A Study in Scarlet Women, by Sherry Thomas

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There have been so many takeoffs on the Sherlock Holmes stories that I was wary of one more. However, this series puts a new twist on them by giving the detective’s character—sharp, analytical, unemotional—to a woman.

With such characteristics, Charlotte Holmes does not fit Victorian England’s definition of a proper upper class woman. Her parents are eager to marry her off, which is the last thing she wants. She comes up with a plan to craft a life where she can exercise her remarkable mind without the constraints society puts on women.

However, when that falls through, her backup plan leaves her disowned by her family and a social outcast, until a chance meeting with the remarkable Mrs. Watson opens another possibility. As her family’s social world is rocked by three unlikely deaths, and her father and sister become suspects, it becomes up to Charlotte to find a way to clear them and find the real murderer.

I delighted in the skillful way Thomas has worked in elements of the original canon while staying true to the time period. A woman cannot be a detective, forcing Charlotte and Mrs. Watson to craft a truly inventive workaround. Plus, the characters spring to life—each one unlike what you’d expect, full of flaws and fun and surprising gifts. The mystery itself is engrossing as well.

Usually I avoid novels that use real people or other author’s characters. The former feels invasive and the latter lazy. However, I’m glad I made an exception here. These stories are truly original and a lot of fun. I’ve now read seven in the series and look forward to reading the others.

While I enjoy all the characters and plots, Charlotte herself is what keeps me reading these books. She is a most unusual woman, as you would expect from someone with Sherlock’s personality and gifts. She stands out even more in this time period—the first book takes place in 1886—when women’s roles were much more constrained than now. I enjoy seeing how she handles ever more difficult situations.

If you’re looking for a new mystery series to entertain you while the cold weather keeps you inside, give this book a try.

What mystery series are you enjoying these days?

The Romantic, by William Boyd

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An unusual novel, my book club’s pick for this month covers the life of Cashel Greville Ross from his time as a young child in Ireland, through 451 pages of adventures, to his death. Born in December, 1799, Cashel’s 82 years covers most of the 19th century, and his adventures hit most of the touchstones of that period.

For example, when he gets disillusioned as a teenager, drops out of school, and joins the army, he ends up in the Battle of Waterloo. When he travels to Italy, he becomes friends with Byron and the Shelley ménage. This is a picaresque novel, like Don Quixote, where each chapter is almost a stand-alone story, with a new challenge for the protagonist and a new setting.

It’s great fun, seeing where a new chapter will take Cashel as he travels the world in pursuit of his next great scheme for living. Should he be a lover, an explorer, a writer, a farmer? This question of how to live your best life is far older than Oprah or Mary Oliver. Montaigne’s Essays are primarily multiple attempts to answer it.

The change of scene and story in each chapter becomes a huge challenge for a writer, which Boyd rises to brilliantly. He must have done a tremendous amount of research in order to create a new world in each chapter, full of a stunning amount of period detail. Also, since Cashel’s adventures are often tied to real events and people, each one had to be meticulously studied.

What ties it together, besides the dazzling writing and Cashel himself, is the theme named in the title. The question at the heart of the Romantic Movement in the 19th century is whether we should value our feelings over our rational thoughts. Which should prevail as we make large and small decisions? The Romantics plumped for the former, in reaction to the previous century’s Enlightenment, which prized science, facts, and logic above emotions. Thus, Cashel often allows his emotions to dictate his actions, with mixed consequences.

This theme of feelings versus logic is of interest to me. Of course, nothing could be more relevant to our society’s current discord between those who believe a statement is true because they feel like it is and those who look for facts and proof and logic to support it. Over the course of my own long life, I’ve also considered this theme, and questioned how much one or the other influenced my own decisions.

While I did enjoy—and admire!—the story, I have to admit that I eventually tired of the identical pattern for each chapter—Cashel succeeds brilliantly, then crashes for some reason or other, at which point another opportunity presents itself, which becomes the adventure of the next chapter. The idea that one person could be so amazingly proficient in every sphere is unlikely, which undermined what’s been called the dream of the story, pulling me out of it.

So why did I listen to this lengthy novel, not once, but twice? Because I was entranced by the narrator Kobna Holbrook-Smith. His voice is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever heard, and I’d be happy to listen to him read anything, however boring the content. Here, though, his dramatic talents are on display, bringing the story and each character to life. I might be happy to listen to this story many more times, until I can find something else he’s narrated.

By listening to this book, I apparently missed out on some of the ancillary materials: footnotes, maps, etc. In this case, it was a trade-off I was happy to make. It’s not the first time this has happened with an audiobook. Since I love maps, perhaps in the future, I’ll look to see what’s included with a book before choosing the audio version.

What “whole-life” novel have you read?

Best Books I Read in 2023

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2023. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan
This short novel at first seems, as the title indicates, quiet and unassuming. Set in an Irish town in 1985, it follows Bill Furlow who has earned a modest but sufficient position in life as a purveyor of wood and coal. Set apart from the town is an orphanage and laundry run by the Magdalen order of nuns. There are many things in today’s world—and in the past as well—that make me despair of humanity. Then comes a book like this that reminds me of the courage and goodness that can be found.

2. Purgatory Road, by Charles Coe
Coe’s superpower in these poems is his generous heart. Small things that strike his attention, such as a truck that won’t start in a grocery store parking lot or a woman talking to herself on a traffic island, lead us to understand what it is like to inhabit someone else’s life. Channeling Forster’s call to “only connect,” Coe’s poems from 2020’s lockdown trace what we’ve lost and our attempts to communicate across the void.

3. The Years, by Annie Ernaux
Ernaux’s genre-bending experiment adds a new dimension to the field of life writing. She goes beyond memoir—a subjective view of events in the author’s personal life—and autofiction—a reexamination and fictionalisation of those events—to create a new form that melds both of these with sociology and history. She has captured the sweep of the lifetime simultaneously with that of a person and a generation.

4. Horse, by Geraldine Brooks
This novel succeeds on so many levels. Brooks weaves together multiple storylines, with different narrators and time periods, ensuring that the story reveals itself smoothly. Yes, this is a story about a horse, beautifully written, with leisurely scenes full of luscious period details. It is also the story of the United States, from the antebellum world to the present. Inevitably it is about what Wendell Berry called the U.S.’s hidden wound. It is the story of us, what we strive for, and the price involved. There’s much to think about here.

5. Wild Girls, by Shirley J. Brewer
There were no maps for those of us who came of age at the beginning of the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement. Or rather, we threw them away and created our own path, our own definition of what it could mean to be a woman. My friend Shirley (full disclosure) discarded her Catholic schoolgirl veil and took on the world in sequins and a feather boa. Breezy and brave, with a heart as big as the Chesapeake, she sends us these letters from her world. A chameleon, she revels in the brightest colors and slips into one woman’s heart after another. She pulls off her magic through humor and compassion and turns that surprise us. She awakens the wild, original, and authentic selves that we know ourselves to be.

6. A Charmed Circle, by Anna Kavan
I’ve long been a fan of Kavan’s work. This, her first novel, is the story of an English family whose life has become so enclosed as to become toxic. A modern town, loud with trams and lorries and motorcycles, has grown up around their walled home, an old vicarage. What is a refuge for the parents has become a prison for the three children, who are now young adults. It’s hard not to care about these characters as they try to assert the freedom to be themselves.

7. Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips
In the intense first chapter of this book, sisters Alyona and Sophia, ages 11 and 8, playing alone on a public beach in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, encounter a stranger and accept a ride home with him. This is not your typical mystery that describes the investigation into the girls’ disappearance. Instead, it is a set of interlocking short stories about various girls and women in the city and surrounding communities, and how they are affected by the girls’ disappearance. We also learn much about the pressures on indigenous and Caucasian women in this distant corner of Putin’s Russia.

8. Sisters of Night and Fog, by Erika Robuck
This absorbing historical novel follows two real women, Violette Szabo and Virginia d’Albert-Lake, who became French Resistance fighters during World War II. Why read yet another book about World War II? One: because this is a story of real people based on Roebuck’s extensive research. Two: because many people don’t realise the role that women played in the war effort, particularly in the Resistance. Three: because it is important to remember the actual horrors of Hitler’s fascist state and the weakness of those who supported and contributed to it.

9. Paradise, by Abdulrazak Gurnah
In this second novel from Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar—now part of Tanzania—and won the Nobel Prize, we find that important perspective so missing in Western literature. Yusuf, a rural Muslim boy who leaves his home at twelve is given away in payment for his father’s debts. Paradise is set just before the World War I and provides an unforgettable portrait of precolonial East African society.

10. The Bay of Angels, by Anita Brookner
When Zoë is sixteen, her widowed mother unexpectedly marries again and moves to Nice. Zoë decides to stay in their old London flat and enjoy her new-found freedom from her drab life alone with her mother. As with all of Brookner’s work, this is an iceberg of a novel: brief and quiet on the surface, with a huge mass of emotions and ideas and insights hidden below. Narrated by Zoë, the story is built on scenes that bring to life both the quiet London dusk and the blazing sun of Nice. With her usual penetrating psychological insights, Brookner provides fascinating portraits of Zoë and the people with whom she interacts.

What were the best books you read in 2023?

The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper

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This time of year, when the sun begins to return even though winter is just beginning (in the northern hemisphere), has been celebrated with rituals throughout the centuries. Prehistoric monuments such as Stonehenge, the building of which is believed to have begun around 3100 BCE, identify the precise moment of the winter and summer solstices. They probably had other uses as well; certainly Stonehenge was also a burial site and may be been used for religious ceremonies, a healing site, and/or as an astronomical observatory.

My favorite books about the solstice are The Dark Is Rising sequence, five fantasy novels by Susan Cooper for young adults. The author draws on Arthurian legends, Celtic and Norse mythology, and English folklore to tell the story of the struggle between good and evil.

In keeping with the season, these are identified as the Light and the Dark, which raised no cultural sensitivity concerns when the books were published in the 1960s and 1970s. Whatever we might think today of the persistent identification of dark colors with evil, these are still the best terms to describe the turmoil at the time of the winter solstice, when the sun tries to return and the darkness resists.

In these stories Will Stanton discovers that he is one of an ancient mystical people called “Old Ones” who are gifted with magical powers. He is the seventh son of a seventh son, and his eleventh birthday is the moment when he comes into his powers, including the ability to move through time. He is tasked to find the four Things of Power which the Old Ones need in order to vanquish the Dark.

Cooper’s five books are truly wonderful, especially for someone like me who grew up with these myths and legends. I can still picture that corner of my neighborhood library, just to one side of the front door, that held the books that captured my imagination as a child and put me on the path to become a writer.

The return of the sun inspires us with hope. Whether you are celebrating the winter solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Diwali, Hanukkah, St. Lucia’s Day, the Lunar New Year, Las Posados, or another festival, I wish you joy, health, love and peace, now and in the coming year.

What are your favorite books of the season, however you celebrate it?

The Music Shop, by Rachel Joyce

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I’ve written before about Joyce’s novels The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and Miss Benson’s Beetle, so I looked forward to reading this, her fourth novel. It was even better than I expected.

In London of 1988, Frank owns a record shop—yes, vinyl only—on a street where the buildings are literally falling apart and the shops all struggling. His superpower is to find the perfect piece of music for whoever comes into his shop. They may know what they want, but he knows what they need.

Frank had helped them through illness, grief, loss of confidence and jobs, as well as the more daily things like football results and the weather. Not that he knew about all those things, but really it was a matter of listening, and he had endless patience.

The other shopkeepers are drawn with respect and compassion. Mr. Novak the baker, Maude the tatooist, Father Anthony selling religious bookmarks and other iconography, the Williams brothers who run a funeral home and are often seen holding hands: they are given to us in their fullness. This is an approach I noted in Joyce’s other books, the way she respects the voice of even the minor characters and her tone. She doesn’t make fun of the characters or look down on them.

The push by a development company to buy out tenants and shop owners alike, in order to tear down all the buildings to make way for luxury apartments, strains the communal bonds of the street whose inhabitants have previously been so supportive of each other.

Then a German woman in a green coat faints outside Frank’s shop. Ilse Brauchmann slowly becomes enmeshed in the community, with her mysterious background and amazing—to Frank at least—ability to fix anything mechanical. Eventually she asks Frank to give her music lessons.

The true joy of the book for me is listening to Frank talk about music. His sensitive descriptions, which have almost nothing to do with music theory and much to do with emotion and theme, have sent me back to pieces I thought I knew well and to others that were new to be. He says:

‘Music comes out of silence and at the end it goes back to it. It’s a journey . . . the silence at the beginning of a piece of music is always different from the silence at the end . . . Because if you listen, the world changes.’

As a writer, I was fascinated by Joyce’s interweaving of all these different strands to make an irresistable tapestry. I also noted the way she teased out the characters’ backgrounds with the same care as Frank layering in the context of a piece of music, and thus providing us with the same kind of insight.

At this time, when so much seems to be wrong with the world, this novel gave me comfort, reminding me of our common humanity and how we find it through our emotions in music, mutual concerns, and each other.

What novel by Rachel Joyce have you read? What did you think of it?

Book Launch for A Heart Afire

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A Heart Afire

Last week I was delighted to attend the launch of Patricia Meisol’s A Heart Afire: Helen Brooke Taussig’s Battle Against Heart Defects, Unsafe Drugs, and Injustice in Medicine. Here is what Pat said about the evening:

“Thrilled to launch my biography about a woman doctor’s lifelong crusade to improve health care and end suffering. She changed medicine. Her work is not done.”

Some reviews:

“An enormous work—and, indeed, achievement—covering a life that explores most of the twentieth century. This impressive piece of research is not just about one woman, but also about the health of a nation and global developments in science and medicine.”
—Claire Brock, Associate Professor, University of Leicester; author of British Women Surgeons and Their Patients, 1860–1918

“Exquisitely told with a penetrating eye for detail and the telling anecdote, Patricia Meisol’s biography of Helen Taussig is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of medicine and the twentieth-century struggles of women to break through the profession’s glass ceiling. What emerges from these pages is nothing less than the birth of modern heart surgery.”
—Jonathan Bor, The Baltimore Sun

Working in a critique group with Pat and others, I witnessed the sheer volume of work that goes into creating a biography. Even before you start writing there are the years of research, chasing down clues and people and documents. Then there is the writing itself and all the rewriting that goes into creating any piece of writing much less a book-length manuscript.

I’ll write more about the book itself later—hint: it’s brilliant! Though I admit I’m biased—but for now I want to celebrate the huge accomplishment of a having a book launched out into the world.
 
 

Pat's book launch 1

 
 
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Terrace Story, by Hilary Leichter

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Imagine that you are young and living in a tiny apartment with your spouse. Then there’s a new baby, and it feels like you don’t have room to turn around. The windows look out on other walls, and it’s all so cramped and impossible. Then your friend Stephanie comes to visit, and when she opens a closet door, instead of broom and dustmop, there is a terrace: a large terrace, with a table and chairs and green plants and a gorgeous view.

Whoa, I thought, as dazzled by the idea as the characters are by the sudden sunlight. Impatiently turning the pages, I was terrified that the rest of the story wouldn’t hold up. Reader, it did. It knocked my socks off.

By story I mean the first of the four interlocking stories that make up this book. I don’t want to go into too much detail, and urge you not to read more about the book. Just jump in and let yourself be surprised and saddened and swept away.

Leichter finds imaginative yet concrete ways to get us to think about love and time and space and memory—those ineffable concepts. The book is funny and unsettling, sweet and compelling.

Enough with the adjectives. This may be the shortest review I’ve written, because I don’t know how to write about it or analyse it without giving too much away. I’ll just say that magic happens when the author unleashes her imagination and invites us into the story.

What book have you read recently that knocked your socks off?

A Dog in the Fight, by William Davies

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Instead of a book, this week I want to talk about an essay-length book review that has helped me understand some of the cultural trends that have mystified me. William Davies’s review of A Fan’s Life: The Agony of Victory and the Thrill of Defeat, by Paul Campos, was published in the 18 May 2023 issue of the London Review of Books.

Using football, American for the author and British for the reviewer, both dig into what it means to be a fan. While referees and judges in and out of the sports world are expected to be fair and objective, not favoring one side over another, Davies says fans “make no pretence of balance or reason. They are drunk on irrationality and obstinacy, hurling themselves after the fortunes of their chosen team, band, TV show or celebrity.”

Where it gets interesting for me is this quote from Campos: “While sports allegiances can be seen as a sublimated form of politics, political allegiances can also be understood as a form of sublimated fandom.” Some politicians have supporters who weigh a candidate’s positions on issues, proposed solutions, and their character in order to choose the person most appropriate to represent them, while other politicians have fans who don’t care how illogical or offensive the politician’s statements are.

Davies also discusses how the internet has emphasised fandom:

Once there is sufficient space for every opinion and claim to be published, what need is there for anyone to be looking down on them from a position of assumed disinterest? Fandom can become the norm instead. The internet is less a ‘marketplace of ideas’ (as conservatives and libertarians would have it) and more a ‘marketplace of passions’.

This has significant knock-on effects for the rest of the media, especially the liberal media that once sought to distinguish themselves in terms of their commitment to facts, neutrality and critical distance – values which, in a public sphere awash with fandom, can appear both technically unnecessary and culturally haughty.

As quoted in the review, Campos offers the surprising insight that “‘Sports are a form of entertainment, but deep engagement, which makes the entire sports branch of the entertainment industrial complex viable, is not about entertainment at all: it is about suffering.’” True fans stick by their team no matter how rarely they win; the nostalgia for its few successes is “integral to fan identity.”

Davies discusses “the growing difficulty Americans – especially American men – have in distinguishing ‘life’ from ‘sport’.” The concentration on men and masculinity in both the review and the book is interesting. Certainly, sports are an arena where even the most repressed men feel free to express emotion, but I think there’s plenty here that is applicable to women as well.

The review goes deeper into the connection between sports, politics and fandom, and how in politics and sports, the participation of the middle class in this kind of obsessive fandom can be traced back to a shift from snobby dismissal of the working class to wanting to join it and the subsequent flood of money into sports. Davies calls it an

embourgeoisement of the game. While middle-class men began dressing like working-class football fans, top-tier football was flooded with Rupert Murdoch’s money and the glamorous Italian players it was used to recruit – this was the beginning of the long investment wave that led to today’s multi-billion-pound industry. ‘To have been sports fans over the past few decades,’ Campos writes, ‘is to have witnessed how our passions have been identified, catalogued and then exploited by the relentless engines of hypercapitalism, in its insatiable pursuit of ever-greater profits.’

Lots here to consider in the mix of sports, politics, journalism, and capitalism.

What are you a fan of?

Displaced Dolls and Oviducts, by Marigo J. Stathis

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Displace Dolls

These are some meaty poems from my friend Marigo Stathis! The cover might give you a clue as to what you are in for, but when you dive in you’ll see these are not so much protest poems as heartfelt support for all women on “the female warrior’s path to self-worth and discovery.”

Homeless angels, naked shepherds, broken Barbies will find a welcome here. So will feisty women who defy fortune tellers and speed limits to sport their tattoos and midnight dance moves. They will find acceptance in these poems and, even more important, proof that their voices have been heard.

Many of these poems are packed with details, a feast for the senses. Your mind scrambles to grasp them even as each one lays bare your memories. Here’s the first stanza of “Clarity:”

This night smells of poetry,
amidst cricket cacophony,
with a climate that quavers
of exhaustion, lust,
and crouched cats with
cutting claws to pounce,
in promise:
prey on the way.

Or this description that begins “Mimi:”

On Sunday mornings,
        we woke to light clinks of the prayer string;
as your spotted, once smooth skin
        touched each bead,
with every psalm,
        I wondered how long
        the cross would remain warm in your palm,
that felt like crumpled velvet
        caressing our small faces.

Stathis also uses rhythm to enhance the mood, whether it’s the nostalgic pebbles of memory in “shrewd games of Scrabble. // Pink bubbles, bursting;” the ominous opening “An eclipse was promised that night;” or the “thrashing thoughts, ionic tumble, / altered orbit—stutter, stumble—“ of an “ardent love-storm.”

These poems are full of love, the kind that links arms with you and walks beside you in a world where often justice is missing and others are constantly trying to shape you. Be yourself, these poems urge. I’m with you.

What poetry collection have you read that felt like a feast?