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THE GLASS WOMAN
By Caroline Lea
392 pp. HarperCollins. $27.99.
In 17th-century Iceland, Rosa weds a dangerous and powerful man in order to provide for her ailing mother after her father’s untimely death. But what feels at first like a well-worn tale of the patriarchy’s most obvious predations quickly gives way to something even darker and more complex. Lea’s moody prose (“Again Rosa hears a footstep behind her and whips around. … But, once again, there is only darkness and the wind”) hints at the more sinister story that is unfolding beneath the surface.
Having newly arrived at her mysterious husband’s remote seaside home, far away from her family, Rosa becomes convinced that the attic — which he keeps locked — is haunted, perhaps by his former wife, who may or may not still be living. Cryptic warnings from the women in the village as well as her husband’s secretive and domineering behavior exacerbate her fears, and wear steadily on her sanity.
A macabre confrontation seems certain, and it is, but not in the way the reader expects.
The revelation Lea is building toward is less of a twist and more of a smoldering “of course!,” but that doesn’t make it any less piercing. The narrow focus of the early pages widens slowly and subtly to encompass a much broader landscape of human emotion and experience.
When Lea’s characters are finally revealed for who and what they really are, the effect is devastating and revelatory all at once.
FLED
By Meg Keneally
393 pp. Arcade. $24.99.
Based on the real life of Mary Bryant, the notorious 18th-century runaway from an Australian penal colony, Keneally’s debut novel is a tragedy of epic proportions.
Bryant’s fictional counterpart, Jenny, lives in Cornwall and takes up highway robbery to support her family after losing her father. She’s caught, of course, and is sentenced to an Australian penal colony. Her escape across the 3,500 miles of treacherous seas back home earns her a renown that calls to mind “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.” But her heroic flight is just one segment of this long and calamitous journey.
Keneally doesn’t try to explain the tenacity of her heroine, nor should she; Jenny is in a fight for her life and the lives of her children, and there isn’t time, space or safety enough for long meditations on her situation. But while we don’t get a deep look into the protagonist’s interiority, her resilience is as captivating in fictional form as was Bryant’s when she first made headlines more than two centuries ago.
In the final chapters of “Fled,” Jenny reflects on her unsought notoriety: She is a curiosity, a spectacle, a source of entertainment for an audience that can never really know her.
It is a testament to Keneally’s dexterity that she is able to bring Jenny into focus as both a historical figure and a stand-in for others like her without losing the thread of her narrative. The reader can’t help feeling implicated as a spectator of unimaginable hardship.
THE SIXTH CONSPIRATOR
By Max Byrd
359 pp. Permuted Press. $26.
Byrd’s 11th novel, “The Sixth Conspirator,” begins a year and a half after John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln. Booth and his chief conspirators have already been executed, but a band of Civil War veterans and intelligence officers — including the ambivalent and wayward spy Quintus Oakes — sets off for Europe in pursuit of the remaining accomplices.
Woven throughout this detective story is a tale of star-crossed lovers, divided by class and war. But both the romance and the mystery are ancillary characters to the time period’s leading role; the novel is just as nostalgic for the Lincoln administration as are the players it thrusts into a belated game of cat and mouse.
Every page is an opportunity to dust off and display some delicious tidbit of Civil War arcana, like Union soldiers buying embalming insurance so they could be sent back to their families for burial.
The result will delight any Civil War buff, but might leave the lay reader feeling somewhat overstuffed with historical morsels. Amid this feast of details, the fictional Quintus never looms large enough to engender much passion; and his dilemma of love versus duty fails to captivate. The stakes are much lower than they might have been had Quintus confronted this internal conflict during the war.
Byrd is clearly a meticulous and devoted student of history, but one wonders if the material might have been better served by nonfiction.
THE GIVER OF STARS
By Jojo Moyes
390 pp. Pamela Dorman Books. $28.
Moyes sends her adventurous heroine to Depression-era Appalachia in her new novel, “The Giver of Stars.”
For Alice, marriage to a dapper American man seems like the perfect escape from the strictures of her life in England — “New food! A new culture! New experiences!” — until she finds herself in Baileyville, Ky., with nothing to do and no one to talk to. Help comes in the form of a job with a traveling library, bringing books and magazines to the remote “hollers” of the Appalachian Mountains.
The cast of characters that accumulates, from the other librarians to the townspeople to the hard-up families they serve, soon brings color to Alice’s life. Margery, the heir to a blood feud who bears the scars her father has given her, is determined to live as her own woman. Izzy is a polio survivor who longs to be a singer. Sophia, a professional librarian and one of just a few black characters, is conveniently placid about her status as a third-class citizen. And then there are the families in the mountains who lose limbs and loved ones to the mines, and yet remain independent, ornery, loyal.
Alice develops something of a backbone along with more than a few bruises throughout the long days she spends on horseback in the mountains of Kentucky, but she never really takes center stage in a novel populated with far more worthy characters.
Still, Moyes paints an engrossing picture of life in rural America, and it’s easy to root for the enterprising librarians.
