Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Go Set a Watchman is not a novel. It’s a series of sketches that happen to use the same names and locale as To Kill a Mockingbird -- it includes several chapters that do nothing to advance anything, a few charming flashbacks to scenes with Jem and Dill, some gut-wrenching pages-and-pages of the most vile, racist stuff (being spoken by various people, including Atticus), & a spot of humor. As a book, its purpose is totally, totally different.

It should have been part of Lee’s papers, cataloged in some library, and accessible to scholars or other curious folk who wanted to see how the famous book began. Publishing it as a novel is just.plain.wrong.

And now there might be a third? oy.


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The Painted Bridge: A Novel by Wendy Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Newlywed Anna Palmer, haunted from childhood by dreams and visions of a drowning boy, is committed to the Lake House Asylum for women by her husband, mere weeks after their marriage.  He uses her sudden trip to help the victims of a shipwreck as his excuse. What normal woman in 1859 would do such a thing without first asking her husband's permission?

Before we meet Anna, however, we are confronted with the inverted image of another patient, Lizzie Button. Dr. Lucas St. Clair is photographing the patients and hoping that the new art form will form the basis of a reliable, scientific method of diagnosing madness.

It soon becomes clear that the director, Querios Abse, has no insight into his own troubled family, and not a trace of good intentions towards his patients. Neither do most of the caretakers, whose behaviors range from moderate kindness to stark brutality. While some of the patients are ill, others have been dumped by families who found them inconvenient. Querios's own daughter is starving herself to death while quoting from "Aurora Leigh" and trying to emulate a carnival attraction named The Fasting Girl, who supposedly lives on "drops of dew, brushed onto her lips with a feather."

While the reader never questions Anna's sanity, others do. The treatments she endures are both horrific and historically accurate: purges, chairs that whirl, isolation. They nearly unhinge Anna, who wonders anew at the visions and dreams that have given others license to support her husband's decisions. But who wouldn't begin to lose faith, imprisoned in a torture chamber and seemingly forgotten by the world?

I am giving this book four-and-a-half stars instead of five, only because the villains are depicted without a touch of nuance, and at least one major character is a touch too saintly. But I do, most definitely, recommend it as a story with atmosphere, ideas, insight, and a plot that will keep you engrossed.


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The Other Daughter

The Other Daughter by Lauren Willig
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rachel always thought her father was a botanist who died while he was away on a trip. Throughout her childhood, her mother maintained them as a respectable, if poor family. At the beginning of this engaging novel, Rachel has returned from seven years as a governess in France to find that her mother, dead of influenza, has kept secrets from her, secrets that change her life in ways she could never have dreamed: her father is neither dead nor a botanist. He is an earl - and he has another daughter!

Despite her loving cousin's protests, Rachel's feelings of betrayal lead her to concoct a scheme of revenge with Simon Montford, a handsome gossip columnist who has his own reasons to want to hurt the earl - and the other daughter. Their adventures amongst the glitterati of Jazz Age London and the earl's family change many lives, and will entertain the reader throughout.    

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.I also received a copy of the book from St. Martin's Press. Thanks to both!


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Circling the Sun

Circling the Sun by Paula McLain
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Early in this novel, young English expatriate Beryl Markham (nee Clutterbuck) is almost eaten by a lion. Paddy is kept on a neighbor's property and considered tame, but her father knows better: "he can only be exactly what he is, what his nature dictates, and nothing else." She already has been abandoned in Kenya by her mother, taught more about horses than society by her father, and befriended by a Kipsigi warrior and his son, Kibii.

She longs to be a warrior, too, but has been told it is impossible for a girl. Besides, says her friend, no one would ever know about her triumphs. "I would," she says. "Where's the glory in that?" he asks.

Young Beryl goes on to achieve many bold triumphs, and the world comes to know them. She becomes the first woman to be certified as a horse trainer (and thoroughbred breeder, with Kibii, now a warrior named Ruta). She becomes the first professional female pilot in Africa. Like the lion whose scars she bears, she can be sociable, she can do what others expect, but she can not deny her own wild nature -- not in the world of horses, not in the air, and not in love.

Thrice-married, she and Karen Blixen formed two sides of a love triangle with the doomed aviator, Denys Finch Hatton, whose death drove Karen Blixen back to Denmark, where she became Isak Dinesen and enchanted the world with Out of Africa. His death drove Beryl into the sky, where this novel begins, as she becomes the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.

Much of the novel takes place in and around Nairobi during the 1920s. The Happy Valley expatriates are contrasted with the lives of the farmers, animal breeders, and hunters who claimed the land for England. They may have been fooled if they they thought Africa could be tamed. Like the hungry lion, land and people will always retain their true and best nature.

The reader will be entranced, horrified, and engaged fully while reading this book - and after.

I received this book as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for a fair review, and in physical form from Random House. Thanks to both. 


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