Category: Historical Fiction

Exile and Identity

kim.harwanko

Michelle Cameron’s Babylon: A Novel of Jewish Captivity is a compelling historical fiction that delves into the Judean exile in Babylon during the 6th century BCE. The narrative follows Sarah, a young Judean woman whose life is irrevocably altered when Nebuchadnezzar’s army conquers Jerusalem, leading to her enslavement and forced march to Babylon. The novel spans multiple generations, exploring the challenges Sarah and her descendants face in preserving their faith and identity amidst a foreign culture.

Cameron’s meticulous research brings to life the ancient world, vividly depicting the opulence of Babylonian society and the complexities of palace intrigues. The characters are richly developed, each grappling with themes of assimilation, faith, and resilience. The portrayal of Sarah’s son, Uri, as a scribe transcribing foundational stories of the Hebrew faith, adds depth to the narrative, highlighting the importance of storytelling in cultural preservation.

Critics have lauded the novel for its immersive storytelling and historical accuracy. The Historical Novel Society describes it as a “beautifully crafted masterpiece” that offers a Judean perspective on exile, enriched with detailed descriptions of ancient customs and politics.

Our book club enjoyed this novel. First, the story is truly captivating. You find hours have gone by and you’ve forgetten to get dinner ready. We talked about Sarah’s struggle to maintain her faith and the broader challenges of exile and assimilation. We talked about what choices we’d make if we were in Sarah’s situation. And then we discussed how we’d might try to preserve our cultural traditions and adapt to a foreign society. We certainly had a lively discussion.

Rating: 8.5

Being Significant or Not

kim.harwanko

Wow! Never pictured the 1940’s New York City and the theater crowd quite like Elizabeth Gilbert does in her latest, City of Girls.

We are introduced to Vivian Morris, who at the age of 19 flunks out of Vassar and is sent to live with her aunt (Peg) who owns a run-down theater troupe in New York City called the Lily Playhouse.  The uptight proper life Vivian is used to peels away as she enjoys a freedom, she never thought was possible.  The first half of the book is Vivian’s coming of age – and what a time she had. But remember this is long before the social upheaval of the free-love 1960’s.

Vivian palled around with Celia, the most beautiful of the showgirls, who taught her everything she needed to know about getting men to buy them dinner and drinks and about sex.  They partied their way through the Stork Club and other popular venues, drank expensive champagne and had lots of sex. 

At one point there is a scene that grows dark. Celia is quite aware of what is happening and gets Vivian out of the way. To me it foreshadowed the events to come. Sex is never quite so free.

By the time Aunt Peg’s friend, Edna Parker Watson, and her much-younger husband come to stay, Vivian and Celia are out-on-the-town every night.  Edna and Peg decide to put on a show and Peg asks her ex-husband to leave Hollywood and write the play.  

The playhouse is brought back to life and the play is a huge success.  And Vivian has found a way to be involved.  She is an amazing seamstress.  She begins to date the leading man in the play and seems to settle down a bit.

Naturally, it all comes crashing down. And Vivian is at the center of it. Edna Parker Watson gives one of the best put-downs I have ever read. 

The second half of the book loses its intense tension but kept us riveted because we cared about Vivian and wanted her to be okay.

We all loved the book.  We read a lot of books set in the 1940s but usually around the war, so it was nice to imagine what the City was like at the time and also learning about the small theaters that use to dot the City.

Our book club talked about Vivian’s sexuality and the price she paid when it got out of control.  We talked about Edna Parker Watson, her reaction and about her husband.  We loved Aunt Peg.  Don’t we all want mothers like that?  Vivian’s mother was cold, but Aunt Peg gave Vivian the warm and love she needed.

We talked about the second half of the book and its difference from the first half. And the man she finally fell in love with.

Definitely a book club pick. Enjoy the ride.

Rating: 8.0

The Aftermath of War

kim.harwanko

Ever hear of Night Witches? Not the fictional kind. Real women doing unbelievable things. In WWII they were Russian fighter pilots and bombers. Who “…flew in outdated Polikarpov U-2s a cloth-and-plywood biplane with open-cockpits, achingly slow and highly flammable – no radio, parachute or brakes.”

Yup, that alone is worth the read. And we love these golden historical nuggets and The Huntress has plenty of them.

The characters in this wonderful book are instantly relatable. But the power of the story comes from Nina Borisovna, a night witch, and Die Jägerin, the Huntress.

Nina grew up desperately poor with an alcohol-infused maniac for a father in a remote place in northern Siberia. She escaped her father to become a pilot, normally not an easy task for a woman, but because of the war she was able to join the Night Witches, training first as a bombardier and later a pilot.

The Huntress grew up privileged in comparison to Nina, but that affluence didn’t stop her from actively and willingly lending her talents for hunting by tracking down and killing people for the glory of the Nazi-crazed killing machine. She feds six starving children then killed them.

Nina and the Huntress crossed paths at Lake Rusalka in Poland culminating in a deadly event.  Nina barely escaped and eventually teamed up with Ian Graham and Tony Rodomovsky after the war to find this deadly predator.

The novel crisscrosses time and point-of-view to bring layers of details and wonderful tension as the novel’s setting moves to Boston after the war and to the McBride family.  Jordan McBride, a 17-year-old novice photographer helps her father, Dan, with his antique business. Dan meets and marries Anneliese Weber, a war refugee.  During the small wedding, Jordan finds a swastika medal hidden in the bridal bouquet. Hmmm…what could that mean?

Ian Graham and Tony Rodomovsky are looking for justice.  Ian, a journalist and Tony, a solider and linguist, passionately hunt down war criminals for there own personal reasons.  Nina is hell-bent on revenge.

As a book club we enjoyed this novel. We learned things about the war that we didn’t previously know. We had already read The Nightingale and wondered if this would be more of the same.  But both books are quite different and both great reads.

We talked about revenge and justice. How emotion rules revenge and how justice needs to be impartial. And we talked about survivaling war and its aftermath.

Definitely a good book for book clubs.

Rating: 8.5

Photo Credit: Elinor Florence; www.elinorflorence.com

Stealing Babies

kim.harwanko

Throughout history children have often been abused and killed at the hands of adults who should be there to help and support them. This novel brings us back to the 1930’s through the present following a fictional family and the horrific historical incidents surrounding an orphanage. Evil is interlaced with goodness as we see this gracefully told story unfold.

Lisa Wingate takes us back to 1939 on the Mississippi River in “Before We Were Yours.” Parents, Queenie and Briny have five children.  Queenie is pregnant with twins and can’t deliver the babies with a midwife.  Briny makes the decision to leave with Queenie to take her to a hospital.  What happens after that is such a miscarriage of justice that it’s hard to imagine that this actually happened to children in America. 

Wingate drew from the infamous Georgia Tann and her wretched Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis.

Queenie and Briny’s high-spirited children left on a boat in the Mississippi River while their parents leave for the hospital. They are quite poor without any resources. Rill, Camiella, Lark, Fern and Gabion are taken by the police and put into the Tennessee Children’s Home. 

Fast forward to the present, Avery Stafford, a young lawyer, working with her father’s senatorial campaign has a chance encounter with May Crandall at a nursing home, her father happens to be speaking at.  This meeting set into motion a chain of events that would change all their lives forever.

This book has to be read without a lot of information given out beforehand. Wingate wrote a story with a lot of small moments that all become one large one and the reader should see it unfold the way it’s supposed to.

Our book club loved this book.  It’s quite sad at parts, and we may have glossed over a few things we felt too bad about. The book manages to end on a high note, but it stayed with me for days. I can’t fathom hurting a child.  It goes so against everything I believe in.

We talked about the children and the how their lives unfolded. Also, about the other children that no one seems to know about. So many of them were never found. We talked about motherhood and what that really means – biological and adoptive.

Every book club should read this book.

(There are quite a few non-fiction books on the subject that Wingate offers at the end of her novel if you want to continue reading on this subject.)

Enjoy.

Rating: 9 fffffffff

The Nightingale

kim.harwanko

What makes a person a hero? Do they jump right into a situation or evaluate and make a conscious choice to help others?

In “The Nightingale,” by Kristin Hannah, two sisters face World War II in Nazi-occupied France, with very different ideas of how to make it through the war. The oldest sister, Vianne is married with a young daughter, Sophie, when her husband leaves to fight against Germany. Isabelle, the younger sister, is sent to live with Vianne. They both view their circumstances differently – one wants to fight, the other to endure without making waves.

Throughout the story, both sisters make choices that send them on a collision course with the Nazis. Vianne believes that everything will be fine as long as she just does what she’s asked. However, when a Nazi officer is stationed at her home, her belief that she can simply follow orders starts to crumble as she witnesses the wrongs and eventually the atrocities of her captors. She does what she can to insure the welfare of her daughter and their home. Vianne slowly becomes a hero out of necessity and moral conviction.

(more…)

Life in a Fishbowl

kim.harwanko

Imagine being so adored that you can’t go anywhere, think Princess Diana times two.  Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight in 1927 across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis made him a hero, forever changing his life. But the world’s idolization had a cost to him and his family.  Scrutinized at every level, the Lindberghs were revered at times and maligned at others. Melanie Benjamin’s novel “The Aviator’s Wife,” offers a chance to look inside the fishbowl of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s life.

The novel begins with Charles Lindbergh’s last flight home to Maui.  He is dying and wants to be buried at their Hawaiian home. Anne, his wife of 45 years, looks back over their relationship trying to find some comfort and understanding. Why Charles? Why?

Anne grieves, loves, shoulders the weight of her family and navigates the best she can in a male-dominated world.  Lindbergh was a total control freak!  Anne did everything she could to appease him.  Almost sounds like an old country western song, and in a way maybe it was. The oddness of the relationship began from the first date with his coolness and calculation and her utter amazement that someone like him would even look at her. Throughout the story, Ann struggled with her self-esteem never thinking much of herself.  Her initial detachment from their first-born child, Charley, in his first few months of his life was painful to read knowing that he would be kidnapped and die so young. Anne’s guilt was palpable, and she refocused her attention away from Lindbergh and to her children as her family grew. (more…)

The Secret Wife

kim.harwanko

The great mystery of one of the Romanov heirs surviving the brutal execution at the hands of the Bolsheviks on July 16, 1918 has captivated many over the years.  Even Disney made a movie in 1997 with its own twist on the story. Several women claiming to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia have all been proven to be imposters since the advent of DNA analysis, even Anna Anderson.

Anderson was institutionalized in 1920 after a suicide attempt, and didn’t speak for a few years.  When she did start talking, she told people she was Anastasia.  Supporters helped her financially and a cousin or two of the Romanovs believed her.  However, Olga Alexandrovna, Nicholas II’s sister, didn’t believe Anderson was Anastasia said, “My telling the truth does not help in the least, because the public simply wants to believe in the mystery.”  She was right, no matter what the truth.

Gill Paul has taken this piece of history and devised an alternative story with a dual narrative plot, one taking place in 1914 and the other in 2016.

In 1914, Dmitri Malama, a Russian soldier, met Grand Duchess Tatiana, while he was convalescing from an injury at Tsarskoe Selo. The two fell in love.

In 2016, Kitty Fisher finds out her husband was having an affair and leaves England for a cabin left to her by her great-grandfather. 

What could these two-story lines have in common?  Plenty.

Historical fictions novels have that rare quality of giving the reader a glimpse into a different time, but with today’s understandings and nuances.  I love reading them. 

In the beginning of the novel, the tension of the 1914 narrative was tempered by the future story.  We hoped beyond hope that the ever-increasing danger that the Romanov family face will be different than we know it to be.  As the inevitable happens, the tension in the future story starts to increase. 

Paul stayed close to the facts regarding the deaths of the Romanov family and their burials, with the one obvious exception, as well as many other aspects.

We enjoyed reading this book in book club.  The members that love history talked about the Romanovs and the Anastasia imposters as well as the revolution.  We also talked about the narrative being split between 1914 and 2016.  The novel “Sarah’s Key,” also had a dual narrative and we absolutely loved that book. (See review to the right.)

 Rating: 8

 

 

 

Scandal the Great Equalizer of the Rich and Powerful

kim.harwanko

In a recent writing workshop, a fellow writer told me about a book she just finished, “The Swans of Fifth Avenue,” by Melanie Benjamin.  She thought my book club would like it.

I had found Truman Capote rather odd when I saw him on talk shows in the mid-1970’s.  I was only a teenager and interested in the usual teen stuff and certainly not interested in a “personality.” But a few years later during my true crime genre phase I read “In Cold Blood.”  Personality or not, Capote’s novel captivated me.

“The Swans of Fifth Avenue,” is a historical fiction involving Capote and the ladies of New York’s Fifth Avenue – his Swans. During the 1960’s and 1970’s Capote delighted them with his wit and charm, moving among them with ease, as one of their own.

Babe Paley and her wealthy friends adhered to traditional lifestyles established by their mothers and high society during the turbulent 1960’s. There is a scene where Babe rubs her husband’s feet when he comes home from work, a scene repeated every day.  Imagine that. She was his personal butler – filling every need.  But where was the love?

Enter Truman Capote.  He shook up their lives, made Babe and the other Swans laugh with his quick wit and social satire.  He paid attention to them, praised them, and gossiped with them like teenagers.  He made them feel important – at least for a while. (more…)

March 2016 Book Club

kim.harwanko

Book and Wine glassWe read “All the Light We Cannot See,” by Anthony Doerr for our February’s book club.  It was the Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction for 2015.

Not everyone in our book club likes to read novels set in war time, they are inherently sad and violent, but this book isn’t too graphic.

Survivors are not often inclined to talk about their experiences, some only give a condensed version when asked. I have heard a few brief stories of what the war was like.  My in-laws walked from the Ukraine into Germany and were placed in a camp during World War II.  They were more afraid of the Russians than the Germans.  On the arduous walk my mother-in-law, a young girl at the time, got sick with tuberculosis.  A German woman took her in and nursed her back to health.  Imagine what that must have been like.  Refugees struggling for food and water, walking endlessly amidst bombs and soldiers not knowing who was friendly or foe.

Doerr’s blind protagonist, Marie-Laure, had to walk with her father from Paris to Saint-Malo. They slept in fields or bombed-out buildings and ate scraps of food not knowing what they would find when they reached their destination. You felt their fear and apprehension.

How do you handle the chaos of war?  What would you do to survive? Where’s your line between good and evil? The book will provide plenty of discussions for book clubs.

Our book club liked the book and recommends it. See my complete review under Reviews on our site.

 

An Appetite for Violets

kim.harwanko

February’s book club – “An Appetite for Violets,” by Martine Bailey

Group selfie. Thought to take it after Jean had left.
Group selfie. Thought to take it after Jean had left.

 

 

Still talking about our crazy lives at the end of another wonderful book club.

I couldn’t help but look down at my food and give thanks that I didn’t have to eat any of the recipes in the beginning of each chapter in this month’s book club book “An Appetite for Violets.”   I don’t think they had any Cosmos back then either.

The book, however, was very good.

 

bfbc appetite for violets