CBR16 Book 9: "The Widow of Rose House" by Diana Biller

Page count: 352 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo: Came out more than 4 years ago

CBR16 Sweet Books: New (new author)

It's 1875 and Professor Samuel Moore is doing marvellously, thanks to the many inventions he and his family are coming up with. What he really wants to do, though, is investigate and possibly prove the existence of ghosts, and to do that, he requires an introduction to the infamous Mrs. Alva Webster, a widow with a scandalous reputation. Sam doesn't really care about Mrs. Webster's apparently lurid past, he just wants to set up his instruments and investigate the old house she has purchased in upstate New York. Liefdehuis is rumoured to be haunted, possibly by multiple ghosts and he'd love a chance to make new discoveries. He does notice that Alva Webster is very beautiful, but at least initially, the science angle is the most important to him.

Alva Webster does indeed have a terrible reputation and a dead husband. All the rumours and scandalous gossip were started by her abusive husband after she took the courage to leave him once they lived in Paris. She was even looking into getting a divorce when he was killed during a robbery in Monte Carlo. Now her dream is to restore the once grand mansion, Liefdehuis, and document her process while doing so, hopefully resulting in a book on decorating and interior design. However, her odious brother-in-law is blackmailing her and the contractors she hired to start the restoration work at the house refuse to work, claiming there are ghosts there who scared them all nearly out of their wits. Samuel Moore keeps sending her letters, wanting access to the house, and eventually, she relents and lets him have access to the house, provided he promises to exorcise any ghosts he may discover as part of the process. 

Sam Moore is clearly a scientific genius, and while he's largely oblivious to social cues and what is considered polite and proper, he's also very observant and good at reading people. Having grown up in a loving family who all share a love of science and exploration, his life has been a very different one from that of Alva. The daughter of rich, but cold and status-hungry parents, she was married off to her husband (who needed a rich wife) after he seduced her when she was only 17 and who certainly didn't want anything to do with her once all the scandalous rumours reached them from across the ocean. The few times she's tried to contact them, her mother sends a harried maid out to shoo her away. She went from an emotionally abusive home to a physically abusive husband and even when she's trying to move on with her life and pick up the pieces of her tattered reputation, she's unable to forget because of her blackmailing brother-in-law. So she's naturally rather bitter and skittish, and while it's obvious that Sam finds her very attractive (he's not a man to hide his intentions or feelings), she is reluctant to get involved with anyone new.

This is set in the Gilded Age, mostly in New York, but with some flashbacks to Alva's life in Paris. While not as wealthy as her parents, Alva still has some of the fortune she came into her marriage with, but if she keeps having to pay her unscrupulous brother-in-law every month, she will struggle unless she manages to get her book finished and published. She keeps the truth from Sam as long as she can, since she's not used to having anyone to rely on or to support her.

Sam Moore is basically a big golden retriever of a man. He's tall and blond and clearly neuro-divergent in some way (most of his family seem to be, as well). Most of the time, he is accompanied by his best friend, Henry Van de Berg, a lawyer who makes sure that his patents are registered and that he and his family are paid what they are supposed to for their brilliant engineering solutions. Henry isn't exactly sure that making Mrs Webster's acquaintance is a good idea, but once Sam gets an idea in his head, he will pursue it tirelessly. So despite the potential complications of Sam's involvement in Alva Webster's life, he supports his friend. 

A novel featuring ghosts and a haunted house might be more of a paranormal fantasy. This is more of a straight historical romance with some supernatural elements. Minor spoilers, Alva's house actually IS haunted, and she and others are not imagining the horrible experiences they have with the ghost. But it's not the main focus of the story, for all that it plays an important part.

I really enjoyed this book and loved pretty much all the characters in the story. As far as I can see, Biller has written a novel about Sam's brother, but I hope she decides to give Henry a novel in the future as well. Possibly Sam's younger sister, as well. Either way, this delightful book ensures that I will check out Biller's other novels sometime later this year. 

Judging a book by its cover: Based on the cover image, I would have believed this book to be a much more straightforward historical novel. I certainly didn't expect a romance with paranormal elements. I suspect some readers picking this up would be surprised at getting a romance, while a lot of romance fans may have missed out on this one since it looks rather very different from most historical romance covers.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

#CBR11 Book 84: "The Book of Speculation" by Erika Swyler

Page count: 352 pages
Rating: 3 stars

Official book description:
Simon Watson, a young librarian, lives alone in a house that is slowly crumbling toward the Long Island Sound. His parents are long dead. His mother, a circus mermaid who made her living by holding her breath, drowned in the very water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, ran off six years ago and now reads tarot cards for a traveling carnival.

One June day, an old book arrives on Simon's doorstep, sent by an antiquarian bookseller who purchased it on speculation. Fragile and water damaged, the book is a log from the owner of a traveling carnival in the 1700s, who reports strange and magical things, including the drowning death of a circus mermaid. Since then, generations of "mermaids" in Simon's family have drowned--always on July 24, which is only weeks away.

As his friend Alice looks on with alarm, Simon becomes increasingly worried about his sister. Could there be a curse on Simon's family? What does it have to do with the book, and can he get to the heart of the mystery in time to save Enola?

One of the many reading challenges I'm doing this year is the Monthly Motif Challenge, and for October, the challenge was "Read a book set in a theater, an amusement park, a circus, or a book involving magic, illusions, or characters with special powers." This was pretty much the only TBR book I had involving a circus. It features a lot of things I usually like, librarians, old books, intricate family histories, folklore, mysterious curses and a romantic subplot, yet it failed to really wow me.

Simon spends pretty much all his time not working in a library desperately trying to keep his childhood home from falling apart. After his mother committed suicide in the water nearby, his father just refused to do any work on it, and now it's getting so bad Simon's no longer sure he can save it. Nevertheless, he keeps trying, as he doesn't want to lose the connection to his past, and he wants his younger sister Enola to have something to come back to when she's ready for it.

He's sent a mysterious old book by an antiquarian who claims that it is relevant to his family history. While he initially dismisses the claim, he gets more and more caught up in the tales told in the book's pages, and as he keeps digging, he discovers that his mother is just the last in a long line of women in his family who, despite being absolutely amazing swimmers, able to hold their breaths for unprecedented amounts of time, they have all died by drowning, on the exact same date. As Enola suddenly returns after several years' absence, and the fateful date is approaching fast, Simon becomes terrified that the curse will strike her as well, unless he finds a way to stop it.

I liked the historical bits of the novel, the ones exploring how the curse came to start in the first place, to be the most interesting, but even those sections failed to entirely hold my attention. I also found some aspects of the story to just be too difficult to suspend my disbelief about, and I genuinely couldn't understand why Simon would spend so much time, money and effort to try to save a crumbling old house, especially considering his memories concerning it were more negative than happy.

It's a definite downside when I fail to entirely connect with the protagonist of a novel. Here, I just didn't care all that much about Simon. I liked Enola a lot better, as well as his fellow librarian/childhood friend (although I think she could do way better romance wise). Still, a lot of the Eastern folklore bits in the historical sections of the book, as well as the depictions of the travelling circus were good.

I don't regret getting this book in a sale, or the time I spent reading it, but I doubt I'll ever feel the need to re-read it, either.

Judging a book by its cover: I'm wondering the publisher made a conscious choice to have a woman holding a stack of old books on the cover is because this book is clearly aimed more at a female than a male audience, and it was assumed that this would be more appealing? We basically see the story through the eyes of several men, our protagonist himself being a librarian. It seems a bit odd to me to have the pile of books being carried by a woman (even though, yes, there are lady librarians in the book, as well).

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR Book 48: "Kindred" by Octavia E. Butler

Page count: 304 pages
Rating: 5 stars

In what must be the most frightening birthday surprise ever, on Dana's 26th birthday, as she is moving into a new house with her husband Kevin, she suddenly feels dizzy and gets transported away from her safe and familiar surroundings in 1976. She comes to in the woods by a river, where a boy is in the process of drowning. Dana reacts instinctively and wades into the water, rescuing the boy. Faced with the boy's hysterical mother, and more terrifyingly, the boy's angry father, who points a rifle at her, Dana is suddenly back with her husband. She might have believed that she hallucinated the whole thing, except she's wet and muddy and bruised after being pummelled by the boy's hysterical mother.

It doesn't take long before it happens again. Now Dana is transported into an old house, and has to put out a fire in some curtains. While it's barely been a few hours for Dana in 1976, the boy she rescued in the river has clearly aged a few years. Not only that, he lives in the early 19th Century, in Maryland, long before slavery was abolished. While the boy, Rufus, gets increasingly older with each new encounter, barely any time passes in Dana's present between each new and terrifying time jump. She's unable to relax and enjoy her life, never sure when she may be suddenly dragged back through time. She begins keeping supplies with her in a bag, tied to her body, and her visits in the past seem to last longer with each new encounter.

At first Dana, who is a young black woman, cannot understand what connects her to this white man, but as she learns more about him and where he's from, she figures out that he must be one of her ancestors and something inexplicable is drawing her to him every time he is in danger. She needs to make sure he stays alive long enough to father the girl who will pass on Dana's family line. With each consecutive stay in the past, Dana's own life is further endangered, and there is the very real and scary possibility that she might die, trying to ensure that she ever gets born in the first place.

Kindred was the June 2018 CBR book club selection, one of the most highly rated books in the history of the site (I suspect its average rating has gone up even more now, with more people reading or re-reading it). My copy was given to me during the CBR gift exchange last year, and I was very excited when it was picked for the book club. I've long wanted to read something by Octavia E. Butler, and this, while nominally science fiction, seemed a lot more like historical fiction with a twist to me. Readers of my reviews know that while I do occasionally find the odd sci-fi book that I really enjoy, it's still one of the genres I keep having to challenge myself to keep trying and more often than not, it doesn't entirely work. But historical fiction with some time travel - that's pretty much Outlander. In addition, I am always aware that I should read more diversely. I'm a middle class white woman, I need to read books by individuals from different cultural, racial and religious background than my own.

While I didn't classify it as such in my tags, this book could clearly have been tagged as suspense. Dana's initial jump into the past is quick and doesn't get too scary, but with each subsequent encounter between her and Rufus, the stakes get higher. By the second visit, Dana figures out that it's danger to Rufus that makes him call her to him in the past, but it takes her a bit longer to understand that it's danger to herself that sends her back forward to her own time. Interestingly, as she spends more time in the past and gets accustomed to the brutality then, it takes more and more to send her home, as she comes to learn just how resilient her body actually is.

It's never explained how Dana comes to be jumped through time, but she learns quickly that whatever she touches at the time is sent back with her and in one particularly dramatic incident, her husband Kevin is sent back with her. Because Kevin is white, everyone in the past (many of whom are not entirely sure what to think of Dana, who is certainly not like the other downtrodden black people - most of whom are slaves - and her strange comings and goings, appearing to barely age) believes him to be Dana's owner. While the idea upsets and disgusts both of them, they figure that it's just easier to go with that story than try to explain their real relationship. Shockingly, Dana is transported back to 1976 without Kevin and while their separation is "only" eight days for her, more than five years have passed for him when she returns. Because the whole story is told from Dana's point of view, we don't learn too much of what Kevin experienced in that long and no doubt harrowing separation.

Dana is an educated and enlightened woman in 1976. Both she and her husband are writers and think they are fairly well informed about history and slavery. Yet Dana quickly discovers that reading about her enslaved ancestors and observing, and in parts, living as a slave is something completely different. Then there's the horrible fact that she needs to ensure that Rufus lives long enough to father the child who will continue the line down to Dana herself. The woman who is to birth the child starts out as a free woman, Alice, who loves someone else, yet Dana needs to pretty much support the enslavement and subjugation of this woman, to ensure that she herself will be born in the future. It's an unthinkable dilemma and naturally does a number on her.

I couldn't quite read this book in one sitting, but every time I picked it up, I found myself reading for longer than I should because I just had to find out what scary and unthinkable thing was going to happen next. Dana is a very engaging protagonist and each of her involuntary visits to the past are contained in separate chapters. Neither she nor the reader knows how long it will be until she's called back and that provides extra impetus to keep reading. Dana's experiences in the past, observing slavery firsthand and coming to both understand and feel personally the effects it had on people, the sad corruption of Rufus (from a little boy who is friends with black children, both enslaved and free to a selfish, petty man who will willingly enslave one of the companions of his childhood) - it all affected me on a deep level. I understand now why this is such an acclaimed book, both among critics and readers in general. I will absolutely be trying more of Ms Butler's books in the future.

Judging a book by its cover: This is the cover of my paperback and as always, books done in black, white and red are very striking and eye catching. There's the hands reaching across the cover, one man's and one woman's. Do they belong to Dana and Kevin? Or Dana and Rufus? Or Rufus and Alice? Alice and her husband's? There are several possibilities. There's the white links, evoking chains. I like the cover a lot.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR9 Book 64: "Walk on Earth a Stranger" by Rae Carson

Page count: 464 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

Leah "Lee" Westfall lives on a small farm in Georgia, trying to make ends meet with her parents. The only reason they're really managing to survive at all, is Lee's unusual ability, she can sense gold. It calls to her and is the reason her father is known in town as "Lucky". No one but her parents know about her gift, or so Lee believed. Then she comes home from town one day to discover both of her parents shot (her mother is still just barely alive, and warns Leah to be careful with her last breaths) and the sack of gold dust they had hidden under the floor boards missing.

Her neighbour, sixteen-year-old, half Native Jefferson McCauley is planning on heading west to California, as the news that gold has been found there has just been announced. He wants Lee to come with him, but she's reluctant to leave her family's farm. Then her uncle Hiram shows up, now her legal guardian, and with her gold sense, Lee can tell he's been near a lot of gold dust lately. She's suddenly all too certain who's behind her parents' murder, and once her uncle starts dropping hints, she begins to fear that her father may have told him about Lee's abilities. She regrets not going away with Jefferson, but enlists the help of a friendly shopkeeper in town, cuts her hair, dresses in men's clothing and runs away while her uncle is distracted.

Lee needs to make her way west and try to find Jefferson again, all the while staying out of her uncle's clutches. She quickly discovers that life on the road is dangerous and meets several set-backs before she manages to get a place on a caravan going towards California. Can she keep her real identity hidden with so many people around? Will anyone discover her special gold sense? Will the caravan actually survive the hard and challenging journey across the country to the gold fields of California?

I don't know exactly what I was expecting from this book, but it certainly wasn't a gritty, depressing version of Laura Ingalls Wilder's books crossed with Oregon Trail. There are SO many horrible things that happen to these people, guys. If this hadn't been the start of a trilogy, I would have seriously suspected they would all just be killed in various gruesome ways over the course of the story. Rae Carson's first trilogy, Girl of Fire and Thorns, did NOT prepare me for the level of hardship throughout this book.

With the fairly shocking beginning for poor Leah and the continuing, probably impeccably researched story, full of all sorts of misery, I can't say the book was enjoyable and it made it very difficult for me to get attached to any of the characters, as I never knew who was going to kick the figurative bucket next. I suppose I should be happy that Ms Carson didn't simplify or sugar coat what was probably a very dangerous and arduous trek for a lot of people, so desperate to get to find gold that they would risk everything, including their own lives and those of their families in search of prosperity.

Set in the late 19th Century, there were obviously a lot of less than enlightened attitudes with regards to women, "confirmed bachelors", Native Americans and persons of colour in this story. Lee has to hide her identity for much of the story, and mainly seems to be able to do it quite well for a long time. This was clearly also a time when injuries and illness were a lot more dangerous, which is partly what makes the story so harrowing. While struggling to reach the west, the band of travellers keeps getting reduced, but the ones who make it are a very tightly knit group, and I'm an absolute sucker for found family stories.

One advantage to waiting so long to read this book, is that I won't have too long to wait until the third book in the trilogy is released later this year. I'm hoping that with the difficult journey completed, the next books may be more entertaining and uplifting.

Judging a book by its cover: I'm not entirely sure what I think about this cover. I think the giant gold letters proclaiming the title are unnecessarily large. I think the cover image should have been given more prominence, instead it almost becomes an afterthought. I'm also not entirely happy with the way Leah's "gold sense" has been visually portrayed, but I guess it's hard to get across what is basically just a mental thing.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR5 Books 75-83. "The Little House series, books 1-9" by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Total page count: 2680 pages

Ratings: Little House in the Big Woods - 4 stars
Little House on the Prairie - 4 stars
Farmer Boy - 2 stars
On the Banks of Plum Creek - 4 stars
By the Shores of Silver Lake - 4 stars
The Long Winter - 4 stars
Little Town on the Prairie - 4 stars
Those Happy Golden Years - 4 stars
The First Four Years - 2.5 stars

So during the second week of my summer vacation, I got a really nasty cold and sore throat. What better reading material while sick than Laura Ingalls Wilder's comforting stories about her childhood in 19th Century Frontier America? I was of the impression that I'd several of these as a girl, as it turned out, I had only ever read Little House in the Big Woods. I have, however, seen most of the TV shows, as that was always in constant re-runs in the afternoon on Norwegian telly.

Ingalls Wilder's Little House books are a fictionalised account of her early life, up to and including her first four years of marriage to Almanzo Wilder. While most of the things she writes about is based on true events, quite a bit of the chronology of the locations the Ingalls family lived and the things that happened to them has been switched around in the books, mainly so the stories would flow better. Laura also doesn't write about everything that happened to the family. She very significantly never mentions her younger brother, who died while very young, or the period when the family lived in Burr Oak, where her sister Grace was born.

The books follow the fictional Laura's life from she is five and living in Wisconsin in "the Big Woods". The family later move to Kansas and build a house on the prairie, but are forced to move when it's clear that their land is on an area granted to the local Native Americans. They move on to Minnesota, and live in a dugout "on the banks of Plum creek" and some years later, after a bout of scarlet fever that leaves Laura's older sister, Mary, blind, the family move to South Dakota to stake a claim on a homestead, which eventually becomes the Ingalls family's permanent home. It's in De Smet, South Dakota that Laura earns her teaching certificate. She becomes a teacher at the age of fifteen to help pay for Mary's tuition to blind college. She also makes many friends, and meets Almanzo Wilder, the man that she goes on to marry.

Almanzo's childhood is written about in Farmer Boy, and it seems while I have infinite patience and find it soothing and wonderful to read about the Ingalls girl and their wonderful Pa and Ma, I found Almanzo's childhood fairly tedious and boring to read about. Ingalls spends a lot of time writing about the nature of chores, and food preparation and the ins and outs of managing on a farm in the mid to late 19th Century. Quite a lot of that got a bit repetitive in Farmer Boy, and Almanzo as a child just bored me. All he wanted to do was not go to school, and have a horse. Luckily, the character is much more awesome when he grows up, risking his life to ride through blizzards to save starving townspeople, and patiently wooing Laura over several years. I don't know why I found his book so much more tedious, I'm probably just very sexist.

The First Four Years was found in manuscript form after Rose Wilder Lane, the Wilders' daughter, passed away. It's a much shorter, and rougher book than the other eight, and was clearly published because the other books were so insanely popular. In it, the reader gets to share the incredible struggle Laura and Almanzo (suddenly called Manly throughout) went through during their first four years of marriage. It's really quite a depressing read. I don't want to spoil anything, but things go from bad, to worse, to pretty bloody disastrous. I can see why it wasn't published until much later.

Having read the entire series in about a week (I read three in one day when I had trouble sleeping), I am so very sorry that I didn't get to read these books as a girl. Ingalls Wilder does a wonderful job of depicting what must have been a really rather difficult life as something charming and adventurous. The family were uprooted so many times, and suffered so many hardships, yet the tone of the books are hopeful, cheery and just the right amount of educational. Ingalls Wilder adapts her writing style to fit the age of the Laura she's writing about. A five-year-old would have no great trouble reading Little House in the Big Woods, and as Laura ages, the writing style of the books becomes more complex and advanced, with Laura and her sisters in later books looking back on their childhood and reflecting and musing on all they've been through. They're still wonderful books to read as an adult, but I suspect they would have been magical when I was a child, and I would have treasured them alongside my Anne of Green Gables books.