Category: books

Day 872: Elizabeth Is Missing

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Cover for Elizabeth Is MIssingBefore I begin my review, here is a little bit of news about the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Some of you may know that, along with Helen of She Reads Novels, I am attempting to read all the short-listed novels. Today the short list for 2016 was released. To see the list, check out my Walter Scott project page. I have only read one of the novels, but was disappointed, along with other readers, to see that A God in Ruins, which was on the long list, didn’t make the short list.

* * *

Elizabeth Is Missing is—I won’t disguise it—the third book about Alzheimers I’ve read in the last six months. When the book blurb says Maud is forgetful, that’s putting it mildly. After only a few pages of this novel, I wondered why Maud was living alone.

Maud is an old lady who is having trouble keeping track of just about everything. She writes herself reminder notes but loses them. She makes endless cups of tea and forgets them. Her caregiver comes in every morning and makes her lunch and she has eaten it by 9:30. She remembers occasionally that her friend Elizabeth is missing. Elizabeth doesn’t answer her phone and she isn’t home. But no one pays attention to a dotty old lady.

Of course, we realize fairly quickly that Elizabeth isn’t missing, but Maud has a more important mystery in her life. When she was a young girl just after World War II, her older sister Sukey disappeared, never to be seen again. Although Maud’s short-term memory is inconsistent, there’s nothing wrong with her long-term memory, at least not at first, so the more coherent narrative is the time around Sukey’s disappearance. Maud finds the boundaries between the past and present blurring.

I found this novel extremely painful to read at times, even more so than Still Alice. However, it is certainly compelling although not perhaps as realistic as Still Alice is.

One thing that bothered me, although only a bit, is that Maud clearly has all the information she needs to solve her sister’s disappearance, if only she can make sense of it. But she tried to investigate when she was young, and she had the same information then. That she would finally solve it in her current condition is a bit hard to buy. We’re to understand that she found something before the action of the novel, though. At least, that’s what I think happened, since sometimes the narration from the point of view of a confused old woman is a little opaque.

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Day 871: The Summer Before the War

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Cover for The Summer before the WarBest Book of the Week!
I, for one, have been waiting for Helen Simonson’s second novel ever since I read the first one. And here it is!

Hugh Grange is preparing to pick up the new schoolteacher from the station at the beginning of The Summer Before the War. His Aunt Agatha has been instrumental in the school board’s controversial decision to hire a woman as the school’s new Latin mistress. Agatha has supported the hire because the woman was the most qualified applicant, but she is aware that her position as well as the teacher’s is precarious and that the mayor’s wife, Bettina Fothergill, is up to something.

So, Beatrice Nash arrives to take the position unaware that it is already threatened. She has been eager to leave the home of her father’s relatives, where she has lived since her father’s death. She soon finds that he has bargained away her freedom by agreeing to put her money into trust in return for being allowed to return home to his estranged family. Beatrice’s trustees start right out by assuming that she is mishandling her money.

Hugh is a medical student who is working under Dr. Ramsey, a well-known Harley Street physician. Hugh is a careful person whose future is neatly charted out. He will qualify in a year and then marry Dr. Ramsey’s daughter and join his practice. But the Great War breaks out, and Dr. Ramsey pressures him to accompany him to the front. Hugh wants to finish qualifying first, but Lucy Ramsey threatens to give him a white feather if he doesn’t join up.

Hugh’s cousin Daniel is a poet, and he plans to open a journal in London with his good friend Craigmore, Lord North’s son. But after Lord North sees Daniel and Craigmore together at the local hops festival, he makes Craigmore join the air corps. Daniel joins the Artists’ Rifles in reaction.

link to NetgalleyThis description doesn’t do much justice to the novel, which is about how all the characters’ lives are affected by the war. Aside from the same kind of class and town politics featured in Simonson’s delightful Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, we meet a handful of characters who are genuinely likable and we get very involved in several subplots.

Simonson evokes a bustling town of Rye in 1917, with it occupants becoming involved in their various war activities. Belgian refugees arrive, and the town begins to experience the first horrors of war. This novel makes an absorbing second effort that is at times very touching.

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Day 870: Jane Steele

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Cover for Jane SteeleBest Book of the Week!
Fans of Lyndsay Faye’s Timothy Wilde trilogy (I am one) have undoubtedly been looking forward to Jane Steele, which she describes as a riff on Jane Eyre. In this novel, which Faye dedicates to “Miss Eyre and Mr. Nickleby,” Jane Steele describes her life as one very similar to Jane Eyre’s, only with an important difference—Jane Steele is a serial killer.

At the beginning of the novel, Jane is nine or ten years old, living in a cottage with her mother on the grounds of Highgate House. Although her mother has told her Highgate House belongs to her, it is occupied by her Aunt Patience Barbary and her cousin Edwin. Mrs. Barbary hates Jane and her mother, and after her mother’s death from an overdose of some opiate, Mrs. Barbary wastes no time in preparing to ship Jane off to Lowan Bridge School, run by Mr. Vesalius Munt. But before that can happen, Edwin tries to rape Jane, who pushes him off a cliff to his death. Terrified by the perspicacious Constable Quillfeather, Jane goes meekly to school.

It is difficult to know how much to reveal in this review, but suffice it to say that almost every action in Jane Eyre is echoed in some way in Jane Steele, but always with a twist. Mr. Munt is, if anything, a worse sadist and hypocrite than the headmaster of Lowood School. Jane Steele has a dear friend in the school, Rebecca Clarke, who comes close to dying, but when Mr. Munt offers Jane a choice between further starving Clarke or agreeing to be sent to an asylum, Jane instead chooses to stab him with a letter opener. Jane being sixteen by then, she and Clarke run off to London.

link to NetgalleyEventually, Jane meets her Mr. Rochester when she forges credentials as a governess to go work at Highgate House. There she hopes to search for proof of her mother’s claim that the house belongs to her. She finds herself in an unusual environment. The house belongs to Mr. Charles Thornfield, a nephew of Patience Barbary. Her charge is a little Sikh girl named Sahjara, and the entire household is Sikh. This household has its own secrets, to do with the betrayal of the Khaba, the Sikh military, by its own leaders.

This novel is a romping good read, full of adventure. It features a missing treasure, secret identities, several oily villains, and the resurrection of the heroine’s self-esteem. Yes, Jane kills five men. Do we still like her? Absolutely. I think you’re going to love this book.

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Day 869: Snow

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Cover for SnowSnow is a charming picture book I got for my nephew for Christmas. It is a Caldecott Medal winner with beautiful pictures.

A boy sees a snowflake and says it is snowing, but the adults dismiss it. The radio says it isn’t supposed to snow.

But the weather has other ideas. Soon snow is everywhere. The boy and his dog frolic in the snow, and some Mother Goose figures come down from a sign and frolic with them.

Written for little children or early readers, this is a delightful book with lovely pictures.

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Day 868: Flight of Dreams

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Cover for Flight of DreamsI liked Ariel Lawhon’s first book only moderately but enough so that I was willing to give her second book a try. Since the ending of the first book redeemed what I initially considered a mediocre novel, I was trying to hold out for the ending of this one. That being said, after more than 160 pages, I gave up on Flight of Dreams.

The novel is about the flight of the Hindenburg on its way from Germany to the U. S. on the trip that ends with its explosion. The novel has a large cast of characters, passengers and crew. Many of the characters have secrets, including a couple on some sort of mission, a thief who has deeper motives, and a Jewish woman attempting to leave Germany.

In what Lawhon was attempting, this novel reminded me of Dead Wake, Erik Larson’s nonfiction book about the sinking of the Lusitania. Frankly, Dead Wake built up a lot more suspense. The pace of this novel truly drags. At more than 400 pages, we follow practically every second of four days. By page 168, where I stopped, the book had only reached breakfast on the second day. Since the Hindenburg departed in the evening, I knew I was in trouble.

Perhaps there are too many characters in the novel. We see the actions from five points of view, but there is no distinct voice that differentiates them one from the other. Each narrative point of view sounds the same. Further distance is created by the chapter names, which continue to refer to the characters by their roles (the American, the Stewardess) even after we know their names.

What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t care about Max and Emilie’s romance or what was going on with the Adelts or what the American was up to. I keep making this complaint, but it seems as though some authors don’t know that part of their job is to get readers to care about what happens, not just put characters through their paces. The most notable novels I have read in recent years (or maybe ever) have all shared one trait—they have all had a distinctive voice.

link to NetgalleyFinally, some of the scenes between people play like TV melodrama. I’m thinking of the fight between the Adelts over Gertrud going to the bar and a scene where Emilie kisses a man she doesn’t care for in front of Max. These scenes seem like simply (hackneyed) devices to move the plot, not as if they are originating from the realistic behavior of a character. As far as I was concerned, the Hindenburg could have blown up 300 pages earlier.

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Day 867: The Squire

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Cover for The SquireI don’t think I paid attention to what The Squire was about when I picked it up. Instead, I homed in on the author’s name when selecting it from a list of Persephone books. I’m not sure whether I would have picked it out if I had noticed, since it is about childbearing and motherhood, something I have no experience with. Further, some of the attitudes expressed, particularly about the role of men, are very out of date, although well in tune with the novel’s time.

The squire, who is known only as that through the novel, is a woman past 40 who is due to give birth. With her husband away, she is trying to run her household in the last days of her pregnancy, and there are quite a few crises, particularly with the servants. The squire already has four children, the youngest about four, and she spends a lot of time observing them and thinking about their characters.

There are some things about this novel that I found very foreign. One is how much time the squire spends thinking about death. First, I thought this was because she was about to give birth, but later she considers the same trait in her daughter Lucy, who is only 11 or 12. The other was my surprise at the role of the midwife, who is there more for after the birth than the birth itself. She keeps the squire almost totally isolated and quiet, trying to get her milk to come in correctly. What a contrast to today, when women are practically booted out the door of the hospital. But also, there is a strong class aspect to this and to all the squire’s problems. A woman from another class would have to take care of all her children during this time, unless she was lucky enough to have a neighbor or family member to help, and her biggest concern wouldn’t be hiring a new cook or nursemaid.

I found some aspects of this book interesting, but I didn’t really relate to the main character. But then again, I also felt some distance from The Happy Foreigner, so maybe my problem is with Bagnold as a writer rather than the subject matter of this novel.

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Day 866: Yuki Chan in Brontë Country

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Cover for Yuki Chan in Bronte CountryYuki Chan is on a pilgrimage of sorts. Her mother died ten years ago when Yuki was 13, and just before that she made a trip to England. Yuki is trying to visit the places her mother visited, to feel closer to her and to try to figure out why she died. This pilgrimage has brought her to Haworth and a tour of the Brontë’s house.

Yuki thinks of herself as a psychic detective, but we also follow some of her other musings, most of them very peculiar. She is clearly an eccentric personality.

I wasn’t sure how much I related to Yuki as she performed her various experiments, for example, standing in the same place before the Haworth parsonage window where her mother appears in a photo. She has five photos that she uses to retrace her mother’s footsteps.

link to NetgalleyDuring her adventures, she befriends a teenage girl named Denny. Denny has a bit of a lawless demeanor that gets them into some adventures as she takes Yuki around the snowy landscape on her brother’s motorcycle.

Ultimately, this novel is touching, but it takes a while before we understand Yuki’s compulsions. I don’t think we get any insight to any of the characters except Yuki herself. I only moderately enjoyed this quirky novel.

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Day 865: Arctic Summer

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Cover for Arctic SummerFrom its description, I thought that Arctic Summer might be one of the most interesting books I’m reading from the Walter Scott Prize list. It is described as a fictional biography of E. M. Forster, particularly leading up to his publication of A Passage to India.

That is certainly the time period the novel covers, and A Passage to India is one of its preoccupations. But the novel spends most of its time on Forster’s obsession with his homosexuality and his desire for sexual experience. As I’m not all that interested in reading about anyone’s obsession with sexuality, this novel was not the best fit for me.

The novel begins in 1912 on Forster’s first trip to India. While he is there, he will visit a good friend, Masood, and he has hopes that his life will open up, particularly in regard to sex. At the age of 33, he is still a virgin, his fear of disgrace holding him back from expressing his sexuality at home. Perhaps in India he will have an experience, maybe with Masood, whom he loves.

Unfortunately, Forster, who goes by Morgan, has a tendency to fall in love with heterosexual men and prefers men from a lower class, so nothing quite works out the way he wishes. Even when he finally has some encounters, years later, what he is actually looking for is love, which he never finds. The novel follows him during the long gestation of his novel about India, back to England, to Alexandria during World War I, and back to India again. During this time, his most significant relationships are with two friends who do not return his feelings.

The novel is extremely well written, and Galgut deeply characterizes Morgan, if not the other characters. It did make me wonder if any person could be so relentlessly focused on sex, although of course he is also lonely. It also made me wonder how, if he really felt this unrelenting focus, he ever got anything written. Certainly this novel makes you feel for Forster—he was a sad man.

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