The Untold Story

 The Untold Story (Invisible Library Series)- Genevieve Cogman

Ace 

Release Date: December 28, 2021

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: Irene is trying to learn the truth about Alberich-and the possibility that he's her father. But when the Library orders her to kill him, and then Alberich himself offers to sign a truce, she has to discover why he originally betrayed the Library.

With her allies endangered and her strongest loyalties under threat, she'll have to trace his past across multiple worlds and into the depths of mythology and folklore, to find the truth at the heart of the Library, and why the Library was first created. 

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In the aftermath of The Dark Archive Irene is both shaken and angry. It turns out rogue Librarian Alberich, who has tried to kill Irene and her friends numerous times (and has successfully killed other Librarians plenty of times) may actually be Irene's biological father. It naturally leads to questions like: who knew this? and why did no one tell Irene? Questions she very much wants the answers to. But she isn't given time to wonder about them. Worlds are disappearing, Alberich has agreed to sign a truce, Fae are starting to worry that the Library is Up-To-Something. And Irene, Kai, Vale, and Catherine are starting to gather evidence that suggests that some of the myths dragons ignore and Alberich's conspiracy theories lead to the very heart of why the Library was created-and who created it.

The Untold Story is a fast paced thriller adventure story that feels like it has more in common with the original Invisible Library than several other books in the series. While the first book remains my all time favorite, Untold Story may have become my second favorite in the series. It's hard to write about the story without giving away spoilers- but this book rocked!

Throughout the series we've seen Irene go from book thief to reluctant diplomat and here she gets to be her best (and worst) self. That may be the theme of Untold Story overall in fact: when are we willing to do bad things with good intentions or good things with questionable intentions. a version of "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"? Irene has struggled with this moral dilemma for a while now and has a harder time with it when she has to worry that maybe, as Alberich's daughter, she would have a predisposition for questionable actions. And she still has a tendency to take on too much guilt over choices that aren't hers- when Catherine, Vale, and Kai choose to help her they are doing it because of friendship, or because they believe it is the right thing to do, not because she's tricked them into helping her. Sadly, no one ever points out that Irene's feelings make her her own person and not her father's daughter. 

Vale, Kai, and Catherine each get some good action here. Catherine in particular gets a great, if short, "Librarian rant" towards the end that will have you cheering. It's something you can easily imagine a younger Irene saying, and something probably most of us who were drawn originally to this series on hearing the phrase "magical Library" will love. It definitely made her a hero for me. Vale gets to come through with true Sherlockian flair several times and this was the first book in the series where I was happy with Kai and Irene as lovers.

The only spoilers I will grant the reader are these: just when you start to panic that the book can't possibly be long enough to solve everything, Genevieve Cogman pulls off another brilliant solution and prevents us from a dreaded cliff-hanger ending. And you will close this book with a happy sigh and a grin, a book hang-over, and a need to re-read the series from the start to look for clues that the brilliant Cogman has apparently been laying for us all along to build up to this excellent Untold Story.

I do definitely recommend reading, if not the entire series, at least The Dark Archive before reading The Untold Story to be up to date on Alberich. But really, read the series. In order. Its fantasy world building genius.

The Churchill Sisters

 The Churchill Sisters: The Extraordinary Lives of Winston and Clementine's Daughters- Rachel Trethewey 

St. Martin's Press

Release Date: December  7, 2021

Rating: 📚📚📚

Synopsis:  Bright, attractive and well-connected, in any other family the Churchill girls – Diana, Sarah, Marigold and Mary – would have shone. But they were not in another family, they were Churchills, and neither they nor anyone else could ever forget it. From their father – ‘the greatest Englishman’ – to their brother, golden boy Randolph, to their eccentric and exciting cousins, the Mitford Girls, they were surrounded by a clan of larger-than-life characters which often saw them overlooked. While Marigold died too young to achieve her potential, the other daughters lived lives full of passion, drama and tragedy.

Diana, intense and diffident; Sarah, glamorous and stubborn; Mary, dependable yet determined – each so different but each imbued with a sense of responsibility toward each other and their country. Far from being cosseted debutantes, these women were eyewitnesses at some of the most important events in world history, at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam. Yet this is not a story set on the battlefields or in Parliament; it is an intimate saga that sheds light on the complex dynamics of family set against the backdrop of a tumultuous century.

Drawing on previously unpublished family letters from the Churchill archives, The Churchill Sisters brings Winston’s daughters out of the shadows and tells their remarkable stories for the first time

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The Churchill Sisters is the first book I've read devoted solely to the daughters of Winston Churchill, where they are the focus instead of mentioned on the sides, as in Lynne Olson's fabulous books Citizens of London and Erik Larson's The Splendid and the Vile. Diana, Sarah, and Mary Churchill each lived in a world where women were, at least initially, considered second to men- and as a man of his era Winston thought this way too.  It was exposure to strong women like his wife Clementine and his daughters that made Winston change his mind. But also in the Churchill house, Winston came first always. Everyone believed his career and his work came first. This, combined with being the children of a great man and being children in a time when their class rarely were raised by their parents, and the childhood the younger generation of Churchills had was quite different from one we would recognize today. Their mother, Clementine, was like many others of her generation and class and was distant from her children, especially when they were young, which all of them came to regret later in life.  

I was a little disappointed with the first half of the book, as it didn't tell me anything particularly new. Anyone who has read The Splendid and the Vile or Citizens of London will know most of the early stories of the girls, particularly the war years as they came into their own helping in the war effort. Author Tretheway lingers a bit on each daughter's psychological need to live up to their parent's expectations but beyond that I didn't learn anything new. The second half, post World War II, however, I found more interesting because that was uncharted territory for me. The tragic stories of Diana and Sarah- each trying to find fulfillment in their own ways and never quite reaching their goals or happiness- were heartbreaking. Sarah and Mary taking turns being the one the others leaned on as the others fell apart, the mental illnesses and emotional collapses each sister experienced but tried to keep from their parents . . . the Churchills seems to be a family ahead of their time in accepting the idea of mental illness and treating it as an illness, one to be handled by doctors and not ignored with a 'stiff upper lip', which I was impressed by. 

Each daughter tried to live up to the father their worshipped as a hero and wanted to have look proudly on them, each wanted to make their mother's life a bit easier in caring for that father. Yet they also wanted to be their own person, and went in separate ways to discover who they were and what they might do with their lives. Although constrained at times by the society they grew up in and by the shadow of their father, they each faced life's challenges head on- whether that became constructive or destructive. 

While the writing wasn't always top level and was occasionally repetitive, I would certainly recommend The Churchill Sisters to anyone interested in women's lives over the course of the twentieth century, history buffs, and, of course, Churchill fans. A good new addition to the library, using archives newly opened to researchers.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review