Pandora Carmichael is the daughter of a once-famous tennis player who now teaches the sport to the well-to-do in the Hudson Valley in 1920s New York. She grows up around opulence, but she possesses none of it. A teenager at the beginning of the book, she explores dating relationships, but struggles to achieve exactly what she wants out of life. She has a deep passion for fashion design, but in pre-World War II America, a…
Telling her story in a journal, Freda evacuates from London in anticipation of German bombing. She comes from a humble family with weak bonds to each other. Her grandmother Nan is the only person she feels close to, but she soon dies after Freda’s departure. Her mother and father have recently divorced as her father has left for another woman. As a mere twelve-year-old, she is alone in the world. After a railroad trip, she…
A one-page first chapter opens with Jack Girard’s mother Betty swallowing eight pills in an apparent act of suicide. Jack, an ex-lawyer and owner of a bar club in Key West, Florida, is soon alerted by his lawyer-father “Duke.” As with any good tale, things are not as they initially seem, though, and the story’s twists slowly build intrigue until resolution. Along the way, Jack reorients his life and his self-understanding as he uncovers family…
Lucy Riley is someone with secrets that haunt her from England to the American East to the Mid-West to the West Coast. They even chase her out of San Francisco to the Farallon Islands in the Pacific. She becomes a teacher to the rough island’s children. The handful of adults on the island are employed to man the lighthouse and harvest exquisite eggs. It’s a place that next to no one wants to go to,…
As with me, most people’s first reaction to this book will be to its title. To be clear, it does not use the infamous n-word but rather refers to Nigeria (pronounced with a soft-g, not a hard-g). Further, it is used in real life to describe a group of women in Lagos, Nigeria, who are foreign-born wives of Nigerian men living in Nigeria. As described in this book, they meet in an organized group and…
This book opens with Phoenix Yuan-Whyller’s mother “Rain” dying in Toronto at the ripe old age of eighty-three. Rain had lived a full life spanning two countries on two continents. Phoenix spent most of her life caring for her mother, yet her mother’s early life remained buried in mystery even to her daughter. Having recently married a Anglo-Canadian, Phoenix spent most of her life tethered to her mother. Grief and curiosity combined, and Phoenix flies…
Jeannette Bébinn is the daughter of a plantation owner in Louisiana in the 1840s and 1850s. Her black mother, whom her white father enslaved, died during childbirth. Jeannette can “pass” as white. Her father dotes on her and invests in her during her youth, much to the ire of her father’s jealous, white wife. When Jeannette’s father dies suddenly, this wife finds out that her late husband skipped a generation in his will by deeding…
Even my 11-year-old daughter observes that World War II still defines our modern era. It brought the United States of America into prominence; it ushered in a relatively peaceful Europe; it set the boundaries of communism and democracy; it opened up Americans’ eyes to the global order. Many younger people are realizing this history’s impact as their parents and grandparents have recently deceased. In this book, Brown seeks to kindle one fictional family’s history, from…
In a little-known part of the Holocaust, a Chinese diplomat facilitated the rescue of thousands of Jews from Vienna, Austria, by using his visa-writing powers. They were sent to, of all places, Shanghai during the Japanese invasion of China. (Of course, a war zone is much safer than the overzealous rage of Hitler.) As described in the Author’s Note, this Chinese diplomat, named Ho Fengshan, was not recognized until after his death in the late…
Two young Jewish men were orphaned during the Holocaust, but by hiding together, survived. They eventually achieved passage to the United States. They learned English, and one fell in love with another Jew who left before the Holocaust. This new couple married and started to establish a life. The other, with a longstanding interest in architecture, built them a house in Brooklyn. From there, this story unfolds with tales of love and loss, of affection…