Blog Tour: Radar Girls, A Novel of Women in the Air Raid Defense Team During WWII

  I received an advance review copy of Radar Girls by Sara Ackerman from the publisher via Net Galley when I was selected for the blog tour.  I prioritized the book and practically inhaled Radar Girls more than a week ahead of my post date.  I found it suspenseful, and the inner strength of Daisy, the female protagonist, was very inspiring.

                                     

 Many readers might wonder how a novel about WWII could provide any suspense because we all know the results, but we don't know what happens to Daisy and the other characters in Radar Girls.  The characters put the drama in historical fiction by involving us with their lives.

According to the Author's Note, the main source for Radar Girls was a non-fiction book called Shuffleboard Pilots: The History of the Women's Air Raid Defense in Hawai'i 1941-1945 by Candace A. Chenoweth and A. Kam Napier.  There were numerous incidents from Shuffleboard Pilots included in the novel. 

Before Daisy became a member of the Women's Air Raid Defense team, she was a horse trainer following in the footsteps of her deceased father. There was a sub-plot about a valuable missing horse. Moon was a high spirited thoroughbred whose sire had been a race horse.  Daisy felt responsible because Moon went missing when she took him riding without permission.  

There is also a romance which was a will they/won't they subplot involving Daisy and a man who sets the standard for bravery and integrity very high. This American hero would stand out in any novel.  My respect for him only increased over the course of the narrative.

 

I consider Radar Girls an engaging novel that taught me about an aspect of women's participation in WWII that I knew nothing about.

 

                                   

                                     SARA ACKERMAN

                                               

 

 

Photo by Tracey Wright-Corvo

                      

 

 

 

The Chelsea Girls: 1950's Women in the Entertainment Industry vs. the McCarthy Era

I have wanted to read books by the author Fiona Davis, but didn't have the time due to all my review commitments. Then publicist Becky O'Dell representing the publisher of Davis' novel, The Chelsea Girls, approached me about reviewing it.  She asked me to post my review around  December 8th when their new paperback edition would be published.  I promised that the review would appear within the vicinity of that date on this blog, Flying High Reviews.  

My co-blogger Tara reviewed The Dollhouse by Fiona Davis and called it "fantabulous" here when this blog was known as Book Babe. I hoped to follow her example. So I accepted a digital copy of The Chelsea Girls from Dutton Books via Net Galley. 

Below is the cover of the new edition of  The Chelsea Girls. I feel that it authentically depicts the women who are shown in this novel.  They were living in the 1950's but were doing their best to avoid being confined by that decade's expectations of women.

                          

The Chelsea Girls has a particular focus on the blacklisting of individuals as  alleged Communists during the McCarthy Era.  I had read non-fiction about this issue as a teenager such as The Strange Case of  Alger Hiss by William Allen Jowitt.  I knew about the Hollywood Ten, a group of Hollywood writers who were accused of being Communists and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

I have never read any books about women accused of being Communists during this period, but I am now aware that playwright Lillian Hellman had actually been a member of the Communist Party and had been blacklisted during the McCarthy Era. Davis says in her Author's Note that the experience of The Chelsea Girls protagonist Hazel Ripley with HUAC was based on Lillian Hellman's.

Hazel was an actress and a playwright, but hadn't met with much success when she was blacklisted for attending an anti-fascist rally during WWII.  Like many of the accused in the McCarthy Era, there had been no real basis for Hazel being labeled a Communist.  

Playwright Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible (1953)  about women being falsely accused of witchcraft in the Salem witch trials as an indirect representation of the red-baiting that was going on during the McCarthy Era.

I was inspired by Hazel's courage when she faced HUAC.  I also liked the fact that she was vindicated in the end by the respect of her community.  History shows us that before the end of the 1950's America had rejected both Communism and McCarthyism.   The Chelsea Girls makes me feel optimistic about America's emergence from its current political crisis.

 

                                 

                                             

 

The Night Portrait: Two Women in the History of a Da Vinci Painting

I found out about The Night Portrait  by novelist and art historian Laura Morelli, when her assistant asked me to do a Q&A with the author on both of her 2020 historical fiction releases.  

The first was The Giant, a novel of Michelangelo's David which I reviewed on Shomeret: Masked Reviewer here.  That review is so far my most viewed post of 2020 on that other blog.

 I was gifted with a PDF of The Night Portrait well in advance of publication, but was unable to read it because I couldn't adjust the miniscule font on my Kindle e-reader.  So I had to wait until my pre-ordered copy arrived from Amazon.  I dived into The Night Portrait after I finished and reviewed the title I was reading for a blog tour with a post that had to appear on September 20th.  This is why it took me longer to get to this dual period novel dealing with the creation of Leonardo Da Vinci's Lady With An Ermine and its later history during World War II.

                                         

The first of the two women protagonists to appear in the narrative is fictional  museum art conservator Edith Becker who is introduced to us during 1939 in Munich.  The museum staff are poring over the records Edith had created about the great paintings by Old Masters in private hands in Poland. The Nazis were stealing art from every nation in Europe where they had a presence.  The Chairman of the Board at the museum where Edith worked was justifying German theft of these paintings with a conspiracy theory about Americans seizing them for Jewish museums in the United States. I have visited Jewish museums.  They only contain works by Jewish artists.  There's no possibility that you would ever have found a portrait by Leonardo Da Vinci hanging on the wall in a Jewish museum. 

I sincerely doubt that Edith took the Jewish Museum conspiracy seriously.  She was much more concerned about her life being hijacked.  She was being sent to Poland in order to assist with the largest art theft in history. Edith felt that these paintings  "had been cast like dice into a game that had spiraled out of her control."  This is a direct quote from Laura Morelli's narration.

It seemed to me that the Nazis were taking advantage of Edith's love of  art.  If a painting was given into her hands, she had to preserve it.  She would clean it and ameliorate any damage that had occurred during its travel from the home where it had been kept by its owner. Edith was portrayed as a consummate professional who was inwardly horrified to be conscripted into participation in a criminal enterprise.  Yet she wasn't helpless either.  Could Edith find a way to disrupt the Nazi plan to own all of Europe's great art? 

 The second female protagonist in The Night Portrait  is chronologically first because she is the woman that Leonardo Da Vinci painted when Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, commissioned what became known as  Lady With An Ermine.  She was Cecilia Gallerani, the sixteen year old mistress of Ludovico Sforza.  So history remembers Cecilia as a perpetual sixteen year old.  Here is a public domain image of the painting from Wikipedia.

 

                                Lady With An Ermine by Leonardo Da Vinci

Cecilia might not be regarded as a feminist in the modern sense of the word, but she knew what kind of life would make her happy, and it wasn't becoming a nun as her family intended.  She wanted to be surrounded by the beautiful things that you would find in a ducal court, and to become a celebrated singer.  Ludovico Sforza fell in love with her, and she got everything she wanted.   Cecilia had beauty. She was also a musician and a gifted singer. The Night Portrait also tells us what happened to Cecilia after her relationship with Ludovico Sforza was over.  I will tell you only that Cecilia Gallerani's life was not a story of  victimhood.   Cecilia had a strong will, and she was able to charm people.

There were also significant male characters including Leonardo Da Vinci and participants in the Monuments Men.  The Monuments Men were officially known as the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Program.  I am linking to its Wikipedia article. They were a military organization run by the Allies of World War II to protect European art and return stolen art.  Stolen art was returned to the family that owned it when possible, or to the government of the place of origin.

I was most interested in the character of Edith.  Her inner conflict between her passion for preserving art, and her opposition to Nazi art theft gave her a fascinating level of complexity.  I was reminded of Hanna, the protagonist in The Woman Who Heard Color by Kelly Jones.  Hanna was an art dealer who facilitated Nazi art theft.  The main difference between Edith and Hanna is that it seemed to me that Hanna was a voluntary collaborator with the Nazis.  See my Goodreads review  of The Woman Who Heard Color. I admired Edith, but I thoroughly despised Hanna.

I was also interested in finding out more about the life of Da Vinci.  I was surprised by Laura Morelli's portrayal of Da Vinci's attitude toward the role of art in his life.  I knew that Da Vinci had a great many interests other than art.  In The Night Portrait Da Vinci was shown to have priorities that appeared to be far more important to him than being an artist.

The bibliography that Laura Morelli has included shows the depth of her research, but it also provided me with a number of really awesome candidates for further reading on the topics covered in The Night Portrait.  Among the volumes that I intend to obtain soon,  Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation and Identity by Paola Tinagli might be of particular interest to the readers of this blog.

The Night Portrait combines accuracy with narrative power.   Those who love books with moving characters and a plot with impact will want to read it for those aspects along with the compelling history and themes.  Laura Morelli seems to have built to a crescendo with her novels of 2020.   I anticipate her future fiction with enthusiasm.

The Talking Drum: Blog Tour and Review

  Book Summary

It is 1971. The fictional city of Bellport, Massachusetts, is in decline with an urban redevelopment project on the horizon expected to transform this dying factory town into a thriving economic center. This planned transformation has a profound effect on the residents who live in Bellport as their own personal transformations take place.

Sydney Stallworth steps away from her fellowship and law studies at an elite university to support husband Malachi’s dream of opening a business in the heart of the black community of his hometown, Bellport.

For Omar Bassari, an immigrant from Senegal, Bellport is where he will establish his drumming career and the launching pad from which he will spread African culture across the world, while trying to hold onto his marriage.

Della Tolliver has built a fragile sanctuary in Bellport for herself, boyfriend Kwamé Rodriguez, and daughter Jasmine, a troubled child prone to nightmares and outbursts.

Tensions rise as the demolition date moves closer, plans for gentrification are laid out, and the pace of suspicious fires picks up. The residents find themselves at odds with a political system manipulating their lives and question the future of their relationships.

                            

                                        REVIEW 

Publicist Laura Marie asked me to join this blog tour for The Talking Drum, the debut novel of Lisa Braxton.  I accepted the free review copy that she supplied because I was interested in the issues involving race, class, immigration and urban culture conflict that Braxton raises.

The summary may lead readers to believe that female protagonist Sydney Stallworth is a character who solely plays a support role to others.  It's true that she's supportive, but I thought she genuinely believed in her husband's business.  The potential of The Talking Drum to become a center for African American culture was important to her.  Yet she also  pursued her own goals as well by becoming a local journalist.  If it weren't for her dedication in following the protests of the African immigrants in Petite Africa against the "urban redevelopment" that would shatter their lives, the truth about the fires in that neighborhood might never have been discovered.  I admired Sydney.   Because she cared so deeply, I felt that she inspired everyone around her to follow their own dreams.

Della Tolliver  is an example of someone who clearly benefited from the presence of Sydney in her life, though Della would never have believed it at the outset.  When we first meet Della, she's a very unhappy woman.  I didn't like her very much at that point, but she improves her life over the course of the narrative with Sydney's help.

Just as in real life, there is no permanent victory against the forces of "urban re-development" in The Talking Drum.  Let us hope that there will always be those like Lisa Braxton who will lift up the voices of the marginalized communities that could be impacted before it's too late.

                                   Lisa Braxton

 

Lisa Braxton Bio 

Lisa Braxton is an Emmy-nominated former television journalist, an essayist, short story writer, and novelist. She is a fellow of the Kimbilio Fiction Writers Program and was a finalist in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. She is the former president of the Boston Chapter of the Women’s National Book Association. Her stories and essays have been published in anthologies, magazines, and literary journals including Vermont Literary Review, Black Lives Have Always Mattered, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Northwestern University Magazine and The Book of Hope. She received Honorable Mention in Writer’s Digest magazine’s 84th and 86th annual writing contests in the inspirational essay category and was a finalist for the “Still I Rise” grant for Black Women Writers. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in mass media from Hampton University, her Master of Science degree in journalism from Northwestern University, and her Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Southern New Hampshire University. She lives in the Boston, Massachusetts area. 

Talking Drum Buy Links

Amazon.com

Indiebound

Barnes and Noble

The Mazarinette and the Musketeer-- Lesbian Swordswomen in Historical Adventure Novelette

This is a review of a book I read at the end of February and didn't have a chance to review in that short month.

So I came to a point when I really wanted ESCAPISM.  The news was terrifying, and the last book I read was so dispiriting that I didn't want to promote it by putting my review on a blog.  Fortunately, I had recently downloaded a free book from the author's website that was just the thing I needed. It was The Mazarinette and the Musketeer by Heather Rose Jones.  Jones says on her website that she wrote it in response to  a challenge to create a musketeer story containing only female characters.  I just love sword wielding women.

                               

As a fan of Alexandre Dumas' musketeer novels, I already figured out that the Mazarinette must be one of the seven actual nieces of a real historical personage, the powerful minister of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, Cardinal Mazarin.  See their Wikipedia article  for further information.   Jones says in her historical notes that the Mazarinettes really did wear the uniforms of their uncle's musketeers. The Mazarinette in this novelette was Hortense Mancini.  I have copied a public domain painting of Hortense from her own Wikipedia article below.

                            

                              
There were other real women among the characters in The Mazarinette and the Musketeer.  It does seem likely that Anne Lennard, Countess of Sussex, did have a lesbian relationship with Hortense Mancini as portrayed in Jones' tale.  Julie d'Aubigny, who appears in The Mazarinette and the Musketeer as a teenager, was the subject of a number of fictional accounts about her during her lifetime.  It's difficult to know what's true and what isn't.   She was supposed to have traveled with her fencing master doing sword fighting exhibitions.  Finally,  Aphra Behn  was the first woman to have earned her living writing plays.  She also really was a spy for King Charles II of England as shown by Jones in this novelette.  She's one of my favorite historical personages and I find it impossible to pass up a book that contains her as a character.

The Mazarinette and the Musketeer was as entertaining as I expected with lots of sword fights and women disguised as men. I thought that the female characters were all delightful. This is my idea of a fun read.

The Girl Puzzle: A Very Humanized Nellie Bly

When the Goodreads group Historical Fictionistas decided to allow authors that are active members of the group to nominate their own novels for the March Book of the Month, it had been some time since they had last allowed author members to do this.  The normal rule of the group is that authors can't nominate their own books.  This is a common rule among Goodreads groups.

 I was delighted when Kate Braithwaite nominated her Nellie Bly novel, The Girl Puzzle.  I quickly seconded the nomination, and it won.  I had already purchased it on Amazon a while back, but hadn't had an opportunity to get to it. It's nice to be able to read more historical fiction with strong woman protagonists during Women's History Month.  This means I can  provide more reviews than usual for Flying High Reviews.

                              

I had actually read a novel focusing on patients at the asylum where journalist Nellie Bly did a ten day undercover investigation pretending to have amnesia in 1887.  That book was A Different Kind of Angel by Paulette Mahurin.  It was the best historical fiction that I read in 2018 and I reviewed it here.

The asylum was located on what was then called Blackwell's Island  which is in New York's East River.  It was re-named Roosevelt Island in 1973.  If you're interested in more information about the island's history, see its Wikipedia article here.

In comparing the two books I've read dealing with this late 19th century asylum, I feel that Mahurin's novel was very different in its orientation toward the patients. The fictional protagonist in A Different Kind of Angel was a refugee who was committed to that institution for not being able to speak English.  She clearly didn't belong there.  She encountered other patients who were also unjustly consigned to the asylum.  This protagonist  brought definitions of "sanity" into question. In The Girl Puzzle, Nellie Bly thought that a couple of patients didn't belong there, but the behavior of one patient and the history of the other caused Nellie to doubt her judgment.  So it was unclear whether any of these women were committed without justification.  It seemed to me that Braithwaite was coming down on the side of  compassionate Dr. Ingram who said it was "a complicated issue".  This positively portrayed asylum staff member commented to Nellie that patients could appear sane when they weren't.

It's important for me to add that all the rest of the asylum staff other than Dr. Ingram were portrayed by Braithwaite as either extremely abusive, or  arrogant and uncaring. In her author's note called "Fact and Fiction in The Girl Puzzle" she reveals that the staff  shown in her novel are all real individuals given their actual names, and that their behavior toward the patients is based on fact.  There was a grand jury investigation of this institution after the Nellie Bly exposé , and this too is in the public record.

Another aspect of The Girl Puzzle that makes it dis-similar to A Different Kind of Angel is that it's dual period.  There is a narrator in Braithwaite's book who was Nellie Bly's secretary toward the end of her life.  This narrative displays the elderly Nellie Bly as having poor judgment.   Nellie Bly's secretary admired her employer for her courage and past achievements, but she acknowledged that this feminist heroine had flaws. In the 1887 narrative, Nellie Bly herself experienced moments of angst in which she wondered if she had taken too great a risk when she accepted her undercover assignment.

 I would consider Braithwaite's approach to her protagonist realistic.  She shows us a Nellie  Bly who is strong when the situation calls for it, but is also very human.  This makes The Girl Puzzle vastly superior to a Nellie Bly mystery that I DNFed because she never doubted herself , and kept on repeating the same errors.  Mystery fans call such characters TSTL (Too Stupid To Live).  That's why I recommend this novel by Braithwaite to readers who want believable female protagonists.







                             

The Tubman Command: "I Got An Insurrection To Plan." Harriet Tubman

When I read She Came to Slay, Erica Armstrong Dunbar's biography of Harriet Tubman for Black History Month, I learned about Tubman's great military achievement, the Combahee River Raid (1863).  There is a non-fiction book about it listed in Dunbar's bibliography, but I was unable to obtain it through libraries, and purchasing it was beyond my current means.  So when I was asked to list books that I'm reading for Women's History Month on a Goodreads group called Read Women, I selected a historical novel about the Combahee River Raid, The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobbs, as one of them.

I am particularly pleased to be reviewing a book about Harriet Tubman today because March 10 is the day assigned to Tubman in The Little Book of Feminist Saints by Julia Pierpont.

I read both history and historical fiction.  I feel that each of them have their strengths.  I was looking forward to getting a window into the mind of Harriet Tubman, and feeling the impact of her leadership role in a Civil War military operation through the pages of  The Tubman Command.

                        

Harriet Tubman was clearly a born leader who had a talent for planning and was a gifted speaker.  She was also determined to achieve her goals, had tremendous courage and believed strongly that the visions she received were messages from God. Elizabeth Cobbs portrays her as a character with these traits, but also shows us her vulnerable side as a woman who wanted a relationship with a man.  Her Tubman seemed wary of trusting men on an intimate level.  Based on what I read about her in She Came To Slay, I think she had good reason to be untrusting.

A romantic possibility for Tubman is a sub-plot in The Tubman Command, but it isn't a major focus of the narrative. So I wouldn't call this a romance.  It's mainly about a historic military operation that resulted in the rescue of 750 slaves.

The quote from Harriet Tubman in the title of this review is a fictional one from this novel.  Harriet Tubman was illiterate.  So she herself wrote no accounts of her life.  

The Combahee River Raid was made possible because of Harriet Tubman's status as the leader of a team of Black scouts for the Union Army.  The Tubman Command shows how Tubman persuaded the officers involved in decision making to support her plan.  I felt that there was a great deal of suspense involved in its implementation even though I already knew the result.

In the midst of  all this drama, there was also comic relief in the form of an unexpectedly funny scene involving the antics of Tubman's cat, who was appropriately named Trouble. I was charmed by this scene and was glad it was there.

The fictional elements of The Tubman Command didn't cause me to lose confidence in Cobbs' accuracy.  There is a back cover blurb praising this book from Edda L. Fields-Black, an African American academic who has been working on a scholarly book about the Combahee River Raid that is forthcoming.

I found The Tubman Command moving, insightful and well-written.  I thought it was also original because I had never read a novel dealing with this significant event. This is my first five star read of 2020.  It will certainly be a candidate for my top ten of the year.





                     

Silhouette of a Sparrow: YA Lesbian Historical Novel About Following Dreams

I don't know what led me to Silhouette of a Sparrow, the only YA novel by children's fiction writer, Molly Beth Griffin. It is a book that I needed to read.  So whatever the source was, I'm grateful to have discovered it.

                        

I must have been drawn to this book by the cover which is quite extraordinary resembling some prehistorical image of a bird woman rooted in nature.  Then I must have read the description which identified it as taking place in the Roaring 1920's, a favorite period of mine which began exactly a hundred years ago.  The fact that Garnet Richardson, the 16 year old female protagonist, loves birds and wants to become an ornithologist made the novel seem unusual and intriguing.  This aspect of the book also was appealing to me as someone who is concerned about the non-human species with which we share our planet.

It belongs on this blog because there are strong women who assist Garnet in recognizing that she has the right to claim a future for herself.

The most significant of these women is 18 year old Isabella, the courageous dance hall performer labeled as a "harlot".  Isabella knew that she had to dance, and that if she had to break society's rules to do that, so be it.

Other women who helped to change the way Garnet thought about her life were Miss Maple, her summer employer, and her unconventional Aunt Rachel who never actually appears in the narrative.  Both of them served as examples that caused Garnet to realize that a woman could choose not to marry.

This is also a lesbian romance, but not one with a traditional HEA ending. I felt that the relationship between Garnet and Isabella had emotional intensity despite its brevity.  Would they ever come back together?  It's a possibility.  The future of these fictional characters is unknown unless Molly Beth Griffin chooses to revisit their lives in another book. Without that sequel, Garnet and Isabella remain frozen for us at the point where the author left them behind in the summer of 1926.

The advantage of never advancing this narrative beyond 1926 is that Garnet can retain the optimism for which the Roaring Twenties are known in order to inspire other readers of Silhouette of a Sparrow as I have been. 

The Girls With No Names: Historical Novel About Wayward Girls

The Girls With No Names by Serena Burdick is the first book I've read that was published in 2020.  It's also my first digital review copy from Net Galley of the year.   I noticed a similarity to Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate which I liked very much and reviewed here. I was also drawn to Burdick's novel because it takes place in Inwood, a Manhattan neighborhood where I lived for four years in the late 20th century (though I should point out that the book takes place in the early 20th century.) Yet it was the reference to suffragettes  in the Goodreads description and the reference to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the publisher's publicity which caused me to decide that I needed to review it for this blog.  It sounded like this novel could be a locus for intersecting feminist concerns.   So I accepted the publisher's request.  My honest reactions to The Girls With No Names can be found in this review.

                           

Although the main protagonists are teens, I wouldn't describe The Girls With No Names as a YA novel.  This book deals with the girls' coming of age under dire circumstances which involve mature themes that may be disturbing to some readers.

I found thirteen year old Effie remarkably brave when she comes to believe that she needs to rescue her sister from an institution with a rather horrific reputation called the House of Mercy.

I was also impressed with a girl that Effie encounters at the House of Mercy known as Mable.  Mable's tragic experiences  before her arrival at this home for wayward girls are portrayed movingly in flashback chapters.

 The Girls With No Names turned out not to have a primary focus on women's suffrage. Still,  the book does include a real suffragette who is a minor character playing a pivotal role.  Her name is Inez Milholland.  I've linked her Wikipedia article because I think readers might want to know more about this woman activist. Milholland's Wikipedia article includes a public domain photo of her which I am reproducing below:

                          

 There are Romanii characters in The Girls With No Names.  Burdick tells us in her Afterword that they are called gypsies in the first person narratives taking place in 1913 in order to be consistent with usage in that period.  She is aware that Romani consider "gypsy" offensive, but Burdick isn't trying to offend. She just wants to be historically accurate. I was fascinated to learn from the Afterword that Burdick had discovered from her research that Romani really had camped in the Inwood area during this period.

 I mostly liked the way the Romani were shown, but I did think that one element in their portrayal was anachronistic.  Effie got a Tarot reading at their camp which she regarded as significant.  The interpretation of the cards that appeared in the reading was similar to current day Neo Pagan Tarot readers.  So I considered it doubtful that an early 20th century Romani would approach the cards that way.

Despite the critical comment in the above paragraph,  I identified with both Effie and Mable and considered The Girls With No Names a powerful work of fiction.                 

The Light Over London: A WWII Novel of Romance, Secrets and Women's Autonomy

When a publicist pitches a book to me, the content of that pitch matters very much.   I want it to pique my interest, but I also want it to accurately reflect the book.  I should be made aware of what kind of book I'll be reading.  I try to do that in my blog review titles, so that the book will find its audience.

It seems to me that advance publicity for The Light Over London by Julia Kelly is trying to appeal to the sort of reader who is interested in the combat aspect of WWII.  There is an emphasis on the female historical protagonist joining an anti-aircraft unit and becoming a Gunner Girl.  The sort of reader who is interested in reading about Gunner Girls will expect that a high percentage of the book will contain action scenes or will at least take place in a military context. I requested this book for review on the strength of that publicity and received a copy from the publisher via Net Galley.

                           

 

As I read Light Over London, I realized that I had to adjust my expectations.  It was a good book, just not the one that I thought it would be.   There was a combat sequence. There were also descriptions of training.  Julia Kelly captured the bonding between the women in the anti-aircraft unit very well. Yet I'd estimate that the Gunner Girl experience represented about 10% of the book.

I think that the other 90% was what the novel really focused on.   It was about the struggle of women to define themselves as individuals and live out their dreams.   It was also about how family, or the men in their lives supported or hindered them.   There were a number of  female characters in The Light Over London who were strong women.  They all went on to live the lives they chose for themselves.   There were no  relationships that involved a conventional romance genre HEA, but I think all these truly autonomous women found their own form of happiness.

There were a couple of major secrets.  One was a devastating scandal that infested the heart of a romantic relationship.   The other was a character building mistake that a family member made when she was young.   Both women moved on, and didn't allow themselves to be crushed by circumstances. I have to say that I was able to predict the nature of these secrets before they were revealed based on what I knew about the people involved.  So there were no surprises for me, but it was satisfying that I understood the characters so well.

I was glad to learn about the existence of Gunner Girls, and was delighted to find a novel like The Light Over London where all the major female characters were an inspiration. 

    
                        

Mistress of the Ritz--An Unlikely World War II French Resistance Figure

Although I have never previously read any books by the author of  Mistress of the Ritz, Melanie Benjamin, I do appreciate that her historical novels have focused on real women. All historical fiction requires research on the period, but a credible novel that deals with actual historical people needs additional research to establish what is known about those individuals.  So I salute writers who take this more difficult path.

I received a digital review copy of Mistress of the Ritz from publicist Ariel McCarter.  I decided to review this book because it deals with the French Resistance during World War II.

                         

Protagonist Blanche Auzello seemed somewhat superficial to me as the novel opened.   She experiences growth as a result of meeting Lily, an eccentric political radical.  Blanche's transformation into a woman who wanted meaning in her life and felt compassion for others less fortunate, increased my interest in Mistress of the Ritz exponentially.

Then there is a scene in which Blanche commits what looks like a very foolish and self-destructive mistake.  A reviewer on Goodreads reacted very negatively to this moment in the plot and called Blanche "too stupid to live".  I had to evaluate this turning point differently when I found out from the Author's Note that Melanie Benjamin didn't imagine a disruptive incident at this point in Blanche's life.  Given the real historical consequences, the actual Blanche Auzello must have done something very similar.   Benjamin implies in a subsequent scene that Blanche had subconscious reasons for her actions.  I find this very likely.  There can be complex underlying motives for self-destructive behavior.   

A later event that seemed too coincidental to be believable was also revealed as something that actually happened in the Author's Note.  Blanche was lucky.   In fact, luck seemed to have played a major role throughout the real Blanche Auzello's life.

My favorite character in Mistress of the Ritz was Lily.  Lily is in the historical record, but almost nothing is known about her.  So she is very nearly a fictional character.  I found Lily's invented personality quite appealing, and would have read an entire novel about her.

I did feel ambivalent about this book mainly because of Blanche's marriage to Claude.  What bothered me most was Claude's need to control Blanche.  I think that his domineering attitude gave the ending of the book, which also came from real life, a certain tragic inevitability.

A Savage Kultur: The Fictional Story of a Painting Seized by the Nazis

A Savage Kultur by Monique Roy is the second book that I am reviewing by this author.  I participated in the blog tour for her novel Across Great Divides on this blog here back in 2015.  I  received a free review copy of A Savage Kultur from Monique Roy and this is my honest review.

                               

The last time a review on this blog dealt with a book on the theme of the Nazi looting of art it was Stolen Beauty by Laura Lico Albanese which I reviewed here.  That novel involved an actual famous legal suit brought by a descendant of the original owner to recover an iconic Gustav Klimt painting. 

The  painting at the center of A Savage Kultur, "The Lovers: The Poet's Garden IV" by Vincent Van Gogh isn't well-known and has an unknown fate. An image of Van Gogh's sketch of the painting is reproduced on the bottom section of the cover shown above. Yet all the characters in A Savage Kultur are fictional creations.  So Monique Roy has given us a speculative narrative about this missing work.

Contemporary protagonist Ava Goldberg experiences what might have been a favorite fantasy come true for an art history student like her when she inherits an art gallery from her grandfather.  Her love of art and her devotion to her family are the most believable aspects of her character.   Her determination to reclaim the Van Gogh that had been owned by her grandmother's family is admirable.  On the other hand,  I didn't find the romantic aspect of her life very credible, and thought that the book could have dispensed with it entirely.

My favorite character in this book was Ava's grandfather, Karl Engel, who was the protagonist of the historical chapters in this dual period novel.  I consider him the most fully realized character and I think that the entire plot really does revolve around him.  His courage in Nazi Germany preserves the life of the woman he loves.  His decisions in the 21st century motivate Ava and give her life a focus.

The issue of art forgery arises in this book through the perspective of a character who engages in forgery.  Mention is made of the sophisticated techniques he uses to fool the experts.

What most sets apart this novel about Nazis and art is that this one doesn't portray Nazism as a defunct ideology.  There are unnerving survivals of Nazi beliefs and attitudes alive among their 21st century descendants in A Savage Kultur.  I was reminded of a William Faulkner quote.  "The past is never dead.  It's not even past."  So the resolution wasn't nearly as triumphant as other books in this sub-genre.  Instead there is a dark undertone that could cause readers to wonder when other manifestations of the Third Reich might surface.  One might also wonder whether the entirely too sheltered descendants of Holocaust survivors like Ava will be capable of stopping them. 
                          

Wingmen--Blog Tour with Author Guest Post

I'd like to welcome Almond Jones, the author of Wingmen whose female protagonist is a woman pilot during World War II.

                                 

Here is what Almond Jones wants to tell you about her book:

                                  
                                  GUEST POST

The process of writing Wingmen began almost a decade ago. I lived in a city with too many people and not enough opportunity. Then the economy changed – the degree I’d earned,  (I was told I couldn’t do anything without it), was useless. When I realized I didn’t have to stay where I was and that life could be different, the concept for the novel was born. By that time I’d given up on writing as a career (this was one of many times I’ve given up on my gift and decided it was an unimportant skill). So, I took a trip. I traveled for about a year and wrote the stories I wanted to write. And the first story I wanted to write was about a woman who knows who she is no matter what. I had no intention of becoming a publisher or publishing the book. I hadn’t even planned on writing a book. I just wanted to write – for me. I wanted to write because I don’t’ come across many stories I relate to. So, Celeste was that story. 

After writing the first draft, I put it away for several years. I didn’t think about it much until I decided to write again. But I wanted to do so on my own terms. I didn’t want approval or need permission from anyone to be who I know I can be… just like Celeste. That is the significance of Celeste Bonalee, She is her own person even in the face of pain, grief, life, and death.

 

It is important for people to know what that looks like – both men and women. The “Me Too” movement is strong but Celeste has nothing to do with that. Or trending diversity. Or the real need for more female voices. She is who she is and her story is worth reading. Period.

                                  SYNOPSIS

 Celeste is anything but average. In fact, she's one of a kind – a highly skilled courier pilot with dreams of owning her own hangar. One last delivery is all she needs.  There's only one thing stopping her... World War II. When Celeste is shot down over Paris in 1940, it'll take more than she ever expected for Celeste and her dreams to survive in a world that is falling apart.

Can Celeste and her wingmen make it back home in one piece? Or will war consume her generation and its aspirations?

You can view the Wingmen  trailer here. Wingmen is available now on www.almondjones.com, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com.

 

GRAB YOUR FREE CHAPTER OF WINGMEN