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News of the World: A Novel by Paulette Jiles #AudiobookReview #bookclubs #TBT

Editors’ pick Best Literature & Fiction

Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Readers’ Favorite Historical Fiction (2016)

My participation with The Y Book Club in our local area has been a lot of fun. Their August selection was News of the World which I discovered was also turned into a major motion picture with Tom Hanks in the lead role. I am anxious for that movie to come to Netflix.

The book club meets once a month and is very popular. Members are limited as to the number of physical books they can get for book clubs. Fortunately, I do audiobooks. The moderator does a great job keeping us to book club questions.

My Thoughts:

Quickly acknowledged that the book had been made into a movie starring Tom Hanks, the ladies in the Y Book Club who had seen the movie agreed it was excellent. I can’t wait to see it, as I disagreed that the book was excellent. Oh, yes, it was good, and not to say I didn’t enjoy it. Short, descriptive, chock full of historical majesty, from bandits to Native Americans, it’s a feast for the ears.

Yes, I listened to the audiobook narrated by one of my favorite narrators, Grover Gardner, who better to read the book whose setting is 1870 in Texas? The Civil War has officially ended, but not for Texas. (Tom Hanks, by the way, narrated The Dutch House by Ann Patchett.)

Extensive research went into this novel, no question. Questions arose regarding those children who had been captured by Native Americans, which led to additional research on my part and also contributed to lively discussion among the book club members.

As the ten-year-old Johanna and Captain Kidd travel the distance from Witchita Falls to San Antonio to return the girl to an aunt and uncle she doesn’t remember, they confront the extent of a lawless society that post-war chaos can offer. Johanna is rooted in the Kiowa language and spiritual traditions. She remembers nothing of her life prior to her capture at age six and thinks and acts as a Kiowa. Furthermore, she wants nothing to do with white society. It becomes apparent, however, that she is very clever.

Captain Kidd has managed to survive three wars, earning him the status of Captain, and has a reputation for being a strong, level-headed, and astute man, trustworthy in all endeavors. He is a widower whose payment will be sufficient to bring his two daughters from the east to live with him. He earns his living now by reading pertinent news articles to a paid audience from various papers as he wanders the countryside.

I thoroughly enjoyed the story through to the epilogue. Then the reader is suddenly fed the future of the characters in large clumps of sequel material that would have created another satisfying story—rather than the crushing end to this otherwise beautifully written narrative with powerful characters.

Many thanks to my local library for providing me with the opportunity to read and review this book. The thoughts expressed here are my own.

Book Club Thoughts

The members found a lot of grist for lively discussion as usual. Although short at just a little over 200 pages or less than 7 hours audiobook narration, the storyline packed an emotional wallop that left an indelible imprint on many of the ladies. Again, another reason so many of us are fascinated with historical fiction books is the revelation of a great deal of factual info and eye-opening material that most of us were unaware.

Book Club star rating vote

Book Details:

Genre: Westerns, Western Fiction, Historical Fiction
Publisher: HarperAudio
Narrator: Grover Gardner
Listening Length: 6 hrs 42 mins
ASIN: B084JJ9K3J
Release Date: August 25, 2020
Source: Local Library

Title Link(s):

Amazon-US | Amazon-UK | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

The Author: My website is paulettejiles.com. I review books and say shocking things and include outrageous pictures.

Paulette Jiles was born in Salem, Missouri, in the Missouri Ozarks. Raised in small towns in both south and central Missouri, she attended three different high schools, an exhausting process of social dislocation and fashion wobbles, and with relief graduated from the University of Missouri (KC) in Romance Languages. After graduation she worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto and in the far north of Ontario and in the Quebec Arctic, helping to set up village one-watt FM radio stations in the native language, Anishinabe and Inuktitut. She became reasonably conversant in Anishinabe but Inuktitut was just too much. Very hard. Besides she was only in the eastern Arctic for a year. Work in the north lasted about ten years all told.

She taught at David Thompson University in Nelson B.C. and grew to love the British Columbian ecosystems and general zaniness. She spent one year as a writer-in-residence at Philips Andover in Massachusetts and then returned to the United States permanently when she married Jim Johnson, a Texan. Has lived in Texas since 1995.

She and her husband renovated an old stone house in the San Antonio historic district and amidst the rubble and stonemasons and ripped-out electrical systems she completed Enemy Women. She now lives on a small ranch near a very small town in the Texas Hill Country with a horse and a donkey. If you want a free donkey, please let her know. She plays Irish tin whistle with a bluegrass group, sings alto in choir, rides remote trails in Texas with friends. Her horse is named Buck. News of the World (William Morrow) was a finalist for the National Book Award.

©V Williams

Book Club — AI generated graphic courtesy Gemini 2.5 Flash

The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau: A Novel by Kristin Harmel #BookReview #TuesdayBookBlog

Book Blurb:

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Kristin Harmel, the New York Times bestselling author who “is the best there is at sweeping historical drama” (Kelly Harms, author of The Seven Day Switch), returns with an electrifying new novel about two jewel thieves, a priceless bracelet that disappears in 1940s Paris, and a quest for answers in a decades-old murder.

Colette Marceau has been stealing jewels for nearly as long as she can remember, following the centuries-old code of honor instilled in her by her mother, Annabel: take only from the cruel and unkind, and give to those in need. Never was their family tradition more important than seven decades earlier, during the Second World War, when Annabel and Colette worked side by side in Paris to fund the French Resistance.

But one night in 1942, it all went wrong. Annabel was arrested by the Germans, and Colette’s four-year-old sister, Liliane, disappeared in the chaos of the raid, along with an exquisite diamond bracelet sewn into the hem of her nightgown for safekeeping. Soon after, Annabel was executed, and Liliane’s body was found floating in the Seine—but the bracelet was nowhere to be found.

Seventy years later, Colette—who has “redistributed” $30 million in jewels over the decades to fund many worthy organizations—has done her best to put her tragic past behind her, but her life begins to unravel when the long-missing bracelet suddenly turns up in a museum exhibit in Boston. If Colette can discover where it has been all this time—and who owns it now—she may finally learn the truth about what happened to her sister. But she isn’t the only one for whom the bracelet holds answers, and when someone from her childhood lays claim to the diamonds, she’s forced to confront the ghosts of her past as never before. Against all odds, there may still be a chance to bring a murderer to justice—but first, Colette will have to summon the courage to open her own battered heart.

My Review:

A fascinating dual timeline plot featuring Colette Marceau, now late 80s. During the war, her mother Annabel was arrested by the Germans for theft. The family tradition was modeled under the Robin Hood tradition of robbing the rich to give to the poor, only in her family it was to steal from the despots and give to a worthy cause. In this instance, give back the matching bracelet to her mother’s best friend who owned the matching set that completed a butterfly design.

In the melee of the arrest, Colette’s little sister is kidnapped and her body found later floating in the Seine. Colette has blamed herself all her life for not watching her sister more closely as she was supposed to do.

Colette is now astonished to see the missing half of the bracelet sewn into the hem of her sister’s gown long years ago. It is to be on display in an exhibition. No one knows of Colette’s past, the jewels she’s stolen to continue family tradition or causes but it’s about to be fully exposed.

Perhaps she’ll finally discover who took her sister, what happened to the bracelet. In the meantime, she is forming a new “family,” not all of blood relatives. However, they’ll all have a role in piecing together how the jewels came to be in Boston seventy years later.

The prose and writing style are beautifully laid out and I greatly enjoyed the dual timeline, living the part of the Nazi occupation with mother and daughter’s assistance to the French Resistance. There are numerous quotables throughout:

“The more years one lived, the more indignities one was forced to endure.”

“…caring for someone wasn’t about fitting them into spaces that you’d already cut out. It was about allowing them to exist in their own way.”

“There is a difference between a life that honors the past and a life dictated by it.”

It’s a war fiction mystery and suspense that takes place over decades and for the most part plausible. Except for that one final denouement, I could believe it all happened—just as written.

Many thanks to my local library for providing me with the opportunity to read and review this book. The thoughts expressed here are my own.

Rosepoint Rating: Four point Five Stars