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THE LAST TELEGRAM

Name: THE LAST TELEGRAM
Author: Liz Trenow
ISBN: 978-1-4022-7945-4

by Liz Trenow ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2013

Trenow, who serves as a perfect example of the old adage that you should write what you know—she’s the descendant of...

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A routine World War II romance, Trenow’s debut, is distinguished by the author’s smooth-as-silk delivery.

Lily is in the twilight of life as she sorts through the remnants of her past at her rural British home, The Chestnuts. When her granddaughter finds a locked briefcase in a closet, she’s flooded with memories of her youth, including a guilty secret she’s harbored for many years. Lily’s story, told in hindsight, is the tale of a young woman who discovers love and purpose while learning the intricacies of the family business under the tutelage of Gwen, the assistant factory manager. As her friendship with Gwen deepens and the inevitability of war edges closer, Lily excitedly accompanies her brother to a party where she meets pilot Robert Cameron. He visits the family at The Chestnuts and persuades her father and brother to invest in machinery that will enable the mill to manufacture silk for parachutes. A wise venture, their business deal keeps the factory operating and enables the Verner family to sponsor three German refugees and to provide them with jobs and a cottage. Much to her father’s dismay, Lily rebuffs Robert’s romantic advances and falls in love with Stefan, one of the refugees. She’s heartbroken when England enters the war, her brother enlists in the RAF, and Stefan and the two other refugees are taken into custody and shipped to an internment camp in Australia. As the war rages, Lily becomes her father’s assistant and suddenly is thrust into the directorship, which she manages with Gwen’s assistance. She and Stefan have kept their love alive via post, and when he returns to England, now called Stephen Holmes, their romance strengthens. The story takes a predictable path and ends on a too-perfect note, but nevertheless, it’s worth reading.

Trenow, who serves as a perfect example of the old adage that you should write what you know—she’s the descendant of generations of weavers—has penned a mellifluous, impeccably researched narrative.

Pub Date: April 2, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-4022-7945-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark

Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION

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BEFORE WE WERE YOURS

by Lisa Wingate ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 6, 2017

Wingate sheds light on a shameful true story of child exploitation but is less successful in engaging readers in her...

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Avery Stafford, a lawyer, descendant of two prominent Southern families and daughter of a distinguished senator, discovers a family secret that alters her perspective on heritage.

Wingate (Sisters, 2016, etc.) shifts the story in her latest novel between present and past as Avery uncovers evidence that her Grandma Judy was a victim of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society and is related to a woman Avery and her father meet when he visits a nursing home. Although Avery is living at home to help her parents through her father’s cancer treatment, she is also being groomed for her own political career. Readers learn that investigating her family’s past is not part of Avery's scripted existence, but Wingate's attempts to make her seem torn about this are never fully developed, and descriptions of her chemistry with a man she meets as she's searching are also unconvincing. Sections describing the real-life orphanage director Georgia Tann, who stole poor children, mistreated them, and placed them for adoption with wealthy clients—including Joan Crawford and June Allyson—are more vivid, as are passages about Grandma Judy and her siblings. Wingate’s fans and readers who enjoy family dramas will find enough to entertain them, and book clubs may enjoy dissecting the relationship and historical issues in the book.

Wingate sheds light on a shameful true story of child exploitation but is less successful in engaging readers in her fictional characters' lives.

Pub Date: June 6, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-425-28468-1

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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WASHINGTON BLACK

by Esi Edugyan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 2018

A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.

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High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists marks this runaway-slave narrative, which leaps, sails, and soars from Caribbean cane fields to the fringes of the frozen Arctic and across a whole ocean.

It's 1830 on the island of Barbados, and a 12-year-old slave named George Washington Black wakes up every hot morning to cruelties administered to him and other black men, women, and children toiling on a sugar plantation owned by the coldblooded Erasmus Wilde. Christopher, one of Erasmus’ brothers, is a flamboyant oddball with insatiable curiosity toward scientific matters and enlightened views on social progress. Upon first encountering young Wash, Christopher, also known as Titch, insists on acquiring him from his brother as his personal valet and research assistant. Neither Erasmus nor Wash is pleased by this transaction, and one of the Wildes' cousins, the dour, mysterious Philip, is baffled by it. But then Philip kills himself in Wash’s presence, and Christopher, knowing the boy will be unjustly blamed and executed for the death, activates his hot air balloon, the Cloud-cutter, to carry both himself and Wash northward into a turbulent storm. So begins one of the most unconventional escapes from slavery ever chronicled as Wash and Titch lose their balloon but are carried the rest of the way to America by a ship co-captained by German-born twins of wildly differing temperaments. Once in Norfolk, Virginia, they meet with a sexton with a scientific interest in dead tissue and a moral interest in ferrying other runaway slaves through the Underground Railroad. Rather than join them on their journey, Wash continues to travel with Titch for a reunion with the Wildes' father, an Arctic explorer, north of Canada. Their odyssey takes even more unexpected turns, and soon Wash finds himself alone and adrift in the unfamiliar world as “a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind…running, always running from the dimmest of shadows.” Canadian novelist Edugyan (Half-Blood Blues, 2012, etc.) displays as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as her main characters in spinning this yarn, and the reader’s expectations are upended almost as often as her hero’s.

A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.