A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

Published January 2020 by Random House Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary:

In the late 1930s, civil war grips Spain. When General Franco and his Fascists succeed in overthrowing the government, hundreds of thousands are forced to flee in a treacherous journey over the mountains to the French border. Among them is Roser, a pregnant young widow, who finds her life intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love. In order to survive, the two must unite in a marriage neither of them desires. 

Together with two thousand other refugees, Roser and Victor embark on the SS Winnipeg, a ship chartered by the poet Pablo Neruda, to Chile: “the long petal of sea and wine and snow.” As unlikely partners, the couple embraces exile as the rest of Europe erupts in world war. Starting over on a new continent, they face trial after trial, but they will also find joy as they patiently await the day when they might go home. Through it all, their hope of returning to Spain keeps them going. Destined to witness the battle between freedom and repression as it plays out across the world, Roser and Victor will find that home might have been closer than they thought all along.

My Thoughts:

Isabel Allende is one of my favorite authors - she is superb at writing sweeping sagas that span generations of captivating, unusual characters set in interesting times and places, most often set, at least in part, in Allende's homeland, Chile. Six decades, three generations, much of the book set in Chile - in that regard, A Long Petal of the Sea is no exception. 

This is by far the most political of the books by Allende that I've read and, while I'm not opposed to that in a book, it did overwhelm the story for me. That being said, I learned so much about the Spanish Civil War and the politics of Chile and it was fascinating to compare both of those political environments with the current state of affairs in this country. Allende condemns both sides for atrocities they commit but as the child of a man who headed a socialist government, it's not surprising that the working class is portrayed more sympathetically. A warning for some - the Catholic church does not fare well in Allende's hands in this book.

You are accustomed to me saying that books would have benefited from a pruning; here, with a story this big, I felt like more would have been better. There would have been more room to include the political stories that Allende wanted to include (some for quite personal reasons - her father was the president of Chile for three years in the 1970's) while also allowing room to flesh out the stories of the families. There were characters I definitely wanted to know more about, characters I wanted to understand better. 

Mind you, this book was named as one of the best books of 2020 by a number of publications so what do I know? Perhaps they all appreciated a decades-long saga that didn't go on for 800 pages. And Allende absolutely manages, in these 314 pages, to explore so many themes, tell us so many stories, and, hopefully, have us wanting to learn more. 

Source: checked out of my local library for August's book club selection

Love and Ruin by Paula McLain

Love And Ruin by Paula McLain
Published May 2018 by Random House Publishing Group
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:
In 1937, twenty-eight-year-old Martha Gellhorn travels alone to Madrid to report on the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War and becomes drawn to the stories of ordinary people caught in the devastating conflict. It’s the adventure she’s been looking for and her chance to prove herself a worthy journalist in a field dominated by men. But she also finds herself unexpectedly—and uncontrollably—falling in love with Hemingway, a man on his way to becoming a legend.

In the shadow of the impending Second World War, and set against the turbulent backdrops of Madrid and Cuba, Martha and Ernest’s relationship and their professional careers ignite. But when Ernest publishes the biggest literary success of his career, For Whom the Bell Tolls, they are no longer equals, and Martha must make a choice: surrender to the confining demands of being a famous man’s wife or risk losing Ernest by forging a path as her own woman and writer. It is a dilemma that could force her to break his heart, and hers.

My Thoughts:
I first read about Gellhorn in McLain's previous book about a Hemingway wife, The Paris Wife, which looked at Hemingway's first wife, Hadley Richardson. I wonder if McLain felt herself fall down a rabbit hole once she started researching for the first book or if she had all long intended to write about her as well. Hadley's story was as much about Hemingway as it was about Hadley. Martha's story is her own; Hemingway just happens to make her both ridiculous happy and insanely unhappy for the majority of it.

Gellhorn met Hemingway when she was just 28. He was 37, already divorced and married again with three sons. It didn't matter. Their friendship became much more under the heightened emotional condition of reporting on the Spanish Civil War. He was passionate, adoring, and a fierce advocate of Gellhorn's writing. They married after almost four years of mostly living together because, according to McLain, Hemingway wanted it. Gellhorn balked but she loved Hemingway too much to tell him no, even as she could see that he was starting to want something from her that she couldn't give him.

As in The Paris Wife, McLain tries to explain how Ernest Hemingway became the man he was and she makes him out to be a very devoted father. But it's not enough to make me change my opinion of the man. She also paints him as a man who had to be the center of attention where ever he was, whomever he was with. He was a slob, had a terrible temper, and was unforgiving.

In McLain's hands, Gellhorn is a young woman who is determined to be a writing and even more determined to bring the plight of people in war-torn lands to the public's attention. She wasn't a saint; Hemingway was not the first married man with whom she had an affair. But one gets the impression that she could have been just the woman for Hemingway if he had been willing to give her the space she needed, just as he expected his space.

The book is mostly written from Gellhorn's perspective, but there are occasionally passages of Hemingway's internal thoughts. Maybe McLain thought that was the best way to give readers information Gellhorn would not have known but it was a little jarring. Sometimes I grew tired of the back and forth of Gellhorn's thoughts about the relationship. But the war reporting scenes are extremely well written, showing how a reporter can both be terrified but also unable to leave.

McLain makes me want to learn more about this woman who spent 60 years reporting from war zones all over the world just as she make me want to learn more about Beryl Markham after reading her Circling The Sun. Gellhorn was so much more than just the third wife of Ernest Hemingway.

The Women In The Castle by Jessica Shattuck

The Women In The Castle by Jessica Shattuck
Published March 2017 by Harper Collins Publishers
Source: bought for my Nook

Publisher's Summary:

Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined.

Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany’s defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband’s ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband’s brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows.

First Marianne rescues six-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest childhood friend, from a Nazi reeducation home. Together, they make their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin, where Martin’s mother, the beautiful and naive Benita, has fallen into the hands of occupying Red Army soldiers. Then she locates Ania, another resister’s wife, and her two boys, now refugees languishing in one of the many camps that house the millions displaced by the war.

As Marianne assembles this makeshift family from the ruins of her husband’s resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that the black-and-white, highly principled world of her privileged past has become infinitely more complicated, filled with secrets and dark passions that threaten to tear them apart. Eventually, all three women must come to terms with the choices that have defined their lives before, during, and after the war—each with their own unique share of challenges.

My Thoughts:
I read this with the Omaha Bookworms* last month. It wasn't exactly what any of us had been expecting (maybe because we didn't entirely read through the synopsis); but we all liked the story the book does tell.

This was another one of those books about World War II that surprised me by giving me a view of that war that I've never read about before. Shattuck raises a lot of questions in The Women In The Castle. What of the German people in the aftermath, those who supported the German war machine and those who opposed it? And how do they live with each other after what has happened? And how do people live with the things they've done to survive?

As much as I disliked the Germans for what they did during the war, it's the Russians who really come off as the bad guys here as they literally rape, pillage, and plunder their way across what's left of Germany. I'm not naive enough to believe that American soldiers didn't commit some atrocities as they moved across the lands of the conquered enemies, but the Russians seem to have taken their revenge for what was done to their people by German soldiers and their leaders.

One of the things that grabbed me about this book was how often this piece of history mirrored our current political situation.

"For so long Marianne and Albrecht and many of their friends had known Hitler was a lunatic, a leader whose lowbrow appeal to people's most selfish, self-pitying emotions and ignorance was an embarrassment for their country. They had watched him make a masterwork of scapegoating Jews for Germany's fall from power and persuade his followers that enlightenment, humanity, and tolerance were weaknesses - "Jewish" ideas that led to defeat. They had wrung their hands over his dangerous conflations, his fervor, and his lack of humanity." 

These ladies have stayed with me; a month after reading the book, I'm still thinking about them and their strength and their pain.

*This is a terrific book club selection, with a lot to talk about including the ties to current times, the bonds the women forged, the ways they survived and the truth of the history in the book. We definitely recommend it for other book clubs.

The Absolutist by John Boyne

The Absolutist by John Boyne
Narrated by Michael Maloney
Published May 2011 by Doubleday Publishing
Source: my audiobook copy purchased at my library book sale

Publisher's Summary:
It is September 1919: twenty-one-year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver a package of letters to the sister of Will Bancroft, the man he fought alongside during the Great War.

But the letters are not the real reason for Tristan's visit. He can no longer keep a secret and has finally found the courage to unburden himself of it. As Tristan recounts the horrific details of what to him became a senseless war, he also speaks of his friendship with Will—from their first meeting on the training grounds at Aldershot to their farewell in the trenches of northern France.

My Thoughts:
First - the three covers. Hardcover, paperback/Nook, and audiobook. They're all great covers but that hardcover, which I'd not seen until I started to write this, is absolutely perfect.

"Chiefly a phenomenon of Britain, white feathers were typically handed over by young women to men out of uniform during wartime, the implication being that the man concerned was a 'shirker' or a coward. The co-called 'Organisation of the White Feather' was initiated by Admiral Charles Fitzgerald in the opening month of the war and was encouraged by a number of writers, including Mary Ward. The organisation was founded as a means of applying pressure to able bodied men to enlist with the British Army." - FirstWorldWar.com

The movement was based on the 1902 novel by A. E W. Mason, The Four Feathers, in which a young man who quit his regiment during war received four white feathers as a sign of cowardice. For the soldiers in the field, men who declared as conscientious objectors became known as feather men and were looked down on as cowards, according to Boyne. During the First World War, these men were given noncombat duties (very often duties that put them in the most danger, such as stretcher bearers). An absolutist was someone who refused to serve the war in any way.

Second - the narration. Michael Maloney is fantastic. He manages multiple character voices and reads with emotion and animation. I'll definitely be looking for more of his work.

Finally - the writing.  Boyne addresses cowardice versus courage, both on the battlefield and off, loyalty, guilt, and morality through the lens of war and its aftermath. Boyne draws out his secrets slowly...until he doesn't and that's why it comes as such a big surprise. The story moves back and forth between Tristan's 1919 visit to Norwich and his time with Will during the war in 1916. 1919 is quiet, mannered, a land trying to reclaim normal. 1916 is loud, masculine, harsh - a tough place to be anyone other than a soldier. The contrast works marvelously to show how Tristan has come to the place in his life he has reached. Perhaps it was too easy to make Tristan's loutish father a butcher. Perhaps the war itself might have been broader. But I didn't really care. When it was good, it was brilliant.

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave
Published May 2016 by Simon and Schuster
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:
London, 1939.

The day war is declared, Mary North leaves finishing school unfinished, goes straight to the War Office, and signs up.

Tom Shaw decides to ignore the war—until he learns his roommate Alistair Heath has unexpectedly enlisted. Then the conflict can no longer be avoided.

Young, bright, and brave, Mary is certain she’d be a marvelous spy. When she is—bewilderingly—made a teacher, she finds herself defying prejudice to protect the children her country would rather forget.

Tom, meanwhile, finds that he will do anything for Mary.

And when Mary and Alistair meet, it is love, as well as war, that will test them in ways they could not have imagined, entangling three lives in violence and passion, friendship and deception, inexorably shaping their hopes and dreams.

My Thoughts:
If you ask me if I'd like to read a book set in Europe during the Second World War, I'd likely say "no." It so often feels that there cannot be a stone left unturned in the story of that war. And knowing that any such book it likely to be devastatingly sad, I find it hard to do that to myself. But Chris Cleave won me over with Little Bee so I was willing to take a chance. Cleave has become something of the master of combining humor with crushing sadness.  

In Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, Cleave as found a way to bring those elements together in a completely different World War II story. While Mary stays in London, volunteering, she faces the day-to-day hardships of the Blitz but also unexpected racism. Alistair finds himself stationed on Malta, an island that the Axis powers lay siege to for more than two years, trying to break the people on the strategically important island. There is no shortage of the gore and desperation of war here but the emphasis never veers from the characters.


What first grabbed my attention was the witty dialogue between characters.

"Mary frowned. "You are a mousetrap of a friend, all soft cheese and hard springs."
 Hilda beamed. "I use you for practice. One day I'll have a husband."
 Mary took a second envelope from the tray. "God help the poor man."
 "God will take my side," said Hilda. "He's only human, after all.""

And what great characters they are! Filled with kindness, melancholy, jealousy, anger, bigotry, love, hope, hopelessness, disgust, and sorrow. I became so attached to Mary and Tom and Zachary and Alistair that at times I could hardly keep reading, so unable was I to keep "seeing" them hurting.

Of course, I couldn't stop reading. Cleave's writing grabbed me and held onto me with its honesty, intelligence, and emotion. More than once, I found myself thinking "oh, please no" and just as often "oh, yes, this."

Cleave's grandmother, Mary

"Even as she railed, a hollow feeling grew that perhaps life would turn out to be like this. No, after all, the effortful ascent to grace that she had imagined, but rather a gradual accretion of weight and complexity - and not in one great mass that could be shouldered as Atlas had, but in many mundane and antiheroic fragments with a collective tendency to drag one down to the mean."

"There in the sweet sacking smell of the mailbags he understood that he was dying, and it pleased him that he was going in the company of so many soft words home." 

Cleave's grandfather, David

"I was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season." 

"The quick bright shock of the light between the cloud and the eastern horizon: an unimagined thing, thought Mary, a life. It was an unscrewing of tarnished brass plaques. It was one tile lost to the pattern. It was a world one might still know, if everyone brave was forgiven."

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is loosely based on Cleave's own grandparents lives during the War. The idea for the novel was given to him by his grandfather when Cleave's grandfather asked Cleave to transcript his handwritten memoir into one computer document. The true story is included in the book as well and is every bit as interesting.

The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau

The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau
Published March 2012 by Blue Rider Press, Penguin Group
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher in exchange for this review

As a boy, Younis suffered the bombing of his village, the deaths of his entire family. As an orphan, he is brought to the United States by an aide society where he is raised by a family who can't begin to grasp what the young man (now Jonas) has been through nor what he needs to assimilate in a new culture.

With the help of a counselor, Paul, Jonas begins to explore the truth of what happened to him. But is what's in his head his memory or what he wants his memory to be? And what is the truth about Christopher, the American soldier who came to his aid and whose mother has become a crusader for all of the parents who don't know what has happened to their children in duty to their country?

Dau moves back and forth in time and place with entries from Christopher's diary interspersed. This can be tricky to make work; it's easy to get confused and things can get muddled. But in Dau's capable hands, this style pulled me through the book. The Book of Jonas engaged both my mind and emotions with an ending that, literally, made me gasp.

Dau thoroughly explores the conundrum that is war - who is right, who is wrong, what is the truth. Can the truth ever be known? Can memory be trusted?

"Occasionally Jonas hears the voice of this savior. It comes to him when he is unable to turn his thoughts to anything else. The voice he hears is gentle and deep. When he remembers it, he tries to get it right, tries to match the words exactly, but has the familiar feeling that he is adding and subtracting, substituting what should have been said for what he fails to remember accurately. What should have been said. What he fails to remember. He is haunted by both."

In The Book of Jonas nothing is black and white. The book is full of symbolism but Dau never uses it to hit the reader over the head with the meaning. Neither is it so subtle that it's easily missed, ensuring that Dau's message is not lost.

"This is not a rare occurrence, this penetration of solid rock by molten rock under pressure. It happens all the time. Deep in the earth, it is happening right now. Stones like this are not scarce. ... The invasion, the pressure. The magma has exploited the injured rock, and has made it beautiful."

I highly recommend this book for those who are looking for a book that will really make you think, a book that will stay with you a long time.

My Dear I Wanted To Tell You by Louisa Young

My Dear I Wanted To Tell You by Louisa Young
Published June 2012 by HarperCollins
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher and TLC Book Tours

Riley Purefoy, working-class boy who has spent most of his life bettering himself, and Nadine Waveney have been inseparable since the day they meant but they only just discovered that they love each other when disapproving parents and World War I interfere. Despite the distance, the two cannot be kept apart...until a terrible wound threatens the happiness they were so close to having.

Despite his artistic interests, Riley is a very good soldier, two things that endear him to his commanding officer, Peter Locke. Peter has left behind his beautiful wife Julia who can find nothing more to do for the war effort than keep herself and her home ready for Peter's return. But the Peter who returns to her on leaves is not the same man who left her and Julia is at a loss as to how to hang onto a man who prefers the bottle to his wife and son.

The two couples lives become intertwined with Peter's sister, Rose, a war nurse, playing a pivotal role in trying to help the couples save their love.

Why I read it: I'm always game for historical fiction and this one fit right in with the War Through The Generations challenge.

What I liked about it: Young is British and it comes across in her writing, which I loved. She is equally good at writing about the angst and passion of love and the horrors of war. She is, in fact, so good at writing about war, I sometimes had to take a break from the book. The characters, although they are not particularly unique (if you've read Atonement they will be familiar to you), quickly become three-dimensional. Young doesn't spare her characters, they are all flawed but in a way that makes them feel human. Young touches on the themes of class, love, war, and the importance of appearance, both literally and figuratively. The was perfect for me with closure but no tidy endings.

What I didn't like about the book: The war details were necessary and I could deal with those. But the gruesome descriptions of war injuries and the surgeries to repair them were overly detailed and long and distracted from the story line for me. That being said, if the details were facts, I learned a tremendous amount about how reconstructive surgery progressed and how it is greatly aided by war.

I highly recommend this book, particularly for fans of historical fiction. It is a exceptional blend of character and plot. Check out the other reviews on the tour for other opinions. Thanks to TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour.

Louisa Young grew up in London, England, in the house in which Peter Pan was written, and she studied modern history at Cambridge. She was a freelance journalist and has written ten books, including the Orange Prize–longlisted Baby Love. She is the co-author of the bestselling Lionboy trilogy, which has been published in thirty-six languages. She lives in London and Italy with her daughter and the composer Robert Lockhart.

I've posted the cover from the copy of the book I received and the copy as seen on bn.com. Which do you prefer? I think the one at the top better suits the story.

Home Front by Kristen Tsetsi

Homefront by Kristen Tsetsi
332 pages
Published by Penxhere Press
Source: I won it!

As the book opens, Jake is preparing to deploy to Iraq. His 26-year-old live-in girlfriend, Mia is already on edge about how she will deal with his absence. She tells him she's not even sure she'll be able to write.

After Jake's gone, Mia (who used to be a college professor) tries to return to what passes for a normal life when you've been moved to a city where you only have one friend and the only job you've been able to find is as a taxi driver. One day she picks up as a fare Donnie, the Doctor, Donaldson. Donnie takes an immediate liking to Mia and asks for her to return to pick him up when his work shift is over. When she does, she finds a very inebriated Donnie who is at one minute overly solicitous and the next verbally combative. Donnie is a Vietnam vet who bears the scars of the things he's seen and the way he was treated when he returned from that war. Mia finds herself unable to say "no" to Donnie as he, time and again, pleads with her to spend time with him. Although Mia occasionally feels uncomfortable with Donnie, theirs is, for the most part, a platonic relationship fueled by massive amounts of bourbon.

Meanwhile, Mia's friendship with Denise is tried when she begins to suspect that Denise, who she has believed to be the perfect soldier's wife, is having an affair. And dealing with Jake's mom, Olivia, who calls her son "Jakey," is almost more than Mia can bear.

Soon Mia finds herself unable to work, unable to stop watching the news, unable to care for herself or her cat, and unable to stop drinking. She longs for Jake to call but can't bring herself to pick up the phone when he does. She can't wait for his letters but finds herself unable to write. When she discovers that Jake has email, she uses it to vent her frustration. Jake may be in Iraq but Mia finds life as the one left behind every bit as difficult.



Home Front is not an easy book to read; it's difficult to watch Donnie battle his demons and both Mia and Denise fail at being left on the home front. But this is a story that no one else seems to want to tell which made it a story worth reading for me. Tsetsi writes from experience (she was left behind when a loved one went off to war) and the result is a book that is raw and realistic. Tsetsi also combines her straight-forward prose with bits that are almost stream of consciousness which makes for a very unique story telling style.

Tomorrow I'll post an interview with Tsetsi where she'll talk about her writing style, her own time as a taxi driver, self-publishing and starting Backward Books, a group of self-published authors banded together for marketing purposes.

The Evolution of Shadows: A Novel by Jason Quinn Malott

The Evolution of Shadows by Jason Quinn Malott
253 pages
Published October 2009 by Unbridled Books
Acquired from: Unbridled Books

In July 1995, American photojournalist, Gray Banick, disappeared in the Bosnian war zone. The last person who knew him, his intrepreter, Emil, thought that he was also the last person to see him alive. Two years later, though, Emil has begun to wonder if Gray is still alive. He determines to search for proof of Gray's death or his survival. To help him, he recruits two other people who loved Gray: Jack MacKenzie, Gray's mentor and friend, and Lian Jiang, a former lover who Emil knows Gray was still deeply in love with.

Despite the war being over, nothing is easy yet in and around Sarajevo and with Emil, Jack and Lian all battling their own demons, the job they are undertaking is painful. Emil is struggling with the slaughter of his family, a cousin who is severely disabled and only wants to die, and a woman who wants to love him although he is has not even up the idea that the fiancee who was carried off by the Serbs might still be alive. Jack is struggling with the aftereffects of gunshot wounds to his legs, a raging case of alcoholism, an ex-wife who left him when he refused to stay home and a daughter who despises him. And Lian, a Chinese-American, is struggling with a marriage she is not happy in and unresolved feelings about Gray, whom she betrayed.

This sounds like a lot for any author to throw into a story and this is Malott's first novel. But it never seems like too much. Given the circumstances of all these three characters, all of these things seem entirely natural.

This from the first paragraph of the novel:

"She lies in the small bed the same way she did as a child, her arms crossed over her chest and the arches of her feet pressed together. It's the position of a corpse, and she once thought it would fool the ghosts into believing she was already dead."

Malott has written a very compelling, very real novel. I was immediately drawn into the book wondering first what had happened between Lian and Gray that would cause them to separate and wondering what had happened to Emil's family. Malott does travel back and form in time and this sometimes happened so quickly that I got confused and had to reread passages to put them back into the correct time sequence. The horrors of the Bosnian war and told without whitewash and I learned a lot about what happened during this time. Interestingly, the book frequently talks about the inability or unwillingness of the UN troops to help the Bosnians, a topic that my son and I had just discussed in a more general context right before I started to read the book.

When explaining why people take up smoking during war time:

"It's either that or go stir-crazy...And when someone can kill you at any moment, it doesn't make any kind of sense to worry about your health. Then there's the stench that comes with war. Dead bodies, blood, sh*^. A cigarette deadens your sense of smell."

I truly cared what would happen to each of these characters and continued to hold on to the hope that they would find Gray, even though there seemed to be no real hope that he could have survived, let alone that they would find any proof of it. This is book that's not for everyone. The squimish should avoid it and anyone who prefers a book where everyone lives happily ever after. This is a story that reads like real life.