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A Long Petal of the Sea, Isabel Allende's epic of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath

Allende’s fluidly written saga conveys her deep familiarity with the events she depicts, and her intent to illustrate their human impact in a moving way. The scope spans most of the lives of Victor Dalmau, a Republican army medic in 1936 Spain, and Roser Bruguera, a music student taken in by Victor’s family and, later, his brother Guillem’s lover and the mother of Guillem’s child. The story follows them over nearly sixty years, beginning with the tumult of the Spanish Civil War. Guillem is killed fighting against the Fascists, news that Victor can’t bear to tell Roser initially. After surviving separate and terrible circumstances that leave them refugees in France, where authorities treat them with contempt and worse, the two marry for practical reasons in order to join Pablo Neruda’s mission transporting over 2000 Spanish exiles to Chile aboard the S.S. Winnipeg . In Santiago, the Dalmaus find many Chileans sympathetic to the Spaniards, while others make them unwelcome. With a poetic ...
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The Secret

The Secret

Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner, a tale of two Jewish sisters across 70 years

Spanning seventy years in two sisters’ lives, this is Jennifer Weiner’s first historical novel, and it’s an impressive one. As children, Jo and Bethie Kaufman feel slotted into categories: Jo the sports-loving tomboy who perplexes their rigid mother, and Bethie the pretty, well-behaved daughter. It’s 1951, and the Kaufmans have moved from multi-ethnic downtown Detroit to a “safe” Jewish neighborhood. To better assimilate, their black maid, Mae, is replaced, and with her goes Mae’s daughter, Jo’s good friend.

Bethie and Jo’s probable paths get derailed by several awful events. Over the decades, through college at Michigan and other happenings related in richly detailed yet swiftly-paced prose, their roles turn inside out. Jo, a lesbian and social activist, finds herself a suburban mother of three, and Bethie, who loses herself in ‘60s counterculture, becomes a restless adventurer. Jo loves her children, but neither woman is content, a feeling they see about the other but can’t acknowledge in themselves. Circumstances change, but the return to happiness is complicated.

Poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” In her introduction, Weiner says she has this quote in mind while writing, and it fits her honest, feminist approach. Through Jo and Bethie’s experiences, she shows how women support and fail one another, and how the pressure to conform to society’s expectations takes a different shape in each era. Jo and Bethie are white, but Weiner also shows how women of color had an even tougher road.

There are many seamless cultural references, from civil rights picketing to Joan Baez at Newport (and if you’re of a certain age, you may get the Jell-O jingle stuck in your head). Smart, authentic, and full of human nature’s internal truths, Mrs. Everything is more than “fiction for women”—it’s a vibrant American story.

Mrs. Everything was published by Atria this summer, and I'd read it from an Edelweiss e-copy and reviewed it for November's Historical Novels Review.  You can read more about the background to the novel, including details on how Jo's character was partly inspired by her mother's life, in Weiner's interview with Parade Magazine.

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The Almanack by Martine Bailey, a richly atmospheric mystery of mid-18th-century England

Saturated with beautiful images of the natural world in mid-18th century rural England, Bailey’s third mystery evokes a time when people regulated their lives according to the change of seasons and were fascinated by mechanisms, scientific and not, used to predict future events. It takes place during a pivotal period rarely seen in fiction: the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, when eleven days were “lost.” A young woman named Tabitha Hart is robbed by her latest bedmate while traveling from London to her home village of Netherlea at her ailing mother’s request. Alas, she arrives too late: the Widow Hart lies cold in her bed, presumably having drowned in the river. Although she is shamed for her loose behavior, and for leaving behind an infant girl for her mother to raise, Tabitha is well-educated, and she takes up her mother’s former post as village searcher. She also picks up her mother’s favorite Almanack, and the scribbled marginalia in the little book, along with a threa...
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The Satapur Moonstone by Sujata Massey, a mystery set in 1920s India

Perveen Mistry’s position as the only female lawyer in 1921 Bombay keeps her services in demand. When Sir David Hobson-Jones, the governor’s chief councillor, asks her to investigate a legal matter for the Kolhapur Agency, a British civil service branch, she’s wary of getting into bed with India’s colonizers. It’s a lucrative, prestigious short-term opportunity, however, and she feels compelled to accept. The maharaja of the small princely state of Satapur is a ten-year-old boy, and his widowed mother and grandmother disagree on his education. Because they live in purdah, a woman lawyer is the best choice as mediator. While this premise is similar to the series opener, The Widows of Malabar Hill , Perveen quickly finds herself in a very different situation that tests her physical strength and negotiating skills and lands her into danger. Massey devotes ample time to illustrating the politics and culture of a remote Indian princely state and the personalities of a new cast before introd...
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The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes, a novel about books, dedication, and female friendship during the Depression years

Books provide people with education and entertainment; they change lives as they introduce different worlds and unfamiliar experiences. During the Depression, the women who transported books in their horses’ saddlebags to isolated Kentucky mountain residents, in all seasons, as part of the WPA’s Pack Horse Library Initiative provided a lifeline of literacy to their audiences. Hearing about this unique job after a dull church service, Alice Van Cleve grows intrigued and immediately volunteers to join. After getting swept off her feet by Bennett Van Cleve, a burly, handsome Kentuckian visiting her native England, Alice feels stifled by the insularity in her new home of Baileyville, a small Appalachian town, and surprised by her new husband’s unexpected aloofness. Alice had never fit in at home, and with her clipped British accent and dislike for frivolous social pursuits, she’s an outsider in Kentucky, too. She finds an unofficial new family with the four other pack-horse librarians, inc...
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