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The University of Utah's Independent Student Voice

The Daily Utah Chronicle

The University of Utah's Independent Student Voice

The Daily Utah Chronicle

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Marriott Library has intense historical fiction to offer, including “The Hours Count”

Many of us may vaguely remember the story of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the New York couple executed for being Russian spies in the early 1950s.

Likely, you heard their story one day in an American History class. Perhaps because the room was stuffy or perhaps because the teacher’s voice droned on and on, but many of probably tuned out the lesson. Many of us have never thought what it must have been like to be Ethel and Julius. And we certainly never considered the lives of their two orphaned sons. But Jillian Cantor, author of the novel “The Hours Count,” has thought of this and many other details of the Rosenberg case.

 

“The Hours Count,” released last October, focuses on a fictional neighbor and friend of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The neighbor, Millie, struggles to maintain her failing marriage and care for her son with autism. She befriends and confides in Ethel, creating a steadfast friendship. While this bond between the two women initially improves their lives, all soon begins to unravel. Millie loses her child, a death which decimates her already-troubled relationship with her husband. Ethel’s brother is arrested by the FBI for spying and implicates his sister and brother-in-law in his confession. The plot tests the boundaries between mothers and children, husbands and wives. Eventually the Rosenbergs are jailed and put on trial for espionage. The fictional Millie tries to balance her own demons while fighting against history to try and free Ethel.

This novel falls into a pattern of shaking the dust off of someone’s life, pulling it into the light again and painting over the faded designs. Cantor does this by cleverly weaving together the lives of her imaginary characters with the stories pulled from Ethel’s death-house letters. She delved into additional research of records and accounts of the Rosenberg couple, pulling information about their personalities and filling in the blanks with her imagination. Details like this give Millie and the other fictional characters as much realism as the real-life players in one of the most famous executions of the 20th century. In her author’s note, Cantor details that she wanted to explore the human size of the infamous criminal duo and to attempt to understand what their lives must have been like. For a particularly sad and still hotly contested case (many still maintain the two were innocent), Cantor’s reinvention of the tale is sure to interest many and perhaps shake the foundations of what many think they know of one of the plot.

For those who fall in love with this genre of fiction on the borderline of reality and fiction, check out Cantor’s “Margot,” which recounts the life of Margot Frank, the much less famous sister of Anne Frank, whose journals were never found. For those wanting to break beyond Cantor within the same genre, “Twain’s End” by Lynn Cullen reinvents author Mark Twain’s life, and Little America by Henry Bromell details the life of a young man in the Wyoming location of the same name in America’s bicentennial year.

All these books are available at the Marriott Library and through the Interlibrary Loan Service.

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