Scandalous Women: A Novel of Jackie Collins & Jaqueline Susann
By Gill Paul
William Morrow Paperbacks; hardcover, $18.99; eBook, $11.99; Digital audio, $27.99; available today, Tuesday, August 13th
Gill Paul is an author of thirteen historical novels, many of which re-evaluate extraordinary 20th-century women whom she thinks have been marginalized or misjudged by history. One of those is A Beautiful Rival, which was released last fall, and it revealed the unknown history of cosmetic titans Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, whose rivalry spanned decades and included broken marriages, personal tragedies, and a world that was changing drastically for women. (Please click here for our review from September 2023) Gill's other novels include Another Woman's Husband, about links you may not have been aware of between Wallis Simpson, later Duchess of Windsor, and Diana, Princess of Wales; Women and Children First, about a young steward who works on the Titanic; and The Affair, set in 1961-62 as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton fall in love while making "Cleopatra."
Paul's newest novel, Scandalous Women, is a compelling story set in the world of 1960s book publishing, with a story centered on the real-life, trailblazing authors Jackie Collins and Jacqueline Susann, who were renowned for their scandalous and controversial novels. They overcame the odds and persevered in a man's world, as they dared to write about sex at a time when transparency about female sexuality was not widely accepted. It's also a story about the beleaguered young editorial assistant who introduced them.
Set in 1965 New York City, college graduate Nancy Write is excited about her new job at a Manhattan publishing house, but she was not prepared for the rampant sexism she will encounter. She is tasked with working on Susann's Valley of the Dolls, and she becomes friends with Jacqueline, who then connects her with fellow colleague Jackie Collins.
A year later, Valley of the Dolls arrives in bookstores, and Susann is desperate for a bestseller. No question it's a steamy page-turner, but it's not clear it will make the big money she needs. In London, at the same time, Collins's racy The World Is Full of Married Men launches her career.
Both authors are not prepared for the price they will have to pay for being women who had the courage to write about sex, as they are lambasted by the establishment, besieged with hate mail, and even condemned by feminists.
In public, Jacqueline and Jackie shoulder the outcry with dignity, while in private, they are crumbling, particularly since each has secrets they would rather not see on the front page. There is a question as to whether they will clash as they rise up the charts, and whether Nancy will achieve her ambition of becoming an editor. They are each struggling to succeed in a men's world, as they desperately try to protect those whom they love the most.
.jpg)
Our Narrow Hiding Places
By Kristopher Jansma
Ecco; hardcover, 272 pages; $30.00; available today, Tuesday, August 13th
Kristopher Jansma is the author of the novels Why We Came to the City and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, the winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award and a Pushcart Prize, and he received an honorable mention for the PEN/Hemnigway Award. He is an associate professor of English and the director of the creative writing program at SUNY New Paltz. His nonfiction has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, The Sun, and Real Simple, and his fiction has been published in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Story, and ZYZZYVA.
Our Narrow Hiding Places in Jansma's new epic of historical fiction, set in Holland during World War II. He examines an overlooked chapter in history, the Hunger Winter, when food and heat were cut off, and thousands of Dutch citizens starved during the final year of occupation by the Nazis.
Inspired by Jansma's family history, the novel traces the long-buried memories of Mieke Geborn, a grandmother who finally shares her story when her grandson comes to visit. This brought back not just the trauma and terror of that time, but also the resilience of those who survived, including her Dutch family.
Mieke is eighty years old, and her life has been one of quiet routine since she became a widow many years ago. She enjoys the view from her home on the New Jersey shore, visits with her friends, and tai chi at the local retirement community.
When Will and his wife, Teru, come for a visit, things become upended, starting with the unsettled state of their marriage. Will has questions for his grandmother, including about family secrets that have been lost for decades and are just now rising to the surface.
In order to tell Will the whole truth, Mieke returns to the past, and her childhood in coastal Holland. In the last years of World War II, she survived the brutal Hunger Winter, and her memories weave together childhood magic and the madness of history. It is a story that ranges from the windy beaches of the Hague to the dark cells of a concentration camp, through the bends of rivers filled with eels, and ultimately, to the story of Will's father, who has been absent since he was a child.
It is a provocative story that shows the capacity of people to survive anything, and of the terrible cost of war, and that out of severe trauma comes a resilience to carry on.
Daughter of Fire
By Sofia Robleda
Amazon Crossing; paperback, 283 pages; $16.99
Sofia Robleda is a Mexican writer who spent her childhood and adolescence in Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore. She completed her undergraduate and doctorate degrees in psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia. Currently, Sofia lives in the UK with her husband and son, and splits her time between writing, raising her son, and working as a clinical physchologist supporting people with brain injuries and neurological conditions.
Daughter of Fire is Robleda's historical fiction debut, and it is a deep story about a girl named Catalina de Cerrato, who was born in the 1530s to an Indigenous Guatemalan mother and a Spanish colonizer father. It is a journey that is touched by loyalty and prejudice, love and oppression, and embracing one's identity.
This evolved from Robleda's personal ancestral search, in which she discovered the history of an ancient Mayan sacred text with stories that were so enlightening, they called for them to be written about.
"I grew up in Cancun, surrounded by the ancient Mayan culture, but when I found out I had Indigenous blood, I started studying out pre-Columbian history in a lot more detail," Robleda says in the press materials accompanying this book. "When I read how many documents were destroyed, I had a visceral reaction. I couldn't stop crying over this great loss to our heritage. But the Popol Vuh survived. Its story possessed me. I felt I'd gone out to look for my roots, and they'd taken a hold of me. The result was this novel, and I'm ecstatic that Daughter of Fire will be published this summer."
The Popl Vuh is a sacred text that is not well-known, and it has invaluable insight into the Maya way of life before colonization, including their myths and stories, and the history of the K'iche' people of Guatemala. The stories were mostly passed down orally, until around 1550, when anonymous K'iche' authors wrote them down in secret. After the Spanish conquest of the Mays, missionaries and colonists destroyed many documents, as well as the original sacred text, were lost. Only a translated copy that was made by a friar in the 18th century remains.
Catalina de Cerrato is being raised by her widowed father, Don Alonso, in 1551 Guatemala, around thirty years after the Spanish invasion. Don is a ruling member of the oppressive Spanish hierarchy, and he holds sway over the newly relegated lower class of Indigenous communities.
With a fierce independence, Catalina struggles to honor her father and her late mother, who was a Maya noblewoman that Catalina made a vow that only she can keep, to preserve the lost sacred text of the Popol Vuh, the treasured and now forbidden history of the K'iche' people.
Catalina is spurred to do this by her mother's spirit voice and possessing the gift of committing the invaluable stories to memory, and she embarks on a secret and transcendent quest to rewrite them. Through ancient pyramids, Spanish villas, and caves of masked devils, Catalina finds an ally in the captivating Juan de Rojas, a lord whose rule was compromised by the invasion.
As Catalina and Juan's love and trust unfolds, and her father's tyranny escalates, she must confront her conflicted blood heritage, and the secrets that go with it, once and for all if she is to complete this dangerous quest to its historic finish.
The Shadow of War: A Novel of the Cuban Missile Crisis
By Jeff Shaara
St. Martin's Press; hardcover, 368 pages; $30.00
Jeff Shaara is an award-winning New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly bestselling author of seventeen novels, including Rise to Rebellion and The Rising Tide, and two novels that complete his father's Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, The Killer Angels - Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure. His previous novel is The Old Lion: A Novel of Theodore Roosevelt (please click here for our review from June 2023).
In the engrossing new novel, The Shadow of War, Shaara examines one of the most memorable conflicts between super-powers, the Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962.
President John F. Kennedy took office the prior year, and he inherited an ill-conceived, poorly executed invasion of Cuba that was an utter failure and set in motion the events that put the United States and Soviet Union on a collision course that could have started a war that would have enveloped most of the world.
Shaara tells the story through multiple perspectives and voices, from the Russian engineer attempting the near impossible task of building the missile launch facilities in Cuba, to the U.S. Navy commanders whose ships are sent to "quarantine" Cuba, to the Kennedy brothers, John and Bobby, who can't allow Russia to land nuclear missiles in Cuba, or to show weakness in confronting Nikita Krushchev, but with a keen understanding of how close they are to the precipice of war, while Krushchev is desperate to try and maintain a balance between the conflicting demands of powerful forces in the U.S.S.R.
Shaara writes of what's at stake in his introduction, "In the United States, the election of 1960 has produced a leader of many contrasts to Krushchev. John F. Kennedy rises form aristocratic stock and is a man his powerful father has deemed destined to be president, a claim that proves true. Kennedy is careful, understands the extraordinary power of his office, immediately begins to rely on experts in every field, to help guide the way. Some of these experts dwell in the Central Intelligence Agency, and convince Kennedy that the time has come to eliminate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Kennedy, and his brother Bobby, despise Castro, see him as a standard bearer for the greatest threats to our country, leading a blatantly Communist government right on Florida's doorstep.
"The Cuban government is backed and supported by Krushchev and the Soviets, who see the Caribbean nation as a vital entryway into Latin America, where the Soviet Union's influence might expand. Though photographs show Krushchev and Castro have a smiling friendship, in fact, Krushchev is wary of Castro's tendency to talk too much. For his part, Castro embraces Soviet support as a way to expand his own power, no matter Moscow's cautions. But Castro has an almost paranoid fear that the United States will attempt to forcibly remove him from power. He thus relies on the Soviet Union to provide him with undeniable strength of his own. The Soviets, ever aware that America and her NATO allies have nuclear missiles spread across Europe, now believe they have a successful counter to such a strategy. This far, Soviet missiles of all kinds have been based only inside the borders of the Soviet Union, and with very few Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, their armament is only a minor direct threat to the United States. Cuba offers Krushchev a unique opportunity to move the needle, to balance Soviet missiles strength with American. And Castro is only too willing to accept Soviet military aid."
No comments:
Post a Comment