Air in the Heart, Hearts in the Air

Over the years, I've read lots of historical fiction by Beatriz Williams.  Yet I can't recall a single novel that reimagined a real-life icon.  So when I picked up Her Last Flight, I knew I was in for an, ahem, departure.  Because as its weighty title suggests, this book explores the age-old question: What really happened to Amelia Earhart?

And you thought I was kidding when I made that crack about an Earhart girls trip.  

In some ways, the premise is simple.  Because although a lot of things happen in this book, they're all rooted in this: Just Amelia, or as she's called, Irene, and her mentor Sam on a desert island.  Nothing to do and nowhere to go, the seconds ticking away on the time bomb of when-will-they-do-it?  It's an old trope, lending characters' fantasies a license they wouldn't otherwise have.  Not that it's salacious.  Oh, no.  Williams is nothing if not classy, shrouding the rendezvous in so much secrecy that you'll wonder if it even happened.  

Told in two timelines, Her Last Flight spans the late '20s to '40s to laud and deconstruct a legend.  Sparkling with Williams' signature twists, it's an old-fashioned love story, one imperiled by fate and fame.  Romantic and suspenseful, it has all the elements of good historical fiction.  Still, I can't help but prefer Williams' other novels, especially the Schuyler sisters series (although now that I think about it, Tiny Little Thing may be a tiny nod to Jackie O.).  Maybe because they allow Williams to color more boldly outside the lines.  Or maybe because I'm not big on being a passenger in an airplane, much less the pilot.  Either way, Her Last Flight is less of a girls' trip and more of a brunch.  You know.  Perfectly enjoyable, but you're a little too full after forcing that third croissant.  

I do still wonder what happened to Amelia, though.  Because I'm with Williams in her hope that the clouds she flew through at least had a silver lining.

Ruby Room Rendezvous: A Romance for the Pages

I recently read The Forgotten Room, a jewel of a novel by Karen White, Lauren Willig, and our old pal Beatriz Williams, and the first thing that comes to mind is this: So. Many. Tears.  (The second is: So glad women no longer wear corsets.)  A tale of historical fiction wrapped in romantic suspense, The Forgotten Room is a tearjerker for sure and follows three generations of women as they try to untangle a secret surrounding a necklace.  You've heard of blood diamonds.  Well, this necklace has a blood ruby, and not just because of the color.  It's seen a lot of heartbreak -- and also a little bloodshed.  

The Forgotten Room takes us on a journey through the 1890s, 1920s, and 1940s to meet Olive, Lucy, and Kate, a trio of very different women.  Cruel circumstances cast Olive as a servant, determination drives Lucy to secretarial school (which sounds weak tea but was quite the coup in the Roaring Twenties), and good old grit and her father's death compel Kate to become a nearly Doogie-young doctor.  The plot keeps you guessing as love blooms across decades and class divides.  It even has a villain named Prunella, which made me think of prune juice (ew!).  As the kids say these days, it's a lot.

The Forgotten Room is filled with moving passages, and my favorite is this one about the passage of time.  It's New Year's Eve, 1893, and Olive is waxing reflective:

"All her life, Olive wanted to stay up until midnight on New Year's Eve and experience the exact instant when the old year turned to the new.  When the familiar date passed into history, never to be seen or known or smelled or touched again -- like death, she supposed -- and those bright exotic numbers that had once belonged to some impossibly distant future -- 1893, imagine that! --became your present reality." (294)

I think we've all felt like that at least once.  Because the passing of time, both in life and in this book, is tinged with a haunting beauty.  White, Willig, and Williams's words capture that mysterious magic, a theme that runs through Room and readers' love affair with everything retro and vintage.    

It was so hard to get this story out of my head that I ransacked my craft supply stash for a red rhinestone something.  My efforts were rewarded with the last red and white rhinestone slider bead from an old broken bracelet, itself its own kind of vintage, and I lost no time stringing it with black and red beads.  The resulting necklace -- which I like to call the Half Blood Chintz-y -- is much more modest than the kind I usually create, but I think that makes it strangely -- to borrow an old-fashioned term -- fetching. 

Half Blood Chintz-y Necklace

So, there you have it: jewelry, intrigue, and bittersweet love.  

Forgotten Room, I'll never forget you.  

Sea-ing is Believing: Salt Water Works

There's nothing quite like a book with a surprise party of an ending, and Beatriz Williams is a party planner who knows what she's doing.  I just finished reading Along the Infinite Sea, which is the last installment in the Schuyler sisters trilogy, and it did not disappoint.  Just when I thought I had it all figured out, Beatriz was like, whoa, smarty pants, not so fast!  In addition to mucho mystery, Williams is also known for feisty heroines, witty dialogue, and serving up heaping helpings of history.  Indeed, the cover of Sea looks like an old postcard, its uneven edges framing a tropical paradise that's somehow both bold and dreamy.  Historical fiction is the only way I can digest the moldy old past (sorry, History Channel, but it's true), so good on you, Beatriz, for dropping some knowledge on all us la la land dwellers.

So, where to begin?  If Along the Infinite Sea was lighthearted, then I'd say it should've been called So, I Married a Nazi.  But it's not.  It's so heavy that it's forced me to turn to my old pal levity, right or wrong, as a means of dealing with it.  It's poignant, this tale.  By the end I was crying buckets and once again wondering how I'd come to care so much about people who weren't even real.

The plot alternates between two timelines: 1966, where Pepper Schuyler is pregnant with a married senator's baby, and 1936, where Annabel Creouville/von Kleist/Dommerich (say that five times fast) is pregnant with the baby of a man (also married) who is fleeing the Nazis.  Annabel is young and afraid, and through a wrenching and bizarre string of events, she's ultimately forced to choose between this man and a German general.  Or rather, maybe it's more accurate to say that one of them is forced to choose her.  It's one of those scenarios in which both men have some good and some bad, and not always in the ways you'd expect.  Some may say, "Hey, wait a minute.  Why does she have to end up with either one of these guys?  Isn't there someone less morally ambiguous for her to make strudel with?"  It's a logical question -- which means that it's out of the question for fiction.  Because novels aren't about logic.  They're about pitting characters against impossible situations to get them to show what they're made of.  In other words, if Annabel settled down with some nondescript baker who rubbed her feet every night, then there wouldn't be any story.  And we wouldn't learn anything about her or ourselves or the human condition. 

As for Pepper, she's young but less afraid, partly because it's a different time and party because she's Pepper.  That said, her storyline sort of fades into the background.  But I think that may be intentional, that it's meant as a kind of bright, crackly foil for the more serious Annabel saga.

Yep, lots of fireworks, lots of intrigue, and lots of tears.  That's what's along the infinite sea.

One of these days, Beatriz, I'll crack your code.  One of these days.

Then again, maybe not.

I kind of like being surprised.

Small Thunder: Tiny But Mighty

Pink Lady Necklace 

Top: Self Esteem, Zulily

Skirt: Stoosh, Macy's

Shoes: Payless

Bag: Liz Claiborne, JCPenney

Belt: Kohl's

Sunglasses: Relic, Kohl's

No, this isn't a tribute to that '80s sitcom about the girl robot.  It's a nod to a novel about a woman in the '60s named Tiny.  Yes, Tiny (short for Christina).  I first became acquainted with her in Beatriz Williams's The Secret Life of Violet Grant, through the lens of her sister Vivian:

"Neither of us could politely stand Tiny, who by the grace of God had married her Harvard mark last June, and now lived in a respectably shabby house in the Back Bay with a little Boston bean in her righteous oven.  God only knew how it got there!" (89)

After reading this, I thought, oh, Tiny's the stick in the mud.  We're not supposed to like her.  Yet, even with this understanding, I sensed something of myself in this precious paragon, and I knew that, were she real, I'd get along with her much better than I would Vivian.  It seemed that Williams liked her too because she wrote a follow-up book about her, Tiny Little Thing, revealing, page after page, all the reasons why she wasn't so perfect.  In it, I learned how Tiny's marriage to rising political star Franklin Hardcastle shapes her identity.  Poised and polished, Tiny is the quintessential public eye wife, with never a word or a hair out of place.  That is, until one night when she gets drunk at a fundraiser and tells a reporter how she really feels.

Williams tells the story from two points of view: Tiny's in 1966 and her husband's cousin's Caspian's (ugh, try saying that one five times fast) in 1964.  Caspian knew Tiny before she was married, so his account is much different than the account she gives of herself.  For example, it's Caspian who tells us that Tiny's a ballet dancer and that she feels the most free when she's dancing.  It's also Caspian who divulges Tiny's wish to escape.  He asks her, from what, exactly?, and she says:

"From what everyone else expects of me.  From worrying about pleasing everyone.  Playing my little role.  Living up to their expectations.  Letting their expectations become my expectations, until I can't tell what's real, what I really want, because it's all wrapped up in my wanting what they want." (114)

That's the root of Tiny's problems, the pressure to live up to an impossible ideal, to be someone she's not.  Yet as she struggles to balance her burgeoning self-awareness with the burdens of being a candidate's wife, she finds out that some of those closest to her have been pretending to be someone else, too.   

I loved this book.  And not just because it made me think of that "politicians will philander" line from Baz Luhrmann's "Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)."  Because it's beautifully written, and its characters are achingly real.  Because it's poignant and nostalgic and perceptive.  But most of all because it questions the way girls are raised.  In upper class 1960s America, yes.  But also in all kinds of households today.

On a lighter note, I was charmed by the fashion.  Tiny wears an enviable collection of evening gowns as well as scarves, gloves, and darling day dresses - one of which is a Lilly Pulitzer shift in a green monkey print.  The style is one of the best things about that tumultuous time.  It inspired me to make this Pink Lady Necklace, which combines old-fashioned, ladylike elegance with bright boho accents -- a perfect combination for a '60s heroine breaking free from her well-brought-up shell.      

Because freedom is worth its weight in couture.

And that, dear readers, is no small thing.