In March, my reading theme focused on female authors, characters, and experiences for Women’s History Month. My favorite book this month was both a new release and one I picked for this theme: The Tobacco Wives by Adele Myers.
Maddie Sykes finds herself spending the summer with her aunt in Bright Leaf, North Carolina, while her mother searches for a new husband. It is 1946 and Bright Leaf is enjoying a postwar economic boom propelled by its biggest industry: tobacco. Maddie begins assisting her aunt, a talented dressmaker, with dressing the tobacco executives’ wives. Along the way, she uncovers a dark secret that threatens to ruin the town of Bright Leaf and the tobacco wives who have taken Maddie under their nicotine-stained wings.
I am always interested in books set in North Carolina, and as a native North Carolinian I learned about the power and impact of the tobacco lobby growing up, but the tobacco industry always felt removed from my urban, twenty-first century existence. The Tobacco Wives shows how the foundation of many small North Carolina towns is tobacco, with any threat to the industry a threat to the town as a whole. While the book revolves around Maddie’s decision whether or not to expose the tobacco executives’ coverup of the negative health impacts of their product, it also addresses issues of class, women’s rights, and activism.
I really enjoyed this book and while it is set in the ever-popular World War II-ish time period of historical fiction, the setting of Bright Leaf was very vivid and I loved getting to know Maddie, her aunt, and the tobacco wives. The lack of financial stability and independence outside of marriage was common to all women, regardless of class, and it was interesting to see how the various characters responded to the pressure and expectations put on them as women, whether the wealthy tobacco wives chafing against the restrictions placed on them by their husbands, the female workers fighting to keep their jobs at the tobacco factory, or Maddie and her aunt relying on pleased clients to keep their dressmaking business going.
March’s reads and ratings (out of five stars)
Theme reads
- The Marriage Game, Sara Desai: three stars
- The Tobacco Wives, Adele Myers: five stars
- The Girls Who Went Away, Ann Fessler: five stars
- The Herd, Andrea Bartz: four-and-a-half stars
- A Game of Cones, Abby Collette: three-and-a-half stars
- A Lowcountry Bride, Preslaysa Williams: four stars
Others
- The Wife Upstairs, Rachel Hawkins: four-and-a-half stars
- Marion Lane and the Deadly Rose, T. A. Wilberg: four stars
- Daughters of a Dead Empire, Tara Carolyn O’Neil: five stars
- The Shadows, Alex North: four stars
- Tripping Arcadia, Kit Mayquist: four stars
- The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea, Axie Oh: five stars
- The Last Castle, Denis Kiernan: four stars
- Tell Me An Ending, Jo Harkin: four stars
- Woman on Fire, Lisa Barr: three-and-a-half stars
- Last Summer at the Golden Hotel, Elyssa Friedland: four stars
- Survive the Night, Riley Sager: four stars
- When a Killer Calls, John Douglas and Mark Olshaker: five stars
- Short Stories in Spanish for Beginners, Olly Richards: four stars
- Disorientation, Elaine Hsieh Chou: four-and-a-half stars
- Travelers Along the Way, Aminah Mae Safi: four-and-a-half stars
- Frankly in Love, David Yoon: four stars
Moriah Sharpe 