The Pretender
by Jo Harkin
John Collan is about to have an epic identity crisis. Wrenched out of his placid life in rural late-15th-century Oxfordshire, he’s informed by his new, very secretive overlords that he’s not a 10-year-old peasant but Edward, Earl of Warwick, nephew of King Richard, and thus in the line of succession to the English throne. But England is also undergoing a violent identity crisis as the Plantagenets skirmish among themselves and Henry Tudor schemes to take power. So John (temporarily renamed Lambert Simons) must remain in the shadows, where his long-dead father is said to have hidden him, lest he succumb to the dire fate of other potential heirs.
Inspired by the historical figure known as Lambert Simnel, THE PRETENDER (Knopf, 471 pp., $30) is a rollicking account of a befuddled boy’s pillar-to-post existence as a political pawn. After clandestine tutoring to provide him with a suitable education, he’s whisked to Flanders to be further polished at the court of his supposed aunt, then abruptly shipped to Ireland, where the Earl of Kildare will ready him to be the figurehead of a rebel army. Faced with such a future, John/Lambert/Edward can only remind himself, “a king wouldn’t be trying not to cry.”
Becoming a teenager is hard enough. But try becoming a teenager who hasn’t the faintest idea who he really is and feels responsible for the murders of some of the few people he has come to trust. Longing simply to escape into anonymity, he’s advised instead to “get yourself a courtly countenance. Courtly claws, courtly teeth.” And so, in desperation, he does.
Fifteen Wild Decembers
by Karen Powell
What Emily Brontë calls “the push-pull” of her turbulent family is the subject of Powell’s suitably brooding FIFTEEN WILD DECEMBERS (Europa, 288 pp., paperback, $18). We first encounter Powell’s imagined Emily in 1824 when she is sent to join her sisters at the boarding school that will later figure in Charlotte’s novel, “Jane Eyre.” But all 6-year-old Emily wants is to return to the Yorkshire moors that “are as familiar to me as the features of my own siblings.”
Narrating this account of her brief life, Emily provides a sharp perspective on the penury and isolation that created such anguish — and such inspiration — for the Brontë sisters. Tensions between them flare, as does frustration with their feckless brother, Branwell. Foremost, though, is Emily’s yearning for the “wild freedom” she knew as a child, a yearning that will color her novel, “Wuthering Heights.” Sent to Brussels with Charlotte for more schooling, she chafes at the restrictions of polite society: “I did not belong in this world and even if I could find the words to describe it, these people could never understand mine.”
These Days
by Lucy Caldwell
London during the Blitz has become a familiar subject of World War II fiction. In THESE DAYS (Zando/SJP Lit, 288 pp., $28), Caldwell deftly shifts our attention to the lesser-known devastation of Belfast, Northern Ireland, whose shipyards and factories were targeted by the German air force in the spring of 1941. Intertwined with vivid descriptions of the horrific collateral damage in the city itself are intersecting narratives that remind us how persistently the dramas of daily life can exist even when the world is in flames.
Audrey and Emma are sisters, young women who seem poised for “a life in which the grooves are already set.” But are they? Twenty-one-year-old Audrey, a math whiz who works in the tax office, is engaged to a young doctor colleague of her father’s. Emma, 19, tests her mother’s nerves by volunteering several nights a week at a first aid station. When the bombs start to fall, each sister will find that her notions about love have been shattered, with consequences neither could have foreseen.
A Lesser Light
by Peter Geye
Theodulf Sauer and Willa Brandt would seem to have a few things in common. Both have been comfortably raised in turn-of-the-last-century Duluth, then sent east for fine Ivy League educations. Both have endured a parent quite short on warmth and understanding. Yet in the spring of 1910, when Willa joins Theodulf at his post as master of an isolated Lake Superior lighthouse 50 miles from the Canadian border, it’s clear, as one observer later puts it, that this brand-new husband and wife “seem as well suited for each other as the fish and the hook.”
In A LESSER LIGHT (University of Minnesota Press, 512 pp., $27.95), Geye uses the vagaries of the local terrain — with its violent weather, wolf-infested forests and rough-hewn populace of fishermen and loggers — to highlight the personal storms Theodulf tries to quell with strict Roman Catholicism and Willa tries to deflect via the astronomical studies she once pursued at Radcliffe. It quickly becomes evident that this is a marriage of necessity: for his career prospects, for her financial survival. There’s a cruel but irresistible fascination in watching Willa plot her domestic rebellion as this hellish union threatens to implode: “She would remain as agnostic as nature. And as cunning.”
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