From One Book Lover

   Get a glimpse behind the façade when Ruby Lennox shows us what it takes to make and live in a family in Behind the Scenes at the Museum . The titular museum is York Castle Museum, which exhibits façades of local houses, much like the one occupied by the Lennox family. As Kate Atkinson weaves her tale, Ruby’s first day is spent in part at the Museum Gardens, with her mother and sister, Gillian. I loved the structure of the book: beginning with her conception, Ruby is very much in the “now,” and everything feels immediate and new, with glimpses of foretelling the future. Coupled with these current events are  “appendices” interspersed non-sequentially, revealing family secrets that challenge the fictions perpetrated in the family history Ruby tells. She knows what she knows, so her tale is limited to her scope of knowledge, what she sees and believes. Ruby is our narrator, but is she reliable? Clues pop up indicating that something is flickering just beyond her re...

In Flanders Fields In Flanders fields the poppies blow       Between the crosses, row on row,    That mark our place; and in the sky    The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.   We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,    Loved and were loved, and now we lie,          In Flanders fields.   Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw    The torch; be yours to hold it high.    If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow          In Flanders fields.

Dulce Et Decorum Est Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of disappointed shells that dropped behind. GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And floundering like a man in fire or lime.-- Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;...

courtesy MetaPicture .

If you're off by one degree and don't correct your course, the gap between where you are and where you want to be grows wider with every step. Kate Atkinson measures each step of Ursula's existence in Life After Life , and we see what happens if she alters it by as little as a single step. At first, the return to her birth appeared relentless, and I feared it would be the same story with a different ending each time. Thankfully, that was not the case. The plot complications begin to vary in very interesting ways. Ursula is born on a snowy winter day in 1910. The weather prevents the midwife from arriving, and the doctor arrives too late: the cord was around the baby's neck and she did not live. Had the doctor been there with a pair or surgical scissors.... The scene changes. Snow is still falling but the doctor manages to hitch a ride through the snowy fields from a local farmer and, when delivering the baby, quickly removes the cord. The child lives. Howe...

The Great War was a huge game-changer. Modern warfare changed the landscape, literally: many of the terms in our current lexicon are thanks to the war, which we have the great misfortune of knowing now was the "first" world war. It was unimaginable. The Innocents goes a long way into making modern readers understand the horrors of this particular war. Identical twins Iris and Dorthea had a difficult life. Their mother died at their birth, their father died during their childhood — so they were essentially "raised" by their (much) older brother in the opulent wealth of Eastern élite at the turn of the twentieth century. In his defense, he didn't really quite understand what it took to do that. Any mistakes were made out of ignorance, more so than intentional neglect. Despite their privilege and opportunity, the women came to life when taking action during adversity. First, it was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, which was considered one o...