Fiction book reviews archive | Page 87 of 454

by Mindy Tarquini

A historical fantasy set in 1918 flu-ravaged Philadelphia, The Infinite Now by Mindy Tarquini (Hindsight, 2016) follows Fiora, a young immigrant struggling to learn the intricacies of time bending, teamwork and living in a world which seems as hell-bent on breaking her spirit as she is to keep it.

My fascination with the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 began during a bout of genealogy, which found me paging through Philadelphia death certificates. In late September of 1918, the typical causes of death—cardiac issues, cancers, accidents—gave way to another, ominous in its simplicity: pneumonia, often followed by the notation “subsequent to influenza.” Something tickled at my brain, a newspaper article regarding the bird flu scares of recent years, that the H5N1 virus responsible for that flu may be related to the virus which killed so many in 1918.

The reason for my deep dive into digital death certificates was due to my grandfather’s curious absence from the 1920 census. I’d found family records in Italy going back two centuries, found my grandfather’s emigration to the United States as a young boy, found his father’s naturalization papers, then unexpectedly, found a record from late in 1920 listing a marriage between my great-grandfather and, of all things, a second wife. But in the 1920 census, not a hint or a whisper, not on their street, or any neighboring street, nor any of the blocks after blocks that I searched page by tedious page.

Then I stumbled on records from an orphanage far outside the city that listed my grandfather as an “inmate,” a sad little name among many sad little names. He was only 12 years old.

My heart broke.

Quizzing my relatives revealed the story. My great-grandmother had died suddenly circa 1918-1919. My great-grandfather, a grief-stricken and overwhelmed father of four, had farmed out the children until he could find them a new mother. He married within a year of my great-grandmother’s passing. The family reunited, their lives continued.

Stories are birthed from a myriad of circumstances and ideas. I could not get the vision of my all-but-abandoned grandfather out of my head. Dumped in an orphanage, far from anybody or anything he knew or loved, desperate to return home. I also couldn’t shake the hundreds of death certificates from pneumonia, some “subsequent to influenza,” that I’d uncovered in my quest for my great-grandmother’s passing. So many of the victims had been young adults, an unbearable irony when viewed through the prism of the war raging a half a world away.

My forays into family history gave me a good impression of my great-grandparents’ immigrant community. Newspapers from the period, histories of the Great Influenza and an insatiable curiosity provided the rest. One morning, a girl woke me. Just 16 years old, she filled my mind’s ear with her tale:

Her parents had just died from the influenza. Her immigration status was precarious, her brothers fighting in the war, and a neighbor had dumped her at the door of a mysterious old man, a shoemaker the girl did not know, but who was the only person standing between this girl and an orphanage. Because this girl’s mother had been the village fortune teller. Because her neighbors feared her.

The girl was bright. She was a modern thinker born into a traditional world, tough as they come, hopeful without end and determined to prevent the metaphorical tornado churning its way through her city from sweeping her American dream into the maelstrom.

I knew I had to tell her story.

Connect with the author at mindytarquini.com.

A historical fantasy set in 1918 flu-ravaged Philadelphia, The Infinite Now by Mindy Tarquini (Hindsight, 2016) follows Fiora, a young immigrant struggling to learn the intricacies of time bending, teamwork and living in a world which seems as hell-bent on breaking her spirit as she is to keep it.

Fiction, Horror

Fiction Horror

A school’s menace inspires a sinister novel

Behind the Book by Colin Winnette

by Colin Winnette

The Job of the Wasp, the sixth novel from Colin Winnette, slips under your skin. When corpses begin to appear in a strange state-run school for orphaned boys, the novel’s unnamed narrator begins an investigation that steadily builds in surrealist horror. Winnette takes us back to his own creepy school, where a buzzing menace laid the groundwork for what would eventually become this twisted, experimental tale.

In The Job of the Wasp, a new arrival at a facility for orphan boys discovers several dead bodies hidden around the campus. He quickly begins the obsessive work of piecing together what’s happened and why, and along the way, he encounters the possibility of ghosts—and the wasps of my childhood.

The layout of the facility in the novel is drawn from the middle school I attended in Denton, Texas—although one wouldn’t necessarily know it to see the place. The gauze of memory, and the scant details included in the book itself, set the world of the novel at a slight distance, making it hazy and uncertain for the reader at times, just as it is for the narrator. But in order for that to work, to be more than just confusing, I needed a reliable foundation on which to build the dream. I needed a fixed sense of how the facility was laid out—how the yards looked, the lunch hall, where the lake was or the headmaster’s home—and my childhood memories made for a handy map.

My middle school sat on a series of rounded hills on the edge of town. It was an old facility, designed by a local architect long dead. The campus consisted of a series of long, narrow buildings, built almost entirely from red bricks, large panes of glass and some kind of splinter-prone wood. And in the eaves of almost every building, you could find a wasp’s nest.

A groundskeeper was always fighting them, hosing down the nests with chemicals or knocking them with a broom. And they always came back. The kids bolted through doorways, our books held above our heads. We stood warily in the halls, watching the wasps rebuild on the other side of a pane of glass. At lunch, they swooped down to our tables. At recess, they drifted into our field of play. They were everywhere. This constant, unpredictable threat.

These wasp nests were like a viral growth in the joints of our school’s buildings, and I couldn’t imagine the campus without imagining them. They were just always there. And because I was afraid of them then, and writing about fear, I knew I couldn’t ignore them now. The wasps became an integral part of the novel—a story about a young boy living at the heart of a dark and violent secret. Unsure how he fits into it all. Unsure what’s happening or why. Only confident in the presence of the threat, leading him to one of the novel’s central questions: What’s to be done with a threat that will not go away?

Author photo by Jennifer Yin

The Job of the Wasp, the sixth novel from Colin Winnette, slips under your skin. When corpses begin to appear in a chilling state-run school for orphaned boys, the novel’s unnamed narrator begins an investigation that steadily builds in surrealist horror. Winnette takes us back to his own creepy school, where a buzzing menace laid the groundwork for what would eventually become this twisted, experimental tale.

Family Saga, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction Family Saga

A fierce beauty comes to life

Behind the Book by Gregory Blake Smith

by Gregory Blake Smith

The new novel from award-winning author Gregory Blake Smith explores Newport, Rhode Island, through five stories spanning three centuries. From a tennis pro in 2011 to Henry James as a budding writer, the novel connects lives and loves in an emotional, moving epic that presents a truly unique portrait of America. In a Behind the Book feature, Smith introduces a few of his characters: closeted gay man Franklin Drexel, tennis player Sandy Alison and his love interest, Alice du Pont—plus a few more.

I fell in love with Newport, Rhode Island, as a young man when I was teaching myself how to make 18th-century furniture. Newport, with its fabulous Goddard-Townsend cabinetmakers, was like a mecca to me. Only years later did I get the idea of setting a novel there. It’s a city whose remarkable history is preserved in its streets and buildings. It almost seems like you can hear the boot heels of the past on its cobblestones, or spy the ghost of a Quaker peering out the tiny window of a half-cape, or see in the harbor the masts of ships, or dream of life in one of the fabulous Gilded Age “cottages” on Bellevue Avenue. Building my own cottage, Windermere (with the brick and mortar of my imagination: all 28 rooms!), and peopling Newport with three centuries of characters has been the greatest pleasure of my writing life.

So about those characters. Readers seem to wonder to what degree they’re based on historical people. While there are a couple of historical characters—my bon vivant conniver Franklin Drexel is very loosely based on Harry Lehr (called “King Lehr” for the way he ruled over Newport society)—most of the characters in The Maze at Windermere are the inventions of a novelist’s imagination. Where they come from is as much a mystery to me as it is to readers. But just as an illustration, here’s how my 21st-century heroine got herself born.

I had just returned from Newport, where the idea for the novel had first bloomed in me, and I was wandering in a kind of creative delirium through the Boston Public Gardens, dreaming of the novel-to-be, when I happened to see a young woman with cerebral palsy walking near the swan boats. I only saw her for a short time, but in those few seconds, the character of Alice du Pont came alive in my head. I saw her in all her tragic beauty: the encumbrance of her disability, and yet the fierceness with which she lives her life, her wit, her daring, her moral courage. OK, no doubt that’s not literally true—the complete character must have come later in the writing of Alice—but that moment, the sight of that young woman walking with her strained yet beautiful grace set in motion the story of Sandy and Alice.

And what about Sandy? For all his good looks and easygoing charm, there’s a kind of emotional blindness to him, isn’t there? A limitation to his moral sight that requires the reader to constantly re-evaluate him, especially in regard to what degree he is responsible for what happens to Alice. When he kisses her in that scene in the library at Windermere, is he succumbing to the duplicitous motives that lie at the heart of so many of the other characters in the novel? Or is it a moment when he begins to reach beyond conventional ideas of female beauty, of personal worth, and begins to grow both morally and emotionally?

In each of the novel’s eras, the reader is confronted with similar questions of culpability: Is Franklin Drexel’s scheme to marry a rich woman he can never love excusable because he lives in a world that has no place for him as a gay man? Should the young Henry James have seen sooner that his attentions to Alice Taylor might be misinterpreted? And is even the despicable Major Ballard redeemed by his beginning to love the young woman he had only meant to seduce? None of these questions are simply answered, but the reader’s mission—should she choose to accept it!—is to note the ways in which the different stories parallel or mirror or invert one another, and in doing so, to marvel at the infinite capacities—and the duplicities—of the human heart.

Author photo by Laura Goering

Fiction, Historical Fiction, Popular Fiction

The box buried in the backyard

Behind the Book by Chanel Cleeton

by Chanel Cleeton

Romance author Chanel Cleeton was unsure whether she’d ever write again after finishing her latest series, Wild Aces. The only things that inspired her were the stories she had grown up hearing about her grandparents’ flight from Cuba, and how they had buried their prized possessions in the backyard the night before they left the island for America. But as Cleeton began work on a plot inspired by her family history, she realized the story would need to be a different genre entirely in order to do it justice.

My favorite part of writing is the adventure my characters take me on as their story emerges. When I begin working on a book, it’s that adventure I look forward to most, and while I usually have a kernel of an idea to guide me, a rough sketch of a plot and of my characters, the heart of the story is often unknown to me until I sit down at my computer and discover where the story will take me. That sense of adventure fuels my passion for writing, making it exciting and challenging while pushing me to grow as a writer, explore new boundaries and learn new things about myself.

In the summer of 2016, I was at a crossroads in my career. I had finished writing the final book in my Wild Aces series, and while I had some romance ideas rattling around in my mind, nothing was really jumping out at me. I liked the characters in the story I was working on well enough, but I didn’t love them like I wanted to. And as a writer, when you spend months working on a book and exploring your characters, it’s difficult when you don’t feel that connection. To be honest, although I didn’t admit this to anyone, I was at a point where I wasn’t sure if I would keep writing—and that was scary. I didn’t know what my next book would be or if I would have another publisher deal. And honestly, it was a familiar feeling. It wasn’t the first time I had felt that way, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. But it did inspire me to step outside my comfort zone and write something different, something a little bit scary.

Because I did have an idea that had taken hold. But it wasn’t a romance novel like my earlier books. It was based on my family’s history in Cuba, based on my own attempt to better understand my Cuban identity, to explore an island I was desperate to visit yet had only ever experienced through my grandparents’ memories. It was inspired by a family story told to me by my father—of the night before they left Cuba, when my grandparents snuck out to their backyard and buried their most prized possessions, knowing they would be forced to leave them behind when they fled the country. That story stuck with me for weeks, posing the question that inspired Next Year in Havana. If you were forced to leave your home, and you had a box in which to place your most cherished items, what would you save for the day you would return?

I knew that the heart of the book would be about two women, that they would be bound by a powerful legacy, and because I am a hopeless romantic, I knew that each woman would have a great love, a man who would challenge them—epic love stories set against the backdrop of revolution and its aftermath. But the focus wasn’t the romances. It was equal parts a love letter to Cuba, then and now, and a story of the courage and strength of these two women and their family and friends.

In the beginning, the scope of the novel was daunting and took me into uncharted territory. Working with dual timelines was often like fighting a Rubik’s Cube, and writing in two distinct time periods brought its own set of challenges. But as soon as I dove into the story, as soon as I met my characters, I fell in love with them, with the experience and with the journey they took me on. And when I found myself wading in murky waters and didn’t know the best way to proceed, it was the lessons I’d learned writing romance that guided my way as I focused on what fueled the story, the human elements of war and political upheaval.

When I began writing Next Year in Havana, I wasn’t sure what would come next or where this journey would take me. Was this move away from romance a one-time thing or a more permanent one? But as with my writing, my characters answered that question for me. As soon as I introduced one of my heroine’s sisters and discovered her fascinating background, I knew I had to write her story. And then another book came, with more characters demanding their stories be told. And I’m loving the challenge that this adventure presents as I move into a new genre, learning new things and incorporating the elements that have filled the heart of my previous books—love, sacrifice, family—in my forthcoming women’s fiction titles. I can’t wait to share this next chapter with my readers and am so grateful to everyone who is joining me on this new adventure.

Author photo by Chris Malpass

Romance author Chanel Cleeton was unsure whether she’d ever write again after finishing her latest series, Wild Aces. The only things that inspired her were the stories she had grown up hearing about her grandparents’ flight from Cuba, and how they had buried their prize possessions in the backyard the night before they left the island for America. But as Cleeton began work on a plot inspired by her family history, she realized the story would need to be a different genre entirely in order to do it justice.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Eleanor and Hick, Darling and Dearest: Amy Bloom on ‘White Houses’

Behind the Book by Amy Bloom

by Amy Bloom

There are 3,000 letters between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, then a prominent female journalist, in 18 large, heavy boxes in the archives of the FDR Library in Hyde Park. I first read about the letters, written between 1932 and Eleanor Roosevelt’s death in 1962, in Blanche Wiesen Cook’s exceptional biography, Eleanor Roosevelt (Viking, 1992). She quotes from the letters generously, concluding that the two women were lovers. I went and read the letters. No wild speculation was required.

“I long to kiss the south-east corner of your lips . . . ” and

“My dear, if you meet me, may I forget there are other people present or must I behave?” and

“ . . . I went and kissed your photograph instead and tears were in my eyes. Please keep most of my heart in Washington as long as I’m here, for most of mine is with you!”

These are not the kind of things that I have ever said to just-a-friend, no matter how close. But Blanche Wiesen Cook was pilloried by other historians in 1992 for examining the facts and the letters and concluding that Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok were not just good friends, not just in love, but lovers. Within five years, most of those historians contacted Cook privately and apologized saying, Gee, I finally read the letters. You’re right. (Oops.)

Ken Burns, a great burnisher of the Roosevelt name, is one of the last hold-outs, feeling, apparently, that although Teddy’s maniacal escapades in Africa and FDR’s numerous love affairs only brighten their images, Eleanor Roosevelt’s long love affair was just . . . tabloid gossip. His documentary on the Roosevelts aggravated me as much as his one on jazz had delighted me.

“I assume when you say a relationship you are assuming that there was a sexual relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. We have no evidence whatsoever of that, and none of the historians and experts believe it,” Burns said at a television critics event in September 2014. “This is an intimate [look at the Roosevelts], not a tabloid, and we just don’t know. . . . We have to be very careful because sometimes we want to read into things that aren’t there.”

And sometimes, Mr. Burns, a smoking cigar is, indeed, a smoking cigar (to paraphrase both Blanche Wiesen Cook and Sigmund Freud).

The thousands of beautifully written—and beautifully penned—letters between these two women brought them to life for me, from their early attraction to their burning passion (which both of them, as staid middle-aged ladies, found hilarious, unexpected and irresistible) to their 30-year friendship and all of its ups and downs, from feelings of neglect, to feelings of possessiveness, to cheerful gossip and the absolute unbreakable private Christmas party of two, and to their grief at the separation they both chose. Although I wish I’d seen the letters Hick had burnt (too racy, she said), the 18 boxes gave me Eleanor and Lorena, Darling and Dearest, determined, despairing, purposeful, wild and restrained, passionate and incapable of parting—and they gave me this book.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of White Houses.

Fiction, Historical Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Historical Mystery

‘Downton’ writer takes on an infamous Golden-Age family

Behind the Book by Jessica Fellowes

by Jessica Fellowes

“Downton Abbey” expert Jessica Fellowes (she’s the author of five official companion books) turns an eye to a different headline-making family in her historical debut, The Mitford Murders. Based on the true story of the murder of Florence Nightingale Shore (the goddaughter of the famous war nurse), The Mitford Murders follows Louisa Cannon, the newest young employee at the Mitford’s manor, as she navigates their high-profile world. But when Louisa and 16-year-old Nancy Mitford find themselves at the crime scene of Florence’s murder, their lives begin to spiral out of control.

In a Behind the Book feature, Fellowes dishes on exactly what drew her to the drama-plagued Mitford sisters, the influence “Downton Abbey” had on her story and more.

As a young girl, seeing my uncle Julian was always a treat. He was my father’s younger brother and, until I was 16, unmarried and without a child of his own. We used to go on holidays to Majorca and the South of France together to stay with friends of his who had children, but mostly we enjoyed each other’s company. Julian was never less than a fount of amusing stories, but the ones I enjoyed the most were the anecdotes about our family that he had collected, mostly from his own elderly aunts. My grandfather was born in 1912 and though he was an only child, his father had several sisters and it was these women who told Julian of a dying Edwardian age, with all its extraordinary snobberies and customs, as well as of the challenges and tragedies of a life lived during and after World War I.

It was these stories that we later saw in “Downton Abbey,” which Julian created and wrote for six seasons. I was lucky enough to become a part of the “Downton” world when I wrote the official companion books, which told not only the story of how the series was made but also sought to explain something of the historical context that inspired so many of the characters and plots. I had grown up working for newspapers as well as the iconic Country Life magazine, which taught me a lot about life inside the great houses of Britain. And all the while, Julian and I had continued to talk and share stories, leading me to the writers of the between-the-wars period: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, W. Somerset Maugham and Nancy Mitford.

When I had finished the five “Downton Abbey” books, I knew I wanted to write a novel next and I knew I wanted it to be set in the 1920s—a time that I am both familiar with and endlessly fascinated by. By an extraordinary piece of luck, I was approached by editor Ed Wood at Little, Brown, who asked me if I would consider writing a series of Golden Age-style mysteries featuring the Mitford sisters.

Of course, I knew their legend well—six sisters who grew up in Oxfordshire, England, who each came of age during the 1920s and 1930s. Between them, they represent everything that was compelling, glamorous, political and even appalling about that time: Nancy the satirical novelist; Pamela the countrywoman; Diana the fascist; Unity, who fell in love with Hitler; Decca the communist; and Debo, who became the Duchess of Devonshire and ran one of Britain’s grandest houses. We had the idea for a series, with each book focusing on one of the sisters at a key moment in their lives. I knew I wanted a pair of fictional protagonists who could appear in every book, taking us in and out of every room both upstairs and downstairs, so I created Louisa Cannon, a nursery maid for the Mitfords, and her (sort-of) love interest, policeman Guy Sullivan.

A few weeks after I had started planning the first novel, Ed sent me a newspaper article online about a murder in January 1920 that had never been solved. Could this, he wondered, be our first crime? This was the tragic murder of Florence Nightingale Shore. She was brave, having worked in both the Boer War and World War I, yet only two months after she was demobilized, she was attacked on a train and left for dead.

When I realized that there was a possible connection between Florence and the Mitfords, I knew this was the perfect crime. The inquest records had been destroyed but there were numerous newspaper reports of what had been, at the time, a famous and shocking murder. I was also able to trace details of her will, find photographs of her lodgings and look up the details of her family ancestry as well as those of her close relatives and friends. All of which led me closer to what, I believe, is a likely solution to her terrible death. Alongside Guy’s investigations is always the bright and irascible Nancy, whose predilection for story-telling and close observations are of invaluable help to him. Louisa, too, becomes drawn into the crime and discovers her own talent for problem-solving. For the next book, Bright Young Dead, I’m writing about Pamela Mitford and another real-life criminal. But it’s the smaller details of the world then that continue to fascinate me, and I hope that I can get that across to the readers in a way that feels real and relevant. That, for me, is the privilege of my work.

“Downton Abbey” expert Jessica Fellowes (the author of five official companion books) turns an eye to a different headline-making family in her historical debut, The Mitford Murders. In a Behind the Book feature, Fellowes dishes on exactly what drew her to the drama-plagued Mitford sisters, the influence “Downton Abbey” had on her story and more.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Heart blindness

Behind the Book by Elizabeth J. Church

by Elizabeth J. Church

“How many of us have seen our friends stepping into a bad situation and worried over what—if anything—to say, knowing our counsel is unwanted?”

Head to Las Vegas and leave your past at the door. That is Lily Decker’s hope when she trades in her brutal childhood in Kansas for the glamour of the Vegas Strip in 1957.

Elizabeth J. Church’s new novel, All the Beautiful Girls, follows Lily through her difficult, abusive childhood, when her only trustworthy adult is the man who had caused the car accident that killed her parents. But bright lights and big dreams are always on the horizon, and at 18 years old, Lily, calling herself Ruby Wilde, discovers a showgirl life filled with parties, new friends and every luxury she ever wished for. But her heart was broken at a young age, and some pain cannot be avoided forever.

Church shares an in-depth look at the questions that drove the creation of this heartbreaking, unforgettable character.

It’s frightening to admit this, but I’ve entered my seventh decade on this earth, and not only have I often made poor choices in love, but I’ve seen many others do the same. During the years that I practiced divorce law, I saw dozens of couples who had entered into unwise allegiances, including many who were confoundingly loath to let go. They paid enormous sums of money so that they could continue to fight, sometimes over such things as who would win custody of the good brownie pan or visitation schedules for dogs (and whether the dog bowls should travel along)

It all made me think. How do we choose our lovers? Our partners for life? What factors, what previous experiences, come into play? And why do women who are talented, intelligent and strong, who possess financial security and enviable careers, enter into relationships in which they are demeaned and sometimes even endangered? How many of us have seen our friends stepping into a bad situation and worried over what—if anything—to say, knowing our counsel is unwanted? And why oh why is it only in hindsight that we see people for who they really are?

My novel’s protagonist, Lily (who adopts the stage name Ruby when, at age 18, she heads to Las Vegas and becomes a showgirl), is strikingly beautiful. She’s bright and eager to contribute to a world that, in the late 1960s, is in the process of dramatic change. She’s been pummeled in early life; her family is killed in a car accident when she’s just 8 years old, and she’s forced to live with a stoic aunt and an uncle who sexually abuses her. Despite the brutality of her childhood, Ruby works hard and rises through the ranks until she is recognized for her talent and beauty as “Showgirl of the Year.” She can have her pick of any man—or men. And yet, Ruby falls for a man who, while gloriously handsome and sexy, also has a dark side. Ruby is the friend we’ve all had (or been): She is the friend we worry about and struggle to comprehend.

Countless factors shape our wants and needs in a partner. There is that make-or-break physical attraction, that chemical pull—because without it, we simply look the other way. Perhaps a person comes along at a time when we are particularly vulnerable, or when we have a compelling need that the person seems to meet. We see what we want or need to see. And what’s particularly interesting to me is that we let those initial, needful first impressions harden into a vision we come to believe is reality.

Maya Angelou has said, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” It’s a wonderfully true statement, and her wording is important. She doesn’t write, “When people tell you who they are”; she writes, instead, “show.” It’s an elegant variation on the truism, “Actions speak louder than words.” She also encourages us to avoid giving someone the benefit of the doubt dozens or hundreds of times over.

After completing All the Beautiful Girls, I came to the conclusion that what we must be careful about with love is what we tell ourselves. How often are we excusing behavior we’d never tolerate in a friend or acquaintance? What are we telling ourselves that justifies our staying in a relationship? Why are we working so very hard to justify poor behavior?

I think the most important thing I learned in writing this book is that just because I understand a behavior—why it might occur, what things might lead someone to be ferociously angry, cruel, cutting or simply careless—does not mean I have to tolerate the behavior. I wonder, though, if these are the kinds of lessons that can be learned in the abstract. Perhaps we first have to travel down the wrong road, trip and stumble, before we can find the right path to love.

Photo credit Anna Yarrow

It’s frightening to admit this, but I’ve entered my seventh decade on this earth, and not only have I often made poor choices in love, but I’ve seen many others do the same.

Fiction

Fiction

Cowgirls, family and autism: A novel of Calamity Jane

Behind the Book by Michelle Rene

by Michelle Rene

In her new historical novel, Hour Glass, Michelle Rene draws readers into the wild town of Deadwood, South Dakota, where a boy named Jimmy Glass and his little sister, Hour, seek help for their father, who has fallen dangerously ill with smallpox. In Deadwood they encounter the notorious Calamity Jane—but this is a very different Jane from what readers might expect. Rene shares a look behind the characters that breathe life into this Wild West tale.

The rough draft of Hour Glass was written in 16 days. Yes, you read that correctly. That is not to say the research took that long, just the writing itself, but most people don’t believe you can write anything of value in that short amount of time.

The book was a desperate outpouring of emotions molded into a concise story. I had recently lost my grandmother, who is named in the dedication, and her passing filled me with a litany of emotions. Inside my journey of grief, I discovered sorrow, beauty and even humor. The loving family that surrounded me was my lifeline and a big inspiration for the book.

Why write about Calamity Jane? I’ve been fascinated with her for a long time, the buckskin-wearing woman of the West who could drink like a cowboy and swear like one, too. If you look back through history, we are drawn to stories about women like Jane. Those brave souls who bucked tradition and blazed their own path in the world. Calamity Jane did so with a pistol in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.

There are not many hard facts about the woman, which made my job both challenging and liberating. The way of the Old West was that of oral history, and the exploits of legendary characters like Calamity Jane were often exaggerated, especially by Jane herself. This is liberating in that I had more artistic license with her story, but challenging in that I desperately wanted to paint an accurate representation of the time. To write such a woman as brazen and drunk would be only part of the story. The other side, one that Jane rarely spoke of, was her kindness. She was known to be charitable, and the city of Deadwood credits her for selflessly caring for the victims of the smallpox epidemic of 1876. Who better to represent my story than a generous soul who fought mightily and could laugh in the face sorrow?

On to the subject of my title character, Hour. As far as I know, there aren’t any autistic characters written into Old West stories, and I believe they deserve representation. Of course, that is not the only reason for writing a character such as Hour. My own son is autistic. When I wrote the first draft of this book, he hadn’t been diagnosed, but we were seeing the signs, and doctors were preparing us for what was next.

Hour is not exactly like my son, but Jimmy’s love and fear for his sister represents what I was feeling at the time. He desperately wants to protect her from the world, knowing it can be a harsh place, unfeeling toward her temperament. Many of the rewrites came after my son’s diagnosis and after the shock of it wore off. Those of you who have faced a team of psychiatrists who are explaining your beautiful child is on the spectrum will understand the barrage of emotions that follow. The fear, the love and, yes, even the relief to finally know the truth. It wasn’t until I stopped reeling from the diagnosis that I was able to go back and flesh out the amazing girl that was Hour and not just focus on Jimmy’s love for her.

Though Hour Glass is about Calamity Jane, Jimmy Glass and Hour, the deeper theme is family. Even in the rough and tumble world of Deadwood in the 1870s, a loving family can grow with the most unlikely of people.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction Debut Fiction

Every day, all over the world: What is a girl worth?

Behind the Book by Shobha Rao

by Shobha Rao

As crushing as it is beautiful, Shobha Rao’s debut novel follows two Indian girls through the most hopeless of circumstances, but their enduring friendship burns brightly—endlessly—through it all. Girls Burn Brighter is a light that will not go out. Here, Rao shares a look behind her book.

In November of 1999, two young Indian girls were found unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning in an apartment building in Berkeley, California. One of the girls, who was 13 years old, died from the poisoning; the other survived. The building was owned by Lakireddy Bali Reddy. And as it turned out, so were the girls. Over the course of the investigation into the girl’s death, it was found that Reddy had trafficked the two girls, along with an alleged 99 other women and girls, into the United States over the course of a 13-year period. The girl who died, Sitha V., had served as a sexual and domestic slave to Reddy. These findings eventually led to the conviction of Reddy, one of the wealthiest and most powerful landlords in Berkeley, to eight years in prison.

Many years later, I found myself working at a South Asian domestic violence agency in nearby San Jose, whereupon I came into contact with one of the victims. She never told me her story, as all documentation related to the case was sealed, but meeting her—witnessing her warmth, her laughter—made me think more deeply about the case.

In this thinking, the first question that came to me was: How much did Reddy pay for Sitha?

The second question was: How much was she worth?

The answer to the first question was simple. I didn’t know it, but it was most certainly simple. At some point, in a small village in South India, Reddy had approached the destitute parents of a young girl. He had handed them money: a set amount of money, decided upon, bargained, negotiated by the powerless parents of a powerless girl. The exact amount he paid for her may be unknown, but it is not a mystery, it is currency: Somebody paid it, somebody accepted it, and a girl was bought.

It happens every day.

The second question though. The second question is what haunted me: How much is a girl worth?

It is this question that I set out to explore in Girls Burn Brighter. In some ways, the writing of the novel, the exploration of what a girl is worth is as straightforward as taking a knife to a frog on a dissecting table. There is a body. You can cut up the body, carve away the limbs; you can make a slit, take out the organs, put them back in. That is a body. It is, for instance, generally worth less without all the limbs intact, without all the organs in place. It is worth less if there’s a slit. Or if there’s a scar. Or if it is too fat. Too thin. Too short. Too tall. Or if the skin is too dark. It is worth less if the frog isn’t the exact shade of green that is preferred by the men of the country it is born into, and the culture and proclivities and notions of beauty that dictate its mores. The frog is worth less if it questions a single one of these mores.

In other ways though, writing the novel was nothing like looking at a frog on a dissecting table. It was instead like looking at a frog in a stream. The same frog, let’s say, but now sunning itself on a rock. The light glinting off the silk of its skin. Its eyes deepened by the memory of that first step onto land, feeling in that step the density of the waiting shore, its unending promise. But this frog on the rock is a girl frog, and so that promise is sometimes meager and offers hardly anything. It is sometimes false and feeds her with lies. It sometimes says to her, you are on a rock, dreaming, but you might as well be on a dissecting table, dead.

And so, then came the true question. What am I worth? What are you worth? Your body, your memories, the depth of your eyes, the fall of your foot, what you give to the world, what you take. What do they add up to?

It’s easy to blurt out a number: a million trillion dollars! A number that has no meaning. A number that is not a true reflection of anything but our fragile egos. A number that we hope and want to believe is maybe not even a number. But whatever it is, whether it is coins of gold or coins of light, we know, in the depth of our hearts, that our number is most certainly larger than Sitha V.’s number.

Is it cruel to admit this? Or is it cruel to not admit this?

And really, why admit anything at all? Why talk about the body of a girl? Now long dead. And why ask what she was worth? Why ask ourselves what we are worth? For surely, you and I will never be for sale. We will never be so poor as to be forced to sell our daughters. We will not lay awake, wondering if there is another way, aching to find it. We will not drop to our knees and clasp her in our arms, wordless, silenced by poverty, by inequity, by the ruthlessness of birth and chance. We will not (no, never) live in a place so horrible and unenlightened and remote as Berkeley, California. We will not let it happen in our midst, nor under our noses.

So why worry about a thing that is not our concern? That is not relevant to us. That is not worth our time.

I was talking once to a friend about overpopulation. I was having a pragmatic conversation about food distribution, water scarcity, land resources. But he was having none of it. He looked right at me, his eyes afire, and he said, “Saying there are too many people in the world is like saying there are too many stars in the sky.”

Too many stars in the sky. How romantic.

See. See how one of them is felled. A 13-year-old girl—born into poverty in India, sold by her poor parents to a rich man, trafficked to the United States, fettered into forced labor and raped repeatedly, before dying alone on a dirty floor. She was born and she was bought and then she died.

And like all stars, she hung for a time in the sky. She burned.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Girls Burn Brighter.

Photo credit Carlos Avila Gonzalez

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Merging the worlds of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley

Behind the Book by John Kessel

by John Kessel

Mary Bennet and Victor Frankenstein in love—shocking at first, but as author John Kessel reveals in Pride and Prometheus, it makes sense for these two outsiders to connect. Kessel, husband to novelist Therese Ann Fowler and the director of creative writing at North Carolina State University, shares a look behind his new book and how he combined two of our favorite classics.

I got the idea for Pride and Prometheus while sitting at the critique table of the 2005 Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference, during my comments on Benjamin Rosenbaum’s wonderfully surreal deconstruction of Jane Austen in his story “Sense and Sensibility.” It hit me that Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein were published only a few years apart. Despite big differences in content and sensibility, the two books would have sat on the same bookshelves in 1818. Yet I had seldom heard them spoken of together.

This resulted in my bringing a story titled “Austenstein” (later Pride and Prometheus) to next summer’s conference. After my critique, fellow workshopper Karen Joy Fowler suggested to me that it should be a novel. I resisted. I did not think I could find a novel’s worth of story in Mary Bennet’s brief encounter with Victor Frankenstein and his Creature.

But 10 years later I returned to the idea, realizing that the novelette was only the middle of the story, and by starting earlier and carrying past the end, and adding the perspectives of Victor and his Creature, it would make a book.

Fusing the worlds of Austen and Shelley presented problems if I was not simply going to write some superficial parody. Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein are antithetical books. Austen maintains a cool distance from her characters; she treats them with irony and leavens even the most extreme situations with wry humor. There’s plenty of psychological distress, but for the most part, the most violent thing that happens in an Austen novel is an overheard conversation or someone getting caught out in the rain.

Frankenstein is full of histrionic excess, chases and murders: An artificial human is created from dead tissue, a child is strangled, a home is burned down in vengeance, a woman is hanged for a crime she did not commit, and a man chases a monster to the north pole. There are no jokes.

Frankenstein’s monster does not belong in a Regency drawing room. Mary Bennet does not belong in a 19th-century laboratory.

But the very challenge of mating these disparate tales made it a fascinating project, and the more I got into Shelley’s and Austen’s characters, the more interesting the project became. For one thing, making Mary Bennet the heroine meant I had to evolve her from the sententious, clueless girl she is in Pride and Prejudice. I set my story 13 years after the end of Austen’s novel, placing Mary on the verge of spinsterhood and allowing time for her to mature, to gain a little self-knowledge and sympathy.

It pleased me to tell what’s become of various characters from Austen in the decade after her novel ended. Of course writing sequels to Pride and Prejudice has become something of a cottage industry in recent years, but I hope I have provided as true a vision as they. So here are Kitty Bennet and Mr. Collins, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Darcy and Elizabeth, Uncle and Aunt Gardiner, and even a servant or two, a little older and perhaps even, in some cases, a little wiser.

Moreover, since my novel occurs during the course of Frankenstein rather than after it is finished, I had to work my story into the gaps in Shelley’s. Pride and Prometheus grew into a secret history of Frankenstein, elaborating on events that occur in that book, adding new ones. What would the Creature think upon observing a ball in London society? How might Frankenstein converse with the Bennets at Darcy’s dinner table? My job with Victor and his Creature was to extend what we know of them from the novel, to go deeper into their characters, to explain some things that are left out and imagine why and how they do the things they do.

In the process I got to contrast the worlds of realism and the fantastic, the novel of manners and speculative fiction, the two kinds of stories to which I have devoted my career as a teacher and writer. It turns out that these distinct visions of the world have things to say to each another.

I hope the result is as thought provoking to read as it was to write.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Pride and Prometheus.

Photo credit John Pagliuca

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

The melody of a first novel

Behind the Book by Leesa Cross-Smith

by Leesa Cross-Smith

Love and music, grief and guilt swirl in Leesa Cross-Smith’s debut novel. Whiskey & Ribbons dances around the death of a police officer, unfolding through the voices of three of its characters: the officer’s wife, Evi, months after his death, when she’s snowed in with her late husband’s adopted brother; the officer, Eamon, before he’s killed, as he anticipates the birth of his son; and Dalton, the brother, who’s trying to track down his own father. In gorgeous writing, Cross-Smith renders the relationships between these three characters sacred. We asked Cross-Smith why she wrote her novel, and her answer is simple: because she is a novelist.

I’ve always wanted to be a novelist. I love the word. Novelist. It’s pretty and it’s something I wanted to be. Something I am. Something I love being. I wrote a novel that wasn’t really a novel. I wrote a short story collection. I wrote a young adult novel. I wrote another novel. I wrote my debut novel Whiskey & Ribbons. Whiskey & Ribbons began as a short story and turned into a longer story. For a moment it was a play. I’ve always wanted to be a novelist. I talked myself out of it. I was semi-content only writing short stories. I love writing flash fiction. I’ve written a story that is only 26 words long. I decided to expand on “Whiskey & Ribbons” the short story because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I decided to write Whiskey & Ribbons because I wanted to be a novelist.

I read everything. I listened. I kept writing. I read books re: time in fiction. I read books about plot. I spent a lot of time considering intimacy, a lot of time considering grief, a lot of time considering family—the ones we’re born into, the ones we (sometimes accidentally) find ourselves in. I spent a lot of time considering secrets and complicated relationships and comfort. I started and stopped writing Whiskey & Ribbons because I couldn’t figure out how to structure it. I would walk and wander around, two miles, three miles, listening to Swan Lake and Romeo and Juliet. I listened to Chopin and Bach. Mozart. I am not a composer, I am a novelist.

I decided to structure Whiskey & Ribbons the way a composer would structure a fugue. A piece of music consisting of three voices, three different points of view. But they come together. They blend. And later, one voice drops out. I kill a character. I kill him in the first line of the first page. This is no surprise. But I can still barely read his obituary without crying. He is very alive to me, and I am in love with him. I am in love with all of these characters because they are real to me because I am a novelist.

I’ve written about three people who love one another deeply. I’ve written about two of those people attempting to find their way . . . together . . . after losing someone they both love so deeply. I’ve written about how they hold and honor that space, that piece of them that is now forever missing. I’ve written about a mother, simultaneously grieving her husband and celebrating the birth of the son she was pregnant with when her husband was killed in a random act of violence. I’ve written about a woman who is falling in love with her husband’s adopted brother—her brother-in-law—and the complications that brings. I’ve written about a police officer who loves his job, who loves his wife. I’ve written about a black family in Kentucky. I’ve written about a ballerina and a man who is an exquisite pianist—who was a piano prodigy—a man who owns a bike shop. I’ve written about a blizzard, trapping them inside, a kiss at the piano—sparking a weekend of confession and storytelling and sexual tension.

I’ve written a novel about grief and hope and desire and brotherhood and the slick ribbons that hold families together, even when one of them slips away. I almost talked myself out of writing it, but it wouldn’t let me go. I am so glad it wouldn’t let me go. Whiskey & Ribbons is my debut novel and I am a novelist.

Fiction

Fiction

Looking death in the eye

Behind the Book by Susan Henderson

by Susan Henderson

In her second novel, Susan Henderson writes about the realities and dignities of death through the story of a small town, its residents and one shy misfit, the daughter of a mortician. Henderson is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize.

In my new novel, The Flicker of Old Dreams, I wanted to explore the death of a small town in rural America. And I got it into my head that the best narrator for this story would be a mortician because she could look death in the eye without flinching.

Of course, I knew nothing about the funeral industry. I’d written plenty about death over the years, but always in the context of grief, of trying to absorb and move through the pain. Dealing with the physical body seemed almost contrary to grief. It was a practical matter of lifting and getting hands dirtied and dealing with the grim task—What do we do with this body that has been so precious to us?

And so I began my research. I studied everything I could about embalming, bathing the dead and the decay of the body. My bedside table became stacked with books about death and dying and funeral homes. I talked to morticians. I even turned on YouTube videos of surgeries and autopsies and listened with my eyes closed so I could concentrate on the sounds of the tools and the cutting.

I had to sit a long while with the shock of all I learned. The process of embalming struck me as weird and invasive—steps to make sure the body didn’t leak or foam at the mouth during visiting hours, tools to puncture and then vacuum out the contents of the organs, tiny plastic caps to place over the eyeballs before sewing them shut, so many tricks with Super Glue. The more I learned about embalming, the more I thought, How strange that we do this to people we love!

But Mary Crampton, the narrator who absorbed my research, was quite tender with those who came through her basement workroom. An outcast in this small town, she found it easier to connect with the dead than the living. She understood the vulnerability of the naked body—the girth, the long-raised scar, the damaged liver, the bedsores. She was not blind to the flaws of her neighbors—in fact, some had shunned her. And still she cared for them. There’s a scene between Mary and a high school peer, a former cheerleader, who arrives in her workroom beneath the white sheet. And finally they have this girl time together, with Mary styling her hair and painting her nails crimson, their school’s colors—ways she couldn’t interact with a person when they were alive.

It was Mary’s tenderness with the dead and her deep respect for her profession that helped me know how to tell the complex story of this dying town. I opened my eyes to all that was before me—to a community that was strong, proud, insular, inflexible, beautiful, punishing and grieving. I began to see the rage of the unemployed as a last struggle against an inevitable death. This was a town that had little room for difference or for people like Mary. And yet she wanted the town to die with dignity.

Photo credit Taylor Hooper Photography

Fiction

Fiction

In the place I live: Welcome to rural Kentucky and ‘Weedeater’

Behind the Book by Robert Gipe

by Robert Gipe

Appalachian writer Robert Gipe’s first illustrated novel, Trampoline, was an award-winning coming-of-age tale set in rural Kentucky, where a teenage girl named Dawn Jewell recounts the story of her grandmother’s fight against a mountaintop removal coal mine company. Six years after the events of Trampoline, Weedeater finds 22-year-old Dawn living with her husband and 4-year-old daughter in Tennessee. But the world of Canard County, Kentucky, calls her back. Dawn’s narration forms a duet with that of Gene, a lawn-care worker in love with Dawn’s Aunt June, who is determined to rescue Dawn’s mother from herself.

With Trampoline and Weedeater, Gipe delivers some of the most vivid Appalachian characters we’ve ever read. There are no clichés or stereotypes here. Illustrations of Dawn and Gene deliver clever one-liners and elevate the narration to a face-to-face relationship with the reader.

We asked Gipe to show us around Canard County, so to speak.

I live in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. The hillside out my kitchen window is steep—69 steps up to the front door of my house from the road below, and 75 out the back door up to the road above. The mountains are everywhere where I live.

The world in my novel Weedeater is as steep as the hillside out the window. I tried to make that world as vivid as the world I live in. In the place I live, cars get wrecked. Relationships go sour. Jobs disappear. People get grouchy. People keep going. They shoot off fireworks. They go to the lake to fish in boats big and little. They go to stock car races in motor homes. They go to church in pickup trucks. They ride around on four-wheelers to be alone with their beloved or to hunt for ginseng, or just to feel their hair blow in the wind.

In the place I live, sometimes food runs low. Electricity gets cut off. People die from falling off roofs, from coal mines collapsing on them, from eating bad, from trying to save people, from taking too many drugs. They drown. They get struck by lightning. They die in their own time in their own beds surrounded by friends and family and their little dogs. Snakes bite them. Spiders bite them. Dogs bite them. They comfort one another. They pray for one another. They scheme against one another. They tattle. They keep secrets. They buy new clothes. They wear old clothes. They fix their own water heaters and roof their own houses. They change their own oil and fix their own washing machines. They make doll clothes and knitted things that fit over your toaster, and burn Bible verses into pieces of wood, and they sell these things off car hoods and in flea markets and on the Internet. They also write books and keep up with what’s going on in the world and make art, and sometimes they fix soup beans and cornbread to eat, and sometimes they fix chicken curry.

Sometimes people here organize strikes against their bad bosses, and sometimes they just go on to work. Sometimes they rise up in protest against things that aren’t fair and aren’t right, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they cry because they had to move away, and sometimes they cry because they had to stay. Most times people here know who their local politicians are. Most times they’re aggravated with them. Sometimes they say, “Well, they’re doing the best they can.” And as for national politicians, let’s just say most people I know think the electoral college and gerrymandering are highly problematic and but two examples of how the game may or may not be rigged against us and are not surprised when their neighbors have trouble taking participatory politics seriously.

This area where I live has never consistently had a good rate of employment. Things might go OK for a while, but then there are layoffs and companies going out of business, and so things have been rough here forever. The bad things that can happen to people pile up. And repeat. And wear a person down. Wear a whole place down.

I wrote Weedeater knowing people who live where I do also read books. So I try to write something for them that deals with what is hard, but also catches how much fun we have, and how much spirit for surviving we have, and I try to write books that mess around with ideas about how things could maybe get better. But then I also write books to try and catch what it’s like when a whole bunch of things go wrong at once for readers for whom not so many things have gone wrong. I grew up with only a few things going wrong and most things going right for most people I know. It’s easier when fewer things go wrong in your life to think you’re smarter or better than the people who are always in the soup. But you’re not. You’re just luckier. And so I try to write stories that help people identify with and love people with too-complicated lives. I don’t want anybody feeling sorry for them. I want people to see what it’s like, and realize maybe hard-luck people are actually pretty smart and creative and have a lot of grit and are a lot of fun to root for, whether you are one of them or not.