Booth by Karen Joy Fowler

This is a fictional depiction of the lives of the Booth family, including Abraham Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth and the famous actor Edwin Booth.  It’s told in the present tense, which is always annoying but doesn’t detract from the story, and from the viewpoints of several of the Booth siblings, but *not* John Wilkes.  Interspersed with their story are updates on the political events of the time, told as they impacted on Abraham Lincoln.

National events don’t really seem to have much effect on the Booths, apart from a few references to John’s involvement with the Know Nothings.  I first came across the Know Nothings in North and South, when I was 11, and the term threw my little self completely.   Anyway.  We don’t even get John’s angle on that; and we’re told that his political views and sense of Southern identity were largely formed during his schooldays, which we don’t see.  Most of the family are in New York during the Draft Riots, but that’s as close as the war gets to them.  Edwin and John just carry on working as actors throughout the war.  However, we do see their relationship with a freedman and his family, and his efforts to buy his wife and children out of slavery.  But, again, we don’t get John’s angle on it.  We get a good sense of his sisters Rosalie and Asia, and of his brother Edwin, but we don’t get much of a sense of John.

It’s an interesting portrayal of an often unconventional family, and I found Rosalie, the elder sister, particularly appealing.  But I don’t really get the idea of writing a book about John Wilkes Booth’s family without telling us anything much about John himself.  If the idea was that he was largely shaped by his family and upbringing, I’d get it, but we’re told that he was largely shaped by his time and school, which the book doesn’t show us.  The blurb on the back cover said that the book showed the effect of the assassination on the family, and how they had to come to terms with what their loved one had done. That would certainly have been interesting, but the book only went on for 31 pages after the assassination.

The blurb on the back also said that John Wilkes Booth changed the course of history.  Did he?  Would things have turned out differently if John Wilkes Booth hadn’t assassinated Abraham Lincoln?   I’m not Lincoln’s greatest fan, but surely he’d have handled Reconstruction better than Andrew Johnson did.  He could hardly have handled it any worse.  If Reconstruction had been handled better, would a lot of the problems faced by the re-United States then have been mitigated?   We’ll never know.  And, as a slight aside, pretty much everyone can name John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, but hands up anyone who can name the assassins of William McKinley and James Garfield.

I did quite enjoy this book, because the Booths were an interesting family, but it all seemed to be leading up to John Wilkes Booth shooting Lincoln – the book ended not long after that – and yet John, and his reasons for what he did, featured relatively little in the book.  It was an interesting idea for a book, but I’m not sure that it entirely worked.  It wasn’t a bad read just as a book about the Booth family, though.

Advertisement

Atlantic Crossing – Drama

I feel a bit guilty for watching this, because it’s caused quite a bit of upset in Norway over its historical inaccuracies.  I refuse point blank to watch The Crown, so I probably shouldn’t be watching this.  But it’s entertaining, and there’s not a lot else on on a Saturday night #excuses.  And I’m enjoying it.

When the Nazis invaded Norway, Crown Princess Martha, niece of the Swedish king, and her three young children, including the future King Harald, were evacuated to Sweden.   However, their presence there was seen as threatening Sweden’s neutrality.   The programme strongly suggests that King Gustav had Nazi sympathies, something which is a moot point.   As the situation worsened, King Haakon, widower of King George VI’s aunt Maud, and Crown Prince Olav, together with the Norwegian cabinet, were evacuated to London, but by then it was too late for British forces to be able to evacuate Martha and the children safely.  President Roosevelt, who’d met Olav and Martha on a state visit just before the war, sent a ship to evacuate them to the US via Finland.

The series strongly suggests that there was some sort of romantic friendship between Martha and FDR, which almost certainly wasn’t true and is what’s upset people in Norway.   So far – I haven’t seen the whole series yet – the suggestion is that he was infatuated with her, not that she reciprocated his feelings and certainly not that there was any impropriety.   But it does suggest a very close personal relationship.   It also suggests that Martha held far more sway over him than she really did – to watch it, you’d think that she’d been personally responsible for the entire Lend-Lease Agreement!

So, historically accurate it is not, strictly speaking but it draws attention to the sometimes neglected struggle of occupied Norway, and it makes for good TV.   I still feel a bit guilty about watching it, though!

The US and the Holocaust – BBC 4

This three two-hour episode Ken Burns film made for some very uncomfortable viewing at times, and was clearly meant to.  I don’t think it was meant as direct criticism of the US, but it certainly raised some questions about isolationism and tight immigration controls at a time when the media’s full of reports of terrible persecution.  Viewers were informed that, even after the war, when people had seen the newsreels showing what had happened at the concentration camps, polls showed that most Americans opposed admitting refugees.  It also reminded the viewer of some of the less savoury elements in parts of American society, ending with footage of recent hate crimes and the storming of Congress.  There was certainly a great deal to think about.

The first episode, about the situation up to 1938, didn’t say anything that I didn’t already know.  I studied US immigration history in depth at university, so I knew all about the quota-based system and the eugenics-based arguments behind it.   The revival of the Ku Klux Klan, the WASP-only clubs, hotels and even housing estates, the German-American Bund, Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic propaganda, Charles Lindbergh’s American First movement … it was all familiar.  But hearing it all together, in this context, was definitely food for thought.   It was even pointed out that Hitler admired the Jim Crow laws and the deportation of Native Americans from their homelands.

The programme did try to present a balanced view, and it was made clear that, the majority of people in the US were horrified when reports of persecution began to come in, especially after Kristallnacht.  And the US did take in more refugees from Nazi-controlled lands than any other country, and there were some major anti-Nazi protests.   As the programme pointed out, organisations in the US which wanted to help were in a difficult position, with Hitler claiming that anything they did showed that Jews controlled American politics.  There was, however, also a fear that too much open protest by Jewish groups would lead to a rise in domestic anti-Semitism.

It was Roosevelt who called the Evian Conference to discuss the refugee crisis.   Pretty much every country represented there refused to do any more to help.

There were some absolutely heartrending accounts, mainly told through first person interviews with elderly people who’d been children at the time, of desperate attempts to bring loved ones to safety in America, only to be thwarted by red tape and demands for unaffordable financial bonds.  There were also accounts from Holocaust survivors, including Anne Frank’s stepsister.  It wasn’t just the quota system: it was the need to prove that the individual wouldn’t be a burden on the state.  It was a far cry from “Give me … your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free”.  What vision of America did people actually have?   Or do visions not matter, only practicalities?  Unrestricted immigration isn’t practical, but should exceptions be made when people are clearly refugees, not economic migrants?   These are difficult subjects, and there was a lot of food for thought in this.   And of course it wasn’t just America.  Other countries did little to help either.

You got the feeling that FDR, left to himself, might have eased immigration controls, and brought the US into the war earlier.  But he was working in the face of overwhelming isolationist feeling amongst the American public.   Given the loss of American life in the Great War and the problems caused by the Depression, that was understandable.   It’s not the United States’ job to be the world’s policeman.   But was it her duty to stand up against the Nazis?

Of course, Pearl Harbour brought the US into the war, against the Nazis as well as against Japan.  By 1942, reports of mass killings were coming in, from prisoners who’d managed to escape and from the Polish Resistance, and then from Soviet forces as they advanced westwards.   There were some calls to prioritise trying to rescue prisoners, but the authorities felt that they had to concentrate on winning the war – and, at that point, Allied planes would have to have left from Britain and wouldn’t have been able to reach Poland.   Once the Allies were in control of Italy, the planes would have been able to reach the concentration camps, but didn’t have the precision to guarantee that they’d hit the gas chambers and not the housing blocks.

A poll in early 1943 showed that over half of Americans didn’t believe the reports of mass killings of Jews.   Even when the Soviets liberated Kyiv and American photographers took pictures at Babyn Yar, some of the American press presented the reports as Soviet propaganda.  It was stated by the programme that the government didn’t want people to feel that the war was being fought for Jews, in case that damaged morale.  I was expecting someone to point out a parallel with the Union side in the Civil War there, not making it a war about slavery – “Let us die to make men free”?? – but no-one did.   Most shocking was the attitude of the State department, which deliberately suppressed reports of atrocities which the Polish Resistance managed to smuggled into Switzerland, and stalled moves by the World Jewish Congress to send funds to help Jews in Hungary and Romania, then not under direct Nazi control.

By this point, the programme showed us, American Jewish groups were lobbying for action to stop the mass murder of European Jews, including a number of large scale rallies.   Eventually, in 1944, Roosevelt set up a War Refugee Board, which worked with diplomats from neutral countries to gain their protection for Jews in Hungary, and also bombed Hungary in a move to stop deportations.   After US reporters sent home pictures from Majdanek, liberated by the Soviets, people accepted that something truly horrific was happening, even if they couldn’t quite take in the scale of it.

When it came to the liberation of the camps and the end of the war, the programme did move away from American attitudes and focused on the accounts of the survivors, and of veterans who’d been amongst the liberators and one of the men who’d been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.   But then it told us that, even then, public opinion in America was against admitting refugees, and reminded us that the quota system didn’t end until 1965.

Then it finished with footage of some of the hate crimes and extremist marches which have taken place in the US very recently, and of the storming of Congress.   I honestly don’t think that this was meant as an attack on the US, which I love, which I’m sure Ken Burns, his fellow film makers and all those involved in the making the programme love, but it was a reminder that we – in the UK and everywhere else, as well as in the US – don’t always see what’s happening abroad as our problem, and that there are dangerous elements even within our own societies.  If you’ve read all that, thank you.  If you want to watch it all, it was shown in the US last year, and has been shown in both the UK and Australia, and possibly elsewhere as well, in the run-up to Holocaust Memorial Day tomorrow.   It’s long and sometimes chilling, but it’s worth watching.

Caroline: Little House Revisited by Sarah Miller

  This is the story of Little House on the Prairie, retold from the viewpoint of Ma, Caroline Quiner Ingalls.  Reading the Little House books as a child, I thought that Pa was the big hero, hunter-gathering, building houses and playing jolly tunes on is fiddle, whilst Ma seemed a bit dull, always fussing about the girls’ behaviour and education.  Reading them now, I’m overwhelmed with admiration and sympathy for Ma, being uprooted time and time again because of Pa’s “itchy feet”, and trying to bring up four children amidst it all.  Her cooking, cleaning and especially sewing skills under such difficult circumstances were amazing.

This book was written with the full approval of the Little House Heritage Trust, and never criticises Charles/Pa, but it does show how difficult life was for Caroline, especially on the long journey they made when they left Wisconsin.  The author explains in an afterword that, whilst the Ingalls family travelled from Wisconsin to Kansas, then to Missouri and then back to Kansas (in an area which wasn’t actually part of “Indian Territory”), she’s gone along with Laura’s depiction of their just going straight from Wisconsin to Kansas.

However, she shows, which Laura didn’t, that Caroline was expecting Carrie whilst travelling.   And she shows that they had to leave because the buyer of their Wisconsin property defaulted on his payments.   They weren’t moved out of the area reserved for Native Americans, because they weren’t inside it.

On the now controversial subject of Caroline’s attitude towards Native Americans, she makes reference to the killing of settlers during the Dakota Wars, and also makes clear the natural fear of a woman when strange men entered her home whilst she was on her own with three little girls.  That’s understandable, but there’s no sympathy at all shown for the people being driven off their ancestral lands as they pass the Ingalls claim, and there’s a distinct sense of “otherness” in that Caroline is unable to feel any sort of sisterhood with the Native American women.

Overall, we’re left feeling that life’s hard, but that there’s a lot of joy in it too.  We see Caroline’s joy in her new house, which was supposed to be their “forever home”, in her children, and in her marriage.  And we’re left with mixed feelings at the end, when they’re going home to Wisconsin and their family there, but leaving the house and crops that they’d put so much work into.

I’ve also got mixed feelings about people publishing books about other people’s characters, especially when they’re just retelling someone else’s story and not even creating their own plots; and this one’s particularly strange in that it’s about a real person, who lived not so long ago.   But I did enjoy it, and I think that most of Laura’s other fans would/will enjoy it too.

The Hidden Light of Northern Fires by Daren Wang

Eleven Southern states seceded from the Union in 1860-61, but there’s a little-known story about the hamlet of Town Line, New York state, close to Niagara Falls, also voting to secede.  No-one outside really recognised the vote, but Town Line didn’t vote to rejoin the Union until 1946!   It’s not clear exactly what went on, but many of the locals were German-Americans who’d left Bavaria and other German states during the 1848 Revolutions, and the author’s view, which is as likely as any, is that they’d fled partly to avoid conscription and didn’t want to be conscripted to fight for a Union with which they didn’t really identify.  Conscription didn’t actually exist in 1861, but, still, it’s as likely an explanation as any.

Town Line lies very close to the Canadian border, and, in this book, some of the inhabitants are part of the Underground Railroad, whilst others are bounty hunters who try to capture slaves trying to reach freedom in Canada, and return them to owners offering rewards for their capture.  We also hear their fears of competition for jobs if slaves are freed and head north.  A young male slave has fled Virginia and made it to Town Line, but been attacked by a vicious dog belonging to the bounty hunters and lost a leg as a result.   Our heroine Mary is trying to help him to get over the border.

It’s an interesting setting for a Civil War novel.   They tend to focus on either plantation owners in the Deep South or pro-war characters in the North, and ignore the spectrum of views which existed on both sides of the Union-Confederate border.  The blurb for the book refers to the “Mason-Dixon Line”, but even that’s not accurate because not all the Southern states seceded.   Washington DC was a Southern city, for a kick-off.  And West Virginia, from where the slave in question had escaped, seceded from Virginia and was admitted to the Union as a separate state.  It was complicated.

This is the author’s first novel, and that shows.  The subject matter’s interesting, but the characters are a little one-dimensional, all either goodies or baddies with not much in between.  And the escapee’s former owners live in West Virginia, but the book doesn’t really explain how West Virginia seceded from Virginia, etc – although it does make the point that slaves in Union slave states weren’t covered by the Emancipation Proclamation.

Some of the language and attitudes may offend, but none of it’s inappropriate in context.  It would be ridiculous to write a book in which characters in the 1860s spoke about racial issues in the language of the 2020s, and I wish people would accept that.  This isn’t a great book and never really gripped me, but it was very positive to see a book which showed a range of views being held by different characters.  Due to the “culture wars” present plaguing the US and beyond, a narrative’s been created by which the American Civil War was all about the North opposing slavery and the South supporting slavery, which just wasn’t the case.   There were complex issues involved, and views across a broad spectrum were held, in both Union states and Confederate states.   Thanks to Daren Wang for showing that.

 

The Children’s Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin

This is a novel about the severe blizzard which, after an ordinary-seeming morning, hit the Great Plains one afternoon in January 1888, killing  235 people and causing many others to lose limbs or digits to frostbite.   It’s sometimes called “The Children’s Blizzard” because, due to the timing, many of the victims were school pupils trying to make their way home at the end of the school day.

As readers of Laura Ingalls Wilder will know, teachers at that time and place could be girls of just 15 or 16, little more than children themselves.  They were the ones who had to decide whether their pupils should wait out the storm in the schoolhouses, try to get home, or try to reach another place of shelter.  Two of the four threads of the book are those of two such teachers, sisters, one of whom was hailed as a heroine in the national press as well as locally, the other of whom was vilified for making what turned out to be a bad choice.  The other main characters are a hired girl and a “booster”.

Boosters, who featured a lot in The Beautiful Snow, aimed to persuade people from Europe, mainly Scandinavia, and the eastern US to settle in Minnesota and Dakota Territory, giving a very over-favourable impression of the farming conditions and climate there.   Most of the characters in the book were Norwegian immigrants, and the author seems to contend that the US authorities and eastern US society weren’t overly concerned what became of them.

For some reason, there aren’t a lot of books about Scandinavian settlers in the Great Plains.  Vilhelm Moberg’s four The Emigrants books, about a Swedish family, spring to mind, and Laura Ingalls Wilder mentions Norwegian neighbours;  but most people’s image of immigrants in the late 19th century US is of people from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe crowding into New York City.   And, other than Laura Ingalls Wilder’s brief reference to a black doctor, I can’t think of any other books mentioning black settlers in the area, as this one does.  And the settlement of the area in general doesn’t get much attention, with the obvious exception of Laura’s books. Incidentally, I just did a “Goodreads” search on “pioneer”, and 8 out of the top 10 results were books by Laura.  Other than Willa Cather, none of the other authors or books in the top 25 were well-known.  Yet both the Native American Wars and the Dust Bowl have attracted a lot of attention from different quarters.  It’s strange.

It’s an interesting subject, not least because it’s had so little coverage; but it’s not the most gripping of books, which I think is largely because it’s so focused on the one incident, and goes into it very quickly.  We don’t really have chance to get to know and care about the characters before they and we are swept up in the blizzard.   But it’s still a fascinating story, about the hardship faced by the pioneers, many of whom had thought they were going to a land of plenty.   And, without wishing to get political, it’s interesting to think how often, in the past, there were places which were desperate for immigrants, so desperate that they deliberately gave a falsely favourable impression of the lands they wanted settling in order to get people in; and how that’s changed.

The best part of the book was actually the last few chapters, about what happened to the girls after the blizzard.   What happened sounded far-fetched, but is based on real accounts of the time.  The hired girl and the “right” sister briefly became the 1880s’ equivalent of tabloid celebs, benefited from a “Heroine Fund” set up by a newspaper and were able to start new and better lives.  The “wrong” sister ended up teaching at an “Indian school” in Montana and being horrified by the abuses committed there.   I think the author felt that she had to include that, given the current (unfair) fashion for criticising the Little House books.   And both the booster and the hired girl’s mistress were overcome with guilt over the way they’d treated them, which felt rather like a 19th century American moralising novel.  Somehow, that all made for better reading than the drama of the blizzard, maybe because we actually got to know the characters better.

All in all, I don’t think that I’ll be reading this again, but I’m certainly glad that I’ve read it once.  If you can find a reasonably-priced copy, it’s worth a go.

White Houses by Amy Bloom

Marking Pride month #pridenotprejudice, this is a review of a novel about Eleanor Roosevelt’s relationship with the journalist Lorena Hickok.  No-one’s entirely sure whether they were lovers or just very good friends, but some of what’s written in Eleanor’s letters strongly suggest the former*.  They were both fascinating characters, Lorena as someone who rose from a very poor background to become a groundbreaking journalist, one of the first female sports reporters and also working on some of the major news stories of the day, and Eleanor as someone who was really ahead of her time in terms of her views on equality.  Also, given that history is full of dutiful political wives who turned a blind eye whilst their husbands played away, I rather like the idea of Eleanor doing her own thing just as FDR did his.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really love this book, told in the first person by Lorena.  It was too short for me to get into it properly, and it jumped about between 1945 and various other points in Lorena’s life, so it never really flowed.  Also, the author’s admitted that some bits of it were completely her own invention, notably a section in which Lorena ran off with a circus (seriously).  She’s also invented a gay cousin of Eleanor’s, called Parker Fiske, who goes around using rude words in Yiddish.  Why would an upper-class WASP use rude words in Yiddish, and why invent storylines and characters when writing a book which was supposed to be about real people?  And, whilst some of the sarcastic observations about the rich and famous are amusing, others just seem shoehorned in to reflect the author’s interests, rather than Lorena’s.

All in all, it was OK, but I didn’t really get why it attracted so many rave reviews.  Books that jump about in time so much never seem very coherent to me.  And making up storylines is fair enough if you’re writing about a medieval character for whom there are no sources for certain times of their life, but not for someone whose life story is known – and showing her going off to join the circus, like a Blyton or Streatfeild character, was just very odd indeed.

* “Hick darling, Oh! how good it was to hear your voice, it was so inadequate to try & tell you what it meant, Jimmy was near & I couldn’t say ‘je t’aime et je t’adore’ as I longed to do but always remember I am saying it & that I go to sleep thinking of you & repeating our little saying.”

“Dearest, I miss you & wish you were here I want to put my arms around you & feel yours around me. More love than I can express in a letter is flying on waves of thought to you.”

This was a relationship between two very big personalities, and a book about them could have been brilliant.  This one just wasn’t, though.

 

 

 

Thatcher and Reagan: A Very Special Relationship – BBC 2

Those of us who grew up in the 1980s saw the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev (who comes from a village near the Russo-Ukrainian border, brought glasnost to the old USSR and must be absolutely devastated at what’s going on at the moment), Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa bestriding the world stage (I like that expression).  Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and to some extent Helmut Kohl were also part of that.

Going back into history, you find, to name but a few, Churchill, Disraeli, Gladstone, Bismarck, Metternich, Louis XIV, Elizabeth I, Charles the Bold, Henry V, Saladin, William the Conqueror, Harald Hardrada, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great … on and on and on.  Where are all the world leaders now?!   That new German Chancellor’s so anonymous that I can only remember his name because it makes me think of the snowman in Frozen, and the rest of them aren’t much better.   And how is banning Russian players from Wimbledon supposed to help anyone?  Maybe that’s why everyone’s so into Zelenskyy, because he actually *has* got something about him.

Anyway.  Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were obviously both quite controversial figures at home, but this programme wasn’t about that; and I was impressed that the BBC, which often seems to forget that it’s supposed to be politically neutral, respected that – and focused on the relationship between the two, which was what it said on the tin.

We even got some Freudian-type stuff about how Ronald liked Maggie because strong women reminded him on his mother, and how Maggie liked Ronald because she was keen on glamorous, powerful men.  That does rather make one wonder how she ended up with Denis, who was many things but certainly not glamorous, but never mind.

It’s rather frightening how dated the video shots from the ’80s and early ’90s look now, but I’m trying not to think about that.  I’m still trying to process the fact that the Miami Open was won by someone who was born in 2003, and that the defeated finalist was someone whose dad I remember as a young teenage pro.  And how on earth is Brooklyn Beckham old enough to get married, when surely it was only five minutes ago that he was an adorable toddler kicking a ball round the pitch at Old Trafford after we won the league in, er, the year 2000?  Oh, and, speaking of the ’80s and early ’90s, remember the Berlin Wall coming in November 1989, Nelson Mandela being released from prison in February 1990, and those precious few months of thinking that we’d finally reached an age of peace?   It all went kaput when Iraq invaded Kuwait in July 1990, before The Scorpions had even released “Wind of Change”, but it was nice whilst it lasted.

This first episode really was quite interesting, because there was so much about that personal bond and what helped them to form it, and how Mrs Thatcher (as she was then) coped with being a woman in a man’s world.  I’m not sure that we needed quite so much psycho-analysis about the significance of her handbag, though.  Why are people so obsessed with the Queen’s handbag and Maggie Thatcher’s handbag?!   They should see the contents of mine – talk about everything but the kitchen sink.

I wish we could get back to a point where Anglo-American relations are as close as they were then, but we don’t seem to have had another pair of leaders who’ve got on so well.  Blair and Clinton, to some extent, but both of them were very narcissistic and I don’t think that they worked together anything like as well as Thatcher and Reagan did.

Also, even with the Gulf Wars, there wasn’t the sense of the common enemy that there was in the days of the Cold War.  I never really got the Cold War, TBH.  OK, it was coming to an end by the time I was old enough to understand much about it, but I think it was because people were always talking about “the Russians”, rather than “the communists” of “the Soviets”.  I like Russia.  Not easy then and not easy at the moment, but all that Russians-as-baddies stuff has never worked for me.  But it did for Thatcher and Reagan … until Gorbachev came along, and we’ll hear more about that next week.

A lot of this was about the issue of American nuclear weapons being based in Britain, and in Western Europe, and how Thatcher and Reagan worked very closely together on that, but we also saw them having their differences over trade issues, and over the lack of overt  American support for Britain during the Falklands War.

All in all, I thought it was very well-presented.  Too many BBC programmes these days take a very biased political viewpoint, and or try to make the issues of the past about the issues of today, like that ridiculous programme in 2017 which tried to make out that the Reformation was somehow linked to Brexit, or that Simon Schama programme which tried to link William Blake to Darth Vader.  This one did what it was meant to do, and it did it rather well.

 

Varina by Charles Frazier

Hmm.  This was an interesting idea for a book, but it didn’t quite work for me.  As the title suggested, it was about Varina Howell Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis and therefore First Lady of the Confederacy.  She was a very interesting person – not the Southern belle you might expect, but someone who was very well-educated, partly in Philadelphia of all places, not a strong supporter of either slavery or secession, not particularly keen on hostessing and not at all convinced that her husband was the right person to be president of the Confederacy.

I was expecting the book to be set largely during the war years, and it wasn’t.  That was my fault, not the author’s: there was no reason why the book should have focused on those years, rather than on aspects of Varina’s life before and after the war.   So, OK, I can’t really moan about that.  But I can moan about the way it jumped about.  One minute, Varina was in her late 70s, living in New York.  The next, she was a teenage girl in Mississippi.  Then she was in her late 30s, on the run after the Confederacy surrendered.  Then she was in her 20s, living in Washington.  It just jumped about all over the place, and that really made it very difficult to get into the story.

That was really rather a shame, because her life story was very interesting.  And intertwined with it was the fascinating story of Jimmie Limber, a young free mixed race boy, who was  taken in by the Davises during the war after Varina saw him being mistreated by his guardian.  Sadly, he became separated from them whilst they were captured.  It’s not clear whether or not they ever met again, but this book imagined him and Varina being reunited years later.  That could have worked very well.

So it could have been a very good book.  But all the jumping about and failure to get into any one particular time in Varina’s life didn’t really work for me.  I wasn’t expecting Gone With The Wind or North and South – and I’m afraid that my idea of Varina was largely drawn from the negative opinion held of her by Ashton Main Huntoon in the North and South books, which, given what a nasty character Ashton is, was silly of me:-) – but I was at least expecting a coherent narrative!

Hmm …

 

All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor

I’d somehow never come across this lovely book before.  It’s rather like a Lower East Side equivalent of Little House on the Prairie, with the same simplistic language and a sense of a family home which is full of love and happiness despite poverty, but with a greater sense of community and a blessed absence of politics.

Like Laura, Sydney Taylor’s telling the story of a quintessential American experience, an essential part of the making of the United States of America, but it’s a very different one – the lives of first and second generation immigrants in New York City in the early 20th century.  We’ve got five young Jewish American sisters, and they’re American-born but their parents seem to have emigrated to New York from … we’re not told where, but somewhere in Eastern Europe, probably somewhere in the Russian Empire.  Quite possibly what’s now Ukraine.

In addition to what we see of the family’s home life in general, there’s a sub-plot about a family friend whose long lost love turns out to be the librarian at their beloved local library, and there’s an interesting storyline about the children having scarlet fever and how they have to put a notice on the door and then have the house fumigated once everyone’s recovered.  There’s also a wonderful description of the local market: I could read that over and over again.

And much of the book’s about festivals.  These are mostly Jewish religious festivals, but there’s also a chapter about the Fourth of July, and I loved that.  I know that some people take issue with the Fourth of July chapter in Little Town on the Prairie, and there’s now a rather unpleasant school of thought that celebrating any sort of national holiday makes you some sort of bigot.  It does absolutely nothing of the sort, and the All-of-a-Kind Family celebrating the Fourth of July is the way I grew up thinking about the USA, of (with apologies to Neil Diamond) freedom’s light burning warm, of people with a dream they’ve come to share … even if most of the people with that dream did find poverty on the Lower East Side rather than streets paved with gold.

I loved this.  I’m only sorry that I didn’t come across this series 40 years ago, when I was the right age for it!