Historical richness: ‘Threadbare’ by Jane Loeb Rubin
I reviewed US author Jane Loeb Rubin’s debut novel In the Hands of Women last year. Her second novel has been released recently and is actually a prequel to the first, as it tells the story of the experiences of refugees and immigrants in New York in the late 1800’s.
Once again there is a treasure trove of historical riches in this book. The main character is Tillie, a girl whose aspirations to attend high school are cut short by the tragic death of her mother from breast cancer. Tillie is left in charge of helping her father run their farm in Harlem, on what was then the northern outskirts of the city. She also keeps house and looks after her younger siblings, including Hannah, who is the main character featured in In the Hands of Women. In this new novel we get a fuller understanding of the tough circumstances in which Hannah’s life began, and the sacrifices made by her older sister.
Tillie marries at sixteen and fortunately – for it’s a match arranged in part by the local Rabbi – it is a mostly happy one. However her new husband brings her to live in the tenements of New York’s lower east side, notorious for their terrible squalor and poverty. The plan is to stay here only temporarily until they can save enough to move to a better area.
Tillie’s refuge is the local Jewish centre with its lending library, where she begins teaching English to the many people from Europe crowding into the city.
She helps her husband with his business selling buttons to the burgeoning clothing trade in the city, and becomes fascinated by fashions and the beautiful clothing she sees, but can never afford. During this time the family experience the trauma of the infectious diseases that run rampant through the poorly ventilated apartment buildings, and the death of an infant.
As an aside, I looked on Google maps to get an idea of the areas being described in the book. I was pleased to note that in the district where Tillie and Abe first live, there is now a museum dedicated to telling the stories of the many immigrant communities who lived here from the nineteenth century. The link to the Tenement Museum is here, if you are interested. If I ever get to New York City, it will be on my ‘to do’ list for sure.
As Abe’s business grows they move to a newer apartment and things begin to look up for the family. With her best friend Sadie, Tillie starts a business, making kits for poorer women to be able to sew their own clothes, using patterns rather like the ones my own mother used to buy, to sew for herself and her family.
I always love learning the ‘back story’ of a place, a company or industry, and Threadbare provides so much of the history of ‘Gilded Age’ New York – which was anything but gilded for its poorer citizens, especially women. Contraceptive devices and abortions were illegal then and made life so much harder for poor women and their families – something that Tillie herself experiences. There is also the scourge of diseases such as tuberculosis and women’s cancers, at a time when germ theory was a relatively new idea and surgical and other medical treatments still far from those we would recognise today.
Especially vivid in Threadbare is the way in which women in business were ignored, patronised, or ridiculed. Tillie’s husband must accompany her to meetings with potential business partners even though the ideas being pitched were hers and Sadie’s.
As in the best historical fiction, Threadbare offers opportunities to learn about the past while enjoying an engrossing story about believable and sympathetic characters. The ups and downs of Tillie’s life had me cheering her on, metaphorically speaking, and hoping that the many obstacles lined up against her could disappear. They don’t, of course, but in the process of her dealing with them we see what determination and courage look like.
As always with such stories, I drew particular pleasure from the fact that Tillie is inspired by the author’s real-life great-grandmother, Mathilde, who had arrived with her family from Germany in the 1860s. I can’t think of a better way to honour an ancestor than by writing a book inspired by their life!
Threadbare is published in 2024 by Level Best Books.
Regency adventures: ‘The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered ladies’ by Alison Goodman
‘Welcome to the secret life of the Colebrook twins: unnoticed old maids to most, but unseen champions to those in need – society be damned.’
The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered LadiesFans of Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels and the TV hits Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte will welcome this romp-with-a-twist through Georgian society.
Far from simpering ‘young gels’, the Colebrooks (Augusta and Julia) are spinsters of what was then regarded as advanced age – late thirties and early forties. Rather late to still be unmarried.
Augusta (‘Gus’) decides to take matters into her own hands when she learns that her good friend’s goddaughter is being cruelly mistreated and kept a virtual prisoner by an abusive husband. She hatches a plan to rescue young Caroline and Julia becomes her sidekick – somewhat reluctantly and certainly with misgivings, but wholeheartedly once they both realise the seriousness of Caroline’s situation.
The mission presents many dangers, especially once their carriage is held up by a highwayman on the way to their destination, and Gus accidentally shoots the man on horseback, who has demanded their money and jewellery.
Once she realises he is someone they knew from years before – Lord Bevan who was exiled to Australia after being accused of murder – the sisters’ plans begin to unravel in a hilarious way. Despite the setbacks, they succeed in rescuing Caroline and this whets Gus’s appetite for more adventures – much to her sister’s dismay.
Gus and Julia are very different women, bound by deep love for the other, and they bring a different skill set to each of their subsequent missions to help badly used women. Lord Bevan plays a role and of course there is a blossoming romance (it would hardly be a Regency novel without it, right?)
The fun of the novel is coupled with some devastating scenarios that beset many women during this time. The graceful gowns, satin slippers and elegant manners of polite society were accompanied by laws and attitudes that seriously disadvantaged women, sometimes to the point of threatening their lives.
I loved seeing Gus and Julia sally forth on their pursuit of justice for other women. They are heroines we can admire and enjoy – while men provide assistance, the brains of the outfit definitely resides in female heads!
There is apparently a sequel on the way and I look forward to more fun with the ill-mannered ladies.
The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies was published by HarperCollins in June 2023.
Behind the scenes: ‘The Mystery Writer’ by Sulari Gentill
I first fell in love with the work of Australian best-selling author Sulari Gentill with her historical crime fiction Roland Sinclair series, which combine my love of the two genres of historical and crime fiction in a brilliant and somewhat addictive way.
Since the last book about Roland and his friends, Ms Gentill has written several stand-alone novels, set in contemporary America. A theme that unites these disparate stories is the ‘behind the scenes’ glimpses of the worlds of writing and publishing, with twisty tales of dark deeds threaded throughout.
The Mystery Writer is set in middle America, a town called Lawrence in Kansas. This is where Australian student Theodosia arrives unexpectedly on her older brother Gus’ doorstep. She has left behind a partly completed law degree and brings with her a burning desire to become a writer.
She meets a best-selling author Dan and a friendship starts to form, but to her horror, Theo discovers Dan dead on the floor of his apartment, his throat cut.
The murders begin to mount up and Theo is suddenly the prime suspect. What can she do to protect herself, her brother and his friend Mac? She has to make a difficult choice which leads to devastating consequences.
Gradually she understands that Dan’s life and death have a connection to a dark web network of conspiracy theorist fantasists and ‘preppers’. The online posts of key members of this group preface each chapter of the novel, and are by turns hilarious and chilling.
In the midst of all the dramatic events, Theo receives an offer of representation by the literary agency connected with Dan. A condition is that Theo turns over total control of her social media and online presence to the agency for management by them. She is assured that this is standard procedure. We are left to wonder if this is true…
The novel explores how fictional narratives can be used to vicariously wield political and business influence. While this is in a context of a piece of fiction, it is worth thinking about in the broader sense, given the events that we’ve seen in US, British and Australian politics, economies and societies over past years.
Theo, Gus and Mac are all sympathetic and relatable characters,; the tension is nicely calibrated throughout the novel. It’s a book that will please crime and mystery readers and which also provokes some thought about the online worlds we now inhabit.
The Mystery Writer is published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, in March 2024.
My thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for an ebook copy to review.Perfect: ‘The Bookbinder of Jericho’ by Pip Williams
Do you know the feeling when you treat yourself to a new book purchase and, because you have several other books to read first, it sits on your bookshelf or bedside table for a while? Every time you pass it, you have a warm feeling inside. I will get to you soon, you promise. There is often great pleasure to be had in the anticipation of pleasure.
That was me with The Bookbinder of Jericho. I had (like so many others around the world) fallen in love with Pip William’s 2020 novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words, and so I was very pleased when I learned she was writing a second novel set in Oxford in the World War I era. Having at last been able to read it, I can say with certainty that it will be one of my standout reads for 2023.
Pip Williams writes the best kind of historical fiction: stories about real places and events, with characters to care deeply about. Fiction that tells us something about who we are today and how we got here. The past is the recipe for the present, whether we know it or not. These types of novels illuminate how and why.
The Bookbinder of Jericho stands on its own as a perfect story; there is no need to have read the earlier book. It is not a prequel or a sequel, but a companion novel. Having said that, I did have little thrills of recognition as characters or references from the first book made brief but profound appearances in this new story.
The narrative centers around the people in the ‘bindery’ of Oxford University Press: almost all women, they were the workers who gathered, folded and stitched the printed pages into books. This work is imbued with a grace and dignity; though never glamorised. In the early twentieth century, there was a steep price to be paid for being working class and a woman. Even as Britain moved towards women’s suffrage, this initially only applied for women who owned property or wealth.
Peggy is one of the ‘bindery girls’ but she longs to be able to have the words in her mind as well as the papers in her hands. She is told more times than she can remember, Your job is to bind the books, not read them. Her twin sister, Maud, is special: a ‘one of a kind’, loved by her family and neighbours, though Peggy has moments of wondering what life would be like without the responsibility of caring for her sister.
The sisters live on a narrowboat moored on the river, which sounds romantic but is also cold in winter, hot in summer, and very cramped.
Their tiny home is filled with bookshelves installed when their mother was alive, containing bound and loose leaf printings of books or parts of books, collected by Peggy and her mother when rejected as ‘waste’ at the printer or bindery. The girls’ mother introduced them to classics and works of antiquity, such as Homer’s Odysseus. Peggy dreams of entering the women’s college of Oxford university, just across the road from the bindery where she goes to work every day.
‘I’m from Jericho, Bastiaan, not Oxford. I left school at twelve, and Homer was not in the curriculum at St Barnabas – not in English and certainly not in Ancient Greek.’
The Bookbinder of Jericho p258
‘But why not in English?’
‘There was no point. Our destinies were too ordinary to bother the gods, and our journeys would take us no further than the Press.’
‘The same Press that prints Homer in English and Ancient Greek?’
I raised my eyebrows and did my best impression of Mrs Hogg.
‘Your job, Miss Jones, is to bind the books, not read them.Then WWI breaks out and life changes for everyone.
This is the story of women’s work and their challenges; the prison that social class and gender expectations create for everyone; the way war both damages and destroys, yet can open new opportunities for some.
Especially it is the story of people and relationships: how they can hurt and heal; how friendship and love can embrace and nurture even in the darkest of circumstances; how some injuries cannot be healed.
For me, it is a perfect piece of historical fiction. I loved this book.
The Bookbinder of Jericho was published by Affirm Press in 2023.
Here is a little video showing the author folding, stitching, and binding her own printed book – just as the bindery girls did in the novel.
Friendships and memory: ‘True Friends’ by Patti Miller
Upon opening Australian author Patti Miller’s latest book, I immediately began thinking about my own friends, past and present. I have been fortunate to have experienced sustained, deep, nurturing friendships throughout my life, but of course there have been some that have fallen away as the years went on – mostly gradually through changed life circumstances, but one or two abruptly and somewhat painfully.
True Friends is an exploration of friendship but also of memory: when considering the people and events in our past, what Patti Miller calls the ‘questionable vault of memory’ will inevitably get things wrong, or in a muddled order. Tightly linked with memories are sounds, smells, tastes, places, feelings; even if we get some facts wrong, these things bind the event or moment to the memory and help to bring it alive once again.
First there is the original experience, but even at that stage, before interpretation or memory, so much is unobserved, unrecorded. A few moments of colour and sound are partially registered and then all that is left are the neurotransmitters floating from axon to dendrite, hopefully creating a neural pathway. The lovely, faulty, biochemical science of friendship.
True Friends p167She describes the epic poem Gilgamesh, written on clay tablets up to two thousand years before Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey were written, as the first story – and it is, essentially, all about friendship. The need for connection, contact and understanding with another is a fundamental trait from the deep past of humanity right through to modern times. Thinking about this, I wondered why there have not been many more non-fiction books on the topic of friends.
This book is about friendships generally, and the author’s friendships specifically, but it is told through the framing device of one friendship in particular which did not last, and which ended in a way that left her feeling bewildered and hurt. She describes the period of time during which she struggled to recognise the end of the relationship as ‘the long bewilderment.’
I’m certain that many reading this book will recognise the pain of this.
Overall, though, the book is a hymn to friends and the richness they add to our lives, in all their complexities and challenges:
For me, loving friendship is not a fusion with another, but it is a rickety swing bridge to a separate being, and even though I know it can fall away in to the abyss, the urge to step onto it is always there…when I am with a friend, I am woven into the human mystery.
True Friends p279I have enjoyed every book by Patti Miller that I have read, and this one is no exception. It is a book to savour, one that made me laugh and sigh in recognition, and that I continued to think about long after I’d closed the cover.
True Friends is published by University of Queensland Press in 2022.
My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.
Stories and silences: ‘After Story’ by Larissa Behrendt
Amongst loss, you need to hold onto what you still have.’
After Story p260What do Australian First Nation’s cultural stories and history have to do with the writings and times of Dickens, Shakespeare, Woolfe, Keats or Austen? The surprising answers to this question are to be found in the pages of After Story, by First Nations lawyer, academic, author, speaker and film-maker Larissa Behrendt.
A tragic loss opens the story, one that forever scars Della and her family. All the other events of the novel hang off that one devastating event and its consequences.
Years later, Della accompanies her now adult daughter Jasmine on a literary tour of England, taking in the places where many of the ‘greats’ of British literature were born, or lived, or worked.
Jasmine sees books as her escape from the claustrophobia, racism and limited opportunities of the small town in which she grew up. She has read widely, graduated from university, and now works in a legal career. She invites Della on the tour with her as a way of bridging the gap that has arisen between them over the years. Alternating viewpoints allow us to experience both women’s perspectives on the tour. Della’s viewpoint is less sophisticated than her daughter’s, especially as she knows little about the writers and their works, but no less heartfelt or insightful for that.
At every significant place visited, the characters in the group chat, argue and reflect on the particular writer, their historical context and achievements. The author has skillfully linked all of these with commentary and reflections on Aboriginal experiences. An example: when told of the plague that struck England during Shakespeare’s time, followed by London’s Great Fire in 1666, Della relates these catastrophic events to the smallpox outbreak and land dispossession that decimated First Nations communities in the earliest years of English settlement:
I thought about what it must have been like for those Aboriginal people who watched the world around them change hard and fast when the colony was set up, who had to watch the destruction of the life they knew.
After Story p43Della’s deceased Aunty Eileen is an important, if unseen, character. It is through Della’s and Jasmine’s remembered conversations with her, that key features of Aboriginal culture, history and beliefs are shared and further linked to European lives and histories. Gazing at a copy of the Magna Carta in the British Library, Jasmine reflects that:
If Dickens reminded us that the system is not fair, here was the hope, the ancient promise, that it might be. Aunty Elaine’s generation had advocated for changes that made opportunities in my life different from those for Mum and Dad. It’s not just the words on the page but the people who push the ideas at the heart of them who really alter the world.
After Story p82The characters are all three dimensional and fresh, their struggles real, and at times there are uncomfortable moments, as the author invites us to consider our own culture’s role in the theft, forgetting or dismissal of cultures other than our own. But for anyone who loves literature and/or stories and their long histories, this is a book to relish, made all the more special by the weaving together of old and contemporary, indigenous and non-indigenous traditions, tragedy and loss with hope and love.
After Story was published by Queensland University Press in 2021.
The sweetness of friendships: ‘Birds of a Feather’ by Tricia Stringer
It’s good to branch out into a genre you don’t generally read much of, or an author not encountered before, and that’s what I’ve done with this contemporary fiction by Australian author Tricia Stringer.
Birds of a Feather is all about family and friendships, old and new. Set in fictional Wallaby Bay on South Australia’s Spencer Gulf, the story features three very different women. There is Eve, battling to maintain her independence after a crippling shoulder injury; her goddaughter Julia, struggling with suppressed grief and the sudden loss of her scientific research job; and Lucy, trying to be the best mother she can be to her two young children, and coping with the absence of her FIFO (Fly In Fly Out) husband.
The first part of the novel sets up the circumstances that bring these characters together: at first unwillingly, each feeling their way in a new situation, trying to overcome mistrust, hesitation and past hurts. Once the women are together, the story really gets going. Before that, there are hints and veiled references to their back stories, tensions, traumas and the circumstances that shaped each one, and it is fun to put their stories together as the novel goes along.
There are references to the Covid pandemic and the dilemmas faced by people like Lucy, an aged care worker, who must try to deal with an emotionally and physically draining experience while also worrying about her kids. It’s a very real scenario that brings home the additional challenges the pandemic introduced to already complicated lives.
The author captures the small town atmosphere beautifully: all the strengths of rural communities, along with the downsides that can accompany living in a place where everyone knows everybody else (and their business).
I found it soothing to be lost in the minutia of others’ lives, and the novel’s resolution was satisfying, even though some aspects felt a bit too tidy.
Birds of a Feather will be an enjoyable read for people who like to read character-based contemporary fiction about real-life struggles and challenges and the ways in which they can be overcome.
Birds of a Feather is published by HQ Fiction, an imprint of Harlequin Enterprises, in December 2021.
My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.Colonial women: ‘Daughter of the Hunter Valley’ by Paula J Beavan
In my deep dive into family history during the 2021 Covid lockdown in NSW, I realised that the Hunter Valley played a big role in my paternal ancestors’ lives. Both Great-Grandparents emigrated from England in the mid nineteenth century as children and lived out their lives in the Maitland and Newcastle regions. So it was with interest that I picked up Paula J Bevan’s novel which is set in the 1830’s along the Hunter River.
The heroine, Maddy, is newly arrived from England. Her father has established a farm there and planned to bring his wife and daughter to live in the colony with him; but Maddy’s mother died before she could embark on the voyage, and Maddy arrives alone to break the awful news. To her horror, the very next day her father drowns in the river and Maddy must decide what to do: return to England; or stay in NSW and try to make a new life for herself?
She decides to stay and finish creating the house and farm that her father had begun; but it is a very different world for a young woman from the green gentility of country England. The house her father promised is largely still plans on a page, so Maddy must live in a rough hut with two convict women, and she has to quickly learn how to run a property with only assigned convict labourers, and Daniel Coulter, the overseer, to work the land. There is heat, dust, unfamiliar wildlife and unaccustomed threats, and plenty of hard work. To her surprise, Maddy finds that the new life agrees with her as she gradually becomes part of the local settler community.
The original inhabitants of the region are the Worranua people; they get sidelong references in the narrative, which I found disappointing, though perhaps historically accurate; as many European settlers preferred not to think of the people whose lands they had taken. There is, however, a complicated cast of characters from properties nearby, who I found a little hard to sort out in my head. There are also convicts, bushrangers and an orphaned child.
I enjoyed Maddy’s development from a confused, grieving daughter to a more assured young woman forging a new life for herself. The author based some of Maddy’s character on colonial women who stepped up to run estates in their men’s absence, and I always love it when I read fiction based in part on real people or events.
Daughter of the Hunter Valley is primarily a romance, and I did find Maddy’s preoccupation with Daniel a little annoying after a while – as was her tendency to blush whenever she saw him!
The strength of the novel is in its finely observed portrayal of early colonial life away from the Sydney township; the new environment in which the settlers found themselves, and the hardships they faced. I could picture my own ancestors in similar circumstances in similar locations. Knowing that they, too, had dispossessed Worranua in order to create this new life is uncomfortable, but it is part of my personal history and the history of this country. There are, no doubt, echoes of Maddy’s story in the lives of many of those who came as colonisers to this country.
Daughter of the Hunter Valley is published by HarperCollins in September 2021.
My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.
Australian Women Writers’ Challenge 2021: my Aussie reading year
This year I signed up to read at least 10 books by Australian women writers and review at least 6. On this score at least, I am an over-achiever! As at the beginning of September, I had read (and posted reviews for) 30 books by Aussie women. I think next year I’ll need to aim for the top level of AWW Challenge. It is not hard for me to read plenty of books by the wonderful and talented authors we have here in this country.
My 2021 reading ranged across multiple genres, from historical fiction (always a favourite, especially Australian history and stories featuring women in WWII, which is a theme that has become very popular in recent years); memoir, history, quite a few children’s books, true crime and crime fiction.
My standout reads by Aussie women so far for 2021?
These four spoke to me the loudest (the links are to my reviews):
People of the River by Grace Karskens (non-fiction, history) This one, by the way, recently won the Australian history prize as part of the NSW Premier’s History Awards.
The Things We Cannot Say by Kelly Rimmer (historical fiction)
Ten Thousand Aftershocks by Michelle Tom
Of the children’s books, Night Ride into Danger by the marvellous Jackie French
Thank you to the wonderful Australian Women Writers’ Challenge for another year of fabulous reading. If you haven’t checked out the AWW website, be sure to have a look. You will find so many recommendations for new authors and books to discover.
Cold War deceptions: ‘Our Woman in Moscow’ by Beatriz Williams
The cover of this new title by best-selling US author Beatriz Williams is emblematic of the deceptions she writes about. A glamorous woman in a snowy city, walking towards her fate… The thing is, this is a story of two women, sisters Iris and Ruth, neither of whom (despite initial impressions) are people who passively await what the future might bring.
The story plunges us head-first into the murky world of post-WWII espionage, via Iris and Ruth’s very different pathways out of the war. Loyalties, family bonds and assumptions are all put to the test when Iris sends a message to her sister – after nearly a decade of estrangement and silence between them. She needs Ruth to come to Moscow, where Iris lives with her husband since his defection to the Soviet Union. She is about to give birth to her fourth child, and with a history of difficult, dangerous childbirths behind her, she pleads for Ruth’s support.
Ruth’s journey to the Soviet city sets in motion a complex series of events and uncovers layers of deception and of course, dangers. I was immediately invested in the fate of Iris and Sasha, Ruth and Fox, and the novel was, for me, an absolute page-turner.
What I enjoyed most was the focus on the relationships, rather than gun battles and car chase scenes as in a James Bond spy story- which can get, frankly, yawn-worthy. Rather, we witness two sisters realising new truths about each other; a crumbling marriage and a new, unlikely, relationship; and the unravelling of long-held beliefs. Ms. Williams borrows certain famous Cold War era episodes and characters to weave her own story around, but there are echoes of truth that are as relevant now as in 1948:
“It’s all these chaps, you know, bright young things who radicalized at university in the thirties, when the capitalist economies went to pieces. They very fashionably joined the Community Party as students and ended up recruited {by} the Soviet intelligence service.”
Our Woman in Moscow p169
“But surely they all shed their illusions as they got older?”
“Most of them, of course. I daresay the Nazi-Soviet pact did for a great many. Stalin’s thuggery, the famines. But it’s like a religion, you know. To the true fanatic, everything and anything can be twisted around to prove what you believe in.”The characters are complex, believable – and damaged, all of them, by conflict and deception. I enjoyed this novel very much and will be on the watch for future titles by this author.
Our Woman in Moscow is published by HarperCollins Publishers in Australia in September 2021.
My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.
