Guest Book Review: ISABELA'S WAY

Book cover for ISABELA'S WAY

Local Northport author Barbara Stark-Nemon has done it again. After two other outstanding novels (Even in Darkness and Hard Cider), Isabela’s Way may be her best work yet.

Set in the early seventeenth century, this absorbing historical novel describes the impact of the Inquisition on families forced to flee persecution. As the story opens, non-Catholics have been expelled from Spain, and enforcement of the Inquisition is spreading to Portugal.

Isabela is a conscientious fourteen-year-old Portuguese girl and a talented needlework artist. Her mother has died of the plague. Her father, a textile merchant, is traveling and living in Hamburg. While her village is roiled by illness and the terrifying unrest of the Inquisition, Isabela maintains the household and fends for herself, with help from her friend David.

An enigmatic stranger, Ana, contacts Isabela with an urgent message from her father: Isabela is in danger and must leave Portugal immediately. As cover for her escape, Ana announces that Isabela has been commissioned by a family in the Basque region to embroider their daughter’s trousseau. 

Raised as a Christian, Isabela had assumed she would be safe from religious persecution. She is shocked to discover that her own heritage is Jewish and that she and her family, as converts, or “New Christians,” are also at risk. Isabela learns that her friend David has fled Portugal with his sisters and is escaping along a northern route. 

During their journeys across Spain, Ana, Isabela, David and his sisters are aided by a network of friends and sympathizers helping Jews escape persecution. Isabela finds a safe retreat with the Basque family and completes her commissioned work, but she is at growing peril of being exposed and eager to find her father. 

Ana, Isabela, David and his sisters continue traveling east, seeking refuge with additional sympathizers in France. All of them are also being pursued by a priest from their home village, who is determined to enforce the strictures of the Inquisition. The account of Isabela’s attempts to escape to safety and reunite with her father and David is gripping, with many suspenseful scenes and unexpected twists.

The book is rich with historical detail, offering deeply evocative descriptions of the cities, architecture, and culture of seventeenth-century Europe. At the same time, the themes of religious intolerance and oppression are utterly (and unfortunately) contemporary and relevant. 

Stark-Nemon is masterful at creating spirited female characters. Isabela uses her embroidery talent to assist with the refugees’ safe passage; she stitches elaborate symbols for banners that indicate safety or danger at each sanctuary on their route. Her growth from a perceptive but innocent girl to an assured, wise woman makes for a compelling coming-of-age tale. Similarly, Ana is a compassionate and gifted herbalist and healer; she bravely risks being apprehended as a heretic when she aids the sick and injured along the way. They are inspiring characters facing menacing danger with grace and hope.

Like Isabela’s embroidery, this intricate, beautifully written novel, with its complex, intertwining story lines, is a testament to human resilience and strength even in times of tyranny and cruelty. 

Author's needlework rendition of book cover

Reviewer Kristen Rabe also says:

"I am always thrilled when Pamela invites me to review a book for her blog. We have so many talented authors in Northern Michigan, and it’s a delight to highlight their work. Barbara Stark-Nemon is among the very best of those authors, and this fascinating historical novel with its remarkably relevant themes should attract a wide readership. Thank you once again, Pamela, for all you do to promote thoughtful discussion in our community."

Note: The release date of this book is Tuesday, September 16, 2025. I have it on back order and should have copies next week. Barbara will also be signing and selling her book at a booth during Leelanau UnCaged in Northport on Saturday, September 27.

Journey Into a Broken Heart

The Family: A Journey Into the Heart of the Twentieth Century, by David Laskin

NY: Penguin, 2013

Paper, $17

A strange, unlikely, and in the end a false family legend sends David Laskin back into his family’s past, the legend quickly abandoned for a true story – or rather, several true stories -- much more complicated and compelling. His great-great-grandfather, Shimon Dov HaKonen, a scribe in the village of Volozhin in the Pale, in the part now called Belarus, is the beginning of a dynastic trail that branches in three different directions. One leads to the United States, another to Israel, and the third ends there at the place of beginning, as the branch of the family that stayed in place is overcome by the Holocaust.

How can one review such a book? It is well written, with fully dimensional, engaging characters (i.e., real people), but with every page we turn, we know what is coming. It’s not like reading a novel or even the personal memoir of someone whose life is unfamiliar to us. We are told from the beginning that the family members in the Pale did not survive, and we have read and heard accounts of the atrocities committed in those places and those times. And yet there is a strange, irrational hope as one reads, as one turns pages, that maybe a miracle will --. But no, what’s past is past, and all of them died, perishing in ghastly, unspeakable circumstances. But it is precisely in speaking—and then writing--of the circumstances, of the lives and deaths, that the author reconstructs what happened to these lost relatives, in order that the stories of their lives and deaths will not be lost.

The American stories are of success, for the most part, most notably in the case of Itel, who became in America Ida Rosenthal, founder of the legendary Maidenform Bra company. At last count, the author tells us in his epilogue, the American branch of the family numbered 101. Stories from Israel tell of the founding of a pioneer family, which numbered 32 at the time the book was written.

The further I read in The Family, however, the more I found myself becoming still, willfully contained, trying physically I suppose to barricade myself, so to speak, against the shocking reality both of the historical past and so much of the world’s present. The maps in the book of Eastern Europe and the Middle East focus on places once again torn by hatred and cruel strife.

Is it the privilege of having grown up in the United States that allows David Laskin to cast the stories of his family in universal terms? For me, this “journey into the heart of the twentieth century" reveals a heart broken time and time again. As Stephen Daedalus said to the dreadful Mr. Deasy, the pompous, self-confident, anti-Semitic headmaster in James Joyce’s Ulysses, “History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” It was the more astonishing to read Laskin’s even-handed last pages since I was going back and forth between the book and, drawing deep breaths and trying to sort out current events, an article called “The Liberal Zionists,” by Jonathan Freedland in the August 14 issue of the New York Review of Books. What Laskin writes in his epilogue is undeniably true but can be difficult to acknowledge when one’s relatives have suffered horribly for religion or ethnic background, and as I read the following paragraph again, I am once more astonished by it.

The pulse of history beats in every family. All of our lives are engraved with epics of love and death. What my family gained and lost in the twentieth century, though extreme, was not unique. War has touched all of us. Fate and chance and character make and break every generation. The Shoah was not the only genocide America is not the first land of opportunity nor will it be the last. Warring peoples have fought over the Holy Land for thousands of years, all of them claiming to have God on their side. In a family history written by Palestinian Arabs, Chaim and Sonia and their fellow Zionists would be oppressors; the Koran, not the Torah, would be the holy book; Jerusalem would be a besieged, stolen city. Open the book of your family and you will be amazed, as I was, at what you find.

Now, will I have the courage to read Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel?

Laskin is right. We are all touched by both love and death, we have all gained and lost, and no one in today's world has been untouched by war. Broken hearts are never made new, unbroken, but with enough love and good fortune they can mend time and time again, and so families and countries go on. We go on as individuals, too, for whatever span is given us. 

It's a soft, rainy, late summer morning. I'm here now. Wherever you are, you're there now.