Wrongfully Infused

 Living in the make believe world with Gemma and her best friend, Cassie, running a tea shop in in her tiny Oxfordshire village in England you can forget all the crazy stuff happening here in the real world.  

Gemma returns to her tea shop, Little Stables to find the clientele has been lured away by a new Tea Bar on the other side of town.  Gemma and her best friend are going to eat at the new location to see what the fuss is all about and of course find their best customers, the 4 elderly ladies, the Old Biddies, there.  Gemma has dinner with her parents and explains the problem to them and her mother gives her some good advice to improve her own tea shop to attract the people back to her cafe. 

Gemma is busy baking the best scones in the Cotswolds and trying to keep her relationship moving forward with her rediscovered first love, Devlin, who is up for a promotion to Detective Inspector.   Her mother is expanding her interests and helping people coming to live in England from other countries learn the customs and language.  She is also learning their customs and enjoying some of the new ways of eating and living.

Then her mother introduces her to her newest friend, who is the mother of the woman with the offending Tea Bar.  There has to be a crime committed and of course Gemma is one of the accused.  Of course if she is a suspect in the death she must defend herself.  Thus begins the trail of characters Gemma interviews to find out who could have really murdered the Tea Bar owner, to clear her own name.  Also because Gemma realizes even when her boyfriend, Devlin asks her to stay out the case because it could affect his upcoming promotion, Gemma cannot stop hunting for the killer.

Another fun entertaining light mystery.  So cozy that I spent the day on the couch through a snow storm reading this novel.  Also it takes you away form the news and the CoVid pandemic we are living through.  There is not one mention of illness or masks.  Here you can forget that those are a part of our world today.

Disclosure: A review copy of this book was sent to me by the author. All of the above opinions are my own.    

The Vixen

 I was looking forward to reading this book, but  in the end I was a little disappointed.  Though again after the conversation about it with my book discussion group, I felt it was worth the read.

An interesting novel ...but disappointing.  I was hoping for more of a story about the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.  This is a story  of a young man who is trying to establish himself int he world of publishing.  He is very naive and is easily taken advantage of in the hard boiled world of publishing at a time when there were still three martini lunches, men dominated the business and it was an all boys network.  

Simon the narrator of this book and the new man at the publishing company that wants to publish a bodice ripper about Ethel Rosenberg, has to figure out whether to stand up for his beliefs or follow the  direction of his boss and defile the good name of Ethel Rosenberg.  

Francine Prose grew up knowing that her mother went to  high school with Ethel Rosenberg, so her protagonist, Simon has a similar connection to the Rosenbergs.  

He is haunted for the entire novel by Ethel's last words, sent to her lawyer, " Ethel said in her letter, you will see that our name will be kept bright and unsullied by lies. "

So when Simon is offered a job  at a publishing company he jumps at the job.  Then he is asked to copyedit a novel loosely about Ethel that sullies her name.  Simon is torn between keeping his job  and acting like the men he meets on the job or being loyal to what he images his mother would want and also to Ethel.

This is a coming of age story. Simon is a learning how the world works and how women can use their sexuality to take advantage of you .  How men use power to get what they want.  

All in all an interesting novel but not a favorite of mine.  Much of  the plot seems very far fetched and a bit unrealistic.  

The Lincoln Highway

Amor Towles is being praised for this new novel.  So unlike his previous novels, this plot takes us back in US history to the 1950s, a simpler time, but still a time of heartache for so many young men coming of age. 

This novel explores the lives of three young men who come from very different walks of life and different places in the United States.  We get to know each of the characters telling their story as they travel from Nebraska to New York.  They and others share what has led each of them to end up in Salina, a work farm for troubled boys.   

Emmett, who grew up in Nebraska, was at Salina for involuntary manslaughter after a boy was killed in a fight.  His father has died after years of being an unsuccessful farmer and loosing his property to the bank.  As Emmett and his younger brother Billy are about to leave and start a new life, Wooly, son of an aristocrat and Duchess, son  of a vaudevillian , two boys who were at Salina with Emmett show up unexpectedly and detour Emmett and Billy to New York.  Wooly and Duchess are are on the run, having snuck out of Salina before their time is up.  

This is the story of misadventures and coming of age, self discovery and learning along the way to be a better person in order to succeed.

The writing style in this novel is perfection.  The descriptions and the character development are very well done. Maybe it is the perfect writing... but I was on edge the entire time I was reading this novel.  I had a pit in my stomach, worried that something terrible would happen to Emmett and Billy, who I really wanted to succeed from the very beginning.  So along the way,  there were many times where I thought I would just put the book down and not continue to make myself so uncomfortable.  But in the end the writing and story kept me engaged and I had to read all the way to the end.

The Woman in the Library

 Sulari Gentill  has hit it out of the park again.  I love her Rowland Sinclair mystery series. Then Gentill wowed her readers with a stand alone, After She Wrote Him.  This mystery within a mystery was fabulous, so I was excited to read this one.  Gentill's mind works in very creative ways.

In this new mystery novel, The Woman in The Library, we meet Hannah, an Australian novelist, who is writing a novel about Winifred, a novelist writing her next book as a writing scholarship winner in Boston.  Hannah creates the other main characters in this mystery as the people Winifred, or Freddy as she is known by her friends, that Freddie meets in the Boston public library.  At first they are just characters for her book, Handsome Man, Heroic Chin, and Freud Girl, who she sees sitting at a table in the reading room.  When they hear a woman scream, they all become involved in conversation that leads to friendship.  Then they are Cain, Whit and Marigold and try to solve the mystery of the woman who screamed turning up dead in the BPL.

As Hannah develops the story plot with Freddie trying to solve the mystery, we are also privy to Hannah's correspondence with a fan, Leo, who is reading the chapters along with us and commenting on the story details.  He starts to get more insistent and graphic as the story builds, giving Hannah tips about the differences between Australian and American terminology.  Leo also gives her ideas for ways to murder and pictures of murders that he seems to find even before the police find the crime scene.   Leo also gives her advice about including CoVid references and masking in the mystery novel.  This is an interesting point , that the novel will be dated if you do or do not put references in about masks and the pandemic with the characters. It has been interesting reading novels written in the last two years and how they refer to the Pandemic.  

I really like the way Gentill uses the Leo character to add the masks and pandemic without affecting her main storyline.  This novel had a slow start and took about half way through to really become connected to the characters and the plot so that I wanted to finish reading and find out what happened.

Our Woman in Moscow

 Beatriz Willams has written another great novel, Our Woman in Moscow.  This is a quiet spy thriller that takes place during the end of WWII and at the beginning of the Cold War with Russia.  

Two sisters, fraternal twins are orphaned at a young age, brings them close and the major supporter of each other.  They are physically very different, Ruth is blond and statuesque , working for a fashion modeling company, and Iris petite, with a dark complexion and on a trip to Rome after finishing school she meets the man she will marry.  Iris embraces the life of a mother and housewife.

Sasha Digby, the man Iris falls in love with and marries may not be the man he seems, and as the novel progresses he goes through many changes in behavior.  This is the heyday of the infamous Cambridge Spy Ring. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two of these five highly-placed British intelligence officers who spy for the Soviets, are characters in the book and associates of Iris’ husband.  This was an interesting part of history that I enjoyed learning about.

Sasha is an American diplomat who traveling when he meets and marries Iris.  She has three children, who were a difficult delivery.and is about to deliver her fourth child.  She writes to her estranged sister asking her to come help. It has been 12 years since the sisters parted bitterly in Rome.  In the meantime Iris has defected to Russia with her family at her husband's insistence.

Through a series of complicated moves Ruth travels from New York to the Soviet Union with the assistance of C. Sumner Fox, an FBI agent.  Told in alternating chapters by Ruth and Iris we learn the past and the present lives of all the characters.  Then there are a few chapters dedicated to Lyudmila Ivanova, a ruthless, calculating and heartless member of the KGB.

This is a story of trust, resilience and love.  

A Boy is Not a Ghost

 A Boy is Not a Ghost is an incredible story.  This book is written by Edeet Ravel, who also wrote A Boy is Not a Bird.  Both of these stories are about a young boy caught up in life during a war.  He has grown up  in the Russian city, Czernowitz. After his father is arrested he and his mother are rounded up with other people from the city and sent to Siberia. 

Natt Silver is twelve years old as he rides with his mother and their neighbors in the cattle car of a train headed for Siberia.  He describes in perfect detail the sounds, smells and crowded conditions on the train as they slowly travel across Russia for two long months. The food is scarce and the weather gets colder as they travel north. His father is in a Gulag or prison under extreme conditions. He and his mother do not know where they are going end up or what life will be like there.

We hear Natt's voice as he writes letters to his friend Max, who its seems has been lucky to escape with his family to Basel, Switzerland. Natt knows the Soviet police are reading people's mail, so he writes letters to Max in secret code, never really knowing if Max is receiving his mail.

It is incredible how easily a person can call attention to themselves by the authorities and how dangerous that can be.  Natt gives us an example of this when he tells this story about waiting with his mother for a train and reading a newspaper, "A police guard sees me smiling and marches over to our bench. 'You two! Follow me! At once.'  His voice makes my blood run cold.  It's the tone guards use just before they arrest you. He thinks I was laughing at Stalin, or at an article about how great the Soviet Union is."  Natt and his mother follow the guard and are interviewed.  Giving the wrong answer could land them in jail or worse.

Natt and his mother are shuffled from place to place trying to find a place to live and work. When his mother gets a prized inside job, where someone is working inside during the freezing cold weather, and Natt is  going to school, Natt thinks things might not be so bad.  Then his mother is falsely arrested for stealing potatoes and taken to prison.  Natt is really on his own. He must use all his cleverness and bravery to find a family to live with. He makes friends and works hard.  He will need his friends and some luck to help him survive as he struggles to find his way back to his mother and tries to reunite his family.   

Natt learns that he needs to have two sides to himself, to be an outside Natt and a secret Natt. He is going to practice not calling attention to himself, so that when he has to leave town no one will notice he is gone.  He will keep a part of himself hidden from everyone. Natt says the life he is living in Siberia can make a person feel like a ghost.

This book is so beautifully written.  It is appropriate for middle school readers and it is such an incredibly poignant and touching story that it is also an important story for adult readers.  Ravel has written this novel based on the true story of her fifth grade teacher, Nahum  Halpern, who shared stories of his childhood with his students. 

This story covers the horrific way Jewish people were treated during the Second World War.  There was the threat of Hitler and the Final Solution, which was the genocide of the Jewish people and there was Stalin who, though his campaign posters depicted him as kind man, was also ruthless and targeted the Jews and other minorities. Natt Silver shows readers how to survive the many challenges during these two major historical events.

 

An Unlikely Spy

 Rebecca Starford has written a different kind of spy novel in An Unlikely Spy.  

In this novel, the protagonist is a young girl looking for acceptance and trying to leave the family and lifestyle she finds embarrassing and become apart of the world she aspires to.  Evelyn Varley grows up in a middle class working English family.  She wins a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school and sets off to change her life.  She does not share her personal life with the girls at school.  Then she befriends Sally and her cousin Julie who are from the kind of world she wishes to inhabit.  

Sally and Julie become her life long friends.  Sally's father Hugh has well placed friends and finds Evelyn a job with MI5 as the war in Europe is beginning.  Evelyn becomes a spy and is working for the War office infiltrating the group known as The Lion Society, “. . . a group of fascist sympathizers, mostly renegades from the Establishment.  Their plans and ideals test Evelyn and her loyalties.

In the end can a spy really have friends or is everything just an illusion ?  What does a person give up or find a challenge to their real personal beliefs ?  This is an interesting book with some twists and turns .  Though it is not really what this reader would call a spy thriller, more of a novel of friendship, loyalties, family acceptance and love.

The Perfume Thief

 The Perfume Thief is written by Timothy Schaffert.  

I felt this was an unusual novel about Clementine, an 72 year old American ex pat with a perchance for dressing as a gentleman.  Different than any other historical novel of this time period I have read before.

Looking back on her life as a con artist and lesbian, she is trying to lead a quiet life of a legitimate perfumer during the early days of Germany's take over of Paris.  When she gets caught up once again in intrigue as a collaborator to Oskar Voss, a Francophile Nazi bureaucrat, who is trying to win the favor of Hitler with a special perfume scent that he thinks will disguise the smell of noxious gas.

Caught up in her final con as she tries to work for the resistance and help save Paris from the Nazis, while trying to find a secret perfume diary, she thinks was originally stolen from her.  She is 

In order to complete this she finally has to tell the story of her life, that has led her from Manhattan to Marrakech, to Costa Rica and finally to the bordellos of Paris. This is a look at the life of someone hiding 

 Clementine is a brilliant character invented as an example of the queer history that was lost. This is a story created from history , but  the imagination of the author to tell the story of those who needed to hide their sexual preference and their true feelings of love to stay alive.   Once she’s allowed herself to love others, she deceives one last time for those she loves. 

I found this novel hard to follow the way its flashbacks and current storyline were interspersed.  I also found it slow reading and not as compelling as I normally enjoy,