A Childlit Connection To Oppenheimer?

I saw Oppenheimer Saturday night. Perhaps if I'd been in a theater and couldn't keep going onto my iPad to check out the historical figures in the movie and dwell on the unhappy women in Oppenheimer's life, I would have been able to follow it. 

Once the movie got to Los Alamos, I was reminded of The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages. It's a very well-regarded middle grade novel from 2006 about a girl going to Los Alamos to live with her father who is working there on the Manhattan Project. 

Were librarians all over the country doing Oppenheimer themed displays last year? I know it's probably not appropriate to do a library display linking books for middle grade students to an R-rated movie, but I can't be the only person who thought of it. Or maybe I can. 

Jane Steele--A Good Jane Eyre Variation

Interesting story: I decided I needed a new Kindle. While I was working out what to buy, a family member told me I could get a Kindle app for my iPad for free. For free! And she was right! And it works just like a Kindle, except better, because the covers are in color and I can see them all instead of
just lists of book titles, which was all I had on my very old Kindle.

A great deal of my life is on my iPad now.

But that's not the interesting part of the story. The interesting part is that I was able to transfer my nearly 200 volume Kindle library to my iPad with no problem. Except that the "read" categories didn't transfer. There were just all these book titles, some of which I didn't recognize, and some of which I couldn't tell if I'd read for one reason or another. So I've been dipping into some of these unfamiliar titles, and it was clear that I couldn't remember if I'd read some of them because I hadn't liked them and probably didn't finish them. So I didn't waste any time on those and filed them away under one of the beautiful new categories I've made.

But one book I didn't recall reading was Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye. Its publisher describes it as a "reimagining of Jane Eyre as a gutsy, heroic serial killer." Reader, that is right up my alley. I love reimaginings of Jane Eyre, the most famous being Rebecca. But I couldn't remember reading this particular one. So I start reading it, and I get through the childhood and school part, with no recollection, but then I come to something I do recall reading. So I thought, Well, I must have read this far. Then I read some more, and I get to another part that's familiar. 

I go on like that through the whole book. Which I did like a great deal. Presumably I liked it the first time I read it, too, though not enough to remember it.

What Is Jane Steele?

The original Jane Eyre is a Gothic novel, in which a young woman is in some kind of danger in a moody setting with a house having a significant part in the story. I think you could argue that the danger Jane is in is from losing her independence and having to play some role defined for her by society or within marriage. She struggles to live life on her terms. Jane Steele is more of a mystery/thriller, one in which the main character has read Jane Eyre and refers to it often. In the original Jane Eyre, Jane believes that she is not a good person, probably because she doesn't have an interest in conforming to social norms. In Jane Steele Jane has no doubt that she is not a traditionally good person.

Author Lyndsay Faye's website appears to have vanished. Earlier this year, she had a neat section on research she did on the clothes Jane Steele wears. I did notice her clothes while reading the book this second time. 

The ending of the book seemed to be a set up for one of those nineteenth century historical couples mystery series. Or maybe it is just a nod to another type of book, the way Jane Steele, itself, is a nod to Jane Eyre.

A Nineteenth Century Couples Mystery For YA

 I often have a reason for picking up the books I do, one that goes beyond, "Gee, that looks good." I chose Anatomy: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz, because it sounds similar to the various adult mystery series I've read that are set in the nineteenth century with a male and female lead who meet somehow, get involved with solving a mystery, one thing leads to another, and romance ensues. Also, not to leave anything to the imagination here, sex.

That pretty much is what happens with Anatomy, which involves an aristocratic young woman who wants to break out of her planned life and become a surgeon. In that era, the study of anatomy was becoming significant in the training of doctors. Bodies to study were few and far between, and the medical community supported grave robbers, known as resurrectionists. Sure enough, our heroine gets tangled up with one who provides her subjects for study.

This was a good book, very readable. I'm not a fan of the direction it took at the end, but that definitely is a just-me thing. Additionally, for those of us accustomed to reading these kinds of stories for the adult market, the romance/sex is very tame. To the point that I was left wondering what happened and just what kind of relationship did these two now have. I hope that this doesn't mean that I need no-doubt-about-it sex scenes. It may be more that I struggle to read between the lines.

Whenever I've read of resurrectionists, the stories have been set in Great Britain. Anatomy takes place in Scotland and inspired me to check out if something similar went on in the United States. Oh, my goodness. Did it ever.

Yeah, the nineteenth century American medical community didn't suffer from an abundance of ethics, at least as we would recognize it today. 

And racist? Oh, yes. Though I suppose doctors back then could have argued that they only seemed like racists, because, hey, these are the bodies we could get.

I am so turned off to medicine right now.    

Ironhead: When You'd Rather Go To War Than Stay In This Marriage One More Minute

I can recall reading novels, probably historical romances, about the Napoleonic Wars when I was a teenager. So you can see why I was attracted to a review of Ironhead: Or Once a Young Lady by Belgian writer Jean-Claude van Rijckeghem, with translation by Kristen Gehrman, which might be described as a historical anti-romance.

Eighteen-year-old Constance is a young woman who doesn't know her place in early nineteenth-century Belgian society, probably because there isn't one for her, since she has minimal interest in doing laundry and bearing children. Her father insists she marry a much older man who will then become his business partner and pay off his debts. Constance sticks out the marriage for four months. Then, recalling having run into what was clearly a lesbian couple in which one member was dressed as a man, she comes up with a plan to take the place of a local acquaintance who has been drafted into Napoleon's army. Living as a man among soldiers--that is most definitely Stance's place.

Constance's fourteen-year-old brother, Pier, does know his place in their society. He's a student in a boarding school, which will open possibilities for him. But his father can no longer pay his school fees. Money from Constance's husband was supposed to take care of that. So when Constance disappears, he takes off with a supposedly trustworthy guide to find her and bring her back.

The two siblings appear as point-of-view characters in different parts of the book. We're not talking alternating chapters here, but close to it. Because Pier is a more conventional character, his story thread isn't as interesting in the early part of the book, though he improves markedly. They both have journey/adventure story lines.

I think this is a unique book in today's American YA scene, where you find a lot of fantasy and contemporary romance with some contemporary mystery and thrillers thrown in. Historical fiction tends to be of a more accessible time, say late nineteenth, early twentieth century. Ironhead is a good book that requires a little of the reader to start, with a big payoff later, something I can't recall seeing much of in YA. 

An Incredible YA Historical Novel

I finished reading A Sitting in St. James by Rita Williams-Garcia a week or two ago. Williams-Garcia is the author of a number of books for young people, but the one I'm familiar with is One Crazy Summer, which I described as "fantastic." A Sitting in St. James and One Crazy Summer are very different, though. One Crazy Summer is middle grade historical fiction set in California in 1968. A Sitting in St. James is YA historical fiction set in the antebellum south with mature content and a sophisticated writing style that never lets the reader go. One Crazy Summer I recall including humor. A Sitting in St. James has some dry humor but at a couple of points while reading it early on I remember thinking, This is a horror story. Though it's the kind of horror that's real. 

As I said, A Sitting in St. James is YA, and it does involve three main YA characters, one the son of the owner of a down-at-the-heels plantation, one his enslaved, and acknowledged, half sister, and one the slave who serves the plantation's elderly matriarch. How they will live their lives, either within the family/plantation or by separating from it, is a classic YA situation. 

However, there are two adult characters in this book who have an impact on all around them, and they are hugely important. Sylvie, the elderly wife of the original plantation owner, is obsessed with her past in France, when she knew the royal family. Her son, Lucien, is pretty much a monster. And, yet, what an amazing character. A monsterish character, but...wow.

Some interesting points:

• No one is happy here, slave owner or slave. You'd think that the horrible things Sylvie and Lucien do would support lives that give them satisfaction, because, otherwise, why do them? But, no, they are both miserable. Which, perhaps, may be the point. They're miserable and spread the misery.
• The attitude of the white characters toward the black goes beyond thought or logic. It just is. A gay character, whose life would be ruined if he's found out, might be expected to feel some compassion for others who live under repression. Nope. Doesn't have a clue. The lovely young  woman who is just a beacon of goodness knows how to put a black woman in her place and does so.
• White children grow up with their fathers' black children. They're aware they are half-siblings and grow up as half-siblings. They think nothing of the fact that their half-siblings are slaves and they're not. Or that their fathers cheated on their mothers. Or that their fathers, in all likelihood, raped their half-siblings' mothers. 
• Williams-Garcia shifts point of view in this book, without the cliched YA device of making different chapters from different points of view with the POV character's name on the first page to make sure everyone understands what's happening. This is something that I haven't seen a lot of in the last few decades, and I thought it was even discouraged in the publishing world. It works very well here. (Everina Maxwell does it in Winter's Orbit, too. Striking to have seen it twice recently in such different books.)

Williams-Garcia has created an incredible, justifiably disturbing world in which she tells a mesmerizing story about a plantation family's downfall and its impact on the next generation. The Guilbert family crashes not because of the Civil War foreshadowed in A Sitting in St. James, but because of who they are.

This should be a terrific crossover book for adult readers.

How Does A Zombie Story Fit In With Black History Month?

Deathless Divide, the sequel to Dread Nation by Justina Ireland, is a work of alternative history dealing with the rise of the undead after the American Civil War. That's right. It's a zombie story. Why would I consider that an appropriate book to discuss in relation to Black History Month? Because in an Author's Note, Justina Ireland writes that she feels the one goal she is sure she accomplished with this book is putting "Black people back into history."

Ireland loves the western genre but says she felt that while Black people "lived throughout the West, they are rarely the heroes of any popular narratives." Given the author's goal, and the sense that Deathless Divide appears to have been as meticulously researched as a traditional historical novel, and the fact that, as with Dread Nation, Deathless Divide is about race and gender more than it's about zombies, I think it's a good title to bring to readers' attention this month.

The family member who recommended these books to me felt that the sequel wasn't as good as the original. I think Deathless Divide is as good as Dread Nation, but it is different structurally, which some fans of the first book may find disappointing. 

Dread Nation was told from the point of view of Jane McKeene, an outsider antihero type who is engaging the way outsider antiheroes often are. Deathless Divide is told from alternating points of view, moving between Jane and Katherine Deveraux, another excellent character from the first book. Like Jane, Katherine is a powerful young woman, but she manages her power behind a facade of traditional womanhood, while Jane is right out there. For me, alternating points of view often slow down narrative drive, and that may be an issue in the second book for some readers.

People who have read the first book are also probably going to want Jane and Katherine to get back together, which  takes a while. This is more of a journey book, with both Jane and Katherine on separate journeys to arrive at the same place.

I think you could argue that the author took an admirable risk structuring the second book so differently. I think it worked. I definitely felt I was reading a different book, while sequels and, particularly series, are often so similar to the original and each other that it's hard to pinpoint what happened in which book.

Not the case here. I think these will be memorable books. 

January Diversity Reading: Finding Langston

I was attracted to Finding Langston by Lesa Cline-Ransome, because I read Langston Hughes when I was in high school. We didn't study him, anymore than we studied Shirley Jackson or the authors of the Algonquin Roundtable. I don't know how I stumbled upon all those writers, unless it had something to do with me being a library aid at my high school for three or four years. I can't say I read a lot of Langston Hughes, but I recall liking him, unlike the Roundtable authors, whom I found disappointing. And, of course, everyone knows I have an obsession with Shirley Jackson. 

Finding Langston is a quite impressive book that can be enjoyed from three different angles. Are you interested in reading about the Great Migration, the movement of southern African-Americans to the north in the first half of the 20th Century? Finding Langston is about that. Are you interested in reading about bullying? Finding Langston is about that. Are you interested in reading about poetry? Finding Langston is about that, big time.

Poetry has always been something I respected, but rarely appreciated/understood. Finding Langston may change that for me. In addition to enjoying the Hughes poetry that appears in the book, I was struck by one character's summing up of poetry. "So the poetry you read is a way of putting all the things you feel inside on the outside." That led me to wonder, in an adult way, if poetry for readers is a way of expressing their feelings. You hunt for poets who can do that for you.

Regarding the Great Migration--I am certain I never studied that in either high school or college, where I was a history minor. At the high school level, survey courses back then often didn't get well into the twentieth century and often focused on economics and war. On the college level, I may just not have happened to take an American history course that covered much of the twentieth century. Another possibility? The Great Migration may not have been recognized as a historical event until very recently.

Finding Langston was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won the Scott O'Dell Award for historical fiction. Another award winning book worthy of the attention. Also, another book I read this month because Multicultural Children's Book Day is right around the corner.

January Diversity Reading: One Crazy Summer

One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia was a National Book Award Finalist, a Newbery Honor Book, and won the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction as well as the Coretta Scott King Award. Lots of times I read award winning books and think, Why? Not with this one. One Crazy Summer is fantastic.

Three sisters, the oldest being only eleven-years-old, head out from the east coast to California in 1968 to spend some time with the arty mother they've never known. These very traditional young girls expect to see the ocean and go to Disneyland. Imagine their surprise when they discover that mom, who doesn't seem to want to have much to do with them, is involved with the Black Panthers! 

What a terrific premise. How did I miss this book all these years?

Narrator Delphine has heard of the Panthers and turns a somewhat jaundiced eye on some of their more benign community work. She has been well brought up by her father and grandmother and tries to keep those younger sisters, upon whom she also often turns a jaundiced eye, in line while they are eating breakfast each morning at a children's day camp the Panthers run in their neighborhood. The book is fascinating and funny.

And there are two more books about Delphine and her sisters.

As an adult and a mom, I felt the kind of anxiety reading this book that I often feel when I'm reading books for children. The father and grandmother seemed way too conscientious and attentive to send the girls into a situation they knew so little about. No, no! They wouldn't have done that! Also, I wanted to snatch Delphine and the sisters away and take care of them. Realistically, three kids is one more than I know how to manage. But I would have fed them! Their mom wouldn't even feed them! She kept sending them out for takeout or to eat with the Black Panthers. Who did a good job with providing breakfast, by the way.

This is one of the books I read this month, because Multicultural Children's Book Day is coming up later this week. An excellent read.

"You Are Terrible, Ada. I Like You."

I like Ada, too.

She is the main character in The War I Finally Won by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. This middle grade novel is the sequel to The War That Saved My Life. I liked that book, though according to my post on the subject I found the beginning and ending a little melodramatic. That wasn't the case with the sequel. This was a book I really looked forward to getting back to reading.

Ada, who was also the main character in War That Saved My Life, is marvelous, though not someone who could be described as nice. In fact, I'm a little surprised she made the cut in children's publishing, where likability is tossed around a lot. Perhaps she was accepted because this is a historical novel, and gatekeepers felt young readers could feel some distance.

No, Ada is not likable. What she is is angry and distrustful and expecting the worst, for good reason. When we first met her in the first book during World War II, she is the victim of maternal abuse. What saves her is the evacuation of children from London. Her mother didn't arrange for her to get out, so this incredibly tough young one got herself out. She and her younger brother land with Susan who an adult reading between the lines will believe is a lesbian grieving for her dead companion and a victim of periodic bouts of depression. I love this about Susan. She doesn't wear any signs saying "Lesbian" or "Mental Health Character." She just is. Just as World War II saves Ada, Ada and her brother save Susan.

But just because Ada is saved, it doesn't mean that everything is sweetness and light for her in Book 2. There's still that pesky Hitler to deal with. And Ada is still enraged, because her mother hadn't loved her and hadn't even tried to provide her with some basic health care that would have given her a much different childhood. Ada lived a horrible life before connecting with Susan. She can't be confident that she and her brother won't end up in a similar situation some day.

So The War I Finally Won is both a World War II home front story and a personal story about a child at war with her past and her present. It is really well done. 

Oh, another remarkable bit of character development about Ada--Because her mother kept her confined in an apartment with no access to the world, she is remarkably ignorant regarding run-of-the-mill life things that other children her age would have picked up. She doesn't know what a dragon is or fairy tales, for instance.

YA Historical Thriller...Ah...Mystery

The Girl is Murder by Kathryn Miller Haines was one of my thriller/mystery reads. Reading it met an objective for one of my 2020 goals. 

The Girl is Murder, published in 2011, reads like the set-up to a series, and a second book about its main character, Iris Anderson, was published in 2012. Iris and her father have hit a bad patch financially. Mom killed herself, and we're not sure what that was about. Pop lost a leg at Pearl Harbor and while the war continues, he is trying to make a go of it as a private detective. Things are not going well with that, and he and Iris have had to board with a nice landlady in a lesser part of town. Iris has also had to leave her private school to attend a public one. She wants to help with the family business. Dad says no. When a hot classmate turns up missing, Iris starts a hunt, anyway.

I didn't find the mystery here that compelling or interesting, particularly since Iris, herself, didn't solve it. And it was kind of anti-climatic.

The historical setting was pretty amazing, though. Haines, who writes adult mysteries as well as the two Iris Anderson volumes for YAs, appears to specialize in the World War II era. Not having been there, myself, I can't say that she's got that period down pat, but she sure creates an impressive world, right down to voice.

I believe that as far as world-building is concerned, historical fiction rivals science fiction. The Girl is Murder proves my point.

When I've been writing here about mysteries and thrillers, I've been using the term interchangeably. Mystery, Thriller, or Suspense: Does the Label Matter? by Stacy Woodson at DIY MFA suggests I shouldn't.

Happy Anniversary, Johnny Tremain

This summer I started trying to tweet a link from the seventeen years of blog posts I have piled up. I try to go back exactly ten years, looking for something that has at least some links that still work and isn't terribly dated. Sometimes I have to hit another year or even another date. But today I found an interesting one on September 12, 2009--The Book That Keeps On Going And Going And Going. 

I was talking about Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes. As luck would have it, this Newbery winner is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. Seriously, this book just does not stop.

And how bizarre is it that I would think about doing a Johnny Tremain blog post and then find out it is its anniversary year? My avid followers may recall that I'm always having woo-woo-type experiences with books. And speaking of woo-woo-type experiences: am I the only person struck by the fact that the Tremain anniversary edition has a forward written by someone named Nathan Hale? Come on.

My 2009 JT blog post was inspired by some posts at another blog, Boston 1775, a site on the American Revolution in Massachusetts maintained by J. L. Bell. (This is one of the rare situations in which I've actually met someone I'm talking about. In fact, I've met John a couple of times.) I was thinking about bringing John's 2009 Johnny Tremain posts to my readers' attention again, anyway. Once I realized the book was having a big, big anniversary, too, I went to work.

John did three posts in what I called, at the time, a Tremainathon. They were based upon his reading of  Son of Liberty: Johnny Tremain and the Art of Making American Patriots by Neil L. York, a history professor at Brigham Young University. I found the first and third posts particularly interesting.

The Path to Publication

What I Found Particularly Interesting About Post 1 In The Tremainathon: "I’ve long said that Johnny Tremain reflects the values of America during World War 2, and York confirms that was in fact Forbes’s vision. She called the book “my great war effort...” I don't think a lot of people realize that a lot of what they read when they read history reflects as much about the people who wrote it than it does about the historical events or figures they were writing about. That's what makes history more...mmm...fluid?...then we probably expect it to be. No, what happened in the past cannot change. What we know about it can change, if new information comes to light. And how we perceive it can change, depending on the attitudes of people writing about it.

This summer I finished reading Champlain's Dream by David Hackett Fischer. (Oh, my gosh! John mentions him in his third Tremain post!) Okay, I only skimmed the book, but I can tell you that Fischer includes a thirty-four page section listing writings about Champlain and describing how the authors from different periods perceived him. ("A rough-hewn man of the people." "Imperial.")

History, it appears, is never done.

Johnny Tremain's Deleted Scene

Check it out. It relates to both Post 1 and Post 3.

Three People Detained at the Castle

What I Found Particularly Interesting In Post 3 Of The Tremainathon: Forbes lucked out when she deleted the scene described in Post 2 from Johnny Tremain. Some historical information she used in that scene turned out to be inaccurate. Unfortunately, she had used it in her Pulitzer prize winning biography, Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. What was the problem?

"When that letter, now in the John Lamb Papers at the New-York Historical Society, was printed in Elbridge Goss’s 1891 biography of Revere, there was one small error. Instead of saying “three persons,” Goss’s transcription said “these persons.”

While writing her biography of Revere, Forbes interpreted “these persons” to refer to the men who had signed the letter..."  And she concluded that all those people, instead of  "three persons", were somewhere they weren't.

I think we can all agree that this is a lesson we should all learn in not relying on secondary sources. The thought of hunting down every single primary source for a biography exhausts me. I am overwhelmed as I sit here.

Also, this is the kind of story that confirms my feeling about writing straight history. No, thanks. I already don't sleep well at night.

Johnny And Esther Deserve A Moment

I don't believe I've ever read Johnny Tremain. I may have seen a bit of the movie, but only if it turned up on TV. So I can't say I'm a fan. I do, however, have great respect for Esther Forbes' accomplishment. Within a two-year period she won a Pulitzer Prize and a Newbery Medal. That is one hell of a one-two punch. And, yes, having a book stay in print 75 years is mind-boggling. A very tiny number of writers see anything like that happen. Probably not even 1 percent of writers do this.

I wish Esther and Johnny were getting more attention this year. Maybe more will happen before December. In the meantime, scroll down this column from Shelf Awareness for an interview with Nathan Hale on his involvement with the Johnny Tremain anniversary edition.

Not All YA Is Obvious YA

I recently finished reading The Agency: A Spy in the House by Y. S. Lee, the first in a series of four YA historical mysteries. It's set in the nineteenth century and ends with a couple of feminist twists I appreciated. I grabbed it on a Kindle sale, because historical mysteries are something I read. My Kindle is loaded with them. My heirs will find them.

How These Historical Mysteries Work

Okay, so I've read dozens of these things...dozens. And the dozens and dozens of the adult historical mysteries set in the nineteenth century that I've read involve a female/male couple, who meet angry, end up with lots of sexual tension, and, after a few books, sex. At least one part of the couple is either tormented or has some torment in his/her past. One or the other of them ends up in physical danger that the other one saves them from. As a general rule, the characters are of more interest than the mysteries. And, in my experience, many of these series do the literary equivalent of jumping the shark at some point, and the characters and the sex aren't enough to keep you reading.

"A Spy in the House" And The Historical Mystery Pattern

A Spy in the House pretty much follows the pattern for the first book in one of these series. The female lead has a rough background, she's in conflict with the male lead, at least one of them ends up in physical danger and the other one saves the day. The ending may or may not be typical of these series. I'd have to read the next book to see.

A couple of times references are made to the leads' ages. The male is twenty, the female seventeen, but that's pretty much the only way we know how young they are. At the halfway point, something comes out about the female character's family and background that adds a bit of search for identity to the book world, something that is YA-ish. But it isn't a major part of the rest of the story. The sexual tension isn't very high in this book, though there's enough to suggest something could come of it down the line. This lower key love interest could be a nod to the YA audience.

Otherwise, this is pretty much an adult book with teen characters. The teens could be pulled out and replaced with adults with very little effort.

Nothing Wrong Here

A Spy in the House isn't the first book I've seen that works like this.  Au Revoir Crazy European Chick from 2012 has an adult-like character in an adult-like thriller geared toward teen readers. I Hunt Killers, also from 2012, is a teen Dexter. Illuminae from 2015 is a science fiction space thriller in which teen characters definitely function in very adult ways.

There's nothing wrong with any of this. We're just not talking books with traditional YA themes and YA situations. At most there may be a loose connection to a missing parent to tie the books to the genre. Otherwise, you could imagine any number of adult actors playing these characters in the movie adaptation.

And that is probably the point. These books give teen readers an opportunity to imagine themselves in far more adult and thrilling roles than those they find in more traditional contemporary YA books.

An Obscure Woman Writer For Women's History Month

In my last post, I commented upon writers who ramble and distract from their points with lots of extra words. So I deleted a couple of paras relating to how I came to have two grocery bags full of books from the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, as well as a couple more stacks on the floor. Let's just say, I've got 'em. And in checking them out on-line to see whether or not it's necessary for us to hold on to them, I was struck with how many of them, and their authors, seem...lost. A sobering situation for a writer to learn about.

One of the first books I noticed was a 1900 edition of To Have And To Hold by Mary Johnston. This thing is set in Jamestown during, you know, Jamestown, not one of my favorite time periods. But the story line has features I would have loved as a younger, pre-feminist reader. The lover with a secret identity. How Scarlet Pimpernel! An evil lord. I would probably have eaten that stuff up, though I don't think I was a particular fan of the pirates that also appear here.

What really interests me now is not the book but its author. According to Encyclopedia Virginia, Mary Johnston was the first woman to top best-seller lists in the twentieth century. To Have And To Hold broke publishing records. It's supposed to have been the most popular book between Uncle Tom's Cabin and Gone With the Wind. (Hmm. All three of those books were written by women. What am I to make of that?) It made Johnston rich. She was profiled in the New York Times in 1900, and To Have And To Hold became a movie twice. Okay, they were both silent, but they were movies. (A third version was made in 2015 and never released. Yikes.) And though it was Johnston's most successful book, she wrote and published others. She wasn't a one-hit wonder. She had a career.

And Then...Obscurity

You can find some odd editions of Mary Johnston books here and there, but she's far from a household name. Or a name most of us have heard of. What happened to this bestselling author who wrote the most popular book between Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind? We remember Stowe and Mitchell, don't we? Why not Mary Johnston? Come on, Gone With the Wind wasn't that great.

I have a family member who studies and preserves obscure TV at Television Obscurities, so I have given some thought to obscurity. You have your material that is what you might call born obscure because it never made much of an impact when it first appeared. Then you have material that becomes obscure for some reason.

To Have And To Hold certainly wasn't born obscure. But evidently it isn't considered timeless nor some kind of outstanding representative of its era. Or whatever a book has to be to remain in the public memory. And so it became obscure.

Which raises the question, I believe, of which popular books from our period are headed for obscurity?

Feel free to post your answer in a comment.

For Alcott Fans, Women's History Fans, Women's Lit Fans, Art Fans...You Name It

My faithful readers are aware that I can be a bit obsessive about Louisa May Alcott. I've gone on and on here about Little Men, which I reread last year. I went on and on about An Old Fashioned Girl back in 2010. Honest to God, I've read Little Women and Werewolves. I've been to Alcott's house. I've been to her grave. I've been to Fruitlands. In truth, all this activity was spread over many years. We're not talking an Alcott scholar here.

But I'm going on and on like this to explain why I was attracted to the adult book Little Woman in Blue: A Novel of May Alcott by Jeannine Atkins.

 May Alcott was Louisa May's youngest sister, the inspiration for Amy in Little Women, Little Men, and Jo's Boys. This novel about her adult life is impressive in the way it uses what I, at least, know of the Alcotts' lives. There are lots of small details, like the reference to Louisa's childhood birthday party at which she had to give away all the little cakes to her guests and didn't get one herself, that I'd heard of. Or recognized from Louisa's books, which, remember, had some connection to her life. There's also playing off the books. May in Little Woman in Blue is unhappy with how she is portrayed in Little Women. And, when you think about it, who wouldn't be?

This book is a marvelous mind game for readers who have knowledge of the source material.

But it's more than that. In Little Woman in Blue May Alcott is a single woman who is overwhelmed by her family. I will hazard a guess that this is a classic theme in women's literature. In this case, the needy parents and the needy married sister and her family don't seem to even realize what they're doing or that there's anything unusual in draining their family members. I say "members" because it's not just May they're doing this to. Louisa bears the financial burden for all the Alcotts, as she did in real life. Louisa and May could be described as draining each other, too.

This book also shows the life of "single working women" in the 1860s and '70s. It sounds very much like a section in Louisa Alcott's An Old Fashioned Girl. And then there's all the talk of art and specifically art in nineteenth century Paris at the beginning of the Impressionist movement. (Read Sacre Bleu by Christopher Moore, covering the same period? I have.)

So there's something here for several different types of historical fiction readers. And good somethings.

UPDATE: Reading this book motivated me to record Little Women on PBS last night, which I would probably have passed on.


FTD Stuff: Jeannine Atkins is a Facebook friend, one I actually interact with. I purchased an eBook edition of this book during a sale period.

The Das Saga

I'm taking a little break from picture books to write about You Bring the Distant Near by Mitali Perkins.  This book features a unique subject, and by that I don’t mean the lives of the Indian family
followed for three generations, but immigration and assimilation. This is a Bengali family, but to some extent they’re experiencing what families from  many cultures have experienced coming to America, with the stresses of living with both the old and the new.

My big interest when considering assimilation into American life is that immigrants lose so much in order to do so, since that was certainly the experience of the Gauthier family. But the second and third generation members of the Das family are still Bengali, as well as American.

Perkins dips into each generation of this family, covering mother, daughters, and granddaughters. My complaint about the book is that I wanted more about these five women. I could have gotten into a Forsyth Saga type read spread over several books.

A thought just occurred to me...In children’s literature we get very thin fantasy stories spread out over three or more books all the time. Why not a family/historical tale?

FTC Transparency Information: I am acquainted with Mitali Perkins, having met her a few times. I know her just well enough to get all "Oh, wow, I know a writer whose book made the long list for the National Book Award" when You Bring the Distant Near did just that.

A YA Historical Mystery

Anyone familiar with what I call nineteenth century historical mysteries? Obviously they are mystery series set in the nineteenth century. Some examples: 1813 or so--Sebastian St. Cyr Mysteries, 1890s to post WWI--Amelia Peabody, 1890s--Veronica Speedwell, 1880s or 90s--Gaslight Mysteries (Hillary Clinton's a fan). My Kindle is heavy with these things. The ones I read usually have a female and male amateur detectives or an amateur combined with a professional detective. The ones I read also have some kind of romantic tension and then involvement between the male and female leads.

Well, The Lost Girl of Astor Street by Stephanie Morrell reads to me like the first entry in one of those series. Except for being YA. And set in the early twentieth century.  I would not describe it as "Downton Abbey in downtown Chicago" the way one of the blurbs does. It has a lot more story than that show ever did.

Piper Sail (eighteen years old, on the high end for YA) is the daughter of a well-known defense lawyer in 1920's Chicago. A lawyer with Mafia clients. (This is hardly Lord Grantham we're talking about.) When her best friend disappears, Piper gets involved in the hunt for her. She also gets involved with the hot, young Italian cop on the case. And who, guess what!, also has Mafia connections. Piper is one of those women who is trouble because she won't stay in her place. Mariano, an outsider to both his Mafia family and WASP Chicago culture, can tolerate her.

They are a couple made for a historical mystery series.

When Mom And Dad Are Spies

I'm a fan of The Americans, the FX series about a couple who are undercover Russian operatives in the U.S. in the 1980s. (Because that would never happen now.) Philip and Elizabeth live as a comfortable suburban couple who run a business together. Their teenage children have not been raised in their real business.

At some points the question of what will become of Philip and Elizabeth arises. Will they go back to ol' Mother Russia? What about those kids? Last year I was thinking that a YA book about a kid who was ripped out of his comfortable American life and dragged to a Communist country with parents, who, they just learned, were strangers had some promise. Then I stumbled upon Cloud and Wallfish by Anne Nesbit, which is about a boy who finds out his name isn't his name and his birthday isn't his birthday and he and his parents are packing up to move to East Berlin. In 1989.

Noah/Jonah's parents are a lot more light-hearted than The American's Philip and Elizabeth. But there's no doubt there's something going on with them. Noah/Jonah doesn't know everything about them, but they don't know know everything about him, either.

Every chapter in Cloud and Wallfish concludes with a "Secret File" explaining  historical material. They're like extensive footnotes. Now I like reading historical background. But it did break up the narrative drive of the story. I don't know how younger readers will feel about it. Nonetheless, this should be a great read for a student needing a book for a historical unit.

My First Read Of 2018

I've finished reading my first book of the year.

The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley is a fine addition to the pool of juvenile books about the evacuation of children from London during World War II. My sons and I read a number of these when they were young, and the subject has become of such interest to me that it was the inspiration for an adult scifi book I've completed. I found the beginning and ending that framed the Saved My Life story a little melodramatic, myself. It could have come down a couple of notches. But that doesn't wreck the reading experience by a long shot. I'm interested in this subject, anyway, and like twentieth century small-town British stories on top of that. I knocked off the first half of this book while I was up in the night with an attack of insomnia.

Some of the things I particularly liked about The War That Saved My Life:

• Susan, the woman who takes Ada and her brother in after they leave London, appears to suffer from depression. But the author doesn't use it as some kind of teachable moment. It's merely a way of defining Susan.
• Perhaps I'm ready too much into this, but I also suspect Susan is a lesbian mourning the loss of her companion. Again, there is no big neon sign or any kind of lesson on acceptance here. This is just Susan.
• There's an interesting spin on the "miracle of Dunkirk," which usually, in my experience, focuses on the boats. In The War that Saved My Life, the focus shifts to what happens to the men after the boat lift.

A follow-up book was published last year, The War I Finally Won.

An Example Of Serious World Building

As I'm sure I've said here before, conventional wisdom holds that world building relates to science fiction and fantasy. But every story involves a world that must be created for it. Historical fiction, in particular, can require as much world building as any work of scifi or fantasy. A Bandit's Tale: The Muddled Misadventures of a Pickpocket by Deborah Hopkinson is an excellent example. The world here is 1880s New York City, complete with historical figures, establishments, and events.

After being accused of theft (where the bandit comes from in the title) in his Italian village, eleven-year-old Rocco Zaccaro's parents make a deal with a padrone (boss/patron). The man will bring Rocco to the United States as a sort of indentured servant. What will Rocco do for him? Rocco doesn't find out until he arrives in New York City. He's going to become one of the padrone's stable of child street musicians, who are essentially beggars expected to collect a minimum amount of money each day while living in squalid conditions.

Rocco moves from one situation to another, running into historical figures and places. For an a reader with a little historical knowledge, guessing what was real is part of the pleasure of this type of book.

The problems of today's immigrants to the U.S. kept coming to mind while I was reading this. What's the connection? Immigrants have always had a hard time here. I'm not sure if there's something comforting about that because so many groups suffered and then moved on or profoundly disturbing because so little changes. Another interesting point: This book deals with America's  nonAnglo-Saxon, Protestant experience.

The author adds terrific end material, explaining all the historical elements she worked into the story.

My Favorite Childlit Historical Fiction Collected On A Pinterest Board

Karen Yingling has written at her blog, Ms. Yingling Reads, that historical fiction isn't particularly popular with the students who use her library. I, on the other hand, was fond of the genre when I was all over libraries like Ms. Yingling's. (I was a library aid for a year or two, by the way. Haven't heard of those in a long time.)

Anyway, recalling my days reading fictionalized accounts of long dead kings and queens, as well as stacks of stories of young early nineteenth century women marrying wealthy aristocrats, and those long, long multi-generational stories that cover a century...or two...inspired me to create a Pinterest board on my favorite childlit historical fiction covered here at Original Content.

Pinterest is so easy.