Review: Midnight in Peking, by Paul French

Pages: 259

Original date of publication: 2013

My copy: 2013 (Penguin)

Why I decided to read:

How I acquired my copy: Phoenix bookstore, May 2013

In January 1937, the body of a young British girl, Pamela Werner, was found near Peking’s Fox Tower. Although two detectives, one British and the other Chinese, spent months on the case, the case was never solved completely, and the case was forgotten in the wake of the invasion of the Japanese. Frustrated, Pamela’s father, a former diplomat, tried to solve the crime. His investigation took him into the underbelly of Peking society and uncovered a secret that was worse than anything he could have imagined.

At first, I thought that this would be a pretty straightforward retelling of a true crime, but what Paul French (who spent seven years researching the story) reveals in this book is much more than that. Foreign society in Peking in the 1930s was stratified, with the British colonials at the top and the White Russian refugees at the bottom, but somehow everyone was thrown together in a tightly knit group, unified by a fear of what was to come.

The story of the murder itself is incredibly absorbing; what exactly happened on the night of January 8, 1937 that led to a young woman’s murder and mutilation? Pamela Werner comes across an independent, intelligent young woman, and her father was relentless in tracking down her murderer—even though the British government tried to cover it up and the case was never officially solved. Too, Peking had much greater things to think about at the time than the murder of a young British girl. French solves the crime, but I think he uses his imagination a fair amount in describing how the murder played out. French’s technical writing isn’t particularly good, but he tells an interesting story. I especially loved the superstition surrounding the Fox Tower—fox spirits that represent a woman’s ability to seduce and betray. It’s an interesting parallel, but it wasn’t worked into the story very well.

Review: A Spear of Summer Grass, by Deanna Raybourn

Pages: 384

Original date of publication:

My copy: 2013 (Harlequin MIRA)

Why I decided to read: Copy offered for review

How I acquired my copy: Amazon Vine, April 2013

Set in 1923, the novel focuses on Delilah Drummond, a daringly modern woman who is forced to take a “break” from society when a scandal threatens her reputation. She goes to Kenya and her stepfather’s estate, Fairlight, and quickly becomes acclimatized to the way of life there—meeting, as she does so, Ryder White, a hunter/tracker.

I’ve had a taste of British colonial life in Kenya—Frances Osborne’s The Bolter is about a famous colonist of the period, Idina Sackville, and the five husbands she “bolted” from in order to set up a new life in Kenya (where she continued her adventures, many of them sexual). So there are pretty obvious comparisons to be made between Idina Sackville and Delilah Drummond, as there are between Dennis Finch-Hatton (of Out of Africa fame) and Ryder White. Still, there’s enough about each of these fictional characters to make them interesting, and I was interested to see how Delilah would develop throughout the novel. At first she seems to be a pretty stereotypical fish-out-of-water character, but I was pleased to see how she falls in love not only with Ryder White but Africa, too, and grow as a person in the process—especially since she has her past with which to grapple. So what we are shown is more than just the surface; we are shown the reason for why Delilah behaves (at least in her pre-Africa life) the way she does. So the focus is on reflection—reflection on one’s life, even though it might seem to be small in the grand scheme of things.

What I thought was especially good were Deanna Raybourn’s descriptions of Africa—the love story in the book isn’t really the one between Delilah and Ryder as much as it is about Delilah’s growing love for Africa. So Africa itself becomes a character, with its own flaws and advantages. I’m not usually a fan of Deanna Raybourn’s stand-alone novels that don’t feature Lady Julia Grey, but I thought A Spear of Summer Grass was especially well done. You even get a nod to Walt Whitman; what’s not to love?

Review: Celia's House, by DE Stevenson

Pages: 367

Original date of publication:

My copy: 1978 (Ace books)

Why I decided to read:

How I acquired my copy: Amazon.com, November 2010

DE Stevenson’s books are quite hard to find, but I was able to buy a copy of Celia’s House a few years ago. The novel takes place over the course of about 40 years and focuses on the lives and fortune of the Dunne family and their family estate, Dinnian, in Scotland. Humphrey Dunne inherits the estate in 1905 from Celia Dunne, with the stipulation that Dunnian will be passed to Humphrey’s daughter, Celia, when she comes of age.

Some of the plot is a little predictable; for example, when the elder Celia states that Dunnian be passed on to the younger Celia, the younger Celia hasn’t even been born yet—so it’s pretty obvious that there will indeed be another Celia to carry on the family name. Because the book takes place over a larger period of time, there were also large gaps between events; for example, Stevenson doesn’t really describe what happens when Celia receives her inheritance or her reaction to it. In fact, the book isn’t so much about Celia as it is about the family in general.

Nonetheless, there are a few strong points to the book, including the romance—Steven describes perfectly the agony (and ecstasy) of young love. Still, I didn’t think this book was quite as strong as some of the other DE Stevenson novels I’ve read.

Review: Busman's Honeymoon, by Dorothy L Sayers

Pages: 403

Original date of publication: 1937

My copy: 2006 (Harper Mystery)

Why I decided to read:

How I acquired my copy: Barnes and Noble, May 2010

I have slowly been winding my way through the iconic Lord Peter Wimsey series, based on publication date, and I’ve wound down with Busman’s Honeymoon. Lord Peter and Harriet Vane are newlyweds who decide to spend their honeymoon in the countryside at Talboys, a farmhouse in Herfordshire. But their idyll is shattered when the former owner of their house is found dead in the cellar…

The title is a takeoff on the phrase busman’s holiday; the idea being that, while of vacation or holiday, someone does something that’s similar to their line of work. Of course, Lord Peter and Harriet’s wedding is supposed to be a break from crime, but they nonetheless find themselves solving one all the same.

In all, I thought this was a strong ending to the series—Sayers wraps up a few loose ends in the Lord Peter/Harriet/Bunter storyline (and Bunter gets a more significant role in this book, which I was glad to see). Lord peter and Harriet don’t have a typical relationship; he likes that she’s not a typical woman and that she challenges him, but at the same time there’s a lot of tension between them. And it’s interesting to see how they try not to slide into the gender roles that they’re supposed to fill. We also see Peter’s shell shock (alluded to in previous novels) firsthand.

Review: Letters From Egypt, by Lucie Duff Gordon

Pages: 383

Original date of publication: 1865

My copy: 1986 (Virago)

Why I decided to read:

How I acquired my copy: Ebay, February 2011

A friend to George Meredith, Thackeray, and other notables of that time, Lucie Duff Gordon (1821-1969) was raised in a radical, intellectual family and imbued with a sense of adventure; her imagination roamed father than the usual Grand Tour. In 1862, she took a tour to South Africa, attempting to recover from tuberculosis; when that didn’t succeed, she went to Egypt, where her son-in-law was a banker. Although her daughter and son-in-law lived in Alexandria, Gordon spent much of her time in Luxor, living in a ruined house above a temple. Her letters were alternately written to her husband, Sir Alexander Duff Gordon; her mother; and her daughter.

Gordon’s letters reveal someone with a high amount of inquisitiveness and cultural sensitivity; Gordon frees herself from the usual ways that other Europeans stereotyped Egyptians at the time. She was there just as the Europeans were modernizing Egypt, represented by the construction of the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869, the year Gordon passed away. Her letters reflect the changes to rural Egypt that were occurring, as well as observing social systems that were in place (especially criticizing the corvee, which was a system of forced labor that was used to build the Canal), and she was dismayed by the poverty that she witnessed while in Luxor.

Gordon’s tone is lively; perceptive; she had a keen interest in the Egyptian people and their history, and she interacted with the often, especially as an amateur doctor (Hakeemah). “I am in love with the Arabs’ ways, and I have contrived to see and know more of family life than many Europeans who have lived here for years,” she wrote. So we meet a wide variety of people, including Omar, her faithful servant. In all, a lively, entertaining collection of letters.

Review: The Home-Maker, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Pages: 268

Original date of publication: 1924

My copy: 2008 (Persephone)

Why I decided to read:

How I acquired my copy: Persephone subscription, November 2011

Set in small-town America around the time it was written, this novel explores gender roles and how they affect families, and one family in particular. Lester Knapp is an accountant for a department store; his wife, Evangeline, is a housewife raising their three children. They both perform the roles expected of them by society, yet neither is suited to their role and neither is particularly happy. When Lester is injured in an accident that leaves him home-bound, his wife goes to work—to the benefit of everyone in the family.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher gets her reader deep into the heads of her characters, so we can understand exactly what they’re like and so that we get a three-dimensional view of the situation. Even the children’s point of view is well represented—especially Stephen, aged 5, who fears having his Teddy taken away to be washed. Therefore, we get the truth of a situation without the biases of your traditional narrator and so that the reader can see exactly what’s going on under the surface. While all the characters in the novel are lovable, my favorite is Lester—a dreamy poetry lover who turns out to excel as a homemaker and discovers a new-found appreciation for his children and their talents.

Fisher believed strongly in the strength of one’s internal personal life over external considerations. And the strength of this novel is what it says about American culture in general. Small town life is famous for being busybody-like; everyone knew your business and involved themselves in it, and if you strayed away from that, you’d be ostracized. So this novel serves as a sort of criticism of that way of life and what it represents. None of the Knapp family really has the freedom to do what suits them personally; they’re all at the mercy of what society dictates. In all, an incredible novel, with the wheelchair representing how social expectations can bind us all.

Review: Blood and Beauty, by Sarah Dunant

Pages: 506

Original date of publication: July, 2013

My copy: 2013 (Random House; ARC)

Why I decided to read: Offered through Amazon Vine program

How I acquired my copy: Amazon Vine program, march 2013

I’ve loved Sarah Dunant’s novels for years, so when I saw that Blood and Beauty was available for review before publication, I jumped at the chance to read it. It tells the story of the Borgia family, specifically Lucrezia, and follows them from Rodrigo Borgia’s ascension to the papacy (and pope Alexander) in 1492 to Lucrezia’s third marriage to Alfonso d’Este in 1502. Rodrigo Borgia’s rise to power was much in keeping with the mores of the time period in which his lived. He even Italianized his name from Borja to Borgia. He and his four children, as well as his mistresses, became symbols of the power, splendor, and decadence of the Papal court in the late 15th century.

It’s really, really hard to write fiction about the Borgia family without completely vilifying or vindicating them, but Dunant does a wonderful job of showing both the strengths and weaknesses of these people. They’re ruthless and cunning, but they don’t seem (at first) as bad as history has made them out to be. There’s this wonderful scene about halfway through the novel, where Cesare Borgia gores a boar; the way the scene is described, it serves as a strong metaphor for not only the dangers of the Papal court, but the savageness of Cesare’s character. That’s the kind of fiction I love; the kind of writing that shows you how something is without explicitly saying so. It makes people, places and events seem so much more real. Dunant’s focus is on stripping away the myths in order to reveal the psychological truths that lie beneath the surface.

According to the author’s note at the end, there will be a second novel that will cover the conclusion of Lucrezia’s story.

Review: The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, by Jennifer Cody Epstein

Pages: 378

Original date of publication: 2013

My copy: 2013 (Norton)

Why I decided to read:

How I acquired my copy: Amazon Vine program, March 2013

The Gods of Heavenly Punishment is set during WWII, and specifically focuses on the American firebombing of Tokyo in 1942 and 1945. We are introduced to Yoshi Kobayashi, the daughter of an expansionist; Cam, a bomber pilot taken prisoner by the Japanese; and Anton, an American architect, who had helped build some of Tokyo’s modern buildings in the 1920s and ‘30s but is enlisted to build test structures for the American air force to practice.

Epstein has chosen an event that rarely gets written about in fiction, yet caused so much devastation at the same time; in the Operation Meetinghouse attack of 1945, 16 square miles of Tokyo were destroyed, approximately 100,000 people were killed, and over a million lost their homes. It was the deadliest air raid of WWII. So I was very interested to read about this lesser-known period of history and witness it through the eyes of these characters—especially Yoshi, who finds herself directly impacted by the 1945 raid. Jennifer Cody Epstein writes beautifully, and her description of what happens to these characters is riveting.

Review: The Persephone Book of Short Stories

Pages: 473

Original date of publication: 1909-1986

My copy: 2012 (Persephone)

Why I decided to read:

How I acquired my copy: Persephone subscription, January 2013

The Persephone Book of Short Stories is a collection of thirty short stories—some that have been previously published in other Persephone books (crowd pleasers such as Minnie Panter-Downes’s “Good Evening, Mrs Craven” and Irene Nemirovsky’s “Dimanche”)—some that have been published in the Persephone Post, and others that appear here for the first time. The earliest story in the collection, Susan Glaspell’s“A to Z,” was published in 1909 and the last, Georgina Hammick’s “A Few Cases in the Day Case Unit,” in 1986.

My favorite story in the collection is the first: Susan Glaspell’s “A to Z,’ in which a young college graduate gets a job as a dictionary copyist at a publisher’s office. She strikes up a friendship with a young man at the office; the irony of the story being that while these characters’ bread and butter revolves around words, they cannot find words that are adequate to describe their feelings for one another (personally, I could also relate to the main character’s situation of having that feeling of jumping off into the unknown after graduation, and of having a vaguely-defined dream to work in publishing). Other Persephone authors that appear here include Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Berridge, Dorothy Whipple, Frances Towers, Margaret Bonham, Diana Gardner, Diana Athill, EM Delafield, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Norah Hoult, Betty Miller, and Penelope Mortimer. I was also pleased to discover that stories by two more of my favorite authors, Edith Wharton and Dorothy Parker, were included here.

The stories are arranged chronologically and their subjects vary, but the theme is constant; the stories highlight the types of things that women’s lives are focused on: relationships, family, jobs, etc. The collection is therefore a pretty-well-rounded representation of the kind of fiction that Persephone publishes. I only wish that the collection had included fewer stories that had been previously published by Persephone, and more that were new.

Review: The Wild Rose, by Jennifer Donnelly

Pages: 640

Original date of publication: 2011

My copy: 2011

Why I decided to read: received a copy from the publisher for review

How I acquired my copy: Amazon Vine program, 2011

Although I wasn’t too keen on the first two books in this trilogy—The Tea Rose and The Winter Rose—I picked this one up hoping my mind had changed. Each book in the story offers a different perspective on one family at the turn of the century; this book begins just before WWI and focuses on Seamie and Willa. I think the story is meant to be fast-paced and give the reader a good overview of early 20th century history, but the story lines were so unrealistic and predictable that I had a hard time finishing the book. There were so many characters and coincidences that the book got pretty convoluted after a while. The characters’ dialogue also didn’t seem era-appropriate. This might be a good book if you’re looking for a period romance, but be prepared to suspend disbelief at the plot and characters.