Never Too Late for Summer Reading

This blog was originally titled “Late Summer Reading Part II” but obviously, I’m a bit late getting this one posted. After I wrote the first summer reading blog, I have taken book reviewing seriously and I have been reading as though I owed my English teacher back-to-school book reports. But hey, it’s still summer until next week, even if the beach in the rainy September weather just isn’t the same.

It’s certainly good to be expert at something, but when you are self-conscious about spouting off it’s good to have some background. I did get an M.A. in English from Wayne State University, but that was a while ago. In fact, since recovering from grad school, historical fiction has been my favorite flavor. And from recent reading, here are three great books that I can absolutely recommend:

The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies (available in paperback)
This brilliant novel is set in the mountainous Snowdonia region of northern Wales at the end of WWII. There are overlapping characters and plots: first, the story of Esther, the Welsh Girl for whom the book is named; second, the story of Rotheram, a military investigator who is assigned to interview the high profile prisoner of war Rudolph Hess; and finally, Karsten, the German prisoner of war whose love of the Welsh landscape includes Esther. Author Davies, it should be noted, is a local: he directs the Creative Writing program at U of M. The novel weaves the three characters’ story lines and points of view together, but also adds a sense of how their overlapping paths and worlds are themselves a force: having evolved at the end of the war, this relatively isolated place is changed permanently. Davies makes these changes quite clear, breathing life into small-town existence, where the outside world reaches in to rewrite local history. At the end of the novel, the outcomes are neither unexpected nor totally predictable in Davies’ deft hands.

The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard by Erin McGraw
This novel came to me as a galley that I snatched up at a booksellers’ conference last January, but it has only been released in the last month. At the turn of the twentieth century, Nell Plat is the wife of a Kansas farmer and the mother of two children who walks away from the monotony of all she has ever known to ply her trade in the already glamorous world of Hollywood. This is not the Hollywood of the thirties and forties, but Tinseltown in its infancy, when movies are just beginning to become a legitimate pastime and many moths are drawn to its flame. Nell reinvents herself as Madame Annelle, modiste, and her steps to success, while halting at times, give us ample room to understand the lot one women one hundred years ago, when any form of entertainment was of dubious virtue and value., and when actors and actresses were widely understood to be outside the bounds of Victorian propriety. This ability to summon a past that has been lost under layers of more familiar Hollywood history is the author’s finest achievement: I believe that this novel will become popular over time because of her deft ability to make Nell’s struggles seem somehow modern despite their vintage.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
This is a book that defies a lot of expectations. The title sounds cute and maybe a little silly, but the story is actually a=2 0war story about the German occupation of the Isle of Guernsey during World War II, covering lots of terrible ground. The novel is epistolary: it’s told entirely in letters, a form of storytelling that is not always easy to read. The large cast of characters is rather eccentric, but they become even more complex as the story progresses. As a young journalist puts together a book proposal, she interviews the surviving members of the GLPPPS, who continually complicate and confuse our view of the past as their recollections unfold. The exuberance of those who have survived the war is muted and tinged with the unfinished business of missing characters. But like The Welsh Girl, the novel gives a close view of the home front of that war as seen by those who live too close for comfort to its horror. Let me recommend this book as an uplifting read despite these would-be depression-inducing features. At the end of the book, I marveled at the way in which the authors craft this story, making everything that is askew seem ultimately perfect. There are few books that combine past and present as well as this current bestseller, which will be a great read for book groups and anyone who enjoys a cast of odd characters and an interesting plot.