BOOK REVIEW: Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns

I saw Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns recommended somewhere on instagram and put it on my list. At just over 200 pages, it’s a quick read and completely engrossing. Originally published in 1950, it was re-released in 2015.

The book is narrated by Sophia, who has just told her life story to a friend. Because of the friend’s reaction, she decided to write it as an autobiography or memoir. She has an unsophisticated voice and outlook that charms the reader even as her story breaks the reader’s heart.

In England during its Great Depression, Sophia is a twenty-one-year-old art student who falls for another artist, twenty-one-year-old Charles. They are far too young and naive to wed. His mother is very much against the marriage and accuses Sophia of trapping him, even though Charles is no great prize. His maternal relatives are all awful to her. (His parents are separated.) His father is OK with the marriage so long as it means he can cut off Charles’ allowance. Sophia’s parents are no longer living. She has a sister and a brother who pop in and out of her life.

At any rate, they are married. They take a small apartment and for a while, they live off of wedding presents and Sophia’s meager income from a commercial artist job. Charles just paints. Rarely, he sells something to a friend. The novel gives the impression (although Sophia never comes out and says it) that he is a mediocre artist. She is probably the better one but because her art is commercial, it doesn’t count.

As the money starts to become scarce, Sophia finds out she is pregnant. The ignorance of these two about the facts of life is horrifying. Moreover, Charles doesn’t want children and blames her for being pregnant, not seeming to realize how it happened. Because of her pregnancy, she loses her job. Sophia is very matter-of-fact about their descent into poverty, which gives a blunt and bleak view of how they live. The novel also gives a detailed, eye-opening look at the facilities for childbirth at a charity hospital at the time. Sophia survives, as does the baby, and now their lives become even more difficult.

Charles is an annoying character. He refuses to work because he believes he is a great artist. He shows no concern for the fact that they can’t pay rent and have no money for food. He tries going behind Sophia’s back to put their baby in an orphanage where, Charles says, he’d be better cared for. But that is an excuse for his own self-centeredness. Readers will root for her to ditch this guy as soon as possible, but she’s afraid his relatives will then take the baby from her.

Poverty takes its toll on the young couple. Sophia is the sole support for her family, earning money by modeling for other artists When she becomes pregnant again, she is bullied into having an abortion. The marriage falls apart. It’s misery upon misery, with a few bright spots, but it is all related in such a clear-eyed way that readers will keep rooting for things to get better. (Spoiler alert, they do.)

The novel reminds me in a way of another older, re-released book that I also enjoyed, Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Torborg Nedreaas. In that book, the female protagonist is older and jaded when she tells her story, but in this book, one gets the sense that Sophia can’t be jaded, and it makes the story more uplifting.

BOOK REVIEW: The Riddle of the Roses by Mary Lancaster

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

The eighth book in Mary Lancaster’s historical mystery/romance series is now available. The Riddle of the Roses continues the adventures of Constance Silver and Solomon Grey, a Victorian era private investigating team.

In this book, Constance and Solomon are asked to investigate the death of Caterina di Ripoli, a young opera singer. The request is made by Sebastian Kellar, who readers have met in a previous book, a diplomat with a shady background and shadier connection to Constance. He was an old family friend of the singer and he has a strong feeling the death was not natural. He blames the husband, who stands to inherit all her fortune.

However, the singer has a long history of heart disease, and there is no indication that the death was anything but a complication of that disease. Part of the mystery is why Kellar thinks there may have been foul play. The husband’s grief is convincingly sincere and deep.

Constance and Solomon resist taking the case, which appears to have no merit. But the presence of a bouquet of roses in the dead woman’s room, that seem to have appeared out of nowhere on the night of her death, draws them in. As they dig deeper, rather than having no viable suspects, they find too many, one of whom is Kellar.

The Riddle of the Roses is another gripping mystery that kept me guessing until the end. At the same time, it continues to explore the relationship between the (now married) investigating duet. There are also some intriguing love stories developing within the supporting cast.

BOOK REVIEW: The News From Dublin by Colm Tóibín

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

I don’t read many short story collections (which is what I say whenever I review a short story collection.) However, I’m addicted to Colm Tóibín, so when I saw this collection on Netgalley, The News From Dublin, I had to request it.

Everything Tóibín writes is extraordinary, with deep dives into the characters’ psyches and beautiful prose. There are nine stories in the collection, set in different time periods and different countries. Like all short stories, there are no happy endings and they are much more character driven than plot driven. Tóibín is able to make even unsympathetic characters compelling (The Free Man). I highly recommend the book for the first 8 stories.

The only one that didn’t captivate me was the final story, The Catalan Girls, about a family of Catalan sisters who emigrate to Argentina to make new lives for themselves. They were not close. In fact, they didn’t like one another and their mother only cared for one of them–not the protagonist. That story seemed to drag, maybe in part because it was novella length rather than short story length, but maybe the wandering through life was the point.

Short story fans should not miss The News From Dublin.

BOOK REVIEW: A Shop Girl’s Guide to Wooing a Lord by Shana Galen

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

Shana Galen has a new series coming out: The Heiress Hunters. Book 1 is A Shop Girl’s Guide to Wooing a Lord.

The heiress hunters are the sons of the Earl of Glenister. When they learn of the family’s impending bankruptcy, and of their parents’ reluctant decision to marry off their fifteen-year-old sister to a significantly older wealthy lord to salvage their estates, the sons decide that one of them will have to marry an heiress instead. Being brothers, they turn it into a competition. Garrett Kildare, the second son, is determined to be the one to save the family. The only problem is, the heiresses he has been introduced to leave him cold.

Tamsin Archer is an impoverished commoner who lives with her twice-widowed mother in a tavern where their labor is exploited by the owner and where Tamsin is beaten by the owner’s wife. If this situation isn’t hopeless enough, Tamsin has two younger step-siblings who were sold to a man named Snoozer who runs a company of chimney sweeps. Tamsin has to turn over the little money she earns in order that they might be fed. She’s trying to save up to buy them back, but the price is forever out of reach. And so, she begins stealing. At an aristocrat’s party, she is caught mid-robbery by Garrett.

Tamsin knows what a kind person he is, because she met him once, years before. He bought violets from her when she was a desperate flower girl. She is even more desperate now. She manages to run off, but Garrett is determined to find her. When he does, and learns her story, he wants to help. 

Unfortunately, Garrett is also sticking to his plan to marry an heiress. He falls for Tamsin, but he can’t marry her. She’s a commoner and she’s poor. Tamsin in turn has been in love with Garrett since her flower girl days, but she also knows the class difference is insurmountable.

Or is it?

This steamy Regency Romance is a fun read that introduces spirited protagonists to root for as well as a host of brothers who will no doubt continue the hunt for heiresses. (And a sister who’ll get her own story, I hope!)

BOOK REVIEW: Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt

I’ve fallen way behind on my reading for two main reasons. First, I’m working on my next novel and writing to a deadline. Second, the book I was reading was not one to fly through. It’s a biography of Christopher Marlowe. I’ve had a vague interest in Marlowe for a long while, but I only knew of him as someone “Shakespeare-adjacent.” A contemporary of Shakespeare, Marlowe was also a playwright and poet. He was reportedly a spy for Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster. And he died far too young in a barroom brawl, or some such thing. That is a woefully inadequate biography.

What really pulled him from the shadows for me was Allison Epstein’s extraordinary novel, A Tip for the Hangman, which I highly recommend. More recently, I came across this literary biography by Stephen Greenblatt, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival.

This book succeeds best as a literary biography, more so than as a straight biography. The difficulty is that so much of Marlowe’s life story just isn’t known. Particularly when dealing with Marlowe’s early life, but not exclusive to his early days, we are asked to follow along with the author’s speculations and imaginings. And while they are educated, reasonable speculations, I was frustrated in wanting more certainty from a biography, even though I recognize that information is lost in the past.

Greenblatt does a wonderful job of explaining the dangerous times that Marlowe was living in. The Protestant-Catholic suspicions and plots created a highly anxious society with an undercurrent of violence. Marlowe was sucked into the world of espionage on behalf of Queen Elizabeth’s spy-ring. He was murdered in a tavern, the crime officially explained as a quarrel over the bill. All of which makes his life intriguing.

But what he should be remembered for is not the spying, but his extraordinary literary talent. This biography examines in depth his plays and some of his poetry. It interprets them, and Marlowe’s motivations for writing them,  in light of the life he was living. It all sounds plausible, and it is fascinating, but first you have to accept Greenblatt’s speculations about that life and about those motivations.

Marlowe’s life can be summed up as “live fast, die young.” But his life’s work lives on. It especially lives on in the influence he had on contemporary and future writers.

(If you like literary biographies, I highly recommend Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell, which is a biography of John Donne.)

BOOK REVIEW: The Librarian Spy by Madeline Martin

My history/historical fiction book club’s next pick is The Librarian Spy by Madeline Martin. In this WWII-based historical novel, two women use their literary-adjacent talents to help the war effort.

Ava is a librarian at the Library of Congress, who is tapped by the military to go to Lisbon, a neutral country, to gather intelligence. Her job is to collect as many newspapers and other documents that slip into Lisbon from war-torn countries as she can. Then she helps photograph them for transfer to microfilm so that they can be shipped to the U.S. and evaluated. Determined to do her part because her brother is a fighter pilot and she wants the war to end before he is injured, she doesn’t feel what she is doing is dangerous. And yet, it seems a German fellow, Lukas, a likely spy, is trailing her. And a British fellow, James, is paying her a great deal of unexpected attention as well.

Elaine is a French patriot living in occupied France, whose protective husband has been doing his best to keep her from sticking her neck out. When he goes missing, she joins the resistance. At first, her role is to help distribute an underground newspaper. And then, when it becomes known that she is familiar with running a mimeograph machine, she begins working for the press itself.

Their work intersects when Elaine decides to help a young Jewish mother and child escape occupied France and Ava discovers Elaine’s secret message encoded in the Nazi-banned newspaper.

The contributions of women in WWII is an entire subgenre unto itself, and this is a fine addition, exploring lesser known modes of aiding the war effort.

BOOK REVIEW: Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Torborg Nedreaas

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

I’ve been reading some beautiful but painful-to-read books lately. Nothing Grows by Moonlight by Torborg Nedreaas is another. Originally published in 1947 in Norway, it is being re-released by The Modern Library in an English translation by Bibbi Lee.

Set in the mid-twentieth century (contemporary at the time, but now historical), it’s the story of a woman who suffered terribly at the hands of an older man, her high school teacher, with whom she’d fallen obsessively in love at seventeen. He slept with her, used her, pretended to care for her when it suited him, and repeatedly tossed her aside. 

The novel is unusually structured. It’s in the first-person viewpoint of another older man, who is relating the story as told to him by the woman in one long alcohol-infused night. They are strangers who met at a train station. (In this way, it reminds me a little of The Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque.)

The woman is older now, thirty-eight. The events of her life are not presented chronologically because that is not how memory works. She’s haunted by the relationship and what it has cost her, but at the same time, she is clearly still in love with the man who destroyed her. She suffered abortions, poverty, and alcohol abuse, all of which fed upon each other to send her into a downward spiral of despair.

The fact that the woman is not named makes it feel both anonymous and universal. It is a cry for justice.

Nothing Grows by Moonlight is a powerful novel and highly recommended. However, as a content warning, there is a graphic description of a self-induced abortion. 

BOOK REVIEW: Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore

I read Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore for a book club. It’s a gripping (and enraging) account of the young women exposed to radium in their occupation of painting luminescent dials for watches and military equipment. After its discovery, radium was considered a miracle drug, touted for everything from a cure for gout to an aphrodisiac to a beauty treatment. But its most exciting property was that it glowed.

Women were entering the work force in large numbers in the WWI era, and working in the dial painting factory was considered a plum job. Women were uniquely suited to painting the tiny numbers on the dials. There was no protective equipment, despite the radioactivity of the radium-containing paint, because the dangers were not recognized (or not acknowledged.) And worse, the women were taught that the best way to bring the delicate paint brushes to a precise point was to wet them between their lips. And so for months, even years, these women ingested minute but cumulative doses of radium day after day after day.

And then, usually after a couple of years had passed, often when they were no longer working for the company, they began presenting to dentists and physicians with a mysterious array of symptoms, commonly including disintegration of their jaw bones, loss of teeth (and pieces of bone), hemorrhage,  purulent eruptions, and bone pain. Eventually, it became clear that they were suffering from radium poisoning. A deadly and incurable disease. But the men owning the companies and the higher ups who were all getting rich, denied the possibility and refused any concessions to the women. Instead, they fired troublemakers. They called the women hysterical and insinuated there was nothing wrong with them. And when the women banded together in lawsuits, mostly to get settlements to pay for medical care (they were all essentially bankrupted by job loss and medical bills) the response of the companies was to stall and appeal, hoping the women would die and the suits would be dismissed. (They also declared bankruptcy, reorganized, and reopened elsewhere.)

It’s an important book. And while it’s true that studying these brave women advanced medical science, and that in the aftermath, important industrial safety measures were passed, the most vivid scenes in the book are of the horrific pain and suffering experience by these women, and the callousness and greed of corporate men.

BOOK REVIEW: Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes

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

Langston Hughes is an author on my should-read list, so I was glad of the nudge provided by Netgalley to read the novel Not Without Laughter. First published in 1930, it is being re-released by Union Square & Co. with an introduction by the poet Jasmine Mans.

The novel is semi-autobiographical: a coming-of-age story of a young Black man, Sandy, growing up in Kansas. Sandy is primarily reared by his grandmother, Hager, who was once enslaved. She is a deeply religious woman who refuses to hate, despite the injustices she sees in the world. She works hard as a laundress. And she has big hopes for Sandy.

Also in the family are Hager’s three grown daughters. The eldest, Tempy, has married well and is financially comfortable. However, she feels superior to the rest of her family and rarely comes home. The middle daughter, Annjee, is Sandy’s mother. She’s another hard-working woman, in service to a white family, but her focus is on her much-absent husband, Jimboy, not on her son. She works long hours, and when she’s home, she’s tired and depressed over Jimboy. He’s got itchy feet, never able to hold a job for long and constantly on the move looking for something better. And finally, the youngest daughter, Harriett, is a good-time girl. She wants better for herself. She is fiercely aware of racial injustice. And she doesn’t want to get trapped in the drudgery that rules the lives of her sisters and mother. She runs off to join a carnival. She resorts for a while to prostitution. But she finally finds her stride as a Blues singer.

Sandy is influenced by all of these family members. He grows up learning to take jobs wherever he can to help his grandmother and to have some spending money. But he’s also a fine student. He knows that a good education is his best hope of escaping poverty.

It was a little difficult settling into the book. The beginning uses a lot of Black dialect that, in this day and age, is disconcerting to read. But this is less pronounced, or less noticeable, as the book progresses and we are pulled deeper and deeper into Sandy’s life. The novel doesn’t shy away from his confusion and conflicted feelings. It presents the family members compassionately while showing them warts and all. It shows the differing struggles of the Black community in Kansas in that time period, but also brings to life their love and joy. 

BOOK REVIEW: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

I just (finally) finished The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, short-listed for the 2025 Booker Prize. A good short description comes from the book jacket: “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next.”

I enjoy sweeping, inter-generational family sagas in general, but this one got to be too much. The smallest part of the novel was the slow-motion love story between Sonia and Sunny. They are from the youngest of three generations covered in the book. The contemporary generation. They are from wealthy, higher-caste Indian families and are sent to the U.S. for college in order to make something of themselves and to bring prestige to their families. But in the U.S., they are lonely and unable to form healthy relationships, unable to find the lucrative careers that their families expect. Eventually, they have to find their way to each other, back in India.

However, this is not really their love story as much as it is the story of their relationships with their parents, their country, and their culture. The book takes the reader through the backstories and ongoing stories of family members and friends. And while it was interesting at first, I got bogged down in a narrative that didn’t seem to be going anywhere. The themes of alienation and dysfunctional families are not favorites of mine, and these themes seemed to swallow up all the others. The characters were all largely unhappy, unfulfilled, and selfish, which, although sadly realistic, made it difficult to sympathize with their plights. Eventually, in order to draw the disparate threads back together, it became necessary to rely on magical realism, and I’m not a magical realism fan. 

But this is a novel to read for the beauty of its language, not the plot or interwoven themes. And the language is beautiful. Mostly. The descriptions of setting and the deep psychological dives were compelling enough to keep me reading. But even that got to be too much. Like a lot of modern literary fiction, this novel showcases its lovely prose using lists. Lots of long lists. Inevitably, I’d find myself skimming.  

The book has earned a lot of praise, and it is certainly ambitious and sweeping. But it just wasn’t the right book for me.

BOOK REVIEW: The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur by Scott S. Greenberger

The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur by Scott S. Greenberger is our history/historical fiction book club’s next pick. Presidential biographies are not really my thing, but I’m glad to have read this one. I knew nothing about Arthur. He’s pretty obscure as presidents go. During the Gilded Age, he was James Garfield’s vice president so he became president when Garfield was assassinated.

This biography points out how Arthur was an important cog in the New York State Republican machine, a close underling of Roscoe Conkling. He was chin-deep in the corruption of the times and became a very wealthy man.

The thesis of this biography is that he turned over a new leaf when he became president, turning his back on his old machine cronies and trying to reform the spoils system. This was partly in response to letters written to him by a woman who was a stranger to him, who urged him to redeem his reputation while there was still time.

It’s an interesting picture of the man and his times, but I’m not sure I buy that his late turnaround redeemed him.

BOOK REVIEW: Sixty Seconds by Steven Mayfield

In Sixty Seconds by Steven Mayfield, it is one minute till midnight, Central European Time, one minute till 6:00 PM EST, on the eve of V-E day. In sixty seconds, the war with Hitler’s Germany will be over. But the quiet anticipatory lull one might expect is not there. Instead, that last minute is jam-packed with activity and danger.

Mayfield follows the stories of nine people who are experiencing that final minute, waiting for what will come next. He creates a gripping atmosphere of anticipation for the reader.

Farley is a war correspondent, a famous broadcaster, who is narrating the celebration about to erupt in Times Square. 

Selma is an elderly, mentally unstable widow, whose home is inundated with too many cats to count. She has enlisted Riley, a young man who flunked out of basic training, to carry out an assassination when the clock strikes 6:00 in New York.

Jenny is a 15-year-old girl with a remarkable voice and equally remarkable presence. She has been chosen to sing the national anthem to be broadcast worldwide as the clock ticks down. As she sings, she has to keep her mind from drifting to concern for her older brother, a gunner in the Air Force, who is still overseas and still in danger until the cease-fire takes effect.

Jimmy is Jenny’s brother. Although warned by his commander not to wander off the air field after dark, Jimmy continues a nightly walk to stretch his legs and clear his head. 

Stangl is a Nazi through and through. The one-time commander of a death camp, he is now imprisoned after capture by the Americans. He knows he is destined for execution. He is being interrogated by his captors, one of whom, the translator, had been a prisoner in the camp and had been forced to watch while Stengl repeatedly, brutally, raped his wife.

Antoni is the translator. Gosia is his wife. Gosia is now in New York, waiting for him to be able to join her. She is pregnant and her difficult  labor has begun.

And, finally, Zimmer is a German soldier, a reluctant Nazi, who hopes to survive long enough for the cease-fire to take hold. He’s counting on surrendering to the Americans to avoid capture by the Russians. But the closer he gets to safety, the less safe he becomes.

This tightly plotted novel follows the characters in ten second intervals, bringing them all closer and closer to the war’s end, revealing the interconnections between them. With sixty seconds still to go, the war isn’t over yet, and no one will be safe until it is. Deeply drawn characters, high-stakes tension, and a unique structure make this is an enjoyable WWII read.

BOOK REVIEW: Remember That Day by Mary Balogh

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

I love Mary Balogh’s historical romances. Her newest release, Remember That Day, brings together the Wares and the Westcotts, families whose courtships are featured in the Ravenswood Series and the Westcott Series. I’ve enjoyed both series and was happy to see them all meet. However, this latest novel is not one of my favorites. 

The premise is wonderful. Nicholas Ware, the second son in the Ware family, has been a soldier since he turned 18. Now in his thirties, with the Napoleonic Wars ended, he is in the Horse Guard. Although traumatized in his youth by the discovery of his father’s infidelity, and thus suspicious of love, he is ready to settle down and start a family. He is close with his commander’s daughter, Grace Haviland, and has decided to propose to her. She’s beautiful and essentially perfect, but she doesn’t stir his heart.

Winifred Cunningham is the adopted daughter of Camille Westcott and Joel Cunningham. She is unattractive. She was abandoned as a baby at an orphanage and has no idea who her parents might have been. Although much of her youth was spent insecure and desperate to be loved, she has matured to be a woman comfortable in her own skin, despite her lack of good looks and the fact that everyone who sets eyes upon her must think or comment upon this lack, often more than once. She, too, has given up on love. However, she is good friends with Owen Ware, who has similar ideas about helping troubled youths, and she has begun to hope he might fall in love with her and propose. Owen is Nicholas’ younger brother.

Nicholas and Winifred meet in London. And then they spend time together at a house party of sorts, where the two families come together, as well as the Havilands. It is more or less expected by all attendees that by the end of the visit, Nicholas will be engaged to Grace and Winifred will be engaged to Owen.

The slow-burn love story is sweet and engaging. The characters are all generous, kind, and understanding. The emotion and interiority is all signature Balogh style. However, too much of the novel is taken up with reminding the reader who all the players are. While it is good to have some of the reminders, the detailed pedigrees and backstories slow the pace and intrude too much on the story. They also make some of the dialogues feel unrealistic. Moreover, readers don’t really need to have every character remind us that Winifred is unattractive. Very few pages go by without someone reminding us of that fact. Even when Nicholas asks Winifred’s adoptive father for her hand, the father finds it hard to believe someone as good-looking as Nicholas could have fallen for his ugly daughter, and essentially says that out loud. I appreciate that Winifred has inner beauty and everyone can see it, but I still get the sense that they all think outer beauty is more important. 

Nevertheless, I still admire Mary Balogh’s romances and will certainly read the next.

BOOK REVIEW: The Air Between Us by Deborah Johnson

The first book for the new year is one that has been on my TBR pile for far too long. The author, Deborah Johnson, taught a class I took...back in 2023!...on writing historical fiction. She’s a great teacher, and I’m annoyed with myself for taking so long to read her work which, of course, I loved!

The Air Between Us is set in small-town Mississippi in the 1960s. It begins with a 10-year-old Black child emergently bringing a poor White man to the local hospital, a gut-shot hunter, a heavy drinker, who had fallen on his own gun. The hospital is owned by the town’s wealthy White surgeon., Dr. Connelly. It has a separate entrance and separate rooms for Black patients, who are treated by the town’s Black surgeon, Reese Jackson. This particular patient has supposedly been brought in just on time, and the surgery is supposed to have been a success. But shortly afterward, the man unexpectedly dies. This is the mystery at the book’s core.

But the answer to the mystery unfolds quietly in the midst of everything else going on, which has more import than one man’s strange death. Times are changing. The town has always been strictly segregated, but now Federal anti-segregation forces are at work. Surprisingly, it is Dr. Connelly who is fighting the hardest for the townfolk to accept integration of the schools. It’s even more surprising because his powerful father, a State Senator, is fiercely racist and has a weekly column in the newspaper where he spouts nastiness to keep the White folks riled.

The novel is written with multiple viewpoints, delving into the conflicts, relationships, and secrets of the townspeople. It deals with racial prejudice, but also class and gender politics. Violence simmers beneath the surface, catching the tensions of the period. And the ending surprised me.

If you like historical fiction, Southern fiction, or mysteries, this book is highly recommended!