A house in the country has some hidden secrets as do some of the people who visit the house throughout 150 years of history.
What I Liked
The overall story is awesome, despite some accessibility challenges with the structure (see below). You get to see pieces of the long story in the 1850s with one character as a young girl and another as a young boy; period two is an outing a number of years later when a bunch of artists descend on the house for a seminal event in their history; later occupation of the house by a woman who runs a girls school there; transformation of the house into a museum much later, to honour one of the artists from the fateful summer; occupation of the house by a young family during WWII; a visit to the house by a man and a woman years later; and finally a visit by an archivist in the present day, trying to find out some of the history from those various periods. She has some of the clues about the various timeframes and is trying to piece together more information about the fateful summer.
What I Didn’t Like
I didn’t like the constant jumping around in time and point of view, which is the structural problem I mentioned above. There are at least seven separate timeframes for the house, and even a couple more in there that are alluded to through reminiscing, but some of the timeframes are not indicated very precisely. You kind of have to figure a couple out as you go. In addition, while the author is a master of lyrical prose, you know some of the story is going to be a bit weird when early on you see an event from the point of view of a satchel that is being opened. Yes, the actual satchel, as if it is alive. It is not the only fantastical element in the book, but the rest would be too much of a spoiler to reveal. A bigger problem I had was that in one timejump, the new PoV is in the head of a woman who has a name VERY similar to that of another character; so much so that I was ten pages into the section before I realized that it wasn’t the woman I thought it was, and the timeframe was VERY different as a result. I often read books that have timeline issues that are way more complex than here, but even I had trouble following some of the hops. I also found part of the ending left things a bit hard to understand with one person acting very out of character and the final piece being a bit open-ended.
The Bottom Line
Great prose, wonderful saga, but difficult structure.
Set in the 1970s, a Russian poet has sought asylum in the U.S. Days before he qualifies for citizenship, he is kidnapped from Grand Central Station. Why was he taken? How can they help him? Where is he?
What I Liked
The story diverges on two tracks — a black-bag CIA operative comes in from the cold just enough to maintain full deniability while he looks for the missing poet. At the same time, an FBI manager keeps poking and prodding trying to find out why. Neither one knows the other exists, and the two stories remain fully compartmentalized.
What I Didn’t Like
The opening is extremely descriptive, almost one step removed from the action, and it takes a while until you fully engage in the two tracks.
A collection of 20 solve-them-yourself mysteries, perfect for reading on your break. For context, the stories are all short, suitable for reading one or two on a coffee break. If you have seen the 5-minute mysteries in the back of magazines like Reader’s Digest or remember the old Encyclopedia Brown series, then you understand the premise — you read a short-short story (almost flash length) with a mystery of “who did something”, ending with the narrator announcing that she or he knows the solution. Then, as the reader, you are challenged to figure out the mystery too. Turn the page, and voila, the solution from the story’s narrator to see if you’re right.
What I Liked
Sometimes when you see this type of story presented in magazines, the author doesn’t play fair — they hide a piece of evidence, or they play games with personal pronouns to trick you into thinking the character named “Chris” is a man but is really a woman. In this collection, I was happy to see that all of the mysteries play out completely fairly — in almost all cases, the information you need to solve them is provided completely within the text of the story. (There are three small exceptions to this where you need to have some basic knowledge of American or literary history.) I also really liked the Ask Martha “collection within a collection”. These are all stories with the same narrator — Crusher Davis, an ex-athlete turned sportswriter who also writes an “Ask Martha” column for the newspaper on the sly. It is odd, but the continuing character really helps the stories feel more vibrant, and more easily digestible. Of the six stories with Davis, The Arsonist and the Baseball Mystery are two of the best mysteries in the entire collection. Finally, the last story (Is It A Wonderful Life) is one of the best of the collection, except there aren’t enough suspects or meat to the story. Overall, here are the stories I liked the best:
The Pilgrim Thanksgiving — A holiday pageant at a school concludes with a test — which of the stories was historically inaccurate? Rating: 4.00;
Edgar Allan Poe’s Mysterious Visitor — A group of local Poe lovers want to take over the graveside vigil of the anonymous Mysterious Visitor who comes to Poe’s grave every year, but to be chosen, they must pass a test about Poe. Rating: 3.00;
The White House Ghosts — Four former Presidents decide to leave a gift for the new President’s children…but which President is represented by the gift? Rating: 4.00;
Ask Martha – The St. Patrick’s Day Mystery — Somebody spikes the drink at a fundraiser, but who turned the green celebration blue? Rating: 4.00;
Ask Martha – The Arsonist — Somebody is setting fires around town, and the tipline produces some leads…but only one leads to the firebug. Rating: 4.50;
Ask Martha – The Identify Thief — A group of friends go out for lunch, one comes home without a credit card. Rating: 3.00;
Ask Martha – The Jackie Mitchell Autographed Baseball Mystery — A dying old man has a special baseball on his mantle that goes missing as soon as he dies. Rating: 4.50;
The Miser’s Hoard — An old miser dies, leaving a small treasure hidden in the wall…but when it is about to be divided up, somebody sneaks an early withdrawal. Rating: 3.00;
The Gourmet Mystery — Who was a pig that ate the expensive truffles and didn’t want to pay for them? Rating: 3.00;
Is It A Wonderful Life? — An old man dies of an overdose — was it an accident, or a prescription for murder? Rating: 3.50;
What I Didn’t Like
All of the stories are rated PG — which is only a problem in the sense that some of the characters seem uni-dimensional like they’re stuck in an episode of Leave It To Beaver (one involves naive students pickpocketing people, which is dismissed as a prank because they apologize). At least three of the stories rely on an assessment of character (such as a person’s religious devotion) to eliminate suspects, which hardly registers as “evidence” to the normal mystery reader (in one case, a religious devotee is cleared of stealing a religious artifact because he is too devoted to stealing). The solutions aren’t that complicated, but if the nuance was added that the police/narrator would prioritize their investigation on the main suspect first, rather than the narrator declaring “I know who did it”, it would be a little softer to read. And easier to agree with the solution presented. Often times I had it narrowed down to two suspects and agreed the “correct” one was more likely, but I couldn’t eliminate the other one on the evidence alone. Here are my ratings for the short mysteries that I didn’t particularly enjoy:
Who Poisoned George Washington? — George is poisoned while visiting New York, and there are four suspects. Rating: 2.50;
A Dream of Old Salem — A girl dreams of a witch trial in old Salem, but which of the witnesses is lying? Rating: 2.50;
Stealing Second Base — A baseball base is stolen from a display case and three students had the opportunity. Rating: 1.50;
Lost (Stolen) and Found — A purse of money is found in the woman’s washroom at the diner…but who put it there? Rating: 2.50;
Ask Martha – The Pickpocket — People are losing their wallets around town, and a small pool of suspects has already formed. Rating: 2.00;
Ask Martha – The Shoplifter — Four people write to Martha for help, followed by the police — and all of them are related stories about potential five-finger discounts. Rating: 2.50;
What the Dickens – A Christmas Eve Mystery — A re-imagining of Dickens’ Oliver Twist and his reunion with his family. Rating: 1.00;
The Twelfth Night Mystery — The Three Wise Kings visit a little girl in modern times, bringing gold, frankincense and myrrh — and a kitten! Rating: 2.50;
The Crusader’s Robe — A ship is returning from the Crusades with treasures, and somebody pilfers one. Who was it? Rating: 2.00;
The Geneva Summit Goldfish Mystery — Reagan goes to Geneva to meet a goldfish. Rating: 1.00;
Disclosure
I received a free reader’s copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review. I am not personal friends with the author, but I have interacted with them briefly on social media.
This book is an anthology of women’s experiences in Canada during World War II. The anthology is a collection of first-person narratives from 57 women who served in various branches of the armed forces, auxiliaries, and private industry in Canada during World War II. Each of the narratives has a similar chronology and approach – what the women were doing before the war, how they joined the Armed Forces or supporting occupation, their experiences during the war (both personal and professional), their life-in-brief after the war, and, finally, a chance for them to pass some judgement on “what did it all mean” for them or for women in general.
What I Liked
Although I know the editor, and hence added the book to my reading list for that reason, the stories and subject matter are compelling to me in their own right. I can remember reading a USA Today article back in 2001 about the efforts of some U.S. organizations to capture oral histories of their WWI and II survivors, archiving them at the Library of Congress and elsewhere. Volunteer organizations set up sample questionnaires and encouraged young Americans to interview their grandparents about their experiences in the war, recording them and sending them off to be archived. Distributed processing of oral histories is a great technique that works with limited resources, and I remember getting excited about it, wondering what we were doing for Canadian histories? As it turns out, quite a bit.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has a website that captures a lot of this for Canada and has some great materials available to all online. This book captures the often-missed histories of women during that time. The individual stories are compelling and varied in place of origin, type of occupation, impact, and all the elements that comprise the story of each woman, presented in their own words. It is an amazing collective resource for anyone doing research on the era and would serve as both a stand-alone text as well as a supplement to the experiences of others (mostly men) during the Second World War covered elsewhere. And it includes all the things people would expect, which I won’t cover in detail, as well as some surprising elements that transcend the ordinary.
First and foremost, the book does a fine job of avoiding over-stating the impact of WWII on the women’s movement…the tendency in many publications of this sort would be to say “this era is important, these women are important, and therefore this time was the sole catalyst for changing the world forever for women”. However, as many of the stories note, a lot of changes were already underway. This doesn’t discount the impact or added impetus of the time, but also places it in a larger context, where women were no longer only being considered second-class citizens. Many of the women left decent jobs to join the Armed Forces, putting a lie to the often-popular view that the women simply “left the house” for the first time during WWII. Second, the small details from individual stories are particularly riveting, golden nuggets of their experiences:
the lack of common knowledge about the true horrors of the concentration camps until much later after the war – while lots of organizations try to argue or advocate that people in other countries knew but sat and did nothing to prevent the atrocities, they make that argument with the wisdom of hindsight, forgetting that while rumours ran wild, very few people believed the true level of catastrophe when they heard those rumours…only after the reality was truly known and documented could people look back and say “that particular rumour there” was true, and we should have believed it. Without a reference point, lots of people would not – and maybe could not – believe that such atrocities were possible. Even today, it is hard for people to accept genocide as a real event even though it’s happened before (Jacqueline Laplante, p.22, Elizabeth Hunt, p.142) yet there was some official recognition of the problems as many Jewish people were told to change their identifications before fighting overseas (Nano Penefeather-McConnell, p.126-127);
the experience of women’s rifle training and teams (Jacqueline Laplante, p.28);
the role played by French priests in some family decisions in Quebec, with many of the priests trying hard to prevent the women from joining up or calling them home claiming their birth certificates were forged (Mary Saunders, p.28, et al);
the commonplace / matter-of-fact way of dealing with notifications of deaths in the family (Ruth Ralston, p.72);
the drafting of women in England (Elizabeth Hunt, p.134);
the impact on the economy in Quebec in 1939 with many farming families suddenly having boosts in their family income with many sons and daughters working in factories, and for families in general with work plentiful and banks willing to give loans again (Olive Villeneuve, p.166); and,
the two government employees explaining to them in 1941 that there were going to be new deductions from their wages for something called “income tax” and “unemployment insurance” (Olive Villeneuve, p.168).
My favourite story is the impact of reading Lorna Stanger (p.161) talking about VE-Day in Europe. For the first time since the war started, they could have the lights in the city on at night and had it all lit up. For the youngest children, many had only known black-outs and air-raid sirens, and seeing the lights at night actually scared them.
What I Didn’t Like
My biggest complaint is self-inflicted – I did not follow the advice of the Chief Archivist for DND who recommends in the introduction that people should read a few stories at a time. My challenge was simply that I borrowed the book from the library, so with limited time, I plowed through them. And hence probably had a lessened impact than if they were read properly.
As a result, I found myself in some places confusing stories with the previous one, thinking “how did she do that? Wasn’t she in Europe by then?” and then paging back to realize it was a different woman with a similar occupation. In others though, I find myself struggling with the format – the stories appear one after another, seemingly ungrouped in any way. I can’t help wondering if there would be more impact if the stories had been alternatively grouped to convey a stronger message.
For example, they could have been grouped by province – would those who were born in Ontario have a different experience than those in Winnipeg? Ordering by service branch would be an obvious option but might negate some of the commonalities across branches. One could organize by a dozen other possibilities too, such as their posting, occupation, age at induction, future careers, whether they went overseas, etc.
In the end, the challenge might just be the biographical genre. Given the wealth of information, I found myself wanting to see some analysis across the anthology that you could digest and pull out, rather than just the raw text. But that would be a different text then, perhaps one more for academics to produce. And absent the analysis, I wanted to see different ways of sorting – but that too would be a different publication, more of a database than a book.
Keziah Dane is a struggling single mother in 1939. Her husband died two years before in a flood, trying to rescue other townspeople, and her son was taken too. This leaves Keziah with no money, and she has to look after four remaining sons and two daughters. In addition, her mother-in-law has gone a little batty with the loss of her son, leaving Keziah to take care of her too. A passing drifter sees the family burying the family dog and figures if they are burying something, it must be money. He ingratiates himself into the family posing as an unconventional minister, and tries to figure out how to get the money. The sub-stories are fairly straightforward – the oldest son wants to go back to the flooded town and dive for salvage, despite the danger; the second oldest son is working for a local farmer and falling in love with the daughter; and the remaining family members are struggling through being at school with much wealthier families.
What I Liked
The sub-story with the second oldest son falling in love with the local farmer’s daughter is really well-done. Her mother is a hypochondriac with a small problem with her foot, but it is interesting to see how the son deals with her, ending up as an excuse to spend time in the house near the daughter. The blossoming romance between the two of them – one practical, one romantic – is really well done, and natural, albeit perhaps mis-placed in time (would work even better in the 1800s, except for the physical side perhaps). I also like the hook for using the farmer himself to drive a plot twist near the end. There is a scene with the drifter and the buried treasure that is beyond disgusting, and made me shudder – a perfectly done description by Grafton. I could see it and I really didn’t want to anymore. Blech. In a good way. The struggle of the children to adapt to their situation, the realization that they are poor and what that means, is strongly written, and captures the heartache, pride, jealousy, desire, fear, happiness, and importance of family that goes along with it. I thought there were a few too many young kids to talk about in the story, and Grafton could have got by with two fewer in my view, but it was not a complete distraction.
What I Didn’t Like
The opening is fairly basic, reminiscent of Old Yeller, and doesn’t do much to hook the reader. I’m almost ambivalent towards Keziah Dane herself as she seems like the perfect mother – understanding when she needs to be, long-time sufferer or martyr who soldiers on, but I would have liked to see more conflict within her. A lover perhaps that she goes to visit occasionally. In addition, there is a conflict near the end of the story that is bizarre in detail, although so confused and disjointed in places that it is hard to tell what exactly is happening. The ending is also a little pat, with everyone better off. Grafton potentially missed an opportunity with the chronology – setting the story in November 1939 could have included a hint of the outside world intruding, but no wind of change is blowing their way. It could have easily been set in the 1800s with no real loss of story.
