I obtained A Walk with Esther as a trade when meeting with the author, Deb Bowen. I’d seen a story on the local news about Deb and her book on the recent Holocaust anniversary. When I looked at her website, I learned about the A BOOK by ME project where Deb partners children with Holocaust survivors or World War II Veterans and adult mentors to write books telling the survivors’ or Veterans’ stories. I loved this idea so I emailed Deb and we had a wonderful visit about our respective writing and projects. I traded Missing Emily: Croatian Life Letters for A Walk with Esther.

A Walk with Esther not only tells the stories of these three Holocaust survivors named Esther, but also Deb’s journey with them. The book is also a memoir of how A BOOK by ME was created and affected Deb’s and her daughter’s, Cassie’s, lives. It’s also more than walks with Esthers, but also with other Holocaust survivors and those touched by World War II.

I was pulled into the stories; I would look up from reading them and realize an hour had passed. I liked Cassie’s perspectives, too; they added even more to the gap-bridging aspect of the book. I read the book as part sales pitch, like an extra long sales letter to get the reader to support the worthy cause. But even though this thread of asking for support was weaved through the stories, they were so interesting I didn’t mind. Plus, they were effective – they made me want to support the effort.

Along with the stories about the Holocaust survivors or Veterans themselves, the book also presents photos of the authors and illustrators who created the A BOOK by ME products and photos of the books’ covers. Other photos and facts related to the stories, World War II, and the Holocaust are also included, which I found very interesting and added value to the book.

Be aware, after you read this book, you will be touched by the stories and will want to do something to promote the A BOOK by ME project. However, you will also feel Deb’s gratitude by simply purchasing the book. The proceeds from A Walk with Esther go back to Deb’s A BOOK by ME project, so you’ll know you’ve helped to fund something important. More than just financially, however, you know you are helping these stories stay alive, doing your part to help prevent the past from repeating. And you get to learn something, too.

I loved this book and reading all of the stories; I found myself coming back to it as quickly as I could. So, on a can’t-put-it-down-scale of one for I couldn’t even finish it to ten for I was up until the wee morning hours, I give it an eight and a half.

A Walk with Esther along with all of the A BOOK by ME books published to date are available to purchase on www.abookbyme.com. The website also offers a wealth of information about the project, including how you can help.

In March 2015, I attended a National History Day showcase at my son’s school. As we browsed the talented students’ projects, I came across an exhibit one articulate young lady prepared about Nellie Bly. She told us that Nellie Bly was a reporter who got herself committed to an insane asylum in the 1880s to write a story about it in Ten Days in a Madhouse. I went home, found the e-book on Amazon, and purchased it for 99 cents (I found it later for free here).

My aunt, knowing that I like historical fiction, loaned me her copy of The House Girl. I’m glad she did; the only thing better than reading a great book is reading a great book for free.

The House Girl has several major characters; the main characters are Lina in 2004 and Josephine in 1852, each with a unique voice. Being a historical novel fan, hooking me with Josephine’s story first got me into the story. For me, there is always a risk I will lose interest when the second chapter switches to a story told from a different character’s point-of-view. But, Lina’s story of preparing a reparations lawsuit was almost as compelling as Josephine’s, a slave, so that was no problem in this book.

Lina, in 2004, is an attorney working for a large law firm in New York City. I was a paralegal in a large (for Iowa) law firm for nearly nine years. The descriptions compared to the law firm where I worked – from the assistants to the attorneys’ offices, to living life in six-minute increments – were so uncannily similar to where I worked, I briefly wondered if the author had worked for the same firm. (According to her bio, she’s seemed to have lived her entire life in New England.)

As sometimes happens when I read novels, the author included some material of which I wondered about the purpose. On pages 73 through 75, she includes a list of names which was too lengthy and too tedious to read. Later, she also included some charts and tables I might expect to find in a textbook or case study. These took me out of the story and since I skipped them and don’t feel like I missed anything, didn’t add anything for me.

After that, there was nothing else that startled me or that I skipped. I loved the connection between the present and past demonstrated in this book. Part of it is Josephine’s story told from her own and Lina’s perspectives. Part of it is told through two other major characters through letters. Josephine’s story is the vein running throughout the book, but the other three major characters also have stories to tell with their own problems and character arcs. Tara Conklin pulled these stories together beautifully.

I also enjoyed the fact that though The House Girl focuses mostly on these four major characters, only one of them is living. And even though there is no time travel involved, they are all connected through time. It made me think about the past, lineage, heritage, and legacy – about the web of our connections as human beings.

There were several twists, turns, and surprises which kept me engaged in the book and reading through to the end. So, on a can’t-put-it-down-scale of one for I couldn’t even finish it to ten for I was up until the wee morning hours, I give it an eight.

Source: Conklin, Tara. 2013. The House Girl. William Morrow and Harper Collins: Canada.

The Mida by Lyle Ernst and Kimberly Sigafus, according to the back-of-book blurb, takes place in 1952. However, it’s not historical per se. Other than the subtle absence of cell phones and computers, the story would fit into most any time period.

The Mida tells the story of a time-traveling circus headed up by an Ojibwa woman and the trouble it faces in the current, as-of-the-story, time and through time itself. There are numerous characters and the story is written in the third person omniscient point-of-view. The main characters seem to be Mesa, the carnival owner, and Tony. But it’s hard to tell if that was the authors’ intent as many of the characters are central to the story.

It took me a while to catch on to who-was-who, but I was able to do so as the tangled mysteries unfolded. (To help, the authors might consider a free character guide download.) These mysteries involve murder, the carnival’s existence, romance, and family ties. It has something for just about everyone: twists, betrayal, loss, violence, superheroes, and witches.

I can’t pigeon-hole it into just one genre – it’s part fantasy, part murder-mystery, part romance. But once I was able to get over the hump of learning the characters, I found myself hooked in the story and wondering how it would turn out. I can’t say the ending was a complete surprise – but only because I had no suspicions about “who done it.” There’s really no more I can say without the risk of giving away spoilers…

I enjoyed Lyle’s and Kimberly’s writing. The book contained lots of good dialogue, interesting phrases, subtle humor, and fresh ways of describing scenes.

The Mida is a good read. On a can’t-put-it-down-scale of one for I couldn’t even finish it to ten for I was up until the wee hours, I give it a seven and a half.

Source: Ernst, Lyle & Sigafus, Kimberly. (2014). The Mida. McIver Publishing: Freeport, Illinois.

Karen Musser Nortman is a fellow Iowa Author I met while at a publishing event in West Liberty, Iowa, in November 2014. Because there were so many books I wanted to buy written by several talented authors, I could only purchase one of Karen’s. The Time Travel Trailer sounded the most intriguing to my historical fiction tastes. I finally got a chance to read it at my in-laws over the Christmas holiday, after I’d finished my MBA.

The Time Travel Trailer provides a glimpse of life during several different time periods. The first thing I noticed was the realness of the writing. Life with the teen daughter, especially during the earlier part, is totally accurate. There is also plenty of humor with distinctive character voices. I especially enjoyed the mother’s, Lynne’s, slightly sarcastic voice.

Nortman’s historical facts are weaved beautifully throughout The Time Travel Trailer and ground it in time – we get information about happenings, court cases, and events we’ve likely heard about before. The story is told through short, easily digestible chapters; you can pick it up, read a few chapters, quickly do what you have to do, and jump right back in without having to thumb through to see how many pages the next chapter has so you can decide if you have time to start reading. As I read, I was continuously curious about what Lynne and Dinah would find and in what year they would find themselves placed.

The story is told through Lynne’s and Dinah’s point of view (Lynne’s in the first person and Dinah’s in third) in no-particular-order alternating chapters or chapter groups. After the first few chapters from Dinah’s point of view, I wasn’t sure of the purpose of the alternating viewpoints and wondered if it would add to the story. As the story unfolded, however, I learned how Dinah’s unique perspective fit in and I can’t think of a way the author could’ve handled it differently.

The Time Travel Trailer, in addition to providing an interesting history lesson, develops into a double mystery – what happens along the way and what happened with the trailer’s original owner. As mentioned above, during the first approximate one-third of the book, I wondered where the story was going, but then the suspense picked up, keeping me turning the pages and reading “just one more chapter” before putting it down for the night. Nortman doesn’t disappoint in her mystery writing ability, either; the end provides a satisfying conclusion.

The Time Travel Trailer was a great read. It had good suspense that pulled me through the story, so on a can’t-put-it-down-scale of one for I couldn’t even finish it to ten for I was up until the wee morning hours, I give it an eight and a half.

This book would be great for those who enjoy camping, time-travel stories, mysteries, or history. It’s enjoyable on many levels.

Source: Nortman, Karen Musser. 2014. The Time Travel Trailer.

I found this book, the full title of which is River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa while browsing the local section in my Davenport, Iowa, Barnes and Noble. I love to learn the stories of places by visiting historical museums and reading books. When I started reading the Prologue and recognized the names of some of the people mentioned, I had to buy it.*

River Bend Chronicle is a memoir starting in approximately the late 1960s or early 1970s after the author came to Davenport. I call it a literary memoir because of the detailed, vivid, colorful and fresh, almost poetic, descriptions and writing style. The text is filled with subtle humor. If we’re talking English composition, the long, somewhat drawn out style is inappropriate. But for a literary piece, it fits perfectly. Some of the expressions reminded me of A Christmas Story: ornate, musical, and subtly humorous.

Parenthesis were numerous in the book, especially more toward the beginning. Sometimes they added to the story, so the parenthesis marks weren’t necessary. At other times, they were distracting or didn’t add to the story and could’ve been eliminated. The book also included photographs that I recognized as subjects around Davenport but I would’ve liked to have seen captions. These are minor issues, however, and never tempted me to stop reading.

River Bend Chronicles is not just a memoir or a life story; it’s a study of the author’s life to find meaning and the cause and effect of how and why it turned out as it did. And really, it is the story of a writer and how this particular writer came to be from despair. It seems that, like a lot of writers, the writer was always within Ben Miller waiting to get out, and thankfully it did. I can relate; in all my young experiences, especially despair, I turned to words to cope.

In addition to the content, the words themselves evoke sad overtones of something lost and missed. It’s an insightful, thought-provoking journey of a life from point A to point B.

There seem to be several, weaved-together layers in this memoir. The story is also about a boy’s tumultuous, complicated relationship with his family that reflects in depth on being the eldest sibling amid a dysfunction that seemed to be rampant in families during the 1970s.

The story was engaging, but heavy, taking me a couple of weeks to read so on a can’t-put-it-down-scale of one for I couldn’t even finish it to ten for I was up until the wee morning hours, I would give it a six and a half.

If you’re looking for a light, beach read, this book is not for you. If you like to study people and delve into their minds to find out how they tick, you would enjoy this book. It shows that we Iowans are more than farmers living ideal, rural lives but that many of us live in real cities with real hurts.

Source: Miller, Ben. 2013. River Bend Chronicle. Lookout Books: Wilmington.

*These people were associated with The Midwest Writing Center, a non-profit organization in its pre-infancy (and maybe infancy) during the time period the book covers. I volunteer for MWC and serve on its Board of Directors.

I found A Family Apart on Amazon when I was researching for my pre-civil war era historical novel. The story takes place in 1860 and involves (at least partially) the Midwest so it fits in with my subject’s time and location. And I wasn’t disappointed – this book provided a lot of good information about the appearance of the rural Midwest and about how people lived in their farm communities. As I researched, I also discovered that there are many, many stories taking place during the dawn and the active civil war, but not a vast amount about the pre-dawn years so it was a good find in that regard as well.

A Family Apart is one of a series of seven books about the orphan trains and their passengers. It won the Golden Spur Award and is suitable for juveniles; with the historical information and story structure, it would be a good read for them.

A Family Apart opens in modern times when the grandmother of bored visiting kids in Missouri pulls out their great-great-great grandmother’s, Frances Mary Kelly’s, diary. It then jumps to showing Frances Mary Kelly’s difficult life in New York City helping to support she and her five siblings after her father dies. As an author, I’m not sure I would’ve included the beginning and ending modern times because it didn’t seem to really add anything significant to the story. However, the inclusion doesn’t detract from the story at all either. Plus, since it was published in 1987, approximately 26 years ago, perhaps it was the norm for historical fiction at that time.

The story was engaging; I read it in approximately two days so on a can’t-put-it-down-scale of one for I couldn’t even finish it to ten for I was up until the wee morning hours, I would give it an eight. It was a quick, easily digestible read.

After giving a vivid sense of financially struggling to survive in New York City, the story transitions into Frances’ travel on the orphan train with her siblings to be adopted by families in and around Missouri. I could feel Ma’s desperation and hurt when she sends her children west as well as the anger and confusion in her children who each react in their own way. Even though I knew essentially how the story must end – after all, the great-great-great grandchildren are reading the diary and discovering the story – there was enough tension, action, and conflict motivating me to keep reading to find out exactly how the story gets to that end.

I appreciated this book more because it was based on the true experiences of children being sent west to join new families on the orphan train. The characters and plot points were true to life; it’s an all around well developed engaging read.

Source: Nixon, Joan Lowery. 1987. A Family Apart. Bantam Doubleday: New York.

Her Kind tells the story of Rose Emma Parmlee via her diaries, compiled over her ninety-years of life, addressing her family’s migration from England to final settlement on the banks of the Mississippi River in LeClaire, Iowa. It is a historical novel based on real historical events and documents. While reading Her Kind, I felt like I was perched on Rose Parmlee’s shoulder as she leafed through her diaries. I especially like the touch of the historical record reprints peppered throughout the book. This added credibility to the story and to the illusion I was viewing someone’s personal thoughts and musings.

This is an intelligent story written beautifully; it is not an easy beach-read but the reward obtained matches the need to pay attention. The story is not told chronologically so you get the feel of flipping back and forth through something I would think would’ve been written chronologically. But perhaps Rose was like a lot of we writers who scribble on paper scraps or whatever else is available. So, as the reader, we are witness to Rose compiling these snippets into a cohesive unit, sorting and reflecting.

Her Kind gives a true sense of what it must’ve been like to live in a Mississippi River town in Iowa through several generations. In all, the story is beautiful and elegantly written, almost poetic. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in history, Mississippi River lore, family, or relationships.

The fifth-anniversary edition of Her Kind was recently released by 918studio press (full disclosure, my own publishing company) with a new foreword by Nancy Purington, Iowa City Mississippi River visual artist.

Source:

Throne, Robin. (2013). Her Kind: a novel. 918studioL LeClaire, Iowa.

Finding Manana is not fiction, but it is historical, covering the Cuban exodus, specifically 1980 in this piece. If I recall correctly, I picked this book up on the bargain rack at one of my local bookstores. It took me only a few days to read it; however, I did not read the entire book, so on the can’t-put-it-down-scale of one for I couldn’t even finish it to ten for I was up until the wee morning hours, I would give it a three.

This book tells the autobiographical story of the author, Mirta Ojito, starting on May 7, 1980, when her family was finally given the permission and means to leave Cuba as they had been working toward doing for years. It then goes back to previous years, telling the story of why and how her family came to want to leave Cuba. Mirta’s story was fascinating and well-told, but her story didn’t fill the entire book. Instead, the author filled the book with stories about historical events surrounding Cuban politics as well as other stories. These are the parts I skipped.

The first alternative chapters were stories told from political figure perspectives and I just couldn’t get into them. They seemed distant, boring, and devoid of emotion to me; well written and valuable in their own right, but not what I was looking for after I read Mirta’s chapters. Some other chapters, I believe, were told from ordinary citizens’, like Mirta’s, perspective and were likely quite interesting, but I was so engrossed in Mirta’s story and her voice, wanting to find out what happened to her and if she was able to get to the U.S. that skipped those chapters as well.

The switching of points of view jolted me and I don’t think they were appropriate for a memoir, which I assume is a story told from the author’s perspective. How can you get in someone else’s head and witness events where you weren’t present in a memoir or autobiography? I realize that the author likely conducted extensive research and wanted to use the results of those efforts, but I think she could’ve created three separate works: her memoir, a collection of stories of other refugees or ex-Cubans, and a factual non-fiction story about the political events surrounding the Cuban exodus.

Parts of Finding Manana I did read, Mirta’s story, were intriguing, tension-filled, and had me turning pages, anxious to see what happened. Most of it was told well from Mirta’s perspective and were consistent, except for a brief passage on page 162 where she put herself in an exchange between her mother and father when she was at school; I attribute this anomaly to editing. I greatly enjoyed Mirta’s story, but because of having to flip pages to find where it picked back up, the pace was off and it reduced the ease of reading. I love the title and the dual of the meaning of Manana meaning tomorrow in Spanish and it being the boat the author took to Florida.

Source: Ojiot, Mirta. 2005. Finding Manana: A Memoir of Cuban Exodus. Penguin Books: New York.