The Gown

I was supposed to receive an advanced review copy of The Gown from the publisher in October, 2018 through the Early Reviewer's Program at Librarything but, sadly, it never arrived in the mail. I took the book out of my local library as soon as it hit the shelves. The Gown is the story of Queen Elizabeth II's wedding gown.

The story begins by introducing the characters who work for Thomas Hartnell, the designer of the wedding gown as well as the introduction of a parallel plot. However, this introduction was 140 pages long. 140 pages out of a 370 page book is a long time to wait before a reader gets to the point of a book, in this case, working on Elizabeth's wedding dress.

The two main characters Ann Hughes, an English girl, and Miriam Dassin, a French immigrant who survived Nazi France, were embroiderers who worked on the wedding dress in 1947. In Toronto in 2016 Heather Mackenzie discovers in a box left to her by her grandmother some embroideries that matched those on Queen Elizabeth's wedding gown. Heather also finds an old photo of her grandmother with the now famous artist Dassin. She travels to London to learn more about her grandmother's past. The story alternates between the 1947 plot and the 2016 plot.

The story had a slow start. Once the characters began working on creating Elizabeth's dress, the book became exciting. The seamstresses and embroiderers were under great pressure to keep the dress's design a secret. Some were used by reporters masquerading as boyfriends in attempts at getting inside information on the gown. Even the parallel plot became more exciting too.

The two main female characters were quite interesting. They were strong women, unusually strong for the era. Miriam was a French Jew who was sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany. Within months of her arrival in London she is working on a royal princess's gown.  That is an incredible turnaround for a one year period of time.  Ann has her own rite of passage but since I don't want to give away any more spoilers, I will leave her story out of my review.

Despite the slow start, this was a wonderful story. The reader could feel the emotional drain of WWII on England before the announcement of Elizabeth's engagement. Her happy announcement catapulted the nation out of its feelings of depression into joy. Perhaps any happy event would have done the trick but it was Elizabeth who got the job done. This begs the question whether her connection with her subjects was strong from this time forward because people remember how they felt during the time of her wedding.

At the conclusion of the story the author interviewed Betty Foster who was one of the four seamstresses who created Elizabeth's gown.  This interview gave me goosebumps as it validated the story I just read.

4 out of 5 stars! 

Book of the Month: April

My favorite book for the month of April is Kid Gloves by Lucy Knisley. Kid Gloves is a graphic novel detailing the author's attempts to get pregnant and carry a child to full term.

I am surprised that for 2 months in a row my favorite book was a graphic novel. It just shows how good these adult graphic novels can be. Kid Gloves is Knisley's most serious novel to date. It is autobiographical and while I am not maternal in any sense, I felt Knisley's emotions throughout her experience, from miscarriage through miscarriage to a full pregnancy and a delivery that almost killed her.  She showed emotion on every page with her drawings and while she used bright colors I think she was being optimistic by using them.

I enjoyed the book enough to buy it after taking it out of the library. I cannot recommend it to you more highly.

The Malta Exchange

I haven't read a Steve Berry book in a few years because I got tired of political and spy novels. His books have always been more treasure hunts than any other mystery sub-genre so I thought I would give Berry another try.

In the Malta Exchange former Magellan Billet member Cotton Malone has been hired by the British to locate a satchel of letters written by Winston Churchill to Benito Mussolini during WWII. However, as soon as he finds them in Lake Como, Italy, Malone is knocked unconscious and the satchel is gone when he regains consciousness. Meanwhile, Roman Catholic Cardinal Kastor Gallo is on the Island of Malta trying to find the Nostra Trinita, a secret document of the Knights of Malta that could propel him to the papacy if he finds it. The Secreti, a secret section of the Knights, Malone and the Billet's Luke Daniels all work against each other to find it first. With a papal conclave due to begin in days there is urgency.

History is supreme here. The reader learns about Mussolini's last days and the aftermath of his killing. Churchill's reasons for writing him, a British secret for decades, is revealed. In addition, the entire history of the Knights of Malta is given, from their formation to the present. This is a rich history lesson. I learned much here and had fun reading about the Knights. The inner workings of the Catholic Church is also on display here.

What was interesting to me was how much writing was spent on individual church member inner motives.  The author explores how several characters became the way they were from their childhood. I don't recall reading anything like that before in a Berry novel.  As for Cardinal Gallo, he was a thief and liar since he was in a church orphanage but his behavior was never challenged because the Mother Superior wanted to see how far he would go with his treachery. When he declared an intent to become a priest it was too late for her to take action. However, being a liar and a thief helped him fit in when he ascended to jobs inside the Vatican.

The Malta Exchange was an entertaining read. The pace was fast and the plot action packed. The characters from the Knights and the Catholic church were interesting. The usual Magellan Billet characters were not as compelling which is unfortunate as the Berry novels are a series.  Now I am wondering what Steve Berry books I missed reading that need to be placed on the TBR list.

5 out of 5 stars!

Harvest of Secrets

Harvest of Secrets is the 9th Wine Country Mystery featuring amateur sleuth Lucie Montgomery.  Lucie is a physically disabled vineyard owner in Virginia, owning Montgomery Estate Vineyard.  This is a cozy mystery series written by Ellen Crosby.

The story opens with Lucie recieving a message from one of her employees that he has found a human skull inside  a shed on her property.  She hurries over to look into it and then calls the sheriff for an investigation. A few days later a former neighbor returns to Virginia from France, Jean-Claude de Merignac. The Merignacs are a powerful winemaking family in both France and Virginia but they have been friends with Lucie's family for generations. Jean-Claude is a womanizer with a past history with many woman in Virginia. When he is found dead, there are plenty of suspects.

The book alternates between Lucie's investigation into the identity of the person whose skull was found in her shed and the local police investigation into Jean-Claude's murder.

While a huge suspension of belief is usually necessary with a cozy mystery, Harvest of Secrets was pretty believable. Lucie immediately thinks the skull belongs to a family member since the family cemetery, dating back to the 1700s, is located near the shed. After a DNA test proves her to be right this storyline just gets more interesting as it sheds light on an old secret in her family. Jean-Claude's murder investigation is not too exciting but the identity of the family member and why she was killed was a gripping story.  In fact, I think the whole Jean-Claude plot could have been eliminated. The other storyline was interesting enough to carry this book.

You should read this one! 4 out of 5 stars.

The Island of Sea Women

Lisa See's latest book was just published in March, 2019. The story takes place on a Korean island called Jeju and is about two women who are haenyeo, female divers for food. Young-sook and Mi-ja have been best friends since early childhood. Mi-ja is the orphan daughter of a Japanese collaborator and Young-sook is the daughter of the leader of the haenyeo collective. The story covers a period of time from the 1930s through the end of the Korean War with a subplot from 2008.

The haenyeo culture is unique as the women are in charge of providing the family finances and the men stay home and care for the children. Their job of harvesting fish from the sea for sale or to feed their families can be unsafe. One haenyeo in the story was almost killed by an octopus and Young-sook's mother died while helping her gather her first abalone. The women continue this work because they feel freedom from the cares of the world when they are underwater.

Our two heroines remain close friends until they marry and discover their husbands have different political views. They are also separated by living in different villages but their distance is primarily created by their husbands being on opposite political sides of Japanese colonialism in Korea and the Korean War. Each woman takes her husband's side and one betrays another during a period known in history as the Jeju Uprising. Between 14,000 and 30,000 people were murdered by American controlled South Korean government officials in 1948 and 1949. The author wove this event, covered up for decades by the South Korean government, into the story.  Most of the people killed were men as Young-sook remarks in the story that she lived on the Island of Widows.

This story reminded me of Mary Lynn Bracht's White Chrysanthemum which I read last year. It, too, was about a family of haenyeo on Jeju Island during World War II.  However, the See book reads rather slowly and had less poignancy than her books usually have. The characters were not as compelling as those in White Chrysanthemum. It is hard not to compare the two books as they are both about the haenyeo during the World War II era on Jeju Island and they were published one year apart. They are quite similar but White Chrysanthemum is a more interesting read and it was my top book for 2018.

I was surprised by the slow pace. A Lisa See book usually has a good pace. The plot was good and it could have been an exciting read. It wasn't. The book was OK, just not up to par with all of the author's earlier books. My expectations may have been unfairly high due to the similarities with Chrysanthemum but it was hard not to compare the books. While the characters in The Island of Sea Women were compelling, I felt that Young-sook was really the only character that made you want to keep reading. In a book that is supposed to be about the relationship between two women, having one woman not that strong of a character was a problem for me.

I am still glad that I read this book. I never want to pass up a Lisa See novel. It just wasn't the blockbuster I was expecting.

3 out of 5 stars.

Kid Gloves

Kid Gloves: Nine Months of Careful Chaos is Lucy Knisley's 6th graphic novel. It details her experience trying to conceive a child, her eventual pregnancy and the life threatening delivery of her baby. It has been written with low key humor. Kid Gloves was published in February, 2019.

Lucy begins this graphic memoir with her first introduction to contraceptives when she was a teenager.  She volunteered for Planned Parenthood's Peer-to-Peer Educator Program. She was trained about sexual health and contraceptives and then informed her classmates about what she learned and passed out condoms and pamphlets. She quickly notes that when she became an adult she realized how little information she received. Her attempts to use a diaphragm, the pill and an IUD had terrible side effects which required her to have surgery.

After she and her husband decided to have a child they thought conceiving would be easy. It was. However, Lucy had several miscarriages and found out one in four pregnancies is miscarried. She wondered why the Planned Parenthood classes didn't give this information.

She fell into grief after each miscarriage and could not work. Her female friends and acquaintances all told  her every old wives tale about pregnancy and miscarriage which she dutifully covered in a section called Miscarriage Myths.

Finally Lucy had a successful pregnancy that was fraught with nausea, insomnia and undiagnosed eclampsia which resulted in an emergency Caesarean and 2 days of unconsciousness. However, she got the baby she wanted. Still, she is wondering why she was not taught about all of these possibilities of pregnancy when she was a teenager.

I thought the author chose a clever theme, sex education, for her story.  Using her high school sex ed classes through Planned Parenthood was a brilliant backdrop for her own experience. In addition, while this story was about a serious topic it was told with humor. The humor was low key probably because of the subject matter. Also, the reader could feel the emotions of the author through each stage of her pregnancy experience. The emotions were both written and drawn on her many  facial expressions and those of her husband.

I learned a few things too.  I did not know that one in four pregnancies are miscarried. The author discusses many misconceptions about the entire maternity process that I would recommend the book to a newly pregnant woman. There is much to learn here if you didn't have a great sex education as a youth.

The artwork was done in line drawings primarily in a comic strip format. Bright colors are used throughout the book except for the two day period of time when the author was unconscious after the delivery of her baby. Here, she uses black and white drawings and the writing is from the point of view of her husband.

Kid Gloves was a quick read. I loved it and read it again the day after I finished it. It is informative but in a funny way. I love the use of bright colors and perhaps they bring some lightness to this serious book. I borrowed this book from my public library but feel that it belongs in my graphic novel collection. I will probably buy it.

5 out of 5 stars!

The Gondola Maker

The Gondola Maker is the first book in Laura Morelli's Venetian Artisan series. It features a fictional young gondola maker named Luca Vianello who is supposed to inherit his family's esteemed gondola making business.  His parents want him to marry a girl from the glassblowing guild in order to strengthen their political ties in Venice. After a fight with his father over the poor treatment of his mother, the boatyard accidentally catches fire and is destroyed. Luca flees. He fears being charged criminally as well as being unsure about whether his family survived the fire.

Knowing he needs a job in order to eat, Luca hires himself out to the owner of one of the largest ferry stations in Venice. His job is to load and unload boxes of merchandise for customers. It is a menial job compared to the artistry he was used to performing at home. Soon after his hire, Luca gains the attention of a master painter named  Trevisan and Master Trevisan hires him to restore an old gondola that he inherited from his father. Luca works hard on the gondola so that he can offer a ride to a girl he has met at Master Trevisan's studio. However, the girl like many others Trevisan has painted will be sexually assaulted by the man who purchased her painting, with her father pocketing alot of money. The girl will have to go into a convent though, as she will no longer be marriageable.

The Gondola Maker shows the reader the level of craftsmanship that is required to construct a top quality gondola.  You also learn about the life of a 16th century Venetian, particularly the gondoliers with their secret codes for maneuvering the canals of Venice and their custom of making a few extra bucks with their dishonest practices. The author's knowledge of the era is evident. She paints a realistic picture of 16th century Venice with women being treated as non-entities, extravagant palaces for the rich and ordering into slavery any citizen who violates the laws.

While I enjoyed the book I have to say the second book in the series is better. The Painter's Apprentice was an exquisite tale of a female apprentice of Master Trevisan. Her main problem is preventing the boatman from telling everyone her secret. These gondoliers just can't be trusted but they sure are entertaining!

Forthcoming April Reviews

I have a stack of books from the library and from Amazon that I am ready to read and review:

An Island of Sea Women: Lisa See
The Malta Exchange: Steve Berry
The Enemies of Versailles: Sally Christie
The Gondola Maker: Laura Morelli
Peace Child: Don Richardson
Harvest of  Secrets: Ellen Crosby

I am on a wait list for Jennifer Robson's The Gown and expect that I will get it around the end of April. The Steve Berry book was reserved at the library in hardcover but I received an audio version of the book instead. I am not sure I will be able to handle that format. We shall see. In addition, I just bought Ken Follett's A Column of Fire but it's 916 pages will have to wait for another month.

April will be a month of exciting reading!

Book of the Month: March

My favorite book for the month of March is Dan Dougherty's Self Employee of the Month. It is a comic book and is the 4th book in the Beardo series.

This book was just plain funny. I laughed from the moment I began reading until I finished the book.  Beardo's comments about being at Comic Con are spot on and how he handled working at home was hilarious. This was the best book in the series.

Not all comic books make a reader laugh out loud. Self Employee of the Month is one of them.

The Miracle of Creation

This is the 5th and final book in the Beardo series. The comic strip has ended. The series is autobiographical and covered ten years of the author's life. The Miracle of Creation was published in 2016.

The story begins with the newly pregnant Meg (Beardo's wife) counting up the number of days she can take off for maternity leave. Their two dogs see the baby as competition for attention but once they realize that she will throw food on the floor for them to clean up they are happy. Beardo is still attending many Comic Cons throughout the year and brings the baby along after she is born. He is teaching at the International School of Comics as well as continuing to write his Beardo comic strip.

This book is more of a poignant end to the series than a humorous book. There is humor here, just more poignancy as the story is really about becoming a parent. Beardo, however, is supposed to be a funny comic strip.

I hate to rate the book 3 out of 5 stars as each of the other 4 books were 5 star books. It just wasn't as funny as the earlier books. However, as I was reading I felt like I was witnessing a friend having a baby. I have come to love the Beardo and Meg characters in the series and am sad that it is over.

Self Employee of the Month

Self Employee of the Month is the 4th book in the Beardo 5 part comics collection by Dan Dougherty. It was published in 2015. At this point there are only 5 books in the series but as Dougherty's life progresses I am thinking that there might be more coming in the future.  I hope so.  I love this series which is autobiographical.  I met Dougherty a few years ago at Chicago's Printer's Row Lit Fest.  He hasn't been there the past 2 years but I hope to see him there next month.  I will have read all of his books by then and have many questions to ask him about his work and about cartooning in general.

The story opens with Beardo writing an agenda for a self employed staff meeting. Interspersed throughout the book there is a roll call, productivity report, advertising report, an accounting report, a self employee of the month award presentation, and an annual Christmas party that gets changed to a holiday party in order to be open minded.  He attends Comic Con with the first 3 books in this series but only sells books when he is in the bathroom and his attractive wife is handling the sales.

The author shows the reality of life as an artist when he shows Beardo denying friends' attempts to get free art jobs out of him. The reality of being a cartoonist in the 21st century is also discussed with newspapers turning away cartoons that they like due to dwindling budgets. Of course, the need to get a "real" job comes up when Beardo begins substitute teaching in elementary school.

I loved when he and his wife Meg went on a date to the Art Institute in Chicago where I live and visited one of my favorite exhibits, the Thorne Miniature Rooms. This exhibit has been open almost 100 years and has 68 miniature rooms decorated from time periods covering the 1600s to the 1930s. Chicago is the setting of the story probably because the author lives in the suburban area. Part of the setting included our town's first polar vortex in 2014.

I think this book is the funniest one in the series. With Beardo's sarcastic quips about working from home, his imaginary alcoholic cat friend Whiskers, and comments about being at Comic Con, he had me chuckling throughout the book.

This is the best book in the series. Way over 5 out of 5 stars!

'Til Debt Do Us Part

'Til Debt Do Us Part is the 3rd book in Dan Dougherty's 5 part Beardo comic book series.  I read the first two books in the series last year and loved them.  I just had the next three books in the series delivered in the mail and immediately began reading.

The story opens with Beardo and his girlfriend Megan getting engaged while on a cruise. Upon their return to work at a coffeehouse, Beardo quits his longtime job as a barista to focus on his cartooning. Meg continues to work there as a manager. With wedding bills piling up, the wedding planning going awry and his art business not taking off as he expected, the stress mounts and Beardo considers joining another band and getting a bank loan. Before the big day arrives Meg thinks she has become pregnant.

I love the  Beardo and Meg characters. They seem perfect for each other. When one is down the other is up and vice versa. The secondary characters from the coffeehouse and the band are sufficiently weird to bring humor to this book.  Beardo himself is hilarious and is definitely the star of the series.

The author uses bright colors with oversized fonts in a horizontal comic strip format that is traditionally used in Sunday newspapers. It makes for comfortable and fast reading. I love that Dougherty uses vivid colors in his comics. In fact, I try to only select graphic novels with colored graphics to buy.  When I am feeling down, the colors on the page just speak to me. I am an artist on the side as Beardo was for many years so perhaps that is why I love to see those vivid colors.

This installment of the series is a great addition to the series.  Beardo's life moves along at a quick pace and he makes everything about life seem funny.  5 out of 5 stars!

Behind Putin's Curtain: Friendships and Misadventures Inside Russia

I received an advanced review copy of Behind Putin's Curtain through Librarything's Early Reviewer's Program. It is a travelogue of Stephan Orth's 10 week trip inside the republics that make up the Russian Federation.

Orth begins his journey in Moscow where he had advance "hotel" arrangements through couchsurfing.com. In fact, all of of overnight stays were arranged through this organization. The results were usually comical but sometimes dangerous. Orth stated early in the book that he "wanted to spend time with normal people doing the things that they normally do and not focus on politicians, activists, or intellectuals, as is the usual practice of journalists." The purpose of the trip was to understand what was on young people's minds and to understand the Putin phenomenon and its effect on people.

My first impression of this country was that it was truly poverty stricken. I always believed otherwise. While I knew there were parts that were poor my general impression was that Russia was a comfortable country that I would like to visit one day. This book changed my mind. Russia seems to be the kind of country my church would have a practical mission trip to in order to construct a building or fix one.

My first impression of the book questioned how the author could stand these strange people he stayed with. My next thought was how did these folks become so strange in the first place? Russia is a country of many accomplishments yet the people are quirky and they are living like they are in a third world country.

While their living conditions are not so great, i.e., food and electrical shortages, they seem to love Putin as he is a strong leader.  They see him as being able to bring back national pride and that is more important than their personal struggles. When Putin invaded Crimea, they felt proud of the accomplishment. When Putin looks superior to other world leaders they are similarly proud.  When Russia gets blamed for interference in international affairs the Russian people feel proud that they have power again.

The author made an in incredibly astute assessment of the world's political situation. During the months before and after his trip the British voted for Brexit, the U.S. elected Trump as President, Igor Dodon became the President of Moldavia and Rumen Radev, the new president of Bulgaria, took over the presidency of the European Union. All of these events happened exactly as Russia would have wished. They all strengthen Putin's position in the world. I haven't heard any of the U.S. news stations report on Putin's political power in the world as the author has reported.

The author never stayed in one place more than a few days. He maximized his interactions with people and summarized his experiences at the end of some of the chapters with what he calls truths about Russia. They are comical but true. An example is Truth #6 "The words 'That's Russia' explain many things for which there is no logical explanation."

However, the book was slow reading perhaps because of the journalistic format. Most of the interesting assessments of the Russian people and of Putin were at the end of the book. The reader does get a feel for what it's like to travel within the country via train and plane. The psyche of the Russian people is evident in the stories the author told from his interactions with his various hosts. You only get that from the format the author used where he shows you what the Russian people said and did when he was with them. He doesn't tell you in a summary. While it seemed the book read slow, I don't know that the reader would be able to surmise the Russian psyche without this particular format. It was necessary.

I find it hard how to rate this book on my 5 star rating list. The author made some incredible political assessments. He showed us what makes Russians tick. However, it was slow reading. Even though I think the way he wrote it was necessary, it was slow reading for me. I am thinking 3 or 4 stars for its entertainment readability but if you consider the book's duty to inform it might be a 5. I cannot decide so I won't rate it.  Read it yourself and you decide.