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 Kill Club: Blog Tour and Review

I'd read a description of The Kill Club by Wendy Heard before the publisher offered  me the opportunity to join the blog tour for this highly immersive crime thriller.  I'm not someone who enjoys books that are terrifying.  Yet an organization devoted to providing justice for victims of abuse is right up my alley even though a journey down that alley could haunt my nights.  Was I ready for this?  I wasn't entirely certain when I downloaded my review copy from Net Galley.

                            

All doubts vanished when I was introduced to the protagonist, Jasmine Benavides.  I'd read that Wendy Heard is the co-host of  a podcast called Unlikeable Female Characters. If the author intended Jasmine to be such a character, I have to say that she failed completely.  I absolutely loved Jasmine from the start--long before I really got to know her.  I had to discover more about this brave survivor of abuse who will not rest until her thirteen year old brother is also freed from the domination of their nightmarish foster mother, Carol Coleman.

Some might say that I'm perpetrating a spoiler when I reveal that Jasmine is a lesbian.  Other reviewers have already outed Jasmine, and I feel that mentioning her sexuality is helping the book reach its audience--the readers who need to see bold lesbian action heroes in their thrillers.

 Jasmine is also very human.  She makes mistakes.  A few of them have had terrible consequences, and she doesn't forgive herself  for them. Admittedly, Jasmine has an overly active conscience.  So she also blames herself for  disasters that weren't her fault.  Yes, Jasmine is an angst queen.   I actually admire angsty characters.  Protagonists who take responsibility for their actions are far more worthy of respect than those who self-righteously refuse to accept that they've ever harmed anyone.  People in the second category are usually villains.  Carol Coleman would be an example of that type of individual.

There were surprising twists in The Kill Club, but there were also a few that I found predictable.  Even though I sometimes knew what was going to happen next, I was still totally involved in the plot.   I was so invested in Jasmine as a character that I felt that I had become part of her world.  I would find myself thinking about where the narrative was headed when I was doing other things. This doesn't happen to me very often.

I did have one problem.  I felt that a police detective was portrayed  in a pivotal scene as being less competent with a gun than I would expect of an experienced officer.  That character's credibility as a detective was compromised. This wasn't a minor glitch, and it's the reason why I can't give The Kill Club five stars on Goodreads.

Despite the above criticism, the suspense was first rate and the characterization of Jasmine as a powerful yet vulnerable protagonist is what really makes The Kill Club by Wendy Heard well worth reading.

                             

                                                      Wendy Heard
                                              photo courtesy of MIRA

Dead Man's Jazz--Speakeasy Musicians Are Murdered in YA Mystery

Dead Man's Jazz is the second in a mystery series by Connie B. Dowell.  I reviewed The Poison in All of Us, the first book in the series, here. I was looking forward to finding out how the small town Georgia teen investigators, Emmie and Dessa, would deal with crimes in the city of Savannah in 1919.  So I pre-ordered it on Amazon and have finally gotten a chance to review it.
                         
                             

My main impetus for reading The Poison In All of Us was that the case dealt with suffragettes.   There are suffragettes in this novel as well.  I would have to say that this is necessarily so because Emmie's mother, Irene, is a dedicated suffragette.  She decided to make the trip to Savannah in order to network with a Savannah suffragette leader.  Emmie and Dessa came along because they were on summer vacation from school.

I feel that it's important to note that Dead Man's Jazz takes place during the Red Summer of 1919.  This  was exactly a hundred years ago, and involved a nationwide intensification of white supremacist violence in the United States.  I found a relatively recent article about it from Teen Vogue here.  Connie Dowell also discusses it in her Author's Note.  Racism is a theme in  Dead Man's Jazz, but it isn't the primary focus of the novel.  Dowell says in the Author's Note that she didn't feel that she was the right person to write a book about Red Summer, but neither could she ignore the issue. Both Dessa and Irene take affirmative roles in trying to connect with and later assist the local African American Women's Club.  (Though I do think it likely that it would have been called the Colored Women's Club in 1919. "Serial killer" was another example of anachronistic vocabulary in this novel.  See Origin of the Term "Serial Killer" from Psychology Today.) The attitude of the white Savannah suffragette leader toward African American women seemed to imply that she firmly believed in segregation.

The case focused more on the band at a Savannah speakeasy.  It was mentioned that though there was no national prohibition of alcohol at that point, Georgia was a dry state where alcohol was illegal.   There were characters involved in bootlegging.

Another prominent issue was one involving the personal lives of a couple of the characters.  In reviewing The Poison in All of Us, Dessa's sexual identity was a spoiler, but Dowell outs Dessa in the description for this book.  So I guess it's appropriate for me to say in this review that there's lots of focus on lesbian relationship issues.  Theresa, Dessa's former lover, is the catalyst for Dessa and Emmie to be involved in this case since Theresa is a musician in the speakeasy's band.  I found Theresa very sympathetic.  Her inner strength made her my favorite character in this book.

It did seem to me that Dessa was far more dramatically prominent in Dead Man's Jazz than Emmie.  She was motivated by Theresa's involvement to take a more active role in the case and was going through a period of transition.  Emmie seemed to me to be a relatively marginal character.  I also found her less interesting than Theresa and Dessa, though I also very much liked Emmie's mother, Irene. There's a free prequel short story available to subscribers to Connie Dowell's newsletter in which Irene and her brother Charlie investigated a case when they were teens.  It's called "Unwound" and there's a download link for it after the Author's Note.   I think there's potential for an entire series about Irene and Charlie, but there's also potential for books focusing primarily on Dessa.

I was hoping for more focus on jazz  in Dead Man's Jazz since so many of the characters were musicians, but music was relegated to the background.   There were aspects of this book that I liked very much, but there were also parts of the narrative that I didn't find engaging. Yet I would definitely like to read more about some of these characters. 

      

The World Unseen: Rebels Against Apartheid in the South African Indian Community

I have been interested in reading novels about apartheid South Africa ever since I read K.P. Kollenborn’s  How The Water Falls earlier this year.   I reviewed it here .  After that I read one book after another in Malla Nunn’s apartheid South Africa mystery series about the mixed race detective Emmanuel Cooper.  See the Goodreads Page on the Emmanuel Cooper Series.

This recent reading history is why I noticed The World Unseen by Shamim Sarif.  In addition to taking place in apartheid South Africa, it deals with the Indian community in South Africa.  I’ve been wanting to find out more about Indians in South Africa ever since I read that Gandhi had lived there and was radicalized by the experience.  See this page on Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha on the American National Public Radio’s website.

                                             

                                              

The World Unseen deals primarily with two Indian families in South Africa which have non-conformist members that refuse to co-operate with apartheid.  Amina has an African business partner with whom she runs a café.    Amina is also a lesbian.  This is never stated explicitly.  There is a reference to a past relationship with a woman, but there is no explicit lesbian sexuality in this book.  So the cover might be considered misleading in the view of readers who are looking for an explicit lesbian romance.   Amina becomes attracted to Miriam.  Miriam’s husband had a sister who married an English descended South African.  They left South Africa in order to get married and reside in Paris.  The trouble starts when this rebellious couple decide to come home for a visit.  The actions that characters in this novel take in response to this visit reveals them for who they really are, and changes relationships. 

I liked the Indian perspective and the characters who wanted to be unconventional in such a repressive environment.  I only wished that the book could have been a bit longer.  There are possibilities for the future, but no indication of whether they will really develop.  There is a movie based on this novel.  Here is the official website .  Since I haven't seen the movie, I don't know which version I would prefer. Although this is still one of the best books that I’ve read in 2014, I would have liked it even better if there were more of a resolution.