BEAUTIFUL MAUI
Like many people, the Chief Penguin and I have fond memories of visiting Maui over the years and being treated to insider tours with good friends. It is wrenching to see the wildfire destruction of so much of historic Lahaina and its residential neighborhoods.
On those earlier trips, we enjoyed meandering Front Street, checking out the small shops, and then tucking into a tasty lunch at the fun and funky Lahaina Yacht Club, now completely gone.
Our hearts and thoughts are with those who have lost loved ones and their homes. (Our friends were fortunate that their property was not affected.)
RECENT READING
A WOMAN WITH AN INTRIGUING PAST
The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear
This latest novel by Winspear is a standalone one. I’ve owned it for several months but put off reading it. Now I wonder why as I found it fascinating, engaging, and occasionally suspenseful. Elinor DeWitt, also known as Elinor White, was a practically a child during the First World War I when she and her sister were recruited to help the Resistance effort in Belgium. Their assignments completed, not without danger or continuing mental anguish, they and their mother were taken safely to London, their mother’s early home.
Elinor completed her education and embarked on a career as a language teacher before being importuned to assist the war effort, this time against the Nazis. The book goes back and forth in time between the war years, and the present London setting in 1947. Elinor finds herself drawn to investigate a neighbor family’s business dealings. This leads to re-connections with former colleagues and reflections on her wartime experiences.
I found Winspear’s more recent Maisie Dobbs’ mysteries a bit tired. Thus, I was pleased that Elinor White is a complex and intriguing character. I stayed involved wondering what her fate and that of others would be. Recommended! (~JWFarrington)
CREATIVITY OUT OF MISERY
Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel (Published in 2003)
It was an interesting pairing to read Winspear’s novel right after Hilary Mantel’s haunting, graphic, and sharp-edged memoir. Mantel was born in 1952 in a Britain still suffering the shortages and exigencies of the Second World War. Much of her childhood was spent in a politically provincial village outside Manchester. The tensions between Protestants and Catholics reigned supreme, and which you were governed your schools and your daily routine. Living near multiple sets of older relatives, Hilary received much in the way of family lore and readily accepted that there were ghosts, even recounts personally experiencing sightings. And to a great extent, she took the teachings and warnings of the family’s Catholicism to heart.
As a teenager, her mother moved her and her siblings to another town along with her live-in partner, Jack. A life that was already fraught (her father and Jack had both lived with the family before the move) continued to be so in the new setting as Hilary worked to stay under the radar and quiet, if not invisible. Plagued by illness which became severely painful in her late teens, she spent years being misdiagnosed, mistreated, patronized, and ultimately operated on.
Having lost the ability to have children, she turned to writing. For anyone who has read Wolf Hall or Bringing Up the Bodies, award-winning novels in Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, it’s easy to see the seeds of those historical works here in her approach to life.
This is an unconventional and brilliantly written memoir. Those novels came much later. Hilary Mantel died in 2022 at the age of 70. Thanks to my friend Margaret for passing this book on to me. (~JWFarrington)
Note: Unattributed photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved)
