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Quick housekeeping note: I might be skipping next week due to Passover, driving half way across the country in order to be with family for Passover, and a Serious Work Issue that extends through midnight on Wednesday.
I'm so torn over this book. I want to love it without caviling because it has a Jewish hero whose Judaism is central to the plot and engaged with, which is beyond rare in historicals. And it has quite a bit to recommend it. However, there was element that made me uneasy in a way I couldn't shake. And that makes it a little hard to unconditionally recommend the book.
Our hero, Simon Cohen, is a banker who is returning to his native England after years of living abroad with his parents, who have recently died in a tragic accident. Simon's mother was a Jew-by-choice, and Simon's paternal family handled that unevenly. Simon's maternal family declared her dead. Quite literally, she was recorded as dead in several places. Given this, they moved away from England.
Simon comes back in part because he's at ends having lost his parents, in part because his cousin has been elected to Parliament, but cannot be sworn in because the wording of the swearing in requires swearing on the true Christian faith, and Simon needs to do some politicking (of the money and influence kind), and in part for revenge. The revenge part is honestly complicated, but suffice to say, it involves him getting a wing of the National Gallery named after his mother. This, in turn, involves a donation of art.
Lydia, our leading lady, is the daughter of a Marquis with a gambling problem who has just been left by her fiance, due to her younger sister being with child out of wedlock. On top of everything else, Lydia's father has lost their last property to Simon in a card game.
Lydia and Simon have good chemistry from their first meeting, and they challenge each other's preconceived notions of what is right, what is proper, what will keep themselves safe. This is a book where the two mains go toe to toe a lot, and rather than one side winning, they mostly level each other up.
Simon's relationship with his paternal family is complex and well-drawn, and Lydia's family history, which is revealed in layers, is tragic, but also explains so much of who she is. All of the characters here, even the truly unlikeable ones, are the kind of people we all know.
I should state that while none of these are in any way glorified, this book does discuss child sexual grooming (not of either of the main characters), self-injury (also not of the main-characters), and has a decent amount of period specific anti-Semitism.
Here comes my issue: the place Simon's parents remove themselves to is Cape Town. Just to begin with, this is a pretty icky choice that necessitates them being part of an immediate and significant system of oppression. It's made somewhat worse by a number of things: 1. Simon never really talks about Cape Town. He talks about growing up on the veldt, which speaks more to the concept of Africa being this wild, untamable place. Only, Cape Town was pretty established by this point BY colonizers. Like, forget that Simon never mentions the Jewish community there, which was also established at that time and it seems weird AF that his observant parents seem to have had no part of, he never mentions anything to do with people. Which I think was a way of trying to pretend that being a European in Cape Town at that time wasn't that big a problem, but. It was. It really really was. And the LACK of any discussion of the politics of Cape Town while so much of the politics of Jews in England get talked about feels...like putting a problem in a corner and hoping nobody will notice. 2. On several occasions, Lydia thinks of Simon in exoticized terminology, e.g., analogizing him to a tiger. Setting aside issues of the Othering of Africa, Simon isn't African. He was born in England. Both of his parents are English. It's a whole bundle of no happening in noville there. 3. At one point, Simon DOES bring up that Jewish money helped to finance things so that England could work itself free of slave ownership. I'll be honest, my knowledge of the end of slavery in England is crap, I have no idea what went into it. This may or may not be a historically accurate statement. But it feels like a what-aboutism. Like, it's FINE that Simon's family was hanging out, taking advantage of South African Blacks because some other Jewish dude from England made sure that Blacks in England could be free. And, uh. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's not how this works.
Basically, I'm left with the more-than-sneaking suspicion that Simon might be a raging racist throughout the whole book, and that even if he's not, he's sure as hell done a whole lot to hold up White Supremacy without even having the grace to acknowledge that, and honestly, it took a lot of the joy out of it for me. Which sucked because, yeah, like I said, Jewish hero = fucking unicorn, and the book is extremely well written. Sigh.
I'm so torn over this book. I want to love it without caviling because it has a Jewish hero whose Judaism is central to the plot and engaged with, which is beyond rare in historicals. And it has quite a bit to recommend it. However, there was element that made me uneasy in a way I couldn't shake. And that makes it a little hard to unconditionally recommend the book.
Our hero, Simon Cohen, is a banker who is returning to his native England after years of living abroad with his parents, who have recently died in a tragic accident. Simon's mother was a Jew-by-choice, and Simon's paternal family handled that unevenly. Simon's maternal family declared her dead. Quite literally, she was recorded as dead in several places. Given this, they moved away from England.
Simon comes back in part because he's at ends having lost his parents, in part because his cousin has been elected to Parliament, but cannot be sworn in because the wording of the swearing in requires swearing on the true Christian faith, and Simon needs to do some politicking (of the money and influence kind), and in part for revenge. The revenge part is honestly complicated, but suffice to say, it involves him getting a wing of the National Gallery named after his mother. This, in turn, involves a donation of art.
Lydia, our leading lady, is the daughter of a Marquis with a gambling problem who has just been left by her fiance, due to her younger sister being with child out of wedlock. On top of everything else, Lydia's father has lost their last property to Simon in a card game.
Lydia and Simon have good chemistry from their first meeting, and they challenge each other's preconceived notions of what is right, what is proper, what will keep themselves safe. This is a book where the two mains go toe to toe a lot, and rather than one side winning, they mostly level each other up.
Simon's relationship with his paternal family is complex and well-drawn, and Lydia's family history, which is revealed in layers, is tragic, but also explains so much of who she is. All of the characters here, even the truly unlikeable ones, are the kind of people we all know.
I should state that while none of these are in any way glorified, this book does discuss child sexual grooming (not of either of the main characters), self-injury (also not of the main-characters), and has a decent amount of period specific anti-Semitism.
Here comes my issue: the place Simon's parents remove themselves to is Cape Town. Just to begin with, this is a pretty icky choice that necessitates them being part of an immediate and significant system of oppression. It's made somewhat worse by a number of things: 1. Simon never really talks about Cape Town. He talks about growing up on the veldt, which speaks more to the concept of Africa being this wild, untamable place. Only, Cape Town was pretty established by this point BY colonizers. Like, forget that Simon never mentions the Jewish community there, which was also established at that time and it seems weird AF that his observant parents seem to have had no part of, he never mentions anything to do with people. Which I think was a way of trying to pretend that being a European in Cape Town at that time wasn't that big a problem, but. It was. It really really was. And the LACK of any discussion of the politics of Cape Town while so much of the politics of Jews in England get talked about feels...like putting a problem in a corner and hoping nobody will notice. 2. On several occasions, Lydia thinks of Simon in exoticized terminology, e.g., analogizing him to a tiger. Setting aside issues of the Othering of Africa, Simon isn't African. He was born in England. Both of his parents are English. It's a whole bundle of no happening in noville there. 3. At one point, Simon DOES bring up that Jewish money helped to finance things so that England could work itself free of slave ownership. I'll be honest, my knowledge of the end of slavery in England is crap, I have no idea what went into it. This may or may not be a historically accurate statement. But it feels like a what-aboutism. Like, it's FINE that Simon's family was hanging out, taking advantage of South African Blacks because some other Jewish dude from England made sure that Blacks in England could be free. And, uh. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's not how this works.
Basically, I'm left with the more-than-sneaking suspicion that Simon might be a raging racist throughout the whole book, and that even if he's not, he's sure as hell done a whole lot to hold up White Supremacy without even having the grace to acknowledge that, and honestly, it took a lot of the joy out of it for me. Which sucked because, yeah, like I said, Jewish hero = fucking unicorn, and the book is extremely well written. Sigh.
