Category: Books

Review 2684: Wolfe Island

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For quite a while, I wasn’t sure whether Wolfe Island is a contemporary novel or a dystopian one set in the near future. Eventually, it became clear that it is dystopian. It was published in 2019, but we are so much nearer now to its reality that it’s scary.

Kitty Hawke has lived on Wolfe Island in Chesapeake Bay almost all her life. It was once thriving, the home of watermen and their families and summer tourists. Now, with the rising waters, she is the only person left. She is an artist who makes sculptures out of found objects, and her only company is her wolf-dog Girl. All the houses on the island but hers are ruins.

Kitty tried to live off the island when she married Hart, but away from the marshes she couldn’t create, and she felt like an outsider. Once her daughter Claudie was a teenager, she left her family to return to the island, causing a break with Claudie.

During a storm, some people arrive on the island, three teenagers—two boys and a girl—and a little girl. Kitty recognizes the teenage girl as one who asked her questions when a school field trip came to the island. It turns out, she is Kitty’s granddaughter Cat, whom Kitty has never met. With her are her boyfriend Josh and Luis, a Hispanic young man, and his little sister Alejandra. Cat explains that she and Josh illegally drive people north, but they need to lie low for a while.

Luis and Alejandra are illegal aliens. Their father disappeared and their mother has been arrested. They are trying to find their mother, in a climate where ordinary citizens are challenging people to produce their papers and men are running around shooting anyone who looks foreign. Rising waters have ruined the soil of many farms, places are abandoned, and people are flocking north.

The young people move into a nearby house, and they stay there for several months while Cat is pregnant and eventually has the baby. But soon afterward, it becomes clear that someone has found them.

This is a really engaging and occasionally exciting novel. I’m having to eat my words about being sick of dystopian novels, as two of the best novels I read lately are dystopian, and this is one of them.

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14th Anniversary! Top Ten Books of the Year!

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It’s hard to believe that yesterday was the 14th anniversary of my blog. As has become my habit, this is the time that I list my favorite books of the ones I reviewed during the year. As usual, I make my list from the Best of Ten books during the year.

This year was a tough one to pick, because I had twelve books that were difficult to choose among, along with all the other Best of Tens. I ended up with three or four fairly recent books and five or six classic novels, one comic novel, three novels about the course of the main character’s childhood and life, four historical novels and one partially historical, one nonfiction memoir, one mystery, and one drama with a twist. Three were by men, and seven by women. Two of these books were re-reads for me.

So, here they are, in the order I reviewed them:

Review 2683: Hex

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I actually read Hex for Novellas in November but somehow forgot to schedule it for November. Oh well.

It seems I have been reading the Darkland Tales series in order without even knowing it existed. I read the first, Rizzio by Denise Mina, because I usually read everything by her. Hex is the second.

Darkland Tales is a series of retellings of incidents in Scottish history, written by well-known Scottish writers. In this case, Hex is about the hanging of Geillis Duncan (not the Outlander Geillis Duncan) as a witch in 1591 Edinburgh.

The story begins with a witch from 2021 using a seance to visit Geillis in her cell the night before her execution. Iris, the real witch, is determined that Geillis will not spend her last night alone. Geillis is a young housemaid, a healer who has fallen afoul of her master’s plot to steal the inheritance of his wealthy sister-in-law.

This story interprets the witchcraft trials as misogyny, which they were, and so its two main characters express a great deal of the opposite. This work is symbolic and poetic, sometimes a little too abstract for me, but also angry. It’s powerful.

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Review 2682: The Woman in the Hall

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Molly and Jay Blake have led a straitened but normal childhood until Jay is hospitalized and needs care that Lorna Blake cannot afford. So, she has Molly dress in her shabby gym dress and takes her to beg at a rich person’s house. Molly is mortified. Lorna has an unusual relationship with her servant, Susan, and we understand from a conversation that this is not the first time Lorna has done this.

Jay recovers and life returns to normal. However, periodically Lorna gets restless and begins approaching rich people, telling them outrageous stories and usually coming away with money. She is a professional con woman who uses the excuse of needing money for her daughters, when she is clearly excited by this life. In fact, in some way she makes herself believe her lies. For example, years after she lies about Jay wanting to play the violin, she says that Jay used to beg her for luxuries, including the violin. In fact, both girls are horrified by their mother’s behavior and seldom ask for anything.

Lorna has done things in the past that have made her enemies. Captain Alexander Muir-Leslie’s engagement to Sylvia, whom he adores, is broken when he tries to convince her that Lorna cheated her. So, he begins trying to track Lorna down. He travels to America because Lorna has told people that her husband, Neil Inglefield, deserted her and her daughters. But Neil Inglefield is her stepbrother, not her husband. In company with his friend, Shirley Dennison, whose romance with Neil’s brother Lorna broke up years ago, Neil sets out to find Lorna. Instead, he finds Molly.

The first part of the novel, dealing with the girl’s earlier lives, seemed to me to become a bit repetitive after a while, as Lorna pulls her cons and then turns her stories back on her children to justify herself. Later, with the introduction of Muir-Leslie, the novel begins to be more about the effects on other people’s lives of her lies. This change immediately made the novel more interesting, culminating in a grotesque betrayal of one of her daughters.

I’ve always been interested in novels about sociopaths, and Lorna is an early portrayal. Also, the words “child abuse” are never spoken, and perhaps in 1939 Lorna’s behavior wouldn’t be understood that way, but it is now. This novel is a compelling character study. There are characters to like in this novel, but Lorna isn’t one of them.

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Review 2681: A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth

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A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth is a collection of short stories that I read for my Pulitzer Prize project. I sometimes have problems reading short stories, but I found most of these engrossing. Most of them were about scientific curiosity and the characters’ actual or potential legacy.

“Death of the Pugilist, or the Famous Battle of Jacob Burke & Blindman McGraw” is set during the early 19th century. It is about how a burly lad becomes a prize fighter. These were the days of no-holds-barred bare-knuckle fights.

Another historical story, “The Ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace,” is about an early collector of bug specimens who begins to draw conclusions similar to Darwin’s about the survival of the fittest. He writes to Darwin hoping for a scholarly exchange, but perhaps Darwin is worried about which of them thought of the theory first. This one has really beautiful prose.

“For the Union Dead” is a contemporary story about the narrator’s uncle, who became involved in Civil War re-enactments.

“The Second Doctor Service” is a letter to a medical journal from a 19th century man who begins having periods of blackouts and thinks another self is trying to take him over.

“The Miraculous Discovery of Psammetichus I” is based on a story by Herodotus. It’s a series of descriptions of experiments supposedly performed by a curious Pharoah, most of which involve having children raised by animals.

“On Growing Ferns and Other Plants in Glass Cases, in the Midst of the Smoke of London” is set in the 19th century during the height of the industrial revolution and major air pollution. A widow’s young son begins suffering from severe asthma, and the doctors fail to treat it successfully. She eventually gets a better idea.

“The Line Agent Pascal” is set in the 19th century South American jungle. Pascal is a telegraph operator who likes the isolation of his position but forms a sort of family with the other operators. There is one in particular whom he has never met but for whom he feels an affinity.

“On the Cause of Winds and Waves, &c” is a letter to her sister by a 19th century balloonist in France. Observing a strange phenomenon in the heavens, she is asked to report about it to the scientific Académie, but she doesn’t realize she has only been asked to be ridiculed.

“A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth” is a record by a man who has been incarcerated in an insane asylum but is probably OCD or on the spectrum instead of insane.

Most of these stories have some kind of uplifting ending. Maybe I enjoyed them so much because many of them felt like short historical novels. I liked them a lot.

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Review 2680: Fenwomen

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Fenwomen is the very first book printed by Virago, an ethnographic study of women living in a remote village in the English fens in the 1970s. By interviewing women of all ages and situations, Mary Chamberlain, now Emeritus Professor of History at Oxford Brookes University, recorded memories of conditions for women as far back as the late 19th century.

The timing of this book isn’t a coincidence, because it came about along with a new movement toward women’s liberation when some colleges and universities were beginning to set up departments in women’s studies. In fact, I found the updated Introduction, written in 2010, just as interesting as the book itself. It tells the story of the original reception of the book and how some journalists and critics so misrepresented its contents that it broke the trust Chamberlain had gained with the inhabitants of the village. I assume the men did this because they felt threatened by the idea of a feminist study.

The work explores women’s lives—their work, religion, entertainments, family life, and so on—in this isolated village, very primitive living conditions in the past, limited work opportunities, isolation from transportation, etc. It’s not a very long book, and my Full Circle Editions edition ends with about 20 beautiful photographs of the area and people by Justin Partyka.

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Review 2679: Heaven, My Home

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I’m really liking the Highway 59 series by Attica Locke. I think the mysteries are fully imagined, and black Texas Ranger Darren Mathews is interesting and appealing. I have a few problems with some ongoing issues, but I’ll talk about them later.

Nine-year-old Levi King has gone missing, and his father Bill King, a racist and murderer, has written from prison asking for help finding him. Darren’s boss needs him to help out, as there is hope that King can offer insight on other cases.

Levi lives with his mother Marnie, sister, and Aryan Brotherhood wannabe Gil Thomason, Marnie’s boyfriend, in Hopetown on the edge of Caddo Lake, a huge lake that used to be a major transportation route down to Louisiana. Hopetown is barely a crossroads, a trailer park full of racist trailer trash, and closer to the lake, the much nicer homes of the original black and indigenous settlers.

The reactions of some of the people involved to the disappearance are strange. Levi’s mother and sister are clearly upset, but no one else, including Levi’s wealthy grandmother, Rosemary King, seems to be worried. Darren hears that Levi had been harassing the black and Caddo indigenous population, and when he visits Leroy Page, he learns the old black man owns all of the property and hasn’t tossed out the trailer park residents because the lease with Marnie’s recently deceased father, Leroy’s friend, is not up for a year. Leroy isn’t very cooperative, but Darren is disturbed to learn from his best friend Greg, a federal agent, that Leroy Page’s harassment by Levi is being turned around as a motive for murder, especially because Leroy was the last to see Levi. In fact, the Feds want to show the new Trump administration that they are as ready to prosecute black people as white, so they are pushing hard even though there is no proof that Levi is dead.

Darren thinks there is something else going on here, but he has several personal problems in addition to hostility from the local authorities and the federal goals.

The only things I don’t like about this series are the ongoing plot that has Darren suppressing evidence to protect an old family friend and his drinking, which is such a cliché. He is on the wagon and repairing his marriage at the beginning of the novel, but things go south pretty fast (although his wife’s professional goals for him do not match his own, so I don’t prophecy success at that).

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Review 2678: The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography

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Although I’ve read more than one biography of Jane Austen, this graphic biography contained insights I hadn’t read before. That’s probably not surprising, since Janine Barchas is an internationally renowned Austen scholar.

Using information from letters and quotations from Austen’s novels, this graphic biography follows Austen from 1796 until her death. In brighter colors, it contains a few scenes from her novels as in Austen’s imagination and some “Easter eggs’ of scenes from movies. I caught a couple of obvious ones, but I’m sure there were more.

The illustrations are in a naïve, slightly ugly style, but the characters are clearly identifiable, which isn’t always the case in graphic books.

I found this work entertaining and informative. It contains a “glossary” that provides more information for the interested.

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