Review: 'The River We Remember'

 ©2023 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The River We Remember
By William Kent Krueger
Fiction
September 2023
Atria Books

Love of family, love of the land, love of that one special person are all chronicled in William Kent Krueger's new novel, The River We Remember.

The author of the Cork O'Connor mysteries has long written about the hold of the land and of loved ones on a person's heart. His Minnesota-set novels are people-centered, where what is important to the characters is what guides their actions. In this stand-alone novel, every character acts according to the dictates of their hearts, with consequences both dire and delightful.

Jimmy Quinn, the biggest landowner in the county and the biggest bully, has been found in the Alabaster River. There's a big hole from a shotgun blast in his torso that the river's catfish have found. They've also found his face. But because of his bright red hair and size, Dern and everyone else knows it's him.

The suspects are plentiful, but the focus right away on Dakota Noah Bluestone, who returned to the county after a military career. To some, it's bad enough that he's an Indian. To others, it's even worse because he brought with him a Japanese wife, Kyoko. Noah and his late father worked for Quinn, who had just fired Noah for allegedly stealing gas.

Dern would just as soon have the case be ruled a suicide or accident. But his deputy, and former boss, won't have it. Connie Graff wants the truth to be discovered, knowing the county is going to be torn up regardless of who is guilty.

Also drawn into the events taking place after Quinn's death are Angie Madison, a young war widow whose past has not destroyed her, who now is a beacon of light in the town diner owned by her mother-in-law. Her teenage son, Scott, has a faulty heart physically speaking, yet his spirit is strong and true. Scott's best friend Del and his mother are knocked around by his stepfather, Creasy, a drunk who belongs to a hard-drinking, hardscrabble family. Creasy accused Noah of stealing Quinn's gas.

And then there's Charlie Bauer. Charlie, born Charlotte, was put down constantly by her widowed father. She left town and went to California, where she became a lawyer for the defenseless. She has come back home and occasionally takes on cases of the defenseless, when not reading on her porch or sipping whiskey. She becomes Noah's counsel, but he does not want to enter any plea. He doesn't want to do or say a thing.

Jimmy Quinn's big family also have stories to tell. Or hide.

As the author of terrific mysteries, Krueger handles the whodunit aspects of the story very well. As a writer who also has demonstrated wisdom about the frailties and strengths of the human spirit, Krueger adds the layers that make some mysteries whydunits. The revelations about many characters that the investigation uncovers create a novel that explores both individual characters and the character of a community. Other measures of his strong writing are the pacing keeps all the characters separate, and he anticipates a whodunit reader's ideas about the clues presented.

The prologue is a work of art on its own. Krueger circles back to it in an epilogue. Both are about the lure of home along the river, how the river is a source of wonder, fun, solace and, on occasion, danger. And how we are all are part of a river and we all have a part to play.

Our lives and the lives of those we love merge to create a river whose current carries us forward from our beginning to our end. Because we are only one part of the whole, the river each of us remembers is different ...

Those differences, as well as things in common, fit together to be a remarkable story told very well.

Review: 'The Book of Goose'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Book of Goose
By Yiyun Li
Literary Fiction
Picador

A young woman who grew up in poverty in post-WWII France marries an American and quietly raises chickens and geese in the States. She recently receives word that her childhood best friend has died in childbirth, the same as her friend's older sister. Although the woman, Agnes, is not yet middle aged, her account is as someone whose life has already been lived.

This story of mine expired when I heard of Fabienne's death.

That's because Agnes and her friend, Fabienne, once pulled off what could be seen as a remarkable act of creativity or a stunt with malicious overtones that got away from them. Fabienne was the stronger personality. She was always poking and prodding people. She would do things to people and animals to see their reactions. When not tending to her father's livestock and her motherless brothers, she ran wild. She was not loved, except by Agnes.

After the postmaster's wife dies, the poetry-loving man is on his own. Fabienne decides to poke and prod, so she and Agnes visit him every evening. Eventually, they show him the stories that Fabienne has dictated to Agnes, who writes down the tales of dead children. Devaux, when he reads the stories each night, calls them macabre, puerile, morbid, unbalanced, and waits with greed for each new one. 

He knows they are Fabienne's stories, and the two of them frequently spar. When she declares the stories are done, he dictates some editing changes that Agnes copies out in her handwriting. Devaux finds a publisher for them, and Agnes is whisked to Paris as a child prodigy author. Fabienne insists she go, alone, and later to England, again alone.

The rest of the story involves deceptions, betrayals and the fervent wish of Agnes to return home, to the days when she and Fabienne wandered around the countryside. But, of course, we know that even if that happens, it will never be the same again.

Agnes knows that for a time, she was considered a minor myth. And she knows that no one would believe her now. But she says that isn't important:

But is it a myth's jonb to make you believe in it? A myth says, Take me or leave me. You can shrug, you can laugh at its face, but you cannot do anything about it.

That mindset is embedded in everything Agnes tells the reader. She insists that a notable life and a dull life are the same, because both are lives that are being lived. 

"Any experience is experience, any life a life."

And yet, and yet. If that is so, why was she so determined to go back to Fabienne and to try to reclaim the past? Agnes is determined that she can only be herself when she is with Fabienne and that the two of them make a whole person. To Agnes, they wanted each other's experiences and to feel as the other felt, to go beyond themselves. For someone who states that "any life a life" Agnes protests a bit too much when the story reaches its climax. As she acknowledges:

Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.

The Book of Goose is not a story about contentment. Or love. It is a complex philosophical treatise about myth and reality, friendship and solititude, truth and deception, in the guise of a narrative. Of course this is an unflinching work. Because this is an author who could write a novel about a woman contemplating the suicide of a daughter (Must I Go) that she put aside when her son committed suicide. She wrote an imagined dialogue between her son and herself in Where Reasons End. This is a book to ponder over with its implications of how people consider themselves and others, and the places in which we exist.

Review: 'The Many Daughters of Afong Moy'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
By Jamie Ford
Historical Fiction
Atria Books

That feeling you can't escape destiny? Or that the person you've just met is someone you immediately feel you already know? Or wondering why people in your family feel the same way about things?

Those ideas are explored in Jamie Ford's new novel, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy.

Ford was inspired by his child's taste in music so closely mirroring his own, and wondering what happened to a Chinese woman who was put on American music hall stages as a curiosity in the 1830s to 1850s, only to disappear from history. She was known mainly as the Chinese Lady, but also was identified as Julia Foo-chee ching-chang-king, Miss Ching-Chang-foo, Miss Keo-O-Kwang King, and Afong Moy.

The family connections he explores through the lens of epigenetic inheritance. At a most basic level, we're talking family traits here. Or the way that some identical twins share so many things in common, even some who have been raised apart from each other.

But Ford and some researchers take it deeper, that there may be a connection between family members in which patterns are repeated from generation to generation because of the way individuals react to situations and feel about certain things. This includes intergenerational trauma, in which later generations learn ways to cope from their elders, ways that may not be healthy. There also is the concept of later generations feeling the burden or pain that their elders went through.

I know many of my relatives and I share similar taste in music, food and entertainment. But sometimes I wonder if there's more when it comes to things like a younger relative not getting over a first love, just like my great-grandfather (who made sure his wife knew she wasn't the one; what a rotten thing to do). Or knowing how to get somewhere in a large city when I'd never been there before (or studied the kind of map that would show me where to go).

What if, well not exactly the same two souls, but two souls who recognized each other, kept meeting but also were kept apart, generation to generation?

The women in this novel are the descendants of Afong Moy. The reader learns her tragic story, as well as what happens to succeeding generations of female descendants. The first daughter encountered is Faye, a nurse during WWII who feels an instant connection to a wounded pilot who crashlands his fighter plane and collapses in her arms. Later, she finds a photograph of her when younger, with the words "Find Me" written on the back. It's a photograph she never had taken.

No way was I not going to find out the mystery of that photograph.

Ford goes back and forth in time, dropping a trail of breadcrumbs through the lives of Moy's daughters. They include a programming genius whose work makes a female-based dating app a spectacular success, a poet in near-future Seattle who suffers from depression and a partner with an overbearing mother, a girl with a crush on one of her female teachers at the famed Summerhill school, a young girl sent back to China after a plague outbreak in San Francisco, and Afong Moy herself. Any single one of them would have been the strong lead in a historical novel.

But Ford combines both the historical stories with the metaphysical and emotional searches of each character. It's not just the meeting, and losing, of each one's true companion. It's also the way each character, in her own fashion, strives to devise a life for herself within the restrictions of her time and place. And the way none of them give up, despite the yearning, despite the loss, despite the traumas, no matter how injured they are.

Without spoiling the ending, let's just say Ford knows what to do with the narratives he has created. The Many Daughters of Afong Moy is a most satisfying book to read.

Review: 'Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney
By Adam Braver
Literary Fiction
University of New Orleans Press

When the Beatles' Abbey Road album was released in 1969, a giant billboard with the iconic album cover of the Fab Four crossing the street was put up on Sunset Boulevard. Paul McCartney's head was cut off and never found. 

Wondering why that might have happened is a starting point, but not the only point, to Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney. The novel by Adam Braver has an ensemble cast, all touched in some form by the missing billboard head, to bring to vivid life what an intense time the late 1960s were. There is a young couple who drive by the billboard and wonder, like Leonard Cohen, about the cracks that let the light in a chaotic world. There is a college student confronted by the FBI because a neighbor overheard her and her university friends talking about the billboard head but he thought they meant Gov. Ronald Reagan. There is a photographer in East Germany whose sister is working to get him and his work out. There is a young man whose girlfriend talks him into the performance art of dancing down Sunset Boulevard with only his head showing. There is another young couple who hide in a friend's bedroom after they are assaulted in a drug deal. There is a young woman who insists she is in the background of one of the six photographs taken the day the album cover was shot. And there is a young boy who carries the dream of someday finding Paul McCartney's head.

Some of the characters interact with each other. Some of them bump into each other years later, even if they don't know that they share a moment in cultural history. Some of them find closure, some find a way to carry on, some remain mourned for decades. Mistakes also are carried by souls for years.

Whatever bad things happened to each one of us, as they did, we accepted them as penance for that time in our lives when we might have been so much more courageous.

Braver's construction of writing the novel in suites keeps each story on track and the characters individually memorable. Most seek connection with the greater beauty of life, whether they seek a purpose to their days or not.

Those were the years when all I craved was connection, when you have the sense that any person that you might meet could be the one to change your life.

The author also brings back into focus just how intense that time was.

This was a tough time in our country and the world. We had seen a president shot in the street in broad daylight. We watched soldiers and the Vietnamese die on the nightly news. Police officers in Chicago had beat a young man holding an American flag. Black man targeted by cops and then jailed for defending themselves. For us, grasping at rationales had become a way of life.

It's easy to see parallels to today, when put in those terms. 

And because of those parallels, Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney brings to mind how individuals, whether they drift through life or are determined to follow a certain path, are affected by what is going on around them. 

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Shrines of Gaiety
By Kate Atkinson
Historical Fiction
Anchor

The apex of the Roaring Twenties during which nightclubs flourished and competed with each other for the patronage of the aristocracy, the underworld and those visiting the big city for thrills, girls leaving their provincial lives, a family that depends on each other but doesn't much like each other, a morose copper and the queen of night life released from six months in gaol all feature in Kate Atkinson's latest novel.

Shrines of Gaiety is a twisty tale that has the best features of both her Jackson Brodie novels and her historical works, especially Life After Life and A God in Ruins. This one begins with Nellie Corker leaving Holloway after being sentenced for violating liquor laws. The mother of six and owner of London's most popular nightclubs is greeted by her family, a throng of fans, the press and at least one policeman. With the copper is Gwendolen Kelling, a librarian from York who has come to London in search of two girls who ran away from home, but who really seeks to more fully live. She's going to spy on the Corker empire while searching for the girls.

Nellie's children includea WWI sharpshooter, the mysterious Niven; practical Edith, her mother's heir apparent dealing with an unexpected problem; two sisters who would rival the flightiest Bennet sisters; inept Ramsay who doesn't know who or what he likes; and the youngest, nearly feral Kitty. All play a role in what happens to their family empire after Mum is freed, especially with at least two factions trying to bring her down.

And, because this novel is written by someone who is a master of combining narrative threads of various characters, the relationships they form with Gwendolen and others is fascinating.

The others include that copper who was with her when Nellie Corker came out of Holloway. Detective Chief Inspector Frobisher has been assigned to Bow Street to clean house. He also has his eye on the Corkers. And spends a lot of time working because he doesn't know what to do for his depressed French wife, who is trapped in a world of her own pain.

The girls Gwendolen is looking for have stories of their own that convey what life could be like for girls who wanted more than settling for second best in York. Freda is ignored by her mother and thinks she may have a chance to become a famous dancer, performing in the spotlight every night. She convinces her hapless friend Florence to run away to London with her. Their stories show the dangers of shooting for the stars. 

But the heart and soul of this novel is Gwendolen. The former war nurse who became a librarian is an intrepid heroine who shines, even when she's not sure of where her heart is leading her. She represents what once was seen as the best of sturdy English sensibilities. As a portrait of was considered to be the genuine character of a nation, she anchors the serious commentary that in turn anchors the rompish aspect of the narrative. Both she and the novel are delights.

Review: 'The Marriage Portrait'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Marriage Portrait
By Maggie O'Farrell
Literary Fiction
Knopf

She had
A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Browning's "My Last Duchess" was the first poem I studied in college that caught my attention and imagination. The story it tells of a young woman who seemed kind and interested in the world, who was not appreciated by a world-weary aristocrat, who died and who was not mourned, whose portrait was a curio among many for her widower, floored me.

How could anyone be that callous? How could anyone not appreciate kindness and beauty? How could "a nine-hundred-years-old name" be worth more than those qualities? Is the male ego that fragile? Is is an aristocracy thing?

These questions came back to mind while reading Maggie O'Farrell's latest historical novel. The Marriage Portrait imagines the life of Lucrezia di Cosimo de' Medici d'Este. The middle daughter of Cosimo and Eleanora de' Medici was married to Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, at the age of 13. This happened after her elder sister, also promised to Alfonso, died before the wedding could take place. Lucrezia died at the age of 16.

She is believed to be the subject of Browning's poem about a dead young wife's marriage portrait. The actual painting of her that inspired Browning, which was on display near his Italian home, although it was apparently painted some time after the marriage, makes one wonder what she was thinking. O'Farrell has some ideas.

In the novel, Lucrezia is unlike her sedate siblings. She is not only the opposite of sedate, she also is curious and desires to know things, to see things, to understand things. As a child, she crept down to the family's courtyard during the night when a tiger her father had commissioned to be part of his private zoo arrived. Mesmerized by the fierce, caged beast, she later gets to visit the caged animals with her older brothers and sisters. As the odd one out, Lucrezia is skilled at fading into the background, and does so to go to the tiger's cage. To stroke its magnificent fur. She is discovered doing so and is dragged away. Later, the tiger is killed when the doors to its cage and those of the two lions already in the zoo are opened. 

That part of the story is factual. But like deeds surrounding her eventual husband, whether her father had something to do with what took place is worthy of speculation. 

To anchor Lucrezia's fictional character to the real portrait, and subsequent fame through Browning's poem, O'Farrell's protagonist is a talented painter. Brushstrokes, use of color, the fascination of creating underpaintings no one but the artist will see are all fascinating and satisfying to the Lucrezia of the novel. The way that O'Farrell describes how these aspects of creating art giving meaning to her character's inner life show another interpretation to the complaints of the widower in the poem, who is peeved at not being on some mythical pedestal. Instead, the novel's Lucrezia is lost inside her art.

The truth is, though, that she is still caught in the microcosm of her painting: that is the only place she wishes to be. All other sights, all ther worlds, will be dissatisfying to her until she finishes it, until the painting is complete and will release her back to where she belongs. Here, in this salon, waiting for her husband to appear, an embroidery hoop in her hands.

Added into the mix are Alfonso's troubles with his Protestant mother, who has angered the Pope, and his desperation for a child. (The real Alfonso married twice more after Lucrezia's death but had no children.) If Lucrezia feels a bond with a different man, that could well be the last straw for an aristocrat accustomed to getting his way.

It is easy to see that a would-be empire builder, in an age when Henry VIII would be doing the same, only in public, would think murdering a wife could solve some of his problems and perhaps soothe his ego.

How much any of this is true is not the purpose of the story. It is the wondering about what drives people, what inspires or motivates them, what controls them, that makes The Marriage Portrait a fascinating look at how people with so many advantages can fail at life on such a grand scale.

Review: 'My Government Means to Kill Me'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

My Government Means to Kill Me
By Rasheed Newson
Literary Fiction
Flatiron

A young man leaves his affluent Indianapolis home in the 1980s, lands in New York City and seeks well, not fame and fortune, but some of the lustier glories of the big city. And since he is a young Black gay man with unresolved sorrow in his heart, a flamboyant attitude and a quick mind, he can only be Trey Singleton in Rasheed Newson's My Government Means to Kill Me.

Trey is a teenager when his life in the Big Apple begins. He knows he stands out. Sometimes, he embraces it and sometimes, he acknowledges that it is not half of who he is.  From his first job as a bicycle messenger, Trey knows he doesn't fit in. He also knows he is going to have to take it if he plans to stay. There is an acknowledgement and honesty to Trey that is immediately endearing. 

Although he knows that "the average person was never going to bestow pity or mercy on me", he also quickly learns that "We are not so narrowly defined as society would have us believe."

Trey soon discovers Mt. Morris, a bathhouse that has not been closed down because of its mostly Black clientele. There, he cruises for quick sex and becomes friends with Bayard Rustin. This Rustin feels and sounds like the little I know of the real Rustin, whether he would ever have been in such a setting or not. Like all the real people mentioned in the novel, each chapter, or lesson, has a footnote when they are introduced that is factual. (Excuse me for a moment. Footnotes! Oh joy! Rapture! My nerdy little heart was delighted.)

Rustin is one of several characters who serve as anchors while Trey bounces around discovering the ups and downs of life in the big city. Rustin serves as both advisor and Greek chorus, telling Trey and the reader of how far things had come even back in the 1980s.

When Trey and his roommate can't pay rent, Trey plows through the old-fashioned kind of research, when one dug through paper documents in dusty basements. He then finagles his way into a rent strike against the landlord who is, of course, Fred Trump. The portrayal of that despot is both a clue into why his son turned out the way he did and a portend of things to come. It is brilliantly written, as are other setpieces with prominent conservatives of the era.

As Trey becomes more involved in his New York life, he is drawn toward activism. The rent strike is the tipping point. In this and all the outer things that happen to Trey, his observations about himself apply not just to the action at hand, but to him. To wit:

If we never meet our despicable adversaries, we'd never be forced to find out how brave, resilient, and cunning we can be.

This bit of wisdom applies to the trauma Trey carries from his childhood, when something happened that he was at least in part responsible for and which is the main reason he left home. In between episodes that portray 1980s New York City and the explosion of the AIDS crisis, Trey deals with his past. It will affect his future. And it will involve confronting demons, both those in his head and those in his family. But one of Trey's great strengths is his self-awareness and knowledge:

We could blame it all on our families, but then we'd never find the keys to unlock our cells.

This self-awareness and knowledge also leads to one of those big "oof" reading moments when the air can leave the reader's innards and tears may come to one's eyes:

What flesh-and-blood man was ever going to immediately recognize the inner beauty and value in me, then make the effort to machete his way through the thorny thickets of insecurities and defense mechanisms surrounding my heart?

As Trey becomes involved with ACT UP, the reason for the book's title comes to the fore. It is a brutal realization that this is how dire things were. And a reminder that we're not that far from seeing how dire things are close to being again:

The point is to let your bruised and bloodied bodies serve as evidence that the government means to kill you, if you so much as protest its bigoted policies.

The novel is not all doom and gloom though. Through all the ups and downs in Trey's life and those of his friends, there is a cheekiness, an earnestness and an honesty to the story that thoroughly anchors it. My Government Means to Kill Me is not only a brilliant historical novel of those times, it is a bold statement of how someone who could have been an outcast doesn't settle for being left out. 

Review: 'Circus of Wonders'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Circus of Wonders
By Elizabeth Macneal
Historical Fiction
Atria

A country girl, covered in birthmarks that make her an object of scorn and curiosity, is sold by her destitute drunk of a father to a traveling circus owner in post-Crimean War Britain. Just as Nell grows into her true self as the mechanical wings she performs with unfurl, so the story of all the characters in Circus of Wonders unfurls. It's a novel of yearning, sorrow and wonder.

Elizabeth's Macneal's second novel opens with Nell, a girl on the cusp of womanhood, entranced by the colorful handbills being put up around the village by a bear of a man. The man, Toby, is the brother of the circus owner, Jasper Jupiter. Jasper sees himself as the natural successor of P.T. Barnum and is determined to not fail as the master showman did. Nell draws the townsfolk's attention and flees to the sea, where she feels free in the water. Her ability to ride the waves and dance in the sea precedes her aerial performing in the circus. Toby sees her dive into the water and fears for her safety. He is caught flat-footed staring at her when she surfaces. The entire scene sets the stage for what becomes of these characters, from Toby introducing Nell to his brother's circus to Nell's way to be the queen of her world.

Circus of Wonders has overtones of the story and film "Freaks" in the way it takes us into the world of people who live being stared at by others. The comradery draws Nell in. So does the honesty:

"Where else can we be celebrated for who we are?"

"For how we look, not who we are."

Nell soon realizes that she can control the way people see her. When she flies during the show, she is the one in control. The crowds adore her. It is a power that helps her believe in a genuine chance of a life not spent alone, or as someone doomed to be the unwed aunt to the future children of her beloved brother and his betrothed.

Just as Nell once thought she and her brother were inseparable, so did Toby and Jasper. Jasper is the older and has always been the leader. Their father gave Jasper a microscope, while Toby received a photography machine. The microscope plays into Jasper's sense of being in charge, while the camera reinforces Toby's fading into the background while life goes on in front of him. Toby joins his brother on the Crimean battlefields. That's where Jasper and a new friend, Dash, turn into rowdy war criminals, killing with bloodlust and looting with glee. Toby is charged with creating pro-war propaganda, and sets up photographs that make the war look, well, civilized. 

It was astonishing, he added, what a difference modern machines made. They could offer an exact impression of how things were and have it delivered to thousands of drawing rooms within a fortnight. 

Or an exact impression of what was created to look like how things were. Something we are grappling with today in this era of misinformation and social media.

Jasper's ambition is the force that drives what happens in the narrative. He is part Icarus and part Dr. Frankenstein. He likens himself to both driven, doomed figures. Other characters' awareness about themselves and what matters to them do not stop him; sometimes, they are the impetus to his bad choices.

Circus of Wonders is filled with illusions -- the illusions of how war is portrayed, of how circus acts are created, of how people see each other. The illusions work together to reveal some poignant truths about how important it is to see oneself clearly, and to know when it matters to have a dream. Whether it comes true or not.

Review: 'The Moor's Account'

The Moor's Account
By Laila Lalami
Literary historical fiction
September 2014
Pantheon
ISBN: 978-0307911667

Winners may control the narrative, but in Laila Lalami's latest novel, who wins and who gets to tell the true story depends on how one views it.

The Moor's Account is based on one line in a report of a Spanish expedition to the New World in the 16th century. Nothing is known about the black slave who survived, but that one line was enough for Moroccan-born Lalami to weave a tale of many stories in a densely packed novel.

Mustafa is the hard-working and greedy son of a trader who takes his life and freedom for granted. When his Moroccan city is captured by the Portuguese, times get hard and his family struggles for the basics. He decides the way to save the others is to sell himself into slavery. His years working for a Spanish merchant offer few moments of happiness, and his loyalty and ability to help his master make a fortune are not appreciated. He ends up the slave of a soldier traveling to the New World to seek gold and lands for the king of Spain in New Florida.

Just as hubris helped lead to his downfall in his native city, ignorant pride leads to disaster for the Spaniards. Their journey through the wilderness does not lead to the gold they thought would be found easily. As their number dwindle and they are reduced to the most base forms of trying to survive, Mustafa, who was renamed Esteban, then Estebanico, finds ways to survive and thrive.

Mustafa's inherent dignity and willingness to meet the circumstances of each day as they find him, or his resilience, are shown more than told about in the novel. Indeed, every aspect of the novel is subtle, whether it's how Mustafa and the Indians are regarded by the Spaniards, or the small differences in how individuals view the world and their changing circumstances.

Written in a highly formalized fashion, The Moor's Account is more like a series of fables than a fast-paced novel. There are adventures aplenty, but the action is not the point It is the appreciation for the sun, the rain, food and good company you can count on that matters. It is the opportunity to tell one's story so that one is not forgotten.

©2015 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'An Unmarked Grave'

AN UNMARKED GRAVE: A Bess Crawford Mystery
By Charles Todd
Historical mystery
June 2012
William Morrow

ISBN: 978-0-06-201572-3                                                                                    

Intrepid Bess Crawford is just behind the trenches in wartorn France, tending to the wounded, when the Spanish Influenza strikes in the spring of 1918. In the mdist of the chaos, an orderly notices something wrong with one of the many bodies. He didn't die of war wounds or the flu. His neck was broken.

The orderly informs Bess as someone he trusts. She promises to alert the proper people. She promises not only because she trusts the kindly older man who is the orderly and sees for herself that the dead man was murdered, but also because the victim was a family friend who served in her father's regiment.

But before she can get anywhere, the flu strikes her as well. In the near-fairytale atmosphere in which Bess Crawford exists, she is spirited out of France and convalesces back home as strings are pulled. For Bess Crawford has connections, most importantly her father, the Colonel Sahib.

This imposing figure and dearest family friend Simon are full-fledged confidants as she pieces together bits of information and visits various figures connected to the victim. These figures are representative of various strata in Britain's WWI class system, and as such provide a fascinating picture of people carrying on while the Great War goes on and on and on. Although Bess initially isn't quite believed, it's soon evident that the orderly, who died soon after she was taken ill, showed her something important.

Before long, more people connected with the investigation die. Bess knows the killer will target her, but her sense of duty demands that she continue. And if that means she has to take along with her a brash American officer recovering from his war wounds, that's what she will do. Even if he and Simon don't exactly take to each other. The killer gets closer and closer to Bess and her inner circle before the end, which is a classic case of the sleuth figuring it all out in the nick of time.

The world for Bess that the Todds have created is a genuine homage to the World War I era. The violence is off-screen, the characters do not directly express their feelings for each other (really, how thick are Bess and Simon to not have figured that out?) and duty reigns supreme, the plot unfolds in true tricky Agatha Christie style. The series also has other aspects of the historical era it depicts. There is no irony or nod to modern sensibility in Bess calling her father the Colonel Sahib. Women and lower class folk are expected to know their place. In one of the poignant stories told during the unveiling of the plot, a widower father who has lost several sons to the war doesn't understand why the widow of one of them won't come work the farm. Her son would grow up in fresh air but the workload would obviously kill her.

Downton Abbey fans would be well served by reading the Bess Crawford novels while waiting for a new season. Fans of Inspector Rutledge, the first series character brought to life by the Todds, will find a lighter version of the tone in that post-war series.

©2012 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'The Reservoir'

THE RESERVOIR
By John Milliken Thompson
Historical fiction
June 2011
Other Press
ISBN: 978-1590514443

Although it's a well-known axiom to not judge a book by its cover, in this case it is all right. John Milliken Thompson's debut novel, The Reservoir, has as its cover a gorgeous, sprawling tree that hasn't leafed out, with an amber wash that harkens back to another time. It is desolate and nearly devoid of life. The cover is based on something that exists, yet has been turned into something else.

That's an accurate description of the novel. It's based on a true story, but Thompson, a nonfiction and short story writer, has taken the bare bones of what was known and turned it into a stark, sad story that is steeped in old-timey feel.