{"id":3217,"date":"2024-05-25T10:23:44","date_gmt":"2024-05-25T17:23:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=3217"},"modified":"2024-05-25T10:23:44","modified_gmt":"2024-05-25T17:23:44","slug":"mysteries-and-secrets-in-victorian-england","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=3217","title":{"rendered":"Mysteries and secrets in Victorian England"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson<\/p>\n

THE LIBRARY THIEF. By Kuchenga Shenje. Hanover Square Press. 358 pages. $29.99.<\/p>\n

The Library Thief<\/em> is a remarkable, entertaining and ambitious debut historical mystery novel by Kuchenga Shenje, a writer, journalist and speaker who lives in Manchester, England.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the story of Florence Granger, who grew up a lonely, motherless child after her father brought her home from Jamaica. Florence spent a great deal of her childhood quietly working in the shop of her father, a master bookbinder, who taught her his trade. \u00a0Her love of books, first the feel of the cloth they used when repairing them, and later the words, stories and ideas between the covers, filled some of the emptiness in her heart.<\/p>\n

Her father gave her a home, but he had little to give in the way of love. When he came upon Florence and a young man \u2013 an anarchist \u2013 engaged in an unacceptable act in late Victorian England, he threw her out.<\/p>\n

But Florence is feisty and resourceful, and all those books she\u2019d read had given her ideas. \u00a0She intercepts a letter from one of her father\u2019s customers, Lord Francis Belfield of Rose Hall, asking her father to repair his extensive, valuable, yet sadly neglected book collection. The estate has fallen on hard times, and Lord Belfield is preparing to sell much of his library.<\/p>\n

Florence manages to make the hours-long journey to his manor on her own. There, she tells a doubtful Lord Belfield that her father\u2019s eyesight is failing and he sent her to do the work in his stead.<\/p>\n

Still wary, Lord Belfield allows her to enter his prized library.<\/p>\n

As Florence gets to know the members of the depleted household \u2013 nearly all the one-time servants are gone \u2013 she also begins to pick up on a darker web of secrets and undercurrents. She becomes particularly interested in learning the truth about the recent death of Lord Belfield\u2019s wife, Lady Persephone, who had gone out alone at night and was found dead in the river the next day.<\/p>\n

Lady Persephone\u2019s death is the mystery that drives the book. Shenje does an admirable job of giving enough clues to keep us intrigued.<\/p>\n

As the story progresses, though, it also becomes much more than the mystery. Shenje\u2019s characters and stories shine a light on the Victorian era\u2019s rigid divisions of sex, race and class \u2013 and related prohibitions on women, those who today are called \u201cgay\u201d or \u201ctrans,\u201d and people who weren\u2019t white Anglo-Saxons. The hypocrisy of the white males and upper classes is also clearly portrayed.<\/p>\n

Florence is better read than most Victorian women, but she\u2019s also young, inexperienced and lonely. Having grown up with a harsh, withdrawn father and no mother left her unprepared for some of the realities of the world into which she has intruded. Part of the story becomes her search for her true identity, as well as the lengths she must go to in order to have any hope for the future.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s a flaw in the book, it\u2019s that Shenje may have gone overboard with the number of her characters in this restricted setting who deviate from those Victorian norms, whether it be unacceptable sexuality or people of color passing as white. At times, it begins to feel as though she were trying to pack too much into one novel. She\u2019s done well with this one; let\u2019s hope there are many more to come.<\/p>\n

Back to the mystery: The twists and turns lead to a denouement that\u2019s both surprising and utterly believable.<\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson THE LIBRARY THIEF. By Kuchenga Shenje. Hanover Square Press. 358 pages. $29.99. The Library Thief is a remarkable, entertaining and ambitious debut historical mystery novel by Kuchenga Shenje, a writer, journalist and speaker who lives in Manchester, England. It\u2019s the story of Florence Granger, who grew up a lonely, motherless […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3217"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3220,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3217\/revisions\/3220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}