Here is an excerpt from another “book report” from NPR provided by Jean Zimmerman. She discusses five of her favorites. Here is the first. To read the complete article, please click here.
Illustration: Andrew Bannecker
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“So was that real?”
I hear variations on this theme all the time from readers. Titrating fact and fantasy can give a story a mysterious energy. Writers fetch up those details that sate the senses, allowing us to touch and taste, hear and feel how things were once upon a time. A woman steps out in Gilded Age New York City. Would she wear muslin or silk, petticoats or a hoop of whale baleen? Short kid gloves or long satin ones? How deep is her decolletage? All the particulars, please!
Some classics — Jack Finney’s Time and Again comes to mind — place invented characters in an authentic historical milieu. This approach is great. But I have a soft spot for those authors who revive some living, breathing figure, often a relatively minor one (hello, Thomas Cromwell). Real events, forgotten or infamous, also have a welcome grit about them.
Each of these summertime reads picks up where history leaves off. All are rich enough that I felt satisfied even before I read the author’s source notes. But when I learned “what was real” in these books I reached a whole new level of delight.
Orphan Train
by Christina Baker Kline
Paperback, 304 pages
I was astonished to learn that between 1854 and 1929, thousands of homeless New York City children were essentially kidnapped by the authorities and taken west by rail to start new, not necessarily wonderful lives. Christine Baker Kline takes this often brutal historical reality and raises it into a restorative tale of emotional survival against the odds. The author did considerable research with the few remaining orphan train survivors. That groundwork gives Orphan Train its sharp sense of authenticity.
The narrator, 91-year-old Vivian, recounts her past. As a sensitive, redheaded Irish child, she loses her immigrant parents in a tenement fire and is shipped off to rural Minnesota. Vivian’s trials and triumphs as she matures are the stuff of quiet, poignant drama. I found myself hurting for her when she lands in a dirt-poor backwoods household. I celebrated when a kindhearted seamstress buys the half-starved girl a precious stick of penny candy. And, crucially for historical fiction, I felt secure in Kline’s command of period details, down to the exact shade of lipstick worn by Midwestern teens in 1939: Terra Coral.
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Jean Zimmerman‘s debut work of historical fiction, The Orphanmaster, a murder mystery set in Dutch Manhattan, has just come out in paperback. She posts daily at Blog Cabin.
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