Arlene McKanic

FictionThrillerLiterary Fiction

Your House Will Pay

Review by Arlene McKanic

Steph Cha’s nerve-scraping novel—with its biblical, plangent title and painfully relevant plot—could be described as triggering, depending on the reader. Your House Will Pay is based on a particularly sickening episode during a particularly sickening period in American history. In 1991 Los Angeles, Korean grocery store owner Soon Ja Du shot 15-year-old Latasha Harlins in the back of the head after accusing her of stealing. The horror was caught on video, and although Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, she never went to jail.

Who was this woman who pulled the trigger? Who was the girl she shot? To answer this, Cha has fictionalized the players, with Du turned into Yvonne Park and Harlins into Ava Matthews, and has brought them to life through the eyes of their loved ones. In Yvonne’s case, this means her taciturn husband, Paul, and their daughters, Miriam and Grace. After Yvonne kills Ava, the Parks escape into anonymity. They run a tiny pharmacy in a mall filled with modest Korean businesses and keep to themselves.

As for Ava, she and her brother, Shawn, were raised by their aunt Sheila after the death of their mother. Sheila’s son, Ray, is more like a brother than a cousin. The comings and goings of this African American family are far more dramatic than those of the reclusive Parks. Shawn and Ray have been in and out of gangs and, unlike Yvonne, in and out of jail. For most of the book, they’re middle-aged and determined to stay on the straight and narrow. Ray is a husband to the faithful Nisha and a father to their children, and Shawn is helping his girlfriend raise her adorable toddler. Then something terrible happens, and the Parks and the Matthewses are thumped back to square one.

The heart of the book is how alike these people are. They work, they eat, they pray, they love; their devotion to their families is painful. They are caught up in a racial pathology that came into play long before the Parks emigrated to America and before any member of the Matthews family was born. That pathology led them to turn on each other. 

What Cha wants the reader to understand through her straightforward prose is that none of what happened between these two families had to happen, and everybody’s house pays.

Steph Cha’s nerve-scraping novel—with its biblical, plangent title and painfully relevant plot—could be described as triggering, depending on the reader.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Find Me

Review by Arlene McKanic

Did you see the movie Call Me by Your Name, based on the book by André Aciman, and wonder what happened to poor Elio after his romance with Oliver? Aciman’s latest novel, set about two decades after the momentous events of the first, has the answer.

In a nod to Elio’s reputation as a musical prodigy, the book is divided into musical sections: “Tempo,” “Cadenza,” “Capriccio” and “Da Capo.” Surprisingly, it starts not with Elio’s journey but with his dad’s. In “Tempo,” Mr. Perlman has gotten a divorce and, one day on a train, meets a grumpy-looking girl who’s young enough to be his daughter. They fall instantly in love. In “Cadenza,” Elio meets a man old enough to be his father at a recital. They fall instantly in love. In “Capriccio,” Oliver, about to decamp from New York for a teaching job in New Hampshire, throws a party with his wife in their nearly denuded apartment. Enjoying his last view of the Hudson River, sipping prosecco and nibbling finger foods, he pines for the boy he deflowered so many years ago. As for “Da Capo”—well, that would spoil things, but if you know what Da Capo means, and if you read the first book, you have an idea.

As with the first book and movie, much of the action takes place in Italy, with great food and tipple, hidden museums full of Renaissance art, passionate music, cooling fountains and warm, honey-gold sunshine. We see nothing of the dark side of Italy, with right-wing politics or trash rotting in the streets because everyone’s on strike. In other words, the characters are as overprivileged as ever, and Aciman populates his novel with a sensual, almost overripe type of a man who swears he can’t live without Balvenie Doublewood 17 Year Scotch. Better yet, Aciman’s people are as foolish as ever, and their foolishness is their point of connection with the reader.

It’s tempting to describe Find Me as a pleasant, post-summer diversion, but it’s deeper than that. It will remind you of that one person you loved and lost and maybe found again. True, the book is lush, but it’s also bittersweet and nostalgic and a bit heartachey. Autumnal is probably the best word to describe it.

True, the book is lush, but it’s also bittersweet and nostalgic and a bit heartachey.
FictionLiterary Fiction

We, the Survivors

Review by Arlene McKanic

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” according to Thoreau. That’s if they’re lucky. What if, like the narrator of Tash Aw’s latest novel, the desperation is noisy and violent? When We, the Survivors opens, such desperation has caused Ah Hock to take another man’s life.

Ah Hock is a Chinese citizen of Malaysia, a country where everybody—every man, woman and child—is on the hustle, and everybody is fungible. When the workers at the fish farm where Ah Hock is foreman come down with cholera, he and everyone else assumes they can be replaced easily, cheaply and permanently. It matters not if the substitutes are refugees from Myanmar, Nepal, Indonesia, Bangladesh or Mars. Indeed, bosses seek out these refugees because they can be paid much less than native Malaysian workers. There’s no thought given to sick leave, health insurance or even how people come down with cholera in the 21st century in the first place. But the economy is booming, and the replacements all have jobs.

Ah Hock’s boss is out of town, and he knows he’ll be canned if he can’t find a work crew, even though no part of the emergency is his fault. If he’s fired, he’ll probably be thumped back down to the bottom of a brutal economic hierarchy. He is no longer very young, and his body can’t tolerate the grueling physical labor of his youth.

Told to two interlocutors, a shadowy “you” and an uptight scribbler named Su-Min who writes a novel based on Ah Hock’s adventures, We, the Survivors begins and ends after the homicide. In between, the narrative loops through different, crucial times in Ah Hock’s life. Through most of that time, he maintains a reluctant friendship with a scoundrel named Keong. At times a drug dealer, gangster and fixer, Keong is a creep, but a fascinating one. He knows how the corrupt, inhumane hyper-capitalism of Malaysia works, and he works it to his advantage. Ever on the brink of violence, Keong knows everybody who’s anybody. Sometimes he’s flush, sometimes not. But his dedication to his “little brother” Ah Hock is genuine, and when Ah Hock goes to Keong for help, the hustler of hustlers does his utmost. It’s not enough.

The author of The Harmony Silk Factory, Aw brings us a steamy, smelly, muddy, Hobbesian Malaysia most tourists avoid. If there’s a book that’s a masterpiece of the wages of the worship of Moloch, it’s We, the Survivors.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” according to Thoreau. That’s if they’re lucky. What if, like the narrator of Tash Aw’s latest novel, the desperation is noisy and violent? When We, the Survivors opens, such desperation has caused Ah Hock to take…

FictionComing of Age

Opioid, Indiana

Review by Arlene McKanic

Two days into reading Brian Allen Carr’s hilarious, heartbreaking Opioid, Indiana, I made an omelet for the first time in a while. I made it because the teenage hero of Carr’s book, Riggle, is an ace at making omelets. His mother taught him, but she’s dead. So is Riggle’s father. Since then he’s bounced from one foster home to another until ending up in Opioid, Indiana, at the home of his Uncle Joe, a junkie.

Soon after the book opens, Joe goes missing. The rent is due, and between Joe, his girlfriend Peggy and Riggle, Joe is the only one who has anything resembling money. At the same time, Riggle is suspended from school because of a medicinally enhanced vape pen. No one is particularly concerned about him being out of school and at liberty. Indeed, it’s shortly after this that he gets a job at the local restaurant after flourishing his mad omelet skills. Peggy insists he use his free time to hunt for Joe.

To an outsider, nothing much happens in Opioid, until it does. It’s gray and cold, with everyone just trying to get by. Readers are privileged to be inside Riggle’s head, as this bright, fractious, hurting, lovable boy muses on everything from race and class to drugs and sex. To make sense of a world that makes no sense, he employs a shadow puppet named Remote. Riggle’s mother used to play the Remote game with him when he was little, using the puppet to tell a story of how the days of the week got their names. The book even includes illustrations of hands forming the all-knowing shadow puppet.

Carr’s style is delightfully straightforward, and he takes special pleasure in absurdity. The climax of the story is so strange, horrifying and darkly hilarious that you may have to put the book down because you’re laughing so hard.

The story offers no clear answers as to what’s going to happen to Riggle, Peggy and all the other characters. But the reader will wonder for quite some time—and there’s really no higher compliment to give a book.

Two days into reading Brian Allen Carr’s hilarious, heartbreaking Opioid, Indiana, I made an omelet for the first time in a while. I made it because the teenage hero of Carr’s book, Riggle, is an ace at making omelets. His mother taught him, but she’s…

FictionThriller

Too Close

Review by Arlene McKanic

Halfway through Natalie Daniels’ novel of grief, middle-age regret, betrayal and acid—specifically, acidic British wit—something happens that the reader can scarcely believe. Connie, the protagonist, overhears something. At first you don’t know whether she’s meant to hear it, she’s hearing it by accident or if it’s a bit of both. Whatever the cause of the inadvertent eavesdropping, what Connie learns is shocking. And it leads to a lot of bad craziness.

Daniels teases out Connie’s story bit by bit. At first, we see this humorsome and perceptive lady in a London playground with her preschool-age daughter. There, Connie meets Ness, the mother of another preschooler. The mums and their daughters quickly become the best of chums. Next thing we know, Connie—burned, battered, sliced up—is in an institution. We don’t even need to be told that one of the reasons for her predicament is Ness.

Connie isn’t the only troubled female in this novel. Her psychiatrist is Emma Robinson, whose own problems cause her to identify with her patient a bit more than she should. What happened to Emma is much too close to what almost happened to Connie. Indeed, just about all the women and girls in Daniels’ tale have something at least a little wrong with them. Connie’s daughter is strange, her mother has Alzheimer’s, and Ness seems to be at the whim of her premenopausal hormones. (The reader shouldn’t wonder why her name rhymes with “mess.”) Connie’s fellow inmate, whom she calls Mental Sita, likes to pretend she’s a dog. All the while, fathers, sons and husbands are either absent or just sort of stand around and go about their manly business. Is it the patriarchy that’s making these women sick and crazy and leaving their men so disconnected? Why don’t we need to be told that Ness is part of the reason Connie went mad? Is this how it must be? Must women’s relationships with each other always end up toxic, tormented, even deadly?

Maybe there is healing at the end, but clever, heart-shattering Too Close reminds you of the minefields you have to crawl through to get to it.

Must women’s relationships with each other always end up toxic, tormented, even deadly?
FictionHistorical Fiction

Deep River

Review by Arlene McKanic

Before you read this review, look up “steam donkey” on Wikipedia. Take a good look at the picture, then return. Now you know what a major piece of equipment looks like in Karl Marlantes’ sprawling tale of immigrants, logging in the Pacific Northwest and what it all has to do with early 20th-century socialism. A doorstopper at over 700 pages, Deep River seems a work born from Willa Cather by way of Upton Sinclair. But this new book is its own animal, and it’s something of a masterpiece.

The story begins at the turn of the last century in Finland, the home of the brilliant, fearless, passionate Aino Koski and her family. At that time, Finland was under Russian rule, and Aino is drawn to socialism and revolution, which she clings to even through bouts of torture whose ghastliness is only hinted at. Her commitment to Comrade Lenin only grows when she and her brothers emigrate—flee is actually a better word—to Washington. Nothing dims her zeal for the coming socialist utopia, not even her troubled marriage or motherhood. Aino brings her baby along to Wobbly (Industrial Workers of the World) meetings or leaves her with her brother and his wife.

Marlantes, author of the powerful war novel Matterhorn, immerses the reader in the life of the Koski siblings, whose worldview is dominated by sisu, a Finnish concept of honor, dignity and inner strength. Sisu requires men and women to be stoic, to always fight for their honor and to work from sunup to sundown. Page after page is dedicated to the dangerous and grueling job of harvesting gigantic trees from old-growth forests—see “steam donkey.” The reader will be in awe of such hard labor done in the service of exploitive bosses who pay little. At the same time, Deep River bemoans the ruin of virgin forests, the pollution of pristine rivers, the fact that 100-pound wild salmon are now scarce. The book extols the love of family and friends and the beauty of the landscape even as that landscape is ravaged.

Best of all, Marlantes’ new novel has more than a few moments of fun and laughter. Even combative Aino can laugh at herself. In Deep River, she takes her place beside Ántonia Shimerda as one of the great heroines of literature.

The story begins at the turn of the last century in Finland, the home of the brilliant, fearless, passionate Aino Koski and her family. At that time, Finland was under Russian rule, and Aino is drawn to socialism and revolution, which she clings to even through bouts of torture whose ghastliness is only hinted at. Her commitment to Comrade Lenin only grows when she and her brothers emigrate—flee is actually a better word—to Washington. Nothing dims her zeal for the coming socialist utopia, not even her troubled marriage or motherhood. Aino brings her baby along to Wobbly (Industrial Workers of the World) meetings or leaves her with her brother and his wife.

FictionFamily Drama

Searching for Sylvie Lee

Review by Arlene McKanic

As a child, Sylvie Lee had a lazy eye, a crooked tooth and a peculiar birthmark that she’s retained into adulthood. Now grown, she’s brilliant and successful. She is cold and even punitive toward people she doesn’t know, but she is capable of passionate love for the few who are close to her. She spent the first nine years of her life in the Netherlands with her grandmother; her mother’s rich cousin, Helena Tan; Helena’s husband, Willem; and their son, Lukas. After that, Sylvie was shipped back to the cramped Queens, New York, apartment of her Ma, Pa and adoring younger sister, Amy.

When Jean Kwok’s latest novel opens, Sylvie has returned to the Netherlands to tend her dying grandmother’s funeral, then vanishes. No wonder: If you were Sylvie, you’d probably want to get as far away from the Dutch branch of your family as possible. Helena hates her, and Willem is handsy. Friends Estelle and Filip, whom Sylvie meets when she returns to the Netherlands, are duplicitous. Sylvie falls in love with Lukas, but it’s an impossible union, not only because they’re second cousins but also because she’s already married to an unfaithful man and Estelle is Lukas’ girlfriend. After Sylvie’s disappearance, Amy burns up her savings to fly to the Netherlands to find her.

On top of the turmoil surrounding Sylvie’s disappearance, Kwok throws in the racism experienced by the Lees in America, and the less expected but often cruder racism the Tans experience in the enlightened Netherlands. Throughout the novel, women struggle to cope with the misogyny found in Chinese, American and Dutch societies, language barriers, class differences, amusing customs (such as the Dutch traditions of giving three kisses in greeting and riding bicycles absolutely everywhere) and irresistible cuisine. Kwok is unafraid to fully translate her characters’ flowery Chinese and contractionless Dutch, which gives the book an unexpected Pearl S. Buck-style flavor. There’s even a cache of valuable jewels passed from mother to daughter that everyone thinks everyone else wants to get their hands on.

The result is a book that is busy, compelling and not a little wild. When you think of it, it is very much like Sylvie herself.

When Jean Kwok’s latest novel opens, Sylvie has returned to the Netherlands to tend her dying grandmother, then vanishes. No wonder: If you were Sylvie, you’d probably want to get as far away from the Dutch branch of your family as possible.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Disappearing Earth

Review by Arlene McKanic

Although it may seem that every square inch of the earth has been mapped, there are still places that are mysterious. The Kamchatka Peninsula is one such place. You’ve seen it on a map, extending like a swollen appendage from the northeastern edge of Russia into the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk. Maybe you’ve wondered about the people who live there. Does anyone live there?

Of course, people do live in Kamchatka, both in real life and in Julia Phillips’ powerful debut novel. There are those from the indigenous and the white Russian population. The book opens when two little white girls are snatched from the seaside by a creep. The rest of the book concerns both the search for these two girls and the mystery of how they could have vanished on a peninsula all but cut off from the rest of Russia by a mountain range.

The book’s many characters are introduced in the preface, which calls to mind all those classic Russian novels with sprawling casts. But at the same time, Disappearing Earth is utterly contemporary. Cellphones are as inescapable in Kamchatka as they are anywhere else, even though they’re frequently out of range.

Phillips’ focus is on her female characters. There are the missing Golosovsky girls and their desperate mother; unhappy schoolgirls; a new mother going out of her mind with boredom; and a bitter vulcanologist with a missing dog. We hear from a native woman whose own daughter disappeared years before, as well as from her other daughter and her daughter’s children. Most of these women brush or bump up against each other, connected, sometimes tenuously, by the disappearance of the Golosovsky girls. The men in their lives aren’t so much useless as they are in the way. The cops give up the search, and husbands, fathers, boyfriends and brothers just don’t get it.

Besides the deep humanity of her characters, Phillips’ portrayal of Kamchatka itself is superb. Has there ever been a novel, even by Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, set in such a strange, ancient, beautiful place, with its glaciers and volcanoes and endless cold? It’s a place where miracles might happen—where what is lost can once again be found—if you jump over a traditional New Year’s fire in just the right way. Phillips’ stunning novel dares to imagine the possibilities.

Although it may seem that every square inch of the earth has been mapped, there are still places that are mysterious. The Kamchatka Peninsula is one such place.

FictionFamily Drama

There’s a Word for That

Review by Arlene McKanic

It’s easy for an author to get sucked into familiar tropes when writing about families; like venturing into a blind canyon, writers can stumble into cliches and have difficulty finding their way out. But with her latest novel, There’s a Word for That, Sloane Tanen is evidently undaunted by these common pitfalls, as she presents us with not one but two families with serious issues.

We first meet the Kesslers through Janine. A former child star on a wildly popular sitcom, she’s now in her early 40s and washed up. She’s still dependent on her beloved father, Marty, a just-as-washed-up Hollywood producer, and has no prospects. We first find her signing on for a cartoon-drawing class even though she can’t draw. Indeed, the class leads to one of her nastier humiliations in a lifetime of humiliations. Janine may have been the child star, but her late mother always preferred her beautiful sister, Amanda, now the soon-to-be-divorced mother of twins Jaycee and Hailey, who are replicating the same toxic sisterly dynamic as their mother and aunt.

Marty is a heroin addict. He doesn’t do anything as scuzzy as shoot up, but he does need his bumps once in a while, the same way he needs women. The latest is Gail, who is more of a minder than a lover and who probably isn’t as greedy as Janine thinks she is. Marty is Tanen’s great creation. Funny, big-hearted and still vigorous enough to make the reader imagine what he was like when he was firing on all thrusters, Marty is so charismatic that he can convince an attendant at the rehab center to sneak him a bottle of booze.

Speaking of rehab, the Directions Rehabilitation Center is where most of the novel takes place. With its beautiful landscapes, deluxe rooms, countless statues of the Buddha, simpering counselors and squillionaire clientele, the joint could only be in California. 

One of the squillionaire clientele is Bunny Small, a bestselling British author with an oxymoronic name. The opposite of sweet and fluffy, Bunny is a lush and a harridan who’s alienated nearly everyone, including her brittle son, Henry. Only her devoted agent is left standing, and it is he who packs her off to Directions. And what d’you know, she’s there at the same time as her ex-husband, Marty Kessler. Not only that, but Henry and Janine meet and, rather too quickly, mate. (Rest assured, they’re not half-siblings.)

Like so many other books that capture the foibles of good-hearted but misguided folk, There’s a Word for That is often uproariously funny. Tanen’s skill is that you don’t laugh at the characters. Janine and Marty and Hailey and Henry and even Bunny know how messed up they are. All you, and they, can do is laugh at the straits they find themselves in and soldier on.

It’s easy for an author to get sucked into familiar tropes when writing about families; like venturing into a blind canyon, writers can stumble into cliches and have difficulty finding their way out. But with her latest novel, There’s a Word for That, Sloane Tanen is evidently undaunted by these common pitfalls, as she presents us with not one but two families with serious issues.

FictionComing of Age

Daisy Jones & The Six

Review by Arlene McKanic

If you are a fan of a certain troubled rock ’n’ roll band from the 1970s, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the eponymous character of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s new novel is based on Stevie Nicks. You’d also be forgiven for wondering, wait, did Stevie really marry an Italian prince?  This will send you racing to Wikipedia, where you will learn that no, Stevie did not marry an Italian prince. However, like the marriage of Daisy Jones and her cracked Italian nobleman, Stevie’s one marriage was just as impulsive and just as brief.

Daisy, a talented singer and a gorgeous, drug-addled train wreck, falls in with a band called The Six at a critical juncture. The group’s fame and fortune blow up, and Daisy rides the rocket with them thanks to her passionate duets with their founder and leader, Billy Dunne. Inevitably, Daisy and the married Billy fall in love. They also hate each other’s guts. It’s beautiful.

Readers will feel for Billy though. A recovering druggie and alcoholic, he’s saved from dissipation by his wife, Camila, and their kids. His integrity and lack of cynicism keep the reader from resenting him the way his bandmates sometimes do. At the same time, Reid is adroit enough to make us understand why his white-knuckled virtue gets on people’s nerves.

A multinarrative interview style of storytelling allows Daisy, Billy, the members of The Six and others in their orbit, such as managers, producers, rock critics and loved ones, to recall their memories. They’re being interviewed around 2012 or so, and everyone is now of a certain age, so some of those memories contradict, and many are funny or sorrowful and startlingly candid. Their confessions become even more surprising when we learn the identity of the interviewer.

It’s hard to be good is the message of Reid’s humane, delectable, rollicking novel. But goodness is still worth the trouble.

Daisy, a talented singer and a gorgeous, drug-addled train wreck, falls in with a band called The Six at a critical juncture. The group’s fame and fortune blow up, and Daisy rides the rocket with them thanks to her passionate duets with their founder and leader, Billy Dunne. Inevitably, Daisy and the married Billy fall in love. They also hate each other’s guts. It’s beautiful.

FictionPopular Fiction

The Winter Sister

Review by Arlene McKanic

What do you do when a family member has a secret that is so terrible it changes the way you’ve experienced reality for the first 30 or so years of your life? This is but one of the dilemmas facing the narrator of Megan Collins’ latest novel.

Since she was a child, Sylvie O’Leary’s life has been darkened by her sister’s murder. Persephone—who was aptly named—was strangled on the one night that Sylvie, then age 14, refused to leave their bedroom window cracked open so Persephone could sneak into the house after an assignation with Ben Emory, the son of their town’s mayor. Their mother, Annie, forbade Persephone to date, even though she was already 18. And Annie definitely didn’t want Persephone running around with Ben. Too proud to ring the front doorbell, Persephone ran back to Ben’s car and was never seen alive by her family again.

The catastrophe causes Sylvie to skip town as soon as she’s able, leaving her feckless mother—unhinged from alcoholism and grief and recently diagnosed with esophageal cancer—in the care of Annie’s sister, Jill. When Jill must attend to her own daughter, who is about to give birth, Sylvie is forced to return not only to dying, bitter Annie but also to the town that was the scene of her sister’s murder. The case has been cold for the better part of two decades, but Sylvie is determined to get to the bottom of it. What she finds is more devastating than she even imagined.

With its focus on the grim-dark aspects of the female experience, The Winter Sister calls to mind works like Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects or the film The Tale. This twisty-turny story reminds the reader of the fickle nature of the truth, and that impossible things happen more often than you think.

What do you do when a family member has a secret that is so terrible it changes the way you’ve experienced reality for the first 30 or so years of your life? This is but one of the dilemmas facing the narrator of Megan Collins’ latest novel.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Golden Child

Review by Arlene McKanic

Every society has a founding myth that they tell themselves to explain why they came to be and what they value. The same is true for families, and it is certainly true of the Deyalsinghs of Trinidad in Claire Adam’s excellent debut novel. The overarching myth of this family—which includes Clyde, Joy and their twin sons, Peter and Paul, all descended from Indian immigrants—is that studious Peter is the golden child. Paul, born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, is a “little retarded.” In such families—and such societies—the myth is so all-encompassing that they believe that without it they will crumble. And they’re willing to sacrifice a great deal to keep it.

The tragedy is that Paul is not “retarded” at all. He’s dyslexic and may be on the spectrum, but he’s also perceptive, observant, brave and even bold. But even though his family loves him, those qualities don’t matter much.

One night, Paul runs away after an argument with his father. That scene opens the book, and the rest of the novel describes what led up to the day when Paul went missing in the bush and what happens after.

Adam was born in Trinidad and has a razor-sharp understanding of its society. If you’ve been to the Caribbean, you’ve seen a house like the Deyalsinghs’: low to the ground, faced with cinder blocks or stucco, with a roof of corrugated metal or tile, protected—imperfectly—by grates painted a lovely pastel color. Adam allows us to share in Joy’s resignation when the water pressure in the tiny house goes out, to know what it feels like to slosh through a monsoon and to imagine food that ranges from traditional rotis, curries and melongene choka to packets of Chee Zees. The author shows how American culture has infiltrated the island nation, from Kentucky Fried Chicken joints to movies and TV. And then there are the Deyalsinghs themselves, their neighbors and their somewhat nutty extended family. They are good and generous people—but the Deyalsinghs, especially Clyde, believe what they believe, and they’re sticking to it.

Golden Child is one of those uncommon debut novels that makes you eager to see what its author does next.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Every society has a founding myth that they tell themselves to explain why they came to be and what they value. The same is true for families, and it is certainly true of the Deyalsinghs of Trinidad in Claire Adam’s excellent debut novel.

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Gown

Review by Arlene McKanic

England after World War II was a grim place, and the winter of 1947 was one of the nastiest Britain had seen, which is saying something. The major cities, especially London, had been bombed to smithereens by Hitler’s Luftwaffe. There was still rationing of fuel to heat tiny rooms, and even soap and potatoes were scarce. The one bright spot was the upcoming wedding of the heiress presumptive to the throne, Princess Elizabeth. Then, as now, the royals gave good value in troubled times.

Jennifer Robson’s latest novel focuses on three women, with a few men and glimpses of royalty on the side. Ann Hughes is an embroiderer at the salon of Norman Hartnell, couturier to the royal ladies and designer of the princess’s wedding gown. Ann considers herself a plain girl that no one would notice. Her roommate and friend Miriam Dassin, another embroiderer, is a French émigré who arrived in London with a recommendation from Christian Dior in hand. She’s also a Jew and a Holocaust survivor, something she reveals but sparingly; this was a time and place when anti-Semitism was casual even after the Nazis had been routed.

Both women live to great old age, and when Ann finally dies, she leaves a box of embroidered flowers to her Canadian granddaughter, Heather. Heather has no idea why she’s received the box, or that Ann worked for Norman Hartnell and helped put together the royal wedding ensemble. Ann never spoke of her life in England or her friendship with Miriam, now a world-famous artist—why?

Robson, bestselling author of Somewhere in France, makes the reader eager to find out Ann’s secret. Ultimately, it’s one of those things you see coming, and yet you hope you’re mistaken. Did Queen Elizabeth know what Ann went through to make her wedding gown? Of course not. Nor does Heather. But Ann does the British thing: stiffens her upper lip and soldiers on.

The Gown is an inspiring story about strength, resilience and creativity.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

England after World War II was a grim place, and the winter of 1947 was one of the nastiest Britain had seen, which is saying something. The major cities, especially London, had been bombed to smithereens by Hitler’s Luftwaffe. There was still rationing of fuel to heat tiny rooms, and even soap and potatoes were scarce. The one bright spot was the upcoming wedding of the heiress presumptive to the throne, Princess Elizabeth. Then, as now, the royals gave good value in troubled times.

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