I read five books in April.
Brave Hearted: The Dramatic Story of Women of the American West by Katie Hickman
Most people have heard of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her pioneering family, from the Little House on the Prairie books and the loosely based TV series in the 70s.
In this fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking book, Katie Hickman tells us about other women in the days when ‘America’ was still expanding its territory – whether they were wives, mothers or daughters in pioneering families, missionaries, poker players, sex workers, madams, bar owners, African Americans in search of freedom from slavery or displaced Native Americans (the last two is where the heartbreak happens and the resonances down the years are inescapable).
‘Brave hearted’ scarcely begins to cover the courage of all these women.
I’ve previously read KH’s book Daughters of Britannia:The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives, also recommended.
Burial of Ghosts by Ann Cleeves
A standalone title, first published in 2003. (How prolific is Ann Cleeves? Incredibly is the answer!)
Lizzie, brought up in care, receives an unexpected legacy of £15,000 from a man she had a holiday fling with – but there are strings attached.
Overkill by Vanda Symon
The first book featuring Constable Sam Shepherd. I bought it and three subsequent titles in the series in a charity shop because they are set in South Island, New Zealand, which I love to read about, and also because Sam(antha) is described as being feisty. I anticipated a Kinsey Milhone or V. I. Warshawski with gorgeous NZ scenery.
Well, all four books will be returned to the charity shop, three of them unread. For ‘feisty’ read ‘irritating’, ‘needy’ and ‘complete pain in the posterior’. She thinks she’s the only one who can sort anything out (she can’t) and the lip she gives senior officers (while being suspended from duty) would surely see her dismissed in real life. Disappointing (if you haven’t guessed that already).
The Republic of Love by Carol Shields
The much-missed Carol Shields in fact.
A reread. Not one of my favourites of hers (Happenstance and Larry’s Party taking that slot) but she’s always a pleasure to read. If you like Anne Tyler (and if not why not?) you will like Carol Shields.
Rather incensed to see the strapline on the big online retailer: ‘a charming chick lit novel’ – even when it was published in 2003 that would have been a misleading description; it should certainly be updated now.
Fay is a commitment-phobe (as we say in the 2020s) and in any case thrice-married late-night-radio host, Tom, does not seem like a good bet. She has plenty to keep her busy with her research into mermaids for the Folklore Society and with worrying about her parents’ long and apparently happy marriage.
But there’s the inconvenient fact that for both herself and Tom it was true love at first sight …
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie
This appealed to me when it first came out and I wish I’d read it before going to an Edinburgh Book Festival event with the author last year.
I’ve read it now. It’s told in two voices – each one a 15th-century female mystic: Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. Although not much is known about their lives (which Victoria Mackenzie has imagined most vividly), it is documented that the two did meet each other and that both had visions – or ‘shewings’.
Margery – mother of fourteen children, cried a great deal in public following her visions of Christ on the cross, leading to support from a few people and condemnation from many, including her husband. She wrote a book (or probably dictated it) – astonishingly, the manuscript was missing for six hundred years and found in a cupboard in an English country house in 1934.
Julian (she took a saint’s name) lost her husband and child to the plague and so decided to be an ‘anchoress’, the term for a female hermit. As it would be dangerous for her to live the life a male hermit could (ie in a cave or other isolated place), she had herself bricked up in a room attached to a church in Norwich. There was a curtained window where the necessities of life were passed to and fro to/from a devoted maid whose face Julian never saw. People came to her for guidance; again she couldn’t see them, only hear them.
She also wrote a book, thought to be the first book in English by a woman that has survived.
Imagine being bricked up … yet, this is the person whose optimistic words have lasted down the centuries: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
