SKYLARK, Author Paula McLain's dual-timelines historical Paris novel

SKYLARK
PAULA McLAIN
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: The New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Wife weaves a mesmerizing tale of Paris above and below—where a woman’s quest for artistic freedom in 1664 intertwines with a doctor’s dangerous mission during the German occupation in the 1940s, revealing a story of courage and resistance that transcends time.

1664: Alouette Voland is the daughter of a master dyer at the famed Gobelin Tapestry Works, who secretly dreams of escaping her circumstances and creating her own masterpiece. When her father is unjustly imprisoned, Alouette's efforts to save him lead to her own confinement in the notorious Salpêtrière asylum, where thousands of women are held captive and cruelly treated. But within its grim walls, she discovers a small group of brave allies, and the possibility of a life bigger than she ever imagined.

1939: Kristof Larson is a medical student beginning his psychiatric residency in Paris, whose neighbors on the Rue de Gobelins are a Jewish family who have fled Poland. When Nazi forces descend on the city, Kristof becomes their only hope for survival, even as his work as a doctor is jeopardized.

A spellbinding and transportive look at a side of Paris known to very few—the underground city that is a mirror reflection of the glories above—Paula McLain’s unforgettable new novel chronicles two parallel journeys of defiance and rescue that connect in ways both surprising and deeply moving.

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My Review: Tunnels, underground/out of sight communication, hidden pathways...thematically this is the heart of Author McLain's story. The literal, factual tunnels under Paris start us out on the careful and hazardous reality of being a woman or, later, that other despised minority a Jew...yes, women were a social minority, rendered voiceless and affectless the way minorities always are...so we're going underground to follow them as they fight to survive without being Seen and still being effective actors in society. Spoiler alert: It doesn't go well.

There ya go. That's the story. It took almost five hundred pages of pretty sentences to get there.

They are pretty sentences but honestly, taken out of context they're pretty much meaningless. Describing a sculpture made by a side character, "... a lark with wings unfurled, fashioned from pale limestone with such delicate precision that it seems almost alive," is lovely...but its entire reason for being described is in fact its meaning and that's a gestalt. This is not a criticism of the writing, it's a statement of why I'm not quoting a lot more pretty sentences.

In my opinion reading this really interesting story-idea could have been a lot more fun had the author been less pretty and more concise in her writing. It's a fine way to spend a weekend in the company of two people marginalized for being...unpopular because they're Other...but I don't know that I felt adequately entertained to justify the length of time it all took to come together.

THE LAST OF EARTH, Tibetan national survival has been under threat forever

THE LAST OF EARTH
DEEPA ANAPPARA
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning author of Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line comes a stunning historical novel set in nineteenth-century Tibet that follows two outsiders—an Indian schoolteacher spying for the British Empire and an English “lady” explorer—as they venture into a forbidden kingdom.

1869. Tibet is closed to Europeans, an infuriating obstruction for the rap¬idly expanding British Empire. In response, Britain begins training Indians—permitted to cross borders that white men may not—to undertake illicit, dangerous surveying expeditions into Tibet.

Balram is one such surveyor-spy, an Indian schoolteacher who, for several years, has worked for the British, often alongside his dearest friend, Gyan. But Gyan went missing on his last expedition and is rumored to be imprisoned within Tibet. Desperate to rescue his friend, Balram agrees to guide an English captain on a foolhardy mission: After years of paying others to do the exploring, the captain, disguised as a monk, wants to personally chart a river that runs through southern Tibet. Their path will cross fatefully with that of another Westerner in disguise, fifty-year-old Katherine. Denied a fellowship in the all-male Royal Geographical Society in London, she intends to be the first European woman to reach Lhasa.

As Balram and Katherine make their way into Tibet, they will face storms and bandits, snow leopards and soldiers, fevers and frostbite. What’s more, they will have to battle their own doubts, ambitions, grief, and pasts in order to survive the treacherous landscape.

A polyphonic novel about the various ways humans try to leave a mark on the world—from the enduring nature of family and friendship to the egomania and obsessions of the colonial enterprise—The Last of Earth confirms Deepa Anappara as one of our greatest and most ambitious storytellers.

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My Review: Tibet closed itself off from the Western powers playing "the Great Game," as it was dismissively described from 1840 onwards, because they saw its awful effects on India, Nepal, Burma, and China. The British took this as a challenge, like Katherine in this story...a mixed-race woman thwarted in desire to join the Royal Geographical Society despite her surveying achievements. They set about circumventing the Tibetans' desire to be left in peace (Katherine by disguising herself to become the first European woman to enter Lhasa) by training Indians like Balram in this story to survey the land for them. These men and one pretender disguise their purpose by the faking the trading of goods into and out of the country, pretending to be religious pilgrims visiting the holy places, and other subterfuges. (When your country covers the headwaters of the main waterways serving multiple billions of people, isolation is an untenable fantasy.)

The novel begins in 1869, a time when Tibet was also fighting the Qing Dynasty for territorial integrity. Its diplomatice relations with Nepal were strained by this series of wars. It is, then, a story of people doing things that are reprehensible and selfish at a time of upheaval engineered by reprehensible and selfish colonial powers. The different PoVs are each checked in with in alternating sections. It's a technique with many advantages, like avoiding awkward and forced joinings of forces, as well as perils, like leaving one PoV at a critical juncture for long enough to vitiate the plot's momentum. Both happen here. It is not as though there is a shortage of story; it's action that takes the hit.

Duty, freedom, self-willed assertions of independence, are all present in micro- and macro-scale facets of the plot. It never gets terribly deep into the whys and wherefores on the personal or the political scales. Like the prose itself, it limns the surfaces and reflects the highlights but leaves off before any deep diving takes place. I was utterly rapt at the descriptive language used for the landscapes, the customs, and the cultures around the characters. I felt distant from them, though, like they were cameras and I was viewing their footage played back after editing into a narrative.

Distanced as I was, I was quite clearly inspired to go poking around into the faxtual history of the time and place. Author Anappara has done this to me before: taken a truly epic story with ramifications reverberant well beyond the slice she chooses for her focus. It's clearly working on me at one level. I am once againg stopping short of a full five-star rating because I'm in too many places, too much is touched on but not explored, for the read to merit that accolade.

It's not like it was a failure of a read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was ready to pick it back up, but I was also ready to put it down to look up the details I wanted to know more about.

The BOOKBINDER'S SECRET, debut historical mystery set in a biblioholic's fever dream

The BOOKBINDER'S SECRET
A.D. BELL
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Every book tells a story. This one tells a secret.

A young bookbinder begins a hunt for the truth when a confession hidden beneath the binding of a burned book reveals a story of forbidden love, lost fortune, and murder.

Lilian ("Lily") Delaney, apprentice to a master bookbinder in Oxford in 1901, chafes at the confines of her life. She is trapped between the oppressiveness of her father’s failing bookshop and still being an apprentice in a man’s profession. But when she’s given a burned book during a visit to a collector, she finds, hidden beneath the binding, a fifty-year-old letter speaking of love, fortune, and murder.

Lily is pulled into the mystery of the young lovers, a story of forbidden love, and discovers there are more books and more hidden pages telling their story. Lilian becomes obsessed with the story but she is not the only one looking for the remaining books and what began as a diverting intrigue quickly becomes a very dangerous pursuit.

Lily's search leads her from the eccentric booksellers of London to the private libraries of unscrupulous collectors and the dusty archives of society papers, deep into the heart of the mystery. But with sinister forces closing in, willing to do anything for the books, Lilian’s world begins to fall apart and she must decide if uncovering the truth is worth the risk to her own life.

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My Review: I was suckered in by "forbidden love" in the description. It does not mean queer love. It means a girl of "gentle birth" (SOMEone's never been in a delivery room, there is not one single thing gentle about birth) falling for a lower-class boy, being thwarted in her desire for him, and the very tedious and predictable consequences thereof.

All of this features in the mystery the young bookbinder's apprentice is required to solve by her...compulsion, I guess...to have some control over something in her life. Her status as a 1901, so transition between Victorian and Edwardian, woman means she's hemmed in on all sides in spite of being her antiquarian-bookseller father's heir and an apprentice bookbinder of significant skill.

She is, in other words, that most dangerous of people: One who knows just enough to know she is second-class by other people's designs. Those are the people who foment revolution, who commit violent crimes, who rise up for their own benefit. Lily's many steps above her peers because she's got a (failing?) business coming to her, she's learning a skilled trade, and by and large is left to her own devices to live her life as she sees fit.

Which leads me to that missing star. Lily has two suitors and pursues relationships with each unremarked on...in 1901. It's the unremarked on that is the bridge too far in straining my suspension of disbelief. She'd have A Reputation, be called names, be gossiped about. As we're never in the men's company for long enough to form our own opinion about them, at least the gossiping neighbors could've filled us in. Also, the mystery is set in 1851...how did it end? Why do I care if a mid-Victorian pairing gets consummated? For that matter, why does Lily, except to distract herself from the unsatisfying life she's leading?

I liked very much the bookbinding bits. I honestly got invested in Lily's struggles with discovering clues, being perfectly willing to lie and steal to acquire them; but also was sure this would not have gone unremarked in her small professional world. For all of my willingness to meet the book halfway, this was my quarter-star docking point. In the future installments of the series this is clearly meant to be I hope some judicious pruning will cut some redundancies, some peril will attach to Lily's unconventional lifestyle, and her men will either be more present or at least gossiped about.

STATE OF EMERGENCY, historical novel about Singapore, Malaya, and how Malaysia came to be

STATE OF EMERGENCY
JEREMY TIANG
World Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.99 trade paper

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Siew Li leaves her husband and children in Tiong Bahru to fight for freedom in the jungles of Malaya. Decades later, a Malaysian journalist returns to her homeland to uncover the truth of a massacre committed during the Emergency. And in Singapore, Siew Li's niece Stella finds herself accused of being a Marxist conspirator.

Jeremy Tiang's debut novel dives into the tumultuous days of leftist movements and political detentions in Singapore and Malaysia. It follows an extended family from the 1940s to the present day as they navigate the choppy political currents of the region. What happens when the things that divide us also bind us together?

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My Review: What happens when a woman dedicates herself to The Cause (whichever one it might be)? The kind of dedication that requires her to leave family behind, the way men have for millennia? She gets special treatment, in the worst sense of the words "special" when she is caught by the apparatus of state repression. That apparatus crushes communist cadres for the British Empire, then the state that became Malaysia, because heaven knows we can't have people thinking they have rights, deserve consultation on the way they'll be governed, any of that disorderly democratic foolishness! The people don't know (ever, according to their rulers) what is good for them! We'll have to lock 'em up and torture 'em for a while. How long? Who asked you, foreigner, to butt into our business?! Hand over some money so we can torture a few people you don't like, shut up and go away.

Authoritarians all have their eyes on the same hymnal, their hands in the same pot, and their souls AWOL. Doesn't matter the name of their "belief/political system" because they in themselves do not change.

Now that you're all ready for the read...understand that the prose is good but simple (Something heavy was settling onto her, an unpleasant awareness that the world was aslant and she was at the higher end. What could she do?), the characters are good but simple, the world they want to create is good but simple. I learned a good deal about the Emergency, something I wasn't very familiar with compared to the contemporaneous Viet Cong insurgency against the French. Unsurprising from a US reader...and also clear proof British propaganda efforts to keep the monster of American public opinion far away from the fraying Empire's horrific abuses.

There are six loosely linked PoVs in the story. It isn't the smoothest narrative technique but, for this time-hopping story, it works to the advantage of the tale of the Emergency as it develops and resonates through this clan's life. You'll need to be aware of who is addressing you to fully invest in their story, but it is not made difficult for you by Author Tiang. No unusual demands on your concentration are made, no mid-narrative jumps or other such Woolfian stuff; making it into Orlando: A Biography is not his aim.

I found its structure and its voice very easy to immerse myself into, allowing new information to settle into the places I lacked it. I was surprised to learn that women would be aware of what awaited them but still join the rebels. Sexist assumptions are hard to shed, clearly. Very much an ongoing project and welcome to find it reinforced here.

I'm ready for Author Tiang's next book whenever it comes. He has that thing no one can teach: Seeing his story through to its own ends. Nothing forced or misplaced. I'd've bestowed that fifth star had he done a tad bit more to signal how the interconnections really worked, but that isn't a full-star-off offense.

GLORIOUS EXPLOITS, and glorious they are! Humor, pathos, sharp observation...all in this compact true tale

GLORIOUS EXPLOITS
FERDIA LENNON
Henry Holt and Co.
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Longlisted for the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction! "A Shortlist will be chosen by the judges and announced on April 15th, and the winner will be announced at the Borders Book Festival and at Abbotsford between 12th and 15th June."

Ferdia Lennon: "I was tired of ancient Greek or Roman characters sounding as if they’ve stepped out of a Merchant Ivory production"

Rating: 5* SIX (6)* of five

The Publisher Says: An utterly original celebration of that which binds humanity across battle lines and history.

On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.

Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.

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My Review: Graft Irish brogue onto ancient Syracusan and Athenian combatants, set the story in the aftermath of the Athenian defeat at Syracuse with its famously weird resolution to the problem the Syracusans had with what to do with the POWs, and make a buddy comedy out of it.

Of COURSE I asked for this book!

The titanic tragedies unfolding in today’s world are nothing new. The sheer number of us alive on Earth compared to three thousand...heck, three hundred...years ago means there are higher head counts in the disasters, but not greater or even equal proportions of the population. The scale of Athens’s humiliation, and her losses, in the failed imperial project that included her attempt at conquering Syracuse, rivals the British losses in World War I. An entire generation gone. The scale of democracy’s failings, and this imperial expansionist war was directly down to a democratic vote in Athens, has always been epic. After all, no government is one tiny bit better than its people force it to be.

So Gelon and Lampo get the historically accurate job of dealing with the horribly immiserated prisoners chucked down into the quarry to die. The solution has not changed. We get to see it all from the viewpoints of the two men who more or less came up with the solution, though. Gelon is sort of a sad soul, a man who is aware of and burdened by awareness of, the pointlessness of existence. Does any of this really matter, on can hear Gelon wondering inside himself. He finds no joy in the deaths the Athenians are doomed to, especially since it means he...and the world, of course...won’t get to hear the latest Euripides hit The Trojan Women. Because of course Gelon is all about the tragedian Euripides.

Lampo...get it?...finds light gleaming in all darknesses, Lampo thinks the Athenians must be good for something...and entertaining the Syracusans with the latest and greatest plays from cultural hub Athens is just the ticket. The men overhear the Athenians lightening ther last hours with dialogue from the current Athenian version of the West End/Broadway season, and hey presto a solution to the awful moral conundrum of just letting human beings die in misery comes. Lampo is the instigator of the full cast revival of the play, and convinces the angry Syracusans...even the guy with the club who’s taking revenge for his lost sons by killing every Athenian he possibly can...to set aside their hatred and listen to this brand-new play from the cultural capital of the world.

Setting aside the utter weirdness of this story’s factual reality...we know it really happened...this could have been a retelling of the events that went heavy on Message, bearing down hard on whichever piece caught Author Ferdia’s fancy. Instead he lets the reader select the message they want from the many on offer. Start with an Irish voice telling, in English, a tale of a violently failed colonial enterprise. I trust I do not need to go too far on that one to bring it into focus for you. Move to the unemployed potters, those craftworkers whose job it is to take dirt and turn it into useful and often beautiful things for people to benefit from, who see the utility and the necessity for using these aggressors for some kind of benefit to those they harmed. A tale, then, of restitution, never a bad thing to bring into the modern world. But then look again: the actors are there, able and ready to do their jobs, but unnoticed until summoned into being as actors by capitalist producers, who in case this parallel to the modern world slid past you, make no effort whatever to compensate the creator of the play they are producing. And the actors making the play are, it should not go unremarked on, living below the poverty level and thus are ready to do anything to stay alive.

And, should all that be more than you want to deal with in your present mood, this short novel can simply and pleasurably entertain you with its surreal blend of fact, fiction, and Aristophanes-level multilayered comedy.

Laugh along. Think deeply. Enjoy the music. You pick, you are the one who makes this read...all Author Ferdia did was find the story for you. I can’t recommend it highly enough.