Strands of Bronze and Gold by Jane Nickerson

Strands of Bronze and Gold by Jane Nickerson

Goodreads: Strands of Bronze and Gold

Series: Strands of Bronze and Gold #1

Source: Purchased

Published: 2013

Summary: After the death of her father, seventeen-year-old Sophia Petheram goes to live with her godfather, a mysterious man who keeps to himself in his abbey in Mississippi.  Initially, Sophia delights in the fantastic world he has created—one where she lives surrounded by beauty, art, and luxury, and can break all the social taboos.  Her godfather, however, keeps her isolated and soon Sophia begins to fear both his violent temper and the veil that lies over his past.  The discovery of his four former wives, all with hair as red as her own, sets into motion a series of events that may leave her a prisoner in the abbey forever.

Review: Nickerson makes the Bluebeard fairy tale her own, setting it in antebellum Mississippi where she can not only play with the details of the original story but also reimagine them in the context of a society preoccupied with class codes and the ideal of the proper woman.  Much of the allure surrounding Sophia’s godfather lies in his encouragement for her to break the social taboos, to dress more exotically, to lower her inhibitions.  In succumbing to his manipulations, Sophia starts to lose both her sense of morality and her sense of self.  Her journey back to find her moral center makes this book stand out from other contemporary retellings that often focus on the darkness of fairy tales, but sometimes forget to let in the light.

Of course, setting forth a moral in any tale proves tricky ground.  In Bronze and Gold, Nickerson does not avoid the common trap of assigning modern sensibilities and philosophies to her protagonist.  Thus, Sophia (somewhat suddenly) shows herself an ardent abolitionist once she steps foot on her godfather’s plantation.  While authors understandably want readers to relate to their protagonists, imposing contemporary beliefs onto historical characters does a disservice to both the past and to readers.  A more provocative and believable story might have shown a sheltered girl who never thought much of slavery (Sophia has enough naivety and even foolishness to find herself lured into Bluebeard’s trap, so it is not such a stretch to imagine she never thought about the hot button issues of her day) until she witnesses it.  Watching Sophia learn to appreciate the humanity of those around her would have been great development for her.  Instead, readers are treated to a girl who randomly spouts off offers to serve on the Underground Railroad to anyone who seems like they might be abolitionists--her only motivation apparently being that doing so will make her a superior moral force in the eyes of the readers.  Perhaps wisely, none of the characters takes up her offer.  (She is, after all, essentially a prisoner in the house of a man who owns slaves.  One wonders what exactly Sophia plans to do for the Underground Railroad.)

Sophia's actions, in fact, often seem written solely because they fit the needs of the plot and not because they form an integral part of her character.  None of the other characters, barring perhaps her godfather, who exudes a mixture of sensuality and danger that should have had the girl running for the door as soon as she arrived, ever rise about mere stock types.  The standard rebellious and handsome youth makes an appearance, as does his pretty and more cautious lover.  The old and wise conductor on the Underground Railroad, the handsome and bookish minister, the leering groom—they are all included.  Arguably, the status of the book as a retold fairy tale might allow for or even call for flat characters, but it still seems odd to focus the story around the premise of the characters’ humanity and then portray them as one-dimensional.

If the characters lack something, however, the atmosphere of the book proves suitably creepy.  Readers will experience the same sense of wonder and danger as Sophia as they explore her godfather’s abbey and his past.  Nickerson has all the ingredients she needs to create an exciting and compelling story.  Perhaps the second in the trilogy will show what she is truly capable of doing. 

Note: The darkness of the plot and some of the themes addressed, such as sexuality, make this book more appropriate for older readers.

Dante's Daughter by Kimberley Heuston

Goodreads: Dante’s Daughter

Series: None

Published: 2004

Source: Library

Summary: Antonia Alighieri’s world turns upside down when the Black Guelfs invade Florence and force her family into exile.  Separated from her mother and her brothers, Antonia travels with her father, the famous poet Dante, through Italy and France.  The people she meets and the places she experiences will help her find her own place in the world and give her the courage to follow her dreams.

Review: Heuston paints a vivid picture of pre-Renaissance Italy, taking the few known facts about Antonia’s life and transforming them into a story sure to inspire readers and warm their hearts.  Though she writes about the daughter of a man who will one day be recognized as one of the world’s greatest poets, Heuston does not allow Dante—or the political forces surrounding him—to overshadow her protagonist.  Anotonia has her own life, her own needs, and her own vision.  Her navigation through adolescence and young adulthood in a male-dominated world will resonate with readers long after they close the book.

Since historians know so little about Dante’s family, Heuston had a liberal amount of poetic license with which to work while writing Dante’s Daughter.  My limited understanding of Dante suggests, however, that Heuston stayed remarkably true to those facts even while she used them to make assumptions about the way in which events may have unfolded.  Thus, Heuston utilizes speculations about an unhappy marriage between Dante and his wife Gemma (in part due to his poetry about another woman—Beatrice) to create a fully three-dimensional woman who feels hurt by her husband’s emotional betrayal yet still provides for her family and their interests.  The dynamic between them drives a lot of the story and provides for some interesting speculations about the how a man so preoccupied by intellectual pursuits may have related to others.

Dante springs to life as a complex man who loves his family, but whose idealism and divine inspiration sometimes cause him to neglect the worldly sorts of tasks that might keep them fed and clothed.  Antonia loves her father in return and craves his affection and protection, but finds that he has difficulty relating to her.  In part, the book suggests, Dante lived too much on his own to understand the needs of others, especially children.  However, Dante does not only experience difficulty in speaking to Antonia simply because she is a child, but also because she is a woman.  She, like him, possesses a quick wit and a keen sensitivity for beauty, but she lacks his education.  There exists between them a fundamental inability to communicate because Dante thinks in terms of the great poets and philosophers who came before him—and Antonia does not yet know them all.

Dante’s attitude toward his family—particularly his wife and daughter—thus serves as a springboard for reflections on gender roles.  As the daughter of a great poet, Antonia will learn Latin, hear the stories from Virgil, and even learn to paint.  However, she remains a woman, and society expects her not to create great art like her father, but to make a home and care for a family.  She does not deny this calling, or even its validity (Antonia’s aunt in fact provides a lively defense of the occupation of women in her society, asserting that men can accomplish so much intellectual work only because the woman take care of their practical needs).  However, she does recognize her need to find her own calling, rather than to follow the path laid out for her by others.

Heuston’s nuanced and varied depiction of woman is completely refreshing.  She presents a wide spectrum of strong women, from Antonia’s aunt who loves being a wife and mother to the Beguines, a group of lay Christian women who lived apart from men and could earn their own livelihood.  All of these women have different gifts and different strengths; Heuston does not assert the primacy of one vocation over another, but illustrates the various ways women can serve God and others.  Antonia ultimately takes the best from all these women, forging her own destiny where she can love freely and be true to herself.

Dante's Daughter possesses a rare beauty, bringing to life a fascinating woman who chose to accept her struggles and use them to make herself stronger.  This book will leave readers feeling refreshed and inspired.

Movie Review: The Molly Maguires

Date: 1970

Director: Martin Ritt

Summary: Life is hard in the anthracite coal region of 19th-century Pennsylvania, especially for the Irish workers who seem trapped in a hopeless cycle of poverty and dangerous work.  But one group of men – a secret society of Irish Catholics known as the Molly Maguires – has decided to fight back.  Using covert acts of sabotage and assassination, the Mollies terrorize the coal operators and the police who they feel have wronged them for so long.  But now there is an informer among their ranks, and he may prove more dangerous to the Mollies than any coal operator has ever been.

Review:  The Molly Maguires is an interesting movie, from a Catholic perspective, for at least two reasons.  First, it tells a part of our collective history.  And second, it introduces the theme of social justice while showing what can happen in its absence.

Though the story of the Molly Maguires has been part legend from the start and continues to be shrouded in mystery, there is truth in that story that is worth being told.  In the second half of the 19^th century, many Irish Americans lived and worked in coal patch towns.  Poverty and violence were a constant reality and, in the decades following the Civil War, Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region found itself in the national spotlight when a series of assassinations and other violent acts against coal authorities were attributed to a secret society of Catholic Irishmen.  Detectives got involved, and in the end several men hanged for it.

The movie, necessarily, states as fact some things that might not be true.  It names the Mollies and their motives while fully analyzing the perspective of the man – an Irish Catholic himself – who agreed to find the Mollies and set them up for arrest and execution.  Though the writer and director had to take some creative license with history, they reach to the core of some very real themes that are as relevant today as they were in the 1870s.  Viewers are led to sympathize with the grievances of the Mollies, but they cannot endorse murder as an appropriate response.  They struggle with one character’s comment that this fight is like a war, and have to wonder if the rules of war could apply to this situation, with some “soldiers” drawn reluctantly into battle by the simple nature of their job title or ethnicity.  They have to look at the character of McParlan – the informer – and decide if he is more or less guilty than the Mollies.  Is he justified to turn in the assassins?  What if he admits that he does it not in the name of justice, but because it is his chosen way to find a better position in society?  Is anyone in the story wholly innocent?  Is anyone entirely guilty?  If there is a blameless course of action, what can it be?

Though some historians find fault with the factual accuracy of the movie, it powerfully draws attention to the most relevant questions brought up by the Molly Maguire events.  The movie tells a good story, and it does it well.  Furthermore, its cast includes Richard Harris and Sean Connery, so Dumbledore and James Bond unite to share with us this important piece of American Catholic history.

Awakening by Claudia Cangilla McAdam

Goodreads: Awakening

Series: None

Published: 2009

Source: Borrowed

Summary: Ronni does not understand why Jesus had to die for her.  Rather than attend Mass or even celebrate the Triduum with her mother, she would prefer to spend time with her friend Tabby.  Thus, when she awakes to find that she has travelled back in time to the last days of Jesus, she forms a plan to save her Savior.  As she watches and learns from Jesus, however, she begins to realize that the best thing she can do might be to leave history unaltered.

Review: McAdam makes history come to life as she cleverly inserts tidbits from the Bible into her story, down to an explanation of the naked young man in the Garden of Gethsemane.   Readers will feel as if they have truly travelled back in time with Ronni and they, like her, will want to take this opportunity to watch and learn from Jesus.  The book is history lesson, theology lesson, meditation, and a Bible trivia scavenger hunt all in one.

The author does not hide her intention to teach with this story and older readers especially may find that the didactic purpose has a tendency to interrupt the plot.  The action, however, never flags, even when the audience can discern the not so subtle messages behind it.  In fact, so much adventure and excitement occurs that it sometimes defies the suspension of disbelief.  The question arises: would a proper Jewish young woman and her friend really so flagrantly disobey all the laws?  Not only the religious ones that they feel Jesus has replaced with the new covenant, but also the legal ones?  Readers will understand that twenty-first century Catholic Ronni does not hold much with the laws of uncleanliness, but when she convinces a friend to attempt to jail-break Jesus, it all suddenly becomes too much.

If readers can accept that Ronni’s first-century friends all conveniently hold her twenty-first century values, the plot proves engrossing.  Ronni is a sympathetic teenage character with whom readers can relate even when they recognize that she often behaves foolishly.  She has real concerns not only about her crush who lives next door, but also about the meaning of life and the reason for suffering.  Her interactions with Jesus thus touch readers on an emotional level: He is not only answering Ronni’s concerns, but also speaking to them.  McAdam makes Jesus come alive, makes Him seem like a real person really concerned with each individual.  That is the true triumph of her storytelling.

Awakening skillfully uses an entertaining story to teach about the Crucifixion and to encourage readers to commit to a more personal relationship with Jesus.  It combines deep philosophical questions with a fun and funny plot and, if the answers are not as deep as one might have wished, it is helpful to remember that the story is geared toward younger readers, preferably those in their tweens.  One envisions this book mostly used for homeschooling or other educational purposes.

Cascade by Lisa Bergren

Goodreads: Cascade

Series: River of Time #2

Publication Date: June 1, 2011

Source: Borrowed from a friend

Summary: Gabi and her sister Lia return to the fourteenth century, this time with their mother, in order to help defend the castle and the people they have come to love.

Review: Cascade follows very much in the footsteps of Waterfall, in terms of both plot and style.  Bergren continues to have Gabi think in a hilarious form of what she clearly believes to be modern “teen-speak,” which can be annoying unless the reader decides there is nothing left to do but take it in stride and laugh.  The strange “medieval-speak” is back, as well, with an overabundance of “nays.”  This time, the major discrepancy is that Gabi claims the medieval language is natural to her, but the consistent use of modern idioms in her thoughts suggest that she must be putting a real effort into “translating” her speech.

As usual, however, the language is just one of many things readers will have to accept if they wish to enjoy the plot.  The time portal follows no more logic than it did in Waterfall, and Gabi essentially explains it away by saying that it just does not make any scientific sense and that is all there is to it.  At the end of the book, she and her family make a major alternation in time that should have drastic effects by anyone’s standards of time travel.  It never does.  Time travel operates mainly as a convenient way to get Gabi and her sister to meet some attractive medieval Italian guys in these books and is clearly not bound by any reason.

And yes, the attractive Italian guys are back, and once again are the focus of the book.  The pattern of Waterfall continues.  Gabi gets captured and then Gabi gets rescued by the handsome Marcello.  She has all obscure talents necessary to help her survive, with her knowledge of astronomy being the newest introduced.  For a change in the pattern, however, Gabi occasionally shows some good sense and does what Marcello suggests she do, instead of charging into battle and thinking she can singly wipe out the entire enemy with her sword.  Overall, the plot if rather exciting, and anyone who liked Waterfall will enjoy Cascade just as much, or perhaps even more since all the introductory bits have happened already, and readers are left with pure action and romance.

Gabi’s relationship with God does not develop as quickly as her relationship with Marcello, however, and Cascade, like Waterfall, is a Christian book mainly in that Gabi thinks about God once in awhile and the romance sticks to pretty words, kissing, and hugs.  Gabi now prays a little more often, apparently out of desperation because her life in constantly in danger, and she has moved on from thinking He has a purpose for putting her in medieval Italy to being convinced simply that He must want her alive for something since she has not died yet.  Perhaps in the third book her faith will strengthen.  She will definitely have a rough time if she chooses to remain in medieval Italy without a conviction that God plays an important role in her life.

Cascade does has its flaws, but the characters are endearing and there is always something happening to keep readers entranced or in fear for Gabi’s life.  The romance is beautiful, and occasionally Gabi throws out some philosophical thoughts that are beautiful, as well.  The series remains a good choice for those who like romance and a medieval world that is surprisingly realistic in the fiction genre, even when mixed with all of Gabi’s notions that women are equal to men.

Waterfall by Lisa Bergren

Goodreads: Waterfall

Series: River of Time #1

Publication Date:

Source: Borrowed from a friend

Goodreads Summary: Most American teenagers want a vacation in Italy, but the Betarrini sisters have spent every summer of their lives among the romantic hills with their archaelogist parents. Stuck among the rubble of the medieval castles in rural Tuscany, on yet another hot, dusty archaeological site, Gabi and Lia are bored out of their minds...until Gabi places her hand atop a handprint in an ancient tomb and finds herself in fourteenth-century Italy. And worse yet, in the middle of a fierce battle between knights of two opposing forces.

Suddenly Gabi's summer in Italy is much, much more interesting.

Review: Waterfall is a fun read focused on the adventures of a modern girl who inexplicably finds herself in medieval Italy—scandalously clad in skinny jeans and a cardigan.  Most of the amusement of the book comes from watching Gabi attempt to navigate the two very different worlds.  On one hand, she knows she needs to conform and behave like a believable and proper young noblewoman, particularly if she wants to catch the eye of a certain young nobleman.  On the other, she is fiercely free-spirited and wants to distinguish herself as a confident woman with more skills than these men could have imagined.

The idea of the modern woman travelling back in time and griping about the lack of feminism is becoming a little cliché, a little tiresome.  Bergren mostly manages to make it work, however.  The medieval characters are not instantly won over by Gabi’s behavior.  In fact, they are suspicious and accuse her of being either a witch or a prostitute.  The process by which they slowly begin to accept Gabi has something to offer the medieval world is actually fairly believable.

Interestingly, most of the modern parts of the book are not.  Bergren’s idea of how the average teenager talks is interesting, to say the least.  Gabi employs a number of rather embarrassing phrases such as “the whole enchilada” and terms that Bergen clearly believes qualify as teen “lingo.”  It all comes across as stilted and uninformed, and the merits of her story are often lost behind the awkwardness.

Bergren’s explanation of the medieval/modern Italian relationship is equally questionable.  First, Gabi decides she is magically able to speak this old version of Italian because she has just read so much Dante it has become ingrained in her mind.  This is highly unrealistic.  I read a lot of Middle English, but I have yet to start speaking it.  Worse, however, are the “corrections” characters make to Gabi’s speech.  She uses terms like “tomorrow” which evidently confuse others, and then they explain that they say “on the morrow” instead.  These explanations would make far more sense if Gabi were actually speaking medieval English, not medieval Italian.  This is a minor part of the book, but like Gabi’s strange teen dialect, it proves immensely distracting.

Once the reader gets past these flaws, the plotline is rather interesting.  There are battles, intrigue, sicknesses, and more—everything one would expect to make a book in medieval times exciting.  Gabi does give a fair amount of her attention to these occurrences, but she is also very much focused on developing a potential romance.  In fact, she has rather an obsession with medieval men because they are just so much more “manly” than modern guys.  Her swooning over their masculine smell and physiques and how primal they are is rather intense.

It also overshadows whatever Christian message this book is supposed to have.  Occasionally Gabi stops to wonder why she was sent back in time and what God wants her to do there.  No answer is forthcoming.  She does help her new friends out in a fairly large way, but her ultimate goal always appears to win over her guy.  Here, “Christian fiction” translates fairly well as “clean romance.”

Waterfall is an entertaining read with a lot of promise.  It has its flaws, but is ultimately captivating enough to leave readers wanting the sequel.  There are also a number of unanswered questions that one can only hope will be explored in the following books.