Matchstick Girl--A Fairy Tale Retelling Set In 19th Century Russia

Matchstick Girl by Suzanne Hocking was chosen as a Book of the Month by the Goodreads group Read Women.  It was chosen as an LGBT book.  The protagonist might be considered bisexual, but I didn't perceive this novel as being about her sexuality.  It could have taken place in any number of cities, but it's a retelling of "The Little Match Girl" by Hans Christian Anderson that's set in 19th century St. Petersburg in Russia.  I purchased this book on Amazon and this is my review.

                                 

This is a retelling of "The Little Match Girl" because the protagonist, Yelena, was sold by her father to a brothel when she was five years old.  Taras, the brothel keeper, then sent her out to the street to sell matches. Taras was a pretty sleazy and abusive individual, but at least he thought a five year old was too young for prostitution.

The Match Girl metaphor is extended throughout the novel by Yelena's identification with actually being a matchstick and her association with fire.

Later in the book, Yelena got a couple of Tarot readings from a fortune teller who becomes a minor character.   As someone who has studied the Tarot and its history, my main problem with these readings is that all the cards seemed to have illustrations unique to them.  The first fully illustrated deck appeared in 1910.  Tarot cards were originally playing cards.  The majority of the deck are numbered cards in four suits which show their connection to playing cards.  Before 1910, these numbered cards usually had the symbol of the suit repeated in the number the card represented.  For example, the Three of Swords would display three swords, but nothing else.  These numbered cards were often interpreted using numerology which is the very ancient idea that numbers have associations. This is the second historical novel I've reviewed in which there was a Tarot reading before 1910 with a fully pictorial deck.  See my review of  The Peddler of Wisdom here.

Although I mostly admired Yelena for her determined efforts to establish a better life for herself and her chosen family , I was annoyed by some of Yelena's behavior -- particularly when she picked on a very vulnerable girl in order to be accepted by a mean girl and her friends.  This reminded me of the worst aspects of  many YA novels.

 The prose in Matchstick Girl was high quality, but there were long sections of this novel that didn't engage me.  I would have preferred this book to have been pared down to a novella.  Perhaps it would have made a stronger statement about social injustice at a shorter length.  I expected more of  Matchstick Girl than I got.  So I have to say that it was disappointing.

                            

A Shadowed Fate: Claire Claremont Continues To Investigate Byron Mysteries in a Sequel

When I found publicist Mary Glenn McComb's e-mail offering an ARC of A Shadowed Fate by Marty Ambrose, I had already obtained it through the free inter-library loan network.  I responded that I intended to review A Shadowed Fate in April, and that I didn't need a copy. I wasn't going to miss this book.   You see, it's the sequel to Claire's Last Secret, a mystery mainly from the perspective of Claire Claremont. For an explanation of who Claire Claremont was, read my review of Claire's Last Secret here.  That should give you the background you need to read my review of  A Shadowed Fate below.  It's appearing a little bit before April.

                           

Just as in Claire's Last Secret, the crime that opens the narrative is investigated by the police, not Claire.  A valuable sketch was stolen from her.  Claire had hoped to sell it to cover her own living expenses and those of her niece and grand-niece who are living with her.  The sketch was drawn by the 18th century Italian artist Giuseppe Cades who was highly regarded during the period in which this novel takes place. Detective Baldini is in charge of the theft case, but there are also astonishing developments in the murder case from Claire's Last Secret.

 Claire is mainly preoccupied with finding out what really happened to her daughter,  Allegra, whose father was the poet Lord Byron.   She travels to the convent where history records Allegra as having died when she was a child.  Sinister events occur en route.

Yet I considered a Byron memoir that deals with the period when Byron sent Allegra to the convent as the true heart of the narrative.  We don't know if Byron wrote such a memoir.  If he did, it didn't survive.  According to A Shadowed Fate,  Byron had given his friend, Edward Trelawny this memoir and Trelawny had copied it.   Trelawny is a significant character in this novel.  In A Shadowed Fate, he gave the copy of Byron's memoir to Claire, and she read it during the course of the narrative.  This is a Byron I had never previously encountered.  He isn't at all like Byron as he is commonly portrayed.  It raises the possibility that the motives for some of Byron's actions may have been misunderstood.   The memoir also reveals dangerous secrets that I found very intriguing.

Although the case of the stolen sketch is solved, Claire continues to have no clarity about the fate of Allegra.  Presumably, we will learn more in Marty Ambrose's  third novel of Claire Claremont's journey of discoveries.  I will definitely want to read it.

                            

Beast Heart: YA Steampunk Novel With Character Development

It's been some time since I reviewed a book from Meerkat Press.  The last one was Smoke City, an urban fantasy with a historical dimension that I reviewed here.  I received a review request from Meerkat recently for the YA steampunk novel, Beast Heart by Kyle Richardson.  Since I enjoy steampunk, I downloaded a digital ARC from Edelweiss.  I hoped that it would suit my escapist mood.

                          

 
While reading Beast Heart, I was reminded of  a Jekyll and Hyde YA steampunk dystopia called The Heartless City by Andrea Berthot which I reviewed here . The monsters in Beast Heart didn't voluntarily imbibe a potion created by Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll as in Berthot's  novel. Richardson's monsters transmitted their condition by bite like rabies.  Nor were the number of monsters in Beast Heart so overwhelming that the problem was systemic as in The Heartless City.  Yet I could see monsters becoming increasingly prevalent in Beast Heart's timeline if  a concerted effort isn't made to resolve the problem.  There was also a character parallel.  Gabby, the girl who was hunting monsters, evolved from victimhood into someone that seemed very like Iris in The Heartless City, who was a strong female protagonist that I loved.

The male protagonist in The Heartless City was nowhere near as interesting as Kemple in this novel under review.  Berthot's male central character wasn't a monster and seemed very one dimensional to me.   Richardson builds the backgrounds of both protagonists in the course of Beast Heart's narrative.  Readers are likely to sympathize with Kemple over his childhood history of abuse long before he becomes the monster in search of a cure.

Unfortunately, there is a  pivotal plot development that I found unlikely and there is no resolution at all.  Beast Heart ends abruptly becoming one of those books with an immediate need for a sequel that readers will need to wait for.  This strategy reveals a lack of confidence in the first novel's ability to generate interest in the sequel without withholding closure.

Despite the appealing characters, I felt unsatisfied by Beast Heart.  I would have preferred a longer book in which some aspect of the novel is resolved.

                   

                            

The Beekeeper of Aleppo--Syrian Refugees Surmount Trauma

I've been in an escapist mood, so I didn't know if I could deal with anything quite so heavy as The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri. It was selected by a Goodreads group for discussion this month, but I thought it might be too grim to read during a pandemic.  I had requested it from the library before Covid-19 became a factor in the United States.  I had been wanting to read it for some time and I now had the time to do that.  I figured I'd try it out. If it was too depressing, I could always set it aside.  Well readers, I finished it and am now anxious to review this book.

                             

In this era where Own Voice novels are socially significant,  I have become much more conscious of whether it's appropriate for an author to utilize particular types of viewpoint characters which would require sensitivity.  Christy Lefteri's Author's Note didn't put my concerns to rest when she mentioned her Cypriot parents' refugee past, but reading online about the atrocities that were committed against Greek Cypriots during the Turkish invasion in 1974 made me realize that her background could qualify Lefteri as much as her reliance on a Syrian refugee beta reader.  I was also impressed that she volunteered at a refugee center in Athens.   I could see that the combination of her experience with refugees, and dealing with her Greek Cypriot father's PTSD made her feel impelled to write this book.

The last time I'd read a book about Syrian refugees, it was No Right Way, a thriller by Michael Niemann  which I reviewed here.  No Right Way was an investigation taking place in Turkey, but The Beekeeper of Aleppo follows the entire journey of its refugee protagonists from Syria to the country where they eventually find a home.  Terrible things happen to them on their long road, but I kept on holding on to the hope that they would have a future.

It was engagement with the characters that kept me reading.  Nuri Ibrahim is the narrator and the titular beekeeper.  I was drawn to this book by that title.  I wanted to know the story of this protagonist.  I hadn't thought of Syria as a place where there are beekeepers.  Bees need flowers to produce honey, and I'd always imagined Syria as a desert country without flowers.  Well, I was wrong.  As portrayed in this novel, the geography of Syria is more diverse than I expected.  There have actually been beekeepers in Syria.  Christy Lefteri mentions encountering  Dr. Ryad Alsous, a Syrian refugee who was a beekeeper there.  Alsous inspired Lefteri to create Nuri.  I also found an article about a real Syrian beekeeper named Adnan Al-Outani here.

As someone who is interested in environmental issues, I've learned about the importance of bees in maintaining our supply of so many crops.  Now bees are a threatened species in the U.S.   Americans took them for granted and we may well lose them.  It seems to me that any refugee with beekeeping skills should be welcome anywhere.  That's an important reason why I had faith in Nuri.

For much of this novel, I didn't have the same faith in Nuri's artist wife,  Afra.   I wanted to believe in her, but her perspective wasn't provided. I felt that without a direct tie in to her subjectivity, I would never understand Afra.  I love reading about woman artists, but she was clearly very damaged by events that had happened in Syria and during their travels since.  Toward the end of the narrative, she has a breakthrough which allowed me to have hope for her recovery. 

Nuri had also been  emotionally wounded by what he had gone through, but he was holding on so hard to his composure for Afra's sake, that we don't really see how injured his psyche was until extremely late in the novel.

I found the resolution of The Beekeeper of Aleppo very moving.  It was what I had wanted for Nuri.  The new life that I had envisioned for him seemed on the verge of  becoming a reality.  I also thought that Afra would be able to fully reclaim herself in that supportive context.  This book shows how refugees can re-integrate themselves successfully and contribute to their new home countries as they have in previous generations.

                           

The Tubman Command: "I Got An Insurrection To Plan." Harriet Tubman

I have copied most of this post from Flying High Reviews, my blog for strong female protagonists.  There is an additional paragraph that I wanted to add that I thought would be more suitable for this blog.

When I read She Came to Slay, Erica Armstrong Dunbar's biography of Harriet Tubman for Black History Month, I learned about Tubman's great military achievement, the Combahee River Raid (1863).  There is a non-fiction book about it listed in Dunbar's bibliography, but I was unable to obtain it through libraries, and purchasing it was beyond my current means.  So when I was asked to list books that I'm reading for Women's History Month on a Goodreads group called Read Women, I selected a historical novel about the Combahee River Raid, The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobbs, as one of them.

I am particularly pleased to be reviewing a book about Harriet Tubman today because March 10 is the day assigned to Tubman in The Little Book of Feminist Saints by Julia Pierpont.

I read both history and historical fiction.  I feel that each of them have their strengths.  I was looking forward to getting a window into the mind of Harriet Tubman, and feeling the impact of her leadership role in a Civil War military operation through the pages of  The Tubman Command.

                        

Harriet Tubman was clearly a born leader who had a talent for planning and was a gifted speaker.  She was also determined to achieve her goals, had tremendous courage and believed strongly that the visions she received were messages from God. Elizabeth Cobbs portrays her as a character with these traits, but also shows us her vulnerable side as a woman who wanted a relationship with a man.  Her Tubman seemed wary of trusting men on an intimate level.  Based on what I read about her in She Came To Slay, I think she had good reason to be untrusting.

A romantic possibility for Tubman is a sub-plot in The Tubman Command, but it isn't a major focus of the narrative. So I wouldn't call this a romance.  It's mainly about a historic military operation that resulted in the rescue of 750 slaves.

The quote from Harriet Tubman in the title of this review is a fictional one from this novel.  Harriet Tubman was illiterate.  So she herself wrote no accounts of her life.  

The Combahee River Raid was made possible because of Harriet Tubman's status as the leader of a team of Black scouts for the Union Army.  The Tubman Command shows how Tubman persuaded the officers involved in decision making to support her plan.  I felt that there was a great deal of suspense involved in its implementation even though I already knew the result.

Tubman needed to decide who would be the best officer to place in command of the operation. You would think that the abolitionist Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson who Tubman had worked with previously would be the most obvious candidate.  The reasons why she regretfully decided in this novel that he wouldn't be the best commander are very illuminating.  I found this fictional Tubman's insight into Higginson's attitudes as surprising as what I'd read about the divisions among abolitionist Quakers in Slavery and the Meetinghouse by Ryan P. Jordan which I reviewed on this blog here.  Tubman wasn't actually in charge of the decision of who would command the Combahee River Raid, but she figured out how to get Major General David Hunter to agree to her choice.

In the midst of  all this drama, there was also comic relief in the form of an unexpectedly funny scene involving the antics of Tubman's cat, who was appropriately named Trouble. I was charmed by this scene and was glad it was there.

The fictional elements of The Tubman Command didn't cause me to lose confidence in Cobbs' accuracy.  There is a back cover blurb praising this book from Edda L. Fields-Black, an African American academic who has been working on a scholarly book about the Combahee River Raid that is forthcoming.

I found The Tubman Command moving, insightful and well-written.  I thought it was also original because I had never read a novel dealing with this significant event. This is my first five star read of 2020.  It will certainly be a candidate for my top ten of the year.

                           

                     

Blame The Dead: WWII Field Hospital Mystery

I was approached by publicist Alessandra Scarpaci via e-mail asking if I was interested in reviewing the historical mystery, Blame The Dead by Ed Ruggero.  The promotional material emphasized Ruggero's military background as a West Point graduate and an army officer.  It also mentioned women's issues and the role that women played in the military during WWII.  I realized that I hadn't read any WWII novel by an author like Ruggero. I also had never read a mystery in which the setting was a field military hospital in wartime.  So I requested a digital ARC which I received free of charge via Net Galley.

                       

Last year, I had been taken aback by the WWII novel, The Light Over London by Julia Kelly, because I had been anticipating a novel primarily about gunnery girls in London.  My review of Light Over London appeared on Flying High Reviews, my blog focusing on female protagonists, at the hyperlink I've provided. I discovered that the military content amounted to only about 10% of Kelly's book.  With Ruggero at the helm, I didn't think I would need to readjust my expectations of  Blame the Dead.

I saw a review on Goodreads that dismissed this novel because the protagonist was an ordinary member of the MP (military police).  Given the author's knowledge of the military,  I didn't think it likely that he'd made that kind of mistake.  The reviewer pointed out that the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) would be investigating.  So I hunted down the History of CID and discovered that in August of 1943, when Blame The Dead took place, criminal investigations in the U.S. Army were still the province of local MPs.  Never accuse an author of inauthenticity unless you've done the research to support your claim.  It was actually very easy to find the source I linked dealing with the CID's history.

The women in Blame the Dead were nurses. I was delighted that not all of them were content to remain victims of  physicians who abused their positions of power. The most notably strong female character was Nurse Kathleen Donnelly. She was determined, courageous and a quick thinker. She's just the sort of person you'd want with you in a crisis. 

There were a number of people committing crimes at various levels of severity in Blame the Dead. Since the main reason why I read mysteries is to see justice done, I was disturbed that one offender got away with serious crimes.  Some readers may consider this character sympathetic, but I couldn't deal with the injustice.  That was my only significant problem with this book.

I felt that Blame the Dead realistically portrayed the period, and the military hospital context.  It showed the impact of routine sexual harassment and assault on women. It also showed the impact of poor leadership, corruption and abuse of authority. The resolution was a bit too noir for me, but I thought it was well-written.

                               

Water Darling: A Novel Dealing With Rain Callers and Racism in 1920's Oklahoma

Water Darling by Evan Ramspott is my third Historical Fictionistas giveaway win that's getting a review on this blog.  The previous wins from this Goodreads group that I've reviewed here are Peddler of Wisdom and Before We Were Yours.  The hyperlinks will take you to the reviews.  I received a free copy of Water Darling from the author and this is my honest review.

                             

The strongest aspect of this novel involved the massacre in Tulsa in 1921. It's a powerful description of the terrible violence of this event.  I had no trouble following the changing perspectives, but some readers may be confused. I think that the constant switching of viewpoints effectively conveyed the utter chaos in Tulsa at the time.

Ramspott said in his acknowledgements that his main source was the report from the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.  This is a 200 page report.  I downloaded it, but didn't have time to read it yet.  For those who are interested, the pdf is available at https://www.okhistory.org/research/forms/freport.pdf.
  
 I looked at the talk section in the Wikipedia article called The Tulsa Race Riot. There was a controversy about whether it should be called a riot or a massacre. There's yet another perspective.  A book that Ramspott lists in his bibliography by James S. Hirsch bears the title, Riot and Remembrance:  The Tulsa Race War and its Legacy. Readers of Water Darling  can decide for themselves whether Ramspott is portraying it as a riot, a massacre or a race war.

Water Darling could have been two separate novels, and perhaps that is what Evan Ramspott should have done. There would have been a paranormal character-oriented book about rain callers, their training, their internal conflicts and the difficulties of  rain calling as a profession. The other book would  have focused on racism--particularly the deadly paroxysm of societal racism that led to the massacre in Tulsa.

It seemed to me that the attempt to connect rain calling and the horrific event that happened in Tulsa in 1921 did not benefit the book as a whole.  The rain calling aspect was underdeveloped.  If protagonist Imogene's career as a rain caller had been a separate book, we could have had a broader view of rain calling and its practitioners.  Readers could have met potentially fascinating characters that are only mentioned in Water Darling, and discovered more about Imogene's interactions with them. The Tulsa massacre aspect as a separate novel would have been a better paced, more action oriented book.

Another problem I had with Water Darling is that Imogene went through a process of maturation during the novel that wasn't completed during the course of the narrative.  So I never got the chance to say that now Imogene is a strong woman protagonist.  I thought she was almost there, but I'm not convinced from the epilogue that it actually happened.  The epilogue was a sketchy summary. It didn't tell me what I really wanted to know about Imogene.  I was looking for some sort of  scene that would illustrate her growth.
 
Although I was impressed with the Tulsa massacre section and Ramspott's research into the historical record about it,  I have to conclude that Water Darling is a flawed novel that didn't meet all of my expectations.