I guess I was in worse shape in June and early July than I realized. I have stated in at least one blog that I enjoyed the novels I read in June because I hadn’t read a novel since January. I was surprised a couple of weeks ago to find a list of the books I read in May: The Creek, The Crone, and The Crow, by Leah Weiss; The Immigrant and the Outlaw, by Joy Neal Kidney; and The Astral Library, by Kate Quinn. It had slipped my mind that I enjoyed all three of those books in May, so I apologize to the three authors for my memory failure.
After having a very good month of reading in June, I had high hopes for July, but sometimes our reading experiences don’t meet our expectations on all counts. July turned out to be a mixed bag.
The River Knows My Name, by Kelly Mustian
by Kelly Mustian
After reading The Girls in the Stilt House, Kelly Mustian’s debut novel in 2021, I kept hoping she would write another historical novel. She came through for us last year with The River Knows My Name. I finally got around to reading it in July.
As the blurb on Amazon states, it is “a haunting Southern story about memory, family secrets, and fierce and fragile love.” Set in the early 1930s in Mississippi and 1971 in North Carolina and Mississippi, Mustian has woven a story of intrigue, family loss and love, and how one decision can affect generations to come.
Why did Evie appear at Nell’s house when they were young children and Evie never left? What did Evie’s hidden birth certificate reveal?
This is a dual timeline novel, which you know is not my favorite format, but I stayed with it because the characters and the plot drew me in from the beginning. Mustian did a masterful job of telling a complicated story of secrets, the passage of time, “where there’s a will there’s a way” perseverance, the love a mother has for her child, and how family isn’t necessarily based on biology.
I highly recommend The River Knows My Name, and I hope Kelly Mustian will gift historical novel fans with many more novels.
John of John, by Douglas Stuart
After watching an online interview of Douglas Stuart, I eagerly awaited my name reaching the top of the waitlist for John of John at the public library.
I have had the privilege of visiting the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. I have spent some time on the Isle of Lewis and visited the Isle of Harris. They are wild and stark and incredibly beautiful!
John of John, by Douglas Stuart is set on Harris. The author does a great job of giving you the setting. The moon-like starkness, the incessant wind coming off the Atlantic, the sometimes-rough ferry crossing of The Minch – the body of water between the mainland and the Outer Hebrides. The houses, the crofts, the weavers of Harris Tweed (which is also made in cottages on Lewis), the single-track roads, the sheep, the Gaelic native language, and the conservatism of the Free Presbyterian denomination (which is quite different from the Church of Scotland) are all brought to light in this novel.
The setting is almost a character in the book because to give the landscape and climate justice, one has to be immersed in it to truly appreciate the story.
The protagonist is John MacLeod, son of John MacLeod, son of Iain (John in Gaelic), son of Iain MacLeod. Young John has left the island to go to art school. He has gotten caught up in the fast life (life everywhere is “fast” compared to life in the Outer Hebrides) in Edinburgh. His father calls him home to care for his ailing maternal grandmother.
The younger John is not keen on the idea. The life he has lived on the mainland as a gay young man will surely upset his devout Free Presbyterian father to the point that he expects his father will disown him. How long can he keep his homosexuality a secret from his father.
But his father also has a secret.
If you are sensitive to “F-bombs,” you might not enjoy this book. I accepted them as apparently being part of the homosexual scene in which the younger John lived. Not that all homosexuals casually use this language, but it was part of the make up of the younger John – probably as part of his rebellion against the strict religious home in which he had been raised.
I tired of the story after 150 pages. There were other books I wanted to read, so I returned John of John to the public library. Kudos to the author for transporting me to the Outer Hebrides for a few hours.
Roses and Radicals: The Epic Story of How American Women Won the Right to Vote, by Susan Zimet
This book caught my eye when I was at the public library the week of July 4th. It was part of a display the librarians had assembled of books pertaining to the 250th birthday of the United States Declaration of Independence and related patriotic books and history books.
The book prompted me to pause and contemplate the incredible sacrifices the women (and a few men) made throughout the first fourteen decades of our country’s history to work toward the passage of a Constitutional Amendment that would make it unlawful for any state in the union to prohibit anyone from voting based on their sex.
I will write more about the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution in my blog post on August 26 – the 126th anniversary of the ratification of that amendment.
Roses and Radicals is a relatively small book of barely 150 pages, including the bibliography and index. I thought it would be a quick read.
Sprinkled throughout the book are sidebar-like sections within chapters that tell the stories of individual including Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anne Marbury Hutchinson, Lucretia Mott, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, Victoria Woodhull, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Ida B. Wells, and Edith Wilson. A book could be written about each on of them.
Roses and Radicals begins with the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840. Elizabeth Cady Stanton accompanied her husband, who was a convention delegate. But her story began when she was five years old and her last brother died. Her father said to her, “Oh my daughter, I wish you were a boy.”
In response to that remark, she was determined to be the son her father had lost. That path served to show her how difficult it would be for a woman to fulfill the burden her father had placed on her because women were so restricted by law and society norms. Fathers held legal rights over daughters and husbands held legal rights over their wives and children.
But, getting back to the anti-slavery convention in 1840… The wives of delegates and the women delegates were not allowed on the main floor. They were relegated to a balcony. The women were so incensed that they began laying plans during the convention. If people from around the world could meet to work for the abolition of the slavery of Africans, the women concluded that they could organize themselves and fight for the rights of women.
The book tells how each of the women I named in an above paragraph worked for the equality of women, women’s rights in the eyes of the law in the United States, and ultimately for women to have the right to vote. It gives little-known details of how women worked behind-the-scenes as well as marching in the streets to secure women the right to vote.
Janet
Too many books. Not enough time. Not enough bookcases. Never take your right to read – or your right to vote — for granted.
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