THE WHITE HARE: Cornish mysticism meets post-war pragmatism

THE WHITE HARE is a moving, powerful tale of love, loss, betrayal, treasure, and ultimately joy.

The novel opens on a textured, vivid, atmospheric beach scene. The rich language draws the mind's eye from the macro--literally the birdseye view--down to the micro: sand flies buzzing over the seaweed and the small gray green crab that skittles out of a rock pool. This opening is beautiful and terrible and immersive, and would almost certainly be so even without the body marking time by the withdrawal of the tide, baring its' frail limbs to the rising sun.

The language is often lyrical, never stalling the story’s forward motion, with secrets small and large advancing and receding in a dance worthy of the Grand Dame of 1950s women's suspense. That Mila is reading--or trying to, when the book doesn’t wander off between night and dawn--the famous Cornish novel ‘Jamaica Inn,’ is an overt homage to Dame Daphne DuMaurier as well as to the tangible and mystical mists that seep around Cornish moors and tors.

 

 Rooted in postwar Britain’s social and familial turmoil, The White Hare follows Mila, her daughter, and her mother as they reckon with rebuilding their shattered lives in a near-derelict seaside home at White Cove, whose long-habituated ghosts embrace the torments carried in each woman’s inner baggage. Items wander room to room, the child sees deeper than she should, and soon the very roof that shelters them seems almost as menacing as the wild winds and shadowy, ancient hollow ways that course and cut their isolated valley.

The valley's neighbours mutter of curses and avert their eyes, all but a pair of women in a vine-laden cottage who would surely be labeled witches in any other era. And then there is the mysterious handyman, appearing and vanishing like an unquiet spirit.

As matters long buried surge to the surface during a torrential New Years' Eve, will they all live to see the dawn? And will sunlight disinfect the old sins or release yet greater evil upon the women of White Cove?

If Daphne DuMaurier set out to write an early Mary Stewart romantic suspense novel with guidance from Celtic goddesses and saints, the result would be this spellbinding and suspenseful tale whose textured language flows like foam on the tide and illuminates great truths like moonlight through gossamer mists.

Highly Recommended

#Netgalley #TheWhiteHare JaneJohnson #Cornwall #Penzance #Mousehole #novel #family #secrets #seashore #well #legend #spirituality #Ostara #PreChristian #Celtic #murder #relationships #confrontation #truth #power

 

HER DEADLY MISCHIEF by Beverle Graves Myers

In this historical mystery series' 5th novel, set in 1742, the celebrated castrato Tito Amato is back home in Venice, on stage, in full-throated triumph over his rival Emilio, when a much-feted courtesan is stabbed in an opera box and flung down to the floor of the Teatro San Marco. Despite a whole theatre filled with possible witnesses including the city's new chief investigator, the killer eludes suspicion and capture while Tito untangles the threads of the dead Zulietta's conquests, her other relationships, and her childhood in Venice's ancient and rigidly controlled Jewish Ghetto. 

I laughed, I wept, I held my breath.

Tito Amato is musically gifted, sharp-witted, and engagingly human, always well-meaning but sometimes jealous or self-doubting or angrily impulsive. The supporting characters who have been with him since the first book are like my own family by now, and the new ones introduced for this novel are well-drawn, easily distinguishable and memorable long after the book ends. There's a fascinating scene or two in a glass-blowing factory and a solid look at the complex layered society in Baroque Venice.

This is my second time through this book, first time by audiobook, and while the series has always enchanted me, it's an even better experience now that I've learned so much about historical Venice myself for writing 'Timely Taffeta' (in which Maddie Hatter goes undercover in a fashion house famous for its jeweled Carnevale costumes) and can more fully envision every step Tito takes, every mood of the weather or the passersby or the frenetic gaiety of the great Piazza at the height of Carnevale. If I could, I'd commission a video game in which I follow Tito on his investigations through those fabled streets and canals, to the soundtrack of all the incredible music he sings through the series. 

These books are short but exquisite, so it's no hardship for any historical fiction fan to start from the first (Interrupted Aria, set in 1731) and continue on to get the full shape of not only the theatrical era in one of Europe's most fascinating cities but Tito's amazing and sometimes very sad life, his fortune at finding love when he had thought it out of reach, and his compassion for the frailty of humanity including his own.

The Tito Amato Mysteries

by Beverle Graves Myers

https://www.goodreads.com/series/41383-tito-amato

#mystery #histfic #Venice #histmyst #TitoAmato #BeverleGravesMyers #amreading #amlistening #bookreview #Italy #1700s #Baroque #music #opera #aria #castrato #Murano #glassblowers

 

 

“Why are you all dressed up?“ 

 For those of us who love skirts, dresses, all things long and fluttery or clean and sleek, that’s a question that gets asked a lot. This book is chock full of fun facts to quash the impertinent questioner.

Pants are a relatively recent addition to western women’s wardrobes, their 20th century invocation aided by fabric shortages during the world wars. Their adoption was not fast or easy. While Coco Chanel popularized 'beach trousers' in the 1920s, in 1961 Mary Tyler Moore was permitted to show Capri pants only, in only one scene per episode, on the Dick Van Dyke show.

These are only a couple of the many thought-provoking historical tidbits about pants, skirts, fabrics, and all manner of women’s fashion, including laws and customs around the world, that feature in the pages of this fascinating fashion history.

And yet, for all that pants were claimed as serious wear for professional women and especially feminists, the skirt (or dress) remained popular throughout the 20th century, not only on ordinary women but on those who changed the world for women.

“The heroines of the civil rights movement—Rosa Parks, ruby bridges, 2/3 of the Little Rock Nine, the bloody Sunday marchers in their church clothes—took a stand in skirts. Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe revolutionized modern art in skirts. Marie Curie won two Nobel prizes in a skirt. When NASA put a man on the moon, “the computer wore a skirt,“ in the words of one of those computers, mathematician Catherine G Johnson.”

As the decades of the 20th century marched on, women’s dress called back to earlier eras, especially the classical and neoclassical. Having just read the detailed explication of early chiton pleating in 'Skirts', I immediately recognized the style's roots when I encountered it this week in the new fantasy epic series, 'Rings of Power,' on Prime (one costume's a lovely indigo hue, too, which probably wouldn't have survived long in in its full vividness while being scrubbed on stones with whatever harsh soap was used in that relatively primitive rural village. Faded indigo only looks good in jeans).

 

The discussion of evolution in women's sports clothing was all the more interesting considering tennis great Serena Williams' recent contretemps over her court wear at Wimbledon. Here's a great early-1900s description from American women’s tennis. Violet Sutton complained, “It’s a wonder we could move at all. Do you want to know what we wore? A long undershirt, pair of drawers, two petticoats, white linen corset cover, duck shirt, shirt waist, long white silk stockings, and a floppy hat. We were soaking wet when we finished a match.“ That all began to change as French women followed American and British women into more sporting activities, and their fashion houses followed suit. Soon women's sporting and leisure attire sprouted a wider range of colours, fabrics, and styles, although skirts have stuck for sports like tennis despite the occasional introduction of bloomers and divided skirts and even (for amateurs) shorts.

Anecdotes skip between the recurring Taxi or 'wrap' dress for working women and the strapless prom gown as the ultimate debutante play wear that any suburban interwar teenager could aspire to.

A strength of this book is the ways it links changes in fashion to changes in wider society, not simply whether there was a war on and fabric needed rationing but where women spent their days, and their evenings. Office wear, sports wear, afternoon wear, and evenings from casual nights out to the Met Gala all get their due. 

 

Despite many references to English aristocracy and French fashion houses, the book maintains its distinctly American lens. While the anecdotes are entertaining and the famous names drop with aplomb, there are a lot of both. It’s a book you won’t want to rush but rather dip into for a chapter or two, to whirl yourself away from modern fashion to the fashions in your youth, your grandmother's, even your great-great grandmother's.

Fair warning: you will yearn for illustrations of all the fabulous gowns worn to fabulous parties. I ended up searching online to see for myself the iconic evening wear of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and other great women of the 20th century. It's fashionista heaven.

Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the Twentieth Century 

by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell 

 Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Martin's Press (September 6, 2022)

Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250275792
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250275790  
 
 
 #NetGalley #Skirts #Fashion #20thCentury #clothing #gowns #tennis #LOTR #SerenaWilliams #RingsOfPower #Indigo #chiton #sportingwear #StMartinsPress 

 

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Reviewed by Jayne Barnard, author of the Maddie Hatter Adventures, whose parasol-dueling fashion reporter tangles with industrial spies in Gilded Age New York City during "Gilded Gauge"

https://books2read.com/gildedgauge

   

A Lady's Guide to Fortune Hunting by Sophie Irwin

Some Regency romances start off by establishing the scene, gently acquainting you with the main characters around a pianoforte, and then introduce the main story problem once you have settled in with your teacup and a biscuit. Not so Lady's Guide. Within the first few paragraphs the problem facing our heroine is as thoroughly in our face as it is in hers. And yes, there's effective scene-setting, including the pianoforte. It is a quick and effective hook rendered in decisive, character laden language that feels appropriate to the era.

 

Having cut my teeth on Georgette Heyer's groundbreaking Regency romances, I am not an easy mark for modern clones. But this book, which in some ways seems an homage to that august author’s classic tale of a managing elder sister and beautiful younger, has held my attention and defied a direct comparison. There's also a nod to that most famous of all Regencies, Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, in the family with five dowerless daughters at risk of losing the only home they've ever known.

The main characters are consistent, their dialogue witty, and the situation comedy more than entertaining enough to allow the relationships to develop in an authentic manner almost in the background. By the halfway point I was compelled to keep reading even though, as usual with romance , the outcome was already clear. My commitment was rewarded by a most satisfactory new complication that involved deep games both social and monetary.

A few small elements marred my overall enjoyment.  Since when is it necessary for every elder brother to have a sad or tragic past event repeatedly dragged up when it's not truly needed to explain a later choice? (I know, I know: since Season 1 of Bridgerton hit the streaming services). At another point, when the reader is already quite sure what’s going to happen, the author feels the need to foreshadow it with an unusually heavy hand. The early thorough grounding in setting became slightly spongy in later scenes, and some threads that early on promised a fair bit of drama in their conclusion were rather quickly and tamely wrapped up.

 

But these are small flaws indeed in what was an otherwise most enjoyable read, with balls aplenty, scheming matrons, sweet side romances, and a primary relationship with snap and crackle of the non-steamy variety, its dialogue more enjoyably witty than sappy.  If you like your heroines to give as good as they get, and your heroes slightly flawed, this is a great way to spend a weekend.

Recommended.

Thanks to #Netgalley for the ARC

#Regency #romance #ballgown #fashion #London #Almacks #JaneAusten #GeorgetteHeyer #LadysGuide #FortuneHunting #siblings #review #bookstagram #bookreview

TOMORROW And Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zelvin

This novel has the potential to be the gamer-geek's literary LOTR.

Speaking as both a gamer and a writer, with kin and friends deeply embedded in the gaming industry, I found this novel an amazing read on multiple levels of complexity. Like the best video games, in fact, it can be read (played) through several difference lenses/levels of difficulty.  There's the children of immigrants thread that winds through the whole, the Unfair Games' autobiographically-tinged rags to riches origin story, and the mixture of twenty-something relationships - friends, romances, sexual, even violent - plus Sam's physical disability story being subsumed by the character Ichigo while Sadie's psychological fragility is its own precarious quest mirrored into 'Both Sides', their next original game. Social tropes abound without being allowed to become preachy or take over from the unfolding quest for the perfect game.

My review is not in the least objective as I loved, deeply loved, this novel far beyond my ability to comment on the quality of writing or character development . Honestly, after the first tentative dip into Chapter One, every time I opened a new chapter I was quickly drawn into the spell, no matter how many days had passed since my last session. I'll likely come back to it several more times and find other elements to comment on in more detail.

If you enjoyed Erin Morgenstern's 'Starless Sea' and played the hell out of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, you'll find elements here to pull you into Sam and Sadie's world, with Marx as the helpful, if sometimes annoying, Navi character.

Also

(from Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth)

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more.

I'm very grateful for the e-ARC from Netgalley

#gamers #gaming #fiction #friendship #Netgalley #Harvard #tech #GameDevelopment #disability #immigrant #VisibleMinority #Tomorrowx3

 

 

The Liquor Vicar by Vince R. Ditrich

It's every eccentric dreamer & small-town store owner & jaded RCMP officer you've ever met, all crushed into one zany story by an ex-rocker who lives on Vancouver Island himself. He knows whereof he writes.

The first thing that hits you about this book is that it’s not a cozy. As if it could be with a title like this. But it goes in hard and fast and definitely off the twist. And that’s just the prologue. 

 

Chapter 1 is just as weird in a different way, introducing our protagonist, our antihero, Tony Vicar who is at that very moment gyrating his way right out of a job as an Elvis-impersonating wedding DJ. Then we meet Tony‘s new boss, and have a really enjoyable few pages inside Tony‘s head while he mentally corrects all the malapropisms his new boss utters. But at the end of it, he has a new job in a back-bush hamlet on Vancouver Island. 

 

Even if we still don’t find much sympathetic about Tony or any of the other characters, there is a hint that he cares not to make life worse for himself or anybody else, no matter how much he despises them. And he despises pretty much everybody. There is no softness, very little political correctness, just jaded dystopian review of his neighbours and society and the whole universe. 

 

The only thing that makes Tony truly outraged is unwitting massacre of the English language; The only thing he loves is music, preferably from 40 years ago. But he has these Robin Hood moments where he just goes off to help out someone vulnerable. 

 

I was definitely intrigued enough to keep turning the pages as Tony settles in to his new life, and the front seat of his new boss's massive, ancient muscle car.

I admit to being a bit generous with the stars on this one, in that I really enjoy the voice of Jacky O. That’s not her real name but she says herself that nobody can spell it and very few can extract what it's supposed to sound like from the Irish Gaelic spelling. And her descriptions of other characters tell as much about her as about them, for example, “This guy. Kind, generous, and surprisingly sensitive, but with the social graces of a bag of mud hitting the sidewalk from a great height.“

There are some funny minor truths here too. 

 

“Those passengers were surveilling him, stalking him. Driving around his house to get a look-e-loo. He’d never heard of such a thing in this country, where most celebrities still mowed their own lawns.”

One annoying little tic is the author intrusions. We’re going along happily falling for all the rhetorical flourishes, seeing exactly what we're intended to see and thinking what we are supposed to think about all the characters, and then the author intrudes to underline it for us. Whether the author himself or an editor somewhere along the way decided that it had to be underlined for the slow readers, I don’t know. But it is obvious and off-putting when it happens.

Despite that last comment, I am definitely up for another dip into the world of this author, just as soon as I can get my hands on their next book.

#Dundurn #VancouverIsland #ComedyOfErrors #music #love #friendship #smalltownlife

DARE NOT TELL by Elain Aucoin Schroller

The novel is named for the poem by Henry Lawson, “The things we dare not tell,“ and includes verses from that poem at each section.

Although the story is billed as concerning events in World War I, it opens in 1939 London. Immediately we learned that Joe's  brother Robbie had been missing, presumed killed,  for the past 22 years. Then we follow Joe and his wife Sophie, a war nurse, back to their World War I meet, and onward again to 1939.  Joe and Sophie spend part of the summer in France, and slowly realize that the shadow of war is looming over the border from Germany again.

Sophie and Joe are overall good, responsible, ethical people. Their wartime and later relationships develop in a way that feels recognizably real. This is solid women's fiction from a historical perspective. The details of Parisian wartime life are seamlessly woven in (although there's a lot of roast chicken eaten). Their travels through France and meeting with other WW1 veterans at the War Memorial are engaging, although the secondary characters aren't developed. Joe's troubles with nightmares and other symptoms of Post-Combat Stress Disorder are convincing.

The second half of the book is almost a different story than the first. If the first half is good women's fiction, the second is mediocre spy story. Journal entries from an unnamed point of view character are introduced out of nowhere. These were 'as you know, Bob' descriptions of the narrator's actions instead of credible journal entries that reveal the character and motivations of their writer. I found them an unnecessary distraction from, rather than an augmentation to, the unfolding intrigue plot. The tension would have been greater if Joe and Sophie, along with the readers, had been left guessing for longer about the source of the suspicious events..

Don't judge this author's whole future body of work on this one review. The writing is sound and there's deft handling of the main characters. The structural issues of the second half are not uncommon with debut authors, and should have been pointed out by editors, as should the relative flatness of the secondary characters. I would look at this author's next book before crossing them off my reading list


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