Giants in the Earth

Giants in the Earth by O.E. Rolvaag

 

The classic story of a Norwegian pioneer family's struggles with the land and the elements of the Dakota Territory as they try to make a new life in America.
-FantasticFiction.com

 

A very moving tale of the hardships endured by the early settlers of the Dakota's in the 1870's.  A tale of lonliness, back-breaking work, locust plagues, snowstorms, fears, starvation.  A tale of determination and ingenuity. These pioneers helped make our country what it is today.

-Mona

Gone with the Wind

I'd never read the book before.  I'd seen the movie a couple of times and always thought the over wrought love affairs and girlishness of the movie plot would be boring or even ghastly to have to read.  I was wrong. Maybe I now needed to read it from an older person's sense of history, an attempt to understand what made the 20th century generations of 'old south' whites fight so hard to somehow return to a pre-Civil War south. Perhaps I needed to try to understand more as Mona and I hope to live so much in Dixie over our next years that I needed to come to grips with this part, and many others, of just what Dixie was and is today.  But 'Gone with the Wind' is not a book about that way Dixie ever was.  It is a book about the way Margaret Mitchell believed, after growing up in a hurting, slow growth Atlanta of the early 1900's, Dixie had really been.

Yes, many of her anecdotes and historical facts are correct. Yes, she went to many original diaries and historical documents for research, as well as the memories of her own extended family from the period.  But it is doubtful she ever checked her facts of white/black relations with any former slaves or their descendants. On any issues in the book regarding slavery and slaves the reader must be left shaking their head, in wonder, or even shame.

Some of her words are hateful, hurtful, and mean, by today's standards of American writing.  Calling the air of a slave cabin 'niggerly', or constantly comparing grown blacks to children, apes and gorillas, even at one point saying the loving 'Mammy' had a puffed face like a gorilla.  These are things Mitchell meant differently in her 1930's Atlanta world than we do today, but never meant to be honoring to blacks.  She only ever wished to show them their place, and the reader where she felt they really belonged under God's blue heaven.

So I invite you to read Gone with the Wind not as historical fact but as a phenomena of the American Civil War, which lasted well into the 1970's, and for some still lasts down to this day. I came away after it's thousand plus pages feeling that I had lived in the world of Scarlet and Rhett, and Ashley and Melanie, and Mammy and Pittypat deeply and well.  But it is a world almost as unreal as the Middle Earth of Tolkien.  His world akin to the middle age Europe of Christendom.  And Margaret Mitchell's, a world she and her kind wish the American South could have really been, in a time far, far away.

-Ken

A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell

 

It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it becomes overnight an open battleground among the Nazis, the Allies, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive.

Mary Doria Russell sets her first historical novel against this dramatic background, tracing the lives of a handful of fascinating characters. Through them, she tells the little-known but true story of the network of Italian citizens who saved the lives of forty-three thousand Jews during the war's final phase. The result of five years of meticulous research, A Thread of Grace is an ambitious, engrossing novel of ideas, history, and marvelous characters that will please Russell's many fans and earn her even more.

FantasticFiction.com

 

What a powerful novel of love and hate, compassion and cruelty, survival and death during this dramatic time in the history of the world.

-Mona

Jerusalem Inn

Jerusalem Inn by Martha Grimes

 

When a young woman is found dead in the snow, Richard Jury is convinced her death was not an accident. Delving into her background, Jury uncovers unlikely links between the local children's home, a run-down pub, the Jerusalem Inn, and a socially elite house-party in Spinney Abbey.

-FantasticFiction.com

 

This is book #5 in the Richard Jury mystery series.  I found it good, but the sections in which she goes into detail describing several games of snooker (of which I know nothing about!) tended to get a bit tedious.  Beyond that, a good read.

-Mona

A Sudden, Fearful Death

A Sudden, Fearful Death by Anne Perry

 

Private detective Monk makes his fourth appearance in the vivid Victorian series by the beloved creator of Inspector Pitt and wife. A gifted nurse has met death by strangulation, and William Monk is convinced it was no random act of violence. Soon he discerns the shadow of a tragic evil that darkens every level of society.
-FantasticFiction.com

 

In a London hospital, Prudence Barrymore a talented nurse who had once been one of Florence Nightingale's angels of mercy in the Crimean War, meets sudden death by strangulation.  Private inquiry agent William Monk is engaged to investigate this horrific crime- which intuition tells him was no random stroke of violence by a madman.

 

Greatly helped by his unconventional friend Hester Latterly, another of Miss Nightingale's nurses, and barrister Oliver Rathbone, Monk assembles the portrait of a remarkable woman.  Yet he also discerns the shadow of a tragic evil that darkens every level of society, and a frightening glimmer of his own eclipsed past....

 

This fourth book in Anne Perry's William Monk series is every bit as riveting as her others.

-Mona

The Opposite of Fate

The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings by Amy Tan

 

A personal account of life as seen through the eyes of one of America's best-loved novelists. Over the course of her writing life, Amy Tan's essays and articles have appeared in numerous magazines, journals and anthologies, much to the delight of her fans. Here she has put together her musings on what she sees as the opposites of fate. This work should illuminate her fiction and give her readers a rare glimpse into her heart and mind. Born into a family that believed in fate, Tan has always looked for ways to make sense of the world - other than the excuse of destiny. From retelling the tales of her ancestors, to redecorating her house, and from seeing ghosts to strapping on skis, her narrative journey reflects on fate's opposites - lucky accidents, choice, memory - as well as on the comfort of accepting her past.

-FantasticFiction.com

 

I found this book to be full of interesting, insightful and sometimes amusing bit of wisdom.  I love her novels as well.

-Mona

Peachtree Road

Peachtree Road by Anne Rivers Siddons

 

In Atlanta, Georgia, Lucy Bondurant, a spirited beauty who refuses to conform to the demands of Southern society, and her cousin, shy and quiet Gibbs Bondurant, are joined by their defiance against the constraints of aristocratic society.

 

Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable is a beautiful burning-flame of a woman, a woman of great passion and terrible need.  Sheppard Gibbs Bondurant III, Lucy's cousin and lifelong confidant, is a man turned recluse because of his own fatal feelings.  Their mesmerizing story begins on the childhood day when Lucy comes to live with Shep's family in the great house on Peachtree Road.  Set in one of the South's most elite societies here is a novel that chronicles the turbulent changes of a great city - and gives us the unforgettable story of an astonishing love and hate between one woman and one man.

 

Incredible spellbinding story of triumph....and tragedy.

-Mona

Rumpole of the Bailey

Rumpole of the Bailey by John Mortimer

 

A collection of stories featuring Rumpole of the Bailey, including "Rumpole and the Younger Generation", "Rumpole and the Alternative Society", "Rumpole and the Honourable Member", "Rumpole and the Married Lady, "Rumpole and the Learned Friends" and "Rumpole and the Heavy Brigade".

Horace Rumpole, barrister-at-law, has an unsurpassed knowledge of typewriters and bloodstains, a penchant for quoting poetry, and a wife whom he secretly calls She Who Must Be Obeyed.  He long ago solved the infamous Penge Bungalow Murder and the Great Brighton Benefit Club Forgery.  Now he takes on a violent robbery a drug- peddling affair, a rape, a divorce, a safe-breaking, a murder - and in doing so uncovers some hidden corners in the maze of British justice....

 

Rumpole's ever-present wit and cunning make these stories thought provoking and fun.

-Mona

The Folded Earth

The Folded Earth by Anuradha Roy

 

 

In a remote town in the Himalaya, Maya tries to put behind her a time of great sorrow. By day she teaches in a school and at night she types up drafts of a magnum opus by her landlord, a relic of princely India known to all as Diwan Sahib. Her bond with this eccentric, and her friendship with a peasant girl, Charu, give her the sense that she might be able to forge a new existence away from the devastation of her past. As Maya finds out, no place is remote enough or small enough. The world she has come to love, where people are connected with nature, is endangered by the town's new administration. The impending elections are hijacked by powerful outsiders who divide people and threaten the future of her school. Charu begins to behave strangely, and soon Maya understands that a new boy in the neighborhood may be responsible. When Diwan Sahib's nephew arrives to set up his trekking company on their estate, she is drawn to him despite herself, and finally she is forced to confront bitter and terrible truths. A many-layered and powerful narrative, by turns poetic, elegiac and comic, by the author of An Atlas of Impossible Longing.

-FantasticFiction.com

 

Roy's descriptions of the Himalayan region of India, from the majesty of the mountains, the kiss of a butterfly's wing, the aroma if spices at the markets and in the kitchens, the song of the birds, the call of the animals, bring the pages of her book alive.

-Mona

The Paris Wife

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

 

No twentieth-century American writer has captured the popular imagination as much as Ernest Heminway. This novel tells his story from a unique point of view - that of his first wife, Hadley. Through her eyes and voice, we experience Paris of the Lost Generation and meet fascinating characters such as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Gerald and Sara Murphy. The city and its inhabitants provide a vivid backdrop to this engrossing and wrenching story of love and betrayal that is made all the more poignant knowing that, in the end, Hemingway would write of his first wife, "I wish I had died before I loved anyone but her."
-FantasticFiction.com

 

McLain's novel is very historically accurate.  In this book she takes us inside the life of Ernest Hemingway and his first wife Hadley...their joys and sorrows, .their friends and enemies...their loves and losses.  Very well written.

-Mona