BOOK REVIEW: The Muse of Maiden Lane by Mimi Matthews

I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

The Muse of Maiden Lane is the fourth book in Mimi Matthews’s wonderful Victorian Romance series, Belles of London. The series centers around four women who come to London for the Season to find husbands. Initially, they find only each other, bonding over their love of and skill with horses. The series includes The Siren of Sussex, The Belle of Belgrave Square, and The Lily of Ludgate Hill. You don’t have to read them in order, but you might get to know the ladies best if you do.

The last of “the four horsewomen” to make a love match is Stella Hobhouse. When Stella’s father died, he left her a small inheritance, just enough to live on (with her horse) and to have two London Seasons to find a husband. If she doesn’t, she is doomed to live with her brother, a sour, self-righteous clergyman, who criticizes her constantly and keeps trying to control her and her money. Worst of all, he’s interested in marrying a woman who is even more critical than he is. 

But Stella has another problem. Although she is only twenty-two, her hair has gone completely platinum gray. She is seen as an oddity, and the ton is cruel to oddities. She hides in the background. But there is one man who sees her for the beauty she is.

Teddy Hayes is a young, very talented artist who burns to paint her from the first moment he sets eyes on her. Teddy has his own obstacle. An illness has left his legs paralyzed and he is confined to a wheelchair. He is accompanied everywhere by a manservant. And he is coddled by his sister and her husband, who infantilize him. But he is as determined to gain his independence as he is to paint Stella.

Stella can’t possibly pose for Teddy. Artist’s models are usually prostitutes or actresses, and Stella has enough trouble with her gray hair and judgmental brother. Still, the two are drawn together.

This is a beautiful story of two people overcoming society’s boundaries to fall in love and find their happily-ever-after. 

BOOK REVIEW: The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman

The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern by Lynda Cohen Loigman has been garnering a lot of buzz. It’s a feel-good second-chance love story, so compelling that I read it in just two sittings.

Augusta Stern is about to turn eighty, and is nudged (against her inclination) into retirement from her position as a hospital pharmacist. Her niece has helped find her an active senior retirement community in Florida. Augusta is not crazy about this idea, but she goes, moving away from Brooklyn. The first day there, she comes across Irving Rivkin, a blast from her past. Sixty-two years ago, Irving was the delivery boy working in her father’s pharmacy. He was also her first and only love.

Augusta was devoted to her father, Solomon, and to his profession. In the 1920s, when Augusta was a teenager, women were rarely pharmacists and those who were faced significant discrimination. But Augusta had great determination and the support of her father. However, Augusta’s mother died (of diabetes, one year before insulin treatment was discovered) and Augusta’s great-aunt Esther arrived to help raise Augusta and her sister. Esther was, to Solomon’s dismay, a folk healer. On occasion, when none of Solomon’s medicines worked, and doctors had given up, Esther’s chicken soup, ointments, or...potions? cured the ills of their neighbors.

Augusta is enthralled, and yearns for a way to combine her father’s scientific knowledge and compassion with Aunt Esther’s somewhat magical elixirs, to use all means at her disposal to help people. 

The novel’s chapters alternate between 1987, in Florida, where Augusta is dealing with Irving, a man she’d never expected (or hoped) to see again, and the early 1920s. As kids, Augusta and Irving began as friends. Their friendship matured to love. And then, Irving disappeared to Chicago without so much as a goodbye, marrying another girl immediately, and breaking Augusta’s heart. Of course Augusta carries a grudge. But she also carries a lot of guilt. Because she believes that in experimenting with Aunt Esther’s elixirs, she might have been responsible for Irving’s defection.

Is it too late for honesty, forgiveness, and renewed love?

BOOK REVIEW: The Spinster's Last Dance by Mary Lancaster

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

Although this is contrary to my usual practice, I read The Spinster’s Last Dance, Book 7 of Mary Lancaster’s Regency Romance series One Night in Blackhaven, after having only previously read Book One, The Captain’s Old Love. The books are centered on the Vales, a large family of siblings who have returned, after their father’s death, to the family estate in Blackhaven, which is a spa town. The youngest of the group, the twins Leona and Lawrence, play matchmakers for their older siblings. The stories take place simultaneously, so I think it doesn’t really matter to read them out of order, though I do recommend reading book one first.

The Spinster’s Last Dance focuses on the eldest sister, Delilah. She has always been something of a motherly figure to her siblings. She also played the role of hostess/secretary/traveling companion to their father, who was a diplomat. However, she is an illegitimate sibling and she has just turned thirty, so she now expects to fade away into genteel spinsterhood. Before she does, she wants one last waltz at a local ball. She chooses her partner, the handsome Denzil Talbot, Baron Linfield, who she vaguely recognizes. He also recognizes her. He’d been a young friend of her father.

Denzil is a spy for the Crown, and he has come to Blackhaven to investigate Delilah, who is suspected of being a traitor.

The two are made for each other. However, they have to get past Denzil’s initial mistrust and Delilah’s certainty that his only interest in her is as a suspect. They also have to solve the dangerous puzzle of who is the traitor in their midst, and there is a clock ticking.

The protagonists are sympathetic and the love story sweet. Additional viewpoint characters are brought in, which is unusual for historical romance but becoming more common. The main villain is sufficiently villainous to keep readers invested in his downfall.

The other siblings have fairly small roles, but their love stories are hinted at, and make me want to read more of the series.

BOOK REVIEW: Upon the Corner of the Moon by Valerie Nieman

 I received this ARC for free. That did not influence this review.

Upon the Corner of the Moon by Valerie Nieman is a remarkably immersive historical novel of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Set in Scotland in the early second millennium, the novel provides the backstories of this infamous couple, placing them squarely in the larger framework of Scotland’s history, while humanizing them and making them sympathetic. Each is related to the high king Malcolm, who guards his power jealously. Macbeth and Gruach (the future lady Macbeth) are taken from their parents for fostering, and are brought up to be pawns who will exist to support Malcolm’s aims. This is an era of constant warfare and jockeying for power. Christianity has a hold on the people, but the old religion of the Picts has not yet faded away. Macbeth and Gruach are lonely figures who do their best to survive by bending to the king’s will. Yet as time passes, Malcolm ages, and the ambitions of his followers lead them to break oaths and bonds. Macbeth and Gruach are shaped by events, and find each other in the bloody aftermath. The beautiful language of the novel pulls the reader into the cold, brutal world. This is book one of the story, and I’m eager for book two.

BOOK REVIEW: The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli by Richard Aldous

After reading a biography of Benjamin Disraeli, I thought I should read one about his nemesis, William Gladstone. Instead, I chose a dual biography that focused on the rivalry between them, The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli by Richard Aldous.

This monograph very nicely lays out the political questions of the time (in superficial detail) and delves into the positions and personalities of the two prime ministers of late 19th century Britain. The two men were supposedly both brilliant orators, but apparently that meant they could speak for 4 or 5 hours at a stretch and lard their speeches with witty (or what passed for witty at the time) invective.

It seems as though the two began their political lives on roughly the same side of issues, with slight differences of opinion, but as their ambitions grew, their rivalry increased, and they began staking out more extreme positions. Disraeli became more reactionary. Gladstone became the leader of the Liberals. At times, they borrowed policies from one another with minimal deviations, more concerned with scoring political points for their parties than with actually achieving effective change. (Disraeli seems more guilty of this.) It’s unclear how strongly they believed in the principles they espoused.

Clearly, to better understand their roles in guiding British politics, I’d need to read something that gets more into the weeds. I was left with the impression that they were captains of the ship (alternating captaincy) at a time when Britain was undergoing great upheavals (industrialization, increased colonialism, etc.), but although they are each considered among the great Prime Ministers, I’m not all that clear on whether their incessant bickering actually steered the ship or just rocked it back and forth.

BOOK REVIEW: Must I Go: A Novel by Yiyun Li

Must I Go: A Novel by Yiyun Li fits partly into the mold of a crotchety elderly woman (in an assisted-living facility) telling her life story. The unusual aspect of the story is that she chooses to do this not because of the memoir-writing class that is inspiring others in the facility, but because she has located a published (abridged) diary of an old lover, and feels the need to append it.

The first part of the book is set-up. The protagonist, Lilia, has been married and widowed three times and has a passel of children from her first husband. But just before she met him, she met the lover, Roland, and they had a one-night stand. She was sixteen years old, beautiful, and saw him as an exciting man of the world. (He seemed to see her as available and disposable.) They met again when she tracked him down in a hotel in the city and had sex again. At the same visit to the city, she met her first husband. She was already pregnant with Roland’s baby.

It’s possible her memories of Roland would have faded over time, if not for the daughter they shared that he was never aware of. But what truly made him unforgettable was that the daughter, Lucy, killed herself in her early twenties. Lilia can’t think of Roland without thinking about Lucy or vice versa. 

At any rate, Roland always wanted to be a novelist, and Lilia kept an eye out for his novel. He never wrote one, but his diary was published posthumously and she found that. She relives her life in the reliving of his, learns a good deal about him, and decides that even though Lucy never knew her biological father, it was important that Lucy’s daughter and granddaughter know of him. So she as she read the diary, she pasted notes into it that were both clarifying and questioning.

This is an interesting premise and structure. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an interesting story. Roland had been a larger-than-life figure in Lilia’s head until she read the diary and discovered (if she didn’t, the reader certainly does) that he is a dull man, who wavered between imagining himself fascinating and bemoaning his own dullness. Lilia’s personal claim to fame is her ability to repress all her emotions. Repression may serve her well enough, since losing a child to suicide is an unfathomable tragedy, but it doesn’t serve the narrative of the story. We end up with two not very likeable protagonists, perseverating over the disappointments and suffering of their lives in an increasingly monotonous way. There are some lovely insights and turns of phrase, but these weren’t enough to sustain my interest in the book.

BOOK REVIEW: Much Ado About Margaret by Madeleine Roux

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

Much Ado About Margaret by Madeleine Roux is a Regency Romance homage to Shakespeare, and particularly to Much Ado About Nothing. The main characters, Margaret Arden and Bridger Fletcher, resemble Beatrice and Benedick. The main trope is enemies to lovers.

Margaret has wanted all her life to write novels. After her father’s death, she becomes more frantically determined to be published. She needs money. As the eldest daughter and with two younger sisters and a mother to support, she is being coerced by her aunts to marry soon and well. She wants to do right by her sisters, but not at the cost of sacrificing herself. She has a manuscript that she knows will succeed, but when she sends it to a publisher, it is ignored. And when she thrusts a copy into the hands of the publisher at a party, he pushes it back and insults not only the book, but female authors in general. The publisher is Bridger Fletcher.

Shortly, they meet again at Margaret’s cousin’s wedding. The cousin is Bridger’s closest friend. Bridger is dealing with troubles of his own, a dying demon of a father and an alcoholic older brother bent on ruin. All three men have terrible tempers, which partly explains Bridger’s cruel response to Margaret. However, Margaret’s manuscript is accidently scattered by the wind, and Bridger finds a few pages. He discovers he was horribly wrong about the book, and wants to publish it after all. Can Margaret forgive him for his initial rudeness? 

Likely, yes. Especially since they are both strongly physically attracted to one another and both share a love of literature. Unfortunately, they are surrounded by ill-intentioned family, friends, and ex-fiancees and a wedding drama that plays with plot themes from Shakespeare’s play.

It’s an interesting premise and fun to pick out where the plot might reference Shakespeare. However, I wasn’t caught up by any chemistry between the hero and heroine, primarily, I think, because of the dialogues, which didn’t ring true for me.