Book Review: The Paris Express

 By Emma Donoghue

• 
  Pub Date: 2025 
  

• Genre: Historical Fiction 

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Books, Newport, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: It has maps on the front and rear endpapers 

• Bookmark used: Books are Freedom, Roebling Books

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    A tantalizing tale that uses an impending disaster to tell the stories of the lives aboard a train traveling through the French countryside between Granville and Paris in 1895.

    It employs fictional characters to make lives real, and real people to enhance the drama and tension on board. Told at a time when train travel was new and steam trains were an exciting adventure, it explores the marvels of science coming to life, with all its novelty, tedium, and danger.

    Donoghue hews close to the historical record when it suits her, borrowing the names and known characteristics of such people as the engineer,¹ the conductor,² and other train personnel, but altering or inventing their actions, discussions, and personal lives. She follows the story of the train as it speeds through the countryside, trying to make up time lost on stops along the way. Its crash into the Paris-Montparnasse Station is well documented, and Donoghue took full advantage of the pictures and stories from the incident.

From the book jacket

    Thusly, appearing in the book are redrawn characters on the train from France, Ireland, the United States, Russia, and Algeria. Included are the unknown, along with such famous people as the Irish playwright John Synge³ (who could have been aboard the train because he was living in Paris at the time); Alice Guy⁴, a pioneer in early film-making, sometimes called the Mother of Cinema), a woman giving birth; and the American painter, Henry Ossawa Tanner⁵, the son of a slave who spent most of his career in France.

    Perhaps the most intriguing of the characters, arguably the protagonist, is 21-year-old Madeleine Pelletier, a fiery anarchist who is dying to make her mark on the world. Nicknamed Mado in the book, she is known in French history as an unconventional woman who insisted on wearing trousers, studied as a psychiatrist, worked as a doctor, performed abortions, started a suffragist journal, and smashed windows. On the train, she contemplates making a bomb and blowing up everything, and is thrilled when she learns a number of politicians may be onboard, which will enhance her actions.

    Yes, this is somewhat of a political book. But more than that, Donoghue tells of people, ordinary and extraordinary, as they embark on a journey to the start of the 20th Century and ponder their lives and the direction of their country nearing the end of what is called "the long 19th Century" -- starting with a revolution and ending with a world war.

    Poverty and wealth, the speed of modern life, and the changes in the countryside as the city of Paris takes center stage are discussed in the first-class cabins, the second-class coaches, and the crowded third-class cattle cars.

    When I first finished the book, I sort of agreed with a reviewer who called it scattered with too many characters to keep track of. 

It rather feels as commotion ... making it hard to keep track (of) who is who and get attached to any character with brief stories among such (a) large cast of characters.

    But then I thought, isn't that the point? Here's a time in history when so much is happening that some people get lost in the shuffle.

    In her author's note, Donoghue tells us the conductor² died a year later, at the the age of 43, as did an 18-year-old girl⁶ who had been sick on the train of a then-unknown disease. Meanwhile, a Paris city engineer, briefly mentioned in the tale, saw his "audacious plan ... to build Paris an underground rail system" adopted a year later and open at the turn of the century. It is now one of the largest and busiest subways in the world.

    Donoghue is at her best here, using a specific time and place to reveal the hopes, dreams, and anonymity of everyday life. 

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¹ Guillaume Pellerin

² Léon Mariette

³ J.M. Synge, whose most famous play is The Playboy of the Western World, also was a poet and figure in the Irish literary revival of the time

⁴ Including The Fairy of the Cabbages in 1896

⁵ He discusses his work, including The Resurrection of Lazarus, while on the train

⁶ Jeanne Sarazin-Levassor, of whom little else is known, although her parents were instrumental in early automotive history

Book Review: Midnight Timetable

   By Bora Chung

 Translator: Anton Hur

• Pub Date: 2025

• Genre: A novel in ghost stories  

• Where I bought this book: Midtown Scholar, Harrisburg, Penn. 

• Why I bought this book: Because the author is Bora Chung, who is phenomenal

• Bookmark used: Whatever was handy

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    This is either a novel disguised as a book of short stories, or a book of short stories disguised as a novel. Or it's both. Any of those are fine descriptions for this work of art.

    I'm at the point now that any book with Bora Chung's name on it is worth buying; as soon as I saw this one on the bookstore table I grabbed it. She is, without a doubt, one of the best writers in Korean, and her works translate easily into English. (I'm guessing at the actual ease of translation. But the outcome proves my point.)

    She is inventive, descriptive, perceptive. She is a polymath -- a writer, a teacher, and a translator with degrees in Russian studies and Slavic literature. 

    Her fiction deals with science, technology, the (perhaps dystopic) future, time and space. Her characters are people struggling to deal with the rapid, sometimes distorted, often random changes they cope (or not) with daily.  

    Her writing is breathtaking and pointed. Look at the way she described the challenges that Chan, a gay man, faced growing up in a fanatical religious household.

The religion they zealously adhered to had strict rules governing the manner in which people should exist, and they liked to perpetuate discrimination and hate according to their arbitrary tenets. Chan, torn between the way he was born and the religious tenets that condemned him, discussed his dilemma with a leader of his religion. This leader violated every ethical and legal principle in the books by swiftly conveying the contents of this discussion to Chan's parents. Chan's parents, on the leader's recommendation, used their authority over their minor to force the child to go to "ex-gay" conditioning. But sexual orientation not being a disease, and a person becoming conditioned to "ex" their sexuality also not being a feasible proposition, the treatment served only to torture him rather than change him.

    The stories are about people who work at the Institute, which is described only as a research organization. The people are mostly security, who go around checking the many doors in many corridors. They are told not to go inside any room, or talk to anyone they meet, or listen to anything they may hear.

    Each story is a discussion with their sunbae, or a tale told by or about an employee. They overlap. They build on each other. They explain -- to a point -- a common theme. Many of the tales are from Korean folklore, mythology, or spirituality.

    In her afterword, Chung says they are ghost stories, At the end of the book, she explains her love of such stories, and how the best part is when the scary ghost appears. She also explains how she found her title.

I moved to Pohang in 2021, when the pandemic still raged. Pohang Bus Terminal has a separate ticket window for night buses. Since it's a port city Pohang has always had an influx of foreigners, which means the bus terminal has many signs in English. The night bus schedule that hangs over the night bus ticket window, for example, helpfully has the English words midnight timetable emblazoned on it. These two words in juxtaposition felt very poetic and mysterious to me, and I've always wanted to use them in a story.

Book Review: Sisters of Belfast

   By Melanie Maure

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Irish fiction  

• Where I bought this book: The Bookmatters Bookstore, Milford, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: It has Belfast in the title

• Bookmark used: The Bookshelf bookstore

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    The blurbs for this novel seriously underestimate the emotional impact it pommels. It's portrayed as a novel of two women, with the special bonds of twinness and sisterhood, whose lives diverge for years before uniting through fate and faith.

    Well, if it were only that simple.

    Instead, it has Aelish, the "good" twin, a devout Catholic who joins the Sisters of Bethlehem and starts down the road to a life of prayer and service, and Isabel, the "bad" twin, rambunctious and rebellious. Both are taken to a Catholic orphanage after their parents are killed in the bombing of Belfast by the Nazis in World War II. 

    Isabel, known as Izzy, is soon sent to another nearby home, run by a order of French nuns known as the Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours. She eventually rejects the church and runs away, moving to Newfoundland, Canada, with her boyfriend, Declan, who becomes her husband.

    But after a few years, the sisters reunite and live in the orphanage-convent they grew up in, where Aelish now serves as Sister Clare. Izzy is grateful for the housing, but uncomfortable with the church.

    The tale goes back and forth from the sisters' early days as young girls, until their becoming older woman with stories and secrets. Sister Clare is devout, but wonders if she made the right choices in life. Isabel is angry about the choices made for her, and lashes out at those who caused her pain.

    Soon, the sisters together, in their separate ways, begin to question the work of the Mother and Baby Home near their own convent. It's in the early 1950s, and the homes are still seen as benevolent Christian organizations helping the young girls and women they take in and ostensibly care for. But their sisters' explorations runs into the reality of what church and state have both wrought.

    This is a compelling tale, laced with melancholy, and Irish to the core in its setting, language, and poignancy.    

Book Review: Lessons in Magic and Disaster

  By Charlie Jane Anders

• Pub Date: 2025

• Genre: LGTBQ fiction  

• Where I bought this book: The Bookmatters Bookstore, Milford, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: I like her writing style

• Bookmark used: The Bookmatters Bookstore

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    The further one gets into this book, the better it gets.

     It's a delightful confluence of fiction, non-fiction, and faux fiction.   

    It revolves around Jamie, the child of a pair of lesbian activists, who is struggling with multiple people in her life. There's her mother, Serena, who has become a hermit and is mourning Mae, her wife, who died more than a decade ago. Jamie tries to reconnect with Serena by teaching her magic.

    But Jamie has other issues. Her own relationship with her partner, Ro, is in trouble, and Jamie doesn't know how to fix it. That's because she also is struggling to finish her dissertation while teaching classes to students who just don't get her fascination with 18th Century women writers. Those students include Gavin Michener, "who looks like the villain of every eighties teen comedy (wavy dishwater hair, beady ice-blue eyes, letterbox chin)," who deliberately antagonizes her with his conservative views on women, literature, and LGTBQ people.

    But wait, there's more. Jamie's dissertation is on a series of early feminist writers and their books -- some real, some Anders admits she just made up. Jamie attempts to make some sense of their novels and relationships with the events of the late Restoration and early Georgian periods in England. 

    There's also a buried story in there about Jamie's sexual identity, which comes out over the span of the novel.

    Yes, it's complicated, but Anders can weave a tale like no other. She's a stylish and witty writer unafraid to look peculiarly at her own people and their foibles.  

    For instance, as Jamie teaches her mother magic, mom insists on bringing in other women, and forming a union of witches. In another effort to get her life together, Jamie joins a book club, but it's full of women with cars "that have Planned Parenthood stickers and messy backseats." Their discussions veer quickly away from books and into mindfulness techniques. 

    There's a lot to take in with this book, but it gets there in the end. It's got a somewhat snarky tone, but Anders gets away with it because she's writing about a people she is a part of, and she wants to show off their charm and pitfalls.

Book Review: The Gales of November

    By John U. Bacon

• Pub Date: 2025

• Genre: Non-fiction, history 

• Where I bought this book: The Joseph Beth Bookstore, through author speech at The Mercantile Library 

• Why I bought this book: The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald has fascinated me for 50 years now, and, of course, the song

• Bookmark used: Stop Book Bans, the ACLU

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   Part history, part geography, part maritime lore, part biography, and part legend that lives on, Bacon's book, subtitled "The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is a work of art.

    Untold may be an exaggeration, but the book does give a broad look at the 1975 tragedy that resulted in 29 deaths when the ship went done in Lake Superior during a record-shattering storm.

    It's true the lake never gives up her dead, but we can admire its strength, power, and history. And Bacon's does a marvelous job of showing it all with precision, focus, and feeling. 

    If you want to know why the wreck of boat carrying 26,000 tons of iron ore that crashed 50 years ago on Dec. 10 has captured the imagination of millions around the country, listen to the Gordon Lightfoot song, then read this book.

    It begins with history, including a previous "storm of the century" that began on Nov. 7, 1913, and raged with blizzard conditions for four days over four of the five Great Lakes. Hurricane winds reached up to 80 mph, and waves breached 35 feet. Some 250 died, and nearly 40 ships were damaged or destroyed.

     Bacon said the 1975 storm also came in early November, which had an unusually warm autumn with calm and clear conditions.

    Adding to the threat was a dangerous dynamic all too familiar on the Great Lakes. The later winter shows up, the angrier it becomes.

    The story continues with the geography of the Great Lakes, the connection between the shipping and iron ore industries, and the growth in the region, especially Toledo and Detroit, in the early and mid-20th century.  The construction of the Edmund Fitzgerald -- named after the executive of the company that built it -- began in 1957. Launched the following year, it was the biggest ship the lakes had ever seen. At 729 feet long and 75 feet wide, it was built specifically to fit into the Soo Locks on the St. Marys River, between lakes Superior and Huron.

    He explains how large and perilous the Great Lakes are. Fresh water lakes are more dangerous in storms than an ocean because salt water weighs down and smooths out the waves. Superior, sometimes called the GLOAT*, is 350 miles long a 160 wide, meaning your cannot see a shore from its center. The lakes stretch from New York in the east to Minnesota in the west. They border eight states and two countries.

    The facts and history are interspersed with taut but emotional biographies of the men who went down with the ship, based on interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, mariners, former crewmen, and rescuers. We can envision their lives ending all to soon, and what could have been. We can admire their strength and courage -- and their fears as they saw "the Witch of November** come stealing."

    Bacon explains how the tragedy brought together the families of the 29 men who died. To this day, the wives and the sons and the daughters -- now into the second and third generations -- have struggled together, supported each other, and became a small community.

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed

In the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral

The church bell chimed 'till it rang twenty-nine times

For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald***

The Mariners' Church of Detroit

    Through the interviews, we learn how the tragedy brought together the families of the 29 men who died. To this day, the wives and the sons and the daughters -- now into the second and third generations -- have struggled together, touched each other, and become a small community.  

    The families have cried together at the site of the wreck, which is now a internationally protected burial ground. They meet yearly at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Bay, where the ship's bell -- brought up in 1995 from under more that 500 feet of water -- is always on display. They have prayed together at the Mariners' Church of Detroit -- which Lightfoot had dubbed the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral. 

    Despite its sober topic, and its width and breadth, the book is quite readable. It combines short chapters on the history and geography, then includes chapters on the people involved, often bringing them back to discuss their lives, the lives of the crew, and of the people who live and work on the Great Lakes.

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*     Greatest Lake of all Time.

**   A storm in early November.

*** In the original lyrics, Lightfoot called it a "musty old hall." After he visited and parishioners gently chided him for the term, he agreed and started singing, "in a rustic old hall." After he died, on the anniversary of the wreck, they rang the bell 30 times.