Spring Garden, by Tomoka Shibasaki translated by Polly Barton. Pushkin Press, 2014

This is a rather odd little book. Divorced Taro, who seems to have no friends, lives in a rundown apartment building, which will be torn down once the leases all run out. Over a concrete wall, he can see the top of the house next door from his balcony. It’s a big, expensive, house, with a sky blue roof. One day, he sees one of his neighbors trying to climb up the wall. She’s not a robber; she’s obsessed with the house. Years before, she found a book of photographs called “Spring Garden”- the house the photos were taken of is the sky blue house next door. She wants to see the house, inside and out. The photo book, that is all interior shots some of which show the home owners, has given the house a kind of mythic beauty for her. As she schemes to get inside the house, Taro finds himself drawn into her obsession.

Not much happens in the book. They see the house. He sees the current house under laid by the photos in the book, just like he sees signs of the rivers and streams that have been tamed and forced into culverts underground all over the city. The whole world is a palimpsest.

Despite the lack of action, I sped through the book. I, too, became enamored of the beauty of the house, and how the now overlays the past. Four stars, even though it is, as I said, odd. 

the above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- from amazon, they will give me a few cents. 

I received this book free from the Amazon Vine program in return for an unbiased review. 

neither of these things influenced my review.  

A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, by Emily Midorikawa & Emma Clare Sweeney. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017

 

“A Secret Sisterhood” examines the relationships that early female writers had with friends. Most that is written about Austen and Charlotte Bronte shows them working in isolation (aside from the Bronte siblings); in fact they both had active friendships with other women both through correspondence and face to face, where they talked about their work. Eliot and Woolf have less of a reputation for loneliness, but still aren’t considered to be extroverts. But they, too, had their special friends with whom they could talk shop.

Jane Austen was friends with her brother’s nanny (which was not looked upon well), who was a playwright when not wrangling kids; author Mary Taylor helped Charlotte Bronte; the outcast George Eliot (outcast for cohabiting with a married man for years) had a long correspondence with Harriet Beecher Stowe; and Virginia Woolf had a relationship both friendly and very competitive with author Katherine Mansfield. These friendships helped sustain the writers in their solitary work (even with people around them, a writer works alone) and provided sounding boards for their new writings.

The authors, themselves friends since the beginnings of their writing careers and who first found success at almost the same time as each other, have done meticulous research and found previously unread documents on or by their subjects. It’s an interesting read, so see how these friendships affected their writing. Much has been made of the friendships of certain male authors- Byron and Shelley, Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins- and now at last we have the feminine side of that coin – and a foreword by Margaret Atwood. Four and a half stars. 

 The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- from Amazon, they will give me a few cents. 

I received this book free from the Amazon Vine program in return for an unbiased review. 

Neither of these things influenced my review. 

Dark Knowledge, by Clifford Browder. Anaphora Literary Press, 2018

In New York in the late 1860s, Chris Harmony uncovers some pre-Civil War papers that hint that his grandfather could have been involved in the slave trade. He feels a need to find out what the truth is, but other family members don’t feel the same way- and even attempt to steal the papers. As he asks around, he finds clues that link other society people to the slave trade, too. And, fearing exposure now that trading in humans is illegal and looked down on in New York, those people set out to stop him.

Chris, his sister, their mother, and their cousin are all for getting to bringing it to daylight, even if it means their own family name will be besmirched. Their other relatives, and others in the shipping industry, are very much against it. They have their money, they have made their way into society, and they want the status quo held.

The story takes Chris from the docks to society balls. It’s a historical mystery, with a lot of family dynamics happening, and with a bit of a love story, too. It looks like Browder has done a lot of research into what trade and shipping was like back then. It’s pretty well written, but I found the ending very abrupt and unsatisfying – not so much of an ending so much as a “see you next week, same time, same channel”. I don’t know if this will be a series, and we’ll see the story given a better ending or not. I would have liked to have seen Chris’s sister take a more active role, too. Chris’s character is fairly well filled out, but the others not so much so. The author has promise, but this one gets four stars out of five. 

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- from Amazon, they will give me a few cents. 

I received this book from Library Things Early Reader's program in return for an unbiased review. 

Neither of these things influenced my review.