Charlee LeBeau & The Gambler’s Promise (2019), by C.V. Gauthier

15 October 2020

Hopefully no unforgivable spoilers, but this review does involve plot summary.

Charlee LeBeau & the Gambler’s Promise promises to be one of a trilogy; Charlee LeBeau & the Salish Wind is due out February 2021. I can’t wait! Those of you who follow my blog will remember my rants about both series fiction and cliff-hangers. Charlee LeBeau, although the first in a yet-incomplete trilogy, still satisfies. C.V. Gauthier manages to leave the narrative in a place where her readers are both reassured and yet anxious to read on. This is a difficult balance to achieve.

Charlotte—Charlee—LeBeau is the daughter of a Métis ranch foreman in Sonoma, California, in the mid 1850s. Highly intelligent, she tutors the ranch-owner’s son—her best friend, Jake Miller—in mathematics. His interest lies more with governmental history and policy (which I am guessing will become significant later in the trilogy). Charlee’s affinity for numbers, on the other hand, is a life skill she draws on throughout this first novel.

Life on the ranch is complicated: both wonderful and fraught for a fourteen-year-old girl. While friends with Jake, as her father is with his, she is taunted by his younger step-sister, Bernadette, and denigrated by his step-mother. Her father and her surrogate mother, the African-American cook, Miss Molly, help to guide the headstrong, mercurial Charlee as she begins to experience the injustices of society: the injustice preventing her father from an open relationship with Miss Molly, the injustice of the power The Missus wields, the injustice of young Bernadette’s jealous taunts and lies. The situation between Charlee and the female Millers grows progressively worse, and when Charlee’s father is killed in an accident—trying to save Bernadette from being trampled—Charlee is left with little choice. No longer welcome on the ranch, bitter and angry at having her father taken from her, Charlee feels abandoned by all except Miss Molly. With few other options, despite misgivings, Charlee chooses to move to San Francisco with father’s brother, Uncle Jack, who promises her an education.

“Papa had no use for Uncle Jack. Going with him would mean leaving everything I’d ever known. … I fought to balance myself between opposite forces. Staying and leaving. Work and school. Grief and joy.” (122)

With the promise of an education, the knowledge of some personal funds from the sale of her father’s estate, and a generous gift from Mr. Miller, Charlee’s future does not seem all that bleak.

“Don’t like this one bit,” Miss Molly tells her, though, as she prepares to leave, “you going to the city with Mr. LeBeau. Don’t care he’s Luke’s kin. … I got a bad feeling, you going to San Francisco with him. I don’t like him one bit.” (142-43)

“That part made me nervous,” Charlee admits. “Miss Molly was usually right when she had one of her feelings.” (143)

At least we were warned.

The hardship of Charlee’s life in the city is thus, although harrowing, not unexpected. Here I think is where Gauthier’s sensibilities and writing ability really come to light. We are given a troubling yet honest glimpse into the dangerous, illicit world of the San Francisco docks in the 1850s, and the struggles Charlee has with a drunken gambler for an uncle; with hiding her gender, working as a stable-boy to feed herself when her uncle won’t; with the simple act of walking safely from their hovel of a room to the stables and back every day. The life of the docks was truly multicultural, and in the 1850s that meant prejudice and discrimination leading to conflict and abuse. The book’s strength is founded on more than just good research, though: Gauthier’s description is highly evocative, her narrative solid and convincing. The hierarchy of class and culture and race, the little details of characterization, give a richness to the narrative that makes the reader really feel the atmosphere of Charlee’s world. And her isolation. Despite that some people she encounters do help her—mostly the disenfranchised, like herself: the African Americans, the Chinese, other immigrants—Charlee has no one she can trust. Her final interaction with Tubby, the stable owner, shows how really alone she is. Despite her help with his accounts, and preventing him from signing a exploitative lease, she—and thus the reader—is honestly uncertain of her position when he comments that her uncle “forgot his niece when he blew town” (250). I’m not expressing well the power of that moment, when we think that Charlee has found a safe space, and her confidence is ripped away with her disguise. At her parting, Miss Molly had told Charlee: “You have trouble with Mr. LeBeau, you find Amos [her brother] straight away. Promise me you will” (143). In the end, finding Amos, Charlee’s only viable option, turns out to be not only complicated but dangerous. Seeking help from Jake, who she had located but been too proud to approach, she prepares to meet with Amos and beg to head north with him on the Salish Wind.

There is, of course, much more going on, much more that Charlee learns, including how to cheat at gambling, the use of gunpowder in fireworks, and the law governing mining shares in British Columbia. As she moves towards an uncertain future, we are confident that she has learned well, and will do well. The self-confidence developed through the hardships she has survived alone is complemented by the realization that her pride has made her more alone than she needed to be.

“Blame had never gotten me anywhere but into spirals of anger and frustration. No wonder Papa had wanted me to learn forgiveness. I finally understood why. I wasn’t quite ready for it, not totally. But I could see the top of its sail on my horizon.” (295)

I look greatly forward to seeing where the Salish Wind will take her.

Convictions (2016), by Judith Silverthorne

This review was first published in Resource Links Magazine, “Canada’s national journal devoted to the review and evaluation of Canadian English and French resources for children and young adults.” It appears in volume 22.1.

Another obvious contender for the 2017 Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction For Young People, in my estimation. I really wish I were a juror again this year, as I have been in the past, as there are some really good historical novels for young readers out there this year.

Convictions (2016)

It is 1842. Jennie’s family is starving, so she takes some mouldy oats from a milliner’s garbage. For that, she is convicted of theft and sentenced to 7 years transportation to the penal colony of Australia. She is one of 235 female convicts, including pregnant women and women with young children. Jennie is fourteen when she boards the convict ship Emily Anne; the youngest prisoner is ten-year-old Alice.

Judith Silverthorne’s account of Jennie’s life on board the Emily Anne is convincingly harsh; there is very little evasion of the horrors of the women’s lives at the hands of uncaring or even abusive guards. What helps Jennie survive are the relationships the women forge in their shared hardship. As Jennie discovers the gamut of “crimes” the women have been sentenced for, she comes to appreciate her fellow prisoners’ differences. Learned prejudices against the “doxies” Lizzie and Fanny, or the alcoholic Dottie, or the Irish-Catholic Kate, are eventually subsumed in the need to band together to survive the physical and psychological trauma of their situation. Seasickness and poor rations threaten their health. Crowded into small shared bunks or hammocks, they are afflicted by rodents, lice, and fleas. Women and children, most used to living simply but honorably, are treated like animals by the poorly paid crew and guards.

Not all the guards are as vile as “Red Bull” Chilcott, whose lecherous behaviour threatens the sexually innocent among the prisoners, and whose sexual appetites mark him as a target for Fanny’s manipulations on behalf of her friends. Some of the guards are cruel but not abusive, and some appear more sympathetic towards the women’s plight. We see a subtle connection growing between Jennie and a young crew-member, Nate, and when the ship is wrecked on a reef near Tenerife, we are not surprised that the intelligent Nate is instrumental in saving a small number of crew and prisoners.

Silverthorne does not stray from her excellent historical representation even in the romance that is beginning to grow between Jennie and Nate. The women’s ultimate fate after being saved by a passing Scottish vessel—whose Captain and crew are welcoming neither to the English nor to women—is logically supportable in terms of the political, financial, and cultural reality Silverthorne is recreating. Nate expresses his hope that his and Jennie’s lives will follow a similar path, and we are shown a narrative direction in which that could be true; but at the close of the novel, we are left with as much uncertainly as Jennie and the other survivors. As readers, we are convinced of the historical truth reflected in Convictions; Jennie’s story remains in our minds, her future pondered, long after the last page is read.

When Morning Comes (2016), by Arushi Raina

This review was first published in Resource Links Magazine, “Canada’s national journal devoted to the review and evaluation of Canadian English and French resources for children and young adults.” It appears in volume 22.2.

Having been a juror for the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction For Young People for the past two years (it is a two-year appointment), I have to say that When Morning Comes stands a very good chance of being the winner for 2017. That cannot, of course, be reflected in my review for Resource Links, but I wanted to add that opinion to my appreciation of Raina’s excellent novel.

When Morning Comes (2016)

I am not an expert on African politics, but have been come increasingly interested through a number of fabulous young adult novels that have come my way. First there was

I am not an expert on African politics, but have been come increasingly interested through a number of fabulous young adult novels that have come my way. First there was Cape Town (2012), by Brenda Hammond; then Walking Home (2014), by Eric Walters; and now When Morning Comes, by Arushi Raina. They just keep getting better. Raina’s complex characterization and intricate plot kept me enthralled from my first meeting of Zanele and Jack and Meena through to the devastatingly inevitable conclusion. Raina does not capitulate to simplistic narrative expectations of some current YA genres, wherein the teen protagonists rise above the socio-political powers against which they struggle and succeed; this is perhaps because the novel is based on historical events, but it is nonetheless admirably handled. Raina’s characters are young: inexperienced yet passionate, afraid yet determined. They behave immaturely under pressure. They make mistakes. They—and more importantly those around them—suffer for those mistakes. And so they learn, but that learning sometimes comes too late. The bravery of some characters seems at times almost excessive, but it is always believable.

The story is set in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1976. We meet Zanele as she and her friends attempt to bomb a power station. The attempt fails; two of her friends are arrested; Zanele escapes. Theirs is but a small act of terrorism aimed at helping to overthrow the apartheid government. As the novel progresses, Zanele’s life becomes inextricably entwined with that of Jack, a naïve white boy who is entranced by Zanele; Meena, daughter of a South Asian shopkeeper who is being extorted by a local gang; and Thabo, one of the gang members and Zanele’s childhood friend. The intricate connections Raina constructs in her narrative all lead inexorably toward the tragedy that erupted on June 16^th, 1976. The Soweto Uprising is infamous in South African history for the police brutality used against the 15,000 students in the protest that quickly became a riot. Raina’s novel traces the path from the government imposition of Afrikaans as the language of instruction, through the Soweto high school students’ growing dissatisfaction, to their cohesive plan of action. The short “historical intro”—significantly at the back of the novel—informs the reader of the real historical moment, but the novel itself is a far stronger exposition of the students’ anger and power than any historical commentary could be.

The Blackthorne Key (2015), by Kevin Sands

4 February 2017

I was discussing Kevin Sand’s The Blackthorne Key, which won the John Spray Mystery Award for 2016, with a friend, who thought that it was a little bit predictable. No (she thought a bit about it)… it was just that perhaps the protagonist, Christopher, should have figured things out more quickly, given his purported intelligence. I had to ponder why I didn’t have this same criticism, because when she pointed out some examples, her position made sense. But I didn’t have that response: I was so immersed in the novel, so convinced by the characters and intrigued by the plot, that no criticisms had the space to rear their ugly heads. In teaching rhetoric, I tell my students: “If as an author you make a mistake, and your reader notices, you will have lost them. So don’t make a mistake.” As far as I could tell as I read The Blackthorne Key, Kevin Sands makes no mistakes: I was enthralled from start to finish.

Sands really does understand his setting. Christopher, his friend Tom, even his master Benedict Blackthorne and the other apothecaries, do not sport modern sensibilities lurking beneath the narrative trappings of the seventeenth century; their characters are, rather, consistent with a world in which the boundaries between science and faith and magic are blurred. Christopher, for all his innate intelligence, is still a young boy at the same time as he approaches manhood: his youthful exuberance hatches the (illegal but oh-so-much-fun) plan to build a cannon; his intelligence gives him the means to do so; his lack of experience results in his blowing up the stuffed bear in his master’s apothecary shop. By the end of the novel, though, as he is thrust into the adult world, he has gained a maturity far beyond either his earlier self or the middle-school readers the novel is aimed at.

In the case of the bear, as throughout the novel, Sands creates a balance between authenticity and reality: Christopher is not beaten for his exploits, but we are let know in no uncertain terms that others in his position would have been. Benedict Blackthorne is presented as a reasonable, intelligent master, who values Christopher’s sharp mind, even as he strictly controls his activities. As the novel progresses, though, and Christopher and Tom are pulled into the shady dealings of the apothecaries’ guild, we—as much as they—are uncertain where Blackthorne’s loyalties really lie. The plot is sufficiently complicated, the events sufficiently believable within Sands’s carefully constructed temporal and social setting; questions the reader might have about Christopher’s world are all ultimately answered, and we are left satisfied.

What really engaged me first as a reader, though, is Sands’s sense of humour, slightly sarcastic narrative voice, and clever word play. Christopher narrates the story with language that melds a sense of the period (1665) with a typically boyish irreverence and delight in really bad ideas. When Tom comments that “people can’t just build cannons,” Christopher responds: “But that’s where cannons come from: People build them. You think God sends cannons down from heaven?” And he later laments, “I wished God’s warnings would be a little clearer. You wouldn’t think it would be so hard for the Almighty to write STOP STEALING STICKY BUNS in the clouds or something.”

Throughout the novel, I grew more and more fond of Christopher; as he gains knowledge and maturity, he loses nothing of his boyish charm. The Blackthorne Key introduces us to Christopher; his story continues in The Blackthorne Key: The Mark of the Plague. Happily, though, The Blackthorne Key is completely self-contained; we do not need to read the second book, but I, for one, certainly will.