Looking for Jane

September 1, 2022

The Emmy Award--winning Calvi (Dear George, Dear Mary) returns with the story of a young Teddy Roosevelt wooing Boston belle Alice Lee in If a Poem Could Live and Breathe (60,000-copy first printing). Three Souls author Chang goes hardcover with The Porcelain Moon, about a young Chinese woman who flees her uncle's Paris home in 1918 to avoid an arranged marriage, seeking a cousin in the French countryside working with the Chinese Labour Corps and befriending a Frenchwoman who wants quit of her abusive husband (50,000-copy first printing). Set in 1940s Trinidad, when British colonialism and U.S. occupation were folding, Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner Hosein's Hungry Ghosts contrasts the lives of wealthy farm owners Dalton and Marlee Changoor and their impoverished workers, with the plot driven by Dalton's disappearance (100,000-copy first printing). In Code Name Sapphire, from World War II fiction titan Jenoff, Hannah Martel flees Nazi Germany for Brussels and joins the Sapphire Line, which spirits downed Allied airmen to safety; when her cousin Lily's family is slated for deportation, she must decide whether she should risk trying to rescue them (350,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing). Best-selling thriller writer Labuskes turns to historical fiction with The Librarian of Burned Books, which moves from U.S. author Althea James's discovery of Nazi resisters in 1933 Berlin to German refugee Hannah Brecht's work at the German Library of Burned Books in 1936 Paris to Vivian Childs's efforts in 1944 New York to block the censorship of the Armed Service Editions, paperbacks shipped to soldiers overseas (100,000-copy paperback and 30,000-copy hardcover first printing). Writing under his father's Lithuanian surname, Maetis, British thriller writer John Matthews takes readers to 1938 Vienna, where members of The Vienna Writers Circle fear that the Anschluss means they won't be able to write and then fear for their very survival (50,000-copy first printing). In Canadian author Marshall's best-selling debut, Angela Creighton's discovery in 2017 of a long-misplaced letter with great import to her family sends her Looking for Jane, with Jane the codename for a network providing illegal abortions in 1970s-80s Toronto. Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award and National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honors for Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories, Moustakis tries out full-length fiction in Homestead, about a couple named Marie and Lawrence who marry impulsively and then learn about each other while homesteading in Alaska as it nears statehood (75,000-copy first printing). In Pulitzer Prize-winning Verble's Stealing, a Cherokee girl named Kit Crockett is taken from her home in 1950s bayou country and sent to a Christian boarding school intent on expunging her heritage (50,000-copy first printing).

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November 21, 2022
Marshall’s sweeping debut follows series of Canadian women in their struggles for reproductive autonomy. In a Toronto antique store in 2017, Angela Creighton, who’s suffered a second miscarriage, discovers an undelivered letter addressed to Nancy Mitchell. It was written by Nancy’s mother, Frances, who confesses as she’s dying that in 1961 Nancy had been adopted from St. Agnes’s Home for Unwed Mothers. As an adoptee connected with her own birth mother, Angela decides to track Nancy down and pass along the information. Marshall then moves back to 1979, when Nancy, a college student, helps her cousin obtain an illegal abortion. Only after her cousin nearly dies does Nancy learn about the underground abortion access network called Jane. Two years later, Nancy requires Jane’s services for herself, and she believes so strongly in Jane’s mission that she volunteers as an organizer until abortion is legalized in 1988, work she keeps secret—along with her own termination—from her new husband. Marshall vividly brings to life the dangers involved with operating Jane and the cruelty of the nuns running St. Agnes’s, where Evelyn was forced to give up her baby. It’s a page-turner that unfortunately falters with an unnecessary, gimmicky twist involving two of the women. Still, readers will be moved by the courage and thoughtfulness with which these characters face their dilemmas. Agent: Hayley Steed, Madeleine Milburn Literary.

December 1, 2022
Mothers and daughters, secrets and lies. Canadian writer Marshall makes an absorbing debut with a timely novel about the complexities of pregnancy and motherhood: "About wanting to be a mother and not wanting to be a mother, and all the gray areas in between," as she writes in an author's note. Her deftly braided narrative, which takes place in Toronto beginning in the 1960s, focuses on three women whose lives have been deeply affected by the struggle over women's reproductive rights in Canada, which finally ended in 1988 with a groundbreaking decision to legalize abortion. In 1960, though, Evelyn Taylor is sent to St. Agnes's Home for Unwed Mothers, where she is forced to give up her daughter for adoption. In 1979, Nancy Mitchell is horrified by witnessing a cousin's sordid back-alley abortion; and in 2017, Angela Creighton, who had been adopted as an infant, is undergoing rounds of in vitro fertilization so that she and her wife can have the baby they long for. Angela sets events in motion when she opens a misdirected letter addressed to a Nancy Mitchell, a wrenching confession from Nancy's dying mother telling her daughter that she had been adopted and sharing, at last, the name of her birth mother. Angela's efforts to find Nancy lead her to another discovery: of an underground network of abortion providers, staffed by physicians who risked their lives and careers to help women end unwanted pregnancies. They called themselves the Janes. One of the abortion providers is Evelyn, who became a physician in response to the trauma and "crippling sense of helplessness, and lack of control over her own life" she had suffered at St. Agnes's. Nancy, sympathetic to the cause, volunteers as an administrator, booking and scheduling patients. Although the three lives intersect a bit too neatly, Marshall keeps the tension high as she reveals the devastating consequences of denying women autonomy over their bodies. A charged topic handled with sensitivity and compassion.

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Starred review from November 1, 2022

DEBUT This powerful novel features a trio of strong women whose lives are woven together across the years through a lost letter and a secret network of women fighting for the right to choose. In 2017, Angela Creighton and her wife are trying to have a child through IVF. She comes across a letter written in 2010 from a dying mother to her daughter Nancy revealing that she was adopted and urging her to seek out her birth mother. An adopted child herself, Angela is determined to track down Nancy Mitchell and give her the letter. In 1961, Nancy's birth mother Maggie was sent to a home for "fallen" women where she befriends another teenager named Evelyn. Against their will, the women are forced to give up their babies for adoption. Evelyn is devastated by the loss of her child but determined to fight for a woman's right to choose motherhood. She becomes a doctor and joins the secret Jane Network in Canada, providing safe but illegal abortions. Angela's search will bring all three women together as daughters and mothers fighting for women's ultimate choice. VERDICT This timely novel about motherhood and choices is a must for all fiction collections.--Catherine Coyne

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