Will They Ever Recover from Their Good Luck?
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A unique part of my family history is that my dad’s family was supposed to come to America on the Titanic, but they couldn’t board the ship because Dad’s brother had chickenpox. The family traveled a week later (April 20, 1912) on the Caronia. Thanks to this fact, when my adult kids saw the title of this book, they thought it perfect for me.
And it really is perfect because the survivors mentioned in the title are not people who had a spot on a lifeboat after the sinking of the ship, but instead people who had tickets to board the ship but did not do so for some reason.
It was a toymaker who had rounded up people to form clubs. He understood that each person would have his own unique story to tell about the Titanic, but that they all had a lot in common. As he explained, “I thought there might be a few things we’d all have to say to each other. I was not on the ship, so I have no business saying I survived it, but I’ve not recovered from my good luck. That shipwreck I avoided just keeps dragging at me nonetheless.”
The toymaker’s research on the matter found nearly fifty people and he formed three secret societies, one each in Paris, London, and New York. The Paris club is the subject of this book. There were about a dozen people in the group including an actress, a writer of murder mysteries, an evangelist, and a man who was supposed to be the librarian for the ship’s second-class library.
The librarian was named Yorick and his story is interesting. Beyond the books approved by the White Star Line, he brought books to the library that had been censored for some reason. He is not sure if this was the reason he was ultimately asked not to board the ship or if it was his pronounced limp that made him unpresentable as a member of an elite staff.
Yorick becomes the leader of the survivor’s group. Since he owns a bookshop post-Titanic and has an encyclopedic knowledge of literature, it’s a book club he forms. As the book’s jacket tells us, the book club members “grapple with their own anxieties through heated discussions of The Awakening or The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
The reader learns a lot about a lot of books too.
Another interesting survivor we meet was named Zinnia. She was a wealthy woman whose family made candy. Her father was white and her mother was Japanese. The ship would only allow a mixed-race family to travel in second class, which was not agreeable to Zinnia’s family, so they did not board.
Though the book club meets somewhat regularly, and we get to know the various characters pretty well, the story ultimately is the tale of the deep friendship that forms between Yorick, Zinnia, and another member of the group, Haze, a photographer.
Indeed, theirs is a love triangle and it takes over the rest of the book as the chapters move us from 1912, through World War I, and into the post-war years.
While this love story was very interesting – especially for what it told us about relationships in the era of World War I – I had hoped to stick more with the Titanic story, but that was not the route the author took.
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Click here to learn more about The Titanic Survivors Book Club on Amazon.
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