The Beach at Summerly by Beatriz Williams - advance reader edition
This novel takes place on the fictional Winthrop Island, moving back and forth between the summer of 1946 and the spring of 1954. The story is told from the point of view of Emilia Winthrop, a descendant of the island's first settlers and daughter of the caretaker of the island summer home (Summerly) of the wealthy Peabody family. Emilia, her older brother Eli, and younger sister Susana spent summers playing with the three Peabody boys. She had a crush on handsome middle son Amory, but was best friends with youngest son Shep.
In 1946, the family is finally returning to the island after the end of World War II. Eli and the Peabody boys all served, with Eli and the oldest Peabody dying. Coming with them is a young aunt, Olive Rainsford, and her three young children. Emilia gets hired to watch the children so Olive can do her translating work in peace. But is it really translating work? In the 1954 storyline, Olive is in prison.
For some reason, I had a tough time getting into this book. It took me the entire month of June to read its 357 pages (although I did have a lot else going on). Perhaps it was because the story involving Olive did not seem very realistic to me. Perhaps if I'd been on vacation, it would have felt more like the advertised "summer read" to me. The end, however, had an interesting twist, which will keep me reading author Beatriz Williams' works.
Friends Like These by Meg Rosoff
"The summer of 1983" caught my eye in the blurb for this book. Back then, I was seven years older than main character in this book. (As it turns out, author Meg Rosoff is about the same age as me.) Beth is an eighteen-year-old from Rhode Island who's won a prestigious journalism internship in New York City. She's one of four interns, and soon becomes best friends with the only other female, NYC-native Edie.
This book was a fast read (310 pages, but with short chapters of a larger double-spaced font), and I finished it in two days. Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot to it. The title was a bit of a tip-off as to the nature of Beth's friendship with the flamboyant Edie. Sometimes Beth seemed especially naïve, but she had learned something by the end of the book.
Maybe I'm just not the right audience for this book - it's supposedly for young adults and teens. There is a warning at the beginning of the book about "scenes of a sexual nature" - there's also a lot of heavy drinking and some drug use.
Spheres All Year / Esferas Todo el Ano by Elizabeth Everett, illustrated by Anuki López.
This children's book by former classroom teacher Elizabeth Everett is from Science Naturally, a publisher of STEM books for young readers. I requested the bilingual English/Spanish edition for review, but the book is also available in an English-only version, and there's a bilingual board book version that is (mostly) round.
Rhyming couplets on each page (English at the top, Spanish at the bottom) provide examples of spheres grouped by the four seasons. Sometimes the rhyming is a little forced, and the Spanish is not always a direct translation of the English (likely to improve the rhyming in that language). The vibrant illustrations by Spanish artist Anuki López include diverse children with big, round eyes.
The book is intended for ages two through seven, although the concepts might be hard for preschoolers. My review copy indicates there is a teacher's guide available, although I cannot find it at the publisher's website. A double-page spread at the end of the book explains the difference between two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes.
The Ice Harp by Norman Lock
Earlier I read another book in Norman Lock's American Novels stand-alone series, Voices in the Dead House, and I really liked it. The two main characters from that book, poet Walt Whitman and novelist Louisa May Alcott, appear in this one as well (the former as a spirit, the latter in real life), but the main character and focus is essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (a neighbor of Alcott's in Concord, Massachusetts).
The book is set in Concord on October 21-22, 1879, less than three years before Emerson's death. He is suffering from memory lapses and aphasia. He sees and has conversations with friends who aren't there - some of them deceased - such as Whitman, naturalists Henry David Thoreau (who also lived in Concord) and John Muir, journalist Margaret Fuller, and abolitionist John Brown. There's also an escaped slave named Samuel Long, who was the main character in an earlier book by Lock, A Fugitive in Walden Woods. Lock's forward notes that "Italicized passages set off by quotation marks represent Emerson's 'conversations' with his special guests. They are unheard by any actual persons present."
In this book, Emerson faces a moral dilemma with the arrival of a Black soldier named James Stokes, who deserted after provocation from racial slurs and killing a white soldier in self-defense. Emerson is torn between hiding Stokes, a former slave, and turning him over to the authorities, where Stokes would face likely execution. Emerson spends much of the novel (and the night) thinking this through, talking with his "special guests," and visiting the Sleepy Hollow cemetery and Walden Pond.
The book's title comes from the December 10, 1836 entry in Emerson's journal, The Wide World:
At Walden Pond, I found a new musical instrument which I call the ice-harp. A thin coat of ice covered a part of the pond, but melted around the edge of the shore. I threw a stone, upon the ice which rebounded with a shrill sound, and falling again and again, repeated the note with pleasing modulation. I thought at first it was the “peep, peep” of a bird I had scared. I was so taken with the music that I threw down my stick and spent twenty minutes in throwing stones single or in handfuls on the crystal drum.
I'm not as familiar with Emerson's work as I should be, but I could appreciate this book for its observations on an older person witnessing and fearful of his own decline (something most of us experience as we age), as well as its Concord setting and period details.
Switchboard Soldiers by Jennifer Chiaverini
This novel tells the story of telephone switchboard operators - who were women - for the United States Army's Signal Corps in World War I. Colloquially known as "hello girls," the women were actually sworn into military service - although they did not receive recognition as military veterans until 1977.
Jennifer Chiaverini tells the story from the points of view of three women: Grace Banker of New Jersey (who was real, the Chief Operator of the First American Unit), and the fictionalized Marie Miossec, a French immigrant in Cincinnati, and Valerie DeSmedt, a Belgian immigrant in Los Angeles. Other characters in the book are both real people (like Inez Crittenden, the Chief Operator of the Second American Unit) and fictionalized - although I will say I wish Chiaverini had made it clear in her author's notes about who was real and who was not.
The book begins in August 1914, with Marie and her family learning of the outbreak of the war, then skips ahead to Grace in April 1917 and Valerie in August 1917. Although their individual stories rarely converge, the flow is seamless from narrator to narrator. The book ends with Marie leaving Europe in June 1919, as many women continued to serve during the occupation in Germany after the war ended in November 1918.
I can appreciate the work these women had to do, having operated a PBX switchboard (thankfully, only occasionally as lunch relief) for a city hall in the early 1980s, that was nowhere near as busy - nor as crucial. The women had to speak French (and English) flawlessly, as they often had to be able to translate between the two languages on the fly.
This book was a fascinating look at a chapter in history I had not known about.
