Hello everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. In this post, I will be doing a wrap up of all the books I read in February despite it being almost time for my March Wrap Up. Sorry about that. I read 8 books in February. Here’s what I think about each one of them.
1. HISTORICAL FICTION: The Alice Network by Kate Quinn
This is the third book I have read by this author and I really liked it. The protagonist, Charlie St. Clair, is a young American college girl on her way to Europe to get an abortion. But when she gets to London with her mother, she abandons her at the hotel and sets out to look for Eve Gardiner, the last person known to have been in contact with Rose, Charlie’s long lost cousin and who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war. But when Charlie finds Eve, she finds a woman bent on revenge who doesn’t even remember Rose. She does remember though the last person Rose worked for: René Bordelou.
Here’s what I liked the most about this book: one, the relationship between Charlie and Eve (and her attachment Finn, who, obviously, falls in love with Charlie) and how the three of them slowly but surely become a close-knit family and find themselves in one another, for all three of them were utterly lost at the beginning of the book. And two, all the literary references, starting with Charles Baudelaire and the name of Rene’s restaurant, Le Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology. These were the most memorable, but there were a couple more that I noticed and I really enjoyed that. I recommend this book to anyone who loves historical fiction.
2. NONFICTION: Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire and Revolution by Kelley Lytle Hernández
This is a book that anyone interested in Mexican-American relations or living close to the border between these two countries needs to read. Unfortunately, the history between the USA and Mexico is not taught in American schools and very little events of it are mentioned in Mexican ones, if at all. I barely remember it. So I recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic. It does have some negatives, and I mention those in my full review of this book here.
3. LITERARY FICTION: The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christi Lefteri
Trigger warning: war, death, grief. This book is set in the current devasting civil war in Syria and it relates the story of a couple, Nuri and Afra Ibrahim, as they escape Aleppo and make the perilous journey to Britain after their son, Sami, dies. The loss of a child is always a hard topic for me to read about, and this book does a superb job at describing both Nuri’s and Afra’s grief after losing their son. It was heart-wrenching at times, and more than describing their journey to Britain this book is about each one of the protagonists journey in processing that loss. But what is more, the book doesn’t shy away from describing the reality of war and its consequences; primarily, death and the dispossession of both goods and a place to live. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic.
4. BOOK CLUB BOOK: North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
This book was February’s pick for one of my book clubs and I liked it but it wasn’t my favorite either. I admit I watched the BBC production of this book even before knowing that it was based on a novel, and I liked it very much. The one from 2014, I mean, with Richard Armitage as John Thornton and Daniela Denby-Ashe as Margaret Hale. And though I appreciated how this book contrasts the differences between England’s social classes of the time, I read it for the romance and there was very little of it. And in true 19th century fashion, the couple gets together on the very last page of the book. I knew this, given the social standards of the time, but still, I was not enamored and rooting for this couple in the book as I was in the TV show. Yes, this book has its importance (hence its status as a classic), but I don’t think I’ll ever read it again.
5. FANTASY: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
I picked this book up because The Lord of the Rings is going to be one of my book club’s big reads this year, and I wanted to start by reading the prequel. And to be honest, I liked it more than I’d anticipated. But I think this has a lot to do with the audiobook edition that I listened to, too. The narrator does a fantastic job with it, and I enjoyed listening to Bilbo’s adventures. I was expecting the dwarves to face off against their nemesis though, and when that didn’t happen I felt rather cheated. The final battle ended up being a fight to see who would keep the treasure. I am glad I read this, as I couldn’t get into The Simarillion at all, and I am looking forward to reading the next book.
6. CLASSIC: Hiroshima by John Hersey
Miss Toshiko Sasaki, Dr. Masakazu Fujii, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, Father Wilheim Kleinsorge, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto were hibakusha—survivors of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. I picked this book up because I wanted to know why the US bombed Japan after Hitler and the Third Reich party were defeated in May 1945. Despite Germany’s surrender, however, WWII continued until Japan, the country that had attacked the US at Pearl Habor on December 7th, 1941, was defeated. The US dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later, on August 9th, 1945, and Japan finally signed the Instrument of Surrender on September 2nd ,1945.
On August 6th, 1945, at exactly 8:15 AM, Japanese time, Toshinko Sasaki had just sat down at her place in the personnel department of East Asia Tin Works and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk; Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura stood by the window of her kitchen window watching her neighbor tear down his own house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilheim Kleinsorge reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house reading a magazine; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki walked along one of the corridors of his hospital with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto was helping a friend clear out his house and store his belongings because he feared the massive B-29 raid everyone expected Hiroshima was soon to suffer. Then there was a noiseless flash.
This book is an attempt to let the world know what happened to the people of Hiroshima hours after the bomb was dropped and how their exposure to it affected them for the rest of their lives. Originally published as an article in The New Yorker on August 31st, 1946, the author intended to make people understand the incredible destructive power of the atomic bomb and that there are “terrible implications of its use.” Focusing primarily on six survivors, Hersey wanted to present a raw image of the impact of the bomb to American readers, and he accomplishes that. He describes quite vividly the graphic and gut-wrenching misery of the citizens of Hiroshima and the human cost of the bomb. I recommend this to anyone interested in reading about this topic.
7. LIBRARY BOOK: After Hitler: The Last Days of World War II in Europe by Michael Jones
This book is an account of the first 10 days after Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker on April 30th, 1945. Focused on the leaders of the Alliance and on the events leading up to Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 8th, 1945, in the West, and May 9th, 1945, in the East, the book tries to explain why we have two VE-Days. I really liked this book and recommend it to anyone interested in the history of WWII.
8. START A SERIES: Under The Eagle by Simon Scarrow
This book is the first installment of the Eagle series by this author, featuring the centurion Lucius Cornelius Macro and his optio Quintus Licinius Cato. Under The Eagle introduces the world/setting (the Roman army) and the protagonists of the series and starts to portray a relationship between the two protagonists based on mutual respect and camaraderie. However, this is the Roman army so Macro and Cato eventually find themselves immersed in the political machinations of those above them, among them the Emperor himself, Vespasian, the legate of the Second Legion, his wife Flavia, and the senior tribune Vitellius, all of them historical and prominent figures of the Roman Empire in AD 42.
This is not the first time I read this book, but it had been a while and there were a lot of things that I did not remember from before. The political background and wars against this book is set makes more sense now that I have had a chance to read more books on Roman history. This is a good beginning of the series, and I will definitely continue on with it.
