Book Archive - Jan to May 2022

This is an intense story essentially of one individual moving through a specific historical time and place. It is told in the first person and engages we readers into a personal relationship with the protagonist, Cussy Mary Carter. She is a “fugate blue,” which is a person with a hereditary blood disorder minimizing blood oxygen levels, to the extent that their skin takes on a blue color. Cussy introduces us to the people who mean the most to her—her father; her workmates who deliver books and reading materials to rural eastern Kentucky poor families as part of the Packhorse Librarian program; and the one man willing to accept her for herself and the “blue baby” she has promised one of her book readers, as she lays dying in childbirth, to care for as her own. Cussy also reveals to us the society members who persecute her and purposefully strive to negate her personhood, at every turn, because of her being a poor, non-white, woman in Depression era USA. This novel is genuinely historical fiction, with plenty of contemporary allusions, attitudes, events and social occurrences. But the power and attraction of the story is character driven and it rides above the history, rather than immersing the character into the history.   I knew Ms. Richardson had grabbed me when I got so worked up and disappointed throughout the chapters where Cussy was accepting experimental pharmaceutical treatments to overcome her “blueness,” so she could become a “white” person more acceptable to the people of Troublesome Creek, who would have nothing to do with her otherwise. I felt she had let both herself and me down. And I certainly had no right to feel that. I have no idea what it feels like to be consistently rejected and persistently persecuted for the color of my skin. That’s some darn good writing on this author’s part to make that happen to, and within, me.   

© 2019 Sourcebooks Landmark 

[ Ms. Richardson’s sequel, The Book Woman’s Daughter, comes out this May ] 

In a more prevalent approach to historical fiction, this storyteller uses the omniscient third person narrator point-of-view to tell an involved and intriguing tale. 

There are many characters who are moved by the narrative of the events of the day or relationships they may not fully control:

injustices to mine workers, systemic racism against people of color, disrespect for women's rights, poverty and hunger in Depression era Appalachia, and social inequities based on disproportionate distribution of wealth and power.  

We readers can choose which personality in the story with whom we most relate or empathize, as much as those we can find abhorrent or attractive. Within the historically-inspired library ladies alone, there are five appealing women, developed to different depths. Several men portray social power brokers or counterculture antiheroes, each of whose lives and choices can repel or appeal to readers. 

These men and women do not solely drive the narrative as in Ms. Richardson’s book. Rather they are themselves swept by currents of the time, which they anticipate or to which they react, and within which they are immersed, in a plot-driven narrative. 

I found this to be a period piece of the type I tend to favor. Of the two, I read this one first and found the experience very pleasing. 

But in retrospect, after reading Cussy’s story, I recognize this book did not get under my skin the way Troublesome Creek did.  

© 2019 Pamela Dorman Books / Viking   

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A NOVEL

I sought this book out because the three other Anthony Doerr titles I had read were so pleasing. I was not disappointed. Other reviewers and commenters have said nice or contrary things about this multi-faceted book. But here I want to chase just one focus. How does storytelling in books—both in the writing and in the reading—impact individual persons? How does intercourse with a book enhance each one’s experience of living—writer or reader? 

Doerr takes us on a journey through time and across space. (That had me hooked from the get-go). The vehicle for the trek is a fictitious ancient Greek fictional tale: Cloud Cuckoo Land.  Individuals take part by discovering the ancient text and then reading it alone or to each other. 

Doerr fashions this ride for us and his characters alongside and within that tale. He is so capable and builds credible atmospheres and relatable people; he grabs our questing imagination and catapults us to ask many questions.

How do two pre-adolescents, an orphaned girl and cleft-palated conscripted boy, experience the pursuit of this magical land to escape the 1453 Fall of Constantinople? How do five Idahoan marginalized fifth graders in 2020 evade a home-grown terrorist’s attack while they practice to perform a play of the story? A play written by a socially awkward PTSD’d octogenarian, whose first experience of story-telling Greeks seduced him as a Korean War POW. Can the lure of the tale transform a paroled convict who struck out against Cuckoo Land’s devotees? And, will the pursuit of the tale’s land-in-the-sky be enough to save a young girl who might just well become the sole survivor of a deep-space mission to find a new world for a future earth generation’s human refugees? 

Each and all of these people we meet become enamored of the tale’s hero, Aethon, the prototypical pilgrim toward Cloud Cuckoo Land over the course of his shape-shifting plights of discovery, as a man, a donkey, a fish and a crow. Doerr creatively insinuates the fantasy into the sinews and synapses of these searchers we first see as an observer, and then join as a fellow journeyer. Their questions become ours. Aethon’s deliberations resonate into our personal self-examination. And ultimately, the single, shared choice interwoven within the Greek tale and within Doerr’s telling of it, becomes part of the fabric of our experience, with an invitation for us to make our own choice of how we try to live. 

And so, the acts of story-writing and story-reading collide amid the same whisper of pages rustling shut and our two-handed clutch around its front and back covers, as we sit with Doerr’s book in our lap and a far-away look in our mind’s newly-opened eye. 

© 2021 Scribner 

A NOVEL

Our second book of the month brings us back again, in part, to Constantinople a hundred years later than in Cloud Cuckoo Land. 

This debut novel constructs a dual-aged pair of parallel tales that have story-telling at their core. Giovanni (Gio) Lomazzo, a Renaissance artist in Venice hurries to transcribe his thoughts about art and philosophy before he loses his eyesight to impending blindness. But he writes his treatise on pages of vellum he had previously used to keep a diary about his love of a courtesan, Chiara, on the eve of an historic naval engagement. The Battle of Lepanto is the actual fierce 1571 naval confrontation between Christendom and the Ottoman Empire that set the stage for centuries of political hegemony. Strategic to this story-writing and story-reading is the process of making a palimpsest. Gio physically scraped much of the ink and sketches of his diary off its vellum pages and then wrote his treatise directly over his effaced adventurous story of Venetian society at war and in love. 

But the bi-level manuscript survives and makes its way, in twenty-first century New Haven CT, to a bookstore owner and rare book restoration expert, Rose Newlin. Rose agrees to restore the book, a family heirloom, for a local artist/painter, William. Rose and William discover two things as the restoration and translation of each of the two stories—the diary and the treatise—progress. William is a descendant of Giovanni, with whom he shares being an artist with the surname Lomazzo, hence the family’s heirloom. And married William and single Rose become infatuated with each other, in the shadow of Gio and Chiara’s forbidden love. Two artists and two muses separated by social mores. Two stories, separated by centuries. A historical novel with contemporary anchoring. Engrossing story-writing and rewarding story-reading.

The mutual unfolding of their stories and what the artists and muses learn about each other challenge the talent of the writer to create a credible tale. And she does, replete with foils and supporting casts of interesting personalities. 

At the same time, we readers discover their secrets and passions only at the pace and within the intrigue that Ms. DeRoux allows. Her companion stories in the volume evolve in an ever-growing helix. One strand of DeRoux’s story-writing is pinioned around real people (artists, courtesans, politicians, soldiers, statesmen) and actual historic events of empire building warfare (Cyprus, Lepanto) and literature (Gio’s treatise). The other strand uncoils the lives of her fictional characters. But at each turn and twist she skillfully links them, ladder-runged, to ascend to their individual and multiple climaxes. 

Our story-reading of Ms. DeRoux imagined worlds, centuries apart, engages us in favoring some characters’ plights over others’, while arousing our empathy for many, even some we don’t particularly care for. We can see ourselves or those we know in her characters. Their struggles are relatable and realistic, regardless of the time or place in which they are portrayed. 

© 2020 Ballantine Books 

Ms. See creates a powerful, representative story of two childhood-to-womanhood friends, Mi-ja and Young-sook, and their mothers, within the fabric of the historical divers of Jeju Island, Korea. This intergenerational story, interwoven and driven forward by the complexity of friendship, is set on Jeju Island, beginning in the turbulence of Japanese colonialism (1930s) and reaching into contemporary times (2008). 

The island society is fiercely independent and uniquely women-focused, exemplified by the mothers and daughters who form the free-diving collectives that harvest the sea for family sustenance and the island’s economy.

The armies of Japan and the United States do not prove sufficient to subjugate these proud women. 

But can their friendships and loyalty to the collective survive tragedy, mistrust, and family honor? 

Only in the end do the girls, now grown, realize how each person’s memory is individualistic and events can be remembered in contrary ways. Such a discovery makes forgiveness possible, but not a sure thing. 

©  2019 Simon & Schuster

Two cousins—both medical professionals in 1883 New York City—find themselves in personal, professional, and family turmoil. Drs. Anna and Sophie Savard support one another to defy the political power and social pressures aligned against women and caregivers in Gilded Age Manhattan and environs. This book weaves a tapestry of fictional characters and historical personalities richer than the brocades and draperies adorning their homes and hotel galas of their day. Ms. Donati makes their world tangible as the cousins and their associates and antagonists usher us along streets and waterfronts, ferries and carriages, parks and tenements, hospitals and orphanages, offices of church officials and power brokers, homes and businesses of first-and-second-generation immigrants, and the workplaces of surgeons, midwives and abortionists of the day. 

The Gilded Hour’s historical figures include vice-suppressionist Anthony Comstock, Drs. Abraham (Children’s Hospital) and Mary (Woman’s Medical School) Jacobi, and Sr. Mary Irene (NY Foundling).  

© 2015 Berkley / Penguin Random House

Twenty years later, in 1913 Calumet, Michigan, Annie Clements was instrumental in a famous labor strike against the copper mining industry. Ms. Russell gives us a compelling novel built around the bravery of this woman, and the men and women she finds herself leading in their struggle. She began her activism to save her family, yet it grew to be much more; unfortunately, at the cost of losing that family and marriage. The toll of battling unscrupulous mine owners, murderous strikebreakers, unreliable politicians, and her time locked up in jail proved too much to bear. This engaging book personalizes Clements’ life and times, her hardships and the bond of the women of the mining communities whose sisterhood and friendship sustained her. Russell even includes a portrayal of the historic train trip and strike rally at the mining community by famed international labor organizer Mother Jones. The author’s note at the end of the novel identifies the historical facts and the real people in the book, as well as fleshing out the representative composite personalities in the story. These few end-pages are indeed a lesson in creating a book of this genre; a bonus that readers and writers of historical fiction will treasure. 

© 2019 Atria Books

This book’s narrator/protagonist is an AI creation named Klara. She is of a generation known as Artificial Friends (AF). Mr. Ishiguro masterfully presents this volume as a memoir, rendering the story as a personal history of Klara and Josie, her adopter. It is Klara who wins our admiration and sympathies, regardless that five or six main human characters compete for our attention. In a stroke of genius (and dare I say anachronistically, a pen) the author tells us two parallel coming-of-age stories—Josie’s and Klara’s—intriguingly through the AF’s perspective. The femininity of this story exceeds physical gender types and resides in the blossoming of maturing personalities: Klara and her companion AF, Rosa, and their shopkeeper/mentor, Manager, on the one hand; and Josie, her friend Rick, and her Mother on the other. Only in the hands of such an accomplished and disciplined author could a futuristic story so comfortably wear the cloak of an historical fiction. And it fits wonderfully.

© 2021 Alfred A Knopf