Patti Callahan Henry
Nov 12, 20213 min
Updated: Jan 25, 2022
Janet Somerville
Toronto Star
Friday, November 12, 2021
Patti Callahan
HarperMuse, 320 pages, $24.99
"Beautifully written, this love letter to imagination is a balm."
The Woman at the Front
By Lecia Cornwall
Berkley, 448 pages, $23
When the Countess of Kirkswell learns that her son, Lord Louis Chastaine, has been wounded at the front and is recovering in France, she tasks Dr. Eleanor Atherton, a local Yorkshire woman, with travelling to retrieve him and accompany him safely home in January 1918.
Although Eleanor recently completed medical training in Edinburgh, when her father refuses to let her practice, instead insisting she wed a doctor, Eleanor leaps at the chance to be useful by accepting the assignment.
When she arrives at the casualty clearing station and realizes that Louis does not really need her support, she helps to triage cases and soon assists in surgery. Her fellow physician, Dr. David Blair, pragmatic and progressive, insists “hope … doesn’t care whether you’re male or female.” Eleanor uses her training, knowledge and compassion to ease patient suffering and feels alive, doing what she is meant to do, focusing on essential work in the face of daily horror.
Realistic and emotionally engaging, you’ll believe every word.
The Show Girl
By Nicola Harrison
St. Martin’s Press, 400 pages, $37.99
With a heady mix of history, drama and romance, Harrison transports readers to 1927 New York City, following Olive Shine, a young Midwestern woman who makes a name for herself in the storied Ziegfeld Follies.
The glamour and excitement that Olive imagined that life as a showgirl would bring meet her dreamy expectations and then some. But she has made dark personal sacrifices to get there, sacrifices that haunt her even when she falls in love with Archie Carmichael, a successful businessman who is the only man she’s met who seems to embrace her modern, independent ways.
An unexpected, genuine friendship with an opera singer provides Olive with the advice she needs most: “Be careful with your heart, be careful with your talent.”
The portrayal of the tension between love and ambition resonates.
The Singing Forest
By Judith McCormack
Biblioasis, 298 pages, $22.95
Toronto lawyer Leah Jarvis is working on the deportation case of Stefan Drodz, an elderly war criminal who fled Belarus for a new identity in Canada as an industrial glass-blower. There are facts of brutality, torture and murder, and a mass grave in a Kurapty forest where Stalin’s police killed and buried unofficially 200,000 citizens. Jarvis is faced with the problem that “however terrible the crimes, the passage of time has dehydrated them into a piece of history.”
Liaising with War Crimes Section bureaucrat Owen Menzies, she travels to Belarus to meet with a farmer, a welder, a mathematician and a teacher, “each with a harrowing tale, each with only the most dubious identification of Drodz.” A series of affidavits adds authenticity to the interview process.
In a parallel narrative thread Leah learns of truths about her own past that shift the ground and redraw the lines of her own understanding, and she realizes that memory is “so wily, so brittle. So corruptible.”
Questions of morality and justice are explored with aplomb.
Janet Somerville is the author of “Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love & War 1930-1949,” available now in audio, read by Ellen Barkin.