Generations of History – The Night Travelers by Armando Lucas Correa

This novel is about four generations of women and has multiple settings: Nazi Germany, Cuba during both the Batista and Castro regimes, New York, and the reunited Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall and into the near present.

Ally is a beautiful young German poet in Berlin who has a relationship with Marcus, a Black German jazz musician, while Hitler and his Fascism is sweeping the country. Marcus eventually disappears and is presumed dead. Ally has given birth to a daughter, Lilith, a brilliant child whom she realizes she must hide away since the child is a Mischling – of two races – and forbidden and hated by the Nazis and their policy of racial purity. The two go out only by night where Lilith's darker skin tone and hair texture are not on display. 

Very painfully, Ally concludes she can only protect Lilith by sending her away, and the child joins the Herzogs, a Jewish couple on the ill-fated SS St. Louis on its way to Cuba, where they are some of the very small number allowed to enter that country, despite its promise to take in the ship's large number of Jewish refugees. The St. Louis will also be rejected by FDR's government, and returns to Germany, where its remaining passengers will be murdered in the concentration camps.

Lilith is raised by the Herzogs and eventually she and her closest friend, Martín, fall in love and marry. Martín is a Cuban air force  pilot and his family is close to the Batista government. The two have a daughter, Nadine, but Martín is killed when Castro takes over. Lilith, through contacts in the Catholic church, follows her mother Ally's path, and arranges for Nadine to be sent to Queens, New York where she is raised by a couple there – the man is a veteran of World War II, and his wife is a German immigrant he met while serving abroad. The wife hides a terrible secret.

Nadine inherits her mother's intelligence and becomes a scientist. She is multi-lingual and moves to Germany, where she marries Anton. They have a daughter, Luna, whose skin color echoes her grandmother's. As an adult, Luna, always a voracious reader and writer, convinces Nadine to explore her family history, something she has long avoided.

This is a complex story – part family saga, part historical epic, part study of the complexity of racial, religious, ethnic, and sexual preferences. It's beautifully written, and examines many difficult, challenging topics many authors, and readers, may choose to avoid, but there is much to learn here. 

I would also encourage readers not to skip the Author's Note following the end, which provides  background on some of the issues raised in the text, the first two paragraphs of the Acknowledgements, and the extensive Bibliography. This author truly did his homework... 

Violence Against Girls and Women – When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McClain

Due to the subject nature (abducted/missing young girls and teens), this was a tough book to get through. There is some violence, a lot of emotional stress and accounts of emotional abuse, and the suspense of the dark plot details. The book is set in 1993, during the search for abducted and murdered Polly Klaas, a young girl from Petaluma, CA.

Anna Hart is a San Francisco detective, specializing in missing persons. After a personal tragedy, unrevealed till much later in the book, her husband insists on a separation. Anna heads to Mendocino, the small California town where she grew up with foster parents Eden and Hap, who were kind and nurturing to her after the very difficult past of her earlier childhood. She finds a small cabin in the woods to rent, and acquires a dog.

Anna becomes embroiled in the search for Cameron, a missing girl, one of a few concurrent cases in Northern California, including the Klaas case, which is receiving a lot of media attention, partly because actress Winona Ryder, who grew up in Petaluma, has taken a personal interest. 

Cameron, the adopted daughter of a former actress and her producer husband, is a beautiful but sad girl who is dealing with early trauma, much of which is unknown to her parents. During Anna's intensive detective work on the case, she uncovers much about Cameron's early childhood, and finds Cameron's protective older brother, Hector, from whom she was separated when she was adopted.

While searching for Cameron, Anna is confronted with her own unresolved, unreconciled personal tragedies, both her current situation, and the earlier ones that haunt her. She becomes reacquainted with Will, the sheriff and an old friend, and Caleb, another, whose twin sister Jenny disappeared during their high school days.

The multiple threads of Cameron's case, and that of another girl named Shannen, and Anna's inner search for resolution with her past coincide and collide throughout this novel, but it never descends into melodrama, as the situations described are all too common, and in the Klaas case, real. 

By the end, nearly all of the tensions and conflicts reach a conclusion, though author Paula McClain does leave one untied thread...which I found both surprising and disappointing.

This subject matter is very disturbing, and since we read and hear about similar cases every day, it's also an important, urgent topic, one that certainly should not be diminished or dismissed by some of our political structures, which seem, in some cases, to care less about the ongoing care and nurturing of children, than than they do about their so-called "pro-life" stance, which ends once birth takes place. Those politicians, who are limiting the rights of women and girls, and who refuse to provide adequate funding to local governments who need help combatting the type of crime addressed in this book, need to be voted out. Please think about that in this very important election year.

 

Hearts of Gold – Curves for Days by Laura Moher

I don't usually choose "romance" novels but I took a chance on this one since it featured a less than ideally sized (meaning not thin) woman, at least one who saw herself that way. I was not disappointed.

Rose, our heroine, is a thirty-something woman who comes from a tough working-class background, and is alone in the world. She comes into a winning lottery ticket that nets her 80 million dollars, and finds herself surrounded with hangers-on and worse in Indianapolis. Wanting to escape that, as well as traumatic memories that led her to drop out of high school, after securing legal and financial help for managing the money, she buys a car and starts driving, eventually landing in a small town in North Carolina, where she begins to create a new life for herself.

Angus, also in his thirties, is a life-long resident of Rose's new town, and has a repetition for his gruff demeanor. He has a one-man contractor business, but also is a part-time mental counselor working with his fellow veterans, who are sufferers of PTSD, have drug and alcohol problems, and in some cases, debilitating effects of injuries from their service.

Rose buys a fixer-upper home and hires Angus as her contractor. Each of them is wary of the other, but gradually they form a friendship, and eventually more. How that all happens, and how the author presents Rose's desire and plan to do something productive with her newly-acquired money, and Angus's work with his clients, along with their ups and downs with each other, makes this novel quite a cut above what the reader might expect from romance fiction. I enjoyed it, was a bit sorry to have it end, and will look for more from this author. 

A Tale of Two Eileens: The Switch by Beth O'Leary

Such an easy to enjoy novel, set in London and a small village in the Yorkshire Dales, about two women, twenty-nine-ish Leena and her seventy-nine year old grandmother Eileen.

Leena is a high-octane rising-star executive at a consulting company in London, known for her outstanding presentations. She's in a relationship with Ethan, something of a male counterpart. Eileen is supercharged too, but as the get-it-done, list-making center of village activities, serving on every committee and a friend to all. Her former husband, Wade, left her for a dance instructor, but she's doing just fine without him.

The two form a sandwich of a relationship with Marian, Leena's mother/Eileen's daughter. What they all share is their deep grief over the recent loss of Carla, Marian's younger daughter, to an agonizing death from cancer. Leena and Marian are currently estranged.

Leena has a panic attack and meltdown at a presentation, and her kind (fortunately) boss, Rebecca, forces her to take a two-month leave of absence so she can heal and regroup. Leena confides in Eileen, who urges her to visit in the village. They decide, on a whim, to switch places for the two months: Leena will stay in Eileen's village cottage and Eileen will go to London to Leena's apartment, which will be a chance for her to grab a taste of her youthful dream to be an independent woman in the city.

While the overall plot is somewhat predictable, many unlikely and surprising events ensue, and the result is a contemporary, colorful, entertaining, and heartfelt story that most readers are likely to enjoy (and maybe envy a bit). I definitely recommend Beth O'Leary's The Switch.

Fair Maidens: We Came Here to Shine by Susie Orman Schnall

It was an interesting idea to set this novel against the backdrop of the 1939 World's Fair, and to include some of the most famous people in the popular culture of the time in the action, including Johnny Weissmuller (aka Tarzan of the movies), or as subsidiary figures to the story, Billy Rose (the theatrical showman and producer). There are some terrific historical details, such as descriptions of the architecture and events of the fair, such as the visit of King Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth (parents of the current Queen of England) and references to political figures including President Roosevelt and Governor Lehman of New York.

The fictional characters bring the book down because they are somewhat unbelievable, and don't quite hold up in the intermixing of historical and plot events. 

Vivi Holden is a young actress, originally from Brooklyn, but beginning to make her way in the movies, who is pulled from a leading role at a Hollywood studio and sent back East to replace real-life actress Eleanor Holm in the Aquacade (an eye popping water ballet that was one of the most popular entertainment events of the fair). That idea is hard to accept. 

Maxine Roth is a college student in the journalism department at New York University (NYU) who is sent to the Fair to work on its daily publication Today at the Fair as a summer intern. We read that she lives with her parents and sisters in an apartment on New York's Upper West Side, in Manhattan. It's confusing for contemporary readers to learn that Maxine worked on a college newspaper called The Heights, without some explanation. Today's NYU is well-known as a fixture of Greenwich Village, but during the time period of the novel, NYU's main campus was located in the University Heights section of The Bronx (in the 1960s, due to financial distress, it was sold and became the location of Bronx Community College). 

The two young women meet and bond, but their exploits both separately and together seem heavy-handed and contrived. I truly enjoyed reading about the fair, and author Susie Orman Schnall has done a wonderful job of capturing its physical aspects and describing some of its exhibits and amusements. Hats off to Schnall for her excellent research.