Miss Aldridge Regrets

 

Miss Aldridge Regrets by Louise Hare 368 pages

Lena Aldridge isn’t happy with her life. She thought she would be a big star by now. Instead, she’s singing in a dump in London’s Soho. Her father, Alfie, just died, and her married lover has left her. She’s lucky to have the gig she has, mostly thanks to her best friend, Maggie, whose husband, Tommy Scarsdale, owns the joint.

But tonight isn’t Tommy’s night. He dies right in front of the stage, right in the middle of Lena’s set. This isn’t the first murder that has happened, which make Lena skittish.

A stranger appears, saying that his boss owes Alfie a favor. He offers Lena a chance to star on Broadway and a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary. Lena weighs her options, and figuring she has nothing to lose, she jumps at the opportunity.

Author Hare does a fabulous job in creating the period details and the luxuries Lena enjoyed on the ship. Luxuries she has never known in her twenty-six years. Heck, she even had to borrow clothes from Maggie just to fit in.

On Lena’s first night, she learns that her tablemates are the Abernathy’s. Each member of the family is stereotypical of their role. It got old quick! It’s more important than ever the Lena keeps her mixed-race identity a secret.

Wandering around the ship in search of what Lena isn’t quite sure. She meets one of the bandleaders, Will. There is mutual attraction, but Lena must be very, very careful. Will is African American, and mixed couples in 1936 are exactly welcome in either race. Lena believes that the Abernathy’s would rather have her thrown overboard as shark food rather than sit at the same table with her.

When the Abernathy patriarch dies, murdered it seems, Lena is more frightened than ever.

“Miss Aldridge Regrets” is hailed as being an Agatha-Christie like murder mystery. I don’t see t. To me the pace was slow, tension was low, and the characters were so stereotypical, Christie would be embarrassed. I did love the period details and that pushes “Miss Aldridge Regrets” to 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

Yellow Wife

Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson  288 pages

I came of age when the Old South was in its final death throes, and I was no stranger to the horror stories of slavery. This well-researched, oftentimes hard to read, story evokes those stories that I heard as a kid.

Pheby Delores Brown lives on the Bell Plantation in Virginia with her mother, Ruth.  Sired by Master Jacob, he has promised Ruth that Pheby would be educated and freed on her eighteenth birthday. Pheby believes that she will have a good life and is in love with one of the other slaves, Essex Henry. But after her mother dies and Jacob is away traveling on business, Jacob’s wife, Miss Delphina, decides that the uppity young woman must learn that she is in charge.

Delphina sells Pheby to a notorious slave trader, Rubin Lapier, who reigns over Devil’s Half Acre, an infamous jail in Richmond where slaves are taken to be sold or to have their spirits broken. The beatings and whippings, described in minute detail, some of the slaves must endure is the stuff of nightmares. After a torturous walk from the Bell Plantation in Charles City to Richmond, Pheby is chosen by Rubin to be his mistress.

Pheby is treated better than most as Rubin sets her up with sewing clothes for the incoming slaves, especially the ones who he puts to work as prostitutes. Rubin wastes no time in making Pheby is mistress. As the year go by, Pheby longs for the promises of education and freedom that were denied her and she longs for her one true love, Essex.

By the time Essex is brought to the jail, Pheby has had several children with Rubin; Children he dotes on. They are raised in his home where Pheby now lives and sleeps in a bedroom across the hall from Rubin. He even introduces her as the the Mistress of the Jail.

But Pheby cannot forget the man who has her heart, and she does whatever she can to make things better for him.

Author Johnson does not shy away from the realities of slavery, from the fears of being sold to harsher masters, from the fear of the whip and from the fear of familial separation that haunt a slave’s every waking and sleeping minute.

This is not an easy book to read. I swear as I read, I could hear the crack of the whip, the screams as flesh is torn open.

I was disappointed in the ending. It seemed like Johnson got tired of writing and just wound it up. I was planning on giving Yellow Wife 6 out of 5 stars, but the ending forced me to lower its rating to 5 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.