Books Completed Since March 1

  To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, Joanna Russ
You cannot read books about Star Trek fanfiction without seeing Joanna Russ mentioned: she was a feminist and science-fiction writer who was also a member of the LGBTQIA community. She not only wrote essays about whether science fiction and fantasy are legitimate literature, but ones where feminism and misogyny are addressed. This is a collection of those essays. The few that justify SF&F as lit are interesting, but the meat of the book comes where she begins talking about feminist issues. One essay addresses "feminist" books written by men, in which the ruling class of women turn out to be just as corrupt as men, and end up being "tamed" by the healing power of male sex! Another points a finger at Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog," although she admits the movie is more at fault than the story.

My favorite essay in this book is her essay about the very popular "modern Gothic" novels of the 1970s. I remember these things all over the bookstores, with the pretty heroine always marrying some type of brooding male who was hiding some secret (shades of Mr. Rochester!). It's pointed and humorous at the same time.

 The Belle of Belgrave Square, Mimi Matthews
Julia Wychwood is a heiress with a problem: her sickly parents expect her either to nurse them through their (usually psychosomatic) illnesses or make a good match. Julia, an introvert who prefers her books and horse riding to socializing, hates going to parties, and just wants to be left alone to read. But her parents believe reading novels is "inflaming" her and keep having the doctor bleed her, sometimes until she is totally debilitated.

The "notorious Captain Jasper Blunt," the harsh hero of Waterloo, is in search of a bride, or more appropriately, a bridal dowry that can replenish his Yorkshire estate and provide for his two bastard children. Why would Julia Wychwood not do as a bride? They both love books—in fact, the same author's books—and he agrees that he will let her live her own life (and rescue her from her parents) if she will take care of his children. But her parents have found a more appropriate—older, with better social connections—match for her and they will manipulate her as much as they can. In the meantime Julia and Jasper grow closer, but one of them is harboring a secret.

This is an enjoyable takeoff on Beauty and the Beast with two book lovers from different worlds, but who bond over their love of books. I kind of guessed the secret one of the protagonists was keeping about halfway through the book, but it didn't ruin my enjoyment of the story—except I wanted to beat the crap out of Julia's parents, who considered her some hired slavey, just given birth to provide them comfort.

  Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, Anne Boyd Rioux
This book illustrates my problems with e-books. I read this first as an e-book, and dismissed it. Then I picked it up as a remainder book, and enjoyed it a lot more. Rioux first talks about Alcott's history and the reason she wrote the book—her publisher requested "a book for girls." This perplexed Alcott, as she claimed she didn't "know any girls," except for her sisters, so she wrote her story around her family life—and her simple narrative became a hit.

Over the decades, Little Women has remained popular, although its audience has changed: boys, for instance, were also readers of the book in its early days; now it's considered "too girlie." Others believe that with today's mores Little Women, with its themes of traditional femininity, having nothing to say to modern girls, while Rioux refutes this, since both contemporary men and women need to learn lessons of controlling their temper, keeping house, etc. Media versions are also considered, and modern girls' stories as compared to Alcott's classic.

If you're an Alcott fan, and I am, this book will exactly suit.

  Murder at Crossways, Alyssa Maxwell–
In this seventh book in Maxwell's Gilded Newport series, it's the summer of 1898, and Emma Cross, distant relative to the Vanderbilts (the poor side of the family) is working as acting editor-in-chief at her fiance's paper, the Newport Messenger. When she must fill in for the society editor at the wealthy Fishes' Harvest Festival, she, like the rest of the crowd, is awaiting the arrival of the guest of honor, Price Otto of Austria. But he never shows up, and then turns up in the garden, dead, his method of death very close to a man who was found on Bailey's Beach a few days earlier. When Emma investigates the beach death, she is stunned to discover the victim looks familiar—in fact, like her half-brother, but older. Could this be his father?

In the meantime, a series of mishaps at the Messenger convince Emma that someone is trying to sabotage the paper, or at least her editorship of it.

Mamie Fish, the eccentric—and she and her husband are based on the true-life Mamie and Stuyvesant Fish, who really were loving and eccentric as portrayed in the novel—owner of Crossways joins Emma as she investigates both crimes, and she's a definite plus in this story. Oh, and Emma finally has a new horse and poor Barney is finally retired.

  Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady, Susan Quinn
You can't read anything about Eleanor Roosevelt without a mention of Lorena Hickok, the brash woman journalist Eleanor met when her husband Franklin Delano Roosevelt was on his original presidential campaign trail. She and "Hick" became best friends—in fact, in reading their letters you might say they were more than just best friends.

Whether you believe or not that the two women also had a physical relationship or that they were platonic lovers, but lovers indeed, they did share intimacies over the course of their friendship that helped the First Lady break away from negative influences. Hick had her own bad habits: she was a chronic workaholic, smoked heavily, and didn't take care of her diabetes, and eventually her possessiveness—since Eleanor eventually had many friends, including those Hick was jealous of—strained their friendship to the breaking point. This is a vivid story of two women, one (Hick) who had to be strong after being thrown out of the house at age fourteen and the other (Eleanor) who was raised "with a silver spoon" that nevertheless came with a bleak childhood and an adult experience that included her husband cheating on her, having a child die, and having to nurse her husband through polio.

Very enjoyable especially if you are an Eleanor Roosevelt aficionado as I am.

  Into the West, Mercedes Lackey
Kordas Valdemar and the people who have followed him to escape the cruelties and the smothering rule of the Empire now take steps to move beyond the lake they emerged from through a magical gate.

This is the next part of the "Founding of Valdemar" saga, and it was a good read, just not as compelling as the first book. A lot of the story is about Kordas' good faith efforts to be a just leader, and his learning to become a good leader as the Valdemarian expedition searches for a permanent place to live without displacing any of the people already there. The mage storms have left their mark, and they are attacked by deadly, unusual creatures who were melded together by weird magic, and come upon a sinister forest that projects malevolence.

While the statecraft bits can make the book drag a little, Delia, Kordas' sister-in-law, undergoes a transformation in this book, from little sister with a serious crush on Kordas to an explorer and much-needed member of the scouting team, her own person.

With a little help from the Hawkbrothers and the hertasi, Kordas and his people find a place to spend the winter. Could this be the place to settle?

Looking forward to the next volume! Have come to love Kordas and his people.

  All That Remains, Sue Black
I bought this because in looking through it discovered Black, a forensic scientist, using her skills to identify dead bodies found at crime scenes. However, this is so much more: the author discusses death itself, the nature of our fears about death, and about working with corpses and how she is thankful for the people who donate their bodies to science so that she can learn about the human body from real remains rather than computer simulations, which she states are poor imitations of learning anatomy from bodies. She even tells a story about a elderly man who is preparing to donate his body to her institution who insists on coming into the anatomy laboratory and watching the students dissect a body so he will know everything that will happen to his corpse—definitely a braver person than I'll ever be.

I'm pretty squeamish about death (having been afraid of dying since I was quite young), but I found this fascinating reading, if even a little comforting, but I would definitely not read if things like this trigger you. There are some very explicit scenes of dissection and discussion of preserving bodies for dissection.

 The Crocodile's Last Embrace, Suzanne Arruda
I hadn't read the rest of my Jade del Cameron books in ages. This one, number six, is an action-fan's dream. Jade's great love, the movie maker Sam Featherstone, has not yet returned from the United States, and the once fearless Jade had, in the interim, gone back to France and seen an eerie vision of her dead fiancé David Worthy, killed in the carnage of The Great War. Now back in Kenya, she is receiving notes from David and seeing visions of him. Her friends tell her she needs to relax and hope Sam will return soon; then Jade almost witnesses a car accident at a bridge in which a car was deliberately pushed off the side. This is only the beginning of a murder investigation and more—in which Jade begins to suspect her one true foe: David's evil mother Lilith.

This book gets off with a bang and never quite stops moving. I figured out part of what was causing Jade's distress almost immediately, but it didn't spoil the rising tension and the heart-stopping climax. I'm sorry there's only one of these unread left. Probably the best of the books since the first, Mark of the Lion.

  For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts' Advice to Women,  Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English
I had to pick this up for Women's History month. In general I enjoyed it, although it was more scholarly than I expected. The basic premise is that although most society was patriarchal in the past, men had their roles and women had equally as important, but different, roles. However, with the coming of industrialization came masculinism, which infantilized women, drove away "wise women" and midwives who knew the workings of women's bodies, and turned them over to male doctors, who had all sorts of fantastically weird ideas, like that menstruation messed with a woman's sense of reason, that all women automatically wanted to be nurturing wives and mothers, and that women's brains were not fit for more complicated reasoning—studying things like medicine, physics, chemistry, etc. would make them "less womanly" and might even burn out a woman's brain! (And with that came the "rest cure" as Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote about in "The Yellow Wallpaper," which would drive anyone stark raving mad.) Just the change in nurturing children between 1900 and 1960 (going from treating kids like miniature adults to considering children as small angels to keeping children to rigorous time schedules even as babies and then Dr. Spock says "For heaven's sake, cuddle and love them!") switched back and forth so quickly that you were liable to get whiplash.

Illuminating and infuriating, but be prepared for much quotation from medical texts.