{"id":6179,"date":"2025-01-11T07:00:55","date_gmt":"2025-01-11T15:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=6179"},"modified":"2025-01-11T07:00:55","modified_gmt":"2025-01-11T15:00:55","slug":"ellen-yardley-eleanor-and-the-cold-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/ellen-yardley-eleanor-and-the-cold-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Ellen Yardley: Eleanor and the Cold War"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eleanor Roosevelt #1<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>This is a pleasant read, with the added bonus of having Eleanor Roosevelt, a remarkable human being and perhaps our greatest first lady, as one of its main characters.\u00a0 In this novel, which takes place in 1951, we find her in the middle of the cold war, a widow and a former first lady working for human rights in every possible manner.\u00a0 The action begins when Eleanor and her secretary, Kay Thompson, discover the body of a young woman in the bathroom of a train. The girl proves to be the missing daughter of a friend who had asked Eleanor to look into her disappearance.<\/p>\n

Filling in for her aunt \u201cTommy\u201d (Roosevelt\u2019s real long time secretary), Kay is new to the job. Young and beautiful, she\u2019s hoping she\u2019ll meet a husband while working for the former first lady, but what she doesn\u2019t expect, and what makes this novel a journey of identity, is that Mrs. R will profoundly change her perspective on life.\u00a0 Kay and her employer get involved in the investigation of the girl\u2019s death which may involve the Soviets – it\u2019s the height of the Cold War and the atmosphere is cloudy with paranoia. When the jurisdiction changes from the local police to the FBI, an organization Eleanor is familiar with, she has a bit more leeway to investigate.<\/p>\n

But Kay discovers that what Eleanor is even more familiar with is human nature, and it\u2019s her insight into the character of the people involved that allows her to solve the crime.\u00a0 In the midst of all the mystery, the reader is taken on an atmospheric tour of the early 1950s that feels only too authentic.\u00a0 As Kay struggled through some unwanted advances herself \u2013 advances she takes for granted though does not enjoy – I remembered my aunt saying she couldn\u2019t watch the television show Mad Men<\/em> because the handsy, arrogant, sexist men were all too realistic and took her back to a place she didn\u2019t want to be.<\/p>\n

Kay has to decide if she wants to be a pampered, confined wife or a free ranging woman like Eleanor who owns her own home (very unusual for the time).\u00a0 Meanwhile, the book introduces other real-life characters like Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Jaqueline Bouvier, all very young and not yet attached to one another.\u00a0 Kat admires Jackie\u2019s work as a photographer, and the future First Lady ends up helping her find a vital clue.<\/p>\n

Sprinkled throughout \u2013 and bolstered by epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter \u2013 are Eleanor\u2019s practical words of wisdom.\u00a0 Eleanor\u2019s spirit infuses the book, though she is in fact technically a secondary character.\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting to see the pairing of a confident older woman (Eleanor would have been in her mid 60\u2019s at the time) with a young one still figuring out her life.\u00a0 This is a solid read and a decent mystery with a solution that\u2019s somewhat unexpected while remaining believable. The heartbreak of the dead woman is not slighted and the mechanics of an investigation involving the influence of a beloved former first lady are strong elements here.\u00a0 I liked meeting Kay and enjoyed seeing her begin her journey to full adulthood. This first voyage is a good start to a series following that path. —\u00a0Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eleanor Roosevelt #1 This is a pleasant read, with the added bonus of having Eleanor Roosevelt, a remarkable human being and perhaps our greatest first lady, as one of its main characters.\u00a0 In this novel, which takes place in 1951, we find her in the middle of the cold war, a widow and a former … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1952,1951,162,1276],"class_list":["post-6179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-eleanor-and-the-cold-war","tag-ellen-yardley","tag-kensington-books","tag-robin-agnew"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6179"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6181,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6179\/revisions\/6181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}