25. The Kommandant's Girl

By Pan Jenoff
Rated ★★★

After having said that I don't do Holocaust books here I am reading another one. But I did enjoy this one, probably because it came off as a more positive book than those that have distressed me so much in the past. The characters in this book were fighters, not just helpless victims so the focus of the book was their struggle. You know while reading that a story like this would not end well but still it is heart warming to read about people who are taking their fate in their own hands and even if their cause is nearly hopeless at least they are going down fighting.

Emma, a beautiful young orthadox jew in Krakow, Poland meets Jacob while working at the university library and met Jacob. He sweeps her off her feet, and they marry on the eve of the Nazi invasion. Jacob immediately leaves to join the Jewish underground, and Emma returns to her family, now locked in the Jewish ghetto. Jacob provides false papers, enabling Emma to become Anna Lipowski and move in with his Catholic aunt Krysia, posing as her niece. Krysia works for the underground while maintaining her status as a leader in the arts community. During a dinner party, Emma/Anna is introduced to Nazi Kommadant Richwalder. Smitten, he asks her to come work for him. She agrees, knowing such access will aid the underground, and even becomes intimate with the enemy to gather information.

Written in the first person, the author gives an insightful portrait of people forced into an untenable situation and succeeds in humanizing the unfathomable as well as the heroic

Movie - The Illusionist

Rated ★★★★★

Martin and I watched The Illusionist last night. I had been on a long waiting list for it at my library and it was well worth the wait. It was beautifully acted and beautifully filmed. Naturally there was a lot of it that I didn't get. But that's ok, I still liked it anyway.

Briefly - Sophy (a Dutchess) and Eisenheim a (poor peasent boy) become childhood friends. When thier friendship becomes known her family puts a stop to it. Eisenheim goes off to see the world and encounters an old man who teaches him magic. He returns years later to find that Sophy has become engaged to a Crown Prince. Eisenheim uses his powers so that he and Sophy can elope. The whole thing was kind of Gothic but in a fun kind of way.

Jeanette

24. Dolly and The Bird of Paradise

By Dorothy Dunnett
Rated ★★★½

The story starts in London with Rita Geddes a cheeky, punky makeup artist with multicolored hair and an attitude. She is called to a photo shoot by associate to make up a celebrity journalist. There she meets Johnson Johnson in whose apartment the shoot is being held.

Rita is offered a temporary position with the journalist to fill in for her close friend Kim Jim who is planning to retire. Because the money is so good Rita is soon off to the journalist's lush island hideaway where she is beaten up and knocked out. To make matters worse the friend who got her into this mess is found murdered. Rita is out to avenge her friend.

As I am no great fan of mysteries but I did enjoy this book. The tight writing, clever dialogue, delicious mahem, malaprops and misnomers make this a gem to read. She could have left out the french phrases and dialogue. I have never appreciated it when Dunnett does this but since I love her other books so much I forgive her. But I do retain the right to grumble.

23. War and Rememberance

By Herman Wouk
Rated ★★★★★


War and Remembrance covers the period from after Pearl through the surrender of Japan in August 1945. As he did in Winds of War the author sends his fictional cahracters all over the world in order to cover every aspect of the Second World War including the "Final Solution" thru the pov a Natalie Jastrow who married the youngest son on Victor Henry. When it got down to the nitty gritty for Natalie I skipped because as I said in the previous entry I just don't go there.

While I realise that Wouk needed to tell the complete story of what happened to the Jewish people in Europe I found parts of it too painful to read. I get caught up in the story and kept wishing I could reach into the book, grab Natalie by the shirt and scream in her face "get out of there you stupid twit. Leave while you still can."

The author has also included a fictional book within his book written by a German General in order to give the German pov. I thought this was very clever of him. The only criticism of this marvelous work I have is that the author's focus is primarily on the war in Europe, just skipping lightly over the war in the Pacific and giving no corresponding Japanese character to give their pov. Oh Well, it was still a wonderful read. I am very glad I decided to revisit these books.

22. Winds of War

By Herman Wouk
Rated ★★★★★

This is another book from my list of wonderful books I read years ago. It's books like this that make Historical Fiction my favorite genre as it's the easiest way for me to learn about history without having to read a bunch of dry history books.

The blurb on my library web site states that this book and it's sequel War and Remembrance capture all the drama, romance, heroism and tragedy of the Second World War. I agree with that statement. Also it's the last war that the United States flat out won so for that reason alone it's a unique achievement.

Wouk uses the fictional family of Naval Officer "Pug" Henry to spread out over the globe in order to give the story a unifying, human-level plot. But in order to make this work one has to totally suspend their disbelief at having the characters show up in every key situation and just sit back and enjoy the ride.

The only real problem I had with this book was with the parts that dealt with the Jewish daughter in law being trapped in Europe at the outbreak of the war. I recognized that Woulk was using this plot device in order to give the reader a clear picture of what happened to the Jews when the Nazi's came to power but I just can't do Holocaust stories. I am too much of a wuss and they give me bad dreams. So I just skipped that part of the story when it started to get bad.

Other than that it was an engrossing story and once again I had forgotten so much from my previous read that it was pretty much all new again. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in this period of history.

21. Family Tree

By Barbara Delinsky
Rated ★★★★

From the blurb: "The old and illustrious New England Clarke family has a new member, and she is not what the family envisioned. Elizabeth Clarke, a beautiful daughter born to Hugh and Dana, possesses definite African American traits."

"As Dana's family history and fidelity are questioned, Hugh, who thought he was above racism, now wants his wife to find out the truth about her heritage. While Dana searches for her father and Hugh's family pressures him to find out for certain if the child is indeed his, Hugh must confront the truth about himself, his family, and their racist attitude while also trying to reconcile his own attitude toward his daughter."

This book makes you think about how you would react if this had happened in your family.

20. In Pursuit of the Green Lion

by Judith Merkle Riley
Rated A++

This book is a sequel to A Vision of Light. Married now to Brother Gregory (Gilbert de Vilers) Margaret, is living with the insufferable, penny pinching in laws She is carving out a life for herself and her daughters despite the hostility and greed of her in-laws. But when Gregory is captured in France and held for ransom, Margaret knows she must take action—her in-laws are too tight with money to be of any use—so she teams up with her old friends Mother Hilde, the herbalist, and Brother Malachi, an alchemist on a quest for the secret of changing base metals into gold. Together, the trio plan to rescue Gregory and bring him back to London, where he and Margaret can start a new life away from his meddling family.

And thus begins a wild adventure across fourteenth-century Europe. Murderous noblemen, scheming ladies, truculent ghosts, and a steady stream of challenges plague the journey. Margaret will need not only her special gift of healing, her quick mind, and her independent spirit but the loyalty of her friends and the love of her new husband to carry them all safely home.

19. The Persian Boy

by Mary Renault
Rated B

I thought the end of this book would never come. My problem with it is that I read the first half, read two other books and then came back to it. Bad idea.

The story is told from the viewpoint of Bagoas, a young eunuch and a real historical character who became Alexander's servant and lover following the conquest of Persia. Essentially this is a love story: not just between Alexander and Bagoas, but also Hephastion one of his generals and boyhood friend, lover, and battle companion. In the author's note at the end of the story Renault points out that history bears out the fact that Alexander was bi-sexual but leaned heavily to the homosexual side of his nature.

I recently watched a televised version of Alexander's life on the History Chanel. In that program they mentioned that Alexander and his army covered approximately forty thousand miles (mostly on foot) in twelve years. Taking into account that this army was fighting battles, and conquering nations all the way, I can't see how Alexander had time to date girls or the energy left to conduct a romance. This may have been a simple case of making do with what was readily available.

Renault portrays Alexander the Great as being handsome, charismatic, brave, usually fair and just, and a brilliant military strategist whose Macedonian warriors are willing to follow him to the ends of the earth. Putting together Renault's book and the History Chanel biography of him, I am totally impressed. He was truly a remarkable man.

18. All Passion Spent

Vita Sackville-West
Rated C

Blurb from back of book "Having surrendered of her life to the exemplary, if often hollow fulfillment of her marriage, to the expectations of her statesman husband and the demands of her children, Lady Slane finally, in her widowhood, defies her family. She dismisses the wishes and plans of her six pompous sons and daughters for her future, and instead retires to a tiny house in Hampstead, where she chooses to live independently and free from her past. There she alters, and not without some success, the course of her personal history. There, too, she recollects the dreams of her youth and at last, with one last "strange and lovely thing, " acts upon the passion she forfeited seventy years earlier to the narrow conventions of a proper Victorian marriage."

After reading the first few pages of this book I was entirely in sympathy with Lady Slane as she declares her independence from her pompas and patronizing children. However by the time I finished this book the only characters I liked were the landlord, the handyman and the french maid. As I read it slowly dawned on me that Lady Slane had a mean streak that had remained hidden under her personna of gentle, scatterbrained and submissive wife and dedicated Mother.

17. Natural Born Charmer

By Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Rated A+++

Chicago Stars quarterback Dean Robillard is driving to Tennessee when he spots a headless beaver walking down the side of the street.

Once again this author has come through for me in a big way. She is a genius of creating a comic situation and giving it depth and a touch of pathos. She has a talent for drawing the reader into the story so the reader feels emotionally invested in the outcome. There is far more than the relationship between the main characters. There is a broken family that tries to find its' way back. There is a child who finds her way back to her father and a man who has to find forgiveness in his heart for a mother that would never ask for it.

16. A Vision of Light

by Margaret Merkle Riley
Rated A+

From the blurb on back of book "An appealing novel about Margaret of Ashbury, a 14th-century Englishwoman, who is inspired in a ``vision of light'' to write her memoirs and tell a woman's story. Unable to write, she hires Brother Gregory to record her memories. He is contemptuous of her ambition, but hungry enough to accept her offer."

Gregory is a clerical scholar, who desparately wants a profound spiritual experience, intellectualizes constantly about it, whereas for Margaret, she simply lives it. He tries to control and force it, while for Margaret it is a gift of the ability to heal.

Margaret stays in hot water with her neighbors, her client's and eventually she attracts the notice of the church. She is saved by an rich and elderly merchant whom she marries. What started out as a marriage of convenience turns into a real love match and it is he who encourages Margaret to tell her story and also to learn to read and write. But when he dies Margaret has to face once again that a women without the protection of a husband during this period is extremely hazardous.

The book alternates between Margaret's and Gregory's clashes in their present and her telling of her past. I loved the medieval setting and where Margaret is describing life as a midwife in London. I really liked Brother Gregory because even from the beginning you knew that Margaret was going to poke holes in all his pet theories on the superiority of men and how inferior the minds of women were.

15. Fire From Heaven

by Mary Renault
Rated B-

Fire from Heaven is an historical novel of Alexander the Great's life from his birth through the death of his father when Alexander was a young man.

This novel deals only with the period before he became king. He grew up in one of history's great dysfunctional families. His father and mother did not see eye-to-eye. Part of the reason was that his mother was probably overly politically ambitious. She reminded me of the Queen in Dororthy Dunnett's Race of Scorpions, the one with no nose.

Also another part of the problem was that his father, Phillip was of the old spartan school of thought and engaged tutors for him that stressed harsh living conditions and semi starvation as a way of toughening up and building character in young men. His first teacher was the harsh Leonidas, a relative of Olympias, perhaps her uncle.

Leonidas was replaced with Lysimachus, who taught Alexander to play the lyre, and taught him an appreciation for the fine arts of music, poetry, and drama. Later on he studied under Aristotle.

Alexander was a sensitive and a slightly built and effeminate boy Alexander liked drama, the flute and the lyre, poetry and hunting. In order to survive this rough upbringing Alexander developed a tough shell and as he grew older independence of both of his parents. However he couldn't have been all that sissified because he was commanding troops in Byzantium at age 16 and was king at 18.

While Alexander was indisputably a great leader Renault's somewhat over the top depiction of him had me rolling my eyes in several places. You knew he had to be bright, probably precocious and must have been dripping with charisma in order to accomplish all the things he did as an adult. But I thought that Renault made him out to be just a little bit to perfect as a child. I personally would have liked him better if he had he taken time out from walking on water and spilled his milk or fell down and skinned his knees once in a while when growing up. It was interesting to read about what it might have been like to have had Aristotle as a tutor