Bonnie Prince Charlie, by G. A. Henty

Bonnie Prince Charlie

G. A. Henty

G. A. Henty wrote a remarkable number of historical novels meant for young people, especially boys, and he no doubt is getting a bit of a pposthumous revival since his books are in the public domain and available free in a lot of places on the Internet.  They will not suit most modern readers, save perhaps for those who like a very old fashioned narrative style.  I have to confess to mixed feelings on Henty's work in general, and in particular with this novel.

It is the story of Ronald Lesley, the son of a Scottish Jacobite who had to flee to France in 1715.  The rebel fell in love with a young noblewoman, whose father caused him to be imprisoned to prevent him from seeing the woman who it turned out had not only married her sweetheart but had a son by him.  We meet the boy as a toddler as longtime servant and companion of his father, Malcolm Anderson, brings him to Scotland for Anderson's brother to raise.  In typical Henty fashion the boy is a superman by 15.  He gets involved in some latter day Jacobite, support of Bonnie prince Charlie, so like his father has to flee to France.  Hey, he wanted to go there anyway, to find his mother and free his father, both of which he does.  He rocks the same boat as his dad did and must himself now flee back to Scotland.  he does so in the company of said Bonnie Prince, allying himself with the Young Chevalier and following him all the way to his ignominious defeat.  Still, Ronald has a loving mom and dad to fall back on, and that is what he does.

So what Henty does in his novels is find a way to put a young boy or young man in a historical situation.  He does this well enough, though you are not goign to find the inner boy in these characters.  They are all pretty together, bluff and accomplished.  there are no love interests in this particular novel.  Once the freeing of Maman and Papa are accomplished, cleverly though this is, Ronald's role in the historical events is rather thinly detailed.  In Fontenoy and then in Culloden he is no more than furniture.  What I wouldn't have given to see Culloden from Ronald's perspective.  Not only does Henty just give us the straight historical account, he doesn't even do much of that.  Given all the tragic ballad I have heard about the event Henty's account is rather blah.

I expect that Henty's novels are all like this and the other I read about the Crimean War.  At least the latter did more with the main character than "Charlie" did.  Ronald is as boy scout upright as he can be,.  Maybe the average public school boy would find it all appealing, though I tend to doubt it.  I think they would want more of what was going on in Ronald's head, just as I did.

The Children of Mother Glory, by C. M. Harris

The Children of Mother Glory

C. M. Harris

Reviewed by Morgayne

As was often the only way it could happen in 1900 for a woman to become clergy, Glory Potter inherited the ministry of her father’s church. Raised without a mother, she was groomed for the role by being of service to the people in her parish long before taking over Sunday sermons upon her dad’s passing. The strict sect was founded on the mutual goals of preparing its members in fellowship for the imminent Coming of Christ and their health and welfare until then. Glory is particularly effective at both of these roles.

So much so that even though she has no children of her own she was mother of many. A woman in her early twenties, Glory Potter navigates the tight rope of the Potterite church established by her father. At least she does until the feelings she has for her childhood friend, Emma, lead them to bed for one brief taste of their passion before returning to live in the church like before as if nothing had happened between them.

What happens while the two women are dreaming of those stolen moments? Life. Emma marries and has children and Glory continues to steward the members of her church flock. During wars the Potterites are interred in prison camps as conscientious objectors because their church requires pacifism. Other members of the church struggled and die from drugs and alcoholism.

Although the church kept their members in a religious straight jacket, Mother Glory’s children manage to follow in her footsteps in finding love in non-traditional ways. More importantly they find ways to acknowledge and live with who they really are within the church and the larger context of the world. The main characters were well developed and I was able to have a personal experience with the secondary characters also. As much as I enjoyed Mother Glory’s children I would like to have seen more between Glory and her beloved Emma.

I enjoyed C.M. Harris’s prose which was elegant and poetic. Her story covers a hundred years and Harris manages wonderfully to keep the language progression true to each time period from 1900 to a current setting. In The Children of Mother Glory the author sets herself the Herculean task of exploring pretty much all the social issues of the Twentieth century including: good vs. evil, women as clergy, war and peace, the evils of technology, alcoholism, drugs and other addictions, homosexuality and gender reassignment. It’s a great deal to wrap one’s mind around and at times I was a little daunted by the epoch scope of this novel.

Overall however I found Children of Mother Glory to be well written and nestled nicely in an accurate historical setting. Having grown up in Indiana I can easily see how an ultra conservative church and followers could spring up in the mid-west.

About Morgayne: My life is here on the Olympic Peninsula in western Washington with my cat Shadow where I find inspiration for writing in the beauty of the Olympic Mountains, beaches and in the writing of others.

Two Historical Novels Review Online Reviews

Historical Novels Review Online, May 2011
Reviews by Nan Hawthorne

Grant Me Timely Grace

By Timothy Woods

Civil war spy thriller.

The King of Silk

By Joe Douglas Trent

 Time travel to and high finance in Renaissance Italy.

Lessons in Discovery and Lessons in Power, by Charlie Cochrane - Cambridge Fellows mysteries

Lessons in Discovery
Lessons in Power

Charlie Cochrane

Cambridge Fellows Mysteries

When I finished reading Lessons in Discovery I was so lonely for jonty and Orlando that I had to go on and read the next novel in the series,Lessons in Power.  The result was two quite emotional reads in a row, though from what I understand these are not the toughest by any means.  Cochrane's generally light hearted and entertaining novels get you, or at least they got me, so wrapped up in the love story of these two quite distinct men that the fact each of these novels confronts relationship challenging events put me through a wringer.

In Lessons in Discovery a freak accident leaves Orlando with partial amnesia just as he and Jonty have started to talk about finding a house together.  Orlando does not remember Jonty and their love affair at all.  He was such a hard sell to start with that you might imagine it's time to start all over.  But Cochrane's skill with these novels is such that you learn right away, as Orlando does, that something during that year of lost memories has changed him.  He wakes to a friend, that alone showing him how much has changed in his hitherto solitary life.  The novel, like all the others, is blessed with two parallel plots, a mystery and the love story.  The latter involves a look at jonty's loving patience and Orlando's surprising readiness to trust.  The mystery is about the ward of Elizabeth of York who disappeared in the 15th century and is later thought to be the corpse found in a well near St. Bride's.  The investigation is academic, all written records and strange encoded letters.  The exercise is reminiscent of Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, and coincidentally Elizabeth, wife of henry Vii, is that "Daughter".

It is painful to watch Jonty's fear that he has lost Orlando's love, but in a way it is a chance to watch the two come together  a second time, this time with a different Orlando, one already primed for loving his Jonty.  The mystery they work on gives uss a chance to spend time with members of Jonty's wonderful family and also introduces us to Ariadne Peters, a strong independent woman who quickly becomes the lovers' firm ally.

In Lessons in Power the crisis is Jonty's as Matthew Aindley from the second novel  asks the Cambridge Fellows to investigate a murder.  The victim turns out to be one of the schoolfellows who raped Jonty when he was young.  All this brings back terrible memories that have not healed, and Jonty suddenly cannot bear Orlando's touch.  Orlando is not the understanding partner Jonty was in Discovery but manages to hide his impatience with Jonty's exorcism of the ghosts of his past.  Again, we see more of the Stewart family, always a joy.  The fellows are in their new house now, so we have that pleasure as well.  Complicating both the mystery and love stories however is discovering the other schoolfellow who hurt Jonty, the hall master who egged them on, and another victim are involved in the crimes, reopening those scars for Jonty again and again.

I am quite susceptible to the emotions replete in well written novels with great and charismatic characters, so I was a basket case reading these two in a row.  I suspect I should take something of a break until I read the next in the eight volume series.

One thing that struck me reading these novels, and the more so with Power, is that I wish everyone who doubts that gay people have the capacity for deep and enduring love would read them.  Cochrane shows the range of affection in both gay and heterosexual couples, from contentious to devoted, and they are drawn as having no predetermined strength based on the gender of the partners, I think people would have a hard time not breaking through their bias.  At least I would hope so.

I bought both books from Amazon's Kindle store and thank the author and publisher for enabling text to speech so reading them was even possible for me.

Diary of a Part-Time Ghost, by Vered Ehsani

Diary of a Part-Time Ghost


Vered Ehsani

A young adult time travel and fantasy novel, the historical content involves the Boston Tea Party of 1773.  It is in first person, a story told in a quirky way by a fifteen-year-old boy named Ashish.  One of the unique things about this story is that it is told by an Indian American boy, not your run of the mill teen protagonist.  The author has written Ash as a typical high schooler, just wanting to fit in and stay awake during monotonous history lectures.

Ash's life takes a dramatic turn when his aunt drops a birthday gift  off for him, a strange old history book with a leather cover.  The boy's life has been getting strange already, with disembodied voices and nighttime apparitions.  His aunt's cryptic admonitions that "What you focus on you will become" and "Don't let him touch you, the book of The Veil" offer him no clues about what his mission will soon be.  In history class he happens to open the book to a strangely compelling painting of a poor 18th century English family.  He touches it and finds himself there, though as invisible as if he was a ghost.  Back at home, tortured by three sisters, he nevertheless finds himself back through the literary looking glass for his first clear sight of The Veil between our world and another.  He has an erstwhile guide there who frequently decamps, leaving him on his own.  He also soon encounters the "him" of "don't let him touch you", a tall rangy yellow eyed fellow who is the epitome of all the darkest urges.  This fellow, plus the shadows of negative emotion that reach out at his bidding, are constant threats for Ash, not only in his own real world but also in the past where he struggles to help a girl, his ancestor, and her brother stay clear of the monster.

The joke-cracking teen boy took me a little while to warm up to, but once he started his trips to 1773 he started to make sense.  I think of all his traits, Ash's quickly learning how staying neutral for safety's sake in the life he has lived so far was most admirable and heartening.  He constantly carps on himself for acting before thinking or saying impulsive things, but it seems natural for him to do so.  The females in the story are stronger than they would be in many young adult novels, and for the most part the author gets his history right.  Those small inn accuracies I did notice, like the sofa in the living room of the 1773 Boston house, can be explained as Ash's interpretation.

The only trouble is that the book ends without tying up some loose ends.  Some of that seems part of the author's plan for sequels, but not all.  For instance, Ash only gets the book his mother confiscated back because he promises to type up his sister Shanti's history paper.. and that never happens.   That just does not feel like something important enough that it can wait for the sequel.

All in all, however, I found the story charming and inventive, and halfway through it I realized that two boys I know, Daniel and Samuel Ahn, would love this book.  The author provided me with a digital copy so I could read it with a text to speech program, but I have already sent for a paperback edition to give to my young neighbors.

Irish Winter, by John Simpson

Irish Winter

John Simpson

I like M/M romance and the history of Irish rebellion, so as I noted in Goodreads, what's not to love?

Iam meets Devlin when an aact of British brutality drives him to join the IRA.  Devlin is a street smart experienced fellow, and though at first neither knows the other is attracted to him, Devlin takes the initiative and they begin their sexual relationship, of course on the sly.  Iam does not know that Dev has turned tricks to survive.  Ian, the more sensitive, takes a role as a medic with the local IRA brigade, which helps him accept the violence of his involvement.  At the same time, the British take one action after another that further alienates him.  The story runs along two tracks, the evolution of the 1919-1924 fight for Irish independence and the developing relationship between the two young men.  Will they be able to survive the violence and commit to a lifelong love?

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this otherwise pretty average M/M erotic romance is how much actual history made it into the sex story.  The events in which Ian and Dev become involved are all real events, culminating in the assassinations of British intelligence officers in Dublin and the massacre of attendees at a major Irish football game the same day.  The young men's lives are fraught with poverty, hunger and danger in this very black time in Irish history.

Ian and Dev are remarkably sanguine about being gay in a time and place where exposure could be fatal, officially or through vigilante action.  They do not seem to worry about sinning, and there are a couple love scenes where I felt like hissing "Quiet down!"   Ultimately this is quite possible, so I may be imposing my own beliefs on the fictional situation.  Where I feel justified in expressing doubt is in the abruptness of the ending which leaves the reader wondering what happened when the young men achieved their ultimate goal.

As characters Dev and Ian are mostly unremarkable, tend to wisecrack a great deal, but the love scenes are intense and sincere.  They are, at the very least, likable.

I bought this novel to read on my Kindle.  Thanks to Dreamspinner Press for allowing text to speech to be enabled so I could do so.

The Demon's Parchment, by Jeri Westerson - A Crispin Guest Medieval Noir

The Demon’s Parchment

Jeri Westerson

A Crispin Guest Medieval Noir

Jeri Westerson turns out complete novels at a remarkable rate, and with The Demon’s Parchment she shows no loss of quality and intelligence in its writing or construction.

Her detective, the Tracker, Crispin Guest, is on his way to Westminster to meet a new client, a Jewish physician named Jacob, when he becomes embroiled in solving the murder of a young boy whose body was found in the Thames. Almost immediately he wonders if the two crimes, the theft of sinister documents from Jacob and the ritual rape and mutilation of the boy is connected. His friend the abbot supports the old stories of Jews crucifying Christian boys, and Crispin is a man of his age with all his prejudices. When he stumbles on a secret Jewish enclave after preventing the kidnap of a boy from their midst, then discovers what might be a golem, a clay creature that could have been created from the stolen scrolls, Crispin almost doesn’t know where to turn to look next. Just to complicate things further, when Jacob's son Julian kisses Crispin, he finds he liked it. As if it wasn’t difficult enough just avoiding being beaten up by old friends and their cousins or getting in and out of the palace!

The mystery is just complex enough and there are just enough red herrings to make the story good without confusing the reader. Westerson handles the orchestration of clues, reveals and distractions masterfully. On top of this she offers here an insight into two controversial topics of the day. One is the fact that Jews were outlawed in England under the present King Richard’s great grandfather, Edward I. The only reason Jacob and Julian are at the palace is because Richard is anxious to sire an heir and wants expertise to discover why his wife has not become pregnant. The few Jews allowed to stay in England had to promise to convert and to live under the supervision of the Church, so the existence of the clandestine enclave puts Crispin in a bind whether to tell on them or not.

The other topic is introduced when Crispin is horrified to discover he enjoyed young Julian’s kiss. He heads to Southwark to reassure himself in the stews, but instead he runs into John, a cross dressing male prostitute and an old acquaintance, hardly reassuring. This male prostitute, one learns in the historical note by the author, is a real historical person. The note also presents evidence that in fact homosexuality was not quite the taboo in the Middle Ages we have been told. That came in the 17th and 18th centuries. What got this fellow imprisoned more than anything was his donning of a female identity. The punishment for the act of love between men (and between women?) was often no more than penance.

Westerson has the rare ability to step away from the usual stereotypes about medieval people without resorting to characters with modern sensibilities. I and other authors will be well advised to mimic her evenhanded treatment of controversial topics.

Westerson sticks loyally to the noir genre with the down and out ex-knight getting help from his underworld pals and the often arbitrary powers that be an ever present threat whenever he gets too close to the truth.

I bought this novel as a Kindle book and read it using text to speech. I thank Westerson and her publisher for allowing text to speech to be enabled or I should not have been able to read it.

Sharpe's Devil, by Bernard Cornwell

Sharpe's Devil

By Bernard Cornwell

Originally posted on Dec.30, 2008, but we just reread it and liked it even more.  The only problem.. we have now read every single Sharpe book!!!!

I deviate occasionally from reading novels set in the Middle Ages, and this one which takes place mostly in Chile in 1820-21 is one of those times. My husband, Jim Tedford, and I got bitten by the Sharpe bug recently, and he read this one to me night after night before going to sleep. I had mistakenly thought this one takes place right after Sharpe's Waterloo, which I had read via cassette, so I ordered it from Amazon. I wanted to know what happenws to Jame Sharpe. It turns out there is one in between, Sharpe's Challenge.

The subtitle of this novel, Sharpe's Devil, "Sharpe and the Emperor", made me assume the title Devil was Napoleon Bonaparte. Boney may be, but there is yet another I will describe below. Bonaparte makes a short cameo in this novel, allowing Sharpe his sight of Boney that he had only at a distance at Waterloo. On his way to Chile to find out what happens to old friend Don Blas Vivar, Sharpe's ship looks in at St. Helena where Bonaparte is held, and the defeated emperor takes to Sharpe and entrusts him with a framed portrait for a fan in Chile. Suitably star-struck despite the man being ultimately responsible for the deaths of everyone from Theresa, Sharpe's wife, onward, Sharpe agrees.

Arriving in Valdivia, the Spanish roayl capital of Chile, Sharpe, accompanied by the faithful Patrick Harper, now a Dublin publican, learns that Vivar, the former governor, is dead and that a villain named Boutista is in his place. Our heroes are sent to another town where they are told they will find Vivar's tomb. Managing to avoid assassination on the way there, they find the tomb but are arrested and treated to a display of Boutista's grandiosity and cruelty. The portrait of Napoleon has found its way into Boutista's hands and proves to be inscribed in code on the back. Sharpe and Harper are summarily sent packing back to Europe.

Now here is where the title Devil comes in, the entire reason, I suspect, why Cornwell even wrote this book. It is a highly colorful historical figure named Lord Thomas Cochrane, a Scots pirate and passionate freedom fighter. He is indeed a fascinating personality, a documented hater of "farting lawyers", flamboyant and both fearless and confident no matter the odds against him. Cochrane takes the ship that Sharpe and Harper are sailing on, then recruits the two to help him oust Bautista. Sharpe agrees, having been told that Vivar is not infact dead but a prisoner at the Angel Tower in the Citadel, the stout fortress at Valdivia. Although Sharpe and Harper are no longer soldiers, they both participate ably in Cochrane's battles. In fact, in typical Cornwell fashion, Sharpe is essentially the man who liberates Chile. I am sure the Chilean historians approved this assertion...

Sharpe finds something quite unexpected in the Tower, definitely not a prison cell complete with Vivar, but need not return to Europe empty handed -- and that's all I will say about that.

Jim and I enjoyed this novel, though it veers from the typical Sharpe, not taking place in Europe nor during the Napoleonic Wars, and Sharpe is not a soldier in it, though he certainly does fight. The ending comes quite abruptly, and the dispposition of Vivar is decidedly peripheral. If you like Sharpe novels, you will like this one, though not as tight as the rest. There are loose ends left unresolved, though the visit to St. Helena does come full circle with a tantalizing "what if?" in regards to Bonaparte.

If you like the Sharpe movies with Sean Bean, you may enjoy this parody, Sharpe's Plot, published recently on Nan Hawthorne's Bookking the Middle Ages.