The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn

 435 pages / 12 hrs, 51 mins

"In 1937 in the snowbound city of Kiev (now known as Kyiv), wry and bookish history student Mila Pavlichenko organizes her life around her library job and her young son--but Hitler's invasion of Ukraine and Russia sends her on a different path. Given a rifle and sent to join the fight, Mila must forge herself from studious girl to deadly sniper--a lethal hunter of Nazis known as Lady Death. When news of her three hundredth kill makes her a national heroine, Mila finds herself torn from the bloody battlefields of the eastern front and sent to America on a goodwill tour.

"Still reeling from war wounds and devastated by loss, Mila finds herself isolated and lonely in the glittering world of Washington, DC--until an unexpected friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and an even more unexpected connection with a silent fellow sniper offer the possibility of happiness. But when an old enemy from Mila's past joins forces with a deadly new foe lurking in the shadows, Lady Death finds herself battling her own demons and enemy bullets in the deadliest duel of her life.

"Based on a true story, The Diamond Eye is a haunting novel of heroism born of desperation, of a mother who became a soldier, of a woman who found her place in the world and changed the course of history forever."  --from the publisher

This is quite a story, and the author does a great job telling it. I appreciate that the epilogue contains an explanation of which events in the book are the fictional part of this historical fiction work. I recommend this title to anyone interested in World War II from the Soviet point of view or in reading about women on the front lines. I give this one four out of five stars.

Mr. Dickens and His Carol by Samantha Silva

Mr. Dickens and His Carol: A Novel of Christmas Past by Samantha Silva --- 276 pages with Author's Note and Acknowledgements

Following the critical and popular failure of Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens' publishers propose to recoup their losses by invoking a clause in their contract with Dickens to require him to produce a Christmas story in just  a month’s time --- or they will force him to repay the advance he received for Chuzzlewit. 

Dickens is not interested in writing a Christmas book. He's frazzled and anxious about his mounting debts. His wife and children have become accustomed to a lavish lifestyle, ne'er-do-wells and hangers-on  are always asking for loans or other favors, fickle fans have turned into critics, envious rivals are eager to take him down a notch. Memories of his impoverished childhood convince him that he will end in the poorhouse and bring on a severe case of writer’s block.

Holed up in a cheap lodging house by day and walking the streets of London by night, Dickens desperately seeks a new inspiration to rekindle the magic of Christmas for him. In her debut novel, Samantha Silva creates a parallel tale to Dickens' Christmas Carol, mixing real people and events from Dickens’ life with dreams and phantoms uncannily like his own. Silva's book, published by Flatiron Press, was named one of the 20 Indie Next Great Reads in November 2017.

A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas, was published in London by Chapman & Hall on December 19, 1843; the first edition was completely sold out by Christmas Eve. By the end of 1844, thirteen editions had been released. Dickens said he was inspired to write the story after a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several charity schools that served London's half-starved, illiterate street children.

A Christmas Carol tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a mean old miser who is visited during the night of Christmas Eve by the specter of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. After their visits Scrooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man. 

In 1849 Dickens began public readings of the story, which proved so successful he undertook 127 further performances until 1870, the year of his death. A Christmas Carol has never been out of print and has been translated into several languages; the story has been adapted multiple times for film, stage, opera and other media. After the Nativity Story itself, A Christmas Carol is considered to be the best known and most popular Christmas story in the English language.

Click HERE to read a review from the Historical Novel Society web site.

A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker

A Country Road, A Tree: A Novel by Jo Baker --- 289 pages

The author, best know for her critically acclaimed bestseller Longbourn (2013), which retells Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice from the illuminating viewpoint of the Bennet servants, here turns her attention to the wartime experiences that forged the artistic vision and distinctive voice of Irish author Samuel Beckett.                     

The book describes Beckett’s suffocating relationship with his mother, and his equally uneasy relationship with his mentor James Joyce and Joyce's family. In essence, Beckett, although attractive and personable enough when he chose to be, was solitary by nature, and held even his closest friends at an emotional distance. Butler portrays a man uncertain of his own gifts, ambivalent in his personal relationships, yet certain of his moral choices amid the bleakness and terror of war.  Through Baker's fictional persona of Beckett we are witnesses to life under the Nazi Occupation of France, Beckett's decision to join the Resistance, the betrayal of friends, and his harrowing flight south into the countrside to avoid arrest by the Gestapo. Almost all of the named characters is the book are real people; most notably his companion and eventual wife, Suzanne DeChevaux-Dumesnil. Baker's portrait of Suzanne may be the weakest one in the book; it certainly does not explain a relationship that endured over fifty years between two austere and independent souls.

One reviewer called this an example of strengths and weaknesses of "biofiction." Another considered whether it constitutes a kind of omniscient presumption to claim to know the most intimate thoughts and actions of a man, now dead, who was notable for his dogged reticence. But it does make for a fascinating reading experience. Put Jo Baker on your literary watch list.

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was an Irish expatriate who lived most of his adult life in Paris. As a young man he was for a time the personal secretary or literary assistant of James Joyce.  Beckett remained in France throughout the German Occupation and World War II.  He was awarded the Crosse de Guerre in 1945 by the French government for his work with the French Resistance. Beckett was fluent in several languages and wrote in both English and French. He was a novelist, playwright and poet.  His most famous work was his play, Waiting for Godot. The title of Baker's book is taken from the stage direction for the first Act of that play. In 1969 he was awared the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although they both had other relationships, Beckett married his longtime companion, the French musician Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil (1900-1989), in 1961. She had worked tirelessly to promote his career after the war. Suzanne died six months before Beckett. They are buried side by side under a single stone that, according to his wish, "could be any color as long as it is grey," in the famous Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

Click HERE to read a review from the UK Guardian.

Click HERE to read a review from the New York Times.

Click HERE to read a review from the South China Morning Post.

Click HERE to read a review from the Irish Times.

Click HERE to read an article about Samuel Beckett and the women in his life, published in the UK Independent in 2014 on the 25th anniversary of his death.