The Sea Captain's Wife by Martha Hodes - biography - I thoroughly enjoyed this biographical history based on an archive of about 500 letters from the 1850s to 1880s in the Lois Wright Richardson Davis papers at Duke University. Most of the letters were written to Lois, but about a fifth of them are from her daughter Eunice Richardson Stone Connolly, the "sea captain's wife" that the book is about.
Eunice's story is fascinating, and with historian Martha Hodes' meticulous research, it comes alive. Born in 1831 and living her early years in mill towns in New Hampshire, she marries a carpenter, William Stone, at age 18, and works in the mills to help make ends meet. William follows Eunice's sister and brother-in-law to Mobile, Alabama, in search of better opportunities, and Eunice and their young son Clarence join them in late 1860, just before the outbreak of the Civil War.
Unlike the in-laws, the Stones are not economically successful in the South, but William joins the Confederate army with his brother-in-law anyway. A pregnant Eunice returns to New England with Clarence in December 1861, and spends the next eight years as a servant and washerwoman, learning that her husband died in a hospital near the end of the war.
Somehow (Eunice is with her family and this doesn't write letters), Eunice meets a wealthy Afro-Caribbean mixed-race sea captain from Grand Cayman named William Smiley Connolly, and marries him in November 1869. Soon after, they and Eunice's two children from Stone move to Grand Cayman, where Eunice's economic status is vastly improved. She and Smiley have two daughters (but lose Clarence), but the family dies in a hurricane at sea in 1877.
Hodes goes on to tell what happened to the rest of Eunice's family of origin, as well as to the descendants of Smiley Connolly from his first marriage. For me, the most interesting chapter was the last one, where Hodes details her research process and how she searched for more information about Eunice and her family.
Maps and a list of family members at the front of the book, photographs and other illustrations throughout, and extensive (40 pages) endnotes, an essay on sources (22 pages), acknowledgments, permissions and illustration credits, and a 13-page index round out this excellent nonfiction.
The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde - fantasy, mystery - Clever and funny murder mystery featuring characters from nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Humpty Dumpty falls from a wall - but appears to have been shot first. Jack Spratt (also of beanstalk fame) and Mary Mary (who can be contrary) investigate. There's also lots of puns in the naming of locations and minor characters. Best of all were the beginnings of each chapter, written in the style of book excerpts, news stories, or editorials, that slyly referenced other nursery rhymes or fairy tales and sometimes become relevant to the plot.
I have the next book in this Nursery Crime series (The Fourth Bear), and I've learned I'd better read it sooner rather than later. I read The Eyre Affair (first book in the Thursday Next series) over ten years ago, and tried to read its sequel (Lost in a Good Book) recently, but was completely lost with some of its references to the earlier work, which I;d forgotten. (I'll try again, though, as fortunately I wrote a pretty good review of the first book).
The Lost Diary of Venice by Margaux DeRoux - historical fiction, romance, early reviewer, advance reader edition - I liked this blend of historical fiction, romance, and contemporary realistic fiction! There are two storylines, one in a present-day New Haven, Connecticut, the other in 1571 in Venice. The connection is a palimpsest (a manuscript page from which the original writing has been scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused for another document) from the Venetian period.
William Lomozzo, an artist, brings Rose Newlin, a book conservator, the palimpsest. The overtext is a treatise on art written by a Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (a real artist, by the way) - who might be related to William. The undertext appears to his personal journal.
The other narrative line follows Giovanni, or Gio, as he is commissioned by Sebastiano Venier (another real person) to paint his mistress Chiara. Venier is about to lead the Venetian navy at the Battle of Lepanto, which forms the historical context for this part of the novel. Gio is slowly going blind, and he discovers that Chiara is a talented composer.
It's pretty easy to predict what happens with Gio and Chiara, although there is a little surprise about the latter character (the only one of the four major characters who doesn't have a direct voice in the narrative). I actually found the present-day story more interesting. William and Rose fight their attraction to each other, given that William is married (albeit unhappy) with children. I liked how this was sensitively resolved, and how the characters learned and grew from the process.
Margaux DeRoux's descriptions are poetic and helped me fully experience the settings. My verdict? Not bad for a debut author.
© Amanda Pape - 2020
