The Moor

The Moor by Laurie R. King

Rumors of a "devil dog" lead Sherlock Holmes and his wife, Mary Russell, back to the scene of one of his most celebrated cases. And when the body of miner Josiah Gorton is found surrounded by paw prints, it looks as if the "Hound of the Baskervilles" has returned to haunt Dartmoor once more.

-FantasticFiction

In my opinion, this fourth book in Laurie R. King's Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series is the best one so far. Looking forward to the rest.  This one rates a very strong four stars****.

The Judas Field

The Judas Field by Howard Bahr

In this epic novel of violence and redemption by the author of The Black Flower, a Civil War veteran travels back over old battlefields toward a reckoning with the past

It's been twenty years since Cass Wakefield returned from the Civil War to his hometown in Mississippi, but he is still haunted by battlefield memories. Now, one afternoon in 1885, he is presented with a chance to literally retrace his steps from the past and face the truth behind the events that led to the loss of so many friends and comrades.

The opportunity arrives in the form of Cass's childhood friend Alison, a dying woman who urges Cass to accompany her on a trip to Franklin, Tennessee, to recover the bodies of her father and brother. As they make their way north over the battlefields, they are joined by two of Cass's former brothers-in-arms, and his memories reemerge with overwhelming vividness. Before long the group has assembled on the haunted ground of Franklin, where past and present - the legacy of the war and the narrow hope of redemption - will draw each of them toward a painful confrontation.

Moving between harrowing scenes of battle and the novel's present-day quest, Howard Bahr re-creates this era with devastating authority, proving himself once again to be the preeminent contemporary novelist of the Civil War.

-FantasticFiction

A beautifully written portrayal of the price that war extracts.  A powerful novel well deserving of five stars*****.

-Mona

Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars

Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars by Robert V. Remini

For 16 years Andrew Jackson fought and led fighting in multiple Indian Wars in every one of the states now called the deep south, and Tennessee.  And he learned and would never unlearn that the only way the white and red man or woman would ever survive was fully separate.

His concern was never for the white person; he knew that the United States, barring another European war after the war with England in 1812, would grow such a population that the Indians of the east would be decimated by or amalgamated into the white culture. And he feared the latter was the most likely.

Robert Remini describes in highly documented and highly personable and conversational style why the US, for the most part, and Jackson, each wanted the same thing, though often for very different reasons.

It seems unfair, but I am going to give you the last words of this book which are the author's take on the probable result if the awful, horrible, and inhumane "Removal Act", which took as estimated 50,000 Indians, many of them Cherokee on their now famous "Trail of Tears" had not occured at all.

"He saved the Five Civilized Nations (Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek) from probable extinction."

There is no way to disagree with this statement without reading Remini's book.  I've read it, and for much of the last year Mona and I have traveled on parts of the several 'Trails of Tears', for there was not only one. We have visited Paynes Fort, Alabama and now Blythe's Ferry, Tennessee, the two gathering places that the US Army forced the last of the Cherokee to, and we have seen homes and sites where some of these Indians once lived.

Do i agree with Remini's words?  I can neither agree nor disagree. The 'what if's' of history are hard enough on historic battlefields, let alone in the halls of Congress and the Supreme Court, which is where these awful trails really began.

But I can say this, if you believe the end does justify the means, then perhaps you will find yourself agreeing with Jackson and the vast majority of Americans of the first half of the 20th century.

But then, these are some of the same Americans who said "Secede from the Union! Damn the United States!" or in response, "Trample those southern devils into the ground, and all their plantations too."

As the Civil War raged for it's four years one old plains, now reservation,  Indian was heard to say, "Why did we ever try to defeat these people? They have enough warriors to kill each other by the tens of thousands and still keep us imprisoned here. The Great Spirit has turned his face from us."

This book is REAL history, told in a way that the non-historian may understand and come away knowing something every human should know.  Whether you agree with Robert remini or not.

-*****
KEN

Dinner at the Homesick

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

Pearl Tull is the matriarchal head of the Tull family since being abandoned by her husband Beck 35 years ago. She was left to bring up their three children.

-FantasticFiction

Now grown, they have gathered together again-with anger, with hope, and with a beautiful, harsh and somewhat heartbreaking story to tell....  I rate this one with four stars****.

-MONA

The Drowning Season

The Drowning Season by Alice Hoffman

Here is the brilliant story of Esther the White, a Russian emigre who chooses to live cut off from normal human experience. And only by calling upon all the healing powers of love can the members of Esther's family make peace with themselves and each other.

-FantasticFiction

All of the books by Alice Hoffman that I have read so far have tended to be fascinating in their own way, but lean toward a dark side.  Although well written, this one is no exception.  I rate it with three stars***.

-MONA

Unto the Sons

Unto the Sons by Gay Talese

At long last, Gay Talese, one of America's greatest living authors, employs his prodigious storytelling gifts to tell the saga of his own family's emigration to America from Italy in the years preceding World War II. Ultimately it is the story of all immigrant families and the hope and sacrifice that took them from the familiarity of the old world into the mysteries and challenges of the new.

-Amazon books

A very readable history of Italy and Italian emigration to the US told with many personal family stories.  I rate this with four stars****.

-MONA

Born on a Mountaintop

Born on a Mountaintop by Bob Thompson

Called an exploration of the boundary between fact and fiction surrounding America's most iconic hero; a shrewd and heartfelt account of the author's yearlong journey through the thickets of Crockett lore; a splendid job of evoking the life, true and fanciful, of Davy, DAVID, Crockett; Highly personal and witty; written by a born storyteller...  I would agree with all of the above.

Thompson has taken 175 years of tales, tall or otherwise, historical facts and fictions, and the essence of the 'King Of The Wild Frontier' himself, as he has come to understand him, and written an easy and fun to read, modern take on each of the many hard fought over explanations for the life, deeds, and death, of Mr. Crockett, bear hunter, husband and father, wanderer and congressman from Tennessee.

I can't recommend this book enough for anyone who, like me, has caught a bit of the DC craze still in the air from Walter Elias Disney's genius production of 'Davy Crockett' in three segments of his 1954 'Disneyland' TV show, which he turned into an almost 3 hour long wide screen movie and several prequels that later aired on the Sunday night Disney show.

To any Boomer Generation kids out there: Did you have a Disney Davy Crockett coon skin cap, tent, rifle, bow and arrow, canteen, record, records, more records, etc, etc, etc when you were a girl or boy in the 1950's?

See my pics on Facebook!

-*****-
-KEN

A Letter of Mary

A Letter of Mary by Laurie R. King

August, 1923. The quiet in the Holmes household in Sussex is shaken when Dorothy Ruskin, an amateur archaeologist from the Holy Land, appears with an exquisite inlaid box containing a scrap of ancient writing. Miss Ruskin soon dies in a traffic accident that Holmes and Mary prove was murder. But what was the motivation? Was it the little inlaid box holding the manuscript? Or the woman's involvement in the volatile politics of the Holy Land? Or could it have been the manuscript itself - a letter seemingly written by Mary Magdalene that contains a biblical bombshell. Beautifully written and steeped in authentic period detail, A Letter of Mary is a fascinating and intelligent read.

-FntasticFiction

This third book in King's Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series keeps you guessing and wondering.... I rate it with four stars****.

-MONA

The Beach House

The Beach House by Mary Alice Monroe

Known for her moving characters and emotional honesty, Mary Alice Monroe brings readers a beautifully rendered story that explores the fragile yet enduring bond between mothers and daughters.

Caretta Rutledge thought she'd left her Southern roots and troubled family far behind. But an unusual request from her mother -- coming just as her own life is spinning out of control -- has Cara heading back to the scenic Lowcountry of her childhood summers. Before long, the rhythms of the island open her heart in wonderful ways as she repairs the family beach house, becomes a bona fide "turtle lady" and renews old acquaintances long thought lost. But it is in reconnecting with her mother that she will learn life's most precious lessons -- true love involves sacrifice, family is forever and the mistakes of the past can be forgiven.

-FantasticFiction

Although somewhat predictable, Mary Alice Monroe's story of the bond between mother and daughter that is recreated after 20 years of separation is full of pain and never-ending love.  And once again, the magic of the Lowcountry draws you in and wraps it's arms of healing  around you so that you never want to leave.  This book is well deserving of my five star rating*****.

-Mona

PrairyErth

PrairyErth- William Least Heat-Moon

To capture the essence of a place; more than its history, its demography, or even its ‘feel’, you must immerse yourself in it.  You must become the place itself so that you are IT, feeling what IT feels, being what IT is. You must become one of ITs people. And all of these goals, every one, is doomed to fail.  For no matter how long you live in that place, walk its roads, be among its people you are never able to be IT, or THEM. 

‘Walk a mile in his moccasins’ we think Indians once said, and you can only then know his pain or joy.  William Least Heat Moon has done more than walk where other moccasins have trod than any other I know.  And I believe he would be the first to say, ‘Its impossible.”  But he, and I, must try.

I began to mentally prepare, indeed, be called to and for this journey Mona and I are on, by Moons first book, Blue Highways.  I read his Quoz not long before we purchased FROG.  Our first name for our coach was Quo, of the latin ‘Where?’ which I took from the title Quoz, which means a strange, indefinable something. And in my mind Frog is still Quo. Where next?

I just finished reading the subject of this review and I am no closer to knowing how to become the place and people we meet than he was at the end of all of his books.  What I do have, and he obviously has, is the desire to try to learn, to attempt to know, what it meant to be fully and truly in a place once, or be in that ‘other’ place now, which others inhabit.

PrairyErth - by William Least Heat-Moon

PrairyErth, an old concept word that means more than the words in correct modern English than those two words could ever mean, is over 700 pages of being, living, experiencing one county in the center of rolling hill plains Kansas.  Chase County.  One of the most ignored of the most mundane counties of all the so-called mundane state, yet absolutely chock full of history, drama, violence, love, passion and every human emotion… just like every other county in every other one of the American fifty states.  Chase County, Kansas, is each of us, but very much itself.

I started reading it too late; just before we left the Colorado plains.  And today we are on the eastern edge of Arkansas preparing to move on east into Tennessee. But there is nothing I have read that does not prepare me to see the next county, meet the next person, attempt to become IT, or THEM, all over again.

Moon has walked thousands of miles in others shoes so he could write of their journeys. For some known but to God reason, I am called to do the same. 

If you are similarly called, you will learn at least better how to, and you will simply love the way he instructs you, in any of William’s books.  But this one takes you deeper, more fully into IT than anything he or another I have read. Read it to laugh, tear up, and wonder ‘why?’. Read it to learn.  But mostly read it for the sheer pleasure of the walk.

Privileged to share moccasins with the best of them…

*****-Ken

We Shall Not Sleep: 1918

We Shall Not Sleep: 1918 by Anne Perry

October 1918. The war is in its closing stages. Joseph and Matthew are desperate to solve the conspiracy, because they know their arch-enemy will find a way to be involved in the war settlement - to Britain's disadvantage.

Trying to save his skin, the Peacemaker's cousin turns himself in, agreeing to reveal the identity of the mastermind. However, just as he arrives at Joseph's field hospital, hidden among other German defectors, one of the nurses is brutally raped. Of course, everyone wants to believe it's one of the German prisoners, and no one can leave the hospital until the truth is found. Joseph finally obtains the last pieces of information he needs about the master plot. The man is the German counterpart to the British leader of the conspiracy. Joseph, Judith, and Mason bundle him into an ambulance and drive for all their worth through France, trying to get him to London to alert the Prime Minister to the plot. After a hair-raising journey, they burst into Lloyd George's office and expose the Peacemaker at last. Then silence falls: the guns have stopped. It's the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

-FantasticFiction

In this, the fifth book in Anne Perry's WW I series, through all the twists and turns of the plot and all the sub-plots, the long awaited conclusion is finally reached.  Filled throughout with suspense and surprises, Perry has created a masterwork well deserving of five stars*****.

-MONA

At Some Disputed Barricade: 1917

At Some Disputed Barricade: 1917 by Anne Perry

It's July 1917, and as the sun sets over No-man's-land so Joseph Reavley's heart sinks with it. As chaplain he must keep up the men's morale, but as rumours of mutiny grow stronger he is losing any chance of getting through to them. After the death of an officer, twelve soldiers are arrested, and it falls to Joseph to uncover the truth about their involvement. Joseph's brother Matthew, of the S.I.S, is also in pursuit of the truth, whilst struggling to come to terms with his part in the Peacemaker's death. Approached by a Junior Cabinet Minister who is being blackmailed, Matthew learns of a plot to destroy the only men who can bring about lasting peace. As he embarks on an investigation Matthew knows his own life is in danger but thinks it a small price to pay to secure the future of millions of people.

-FantasticFiction

Anne Perry outdoes herself in this fourth novel of her WW I series.  This one rates five stars*****.

-MONA

Angels in the Gloom: 1916

Angels in the Gloom: 1916 by Anne Perry

This third book of Anne Perry's World War I series begins in the trenches, where in March of 1916, Protestant chaplain Joseph Reavley is wounded. With his shrapnel-peppered broken arm and a shattered leg, he is sent back to Cambridge for surgery and a hospital stay. During his recuperation period at the Reavley family home in Cambridgeshire, he is thrust into investigating a murder case that places national security in peril.

Meanwhile, the Germans are advancing along the Somme - and England is losing many ships to German U-boats...

-FantasticFiction

And the saga continues....just who IS the traitor and who is the Peacemaker????  Anne Perry produces yet another episode in the WW I series.  I rate this one with four stars as well****.

-MONA