BLUEBIRD by Genevieve Graham

Moving back-and-forth between the last years of World War I and early 1920s to modern-day Windsor area, this book explores life for nurses and soldiers during the war, touches on the Spanish flu epidemic in in the aftermath, and does a decent job of conveying the frenetic energy of the early 1920s. 

There’s a good bit of Prohibition history worked into the narrative, including the basic differences between US Prohibition and Canadian, especially Ontario prohibition. I also appreciated the mention of how the War Amputees Association got started.

The modern story takes a while to pick up suspense, but with the point of view character working in a local history museum, it adds some interesting details about how old artifacts, and especially paper ones, are handled to preserve information about where they came from and how they ended up where they were found.

The writing is confident, the characters interesting and suitable for their roles. Jerry, as the soldier turned bootlegger, has a good heart and a good mind, and I found myself rooting for him and Adele, his Bluebird/nursing sister, all the way through.

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I ultimately did. But a few things worked against my eagerness:

1. It was often hard to tell how much time was passing after switching between points of view, and at one place I was very surprised to hear it was only 2 1/2 years after the war ended since from the setting and descriptions of clothing and business, everything felt much more settled into Prohibition, and thus later into the 1920s.

 

2. Cassie, the modern museum worker, had nothing personally at stake in her investigation, and her tragic childhood incident had no story purpose beyond making readers feel sorry for her, which was also unnecessary and not particularly convincing. When the story would be just as strong - or stronger - without a particular plot or character element, you can safely leave it out.

 

3. There was lots of potential for suspense and dark, seedy underbellies of Prohibition, but every incident was tidied up and prettied up, with the result that most of the suspense oozed away every time it seemed to be jacking up. Writing a story involving Prohibition, gangs, bootleggers,and shootouts on the dark midnight Detroit river, and having it lack suspense or tension any more than intermittently, is really not making best possible use of that rich historical material. 

 

I'd give this three stars out of five, as it wasn't an unpleasant read and did a decent job of introducing Prohibition history to readers unfamiliar with the era. 

#Bluebird #Netgalley #Prohibition #Windsor #Detroit #DetroitRiver

After The Romanovs

" From Helen Rappaport, the New York Times bestselling author of The Romanov Sisters comes After the Romanovs, the story of the Russian aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals who sought freedom and refuge in the City of Light."

Don't let the main title mislead: this history begins well before the Romanov Tsars and Russian nobility were overthrown in 1917. Beginning with la Belle Epoque, there's a thorough discussion of the Russian princes who made their main homes in Paris while Tsars still ruled in their homeland. Your head will whirl with the names of Grand Dukes, Grand Duchesses, morgantic wives, mistresses, dancers, painters, impresarios. You will find yourself referring back often to the cast of characters in the front matter. 

What you won't find is much reference to the last Tsar and his unfortunate family. We all know their fate.

The early chapters form a rich tapestry of the glittering pre-Revoluntionary Russian cultural outpost gaining its foothold in Paris. The importance of noble patrons for ballet, opera, theatre, and painting cannot be understated. Without their early money and influence behind impresarios such as Diaghilev, much of Russian culture might well have vanished forever in the flames of revolution sweeping Moscow, St. Petersburg & other cities, and its influence on modern ballet, theatre, and art lost. The already-emigrated smoothed the path for later, more desperate artistic emigres and guaranteed that their influence would survive. Imagine modern painting without Marc Chagall's iconic works? Yes, he later was forced to flee France ahead of the Nazi occupation but before that he'd already fled Russia for Paris. The artists of every stripe welcomed in Paris have left their mark in every cultural arena we now take for granted.

Those who came latest fared worst in their ability to smuggle out enough material wealth to survive on. Those without established wealthy relatives or patrons were soon competing against Tsarist Russia's military heroes for menial jobs like doorman, car washer, freight-handler, waiter.  But even the richest of emigrees had to find ways to increase income or live in an ever-shrinking bubble of their remaining opulence. Nor, as the Russian diaspora spread out, were the French, or the British, or the Americans happy to welcome this influx of formerly wealthy or upper middle class workers. Then, as now, immigrants were seen as taking jobs from deserving locals. Resentment ran higher in some quarters than others, and newspaper editorials in many countries openly gloated, rather than commiserated, over the aristocrats, doctors, lawyers, and others thus humbled. For page after page, vignette after vignette, a life begun in a palace ends with death in a single small room on foreign soil.

The looming menace of WW2 put the final hammer down on the formerly glittering Russian emigre circles in Paris. Their artistic, educational, and philanthropic organizations were shuttered, their former patrons broke or fled or dead. Then came the Nazi occupation and those few Russians left with any influence turned their efforts to protecting their countrymen from the Gestapo. A thousand Russians were arrested in June 1941 alone. Many more fled. After that war the new emigre heartland was New York City, and around the world, more and more emigres began to shift their emotional identification from the old, barely remembered Tsarist Russia to the new, powerful Soviet Union.

All this is but a superficial recounting of what is a veritable hailstorm of similar stories gathered by Dr. Helen Rappaport, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a specialist in Imperial Russian and Victorian history, into this dense but readable recounting of one of Europe's largest and wealthiest emigrations. 

#Russia #Revolution #BelleEpoque #RussianBallet #Diaghilev #Nabokov #Chagall #GrandDuke #nonfiction #history #SocialHistory #HelenRappaport #RoyalHistoricalSociety #Paris #FinDeSiecle #WW1 #WW2

She Gets the Girl: finding true love amid college chaos

Alex’s love life is a train wreck that hasn’t finished crashing. Molly's train has never left the station.

Alex needs to prove to her absent ex that she’s able to be faithful and upstanding (worthy of a second chance) while Molly hasn’t ever had a real conversation with the girl she’s been dreaming about since they were in grade school together. When both young women end up at the same college, in the same social circle, there’s only one practical solution: they’re going to help each other get the girl of their respective dreams.

This novel is co-authored by author Rachel Lippincott (Five Feet Apart) and debut novelist Alyson Derrick, a wife-and-wife team. The writing is competent, the pace cracking, the characterizations sharp. Both sets of mother daughter relationships capture opposing parenting styles with brevity and wit. This is a really believable, funny, heartfelt exploration of life and love in your freshman year.

#lesbian #college #freshman #party #studying #hookup #LoveGoneWrong #FindingMsRight #FindingYourself #LGBTQ+ #BandLife #introvert #Momster #netgalley #RachelLippincott

 

Looking for Jane: a novel of women's fight for legal abortion in Canada

 

Not a history of Canadian women’s fight for legalized abortion, but a character driven novel in which the intertwined narratives of three women’s lives cover much of that history.

There is not as much darkness as you might expect in a book about the dangerous, sometimes fatal abortion fight. The former is most evident in the parts that take place in the church-run home for unwed mothers: rigid nuns and embarrassed parents essentially jailed pregnant teens far from home to ‘hide their shame.’ As a teen I lived the tail end of that shadowy regime, starting high school when girls were removed from sight early ‘to visit a sick aunt’ while the adults around us spoke of them in hushed voices and encouraged us to avoid ‘that girl’ when she returned the following school year chastened if not chaste. By my senior year one brave girl refused to be either married off or sent away, and actually wore maternity clothes to class in her final months. But the legalization of abortion in Canada was still in the future when I graduated.

A home for unwed mothers - or wayward girls - was a moneymaker for the churches, paid by families or charitable groups to take in the pregnant girls and paid again to hand over babies to ‘approved’ married couples. Girls who didn’t ‘earn out’ - whose babies died or who had to stay longer to recover from a difficult birth - might find themselves little more than indentured servants until their debt was paid.

This book opens the drapes not only on the homes but on the psyches of the girls sequestered there, incubating lives they must give up to strangers and thereby incurring heart-wounds that will last many for the rest of their lives.

This isn’t an easy read despite the enjoyable characters. Death lurks in those regimented homes and elsewhere too, as when Dr. Morgenthaler tells Evelyn that the glass behind him is bulletproof. It lurks when Nancy’s cousin is being dragged to the hospital after her botched back alley abortion. But the first death that chokes me up is old Chester’s, when Evelyn confronts her own past back in that repurposed building and lets the sunshine in on all the dark memories that led to her precarious, highly stressful life as an abortion doctor before it was legal.

The old system - surely inconceivable to many teen girls today - was inhumane, rooted in moralistic good-versus-evil thinking that blamed, shamed, and punished the pregnant women throughout, including their birthing process, while letting their sexual partners off the hook entirely. The novel makes a great case for the burning down of the patriarchy and shows the personal and professional costs for women caught helping other women to safe, secret abortions. It reminds us all that the freedoms girls and women enjoy today were hard-won and remain terrifyingly fragile all theses decades later. They are under constant assault by right-wing politicians and evangelical leaders across North America and around the world.

That this book can present so much grim history and yet keep the reader engaged with its three women characters to the end is a testament to both the author and the editing team.

Highly recommended as both a social history and as women's fiction.

 

My thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for making the ARC available.

#abortion #AbortionRights #Canada #1970s #SimonAndSchuster #HeatherMarshall #WomensFiction #Morgenthaler #WaywardGirls #UnwedMothers #SocialHistory #WomensHistory #WomensRights #FreedomToChoose #BodilyAutonomy #CharacterDriven #Church #Shame #Sin #Patriarchy #NetGalley #bookreview #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #ILoveBooks

Versailles and the French Revolution: The School of Mirrors

The School of Mirrors

By Eva Stachniak

 

CW: child sexual assault

A generational saga and a meditation on motherhood.

Set in Pre-Revolution France, the novel unfolds adjacent to the glittering court of Versailles, the royal family, their courtiers and their servants all seen through the eyes of a poor young girl beautiful enough, and unlucky enough, to be groomed as a potential bedmate for the self-indulgent, all-powerful king. Details of her family life weave a grim tapestry of single parenthood and its endless striving to gain some slight advantage in life even if it means selling a child into prostitution.

Part two follows the unwitting offspring of that grooming process—one of many bastards sired on young girls by the aging king with the contrivance of his valet & his official mistress—as she grows up ignorant of her true parentage, passed from guardian to guardian in accordance with the payments and orders flowing from the palace. Through her years of training as a midwife we see the growing discontent of France’s burgeoning middle class and the seeds of revolution landing on fertile soil. What danger does her bastard royal blood present when the enemies of the king get the upper hand?

The novel is beautiful and disturbing, an angle on the French Revolution that is both intimate and panoramic. The language is polished, the details rich with texture. In this age of #MeToo, its grooming of young girls is a particularly disturbing element in a deeply compelling story.

 

#NetGalley #France #RevolutionaryFrance #FrenchRevolution #WomensFiction #HistoricalFiction #Versailles #HallOfMirrors #SchoolOfMirrors #Midwifery #royalty #revolution #prostitution #MarieAntoinette #MadameDePompadour #mistress #historical #fiction 

The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont

From the privations of World War 1 Ireland to the lush comforts of upper class London in the lavish 1920s - a multi-layered mystery wrapped around enigmatic women whose wartime connections breed a dangerous peace.

This novel is so much more than the mystery one might expect. Yes, it deals fictionally with the well-known disappearance of the famous mystery author, Agatha Christie, on the eve of her divorce from her adulterous husband. But beyond that, it’s an examination of women’s lives in England and Ireland in the 1920s. Intertwined with the hunt for Agatha is one path her husband’s mistress might have followed to grow from an innocent teen writing to her soldier boyfriend, through the Influenza that decimated the world’s population in the aftermath of World War I, to become a young woman who coldly, calculatingly, sets her cap at a married man with the intent of replacing his wife.

While some aspects of this book resemble the 1979 movie (with Vanessa Redgrave gravely and gracefully convincing as a very distressed Agatha), this story is more layered, as much character driven as plot oriented. The narrator rings true all the way through. The side characters littered throughout are fascinating, as many layers to their lives as the main characters, although we are only permitted glimpses into those hidden depths. The unraveling of a side mystery is a bit rushed, but we didn’t care about those people anyway, being spellbound by the complex interplay between Agatha’s story and Nan’s.

The book is also a socio-psychological study into Irish Catholic culture at the time: elements that are well known to all of us now, about convents, unwed mothers, and the cruelty of nuns; the secret lusts of priests; the Magdalene laundries where any girl thought to be immoral or uncontrollable could be sent to slave for the rest of her life. In its way this book is a rage against the patriarchy of a bygone era. It is also a love story and a family saga, a step outside of time, and a mystery novel with a murder and other crimes at its heart.

Highly recommended.

#NetGalley #Murder #AgathaChristie #Nuns #Magdalene #adultery #motherhood #WW1 #SpanishFlu #influenza #Irish #ireland #1920s #England #London #mystery #tragedy

 

Return of the Pharaoh: from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.

In this fourth of Nicholas Meyers' Sherlock Holmes pastiches, Watson learns his second wife has tuberculosis and he arranges to take her to stay at a sanitarium in Egypt. He hasn’t seen Holmes for some time and is surprised to meet the man in a Cairo bar...in disguise.

Audio Owl review

 

Holmes has been tasked with finding an English duke whose usual winter archeological season in Egypt is not unfolding as it should. The Duke, you see, has not been seen in Egypt for nearly 3 months. Not since he left England at the usual time last fall. 

 

From the initial investigation through to the first foray into the desert, the story gets more steadily adventurous, very much in the spirit of Professor Challenger or the newer adventure of Indiana Jones, although neither Holmes nor Watson breaks character to the extent of carrying a bullwhip or engaging in bar brawls.

A review in the Associated Press praised the print novel, saying it “blends old with new, giving readers familiar stories with parallels to and hints of more modern takes.“

That very much sums up my assessment of the audiobook version as well, which I received courtesy of NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The vocal style for Dr. Watson, by David Robb (Downton Abbey) feels correct for the era - pre-WW1 – and the great detective's few pronouncements (Nicholas Meyer, the author) seem quite in keeping with the original. It is a combination that works marvelously well in audio. The production details are excellent, with musical cues and generally unobtrusive effects that make this feel more like listening to a radio play than a novel.

 

Both the print and the spoken versions deliver a narrative that has a freshness and immediacy nowadays lacking in the original Holmes stories. This is due not so much to modernization of story tropes but to modern reader expectations of character, offering us a better picture of John Watson as a man, as a husband, as a war veteran. Modern readers' engagement with the goals and wellbeing of a key character is an essential element in their willingness to follow a tale to the end, and this Holmes story delivers a Watson whose essential humanness is easy to identify with.

All in all a most enjoyable 8 hours.

This ARC was sent to J.E Barnard by NetGalley in exchange for honest review.

See reviewer Barnard's books (both the grim and the gleeful)

#novel #desert #murder #Egypt #NicholasMeyer #SherlockHolmes #DrWatson #StMartinsPress #adventure #NetGalley #Minotaur