Victorian Murderesses, by Mary S. Hartman ****

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victorianmurderessesIt took me awhile to decide to include this title on my blog. The problem as I saw it was that it was marketed in October as a fun-but-naughty romp through history. The reality is less interesting, and to my eye, unbelievably dry. My daughter, a high school student, saw it differently. The four stars are our compromise between my three stars and her five.

“True crime” is a big house with a whole lot of rooms. Some true crime books are deliciously prurient; others are as dusty as the top of a ten foot tall bookcase. In this case, the title (“unspeakable”) and the jacket artist lead the reader to believe we are really going to get down and dish the dirt, and what is more…it’s all true!

Instead, what we have here is a very well-written, well-documented, extremely scholarly if surprisingly dull bit of research, maybe the author’s advanced degree work. The collision between the teaser and the product are somewhat jarring. This was a First Read sent me free through the Goodreads program and the publisher. I would have abandoned it more readily had I not felt a duty to get through it.

What would have fit the bill without ruining the author’s hard work is a good piece of juicy narrative nonfiction. Put in the documentation, but pick up the pace! As is, the book is sometimes a feminist treatise that all but blames Victorian society’s social contract for slut-shaming as an understandable excuse for murder in the case of unsuitable, unmarriageable mates of the lower classes (sorry, no sympathy here), or a self-defensive maneuver against constant verbal abuse, without the loss of a high standard of living that came with the ornery groom. A baby born out of wedlock gets snuffed when an abortion can’t be obtained. The author is inexplicably sympathetic to the not-for-long-I’m-not young mother. Don’t get me wrong; I am pro-choice and an ardent feminist, which you already know if you’ve been reading my blog long. But we’re talking about an infant carried to term, birthed, then suffocated. It turns my stomach to think of it.

At other times, the pace quickens a bit, as if the author is about to get excited and take us along with her, but then her dispassionate researcher’s mind grabs hold of her–stop it right now, you’re getting worked up!–and we go back to the librarian’s hushed monotone.

The font, while suitably Victorian, is really tiny and hard on the eyes.

It may be that I am being unfair to Hartman; she has done a good deal of work here, and the fault may lie with Dover or whoever is publishing and promoting her work. All I know is that I expected this to be a fun read, and it wasn’t. I kept pushing it away in favor of other reading, as if postponing the book might make me like it better once I returned to it.

My daughter, on the other hand, took it to a corner and became disconcertingly fascinated by it, not unlike a cat who’s just found an aquarium full of fish. Hmmm! Her explanation: “It’s even better than I expected!” Well…okay. And now, it’s HER galley.

A strong, scholarly effort that should have been marketed as such. Not a Halloween read.

History of the Battle of Gettysburg, by Craig Symonds *****

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historyofbattleofgettysburg Ordinarily I have little patience for anyone who picks up a book on US military history and just wants to look at the pictures.

But I read the text. In most places it’s fine, but once you start reading McPherson and Sears on Gettysburg, there isn’t much that Symond’s text will tell you that’s new. Symonds sticks to the basics, and he gives you the brass tacks, if you want to cut to the chase. He is the retired chair of the US Naval Academy. His background speaks for itself, and he is highly lauded as a Civil War scholar.

And look at the pictures!

The American Civil War was the first US war that had photography available. No, they couldn’t take action shots yet; the subject had to remain stationary for too long at a time for that to work. But there are a lot of primary documents here, photographs of leaders, of letters and memos as they were originally written (with the text beneath them if illegible; spelling was pretty much a discretionary practice back then). There are photos of battlefields with men still lying on them. (It is now considered a breach of national security for the press to go to Afghanistan and shoot photographs of US troops, whether in action or in closed coffins, for the American public to see.) There are photographs of the weapons available at the time, and of landscapes you can visit today that look nothing like they did then.

Look at the pictures!

My favorite is a full page photograph of Lincoln. His bow tie is dusty, faded, and crooked. His hair cut is terrible. His face is creased, and it bears the hardship of many sleepless nights, and perhaps also of the death of his son and the illness of his wife. It is a picture of a real person, long before the era when presidents became packaged goods to be marketed to the American public.

I have sometimes felt bad about the fact that I will likely never visit the Smithsonian. It is the dream of all serious students of American history. But my legs won’t let me get far now, and an airport is accessible only if I use the wheelchair service, which makes me feel quite conspicuous. It’s far easier to stay home and read.

This book, which I purchased some time ago in hard cover, will hold a place of pride on my bookshelves for many years to come. Primary sources aren’t that easily come by. Along with Sherman’s and Grant’s memoirs, this is an important addition to my Civil War library.

Betrayal of Trust, by J.A. Jance *****

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betrayaloftrust Jance’s JP Beaumont detective series is one of my all-time favorites. Set (usually) in my own home town, it carries a gritty yet human, thoroughly believable flavor that I just can’t find anywhere else.

In this case, Beaumont is roped into a scandal unfolding at the governor’s mansion; it turns out he knows the governor. She was the girl who was too important to talk to him in high school, but now she wants his skill in discreetly looking into some things she’d rather not see on the front page.

It doesn’t work out that way.

This title has been re-released, and so I accidentally read this twice, but even once I had realized my error, I decided to plow through and finish it a second time. It wasn’t that I had no other books; but this series is on my very short list of things I don’t mind seeing a second time around.

Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys good detective fiction.

Escape the Night, by Richard Patterson ****

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EscapethenightEscape the night? Envision being trapped in a tunnel, inside of a tunnel, inside of a tunnel. Some are metaphoric or symbolic, but there’s a whole lot of darkness in this espionage thriller, a suspenseful tale that will play with your head more than once before the author is done. Thank you to Net Galley and Open Road Media for the ARC.

The setting at the outset is New York City during the McCarthy era. Black Jack Carey owns a publishing house that carries work by a left-leaning writer that is being watched by the CIA. Pressure from HUAC comes to scrap the writer’s work. Son Charles, eldest and best-loved son of Black Jack, refuses to yield to the pressure. Resentful younger son Philip, weaker in character and more easily swayed, takes the side of the government. He hopes his sensible nature will cause his father to will Van Dreelen and Carey to him rather than Charles.

At multiple places within this white-knuckle thriller, I had to put the book away because even with the assistance of sleeping pills, I knew I could not fall asleep if this story was in my hands. Were it not for that, I surely would have finished it sooner. This title along with a nonfiction galley have occupied my interest and attention far more than any of the other four books I’ve been reading.

Our villain, a well-drawn government spook named John Joseph Englehardt, becomes obsessed with the Carey family:

“Englehardt had learned that men who spied on other men, out of the loneliness of such a job, came to like or dislike their chosen quarry. But in his soul, he knew that the secret passion for the Careys grew from something stronger.

“The brothers’ rivalry was also his.”

Eventually Englehardt is officially ordered to abandon the Careys, but his psychosis is too thoroughly developed to let go. He turns to the CIA and is able to extend his surveillance. Phillip Carey’s cause has become his own. He despises Charles and is determined to do whatever dark thing is necessary for Phillip to inherit everything.

Generally speaking, I don’t read books about wealthy folk, and this is for a variety of reasons I won’t go into here. But the characters of John, Phillip, Englehardt, and later, Peter Carey, are so intimately sculpted that I had to buy the author’s premise. Once I did so, the pace picked up and the story was unstoppable.

The ending came with hairpin turns and swift kicks to the reader’s solar plexus, but everything that occurred seemed eminently believable, because the main characters and setting were so palpable.

My one small quibble with the writer–and it’s a common problem in literature not specifically geared toward women, but someone has to talk about it–is that the people who were well developed and occupied center stage were all men. Women existed here only as a foil for what was going to happen to someone else. For the novel to go beyond “really good” to “outstanding”, a novelist needs to be able to develop characters of both genders.

That shouldn’t keep you from buying this title, though. It’s one helluva ride. But don’t think you’re going to read it in small easy pieces. Once you pass a certain point, you have to keep going, and you may see the new day dawning and wonder where the night went.

Also, you’ll want to avoid tunnels for awhile.

The Hurried Child, by Dr. David Elkind ****

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thehurriedchildI’m using today’s book review to revisit a previously published book. I think it’s valuable to both parents and educators. Recently I’ve seen some reality TV competitions in which girls in their middle teens were dressed up to look like they were twenty-five. Sometimes that’s a judgment call, I guess, but this brief but authoritative book reminds us that it’s important to let kids be kids, and that when our girls feel rushed to become women, they may later thank us if we remind them to slow it down a bit.

To put it another way folks, don’t put mascara on your twelve-year-old, and don’t buy it for her, either.

Elkind makes a lot of really strong points here. This book is more geared toward those who are raising children (parent/guardians…so many, many grandparents raising kids these days!) than toward educators, who follow the school or district’s policies regardless, but since teachers often influence the choices made by the children they teach, it’s worth reading whether you have children in your home, your classroom, or both.

The last chapter draws a lot of extremely conservative conclusions with which I would not care to be associated, and this is why the final star is denied. However, in this day and age in which kids in fifth grade come home and announce they have a boyfriend, in which teensy children are packed off to beauty contests carefully coiffed, manicured, and covered in cosmetics, this is a breath of healthy, let’s-get-real common sense.

If you are a parent who is not sure what children should do as they move past early childhood, or if you have questions about adolescents, this is a good read. Sadly, the people who should most read this book probably won’t, and those who are already doing a pretty decent job probably will.

Still, highly recommended.

A Note Between Reviews

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I am stepping outside my usual format for a day to let you know of a wonderful opportunity, if you haven’t caught wind of it elsewhere. (I can’t review a book today anyway, since I am still marching through Napoleon and halfway through a few novels.) But here it is:

Author Sara Paretsky, one of my all time favorite writers, posted on social media that if you tweet or Facebook post a book you are giving this holiday season along with the hashtag # GiveaBook, Random House Penguin will donate to Save the Children.

For me, this is a no-brainer. My whole family knows that unless they are that rare bird, the non-reader, they will be getting a book from me this year. I posted some I am giving and a couple more I wish I could give, if only I could match the brilliant book with the right recipient. You can do this as many times as your heart allows.

So if you wish you could give liberally to a good cause but are constricted by your bank balance, here’s one painless, actually kind of fun way to contribute to the greater good. Your title does not have to be a Random House title; it can be any book at all.

Why not? And if you’d like, just for giggles, feel free to post your titles in the comment section of this blog, too! I’d love to see what titles others are giving.

Ring in the Dead, by JA Jance ****

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ringinthedeadJance is a matriarch in the world of detective novels, or in this case, the novella. She has four different series that she prodigiously juggles and maintains. The others take place in Arizona and don’t interest me as much as this series, her first, whose protagonist is a Seattle cop named JP Beaumont.

It takes a good writer to make me buy the premise here, namely that the SPD are mostly hard-working, good-hearted citizens who joined the police department out of a sense of civic duty. The reality is very different; Seattle’s cop force was recently named the most violent in the entire USA. Cops here are legendary for their gratuitous use of brute force. They develop vendettas against individual citizens. My own middle-class neighborhood recently met with the chief of police to let him know that we are comfortable policing ourselves, and he can take those cops he says are too few to do the job, and assign them somewhere else. Anywhere else. Please. Just get them out of here!

So while the FBI knocks its collective head against the brick wall of SPD intransigence, trying to find some way to rein in these mad dogs before the city goes completely nuts and becomes another Ferguson, I read this engaging little novella, and for the brief time it lasted—a single evening—I could forget reality and buy Jance’s premise of brother officers doing good things. That isn’t easy to do.

The fifth star is denied simply because of the brevity of the work. There must surely be a definition that separates the short story from the novella, but I am darned if I know what it is. When reading a digital work it’s not a bad idea to skip to the ending first, so you’ll know when it’s coming. I was glad I did that, because this one ended 67% of the way through its brief length. A full third of its space was devoted to plugging another novel. (I was too annoyed by this to remember the title of the work-to-come, so I guess the teaser didn’t work for me.)

The novella focuses on a long-ago case when Beau was a newly-promoted detective. His partner, known as Pickles, died of a heart attack, and his daughter found some papers when she was cleaning out the family home. She comes to talk to Beau and to give him the papers, which relate to a case he had worked. In a nut shell, the story reminds us that time is short, and that we should spend ours on things that count.

I look forward to Jance’s next Beaumont novel. I just hope it’s full length. I obtained this novella from our public library, but if I had paid for it, I would have felt robbed. Get it free or cheap, or keep your plastic put away.

The Trouble with the Truth, by Edna Robinson ****

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thetroublewiththetruthThree and a half stars, rounded up. My thanks go to Betsy Robinson, the late author’s daughter, who invited me to preview an ARC and review it. It’s been a fun read.

Lucresse and her brother Ben have an unusual life. On the one hand, they aren’t starving, as many people around the world were during the Great Depression. But on the other hand, their circumstances require a constantly changing back-story in order for them to be accepted by polite society, which was much harsher and more judgmental than it is today.

For one thing, their mother is dead, and their father, a much older man than their classmates’ fathers, has not remarried. Not unless you count Fred, their chauffeur, butler, and otherwise highly respectable servant whose devotion to their family is not fully understood until a crisis strikes. Fred does not sleep with Father, of course. He has separate quarters, but no separate life. They’re pretty much his whole story.

Lucresse has the trouble with the truth that gives our novel its title. Her whole life is predicated upon a series of courteous lies; every time they pack everything and move to a new town, which occurs as often as four times annually, she and Ben are thrown birthday parties. There’s a good reason to do that, but it’s not true that it’s their birthday, and they both know it. And when Father cultivates the acquaintance of a well-known actress and she moves into their guest room, a visiting aunt is told she is the book keeper. It’s another lie, for the sake of appearances.

This highly accessible, charming novel is set out in brief chapters, and in most cases the chapter represents a new story within the overall story, so it is almost like reading a series of consecutive short stories featuring the same characters. With quirky good humor and also a certain amount of ambiguity regarding our head of household, I found myself smiling and nodding at the fib-to-cover-another-fib.

Though the family’s life is bizarre, the children are loved and well cared for; this is no Glass Castle. Rather, it is a portrait of a fictional family that never quite meets the conventional standard society seems to expect.

Recommended for those who like a little whimsy now and then.

The Smoke at Dawn, by Jeff Shaara *****

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thesmokeatdawnI hungered for this book! I am a great fan of Shaara’s work. I didn’t get the ARC, but Seattle Public Library came through. Had it not done so, this is one of the very few books for which I would have paid full jacket price.

Shaara writes historical fiction about American wars, sometimes in the form of trilogies, and here he wraps up a trilogy on the Western campaign of the American Civil War. The scenario: Rosecrans, the Union officer who heads the Army of the Cumberland, has had a strong victory followed by a stunning defeat. First he used brilliant gamesmanship and planning to attack and take Chattanooga; this went largely unnoticed by the press, which was beside itself, understandably, over the twin victories of Vicksburg and Gettsburg. But then, unfortunately, Rosecrans pushed his luck too far, getting his ass kicked and a lot of good men dead at Chickamauga. The result was that he ran like hell, dug himself in, and refused to go forth again. Unfortunately, the Confederate troops led by Braxton Bragg cornered him and he was besieged. When Grant was given overall command of armies in the west, he was asked to choose whether to keep Rosecrans in place, or send him packing and promote George Thomas. He chose the latter.

Shaara is generally brilliant at crafting character based upon the historical record. I found Bragg to be almost a caricature—and hell, for all I know, maybe he didn’t have many good characteristics from which to draw; I haven’t studied him much. Grant is portrayed with warmth in a way that sits right with me; the same holds true for Sherman. Thomas has always been something of an enigma, and he clearly is for Shaara also. Sherman and Grant both said in their memoirs that he was slow. (My own memory of Sherman’s is a letter to Grant in which he says, “We both know Thomas is a little slow,” and I sensed irony and understatement in his tone). Yet other historians swear that he was in fact misunderstood. Shaara gives him the benefit of the doubt while allowing for some ambiguity.

I read my copy digitally, and I was pleased at the way I was able to zoom important maps that made it much more possible to see what troops were moving where.

The most controversial aspect, judging from what other reviewers have said about this trilogy, is the creation of Bauer. When I have wanted to confer 4.5 stars on one of his novels in this series, I round up, and it is for Bauer that I do so. Bauer is the only character that is entirely fictional, but Shaara chose to create him to represent that nameless, faceless soldier who represented the vast number of those who bore the greatest burden. They didn’t become famous or have their belongings shown in museums. It’s rare to find a foot soldier’s whole story. Some kept journals, but these were often lost during a battle, scuttled during a hard march when everything non-essential got tossed on the road, or drenched in rain or during a river crossing. No journalist ever followed a humble private around to record his experiences and opinions. For his effort to include the every-man in spite of the flack he would endure from the purists among his readership, I give Shaara high marks.

Next up: Shaara will tackle Sherman’s march through Georgia, through the flames of Atlanta, to the sea. This is my favorite part of the whole thing, and I am excited as I look forward to reading it.

If you enjoy historical fiction based on the American Civil War, and especially if you do not harbor any cherished sentiments toward the dead lost “Cause”, you can’t go wrong with this one. Historical fiction at its best, from a master of the genre.

Where the Heart Is, by Billie Lett ****

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wheretheheartis  I recently read and enjoyed another title by this author. A quick internet search brought me to this title, which the same search told me had made Oprah’s book club. I rarely watch daytime television and have never seen that show, but I know that books she recommends are often titles I like as well. Such was the case here.

Just imagine it: seventeen years old, basketball-belly pregnant, and riding in a car so beat-up that when you nod off, your shoes fall off your feet and through the rusted-out spot in the floor of the car. There they go! And what could be worse than that?

Then the man of your dreams, who to be fair doesn’t seem all that engaged in your relationship, drops you off at Walmart to get some house shoes, and floors it as soon as you enter the store. There he goes, too.

This story is fascinating because it forces us to examine the difference between innocence and ignorance, between the trusting nature that being a trustworthy person sometimes engenders, versus straight-up stupidity.

Novalee Nation is innocent and maybe a little bit ignorant, but when given the chance to improve her own knowledge base, she does it with enthusiasm. She isn’t stupid; she suddenly realizes, as she enters the Walmart, that Roger would not have given her a ten dollar bill when she only asked for five, if he hadn’t planned to dump her there. She runs back out to the parking lot, but she’s too late. All she has now is Walmart.

Once in awhile the fringe characters in this affable tale are a tad overdrawn (all those bandaids; really?), but most of them–Sister Husband, Forney, Moses Whitecotton, and others, not to mention our protagonist– are so palpable that I found myself inventing other scenarios for them as if they were actual people. That’s always a good sign.

So get your copy–I got mine at the Seattle Public Library–and hunker down in your favorite reading spot. This is engaging fiction from a writer I’ll be following in years to come.