Author Archives: Jaclyn

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About Jaclyn

Reader, writer, bookaholic for life!

Review | The Rose Arbor, by Rhys Bowen

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The Rose Arbor is a captivating and highly engrossing historical fiction/mystery. Rhys Bowen does a great job in immersing you in a different time and place with her prose. I was fully invested in the characters and their journeys, and I actually enjoyed my commutes to and from work because I got to delve into this story again and again.

In 1943, the residents of a small English village named Tydeham were asked to evacuate, so that the military could use their village for wartime exercises. The evacuation was rather frantic; in most cases, people didn’t want to leave their homes. There’s a beautifully heart-breaking moment where a woman insists on having a final cup of tea in her own kitchen before she has to get on the van to leave, and her husband tells her they unfortunately don’t have the time. In all the hubbub, three young girls end up missing, and years later, only one of their bodies has been found.

Flash forward to 1968. Liz Houghton hates her job as an obituary writer for a London newspaper, so when her roommate, Marisa, a police officer, mentions travelling to Dorset to pursue a lead about a young girl’s disappearance, Liz jumps at the chance for a more interesting story. While in Dorset, Liz finds herself drawn to the nearby village of Tydeham. Even though her father insists they’ve never lived there, and Liz would only have been two when the village was evacuated for the war, something about the village seems familiar, and a hunch leads to the discovery of a body behind an old manor house. It isn’t one of the missing girls, but rather the skeleton of a young woman.

Whose body is it? How did Liz know it was there? How, if ever, is it connected to the missing young girls, both from the 1940s and from the present day? Bowen packs her narrative with lots of mysteries, and somehow manages to make all the disparate threads come together by the end.

However, the book’s strength isn’t so much in the mysteries that its characters need to solve, but rather in the characters themselves and the world they inhabit. More than the mystery of how Liz is connected to the village of Tydeham, it was her relationships that intrigued me. I was drawn in by the romance developing between her and James, the young man whose family owned the manor where the body was found, and I thought James’ father was charming. Liz’s mother had advanced dementia, and in the few scenes she appeared, Liz’s love for her and sorrow for her current condition really shone through. And Liz’s brigadier father was just shady from the get-go; the way he was portrayed on the page, I imagined far worse secrets than what was eventually revealed.

Adding an extra layer is the stories, mostly lost, of the people of Tydeham. The book starts with the residents of this town reacting to the news that they would have to evacuate, and as much as I got pulled in by the story of Liz in 1968, I also couldn’t help wishing that we’d gotten to spend more time in Tydeham in the 1940s. By the end of the novel, much of the village’s role was reduced to providing plot points for the central mystery, and while I can see the benefit in terms of keeping the storytelling tight, I also couldn’t help but feel the sense of loss that Liz tried to capture in her obituary for the town. Those people mattered, and while it’s certainly realistic that within the context of Liz’s story, so many of these minor characters’ stories would have been lost to time, Bowen has managed to make us care enough to wish this weren’t so.

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Thank you to Firefly Books Limited for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | Those Opulent Days, by Jacquie Pham

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The murder mystery in Those Opulent Days serves as a jumping-off point for a deep dive exploration and expose of the various complexities around racial and class disparities during 1928 French-colonial Vietnam.

As someone unfamiliar with Vietnamese history, I was fascinated by this glimpse into the country’s history. The way Vietnamese characters (referred to as “Annanites” in this novel) automatically provide more deference to French nationals, and the way in which wealthy Vietnamese characters set themselves apart from their poorer counterparts by adopting aspects of French culture, felt raw and distressingly true. They reminded me of how colonization by Spain and then the United States of America also resulted in similar ripple effects in the Philippines, where I grew up. Almost a century since independence, and we still talk about “colonial mentality,” and how we must fight against some of these beliefs that we have internalized.

The murder mystery centres on a quartet of friends from wealthy families: Duy, Phong, Minh, and Edmond. One of them ends up dead during a weekend at Duy’s family’s vacation home, and it isn’t till much later in the book that we learn who the victim was, and who may have wanted him dead. There isn’t much of an investigation, nor much suspense over the reveal. While the incident serves as a focal point for the events of the story (most of the novel’s events happen within a week of the death), the murder itself isn’t actually the focus of the story.

Rather, the story is about the lives of these four young men, and how the social inequities during the period play out in their families. I love how Pham explores the subtleties in their relationship through minor details, like how Duy’s family’s opium business makes them powerful in one way, but Minh’s family’s rubber business actually makes him the wealthiest of the group. More significantly, Edmond being French and white immediately accords him and his family prestige that even Minh’s wealthy and powerful family can’t achieve.

We learn how Phong is the smartest of the group, and how his father maintains his deceased first wife’s primacy by sending the children of all his subsequent wives to work in Minh’s factories and fields. We also learn how Edmond’s mother is so racist that she rubs her hand raw when a Vietnamese man accidentally brushes against it, never mind that he’s literally royalty. Pham sprinkles all these details throughout that truly make this world come to life. Whomever is killed, and whomever the murderer turns out to be, it’s clear that the villain in this novel is French colonization, and the way that Vietnamese people are second-class citizens on their own land.

Possibly because of this theme, the chapters I found most powerful are those from the perspectives of Vietnamese servants in Minh’s household: Hai, a kind-hearted maid whose romance with Minh threatens the elevated place in society that Minh’s mother has fought so hard to attain, and Tattler, an ambitious housemaid who hates the upper class until she realizes she actually really wishes to be one of them. Both are doomed by the circumstances of their birth and the society they must learn to navigate, and amongst all the glitzy glamour — the opulence, so to speak — the four main characters inhabit, Hai and Tattler’s chapters provide us a grittier counterpoint. Their stories show us that, however much we sympathize with Duy, Minh, Phong, and Edmond for their struggles within social structures, the four men are also somewhat complicit in keeping those structures going.

Hurt people hurt people, and this novel explores the many ways that power imbalances can lead to people lashing out to those who are less powerful. There’s a powerful moment near the end where characters are forced to confront the harsh limits of their own power, and yet there’s another, equally powerful, moment where power structures are subverted when a character takes control of their own destiny. Overall, this is a fascinating, multi-layered, and textured historical novel, one where a murder mystery is a powerful metaphor for all the complex and simmering tensions amongst a people longing to regain control over their own homeland.

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Thank you to Publishers Group Canada for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review | The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards, by Jessica Waite

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How do you grieve someone when you’ve just learned of all the many ways that they’ve done you wrong? Jessica Waite’s memoir, The Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards, begins with an arresting image: the author confronted with nine photos of vulvas, arranged in a three-by-three grid “like the Brady Bunch family” (page 1). It’s a tiny subset of her recently-deceased husband Sean’s porn collection, and his secret stash of digital images is the least of his transgressions.

As Jessica processes his loss, and tries to help her young son, Dash, heal, she continues to unearth more of Sean’s secrets: he regularly pays for sex while on vacation, he’s had a long-time affair with a colleague, and his debts put Jessica’s financial security in jeopardy. This memoir may have started with a pointed, darkly humorous observation about Sean’s secrets, but most of the book takes us on Jessica’s raw and rather emotional journey in the aftermath of Sean’s death.

There’s anger: in a moment of petty revenge that Jessica deliberately conceals from friends until it’s too late for them to stop her, Jessica sets out to ruin Sean’s affair partner’s Christmas. Jessica’s barrage of texts and emails are straight-up harassment, and her threats involve not just the affair partner’s holiday cheer, but also her career. So it’s hard to cheer for Jessica in that moment, yet the act alone proves to be enough catharsis without having to escalate, so all’s well that ends well?

Beyond the anger is also a lot of fear. Jessica takes us through her anxieties about getting tested for STDs, and about waiting for all the legal stuff around Sean’s death benefits to come through. Worse is the lingering fear of what else remains unknown; if Sean had succeeded in keeping all this from her till now, what other secrets had he been keeping that could end up ruining the life she’s building?

Jessica deliberately leaves vague her own personal beliefs about the afterlife, or lack thereof, but the memoir also takes us on her deeply spiritual journey in exploring those questions for herself. This, too, rings true. There’s nothing like losing someone to make us wonder where they may be now, and if we’ll ever see them again, and while Jessica’s exploration does stay within particular paths of spirituality, her curiosity and yearning are also very real.

There’s a wonderful metaphor from someone Jessica goes to for counsel: when the day of Sean’s death began, Jessica was at the 12:00 point of an analogue clock, steady, secure, and with an entire clock’s worth of stability beneath her. Sean’s death plunges her all the way down to the 6:00 point in a moment, and suddenly, she’s scrambling to figure out where she can find her footing again.

Jessica’s response rings so true for anyone who’s gone through grief: after a ‘decent’ period of mourning (the length of which differs by person), her loved ones expect her to be back to the woman she was at the 12:00 point. Yet even if she does manage to climb back up there, she’s no longer the same woman. Grief has forever changed her, and it’s tough to quantify how, much less explain it to others. It’s a powerful and heartbreaking message, yet one that reminds me of my own experiences of grief, and makes me feel less alone.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.