Tag: historical fiction

Review 2488: #1970Club! Charity Girl

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Georgette Heyer is always a pleasure, and I was delighted to reread this one for the 1970 Club. As usual, on my first post for the club, here is a list of some other books from 1970 that I have reviewed:

Now for my review.

While visiting friends in the country, Viscount Desford goes to a party to see the latest beauty. He notices someone watching the party from upstairs. Thinking that she’s a child, he speaks to her, only to find she is older, a naïve relative who has been taken in out of charity.

The next day on his way to London, he finds the girl, Cherry Steane, on the road, running away from her aunt. Desford tries to talk her into returning, but she has been treated as a drudge and accused of trying to attract Desford to herself away from her beautiful cousin. He finally agrees to take her to her grandfather’s house in London, but upon arriving there, finds the house shut up.

Desford tries to think where he can take Cherry without ruining her reputation. His parents’ house is out of the question, not only because his father is suffering from a gout attack but also because Lord Desford despises both Wilfred Steane, Cherry’s father, who disappeared without paying her school fees, and Steane’s father.

Desford decides to take her to his best friend, Henrietta Silverdale. At one point, Lord Desford tried to arrange a marriage between Desford and Henrietta, but both refused. However, when Desford brings Cherry in, Henrietta feels pangs, fearing he may be attracted to her.

This novel features one of Heyer’s romping plots, with Desford encountering a slew of memorable characters while he tries to find a place for Cherry.

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Review 2487: The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

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In 1930s Pottstown, Pennsylvania, the Jewish residents are beginning to move away from the Chicken Hill neighborhood where they’ve always lived with their Black neighbors. But Chona Ludlow refuses to leave the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store that her father established even though her husband Moshe would like to live in a neighborhood where the streets aren’t muddy and there is running water and sewage.

Chona is beloved by most of her neighbors for her kindness. She runs a tab for anyone who needs it and hands out marbles and small toys to the neighborhood children.

There is always some kind of trouble on Chicken Hill. Chona herself constantly writes letters to city officials complaining of unfairness to various Jewish or Black residents. But trouble from higher up arrives when Moshe’s trusted friend and employee, Nate Timblin, and his wife Addie take in his 12-year-old deaf nephew Dodo, whose parents have died. The trouble starts when Dodo stays out of school because he can’t hear the instruction and is being mocked. Officials decide to institutionalize him by placing him in a horrible insane asylum called Pennhurst under the assumption that since he can’t hear, he’s an idiot.

Nate, who is Black, asks Moshe if he will hide Dodo at the store. So Dodo moves in and helps out at the store and hides in the cellar if the authorities come by. But word gets out that Chona is hiding Dodo.

A combination of criminal and tragic events result in Dodo being caught. Can he be rescued from forces against him, including the racist Doc Roberts, a prominent member of society and also of the Ku Klux Klan?

McBride tells a great story, peopled with lots of colorful characters. There’s a lot going on in Chicken Hill, and it makes for fun and sometimes touching reading.

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Review 2483: In the Upper Country

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In 1850, Lensinda Marten lives in an all-Black town in Canada north of Lake Erie. She is a healer, but she is puzzled when she is summoned to the side of a slave catcher who has come after a group of escaped slaves that are hiding on Simion’s farm. Puzzled because the man is dead. When she hears that an old woman, one of the escapees, has been arrested, she realizes she is wanted to write a story about the woman for the Abolitionist paper.

She goes to visit the old woman in jail and finds that she isn’t ready to tell her story. Instead, she wants to swap stories with Lensinda. In doing so, a history of cruelty is reveealed, and the two women find connections between each other.

Thomas says in the Afterword that he heard and read many stories about Canada’s history of slavery, its treatment of First Nations people, and the War of 1812, but he could find no story that did everything he wanted. So, he chose this method of telling several stories that interface.

Although I found the information interesting and the settings and historical details to be convincing, I’m afraid his approach didn’t work that well for me. Just as I was getting interesting in Lensinda’s story, the novel appeared to move away from her. There were quite a few characters whose connections aren’t immediately clear, and I kept getting them confused as we jumped from story to story. Eventually, the stories connect, but that wasn’t clear for quite a while.

I read this novel for my Walter Scott prize project.

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Review 2482: These Old Shades

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In trying to fill some of the holes in my Century of Books project, I noticed that These Old Shades, which I haven’t read for many years, would help. This novel is Heyer’s first, and it is also the first of four about the Alastair/Audley family. (The others are The Devil’s Cub, Regency Buck, and An Infamous Army.)

Late on a mid-18th century night, His Grace of Avon Justin Alastair is walking through a Paris slum when a boy collides with him. The boy is fleeing his brutish brother. On impulse, the Duke buys the boy, but it is clear he is up to something. He takes the boy home and makes him his page.

The boy, Léon, has fiery red hair and dark eyebrows. The Duke has noticed this resemblance to his enemy, the Comte Saint-Vire, and takes Léon around to embarrass him. However, he begins to have other thoughts about the resemblance because of Saint-Vire’s reaction.

Soon, though, it is revealed that Léon is really Léonie, disguised as a boy since she was 12. The Duke takes her to England and leaves her with his sister while he arranges a chaperone, announcing that he intends to adopt her as his ward. Léonie is starting to enjoy being a girl when she is kidnapped by Saint-Vire.

This is an adventurous, amusing romantic novel. The Duke is enigmatic and Léonie is charming and feisty. Although the Duke has a bad reputation and is known as Satanas, as his relationship with Léonie develops, he becomes more human. Some of the interviews between Saint-Vire and Avon struck me this time as a little unsubtle, but overall, it is a great start to Heyer’s career and I enjoyed it very much.

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Review 2477: The Time of Women

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In 1950s Soviet Union, Antonina has a child out of wedlock. She is lucky to be allotted a room in a house with three old ladies, making a deal with them to cook and clean if they’ll take care of the baby while she’s at work at the factory. The deal becomes even more important when they realize Suzanna isn’t talking at the right time. They all become terrified that the girl will be institutionalized or at least that Antonina will be forced to take her from one doctor to another.

So, Suzanna stays out of school and the grannies teach her to read and write and even to understand French. She imbibes Russian fairy tales as well as some strange beliefs and superstitions, and the grannies sneak her to church to have her baptized.

All goes well until a man at work, Nicholai, starts paying attention to Antonina. Although they have done nothing but have tea, the union people at work assume they are having an affair and begin pressuring them to get married.

Then the situation turns serious. Antonina has cancer. How will the grannies be able to arrange to keep Suzanna after Antonina dies?

This novel effectively depicts the poor living conditions and the uncertainty of life in Soviet Russia, where the state can become involved in the details of anyone’s private life. The narration moves from person to person, and a lot of action is conveyed in somewhat elliptical dialogue, so I wasn’t always sure what was going on. Dreams and stories are also given a lot of importance.

I found the ending, which is another story, fairly unsatisfying, though.

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Review 2476: Hungry Ghosts

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I feel safe in saying that if I wasn’t reading Hungry Ghosts for my Walter Scott project, I wouldn’t have read it at all. It is absolutely brutal.

In 1940s Trinidad, Krishna lives with his family in the Barracks, run-down ex-military barracks that are leaky and filthy, where five families live in each building, one to a room. Krishna’s father Hans has aspirations for better and insists that Krishna attend school in the village, but there he is mercilessly teased and bullied by other students as well as teachers. Krishna and his cousin Tarak have begun to hang with two twin brothers, Rudra and Rustrum, who have a bad reputation because their father was a murderer.

Hans works for Dalton Changon, a prosperous man. Changon’s wife Marlee has recently noticed some disturbing changes in his behavior—a heightened paranoia and a tendency to hallucinate. Then he disappears during a night when there’s a terrible storm.

Marlee receives a threatening note, so she offers Hans a large amount of money to stay on the property overnight as a guard. He accepts, thinking to save a down payment on a house. However, soon he is involved in a torrid affair with Marlee, not even returning to his home when his wife, Shiveta, is hospitalized for an infected foot.

Meanwhile, Krishna, defending himself from some village boys who try to drown Tarak’s dog, injures Dylan Badree. Because Dylan’s father is a policeman, Krishna is put in jail and is only released after Marlee’s intervention. But the boys’ feud begins to go in evermore dangerous directions.

This book contains graphic descriptions of drowned dogs and murdered dogs and the killing of a rabbit. Everyone in it who seems like a good person either becomes bad or is victimized. The language of the book is impressive, but sometimes Hosein uses such obscure words that it seems pretentious. Hosein certainly describes a vivid world, but it’s not a place I wanted to be in.

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Review 2474: North Woods

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In early colonial days, a couple flees one of the colonies into the wilderness of Massachusetts. There, they settle in a valley.

A settler with a baby is kidnapped by natives. When she becomes ill with fever, they leave her with an old white woman, who cares for her. But when white men come after her and plan to kill the natives—the old woman’s friends—she murders them. Before this happens, one of the men gives the captured woman an apple, and she drops the seeds on the ground.

An apple tree grows.

After the French and Indian Wars, Major Charles Osgood gives up his uniform and decides to grow apples. His friends think he has lost his mind. He searches all over until a child leads him to an apple tree near a ruined cabin in the wilderness. The apple is marvelous. He builds a house and takes cuttings from the tree to make an orchard, producing an apple called Osgood’s Wonder.

So Daniel Mason goes on relating the history of this plot of ground, from one owner to another. People die, are murdered, are conned, become ghosts, run mad, the wilderness recedes and then returns, the house is ruined and rebuilt, added to, ruined, rebuilt. Each section is linked to others by characters, coincidences, and place. Some of the incidents are funny, some fates are sad, some characters get what they deserve. Tales are punctuated by songs written from the grave.

I can’t really convey how much I enjoyed reading this unusual novel. It’s steeped in the beauty of the forest. It somehow manages to involve you despite some quite short (some longer) stories of its characters. You get worried about the fates of apple and chestnut trees! I loved this one. It did exactly what a book is supposed to do, pulled me into a different world and made me reluctant to leave it.

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Review 2473: My Father’s House

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Helen of She Read Novels has posted a note about Readers Imbibing Peril (RIP XIX), which I always forget about but usually participate in. As somewhat of a suspense novel, My Father’s House qualifies, so let this be the start of my participation this year. Most of the action is on Instagram at @PerilReaders, but I am not a great user of that.

My Father’s House is a book I read for my Walter Scott project, and it is also the first in O’Connor’s Roman Escape Line trilogy. It is based on the true story of the Escape Line, a group of people who helped captured soldiers and others escape from the Nazi occupation of Rome. In particular, it focuses on Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, one of the group’s founders.

After Rome is overrun by the Nazis, the Vatican gives Monsignor O’Flaherty a duty of ministering to British soldiers in Nazi captivity. Being an Irishman, he isn’t eager to do this duty. However, when he sees the condition of the men and the ease with which the Nazis break the Geneva Conventions, his manner to the Germans is such that he is removed from the duty. In this way, he comes to the attention of Obersturmbannführer Paul Hauptmann.

O’Flaherty then decides to form a group to help soldiers escape from the Nazis. The group becomes successful enough that Hauptmann begins receiving threatening communications from Himmler.

Much of the novel centers around a Rendimento, as the Choir, the central group that runs the Escape Line, calls their missions. The group has planned its mission for Christmas Eve (1943), thinking that Hauptmann won’t expect it, but in the last few days, Sam Derry, an escaped British major who would normally run it, is incapacitated. They begin training Enzo Angelucci instead.

The main focus of the novel is whether the mission will be successful, but the narration travels around in time and person via transcripts of interviews of several of the participants. In some respects, this structure is interesting, helping you get to know the other characters, but they didn’t all have distinct voices, and you didn’t get to know them well. There is also the disadvantage that the approach tends to interrupt the building suspense.

I thought the novel was very interesting in its subject matter. I’d never heard of the Escape Line. However, as the first of a trilogy, I’m not sure how much more there is to say, even though no doubt there are many adventures to recount. I didn’t feel as if I got to know most of the characters in the novel, not even the Monsignor.

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Review 2462: Weyward

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Bookish Beck has a meme called “book serendipity” where she finds things in common between books she’s read recently, and I have a doozy. Not to give too much away, but this is the second book I’ve read in two weeks where women decide that the only way to deal with their abusive husbands is to murder them.

This novel is set in three time frames. In 1619, Altha is being tried for witchcraft. In 2019, Kate has discovered she is pregnant, so she has decided she must leave her abusive boyfriend, Simon. She has inherited a cottage from her Aunt Violet that he doesn’t know about and she has quietly saved some money, so she goes. In 1942, Violet has grown up isolated, not even allowed to go to the village and never told anything about her mother. At 16, she is jealous of her brother Graham, who is allowed to study interesting topics while she is forced into a traditional feminine role. She wants to travel the world and study bugs, but her father has apparently already chosen a husband for her.

Back at the cottage, Kate begins looking into her family history, into the women who called themselves the Weywards and have an unusual connection to animals.

This is an interesting novel with supernatural overtones that are fairly slight. I was interested in all three stories, although I found the outcomes of Altha’s and Kate’s stories fairly easy to guess. In this novel, I wasn’t as disturbed by the husband murder as I was in the other novel, in which I thought the wife could have easily gotten away. In any case, almost all the men in this novel are rotten to the core. So yes, I liked this novel fairly well.

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Review 2458: Miss Granby’s Secret or the Bastard of Pinsk

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I was thrilled to learn that Dean Street Press was continuing its Furrowed Middlebrow imprint. This novel is an entertaining entry in that line.

In 1912, Pamela receives a bequest from her great-aunt Addie Granby of a house and a box of keepsakes and papers. Aunt Addie had been a well-known romance writer, but her modern great niece doubts that her spinster aunt ever understood the facts of life. Pamela finds hints that Addie had a romance when she was 16 with someone named Stanislaw. She also wrote her first novel.

The entirety of the novel, entitled The Bastard of Pinsk, is included within this novel. It begins with a conscientious list of terms that some polite young man has given her definitions for. As an example, “bastard” is given as “a very noble Hero of Royal Blood.”

The novel within the novel is made funny by the naïveté of its author, who writes in a Romantic, florid style and flings about words she doesn’t know the meaning or connotations of. Her Romantic upbringing and reading in the Gothic tradition are manifest in the ridiculous plot. If I have any criticism, it’s that it’s a bit too long. However, it picks up as it goes along.

Twenty years later Pamela learns that her friend Adey has been nursing an old man—her Aunt Addie’s Stanislaw! Now, she thinks, is her opportunity to find out about Aunt Addie’s past.

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

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