A Girl Walks Into a Bookstore...

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 pe...

Pages: 245 Original date of publication: 1928 My edition: 1986 (Virago) Why I decided to read: All Virago/All August How I acquired my copy: LT member, June 2012 Winter Sonata revolves around the lives of several people in a small English village. Arnold Nettle is a shy telegraph operator, disinclined towards conversation, which nonetheless is invited to his neighbors, where he plays the cello for them in the evenings. He falls in love with Olivia, the eldest daughter, a smart, introspective young woman with good judgment about other people. Other characters in the drama include Olivia’s teenage sister Eleanor, their cousin George, his best friend Mr. Premiss, and Mr. Nettle’s landlady’s teenage daughter, Pauline. Although the book claims to be a love story, it is mostly about the interactions between the main characters. Although part of the group, Mr. Nettle is completely detached from them, and it’s interesting to watch the difference between Olivia, who’s in h...

Pages: 410 Original date of publication: 1860 My edition: 1997 (Virago) Why I decided to read: LibraryThing recommendation How I acquired my copy: Amazon UK, March 2011 Emily Eden’s name has been floating around in my literary consciousness for a while—many years ago I read a novel called One Last Look , which apparently is based on Emily Eden’s travels in India; and then a couple of years ago I read Women of the Raj , a historical overview of British women in India in the 18 th , 19 th , and early 20 th centuries. So when I found out that her letters home to her sister were available, this became a must-read for me. The book is a collection of letters that Emily wrote between 1837 and 1841, when Emily’s brother George, who was Governor-General, set out to tour the Upper Provinces of India; Emily and her other sister, Fanny, came with him. Historically, Emily’s travels were important because she was able to witness the beginnings of the First Afghan War, although s...

Pages: 119 Original date of publication: 1956 My edition: 2007 (Persephone) Why I decided to read: browsing the Persephone catalogue How I acquired my copy: Persephone subscription, June 2010 As I was browsing my TBR shelves for something to take with me on a business trip (traveling theme and all of that), my eye (no pun intended) was drawn to Every Eye , a slim novella about a woman who marries a much younger man and takes a holiday to Ibiza. The novel isn’t so much about the holiday as it is about the journey, and it’s a novel that is “based on the premise that life is lived forwards but understood backwards” (from the preface written by Isobel English’s husband, Neville Braybrooke). There are many flashbacks to Hatty’s affair with a much older man, and her relationship with her step-aunt that illuminate certain things about Hatty. There’s not much action per se in this book, but there are some absolutely gorgeous descriptions of the scenery as Hatty and Stephen tr...

Pages: 378 Original date of publication: 2010 My edition: 2010 (NAL) Why I decided to read: heard about it through HFO How I acquired my copy: review copy from the publisher, March 2010 The Queen’s Pawn is a novel about Alais, Princess of France, who was betrothed to Richard Plantagenet. She went to England at a young age, and was raised in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Later she (supposedly) had an affair with Henry II. In this novel, the author also posits that it was Alais who seduced Henry so that she could become Queen herself. It seems to me that it must be a challenge to write a novel about Alais. She grew up in one of the most well-known royal courts in the world, yet there’s not much that’s known about her. Several authors have tried to write her story (including Judith Koll Healey, who write a couple of mysteries featuring Alais), and, unfortunately, I’m still looking for a really good novel about her. Thus one just didn’t do it for me completely, I’m afraid...

Pages: 448 Original publication date: 2009 My edition: 2009 (Touchstone) Why I decided to read: Vague interest in Arthurian legends/early medieval history. How I acquired my copy: bought with a giftcard at Barnes & Noble. I have to say right off the bat that this book wasn’t what I was expecting at all. I was expecting (and maybe dreading, a bit) a fantasy-ish retelling of the Trystan and Isolde story. But what Anna Elliott does here, to my delighted surprise, is combine elements of the legends with what is known about the early Middle Ages—in this case, the invasions of the Saxons in the 5th and 6th centuries. Most of the Trystan and Isolde stories are based on those written down in the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries, and are therefore done in the tradition of courtly romances. Anna Elliott’s rendition is much more realistic. The story opens just after the death of Isolde’s husband Constantine, the High King of Britain. Immediately, Lord Marche begins jockeying for power, quickly ...

The Fraud is a novel with a complicated plot. It opens in 1735, and closes in the 1780s, so it covers a lot of ground. Growing up, Grace Marshall had every intention of becoming a Painter; but her brother Philip was the one who was permitted to take his Grand Tour to Europe to study art. Many years later, he comes back from Grace—as Filipo de Vecellio, conquering the world of portrait painting in London. He enlists his sister’s help in his deception, and Grace becomes Francesca, housekeeper to the famous portrait painter. It’s a remarkable self-sacrifice that Grace makes, but she does it for love of her brother—who, in time, she ends up hating. There’s a whole lot going on in this novel, some of it crucial to the plot, some of it not (I won’t go into specifics, but sometimes I felt as though the author thought “what’s the worst thing that can happen in this situation?” and made it happen to her characters). I also didn’t really believe in Grace’s relationship with James Burke (because...

I usually love timeslip novels like this. A first-century Celtic princess’s life parallels that of a modern-day woman, who escapes to Wales to avoid someone who attacked her in London. Later Jess, the modern-day woman, goes to Rome, partly to escape her attacker (who followed her to Wales), partly to research Eigon’s story. I thought I couldn’t go completely wrong with a premise like this. The premise is good, but the execution of the book falls far short of my expectations I enjoyed the historical part of the novel, but it took me a while (about 300 pages) to get in to Jess’s story in the present day. You really have to suspend your sense of disbelief at this book, peppered as it is with too many coincidences and deus ex machinas to save the day to count. It’s lazy writing, in my opinion. And although Erskine conveys Jess’s sense of panic at being stalked really well, through the first 200 pages or so, I found myself thinking, “OK, I get it now, can we move on to the more interesting ...

I picked up Belinda when I heard that it was similar to Jane Austen. While there are parallels to Austen’s work, Edgeworth differs in that she was slightly more worldly than Austen was. In Belinda , we follow the story of a young woman of uncommon good sense, who, at the behest of her aunt, goes to stay with Lady Delacour in London. While there, Belinda meets Lady Delacour’s protégé Clarence Hervey, with whom, of course, she falls in love. Mr. Hervey, however, may or may not be attached to another young lady. Lady Delacour has a secret, which she keeps from everyone except her overbearing servant Marriott and Belinda. The book touches on colonialism when Mr. Vincent, a man with a deep secret, enters the picture and threatens to steal Belinda’s heart. Along the way, Belinda learns by the example of her friends how to and how not to behave. The novel is an 18th-century “will they or won’t they?” and the plot unfolds neatly, albeit dramatically. For a novel (or, as Edgeworth would have ca...

A witty, brilliant piece of social commentary about America in the 20th century, Middlesex is the story of a Greco-American family. It is a series of vignettes about a hermaphrodite and his inbred family. Born as a girl named Callie in 1959, Cal Stephanides discusses with candor and insightfulness the story of his family. Middlesex is filled with deux ex machinae, those little twists and turns of fate which allow everything to "fall into place" as they were meant to. I have no idea why I didn't pick up this novel earlier. But now I'm glad I did. While the subject seems, at first to be exceedingly strange, there is a lot of truth to what Eugenides puts out on the table for his readers. Cal explores the history of his family, beginning with his grandparents in a small town on a small island in Greece, who immigrate to the United States in 1922. Cal follows his grandparents as they find a new home and a new life in the strange city of Detroit, home to the Ford Motorcar ...

The Painter From Shanghai is the fictional tale of a real person—the post-impressionist painter Pan Yuliang. Her life was unusual; she was sold into a brothel at age 14. Rescued by Pan Zanhua, she later became his second wife, and travelled to Paris extensively to study and work. Her work was controversial and proclaimed “depraved” (one of her nude portraits was a self-portrait), and Yuliang eventually had to move to France permanently in order to continue working. The novel takes place between 1912 and the 1950s, with the bulk of the story occurring between 1912 and the 1930s. The Painter From Shanghai , written in the present tense (which bothered me a little at first, until I became emotionally invested in the story), it is a superb, deeply-moving novel, not unlike Ellis Avery’s The Teahouse Fire or Arthur Golden’s better-known Memoirs of a Geisha . The Painter From Shanghai is an expressive novel and as beautifully written as Yuliang’s paintings are. Also reviewed at Booking Mam...

So Brave, Young, and Handsome , to be published on April 22, is about a failed writer, Monte Becket, living in Minnesota with his wife and son. One day, he meets aging outlaw Glendon Hale, and agrees to run with him. Eventually, they are joined by sixteen-year-old Hood Roberts, automobile repairman-turned-criminal. They are chased by the seasoned ex-Pinkerton Charlie Siringo (who was in fact, a real historical figure who did indeed hunt down Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, and was one of the first detectives to operate undercover). Siringo turns out to be the most intriguing character, and one gets the impression that Enger enjoyed writing fictionally about him. The other three main characters aren’t nearly so well drawn as he is. There are scenes where Siringo appears literally from nowhere, which sent chills down my spine. But all the characters were enjoyable to read about. I’m not normally a reader of Westerns or books with Western themes, but I was completely engrossed by this book. E...