Books Set in North America: United States: Texas and California

The Four Winds, by Kristin Hannah (2021)

 

The novel opens in 1921 in the Texas panhandle.  The economy is booming and life is good.  Elsa Wolcott is the eldest daughter of a wealthy family.  She is, however, tall, unattractive and unmarriageable, or so her parents tell her.  When she was fourteen, she suffered an illness and now her parents keep her sheltered.

 

One night, she meets Rafe Martinelli, a young man several years younger.  She falls head-over-heels and soon her reputation is ruined.  Her father demands that she marry Rafe, then her family disowns her.  Elsa and Rafe begin their married life living with his parents on a farm.  Although Elsa had never worked hard in her life, she soon comes to love the farm.  Rafe’s parents, although disappointed that Rafe’s life has taken a turn, soon come to love Elsa as their own.  For the first time, Elsa feels love.

 

By the mid-1930’s life has changed.  Dust storms and droughts devastate farmlands.  Elsa struggles to keep life going on the farm for the sake of her two young children.  After one particularly bad dust storm, however, Elsa has had enough.  She packs the farm’s only truck and with her children in tow, heads for California.  They have heard that California is the land of milk and honey and jobs are plentiful.

 

Unfortunately, once they reach California, Elsa realizes that she has no idea where to turn to next.  The harsh reality sets in.  Californians resent the migration of “Okies”, a generic term they used to describe all migrants coming to escape the Dust Belt.  The children are discriminated against in school, and hospitals will not accept the Okies.  Eventually, Elsa gets a job picking cotton, but soon learns that she is paid on credit, and must use the company store for all her groceries and needs.

 

Workers are beginning to get restless, and the Communist party begins to organize strikes.  I learned a lot about what life was like for the migrants.  It was a fast read.

 

Read:  March 27, 2021

 

4 stars

 

Books Set in Europe: France

The Book of Lost Names, by Kristin Harmel (2020)

 

The premise of this book is interesting.  It is about forgers during World War II who created false documents to save French Jews during World War II.  Instead, the book reads like a young adult sanitized version of Nazi-occupied France.

 

Eva Traube is a 20-something young woman who lives in Paris with her parents.  Although Eva was born in France, her parents are Polish immigrants.  As the Nazi’s begin rounding up Jews, her father is arrested, but Eva and her mother escape to a small town in southern France’s “Free Zone.”  Apparently, Eva had some talent as a budding artist, thus, created some forged documents that aided in their escape.

 

Soon she become involved in an underground resistance group and begins forging documents to help young Jewish children escape into Switzerland.  Although the dialogue is stilted and unrealistic (she asks questions that, as a Jew, she should have known), she does realize that by creating new identities for these children, she is, in effect, erasing their past.  This bothers her, and she wonders how these children will be able to reunite with their parents after the war.

 

One of her collaborators in drafting forged documents is Rémy, a young Catholic.  Together, they devised an elaborate code to identify the children with both their real names and their forged names.  Eva and Rémy record these coded names in an old obscure religious text found the parish church’s library.

 

While Eva is working on these documents with Rémy, they form a budding romance.  Her mother, however, frets about this relationship because Rémy is not Jewish.  Her mother sits around and broods about her missing husband and accuses Eva of abandoning her faith.

 

As the War continues, Eva becomes involved in activities that stretch the imagination, especially considering that she appears as being very naïve.

 

This was a very quick read, and something that I could see myself enjoying when I was about 12 years old.  The characters were not fully developed and the book did not depict the actual horrors and fears of living in France during the Nazi occupation.

 

Read:  March 23, 2021

3 Stars

Books Set in Africa and North America: Egypt and Boston, Massachusetts

The Book of Two Ways, by Jodi Picoult (2020)

In ancient Egyptian mythology, the Book of Two Ways describes the roads through the afterlife.  One route is through water and the other by land.  The roads are separated by a lake of fire, but both routes have the same destination.

In this novel, the author uses this theme as a way to describe Dawn’s life.  Dawn had been an up-and-coming graduate student in Egyptology, when she learned her mother was in hospice and would soon die.  Dawn left her studies to be with her dying mother.  After her mother died, Dawn suddenly found herself responsible for raising her young brother.  At the hospice facility, she met Brian, whose grandmother was dying.  They took comfort in each other, had a child and then married.

Brian represented security.  He was a respected theoretical physicist at Harvard who studies, in its own way, a theoretical path of two ways.  After giving up her studies in Egyptology, she becomes a death doula – she assists people at the ends of their lives.

For 15 years, Dawn has had a wonderful life.  Her relationship with her teenaged daughter becomes rife with teenage angst.  Her marriage reaches a stalemate.  Dawn finds that she can’t forget Wyatt, the pedigreed fellow graduate student, with whom she initially had a love-hate relationship, back before she gave up on her studies in Egypt.

The novel takes the path of two ways.  In one path, Dawn travels to Egypt to find Wyatt.  In the other path, she stays with Brian as their relationship frays.  The novel also goes back and forth in time, from the present to events that occurred in Dawn’s student days.

The author seemed to try too many story lines.  Dawn’s parents never married.  As presented in the story line, the reader thinks there must be a reason for this that will be later explained.  Kieran’s brother is gay, but this is irrelevant to the story line.

Ultimately, none of the characters were very likable.  I read this book while trapped on a plane for several hours.  Otherwise, I might not have finished reading it.

Read:  March 19, 2021

2 Stars

Books Set in Asia: Turkey

The Sultan’s Seal, by Jenny White (2006)

 

The Sultan’s Seal is a novel that takes place in the 1880’s, the final years of the Ottoman Empire.  When the body of a young English governess washes up on the shore of the Bosporus Strait, north of Istanbul, Kamil Pasha, a magistrate in the secular courts, wonders if there is a link between this death and a similar death of an Englishwoman that occurred 8 years earlier.  Kamil believes this will be a simple murder case.

 

Kamil’s first stop in the investigation is at the English Embassy, where he meets the Ambassador’s daughter, Sibyl.  Although she is English and he is Muslim, they form a friendship.  He tells her details of his investigation, and, because he is unable to meet with the women of the Sultan’s harem, Sibyl attempts to aid in the investigation.

 

The story line is rather convoluted and is far from a simple murder.  The novel is told through the voices of many characters.  The novel is more of a historical fiction than a mystery novel.  The author provides many details of daily life in Ottoman Turkey at this period of history, when there is clearly a tension between the Western influence in the country and the political area of the sultanate.

 

This novel is the first in the Kamil Pasha series.  I enjoyed the first part of the book much more that the final third.  As noted, the story line was convoluted and ultimately, I was not satisfied with the ending.  I learned about Ottoman culture but will probably not seek out other books in this series.

 

Read:  March 4, 2021

 

3.5 Stars