Enchanted Prose

An elegant memoir of the unbreakable bond between a daughter and her father using literary scholarship (Rhode Island, Boston, also England, Australia; roughly 1980s to present-day): There are many ways to describe this heartbreaker of a memoir about an only child who loses her beloved yet enigmatic, alcoholic father.

Katharine Smyth misses her father terribly, yearns to better understand him, which means reconciling conflicted memories of him. She wants to see him in the best light – Light a constant thread – not through a child’s adoring eyes (“a child [who] danced on the top of his feet”), but as an adult often disappointed and disgusted by his “recklessness.”

Smyth’s father remains nameless until the acknowledgements, a nod to the mystery of him. He died at 55 to cancer, hastened (if not brought on) by self-destructive behaviors. Truth is, and Smyth writes candidly, she’d been losing him many years before.

How can someone go from “the most gentle and loving being” to an unrecognizable “brutish stranger”? Be so “anti-life” yet “hold such life within”? What happened to the man who seemed happy when they sailed and swam together? Once so energetic, so full of life, then so full of “exhaustion and sourness.” If, as the author concludes, he was “born an alcoholic,” was he ever truly happy? Happy enough? What was the meaning of his life?

Smyth has been struggling with these complicated questions for at least the past ten years, which is how long she says she’s been writing about him. Seems much longer, going back to when she was eleven when she started a diary. Even with all those years of reflections, her impressions of him keep shape-shifting. Understandable, as he was complex, a nasty drunk, and her mother was private and distant, silent and absent during all those troubling years.

This testament to a daughter’s unbreakable attachment to and love for her father is profound. Her teenage years were emotional roller coasters as she (and her mother) walked on eggshells, so erratic and unpredictable was he. Yet she, not her mother, was his primary caretaker (minus the years she was sent to boarding school, a godsend). Not a slight matter as her father underwent frequent cancer treatments, sometimes every three months, in and out of hospitals. When the disease spread, his last hospitalization was lengthy, torturous. “How can people be asked to endure this?” asks the daughter who never left her father’s side.

Smyth seeks existential answers from Virginia Woolf, her literary idol, who counsels “life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive.” As the subtitle suggests, the author applies Woolf’s early 20^th century inner thoughts (from letters, essays, diaries) and fiction to 21^st century loneliness and grief to enlighten her. Perhaps Woolf is right: you can never truly know someone. But the beautiful thing about the author’s impressive effort is not wanting to accept the darker view. In elegant prose, she strives to find the light.

Where better than in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, which as far as the author is concerned “tells the story of everything.” This is the book she holds dear above all books. (“Perhaps there is one book for every life.”) Even if you haven’t read it or remember it, the author shows how relatable it is to her life starting with a favored parent (the mother, Mrs. Ramsey) at the heart of a family and a marriage.

Woolf spent her childhood in a house by the sea and the light (“the purest ecstasy I can conceive”) in Cornwall, England with a view of the Godrevy Lighthouse, where she summered as a child. (Fictionally, she moved the house, sea, and light to the Isle of Skye in Scotland.)

Virginia Woolf’s real and fictionalized homes remind the author of an 1890s house with a waterfront deck in Rhode Island she spent happy summers. The Cornwall home was “the most important of all memories,” wrote Woolf. True for Smyth and once upon a time for her father.

The author knows Virginia Woolf intimately; she’s the subject of her master’s thesis. (Her father was also from England; the author studied at Oxford and fondly recollects those days.) Other Woolf writings (and biographer analyses) are sometimes blended in, all often within the same paragraph. Stylistically, the memoir reflects some of Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness modernism, including use of Woolf’s bracketed parenthetical thoughts. So there’s plenty of literary food for thought.

We can also examine the memoir psychologically, as this is a sad story about what happens to a person’s psyche when they become unemployed and it drags on and on. The author’s father never really made a comeback from a creatively satisfying architectural career (her mother also an architect) when he lost that job to the recession in the ‘80s. A tragic example of how job loss can spiral downward triggering heavy, constant drinking (and smoking).

Another psychological factor is the extent to which the “unique psychology of sickness” (Woolf’s prophetic words, having committed suicide) fueled her father’s depression and alcoholism, a toxic mix coupled with the psychological damage caused by joblessness.

Alcoholism affects the whole family. The memoir, then, is a window into the perniciousness of alcoholism victimizing a family, eating away at a marriage. (Though theirs didn’t end in divorce, a topic of consternation since the author’s marriage dissolved after four years.). The family goes on, but not without considerable sacrifices. “Marriage is a loss, a sacrifice of self and its expression,” says the author reflecting Woolf’s feminism.

All the Lives We Ever Lived raises many provocative issues, including a different perspective to consider only children other than the typical stereotype of spoiled brats.

The question of whether a child loves their father or mother more comes up. Let’s accept the question is a universal one owing to human nature and circumstances. The question that’s not universal is why an only child might have a more intense obsession for one parent over another? Adoration so acute and vital it becomes wrapped up in a fear life will become unbearable when that parent dies.

Only children like the author may carry a melancholy “sense of envy” of larger families, a kind of grief on its own for not being part of the “happy chaos of siblings” as seen in Woolf’s Ramsey family. Feelings of existential longing are practical too: not having a sister or a brother to comfort you, especially when you have to carry the burden of a dysfunctional family. Fiction, then, is not just for entertainment, escape, but to gain insight into ourselves by letting us inside how others live, act, and think.

The author also does us a service when she’s hit by how different her emotions are from societal expectations of grieving. She describes grief as “dreaminess,” “alienation,” “fogginess,” “formlessness.” But what she discovers is that for her it’s not the non-stop crying and falling-apart she dreaded for so many precious years.

Most remarkable is the lack of bitterness in the prose. Perhaps, in part, because the author’s idol shunned “sentimentality.” But we need to let Smyth shine here all on her own, admire her optimism to find her father’s lost light – “that astonishing light” – not just for the memory of him but for herself.

Tenderly and compassionately the author writes about wildlife by the water – great blue herons and swan egrets and creatures of the sea like starfish, oysters, horseshoe crabs. Poignantly observing species disappearing year after year, the prose cries out on climate change and how much Nature nourishes our well-being.

Ironically, in writing to better know her father, the author found a brighter light for her mother, for whom she dedicates her eloquent memoir to.

Lorraine

Will justice triumph over evil? (Soviet Union, Poland, Austria, Germany, and Boston 1937 – 1950; 1959 epilogue): Confession:The Huntress took me out of my comfort zone, but I could not put it down. Superbly crafted and thrilling, yet uncomfortably up-close to the evil perpetrated by Nazis. Kate Quinn’s point: we must never forget.

Consider these chilling facts. The plot – about a fictional female Nazi war criminal being hunted down – combines aspects of two real Holocaust killers. One caught in Queens, New York where I grew up. The other murdered six innocent Jewish children, heinous cold-blooded cruelty that netted her the name Die Jägerin, which means the huntress.

Three characters in the novel do the hunting. Ian, a well-known British war correspondent, and his sidekick Tony, a Jewish-American from Queens. Nina from Siberia joined the team after navigating and flying Soviet bomber planes to defend The Motherland when Germany invaded her country. All in their thirties, all with deep personal anger to hunt down Nazi war criminals with a “hunger so vast it could have swallowed the world.” Their obsession reflected in intense prose that brings history intensely alive.

Yet this is still fiction, so the reader doesn’t know whether the huntress will be found and captured, especially after the Nuremberg trials when the world wanted to move on. Consider another chilling fact: dozens of Nazi war criminals are estimated to still be alive, perhaps hiding out right before our eyes.

Alarming and morally disturbing facts that are powerfully timely as anti-Semitism has dramatically resurged in the US and around the globe. The Anti-Defamation League reported that in just one year (2016-2017) the US jump – the largest jump in two decades – approached 60%.

Also eerily timed is the novel’s depiction of America in the fifties preoccupied with Communists not Nazis. Given today we’re in the throes of Russian investigations rightfully aimed at saving our democracy, the novel warns we must not be so overwhelmed with one enemy that we don’t pay enough attention to other dangers.

The existential writer Franz Kafka was recently quoted in the article What Books are the Most Shocking and Disturbing? as saying “if the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?” I imagine he’d be giving the author a standing ovation, if alive today.

Still, it takes a masterly writer to keep hitting us in the gut over 560 pages and we don’t put the book down. We can’t because it’s action-packed, racing back and forth over time and many places, blending WWII atrocities and realities with a post-WWII hunt that feels like everything is happening at once. Time and place are structured so questions you may have about events that occurred during one time period are addressed in another in the chapter that follows. And this pace is delivered through the voices of six characters whose alternating stories are all interesting to the end.

The two other main characters who make up the six cited above (the huntress plus the hunting team) live in Boston where the hunt is set and tracked month by month. They are sensitive, seventeen-year-old budding photographer Jordan, and her mysterious new stepmother Anneliese, an Austrian widow from the war. That’s four compelling female characters who overpower the men, striking a feminist theme about powerful women who make consequential choices. Only two, though, are good and courageous. Of the other two, one is absolutely abominable while the other might be too.

How difficult and exhausting was all of this to put together? Perhaps if I’d read Quinn’s bestselling 2017 female spy novel, The Alice Network (on my TBR list for sure), the answer would be clearer. So much historical research must have gone into developing a novel that spans so many countries including the Soviet Union’s Siberia, Moscow, Engels, and Northern Caucasus region. How hard was it to transform WWII flying adventure movie-like scenes into blow-by-blow, high-wire prose? The image of Nina and her partner in the cockpit of the Soviet fighter biplane Polikarpov U-2 as vivid as watching on the screen.

Dialogue is plentiful and key to visceral reactions. Sometimes it moves so briskly we can’t read fast enough. Sometimes because we’re caught off guard, as it’s laced with Nina’s crude Russian slang (shocking to even Ian whose “chased two wars across the globe”); Polish and German words, translated or not; offensive ethnic slurs toward many nationalities and identities; and numerous unfamiliar historical references. The gritty language helps us feel the rage and bewilderment of a weary, battered world. A world where too many wanted the horrors of the past to stay in the past. Some, of course, could not. We cheer their bravery and moral convictions.

Ian’s founding of a documentation center to track Holocaust criminals reminds us of Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal’s renowned work, but it’s actually another survivor and war hunter, Fritz Bauer, the author tells us in her fascinating notes who inspired Ian’s doggedness. Most of the fictional characters are drawn from historical figures.

For a blog called enchanted prose it must be said that The Huntress is by no means enchanted as in charming. Rather, it’s bewitched in the sense that Quinn has cast a spell over us.

In fact, witches are everywhere, most notably in mythology about water. Nina grew up in a witch-like place by the mystical Lake Ruselka, “the world’s deepest lake at the world’s furthest end,” haunted by an evil fable about lake witches. Her brutal childhood indelibly scarred by this icy blue body of water that matches the huntress’ icy blue eyes. Water is the only thing she fears. Flying, the furthest away she can get from the sea, becomes her passion, her salvation. Nina’s WWII flying story historically represents the first group of female aviators in the war, outperforming the men. Known as Night Witches, they flew at night.

A lot about “wolverine-mad,” razor-toting Nina’s otherworldly toughness will make you cringe, but she also has the capacity to love, can be fiercely loyal, and is incredibly fearless in the skies, modeling herself on her Soviet idol, famous aviatrix Marina Raskova.

Two more lakes are featured. One in Poland where the Nazi witch being hunted did her destruction; the other outside Boston where an ugly accident (?) occurs.

To be fair, Tony’s role is to be a charmer so he can butter up witnesses to get them to talk. He also charms Jordan McBride, the observant photographer and daughter of a widowed father who owns an antiques shop in Boston.

The McBride story kicks off the plot. Chapter 1 opens with Jordan discovering she’ll soon have a stepmother (Anneliese) who does everything to assimilate including changing her name to Anna. Jordan’s quick to snap a picture of her, revealing a coldness only she sees through her lens. Some other things happen early on that lead Jordan to believe “this woman is hiding something.” Suspicions about Anna’s truthfulness burn through Jordan’s story as she grows to love her stepmother. Tormented, she wonders if she’s jealous of the woman who took away her father’s attention. Then again “cameras don’t lie.” Either way, Jordan’s instincts are admirably protective of her new little stepsister Ruth, picking up on how sad a child she is. She wonders why.

Jordan’s character touches us. Her evolving relationship with Tony, and a wagging tail dog sweeten the pot but these cannot compete with the darkness.

An epilogue wraps things up, but we’ll never be able to wrap our heads around the inhumanity. Something even the finest research and writing can’t possibly find the words for.

Lorraine

Hearts full of love and a weak heart (Long Island, NY 1999 to some years later; Kiev, Ukraine 1986 backstory): “A good book can transform souls,” says Maggie Topper, our bright-eyed, twenty-six-year-old narrator excited to embark on a new career teaching sixth grade English at a middle school on the northern shore of Long Island (same region the author lives.) If Maggie is right – as readers who can’t live without books would agree – then The Secret of Clouds has a big-hearted, life-affirming soul about a special teacher and a special student transforming each other’s lives. Buoyed by a big-hearted cast of characters, this is a feel-good yet poignant novel sprinkled with tug-at-your-heart student writings shared with a teacher they trust.

Authors frequently preface their novels with a quote (or two). Sometimes it captures the essence of the book, often not or the meaning obscure. Alyson Richman, known for her historical fiction novels, introduces her first contemporary one with a single line by Zelda Fitzgerald that may be the best at summing up a novel:

Yuri Krasny is one of Maggie’s students. Yuri may be turning twelve but he’s an “old soul” with a “most generous heart.” Maggie’s principal asked her to tutor him at his home as it’s too risky for him to go to school. Born with a “weak heart . . . but his mind had no limits. It could still be filled with dreams.” Enter Maggie, a teacher who finds “light in the darkness,” who sees Yuri’s “spark,” that light. The novel opens with Maggie’s lyrical description of Yuri as the child:

“You sense is extraordinary, is the one who returns everything you give and more … your beacon as every word you utter in the classroom suddenly has a destination. It’s as if you are teaching to the light.”

Yuri is mature beyond his years because his protected life is surrounded by adults: stay-at-home mom Katya and molecular biologist father Sasha who works at Stony Brook University, where Brookhaven National Lab is located. Which is to say Sasha knows painfully well the science behind Yuri’s illness. Though Yuri is blessed with extremely devoted parents, he’s extremely unlucky to have a genetic condition preventing him from living a normal childhood, from living his dreams.

Richman, still very much the writer drawn to the historical past, skillfully weaves Yuri’s parents’ backstories into the plot: Katya was a former Russian-trained ballerina in the Kiev ballet corps (today also called The National Ballet of Ukraine, considered “one of the world’s greatest ballet schools”). Graceful and thin, “weightless, as if she had harnessed the wind,” her motherly love and suffering for her sickly child is reflected in graceful prose. Sasha is Jewish. Choosing 1986 to tell their Ukrainian stories comes at a time when Gorbachev “announced those with Jewish ancestry” could leave their country. In an unusually candid statement coming from a Soviet leader, he admitted “Jews had been widely prosecuted.” Katya was only nineteen when she married adoring Sasha. She hadn’t realized how widespread anti-Semitism was until they met – Sasha’s reason to emigrate. Katya sustained an injury that ended her dancing dreams, so when the opportune time came the two left their homeland. Historically, 1986 also marks the date of the world’s worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, alluded to from the start in the Prologue.

In America, Katya is the epitome of a sleep-deprived mother living and breathing every moment worrying about her baby, now at a tender age, “such a beautiful yet fleeting time” Maggie reminds those of us who have children.

Mother and son are terribly isolated. This is a family living on the edge, so everyday is precious to them, everyday grateful for what they have.

When Maggie is let into this loving family, her life changes. While she’s laser-focused on inspirational lessons she can gift Yuri, it’s Yuri (and his parents) who gives her the greatest gift of all: a deep personal connection to the fragility and preciousness of life.

Maggie’s lessons are powerful messages too. Creatively, she comes up with meaningful reading and writing assignments matched to Yuri’s (and his classmates) interests and needs. For instance, she picks sports stories to appeal to the boys like Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella that inspired The Field of Dreams baseball movie with Kevin Costner we all loved. First, though, she must figure out how to connect with the pale boy slumped in his living room chair. Once she learns his passion is baseball, Maggie and Yuri begin to see the light.

Richman teaches us too, again drawing on history. In 1981, Lucy Calkins, a Columbia University educator, pioneered the method of combining the teaching of writing with the teaching of reading. Maggie, by the way, graduated from Columbia Teachers College.

Maggie is the teacher you never forget. A romantic soul, soothed by the fairy-tale cottage she rents in a rural enclave that’s “more like New England than the fancier towns closer to Manhattan.” She’s close to her parents who live nearby. Her mother loves to cook mouthwatering meals, recipes passed down from the Sicilian old country. (Katya’s home is also filled with savoring smells, meals nostalgic of Ukraine.) “Food is love.” Maggie’s retired father is now living out his dream of making violins in the basement of her childhood home.

Other heart-warming characters who bring something special for Maggie and the reader are her school colleagues: art teacher Suzie, Maggie’s best friend, the one we’re all grateful to have or wish we had. A colorful ball of fire and counselor-in-chief ready to drop everything when Maggie needs her; substitute music teacher Daniel who just so happens to treasure beautifully-crafted violins like the ones Maggie’s father makes. With his green velvet jacket, “poetic soul,” charm, and old-fashioned manners he seems more out of the 19^th century literary world than the 21^st; and Florence, an older teacher who decorates her classroom every year with butterflies, giving the impression she’s lost her passion until Maggie discovers there’s a heartbreaking reason.

“Baseball banter” fills the pages when Maggie and Yuri are together. He’s an avid Yankees fan, like his dad; Maggie roots for the Mets, like her brother. When Maggie asks Yuri why he loves baseball so much, his answers show how wise and intelligent he is:

“Everything about it is unpredictable. You never know what’s going to happen . . . “the math of baseball is always changing” . . . “baseball is like live math” . . . “you can always change the stakes every time you’re up at bat.”

Author notes at the end of historical novels that inform us what’s fiction versus fact are favored. Richman knows this, doesn’t disappoint when she turns her sights on the contemporary. In a Reader’s Guide interview included in the novel, she explains the personal inspiration for her characters’ passions and Maggie’s teaching ideas such as: her son loves baseball, which accounts for why she writes like a sports columnist, and all her novels feature something artistic because her mother is a painter. In this novel, it’s the violin that both her husband and daughter play.

Sasha also speaks of butterflies. Butterflies having to do with the physics of chaos theory. The “butterfly effect” also beautifully summarizes the novel’s soul: how one small action can make a big difference.

There’s a secret in the clouds but there’s no secret that one person can make a big difference. Or, in this touching, heart-filled novel, the light beams on two.

Lorraine

Unbelievable fakery, believable psychological consequences (Manhattan and towns across America, 2002-2006; Appalachian West Virginia/Virginia childhood years): This “concert crimes” memoir is unlike any I’ve ever read because it’s almost impossible to believe it’s true. The truth telling so difficult to swallow, a preface anticipates your disbelief:   

“While this is a memoir about being a fake, this is not a fake memoir. This is a memoir of earnest, written by a person striving to get to the truth of things that happened in the past . . . This book argues that while determining the difference between the real and the fake can be maddening and ultimately imperfect, it remains a worthy endeavor.” 

Maddening even for this mind-boggling fake news era. How could Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman spend four fraudulent years as a “fake violinist” playing in an ensemble for a “famous composer” duping audiences all across America and no one caught on the music was faked? How can that be?

The Composer – never referred to by his real name – and his complicit ensemble performed and conducted at world-class concert venues such as Lincoln Center! On PBS! More intimately at countless shopping malls, and arts and craft fairs. During a “74 days, 60 cities, and 54 performances” tour after 9/11 when vigilance reigned! Incredible not a single person in the audience realized the sounds were not coming from the musicians on stage. An astonishing scam. Though musicians were really playing their instruments, the microphone was turned off, so the “most beautiful music in the world” actually came from backstage, from a $14.95 Sony CD player! Yes, all the exclamation points are warranted. Wait, it gets worse.

The artistic cover-up wasn’t even synced from original compositions. The music was copied from other works, leaving out just enough notes to avoid violating copyright laws. The so-called composer couldn’t even recognize the iconic notes from Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony!

On nearly every page, you’ll be asking, like Hindman does: “Who is The Composer?” She never outs him. That’s not her purpose. Hers is a tell-all meant to come to terms with how she got so profoundly in over her head until she reached the breaking point when she could no longer discern reality. Engrossing as we try to absorb the implausibility of not being discovered versus the plausibility of the emotional and physical toll that “almost killed” the author.

Hindman describes herself as “desperate.” One explanation is desperate financial times called for desperate actions, that by the time she’d gotten a sudden opportunity to work for the rock-star composer she’d hit fiscal rock bottom so how could she resist? Too simple.

Far more insidious were complicated, deep-seated emotional struggles, psychological vulnerabilities, rooted in her formative years growing up in Appalachia. Perceiving herself as one of Dr. Mary Pipher’s Ophelia teenage girls who succumbed to female expectations, low body image, and perfectionism, she suffered a mental and physical breakdown. Running commentaries explaining herself within larger contexts – in this case societal and cultural – are thoughtful and insightful.

This years-to-write memoir is dedicated “to those with average talents and above-average desires,” hinting from the get-go that’s how she’d defined herself. Note: her work effort is more like off the charts.

As a young, serious girl growing up in Appalachia who needed to be taken seriously, playing a serious instrument meant everything. No one will “laugh at you when you’re playing the violin.” A work ethic born out of what’s “most revered by the adults around her . . . Work is in the Appalachian air you breathe.” All the practice and hardships that went into earning early recognition as a “reeyl star” put so much extra pressure on wanting to be “valued in the world.” Years later, when her impossible dream seems to have come true – playing big-time for real yet never being heard – her sense of self, her value comes into serious jeopardy, precipitating crisis.

Which is another reason Sounds Like Titanic is unlike anything I’ve read as the only way Hindman found she could tell large portions of her story was to distance herself from painful truths, using the least common narrative point-of-view: the 2^nd person. Not the easiest literary approach to pull off successfully, which she does.

One thing the memoir shares with others reviewed here is gorgeous prose, reaching stirring heights with energetic descriptions of violin playing:

“Fingers fly up the neck of your violin. You dangle on the highest note like a mountain climber clinging to the summit by a fingertip. It is never about conquering the mountain. It’s always about conquering the fear of the fall.”

Mountain metaphors are everywhere. Growing up in Appalachia meant her parents had to literally climb mountains driving hours to find (and pay) someone to teach their striving daughter the violin. Better off than most, this was still a financial sacrifice.

Drawn to “sinister music” at a young age, the author sensed “the connection between the music and the mountain fog.” Music she equated to “childhood sadness,” to Holocaust music evoking Anne Frank’s tragic story. Complex, ominous sounds.

Whereas The Composer’s instrumental music is easier and uplifting. Its most distinctive feature is the high-pitched “pennywhistle” sounds of the flute, likened to Celtic and Native American music. Music echoing the soundtrack of the movie Titanic – hence the memoir’s title.

So when Hindman arrived in Manhattan to attend Columbia University she’s already carrying heavy emotional baggage. Add to that endless economic angst to supplement her music scholarship, depleting the money her family managed to save up and the limits of egg-donorship. That’s when the author gets entangled with The Composer. After graduation, she relentlessly sought other jobs, hitting dead-ends and rejections, so she stayed on and on with him. Now really on her own, she went through hoops to find a dirt cheap apartment in a ridiculously expensive rental market. Survival, unless she quit. Jessica Hindman is definitely not a quitter.

Many recollections come from a journal Hindman kept while touring America in a dilapidated RV, along with The Composer and three other musicians. RV comrades in crime include another female violinist possessed with the kind of natural talent Hindman reminds us she doesn’t have; a flutist; and a Russian musician who resembles a “Hollywood parody of a KGB agent.” The driver of this wretched home-on-wheels navigates for months for free in exchange for being bathed in The Composer’s music, one of his “hardcore fans.”

More musicians perform on stage and work behind the scenes to produce the pirated CDs that garner big bucks. The Composer donates to charities and PBS, of course, but his con-artistry is impossible to condone no matter what his real motive(s).

Pursuing an Ivy League education was also eye-opening. Discovering an elite moneyed class full of privileges and stereotypes toward people from the South, prejudices strongly influenced the author’s academic path. The Iraq War was raging, so she fixated on a second major – Middle Eastern studies – aspiring to become a war correspondent. Writing evidently also an interest, except now the workaholic is juggling two uphill, demanding careers. Both seem vastly different but Hindman identifies a disturbing commonality – “ignorance” – ignorant musical audiences and ignorance about the Middle East.

Today Jessica Hindman is a bona fide professor of creative writing at Northern Kentucky University. We’re heartened she climbed her personal mountains to get there.

Lorraine

What Queen Elizabeth II’s wedding gown meant to post-WWII England (London 1947; Toronto, Canada 2016): Historian and bestselling historical fiction author Jennifer Robson makes fashion design so interesting when she takes us inside who/what was involved in creating Queen Elizabeth II’s dazzling wedding gown during Britain’s austerity program in the aftermath of WWII, when even the royal family rationed their clothing. Desperate for a show of optimism for their bankrupt nation, British citizenry went so far as to send their ration coupons to Buckingham Palace, only to be returned to them.

In an elucidating author’s note, Robson explains how she was put to the test researching The Gown, her fifth historical novel. All she had were the “barest details” about the famous British fashion designer, Norman Hartnell, whose design was chosen for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten on November 20, 1947. Similarly, very little was known about his senior staff and embroiderers, and the process for making the exquisite gown at Hartnell’s embroidery workroom in London’s tony Mayfair district.

“Swirls of tiny gold beads, translucent crystals, and matte copper sequins” were embroidered onto silk satin, along with appliquéing hundreds of flower motifs using a tambour hook and a frame. Delicate, meticulous work completed in just six weeks, with the added pressure of not breathing a word about what they were doing. Keeping the gown under wraps reached a feverish pitch, with consequences for anyone who breached their word of honor.

Robson is a persistent researcher because some of the Hartnell characters ended up being real ones. She’s also a detailed researcher and writer who doesn’t rush through scenes, rather, takes her time describing them. The effect is to put the reader into the bleak world of 1947 London when the British were grieving significant losses and still enduring major hardships.

We view this world through the lens of three fictional women, told in alternating chapters and time periods. Two are Hartnell embroiderers: Ann Hughes and Miriam Dassin. Miriam, who went on to become an embroidery artist in her own right, felt so authentic I googled her, to no avail. I wasn’t satisfied until Robson confirmed in her explanatory note that they were imagined, though a bona fide embroiderer did inspire them.

The third female character, Heather Mackenzie, brings us into contemporary times. In her opening chapter, Heather’s grandmother Nan passes away. Nan was ninety-four, yet it was hard to believe she was gone. “All those people who lived through the war. You’d think they were made of cast iron.”

Nan leaves Heather pieces of embroideries. Heather (and her mother) haven’t any clue what they are or where they came from. Like the author, Heather travels to London to piece together Nan’s embroidery story. Stunned that as close as they were Nan kept part of her life secret. Why? Neither Heather nor her mother hadn’t even known Ann once lived in London. They’re all from Toronto, like the author.

Ann and Miriam are talented embroiderers. Ann had been working at Hartnell for over a decade when they met; Miriam was an embroiderer before she emigrated from France. While the novel focuses on England in the immediate years after WWII, Miriam’s French-Jewish refugee backstory brings the horrors of the Holocaust into the plot.

The two women become fast and best friends when Miriam lands a job at Hartnell’s and moves in with Ann, into the same council house she’d been living in since childhood, located in a working class suburb of East London. Council housing was part of Britain’s public housing program that began after WWI, blending more British history into fiction.    

Early on we learn that Miriam fled her homeland after she was freed by Americans from the all-women’s concentration camp, Ravensbrück. Ann and Miriam both lost family in the war. Both are surviving quietly. Both are anxious and reserved, for different reasons: Miriam is hiding from her past; Ann is keenly aware of the “gulf between classes” to the point of painfully accepting her destiny.

Ann and Miriam find comfort in each other as they go about their daily lives, rationing food and other needs, calling forth strength, humility, and a stiff upper lip. The pride, gratitude, and camaraderie they found at Hartnell’s cannot be overstated.

Theirs was a friendship bonded over commonalities and vulnerabilities. Differences in their European cultures and religions they bridged easily. There was, though, one huge difference between the two: Ann’s past was ordinary, whereas Miriam’s was historically extraordinary and haunting. At Harnell’s, they worked together on something luxurious, optimistic.

Which is why the glamor and excitement of a royal wedding – including the gorgeous gown – meant so much to a battered nation.

Heather is the one who brings Ann, Miriam, and Britain’s past alive. At first her dilemma was whether to ignore looking into the bequeathed embroideries out of respect for Nan’s privacy. It doesn’t take her long to realize Nan left them for her because she wanted Heather to know there was more to her grandmother than she could ever dream of. Heather discovers that because she’s a fine researcher who gets lucky.

The Gown is also a modern day example of how the beauty and pageantry of a fairy-tale royal wedding can boost an entire nation, if only briefly. Recall how the world was captivated last year by the courtship and marriage of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle. As of this writing, it seems British media has turned against the Duchess of Sussex, whereas Queen Elizabeth II is still beloved seventy years later. We may not be royal watchers, like Heather, her mother, and apparently the author, but we certainly felt the magic, love, and a sliver of optimism the new royal couple heralded.

Amidst the chaos in our country and around the world, the goodness and decency of Robson’s characters – kind in both deeds and prose – is a perfect novel for ushering in 2019.

Of course, there’s got to be a character whose trouble. In this novel he’s 1947 Jeremy with movie-star looks, “silver-blue eyes,” and a “top secret job.” He goes out of his way to court Ann, who can’t fathom why. She’s one of the “plain girls” and he’s so clearly upper-class. Let’s just say he’s not what he seems.

On the other hand, Ann, Miriam, and Heather will warm your heart. So will Ann’s widowed sister-in-law Milly, Miriam’s outside-of-work friends, plus a charming fellow connected to Miriam Heather fortuitously meets in 2016.

Starting off in 2019 with these kind, decent characters uplifts us. We welcome their warmth, goodness, and perseverance.

Lorraine