Tag: health

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.

Flora Johnston, The Paris Peacemakers (Allison & Busby 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203045222-the-paris-peacemakers?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=dSn1xdVGQq&rank=1

Two sisters, in different worlds, try to heal the wounds from WWII
1919 Europe is trying to heal, and so are two sisters, Corran and Stella. What does Corran’s specialty, the Greek and Latin classics she learned at Cambridge, even mean, now? Corran is going to Dieppe, to teach at a YMCA education centre for the troops.
Stella and her Irish friend Lily experience the spontaneous celebration outside Buckingham Palace, the crowd baying for King George to share in their joy. In the crowd they meet American soldiers.
Stella is in Paris, among ‘the chic and the shattered’, here to work as a typist for international peace. She wants to ‘get the years back’ that war has stolen from them all. Their dead brother Jack is a subject neither sister wants to acknowledge.
Corran’s fiancé Rob is a surgeon, clearing casualties in France. As well as catastrophic injuries, they face an outbreak of influenza.
The focus of this novel is both sad and uplifting. The damage and the desolation of war is well portrayed; we sense the characters striving to heave themselves and their world out of ruin. Even the Germans are helping.
The descriptions of grief for Jack are emotional, the descriptions of wounds and amputations harrowing. Rob’s work is not only physically demanding, it requires huge strength of character—the mission to regain ‘dignity and self-belief after all they’ve been through’. At clubs playing American music, people are dancing ‘with a frenzy that was surely only this side of fun’.
The parallels with the Odyssey are gorgeous and remind us of the relentless march of history.
I found courage in this story, the courage to create a new world out of a destroyed one. This may be a work of fiction, but we must never forget that all this really happened, as our world slides into relentless repeat.
This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.

Kenneth Sinclair and Gillian Paschkes-Bell, Vu (Pantolwen Press 2024)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vu-Kenneth-Sinclair/dp/1739362349/ref=sr_1_1?crid=21OSWPNK0M6WU&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.4hsIaNALbnWIRub4ElBoQBB3TZBOowzqDbHeChF0CWvEmgCPn-NzgQP4ICAHiR8GQcAb8z1ReHatZgdhvLSY4La2xBZBDxChK0Tlslu3rR3s6NLWeoyuPQiPX1liVyS01L5YsmWfEmKaX8Ku9GtFJ5JTgvUJXHFrobUhOBbMYsE7e5QO3UWQt70oFQmLeE4RuvFqsbJFO7ymT7Y4-cybEPeNLdF0xnkBZCWNabiq-a4.BDV1KirwDJhYymmC5_yYyRWVaAzl9xD9CNFzDUqRBg4&dib_tag=se&keywords=Vu+sinclair&qid=1755202331&s=books&sprefix=vu+sinclai%2Cstripbooks%2C628&sr=1-1

To go back in time and tell 1001 stories to Scheherazade. What storyteller wouldn’t want that on their resumé?

Gabriel is time-, or is it dream-travelled, ‘summoned’ to the princess, who inhabits a palace out of time and place.

He tells her of the ‘black hulls of the Greeks’ bound for Troy, a star shining over Bethlehem, Chuang Tzu painting a crab, Taliesin speaking bardic riddles, Abelard and Héloïse continuing their chaste love, the corpse of Ghengis Khan carried across the desolate steppes, Marco Polo following the silk route, Boccaccio writing Decameron.

The princess sometimes joins in the raccontage: the philosopher Averroes discussing eternity with the Almohad prince, perfume ‘drifting over the rose gardens of Shiraz’, Mansa Musa carrying gold to Mecca on a hundred camels.

They take each other on a magic carpet ride, plucking up all the beauties history has to offer.

I’ve never seen a book like this. The words are so beautiful, so image-rich, a cornucopia for the senses, they are almost poetry, gorgeous metaphor-filled erudite references to literary and artistic wonders. No chapter is one complete story, nor the complete story of one night with the princess, but rather a tangle of images—like dreams. Every paragraph is a jewel, an ‘iridescent text that causes others… to quiver a little’. They flit like butterflies, never quite anchored, like Japanese tanka court poetry, little bubbles linked not so much by narrative but by theme or emotive effect.

Reading 280 pages with no plot structure and ‘almost no subject… only form, only style’ can be exhausting, but there is some thematic succession to the stories, and there are fleeting moments between Gabriel and the princess.

A peacock screams, the princess turns her ring, birds fly through, and history begins a new day.

This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.

em.thompson, The Curious Case of The Prawnographic Nibbles (Kindle 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/220810951-the-curious-case-of-the-prawnographic-nibbles?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=2bh5v5kCbN&rank=1

‘It was a day to forget that Heather Prendergast would remember till her dying day, if not longer.’
After a swanabout to the Cannes Film Festival with her celebrity aunt, which mostly involved shopping—and absolutely no revising—Heather Prendergast is ill-prepared for her exams at Merton Police College. Failure is not an option if she is to achieve her lifeheld dream of becoming ‘Prendergast of the Yard’. But why study? She can just learn her detecting from her illustrated Sherlock Holmes almanac.
In her absence, someone has given Principal Pratley a video of his wife bonking Professor Morrison, and there has been an incident, resulting in hospitalisation as well as disgrace.
On the way in to assembly, snotty classmate Daisy Miller (‘bleachblonde hair, beachball breasts, a bowlingball bum… an incongruous rhinoplastic nose and teapot ears’) insults Heather’s Cannes designer-wear by spilling her cherrycola on her.
Then the new principal insults her designer coat and sends her to help Debbie Smith in the campus kitchen. And thus begins a hilarious caper.
This contribution to the Prendergast of the Yard canon features Thompson’s signature brilliant wordplay. He invents words at will (equilibriumise her blood sugar levels, disacidify her discombobulation, uncarrier-bagging, whistlestop cleanathon, unscrewtopped, chimpanzoo, phlebotomised) and turns metaphors on their heads in clever ways.
His characters are clowns: Prendergast, who takes herself sooo seriously and is always crazily dressed for any occasion; filthy rich and famous Aunt Elizabeth, who is always ready with some zany folk wisdom. Their madcap capers are reminiscent of Wodehouse or Tom Sharpe.
Yet there is always a serious plot, and a satisfying conclusion where the baddies get what’s coming to them.
Another hilarious Prendergast of the Yard novella.

Charles Paul Collins, The Remembering: Of Leather and Stone (Griffon House Media 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/220270639-the-remembering?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=fSp510crf1&rank=1

When his mother is buried, the author discovers a treasure in the attic—his ancestors’ private journals, detailing their origins in the old country, their journeys to America, their lives and families. If we only knew how much our grandchildren would treasure such a thing, we would all do this.
This is a family saga or genealogy—a ‘fact-based fictional account’. The tale is told in first person, as if from the pen of Cornelius Collins. In Part II, son Michael James picks up the pen. Then the other side of the family’s tale is told, stonecutter Giuseppe Ambrosini.
Cornelius’s odyssey begins with An Gorta Mór—the Irish Potato Famine, one of the worst tragedies in human history. Collins’ descriptions of his ancestors’ sufferings and the horrendous ‘coffin ships’ are harrowing.
I was moved by Cornelius’ admission that the famine was so hard on him that his mind had forgotten everything that happened in his life before it.
Though the journey on the ‘coffin ship’ is terrible, immigrants in those days were treated better than they are now. On arrival in Milford, Massachusetts, bootmaking capital of America, Cornelius is immediately given food, shelter and a job as a cordwainer (bootmaker), a sense of pride in himself. He marries, starts a family and becomes a US citizen.
I share the author’s passion for genealogy research. The trouble with genealogies in the bookshop or Amazon, however, is they are of little interest outside your grandchildren and your cousins. Unless someone in your family is a celebrity or a serial killer, your target readership is limited. There needs to be something in your family’s history that makes readers think ‘hey, that relates to me’. ‘These people lived here, did that and had these children’ is not enough of a story.
Collins tells the story within the bigger human history in which his ancestors were players, bringing it home to his protagonists by quoting articles from the Milford Journal and the Framington Star of the time. We also learn in detail the processes of bootmaking and stonecutting.
The Collins and Ambrosini families go through the Civil War, the abolition of slavery, the establishment of the Irish Republic, a visit from PT Barnum’s circus, the Great Depression, the misappropriation of the West from the native Americans, the invention of the telephone, votes for women, the sinking of the Titanic and WWI. Every year at Samhain (now Halloween) they hold a Cuimhneamh—‘the Remembering’—ceremony of ‘how it was with us in our time’.
At some point, it becomes more of a listing of American news events than a family saga. It is also much too long.
The ‘poor, tired, huddled masses’ who braved all these hardships and risks to create a better life in the New World, theirs is a big story, one for all of us.