The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey ✔✔✔✔

Jane Eyre is one of my all-time favorite classic novels,  I re-read it just this past year as a prelude to reading Charlotte and Emily by Jude Morgan, and we also watched the most recent movie version not too long ago.  This particular book, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, has been on my list, and I borrowed it from Ann Gaston.

It's a modern re-telling of the Bronte novel, set in the 1960's, and it follows the original story line very closely, but with enough bends in it to make it more modern.  I didn't find the romance between Gemma and Mr. Sinclair quite as meaningful as in the original, and I felt a bit of a let-down by the ending, but I'd still give it four stars.

Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan ✔✔✔✔

Looping from Nazi-occupied Berlin and Paris to modern-day Baltimore and back, Esi Edugyan's Giller prize-winning Half-Blood Blues is a haunting song of a novel. In Paris 1940, the three remaining Hot-Time Swingers run take after exhausted take, trying to get one right before the S.S. boots stomp their last chance. Our irascible narrator, Sid, learned to play bass lin Baltimore, with his longtime friend and rival Chip on drums, and in Berlin they'd joined up with Hiero, a half-black German “kid” who blows brilliant trumpet with a “massive sound, wild and unexpected, like a thicket of flowers in a bone-dry field.” As Hiero scratches the wax on disc after disc of imagined mistakes, Sid saves the final take--the record that will become legendary. When Hiero's arrested and sent to a Nazi camp, Sid’s the only witness, and things look suspicious. Fifty years later, Chip and Sid return to Berlin for the opening of a film about Hiero. But Sid stands accused of engineering his disappearance, and a strange letter suggests there’s more to the story than anyone knew. With delightfully witty jazz-cat banter, tactile imagery, and descriptions of music sensual enough to stand your hair on end, Edugyan evokes a time, a place, and a band whose refusal to repress their difference could mean death, or become a catalyst for acts of creative genius that will make them immortal. --Mari Malcolm

I'm not sure whether the above really sums up this novel properly.  I found it somewhat difficult to read, because it's dark and there's a sense of impending doom over it throughout, but I also found it difficult to file it under "Did not finish" on my Kindle.  I think this will be this year's recommendation for Book Club.  It's a different take on WWII, it's by a Canadian author we've not yet read, and it really is, as the reviewer says above:"a haunting song of a novel"