The Last Runaway

I haven't been disappointed by a Tracy Chevalier book yet.  I enjoyed Girl With a Pearl Earring and The Lady and the Unicorn, and loved Remarkable Creatures, but I think her latest, The Last Runaway is my favorite.

Maybe it's because it is set in pre-Civil War America and I've been reading a lot about slavery and the Civil War lately; maybe it's because its main character, Honor Bright, is a quilter and I've been feverishly working on three quilts this spring and so can appreciate Chevalier's riffs on sewing; maybe it's because Honor is such an atypical heroine but one I can relate to and understand.  Or, maybe it's because Chevalier is a gifted writer who continues to explore new stories and articulates so well internal dramas.

Quickie synopsis - Honor Bright is a young Quaker woman from England who accompanies her engaged sister in 1850 across the Atlantic to America to immigrate.  The sister dies enroute to Ohio, and Honor is stranded in America, unable to return home because of debilitating seasickness, friendless, shy, and dependent on the kindness of virtual strangers.  She settles in a tiny town near Oberlin, where the man who was to marry her sister lives.  Honor is befriended by Belle Mills, a local haberdasher, whose brother, Donovan, is a runaway slave hunter.  Donovan fall in love with Honor, who acknowledges a spark of attraction for him but abhors his occupation.  Honor marries a local dairy farmer, Jack Haymaker, and struggles to find her place within his family.  Her mother-in-law, Judith, is rigid, demanding and condescending.  Her sister-in-law, Dorcas, is jealous of Honor and not to be trusted.  And, with the recent passage of the Fugitive Slave Laws, the Haymakers have decided that they cannot risk losing their farm by helping slaves along the underground railroad as they pass through the Oberlin, OH area on their way to Canada.  Honor defies them by helping the runaways she encounters...and therein lies the heart of the story.

There's a lot of Fanny Price (Austen's Mansfield Park heroine) in Honor Bright--both are quiet, unassuming, and completely dependent on others and yet their moral compass is so strong that they muster the courage to defy the authority figures who rule them and will not be swayed from following the dictates of their conscience and heart.

There's also a lot of Elizabeth Gaskell's Thornton family (from North and South) in the Haymaker family.  Judith Haymaker and Mrs. Thornton are definitely cut from the same cloth--neither thinks the pretty foreigner who comes to town is good enough for her princely son, and neither is afraid to make her feel small, uncomfortable, and unwelcome.  Dorcas Haymaker has a sister in Fanny Thornton--both are awed by the new girl in their lives and both deal with it by flaunting their own more secure status and indulging in fits of jealousy and spite.

Despite the similarities between the Thornton women and the Haymaker women, I have to stress that Jack Haymaker is no John Thornton.  He was actually the hardest character for me to wrap my mind around.  Honor married him after a very brief courtship, primarily because she couldn't see any other choice given her lack of family in America to look out for her.  While he has his moments, he never achieves a heroic level--he lets life happen around him but doesn't really work to shape that life.  Both Thornton and Haymaker experience devastating losses early in their lives, and both assume the mantle of head-of-household at too young an age, but they handle this role very differently.

My favorite characters, however, after Honor, are Belle and Donovan.  Belle is a wonderful, energetic woman--free-speaking, blunt, independent, and big-hearted.  Despite their vast differences in temperament and demeanor, she and Honor become true friends.  This is one way in which Honor's story differs from Fanny Price's--in Mansfield Park, Fanny never has a true friend, to whom she can unburden her heart and who always has her back with no strings attached.

Donovan is a wonderfully interesting character because while he is definitely a villain, dangerous and mean-spirited, he loves a good woman and this makes you think that redemption might actually be a possibility for him.  Donovan loves Honor not just because she is pretty and compliant, but because he sees and appreciates the light of her spirit, something Judith Haymaker is never able to do.

I think the premise of an English Quaker girl encountering slavery and coming to terms with the otherness of the slaves and then their humanity and very personal connection to herself and her own story is a brilliant way to comment on America's "peculiar institution."  Honor experiences slavery first as an outsider who is horrified by what she sees, and then as an insider (once she marries into the system) who must resist the impulse to simply protect self-interest when crimes against humanity are being perpetrated.  I think the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law probably accelerated the timing of the Civil War by decades because it forced so many people to finally take a stand against slavery whereas before the Law they were willing to "live and let live" as along as they didn't have to help recapture slaves.

Finally, I really loved reading about Honor's sewing--her English patchwork as opposed to American applique, her technique of making rosettes, and her analysis of what makes a pleasing final product.  Here's a Star of Bethlehem quilt from the 1830s and now housed in the Brooklyn Museum.  This quilt pattern is mentioned many times in the novel.  I may have to make one myself.

Star of Bethlehem quilt, circa 1830,  Brooklyn Museum

Lucky Number 6

The Classics Club Lucky SPIN number is 6!

This means I get to read Frenchman's Creek by Daphne du Maurier by July 1.

What an absolute treat I have in store.

Here's the Amazon blurb:

Jaded by the numbing politeness of Restoration London, Lady Dona St. Columb revolts against high society. She rides into the countryside, guided only by her restlessness and her longing to escape. But when chance leads her to meet a French pirate, hidden within Cornwall's shadowy forests, Dona discovers that her passions and thirst for adventure have never been more aroused. Together, they embark upon a quest rife with danger and glory, one which bestows upon Dona the ultimate choice: sacrifice her lover to certain death or risk her own life to save him. Frenchman's Creek is the breathtaking story of a woman searching for love and adventure who embraces the dangerous life of a fugitive on the seas.

I read a lot of du Maurier's novels in my teenage years, but somehow never read this one.  Sometimes it's good to hold out on finishing up on an author so that you can have a treat later on!

Captains Courageous

I've had a copy of Rudyard Kipling's Captains Courageous on my shelf for years, and so it was a natural to put on my Back to the Classics list under the Classic Adventure category. It is a classic boy's story and definitely in the mold of an Horatio Alger story, in which hard work, courage, and determination provide the path to glory.

Rudyard Kipling is most well-known for his stories and poems extolling the wonders of the British Empire, so I was a bit surprised to find out the story is firmly planted in the American mythos.  Published first serially in 1896, Captains Courageous is the story of  Harvey Cheyne, son of a railroad tycoon and insufferable brat of 15 who is washed overboard early into a journey from NY to England on an ocean liner with his mother.  He is rescued by a fishing boat, the We're Here, whose captain refuses to cut short his fishing season to take him back to NY, even though Harvey assures him that his father will reward him handsomely. Instead, he sets Harvey to work, making him earn his keep, and in a fairly short time, Harvey is relishing the hard work and the camaraderie of his new life.

When he is finally reunited with his parents near the end of the book, his father, in particular, is immensely proud of the man his son has become under the tutelage of Disko Troop, the We're Here's captain.  The father acknowledges that he gave his son a life of privilege and so deprived him of the opportunity to make a man of himself through that magic elixir of hard work, courage, and determination that the father experienced himself.

It's good that Captains Courageous is a short novel because the saccharine quality of the story would become too much to swallow after awhile.  As it was, I enjoyed it for what it was in the pantheon of Boys Stories, and I particularly enjoyed reading about life in a fishing boat circa 1900 in the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.  I also absolutely loved the description of the train trip that Harvey's parents took from San Diego to Boston after they receive word that their son had been rescued.  According to Wikipedia, it is a classic of railway literature. 

The couple travel in the Cheynes' private rail car, the "Constance", taken from San Diego to Chicago as a special train, hauled by sixteen locomotives in succession. It takes precedence over 177 other trains. "Two and one-half minutes would be allowed for changing engines; three for watering and two for coaling." The "Constance" is attached to the scheduled express "New York Limited" to Buffalo, New York. The car was transferred to the New York Central for the trip across the state to Albany. Switched to the Boston and Albany Railroad, the Cheynes complete the trip to Boston in their private car, with the entire cross-country run taking 87 hours 35 minutes.

I read a little bit about Kipling and discovered that he lived in Vermont for awhile early in his marriage and wrote this novel whilst living there.

I also learned that the book's title comes from the ballad "Mary Ambree", which opens with the line "When captains courageous, whom death could not daunt." Kipling had previously used the same title for an article on businessmen as the new adventurers, published in The Times in 1892.

Here's a sample of the kind of writing that exemplifies Captains Courageous and that made it a fun read for this landlubber who had a print of Winslow Homer's Sailing the Catboat in her room when she was a child. 

It thrilled through him when he first felt the keel answer to his hand on the spokes and slide over the long hollows as the foresail scythed back and forth against the blue sky.

Sailing the Catboat, by Winslow Homer

The Classics Spin

The Classics Club Spin #2 - I wasn't a member for the earlier spin this year, but I loved the idea of having a random number generator pick what classic I would read next.  

Here's the format.

• Pick twenty unread books from your list. This could be five you are dreading/hesitant to read, five you can’t WAIT to read, five you are neutral about, and five free choice.
• Number them from one to twenty.
• On Monday a number will be drawn.
• That’s the book to read by July 1.

1. Mystery Mile, by Margery Allingham
2. Elizabeth and Her German Garden, Elizabeth von Armin
3. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
4. David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens (reread)
5. Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
6. Frenchman's Creek, by Daphne du Maurier
7. Trilby, by George du Maurier
8. Felix Holt, by George Eliot 
9. The Art of Eating, M.F.K. Fisher
10. The French Lieutenant's Woman, by John Fowles
11. The Sybil, by Par Lagerkvist (reread)
12. The Leopard, by Guiseppe di Lampedusa
13. The Blue Castle, by L.M. Montgomery
14. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
15. Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates
16. Excellent Women, by Barbara Pym
17. Waverley, by Sir Walter Scott 
18. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by R.L. Stevenson
19. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck (reread)
20. Dr. Thorne, by Anthony Trollope 

If left to my own devices, I would go with #8, #18, #19, or #20 as they are all on my Back to the Classics Challenge.

First Chapter ~ First Paragraph Tuesday Intros:

Hosted by Diane @ Bibliophile by the Sea

This is my first time doing this meme. 

My selection is from The Ninth Daughter, by Barbara Hamilton.  It's the first in her Abigail Adams mystery series, and I'm about half way through the book now.

     Abigail Adams smelled the blood before she saw the door was open.   

     In November, Boston didn't reek the way it did in summer, especially down here in Fish Street. The coppery blood-stink cut the more prosaic pong of fish-heads and privies from the moment she stepped through the gate into Tillet's Yard, the way the single thread of gore seemed to shriek at her against the gray of the wet morning, trickling down Rebecca Malvern's doorstep.

I'm really enjoying this book, and Hamilton's Abigail seems very authentic--I keep hearing and picturing Laura Linney, who played Abigail superbly in the John Adams mini-series, and who I think got it right!

Thoughts?

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

I have wanted to read Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, for years.  I was pleasantly surprised awhile ago when I finally read Dracula--I don't read horror, except on rare occasions--but I really liked the book and could see how it captured an audience and never let it go.  I've been anticipating a similar experience with Frankenstein.  Furthermore, I think Mary Shelley is an interesting person--her position as daughter, wife, and friend to pillars of English literature and philosophy as well as her authorship of a book that sparked a legend and an industry makes her fascinating to learn about.  As someone interested in the evolution of the novel, it was simply a matter of time before I got around to this seminal work.

Now that I've read it, I confess that I was a bit disappointed, primarily because I found the character of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the creator of the monster and the purported hero of the story, to be insufferable.  As a parent, I simply cannot forgive his abandonment of the creature he created.  I found the middle volume of the book, in which the monster tells his own story, to be the most interesting part of the novel and I felt far more sympathy for the monster than I could summon for his creator. 

The story of Frankenstein is told as a story within a story, and I also found the initial narrator, Robert Walton, to be as irritating as Dr. Frankenstein.  Their egotism and recklessness in the name of scientific ambition was hard to swallow, and I'm struggling to figure out whether Shelley intended for them to be seen as heroic or whether the point of her story was to show how tragically genius can be squandered when the aim is solely fame.  

The reason that I have mixed feelings about Frankenstein is that I really think that Shelley saw Frankenstein's decision to not create a mate for his monster as a noble one.  In her story, he consciously sacrificed the safety of his family for the good of mankind--without a mate, the monster can't procreate.  However, Frankenstein made a bargain with his monster that I don't think the monster would have reneged on.  While the creature thought that Dr. F. was making him a mate, he refrained from killing. Without hope for ever having love or companionship, the monster snapped and returned to killing everyone beloved by Dr. Frankenstein.  Dr. F. kept on saying how persuasive and eloquent his monster could be--he was right, he convinced me that he would have kept his promise to be good.

By assembling body parts and applying electricity to them, Dr. Frankenstein created a living being.  By denying him access to society and failing to teach him how to live productively, Dr. Frankenstein made that living being into a monster.  On Mother's Day, it seems fitting to point out the Dr. Frankenstein was a very bad parent. 

I think the idea behind the story of Frankenstein is brilliant--it is a thought-provoking book and provides incredible insight into the anguish of marginalized people, as well as society dealing with technological capabilities that outstrip the moral code.  It has some good writing, particularly the middle section in which the monster waxes as eloquently as Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost, one of the first books he taught himself to read!  

It's certainly not one of the best books I've ever read, but it definitely is one of the most interesting.

Frankenstein is part of my Back to the Classics challenge.

The Classics Club - May Meme

The Classics Club meme for May is:
Tell us about the classic book(s) you’re reading this month. You can post about what you’re looking forward to reading in May, or post thoughts-in-progress on your current read(s).

I just finished Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and look forward to blogging about it shortly.  It's been on my reading list for years, and I have mixed feelings.  I expected to unconditionally love it, but I had a few issues.  It was still a great read and a timeless classic.

I am almost done listening to Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling.  Just two chapters left, and it is terrific.  Sort of a mini version of Moby Dick--I feel like I have been well-schooled in fishing vessels at the turn of the last century.  I'm even inspired to maybe add a question or two about it to the Goodreads' Never-Ending-Book-Quiz, my personal favorite procrastinator's tool.

I'm about to start Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguao.  I had meant to read his Remains of the Day first, but I joined a read-along this month and so changed the reading order.

Mailbox Monday - May 6

Mailbox Monday is hosted by 4 the LOVE of BOOKS--stop by the site to see what other bloggers just added to their TBR shelves.

I picked up a copy of A Little House Sampler--no it's not about cross-stitch that Laura and Mary did--instead it is a collection of fiction, essays, articles, columns, poems, drafts, unpublished manuscripts, notes, and musings of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her journalist-novelist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. 

I'm looking forward to reading a new novel that's just on the horizon,  A Wilder Rose: Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Their Little Houses, by Susan Wittig Albert, and I wanted to get a flavor of their non-Little House writings first.  While I've read the LH series many times, I haven't really read much else that they wrote.

Strong as Death - A Catherine LeVendeur Mystery

I usually don't read books in a series out of order, but when I heard that the fourth book in Sharan Newman's mystery series set in 12th century France took place during a pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, I knew I had to read it.

Newman did an excellent job in filling in the backstory of Catherine LeVendeur so that I was able to read Strong as Death as a standalone novel, and I hope to read more in the series as I liked the characters, the writing, and the overall setting.  Sort of Brother Cadfael meets Outlander--there was a lot of medieval Christianity content and Catherine and her husband, Edgar, really reminded me very strongly of Claire and Jamie Fraser from Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series.  Both Catherine and Claire are feisty, capable, practical, compassionate, emotional women, and both Edgar and Jamie are loyal, strong, steadfast, and hopelessly in love with their respective wives.

Now on to why I read the book in the first place, the Camino.  According to the afterword, the author walked the same path as her characters did, starting in Le Puy, France and it was great fun to Google the places where the pilgrims stopped along the way and gaze at the pictures of towns that really don't look like they've changed much during the past millennium.  It seemed that all of the churches, shrines, and other landmarks mentioned in the book remain for today's pilgrims to enjoy.

The mystery itself was pretty good.  I did guess at the murderer fairly early on, but I thought the story was sound and tight and not too fantastical and I loved reading about the customs, religious issues, and day-to-day living issues that constituted the world of the 12th century pilgrim.

This goes on my Camino bookshelf, and I imagine I will be rereading it before I begin my own pilgrimage two years from now.

Conques, France - near the beginning of the journey to Compostela

Joining the Classics Club

A lot of my blogger friends are members of the Classics Club, and since this seems to be my year of jumping on the bandwagon, I decided to join.  Here is my list of fifty classics in five years.  

Only one is currently in-progress, Frankenstein, the rest are books that I plan to read or reread within the next five years. 

Most are novels, but there are a couple of non-fiction books in there as well.

With this list, I will finish my end-to-end reading of George Eliot, begun a few years ago, and make good headway with R.L. Stevenson and John Steinbeck.  It also accounts for finishing up Trollope's Barset collection. It has a couple of books set in Venice and about the Civil War, both of which are current reading interests. It also includes a number of firsts--my first Joyce Carol Oates, my first Sir Walter Scott, and my first Ann Patchett.

1. Mystery Mile, by Margery Allingham
2. Elizabeth and Her German Garden, Elizabeth von Armin
3. Agnes Grey, by Anne Bronte
4. Shirley, by Charlotte Bronte
5. Camilla, by Fanny Burney
6. A Diary from Dixie, by Mary Chestnut
7. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
8. No Name, by Wilkie Collins
9. The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens (reread)
10. David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens (reread)
11. Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
12. Frenchman's Creek, by Daphne du Maurier
13. Trilby, by George du Maurier
14. Felix Holt, by George Eliot 
15. Middlemarch, by George Eliot
16. Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot
17. The Art of Eating, M.F.K. Fisher
18. The French Lieutenant's Woman, by John Fowles
19. A Passage to India, by E.M. Forster
20. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
21. Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
22. The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James (reread)
23. Daisy Miller, by Henry James
24. Captains Courageous, by Rudyard Kipling
25. The Sybil, by Par Lagerkvist (reread)
26. The Leopard, by Guiseppe di Lampedusa
27. The Razor's Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham
28. Battle Cry of Freedom, by James M. McPherson
29. The Blue Castle, by L.M. Montgomery
30. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
31. Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates
32. State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett
33. Excellent Women, by Barbara Pym
34. Waverley, by Sir Walter Scott 
35. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley 
36. The Black Arrow, by R.L. Stevenson 
37. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by R.L. Stevenson
38. Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner
39. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck (reread)
40. East of Eden, by John Steinbeck (reread)
41. Travels with Charley, by John Steinbeck
42. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
43. Dr. Thorne, by Anthony Trollope 
44. Framley Parsonage, by Anthony Trollope
45. The Small House at Allington, by Anthony Trollope
46. The Last Chronicle of Barset, by Anthony Trollope
47. 1876, by Gore Vidal
48. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh (reread)
49. The Buccaneers, by Edith Wharton
50. Germinal, by Emile Zola