Murder on Astor Place by Victoria Thompson

Murder on Astor Place is the first book in Victoria Thompson's Gaslight Mystery series. The setting is NYC, the year is 1895 and when the novel begins we are introduced to Sarah Brandt, a young widow and nurse/midwife who lives in Lower Manhattan.  Sarah grew up in a wealthy high society family who she has been estranged from for the past few years.  We are also introduced to Frank Malloy who will become Sarah's detective partner in this 25 book series.  Frank is a police officer with the NYPD.  He is a gruff man made weary by life and, like Sarah, his spouse died a few years back.

Sarah and Frank first meet when a young woman, Alicia Van Damm, is found murdered in a boarding house on Astor Place.  Alicia was pregnant at the time of the murder and that she would wind up dead in a boarding house is puzzling because she is the daughter of the wealthy Van Damm family.  They are not eager to solve their daughter's murder, not wanting the scandal.

Sarah and Frank are not thrilled with each other.  He sees her as a too sure of herself suffragette type.  She sees him as a rude and coarse NYC cop who is probably on the take.  Nevertheless, Sarah and Frank are angry that no one seems to care about poor Alicia and so they decide to work together to find her killer.  

I found Murder on Astor Place to be a really fine start to what I predict will be a well worth one's time historical mystery series.  The author has done a very good job researching the time period of what 1890's NYC was like.  Sarah Brandt and Frank Malloy are an engaging duo that the reader will want to invest in and if my TBR list wasn't so long I would be up to tackling this 25 book series.  That said, I plan to at least give the second novel in the series, Murder on St Mark's Place, a try.

2022 Back to the Classics Wrap Up

For this year's 2022 Back to the Classics Challenge I didn't make it to all 12 categories.  So here is a recap of the 9 classics I did read: 

Choose a 19th Century Classic:  Frankenstein by Mary Shelley -  My favorite book from this year's classic's challenge.  A wonderfully written gothic masterpiece.  It's also a novel of ideas in which the author takes on the 18th Century Age of Enlightment and Scientific Progress by creating a doctor, Victor Frankenstein, who decides he can create the perfect man with tragic results.

Choose a 20th Century Classic: Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier - The writing was excellent but I did not care for the heroine, the second Mrs. DeWinter.  Beneath her timidity and shyness I found her to be snobby in many ways, inwardly cringing at  those she considers forward and low class.  Where Mrs DeWinter's judgment fails her is with her husband Maxim DeWinter.  Once he reveals his secret she is more okay with it then she should have been in my opinion.

Classic by a Woman Author:  Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen - No book will equal Pride and Prejudice for me but Sense and Sensibility I really enjoyed.  Persuasion is probably the better book but I was somewhat bored.  Next year on to Emma!

Choose a Classic Mystery or Crime Novel:  Laura by Vera Caspary - A classic crime noir novel from the 1940's.  I enjoyed it and it's rare to find a mid-twentieth century crime noir novel written by a woman.

Choose a Classic Written before 1800: Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster - One of the earliest American novels to be published and based loosely on a true story.  It's interesting from a historical perspective.

Choose a Classic from a Place You Would Like to Visit: Breakfast at Tiffany's  by Truman Capote - People who have seen the film and Audrey Hepburn's charming and quirky performance as Holly Golightly are going to be suprised by Truman Capote's book.  The Holly in the novel has a much harder edge than the screen version and of the two I prefer the screen version.

Choose a Classic Short Story Collection: Hungry Hearts by Anzia Yezierska - Published in 1920 Hungry Hearts is a collection of short stories set on the Lower East Side of NYC in the early 1900's focusing on immigrant Jewish American women and girls trying to build a better life despite the sweatshops, poverty and heartbreak.  It's a moving collection of stories about how though the dreams one started out with may not match the reality, with hope and determination, new dreams are possible.

Choose a Non-Fiction Classic: Walking by Henry David Thoreau - I have been meaning to read Thoreau for years and Walking is a very short book about walking, the natural world and humanity's place in it.  It's a good introduction to Thoreau although the classic he is known for is Walden.  

Choose a Wild Card Classic:  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe - Published 1958, the year I was born, a classic of mid-twentieth century British fiction.  This novel was one of the most prominent works to come out of the Angry Young Man movement dealing with the lives of the working class in Britain in the years after World War II.  This novel is realistic, gritty, very disturbing in certain parts but also the writing is first rate.

If Karen at Books and Choclate decides to host the Classics Challenge next year I'm up for it.  I owe this challenge so much because most of the classics I have read since taking the challenge 5 years ago I would probably never have gotten around to reading.

Walking by Henry David Thoreau

For the 2022 Back to the Classics category- choose a nonfiction classic I decided to go with Walking by Henry David Thoreau (1851).  At only forty pages, its a nice introduction to Thoreau's writing, his views about the natural world and humanity's place in it and the importance of walking.  Here is Thoreau on these subjects: 

"We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk.       

"I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights—any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi".

"At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the PUBLIC road, and walking over the surfarce of God's earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds".

I enjoyed Walking and underlined quite a few passages as I read through the book.  Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is remarkably relevant today.  He was a writer, an abolitionist, a naturalist, a philosopher and as has been pointed out his one room cabin on Walden Pond could be considered the forerunner of the tiny house movement.  I recommend Walking and I am definitely planning to give Thoreau's great classic Walden a try. 

Hungry Hearts by Anzia Yezierska

"Was it then only a dream—a mirage of the hungry-hearted people in the desert lands of oppression—this age-old faith in America—the beloved, the prayed-for “golden country”? Had the starved villagers of Sukovoly lifted above their sorrows a mere rainbow vision that led them—where—where? To the stifling submission of the sweatshop or the desperation of the streets!"

Many years ago I read Anzia Yezierska's novel Bread Givers (1925) about a Russian Jewish family who move to New York's Lower East Side in the early 1900's.  The daughter, Sara Somilinsky, is in conflict with her father who wants her to stay home and lead a traditional life.  But Sara has dreams and wants an education and a chance for a brighter future.  I really enjoyed Bread Givers and I always meant to read more by Anzia Yezierska and so for the 2022 Back to the Classics category- choose a classic short story collection I decided to go with Hungry Hearts (1920) by Anzia Yezerskia.

Hungry Hearts consists of 10 stories set on the Lower East side of Manhattan.  Her characters are immigrant Jewish women and we learn about their dreams of finding love, happiness and belonging.  Each character in Hungry Hearts wants more out of life and to feel a part of America but it's not easy.  The tenements are bleak and the work when one can find it is exhausting.  Who has the time and the energy to dream and get an education?  And yet many of the women in Hungry Hearts are able to see a way to a brighter future.  But not all.  Some are ground down by poverty, landlords, sweatshops, bosses and the charity organizations that instead of helping treat the immigrants and the poor with condescension.

And yet, in the final story, How I Found America, we meet a young woman working long hours in a sweatshop with other immigrant women and the boss decides to cut their salaries. The young woman decides that she will say something to the boss and is promptly fired.  Leaving the factory upset she gets into a traffic accident, recovers and decides that she is not going back to the machines and enrolls instead in school.  She meets a teacher who really listens to her and the teacher reads a poem Our America by Waldo Frank:

"All the way home the words she read flamed before me: “We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her. In the quality of our search shall be the nature of the America that we create.” ... How glad I was that I had not stopped at the husk—a good job—a good living—but pressed on, through the barriers of materialism. Through my inarticulate groping and reaching-out I had found the soul—the spirit—of America"

Anzia Yezierska's novels and short stories like so many women writers from the 1920's fell into obscurity in the mid-twentieth century.  But thankfully her novels, memoir and short stories have had a revival.  I would start with Yezerskia's classic novel Bread Givers but Hungry Hearts is also well worth reading.  And though published in 1920 the issues tackled in Hungry Hearts: immigration, low wages, getting an education and finding your path in life regardless of the obstacles that others set up are as relevant today as they were one hundred years ago. 

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

"The dinner was a grand one, the servants were numerous, and every thing bespoke the Mistress’s inclination for show, and the Master’s ability to support it.  In spite of the improvements and additions which they were making to the Norland estate, and in spite of its owner having once been within some thousand pounds of being obliged to sell out at a loss, nothing gave any symptom of that indigence which he had tried to infer from it;—no poverty of any kind, except of conversation, appeared—but there, the deficiency was considerable".

I have read Pride and Prejudice twice in my life and loved the novel both times and when I get around to reading it again I know I will be just as enthralled. That said, in recent years I have also read Jane Austen's Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.   I was underwhelmed and so I approached Sense and Sensibility with trepidation.

But I am pleased to say I really enjoyed this book. The writing as always with Jane Austen is excellent and there was humor and the relationship between the two sisters at the center of this novel for me was the highlight of the book.  Elinor Dashwood representing rationality, decorum and common sense and her younger sister Marianne Dashwood representing heart on her sleeve romantic feeling was a nice contrast.

And I think Austen was making a point in Sense and Sensibility that in matters of the heart common sense and decorum are important but the courage to express one's emotions, what one is really feeling, is also needed, maybe not to the extent that Marianne does it but keeping everything bottled up as Elinor does throughout most of the book can have its drawbacks as well.  

Of course this is Jane Austen so I don't think I am giving away much of the plot when I say that it all ends happily.  And though a part of me wishes that Austen would have taken more risks in her books,  I must remember the era in which she lived, the early 19th century.  Jane Austen died in 1817 and never lived to see the arrival of railroad travel or the industrialization age.  What she knew was the world of the landed gentry in Britain and the families just a rung or two below.  As Austen once wrote to her niece: "Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on". 

Sense and Sensibility (2011) is my choice for the 2022 Back to the Classics category -choose a classic by a woman author

Night - A poem by Anne Bronte

I am continuing with my Victober Challenge.  I have read Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge and also My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell.  I recommend both.  We were also asked to read a poem from the Victorian Era.  I decided on Night by Anne Bronte which I like: 

Night by Anne Brone

I love the silent hour of night,

For blissful dreams may then arise,

Revealing to my charmed sight

What may not bless my waking eyes.

And then a voice may meet my ear,

That death has silenced long ago;

And hope and rapture may appear

Instead of solitude and woe.

Cold in the grave for years has lain

The form it was my bliss to see;

And only dreams can bring again,

The darling of my heart to me.

My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell

I decided to go with My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell (1858) for this year's Victober category -  choose a Victorian novel where chronic illness or disability is represented.  I was nervous about this category.  What would it have been like to be disabled in the 19th century?  But I finished My Lady Ludlow in good spirits.  This is a sweet and uplifting story about the impact a good person can make in the lives of others. 

The narrator of My Lady Ludlow is Margaret Dawson and when the novel begins she is an elderly woman looking back to 1800 when at age 16 she was sent to live with a distant relative, the Countess Ludlow of Hanbury Court.  Margaret's parents with nine children to raise had no choice but to accept Lady Ludlow's offer to have Margaret stay with her. 

When Margaret arrives at  Hanbury Court n the Village of Hanbury she meets other young women of aristocratic background who have fallen on hard times.  Lady Ludlow is running a kind of boarding school where the young women learn the skills one needs to get on in the world.  

Lady Ludlow can be strict in terms of how she likes things done but she is a decent, kind person.  The girls think highly of her and for Margaret, who narrates the book, this is particularly true because a year after Margaret Dawson arrives at Hanbury Court she starts to have trouble walking.  The situation deteriorates and Margaret is left crippled. 

Lady Ludlow could have sent Margaret back home to her parents. She doesn't do that.  Instead without ever mentioning Margaret's disability Lady Ludlow invites her to the office one day, gets a comfortable chair for Margaret to sit in, and explains that she has been needing an assistant and would Margaret be willing to help her out.  

As the years go by Margaret becomes a friend to Lady Ludlow and is often the sounding board for Lady Ludlow's opinions and she has strict opiions about the class system and people knowing their place.   A new young pastor for example, Mr. Gray, arrives in Hanbury with all kinds of revolutionary new ideas as Lady Ludlow sees it and she is not amused, particularly on the subject of educating the lower classes.  As she tells Margaret: 

"It was a right word,” she continued, “that I used, when I called reading and writing ‘edge-tools.’  If our lower orders have these edge-tools given to them, we shall have the terrible scenes of the French Revolution acted over again in England ... When I was a girl, one never heard of the rights of men, one only heard of the duties" 

Lady Ludlow is not perfect but she has empathy maybe because her own life despite her wealth and privilege has not been easy.  She is a widow and she lost all her children but one, her son Rudolph who lives in London.   She is rather lonely and one senses that the town of Hanbury is her family.  She keeps abreast of the goings on in the town and if anyone needs help no matter what class she will be there to see what she can do and as the times change, Lady Ludlow changes with them, including her views on educating the working classes.

Elizabeth Gaskell's great novels are North and South, Cranford, Wives and Daughters, Mary Barton and so if you have never read her that is where you should begin.  But I found My Lady Ludlow a heartwarming novel and what I have discovered in the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell is that she bridges the gap in her books between Jane Austen where  the lower classes are firmly off stage and Charlotte Bronte where if a Lord or Lady does show up in the text it's probably not in a flattering way.   Elizabeth Gaskell was more interested in bridging the divide knowing that people are not that different no matter their classs and that the times were changing.

The Mayor of Casterbridge: A Story Of A Man Of Character by Thomas Hardy

"Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.” - The Mayor of Casterbridge

I have been meaning to read Thomas Hardy for some time now and I figured when I finally got around to it I would start with Tess of the Ubervilles.  But this month I am taking the Victober Challenge and the group-read is The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and for someone like me who had never read Hardy before this book was quite the introduction.  The writing is brilliant, the characters are so memorable and it's a gripping read as well.  But having said this I am not sure how quickly I want to jump into my next Thomas Hardy novel and I will discuss why a bit later but first the plot.

The Mayor of Casterbridge takes place in rural England in the early part of the 19th century and the novel centers around Michael Henchard who is the mayor of the fictional town of Casterbridge.  Michael is a very successful man but he harbors a dark secret.  When he was twenty-one and living in another town he sold his wife and daughter to another man at the country fair.  How this could happen is that Michael Henchard's wife Susan was fed up with her drunken husband offering to sell her and their infant daughter Elizabeth Jane and so she agrees to go with the young sailor.

Michael wakes up the next morning and is horrified at what he did in his drunken state.  He tries to find Susan and his daughter Elizabeth Jane but they are gone.  No trace of them.  Eighteen years go by and Michael is the respected Mayor and business owner in the rural community of Casterbridge but he has never forgotten what he did when he was young.  He has never remarried and has sworn off alcohol.  The town knows nothing about his past.  He has become a lonely man.

And then one day Susan and Elizabeth Jane arrive in Casterbridge looking for Michael.  Susan is recently widowed from her sailor husband Richard Newson and Elizabeth Jane has never been told the truth about who Michael is and what happened that night in the tavern.  She thinks Michael is simply a distant relative that her mother is seeking out for help.

Susan and Michael reunite and marry but not long after the wedding Susan dies and leaves Michael a letter which is quite a revelation and the contents of this letter greatly affects his relationship with Elizabeth Jane.  Two other characters are also featured prominently in the novel.  The first is Donald Farfrae who starts out as Michael's friend and business assistant but Michael through his jealousy and suspicion turns Donald into a rival.  There is also Lucetta Templeman who Michael thoughtlessly dumps when Susan and Elizabeth Jane walk back into his life. But now that Susan is gone Michael assumes he can pick up with Lucetta where they left off.  

As the novel progresses Michael Henchard's fortunes take a nosedive on a level that I have rarely seen in a novel. Michael is a flawed man and his pride and temper lead to his downfall.  His past continues to stalk him as well.  But he is also capable of good and so the bad luck and the humiliations that continue to befall him I found increasingly hard to take.  

And so I came away from The Mayor of Casterbridge awed by Thomas Hardy's brilliance but hoping to find a Hardy novel where the outcome for the main character is a bit more uplifting and not so incredibly bleak as it was for poor Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge.

The Girl On the Train by Paula Hawkins

The Girl On the Train by Paula Hawkins published 2015 was a nice suprise and I say that because in the past few years I have had disappointing experiences with bestselling psychological thrillers:  Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn  The Dinner by Herman Koch, And Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell to name a few.

And so when I picked up The Girl On the Train I was cautious but I didn't need to be because though this is a book that takes twists and turns they are believable, the writing is first rate, particularly in the creation of Rachel Watson who narrates a major part of this novel.  The two other narrators are Anna Watson, who is the new wife of Rachel's ex-husband Tom and Megan Hipwell the beautiful young woman who lives with her husband Scott a few doors down from Anna and Tom.

But mainly this is Rachel's story and when we first meet Rachel her life has gone downhill.  She married her husband Tom a few years back but found out she was incapable of having children which she so wanted.    Rachel tried everything but it was not to be and she began drinking heavily, arguing with Tom and he began an affair with Anna, the woman who is now his new wife.  And so Rachel who is now a full blown alcoholic aimlessly rides the train each morning to London and rides it back home each evening because she has told her roomate Cathy that she still has a job when in reality she was fired a few months back.  

But the daily train ride for Rachel has become something she looks forward to, a source of excitement in her life because one of the train stops looks out on her old house where Tom now lives with Anna.  Rachel is obsessed not so much by Tom and Anna anymore but rather the attractive young couple who live a few doors down.  Rachel doesn't know them but she can see their patio from the train.  She has named them Jason and Jess and as Rachel tells us: : 

"Jess is often out there in the mornings, especially in the summer, drinking her coffee.  Sometimes, when I see her there, I feel as though she sees me, too.  I feel as though she looks right back at me, and I want to wave.  I'm too self-conscious. I don't see Jason quite as much, he's away alot with work. But even if they're not there, I think about what they might be up to.  Maybe this morning they've both got the day off and she's lying in bed while he makes breakfast, or may they've gone for a run together because that's the sort of thing they do".  

Rachel is not jealous of Jason and Jess.  Quite the contrary.  She is kind of in love with them and likes to think about the wonderful life they have planned.  But then one morning from her train window Rachel spots Jess on the patio in a romantic embrace with another man.  Rachel is devastated and hurt. How could Jess cheat on Jason ike this and she feels a kinship with Jason since she knows what being cheated on feels like.  And so Rachel decides to go to Jason and Jess' house on a Saturday evening when Jess is out and inform Jason about his wife's infidelity. 

It's a very bad idea of course and the next morning Rachel wakes up with an injury to her head, some blood on her clothes, and no memory of the Saturday night before since she was in an alcoholic blackout.  A day later Rachel is readiing the paper and learns the real name of Jess and Jason.  They are Scott and Megan Hipwell and the newspapers are reporting that Megan went missing the night Rachel went to Scott's house to warn him.  The police find Megan's body a few days later and it's now a homicide.  

So what happened?  Who killed Megan?  And will Rachel's memory of that night return to provide answers?   There is more than one suspect and I was kept guessing throughout the book and most important for me the ending was satisfying, even hopeful.   

I would say that how you feel about The Girl On the Train will hinge on how you feel about Rachel.  Some will be exasperated but I was drawn to her.  People suffer disappointments in life and sometimes they can't pull themselves together.  And in the case of Rachel to give herself something to look forward to she imagined an ideal life for a beautiful young couple only to discover she didn't know them at all.   I highly recommend The Girl On the Train 

The Journey by Mary Oliver

Normally I don't read poetry but I have been thinking about taking the Ray Bradbury Challenge where you read a short story, a poem and an essay each day.  And so in searching for a poem to read I found The Journey by the award winning poet Mary Oliver and  I wanted to share: 

The Journey

by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice –

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

“Mend my life!”

each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do –

determined to save

the only life you could save.

-Mary Oliver, 

The 2022 Victober Challenge

October is a great month for book challenges but as a reader I feel torn about which challenge to take.  It's the month of Halloween and so should I read novels in the horror, gothic and paranormal genre?  But as anyone who follows some of the excellent and fun booktubers out there knows, October is also Victober where fans of all things Victorian devote the month to reading 19th century British literature.  

I love both genres, Victorian and Gothic horror, but for this October I have decided to go with Victorian literature.  Don't know how far I'll get and according to the five booktubers hosting Victober this year there is no pressure.  You only have to commit to reading one Victorian novel during the month of October.   But if you want to take the full challenge the booktubers have come up with five interesting categories to complete by October 31, 2022: 

1.  Choose a Victorian novel where chronic illness or disability is represented - I have decided to go with My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell 

2.  Choose a Victorian Coming of Age Story - My choice will be Love and Mr. Lewisham by H. G. Wells

3.  Choose a Victorian Short Story - A Terribly Strange Bed by Wilkie Collins

4.  Read a Victorian book and then watch a film adaptation - Washington Square by Henry James.  He became a British Citizen in 1915 so he qualifies for the Challenge.

5.  Choose to read a Victorian poem. - I am going with a poem by Ann Bronte

Also for Victober the read-a-long is the Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy where the goal is to read two chapters a night starting October 1st and since I have never read Hardy this is a good way to finally do so.

Alot of the fun of Victober is discovering how many really excellent booktubers are out there.  The five hosts running this year's challenge for example have very fine video blogs:  They are: 

Katie, Books and Things

Kate Howe

Marissa, Blatantly Bookish

Petra U

Ros, Scallydandling about the Books

If you type their names into the search engine their videoblogs will pop up and when it comes to Victorian literature Katie at Books and Things knows everything there is to know. 

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

For the 2022 Back to the Classics category - Choose a Wild Card Classic I decided to go with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe published 1958. I had heard about the novel and since it was published the year I was born I decided to give it a read.

The author, Alan Sillitoe, was part of the Angry Young Men literary movement that formed in the UK in the 1950’s. They were working class young men who had come of age during the post World War II era.  They were in rebellion against society and the British class system and they wrote gritty, sexually frank novels and plays featuring men like themselves. 

Such is the case with Arthur Seaton the main character in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Arthur is a young man who lives in Nottingham, England and works as a machinist in a bicycle factory.  Arthur works hard, spends his Saturday nights at the pub getting drunk and he is quite the ladies man.  When the novel begins Arthur is having an affair with Brenda the wife of one of his coworkers at the factory but Arthur doesn’t seem worried about the risk he is taking or even feels much guilt:

"Arthur classified husbands into two main categories: those that looked after their wives, and those that were slow.  Jack fell into the latter class, one that Arthur, from experience, knew to be more extensive than the first. Having realised this quickly he had been lucky in love, and had his fun accordingly, making hay while the sun shone, growing up from the age of seventeen with the idea that married women were certainly the best women to know. He had no pity for a “slow” husband“.

In reality Arthur is taking enormous risks not only by having an affair with a married woman but also with his drinking.  When the novel begins for example Arthur is at the pub having gotten wasted and fallen down a flight of stairs. He’s okay but it ‘s a metaphor for where Arthur’s life is headed if he doesn’t turn things around.  

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a novel way ahead of its time in dealing with issues that weren't discussed in the 1950's.  There are parts of this novel that are shocking and disturbing.  I can't say I liked Arthur and the author is not romanticising the life he is leading.   But Arthur and the other characters in the novel are drawn from real life, not having enough money, hanging out at the bars, having affairs with other men's wives and no thought to the future.   The dialogue between the characters can be a little difficult to decipher at times but it gives the novel a realistic tone and this is a very well written book.

Regarding the author, Allan Sillitoe, he grew up poor in Nottingham and his home was a violent one.  He would go on to write novels, plays, children's literature, a memoir but he is best known for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and his collection of short stories The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.  Sillitoe though his childhood was tough went on to have a good life, married for fifty years to the accomplished poet and translater Ruth Fainlight. They had two children.  Alan Sillitoe passed away in 2010 but today he is considered one of the most important British writers of the post World War II era.  Not bad for a young boy who had to quit school at 14.

The TBR File - Mrs Wiggs of The Cabbage Patch by Alice Hegan

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch by Alice Hegan Rice published 1901 was a big bestseller in it’s day and that always interests me.  So many authors and novels from the early 20th century have been forgotten but thanks to kindle people are beginning to read these books again.

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch is a sweet novel which gives us important advise about life. The main character is Mrs. Wiggs, a widow living with her children in a very poor part of Louisville, Kentucky called the Cabbage Patch. The people who live there have very little and yet despite this Mrs. Wiggs has an optimistic spirit. She tries to see the best in life, never gives up and she loves her children dearly. It’s not great literature but I enjoyed it. Here is Mrs Wiggs giving her philosophy of life:

“Lots of folks is walkin’ ’round jes’ as dead as they’ll ever be. I believe in gittin’ as much good outen life as you kin—not that I ever set out to look fer happiness; seems like the folks that does that never finds it. I jes’ do the best I kin where the good Lord put me at, an’ it looks like I got a happy feelin’ in me ‘most all the time.”

Who was the author Alice Hegan Rice? She was a prolific novelist born in 1870 in Shelbyville, Kentucky and she came from a privileged background. When she was a young woman she worked at a mission in a very poor part of Louisville, Kentucky. It was a life changing experience and she wrote Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch based on her work at the mission.  Alice Hagen Rice would later help found the Cabbage Patch Settlement House which exists to this day.

Unmasking Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson

"And there lay the crux of Alice’s undying appeal ... Alice acted the way you sometimes felt. If you kept a journal, or filled endless pages with dark, haunted poetry, or felt the stab of a singer speaking directly to you, so sweet and sad your heart could barely take it, you had a kindred spirit in Alice. Fiction or not, she was real. And she understood". - Rick Emerson, Unmasking Alice

When I was in high school in the 1970's there wasn't as large a young adult book market as there is today.  But one book that was certainly making the rounds was Go Ask Alice  published in 1971.  The book I assumed at the time (we all did) was the real life diary of a teenage girl who got caught up in the drug culture of the late 1960's and died from an overdose at age seventeen.  

In later years we would discover that Go Ask Alice was fiction.  The author, Beatrice Sparks and her publishers had presented the diary as real but in reality it was a novel.  But I never felt conned because I loved the book and so what was the big deal if the diary was marketed as real but wasn't?  Well, in Unmasking Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic and the Imposter Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries (2022), Rick Emerson explains why it was a big deal.  But first he tells us about the author.

Beatrice Sparks was born in Idaho in 1917.  Her childhood was a difficult one.  Her father abandoned the family and Beatrice at 15 had to quit school and go to work.  She married young and her husband LaVorn Sparks had come from a childhood equally as difficult.  But Beatrice and LaVorn were a couple who despite the setbacks life had dealt them were determined to persevere and they did.   LaVorn would go on to be a wealthy business man and Beatrice raised her children and worked as a Mormon youth counselor.  

Beatrice also wrote and her job as a counselor gave her the inspiration for Go Ask Alice.  After the tremendous success of the book Beatrice in 1978 published Jay's Journal and as with Go Ask Alice it was marketed as a real diary this time written by a teenage boy who descends into a world of devil worship and animal sacrifice which ends in tragedy.

As Rick Emerson tells us, unlike Go Ask Alice the Jay of Jay's Journal is based very loosely on the life of an actual teenager, Alden Barrett, who committed suicide at age sixteen.  Alden's mother, sought out Beatrice Sparks after reading Go Ask Alice and she was hoping Sparks would tell Alden's story which could help others.  She gave Beatrice her son's diary and Sparks did include a number of Alden's diary entry's but the bulk of Jay's Journal is filled with fictional entry's presenting a very unflattering and false picture who everyone back in the Barrett's hometown of Pleasant Grove, Utah assumed was Alden's real diary.

In reality Alden, unlike the fictional Jay, was not into Satanism at all.  Alden suffered from depression and it eventually killed him.  That's the story Beatrice should have told and the publication of Jay's Journal with the made up nonsense caused the Barrett family alot of pain.  Beatrice would go on to write other fictional teen diaries which were presented as real.  She aso began referring to herself in print and in interviews as Beatrice Sparks PhD even though she never earned a PhD.  Rick Emerson does a good job of tracking all this down and he talks about how the publishing industry who knew this was all a hoax let it slide.  Interviewers over the years went along with Beatrice's inaccurate view of herself and her books as well.

Unmasking Alice is an interesting read, an important piece of investigative journalism about a very popular author and where we have been as a culture.  Did reading Unmasking Alice change my feelings about Go Ask Alice?  Not really.  I still like the novel and if we only read books by authors whose behavior we admire we would miss out on alot of great reads.

Mystical Paths by Susan Howatch

Mystical Paths by Susan Howatch (1992) is the fifth book in her wonderful series of Starbridge novels.  There are six books in this series set in the fictional town of Starbridge, England and dealing with the changes that took place in the Church of England from the 1930's to the 1960's.  Each novel, with one exception, is narrated by a different Anglican cleric who has risen high in the Church of England but is now encountering a troubling period in his life. 

In Mystical Paths for example the narrator is Nicholas Darrow who is training for the priesthood.  Nicholas is the son of Father Jonathan Darrow who is featured prominently in books one and two of the series.  Nicholas like his father has psychic abilities which his father has warned him to be careful with.  But Nicholas decides to perform a seance as a way to help his friend Katie Aysgarth get over the drowning death of her husband Christian.

Katie feels guilt about Christian's death due to the fact that she feels he committed suicide.  But the seance only makes matters worse for Katie and so Nicholas as a way to repair the mess with the seance decides to investigate what really happened to Christian.  Was it an accident or suicide?  Nicholas hopes he can prove it was an accident and bring Katie some closure.   

Getting to the truth will be difficult and Nicholas Darrow becomes an amateur detective as he talks with Christian's friends and family to find out what really happened and why.  Nicholas also talks with Christian's father, Dr. Neville Aysgarth, the retired Dean at Starbridge.  We learn a great deal about Neville Aysgarth's younger years in book three of the Starbridge series and he's a man with issues.  But in Mystical Paths Dr. Aysgarth is now much older and he shares with Nicholas the concerns he had about his son Christian:   

“This is the truth, Nicholas; this is the truth your father and I worked out together: Christian was sick. It was a spiritual sickness. It arose because he’d turned away from God after his mother died and he’d never filled the vacuum satisfactorily. Of course there are many admirable people in this world who don’t believe in God and yet lead moral, meaningful lives, but they’ve succeeded in filling the spiritual vacuum with sound humanist principles. For a long time I assumed Christian had done that, but in the end I began to wonder and then I started to worry" 

I have only one book left to read in the Starbridge series and I will be sorry to see it come to a close.  These novels can be read out of sequence but it's best to read them in order because the characters carry over from one book to the next.  So if you are curious I would start with book one, Glittering Images.  You may find the series is not for you but if you get hooked you have a very enjoyable reading experience ahead.

The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly

“I mean, most of the people I defend aren’t evil ... They’re guilty, yeah, but they aren’t evil. You know what I mean? There’s a difference. You listen to them and you know why they make the choices they make. People are just trying to get by, just to live with what they’re given, and some of them aren’t given a damn thing in the first place. But evil is something else. It’s different. It’s like… I don’t know. It’s out there and when it shows up…  I can’t explain it ... All I know is I should have been afraid of one thing but I was afraid of the complete opposite.” 

The Lncoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly (2005) is a legal thriller set in Los Angeles California and it's the first book in Connelly's Mickey Haller series.  Michael (Mickey) Haller narrates this novel.  He's a criminal defense attorney who works out of his Lincoln town car meeting with witnesses, reviewing files, making calls etc.  His driver Earl takes him wherever he needs to go. 

Haller's been a defense attorney for 15 years.  He has two ex-wives who he gets along with and a young daughter.  He is smart and successful but he has become jaded about the legal system.  Haller still does pro bono work but mainly these days he is on the lookout for wealthy clients who can pay his considerable fees.  And then he gets the high profile case he has been waiting for.  

His client Louis Ross Roulet is the son of a prominent family.  Louis has been charged with attempted rape and battery of Reggie Campo, a young woman he met in a bar.  Louis insists he is innocent and that he is being extorted because of his family's wealth.  Haller is inclined to believe Louis and is sure he can get the case dismissed without even having to go to trial.   

Haller is a bit disappointed at this because if the case were to drag on he could continue to bill the Roulet family for his services.  But Haller has ethics and so he proceeds to bring this case to a quick close.   Or at least that's the way he expects this case will go.  I'll just leave it there..

I really enjoyed the Lincoln Lawyer and a major reason was Mickey Haller.  He is smart and a good man despite a few flaws.  He's also very funny in the way he explains the legal system.  I also liked the storyline of The Lincoln Lawyer where you have a narrator for whom the idealistic reasons he became a defense attorney went out the window years ago.  Now it's pretty much a game and a nice paycheck until the Roulet case lands in his lap.  

Thanks to Lark & Sam at Larkwrites and Bookchase, two very fine bloggers I follow for alerting me to Michael Connelly.  I plan to try his other series featuring Detective Harry Bosch.  What's interesting is that Mickey Haller and Harry Bosch are half-brothers who meet later in life and after reading Harry's bio you could not find two more different individuals.  

Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier

THIS REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

A shy and reserved young woman who is alone in the world, no friends or family, arrives at an isolated mansion. The owner of the estate is considerably older than the young woman.  He is handsome, brooding and mysterious. There is a secret about his first wife which the young woman will discover and at that point she will have a decision to make.  

Charlotte Bronte made this storyline immortal in Jane Eyre and almost one hundred years later Daphne DuMaurier gave this tale her own twist in Rebecca published 1938 which I decided to go with for the 2022 Back to the Classics Category - choose a 20th century classic.

It is my first time reading Rebecca and I went in thinking I knew the novel better than I did.  But I soon discovered that the book is significantly different than Jane Eyre in key aspects.  And nowhere is that more true in my opinion than in the different way Jane Eyre and the second Mrs DeWinter respond when a major revelation about the men they love occurs later in the book.  Their opposite response shows that despite some biographical similarities they are very different women.

But since I am here to review Rebecca let me get started. Rebecca is set in the 1930's and narrated by the second Mrs. DeWinter.  We never learn her first name but we do learn how she came to meet her husband, Maxim DeWinter.  She was twenty and staying in Monte Carlo working as a companion to a wealthy older woman by the name of Mrs Van. Hopper.  Mrs. Van Hopper is a busybody and thrilled to discover that the wealthy widower Maxim DeWinter, owner of the magnificent  Manderley Estate in Cornwall, is vacationing at their hotel.   

In true Cinderella fashion Maxim is interested in Mrs. Van Hopper' shy young companion and within weeks they are married.  After the honeymoon the DeWinters arrive at Manderly ready to begin their new lives but Mrs DeWinter is a fish out of water.  The servants are reserved and not very friendly.  And Mrs Danvers the unbalanced housekeeper who was very close to Maxim DeWinter's first wife Rebecca makes it clear that she regards the new Mrs. DeWinter as an unwanted intruder, not fit to touch any of Rebecca's things.  

Maxim has also changed since returning to Manderley.  He has become withdrawn, short- tempered.  Maxim's friends and neighbors are eager to call on the the new Mrs. DeWinter. But she tries to avoid these lunches sure that they will be comparing her to the beautiful Rebecca who died a year ago in a boating accident as she has been told and who she fears Maxim is still in love with.  

Mrs. DeWinter finally decides to throw a costume ball.  But the evening ends in disaster when Mrs Danvers in an attempt to sabatoge Mrs DeWinter picks out a ball gown which Rebecca used to wear.   Mrs DeWinter doesn't know this and as she descends the staircase at Manderly wearing Rebecca's dress the guests are shocked and Maxim is furious demanding she change her outfit.  Mrs DeWinter in tears runs back to her bedroom.  Maxim's sister Beatrice tries to comfort her but it does no good.  Mrs DeWinter is a young woman with not much confidence and she compares herself harshly to Maxim's sister Beatrice: 

"She belonged to another breed of men and women, another race than I. They had guts, the women of her race. They were not like me. If it had been Beatrice who had done this thing instead of me she would have put on her other dress and gone down again to welcome her guests. She would have stood by Giles’s side, and shaken hands with people, a smile on her face. I could not do that. I had not the pride, I had not the guts. I was badly bred."

Can you imagine Jane Eyre talking about herself like this?  I can't. Jane was shy and reserved but there was also an inner strength and toughness in Jane which is missing from Mrs. DeWinter who is constantly imagining the worst with regard to what everyone is thinking about her and believing it as well.

But then a significant event happens at Manderley which I can't go into but the pace of the novel really picks up and I was very eager to know how it would play out.  It is also because of this event that Mrs. DeWinter finds her strength so that she can stand up for herself, be a supportive spouse to Maxim and run Manderley with confidence.  And that was a problem for me because this is not the lesson in my opinion Mrs DeWinter should have drawn from what is revealed.  Standing by your spouse is a good thing  but there should be limits and Mrs. DeWinter doesn't see those limits.  Jane Eyre would have.

I finished Rebecca therefore with a new respect for Jane Eyre and for Mr. Rochester.  But I also enjoyed Rebecca which is very well written and the suspence builds which is what I like in a mystery.  I can see why after finishing Rebecca many readers go on to Daphne DuMaurier's other novels, Jamaica Inn and My Cousin Rachel to name two.  

American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever

I'll just say it straight out, I loved American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever published 2006.  What a marvelous group biography of Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau.  Some may ask why did the author choose these particular writers for a group biography? What connection do they have with each other?  You would be suprised.  I know I was. 

For starters all five writers, to a greater or lesser degree, were part of the transcendentalist movement.   Trancendentalism was a philosophy that began in New England in the 1830's, and as Susan Cheever explains:

The Concord group of transcendentalists was part of a wave of liberalism and a passion for freedom that seemed to be sweeping through the new United States. After decades of Puritan striving and dour farmers rising at dawn to tend to the necessities of crops and barns now nature was a friendly environment to be enjoyed. The world was shifting. It was time to kick up our heels ... Even the dour, handsome Nathaniel Hawthorne was not immune to this exuberant mood. “I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world,” he wrote; “I want my proper sphere, my thing.”

After discussing trancendentalism Cheever moves on to the major focus of her book detailing the lives of these brilliant American writers liiving near each other (in the case of the Alcotts and the Hawthornes right next door) in Concord, MA during the 1840's to the 1860's.  These writers also lived elsewhere at different points in their lives but they always returned to Concord.  The  exception tragically was Margaret Fuller who drowned in a shipwreck with her husband and infant son off the coast of Fire Island, New York.  Hawthorne and Emerson were deeply affected by Margaret's death. Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott were horrified as well and Susan Cheever's recounting of the shipwreck makes for powerful reading.

American Bloomsbury brings home throughout the book how connected the lives of Alcott, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson and Fuller were.  The young Louisa May Alcott went on boat rides with Thoreau and Cheever tells us the character of Laurie in Little Women is based on him.  Hawthorne was quite taken with Margaret Fuller and she may have been the inspiration for Hester Prynne in The Scarlett Letter.  When Louisa May Alcott returned to Concord an invalid after working as a civil war nurse the Hawthornes and the Emersons went right to the Alcott's home asking how they could help.  That's understandable since Louisa had leant a helping hand caring for the Emerson and Hawthorne children when they were growing up.  

I don't want to reveal too much more because I want people to read American Bloomsbury for themselves and there is much more to discover.  I can't close though without saying a few words about Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was a wealthy man and a generous one.  He helped his friend Thoreau out financially throughout his life.  The Alcotts and the Hawthornes would eventually be able to live comfortably but for a long time they needed Emerson's help and he always gave it.  Suffice it to say without Emerson such American classics as Walden, Little Women and The Scarlet Letter might never have been written. 

I finished American Bloomsbury determined to read and in some cases reread the works of these classic American writers and I highly recommend American Bloomsbury, a fascinating and inspiring book of American cultural history.

Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

"Suddenly Peter felt his stomach turn to ice. What if kindergarten was not as great as he’d imagined? What if his teacher looked like the witch on that TV program that gave him nightmares sometimes? What if he forgot which direction the letter E went and everyone made fun of him? With hesitation, he climbed the steps of the school bus. The driver wore an army jacket and had two teeth missing in the front. “There’s seats in back,” he said, and Peter headed down the aisle" 

Jodi Picoult is a bestselling, critically acclaimed novelist who I have been meaning to read for some time.  She has published 28 novels that have been translated into 34 languages. Her books often touch upon hot button, ripped from the headlines issues.  And in 2007 she published Nineteen Minutes a novel centering around a mass shooting at a high school.  It's a subject that tragically hasn't aged in the fifteen years since the novel was published.  If anything it's gotten worse. 

The shooter at the center of Nineteen Minutes is seventeen year old Peter Houghton who  walks into Sterling High one morning and opens fire on his classmates.  Ten students are killed including a teacher.  Nineteen Minutes deals with the aftermath of the shooting but also the years that led up to why Peter snapped and did this terrible thing.   There is no excuse for what Peter did but we are shown over the course of the novel how serious an issue school bullying is.  How it can change a person and it certainly changed Peter who was physically and verbally assaulted by the school bullies starting in kindergarten.  

At first Peter has an ally in his friend Josie Cormier.  She protects Peter from the kids who pick on him daily but as they go through grammar and high school together Josie begins to drift away from Peter joining the popular crowd.  She feels bad about this since she likes Peter but it becomes clear that to remain friends with him will end up making her an outcast as well.  So Peter becomes increasingly isolated and actually if the jocks and the bullies left Peter alone he could live with that.  But these kids are sadistic and cruel.  They will not leave him alone and it eventually ends in disaster.  

Nineteen Minutes focuses on school bullying mainly but other issues are discussed too, the easy availability of guns, violent video games, mental illness.  And one thing that really struck me in this novel is how hard it is to be a parent.  Your heart breaks for Peter's mother Lacy.  She is a good woman and she loves her two sons but she makes a mistake early in the book when she goes to see Peter's teacher.  Peter is about seven and the teacher tells Lacy that the other kids are picking on him.  Lacy is horrified and expects the school to put the bullying to an immediate stop. 

But the clueless teacher tells Lacy that this kind of thing happens in schools and therefore the best thing for Peter would be learning how to stand up for himself.  Lacy in her heart is bothered by this advise and yet she is intimidated into thinking maybe the teacher knows best. A big mistake since the bullying doesn't stop and going forward Peter begins to withdraw further and further and never shares with his parents again about how things are really going in school.  

Nineteen Minutes is not a beach read but it is wonderfully written, thought-provoking and heart-breaking.  And one lesson the author drives home is that from the moment a child leaves for kindergarten and on through high school, parents have to stay involved and ask questions.  Teachers have to be on the lookout as well because kids that are bullied often don't say anything. 

The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster

"From a scene of constraint and confinement, ill suited to my years and inclination, I have just launched into society. My heart beats high in expectation of its fancied joys. My sanguine imagination paints, in alluring colors, the charms of youth and freedom, regulated by virtue and innocence. Of these, I wish to partake ... I recoil at the thought of immediately forming a connection, which must confine me to the duties of domestic life"  - The Coquette

The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster (1797) is based on the true story of Elizabeth Whitman who came to the Bell Tavern in Danvers Massachusetts in the spring of 1788.  She was pregnant and told the owners of the tavern she needed a place to stay and that her husband would be along shortly.  He never arrived and Elizabeth Whitman died a few months later after having given birth to a stillborn baby.  

The local newspaper printed this tragic story but when Elizabeth's real name became known (she had been staying at the inn under the name Walker) it became a national story since Elizabeth Whitman came from a relatively prominent family and so how could she have ended up pregnant and alone and who was the father?

The author Hannah Webster Foster, a distant relation of Elizabeth Whitman, decided to write a novel, The Coquette published in 1797, about this matter. The book takes a sympathetic view towards its protagonist Eliza Wharton modeled after Elizabeth Whitman.  The author tries to explain how a well brought up, virtous woman could end up in such a predicament.  The Coquette is also a cautionary tale advising young women to steer clear of rakes and scoundrels and certainly in Major Peter Sanford, the father of Eliza's baby, we have a scoundrel.  Upon first meeting Eliza he writes to his friend:

"Were I disposed to marry, I am persuaded she would make an excellent wife; but that you know is no part of my plan, so long as I can keep out of the noose. Whenever I do submit to be shackled, it must be from a necessity of mending my fortune. This girl would be far from doing that. However, I am pleased with her acquaintance, and mean not to abuse her credulity and good nature, if I can help it."

In The Coquette, Eliza is faced with a choice.  There is the decent respectable Reverend Boyer who all her friends are urging her to marry and then there is Peter Sanford who her friends are telling Eliza to stay away from.  They know his reputation and the young women prior to Eliza who he has deceived and then cast aside.  

But Eliza is young and feels that her friends have misjudged Major Sanford.  She had been set to marry Mr. Hoyer, her parent's choice but he became ill and passed away.  She admired Mr. Hoyer but didn't love him. And now Eliza wants to take her time, enjoy the company of friends, attend parties etc before immediately settling down.  

Given the time in which Eliza lives a young woman sowing her oats is not the best course of action. Eventually Mr. Boyer catches Eliza in a compromising position with Peter Sanford.  Boyer storms off, ends their relationship and now only Sanford is left, a man who has no interest in marriage and is skilled in the art of seduction.

Though Eliza is not too smart when it comes to suitors in other ways she is quite smart, independent and vivacious.  She also has a good heart and when her reputation begins to take a hit I am pleased to say her friends and her mother do not abandon her.  

The novel is well written and told in letter form, most of which are written by Eliza.  I enjoyed this novel which I found superior to Charlotte Temple by Susannah Rowson, published around the same time.  Charlotte Temple may have been more popular in its day but I felt The Coquette gives a more realistic look at the lives of young women in the 18th century and how central the subject of marriage and therefore guarding one's reputation was in a woman's life.  

The Coquette fulfills the Back to the Classics Category - choose a classic written prior to 1800.

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

"What I've found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany's, then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name" - Breakfast at Tiffany's

For the 2022 Back to the Classics Challenge - choose a classic from a place you would love to visit I decided to go with Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote published 1958.  I love New York, lived there most of my life, and would certainly like to go back to visit and stay there actually.  Also having seen and enjoyed the classic film based on the book and Audrey Hepburn's enchanting portrayal of the beautiful, quirky NYC party girl Holly Golightly I wondered how the Holly of the book might differ.  

To start with. the novel is exceptionally well written which having read Capote's In Cold Blood years ago did not come as a suprise.  And as for Holly in both the novel and the film she makes her living through men who buy her things and pay her bills.  But she has a harder edge in the book.  Here she is for example explaining to her upstairs neighbor how she visits Sal Tomato, an organized crime figure, in prison once a week and gets paid $100.00 a visit for an hour of conversation: 

You can do as well as that on trips to the powder room: any gent with the slightest chic will give you fifty for the girl's john, and I always ask for cab fare too, that's another fifty. But then he told me his client was Sally Tomato. He said dear old Sally had long admired me à la distance, so wouldn't it be a good deed if I went to visit him once a week. Well, I couldn't: it was too romantic.  I don't know. It doesn't sound right.’‘ She smiled. ‘‘You think I'm lying? .... I'm supposed to be his niece.’‘

In the film Audrey Hepburn gave Holly a much more naive waif-like appeal but in the book she is a coniver.  Money means alot to Holly.  She does take a liking though to her upstairs neighbor, a writer who reminds her of her brother Fred who she adores  Her upstairs neighbor is also the narrator of the book.  Unlike in the movie these two do not end up romantically involved.  

Instead the narrator is reflecting back on the year in which he knew Holly.  And we learn a good deal about her life before she came to New York.  Born Lulamae Barnes in rural Texas her childhood was one of abandonment and abuse.   By the time she arrives in NYC, age nineteen, she has totally reinvented herself.  As I was reading the book and noting how Holly Golightly was living her life, the parties, men in and out of her apartment and no regard for her future I kept thinking this can't end well.  But like the cat she found abandoned by the river and took home, Holly is a survivor and I closed the book smiling at how she got herself out of a bad situation that arrives near the end of the novel.

Breakfast at Tiffany's is not very long, 85 pages.  I can't say you will like Holly but based on her difficult childhood I think you will understand and root for her.  That said she is not a blueprint in how to live one's life.  A real life version of Holly Golightly would be headed for trouble.

Books and Beyond - 1958 Goodreads

I am always creating book lists for myself.  And so I decided to look up novels published the year I was born which was 1958.  I  typed in 1958 Goodreads and up popped Most Popular Books Published in 1958.  It was a list of about two hundred books.  I scrolled through the list and chose the following ten:

1.  Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart

2.  Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe

3.  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

4.  Ice Palace by Edna Ferber

5.  Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver

6.  Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton

7.  Web of the City by Harlan Ellison

8.  Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym

9.  Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

10. Breakfast at Tiffanys by Truman Capote

I was surprised by the high quality of the novels published in 1958 and I suspect anyone who types in their birth year followed by Goodreads into the search engine will have the same experience.  Really great books are published every year.

As for the ten I chose I may not post about all of them but I will try to read them all and Breakfast at Tiffany's is already on my Back to the Classics list.  Six of these writers I have read before, though not their above novels.  The remaining four (Alan Sillitoe, Robert Traver, Anya Seton and Chinua Achebe) I have yet to read but I am looking forward to doing so.  

Finally, the fun of choosing from Goodreads ten of the most popular books published the year you were born is you end up with an interesting mix of novels.  I was pleased to see Harlan Ellison published a novel in 1958.  I am not a science fiction fan but Harlan wrote non-fiction as well which I very much enjoyed.  He was not only a talented writer but quite an interview guest! 😄  He passed away recently and his writing and his voice are greatly missed.

Laura by Vera Caspary

"The city that Sunday morning was quiet. Those millions of New Yorkers who, by need or preference, remain in town over a summer weekend had been crushed spiritless by humidity. ... Sitting at my desk, pen in hand, I treasured the sense that, among those millions, only I, Waldo Lydecker, was up and doing ... I had gathered strength for the writing of Laura’s epitaph. My grief at her sudden and violent death found consolation in the thought that my friend, had she lived to a ripe old age, would have passed into oblivion, whereas the violence of her passing and the genius of her admirer gave her a fair chance at immortality" - Laura by Vera Caspary

Many years ago I read a review of Dorothy Hughes' classic noir crime novel In A Lonely Place (1947) and I realized that along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, Chester Himes etc, women also wrote noir fiction in the mid-twentieth century.  I ended up reading In A Lonely Place and loved it and so for this year's Back to the Classics Challenge - choose a classic mystery or crime novel, I wanted to try another bestselling 1940's noir novel and so I went with Laura by Vera Caspary (1943).  

Laura is set in NYC during the 1940's and when the novel begins we learn that the title character in the novel, Laura Hunt, has been murdered.  Laura was alone in her apartment on a Friday night when the door bell rang.  Laura went to answer it and the killer in gruesome fashion shot her in the face.  The housekeeper Bessie found Laura's body the next morning when she arrived for work.

Mark McPherson an experienced NYPD Homicide Detective is assigned to the murder case but who was Laura Hunt and who would want to kill her?   Laura we discover was a beautiful, elegant, young woman who lived by herself in an expensive Manhatten apartment and had a country house in Connecticut.  What's interesting for the time period of the 1940's is that Laura could afford this all by herself.  She was a modern woman with a successful career in advertising fifteen years before Mad Men.  Laura was also a kind person, generous to friends and coworkers. Could that generosity have led to her death?

Detective McPherson quickly zeroes in on two suspects, Laura's fiance Shelby Campbell and Laura's friend and mentor the high society newspaper columnist, Waldo Lydecker.  Both men claim to have loved Laura but in the novel we are shown that neither man had her best interests at heart.  

Shelby for example is handsome and charming but he's a gigolo.  Walter is very controlling and has tried to subtley sabatoge every romantic relationship Laura has been involved in, claiming that this or that man is simply not good enough.  Detective Mark McPherson is becoming obsessed with Laura as well.  But then, a quarter of the way through the novel, there is a dramatic turn of events which anyone who has seen the film will understand and Detective McPherson now finds himself working a very different case.  I'll leave it there.  

I enjoyed Laura I was interested right through to the last page and that's what you want in a mystery.  The author Vera Caspary led an interesting life as well.  She was born in 1899 and died in 1987 and she once joked that she was accidentally born in the 19th century.  That's true.  Vera Caspary was very much a 20th century woman, maybe even a late 20th century woman, years ahead of her time.  Throughout most of her life she was single and self-supporting, working first in advertising, like Laura, and then as a successful novelist,  Vera Caspary married when she was fifty and it was a very happy marriage. She published eighteen novels during her life in different genres but one consistent theme seems to have been "the working woman and her right to lead her own life, to be independent"  I recommend giving Laura a read...

Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff

Just finished Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff published 1982.  It's the first book in The Oxford History of the United States and it covers American History from 1763 - 1789. It's about 800 pages and the American Revolution must have taken up 500 pages or it certainly felt like that.  The author wanting to be accurate and miss nothing let's us know about every aspect of the war in minute detail.  The end result is that I retained very little except that George Washington was a great general but I knew that going in.  It took me on and off about a year to finish this book and I can't even be sure I read every part of it because I read it in an audio version and at certain points I dozed off while the book kept rolling on.  

I don't fault the author (well, maybe a little) but he did do a tremendous job of research and the book is well written.  It's just that sometimes less is more.  If you go into too much detail regarding a historical period the reader is not going to remember the important events you want to stress.  It will all be a blur.  As to why I have embarked on this American history project it's partly because I don't know that much about American history.  Whatever I may have learned in school I have forgotten and I have come to realize a large part of our country's history I was never taught at all. 

One thing I did get from Glorious Cause is that from America's founding there has been a distrust by the states for the federal government.  The constitution was ratified in 1788 but it almost didn't happen because states wanted their independence and feared a federal government that would be too strong.  You definitely see that playing out today as well.  As for me, I am with Hamilton and Madison.  States going off on their own has not worked out well in our history. 

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

I decided to go with Frankenstein by Mary Shelley published 1816 for the 2022 Back to the Classics category - choose a 19th century classic and one suprise I had while reading the novel is how different it is from the 1931 film version.  

Now, I haven't seen the 1931 film starring Boris Karloff in its entirety but from the clips I have seen I get the sense that the monster is a character you feel empathy for and that in comparison his creator, Victor Frankenstein, is an arrogant mad scientist who abandons the monster right after creating him.  The poor monster has no one to guide him.  He's barely literate but he wants to be friends with people.  He's really a gentle giant at first  but because of his frightening appearance everyone runs from him screaming in horror or hurls rocks and stones at him until he flees.  Eventually it is too much for the monster and he starts killing his tormentors.

In Frankenstein the novel we get a very different picture.  For one thing the monster in the book is brilliant.  He speaks several languages.  He knows history, philosophy, literature and he is completely self-taught since, as in the film, Dr. Frankenstein abandons him at birth. Dr. Frankenstein in the novel is different as well.  He is arrogant thinking he could create a new life in his lab and not have it backfire.  But he's not mad and his intentions started out well:

"No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success.  Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds , which I should first break through, and pore a torrent of light into our dark world.  A new species would bless me as it's creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.  No father could claim the gratitude of his child  so completely as I should deserve theirs.  Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption"

But Dr Frankenstein's experiment goes very wrong.  He creates a being with super-human strength who is so physically deformed in appearance that he can't live among humans.  But the monster in the novel is smart and after reading Paradise Lost he is profoundly affected by the story of Adam and the Garden of Eden and how God after creating Adam didn't abandon him but loved him and provided a partner in Eve so rhat Adam would not be alone.  The monster after tracking down Frankenstein demands the same, that Dr. Frankenstein create a mate for him: 

"as hideous as myself; the gratification is small, but it is all I can receive, and it will content me.  It is true we shall be monsters cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another ... Oh! my creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit.  Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing".  

Dr Frankenstein is moved by the monster's request feeling that he does have obligations to his creation but the monster is also making a threat.  He has already  killed Dr. Frankenstein's young brother and planted the evidence on Justine, the Frankenstein family's innocent young housekeeper, who is hanged for the crime.  And if the monster doesn't get his mate he is vowing to destroy everyone Dr. Frankenstein loves.  And so unike in the movie I could not feel sorry for the monster in the novel who is not illiterate by any means and his bottomless rage and thirst for revenge if he doesn't get his way are monstrous qualities in their own right.

But I recommend Frankenstein.  It's marvelously written and it's also a book of ideas.  According to literary scholars, Mary Shelley in writing Frankenstein was to some extent criticizing the age of enlightenment where in the 1700's science, rationality, the end of monarchies began to overshadow the Middle Ages where religion and obedience to one's king ruled everything.  Mary Shelley along with her husband Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats were part of the movement known as romanticism which looked suspiciously at the age of enlightenment.  Frankenstein is seen therefore as a gothic masterpiece but also a cautionary tale about what can happen when science and rationality go too far.  It's a classic horror novel well worth your time.

The Staircase by Ann Rinaldi

Ann Rinaldi (1934 -2021) was a prolific and award winning writer of historical young adult novels.  Her books focus on American history and The Staircase published in 2000 is set in 1878 and centers around the Loretto Chapel and its beautiful spiral staircase located in Santa Fe New Mexico which tourists continue to visit to this day.  No one really knows who built the staircase but the legend says it may have been St Joseph himself.   Regardless the staircase remains a marvel of architectural design.

Ann Rinaldi decided to write a fictional account of how the staircase came to be built.  Her novel is well written and has received fine reviews but it's possible I am not the right age for this book.  It is geared for young adults and certainly I am no longer in that category.  I will say that one of the characters in The Staircase, Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy was the actual Bishop of Santa Fe back in the 1870's and he must have been a memorable man because Willa Cather used his life as the basis for her classic novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop.  

Ann Rinaldi passed away in 2021 but her well written books will continue to attract young readers and inspire them to learn more about history.

My February 2022 Reads

I have decided to read four books in February and three of these books, I am embarrassed to say, were on my list to read in January but I didn't buckle down and so this month I am carrying those three books over to February and adding a fourth book.  My reading plan is:

                        Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

                        The Girl of his Dreams by Donna Leon 

                        The Staircase by Ann Rinaldi 

                        Freedom Summer by Bruce Watson 

I am excited about these book choices.  They are not very long and so I should have no problem completing them and posting my thoughts and then in March I can choose a whole new crop of books to read.  I think four books a month suits me.  If I aim for five or six a month I run into trouble.  

I also plan each month to choose one non-fiction book and the subject this year will be American history.  Somehow I have arrived at the age I am without knowing all that much about American history and I want to learn more as a way to navigate these times.  We have to know where we have been as a country so that we can make sense of what's happening now.  Maybe there are answers in America's past, lessons to be learned and historical figures to guard against but also historical figures to nspire.  In any case I need to know more.

Charlotte and Emily: A Novel of the Brontes by Jude Morgan

If you are a fan of the Brontes, as I am, Charlotte and Emily: A Novel of the Brontes by Jude Morgan published 2009 is a must read.  The only qualification I would make is that this book is not available on kindle.  You can only read it in paperback but it is very much worth the effort.  

What makes this novel so good?  Well, it starts with the fact that Jude Morgan is an excellent writer who specializes in historical novels centering around literary figures.  Another one of Morgan's books Passion is about the lives of the Romantic Poets, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats and has been described by Publisher's Weekly as "well researched, deeply imagined and gorgeously written"  

The same applies to Charlotte and Emily which is also a deeply imagined novel and though the title implies that the focus will be on the two famous sisters, this is very much a novel of a family and that's really the only way the Bronte story can be told.  Their lives were intertwined by their passion for writing, imagining and learning.  But it is also a story of grief and lives cut way too short.

The novel begins for example with the father, Patrick Bronte, at the bedside of his dying wife Maria who is beside herself worrying about what will happen to her children, the oldest of which being only seven.  After Maria passes it is left to Patrick Bronte to raise their six children on his own.  Fortunately, his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Branwell, moves in and she was a great help providing motherly attention and what money she could spare towards the children's education.  But tragedy was never far from the Brontes and after the two eldest daughters Maria and Elizabeth age eleven and ten died from TB at the Dickensian boarding school they attended (a school made infamous in Jane Eyre), Patrick decided to teach his children at home.  

Home was Haworth West Yorkshire and Patrick was the town's parson.  He was not wealthy by any means but what Patrick was able to give his children was a love of reading and learning.  One day he brought home a box of wooden toy soldiers and his children's imaginations took off.  Charlotte and Branwell chose two of the soldiers and created the imaginary world of Angria.   Emily and Ann created the world of Gondol.  For the next eleven years Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Ann wrote poems and little handmade books about their magical kingdoms filled with lords and ladies, battles and adventures for their fictional characters.  

But childhood doesn't last and siblings are expected to grow up and venture out into the world.  As the book shows, Emily could never do this.  If she was away from home for any length of time she began to weaken and so any thought of being a governess was out of the question.  Charlotte and Ann did spend a good part of their twenties as governesses.  It was not an easy life but what could they do?   Branwell upon whom his father, and to a certain extent his sisters, had placed so much hope was floundering. 

So there you have it in 1846, Branwell in serious decline.  Patrick elderly and almost blind.  Charlotte sees the handwriting on the wall since Patrick doesn't even own the house they are living in which belongs to the church.  Charlotte reminds Emily and Ann how much they have always loved writing.  Why not submit their poems to a publisher and more important why not see if they can each write a novel and of course the rest is literary history. 

I enjoyed Charlotte and Emily a great deal and Jude Morgan does a good job of imagining what Patrick, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Ann were like.  The dialogue and their internal thoughts ring true as does their interaction with each other.  It's harder of course to get inside the head of Emily who will forever remain a mystery and Morgan is careful not to assume too much about what Emily was thinking.  Charlotte who was the sister who ventured out into the world is much easier to write about and she left letters as well.

We learn about Ann, a sweet sensitive young woman who had a great deal of self doubt and yet in her novels was bold and ahead of her time.  And Branwell who has come down to us through history as a burden on the family who destroyed himself through drink and drugs.  But as with Anne who is finally getting the respect she deserves might it be time for a second look at Branwell?  He had talent as a poet and painter but is it possible too much pressure was put on him as the only son?  Patrick was counting on Branwell from a very early age to be a brilliant success and to be able to support his three sisters in their later years.  

But of course the Bronte children never reached their later years but we have their poetry and their novels Jane Eyre, Villette, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall which will live on for as long as great literature continues to be read

The Next Century by David Halberstam

A few weeks ago I was scrolling through Book Bub (an online reading service I subscribe to) and I came upon The Next Century by David Halberstam.  I wanted to read this book  because David Halberstam was a great reporter (he died in 2007) and was best known for his coverage of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.  But what interested me the most is that The Next Century was a book about what the world and the US would look like in the 21st century and he wrote the book in 1991. 

Imagine trying to contemplate what 2022 would look like from the vantage point of 1991?  Halberstam had too much experience of course covering wars and revolutions to make such firm predictions.  Instead in The Next Century he lays out where the world and the US has been since World War II, where we were in 1991 and his concerns for the future.

But what I came to realize as I finished The New Century is that any sort of speculation from 1991 about where we are now was going to miss so many key events that no one saw coming.  Halberstam's book for example begins with Gorbachev, the breakup of the Soviet Union, Lech Walesa and the trade union movement Solidarity.  It seems like a long time ago.  He also writes a good deal about Japan.  Back in the 1980's Japan and how they were possibly moving ahead of the US in auto production, electronics etc was seen as a big challenge.  No one worries about that now. 

But did David Halberstam spot back in 1991 things about America that we should have been more concerned about?  He does write:  

"What started in the early fifties as a sense of possibilities gradually became expectations and then finally entitlements.  Those who have memories of a poorer pre-World War II America, one touched by the Depression, where people (and the nation) had to make choices about spending, are older and increasingly a minority ... Now we have the current generation which believes that living in the present and paying in the future is the best revenge ... How quickly it all goes when it's built on sand ... and Donald Trump's empire is in the hands of banks (the key to the Trump success, while it lasted, is that New York City was in such bad shape that it gave him a 160 million tax benefit for his glitzy projects).  The result, of course, was not greater productivity but greater wealth for the already wealthy".  

Halberstam did a decent job in The Next Century trying to see into the future but it turned out to be an impossible task.  Even in 2019 who could have predicted Covid? And so I can't recommend The New Century.  Instead you might want to go with David Halberstam's other books, his critically acclaimed bestseller The Best and the Brightest about the Kennedy Administration and The Children about the Civil Rights Movement.  Both books I believe will have a great deal to say about today's times.  

2022 Back to the Classics Challenge

I am so happy that the 2022 Back to the Classics Challenge is on for this year and thank you Karen K at Books and Chocolate for once again hosting the challenge.  Here is my list:

Choose a 19th Century Classic-  Frankenstein by Mary Shelley -  Written by Mary Shelley when she was 19 and staying at a resort in Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Lord Byron's personal physician, John Polidori.  The four challenged each other on a stormy night to come up with a really good ghost story and after a few days of struggle Mary began writing Frankenstein and a classic was born.

Choose a 20th Century Classic - Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington - Saw the movie with Joseph Cotton which I enjoyed and so would like to give the novel a try.

Classic by a Woman Author -  Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier - I've never read Rebecca but have always been meaning to and so this year I will finally check it off my to do list.

Classic Mystery or Crime Book - Laura by Vera Caspary - When it comes to mid- twentieth century crime noir fiction there are not many novels by women but Vera Caspary along with Dorothy Hughes (In a Lonely Place) were two exceptions and the plot of Laura, a detective obsessed with the mysterious woman whose death he has come to investigate has always intrigued me.

Choose a Classic in Translation - Meditations by Marcus Aurelius -  Guido Brunetti the lead detective in Donna Leon's marvelous mystery series reads Marcus Aurelius at night when he's at home to relax.  So I want to try reading him as well.  

Choose a Classic written before 1800 - The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster - A very early American novel published in 1797.  

Choose a Classic from Your TBR shelf - Aylmer Vance: Ghost Seeker by Alice and Claude Askew - The book I believe has been on my TBR pile the longest.  The Askew's were a British husband and wife writing team who wrote novels influenced by Sherlock Holmes but the two detective friends in the Askew's short stories investigate the paranormal.

Choose a Classic from a Place You Would Love to Visit - Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote - Would love to visit New York again.

Choose a Classic Book of Short Stories - Fall of the House of Usher and Other Stories by Edgar Allen Poe - Eager to begin reading these classic stories but maybe not just before I go to bed. 

Choose a Classic Book of Non-Fiction - Silent Spring by Rachel Carson - A classic in environmental literature.

Choose a Classic by a BIPOC author - Passing by Nella Larsen - Been meaning to read this novel and now there is a Netflix film as well.

Choose a Wild Card Classic - Men to Match My Mountains by Irving Stone -  This is another book from my TBR list,  a big, sprawling history of the American far west from 1840 - 1900.  And I have read Irving Stone's historical novel about the marriage of John and Abigail Adams and it was well done.  

So those are my choices for 2022.

The Children's Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin

"It was the right thing to do, she decided; they were already bundled up and ready to go home ... There would be no teaching her disappointed pupils if she changed her mind and kept them all inside.  And there would be no pretending with Tiny, in the snug little farmhouse cooking him the meal she'd planned ... No kisses designed to lasso her cowpoke. 

"Go home," Gerda called gaily over the whine of the wind causing some of the students to halt in confusion ... Homestead children understood weather.  Shelter in place -- wasn't that what they were taught to do in a blizzard?  But they were also taught to always obey teacher" 

The above passage is from The Children's Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin (2021) recommended by my friend Iris and thank you Iris for letting me know about this gripping and very moving historical novel with characters I will not forget any time soon.  

The Children's Blizzard tells the story of a real event, a terrible blizzard, that struck the Great Plains on January 12, 1888.  By the time it was over 235 people had died and many of the dead were children.  No one saw this tragedy coming because the day had started out so well.  The weather had been bad in the week leading up to the blizzard but then on the morning of Jan 12th it was unseasonably warm and the children went off to school miles away dressed in relatively light clothing.  But then suddenly around noon the sky darkened and shortly after a monstrous blizzard descended on the plains states.  Winds so strong they blew out windows and shattered buildings, temperatures plunging to sub zero and snow and sleet so bad that it was impossible for people to see a few feet in front of them if they were unlucky enough to be caught outside.  

And so Melanie Benjamin uses this backdrop to tell a powerful story (based loosely on real life characters) of two sisters Raina and Gerda Olsen. They are also school teachers and very young.  Raina is 15 and teaching in Nebraska and Gerda is 18 and teaching in South Dakota.  These two sisters are isolated in their one-room school houses with their young students when the blizzard hits.  Raina decides to keep her students together, sheltering in place.  Gerda cares about her children but also decides that the weather isn't that bad and so sends them home early when the sky starts darkening.  

The second half of the Children's Blizzard deals with the aftermath of the storm and the different choices Raina and Gerda made.  There are other interesting characters in the novel.  Raina for example is boarding with the Pedersen family while she teaches school and the father of the household, Gunner Pedersen, is a piece of work, seducing 15 year old Raina.  Also living with the Pedersens is one of Raina's students, Annette.  Her mother sold her to the Pedersen family and Anna Pedersen, Gunner's wife, takes her frustrations out on little Annette treating her like a servant.

And in a separate storyline that later will link up with the other characters in the novel we have the newspaperman Gavin Woodson who writes for the Omaha Daily Bee.  He hates it.  He had a great job in New York working for The World but due to an argument with the owner, Joseph Pulitzer, he was let go and is now stuck out in the middle of nowhere as he sees it.  Woodson longs to be back in New York and he feels guilt as well because his articles for The Bee are not real reporting.  The advertisers demand he write articles that sugarcoat what life on the prairie is like so as to attract immigrant families and families back east and urge them to sell their belongings and head west.  Gavin Woodson feels guilt about this and so when the blizzard hits he knows he has the story of his career but also a chance at redemption.

Guilt and the search for redemption factor big in this book and ultimately this is a story about two sisters, the dreams they had planned and the journey they saw their lives taking until that fateful day.  I heartily recommend The Children's Blizzard.