Books Completed Since August 1

 Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne from a story by J.K. Rowling
One must approach this book with two things in mind: it's only from a story by J.K. Rowling and it's the script of a play, not a novel. It is the latter that hurts this book the most, because, since we cannot see the the emotions that the actors are imparting to these characters and their lines, we really miss a lot of what drives them (Ron, in particular, comes off as a bit of a nitwit). Rowling's sharply pointed narrative is missed as well as some of her wordplay. Plus what drove Albus to feel the way he does doesn't seem to be well explained—one day he's on the train, there are a few pages of bridging dialog, and then full-blown teenage angst and resentment emerges from what seems to be left field. Maybe it's more acted out on the stage.

I did ultimately enjoy the story: Albus' friendship with Scorpius Malfoy and their partnership with Delphini Diggory, Harry's still-lingering ghosts after the death of Cedric Diggory, the exploration of "roads not taken" via alternate timelines, and further takes on the character of Severus Snape. And, yeah, I cried at the end, so the story accomplishes what it set out to do.

 Time Unincorporated: The Doctor Who Fanzine Archives/Volume 3: Writings on the New Series, from Mad Norwegian Press
The title, the editors explain, is a bit of misnomer. Fewer Doctor Who fanzines exist today—not because the series is less popular, but because the internet has pretty much replaced fanzines. At least  half of the essays are original to the volume.

While this volume has the usual variety of excellent, or at least interesting, essays that Mad Norwegian is known for, I was a little less absorbed by this volume because it was about a recent and known quantity, the new series, and there's been so much written about it that it's almost overkill. Still, notable essays stand out: one that illustrates that the final episode of the old series, the television movie, and "Rose" show an almost seamless progression, so that the old series and the new are not as far apart as thought; a piece about the Christmas specials; a funny and mad "dialog" about illegally downloading episodes; an essay about the morality of the Doctor; a humorous tale of "Barrowmania," essays on both Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures...did I say "less absorbed"? Oh, heck, I guess there's never too many Doctor Who essays!

Carry on, Mad Norwegian!

Incidentally, on the spine of my copy it says "Writings on the Classic Series." Ooops.

 The Elements, Theodore Gray
I've wanted this book ever since I laid eyes upon it, and when I saw the paperback at $10 I bought it so quickly you couldn't see my credit card move. It's the very definition of a coffee table book, oversize, thick paper, color printing, with two pages each (some more popular elements have four pages) on each element, with photographs of items that contain that element (atomic weights, structure, electron paths, spectrum prints, and other more complicated chemical facts are included as well). In the later pages, with the more theoretical elements, each page holds multiple elements and explains where the name of that element comes from. You might wonder what real knowledge a person might gain from this glorified picture book—and you might be correct, but it's great just for its gorgeousness. The illustrations included nuggets and crystals, old specimen bottles with solutions inside them, metallic bars and parts, it's just great to look at.

Unfortunately the author is also insane; he thinks icky CFLs with their glare bright light and headache-inducing tendencies are better than incandescent bulbs. Forgive him, God, he knows not what he says.

 The Lost Art of Dress, Linda Przybyszewski
Considering that my favorite mode of dress in winter is a sweatshirt and sweatpants and that I don't even wear a dress to work, one might think this book would be the last thing I would buy, but I was fascinated by the topic.

Home Economics came of age just before World War I, after years of restrictive fashion for women was giving way to clothing that helped her move naturally and participate in sports. It was a little-respected science at the time, but its proponents did not let it stop them. When Great War-era women asked for advice on fashion, domestic science produced the Dress Doctors: women who looked at the whole picture of a woman's build, mathematical ratios, color coordination, and fabric types and made recommendations so accurate that at one time American women were considered the best-dressed women in the world. The Dress Doctors followed one from childhood to girlhood to womanhood, recommending the ideal of proportion of eight "heads," and within that framework produced options every woman could use. These ideas were spread not only in domestic science courses in school, but by the 4H and settlement houses, and during the lean years of the Depression and the rationed years of World War II, the Dress Doctors came up with economical alternatives.

The author's narrative was so lively and the subject so interesting that I didn't even mind that it was about hated sewing. By the time they got to the baggy, childish dresses of the 1960s, I was in complete agreement and wish we'd learned about this in school in the 1970s, especially the budgeting concepts that young women learned alongside cooking and sewing lessons! Sewing fans, women's studies majors, history buffs, and someone just interested in a neat story will all enjoy this one.

 City of Darkness and Light, Rhys Bowen
Molly Murphy Sullivan is delighted by her sturdy baby boy Liam, but worried about her police captain husband Daniel: he's working later nights on something dangerous to do with the Society of the Black Hand. All her fears come true when someone tosses a bomb through the window of Daniel and Molly's little house in Greenwich Village, killing Annie, the little Irish girl that Molly rescued from an abusive situation, who dies protecting baby Liam. Daniel wants Molly and Liam out of the city and fears she will be traced even to his mother's home in Westchester, but a solution has presented itself: she will go stay with her two wealthy friends Sid and Gus, who are studying art in Paris. But when Molly gets to Paris, Sid and Gus have vanished from the pension where they were staying, and when Molly tries to find them, she finds instead the body of a famous American artist.

Turn-of-the-century Paris—which turns out to be as much of a character as the people Molly interacts with—is vividly portrayed in Molly's search for her friends...and for a murderer; she immediately finds herself rubbing shoulders with famous artists (what Quantum Leap always referred to as "a kiss with history"), including Mary Cassatt, as well as getting herself involved in the mystery of the deceased artist, whom she finds out was not universally beloved. The mystery moves at a good clip, with a slowly-building suspense that does not let up once she finds out the fate of her friends, plus a few hair-raising escapes for good measure. (You may wonder how Molly investigates a murder since she has a baby with her, but in the fortuitous Murphy world she finds a pleasant young woman, daughter of the local baker, who is happy to take over care of Liam while Molly goes sleuthing, and the situation even makes sense.) A great entry in Bowen's Molly Murphy series, and at least we don't have to endure Daniel telling her to stay out of his cases!

 The Hired Girl, Laura Amy Schlitz
Fourteen-year-old Joan Scraggs lives the life of a drudge on her father's farm cleaning up after her dad and four brothers, all of whom seem to hate her. She longs for education and to become a teacher, but her father seems set to work her to death the way he did her mother. She might even settle for some love. The last straw comes when her father burns her only three "friends," her beloved books. Finding out from a newspaper that she can get paid work in the city for the same labor she performs for free daily on the farm, Joan runs away to the city of Baltimore using money her mother hid in her doll and is rescued by Solomon Rosenbach, a young Jewish man. She tells his family her name is Janet Lovelace and that she is an eighteen-year-old looking for a job. The family hires her and so begins "Janet's" real education—in city life, in the life of a faith different from her own, in believing in herself.

I really enjoyed this book, which Schlitz based on the diary of her grandmother. Janet/Joan is a real teenager; her moods go up and down depending on what is going on in her life, but despite her almost animalistic upbringing—you will tear up when Joan finally confronts her father and finds out why he acts the way he does—she is good at heart and makes a difference to the people in the Rosenbach household. Her crush on Solomon's handsome brother goes on a bit long, but is typical of a girl her age, and there are some funny, and not-so-funny, hijinks in the process. I really appreciated that although Janet/Joan was a devout Catholic that she did not allow the prejudices of certain church members to change her opinions of the Rosenbach family, really loved her relationship with Mimi Rosenbach, and was glad that she came to love Malka, the elderly housekeeper who initially bedevils her.

In addition, Joan's description of her housework duties, both on the farm and in the city, will make your doubly glad you don't live in 1911!

 Art in the Blood, Bonnie MacBird
I was really looking forward to this book after hearing MacBird read excerpts from it at 221B Con [a Sherlock Holmes convention]. Now that I've read it, I can say I enjoyed it, but not as much as I thought I would, especially after I found out the custom illustrations we had seen at the convention were not in the hardback or the paperback, only in the special edition. (You can see them online here, but it's just not the same.)

Dr. John Watson finds his friend Sherlock Holmes in deep depression after unsuccessfully trying to capture Jack the Ripper; surprisingly the great detective is aroused from ennui by an encoded letter from a Frenchwoman who says her son has been kidnapped. Upon arriving in Paris, an interview elicits that the woman is a dancer at a French club and her son is the illegitimate son of a British lord. Before you can says "blue carbuncle," Holmes and Watson are attacked by thugs at the club, make the acquaintance of the great French detective Jean Vidocq, and discover that the disappearance of a Greek antiquity—just coincidentally something the elder Holmes brother Mycroft is invoved with—may turn out to be related to the boy's father.

MacBird's prose flows easily enough, not in direct imitation of Conan Doyle, but usually suggestive enough for the story to sound authentic. The story is certainly more action-packed than most Holmes mysteries (although Holmes is perfect able to comport himself physically), famous names are dropped periodically (look, there's Toulouse Latrec!), and there are little inconsistencies that quirk at TruFen (for instance, Mary Morstan has a sick mother in this outing, but canon has established her as an orphan). Vidocq is based on a true person, a French criminal-turned-detective, but his character in this book is just flat annoying. (Holmes is partially based on Vidocq, which makes him an inside joke.) I would recommend the book, but a Holmes purist may not see beyond these flaws.

 Dawn of the Belle Epoque, Mary McAuliffe
After reading both City of Darkness and Light and Art in the Blood, both which have significant settings in Paris and "kisses with history" with artists and other 19th/early 20th century celebrities, I naturally gravitated to this one next.

Dawn is a bit like an impressionist painting, with a chronological story opening at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in a Paris still smarting from the loss, and progressing year by year, following the artists, the authors, the musicians, the political repercussions, the styles, and the culture that would all mark this period of history. The painters and sculptors, including the usually overlooked talent Berthe Morisot and the later-famous Mary Cassatt, supply the lions' share of the narrative, as the new painting style, "impressionism" (once an insult) is criticized and then finally accepted and admired, and writers like Dumas the Younger, Zola, and Hugo leave their marks on French literary society.

McAuliffe skips from subject to subject, sometimes with awkward segues, which may annoy some readers, but don't think of this as a straight history: view it as a scrapbook of the era one has unearthed from the depths of an antique shop, to page through to see the brilliant flares of character in bright cutouts pasted on each page: Sarah Bernhardt and Cesar Ritz, Victor Hugo and Georges Clemenceau, Ravel and Debussy, Gauguin and Manet, Cezanne and Monet, the art studios in Montmartre, Gustave Eiffel following his engineering career little knowing he will one day build a Parisian icon, the American expatriot Whistler, the cruel bigotry of the Dreyfus affair and the saga of Emile Zola, the reign of fashion designer Charles Worth (whose gowns were de rigueur for wealthy Victorian ladies),  the rebirth of the narrow medieval streets of Paris into wide boulevards, absinthe, squalid truths, bare garrets, and splendid beauties—just a few of the names and situations that inhabit this book. I found it captivating and can't wait until the sequel is released in paperback.

 Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee
The shock waves went deep on this one. To Kill a Mockingbird is such an iconic novel, and Atticus Finch such the ideal of the honest lawyer, defending his client against impossible odds, and the unique, loving father, that when it was revealed in the pages of this novel that, horror of horrors, Atticus Finch was a racist, it overwhelmed almost everything else about the book. None of it should have surprised anyone: Atticus was a product of his time. He defended Tom Robinson not from some ideal about race equality, but because he knew Tom was innocent, and to him convicting an innocent man, whether Negro or white, was anathema to him, a blot upon the legal system he so respected. (And still Atticus is fighting in his own way in his own era; he invites the Ku Klux Klan speaker to the courthouse so that the man reveals his own prejudices while still feeling he was allowed free speech, without totally agreeing with him.)

The real problem with this book is its sheer pedestrian narrative. Scout's voice in To Kill a Mockingbird is so fresh, so vivid, so unique, and tells such a compelling story that the third-person narration of Go Set a Watchman is flat and sometimes flatfooted in comparison. The older Jean Louise and her dull fiancee aren't a patch on Scout, Jem, and Dill, and the swift dismissal of Jem's future is all the more uncomfortable having read Mockingbird first. Had Watchman actually been published first, I doubt if many people would have waited impatiently to read Harper Lee's second novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Uncle Jack, who's such a pleasant figure in Mockingbird, becomes a pompous windbag who speaks in quotations and aphorisms and babbles about the classics to make his point, and poor Atticus just sits around and suffers with arthritis when he's not quietly opposing the NAACP. (Plus there's a few inconsistencies: here Francis is Aunt Alexandra's grandson, not her son; Jean Louise's fiance was apparently a close friend of theirs from childhood, although he doesn't appear in Mockingbird at all.) There are still some affecting situations, especially when Jean Louise goes back to visit Calpurnia and finds things have changed in their relationship, and we get to see some of Scout's hijinks as she grew from small girl to adolescent, but most of this book is merely a jog-trot through familiar territory without any of the pleasures. A library read if there ever was one.

 Dead Presidents, Brady Carlson
Carlson fell in love with presidential stories as a schoolboy, but it was only after he visited Abraham Lincoln's grave in Springfield, Illinois, that he became fascinated with the afterlives of the presidents, whether it be their graves (Lincoln, for instance, is encased in concrete to keep people from stealing his body after several attempts were made to do just that), their tributes (museums, city names, school names, state names, the Interstate highway system), or the odd or even gruesome events (think poor James Garfield, killed by doctors sticking dirty fingers in his bullet wound) surrounding their deaths. In this book Carlson travels from Mount Vernon to Monticello, New York to California, and even out to the Kansas prairies to discover that sometimes the death story is just as compelling as the life story (certainly William Henry Harrison is known more for his one-month presidency and death from pneumonia more than for his prowess as a general.).

Rather than their being arranged chronologically, Carlson groups his presidents by categories—George Washington and Abraham Lincoln soloing, naturally—presidents with gruesome deaths, controversial presidents, forgotten presidents (think Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce, whose names usually turn up only in trivia contests), presidents with libraries or monuments, obscure presidential tributes, etc. To some the narrative might appear a bit scattershot, but I appreciated the author ditching the usual chronological order as in informational booklets about the presidents to give us a unique comparative story instead, and I enjoyed it very much.

 Black Dove, White Raven, Elizabeth Wein
Americans Rhoda and Delia met during the Great War and immediately became soulmates. Both marry: Rhoda an Italian and Delia an Ethiopian, and both have children, a girl and a boy, respectively. Together they performed airplane acrobatics as Black Dove (Delia) and White Raven (Rhoda) and raised their children alone—until the day Delia died from a bird strike. But she and Rhoda had a dream: to go live in Ethiopia, where Delia and her son Teo would live a life without the segregation rampant in the United States in the 1920s; Rhoda was still determined to make that dream come true, and eventually it did. But the little family of three—Rhoda, daughter Emilia, and Teo—are about to lose their happy life when the Italians advance on Ethiopia.

Taking place mainly in the 1930s, and told alternately by Em, Teo, and through their fictional Black Dove/White Raven stories in which the fears emerging in their lives take fictional form, this appealing adventure story follows Em and Teo from their earliest memories to the "now" of the threat of Italian invasion, where Rhoda fights for their home and Teo learns a horrifying secret about his father that affects his future. Both children learn to fly from Rhoda, but while Teo is a natural pilot, Em struggles with each flight, until a crisis forces her to face her fears.

Wein paints a lovely portrait of pre-invasion Ethiopia, where modern medicine and respect for native culture co-exist, and of the bond shared by Delia and Rhoda that lasts beyond death and the friendship of Emilia and Teo. Rhoda's unconventional Quaker family is also a compelling factor in the opening chapters of the book. The landscapes are lovingly drawn and, as always in a Wein novel, the magic and majesty of flying has a prominent role. While the situation may not be quite as compelling as Code Name Verity, the characters and setting are unforgettable.

 Pony Girl, Janet Randall
This is a children's book from the early 1960s that I picked out a freebie bin somewhere having never heard of the book or the author, who apparently wrote other books with horses in them. Peggy Warmack and her little brother Jimmy, along with their father "Slim" Warmack, a rodeo star just getting over a serious injury, live on a small ranch in Nevada. Their dad arrives home one day, having unsuccessfully tried going on the rodeo circuit once more, without his rodeo horse and with a shocking surprise, a blowsy bright woman named Maida that he introduces to the kids as their new stepmother. But further shocks are in store: Slim is giving up the rodeo business and he and Maida have bought a pony ride concession in California.

The family makes the move to California with Peg and Jimmy still resentful of Maida, and arrive in California to find the former owner of their new house left it a trashy mess and left the ponies for the pony ride starving. But as they all pitch in to care for the ponies and get the concession on its feet, the kids find out Maida is more an ally than an enemy. Now if only they could make some money and get on their feet, and also find out who is trying to put the carnival their concession is attached to out of business.

In a gentler, yet tougher, way than would be used today, the author addresses things like getting used to a stepparent, animal cruelty, facing death, prejudice toward people living different lifestyles (Peg makes a friend in school who is forbidden to associate with her because she is "one of those carnival people"), and other childhood problems. The story is relatively free of gender stereotypes: although Maida and Peg clean and cook, they also run the pony concession and take care of the animals, and no one suggests Peg shouldn't ride and go out exploring just like the boy she befriends. There's a pony named Golliwog in the story that might give some people pause, but the name is not used to further a racial stereotype, and I was impressed that there was a Native American character who neither talked "ugh you see 'um" stereotypical "Indian language" nor had some mystic Native American "woo-woo" factor associated with him. A child today could still read this and not have any problems.

 My Year With Eleanor, Noelle Hancock
I'm an Eleanor Roosevelt fan, and was intrigued by the theme of this book. Hancock, just laid off from her six-figure job with a gossip website, fearful of her increasingly intimate relationship with her boyfriend not to mention many other things, still sparring with a father who wants her to be a lawyer, and with her 30th birthday on the horizon, takes to heart a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt: "Do one thing every day that scares you." Having saved money, she decides to embark on a one-year project of doing something that frightens her every day. Along the way, she hopes to give up sleeping pills and give more consideration to her future with boyfriend Matt.

While this book does have its compelling parts—afraid of death (one of my own fears), Noelle volunteers at a funeral parlor; she volunteers working with cancer patients; and she climbs Mount Kilimanjaro—I had a lot of problems with her other "fear" choices. So many of her fears were that far out (skydiving, performing kareoke, flying in a fighter jet, performing standup comedy, being in a shark cage) that I thought it was kind of dumb. She's so very insecure that she can't figure out what to do with the incredibly patient and loving Matt. When she hasn't time to do something frightening during the day, she runs naked down the main hallway of her boyfriend's apartment house at night to fulfill her promise. At least she's grateful for him, as well as for her three crazy friends who go with her skydiving and being dunked in the shark tank (I can't believe the shark tank people let her go down there without more instruction on how to use her scuba gear!), because most people would have lost patience with her a long time ago. Her therapist seems to be God to her.

The last third of the book is the most palatable. She seems to have matured and does indeed work out a lot of her fears working at the mortuary and climbing Kilimanjaro. Otherwise she strikes me as a ditz who lucked out on a 6-figure salary early in her life and then had to figure out what to do with the rest of it.

(BTW, does Hancock really think women pee out of their vaginas? Yeah, this is mentioned on page 260.)

 Shakespeare's Pub, Pete Brown
At Christmas we still see them: the images of happy travelers on English stagecoaches, schoolboys and rosy-cheeked chubby businessmen heading home for the holidays. The stagecoach era was very short, and almost all of the "coaching inns" associated with it are gone, except for this one: the George Inn in Southwark, reduced in size substantially from what it was during its prime and rebuilt twice in the 1600s, but still surviving. Chaucer's fictional pilgrims probably stopped here, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre was nearby and he probably drank there, and Charles Dickens was a customer (one of the licensees used to insist The George is where Mr. Pickwick met Sam Weller, even though the book calls the rendezvous The White Hart).

With an amusing, breezy narration, Brown tells the history of The George, from 1475 to the present, and in the process chronicling the history of the Southwark area of London, especially during The George's heyday as a coaching inn. You'll meet the watermen of the Thames, the pollution, the tawdry recreations of earlier days (bearbaiting, cockfights, gin houses, and of course the ever-popular brothels), the recollections of later licensees, and the efforts to save the Inn from the curse of urban renewal. While the connection to Shakespeare is rather tenuous, a Dickens fan will enjoy dipping in here as well, especially if their interest is Pickwickian.

The only problem I had with this book were the large number of references to modern British pop stars I didn't know. The history bits are quite enjoyable.

 Murder at Marble House, Alyssa Maxwell
The second of the Emma Cross "Gilded Newport" mysteries opens where the first left off, with Emma having discovered that the "reporter" who helped her in the previous book is really Derrick Andrews, scion of a wealthy Providence, RI, family. Emma has no time for his romantic overtures although she is drawn to him, and is just recovering from their encounter when her Aunt Alva calls her and demands she visit. Emma, a "poor relation" of the Vanderbilts, arrives at Marble House to find her aunt wants her to help talk her cousin Consuelo into an arranged marriage. Later in the day there will be a get-together where a "mystic" will tell fortunes and Aunt Alva wants Consuelo sparkling for the event. But that never happens because the fortune teller is found murdered out in the gazebo. Now not only does Emma feel obliged to help Consuelo, but she also wants to free the young maid accused of the crime.

I will admit I found this a page-turner as Emma encounters each new suspect. However, my criticism of this series stands: the vocabulary often throws you out of the story very quickly. Really, would a woman in 1895 talk about another woman as being "victimized"? Other things have a "boy's own adventure" aroma about them, like Emma dressing as a man to investigate a situation and being thrown into some danger; as much as she espouses being independent, a man has to rescue her from the situation. She also seems to travel around Newport very freely in an era where women were carefully chaperoned, and frankly I don't see Consuelo Vanderbilt doing what she ended up doing.

Still, I enjoy the Newport setting, and Emma's determination to make something of herself in the newspaper field appeals to me. This one also does a real hatchet job on Alva Vanderbilt, who basically shopped her daughter out to the British peerage so she could brag she had a "real duchess" in the family and who had a strong will and temper (Maxwell makes Alva sound meaner than a wolverine). I'd love it if Maxwell would keep up with the vocabulary of the time, but here I am on the second book, so I suppose I'm managing still.

 Carry On, Rainbow Rowell
In Fangirl, Rowell introduced us to Simon Snow, the hero of a series of eight books, and fanfiction fodder for Fangirl's protagonist Cath and her sister Wren. Elements of the Snow "universe" were excerpted in the book as Cath's stories. Rowell got so intrigued by the fanfic characters that she created that she decided to write a real Simon Snow novel.

Like Harry Potter, Simon goes to a magical school called Watford, has had a bad home life (he lives in an orphanage), has a close friend in Penelope (the Hermione of the piece), a girlfriend in Agatha, and an antagonist in his roommate Basilton "Baz" Pitch, whom he's discovered is a vampire. Spells are cast with Magic Words, the head of the school, the Mage, is Simon's protector, and Simon even has a vicious enemy, the Insidious Humdrum. Unlike Harry Potter, Simon spends a lot of time feeling sorry for himself, and his roommate is not only a vampire, he's gay, and in love with Simon. The latter was a great deal of the focus of Cath's fanfiction, but frankly, in the book all the moping of Baz over Simon and Simon over Baz gets old pretty fast. In fact, Baz is a lot more interesting character than Simon, and so is Penelope, for that matter, since Simon's always whinging about one thing or the other. What carried the story for me was the fascination of the Magic Words (you could use a cliche, or a song lyric, if only the emotion behind it was strong) and the conundrum of the Humdrum [wordplay intended] looking exactly like Simon as an eleven-year-old boy.

I probably should have waited for the paperback, but it wasn't half bad, either.

 The Perfect Horse, Elizabeth Letts
Following Letts' absorbing story of the jumping horse Snowman in The Eighty-Dollar Champion, she hits the bullseye again with this suspenseful story of the rescue of the priceless Lipizzaner horses of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. As a child I'd seen Walt Disney's Miracle of the White Stallions and thought I knew most of the story, but of course it was even more complicated than that. Not only were the Lipizzaners in Vienna endangered, but so were the breeding mares and foals that lived in the Piber Valley, and also champion Arabian horses in Poland. All of these horses were brought together by Gustav Rau, a horse fancier and Nazi officer who was collecting these animals for the Reich, in order to breed the perfect horse for war: powerful, tireless, and eating minimal food. He was fascinated by the Lipizzaners and planned to change their beautiful lines for something more suitable for working.

Letts brings together all the players in the story: Alois Podhajsky, the director of the Spanish Riding School; Gustav Rau; Stanislaw Pohoski, the director of the Arabian stud farm in Poland; Rudolf Lessing, the veterinarian for the Arabians; Hank Reed, the American cavalry officer who is the last of a dying breed; plus Tom Stewart, Ferdinand Sperl, and the others that took part in the amazing rescue, including a cameo from General George Patton, to tell the story of totalitarian obsession, love of horses, dangerous missions, delicate negotiations, war-scarred villages, exploding bombs, avaricious Soviets, determined Americans, and the beautiful animals they are trying to save. A great war story, but even better if you're a lover of horses or, still, like me, a fan of Miracle of the White Stallions from way back in 1963.

 A Front Page Affair, Radha Vatsal
Capability Weeks, better known as "Kitty," has had an eclectic, around-the-world education, but having a job is a new experience for her. In 1915, she is hired to be the assistant to Miss Busby, the Ladies' Page editor at the New York Sentinel. Kitty gets her first big assignment when she attends the garden party of the wealthy Elizabeth Basshor in place of her under-the-weather boss. She's in the midst of gathering color for her article when she notes an older man and his much younger wife (once a showgirl); later, after a fireworks display, the older man is found shot dead in the stable. Kitty desperately wants to follow up on this real case, but it's not something a young woman does in 1915. Can she juggle an investigation, her social job, and even a rival—and figure out why the FBI is trailing her father?

This is a pleasant enough cozy mystery with, to my surprise, a plot element that came directly from a nonfiction book about the first World War that I read a couple of years ago. Despite her practical demeanor and intelligence, Kitty is initially a bit careless at her first job, and it is interesting to follow her growth as her investigation proceeds. Vatsal also vividly illustrates the strikes against women working in journalism in Kitty's day: they were considered not intelligent enough to remember anything but feminine facts (clothing details and society gossip) and not strong enough to compete against men in what was then a strenuous profession. Several red herrings throw us off the trail, and a friend turns into an enemy and back into a friend again.

This is Vatsal's first novel, an excellent debut, and a pretty good portrait of American society in the years before our involvement in World War I.