Leila Meacham (1938–2021)

I am a huge fan of historical fiction, and I have a deep love for WWII fiction, particularly those with female protagonists. I don’t necessarily gravitate towards spy novels, and while Dragonfly IS a tale of espionage, it reads more like literary fiction with beautiful, concise prose, superb imagery, and simply wonderful storytelling. It is a story of bravery, adventure, friendship, survival, and self-discovery,

Dragonfly is one EPIC book. The meat and potatoes of the book span from May show more 1942 to August 1944, when five young adults are recruited by the OSS to run a clandestine operation in France. The plot is engrossing and nerve-wracking, as this was a time in France when the slightest thing might arouse suspicion, and the circumstances the five spies often found themselves in will leave you holding your breath!

Meacham successfully weaves together individual plotlines and subplots to make a layered and complex story. Characters find themselves in dangerous situations and cleverly work their way out, especially when plotline unexpectedly overlap. It’s all a bit of luck and circumstance and opportunity mixed together with a lot of risks.

She also does an incredible job with the setting, one aspect of the book that drew me in on an emotional level. Her writing beautifully reflects a sense of the time – the faded beauty of a war-torn Paris, the tension, fear, and suspicion felt by the French as well as the fierce pride they held for their country.

Leila Meacham is wonderful at character development and the characters in this story are realistic and complex, brave, and diverse in their backgrounds. They are literally plucked out of their regular lives and put in this very unexpected role that is both secret and important, and that is part of what makes it so fascinating.

The plot unfolds steadily and there are risks and near misses at every turn, and with them come some twists that I definitely did not expect. These extraordinary characters will pull you into their stories and keep you turning pages.

Thanks to Goodreads and the author for providing me with a copy of this book. All opinions are my own. show less

I am a huge fan of historical fiction, and I have a deep love for WWII fiction, particularly those with female protagonists. I don’t necessarily gravitate towards spy novels, and while Dragonfly IS a tale of espionage, it reads more like literary fiction with beautiful, concise prose, superb imagery, and simply wonderful storytelling. It is a story of bravery, adventure, friendship, survival, and self-discovery,

Dragonfly is one EPIC book. The meat and potatoes of the book span from May show more 1942 to August 1944, when five young adults are recruited by the OSS to run a clandestine operation in France. The plot is engrossing and nerve-wracking, as this was a time in France when the slightest thing might arouse suspicion, and the circumstances the five spies often found themselves in will leave you holding your breath!

Meacham successfully weaves together individual plotlines and subplots to make a layered and complex story. Characters find themselves in dangerous situations and cleverly work their way out, especially when plotline unexpectedly overlap. It’s all a bit of luck and circumstance and opportunity mixed together with a lot of risks.

She also does an incredible job with the setting, one aspect of the book that drew me in on an emotional level. Her writing beautifully reflects a sense of the time – the faded beauty of a war-torn Paris, the tension, fear, and suspicion felt by the French as well as the fierce pride they held for their country.

Leila Meacham is wonderful at character development and the characters in this story are realistic and complex, brave, and diverse in their backgrounds. They are literally plucked out of their regular lives and put in this very unexpected role that is both secret and important, and that is part of what makes it so fascinating.

The plot unfolds steadily and there are risks and near misses at every turn, and with them come some twists that I definitely did not expect. These extraordinary characters will pull you into their stories and keep you turning pages.

Thanks to Goodreads and the author for providing me with a copy of this book. All opinions are my own. show less

HISTORICAL FICTION
Leila Meacham
Titans
Grand Central Publishing
Hardcover, 978-1455533831 (also available as an ebook, an audiobook, and on Audible), 608 pgs., $26.00
April 12, 2016

One night in March 1881, a woman gives birth to twins on a homestead near Gainesville, Texas. Millicent Holloway didn’t want one baby, much less two, so she and her husband, Leon, send the baby girl away with the midwife.

Twenty years later, Nathan Holloway knew he wasn’t his mother’s favorite but still “felt show more a part of the family scene if for the most part ignored, like the indispensable clock over the mantel in the kitchen.” Until Trevor Waverling arrives at the Holloway homestead outside Gainesville to announce that he is Nathan’s biological father and Nathan discovers that his mother is selling the farm out from under him. Meanwhile, near Fort Worth, Samantha Gordon turns down a future in her first love, paleontology, to apprentice with her adoptive father, Neil Gordon, preparing to inherit one of the largest ranches in Texas: Las Tres Lomas de la Trinidad. But she can no longer deny nagging curiosity about her birth parents. When Samantha unearths a dinosaur cemetery and oil is found on Las Tres Lomas, Neal Gordon takes “an outraged view to her equally fiery argument that a burial ground of old bones was more valuable than an oil field if drilling for petroleum meant preserving the homestead,” and the stage is set for the generational clash of the eponymous titans.

In Titans, Leila Meacham crafts a grand Texas family epic, by way of Dickens, about the titans of the titans of Texas: ranching and oil. Meacham considers family and home. What is family? Is it always blood? Or is family whom we choose to be ours? Is home a specific place, a plot of land, or house? Or is home actually family, no matter where you are? Or, maybe, home is a state of mind.

The briskly paced plot is deceptively simple, allowing Meacham’s complex characters significant development. Titans is set at the turn of the twentieth century, and Meacham’s younger women reflect the growing independence and changing roles of women in American society. Betrayal and generational change are major themes in Titans: tangled relationships, secrets, and competing motivations. Like Watergate, it becomes essential to determine who knew what and when they knew it.

Meacham’s descriptions are appropriately, sometimes delightfully, classic to the genre. “Tall, slim, straight as a Comanche arrow, brown as river rock,” was Sloan Singleton, “hardened by wind and sun, saddle seasoned, he could have passed for none other than what he was—a son of the range.” Other times Meacham is carried away and becomes saccharine, as when the sun’s “benevolent warmth fell upon [Samantha] like the reassuring smile of an angel,” but this happens less frequently than in the typical historical family saga. Meacham’s gift for the earthy, humorous colloquialism is on display as Samantha is accused of “pole-vaulting over mouse turds.” She is also accomplished at curiously evocative metaphors, such as a young woman forced into a blind date by her parents, who “wore the resigned face of a kidnap victim conscripted to serve an adversarial government.”

As exhausted chickens ready to roost, the hurricane that struck Galveston in 1900 is employed as an appropriate metaphor for all of the explosive plot elements to collide in a satisfying climax and a final paragraph that is practically perfection.

Published by Lone Star Literary Life. show less

I liked this novel well enough - it's well-written, the characters are engaging, and the story moves along quickly. However, I found the stubbornness of the characters often frustrating and the values and morals the characters represented sometimes detract from the story's enjoyment. It is repeatedly implied that the characters would be better off if they followed their hearts instead of focusing on their jobs and family legacies. Perhaps its the feminist in me, but in this story, it always show more seems that it is the female characters who are asked to give up their livelihood and ambitions to follow their passions, but the same dilemma is never presented to the male characters. By the end, I wondered if the characters could have made better choices and been happier for it - if only the author had allowed it. show less