Seven Days in May

It would have helped if I had like any of the characters.

Kim Izzo's Seven Days in May is essentially two mini-stories revolving around the Lusitania, with the characters in each never meeting, intersecting, or even passing, excuse the pun, like ships in the night.

Brooke and Sydney Sinclair are two of New York's wealthiest and most eligible heiresses. Brooke has fulfilled her heart's desire in landing a young, English "aristo" who will give her the title she so desires. Her younger sister, Sydney, tends toward the more political activities of the day, namely women's suffrage and family planning. Of course, they get along like oil and water, such that Sydney, upon boarding the Lusitania, forgoes their joint suite and books herself into third class for the voyage to England - and Brooke's wedding. The arrangement must be concealed from the future earl, Edward Thorpe-Tracey, lest he be too scandalized to follow through with the marriage. (Spoiler alert: He does find out, and is far more intrigued by Sydney's feisty independence than scandalized by her "outrageous" act.)

Simultaneously, Isabel Nelson, has earned her way into work in the highly secretive Room 40, where she works alongside a cadre of high-ranking men from the British Admiralty decoding intercepted German messages. In this capacity, she has access to top-secret communications, including many about the Lusitania; she routinely frets over matters far beyond her pay grade and even second-guesses Churchill. Thanks to any number of clumsily dropped clues, the reader figures out pretty early that Isabel has a secret past. Her past feels like the most contrived part of Seven Days in May and together with her meddling in things that she clearly shouldn't, renders her the most unbearable of the characters, in my ever humble estimation.

In the end, I had two major complaints:

1) Seven Days in May was inspired by true events. Izzo's great-grandfather did sail on the Lusitania (and survived to tell the tale). He appears in the highly likeable person of Walter Dawson (Izzo's grandfather's name, in fact). Dawson is a third class passenger whom Sydney befriends; focusing more on him and less on the simpering Brooke and out-for-battle Sydney would only have improved the narrative.

2) It feels like Izzo had two stories she wanted to tell here, but not enough material for either one to stand on its own. Still, it was hard to understand why the second story, that of Isabel Nelson, had to be there, particularly given that the portion of the story set on-board the Lusitania didn't lack for action - and probably could have been drawn out further.

Final verdict: Skip Seven Days and head directly for Erik Larson's Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania.

The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

The Crazyladies of Pearl Street begins with the LaPointe family, six-year-old Jean-Luc (Luke), three-year-old Anne-Marie, and their (horribly ill-equipped) mother moving from rural New York to the slums of Albany at the height of the Great Depression. Actually, they've been summoned by their ever-absent husband/father, whose abandonment proves final when he never appears at the apartment he's rented them.

Throughout the next eight years, neighbors, teachers, friends, and relations come and go, moving the story (autobiographical fiction, according to the author's end note, which perhaps make this is an exaggerated memoir) forward in fits and starts. The pages and pages detailing Luke's "story games" definitely contributed to the fits. I kept waiting for something to happen, but really the story just floated along, the events no larger or more exciting than the minutiae of daily life. Harumph.

In addition to the limited action, I didn't particularly care for most of the characters, Jean-Luc's mother, Ruby, least of all. (I'll stop for a moment to say that while her parenting skills were abhorrent, I think I was irritated more than anything by the way Luke referred to her/how she referred to herself. I thought I'd scream if I read one.more.time. about her "famous French-and-Indian temper" and her hackneyed patterns of speech.) In any event, the most sympathetic of the cast is Mr. Kane, the Jewish proprietor of the corner store where Luke buys penny candies and the whole block places calls on the in-store pay phone. I could have used a little more of him.

Spanning the Great Depression and World War II, and told from the perspective of a rapidly maturing child, Crazyladies of Pearl Street has great potential, but is ultimately a little flat. If it were an actual memoir, it might remind have the lingering sweet notes of, say, The Situation in Flushing (could I offer higher praise??), but as it's clearly stated to be a fictional account, I expected a bit more, well, action. (And by this I mean that if an author were to create a "memoir" whole cloth, Lovers at the Chameleon Club is the way to go.) The best I can say is that Luke reminded me often of Elizabeth Gaffney's Wally (When the World Was Young), similarly making her way in a complicated world.

Lee Smith says that all stories take one of two forms: either somebody takes a trip, or a stranger comes to town. With Crazyladies, Trevanian (and, yes, I think it's weird that he's styled himself as a one-name author, the only other one that comes to mind being Homer - but I digress) has proven this wisdom more times than I can count.

Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America

Native Roots is an obscure little book* that delves deeply into the cultures of the native tribes of the America, from the Inuits of the far north to the Incas of South America. Author Jack Weatherford examines aspects of their lives and civilizations from diet and housing, dress and transportation, with extensive sections devoted to the ways in which European settlers incorporated native elements into their new world - particularly when it came to their diet.

Weatherford also spends time education the reader on the ways in which native languages enriched English. Here, we have everything from kayak to raccoon, igloo to tobacco. Which is to say nothing of the continent's place names. My own town, Okemos, is named for an Ojibwe chief of the same name, and like every good Michigander, learned the meaning of Gitche Gumee as a child.

Native Roots especially examines the contributions of individual Native Americans to "American" history and culture, from Pocahontas to the entirety of Henry Schoolcraft's in-laws. Although his approach is less in-depth than those of Peter Starks (Astoria) or Stephen Ambrose (Undaunted Courage) - both of whom focus less of their overall work on the contribution of the Indian guides, but go into greater detail when they do - the overall impact is far greater because Weatherford's approach is much broader and ultimately provides a better sense of the collective impact of Native Americans on "Americanizing" the continent.

As is frequently the case with non-fiction, the audience that will truly enjoy reading Native Roots is relatively s mall, but readers who love early American history, and certainly pre-United States history, should be quickly taken in.


*Native Roots was published in 1992, yet has only 22 reviews on Amazon, so I'm extrapolating here, but I don't think unfairly.

Turner House

One of my goals this year is to read more broadly, from a wider cross-section of authors, settings, and time periods. Regular readers of this blog will know that, in faction, I skew heavily toward the historical, and when I deviate into the present day, the result is usually disappointment. Not so with Angela Flournoy's Turner House, which I gravitated to because of its setting - Detroit.

Charles "Cha-Cha" Turner is the oldest of 13 children, all of them born and raised in Detroit to parents newly up from Arkansas. (Cha-Cha, in fact, spent his earliest years in a shotgun house there, but the other 12 siblings were all Detroit-born. But I digress.) As the oldest, Cha-Cha is long accustomed to looking after his younger siblings and, since the death of his father, to being their patriarch. His trouble is his haint. The haint, a ghost-like spirit, first visited him as an adolescent living on Detroit's east side. It's left him along for decades, but has returned now, and is driving Cha-Cha mad. The timing couldn't be worse, as he and his wife have become full-time caretakers to his live-in, elderly mother, his youngest sister is going through her own crisis, and the family must decide whether to short-sell their beloved, but now unoccupied, family home.

In Turner House, Flournoy has given the reader much to love. She has created a bevy of characters - thirteen siblings, their parents, their children, and so on - but has wisely focused most of her attention on a manageable handful of them, so that the reader is neither overwhelmed, nor wondering, where a character came from or when and why they were dropped from the story. Not only do her characters truly resonate, but so do the troubles they face. Cha-Cha's haint is unique to him, but can also be symbolic of so many mid-life crises. Flournoy's writing is often amusing without being laugh-out-loud funny, and she sustains the same tone throughout the book.

Ultimately, it's easy to see why Turner House was a 2016 National Book Award finalist.

Four stars.

Claude and Camille

I hesitated before reading Stephanie Cowell's Claude and Camille because the genre of Impressionist painter historical fiction had disappointed me thus far (see Luncheon of the Boating Party or The Painted Girls). I needn't have worried; a bit like Monet himself, Claude and Camille is in a class by itself when it comes to this genre.

As any enterprising reader might guess from the title, Claude and Camille is the story of the see-sawing, ultimately tragic relationship between Claude Monet and his first wife, Camille Doncieux. As Wikipedia will tell you in a matter of seconds, she died at 32 of cancer, so no spoilers to say there's no happily ever after here. What Cowell does well, she does very well indeed, and that is to improvise. As she notes in the afterward, the historical record contains very little about Camille, and so Cowell was able to invent a story, populated by real people, artists mainly, and events, but largely of her own invention. What she has created is lovely.

One of the strong suits is the way Cowell incorporates painting, as a noun but especially as a verb, into the work. Because she is not overly constrained by facts, she is free to get into Monet's head in a way that other works of this genre haven't done. As a result, Monet's paintings are sprinkled throughout, while the act of paining, as important and life-giving to Monet as breathing, dominates. Too, I was struck by the way in which she situated Monet in the spaces where he created so many masterpieces, and that his lily pads were not the centerpiece. The church, the haystacks, London in the fog: I could picture Monet's paintings through Cowell's carefully chosen words, which were frequently no more than allusions.

Readers who love the arts, and especially Impressionism, will be smitten. Those who are iffy on the subject may well like Claude and Camille well enough, but I'm a little more hesitant to recommend it to that crowd.

Dreamers of the Day

It would be difficult to start the year with a better - or more appropriate, but more on that later - book. Several years ago I loved Mary Doria Russell's Doc, which set me on a Wild West reading spree. Moreover, Hero remains one of the finest biographies I have read, and Gertrude Bell was nothing if not extraordinary. Hence, there was no way I was missing out on Dreamers of the Day, written by Russell, co-starring Lawrence, and with some serious cameo appearances by Bell.

Agnes Shankin is an unassuming school teacher from Ohio, alone and lonely following the death of her entire family in the influenza pandemic that swept America on the heels of World War I. She is dogged by a lifetime of maternal criticism, but has the happy fortune, at least, of inheriting three modest estates as the result of her aforementioned circumstances. Seeking a chance of scenery, she departs for Egypt rather on a whim. There, she finds herself the honored guest of none other than T.E. Lawrence, who knew Agnes's sister when the latter was a missionary in the Middle East before the war. Through Lawrence, Agnes is thrust into a high-powered circle of British actors who are gathered in Egypt for the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference. (Not incidentally, it is at this conference where the fate of the Middle Eastern tribes was sealed, their borders drawn, and so many subsequent troubles sown.)

Agnes is likeable, witty, sympathetic without being cloying...in short, everything I would expect from Russell. Russell's language is bright, the characters - both historical and fictional figures alike - are well-developed, and the story is reasonable: the reader knows it is fiction, but it's constructed in a way that it could have happened. Russell has clearly done her homework. In short, Dreamers of the Day is a joy to read.

And then I got to the last page. Now, this is a book whose topic is relevant for any number of reasons these days, unfortunately, but I was unprepared for the penultimate paragraph, which is short, pithy, and can be repeated here without spoiling a thing: And never buy anything from a man who's selling fear. Reading that, I was certain Russell had whipped this book up in the last year. She didn't; it was was published in 2008. Nevertheless, the words hold true, and perhaps never has an ending felt more appropriate to me than that.

Four stars.