The Familiars, by Stacey Halls. Mira, 2019

It’s 1612, in the reign of King James I, and Fleetwood Shuttleworth (a real historic person) has not had an easy life. She’s 17 and enduring her 4^th pregnancy, the first three having ended in miscarriages and a still birth. She’s found a letter from a doctor to her husband saying that she will not survive another pregnancy. Her first husband, who she was married to at age 4, molested her. She’s never had a friend in her life.



By accident, she meets Alice Grey, a poor young woman who knows herbs and midwifery. Fleetwood becomes convinced that Alice is her only hope of surviving the coming birth, and ending with a live baby. But her husband’s best friend, Roger Nowell, is investigating witches (the Pendle Hill witches, to be exact), and his eye is on Alice. Convicting some witches would give Roger brownie points with the king, and enrich his retirement. In time, Fleetwood finds herself regarding Alice as a friend. She’s willing to go to any lengths to save her from being hung.



The pace is very, very slow in the first half, and then speeds up dramatically. There are several threads running through this novel, some of which don’t come to light until well into the story. Fleet herself starts out as rather a boring character- immature, naïve, and uneducated- who matures and grows through the story. At the start, she has no idea how the ‘other half’ lives, and is shocked at the conditions that exist outside her manor house. But she learns fast. I give five stars for atmosphere; the descriptions of the forests, people, villages, and homes are wonderful. While I loved Alice, the characters I was less taken with. I disliked Fleetwood’s husband a great deal, even at the end when all the threads are tied off. In the end, I give it four stars. This is Hall’s first novel; I assume her writing will mature and I will give any second book she writes a try.

The Girls in the Picture, by Melanie Benjamin. Delacourt Press, 2018

 

In 1914, Frances Marion, a twice divorced artist, was living in Los Angeles, drawing for an advertising company. Then she met Mary Pickford, then one silent film star among many others, and both their lives changed. Frances became a script writer and director, working mainly with Mary, and Mary became the top female star in the world. Not only did the two women’s talents mesh, they became best friends, inseparable at work and at home. Eventually, they would both win two Academy Awards. But people change. Mary met Douglas Fairbanks and they fell in love, becoming the king and queen of Hollywood. They built Pickfair, a dream mansion, and hosted not must Hollywood royalty but real live royalty. Frances married Fred Thomson, a soldier, athlete, and former minister, and while they were rich, they lived much more sedately. And Mary changed, with her fame and wealth going to her head.

The story alternates between Frances’s and Mary’s points of view; Frances in first person and Mary in third. The author has a real way with describing emotion that grabs me. Frances stays likeable all through the book, but at times, Mary is not. She has a lot of stress on her; from the time she was a small child, she was supporting her mother and two siblings. She also had a public that wanted her to continue playing children when she was well into her 30s (she was tiny) and got upset when she cut her famous curls off for a stylish bob. She thought about business constantly, running through the ledgers of United Artists every day. It’s understandable that she might succumb to stress in unpleasant ways.

I loved this book despite the sadness within. It’s about love and a lifetime of friendship, and two women who became huge forces in Hollywood when Hollywood was just beginning. In a business that quickly became male dominated, they didn’t give up their power or succumb to the casting couch. I have a love for old Hollywood tales, and this is my favorite so far. Five stars out of five. 

Darla, I'm putting this one aside for you! :-D

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The Household Spirit, by Tod Wodicka. Pantheon, 2015

 

Everybody is weird to some degree, and with their own flavor of weird. Howard Jeffries and Emily Phane happen to be further-much further- along the weird continuum than most. They have lived next door to each other since Emily was new born, but have never interacted. Howard is pathologically shy and nearly incapable of showing- or perhaps of having- emotions. Emily has night terrors and is afraid of becoming close to others.

Living on an isolated stretch of highway in upstate New York, theirs are the only two houses for a distance. Howard is 50, divorced, and thinks about fishing a lot. Emily is in her twenties, and home from college to care for her grandfather after he has a brutal stroke. Peppy is the only family Emily has; her mother and grandmother were killed in an auto accident when Emily was tiny and her father was never a part of the picture. Losing her grandfather pushes Emily past the point that her fragile ego can handle; when she accidentally sets fire to her house, Howard is forced to come to her rescue, bringing her into his house to recover. They end up in an odd codependent friendship as each draws the other reluctantly out. Their odd relationship is disrupted when Howard’s daughter, Harri, who is the same age as Emily, comes crashing back into Howard’s life. She’s rarely been around since Howard’s divorce, and the reason why she’s back just about breaks Howard’s mind. Her presence forces a change that sets the odd pair back on their own separate roads to living life.

I had a hard time getting into this book; if it hadn’t been from the Vine program I probably would have given up halfway through. I’m glad I kept going, because the ending is pretty cool. I had problems with the characters – not with who they were, but how they were presented. The two main characters have pretty much zero self awareness. The secondary characters are basically props that force the protagonists to react in certain ways. Harri has no real personality (and she had a lot of potential) and we never see why she did the things she did. Likewise, we don’t get much insight into Emily’s boyfriend. He is simple a Good Guy, as Harri is a Disrupter. In the end, it’s all about how Emily and Howard watch over each other, like the household spirits of the ancients that protected families. 

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Neither of these things affected my review.