Category: Reviews

In The Summer Girls, New York Times Best-selling author Mary Alice Monroe weaves a compelling story of three granddaughters who visit their grandmother on her 80th birthday in the old family house they had loved as children on Sullivans Island off the South Carolina coast.

The invitation runs to a 3 month stay, so we get the low-down on the troubles that have caused these girls to grow apart over the years. We also watch a number of steps they all make, and the secrets they reveal, to get closer again.

It is a beautiful spot and Mary Alice Monroe writes lovingly of the environmental characteristics of this particular coast. This includes the changing light on the ocean and endless fascination of the waves rolling in. Monroe is herself an active conservationist and part of the story tells of the amazing attachment between dolphins and humans.

The grandmother has kept her own secrets all these years, so there are revelations all round. It makes for an intriguing summer read.

This is the first Pocket Books paperback edition of The Summer Girls and is the second book Monroe has written in what will be the Lowcountry Trilogy.

 

Review by Anne McDougall

Tom Rachman made his name with his first novel, The Imperfectionists which became an international bestseller and was translated into twenty-five languages. With this second book, also a novel, he tells the rivetting story of a young woman who was abandoned as a child and spent years travelling the globe looking for her forebears.

Rachman himself was born in London and raised in Vancouver. He went to the University of Toronto and Columbia Journalism School and later worked as a journalist in New York, Rome and Paris. When his heroine in this book tramps the streets of Manhattan, or clambers around an island off Vancouver, you feel you are right beside her.

The book opens with Tooly Zylverberg reading in the tiny bookshop that she owns in Wales.  Her assistant, Fogg, is tidying books beside her. From here she sets out to find again the people who had cared for her as a child. It is a tricky story because Rachman includes the rise and fall of the American empire in the past twenty years. He also jumps from decade to decade all the while travelling from Sydney, Australia to Bangkok and beyond. He is a brilliant writer, and also full of surprises.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a heart-warming, unsentimental story of a German shepherd dog who stuck with his master through some of the most dangerous years of World War ll.

The dog was called Ant, after a dive-bomber used by men of the Czech Air Force before they escaped Czechoslovakia for England and flew with the RAF Bomber Command. Robert Bozdech came across the puppy when he was escaping from a crash-landing in France. It had been abandoned by its owners and left in an old farm-house. Bozdech tucked it into his jacket and from then on managed to keep the handsome, intelligent animal beside him. The most amazing part of this story is the number of commanders  who one way or another allowed this to happen. It is also true that on a number of occasions the dog saved his master’s life.

There are a number of vintage black-and-white photos of Robert and Ant. By the end of the war they had become British war heroes. Ant won the Dickin Medal, the “Animal Victoria Cross” for his bravery.

The author, Damien Lewis, has spent twenty years reporting from war and conflict zones for the BBC, CNN  and other news organizations. He is also a lifelong dog lover and has written two earlier books on military working dogs.

Review by Anne McDougall

There have been many books written on Jane Austen and her beloved novels, some of the most important by this author, Deirdre Le Faye.

In this one, she take a close look at Jane Austen’s life in the countryside around the two towns where her father had his vicarages. These were Steventon and Chawton in Hampsire, South-West England. Her father had studied at Oxford before becoming a clergyman and Le Faye has already written about the scholarship and love of books in Jane’s background.

But her father also inherited considerable land-holdings and ran large family estates where they kept horses, cows and a chicken run. Her mother, who had eight children, also turned her hand to farming. Jane herself got totally involved in this work which helps explain her down-to-earth attitude in describing the characters in her books. She loved the country and would sometimes say she thought it must form one of the joys of heaven.

This book is full of pictures with contemporary paintings of this early period. Jane lived from 1775 to 1817. Her 41 years produced books more popular today than they were 200 years ago. This study goes a long way in explaining this, and is a delight to read.

Review by Anne McDougall

Reading Northern Dancer is almost like going to a horse-race. The thrilling action takes place in a few scant moments (at the track or reading this book) but the background story to this amazing Canadian thoroughbred is totally engrossing.

Northern Dancer belonged to the Canadian business tycoon, E.P. Taylor. His major hobby was building up a stable of race-horses first outside Toronto, later in Maryland, U.S.  We learn how he acquired Northern Dancer, a short, chunky colt who didn’t look like anything until he started to run. His Argentinian trainer played an important part, as did the jockey Bill Hartack.

It is now 50 years since the time the legendary horse won two of the Triple Crown races in the U.S. and Canada’s Queen’s Plate. He became a Canadian hero, just at the time we were still seeking our own identity and getting a Canadian flag. At the time of his running success, l964, the author Kevin Chong points out, Canadians could not have realized what an impact Northern Dancer would ultimately make on his sport. He left the track this same year and would become the greatest sire of his breed. About three-quarters of the thoroughbreds alive today, including the forty thousand foals born every year, carry Northern Dancer in their bloodline. In his career as a stallion, he had produced 635 foals, 467 winners, and l47 stakes winners.

Kevin Chong was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver. He has written four other books, including the race-track memoir My Year of the Racehorse. He teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia. He has a winner in Northern Dancer.

Review by Anne McDougall

Billionaire Francis Reboul lived in the biggest private residence in Marseille. Built for Napoleon lll, it had a direct view of the bay.

One day, its owner was enjoying this view, when he spotted a huge, dark blue, 300-foot yacht anchored just offshore and apparently taking photographs of his house. Sure enough, the owner, Oleg Vronsky, had been cruising along the Riviera from Cap Ferrat to Saint-Tropez, looking at properties with a view to buying a house here. He fell instantly in love with this one and decided to buy it, at all costs. This book is the story of Vronsky’s decision and Reboul’s desperate attempts to stop him.

Peter Mayle has written thirteen books to date, seven of them novels. Many are set in Provence where he has lived for the past twenty years. He knows and loves every aspect of this beautiful corner, especially its cooking!! The book is full of tantalizing menus and recipes. The result is that The Corsican Caper is all about the Riviera jet set and provides a delightful escape book, in spite of the deadly serious plot at the centre of the story.

Review by Anne McDougall

It’s the first time the widely-read detective writer, Donna Leon, has entered the tranquil world of rare books. By Its Cover turns out to be a surprisingly brutal account of what happened around these books.

Like all Leon’s books, this story takes place in Venice. Leon is an American who has lived in Venice for the past 30 years. The result is an intimate picture of this beautiful city, with its winding canals and nooks and crannies at every corner. The detective in all these books is Guido Brunetti, who lives with his wife and two children and loves the city as much as Leon does.

In this book he is called one morning by the woman director of the distinguished Merula Library. A professor from overseas who had been using the rare book room, disappeared at the precise moment it was discovered a considerable number of these books had had certain pages torn out, while a number had been stolen outright. The professor could not be traced to the country he claimed to live in. Brunetti begins his hunt. The book has a surprise ending, needless to say. Meanwhile, the reader has had a happy time sharing delicious meals and funny family situations with this popular detective – “the sophisticated but still moral Brunetti” – as the Wall Street Journal calls him.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is a provocative little book by a Boston doctor who examines the illnesses and deaths of ten famous English writers.

John J. Ross is a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has a deep love for the literary output of these writers, and concern for what they suffered at a time before vaccinations, sterilized scalpels, or real drug regimens. He begins with Shakespeare who died in l6l6 at the age of 52. Since writing Hamlet (l600) he had struggled with heavy body shaking that finally made it impossible for him to write. Was this essential tremor, or mercury poisoning? He had lived in London away from his wife, in Stratford, and never got over the death of his only son.

The Bronte sisters led dreary, lonely lives in a remote town in Yorkshire, attending a repressive school, the Clergy Daughters’ School in l825, before getting tuberculosis.

John Milton lost his eyesight but maintained a deep religious faith and wrote in Sonnet XXll:

Yet I argue not
Against heaven’s hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope;  but still bear up and steer
Right onward.

It is an altogether sensitive and thoughtful book.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is a far-reaching biography of one of Canada’s most distinguished Governor Generals, John Buchan/Lord Tweedsmuir.

Buchan was Governor General from l935-40, years of special significance for Canada. The Statute of Westminster, l93l, had given Canada constitutional equality with Britain which meant special sensitivity in political interfering. Also, tension was building from Nazism and Fascism toward the Second World War and it put Canada in a unique position between Britain and the United States.

Buchan was in his sixties when he became Governor General. Born in Scotland, he had gone to Oxford, later represented a Scots constituency in the British Parliament, served in the Intelligence Corps in France in World War l and also in South Africa for the British Government. All this time he had been writing articles, novels, history, thrillers and was well-known for books like “The Thirty Nine Steps” and “Greenmantle”. In Canada he put cultural life at the top of his priorities and in l937 founded the Governor General’s Awards, still our top prize for literary  achievement.

The book tells also of his extensive travels across Canada, as well as the U.S. He believed Canada should keep its diverse, multicultural society while at the same time embracing national unity. He met many First Nations people, travelled to the Far North, liked to climb mountains and go fishing whenever he could! He met often with President Roosevelt but was particularly sensitive to his own position and refrained from any political interfering.

Many people praise Buchan in this book, including our current Governor General,  the Right Honourable David Johnston. It is a touching and impressive story of a great man. The author, J. William Galbraith, has worked for a number of Canadian federal departments and lives in Ottawa with his wife and three children.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is an impressive tribute to a gentle Canadian woman who brought the joy of reading to a generation of African children. The writer is Deborah Cowley, based in Ottawa, with wide international experience as broadcaster and author.

In The Library Tree she is writing about Kathy Knowles and describes how she was living with her husband John (both from Toronto) and their three children in l990, when a job offer came from Ghana for an accountant to a Canadian-owned gold mining company. Ghana had returned to relative calmness after a turbulent time following independence from Britain. The Knowles set off, Kathy expecting her fourth child. They arrived in the capital, Accra, and got settled with a good staff. Kathy liked to sit in the garden under a scarlet Flamboyant tree and read storybooks to her children. Very soon friends of the children crept into the garden too. They had never seen storybooks and were bewitched. Very soon some 70 were coming. Kathy and John decided to turn their spare bedroom into a tiny library to be called the Osu Library, after the name of their street.

From this beginning, the book tells how Kathy negotiated with school and city officials to buy an empty shipping container, and so the library grew. Volunteers from Canada sent more and more books and the children slowly learned to read. After four years years in Ghana,  the Knowles family returned to Canada, to live in Winnipeg. In l994 Kathy was back in Ghana checking on the libraries and pleased the way they had caught on.

Deborah Cowley is a free-lance journalist with wide international experience, based in Ottawa. She had heard of Kathy Knowles’ work and in 2000 had an assignment from “Readers Digest” and flew to Accra. By that time, Kathy was going to Ghana twice a year for five weeks. She met Cowley who would continue her connection and by 20l2 had made fifteen trips to Ghana.  She visited the libraries, which grew in number, watched the children greeting Madam Katty with songs, poems, bunches of flowers. She saw the first community centres built, larger than the early libraries, with a stage for plays and drums for concerts. She also saw Kathy writing a series of storybooks about Africa which are now widely published and distributed to the libraries.

This book has good photographs of this modest, but very effective, story.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall