fiction

The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp, by Leonie Swann

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There’s a body in the woodshed at Sunset Hall, Agnes’s home that she’s turned into co-housing for other elderly folks. They include Bernadette who’s blind, wheelchair-bound Winston, flighty Edwina who practices yoga and bakes impossible biscuits, and Marshall who sometimes goes off into la-la land. And of course Hettie the tortoise.

Agnes already has a lot on her plate: finding her false teeth, the occasional ringing in her ears that renders her temporarily deaf, and having to take the stairs when the doorbell rings because the stairlift is broken. The door turns out to be the police to tell them about the fatal shooting of a neighbor, Mildred Puck. The murder may be a solution to one of Agnes’s problems.  To add to the confusion, a new resident arrives: Charlie who has a fabulous wardrobe, a mind as yet untinged with dementia, and a dog named Brexit. Then Marshall brings in his grandson Nathan without prior authorization. The television gets moved to the basement, but not because of the grandson.

A lot of quirky characters, but it’s easy to keep them straight in this fun mystery. The way they have to navigate their disabilities adds a bit of shading to the story, along with a lot of unexpected suspense. I quickly became attached to these pensioners, and their surprisingly shadowy pasts.

I’ve been thinking about a post I read recently by Leigh Stein. She discusses John Truby’s idea that a story should have a designing principle, some way of organising the story as a whole. It can be the way it uses time—such as the film Titanic which unfolds in real time—or the perspective from which it’s told—such as Darling Girl, by Liz Michalski a story of Peter Pan from the point of view of Wendy’s granddaughter.

The designing principle is like a plot twist but in the story as a whole, in the story’s premise. In this cosy mystery, the first twist is that the amateur detectives are elderly. We’ve seen that before, from Miss Marple to the Thursday Club mysteries. So the second twist is that almost all of them are disabled in some way that affects the plot. And then the third twist is that they all have unexpected pasts.

I enjoyed this mystery a lot, though it took me a while to work out what rules had been established by the residents for their co-housing situation at Sunset Hall. This is what Ray Rhamey calls an information question rather than a story question. Withholding information about the world of the story creates irritation rather than the suspense we get from true story questions (what’s going to happen next?). Aren’t you wondering why the corpse is in the woodshed? That’s a story question all right. This is a small quibble, and not something that I have to worry about as I chase down the rest of the series.  

Have you read a story where a tortoise plays an important role?

Hush Hush, by Laura Lippman

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I was thrilled when this twelfth book in Lippman’s Tess Monaghan series came out in 2015. I decided to save it for a moment when I really needed it, a moment that came this week. Hush Hush is everything I hoped it would be and more. Lippman is in top form, digging into the darkness of family life—and its joys too.

After the death of her baby, Melisandre Harris Dawes was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity (postpartum psychosis). She spent some time in rehab and then moved to South Africa and then England. Her husband Stephen had full custody of the two older girls, Alanna and Ruby. Now, twelve years later, Melisandre has returned to Baltimore to reclaim her daughters—now teenagers—and her reputation.

A stunning woman, imbued with the glamour and confidence of old-style Baltimore wealth, Melisandre expects to impose her will on everyone around her. She has hired a filmmaker to create a documentary about her trial, supposedly to expand public understanding of the verdict. Interviews for this documentary crop up between chapters, adding new insights for the reader. Mindful of her notoriety, she has contacted her old flame, lawyer Tyner Gray, for help.

Through Tyner—Tess’s friend, mentor and husband of her beloved aunt—Tess has been hired by Melisandre to look into her security. It’s not work Tess and her new partner, ex-policeman Sandy Sanchez usually do, but Tess is feeling the financial pinch of being a parent. The interweaving of the investigation with Tess’s home life—deepening relationship with Crow, adoration of their three-year-old daughter Carla Scout, and the inevitable complicated scheduling of their work and day care—furnish an extra level of depth to the story.

The theme of mothers and daughters is one of those universal themes that always draws my attention. The subtheme of questioning what constitutes good parenting adds complexity and further deepens my interest. Both Tess and Melisandre receive anonymous notes criticising their parenting, though most parents (me included) don’t need outside critics in order to question themselves. I’ve been faced with more than one toddler meltdown in a busy grocery store and could thoroughly identify with Tess’s reaction. Carla Scout is not the first three-year-old with Big Feelings whom I’ve encountered.

The mystery itself is satisfyingly twisty. Alanna’s rebellion against, well, everything and Ruby’s tendency to search out secrets and hold them close complicate the story, as does their young stepmother’s struggle to care for her own new baby. Sandy Sanchez adds a gravitas to the story and another point of view. Lippman does a good job of showing how his strengths align with Tess’s. As events escalate, each character adds to the richness of the story.

The story felt especially poignant for me because I left Baltimore a few years ago after a lifetime there. On the trail with Tess, crisscrossing the city, even visiting some of my formerly regular spots left me a little homesick.

I’ve read and enjoyed Lippman’s standalone novels since Hush Hush came out. If you search my blog you’ll find seven other Lippman novels I’ve reviewed. I am still hoping for another Tess story.

What’s your favorite Laura Lippman book? Do you have a favorite spot in Baltimore?

Brother of the More Famous Jack, by Barbara Trapido

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What a delight this novel is! I wrote a couple of weeks ago about “pleasure buttons:” the aspects of fiction that provide a pleasurable experience for readers. The missing one in that discussion turns out to be wit.

In Trapido’s debut novel, 18-year-old Katherine is eager to explore the world outside her mother’s petit-bourgeois bungalow, but is at first hesitant and only too aware of her own naïveté. It’s telling that in times of stress she turns to her favorite novel: Jane Austen’s Emma.

Lacking Emma’s self-assurance, Katherine assumes she’s blown her interview with the philosophy professor Jacob Goldman. She’s chosen philosophy as a shortcut to worldly wisdom, and does not realise that he’s thoroughly enchanted with her original bent of mind. He sees through her youthful lack of confidence to the potential rogue adventurer lurking underneath.

She then gets picked up by the much older John Millet, charmed by his aesthetic knowledge, not recognising that however much he flirts with her, what really turns him on are young men.  John carries her off for a weekend which turns out to be with the Goldman family: Jacob, a very pregnant Jane, and their many children.

The house, as it presents itself from the road, is like a house one might see on a jigsaw puzzle box, seasonally infested with tall hollyhocks. the kind one put together on a tea tray while recovering from the measles.

There’s the family you’re born with and the family you choose, and Katherine finds her real home with the eccentric and outrageous Goldman clan, quite aside from falling head over heels with oldest son Roger. They all adore her right back—even Roger, for a while anyway. In Jane, she finds her true parent.

[Jane] stands hugely in strong farmer’s wellingtons into which she has tucked some very old corduroy trousers. She has these tied together under a man’s shirt with pajama cords because the zip won’t come together over the bulge. Bits of hair are falling out of her dark brown plait.”

This hilarious, madcap novel is full of quips like the title. However, running alongside is a pungent critique of class in Britain, anti-Semitism, and women’s roles. First published in 1982, it might seem dated to modern readers, particularly the debate over women’s issues, such as motherhood vs work, and who does the dishes. However, recent events, such as the current push in the U.S. by a minority of radical evangelists to remove women from the workforce and keep them in the kitchen or making babies, make it newly relevant. It’s a good reminder that women’s gains toward equality have only come about recently and still encounter panic-stricken backlash.

Even the most revolting characters, such as macho Michele “a backward-looking romantic with right-wing views and left-wing friends” come across as hilarious when seen through Katherine’s amused and loving eyes, and then turn around and redeem themselves unexpectedly. It shouldn’t work; I should be horrified by some of the things these characters get up to.

Somehow, though, Katherine’s eagerness for adventure and the sheer number of fantastical goings-on lead to a suspension, not only of disbelief but of censure. I was swept up in a witty fairy tale and willing to go along with Katherine. Toward the end of the novel, a bit of sanity returns as Katherine, older and wiser, begins to see through the smokescreen of antic fun.

The story was not so much laugh-out-loud funny as snort-and-snicker witty, making it the sort of comedy I most relish. I thorough enjoyed this delightful novel and can’t wait to explore some of Trapido’s later works.

What novel has most amused you lately?

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

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Put six people from five countries into the International Space Station orbiting Earth and leave them there for several years. Now write about a single day, which encompasses sixteen orbits, so sixteen sunrises, sixteen sunsets. I immediately imagined around a dozen different stories that could come out of this premise.

I never imagined Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.

I am stunned by the gorgeous language. When Chie sees the islands of her native Japan, they look like “a trail of drying footprints. Her country is a ghost haunting the water.”

When Roman glances out a window in passing, “the view is at first indistinct. It takes a moment to orientate. An expanse of wintry nothingness, pearly cloud cover, and then the familiar gleam of ice sheets sloping off the Antarctic Circle. Starboard, the seven sisters audaciously bright.”

From space, borders and boundaries blur. Within their small metallic bubble, we see the astronauts and cosmonauts—from Britain, the U.S., Japan, Italy, and two from Russia—sometimes individually and sometimes as a group as they go about their days. They exercise to preserve their legs and hearts, pursue their scientific experiments, manage the effects of weightlessness.

They have moments of awe—wonder and terror—at the boundless space around them. “Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it is stalking through their quarters.” Sometimes they feel themselves remote from those on the planet below them, unable to intervene in looming catastrophes. At other times, they are affected by news from home and memories. Shaun recalls a high school lesson about the Velázquez painting Las Meninas and the shifting possibilities of subject and perspective. A postcard of the painting is one of the things he brought with him.

Haley Larsen recently wrote on Substack about the use of free indirect narration. When we talk about different points of view, we’re describing different degrees of narrative distance from the characters. For example, first person PoV is the most intimate, providing access to the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings, while third person is sometimes compared to a camera over the protagonist’s shoulder with no access to thoughts or feelings. Free indirect narration is when the author’s lens moves in and out, between a narrow focus on one character and a wider zoom.

Winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, Orbital is a brilliant example of this narrative technique. Not only does the author zoom from all-seeing narrator to the group aboard the space station to a single astronaut/cosmonaut, but through the six people we see the earth as a whole, individual places (e.g., the pyramids), a family, a single person on earth. That movement in and out IS the story’s movement. Amazing.

In a recent blog post, author and teacher C.S. Lakin writes, “I was reading A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, and I was struck by a passage that didn’t filter the world through the characters’ eyes but used a shared experience to reveal their reality.” That shared experience was hunger. She goes on to say, “[T]aking the perspective of a singular force, such as hunger, can be a powerful way to reveal not just one character’s experience but the life of an entire community.”

The community in Orbital is the six people aboard the space station. To me, though, they are an example of synecdoche, where a part of something is used to signify the whole. They are all of us, riding on this increasingly fragile planet.

I loved the book and, finishing it, immediately started again. I continue to return to it. I could write a whole essay about each tiny part. However, not everyone in my book club enjoyed it. While this is a novel, you won’t find much in the way of plot. It is more a collection of poetry, of meditations about humans and our Earth, embodied in six memorable people and their remarkable experiences.

Have you read a novel that simply astounded you?

The Light Between Oceans, by M. L. Stedman

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In 1926 Tom Sherbourne becomes the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, a lonely spot off the southwestern coast of Australia. It’s a lonely job, with a supply boat only visiting once a quarter, but Tom enjoys it. After a shattering four years fighting in WWI, Tom returned to Australia and began learning the lighthouse trade, attracted by the quiet life, the precision required, and the opportunity to save lives. On a rare shore leave he meets and marries Isabel who adjusts quickly to life on the island and looks forward to raising a family.

Unfortunately she suffers two miscarriages and a stillbirth. So when a boat washes ashore with a dead man and a live baby, she calls it a miracle. Tom, a principled man, wants to report it immediately, but Isabel persuades him to wait, arguing that the mother must have been washed overboard and drowned. The stillbirth is recent enough that Isabel is able to nurse the baby.

Stedman wonderfully evokes the fierce love of parents for a child, as well as Tom’s love for Isabel. Their quiet, isolated life on the island is idyllic. However, when the child is two, they have leave to go to town on the mainland for the first time in three years and, during that visit they are forcibly reminded of the lives of others. While Isabel is fixated on the child, Tom finds himself in a moral quandary.

Stedman’s debut novel appealed to me first because of the setting; I love a lighthouse novel. Tom also appealed to me in some ways: reserved and moral, meticulous in his care of the light, steadfast in his love for Isabel and Lucy. However, I found the book’s premise hard to believe unless the characters were completely self-centered, but then I’ve always held to the philosophy that children come first; what’s best for them is my priority. Too many of these characters give that idea lip service and then do what they want.

I still enjoyed much of the story, though. I recently read a post by Leigh Stein on her Attention Economy Substack where she mentioned the work of Dr. Jennifer Lynn Barnes, a novelist and former psychology professor. I also watched the Grammar Girl interview of Barnes on YouTube that Stein mentions. Believing that novels succeed when they provide their readers with pleasure, Barnes took a scientific approach to identifying the primary pleasure buttons. She came up with six: beauty, money & wealth, status & power, sex & touch, competition, and danger.

It’s an interesting idea, and one that fits this popular novel. The landscape of the light, the sea, and the sky is beautifully drawn. Of all the senses, touch is the one that stays with me from this story: Lucy’s soft cheek, the feel of salt spray from a rough sea. There’s competition and danger, and the potential loss of status and power. The only pleasure button missing is money, which is not a motivation for anyone in the story, but there’s another kind of wealth: family and community.

And I did take pleasure in this story, despite the unlikely premise and some unlikeable characters. It captures the joy of bathing a baby and playing with a toddler. It made for good bedtime reading.

What novel have you read recently that gave you pleasure? What about it made you feel that way?

Lost in the Never Woods, by Aiden Thomas

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In this retelling of Peter Pan, Wendy Darling lives in Astoria, Oregon, a small town where children have begun disappearing. People turn to her because she and her brothers also went missing five years earlier. She has no answers because when she did turn up in the woods, she remembered nothing of what happened. Michael and John have never returned.

When Wendy, on her eighteenth birthday, almost runs over a boy lying in the middle of a forest road, she discovers that the Peter Pan of the childhood stories her mother told them is real. He’s left Neverland to recruit Wendy’s help in finding the missing children.

It’s clear that Thomas put a lot of thought and imagination into how to adapt the magic of the J.M. Barrie original to the modern world. I especially like how he characterises the antagonist. Also, he’s done a good job of understanding issues such as grief, guilt, and PTSD. The damage to the Darling family, in particular, struck me as genuine.

Unfortunately, I came near to setting it aside unfinished, despite so much I liked about it and my own fascination with Peter Pan. Only the fact that I was listening to it as an audiobook while doing chores and commuting enabled me to stay with it. So what lessons can I as a writer draw from this Young Adult novel and NYT bestseller?

Go for broke with the cover. The book’s cover is fabulous! It draws you in to the tangled woods with their tempting flowery path and threatening blue and mauve trees. And the mysterious faces in silhouette. Who wouldn’t want to pick up a book with a cover like this?

Take time to describe your main characters with surprising sensory details. The early descriptions of Peter charmed me, with so many wonderful details such as twigs in his hair, the woodsy scents that accompany him, the oddball clothes that he’s picked up in Wendy’s world. I loved this aspect of the story.

Make sure your characters feel like real people. Sadly, after the wonderful description of Peter, he and Wendy, not to mention her family and best friend, come across as one-note characters. This is especially problematic with Wendy, since she is our point-of-view character.

Vary your pacing. The whole story is at fight-or-flight level. Wendy starts the story freaking out and, aside from one or two brief moments of connection, she spends the entire story at the same panicked level. Many Goodreads reviewers complained about slow pacing. I attribute this reaction to the pedal-to-the-metal emotional level, the absence of character development, and the scarcity of actual actions Wendy and Peter take to solve the problem.

These problems could be attributed to a rush to publish a second novel in 2021 after the big success of Thomas’s debut novel Cemetery Boys in 2020. Most writers labor for years on their first novel trying to make it perfect in this difficult marketplace. Then the follow-up doesn’t have a chance to get as much attention.

I’m impressed by Thomas’s productivity. I’m also taking a lesson from the way he interacts with his fans online, from his fun bio to the way he addresses them directly.  Given the very positive reviews for Cemetery Boys, I will give that one a try. I’m also looking forward to seeing how this promising writer develops over his next few books.

What Young Adult book laced with a bit of magic have you enjoyed?

The Face on the Wall, by Jane Langton

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Professor Homer Kelly already has plenty on his plate, when his wife Mary presents the part-time sleuth with an important task: find out why her former student Pearl Small has disappeared. Worryingly, Pearl’s husband Fred is negotiating a deal to turn the land, a former pig farm which is in Pearl’s name, into a development of McMansions.

Meanwhile, the Kellys are helping Mary’s niece Annie as she uses the windfall from her suddenly success as a children’s book illustrator to build her dream home, constructing it as an extension to her current house and renting that out. Annie goes all out to make it everything she’s ever wanted, including a 35-foot blank wall where she begins to paint a mural of famous stories for children.

Enter the Gast family. Social climbers Roberta and Bob who rent Annie’s house have two children: ten-year-old Charlene, a self-centered swimming champion, and eight-year-old Eddy, who has Down’s syndrome. Eddy loves to visit Annie and watch her paint. When she gives him some materials to work with, she finds that he is a remarkably gifted artist.

All is not well, though. The Gast parents are embarrassed by Annnie’s artistic eccentricity, and covet her part of the house. Accidents plague the property. Worst of all, a face keeps appearing on Annie’s wall, no matter how many times she and Flimnap O’Dougherty, a strange handyman who showed up one day, paint over it.

And where is Pearl? We learn that she loves her inherited acres and has been turning them into a nature sanctuary, planting trees and flowers.

This thirteenth Homer Kelly mystery is a light-hearted story about art, hubris, and community action. What do we value? What do we owe each other?

There are a few incidents that strain the reader’s credulity, but they fit with the fairy-tale atmosphere of the story. I especially enjoyed mentions of various beloved children’s books, such as Wind in the Willows, and other favorites, such as Three Men in a Boat, and the pen-and-ink illustrations of Annie’s wall. There is also plenty of suspense that builds throughout the story, so that the pages fly by.

Jane Langton, who died in 2018, remains one of my favorite authors. Her children’s book Diamond in the Window has to have been the most influential book I read as a child. I still often think of the adventures in it. What I love about her adult books is the way she weaves a tale that whose charm and humor hold serious questions for those who care to look for them.

Have you read any of Jane Langton’s books?

The Blue Hour, by Paula Hawkins

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“How very odd it must be, living at the mercy of the tide.”

Eris is a tidal island off the coast of Scotland, meaning that it can only be accessed at low tide. It is a place of crashing seas, wild storms, and dark woods where mainlanders once buried their dead to keep wolves from disturbing them.

Once the home of the reclusive artist Vanessa Chapman, now—five years after her death—the island’s only inhabitant is Grace, her friend and companion. However, Vanessa’s art and papers were left, not to Grace, but to the Fairburn Foundation run by Vanessa’s lover-turned-enemy Douglas Lennox, who feuded with Grace for years, certain that she was holding back art and papers. He is now dead, shot in a hunting accident, and his son Sebastian in charge.

When one of Vanessa’s pieces, on loan to Tate Modern, is discovered to contain a human bone, Sebastian sends James Becker, curator of the Chapman collection to Eris to gather any papers that may shed light on the origin of the piece. Becker intends—unlike Sebastian’s family—to be conciliatory toward Grace, while she initially defends her isolation but gradually finds Becker eases her loneliness.

The shifting ground between the two of them captured and kept my attention.I found myself eager to get back to the book every time I set it down, wanting to explore the twists in the plot, rummage through the complicated relationships between the characters, and measure the reliability of each person. In a time when we are told so many lies, looking for the truth becomes a skill to be honed.

While two of the story’s voices are those of Grace, who loved her, and Becker who wrote his thesis on her work and is still obsessed with her, it is Vanessa—the third voice—who is at the heart of this story. A creative woman who fled domesticity and came to this wild island, her journal entries throughout the book bring out her voice and her rage to be free.

Through Vanessa’s own words, as well as those of Becker and others, her paintings became so vivid in my mind that I could almost swear I’ve seen them. I enjoyed imagining them and can easily say that it would have been worth reading the book solely for them.

The title also drew my attention, as I have always loved that mysterious hour before sunrise and after sunset. The image signaled to me that this would not be a breakneck thriller like Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train. Instead, it’s a slow burn of buried secrets, sinister suspicions, and mysterious deaths. It reminded me of Daphne du Maurier’s novels.

A glimpse at some of the reviews on Goodreads reveals a widespread dissatisfaction with the ending. I won’t give it away, but my interpretation of it is quite different from most people’s. I like ambiguity in fiction. I like being asked to invest some of my attention into working out the subtext of a story. Here, I felt quite certain of what was being said between the lines, and am surprised to find myself at odds with so many others. I’ll say no more, but once you’ve read the book, I’d be happy to share views on the ending.

 Can you recommend a mystery about a woman artist?

Walk the Blue Fields, by Claire Keegan

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In this second collection of short stories, the author of the remarkable novella Small Things Like These takes us to rural Ireland. The seven stories occur in the modern day but they seem timeless, as though they could be happening anytime in the last century. Partly this sense comes from the rural setting, where so little has changed, and partly because of the psychological realism of Keegan’s characters. We know these people.

Keegan is a brilliant writer, able to condense masses of meaning into a few pages, and those so clearly written that you almost miss the layers they encompass. I’ll just mention a couple of the stories, and tread lightly so as not to ruin them. As with the best stories, several of them turn on a secret revealed, and I would not spoil your discoveries.

As the title story begins, we are placed in a chapel decorated for a wedding, and a priest ready to officiate. The ceremony itself is dispensed with in a few sentences; the story concerns the immediate aftermath—the photos, the hotel reception, the speeches—as filtered through the priest’s eyes. We do not know his name since he is only referred to as “the priest” or called “Father.” It must be a poignant moment when you lose your identity and begin to be held at arm’s length.

A melancholy air comes forward as the priest locks up the church and heads to the reception. He’d rather walk down by the river, but the hotel is “where his duty lies.” As he walks down the avenue,

On either side, the trees are tall and here the wind is strangely human. A tender speech is combing through the willows. In a bare whisper, the elms lean. Something about the place conjures up the ancient past: the hound, the spear, the spinning wheel. There’s pleasure to be had in history. What’s recent is another matter and painful to recall.

Then we are caught up in the whirl of the reception. The scene comes to life through the banter, the details, the people described so acutely. I won’t go on; just know that you are in the hands of a master, and the story will take you to surprising places. The ending is particularly satisfying in the way tiny, almost unnoticed details from the beginning of the story come into play.

The combination of realism and lingering remnants of legends and superstitions are even more central in the last story, “The Night of the Quicken Trees.” That is ancient name for the rowan tree or mountain ash, well known for its magical properties.

Margaret Flusk—”a bold spear of a woman . . .  not yet forty”—moves into an isolated house on the coast in the autumn. The house had belonged to a priest, now dead, and is joined to another house of the same size. It’s inhabited by a forty-nine-year-old bachelor named Stark, who has an odd relationship with his goat Josephine. A blend of comedy, folklore, and the way isolation and loneliness can set a person askew, the story is surprising and inevitable at the same time.

I love the morning when Stack first comes to her door. “Margaret wasn’t dressed. She was scratching herself and thinking. She liked to roam around in her nightdress having a think, drinking tea in the mornings.”  Such a great description of someone used to living alone.  

I saw an interview with Keegan in which she said that rather than planning out her stories ahead of time, she lets her main character loose and follows their footsteps. Perhaps that is why we get the sense of discovering the story—and the story behind the story—along with her.

Although these quiet stories speak of lost opportunities, escape, and desire, they are told with “a measured, almost documentary reserve,” as one reviewer put it, which give the reader a little psychological distance, thus enabling us to appreciate the tiny moments that carry considerable meaning, as well as the larger threads of timeless situations and how people survive them.

What short story collection have you come across that entranced you?

The First Ladies, by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

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Benedict and Murray, authors of The Personal Librarian, once again join forces to bring us a well-researched and fascinating story of a friendship that helped form the foundation for the modern civil rights movement. Eleanor Roosevelt’s work as First Lady of the United States is legendary; less well known is Mary McLeod Bethune’s work, which led to her being called the “First Lady of Negro America” by Ebony magazine.

The daughter of a formerly enslaved couple, Mary Bethune became a fearless and passionate Civil Rights activist. Among her many accomplishments, she founded the American Council of Negro Women, and a private school (which later became Bethune-Cookman University) for Black students in Florida.

The friendship between the two women lasted many years, through the 1920s and 1940s, during which they partnered to push for equal rights. They first connected over a shared commitment to women’s rights and education, which later evolved to include equal rights for people of color. In this story—and this was one of the most interesting parts of the story for me—Eleanor gradually begins to recognise her personal shortcomings and blind spots around race. Their friendship is powerful enough to enable Mary and Eleanor to talk honestly about racial issues, to give and receive advice. And to understand that the work is never done.

The women partnered to work directly—Eleanor trying persuade Franklin to ensure Black citizens reaped the benefit of the New Deal jobs, for example, which led to Mary heading the Negro Division of the National Youth Administration—and indirectly. During a time when even driving in a car together was “not done,” they not only did that, but also met in public, shared a table for  tea in a restaurant, attended each other’s events, etc. By doing so, they changed public perceptions, normalising integration and promoting equality.

Their story is a good reminder that the fight for civil rights in the U.S. began before the 1960s. But the story isn’t all politics. We learn about the family relationships that offer a context for each woman. I found it fascinating to see the ways status and power shifted back and forth between them as the relationship between the two women deepened. As friends and admirers of each other, they rose above such petty concerns. They shared secrets and dreams. They supported each other through disappointments and tragedies.

Readers might be familiar with Eleanor’s struggle with her overbearing mother-in-law Sara and heartbreak over Franklin’s affair with his secretary Lucy Mercer. However, both receive even-handed treatment here, as we see Franklin’s early ideals clashing with the political realities of getting the New Deal laws through, and how Sara’s early support of equal rights for women and people of color influenced Eleanor.

Mary’s handling of daily insults and microaggressions, her insistence that she be addressed as Mrs. Bethune in professional settings rather than by her first name as though she were a servant, are inspiring. When one of her students got appendicitis and was refused treatment at the local hospital, she raised money and founded a hospital for people of color. When her grandson was refused access to a segregated beach, she collected investors and bought a stretch of the beach and waterfront, which they then sold to Black families–and White people were allowed to visit the beach. She invested in Black businesses, including a newspaper and several life insurance companies.

Bear in mind that these two amazing women led active political lives. Historical fiction comes in many flavors, so it’s important to adjust your expectations. I enjoy a light, historical romance as much as anyone else (Georgette Heyer, anyone?), but that is not what we have here. While we do get insight into the personal lives of these two women, for them the personal is political, as the saying goes. Much of the book shows how their personal beliefs and experiences motivate their political work. Thus the pace is sometimes leisurely and the story is rich with historical detail.

I especially appreciated the historical notes from each of the authors at the end, clarifying what came from the historical record and what was added by the authors. I also enjoyed the authors’ discussion of their collaboration. The narrators of the audiobook, Robin Miles and Tavia Gilbert, did an excellent job of bringing this story to life.

Especially in these difficult times, the story of these two women, their courage and commitment, their comradeship and deep friendship, is inspiring.

Who are you turning to for inspiration these days?