Retirement means more time to read.
One Blood, by Denene Millner. This book and author won the Townsend Prize for Fiction 2025 and therefore beat me as one of the other nine finalists. She deserved it for her dramatic and exotic style; mine feels pale in comparison. I have to admit, I have timed out on it when I got to the third main character's story. It starts with a Black midwife in 1950s/1960s Virginia, who is imprisoned for not lying on a birth certificate about a "white" baby's racial identity. The baby is clearly part Black, meaning either the family had Black ancestors or the mother had a lover (I'm not entirely sure about that). The midwife's daughter is brutally murdered by her lover and in this chaos, the granddaughter is spirited away to New York in a wooden box. (Why I am not sure--New York makes sense, because a relation lives there, but why she couldn't just be put on a train, I'm not sure. I imagine Black people could ride trains in Virginia then. Anyway, her life in New York is rather hellacious, since her relation wants nothing to do with her or any of her family in the South. The relation has started a new life teaching Black debutantes how to be cultured, and she has managed to work her way up in more upper middle-class Black society. One of the society sons takes a liking to the granddaughter but he also gets involved in race riots in Spring of 1968. The granddaughter of course gets pregnant and the relation takes the baby to an adoption "agency/orphanage" to dispose of it when it is born, having ignored the pregnancy. Then a new character takes over....and she also has had a wrecked, cruel life where she was raised in an orphanage and treated as disposable. It was hard to take, like Toni Morrison--it has a lot of the rawness of the Black experience in a society that enslaved it, then tried to ignore it. Of course, that is what literature is, a way to explore and expose life, so I will go back to it eventually, but for now I've got the picture. Some readers criticized that the story of the granddaughter was dropped after the baby (who is adopted by the third main character an her husband) is born.
Becoming Mrs. Lewis, by Patti Callahan. This is a very different book, and I doubt I would have picked it up. It was a gift, and a good read on plane trips to Baltimore and back. It did keep me reading for the most part, and the author was also a Townsend Finalist, so I felt a kinship. She is a Southern writer, so it is puzzling why she chose to write aboutt Joy Davidman, not exactly a Southern belle. (The book refers to her husband, who is the villain in the story as a Southerner, but he was born in Baltimore and raised in New York.) Essentially, this is about how C.S. Lewis became involved with his wife, Joy, through letters and then her "sabbatical" (that's really ironic there, if you miss my drift) in England.
The concept I had to keep fighting in reading the book is that it is not a biography. It uses biographical facts but is largely fiction. Even the letters between Clives Staples Lewis and Joy Davidman are fictions--something I didn't know until the end. Later in the book Callahan has Joy, from whose perspective the book is written, so it is first person, say that Lewis threw away his correspondence from other people. Is that true? I don't know. By the end, I came to doubt everything I read in the book, even things that could probably have been easily substantiated by real biographers. I am not necessarily motivated to do that at this moment, but I found her portrayal disturbing. Joy Davidman really comes off like a stalker of C.S. Lewis, who wiggles her way into his and his brother's lives by her innate charm and "vibrancy" (a word used a great deal).
In fact, there are several things that come up a great deal in the book because it is really just too long and therefore repetitive. She talks about how little money she has to live on over and over, but then says "I tied on the new scarf I splurged on" or "I arranged the new hat I just had to have."
So, it's a bit of a fantasy/hagiography. Since I do not worship at the temple of St. Clives, like some evangelicals, it was a beach read. Other readers on Amazon really dislike Joy Davidman. She does come across like a bit of a slut, which I thought unnecessary. She is obsessed with having sex with C.S. When he marries her for immigration purposes, it makes her even, well, amorous. And her leaving her children for six months when she knows her husband is such a villain is unforgivable, as portrayed here. So the narrator is unsympathetic in a lot of the pages.
Even though I do not beatify C.S.Lewis (and I wonder how that veneration came to be over the years), I do admire and appreciate his writing--brilliant, lucid prose that borrows from all manner of literature and knowledge of history. He could write sci-fi, children's stories, poetry, essays that push nonbelievers to consider Christ, and memoir that shake personal worlds. I just know too many of God's servants who have taken the different path, that of obscurity and great sacrifice, that I would rather be acknowledged rather than Lewis one more time. Like Betsey Stockton (look her up).
Til We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis. I have read this before, but it bears multiple readings (the other two so far do not). Callahan claims that--and she is correct--Joy Davidman helped him write it. It is based on Greek myth and is not a Christian allegory, like the space-novels; only in virtue perhaps, but not theology. It pays to read the greats sometimes.
I read two books by authors in Dickenson County, Virginia, about their community, and am digging into at times a third.
My other current one (the Lewis concurrent with it) is a YA novel The Story That Cannot Be Told, which is about life for a young girl in Romania prior to the 1989 Revolution. It uses folktales about "Cunning Ileana," which is used as the young girl's name. I am quite impressed by it.
I believe I have read about my other recent reads in an earlier post.
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