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Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue chooses fascinating issues for her stories. Her writing is incredibly well-researched and in this novel, readers are introduced to the 'long -buried' story of first love experienced by two girls in a British boarding house during the 19th century.
One of the girls is Anne Lister, described as a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who has become iconic through what she wrote in her extensive five-million-word secret diary and recently her representation on screen as HBO's 'Gentleman Jack'. She is not particularly likable though. My impression of her character is that she presumes her own privilege and showers Eliza with affection, making her fall in love with her only to then disregard her easily. Worth remembering that their behaviour is that of teenagers though.
In contrast to Anne Lister's playful exuberance and laissez-faire approach to all about her boarding school life, Eliza Raine's existence and her life choices are heartbreaking. She was an orphaned heiress banished from India to England at the age of six and Donoghue's narrative explains her mixed-race Anglo-Indian background, her disconnect with India and her mother, her inability to connect fully with her new surroundings and ultimately the futility of her life once she is disregarded by Lister following their young teenage same-sex love experiences. The later chapters in the novel document her final years in a mental institution during which she desperately wrote to Anne Lister recounting all they had promised each other during their first love experiences.
Eliza is the character who holds the reader's empathy most since she is deemed to have been Lister's first love at the age of fifteen. Her vulnerability and complete abandon to these emotions is likely to be sensitive for most readers.
I've read 'Room', 'Pull of the Stars', 'The Wonder', 'Haven' and now 'Learned by Heart' and I have to say Donoghue knows how to hook you with her words. The voices of her characters are allowed to speak so close to their emotions and so hauntingly of the truths they experience in their respective worlds that Donoghue's messages leave strong indents in her reader's minds.
Emma Donoghue's writing has a didactic but eerily penetrative style and resonance.
review by Christina Francis-Gilbert
Iceberg by Jennifer A. Nielsen
This novel is a 2023 publication and a worthwhile narrative retelling of some of the noted historical experiences from this well-known tragedy. the central voice is a young girl called Hazel Rothbury who is travelling alone from her home in England to New York , in the hopes of finding work so she might send money back to her poor destitute mother and siblings.
Hazel, keen to be more than a factory worker and eager to become a journalist once she arrives in the United States, is observant and perceptive. She observes the ignorant oversights, mistakes, calamities and challenges of how the ship and its various representatives of different levels of society were managed, and she starts to take notes in a gifted notebook from a fellow passenger. She also asks questions, sometimes getting herself into more trouble than she is already in, as a stowaway. She makes friends on the ship including a young crew member called Charlie, a 1st class passenger Sylvia Thorngood and her governess Ms Gruber and Mrs Ruth Abelman amongst other travellers who help to build her travel aboard this ultimately fateful ship into a dangerous and suspenseful journey of troubled revelations and experiences.
I greatly enjoyed this novel, having also recently read Nielsen's Words of Fire. It is written with young readers in mind and so the storyline is swift and exciting, yet filled with informative learning points and clearly well-researched representations of what is known about the Titanic tragedy.
review by Christina Francis-Gilbert
The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave
Favourite scene in the novel for me is the final scene. Don't jump to it though, I'm warning you! Read the novel, it'll only take you a day or less if you have the time to stay with these likable, well presented characters.
This novel has short, engaging chapters and a storyline that twists and jumps between great settings of California and Texas. I loved the way each chapter opens with a subheading that gives the reader a moral or hint at what the next events of the novel will entail. I haven't tried it, but I expect you could simply read the subheadings as a complete text and absorb just as intriguing a story as the full adventure set out by Laura Dave for her characters.
At times, I wanted to stay with characters for longer. I wanted to know more about the daughter Bailey's internal thought struggles and the step-mother Hannah is a great voice from which we hear the story, but the father deserves a whole novel to himself.
In brief though, this novel (also an Apple TV series), the novel opens with a missing husband, a note for his wife, a challenge for her step-daughter and a swathe of mysterious occurrences, bad choices, disrupted plans, weird circumstances and ultimately guidance towards meaningful family relationships and care for others, whether they start out as family members or not.
On a personal note, I felt I wrote some snappy scenes of my own (in my NanoWriMo novel draft 2023) whilst reading this novel since the quick shifts in location and event kept me on my toes as a reading writer.
It's on Reese's Book Club list. Laura Dave's other titles include: Eight Hundred Grapes, The Divorce Party and The First Husband.
review by Christina Francis-Gilbert
Words on Fire by Jennifer A. Nielsen
This an interesting novel of historical fiction with themes, characters and context that make it an important reading recommendation for our current times. It starts with a family farm in Lithuania and a mother and father living with their daughter Audra. We are introduced straight away to the dangers they are fearful of in their community, such as the occupying Russian Cossack soldiers, "who insist that everyone must become Russian ...[banning] Lithuanian books, religion, culture, and even language. The story opens as we learn that Audra knows her parents are involved in some kind of perilous and secret affairs.
The journey of the novel takes us with Audra as she escapes, fleeing her house, set alight by the Cossack soldiers, having been given an important package from her parents and an instruction to deliver it to someone in a nearby town.
I greatly enjoyed this novel, reading it with a young reader's thoughts in mind. There are a number of appropriate themes addressed such as courage, survival, the power of words and documentation of history and culture, as well as perseverance and community spirit in the face of oppression. A novel that is worth a read and easy to read, with topics sensitively addressed.
review by Christina Francis-Gilbert
The Keeper of Happy Endings by Barbara Davis
This is a another novel which I have enjoyed, though not loved. Its historical fiction genre is interesting and the time during which the fictional storylines are set is 1976 and 1985 in Boston. There are multiple points of view with main protagonists being Soline Roussel who has unfortunate memories and repercussions from the past when she lost her fiance during WWII, and Rory, whose full name is Aurora and who is living in Boston, with a similar tragedy having lost contact with her fiance who is away working for Doctors Without Borders.
There are themes of chasing one's dreams, coping with a lost love, forgiveness, following your mother's mistakes amongst other details like the cityscapes of Boston and Paris.
There are a number of beautiful epigraphs throughout the novel, often relating to Esmee Roussel who transpires to be the mother of 1st person protagonist Soline known as the Dress Witch.
A book club choice that I have to admit I skimmed over a little. A cute ending though, if a little predictable!
review by Christina Francis-Gilbert
