The World's Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant
by Liza Tully
Formidable Female PI meets Eager Young Assistant (3/10/2025)
The writing in this novel is clear, and especially evocative of the beautiful Vermont setting where the action occurs. However, as the title might predict, the opening involves some rambling and wordiness, which recurs at some points in the story.
Olivia Blunt, 25-years-old, narrates the story of her becoming the assistant to well-known and successful Private Investigator Aubrey Merritt, a formidable woman in her sixties. The fastidious Ms. Merritt has very high standards for all behavior and work, and is vocal when these standards are not met. Olivia is enthusiastic and dedicated, but untrained, and somewhat clumsy interpersonally. Her only experience is as a company's fact checker, a skill she puts to good use in their sleuthing.
A clever murder in a Vermont resort setting involves complicated family and business dealings. It also tests Olivia's talents and commitment, and her ability to stand up to Merritt's criticism and condescension. It seems a new detective partnership has begun, which hopefully will be followed up in other books, though with fewer pages.
Happy Land
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Enduring Injustices (10/23/2024)
Thank you to Book Browse and Berkley Books for an advance readers copy of this book.
Based on a true story, "Happy Land" is a saga of strength, struggle, survival and success.
In the 1870's, after emancipation, Black citizens in South Carolina find themselves persecuted by the Klan. Many of them leave, heading together for the mountains of North Carolina, to establish themselves on land where the community flourishes. However, while physically less vulnerable, they still must deal with economic and legal abuse, whose consequences continue to appear in the present.
Starting there, with the most recent descendants of this group, Happy Land returns to tell the 1870's saga of the family who led the move to their new life, and the ensuing efforts to grow and save the land they make their "Kingdom."
While the charismatic leader, William, originally led the way, it is the women in the family who persevere and who tell the story: Nikki, in the present, and Luella, 150 years before, at the Kingdom's beginning. In the first person, each woman speaks with a distinct voice, yet their conversational styles give well-defined voices to a variety of family members and neighbors.
The story is engrossing, the writing engaging, and the dialog draws the reader in so thoroughly, it takes a moment to return to one's own world. This would make an excellent book group choice.
Harlem Rhapsody
by Victoria Christopher Murray
Bringing to Life a Forgotten Black Feminist (8/26/2024)
Thank you to Book Browse, Berkley and NetGalley for an advance readers copy of this book.
This inspiring, evocative novel joins several others by the same author about important but forgotten Black women in the first half of 20th century America.
Born in 1882, Jessie Redmon Fauset was a Black feminist who, in 1919, became the first literary editor of "The Crisis," the premier Negro periodical of its time. With impeccable academic credentials (BA from Cornell, Phi Beta Kappa; MA from University of Pennsylvania), Fauset was dedicated to changing the racist world. In her role at "The Crisis," she discovered and nurtured young Negro poets and writers, and eventually became a celebrated novelist herself.
Fauset also was devoted to WEB Du Bois, the founder and editor of "The Crisis," with whom she apparently had a long-time affair. This affair provides the framework for the book, as she comes to Harlem because WEB made her literary editor, and she constantly has to choose between work and love, and the knowledge that her great love is morally objectionable to her family, and must be hidden from her friends.
With vivid character portrayals, the author introduces a panoply of writers and thinkers from the Harlem Renaissance, populating the book with others whose stories invite further reading.
The book also raises a philosophical question: in the Author's Note Murray says that there is clear evidence of this affair between Fauset and Du Bois. However, it was hidden, if rumored, and I am not sure why the author chose to build the story of a remarkable woman, of any time or race, around something that she was so secretive and, presumably, uncomfortable about being known.
It does make for engrossing reading, but as with other novels based so heavily on a real person's life, it raises questions about the choices to fictionalize private, protected areas of that life – and will add to the many ways this novel makes for good book group discussions.
This was the term favored at that time by the Black community.
Follow the Stars Home
by Diane C. McPhail
Memory, Like a River (4/28/2024)
Thank you to Book Browse for an advance reader's copy.
This engaging novel-as-memoir is told in the voice of Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt (1791-1876) and recounts the real 1811 maiden voyage of the first steamship to travel the Mississippi River. The success of that adventure made trade possible both up and down the Mississippi, and helped open the West for America's expansion.
Happily married to the much older Nicholas Roosevelt (much is made of this) who designed the steam engine and paddles, Lydia's recounting covers the almost three-month trip, marked by dangers on land and water, the experience heightened by concern for their young children, a toddler and newborn, who accompanied them.
As they wait for the water to rise and their travel to begin, Lydia returns repeatedly to her early childhood, marked by the loss of her mother in childbirth, abandonment by her grief-stricken father, and the traumatic journey finally made by sea to reunite with him. The river acts both as a reminder of that trauma, and as a metaphor for her meandering ruminations, anxieties, and hopes.
Then the voyage begins, and the descriptions – and emotions – become vivid and exciting. Going through the dangerous Falls of the Ohio, experiencing the devastating New Madrid, Missouri, earthquake, and navigating the river where landmarks have been drastically changed by the earthquake - all are based in factual research, and add up to a dramatic and largely satisfying reading experience, re-introducing this intrepid woman to a modern audience.
The Funeral Cryer: A Novel
by Wenyan Lu
A Voice from a Chinese Village (2/10/2024)
Thank you to Book Browse and NetGalley for an advanced reader's copy of this book.
This is a book that I found slow to warm up to, as it is a steady recitation of one woman's thoughts and perceptions about what are often disappointing or distanced relationships.
The Funeral Cryer opens when the unnamed woman narrator, a professional mourner paid for her dramatic presentations, including tears, has been performing for 10 years.
She is associated with bad luck because of her work, and is isolated from most people in her rural village in Northeast China. Sometimes, she admits, she is even suspicious of herself.
The book takes the form of continual internal musings, about family relationships, opportunities taken or not, about the limited choices she had to make, especially her marriage to "The Husband." Now in her mid-40's, she also has an awakening of her physical self, how she feels about her body and how it appears to others, including sexually.
At times her thoughts seem more like the ruminations of a depressed person, going over and over the same experiences as if that will help change them, though it does not. However, there are small changes in her perceptions and in her actions, that rescue the book from dreariness, and made it a moving and thoughtful read.
Becoming Madam Secretary
by Stephanie Dray
Rediscovering a 20th century American heroine (11/5/2023)
Thank you to BookBrowse and NetGalley for an advanced reader's copy of this book.
This vivid novel, told in the voice of Frances Perkins, the first female U.S. Cabinet member, brings to life this forgotten pioneer in the fight against poverty. It communicates Frances Perkins' sense of mission and of responsibility, as well as the sacrifices she made as a public servant, and re-introduces and re-establishes her as a true American hero.
Frances Perkins (1880-1965) trained in social work and economics, was part of the original, early 20th century Progressive Movement in American politics. She fought for the safety, health, and other rights of children, women, the poor and the elderly. And she conceived of "social insurance," the Social Security that became law, with her guidance, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1935. During this time, she had personal losses and tragedies, including the manic-depressive illness and hospitalization of her husband, which were kept from the public with the help of influential women like Eleanor Roosevelt.
Despite this, "Miss Perkins," as she preferred to be known, became a lightning rod for conservative opponents, and was often vilified in the press and hampered by powerful men in achieving her compassionate yet pragmatic goals.
A very private person, Miss Perkins did not leave much information about her own emotional life; author Stephanie Dray does a fine job of using what records remain, including love letters and poems, to describe what Miss Perkins may have experienced as she fought against misogyny and elitism to protect vulnerable people at all levels of society.
North Woods: A Novel
by Daniel Mason
A remarkable collection of linked stories across time and space (9/7/2023)
This book might be subtitled, “What we do for love”: love of place, nature, parents, children, siblings; romantic love and illicit love, platonic and physical.
This remarkable collection of linked stories is told in different voices from different times, with many contemporaneous social and cultural issues explored. These range from colonial settlers in the 17th century, to apple growers in the 18th, to the slave catcher in mid-19th century, the séance in the early 20th century, and the treatment of mental illness in the mid-20th.
There are riddles, ballads, and ghost stories, and writing that seems to come right from the first-hand accounts of captured colonial settlers as well as Victorian authors like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and 1950’s-60’s pulp crime fiction.
The North Woods gradually comes into view as the dense forests and mountains of western Massachusetts. Over time the forest is transformed by nature and man, and yet the home site, a yellow house built in the 1700’s, remains, serving as place for varied epiphanies as it is visited by new people and old ghosts. As the author writes, “The only way to see the world other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”
This book captures both loss and change, giving a vivid and thought-provoking perspective on humans and their humanity across time
All You Have to Do Is Call
by Kerri Maher
The world before Roe v. Wade (6/4/2023)
Thank you to Book Browse and Net Galley for an Advanced Reader's Copy of this book.
This absorbing novel is a reminder of what life was like for women needing abortions before Row v. Wade, and a warning about how the current anti-abortion movement will impact women today.
"Jane," the network of lay-women who provided safe abortions as well as reproductive health information, worked in Chicago in the early 1970's. This fictional account centers on five women involved, all in their late 20's and early 30's at the time.
Most of the women are white and middle class; all have choices to make in their work and relationships. There is suspense as they navigate these choices against the necessity but illegality of their efforts to help other women and grow in their own lives.
Unfortunately, the book is something of a morality play: the good women are very good; the bad men are very bad. While there is some complexity and growth, there is a fairy-tale quality to all the women finding satisfying futures that use their personal talents and further their commitment toward recognition of women's skills and rights.
However, this is an engaging and important book with its messages about limited choices for women not so long ago, and what work there still is left to do today.
The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise
by Colleen Oakley
Driven to Distraction (10/7/2022)
What an engaging book! An improbable pair of women, at different stages of life, but both dealing with physical frailties and past mistakes, go on a sudden, urgent road trip across America, learning from each other.
The author brings to life both the pathos of the young woman whose accidental injury ends her soccer scholarship and her dreams of a professional soccer career, and the feistiness of the elderly woman, recovering from a broken hip and dealing with the physical and mental deterioration of Parkinson's Disease.
Both have distanced themselves emotionally and hurt loved ones. Both have secrets they won't share. And both come to trust and care about each other as they try to right their wrongs.
The writing is brisk and humorous, capturing both old and young voices and propelling the main characters, Tanner (21) and Louise (84) to an unexpected but satisfying ending.
Note: Though the book begins with an epigraph from the movie, "Thelma and Louise," one need not be familiar with that story to enjoy this one.
Flesh & Blood: Reflections on Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life: A Memoir
by N. West Moss
Both vulnerability and strength in healing (8/7/2021)
I was very moved by this strong, poignant, warm and, yes, suspenseful book. Having myself experienced both primary and secondary infertility (our son was born after 11 ½ years of marriage and we were unable to have another), I understood some of the writer's experiences all too well. Yet the book goes beyond the specific pain of infertility, and would be helpful to any woman who is dealing – or has dealt - with the physical and emotional suffering of illness.
Written over months of severe bleeding and weakness, and tied to the natural world by seasons, flowerings, insect and animal life, the book mirrors the author's sense of regret and recovery circling back on themselves. Many readers may be comforted by the message of both strength and vulnerability that can accompany healing from any loss.
I Am a Girl from Africa
by Elizabeth Nyamayaro
From humble childhood to world-wide impact (6/16/2021)
This inspiring, if sobering, story tells of the author’s life from her girlhood in rural Africa, where she is saved from dying in a drought by a UN worker, through her challenges and opportunities to become a respected, impactful advisor for UN Women. She writes not only of her own family’s situation of poverty, hunger, and unemployment, but also of HIV/AIDS, River Blindness, and Domestic Abuse, and Health Care Inequities in countries like Uganda, Zambia, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo
The program she spear-headed, HeForShe, has led to the end of child marriages in Malawi; steps to end domestic violence and rape in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and other countries; establishing the African Women Leaders Network, a network of over 100 former, current, and aspiring female politicians across Africa, and more in Europe, Indonesia, and Latin America as well.
Impressive as these achievements are, the values that have guided her, instilled by her beloved grandmother in the Zimbabwe village, can speak to us all. First, there is ubuntu (Ooo-Boon-too), which is respect, compassion, and connection to all people. It is stated as “I am because we are, and because we are, you are.” One must uplift others in order to uplift oneself.
Second, she firmly believes that change must come from within the community. It can be supported from outside, through money and other resources, but the community must be committed to and intimately involved in order for lasting change to be achieved.
Nyamayaro’s writing is simple, clear, positive, and captivating, and her tone humble. It isn’t until we sit back to look at all she has done, that we realize what this “girl from Africa” has done to make the world better for all of us.
The Lost Apothecary: A Novel
by Sarah Penner
In looking for a lost apothecary, a character finds herself (8/21/2020)
From its first pages, "The Lost Apothecary" engages and intrigues the reader. The clear, strong dialog and descriptions move easily between centuries with the distinct voices of three characters: the 18th century's apothecary, bitter Nella; Eliza, the young maid who learns from and helps her; and modern-day Caroline, who uncovers their efforts with poisons to rid women of men who have harmed them in body or soul. In tracing their long-lost secrets, Caroline finds her way through her own troubled relationship, and into the future she has wished for and delayed. Also woven into the story are descriptions of the apothecary's art, as well as the "magick" of high-tech research tools, and some ethical themes to ponder, including when and if secrets should be kept.
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