Miller, Joanna, The Eights (novel, Oxford, 1920s) rate: 5 of 5
A men’s only university, Oxford finally decides to grant women the right to earn degrees—after a thousand year history. It wasn’t easy on the first women. It is the 1920s and there are movements all over the western world to grant women new rights, including the rights to vote. The struggle is fierce and opposed with violence and imprisonment.
This novel gets its name from “Corridor 8” at St. Hughs College for Women at Oxford. Four young women are housed in that corridor, become friends, and are known around campus at “the eights.”
In a challenge for the author, all four women are presented as protagonists in the book, trading places during the course of the novel as the primary focus. In a major weakness of the novel, we find ourselves wanting more depth in the stories of Otto and Beatrice.
But altogether this piece of fiction provides an important insight into the struggle that women had at the beginning of the 20th century, a struggle that is quite forgotten today.
Papadopoulos, Madina, The Step-Spinsters (fantasy, retelling of a fairy tale) 5/5
This is another great sequel by a modern writer exploring the untold tales and context of a classic story (Wizard of Oz/Wicked; Huckleberry Finn/James.) And it sparkles with imagination, insight, and poignancy every bit as much as the original classic. In this case, we read the real story behind Cinderella. Set in medieval France, the mysterious Cinderella (Cindy) has danced with the smitten prince and now heads to the castle to be married. The step-sisters, who had also competed for the hand of the prince are rejected and dismayed: Fredegonde (Freddy) and Javotte (Votte.)
Freddy is a giant of a woman, who would have made a good looking man. She was also intelligent, driven, and hard working. But in that culture, all her qualities counted for nothing—for women had no rights. Freddy is a tough, practical, hard-edged, driven farmer and businesswoman. Votte, on the other hand, is tiny, delicate, a romantic, an artist, toothless, and suffers from incurable halitosis. Well—she does have one tooth remaining. Even her loved ones cannot tolerate her breath.
The step-mother is Isabel, twice widowed, and about to be kicked off the estate (for women cannot own property.) The only hope for the future would be if one of her daughters got married. But since Cinderella is the one getting married, and Cinderella is estranged from her step-mother and step-sisters, her marriage will do them no good.
It turns out that Cinderella didn’t find the prince or the castle as charming as she first thought. They were both a disaster—leaving her feel trapped.
Then, in a twist of plot, the prince decides to invite the step-sisters and the step-mother to the castle, prior to the wedding, to live as guests. But before the wedding can take place, all three sisters have unexpected counters with men who vie for their affection: Duke Lou (father of Prince Charming,) Enguerrand (a knight who is much more charming than Prince Galant—who hopes to marry the lovely Cindy), Count Guglielmo (who aims to stop a wedding and claim the lass for himself), and Lord Mercier (a wealthy merchant who develops a financial interest in one of the sisters.) I won’t spoil it for you—but recommend this as a wonderful read.
Haig, Matt, The Humans (science fiction, novel) 5/5
Cambridge mathematician Andrew Martin has finally cracked the Reiman Hypothesis. Sentient creatures on the planet Vonnadoria are alarmed, believing that this will now give the human race the power to discover other worlds and develop travel throughout the universe. But because they despise the human race, they cannot let such power fall into such hands. One of their creatures immediately travels to earth, kills Andrew Martin, and takes over his body. It is his task to destroy the proof he developed (for the Reiman Hypothesis) and kill his family and others who have knowledge of it.
Smart as the Vonnadorians are, the new Andrew Martin has trouble getting the hang of things like wearing clothes, eating food, and handling women and teenagers. Coming from an emotionless planet, he was unprepared for human emotions, the good and the bad.
Haig’s story does a wonderful job of making us think about both the blessings and curse of being human. Some worthy insights pepper the book. And the reader is taken along for a ride through a clever and suspenseful story.
Vogt, Laura, In the Great Quiet (novel, Oklahoma land rush) 4/5
This is one of those novels that reminds me how little I know about some aspects of history. In this case, the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1893. A little background. In the earliest days of the U.S., the Cherokee lived in the southeastern part of the country. But in 1838-39, at the insistence of Andrew Jackson, all Cherokees in the southeast were ordered removed to Indian Territory—which is present day Oklahoma. They were guaranteed rights to lands and self government in the Indian Territory. But during the Civil War, the Cherokee nation was split between the North and the South, and great internal political and social damage resulted. Following the war, a new treaty, the 1866 Reconstruction Treaty, became the new law. Sections of what had been the Cherokee outlet in Oklahoma were opened up to non-Cherokee settlers. In 1893, over 100,000 people lined up to claim lands that were once the domain of the Cherokee. Claimants included whites and freed slaves.
On September 16, at noon, a gunshot signaled the start of the race, as 100,000 people poured into Oklahoma, by foot, horse, and wagon to claim homesteads—160 acres—theirs as long as they built on it, farmed it, and stayed 5 years. The land rush that day included violence, death, deception, and crime of various sorts. And the jostling afterward to claim lands and survive on them was also fraught with danger and fraud.
It is in this setting that we meet the protagonist, Minnie. She is a single woman determined to do what no one believed women should be doing: claiming their own life and their own homestead. She is befriended by both Cherokee and Black settlers and learns true stories about history and government betrayal that she had never known. She must fight off rape attempts, posses, fire, ice storms, and tornadoes. She must bridle her independence and learn how to work with others to survive. And she must fight her own past—her losses, her foolish decisions, and her broken relationships—that she tries so hard to escape.
This is an historical novel based on the author’s great-great grandmother.
I gave the novel a 4 instead of a 5 because I believed the author could have done a better job of placing her story in the context of both the Osage Tribe and the freed slaves who settled in Oklahoma. The protagonist is presented as being keenly interested in this hidden history, but the author doesn’t add anything to the reader’s knowledge. I also gave it a 4 instead of a 5 because the growth of the protagonist feels artificial as the book comes to an end. This is a good book, worth reading—but it needed a little more to round it out.
Levi, Allen, Theo of Golden (novel 10 on scale of 5)
My favorite book of the year so far. In the fictitious Georgia city of Golden, a stranger from New York appears, his first time to dwell in the south. Leo is in his late 80s, hails originally from Portugal, and seems a mystery to the circle of people who get to know him. They are easily drawn into conversation with him, find his curiosity about them irresistible, and notice how slippery he becomes when they try to ask him about himself—even to the point of never revealing his last name. The old man is gentle, kind, and thoughtful. To be with him is to be healed, restored, resurrected.
Everyone soon finds out that Leo loves good coffee, black and white portraiture, and the cello. A local artist has painted 92 portraits that hang in the coffee shop. Leo begins purchasing them and gifting them to the models. Everyone thinks this is weird, but quaint and charming. The presentation of these portraits brings Leo into the lives of those he gifts—for each presentation involves sitting down with him on a park bench and having a conversation.
Leo’s growing circle of friends is diverse: an atheist book shop owner, a mentally ill woman, a cello player, a janitor at the university, a woman being abuse by her boyfriend, an unhappy accountant…. In every relationship, Leo wants to know the person’s story. And they want to know his—even though he continually changes the subject on that matter.
Throughout the book we get an extraordinary portrait of a man who is gentle, humble, gracious, generous, and wise. In Leo, these are not abstract qualities, but incarnated in his very specific words and actions. The reader becomes as curious and enamored of Leo as the people of Golden.
The plot has its twists and suspense. Leo’s story is eventually revealed. And not only are the lives of his new friends upended, but so are the lives of some of this novel’s readers—all for the good.
Khlevniuk, Oleg V., Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, (history, biography, Soviet Union) 4/5
The scholar Khlevniuk provides us with an important biography (2015) that utilizes previously unknown letters, reports, memos, diaries, etc. in describing one of history’s most influential figures. During the years Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, the country was the largest country in the world by land and the second largest country in the world by population. (China was the most populous.)
Stalin’s rule was marked by repression, political purges, terror, destruction of social structures, war, starvation, poverty, famine, economic collapse, and imprisonment. It is estimated that 800,000 people were ordered executed under Stalin, most were simply shot in the head with no trial. Another 800,000 died in the process of forced resettlements and deportations. Around 6 million died of starvation because of Stalin’s agricultural policies in 1932-33.
After World War II, Stalin was responsible for extending his dictatorship over eastern Europe, China, North Korea, North Viet Nam, and large sections of Africa.
Khlevniuk gives us a good picture of how Stalin’s mind worked, his early life, his political survival during the Lenin years, the purges of his political partners—often by execution, his mishandling of the economy and the war, and his personal habits.
I would have given the book a 5 except for the lack of editing which left the reader going over previously covered ground on several occasions.
In our own day of dictators and autocrats, populations who don’t know the lessons of history are prone to select leaders and support leaders who have the same lack of morality that Stalin had. While Stalin is a picture of extremity, his spirit seems to live on.
Eskens, Allen, The Quiet Librarian (novel, Bosnia, genocide) 5/5
Yet another novel reminds me that I haven’t always paid attention to history as it was being made in my own lifetime. In this case, the genocide in Bosnia.
Yugoslavia was a tacked together country in Europe that existed between 1918 and 1992. It was made up of multiple nationalities and cultures. After World War II, it was under the heavy influence of the Soviet Union. As the Soviet Union broke apart, so did Yugoslavia. Many of the leaders of these nationalistic groups were arrested and executed during communist rule.
There were growing protests within the various nationalities to have independence. The dominant nationality, the Serbs, were ruthless in putting down these independence movements, their response becoming increasingly genocidal. In the 1980s, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic led the repression, especially against the Bosnians. The mostly Albanian city of Kosovo rebelled all the more. The Slovenian and Croatian nationalities supported Kosovo and advocated greater autonomy for the various republics that made up Yugoslavia—away from Serbian control. In 1990, armed conflict broke out between Croatian forces and Serbian.
By 1991, independent republics began to form: Slovenia, Croatia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Serbia.
But through the process, Serbian genocide continued under the rule of Milosevic.
Eskens’s novel is set in 1995 in war torn Bosnia and in 2025 in Minnesota. Hana Babic is a reclusive librarian in Minnesota in 2025 when suddenly her past life suddenly appears to interrupt her peace and safety. She had lived for 30 years in fear that her experiences in Bosnia would follow her to her new country.
And so they do. The novel is well written, suspenseful, and thrilling. Hana is a complex person—a necessity after what she has lived through. The novel brings us the whole story. Well written and a reminder that our past is always part of us, politics is always relevant to us, and things the rest of us think are buried in history are still very much alive.
Bailey, Robert, The Boomerang, (political novel) 2/5
From the beginning I felt that this novel had problems. But to write the review, I needed to sit down and list the qualities that a good political novel should have (in my opinion.)
- If it is set in a democracy, it should have an election (which is the political god of a democracy) and if in some other form of government (monarchy, dictatorship, etc.) it should have a looming changing of the guard.
- It should have suspense.
- There should be an issue that gets probed—intelligently and perceptively.
- The story should have complexity and several moving stories that seem on a collision course.
- The writer needs to fact check.
- There needs to be politics, in the sense that factions threaten to undo not only each other but the national well-being.
- There needs to be a sacrifice made, a death—at least a metaphorical death.
- There needs to be an arc to the story—even if it is an unpleasant one for the readers.
- There should be a satisfying ending—not in the sense that the novel ends how the reader wants it to end, but in the sense that the literary work doesn’t feel suddenly aborted when the book comes to an end—no abandonment of the literary craft before the book concludes.
- Heroes and villains should emerge and morph as the story goes along, and the mains characters should be complicated—each one partly appealing and partly disgusting.
- Violence should be outsourced rather than executed by politicians themselves.
- A good political novel doesn’t need to import fantasy, science fiction, or erotica to pump it up.
- The reader should be spared (for the most part) the normal platitudes, profanities, and parroting that infest political discourse—give us some insight into politics without making us wade through all the garbage to get there.
Overall, The Boomerang is not a satisfying political novel. It held my attention, provided a nice distraction for me, and kept me wondering how the plot would end. But the characters were shallow, the politics was missing, and the novel as a whole failed on most of the qualities I just listed.
The framework of the novel is cancer: the president has it and the daughter of his chief of staff has it—terminal in both cases. And the Defense Department has stumbled across a cure for cancer—but decides to bury it in order to protect the oncology and pharmaceutical industries—both of which depend (economically) on people not being cured. Anyone who knows about the cure is hunted down by the Defense Department and murdered.
This is a real issue. People invent technology and cures all the time. I live in Urbana, IL, the location of a world class university. Several researchers here start their own businesses, invent things, get them patented, then sell the patents to corporations, and sign NDAs. It is not unusual for the corporations to then bury the patent if the new invention will undercut their profit margins. Money rules.
But in the novel, this issue is only handled superficially. It is presented in a way that lacks credibility. And it is never thoroughly probed, even though this novel would be an ideal place for that kind of airing.
This novel also plays loose with the facts. Granted—so does the current non-fiction President of the United States. And just as the dismissal of facts makes it hard to take anything he says seriously, so it makes it hard to take the writer of this novel seriously. Little things—but little things (like toxic bacteria in your body) can bring down a whole story. For example, the writer notifies us that no president has ever died of cancer while in office—except Ulysses Grant. Grant died from cancer—but not while in office and not in 1877. He left office in 1877, made a short run for president in 1880—before losing the Republican nomination to James Garfield, and then lived until 1885. Later in the novel, it is stated that no president ever died from cancer—except Grant. But Herbert Hoover also died of cancer in 1964. The novel implies that the reason Jimmy Carter did not die of his cancer is that there was a secret cure that only he had access to some secret drug. Carter was diagnosed with melanoma when he was 91—that had spread to his liver and brain. By this time, Carter had been out of office for decades. He was cured of the cancer. But it was not with a “classified” drug. Carter received immunotherapy—a procedure that is available to the public.
On several occasions, the writer also states that the president stood in the oval office and looked out over Pennsylvania Avenue. That is not possible. Pennsylvania Avenue runs along the north side of the White House. The Oval Office is located on the south side of the White House and looks out upon the south lawn—not Pennsylvania Avenue. This may seem like a little thing—but a good novelist isn’t careless with details such as this.
Some of the characters in the novel are complex, but still shallow. The dialogue is weak—full of platitudes. And even though people often talk like this—on the written page such speech becomes tedious.
There is little politics in this novel—in the sense that a major decision is on the line—and the levers of politics are being used to influence the outcome. Instead of the levers of politics, this novel turns politicians into Rambo and they fight it out with machine guns, Black Hawk and Apache helicopters, and Pepsi 18-wheelers filled with explosives. Kind of cheap writing.
And the end of the novel pulls a few surprises—then doesn’t tell you how they happened. Dead people reappear in the last few pages—with no explanation. This writer shouldn’t be writing books. I don’t know what else he could do for a living—but I hear there are a few positions open in the president’s cabinet. He would fit right in.
Pernin, Peter, The Great Peshtigo Fire: An Eyewitness Account (Memoir, History) rating 5/5
Father Pernin was a priest in Peshtigo, Wisconsin in 1871. On the same night at the Great Chicago Fire (October 8, 1871) an even more deadly fire occurred in this lumber town along the northwest shores of Green Bay. No one knows the exact number who died in the fire—and as a consequence of its aftermath, but 2,500 is a good guess. It was the deadliest single fire in the history of the United States. Peter Pernin, local priest, barely survived the fire and later wrote an account of the event.
Pernin’s account is a graphic description of foreboding prior to the fire, experiences of fire rumbling through wooded areas in the weeks prior to the October 8 event, absolute panic during the fire, destruction of human lives, animal lives, and property during the fire, intense physical pain and exhaustion immediately after the fire, and the start of his own physical and emotional recovery.
The book includes a forward on modern day wildfires, and calls for an assessment of the human folly that contributes to such disasters. A quick read—64 pages.
McMurty, Larry, Lonesome Dove (Audible book #1) (novel) rating—10
Written in 1985, this book became an American classic—deservedly so. The narrative follows two retired Texas Rangers who decide to leave Lonesome Dove and venture to Montana for a new chapter of their lives. They are accompanied on this journey by a cast of misfit characters. The characters in the novel are richly portrayed and the fact that nearly all of them are ill-suited for the stories life gives them is one of the brilliant themes of the book.
Set in the post-Civil War lawless west, the author’s descriptions of the land and weather are graphic and sensuous, leaving the reader feeling both the discomforts and grandeur of it all.
The use of different points of view in the novel give us deep psychological insight into many of the characters. We are privy to their feelings, logic, defense mechanisms, and thought processes. Each character is incredibly complex, and the reader comes to care about them, even when frustrated by their choices.
Because we care about the characters, the novel is full of suspense—one chapter after another once it gets rolling. Death is all over the place in the novel—and how people face it and how they adjust to it is a major theme in the book.
The dialogue is outstanding. Humor runs throughout the book, one of the healthy ways the characters cope with their challenges.
The most entertaining character in the book is Gus, one of the retired rangers. The man can’t shut up. But his Tennessee/Texas/rural idioms and twang and humor and philosophy are mesmerizing.
I listened to the book on Audible and look forward to getting a copy and reading it again. Something I rarely do.
Repertoire 