The Next Ship Home, by Heather Webb

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Two sisters from Sicily arrive at Ellis Island in 1902 after a nightmare ocean journey. Fleeing their abusive father, they hope to build a new life together in the U.S. However, Francesca worries that her beloved sister Maria will not pass the health exam; she has become ill in the crowded and unsanitary third-class compartment where they were confined. They might both be sent back to Sicily on the next ship.

Meanwhile Alma, a second-generation German-American, lives in a tenement in the Lower East Side’s Little Germany where her stepfather owns and runs a bierhaus in the basement. He thinks Alma is worthless and mocks her interest in learning languages spoken by their Irish and Italian neighbors. Deciding her unpaid labor in the bierhaus and home is not enough, he forces her to take a job at Ellis Island processing new arrivals telling her she must give her pay to him to help support the household.

Although Alma starts her new job filled with the prejudice against immigrants she’s learned at home, her compassion is stirred by the fear and suffering she encounters, and she gradually learns that these are just people like herself. Becoming especially close to Francesca and Maria, Alma works hard at her language skills so she can help by translating for those who don’t speak English. She also tries to find ways around the roadblocks put in place by the bureaucracy and some corrupt officials.

At first Alma doesn’t believe the whispered stories of extortion and abuse at Ellis Island—carefully researched by the author and based on real events—but Francesca has first-hand knowledge of them. The courage of two women and the growing friendship between them are inspiring.

Unlike some historical fiction that glosses over the practical details of everyday life, the author gives us a full picture of these women’s lives. I love that Webb has chosen to portray this neglected but important part of history: the corruption at Ellis Island, the mutual support of the downtrodden, and the dreams that women fight for despite the forces arrayed against them.

The story also follows Francesca after she leaves Ellis Island, providing unusual insight into this critical phase, including the hoops that new immigrants—especially women—must jump through and the traps they must avoid. I’m learning so much these days about the immigration process as I follow the news, so I appreciate the author’s depiction of the inner lives of both Francesca and Alma.

As we confront and protest against the atrocities visited upon legal immigrants in this country by a rogue regime, I found both comfort and inspiration in this story. Corruption and the abuse of immigrants have a long history in the U.S. and Webb’s portrait of the Ellis Island bureaucracy shows the range of workers, from those who actively abuse arriving immigrants to those who look the other way to those who try to help the new arrivals as best they can. At the same time, Webb shows what seemingly powerless people can accomplish by working together.

Can you recommend a fiction or nonfiction book about the history of Ellis Island?

A Good Neighborhood, by Therese Anne Fowler

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In Oak Knoll, a diverse and modest North Carolina neighborhood full of trees and ranch houses,  professor of forestry and ecology Valerie Alston-Holt is concerned about the people who’ve just moved in next door. Flush with new money, the Whitmans have ignored the character of the neighborhood and instead cleared all the trees from their plot and built a McMansion complete with in-ground pool.

Although Valerie is worried about the health of her beloved and historic oak tree, its root system disrupted by all the digging, she tries to find a way to get along with her new neighbors, inviting Ms. Whitman—Julia—to a book club meeting. Then Valerie’s bright and talented biracial son Xavier meets Julia’s teenaged daughter Juniper.

In order to shield her daughters Juniper and young Lily from the hardscrabble life she led until marrying her boss, the up-and-coming millionaire Brad Whitman, Julia had the family join an evangelical church. Juniper agreed to take the church’a purity vow in which she agreed that her virginity belongs to God and, until she marries, to his representative on earth: her stepfather Brad. Having just watched the Neflix documentary Trust Me, this vow gave me the creeps. Already Julia’s purity vow has opened her up to bullying at her new school.

Meanwhile, Xavier, a classical guitar prodigy, is off to college in the fall on a music scholarship. He has close friends to hang out and play music with. He’s had two brief relationships with classmates, but his heart wasn’t really in either. When he meets Juniper, though, he discovers the power and glory of love. And miracle of miracles: she, too, falls for him.

Fowler makes this familiar story both urgent and utterly engaging with a relatable setting, masterful pacing, and vivid characters. I like that she works against stereotypes with some characters, but wonder if she doesn’t go too far, making them either too good to be true or too evil.

What really makes the book stand out, though, is the use of the neighborhood itself to narrate the novel. They say right on the first page: “[W]e never wanted to take sides.” They come back as a chorus throughout the story, reminding me of Euripides’ plays and other Greek tragedies. Just as the main characters are changed in the course of the story, so too is the collective group.

Using the first person plural “we” as the point of view in a novel is unusual and difficult to do well. I loved Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, where he maintained that point of view until near the end of the book. Here the chorus appearing between more traditional third-person scenes adds to a sense of looming tragedy. Even more importantly, it includes the reader as part of the “we,” making us complicit in their attitudes and opinions.

What a brilliant way to work issues of class, race and women’s lives into an old story! Because of our involvement, we readers are put on the spot: What we really think it means to be a good neighbor? How can we share our community with those who may be different from us?

Fowler’s story is more important than ever during this time when resurgent racism is polluting our  society. We may not want to take sides, but standing aside while tragedy unfolds carries its own consequences.

Have you read a novel with an unusual point of view?

Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon

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Syracuse, 412 BCE: The Athenians’ invasion has surprisingly been defeated and the surviving invaders stuck in an old quarry where they are dying in droves from malnutrition and ill-treatment. According to Plutarch, some of their captors so loved the plays of Euripides that they offered prisoners food in exchange for lines of verse.

Lennon, with degrees in History, Classics and writing, takes this morsel of history and creates something both fantastic and deeply human. Two out-of-work potters—Gelon who loves Euripides’ plays and Lampo who loves wine and fun times—make their way into the quarry armed with olives, bread and wine in search of verse. Eventually they decide to put on a fully staged performance of two plays by Euripides: Medea and The Trojan Women.

Lampo narrates the story in full-blown Irish vernacular, which is a little startling at first. He’s illiterate and doesn’t share his friend Gelon’s devotion to Athenian tragedy, but why not go along with it? He has nothing else to do. “Gelon says that’s what the best plays do. If they’re true enough you’ll recognize it even if it all seems mad at first, and this is why we give a shit about Troy, though for all we know, it was just some dream of Homer’s.”

It does all seem mad. But Lampo’s voice is irresistible. His wisecracks and pranks contribute much of the promised humor. However, as members of my book club said, for a book advertised as a comedy, most of it isn’t funny at all.

At first Lampo gloats about the prisoners’ suffering, saying of the stink in the quarry: “Ah, and I like the way they smell. It’s awful, bult it’s wonderful awful. They smell like victory and more. Every Syracusan feels it when they get that smell. Even the slaves feel it.” Yet, as they proceed with the plays, he cannot ignore the prisoners’ humanity. For me the most interesting aspect of the book is how the characters, especially Lampo, deal with setbacks and successes, finding parts of themselves they never knew existed and looking at others in ways they never thought possible.

I don’t think I’d have read this book if one of my book clubs hadn’t selected it. The premise didn’t seem like something I’d choose, especially in this time of too many stupid wars and inhumane concentration camps. I’m glad I did.

This story surprised me in ways that few novels do these days and moved me even when I didn’t want to be moved. It’s oddly light-hearted despite the grim circumstances. It seems to me to be a buddy caper like Butch and Sundance with a bit of Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland hey-let’s-put-on-a-show’s energy. Lennon doesn’t press his themes hard but leaves us to take what we will from this remarkable story.

What novel have you read that surprised you?

What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan

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In McEwan’s latest novel it’s 2119 and the world has achieved a tenuous stability after the long-predicted climate catastrophe. Combined with a nuclear accident, climate change led to what’s known as “The Inundation,” a tsunami which devasted continents, leaving the UK an archipelago of former mountaintops, Nigeria the wealthiest nation and storehouse of knowledge, and the U.S. in fragments run by heavily armed warlords.  

The digital world has been preserved, though, and scholars of the 22nd century have access to everything previously stored in the cloud including our emails, DMs, and social media posts. Nostalgic for the lost pre-Inundation world, Thomas Metcalfe, a scholar of literature from 1990 to 2030, is fascinated by a poem called “A Corona for Vivien,” written in 2014.

Thomas has the facts: Francis Blundy, a famous poet, composed it for his wife Vivien and read it aloud at her birthday dinner in October 2014. It has since been lost. Francis is determined to find it and thus make his name in the world of academia. He’s read everything he can find on Francis, Vivien and their friends and, as a result, believes he understands their feelings and motives, so much so that he feels entitled to fill in gaps with what he imagines they must have felt and thought.

However, as we learn, Thomas doesn’t understand at all. He visits the Bodleian Library, now on a peak in Snowdonia. Then he and his sometime-girlfriend Rose, another academic who mocks Thomas’s obsessions, take off on a quest to find the poem itself, leading to an entirely different second half of the book.

The novel is an interesting intellectual exercise about the limits of our knowledge of the past and, indeed, of ourselves and the people around us. However, as I’ve mentioned before, his characters seem cold and impersonal to me. I often have difficulty believing in them as anything more than  convenient pawns to move the plot forward. I couldn’t accept Thomas’s complete cluelessness, Rose’s patience with her man-child,  Vivian’s mix of passivity and sexual hunger, or Francis’s nacissism.

I’ve reviewed many of McEwan’s books, mostly because my book club likes to include them in our schedule. This time we encountered a curious split. Some people liked the first, dystopian part and thought the second part contrived, while others thought the second part realistic and the first part boring.

We all agreed, though, about the quality of McEwan’s prose. Sentence by sentence, there is much to be learned by studying his work. We also agreed that his description of the heartbreaking difficulty of caring for someone with dementia truly captured that reality.

As often with his novels, the adjacent discussions were the most interesting. We talked about history and the way details are selected and presented by historians, who (like all of us) have their own ideas and preconceptions. We also talked about the inevitably performative aspect of our interaction with others. The manner we adopt when we stand up to teach a class is different from the one we use when sitting around a table with wine and cheese to discuss a book with friends. There’s nothing dishonest in this. We contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman famously declared of himself.

So McEwan’s novel, for all its flaws (to my mind, anyway), is a potent reminder of our limits. We fumble about with our partial knowledge of ourselves, others, and the world, forming opinions and making decisions that have consequences. We do the best we can with what we know.

However, when I think of Thomas filling in the gaps in the records, I’m reminded of an issue that I often confront as writer of memoir and other forms of creative nonfiction: How do I respectfully write about the real people who are present in my piece? I can change names or obscure details. I can try to write the emotional truth of a scene even if I don’t remember exact words or details. I can depict them as the complex people they are instead of one-sided caricatures.

Yet I still feel I’m in danger of invading their privacy. This book warns me against the arrogance of believing I know anyone sufficiently to believe I can depict them in their fullness. And it reminds me of the hurt caused by appropriating someone else’s story. At the same time, I believe in the power of stories and hope they will continue to be told many years into the future.

What do you think our world will be like in a hundred years?

The History of Sound, by Ben Shattuck

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In 1984 a renowned singer and music scholar receives a box of wax cylinders. Lionel knows what they are: the long-lost recordings from a trip he took in the summer of 1919, accompanying his friend and lover David who planned to record folksongs in rural Maine.

I was hooked right away because of my long-ago research into the song-collecting travels of Maud Karpeles, Cecil Sharp, and Anne and Frank Warner, as well as my more recent interest in the methodology. In Shattuck’s title story, Lionel is the shy novice while David is the persistent charmer who wears down reluctant backwoods singers.

The intensity of emotion mingles with the immersive setting of the woods to create a kind of dream. Yet we know from the beginning of the story that Lionel ends up alone, and that “this cylinder reminded me of what I’d missed—which is, I think, a life that I didn’t know but of which David was a part. The real one. And how ridiculously short it had been.”

Lionel tries to analyse the “bone-deep” emotions roused in him by the sight of the cylinders and the prospect of once again hearing David’s voice. “How to put it? This type of sadness. Not nostalgia. Not grief. Just the obvious and sudden fact that my life looked an inch shorter than it could have been. That the best year really had come when I was twenty.”

In an interview with The Adroit Journal, Shattuck describes exploring the idea that the “relationship between those in the present and past isn’t static — anyone who has discovered a secret about their family’s past knows this, that you can be changed by the past as it becomes illuminated.” How Lionel is changed by these artifacts from the past makes for a powerful experience.

Each of the remaining eleven stories is equally powerful, their waters troubled by the rip tide of history. As I enter my later years, I think often about my past, how it informs my present but also what I may have misunderstood back then. In this collection the mingling of past and present occurs not only within the stories but also between the pairs of stories.

For Shattuck has structured the collection, as he describes in a note at the beginning, using the “hook-and-chain” song or poem format popular in 18th century New England, where we have five pairs of stories, held within the first and last: A BB CC DD EE FF A. The second story in each set might provide some insight or twist to the first. It might be set before the first or long after.

All of these stories summon strong emotions independent of their time periods, universal emotions, refuting L.P. Hartley’s famous opening sentence “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Maybe, but emotions are the same. The primary one a few members of my book club found was regret. Some of the characters didn’t follow their hearts; some did and perhaps were sorry later. Yet there’s also humor in some of the author’s choices and playful stabs at how academics and historians misinterpret the past.

I fell into each of these mysterious stories so profoundly that I could only read one a day. Each story called me to sit with it a while, think about it, try to grasp what it meant to me. It was as though each one left me with a handful of shells, or stones perhaps, that I had to examine, turning them over and over, rubbing one or another to see what it might tell me.

I loved Shattuck’s use of an unusual structure and that he didn’t try to mimic period dialogue. I also liked the variations of point of view—first or third, close or distant—and verb tense—present or past—which keep the stories from falling into a rut. Most of all, though, I loved the surprising tenderness of the stories. He is gentle with his characters while keeping the writing strong and unsentimental. I’ve found that this kind of tenderness is what I love in the work of many authors I enjoy; their characters have good hearts.

The stories are spun together by theme and setting, yet can stand alone. They contain much that speaks to me and perhaps my own obsessions: the song collecting, the New England settings, the tenderness, the interplay of past and present. Yet it’s not just me; my book club was unanimous in its praise. They found the stories as moving and mysterious as I did.

This is my favorite book of the year so far, and that’s saying a lot. What has been your favorite book in 2026?

Goddess of Swizzle, by Shirley Brewer

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The title perfectly describes this new collection of poems from my friend Shirley Brewer who is indeed a goddess and a master mixologist. A graduate of a bartending school in Baltimore, she serves up concoctions that are bold and funny and tender and unexpected. She sings:

Let all the brazen Hallelujahs multiply

like leaves.

She invites us into her memories, summoning the food and drink that nurture us, coaxing us to smile or startle, her past echoing ours. She writes of the night Bobby Kennedy was killed, memorable already as her 21st birthday (and my senior prom night). Into what kind of adulthood were we graduating? “In the hotel chaos, Ethel / offers her husband comfort. / I’m with you, she whispers.” Shirley offers us the comfort of recognition.

Some of the poems revive scenes from her youth in Rochester while other celebrate the half-weird, half-stodgy city of Baltimore. Yet behind the fine, careless toss of her feather boa lies the abiding pain of loss. Her solace is to feed us on these playful poems served with food and drink.

She gives us a sense of those who are gone, such as a beloved dance teacher and a friend with whom she made pies of Concord grapes picked at the Finger Lakes. She memorialises her sister “fighting for one more/one more breath.” She brings to life a favorite fast-food tradition with her late brother on Opening Day and shows us her parents, including their favorite libations. In “Dear Dad” she says:

Because of you, I imagine the world

as a succulent maraschino cherry

ripe with possibilities.

At the same time, her unbounded imagination delights us: Cher and Emily Dickinson chat over blackcurrant tea in a Hampden café? A poet bringing goats into the Baltimore Museum of Art to view the Cezannes and Matisses? An alligator cruising the aisles of Walmart? Why not?

She celebrates childhood trips to Wegman’s, dancing to Chubby Checker, and Baltimore’s squeegee boys. She finds hilarity and abiding affection in a poem about trying on clothes with her mother in department store changing rooms. And how can you resist a poem that begins:

My grandfather talked to his scarecrow

in the fields near Dundee.

He called it Joseph. 

Another section includes ekphrastic poems. My favorite is “Purple Robe, Silver Swan” in which she “pledge[s] allegiance” to a Matisse painting, filling us with its sumptuous colors, before a surprising turn that harkens back to the beginning. She begins a remarkable flight of imagination with “I share a villa with Vincent/in the south of France.”

These poems capture Shirley’s ebullience and compassion, as well as her delight in the sensory world. Full of color, tastes and aromas, she truly gives us “a feast for here and now.” Whether it’s “parakeet blues, a taste of lime” or twists of lemon that come to life in a drink, these poems nourish us. Fun, surprising, warm: we are always in on the joke, every poem an invitation—often studded with spangles.

I have always loved Lucinda Matlock in Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters which ends:

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,

Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?

Degenerate sons and daughters,

Life is too strong for you —

It takes life to love Life.

Shirley’s zest for life comes through in each of these poems. A bright light in a dark time, they make me, like her poet-friend, believe in love. As Sue Ellen Thompson says, “This collection is an antidote to the world’s miseries.”

What poems have you read that lift your spirit and tickle your funny bone?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Three Bags Full, by Leonie Swann

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A flock of sheep gather around their shepherd who is lying on the ground with a spade stuck in his body. They’ve never seen anything like this in their meadow near the Irish village of Glennkill. They’re very fond of George and worry about what will happen to them now. Who will read books to them and explain the difficult words? So they decide to find his killer.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this unusual story but found it not only clever but remarkably consistent in the way the ovine protagonists are presented. They know only what a sheep might be expected to know, at least one with a shepherd like George. For example, they think the priest Father Will is named God because of the way he talks about himself.

They can’t interview suspects, since they can’t talk to people directly, so they must watch and listen and make inferences from what they gather. “You shouldn’t believe what you don’t understand. You should understand what you believe.”

Sometimes this can cause confusion, such as when they misinterpret what’s happening, but I found that just another layer of the puzzle. Mostly their opinions of the humans around them are both simple and profound. “Maple thought optimistically that human beings, on their good days, weren’t much dimmer than sheep. Or at least, not much dimmer than dim sheep.”

I also liked that the pacing is a little slow in the beginning. The story takes its time to settle in and let us get to know the various sheep and humans. I loved how the flock continues to follow George’s routine after his death and their sense of what makes for a good life.

The plot itself is satisfyingly twisty, but the real joy is in the characters. We joke about sheep being followers, but each of these remarkable animals has a strongly individual personality. My favorites include Miss Maple, who is said to be the smartest sheep in Glennkill, and Mopple the Whale, who provides comic relief and surprising support; his hunger is as reliable as his memory. And the ram Othello, who knows the most about the outside world because he was once confined in the Dublin Zoo; he knows what it is to be alone.

Reading and books are a slight thread through the book. After all, much that the sheep have learned about the world and about humans comes from the books that George has read to them. “Cordelia was thinking how human beings can invent words, how they can line up their invented words side by side on paper. It was magic.”

A movie based on the book is due to come out in May 2026, but I recommend reading the book first to experience the wit and charm of the story told entirely through the sheep’s point of view.

What is the most unusual mystery you’ve read?

Until It’s Over, by Dorothy Van Soest

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When retired social worker Sylvia Jensen refuses to be silenced by a politician with dark secrets, her investigation takes her deep into the past, to the secret springs of guilt, regret, fear and trauma. The story opens with a protest in the state capitol rotunda against a mining company’s plan to open a uranium mine on Indian land.

Readers of Van Soest’s earlier three novels featuring Sylvia know her courage and willingness to fight for her clients’ rights and well-being, as well as for the betterment of all. Now in her eighties, Sylvia attends the protest with her young journalist friend J.B. to support Peter Minter, the frail Ojibwe elder who had been arrested at the mining company’s office.

Peter immediately turns the microphone over to the leading candidate for the Senate, Anthony Jordane, a White man who smoothly promises to protect Indian rights. Then Sylvia, who’s been growing increasingly agitated, lunges toward Jordane screaming that he is a liar before collapsing to the ground unconscious.

This is J.B.’s story as much as it is Sylvia’s. A victim of the U.S.’s unjust and inhumane policies towards the Native Americans whose land they stole, J.B. was forcibly removed from his family as a baby and given to a middle-class White family. Then at age seven he was again forcibly removed from the only family he remembered and returned to his birth family. Eventually he ran away and took refuge with his foster grandparents.

Now he is an investigative journalist with the New York Times who has worked with Sylvia before on some of her cases and also knew her as a social worker who actually cared about what was best for him. However, his unresolved issues about his past, his ethnicity, and his identity make it hard for him to decide the right course of action while Sylvia is sidelined in the hospital.

Per his training, he must first investigate the truth of Sylvia’s claims about Jordane, which means going to the small rural town where she and Jordane grew up and attended high school together. There he must pry open the lid of silence the townspeople have slammed down over the events of that fateful year, the one that made Sylvia leave town swearing never to return.

What I admired most in the story is the subtle way Van Soest weaves the theme of silence versus speaking truth to power through the actions each of the major and minor characters. Sylvia and J.B’s stories were especially moving as the main characters, but I also found myself caring deeply about the minor characters.

This exciting tale, full of compassion and psychological insight, gives voice to the victims of injustice. It speaks to today’s headlines and reminded me of The Great Gatsby where Fitzgerald characterizes the Buchanans as “careless people.” That is of course what we’re seeing today, so I’m grateful to Van Soest for demonstrating how we all, including writers and artists, can resist injustice.

What stories of resistance have inspired you?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

The Woman with the Cure, by Lynn Cullen

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Meet Dr. Dorothy Horstmann who worked tirelessly and in the face of persistent gender discrimination to stop the polio pandemic. Now mostly forgotten, polio epidemics between 1948 and 1955 paralyzed or killed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly children, around the world. President Franklin Roosevelt is the patient with whom most people are familiar.

 

Cullen brings this time period to life with searing portraits of wards filled with children in iron lungs and scientists competing against each other to be the first to find a cure. Dorothy doesn’t care about fame; fighting polio is her only concern. She freely shares what she learns with the two leading competitors—Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin—as well as with others working to end the scourge.

 

I love that biographers and historical fiction writers are bringing to light women whose essential contributions have been downplayed and forgotten while only the “great men” are credited and remembered. It’s worth noting that polio research was one of the first uses of HeLa cells which I first learned about in Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. How much we owe to Ms. Lacks! Check out the book if you’re ever looking for an example of how one person can—even unwittingly—change the world.

 

Rejected for a residency because of her gender, Dorothy applies again as D. M. Horstmann and is accepted. The first to suspect that polio travels from the gut to the blood, she is refused support needed to investigate and conduct trials. She finally gets funding years later after a male scientist proposes the same thing; meanwhile thousands of children continued to be paralyzed or died each year. Nominated for a Nobel Prize for her work, she is passed over for two men.

 

With no time for bitterness, Dorothy pushes forward. The first woman to become a full professor at the Yale School of Medicine, she travels around the world to participate in polio conferences and to study polio outbreaks, thus contributing valuable data. She is also instrumental in the Russian study that validated Albert Sabin’s successful polio vaccine, enabling it to be approved.

 

Cullen takes us behind the scenes as scientists race the clock and each other. I felt Dorothy’s despair at setbacks and her thrills at successes. The delays caused by infighting I found frustrating, thinking of the children around the world left to suffer while male scientists kept their secrets. One of the holdups was danger of human trials with children.

 

We learn that the first round of Salk’s initial vaccine (which was greeted with cheers of relief) left 164 people paralyzed and 10 dead, due to one of the suppliers cutting corners, so that their vaccines actually gave people polio. The resulting distrust of vaccines lingers to this day.

 

I’m old enough to remember those awful years, with terrified parents keeping children apart and swimming pools closed. Some of the children in my school stumped around in their leg braces, while other children never got to attend because schools couldn’t accommodate wheelchairs.

 

I vividly remember the day at school when we lined up to get our first sugar cube with the vaccine and my mother crying. Since then I’ve been a confirmed advocate of vaccinations and nothing that drug-addled creep currently in charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—who has made millions of dollars off of anti-vax activities—can say will convince me otherwise.

 

For me, the most moving scene in the book occurs in Detroit, Michigan in 1953 when Dorothy tours the Henry Ford Hospital’s polio unit with its rows of “groaning and wheezing iron lungs out from which heads stuck.” Dorothy herself had tried out one of them early on so that she’d better understand her patients and had immediately panicked.

 

On the tour, Dorothy is distracted by a little girl in a wheelchair. “With her physician’s eye, she noted that the muscles of both the child’s legs had atrophied from the hips down and were thus likely to remain permanently paralyzed.” The child is playing a board game with a grown woman in an iron lung, Mrs. Konkle, who cheerfully announces that all the children beat her at the game, even her own children when they come to visit.

 

The game is Candy Land which we played incessantly when I was little. I never knew that it was invented by a schoolteacher in California while she was in the hospital with polio. Mrs. Konkle had her husband buy it and spent her days cheering up the children in the ward with her by letting them win. Such courage!

 

Occasionally the ins and outs of such a complex, multifaceted effort became a bit tedious, and perhaps some of the side stories could have been eliminated, but it is worth pushing through to get the full story of the dedication and sacrifice, not only Dorothy’s but that of others as well, which finally brought about a cure. Of course, Dorothy—the daughter of immigrants by the way—didn’t stop there but went on to work on the rubella vaccine still used today to protect children.

 

Did you ever play Candy Land? Were you aware of its history?

Bloomsbury Girls, by Natalie Jenner

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In 1950s London, Bloomsbury Books is a relic of an earlier age. Offering new and rare books, the store has resisted change for a hundred years, and its stodgy general manager, Herbert Dutton, with his 51 unbreakable rules is determined to keep it that way. However, the three women who work there have other ideas.

Vivien staffs the Fiction department and loathes her one-time lover Alec who heads the department. She wants to introduce more female authors while Alec refuses all but the usual classics like Jane Austen and George Eliot. Ambitious and clever, Vivien provides much of the humor in the book. I especially love the way she comes up with witty and daring names for the people and places in the bookshop, like the Tyrant and the Via Dolorosa.

As Mr. Dutton’s secretary, Grace is the unacknowledged angel of the house. She helps Mr. Dutton manage his workload and tries to keep things on an even keel. She’s an anomaly for the time: a wife and mother who decided to take a job to avoid her abusive, unemployed husband. She cannot leave him because she doesn’t make enough to support herself and the children and fears she’d lose custody of them.  

Despite a brilliant career in Cambridge, a member of the first class of women awarded degrees by the university, Evie’s academic plans are crushed when she is passed over for a less accomplished man who takes credit for her work. At the bookstore she is in charge of cataloging the jumbled collection of rare books on the top floor, but she has an ulterior motive for working at Bloomsbury Books.

All tea-making is done by the three women, in obedience to Rule No. 17: ‘Tea shall be served promptly four times a day.’ Each of the four departments is run by a man, and they, of course, cannot be expected to make their own tea. The exception is Ash, head of the Science Department, who makes his own chai. As an immigrant from India, Ash’s presence brings portents of change and adds another dimension of discrimination.

I selected this story when looking for a light but engaging audiobook for a trip. Not only does it check those boxes, but it also features a few of my favorite things: a bookstore, London, one of my favorite actors as narrator—Juliet Stevenson—and the post-WWII time period. It also offers something I look for and rarely find: people, especially women, functioning in the workplace. Yes, raising children and running a household is work, and there are many stories about that, but little is written about the rewards and difficulties of working in an office (literal or figurative).

Jenner’s story abounds with the kind of rivalries and shifting alliances, the kindnesses and restrictions recognisable to anyone who has worked in an office. They keep the plot roiling and force the characters to show what they are made of. Other characters come and go, including real people of the time, such as Peggy Guggenheim, Daphne du Maurier, and Samuel Beckett.

Of course I hate the use of “girls” in the title applied to women, but it is true to the time period. I was a child then, but I see my parents in these characters. Many of those who survived the worldwide depression and WWII treasured security and stability, like Mr. Dutton and his 51 rules. And after the war many women like my mother had to give up jobs they found rewarding and confine their ambitions to home and family. Thus, I found Grace’s journey and her impulsive decision to work at the bookstore particularly touching.

If you’re looking for a cosy read with a bit of a bite, check this one out. You don’t need to have read Jenner’s previous book The Jane Austen Society which includes some of these characters. In writing this book, she was inspired by rereading 84, Charing Cross Road. She describes Bloomsbury Girls as “Mad Men meets You’ve Got Mail” which is pretty accurate. Of note, Jenner once owned an independent bookshop in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives now.

Can you recommend a story set in a bookshop?