Grange House Before air conditioning, Victorian families would travel extensively to spend the summer months in a cooler place.  The focus of the novel “Grange House” is a well run resort home in Maine which hosts the prosperous Thomas family of Boston.  Maisie and her parents have been coming to Grange House for years, so she is familiar with the staff that runs the hotel.  Miss Nell Grange is a shadowy constant presence, although she is not involved with day to day operations.  Instead she lives in the attic and occasionally interacts with the guests.  Her role is uncertain, and she is generally considered to be a poor relation that has simply been provided with a place to stay.

Maisie is at the point when a young Victorian miss will make the biggest choice of her life.  Of course her parents will have a great influence on the choice of the man she marries.  But Maisie is questioning the direction her life is taking.  She wonders if there is more to life than aspiring to being a good wife and mother.  Maisie dreams of being an author like Nell Grange.  These two compare stories and Maisie becomes confused about whether Nell’s stories are fact based or totally imaginary.  Nell gives Maisie what she claims is her diary, but is it?  Is Nell trying to tell Maisie important facts about their families or is she trying to stimulate Maisie’s imagination?

On the day Maisie and her family arrived for the summer of 1896, two lovers are found, drowned with their arms intertwined.  What is their story?  As Maisie attempts to learn what passions inspired them to try to sail away, she also must confront the two men in her life.  One is a staid, serious young man who works for her father.  The other is a committed traveler who sees the romantic in every situation.  Complicating the plot are ghostly children’s handprints that show up on walls.  Is this a ghost story or a romance?  The writing style makes the reader feel they are reading a Victorian novel instead of a modern novel.  Both the actions of the characters and the dialog have the flavor of another time.  The author, Sarah Blake, received her doctorate in Victorian literature. This novel is a successful attempt at recreating a story which might have been read by a daring Victorian miss. [7/3/08]

Stealing Athena by Karen Essex is two novels for one read.  She tells the story of two female historical characters, with their stories linked by the Elgin Marbles from the Greek Parthenon.  Mary Nesbit Bruce became the Countess of Elgin when she married.  Her husband, Lord Elgin, an impoverished Scottish nobleman, had been appointed British ambassador to Constantinople.  The Napoleonic Wars made travel dangerous as Mary journeyed with her husband to their first appointment.  She is newly married and already pregnant, but must endure primitive traveling conditions, both on a sailing ship and by donkey.  She feels pressure to remain a lady, but be flexible enough to endure any necessary hardships.  Mary hopes to be a true partner to her husband, both on the diplomatic front, and as he attempts to bring Greek art home to the British Isles.  Napoleon had plundered European capitals of their art treasures for France, now Elgin wants to do the same for England.  He had originally intended to only make casts and drawings of sculpture, but he becomes mesmerized by the remarkable marble statues on the Parthenon.  Money from Mary’s family and Mary’s charm are what makes Elgin’s mission possible.  Although his original plan was to deconstruct the Parthenon and bring the marbles to become decoration for his Scottish home, they ultimately wound up in a London museum.

Essex alternates their struggles with the story of Aspasia, who became the mistress of Perikles, the ruler of Athens during Greece’s Golden Age.  Aspasia was supposedly the model for the sculpture of Athena on the Parthenon’s frieze.  As a female who was basically sold as a slave girl to Perikles, she used her wit and determination to become a background voice while Perikles oversaw the construction of some of the world’s most glorious structures.

The removal of the Elgin Marbles has always been controversial, even two hundred years ago. Since the area was controlled by the Ottoman Empire when Elgin removed them, the ruling bureaucrats were not as protective of Greek heritage items as preservationists are today. Some arguments maintain that cultural items should never be removed from their place or origin; some maintain that an item in danger of destruction should be preserved wherever they will be safest. This work of fiction does convince the reader that much of this ancient artwork was in danger of crumbling to dust or becoming subject to vandalism, so Lord Elgin did the art world a great service. [7/8/08]

Fall of Knight I don’t usually read very much science fiction or fantasy.  The creation of other worlds in which the reader must comprehend who are each others sworn enemies and learn histories of individuals with complicated names just often feels like too much effort.  That much mental concentration must be done so that the reader can connect with what is usually only a minimal plot.  “Fall of Knight” by Peter David is a fantasy novel that does not place that burden on the reader.  Most of us are familiar with the names and roles of the characters of the Arthurian legends.  For this tale, Peter David has given Arthur a completely modern persona.  Arthur Pendragon, a natural leader, became mayor of New York, then President of the United States.  Then an assassin shoots his wife, Gwen, and she is in a non-responsive coma.  Secretly, Gwen was restored to full health with water from the Holy Grail.  Because Arthur and Merlin realize the general populace would have difficulty believing in such a miraculous cure, Arthur and Gwen go into hiding.  Even legendary heroes have some of the same fantasies as ordinary mortals, so Arthur and Gwen take off on a cruise in secluded tropical seas.  They had naively forgotten about the modern magic of satellites.  The fully recovered Gwen is spotted on the deck of their sailboat.  When the White House security realizes they must deal with the reappearance of the ex-president and his recovered wife, all federal agencies go into overdrive.  The public’s questions are persistent.  When the miraculous powers of the Holy Grail are accidentally revealed to the press, almost everyone wants to drink from the cup.  This starts the battle between good and evil.  Grail Ale becomes commercialized as a cure all.  The FDA cannot ban it because the brew can only be analyzed as tap water that has been poured through the mystical cup.  The water is diluted so it will only provide the drinker with enhanced health.  The unanswered question is what will the long-term effects be?  The story becomes a cautionary tale about the pollution of the world’s waters. 

The author, Peter David comes equipped with an extremely imaginative mind. He has had wide experiences in the entertainment media. He has worked on television and film scripts, also he has written over forty novels, including several Star Trek Books. For twelve years he has been the writer for the Incredible Hulk comic books.[July 15, 2008}

The Amateur Spy by Dan Fesperman. The time which Dan Fesperman has spent as a war correspondent gives validity to his novel about an ex-UN aid worker who is forced to act as a spy.  Freeman Lockhart, of “The Amateur Spy” has just retired at age 55 after years of administering UN aid in many of the world’s trouble spots.  He and his younger wife, Mila, plan to live the simple life on a Greek island.  Their dream is to grow and hunt much of their own food and earn a little money with simple crafts.  On their first night in their new home, they are victims of a break-in.  Mr. White, Gray, and Black take Freeman to a close-by luxury home and ask him to spy on an old friend.  These mysterious figures know the details of a shameful event from his aid past in Tanzania.  At all costs, Freeman does not want these details revealed to Mila.  Therefore, he agrees to spend a few months attempting to determine what his old friend Omar al-Baroody is really doing.  Omar and Lockhart had been partners in the distant past patrolling in Palestine together.  Now Omar is trying to put together an aid organization which will build a hospital in Jordan.

Additional, initially separate characters are Abbas and Aliyah Rahim, a middle class Palestinian-American couple.  This couple is attempting to deal with the loss of their daughter in a traffic accident in London.  She had been on a trip and her return home was delayed, most likely because in the post 911 world, her identity came under heavier scrutiny simply based on her foreign sounding name.  During the delaying period, she was hurrying to the airport and was hit and killed by a bus.  Grieving people often feel the need to blame an outside source, and her father focused on what he perceived as overly suspicious and accusatory regulators. Freeman is troubled by his role as an amateur spy.  He is not sure who he is working for or what their goals are.  He is reminded of the history he had with Omar when a minor argument erupts between acquaintances:  “Omar nodded to me almost imperceptibly, as if to acknowledge we were still doing our bit for peace and harmony.  It brought on a flush of nostalgia, which of course produced an immediate backwash of guilt.”  Freeman struggles with these emotions throughout the novel.  Is he working for a greater good, or is he just trying to make sure his own tawdry past stays hidden? [7/22/2008]

 

Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler.  Although “Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict” by Laurie Viera Rigler could easily be dismissed as a frivolous story about time travel with Jane Austin thrown into the mix to pull in readers, this novel is far better than that brief description.  The details of Jane Austen’s life let you know that the author is fully familiar with the charming author’s history.  So many details of her works are placed in the novel.

Courtney Stone has suffered failure in both her romantic relationship and her closest friendship.  Whenever life has gotten her down, she has always retreated to reading one of Jane Austen’s works.  After a disillusioning night spent with vodka and re-reading “Pride and Prejudice”, she wakes up in an unfamiliar bedroom.  She emotionally goes through all the usual tests to determine whether or not she is dreaming.  Nothing seems to make her wake up.  She learns that her new family thinks that she is recovering from a fall from a horse.  She is inhabiting a body with a better figure and better hair.  Her immediate problem is the arrival of a doctor who wants to start blood letting.  Courtney has her twenty-first century mind that rebels at, first, the thought of loosing blood, and secondly, having any instruments used on her in such an unsanitary situation.  She is sure she does not want an infected wound in pre-antibiotic days.  Courtney’s new persona is Jane Mansfield, a thirty-year-old spinster.  Courtney meets Jane’s friend, Mary and discovers both she and her new self have an attraction to Mary’s brother.  She realizes that her new mother’s greatest fear is that she will not be able to see her daughter well married.  This society with its confining rules is a shock to Courtney, no matter how well read she is.  A California girl who likes her vodka and cigarettes has a difficult time blending into a time where she can go nowhere without a chaperone.

Naturally, there is a love interest, but Courtney strangely has memories of that person.  She feels very disoriented when she realizes that she can remember incidents from the lives of the new people who surround her.  The book is a novel of manners with similarities to a Jane Austen novel with an outspoken, opinionated woman who is forced to look for a husband who will give meaning to her life.  The ways a modern-day woman reacts to that limiting opportunity provide comedy, satire, and suspense. [7/29/2008]