The Mirk and Midnight Hour by Jane Nickerson
I listened to Nickerson’s first novel, Strands of Bronze and Gold (a re-telling of Bluebeard set in the antebellum South), and liked it well enough. Her second novel is in the South during the Civil War and re-tells a different legend: Tam Lin. Nickerson’s writing is slow with an emphasis on developing setting and building atmosphere. It worked pretty well in her first, but it’s less successful here. A full third of the book is purely expository. The protagonist, Violet, lives on a small plantation in the South. Her twin brother was recently killed in the war and her father remarried, then went off to fight himself, leaving Violet with a new stepmother and stepsister along with two male cousins who have come to stay. Nickerson spends a lot of time getting us acquainted with the farm, called Scuppernong, and its inhabitants, including several slaves.

About halfway through the book, Violet meets a wounded Union soldier named Thomas Lind. She dare not take him to a hospital, since he’d simply be taken captive. Thomas is being kept alive by a group of free Black people who practice hoodoo and are obviously preparing Thomas for some sort of ritual, which comes to a head at the end of the novel. This storyline is juggled awkwardly with that of the cousins at Scuppernong, one of them a young man whose intentions toward Violet and his younger cousin are anything but charitable. This would have been a stronger novel had Nickerson focused on one of these plotlines; as they exist now, they seem to be fighting each other for prominence. They don’t come together in any way by the end.

Violet’s voice is heavily accented and seems a little forced. I don’t think the narrator – Dorothy Dillingham Blue – has such a strong Southern accent naturally and it just comes across as fake. I also find books featuring hoodoo awkward when written from a white perspective, and I’m perhaps a bit tired of white Southern Civil War stories, where the white protagonist comes to the realization that people should not be owned and is lauded for it. It’s a hazard of Civil War historical fiction and it’s become cliche. A more nuanced and interesting take on slavery in a Southern plantation is Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze.

I don’t think this will appeal much to readers interested in Tam Lin; the retelling isn’t hugely obvious and it doesn’t even come into play until halfway through the book. Readers looking for setting and atmosphere may enjoy it, as well as readers who can’t get enough of this time period – and there are certainly those readers out there. Violet herself is an incredibly naive narrator, which may be accurate for this era when girls were meant to be quite sheltered, but it also slows the novel down some and keeps certain conclusions (mostly the cousin being a bad egg) from coming to light for much too long. I wouldn’t call this a first pick.

A Mad, Wicked Folly by Sharon Biggs Waller
This novel is set in 1909 London and focuses on a teenage girl who is determined to become an artist. Vicky comes from a wealthy family and they are determined that she give up her foolish dreams and get married. She’s taking an illicit art class in Paris while she’s supposed to be at finishing school and she decides to pose nude – it’s a life drawing class, the model failed to show, and all the other male students had already posed. Of course, her act is found out by her parents and she’s sent back home to London in scandal.

Her parents arrange for an engagement to a young man, a gambler who seems nice and whom Vicky believes may just be progressive enough to pay for tuition at the Royal College of Art. Vicky doesn’t mind marrying him if it means she can pursue her dream. The problem is, she starts to fall in love with a young police officer she met while sketching the suffragettes at a rally. Her life becomes a series of deceptions – sneaking away to meet the police officer (who has become her muse), sketching the suffragettes and eventually using her artistic talent to help them (a cause with which her parents heartily disagree), and applying for a scholarship to the art college.

Waller does a good job of showing Vicky as being progressive for her time but also caught up in its prevailing ideals. She can’t see a way to achieve her dreams beyond a man agreeing to give it to her. At the same time, she keeps pushing for a way to make it happen, and some of her actions would be considered progressive even for our own time (posing nude, for example). The suffragette storyline is a great subplot and helps give Vicky an arc – she realizes she has to fight for this cause if she ever wants to make her own dreams come true, that she can’t rely on others to do it for her. She’s a strong-willed protagonist who also seems like she belongs to her time, a fine line to walk in feminist historical fiction.

This is a great example of what historical fiction can be: a snapshot of a certain place at a certain time featuring an interesting protagonist in interesting circumstances. Readers wanting to know more about the suffragette movement in England would do well to pick this up – it features a number of real prominent figures in the movement and focuses on the force-feeding of the imprisoned women, a real-life occurrence which I know will be new to many readers. Katharine McEwan narrates Vicky’s story well, injecting personality into Vicky’s voice and slightly voicing the other characters.

Both audiobooks borrowed from my local library.