34. Jane's Fame

BY:  Claire Harman
Rated 4.5 Stars
From:  Library

I am a Jane Austin Junkie.  Someone needs to develop a 12 step program for people like me.

But seriously, this was a very interesting book that looks at how and why Jane Austin and her books have become giants in the publishing world for almost two hundred years.  She is second only to Shakespeare in achieving that.

PUBLISHER SUMMARY:
Mention Jane Austen and you’ll likely incite a slew of fervent opinions from anyone within earshot. Regarded as a brilliant social satirist by scholars, Austen also enjoys the sort of popular affection usually reserved for girl-next-door movie stars, leading to the paradox of an academically revered author who has served as the inspiration for chick lit (The Jane Austen Book Club) and modern blockbusters (Becoming Jane). Almost two hundred years after her death, Austen remains a hot topic, and the current flare in the cultural zeitgeist echoes the continuous revival of her works, from the time of original publication through the twentieth century. In Jane’s Fame, Claire Harman gives us the complete biography—of both the author and her lasting cultural influence—making this essential reading for anyone interested in Austen’s life, works, and remarkably potent fame.

37. Eleanor and Franklin

By:  Joseph P. Lash
Rated 5++++ Stars
From Library

Who knew the Roosevelts were such interesting people.  Given the pitiful state that politics today have sunk to we will never see their like again.  In public office anyway.

This is not so much a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt so as an examination of her life with Franklin. Some of this story is both sad in parts but mostly inspiring, and frankly I blown away by it.

Eleanor always saw her self as "just" a housewife and Mother who by circumstances just happened to be the wife to be the wife of the President of the United States.  But although she emphatically denied it, Eleanor Roosevelt was a great politician.  One who evolved into one of the great pillars of the New Deal and one of the great architects of the post-WWII order through her role in the founding of the United Nations.

The book ends with Franklin's death and its immediate aftermath. Although he was with his mistress when he died, and that fact affirmed his infidelity to her, I really can't entirely blame him.  The marriage of Eleanor and Franklin was so highly charged with politics and the causes in which  both he and Eleanor most fervently believed that it's hard to really blame him for seeking a little comfort from a not very bright, undemanding woman.  And even though I think he felt overwhelmed by Eleanor sometimes he never tried to stifle her, never stood in her way, and always backed her up.  And for her part she always did the same for him.  They were truly a dynamic duo  I don't think either of them would have ever been able to achieve what they achieved without the other.

This is biography at its best.

Product Description

In the words of Arthur Schlesinger, Eleanor & Franklin "is a beautiful book - beautiful in its scholarship, insight, objectivity and candor." Joseph Lash was secretary and confidant to Eleanor Roosevelt. His book was made into the PBS special of the same name.

About the Author

Joseph Lash won a Pulitzer prize for this biography. he was a longtime associate of Eleanor Roosevelt and is also the author of Eleanor: The Years Alone.

40. Savor the Moment

By:  Nora Roberts
Rated: 4.5 Stars
From Library

Light, fluffy and fun.

Publisher Summary

Wedding baker Laurel McBane has been in love with her business partner's older brother, Delaney Brown, since childhood, but she worries that her relationship with the dashing Ivy League lawyer will never move beyond friendship.

Maisie Dobbs

Maisie Dobbs 

Through her own natural intelligence—and the patronage of her benevolent employers for whom  she worked as a housemaid—Maisie works her way into college at Cambridge. When World War I breaks out, Maisie goes to the front as a nurse. It is there that she learns that coincidences are meaningful and the truth elusive. After the War, Maisie sets up on her own as a private investigator. But her very first assignment, seemingly an ordinary infidelity case, soon reveals a much deeper, darker web of secrets, which will force Maisie to revisit the horrors of the Great War and the love she left behind.

Birds of a Feather - 
Audio Book - Rated 4 Stars


Maisie, "Psychologist and Investigator," as the brass nameplate on her office door declares, gets hired by a wealthy industrialist to find his only daughter, Charlotte Waite, who has gone missing. With the help of her cockney assistant, Billy Beale, Maisie sets out to learn all she can of Charlotte's habits, character and friends. No sooner has Maisie discovered the identities of three of these friends than they start turning up dead—poisoned, then bayoneted for good measure. At each crime scene is left a white feather. Increasingly preoccupied with these tragedies, Maisie almost loses sight of her original mission, until it becomes apparent that the murders and Charlotte's disappearance are related.

Pardonable Lies
 Audio Book - Rated 4 Stars


In late 1930, the London "psychologist and investigator" gets involved in three cases: proving the innocence of a 13-year-old farm girl, Avril Jarvis, accused of murder; undertaking a search for Sir Cecil Lawton's only son, a pilot shot down behind enemy lines in WWI, whose body was never recovered; and looking into the circumstances of the death of her university friend Priscilla Evernden Partridge's brother in France during the war. Maisie must go back to the region where, 13 years earlier, she served as a nurse, and confront her memories of mud, blood and loss. Filled with convincing characters, this is a complex tale of healing, of truth and half-truth, of long-held secrets, some, perhaps, to be held forever.


Messenger of Truth 
Audio Book - Rated 4 Stars

Georgiana Bassington-Hope, a pioneering female war reporter who was a classmate of Maisie's at Girton College (Cambridge), asks Maisie to investigate the death of her twin brother, Nicholas Bassington-Hope, a WWI veteran and artist. The police have ruled Nick's fall from a scaffold at a Mayfair gallery before his masterpiece could be unveiled an accident, but Georgiana suspects foul play.

An Incomplete Revenge 
Book - Rated 4 Stars


Maisie's benefactor, tycoon James Compton, wants to buy an estate in the bucolic hamlet of Heronsdene, but is wary after a string of mysterious fires. Maisie soon proves Compton's suspicions correct when she encounters the shady current landowner and a vaguely menacing band of Gypsies in town for the seasonal harvest. The locals are also curiously tight-lipped about Heronsdene's wartime tragedy, when a zeppelin raid wiped out a family. Teasing out Heronsdene's secrets will take all the intrepid former nurse's psychological skills and test her ability to navigate between the Gypsy and gorja (non-Gypsy) worlds.

Among the Mad - 
Audio Book - Rated 4 Stars


On Christmas eve 1931, a man Maisie passes on a London street detonates a bomb, killing himself and slightly wounding Maisie. This traumatic event turns out to be linked to threatening letters the British prime minister starts to receive, the first of which mentions Maisie by name. Maisie joins a high-powered investigative team devoted to averting the cataclysmic disaster promised by the unknown author of the messages. By providing the letter writers perspective, Winspear removes some of the mystery.

33. God of the Hive

B

By Laurie King

Rated 4.4

Purchase

I stayed up very late to finish God of the Hives. I HAD to finish it. It may well be my favorite of the series so far because the mystery was a real page turner. Russell only had a couple of Brat moments and there was one scene that made me laugh out loud. From time to time King attempts to write chaos (usually the same pursuit scene over and over) but this is the first time she has, IMO, really succeeded in pulling it off.

Publisher Summary:

A conclusion to the best-selling The Language of Bees finds Mary Russell picking up a mysterious friend while making her way back to London. Sherlock Holmes is busy investigating questions about a ruthless villain while hiding a wounded son, and murderous adversaries setting a deadly trap.

While Sherlock Holmes desperately seeks medical help for his gravely wounded son, Damien Adler, Mary Russell tries to protect Damien's daughter, Estelle, from the ruthless enemy pursuing all of them.

32. Other Family

BY: Joanna Trollope
>Rated 4 Stars
From: Library

For the most part liked it. I would have rated it a little higher except that the character Chrissie annoyed me. Seemed to me that if anyone had a legitimate gripe it was Barbara, not her. Still, I enjoyed it.

PUBLISHERS DESCRIPTION:

After Richie Rossiter, a pianist and songwriter, dies suddenly, his companion, Chrissie, with whom he had three daughters, and the wife he left behind, with whom he had a son, are left to deal with each other and the unexpected terms of his will.

31. Confessions of a Pagan Nun

By: Kate Horsley
Rated 4 Stars
From: Library

This moving and subtle tale both embodies and confirms the enduring power of language. Gwynneve (Gwi-NEEV) is raised in a village of fishermen and pigkeepers at the height of Ireland's transition from Paganism to Christianity. All around her the new doctrines of Patrick and the "tonsured men" are inexorably driving out the old Druid ways. When Gwynneve loses the two figures she loved the most—her mother succumbing to disease, her outspoken Druid teacher abducted by his enemies—she leaves her village and finally takes refuge in the convent of Saint Brigit. Of her past life and loves she retains only intangibles: her mother's love of nature and independent mind, her teacher's gift of literacy and addiction to truth. Clinging to the one constant and comforting force in her life—the power of words, and their offer of immortality to those who set them down—she records her memories surreptitiously, interrupting her assigned tasks of transcribing Patrick and Augustine. But disturbing events from the present keep intervening. Finally, her headstrong ways and growing criticism of the monastery's new abbot lead to the accusation that she consorts with demons. The story's tragic conclusion confirms both Gwynneve's fears and her powers: centuries after she and her tormentors sink back into the Irish earth, her words remain to haunt and inspire us.

30. A Rose for the Crown

By: Anne Easter Smith

Rated 4.5 Stars

From: Library

AUDIO BOOK

This book got mixed reviews on amazon and so I turned to Jani to see if she had reviewed it and sure enough she had. Jani is almost always the final word with me when it comes to historical fiction. The reviews on amazon are losing more and more credibility with me. If reviewers are not complaining about the Kindle prices then they are complaining that a book of fiction is {GASP} Fiction. Oh well . . . .

PUBLISHERS DESCRIPTION:

Inspired by the historical record of Richard III's bastard children, Smith invents a spirited, "tawny-eyed" mistress for the 15th-century king in her sweeping debut. Kate Bywood is plucked from her peasant life at the age of 11 to join the household of her mother's noble cousins, the Hautes, as companion to her timid cousin, Anne. A brief, unwilling marriage to an older, wealthy merchant leaves Kate a young widow with a considerable fortune. A second marriage to George, an opportunistic Haute cousin who prefers the stable boy to Kate, leaves her yearning for love. In a chance encounter, she meets Richard of Gloucester, and the ensuing secret romance is filled with the passion and intimacy her marriage lacks. George is killed during an attack in the forest, and Kate bears Richard three children. The narrative flies when the lovers are together, but once Richard marries Anne Neville, and he and Kate are separated for long stretches, the story loses its spark.

29. Quiet Please

By: Scott Douglas

Rated 4 Stars

From: Library

PUBLISHERS DESCRIPTION

For most of us, librarians are the quiet people behind the desk, who, apart from the occasional “shush,” vanish into the background. But in Quiet, Please, McSweeney’s contributor Scott Douglas puts the quirky caretakers of our literature front and center. With a keen eye for the absurd and a Kesey-esque cast of characters (witness the librarian who is sure Thomas Pynchon is Julia Roberts’s latest flame), Douglas takes us where few readers have gone before. Punctuated by his own highly subjective research into library history-from Andrew Carnegie’s Gilded Age to today’s Afghanistan-Douglas gives us a surprising (and sometimes hilarious) look at the lives which make up the social institution that is his library.

28. Bless This House

By: Nora Lofts
Rated 4 Stars
From Library
AUDIO BOOK

From time to time I started getting caught up in the stories of the inhabitants of the house and started to become annoyed when the story moved on. I had to remind myself that this was the story of the house and it's inhabitants were secondary to the story. When I kept that in mind I did fine with it.

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

This is a book to be savored by those who enjoy historical fiction. Beautifully written by a master storyteller, it centers around a beautiful house, Merravay, which was built during the Elizabethan era, and the lives of those who lived in it throughout the passing centuries.

It is a rich melange of personalities, conflicts, loves, and everyday twists that meld into the foundation of the house whose inhabitants have seen so much personal and historical strife. Filled with memorable characters throughout the ages, this thoroughly engrossing book will keep the reader entertained until the very last page is turned.

27. The Mapping of Love and Death

By: Jacqueline Winspear
Rated 4.5 Stars
From: Library

I think this is my favorite book in the series thus far.    The mystery plots in this series have always been excellent and carried a heroine that I wasn't always sympathetic with.  She could come across cold and way, way too uptight.  Sometimes I wanted to shout "for heaven's sake girl, lighten up!" at the book.

I have read so many books both fiction and non fiction that were set in this time period that I took as a given that men who had served in the war would go through a period of depression or would have been changed forever by there experiences.  I had never thought to apply the same behaviors to the women who had been through  many of the same experiences.  So now I am wondering if the author is becoming more comfortable with her characters or has done a very clever job of aging her characters.  Maisie has indeed "lightened up" as this series has progressed.

It took her a long time to get over Simon and I sincerely hope her relationship with James will survive the future.  With WWII looming and the broad hints thrown out about future demands from the Foreign Office it looks like busy times are ahead for everyone.

PUBLISHER DESCRIPTION:

The sixth Maisie Dobbs mystery, set in England between the wars, is based on a true story about the discovery of a collapsed dugout from World War I containing the bodies of a cartography team and their equipment. The American parents of the dead cartographer hire Maisie to find "the English Nurse," the young man's mysterious lover—and possibly his killer, as the autopsy evidence points to his having been murdered shortly before the dugout collapsed. Only a few hours after having hired Maisie, the Americans are attacked and badly beaten, prompting Maisie to take it upon herself to discover their attacker. Maisie and her assistant, Billy, take on the case in their usual careful and contemplative style, even as difficulties in Maisie's personal life challenge her concentration. Readers who preferred the earlier novels in the series will be pleased with this entry and those waiting for Maisie to finally find a love interest will have something to cheer about.

26. The Street of a Thousand Blossums

By: Gail Tsukiyama
Rated: 5 Stars
From Library

Thank you Connie for bringing this book to my attention. It was, as they say, right up my alley.

PUBLISHER DESCRIPTION

“Just remember,” Yoshio said quietly to his grandsons. “Every day of your lives, you must always be sure what you’re fighting for.”

It is Tokyo in 1939. On the Street of a Thousand Blossoms, two orphaned brothers are growing up with their loving grandparents, who inspire them to dream of a future firmly rooted in tradition. The older boy, Hiroshi, shows unusual skill at the national obsession of sumo wrestling, while Kenji is fascinated by the art of creating hard-carved masks for actors in the Noh theater.

Across town, a renowned sumo master, Sho Tanaka, lives with his wife and their two young daughters: the delicate, daydreaming Aki and her independent sister, Haru. Life seems full of promise as Kenji begins an informal apprenticeship with the most famous mask-maker in Japan and Hiroshi receives a coveted invitation to train with Tanaka. But then Pearl Harbor changes everything. As the ripples of war spread to both families’ quiet neighborhoods, all of the generations must put their dreams on hold---and then find their way in a new Japan.

In an exquisitely moving story that spans almost thirty years, Gail Tsukiyama draws us irresistibly into the world of the brothers and the women who love them. It is a world of tradition and change, of heartbreaking loss and surprising hope, and of the impact of events beyond their control on ordinary, decent men and women.