Laura's Review - The White Family

Alfred White has had a long career as a London park keeper. His days are spent patrolling the park, monitoring its condition and making sure visitors adhere to park rules. Alfred is close to retirement, and has seen a lot of change over the years. He longs for the Britain of his youth, during and after World War II. He is especially upset by the influx of foreigners, changing the ethnic mix of his London neighborhood and, consequently, the park visitors.

One day Alfred collapses on the job and is hospitalized. His sudden weakness shocks his wife and adult children, who have grown accustomed to Alfred's firm, controlling hand. His adult children have all gone their separate ways, but are brought back into contact at Alfred's bedside. Darren is an established journalist living in the US, and is on his third marriage. Shirley is in a relationship with a black man, which caused a rift with her father. Dirk has been unable to establish an independent adult life, and lives at home while working in a corner shop. He has developed disturbing extremist political and racial views.

May, the wife and mother, held this crew together over the years. Like many women of her generation, her husband made all the decisions. When Alfred went into hospital, May found she couldn't even withdraw money from the bank on her own. But May is also strong inside, in her own way, and she has a suppressed intellect that remains an important part of her life:

She always liked to have a book in her bag. In case she got stuck. In case she got lost. Or did she feel lost without her books? There wasn't any point, but she liked to have one with her, a gentle weight nudging her shoulder, keeping her company through the wind, making her more solid, more substantial, less likely to be blown away, less alone. More -- a person. (p. 19)

Through short chapters narrated by different family members, Maggie Gee develops the White family's history and the nature of the parent-child and sibling relationships. Each of the children bear scars from their father's discipline and temper. Darren appears successful on the outside, but is deeply wounded inside. Shirley has been unable to have children, and struggles with issues of faith. Dirk is a ticking time bomb, prone to alcohol-infused bouts of temper as he acts out his resentment towards anyone better off than himself. Alfred and May, for all their flaws, have shared a long and loving marriage, and are likeable in their own ways.

This book is not for the faint of heart. There's a lot of sadness, as the entire family copes with Alfred's medical condition. May considers, for the first time, that Alfred may not always be there for her. Alfred struggles with weakness & infirmity. Each of the children relive their childhood and their relationship with Alfred, and rather than bond together each of them struggles individually. There are also many disturbing moments, particularly Gee's portrayal of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. This would have been a 4.5-star book were it not for a too-tidy denouement about Shirley which struck me as both unrealistic and unnecessary. Still, this is a well-crafted story, with a strong emotional pull and an intense and startling climax.




Cross-posted from my blog

The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert (Jill)

The Dark Room
By Rachel Seiffert
Completed November 30, 2010

Over the past year or two, I have been drawn to books about World War II. Most are told from the perspective of the Allied nations or Jewish people affected by the Holocaust. I am glad to have stumbled upon Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room, which offers the perspective of the average German citizen affected by World War II.

The Dark Room is divided into three separate stories:

1) Helmet is a young photographer’s apprentice, whose family supported Hitler and prospered during The Third Reich’s heyday. Even at war’s end, Helmet still clung to Nazi Germany’s ideals. Then, one day, he stumbles into a round-up of gypsies by German soldiers and sees the gross mistreatment of these people. He took pictures of the atrocity and ran away from the scene. As he reflects over his photos, you feel his heartbreak for a nation lost in so many ways.

2) Lore is a teenage girl – one of six children – who must embark on a treacherous journey from Bavaria to Hamburg at the end of the war. Through Lore’s journey, you see how war affected the home front and the people who once were bound by the same cause. No longer united, they stole and cheated from each other. Like Helmet, Lore didn’t realize Germans was killing innocent people, until she saw pictures posted in a village. Confused by what she saw, she befriended a young man, Tomas, who confirmed the genocide. Lore was devastated, especially as she considered her father and brother might have been involved in these mass murders.

3) Michael is a school teacher living in 1990’s Germany who began wondering why his grandfather had been imprisoned for so long after World War II. He began to research and learned that his grandfather was part of the Waffen SS, the elite police force of the German Army. He traces his grandfather’s service to Belarus and traveles there to learn more. The important theme in Michael’s section is national guilt – how after 50+ years, some Germans truly mourned what their country did, while others didn’t grasp it, or were too far removed from the war to be impacted. Michael, though, couldn’t forget and carried the weight of guilt for his whole family.

Admittedly, The Dark Room is a bit bleak, but Seiffert pulls you right in so you can experience the characters’ emotions. Seiffert writes simply but effectively, and her sparse prose adds to the brevity of her stories. Despite the grim subject matter, I found this book to be enlightening and engaging – and would highly recommend it, especially to those who believe, like me, that war has no true winner. ( )

Laura's Review - The Siege

The siege of Leningrad began in 1941, when the German army cut all land connections into the city, disrupting energy, water, fuel, and food supplies. The result was a famine of epic proportions. Anna, a 23-year-old nursery school assistant, lives with her father Mikhail and much younger brother Kolya in an idyllic pastoral setting. They grow their own food, preserve jams, and tend flowers. As the army approaches, countryside living becomes more dangerous. Anna and her family join others in migrating to the city, where food supplies are believed to be more plentiful. Once there, they find shops have been looted and most goods are available only on the black market.

At first Anna works as part of a defense crew, and her father also volunteers his services for the war effort. But then Mikhail is injured, and Anna assumes a "head of household" role. She also meets Andrei, a young doctor who treated her father, and who is working round-the-clock shifts caring for the sick and injured. Anna and Andrei feel a strong attraction to one another; soon the family offers him shelter, and they are also joined by Marina, a family friend.

With each passing week, the German army tightens its grip on the city. The basics of daily living go from being scarce, to completely unavailable. Food is rationed, and people resort to violence to get hold of additional ration cards. The rations are gradually reduced as officials calculate and recalculate how long supplies will last. Hunger claims one life after another. Winter approaches, and there is no energy for heat, no water for bathing or drinking. And yet Anna works tirelessly to provide for the group, sacrificing portions of her own ration for Kolya and bundling him up in clothes and blankets each day. She scrapes together funds to buy a wood stove, and scavenges for wood while also burning books and furniture. She never gives up, even as her own body weakens. The bond between Anna and Andrei shifts from one of passion, to one of intense commitment to survival.

This book was simply amazing. Helen Dunmore conveyed the physical and mental effects of extreme hunger and cold in such a powerful way:

You wake yourself, snuffling around in the bedclothes. A load of blankets and coats weighs you down, but you're still cold. Your feet are numb and your breath comes short. The cold settles in your back and makes your spine hurt. You must breathe gently. You must not be restless. Every movement destroys energy which you no longer possess. (p. 191)

And she also brought strong emotion to the story, such as the moment when Anna reflects on how she used to take things for granted:

It's her father's breathing, back in the apartment, that keeps her pinned here. All her life he's been breathing. Why didn't she count those breaths when she had the chance? Why didn't she stop still and listen, on just one of those bad-tempered mornings when she was late for work and Kolya was whingeing that he didn't want his porridge because he always had porridge every single day? She'd never once stopped to bless the fact that her father still breathed. She certainly never stopped to bless the everyday porridge. (p.231)

Reading The Siege, one can't help getting caught up in the lives of these characters as they face one obstacle after another. It's hard to imagine how anyone could have survived under such extreme conditions, and yet people did. In this powerful story, it was their hope and love for one another that sustained them through some of the most horrific situations imaginable.



My original review can be found here.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (Jill)

Fingersmith
By Sarah Waters
Completed July 21, 2009

The story of Fingersmith reminded me of a crazy car ride with no seat belts. Sarah Waters expertly led her readers through plot twists and turns, leaving you near-breathless as you wrapped your head around colorful characters and tricky plot advancements. When I was done reading Fingersmith, I had to pry my hands off the book.

It’s hard to summarize Fingersmith without revealing spoilers. Suffice it to say, this book is set in Victorian England and includes a drafty old house, a crazy uncle, a secluded lady, a pickpocket, an opportunistic bastard and sex. While it sounds like another formulaic Gothic novel, trust me when I say it’s not. Dickens could have created the characters but only Sarah Waters could have delivered them in such a fashion.

Fingersmith wasn’t without flaws and some believability issues, but who cares when you’re ensnarled in good Victorian fiction? I especially loved the exploration of female love and companionship during this time. Many scholars have speculated about how intimate Victorian girls were, who often hugged, kissed, held hands and shared beds for warmth. It’s nice to read how true this affection could be between girls from this era.

For fans of historical fiction, I would highly recommend Fingersmith to you. Fast and furious, I believe most readers will find this stout book to be a real gem. ( )

Fingersmith - Wendy's Review

We were all more or less thieves, at Lant Street. But we were that kind of thief that rather eased the dodgy deed along, than did it. - from Fingersmith, page 7 -

Sue Trinder has been raised among thieves - an orphan who has never met her mother. The woman who has cared for her is Mrs. Suksby who takes babies from their mothers for a fee. The house on Lant Street where they live teems with characters such as Dainty, a girl with her own questionable past and Mr. Ibbs who buys stolen goods. Then one dark, rainy night a man arrives with a proposition to make them all rich.

In the passage stood a man, dressed dark, wet through and dripping, and with a leather bag at his feet. The dim light showed his pale cheeks, his whiskers, but his eyes were quite hidden in the shadow of his hat. I should not have known him if he had not spoken. - from Fingersmith, page 19 -

The man - known as Gentleman - hatches a scheme to send Sue, disguised as a maid, to the home of Maud Lilly and befriend her. A large sum of money is at stake, and the plot to get it means tricking Maud into marrying Gentlemen and then confining her to a mental hospital. From this point forward, the novel moves steadily forward with unexpected twists and turns which kept me reading long into the night.

Sarah Waters has written a gothic novel filled with evil villains, betrayal, lies, love, debauchery and shocking revelations. Set first on the dirty backstreets of the London Borroughs, the novel then moves to the dark and eerie rooms of Briar - a dilapidated mansion where Maud is being raised by her cruel uncle. The writing is provocative and rich, creating the atmosphere of a period Gothic setting filled with suspense and things that creep in the night. The dialogue is pitch perfect, the characters convincingly wrought. But it is the plot - unnerving and constantly shifting - which reels the reader into the story and keeps the pages turning.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel which uncovers the sinister underbelly of the human soul. Gentleman is the perfect villain - handsome, mysterious and evil. Just when the reader thinks she knows where the story is taking her, there is a twist and it goes in another direction. No one is as they seem.

Waters has written a book rich in period details and lush with complex characters. Ingeniously plotted and sexually charged, this is a novel you do not want to miss.

Highly recommended.

Laura's Review - Fingersmith

Fingersmith
Sarah Waters
582 pages

Set in the 1860s, Fingersmith is the story of two young women: Sue, raised among thieves in London, and Maud, a privileged lady raised by her uncle in the country. Sue is enlisted as part of a con scheme by Richard Rivers, aka Gentleman, who plans to secure Maud's fortune via marriage, and then have her committed to an asylum. The first part of the book describes Rivers' courtship with Maud, their marriage, and the trip to the asylum -- and suddenly things are not what they seem, and the plot goes topsy-turvy. Then Maud takes over as narrator, recounting the same events from her perspective and filling in blanks as to who knew what, and when they knew it. Not much more can be said about the plot without spoilers, so suffice to say that there are enough surprises to keep the reader on their toes, guessing at identities and truth.

Sarah Waters has written a brilliant tale of two very strong female protagonists, embellished with a number of colorful characters: Maud's uncle, whose life work is a scholarly study of pornographic literature; Mrs. Sucksby, who raised Sue and assists in running a petty thievery operation; and Rivers (Gentleman), who is as convincing as he is smarmy. I enjoyed every minute of this book; it was "un-putdownable". ( )

My original review can be found here.

The Siege by Helen Dunmore

Originally posted on my blog in April 2006. You might be able to tell that this review was written as a comparison to The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons - one of my favourite books of all time!

Leningrad, September 1941. German forces surround the city, imprisoning those who live there. The besieged city of Leningrad face shells, starvation and the Russian winter.

Interweaving two love affairs in two generations, The Siege draws us deep into the Levin family's struggle to stay alive during this terrible winter. What is it like to be so hungry you simmer your leather manicure case to make soup, so cold you burn first your furniture and then your books? An in spite of everything to resist...

The Siege is a brilliantly imagined novel about war and the wounds it inflicts on ordinary people's lives. It is also a profoundly moving celebration of love, life and survival.

The main characters in this book are the Levins - Mikhail, a writer who is unfortunately out of favour with the Communist authorities, his daughter Anna who is a talented artist who works as a child care worker and 5 year old Kolya, her brother. Her mother having died during childbirth, Anna is both her brother's sister and substitute mother, and provider for the family.

When war is declared Anna is at the family dacha, working in the family vegetable plot, and just beginning a portrait of the mysterious actress Marina Petrovna. As war goes on, the little family grows as Marina comes to join the Levin's in their apartment. What is her connection to Anna's family? Is Anna right to feel the animosity for Marina that she does? Is it right to accept the gifts of food that Marina has brought with her that will in the end help keep them alive? Eventually, Anna's doctor boyfriend Andrei also moves in. She met him when he comes to tell her that her father had been wounded when working out at the defense line against the Germans who have encircled Leningrad, and who are gradually tightening the screws on an increasingly desperate population.

The aspect of this book that Dunmore did excel at were the pictures that she drew of the population as they went through the various phases of The Siege. The initial disbelief that they were at war, the feeling of still having to be careful about what you say even as you are working at the front lines to provide defense against the oncoming Germans, the repatriation of the children of Leningrad only to find them needing to be repatriated back to Leningrad when it turns out that they were in the way of the advancing Germans. As the war and the siege proceeds, the desperation becomes more intense as each person gets meagre rations of what is loosely called bread, and as the winter progresses, means of keeping warm. Eventually the only way for supplies to get in is over the Road of Life, over the frozen ice of Lake Ladoga. When the siege of Leningrad began there were approximately 3 million people living there...a million people died before the siege was lifted!

Where this novel didn't excel in my opinion, is in the relationships. Reading the back cover I was expecting that the relationships would be given a major focus, and yet they weren't. The book was a quarter of the way through before Anna and Andrei even met, and the relationship between Mikhail and Marina was mainly alluded to through the later part of the book. It was really a relationship from the past, as opposed to one that has been rekindled and explored with the reader.

My question to myself is really....if I had read this book before I read The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons, would I have liked it more than I did. I'm not sure what the answer is. All I can say is that The Siege pails in comparison to The Bronze Horseman, even despite the fact that the focus is different in the two books. TBH is all about the relationships, against the elaborate background of the siege in Leningrad, whereas The Siege seems to be about conditions in Leningrad with a nod to the relationships between the two couples in the book. TBH also seems to be better at giving some idea of the grandeur of Leningrad (now St Petersburg), the sights and sounds if you will. (I have had a desire to go to St Petersburg ever since reading TBH...for now I content myself with cyber tourism!)

I'm afraid it will be a long time before I attempt a book with a similar setting to TBH because there aren't many that will stack up against it! I should have known better, I really should have!