Alice Cary

NonfictionBiographyAnimals

The Ride of Her Life

Review by Alice Cary

Road trip sagas can be unforgettable, whether it’s Jack Kerouac crossing the country in On the Road or Cheryl Strayed hitting the trail in Wild. That’s definitely the case with Annie Wilkins, a 63-year-old widow from Maine who made a bold decision when life handed her way too many lemons. In 1954, she suddenly found herself with no money, home or family, and her doctor had just told her she had only two years to live. 

Determined not to become a charity case, Wilkins remembered that her mother had always dreamed of saddling a horse and heading to California to see the Pacific Ocean. So, improbable as this sounds, that’s what Wilkins decided to do—never mind the fact that she had no horse and hadn’t even sat on one in at least 30 years. Elizabeth Letts tells Wilkins’ amazing story in The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last-Chance Journey Across America, drawing on Wilkins’ extensive diaries, postcards and more.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Elizabeth Letts discovered the freedom of the open road—in the midst of lockdown.

Wilkins is an extraordinary woman with an abundance of grit and wit—imagine Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, or Frances McDormand’s character in Nomadland. She managed to buy a horse named Tarzan and set out with her beloved mutt, Depeche Toi—French for “hurry up,” which is something this unusual trio certainly couldn’t do. Wilkins wore layers of men’s clothing, had no map or flashlight, and only kept about 32 bucks in her pocket. Undaunted, she wrote in her diary, “I go forth as a tramp of fate among strangers.”

Wilkins was repeatedly hospitalized and encountered all sorts of weather and hardships, but she never gave up. Sometimes she slept in stables with Tarzan, and she often spent nights in jail cells—a somewhat common occurrence for thrifty travelers at the time. However, she also became famous as reporters shared her story, and many communities and households began to excitedly await her arrival. They showed her endless hospitality, putting her up in their homes and sometimes in fancy hotels. As Letts writes, “That was when Annie realized she wasn’t just riding for herself—she could carry other people’s hopes and dreams along with her.”

This is a feel-good story in every way, and Letts keeps the momentum lively, sprinkling in interesting historical tidbits that enrich the drama. The Ride of Her Life is an altogether quirky, inspiring journey that’s not to be missed.

This is a feel-good story in every way, and Elizabeth Letts keeps the momentum lively, sprinkling in interesting historical tidbits that enrich the drama.
Children's & YAPicture Book

And I Paint It

Review by Alice Cary

There’s hardly a more intriguing or renowned family of creatives than the Wyeths. Patriarch N.C. Wyeth was a painter and illustrator who, with his wife, raised five talented children in their famed home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Henriette, Carolyn and Andrew all followed in their father’s artistic footsteps, while Ann became a composer and Nathaniel an engineer and inventor.

Writer Beth Kephart invites readers into the Wyeth family’s busy life, depicting an imaginary day narrated by young Henriette. With paint box, easel and canvas in hand, Henriette eagerly follows her father on a ramble through the countryside to paint the sprawling landscape. Along the way, they pass the other Wyeth children, each busy in their own little world, and Henriette ponders Pa’s advice to “awaken into your dreams.” When Henriette and Pa reach an open meadow, they set up their easels and, in a wonderful spread, begin to paint side by side.

And I Paint It: Henriette Wyeth’s World is a sensitive, satisfying portrayal of an adoring daughter spending time with her father. It’s also an inspiring glimpse into the careful cultivation and blossoming of a child’s creative spirit. Kephart’s writing is full of marvelously specific detail, from “the slosh of the creek” to “the green growing into the cap of a strawberry” to Pa’s coat, which “smells like apple cores and packing moss and turpentine.”

The text echoes with an unspoken sense of the past that’s reinforced by Amy June Bates’ mixed media illustrations. Her muted palette of pastels lends a dreamy mood to the spreads and recalls the spirit of the Wyeths’ worlds. She nimbly alternates between broad landscapes and close-ups of singular items (acorns, a bouquet of flowers) that echo how N.C. and Henriette observe and paint subjects both big and small. Her illustrations also incorporate small pencil sketches—a leaping squirrel, birds in flight—that highlight another stage of the artistic process.

Though the narrative is enriched by biographical information included in the backmatter, this beautiful picture book stands well on its own for readers unfamiliar with the Wyeth family and provides a fascinating look at one of its often overlooked members.

Writer Beth Kephart invites readers into the Wyeth family’s busy life, depicting an imaginary day narrated by young Henriette. With paint box, easel and canvas in hand, Henriette eagerly follows her father on a ramble through the countryside to paint the sprawling landscape.

NonfictionMemoirGraphic Memoirs

The Secret to Superhuman Strength

Review by Alice Cary

A new graphic memoir from Alison Bechdel is always a treat, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength is no exception. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), which concentrated on Bechdel’s father, became not only a bestseller but also a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical. The subsequent Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012) was also a bestselling hit. The long wait for Bechdel’s third book—and the first one to be published in full color—is now over, and this time her long-standing obsession with exercise is in the crosshairs of her literary lens.

“My bookish exterior perhaps belies it,” she writes, “but I’m a bit of an exercise freak.” She immediately adds, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not ‘good at sports.’ I’m not a ‘jock.’ That’s a whole different ball game, and not my subject here.” Instead, she takes readers on a very personal journey—divided into decades, beginning with her birth in 1960—that showcases America’s many fitness crazes over the years.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Alison Bechdel reveals the surprisingly physical process of creating her illustrations.

Bechdel’s early fascination with exercise was sparked by Charles Atlas bodybuilding ads in comic books. These ads made her realize she was “a textbook weakling” and led her on a lifelong quest for strength. “It’s a world gone mad!” she observes about the current state of working out. “Pacifists paying for boot camp! Feminists learning to pole dance! Geeks flipping tractor tires! And the trends keep coming!”

Don’t be fooled, however. The Secret to Superhuman Strength is much more than simply a fab, fit, fun retrospective. With her trademark self-deprecation and deliciously dark humor, Bechdel takes a thought-provoking look at her gradual realization that she’s gay, as well as at her search for transcendence as she ages and faces the specter of her own mortality. While exploring these themes, she devotes scenes to literary and philosophical heroes who may at first seem like unlikely exercise gurus: Jack Kerouac, Margaret Singer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and more. Rest assured, in Bechdel’s talented hands, such commentary works beautifully, immensely enriching the book.

Every page yields a variety of delights. There’s the poignancy of a full-page depiction of her last walk in the woods with her beloved, complicated father in late 1979, just months before his death. There’s the surprise of peppered-in fun facts. (Ralph Waldo Emerson was so grief-stricken a year after his first wife’s death that he opened her coffin.) And there’s the simple, repeated joy of reading a really great line. After a karate class in the 1980s, Bechdel guzzles a Budweiser and says, “There was no constant, namby-pamby suckling of water bottles in those days.”

The Secret to Superhuman Strength is the liveliest literary workout you can get. Bechdel’s unique combination of personal narrative, the search for higher meaning and nonstop comic ingenuity will leave you pumped up and smiling.

Alison Bechdel’s unique combination of personal narrative, the search for higher meaning and nonstop comic ingenuity will leave you pumped up and smiling.
NonfictionTrue CrimeMemoir

Everything Is Fine

Review by Alice Cary

On July 24, 2014, while experiencing schizophrenic psychosis, 23-year-old Tim Granata murdered his beloved mother. Although Tim’s mental health had been declining for several years, the family’s worry was that Tim would take his own life, not harm others.

Soon afterward, an acquaintance wrote to Tim’s brother, Vince: “I hope you will eventually be able to find some peace and feel whole again, though that might be your life’s work.” Despite the enormity of the task, Vince Granata bravely and lovingly chronicles his family’s story—before, during and after the tragedy—in his riveting memoir, Everything Is Fine. 

Tim’s illness “began as a whisper” late in high school and during his first year of college, but it slowly took over his life. Repeated hospitalizations and therapy didn’t help, and he refused medication. Because of his background as a champion wrestler in high school, Tim lifted weights to try and calm the cacophony of his increasingly psychotic thoughts.

Granata shut down after his mother’s murder, unable to think of her without remembering her horrific death. Plagued by nightmares, he avoided sleep and turned to caffeine and alcohol. Still, he was wracked by magical thinking, wondering if he might have been able to save his mother had he been present instead of 1,000 miles away tutoring children in the Dominican Republic.

Granata writes with compassion, reflection and unsparing honesty of not only his brother’s metamorphosis but also his own transformation after the crime—how he was finally able to find his way back to his life, memories and love of his brother. Some of the book’s most memorable scenes take place during his visits with Tim in Connecticut’s Whiting Forensic Hospital, where Tim was sent to be “restored to competency” so that he could eventually be tried for his crime.

Anyone trying to better understand the cruel grip of psychosis will learn much from Everything Is Fine. As Granata concludes, “We can only conquer terror when we drag what scares us into the light. We only understand horror when we think about what we know, when we look at all the pieces.”

On July 24, 2014, Vince Granata’s 23-year-old brother, while experiencing schizophrenic psychosis, murdered their beloved mother.
FictionFamily Drama

Margreete’s Harbor

Review by Alice Cary

Eleanor Morse’s precise, patient prose captivates from page one of her fourth novel, Margreete’s Harbor, as she describes an early winter morning for an elderly woman named Margreete. At home on the Maine coast, Margreete heats up some bacon drippings and retrieves her slippers, but while she’s sidelined by a dead mouse that the cat brought in, poof—her stove catches fire. That fire leads to big changes, as Margreete’s daughter, Liddie, and her family must move from Michigan to look after Margreete in Burnt Harbor, Maine. 

Beginning in 1955 and continuing through 1968, this is a bighearted, multigenerational saga with a simmering social conscience, as Margreete; Liddie; her husband, Harry; and each of their three children wrestle with their secrets and desires. Morse chronicles big and small moments equally well, the sum of which can make—and sometimes break—a family. 

Burnt Harbor is “the tiniest eyelash compared to the great eye of the ocean beyond,” and Morse expertly plays with this perspective, showing how global events seep into every molecule of the family’s life. For example, with dogged determination, teenager Bernie tries to head to Washington, D.C., to join Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, partly motivated by his realization that he loves his best friend, a Black boy named Noah. A few years later, Harry chains himself to a White House fence to protest the Vietnam War—at a moment when Liddie desperately needs her husband by her side.

Margreete’s Harbor is also a particularly tender portrait of a family faced with dementia. All three grandchildren safely confide their greatest secrets to their grandmother, sure that she won’t remember their confessions. But Margreete still has wisdom to share, and when Bernie is just a boy, she advises, “When you grow up, don’t ever try to love someone you don’t love. And don’t ever try to not love someone you do love.” 

Of course, things aren’t always rosy. By moving to Maine, Liddie must leave behind her spot as first cellist with the Ann Arbor Symphony. One of the grandchildren must stop Margreete from jumping out a bedroom window, and Harry has a secret rendezvous with a nurse he encounters in the emergency room. As Morse writes, “Unless you live in a cave by yourself and speak only to the chickadee, life is messy, because humans are messy.”

Full of love, triumph and a boatload of heartbreak, Margreete’s Harbor is a celebration of life’s inevitable messiness. As after any good visit with family or dear friends, you will leave feeling satisfied while yearning for more.

Like a good visit with family or dear friends, Eleanor Morse’s novel will leave you satisfied while yearning for more.
YA FictionYA

Luck of the Titanic

Review by Alice Cary

Stacey Lee has earned critical acclaim and a loyal readership for intricately plotted fiction featuring Chinese characters amid memorable historical settings, including Under a Painted Sky and The Downstairs Girl. Her new book, Luck of the Titanic, was prompted by a little-known fact: Of the eight Chinese passengers aboard the Titanic, six survived, but they were deported within 24 hours of arriving in the United States.

The novel opens with a mesmerizing action scene as Valora Luck, a trained acrobat, catapults her way on board the doomed ship. Although she has a valid first-class ticket, an officer has refused to let her board, claiming she lacks proper documentation and won’t be allowed to disembark in America due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. But Valora is determined to join her twin brother, Jamie, who has already boarded in third class for the first leg of a journey to Cuba. They haven’t seen each other for two years, and Valora has a scheme to reunite them: She wants to convince a circus executive who’s also on board to hire them both as acrobats for the Ringling Brothers.

Lee’s characters often adapt disguises, and Valora alternately poses as a male laborer alongside Jamie below decks and as a fashionable first-class widow who turns heads with her confidence and style. As Valora navigates the highly class-conscious world of the ship, readers witness the stark discrepancies between rich and poor, as well as some of the racist behavior of its passengers. “The English love all things Chinese—silk, tea, plates—just not if it comes with a beating heart,” Valora observes.

The narrative builds slowly toward the looming, inevitable tragedy. In a moment of overt dramatic irony, a well-heeled character remarks, “Imagine being afraid on such a magnificent vessel as the Titanic.” Once the ship strikes the iceberg, Lee unspools one heartbreaking scene after another as Valora, Jamie and their friends struggle to find each other and reach safety. 

From the start, readers are aware that two of the book’s Chinese characters will die. When one succumbs early in the disaster, the remainder of the novel becomes a superbly choreographed guessing game of who the second victim will be. Despite the hardships its characters encounter, Luck of the Titanic is anchored by its energetic and empowered heroine. This novel is an admirable and engaging addition to the annals of fictional Titanic lore. 

Stacey Lee has earned critical acclaim and a loyal readership for intricately plotted fiction featuring Chinese characters amid memorable historical settings, including Under a Painted Sky and The Downstairs Girl. Her new book, Luck of the Titanic, was prompted by a little-known fact: Of the eight Chinese passengers aboard the Titanic, six survived, but they were deported within 24 hours of arriving in the United States.

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

War and Millie McGonigle

Review by Alice Cary

Newbery Medalist Karen Cushman (The Midwife’s Apprentice; Catherine, Called Birdy) loves to write about “gutsy girls figuring out who they are.” The titular character of War and Millie McGonigle is yet another outstanding creation.

Twelve-year-old Millie knows all too well what it’s like to endure a personal and a national crisis simultaneously. It’s September 1941. Over the summer, as World War II raged in Europe, Millie’s beloved grandmother died on Millie’s birthday. No wonder Millie feels that the world is “full of war and death.”

Just before she died, Gram gave Millie a diary and instructed her to use it to remember good things. Now Millie keeps her “Book of Dead Things” like a talisman, jotting down notes and sketches of things she sees, such as an octopus caught by a fisherman on the San Diego beach near her home. She’s also developed a ritual of writing her last name in the sand over and over, which she hopes will keep death away from her family.

Money is tight for the McGonigles, but everyone pitches in to help the war effort. After Mama becomes a welder and Pop gets a job as a clerk at the Navy Exchange, Millie is left to oversee her younger siblings, including Lily, who has weak lungs. Gram’s absent-minded cousin Edna also moves in, making the family’s tight quarters even tighter. As Millie seeks freedom outdoors, she finds joy in a new friend and develops a crush on an older surfer.

As always, Cushman exquisitely captures her story’s historical setting. Readers will feel the San Diego sun on their shoulders as Millie steers her rowboat into warm bay waters and the sand between their toes as Millie explores the mud flats. Millie’s winning first-person narration is filled with 1940s slang like “holy mackerel” and “good gravy,” as well as references to “The Lone Ranger,” Bob Hope and the ongoing fear of polio. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the McGonigles sleep in their clothes and keep suitcases packed in case they have to evacuate, and their blackout curtains make Millie feel as though there is “not a glimmer of light left on earth.”

Despite such serious topics, War and Millie McGonigle is a lively book filled with humor, love and transformation. Millie gradually learns to navigate her grief, deal with her fears and shift her focus from war and death to life and the living. Though Cushman roots the story in tangible details of the ’40s, it has much to offer contemporary readers. Gram, for instance, was a crusader who felt that all girls should know “songs of protest and the phone number of your state representative.” Millie follows in her grandmother’s footsteps and repeatedly intervenes to prevent bullying against kids of Italian and Japanese descent.

Reminiscent of Katherine Paterson’s sensitive portrayals of grief, War and Millie McGonigle acknowledges the suffocating enormities of fear, injustice and tragedy Millie experiences while revealing a path forward. As Gram tells Millie, “Life’s not hopeless. We can do something about what worries and scares us. . . . Despite the horror, people care, work together for a better world, and bravely fight back.”

Newbery Medalist Karen Cushman (The Midwife’s Apprentice; Catherine, Called Birdy) loves to write about “gutsy girls figuring out who they are.” The titular character of War and Millie McGonigle is yet another outstanding creation.

NonfictionMemoirEuropean History

Eva and Eve

Review by Alice Cary

After Julie Metz’s mother died in 2006, she mused, “I wish like hell I’d asked my mother more questions.” That’s a common regret of newly bereaved daughters, but this one had special urgency: Metz had just discovered “a vault of secrets” tucked away in her mother’s lingerie drawer. A small keepsake book contained childhood notes and souvenirs from Vienna, the Austrian city from which Metz’s mother, Eva, and grandparents were forced to flee in 1940. Their Jewish family had been wrenched apart two years earlier when Eva’s two older brothers were sent to London because a neighbor’s son, who had joined the Hitler Youth, had begun targeting them. By 1940, London was no longer an option for the rest of the family, so they headed to the United States. Once there, 12-year-old Eva changed her name to Eve and grew up to become a “steely, savvy” New Yorker, as well as a successful art director at Simon & Schuster.

Metz had known about this tragic saga from a young age, but her hunt for additional details after her mother’s death turned into an obsession that “felt like a séance, a conversation she and I never had when she was alive. A collaboration with a ghost.” The result is her intriguing memoir, Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother’s Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind.

The author is no stranger to digging into the past. Metz’s 2009 memoir, Perfection, reexamined her marriage after she discovered that her recently deceased husband had been a serial adulterer. In Eva and Eve, her research leads her to Vienna, where she visits her mother’s childhood apartment and tours the factory her grandfather, Julius Singer, was forced to abandon. Singer invented an accordionlike paper used to dispense medicine that was manufactured on a “machine so complicated that the Nazis had kept Julius alive to run it.” These visits are fascinating as well as heartbreaking. As Metz retraces her mother’s journey to America, readers come to understand in a visceral, immediate way the hardships and terrors her family faced. 

Metz is a dogged, careful researcher, but at times she describes imagined scenes, with mixed success. Many of these passages vividly bring her ancestors to life, but a few seem like a stretch. Still, Metz is a compelling narrator who offers thoughtful reflections on how her family’s situation parallels today’s world. “I wondered about all the other Evas, children forced to leave their countries because of war and drought, riding the Bestia train through Mexico, or waiting in refugee camps in the Mideast and Europe,” she writes. “When those who have suffered persecution feel that they belong, that their lives truly matter, we will all live more truthful lives.”

After Julie Metz discovered “a vault of secrets” in her mother’s lingerie drawer, she went searching for information about her family's prewar life in Austria.
NonfictionBiography

The Code Breaker

Review by Alice Cary

Thank goodness Jennifer Doudna didn’t listen to her high school guidance counselor, who told her that girls don’t do science. Instead, Doudna followed her passion and pursued biochemistry, inspired by her childhood explorations of beaches, meadows and lava flow caves in her hometown of Hilo, Hawaii. When Doudna read James Watson’s book The Double Helix as a sixth grader, she realized that “science can be very exciting, like being on a trail of a cool mystery and you’re getting a clue here and a clue there. And then you put the pieces together.”

That’s exactly the feeling you’ll have while reading Walter Isaacson’s marvelous biography The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. It’s a hefty but inspiring book that chronicles Doudna’s and others’ development of the gene-editing tool CRISPR. With his dynamic and formidable style, Isaacson explains the long scientific journey that led to this tool’s discovery and the exciting developments that have followed, noting, “In the history of science, there are few real eureka moments, but this came pretty close.”

Like Lab Girl on steroids, The Code Breaker paints a detailed picture of how scientists work. As Doudna interacts with a variety of talented colleagues over the years (color photos are included), she experiences excitement, uncertainty, rivalry, betrayal and more. At one moment she’s joyfully stirring spaghetti while explaining CRISPR to her 9-year-old son; during another, she’s standing in her backyard in the middle of a rainy night, reeling from the realization that leaving her academic post at the University of California, Berkeley to work in the genetics industry was a huge mistake.

The timing of Isaacson’s book could hardly be better. He was well into his research and writing when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and while many of us were baking bread and worrying about toilet paper, Doudna headed to Berkeley to lead one of the teams developing diagnostic tests and messenger RNA (or mRNA) vaccines, catapulting CRISPR into the global spotlight as a lifesaving tool. The Code Breaker includes a lengthy section about these recent events, culminating in Doudna winning a Nobel Prize in October 2020. As the Moderna chairperson put it when he saw the promising clinical trial results of the company’s vaccine, “It was a bad day for viruses. . . . We may never have a pandemic again.”

In addition to being an accomplished historian of science and technology, Isaacson is a professor at Tulane University and former editor of Time magazine. His previous biography subjects include Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs—all united by their creative intellect and natural curiosity. As a biographer, Isaacson is truly an immersive tour guide, combining the energy of a TED Talk with the intimacy of a series of fireside chats. For this book, he tried his hand at gene editing and enrolled in Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials. He takes a big-picture approach to CRISPR’s significance and legacy as well, discussing its many uses for treating diseases such as sickle cell anemia, while also considering the myriad complicated moral issues surrounding CRISPR’s use.

For readers seeking to understand the many twists, turns and nuances of the biotechnology revolution, there’s no better place to turn than The Code Breaker.

Like Lab Girl on steroids, The Code Breaker paints a detailed picture of how Nobel Prize-winning scientist Jennifer Douda works.
Children's & YAPicture Book

All of the Factors of Why I Love Tractors

Review by Alice Cary

Freckle-faced Frankie McGee loves tractors, but his obsession finally tips his mother over the edge, sending her into a humorous meltdown at the public library in All of the Factors of Why I Love Tractors. Kids will get a kick out of this hilarious role reversal, especially when Mom is shown perched upside down in a chair, with her head on the floor and feet in the air. As Mom pleads with Frankie to branch out with his reading choices, he mounts an entertaining defense in rhyming prose that’s guaranteed to grab the attention of young vehicular enthusiasts.

His arguments unfold in a series of full-page spreads in which Davina Bell’s text and Jenny Lovlie’s art fall together like seeds in a newly planted field, brimming with possibility. Tractors fill a cascade of countryside scenes that show male and female drivers busy with different tasks that readers will enjoy identifying. Lovlie’s art strikes a perfect balance between healthy doses of technical detail (for instance, comparing Massey Fergusons with John Deeres) and a cornucopia of kid-friendly curves and colors.

Mom’s urgent protests are comical; with a talk-to-the-hand gesture, she turns away from her son’s lecture. Their good-natured give-and-take ramps up the tension delightfully. When Mom reminds Frankie that he used to like trains, he quips, “How boring—I’m snoring just thinking of that.” Meanwhile, readers will be energized by every colorful page, whether it’s a town scene that shows the path Frankie and Mom take to the library or a spread brimming with all sorts of things that go, including a hot air balloon, a tugboat and a cement mixer. 

At its heart, All of the Factors of Why I Love Tractors is a rollicking love letter not just to tractors but also to libraries, where books are waiting for people with many different interests. The kind librarian, Miss Squid, tells Frankie’s mom to “Hush!” while reassuring Frankie, “Well you know yourself best. / When you want something different, just come and find me. / A kid who likes books is a nice thing to see.” 

Freckle-faced Frankie McGee loves tractors, but his obsession finally tips his mother over the edge, sending her into a humorous meltdown at the public library in All of the Factors of Why I Love Tractors. Kids will get a kick out of this hilarious role reversal, especially when Mom is shown perched upside down in a chair, with her head on the floor and feet in the air. As Mom pleads with Frankie to branch out with his reading choices, he mounts an entertaining defense in rhyming prose that’s guaranteed to grab the attention of young vehicular enthusiasts.

NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistory

Come Fly the World

Review by Alice Cary

In 1967, Coffee, Tea, or Me? The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses captured the world’s imagination with tales of amorous adventures. Decades later, Donald Blain revealed that as a publicist for American Airlines, he actually wrote the book and its sequels, and two female flight attendants were hired to pose as the authors for book tours. Although the stunt sounds like something from “Mad Men,” readers fell for it hook, line and sinker, casting an indelible reputation on the profession.

“The industry saw no reason not to capitalize on male fantasy,” writes Julia Cooke in the fascinating Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am. Cooke has created a sweeping account of not only the airline industry and its cultural history but also women’s evolution in the workforce. She blends an overview of the job with the personal stories of several (real!) flight attendants, dispelling ludicrous myths and showing how Pan Am presented adventurous, curious women with a way to see the world at a time when their opportunities were limited.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Author Julia Cooke shares her thoughts on air travel and offers some suggestions for making your own glamour when you take to the skies.

Stewardess positions were so coveted in the 1960s that in 1968, over 266,000 women applied for 12,000 spots in the American airline industry. Many of these young women, such as biology major Lynne Totten from upstate New York, saw the job as an exciting chance to try something new. Years later, when a male passenger spotted Totten reading an issue of Scientific American, he suggested that Vogue might be a better choice. She quickly set him straight, but Totten was hardly an anomaly. As Cooke points out, “throughout the 1960s, 10 percent of Pan Am stewardesses had attended graduate school at a time when only 8 percent of American women had graduated from college.”

Despite the unparalleled opportunities offered by Pan Am, these stewardesses had to pave their own way, fighting against weight and height limits, age ceilings, marriage bans, racism and other glass ceilings that prevented them from being offered management positions.

An entertaining and informative narrator, Cooke has a big story to tell and excels at painting her panorama in broad strokes. At times, however, readers may find themselves wishing for a few more anecdotes, as well as more direct quotations from the women she profiles. Nonetheless, many of her accounts are memorable, especially those involving Pan Am’s flights to Vietnam, which Cooke covers extensively and in which young American men reading Archie comics were dropped off, many to never return.

Come Fly the World is an eye-opening account of female flight attendants’ successes and struggles in the not-so-distant past.

Come Fly the World is an eye-opening account of female flight attendants’ successes and struggles in the not-so-distant past.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Kitchen Front

Review by Alice Cary

Grab a cup of tea and a scone, and curl up with The Kitchen Front, Jennifer Ryan’s positively delicious novel about four British women competing in a cooking contest during World War II. The winner will become the first female host of a BBC radio show called “The Kitchen Front,” which guides listeners in creative ways to use food rations. Ryan, author of The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir and The Spies of Shilling Lane, continues to excel at creating warmhearted, intriguing homefront drama.

Both the book and the contest are divided into three rounds, in which each contestant must cook a starter, main course and dessert. The stakes are high for the competitors, each of whom yearns for the career-boosting prize. There’s Audrey, the anchor of the book, a struggling war widow with three sons, as well as her estranged, wealthy sister, Lady Gwendoline, who’s trapped in a loveless relationship with her abusive husband. Lady G’s shy young kitchen maid, Nell, is also competing, as well as a professional cook from France named Zelda, a single woman who’s trying to hide an unplanned pregnancy.

Ryan uses alternating chapters to explore each woman’s personality, moving the drama steadily along with brisk dialogue and action. This is very much a book about women’s rights, strengths and abilities, and the class differences among characters add drama and a dash of complexity.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Jennifer Ryan marvels at the upbeat attitudes of the homefront cooks who inspired The Kitchen Front.

Recipes are included for each round, some adapted from wartime leaflets. They’re fun to read, and each is well integrated into the unfolding drama. Readers are likely to be more inclined to try some (vegetarian Lord Woolton pie or Audrey’s fruit scones) than others (Lady Gwendoline’s sardine rolls). Historical details sprinkled throughout are equally fascinating, such as the fact that during the war, the moat around the Tower of London was drained to grow cabbages and potatoes that fed struggling Londoners in the East End.

Though the four contestants each face personal difficulties, endure shortages and fear bombing raids, their village of Fenley feels removed from the raging horrors of World War II. Ryan injects humor into their sorrow—as well as empowerment—as the group gradually learns to band together and pool their talents instead of facing off as kitchen opponents.

While The Kitchen Front goes down like a spoonful of sugar, Ryan manages to instill substance and plenty of food for thought in its creative and ultimately uplifting story.

Grab a cup of tea and a scone, and curl up with The Kitchen Front, Jennifer Ryan’s positively delicious novel about four British women competing in a cooking contest during World War II.
NonfictionMemoir

Between Two Kingdoms

Review by Alice Cary

Twenty-two-year-old Princeton grad Suleika Jaouad was working as a paralegal in Paris when symptoms of acute myeloid leukemia sent her home to Saratoga Springs, New York, to live with her Swiss-born mother, an artist, and her Tunisian-born father, a French professor at Skidmore College. Raised to roam the globe, Jaouad found that her world had suddenly shrunk to a hospital room at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she underwent a stem cell transplant and other grueling treatments, which she began chronicling in a New York Times column called “Life Interrupted.” Her engrossing memoir, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted, paints a more complete portrait of her experiences during and after treatment.

Jaouad was supported by her parents and a new boyfriend, who put his life on hold for several years to care for her. The ups and downs of their relationship eventually became fraught. She was also buoyed by other cancer patients her own age, including two gifted, beloved friends, an artist and a poet. As she relates these stories, her honest and reflective voice spares no one, not even herself.

Later Jaouad was stunned to discover that “the hardest part of my cancer treatment was once it was over.” She no longer had her support system, and she felt paralyzed by fear. In an effort to reenter the world after treatment, she set out on a 100-day, 33-state solo pilgrimage to connect with an intriguing array of people who had reached out to her during her illness, including a California mother who had lost her adult son to suicide, a bighearted cook on a Montana ranch and a Louisiana death row inmate named Lil’ GQ. She learned valuable, unexpected lessons from all.

Jaouad’s cancer treatment narrative and travelogue are equally compelling as she deftly mixes moments of grief, anger and despair with joy, gratitude and hefty doses of self-deprecating humor. For instance, as a brand-new driver, the first thing she did when setting out on her journey was drive the wrong way down a New York City street. Not long afterward, she had to look up a YouTube video to help her set up her tent.

Between Two Kingdoms is a thoughtful book from a talented young writer who never sugarcoats or falls prey to false hope. As Jaouad writes, “After you’ve had the ceiling cave in on you—whether through illness or some other catastrophe—you don’t assume structural stability. You must learn to live on the fault lines.” Her message will ring helpful and true to many, regardless of the challenges they face.

Suleika Jaouad’s engrossing memoir, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted, paints a portrait of her experiences during and after treatment for leukemia.

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features