Month: July 2014

The Awakening of Miss Prim: A Novel, by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera, (Simon and Schuster), 272 pages

When I requested an electronic ARC for Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera’s The Awakening of Miss Prim, I knew I was taking a chance. This is a “quaint” novel, one that idealizes a vague past, when things purportedly were better for everyone. Education wasn’t watered down by modern educational theory, people spoke their minds clearly and without rancor, and genuine debate thrived. People also fell in love gradually, with minds, then hearts, and physical love was left for much later.

Sometimes I find such conceits charming, at other times they seem cloying. If you visit the Goodreads page for this book, you’ll see that the responses to it are very mixed, suggesting that The Awakening of Miss Prim is a book you’ll need to look at for yourself—not one that you can buy or skip based on reviews.

To sum this book up succinctly, Miss Prim decides on a whim to apply for a rather unusual private librarian’s position: the applicant should be good with children and dogs and have no qualifications whatsoever. Miss Prim actually has quite a few qualifications, including multiple advanced degrees, but she nonetheless manages to land the position and moves to the village where her employer lives. This is a village composed of individuals who feel alienated by modern life and who are attempting to create a gentler, more intelligent world by looking to the past. Miss Prim arrives here, is first nonplussed, then increasingly attracted by life in the village.

That’s pretty much it. The prose has a sparkle to it, but the reader’s response will be shaped primarily by her patience with gradual unfoldings of minor events. The author is attempting a modern-day sort of Pride and Prejudice, with mixed results—mixed not because they’re uneven, but because different readers respond to the narrative in such different ways.

I didn’t love this book, but this doesn’t mean you’ll feel the same. The next time you’re at your local independent bookstore, pick up a copy, read a few pages. You’ll quickly be able to decide for yourself whether you’ll be delighted or disinterested.

The Sacred River: A Novel, by Wendy Wallace, (Scribner), 304 pages

I requested an electronic ARC of Wendy Wallace’s The Sacred River because the story seemed so suited to my interests. The book opens in London, but is set primarily in British-controlled Egypt during the early 20th Century—a time of political unrest and archaeological discovery. What I hadn’t realized was that Wendy Wallace is also the author of one of my favorite books from 2012, The Painted Bridge, and I found The Sacred River every bit as enjoyable as that earlier work.

What Wallace writes is almost romance. Almost. But with more intellectual richness and with resolutions that are more complicated than the usual heterosexual coupling such books end with. Yes, in each book a man and a woman emerge as a couple, but that coupling isn’t the purpose that drives them. Instead, they come together because of shared interests or intellectual pursuits—and the women have as much substance in this area as the men do.

The Sacred River focuses on three women: a mother, Louisa; her sister-in-law, Yael; and Louisa’s daughter, Harriet. Harriet, now in her early twenties, is consumptive. She’s spent her years as an invalid studying texts on ancient Egypt, particularly hieroglyphs, and convinces her doctor to tell her parents that travel to Egypt is essential for her health. So Louisa and Harriet, accompanied by the spinster, Yael, set sail.

As it turns out, Egypt is good for Harriet’s health, easing her breathing and also giving her life a sense of purpose that it’s lacked before. Harriet is able to participate in archaeological work, sketching paintings and glyphs in a recently discovered tomb. Yael also finds a new sense of purpose in Egypt, one suited to her Christian beliefs and her inherent feminism. Louisa, meanwhile, is confronted with a past that, as a cover copy-writer might put it, she’d “prefer to keep buried.” The paths the women take are very different, giving the book a satisfying breadth of scope.

For the most part, the Egypt readers see is the Egypt of British colonialism. Egyptians themselves are background figures, helpful servants or vaguely menacing strangers. But by the book’s end, as political resistance to British rule increases, readers are given a sense of the anti-colonial struggle that will shake the country in years to come.

The Sacred River is one of those wonderful reads combining lyricism, self-realization, and historical reality in a combination that delights throughout. If you have time for a summer read, I can’t imagine a better recommendation than The Sacred River. This book will broaden your horizons as the heroines work to broaden their own.

As High as the Horses’ Bridles: A Novel, by Scott Cheshire, (Macmillan, Henry Holt and Co.), 318 pages

I can’t say that I enjoyed reading Scott Cheshire’s High as the Horses’ Bridles, but I was certainly engaged by it. This is the sort of book one reads not for the narrative arc or for the specific characters that inhabit it, but in order to explore the ideas underlying it.

We meet the book’s narrator in 1980 at age twelve when he’s about to testify before a group of evangelicals some four thousand strong. Star Wars action figure in his pocket, he comes on stage and surprises himself by announcing that the apocalypse will come in the year 2000.

The novel then fast-forwards. Our narrator is now thirty-seven, he’s long since shed any belief in the apocalypse or even God, but his elderly, widowed father remains obsessed with the end times. Josiah has been living in California for years, but he’s returned home to New York at the urging of his ex-wife, who’s deeply concerned about Gill’s, her former father-in-law’s, health—both physical and mental.

The horses’ bridles of the title come from the book of Revelation. An evangelical preacher declares: “that Last Day will be like none since the Flood. And God’s army will come riding forth on horses, and the sinners’ blood will run in the streets, thick and deep, high as the horses’ bridles.”

Josiah finds himself haunted by this image, asking “Whose blood?… I’d recited this scripture how many times without thinking?… My good mother would one day slip and swim through whose wet blood?… My mother would wade through a river of whose dead blood exactly?”

It’s the contrasts like these that make High as the Horses’ Bridles so interesting. Josiah questions his faith—but even when that faith is gone he never mocks it. For Josiah, apocalyptic faith is one reasonable way of being in the world. It’s just that he’s left it long ago and his father lives there still.

This isn’t a book to rush through. It needs to be read slowly and carefully, with plenty of time for reflection between periods of reading. Most readers won’t find a character with whom to identify, but they will have the opportunity of picking up and trying on what might seem like foreign identities, living within them until their own logic becomes clear.

The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America’s Coldest Cases, by Deborah Halber, (Simon & Schuster), 304 pages

Deborah Halber’s The Skeleton Crew is another book that falls into the I-wanted-to-like-it-more-than-I-did category. Like a great many readers, I’ve been looking for and devouring non-fiction about forensic detection—particularly forensic anthropology—for at least the past ten years. As a result, I was delighted to receive a digital ARC for review. The Skeleton Crew has a great premise: explore the work of amateurs attempting find identities for unidentified remains.

Interesting possibilities, yes?

Unfortunately, these possibilities are never realized. Instead, we get a rambling, digressive depiction of a few cases and individuals, but never a book with a clear purpose. Halber attempts to hold the book together by returning periodically to a single case, but all this does is spread out that particular narrative in a way that confuses and frustrates readers.

The prose itself is turgid, thick with descriptive detail that doesn’t always make sense. Three examples:

Livingston, Tennessee, is plopped like the yolk of a sunny-side-up egg in a valley roughly midway between Nashville,home of country music, and Knoxville, birthplace of Mountain Dew and the Dempster-Dumpster.

In the yearbook’s head-and-shoulder portraits, the girls’ big hair fell in bangs curling like spiders’ legs over their foreheads.

The day I met him, his dark suit, crisp white shirt with a monogrammed cuff, and sharp tie were set off by mother-of-pearl cufflinks in rich blues and greens—almost as reflective as his bald head—that glinted as he offered me his hand.

What one wants from a book like this is a sense of the puzzle of identifying remains and how it’s solved—the thinking and step-by-step actions of individuals who have succeeded in this work. That material is buried in The Skeleton Crew here and there, but like the bodies these amateurs work with, it’s hard to identify.