Black Cake

 by Charmaine Wilkerson

I found this a very interesting story.

It starts with a woman dying and leaving a tape for her children, one of whom she is estranged from.  The daughter comes back reluctantly.  She and her brother had been close but have drifted apart especially since she did not come back for her father's funeral.  We eventually find out she did return for it but had been beaten up by a lover and didn't want people to see her in that state.

The girl had fallen out years before when she couldn't settle on a career and especially when she announced she was gay.  She left home after her parents reaction to this announcement.

The mother's message tells them she had a past and a different name.  As a young woman in the caribbean her father, a gambler, was going to marry her off to the man he owed money to.  The girl is shocked that her father would do this to her.  When her groom dies at the wedding ceremony she runs away.  Everyone thinks she poisoned him.

She flees to England and then is involved in a train crash on a train to scotland.  She is assumed to be her frend, who has died in the crash, and goes along with the misunderstanding.  She gets a job, is raped by her employer and gets pregnant.  She has to give up the baby but is haunted by this especially as she ages.

She eventually runs into a boy she loved in the caribbean.  They both change their names and move to America where they marry and have two children.

The mother tells them she has tried to track down her lost daughter.  

The children are shocked at all this news, it takes them time to digest it.  The lawyer eventually tracks down their sister.  She is shocked by the news she has siblings and comes to meet them but then leaves

Evenutally she comes back and they share some of their mothers black cake.

This was a very interesting story.  I really enjoyed it.

Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

 by Stuart Turton

This is a kind of ground hog day scenario

A group of people as gathered at a family estate on the anniversary of the death of the son of the estate owners years before.  A guest at the estate sees what he thinks is a woman being attacked/murdered and is injured himself.  He manages to make his way back to the house.  Over the next few hours the man finds that he is inside the heads/bodies of several of the guests.  

He finds that he is tasked with trying to find out who murders the daugther of the family.  If he manages to solve this he will be allowed to leave the property.  The man finds it very disconcerting to inhabit these different people, at different times of the day.  He meets a woman Anne who appears to be trying to help him and he wants to save her also.

The book then goes through various times of day and characters as the "main character" tries to figure out what is going to happen.  I appears that the daughter of the family is engaged against her will to a much older man, a friend of the family.  The marriage is being orchestrated so that her husband will bail the family out financially.  The scenario seems to be that the young woman kills herself rather than go through with the marriage.

As the story progresses the main character eventually figures out that the young woman wants to fake her suicide but her brother actually tries to kill her.

It was a novel idea to a story and structured quite well between all the personas.  However by the end it was getting quite confusing as to who did what and who knew what.

Dictionary of Lost Words

 by Pip Williams     

This is the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, told from the point of view of the daughter of one of the men who worked on the project.  The daughter initially started as a young child, hanging out in the workshop where her father and others were working.  She spent a lot of time underneath the table where the men were working.

This project took several decades to complete.

The task was to identify words and then find usage of them in literature, or in newspapers that document the usage.  After that the team members attempted a definition of the term.  Some termswere open to a lot of discussion.

The young girl is sometimes left in the care of a young maid who works in the house on the property.  They become very close friends.  While the maid is only a few years older than the girl she becomes something like a mother figure for her as the young girl's mother is dead.

As time goes by the girl starts to realize that "women's words" do not necessarily make it into the dictionary or if they do they are often disparaged.  The maid takes her to the local market and the young woman starts writing down words she hears there and the sentence in which they are used, then cites the name of the person who spoke the words.  She keeps her precious words in a box under the maid's bed.

Eventually the young girl is given a job helping the men working on the dictionary, sorting words, running the papers with the completed words to the printers.  She meets a young typesetter there and they eventually become close friends and eventually marry.  Her boyfriend/fiance publishes her words into a book, The Dictionary of Lost Words.  She is overjoyed at this wonderful surprise.

The book is well written and gives excellent details as to all the work that went into the compilation of the dictionary.  I had picked it up on a whim and really enjoyed it.