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Deborah Donovan

FictionHistorical Fiction

Shanghai Girls 

Review by Deborah Donovan

Lisa See’s previous work has highlighted the lives of women in China from the 17th century to the present. Shanghai Girls opens in 1937 Shanghai, then shifts to the U.S., where See focuses her unique lens on the poverty and prejudice experienced by Chinese Americans until the late 1950s.

Pearl and May Chin, 21 and 18 years old, are working as models in Shanghai when their lives are dramatically uprooted: their father’s gambling debts have forced him to sell them into marriage to Chinese-American husbands. As they plan to elude this unacceptable fate, Japanese bombs begin falling on Shanghai; in their attempt to escape, Pearl is brutally raped by soldiers and hospitalized.

Their misfortunes continue after landing at Angel Island (“the Ellis Island of the West”), where the sisters are interrogated for months. Pearl realizes they are hopelessly stranded: “China is lost to the Japanese, May’s pregnant, and we have no money and no family.” The only officially married woman of the two, Pearl takes May’s place as mother of Joy, the baby born shortly before they leave for Los Angeles to meet their husbands. See astutely blends the struggle of this extended family with actual historical events: their attempts at distinguishing themselves as non-Japanese during the war, their reactions from afar as the Red Army pushes across China and the ensuing McCarthy-era bids at labeling them Communists.

Throughout her compelling family saga, See underlines the importance of ancient traditions for her characters, especially Pearl, whose mother-in-law instills “Chinese” into her “as surely as the flavor of ginger seeps into soup.” When Joy returns from her first college year in 1956 calling her family “wrong and backward,” it is Pearl who reacts most strongly, while May is the one who has adapted L.A.’s Hollywood mores quite easily. But as the novel ends, May tells Pearl, “Whenever our hair is white, we’ll still have our sister love.”

Satisfying on so many levels, See’s latest is above all a confirmation of unbreakable family bonds, as two Shanghai girls survive seemingly insurmountable setbacks, both at home and abroad.

Deborah Donovan writes from La Veta, Colorado.

Satisfying on so many levels, See’s latest is above all a confirmation of unbreakable family bonds, as two Shanghai girls survive seemingly insurmountable setbacks, both at home and abroad.
Fiction

The ripples of discontent

Review by Deborah Donovan

Muddy River, a small provincial Chinese city, is the setting for this intense and thought-provoking debut novel from Yiyun Li, who was raised in Beijing. The year is 1979, 10 years before the violent protests at Tiananmen Square. The seeds of discontent have already been planted in Muddy River—The Vagrants opens with the execution of a young woman, Shan Gu, formerly a supporter of Chairman Mao and his Cultural Revolution, now a vocal counterrevolutionary.

Li deftly examines the effects of Shan's execution on her engrossing cast of characters, whose lives are interwoven both by proximity and by emotional bonds. Shan's father, a teacher, has spent years apologizing for his daughter's actions, telling himself "a child's fault is the father's fault.‚" Her mother mourns her only child deeply and harbors a dangerous belief that Shan had a right to vocalize her convictions. 

Across the city live Kai, a former actress, now the Katie Couric of Muddy River, and her husband, the son of powerful government employees. Kai attended school with Shan, and has recently become involved with the counterrevolutionary group, unbeknownst to her husband or in-laws. Aware of the burgeoning "Democratic Wall‚" movement in Beijing, this group distributes leaflets in Muddy River and organizes a petition in protest of Shan's execution. Each of Li's characters is swept up in this counterrevolutionary epidemic in a variety of ways; she poignantly portrays how the ripples from the execution of one villager ultimately affect them all.

Li received numerous awards for her 2005 short story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, including the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and a Whiting Award. Her debut novel is both a stunning encapsulation of China in the decade before Tiananmen Square and a perceptive portrayal of individuals who took part in those historic events, willingly or otherwise.

Deborah Donovan writes from La Veta, Colorado.

Muddy River, a small provincial Chinese city, is the setting for this intense and thought-provoking debut novel from Yiyun Li, who was raised in Beijing. The year is 1979, 10 years before the violent protests at Tiananmen Square. The seeds of discontent have already been planted in Muddy River—The Vagrants opens with the execution of […]
FictionDebut Fiction

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Review by Deborah Donovan

This spellbinding debut novel set in the north woods of Wisconsin resonates with the reader on many levels. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is a mystery, a coming-of-age tale and a deeply emotional exploration of the often inexplicable ties between dogs and their owners.

Starting with Edgar's grandfather in the 1920s, the Sawtelles have been dedicated to the breeding and training of dogs – a mission they have painstakingly carried out not by tracing pedigrees, but by a unique, intuitive method of tracking behavioral and personality traits. Edgar, Gar and Trudy Sawtelle's only child, is born mute, but he is perceptive beyond his years, and his ability to communicate with the kennel dogs using his own brand of sign language is uncanny.

Born at nearly the same time as Edgar is the dog Almondine, and they forge a heart-rending bond. Author David Wroblewski, who grew up not far from where the book is set, paints his characters with a keenly empathetic brush. His passages that revolve around human-dog relationships are especially memorable. Scene after scene etches itself in our minds, such as when Edgar races back to the house from his father's gravesite near the ceremony's end to retrieve Almondine, who had inadvertently been left behind. She sits her "wise haunches down," and together they watch the casket descend.

Wroblewski's seemingly bucolic plot takes a menacing turn when Edgar discerns foul play behind his father's sudden death. In addition, he is inwardly enraged by the attention his mother is showering on his uncle Claude – Gar's brother, with whom he had always been at odds. Edgar's dreams of his father become painfully realistic; he feels his presence as if all his father's own memories were being given, somehow, to him.

An accident for which Edgar feels partially to blame propels him, along with three of his dogs, into the surrounding Chequamegon forest, only sparsely dotted with tiny towns and isolated cabins. The struggle of this steadfast quartet to survive, and learn to trust not only each other, but strangers, constitutes a harrowing coming-of-age saga, culminating in Edgar's return home, and the violent, somehow preordained conclusion that awaits him. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is an unforgettable debut – one to savor, to share, and even, despite its length, to re-read.

Deborah Donovan, a dog person, has spent part of each summer since childhood in the Chequamegon National Forest.

 

This spellbinding debut novel set in the north woods of Wisconsin resonates with the reader on many levels. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is a mystery, a coming-of-age tale and a deeply emotional exploration of the often inexplicable ties between dogs and their owners. Starting with Edgar's grandfather in the 1920s, the Sawtelles have been […]
Fiction

A town connected by a painful past

Review by Deborah Donovan

Louise Erdrich's 13th mesmerizing and generations-spanning tale, A Plague of Doves, takes place in the small, now-dying town of Pluto, North Dakota—a town founded by whites in the late 1800s on the very edge of an Ojibwe Indian reservation, in the hope of profiting from the soon-to-be-built railroad line. There Evelina Harp, a young woman of mixed heritage, hears from her grandfather Mooshum a haunting story—a story kept from her for more than 50 years.

That story is Mooshum's recollection of the gruesome murder, in 1911, of one of Pluto's white families, and the hanging shortly thereafter of three innocent Indians cast as the perpetrators, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Evelina subsequently becomes obsessed with lineage, gradually tracing the blood history of all the participants—those murdered, the Native American scapegoats and the lynching party—through their remaining relatives in "elaborate spider webs of lines and intersecting circles." Erdrich reveals these webs of relationships gradually, by means of chapters moving back and forth in time, each devoted to one of the descendants. These include Evelina herself, whose grandfather escaped the lynching but still feels guilt for the role he played that day; the judge who marries Evelina's aunt; Pluto's female doctor who, as an infant, was the only one in her family to survive that long-ago massacre; the teaching nun descended from brothers in the lynching mob—each is irrevocably tied to the others in never-ending threads of history.

Enriching this character-driven plot are exquisitely drawn scenes, like the mass of late-19th-century parishioners wildly dancing through the cornfields, hoping to scare away the ravenous plague of doves destroying their crop; a young nun's swirling habit as she rounds the bases at recess; and two of Pluto's oldest survivors taking their daily walk around the town perimeter, until their footsteps "wear [our] orbit into the earth." As Erdrich traces the rippling repercussions of that fateful day, her characters' lives leave an indelible trace on her readers.

 

Deborah Donovan writes from La Veta, Colorado.

Louise Erdrich's 13th mesmerizing and generations-spanning tale, A Plague of Doves, takes place in the small, now-dying town of Pluto, North Dakota—a town founded by whites in the late 1800s on the very edge of an Ojibwe Indian reservation, in the hope of profiting from the soon-to-be-built railroad line. There Evelina Harp, a young woman […]
Fiction

Wit’s End

Review by Deborah Donovan

Karen Joy Fowler’s fifth novel follows 2004’s The Jane Austen Book Club, which was made into a movie last year. Wit’s End offers themes similar to those found in that very popular book, but takes some mysterious and highly divergent paths along the way.

Rima Lanisell is a 29-year-old high school teacher in Cleveland who has lost her whole family—her mother a long time ago to an aneurysm, her beloved younger brother Oliver four years ago in a car crash, and her father recently to leukemia. Rima’s godmother Addison Early (known as A.B. Early to the fans of her many mystery novels) was once an “old pal” of Rima’s father Bim; Addison invites Rima for a visit to her home in Santa Cruz, California—a rambling old house near the coast called Wit’s End. Rima arrives, not only seeking solace from her unhappy life in Ohio, but also trying to discover clues about the enigma of her father’s life: What was his relationship to Addison all those years ago? Why did Addison have a character named after her father kill three people in one of her most popular books? And what about Addison’s obsession with cults and communes—is it related to Holy City, a real-life commune not far from Wit’s End?

As Rima seeks to unravel clues by studying Addison’s fictional world, she begins to realize how intricately the real world is tied to her godmother’s mysteries, manifested by the countless blogs that dissect each book, and the fans, past and present, who “communicate” with Maxwell Lane, Addison’s famous detective.

This bond between writers and readers, and the link between real life and an author’s work, echo ideas in The Jane Austen Book Club, but Fowler has given her new novel a myriad of contemporary twists, from the machinations of posting and editing on Wikipedia to Addison’s newest endeavor: a website called Murder Capital of the World that revolves around a virtual Maxwell Lane. Fowler obviously had fun with her latest offering, and new fans as well as old are sure to do the same.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

Karen Joy Fowler’s fifth novel follows 2004’s The Jane Austen Book Club, which was made into a movie last year. Wit’s End offers themes similar to those found in that very popular book, but takes some mysterious and highly divergent paths along the way. Rima Lanisell is a 29-year-old high school teacher in Cleveland who […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Tenderness of Wolves

Review by Deborah Donovan

Stef Penney's mesmerizing debut novel, winner of Britain's Costa Book of the Year Award (formerly the Whitbread Award), entertains on several levels. The Tenderness of Wolves is in part a murder mystery, opening with the brutal killing of a French-Canadian trapper near Dove River, a small settlement in Canada's northern territory. It's also a historical family saga, focusing on Mrs. Ross, who discovers the murdered trapper, and who came to this remote part of Canada with her husband Angus from Scotland as part of the mid-19th-century Highland Clearances. They were two of countless immigrants who fanned out from the landing stops at Halifax and Montreal like the tributaries of a river, and disappeared, every one, into the wilderness. Mrs. Ross and Angus lost a baby daughter; they later adopted Francis, an Irish orphan, who is now 17 and as much a stranger as ever to his parents. His mother is worried, for Francis has been gone since the day of the murder. Constantly encompassing the novel's multilayered plot is the landscape itself vast and unpopulated, with dangerously frigid temperatures and endless stretches of snow and ice where first Mrs. Ross and a half-breed tracker, then two Hudson Bay Company men, set off to find Francis and the murderer, assuming they're not one and the same.

Penney is a Scottish screenwriter who has drawn this landscape so realistically that the reader feels he is accompanying her stoic characters despite the fact that she has never traveled to Canada herself. She immersed herself in research at the British Library, and has sprinkled her captivating debut with such diverse characters as two young sisters who disappeared 15 years earlier; the searcher employed by their parents who is now obsessed with discovering evidence of a written Native language; and various Hudson Bay Company hangers-on, debilitated by drugs and drink as trapping profits have dwindled. Penney is at work on her second book. This one set in is Britain, and sure to be eagerly awaited by readers of this haunting melange of mystery, history and adventure.

Stef Penney's mesmerizing debut novel, winner of Britain's Costa Book of the Year Award (formerly the Whitbread Award), entertains on several levels. The Tenderness of Wolves is in part a murder mystery, opening with the brutal killing of a French-Canadian trapper near Dove River, a small settlement in Canada's northern territory. It's also a historical […]
Fiction

Ondaatje’s portrait of a family divided

Review by Deborah Donovan

Canadian author Michael Ondaatje is best known for his 1992 novel, The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize that year. In his latest novel, his first since 2000's Anil's Ghost, Ondaatje weaves a mesmerizing saga of closely-knit characters who suddenly and dramatically disperse, and are forced to reinvent themselves years and continents apart.

The novel opens with a bucolic scene a farm in northern California in the 1970s where a single father has raised two teenaged daughters, Anna and Claire, since birth. He is assisted by Coop, a boy a few years older than the girls an orphan he informally adopted. Their peaceful life is fractured when the father discovers a doomed romance between Anna and Coop, and the ensuing violence propels them all onto different and solitary paths.

The reader next encounters Anna 18 years later in a small village in southern France. Now a literary archivist conducting research on Segura, a turn-of-the-century poet and novelist, she is still unable to escape the incident that set fire to the rest of [her] life. During these same years, Claire finds herself living two distinct lives: doing legal research in San Francisco during the week, then spending weekends with her father on the farm. The two live quietly there, always circling the episode that led to the absence of Anna in their lives. While working on a case, Claire runs into Coop in Tahoe, and discovers he has lost all memory of the incident and has no desire to revisit his past.

The narrative then shifts to the life of the novelist Anna is studying in France. After leaving his own wife, Segura buys an abandoned farmhouse and adopts his own gypsy couple and their son Rafael. Decades after that, Anna stays in that farmhouse, and meets and loves Rafael thus tying together two of many threads in this haunting and ever-spiraling story.

Ondaatje is also a poet; here he has woven a tale of loves lost and families sundered in a brilliantly poetic voice a tale that lingers long after its telling.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

Canadian author Michael Ondaatje is best known for his 1992 novel, The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize that year. In his latest novel, his first since 2000's Anil's Ghost, Ondaatje weaves a mesmerizing saga of closely-knit characters who suddenly and dramatically disperse, and are forced to reinvent themselves years and continents apart. The […]
FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

Memoirist spins a tale of two brothers

Review by Deborah Donovan

In acclaimed memoirist Da Chen's fiction debut, he blends an account of China's late 20th-century political history with the gripping story of two half-brothers separated by fate. In 1960, Shento is born in southwest China, just before his disgraced mother, the mistress of the prestigious Gen. Ding Long, kills herself; he is found and raised by villagers. Born in Beijing that same year to the general and his wife is Tan, who is raised in luxury. Neither knows of the other's existence until they reach manhood Chen gradually brings the reader to that point in chapters written in their alternating voices.

When Shento's adoptive parents are killed, he is sent to a strict army school. There, he meets Sumi, a beautiful young girl whose intelligence matches his own. He kills to survive, he's imprisoned, then forcibly enlisted into a secret intelligence unit. When he is released, Shento is a changed man, driven by the need for revenge on his father. He is assigned to protect President Heng Tu, one of his father's old enemies.

During the same years, Tan has also changed. In high school he admires speeches about the need for China to follow in democracy's footsteps a surprising path for the son of conservative military chief. He, too, meets the thoughtful and intelligent Sumi, who believes that Shento is dead. The two head to Beijing University, where they become involved in campus political groups seeking to overthrow Heng Tu.

The story intensifies as Shento climbs higher on the ladder of the repressive government in power, and Tan turns into one of China's brightest and most progressive capitalists. The vying factions collide at Tiananmen Square in 1986, the three forever altered by the turmoil in their beloved country. Chen's memorable debut novel has many facets a family saga, a love story and a tale of political intrigue, dramatically woven into years of social upheaval.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

 

In acclaimed memoirist Da Chen's fiction debut, he blends an account of China's late 20th-century political history with the gripping story of two half-brothers separated by fate.
Fiction

Love and larceny in Carey’s latest

Review by Deborah Donovan

Australian author Peter Carey, winner of the Booker Prize both in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang, mines the pricey world of modern art in his latest novel, Theft: A Love Story, set in Australia and New York City.

Michael Boone is a formerly famous artist. His biggest collector sets him up as caretaker of his country estate in New South Wales, hoping he'll regain some of his former brilliance. Accompanying Michael is his mentally challenged brother Hugh. Into their somewhat humdrum existence drops Marlene Leibovitz—the daughter-in-law of the famous abstract expressionist, Jacques Leibovitz. Marlene's husband has inherited the right to authenticate his deceased father's works. Marlene's larcenous side leads her to steal and alter real Leibovitz paintings, and to get Michael to produce fakes—no scheme is too over-the-top for Carey's pen.

For the past 15 years Carey has lived in New York; a friendship with an art dealer there led him to reflect on how the value of a work of art is ultimately assessed, and how quickly one style in current favor could be abandoned for another. He sprinkles dollops of tongue-in-cheek satire throughout this novel, skewering everything from dealers who capriciously decide what's in and what's out to exhibitions in department stores.

Carey's tour through the modern art scene has its touching moments, too. Michael constantly worries that Hugh is "dead, drowned, run over, [or] picked up by sick-ohs in a van," and Hugh, though short on brain power, perceptively feels his brother's pain at being out of the artistic limelight.

Readers new to Carey's prose will soon find he is a master of the metaphor, repeatedly offering gems like the one Hugh uses to describe his image appearing in a Polaroid: "like a drowned man floating to the surface of a dam." Carey's latest romp, a winning combination of character study and suspense, should appeal to readers who enjoy literary fiction delivered in a satirical and witty voice.

Deborah Donovan has a master's degree in art history.

 

Australian author Peter Carey, winner of the Booker Prize both in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang, mines the pricey world of modern art in his latest novel, Theft: A Love Story, set in Australia and New York City. Michael Boone is a formerly famous artist. His […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

Feuding sisters vie for immortality

Review by Deborah Donovan

Following her well-received fictional biography of Cleopatra, Karen Essex's latest novel brilliantly captures the turbulent years of late 15th-century Italy as seen through the eyes of the bold and beguiling Este sisters, whose lives and fates were inextricably woven into the political tapestry of those times.

In 1490, the beautiful and brainy Isabella d'Este of Ferrara, 15, is engaged to Francesco Gonzaga, destined to become the Marquis of Mantua; her younger, homlier sister Beatrice is promised to Ludovico Sforza, the future Duke of Milan. Both marriages are forged solely to cement stronger ties between Ferrara and those more powerful cities. Though Isabella is initially happier in her marriage than Beatrice, she secretly lusts for Ludovico and his political power. The sisters vie constantly with one another, as each triumph in Isabella's life is immediately overshadowed by Beatrice's victory. Above all, Isabella is jealous of the fact that Ludovico is the patron of the famous Leonardo da Vinci; she longs for her beauty to be immortalized by the master of masters. But Ludovico knows he can only commission Leonardo to paint his sister-in-law after he has painted his wife, and Beatrice has no interest in sitting for the artist who has already painted her husband's mistress.

Essex breathes vibrant life into the privileged lives of these two royal families with lavish descriptions of their bejeweled clothing, myriad servants and rooms with lush tapestries and paintings on every wall. The narrative crackles with political intrigue, as Essex carefully outlines the battles between city-states, and the growing animosity between Francesco and Ludovico over France's burgeoning presence in Italy. Of the two sisters, only Beatrice was painted by Leonardo—inserted by him into a mural by a lesser artist on the wall opposite The Last Supper. Though she died in childbirth at age 21, that portrait assured her immortality, leading Essex to bring her short history to life.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

Following her well-received fictional biography of Cleopatra, Karen Essex's latest novel brilliantly captures the turbulent years of late 15th-century Italy as seen through the eyes of the bold and beguiling Este sisters, whose lives and fates were inextricably woven into the political tapestry of those times. In 1490, the beautiful and brainy Isabella d'Este of […]
FictionWomen's Fiction

Forces of nature

Review by Deborah Donovan

The Ice Queen is the latest in a long line of 30 years' worth of novels from Alice Hoffman—novels that seamlessly blend magic and reality. It is the tale of a librarian in a small town whose wishes come true, but not always for the best.

When the unnamed narrator is eight years old, and her brother Ned 12, their mother leaves the children alone one night, ostensibly to celebrate her birthday with friends. The narrator wishes her mother, who is raising the children alone after her husband abandoned the family, would disappear—and she dies that night, her car crashing on an icy road. The children go to live with their grandmother; Ned becomes a meteorologist and moves from New Jersey to Florida while his sister goes to library school, still feeling the guilt and self-loathing brought on by her wish the night her mother died.

After suffering a mental breakdown, the narrator goes to Florida with Ned to start work at the local library, but remains obsessed with death until she is struck by lightning. Suddenly her drab life changes dramatically. Suffering heart and neurological damage, she enlists in a study of lightning-strike survivors at the local college. She decides to seek out one such survivor who had been struck dead, then came back to life Lazarus Jones. They embark on a strange and erotic relationship fueled by their ability to share secrets that have kept each of them estranged from most other people for years. In her signature style, Hoffman describes their powerful desire for one another as a force of nature, brought on by the trauma each experienced both before and after their lightning episodes.

Hoffman confronts death and dying, and the significance of the "now," finally allowing her narrator to feel lucky for what she has. In her unique way she imbues seemingly mundane issues with a touch of magic, and in so doing brings her unique and endearing characters vividly to life.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

The Ice Queen is the latest in a long line of 30 years' worth of novels from Alice Hoffman—novels that seamlessly blend magic and reality. It is the tale of a librarian in a small town whose wishes come true, but not always for the best.

FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

East meets West in a sensitive debut

Review by Deborah Donovan

A cornucopia of stories, woven intricately together by one exquisite painting, flows throughout Nina Schuyler's debut novel, each one dependent on the other, yet shining on its own. The Painting opens in Japan in 1870, when the country was beginning to cast off its centuries of isolation and open itself to western influence. Hayashi, a crippled potter who now exports his bowls to France, and his young wife Ayoshi, who struggles to maintain her loveless, arranged marriage, live just outside Tokyo. Ayoshi privately mourns the loss of her lover, Urashi, and their baby, whom her father forced her to abort. Her paintings of herself and Urashi, done in secret and kept hidden, somehow alleviate her grief and allow her to navigate the sad reality her life has become.

On the other side of the world, Jorgen, a Danish soldier and volunteer for France in the Franco-Prussian War, is running from his own failures at home. After losing a leg in battle, he hunkers down in Paris, taking a job with Pierre, the brother of one of his fallen comrades, in his black market enterprise. There, while unwrapping one of Hayashi's bowls, Jorgen discovers a delicately rendered painting of two Japanese lovers. Drawn by the beauty of the painting and its emotional message, Jorgen stashes it away, never telling Pierre of its existence.

Schuyler deftly employs her secondary characters to represent opposing views a young Buddhist monk descends on Hayashi and Ayoshi's home and secretly holds ancient Buddhist ceremonies there at the same time another guest extols the virtues of casting off the past in favor of commerce with the burgeoning markets of the West. And in Paris, Jorgen's boss Pierre gets rich from his sleazy business ventures while his sister, whom he calls a "dangerous idealist," joins the army to support her country's cause.

Ultimately, all are affected in various ways by the painting Ayoshi has so carefully dispatched to the new world, a world she eventually joins. Packed with historic detail and musings on the bond between emotions and artistic endeavor, Schuyler's novel is an illuminating and sensitive debut.

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

 

A cornucopia of stories, woven intricately together by one exquisite painting, flows throughout Nina Schuyler's debut novel, each one dependent on the other, yet shining on its own. The Painting opens in Japan in 1870, when the country was beginning to cast off its centuries of isolation and open itself to western influence. Hayashi, a […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

Hardscrabble lives on the Great Plains

Review by Deborah Donovan

Set in the isolated and fictitious town of Minerva, Minnesota, in the 1920s, Sharratt's luminous second novel captivates the reader from the first page with an intriguing tale of three strong women who struggle against the choking repression of both the town and the times in which they live.

The relationship between 15-year-old Penny and her mother Barbara, who is only 30, has been deteriorating since Penny became aware of Barbara's "dirty" affair with her employer Laurence Hamilton, for whom she cooks and cleans. Hamilton's wife has been in a coma-like state, a victim of the Spanish flu epidemic, for four years and lives in a nursing home in the neighboring town. Though her mother seems oblivious to the local gossip, Penny feels the town's condemnation wherever she goes; she retaliates by answering an ad for a hired hand placed by Cora Egan, a mysterious, pregnant newcomer to Minerva. Penny fortuitously arrives on the day that Cora's daughter Phoebe is born, and the lives of these three immediately become inextricably woven.

Home-schooled by Cora, Penny gains knowledge of science and literature, even identifying with Penelope of the Odyssey, who demonstrates the same determined individuality that Penny so admires in Cora. Gradually, Penny learns more and more details of Cora's past as a debutante and wife of a surgeon, and discovers why she now takes such pains to disguise her femininity by cutting her hair and dressing like a man. Tensions begin to build as both Cora's and Barbara's hidden lives seem destined to be explosively revealed, threatening both the strong bonds the women have created and the stable lives toward which they've been working.

Sharratt perceptively portrays the simultaneous freedom and repression of the 1920s, and poetically imbues even the most mundane chores with significance. As she did in her well-received first novel, Summit Avenue, Sharratt has again drawn on her Minnesota roots to bring a small, seemingly placid town to unpredictable life.

 

Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.

Set in the isolated and fictitious town of Minerva, Minnesota, in the 1920s, Sharratt's luminous second novel captivates the reader from the first page with an intriguing tale of three strong women who struggle against the choking repression of both the town and the times in which they live. The relationship between 15-year-old Penny and […]

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