My Connections Magazine Holidays Season 2017

My Connection Magazine 2017 October, November, December Holidays Season
KIRKUS REVIEW
An Edwardian-era duke and duchess are torn
apart by the expectations of their families
and the death of their child.
Seraphina Bevingstoke, Duchess of Haven
fully admits that she trapped her husband
into marriage. But that was only because she
loved him so much and was sure he would
never offer for a social mushroom like her.
Unfortunately, her husband, Malcolm, was
still having a hard time forgiving her when
their baby daughter died at birth.
Overwhelmed with the pain of losing
Malcolm’s love and their child, Sera ran
away to America. Now, nearly three years
later, she’s back in London, seeking a divorce
on the floor of Parliament, determined to
put her disastrous marriage behind her. She
needs the divorce so she can own property
in her own name. She wants to be the sole
proprietor and most cherished entertainer at
the Singing Sparrow, a tavern in Covent
Garden where she sings on stage in disguise.
What Sera doesn’t know is that Malcolm has
never stopped searching for her and has no
intention of giving her a divorce. He plays
along, though, forcing her to help him find a
replacement bride at his country estate. Sera
sees no choice but to bring reinforcements in
the form of her scandalous sisters. MacLean
(A Scot in the Dark, 2016, etc.) delivers a
dense, richly woven tale of betrayal and grief
and family loyalty. The main characters lack
self-confidence, believing themselves
KIRKUS REVIEW
A gifted Irish author offers another take on
his country’s Great Famine through the eyes
of a teenage girl as she travels through a
land wracked by want.
When a blight hits the potato harvest of
1845, a pregnant widow with four children
seeks to spare her 14-year-old daughter,
Grace, from hunger, maybe, but certainly
from the appetites of her own insatiable
lover. She cuts the girl’s hair, dresses her as a
boy, and sends her off to seek work. Grace is
soon joined by her irrepressible brother
Colly, 12, who gives her a few lessons in
maleness. Their time together is cut short
when he is swept away in a teeming river as
they try to salvage a drowned sheep. She
lucks into work helping to herd cows, but
betrayal and murder await down the
drovers’ path. She joins a road crew, but her
first period surprises and unmasks her,
stirring unwanted interest. A fellow worker
saves her from would-be rapists and travels
with her on adventures that seem to cover
about half of Ireland by foot. Their
unmeasurable route is through deepening
despair and the hell beyond mere hunger—
“past want to a point that is longing
narrowed down to the forgetting of all
else”—and the descent into crime and then a
blackness: indeed, four Sterne-like blank
black pages to signify perhaps more than
pen can write, even one as eloquent as
Lynch’s (The Black Snow, 2015, etc.). Grace
KIRKUS REVIEW
Nigeria serves as a prism refracting the
myriad experiences of both former and
current inhabitants.
In two different stories in Arimah’s debut
collection, characters have the supernatural
ability to drain emotions from other people,
for good or for ill. In “Who Will Greet You at
Home,” a Nigerian woman participates in a
tradition of making children out of inanimate
materials and having them blessed by older
women in hopes that they will become real.
But these blessings come at a price—in her
case, "Mama" blesses the child in exchange
for the protagonist's own joy, “siphoned a
bit, just a dab…a little bit of her life for her
child’s life.” In the title story, figures known
as Mathematicians are able to use precise
algorithms and equations to relieve negative
emotions from customers who can afford it.
This power over feelings is as good a
metaphor as any for storytelling. And
Arimah has skill in abundance: the stories
here are solid and impeccably crafted and
strike at the heart of the most complicated
of human relationships. Against a backdrop
of grief for dead parents or angst over a
lover, Arimah uses Nigeria as her muse. The
characters exist in relation to a Nigeria of the
past—the ghost of the Nigerian civil war,
especially, looms over many of the stories—
as well as present-day Nigeria, either as
citizens or expats. Arimah even imagines a
future Nigeria in which it has become the
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