Books Set in North America: United States: New York, New York

The Social Graces, by Renée Rosen (2021)

 

Set in the 1870s, The Social Graces focuses on two of the wealthiest families in New York ~ the Astors and the Vanderbilts.  The Astors were “old money” and the Vanderbilts were the nouveau riche, having earned their money through the railroads.  Old money looked down on the new money.

 

When the novel opens, women are basically chattel of their husbands.  Society marriages are arranged as business transaction not as love matches.  The wives must ignore their husbands’ affairs.  What the women do have is Society with a capital “S” and their children.  Caroline Astor, the Mrs. Astor, is the Queen of New York Society.  She is one of the most powerful women in New York Society.  She holds the cards for who is who in New York Society.

 

Alva Vanderbilt is the young bride of William K. Vanderbilt.  When she was young, her father lost the family fortune, so Alva had grown up in Alabama in relative poverty.  After her marriage to a Vanderbilt, she is suddenly thrust into tremendous wealth, but her husband’s money won’t buy her a place in Society.

 

Alva tried to enter into the Astor circle only to be snubbed time and time again.  A chance encounter with Emily Astor seemed to be the key to the Astors.  Alas, it wasn’t to be.  Still, Alva was determined to enter into the coveted Society Circle.  With the Vanderbilt money, Alva has certain powers that allow her to make her mark in New York.

 

This novel, based on facts of the Astors and Vanderbilts, is a delightful read and a page-turner.  I couldn’t put it down.  It reminded me of the novel The Swans of Fifth Avenue, by Melanie Benjamin, which was about New York Society in the 1950s.

 

Read: December 24, 2021

 

5 Stars

Books Set in North America; United States

Fast Girls: The 1936 Women’s Olympic Team, by Elise Hooper (2020)

 

This is a novel that focuses on the lives of four young women athletes who competed to make the 1936 United States Olympic track team. The novel is based on the lives of Betty Robinson, Helen Stephens, Louise Stokes, and Tidye Pickett.  Each woman came from very different backgrounds and the author takes the reader back to their origin stories.

 

Running, and athletics in general, were not considered “suitable” for women at the time, and the Olympics Committee threatened to cancel future women’s events.  A strong lobby, however, kept women’s sports in the Olympics.

 

Betty Robinson was from the Chicago area and had competed in the 1928 Olympics at age 16.  While in high school, she caught the eye of the men’s track coach and was allowed to join the men’s track team.  From there, she ultimately qualified for the 1928 Olympic trials.  She had hoped to be able to compete in future Olympics, but a small plane accident in 1931 (although the story has the incident occurring in 1932), left her seriously injured.  She was not expected to live, but sheer will-power got her walking again.  Once she was walking again, her brother-in-law urged her to try running.

 

Helen Stephenson was from a small farming town in Missouri.  She was tall and gangly, and always felt like a misfit.  Her father was a poor farmer who wanted her to work and earn money for the family.  Her mother, however, had gone to college and wanted her daughter to gain an education.  Helen loved to run, and running was a way for her to be herself.

 

Louise Stokes was from a working-class Black family in Malden, Massachusetts.  She loved running but knew that she needed to help with her family’s finances.  Her church and her town, however, supported her ambition to run and provided her with the funds to join the Olympic team.  She faced discrimination but did become one of the earliest Black professional runners.

 

Tidye Pickett is the least developed character in this novel.  She, too, was a Black runner who made it to the 1936 Olympic team while fighting racism.

 

The novel also briefly delves into the politics of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.  The United States Olympic committee had debated whether or not to allow athletes to compete in the Games that were being held in Nazi Germany.  The decision to compete was close.  Some of the team members themselves, questioned whether or not they should participate in the games.

 

This is an interesting novel and the author tried to tackle such topics as feminism, racism and sexual identity.  The novel takes place when women’s sports is in its infancy and all of the women initially face obstacles intended to halt their competing for fears that it is unlady-like and will impair their ability to have children in the future.

 

I would classify this book as a Young Adult novel.  It is a book I would have really enjoyed as a junior high student.  It was an interesting look at the beginning of women’s track competitions.

 

Read:  October 16, 2021

 

3.5 Stars

 

Books Set in Australia

Picnic at Hanging Rock, by Joan Lindsay (1967)

 

The year is 1900.  On Valentine’s Day a group of young women who attend the Appleyard College for Young Ladies, private boarding school set out for a picnic at the infamous Hanging Rock in central Victoria, Australia.  Mrs. Appleyard, the Headmistress of the school, is very strict and has very rigid rules that the girls must follow.  She also keeps financial tabs on the students, taking care to garner to the wealthiest.

 

After their picnic lunch, several of the young women and one of the chaperones set off on a hike towards the Hanging Rock.  Come time to return to the school, these women were nowhere to be found.  Their mysterious disappearance is the beginning of a series of strange and dark events for the school and those involved in searching for the young women.

 

A search party is sent out to find the young women, but to no avail.  The girls’ disappearance sets the locals tongues wagging:  Were the girls abducted, murdered, “or worse”?  Meanwhile, while the girls set off, they passed the wealthy and privileged Michael Fitzhubert and his course coachman Albert Crundall.  Albert cat-calls the girls, much to Michael’s chagrin.  When he learns the girls are missing, Michael decides to go look for them on his own.  He discovers Irma, one of the young women, unconscious and near death lying on a rock.  Before he can return home, he falls and is rendered unconscious when Albert finds him.

 

Ultimately, both Irma and Michael rescued, Irma to the Appleyard College, and Michael to his uncle’s summer home, where they recover from their injuries.  Irma has no recollection of what happened at Hanging Rock.  Michael, seemingly to be of weak disposition, takes weeks to recover from his wounds.

 

Irma was one of the wealthiest students, so when her father informed Mrs. Appleyard that she would not be returning after the Easter Holidays, Mrs. Appleyard becomes concerned.  Soon other parents are withdrawing their daughters from the school.  Teachers and staff also begin to leave their employment with the school.

 

Spoiler Alert:  One student, Sara, is an orphan and not a favorite of Mrs. Appleyard.  When Sara’s guardian fails to send in his payment for the term, Mrs. Appleyard punishes Sara by not allowing her to continue art lessons.  Then, Mrs. Appleyard suddenly announced that Sara’s guardian was coming to collect her from the school.  Mrs. Appleyard insists that she, herself, will welcome the guardian and see Sara off.  After Sara is ostensibly sent away, under circumstances that seem strange to the remaining staff, we learn that Mrs. Appleyard receives a letter from the guardian apologizing for not remitting Sara’s tuition.  What really happened to Sara?

 

The novel ends with Mrs. Appleyard ostensible leaving the school to visit friends.  Instead, she set an elaborate plan to leave the school, head for the Hanging Rock and meet her demise.

 

This novel delves into several characters.  It was a bit hard to understand as there was a considerable amount of Aussie slang, which I am not familiar with.

 

Read: August 22, 2021

 

3 Stars

Books Set in Africa: Burundi

Small Country, by Gaël Faye (2018)

Small Country is a semi-autobiographical novel of Gabriel, a young boy growing up in Burundi in the 1990s.  He had an idyllic childhood, living in Bujumbura, the capital city of Burundi to a French diplomat father and a Tutsi Rwandan mother.  Most of his closest young friends also had white fathers and Black mothers.  His life is sheltered from the politics brewing in his country.

As a 10-year old boy, he spent his days stealing mangos from neighbors’ trees and selling them back to tree’s owners.  He is oblivious to the rising tensions erupting in Rwanda, other than the whispers he hears from his parents.

His mother is a Rwandan refugee and has family still living in her home country.  She worries about her native country.  Her younger brother decided to return to Rwanda to fight for the Tutsi, who are being slaughtered by the Hutus.  Gabriel becomes aware of conflict when his family visits their Rwandan family to attend his uncle’s wedding.  While there, he eavesdrops and hears his aunt describing the violence and genocide of Tutsis.

The violence knows no borders and erupts in Burundi, too.  Gabriel recalls the first democratic election of the country’s president in June 1993.  He was the country’s first Hutu president and had hoped to smooth relations between the Hutus and Tutsi in the country.  When he was assassinated 3 months later, the country erupted into a civil war.  The political climate had a profound impact on Gabriel.  His young friends are anxious to take up the “cause” and defend their neighborhood.  Gabriel retreats into books and befriends and elderly Greek widow who has a house filled with books.

The civil war forced its citizens to choose sides.  Violence and death are all around and curfews are in place.  Young Gabriel is suddenly faced with a terrible choice that will end his childhood with which ever option he selects.

This is a small novel, but very powerful.

Read:  July 25, 2020

5 Stars

Books Set in Europe: England

Queen of Shadows: A Novel of Isabella, Wife of Edward II, by Edith Felber (2006)

This historical novel is as much the story of Isabella, Queen consort of England and wife of Edward II, King of England as it is her lady-in-waiting, Gwenith de Percy.  Gwenith was a young Welsh woman who landed herself a position on the English Court bent on revenge for the actions of Isabella’s father-in-law, Edward I.  Edward I had conquered the Wales and stripped the nobility of its lands.  He the process, he named his son the first English Prince of Wales.

Isabella, the French princess and daughter of Philip IV, King of France, arrived in England at age 12 to marry then Edward, Prince of Wales.  She soon learned that her husband had a string of male lovers.  Despite this, they have 4 children together.

When Edward became King Edward II, he proved to be a weak king.  This allowed the the young and ambitious Hugh Despenser to dig his claws into Edward.  Hugh became Edward’s lover, but with the idea of becoming ruler of the country.  Isabella recognized that Hugh’s interest in Edward was not on altruistic grounds.  She despised him.

Meanwhile, Gwenith became friendly with the Welsh baron Owain de Rhys.  He first initiated a friendship with her in hopes that she would be able to convince Isabella to spare fellow Welshman Roger Mortimer his life.  Mortimer had been in prison awaiting his execution at the hands of Edward, or more likely Hugh Despenser.  Gwenith convinced the Queen to visit Mortimer in prison.

Mortimer and the Queen became lovers and she was able plan his escape from the Tower of London.  Soon Isabella and Mortimer were plotting to overthrow Edward.

While reading this novel, I did a lot of fact-checking and most of the events depicted in the novel corresponded to actual historical events.

I enjoyed this book.  It is a fast read, and interesting because it tells the story of King Edward from Isabella’s point of view.

Read:  May 14, 2020

4 Stars

Books Set in North America, Europe and Asia

Edge of Eternity, by Ken Follett (2014)

This novel is the third book in Ken Follett’s The Century Trilogy.  The first two books are Fall of Giants and Winter of the World.  The trilogy follows the generations of 5 families, whose lives are all intertwined, spanning from the early years of the 1900s through the century.  The first book, Fall of Giants, focused on the Russian Revolution and World War II. Winter of the World focused on World War II.  This final book covered a host of social issues beginning with the Cuban missile crisis, the erection of the Berlin Wall and the American Civil Rights marches and ending with the election of Barack Obama.

We meet the later generations of the families from the first two books in the series in this novel.  We experience the Cold War through the eyes of the Franck family who lived in Berlin until almost overnight it became East Berlin.  Families were split – some members free to travel about in the West while other members stuck under the regime of the Stasi in East Berlin.  The novel takes us through to the fall of Communism of the1950s to its collapse in the late 1980s.

The twin sibling in the Russian Dvorkin are close but are on opposite sides of the political structure.  Dmitri gets a job as an aide to Khrushchev, while his sister, Tanya, writes for TASS, but sneaks the dissident writings of a political prisoner to the free world for publication (reminiscent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn).

We experience the Civil Rights Freedom rides through the idealized eyes of young George Jakes, a young man with a black mother and white political father.  He later becomes an aide to Bobby Kennedy and watches the progression of the enactment of Civil Rights laws.

We move on to the music and drug scene in San Francisco in the mid-1960s.  We experience Vietnam through the experiences of a young naturalized citizen.  The characters in the families grow from idealized young people out to change the world into harden by life with some of their dreams realized, while others are left behind.  Nixon becomes President, then we see the cause of his downfall.

The original families depicted in the first book are the same throughout the series, one need not have read the first two books to appreciate this one.  This novel is cram filled with historical events and facts.  It is well researched and provides on of the best explanation of the Bay of Pigs and Cuban missile crisis that I have read.

The book is long (nearly 1100 pages), but it is a page-turner.  It kept my attention even though I knew the outcome of the historical events described in the book.  I greatly enjoyed this novel and felt I got to know most of the characters in the families living through these momentous events.

Read:  March 24, 2020

5 Stars

The Century Trilogy:

     Fall of Giants; Book I (Read: August 3, 2011)

     Winter of the World; Book II (Read: March 17, 2015)

     Edge of Eternity; Book III (Read: March 24, 2020)

Books Set in Europe: Poland

The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris (2018)

The Tattooist of Auschwitz is based on the experiences of Lale Sokolov and Gita Furman who were deported to Auschwitz in the early 1940s, and remained there until the end of World War II.

Lale was a young Slovakian Jew who was rounded up, ostensibly for construction work, in 1942.  He soon found himself a prisoner at Auschwitz.  At the time he was taken, he was not aware of the full extent of Nazi actions.  Because he spoke several languages, he became the assistant to a French Jew named Pepan, the tattooist.  Pepan took Lale under his wing and taught him the art of tattooing.  Although he despised the work, he learned to keep his head down and tattooed the numbers on the arms of Jews entering the camp.  One day his tattooist mentor disappeared, he Lale became the primary tattooist.  This position gave him privileges not afforded other prisoners.

One day, he tattooed the arm of a young women.  Although she had already been shorn of her hair, he thought she was beautiful.  He learned her name was Gita and she was a prisoner at Birkenau.  She, too, was given a “job” at Auschwitz, which provided her with some protections.  The two young people were able to arrange meetings and they fell in love.

Because of Lale’s position and privileges, he was able to smuggle extra rations of food and clothing to some of the other prisoners.  Lale did what he had to do to survive and to try to keep some of his fellow prisoners alive.

When the War ended, Lale and Gita were separated, however, they continued to search for each other, as well as their family members.  Ultimately, they found each other and after the War, they married.  They ended up living in Australia.  He kept his work as at tattooist secret for many years for fear that he would be considered a Nazi collaborator since his work in the Auschwitz kept him alive.

After Gita died, Lale met with the author and told his story.  It is a fascinating tale of love and survival amid unthinkable horror.

Read:  November 19, 2019

4 Stars

Books Set in Asia, Kharbin, Manchuria

The Winter Station, by Jody Shields (2018)

The Winter Station is based on an actual event of a deadly plague epidemic that occurred in Kharbin, Manchuria in 1910.

Kharbin was a railroad hub in Manchuria that was under the control of both Czarist Russia and the Chinese empire.  The citizens of Kharbin are both Russian and Chinese and there is also a “foreign” section of the city.  The novel follows the Baron, the chief Russian medical officer of the city.  The Baron is of Russian aristocracy with a Manchurian wife, something that would be frown upon had he been living in Western Russia.

Bodies begin to be found near the rail station, but then mysteriously disappear. The cause of death is unknown. Soon people begin to run high fevers, begin coughing blood and are dead within days.  The mortality rate of the disease was virtually 100%.

Doctors from Russia and Europe descend upon Kharbin to determine the cause of the epidemic.  Also on the scene is Dr. Wu Lien-Teh, a Malayan-born Chinese doctor.  (He is an actual historical figure.)  Medical examination of patients must be sensitive to both Western and Chinese medical techniques.

Because Dr. Wu was born in Malaysia, his mastery of Russian and Chinese is shaky. This creates some initial mistrust among the other doctors.  Dr. Wu received his medical degree at Oxford University, so his ideas were very radical to the Russian and Chinese doctors. His ultimate solution for handling the plague was a turning point preventing further spread of the disease.

Unfortunately, the novel does not provide more insight into Dr. Wu.  I researched Dr. Wu and the 1910 plague epidemic.  He was a significant figure in modern Chinese medicine.  The plague is believed to have killed between 50,000 and 60,000 during the winter of 1910.

Jody Shields wrote The Fig Eater, which I read in 2003.

Read: May 20, 2018

4 Stars

Books Set in Eastern Europe: Poland

The Librarian of Auschwitz, by Antonio Iturbe (2012; English Translation, 2017)

The Librarian of Auschwitz is based on the real-life experience of young Dita Adler Kraus.  She and her family were Jews living in Prague, when there were round up by the Nazis and first sent to Terezín, before being transferred to Auschwitz.  At Auschwitz, they were placed in the Block 31, the Family Block, where, although men and women were separated, families could remain somewhat intact.

Fredy Hirsch, one of the prisoners, ran a secret school, to keep some sort of normalcy for the children.  Although books were forbidden, the school had a collection of 8 dog-eared and ragged books that had been smuggled into the camp.  Dita was chosen to protect the books.  The novel depicts daily life in the camp and the struggle to stay alive, while maintaining a modicum of humanity.

Life in Block 31 was hardly without its struggles, and one never knew when the Nazis would transfer prisoners to the gas chambers.  Many of the characters in the novel are real people.  The author met with and interviewed Dita when she was well into her 80s.  In the afterwards, the author acknowledges that he took some artistic licenses with the story, but does present a summary of the lives of some of the other characters.  One such real-life person was Rudy Rosenberg (also known as Rudi Vrba), who escaped the camp and wrote a detailed report to inform the world of the horrors of the concentration camps.  His report, however, was unheeded.  Fredy Hirsch was another real person who life continues to spark controversy.

Read:  February 20, 2018

4 Stars 

Books Set in the United States: Maine

The Stars are Fire, by Anita Shreve (2017)

For 2 weeks in October 1947, a horrible fire swept through the Maine coast.  The fire consumed nearly 250,000 acres of forest and totally destroyed nine towns, leaving thousands of people homeless.  This is the backdrop of Anita Shreve’s novel, The Stars are Fire.

Grace Holland is a young wife and stay-at-home mother of two small children.  She lives in a small coastal town on the coast of Maine.  Her husband is very controlling, and his mother despises her.  Grace’s social life consists of her children, her mother and her friend and neighbor, Rosie.  She is pregnant with her third child when the fire comes.

Her husband, Gene, joins the volunteer firefights, leaving Grace to protect their children and home.  The fire is too strong to protect the home, but Grace is able to save herself and the children by wading in the ocean.  After the fire has passed, Grace finds herself homeless until she remembers that her mother-in-law’s huge house may have been spared.  She moves in with her mother and children and awaits work of her husband’s fate.

In order to make ends meet, Grace finds a job assisting in a doctor’s office.  On her own, Grace finds that she has strength she didn’t know she had.  She begins to rebuild her life until, one fateful day, her life is again changed.  She now must face an even bigger challenge.

I have read other books by Anita Shreve, and enjoyed then.  I picked up this book because, having recently read a book about the 1917 Halifax explosion, I thought this book was a fictional account of that event.  That probably colored my reaction to this book.  The Stars are Fire takes place in Maine 30 years after the Halifax explosion.  I was well familiar with the Maine fire, having grown up in Maine and spending a lot of time in Bar Harbor, which was also badly damaged by the fire.

Read:  January 29, 2018

3 Stars