Books Set in North America: New York City

The Hidden Palace, by Helene Wecker (2021)

 

The Hidden Palace picks up the characters from The Golem and the Jenni, but the reader need not have read the first book to enjoy this one.  This novel takes place eight years after the first novel has ended and begins around 1900.  There are several threads plots in this novel.  Chava, the Jewish golem, and Ahmad, the Arabian jinni, have gone their separate ways haven’t seen each other in years.  Sophia Winston, who became chilled following her affair with the jinni, has traveled to a desert Middle East to find a cure.  Anne is working as a laundress and raising her young son.  Interwoven into the lives of the characters, is a fair amount of history, as the world is on the brink of World War I.

 

Cheva realizes that as a golem, she never ages, while the people around her do.  She realized that she could no longer work in the bakery, so attends a nearby college and gets a degree in that allows her to teach cooking.  She reinvented herself as Charlotte Levy and landed a job at an orphanage academy.  After the jinni’s partner died, he holed up in the building and cut himself off from the rest of the community and spent his time constructing with steel.  Anne’s son landed a job as a Western Union messenger, which takes him around New York City.

 

While searching for a cure to her illness, Sophia encounteres a female jinni, whom she calls Dima.  Dima has been banished from her tribe and is searching for the jinni who can touch steel (Ahmad).  She promises Sophia a cure if she can bring her to Ahmad.  Meanwhile, back in New York, the reader meets Kreindel, a young girl who studies Hebrew with her rabbi and assists him in making Yessele, another golem to be her protector.

 

In addition to a beautiful story, the author also gives us a glimpse of life in the New York tenements at the turn of the last century.  I loved this book and look forward to other writings from this author.

 

Read:  May 3, 2023

 

4 Stars

 

 

Books Set in Europe, Madrid, Spain

The Princess Spy: The True Story of World War II Spy Aline Griffiths, Countess of Romanones, by Larry Loftis (2021)

 

Aline Griffith (1923 ~ 2017) was born Pearl River, New York, a sleepy little town in outside of New York City, to a middle-class family.  She had big dreams and longed to make a name for herself.  After graduating from college, she landed a job as a model with New York fashion designer Hattie Carnegie.  While it wasn’t her dream job, she did learn poise and a fashion sense.

 

A chance meeting at a dinner party one night in the early 1940s with an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operative changed the course of her life.  She was given mysterious instructions and told to show up at a building in Washington, D.C., and give a false name.  That led to her training to become an operative with the OSS.  After completing the training course, she was sent to Madrid, Spain in the midst of World War II.  There she was to search for Nazi supporters in the supposedly neutral Spain.  She rubbed elbows with the rich and famous and dated many glamorous men.

 

After the War, she married Luis Figeuroa y Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno, Count of Quintanilla, making her an instant countess.  Her husband’s grandfather was Álvaro de Figeuroa, who had served as Prime Minister of Spain in the early 1910s.  She mostly retired from the spy business after her marriage, but in the 1950s she occasionally took on secret information-gathering missions for the CIA.

 

Her actual involvement in espionage was not well enumerated.  The author describes one event when Aline takes in some female operatives into her home, and one woman was sleeping in her bed.  Later, Aline discovers that the woman had been shot and killed while sleeping.  Aline called her handler and they quietly removed the body before morning.  The author, however, acknowledges that it is difficult to determine what is real and what is not because Aline, herself, provided very contradictory versions of various events.

 

Most of the book describes the life of high society in Spain during.  The author describes the sport of bullfighting in detail and introduces the reader to some of the most famous bullfighters of that era.  Aline traveled in circles where she met and became friends with many of the bullfighters.  From reading this book, one gathers that most of her time as a spy was attending cocktail parties and bullfights.

 

During the War, Aline seems to be nervous about having too much contact with Nazis.  After the 
War, however, she considers the Duchess of Windsor, a known Nazi sympathizer, as one of her closest friends.

 

The book was mildly interesting.  I expected to learn more about a female spy during World War II, and not the antics of a high-society partier.

 

Read:  April 26, 2023

 

3 Stars

 

Books Set in North America: New York, New York

Brazen, by Julia Haart (2022)

Brazen is a whiny memoir about a woman who was born in Moscow, Russia to secular parents.  As a young child, her parents immigrated to America, where they became ultimately joined a large ultra-Orthodox community in New York and were essentially cutoff from the modern world.  Later, as an adult, she left the community to enter the world of fashion and become a shoe designer.

As her family became indoctrinated into the ultra-Orthodox community, Haart was taught to believe that any deviation from the community’s norms would incur the wrath of God.  Because her family was not always religious, her parents were concerned about making a good marriage match.  Although she had some say in her marriage partner, Haart essentially married a young man she had met only 3 times prior to the wedding.  They had little in common and he expected his wife to work and keep the home while he studied Torah.

She described how, at age 19 and with no formal higher education, she taught 17- and 18-year old girls in her community.  The education was limited to religious instruction, as subjects such as math and science were forbidden.  Eventually, her husband gets an outside job and the family moved to an Orthodox community in Atlanta for a few years.

Somehow, the family has money and Haart describes the high-end clothing that she wears, after altering them to conform to the stringencies of the community – long skirts, high necks, long sleeves so no skin is showing.

After Haart left the community, my interest in her life began to wane.  She wanted to be a shoe designer.  Suddenly, everyone she met wanted to both help her and take advantage of her.  She admitted that she was naïve to the outside world, but still …  She also describes in cringy detail her sexual encounters.  Suddenly, everyone wants to have sex with her, and she often seems to have no objection to their wishes.

What she left out, however, is the reaction of the community once she left.  She mentions one instance in which she was invited to a family wedding but was never invited to a family event after that.  She implies that her children have left the community but doesn’t explain what and how that happened.  One daughter married young before Haart had left the community.

The book could have used some better editing.  Some of her accounts of biblical stories seem a bit “off.”

I read the book to the end, but found it very whiny and egocentric.

Read:  March 25, 2023

2.5 Stars

Books Set in North America; United States

Deliberate Cruelty: Trumann Capote, The Millionaire's Wife and the Murder of the Century, by Roseanne Montillo (2022)

 

Deliberate Cruelty is about the rise and fall of Ann Woodward and Truman Capote, two prominent figures in New York society.  Their paths occasionally crossed, and Capote was “deliberately cruel” in his writings of Ann.

 

Ann Woodward (née Evangeline Lucille Crowell; 1915 – 1975) grew up in poverty in Kansas, but she had big dreams.  She changed her name and set off for New York, where she became a model, actress and nightclub dancer.  It was as a nightclub dancer that she met William Woodward, Sr.  They likely carried on an affair until the father introduced her to William Woodward, Jr.  The son was smitten, possibly as an act of rebellion against his tight-laced and monied family.

 

When Ann and William, Jr., married, Ann became the socialite she had dreamed of becoming.  Life was not all she expected, however.  Soon William, Jr., tired of her and the two began having very public fights.  One night in 1955, Ann shot and killed her husband, thinking that he was the prowler who had been breaking into homes in their posh neighborhood.  Although Ann was ultimately not convicted of her husband’s killing (a cover-up by her in-laws to avoid a worse scandal?), she was shunned from her former society life.

 

Truman Capote (1924 – 1984), was also born into poverty and came from a dysfunctional family.  He, too, had dreams of making it big.  With the publication of In Cold Blood, he became a household name and a fixture in New York society.  Capote became the confident of all the high society socialites, or swans as he called them. They spilled all their secrets to him.  Capote imagined his next book, which would be called Answered Prayers, to be a fictionalized account of all the tales that his swans had revealed.  The sordid scandal of the Woodward killing was red meat to Capote.  He took to calling Ann Woodward Mrs. Bang Bang.

 

Capote’s downfall came with the publication and article entitled La Côte Basque, 1965, which was published in Esquire magazine.  The story was a chapter from his incomplete novel Answered Prayers.  La Côte Basque, 1965, was a thinly veiled portrayal of his swans.  Once the story was published he was instantly cut off from high society, that had been so meaningful to him.

 

This was a fast and fun read.

 

Read: March 13, 2023

 

4 Stars

 

Books Set in North America: United States, Massachusetts and California

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin (2022)

 

Sam Masur and Sadie Green met as young children when Sam was in the hospital recovering from injuries sustained in a car accident, that will leave his disabled.  Sam was traumatized by the accident that killed his mother and had been non-communicative.  Sadie, who was bored visiting her sick sister, went into the hospital’s game room.  There she met Sam who was playing a video game.  They quickly bonded over video games, and she got him out of his depressive state.  Years later, they ran into each other again when Sam was attending Harvard, and Sadie was at MIT.

 

As young college students, they renewed their love-hate friendship and their love of video games.  They created their first video game, Ichigo, which quickly launched them into the gaming industry.  The game, however, required a platform created by Sadie’s former professor and lover.  While taking a course in computer gaming, Sadie entered into a destructive relationship with a married professor, who comes in and out of her life.  During a particularly painful breakup with the professor, Sam pulled Sadie out of her depression.

 

Sam and Sadie established a computer game company with the help of Marx, who had been Sam’s college roommate.  At this point, the novel’s focus explained in detail the creation of various games the company created.  Sam and Sadie’s relationship also went through many periods of ups and downs.  Marx is the glue that keeps their gaming company from exploding.

 

The first part of the book kept my interest, but I got bored by the final third.  Sam and Sadie’s relationship began to drag.  They were never romantically involved, but they were constantly feuding.  I ceased being interested in their exploits.  The novel then delved into politically correct issues by creating games where the characters could enter into same-sex marriages.

 

The title of the novel comes from a soliloquy in Macbeth where Macbeth discussed the futility of life.

 

Read:  March 11, 2023

 

3 Stars

Books Set in Europe: England

Disobedience, by Naomi Alderman (2006)

Read: March 3, 2023

3 Stars

Books Set in Asia (Lahore) and Europe (France)

The Book of Everlasting Things, by Aanchal Malhotra (2022)

 

Samir Vij was a 10-year-old Hindu boy living in Lahore, Hindustan in 1938 when he first met Firdaus Khan, a young Muslim girl.  Samir was born into a family that made perfumes and Firdaus’ family were calligraphers.  They were born in a time when their country was under British rule, but families of the various religions lived side-by-side.  Their fathers become friends, and Samir learns calligraphy from Firdaus’ father.  Samir and Firdaus become fast friends and soon fall in love.

 

On Samir’s 10^th birthday, he was given a bottle of ittar by Uncle Vivek, who operates the family’s perfume atelier.  Samir has been blessed with a keen sense of smell that will be an asset when he enters into his family’s business.  He is moved to tears as he inhales the essence of the tuberose ittar given to him by his uncle.

 

Firdaus’ father, Altaf Khan, is a master calligrapher and teaches the art to young students, including his daughter, whom he wants to be educated.  When Samir joins Altaf’s classes, he also gets to spend time with Firdaus.

 

Ten years later Samir and Firdaus hope to plan a life together.  In 1947, however, the plan to Partition the Indian subcontinent is put into force.  Suddenly, what the citizens have considered to be Hindustan, is now Pakistan and India.  Lahore is now Muslim Pakistan.  Immediately tensions arise between the Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs.  Overnight, Samir’s neighborhood was burned to the ground.  Samir’s family is all killed in the fire.  Only Samir survived, and with him a few family artifacts, including numerous journals from Vivek’s experiences during World War I.  Samir went to Altaf, hoping to live with the Khan family, but Altaf rejected him.

 

On his own, Samir has no desire to relocate to India, instead finding his way to Paris, France.  He chose Paris because that was where his Uncle Vivek learned the art of perfume and where he fought during the First World War.  He never stops thinking of Firdaus but eventually he met and fell in love with Léa.  They marry and have daughter.  Meanwhile, back in Lahore, Firdaus entered into an arranged marriage.  Each goes on to a separate life, but they never truly stop loving each other.

 

[Spoiler alert:  Before the Partition, Samir created a special perfume for Firdaus from the tuberose.  He never knew until decades later that Firdaus was unable to smell certain scents, thus could never truly appreciate the perfume that he made for her.]

 

The author beautifully describes the city of Lahore.  One can feel the city through the writing.  The author carefully details the methodology of creating the perfumes.  One can almost smell the scents as they are created.  Additionally, while learning of the perfume trade, I also learned about the Partition that separated India into Hindu and Muslin countries.

 

This is truly one of the best books I have ever read.  It will not appeal to everyone, as many Urdu phrases and words are scattered throughout the book, and the names are not common to the English speaker.  Still, I highly recommend this book for its beauty.

 

5 Stars

 

Read: February 26, 2023