Book Review: The Sweetness of Water (2021). Nathan Harris.

I picked up this recent first novel by Nathan Harris, which became an immediate bestseller and an award-winner last year, based on rave reviews from my wife and several friends in her book club who had already read it. It did not disappoint – it’s a beautifully told story of white and black characters trying to survive and find meaning in the deep South, in the midst of the social turmoil at the end of the Civil War.

The slaves have been freed, and the Union Army arrives in town to enforce the new social order. That doesn’t protect the freed slaves from the hostility, fear, racism and hatred of much of the white population, but it has opened the door to some new opportunities and possibilities.

If this were just a book about the struggles of recently freed slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War, it would still be remarkable, but it is so much more than that. At the center of the story is an old white man George and his wife Isabelle, living alone on their farm outside of town, as they await news of the fate of their son Caleb, a Confederate soldier in the war. 

Caleb turns out to be a complex character himself; once we learn his story, it’s revealed that he is something of a disgrace, and is carrying several heavy secrets that could exact a terrible price on him and his family if they were revealed. Yet he is an only child, and is still loved by his parents.

Then there are two young brothers, Prentiss and Landry, freed slaves who George first encounters in the woods near his home. Out of their basic human decency and kindness, and perhaps measures of guilt, both George and Isabelle each slowly become involved with the two brothers, and try to help them get a start on their new lives, in part to fill their own feelings of loss and loneliness.

Under the stresses of their world and their individual situations, we come to learn ever more about these five people, and a number of other characters that come in and out of their lives. Through their eyes, we experience something of the intense social pressures at play in the small southern town, and we feel the savage cruelty and intolerance of the many, but also the human kindnesses and vulnerabilities to be found among individuals, even within a community poisoned by prejudice.

The exploration of the emotional dynamics of the marital relationship between George and Isabelle is particularly moving. It captures perfectly the search for balance and harmony between two different (and difficult) personalities in a long-term love relationship, and probes some of the different ways in which compassionate people try to come to terms with their own guilt and responsibility for the monstrous crimes of the unjust society they inhabit.

The Sweetness of Water is one of the most satisfying and realistic stories I’ve read about what social life looked like in the late 1860s in the South, as the Civil War ended and southern society tried to figure out what to do next. It is certainly not a hopeful portrait of where things were headed, yet for these characters, we’re left with some sense of redemption and the promise of better lives for the future.

This is a truly excellent fictional account of a difficult historical period, with strong resonance in our own society today, more than a century and a half later. Highly recommended.

Book Reviews: Honorable Mentions: Fiction, Mysteries and Thrillers.

Today I'm posting another one of my "Honorable Mentions" special features of short reviews of five related types of books.  Today I want to talk about historical novels, spy thrillers and mysteries I've enjoyed. 

Book Review: The Girl From Venice (2016). Martin Cruz Smith.

Martin Cruz Smith is a very good and rather prolific thriller writer, most famous for his nine-book Gorky Park series about Arkady Renko, the disillusioned Russian police detective just trying to do his job while faced with nearly insurmountable political, bureaucratic and international espionage situations in the late Cold War and post-Cold War eras.

The Girl from Venice is one of his creative departures from the Arkady Renko books (I previously reviewed another one, December 6). This one is also a very worthwhile entertainment, and a quick-read historical thriller, about a 28-year-old war-weary fisherman in 1945 Italy, who catches a "dead" young woman in his fishing net, only to stumble into a whole series of dangerous situations as World War II in Italy, and the Allied invasion, rushes to its final chaotic conclusion. Recommended.
 

Book Review: The Red Sparrow Trilogy: Red Sparrow (2013), Palace of Treason (2015), and The Kremlin’s Candidate (2018). Jason Matthews.

This is an excellent set of modern spy novels, written by a real-life veteran CIA agent. When the cold war ended, a lot of us thought it might be the end of the great spy novel era too. As this trilogy demonstrates, there’s nothing to worry about on that front – the world’s second oldest profession is alive and well, along with the literary scene devoted to it.

These books have well-developed characters, a brave and tough heroine, great plots, nerve-shattering suspense, incredible complexity and realistic details of how modern spy operations are planned and carried out. The fact that they centered on the vicious and toxic regime of Vladimir Putin and the political world of post-Soviet Russia, before all of us were fully aware of the nature of his brutal regime, gives the books added authenticity.

The first book, Red Sparrow, was made into a popular spy thriller movie starring Jennifer Lawrence. These books are all recommended.
  

Book Review: Everyone Brave is Forgiven (2016). Chris Cleave.

This is a fictional story of three young people (a woman and two men) coming of age in London and Malta during the Blitz in the early part of World War II. Through their stories, we see the hard choices each one has to make, between their dreams for their own personal futures, and the unavoidable and limited options to be had in a time of war, sacrifice and loss.

There’s a love triangle, and a good English World War II adventure story, with a particularly vivid description of the lesser-known privations and tragedy of the British attempts to defend Malta. 

Apparently the author was inspired to tell this story by love letters from the period by family members. The book is beautifully written. Recommended.
  

Book Review: Midnight in Europe (2015). Alan Furst.

This book is a predictably great read, as we can expect with most Alan Furst novels. For those who are not familiar with him, Alan Furst is arguably the best World War II spy fiction thriller writer of our generation. 

His books tend to take place in different locales across Europe in the pre-war 1930s, and during the early war years, and he focuses on portraying the kinds of dangerous situations and unavoidable daily moral choices people faced as a consequence of the simultaneous rise of fascism and Soviet communism during this period.

This particular novel takes place in Paris in 1938, as the Spanish Republicans try desperately to find arms across Europe for their lost cause, the Spanish Civil War against General Franco and his army. It has Furst’s usual cast of mostly middle-aged men and women trying to figure out how to survive and maneuver against Nazi and Soviet spies and sympathizers, the secret police of various countries, local informers and the coming onslaught of total war. Recommended. 

 

Book Review: Another Man's Moccasins (2008). Craig Johnson. Walt Longmire Series #4. 

I previously reviewed the first three books in Craig Johnson’s 20+ book series about his modern western sheriff Walt Longmire, and his fictional Wyoming world of Absaroka County, where he tries to keep the peace and solve murders in his fraught small-town rural community of whites, Native Americans, Basques and others, with the help of a memorable supporting cast, including his Indian friend Henry Standing Bear, his tough young female deputy Vic Moretti, his daughter Cady and others.

Along the way, he usually has to interact with and come to understand a variety of new local characters and competing economic interests, in order to get to the bottom of whatever crime has been committed.

In Another Man’s Moccasins, the main crime at the heart of the story involves the murder of a young Vietnamese woman, possibly but not definitely by a disturbed young Crow Indian man. Without giving away the plot, I’ll just mention that there is a story line about sex trafficking, but also a mysterious link to Longmire’s own history as a U.S. Marine Military Policeman in the Vietnam war, a plot device that allows the author to further develop Longmire’s character and backstory, as well as that of Henry Standing Bear and their lifelong friendship.

This will probably be my last Longmire book review – it’s a very good series, the best murder mystery series I’ve encountered recently (I’m not generally that big a fan of the genre), especially because of the excellent characters and great dialogue. But it is a long series, and after awhile it just becomes an enjoyable pastime to read them. They’re not that individually memorable after you've read a few -- a common problem with long-running mystery series, I find. But still, recommended.

Book Review: The Lincoln Highway (2021). Amor Towles.

The Lincoln Highway is the third and most recent bestselling historical novel by Amor Towles, who left a twenty-year career as an investment professional to become (more or less out of nowhere) one of our most skilled contemporary novelists and storytellers. It has some similarities to the other two novels, but diverges in its narrative approach, which entails jumping back and forth between the stories of four different characters, all tied together by their roles in a youthful road trip.

Towles’ specialty seems to be in focusing in on the lives of rather ordinary fictional characters, and artfully depicting their everyday growth and struggles, while bringing alive the historical eras in which their lives take place. In the process, his beautifully drawn main protagonists also come into contact with other interesting characters, and find themselves in unexpected situations that range from the amusing and mundane to the morally challenging and dangerous.

In his first novel, Rules of Civility (previously reviewed), his main protagonist is a young woman from a lower class background, trying to work, party and find her way into the elite social world of New York’s upper class during the 1930s. In A Gentleman in Moscow (also previously reviewed), Towles’ main character is a former member of the Russian aristocracy, now trying to build a life under house arrest in Moscow in the post-revolutionary 1920s.

The Lincoln Highway is primarily the story of Emmett, an 18-year old Nebraska boy in 1954 rural America, who is being driven home at the beginning of the story to his late father’s farm. Emmett is driven by the warden from the reform school where Emmett had been incarcerated for the past year, for accidentally killing another young man with an angry (if perhaps justified) punch. Waiting there for him at the farm are his exceptionally bright 8-year old brother, as well as a neighbor girl (who appears to be fond of him) and her farmer father, who wants to acquire the farm.

In the course of the first chapters, we realize that Emmett is basically a good kid, who lost his temper and made a mistake, but who’s done some growing up as a result of his hard life experience. However, his immediate prospects are discouraging: the family farm is forfeit because of his father’s inability to make it work, so Emmett has a different plan. He wants to abandon the farm, take the small amount of money he inherits, and set out with his younger brother in his well-maintained Studebaker sedan to California, where he hopes to start buying and renovating houses, and building a good life for the two of them.

Unfortunately, fate has different ideas, in the form of two of his fellow young prisoners, who appear unexpectedly after escaping and stowing away in the warden’s car, with their own plan to join Emmett and his brother on their road trip. These two young fugitives have come up with a plot to steal one of their inheritances on the way, and share the loot among the four of them. What could go wrong? But of course, plenty could and does go wrong, and eventually they will all end up not in California, but in New York instead.

Along the way they get separated, face different dangers, meet unusual new characters, reunite, and bring their strange road trip to its unexpected end, with powerful and life-changing consequences for each of them.

At the beginning, as soon as the two escaped prisoners showed up and revealed a little about their respective characters and backgrounds, I could barely stand to keep reading. It was so obvious that they were going to spell trouble for Emmett and his little brother, and that their clever plot would go wrong. Three teenage young men with histories of poor judgment, and a vulnerable but precocious child, heading off in a car on a seemingly larcenous and crackpot quest? It sounded like a prescription for a heart-breaking disaster.  

Fortunately, the plot twists and surprises continued to be intriguing and unexpected, and new revelations continually added depth to each of the characters, so I kept with the story just to find out what would happen next. It turned out to be well worth the trouble, as the pace steadily picked up, and the suspense increased all the way to the dramatic conclusion. Recommended.

Book Series Review: Outlander. Diana Gabaldon.

I previously reviewed the ninth novel in the long series of Outlander novels by Diana Gabaldon, Go Tell the Bees that I Am Gone (2021), but have now decided that I ought to provide a little more information and a description of the entire set of books in the series, which began with the release of the first novel, Outlander, in 1991. That's mainly because, after spending several years reading all nine of the gigantic Outlander novels (each one runs roughly 900 pages of hardback-sized pages filled with small, densely compacted text), I've become a completely devoted fan of this amazing long-running book series.

I was happy to learn last year, around the time Go Tell The Bees That I Am Gone was published, that Dr. Gabaldon (yes, the author is also a PhD biologist) plans to write a tenth and final Outlander novel before the series concludes at the end of the American Revolution. This may take her a few years, if past performance is an indication; each novel she's added to the series has taken roughly five years to appear after the preceding one.  Fortunately, recent online stories confirm that she is now at work on this tenth novel, so at least we can start the clock running on when it might arrive!

I decided to try to read the first book after becoming a fan of the Starz TV show, Outlander,  which is closely based on the book series. These novels (and the show) are a curious mix of genres, combining well-researched historical fiction, romance and sex from a woman's perspective, and science fiction/fantasy, which have drawn generations of enthusiastic readers and now TV viewers to the outstanding TV version of the story.

The main character and principal narrator at the heart of the stories is Claire Randall, a modern Englishwoman and feisty, resourceful young veteran of World War II service as a combat nurse. While on a "getting reacquainted" holiday after the war with her husband Frank, she accidentally falls through a time portal in a ring of ancient standing stones, and ends up alone in early 1740s Scotland, where she has to quickly adapt to a very different world and life in order to survive. 

They're very thick novels, rich in period detail, adventure and racy love stories, and very addicting, but they take a long time to read, and the plot jumps around between olden and modern (20th century) times, so I'll refrain from recounting the contents of each book in my review.

So what are they about? Mainly, they're incredibly rich historical novels. They portray individual, social and family life in the past through a large cast of interesting characters, whose stories and fates are interwoven through their family relationships, wars, rebellion and coincidence across a specific arc of past time, history and locations.

That arc begins with the Jacobite uprising for “Bonnie Prince Charlie” in Scotland in the early 1740s, then moves through the post-Culloden Scottish migration to America, colonial life in the new world, and the years of the American Revolution -- which, as Diana Gabaldon has explained in interviews, is the period when the pre-industrial world was transitioning to the modern scientific and technological era.

They're also wonderful romance novels, focused primarily on one couple (Jamie and Claire Fraser), but also on their children, close family members and friends, and the intimate details of their various sex lives, loves, traumas, battles, adventures and relationships over decades.

But wait, there's more! They also contain a very good sci-fi/fantasy time-travel story, with occasional bits of apparent magic thrown in, as well as a fascinating ongoing exploration of modern medicine in contrast to primitive healing, and the knowledge and beliefs of each, along with convincing portrayals of what ordinary life was like before germ theory, anatomical knowledge and penicillin were discovered.

With all that going on, these Outlander books take forever to read and absorb, but at least from my perspective, it is totally worth it. These books now rank among my top fiction series ever, along with Patrick O'Brien's epic 20-volume Master and Commander Aubrey/Maturin series, C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series, Frank Herbert's original 6-volume Dune series, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Very highly recommended.

Book Review: Varina (2018). Charles Frazier.

This is a beautifully written, haunting novel about Varina Davis, the much-younger wife of Jefferson Davis, and First Lady of the Confederacy, by the noted author of another Civil War epic and award-winning novel, Cold Mountain (1997) (which was also made into an outstanding movie of the same name in 2003 starring Nicole Kidman, Jude Law and Renee Zellweger).

Varina is written in a non-sequential fashion, jumping from her youth and adolescent years, to the story of how she ended up married to Davis, with important moments, insights and experiences she had from before, during and after the Civil War, and then from episodes and periods later in her life.

In the story, we gain a sense of a young woman who made understandable choices out of necessity early in life that unexpectedly took her to a position of power and influence in a revolutionary moment, yet who was sensitive enough to realize along the way, and in the aftermath, the profound injuries and injustices of the course and the cause she’d chosen, and to regret her complicity in them.

I don’t know if this fictional portrayal of her character is fully accurate to the life and person of the real Varina Davis, but in Frazier’s telling, we get a very three dimensional portrayal of an intelligent woman trying to find her way through a life that was (for a time) exceptionally privileged, yet achieved at the expense of the suffering of so many others. 

She becomes increasingly aware of that suffering through the events and hardships she experiences as the southern rebellion collapses, and she has to find ways to go on with her life as a wife, mother and then widow, as well as a venerated celebrity in the South for her role in a failed cause that was considered traitorous and despicable by most of the rest of American society, and perhaps as well by her own conscience.   

Another interesting aspect of the story is Frazier's exploration of the extent to which Varina was automatically held responsible by many for the decisions and actions of her husband and the other powerful Confederate men around him, but on some levels had little agency in those decisions and their consequences, as a woman in 1860s American society.

I found it a gripping human story, powerfully told, despite the fact of her inherently unsympathetic supporting role in history as wife and First Lady at the center of the moral calamity that was the Confederacy. Recommended.

Book Review: December 6 (2003). Martin Cruz Smith.

In my ongoing search for reading and entertainment available from the library by e-book during the pandemic, I started looking for novels from the past in the thriller/mystery vein by well-known authors in that genre, and fortunately stumbled on this one.

I knew I'd read several of the very good Martin Cruz Smith mystery novels about his Russian detective character Arkady Renko a long time ago, but this book is about another sort of anti-hero protagonist, Harry Niles, a cynical, rebellious son of American missionaries who grows up in 1930s Japan.

Niles is a gaijin (a white foreigner) who is nevertheless steeped in Japanese culture, art and criminality from having grown up in it, yet with a part of his identify and loyalty still tied to his American family and roots.

The novel is a well-written, gripping story of life on the edge of danger in Japan during the China war of the 1930s, with a little bit of a spy thriller plot about the impending Pearl Harbor attack included, along with an interesting portrayal of the China war and the lead-up to World War II as seen from the Japanese side.

This was definitely a worthwhile, interesting and exciting read in an unusual and little-visited historical setting. Recommended.

Book Review: A Gentleman in Moscow (2016). Amor Towles.

This is the beautifully written story of an elegant Russian gentleman and nobleman of the old order, Count Alexander Rostov, who becomes a "former person" when he is sentenced by the young Soviet regime in the 1920s to live out his life confined to the Metropol Hotel in Moscow.

It’s a remarkable tale of how he copes for years under a kind of luxurious house arrest, and finds meaning and love in the human relationships he builds in his tiny slice of Russian society. At the end, there’s a surprise foray into espionage, intrigue and danger, which adds delightful spice to the story. Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Good Lord Bird (2013). James McBride.

This is an amusing and award-winning satire and fictional narrative of the last years of "Osawatomie" John Brown (the famous abolitionist), as told through the eyes and experiences of a young slave boy who is mistaken by Brown for a girl.

Our narrator ends up being freed by Brown, and swept along (now masquerading as a girl) as Brown leads his abolitionist campaign, and his tiny "army" of religious fanatics, from skirmishes in Kansas to their inevitable denouement at the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry.

Along the way, John Brown and his ragtag group encounter Jeb Stuart, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, as well as other minor heroes and villains of Brown's real-life famous private crusade against slavery that helped spark the Civil War. Recommended.

Book Reviews: Blackout (2010) and All Clear (2010). Connie Willis.

I recently re-read these two thick science fiction and historical novels, which were originally intended to be one volume, but grew to be two because Connie Willis couldn't fit the whole grand story into one book. They are built on the same time-travel plot premise introduced in The Doomsday Book, which I reviewed recently.

It's six years after the events of The Doomsday Book (it’s now 2060), and the time travel missions of the student historians at Oxford have proliferated, but trying to manage the complexity of it all is becoming an ever more chaotic process. Planned drops into past eras are being reshuffled by Mr. Dunworthy (the head of time travel historical studies) at the last minute, no one can get the right period outfits from the Costume department because the historians' schedules keep changing, and it seems to be increasingly hard to find drop sites (exact times and places in the past) that will work with the time travel machinery.

Into this organizational maelstrom come three young historian innocents, Merope, Polly and Michael, each headed for different periods and situations in World War II Great Britain, including the children's evacuations from London, the evacuation from Dunkirk, and the Blitz (the German bombing of London). But once they arrive, they slowly discover their return drops won't open, and they eventually have to face the possibility that perhaps there's no way back to their own era.

Is time travel broken? Could they be altering the outcome of the war by their own actions (which isn't supposed to be possible, according to their time travel theory)? What is going on back in future Oxford? And how can they make contact with each other, to figure out what’s wrong and how to return to their future?

Using Connie Willis's trademark plot devices of missed connections, endless frustrated plans, messages not received or answered, and time travelers under unexpected duress having to constantly improvise new solutions, these two books are a truly wonderful tour through the heroism and bravery of the British people in World War II. Marvelous, moving and really fun to read! Highly recommended.

Book Review: News of the World (2016). Paulette Jiles.

This is a very satisfying Western story about an old man, a veteran of several American wars of the early and mid-19th century, who travels from town to town across the post-Civil War west, eking out a living putting on one-man shows, where he reads and comments on stories from the newspapers of the time.

At one stop, he reluctantly accepts the job of returning a 9-year old white girl, who's been abducted by and lived among Indians, to her surviving family members.  It’s a great Western adventure tale about two lonely but strong-willed people, who learn to love and care for each other across the wide bridges of age, culture, language and understanding between them.

I previously reviewed the movie version based on this book, starring Tom Hanks.  I would rate the book as even better than the movie, due to its sensitive and powerful evocation of the complex emotions and slowly-developing relationship between the old man and the girl, and its focus on the unusual history of whites kidnapped by Indians, who then didn't want to return to white society, or to be "rescued" from their Indian families and tribal life.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Go Tell the Bees That I am Gone (2021). Book 9 of the Outlander Series. Diana Gabaldon.

After a very long wait for legions of dedicated fans around the world, the latest installment in the epic Outlander series of novels by Diana Gabaldon (now also a major hit TV show from the Starz channel), arrived in November of 2021.  It’s the usual 900 pages or so of small, dense type (in the hardback version) – in other words, a very long read, but worth every minute of it, and the seven long years of waiting since Book 8 (Written in My Own Heart’s Blood) was released.

As the book begins, it’s 1779, and Jamie and Claire and their family are back together again at their frontier home on Fraser’s Ridge in rural North Carolina.  They’re safe for the moment, but the American revolution is moving south, and they know from their pre-knowledge of history that navigating the next two years of war, with all the fratricidal terror to come between Loyalists and Rebels, will be fraught with danger and hard choices.

As always, Gabaldon brings the characters and scenes totally alive, with fascinating attention to period detail, contrasted social and cultural mores and conditions between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, dramatic historical events described, and moving portrayals of many of the more timeless experiences of life, love and war.  No matter how long these books take to read, I never want them to end each time I start reading one of them.

When I started reading this series (some years ago now), I thought it might be a cheesy historical romance and bodice-ripper with some science fiction time-travel thrown in, but I soon realized it was serious literature and addictive historical fiction (with lovely occasional touches of the cosmically mysterious and fantastic) of the very best sort.  If you’ve read all the other books (and yes, they need to be read in order, at least the first time through), you’re definitely going to want to keep going, and read this one. 

Gabaldon has promised to write one final volume to end the series, and to reach the end of the American Revolution, but at one book every 5-7 years, it’s going to be a long wait for Book 10 (2028, maybe?).  In the meantime, if you haven't read this series, you'll have lots of time to catch up before the final volume arrives.  And if you have, you can always go back and re-read the previous nine books while you’re waiting!  Very highly recommended.

Book Review: Unsheltered (2019). Barbara Kingsolver.

Unsheltered is a beautifully woven tale of parallel lives in a small rust belt town, one thread in the late nineteenth century and the other in modern times. 

Certain themes tie the two stories together across time: the physical location and the two different slowly disintegrating houses that stand on it, the family lives and their struggles with financial survival despite educations, intelligence and good will, and the small-mindedness and irrationality of some of their neighbors in each time and place.

Kingsolver is wonderful at capturing the internal monologues and feelings of characters, and the ebbs and flows of events and emotions within individuals and communities.   I definitely will go explore some of her other novels.  Recommended.

Book Review: Under Occupation (2019). Alan Furst.

For those not familiar with Alan Furst, a quick summary:  Furst is an American novelist who has written more than a dozen novels about the period in Europe leading up to and during the early years of World War II, which are in the “spy thriller” genre, but are so much more. 

As he has commented, his stories, which take place in various capitals and countries all over eastern and western Europe, try to capture the lived experience of ordinary people faced daily with unavoidable moral choices between going along with evil or resisting that evil, and having to risk or choose life or death for themselves and others as the price of the choices they must make.  This perspective and Furst’s skill as a fiction writer make for some of the best spy novels ever written about World War II and its prelude.

Under Occupation features the latest in his obligatory middle-aged male leads, this one a writer of detective novels living in occupied Paris.  I had the feeling that this particular character was particularly close to Furst's heart and personal identity, almost as though he was imagining himself (a real-life writer of spy novels) trying to survive and participate in the World War II Resistance.  Most of his other heroes don't do exactly the same kind of work he does. 

But in any case, it’s a very compelling story, with a new set of interesting, likable and complex characters, a couple of artful sex scenes, moments of tension and fast action, and of course some treacherous Nazis and collaborators to overcome.  Recommended.

Book Review: Rules of Civility (2011). Amor Towles.

This is Amor Towles's first novel, written as a first-person account of the life of an aspiring young woman from the lower classes, who dives into the social life of the wealthy in late 1930s Manhattan.  

It contains wonderful, evocative descriptions of the people, places and social behavior of the American Yankee aristocratic class (and particularly of the young people) at that time, when the Depression was still recent history and the calamity of World War II was just ahead.  

It also nicely depicts the way in which for so many of us, our twenties are the time when who we ultimately will become in life as adults is shaped and molded by our experiences, the people we meet then, and the historical events around us.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Cloudmaker (2021). Malcolm Brooks.

The setting for this unusual adventure novel is rural Montana in 1937.  Young Huck, a high school kid with a talent for building and fixing mechanical things and an obsession with aviation, is building a Pietenpol biplane (one of the earliest “homebuilt” airplane designs) from plans, in a barn, without even telling his mother.  

It's a story of families, youthful sexual exploration, growing up, and small-town adventures in the Depression era.  Other great characters include Annelise, Huck’s rebellious "bad girl" cousin from the city, who is also a young pilot and Amelia Earhart fan, and McKee, a disaffected young Mormon, blacksmith, mechanical whiz and gun expert. 

This is a well-paced twentieth century western adventure novel with an appealing set of characters.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: The Rose Code (2021). Kate Quinn.

A very good historical thriller and mystery about three very different young women in England who become friends while working at the Bletchley Park code-breaking facility in World War II.  Each of the young women comes from a different background, with different personalities and talents that contribute to the code-breaking effort, and to the community of their friends and colleagues, in different ways.  

 

Of course, it has the obligatory spy thriller sub-plot about a betrayer in the community, and the race to figure out who it is and to expose the traitor.  There was also another intriguing thread about the romantic relationship between one of the women and the young naval officer Prince Phillip, that lasted through most of the war.  It all added up to a rich historical novel about one of the great British technical and organizational triumphs of World War II, and the important role that women played in it.

 

What was even more surprising was to find out in the Afterword how closely the fictional story adheres to the real lives and experiences of several of the actual female veterans of the Bletchley Park code-breaking team (and of Prince Phillip!).  A well-researched and entertaining novel of women's contribution to the Allied war effort in this very unique time and place.  Recommended.