Book Review: IN THE HANDS OF WOMEN

TITLE: In The Hands of Women

AUTHOR: Jane Loeb Rubin

340 pages, Level Best Books, ISBN 9781685123468 (softcover, also e-book)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Jane Loeb Rubin’s In the Hands of Women is an engrossing historical fiction novel (a genre I readily admit I am not well-read in). Taking place in the early 1900s and set against the backdrop of the pre-WW1 immigration surge and the Women’s Suffrage movement, the book tracks the life and career of Hannah Isaacson as she attends Johns Hopkins Medical School to become one of the first accredited female doctors working in the relatively new field of obstetrics, and then returns to her family in New York City to practice.

Hannah is a multi-faceted narrator. She is a survivor of poverty and trauma (the death of her mother when she was just a toddler from breast cancer, the remarriage of her father, the death of her best childhood friend from consumption) who has been motivated by that trauma, and by the love of the older sister who raised her and the support of a local physician who believed in her, to pursue a career in medicine at a time when women weren’t encouraged to be doctors (leaving many to “settle,” as it were, for nursing or midwifery). Stalwart friends and family surround her both at medical school and when she’s practicing in New York. I enjoyed the depth of character Rubin gives to not just the supporting cast but even the tertiary characters. In addition to Hannah, the book has a lot of strong and complex women characters, from Hannah’s older sister Tillie to her medical school best friend Elspeth to her secretary Ina and including some real-life women at the time: Johns Hopkins trustees Mrs. Garrett and Mrs. Thomson, and controversial Suffragist movement / sex education advocate Margaret Sanger at the beginning of her career. Not every strong woman in the book is on Hannah’s side though. There’s a particularly nasty prison warden who plays a significant role in the second half of the book.

The book’s male characters are equally split between supportive (Dr. Boro, her mentor; Tillie’s husband Abe; Hannah’s stepmother’s second husband) and horrible (several other medical students at Johns Hopkins, among others). The attitude that even accomplished professional women were “second class” in relation to men, that they should be thankful for men’s attention and also clean up men’s mistakes without complaint, permeates the book as it permeated the time, as does the limited options for women in terms of understanding and thoughtful healthcare, including birth control and abortion rights, of the time. I would like to say these issues made the book feel purely historical, but unfortunately, we know very well how much and yet how little has changed in the past 120 years. The novel informs without preaching, the issues of the time a natural part of the narrative and reflective of our current environment.

In addition to women’s rights, the book also puts a laser-focus on immigration, the waves of Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews that filled the southern half of Manhattan in the years between the end of the Civil War and the advent of Prohibition. The majority of the main characters are recently immigrated or first-generation Russian Jews but their story is reflective of what immigrants of other nationalities and faiths were experiencing at the time. The squalor so many of them lived in, having fled even worse in Europe, impacted the city’s crime rate and public health. The overlapping issues of poverty, crime, and public health (and even more so, women’s health) become the focus of Hannah’s career.

Hannah also has a personal growth arc that takes her from a naïve medical school student to a woman who can stand up to bullies (both the political and romantic/sexual type). I enjoy novels where characters come into their own, and Rubin accomplishes that subtly and completely.

Highly recommended to fans of historical fiction that centers complex female characters!

SUNDAY SHORTS: Mercedes General

TITLE: Mercedes General

AUTHOR: Jerry L. Wheeler

196 pages, Queer Mojo/Rebel Satori, ISBN 9781608642991 (Paperback, e-book)

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5

MY THOUGHTS: Nominally a short story collection, Jerry L. Wheeler’s Mercedes General might better be described as a “mosaic novel” – the stories are all linked, presenting in chronological order the events of the lives of two extraordinarily ordinary gay men from 1966 to 2006. But whatever you call it, this is a book everyone needs to read. It is a history of the gay rights movement, the advances and the setbacks, the acceptances and the discrimination, the love and the hate. It is also an intimate story of lifelong love, the kind of love that roots early and permanently and never looks back.

Kent Mortensen meets Spencer Michalek when they are ten years old. Kent is firmly under the control of his bully of a big sister, who sees the “new kid” in town at the bus stop and absolutely must try to torment him. It doesn’t work, and a bond forms between Kent and Spencer that will stand the test of time. Per the back cover copy, “Defying anyone who steps between them, they take on the challenges of growing up a couple – including battles with their families, pedophiles, protestors at their senior prom, and unwanted attention for starting an AIDS hospice during the early part of the epidemic.” And through almost all of it, they have the love and support of Kent’s grandmother, Miss Lee, who owns the big house at the top of the mountain and who is a force to be reckoned with in her own right.

While Kent is the first-person narrator of each story (for reasons that become clear at the end of the book and which I will not spoil), we get to know Spencer, Miss Lee, and the found family they build around themselves as well as we get to know Kent. And what I love about all three is – they are none of them “perfect.” They make mistakes. They make bad decisions that affect their loved ones in ways they don’t anticipate. But they also more often than not make good choices, often tough choices, that echo just as much, if not more, into the lives of those around them. They are all three secure in who they are, even when the world wants them to be different.

Found family is a core tenet of LGBTQIA+ culture, and especially so for men of Kent and Spencer’s generation, dismissed, ignored or downright disowned by their biological families (this is not to say such things don’t happen to today’s LGBTQIA+ youth – of course it does, I’ve seen it; but I’ve also seen a lot more supportive parents than Kent and Spencer’s generation would have, or even my own generation). While we get to watch Kent and Spencer’s romance bloom and deepen, we also get to watch them build a family that fills the voids left by biological parents and siblings who are unwilling or unable to understand and love them, a family that adds new generations to the mix. And these supporting characters are as well-drawn and interesting as the three lead characters.

One of the things I struggle with when it comes to reading historical fiction is the tendency for authors to place their fictional characters at the center of every single major cultural event that happens in that character’s lifetime. Wheeler neatly sidesteps this, and the book is all the better for it. Spencer and Kent have the kinds of experiences that made the news in the decades the book covers (waging a public fight  to go to prom as a couple in the 1970s; taking into their New York brownstone men whose families have disowned them, and whom the hospitals won’t treat, during the early days of the AIDS epidemic), but they are never at any of the cultural hot-spots of those periods (attending drug-filled nights at Studio 54 or encountering Bette Midler performing at the Continental Baths, or somehow making it to NYC at age 13 to be present during the Stonewall Riots). This adds a level of realism to the book, a level of “lived experience,” that a lot of historical novels lack in my opinion.

The book is as much a meditation on grief and loss as it is on love. Another place Wheeler excels is in teasing through the complicated web of emotions that accompany the passing of family members who were at best cold and distant and usually hateful/dismissive. These scenes spoke to me in a way I didn’t know I needed to see laid out on a page and invoked tears I didn’t know I needed to shed (some from sadness, some from anger).

Love, loss, family, friendship, grief, laughter – Mercedes General is a tour through a pair of very real lives, with recognizable moments regardless of your sexual orientation. It’s a book I will be thinking about for a long time. It’s a book I will certainly be rereading in the future and one I suspect will speak to me differently each time I do.

Book Review: THE GIRLS IN NAVY BLUE

TITLE: The Girls in Navy Blue

AUTHOR: Alix Rickloff

416 pages, William Morrow and Company, ISBN 9780063227491 (softcover, e-book, audiobook)

MY RATING:  4 stars out of 5

SHORT REVIEW: While there is a mystery, or more accurately several mysteries, at the core of The Girls in Navy Blue, it is mostly historical fiction, and more accurately early 20th century historical fiction. The book takes place in two distinctly different years: 1918, just after the United States has entered The Great War in Europe, and 1968, during the then-latest of the 20th century’s endless stream of global conflicts. Rickloff spools out and intertwines the mysteries at a near-perfect pace, neither rushing the reveals nor leaving the reader completely in the dark for too long, using each small reveal to build towards the novel’s dual climaxes. Along the way, we become invested in the four women at the center of the narrative. I’ll admit, I teared up a bit at the end.

LONGER REVIEW: I joined the monthly book club at my local bookstore (Sparta Books in Sparta, NJ) partially for socialization and partly to force myself to read outside of my habitual genres (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery). The Girls in Navy Blue definitely fits that description. While there is a mystery, or more accurately several mysteries, at the core of the book, it is mostly historical fiction, a genre I am not very well-read in at all, and it is more accurately early 20th century historical fiction, which I’m even less well read in.

The Girls in Navy Blue actually takes place in two distinctly different years: 1918, just after the United States has entered The Great War in Europe, and 1968, during the then-latest of the 20th century’s endless stream of global conflicts. The action in both eras takes place in the same location: an oceanside cottage in Ocean View (although the 1918 chapters also take place on the grounds of the nearby Naval hospital and a few other places). In 1918, the cabin is inhabited by three women who have joined the Navy Yeomanettes to do their part for the war effort, each of whom carries a secret or burden that motivates them. In 1968, the house is occupied by the grand-niece of one of those women. Mysteries connect the years: why did Blanche leave the house to her estranged niece Peggy? What drove the housemates and friends apart in 1918? What secrets was housemate Viv harboring? And what tragedy is Peggy running from?

Rickloff spools out and intertwines the mysteries at a near-perfect pace, neither rushing the reveals nor leaving the reader completely in the dark for too long, using each small reveal to build towards the novel’s dual climaxes. Along the way, we become invested in the four women at the center of the narrative: Blanche, a strong-willed child of privilege who finds life full of unexpected challenges; Marjory, whose German surname means constantly having to prove her patriotism; mysterious Viv, finding her way free of her past; and Peggy, reeling from unimaginable loss and trying to find her new path. In both eras, the women cope with misogyny, restrictive societal expectations, and judgement by other women. Whether the author intended it or not, this book has a lot to say about how little progress we’ve made in some aspects of society if the reader takes the time to compare not just the 1918 scenes to the 1968 scenes but also both of those to our current year.

I also found the construction of the novel interesting. The 1918 scenes are narrated in first person by Viv, while the 1968 scenes are more of a limited omniscient POV centered on Peggy. I found it an effective way to further differentiate the eras, lend a different type of immediacy to each era, and help keep the reader in tune with when each chapter was occurring (chapter headings with the year and POV character name also helped).

And I’ll readily admit – I teared up a bit at the end of the novel when everything came together.