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We all need a to find a little magic in reality to survive. Sure, it might be brutally cold out there, but the ice sparkles. The books in this week’s Brit + Co book club marry unsentimental conditions with bits of fancy and charm. They’re not wacky or heavily whimsical, but they’re thoughtful and thoroughly delightful, about art, love and family.
<em>The Stolen Child</em>
The Stolen Child comes from the ancient Irish myths about fairies, but it’s no fairy tale, full of dread, regret and stark descriptions of lives unfulfilled. In May of 1959, 40-year-old American Brigid comes to stay on an Irish island that fittingly bears her name. “St. Brigid’s Island perched like a jagged accident above the water, all grass and rock, no beach to ease the passage of a boat, no harbor to shelter it once there.” The forbidding island was settled hundreds of years before, and maintains what some would call a rustic, old-world charm, but some would call a nightmare: there’s no electricity and almost no contact with the outside world.
<em>The Lonely Hearts Hotel</em>
Lullabies for Little Criminals) takes us into the magical Montreal underworld, where two orphans find love, fame, art, drugs and tragedy. Pierrot and Rose are both left to the same orphanage in the brutal winter of 1914. They grow up inseparable, and their love for each other manifests in their talents: Rose is a dancer and comedian; Pierrot plays piano in ways that make even the most jaded stop and listen. The nuns that run the orphanage vow to keep them apart (“they had already escaped death. And still they were expecting more”), but their performance success is initially too compelling, and the funds are keeping the orphanage afloat.
<em>Autumn</em>
Autumn, which is the first of a set of anticipated seasonal novels, the reader travels back and forth in time throughout the friendship between Elisabeth and Daniel (70 years her elder), who Elizabeth met when she was a child looking for a person to interview for school.
