“I hope they will leave some men behind, to make sure she doesn’t kill us in our sleep.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (APR 10, 2014)

Twenty-eight-year-old Australian author Hannah Kent spent time in Iceland while in high school, chosen because she wanted to see snow for the first time. She fell in love with this island country south of the Arctic Circle, and returned several times to do extensive research on Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman to be beheaded in Iceland, in 1829. Kent imagined the interior psychological states of various characters, especially the enigmatically alluring Agnes, and has successfully penned a suspenseful fiction tale that transcends the outcome. It reveals a complex love triangle and double murder, and a provocative examination of the religious and social mores of the time. Knowing the fate of Agnes prior to reading the novel won’t change the reader’s absorption of the novel. The strong themes hinge on the backstory and viewpoints that are woven in and reveal characters that go through a change of perception as the circumstances of the crime come to light.

Each chapter begins with official or private correspondence or testimony, which reflects the judicial process and established standards of the time, which was then under Danish rule. The title refers to whether the dead are fit to be buried on consecrated ground. Agnes is sent to northwest Iceland, to stay with the district officer, his wife, and two daughters, pending her execution. The family members are outraged at first, some more than others. The farmers in the area are also hostile to her. Over time, as her story unfolds, I became emotionally engaged with Agnes, and touched by the young cleric, Toti, Agnes’ appointed spiritual advisor.

Kent is a poetic writer, whose descriptions of a grim, harsh, bleak landscape and a socially rigid terrain are told with a striking beauty.

“Now we are riding across Iceland’s north, across this black island washing in its waters, sulking in its ocean. Chasing our shadows across the mountain.”

“They have strapped me to the saddle like a corpse being taken to the burial ground.”

“…waiting for the ground to unfreeze before they can pocket me in the earth like a stone.”

The restrained savagery and cruel irony reflects in those that persecute Agnes and accept the official story of her acts as gospel. The gradual overtures of Toti and certain members of the family were organically developed, allowing for tension and intimacy in equal measure. The slight stumbling block for me was accepting Agnes’ relationship with her lover, Natan, one of the men she is convicted of killing. I understand that very smart women can often make poor choices in men; however, Agnes was depicted as a self-contained woman. I had a difficult time accepting her bottomless apology for Nathan’s consummate cruelty and selfish barbarity.

Despite my tenuous acceptance of Agnes’ love for Natan, I did register the isolated, punishing terrain of 19th century Iceland, especially in the winter months, when loneliness was crushing, and reaching out for companionship a pressing need. The landscape came alive as a character, and Kent folded in an Icelandic Burial Hymn and bits and pieces of the Nordic sagas and myths, such as “I was worst to the one I loved best.” Poet-Rosa, who also loved Natan as passionately as Agnes, writes a bitter poem to her. (Interestingly, I have just read the first 80 pages of the Laxness novel of Icelandic sheep farmers, Independent People, in which a character named poet-Rosa is described.)

This is an impressive debut novel, easily read in a few sittings. The point-of-view shifts back and forth from third to first skillfully. By the end of the novel, I was able to answer the question of whether a condemned life can have meaning, and whether the person who is condemned can change the perceptions of others –for the better. I will be looking out for Kent’s next novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 699 readers
PUBLISHER:	Back Bay Books (April 1, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Hannah Kent
EXTRAS:	Interview and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve

Bibliography:

• Burial Rites (2013)

“I then realized that the cathedral is a monument to our grief. It is a shrine for all our dead, constructed of the wreckage of the lives that have fallen down around us.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perksie  (FEB 14, 2014)

Swan Gondola literally starts off with a bang! Two elderly sisters, Emmaline and Hester, known by most in their small county, as the “Old Sisters Egan,” are sitting in their Nebraska farm kitchen drinking coffee. The day has been a peaceful one. Suddenly the house begins to shiver and shake and they are enveloped in noise, a loud BANG!! Books fall from their shelves, china dishes and cups fall to the floor, breaking, chimney bricks drop into the hearth, their caged canaries stop singing and the two sisters are left stunned, shocked. Hester, the tough one, lifts her rifle and opens the door, not knowing what to expect. She and petite, romantic Emmaline, are immediately enveloped in silk. Silk is everywhere. They have witnessed so much in their lives on the farm that nothing really surprises them anymore. The silk comes from a ruined hot air balloon which has apparently crashed into their roof. “Escaped the circus?” Hester wonders. The two immediately search for the pilot, who could be hurt or, even worse, dead. They do find the man alive, flat on his back on the ground, his left leg in a terrible bend. Emmaline’s and Hester’s discovery of the balloon’s pilot will change their lives forever as he relates his strange, mesmerizing and sorry tale.

Obviously in pain, the man snaps his fingers weakly and a card slips from his sleeve which reads, “B. ‘Ferret’ Skerritt, Omaha, Nebraska.” And on the back “This slight of hand you just witnessed is only a hint of my wizardry.” From his inside pocket a postcard falls. Written by Ferret, it gives the reader an example of his unrequited love for his beloved, Mrs. Cecily Wakefield of Omaha. Their’s is a star-crossed love…dramatic, romantic and heartbreaking.

Thus we meet our protagonist whose name is really Bartholomew Skerritt. He is an orphan, (now 25 years-old), left at the door of a Catholic orphanage when he was an infant. Sister Patience told him, “All orphans are born of whores.” There was a note that his mother had tucked into his little suit. “She had addressed the baby as Mr. Bartholomew Skerritt and written: ‘Your last name is your daddy’s last name, (I’m damned sure of it, don’t let anybody tell you different), and your first name was the longest first name I’ve ever seen written down. I can’t give you nothing much but I can give you a name with lots of letters in it. Sincerely, the mother you never knew.'” Reflecting back on his childhood, Ferret says: “Childhood is too awful a thing to make happen to somebody.”

When he was a boy he met librarian, Mr. Crowe. Crowe’s real vocation is that of a ventriloquist. He took a shine to Bartholomew and taught him about the world of books, and more importantly to the boy’s future, how to excel as a ventriloquist.

Ferret has become a petty thief and con-man who currently works as a ventriloquist and a magician at a vaudeville theater, (before the Fair). He usually follows the carny circuit with his unique dummy, Oscar. It is at the Empress Opera House where he meets and immediately falls in love with the mysterious Cecily, an actress with an unknown history. “I heard her name before I saw her, backstage.”

The narrative takes place in the Sisters Egan’s farmhouse while he is recovering. The ever practical Hester, who acts as the community’s amateur veterinarian, has patched him up and put his leg in a cast. It is at the farmhouse where he relates his tale. The author effectively uses letters from Ferret to Cecily, and from Cecily to him, to further the storyline, which weaves back and forth in time from Autumn 1898 to the winter of 1899.

This story-within-a-story begins in the spring of 1898, at the opening of the Omaha World’s Fair. Omaha, Nebraska, is still a noisy, dirty frontier city whose nickname was the “Gateway to the West.” The author writes, “The Omaha World’s Fair, as depicted in  The Swan Gondola,  is a fictional approximation of the “Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition.” The author’s version of the Omaha World’s Fair was held from June 1 to November 1 of 1898. Its goal was to showcase the development of the entire West, stretching from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast. Over 2.6 million people came to Omaha to view the 4,062 exhibits during the four months of the Fair. President William McKinley was among the dignitaries who attended. McKinley, in a cameo role here, is immersed in the Spanish-American War, yet still makes time to attend.

Already known as the “New White City,” this fair tries to one-up the fair at Chicago, originally called the “White CIty.” Chicago’s fair took place in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World in 1492. The Omaha Fair is much different from Chicago’s, as there is very little “white” about it. Behind the scenes at the Fair, another story takes place, a sleazier story: that of the “rousties,” those workers who put the fair together and take it down; ZigZag the clown, Rosie the anarchist and friend to Ferriet as well as August, another close friend of our protagonist. August is an eccentric Native American homosexual who has a crush on Ferrit. Also among the fair’s “players” are the ragtime player, the nervous lion tamer, the waltzing dwarves, can-can dancers, hootchy kootchy showgirls, etc. They are all looking to make a buck from the “gillies,” (civilians), legally or illegally. This “carny-like” background really enriches The Swan Gondola.  The author has said in an interview, “As for the genre of carnival fiction – perhaps its appeal rests in the hodgepodge of it all. Our concept of an American carnival brings to mind childhood delights, but also an element of the seedy, the deceptive, and the decidedly adult. A carnival is a bit of a fever dream – it’s all cotton candy and sex, on a dirt lot.”

“The Swan Gondola” is situated on a lagoon on the midway. It is at the gondola that Ferret and Cecily meet and conduct their romance, at least initially. Ferret is obsessed with Cecily from the first moment he sees her. His obsession drives the narrative.

The Swan Gondola is a novel that grabbed me from page one until the very end. The characters are well fleshed-out and complex and the writing is tight – no unnecessary filler. Readers will be ensnared by the offbeat personalities and carried along by the unexpected plot developments. Timothy Schaffert clearly did a tremendous amount of research for this book. It seems that the author is a huge fan of L. Frank Baum’s “Wizard of Oz,” as demonstrated in this tale. A riveting piece of historical fiction from page one to the very end. I highly recommend this novel. It is original and entertaining and gives one a good look at the goings-on at a fair, a carny show or a circus.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (February 6, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perksie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Timothy Schaffert
EXTRAS:	Swan Gondola Nostalgia
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Coffins of Little Hope

Bibliography:

• The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (2002)
• The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God (2005)
• Devils in the Sugar Shop (2007)
• The Coffins of Little Hope (2011)
• The Swan Gondola (February 2014)

“Iris Dunleavy?” asked Mary. “Is she the plantation wife? She dresses so well for a lunatic. She had the most colorful flounces on her skirt the other night.”

Book Review:

Review by Judi Clark  (FEB 9, 2014)

This is Kathy Hepinstall’s fourth novel… and I’ve read all four, so obviously I like this author. She writes a different book each time and thus one never knows what will be found upon picking up her latest, although one can be sure it will be both literary and lyrical, no matter the tone and subject.

Blue Asylum takes place during the Civil War years on Sanibel Island on the west coast of Florida.

A judge finds the main character, Iris Dunleavy, insane essentially for hating and embarrassing her husband, “Wives were not supposed to hate their husbands. It was not in the proper order of things.” Her rich husband pays extra for her to be cured at the institution with the best reputation, the SANIBEL ASYLUM FOR LUNATICS which is managed by British born psychiatrist Dr. Cowell, who stubbornly believes that Iris is insane because a judge declared it. But Iris insists that she is not insane, that she was merely escaping from a hateful husband and cruel man. As she reveals her horrific story bit by bit, we can see that while she may not be clinically insane, she may have been crazy mad considering the decisions/actions she undertook (and continues to undertake).

She befriends the doctor’s 14-year-old son Wendell and another patient, Ambrose, who is suffering from something that happened during the civil war. She longs to escape and eventually does but with devastating effects.

I liked many things about this book, but I didn’t “love it,” at least not as much as I did The Absence of Nectar and Prince of Lost Places. But I did enjoy it immensely even though it is a little heavy handed on the message, not unlike her debut (and Oprah book club choice)  The House of Gentle Men.  Then again, given headlines such as Todd Akin’s comment on legitimate rape, it may be that heavy handed feminist historical literature is still necessary.

Hepinstall captures the historical detail of well and it is very visual as she sets a mood and imagery that plays out well both as metaphor and setting:

“Dawn broke soft and clean on the island of shell and marl and current. It was a day like any other, one more day in a season when marking the days was difficult, since the balminess was resolute and the birds were attuned to the tides, the tides to the moon, and the moon to the lunatics, under their crazy spell, waxing and waning in the accordance with the fluctuations of their madness and the depth of passions. A group of terns had gathered at the edge of a calm sea, and a single raccoon, caught after a daylight, skittered out of the dune vegetation and into the forest, leaving behind a loggerhead nest full of ruined eggs, shells broken and half-formed turtles spilling out in the sand.”

Hepinstall considers this a love story… and it is, but not the happy kind. This novel is an excellent choice for book clubs.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 139 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mariner Books; Reprint edition (April 9, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Judi Clark
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kathy Hepinstall really humorous blog
EXTRAS:	Website for Blue Asylum Reading Guide Interview with Kathy Hepinstall
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Prince of Lost Places  The Absence of Nectar The House of Gentle Men

Bibliography:

• The House of Gentle Men (2000)
• The Absence of Nectar (2001)
• Prince of Lost Places (2003)
• Blue Asylum (2012)

“She felt she had been created by the demands of others, by their insatiable appetite for something beyond ordinary life. They craved a world without death and they had spotted her, in their hunger, like wolves alert to any poor sheep that might stray from the fold and stand gazing ignorantly up at the stars.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (JAN 30, 2014)

FACT: “The Mary Celeste,” (or “Marie Céleste” as it is fictionally referred to by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and others after him), was a British-built American-owned merchant brigantine famous for having been discovered on 5 December 1872 in the Atlantic Ocean, between the Azores and Portugal, unmanned and apparently abandoned, (the one lifeboat was missing, along with its 7 member crew, the captain, his wife and small daughter). The ship was in seaworthy condition and still under sail heading toward the Strait of Gibraltar. She had been at sea for a month and its cargo and provisions were intact. The crew’s belongings including valuables were still in place. There was no sign of foul play. None of those on board was ever seen or heard from again and their disappearance is often cited as the greatest maritime mystery of all time. There was nothing written in the ship’s log to account for the vanishing. ” (Wikipedia entry)

I was riveted from page one by this very realistic fictional account of the “The Mary Celeste.” The story and some of the book’s fascinating characters are quite eerie and mysterious. There are scenes, especially those at sea, which are terrifyingly lifelike. I could hardly put the book down. Many have speculated and written about the real life story of this ghost ship, including investigative journalists and authors, one of whom is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a character here. There are many theories about her disappearance but none have proved to be true and none have proved to be false, either. For the seafaring families of New England who captained and crewed the ship, the nautical mystery has haunted them for generations. No one, to this day, knows what happened to “The Mary Celeste,” and all who sailed on her.

The Ghost of the Mary Celeste opens with a vivid account of a shipwreck in which the captain and his wife, Marie, are lost overboard. Back in Massachusetts a thirteen year-old girl, a relative of the ill-fated couple, is convinced that she sees and hears the cries of her cousin Marie.

The reader is then introduced to the Briggs and Cobb families from Marion, Massachusetts. The two families are intimately connected in an intricate sort of way, which I won’t try to explain here. Let it suffice to say that the Briggs and Cobb children are cousins. The Briggs family has always made its livelihood from the sea, however by the time young Captain Benjamin Briggs marries his first cousin, Sarah, (Sallie), Cobb, his unfortunate family had already lost many members to the ocean. Benjamin plans to retire his captaincy after his marriage. However, he does decide to accept one more command and Sallie and their two year-old daughter Sophy accompany him on this last voyage. Their son, Arthur is left home with his paternal grandmother, “Mother Briggs.”

It is important to mention that Sallie has a younger sister, Hannah, with whom she is quite close. The fey Hannah “sees things.” She has strange dreams/nightmares and is quite fantastical. “As a child she always had her dreamy side. She talked to trees and made up stories. She wrote sweet poems about the dew being dropped from the drinking cups of fairies, or enchanted woods where elves had tea parties using mushrooms as tables.” However, with the loss of her beloved cousin Marie, 13 year-old Hannah sees and hears Marie calling to her. Her family disapproves of her “visions and fantasies.” Sallie rebukes her after one bout of almost hysterical lamentations that Marie is there and “wants to come inside.” Their father is concerned, naturally.

Late-19th-century spiritualism plays an important role here. Spiritualism, the belief that the dead communicate with the living, became a fad throughout America and Europe during the 1850s. Spiritualism was a cultural and religious phenomenon which swept through the sitting rooms and village halls of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Basically dead people were all the rage. Sallie’s and Hannah’s father, in particular, is worried about his youngest daughter’s fervent beliefs and visions. “It’s this insalubrious craze with talking to spirits: it’s loose in the world.” He fears that, as she grew older, Hannah would become involved in this movement.

Author Valerie Martin employs multiple voices, styles and points of view. She takes the reader through time and place, in a variety of means, to tell her tale through a straightforward, third person narrative, and also through her characters, their conversations, diaries, letters, newspaper clippings, legal court findings, ship’s log, etc. We are introduced to a young Arthur Conan Doyle, who, intrigued by the entire incident of the ghost ship, writes a fictitious and “scurrilous story,” supposedly told to him by a crewman who said he survived the incident. The actual story, “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” was printed anonymously in the British journal Cornhill. The story sparked Doyle’s literary career. “He was thirty-five years-old. With scarcely a hint of what he might achieve, but driven by a furnace of ambition to strive in every field that opened before him. He made himself up.”

Doyle’s tale travels across the Atlantic to America where Violet Petra, a famous medium of extraordinary powers, reads it and threatens to sue Doyle for his lies about the Briggs family and the nautical mystery. And, Miss Petra, one of the famed spiritualists of her day, spiritual society’s darling, who is she? Has this inscrutable woman also invented herself?

Phoebe Grant, a journalist employed by the Philadelphia Sun is to investigate Violet Petra for fraud. The intelligent and business-like Miss Grant is a quick-witted skeptic who finds herself totally confounded upon meeting and speaking with the woman. They eventually become friends “of sorts.” She says this about Violet and her supporters,

“The spirits they peddled had no mystery; they were ghosts stripped of their otherness. In their cosmography, the dead were just like us and they were everywhere, waiting to give us yet more unsolicited advice.”

The books has several characters, the primary ones being Violet Petra, Mr. Doyle and Phoebe Grant, the ghost ship, and of course the sea. All the characters are eventually tied together by the “Mary Celeste.” The novel spans decades and the author fleshes out her characters and allows us to see how they grow and change.

I really enjoyed The Ghost of the Mary Celeste and am mystified by the mystery. Ms. Martin creates an extraordinary fiction from facts. This is a page-turner written with intelligence and originality. The author uses as much historical detail as possible and, in fact, at times the book reads more like a history than historical fiction. I was surprised by the ending. Although one has to use the imagination to figure out parts of the story, the finale is indeed unsuspected…at least by me. I am left with a head filled with questions. Kudos to Valerie Martin. I now want to read more of her books.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	Nan A. Talese (January 28, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jana Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Valerie Martin
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Confession of Edward Day  Trespass Another New England unsolved mystery: The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve

Bibliography:

• Set in Motion (1978)
• Alexandra (1979)
• A Recent Martyr (1988)
• Consolation of Nature (1988)
• Mary Reilly (1990)
• The Great Divorce (1994)
• Italian Fever (1999)
• Love: Short Stories (1999)
• Property (2003)
• The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories (2006)
• Trespass (2007)
• The Confessions of Edward Day (2009)
• The Ghost of Mary Celeste (January 2014)

Nonfiction:

• Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St. Francis (2001)

Movies from books:

• Mary Reilly (1996)

“How can anyone who does not know their history truly know who they are.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (DEC 29, 2013)

Oscar Kortico might be living in the slums of Havana now but the story he narrates is one of voluptuous plenty — populated by a vast array of colorful characters in a seemingly idyllic setting. “In the 1800s Pata de Puerco was just one small corner of a sweeping plain with a few scattered shacks between the Sierra Maestra mountains of Santiago de Cuba and the copper mines of El Cobre,” Kortico says, as he describes the Cuban village where his grandparents settled. Oscar has never actually been to Pata de Puerco (translated as Pig’s Foot) but instead relies on memories handed down over generations to paint a picture of the town and the events that eventually lead to his beaten down existence in a shantytown. Nostalgia invariably wears rose-colored glasses so it is that the small town with its slow pace of daily life casts a delightful shadow and creates a sense of longing — even if the events that transpired there were often riven by violence and vengeance.

The author Carlos Acosta, is a world-famous dancer, and in fact bears a great deal of resemblance to the polymath, Melecio, in the book, one of Oscar’s relatives. Acosta nimbly weaves threads of magic realism in his novel and the able translation makes the story come alive. The old-fashioned “once upon a time” narration dispenses with gimmicks (at least in the beginning) and makes for an arresting and page-turning read.

Acosta sets his story from the early 1800s and sprinkles peeks into the country’s history as he goes along. We get brief (very brief) glimpses into the war of independence in 1868; the USS Maine incident in Havana harbor (in 1898) all the way to more contemporary times. An occasional jab at Cuba’s political climate is thrown around: “An island the size of a sardine can’t govern itself, that one way or another it is dependent on the whale in order to thrive,” but Acosta doesn’t really stray too far from the script. Sometimes one wishes for a more intimate working of these political events into the story but perhaps Acosta’s point is precisely that political events often serve only as a backdrop against which the theater of life unfolds.

The end is intentionally ambiguous — one wonders whether it is meant to cast a shadow over the verity of the narrated events or to question the place of history in our lives. “My grandfather said I didn’t know what I was talking about, that for all its faults Cuba was much better today than it had been, that young people these days knew nothing about history and spent their lives complaining, not realizing how much worse things used to be,” Oscar says towards the end. It seems for all the talk of history, not much is easily remembered or its lessons at least, seem to be appropriately diluted, ready for easy consumption. It is perhaps true, Acosta seems to say in his compelling novel, that as Napoleon once said, history is but a set of lies people have agreed upon.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (January 14, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Carlos Acosta
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Cuba: Adios, Happy Homeland by Ana Menendez

Bibliography:

• Pig’s Foot (January 2014)

Nonfiction:

• No Way Home: A Dancer’s Journey from the Streets of Havana to the Stages of the World (2008)

Related:

• The Reluctant Dancer by Margaret Willis (2011)

“From the folds of her skirt she brought out a dull green change purse.  How much?

He told her. She pinched out the correct change and handed it to him.

As he filled the sack with fruit, the woman turned and gazed behind her.  Said: Look what the cat drug in.  Those two looking over here like that, you aren’t careful, they’ll come rob you.  Hooligan-looking. She sniffed.

After a moment he looked where she nodded.  Down the street, under the awning of the hardware store, two girls— raggedy, smudge-faced— stood conspiratorially, half turned toward each other.  When they saw Talmadge and the woman observing them, they turned their backs to them.  He handed the burlap sack to the woman, the bottom heavy and misshapen with fruit.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (DEC 22, 2013)

In this understated and emotionally raw novel of a family born as much from choice as from blood, debut novelist Amanda Coplin explores themes of love, loyalty, courage, compassion, revenge, and honor, as well as the lifelong, traumatic impact of both childhood abuse and loss.

The novel opens with orchardist William Talmadge, a tall, broad-shouldered and solitary man who is composed of the most steadfast moral fiber and potent vulnerability of almost any protagonist that I can recall in recent (new/contemporary) literature. After his father died in the silver mines of the Oregon Territory when Talmadge was nine, he came to this fertile valley at the foothills of the Cascade Mountains (Washington State) in 1857 with his mother and sister. Within the next eight years, he suffered from smallpox, his mother died of illness, and his sister later disappeared in the forest, never to return. This is Talmadge’s story, and the saga of his chosen family, borne from the blood of loss and abuse.

Two young pregnant teenagers, Della and Jane, enter Talmadge’s life in his middle-aged years. They steal fruit from him at market, where he sells the apricots, apples, and plums from his sweeping acreage of crops. A bit of a touch and go, cat and mouse game ensues, as they follow him home, hide, and emerge when they are hungry, only to scamper and scatter away again, staying close to the edges of his property. Talmadge gradually gains, if not Della and Jane’s trust (they have a harrowing history of ritual abuse), then a tentative acceptance, and they become inhabitants of the orchard, living alongside Talmadge. He becomes their loyal benefactor.

If I give any more of the plot progression, it will proceed into spoiler territory. The story bears its fruit gradually, almost meditatively, during the first two sections (135 or so pages). There are eight sections in all, but some are long and pensive, and some short, at times just a few pages. The middle sections compress the years into thumbnail sketches without losing its stirring effect on the reader. The story is told in a quiet and nearly oblique manner, yet without being detached. The overall effect is powerful, and it rumbles fiercely, and menacingly, at intervals, without open sentimentality. The characters evolve delicately, with contemplative subtlety.

“Through glances she had caught various features—his nose, the set of his shoulders, the striking color of his eyes. But he had one of those complicated faces that one had to consider at length to understand how emotion lay on it, to understand it at all. It was like a landscape: that wide and complicated, many-layered expanse.”

The land is essential to the story—the planting of seeds, the cultivation, and the harvest. The orchard is Talmadge’s lifeblood, and a ripe motif for the burgeoning love he has for the family that has germinated from the edges of his vast plantation. Nature and nurture merge, and the repository of grief yokes to the deep basin of humanity and from there, the kernels of love grow and reproduce.

At times, as I reflect on the ending, I am troubled by the author’s choices, but so goes the cycle of life in its order and perplexity.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 675 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (March 5, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Amanda Coplin
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another orchard book … The Orchard by Larry Watson

Bibliography:

• The Orchardist (2012)

“But there is no truth except truth in relation, and heavenly relation is composed of wheels in motion, tilting axes, turning dials; it is a clockwork orchestration that alters every minute, never repeating never still…We now look outward…we see the world as we wish to perfect it, and we imagine dwelling there.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (NOV 17, 2013)

Twelve men meet at the Crown Hotel in Hokitika, New Zealand, in January, 1866. A thirteenth, Walter Moody, an educated man from Edinburgh who has come here to find his fortune in gold, walks in. As it unfolds, the interlocking stories and shifting narrative perspectives of the twelve–now thirteen–men bring forth a mystery that all are trying to solve, including Walter Moody, who has just gotten off the Godspeed ship with secrets of his own that intertwine with the other men’s concerns.

This is not an important book. There is no magnificent theme, no moral thicket, no people to emancipate, no countries to defend, no subtext to unravel, and no sizable payoff. Its weightiness is physical, coming in at 832 pages. And yet, it is one of the most marvelous and poised books that I have read. Although I didn’t care for the meandering rambling books of Wilkie Collins, I am reminded here of his style, but Catton is so much more controlled, and possesses the modern day perspective in which to peer back.

I felt a warmth and a shiver at each passing chapter, set during the last days of the New Zealand gold rush. Catton hooked me in in this Victorian tale of a piratical captain; a Maori gemstone hunter; Chinese diggers (or “hatters”); the search for “colour” (gold); a cache of hidden gold; séances; opium; fraud; ruthless betrayal; infidelity; a politician; a prostitute; a Jewish newspaperman; a gaoler; shipping news; shady finance; a ghostly presence; a missing man; a dead man; and a spirited romance. And there’s more between Dunedin and Hokitika to titillate the adventurous reader.

Primarily, The Luminaries is an action-adventure, sprawling detective story, superbly plotted, where the Crown Hotel men try to solve it, while sharing secrets and shame of their own. There’s even a keen courtroom segment later in the story. And, there are crucial characters that are not gathered in the Crown that night who link everyone together. The prostitute and opium addict, Anna Wetherell, is nigh the center of this story, as she is coveted or loved or desired by all the townspeople.

The layout of the book is stellar: the spheres of the skies and its astrological charts. You don’t need to understand the principles and mathematics of astrology (I don’t), but it is evident that knowledge of this pseudoscience would add texture to the reading experience, as it provides the structure and frame of the book. The characters’ traits can be found in their individual sun signs (such as the duality of a Germini). The drawings of charts add to the mood, and the chapters get successively shorter after the long Crown chapter. The cover of the book illustrates the phases of the moon, from full moon to sliver, alluding to the waning narrative lengths as the story progresses.

“But onward also rolls the outer sphere–the boundless present, which contains the bounded past.”

Take note of the cast list at the beginning, which is quite helpful for the initial 200 or 300 pages. With so many vivid characters coming at you at once, it is difficult at first to absorb. However, as the pages sail (and they will, if this appeals to you), you won’t even need the names and professions. The story and its striking, almost theatrical players become gradually and permanently installed, thoroughly and unforgettably. From the scar on Captain Francis Carver’s cheek, to the widow’s garment on Anna Wetherell’s gaunt frame, the lively images and descriptions animate this boisterous, vibrant story.

Catton is a master storyteller; she combines this exacting 19th century style and narrator–and the “we” that embraces the reader inside the tale–with the faintest sly wink of contemporary perspective. Instead of the authorial voice sounding campy, stilted, and antiquated, there is a fresh whiff of nuanced canniness, a knowing Catton who uncorks the delectable Victorian past by looking at it from the postmodern future.

You will either be intoxicated by this big brawl of a book, or weighed down in its heft. If you are looking for something more than it is, then look no further than the art of reading. There’s no mystery to the men; Catton lays out their morals, scruples, weaknesses, and strengths at the outset. The women had a little poetic mystery to them, but in all, these were familiar players–she drew up stock 19th century characters, but livened them up, so that they leaped madly from the pages. There isn’t much to interrogate except your own anticipation. If you’ve read Colour, by Rose Tremain, don’t expect any similarities except the time, place, setting, and the sweat and grime of the diggers. Otherwise, the two books are alike as fish and feathers.

The stars shine bright as torches, or are veiled behind a mist, like the townspeople and story that behave under the various constellations. Catton’s impeccably plotted yarn invites us to dwell in this time and place. At times, I felt I mined the grand nuggets of the story, and at other times, it blew away like dust.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 230 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company; First Edition edition (October 15, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Eleanor Catton
EXTRAS:	2013 Man Booker Award Winner Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another big book set in New Zealand: The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

Bibliography:

• The Rehearsal (2010)
• The Luminaries (October 2013) 

“Alma Whittaker, born with the century, slid into our world on the fifth of January, 1800.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (Dec 5, 2013)

From the opening pages, it is evident that Gilbert can write with lyricism, confidence, and substance. I was afraid that her mass popularity would lead to a dumbed down book with pandering social/political agendas or telegraphed notions. I am thrilled to conclude that this was not the case. Gilbert is a superb writer who allows her main characters to spring forth as organically as the natural world that they live in. This is a book of well-considered people of the times, who are emblematic of daring and discerning ideas, as well as an absorbing story that will keep the pages flying. The 18th and 19th century comes to life, and botany keeps the composite parts anchored to the earth. It is a both beautiful and intermittently appalling story of humanity and nature.

The book begins with British ex-pat Henry Whittaker, a boy of humble origins, who, by the time he is an adult in the 19th century, turns himself into a captain of industry in the botanical and pharmaceutical industry, particularly quinine. As a boy, he pilfered from the Royal Botanical Kew Gardens and sold to others, and showed his mettle as an entrepreneur. The director, Sir Joseph Banks, eventually apprehended him. Whittaker’s penance was to be sent on faraway travels, in order to prove himself worthy and edify himself in the realm of plants.

When Whittaker returned, he made it his life’s work to eclipse Banks and become a wealthy self-made industrialist of the natural world. He got himself an educated Dutch wife, left Europe for good, and settled in Western Pennsylvania, where he built an elaborate estate that truly did rival the Kew Gardens, called White Acre. All alike envied his ostentatious mansion on the hill, and were impressed by his breathtaking, unparalleled gardens. He sired one daughter, Alma, and adopted another, Prudence. Whittaker became one of the richest men in North America, or anywhere. But, more important than riches, to him, was the power to command others, and the talent and skill to master your work. Education was the tool to that end. Therefore, his children received a scholarly education at home.

Henry’s prominence on the pages segues into his daughter’s, Alma. The beautiful Prudence becomes an outspoken abolitionist, while Alma grows into a scholarly, tall, large-boned, homely, and privately carnal woman who becomes the flourishing main character. I would list her as one of my favorite protagonists of contemporary times, as unforgettable as Teresita Urrea of The Hummingbird’s Daughter, although of polar sensibilities. Alma is so fleshed out that I can smell her, and every moment in her life is organically rendered. As she becomes her father’s daughter as a scientist, (but with a gentler disposition), the reader is taken ever further into her inner and outer journeys. She is not just a botanist and taxonomist, but in many ways, a philosopher, a noble thinker, with a sexual and sensual hunger.

Gilbert doesn’t portray Alma as flawless or unbelievable. Rather, Alma is a construct of her environment and her gifted mind. She is also metaphorically imprisoned by the life of a proper woman in the 19th century. However…

Alma’s portrait is the fruit of this elegantly written, lyrically cadenced, engrossing tale. Gilbert braids in the enigma of life from botany to the human body, and folds in science, mysticism, spirituality, psycho-sexuality, all in a vibrantly flowing historical novel. Some of the characters make a brief or lucid appearance, and then fade, but Alma grows more luminous with each passing chapter. A few sections focus on scientific philosophies and the question of creationism and evolution (the way a discussion would happen in the 1800’s), but it fits radiantly into this story. But, mostly, it is Alma who pollinates this ripe and exhilarating tale. I still see her bending over a leaf, or examining moss with a microscope, or hunched over her scholarly tomes and writing her books on the mysteries of plant life. Being at her father’s beck and call, but carving out a solitary but teeming life.

The title of the book refers that all life contains a divine code or print, and was put forth by a 16th century German cobbler and early botanist, Jacob Boehme, one rejected by the Whittakers, for the most part, as medieval nonsense. He had mystical visions about plants, and believed there was a divine code in “every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code.”
You can see it in a curling leaf, a nesting bird, and when the stamens of one plant stick it to its receptacle. Every unique living creature, according to Boehme, contains the eponymous title. Alma meets an orchid painter who embodies this belief, and who pulls her into the world of mysticism. As an explorer and thinker, she is compelled to understand this notion.

Alma’s professional and personal life leads her to contemplate the “struggle for existence.” As the reader follows Alma on her odyssey of the natural world and beyond, the wonder of life becomes ever transcendent–that “those who survived the world shaped it—even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.”

This exquisite novel feels like a gift to humanity. It has heart, soul, and earthiness. And Alma.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 407 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult; First Edition edition (October 1, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Elizabeth Gilbert
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Committed Pilgrims

Bibliography:

• Pilgrims (1997; 2007)
• Stern Men (2000; 2009)
• The Signature of All Things (October 2013)

Nonfiction:

• The Last American Man (2002)
• Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, Indonesia (2006)
• Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage (2010)

“On one occasion in the 1890s, Lord Charles Beresford, a well-known rake, let himself into what he believed was his mistress’s bedroom. With a lusty cry of ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo!’ he leapt into the bed – only to discover that it was occupied by the Bishop of Chester and his wife.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (OCT 14, 2011)

What would the world do without Bill Bryson? One simply wants to sit at his knee with a huge grin and listen interminably. I’m an irredeemable skinflint and get all my reading material from the library, but At Home is one book I would seriously like to buy for myself. Considering I have almost no books apart from reference books, my Complete Shakespeare and a Bible I once found in a discard pile somewhere, that’s saying quite a lot.

The volume is in essence a long and amiable discourse on the marvel that was the Victorian era. It’s loosely based around (and supposedly inspired by) the Victorian rectory Bryson lives in. The chapters have titles like: “The Hall,” “The Kitchen,” and so on. The theory is that “houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.” However, apart from in the early chapters (notably “The Hall”) there’s little talk about anything prior to the Victorians. It’s the speed of change and the immeasurable vigor with which so many Victorians pursued their eccentricities and interests that really fascinates Bryson, and he re-tells it at the top of his engaging best.

The downside of the book may perhaps be that it has little structure. It is a little like swimming through thick soup, but oh such good soup! It’s the perfect book for sitting companionably of an evening. The urge to exclaim “Listen to this one!” and regale anybody within earshot with the latest snippet of fascinating information Mr. Bryson has dredged out of history for you, probably occurs about once every fifteen minutes. Which, incidentally, is the perfect interval for this sort of activity: any less and it’s startling, any more and it gets annoying.

The best thing about it is that it’s simply so shockingly knowledgeable. The bibliography alone goes on for 25 pages of dense text, with a further note at the bottom: “for Notes and Sources, please go to www.billbryson.co.uk/athome .”

Despite this, there are a number of curious little niches which harbour the oddest throw-away statements. Like the one that claims the dining room really came about because of the advent of upholstery, with the Victorians not really wanting people smearing greasy chicken over their expensive sofas. What on earth were all those Medieval dining halls doing, then, one wonders briefly? Or the later Elizabethan private dining rooms? Oh Billy, one thinks – but it’s such a lovely idea that a specialised room should be invented because people couldn’t quite envisage a table napkin that one quite forgives it.

These little anomalies only seem to add to the charm: they’re like “Easter eggs” in a computer game. The vast majority of the time, one is overwhelmed with gratitude at the sheer volume of reading and dredging that has been done to winkle these pearls of Victoriana from dusty obscurity. They range from the obscure (why forks usually have three tines: actually it’s never quite explained but apparently people have experimented with other numbers and it’s never quite right) to the monumentally important (such as the discovery of the sources of cholera and scurvy). Electricity holds sway over a whole chapter in “The Fuse Box,” and seems to hold a particular fascination for Bryson, as the “characters” who feature here pop up throughout the book. Perhaps it is not surprising, as without electricity so much of further development would simply not have been possible.

I would recommend this unreservedly to anybody, but actively prescribe it if you are feeling glum. Perhaps that’s why I’d like it on my shelf permanently. It’s cheering for three reasons. The unquenchable amiable spirit it’s written in, along with the sheer love of language and words that beams through the pages are two of these reasons – but any Bryson fan will already be familiar with these. The third is that the book will immerse you entirely in the day-to-day reality of Being Victorian. Which includes carrying 40 bucket loads of hot water upstairs nightly for a bath, having to take clothes apart and re-stitch them together for the laundry, refrigerating food (if one were so lucky) with ice brought over from lakes in the States, and countless other inconveniences and checks to daily living that we would simply never consider possible. The writing is so engrossing one’s arms almost ache with the weight of the water-buckets… only to look up and find that: joy! One can just turn the hot water on instead. If you think you’re bogged down with a tedious job or an unrewarding existence or poor working conditions, just read this. You’ll be skipping in no time.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 491 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; Reprint edition (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bill Bryson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome by Alberto Angela

Bibliography:

• The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words (1984)
• The Palace under the Alps and Over 200 Other Unusual, Unspoiled, and Infrequently Visited Spots in 16 European Countries (1985)
• The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989)
• The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way (1990)
• Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe (1991)
• Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States (1994)
• Notes from a Small Island (1995)
• A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (1998)
• I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away (1999)
• In a Sunburned Country (2000)
• Bill Bryson’s African Diary (2002)
• Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words (2002)
• A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)
• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (2006)
• Shakespeare: The World as Stage (2007)
• Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors (2008)
• At Home: A Short History of Private Life (2010)
• One Summer: America, 1927 (October 2013)

“The circus arrives without warning.

No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers.  It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (SEP 13, 2011)

Illusion and reality intersect and overlap to reveal a luminous, mesmerizing character– Le Cirque des Rêves (The Circus of Dreams). As the sun is the center of the solar system, the Circus of Dreams is the central character of this enchanting tale. Like a magnetic field, Le Cirque des Rêves pulls in other characters like orbiting satellites around a bright star. This isn’t your childhood circus–rather, this is more in tune with Lewis Carroll or M.C. Escher–a surreal and hypnotic place of the imagination and spirit.

Le Cirque des Rêves is a dazzling venue of magical intensity and Tarot images, a story of dreams and desires. It is an invention that reflects the Jungian collective unconscious and personifies the archetypes of polarity–night/day, good/evil, life/death, safety/danger, among other symbols and experiences that have repeated themselves since ancient times. The manipulations of these images and forces speak to the core of the story.

At the end of the nineteenth century in London, two self-regarding necromancers arrange a duel, part of an ongoing contest reaching back through their long history. Prospero the Magician and “the man in the grey suit” agree to provide a worthy opponent each for this contest of illusion, a competition that is only partly visible to the reader’s eye. Prospero trains his daughter, Celia; the grey-suited man selects a fitting boy, Marco, from an orphanage. Sealed with a ring in a familiar ritual, the turf war proceeds.

When Marco and Celia become adults, the duel commences within the venue of the atmospheric, aromatic circus, which is open only at night, in colors black and white (and shades of silver). The duel and its setting is showcased in its artistry of conception, the beauty of its containment, and the mystery of its migration. Le Cirque des Rêves travels silently, invisibly, from country to country, unannounced. There’s a tent of stars, a room of sculpted ice, a pool of tears. The fireplace burns eternally with a white-hot blaze. The landscape of the duel’s setting is a phantasmagorical tour de force.

The cast is inseparable from Le Cirque des Rêves. Among others, they include the tattooed contortionist, Tsukiko, the twins, Poppet and Widget, (born on the dawn of the circus’ opening night), and the Tarot reader, Isobel. Marco is a chameleon-like magician and Celia is the Isis of alchemy. They mirror the archetypes of Jung’s collective unconscious–the shadow; the animus/anima; the hero; the mother; sacrifice/rebirth; the Self, and the wise old man.

The tarot readings, like the story’s progression, are dynamic components of character transformation, digging down to the layers of repressed memories and sublime intuition. ??Within this process of transformation, the individual characters of this story must journey through uncharted terrain like portals in the soul, proceeding toward a cosmic relationship with humanity. How to separate reality from illusion and arrive at the totality of the Self? What obstacles and pathologies must be overcome to achieve a kindred consciousness? Likewise, the duelists become lovers, complicating the stakes of the game–if you win, you lose.

A magnificent, spectral clock is commissioned from a renowned German clockmaker, a clock that is mystical and harlequin, dreamlike and figurative. It stands like an emissary at the gates of the circus, a timepiece of magical stratification, an emblem of temporal shifts. No patrons can enter until dusk, and all must be gone by dawn.

In Erin Morganstern’s enchanting first novel, illusion and reality are two sides of the same coin. Inspiration and imagination become tangible territory, a dream circus of the wakened mind, a magical mystery tour of the unconscious. This is a Fool’s (Hero’s) journey, an adventure for the immortal child and enduring lovers, to a star-filled tunnel and a silver sky. Step from bare grass to painted ground, eye the towering tents of black and white stripes. Enter.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1085 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Erin Morganstern
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers

Bibliography:

• The Night Circus (September 2011)