The Makioka Sisters

Synopsis
The four Makioka sisters struggle with love and marriage in the early 1940s in Osaka.

My thoughts
It's a little simplistic to describe The Makioka Sisters as "Pride and Prejudice set in Japan," but it's not completely off the mark. Of the four Makioka sisters, two of them are already married; when the book starts they're trying to find a suitable groom for the third sister, Yukiko. Meanwhile, the fourth sister, who can't get married until Yukiko does, pursues love and career on her own terms.

It's a long book - more than 500 pages - I was really able to get a feel for the characters. I especially related to Taeko, the youngest sister, because she's the most modern. She falls in love with two different men and goes into business for herself - definitely not the path a traditional young Japanese woman was expected to follow. Tanizaki does well with the subtle tension between Tsuruko, the oldest sister, and her younger sisters. Tsuruko and her husband are technically the heads of the family, but they live in Tokyo and are physically and figuratively out of touch with the rest of the family. Tanizaki depicts both the affection and the wariness in the sisters' relationship.

I was also interested to see European characters in this book. The Makiokas' neighbors are German, some acquaintances are Russian (one of them is named Vronsky, a little shout-out to Anna Karenina), and Taeko takes French lessons and considers traveling to France at one point.

However, parts of the narrative bit did meander, and I was frustrated by the fact that the action often took place "off-screen" and then was relayed to the reader by conversations between the characters. My translation also had a couple of funny quirks. There was an entire footnote to describe sushi, but you were on your own if you wanted to know the background of the Battle of Sekigahara.

Bottom line
Interesting and insightful. I'd like to read more of Tanizaki's works.

Fine print
The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki
Genre: fiction, foreign literature
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

Franklin and Eleanor

Synopsis
Hazel Rowley attempts to delve into the unconventional marriage of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

My thoughts
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt are two of the most remarkable Americans of the 20th century and Rowley does a very good job describing their personalities and explaining the context of the times. However, she's somewhat less successful in capturing the dynamic of the marriage, which was the appeal of the book.

The book is subtitled "an extraordinary marriage," and it certainly was. Rowley has exhaustively researched the available correspondence between Franklin and Eleanor themselves and between each of them and their close friends, potential lovers, and employees (which are sometimes one and the same). It's clear that Franklin and Eleanor had a great deal of respect for each other, and each of them needed and depended upon the other. (At least to some degree. They were both fiercely independent and self-sufficient.) I felt like I only gained a superficial understanding of what made their unorthodox relationship work. This isn't really Rowley's fault; the only people who knew how the Roosevelt marriage worked were the Roosevelts themselves, and their relationship was so complicated and multi-faceted that even they probably weren't entirely sure what was going on all the time.

To say that the Roosevelts did not have a smooth marital relationship is a vast understatement. They were overshadowed at their own wedding in 1905 by Theodore Roosevelt - Eleanor's uncle, Franklin's distant cousin, and the president of the United States. From the beginning, they had to live under the scrutiny of Franklin's overbearing mother, who controlled the purse strings and lived next door. Franklin's affair with Eleanor's secretary, Lucy Mercer, devastated Eleanor. They remained married, but the character of the marriage changed. Then came Franklin's battle with and recovery from polio and his decision to seek public office.

This is actually where the dual biography loses steam. A portrait of a marriage is a difficult subject when the interests and everyday lives of the individuals in that marriage diverge, and Rowley's book in effect becomes two separate biographies somewhere around here. Rowley loses the thread that held the marriage together, that shows how Franklin and Eleanor worked together and how they regarded each other. The latter part of the biography is slightly weighted toward Eleanor because of the two she is easier to relate to. Franklin comes off as charming and brilliant, but he's also arrogant.

Bottom line
Find a good biography of one and then read a good biography of the other.

Fine print
Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage, by Hazel Rowley
Genre: biography
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

The Lady of the Rivers

Synopsis
Jacquetta, a Burgundian princess, is married off into the English royal family as a teenager. She gains her footing and forges her own destiny - and that of a dynasty.

My thoughts
This is technically the third book in Philippa Gregory's "The Cousin's War" series, but it's chronologically the first. Jacquetta is Elizabeth Woodville's mother, and The Lady of the Rivers succeeds where The White Queen stumbles. The forbidden love story between the widowed Jacquetta and her late husband's groom is vivid and passionate, even after they've settled into a comfortable married life and produced a bevy of children.

The narrative of The Lady of the Rivers flows better and than it does in The White Queen and I felt a connection with Jacquetta that I just didn't feel with her daughter Elizabeth when I read The White Queen. This is partially because The Lady of the Rivers is a coming of age story and I was able to watch Jacquetta grow from a proud Burgundian princess into a strong-willed and powerful member of the Lancaster court. The Lady of the Rivers is also more successful at weaving the water goddess Melusina into the narrative than is The White Queen. In The White Queen Jacquetta and Elizabeth whistle up winds and mists and storms to defeat their Lancastrian foes, which felt like a cheat to me. The use of magic was more intuitive and less invasive in The Lady of the Rivers. And the book ends with a sweet tie-in to the beginning of The White Queen.

Not only is it more entertaining and satisfying than The White Queen, it also fills in some important background information. Margaret of Anjou, who haunts The White Queen from afar, is more fully fleshed out here. Philippa Gregory does an incredible job straightening out a very complicated era in English history. My husband and I watched the premiere of The White Queen on STARZ last weekend and I had to keep pausing the action to fill him in on the relationships between the characters. I read Alison Weir's non-fiction history The Wars of the Roses six years ago and found it similarly confusing. Everyone had the same names, which was complicated further by the fact that they were sometimes referred to by their family names and sometimes by their titles. I had no such confusion with Gregory's books. And Gregory writes decent battle scenes, too. She sends Jacquetta with Margaret of Anjou to watch the action, which was very effective. Later, she depicts the anguish of women watching for their men to come home from battle.

Bottom line
Read this first and then move on to the rest of the series. It's a fast, engaging read, and it sets up the rest of the action nicely.

Fine print
The Lady of the Rivers, by Philippa Gregory
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.

White Oleander

Synopsis
Astrid's psychopathic poet mother murders her ex-lover, throwing Astrid into the worst of the foster care system.

My thoughts
I liked this book in spite of itself. It's one of those insufferable poetry-written-as-prose novels where you get dense paragraphs of dreamy, elaborate thoughts and descriptions and six pages later you're still waiting for the point of it all.

But Astrid is such a remarkable character that I had to admire her. She's delicate yet resilient in the way only teenagers can be. She worships her selfish, manipulative mother but has to grow up on her own when she's put into foster care after her mother is sent to prison for murdering her ex-boyfriend. Astrid is placed in one foster home after another, each with its own unique set of horrors, and she grows tougher as she navigates each one. There's the ultra-religious woman with the boyfriend Astrid seduces (or the boyfriend who seduces Astrid - it's hard to tell). There's the racist woman who uses Astrid as a free babysitter. There's the woman who seems nice but who starves her foster children. But the most heartbreaking is Claire. She seems like the ideal mother; she takes a genuine interest in Astrid and encourages her to dream big. But it slowly becomes obvious that Claire is dealing with deep psychological issues of her own. So just when Astrid has found someone who cares for her and a place where she feels comfortable, it's all cruelly snatched away from her.

White Oleander is a sobering look at the U.S. foster care system, but it needs to be taken with a boulder of salt. Astrid's experiences with the foster care system seem cobbled together from a collection of news articles about the most abusive foster parents and then stretched and exaggerated for dramatic effect. The majority of foster parents are genuinely good people who perform a service I'm not a strong enough person to take on myself.

It's such a depressing story - and it takes nearly 500 pages to tell - that it's tough to stick with it. But it's also strangely uplifting. Astrid just doesn't give up and she grows in amazing ways throughout her harrowing journey. I will say that Janet Fitch is a master storyteller. She has a gift for inserting monster plot twists that are plausible and exciting. The story never went the way I thought it would, and I never felt like Fitch took the easy way out of untangling any of Astrid's myriad problems.

Bottom line
A good story bogged down by fussy, flowery storytelling.

Fine print
White Oleander, by Janet Fitch
Genre: fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library.

The White Queen

Synopsis
Commoner Elizabeth Woodville goes from Lancaster loyalist to York queen.

My thoughts
The drama is lacking in what should be a riveting book. Elizabeth Woodville was a fascinating woman, the wife of Edward IV and the mother of the princes in the Tower. She was a commoner when she married Edward IV for love (some say she ensnared him with witchcraft) during a lull in England's tumultuous Wars of the Roses. Their union and her family's rise to power alienated some of Edward's staunchest supporters and contributed to Edward's overthrow and the restoration of Henry VI, the previous ruler. Edward fled to Flanders, leaving Elizabeth and their children to seek sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, where their fourth child (and first son) was born. Less than a year later, Edward reclaimed his throne and ruled in relative peace until his untimely death in 1483. His twelve-year-old son came to the throne as Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York, was named regent. But before Edward could be crowned, Richard declared Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville invalid and their children illegitimate. This cleared the way for him to seize power as Richard III. Edward V and his only living brother (also named Richard) disappeared and were presumed to have been murdered by ... someone. Exactly who killed them and why remains one of history's most intriguing mysteries. (When I visited the Richard III Museum in York in 2006, there was a whiteboard that allowed visitors to write in their own suspects. There were votes for everyone from George W. Bush to the unpopular coach of England's national soccer team.) Anyway, by the end of The White Queen, Elizabeth is left not knowing whether her sons are dead or alive and she has entered into a secret alliance against Richard III with Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry Tudor, the heir to the Lancaster claim to the throne.

Elizabeth Woodville was a strong and determined woman and there's a lot of rich material to work with, but there's very little heart or soul to The White Queen. Instead it seems more like a 400-page laundry list of "this happened and then this happened and let's drop this name because it will be important in 80 pages." And the supernatural element that Gregory tries to include feels contrived and cheapens the actual history.

The strengths of the novel lie in Philippa Gregory's ability to breathe life into the uncertain parts of history - whether both princes died or one escaped, who killed them, and whether Elizabeth's eldest daughter (also named Elizabeth) fell in love with her uncle Richard III (ick). She also does a good job describing the futility and brutality of war, particularly a civil war.

I picked up this book because on August 10 STARZ will debut a new series based on The White Queen and the other books in Gregory's "The Cousins' War" series. The hook is that it's the Wars of the Roses from the perspectives of the women who played pivotal roles in the conflict. I probably won't reread this one, but I've already moved on to the next book in the series and I'm interested enough in Gregory's retelling of history that I'll probably read the rest of the books, too.

Bottom line
It's such an amazing story that I'd recommend it despite the lackluster storytelling.

Fine print
The White Queen, by Philippa Gregory
Genre: historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I bought this book.