Review of The Bonnet Book by Nancy Menees Hardesty

Hi Readers!

I'm trying to get back into the swing of blogging more regularly, but probably that means once every couple of months to start! But I've been reading up a storm for the past 6 months and that's really great progress since I was unable to read for two years due to my illness. 

I've gained a real appreciation for historical fiction/memoirs since my father recently wrote his own memoir. Full disclosure, Nancy is a long time family friend, and I'm always a bit nervous about reading books from friends as I want to be honest and impartial but if the book isn't good? It isn't good. Usually in that case, I just refrain from writing a review to at least spare the ratings a bad review. But fortunately, that was not the case in this book. I was engrossed from start to finish.

Rating: 4.5 Couches

About the author: Nancy Menees Hardesty, born in Illinois and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, moved to San Francisco, California in 1969. Nancy spent six years researching and writing her debut novel, The Bonnet Book. She had various family journals and artifacts and the extensive help of her mother, Mary Kay Menees, who was the daughter-in-law of the book’s protagonist, Bonnie Spencer. The tiny “Bonnet Book” of hat sketches and the wooden hat-supply trunk featured in the book are still in the author’s possession.

My Review: The Bonnet Book is many things. Yes, at the heart, this was a book started and finished with the main goal of telling Nancy's grandmother's story starting in 1902, but it is so much more than that. It's a coming of age of a young woman who has endured so many hardships at an early age, most notably being parted from a loving family and sent to Saint Louis to seek her fortune. This was a forced choice, and an unusual one as well since we usually see young boys as the ones ousted from their families for this reason. I wonder if having a young girl leave their families is more common than we might imagine, but don't appreciate because most written early histories are from the viewpoint of men. 

Blanche is a likeable heroine from the get go. She is plucky, creative, intelligent, and full of grit. After she is sent away by her father to seek her fortune, she takes the Orphan Train to Saint Louis, a program to establish homes for orphaned children. While she is not an orphan, she has effectively been turned into one, with no monetary or emotional support. She is "adopted" by the Robey family who see her as a servant aka nanny for their two younger girl children. She sleeps in a pantry at night and while she is not taking care of the children, she does chores around the house. The goal of her father sending her to Saint Louis in the first place was to get an education that she would not be able to achieve in their small backwards town. But the Robey family would not allow her to go to school, and since she relied on them for food and shelter, she had to obey. But in small ways she fought back, staying positive and finding ways to educate herself-- from doing math on a regular basis to calculate change when she was sent for produce to writing down new vocabulary words when she was able to read newspapers in her spare time, which was minimal. While I do not condone the Robeys treatment of Blanche, I will say they have their own sense of honor. Mr. Robey who in many ways was the "villain" of the novel, did honor the initial agreement to help Blanche find an apprenticeship/job after her work was completed. And he did not set her up with just any job. He paid attention to her interests and saw her fall in love with hat making at the World's Fair. He also set her up to intern at a very good hat making company. Hat making became Blanche's refuge and a way to use her intelligence and creativity in a positive way. In those days, I imagine it was almost unheard of for a woman to make good money on her own, but she was able to do so even at a young age. 

Blanche also endured hardships emotionally, feeling scarred by the loss of her family and the apparent rejection of her father who she loved so much and fostered her love of reading and public recitation. This emotional journey comes to a satisfying close.

I do wish there was a bit of an epilogue to say where Blanche's hat making went next. She was still encumbered with the restrictions of the time-- her new husband who she loved very much still made decisions on where they would live without consulting her. And her flourishing career as an amazing hat maker seemed to come to an abrupt halt. I'm sure even as hats went out of fashion, she likely found other ways to foster her burning creativity. I would have liked to know more of that.

That said, I was supremely impressed by this well researched (don't forget to read the preface and the notes at the end of the book, they really enhance the reading journey!), and well written historical novel, Nancy Menees Hardesty's debut. This book took her 6 years to research and write, but I hope she writes another one as she is definitely talented and this genre needs more of this kind of novel to add to the obvious gaps in our knowledge of the past.