Review 2196: Lucy by the Sea

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Lucy by the Sea is the latest in Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton novels. As usual, it references all the others, including her books that are not about Lucy. It is also a Covid chronicle.

The beginning recaps a bit of her previous novel, Oh, William! Lucy is still grieving the death of her second husband, David, when her first husband, William, calls to tell her the virus is coming and he’s taking her away from New York City. Lucy is oddly oblivious to what’s happening and only packs for a few days. William has to take her laptop himself.

Lucy finds them in a house in Maine all by itself at the end of a point above the sea. Bob Burgess (of The Burgess Boys) has arranged this home for them. William has also talked their daughters, Chrissy and Becka, into leaving Brooklyn for Connecticut.

From this distance, William and Lucy experience all of the dislocating effects of the pandemic—the worry about others, the isolation, the shock of hearing about friends’ deaths, the yearning for contact. Lucy is as always naïve but wise, full of anxiety and affection. She finds she cannot write.

I always love the Lucy books, which have a deepness to them that lies beneath an almost childlike storytelling style, but this one seems even more lovely.

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Review 2195: Catriona

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I was unaware until recently that there is a sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, but there is, Catriona, and it begins right where the previous novel left off. (Note that apparently this novel is sometimes called David Balfour.) David Balfour has been confirmed in his estate and is ready to learn to be a gentleman, but first, he has some old business to take care of. He must arrange a ship to take his friend Alan Breck Stewart to France, and he must appear as a witness in the Appin murder case, for which he himself is wanted, to free James More, who is innocent.

The problem with this second plan, he finds when he visits the Lord Advocate’s office in Edinburgh, is that no one wants James More, who may not be guilty of Appin’s murder but is guilty of a lot else, to go free. David’s challenges are further complicated when, in the approach to the Lord Advocate’s house, he meets Catriona Macgregor, James More’s daughter, and falls instantly in love with her.

Conscientious David will not agree to any of the compromises proposed by the various lawyers as alternatives to his testimony, so David finds himself kidnapped again in an attempt to prevent him from testifying. So begins another set of adventures for our hero as well as for the innocent but feisty Catriona.

Kidnapped has long been my favorite Stevenson adventure but I liked Catriona very much.

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Review 2194: The Marriage Portrait

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Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel is loosely based on the life of Lucrezia di Cosimo de Medici, who in 1560 at the age of 15 went to Ferrara to take up her married life with Alfonso II d’Este and was dead within a year, rumored to have been murdered by her husband. None of this is spoiler information. It’s explained before the novel begins.

At the beginning of the novel Lucrezia arrives at a remote country fortress with only her husband and some of his men. Her personal maids have been left behind. Lucrezia is sure her husband is going to murder her.

Then the novel returns to trace her childhood and young womanhood in the Medici family. There, she and her sisters are brought up entirely confined to a few rooms of the house and occasionally allowed outside. On the other hand, she has the example of her parents’ marriage, still loving, with both parents collaborating even in political decisions.

Lucrezia is not a favorite child. She has a core of resistance in her, and she prefers painting small, detailed pictures from nature to social pursuits. Fatefully, when she is ten, she briefly meets her older sister Maria’s fiancé, Alfonso II, heir to the Ferrara dukedom. When Maria dies before her marriage, Alfonso says he is open to taking Lucrezia instead, although she is only thirteen.

At fifteen, she marries Alfonso and travels with him to Ferrara to begin her marriage. At first, all seems well. His initial encounter with her was reassuring and he seems kind. Of course, she has to deal with knowing no one except her maid and not even understanding the servants’ dialect. Clothing and hair styles are different. And although she has much more freedom, she begins to learn that Alfonso’s ideas of marriage aren’t like her parents’. He wants her to obey him immediately no matter what he asks, and he doesn’t tell her what’s going on or want her to know anything. She appears to have no responsibilities, so she spends her time painting or socializing with his two sisters.

But slowly she learns that she only has one role in the family—to produce an heir. And Alfonso is known never to have fathered a child. Also, Alfonso is not as benign as he first appeared.

I found this novel absolutely fascinating with its convincing portrait of life in Renaissance Italy. The descriptions are detailed, and although Lucrezia is naïve, she is also a person who notices things. With growing dread, we observe her trying to make sense of this new world, with almost no preparation from her parents. As usual, O’Farrell is a deft writer who knows how to keep readers pinned to the page. I loved this one.

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Review 2193: A Children’s Bible

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The children are a group of mostly young teenagers, but they are aged from nine to seventeen. They have been brought along by their parents on a reunion vacation to a mansion on a lake by the seashore, but they are mostly let alone while their parents drink, do drugs, and generally misbehave. Evie, the narrator, does her best to take care of her brother Jack, a sensitive nine-year-old.

The children, who have never met before, disdain their parents, and they have a game going in which the winner is the last child to be matched with a parent. The kids all sleep together in an attic and at first their vacation is idyllic because they can do what they want.

Things begin to go wrong, though, when a huge storm rolls in that wreaks a lot of damage and disrupts services. The story begins to move away from reality after the house is partially destroyed and the parents insist that they can’t leave because they signed a lease. The kids do leave, though. Burl, the caretaker for the property, is worried about possible disease from the mosquitos on the now unsanitary property, so he takes them to a compound that has clearly been prepared for Armageddon.

From here, the novel slides in dystopia, fantasy, and even fable as civilization begins to break down.

This novel is fast moving and well written. Although I certainly found it interesting, it ultimately evolved into something that was not quite my thing, especially the religious overtones injected when one of the parents gives Jack a book of Bible stories, which he, having no religious upbringing at all, struggles to understand.

I read this book for my James Tait Black Prize project.

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Review 2192: Act of Oblivion

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It’s hard to know where sympathies might lie in this historical novel set right after the Restoration, in 1665. On the one hand, there is Richard Nayler (a fictional character), tasked with finding and taking to trial (or later, just plain executing) those deemed responsible for killing Charles I. A mighty task, but he performs it so zealously, not minding a dirty trick or two.

On the other hand, there are Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law Colonel Will Goffe (historical characters), on the list because they signed the King’s death warrant after an illegal trial. They have escaped to America, but Nayler blames them for the death of his wife (in premature labor after they broke in on a religious service on Christmas Day, deemed illegal under Cromwell, and arrested people) and is determined to catch them.

Robert Harris states that this hunt for the regicides was the greatest manhunt of the 17th century so we may assume that’s his motivation for the book. Although I’m not particularly interested in the Puritan period of New England history, certainly there are interesting things I didn’t know disclosed in this novel, like the history of New Haven. In addition, Harris depicts the wildness of New England at this time more vividly than anything else I’ve read.

Harris manages to raise the tension of the novel at the end, when Nayler, long after everyone else has lost interest, finally locates Goffe, but overall, I was too turned off by the deeds on both sides of the English Civil War (usually I favor the Royalists, but he shows just how brutal both sides were) to care much about these antagonists. I read this book for my Walter Scott Prize Project.

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Review 2191: Sally on the Rocks

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Sally Lunton has been living in Paris as it waits for a German invasion in 1915, and she is at her wit’s end. Her sketchy career as an artist has been finished by the war, and she is stone broke. She has changed from a blithe Bohemian to a woman nearly middle-aged (by the standards of 1915—she’s 29) who thinks her only hope is to marry someone well off.

Then Sally gets an apparently friendly letter from Miss Maggie Hopkins telling her that there is a new bachelor in her home town of Little Crampton, a bank manager, and he will soon be snapped up by a young widow with a daughter. Sally thinks Mr. Bingley will be horrible, but she goes home prepared to fight for him. She returns to the home of her guardian, the mild-mannered and affectionate Reverend Adam Lovelady.

Mr. Bingley turns out to be worse than Sally expected. He is plump and unattractive but full of himself for his lofty position in town. He is also religious and judgmental and is looking for a wife who is above reproach. He is guided by a book left by his deceased mother telling him what to look for in a wife—or rather what to avoid (hint—everyone).

Unfortunately, Sally has a skeleton in her closet. Six years ago, madly in love, she went off to Italy with Jimmy Thompkins. But after a summer in Italy, he left her. Sally has never really recovered, but it is vital that Mr. Bingley not learn of this escapade. Unfortunately, Jimmy is living in the village with his wife and two children, and he thinks Sally should not marry Mr. Bingley without telling him.

Another peril is Miss Maggie, who senses there is something between Jimmy and Sally and is determined to ferret it out.

Despite these complications, Sally’s appearance and pretenses of admiration are getting her ahead of her rival, Mrs. Dalton. However, soon there is another problem. Up on the moors, Sally meets Robert Kantyre, a disgraced former officer on the point of suicide. Sally is determined to save him from himself and from alcoholism.

This is a complex little book considering when it was written. Not only is it a satire of village life, but it makes some surprising observations about the differences in how men and women in the same circumstances are viewed and treated. Although Mr. Bingley is usually a figure of fun, he shows another side, even though his feelings for Sally fight with his yearning for his dinner at times. The only real villain is Miss Maggie, whose idea of fun is mischief making at the expense of others’ lives.

Except for tiring a little bit of Mr. Bingley’s internal battles, I found this novel very enjoyable and insightful.

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2190: Bleeding Heart Yard

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Detective Inspector Harbinder Kaur has transferred to London, where she is just meeting her two flatmates and her new team. Then she gets a high-profile case—while attending a school reunion, Conservative MP Garfield Rice, called Gary by his friends, has died of an apparent cocaine overdose. The only thing is, his friends say he doesn’t take drugs.

Attending the reunion are some notable figures—Isabelle Ister, a famous actress; Kris Foster, a rock star; Henry Skep, Labour MP—who used to belong to a popular group in school called The Group. Also members of The Group were Anna Vance, a teacher now living in Italy who is in London caring for her dying mother, and Cassie Fitzberbert, Harbinder’s Detective Sergeant. We know right from the beginning that Cassie believes she killed a boy when she was in school.

Of course, it turns out that Gary was murdered by an injection of insulin. His friends find it hard to believe, because Gary was liked by everyone.

There turns out to be more than one line of inquiry. Gary had received several anonymous letters featuring a bleeding heart, and he was regularly meeting other Conservative leaders at a restaurant in Bleeding Heart Yard. Also, the team learns that during exam week before the reunion attendees graduated years ago, a boy named David died when he fell in front of a train, and Gary was the principal witness. Harbinder wonders if David was actually pushed.

The book alternates narrators with members of The Group in first person and Harbinder in third person. I don’t remember if Griffiths used this form of narration in the other Kaur novels, but it began to irritate me. First, the first-person narrators should each sound different, but they don’t. More importantly, with the narration skipping around across very short chapters, the novel started to feel choppy.

So far, I have enjoyed the Harbinder Kaur series, but I didn’t like this one as much, despite it having an unpredictable ending. I still like Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway series best.

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Another Classics Club Spin!

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Classics Club has just announced another spin. How does the spin work? Club members select 20 books from their Classics Club list and post them in a numbered list by this coming Sunday, June 18. The club then picks a number and that determines which book you read next, attempting to post a review by Sunday, August 6. So, with no further adieu, here is my list for the spin:

  1. Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston
  2. The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
  3. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de La Fayette
  4. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
  5. A Double Life by Karolina Pavlova
  6. Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth
  7. The Methods of Lady Walderhurst by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  8. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
  9. Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford
  10. The Tavern Knight by Rafael Sabatini
  11. The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair
  12. The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
  13. Miss Mole by E. H. Young
  14. Merkland: A Story of Scottish Life by Margaret Oliphant
  15. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
  16. Cecilia, Memoirs of an Heiress by Frances Burney
  17. Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
  18. The Book of Dede Korkut by Anonymous
  19. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
  20. The Book of Lamentations by Rosario Castellanos

Are you participating in the spin? Which book would from your list do you hope is picked?

Review 2189: Faith Fox

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The cover of my Europa edition of Faith Fox is a little misleading, because although the plot of the novel revolves around a child, the child is a baby, not the young girl shown on the cover. You have to wonder sometimes if the artist ever reads the book or even knows what it is about.

When Holly Fox dies in childbirth, her mother Thomasina can’t bear to see the baby, Faith. The baby’s father, Andrew Braithwaite, seems oddly uninterested in her and anyway works brutal hours in the hospital. So, he decides to take her to his brother Jack, an Anglican priest who runs any experimental farm up in Yorkshire.

Jack is a sort of living saint, whose work barely supports a small community made up of ex-cons and Tibetans. The down side of this is his lack of sense. He trusts everyone, has no concept of a feasible project, and tends to forget the practical aspects of life. His little community lives in extreme discomfort and doesn’t accomplish much. He forgets Faith almost as soon as she arrives and his wife Jocasta has her reasons for avoiding Faith—she has been in love with Andrew since they met, but he could not afford to marry. So, he dropped her and her son off at Jack’s and later got engaged to Holly.

In fact, the only people yearning to see and care for Holly are Andrew’s parents, Toots and Dolly. But they are elderly and Andrew avoids bringing her to visit. Philip, Jocasta’s ten-year-old son, also cares about Faith and worries about her at school, but her care is basically left up to the Tibetans.

In the meantime, Thomasina scandalizes her friends by missing her daughter’s funeral to go to Egypt with Giles, an elderly colonel she just met. And Andrew and Jocasta have revived their affair after he brought Faith up to Yorkshire.

Gardam certainly has a gift for depicting dotty upper-class characters, selfish people, and hopeless charitable projects in the novel, as well as some peculiar lower-class characters. She also clearly understands the workings of grief, both bereavement and the lovesick kind. I’ve discovered Gardam late, but I’m really enjoying her.

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