Book Box: Fresh look at the past
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SINGAPORE – In this week’s Book Box, The Straits Times looks at books that discuss history from unconventional angles. Buy the books at Amazon
Book review: Creative language-based magic, but weak relationships in historical fantasy The Familiar
The Familiar is author Leigh Bardugo's first foray into historical fantasy.
PHOTOS: PAN MACMILLAN
Leigh Bardugo, best known for her Grishaverse young-adult fantasy books, dips her toes into historical fantasy with The Familiar, a standalone novel set sometime towards the end of the 16th century.
It follows scullery maid Luiza Cotado, whose lack of sense puts her under the bidding of Victor de Parades. Caught using magic to perform miracles, she is presented with an opportunity to raise her station. The challenge is to win a competition by the Spanish king’s former secretary, Antonio Perez, and turn the tide for Spain to win the war against the heretic English queen.
Bardugo, an Israeli-American author, rose to popularity with her young-adult novel Shadow And Bone (2012), the first in a trilogy that later spawned two spin-off duologies, Six Of Crows (2015) and King Of Scars (2019).
Book review: James Shapiro’s The Playbook narrates theatre and culture wars in 1930s America
The Playbook by James Shapiro explores the birth and trajectory of the United States’ Federal Theatre Project in the aftermath of the Great Depression.
PHOTOS: FABER & FABER
Something theatrically anti-theatre happened in 1939. The ending of Pinocchio, the United States’ latest Broadway hit, was changed so the puppet boy dies, killed by an “act of Congress”.
Stagehands knocked down sets in full view of the packed house. The fantastical creation of Italian writer Carlo Collodi had become the stand-in for the very real demise of the Federal Theatre Project, instituted by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and which once employed some 12,000 struggling artists in the US, including American film-maker Orson Welles and playwright Arthur Miller.
Baillie Gifford Prize winner James Shapiro’s latest book uncovers the precarious birth of America’s first Federal Theatre Project in the aftermath of the Great Depression, and its subsequent targeting by Congress amid the culture wars in the lead-up to World War II.
Book review: Period novel Her Side Of The Story reclaims herstory in female-centric WWII story
Her Side Of The Story by Alba de Cespedes.
PHOTO: PUSHKIN PRESS, MONDADORI PORTFOLIO
War is seen as a masculine project initiated and fought by men.
Women and children are relegated to passive casualties and illegitimate targets. Yet, in 1949, Cuban-Italian author Alba de Cespedes’ Her Side Of The Story already sought a nuancing of this narrative.
Her protagonist, Alessandra, is an active member of the resistance against the Italian fascist regime during World War II, volunteering to cycle across borders to deliver bombs while her communist husband languishes in prison.
In an extension of her effort to prove that women can be more, she overcomes fear “to continue the battle that we had been waging since my childhood”. It is not for her motivations of vainglory, or the relative shallowness of Italian nationhood. The violence, she makes clear, is a way for her to enter her husband’s world and remain close to him in his absence.
Book review: The Lost Love Songs Of Boysie Singh tells story of Trinidad gang boss through four women
There is that famous final scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) between Al Pacino’s Michael and Diane Keaton’s Kay.
Michael, having just ordered a slew of revenge killings – including that of his brother-in-law – lies to his new wife about his involvement. A wave of relief breaks across her face as she chooses to believe him.
As she exits, Michael’s lackeys surround him, kissing his ring to crown the new don of the Corleone mafia family.
One of them closes the door on Kay: She will be shut out of this world of men and violence, sometimes turning a blind eye to and benefiting from the prestige of its activities, but growing increasingly estranged from the man she once knew and loved.
Costa First Novel Award-winner Ingrid Persaud’s second full-length novel The Lost Love Songs Of Boysie Singh captures much of this same dynamic, writing from the points of view of four women connected to the real historical figure of Boysie Singh, a gang boss who terrorised inhabitants of the Port of Spain in Trinidad from 1947 to 1956.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers June 8
Kevin Kwan’s newest book, Lies And Weddings, hits No. 1 on the fiction bestsellers list.
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