BookPage starred review, February 2019

To tell a good tale, you need drama—and in this area, Bowlaway spares no expense. A turn-of-the-20th-century candlepin bowling alley works its way into people’s lives and under their skin in Elizabeth McCracken’s sixth book. 

After she seems to materialize in a cemetery in Salford, Massachusetts, Bertha Truitt opens Truitt’s Alleys (later rechristened Bowlaway), which takes on a life as mysterious as her own. Bertha’s oddities are numerous: bicycling in a split skirt, building an octagonal house named Superba high on a hill, marrying a black doctor named Leviticus Sprague and then letting women bowl in full view of spectators. The whole being of Bertha scandalizes and perplexes. When Bertha is struck down in a bewildering accident that evokes (for this reader, anyhow) a scene from the fantastic but short-lived sitcom “Pushing Daisies,” her death sets the lives of those in her orbit spinning.

“Our subject is love because our subject is bowling,” McCracken’s narrator opines early in the novel. The love in Bowlaway takes many forms: love of a spouse, love of a child, love of self and love of a capricious game. People love the alleys; they hate the alleys; they keep coming back to the alleys. Bowlaway forms the linchpin in the lives of an eccentric cast, from Bertha’s disconsolate widower to Joe Wear, the young watchman who first found Bertha in the cemetery. Joe becomes manager before an unexplained disappearance, but his fate is intertwined with Bertha’s and the bowling alley, no matter how long he stays away from the lanes.

In Bowlaway, McCracken’s prose is well-tooled, hilarious and tender, thoughtful and jocular. Her characters inhabit their world so completely, so bodily, that they could’ve truly existed. Her detailed observations make the bizarre seem plausible, and always enjoyable.

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

BookPage starred review, February 2019

It’s shocking to imagine that, while remarkably successful in its time, The Wizard of Oz now ranks more than 2,000 slots below Garfield: The Movie in terms of domestic gross revenue. And while MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer insisted that he was in the business of making money rather than magic, bestselling author Elizabeth Letts’ latest novel, Finding Dorothy, uncovers both in abundance on the set of the 1939 film.

In some ways reminiscent of Jerry Stahl’s excellent I, Fatty, Letts’ Finding Dorothy combines exhaustive research with expansive imagination, blending history and speculation into a seamless tapestry. It’s true that Oz author L. Frank Baum’s widow spent time with Judy Garland on set. And it’s from this point of departure—California, not Kansas—that Letts leads us down a parallel pair of yellow brick roads. One traverses the courtship, marriage and adult life of Maud Gage Baum, suffragette’s daughter and modern woman. She became the wife of a dreamer, a man not always financially successful but deeply committed to providing for his family and madly in love with his wife. The second road takes us into the golden age of Hollywood, where fate and opportunity conspire to make Judy Garland a superstar. Maud arrives on set to try to ensure that her husband’s vision is preserved, but she realizes that the more immediate task at hand is to take Dorothy/Judy—their identities in many ways inseparable at this point—under her wing. 

It’s a testament to Letts’ skill that she can capture on the page, without benefit of audio, that same emotion we have all felt sometime over the last 80 years while listening to “Over the Rainbow”: “Maud knew, right then, that Judy had done it. She had captured the magic that Frank had put into his story, sucked it from the air and breathed it back out through her vocal cords. Maud felt in her heart that Frank must have been listening.”

Let’s see some smug, wisecracking Hollywood cat do that.

This article was originally published in the February 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.

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.

BookPage starred review, January 2019

In so much of American history—or in so much of America’s interpretation of its own history—there is an air of pulp fiction. In retellings of the lives and doings of grand, almost mythological figures who shaped this country, the real and fantastical commingle, overlap, become inseparable. It is this fundamental inseparability that makes Jerome Charyn’s novel about the life and times of Theodore Roosevelt so much fun to read.

With its dimestore-comic cover design, The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King is presented as a kind of pulp pastiche of the 26th president’s thoroughly inimitable life. The book, which begins with Roosevelt’s childhood and follows him to the cusp of his presidency, leans hard on the real (and in many cases, likely inflated) events of the man’s life. But it is also a surprisingly poignant assessment of smaller, more universally human moments.

Two-thirds of the novel is set during the early and middle years of Roosevelt’s life—the years he fought in the sewer-dirty wars of New York City politics. Here, Charyn does his most impressive scene-setting work, placing the reader in the heart of late 19th-century Manhattan. The sense of place and the fundamentally ugly nature of big-city politics are consistent and convincing. By focusing on this part of Roosevelt’s life, rather than his Rough Rider days or his time as president, the bulk of the book works very well, and makes for a much more kinetic and less well-worn story.

Charyn has a gift for the unexpected, both linguistically and narratively: A snake wraps itself around a boy’s arm “like a living bandage,” and President McKinley has “the soft, sunken heart of a chocolate éclair.” The most emotionally resonant relationship in the book is between Roosevelt and Josephine, his pet mountain lion.

Deftly, Charyn interweaves what is real and invented about Roosevelt’s life, and the result is at once surprising and very entertaining.

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

In comparison to our current crop of dingy squillionaires and robber barons, the Vanderbilts, Belmonts and Astors were so much more entertaining, with their monstrous Fifth Avenue chateaux and even more monstrous “cottages,” their frivolous costume balls, their genteel contempt for the hoi polloi and their obsession with bloodlines, both their own and those of their thoroughbred racehorses. Therese Anne Fowler’s biographical novel isn’t about careless people, but people who care too much about the wrong stuff.

Alva Vanderbilt Belmont married for money, as did just about everyone else in her set. She hasn’t a scintilla of a sense of humor. She is a hypocrite and a coward. She may feel bad about letting her lady’s maid go because she is black, or for shunning one of her friends because he penned a silly book, but she does it anyway. She all but imprisons her beautiful, dimwitted daughter, Consuelo, because she wants her to marry the Duke of Marlborough and not the older, less well-heeled Winty Rutherfurd. (Fowler leaves out how Alva used to beat Consuelo with a riding crop but leaves in how she threatens to shoot Rutherfurd dead.) Fowler skillfully depicts both the doomed, cruel, ridiculous society that Alva married into and how she tries, in her plodding yet ruthless way, to navigate it. It is ever so tempting to believe that Edith Wharton’s ghastly Undine Spragg contains some of Alva’s DNA.

But don’t feel sorry for the Vanderbilt women. Both Alva and Consuelo lived to ripe old ages, and both gained some wisdom, no doubt born of pain. The end of Fowler’s absorbing book finds them at a suffragette rally in London’s Hyde Park, spellbound by the words of a true heroine who really knew how to buck the patriarchy. As the book says, “[Alva] was no Emmeline Pankhurst.” Indeed.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, November 2018

It might not be so wrong to review Edward Carey’s new novel, Little, with the simple declaration that it is exceptionally good. Filled with delightfully macabre illustrations, Little is about the journey of Marie Grosholtz, a rather odd-looking, diminutive child born in a tiny Swiss village in 1761. An orphan by the time she is 8, Marie finds herself in the care of the equally lonely and eccentric Dr. Curtius, a wax sculptor for the village hospital.

There, amid the real bones and organs, Marie is not scared but instead intrigued and anxious to learn the magic of plaster and wax to replicate anything at all. Soon, the master and his little apprentice escape to Paris, where they meet Widow Picot and her son, Edmond. With a head for business, the widow knows how to cash in on Dr. Curtius’ skills, and the Monkey House is born as a spectacle for the locals to marvel at wax heads of famous (and infamous) personalities. Money and fame follow, but not for Marie, whose unseemly looks overshadow her artistic talents, and she is banished as a worthless servant and denied money, power and love.

If this seems dark, it’s because it is. But Carey portrays Marie as one of the most ambitious characters you will ever meet. She is funny and kind, but above all, she is relentless in her pursuit of opportunities, which she first finds as a teacher to a princess at Versailles, then as a sculptor of wax head castings during the bloody French Revolution and later as the legendary Madame Tussaud. Marie is little only in name.

An irresistible tale, Little will please all readers, especially those who love period adventures and old-fashioned stories of triumph over human folly.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Carey for Little.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

War “is all failed plans and improvising,” muses a character in Abigail DeWitt’s third novel, News of Our Loved Ones. Though liberating, D-Day brings the worst horror upon the Delasalle family, as a bomb destroys the family’s home in Caen and splinters the survivors’ lives. For 18-year-old Geneviève Delasalle, this is a seminal moment to which she returns throughout her life, and years later, it fuels the stories that enthrall her boisterous American children, especially her daughter Polly. For Geneviève’s extended family in France, it is a constant presence, even as decades pass.

Set primarily during events surrounding World War II, News of Our Loved Ones functions less as a cohesive, plot-driven narrative and more like a collection of short stories, a string of vignettes or character studies. The chapters, some of which were published previously on their own, feel a bit truncated, and often a strong narrative thread is obscured by this abruptness. Still, DeWitt is ambitious with her latest novel, told from several perspectives through time, ranging across France to America and back again. The lives of her characters intertwine in a widening maze of infidelity, loss and secrecy, as the war links generations together as much as it tears those bonds apart.

While the shifts in time and point of view could have been more deftly handled, DeWitt’s strengths lie in keen emotional observation and the portrayal of her characters’ inner turmoil. DeWitt poetically illuminates her characters’ lives, weaving in and out like a knitting needle through wool.