We Hope for Better Things

We Hope for Better Things by Erin Bartels    400 pages

As a reader and a writer, I’m always looking for compelling reads that linger long after I’ve turned the last page. Erin Bartels’s debut novel, “We Hope for Better Things,” is such a novel. Bartels startles with her ability to take three separate timelines and weave them into one excellent story.

The story lines cover contemporary times, 1960s Detroit and Civil War-era Detroit outskirts. At the heart of each plot is forbidden love, one of the most that forbidden loves of all times, between whites and blacks. There are also the stories of race relations of each time period that could easily overpower the story, but Bartels uses her skill to not let that happen.

The main protagonist is journalist Elizabeth Balsam, who works for the scandalous rag, the “Free Press.” She is about to break a story that will have major repercussions in Detroit’s political powerhouse. Before that happens, Elizabeth has been contacted by a man who claims to have a box of photos and a camera that belongs to her family. Someone she has never heard of.

Elizabeth, who loves a good story, rather reluctantly agrees to take the camera, and if she can contact the woman named Nora, and if she wants the, she’ll arrange to have the photos returned.

Nora is Elizabeth’s great-aunt on her father’s side. Her sister knows of her as does a cousin, Barb, that is also a stranger. In contacting Barb, now unemployed, Elizabeth has somehow managed to agree to see if old Aunt Nora is still fit to live alone. Elizabeth goes to visit Nora, and there she begins to learn her family history, a history that is foreign to her, and one that she participates in.

Sometimes the timelines between the contemporary story and the 1960s story was a little confusing. Nora is such a major character in those periods that it threw me off a tad when the story switched, although Bartels clearly delineates each section.

 “We Hope for Better Things” is a wonderful read, and it receives 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

Shooting Lincoln: Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and the Race to Photograph the Story of the Century

Shooting Lincoln: Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and the Race to Photograph the Story of the Century by Nicholas J. C. Pistor   272 pages

I distinctly remember when I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I had to do a report on Civil War-era photographer Mathew Brady. I remember cutting pictures from a “National Geographic” to illustrate it, and my cousin helping me type it. The pictures and process were so much different than how the nightly news covered the Vietnam War.

It seems that at that time, Brady was getting credit for most of the indelible pictures that we know of today from that time period. Over the years,  it seems that Brady started getting less and less credit as more research came to illuminate Alexander Gardner, once a student of Brady’s, was the real mastermind behind those stirring photographs.

In this book, author Pistor uncovers the true nature of the men’s professional abilities. I was a little taken aback to learn how Gardner posed many of the battle scenes. Given the 1860s process of developing the glass-plate negatives, it’s no wonder that the image that we see are taken after days or even weeks after the battles. It was also a disconcerting to learn that Gardner posed the bodies for the utmost affect.

Brady was known mostly as a portraitist. He photographed the celebrities of the day and made them available to the public to buy and trade (much like we think of baseball cards today). And the public loved them. Learning how bad Brady’s eyesight was made me wonder how he was able to produce any worthwhile photographs.

Gardner, on the other hand, was a robust Scot immigrant who had studied and worked with Brady. Gardner made history when he was the only photographer allowed to photograph the Lincoln assassination conspirators and the only one allowed to record their execution. Also, Gardner was the man behind the cloth of the last photograph take of President Abraham Lincoln (February 1865).

The book’s timeframe flowed well, centering on the time from 1851 to Summer 1865, with an Epilogue dating 1875. The action during each chapter was rather choppy, as author Pistor had a tendency to want to go back in time to explain something.  All in all, it was a good read.

“Shooting Lincoln: Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and the Race to Photograph the Story of the Century ” receives 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

The Murder of Willie Lincoln

The Murder of Willie Lincoln by Burt Solomon    304 pages

Author Burt Solomon transports readers back to Washington City in 1862. Abraham Lincoln is the president; America is embattled in a great Civil War. The Lincoln family is devastated when their middle surviving son, William Wallace, better known as Willie, dies from typhoid fever. Students of the Lincolns can with confidence that neither Abe nor his wife Mary is ever the same.

Lincoln is so beside himself with grief, and given the political climate of the time, he begins to wonder how little Willie could have died. He asks his personal secretary, John Hay, to discreetly look into Willie’s death, just to make sure that he didn’t suffer at another’s hands.

This is not a fast read; it wasn’t a page-turner for me. However, what I did find riveting what the details. Solomon has done an excellent job in recreating the period so that readers may feel they have traveled to the 1860s.

Right before the ending was revealed, Hay made his case for Willie’s death at the hands of a well-known traitor. The fact that this person had not been seen before in the storyline was a little disconcerting, but it’s fiction, so I was willing to let it slide. But as Hay further drew his net, an settled on a completely different person, I found it unrealistic. The motive makes sense, but Solomon isn’t able to make a strong case.

The Murder of Willie Lincoln receives 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

Murder in the Lincoln White House

Murder in the Lincoln White House by C. M. Gleason   304 pages

I’m a historical fiction buff, especially for the Civil War era and doubly for anything about the Lincolns. It was with bated breath that I opened the cover of this first book in the Adam Quinn series. 

The time is March 4, 1861, Lincoln’s first inauguration. The day has gone rather smoothly…a bomb threat at Lincoln’s podium was thwarted, but otherwise it’s been a peaceful day. Now it’s almost 11 p.m. and the Lincoln’s have…finally…made an appearance at the Inaugural Ball.

While Abe and his beloved Mary promenade around the room, a body is discovered in one of the side rooms. There isn’t much blood, but Custer Billings is dead, apparently stabbed. When Abe learns of what has happened he asks his closest friend, Joshua Speed’s, nephew, Adam, to handle the case.  

Adam has no background in detective work. In fact he has just returned from the Kansas Territory. He accepts the challenge and the search for the killer begins.

Author Colleen Gleason, writer of more than twenty books, does an excellent job in steeping the reader in the 1860s culture, politics and ambiance of Washington, D.C. The Ball is held in a thrown together building, erected especially for the occasion. Planks cover the mud outside. The half-finished Capitol Building looms in the background. I felt as if I was at the ball with the description of the dresses, the dances, the men’s fashions. But often Gleason went on too long. She used the same description of the dresses several times, and repeated many images. 

Given the tenseness of the times, there is no tension in Murder in the Lincoln White House. Most of the time we see Adam scurrying from place to place, trying to enlist the help of anyone he can to solve the murder, picking up a small clue here and there and berating the ones he does have to death. As the novel takes place over three-four days, that makes the plot seem to move even slower.

I want to give this disappointing novel 2 stars, but the author's research coerced me into giving it 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.