I grew up knowing very little about the Irish side of my family. That side of my family came over to this country before the Revolutionary War. So all I knew about the Potato Blight was what I had read from history books in high school. Galway Bay is a story of one family’s struggle to survive the potato blight and leave Ireland for the golden shores of America. The book goes into great detail on how the Irish suffered not only from starvation but from discrimination by the English government. The government was set on eliminating the Irish blight on their island, but not helping to alleviate the suffering.
So, they managed to escape to America, the land of opportunity, where they suffered the same discriminations and persecutions as they did at home.
I found this book to be an eye opener to the history of the Irish. Though the story is bleak, the characters continue to have faith and persevere at home in Ireland and then in their new home of America.
Review by Leslie B.
Most people younger than me are not very familiar with silent movie stars, and with how the film industry began. This novel is a fictional telling of that beginning as seen through the eyes of Mary Pickford: actress, producer, studio owner; and her best friend Francis Marion: writer, director, producer, and studio owner. In the days of male dominance, it is hard to think about the fact that two women were the most powerful, artistic and well payed people in Hollywood. The novel takes these women from the beginnings of their friendship around 1912 until the 1960’s when both women’s carreers had faded, like the appeal of the silent film was destroyed by the talkie.
This book focuses on a female writer in England after the end of WWII. It’s a story told through letters. She’s trying to find a topic for her next book, since a collection of her humorous articles has just been published in one volume. She receives a letter from Guernsey, a small island in the Channel that was occupied during the war, from a man who happened to buy a book that had once belonged to her. He saw her name in the cover and decided to write to her to thank her for the serendipitous travel of her book to Guernsey. This introduces our main character to the Literary Society and it members, most of whom write to her, and she finds a topic for her next book: Guernsey’s story.
Biographical fiction has the ability to give humanity to historical figures who are often painted as villains or at least show how complicated those individuals are. Such is the case with Malinche, about the life of Malinalli, a slave girl who became the voice of conquistador Hernán Cortés. Much of the book focuses on her deep spirituality and her love of her grandmother who engendered this love of the gods. She believed that Cortés with his corn-blonde hair was the emissary of Quetzalcoatl, the Nahua god credited with giving corn to humankind. It seemed the Aztec ruler of Mexico, Montezuma, also believed this when he abdicated in favor of Cortés. By this time, Malinalli had been sold into slavery by her mother at a young age, given to the Spaniards, and become Cortés’ translator. As his translator, she learned quickly that he was not sent by the gods, but found herself furthering his cause anyway. Partly because he wanted to tear down Aztec rule (and she belonged to an ethnic minority oppressed by the Aztecs), and partly because she was safer doing as she was told, rather than rebelling.
I always love Lisa See’s books. They give me such an insight into another culture. There is so much I don’t know about the Chinese people. Their customs, their religion, and their history. This book starts in 1935, before WWII and leads us through the changing world of China. May and Pearl are two sisters who are trying to be modern women in Shanghai. They find themselves caught in a web of tradition that leads them into arranged marriages, an attack by the Japanese at the beginning of WWII, and fleeing to America before communism comes to China. The book is full of history and danger, and I could not put it down.
Kate Morton has a wonderful way of allowing the story to unfold. She jumps back and forth between different time periods, using different characters to reveal a little more of the picture. That said, I found this story to be confusing. She spent too much time in one time period for me to remember what had happened in the other times. I got confused and frustrated. It could just be me, we all know that I don’t have a long attention span. Though I found the format problematic, I would not have missed this book for the world. The weaving in and out of people’s lives, people in many cases who never knew that their lives intertwined.