The Rush
by Beth Lewis
“My story is the story of all Klondike women dragged up here on promises. Men wish for gold, women for freedom.” In Lewis’s historical thriller, THE RUSH (Pegasus, 394 pp., $28.95), very few Klondike wishes are fulfilled, mainly because the long, dangerous trek from the Alaskan coast to Dawson City only leads to the brutal reality of a plundered wilderness. It’s 1898 and most of the miners are going broke. Ellen Rhodes and her husband have been working their claims for three years, but it’s money from Ellen’s father that has kept them afloat. Until he cuts them off.
Ellen is just one of three female narrators who struggle to survive in the Yukon. Kate Kelly, a Midwestern journalist intent on tracking down her wayward sister, barely escapes an avalanche on the mountainous trail from Skagway. And in Dawson City, Martha Malone is locked in a desperate battle to keep her whorehouse from the clutches of a rival intent on owning every scrap of real estate in town. Avenging a violent death will bring these women together, even as they realize that, as Martha puts it, “relationships are like ice out here. They form quick and strong, but can break just as easy.”
The Girl in the Green Dress
by Mariah Fredericks
In 1950, the former New Yorker writer Morris Markey was found dead, shot through the head. A year earlier, he had written an article about Joseph Elwell, a fixture of New York society who’d died under similar circumstances in 1920. From these two still unsolved cases, Fredericks has constructed a lively return to Jazz Age Manhattan, featuring a guest appearance by 20-year-old Zelda Fitzgerald. But it’s another woman who gives THE GIRL IN THE GREEN DRESS (Minotaur, 324 pp., $29) its title.
Briefly spotting this mystery woman with Elwell just before he died, Markey sets her at the center of an investigation he hopes will turn him from cub reporter to serious writer. There’s no evidence the real Markey ever met the real Zelda Fitzgerald, but that doesn’t stop Fredericks from allowing a convincingly bored (and convincingly daredevil) Zelda to help Markey penetrate the salons and saloons of early 1920s New York. The more he discovers about Elwell, the less sure he is about where all this sleuthing will lead. Is it possible that “his story of a society woman scorned had become a tale of wartime intrigue”?
Simone in Pieces
by Janet Burroway
The heroine of Burroway’s SIMONE IN PIECES (University of Wisconsin Press, 261 pp., paperback, $18.95) is a World War II orphan who can’t remember much of what happened before she was rescued from a Flemish beach and spirited across the Channel to England. In a series of slyly eloquent chapters that follow Simone Lerrante from childhood into her 60s, we see her through the refracting context of the people she meets, from a star-struck Hertfordshire headmaster’s daughter to a troubled Hungarian-born faculty wife in upstate New York, a snarky garage mechanic in Nevada and a disgruntled young mourner at a funeral in Missouri.
A Fulbright scholarship takes Simone from Cambridge to New York, and a bad marriage sends her into divorce and a second-tier college teaching job “landlocked in middle age in the middle class in middle America.” Eventually, though, a crucial piece of her past is retrieved and the blurred images of her long-dead Belgian parents begin to take on sharper definition. In her acknowledgments, Burroway explains her narrative strategy, reminding us that we build ourselves “by will and happenstance” through our encounters with others. For Simone, self-recognition — and self-acceptance — may only come when she can permit herself to return to the streets of Liège.
Love, Sex, and Frankenstein
by Caroline Lea
“We will each write a ghost story.” Lord Byron’s directive to his guests in a storm-lashed mansion on Lake Geneva is a very familiar piece of 19th-century literary lore. Do we need yet another account of the creation of Mary Shelley’s monster masterpiece? Despite its lurid title, when it comes to LOVE, SEX, AND FRANKENSTEIN (Pegasus, 391 pp., $27.95), the answer is yes.
Lea gives us an eminently credible, eminently anguished 18-year-old Mary, two years into her scandalous elopement with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, “shifting the temperature of her moods in response to his” and realizing that she and her infant son are totally dependent on a feckless man who inspires both devotion and fury. As Percy indulges in a dalliance with Mary’s neurotic stepsister, Claire Clairmont, Mary draws closer to Byron, who — despite his self-indulgence and grandiosity — treats her as an equal and respects her intellectual prowess.
Lea effectively conveys the volatility of Byron’s isolated household. Trapped by the horrific weather, its contentious inhabitants are unable to escape one another’s truths and lies. In this temporary prison, Mary’s diary entries evolve into a novel while she evolves into a different, less dependent woman. “Now she has acknowledged the rage, it simmers in her constantly: She cannot ignore its fierce heat and light.”
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