THE SECRETS THEY HID, WWI family drama

THE SECRETS THEY HID
ROBERTA KAGAN
Self-published (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: All's not fair in love and war.

As the Great War rages, two brothers, Leo and Alex, are ensnared in a captivating love triangle with the stunning Adelaide. While Leo is the unwavering protector, Alex, the enigmatic seducer, ultimately captures Adelaide's heart.

Their lives are further complicated by a baby girl of hidden Jewish lineage—a secret burden Leo chooses to bear alone. When the brothers are drafted to war, their world is torn apart, leaving Adelaide to navigate the treacherous waters of survival and betrayal.

As years go by and the landscape of their homeland changes with Hitler's rise, the family secrets become a ticking time bomb. Margot's true lineage, hidden in plain sight, becomes the very thing that may tear the family apart.

Dive into Roberta Kagan's heart-stopping saga of love, secrets, and the harsh price of betrayal during one of history's darkest times.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Another day, another family saga.

Secrets, lies, reprobate men, stupid women who believe them; why does this plot still appeal? Because all of us like to see the struggle of life played out in such a deeply misguided way so we can feel smug, is my guess. "I wouldn't do that," we say, without thinking of the innumerable bad decisions we've made on any number of fronts.

I myownself liked the viewpoint of an ordinary, working-class family coping with the endless horrific challenges of economic and social chaos in the wake of devastating wartime losses and privations. Not so great for this reader was the writing style, which I'll characterize as "serviceable." So the focus of my attention is squarely on the way the grim costs of war and then defeat are borne by women. The role Adelaide fulfills, provider, nurturer, support and helpmeet, is frankly superhuman. The stoic resignation of the Heroic Woman was overplayed; the longing, yearning, crying out stuff wore on me.

The second part of the book is clearly the one that the author was more interested in. The three sisters raised by Saint Adelaide the Mother are coming of age just as Hitler is rising to power by promising to Make Germany Great Again. (This line never fails to get the stupids into line behind it, does it?) Of course, we know the future they're groping towards will explode a time-bomb that Alex planted decades ago, and Saint Adelaide the Mother isn't even aware of the awfulness ahead despite knowing only a little of the story.

Kitchen-sink drama and a setting we don't see often, from a viewpoint we see even less of than the setting. The one caution I'll repeat is that the writing isn't more than okay at any point, so if the time and place don't appeal, it's not likely to thrill you.

THE PRESIDENT'S WIFE, historical fiction about very interesting relationship that helped change the Constitution & world history

THE PRESIDENT'S WIFE
TRACEY ENERSON WOOD
Sourcebooks Landmark (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The incredible story of the First Lady who clandestinely assumed the presidency

Socialite Edith Bolling has been in no hurry to find a new husband since she was widowed, preferring to fill her days with good friends and travel. But the enchanting courting of President Woodrow Wilson wins Edith over and she becomes the First Lady of the United States. The position is uncomfortable for the fiercely independent Edith, but she's determined to rise to the challenges of her new marriage—from the bloodthirsty press to the shadows of the first World War.

Warming to her new role, Edith is soon indispensable to her husband's presidency. She replaces the staff that Woodrow finds distracting, and discusses policy with him daily. Throughout the war, she encrypts top- secret messages and despite lacking formal education becomes an important adviser. When peace talks begin in Europe, she attends at Woodrow's side. But just as the critical fight to ratify the treaty to end the war and create a League of Nations in order to prevent another, Woodrow's always-delicate health takes a dramatic turn for the worse. In her determination to preserve both his progress and his reputation, Edith all but assumes the presidency herself.

Now, Edith must contend with the demands of a tumultuous country, the secrets of Woodrow's true condition, and the potentially devastating consequences of her failure. At once sweeping and intimate, The President's Wife is an astonishing portrait of a courageous First Lady and the sacrifices she made to protect her husband and her country at all costs.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Charming historical fiction about two people of riper years whose love for each other is tested, re-tested, and ultimately short-lived due to death.

So many things about Woodrow Wilson are awful to me. A racist, an ivory-tower academic without the track record to be the strong-arming law-ramming president thr first World War demanded; but most of all the man who gave away the keys to the economy to the banksters of Jekyll Island's cabal in 1913, thus dooming us to cycles of boom and bust that would only get worse every time the banksters clawed more money from our pockets to feed their greed and gambling addiction.

*ahem*

That not being what this book's about, let me tell you about it, not him.

First of all, it's a novel about two older people whose lives are mostly behind them finding comfort and companionship at the end. That one of them is the president of the US is, in a strange way, tangential to their story. They had a true connection to each other as people, as a man and a woman left alone by the deaths of their spouses. Author Wood gives us the sense that, had they met without this central fact being present, they likely would've had an affair because they were so simpatico. The way their relationship played out, so very publicly, and at such high volume, meant that the end of the affair was inevitably going to be marriage...nothing less would assuage the "moral standards" of the day. Edith Bolling was, thank goodness, a practical person, aware of the world around her and its demands; also to be praised is her full belief in Wilson's political and social progressivism (as far as it went, anyway), so her voice was added to his, not in conflict with it in the battles he was waging.

The Great War, as World War One was called at the time, was only one item on Wilson's plate and isn't the major focus of the book. More weight is given to the all-important enfranchisement of women. This is the one unqualified success of Wilson's presidency. Edith Bolling Wilson was influential on the president's support for this amendment to the Constitution.

Again, more important than the history lesson of the book is the close relationship between these two people. The background of their lives together was always public, and the work they did together was consequential to this very day. But they themselves, as people, are Author Wood's focus. She does not present them as superhuman archetypes. Thy are believable characters, strong people with powerful convictions, who found each other in the last act of the play that is a human's life. Their needs and their interests matched so well that it feels, to this elderly reader, as though they each found the satisfaction of an entire lifetime's search for their best partner.

It's a fine story, about interesting people, and it's told well. Enjoy it soon.

Book-A-Day #8: REGENERATION, my favorite Great War novel

REGENERATION
PAT BARKER
Plume Books
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Regeneration, one in Pat Barker's series of novels confronting the psychological effects of World War I, focuses on treatment methods during the war and the story of a decorated English officer sent to a military hospital after publicly declaring he will no longer fight. Yet the novel is much more. Written in sparse prose that is shockingly clear -- the descriptions of electronic treatments are particularly harrowing -- it combines real-life characters and events with fictional ones in a work that examines the insanity of war like no other. Barker also weaves in issues of class and politics in this compactly powerful book. Other books in the series include The Eye in the Door and the Booker Award-winner The Ghost Road.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt is to discuss the Great War novel you loved best.

This was *hard* because there have been several, two in the past year!, Great War-themed novels that I really love. I spent a sleepless night thinking about this. I re-read portions of both my recent reads that suit the prompt, and as much as I was enwrapt in [The Daughters of Mars], feeling the swirl and ebb of tidal feeling, I was utterly immersed in [Regeneration], I felt I was *there* and I was simply, unaccountably, invisible to the characters and so not remarked upon.

I know that Ms. Barker was born in 1943...imagine! 1943! Were there *people* then?...and so could not have witnessed the events that so utterly traumatized Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and so many thousands of other men, but you couldn't prove it by this:

Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough's army, than to think they'd been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice, saying: 'Run along, little man, be glad you've survived'.

If that doesn't sound exactly like something a survivor would think, I don't know what does. And yet she's 25 years younger than Armistice Day! Channeling? Spirit possession? Filing clerk for the Akashic Records Office?

That last sounds about right...anyway, there we are mise en scene with the survivors, the ones confronting a world that feels empowered to judge them for their responses to stimuli unknown to mere civilians:

The way I see it, when you put the uniform on, in effect you sign a contract. And you don't back out of a contract merely because you've changed your mind. You can still speak up for your principles, you can still argue against the ones you're being made to fight for, but in the end you do the job.

Doesn't that sound like someone who hasn't had to do the job issuing a pronunciamento? An armchair warrior speaking from the privileged place of one who is defended, not one who defends. It was ever thus.

What a horror, then, to be trapped between a world that you fought to save, and that world's utter inability and complete unwillingness to learn what you lived:

This reinforced Rivers’s view that it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition. That would help to account for the greater prevalence of anxiety neuroses and hysterical disorders in women in peacetime, since their relatively more confined lives gave them fewer opportunities of reacting to stress in active and constructive ways. Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace.

That kind of knowledge would devastate Society! Undermine the Divinely Ordained Rules! Heresy!! It must be the case that these damaged men were weak, weak I say, unmanly and unworthy! It cannot be that what they lived through damaged them by its nature, or else codified gender (and skin-color) inequality is Wrong. And we all know that it is Right!

Ugh. But blessedly, the Great War began a process of (wrenching, painful) psychic change that the Ruling Elite has been resisting, beating back, discrediting at every opportunity, and with increasing success, for 95 years:

It was... the Great White God de-throned, I suppose. Because we did, we quite unselfconsciously assumed we were the measure of all things. That was how we approached them. And suddenly I saw that we weren't the measure of all things, but that there was no measure.

Look at the returned Iraq War and Afghan War veterans...disillusioned, mutilated in body and in soul even when bodies are whole, record numbers of veteran suicides stand to our national, human discredit, exactly as they did then, and all because:

You know you're walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can't because everybody else thinks it's your face.

If that sentence does not make you weep actual physical tears of helpless sadness and empathetic misery, you are wanting in basic human kindness.

In the end, the reason I selected this book as my favorite Great War novel ahead of all others, is this simple distillation of the pointlessness of war in the face of its costs:

And as soon as you accepted that the man’s breakdown was a consequence of his war experience rather than his own innate weakness, then inevitably the war became the issue. And the therapy was a test, not only of the genuineness of the individual’s symptoms, but also of the validity of the demands the war was making on him. Rivers had survived partly by suppressing his awareness of this. But then along came Sassoon and made the justifiability of the war a matter for constant, open debate, and that suppression was no longer possible.

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