Mini-Reviews: Darling Girls and Wild Women

Two books that couldn't be more different, other than I liked them both and don't have a ton to say about them - so it's time for another round of mini-reviews!

First up is Wild Women and the Blues by Denny S. Bryce, a dual timeline historical fiction, with romantic elements, novel set in 1925 and 2015. 1925 Chicago is flowing with bootleg liquor, mobsters, and hot jazz clubs. Honoree Dalcour is a former sharecropper's daughter from Louisiana, having been in Chicago since she was a child. Her parents are both now gone (father dead, mother basically took off) which means Honoree has been left to make her own way in the world, as a dancer. Her life's ambition, to work at the classiest black-and-tan club in town, The Dreamland Café, is about to come true - until a ghost from her past waltzes through the door at her current job. The boy she desperately loved and coughed up her virginity to. The boy from a respectable wealthy Black family. The boy who ghosted her three-years ago and she assumed was dead.

In 2015 Chicago, film student Sawyer Hayes is hoping to finally finish his overdue doctoral thesis. He discovered a hidden box in his grandmother's attic containing photographs and a film cannister he thinks contains a long-lost film by the legendary Black filmmaker, Oscar Micheaux. He needs to get the film restored and talk to the last living link to Micheaux, a former dancer who appears in some of his grandmother's found photographs, Honoree Dalcour. Yes, she's over 100, still alive, and living in a nursing home in Chicago. Unfortunately she's stubborn and extracting her secrets is taking precious time Sawyer doesn't have.

This was an entertaining story with a lot of good historical color and flavor. The 1925 portion of the story is more richly drawn and while the book cover is bright and vibrant, the story itself is a bit darker around the edges with the plot leaning heavily on bootlegging, mobsters and the numbers racket. It's one of those plots where something good happens, immediately followed by something bad - so it definitely kept the pages turning. The 2015 storyline was interesting because it's chock-full of family secrets waiting to be uncovered, although I felt like Sawyer's personal baggage is largely left adrift. Also, while I'm a sucker for secrets, Honoree's Big Secret was a bit of a head scratcher for me - I mean why?! What was the point exactly? I'm not sure it entirely works. That being said, I did like the story overall and will read more of Bryce.

Grade = B

Sally Hepworth writes the type of suspense that's great for folks who like suspense but don't want to wade through a bunch of violence. She also knows her way around writing tension. The kind of tension that suffocates the reader from the first page to the last. Darling Girls tells the story of Jessica, Norah and Alicia, three women who were rescued from family tragedies and raised in foster care by Miss Fairchild, who owns an idyllic farm out in the country. Things, of course, are not what they seem. The girls, now grown, are called back "home" when construction workers, tearing down the house to build a new development, uncover the skeletal remains of a small child.  The "sisters" are now called back as potential witnesses (or possibly suspects) and none of them are all that ready or willing to revisit the past.

Out of the gate, all the trigger warnings for childhood trauma and abuse (psychological and emotional).  Miss Fairchild is one of those evil adult characters whose milk and cookies image is hiding a monster underneath. It's very hard to read and unsurprisingly all that childhood trauma has manifested itself in unhealthy ways now that the girls are adults. 

Told in a dual timeline between past and present, the suspense is very slow burn (hence that suffocating feeling) and doesn't truly begin to cook until the final third, when I could not tear myself away.  There's a twist at the end that had me gasping out loud, but also took off a bit of shine. It moves this book firmly from suspense to the thriller category - meaning it leaves a door open more than a crack and I'm not convinced the person how needs to be punished (mightily!) truly will be. However, all three women do end up in a better place by the end of the story, which goes a long way in making me feel less annoyed. While I'm assigning this the same grade, The Soulmate edges this one out for me, but it sure as heck is still plenty riveting.

Final Grade = B+