This Here Is Love
by Princess Joy L. Perry
Despite its title, you’ll find very little uncompromised affection in THIS HERE IS LOVE (Norton, 372 pp., $29.99). Set in the early years of the Virginia Colony, Perry’s searing first novel never flinches from the brutality of plantation life. In a twist on the horribly familiar depictions of slave ships, we’re shown a hold filled with Britain’s “most miserable,” including a Scots-Irish family desperate to believe that indentured servitude will lift them out of poverty. In another twist, we’re introduced to an industrious Black planter scheming to buy freedom for his wife and children. But, inevitably, we also encounter an enslaved mother and daughter who can’t save themselves — or their feelings for each other — from the cruel whims of their owners.
With steely empathy, Perry probes the complexities and contradictions of a society built on bondage. How does a white boy who devoted himself to a helpless infant sister and toiled alongside slaves learn to become “the kind of man who owned another”? Can two slaves forced to breed “people who knew their place” forge any kind of unfettered alliance? Will the swamps and the frontier provide a haven for escapees, white and Black, from the “civilized” coast? As she explores these questions, Perry’s intersecting plots are gripping, but what’s more impressive is the way she guides us through her characters’ emotional depths.
Fonseca
by Jessica Francis Kane
In 1952, the yet-to-be novelist Penelope Fitzgerald visited a deeply eccentric expat household in Mexico with her 6-year-old son, Valpy. Thirty years later, she touched on this journey in an essay but never wrote about it again. Thankfully, Kane was inspired to follow the trail. And her latest novel, FONSECA (Penguin Press, 272 pp., $28), deploys an understated wit and bittersweet wisdom reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s own work.
The setup seems made for a Masterpiece Theater mini-series. Our heroine, pregnant and penurious, has left her husband and young daughter back in England after accepting an invitation to meet two wealthy, hard-drinking Irishwomen who profess to be in need of an heir. Already ensconced in the household are an Irish organist and his wife. In addition, a clutch of regular visitors to the Delaneys’ rigorously choreographed cocktail hours have their own plans for the legacy. While Valpy hangs out with the omnicompetent Mexican housekeeper, Fitzgerald finds herself romantically tempted by yet another claimant, a charming American who insists, somewhat dubiously, that he’s a distant relative. As befits an homage to Fitzgerald, the dividing line between fact and fiction is very blurred. And very entertaining.
The Original
by Nell Stevens
THE ORIGINAL (Norton, 328 pp., $28.99) has many of the traditional elements of historical romance: a slightly seedy Oxfordshire mansion, a ne’er-do-well scion with a dodgy history, his domineering mother and a female narrator whose presence is barely tolerated by the relatives upon whom she’s been foisted. Also a family history of madness. And yet, when the novel opens in the autumn of 1899, it soon becomes clear that conventions are about to be upended.
Stevens’s narrator, Grace, has a strange inability to remember faces, but she’s uncannily brilliant at copying works of art. While she’s trying to break free of Inderwick Hall to make her living as a forger (and discovering that “the feelings I had about women were the feelings men had about women”), she also becomes embroiled in a scandal involving her long-lost cousin, Charles, who has recently resurfaced in a grubby Roman atelier. The family lawyers insist he’s an impostor; Grace’s widowed aunt insists just as vehemently that he’s not. For Grace, there are possible benefits either way. Rest assured, though, that her route to a resolution will be decidedly unorthodox.
World Pacific
by Peter Mann
Between the two world wars, the writer-adventurer Richard Halliburton earned a reputation for outlandish derring-do. Then, in 1939, while attempting to sail a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco, he and his crew were lost in a typhoon. The prospect of reviving a Halliburton-ish character and launching him into a maelstrom of spies, émigrés and double-dealers proved irresistible to Mann, who demonstrated a knack for comic thrillers in his previous novel, “The Torqued Man.”
WORLD PACIFIC (Harper, 400 pp., $27.99) is partly narrated by Richard Halifax, hero to the devoted members of the Dicky Halifax Junior Adventurers Club, whose newsletter is the latest attempt to beef up the dwindling Halifax bank account. Gunrunning and industrial spying are in the mix as well, but it’s Halifax’s acquaintance with a comatose literary editor named Hank Rauch, whose Thomas Mann-inspired dad lives in plush exile in Santa Monica, that ropes in the novel’s other main narrator, Hank’s twin sister, Hildegarde. Mysterious letters, disappearing military diagrams and rival British and American agents provide more intrigue, as does a Nazi doctor conducting “regeneration therapy” in the middle of a coconut farm. There’s even a guest appearance by a bordello proprietor with a passing resemblance to Sally Rand.
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