Book Reviews

“Family of Liars” by E. Lockhart is the prequel to and almost as good as “We Were Liars.” Boy, can Lockhart plot. If you’ve read the original, the reader might guess that the narrator is unreliable, which is a handy device for leading us astray. But I bought right into the story.

This prequel takes place a generation earlier than “We Were Liars,” in 1985, and centers around 17 year-old Carrie and her slightly younger sisters, Penny, Bess, and ten year old Rosemary. Their wealthy and entitled family spend summers on their private island an hour off of Martha’s Vineyard. This summer, her uncle brings three teenaged boys to the island to accommodate his teenaged daughter Yardley. George is Yardley’s boyfriend. Major and Pfeff are his friends.

The island is big enough that there are several beaches, several docks, and four houses, one for the caretaker and servant. The provided map is helpful. It’s pretty intoxicating for the reader, especially the young reader, to read about these ultra-rich people and how they live, boating hours to the mainland to shop, having everything you never knew needed, at their fingertips. Carrie’s mother Tipper is the uber-hostess and serves “nibbles” of lobster rolls for Happy Hour and Dad serves underaged teens alcoholic drinks. Tipper throws parties where she and her maid serve four flavors of handmade ice cream, sponsors lemon hunts with $100 prizes, and the food served makes you wonder if everyone on the island is the size of a house. But you know their lithe and gorgeous. Lockhart says. And they’re all blonde.

The patriarch, Harris, is a rich businessman (that serves cocktails to the kids) who loves his family and passes along various mottos such as “be a credit to the family” and “the only way out is through.” The girls work hard, whatever it takes, to look like a credit to their family, and therein lies their problems. Harris looks upstanding alongside his brother Dean, father of Yardley, and the tension between the two brothers comes to a head midway through the story.

Carrie isn’t as beautiful as the others and her father has masterminded cosmetic surgery to change that, and the pain killers involved become an addiction. The next oldest, Penny, is gorgeous and careless of people’s feelings. The three entitled boys and five entitled girls on the island (Penny has invited her friend Erin for the summer) don’t pair up neatly. It’s far more complicated than that. The story begins with the youngest, Rosemary, having drowned the summer before at the age of 10.

Pfeff flirts with Carrie. Carrie gets her first kiss, but that’s the end of the simple story line. The upper crust Sinclair family pulls us along with their society ways as the plot gets more and more complicated. A fun and surprising read.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning books: Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore.  Books forthcoming about women’s suffrage, Martha Graham, and Ella Fitzgerald. talesforallages.com

“Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix” (2022 Feiwel and Friends) by Anna-Marie McLemore is part of a series of classic remixes. Reading a “remix” helps you remember the original and compare it to the original.

Both F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel and McLemore’s are set in the roaring twenties in East Egg and West Egg, fictional Long Island towns. Both books deal with the upper class and disparities of social class and there is a counterpart for each major character of the original. But Nicolás Caraveo is the narrator stand in for Nick Carraway and Daisy stands in for Daisy Buchanan, and she is Tom Buchanan’s girlfriend, not wife. This Daisy is actually Daisy Caraveo, Nic’s cousin, but she is passing from a Latina girl to a white girl and chooses to be called Daisy Fay. She is seemingly as vapid as the original.

No one is quite as they seem. Both Nic and Jay Gatsby are transgender boys (as is the author) who wear “side-lacers” to flatten their breasts. This is not much of a spoiler—at least we discover this early on or if we read the cover material. This Jordan Baker is a wealthy socialite but also a golf star. The relationships among the characters are similar to the original but the outcome of relationships is quite different. And the story is not the tragedy of Fitzgerald’s book. That’s usually true of YA books and to me that’s a perk in these days of stress and uncertainty.

It would seem fitting that the roaring twenties be written in dazzling prose and at times that’s how I felt about McLemore’s writing. Such as, “I would have sworn to a priest that Gatsby’s smile pulled light in through the windows.” But the constant florid images verge on purple prose, for this reader, especially since she describes Nic, the narrator, as an empirical man. But it’s Daisy who says, “’Don’t you love me anymore, Tom?’ she asked in a voice as airy as her green chiffon.” Lines like that and too many others like them are too much for this reader.

Still it was fun to follow the newly minted plot that revolves around “lavender marriage,” which was a new concept to me. Each of two lesbians marry each of two gay men. In the twenties it was imperative to look upstanding. Afterall, homosexuality was, unfortunately, illegal. So you could have two upstanding-looking couples and then go home to your true lover. It makes you realize how horrifying it was not to be able to be oneself in the world. I’m grateful we’ve made some progress. Knowing how much work it is to maintain a marriage of two, think about the ramifications and complications of a foursome like this. Anyway, it’s the crux of the happily-ever-after outcome of “Self-Made Boys.” Wonderful title, considering the theme of the original revolves around self-made men.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning books: Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore.  Books forthcoming about women’s suffrage, Martha Graham, and Ella Fitzgerald. talesforallages.com

Outspoken Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, an American woman born in 1832, was a Civil War surgeon and Union spy, an advocate of women’s dress reform, and a suffragist. Although she was a contemporary of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Mary saw things differently than they did. “I Could Not Do Otherwise: The Remarkable Life of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker” (Zest Books 2022) by former Champaign resident, Sara Latta, is a deeply researched and a highly readable nonfiction book.

Whereas Stanton and Anthony wore the new bloomers of the day and believed in dress reform for a time, they ceased to wear bifurcated skirts, feeling that dress reform was overshadowing their true mission—women’s suffrage. Mary Walker felt that wearing trousers and a tunic or jacket to below the knee could free women to be more active and therefore healthier. As a doctor, she knew that corsets (being the undergarments of fashion), which were laced so tight that the organs were rearranged inside the body, were ridiculously unhealthy, resulting first in a woman’s propensity to faint, and a general malaise.

Stanton and Anthony worked lifelong for a constitutional amendment that would give women the right to vote. Walker felt that a woman’s right to vote was built into the original constitution when it said “all people are created equal” and that fighting for an amendment was unnecessary and in fact worked against woman’s full rights because they were already proclaimed in the Constitution. She felt that the Constitution simply needed to be interpreted correctly, and worked accordingly.

Mary worked tirelessly alongside grateful male surgeons during the War Between the States but was unpaid by the military. To support herself, she’d have to take breaks and do lecture tours, talking about the plight of women, encouraging women to become activists, as well as lectures about the war and about surgery—topics that interested both men and women. When she toured in Europe, she was an immensely popular speaker. Back home, she was frequently considered too outspoken and perhaps too blustery to be taken seriously. Which is why, I supposed, she’s not a household name today. In her day, she was.

Dr. Mary Walker was briefly married to another physician, who turned out to be unfaithful. As all the cards were stacked against women, it took her many years to procure a divorce. But Mary wasn’t one to give up. She eventually got her divorce.

Photos, their captions, and sidebars offer loads of fascinating information about issues of the day in addition to the primary story of Mary’s life. The information is well-cited for the reader who wants to delve deeper into the topic. This book shows the plight of women in the workplace, the home, and her access to rights. If I had to write a school report, I’d surely write about Dr. Walker by starting with this book.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning books: Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore.  Books forthcoming about women’s suffrage, Martha Graham, and Ella Fitzgerald. talesforallages.com

“The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen” (Philomel 2022) by Isaac Blum is a witty and searing story, longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Hoodie (short for Yehuda) is the only boy in a family of girls all belonging to an Orthodox Jewish community that has moved to the mostly non-Jewish town of Tregaron.

The young men in his yeshiva—his school—argue the moral and ethical teachings of Jewish philosophy. And in the Hoodie’s hands it’s hilarious, but still respectful and illuminating. “The Original Oral Torah plus all these commentaries make up the Talmud. It’s a giant maze of Jewish laws rules, thoughts, considerations, ruminations. Studying it…[is] basically medieval torture, but the cool, Jewish kind. It hurts so good.” Discussing Talmud is “a battle of wits, knowledge, and, in this case, wills.”

There’s this girl he sees out the window wearing, not a long white gown but a white t-shirt. And shorts, showing a lot of skin. He’s allowed to go on walks to think about Talmud, but he’s not allowed to talk to girls, especially those outside his Orthodox community.

Unable to stop himself, he asks her name. “Anna-Marie,” she says. “‘Crap,’” says Hoodie. “I’d been holding out hope she’d be a Chaya or an Esther. But no. She was an Anna-Marie. Just Anna would have provided a sliver of hope. I knew from the shorts that she wasn’t super observant, definitely not frum, like me. But unhyphenated Anna could have been a Jew at least, if a secular one . . . But Anna-Marie? There literally wasn’t a more goyishe name.” And her last name turns out to be Diaz-O’Leary.

Her mother is the mayor who wants the Orthodox Jewish community gone, and who, along with the locals, tries to keep the Jewish community from building a high rise. Hoodie says, “They talked about us like we were an invading army, like we were going to ride in on horseback with torches and pitchforks, to set their buildings on fire and slaughter them kosher-style. . . like we’re going to go home to home rounding up their bacon, confiscating their shellfish . . .”

You get it. Exclusion of the Other. And here is Hoodie falling in love with down-to-earth, hip Anna-Marie who tries to scour off the swastikas that show up on Jewish tombstones in the cemetery. His talking to Anna-Marie means Hoodie is ostracized from the community. Even his family turn away. And we love his family of sisters. His oldest, Zippy who knows the Torah better than Hoodie, but she’s just a girl who sleeps at the kitchen table after studying Talmud all day. Young Chana stations herself on the roof of the house, throwing small vegetable missiles down upon Hoodie. And there are two more younger sisters.

Tension mounts until the unthinkable occurs which shocked me but is authentic in both worldly and literary ways. What a great book! Not only did I laugh reading most every page but I learned a load about the day to day life of an Orthodox Jewish community.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning books: Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore.  Books forthcoming about women’s suffrage, Martha Graham, and Ella Fitzgerald. talesforallages.com