A strange beauty

After Genesis 3:1-19

A strange beauty

the tree possessed,

shimmering in the light.

a shimmering so intense

that it beckoned, singing

its song, its promise,

its fruit so enticing,

so forbidden.

A hand reaches,

the fruit is touched,

plucked

tasted

eaten

consumed

The eyes open

the heart closes

Photograph by Veterzy via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Two YA Victorian Mysteries by Cora Harrison

Four pre-teen boys struggling to survive without parents might make unlikely detectives. But this is the London of Charles Dickens, roughly the 1840s, and if you're 12 years old and living on your own, you survive by your wits and taking advantage of whatever comes your way. 

The Montgomery Murder and The Deadly Fire are the first two in the Victorian London Murder Mystery Series by Cora Harrison. Due to the death of his mother from cholera, twelve-year-old Alfie finds himself head of the family. The family includes Alfie’s younger brother Sammy, who has a beautiful singing voice and is blind, and his two cousins Jack and Tom. 

They live in a basement in Bow Street, and life is focused on getting enough money each week for rent and food. The boys sing, perform tricks with their dog Mutsy, run errands, and are not above swiping a loaf of bread (or a bit more than a loaf of bread) and working as pickpockets. 

In The Montgomery Murder, Alfie is caught trying to steal a loaf of bread and is hauled off to the police station in Bow Street. Facing prison himself and a disaster for his brother and cousins, Alfie is surprised to be helped by a sympathetic police detective, who seeks Alfie’s help in trying to find out any information at all about a man found murdered, strangled with wire in the notorious St. Giles area of London. 

Alfie has seen the man before, and in fact saw him shortly before he was killed. He’s also able to show the detective that the man was not killed while being robbed. The man lived with his family in well-to-do Bedford Square, and it is there where the killer’s trail might lead. Alfie and his family, along with a few friends, are recruited by the detective to keep their eyes open and see what they might learn about the murder.

It’s an exciting story, with the blind Sammy getting kidnaped by the killer, family passions boiling over, and some solid detective work by Alfie and his fellow street urchins.

In The Deadly Fire, the operator of a ragged school (school for poor children) in the St. Giles area dies in a fire that will turn out to be arson. Only Alfie suspects that the fire was deliberately set. He, his brother, and his friends quietly investigate, finding trouble at every turn.

Alfie finds himself running afoul of Mary Robinson, known as “Queen of the Costermongers,” a loan shark who’s particularly unscrupulous and ruthless. She’s a suspect; the dead man had started a broadsheet campaign decrying her activities. So is the dead man’s younger brother, who will inherit his father’s estate now that his brother is dead. Another suspect is a land developer, who wanted the land the ragged school occupied.

Alfie faces the difficulty of his police detective friend being hospitalized with pneumonia, and his replacement more than friends with some of the suspects. But he and his band of street urchins persevere.

Cora Harrison

These mystery stories for young adults (YA) are well-plotted and well-researched. They’re filled with character “types,” who would have been more than familiar to Dickens and the people of 1840s London. What I particularly like is that these stories speak to and with and not down to the reader. And while they are clearly in the YA genre, they are also fully enjoyable for adults.

Harrison has also published three other YA London mysteries, Murder on Stage, The Body in the Fog, and Death in the Devil’s Den. She is also the other of numerous books for children and young adults and historical novels and mysteries for adults.

Alfie’s world is one of often bare-knuckle struggle, but his knowledge of the streets, his savvy for survival, and his love and care for his brother and cousins make these stories fully pleasurable reads.

Top illustration: The London slums in the 1840s.

“Adrift” by Jaycee Weaver

Erin is in her mid-30s, the mother of two teenaged children, and mourning the death of her husband, Jonah. Life wasn’t supposed to turn out this way, with moments and sometimes days of overwhelming grief punctuated by the reality of providing for a family and running a fly-fishing shop. By herself.

Erin and Jonah had invested in the shop as a way for Jonah to leave his father’s company. He had been increasingly suffocated in his corporate job, and the fly fishing shop was a means to break free. After his death, it’s all Erin can do to hold on.

That is, until a customer walks into the shop one day, and he’s looking for outdoors clothes for an upcoming retreat scheduled by his boss. His name is Lucas, and Erin is immediately convinced he must have been a male model, with dimples that imply “heartbreaker.” 

In spite of herself, she’s attracted, in a big way. So is Lucas. They find they have a lot of things in common, including attending the same church, though they’ve never met. Erin’s kids like him as well. And she finds herself becoming increasingly involved with a man she’s falling in love with.

Jaycee Weaver

Except Lucas harbors a secret.

Adrift by Jaycee Weaver is the story of Erin and Lucas, and how a second chance at love becomes threatened by what happened during the first love. It’s a novella in length, and it’s an engaging and well-told story.

Weaver has published several Christian fiction romances, including What Could Be, Whatever Comes Our Way, Love, Laughter, and Luminaries, and What Makes a Home. She lives in New Mexico. 

Adrift is the story of a relationship born, threatened, and ultimately resolved. It’s a “I have to read this in one sitting to see what happens next” kind of story, and its novella length makes that possible.

Poets and Poems: Michael Glaser and “The Threshold of Light”

The Threshold of Light by poet Michael Glaser reminds me why I like chapbooks as much as I do. A chapbook is a small collection, often a third of a size or less of a regular collection. It’s a sampling of a poet’s work, often drawn from individual poems already published. It can be as simple as 8 ½ by 11 sheets of paper folded and center-stitched with a slightly heavier paper cover, or it can be an artistically designed format, like this one by Glaser is.

The 21 poems included all relate to light in some way – dawn, the beginning of the day, a morning walk, how light changes in different geographies, how light is muffled by fog. But light is also a metaphor, and Glaser uses it in similar but also slightly different ways. Light can represent awareness, knowledge, beginnings, wisdom, energy, life, and grace. In fact, in this collection, he seems to use it mostly as a metaphor for awareness and grace.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

'Defiant Joy' by Kevin Belmonte

Everything about G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) seems to have been oversized. He was famous for his physical size. His literary insights were recognized almost as soon as he began writing and publishing. He was considered a master of the paradox, and he was difficult to best in a debate. His interests ranged from detective fiction to Catholic saints, and he is still unsurpassed for his understanding of Charles Dickens. 

I first “met” Chesterton via his Father Brown mystery stories. Beginning in 1911 and continuing until his death in 1936, Chesterton wrote 53 of the stories. Over the years, the priestly detective has been featured in numerous film, radio, and television adaptations, and even in manga. But the stories are really only an introduction to the Broader Chesterton, and they served me as a bridge to his literary studies, biographies, and other works. 

His works are still widely read today, more than 80 years after his death. He was a philosophical adversary of George Bernard Shaw, but they were also close friends, and Shaw mourned his friend’s death. Chesterton has a more than significant influence on C.S. Lewis, and Lewis acknowledged that it was reading Chesterton that started him down the road to faith. A thriving Chesterton Societystill exists today, comprised of his admirers from around the world. And Chesterton still sounds contemporary; the issues he debated and confronted are similar to the issues of our own day.

Biographies have been written over the years, most notably by Garry Wills in the 1961 Chesterton. Writer Kevin Belmonte, in Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life and Impact of G.K. Chesterton, has written a literary biography that focuses less on the details of Chesterton’s life and more on his major works. It’s an excellent introduction, originally published in 2011.

Belmonte tells his story chronologically, and tells the main facts of the man’s life, but he focuses on Chesterton’s works. We’re introduced to his journalism, of which there was a prodigious amount; the literary studies that first captured the critics’ praise; his book entitled Heretics; his deep understanding of Dickens; Orthodoxy, one of his most famous books; the Father Brown mysteries; his famous poem of England, The Ballad of the White Horse; his biographies of Chaucer, St. Francis, and St. Thomas Aquinas; and his account of his travels in North America, What I Saw in America. 

Belmonte provides summary of the works as well as the critical responses, setting each in its historical and literary context. He allows Chesterton and his critics (good and bad) to speak for themselves, quoting long passages of reviews and Chesterton’s responses. In short, Defiant Joy is everything you hope a literary biography to be, creating an understanding of an important literary and cultural influence who was nothing short of brilliant.

Kevin Belmonte

Belmonte received his B.A. degree in English from Gordon College, an M.A. degree in Church History from Gordon-Conwell Seminary, and an M.A. degree in American and New England Studies from the University of Southern Maine. He works include D.L. Moody: A Life: Innovator, Evangelist, World Changer; A Year with G.K. Chesterton: 365 Days of Wisdom, Wit and Wonder; William Wilberforce: A Hero for Humanity (with Charles Colson); The Quotable Chesterton; A.J. Gordon: An Epic Journey of Faith and Pioneering Vision; Miraculous: A Fascinating History of Signs, Wonders and Miracles; A Journey through the Life of William Wilberforce; John Bunyan; and Called to a Different Purpose: The Story of Robert Fulton and His Vision for Web Industries.

Defiant Joy provides great insight into the works of one of the most original minds of modern times. It’s an excellent reference, worth reading again and again, and has already inspired me to go back and reread my favorite Chesterton works.

To hear that sound

After Genesis 3:1-19

To hear that sound

in the garden, of walking

in the garden, a music

in its own way, beautiful

yet ominous, terrible

and fierce, to hear

those footsteps is

to revere, to hear

those footsteps is

to fear, they move

with purpose, not idly 

to smell the flowers

but deliberately

in the knowledge

of what has happened.

Photograph by Fachy Marin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads

Oxford is less than an hour by train from London’s Paddington Station. We’ve visited Oxford five times, and if we return to London, we will also return to Oxford. The best bookstore on the planet (Blackwell’s) is located on Broad Street, and you could spend days in that place alone.

Oxford is also the setting for the Inspector Morse mysteries, which gave birth to the Inspector Lewis mysteries, which gave birth to the Endeavour mysteries. Morse and Lewis each had 33 episodes over several seasons; Endeavour is newer and has fewer but will likely exceed 33. But the city is also a setting for more than the Morse-Lewis-Endeavour mysteries. For example, did you know that Simon Tolkien, grandson of J.R.R., has published three historical mysteries set in Oxford? Paul French at CrimesReads has the story.

J.D. Vance, author of the bestselling Hillbilly Elegy, gave a speech at The American Conservative’s annual gala in Washington recently, and created something of a stir. He suggested the Republican Party redefine itself as a pro-worker, pro-family party. This raises all kinds of conservative issues – and not only those involving Donald Trump. You can read the full text of his speech at The American Conservative. I think he’s on to something.

More Good Reads

Faith

The 75th Anniversary of D-Day & the Extraordinary Providence of God – Eric Davis at The Cripplegate.

Poetry

The One Story of Robert Graves – David Mason at The Hudson Review.

The God who Speaks in Lyric Silences: Poet Temple Cone – Tom Darin Liskey at Literary Life.

Life List – Janet McCann via Kingdom Poets.

The Pen & the Spade: 'The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels' by Adam Nicolson – Nicholas Roe at Literary Review.

Reliquary (4 poems) – Kerry O’Connor at Skylover.

British Stuff

The London I loved: nostalgia for a dirty old town – Anne Margaret Daniel at Spectator USA.

Life and Culture

Abortion: Realpolitik, Kulturkampf, and Evangelization – John Médaille at Front Porch Republic.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest – Hannah Hubin at The Rabbit Room.

Virtue Signaling and Historical Presentism – Thomas Kidd at The Gospel Coalition.

A Politics of Presence – Elizabeth Stice at Front Porch Republic.

Writing and Literature

Over Explaining – Janet Reid, Literary Agent.

"Word Hoard" and the Difficulties of Making Dialogue Authentic – Annie Whitehead at Casting Light upon the Shadow.

Reckoning: An Interview with Silas House – Rebecca Gayle Howell at Image Journal.

Next-Level Writer – Have You Emerged at the Next Level? – Ann Kroeker.

Is He Worthy? – Andrew Peterson

Painting: Girl Reading, oil on canvas (1850-1855) by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875).