Adriana Kraft

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My Review: The Forever Queen, by Helen Hollick @HelenHollick #MedeivalHistory #UKHistory

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This week I’m continuing my reviews of fiction about women across the ages who’ve had an impact on the history of the British Empire. Two weeks ago I reviewed Cathie Dunn’s novel Ascent, focused on the Viking invader Rollo’s hand-fasted wife, Poppa. Poppa is the great grandmother of today’s impactful heroine, Queen Emma.

When I wrote about Poppa, I was writing about a direct – although very distant – ancestor of my husband. Like so many Americans of British descent, his lineage traces back to Edward III, in his case through Edward’s son John of Gaunt and John’s mistress and later wife, Katheryn Swynford.

Queen Emma is not my husband’s ancestor, and the British royal line descends not from her but from her brother. Nonetheless, she and her children had a profound and powerful impact on the course of UK history.

MY REVIEW

The Forever Queen, by Helen Hollick

Emma was but thirteen when her brother – the future Duke of Normandy – accompanied her across the channel from France in 1002 to wed King Æthelred, later known as Æthelred the Unready. Little could she know that as England’s future queen, she held in her hands both England’s rise to success across the middle decades of the century, and its fall to William the Conqueror, her grandnephew, in 1066.

Perhaps more is known about this pre-Norman queen than about any who preceded her, in part because late in her life, she commissioned a book about herself. One may need to take the details of that book with a grain of salt, but its broad strokes mesh with much that is documented elsewhere.

As Æthelred’s queen consort, Emma ruled England with him until his death except for a brief interim in 1013, in which the Dane Sweyn Forkbeard conquered the island and Æthelred fled with his family to Emma’s brother, by then Duke Richard, in Normandy. After Æthelred’s death in 1016, a son of Emma and Æthelred ruled briefly, but was defeated by Sweyn’s son Cnut the Great, who shortly married Emma; hence her title, the forever queen. She ruled with him until his death in 1032, and she was an active participant in the government of her two sons who succeeded him, Harthacnute and Edward the Confessor. Emma died in 1052. Counting her years as advisor to her ruling sons, Emma was central to English politics for nearly half a century, a ruler in fact if not in name.

Author Helen Hollick has taken these known and conjectured facts and delivered a compelling account of Emma, her inner world, her dilemmas, and her choices. In addition, she embeds this narrative in a rich and detailed presentation of Emma’s outer world – the backward state of England’s royal and liturgical structures, the complex medieval culture, the political interplay and some of its traitors, the powerful role of the Catholic church and its bishops, and the incessant Viking invasions.

The Emma who emerges is engaging, often admirable, sometimes devious, and clearly very clever to successfully navigate the swirling power plays that surround her. Is she a likable character? Yes and no. For me, Hollick succeeds in making us understand and empathize with her, so that even when she takes an action we might disapprove of, we know why. I found the presentation of her character and her era to be highly engaging and informative.

Five Stars ~ Highly Recommend.

BUY LINK

The Forever Queen: Sometimes, a desperate kingdom is in need of one great woman.

Helen Hollick

https://amazon.com/dp/B0042JU7QW/

My Review: Ascent: A story of danger, adversity, and love (House of Normandy Book 1), by Cathie Dunn @cathiedunn #Normandy #HistoricalFiction #Rollo #KU

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Since I wish to focus my next spate of Book Reviews on women across the ages who’ve had an impact on the history of the British Empire, where better to start than the hand-fasted first wife of of Rollo, the the Viking invader of Rouen, whose great-great-grandson conquered England in 1066?

Historical fiction author Cathie Dunn has penned a moving account of what could have been this important forebearer’s experience and influence in the decades immediately following Rollo’s late ninth century invasion and ultimate victory over what is now Normandy, France. Reliable records of Rollo’s life and actions are scarce, and those of his handfasted wife Poppa of Bayeux even more elusive. But weaving together what is known with what might be reasonably conjectured, Dunn has given us a brave, determined and hard working early French noblewoman who, given in marriage to the pagan invader against her will to secure advantages for her father, rose above hatred and prejudice and formed at least a tolerable relationship that surely impacted the course of history. It is the offspring of this union who form the foundation of what became the Duchy of Normandy and ultimately the House of Normandy in England.

I love reading about bold, impetuous women who none-the-less show good judgment when necessary and have their wits about them. This is who author Cathie Dunn has given us in fleshing out the bare bones of Poppa’s story. A mere fourteen years old upon Rollo’s arrival, Poppa is handfasted to him as wife but, in Dunn’s account, is left behind for several years as he moves further up the river valley, to Rouen, which he conquers. In the interim she develops skills in managing her father’s estate – skills that will be especially helpful when she must manage Rollo’s ever increasing dominions.

It required considerable boldness and dedication in that era for a Christian woman to consent to remain in what her church viewed as a non-sanctioned marriage to a pagan; yet there is no evidence that a Christian wedding ceremony ever took place between Poppa and Rollo. Many of the details Dunn has created in this highly engaging story are pure conjecture, but they surely fit with such boldness and as such, seem at least plausible. And, as any novelist hopes, they make for a story that will have readers rooting for Poppa. I highly recommend this novel.

This book is the first in a projected series about the first three Norman brides. I eagerly await the second installment, promised for sometime in 2023

BUY LINK

Available exclusively at Amazon.

Free to read on Kindle Unlimited.

https://amazon.com/dp/B09RNB6N5L/

 

My Review: Child of Water, by G. Lawrence (@TudorTweep) #UKHistory #HistoricalFiction #Review

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I’ve said elsewhere that I learned almost nothing in any of my history courses about the western world before the Renaissance. In recent years, I’ve read widely in both fiction and non-fiction about the British Isles throughout the millennium between the exit of the Romans (roughly 400 A.D.) and the onset of the Renaissance (1400 A.D.). And it has thrilled me to discover that not only is a great deal known about this era, but there is a vast amount of material about the powerful role of women. My next several reviews will feature some of these works.

One of the first Norman era books I picked up – available on Kindle Unlimited, which is always a treat – is Child of Water (The Heirs of Anarchy, Book I), by G. Lawrence. This book is the first of a four book series tracing the life of the only daughter of King Henry I (reigned1100 to 1135). Matilda (1102-1167), or Maude, as she was also known, came into power first as the Holy Roman Empress, through her marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V in 1110, when she was a mere child of eight; then, following his death, as the rival claimant to the English throne during the years of Anarchy, 1135-1154; and finally in Normandy, often acting as representative for her son, King Henry II, and presiding over the government of the Normandy Duchy

Almost all the events I just enumerated are things I knew nothing about before I picked up this book, but the book is nothing like a history lesson. Lawrence uses the first person point of view masterfully to create an engaging and highly readable narrative. There’s just enough detail about events to enable unfamiliar readers to anchor themselves, but never so much as to overwhelm. Characters and events materialize on the page because Matilda is affected by them. We see what she sees, learn what she learns, and come to know what she fears, hopes, and decides as the events unfold.

Child of Water opens in Rouen, Normandy, shortly before Matilda’s death, as she reflects on her life and her role. Here is a snippet that spoke to me:

One day, when I am gone, my ladies will tell their husbands and children of me. With a touch of pride, something they will attempt to conceal since noble women are not supposed to possess it, they will say that once they attended upon me, the Empress Matilda, Lady of the English, daughter of Henry I, wife to the Count of Anjou and the Holy Roman Emperor … the woman who waged war against men for a throne.

The book then drops us into the mind of eight-year-old Matilda as she waits on the beach for a longboat to bear her on the first step of her sea and land journey to marry the man who has been named Holy Roman Emperor but not yet crowned. We travel with her, study with her in her new home, grow up with her and see her crowned empress. This first volume then traces her life and her inner world as she returns to England upon the death of her husband. It concludes as she marries the man her father has chosen for her, Goeffrey, Count of Anjou – who wore a yellow flower in his hair and eventually ushered in the Plantagenet house of British royalty, through their son, Henry II. The details of these and subsequent events in Matilda’s life form the remaining three volumes in the series.

In summary, I found Child of Water to be an intriguing and informative read. I was especially struck by Matilda’s reflections (naturally the invention of the author, but plausible at the very least) as she navigated the male world of power plays among her husband the emperor, the Pope, the antipope, and the Germanic nobility, and then the world of her father and his holdings in England and Normandy. One might think such modern thoughts are anachronistic, but embedded as they were in very real events, I found them insightful.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in early Norman history in England, and even for those who are curious to discover if they might develop such an interest.

 

Child of Water (Heirs of Anarchy, Book I) is available exclusively at Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B084KN8G8J/

Free to read at Kindle Unlimited

 

My Review: Once Upon a Wardrobe, by Patti Callahan (@pcalhenry) #Review #Narnia

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Did you devour C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series as a kid? Or perhaps, like me, you read the books out loud to a child. My husband and I started a chapter a night when our son was about 8 years old, after we’d all been enchanted by a community theater production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. For me, as an adult, the entire series was magical, alluring, and profound.

Once Upon a Wardrobe delivers the same magic. The author, Patti Callahan, came to study Lewis’s life and meet his surviving stepson when she embarked on her earlier book, a biography of Joy Davidman, whom Lewis married in 1956. In Once Upon a Wardrobe, Callahan brings us C.S. Lewis in 1950, shortly after the first publication of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, which he wrote in about 1948.

She does so through the eyes of a fictitious terminally ill eight year old child, George, and his older sister Megs, a seventeen year old Oxford math and physics student who loves her brother fiercely. George has just read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and is desperate to know whether Narnia is real and where it came from. When he learns that its author teaches where his sister is studying, he insists that Megs find him and ask him those questions.

Megs is ever practical, driven by what can be observed, measured, counted. But she knows she must do this for George. Through the interplay between Megs, an Irish fellow student of hers named Padraig,  George, and C. S. Lewis, Callahan draws us into a world every bit as luminescent and profound as the series itself.

In the story, Lewis is more than willing to engage in dialogue with Megs and takes an almost fatherly stance. But rather than answer questions, he tells stories – his early childhood, the brutality of a British boys school, World War I experiences, hosting “refugee” children during World War II, conversations with Tolkien and the Inklings. Megs records as much as she can of Lewis’s stories and returns faithfully to share them with her brother, who is worsening.

The message, which Megs resists but gradually comes to accept, is that truth is not confined to what can be counted and measured. Fairy tales aren’t just for children. As Lewis himself put it in a New York Times essay in 1956, “Sometimes fairy stories may say best what’s to be said.”

Not a fairy tale in any sense of the word, Once Upon a Wardrobe brings Lewis’s purpose and perspective to light in exquisite and richly textured prose, creating an experience reminiscent of Narnia itself. An immensely satisfying and uplifting read.

My Review: Code Girls, by Liza Mundy @lizamundy #WWII #WomensHistory #Review #KU

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Code Girls, by Liza Mundy, is the third book in my current series of book reviews featuring the role of women in the WWII Allied victory. The first two books – The Atomic City Girls, and Daughters of the Night Sky – are historical fiction based very closely on actual events and characters.

Code Girls is not fiction, even though through most of its pages it reads as smoothly and dramatically as any novel. Following interviews with more than twenty participants and years of meticulous research, much of the data having spent decades as classified and unavailable, Liza Mundy has crafted the story of over 10,000 American women, most freshly out of college, who secretly worked during the war to break the German and Japanese military codes. These women saved thousands of lives and in no small part helped to bring down first Germany, and then Japan.

They – and their superiors – could tell no one about it for decades.

In November, 1941, letters began going out to select women who were seniors at several of the nation’s elite colleges. The letters invited the women to an interview, where the questions simply were whether they liked crossword puzzles and if they were engaged to be married. If they answered appropriately, they were invited to further meetings where they learned about “cryptanalysis” and were told never to utter that word to anyone else. They entered on-campus training in code breaking – again, about which they could tell no one, not even family members. Those who passed the rigorous training were the earliest recruits to facilities being readied for them in Washington, D.C., by both the Navy and the Army.

Over the ensuing years, recruitment criteria broadened, but secrecy, the ability to identify patterns, and having a bright mind remained paramount. Mundy’s account traces the initial American codebreaking developments between the wars, then proceeds through the war years chronologically. By weaving together historical data and material from her interviews, she provides a window into the mundane as well as the dramatic. We learn what interaction was like in the cramped working quarters; how the women were treated by outsiders – who could never know how technical and important their work was – how they spent their relatively few free hours; and, for many of them, how their lives unfolded after the war.

Most of them remained unacknowledged and unsung for the rest of their lives. Some family members never learned what a mother – an aunt – a grandmother – had accomplished, how many ships were sunk because the Navy “happened” to be in the right place at the right time, due to intelligence provided by the codebreakers.

I found this book to be both informative and very engaging, and I highly recommend it.

BUY LINK

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316439894/

Code Girls is available exclusively at Amazon
and is currently on Kindle Unlimited

My Review: The Atomic City Girls, by Janet Beard #WWII #WomensHistory #HerStory #ManhattanProject

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This review is the second book in my three review series (so far!) on women who won the war – women without whose contribution we could so easily have lost.

Daughters of the Night Sky, by Aimee K. Runyan Goodreads Review
The Atomic City Girls, by Janet Beard Goodreads Review
Code Girls, by Liza Mundy (review coming 11/19)

Growing up as a baby boomer, I naturally learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the first atomic bomb tests at Alamogordo, NM. Later, while I was studying at the University of Chicago, a Henry Moore sculpture commemorating the first atomic fusion was unveiled. It is situated on the university’s former football field, the site of Fermi’s laboratory in the 1940s. The sculpture’s shape vaguely resembles a mushroom cloud, which caused considerable controversy, as there was no explosion in Fermi’s successful experiment. But everyone involved in Fermi’s labs knew where the work was headed.

In spite of this awareness, until I picked up The Atomic City Girls, I was only familiar with “Oak Ridge” as the name of a famous country band, whose song “Elvira” I often dance to in line dance classes. Though I knew the term “Manhattan Project,” I had never heard of the massive calutrons that were secretly built in Oak Ridge, TN during World War II to enrich uranium for the atomic bomb. I was also unaware of the enormous and crucial role of so many women in the Manhattan Project.

The Atomic City Girls, written by a granddaughter and grand niece of two women who worked for the Manhattan Project in Tennessee, succeeds brilliantly in remedying this gap in my knowledge. Though the main characters are fictional, their experiences mirror the life and reality of the actual participants in the project.

The city of Oak Ridge was built nearly overnight in a remote Tennessee valley selected for the potential of its surrounding ridges to possibly contain an explosion, should there be a disaster in the project. Out of nothing, in very short order, grew a city of over 75,000, complete with housing, buses, movie theaters, bowling alleys, and other recreational venues. All who worked there were sworn to secrecy, and violations were not tolerated.

The project recruited recent female high school graduates chiefly from the surrounding region. For most of them, it was both their first paying job and their first time living away from their families. The ”girls,” most of them under 20, were trained to sit at a display of dials and keep them within a very narrow range of settings. In eight hour shifts, they did nothing but watch the displays and turn the dials when required. They were never told what the dials meant or what their work was producing.

Beard has created fictional characters both black and white, male and female, line workers and highly trained scientists and engineers. Thus she succeeds in conveying not only the daily experience of the young women, but also the inevitable tensions and cross currents of racial and status differences within the milieu. Within her story lies a microcosm of the changes that emerged in our society following the war in the roles of women and African Americans.

It turns out that the secrecy surrounding this project also impacted me personally. Shortly after reading the book, I was going through some family history accounts my mother passed along to me before her death. There I learned for the first time that her older brother, a chemical engineer at DuPont in Delaware, worked on the Manhattan project. DuPont was the US firm that designed and built the calutrons in Oak Ridge. My mother’s notes gave no further details about his role, so I do not know if his work was on site in Tennessee, or in Delaware during the planning and design stages.

In short, I found this book to be well written, thoroughly researched, highly informative, and very engaging, and I highly recommend it.

Buy Link https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062666711/