The Court Dancer

The Court Dancer is the story of Yi Jin who spent her childhood in the Korean  royal palace in the mid 1800s. She worked both in the royal embroidery studio and as a court dancer from the age of 6 until the age of 23. When the French legate to Korea, Victor Collin de Plancy, announced that he had been ordered back to France, the King gave him Yi Jin as a gift, one that he could take back to France as a wife.

The story opens with Yi Jin and Victor at the harbor boarding the ship that will take them to France.  It then returns back to Jin as a child and tells how she came to the palace, learned her embroidery and dance skills, and her friendships with best friends Soa and Yeon and a friendship with a French missionary.  When Victor meets her he falls madly in love with her. Jin falls in love with his library. The story forwards again to Jin in Paris where she is always the center of attraction due to her asian looks. She continues with her love of books by translating Korean books into French. However, she ultimately has too many adjustment problems and Victor takes her back to Korea. 

This is a slow moving story. While the author has painted rich details of Korean royal court life, I feel that it could have been written in fewer pages. It seemed to me that it would take 4 or 5 pages to tell what could have been told in one page. I quickly got bored with the book, then action occurred and I got interested again, and then bored again. This repeated for me throughout the book.

I was somewhat disappointed with the book. While I looked forward to what would happen next, the story moved too slow for me. Interest in the plot kept me reading though.

3 out of 5 stars!

The Masterpiece

The Masterpiece alternates chapters between the late 1920s and the mid 1970s.  In the 1920s illustrator Clara Darden arrives in New York City from Arizona as an art student at the Grand Central School of the Art located in New York City's Grand Central Terminal.  She is a promising student and is quickly promoted to class monitor. When a teacher fails to show up for the second semester, Clara is given the class to teach.  While she teaches, she prepares her illustrations for a faculty show as well as for presentation to magazines such as Vogue.  At the school she meets and befriends fellow teacher Levon Zakarian. Levon becomes both her mentor and her downfall.  

Meanwhile, in 1974 Virginia Clay tries to obtain a job as legal secretary with no experience but is fired after the first day.  She is fresh off a divorce from a corporate attorney and thought that she had picked up enough information from listening to his conversations over the two decades that they were married to be able to do the job.  Her temp agency places her in the information booth at Grand Central Terminal tidying up, getting coffee for the others and refilling the stacks of timetables as needed.  While trying to find the bathroom on her first day on the job Virginia stumbles upon the Grand Central School of the Art which had closed during World War II and never reopened.  The space was never rented again and she was able to enter and look at some of the artwork that was left over from the students.

The Grand Central Terminal is the center of a big lawsuit to determine whether is should receive landmark status or be demolished and replaced with a high-rise building.  Virginia becomes enamored with the Terminal as she begins to see what the building was like when it was built. She also returns to the art school and sees an unsigned illustration that she likes and takes it.  Virginia then begins a quest to find out who the artist is. 

I loved this novel!  In fact, I read it in one sitting.  The pace was fast and the characters, all of them, were captivating, especially Clara Darden.  You could not help but feel emotion for a woman who left her family as a teenager, traveled across the entire country by herself, and entered art school as a serious student.  Most female students were looking for husbands but Clara wanted to be a working artist and an illustrator specifically.  Illustration was not considered art at the time. It was considered commercial.  She runs into strong male characters and holds her own.  Her boss at the school, Mr. Lorette, wanted to fire her as a teacher after the first semester and hid her illustrations at the faculty show because he disapproved of illustration as art. He did his best to quash her attempts to be a working artist. Levon Zakarian was both a competitor and a lover but Clara was able to understand him well enough to maneuver his movements.  

Virginia Clay was another strong woman and one that I was familiar with in the 1970s.  Divorce was just beginning to be common at the time and many new divorcees had no education or training for a job. These women had to take whatever job they could find and support their children on whatever amount of money they made. These women always made ends meet.  I don't know how they did it because it does not always happen to these women in the twenty first century. 

There is much to learn here about illustration as an art form.  You see it when it was popular in magazines and in advertisements before photography was used.  It was replaced by photography and had a renaissance in later decades but that history was not part of the book.  In the book almost all of the  working illustrators were men.  Women just were not given opportunities for this type of work. Clara Darden was an exception. I enjoyed reading about this part of art history. 

The Masterpiece was an entertaining  historical mystery novel and I rate it 5 out of 5 stars!

Deadly Cure

Deadly Cure is the first book by Lawrence Goldstone that I have read. It is both a historical mystery and a medical mystery novel.  It takes place in 1893 in New York City.

Physician Noah Whitestone is called to a rich neighbor's home to urgently care for their 5 year old son, Willard Anschutz, as his regular physician, Dr. Frias, was not available.  Noah finds the boy exhibiting the symptoms of morphia toxicity, with leg tremors, a rancid odor, extreme perspiration and dilated pupils.  Noah asked the boy's mother, Mildred Anzchutz, if he had taken any patent medications which were not regulated and were known to have morphine as an ingredient.  She said that he hadn't taken any but that he had been taking a blue pill prescribed by Dr. Frias for a cough. Noah doesn't believe that Willard was not on any patent medications but has to take her word so he gives the boy 2 drops of laudanum and leaves to see 2 more patients. When he returned to the house later that night, the boy had died. However, he was able to get 2 of the blue pills that Willard was taking.

The next day Noah stops by the Anschutz home to pay his respects to the family. Here he finds himself accused of wrongdoing in the boy's death.  After leaving the house he goes to the local hospital lab to do tests on the blue pill to determine what it is made of. Dr. Frias finds out he is testing the pill and threatens to yank his license.  Noah later meets a radical working for a newspaper who tells him the paper is trying to break the Patent Medicine Trust. This radical/reporter knew about Willard's death and the death of other children from patent medications. Noah wants to get involved with research for the publication in order to clear his name but knows there is a risk with being associated with communists.  He does it anyway.

Deadly Cure was spellbinding!  I was hooked from the first page and could not put this book down.  The book had a fast pace, fascinating characters and an intricate plot. However, what I found most interesting was how aspirin and heroin were initially introduced in the U. S. as patent medications. In their beginning forms these drugs killed people. Various German companies worked on what eventually became known as aspirin and heroin and while their products were not healthy they were marketed to the public by physicians who became wealthy by prescribing them.  This history was expertly woven into the story by the author.

5 out of 5 stars!

Read it Again Sam Reading Challenge

I am going to join this annual challenge for the first time in 2019.  I will be joining at the "deja vu" level which requires me to read 4 books but I will probably upgrade the level during the year. I am itching to re-read some Anthony Trollope and Mark Twain, especially Twain's Puddinhead Wilson.  Old favorites like John Steinbeck, Herman Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, Sherwood Anderson and Richard Wright are all coming to mind tonight but my mood changes quickly so who knows what I will read. 

The challenge runs the 2019 calendar year and is hosted by Bev at the My Reader's Block blog. 

Vita Brevis

Vita Brevis is Ruth Downie's 7th Medicus historical mystery featuring Roman physician Gaius Petraeus Ruso and his British wife Tilla.  In this installment of the series Ruso has been sent back to Rome from Britannia with the promise of a waiting job.

After a few weeks without work, Ruso is given a job temporarily replacing a doctor named Kleitos who suddenly left Rome to care for an ailing relative.  Upon moving into Kleitos' home and workshop Tilla finds a barrel on the doorstep.  Inside is a dead body. Ruso and Tilla quickly realize Kleitos disappeared to escape debt collectors and isn't going to return.

Vita Brevis is different from the previous books in the series which were historical mysteries. This book is historical fiction because Ruso and Tilla are not working together to solve a murder. It is still great reading as the plot moves along quickly.  There is something lacking, however, in the 2 main characters as neither of them are using their sleuthing skills and Tilla is not using her herbalist skills at all. In addition, Tilla does not act like her usual strong woman self while she tries to be a submissive Roman wife. Ruso spends more time on Roman politics than being a physician. The feel of the book is different but it still is interesting reading as the reader gets to watch them learn how to maneuver the Roman way of life.  However, I am unclear why the author chose to change her winning formula for this series.

Some of the secondary characters we are used to seeing in the series are absent as they are still based in Brittania. Their absence is strongly felt as the new secondary characters introduced are not as compelling as the old ones.

All in all this was a great read even with the changes in the formula.  I look forward to the next book in the series.  

Portugal

I waited 6 weeks for an Amazon 3rd party shipper to deliver this graphic novel to me and it finally arrived today. Cyril Pedrosa's Portugal is about a fictional cartoonist named Simon Muchat traveling to his family's country of origin in order to overcome his artist's writing block.

The story opens with Simon Muchat and his live in girlfriend Claire arguing over whether to continue their relationship by advancing it with the purchase of a home.  Simon decides to not discuss it and Claire takes her cue from Simon as a "no." Simon decides to travel to Portugal, the land his grandparents emigrated to France from, for a comics convention.  There he feels an attachment to the people he meets even though they are different from him and speak another language.  Upon his return to France, Simon and his father attend a family wedding of Simon's cousin Agnes whom Simon has not seen in 20 years.  A third of the book concerns the interactions of the family members during the wedding celebration week.

The family dynamics are what make this book.  It is an accurate depiction of what I think most families are like.  Each generation seems fractured by how they were raised.  The grandparents who emigrated from Portugal to France pined for their home in Portugal and the reader never discovers why they left although there is speculation.  The grandmother spent her whole life crying for everything she left behind.  The grandfather only communicated with the oldest child because he was born in Portugal.  The rest of the children were born in France so there is some sibling rivalry over the oldest being the favorite.  When these children grew up and had their own families they were not close families.  However, during the wedding celebration week, the children of the immigrants spent every minute of every day together reminiscing, making new memories and a little fighting.  They enjoyed each other's company though.

Simon then decides to return to Portugal to meet his relatives.  He stays in his uncle's home, which was formerly owned by his grandfather before he emigrated to France.  Here he discovers his family's history and ponders the reason why the men in the family are unable to pursue happiness, including himself.

The artwork is done is very dark colors, so dark that it is difficult to see the faces of the people in the drawings.  The drawings themselves are loose.  They look like pen drawings colored over with watercolor paint and are not detailed.  Each character's face is unhappy.  I am not sure if that is intentional due to how they are feeling or if this is the author's style.  It seems unusual to me that every character looks depressed.  However, during the last third of the book when Simon was in Portugal, the colors used were light. Obviously, the author used color to reflect the characters' emotions.

This book was rather depressing.  I enjoyed the middle part of the book when the celebration of Agnes' wedding occurred. However, the book is about Simon.  I could not feel any sympathy for him as a character.  The drawings of him did not make him look very likable and the colors that the author  used for the Simon scenes were not attractive.  I enjoyed Simon's search for his family's roots which is what the book is really about but the characters were unappealing and that detracted from the story.

The Abbot's Tale

I read Conn Iggulden's Genghis Khan series and loved it. The Abbot's Tale is a new novel set in Anglo-Saxon England in the year 937. It is a stand alone novel.

Dunstan and his brother Wulfric are placed in Glastonbury Abbey as youths by their father so that Dunstan can recover from an illness. Their father soon dies and their mother is put out of the family home by an older stepbrother but funds are available for them to stay at the Abbey. They want to leave for they suffer frequent beatings and hate the monastic life but there is no where for them to go.  Dunstan eventually becomes a priest and after claiming to have been rescued by an angel from a tower scaffold he adds to his story by saying that he had a vision of a grand cathedral.  King Aethelstan believes these stories and makes him the Abbot of Glastonbury.  From here Dunstan begins his  lifetime of service to seven kings, all descendants of Aethelstan.  His tale includes his participation in wars, exile to Ghent, traveling to Rome to meet Pope John XII, being named Archbishop of Canterbury and building a cathedral in Canterbury.

While Dunstan had quite the career, I was not as enamored with this book as I was with the Khan series.  I thought that parts of the story were paced a little slow.  However, the author did show the reality of life in the 10th century which could be quite cruel for those living during that era.  That said, the book is an epic story full of royal kings, cathedral building, Viking invasions, and war scenes that show the birth of the English nation.

I guess my disappointment with The Abbot's Tale is due to how much I loved the Genghis Khan series.  It did not measure up to the Khan books. Perhaps that is not a fair assessment but I was expecting more from the book.  Note that the author found a manuscript that was never intended to be read and needed to be translated.  It had gaps in its plot.  The author filled in these gaps with his own writing, added chapter headings and it became The Abbot's Tale.  He stated "It is my hope that the result gives some pleasure and casts light on an exceptional mind of the tenth century." Whoever wrote the manuscript did have a great imagination.  Of that, there is no doubt. He created a vivid character in Dunstan and gave him a fantastical life.  Due to the pacing, I could not stay interested in the story.