Newport

Adrian De la Noye and his young associate, Jim Reid, have been summoned from their Boston law firm to Newport by an elderly client who wishes to revise his will on the eve of his marriage. Not surprisingly, his two children – the never-quite-sober Lady Chloe and especially the threatening and overbearing Nicholas – object vociferously, openly questioning their father’s state of mind. Initially Adrian attributes this to their objection to the marriage generally, but when he discovers that his client is communicating with his long-deceased first wife by séance, and that he believes his first wife has explicitly chosen the decades-younger Catherine Walsh to be his new bride, even Adrian begins to ask questions.

Part Twenties Girl, part Agatha Christie, Newport is a delightful little read. The characters are well drawn and the story is entertaining to no end. Interspersed throughout the present day action Adrian’s memories of the last time he was in Newport , and though this tactic can sometimes be quite distracting, in this instance it worked well. 

Newport should appeal to a wide variety of audiences, from historical fiction fans (I picked it up because I was in Newport recently and hoped for a glimpse of its gilded age past) to cozy mystery and quirky fiction fans.

Pilgrimage to Dollywood: A Country Music Roadtrip Through Tennessee

Pilgrimage to Dollywood says as much about the U.S. and American culture as it does about Dolly Parton. Helen Morales is a transplanted Brit, having recently accepted a teaching position in the U.S., which allows her to make a long-dreamed of pilgrimage to the home of Dolly Parton, whom she has rather idolized for years. 

To make the trip more palatable to her husband and 9-year-old daughter, she plans an itinerary that begins at Graceland, in Memphis, and winds east through Nashville before reaching Dollywood in Pigeon Forge. Half the fun of this book is that these are all places that I have visited and so could easily picture the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, for example, of the giant statue of Athena in Nashville’s replica Parthenon. Which is to say nothing of the Pigeon Forge-Gatlinburg corridor, where my extended family once gathered for a reunion many years ago and which, even then, consisted of mini golf and salt water taffy shops galore.

This is a book about Americans being American, about the South still fighting the Civil War, and about how it all appears when viewed from any outsider’s perspective. For that reason, it should be required reading for anyone seeking to broaden their sense of this country and our, yes, unique and large culture, particularly those aspects of it that are a little more “red state” than blue.

The Tea Rose

I never skip ahead when I read. This is my cardinal rule of reading, which I have embraced from my earliest days as a reader. And yet, I could not help myself. I had to know, absolutely had to know, what became of Fiona and, by extension all of the characters in The Tea Rose.

The Tea Rose, set in Jack Ripper's East End, is nothing if not gripping. From the opening pages, which depict the murder of a Whitechapel prostitute by none other than Jack himself, to Fiona's final fight for her life, Jennifer Donnelly has packed her pages with action, suspense, and not a little violence.

Fiona Finnegan dreams of life away from this place, a life where she will be the proprietor of her own tea shop and the wife of her childhood sweetheart, Joe Bristow. To achieve this dream, they both will have to overcome the violence of the docks, especially when talk turns to unions, and of the streets themselves.

Donnelly's writing is a reminder of the hard scrabble life of Victorian England, and the grit and character necessary to rise above it. I loved Fiona - and Joe - as soon as I began reading. It did seem to me that Donnelly heaped hardship upon hardship on them, especially Fiona. At times, The Tea Rose teetered on the brink from implausible to impossible, and I wished Donnelly had settled for slightly more realistic plot twists.

All the same, I sped through this book, more than once flipping ahead to see how it all turned out. The first in a trilogy, I am looking forward to reading books two and three this summer.

The Nightingale

The Nightingale begins in 1939, on the eve of war, as Antoine Mauriac and his neighbor Marc de Champlain, prepare to say good bye to their wives, Vianne and Rachel (best friends since childhood), and their daughters, Sophie and Sarah (a second generation of best friends), and head to the front. None of them believes war truly awaits, but as they and the rest of Carriveau's residents soon discover, await it does.

One person who understand war with Germany is Vianne's father, Julien, who returned from the last one a broken, bitter man. Despite his younger daughter's pleas to remain with him, he packs Isabelle off to Carriveau to live with Vianne and Sophie, much to the women's dismay. While Vianne pines for Antoine and struggles to face the war without him, Isabelle is determined to fight, seeking out the Resistance and escalating her role.

Overall, The Nightingale is a wonderful read. Kristin Hannah has created multi-faceted characters who grapple with the black of collaboration and the white of resistance and all of the shades of gray in between. Their choices, too often, are imperfect, both because they are human and because war has removed the luxury of good choices from their lives.

My only quibble with The Nightingale is not even a quibble with the book, per se. It is that The Nightingale is one in a long line of novels set in wartime France whose protagonists and, the majority of characters, are actively involved in the Resistance. (All the Light We Cannot See and The Paris Architect are other examples of this style.) The truth, though, is much more complicated: ultimately, very few Frenchmen (and women) were involved in the Resistance; recent numbers suggest there were 10,000 active members of the Resistance in 1942. By 1945 the number had grown to roughly 200,000, still a very small segment out of a population of 40 million. Authors want to create characters whom readers like, no doubt, but taken collectively, these works simply fuel the (false) belief that all good Frenchmen actively resisted the occupation.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World vast terrain from the early days of Mesopotamia to the fall of the Twin Towers. In between we find the rise of Islam, the Great Crusades, Mongols, Vikings, Huns and Genghis Khan, to say nothing of war and oil, religious conflict and conquest, and, of course, trade. This is a deep and dense tome, an academic work in the truest sense, perhaps not best suited for the casual reader. I was most interested in the trade aspect of Frankopan's work, but found the book more focused on the highest level of globalization than on the trade that underpins it.

Ultimately, I believe that Frankopan is attempting to convey a sense of the Silk Roads - and trade more broadly - as a means of exchanging not only goods and currencies, but everything from religions, cultures, and ideas, to disease. Ostensibly, the book's focus is trade, but by Frankopan treated trade as the vehicle for everything else, such that it's less a history of Central Asia and the Middle East as a trade hub and more about how it's role as a hub influenced geopolitics and culture, for example. The high water mark for trade comes relatively early, in my opinion, specifically when Frankopan writes that the Taj Mahal represents "globalized international trade that brought such wealth to [Shah Jahan] that he was able to contemplate this extraordinary gesture to his beloved spouse." (p. 231). Nearly 300 pages remained. 

In the end, I came away feeling that Frankopan had attempted to do too much. Any one of these topics is a book (or books!) unto itself. See Desert Queen, The Orientalist, A Splendid Exchange, Where the West Ends, or Hero, just for starters. Which is perhaps to say that I read too much and too widely (is there such a thing?), or at a minimum that most readers will not have already delved so deeply into this topic.

Perhaps more disconcertingly, though, I had the nagging sense that Frankopan was angry with history, Europe in particular. I could not help but feel that any crime perpetrated by Europeans was trumped up, while those committed by Easterners were somehow minimized. This sentiment crystallized for me toward the end of the book when Frankopan wrote, "...typified by the European Union being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012: how wonderful that Europe, which had been responsible for almost continuous warfare not just in its own continent but across the world for centuries, had managed to avoid conflict for several decades." (p. 383). Yet, as anyone who has read much on world history can attest, warfare has been one of the constants since time immemorial. I don't disagree that Europe was a mess. I'm just not convinced it was that much messier than the rest of the world. I should note, too, that I'm not the only one he noticed this. S. Frederick Starr wrote in his review for the Washington Post that "in chapter after chapter, Europeans emerge as the villains. ... [Frankopan] concludes that “Europe’s distinctive character as more aggressive, more unstable, and less peace-minded than other parts of the world now paid off.”" Indeed.

Complaints aside, Frankopan does an excellent job of filling in the gaps and connecting the dots. Even more than Hero or Desert Queen, Silk Roads provides comprehensive historical background on the West's interaction with and interference in the Middle East and Central Asia for the past several centuries. Scanning headlines today, it's not easy to understand intuitively how certain countries have become allies or enemies; by revisiting every slight and slander for the last millennium, Frankopan allows his reader to understand these historical ties and their on-going impacts.