The Book: The Doctor and the Diva, by Adrienne McDonnell

The Story: Sometimes I avoid certain historical fiction only because I feel like it tells the same story over and over.  This story, I have to say, was totally unique and unlike anything I had read before.

It is the early 1900’s and Erika (an opera singer looking to further her career) and her husband Peter have been trying to conceive since they got married.  A child really is all that Peter wants.  Erika is on-board, but as the story progresses, you  kind of start to see that she’d just as soon have a big opera career before she has a baby.

On a tip from Erika’s brother, they start to visit a fertility doctor, Dr. Ravell.  He’s had success helping couples get pregnant when they thought for sure that they could not.  He was practicing several cutting edge techniques, including invetro fertilization.  Who know that that that existed in the early 1900’s?  As the treatments progress,  Dr. Ravell discovers that Peter will never be able to have children but has found this out on the sly and doesn’t have the guts to tell the couple.  Here’s where he’s faced with a series of tough decisions.

All three of these characters, in fact, are faced with tough decisions.  They are these complicated people who are all just trying to do what is right, even when those things seem to counteract each other at every turn.

What I Thought: I kind of thought that this book was amazing.  I know that you guys know this about me, but nothing makes a book for me like good character development, and that was just incredible here.  Erika kind of goes from this meek, annoying starlet wanna-be to this real woman with real emotions going through a seriously tough situation.  I couldn’t help but put myself in her place.  The decision to have children and put aside all these dreams that you had for your life had to have been so hard and the author fleshes all that out perfectly.  Her struggles, her talent, her needs, they are all just laid out there and the reader is left to make the decision: is she seriously selfish or is she just doing what she thinks is right?

Same with Peter.  At first, he just seems like this controlling, obsessed husband, but as the book goes on you start to see his real heart: he is genuinely madly in love with his wife and just wants a family with her.  He makes some decisions that made me cringe, but even then, was he just doing what was right by his family?

For me, though, the most interesting character was Dr Ravell.  The author somehow takes this creeper of a doctor and turns him into a character that you just want to hug.  His skill at his job combined with his pure old loneliness made for a pretty bad combination for him as far as life decisions go.  Women were falling over themselves for him and he was lonely…. the choices he made may not have been the “right” ones, but the author made his loneliness so palpable that his sleeping with these random women seem alright and even good.  Watching him change and fight these deep battles within himself was probably my favorite part of this book.

Historical fiction is a totally tricky genre I think.  It can get so cheesy so fast.  From the author’s notes at the beginning and the end of the book, she put some serious research into these characters, even basing Erika on someone in her family tree.  As far as I can tell, this is her first novel and I have to say, I was totally impressed.  I’ll keep an eye on her and not hesitate for a minute to read her next novel.

Conclusion: I would recommend this without reservation to anyone except people that are currently struggling with infertility or have recently experienced a miscarriage.  I don’t want to spoil anything, but there are some pretty graphic scenes here and they made the pregnant lady in me cringe and cry a little bit.  Other than that, seriously good stuff.  Check it out.

The Book: A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick

The Story: It’s early-ish 1900’s and Ralph Truitt puts an ad in the paper looking for a reliable wife.  He gets a lot of answers, but one of them really strikes him.  Through letters and pictures, he and Catherine Land decide to get married.  We meet both of them while Catherine is traveling to meet Ralph for the first time.

It doesn’t take very long to realize that Catherine has something a little bit more sinister on her mind than marriage.  We also learn that she has a past that, for some reason, she is going to extreme measures to hide.

When Ralph is severely injured on their journey home, things kind of go askew.  Instead of getting to know her future husband, Catherine is put in charge of nursing him back to health.  As he recovers, they do have a chance to get to know each other and they both realize that this is not really what they were expecting.

Ralph’s first wife had died 20 years ago and around the same time, his young son ran away from home.  Before he will agree to marry Catherine, he puts her in charge of bringing his son back to him.  This starts a twisty, crazy plot that I’m not going to ruin for you!

What I Thought: I don’t really know how to rate this one.  It was alright.  I thought that the story had some real drive and from the first few pages I was intrigued.  The first few mentions of poison and murder that Catherine made got me all excited.  The copy that I got of this book didn’t have a plot outline on the back, just some blurbs.  I had no idea that this was going to be a dark book, I thought it was just going to be about these two people meeting and loving or hating each other or whatever.  Murder is much more exciting, right? Right.

But something went wrong in the execution.  I think that what killed it for me was the excessive focus on sex.  It seemed like every single character was totally obsessed.  At first, I thought it was just Ralph and that it was a serious character flaw, then I realized that it was the author.  Meh.  I don’t mind a couple steamy sex scenes, but these just got out of hand. It just ended up being totally repetitious and boring.

The same can be said for the story, I guess.  The first twist I was pretty surprised, but then the whole book started repeating itself over and over.  Eventually I was just skimming along and kinda rolling my eyes.

I think that what was missing was heart.  There were all these different relationships and back stories and issues that could get super, super emotional.  I didn’t feel an emotion after about the first 10 pages.  Nothing.  There was nothing here that was stirring and there really should have been.  The story itself had some intrigue and merit, but the lack of any connection to characters or plot or anything solid just really diminished all of the positives.

Conclusion: If you’re a screenwriter, a producer, whatever- read this book and make it into a movie.  I think that this could be one of those rare circumstances where the movie would be better than the book.  There’s a lot to work with here, but just not really done well.  I wouldn’t recommend reading this, but if the movie comes out, I’ll make plans to see it!

The Book: The Preservationist, by David Maine

The Story: You know this one, I’m sure.  Noah builds a boat.  Noah gets the animals in two-by-two.  Big flood comes and washes everything away.  Noah & his family are the only survivors. They re-populate the Earth. There ya go.

This book bounces from perspective to perspective:  Noah, his wife, his sons, and his daughters-in-law and we get to experience the flood in all these different lights.  We get to see them argue and bicker and help each other out and work their butts off.  What you get, in the end, is a more complete look at what it may have looked like to live for months in cramped quarters with thousands of animals and your family members while this giant historical event is happening right outside your window.

What I Thought: I haven’t read too many re-tellings of Biblical stories just because I generally get annoyed at the agenda that Christian Fiction tries to push.  I did read Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve and really loved it.  I loved the new, fresh perspective, the humor, and the way he relied on the Bible but also added his own bit of humanity to the story.

I can say the exact same thing for this book.  I cannot tell you how impressed I was.  David Maine didn’t take off on this “God faked us out, Noah is a crazy dude” tangent, nor did he get all pompous and preachy.  The tone that he struck was pretty much perfect for the events that were happening and it just made these characters seem very real.

This could have been written as this long, dense, heavy book but it’s really not.  It was super short- maybe 250 pages or so- and I finished it in just a few hours of reading.  It was light and easy to read.  I would almost recommend it as bedtime reading to my friends who have middle-school age kids, but there’s far too much “rutting” going on here for that.  Meh. Oh well. I’ll recommend to the parents instead.

Conclusion: Give this one a go.  It’s a quick little read that kind of fleshes out a story that everyone has heard but maybe not put a lot of thought into.  I guarantee that it will make you laugh a little and reconsider how these events actually took place.  Fun, fun.

The Book: One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, by Jim Fergus

The Story: I guess that when the government was trying to “figure it all out” with the Native Americans, they had a big get together where they were discussing what could be done to foster peace between the two groups.  One of the Cherokee Indian groups said that in their culture, whatever tribe the mother is a part of is the tribe that the children belongs to.  They suggested that, in exchange for a thousand horses, that the government get together one thousand women to be the Indians’ wives and their children would be this generation that would make peace between the groups possible.  In reality, the government was totally appalled and ended the peace talks.  Jim Fergus took this little piece of info and played a little game of “what if?”… what if the government would have rounded up one thousand women and handed them over to the Indian tribe?  That is the basis of this book.

The book centers around the life of May Dodd, a woman who was in a mental institute for “promiscuity” because she lived with and had children with a man that she was not married to.  Instead of living the rest of her life in this horrible institute, she decided to take this get-out-of-the-mental-institute-free card and become an Indian’s wife.  Eek.  This is written like her journal of that time period, also including letter that she wrote back home.

What I Thought: I’ve been noticing more and more books that don’t have a plot outline or anything on the back of them, just little blurbs.   I got two books at the used bookstore this past week and both of them just have blurbs on the back. That’s all this one has too. I probably never would have bought this book had there bee an outline on the back, so I guess that it worked out well for them this time around. I have never really been into stories about Native Americans. I have no idea why.  Even in elementary school, when we had to read books about Native Americans, I would get annoyed.  I think it’s a fascinating subject and don’t mind non-fiction about it, but for some reason fiction books about Native Americans get on my nerves.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t like this book, but I’m pretty sure that it had nothing to do with it being about Native Americans. In fact, I kind of thought that the little tidbits of fact that were offered up were interesting and that the Indian characters were the best in the book.

I just hated Mary Dodd.  She was the main character and she was totally unlikeable.  She was full of herself and unwilling to bend or change and just kind of annoying.  She lacks any kind of emotional depth.  The other American women who were with her were just straight up cliches and even the ones that I ‘liked’ kind of made me roll my eyes.

I also hated her journal.  I don’t mind this “style” of writing- in letters and journals- if it is done well.  This wasn’t done well.  The voice was absolutely nothing like you would expect from a woman in the 1870’s (while pregnant, she describes herself as ‘as big as a house’…. really?!) and it was beyond obvious that it was written by a man.  The only time this works is when it is convincing, and this was not. I do want to add that the ‘big as a house’ bit wasn’t the only anachronism, just the one that came to mind first.  This bad boy was chock full of them.  If you want to read a well done version of the historical-fiction-as-journal, check out Impatient with Desire.  That book has everything this book was missing.

I guess I’m coming down pretty hard on ol’ Jim Fergus, huh?   To his benefit, the story was fast paced and compelling.  It had an easy flow and it was broken up into ‘notebooks’ and into the individual journal entries so that really kept it moving a long.  I found myself skimming towards the middle, but at the end it really does pick up and the story starts to pack a lot of steam.  I think that had I cared what ultimately happened to May Dodd, I would have been at the edge of my seat.

Conclusion: Like I said earlier, if you want to read what this should have been, check out Impatient with Desire.  So good. This one? Meh. I feel perfectly comfortable telling you to skip it.

The Book: Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan

The Story: While he was still living and working in Oak Park, Frank Lloyd Wright was commissioned to build a house for Edwin and Mamah Cheney.  It didn’t take long at all for Frank and Mamah to realize that they had a lot in common and start to fall for each other.  It took them a little bit of time- each of them was married with kids at home- but after a couple of years, they decided to up and leave their lives so that they could be together.

To say that this caused a stir in the media is putting it mildly.  Chicago journalists were tracking them as far as Europe just to get a few words into the paper.  Meanwhile, the love that Frank and Mamah had grown was tested time and time again.  Their children, their spouses, their jobs, the media… everything seemed bound and determined to pull them apart.

What I Thought: Like I told you last week, I had a heck of a time getting into this book.  I have a warm place in my heart for Frank Lloyd Wright and I was so excited when I found this at a library book sale. I’d been wanting to read it since it came out.  The first 100 or so pages really were pretty rough on me.  It was just so long-winded.  At that point, I knew from the back of the book that Frank & Mamah fell in love and kind of tore their families apart.  Let’s just get to it already!  Those chapters leading up to that were pretty boring for me and it just seemed like they covered the same ground over and over.

Actually, I guess I found that happening several times throughout the book.  When there was a new “reveal” or a new location or something, the book would get pretty interesting for 50 pages or so, then I’d get bored again and kind of quit reading for awhile.  I just think that the author had researched everything really well and wanted to get all her info into the book somehow, because it was really well researched.  You could tell that she knew her characters, knew her settings, knew her information just to the letter.  I just think that this book could have been a little better had she had a real editing eye and taken out parts that were long -winded, even if they contained an interesting tid-bit of information.

I ended up liking this book, but I didn’t really like it easily.  It was kind of a struggle for me.  I didn’t like the Frank (thought he was a conceded bore) or Mamah (how could she leave those kids?!), so reading about them just made me mad most of the time.  In the end though I was totally compelled by the story itself and plan to read some non-fiction on the subject as soon as I make it to the library.  I did a little bit of poking around on Wikipedia when I was done and really was shocked at the amount of this story that was absolutely true.   Totally wild.

Conclusion: Kind of a mixed review, huh?  I would recommend this with caution to people who are interested in Frank Lloyd Wright, but probably not to too many others.  Just kind of a tough read, however I will keep my eyes opened for other books by Nancy Horan.  For a first novel, I think she did good work and I’d love to see what else she comes up with.

Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan

I really, really want to like this book.  I have had a thing for Frank Lloyd Wright since we studied him in a class my junior year of high school.  I only know a small amount about his personal life, so I was really intrigued by this book since it came out.

I have to say, I’m really struggling with getting through this.

I like the language and how the author writes, but I can’t sit and read for more than 10 or 15 minutes.  Maybe my mind is just other places (we are moving, getting ready to go out of town for a few days, and preparing for a baby), but this just has not grabbed my attention at all.

Has anyone else read this? What did you think? Will it grab me soon?

The Book: The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar, by Robert Alexander

The Story: This is the story of the last weeks of the Romanov family, told through the eyes of Leonka, the kitchen boy.  When they were moved to the “House of Special Purpose” during the Revolution, only 5 servants went with them and during that time, the Romanov family treated these servants as one of their own.  Because of this, Leonka had a really intimate look at what was going on in their life and how they truly were behind closed doors.

In their last week, the Tsar and Tsarista used Leonka (and some nuns) to send messages out to someone on the outside who was promising to get them out of their prison before something terrible went down.  The whole story is being written as an old man looking back on the time and from the get-go, he reveals his regrets about how he handled this situation and how he was responsible for their eventual death.

The back-and-forth of these notes and the day-to-day life of the Romanov family is the core of this book.  The author revisits over and over what genuinely good people the Tsar and his wife and children were and how their guards and eventual murders truly were the lowest of low.  The Romanov family has an incredible faith throughout the book not only in God but in their country and in the fact that they were going to get out of this.

That makes it all the harder knowing that they aren’t going to get out of it.  History tells us, as does the narrator, that they were all taken to the cellar and shot during the night then their bodies were mishandled to the point that there are still rumors that some of the children made it out alive.  This mystery is what the whole last hundred or so pages focus on.  I’m not going to tell you the ending, of course, but I am going to tell you that it’s twisty and I had to read it twice to figure out exactly what happened!

What I Thought: I’m embarrassed to say that nearly everything I knew about this time in Russia’s history came from the movie Anastasia, which I seriously love.  Shaun studied Russian and History in school so has a pretty good grasp on both things. I must have asked him three zillion questions while I was reading this book.

That being said, even if you don’t have a history buff living in your house, the author does enough in the way of historical explanation that it really isn’t easy to figure out who’s who and what’s going on, so don’t let that scare you off.  I thought that this was a super interesting time period to read about and I really can’t believe that more isn’t written about it.

I thought that this book was pretty great.  I think that it is a pretty talented author that can take such a huge, tough subject, write a fictional account from a rarely-mentioned character’s point of view, do it in just over 200 pages and still manage to pack a punch.  If there was every a book that should be described as “tight,” this is the one.  Because he fit so much into so few pages, there really aren’t excess story lines, or really even excess words.  It was put together with just the right amount of heart and suspense.

Conclusion: I’ve said this 100 times and I really do stand by it: Good historical fiction makes the reader want to know more about what really happened.  This book did this times a thousand.  My husband has a handful of books about this time period and I wouldn’t be surprised, if I were you, to see some of these creep into my reviews in the next couple of months.  This is a good, short, easy to read book that is absolutely worth your time.

The Book: The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, by Kelly O’Connor McNees

The Story: Most fans of Little Women know at least a little bit of Louisa May Alcott’s history.  Her dad was part of a pretty influential group in Concord, but seemed a little nutty about transcendentalism.  She had three sisters, who she kind of based Little Women on.  She started writing at a very young age and always made it first in her life. She never married.

That is the basic outline that this book follows.  The story takes place during the summer of 1855, when her family had moved and was living in New Hampshire.  She meets a local boy, Joseph Singer, and despite her feelings on love, ends up falling for him.  Louisa’s struggle to keep writing her first priority, take care of her family, and balance a relationship are kind of the core of the story.

The sub-plots involve putting on a play, her sister’s romance, and observations on Louisa’s parents’ marriage.  The most important thing happening in the background is kind of this cultural change.  There is a lot of thought put into slavery and politics as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau  (who were close friends of the Alcotts) and their views.  This is the summer that Whitman’s Leaves of Grass came out and that kind of had a serious effect on Louisa as well as her boy toy.

What I Thought: Like I told you guys a few weeks ago, I’m a pretty big Little Women fan.  I was so excited when I saw this on the bookshelf because I am a sucker for books about Louisa May Alcott.  Last year sometime I read The Glory Cloak , which was a totally different take on Louisa May Alcott’s life, and I throughly enjoyed it.  I’ve also read a couple of non-fiction books about her life, so I kind of knew what I was getting into.

I thought that this book was fun.  Not wonderful, not life-changing, and not even the best historical fiction I’ve read in the last few months.

I loved seeing Louisa May Alcott getting kind of dopey in love because she is generally not portrayed like that at all.  She never married and really did devote her entire life to her writing.  I like the idea that she found love at one point and was all goofy and making bad decisions and stuff.

However. Yeah, there’s a “however.” The writing was kind of cheesy and (especially for anyone with even a base knowledge of Louisa May Alcott’s life) fairly predictable.  I thought that it was researched pretty well but the town and historical period and everything just kind of seemed pretty bland, like stage settings or something- not like a place, a time that was really alive.

I did read it fairly quickly and enjoyed it for what it was: a historical fiction version of brain candy.  I didn’t have to think to read this and the story didn’t get me wrapped up.  It was one of those books that I enjoyed while I read it and didn’t give it a minute’s thought when the book wasn’t in my hand.

Conclusion: Read this by the pool or in the car or while you’re on vacation. It’s not anything life changing, but it is a good, fun read.

The Book: Impatient with Desire, by Gabrielle Burton

The Story: Like most people, I had heard of the Donnor Party.  I knew that they were in wagons on the way out west, got trapped and ended up eating each other.  That is exactly where my knowlege ended.

This book is the story of how this party of 80 people came to be and what they may have experienced.

It is written as the journal of Tamsen Donnor, the wife of George Donnor, the leader of the Donnor Party.  She was 45 when she left for the west and people told her she was too old, her kids were too young, yadda yadda, but she just wanted to better her family’s life, so they set out to do what she thought was right.  As the snow piled up and rescue was looking dim, she was the only one in her family who was strong enough to continually work and cook and cheer everyone up.  She had a couple of chances to leave, but her husband was hurt and she chose to stick with him.

Explored in this book are ideas of family, politics, love, necessity and survival.

What I Thought: I was seriously blown away by this book.  I’ve kind of been on a pioneering kick, which I know is really strange. I just can’t get enough. I also love books that are written as diaries or letters, so this book was right up my alley.

I thought that the author’s decision to make this written as a diary was a smart one.  Because we have access to her thoughts, it is so easy to put yourself it Tamsen’s shoes.  She was this powerful, independent woman and her love for her family in this book was almost tangible.  The progression from feeling optimistic to the decision to eat the family dog to deciding to send her girls with the rescue party while she stayed was a natural progression because we were able to see exactly where Tamsen was coming from.

I have said on my blog probably 100 times that I think that the hallmark of really good historical fiction is that it makes you want to find out what really happened, to dig deeper into the story.  As soon as I was done with this book, I went to the library’s website and requested a couple of non-fiction books about the Donnor party.  I’ll let you know what I think.

Conclusion: I would recommend to just about anyone.  It is short and easy to read.  It explores a time period that isn’t given a ton of attention, but is totally fascinating.  Good stuff.

The Book: Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky

The Story: This is the first two parts of a planned 5 part novel.  Before she could finish her work, Irene Nemirovsky was taken to a concentration camp where she was killed.  She was writing a novel about WWII while it was happening, making this one of  (if not the very) the earliest WWII novels.

Because this is an incomplete work, it’s hard to describe a “story” here.

In the first part, we are introduced to several stories, several sets of characters.  Everyone is moving around France, trying to steer clear of the Nazi’s.  They very from young to old, from rich to not-as-rich.  She kind of spread herself out across the country and just really showed what the onset of the war looked like to all these different people.

The second part focused more intently on a small village that has recently become occupied by the Germans.  The people in the town are trying to maintain these very normal lifestyles while the world is kind of exploding around them.

In the notes and the appendix, Irene’s notes for the last 3 parts are shown as well as a series of her correspondence.  After she was captured, there is a series of correspondence with her husband and others trying to find her and get her out.  The end result was his death as well.

What I Thought: This was certainly not a cheery, happy book. Goodness sakes.  It was sad from cover to cover.

I went into this kind of reluctantly although I had heard great reviews.  I guess just knowing that the story itself wasn’t going to end in a tied-up way and that I was only getting 2/5ths of what the author intended made me feel like the rest was going to be an inferior product.  Not true.

I was impressed with how (after I got them straight in my head) the characters really jumped off of the page.  Maybe it was because she was writing this at the time everything was happening and these people were likely right in front of her, but she just captured a part of WWII that I had never been exposed to before.

I know that Irene Nemirovsky was a famous author in France at the time of the war, but before this book I had never heard of her.  Turns out her writing has true literary merit.  The two parts that she completed are simply beautiful.  Here is a passage that I dog-eared in my copy because I thought it was pretty close to perfect:

“Important events- whether serious, happy or unfortunate- do not change a man’s soul, they  merely bring it into relief, just as a strong gust of wind reveals the true shape of a tree when it blows off all its leaves.  Such events highlight what is hidden in the shadows; they nudge the spirit towards a place where it can flourish.”

Yum, right? I love that.

I would love to read a non-fiction book about the life of this author because the forward and the appendix really interested me just as much as the novel.  I am not sure if this exists but I would love to check it out if it does.

Conclusion: A beautifully written, but incomplete picture of life in France during WWII.  Don’t read this if you want a full, complete story.  That’s not happening here.  What is happening is something worth checking out though and I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in that time period.