Day 838: The Forgotten Room

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Cover for The Forgotten RoomThe Forgotten Room is a romance novel, which is not my genre, but it has enough of a focus on family secrets to keep my interest. The novel relates the stories of three romances, set at different times in the same mansion in New York. Written by three romance authors, I suspect that each one wrote one of the stories.

In 1892, Olive Van Allen is employed in the house as a servant, but she is there under false pretenses. The owner of the house, a nouveau-riche businessman named Pratt, hired her father as an architect for the house but then ruined him by refusing to pay him. Olive hopes to find paperwork to prove Pratt owed her father money, but she is distracted by falling madly in love with one of the sons of the house, the artistic Harry Pratt, and stealing meetings with him in his attic studio.

In 1920, Lucy Young takes a job as a secretary at the office of Cromwell, Polk, and Moore, a law office that handles the affairs of the Pratt family. She also takes a room in a boarding house that used to be the Pratt mansion. In addition to the desire for advancement, Lucy hopes to discover in the Pratt papers the connection between the Pratts and her mother and perhaps learn why her mother whispered “Harry” on her death bed. Lucy is also soon torn between two men, her boss, Philip Schuyler, and a handsome art dealer from Charleston, South Carolina, John Ravenel.

In 1944, Kate Schuyler is a doctor serving in a hospital that used to be the Pratt mansion. She gives one of her patients, Captain Cooper Ravenel, her own room in the top of the hospital because the hospital is overcrowded. But she is surprised when Captain Ravenel seems to recognize her and calls her Victorine.

The pleasures in this novel came from trying to figure out how these people are related and what happens to Kate’s mother and grandmother. The tension is supposed to come from whether Kate will be parted from Captain Ravenel, who is engaged to be married to someone else. There’s not much doubt about that, though, and it’s more interesting to find out what secrets kept the other lovers apart.

link to NetgalleyUnfortunately, Olive’s story is based on something a few words could have cleared up and the spitefulness of Prunella Pratt, Harry’s sister. Lucy’s is a little more understandable. What I found unlikely was Prunella’s conversion at the end of the novel to an old lady who regrets her actions and encourages Kate to follow her heart. Yeah.

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Day 837: Highwayman: Winter Swarm

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Cover for Highwayman: Winter SwarmHighwayman: Winter Swarm is a novella-length story that appears to be an episode of a larger novel. This confused me a little until I read that the publisher, Endeavor Press, was publishing electronic novels in installments.

Samson Lyle is a former Roundhead major who is now a highwayman, doing his best to sabotage the efforts of Oliver Cromwell and particularly General Goffe. Lyle’s disaffection came about because of his refusal to participate in Goffe’s massacres of Catholics in Ireland. Lyle’s goodwife was killed in battle after this incident, and Lyle believes the death was no accident. Since then, he has been a bandit, seeking revenge.

Lyle, known as the Ironside Highwayman, is assisted by a teenage girl, Bella, whom he rescued as a young girl from prostitution, and a tavern owner, Eustace, whose live he saved. He also has various informants around the countryside.

The novella opens with a daring theft of the strongbox containing the back pay for the Middlehurst garrison. Later, Lyle attacks the salt detail, knowing Goffe cannot get through the winter without salt to preserve the meat.

This novella is mildly enjoyable as an old-fashioned swashbuckling adventure. If I understand what the publishers are doing correctly, I’m not sure how well it will work. As the first installment, the novella spent time on exposition that may have to be repeated, but it spent little time on characterization. In the tricks Lyle plays on the soldiers, it reminds me just a bit of the first book in Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, but there is no way to judge whether the series will develop any depth. In general, I felt the approach to be unsatisfying, even though I like the idea of reading a novel in serial form, like the Victorians did. But this episodic approach, which probably doesn’t assume people will read the episodes in order, is not the same thing. It reminds me more of episodic graphic novels, without the pictures.

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Day 836: My Name Is Lucy Barton

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Cover for My Name Is Lucy BartonBest Book of the Week!
Lucy Barton grew up very poor in rural Illinois. She looks back to a time as a young married woman, living in New York City with her husband and two daughters and learning to write. At the time, she had not returned to her parents’ house since she went to college. Something horrible associated with her father is hinted at.

Much of Lucy’s story centers around a stay in the hospital, where for some weeks she has an undiagnosed illness. Her husband can’t bear hospitals, so he asks her mother to come. Her mother stays with her, never leaving her room and refusing to use the cot the nurses provide. During this visit, her mother tells her stories about people they both know.

For much of their lives, Lucy’s family has been outcasts. At school other children complained that they smelled funny. For many years, they lived in a garage with exposure to extreme cold and no access to running water. When she was a little girl and both her parents were at work, her older siblings at school, her parents would lock her into her father’s truck. One time a snake was in there with her. These are some of the horrors of Lucy’s childhood.

link to NetgalleyWe can see that Lucy loves other people for the slightest show of kindness. We can understand why.

My Name Is Lucy Barton is an affecting story about a woman learning to deal with her own past and loving people despite it. The novel is also about becoming a writer.

Strout’s prose is wonderful as usual, picking out the little details of life that make her prose so convincing. I delight in Strout’s depictions of ordinary life and people.

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Day 835: Ross Poldark

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Cover for Ross PoldarkYears ago I used to enjoy the odd Winston Graham novel, but it was his crime novels rather than his historical novels I read, Marnie and The Walking Stick. I didn’t get interested in the Poldarks until the recent Masterpiece rework of the series.

Ross Poldark returns to his home in Cornwall from the war in America to find nothing as he expected. His father has died, and his slovenly servants have not kept up the house or the farm. Someone has set about a rumor that he died, and the girl he loves, Elizabeth Chynoweth, is engaged to his cousin Francis.

Ross sets about trying to put his property in order and to deal with his feelings about Elizabeth. He investigates whether he can get one of the mines on his property back into order. He also involves himself in the problems of his tenants.

While he is at a fair to buy livestock, he plucks an urchin out of a fight about a dog. Although the child is dressed as a boy, she is a girl, Demelza. When Ross finds her father has abused her, he agrees not to return her to her family and takes her as a kitchen maid.

Ross Poldark is an interesting historical novel dealing with the problems of the time in Cornwall. I don’t know much about Cornwall, which is associated in my mind with many of the novels of Daphne du Maurier. Although this novel certainly involved me, I found myself unable to separate it from the Masterpiece series. For example, although Demelza is described as dark, I still kept picturing her as a redhead. Since the Masterpiece series is based on the first two books, I’ll have to wait until the third book before I can begin to separate it in my mind. Certainly, the first novel seems just as effective as the series, which has so far followed the novel closely.

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Day 834: Three Board Books

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As I often do when I buy my young relatives a book, I read it quickly to include a review on my blog. Today I have reviews of three board books I bought for my two-year-old great-nephew.

Cover of Hooray for FishHooray for Fish! by Lucy Cousins
Of the three, Hooray for Fish! has the simplest vocabulary. It seems intended for babies or new readers. It has cheerful pictures of different types of fish, but it doesn’t really have a plot.

Cover for TumfordTumford the Terrible by Nancy Tillman

Tumford is a cute, chubby cat who gets into trouble. This book contains a moral about saying you’re sorry for your mistakes. The text is a little more complicated than that of Hooray for Fish, including some short, rhyming paragraphs. The pictures are beautiful.

Cover for Secret SeahorseSecret Seahorse by Stella Blackstone and Clare Beaton
Secret Seahorse has cute, bright pictures and rhyming text. A seahorse is hidden in each picture, providing some extra fun. These undersea pictures are also bright and appear to be photographs of scenes made from cloth, buttons, and sequins.

 

The creativity of these books is more in the artwork than any originality or deftness of the story. I might compare these books to Little Bird, which had almost no words but is bright and funny. It’s true that Little Bird is a picture book rather than a board book, though. I have some pictures books to review at a later time, and the authors seem to be able to do more with them.

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Day 833: The Shut Eye

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Cover for The Shut EyeJohn Marvel is the main character of The Shut Eye, Belinda Bauer’s latest thriller. He has been an unlikable recurring character in her books, an abrasive police inspector, but previously, he has always been peripheral to the story.

Marvel is obsessed by an unsolved case, the disappearance of Edie Evans, who vanished on her way to school 11 months earlier. Her bike was found a few days later. Marvel has been fighting to keep the case open.

But it’s another case that we encounter first. Marvel saves a young woman from jumping off a bridge one night. She is Anna Buck, whose little boy Daniel wandered out of the house one day and hasn’t been seen since. Anna is distraught and blames her husband James for accidentally leaving the door open.

Marvel is revolted to have his new chief, Clyde, ask him to do him a favor, help find his wife’s dog. Clyde’s wife Sandra has been attending psychic sessions at a church, and Anna meets her there. The sessions are run by Richard Latham, who tried to help police in the Edie Evans case.

When Anna looks at the photo Sandra gives her of herself and her dog, she has her own psychic experience. She sees a garden that looks artificial. When she tells this to Inspector Marvel, he is disturbed to remember that Richard Latham made a similar remark. But he doesn’t believe in the supernatural, so he thinks Latham said something to Anna. Even more disturbing is the blurred picture of Edie on her bicycle that appears in the background of the photo, taken weeks after Edie’s disappearance and while her bicycle was impounded by the police.

We know that Edie has drawn a picture of a garden on the walls of her prison, because we periodically visit her. What we don’t know is when we see her within the time frame of the main story.

This is the first time I recall Bauer’s books having any supernatural content. I don’t know if she plans to have more or not. This is also the first time that Marvel is a main character, and although we don’t like him, we understand him better.

link to NetgalleyI did guess the identity of the perpetrator early on, but I think the guess was more intuitive than anything else. I did not, however, figure out what links the disappearances of the two children.

As usual, Bauer kept me riveted to the page. This novel is a little more mystery than thriller, but her last two novels seem to be moving in that direction.

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Day 832: Sweetland

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Cover for SweetlandBest book of the week!
At the beginning of this novel, Moses Sweetland is an old man living in a small community on an island off the coast of Newfoundland. Although the island thrived at one time, now it is occupied by just a few families, including Sweetland’s niece Clara and her autistic boy Jesse.

All his life, Sweetland has lived on the island, which is called Sweetland after his family. Now, the Canadian government wants to buy out the remaining residents, move them off the island, and decommission it. The lighthouse where Sweetland worked for years is now a battery-driven beacon that gets serviced a couple of times a year.

At the opening of the novel, Sweetland is among only a few people who have refused to take the deal. If they don’t all take it, no one gets it, so someone has been leaving Sweetland threatening notes.

This is a powerful novel that covers most of the major events of Sweetland’s life in flashbacks. We see that events have left him very little except the life on the island, where he traps animals and catches fish, and his relationship with Clara and Jesse.

To tell much more would be to tell too much. Suffice it to say that Crummey gets us to care very much for this crusty old man and also for his community. As in Galore, which I really loved, Crummey brings back even the ghosts of the little island.

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Day 831: Fresh from the Country

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Cover for Fresh from the CountryOne of the pleasures I have not had for years is to read a novel by Miss Read, who wrote quite a few books over the course of 50 years, beginning in the 1950’s. Many of these novels are gentle stories about village life, but Fresh from the Country is about living in town.

Anna Lacey is a country girl who has recently finished training as a teacher and has taken a position as a primary school teacher in a new suburb of London. The school and the town are suffering the results of the post-war baby boom. Shoddy houses are going up quickly, and lodging is scarce. In the first scene of the novel, Anna inspects the grim quarters that will be her new home and is clearly cheated in her rent by her miserly landlady, who also underfeeds her throughout the novel.

The school, too, is crowded, as 48 children are crammed into her class in space meant for 20. The numbers in her class are a constant worry as she learns how to control the children, work in limited space, and keep the class productive. She also has to cope with the peculiarities of the various inspectors, since as a new teacher she is on probation.

Anna flees joyfully home on the weekends and holidays, to the large old farmhouse, her cheerful parents, and the beauties of the countryside. She finds the ugly scenery and the noise of the suburb hard to take.

Although Anna is a nice person, she at first tends to look askance at some of the foibles of her coworkers. It is her friendship with another teacher, Joan Berry, that teaches her not to be so hard on people who haven’t had the advantages of loving parents and a stable upbringing.

This is a gentle novel about the difficulties of being away from home for the first time, about learning new skills and learning to understand others, about the problems of the teaching profession. It has a tinge of light romance as well. It is mildly humorous, especially in the details of Anna’s life as a teacher.

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