The Secret Book Society

The Secret Book Society,  written by Madeline Martin was a delightful read. 

This was a very entertaining novel. Labeled as historical fiction the reader gets a feel for the plight of women living in London England in the early 1800.  They were considered property and totally controlled by their fathers and then by their husbands. 

This is the story of how a small group of women defied their husbands and found ways to read the novels they so enjoyed.  They developed the strength and fortitude to stand up to their husbands and demand better treatment.  

In this story the husbands are controlling and cruel.  They ban books from their wives in fear that they will gather too much knowledge and possibly become independent or develop hysteria, becoming unhinged.  

We meet this three women in unhappy marriages, Mrs Eleanor Clarke, who is married to Cecil.  She came from a life as a daughter of noble birth whose family had fallen on hard times. He is a merchant looking to show his new wealth, marries her and makes a gratuitous  display of her and the gemstones and dresses he can buy.  She is a prisoner to her husband.  Mrs. Rose Wharton, is an American who fell in love with her husband, Theodore.  Now Theodore's brother who was the earl, but is dying from cancer and Theodore will soon step into that role. Rose has to learn how to behave properly for the society she has married into. Theodore is hard on Rose because he fears his brother.  Then there is Lady Lavinia Cavendish, a young woman, not yet married, whose father is worried she feels things too deeply, and that books only increase her exaggerated emotions. Her father takes away her books because he is afraid she is not marriage material and will end up in the lunatic asylum.

This is what happens to many wives who do not obey their husbands. On the word of an angry, spiteful husband they can be sent off to the asylum for life. 

Lady Duxbury who is a widow, but suffered through two terrible marriages, invites the women for tea, they start the secret book group.  They become friends and their bond helps them build resolve to change their circumstances.  They bolster each other as they decide to take control of their lives and their marriages.

You will enjoy spending a few afternoons reading this book with a cup of tea and biscuits.

The Curse of the Blumenthals

The Curse of the Blumenthals is the story of how a family faced a tragedy and tried to rise from the ashes. Author Phyllis Karas, employed her skills as a journalist to research her family history to expose the facts behind the family lore and try to bring justice to her ancestors.

How many times have you sat around the the holiday table with your many cousins, aunts and uncles and rehashed the family stories that have been passed down through the generations. Each person may remember different parts of the story and over the years the facts get muddled and no one is sure about the actual details. 

Karas comes from a large family that came to America from the Riga which was once part of the former Tsarist Russian empire in the 1890s. The Blumenthal family are Lithuanian Jews.  They settled in Providence Rhode Island.  The family starts with the marriage of Phillip and Rose who had eleven children. Three of the children did not survive childhood, but the eight remaining children lived with their parents on Overhill Road with their parents, as a dedicated Orthodox Jewish family. Those four girls and four boys married and brought into the world eighteen off spring.  This large family all lived in the same neighborhood and celebrated life together.

They also experienced tragedy together when in in 1935 six members of the family were tragically killed in what has come to be known as “The Accident".  Six members of the extended family were visiting a relative in a Hartford Connecticut hospital.  On the drive home their car was hit head on by a drunk driver.  All six passengers were killed in the crash.

It was a devastating blow to the family.  The accident was widely covered in the Providence Journal. Karas suggests that this event changed the family in many ways that may not have even been realized at that moment.

Six months after “The Accident” Ronald Blumenthal was born. He was the only child of brother Barney and his wife Edythe, from Boston. This small family left the larger family unit who stayed on Overhill Road in Providence. Barney opened a liquor store and there were rumors that maybe he was involved with bootleggers. 

Could this selling of liquor during the Prohibition have led to the next family tragedy in the Blumenthal family?  Karas attempts to find the links of the two family events.

Now a growing family, Ronnie, (Ronald) grows up with a bevy of eighteen first cousins. Though two of them died in “The Accident” six months before his birth.  The cousins are a close knit group of kids growing up.  Ronnie is a wild child, not a good student, he loved fast cars, pretty girls and drinking alcohol. In 1954, when he was nineteen years old, Ronnie was committed to Charlestown Prison to begin a life sentence for murder.  The family would refer to this tragedy as “The Incident”.  

Karas spends the rest of the book researching the murder of Ora Schonarth, who was strangled and stabbed in her Brookline, Massachusetts apartment. She tries to find a link between cousin Ronnie and the seamstress.  She tries to find a reason for Ronnie’s behavior and a connection back to the first family event that caused so much heart ache for the Blumenthal clan.

The story itself is fascinating and keeps the reader turning the page. Th facts are slim.  Beyond newspaper articles, police reports and interviews from the original timeframe there is not much new information that Karas can gather. There is no smoking gun she reveals.  She interviews those of her fifteen first cousins that she can reach out to. She interviews Ronnie’s ex wife and his son. But in the end, there is only a loose tie between “The Accident" and “The Incident” .  

So this is mostly just a memoir of people who came to America to build a family filled with love and find the America dream.  They found that even a large, loving close-knit family faces tragedy, flaws and heartache.  But I think in the end the lesson is that having a large close family will help you through those difficult times.