With the summer behind us and school underway once more, the pace picks up. But that means relaxation is more important than ever, and what better companions can you have for those still respectably long evenings than our latest collection of books we loved? This month, we have two historical novels and one about a more or less contemporary family in crisis to recommend.
Christina Dodd, A Daughter of Fair Verona (Kensington Books, 2024)
It takes a certain gall to update one of William Shakespeare’s most enduring and most beloved tragedies. Anyone who has survived an English literature class at a US high school or college knows full well that (spoiler alert) neither Romeo nor Juliet lives to old age; and those few who have not read the play for pleasure or under duress have probably seen one of the screen versions. (I’m probably dating myself, but Juliet will always look like Olivia Hussey to me.)
All the more kudos, then, to Christina Dodd for pulling off this updated and reimagined version of that classic play. This first book in a new series called Daughter of Montague features Rosaline, nicknamed Rosie—the practical, intelligent, witty, and tolerant eldest daughter of Verona’s most famous and still passionate couple. Rosie has at best a jaundiced eye toward love and marriage, having spent her entire life observing life on an emotional seesaw. Yet this is fifteenth-century Europe, and “wife” is the only acceptable destiny for a woman. When, after four attempts (foiled by Rosie), her famous parents finally make a match for her, Rosie’s fate seems to be sealed. Then her unwanted groom is found dead in the Montague garden at his own betrothal ball, and Rosie is implicated in his murder.
The story is fun, the mystery satisfying, the author’s obvious delight in manipulating Shakespeare’s famous tale infectious, but what really grabs the reader is Rosie’s voice. At once irreverent and responsible, she sounds more like a modern teenager than anyone from the fifteenth century, but that’s exactly how she draws us into her world and gives us a good few laughs along the way.—CPL
Emily L. Finch, Masquerade in London (Randall Court Press, 2022)
Victorian-era mysteries featuring well-bred young ladies who have little interest in complying with society’s expectations for marriage and motherhood lie thick on the ground, but this relatively new series (book 3 is due out soon) is particularly well done. Samantha Kingston, when we meet her, is chafing under the heavy-handed regime of her uncle and guardian. She has lost her parents to cholera, and her beloved grandfather abandoned her not long before he died.
But all is not well in her uncle’s house: letters keep arriving from a mysterious blackmailer, and Samantha’s uncle refuses to take them seriously. When he can no longer discount the threat, he moves himself, his wife, and Samantha to a hiding place in Holborn (a much less prestigious area of London), where he and his wife are soon killed by thugs.
Samantha escapes, but she knows that the Bow Street Runners are searching for her as the prime suspect in her family’s deaths. For five weeks, she hides out in the slums of London, living hand to mouth, until her attempt to rob a passerby leads her to V.T. Wyatt, the younger brother of Viscount Boxley. Estranged from his family, Wyatt amuses himself conducting the occasional private investigation, and soon he and Samantha are working together to resolve the mystery of her aunt and uncle’s murder, as well as a series of robberies that seem to be related. With luck, they will find an answer before they have permanently scuttled Samantha’s reputation.
It’s the time that Samantha spends on the streets that sets this series apart. Too often, young women in historical mysteries display survival skills that they have had no way to acquire and tackle without fear unscrupulous villains who in real life would eat these girls for breakfast. Samantha, though, has real experience and desperation to draw on, and although she does, eventually, confront the perpetrator face to face (another pet peeve of mine), in this case her reasons for doing so make perfect sense. The main characters are engaging and complex, the writing generally good, and the author’s grasp of Victorian life admirable. Highly recommended.—CPL
Paul Murray, The Bee Sting (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023)
One hundred (101, to be exact) years after James Joyce gave us Ulysses—a long, unconventional, exhilarating, sometimes psychotic, century-defining Irish masterpiece—along comes Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, another unconventional Irish masterpiece. It too is long (about 650 pages), exciting, exhilarating, psychotic, and keenly illustrative of its time (post-crash 2008) and place (Dublin and its rural surroundings).
The story is about the Barnes family. Dickie Barnes takes over his father’s successful car dealership after Dickie’s brother, Frank, who was supposed to manage the business while Dickie pursued academic goals, dies in a horrific car accident. Due to the recession, Dickie is already running the business into the ground when the book begins. His response to his business (and other unrelated) failures is to turn an outbuilding in the wooded area behind his house into a shelter for the apocalypse he envisions. His wife, Imelda, a great beauty who was supposed to marry Frank, cannot hide the anger and humiliation she feels at her family’s financial implosion. Cass, Dickie and Imelda’s daughter, has always been a good student, but now, just as she’s about to sit for exams and begin university, and thanks in part to familial upheaval and in part to the influence of her best friend, has begun hitting the bars—hard. PJ, her brother, who is twelve when we meet him, is a naïve video gamer who meets people on the Internet and whose real-life acquaintances aren’t any less scary.
Each of the characters in this novel has secrets, and Paul Murray draws them out slowly—in the beginning at least, chapter by chapter—focusing on one family member at a time. The first rotation provides a casual overview of the problems that character is dwelling on, but then there is a second rotation, and a third ... Murray zooms in closer and closer, so that in addition to the forward motion of the plot, the reader is simultaneously learning more about the past and the increasingly ugly truths about what really happened to whom and why. Humor and heartache compete for the reader’s attention, especially in the early chapters, sometimes in the very same paragraph. Sometimes in the same sentence! But in the end it is heartache that prevails and propels the story forward.
Climate crisis looms over everything here. Some of the characters—not only within the family but also those peripheral to it—blame the improbability of a climate solution on their inclination to do what feels good at the moment at the cost of dispensing with a “moral guard.” A speech made by Dickie’s friend Willie—not in the time when both men were students at Trinity College but years later when Cass is a student there—about the climate situation will bring readers to their knees.
The Bee Sting becomes a runaway train towards the end of the novel. All the main characters are heading to the same place—metaphorically as well as physically—at the same time. The format throughout the book is inconsistent, with some chapters in first person, some in third, and many in second. In the last chapters, when things are totally beyond the control of any of the characters, the text becomes one long, punctuation-ditching stream of consciousness printed into a right-hand column with the name of the character currently in the limelight appearing on the left. How else would the reader keep pace?
The Bee Sting is dazzling, breathtaking, insightful, and significant—a truly great read.—JS
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