Recommendo Again!

Karen Goes Recommendo Again!

 I just spent six weeks with my leg hiked above my heart, knee covered in ice packs, trying to think while taking a tiny amount of pain medication. There wasn’t much for an active mind to do except stream good series and films, and read, so that’s just what I did! While I read quite a few books, such as William Kent Krueger’s Cork O’Connor series, Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, and an old Arthur Upfield novel featuring half-Aborigine detective Napoleon Bonaparte, aka “Bony” and they were all good and entertaining and I recommend them, too, I’m going to talk about the last three books I’ve read.

All three books feature a female main character and all three reveal and present inequities women have faced and still face today and how each character overcomes the inequities to succeed, in a variety of settings and time periods.

The first book is Kristin Hannah’s The Women. The main character is a woman who loses her dear brother to the war in Viet Nam, so because she is a nurse, she signs up with the army to also go to Viet Nam. This does not please her parents who expect her to get married and have children like a good girl. She learns upon arrival that she has been woefully unprepared for what she must face. As those of us who lived through that time period know, it was horrific. 

Hannah’s writing is so well done that the reader feels inserted into the action in every scene. She holds nothing back. The reader is right in there amidst the bombs and the blood, the good friends who support each other, and we’re there as the main character, Frances McGrath, finds and loses love and finds it again. 

When Frankie comes back from war after two terms of service, she is spit upon and told by the VA when she goes for some psychiatric help, that there were no women serving in the Viet Nam War. There was no help provided for the Army nurses who watched men suffer and die, who stitched those back together who could be, and who helped usher those who couldn’t be into death. 

If anything, this novel is vindication for those nurses who were denied health services because their service didn’t count. Until it finally did, but way too late.  The end of this novel is uplifting.

That novel was historical fiction, but the next novel is science fiction/fantasy, something I don’t usually read. However, I was intrigued by a description of it in a review I read, so I gave it a try.  I came across this warning in the front matter:  “Please be aware that this book contains scenes of violence and abuse, suicide ideation, discussion and references to sexual assaults (though no on-page depictions), alcohol addiction, and torture. This book is not historical fantasy or alternate history, but a futuristic story set in an entirely different world inspired by cultural elements from across Chinese history and featuring historical figures reimagined in vastly different life circumstances…” 

If you are still interested, the novel is called Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhao. The main character, Tian-Tian, (Zetian) is a teenaged Chinese woman, whose feet have been bound so that she can’t walk like women with normal feet. The rest of her family’s expectations fit the mold for what good daughters should be and none of that is what she is. Besides, her father has sold her to be a concubine pilot in the continuing war, the same way her sister has died. That she and a boy from the wealthy class have loved each other for years matters not. Classes don’t mix and they must not divulge their relationship. Almost every concubine pilot dies and yet Tian-Tian plans to wreak revenge on the system for her sister’s death, and she does, surprising even herself. She discovers how the government has manipulated the Chrysalis ships so that the women die from being drained of their Qi. This is a story of a woman’s belief in her mental and physical abilities and how it grows as the plot develops. How the men in her life change as they help her and each other against conspiring overlords is another aspect of this novel. A sequel is in the works. 

The third novel I recommend is The Many Daughters of Afong Moy by Jamie Ford, the author who wrote Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.  This book explores the idea of epigenesis, with each woman of eight generations having memories of another life and suffering from what happened in the life of the first woman, Afong Moy. I truly believe in epigenesis, have seen it in my own family, was interested in reading a novel based on that idea. Our DNA changes with life events, and we pass those genetic changes on to our children, memories included. The novel is written with a different woman of the eight being the focus of each new chapter and we see all of their lives unravel and how the memories of the ones who came before are included in their memories. The last character, Dorothy, has the memories of all her female ancestors and wants for her daughter, who has started to have memories of her ancestors at age five, to have a better life free of this mental suffering. She undergoes a special treatment so she can re-process the lives and memories of each of her prior ancestors. A cool thing is that in every era there is someone who has been searching for Dorothy, a perfect stranger whose yearning has transcended place and time. This is a love story, love or lack of it in each woman’s story and love that ties this all up at the end as Dorothy re-processes the events in each woman’s life.