Review 2325: Homestead

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In her research for Homestead, Melinda Moustakis incorporated her grandparents’ stories of homesteading in Alaska. Yes, in 1956, you could still receive a homesteading grant in exchange for working and making a home on the land. That was a surprise to me, too.

Lawrence Beringer is a withdrawn and hard man who has just filed homesteading documents for 150 acres of land when he meets Marie. Marie has traveled from Texas to stay with her sister Sheila and Sheila’s husband Sly with the plan of finding a husband so that she never has to return home. Within hours of meeting each other, Lawrence and Marie are engaged.

The couple live on a bus the first year while Lawrence clears land, plants a crop, and finally builds a cabin. Life is difficult, but for Marie, most difficult is understanding Lawrence, who is very withdrawn. For Lawrence has found he cares too much and must stay away to keep himself together. A miscarriage when Marie is almost at term doesn’t help, especially because Marie understands that her part of the bargain is providing children.

Conditions begin to improve, but even when things are good between them, Lawrence is aware that he’s keeping a secret from Marie.

I felt some distance from both of these characters but found the story fascinating nonetheless. It is written telegraphically, in short, sometimes partial sentences. Despite the descriptions of such activities as plowing, building a cabin, or planting potatoes, this novel is mostly a study of two distinct characters.

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Review 2324: Wonder Cruise

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Just a little note to say that my biography index page has been selected as one of the Top 30 Biography Blogs on the web by Feedspot. I received a nice email from the founder, Anuj Agarwal, informing of this.

I don’t usually read romance novels, but a few reviews made Wonder Cruise sound like it was more than that. I received the book, to see that it was being marketed as a romance. However, it turns out to be an untraditional representative of the genre.

Ann Clements is a naïve and inexperienced 35-year-old. Before taking a tedious job in a London office as a typist, she lived with her brother, a strait-laced and judgmental rector, and his dull family. Ann dresses dowdily and goes back and forth between her boring job and her dreary lodgings.

Then she wins a sweepstakes—half of a six-hundred-pound winnings from a bet on a horse made by her office mate. All that morning something had been making Ann think of a Mediterranean cruise, so before she loses her nerve, she books passage, after encouragement of her boss.

Her brother Cuthbert vociferously disapproves and even says Ann should give the money to her niece. When Ann is finally on board, she finds herself to be afraid of almost everything. She is seasick, has brought the wrong clothes, and is afraid to do something wrong. Her dining mates are dreadful, but on her first night she meets Oliver Banks, a man she met briefly the day she won the sweepstakes.

This novel mostly dwells on Ann’s self-development—her emergence from a timid woman who thinks she is already old and past chances of happiness to someone who is much more open and wants a chance at happiness.

It’s hard to explain why this novel is not a standard romance without giving too much away. I’ll just say that it takes some unexpected turns.

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Review 2323: Literary Wives! Mrs. March

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Today is another review for the Literary Wives blogging club, in which we discuss the depiction of wives in fiction. If you have read the book, please participate by leaving comments on any of our blogs.

Be sure to read the reviews and comments of the other wives!

This month we welcome a new member, Kate of booksaremyfavoriteandbest! She will join in for the next review in June.

My Review

Set in an undefined time that is probably the 1950s or 60s, Mrs. March is a character study of a woman disintegrating. This all begins at her favorite pastry shop. Mrs. March is a woman highly concerned with appearances. She is married to George March, a writer whose most recent novel is a hit. She is figuratively torn asunder when the shop owner asks her if she minds being depicted in George’s book as the main character, Johanna. Mrs. March hasn’t exactly read the book, but she knows that Johana is an ugly whore whose clients don’t even want to be with her.

Mrs. March immediately becomes obsessed by the idea that he has portrayed her and that everyone is talking about it. She doesn’t read the book, which might be a reasonable reaction, but she destroys a few copies and roots through George’s desk trying to discover his secrets. There she finds an article about a missing teenager in Maine and immediately begins to believe that George, who periodically visits a cabin in the same town, has had something to do with it.

This novel takes a deep look at the psychological behavior of a woman who is unraveling. At times it is darkly funny, sometimes tipping nearly to absurdism. Mrs. March is not likable, her behavior is often outrageous, yet it’s hard to turn away from the page.

What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?

It’s hard to answer this question, actually, because we don’t see much of George. You have to wonder in the first place what would make George give such an unpleasant character as Johanna all of his wife’s rather distinct mannerisms, especially since most of the time he seems affectionate and soothing to her. Artists can be clueless, but it also seems clear that Mrs. March is so self-obsessed that she is detached from everyone, even her son.

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What does the poor woman have to do all day except clean up things she doesn’t want her maid to see and prance around town in her fur coat shopping? It’s enough to drive anyone mad. Yet is seems that no one is stopping her from doing whatever she wants to except, possibly, the notion of how it would look if she, say, got a job.

And how things look seems to be the dominating force in her life. We get a few glimpses into her childhood where her cold mother taught her this priority.

George has his secrets, but he is really not at all important in this novel. Mrs. March is able to adjust her notion of George instantly, thinking he’s a murderer while preparing his birthday party. What a book!

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Review 2322: A Well Full of Leaves

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Laura is from a poor family, but lack of money isn’t the problem so much as lack of love. Her father earns very little and is often drunk. Her mother constantly complains, offers no affection to her children, and tells them they are ungrateful.

At the opening of the novel, Anda, the oldest at 16, is beautiful but selfish. Robert, at 14, loves reading about history but has been made to quit school for a job as a clerk. Both pick on Steve, the youngest at 11, who deeply feels the lack of affection. Only Laura, who is 12 or 13, seems to care about him, and she has learned to adapt to their circumstances by losing herself in the tiny details of life, to enjoy living. She tries to teach her outlook to Steve, but he just becomes more bitter.

A crisis comes when Steve is 14. Although he is the best student of Greek in school and has a good chance at university, their mother tells him she removed him from school so he can work. This is just meanness, because Anda is leaving home, and Robert and Laura are working, so the household is better off than it ever has been. After a huge family fight, Steve burns all his books.

The novel begins to be about the relationship between Laura and Steve. Steve becomes a famous actor with a very bad reputation. He has many affairs but says he loves only Laura. Once their father dies, Laura goes to live with Steve. The real crisis comes when Laura falls in love.

Although I agree with a lot of Laura’s ideas, Myers expresses them far too often and in a florid writing style that seems to belong to the early Romantics. Sometimes, I had no idea what she was talking about and other times, I didn’t want to think about it enough to figure it out. Parts of the novel are absolutely fraught in tone, especially at the end.

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Review 2321: Classics Club Spin Result! Weatherley Parade

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Note: the name on this cover image is misspelled. The cover on the book I have looks the same but is spelled correctly.

In Weatherley Parade, Richmal Crompton takes a look at changes in society through the lens of one upper-class family, the Weatherleys. Her novel begins with the return of Arthur Weatherley from the Boer War in 1902 and ends in the midst of World War II in 1940.

The novel is written in vignettes, chapters that take up a few hours, a few days, or a few months. What with children, grandchildren, and other relatives, there are many characters. No one is completely lovable or unlikeable. They are shown with their good points and flaws.

During the years, there are many events—happy and unhappy marriages, separations, a divorce, and deaths. Among these events, there is one treatment of a child that is hard to forgive.

Among some of the characters is Aunt Lilian, a young woman in 1902 of whom her brother Arthur despairs. He can’t understand why she keeps jilting one fiancé after another. She runs with a fast crowd and seems restless and bored. At first, I thought she was just ahead of her time, dissatisfied with traditional women’s roles, but I liked her less as time went on, and she eventually turns to alcoholism.

Arthur’s two children are Clive and Anthea. Clive is a boy who thinks everything should be done properly and by the rules, which doesn’t make him a popular schoolboy or, later, schoolmaster or father, even though his intentions are good. Anthea likes to have people’s attention, which works well when she is the mother of many children but isn’t so successful when they begin leaving the nest.

The novel stops in to visit these characters and their descendants at key periods of their lives. The scope here is broad rather than particular, so we don’t get to know any characters extremely well. I thought the depiction of changing times and attitudes was interesting, but I felt fairly neutral about most of the characters.

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A Century of Books: How Am I Doing? February Report

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In January, I foolishly decided to join Simon Thomas’s Century of Book Challenge, even though I knew that reading 100 books, one for each year in a century, from 1925-2024, would be tough because last year I only read 169. So, how am I doing?

I decided that the method I chose last month to keep track was meaningless to anyone but me, so it makes more sense if I list the years for which I don’t yet have entries. If you want to see the details, see my Century of Books page.

  • 1925-1934: entries needed for 1926-31
  • 1935-1944: entries needed for all years except 1941 and 1943
  • 1945-1954: entries needed for all years except 1947
  • 1955-1964: entries needed for all years except 1958 and 1959
  • 1965-1974: entries needed for all years except 1965, 1972, and 1974
  • 1975-1984: entries needed for all years except 1976
  • 1985-1994: entries needed for all years
  • 1995–2004: entries needed for all years
  • 2005-2014: entries needed for all years except 2009, 2010, and 2012
  • 2015-2024: entries needed for 2015 and 2024

Read in February (up to today):

  • Fear Stalks the Village by Ethel Lina White from 1932
  • The Warrielaw Jewel by Winifred Peck from 1933
  • Wonder Cruise by Ursula Bloom from 1934
  • Tom Tiddler’s Ground by Ursula Orange from 1941
  • Weatherley Parade by Richmal Crompton from 1943
  • Skeletons in the Closet by Jean-Patrick Manchette from 1976
  • Murder at the Residence by Stella Blómkvist from 2012
  • Mrs, March by Virginia Feito from 2021
  • Chenneville by Paulette Jiles, The Bookbinder by Pip Williams, and Somebody’s Fool by Richard Russo from 2023

Review 2320: The Haunting of Alma Fielding

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The two previous books I’ve read by Kate Summerscale were Victorian true crime stories. In The Haunting of Alma Fielding she changes genres (slightly) and periods to write about the spate of supernatural cases, and one in particular, that hit England when World War II was threatening in 1938.

The principal figure in the book is Nandor Fodor, a Hungarian emigré who studied the supernatural but also had an interest in Freudian psychology. When the Fielding case cropped up, he was in a difficult position, because although his mission was to prove whether there were legitimate supernatural occurrences, when he tried to use somewhat scientific methods of observation, he was accused of being unfriendly to mediums. His role at the Society for Psychical Research was contradictory at best and his notion of the scientific not very well developed.

The Fielding case began with a frightened family haunted by a poltergeist that hurled dishes and toppled furniture. Fairly quickly, it became clear that the activity centered around Alma, who lived in the house with her husband and lodger, and the spirits began to branch out by producing objects from her clothes at séances.

Fodor seemed so happy to have found what looked like legitimate supernatural activity that he believed everything he was told and actually encouraged the “spirits.” When later he found evidence that Alma deceived him, he still believed that some of the events were real and continued his investigation.

I found this book less interesting than the true crime books because I became so impatient with the gullibility of the investigators. And the medium tricks! After all, even if a spirit could produce small objects (called apports) from a person’s body, why would it want to? Obviously, because it’s an effect that can be faked.

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Review 2319: Trust

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Trust is like a stack of nesting dolls. It is the story of a fabulously wealthy couple set in New York of the 1920s and 30s. First, it is written in the form of a novel published in 1937, Bonds by Harold Vanner, in which the couple are called Benjamin and Helen Rask. While the husband makes money, the wife is a patroness of the arts who dies in an insane asylum.

The second section of the novel consists of chapters and notes from Andrew Bevel’s unfinished “autobiography.” Bevel is the actual tycoon depicted in Bonds, and his biography reveals a controlling and almost megalomaniacal personality. In this section, the biggest difference is how unequal the couple are, with Mildred Bevel being treated as the little wife who has the harmless hobby of loving music and encouraging a few musicians. There are also sections about what a financial genius the husband is. This section was so overbearing that I could barely stand to read it.

Patience is needed for this novel, because more is revealed at each level. In the third section, we meet Ida Partenza, the ghost writer of Bevel’s biography. Her narrative is split between two time frames, the “present” of 1985 in which she is an older lady who has just heard of Mildred Bevel’s papers being available for study at Bevel House, and her memoir of working with Bevel on his book as a 20-year-old woman just after World War II. Bevel’s main concern seems to be to refute the novel Bonds, especially in regard to how it depicts his wife, and it’s true that it depicts her as dying in an insane asylum instead of a health clinic. However, to Ida’s confusion, instead of sharing with her memories of his wife or letting her interview Mildred’s friends, he seems to want her to invent things. It is in this section that the novel begins to be really interesting. Who was Mildred Bevel? What are Bevel’s secrets?

The final section is Mildred Bevel’s journal, brief passages written when she was dying in Switzerland.

This is the kind of novel that unfolds more in each succeeding section. It is about money, power, and control but especially about control. It is like glimpsing an image in a sliver of mirror that reflects differently as it moves.

I read this novel for my Pulitzer project. Trust was a cowinner for 2023 with Demon Copperhead.

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Review 2318: Elegy for April

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This third of Benjamin Black’s Quirke series begins with Quirke drying out in a clinic. In the city, his daughter, Phoebe Griffin, is worried about her friend, April Latimer, a doctor and the daughter of a powerful family. No one has seen April for some time, and although she has gone away before, Phoebe thinks she would have told her.

Phoebe first goes to Dr. Oscar Latimer, April’s brother, even though she knows April is estranged from her family. Oscar doesn’t seem interested and says April probably ran off.

Phoebe is beginning to believe that April is dead. After Quirke gets out of the clinic, Phoebe turns to him. He talks to his friend Inspector Hackett, and the police eventually find a cleaned up pool of blood next to April’s bed.

The Latimers seem to be more concerned about their family reputation than they are about April and use their connections to get the investigation shut down. In the meantime, Phoebe is falling for Patrick Ojukuru, a Nigerian student in the small group of friends that included April. When Quirke tells her a Black man was seen visiting April, Phoebe denies knowing of any Black man.

Quirke is falling off the wagon with a vengeance, but he continues looking into the case.

An investigator with a drinking problem is such a cliché, but otherwise I find this series set in 1950s Dublin to be well written and interesting.

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