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Barbara Clark

FictionHistorical Fiction

The pioneer spirit, at any cost

Review by Barbara Clark

Imagine what it would feel like to travel with a wagon train of pioneers, joining the great march to America’s western frontier in 1846. Why would you take such a risk, and how would you cope if the worst happened? Author Gabrielle Burton explores these questions and others in her richly imagined, harrowing tale of death—and survival.

Impatient With Desire, a fictional account of the travails of the very real Donner Party, is framed as a diary kept by Tamsen Donner. Donner was one of 87 actual pioneers who, against the advice of several who had gone before, formed a party of nine wagons that left a much larger wagon train moving west, and struck out on what they had been told was a shortcut to reaching California.

They encountered rivers too swollen to be forged, mud-filled tracks that destroyed their wagons, a desert wasteland, and, at last, terrible snows that imprisoned the party in the Sierras for nearly four months, where nearly half of them perished from cold or starvation.

The story of the historical Donner Party became riveting news after it was learned that in order to survive, some of the party had resorted to eating the flesh of others in their party who had already succumbed. But in this novel, Burton departs from the merely sensational, and explores the fate of the party from a different perspective—that of a woman who, along with her husband, is following a dream shared by thousands at that time: a wanderlust and desire to leave familiar surroundings behind and move on to the edges of what was then an unknown wilderness. Tamsen’s diary captures the pull of this great adventure, in all its combined glory and folly, heady successes and tragic turns.

As her family huddles, close to starvation in the snowbound Sierras, Tamsen describes to her children, who cannot really remember them, the cherry orchards, apple trees and gentle spring breezes in the Illinois town they’ve left behind. The children ask, “Why did we leave?” To this, their parents have no answer, though they have ample time to revisit their decision again and again. Earlier, when given a choice, Tamsen admits they “could not bear to go back.”

Near the end of the diary, Tamsen and her husband sit together, looking out at the spectacular wilderness stretching before them. Tamsen, who has not entirely lost her spirit, reflects, “I knew that behind us lay the shadowed detritus of five months of survival, but our view was spectacular and uplifting.”

Barbara Clark writes from West Yarmouth, Massachusetts.

Imagine what it would feel like to travel with a wagon train of pioneers, joining the great march to America’s western frontier in 1846. Why would you take such a risk, and how would you cope if the worst happened? Author Gabrielle Burton explores these questions and others in her richly imagined, harrowing tale of […]
FictionWomen's Fiction

Moving beyond the ultimate betrayal

Review by Barbara Clark

The engrossing debut The Murderer’s Daughters is a survival story, if ever there was one—a sturdily written book about the close-knit lives of sisters Lulu and Merry, whose father murders their mother when they are just young children. Yes, it describes the fateful day, but little by little, it also lets you in on a secret: life goes on after events like that, too, and what you do with every minute of it counts.

The book deeply inscribes the 30 years that follow the tragedy in a tightly written, unsentimental narrative that doesn’t let either the reader or the characters opt out. Luckily, it also allows everyone to reap the ample rewards of following this story through. Each step forward for Lulu and Merry is hard-won and ultimately uplifting.

Even though he’s been incarcerated ever since the crime, their father’s presence is deeply scorched into the lives of Lulu, the elder, who tries to build her life on top of the past without allowing her family to glimpse its shaky foundations; and Merry, who feels haunted into continued visits to her father in prison. Both sisters dread hearing news of their father’s parol, but in the end that event may be the only way for the two to break free from their long emotional imprisonment of an entirely different sort.

Just like real life, what happens is believable, and the changes are on a human scale we can understand. There hardly seems a word or thought out of place in this narrative, so true does it keep to our sense of how people really do behave when their lives seem constantly under siege.

First-time author Randy Susan Meyers spent a decade of her own life working with victims, attackers and others affected by domestic violence, and all her words ring true.Merry, for one, is looking for perspective on her recently released father: “I could only hope to learn how not to hate him immoderately or love him too much. I needed to make my father life-size.” It’s finally that sense of “making things life-size” that informs this book and offers a way for these two survivors to move on, as they begin to make sense of the intricate tapestry of their lives.

Barbara Clark writes from West Yarmouth, Massachusetts.

The engrossing debut The Murderer’s Daughters is a survival story, if ever there was one—a sturdily written book about the close-knit lives of sisters Lulu and Merry, whose father murders their mother when they are just young children. Yes, it describes the fateful day, but little by little, it also lets you in on a […]
HistoryAmerican History

Lincoln’s holiday surprise

Review by Barbara Clark

In General Sherman’s Christmas, award-winning author and historian Stanley Weintraub has provided an engrossing, up-close-and-personal narrative describing Union General William T. Sherman’s famous month-long “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia, just before Christmas in 1864. Weintraub has built a name for himself by shedding light on some of history’s most memorable holidays, and this latest addition is another success.

In his daring 300-mile foray across the state, Sherman’s plan was not to enjoin his troops in battle, but to cut an intimidating swath with his army of 62,000 men through the civilian heart of Georgia, destroy Confederate supplies, and strike a psychological blow to civilian morale, convincing the populace of the futility of the Rebel effort.

A risky venture indeed, and to ensure its success, Sherman had to cut himself off from all avenues of supply and communication with the rest of the Union army. His troops had to forage for the 300 tons of food they needed to consume each day throughout the march. No humvees here, these soldiers marched with packs and muskets through the desolate and tarnished Georgia landscape, completing anywhere from 10 to 15 miles a day and confiscating everything edible in their path. While leaving the populace and most homes relatively untouched, they burned cotton gins, granaries, supply depots and armories, and destroyed rail lines and bridges as they went, in what later historians would call an early example of “total war” strategy.

A hero to Northerners, who welcomed news of the Union’s advance through the deep South, and a blackguard and villain to the civilian population through whose fields and forests he tramped, Sherman’s daring strategy paid off, and he was able to telegraph his now-famous message to President Lincoln on December 22: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah with 150 heavy guns & plenty of ammunition & also about 25,000 bales of cotton.” Sherman’s march had effectively ended all chances for the survival of the Confederacy.

Weintraub has filled his book with the reminiscences of actual participants in the momentous events, from an officer’s poignant description of soldiers’ songs echoing from campfire to campfire in the dusk, to the diary entries and letters of terrified Southern women desperate to find food after their carefully filled larders have been looted by passing troops, to the false optimism in the headlines of Confederate newspapers. These contributions form the real tapestry of the narrative, and furnish a dramatic backdrop to the march that changed the face of the war. By April of 1865, the Southern cause was dead.

 

In General Sherman’s Christmas, award-winning author and historian Stanley Weintraub has provided an engrossing, up-close-and-personal narrative describing Union General William T. Sherman’s famous month-long “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia, just before Christmas in 1864. Weintraub has built a name for himself by shedding light on some of history’s most memorable holidays, […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Baldacci’s new dynamic duo

Review by Barbara Clark

With True Blue, best-selling author David Baldacci says he knew “from the beginning” that his memorable duo, Mace and Beth Perry, would be taking center stage again in future thrillers. No wonder: this pair of sisters, who both started out as cops but ended up on different roads, make for compelling reading.

Beth is the chief of police in Washington, D.C., while Mace is just out after doing two years in prison for a crime she didn’t commit. Now she wants to clear her name and win back her badge. The sisters, whose close and supportive friendship held strong all through Mace’s imprisonment, are still watching each other’s backs, and now they’re zeroing in on a web of murder and deception that is spiraling outward, taking in D.C.’s darkest criminal neighborhoods as well as the upper echelons of Washington’s political hierarchy.

Baldacci is at the top of his game here, exercising his talent for creating both winsome and darker-than-dark characters that keep readers turning the pages. Mace grinds her mental gears and operates on a short fuse, but she keeps the book going at a breakneck pace as she steams through D.C.’s mean streets on her cherry red Ducati. Chief Perry has worked hard to get where she is, but her stubborn honesty and inner stability keep the book from bursting apart at the seams. Together these two complement each other as they stand alongside a cast of intriguing characters, including Roy, the hoop-shooting lawyer who found the first body (we know he’ll be back!); Captain, a disheveled homeless vet with a penchant for Twinkies; Abe, the richer-than-rich research scientist who hires Mace; and Mona, a vengeful U.S. attorney with friends in high places. Central to the action are Psycho, Razor, Alisha and other streetwise residents of the “Seven D” neighborhood on one side of town, and the high-flying politicos and shadowy intelligence agents who populate the other side—leaving us not at all clear about which is really the wrong side of the tracks.

In researching True Blue, Baldacci accompanied police patrols on their rounds of D.C. neighborhoods, and wrote a nationally published profile of the capital city’s real-life police chief, Cathy Lanier, the first top-ranked female law enforcement officer in that city’s history. The author’s in-depth research into Lanier’s up-through-the-ranks career helped inspire many of the absorbing details that elevate this book to a notch above most crime thrillers.

With True Blue, best-selling author David Baldacci says he knew “from the beginning” that his memorable duo, Mace and Beth Perry, would be taking center stage again in future thrillers. No wonder: this pair of sisters, who both started out as cops but ended up on different roads, make for compelling reading. Beth is the […]
FictionWorld Fiction

Family secrets fill debut novel

Review by Barbara Clark

Tell Me Something True is an apt title for this stunning novel. Thought and action frequently find themselves at odds in this fiction debut from journalist and television host Leila Cobo—we start out dipping our toes in what appears to be a clear stream with a firm sandy bottom, but we soon find ourselves in much deeper waters. As the impeccably drawn characters in this narrative begin to reveal themselves, what they choose to share with us isn’t always the truth.

On a yearly visit to her grandmother Nini in Colombia, Gabriella finds her deceased mother’s diary on a dusty shelf. The personal narrative Gabriella has created in her own mind about her mother’s life begins to unravel as she discovers another, hidden life, one that doesn’t match Gabriella’s creation. The diary abruptly ends just before her mother, Helena, took a final, fatal flight to Colombia, leaving Gabriella with a question: was Helena flying to Colombia to join her lover, abandoning her husband and four-year-old Gabriella, or was she traveling there to end that affair?

The contents of the diary form a sometimes eerie parallel to Gabriella’s story, as she finds herself stepping beyond the bounds of her well-ordered life to embrace a forbidden love affair of her own. The intertwining stories, though occasionally confusing in their similarities, are so well drawn that we’re in up to our necks before we know it.

Helena knows she’s justifying her secret life, but she fights to survive. It’s Gabriella’s life that grabs us, though, because we’re rooting for her, and at the same time we want to warn her she may not be thinking straight. At 22, for all her poise and accomplishments, she’s still acting like a teenager, convinced she has a handle on life’s pitfalls and can avoid them, even as she teeters on the brink. Gabriella wants to flaunt convention, but it’s hard for her to follow through, even as she struggles to find her place in the world and put her own demons to rest.

Does knowing the truth of a matter help us at a moment of emotional decision, even if we see where the chips are going to fall? Or are we every bit as vulnerable as if we’d not seen clear? The book’s strength is that it doesn’t give us the answers to our questions, and the author wisely hints that trying to unravel the knot of truth may prove a difficult task.

Barbara Clark writes from Cape Cod.

Tell Me Something True is an apt title for this stunning novel. Thought and action frequently find themselves at odds in this fiction debut from journalist and television host Leila Cobo—we start out dipping our toes in what appears to be a clear stream with a firm sandy bottom, but we soon find ourselves in […]
Mystery & SuspenseCozy Mystery

Vengeance is up for grabs

Review by Barbara Clark

Sometimes it’s a bad day for news. If you work for a newspaper, that means that nothing is happening. News and Features lounge about, trying to cobble something together, and the editor worries about what can be mustered up for page one, or for the editorial space.

On a particular December day, the staff at the Alpine, Washington, Advocate faces such a challenge, with House & Home (Vida), News desk (Mitch) and editor/publisher/heroine (Emma) discussing the dearth of options for tomorrow’s paper. Fortunately for page one, the sound of police sirens on the street alerts the newsroom, and word that an eccentric artist named Craig Laurentis has been shot and wounded quickly spreads throughout town.

 
At about the same time, Sheriff Milo Dodge pushes open the newsroom door, carrying three anonymous messages he’s received that claim the innocence of one local, Larry Peterson, long ago convicted of murder and serving a life sentence. Milo also brings word that said convict has just died of a heart attack in prison. The anonymous notes were written before Peterson died, but the “coincidental” news is unsettling.
 
Thus begins The Alpine Vengeance, Mary Daheim’s 22nd entry in her Alpine Alphabet series, in which the author revisits a previous book, The Alpine Fury (book six, of course!) where Peterson’s crime and punishment topped off a story that involved Emma and many others in the extended-family atmosphere of small town Alpine.
 
Emma reruns these past events in her mind, but after she pens an obituary on Peterson’s sudden death, she herself is visited by a fourth anonymous message, this one coldly menacing. If Peterson was innocent, who was he protecting? Emma and Milo pursue the case, not willing to let sleeping—or would it be dead?—dogs lie. The duo also pursue their ongoing romance, liberally spiced by the compelling character of Milo.

Alpine is a veritable Pandora’s box of characters, and by this time (letter “V”) the author might have done well to append a cast of characters or family tree to help us cope with all the Petersons and their cousins and kin. The book’s action is oiled by quick-fire and frequently witty dialogue, with an occasional wet snowstorm thrown in to evoke the Pacific Northwest atmosphere. As the story develops, seemingly disconnected threads begin to seam together alarmingly into whole cloth. The events in Vengeance quickly prove that everything’s up for grabs as far as old murders are concerned.  

 

Sometimes it’s a bad day for news. If you work for a newspaper, that means that nothing is happening. News and Features lounge about, trying to cobble something together, and the editor worries about what can be mustered up for page one, or for the editorial space. On a particular December day, the staff at […]
Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

Simone St. James

Interview by Barbara Clark

“Fiction can help us navigate fear, the same way it helps us navigate love and grief and anger and sadness. At least, it does for me.”

In The Broken Girls, author Simone St. James has created an intense, genuinely creepy novel that links the ghostly, gothic strands of a 60-year-old murder with secrets about to be unearthed in the present day.

The past and present stories are linked by Idlewild Hall, a long-abandoned school for troubled teenage girls—those “broken” by circumstance or disrupted family ties. In the 1950s, four roommates at the rural Vermont school share a bond formed from loneliness and a need to survive in the forbidding, eerie landscape at Idlewild, where generations of students have warned schoolmates that the school is haunted by the ghostly presence of a woman named Mary Hand who lurks in the hallways and oppressive gardens. After one of the four girls fails to return after a weekend visit to relatives, the school tags her as a runaway. Her friends, however, are convinced of foul play, and must play a lone hand in order to uncover the grim truth of her murder.

Old ghosts collide with the present more than 60 years later, when the crumbling school is scheduled for renovation. Journalist Fiona Sheridan confronts a haunted presence of her own, as she seeks closure in the murder of her sister, whose body was found 20 years earlier on Idlewild’s grounds.

With a ghostly setting and an addictive plot, St. James’ story is as haunting as it gets—poignant, evocative and difficult to forget.

There are many scenes in The Broken Girls that seem hopeful and bleak at the same time. Did you purposely set out to make the narrative ambiguous in that way?
Well, that’s the way I see life, so I suppose so! I don’t see any situation or any person as any one thing. So I try to portray that in my fiction. It leaves a lot of possibilities.

From the outset, did you have a full-blown concept for this ghost’s enigmatic personality, or did Mary’s motivations take on a life of their own as you wrote?
I had published five ghost stories before this one, so I’d written several kinds of ghosts. With this book, I wanted to write a haunting that was deeply psychological, preying on the characters’ fears. So I sketched out from the beginning what Mary would be like. That one aspect affected a lot of the story on its own.

Do you think all the puzzles surrounding ghostly apparitions in a novel need to be explained, or do you find it legitimate to leave some questions deliberately unanswered?
It’s a fine line to walk. As a ghost story writer you really, really want to avoid the “Scooby Doo” effect, in which everything is explained so thoroughly that it isn’t frightening anymore. At the same time you don’t want it so ambiguous that your reader is lost, and therefore stops caring. The great masters of the genre always leave certain things unexplained.

What do you think makes ghost stories so fascinating to readers?
It’s probably the “what if” aspect of it. Whether you believe or not in real life, in the pages of a novel you can ask yourself: What if it were true? What would happen then? What would the characters do, how would they react? Ghosts are also a manifestation of the past, which we’re always fascinated with, and they’re an idea of what happens after death, which humans have always wanted to know.

Why did you decide to use the plot device of balancing the past with a current-day crime plot? Did one story take precedence for you?
Using both time periods let me explore more than one aspect of the central tragedy of the book: how it unfolds at the time and the effect it continues to have through the years. Grief is one of the themes of the book, and grief is something that continues and changes with time. And it allowed me to show the haunting through generations of girls at Idlewild. Neither took precedence for me—I was equally invested in both.

Were you a fan of ghost stories while growing up? Which ghost “legacies” motivated you?
I’ve always loved ghost stories. I read Stephen King from an early age, and I have several volumes of classic Victorian and early 20th-century ghost stories. I’ve read Dracula countless times. You can’t possibly write a certain kind of book if you don’t enjoy reading it!

What kinds of background information did you seek in order to write this story?
I had to do research to make sure the 1950s era was accurate. I also had to do some World War II research that I won’t give away to avoid spoilers. That part was intense and often upsetting, and as most writers do, I learned much more than I actually put in the book. Trying to pick the most relevant facts is one of the skills of a writer.

The four teenage friends at Idlewild have very distinct personalities in terms of their impact on the story action. Did you have a favorite among them?
I didn’t; I loved writing all of them. Katie was the easiest to write, because her personality was the strongest, but I was rooting for each girl even as I wrote their chapters. I saw them very clearly as I wrote.

Fear seems to be a major factor in The Broken Girls. Did you set out to make fear serve as the main motivation for nearly all the characters in the book?
Fear is one of the themes of every book I write, and what makes me return to ghost stories. Fear is a universal emotion that has been with humankind since the very beginning, and it’s one we don’t often explore. We have lots of different fears in our lives, and not just of the supernatural. Fiction can help us navigate fear, the same way it helps us navigate love and grief and anger and sadness. At least, it does for me.

At what point in your life did you first decide that you wanted to become a writer?
I’ve written all my life; it’s just something I’ve always done, usually to amuse myself. Once I decided to get serious about it, I wrote three whole novels that were rejected everywhere and will live in a drawer forever before I wrote what would become my first published book. I spent years and years getting nothing but rejections as I wrote in all of my spare time. The experience toughened me up, and I learned to write no matter what negative things were happening around me.

 

Photo credit Adam Hunter

In The Broken Girls, author Simone St. James has created an intense, genuinely creepy novel that links the ghostly, gothic strands of a 60-year-old murder with secrets about to be unearthed in the present day.

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