looking back

The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg
Rating: 4.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction
Review: Doris Alm has lived a long and eventful life, from a poor childhood in Sweden, to modeling in Paris, to being a maid and companion to a frustrated artist.  Doris has loved, and lost, and would probably agree with Tennyson that that's better than the alternative.  But now she is concerned that when she dies, everything that has made up her life will die with her.  So she determines to write about the people she knew and the things she did.  She uses the red address book that her father gave her as a young girl as a prompt, as she looks through the pages and sees that nearly all of the names are crossed out and have the notation, "dead" written beside them.  The story alternates between these reflections and her current life, home-bound, with her only connection to the outside world being the aides who come in to help her each day and her weekly Skype sessions with her only family, her great-niece Jenny who lives in San Francisco.

This story is lovely, heartbreaking, tragic, and hopeful, all at the same time.  The writing is evocative, both the past and present sections, and beautifully translated by Alice Menzies.  Although it's slow to get into, Doris's story will sweep the reader along after the first few (short) sections.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

just keep telling the story

The Quintland Sisters by Shelley Wood
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: historical fiction
Review: The first 80% of this book is really quite good.  It details the better part of the first five years of the real-life Dionne Quintuplets, through the eyes of their fictional nurse, Emma Trimpany.  Emma is 17 in 1934 when she assists the midwife at the quints' birth, and has led a fairly sheltered life until then.  As the Depression deepens and the situation is Germany gets worse and worse, Emma's focus remains resolutely on her charges, staying with them even as many other caretakers come and go.  Even naive Emma is shaken by the conflicts between the quints' medical caretakers and their parents, and she can't entirely ignore hints that some people who claim to care for the quints are really there to exploit them, a list that starts with their parents and primary doctor and goes all the way up to the Canadian government.  Told through Emma's journals, and letters she receives, as well as newspaper articles that, we are told in the author's interview, are almost entirely unedited contemporaneous sources (and Wood carefully delineates where any edits have occurred), we get a good feel for the situation.

Throughout the book we read letters sent to Emma from her would-be beau, Lewis, and at the end of the book, Wood makes the unfortunate decision to give us all of Emma's letters in return, as a way of answering a lot of the questions that have come up in the narrative.  It amounts to an info-dump, at the end of  a well-told story.  I think Emma's letters were supposed to be the "big reveal," answering some questions about what was really going on, but I wish Wood had told her story more organically, giving us Emma's and Lewis's letters together and letting the tale unfold as it happened.  The ending is satisfying, in its way, but seems very ragged compared to the rest of the book.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.