Maiden Voyages:

Maiden Voyages: Magnificent Ocean Liners and the Women Who Traveled and Worked Aboard Them

by

Siân Evans

 

 

 You can almost hear those mighty steam whistles blow as this book sets sail into a lively recounting of the ships that changed history and the women who broke the sea's age-old bad luck superstition by working and/or sailing on them. It's part shipbuilding history, with digressions into major social and political upheavals of the era, but the true heart lies in the women's lives. These women are dynamic, making and breaking and remaking their careers upon the waves or while crossing them, their histories sometimes cautionary and often life-affirming.

The glamorous female passengers--famed for celebrity or notoriety--were deliberately courted by the liners' home offices, and by the author, to attract the eye. They range from the rich and scandalous Thelma Furness, twice divorced mistress of the Prince of Wales, to entertainer Josephine Baker, whose first transatlantic crossing brought her to Paris where she later made her name, and her longtime home. There was even an Olympic swimming champion who talked and taught her way into becoming the world's first ocean liner social activities director.

 

The women who waited upon them I found equally fascinating: crofters' daughters or German frauleins leaving their villages for domestic service afloat, and widows offered jobs by the company their husbands had worked for, who left their children in the care of relatives on shore for the demanding and sometimes dangerous jobs as stewardesses or chaperones on the sea. Those women, especially the stewardesses, were expected to  charm the passengers, be friendly with the officers, keep the lower decks in their place, and be on their feet and on call sixteen or more hours out of the twenty-four. They walked a narrow line between discouraging male advances to keep their reputations and maintaining an approachable air to keep the passengers and their shipmates happy with them.

 

One name you'll become very familiar with is that of Violet Jessop, later known as the Unsinkable. She was 24 years old and had been at sea several years before her first liner hit an iceberg and sunk out from under her feet (yes, that liner!). Surviving in a lifeboat with some women passengers and unaccompanied children, she was taken ashore and, along with the other surviving crew, soon shipped back to England where they all discovered their pay had been stopped the day the Titanic went down. By then they'd already been a few weeks without income, and since there were no unemployment or sick leave benefits available as well as no understanding at all of post-traumatic stress, Violet was back working on another ship within a very few weeks of her first--yes, first--sinking. 

 

The Titanic's iceberg encounter led to a dramatic shift in liner design and safety features, as well as crew training. Stewardesses like Violet had, for the first time, safety duties as well. Those stood her in good stead during WW1, when liner travel became a casualty of the U-boat threat and the demands of the military for shipping capacity, for she retrained as a nurse and was assigned to a hospital ship in the Mediterranean. Again her ship was sunk--fortunately before being loaded up with wounded soldiers. Nor was that the only converted liner to sink. Before the Armistice, more than 50% of the Cunard line's total tonnage of ships was lost. 

 

Post-war building booms brought the liners back into service for another grand period of service to the rich and the immigrant alike, and many's the former nurse who traded uniforms to stay at sea for a long and fulfilling career. This time more jobs were open to them. Not only as domestic staff and passenger attendants, they were hired as stenographers, hair stylists, masseuses, and anything else the competitive liner companies could dream up for the ease and comfort of their richest clientele. One holdout was the radio room. Even women who had been fully trained and certified as telegraphers were considered not responsible enough to man the telegraph rooms for many years longer.

All in all, this book is a fascinating look at the age of ocean liners through the eyes of women, all the way from the luxurious upper decks to the cramped crew quarters at the waterline. The author gives much credit to her great-uncle, a lifelong Cunard employee whose connections to old shipmates gave her an inexhaustible source of anecdotes, memories, and explanations for the ways of the great liners at sea.

Hardcover, 368 pages

Published August 10th 2021 by St. Martin's Press

ISBN

1250246466 (ISBN13: 9781250246462)

#oceanliners #history #WomenAtWork #Netgalley #MaidenVoyages #SianEvans

 

Moonlight and Misadventure - 20 Tales of Mystery & Suspense

Moonlight and Misadventure

20 Tales of Mystery & Suspense

Edited by Judy Penz Sheluk

This third anthology from Superior Shores Press is packed full of quirky characters engaging in crimes and mishaps by the light of the moon. The authors come from across North America, the stories’ settings too, from the swamps of the Deep South to the snowy north of Canada.

Some tales revolve around up-to-the-minute technology while others - such as the quaint innocence of 1921’s Moonset  by Jeanne DuBois and a far from innocent tale, Just Like Pen Entwistle by Robert Weibezahl, stalking Hollywood’s most famous hill in 1932 - trace back decades. Seething starlets make way for bayou ‘boys’, good kids go a little bit – or a lot – bad. Any cop you meet on these pages could be good, indifferent, or rotten to the core.

There are heists gone wrong where characters get redeemed by love gone right, and those gone right at the expense of romance. Thefts range from the usual cash, jewels, Rolexes to an irreplaceable fine art study and all way the back down the value scale to a bit of Elvis tat that nobody but an obsessed collector would pursue.

Whatever the variety of crime story you enjoy, you’re sure to find something to enjoy for an hour in this atmospheric anthology.

 ·         Publisher ‏ : ‎ Superior Shores Press (June 16 2021)

·         Language ‏ : ‎ English

·         Paperback ‏ : ‎ 300 pages

·         ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1989495397

·         ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1989495391

 https://www.amazon.ca/Moonlight-Misadventure-Stories-Mystery-Suspense/dp/1989495397/

 

 

The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird

 This novel would be a chilling read in any year but during the COVID pandemic it’s both a terrifying worst-case and a relief that we – human civilization – dodged even greater disaster. It’s a horrifying tale while not a horror story.

Reminiscent of WORLD WAR Z (the book, not the movie)in style, the story unfolds through flashbacks, emails, snippets from blogs, accounts of meetings, with only a few real-time narrators throughout. The last group are rendered in understated prose that conveys psychological trauma response better than more graphic descriptions or reactions might. This separation of time& distance makes for a less emotionally fraught view of the many horrors but allows for a broader worldview, geographically centered in the UK with glimpses into US and Asian-Pacific government and societal reactions.

A striking feature of this book is the centrality of female perspectives, politics, and coping mechanisms. As the men in positions of power and authority start to drop like flies or go into isolation to try to protect themselves from near-certain death, women adapt, reorganize, step in and step up to keep society functioning. The absence of the male-model single heroic figure beloved of movie directors (the Brad Pitt, in WWZ) and too many novels is stark. Success comes from a small number of women going beyond duty or personal responsibility, but also from the tireless work of thousands in research labs and bureaucracies, of millions of ordinary women running their towns and villages.

The male characters – all but one seen through the eyes of women who work for them, love them, or despise them - are a varied lot,some good, some bad, many mediocre, but all recognizable to most female readers.The women characters are only a bit more thoroughly sketched in. Apart from Catherine, the Plague’s almost accidental recording angel, we don’t get deeply or long into their minds or hearts, and on the whole there’s no need to. Women readers can easily fill in the emotional and psychological underpinnings. As with the men, we’ve all met and worked with and been related to those women, met them at the school gate. We’ve loved and hated them, envied their seemingly perfect lives or been thankful our life, our financial footing, our relationship, is stronger.

While there are valid critiques about the lack of depth regarding LGBTQ2S+ characters and the various regions’ political and militaristic responses, both get mentioned and in ways that admit to the complexity of their specific situations. To add more in those areas would be to distance readers further from the central threat to humanity’s survival, and the mechanisms by which the restructured, women-led states tackle the resulting sex imbalance to preserve the genetic diversity of our own species.

Those mechanisms are not the stuff of hearts-and-flowers,sisters-together anti-male Eutopias some male readers might anticipate. They’re practical and often ruthlessly implemented. Not all women agree. Not all women program heads are approachable or warm. A woman in this fictional universe can be brilliant and ambitious and personally unlikeable and still win accolades, like men can in the real world.While there’s more than enough loss to go around, the book ends on a series of small hopeful notes as characters who have survived the unthinkable gradually let their grief settle and move forward.

If the tale unfolded like WORLD WAR Z (the book), it ends like CHILDREN OF MEN (the movie), with new life, new relationships, raising children in a world unlike anything humanity has ever experienced before.

 #Netgalley #EndOfMen

 Publisher : Doubleday Canada (April 27 2021)

• Paperback : 416 pages
• ISBN-10 : 0385696639
• ISBN-13 : 978-0385696630

THE DAY SHE DIED by S.M. Freedman

 Nothing is ever quite as it seems in Eve Gold's life. Or in her death.

The tale starts on her 27th birthday with a chance accident and elides backwards as well as forward. Grim future is filled with hospital rooms, rehabilitation and a deep dive into traumatic brain injury. The past segments are lyrical, multi-sensory - their Elysian shimmer not-quite shielding our eyes from the ragged, often wretched childhood beneath.

There's more than one mystery being pieced together here, and a touch of paranormal. The writing is sound, and Eve is a character who engages the reader's sympathy. But there's no denying this is a hard read, dealing with tough topics: child abuse, toxic parenting, mental illness, and physical as well as psychological trauma.

A gripping journey that will have you thinking about death, memory, and the fluidity of time.  

 

Read more reviews on Goodreads

Check out the author's other books on Amazon Central

 

 

STARR SIGN by CS O'Cinneide

 
If Crime queen Melodie Campbell‘s mafia-family heroine, Gina Gallo, had a goddaughter, it might well be O'Cinneide's Candace Starr, “a wisecracking former hit woman with a stunning array of ways to kill people“.

In STARR SIGN, 2nd in a new crime series from Dundurn Press, Candace finds herself in charge of a sulky stranger, the 13-year-old sister she never knew she had. Their highly erratic mother is missing. To Candace that's not unusual. What is odd is Mom's last known location: At the mansion of her estranged grandfather, a man she swore she'd never see again. The dying head of the vicious Scarpello mob.

Now Candace will have to choose: become a reluctant foster mom to a bad-tempered tween or try to retrieve their real mom from the clutches of her not-so-loving family.

The first thing that attracted me to this novel was the wise ass narrator's unique voice - as distinctive a hard-boiled lead character as any penned by Chandler. The second was the chaotic wake-up scene. They tell beginning writers never to start with a character waking up but there’s always an exception and this one is a boozy doozy of a hangover scene that flaunts the full chaos of Candace's standard non-business operating procedure.

From there the pace rarely lets up. By the end of the first chapter, not only was I fully grounded in the story and its main players,I didn’t need the exquisitely timed hook to get me flipping immediately to chapter two, and then three, and then reading well into the night. The sulky sister and the hot computer nerd are fun sidekicks if not fully-fleshed characters, and the mobsters, from the lowest goon to the coldly calculating mob wife, are deftly portrayed with a minimum of extraneous detail.

This is assured prose in the hands of a masterful storyteller, taking the reader effortlessly from the mansions of the very rich to the seedy sex-trafficking brothels where gangsters go to let down their guard.

Find out more about the author and her books at

https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B07H4VP3GT

#SheKillsLit #StarrSign #Dundurn #thriller

Starr Sign

by C.S. O'Cinneide

Dundurn Press (March 2021)

ISBN 978-1-45974-487-5

First of a new cosy series by Dorothy St James

This small town mystery centers on the local library being threatened with losing all its books in favour of a digital-only revolution. Our heroine – and the books’/readers’ – is mild-mannered library assistant Trudell. She’s trying to capture a street cat and secretly saving books from the soon-to-be-dumpstered collection when the chief architect of the revolution meets an unscheduled end.

This is a fun-enough book for an idle evening, quite light, and with some physically comic moments. There are several fascinating snippets about book history and construction sprinkled throughout. The main and secondary characters are likeable if a bit flat. The relevant clues seemed to me to jump off the page, but our intrepid heroine did not put one and one together, let alone two and two. The cat was a nice touch, leading to several cute moments and revealing the most humanizing aspect of the returning police detective’s personality.

Although it’s the first in a new series the ongoing character motivations are lacking. There doesn’t seem any compelling reason for readers to root for these characters over any others going forward.

#netgalley

"The Ancient Dead" can still impact the living

This novel opens with a love song to the prairies’ people, places, and history. Set partly amid the Drumheller hoodoos, the mystery starts with a dinosaur bone hunt and delves into the dusty secrets of a prairie ranching family. Although well-grounded in the present, the plot has thirty-year old roots that, over the decades, bind the characters and the landscape from Drumheller to Fort Mac and into Calgary’s oil-company office towers as surely as the long roots of prairie grasses tangle beneath gently rolling pastures..  

The series lead, 30-something Amanda Doucette, is supposed to be on a mixed work-and-holiday trip with her main squeeze, setting up another teen adventure outing in Alberta's arid southeast between Drumheller and the Milk River valley. A chance encounter with a familiar farmhouse yanks her into an old mystery involving her own family.

As she juggles the competing demands of the job, her clouded family history, a local mystery that seems somehow entwined, and her future with her increasingly frustrated partner, there's suspense tugging the reader in at least three directions. Will she learn what happened at that farmhouse? Will her relationship survive when yet another romantic getaway is sidetracked by crime? Who is still trying to cover up a 30-year old secret, and why?

Part travelogue, part exploration of parallel family secrets, this crime novel is a good fit for both mystery readers and anyone trying to navigate the tricky questions of love and relationships in our highly mobile modern society.

 #AncientDead #Netgalley