Tag: chatgpt

Monica Granlove, The Electrician and the Seamstress (Kindle 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/214349085-the-electrician-and-the-seamstress?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=3jB7tX14xI&rank=1

Nazi-era Romeo-and-Juliet family saga

1959 Frankfurt. Karla and Bruno are being interviewed about their lives by a history professor at Goethe University. They had travelled nine hours from their home in Kiel. Germany was now divided, East and West, and the whole country, not only the Arnolds, was in recovery from the traumas of two wars.
Karla’s story begins in 1928, her mother’s funeral during the depths of winter. Her father slipping into incompetence, the burden of the household falls upon Karla. Her parents had tried to shield the children from any news about the war. Karla had devoted her energies to the piano; now her dreams of going to university are shattered. Her father and sister support the National Socialists. Her father wants her to marry the Nazi dentist mayor Drechsler. Instead he befriends her sister Erna.

Bruno and his brother Karl work on the ships that Karla’s father designed. He meets Karla as they together rescue a kitten from under a truck. He is a great storyteller. His Jewish friends Eli and Ilse are particularly affected by the political situation. People are being taken to ‘re-education camps’. Bruno and Karla marry amid a sea of black uniforms and swastika armbands, and they try to save Eli and Ilse and protect their own children from the escalating persecution. Bruno is drafted into Hitler’s infantry and makes an arduous escape. Karla is roped into service, too.
This Nazi-era family saga is personal and heartfelt and at the same time well-researched. We discover in the Epilogue that it was based on the true story of Granlove’s grandparents. How wonderful that they had an author granddaughter to record their remarkable story for posterity.
At about the ¾ mark, we lose Karla’s POV for many chapters, serving to accentuate Bruno’s painful separation from his family, which so many people experienced during this war. The story of the whole neighbourhood listening to Karla’s piano playing the evening before they evacuated from Kiel is so moving. As is Bruno’s panic attack while queuing for the toilet.
I could have done without the introduction on WWI and how it affected the media. We already knew that.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1912)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40425.Tarzan_of_the_Apes?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_18

The idea of the ‘noble savage’ son of Viscount Greystoke both reflects British colonial perspectives of Africans and challenges them. The image of Tarzan swinging through the jungle on grapevines yodelling ‘Aayahyayahaah’ has appealed to generations of children.
Tarzan grows up in the jungle, raised by apes, but his discovery of his dead parents’ cabin leads him to struggle with his identity—is he a savage man? or a noble ape? From books and letters found there, he examines the ‘little bugs’ on the pages and teaches himself to read.
He kills the chief Kerchak and becomes King of the Apes, yet his superior intelligence distances him from them.
He falls in love with Jane, a thoroughly civilised white woman, whom he saves from peril. She, too, is smitten. ‘Beast?’ she wonders of the ape-man. ‘Then God make me a beast, for man or beast, I am yours.’
The passages devoted to Tarzan and Jane discovering each other are beautiful, but I was disappointed nowhere to see the line, ‘Me Tarzan; you Jane’.
He searches for many chapters to reunite with Jane, only to discover she is engaged to the cousin who has usurped his viscountship.
He proves his ‘racial superiority’ by treating Jane in a gentlemanly manner, said to be a ‘hallmark of his aristocratic birth’, though he has never been taught this behaviour, and by his revulsion to cannibalism and refusal to eat an African man he has killed. We have to quell our own revulsion at Burrough’s stereotypical portrayal of black Africans, his racist theme of the triumph of white Western civilisation and his sexist helpless females.
The structure of the novel reflects its origin in 1912 as a magazine sequel, each chapter telling another of Tarzan’s escapades and his relations with his ape family, the ‘blacks’—cannibalistic hunters living nearby—and the white visitors.
Tarzan’s evolution toward acculturation is lightning fast, more rapid than would be credible, and I believe Burroughs could have done a whole lot more with the beast-or-man/gentleman-or-savage theme.

em.thompson, The Twist in the Tale (Kindle 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217108899-the-twist-in-the-tale

George Aarbuthnot parks his Bentley next to the moat; he is early for luncheon chez his client, author WC Lumin, at Stoat Hall. Chef/wife Edith Lumin is cooking a wild boar they’d caught rampaging on the estate, with bilberry syllabub for pudding.
The luncheon guests, all with hilarious Dickensian names, have been instructed to write a short story, they are told at first, for their host to rip off. The true purpose of the exercise is more sinister.
Around the table are: Hermione Lumin—’scrumptious eye candy’, Reverend DeMoncey—who organised the Mission for Fallen Gentleladies minibus, Edith Lumin—in a bloodstained butcher’s apron, Sherriden Slipshod—bohemian publisher, Spencer Lumin—pinstripe suited barrister with sunken cheeks, and Felicity Lumin DeMoncey—’knee-tremblingly beguiling’.
Thompson’s distinctive style and clever wordplay is in evidence. With invented words: (minibusphobia, echoic expanse) and alliterations: (mishmash of misconceived mythology, gut-gurgling gulp). A character is ‘like the lovechild of a hobbit and a bull mastiff grim’; a setting is ‘a blot on the landscape in the remotest wilds of deepest nowhere’.
Despite all the punning and joking around, the plot is substantial, with an unexpected twist at the end.
This novella is an absolute joy.

D. H. Morris, The Girl of Many Crowns (New Classics Publishing 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217336977-the-girl-of-many-crowns?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=O7P2s3pQTW&rank=1

A saga of the royal families of pre-Norman Francia and Brittania

Baldwin ‘Iron Arm’ of Flanders is on his way to Senlis to enter the service of Charles ‘the Bald’, king of the western Franks. Seneschal Gauzlin has a special assignment for him.
Baldwin becomes arms master to Prince Louis, whom the king will place as ruler of Neustria. In the process he catches the eye of Princess Judith, and he feasts at the king’s table. He makes the acquaintance of the scholar John Scotus.
Major worries of the rulers at the time were the Pestilence and the Danes, and marriage alliances of their princes and princesses were another. Judith marries King Aethelwulf of Wessex. She teaches Prince Alfred to read. The Franks teach the Wessex men the tradition of kings’ cakes, and the English teach them wassailing.
Aethelwulf and his son Alfred arrive, returned from their pilgrimage to Rome, and hear the news that Alfred’s older brother Aethelbald has usurped the throne of Wessex, and his brother Louis the German threatens Charles’ reign. We see the constant shifting of land borders as warring brothers fight over their patrimony, and incursions of Vikings further disrupt the unity.
After two unhappy marriages, to king Aethelwulf, then his son Aethelbald, Judith, age 17, chooses for herself, Count Baldwin, relinquishing her crowns, and they plot a daring elopement. Louis and Charles also make their own choice of bride.
There is more dirty laundry in the royal family. Lothar, king of Lotharingia, seeks a divorce from his queen Theutberga, accusing her of incest with her brother, a trick to be used again in the future by Henry VIII.
There is not really any one protagonist. We begin with Count Baldwin, then the story is carried by other POV characters—Judith, Archbishop Hincmar, the sons of Charles the Bald—only returning to Baldwin halfway through.
The writing style is straightforward. The major events and personages seem to be roughly in keeping with history, and the discussions between the king and his advisors about politics seem authentic. We see famous names from history—Charles the Bald, Judith of Flanders, Aethelwulf of Wessex—become real people.
Baldwin Iron Arm was my 33rd great-grandfather.

Steve A. Trotter, The Coming of the Yirraalii (Magpie Publishers 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/221570842-the-coming-of-the-yirraalii?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_27

The prologue is spooky, like the misty forests of the Dreamtime.
A battle is pending between the aboriginal Nyangbal mob and the Rain Forest mob. The issue is that a man has taken a bride who had been betrothed to another. Men of a certain mob are expected to marry women from another certain mob and no other.
Balagaan likes Gawngan, but she is betrothed to Dangan. Balagaan won’t see her again until the festival in two years’ time. But he is caught kissing her good-bye and as punishment is sent to live with the Red Soil mob for five years.
The tribes move from place to place, following the seasonal food supply, and they carefully husband their environment.
At the Games, Balagaan comes head to head with Dangan, competing to claim Gawngan as wife. A Clever Man’s prophecy and a magpie, his totem, give him strength.
Returning from a kangaroo hunt, the Nyangbal mob discovers white-skinned newcomers—Yirraalii—have invaded their land. The Yirraalii don’t understand the lore, and their violence disrupts the balanced society and the ecosystem. And Dangan is out for revenge.
The setting and subject matter are exotic, but I wish they had been portrayed more clearly at the beginning. I could have used footnotes or a glossary. After I got into it, I was fascinated. It is set in Bundjalung, on the eastern coast of Australia. The invasion of the white men and their ‘thunder sticks’ and their ‘canoes with wings’ give us a clue as to the date.
The culture is unfamiliar to a non-Australian, and right from the first there are multiple unfamiliar names and foreign words—bagaas, nulla-nullas, woomera, coolamons, janagan, dubay. The extensive use of foreign words brings the camera angle right down to the characters’ level, but it’s hard to get into, as we don’t know whether the names referred to are people, titles, or groups of people. And we lose track of who is a member of which mob. This all happens before we understand who are the main protagonists. This may not be an issue for readers who are more familiar with aboriginal culture, but I found it confusing.
The novel seems to have been retitled Savages.

This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.