When the Stars Go Dark

Title:  When the Stars Go Dark

Author:  Paula McLain

Publication Information:  Ballantine Books. 2021. 384 pages.

ISBN:  0593237897 / 978-0593237892

Book Source:  I received this book through NetGalley free of cost in exchange for an honest review.

Opening Sentence:  "The mother who tore off her dress when the  police came to her house with the news and then ran down the street in only her shoes, while her neighbors, even the ones who knew her well, hid behind their doors and windows, afraid of her grief."

Favorite Quote:  "For the longest time, I stand on Lansing Street thinking about beauty and terror. Evil. Grace. Suffering. Joy. How they're all here every day, everywhere. Teaching us how to keep stepping forward into our lives, our purpose. Long ago Corolla told me that it's not what happens to us that matters most, but how can learn to carry it. I'm starting to understand the difference, and how maybe the only way we can survive what's here, and what we are, is together."

The author's note for this book points out. "Every 73 seconds someone in America becomes the victim of sexual assault. Every nine minutes one of those victims is a child. 82% of victims under the age of eighteen are female." These are mind boggling statistics.

Within this statistic, the book weaves in the actual history of Polly Klaas. In 1993, twelve year old Polly Hannah Klaas was kidnapped from her home during a sleepover. The search for Polly lasted almost two months. During this time, the information about her disappearance was shared far and wide, with thousands of people at a grassroots level involved in the search for Polly. Sadly, only her body was found. She had been strangled. I don't know if Polly's family gave permission for the inclusion of her case in this book or if the information used is public record. I would hope that it would not hurt them in any way and perhaps even bring peace that their daughter is remembered and that talking about her may save someone else. I, for one, would not know about Polly Klaas except for this book.

Within these statistics and this historic case, the book builds the fictional story of a missing teenager in Mendocino and that of detective Anna Hart. Anna Hart is a product of the foster care system. A fortunate placement with a couple in Mendocino brought love and a home, but she has not been back for years. She is passionate about her work as a police detective, often working with the most fragile of victims. Trauma in her adult life brings her "home" again. News of a missing teenage forces her to get involved. That sets her on the trail of a kidnapper but also brings her fact to face again with the traumas of her own past.

To me, this book is not really about the suspense of who the kidnapper is. I do guess that relatively early on simply because there are not that many characters in the book. To me, this book is also not really about the life Anna is running from - her husband and her child. I do wish more had been explained about those relationships.

To me, this book is about the damaged, flawed characters all dealing with the traumas of their past. It is about the emotional and psychological impact of childhood traumas. It is about bringing attention to the so very important issue of abuse and violence against women, particularly against children. The book is dark - by title, by subject matter, and by tone. However, it ends on a note of hope and light in some ways. It brings the statistics to life in a tragic, visual way that I will remember for a long while.

The author's note comes at the end of this book. I am very curious as this book is such a departure from the historical fiction I have read so far from the author, and I want to understand from what the story emanates. This is certainly not what I expect. "Writing a novel is such an interesting mix of effort and surrender, of control and vulnerability. It wasn't until late in the stages of drafting that it fully dawned on me just why I was so drawn to tell this articular story and not any other. My troubled detective, Anna Hart, is obsessed with trauma and healing, with intimate violence and the complex hidden connection between victims and predators, because I'm obsessed with those things, and long have been. I've given her other parts of me too - a version of my childhood spent in foster care, and my abiding love of the natural world as deep medicine. What Anna knows and thinks about the hidden scars of sexual abuse, I know as a sexual abuse survivor." Wow. Just wow.

Please share your thoughts and leave a comment. I would love to "talk" to you.

Love and Ruin

Title:  Love and Ruin

Author:  Paula McLain

Publication Information:  Ballantine Books. 2018. 400 pages.

ISBN:  1101967382 / 978-1101967386

Book Source:  I received this book through NetGalley free of cost in exchange for an honest review.

Opening Sentence:  "Near dawn on July 13, 1936, as three assassins scaled a high garden wall in Tenerife hoping to catch the band of armed guards unaware, I was asleep in a tiny room in Stuttgart, waiting for my life to begin."

Favorite Quote:  "Even when other things come in loud, we have to keep choosing each other. That's marriage. You can't only say the words once and think they'll stick. You have to say them over and over, and then live them out with all you've got."

Love and Ruin is the fictionalized account of the relationship and five year marriage between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Ellis Gelhorn. They were married from 1940 to 1945, a tumultuous period in world history. This was also the time in which Ernest Hemingway published For Whom the Bells Toll, written based on his experiences during the Spanish civil war.

Martha Gelhorn was the third of Ernest Hemingway's four wives. They in fact met and began their relationship while Hemingway was still married to Pauline Pfeiffer. Much - fiction and nonfiction - has been written about Hemingway and especially his marriages. Naomi Wood's Mrs. Hemingway was a snapshot of all four marriages. Paula McLain's earlier book The Paris Wife was about his first marriage to Elizabeth Hadley Richardson.

Martha Gelhorn was a renowned journalist in her own right. In fact, a journalism prize established in 1999 is named in her honor. The Martha Gelhorn Prize for Journalism is awarded "for the kind of reporting that distinguished Martha: in her own words 'the view from the ground'. This is essentially a human story that penetrates the established version of events and illuminates an urgent issue buried by prevailing fashions of what makes news. We would expect the winner to tell an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts, that exposes establishment conduct and its propaganda, or 'official drivel', as Martha called it."

This book begins in Martha's life before she is an established journalist; it begins when she meets Ernest Hemingway by chance on a trip. That chance meeting, a promise, and Martha's dream land her on the front lines of the Spanish civil war and in close proximity to Ernest Hemingway. So begins the relationship, and so begins Martha's career as a war correspondent.

Beyond that point, their relationship and hence the book follows a cyclic path - periods in a war zone, and periods of peace in an idyllic island haven. Interspersed throughout, of course, is writing for and from both of them. The relationship is depicted with the competition from both being in the same line of work. Ernest Hemingway has achieved his fame; Martha Gelhorn is working on finding her voice. At times, the pendulum of success seems to shift from one to the other.

The focus of this story remains throughout the relationship more so than the woman and her accomplishments. Even the portions set in the middle of war zones center on the two of them; I don't really get a sense of the time and place that were the basis of Martah Gelhorn's career. Her career was about the history she lived through; her writing was about the places and people and events she witnessed. Yet, that history seems not to take a back seat in this book.

I am honestly not sure I get a complete picture of the woman herself. She was twenty-eight when she met Ernest Hemingway. She had had affairs previously. She was willing and able to travel alone into a war zone. She was obviously independent and strong. Yet, somehow, the impression I am left with is of someone younger and more innocent. I don't know enough of the actual history to say which is the more accurate one, but I am left with the question in mind.

I guess in many ways I would rather have read the story of Martha Gelhorn, groundbreaking war correspondent, than Martha Gelhorn, one of the wives of Ernest Hemingway.

Please share your thoughts and leave a comment. I would love to "talk" to you.

Circling the Sun

Title:  Circling the Sun

Author:  Paula McLain

Publication Information:  Ballantine Books. 2015. 384 pages.

ISBN:  0345534182 / 978-0345534187

Book Source:  I received this book as a publisher's galley through NetGalley free of cost in exchange for an honest review.

Opening Sentence:  "The Vega Gull is peacock blue with silver wings, more splendid than any bird I've known, and somehow mine to fly."

Favorite Quote:  "'I think I'd always been looking for an escape route.'
'Escape from what?'
'I don't know. Any tight-fitting definition of what a life should be, I suppose. Or what I should be in it.'"

Beryl Markham was an unconventional woman, especially for the times in which she lived. Racehorse trainer. Adventurer. Bush pilot. Pioneer. Author. First woman to fly across the Atlantic from east to west in a solo flight. (The east to west is significant for that direction is considered to be much harder for the pilot flies against the currents.) These are some of the epithets that can be applied to her.

The content of this book has been compared to West with the Night, Beryl Markham's own memoir published in 1942 and the 1937 book Out of Africa written by Karen Blixen under her pen name Isak Dineson. The first I have not read and the second I read too long ago to offer a comparison. I do know that the main characters of Out of Africa, Karen Blixen and her lover Denys Finch Hatton, are both key characters in Circling the Sun. However, both West with the Night and Out of Africa are personal accounts of a period in each author's life. Circling the Sun is a work of historical fiction as was The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. Read the book with that fact in mind for Beryl Markham's life does make for a great story.

The story focuses on two facets of Beryl Markham's life - her adventurous pursuits and her many relationships. Her adventures began early. Although born in England, Beryl moves to Kenya at a very young age with her parents. Beryl's life is forever altered when her mother deserted her at a very young age to return to England. Her childhood is spent surrounded by her father's love, his horse farm, and the native community who took to caring for the motherless girl. The book tells the stories of horse riding, lion attacks, hunting, and many other adventures. The ups and downs of life lead to Beryl reinventing herself many times over in her life, from farm owner to pauper to the companion of a rich man to a renowned horse trainer in her own right to bush pilot.

All along the way come relationships - a childhood friendship, marriages, love affairs, commitments of convenience, an abortion, and a child. Some are notorious, some shocking, and some just sad. Many become a means to an end - respectability, security, and a chance to pursue her adventures. For the most part, it is these relationships that become the focus of this book. More time is spent on the emotional ups and downs rather than the adventure story of Beryl Markham's life, which to me is the more interesting story.

Underlying her entire life, of course, is the story of Kenya, of Africa. Unfortunately, this book does not delve deeply into Africa - its beauty or its history. The characters of these settlers to Africa come alive in this book; the place unfortunately does not. The setting is there, but the focus of the book is clearly the characters and the emotional plot line.

Paula McLain has penned another wonderful description of a historical figure. Wonder whose life she will attempt next?

Please share your thoughts and leave a comment. I would love to "talk" to you.

Mrs. Hemingway

Title:  Mrs. Hemingway

Author:  Naomi Wood

Publication Information:  Penguin Books. 2014. 322 pages.

ISBN:  0143124617 / 978-0143124610

Book Source:  I received this book through a publisher's giveaway free of cost in exchange for an honest review.

Favorite Quote:  "What a pull he has! What a magnetism! Women jump off balconies and follow him into wars. Women turn their eyes from an affair, because a marriage of three is better than a woman alone."

Ernest Hemingway over the course of his life was married to four women - Hadley, Pauline, Martha and Mary. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain tells the story of his first marriage to Hadley.

This book seems to follow the trend for creating fictionalized accounts of real relationships as Nancy Horan does in Under the Wide and Starry Sky and Robin Oliveira does in I Always Loved You. It is important to note that though based in fact, all of these stories are fiction for the true details of the relationships have been lost with the people themselves. That is why each author is very careful to present it as a novel.

This book is written in four sections - each one telling the story of one marriage. Each section begins at the end in a way. It begins at the time when each marriage is ending whether it be through an affair, divorce, or death.

Each section dips back and forth between the highs and lows of the relationship. It dips back and forth between each woman's belief that theirs would be the one that lasted forever and the realization that it would not. Each section touches on the relationship between these women - I suppose the bond from having loved and lost the same man.

This book is a story of Ernest Hemingway up to a point. His character is presented through the views and perceptions of these women. The book does not speak to his motivations. It leaves you wondering what it was about this man that drew these women, even knowing his past relationship history.

This book is, of course, the story of these four women - their love, their efforts to manage their relationship, and their lives after. One of the most interesting things I found was the ongoing friendships and relationships between the women even though one may have been responsible for the end of the other's marriage.

This book is also a story of the times from Paris to Key West, from the war front to high society.

The book blends fiction with known facts about Ernest Hemingway and the lives of these women. It adds research based on letters and telegrams. Through all of this, it weaves a beautifully written story about love, heartbreak, and choices. I cannot say that I understand these women, but it does not matter. This book is a story of emotions, and sometimes there is no why. It is simply an emotional journey to be felt.

Please share your thoughts and leave a comment. I would love to "talk" to you.

The Paris Wife

Title:  The Paris Wife

Author:  Paula McLain

Publication Information:  Ballatine Books, Random House Inc. 2011. 433 pages.

Book Source:  I read this book as this month's selection for my local book club.

Favorite Quote:  "To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too - that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up."

The Paris Wife is historical fiction. It is a fictionalized account of Ernest Hemingway's first marriage to Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. So, with one search, you could know what the story of this book is.

I was hesitant to read this book because Ernest Hemingway is such an iconic figure in American literature. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize. A winner of the Nobel Prize. I knew the story of his life and his suicide, but I did not know if I wanted to read the details that a book like this one would bring. I sometimes prefer to keep icons as icons and not deal with their reality as human beings.

However, because the book was my book club selection, I persevered. I am glad I did. I still don't like the characters or the story itself any better. However, I really appreciated the storytelling. Even though I knew what was coming, I got involved with the characters and their emotions. The book is well written, and the story well told. I am looking forward to hearing what the rest of the my book club thought!