The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

read by Michael Crouch

It’s 1985. Yale’s career as the development director for an art gallery has just begun, his friend Nico has just died of AIDS, and almost everyone he knows is terrified or in denial or both. Nico’s little sister, Fiona, has become the key to a coup that could make or break Yale’s reputation in the art world.

It’s 2015. Fiona is trying to find her daughter, who disappeared into a cult years ago; a random bit of footage has led her to Paris. She’s staying with an old friend, Richard Campo, a photographer who famously documented the ravages of the AIDS crisis in Chicago in the 1980s and 90s.

Days pass in Paris. Fiona is frustrated at the pace of the private investigator’s search for her daughter and heads out to seek her on her own. Meanwhile, Richard and his partner urge her to just enjoy the city while she’s there. She’s not so sure she’s ready for the sorts of enjoyment that are on offer, though. Romance, trips through her own past—that’s not where she’s at. She's in too much pain, too worried about her daughter.

Weeks pass in Chicago, and then months. Disaster looms over Yale’s entire community; some people flee, some descend into debauchery, and some get political and fight to be seen and heard. But for Yale, there’s nothing to do but soldier on, try to close the next deal, try not to feel too alone and scared as his friends get sick, one by one. Meanwhile, he’s getting to know the elderly benefactor whose art collection may or may not be a windfall for his gallery. And she seems to know more about him than he thought he was revealing.

This story winds a sinuous path back and forth, back and forth, between a past when nobody knew who would be struck down next and a today shaped by the loss of a generation of young men. We get to be there in that past with Yale. We see what it does to him, what it feels like on a daily basis to be subject to irrational hatred and constantly on the edge of existential terror, meanwhile going through all the normal growing pains of being a young man just getting started in the world. 

And we get to see, 30 years later, what carrying all that history, all the stories of all those extinguished lives, has done to Fiona, how it has scarred her—and, through her, scarred her daughter, who was only a baby during the worst of it.

I wasn’t there for the AIDS crisis in the same way Yale and Fiona were. Although I lived in San Francisco, or within an hour’s drive, during the 80s and 90s, and a relative I hadn’t seen in years died pretty early on, I was in middle school when things really hit the fan. So I was a little young to be very deeply affected, though of course I was aware of what was going on all around me.

I did work at a dry cleaning shop a few blocks from the Castro during the mid-90s, and I remember watching a lot of customers get sicker and sicker and eventually disappear. It was horrible, but they weren’t my community, my family, my friends. I knew I could become infected if I wasn’t careful, but I also knew I wasn’t at high risk. It wasn’t *personal* to me. It was just how things were. (I never believed I’d make it to age 30, but I didn’t think a virus would take me; I thought it would be that cowboy running the White House with his finger hovering a little too near The Button that would get us all in the end.)

The Great Believers makes AIDS personal. You will walk away from this book shaken. You’ll have some appreciation, if you didn’t before, of what a loss to us all was the loss of those young lives. What living in the middle of it was like—it was like a war, but one that you had to be ashamed of being the victim of, one that you kept to yourself as hard as you could if you wanted to have any chance of a happy life. What caring about and caring for so many young men who didn’t make it was like, what it was like to survive and try to build a life after losing literally everybody you cared about.

The book does this all unsentimentally, cleanly, without tear-jerking melodrama. It just lays the stories out, one beautifully-formed slab after another, each atop the last in ways that seem impossible because of the way the story goes back in time, and yet somehow perfect. 

Read this book. Once you start you won’t be able to walk away, and it will hurt, but that lost generation deserves to be mourned. You’ll be glad you didn’t turn away.

A Fugitive Green by Diana Gabaldon

read by Jeff Woodman

This is a novella from the Seven Stones to Stand collection—these are stories set in the Outlander universe, about characters other than Jamie, Claire, and their immediate family. It recounts the story of how Minnie met Lord John Grey’s brother Hal during a distinctly low period in his life, and it’s charming as all hell.

Minnie is a 17-year-old whose father runs a rare book business—and also trades in gossip, secrets, and documents whose originators and/or proper owners would prefer remain private. Minnie, like most people in that day and age, has been brought up in the family business. And she may have just a little too much knack for the illicit information trade for her own good.

As the story begins, Minnie’s father is sending her off to London, putatively to both deliver and receive some books and at the same time to be introduced to polite society with the idea of catching a wealthy English husband. In reality, he has a handful of less legal commissions for her—and she has some personal business of her own.

Accompanied at various times by two stalwart Irish bodyguards and by the redoubtable matchmaker, Lady Buford, Minnie sets out to accomplish her father’s errands, evade her new suitors, and find and meet her biological mother. Along the way she meets Hal.

Hal’s wife has just died a month ago, giving birth to a probable bastard. In addition to dealing with that, he’s trying to restart the regiment that was disbanded when his father became a convicted traitor, and to do that, he’s got to secure royal patronage. In order to secure royal patronage, he’s got to get rid of the stain on his reputation that was caused when he dueled with and killed his dead wife’s poet lover. And he’s got plenty of evidence—a cache of letters between his late wife and her paramour. But he refuses to let the deeply painful letters be made public, or seen by anyone at all.

Into this muddle sails Minnie, at a critical point. She has the tools to cut this Gordian knot—but will she find a way to do it without unacceptable consequences? How will this mess get set to rights, and who will pay for it?

Ms. Gabaldon’s crystal-clear pose and deft, balanced hand with character, setting, *and* plot will hook you and keep you hooked. (Not to mention a cameo from a certain Jamie Fraser, whose masculine charms get him out of hot water without him even knowing about it.) A must-read for fans of the Outlander books.

The Space Between: An Outlander Novella by Diana Gabaldon

 read by Davina Porter

I’ve spent a lot of my life in the Outlander universe. I started reading the novels when they first came out, but tapered off during the long wait between Drums of Autumn and The Fiery Cross. When that was finally published, my curiosity got the best of me and I had to dive back in and find out what happened to Jamie and Claire—but I had to start again from the beginning because I’d just forgotten too much. 

(Side note: rereading something you really enjoyed and discovering that it’s still just as delicious on a second read, when you already know what’s going to happen, is an incredible treat. Ms. Gabaldon really is a very good writer.)

Finally the TV series happened, but I was super skeptical about it. I saw the stills on social media, and the actors who played Jamie and Claire looked nothing like the Jamie and Claire in my head. I didn’t want my headcanon messed with, so I avoided it. Nevertheless it did have one effect on me: it reminded me that, after another very long wait, Ms. Gabaldon had completed another segment of the story arc. More reading to be done! And I’d never listened to the audiobooks. I had no idea what a treat I was in for: they were read by Davina Porter, whom I wasn’t yet familiar with.

That woman could read her grocery list out loud, and I’d listen. For hours. 

Then I finished listening to Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, and I needed more Outlander, so I finally gave in and gave the show a try. And found, to my surprise, that the actors who play Jaimie and Claire are actually very appealing once they start moving and talking; the stills, in which they struck me as looking like enormous waxworks, had been deceptive. (I think they were *too* beautiful in a way; it made them seem inhuman. With the human attributes of speech and motion, though, they are simply very very very beautiful. IMHO.)

And then the recent season ended, and I needed more.

I’d tried one of the Lord John novellas some years back, but in spite of being set in this universe and centering a character I quite like, I couldn’t get into it. I can’t even remember now which one it was. I’m just not a mystery-novel person. 

But when I heard about The Space Between, I was intrigued. It’s about Jaimie’s stepdaughter, Joan, who is headed to France to become a nun, because she hears voices and knows when people are about to die and she thinks a religious community is the only place she has any real chance of finding answers about this, or at least relative safety from being tried as a witch. It’s also about Michael Murray, Jaimie’s nephew, who is returning to France after the death of his wife. It’s also about… no, I can’t tell you who else it’s about, because actually that would be a huge spoiler. Let’s just say that mysteriousness abounds in this novella.

And it turned out to be a lot of fun. It’s more like a story arc on the TV series in its pacing than like the novels, but that’s not a bad thing. And it delves deeper into the occult and stays there longer than most of her novels, but in a shorter piece like this, that works well. And the characters are charming and the setting is vivid and there are all the other hallmarks of Ms. Gabaldon’s writing in this series.

In other words, this is a very worthwhile use of your time while you wait for the next full-length Jaimie-and-Claire novel. What, you didn’t know about that? It’s going to be called Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, and it’s due out later this year, most likely. You can read all about it, including some excerpts, here.

Eternal Life by Dara Horn

read by Elisabeth Rodgers

Rachel Azaria can’t die. Two thousand years ago, she and Elazar sacrificed their own deaths so that their son might survive a terrible illness—and for two thousand years, Rachel has lived life after life and raised family after family, loving them all, changing very little.

She moves from place to place as her apparent immortality became a danger to her loved ones because of the beliefs of the society around them, or as she is killed in a fire and finds herself renewed, a physically young woman again, somewhere in the world far from where she has “died.” The first time this happened was when she was burned to death at the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, and it’s happened enough times since for her to have lost any fear of it.

What she does fear is that her life will never end. After this many centuries and this many lives, living has lost its meaning. It has also, in this age of social media and biometrics, become much harder to properly disappear and start a new life. And Elazar—who sacrificed his death alongside her, who has followed her and who has become a mysterious presence in the lives of her offspring—Elazar is stalking her, convinced that they are meant to be lovers throughout eternity.

Then her favorite granddaughter starts studying longevity, and Rachel begins to hope, for the first time in many, many lifetimes, that she can die after all. Maybe she can strike a bargain with this granddaughter.

This book is beautifully written—you really get the sense of what somebody born two millennia ago would feel and think if they were still alive today. You understand both the joy and the despair of unending life, the mystery of a terrible oath resulting in a miracle so huge that there’s no knowing whether it’s a blessing or a curse. Highly recommend.

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

read by Davina Porter

It’s 1686. Nella has traveled from her home in the countryside to Amsterdam to join her new husband’s household. But when she arrives, being the wife of a wealthy merchant isn’t at all what she imagined. Somehow Nella has to learn how to be a proper wife and citizen, but she has no idea how and nobody to help her.

She rarely sees her husband, who seems kind enough in his way but takes almost no interest in her; his proud, cold sister is the one who is really in charge of the household; and one of the servants is an insolent keyhole-listener and the other is a foreigner. Nella is lonely, bored, and cooped up in the imposing house almost every day, with no company but her little bird, Peebo. Her few interactions with the burghers who should be her peers leave her perplexed at best.

Then one day her husband brings her a wedding gift: a model of their house the size of a cabinet. Nella commissions a miniaturist to create tiny residents and furniture for the house—but soon finds that the miniaturist seems to know a lot more about the goings-on in her household than she herself does. In fact, everyone she meets seems to know more about her household than she does. All these secrets lead inevitably to disaster, and then Nella really needs to find sources of strength.

This is a gorgeously claustrophobic, twisty-turny book—Diana Gabaldon meets Margaret Atwood. Highly recommend, especially if you like a beautifully-researched period piece that doesn’t succumb to stereotypes. And speaking of Diana Gabaldon, the narrator of the audiobook version is Davina Porter, who also narrated all the Outlander books, and she is nothing short of amazing.

World Without End by Ken Follett

read by John Lee

It’s two centuries after the building of Kingsbridge Cathedral, and while many things have stayed the same—for example, the balance of power between the hidebound clergy and the rapacious nobility is constantly being pushed at by both sides, pretty much always to the detriment of everyone else—change is on the way. The Hundred Years’ War has begun, and the Black Death is on the horizon. This won’t just mean the death of 60% of the population, but also the beginning of the end of the feudal system. New ideas about medicine and architecture are beginning to develop, among other things, and they’ll change the world, too.

In World Without End we see all of this through the eyes of four main characters: Caris, the daughter of a wool merchant; Merthin and Ralph, two very different sons of an impoverished knight; and Gwenda, the daughter of a ne’er-do-well landless laborer. As the book begins, they’re all children. Gwenda is being made to steal a nobleman’s purse at a crowded church service—which immediately leads to a plot twist I don’t want to spoil. In fact the entire book is essentially a big ball of easily-spoiled twisty-turny plotty-wotty stuff. In fact the plot thickens at such a pace that it’s as dense as a neutron star long before you get to the middle of the book's thousand or so pages (a.k.a. 45+  hours of audiobook).

Don’t let the size of the thing put you off, though. I’m long past the age when I was a size queen about books (ah, to be young and have time for a book-a-day habit—during the summer, at least), but I was engaged all the way through. Yes, Follett is putting characters with relatively modern mind-sets into a historical setting—but only relatively modern, and there’s a reason for it. He’s writing about a time when the world was changing pretty rapidly, after all. And he also includes plenty of characters with thoroughly contemporary points of view, including two of the four POV characters, only one of whom is a villain.

By having his main characters start off as children who don’t understand everything, Follett eases the reader into a world that isn’t fully understood. And throughout the book he explains all sorts of things we may not be familiar with, without ever making the reader feel talked down to; it just seems very natural that a given character wouldn’t understand a given situation or a technology fully, and you learn about it along with them. There are several times when some characters seem painfully and even unrealistically naive, but that's my only quibble with a really grand work of historical fiction.

For fans of the first book in this trilogy, Pillars of the Earth, this is a must-read. But you needn't have read the first book to enjoy this one thoroughly; it's written to stand alone. Strongly recommend.

The Dark Between by Sonia Gensler: #tbt review

Plucky, street-wise Kate is an orphan who has just lost her last hope of making an even vaguely respectable living. Frail, dreamy Elsie suffers from fits and can’t admit to anybody what she sees while she has them. Handsome, brooding Asher is just trying to get away from an American father he hates. 

The members of this ragtag group of Victorian teens find their various ways to London’s Summerfield College, where all is not as it seems. There have been mysterious deaths, and the three very different young people are going to have to start trusting each other before they can learn the disturbing truth--and how to deal with their own dark secrets.

This is an entertaining paranormal mystery in the gothic vein with fairly judicious touches of steampunk. It does suffer from a very common fault, that of putting characters with distinctly modern attitudes into a setting that is supposed to be more or less historical. Also, the vast majority of the story's tension revolves around the fact that these characters repeatedly fail to just come out and tell each other what they obviously need to know. 

Nonetheless, the story carries the reader along an amusing roller-coaster of a plot with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing. Refreshingly, the obvious pair-off fails to materialize, and the way the lines between the spirit world and the world of hard-nosed scientific discovery are blurred is interesting in itself. A fun, light read for younger and middle teens.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Narrated by Polly Stone

This is the story of two sisters in Vichy France during World War II. The older sister, Viann, is a school teacher and a young mother in a small village; having been more or less orphaned at age 14, she has found love and a life that she loves for herself and wants nothing more than to live that life, quiet and safe. The younger, Isabelle, is a rebellious girl who keeps getting kicked out of the various boarding schools their father, a Great War veteran and a coldly distant father, keeps sending her to. She's not willing to accept anything life hands her if it doesn't meet her standards, and doesn't see why she should be quiet about it. When the Germans invade France, each sister copes in her own way.

Viann’s husband goes off to fight in the war, so she is left taking care of their children, and teaching at the local school, and keeping up the house, with its orchard and vegetable garden. With all of these responsibilities, and with the husband she adores and relies on far away, her response to the Germans is to keep her head down and just survive, and keep her children alive, the best she can. As time goes on, though, she finds herself compelled by her own conscience to extend what protection she can offer not just to her own children, but to the son of her best friend, who is Jewish, and then to other Jewish children whose parents have been deported to the concentration camps.

Meanwhile, Isabelle is far too outspoken for her own good. After Paris is occupied, she ends up living with her sister. But she can’t bring herself to be polite to the German officer billeted at her sister’s house, or to hold her tongue when she sees atrocities being committed. Apparently she never heard of discretion being the better part of valor. When a villager catches her defacing Nazi signs, he recruits her into the local resistance. At first she just distributes pamphlets, but eventually she rescues a downed English pilot by guiding him, on foot, through the Pyrennes mountains to Spain. Having done this once, she sets up a route and does it repeatedly, under the code name "The Nightingale" and earning the irate and abiding interest of the SS.

I have my quibbles with this book. There are a couple of places near the beginning where the timeline just seems wonky and people behave as if things have been going on for weeks and months that have only been happening for a few days at most; a good editor would have corrected that. Isabelle is far too loose a cannon to be an effective member of a resistance that has to fly under the radar at all times, and Viann’s difficulties and losses feel overly sentimentalized—Isabelle’s, too, toward the end of the book. Not that they aren’t horrific difficulties and losses, but that being the case, they should stand on their own and not be sentimentalized, played to jerk tears out of the reader.

Nevertheless it’s a good read. Knowing about the way the Nazis treated the French in order to break them, and the degree to which they succeeded, is one thing; living it vicariously through an absorbing story is something else again. The author paints a vivid, complex portrait of life in a country brought to its knees, not neglecting either the humanity or the inhumanity of the invaders, nor the strengths or weaknesses of the invaded.

Recommend—especially if you plan to see the movie, which I understand will be released next year.

White Houses by Amy Bloom

Read by Tonya Cornelisse

So many thoughts and feelings about this book. It’s a historical novel, the story of Eleanor Roosevelt and her lover, Lorena Hickock, affectionately referred to by her friends and closer associates as Hick. That’s right, the First Lady was bisexual, or possibly a lesbian. The two of them met when they were middle-aged ladies, a fact that makes my middle-aged heart go pitter-pat. And Hick lived in the White House for a good chunk of the 1930s—in a bedroom adjoining the First Lady’s.

All of that, as well as the fact that the President himself had girlfriends that his wife not only knew about but was distinctly friendly with, is historical fact. This being a novel, the author fills in where the historical record leaves off. Bloom writes of the reserved, upper-class Eleanor and hard-nosed reporter Hick as the love of each other’s life. Hick gave up journalism for Eleanor, when it became clear that she couldn’t write objectively about her or about her husband (who was one of Hick’s heroes as well as her rival).

Eventually Eleanor’s life distanced her from Hick, but they remained close friends, corresponding as their lives continued along separate tracks. Hick was the person Eleanor turned to when her husband died, and Hick never stopped loving her.

This is a really moving story, as well as a fascinating view of the life of the inner circle of the Roosevelt administration. There’s also quite a bit about Hick’s childhood and adolescence, which makes the life of poor kids in the early 20th century vividly clear. There’s also quite a bit of exploration of the differing lives of upper-class white lesbians and those of their lower- and middle-class sisters. Very readable; highly recommend.