Anne Frank Remembered

Anne Frank Remembered, Miep Gies with Alison Leslie Gold  (TBR shelves, 2019)

Anne Frank was recently featured as a "Person of the Week" on the BBC History Extra podcast, which reminded me that I have had this book on the TBR shelves for a good while. I was also reminded by finding on the library sale shelves Etty Hillesum's An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork, described as "the adult counterpart to Anne Frank."

As far as I can remember, reading Anne Frank's diary was my introduction to the Holocaust, as I think it must have been for others in my generation in the US. I owned a copy of the original edition, and when I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam after college, I bought the expanded version published later. I wish I could remember more about that visit now.

Though I haven't read the Diary in a few years, the story that Miep Gies told in her memoir was very familiar, but it was so interesting to see that familiar story from the other side of the door into the Secret Annex. This is also the first memoir I have read about life in occupied Holland during World War II. Both Miep and her husband Jan (Henk in Anne's diary) were active in the Resistance, beyond helping those in the Annex. I did not know that Miep was born in Vienna (in 1909) and sent to Holland after the Great War as part of a program to help feed children amidst post-war shortages. She never returned to live in Austria, but when the Nazis invaded Holland, she was classified as a citizen of the Reich, which distressed her and complicated her life and resistance work.

Miep Gies's narrative about the struggles of life in wartime, with the constant shortages, and also the constant small acts of resistance, is compelling. I also appreciated that her memoir covered the years after the war, and the changes in her life and in her country. I have Dutch ancestry through my father's side of the family, which I have only just begun to learn more about. I would like to visit again some day. In the meantime, I am very glad to have this on the shelves next to Anne Frank's famous diary.

Editing this to add: after hitting "publish" I realized I have read another memoir of life in the Netherlands during the war, Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place. I might need to read that one again.

Returning to Singapore, after the war

 The Angsana Tree Mystery, Ovidia Yu  (TBR shelves, 2024)

This is the eighth book in Ovidia Yu's Crown Colony series of mysteries, this one set in 1946. As soon I saw it was coming out this year, I knew it would be one of my 52 books for 2024. And I see that she has already announced a new one for next year, The Rose Apple Tree Mystery, so there's the first book for my 2025 list.

The first book in this series, The Frangipani Tree Mystery, is set in 1936, with Singapore a British Crown Colony but with Japanese power gathering in the east. The last four books were set during World War II and the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, and they were dark and sometimes difficult to read - not because of the mysterious deaths, though I am sometimes surprised by violent turns in the stories, but because of the brutal treatment of Singapore's residents and the struggles they go through just to survive. Ovidia Yu noted that she drew on her mother's experiences in the war in writing these books.

The Angsana Tree Mystery is the first set after the end of the war. Singapore is again a Crown Colony under British administration, but political change, and upheaval, is in the air with the push for independence from colonial rule in India, Malaya, Burma, spreading across the east. In Singapore, there are tensions as the residents are trying to rebuild from the devastation of the war and occupation, while British administrators reassert their authority. Su Lin has been working with her former boss in the police force, Thomas Le Froy, managing a public health service project. He has been accused of embezzling the funds, so their work is on hold, as is their tentative romance (which honestly, I have a little trouble believing in). Su Lin is bringing some holiday treats for the upcoming Dragon Boat Festival to another family when she finds one of the daughters standing over a dead body. She knows that Mei Mei Pang couldn't have killed the man, and she immediately starts trying both to help her through the shock and to find out who did. Spoiler alert: there are more dead bodies to come.

This is a complicated story, one I sometimes had a little trouble following, but I enjoyed meeting Su Lin and her redoubtable grandmother Chen Tai again. As always I found the Singapore setting fascinating. It is a place I hope to visit some day. This year I also enjoyed Oanh Ngo Usadi's memoir of her U.S family's relocation to Singapore, Hawker Dreams. I look forward to my next fictional visit.

"True Stories of Regency Romance"

The Game of Hearts, Felicity Day  (TBR shelves, 2024)

My first draft started with a rant about the Bridgerton series, because my North American edition of this has a big button that read "For Fans of Bridgerton." I've deleted it as off-topic, but I will say that if I had seen the UK cover first, I'd have clicked with no hesitation to buy my copy.

Even the subtitle is better: "The lives and loves of Regency women."

In this history, Felicity Day looks at the women in the highest circles of society, the "Ton" and those who aspired to join them. She uses letters, diaries, memoirs, and newspaper articles to explore courtship and marriage, continuing beyond wedding ceremonies (to my surprise, often at home with only a few guests, and by special license) into married life. She also looks at how marriages ended, whether by death or divorce. The sources partly explain her focus on the upper levels of society, because these were the people with leisure and the means to write, whose records have been best preserved over the years. Day follows six women in detail, with a host of supporting characters - sisters and other family members, friends, rivals, in-laws. I recognized some of the names from other reading, particularly Georgette Heyer.

With chapters covering topics like "The Price of Love" (settlements and financial matters) and "The Power of Refusal" (what options women had), Day moves beyond the tropes of romantic fiction and also looks at several commonly-held assumptions about women in the Regency period. Companionate marriages were becoming the norm in this period, so parents were less likely to pressure their daughters for dynastic or financial connections. There was also no pressure for a woman to marry in her first season, lest she be considered "on the shelf" or in Georgette Heyer's phrase, an "ape-leader" in a cap at age 20 or 21. Day reports women marrying into their 30s and 40s.

I very much enjoyed meeting the Regency women featured and learning about their lives. The illustrations are both beautiful and informative. I particularly appreciated the pictures of some of the women and men featured, which helped make their stories feel more real. There are even two photographs, as Felicity Day carries some of their stories in her last chapter down into the later Victorian era. This book was more serious than I expected from the North American cover, and I'm very glad to have read it.

More Mr. Fortune, please

Mr Fortune, Please, H.C. Bailey  (TBR shelves, 2024)

I was introduced to H.C. Bailey and his sleuth Reggie Fortune through the British Library collections of Golden Age crime stories edited by Martin Edwards. I took an immediate liking to both author and character and started looking for more of Bailey's work. I didn't have much luck, with most of his books being out of print, since as Martin Edwards and others have said, Bailey fell out of favor after the Second World War. I resigned myself to scouring each new Crimes Classics collection as it came out, hoping for a Reggie Fortune story (and was usually disappointed).

One of my favorite podcasts, "Shedunnit," recently featured Mr Fortune, Please, as part of the host Caroline Crampton's read through the Green Penguins. Caroline mentioned that due to the differences in British and US copyright laws, this book is available in the US. After a few more minutes listening, I had to put the podcast on hold until I could get the book for myself (and not just to avoid spoilers). It was wonderful to be back with Reggie and the Scotland Yard officers he assists as a forensics expert, with cases new to me. I did note that these stories, originally published in 1927, date before he meets and marries his wife Joan, and I missed her.

There are six stories in this collection, slightly longer than a usual "short story" but not novella length. I had read only one, "The Little House," in the Capital Crimes collection. They are a mix of cases, some of theft rather than murder. One turns on a rumor of buried treasure, another on a missing kitten. I was surprised that one of the stories begins with a theft of jewelry, and while Reggie works out who the thief is, he takes no action toward that person. In several of the cases, Reggie is at odds with the local police force when they are too quick to find a solution, especially when they stubbornly hold on to their solution, and when it threatens a person whom Reggie's investigation has proven to be innocent. As he says at one point, "Mercy - that's not my department. I work for justice." He is always concerned for those accused unjustly, for the vulnerable who may be denied justice, and he will not be silent in those situations. I find that aspect of the stories moving and powerful.

After finishing these stories, I wanted more of Mr. Fortune. I found two modern reprints of story collections available, so that's two more slots filled on my "52 books" list for this year.

An angel and a demon decide to immigrate

When the Angels Left the Old Country, Sacha Lamb  (library book)

I don't remember where I saw this book recommended, but I was intrigued enough to put it on my library list.

"Uriel the angel and Little Ash (short for Ashmedai) are the only two supernatural creatures in their shtetl (which is so tiny, it doesn't have a name other than Shtetl). The angel and the demon have been studying together for centuries, but pogroms and the search for a new life have drawn all the young people from their village to America. When one of those young emigrants goes missing, Uriel and Little Ash set off to find her. Along the way the angel and demon encounter humans in need of their help, including Rose Cohen, whose best friend (and the love of her life) has abandoned her to marry a man, and Malke Shulman, whose father died mysteriously on his way to America. But there are obstacles ahead of them as difficult as what they’ve left behind. Medical exams (and demons) at Ellis Island. Corrupt officials, cruel mob bosses, murderers, poverty. The streets are far from paved with gold."  (publisher's blurb)

At the start of the story, the angel doesn't have a name, or rather its name changes constantly with its purpose - which is often counteracting the mischief that Little Ash gets up to. Ash is called "Little" because he is one of many sons of the Demon King Ashmedai, but he himself has almost no magic, "belonging to that class of creatures another people might call fairies, and we Jews know as sheydim: mischievous spirits of the earth who enjoy leading people astray." The angel receives the name "Uriel" when Ash forges papers to allow them to immigrate outside of Russian Poland. Accepting that name changes it in ways that I still don't fully understand, and also changes its relationship with Ash. But then so do all their adventures.

The first part of the story, where demon and angel set out on their travels, and Rose on hers, was enlightening. Much of what I read about immigration to North America focuses on the voyage and arrival. I hadn't thought about how much work it could take just to get to a major immigration port. This is fiction, of course, but it made me want to know more. Ash and the angel go first to Warsaw, where they discover the dangers of trusting the wrong immigrant agents. Sacha Lamb included a very helpful glossary of Yiddish and Hebrew phrases, but I could also wish for a bibliography.

I pulled this almost at random from my stack of library books one day last week when I wasn't sure what I wanted to read. I fell into the story from the first page and read it with great delight. I was probably primed for it, having just read a non-fiction work about Jewish migration and immigration in the same period, Rachel Cockerell's Melting Point. With so many of the people Rose, Ash, and Uriel meet in New York working in the garment district, it also links to another book on my TBR stacks, Triangle by David Von Drehle, Here the sweatshop workers are organizing and striking for better working conditions.

A wicked mother and a terrifying horse

A Sorceress Comes to Call, T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)  (TBR shelves, 2024) 

T. Kingfisher would be an "auto-buy" author for me, except that I find her horror stories too disturbing to read (I have a very low tolerance for horror). When she announces a new book, I have to wait to see what type of story she is telling this time. A Sorceress Comes to Call is usually described as a retelling of "The Goose Girl." That is not a story I know, but I figured this book was one of Kingfisher's reshaping of fairy tales. Her Thornhedge, which has recently won several awards, is a take on "Sleeping Beauty" that I very much enjoyed. I wasn't prepared for just how dark this story became, particularly in the deaths of several innocent bystanders (most thankfully off-page), and the monstrosity of the title character. I skipped to the end more than once, just to verify that my favorite characters were still safe.

The book opens with Cordelia, sitting stiff in a pew listening to a long boring sermon, while a fly torments her. She cannot move to brush the fly away, because her sorceress mother Evangeline can take complete control of her body whenever she wants. Fourteen-year-old Cordelia calls this "obedience," something her mother inflicts on her for misbehaving or for her own convenience. Mother and daughter live in a small ramshackle house in the village of Little Haw, where Cordelia is never allowed to close doors, and where she does much of the housework. Her only relief is in rides on her mother's horse, Falada, whom she considers her only friend and confidant (spoiler alert: he is neither). Every so often, Evangeline rides Falada off to visit her "benefactor," who supports the two of them with money and jewelry. Except one day Evangeline returns home in a rage, saying she has to find a new benefactor, and muttering that she should have made him cut off his own legs with an axe (a grim bit of foreshadowing).

The story then switches to Hester Chatham, who awakens in the middle of the night with a shuddering presentiment of Doom. She lives with her bachelor brother Samuel, the Squire of their neighborhood. And then "Three days after her first panic-filled awakening, Doom appeared on Hester's doorstep, in the shape of a woman." Evangeline (who has given herself a title and a deceased husband) has met the Squire in the neighboring city, claiming to be lost in the bustle and in need of his aid. He chivalrously brings her home to his sister, and Evangeline wrangles an invitation for herself and her daughter to stay. Hester sees exactly what is happening but isn't sure how best to protect her brother. It isn't until Cordelia arrives with her mother that Hester begins to realize Evangeline is even worse than she thought. Cordelia on the other hand finds an ally in Hester and in the maid assigned to her, Alice, and she even gets to shut her door against her mother. Even as Hester gathers allies, though, Evangeline draws Samuel into her coils and doesn't hesitate to use her sorcery on anyone she perceives as getting in her way.

By the end of the story, I was quite attached to Hester and Cordelia, and I would happily read more about them. I was delighted to find at least one Easter egg in the story. When Cordelia is helping to search a library for books about sorcery, the stories she reads blur into "a morass of lost princesses, feckless soldiers, evil wizards, and dogs made of bones" - a clear reference to Kingfisher's Nettle & Bone, a wonderful story.

I was entertained by KJ Charles's review of this on Goodreads, where she wrote, "I will add that I read the author's note, and if T Kingfisher could get therapy for her horse issues, the rest of us might not need to get therapy for the horse issues she's giving us, because WOW the horse in this book." I have to agree, and I don't believe Kingfisher's promise in the same author's note "to write a book in the near future where the horse is pleasant and not attempting to murder anyone," since she adds "Probably."

Diversity and inclusion win

The Takedown, Lily Chu  (library book)

This was first released as an Audible Original. Since I find it hard to follow audiobooks, I have been waiting a good while for the print edition, and it was worth the wait. I enjoyed Lily Chu's first two books, both set in Toronto, as this one is. The Stand-In is a celebrity romance, with Gracie Reed hired as a stand-in for Chinese superstar Wei Fangli while she is appearing in a play. I found the reason for her striking resemblance to Fangli (revealed late in the story) too big a coincidence. The Comeback is more of an anti-celebrity romance, where Ariadne Hui is surprised to find a beautiful man staying in her apartment, who turns out to be the cousin of her roommate. Ariadne knows as little about K-Pop as I do, so she doesn't recognize Choi Jihoon. When she does, romantic and professional complications ensue. There is some crossover between all three stories, since they are all set in the Canadian Asian community, but each story stands on its own.

The Takedown begins with Dee Kwan enjoying her perfectly organized life in the family home she recently received from her parents when they moved north. She has just spent her savings renovating and decorating to make the perfect sanctuary. She has finally achieved her dream job as a diversity consultant, one she worked hard to earn. She relaxes by playing Questie, an on-line puzzle-solving game that involves finding clues scattered around the city.

This perfect life goes off the rails very quickly (and in only the second chapter). The owner of the company where she works announces that he is retiring and closing the business. Her mother calls to tell her that her grandmother has broken her hip, so her parents want to move back in to their house with her, to care for her. Dee ends up sleeping on a camp bed in her former home office, while trying to find a new job in a tough market. There is tension at home, because her grandmother disagreed with her daughter's decision to marry a Chinese man, and she has been hostile to both him and his two daughters over the years.

This story deals with some difficult topics. Dee (who uses her given name Daiyu at work) finds a new job as a diversity consultant, where she is assigned to a fashion company that has image problems (and more) due to its homogeneous staff, particularly the upper management. There are rumors that the creative director is stealing ideas from younger designers. Meanwhile, the handsome young man she has met playing Questie turns out to work for the company she is consulting for, which creates a conflict of interest. And her family crowding her out of her home is driving her to distraction, especially her grandmother's pet chinchilla and his squeaky exercise wheel, but worse is the tension over her grandmother's racism toward the Chinese members of the family. Dee's mother, a relentlessly positive person, refuses to even discuss the situation, or to acknowledge Dee's complicated feelings.

I enjoyed the story of Dee's work more than the family situation. It was a refreshing change to see diversity and inclusion celebrated and valued, even if there is constant pushback to Dee/Daiyu's work. It's not described in detail, nor is the work of the company (other than a disastrous runway show). The ending of the story felt cathartic in that bad people get their comeuppance, and the good people find their way to happiness and new beginnings - and Grandma repents and apologizes.

Lily Chu's next book is also an Audible Original (sigh). Drop Dead sounds like a bit of change for her: "One mysterious mansion. Two rival journalists. Three weeks to uncover the story—and love—of a lifetime." I'm looking forward to reading it when I can.