quick thoughts on three recent reads

because, regardless of extenuating circumstances, it is far too early in the year to give up on what little resolution I had.

After the Storm by Sangeeta Bharava

A coming-of-age story set during the time of the Indian independence movement (1947 bookends the bulk of the action, which takes place in 1941). The upheaval of the period is seamlessly integrated into the story and into the lives of the novel's four main characters:  an Indian princess who's left home to attend a formerly all-English boarding school; her bi-racial best friend, who was raised by a hardworking single mother because her parents' families so disapproved of their match that they would not reconcile even after her father's death; a Sikh college student turned revolutionary; and a young Englishman who will forever be tainted by his father's participation in the Jalianwala bagh massacre. 

The Peculiars by Maureen Doyle McQuerry

This is one of the books I received for Christmas. It was on my wishlist presumably because I'd seen some pre-launch information for this paranormal steampunk novel and wanted to make sure to check it out once it was published.
I have to admit that I didn't like The Peculiars as much as I thought that I would. The protagonist, Lena, is generally sympathetic, but when she's frustrating, she's extremely frustrating.
Things I did like about the novel: the world, secondary characters like Jimson and Mr. Beasley (and Mrs. Mumbles), and the fact that romance while part of the story takes a back seat to the rest of the story.

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater

My favorite Stiefvater novel by far. I've read between one and two-thirds of the Wolves of Mercy Falls Trilogy and by that I mean that I listened to the audio version of Shiver and I may have given up in the face of Linger's angst before I finished it. Quite recently I read The Raven Boys, which was a bit too supernatural for me.
The Scorpio Races was inspired by Celtic legends of water horses. Stiefvater's fictional Thisby island and its inhabitants are so realistic that a reader can almost forget that what she's writing about isn't real.

The Twelve Rooms of the Nile by Enid Shomer

The Twelve Rooms of the Nile by Enid Shomer

This is a work of fiction inspired by real people. Though I have hewed close to the facts, I have also taken liberties with them. [...] Flaubert and Nightingale did indeed tour Egypt at the same moment with nearly identical itineraries, but as far as we know, they never met. However, the historical record does suggest that they glimpsed each other in November 1849 while being towed through the Mahmoudieh Canal from Alexandria to Cairo. (449)

In her debut novel, Enid Shomer (who has previously published three collections of poetry and two of short stories) imagines what might have happened if a 28 year-old Gustave Flaubert met and became friendly with a 29 year-old Florence Nightingale while each was traveling in Egypt in 1849/1850.

The Twelve Rooms of the Nile is a character driven story told alternatively from the perspectives of the novel's two protagonists. It is a bit of a slow read, but that is almost to be expected from a book focused more on the internal lives of its protagonists than on its plot.

Nightingale, Flaubert, and the novel's secondary characters are well-drawn¹ and Shomer plays Nightingale and Flaubert's similarities and dissimilarities against each other to great effect.  The timing of the pair's parallel trips to Egypt, before either of them had begun the work for which they'd become famous, was particularly fortuitous and Shomer deserves much credit for realizing the potential for a double coming-of-age story and for executing it so well.  

1. While I was reading the novel I found Nightingale's maid's backstory unnecessarily odd, but I was happy to learn in "Acknowledgements, Sources, and a Note" that it was based on an actual contemporary relationship, that of Hannah Cullwick (as detailed in The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant), rather than a flight of fancy.

Safekeeping by Karen Hesse

Safekeeping by Karen Hesse

Teenage Radley Parker-Hughes is volunteering at an orphanage in Haiti when the President of the United States is assassinated. Despite the reports that have managed to filter to her remote location, Radley decides that she must return home to be with her parents during this time of unrest. When she arrives in Manchester, New Hampshire, she finds the country under martial law. Her parents' phone has been disconnected. She can't take a bus to Battleboro because she lacks the appropriate travel documents for crossing state lines. Radley's only choice is to walk home along country roads, trying to avoid being caught out after the newly imposed curfews.

With no money (her emergency credit card is now a useless piece of plastic) or food, Radley is reduced to foraging in dumpsters along the way. That she manages to arrive home safe and sound seems like a victory. Her parents, though, are not at home. It seems that they have disappeared, leaving all of their belongings behind. Radley locks herself inside the house, hiding whenever the police make their increasingly frequent visits, and eating all of the food in the pantry. Eventually she resigns herself to the pointlessness of remaining in Battleboro and decides to go to Canada...

I discovered Safekeeping among the featured recently-acquired titles in the teen room of the public library. I was sold on the cover art and flap text, especially this bit:

Illustrated by 90 of her own haunting and beautiful photographs, this is a vision of a future America that only Karen Hesse could write: real, gripping, and deeply personal.

But I have to admit disappointment with the novel. While I do appreciate that Safekeeping is a stand-alone novel,¹ I am dissatisfied with how easily Hesse ties everything up. That, combined with the fact that readers are never given a full backstory for the political and societal unrest, leaves the dystopian premise feeling insubstantial.

The story is very much character-driven and Radley's coming-of-age is the true center of the novel. Hesse does a wonderful job bringing Radley up and using the privations of the situation to facilitate that up-bringing. My disappointment is in how easy everything seems to be for Radley (all the truly awful things happen to other people) and how distant the threat seems to be. In short, Safekeeping seems like Dystopia light.

L: A Novel History² (which I read earlier this year) is constructed around a similar blip-in-the-history-of-the-nation kind of Dystopia. However, L's Dystopia was as horrifying (or more so) as any other I've encountered in fiction (to the point where I could only read the novel in small doses). What I wanted for Safekeeping was for more of the feeling that hell had broken loose (that phrase is used on the flap as well as within the novel) even if only for a time. Then again, limiting the reach of the threat may have been a goal. It does make the novel more palatable for younger readers.

The photographs are indeed both haunting and beautiful. I also love the idea that Hesse took them while tracing the same route she has Radley walk (as described in "about the author," 293-294) and that the "feet-on-the-ground research contributed to the authenticity of Radley's narrative." However, the placement of the photographs within the novel is inconsistent. Sometimes a photo matches the prose almost too perfectly, while at others the image seems at odds with the text.

One final comment -
The library copy of the novel was marked with a science-fiction spine sticker. That categorization is so off that I can only imagine that dystopian fiction is now considered (at least by some) a subgenre of SciFi. In any case, there is nothing in Safekeeping that I associate with science fiction. The novel is set in the future, but that imagined future is so near that it could happen tomorrow.

1. I do like series, but is seems like so much that is being published nowadays (especially in YA fiction) is a trilogy or quartet or longer series.
2. I received a review copy via NetGalley.