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More Tudor binging. When in need of comfort, it’s one of the things I like to read the most.

Diane Haeger’s The Secret Bride is a novel about the romance between Mary Tudor, the younger sister of Henry VIII, and Charles Brandon, a handsome and ambitious young courtier who, since childhood, had been the young King’s companion and close friend - inasmuch as Henry actually was capable of friendship.

The novel is full of rich detail about the social life of the Tudor court during the days when Henry was young, still deeply attached to his wife Katherine of Aragon, and ambitious to make England a major player on the European political stage. The young Mary, betrothed since childhood to the Prince of Castile, is exploring life as fully as she can while she waits to be taken off and finally married to a strange man in a foreign country. Brandon is the ambitious darling of the court. Married several times, into money and families of rank, he hopes to become a power in the country, rising above his commoner roots into the ranks of nobility.

But slowly, even knowing that the odds are vast that they can never be together, Brandon and Mary nonetheless fall in love. Politics eventually pits and end to the betrothal with the prince of Castile, but Henry almost immediately arranges a marriage between Mary and the sick and aging King of France, Louis XII. Mary begs of Henry a promise - that if she marries Louis without complaint, when she is a widow, she will be allowed to remarry as she pleases. Henry agrees - but though she believes him, the reader knows full well he says it only to get her to go without causing a fuss he’ll have to deal with.

In addition to portraying the love story between Mary and Brandon, the novel gives us a close look at how Henry himself changes from a generous young boy to a ruthless and selfish king. The disappointments of his marriage with Katherine, the long series of miscarriages and stillbirths, are seen as part of the process that sours Henry, along with the machinations of the powerful courtiers around him - Buckingham, Norfolk, Wolsey - making him suspicious, determined to have what he wants and capable of lying to himself and others to achieve it.

But through the politics of the English and French courts, and Henry’s anger, Mary and Brandon’s love finally wins out, and though their life together lacks both the wealth and position she was raised to and he coveted for much of his life, the novel suggests, as does history, that they were happy.

Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars takes place in an world that was much like our own, until a massive catastrophe - the fall to earth off the coast of the US of a meteorite last enough to precipitate an extinction level event (ELE) - changes everything. In this iteration of our world, the calculations that show the inevitable changes in climate that will make the planet uninhabitable within decades are accepted as scientific fact by the world’s political leaders, who decide upon a two-pronged approach - to try to ameliorate the effects of the catastrophe to save life in earth, and to colonise the solar system so that if necessary, humanity will have another home.

It’s lucky, in a way, that this catastrophe falls during the early post-war period, when science was respected and economies were still capable of being mobilised to meet goals. If Kowal had chosen to set such a novel today, I suspect no such response to a global catastrophe would have seemed realistic - but this was still the era of potential.

The narrative is focused on Elma Wexler, a former WASP - one of the Women Airforce Service Pilots who, as civilian pilots attached to the military, ferried airplanes wherever needed, including to the front, during the Second World War. Elma, now retired, and her husband, Nathaniel York, a scientist with the Manhattan Project during the war, and later with the fledgling American space program, survived the concussive wave that destroyed most of the east coast, and Nathaniel’s colleagues at Langley, by accident - they were on vacation in the Poconos, having flown out in Elma’s little Cessna - and were able to fly west out of the circle of destruction to reach an air force base that would temporarily become the centre of the immediate response to the meteorite fall.

It is Elma, who is not only a pilot but a calculator - one of the women whose mathematical skills enabled the pre-computer space program to determine how to get an object into orbit and bring it home, whose calculations prove that humanity is facing an ELE. Both Nathaniel and Elma become part of the international effort to reach space, but Elma has a secret goal - to be one of the astronauts that goes into space.

If you’ve read the original novelette that sparked the series, Lady Astronaut of Mars, you know what happens, in the broadest of strokes, in both the race to colonise the system and Elma’s personal quest to become an astronaut. But that doesn’t change the reader’s absorption in the details of the process here, told over the years as it happens.

But while Kowal tells us the story of a successful space program, and the frustrations of a fully qualified woman locked out of her dream of going into space, Kowal also gives us a look at the society of 1950s America that does not flinch from uncomfortable truths. Elma and her husband Nathaniel are Jewish; there are hints of anti-semitism, and echoes, in the deaths surrounding the fall of the meteor, of the devastating losses of the Holocaust. There is ample evidence of the high degree of segregation and the entrenched racism of the time, in everything from the choices made during the post-cataclysmic evacuation not to look for survivors in black neighbourhoods, to the bitterness of black women pilots, who can’t even hope, as Elma does, that they could get anywhere near the astronaut training program. Kowal does not forget the dynamics of the society she’s chosen to place her break in history within.

The novel also deals sensitively with disability. Elma has an anxiety disorder, brought on by the highly pressured and misogynistic atmosphere she faced as an early entrant - and a female ine at that - into a prestigious math and physics program at university. The disorder surfaces when she must take on public relations tasks as a part of her quest to open the astronaut corps to women, and she begins taking sedatives to deal with it - a choice that will jeopardise her position when women are ultimately allowed into astronaut training and she is one of the successful candidates.

The second of Kowal’s “Lady Astronaut” novels, The Fated Sky, takes up a few years after the first novel ends. Having made it to the Moon, and established the beginnings of a colony there, the next goal in the space program is Mars. The extreme climate changes triggered by the Meteor fall are beginning to have demonstrable effects - the temperature is rising, the cloud cover remains thick, adding to the greenhouse effect, and while it is possible that not all the earth will become uninhabitable, still, the need to provide a ew home for humanity is very real, and the Moon is not an ideal location for a self-sustaining colony. But not everyone is convinced that the space program is necessary, and protest is growing, especially among marginalised populations - specifically, in America, black people, who know that if the earth is left behind, they will be too.

Elma has been spending half her time piloting shuttle rockets between colonies on the moon, and half her time on Earth. On one of Elma’s return trips, the rocket is highjacked on landing by a group of black activists protesting the money spent on space that could be better spent on improving conditions on earth. Elma, using her celebrity status as the “lady astronaut” - even though there are a number of female astronauts by now - persuades the activists to release all the other hostages, who are suffering from gravity sickness, which she manages to pass off to the activists as potentially infectious ‘space germs.’ Once again, the lady astronaut makes the news.

To counteract adverse publicity and shore up faltering financial support, Elma is asked to join the the first Mars mission. She accepts, not realising that another astronaut who has been training for the mission with the other crew fir months is being pulled to make room for her. The atmosphere of the mission is compromised from the minute she arrives, and it dies not get any better when the government, suspecting a conspiracy behind the recent highjacking, places pressure on the two black member of the Mars crew, one of whom had been, like Elma, on the rocket when it was taken.

As the novel progresses, we begin to see more and more clearly that Elma, who we are primed by literary traditions to see as the hero, is actually a very flawed character, naive and thoughtless, the perfect example of the white liberal who wants to do the right things, but never actually thinks from any point of view save her own, and ends up making matters worse until she learns to sit back and let those most directly affected by the injustices that anger her take the lead in strategising. She has no idea of how she appears to others, being wrapped up in her own view of herself as both victim and saviour. But the stresses of the journey to Mars become a journey to maturity for her, and by the end of the novel, when she and a handful of other colonists stand on Mars, we feel that she has become something even more important than a hero - a woman who has fulfilled her dreams, and come to know herself in the process.

These are fascinating books, both for their examination of a path to the stars that we might once have followed, and for their uncompromising look at the deep flaws in our society which really have not changed much since the days in which the book is set. We’ve lost the stars, but at the same time, we’ve done little to fix what we have here on earth. It’s this that makes these books a poignant illustration of what might have been.

But at the same time, these are inspiring novels about women in science, and women in space, and my God, I needed to read something like this just now.

Madeline Miler’s second novel, Circe, is the story of a legend, an iconic image of the eternal and dangerous woman, seductress, sorceress, as she might have been behind the stories men have told of her. This is Circe as she might have seen herself.

As in her first novel, The Song of Achilles, Miller takes the myths and legends of Greece as truth within the world she writes about. And so Circe introduces herself as the child of a naiad, Perse, and the Titan Helios - divine, one of a thousand lesser nature goddesses. Her childhood was not happy. She, like her siblings, and sometimes her mother, lived in the great underground palace of the sun god Helios, where he returns each night after riding across the sky. She was not, like her older full siblings, or her many half-siblings, other children of the sun, a bright and beautiful goddess, nor was she graceful and fluid like her many, many cousins, the daughters of other naiads. She was sharp faced, and asked strange questions, and was taunted by the others, despite the love her father showed her.

But as time after time wears on, Circe and her brothers and sister discover their true nature. They do not have the powers of the gods, but they are all pharmakia, witches - they have the ability to draw power from plants and use it, as the gods use the power that flows through their own bodies, to work miracles. The Olympians are concerned; they forbid Helios and Perse from having any more children.

The four witch children are contained. Pasiphaë is married off to one of Zeus’ demi-divine children, King Minos, and they torment each other bitterly, until eventually Pasiphaë gives birth to the Minotaur and the eventual fate of Minos and his kingdom at the hands of Theseus is sealed. Perses, the oldest brother, takes his exotic tastes and cruelties and settles in far-off Asia, far away from the area the Olympian gods frequent. The youngest, Aeëtes, has his own kingdom, which he rarely keaves - until his rebellious daughter Medea runs away with the hero Jason, her father’s golden fkeece, and the blood of her brother on her hands.

Because she is rebellious, and doesn’t play the game properly, because she has used her gifts, the strongest of which is transformation, to change the nymph Scylla into a monster, Circe is exiled, confined to the small island of Aiaia. Though she may not leave, except on rare occasions granted by Zeus, others may come to her. And here she slowly learns the principles of herbcraft, learning the extent of her magic.

At first the god Hermes visits, mostly from curiosity. He keeps her informed about the things that have happened in the world of gods and men, and he becomes her lover.

Later various demigods and minor immortals send their wayward daughters and other women to her island as a punishment, so that she is no longer alone, but surrounded by angry and frustrated young immortals. And sometimes, humans come to the island. The first, seeing in her only a woman among other women, alone without the protection of a man, rape her, as so many nymphs in Greek legend are raped by men and gods. But in her agony, she transforms them into swine, and thus begins the long train of sailors who cast up on her shores. Some are good men, lost on the sea - these leave unharmed, after comfort, food and rest. But most remain as the animals they are, living and dying on Circe’s island.

And then comes Odysseus, as foretold. His men transgress, but he himself, warned and protected by Hermes, avoids the traps, and wins both the freedom of his men, and the friendship of Circe. He stays for several years, becoming her lover - but he never forgets his wife and family, his beloved Penelope waiting for him.

The story of Circe as it unfolds here is woven together from many myths and sources, but it makes a satisfying whole, a take about the limitations of godhood and the triumphs of becoming human.

Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles is a love story, between two young men growing up together, but of entirely different backgrounds and fates. It is simply told, and it is beautiful.

Achilles is a young hero, son of a king and a goddess, gifted with beauty, strength, speed, and all the talents a man could desire. He has never been ignored, never had his wishes set aside. Only his sweetness of character - another gift - keeps him from being a spoiled young brat.

Patroclus is also the son of a king, but his mother was called simple, and his father despised both her and the weak and untalented son she bore him. He is mocked by other boys, fails at arms training and other skills that every young Greek prince should know. When he accidentally kills another boy who is bullying him, he is exiled - to the court of Peleus, Achilles’ father.

Miller tells her tale through the voice of Patroclus, how Achilles came to choose him among all the young men fostered at Peleus’ court as his companion, of the anger of his mother, the great sea-nymph Thetis, at Achilles’s affection for a mere mortal, the years spent learning from the centaur Chiron, and the Trojan war. All the tales are here - the prophecies, the hiding of Achilles among the maidens and Odysseus’ strategem to lure him out, the stories of the Trojan war, from the bloody sacrifice of Iphigenia that brought the winds to the Achaean sails to the bitter end of the lovers’ story.

Miller treats the worldview of the ancient Greeks - their gods, their legends, their concept of honour - with respect, making the old stories real, giving humanity to the heroes and their conflicts with each other and their enemies beneath the walls of Troy. It’s a new telling of an ancient story, by a master storyteller.

One of the few novels about Katherine Howard in print is Diane Haegar’s The Queen’s Mistake. Having recently gone on a binge read about some of Henry VIII’s other wives, but never having read anything written about Katherine Howard other than some of the history books that cover all of the wives, I decided to find whatever I could about Katherine and see how at least one author has decided to interpret the known facts.

Most historians seem to agree that, while Katherine was a Howard and thus a member of a powerful family, she herself was not seem as an important or valuable member of that house until Henry VIII began to show his displeasure at being married to Anne of Cleves. Seeing another chance to control the king through his women, the Earl of Norfolk, head of the Howard family, uncle of Henry’s second queen Anne Boleyn, went looking among the various young women of the family in the hopes that they might find someone pretty enough to catch the king’s eye. The prospective mistress, perhaps bribe, he found was Katherine.

Katherine’s father was a younger Howard son among 21 children, and had no inherited wealth or lands. Her mother died when she was five, having borne six children to Katherine’s father and five to a previous husband. The children were parceled out as wards to various relatives; her father remarried and took a position at Calais.

Katherine was given into the care of her father’s stepmother, the Dowager Countess, who had a rather large number of poor relations and young female wards and attendants and seemed rather lax in watching over and educating them. By courtly standards, Katherine was poorly educated. What she had, however, was beauty. And a history to be hidden.

Looked at through modern sensibilities, Katherine was the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her music teacher, Henry Maddox, when she was around 13, and was later seduced at 15 by an older man, Francis Dereham, her guardian’s secretary, with whom she may have entered into a precontract to marry - witnesses at her trial agreed that they called each other husband and wife, and were fully sexually intimate. In Tudor times, a girl of 13 might be seen as old enough to marry, and a girl of 15 would be deemed capable of consent, so these sexual experiences were generally seen as proof of her unchaste character and not manipulation or abuse of a young girl by older men.

She, however insisted that she had not consented to either. Ironically, had she agreed that she had been precontracted to Dereham, she might have lived - that would have rendered her marriage to the king null and void, and made the charge of adultery with Thomas Culpepper irrelevant, at least as far as the king was concerned.

Interpretations of Katherine’s character and behaviour tend to be connected to how her early sexual experiences are viewed. Those who see her as the victim of older men tend to see her as a tragic figure, one who perhaps, as victims of sexual abuse often can be, was too prone to interpret sex as love, and to seek sex inappropriately because that’s what she was used to. Those who blame her for her early experience see her as deceitful, deliberately unfaithful, hedonistic and immoral. We’ll likely never know, as she left very little behind to tell us who she was, beyond her testimony and confession. She was barely 18 when she died.

Diane Haeger has resisted taking the easy way out, of presenting Katherine as all victim or all whore. Instead, she shows us a young girl bereft of love and affection at an early age, who takes what she can get, but doesn’t trust that what she is given is honest. In her own mind, is she seducer or seduced? A bit of both. The men who claim her while she is still a young girl at the Dowager Countess’s estate of Horsham as a mere girl at least give her a sense of being wanted, and with Dereham, to some extent, Haeger has her return his affection. But she doesn’t take his protestations of wanting to marry her seriously, especially once her uncle Norfolk announces his plans to bring her to court. She hopes to reach higher than a mere secretary, a servant - she dreams of attracting the attention of a nobleman. The thought that she might capture the king is not really in her mind. And Haeger proposes the possibility that the liaisons were not just known of, but arranged by the Dowager Countess as part of a plan to turn Katherine into a courtesan, the perfect mistress. It’s an interesting idea, and allows her to present Katherine as a wanton - she gives her sexual favours freely and carelessly once she arrives at court - and still maintain her as essentially a victim. If she was programmed to respond sexually to any man who showed her interest or affection, then it’s arguably not wholly her fault if she did succumb to attention, even love, from Culpepper.

Once it becomes clear to her that the king desires her, poor Katherine is trapped. Her family is pressuring her to acquiesce to his wishes, and the blackmailers - servants from her former life at Horsham who know all about Maddox and Dereham - have begun to demand favours and positions at court. Her uncle Norfolk and the Dowager Countess have both assured the king of her virginity, even though both know of her past, and that she is now having an affair with Culpepper. The only way out now would be to tell the truth, but that would put Culpepper beyond her reach forever. And so the tragedy move inexorably towards its end.

I liked this interpretation of Katherine as a young woman trapped and betrayed by almost everyone who should have taken care of her, from her early days as an orphaned and penniless unwanted relative to the pawn of powerful forces beyond her control - her family’s ambition, the king’s desires, the intrigues over religion that saw poor Katherine not as a girl in above her head, but a possible resurgence for the Catholic faith. She never had a chance, and all she really did wrong was take what comfort she could from perhaps the only person who truly saw her, cared for her, loved her.

The second book of Elizabeth Fremantle’s Tudor trilogy, Sisters of Treason, is based on the lives of Katherine and Mary Grey, sisters of the Lady Jane Grey, the nine-days queen who was named heir to the throne after the death of Edward VI In defiance of Henry’s Act of Succession. It is suspected that Edward was pressured bypass both his sisters to name Jane because his Protestant Council feared Mary Tudor’s fanatic Catholicism, and because of the taint of bastardy adhering to the Protestant Elizabeth.

It is one if history’s ironies that, other than Henry’s one son, all the major Tudor heirs to his throne were female. Best known, of course, were the daughters of Henry, Mary and Elizabeth. The next potential heirs in strict order of birthright, were the children of his older sister Margaret, married first to the Scottish king James IV and then, after his death, to Archibald Douglas, the Earl of Angus. However, Margaret’s children by James were heirs of the Stuart line in Scotland, and, along with her daughter, Margaret Douglas were excluded from the line of succession by Henry VIII - though it would be an heir of this line, James VI, son of Mary Queen of Scots and Margaret Douglas’s son Henry Darnley, who would eventually come to the English throne after the death of Elizabeth. Next were the children of Henry’s younger sister, Mary. Mary was briefly Queen of France, but had no children from that marriage. Her second marriage to Charles Brandon produce two daughters who lived to adulthood, Frances, the mother of Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey, and Eleanor, the mother of Margaret Clifford. All the Tudor heirs, all women.

As history records, Mary defeated the Protestant nobles who supported Jane Grey, and took the throne. Though she intended at first to spare her young cousin’s life, one of the unofficial conditions of her marriage to Phillip of Spain was the elimination of the Protestant threat to the throne, and after many months in the Tower, Jane Grey was executed.

Her sisters, Katherine and Mary, would be the centre of suspicion during Mary’s reign, for there was always the fear that any ambitious man might seek to claim the throne through a marriage to either of them - though Mary, born with a spinal deformity and dwarfism, would be the less desirable of the sisters. And for Elizabeth, they were also a lingering threat, for their line was untouched by the scandal of Anne Boleyn’s conviction of adultery and treason, and the taint of illegitimacy.

The novel begins with a brief scene depicting Jane Grey’s last moments, and then moves forward to Mary Tudor’s marriage to Phillip of Spain. Fremantle has chosen to tell the stories of the Grey sisters in the first person, in alternating sections, with an additional voice from Levina, a Flemish artist who is a friend of Frances Grey, a secret Protestant, and a protégée of the Queen, told in third person. (Levina Teerlinc was a real woman, and the official Court miniaturist during the reigns of Edward VI and Mary Tudor, and the first part of Elizabeth’s reign. She replaced Hans Holbein in the position, which is an indication of her talent and skill.) The voices of the sisters are quite distinct. Mary is intelligent, questioning, observant, well aware of her circumstances, and of the importance if keeping quiet and drawing little attention to herself. Katherine is more emotional, sentimental, light-hearted, vain, perhaps even a touch shallow and careless in comparison to her sister Mary.

Early in Mary’s reign, Frances Grey, widowed by the execution of her rebellious husband, is granted permission to retire from court and marry her groom - a love match that also renders her safe from those who would try to marry her fir her claim on the throne. Katherine, however, must remain at court under the close eye of the Queen, and Mary, who is seen by the Queen as partway between servant and pet, spends as much time as possible at her mother’s estate, but is often called to court. Levina, living in London and frequently commissioned to work of portraits at court, trues to keep a motherly eye on the Grey sisters. As a secret Protestant with Continental connections, she collects accounts of Queen Mary’s persecution of Protestants, draws pictures of the burnings, and smuggles them out of the country for circulation in the Protestant states.

When Elizabeth comes to the throne, the Grey sisters are not at first welcome at court, but eventually, in Mary’s case after the death of their mother Frances, they become maids of honour. Katherine uses her position at court to engage in a secret relationship with Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford.

As Fremantle presents the relationship, it is all love and romance on Katherine’s side, but Hertford’s affection is ckearly tinged with ambition, in the expectation that if Elizabeth has no children, Katherine and her heirs will be next in line fir the throne. Which is of course why Elizabeth would never have consented fir Katherine to marry such a powerful and ambitious man, as Hertfort likely knew.

They are quietly married without seeking the permission of the Queen - a violation of the Act of Succession, as Katherine is Elizabeth’s heir - but when the alliance is discovered, Katherine, now pregnant, is sent to the Tower. Hertford, who had been sent to Europe on a diplomatic mission, is imprisoned as well once he returns. Because the only witness to the marriage, Hertford’s sister, has died, and the priest cannot be found, the legitimacy of their marriage, and their children, is denied.

The Tower Warden takes pity on them, and Hertford is allowed to visit Katherine in secret, but when she becomes pregnant again, the Tower personnel are changed, and as far as is known, they never saw each other again. After a few years, both were placed under house arrest - in separate counties - and Katherine’s sanity slips away. Accounts of her behaviour and condition at her death are consistent with the state of delusional anorexia that Fremantle portrays.

Meanwhile, Mary, still at court, has firmed an attachment with Thomas Keyes, a commoner and a sergeant at arms in the Queen’s court, and marries him secretly, believing that the Queen will allow it because she has married beneath her, and is unlikely to have children due to her deformity. But the Queen is unforgiving. Mary is sent into house arrest, and Keyes is forced into the Navy. They never see each other again, although When Keyes, who is older than Mary, dies, she is freed to live as she chooses, and lives quietly away from court until her death.

While the ultimately tragic story of the Grey sisters is the main focus of the novel, I am delighted to see Levina Teerlinc playing such a major role. Because she did not sign her work, she was all but forgotten as a significant artist of the time, despite the documentary evidence of her employment at court, from records of her annual stipend (first granted by Henry VIII and continuing until her death) to letters and registries of gifts to the Queen mentioning specific commissions. It’s very refreshing to see the accomplishments of such a woman being made part of the literature that surrounds the Tudors.

The final book in Elizabeth Fremantle’s Tudor trilogy, Watch the Lady, features a woman who was both prominent and notorious in her own time, but mostly forgotten today - Penelope Devereux. Most of those familiar with Elizabethan England will be well aware of her younger brother, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, favourite of the aging Queen Elizabeth and, ultimately, traitor. Penelope, however, was in her own way just as dashing, just as brilliant, and just as dangerous.

The Devereux siblings were the children of Lettice Knollys, cousin to the Queen, and her first husband, Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex. Lettice was the daughter of Catherine Carey, herself the daughter of Henry VIII’s mistress Mary Boleyn and often thought to be the unacknowledged daughter of the king. Lettice is said to have looked very much like the Queen, and their relationship while Lettice was at court is usually portrayed as something of a rivalry. However, when Elizabeth’s favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, entered into a secret marriage with her following the death of her first husband, she was exiled from court, and Elizabeth took much care in seeing that Robert was kept at and away from Lettice as much as possible.

Penelope came to court as a maid of honour to Elizabeth when she was 18, and her bold manner won her favour with the queen. She was much admired at court for her beauty, her musical ability and her dancing, as well as her lively manner. The poet and courtier Philip Sidney, nephew and at ine time heir presumptive of Robert Dudley, wrote the famous sonnet sequence Stella and Astrophel about her. There had been discussion of a marriage between Penelope and Sidney when the two were young, but ironically, the birth of Penelope’s half-brother to Leicester and Lettice ended Sidney’s hopes of inheriting money and titles, and the plan was dropped. Both Sidney and Penelope would marry others, and it is unknown if the sonnets were just the result of poetical fancy, or if they actually had an affair.

Fremantle begins her novel with Penelope’s arrival at court and establishment as a favourite of the Queen. Not long after her arrival, she was married, against her will, to Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick. They had a spectacularly bad marriage; Penelope was flagrantly unfaithful with at least one lover, Sir Charles Blount, and other than spending enough time with him to produce seven children, lived a relatively independent life, which he supported financially. Rich was unusually tolerant for this era, and Fremantle speculates that he was a hidden homosexual, which Penelope promised to keep secret as long as he allowed her to live freely.

Fremantle gives Penelope a significant role in the shaping of her brother Essex’s rise to power, and in the intrigues that ultimately led to his execution. It is Penelope who advises him, trues to talk him out if the worst excesses if his pride, intercedes with the Queen when she can, and helps organise his intelligence network. It is Penelope who engages in a battle of influence at court, her opponent the wily young Robert Cecil, who succeeded his father to the position of the Queen’s chief advisor. And it is Penelope who forges a connection with James of Scotland, though by the time James does come to the throne, Essex is no longer living and it is Penelope alone who benefits from the long secret alliance.

It’s a fascinating portrait of a woman who, rather like Elizabeth herself, lived her own life in a world not yet ready for strong and independent women. She used every possible weapon to achieve her goals - intelligence, beauty and sexuality - and appears to have lived life on her own terms until the end.

I also enjoyed some of the little things buried in the story. Fremantle has some literary fun, for the sharp-eyed - at one point she has Cecil regretting the recent murder in Deptford disguised of one of his chief spies. As most Elizabethan aficionados know, Christopher Marlowe was thought to be a spy for the Queen, and died in a barfight in Deptford. And there’s a scene where a bold young actor, performing at a house party at Essex’s estate, parodies the style of one of Sidney’s Stella sonnets, with one of his own - the poem is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, “My Mistress’ Eyes.”

Both of these novels are well worth the reading, not just for the stories of the remarkable women who are the protagonists, but also for their insights into life for a woman at court, and how Queen Elizabeth managed the many noble men and women who made up her court.

I seem to be having another of my Tudor binges. It is my favourite period of English history, and having just recently finished the excellent cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn by Susan Bardo, I find myself looking through my massive TBR list for historical fiction set in the Tudor era. As it turned out, I was in a mood for more of the tempestuous reign of Henry VIII and the ways his wives have been interpreted. There’s a lot out there about Katherine of Aragon, and of course the enigmatic and iconic Anne, buy his other wives have seemed to get less attention - though I’m seeing more about, and have in my TBR pile, a few new histories of, Katherine Parr. Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard, though, don’t appear to be inspiring figures fir historical fiction - especially poor Katherine. I have’t anything that focuses on her in my library, fiction or history. But I do have some treatments of the other three later wives.

My eye first fell on Margaret Campbell Barnes’ My Lady of Cleves, a novel about the often neglected fourth wife of Henry VIII, and really, the only one who managed a good life post-Henry. To be sure, Katherine Parr survived Henry, but came to a sad end not too long afterward, marrying Thomas Seymour, who would engage in a concerted attempt to seduce her step-daughter Elizabeth under her very nose, and leave her to due alone of post-partum fever. Anne of Cleves not only got out alive, but she remained on good terms with her difficult former husband, wrangled a decent financial settlement out of him, and had a comfortable and relatively long life. Without the passion, tragedy and death associated with most of his other queens, Anne’s story of life with Henry is often overlooked. But she’s one of my favourites, because she was a survivor.

Margaret Campbell Barnes gives us a picture of the Princessof Cleves that is both sympathetic and engaging. Her Anne is a woman who loves little things, is kind and generous, but knows herself to be too tall, large-boned and plain of face, much less attractive than her married older sister Sybille, or her younger, pretty Amelia. She is shocked when Hans Holbein paints her as an attractive woman, and surprised when Henry chooses her rather than Amelia to be his wife.

But on meeting her, Henry is not pleased - he calls her a Flemish mare - and though he goes through with the marriage, his eye is already in the pretty little Howard girl newly arrived Court, and his mind on how to get rid of Anne. Perhaps because she is, after all, a foreign princess, perhaps because she has become beloved of the people of London, perhaps because of her motherly care of his three motherless children, he offers her the option of a quite divorce on grounds of non-consummation, and in his guilt, makes a gift of the royal palace of Richmond and a suitable income to maintain it.

In Barnes’ story, Anne flowers after the divorce, finally free to live her life as she desires. She enjoys keeping Richmond House in good condition, managing her household, being a hostess to her neighbours and those who befriended her at fourt, and doing good deeds in the surrounding area. She is allowed to have Edward, Elizabeth and Mary visit her, and she tries to give them the nurturing that all have lacked. In Barnes’ novel, Anne and Hans Holbein develop a mutual attraction that is acknowledged but never consummated, giving Anne a chance to be a romantic of a sort, but never being impractical about it. The world-wise and cynical Holbein is a source of support and information for her, as he explains the secrets and plots at court that threaten her, marvelling at her ability to remain good-hearted and somehow innocent in the midst of political power plays and corruption. Barnes gives Anne the gift of making people feel comfortable with her - over time, people from Mary Tudor to Thomas Cranmer come to see her as a friend and confidante. The overall picture that emerges is of an intelligent, warm, generous woman who deserved a better life - a loving husband, children, a home - but who made the best of the hand she was dealt, and found ways to be happy and to give of herself to others despite being deprived of the things that might have fulfilled her most.

Elizabeth Fremantle’s The Queen’s Gambit, the first novel in her Tudor trilogy, is the story of the sixth and last wife of Henry VIII, Katherine Parr. Fremantle begins Katherine’s story with the death of her second husband, Lord Latimer (or, as she has it, Latymer), giving Katherine a tragic past beyond the fact of having buried two husbands. Lord Latimer had been involved in the northern rebellion, but unlike many other lords who participated, he was simply no longer welcomed at court, rather than executed. Many believe that Latimer gave information to the King’s forces near the end - certainly, there was enough suspicion that some of the rebels captured the Latimer seat at Snape and held Katherine and her step-daughter Margaret Neville prisoner. In Fremantle’s interpretation, both women were raped, and Katherine bore a child who died at birth. There’s no historical record of this, but then, there wouldn’t have been, with the Latimers neither at court nor involved in the social life of the peerage. Fremantle also presents us with a woman who, watching her husband slowly die in agony, and being skilled in the use of herbs, is persuaded by him to hasten his passing - a mortal sin in those times. While unprovable, these additions certainly give Katherine a traumatic but interesting backstory.

Fremantle uses two very different women as viewpoint characters, Katherine herself, and the young servant Dot, who was with Katherine and Margaret during their captivity at Snape, and who is Margaret’s devoted companion. It’s a clever, ‘upstairs, downstairs’ approach that allows the reader to experience life in the courts of Henry VIII in greater detail.

The development of the romance between Thomas Seymour and Katherine seems a bit forced and overdone. Initially, We meet Seymour as a friend of Katherine’s brother, Will Parr, and Katherine takes a dislike to him, seeing him as a womaniser and flatterer. He quickly persuades her of the sincerity if his passion for her, and awakens a similar response in her, one that is threatened by the King’s growing interest in her as one of the few attractive women at court who is also honest, intelligent, and - though this is only seen in undertones - experienced in dealing with illness and age in a partner. The account of Katherine’s marriage touches on most of the known and agreed upon issues - Katherine’s support of the new Protestantism, Henry’s preferences for Catholic forms within his new English church, the antipathy of Archbishop Gardiner, the dangers Katherine must face in being heretically inclined, in Gardiner’s view. Interpretations of the marriage have varied as to the degree of its physicality - Fremantle envisions the aging Henry as a crude and desperate sexual partner, leaving bruises in his attempts to maintain his self-image as a masterful, powerful, lover.

Fremantle does an excellent job of portraying the tension and fear that rise as the king, more and more under Gardiner’s influence, and in increasing pain from his ulcerous leg, withdraws from Katherine, who waits for her turn in the Tower - when Henry’s death saves her. Once Katherine is free of the political machinations at court and installed in her dower property at Chelsea, Seymour re-enters the picture. Always portrayed as ambitious, he now seems more sinister than before, but Katherine still loves him and they are secretly wed. As the story of Katherine’s final year of life unfolds, Seymour’s selfishness, greed and ambition come clear, and then, his seduction of the young Elizabeth - in Fremantle’s version, fully accomplished - which destroys Katherine’s spirit just as she has finally found herself pregnant at last. The end comes swiftly.

All in all, an excellently written novel, and Fremantle’s liberties with certain events and her inventions for the most part add texture to the ultimately tragic story of the sixth of Henry’s queens.

Keeping to the theme of Henry’s wives in my Tudor binge, the next novel I turned to was the third volume in Alison Weir’s series on the queens, Jane Seymour, the Haunted Queen. The novel opens when Jane is a young girl of ten, and uses the occasion of her older sister Catherine’s marriage to introduce the readers to the large Seymour brood - seven living siblings, Edward, Harry, Anthony, Jane, Thomas, Margery and Elizabeth - their ancestry, wealth and connections, and the feel of life in the Seymour ancestral home of Wulfhall. At ten, Jane cherishes the idea of becoming a nun when she is older, and her indulgent parents seem inclined to at least consider this as a possibility, though they insist that she may not become a novice until she is 18. However, when Jane is 18 and begins a probationary period to test her vocation, she discovers that the religious life opens up questions that shake her long-held desire. While the physical constraints - much more severe in this era than a modern nun would face, being forbidden to heat their rooms or touch another human except in emergencies, among others - are difficult to adapt to, it is the way that the abbess violates the vows of poverty that the ordinary nuns must follow that bothers her. Though she is no longer sure of a religious calling, she is also not sure she wants to be married, watching as her brother Edward’s marriage sours and he seeks out other women, leaving his wife deeply unhappy.

Watching her brothers entering the service of various lords temporal and spiritual, Jane aspires to a position at court as well, and a well-placed relative negotiated a place for her as one of the queen’s maid of honour. She arrives at court during the early days of King Henry’s pursuit of Anne Boleyn, who is also a maid of honour, and his search for a way to end his marriage to Queen Katherine. As one of Katherine’s maids of honour, she is a close witness to the actions of both women, and the swirling loyalties of the court. But once the tide is clearly moving toward reform, and the King’s divorce, her family withdraws her from Katherine’s service - much against her will - and secures a position for her among the women serving the Lady Anne. But Jane develops a lingering illness, and before she can take up her place, the split from Rome is complete, the divorce final, and Anne is Queen - and in confinement, awaiting the birth of the child who will be Elizabeth.

As Anne slowly falls from grace, failing to provide a male heir and, in Weir’s interpretation, becoming increasingly flirtatious, petty, jealous and anxious, Henry begins to notice Jane, quiet, gentle and virtuous. His courtship of her is a prolonged one, and she resists his advances for some time, but in this version, she does eventually yield, and is drawn into the plans if those at court, from her brother to the Imperial ambassador Chapuys, to try to influence Henry in his behaviour toward the princess Mary. By now, Jane has left Anne’s service, and lives at court with her brother Edward, an officer of the king’s household, and his wife. Weir passes quickly over Queen Anne’s last days, focusing more on the secret plans for a wedding between Henry and Jane once Anne is dead.

The year of Jane’s queenship was also a year of great trouble in England. There was an outbreak of the plague, which forced the postponement of Jane’s coronation. The closing of the monasteries and other reforms distressed the people, especially in the north where Catholic sentiment was strong, provoking a rebellion which lasted several months before being crushed. Jane, whose religious tendencies also lay with the old religion, walks a delicate line, trying to mitigate some of the worst reforms while keeping the king’s favour. Jane is influential, though, in bringing about a reconciliation between Henry and his estranged daughter Mary. And - though Weir has Jane miscarry twice in the early months of the marriage - soon Jane is pregnant and past the dangerous periods at which she lost those first pregnancies. The days of her pregnancy move swiftly, with Jane hoping, and the King assuming, that the child will be the long-awaited male heir. Jane goes through the thoughts that authors have, and probably quite rightly, put in the minds of most of Henry’s wives, the prayers that their child be a healthy boy, the fears of what might happen if the child is a girl, or is stillborn. Weir’s interpretation of Jane’s final days, following the birth of the desired prince, are based - as she records in a historical note - are based on a modern medical evaluation of Jane’s condition. Rather than dying of childbed or puerperal fever, Weir’s research suggests that, weakened by a difficult labour followed by a severe bout of food poisoning, Jane succumbed to an embolism. Whatever the real cause of her death, Jane slipped away less than two weeks after the birth of the only male heir Henry would ever have, the future Edward VI.

While I was less than wholly pleased with Weir’s interpretation of Anne Boleyn, I quite enjoyed her picture of Jane and her brief career as Queen of England - though I was a bit irritated by the whole ‘haunted queen’ conceit, which had Jane experiening spectral visitations from the venegful ghost of Anne Boleyn. Given the way that Anne is reported to have treated Jane, and the general horror of the accustions against Anne, which were generally believed, I have trouble thinking that Janr’s conscience woukd have troubled her overmuch, especially as there’s no record that she gave incriminating evidence against Anne. But other than that, I found Weir’s novel good reading. Looking forward to seeing how she handles Anne of Cleves.

I’m going to have to look around for some decent writing about poor young Katherine Howard, though.

Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s novel “Why Did You Lie?” opens with a dramatic scene - a helicopter attempting an open sea rescue of a person reported lost at sea near an isolated lighthouse on a rugged rock formation offshore. What the occupants of the helicopter see is two bodies at the base if the rock tower, and at the top, beside the lighthouse, two people, one on the ground, the other kneeling over him with a knife. The date is January 28, 2014.

The timeline then splits, going backwards, to tell us about four people headed to the lighthouse two days prior - Helgi, a photographer, and Ivar, Tóti and Heida, making a scheduled maintenance visit.

Even further in the past, January 20, and we are with Nina, a police officer who has recently gone through extreme trauma. Her husband has survived a suicide attempt but is severely brain-damaged. She has been the victim of sexual harassment on the job, and a demoralising experience when, during a domestic assault call, the husband assaulted her as well and her partner just stood and watched. After issuing a complaint, she’s been banished to the dead files room in the basement to do clerical work. One if the first folders she opens to work on, unexpectedly, has a misfiled page - one that mentions her husband, and a statement he gave when only a teenager, twenty years ago.

And from January 23, a family returns from holiday. Nói, Vala and their son Tumi have been in the US, after arranging a house swap with an American family visiting Iceland. When they arrive home, they are unhappy to find the the Americans have left some things behind, and have not left the keys to the house and their chalet where they were asked too - in fact, the keys are missing altogether.

There is no hint, initially, of how these threads will be connected. Just mysteries. What happened at the remote lighthouse on Thrídrangar? Who put that page in that file fir Nina to find, and why? And what is it that seems subtly wrong about the departure of the Americans?

As the three timelines advance, odd things begin to pile up - creating an eerie feeing of suspense and discomfort, not quite fear at first, but growing toward it. This is something that Sigurdardottir does with consummate skill. You know something is wrong, you know it’s going to be bad, the only question is, how bad will it be?

Like so many of Sigurdardottir’s suspense novels, the evil behind the strangeness, the fear, the pain and death that follow, has its roots in the past, in darkness that has never been brought into the light, in madness born of loss and grief. And like the horror stories that Sigurdardottir borrows her sense of building atmosphere and tension, when all the threads come together and the full picture is revealed, something of the evil remains leaving us to fear what will come after.

The sixth of Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma mysteries, The Valley of Shadow, finds Fidelma on her way to the remote western mountains of Cruacha Dubha, the homeland of Laisre, chieftain of Gleann Geis. Laisre and his lands remain pagan, but he has recently sent to King Colgu of Muman, Flidelma’s brother, saying he is willing to enter negotiations to allow a priest to come to his chiefdom, to build a church and a school. Colgu has appointed Fidelma as his emissary, thinking her best suited to speak on behalf of both himself and the church, as a princess of Muman, a religieuse, and a dalaigh. Brother Eadulf accompanies her.

But as they approach the mountains, Fidelma and Eadulf are met with a horrific sight. Thirty-three young men, all monks or priests by their tonsures, ritually killed and left by the road into Gleann Geis. Is it a warning? A threat? Despite the danger, Fidelma is determined to carry out her mission, but now she has another task as well - to find out who is responsible for the murder of her brothers in Christ.

This time, Fidelma finds herself in the midst of not only a negotiation over a request that no one but the chieftain appears to want, but an investigation into a horrific mass murder, and a complex plot against her brother’s throne. A solid mystery, with many twists and turns, it’s also an interesting look at Irish temporal and religious political conflicts in the early years of Christianity in Ireland.

These days, one of my go-to authors when I’m in need if a comfort read is Peter Tremayne. His Sister Fidelma mysteries just seem to fill a special little place in my soul without being particularly demanding. I’ve been reading them in order, and am currently on the fifth of the Fidelma novels, The Spider’s Web.

In this latest case, Sister Fidelma, once again reunited with her friend and fellow jurist, the Saxon monk, Brother Eadulf, travels to a remote mountain area to investigate the murder of a local chieftain and his sister.

The case would seem to be open and shut - the accused was found beside the chieftain’s body, bloody knife in hand. But Fidelma will not allow anyone to be punished without first having his right to defend himself. But how will she ensure that, when the accused is not only physically deformed, but deaf, dumb and blind from birth?

In fact, Fidelma finds that, far from being a straightforward case, the motivations for these murders - and other strange events that occur during the course of the investigation - are complicated, and have their root in dark secrets more than twenty years old.

One of the aspects of this particular chapter that Caught my attention was the exploration of attitudes toward the disabled. The accused, Moen, is assumed by most to be little more than an animal. The local priest, a convert to the Roman church, holds his condition to be a sign of sin and the work of the devil, and has persuaded the other people living in the chief’s rath, or stronghold, to abhor him. Even Eadulf has little sympathy for one so disabled, citing Saxon customs that would have had Moen killed at birth. But as Fidelma explains the Brehon laws, disabled persons are entitled to respect and care, and to mock or harm a disabled person carried a greater penalty than to so offend an abled person. And her quest to find a way for Moen to tell his story leads to the revelation that he is in fact fully competent intellectually and has learned, thanks to a patient Druid, a way of signing using the Ogham alphabet, and is, in fact, more literate and educated than many of those around him.

A particularly satisfying read.

It is a fact that when Henry VIII of England had his second wife executed, he tried to erase all record of his life with her. He was eager to wed his choice for wife number three, anxious to forget the woman who made him do a great many things he might not have wanted to do, and then failed to give him the one thing he desperately wanted, a son. Even though his agents did not succeed in making Anne Boleyn disappear completely, there are few primary sources that remain to tell us who she really was - letters, portraits, documents. We see Anne, always, through the eyes of others, often enemies. And throughout the past five centuries, those remaining sources have been used, weighed, interpreted, reinterpreted, endlessly. There are many ideas about Anne Boleyn, who she was, what she did, her choices, her motivations, her guilt or innocence.

In The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’ Most Notorious Queen, Susan Bordo attempts two rather different goals: the first, to examine the multitude of representations of Anne Boleyn, to show the many ways in which she has been imagined, and to attempt, as well as may be done, to tease out of what remains of the historical record, a sense of who she might actually have been.

“One goal of this book is to follow the cultural career of these mutating Annes, from the poisonous putain created by the Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys—a highly biased portrayal that became history for many later writers—to the radically revisioned Anne of the Internet generation. I’m not such a postmodernist, however, that I’m content to just write a history of competing narratives. I’m fascinated by their twists and turns, but even more fascinated by the real Anne, who has not been quite as disappeared as Henry wanted. Like Marilyn Monroe in our own time, she is an enigma who is hard to keep one’s hands off of; just as men dreamed of possessing her in the flesh, writers can’t resist the desire to solve the mysteries of how she came to be, to reign, to perish. I’m no exception. I have my own theories, and I won’t hide them. There are so many big questions that remain unanswered that this book would be very unsatisfying if I did not attempt to address them.”

Bordo begins with the main contemporary source, Eustace Chapuys, the ambassador of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, nephew of Henry’s first wife Katherine of Aragon. His letters and dispatches are extensive, and invaluable to an understanding of certain elements of the English court. They are also, and perhaps predictably, extremely critical of Anne, who is consistently referred to as ‘the concubine’ and ‘the whore.’ It is from Chapuys that the images of the saintly Queen Katherine, the licentious, seductive Anne, and the besotted, helpless Henry are derived. Chapuys’ extreme dislike and distrust of Anne is relentless, and in fact, he suggests that he nay have assisted in the gathering of charges against her when she fell out of favour; he certainly exulted at her downfall. He can hardly be considered an impartial witness, and yet he has shaped the way we see Anne and interpret her relationship with Henry. As Bordo notes in looking at the numerous historians’ treatment of Anne in biographies and histories of the Tudor era, “It’s virtually standard operating procedure for historians to warn the reader, in an introduction or the beginning of a chapter, about Chapuys’ biases and tendencies to believe the most vicious court gossip about Anne, and then go on to use him liberally and without qualification all the same.”

Setting aside as much of the biases as possible, and examining known facts in the light of what we known about the cultural roles and expectations, the ways that people thought, acted and expressed themselves, and the cultural milieu of the time, which was one of religious and philsophical ferment, with many intellectuals - with whom both Henry and Anne would have been familiar - engaged in questioning the traditions of the church and the proper relationship between God and men, Bordo attempts to reconstruct a probable narrative of their relationship and of Anne’s ultimate fate.

It is one that begins with a deep personal attraction, based in common interests, both intellectual and social (dancing, hunting) on both parts. They met at a time when Henry, deeply concerned that there was something wrong in his marriage that had prevented Katherine from bearing a male heir, was emotionally, and perhaps sexually, detached from Katherine but not yet prepared to set her aside. The arrival at court of a vivacious, European-educated and influenced, intelligent and witty young woman, who loved to dance and ride out and engage in witty conversation, not particularly beautiful but notably different in many ways not only from his older, modest wife but also from most of the other ladies of the court, would have been an irresistible challenge to Henry. Though at first he may have sought an ordinary affair, it is likely that the kind of attraction that developed, one based on personalities as much as sexuality, one that we might in our times call romantic love, in combination with a growing sense on Henry’s part that God was telling him to set Katherine aside, would have led to a desire to marry, to make Anne not just lover but partner.

It did not happen all at once. In the handful of letters from Henry to Anne that survive, despite his courtly protestations of eternal submission and devotion, he is asking her to be his official mistress, not his wife. But Anne’s role probable in bringing to his attention the new thinking about the relationship between kings and the church, which led to the strategy of establishing the Church of England and sidestepping the Pope’s refusal to nullify his marriage to Katherine, brought them closer, and when Anne eventually did become his lover, and soon after became pregnant, marriage was inevitable.

But marriage was the trap that failed Anne. She was the perfect companion, but not raised to be a queen, and not by nature suited to become what Henry and the rest of her world expected in a wife. She was not submissive, she did not behave with humility and did not accept being left out of any part of Henry’s life. And what was irresistible in a mistress was unacceptable in a wife. When she was unable to produce the crucial male heir, it was easy for enemies at court to use the very things Henry had fallen in love with to tarnish her reputation and lead to her death.

Bardo argues that in the end, Anne herself recognised this as the real reason for her downfall: “Anne recognized that she had overstepped the boundaries of appropriate wifely behavior. At her trial, insisting that she was “clear of all the offences which you have laid to my charge,” she went on to acknowledge not only her “jealous fancies” but also her failure to show the king “that humility which his goodness to me, and the honours to which he raised me, merited.” Anne’s recognition that she had not shown the king enough humility, in this context, shows remarkable insight into the gender politics that undoubtedly played a role in her downfall. She stood accused of adultery and treason. Yet she did not simply refute those charges; she admitted to a different “crime”: not remaining in her proper “place.” In juxtaposing these two transgressions, Anne seems to be suggesting that not only did she recognize that she had overstepped the norms of wifely behavior, but that this transgression also was somehow related to the grim situation she now found herself in.”

After making this attempt to find a narrative that makes sense of Anne’s journey from a lady-in-waiting at the French court, to the English throne, to the gallows, Bardo turns to the ways that the facts of Anne’s life have been interpreted over the years, to produce images that range from a heartless, manipulative and grasping hedonist to a much maligned and virtuous innocent. One of the most significant factors, certainly for the first few centuries following Anne’s death, was religion; Catholics despised and demonised her, Protestants praised and sanctified her. By the 19th century, she was becoming, to some on the side favorable to her, a tragic heroine, one of the first women to be pictured as such in her own right.

The had always been some recognition of the gendered nature of the trap Anne found herself in, that her intellectual bent and desire to be a partner in ruling, not an appendage, were issues that an aging Henry, losing some of his athletic vigour, resented as a challenge to his supreme authority. But this level of analysis became more common as Anne became a subject of consideration as an agent in the English Reformation. At the same time, however, many historians - mostly men, as the women in this era who wrote about history were generally not granted the name of scholar - seemed content to make of Anne a doomed romantic heroine.

By the mid-twentieth century, Anne is a popular feature of histories, plays, novels, and films, with as many permutations on the key elements of her life and personality as authors. Anne becomes a mystery, an almost blank slate that each author writes their own creation on. Bardo summarises the significant elements of the many portrayals, from Margaret Campell Barnes’ Brief Gaudy Hour and Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of a Thousand Days (the play that was the source for the film starring Genevieve Bujold) to Natalie Dormer’s portrayal of Anne in the television series The Tudors and Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl - all with different perceptions of Anne’s character and motivations.

In many ways, what emerges from Bordo’s analysis is a concept of Anne Boleyn as a ‘woman for all seasons,’ whose actions, because so little exists to give us clues to her interior life, can be interpreted to suit the individual biases and needs of the interpreter. Her recorded actions give the suggestion of a multifaceted and complex individual, neither angel nor devil, victim nor villainess, saint nor whore, and perhaps that is the truest representation of all.

Malaysian author Zen Cho made an impressive debut with her fantasy novel The Sorcerer and the Crown, which I found delightful and engaging, and hope will have a sequel one of these days. In the meantime, I have widened my experience of Cho’s writing with her short fiction collection, Spirits Abroad.

These stories are rich with the history and traditions of Cho’s homeland, but make enough reference to Western sensibilities to be wholly relevant and meaningful to the ignorant reader such as myself, in large part because the themes, though they may be clothed in different cultural realities, are universal human experiences - love, family, a need to belong.

As the title suggests, the stories in this collection are mostly what one might class as fantasy, with some more sciencefictional settings, drawing on Malaysian traditions of supernatural beings and forces - but they are often situated in what seems to be perfectly normal situations. The collection is divided into four sections, titled Here, meaning Malaysia, There, meaning the West, Elsewhere, and Going Back.

The first story of the collection, “The First Witch of Damansara,” is a darkly humorous story about a family preparing for the funeral of their matriarch, fondly referred to as Nai Nai - who is continuing to communicate with one of her granddaughters through dreams. Nai Nai does not want to be buried where her daughters now lives, but next to her long dead husband - not because she loved him, but because it’s the proper thing to do. The task of persuading Nai Nai to be happily buried where her family lives falls to the Americanised Vivian, who is more concerned with finding the right wedding dress - traditional Malaysian, or Western white? It’s funny, and it’s heart-warming, and it’s about family and traditions and legacies that go beyond material things.

“First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia” begins as an account of an NGO organising and opening a conference, and in the process gives the reader unfamiliar with Malaysia a sense of the diversity of peoples and religions in the country, but then it morphs into a recollection of a bittersweet interspecies love story, as the two lovers meet again for a last farewell.

“The House of Aunts” features a young girl who is also a pontianak, an undead woman similar to the western vampire. Having become a pontianak while still an adolescent, Ah Lee lives much like other young girls - she goes to school, has crushes on handsome boys, and struggles over her homework. She lives in a house of women, all pontianak, all her relatives - her grandmother, great-grandmother, and several aunts - who watch over her, give her endless advice on staying in school, going to university, maybe becoming a doctor. And they distinctly disapprove when she falls in love with a boy from school - but are ready to stand by her when she reveals her secret to him, and is rejected. This is another story that centres on the primacy and importance of family, and particularly the love and support that women can give each other. I also suspect that Cho is telling us something about what it means to be a woman of reproductive age in Malaysian society, as traditionally pontianak are created when a woman dies while pregnant or in childbirth - for one family over the course of several generations to produce so many pontianak suggests a social issue with maternal morbidity.

“One-day Travelcard for Fairyland” takes place in England, at a private college prep school in the countryside that caters to international, largely Asian, students. Hui An wanders outside the school gates one day, and accidentally stumbles, stepping into a hole in the ground and killing a sleeping fairy. The next day, the fairies arrive in full force, angry and violent, and the teachers have vanished, leaving the students with only a few words of advice on dealing with fairies.

In “Rising Lion — The Lion Bows” we meet a troupe of lion dancers living in Britain who offer a special sideline to their regular performances - they also exterminate ghosts. But on this particular occasion, they just can’t bring themselves to terminate the ghost in question - a young African boy brought to England a century or more ago to be a servant. “Seven Star Drum” is also set among the members if this lion dance troupe, and tells the story of Boris, the troupe’s founder, who was born with the ability to see ghosts and other supernatural creatures.

“The Mystery of the Suet Swain” features Sham, a tall, hawk-nosed, brilliant but socially awkward lesbian, and her only friend Belinda, both university students. Belinda has a problem - she attracts stalkers, men who mistake her friendliness for something more. But there’s something different, scary, even dangerous about her latest mystery stalker, and Sham sets out to find out who - or what - he is. And to protect Belinda from him. And yes, Sham and Belinda remind me very much of another famous literary duo, and I hope to see more stories about them.

In “Prudence and the Dragon,” medical student Prudence Ong has to deal with a besotted dragon named Zheng Yi, who wants nothing more than to take her back with him to his own dimension to be his consort. Prudence, however, isn’t really interested, especially not now, while she’s still in med school. And not when his attentions seem to be casing trouble between Prudence snd her best friend Angela. Although even when the friends become reconciled, Zheng Yi’s presence is a problem for Angela as we read in “The Perseverance of Angela’s Past Life.” But, as Angela says, “Angela wasn't going to stop hanging out with her best friend just because doing so literally split her in two.” Friendship between women means something in Cho’s stories, which is a wonderful thing to see.

“The Earth Spirit’s Favorite Anecdote” is a charming little story about the beginning of a rather unusual partnership between an earth spirit and a forest spirit - funny, but with Cho’s familiar focus on the importance of relationships, and on understanding tradition, when to observe it, and when to break it.

“Liyana” is a tragic story, one in which a great evil is done for the good of others. I suppose in a way, it reminds me of Le Guin’s “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” - a child, in this case non-human, but precious and loved, sacrificed because there is no other way to honor a previous, willing sacrifice, or keep a family alive.

“The Four Generations of Chang E” is a story about change, about leaving the past behind and moving forward, but still being tied to what has been before, at least for a time. In this story, the first Chang E flees a desolate future, escaping to the Moon, only to find herself out of place among the Moonites. Her daughter and granddaughter are, like her, between two worlds, still tainted by their immigrant past, nit quite a part of the future. But when the fourth Chang E fulfils her mother’s dying request to be buried on Earth, she discovers that she, the fourth generation, is finally of the Moon.

“The Many Deaths of Hang Jebat” is just what it says... a series of vignettes, each of which involves a character named Hang Jebat, being killed, blocked on social media, fired... experiencing some form of physical or social annihilation. Each vignette also involves his childhood friend, Tuah - who sometimes is killed by him, and sometimes kills him. In the background, a shadowy authority figure, Mansur. The permutations of events and settings, though, show some kind of connection, and some kind of slow change in the relationship of Tuah and Hang Jebat. It’s a story to contemplate.

“The Fish Bowl” is a dark story, about a girl living in a culture of achievement, expected to do well in so many things, to be excellent, until the pressure if it drives her to erase herself to escape. It hit me very hard, partly because a friend of mine, back in school, was in the same place, and erased herself completely, finally, irrevocably. But it’s an excellent story, and at the same time a caution about demanding more of a person than they have the resources to give.

In Malaysia, they hold a festival of the Hungry Ghost. Ghosts who have died violently, or with unfulfilled longings, or otherwise still hungry for life, can return to the earth for this one month, experience old things, or new ones. In “Balik Kampung,” Lydia is a newly deceased ghost, who does not remember how she died. But she is a hungry ghost - she thinks it is because her parents were always quarreling, more focused on their own pain than her happiness. She want to go back to the place where she lived with her husband, the only time she believes she was truly happy. But even the dead must face the truth in order to move on.

There’s not one weak story in the collection, in my opinion, and Cho provides notes for each story at the end of the book to provide context and help readers with some of the more specific cultural references. The ebook version contains an excerpt from the author’s novella, “The Dangerous Life of Jade Yeo,” which quite caught my interest and is now on my “must get very soon” list.

I’ve been waiting excitedly for the publication of Rebecca Roanhorse’s novel Trail of Lightning ever since I heard she was writing it. Because based just on the one short story of hers that I’ve read - the one that won this year’s Hugo Award - I knew that I was going to be totally swept up in anything she wanted to write.

And I was totally correct in that.

Trail of Lightning is truly kickass fantasy - think urban fantasy but not in a city, with a troubled female monsterhunter and a serious monster to hunt - that takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where the Navajo Nation, or Dinétah, is now an autonomous region, separated from what remains of a North America ravaged by rising waters and ecological disasters by a wall raised by traditional powers. It’s no paradise - life is hard, technology is rundown and cobbled together, the economic system has reverted to barter, and there are ancient creatures of evil lurking in the hinterlands, and not all power workers have good intentions.

Maggie Hoskie was once almost killed by a monster. She was saved by Neizghání, a legendary, immortal monsterslayer, who took her on as his apprentice, in part because with the wounds she took from the monster, darkness entered her spirit, and only training and discipline could keep her from becoming a monster herself. But he came to mistrust her ability to resist, and stopped teaching her, leaving her alone, mostly trained, with clan powers that enhance her strength and speed, and doubting herself.

Part of her wants to stay away from monsterhunting, without the support of her mentor, but when a family calls for her to find, and save if she can, their daughter, taken by monsters, she does what she can.

The creature is unlike anything she’s encountered before, but with the help of Tah, a medicine man who is like a father to her, and his grandson Kai, she discovers that it’s a magical construct, which means there’s a witch operating in Dinétah, and she sets out with Kai to hunt them down.

The story is complex, with many twists, and unreliable characters who are telling layers on layers of untruths - after sll, Coyote is one of the characters, and you can never trust Coyote. It is steeped in Diné traditions, and - content notice here - brutal in many places. Maggie and Kai and the other humans in this story live in a brutal time, after the end of the world, when all the monsters that were kept in dreamtime have come to life. It’s a very different vision from most post-apocalyptic fantasies I’ve read, and it is absolutely enthralling. Fast-paced, action-filled. And Maggie Hoskie is as real as anyone I’ve ever read about.

I am certain of one thing - the next book is going to be a blast.

Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun is a strange dystopia, presenting a Finland in which government control over all facets of life has brought about both the monstrous - a rigid eugenics program that aims to produce virile, masterful men and bubble-headed submissive women - and the bizarre - a ban on anything consumable that offers a strong sensory experience, from tobacco and alcohol to chili peppers.

The narrator, Vanna, is an aberrant woman - she looks like, and can pass as, an eloi, one of the pretty, incurious, domestically and sexually focused women who are preferred as wives, consorts, and sex workers. But her mind is that of a morlock - she is intelligent, curious, restless. The novel is partly epistolatory, in that much of Vanna’s account of events is told in the form of letters to her missing sister Manna, a true eloi. The letters talk to Manna about Vanna’s present, but also about their shared past, giving the reader insight into how Finnish society was transformed into the world in which
Vanna lives.

As Vanna remembers their upbringing, how both sisters were taught the rigid sex roles demanded of the eloi, we learn how Vanna has managed to reach adulthood undetected. The sisters were homeschooled by their grandmother, who lived in a rural area, free from the degree of observation they would have faced in a city, or even a town. Aulikki, who came of age before the adoption of the eugenics program, realised that Vanna was too intelligent to be an eloi, but physically able to pass as one. She carefully taught Vanna to hide her differences, to seem to be like Manna.

Vanna and Manna’s relationship, once close, is eventually damaged by Manna’s eloi conditioning and responses. Their grandmother had hired Jare, a young man from the city as a hired hand to help out on the farm. Jare accidentally discovered Vanna’s secret, but was willing to keep quiet; this shared secret, and the isolation in which they lived, resulted in something unthinkable to an eloi - a friendship. Manna became jealous, competitive for Jare’s affections as elois are conditioned to do, and resented what she saw as the love affair between Jare and Vanna. When the two girls come of age and move to the city, to enter the marriage market - quite literally - Vanna and Jare become partners in an illegal enterprise, dealing in chiles, the pretense of a relationship an ideal cover for their partnership. Manna, still wounded, quickly becomes engaged.

As the narrative progresses, alternating betwen Vanna’s letters to her sister, Jare’s recollections and thoughts, and excerpts from documents detailing this alternative history of Finland, and the nature of the social expectations of men and women - mascos and minuses, eloi and morlocks - we learn the story behind Manns’s disappearance, and follow Vanna’s desperate search for the truth.

The novel is not just a picture of secret resistance to an oppressive, rigidly gendered and controlled society, however. It is also an examination of loss, addiction and mental illness. Vanna is a capsaicin addict. She craves the heat of chilis, seeking anything with a high scoville rating, the higher the better. Her addiction helps her to control what she calls the Cellar, a space within her mind, a metaphor for anxiety, depression, panic. A place where she can feel as though she’s trapped, with water rising all around her. A depression caused by Vanna’s sense that it is her fault that Manna is missing, presumed dead - though Vanna cannot bring herself to think it.

In the second half of the book, Jare and Vanna become involved with the Gaians, a religious cult that seeks to breed the purest, most potent possible chili, believing capsaicin in its natural form to be a spiritual awakening agent, that the effects of capsaicin on the brain can induce trance experiences - it’s their quest for this plant, which they call the Core of the Sun, that gives the novel its title. Jare and Vanna move back to the country, to the farm where Vanna grew up, inviting the Gaians to come with them and, under the cover of growing hyper-organic vegetables, complete their breeding program to produce the Core of the .sun. Meanwhile, they produce lesser breeds of chili, which Vanna and Jare sell, using the funds to support the group, and to save money for Jare’s goal, which is to defect from Finland and make a life for himself in the outside world. The parallels between the breeding of the plants, and the eugenics-based breeding program that has produced eloi and morlocks, in which only the offspring with the desired characteristics are allowed to breed, raise serious ethical questions - which in some ways, Sinisalo leaves hanging - about when and where selective breeding, attempts to improve a species, are legitimate. If breeding chilis to a point unknown in nature is a spiritual quest, but breeding humans to create a subrace of infantilised women a horror, where does the dividing line lie? In some ways, the fire of the chilis is also a metaphor fir the fire of resistance - the Gaians reject the social order in Finland, and at one point, Vanna, in a capsaicin-induced trace, sees the power of her visions as powers that can also bring down the repressive system. I must admit, as a devote of the chili myself, I was rather taken with the idea of chili peppers as the path to enlightenment and social justice. If only it were so.

The way the novel is structured gives Sinisalo the freedom to make many trenchant comments on the social construction of gender and other stereotypes. At one point, talking about television programming for elois, Vanna says:

“I sat with you and watched one television show after another that ended in marriage. “Elois” flouncing around in beautiful gowns, heavily made up, wigs on their heads, padded in the right places. They couldn’t use real elois—that would have been a real job, would have required memorizing lines, concentration, perseverance. The mascos dressed as elois on the TV shows tittered and giggled and fluttered and swung their hips and stuck out their lips and used an exaggerated caricature to show how an eloi should look and sound. I had read in one of Aulikki’s books that in old American movies, white people painted their skin black to portray Negroes. I wonder if some dark-skinned people who watched those movies thought that they were supposed to speak in simple sentences and roll their eyes and be childish and superstitious.”

I couldn’t help thinking, as I read the passages about the establishment of this rigidly gendered society, of other feminist works that have imagined a ‘return’ to an imagined natural or God-prescribed order where all men are powerful and all women submissive. And of what’s happening now in the US, and other parts of the world, as hard won freedoms for women and other marginalised people are being swept away by people with an ideology of repression and control. Once I thought it would be difficult for such things to happen, once a momentum was established. Now I’m terrified by hiw easy it seems.

Books like this have become vital warnings, to resist before it’s too late.

Zarqa Nawaz is a very funny person. This should not surprise anyone who knows that she is the creator of the Canadian comedy series, Little Mosque on the Prairie. She is also the author of Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, a memoir that begins with her experience as a Muslim girl growing up in Brampton Ontario.

Nawaz was born in England, but her parents, originally from Pakistan, moved to Canada when she was three in search of a better life for themselves and their children. These days, Brampton is one of the most multi-cultural cities in Canada, a minority-majority community where a very large proportion of the residents are from South, Central and West Asia. When Nawaz’s family arrived, she was the only brown girl in her classroom, though she was joined a few years later by a girl whose parents had immigrated from Afghanistan.

Because she is a very funny person, Nawaz speaks lightly, humorously, about not fitting in, about bring ostracised by the nice white girls because of the food she brought for lunch, her unfashionably modest clothing, her hairy legs on display in gym class, the list of differences that set her apart, marked her as alien. The list of incidents, large and small, that extended into adulthood, representative of the unthinking racism around her.

At the same time, Nawaz describes with considerable wit the contradictions and complexities of living as a faithful, but modern, Muslim, in a primarily non-Muslim world, from finding halal marshmallows for a campfire to persuading your parents not to arrange your marriage, at least not yet. She talks about finding her husband, getting started as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, about her experience making the hajj, about being a Muslim in North America after 9/11, and about the making of Little Mosque on the Prairie. Along the way, she educates her readers, through some occasionally side-splitting anecdotes, about many aspects of Muslim life, from the importance of designing a bathroom for ease of ritual ablutions to the controversies over men and women praying together in the mosque, to the Muslim traditions of observance for the dead.

Laughter is a universal human experience, and there are ways of de-mystifying and de-exoticising that perhaps can best be done through humour such as this. Certainly I felt in reading it, a great sense of connection to an intelligent, witty woman who takes the essence of her religion seriously, but questions its sexism and its quirks, and can laugh with love at the foibles of her family and community while demonstrating the shared humanity that links all our experiences. And in terms of the aspects of her personal life that she shares in this memoir, there are things that I’m pretty sure every middle class working mother of four can relate to with a sense of recognition.

Too often, in parts of the world that are mostly white and Christian, Islam is misunderstood, its differences made to stand out. But Nawaz makes us see the similarities. In her description of the hajj, for example, the rituals, the places, the histories and events connected with each part of the pilgrimage, the symbolism of the acts required of the Muslim on hajj, and her own emotions and responses as she moves through the process, one sees the ways in which this central Muslim experience is like the (more familiar to Western minds) Christian religious rituals and traditions, from Lent to pilgrimages to such places a Lourdes, in how it develops, and what it means to those who take part.

In the end, perhaps the best thing I can say about Nawaz’ book is that I laughed all the way through, frequently nodded in recognition, and ended up feeling more than ever that people are people regardless of how they worship or what they wear.

It’s hard to deny that the United States is teetering on the edge of becoming a theocracy, in fact, if not in name. The religious right, a minority among American citizens and voters, holds an undue amount of influence over one of the country’s two main political parties, and its purported values influence the national conversation on social policies to an extent much greater than its numbers would warrant.

Many words have been written about just how this has come about, that a nation founded by religious dissenters who, informed by their experiences as a disadvantaged religious minority, sought to create a political system that embraced the separation of church and state, has become by far the least secular of the developed, democratic nations. A commonly accepted analysis points to the alliance of politicians and evangelicals in the late 1970s, that made abortion a key issue dividing the country into two political camps. However, in his book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, historian of religion Kevin Kruse places the turning point much earlier, during the Eisenhower era. In his Introduction, Kruse notes:

“In his acceptance speech at the 1952 Republican National Convention, he promised that the coming campaign would be a “great crusade for freedom.” As he traveled across America that summer, Eisenhower met often with Reverend Billy Graham, his close friend, to receive spiritual guidance and recommendations for passages of Scripture to use in his speeches. Indeed, the Republican nominee talked so much about spirituality on the stump that legendary New York Times reporter Scotty Reston likened his campaign to ‘William Jennings Bryan’s old invasion of the Bible Belt during the Chautauqua circuit days.’ On election day, Americans answered his call. Eisenhower won 55 percent of the popular vote and a staggering 442-to-89 margin in the Electoral College. Reflecting on the returns, Eisenhower saw nothing less than a mandate for a national religious revival. ‘I think one of the reasons I was elected was to help lead this country spiritually,’ he confided to Graham. ‘We need a spiritual renewal.’ “

Indeed, as one reads Kruse’s account of Eisenhower’s inauguration, it’s hard to argue with this. Eisenhower was the first to encourage his entire cabinet to attend religious services with him before the inaugural ceremonies began. He chose to be sworn in on two separate bibles, each opened to a verse chosen by Billy Graham, about Christian stewardship. He offered a prayer if his own writing following the taking of the oath. The inaugural parade opened with a float that, while ecumenical in nature, proclaimed that “In God We Trust.” And four days later, Eisenhower attended the first ever National Prayer Breakfast. None of this was traditional in the event.

Kruse goes on to say: “All this activity took place in just the first week of February 1953. In the months and years that followed, the new president revolutionized public life in America. In the summer of 1953, Eisenhower, Vice President Richard Nixon, and members of their cabinet held a signing ceremony in the Oval Office declaring that the United States government was based on biblical principles. Meanwhile, countless executive departments, including the Pentagon, instituted prayer services of their own. The rest of the Capitol consecrated itself too. In 1954, Congress followed Eisenhower’s lead, adding the phrase “under God” to the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance. A similar phrase, “In God We Trust,” was added to a postage stamp for the first time in 1954 and then to paper money the next year; in 1956, it became the nation’s first official motto. During the Eisenhower era Americans were told, time and time again, that the nation not only should be a Christian nation but also that it had always been one. They soon came to believe that the United States of America was ‘one nation under God.’ “

It is Kruse’s thesis that this was the consequence of a campaign begun during the 1930s by industrialists concerned over the effects of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘leftist’ New Deal policies on what had been up to that point relatively untrammeled capitalism. Having tried, and failed, to convince the public directly of the benefits of minimally regulated free enterprise, corporate interests took a leaf from Roosevelt’s own book, which promoted his reforms with biblical references and the preaching of a social gospel, and began to develop their own theological argument in favour of free enterprism, Christian libertarianism. One of the leaders of this theological movement, James W. Fifield Jr., went so far as to label the vaguely socialist reforms of Roosevelt as “state paganism” and likened them to Germany and Italy under the fascist totalitarianism of Hitler and Mussolini. This argument was based in a concept of parallelism between free enterprise and Christian salvation - that just as capitalism rewarded the individual efforts of the capitalist, Christ rewarded the individual efforts of the penitent with salvation. Policies that aimed at collective good sought to replace individual striving toward both wealth and grace with dependence, replacing Christ as the giver of all good with the state.

Funded and supported by wealthy industrialists, politicians and public figures such as former president Herbert Hoover and Hollywood celebrities Cecil B. deMille and Ronald Reagan, Fifield and others, among them his long-time friend Norman Vincent Peale, conducted wide-ranging campaigns to bring as many clergymen - mostly Protestant ministers, but also some conservative Catholic priests and rabbis - across the country into the fold, persuading them that the New Deal was just one step away from a rejection of God and an embrace of National Socialism. Their organisation, Spiritual Mobilization, would eventually claim over ten thousand “minister-representatives” prepared to “....exalt the dignity of individual man as a child of God, to exalt Jesus’ concept of man’s sacredness and to rebuild a moral fabric based on such irreducibles as the Ten Commandments.” The equation of Christianity with individual freedom, and the construction of the welfare state as the enemy of both, ensured that policies ranging from taxation to pensions for the elderly were identifies as not just liberal, but immoral, against the natural order as created by God.

Advocates of Christian libertarianism also sought to bring political and economic leaders into their movement. One key tool was the promotion of prayer breakfasts across the country, and particularly in Washington DC, where prominent men of government and industry were invited to meet with their peers, pray, and discuss the ways in which partnering with God - and rejecting government interference - could improve their business prospects. Soon both the
Senate and the House of Representatives hosted regular prayer meetings, largely attended by conservative politicians already opposed to New Deal policies.

By 1949, the gospel of Christian libertarianism had been taken up by a charismatic young preacher, Billy Graham, who fed on the anxieties of an America that was no longer the world’s only nuclear power to promote the message of individuality, reliance on God rather than the state, and free enterprise as the answer to the threat of Godless communism.

“In 1954, Graham offered his thoughts on the relationship between Christianity and capitalism in Nation’s Business, the magazine of the US Chamber of Commerce. “We have the suggestion from Scripture itself that faith and business, properly blended, can be a happy, wholesome, and even profitable mixture,” he observed. “Wise men are finding out that the words of the Nazarene: ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you’ were more than the mere rantings of a popular mystic; they embodied a practical, workable philosophy which actually pays off in happiness and peace of mind. . . . Thousands of businessmen have discovered the satisfaction of having God as a working partner.” “

Graham was instrumental in persuading Eisenhower to run for President, and while he did not openly declare his support, many in the Christian libertarianism movement urged voters to think carefully and choose the candidate God would want as president, and suggested issues to consider that strongly favoured the Republican candidate. The strategy was effective, Eisenhower was successful, winning with a strong majority in the electoral college. The prayer breakfasts continued, emphasising the essential connection between Christian libertarianism and political policy. “In February 1954, Eisenhower, Nixon, and several cabinet members returned to the Mayflower ballroom, along with nearly six hundred figures from government and business. Chief Justice Warren offered the main address of the morning. Speaking at length on the role of religion in American political life, he concluded that “no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have, from the very beginning, been our guiding genius.” Looking forward, the chief justice urged the crowd to adhere to “the spirit of Christian religion” to ensure that the country remained strong both in spirit and substance in the days and years to come. In the end, Warren stated emphatically: ‘We are a Christian nation.’ “

Under Eisenhower, meetings of senior officials in the executive branch - many of them new appointments with ties to the corporate sphere - routinely opened with prayer, either silent or spoken. Employees were urged to attend services regularly, and to facilitate this, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish services were offered in several government buildings, including the Pentagon, on a regular basis.

While Eisenhower did remove many of Roosevelt’s regulations on corporate enterprise, he failed to kill the welfare state, thus losing some of the support of the Christian libertarian movement. He did, however, succeed in “sacralsing” government and linking the American ideal of freedom with the importance of religion. He made Independence Day a National Day of Prayer. The success of this movement to brand the United States as a Christian nation and to establish “faith as the foundation of freedom” was demonstrated when, in 1954, both Republicans and Democrats supported the bill that added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Around the same time, the motto already found on most coins, “In God We Trust,” was added to the design of paper currency, and a very popular stamp bearing the motto was issued. In 1956, “In God We Trust” replaced “E Pluribus Unum” as the official national motto. In the public eye, the connection between religion and government was well established, though the principle of separation of church and state was still observed in the insistence on nondenominational language. Indeed, some stressed that the God of America was the God not only of Christians of all kinds, but also the God of Jews and Muslims. Only pagans snd atheists, it seemed, were unAmerican.

The reinterpretation of the founding fathers as intending to create a Christian nation, one based in biblical faith, grew common in public discourse, normalising a relationship between church and state that was in fact a relatively new development. A consortium of advertising companies, seeing the importance to their own industry of promoting the aims of the corporate movement to bring religion into politics to support their interests, began producing “public service” copy for newspapers, magazines, radio and television. These campaigns stressed the importance of religious institutions in American life, reminding Americans that “religious faith, cultivated by our churches and synagogues, is one of the foundations of our nation and of our dedication to human rights and individual liberty, as suggested in our national motto, ‘In God We Trust.’”

At the same time, the work of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and the flood of anti-communist propaganda created a fear of ‘godless communists’ aiming to destroy both secular snd religious freedom by undermining the free and Christian nation they lived in. Using a trope many of today’s progressives would recognise, Americans were warned that a secular, socialist society would take away their freedom to celebrate Christmas. Anti-communist organisations, funded and supported by corporations who feared the impact of labour unions on their bottom line, produced propaganda and media spectacles, often featuring some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, all expounding on the evils of communism - which was often framed as anything much further left than the John Birch society.

And the people, their receptivity to this message enhanced by the fear of communism and the anxieties of the Cold War Era, adopted this concept of extreme, public religiosity as an essential part of the American way of life. Religious-themed books proliferated on best-seller lists - Angel Unaware, The Robe, Life Is Worth Living, A Man Called Peter, This I Believe, and The Greatest Faith Ever Known, The Power of Positive Thinking, The Silver Chalice. Televangelism began, with popular ministers having their own local and national prayer programs. Hollywood turned to Biblical themes for its blockbusters. In the wake of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, four thousand stone monuments bearing those Bible verses were erected on public land across America.

Kruse presents his argument carefully and in great detail, showing the growing presence of religion in the workings of government during Eisenhower’s administration, and detailing the network of connections between Christians liberationists and government officials, from Eisenhower and his vice-president, Richard Nixon, down. He also looks at the conflicts initiated by the encroachment of specific religious practices into daily life - for instance, the controversies over prayer and the distribution of King James Bibles by the Gideon Society in schools.

In a striking example if the success of this campaign for religion in public life, a legal challenge against the introduction of a prescribed prayer in the schools in New York state was rejected on the grounds that public religious observance was a traditional aspect of the American way if life. In support of their decision, one if the judges cited: “the references to the Deity in the Declaration of Independence; the words of our National Anthem: “In God is our trust”; the motto on our coins; the daily prayers in Congress; the universal practice in official oaths of calling upon God to witness the truth; the official thanksgiving proclamations beginning with those of the Continental Congress and the First Congress of the United States and continuing till the present; the provisions for chaplaincies in the armed forces; the directions by Congress in modern times for a National Day of Prayer and for the insertion of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag; [and] innumerable utterances by our presidents and other leaders.”

Kruse goes on to observe: “Most of these were recent innovations not yet reviewed by the courts, but no matter. In a sign of how swiftly and thoroughly the religious revival of the 1950s had taken root, these judges cited changes that had occurred in their own recent memory as proof that the country’s religious roots stretched back to time immemorial.”

When the Supreme Court reversed this ruling and agreed that there should not be mandated prayer in schools, the majority of Americans were angered by the decision, engaging in ‘slippery slope’ arguments that, once again, ended up with the spectre of a ban on Christmas. When the .supreme Court later ruled that mandated devotional readings from the Bible in schools were also unconstitutional, the demand for a constitutional amendment, which had ben broached from time to time in the past, began to gain more support. A petition was submitted to Congress which read: “Whereas the Supreme Court of the United States by its decisions has virtually outlawed the right to pray or read Scripture in public schools and other institutions, we, the undersigned citizens, respectfully petition you to take the initial steps necessary to bring about an amendment to the Constitution which will forever guarantee the protection of our Christian traditions and the right of our people to pray and honor Holy Scripture in their institutions.”

The election of Richard Nixon only served to heighten both the trappings of religion that now surrounded the office of the President, and the partisan nature of this display of piety. Nixon had worked closely with Billy Graham for many years on the Christian libertarian project, and now welcomed him into the White House as an advisor. Both Graham and Norman Vincent Peale spoke during Nixon’s inaugural ceremonies, which included a full church service. Nixon, with Graham’s encouragement, ordered that weekly religious services be held in the White House. Officiating ministers frequently delivered sermons that stressed not only Christian values, but conservative political policies. A decade later, Ronald Reagan upped the piety content further: “Rather than simply reaffirm the old faith of the Eisenhower era, Reagan created new political rites and rituals suited to his own time. The silent prayer at the end of his speech was one innovation; the sign-off of “God bless America” was another. While the phrase had a long history in American culture, it had actually been used only once before in a major address by a president or presidential candidate. ... Earlier presidents and presidential candidates had used other forms of divine invocation, of course, but only sparingly. ...the eight presidents from FDR through Carter called for God’s blessing in less than half of their speeches; indeed, most of them did so in only a quarter. But from Reagan on, presidents have asked for God’s blessing in roughly nine out of every ten speeches they made. Reagan’s campaign represented a turning point, a moment when this “God strategy” became the new norm.”

Any objective observer can confirm that, in recent decades, the rhetoric and ritual of Christian piety has become an integral part of the American political scene, to a degree unknown in any other major modern democracy. While Republicans presents themselves as the party of Christian values, Democrats have also adopted the cloak of public religiosity. The country as a whole has accepted this relatively recent cultural shift as a long-standing tradition, believing without question that the United States us, and always has been, a Christian nation, ‘one nation under God’ destined to lead the world because it, like no other country, is founded in religious truth. It’s a dangerous myth, and taken too far, can lead to the establishment of a repressive theocracy - as the critics of this movement have argued at every step along the way.

In the current American political environment, I doubt there are enough people willing to read this book, or other critiques of the entanglement of religion and governance, to effect any kind of change. And that gives me yet another reason to worry for the future of America, and the world that must live with whatever it does.

Kim Fu’s novel, For Today I Am a Boy, is a difficult book to read, because for most of the time, the major characters appear to be living lives of quiet desperation. It tells, simply and straightforwardly, with the openness of a child - which the protagonist is, in the beginning - about growing up in a sadly dysfunctional immigrant family. The narrator, Peter Huang, is a young Chinese boy whose family lives in a small Ontario town. His father, desperate to assimilate, to be seen as a model Canadian, to become invisible as a minority, refuses to allow Cantonese to be spoken in the home, insists the only North American foods be prepared. He spends much of his life moving from one job to another, anything that gives him a managerial title, no matter how low the pay, until he finally becomes a civil servant, able to fulfill his image of the successful middle class professional man, dressed in suit and tie, a part of the Canadian dream. He is ambitious for his children, also. The oldest two daughters must assimilate, become doctors and lawyers. And for his one son, the only boy among four children, his ambitions are that he become a man, strong and in every way the perfect model minority.

But his family, which he so desperately wants to be perfect, has deep secrets. His wife pretends to work part-time, but really goes to the local Chinese Association to gamble. He himself has an affair with one of the women in the neighbourhood, who is suffering from delusions clustered around her infertility, and eventually commits suicide.

The oldest daughter Adele resists the role of scholar laid out for her, has no interest in becoming a doctor, and eventually drops out of university to run away to Amsterdam with her boyfriend. The second daughter, Helen, in contrast works very hard to be the perfect reflection of her father’s aspirations, the textbook lawyer, but is never really acknowledged. And the youngest daughter, Bonnie, is a rebel, sexually precocious, smoking, drinking, sneaking out to bars and flirting with older men.

And then there is Peter, who has the biggest secret. He wants to be a girl. Though the story is told from Peter’s perspective, the boy hiding his tryouts with his sisters’ make-up, brushing their hair, secretly cooking dinner when it’s supposed to be his sister Bonnie’s turn, still it’s clear that Peter’s father suspects that something is not quite right. He polices his son’s behaviour, praising him for ‘manly things’ - even when, forced to join in by some neighbourhood boys, he takes part in a an assault on a young girl - and withholding love and approval when he does something too ‘girly.’

For Today I Am a Boy is about Peter’s long, tormented, journey from hidden shame to self-acceptance. Growing up, he has no idea that there is anyone else like him - I use the male pronoun because Peter does not really understand that he can be someone other than a boy, albeit a weak and tormented one, for most of the book - who feels that they are not the gender they were assigned, the gender everyone believes them to be. As soon as he finishes high school, he moves to Montreal, starts working in restaurants, slowly building hs skill towards becoming a chef. And being alone. Not understanding who he is, but knowing that something is wrong, he stumbles through several painfully abusive relationships, avoiding friendships, focusing on work.

But there is a tomorrow for Peter, a time when finally there is an understanding of what has driven the fear and isolation for so long, and in that tomorrow, Peter is Audrey and she is finally whole.

This book hurt to read, for so many reasons. All four siblings have so far to go to become themselves, though arguably it is Audrey who must come the farthest. And always in the background, the pain of the father, demanding and disappointed, the mother, oppressed and enraged. The tangled issues of sexuality that all four sisters have to work through in different ways, and the racism and fetishisation that faces them as Asian-Canadians, and as Asian women.

It’s a powerful novel, and worth reading, despite the pain that so many of the characters carry, for the insights into growing up in an atmosphere that, even without overt violence, is deeply traumatic, and ultimately, just for the joy of the last paragraph: “Four grown women sit in a pub, raising their tourist steins to the camera. The waiter who holds the camera comments on how much they look alike. ‘We’re sisters,’ Bonnie says. ‘Wir sind Schwestern. This is Adele, Helen, and Audrey.’ “

I’ve loved Charles Saunders’ African-inspired fantasy writing for years, ever since I read the very first stories about Imaro, the heroic warrior destined by the gods to battle the forces of evil. Imaro, and the wonderful woman warrior Dossouye, were some of the earliest examples of heroic fantasy that featured black protagonists, moving fearlessly through magical worlds based on African places and societies.

In his new novel, Abengoni: First Calling - the first volume of a planned epic fantasy series - Saunders gives us a new creation, different in conception and intent from his Nyumbani, the world of his sword and sorcery heroes Imaro and Dossouye.

As Saunders says in his foreword to First Calling,

“For Abengoni, a different creative drumbeat thrummed in my mind. What if there were another Earth in which people from parallel versions of Europe and Africa encountered each other on an equal basis, rather than fictionally reprising the racism and colonialism that have for centuries wracked the so-called “Dark Continent” of the world we know? What if European and African folkloric traditions could be integrated within the context of an epic fantasy saga, rather than remain at racial loggerheads?

The Abengoni series is my answer to those questions. It was conceived and written in a spirit of amity rather than anger. Yes, the people of different races within the pages of First Calling are aware of their surface differences, such as skin tone and nose width. They are not color-blind. But they do not attach the suite of negative stereotypes to those differences that have led to the bigotry, discrimination, segregation and apartheid that have plagued our world for far too long. The distorting lens of racism does not exist in Abengoni.”

Saunders’ epic begins in the city of Khambawe, the capital city of the declining Matile Mala Empire. Once more powerful in both its mundane and magical power, the greatest of all the kingdoms of Abengoni, the Empire has faded from the height of its glory, following a catastrophic event known as the War of Storms, which has also cut off the trade with the Fidi, people of a distant continent, which had brought the Empire some of its wealth.

The War of Storms was a war of both men and gods - called Jagasti. The god of the underworld Legaba encouraged rebellion among the Uloans, natives of an island colony of the Matile Mala Empire. As the Matiles fought the revolunaries of Uloa, and the Jagisti massed against Legaba, the forces awakened by the magics used by men and gods on both sides brought about vast destruction, and permanently altered the seas that lay around Abengoni, filling them with massive storms and isolating the continent from the rest of the world. Further revolts among subjugated people followed on the war with Uloa, destroying much of the Empire’s wealth and strength, leaving it a mere shadow of its former magnificence, which slowly continued to fade.

Saunders paints a rich and complex picture of a society in decay. Political factions within, a rebellious underclass, its last remaining allies reconsidering their relationships, semi-autonomous regions contemplating independence, enemy nations waiting for the moment to strike - all these threaten the stability of the once great empire.

It is within this web of potential dangers that a strange and inexplicable event occurs. At an important annual religious ritual, the First Calling, where the sea goddess Nama-kwah blesses the city by temporarily manifesting herself in in the body of a specially trained priestess and dances on the surface of the waters, the expected manifestation fails. The priestess Tiyana feels only a momentary contact with the goddess hears a single word, “Danger” as the goddesses message, and then no more. Suddenly, as the ceremony falters, a large ship looms out of the morning mists, slowly coming into the harbour. When it comes to rest, ramming the great stone dock, the Matiles investigate, only to find the ship full of dead and almost dead men of Fidi, whom they recognise by their white skin and many colours of hair.

Among the the few survivors of the mighty, but battered, ship is a man who appears to be a wielder of magical powers, or ashuma, like the priestess Tiyana and her father Jass Gebram, the Leba, or chief priest. The two of them devote themselves to nursing him, while the other survivors are cared for by healers from the city. When he wakens, and shares his story, they learn that he is Kyroun ni Channar, a descendant if a man from Matile Mala who travelled to Fidi - which is called Cym Dinath by its inhabitants - 500 years ago and was trapped there by the beginning of the War of Storms.

Kyroun is a Seer, and the chief priest of an ancient god named Almovaar, whose worship had declined to almost nothing in Cym Dinath. After some not very successful attempts to revive the worship of Almovaar in the land of his birth, Kyroun received a message from his god to risk the Sea of Storms and return to Abengoni, to bring the worship of Almovaar to that continent.

Kyroun and his followers, and the surviving members of the ship’s crew, are made welcome in Khambawe. Some of the survivors, members of a dwarf-like people, are hosted by the Tokoloshe, allies of the Matile, dwarves like them, only dark-skinned rather than light, at their people’s embassy, while Gebram and his daughter take responsibility for Kyroun himself. But the arrival of the people of Fidi has triggered something that the people of Matile are unaware of - the god Legaba, still worshipped among the Uloans, has declared that Retribution Time has come, the time for Uloa to wage a full-scale assault on what remains of the Matile Mala Empire and destroy it utterly. And the Empire, though no one yet has spoken of it, stands almost defenseless, for the Jagisti have deserted them, and their priests and acolytes, who once could wield the magic of ashuma, are almost powerless.

But this is just the beginning of what awaits the failing kingdom of Matile Mala, and the strangers from Fidi with their powerful but mysterious new god.

Saunders’ first novel of Abengoni introduces a sweeping cast of men and gods inhabiting a world with a long and complex past into which many things, new and old may come. And through the great tapestry that is Abengoni run the themes of power and responsibility, choice and consequence, that must eventually be faced by every being, even the gods. I am anxiously awaiting the next volume of this tale.

Rae Spoon and Ivan E. Coyote are performers, long-time creative partners whose shows are a mix of comedy, music and other media. They are also both trans, and it was inevitable that they would eventually develop - with contributions from a new partner, Clyde Petersen, also trans - a performance that came out of their experiences. The show they developed, called Gender Failure, has now become the basis of a book by the same name.

Gender Failure is not an easy book to describe. Its themes, though, are highly relevant to the current revolution in understanding gender. This is an exploration of growing up assigned female when you are not, about feeling a failure at being a girl because you don’t want to do the same things, about feeling vaguely wrong. It’s about slowly working out who you really are and what you want to do about it. It’s about the way society treats people who are gender non-conforming or non-binary or who don’t fit into the two standard boxes for gender identity and presentation. It’s about gender dysphoria, feeling that parts of your body, the parts we associate with gender, aren’t right, aren’t really a part of you the way your foot or your shoulder is. It’s about realising that human experience transcends the so-called gender binary and that locking ourselves into boxes that prescribe not just a binary of genitals and bodies, but of behaviours and identities, limits us all.

As we learn through a series of interwoven autobiographical essays, alternating between the experiences of the two authors around gender, both Coyote and Spoon have tried out several labels, checked out several gender identity boxes, before separately coming to identify as non-binary. Both have at times chosen a style of gender presentation that tends toward masculine. By the photos included in the book, Coyote in particular reads as butch, and acknowledges that this remains a part of their identity. Neither fits exactly into one of those gendered boxes, however, even the expanded set. But society insists that even if you are gender-non-conforming, you have to do it in the right way to get the body you feel you should be in. As Coyote says, taking about their decision to have top surgery:

“In British Columbia, the province in Canada where I live, this surgery is covered by our health care system, provided you qualify. And by qualify, they mean be diagnosed. They, being the government. The government will pay for you to get fixed, but only if they decide you are broken in the right way. The other they being, in this case, the medical establishment. Before the bureaucrats can sign off on the form and send it to the surgeon, a psychologist and a psychiatrist must first decide if they believe me that I am who I say I am. In order to do this, I must fill out a long multiple-choice questionnaire, which the psychologist that my doctor referred me to will read through and assess, and then refer me to a psychiatrist for a proper diagnosis. Because someone who is trained in this stuff has to sign off that I do in fact have a bona fide gender identity disorder, but that someone cannot be me, because I am not qualified. And by gender identity disorder, they all mean that you want to be a man. Or a woman, as the case may be. It is not enough to just feel that you are not a woman or a man. You must want to be not the box that they have all previously put you in. There is no box to check for not wanting a box at all. No one knows how to fix that.”

Spoon comments on their own first realisation of the possibility of not having to identify as male despite rejecting their assigned sex:

“What would it mean not to be a man or a woman? Over the years I had learned not to think of people’s assigned sexes as their genders, but I had expected others to place themselves at least conceptually on one side of the gender binary. I started to meet a lot more people who went by the “they” pronoun. Most people in the queer community around me didn’t have any difficulty using it. In a space where non-binary pronouns had been largely accepted, I began to see the benefits of using them. It dragged me out of an identity that had been previously cemented because I thought being a man was the only way to move away from my assigned sex. In this community I did not have to be male not to be female.”

By calling the show, and the book, Gender Failure, Coyote and Spoon openup the discussion on gender identity - in discussing their own experiences, initially labeling them as ‘failures’ at being girls, or women, but then also coming to realise that identifying as men is just as inauthentic for them, they call for the question - is it those who do not fit in the boxes who are failures, or is the binary system itself proving to be a failure as more and more people reject its rigidity and limited possibilities. As Spoon comments: “Now that I define my gender and sexuality as stories I tell and agree upon, I want to leave room for future possibilities that I have not been presented with yet. I am a gender failure. I failed at the gender binary, unable to find a place in being either a man or a woman with which I felt comfortable. But ultimately I believe that it’s the binary that fails to leave room for most people to write their own gender stories.”

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, the founder of MuslimGirl.com, a prominent website created by and for Muslim women, has written a memoir about growing up as an American-born Muslim, the daughter of refugees from Jordan and Palestine, in a post 9/11 world. It’s an account that’s both deeply saddening and angering, and a celebration of the determination of a young woman to survive despite the violence and hatred directed toward all Muslims because of the actions of a radical minority.

The wave of Islamophobia that swept the West following the terrorist attacks on America in September 2001 were perhaps to be expected. Racism is always close to the surface in the West, and one of the characteristics of racism is that whatever wrong may be done by one member of a racialised group is held to be a general fault of all, while any good is seen as the act of an exceptional person, someone who ‘isn’t like the others.’ Before 9/11, racism against the peoples of the Middle East had been muted - they certainly weren’t white, with all the privilege that entails, and the stereotypes were many and varied, but they had not been actively criminalised, the way black people in North America had. 9/11 changed all that. Suddenly, the image of the Muslim from the Middle East became that of a fanatical terrorist, bent on committing violence against all white nations and their citizens.

Al-Khatahtbeh was only a child when this change happened around her. With the exception of a brief period when her father attempted to move the family to a place of greater safety, returning to the US after a health crisis which nearly killed her mother, Al-Khatahtbeh grew up in a hostile environment where her sense of her self as a Muslim, as a child of immigrants and refugees, sometimes her very right to exist was challenged.

She writes movingly about the effects of this constant devaluation of herself, about the sense of inferiority that overwhelmed her, making it almost impossible for her to speak up for herself or even ask for her due. At times, she even denied her Identity as a Muslim to avoid the response of those around her.

It was in part the time spent among her cousins, attending a Jordanian school and living among fellow Muslims who might idolise the US in some ways, but had not had to face the consequences of being a young Muslim in an Islamophobic society, learning about the history of Islam, that helped her reaffirm her pride in her religion, not just as a personal choice, but as a part of her identity, that helped bring her to the decision, as an adolescent, to make that identity visible by wearing the hijab. She writes about the symbolism of the hijab:

“With that decision, I inherited the entire history to which the hijab has been tied, and carried it on my head like an issue for public debate.

Throughout time, the headscarf has evolved to symbolize autonomy and control over Muslim women’s bodies. An empowering rejection of the male gaze, colonialism, and anti-Muslim sentiment, it can just as easily be twisted into a disempowering tool of subjugation and repression through its forced imposition. In any given time period, the headscarf would be at the center of a tug-of-war between people and their governments, between colonizers and colonized people. During the French colonization of North Africa, the veil became an object of extreme sexualization, with white men writing literature fantasizing about ripping the scarf off sexy Arab women’s heads—an act that became, in their minds, the most gratifying assertion of power. Edward Said taught us of the orientalized depiction of Middle Eastern women as seductresses hidden behind fictionalized harems—forbidden spaces kept for women only—that were a figment of the white man’s imagination, an imagery that colonizers would stage for postcards to send back home to Europe. Today, some governments are just as eager to mandate its wear in public as others are to forbid it. In all cases, any decision to intervene in how a woman dresses, whether to take it off or put it on, is just the same assertion of public control over a woman’s body. Iran’s honor police enforce that all women wear a headscarf in public, while today’s French laws forbid the veil in public schools. It’s funny how, in our patriarchal world, even two entities at the opposite ends of the spectrum can be bonded by their treatment of women’s bodies. Sexism has been employed in many ways throughout history to uphold racism.”

Al-Khatahtbeh began developing the Muslim Girl web presence with some friends while still in high school, spurred by the lack of media representation and Internet presence of young Muslim women. Though she would work for several mainstream media outlets after university, Muslim Girl became a larger presence in her life and she began to be sought out for the Muslim women’s perspective. The latter part of the book is as much a critique of the representation of Muslims in the media, and the ways that has affected the lives of Muslim men and women in America as it is a personal memoir. She writes about the narratives of terrorism, violence, barbarism, and gender inequality that have dominated the public images of Islamic peoples in America and around the world. She talks openly about being afraid, at times, to go out in public as a hijabi. She writes about the ways in which the Trump campaign - the book was written before the election, although it’s clear that she expected he would win - aggravated the situation, inciting a new level of violence against Muslims.

“Trump discovered that milking anti-Muslim sentiment, with complete disregard to the dangers it poses to our very lives, keeps him in the spotlight and gets him more airtime. Since his ascension to the national stage, I have been receiving press requests around the clock during his media circuses to explain, again and again, “the current climate for Muslim women.” By the time the Muslim-ban comments came, I had run out of different palatable ways to say, “Our lives are under threat right now”—ironically, not from ISIS extremism or the brown men that our society is raising pitch forks against, but from our own Western society itself.”

But there have also been breakthroughs, and Al-Khatahtbeh, through her work with Muslim Girls and her activism a a voice for Muslim women has been a part of these. She ends this memoir, which contains much of her pain and fear, and that of other Muslims in an Islamophobic world, with an acknowledgement of all this, and with hope.

“I think of the little girls we were and the little girls we could have been, and the little girls who never were and what little girls will be if we have anything to say about it. I think of how our generation is a fateful one. We were the little girls who had our voices robbed of us. We were the little girls who had our bodies and our homelands ripped apart while our hands were tied behind our backs. We were the little girls who were told to sit down and shut up while our world betrayed us. We are rising up—we are the ones reclaiming our voices, the ones talking back, and the ones reminding the world that no, we haven’t forgotten. We grew to become our own saviors.”

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My life in books

Books in my life

Recent Entries

Diane Haegar: The Secret Bride

Mary Robinette Kowal: The Lady Astronaut of Mars duology

Madeline Miller: Circe

Madeline Miller: The Song of Achilles

Diane Haeger: The Queen’s Mistake

Elizabeth Fremantle: Two Novels

Three Wives of Henry VIII

Yrsa Sigurdardottir: Why Did You Lie?

Peter Tremayne: Valley of the Shadow

Peter Tremayne: The Spider’s Web

Susan Bordo: The Creation of Anne Boleyn

Zen Cho: Spirits Abroad

Rebecca Roanhorse: Trail of Lightning

Johanna Sinisalo: The Core of the Sun

Zarqa Nawaz: Laughing All the Way to the Mosque

Kevin Kruse: One Nation Under God

Kim Fu: For Today I Am a Boy

Charles Saunders: Abengoni : First Calling

Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon: Gender Failure

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh: Muslim Girl