Ana's Best Books of 2012

I haven't read as much HF as I thought this year and looking back at my reads there's only one book I gave 5* to - Kate Lord Brown's The Perfume Garden that made me research about the Spanish Civil War and haunted me for weeks afterwards. This was the book I mentioned last year in my "eagerly anticipating" post so we can say my expectations were fulfilled.

But there are a few more books that also deserve a mention because I found them very enjoyable:

Oleanna by Julie K. Rose

Hungry Hill by Daphne du Maurier

Defend and Betray by Anne Perry

Oleanna by Julie K. Rose

Set during the separation of Norway from Sweden in 1905, this richly detailed novel of love and loss was inspired by the life of the author's great-great-aunts.
Oleanna and her sister Elisabeth are the last of their family working their farm deep in the western fjordland. A new century has begun, and the world outside is changing, but in the Sunnfjord their world is as small and secluded as the verdant banks of a high mountain lake. With their parents dead and their brothers all gone to America, the sisters have resigned themselves to a simple life tied to the land and to the ghosts of those who have departed.
The arrival of Anders, a cotter living just across the farm's border, unsettles Oleanna's peaceful but isolated existence. Sharing a common bond of loneliness and grief, Anders stirs within her the wildness and wanderlust she has worked so hard to tame. When she is confronted with another crippling loss, Oleanna must decide once and for all how to face her past, claim her future, and find her place in a wide new world.

I am always curious about historical fiction novels set in countries that I am less familiar with. When I found out that Oleanna was set in Norway at the beginning of the last century I just couldn't resist it.

Oleanna is the name of the main character - a woman nearing thirty who has seen most of her family members die and her older brother leave to America. She stayed behind with her sister Elizabeth and a younger brother but now he wants to leave too. The two women will be forced to work the farm by themselves and none is too pleased about it.

I felt that Oleanna was a book about restlessness. About wanting to leave, to get to know new horizons but also about wanting to stay where your roots are. Sometimes you have to leave so that you can come back and stay.

Oleanna feels betrayed because her brother wants to leave but she also feels that she would like to know other places. To her restlessness and anxiety also contributes the fact that she still isn't at peace with how her mother died and that she is developing some feelings for her neighbor Anders Samuelsson.

I did like Oleanna. Her sense of duty kept her going even when she didn't feel like it. I could understand her occasional exasperation with her sister and her sense of betrayal when she felt that Anders was leaving her too. She and Elizabeth cope with their losses in different ways and it was nice to feel that they had both grown up during the course of the story. I never quite understood Elizabeth’s relationship with Torjus father though, or how they had ended up how they were when the book starts.

I enjoyed the glimpse we had of life in an isolated fiord's farm in the beginning of the 1900s, of the political circumstances of the separation of Norway and Sweden and had some fun with Oleanna's introduction to women's rights. I liked the sense of isolation they had on the farm and how that may lead them to feel isolated has individuals.

I closed this story with a satisfied sigh and I wish I could read a bit more about Oleanna and know a bit more about her life after she and Elizabeth had found their happiness.

I really enjoyed Julie K. Rose's writing style and how she made characters and landscape come alive.

Grade: 4.5/5

Julie K. Rose's Books of a Lifetime (includes giveaway)

Today we welcome Julie K. Rose, author of Oleanna to Historical Tapestry to share her Books of a Lifetime.

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When you look back on your life, it's sometimes surprising to remember who you were.  At least it is for me.

I know conceptually that I was a child, a teenager, a young woman. The flashes of memory are still there, images and smells, snatches of song, feelings, photos, family stories worn around the edges with use. But it's disconnected now, not a continuous line of consciousness over the course of 14,660-odd days (some more odd than others).

Certain things have held this life together, given it structure and meaning, a through-line: my husband, friends, and family. Music, art, wonder at the world. Writing.  But it's books, always books, that give me something to hang onto, to anchor me in a point of time.

  

And it all really started with Little Women. It was the first "grown up" book my parents read to me, when I was quite young. The March girls imprinted themselves in my brain, especially fellow tomboy and voracious reader (and writer) Jo. This was the first book that book taught me the joy of being transported to another place and time; watching my mom's face as she read to me, I knew she was transported too.  Our shared love of reading and Little Women gave me a connection with my mom. When the 1994 movie came out, we saw it together, crying, and laughing because we were crying, like the sentimental saps we were. It was the only time we went to the movies together as adults; I remember it like it was yesterday.

Rewind to another crucial point in life marked by a book: the dreaded, dire teenage years. When I was 14, mom loaned me her copy of Trade Wind by M.M. Kaye. With the wonderfully named Hero Athena Hollis, yet another tomboyish, independent heroine, and a completely different time and place (19^th century Zanzibar), the book fired both my imagination and my wanderlust. It stoked my courage. It reinforced my independent streak.  And when I wrote a fan letter to Mollie Kaye, and got a response back, it sowed the seeds for what I would become almost 20 years later: a writer.

But well before that, I went to college, and the book that really rocked my world didn't have a single spunky heroine. Instead, it was an existentialist classic of the mid-20^th century: The Plague by Albert Camus, a terribly grim, beautifully written story. What struck me then, and has stuck with me in the years since, is the deep, aching humanity of the book. No matter what faith you profess, or what your beliefs are, when it comes down to it, it is up to us. We are all here together, and we must always, always take care of each other.  And, despite circumstances and the look of things, there is always hope. It's the book that really marked my passage, intellectually and emotionally speaking, into adulthood.

And frankly, adulthood just sucks sometimes. There was a point about ten years ago where I lost my way, when I lost sight of hope.  As a response to the darkness, I began writing fiction, and the path began to clear. And then a year later, I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time. The obvious love Tolkien had for the land helped restore my sense of peace (and influenced my writing as well). But what was even more important was being reminded that you have to press on, you have to have heart, that anyone and everyone can be a hero. Those three books helped me recover my courage and hope and now I re-read the books once a year, to remind me that the light will always win out over the dark, in the end.

I can vividly remember reading each of these books for the first time, the expansiveness I felt when I was immersed in their worlds. Books are one of the through-lines, the anchor points in my life, reminding me who I was, and showing me who I have become, and maybe even giving me a preview of who I will be in the future.

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called 'leaves') imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”
― Carl Sagan

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About Julie K. Rose

I'm an author of unique historic and contemporary fiction, and I'm particularly interested in the intersection of the spiritual and secular, the supernatural and the everyday, the past and the present, and the deep, instinctual draw of the land.

Oleanna, short-listed for finalists in the 2011 Faulkner-Wisdom literary competition, is my second novel.  The Pilgrim Glass, a finalist in the 2005 Faulkner-Wisdom and semi-finalist in the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards, was published in 2010.

I am a current co-chair of the Historical Novel Society, Northern California chapter and former reviewer for the Historical Novels Review. I live in the Bay Area with my husband and our cat Pandora, and love reading, following the San Francisco Giants, watching episodes of Doctor Who, and enjoying the amazing natural beauty of Northern California.

About Oleanna

Set during the separation of Norway from Sweden in 1905, this richly detailed novel of love and loss was inspired by the life of my great-great-aunts.

Oleanna and her sister Elisabeth are the last of their family working their farm deep in the western fjordland. A new century has begun, and the world outside is changing, but in the Sunnfjord their world is as small and secluded as the verdant banks of a high mountain lake. With their parents dead and their brothers all gone to America, the sisters have resigned themselves to a simple life tied to the land and to the ghosts of those who have departed.

The arrival of Anders, a cotter living just across the farm's border, unsettles Oleanna's peaceful but isolated existence. Sharing a common bond of loneliness and grief, Anders stirs within her the wildness and wanderlust she has worked so hard to tame. When she is confronted with another crippling loss, Oleanna must decide once and for all how to face her past, claim her future, and find her place in a wide new world.

***

We have 2 copies of Oleanna to give away. Open worldwide. Please leave a comment on this post to enter. The winners will be announced on July 1st. And don't forget to return tomorrow for our review of Oleanna.