Rednecks by Taylor Brown

It was a time when King Coal was so powerful and rich the law was in its pocket. The workers were expendable–immigrants and people of color and poor whites, so easily replaced. The work was gruelling, men hunched over in three foot high tunnels for six and a half days a week. The men’s bodies grew strong, but with time disease and exhaustion and accidents took them. And when the menfolk could no longer work, they were thrown out of the houses the mine provided. But what choices did the miners have? What other work was there?

Across the country, workers were organizing unions to demand a just wage and safe working conditions. The workers went on strike and were thrown out of their houses. The miners found quick replacements.

In West Virginia the mine owners hired enforcers to shut down the strikers, killing those who stood by them. Mother Jones, tired and worn from years of union organizing, came with Union supplies and speeches, until she realized the miners were fighting a war they would not win.

The conflict became legendary, the largest armed conflict since the Civil War.

Rednecks brings to life the people and events of the Matewan Massacre and Battle of Blair Mountain in a narrative filled with tension and threat without respite. Author Taylor Brown creates memorable characters on both sides of the conflict, and in the middle a Lebanese born doctor dedicated to healing who must choose sides, inspired by the author’s own grandfather.

On one side were the mine owners, their hired thugs and the lawmen they bribed, and even Federal troops. On the other side the workers and their families, reduced to living in tents, their anger growing with every murder and beating. The miners wore red bandanas, and were known as Rednecks, which made them easy targets when vigilants and lawmen and Federal troops went to war against them.

The novel is riveting as historical fiction, and illuminating as history of the oppression of the workers, consisting of the most vulnerable and least powerful in society. Decried as socialism and anti-capitalist, Unions also are behind laws that protect workers and a fair wage and created the middle class. In recent years, unions have lost members and power, and we have seen the middle class decline.

We have forgotten the sacrifices and the violence behind laws we take for granted. Rednecks reminds us of this history.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.

Rednecks
by Taylor Brown
Pub Date May 14, 2024
St. Martin’s Press
ISBN: 9781250329332

from the publisher

A historical drama based on the Battle of Blair Mountain, pitting a multi-ethnic army of 10,000 coal miners against mine owners, state militia, and the United States government in the largest labor uprising in American history.

Rednecks is a tour de force, big canvas historical novel that dramatizes the 1920 to 1921 events of the West Virginia Mine Wars–from the Matewan Massacre through the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed conflict on American soil since the Civil War, when some one million rounds were fired, bombs were dropped on American soil, and the term “redneck” would come to have an unexpected origin story.

Featuring real-life and invented characters–men and women, adults and children, Black and white and immigrants from many countries who worked in the dangerous West Virginia coal mines–Rednecks tells a dramatic story of rebellion against oppression. Taylor Brown introduces crucial point of view characters: “Doc Moo” Muhanna, a Lebanese-American doctor (inspired by the author’s own great-grandfather) who serves the mining camps; Frank Hugham, a Black miner who helps lead the miners’ revolt; Frank’s mother Beulah, who fights to save her home and her son; and true-life folk hero “Smilin” Sid Hatfield, a sharp-shooting sheriff who dares to stand up to the “gun thugs” of the coal companies. These and other characters come fully to life in a propulsive, character-driven tale that’s both a century old and blisteringly contemporary: a story of unexpected friendship, heroism in the face of injustice, and the power of love and community against outsized odds.

Through inspired portraits of real-life characters including legendary union organizer Mother Jones, to dynamic battle scenes set in the West Virginia hill country, award-winning novelist Taylor Brown reimagines one of the most compelling events in 20th century American history.

Every Time We Say Goodbye by Natalie Jenner

For this world tries and challenges us all. It is so important to honour those who pass its ultimate trial: the unremitting, unceasing acceptance that–no matter what our notion of empyrean–we are all in this world, together.

from Every Time We Say Goodbye by Natalie Jenner

Natalie Jenner’s debut novel, The Jane Austen Society, was a welcome and inspiring read in spring 2020. Set after the devastation of WWII, a community is formed by a love of Austen and the desire to preserve Chawton cottage. Jenner next took one of the characters to a London bookstore in Bloomsbury Girls. And now, in Every Time We Say Goodbye, Jenner takes Vivian Lowry from the bookstore to post-war Italy, working as a script doctor in the movies after her play is a flop. Vivian carries her own war wounds: her beloved fiance disappeared in Italy during the war, necessitating some difficult decisions and leaving her heart hardened against further heartbreak. She takes lovers but avoids love.

Post-War Italy is a glamorous time and place, the novel filled with up and coming actresses like Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren, aggressively pursued by street photographers. It is also a time and place of great contradictions, as Vivian says, a “former Fascist regime…shapeshifting into an ostensible democracy that was heavily influenced by a sensorial church and half-heartedly administered by the police.”

The church is policing the movie industry, censoring anything that is critical of its role under Fascism or what it deems immoral. And yet Catholic church leaders hide their own sullied characters.

The director of the movie Vivian is working on wants to make a movie about the woman he loved, a teenaged Resistance courier who was brutally murdered. Her story is revealed in alternating chapters.

The novel has it all: passion and love, glamor and the grim reality of war, refugees and orphans and the priviledged rich, the imperious authority of the church, scandalous men, and women struggling to live and work and love. Vivian’s insights into the conflicted times are eerily reflective of our own. She struggles with how a few men could “conjure a false enemy and unfounded fear across several nations,” and wonders if it is possible to “eradicate” this hate for good. The impact of movies to tell transformative stories of truth is also central.

You don’t have to have read the previous novels to enjoy Every Time We Say Goodbye. I loved being carried away into this rich and conflicted world.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.

Every Time We Say Goodbye
by Natalie Jenner
Pub Date May 14, 2024
St. Martin’s Press
ISBN: 9781250285188

from the publisher

In 1955, Vivien Lowry is facing the greatest challenge of her life. Her latest play, the only female-authored play on the London stage that season, has opened in the West End to rapturous applause from the audience. The reviewers, however, are not as impressed as the playgoers and their savage notices not only shut down the play but ruin Lowry’s last chance for a dramatic career. With her future in London not looking bright, at the suggestion of her friend, Peggy Guggenheim, Vivien takes a job in as a script doctor on a major film shooting in Rome’s Cinecitta Studios. There she finds a vibrant movie making scene filled with rising stars, acclaimed directors, and famous actors in a country that is torn between its past and its potentially bright future, between the liberation of the post-war cinema and the restrictions of the Catholic Church that permeates the very soul of Italy.

As Vivien tries to forge a new future for herself, she also must face the long-buried truth of the recent World War and the mystery of what really happened to her deceased fiancé. Every Time We Say Goodbye is a brilliant exploration of trauma and tragedy, hope and renewal, filled with dazzling characters both real and imaginary, from the incomparable author who charmed the world with her novels The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls.

Long Island by Colm Toibin

Fans of Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn will be ecstatic to know that Eilis Lacey’s story is continuing in Long Island.

Brooklyn is the story of Eilis who leaves Ireland for Brooklyn, where she met and married an Italian American, Tony. Soon after their wedding, she returned to Ireland where she met and fell in love with Jim. Knowing she was pregnant, she returned to America and her husband, while brokenhearted Jim remains a bachelor.

Long Island finds Eilis a mother of two, overwhelmed by her husband’s close, intrusive, family. Her life is upended when she learns that Tony had an encounter that resulted in a pregnancy, and the woman’s husband warns that he will leave the baby on Eilis’ doorstep. Eilis is adamant that she will not have the baby in her house, and if Tony and his family keep it, she will not stay with him.

With her mother’s 80th birthday coming, Eilis returns to Ireland to be with her, and to give time for Tony and his family to let her know their decision, and to decide herself what she will do if they keep the baby. The children will later join her to meet their Irish family.

Meanwhile, Jim has been involved with Nancy and they have secretly decided to marry after Nancy’s daughter’s wedding is over.

But seeing each other again, Eilis and Jim realize they still have feelings for each other, and secretly met, finally consummating their relationship. But secrets don’t stay secret, and Nancy and family pressure Eilis and Jim, their choices constrained by many considerations.

Eilis’ life on Long Island and her small Irish town are beautifully realized. She does not feel at home in either place, and both communities intrude into her affairs. There is a profound sense of isolation as Eilis struggles with her choices. Wonderfully, we are also allowed into Nancy’s and Jim’s inner struggles.

The story is a revisiting of Brooklyn with Eilis in the same position of having to decide between Tony and Jim. The novel leaves us in the middle of things, and eager for the third in the series to resolve the open questions.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.

Long Island
by Colm Toibin
Pub Date May 7, 2024
Scribner
ISBN: 9781476785110

from the publisher

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis’ life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson

“You have a steel in you I did not imagine,” he said.

“Did you imagine the war only hardened the hearts of men?”

from The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson

I was delighted by this novel and set aside all other books to read it.

I loved it for the witty epigrammatic insights of the characters. I loved it for the sensitive portrayal of the post WWI world of Britain. There are the war wounded men, struggling with horrific disfigurement and trauma, unable to obtain employment because no one wanted to be confronted with the human cost of the war, and because they were considered mentally as well as physically handicapped. Spunky women who had kept Britain together were being forced out of jobs after the government classifies the jobs as for men only. I loved it for the wonderfully drawn characters. So often, I was reminded of Jane Austen, that master of the comedy of manners and reversals of fortune in affairs of the heart.

In 1919, Constance Haverhill is a companion to her mother’s dear friend, connected by regard and not by mere economics, summering at a seaside resort. Come fall, she must find employment or become dependent on her brother, who had inherited the family farm. During the war, she had run an estate, her accounting and management skills top notch. But that job was going back to a man.

Constance meets the iconoclastic Poppy and her women friends who hope to continue their independence with a motorcycle transport business. These daredevil ladies include a mechanic and a motorcycle racer. Poppy hopes to expand the business by adding flying lessons for ladies; her brother Harris was a pilot in the war, returning home without a leg. He is morose and surly; his fiance had thrown him over, unable to face a crippled husband.

The war had left two million disabled and over forty thousand amputees, many of the men maimed with no prospects for employment or love, Constance learns when she visits the local convalescent center filled with veterans. Constance and Harris face the same challenges, unable to find employment. “People are unable to see beyond what they deem our limitations,” Harris concedes.

With the introduction of an American Southerner and a man from India with a secret, the story addresses racism on both sides of the pond.

Constance is drawn into Poppy’s exciting circle and her welcoming family, taking risks she would never have imagined. But even they fail her, their wealth sheltering them from their worst actions. Her prospects growing dim, Constance outwardly keeps her place while secretly she is breaking limits, daring to hope for a fuller life.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club
by Helen Simonson
Pub Date May 7, 2024
The Dial Press
ISBN: 9781984801319

from the publisher

It is the summer of 1919 and Constance Haverhill is without prospects. Now that all the men have returned from the front, she has been asked to give up her cottage and her job at the estate she helped run during the war. While she looks for a position as a bookkeeper or—horror—a governess, she’s sent as a lady’s companion to an old family friend who is convalescing at a seaside hotel. Despite having only weeks to find a permanent home, Constance is swept up in the social whirl of Hazelbourne-on-Sea after she rescues the local baronet’s daughter, Poppy Wirrall, from a social faux pas.

Poppy wears trousers, operates a taxi and delivery service to employ local women, and runs a ladies’ motorcycle club (to which she plans to add flying lessons). She and her friends enthusiastically welcome Constance into their circle. And then there is Harris, Poppy’s recalcitrant but handsome brother—a fighter pilot recently wounded in battle—who warms in Constance’s presence. But things are more complicated than they seem in this sunny pocket of English high society. As the country prepares to celebrate its hard-won peace, Constance and the women of the club are forced to confront the fact that the freedoms they gained during the war are being revoked.

Whip-smart and utterly transportive, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club is historical fiction of the highest order: an unforgettable coming-of-age story, a tender romance, and a portrait of a nation on the brink of change.