March 29 2020

The Clergyman's Wife (2019)
By Molly Greeley

This delightful story takes off right from where Jane  Austen's Pride and Prejudice left off, but offering a look into Charlotte Lucas Collins's life.  The story starts about 3 years into Charlotte and Vicar William's marriage.  She is the mother of Louisa, a ~9-month-old and just learning to walk, but we learn that Charlotte lost her first child, a son who was apparently born prematurely.  Charlotte has accepted her lot, choosing marriage to a somewhat pompous, emotionless preacher whom she chooses not for love but as the lesser of two evils to be preferred to spinsterhood and being a burden to her family.  She enjoys working in her garden, dotes on her daughter, but also enjoys quiet moments when Martha, Louisa's young nanny, is caring for Louisa.

Charlotte has just started to come out of her shell and making efforts to visit the older folk in her husband's church, bringing treats from her garden and mostly just providing company and treating them to Louisa's innocent charms.  In her walks, Charlotte meets the son of one of these parishioners and they come to enjoy their random chats.   Young Mr Travis is a tenant farmer on the estate of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, William's patroness.  Charlotte comes to appreciate that, although she is the daughter of a gentleman, she could have been happy with someone who works the land.  He is neither wealthy nor well-educated, but Mr Travis is kind, warm, and intuitive.

I've read other novels that purport to continue the stories in Pride and Prejudice, but none so faithful to Austen as this one.  The language and manners were completely faithful to the original.  At one point, Charlotte finds a handkerchief embroidered by William's mother, and asks about her and William's father.  His response prompts a rare and vulnerable look into her husband's childhood, and I thought the story could have taken a different turn.  Either way, it was a very satisfying story.

March 26 2020

The Dutch House (2019)
By Ann Patchett

Author Ann Patchett's Bel Canto is a novel about a group of diplomats and an opera star celebrating a birthday, when they are suddenly taken hostage by terrorists in an unnamed South American country.  Expecting something similar, I was surprised by The Dutch House, a story on a much more intimate scale, of a sister and brother, left as orphans when their father dies.  Their mother had deserted the family when Danny was an infant, and he grows up spending his spare time at the work sites, and learning the ropes of the construction industry, at the various real estate projects his father owns. But when Mr Conroy dies, the siblings' stepmother throws them out of their house, the beautiful "Dutch House" in a Philadelphia suburb, insisting she did not sign on to raise them.  Maeve is already in college, and looks out for her teenage brother Danny (the narrator). Left only with a bequest to cover his education, Maeve sends Danny to a posh boarding school.  He goes on to college at Columbia, then NYU med school always keeping in close touch with Maeve, visiting her in her small house in another Philadelphia suburb where she works as an accountant for a Bird's Eye frozen foods type business.  Their visits almost always include a stop across the street from the Dutch House, just to remember and wonder.

Danny marries Celeste, an elementary school teacher from another Phila suburb, and they settle in NYC, where Danny throws away his med school education to follow his calling a a really estate developer, like his dad, taking a first chance on a property in an area he thinks has potential to gentrify.  They have a daughter and son, he becomes quite successful, though Celeste sometimes resents the strong pull she feels Maeve exerts over Danny.  By chance, Danny runs into "Fluffy", a former nanny, whom Danny and Celeste hire as their own nanny, and Fluffy puts him in touch with Sandy and Jocelyn, former maid and cook at the Dutch House, who were like parents to Danny and Celeste.  Soon, another former DH resident comes back into their lives, but Danny is none too pleased about it.

While it may not sound like a page-turner plot, I loved this story about siblings and could really empathize with all of the characters.  The story involves many instances where a character's decision affected his/her or their family's future, and it would be a good book group choice.

March 23 2020

Where the Crawdads Sing (2019)

By Delia Owens

Biologist Owens' book was the best selling novel of 2019, and I was not disappointed in this unique story - a coming-of-age tale about a woman growing up one in the North Carolina marshes, but also a book about marsh biology, along with a mystery.

While still a little girl growing up in a dysfunctional and poor family, Kya (Katherine) is deserted, one by one, by her mother, siblings, and father.  She spends only one day in school, where she is mocked and friendless, where neither her fellow students nor teachers see the hurt or the potential in the lonely, poor "marsh girl".  She grows up, fiercely independent, a true survivor, but could not have survived alone without the help of a friendly shopkeeper and his wife, and a boy who shares her love of the plants and creatures that inhabit North Carolina's swampy marsh.

But underlying this tender story is the mysterious death of a young man at the fire tower in the marsh.  Chase grew up in a parallel world to Kya: he was the same age, but the son of a well-to-do couple and a well-known football star in the local high school. Owens begins the novel with the discovery of Chase's body then tells the story of Kya's growing-up years, and intersects her story with Chase's over the years.

I read this novel as an audiobook while driving, and it was one of those rare books that made me miss a turn or two because I was so absorbed in the story.

March 21 2020

An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (2007)
By Heidi Ardizzone

I visited the JP Morgan Library on Park Ave on a recent visit to Manhattan and was intrigued to learn of the library's first manager, Belle da Costa Greene, who helped build the collection, a very successful collector in a man's world.  Her achievements are all the more remarkable considering her lack of a college education and her African American heritage.  Belle's light-skinned father was the first African-American graduate of Harvard, but, rather than embrace his achievements, Belle Marion Greener distanced herself from him and chose to pass for white, modifying her name and claiming she inherited her olive skin from a Portuguese ancestor.

The Morgan Library, JP's office

Belle was raised mostly in Washington DC in a well-education family.  Her father was a professor at Howard University and her mother a music teacher.  belle got a position at the Princeton Library, where she learned on the job from librarian Junius Morgan.  When his uncle JP Morgan was looking for someone to manage his growing collection of rare books, Junius recommended Belle for the job.  Though initially shaking in her boots when she interviewed for the position in 1905, Belle got the job, developed a strong working relationship with JP, managed to build a world-renowned collection, and became a highly respected collector herself during the 40 years Belle managed the collection.  Her contacts read like a who's who of the literary world: collector Bernard Berenson (with whom Belle carried on a years-long affair), Mary Smith Berenson (Bernard's wife, daughter of writer Hannah Whitall Smith, and an art critic herself), Sarah Bernhardt, Margaret Stillwell, Lawrence Wroth, Edith Wharton, etc.  After  JP died in 1913, his son Jack retained Belle and they opened the library to the public in 1924.   Belle maintained a very active social life, while also supporting her mother and, at various times her siblings, including her sister's son Bobbie, for whom Belle became legal guardian.  Belle was known not just for her librarian's skills, including keeping meticulous records of each purchase (even those that predated her tenure), but also for her acerbic wit and esoteric social circles.  This is a long (nearly 600 pp with notes) biography, much of it taken exclusively from Bernard Berenson's correspondence, and would have been sharper and more riveting had 50-100 pages of the Belle-Bernard story been edited out.  Still Belle was indeed a mysterious and fascinating lady, a scholar and socialite ahead of her time.

March 18 2020

Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux as Told to John G Neihardt (1932)
By John G Neihardt

Black Elk (1863-1950) is a medicine man and warrior who has seen dramatic changes over his long life.  Born free in the Dakota territory, he witnesses his people's efforts to stem the tide of white settlements, from the Fetterman Fight (1866) through Little Bighorn (1876) to the massacre at Wounded Knee (1890).  As a boy he hunts buffalo and rides horses, living a free lifestyle in harmony with nature.  At 9 years of age, he falls ill, and sees a vision of 6 "grandfathers" who tell him what will happen to his people.  His tribe considers Black Elk to be a visionary, and one who has power to heal illness.  As a young adult, he joins Buffalo Bill Cody on a tour of eastern US cities and several European capitols.  When he returns home, however, it is to a reservation.  His people are made to live in "square box houses" (especially confining, as they see life as a hoop, or circle) and have to surrender their weapons.  Black Elk feels that he was given much knowledge in his vision as a young man, but laments that he could not help his people keep their freedom.

Having recently reread James Warren's God, War and Providence in which the English colonists kill eastern Indians (Wampanoags, Narragansetts,  and others) and plunder their resources and land, it is tragic to see the trend continue for more than two centuries.