Just Jennifer

Newport by Jill Morrow

Even with Prohibition in full force, the rich and playful flocked to Newport, Rhode Island after the Great War was over and before the Great Depression to the cottages (mansions) they built to while away the summers with glamorous parties and flights of fancy.  Adrian de la Noye is a young attorney who has spent much time, time he’d rather not remember in Newport and reluctantly returns there to update the will of his client whose children are less than pleased with their father’s choice for the second Mrs. Chapman and the revisions he plans to make.  Mr. Bennett Chapman informs his children that he has been communicating with his dead wife through séances and not only does she approve of him marrying Catharine Walsh, she has in fact chosen Catharine to be her widowed husband’s new bride.  With characters who are not necessarily unreliable, but who withhold thing from each other and have different levels of beliefs as far as Bennett Chapman’s ability to communicate with his dead wife, or his belief that he is doing so, there is an ethereal quality to the story adding to the atmosphere induced by the séances.  Is Catharine an exceptional con artist or does she truly care for the elder Mr. Chapman and does her past connection to Adrian make him a biased party to this rather than an zealous attorney looking out for the best interest of his client? A great summertime read, this novel has all the glitz and glamour of the era along with what is becoming more increasingly well-known, the popularity of séances and other idles of the rich during this time.

Orphan #8 by Kim van Alkemade

At first glance, this debut novel appears to be another orphan-overcoming-adversity tale, but upon closer reading it becomes apparent it is the story of a woman badly damaged physically and the mental scars that damage left and how she handles herself when the opportunity for revenge and retribution presents itself.  Rachel’s capacity for forgiveness is tested as the doctor who performed medical experiments on Rachel in the early twentieth century, establishing Mildred Solomon as an expert but leaving Rachel bald and somewhat disfigured to go through the rest of her life.  As a hospice nurse in Manhattan’s Old Hebrew Home thirty-five years in the future, Rachel finds Dr. Solomon is one of her patients and she now holds the power over the doctor that the doctor once had over Rachel.  A complicated character, Rachel’s first instincts are to inflict the suffering on the doctor that was inflicted upon her as a child but if she does, and allows her anger to take over, will it only perpetuate her anger or will it offer a modicum of satisfaction or only the empty hollow feeling that she is as unfeeling and as uncaring as the doctor herself.  Inspired by actual events, a well-researched appendix, complete with photographs, details the system of orphanages in the early twentieth-century in Manhattan and the mercy at which the orphans were placed for doctors and others to use them as lab experiments for their own gain.  This is a thoughtful first novel with no easy, pat answers.