“Dear parents,

Last night I visited a club in Montparnasse where the men dress as women and the women as men. Papa would have loved it. And Mama’s face would have crinkled in that special smile she has for Papa’s passion for everything French.

The place is called the Chameleon Club. It’s a few steps down from the street. You need a password to get in. The password is: Police! Open up! The customers find it amusing.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (APR 22, 2014)

Early on in Francine Prose’s richly imagined and intricately constructed tour de force, Yvonne – the proprietress of the Parisian Chameleon Club –tells a story about her pet lizard, Darius. “One night I was working out front. My friend, a German admiral whose name you would know, let himself into my office and put my darling Darius on my paisley shawl. He died, exhausted by the strain of turning all those colors.”

History – and the people who compose it – is itself a chameleon, subject to multiple interpretations. Ms. Prose seems less interested in exploring “what is the truth” and more intrigued with the question, “Is there truth?”

The title derives from a photograph that defined the career of the fictional photographer, Gabor Tsenyl: two female lovers lean towards each other at the Chameleon Club table. His is one of five narratives that punctuate the novel. The showcase narrative – written as a biography by the grand-niece of one of the participants – focuses on Lou Villars, a one-time Olympic hopeful and scandalous cross-dresser who crosses over to the dark side and becomes a Nazi collaborator. The other four narratives are composed of devoted letters from Gabor to his parents; the unpublished memoirs of Suzanne, his wife; excerpts from a book by the libertine expatriate writer Lionel Maine; and finally, the memoirs of a benefactor of the arts, Baroness Lily de Rossignol. Each narrative plays off the others and provides subtle suggestions that the other narratives may not be entirely accurate.

What is the truth of this intoxicating time, when artists of all kinds gravitated to the Paris scene and when war with Germany was an increasingly sober possibility? Francine Prose suggests that the truth is fluid. Reportedly, Lou Villars was inspired by a real person named Violette Morris. There are more than a few hints of Peggy Guggenheim in Lily de Rossignol and Lionel Maine bears a resemblance to Henry Miller. How much is fact and how much is fiction?

And once the reader gets over that hurdle, how much of what is revealed by the fictional characters is distorted through their own lens? How much of that is truth and how much is perception? Can we ever know the real person who lurks behind the mask? As Francine Prose writes, “The self who touches and is touched in the dark ,between the sheets, is not the same self who gets up in the morning and goes out to buy coffee and croissants.

I’ve said little about plot and that’s deliberate: the unfolding of the plot is for each reader to discover himself or herself. I will say this: the writing is exquisite and in my opinion, elevates an already talented contemporary writer to entirely new levels. The ending is breathtaking in its audacity. The setting – Paris in the late 1920s – is mesmerizing. The themes touch on universal matters: getting in touch with our authentic selves, crossing society-imposed gender barriers, understanding the fluidness of morality, searching for love and approval in dangerous places, making sacrifices for art, and discovering that history is not immutable, but changes depending on who tells it.

I read Lovers at the Chameleon Club directly after another very disparate book: Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird. Interestingly, both tackle the meaning of truth from very different yet unique angles. This is a stunning book and I enthusiastically recommend it.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper (April 22, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Francine Prose
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife More 1920s Paris: The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

Bibliography:

Fiction:

• Judah the Pious Atheneum (1973)
• The Glorious Ones (1974)
• Marie Laveau (1977)
• Household Saints (1981)
• Hungry Hearts (1983)
• Bigfoot Dreams (1986)
• Women and Children First : Stories (1988)
• Primitive People (1992)
• Hunters and Gatherers (1995)
• Guided Tours of Hell: Novellas (1996)
• The Peaceable Kingdom: Stories (1998)
• Blue Angel 2001)
• A Changed Man (2005)
• Goldengrove (2008)
• Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (April 2014)

Teen:

• After (2003)
• Bullyville (2007)
• Touch (2009)

Nonfiction:

• The Lives of the Muses : Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired (2002)
• Gluttony: The Seven Deadly Sins (2003)
• Sicilian Odyssey (2003)
• Caravaggio : Painter of Miracles (2005)
• Reading Like a Writer (2006)
• Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife (2009)

“The children are frozen, too frightened to move closer to one of the women. The sound they heard while still in the house has advanced, roaring its way above them. There is a crash against the storm door, and they all scream, ducking with their arms held over their heads. Ellis drops his candle and, in the weak light left from the candle Mae is still holding, she sees his terrified face. Ruby is crying. Lavinia has Little Homer’s face pressed into the front of her dress as if she can shield him by blocking his sight. Mae reaches out her arms and Ruby and Ellis come to her immediately. She blows out her candle and drops it so she can hold both children tight against her. In the darkness, Lavinia cries, “Dear Lord! Oh, dear Lord!” Then the roaring moves on, like a train careering over their heads. The sound recedes and, eventually, even the wind seems to subside. When there is no longer any sound except rain on the cellar doors, the children hold utterly still, waiting to see what will come next.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 5, 2014)

Falling to Earth is the kind of novel that makes me want to grab the very next person I see and urgently say, ”You MUST read this.” I read this rabidly with increasing awe and respect that Kate Southwood had the chops to create a debut novel with this degree of psychological insight, restrained power, and heartbreaking beauty.

The story centers on a tragedy of unimaginable proportions – a tornado hits the small Illinois town of March in 1925, causing devastation and grievous loss in the homes of every single resident of the town.

Except one.

That one is Paul Graves, a man of dignity and integrity, who lives with his wife Mae, his three young children and his mother, Lavinia. Incredibly, nothing in Paul’s life is touched – not his family, not his home, and not his thriving lumber business…which, in fact, is even more in demand as townsfolk order coffins for the burials of their loved ones.

As the townspeople are forced to bear up under nearly unbearable grief, their envy of Paul’s “unfair” providence reaches a fever pitch and they begin to turn on him – and against him – in droves. Paul, meanwhile, labors under extreme survivor’s guilt as Mae increasingly falls into a dark depression.

Kate Southwood writes,

“A tornado is a ravenous thing, untroubled by the distinction in tearing one man apart and gently setting another down a little distance away. It is resolute and makes its unheeding progress until, bloated and replete, it dissipates. A tornado is a dead thing and cannot acknowledge blame.. If a tornado smashes your house or takes your child, it does no good to blame it…Even after you’ve yanked up another house in the place the old one stood and planted flowers in the dirt where you laid your child, your fury remains as well your desire to lay blame.”

A parable of sorts, this magnificent novel strives to answer questions that have haunted humankind since early times: how do we comprehend the forces of nature and our own fates? How do we manage the extreme hostility and envy that result from nature’s unfairness? How do we break the cycles of revenge, vengeance, retribution and reprisal? These questions transcend this book and can easily be asked of modern tragedies – Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy, for example.

The themes are universal: love and loss, family, jealousy and suspicion, guilt and survival. I will not spoil the ending but I will say this – it is masterly and seamlessly brought together all the themes of the book and literally let me gasping.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 44 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (March 5, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Southwood
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another tornado-based story: Sing Them Home By Stephanie Kallos

Bibliography:

• Falling to Earth (March 2013)

“The men crouch low, and with their gloved hands, as best they can, they clear the mud from the body.  But it is not a body, not really; it is only a heap of bones inside the remains of a uniform.  Nothing is left of the flesh, only a few black-brown remnants clinging to the side of the skull.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (FEB 2, 2014)

One of the aspects of this impressive debut by Anna Hope that makes me raise my hat is the effectiveness with which she handles its secondary thread. In italics interspersing the main story a page or two at a time, are little vignettes as British officials exhume the body of an unidentified soldier from the battlefields of Northern France, prepare it for a new coffin, and take it with due solemnity to its final resting place in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey. The vignettes, and the story that they enfold, span a five-day period leading up to November 11, 1920, the second anniversary of the Armistice. The First World War is over, but what has become of the survivors?

Each of the vignettes contains an anonymous figure — from a soldier assisting with the disinterment to a war widow bringing her child to watch the procession — real and dimensioned enough for the reader to feel for them, even as the camera moves on. They are emblems of countless stories that might be developed in their millions all over the country, although Hope has chosen to focus on only three. Three women, all coping with loss, all seeking a way to move forward. There is Hettie, a dance hostess at the Hammersmith Palais, whose brother has returned sound in body but damaged in his mind; she is looking for her life to begin, but the normal patterns have all been disrupted. There is Ada, a mother in her forties, the loss of whose son Michael has caused an estrangement between her and her husband. Unlike other parents, they have no information about their son’s resting place; is it possible the Unknown Soldier might be Michael himself? And there is Evelyn, an upper-class girl who has tried to bury herself in a munitions factory and then in a government office after the death of her boyfriend; for five years now, she has not permitted herself to love, and hardly even to live.

Hope juggles the three stories freely in short episodes spread over the five days. She also sketches some connections between them. Evelyn’s brother, for instance, a captain in the army who has come back with his own problems, turns out to have connections with both Hettie and Ada’s son Michael. There were times, I admit, when I was conscious of almost a romance-novel artifice in the writing. But no sooner would I register this than something would come along that was truly fine. To give but one example, there is a scene when Ada goes to consult a medium to find out about Michael. Historically, it is apt; the First World War brought a huge revival of interest in spiritualism. But Ada’s meeting with the medium turns out to be something else entirely, totally human and deeply moving.

This is a novel that is perfectly titled. Wake, as in the wake of a ship, or turbulent aftermath of some great passing. Wake, as in the ritual for the dead. And Wake, as in to awaken from sleep and dreams. All perfectly realized in this deceptively unpretentious novel. As always, I thought of a number of other books while I was reading. I almost immediately put aside the obvious comparison to Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series; Anna Hope has more penetrating ambitions. I certainly thought a lot about Sarah Waters’  The Night Watch, another rich exploration of the lives of women, this time in the shadow of the Second World War. But the comparison that increasingly stuck with me was of a different order entirely: to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. And that is a high compliment.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (February 11, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Anna Hope
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Soldier’s Wife by Margaret Leroy

Bibliography:

• Wake (February 2013)

“Tell me the story of Everest,” she said, a fervent smile sweeping across her face, creasing the corners of her eyes. “Tell me about this mountain that’s stealing you away from me.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (JAN 6, 2014)

Above All Things is the fictional story of George Mallory’s third and final attempt to conquer Mount Everest. I am no mountain climber but those who climb and “conquer” mountains have always fascinated me as does the process these mountaineers undergo to make a successful climb. Years ago I read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, and then Simon Mawer’s The Fall and I was hooked. To me, Everest has always been the “Big One.” Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world, its peak rising more than 29,000 feet. Back in the early 20th century it was a mountain that had defeated and/or killed all who attempted to scale her. Mallory and his team had made two attempts and failed. Unfortunately, today more than 3,500 people have successfully climbed the 29,029 ft. mountain and more than a tenth of that number scaled the peak just over the past year. On one day alone in 2012, 234 climbers reached the peak, (a bit crowded)….leaving their “junk” all over the mountain. As more and more people try to test themselves against Everest, often paying over $100,000 for a “guided climb,” most of the people with ambition to scale the mountain, and the money to pay, can reach the summit. Of course modern climbing gear technology and very experienced Sherpas make the difference.

But back in 1924 things were quite different. Many faced the mountain with determination and died making the climb without oxygen and battling the ferocious elements. Mallory joined the 1924 Everest expedition, led, as in 1922, by General Bruce. Mallory believed that, due to his age (he was 37 years old at the time of the ascent), it would be his last opportunity to climb the mountain and, when touring the US, proclaimed that that expedition would successfully reach the summit. The question is whether George really did reach the summit…or not. Historians will probably never know the real story. Mallory died on the mountain. But did he die returning from the summit or on his way to the top? This is a question that has plagued many people for years.

Howard Somervell, a close friend of George Mallory’s and fellow mountaineer who once attempted Everest, watched Mallory leave on his last attempt to climb the mountain in June 1924. Somervell said, “after the final attempt, Mallory had forgotten his camera. Somervell lent his friend his own camera. “So if my camera was ever found,” he said, “you could prove that Mallory got to the top.'”

In 1999,an expedition was organized, funded by the BBC. The purpose was to find Somervell’s camera. Instead the searchers found Mallory’s body. There was no camera, though, and still no answer to the biggest mystery in mountaineering: who climbed Mount Everest first? Opinion remains divided and the discovery of Mallory’s frozen corpse in 1999 failed to yield definitive evidence either way. You will have to read this historical novel to decide for yourself whether he made the peak and was the first man to stand on that extraordinary and virginal spot.

Above All Things is also a love story – actually a love triangle. Mallory and his wife, Ruth, loved each other deeply. She supported him, outwardly, in his endeavors. They had 3 children together. However, her husband was fatally obsessed with his love for a mountain – Ruth’s incomparable rival. The narrative alternates between Ruth, doing the housework and taking care of the children at home in Cambridge, and Mallory climbing and struggling on the slopes. She does want him to succeed but she is afraid, as anyone would be. She wants to live a “normal life” with a full time husband. The couple wrote constantly but as Mallory and his team moved further and further away from civilization, it became more and more difficult to send and receive mail.

The tension really increases when Mallory makes the final ascent with 21-year-old teammate Sandy Irvin.

Above All Things is a gripping, suspenseful and beautifully written novel….poetic at times. There are no spoilers in this review as the finale is history. Ruth’s narrative is at times heartbreaking as she waits daily for word from George. George, meanwhile comes closer to death with every page. Avalanches and falling ice, hypothermia, the extremely high-altitude, pulmonary edema, excessive fatigue, confusion, etc., were and are major causes of death when scaling mountains such as Everest. Many of Mallory’s team, who lived to tell the tale, recounted these hardships.

Tanis Rideout’s characters are quite complex. The extensive research undertaken in order to write Above All Things is obvious, and the real letters, salvaged, between Ruth and Mallory truly give insight into their relationship and characters.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 71 readers
PUBLISHER:	Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (February 12, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Tanis Rideout
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Essay
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer The Fall by Simon Mawer The Ice Soldier by Paul Watkins

Bibliography:

• Above All Things (2012; 2013 in US)

“She frightened me at every dawn the summer I stayed with her. She’d sit on the edge of her bed, long hair down, down to the floor and shaking as she brushed and brushed, shadows ebbing from the room and early light flowing in through both windows. Her hair was as long as her story and she couldn’t walk when her hair was not woven into dense braids and pinned around and atop her head. Otherwise her hair dragged the floor like the train of a medieval gown and she had to gather it into a sheaf and coil it about her forearm several times to walk the floor without stepping on herself. She’d been born a farm girl, then served as a maid for half a century, so she couldn’t sleep past dawn to win a bet…”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (DEC 21, 2013)

The Maid’s Version by Daniel Woodrell is a small book but reads like a tome, with such literate and beautiful imagery that I was enthralled. The book centers around the mystery of the explosion at Arbor Dance Hall in 1929. The explosion killed 42 people, many unrecognizable in death with their bodies broken up or burned beyond recognition. Alma Dunahew lost her sister Ruby in the explosion and for years has been trying to discover the answer to what happened. Those years have been hard on her with several of them spent at the Work Farm in West Table, Missouri, due to her psychic breakdown caused by rage and grief. Many of the town’s most wealthy citizens want to put the truth of the explosion to the side and no one has ever been apprehended for the crime. They look at Alma’s ramblings about the explosion as words from a crazy person. The magnitude of the explosion was enormous.

“Just as full darkness fell those happy sounds heard in the surviving house suddenly became a nightmare chorus of pleas, cries of terror, screams as the flames neared crackling and bricks returned tumbling from the heavens and stout beams crushed those souls knocked to the ground. Walls shook and shuddered for a mile around and the boom was heard faintly in the next county south and painfully by everyone in the town limits.”

One summer in 1965, Alma’s young grandson Alec comes to visit her. It is to him that she spills the story of the dance hall and her theory about what happened that night. Going back and forth in time, the novel gives the reader vignettes about those who were killed in the dance hall explosion along with the story of Ruby, Alma’s sister. Ruby was a great flirt and what was called in those days a loose woman. She would love them and leave them until she found a real love with the banker, Arthur Glencross. Glencross was married and Alma worked as a maid for the Glencross family. She worked very hard to hide Arthur’s affair from his wife Corrine by carefully washing his clothing to get out smells and stains that would serve as evidence of his affair with Ruby. After Ruby’s death, Alma hated Arthur and this was evident in her actions.

Was Arthur responsible for the explosion? Or, could it have been the preacher Isaiah Willard who spoke of death and damnation to those who danced? He believed that “the easiest portals to the soul through which demons might enter was that opened by dancing feet. Evil music, evil feet, salacious sliding and the disgusting embraces dancing excused provided an avenue of damnation that could readily be seen and blockaded” He was heard to say of the Arbor Dance Hall during that summer, “I’ll blow this place to Kingdom soon and drop those sinners into the boiling patch – see how they dance then.” What about the hobos hanging around town? Those passing through with bad intentions? Someone with a grudge against one of the dancers? Who was it? Alma thinks she knows and tells her story to Alec.

Of the forty-two killed in the explosion, only twenty-eight were whole enough so that graves could be made for them. Most of them were not identified. The rest were parts buried in a pit. Alma’s grief was such that she “touched all twenty-eight and kissed them each, kneeling to kiss the fresh black paint between her spread aching fingers, said the same words to accompany every kiss because there was no way to know which box of wood held Ruby, or if she rested in only one, had not been separated into parts by crushing or flames and interred in two or three, so she treated every box as though her sister was inside in parts or whole and cried to the last.”

Woodrell’s style of writing is unique, sounding like I’d imagine the tenor of speech spoken in the Ozarks. At times it’s a difficult book because of the writing style and the subject matter. It is, however, stunning and has left me with a deep and abiding appreciation for this author’s work. I thank him for sharing his talent and vision with readers.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 117 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company (September 3, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Daniell Woodrell
EXTRAS:	Interview  and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Outlaw Album The Bayou Trilogy

Bibliography:

• Under the Bright Lights (1986) *
• Woe to Live On (1987; 2012)
• Muscle for the Wing (1988) *
• The Ones You Do (1992) *
• Give Us a Kiss: A Country Noir (1996; 2012)
• Tomato Red (1998; 2012)
• The Death of Sweet Mister (2001; 2012)
• Winter’s Bone (2006)
• The Outlaw Album: Stories (2011)
• The Maid’s Version (September 2013)

*The Bayou Trilogy (April 2011)

Movies from Books:

• Ride with the Devil (1999) (adapted from Woe to Live On)
• Winter’s Bone (2010)

“His eyes are slightly widened in the picture as if he is startled to find himself captured there. She is convinced that she sees the necessary gleam of yearning in those eyes; she thinks she can help this yearning.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (MAR 25, 2011)

In Paris-born Shapiro’s first novel, a young visiting American professor, Trevor Stratton, catches the attention of his prospective Parisian secretary, Josianne, not for his scholarship in 19th-century French literature, but for his poetry translations: “A translator, caught in the space between two tongues.”

In hopes that he is a little different (and after an appreciative look at his photograph), Josianne places a box with a red-checked cover in an empty file cabinet in his new office.

Stratton will open the box and be increasingly enthralled by its contents – letters, mementos and photographs dating from the late 19th-century to WWII, mostly WWI and after – belonging to a woman named Louise Brunet.

A real woman, as it happens, and the box of keepsakes is real too. Shapiro grew up at 13 rue Therèse, downstairs from Louise Brunet, whose box she kept after the old lady died and no relatives arrived to claim it. The mementos illustrate the book, each appearing in color in the text as Stratton handles it. The illustrations can also be seen more crisply and in larger format at the novel’s website : www.13ruetherese.com, along with Stratton’s accompanying notes, and several brief videos and audio files.

This sounds gimmicky, but it works, particularly because the box is real, although Shapiro’s story is fiction. She was a little girl when she acquired the box in the 1980s and did not know the dead woman.

Stratton muses over each memento, Louise growing more real to him as he fits her story together in his mind, from the letters from a lover at the front in WWI, including a 1915 marriage proposal, and the photos he, her brother and her father sent of themselves in trenches, to the miniature appointment calendar from 1928 and a photo of her father in 1944, shortly before his death.

Stratton addresses his increasingly fevered notes to an unnamed “Dear Sir,” which seems an odd salutation, given his personal tone and his missives’ increasingly intimate nature. But the novel is a puzzle of sorts and all will come clear in the end, including Josianne’s motives.

Most of the action takes place in 1928, when a new family moves into the building. Louise, married to a nice, but not passionate man, already has a rich fantasy life. She sometimes goes to church to tell salacious lies to the priest hearing confessions and in 1928, fearful of being forever childless, Louise takes her longings a step further.

Or Stratton does. Their lives become intertwined so that the reader, immersed in Louise’s dangerous, romantic year, never really knows for sure if the story is hers or Stratton’s imaginings.

As events unfold, Louise’s thoughts range back and forth in time. Each memento takes on greater significance as deep emotional contexts are revealed, and the 20th century’s early history acquires flesh and blood.

The plot organization is complex and sometimes distancing, when the reader is reminded that the whole thing may simply be Stratton’s fevered imagination. This is risky, given the gut-wrenching revelations and growing personal intensity of Louise’s story. But Shapiro pulls it off; creating a dramatic, multi-layered, sexy story that should appeal to a wide range of readers.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Reagan Arthur Books; 1 edition (February 2, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Elena Mauli Shapiro
EXTRAS:	13, rue Thérèse website Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another novel which uses photos to drive a story: The Rain Before the Fall by Jonathan Coe Three Farmers on Their Way to the Dance by Richard Powers

Bibliography:

• 13, rue Thérèse (February 2011)

“With Hadley, things felt right almost all of the time. She was good and strong and true, and he could count on her. They had as good a shot at making it as anyone did, but what if marriage didn’t solve anything and didn’t save anyone even a little bit? What then?”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (FEB 24, 2011)

Before Ernest Hemingway was ERNEST HEMINGWAY – one of the most revered, studied, analyzed, and parodied authors of American literature – he was a young man with a burning talent, staking his claim to a bright future.

And part of this future included Hadley Richardson, his first wife, a woman who was his equal in many ways – a risk-taker, adventurer, and copious drinker. Paula McLain – in an addictive and mesmerizing debut book – breathes life into their life together in Paris in the 1920s, when everything was just starting to come together.

It was a golden time in Paris. Ernest Hemingway was a writer on the cusp; he was championed by Sherwood Anderson — whom he eventually turns on – and he hung out with expatriates Gertrude Stein and Alice Tokias, Ezra Pound and his lover, Shakespear (no “e” at the end), and later, with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Gerald and Sara Murphy. He eagerly sought advice, learning to fine-tune his craft, especially with the guidance of Gertrude Stein: “She’d hit on something he’d recently begun to realize about directness, about stripping language all the way down.”

Yet the book is always, definitively, Hadley’s to narrate – and indeed, she does so quite sympathetically, in the first-person. In many ways, it is a re-telling of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, as Ms. McLain pushes deeper into the lives of her characters while remaining true to the facts.

Hadley meets Ernest not long after the death of her overprotective mother, and marries him after a short courtship. Nearly a decade older than her new spouse, she lets him lead the way; when Sherwood Anderson convinces him to go to Paris, she gladly signs on. In many ways, she becomes the personification of Hemingway’s famous “True Woman” – someone who is true and gentle and good and strong – without losing her essence.

As their life becomes more and more colorful – ski trips, visits to Ezra Pound at Rapallo, wasted drinking weekends at Pamplona for the running of the bulls, Hadley asks one of their friends, “What is it we want, exactly?” The answer, “Everything, of course. Everything and then some.” Hadley retorts, “If this is a festival, then why aren’t we happy?”

Happiness is hers in fleeting moments, as Ernest begins to attract attention for his work, after her son is born, on skiing and hiking jaunts, and when she loses herself in her piano playing. But Hemingway is crippled by what would now be diagnosed as PTSD as a result of his war years, and is way too self-destructive. Followers of Hemingway know that he will leave her for another woman — the hypocritical Pauline Pfeiffer, who embraces them both, calling them “her cherishables” and “her dears.”

Hadley is, of course, immortalized for the famous lost manuscript incident. When her husband was covering the Lausanne Peace Conference, Hadley paid him a visit by train and packed all of his manuscripts including the carbons in a small valise, which was stolen and never recovered. This is but one of the story lines depicted in this page-turning debut.

With a few missteps – a little too much foreshadowing and sometimes, an over-awe of her subject – Ms. McLain eloquently captures the innermost feelings of Hadley as well as the Paris life at a heady and exhilarating time. Years later, Ernest Hemingway – who married four times in all – writes of Hadley, “I wish I had died before I loved anyone but her.” I closed the pages of this book wondering how much better his life might have turned out had he remained with the woman he called “the best and truest and loveliest person I have ever known.”;

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1,615 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ballantine Books (February 22, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paula McLain
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	A decade later in Paris: The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

Bibliography:

• A Ticket to Ride (2008)
• The Paris Wife (2011)

Nonfiction:

• Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses (2003)

“You are the first generation of women that has ever faced a future in which you will not depend on men. This will give you extraordinary freedom and extraordinary responsibility. For most of you this will not be a choice but a fact of life. We are missing nearly a million men and these, as you are painfully aware, were your contemporaries…. I urge you, my dear young ladies, don’t waste your youth seeking out a husband…. Instead, seize the opportunity of your single status to change the world.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (FEB 12, 2011)

The Crimson Rooms, by Katharine McMahon, opens in 1924, with thirty-one year old Evelyn Gifford shaken by a recurring nightmare involving her brother, James, dying in agony at the age of twenty on a muddy battlefield. She is startled to hear a knock at the front door in the middle of the night. Much to her bewilderment, a woman is standing in the entrance with a little boy who looks exactly like Evelyn’s late brother. The stranger introduces herself as Meredith Duffy; she is accompanied by her son, six-year-old Edmund, whom she claims is James’s child. The arrival of these guests throws the Gifford household, consisting of Evelyn, her mother, grandmother, aunt, and two maids, into turmoil.

Evelyn is a graduate of Cambridge with a bachelor of law degree, but “tradition dictates that women should not be lawyers and the law is governed by tradition.” She considers herself fortunate when Daniel Breen, who is a champion of the downtrodden, takes her on as his articled clerk. She soon becomes embroiled in two very different legal matters: One involves a destitute woman, Leah Marchant, who is desperate to regain custody of her three children; the other concerns a former soldier, Simon Wheeler, who will hang if he is convicted of murdering his wife, Stella. Evelyn works tirelessly conducting research, interviewing witnesses, and uncovering surprising new evidence that could help decide the outcome of both cases.

This is an engrossing work of historical fiction that is almost impossible to put down. The admirable heroine, Evelyn Gifford, is a highly intelligent and tenacious fighter for justice. In spite of the jibes she is subjected to about “women lawyers,” she perseveres, knowing that if she is to become a respected advocate, she will need to be tough. The plot thickens when Evelyn is attracted to a dashing and charming barrister, Nicholas Thorne, who is already engaged to a rich, gorgeous, and well-connected lady. When Thorne appears to reciprocate her interest, Evelyn must decide how to handle this awkward situation. Her decision becomes even more difficult when she is forced to choose between desire and personal integrity.

Eventually, Evelyn learns some hard truths about herself, her family, and the society in which she lives. Not only are females treated as second class citizens in post-war England, but the poor are also shunted aside and denied basic civil rights. In addition, as Jacqueline Winspear does so effectively in her Maisie Dobbs series, McMahon creates a grim portrait of the ways in which the Great War decimated the flower of English youth. Those who survived often returned home maimed both in body and spirit. The Crimson Rooms is compelling on so many levels. It is a suspenseful murder mystery, an incisive tale of social injustice, a poignant love story, and a gripping family drama. Although some readers might have wished for a more upbeat conclusion, the author shows courage in wrapping up her complicated story so realistically. Truth be told, a sequel to this wonderful book would be most welcome.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 11 readers
PUBLISHER:	Berkley Trade; Reprint edition (January 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Katharine McMahon
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Mapping of Love and Death by Jacqueline Winspear Dark Road to Darjeeling by Deana Raybourn

Bibliography:

• A Way Through the Woods (1991)
• Footsteps (1997)
• Confinement (1998)
• After Mary (2000)
• The Alchemist’s Daughter (2006)
• The Rose of Sebastopol (2008)
• The Crimson Rooms (2009; February 2010 in US)

“Jessold was an embarrassment. His name became proverbial, signifying a kind of artistic dementia, a byword for murderous obsession: the same fate Gesualdo had suffered. The works, best dismissed on grounds of taste, were completely unrevivable. These were his missing years, not in life but in death. Nothing of the real man (the charismatic, genius Jessold) survived: only the cartoon, the caricature, the parody, the deluded monster.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (FEB 4, 2011)

Wesley Stace’s ample new novel — half murder mystery, half music criticism — opens with a press report on the death of the talented young English composer Charles Jessold in 1923. He appears to have shot himself in his apartment after poisoning his wife and his wife’s lover and watching them die. The murder-suicide has not one but two ironic precedents. It reproduces the story of the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, who similarly killed his wife with her lover. It is also the subject of an English folk-ballad, “Lord Barnard and Little Musgrave,” which Jessold had taken as the subject for his operatic magnum opus, due to premiere the following night. Given the circumstances, the opera was canceled and Jessold’s posthumous reputation ruined. It seems clear that he was a man obsessed by the career of Gesualdo, his near-namesake, as he squandered his own talent in alcoholism and excess. The facts are not in dispute; it only remains to trace the sorry path that led to this debacle, and ascertain the composer’s possible motives.

This task is left to Leslie Shepherd, a gentleman of independent means who writes musical criticism for a leading London paper. Meeting Jessold at a country-house weekend, he takes it upon himself to promote the young man and guide his early career. It is the period of the English folk-song revival, when composers such as Vaughan-Williams and Holst would go out into the countryside to transcribe ancient versions of the old ballads as sung by aged countrymen, in search of a home-grown nationalism to combat the dominance of German music. Jessold is staying with Shepherd and his wife Miriam when they hear the “Little Mossgrave” ballad (sic) sung by an old sheep-shearer, planting the seed for the eventual opera, for which Shepherd will write at least the first draft of the libretto. But a decade must pass before that. Jessold attracts attention with a number of smaller compositions; he makes two trips to study in Germany, but is trapped there by the outbreak of the 1914 war, and
spends the next four years in an internment camp. There, he manages to write music of ever greater brilliance, and returns to London in 1918 as a musical celebrity and clearly the next great hope for British music. But he also becomes personally unreliable, rejecting his old friends, and turning to drink.

Wesley Stace is clearly a musician; in fact he has a separate career as a singer-songwriter under the name John Wesley Harding. But he knows the classical repertoire too. Unlike virtually all novels about musicians that I have read (Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music being the sole other exception), the musical background to this one is impeccable. Stace understands the conflict in prewar British music between pastoral Englishism and dilettantish daring. He is also aware of the great movements on the continent; he has superb passages on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and especially Schoenberg’s second string quartet, the work in which he renounced tonality. Shepherd sums up his experience of the latter: “Yet I had to admit that I too felt the wonder of the music, its power, its horror. I had laughed at Jessold’s ‘breeze from other planets,’  but I had experienced it, that chill wind blowing from the future, in the hairs on the back of my neck, in my soul.” Stace is brilliant at showing how Jessold steered his way between these various influences. He makes the composer always plausible, but very much his own man. If there is any one composer whose early music one thinks of more than others, it is Benjamin Britten, and the 1945 premiere of Britten’s Peter Grimes is another of the brilliant musical set-pieces in the book.

I do have problems, however. There are many times when I am not sure whether the music is just the background to the personal story, or whether the story has been devised solely to enable Stace to write about the music. As a musician myself (including as an opera librettist and former critic!), I was fascinated by everything, but other readers might find the book slow. Stace also goes out of his way to imitate the mandarin style of a lot of English writing at the beginning of the century, flowing with the stately amplitude of a Henry James, and there are times when you just wish he would get on with it. This is especially so in the second part of the book, after Jessold is long since dead, and Stace continues into the later years of his biographer, Leslie Shepherd. The musical details continue to fascinate, but when Hamlet has left the scene, who is interested in Horatio? Yet stick with it while Stace goes through the same events again but from an intiguingly different perspective. Some of his surprises come close to narrative cheating, but in the end they transform the book into a different kind of psychological study altogether, still very much worth the reading.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Picador (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wesley Stace
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Charles Jessold website
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More music in fiction: Paganini’s Ghost by Paul Adams Blue Duets by Kathleen Wall

Bibliography:

• Misfortune (2005)
• By George (2007)
• Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer by Wesley Stace (February 2011)

“I’m writing to say good-bye. My decision has been made and by the time you read this, there will be no turning back. I have tried….But the war changed me, it changed my family, it changed everything, and finding my way again to what I knew before isn’t possible.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (JAN 23, 2011)

A Lonely Death, by Charles Todd, is one of the most haunting mysteries in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series. The year is 1920 and the First World War has taken an enormous toll on the young Englishmen who naively went off to battle, expecting excitement and adventure. What they found, instead, was terror and violent death. Those who returned were often shell-shocked and/or physically maimed; their families suffered along with the damaged soldiers.

Rutledge barely made it through the war. He was nearly buried alive, and at times, wishes that he had never been rescued. He was severely traumatized by his horrific experiences and bears boundless guilt for his role in sending his men to their deaths. One deceased Scottish soldier named Hamish MacLeod still gives Ian no peace. Rutledge walks around with the young Highlander’s voice, “relentless and unforgiving,” resounding in his head, chiding him, giving advice, and reminding Rutledge that he does not deserve to live a normal life.

At least his work gives Rutledge some respite from his despondency. After he sees off Chief Inspector Cummins, who is retiring, Rutledge is called to Eastfield, Sussex, where a series of deaths by garroting have left three men dead in nine days. This case will prove to be a crucible that will test Rutledge’s determination and strength of character. He, along with Constable Walker and others, must determine why these particular men were targeted. Did the murders have something to do with events that occurred during the war? The evidence points in a number of different directions and the answers are far from obvious. In addition, Rutledge looks into a cold case that Cummins had always wanted to solve, but could not. This subplot is not particularly realistic, but it is intriguing nevertheless.

The mother and son who collaborate under the name Charles Todd have created a complex novel of psychological suspense with a large cast of memorable characters, evocative descriptive writing, and meticulous attention to historical detail. A Lonely Death is a wrenching story of revenge and sorrow. Charles Todd’s fine work of fiction is not only a commentary on the hellish price of war, but it is also an incisive look at the battles we wage each day–with our acquaintances, relatives, employers, and even with ourselves. Few emerge from these encounters unscathed. Inspector Ian Rutledge, alas, still has a great deal of healing to do before he can face the future with equanimity.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 41 readers
PUBLISHER:	William Morrow (January 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Charles Todd
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of: A Duty to the Dead A Pale Horse A Test of Wills

Bibliography:

Inspector Ian Rutledge series:

• A Test of Wills (1996)
• Wings of Fire (1998)
• Search the Dark (1999)
• Legacy of the Dead (2000)
• Watchers of Time (2001)
• A Fearsome Doubt (2002)
• A Cold Treachery (2005)
• A Long Shadow (2006)
• A False Mirror (2007)
• A Pale Horse (December 2007)
• A Matter of Justice (December 2008)
• The Red Door (December 2009)
• A Lonely Death (January 2011)

Francesca Hatton series:

• The Murder Stone (2003)

Bess Crawford, British army nurse:

• A Duty to the Dead (August 2009)
• An Impartial Witness (August 2010)