Short reviews of books by Mollie Moran, Ann Hood, Bill Bryson, Eva Petulengro, Lisa Wingate, Lucy Cooke, Christine Kenneally, Alexander McCall Smith
Aprons and Silverspoons
by Mollie Moran
One of the most thoroughly joyful books I can remember reading! The author seems to be an extraordinary human being – she wrote this at 96, and says she’s never been unhealthy in her life. Every photograph – and there are quite a few scattered throughout – shows a radiant, fun-loving, irrepressible woman, beaming from every pore. It’s a book about being a domestic servant in big houses in the 30’s – she started as a scullery maid at 14 – and at the end she says, “I suppose you could say I’ve been in the unique position of having been on both ends of the social scale, downstairs and upstairs, but believe me, I’m in no doubt which was the more fun place to be. The ten years I spent in domestic service were done in the happiest times of my life and have made me the woman I am today.”
She was a red-headed, fearless, mischievous teenager when she went into service, and was lucky enough to land in a house with a kindly boss and fabulous food. She gets into all sorts of scrapes, particularly with boys, as she was very interested in that stuff! And she had a best friend to lead astray – a fellow servant, who is still her great friend 80 years later.
There are also recipes scattered throughout, for classic English dishes using lots of butter, suet, cream, etc – the houses where she worked had their own farms and in those days everything was local.
I found the book restful and soothing to read because it is so happy, and so full of descriptions of the landscapes of Norfolk and the Fens.
The Obituary Writer
A Novel
by Ann Hood
A readable, well-written novel about grief and loss and love and romance. The stories of two women alternate and then overlap: a young woman loses her married lover in the 1906 SF earthquake, and becomes a gifted obituary writer for newspapers – the bereaved come to her directly and she comforts and listens and then crafts an obit. The Spanish flu comes along later and there is much bereavement. She also never stops hoping her lover has survived. Then, a young housewife in 1961 in Virginia falls in love with a married man and the husband catches them together. The descriptions of the mindset of that time and place are good; I did notice some historical anomalies (I don’t think people used saccharine yet in 1961, for example*) but I always find those in novels set in times when I was alive and the author was not yet! I can see there was a lot of care taken to try to get the details right, though.
I was brought in right on the first page and stayed interested till the end. The characters are likeable and the plotting original; the whole effect is feminine, feeling, clear, soft, merciless, and loving. The author says in an afterword that she herself lost a 5-year-old daughter. I’d not heard of this writer before but she’s written five other books.
[Note by editor: According to Wikipedia saccharine was invented in 1879 and became popular in WWI when sugar became scarce, as well as in the 60’s and 70’s among dieters.]
Down Under
by Bill Bryson
This funny, very readable, informative, informally-chatty travelogue is from 2000. Bryson loves Australia, and that affection and admiration shines through on every page. He likes to go on about poisonous creatures – who doesn’t? – and he does this in a way that makes you laugh out loud. He’s got history and sociology and ecology in here but so palatably that you never feel you’re being annoyingly instructed. I love the way he is so casually personal with everything that happens to him on a journey – the scenes, setbacks, discomforts… and so droll.
Basically this is a series of trips – he has to keep winging off for other commitments – but then he’s happy to come back and resume the adventure – and so are we. I’ve been to Australia once, in the late 80’s, and wouldn’t mind going again; so I had a bit of a sense about where he was and what he saw; in particular I laughed aloud at a whole page regarding the Australian fly and its habits, because in Melbourne I had written a little piece on exactly the same subject. I visited a friend and was accompanied by a fly, which waited outside the door until the visit concluded, and then met me again for my walk back to the tram. Bryson met lots of flies.
Caravans and Wedding Bands
Memories of a Romany Life
by Eva Petulengro
This is the sequel to one I reviewed not long ago. This irrepressible lady continues her work as a clairvoyant palmreader in Brighton, and a popular astrology columnist; her marriage works out as joyously as she’d hoped – in photos her husband clearly adores her and is utterly entertained by her. She is feisty and lovely and everybody laughs a lot and drinks a fair bit and often jumps in cars or caravans to go walkabout – except now Eva also flies off to Hollywood to read the palms of movie stars; and have dinner with them.
I enjoyed the upbeat, friendly-yet-no-nonsense tone, and the adventures – funny things happen, and the coziness of the Romany families is nice to read about: gatherings with cookouts and music and so on. And the families, mostly living in actual houses now, bring their adaptability and cleverness to house life as much as they had to caravan life.
Before We Were Yours
A Novel
by Lisa Wingate
A well-written novel based on a true story: between 1920 and 1950, a Memphis woman called Georgia Tann ran a series of orphanages which were lauded, supported, and patronised by rich people and celebrities. Patronised? Well, babies and children – especially if they had blond hair – were sold to rich people. For huge amounts of money. And Ms Tann acquired these little humans, via paid goons, in all sorts of ways: kidnapping, telling poor women who’ve just given birth that their babies were dead, swooping in and removing poor children from their families in the guise of Social Services. Thousands of children were ‘disappeared’ as well: troublesome babies set out in a pram in the sun to finish them off; disobedient children murdered and hidden in the swamps. The orphanages had the usual array of other horrors too: physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, bad food, siblings separated, shaming, etc etc. In a great many cases birth parents searched in grief for their kidnapped children, to no avail. The authorities protected the orphanages absolutely.
This fictionalised story, written by a former journalist, is about a family of ‘river gypsies ‘ where the young mother is birthing twins and has to be rushed to the hospital, leaving her 5 kids onboard their boat with a neighbour boy. The goons move in… This awful, hair-raising drama alternates with the story of a descendent of two of those kids, in the modern day, who is part of a wealthy political family. She realises that her grandmother has been hiding something about her past, and begins to investigate.
I particularly liked the descriptions of River Gypsy life – funky, free, poetical, musical – and the names the River Gypsy couple gave their children: Fern, Rill, Lark, Camellia, Gabion. A Deep Southern flavour imbued that part of the narrative, all damp and moss-hung and sensuous and rich with atmosphere.
The Unexpected Truth about Animals
Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos and Other Wild Tales
by Lucy Cooke
This funny and informative book is full of surprises. As the author looks at ancient, and merely old-fashioned, myths and misinformations about various animals, she supplies us with what modern research reveals instead. Pandas, vultures, frogs, sloths, beavers, hippos, and more, get their airing. We find out lots of sordid details about the sex lives of penguins – pretty gross! – and the fact that vultures’ stomach acids are so caustic that after eating, the vulture poos on its feet and legs to disinfect them from stomping about inside a corpse. It also, if alarmed at your close proximity, will vomit on you.
Frogs, cats, rabbits, have collided with aircraft at altitude – dropped by birds of prey! Hippos are on the loose in Colombia, imported stealthily in a private plane by a cocaine baron who was later shot by the police. The hippos easily left their pond and wandered… Arctic terns fly 3 million miles in a lifetime. The British killed off their storks long ago because “only God brings children,” while on the Continent they are revered. We learn how people finally figured out where eels breed, and about the intelligence of hyenas, and about an unsavoury experiment by a dad in the 60’s with raising a chimp along with his kids.
There are photos throughout, and whenever the author is in one she is grinning with delight at whatever specimen of wildlife she has in her hands. A fun book, full, however, with the foolishness of human beings! And some good new research.
The Invisible Story of the Human Race
How DNA and History Shape our Identities and Our Futures
by Christine Kenneally
This was fascinating. Genes, ancestry, history, health, the way that history impacts our DNA through our ancestors – a complex interweaving of factors, available to be read now as never before. The author is careful to emphasise the multiplicity of the factors and the breadth of our ignorance, even as she exults in the unfolding possibilities of reading all this stuff encoded in our cells.
The writing is engaging and accessible; the author is a young mother/scientist who lives in Melbourne.
An example: during slaving times certain coastal areas of Africa experienced hundreds of years where uncles routinely sold their nieces and nephews into slavery, and villages raided neighbouring ones to do the same. This did not happen in the mountains of the interior. To this day, the coastal peoples are mistrustful of relatives and friends to a high degree, whereas the mountain peoples are not.
And, in the 1300’s in Switzerland the Plague came along and some genius decided the Jews caused it. They caught hold of one and tortured him “with 12 reliable and upstanding witnesses” for three days, till he confessed to poisoning wells. Thereupon all over Europe, in many villages pogroms broke out. 600 years later, the exact villages where the pogroms had happened were the same ones where they happened again, during Hitler’s reign.
The author asks, How did this information get passed down?
She also brings together genetics and genealogy and introduces various scientists and gifted-amateur characters in both fields who have made discoveries. And she looks at what happens to children whose identities, ancestors, families, are denied them – as in 20th century orphanages in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the States. And she looks at deep history and pre-history – which I found really interesting.
There is conditioning and then there is genetics – and both, it seems, matter very much in our makeup. And our genetics, and thus those of our offspring, are affected by what happens to us.
The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
by Alexander McCall Smith
Such a good little book, spare, rich, human, expert, fun. The adventures of the Ladies’ Detective Agency and the romantic relationships of said ladies continue as the assistant detective, Mma Makutsi, is getting married. Meanwhile, a client comes with tales of two martyred cows, and Charlie the mechanic is being a youthful bad boy, and Mma Ramotswe is working her empathy magic on all sorts of situations.
Plus we get all this Botswana scene and scenery – tenderly drawn.
I found the book restful and delightful.
Featured image credit to Frédéric Forest, available as print from fredericforest.com
These reviews were first posted on Facebook by the author
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