MADWOMEN?
BY LUCINDA BYATT
Jennifer Cody Epstein’s Story of Hysteria and Belle Époque Paris
Josefine, one of the two protagonists of The Madwomen of Paris (Ballantine Books, 2023), asks Laure: “Why would a writer use a real person in a made-up story?” To which Laure replies: “Perhaps he thinks it’s a good way to get his story’s ideas across to his audiences … I think stories – even untrue ones, or maybe especially untrue ones – can teach us things about life that true events can’t.” Here the “true events” revolve around La Salpêtrière, the notorious Paris asylum. By the mid-19th century, its conditions had somewhat improved, and its inmates included not only the insane but also women diagnosed with what novelist Guy de Maupassant had dubbed Paris’s “epidemic of the age”: hysteria. I asked Jennifer Cody Epstein what had inspired her to delve into this murky history, and particularly the “wizard-like” historical figure of Jean-Martin Charcot.
“It all started with a 150-year-old photo I stumbled upon in 2017. I’d actually been researching Memento Mori, the Victorian practice of artfully photographing the newly dead in order to save their images as keepsakes. But this picture was clearly of someone very much alive: a scantily clad young woman, hair tousled, one arm held at an unnatural angle as she stared fiercely back at the camera.” The woman in the photo is Augustine Gleizes, and the character of Josefine in the novel is partly drawn from her story. “After Augustine had been admitted to the Salpêtrière, she joined a handful of women studied, photographed, and publicly displayed there by Jean-Martin Charcot, whose famous ‘Friday Lessons’ were initially intended for France’s scientific and medical communities. But Charcot’s combined usage of attractive young hysterics like Augustine, and theatrical hypnotic techniques to draw out their ‘symptoms’, made the lectures so wildly popular that they were covered by tabloids, featured in chocolate advertisements and even depicted in a famous Salon painting. They were clearly less appreciated by Augustine herself, who, after several unsuccessful attempts, finally fled the asylum disguised as a man.
“This role-inverting rebellion inspired the Gothic storyline I began to weave as I fell deeper and deeper into my research. I read or reread a lot of 19th-century novels as I struggled to fine-tune the novel’s voice. There was also the challenge of trying to both accurately and empathetically portray the traumatized women these men studied, experimented on and presented to the public, and to try to give them back the humanity of which the medical record has largely stripped them.”
Contemporary events contextualise the story in Belle Époque Paris, with well-chosen and aptly placed details about Jules Verne’s voyages, the omnibus transport system, the new photographic
methods used by Charcot in his studies. With such a wealth of context, the story might easily be lost, and Epstein tells me that “For me, it was a painstaking and sometimes endless-feeling process of writing and whittling. My first draft of the book was about six hundred pages and had waaay too much Charcot in it. It got tricky defining the boundary between Laure and Josefine’s stories and those of the men who oppress and exploit them, but having read so many promising historical novels where the plots and characters end up getting submerged and diluted beneath pages of historical fact, I knew it was absolutely essential.”
On the topic of how essential travel is to research, Epstein agrees that “Visiting the Salpêtrière certainly afforded me a more nuanced and vivid sense of the story’s setting.” However, when writing her first and third novels (The Painter from Shanghai, 2008; Wunderland, 2019), she adds, “I had neither the funds nor the flexibility to physically travel to China and Germany, the respective settings for those two works.” Now, the world is at our fingertips in other ways, though. As well as to old film, Epstein “referred a lot to the work of French photographer Eugène Atget for Madwomen, as well as the Salpêtrière’s own published volume of photography, Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. I also tracked down vintage travel guides, memoirs and turn-of-the-century French novels, especially those written by Zola and Colette. All of these helped me gather the elements needed to rebuild Belle Époque Paris on the page.”
I am intrigued by the way authors convey the use of a foreign language. “It was really kind of an intuitive thing,” Epstein tells me, “There’s clearly an argument to be made that since any foreignset narrative written about in English is already effectively being ‘translated’ by the author, including foreign snippets here and there is simply redundant. But I find them helpful to remind the reader that that is the language characters are actually supposed to be using. Of my four novels, the only country I’ve written about whose language I’m somewhat conversant in is Japan, where The Gods of Heavenly Punishment (2012) is set. For the others, I had to do the best I could using Google Translate, and then have native speakers from those countries factcheck the manuscript and coach me – with limited success, it must be said – on pronunciation when I give readings.”
Epstein says that she struggled to portray Charcot in the novel, noting that it felt like a “dangerous balancing act” between his considerable contribution to neurology and psychiatry and making a fair assessment of his treatment of these women. “As the book progressed, I found myself both increasingly believing – as I believe most in the medical world now do – that his work in hysteria was, in the best case, misguided, and in the worst outright quackery. It also resonated so much for me with many of the challenges and dangers women face today, both within the medical sphere and societally overall.”
Epstein’s next book will also have a historical thread, although it turns to more recent times – the Sixties and Seventies, most likely in a music scene setting. “It will also explore adoption, which has personal resonance for me as I’m myself an adoptee.” In fact, it’s to William Faulkner’s words that Epstein turns when she sums up her thoughts on the historical record that maps our own lives: “History isn’t a bunch of chapters in a book, but rather a living, breathing thing that is continually in dialogue with the present. I think Faulkner summed it up best: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’”
Lucinda Byatt is Features Editor for HNR.
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THERE WAS THE CHALLENGE to try to give them back the humanity of which the medical record has largely stripped them.
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PREHISTORIC THE DAWNING: 31,000 BC
Richard W. Wise, Brunswick House, 2022, $6.99, ebook, 342pp, 9798986420813
I recently saw a documentary about the Lagar Vehlo child, a prehistoric skeleton discovered in Portugal twenty or so years ago. What is fascinating about this find is that it is evidently a mix between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens—and that segues rather nicely into Mr. Wise’s story set so far into the past the Neanderthals still roamed the world.
Humans have always been wary of strangers, and this rule applies to the past as well, where our very distant ancestors want as little as possible to do with the stocky and fair-skinned people who live such rustic and primitive lives (!). When two young girls are abducted by a party of Neanderthals, their surviving tribesmen vow to rescue them, which proves harder than they thought.
The Neanderthals have a reason for abducting young, potentially fertile, women. Their women rarely conceive, and the Lion Clan has so few children it is evident they have no future unless, somehow, they manage to reverse the trend. Which is why Scar, the leader of the clan, decides to steal away the two girls, knowing full well this may lead to violent retribution. Our young female protagonist, Lada, is to end up torn in two between hate for the man who abducted her but also a growing tenderness for the same man, now that they have a baby together.
Mr. Wise spins a good tale, capably supported by strong descriptive writing and a cast of interesting characters—from the doomed Scar, to Lada and the very young shaman Ejil. And then, of course, there is little Efram, the baby that carries the DNA of both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens—just like that little child discovered in Lagar Vehlo does! A truly fascinating subject, which Mr. Wise handles with evident aplomb.
Anna Belfrage
CLASSICAL
MEDUSA’S SISTERS
Lauren J. A. Bear, Ace, 2023, $28.00, hb, 368pp, 9780593547762 / Titan, 2023, £8.99, pb, 352pp, 9781803364728
“Even monsters have families” is the appropriate tagline for this reimagining of the story of the Gorgons, told primarily by Medusa’s often forgotten sisters Stheno and Euryale.
Daughters of the ancient sea deities, Phorcys and Ceto, Stheno, Euryale and Medusa have other siblings, including the three Graeae, but these triplets, more human in appearance than other family members, chose to travel when they reach adulthood. Spending time in Thebes and Athens, the sisters’ characters and desires lead them in different directions even as they appear to be inseparable. Stheno is the ‘big sister’ full of concern and worry, especially for Medusa, the only one of the three who is mortal. Euryale is consumed with a desire to find love and chooses to look for an immortal lover, perhaps Poseidon, the handsome, tricky King of the Sea, while sweet Medusa engages in a love affair with the costliest of consequences.
Bear handles the different voices of Stheno and Euryale with masterful skill and wit. It’s a story full of violence, heartbreak, and sisterly infighting. Each sister’s character and decisions contribute to the disastrous fate that awaits them at Athena and Perseus’s hands. Stheno calls her fourth sister “fear,” but while fear pervades the story until Medusa meets her fate, the sisters’ story continues, and the latter stages of the novel are some of the most tender and satisfying parts of this read.
Medusa’s story is the subject of at least three new or recent novels, but with stellar writing and her focus on Medusa’s forgotten sisters, Bear’s contribution to the sub-genre of mythic retellings is not to be missed. Highly recommended.
Kate Braithwaite
LEGIONARY
Neil Denby, Sapere, 2023, £10.99/$12.99, pb, 379pp, 9781800558892
Legionary, first in a series, follows the coming of age of Julius Quintus Quirinius, a young legionary assigned to the Ninth Hispania. It is 17 BCE, and Augustus (Octavian) is in his 10th year as emperor. When Quintus’ cohort (480 men) is punished for the cowardice of a few, they are separated from the legion and temporarily
denied armour, weaponry, and food. One member of each contubernium (a group of eight sharing one tent) must die. In Quintus’ group, it is their leader, Ursus, who earns this dubious honour, but the travesty splits factions within the group. According to Ursus’ wishes, Quintus must step up as protector of his seven comrades and take stewardship of Ursus’ family. Expecting to rejoin their legion and march to Rome, the cohort is sent on a mission in the opposite direction.
Although there are several battle scenes, they aren’t the major plot-drivers. Instead, this is a well-researched exploration of what it means to be part of the Roman army. Honour, discipline, and comradeship are explored in compelling detail: punishment; the extraordinary speed and efficiency of camp construction and deconstruction; the need to know your contubernium has your back. Quintus’ new position as accepted leader puts him at a remove from his friends and their individual quarrels. He must prevent bad blood from circulating between them whilst fulfilling the tasks Ursus has asked of him. He is vulnerably human in his doubts and often lets his temper override his logic. Despite an early dislike and suspicion of Sextus, Quintus comes to appreciate the legionary’s sixth sense, a man who accurately reads the stars and earns the singular right as the group’s confidant. Although the tagline ‘thriller’ doesn’t quite fit here, there is a powerful sense that this series will journey in intriguing directions.
Fiona Alison
CAESAR’S SOLDIER
Alex Gough, Canelo, 2023. £16.99, hb, 300pp, 9781804362075
We all recall the name Mark Antony, largely from Shakespeare. We know he was a trusted supporter of Julius Caesar. But what do we know about him? He started out as a wastrel from a family of minor importance. His father tried to make inroads, and failed lethally, in Roman political life. His mother was practical and largely supportive. He was a crony of the ‘wild child’ Clodius and at a loose end, his family being ruined, he joined the legions. It was here he made his name. A twist of fate leads him to being cut loose from the ruling faction and, aware of his fragility, chose to contact a distant relation – the general Julius Caesar.
First of a series, Caesar’s Soldier is taking a fresh look at a recognised name. Using accepted sources, it’s a fictional account of a factual biography and gives a realistic take to what is ‘on the books.’ The novel is well-written, and Gough reads between the lines with an understanding of the period. I look forward to the next instalment.
Alan Cassady-Bishop
EMPIRE
Conn Iggulden, Michael Joseph, 2023, £22.00, hb, 412pp, 9780241513149 / Pegasus, 2023, $26.95, hb, 432pp, 9781639364015 Athens, 5th century BC. Empire is the
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second book in Iggulden’s Golden Age series which follows the fortunes of the Greek hero Pericles, ruler of Athens, and his arch-enemy, the Spartans. Pericles is only just holding on: a series of earthquakes have brought down temples and left his Athens in chaos, and somehow he must find a way to restore confidence and defeat Sparta once and for all. And for that, he must buy time. Sometimes, the only way to secure peace is to provoke war. Fortunately for Pericles, things have also been difficult for Sparta; earthquakes have flattened much of the city, leaving the Spartans exhausted and running out of food, weapons, and men; she should be in no state to fight. The question is: could Sparta ever recover? And, if so, how long would that take?
Iggulden’s thousands of fans know what to expect from him, and they will not be disappointed. He grasps us by our throats and yanks us into the story with deadly action-packed fights, and a body count where death comes suddenly. All captured Spartan helots are rounded up and dispatched with frightening efficiency. The scene-setting is meticulous, the pace is fast and tenacious, and the unexpected always happens. But Iggulden doesn’t just offer gritty and bloody action, he also thrusts us into the political intrigues of the time and rubs our noses in the reality of how it feels to be surrounded by an enemy who is without mercy, and expert in a thousand different ways of killing. We are there, with Pericles, as he fights to keep his country intact and to act as a beacon of light to his war-weary compatriots. I don’t doubt that Empire will add to Conn Iggulden’s list of bestsellers.
Elizabeth Hawksley
IN THE SHADOW OF THE BULL
Eleanor Kuhns, Severn House, 2023, $31.99/£21.99, hb, 224pp, 9781448310869 Crete, 1450 BCE. After her beloved sister, Arge, dies at the beginning of a wedding ceremony, Martis is visited by Arge’s shade. Her sister was poisoned, and fifteen-yearold Martis, who dreams of becoming a bull leaper, is tasked with exposing the murderer. Martis’s mother, a member of the all-female priesthood, tries to get her daughter to focus on weaving instead of investigating. Instead, Martis sneaks out to fulfill her promise to Arge. Martis is sure it was Arge’s betrothed but quickly learns that there are those in her family that are protecting dangerous secrets. Martis has much to learn in her attempt to uncover the truth behind her sister’s death. As she grows in knowledge, readers are treated to a vivid walk-through of ancient Knossos during the final few breaths of Crete’s flourishing Minoan culture. Kuhns’s exploration of this time and place is intriguing to read. Actually, I could have used more. Many observations are limited to smell (most often, human sweat and bull “musk”) and visualization of a limited area. Occasionally, words pop up that are out
of time, like calling someone a “serf” (serf and slave aren’t synonyms). While the practice/ performance of bull leaping heightens the tension for Martis, these moments don’t quite transcend the page. Additional time with Martis interacting with her fellow acrobats while training would help endear these characters and moments to readers. The middle section’s sense of urgency slows considerably as the investigation pretty much halts. Martis asks the same people questions over and over, prisoners keep escaping the same prison over and over, Martis sneaks out of her house over and over. However, readers will enjoy the final act, which is filled with twists and turns, resulting in a reveal that’s a satisfying surprise.
J. Lynn Else
HORSES OF FIRE
A. D. Rhine, Dutton, 2023, $18.00/£14.99, pb, 528pp, 9780593473061
Horses of Fire is the first collaborative adult novel of two young adult authors, Ashlee Cowles and Danielle Stinson, writing as A. D. Rhine. Set within the Trojan War during the days following the plague, while Achilles remains withdrawn from the fighting, the novel focuses on Andromache, Helen, Cassandra, and an imagined servant, Rhea.
In recent years, there’s been a blossoming of novels creatively and effectively reinterpreting the Trojan mythic tradition and strengthening women’s voices. This Troy novel continues the emphasis on women but also takes significant creative license both in events and character development. The authors’ notes mention “intentional departures from Homer’s storyline” and observe (accurately) that Homer was only one version of the “ancient drama we now call the Trojan War.” Readers may find their imaginative leaps liberating and enjoyable or disorienting, depending on their tastes.
For example, Andromache is portrayed as an Amazon-trained warrior who fights and plans strategy. She chafes against the limitations imposed on her by Troy’s men, in contrast to her childhood. The novel also presents an intriguing political take on the relationship of Troy’s elites with their historical allies from around Anatolia. The allies are disrespected and segregated. This ethnic-based tension will feel familiar and meaningful to modern readers, but would be far less so to ancient Trojans. Much of the novel’s conflict focuses on Andromache’s efforts to bring respect to the allies. Newly imagined battles and crises occur to support this theme. The novel’s abrupt ending finds an understandable explanation in the authors’ acknowledgements. They cut their original manuscript in half on their agent’s advice. However, the reader would benefit from a more complete sense of resolution.
Judith Starkston
HERC
Phoenicia Rogerson, HQ, 2023, £8.99, pb, 400pp, 9780008589875 / Hanover Square, 2023, $30.00, hb, 384pp, 9781335016775
Where, when? We’re never told. But as familiar names – Zeus, Hera, Apollo – begin to appear, we understand that we are in the world of ancient Greek myth.
At first, I felt a bit lost, as narrators proliferated. It reminded me of a funeral when, juggling a sandwich and a glass of something, everyone begins to talk. Each person relates their experience of the deceased: in this case, ‘Herc’, aka Hercules, or Heracles, of Greek mythology. From what initially seemed a random collage of voices, with a non-linear timeline, an order developed. The accounts began with Herc’s birth and (spoiler alert) ended with his epitaph. In between, a multitude of characters – family, friends, enemies, lovers - gradually built a picture of a man struggling with a problem father.
The triumph of this book is to take the bald statements of mythology and imagine how it would feel if it happened to real people. The voices have a modern sound – I’d place their accents somewhere in present-day south London. When they want to offer informal hospitality, they suggest tea. When the Gods come calling, the culture collision is almost comic. Setting is barely mentioned: it’s all about feelings.
So, how does it feel when your family is blessed/cursed by a child fathered by a God? Gradually, the voices reveal Herc as a man we know. The kid who everyone talks about, but no-one gets close to. The man who is full of machismo, but not master of his own emotions. The man who lives hard and dies harder. Recommended for a different take on mythology, and a masterclass in a wordportrait of a man.
Helen Johnson
1ST CENTURY FATAL LEGACY
Lindsey Davis, Hodder & Stoughton, 2023, £20.00, hb, 393pp, 9781529354737 / Minotaur, 2023, $28.00, hb, 336pp, 9781250799906
Fatal Legacy is the latest offering in the extremely popular Flavia Alba series set in 1stcentury Rome. The book opens with rabbits and quickly moves on to a family restaurant managed by Flavia’s aunt, Junia. A couple enjoy a meal then leave without paying. Flavia is asked to track the couple down and gain payment. This is a relatively simple assignment which leads Flavia into a morass of a feud between two warring families over an orchard, an argument which has dragged on for years involving countless lawyers, slavery, skulduggery – oh, and of course murder.
Fans of Lindsey Davis will know what to expect. A taut plot with lots of twists and turns, which brings alive the life and times. Strong characters, and a streak of humour which stretches throughout the book – and of course a twist which brings the book to an end in a
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very satisfying way. Although part of a series, this stands alone in its own right. Readers not familiar with Flavia can start here, then go back to enjoy earlier offerings. Recommended
Mike Ashworth
8TH CENTURY ST. AGNES AND THE SELKIE
G. M. Baker, Stories All the Way Down, 2022, $4.99, ebook, 292pp, 9781778066344
One day, a drenched and seemingly mute young woman knocks on the gate to the abbey of Whitby. Her dark colouring has the abbess, Wynflaed, suspecting she might be Welsh, but the quality of her clothes and her long, thick hair all mark her as a noblewoman, and the only Welsh in Northumbria are slaves.
The girl refuses to say anything about who she is or where she comes from—but she agrees to answer to the name of Agnes and do whatever menial tasks are set before her, as long as she is allowed to stay. Wynflaed fears whatever secrets Agnes carries may well come back to haunt them all.
Set in the late 8th century just as the Vikings are becoming a true pest, St. Agnes and the Selkie is one of those absolute jewels of a historical novel, immersing me in a vivid past. Mr. Baker has not only done his research, he breathes life into his characters—I am especially impressed by his dialogue—and had me reluctant to take even the shortest of breaks. My one little niggle is the lack of chapters: Mr. Baker has written his book in four parts, and I suspect I am not the only reader who finds it frustrating not to have a chapter break to offer a natural pause.
While this is the second book in a series, so well does Mr. Baker contain his plot within the pages of this narrative that at no point did I feel I missed any relevant backstory. Beautiful prose, evocative descriptions and characters one cannot help but love—what more can one possibly want? For anyone with a passion for Anglo-Saxon England, St. Agnes and the Selkie is, in my opinion, a must-read.
Anna Belfrage
10TH CENTURY MAN OF SORROWS
M. N. Stroh, Olivia Kimbrell Press, 2022, $17.95, pb, 239pp, 9781681901947
This first in a four-part series takes place in a scrupulously researched mid-10th century Ireland amid warring clans and Danish
invaders. Subtitled “a medieval Christian romance,” Man of Sorrows centers several families and two different love stories, each of which is daring for its time and for the genre.
Mara, a fifteen-year-old shepherdess, receives divine visitations that predict the future (like her late mother’s demise) and direct her to marry a man who will “humble himself by the sign of the cross.” After she sees a sign that her proposed husband is her best friend Áine’s brother, Marcan, she knows she’ll have trouble convincing him: Marcan is a pious monk at the Cill Dálua community who transforms vellum into beautiful, illuminated manuscripts. Because he thinks he unwittingly caused his mother’s and brother’s deaths, Marcan accepts the abbot’s harsh rule. His father, needing Marcan to tend flocks at home, had waited to give him to the church, as he was duty-bound to do with his firstborn, and Marcan feels God is punishing him for the delay. The second romance involves the crossclass relationship between Áine and Davan, nephew of Chief Cennedigh of the Dal Cais, in a subplot that offers multiple surprises.
In this short novel, Stroh proficiently interweaves multiple viewpoints and plot threads without losing the reader’s attention. The characters and their religious beliefs feel period-appropriate. Mara’s steadfastness is admirable, and Marcan’s internal pain is evident as he struggles to determine God’s purpose for his life. The writing style ranges from smooth to overly formal and cumbersome (“I exist but to guard his means so that he might dote upon you”). The novel also needs a stronger copyedit. With the trials they undergo, Mara and Marcan deserve a happy ending, and it’s rewarding to see how they achieve it.
Sarah Johnson
12TH CENTURY
EVERY RISING SUN
Jamila Ahmed, Holt, 2023, $28.99, hb, 432pp, 9781250887078 / John Murray, 2024, £9.99, pb, 432pp, 9781399805988
As a young teenager in 12th-century Persia, Shaherazade, daughter of Vizier Muhammad, witnesses the infidelity of the king’s wife. When she notifies him of the fact, he beheads his unfaithful spouse, but the danger doesn’t stop there. Driven by a desire for revenge, the king proceeds to marry two other young women and behead them afterward.
Witnessing this, Shaherazade is wracked with guilt yet also feels desire for the king. She prevails upon her father to offer her hand in marriage to the vengeful monarch. On the night of their wedding, she begins to weave a story, only for it to end abruptly, requiring her to finish the following night. She walks a fine line of having to tell alluring tales so that she can survive the king’s bloodlust.
In this gorgeous retelling of A Thousand and One Nights, we hear Shaherazade’s story through her own bewitching words. This is Jamila Ahmed’s debut novel, and what a masterfully woven tale it is. In Shaherazade,
we have a strong protagonist who is human, vulnerable, and utterly relatable. I loved her as the main character. Ahmed writes in a way that brings a bygone world to life, using compelling illustrations and descriptions. You can almost feel the richness of the fabrics and the flavors of the delicious food.
I thoroughly enjoyed this story. Every Rising Sun is an engrossing read from start to finish, and I look forward to reading what else Ahmed will write in the future.
Elizabeth K. Corbett
TOO GOOD TO HANG
Sarah Hawkswood, Allison & Busby, 2023, £19.99, hb, 285pp, 9780749029289
This is the 11th in Hawkswood’s Bradecote & Catchpoll series, and there is something new in the mix. I have read several of these books, and this is the one I have enjoyed the most. Hawkswood may need to rename the series, because I think it is the addition of Underserjeant Walkelin that adds a degree of complexity not present in the others. We are now able to see the developing situation through the eyes of three men, not merely the aristocratic Bradecote and his trusty, if cynical, sidekick Catchpoll, and it enriches the picture significantly.
Again the story is set in a highly believable 12th-century Worcestershire, with a murder to solve; this quickly deepens into rather more horrific events. The background is beautifully drawn, and where the villagers are spotlighted, they are interesting, believable characters. My only quibble is that the villagers en masse are sometimes depicted as the great unwashed; Hawkswood tells us in the narrative they may be ignorant but are not credulous fools, but this is not always shown. Opening with the hanging of an innocent man, the story weaves some dark themes and grasping motives with treasure, the Church, and the daily life of a village. Hawkswood writes so well that the trail is never clear; I didn’t spot the true murderer until the reveal, and enjoyed the building of the case all the more for it. Recommended.
Nicky Moxey
MASSACRE
Christine Jordan, Bloodhound, 2023, £8.99/$15.99, pb, 336pp, 9781504085922
Massacre is Jordan’s second entry in The Hebraica Trilogy, set in Gloucester, England, in 1189. Moses le Riche, a wealthy moneylender, travels to London with his eldest son, Abraham, to attend the coronation of Richard I. This turns out to be an error in judgement. After the ceremony, despite promises made by Richard, all hell breaks loose on the streets. Jewish homes are looted and burned, and Jewish citizens, including children, are brutally murdered before Richard restores order. Abraham and Moses barely escape with their lives.
Before long, Richard’s demands to fund the Third Crusade dig into Jewish coffers once again. As leader of the community, Moses is briefly imprisoned for failing to pay the full
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tallage, and his health takes a downturn. But is Moses being used as an example by the king and his cronies, or are there hostile influences within the Jewish community? Meanwhile, Abraham falls in love with the flirtatious Brunetta, unaware that his cousin Baruch has been there before him.
The ritualistic aspect of Jewish Orthodox life is well drawn here, and readers are privy to family dynamics, secrets long held, revelations made, and family members at odds. Incorporating historical events – the London riots leading to the massacre at Clifford’s Tower in York in 1190, for example –Jordan has clearly done meticulous research. The massive accumulated Jewish wealth aggravated antisemitic sentiment in England, and the persecution of peaceful Jews by outof-control mobs was barbaric.
Although I enjoyed the novel, it does tend to tell rather than show. An author’s note of historical context would be a welcome addition, and an indication of historical vs. fictional characters. Readers interested in the complex history of the Jews from the Norman invasion to the 1290 Edict of Expulsion should definitely consider this series.
Fiona Alison
THE STOLEN CROWN
Carol McGrath, Headline Accent, 2023, £10.99, pb, 384pp, 9781472297341
In 12th-century England, King Henry I has a problem. He has no male heir, just a daughter, Maud, and no one believes a woman can rule. However, Henry makes his nobles and prelates swear that Maud will inherit his crown.
When the King dies in 1135, Maud is in Rouen, pregnant by Count Geoffrey of Anjou, and cannot travel to England to claim her inheritance. Then comes news that Matilda’s cousin, Count Stephen of Blois, who also traces his ancestry back to William the Conqueror, has taken the throne.
An enraged Maud is forced to wait until Stephen’s rule begins to fail, when he falls out with those who backed him. She lands in England in autumn 1139, and there starts almost two decades of fighting, in a time known as the Anarchy, as Maud and Stephen battle for ascendancy.
The book is written from Maud’s point of view and that of her supporters, her illegitimate half-brother Robert of Gloucester, and Alice, an invented court singer turned spy. The use of Robert’s character works well for describing events Maud is not involved in, and the Alice sub-plot gives the reader more perspective on other parts of society. Maud is described well, as a frustrated woman determined to claim her inheritance, but who makes mistakes. I didn’t feel emotionally connected to Stephen, but perhaps I wasn’t supposed to be. As the Anarchy exhausts both sides, Maud and Stephen realise they must compromise and hand over the kingdom to one of their sons. But which one will it be? Will Maud finally get her stolen crown back?
A well-researched adventure about a
strong medieval woman fighting the odds against her.
Kate Pettigrew
13TH CENTURY THE FIRE AND THE ROSE
Robyn Cadwallader, HarperCollins Australia, 2023, A$32.99, pb, 384pp, 9781460752227
Eleanor is a young servant born with a disfiguring birthmark who has an unusual skill for a woman living in the City of Lincoln in the 13th century. She is a scribe, having first learned letters as a child from a holy woman –who features in the author’s earlier novel The Anchoress. The parchment men are dismissive, even suspicious, of her, as women should not have knowledge of written words.
When she embarks on a secret love affair with Asher, a Jewish spice seller, and has a child, Eleanor must weave a dangerous path, as this is an era that has sinister links to what would happen seven centuries later in Europe, i.e., the Holocaust. Forced to wear yellow badges, accused of ritual child murder and generally disliked because of their acumen with money, the Jews suffer persecution. Anyone caught associating with them suffers as well, and many are imprisoned, tortured, burnt at the stake, or hanged. Eventually, the King orders all Jews into exile. Eleanor has to rely on herself as she negotiates these terrifying events in which religion, superstition and prejudice overtake reason or compassion.
The novel’s main strength is in its detailed, pragmatic portrayal of the medieval world. The characters, however, remain a little elusive, as even the most enlightened individuals of that era were still limited by the strictures on their lives and an unwavering adherence to their class and religion, attitudes that enlightened modern readers may find difficult to grasp. The conclusion is to be expected, and there are excellent author’s notes on the background. A perceptive book that serves to remind us of the power of love, and words, and how both can change history.
Marina Maxwell
14TH CENTURY THE NIGHT OF THE WOLF
Cassandra Clark, Severn House, 2023, $31.99/£21.99, hb, 256pp, 9781448306664
The times are out of joint. Political and religious turmoil drive families and friends apart. Lies and rumors displace truth. Violence is common. It’s 1300.
In this brilliant addition to Cassandra Clark’s Brother Chandler mystery series, regime change rocks late medieval England. (Instead of releasing tell-all autobiographies, the British royal family—here Henry IV— formerly usurped, imprisoned, and murdered one another.) Henry and his hench-archbishop are waging a vicious campaign to punish heresy and political opposition. Meanwhile, Brother Rodric Chandler, an unconventional
friar harboring heretical, rebellious, and anticlerical notions, sets forth on a dangerous journey to save English literature… and his own skin. He carries a unique manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, now deemed heresy, hoping to find a hiding place for it outside London.
Very fittingly for the era, his wandering trip resembles both a pilgrimage and a knighterrant’s quest. It also offers a well-researched, exciting tour through the ancient England and Wales evoked by earlier masters of historical fiction, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Brother Chandler encounters a great cast of characters ranging from soldiers, outlaws, and monks to a wool merchant, an abbot, a young wife, a kitchen maid, a prostitute, a summoner, and a nobleman. These people frequently confide in Chandler, a brave, bighearted man who hides his own secrets while exhibiting a great gift for survival. He does solve a murder, but this is more of a novel with a mystery in it than a mystery novel.
Clark deftly creates the atmosphere of the Middle Ages with (among other devices) cleverly chosen archaic words: cresset, losel, cry havoc. Newly addicted readers will immediately search out more Brother Chandler novels, as well as Clark’s earlier Abbess of Meaux series.
Susan Lowell
I, JULIAN
Claire Gilbert, Hodder & Stoughton, 2023, £18.99, hb, 329pp, 9781399807531
This reimagining of the life of the anchoress and mystic Julian of Norwich is a triumph. Taking the few known facts, Gilbert creates a credible and heartbreaking story of life during the plague years of the late 14th century. From the charming little vignette of Julian the child astride her father’s shoulders while he takes her round their small-holding, we’re plunged into her first heart-break when she says, ‘I know I am safe, that I will always be safe because my father is here. And suddenly, he is not here.’
The plague takes him and later her mother, her husband and her only daughter. How is she to go on? Julian eventually receives a vision and becomes a recluse. The day she is walled up is described in chilling tones. She lives in her tiny cell for the rest of her life, except that this is a story not of death and despair but of life affirming itself.
Through the window of her cell she is everpresent, listening and offering guidance to the stream of pilgrims who come to her. In old age she decides to have it written down, her pages gathered under the title ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ by those who revered her wisdom.
I have one small caveat, to do with Gilbert’s timeline, where she blames Richard II for things he could never have done; for example, he could never have actively persecuted the Lollards in 1377. He was ten years old, controlled by John of Gaunt, head of the King’s Council. When Gaunt’s son grabbed Richard’s crown and called himself Henry
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IV, his first act was to establish the law of haeretico comburendo, burning at the stake, for those who objected to him. This was why Julian had to tread carefully in her later years. Her bishop, as a supporter of Richard, paid the ultimate penalty. Rough times!
There is much to learn today from Julian’s own writings and this wonderful reimagining of her life.
Cassandra Clark
THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS
Aline Kiner (trans. Susan Emanuel), Pushkin, 2023, £16.99, hb, 320pp, 9781782278306
1310 Paris. Ysabel runs the infirmary in the Royal Beguinage where she was raised, the religious women shut away from the fumes of burning Templars. Now old, she takes in a little beggar, a red-haired girl, Maheut. She does what she can to nurse the girl, but what is the cure for anger? She gives the wild child a gift: an aquamarine. The stone will absorb her anger, Ysabel says.
Franciscan friar Humbert has brought messages from his master Jean de Querayn to Marguerite Porete, imprisoned by the Inquisition. Humbert is looking for the redheaded girl.
Maheut’s red hair—’the colour of the devil’— gets her in trouble. And worse trouble—she’s pregnant. Ysabel foists Maheut on the widow Ade, unwillingly, and the widow and girl do not warm to one another. Maheut’s daughter, Leonor, connects with Ade in a way her mother never did.
Next Maheut is foisted upon silk merchant Jeanne du Faut. Marguerite is burned at the stake. Ade translates Marguerite’s heretical book, The Mirror of Simple Souls, into Latin and in the course of the work comes closer to Humbert, and their indiscretion is witnessed. The vengeful fingers of the Inquisition shatter the peaceful life of the Beguinage.
This rich historical drama is beautiful and unpretentious, a wonderful piece of historical fiction, fluidly capturing the feel of the period. Though it holds interest, the plot is slow, as the pace of life probably was back then. It is told in the present tense, bringing the reader right into the story. Despite the wealth of detail, the voice—14th-century Ysabel, Ade, Maheut, and Humbert—remains authentic, the characters completely sympathetic. It paints a wonderful picture of the world of the beguines, neither lay nor cloistered, ‘neither Martha, nor Mary’.
Susie Helme
THE ARROWS OF MERCY
Jill MacLean, Tellwell Talent, 2023, $17.00/ C$24.00, pb, 332pp, 9780228887324
1348. After serving as an archer at Crécy, Edmund returns to his village in Berkshire, badly scarred both physically and psychologically. Not that he expects a warm welcome from his neglectful mother and the older halfbrother who bullied him relentlessly. Nor, as a villein, bound under the feudal system, from
the uncertain temper of his overlord. After his harrowing experiences, can he adjust to life in the village? Will pretty Juliana still care for him, she whose memory comforted him amidst the horrors of war? And, most importantly, will he find peace from the nightmares that haunt him?
This is an unflinching portrait of a harsh and violent age, of petty cruelties and terrible atrocities, of ignorance and superstition, of the misuse of power and the vulnerability of women. And then there is the suffering the Black Death is spreading inexorably. Yet amidst the darkness there is light. Understanding and friendships, old and new, bring solace, and though they may not be gratefully, or graciously, received at the (sometimes illjudged) time, acts of kindness may bear fruit later. Trust is a slow-growing plant, but the arrows of mercy offer sorely-needed hope.
MacLean has researched carefully, and it shows in the attention to details of ordinary life in a small medieval village. Some aspire to a better life and chafe at the strict social hierarchy, which others defend out of selfinterest; but all are viewed with a measure of sympathy in this absorbing narrative, told from Edmund’s point of view. He too has the eye of a poet when he looks out at his surroundings: ‘the white petals of roses curtsey to the breeze.’ And the issues confronted still resonate in our world today—notably epidemics, PTSD, and the mistreatment of women.
An impressive performance. Highly recommended.
Ray Thompson
15TH CENTURY WHEEL OF FORTUNE
C. F. Dunn, Resolute Books, 2023, £10.99, pb, 362pp, 9781915981004
Wheel of Fortune is the first in a series, The Tarnished Crown, set during the Wars of the Roses. If you are expecting something like Game of Thrones you will be disappointed, or perhaps relieved. There is a violent episode in Chapter 1 and an affray on a Lincolnshire moor in the last chapter, but otherwise the story unfolds in gardens, children’s nurseries and bedrooms. The 16-year-old heroine, Isobel, is successively an amateur gardener, a nursemaid, and finally the earl’s (reluctant) mistress, reminding us that the Wars of the Roses was mostly a time of intermittent lowlevel violence broken occasionally by episodes of open war.
Dunn is anxious to explain that the combatants were motivated principally by
loyalty to their families and their lords, not by selfish greed. She has steeped herself in the late Middle Ages and understands its psyche.
This is a very atmospheric book with convincing characters and setting, but to my taste there is too much time spent on quarrels between child minders and marital bickering, and I needed the Author’s Note to understand the politics. However, if you prefer the story of a young woman forced into an unwelcome relationship at a time of chronic insecurity, then I am sure you will enjoy this.
Edward James
MARGARET OF AUSTRIA
Rozsa Gaston, Renaissance Editions, 2023, $16.95, pb, 427pp, 9781732589995
History, as most of us know it and are taught it, is filled with the names of kings and emperors. Few women make the highlight reel of the past despite their accomplishments in the world of politics and diplomacy. One such woman is Margaret of Austria, a daughter of Habsburg royalty who lived in the late 15th and first decades of the 16th century.
The Renaissance period in Europe is marked by great change. The New World has been discovered, opening the door to great wealth and generating conflict between nations vying for that wealth. The Protestant Reformation threatens to tear the continent apart. Henry VIII wants a divorce. The Pope wants an emperor to defend the established Church. Into this tumultuous arena Margaret, a daughter of the Habsburg empire, is born.
Margaret has not received the modern press of her near contemporary, Elizabeth I of England, but she was just as preeminent a force in the diplomatic gamesmanship of the time. The only daughter of the emperor Maximillian and aunt of the future emperor Charles V, sister and sister-in-law to rulers from Spain to Hungary, she is placed in the role of governor of the Netherlands, a contentious land of seventeen separate divisions.
Author Gaston has brought Margaret to life as a daughter, wife, niece, aunt, friend, politician, ambassador, and diplomat. Margaret, sought after in marriage by the king of England, was a woman who loved with all her heart and governed with rare wisdom. While she never reached the status of queen or empress, she accomplished far more in her role as a Habsburg politician. In a world of ever-shifting alliances and borders, Margaret held the Habsburg empire together by force of charm and intellect. The reader of Margaret of Austria will be both enlightened and entertained.
Peter Clenott
A BLACKENED MIRROR
Jo Graham, Candlemark and Gleam, 2023, $22.45/£17.00, pb, 302pp, 9781952456145
1489, Italy. Giulia Farnese longs for a marriage that will take her away from her village, and though she is of good family, her dowry is small. She goes to a tomb with gifts
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of pomegranate and bread to ask Proserpina to grant her a husband. That night, travelers seek shelter at the Farnese castle, including Virginio Orsini, Lord Bracciano.
A few weeks later, a marriage proposal to Orsini’s young cousin comes, and Giulia goes to Rome to be married.
Giulia soon discovers the marriage is a sham. Bracciano wants Giulia close by so he can use her powers to speak to spiritual beings, and to do so she must remain a virgin. Giulia lives a secluded life in Orsini’s household with his stepmother and her stepmother’s young cousin, Lucrezia Borgia. Giulia meets and falls in love with Lucrezia’s father, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, an enemy of the Orsini family. Giulia refuses to be a pawn of these great families and strategizes a game of her own.
This is a magical novel of 15th-century Rome as narrated by La Bella Farnese. Giulia is a great character, at times clever, confident, and bold, but at others meek, confused, and frightened—a realistic portrayal of a young woman amid the deadly intrigues of these great Roman families. Graham uses the story of Proserpina and Hades to parallel the relationship of Giulia and Cardinal Borgia, mixing mythology and history and religious spiritualism. The setting is exceptionally well-drawn, and a Borgia family tree, an explanation of church time, and a list of characters are offered pre-story. My only complaint: as this is a series, I must wait for more installments. Highly recommended.
Elizabeth Caulfield Felt
THE SERPENT OF DIVISION
Christina Hardyment, Haugetun Press, 2022, £10.00, pb, 362pp, 9781739198015
During the final years of the Wars of the Roses in 1466, Alyce Chaucer, granddaughter of Geoffrey, is relocating to her palace in Ewelme after a fallout with her son, whose wife is the sister of the Yorkist king, Edward IV. With Alyce’s past familial loyalty to the House of Lancaster and her vast wealth, some Yorkists are trying to find a way to seize her possessions. With the mysterious death of a bedesman in Alyce’s household, there’s a vacancy that the Yorkists plan to fill with a spy who will make quite sure to find evidence of treason. What Alyce doesn’t know is that there are those in her household who are sheltering Lancastrian sympathizers. With her closest friends under threat, trusted servants keeping secrets from her, and her home in jeopardy, Alyce’s hope for a quiet escape from the world is completely upended.
The title harkens to John Lydgate’s The
Serpent of Division, written after the death of Henry V, an allegorical tale about the harm of political and social division. This story is chock full of captivating historical details and political intrigue. The characters are enjoyable, with distinct voices and traits that enrich the plot development. However, the plot is slowed by considerable exposition. Often, characters stand around and talk about plot developments instead of using actions to convey emotions. For example, it’s more interesting to receive bad news while pruning plants with sharp gardening shears versus standing in the garden and discussing said bad news. That being said, The Serpent of Division is a well-written and well-researched tale with entertaining characters and a strong female protagonist that readers of this period will enjoy.
J. Lynn Else
THE QUEEN’S SCRIBE
Amy Maroney, Artelan Press, 2023, $14.99, pb, 420pp, 9781955973090
When Estelle, daughter of the Grand Master Jacques de Milly’s falconer in Rhodes, arrives at the Cyprus royal court in summer 1457, she is greeted with hostility and neglect. Sent as French tutor to Princess Charlotta, she finds the teenaged princess in mourning for her young husband, recently poisoned, and is barred from her presence. Volatile circumstances become even more unstable very quickly. Estelle is accused of theft, and she momentarily allies herself with Charlotta’s older bastard brother, Jacco, who fawns over her for his own gain.
The king’s advisors try to force her into marriage. The Queen sickens and dies, and the King’s death, shortly after, leaves Charlotta the natural heir by Cypriot law. But she is a fourteen-year-old girl, and Jacco is determined to take the throne for himself. Estelle eventually works her way into Charlotta’s good graces, acting as tutor, scribe and interpreter, but not without cost. The only people she can trust are her father’s friend Michel, the king’s master falconer, and Gabriel, a royal under-falconer.
This is a high-stakes adventure moving rapidly from one event to another in a time of great upheaval. Most of the story takes places over the few years of the usurper Jacco’s rampage. The story sometimes relies too heavily on dialogue, but the narrative style is straightforward, using short chapters and a fast pace. There are times when plot speed overshadows depth of character and detail of time and place, but that said, it is an enjoyable read set during a tumultuous and lesser-known period. Readers interested in the history of Cyprus during the last years of rule by the French House of Lusignan may find this worthwhile. The long historical notes are detailed and comprehensive.
Fiona Alison
THREE FIRES
Denise Mina, Pegasus Crime, 2023, $22.00, hb, 144pp, 9781639364558 / Polygon, 2023, £10.00, hb, 128pp, 9781846976384
This short, vibrant novella from acclaimed Scottish author Denise Mina immerses the reader in the life of Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican priest. In late 15th-century Florence, Savonarola was the force behind the Bonfire of Vanities—the mass burning of art, books and other materials considered by Savonarola to be part of the corruption of society, led by the Catholic Church, and dooming the people to poverty and starvation.
In unapologetically modern language, Mina brings Savonarola, a populist prophet, to vivid life. Episodes in his early years— disappointment in love and witnessing savage civil unrest and violence—have their impact on the man he becomes. Clever but awkward, angry, and driven by a belief that he has heard God’s voice, Savonarola becomes a figure able to tap into the people of Florence’s fears and hatreds. “It’s one of his new oratorical tricks,” Mina writes, “he couples beguiling insights with an unrelated call to action: taxes are unfair, exile the Jews. Politicians hoard power, attack the gays. Income differentials are widening, women should obey.” His followers are known as the Snivellers, a name they adopt and use, “with pride, like the Deplorables.”
There is no mincing of words here. Mina sees clear parallels between yesterday’s horrors and today’s challenges. Nor does she find comfort in Savonarola’s execution. He was a man who wrote extensively—he is often credited as a source of inspiration to Martin Luther, for example—and for good and for bad, Savonarola’s influence is with us now. Powerful stuff.
Kate Braithwaite
LADY TAN’S CIRCLE OF WOMEN
Lisa See, Scribner, 2023, $28.00, hb, 368pp, 9781982117085 / Scribner UK, 2023, £16.99, hb, 368pp, 9781398526051 No mud, no lotus.
This aphorism captures the essence of Lisa See’s latest novel: pithy, yet entertaining; thoughtprovoking, yet down-toearth; dark, yet inspiring. Repeated throughout the text, no mud, no lotus encapsulates this 15th-century protagonist’s life. From the mud of adversity grows something even better than beauty: wisdom and high achievement. See was inspired by the biography and writings of
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a female physician who lived during the Ming Dynasty, Tan Yunxian (1461-1556), coeval with Columbus, Leonardo, and Queen Elizabeth I. But Yunxian’s traditional Chinese medicine (still practiced) had advanced far beyond Renaissance European health care.
The novel opens when Yunxian is eight, still in the phase of female life called “Milk Days.” She’s born into an elite family, but mud abounds: bound feet, shriveled legs, oppression, seclusion, smallpox, loneliness, and grief. But when her mother dies, Yunxian goes to live with her grandparents, where her real vocation becomes clear.
Her grandmother, who is one of the very few Ming Dynasty woman doctors, begins to train Yunxian too. In her grandparents’ family compound, upper-class women live in an elegant zoo devoted to breeding male infants. But male doctors are forbidden to see, touch, or speak to female patients, so, like her grandmother, Yunxian becomes a specialist in women’s medicine. Gradually, as she passes through other life stages (Hair-Pinning Days, Salt-and-Rice Days, and Sitting Quietly), Yunxian grows. A circle of other women support her, and in a young midwife, Meiling, she finds a lifelong friend.
In this brilliant novel, loaded with fascinating facts but fast-moving, against all odds, the lotus blooms.
Susan Lowell
FAIR ROSALINE
Natasha Solomons, Sourcebooks Landmark, 2023, $27.99, hb, 336pp, 9781728281230
/ Manilla Press, 2023, £14.99, hb, 352pp, 9781786582645
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet hints at Romeo’s involvement with Rosaline before Juliet. But were there others? This is addressed in Solomons’ new novel about the unsung lover in the play. After her mother’s death, Rosaline’s choices are slim. Granted twelve days of freedom before being locked in a convent, she decides to “gorge herself on pleasure,” sneaking into a lavish Montague masque, thereby encountering Romeo. Rosaline is instantly besotted, and who can blame her? Her fate of a henceforth somber convent life is bleak.
Romeo is a practiced lothario. At 25-30 he is much older than the scholars’ estimate of Shakespeare’s 16-21-year-old, making the age discrepancy with Rosaline (15) and Juliet (13) a bit unsavoury. For all his godlike beauty, he is a predatory, smooth-talking lecher. He plies Rosaline with honeyed words and drink, encourages her to steal, and pretends outrage when she challenges him. Their intimacy is callously self-serving.
Rosaline is given a strong voice, but empowering women by vilifying all things male can detract from the message the author is trying to convey. Tybalt is the only exception in a cast of unerringly horrid men. Father Laurence is Romeo’s procurer; Romeo’s father is abusive; Rosaline’s father is cold and distant. My biggest concern is there is nothing left of the
original romance, despite liberally scattered quotations, imagery and Shakespearean dialogue. The oppressive humidity of Verona is overworked, as are Rosaline’s obsessive thoughts of guilt, filth, sin, and pain. Given the mean-spiritedness of so many of the characters, I puzzled long over the author’s intent. This is a sad tale of children negotiating the adult world without suitable parental guidance. Characters are well-developed and held my attention, despite the melancholic and unsettling feel of the novel. This might be best read with no prior knowledge of the play.
Fiona Alison
DULCINEA
Ana Veciana-Suarez, Blackstone, 2023, $27.99, hb, 350pp, 9798200813414 15th-16th century Spain. Dolça Llull Prat, the young, artistic daughter of a Barcelona aristocrat, lives a carefree life of luxury until she falls madly in love with Miguel Cervantes, a struggling writer of modest means who seeks literary glory and fame. Although Cervantes repeatedly woos Dolça, she refuses to commit fully to him, fearing the loss of her family’s prestigious social position, opulent lifestyle, and the chance to pursue her painting. However, neither will end the passionate liaison, creating a scandalous, decades-long affair fraught with unforeseen consequences.
After a lengthy absence, when Dolça learns that her beloved Miguel is dying, she must confess to him a secret she has concealed for years. She flees her wealthy home, dons the guise of a peasant woman, and journeys across the Spanish countryside, hopeful, at last, to reunite with her paramour, tell him the truth, and be free from guilt, shame, and obsession.
As told through the eyes of Dolça, the masterfully re-imagined heroine patterned after Dulcinea in the classic Don Quixote, this enchanting tale of Cervantes’s bold and unconventional muse provides an ingenious, captivating, and often surprising account of love, adventure, and redemption. Deftly incorporating poetic, detailed descriptions and lyrical dialogue, Veciana-Suarez vividly portrays Spain’s history, land, customs, and people during the dangerous times of the Spanish Inquisition. The clever dual timeline skillfully reveals Dolça’s emerging maturity as she reflects upon the dramatic impact of her choices. Chapter by well-paced chapter, the story switches from Dolça’s life in Barcelona to her later, harrowing trek to locate Cervantes as she defies tradition and follows her heart,
regardless of risks or regrets. An entertaining, mesmerizing coming-of-age story.
Marcy McNally
16TH CENTURY RITUAL OF FIRE
D. V. Bishop, Macmillan, 2023, £16.99/$27.99, hb, 416pp, 9781529096484
This is the third book to feature Cesare Aldo, an officer of Florence’s criminal court. As the title suggests, heat is at the heart of this historical thriller set in Renaissance Italy. It is the summer of 1538, and everyone in Florence seems to be on fire: the residents of the city are roasting in the intense heat; Aldo is burning for his Jewish lover, Saul; and someone is murdering prominent merchants by setting them ablaze. A mysterious stranger is whipping the citizens up into a religious fervour that threatens to destabilise the city and take the life of its ruler, Cosimo de’ Medici. Aldo must work with Constable Strocchi to investigate the ritual killings before Florence is engulfed by an inferno of death and destruction.
This is an intricately plotted, satisfying novel. It successfully depicts how religion, commerce and politics intertwine to form a corrupt nexus. Male relationships, of all varieties, are central to the story. The prominent men being murdered are all members of a newlyoutlawed fraternity desperate to keep their dark secret hidden. The relationships between them are riven by jealousy, ambition and distrust. Their lust for power proves very costly. Aldo’s forbidden affair with the physician Saul is touchingly depicted. His relationship with Strocchi’s family is affecting but remains an underdeveloped element of the novel. Perhaps Bishop will return to this in future books in the series. I look forward to spending more time with Bianca and Tomasia.
The middle section is overlong and would have benefited from tighter editing. But it was well worth reading on to experience the shocking denouement. I thought I’d worked out who was behind the killings, but I discovered I’d been cleverly hoodwinked. Highly recommended.
Michael Lynes
THE FORENOON BRIDE
Jeffrey Hantover, Severn House, 2023, £21.99/$31.99, hb, 192pp, 9781448310272
In 1591 England, young Elizabeth Hilliard falls deeply in love with William Bateman, son of an aristocratic Norwich family, unbeknownst to him. She begins a diary of love, documenting her sightings and knowledge of him, and her enduring belief that she will eventually be his wife. Two years later, an adventurous William travels to Rhodes, where he is taken prisoner and tortured until he renounces his faith. This he cannot do. He relieves his pain in song, which is heard over the prison walls by the governor’s daughter, Safiye. Instantly in love, she rescues William and facilitates his passage back to England. Before he leaves, they both
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pledge that in seven years they will find each other and marry. Growing responsibilities in England prevent William from fulfilling his oath. Meanwhile, he meets Elizabeth and gradually declares his love for her. He agrees to marry many years hence. After a faithful seven years, Safiye must decide on a course of action.
Basing his novel on the British ballad ‘Lord Bateman,’ Hantover is a masterful storyteller with an enviable command of language. His dedication to every word and line, and the lyrical beauty of his prose, make this a measured and compelling read. Told alternately by Elizabeth, William and Safiye, dialogue is scarce, and the thoughts and experiences of the protagonists are internalised through the prose. It reads like an epic poem, or a fairy tale with a beautiful princess in a dashing reverse role. Elizabeth is the first-person voice and the strongest. Several phrases familiar to us determine the main themes: love at first sight; my word is my bond; I’m duty/honour-bound. Readers who enjoy romantic fairy tales full of emotional conflict will find this a deeply moving, poignant read.
Fiona Alison
THE APOSTATES
V. E. H. Masters, Nydie Books, 2022, £9.99, pb, 255pp, 9781838251550
Antwerp, 1549: Mainard, a converso married to Bethia, a Scots Catholic, prepares to move his family to Venice. Ultimately, Bethia, her brother Will (a Protestant who has served time in the galleys for his principles) and Katheline, Mainard’s sister who has only outwardly conformed to Christianity, set out without him. On the way, the little group has to rely on the kindness of strangers, too often revealed as treachery. Meanwhile, Mainard is imprisoned. It is only with the help of the cartographer Abraham Ortelius (one of a number of historical figures who appear in the book) that Mainard escapes and seeks to be reunited with his wife and baby son.
Historical details abound: inflated pigs’ bladders used to float a boat, the plucking of the hairline for a high forehead, Calvin’s dispute with Michael Servetus. But there are inaccuracies, like the reference to ‘wee Queen Mary of Scotland’ (when Henry VIII sought the hand of Mary of Guise in 1537, he described himself as a big man in search of a big wife).
Tintoretto’s ‘Presentation of the Virgin’ is described as hanging above the main altar (of the Madonna dell’Orto); it is not certain that the painting existed at this date, and in any case, it originally served, in two halves, as a pair of organ doors. Will is enraged to hear his sister saying the Ave Maria at a Protestant service when everyone else is saying the Lord’s Prayer. As a Catholic, Bethia is more likely to have joined in – but in Latin.
That said, Masters compellingly explores, through one family, the theme of religious difference and the risk each member of it runs, depending on the prevailing wind of the cities they pass through.
Katherine Mezzacappa
ALCHEMY
S. J. Parris, HarperCollins, 2023, £18.99, hb, 470pp, 9780008208547
1588. Giordano Bruno finds himself in Prague at the request of both Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Walsingham, and his old friend and colleague, Dr John Dee. The court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, is a hotbed of scientific experimentation, with numerous alchemists vying for Rudolf’s favour by attempting to discover the philosopher’s stone or an elixir for eternal life. But all is not well. By toying with forbidden knowledge, Rudolf has brought himself to the attention of the ruling powers of the Catholic church. Moreover, by the time Bruno arrives, one alchemist has already met a grisly death and John Dee is missing. With no idea who he can trust (apart from his enthusiastic but sometimes naïve assistant Besler), it will take all of Bruno’s wits to unmask the murderer and stay alive himself…
This is the first of the long-running Giordano Bruno series of historical thrillers I have read, but that didn’t in the slightest hamper my understanding of who is who and what was going on. Relevant details about Bruno’s past are mentioned in passing, and research is expertly woven in, usually using Bruno’s unfamiliarity with Prague, or Besler’s ignorance, as an excuse to explain things that might not be familiar to the modern reader.
I love the touches of humour in Bruno’s wry first-person narrative, mocking himself as much as he mocks others and providing some light relief in what could have been a very dark novel. Parris plays fair with her readers by never withholding information, and while I occasionally found myself one step ahead of Bruno, within a few pages he had not only caught up but overtaken me. The only downside is that I fear I will soon be adding the earlier books in the series to my already scarily large ‘TBR’ pile.
Jasmina Svenne
THE AFRICAN SAMURAI
Craig Shreve, Canelo, 2023, £9.99/$17.99, pb, 336pp, 9781804366257 / Simon & Schuster, 2023, $17.99, pb, 304pp, 9781668002865
An African child is taken by slavers. His ‘ownership’ is sold to Indian merchants. He is trained to fight, and kill, and forget his past. Then sold to the Portuguese as a child soldier, he fights, suffers, but survives. He is ‘purchased’ by Jesuits, who educate him and treat him far better than anyone since his capture. But he is still a slave. As bodyguard for the Pope’s Jesuit representative in 1579, he finds himself in Japan. Traded by the representative of a church, Isaac, now called Yasuke, finds his imperative to survive, taken into the clan of Oda Nobunaga – a warlord who, against all odds, looks to unite a warring Japan under one government. As Nobunaga is unconventional, so too is Yasuke; half a world from his childhood, he discovers a purpose. He embraces the true meaning of bushido.
Set at a turning point in Japanese history, Shreve has not only given perspective to slavery at the time, but to Japanese values and to the
enigmatic personality of Oda Nobunaga, considered one of the founders of a united Japan.
Alan Cassady-Bishop
THE QUEEN’S PLAYER
Anthony Wildman, Plutus, 2022, $15.24, pb, 377pp, 9780648945444
The Queen’s Player is the second in a trilogy, The Lost Years of William Shakespeare, set during the golden age of Elizabethan theatre when young Will Shakespeare was just getting his start. The novel opens in 1587 and follows directly from the young man’s return from Italy when, through the intervention of Sir Francis Walsingham, he lands a position in Her Majesty’s own company of actors, the Queen’s Men. Just exactly why the queen’s secretary has taken such a keen interest in an unknown glove-maker’s son, who has neither acting credits nor any theater experience whatsoever, arouses the curiosity of the troupe. However, young Will proves to have a fine hand, a knack for improvisation and a good memory which serves him well, all without disclosing that he had previously been pressed into service as Walsingham’s secret foreign courier.
It isn’t until the company goes on tour that Will first takes the stage in a bit part that seems likely to become his big break. But a suspicious death finds him drawn back into working as a part-time intelligencer for Walsingham, while a mysterious royal plot unfolds, and the Spanish Armada threatens invasion.
With lush period details and descriptions of backstage theatre life, Wildman builds a plausible timeline for Shakespeare’s initiation into playwriting, with the bard getting a little help from his friend, Kit Marlowe, along the way. Because Shakespeare’s life from 1585 to about 1592 is relatively undocumented, the author indulges in some speculative imagination by adding a touch of espionage. However, the great strength of this novel lies in the characterization of Shakespeare as he moves toward the career that will define his life. A wonderful read for enthusiasts of theatre, history, and Shakespeare. I can’t wait for the next in this beautifully written and fascinating series.
Deborah Cay Wilding
17TH CENTURY
THE MESSENGER OF MEASHAM HALL
Anna Abney, Duckworth, 2023, £8.99, pb, 304pp, 9780715654798
When we first meet the protagonist, Nicholas Hawthorne, it is 1678. The twelveyear-old is the Catholic heir to Measham Hall in Derbyshire, a safe haven in which he is seemingly protected from the religious conflict of the outside world. But he is soon plunged into dangerous territory when his cousin, Matthew, is taken away by Royalist soldiers.
This sets the scene for what is to come. His father, Sir William, is reclusive, but Nicholas doesn’t know why. He vows to find out the truth
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about what happened to his mother and aunt and who betrayed his cousin. Over the course of the novel, which is split into three parts – Boy, Youth, and Becoming a Man – Nicholas finds himself caught up in conspiracies at the court of James II at a time when England is poised to be invaded by the Protestant William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
This compelling tale is told with great authority, a keen eye for detail and meticulous research. Written in the third person from Nicholas’s point of view, the reader is invested in getting to the bottom of the intrigue as we get to know him and follow his investigation. This is the second of Abney’s series of Measham Hall novels, but it is not necessary to have read the first to enjoy The Messenger for what it is. It was nominated for the Bath Novel Award spotlighting emerging talent.
The author’s connection to the story runs deep. She is among the last descendants of the Abney family who lived at Measham Hall (which no longer exists), and the series taps into a rich stream of creativity inspired by her ancestors’ lives.
Margery Hookings
THE CARGO FROM NEIRA
Alys Clare, Severn House, 2023, $31.99/£21.99, hb, 256pp, 9780727823021
The bustling, cutthroat spice trade forms the enticing backdrop for the fifth volume in Clare’s mystery series featuring country doctor Gabriel Taverner in early 17th-century Devon. If you haven’t read the previous four books, no need to worry, since it stands alone well. Banda Neira, the place of the title, is a remote Indonesian island that was the world’s main source for nutmeg, a spice in high demand in Europe for its food preservation and reputed medicinal properties.
In February 1605, Gabriel gets drawn into a mystery when the coroner’s manservant fetches him to view a body on the banks of the river Tavy, with the hopes he’ll conceal it was a suicide since these victims would be damned for eternity and their family penalized. The poor soul is a woman, single and six months’ pregnant, which could explain her desperate circumstances. To Gabriel’s shock, the woman soon revives. Gabriel tends to her at Rosewyke, his home, but she’s petrified, unhappy to be alive, and unwilling to talk. Then a second body, a man’s, turns up in a cesspit in a seedy quayside alley of Plymouth with several costly nutmegs in his mouth. Gabriel feels the two incidents must be connected, especially after an attempted break-in at Rosewyke that terrifies his patient and gets him firmly into sleuthing mode.
The principal cast are a congenial bunch whose close-knit relationships contrast nicely with the danger stalking them. Gabriel’s sister, Celia, is a sharp-witted young widow, while housekeeper Sallie prepares comforting meals at a moment’s notice. Most intriguing are the changes within Gabriel as his investigation proceeds. A former ship’s surgeon now living
shoreside after an injury, he starts feeling a strong pull to return. While abrupt, the viewpoint switches prove enlightening, and the mystery’s resolution, which offers surprises for Gabriel and the reader, is admirably wellplotted.
Sarah Johnson
DISOBEDIENT
Elizabeth Fremantle, Pegasus, 2023, $26.95, hb, 368pp, 9781639364152 / Michael Joseph, 2023, £18.99, hb, 368pp, 9780241583043
Elizabeth Fremantle brings the story of Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi to life in Disobedient. Gentileschi is arguably the most famous female painter to work during the Italian Baroque period (1600 to 1700) and was known for her masterful rendering of allegorical themes. Though blessed with immense talent, her life was a struggle; the most tumultuous episode of her life is dramatized in Disobedient Artemisia’s rape by a trusted mentor and fellow artist ruined her reputation in Rome, and while the man was eventually convicted, Artemisia had to marry and relocate to Florence to avoid the scandal. It was in Florence where she enjoyed a successful career and was patronized by the powerful Medici family. As a result of her success and talent, Artemisia would become the first woman admitted to the prestigious Academia d’Arte.
Elizabeth Fremantle is an accomplished author of several novels, but these have been set in England during the 16th and 17th centuries. Disobedient is her first foray into a European country beyond British shores. Fremantle excels at providing rich historical detail while keeping up the pace of her narrative. The choices Artemisia is faced with form the crux of the novel, and Fremantle does an excellent job of capturing the consequences of Artemisia’s actions. Italian women were expected to live conventional, if not completely conservative lives: marry, have children, and maintain the household. But Artemisia’s artistic talent cannot be ignored, and ultimately, it is rather amazing that she balanced a thriving art career with the demands of being a wife and mother. Disobedient is a tale of a brilliant woman who fought to assert her rights, was denied multiple times, but eventually triumphed.
Caroline D. Wilson
THE WITCHING TIDE
Margaret Meyer, Scribner, 2023, $28.00, hb, 336pp, 9781668011362 / Phoenix, 2023, £16.99, hb, 336pp, 9781399605854
September 1645 brings trouble to the East Anglia village of Cleftwater. After several women are accused of witchcraft, Martha, a midwife, is assigned to the team of ‘searchers’ working for Master Makepeace, the witch finder. Two of the accused are friends: Prissy, the cook in the household where Martha works, and Jennet, sister of a neighbour, whose recent childbed, overseen by Martha, went awry. Mute since childhood, Martha communicates by signing, but without words to express
herself, she lives inside her head, often seeking guidance from her deceased mam.
Troubled by a need to unburden herself, she turns to her mother’s few possessions, amongst them a wax poppet. During two weeks of arrests, imprisonment, starvation, torture, ‘searching’ and hangings, the novel pushes the poppet front and centre, a symbol of the persecution of all women, holding life and death, good and evil within its waxy grasp.
Stepping into Cleftwater is to live in those menacing times, rampant with prejudice, hypocrisy and fear, beset by storms, sickness and infant death. The fictional village is as real as anywhere I’ve set foot. Martha’s muteness and the palpable conviction of her guilt are compelling plot-drivers. She waits in vain for ‘them’ to come for her, displaying a martyrish ambivalence to the cruelty inflicted on her by others. With the poppet, she feels strong; without it, her resolve weakens. The ‘special contagion’ Makepeace has wrought on the village erodes belief in others’ innocence. The accused must be guilty of something! But does Martha have a sin which needs redeeming?
This dark, unsettling tale does little to soften the unfolding tragedy, but it is a strong vindication of the women who suffered in the East Anglia witch hunts. At the novel’s poignant conclusion, uppermost are thoughts of faithfulness, loyalty and the enduring power of connection. An emotionally spellbinding narrative.
Fiona Alison
THE GHOST SHIP
Kate Mosse, Mantle, 2023, £22.00, hb, 476pp, 9781509806911 / St. Martin’s, 2023, $29.00, hb, 496pp, 9781250202208
The real-life story of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, the lesbian duo whose pirate ship briefly terrorised the Caribbean in the 18th century, has inspired numerous novels. For modern authors it ticks several of the right boxes – a powerful female protagonist with lots of ‘agency’ and an LGBTQ romance – but the awkward fact remains that this was robbery with violence on a grand scale, and the perpetrators were eventually brought to justice.
In The Ghost Ship Kate Mosse turns the story inside-out, relocating it to the Canary Islands in the early 17th century and turning the lesbian lovers into pirate hunters rather than pirates. Ultimately, they escape the law and presumably live happily ever after. In this re-telling Bonny becomes Louise, a rich Dutch merchant, and Read becomes Gilles, a young Huguenot refugee (Gilles is a girl who has
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assumed her late brother’s identity to take up his apprenticeship).
They devote themselves to attacking the galleys of the Barbary pirates who are harassing the Canaries, using a form of chemical warfare to disable the galley slaves without killing them (we hope). Since their own poison gas prevents then boarding the galleys, they content themselves with shooting down the pirate captains and their senior officers. No slaves are actually liberated. It is all very interesting and quite implausible.
Not that Mosse can write a bad book. This is the third in her series The Joubert Family Chronicles, and as in the earlier books, the 17thcentury locations, La Rochelle, Amsterdam, et. al., are vividly portrayed and the main characters are rounded and interesting. Still very readable, but I find this one unbelievable.
Edward James
HE WEARS A BLUE BONNET
John Orton, UK Book Publishing, 2022, £4.99, ebook, 383pp, 9781915338341
Malky Dalgleish is a Scots lad caught up in the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 between Cromwell’s troops and the Covenanters. The dispirited English army, shivering in the open since only Cromwell and his generals had tents, are overlooked by the better provisioned Scottish army from the hill above – and yet the Scottish Covenanters lose the battle because they move from their advantageous position and won’t fight on a Sunday.
Captured, Malky and his fellows are force marched to Durham where the cathedral, in Cromwell’s England, has been demoted to a prison. There they are sold as indentured servants to work in the salt-panns of South Sheels. But this is only the beginning, and our enterprising lads soon have fingers in lots of pies, including smuggling usquebah (whisky), not to mention setting up their own still, which explodes, destroying the house it’s hidden within. The work is relentless, and the life hard.
This is meticulously researched historical fiction (or faction as the author describes it), and the detail of life as a salt-panner, a keelman, and a servant is immersive, so the reader lives the experience too. The camaraderie between the men is touching and well-described. On occasion, more sense of emotion would have made an excellent read even better – they may be tough men on the outside, but what was going on underneath, for example, when Malky killed a man in battle for the first time, discovered his father was not who he thought, and lost his child? This was a fascinating story full of remarkable detail which I thoroughly enjoyed and would highly recommend.
V. E. H. Masters
THE REVELS
Stacey Thomas, HQ, 2023, £16.99, hb, 352pp, 9780008566654
It is 1645, towards the end of the first Civil
War. When his brother dies, Nicholas Pearce is ordered by his father to be apprenticed to Judge William Percival, a former witch-hunter. Investigating tales of witchcraft, Percival and Nicholas travel north to the assizes; first to York and then to Lancaster. Persuaded to return to witch-hunting, Percival is reluctant at first, while Nicholas finds the idea of witchhunting abhorrent, because he knows that if his secret were discovered he too would be condemned as a witch. Nicholas can hear the dead. He can feel their pain and anger, as they reveal their final thoughts, like a song.
Travelling to the Lancashire town of Rawton, the two men uncover a conspiracy of gossip, jealousy and hatred that turns neighbours against each other while witch-hunters pocket the profit. Although the characters are the author’s own creation, there is nonetheless a real sense of place and time in the narrative. We see events unfold through Nicholas; he is our eyes and ears. As an aspiring playwright he shapes the narrative. Caught in the middle, he is both victim and villain. But his budding relationship with Althamia, daughter of York’s Lord Mayor, and his reactions, while witnessing cruelty, poverty and death, place him firmly on the side of the angels. Meanwhile those around him scheme and plot.
This is an incredible, intense, and atmospheric debut blending historical fiction, research and a hint of the supernatural which will appeal to fans of Susanna Clarke, Bridget Collins and Laura Purcell.
Lisa Redmond
18TH CENTURY THE LOST JOURNALS OF SACAJEWEA
Debra Magpie Earling, Milkweed, 2023, $26.00, hb, 264pp, 9781571311450
The story of Sacajewea is a legend that looms large in the history of the United States. But there is very little actually known about her life and her as an individual.
Debra Magpie Earling brings Sacajewea, the young girl, woman, and mother, to life in this fictional tale of her youth. Reading her story is like reading poetry. The prose shifts and changes so that it feels like entering a space that is at once familiar and utterly strange.
The story begins when she is just seven years old, learning the old ways of survival from her elders in the land of the Lemhi Shoshone. After her village is attacked, she is among those stolen and taken to the Mandan trading settlement. There she and a friend are gambled away to the fur trapper
Charbonneau. Life with him is a constant struggle for survival and made possible only with the help of the friendships she cultivates with others in the community. The majority of the book is focused on her life before the infamous expedition with Lewis and Clark. It has the effect of reclaiming her story from the realm of men and offering a new, powerful, almost dreamlike perspective.
Earling’s use of language is exquisite and exceptionally skillful. The language shifts and sharpens along with the moods and experiences of Sacajewea. Although she uses some non-standard grammatical structures, it in no way hindered my understanding. She does have a brief author’s note at the beginning that explains a few of her choices. This is a fantastic, raw, and utterly mesmerizing story. If you love to collect beautiful quotes as you read, this one will fill your notebook.
Shauna McIntyre
LOOT
Tania James, Knopf, 2023, $28.00/C$37.99, hb, 305pp, 9780593535974 / Harvill Secker, 2024, £18.99, hb, 288pp, 9781787304154
The word that does justice to the British Raj’s plunder in India had to be borrowed: “Loot,” as Tania James has explained in an interview, has Sanskritic origins.
Loot begins in 1794, when a precocious seventeen-yearold boy, Abbas, is summoned by the fiery Tipu Sultan, ruler of the southern Indian state of Mysore and fierce enemy of the East India Company.
“All he wants is to stay out of trouble, though it is, perhaps, a little late for that.”
It turns out that Abbas’s toy-making skills have been noticed. He is to assist a Frenchman, Lucien Du Leze, in the making of an unusual automaton – a springing tiger devouring a British soldier. (The life-sized automaton is historical; the tiger was adopted as an emblem by Subhash Chandra Bose as he marshalled an army against the Raj during World War II.)
The automaton is taken as booty after the East India Company’s forces defeat and kill Tipu. Abbas journeys to France and then to England to get it back, possessed by a belief that it holds the key to his future as a craftsman. He joins hands with Jehanne, whom he had met back in Mysore.
This is a taut, entertaining period heist story full of twists and kaleidoscopic changes of point of view. A more conventional design would perhaps have given us a richer sense of Abbas’s experiences as he moves between lands. But with its careening viewpoints,
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Loot really soars in its depictions of people pushed into becoming outsiders. The very end is reserved for an unexpected cameo. Love features in many flavours, all of them done very well.
This is a work that deserves the success of The Moonstone (in which story the diamond was, incidentally, also looted from Tipu’s treasures).
A.K. Kulshreshth
THE BALLAD OF LORD EDWARD AND CITIZEN SMALL
Neil Jordan, Pegasus, 2023, $26.95, hb, 352pp, 9781639364534 / Apollo, 2023, £9.99, pb, 352pp, 9781803289328
This novel begins grittily on an American Revolutionary War battlefield, where an escaped former slave, Tony Small, first makes the acquaintance of British Army officer Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a high-ranking aristocrat within Ireland’s English-installed gentry. Fitzgerald is gravely wounded, and Small risks his own life to save the officer’s. As a result, Tony not only becomes the lord’s lifelong companion but his best friend as well.
Over the ensuing years, the two, almost always together, travel across the wide expanses of the British Isles, North America, and France, pursuing various causes and adventures until Lord Fitzgerald ironically reverses his earlier British allegiances and becomes intricately involved in the desperate but ultimately betrayed Irish struggle for freedom in 1798. Along the way, Tony also manages to learn the reality of his own heritage and how his mother, from Sierra Leone, was captured and sold into slavery by North African Moors. To his surprise, Tony discovers his father’s background is even more exotic.
This book, based on true accounts primarily related to Lord Fitzgerald, is here told from Tony Small’s perspective. Readers may struggle with the apparently deliberate non-standard lack of punctuation and quotation marks in which the story is rendered. Many of the characters, some who flit in and out, are not particularly likeable except for “little Mary” and Tony Small himself. Despite my initial skepticism and misgivings, I found the book grew on me as I progressed further into it. It is simply a great historical story which becomes increasingly more interesting as events unfold. Despite some initial challenges in adapting to the unconventional format, I was quite glad I read it. Recommended.
Thomas J. Howley
THE SQUARE OF SEVENS
Laura Shepherd-Robinson, Mantle, 2023, £18.99, hb, 545pp, 9781529053678 / Atria, 2023, $29.99, hb, 528pp, 9781668031124
A girl called Red writes a memoir. It begins in 1730 with her hard, nomadic life as the child of a gypsy fortune teller. She learns to read people’s futures with ordinary playing cards, using her father’s system of cartomancy called
the Square of Sevens. When he dies, she becomes the ward of an antiquarian, who now possesses not only the secret to this ancient method of divination, but also – she later discovers –possesses hidden papers which hold the only clues to who her mother was. Determined to discover this truth, Red deploys her fortune telling abilities to penetrate London’s high society. She makes friends and enemies in two aristocratic families who are at war over an inheritance. Lazarus Darke, an agent for one of these families, provides a counter-narrative to Red’s memoir, but has his own past to reconcile.
Organised into four books which illustrate a card reading for a main protagonist within Red’s parentage puzzle, each chapter tells of an event predicted by each card. Red must manoeuvre her way through the dilemmas of a Gothic heroine: an orphan vulnerable to fortune; the forced choice of marriage or poverty; a labyrinthine ancestral home. She traverses the twilight world of travelling fair folk – susceptible to deprivation and barbaric punishment for practising magic – and the world of extreme privilege. Red’s narration is appropriately mercurial and exemplifies the Dickensian technique of avoiding onedimensional likeability.
The plotting plays with narrative form and genre and engages us in two conflicting points of view, which really should keep us alert. The twists are unpredictable but align with characterisation, not authorial manipulation. Laura Shepherd-Robinson has been acclaimed for her historical thrillers, and this does not disappoint. This is an impressively clever, entrancing novel about truth and lies which keeps the reader guessing right to the end.
Louise Tree
19TH CENTURY REMEMBER ME
Mary Balogh, Berkley, 2023, $28.00/C$37.99, hb, 368pp, 9780593438152
1815. Aware that his health is failing, the Duke of Wilby demands that his grandson marry. Lucas, Marquess of Roath, is unenthusiastic, but recognizes the necessity since he is the sole male heir. Lady Philippa Ware, sister of the Earl of Stratton, seems an ideal prospect, but four years ago she overheard him cruelly insult her to a companion. It shattered her already fragile sense of self-worth, and she has never forgiven him. The breach heals eventually, but the learning process which both undergo is chastening.
Balogh has a talent for creating likeable
characters and winning sympathy for them, despite their faults. Respect for others and care for family are important, and by this measure, Philippa realizes the autocratic Duke of Wilby is far more admirable than was her charming, but self-indulgent, father. So too is honesty: unlike her father, the duke displays a disarmingly rueful awareness of his own failings; Lucas must tread a more painful path, not only confessing his grievous error to those he hurt unfairly, but making full atonement. And forgiveness, which Philippa must learn if she and Lucas hope to find happiness together, with help from friends, family, and the workings of fate. Highly recommended.
Ray Thompson
THE OTHER SIDE OF MRS. WOOD
Lucy Barker, Harper, 2023, $30.00, hb, 400pp, 9780063317314 / Fourth Estate, 2023, £14.99, hb, 368pp, 9780008597207
In 1873, Mrs. Violet Wood is a most respected medium hosting séances in fashionable homes all across London, with her indispensable assistant, Miss Newman, at her side. But not everything in her well-ordered life is going according to plan. Mrs. Wood’s success has made her complacent, and the younger crowd of spiritualists is eager for something new.
Just as she fears her patrons are losing interest, her financial position becomes perilous. Desperate to keep up appearances and her place in society, Violet decides to take on a young apprentice just as her beloved Miss Newman gets distracted by the suffragist movement. All of these changes disrupt the equilibrium of her life, risking the exposure of secrets that go deeper than the hidden pockets in her séance dress. Things grow desperate as the young apprentice turns out to have secrets of her own.
Set during the height of the spiritualist movement, the novel is well-researched and full of delightful little details on Victorian London. The reader is treated to an unveiling of the secrets of a medium’s life and the various techniques they used to draw a crowd of believers.
While the pacing is slow, the novel still managed to keep me reading well past my bedtime. The real draw of this novel is the insightful portrayal of complicated relationships between women of different classes and phases of life. It covers themes such as women’s precarious position in Victorian society and the resourceful ways in which they can maintain a measure of independence. It was especially refreshing to root for a main character in midlife who must find power in her experience rather than her youthful looks.
Shauna McIntyre
ROCKY MOUNTAIN RENDEZVOUS
Misty M. Beller, Bethany House, 2023, $16.99, pb, 304pp, 9780764241536 Sisters of the Rockies: Book One. In 1837,
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the four Collins sisters travel from Virginia to a trappers’ rendezvous in the American West. They are fulfilling a promise to their dying father. He tasked them with returning some blue beads to a Piegan woman who had saved his life twenty years previously. Riley Turner, a cavalry veteran from Illinois, has come west to trap and barter his furs. He worries about the four unchaperoned girls, and decides to guard them.
Riley and Juniper Collins find love as the girls search for the Native American woman. Little else is resolved, and the mystery ends in a cliffhanger.
This story is pedestrian. There are no stakes and little conflict. The trappers do not pose much of a threat, and the romance has few obstacles. The blue bead mystery is uncompelling. Still, this is a clean, sweet, not unpleasant read, Christian in tone without being preachy. Wildlife rehabbers will cringe at the lovingly inappropriate treatment of coyote pup “Boots.” He is my favorite character by far, and I’ll read the next book to make sure he is all right.
Elizabeth Knowles
RADICAL LOVE
Neil Blackmore, Hutchinson Heinemann, 2023, £16.99, hb, 288pp, 9781529152074
London 1809. The Reverend John Church, a self-made man rising from the dregs of poverty and abuse, is a decidedly unorthodox nonconformist gay clergyman. Handsome and charismatic, his sexual identity and activities put him in constant danger of the vicious retribution of both the state and the mob, who seemed to single out male homosexuals for particular vilification. It brings out the worst hypocritical intolerance within London society and demonstrates with a chilling clarity just how evil supposedly religious and upstanding moral guardians can be to those who do not share their creed. John Church meets a young Black man, Ned, and a romantic and sexual obsession begins.
John Church conducts mock weddings within the gay community, between crossdressers and their “admirers” in a socalled molly house in Vere Street, London. But he is very much the unreliable narrator – psychologically damaged by his treatment and experiences as a child. Elements of Blackmore’s narrative are based upon historical events and characters, in particular the scandal surrounding the shock of the uncovering of male homosexual groups and licentious clubs. There seems to be a special congruity with what we see as the blinkered and hateful standards of behaviour from over two centuries ago, with contemporary entrenched attitudes. “People hold fast to their convictions, and there is nothing that can shake them, not even goodness or truth”. The text, written in first-person narrative by John Church, is a peculiar mixture of early 19thcentury argot and conversation, with modern 21st-century conventional usage. This is no cosy costume drama for a Sunday evening’s
light entertainment, but a dose of unpleasant and intense reality.
Douglas Kemp
THE ROMANTIC
William Boyd, Knopf, 2023, $30.00, hb, 451pp, 9780593536797 / Penguin, 2023, £9.99, pb, 480pp, 9780241994078
The Romantic, William Boyd’s seventeenth novel, takes the form of a personal narrative and life story. A sweeping adventure covering almost an entire century, it follows Cashel Greville Ross from an eight-year-old boy to an octogenarian who becomes a scattershot world traveler. Born in Ireland a year before the 19th century begins, he leaves home at fifteen and finds himself a drummer boy at the Battle of Waterloo, injured by a French lancer, and soon afterward a British army soldier, still in his teens, with the East India Company. Subsequently he is a writer, even sharing company with the poets Byron and Shelley, then a farmer, brewer, and explorer traveling Africa in search of the source of the Nile.
Boyd’s prologue sets up the reader to believe that this is a biography, inclusive of annotated sources, of a real man who left behind autobiographical notes. Hand-drawn maps of battles are presented for authenticity. But it’s a fabricated account that reads like a popular hero’s tale, a picaresque novel with a touch of Fielding, and a 19th-century history of highlights for the armchair historian and adventurer.
Written in a digressive loose-limbed prose, suggesting the Romantic era’s wanderlust, Cashel’s adventures begin at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Instead of dwelling on British history and empire as a chronicle of the changing industrial Victorian England, Boyd sends his hero on a European tour, which creates the material of Cashel’s early career as novelist. Soon wrongly imprisoned for debt, he leaves for Massachusetts, but returns to his homeland, only to leave again. His passion for an Italian countess haunts him throughout his long life, posing the ultimate question: was it a great or simply a doomed love?
Christina Nellas Acosta
WITH GREAT SORROW
Lisa Boyle, Independently published, 2022, $17.99, pb, 404pp, 9781736607756
Rosaleen and Emmet are part of a community of Irish immigrants who have come to Massachusetts seeking a better life. In late 1861, Emmet joins the Irish Brigade and leaves to do his duty in the Civil War. The Irish community generally supports the war effort, but many are uncertain whether emancipation of Southern slaves is in the best interests of the Irish people. Rosaleen adopts her alter ego “Paddy” to rally Irish support for Lincoln’s war as well as for emancipation.
Rosaleen is a memorable female protagonist, talented and confident, imbued with a keen sense of humanity and love of family, brave, and fiercely determined upon setting her course of action. The novel doesn’t
shy away from intense military action when Rosaleen’s husband Emmet experiences the horrors of battle at Fredericksburg, The Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Courthouse, where he is captured and then held in squalid conditions at a South Carolina prison camp. Rosaleen burns to reunite with Emmet and is presented with an opportunity to become a cotton buyer in the Deep South, which might bring her closer to him. Can she compromise on her personal convictions for the love of family?
With Great Sorrow is book three in the author’s Paddy series and is a well-researched, welcome addition to Civil War period historical fiction with its faithful tracking of historical events, not only in battle, but also unrest in the Irish community at home in Massachusetts, and enigmatic cotton trading in the occupied Southern states.
Brodie Curtis
A VISCOUNT’S VENGEANCE
Edie Cay, ScarabSkin Books, 2023, $15.00, pb, 356pp, 9781734439779
When James, Lord Andrepont, is jilted by his mistress, he offers for the first woman he sees: Pearl, the street-educated sister of prizefighter Corinthian John (from the first book in the When the Blood Is Up series). Pearl, seeking stability, agrees to become a viscountess. Thereafter James broods over the piano and Pearl wonders if a title is worth the loneliness.
If the reader holds out through the first third where the leads have no interest in one another, the story sparks when Pearl discovers James’s private training ring and begins using it. James realizes his new bride is more than she seems, and as they spar in and out of the ring, Pearl coaches her husband to emotional maturity. I cheered when she punched him in the face; he needed it. Their bouts lead to connection, passion, and hope for a real marriage, if James can escape the trauma of his father’s cruelty.
Cay’s writing is strong and so are her secondary characters, including the spirited Lydia, the boxing heroine of the first book now domesticated by Pearl’s brother. James undergoes a true reformation, and I would bet on Pearl in any fight. Cay’s knowledge of the popular Regency sport of boxing gives her series a unique flavor, and her vivid characters stand out in a crowded genre. I hope there are more books to come.
Urban
LUCKY RED
Claudia Cravens, Dial, 2023, $27.00, hb, 304pp, 9780593498248 / Allen & Unwin, 2023, £14.99, hb, 304pp, 9781838956738
Orphan Bridget Shaughnessy is a prostitute in Dodge City, Kansas, in 1877. After burying her Pa out on the plains, she rolls into Dodge with a few dollars, which she blows in two weeks on food and hot water. Back on the
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Misty
street, Lila, joint owner of the Buffalo Queen Saloon, singles her out. The saloon has need of a redhead, and Bridget/Red takes to the life like a duck to water. Anyone would think she has a knack for the work. The bookish Constance, who reads Wuthering Heights to relieve boredom between tricks, befriends her. To keep the law favourable, Red agrees to become sheriff’s deputy Jim Bonnie’s mutual favourite, although mutual is a relative term. Then female bounty-hunter, Spartan Lee, rides into town towing outlaw Ottis Shy. Spartan is part of the Lee brothers’ gang, and the one responsible for capturing Shy, who is guilty of massacre, rape and various and sundry crimes. Spartan is there to see him hanged. Provocative sparks fly between Red and the alluring female gunfighter.
Cravens writes her ultra-feminist old West yarn with unapologetic honesty. The constant racket of cattle, horses, yipping cowboys, and saloon pianos is particularly well-drawn, and the air, filled with dust and smoke, smells of old leather and unwashed bodies. The descriptive metaphors pull no punches, so don’t venture in if your sensibilities are easily bruised. With prose by turns philosophical, meditative, and nostalgic, Cravens draws an original comingof-age picture, where choices are limited and earning decent money means whoring. Jim Bonnie’s unexpected offer carries with it the winds of change, and Red’s run of luck turns to heartache. With newfound self-determination, will she accept her fate or ride out with the resolute Constance for revenge? If you enjoy raunchy, fast-paced, western romances where the pendulum swings both ways, this novel could be for you!
Fiona Alison
LEARNED BY HEART
Emma Donoghue, Little, Brown, 2023, $28.00, hb, 336pp, 9780316564434 / Picador, 2023, £16.99, hb, 336pp, 9781035017768
Donoghue’s biographical novel of the reallife Anne Lister and Eliza Raine focuses on Raine’s story. We meet the fourteen-year-old girls when attending the Manor boarding school in 1805-06. Lister’s life and diaries were popularized in the Gentleman Jack television series. She is known as a prolific diarist of early 1800s Yorkshire life, as well as frank, detailed diary entries about her life as a lesbian. She wrote her intimate entries in code, which was later decoded, giving readers a view into her private life.
As a small child, Eliza Raine is sent to England from her home in Madras, India. Her father is an English doctor for the East India Company who had an affair with her Indian mother. As an illegitimate, “young woman of colour,” she isn’t accepted in society and certainly doesn’t fit into the world of the Manor School for young ladies in 1805. Her life changes when Anne, an independent-thinking, rulebreaking tomboy, moves into her lonely attic room. Eliza is enamored with the bold Anne, who is everything she is not, and they quickly become close friends, then lovers. Her first love
is everything, and Eliza desperately holds on to it, expecting to spend a lifetime with Anne. But when Anne is expelled, she moves on to a new life and other lovers.
In alternating chapters dated 1815, Raine writes letters from Clifton House Asylum to Lister. Within these letters, Eliza’s pain and inability to let go of her loss will touch the reader’s heart. It becomes clear that her grief and obsession with Anne have resulted in her mental breakdown. Donoghue has created a living, breathing Eliza whose life was defined by rejection and loneliness, and who was unable to withstand the terrible loss of her only love. A sad, beautiful novel.
Janice Ottersberg
THE MADWOMEN OF PARIS
Jennifer Cody Epstein, Ballantine, 2023, $28.00, hb, 336pp, 9780593158005
In this novel, set in a monolithic asylum in Paris in the late 1800s, protagonist Laure is both a former inmate and current attendant for the Salpêtrière’s hysteria ward. The disease is new, and Dr. Charcot is making his fame from hypnotizing young women on stage during his medical lectures, which are open to the public. Laure arrived there after her parents’ deaths, and later, a young woman named Josephine arrives. Josephine is all anyone can talk about, as she was brought in covered in blood, and is surprisingly violent. Laure manages to get herself assigned to Josephine, and is at once protective of and attracted to her. Josephine becomes famous once Dr. Charcot begins to hypnotize her, allowing sordid games to play out for the entertainment of his lectures. But Josephine can only take so much exploitation before her breaking point.
This engrossing novel explores all the different ways that young women are exploited and told they should appreciate the attention. Indeed, Dr. Charcot notes that vanity is a hallmark symptom of hysteria. A lecherous marquis hangs around the lecture hall, waiting for one of the patients to strike his fancy before bestowing gifts and arranging liaisons. Indeed, much of the book contains studies of selfish behavior from different perspectives. While sometimes mildly disturbing, the novel is wellwritten, thought-provoking, and immersive. A must-read for those interested in the treatment of women and the ethics of medicine. Highly recommended.
Katie Stine
THE LIONESS OF BOSTON
Emily Franklin, David R. Godine, 2023, $28.95, hb, 400pp, 9781567927405
The Lioness of Boston is a fictionalized biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, the prolific art collector who eventually turned her Boston home into a museum. This fascinating look at her early life as a newlywed shunned by Boston’s blueblood society is realistic and emotionally moving.
The novel opens in 1861 with Isabella Stewart’s recent marriage to Jack Gardner, a wealthy, socially prominent Bostonian. Isabella is a New Yorker by birth, and while she hails from an affluent family, their money is too “new” to suit many of the Boston Brahmins she encounters in her new world. Isabella is also whip-smart and willing to question society’s foibles, a habit that does not endear her to the people who matter. As she struggles to fit in, she encounters multiple tragedies that will change the trajectory of her life.
Franklin is an elegant writer with a love for historical detail. Her descriptions of Isabella’s daily life express the ennui that many society women faced during this period; it is no wonder that Isabella sought knowledge and occupation to enliven what would have been a dull existence otherwise. Her tendency to question everything is maddening at times, but ultimately, the tragedies Isabella faces make her an incredibly sympathetic and compelling character. How she manages to bear up under the excruciating sadness of her life is a testament to her resilience.
The Lioness of Boston brings the remarkable story of Isabella Stewart Gardner to life, capturing all the nuances of her character with grace and feeling. Highly recommended.
Caroline D. Wilson
A COURTESAN’S WORTH
Felicity George, Orion, 2023, £9.99, pb, 462pp, 9781398715943
Carefully researched, amusing and written in a direct punchy style, this is an entertaining, rapid read. Set in 1812, the story focuses on Kitty Preece, one of a family of courtesan sisters who live together in a Mayfair mansion, their many children conveniently kept out of the way in the attic. Kitty has been untroubled by pregnancies despite many years in the business, making her particularly popular with the wealthy clients who provide luxurious homes in return for personal services. However, as the story opens she is facing adoption by a particularly unattractive man, the ugly Duke of Gillingham, whose financial muscle deters
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any other candidate for her affections, and even incites her oldest sister to assist his evil purposes.
She has one friend, a curate, Sidney Wakefield, who attempts to provide her with an alternative keeper of equivalent financial standing, but this stratagem is doomed to failure, not least because of the growing physical and romantic attraction between clergyman and prostitute. This proverbially comic situation is handled very deftly. We empathise with the lack of choice then facing women. There is genuine suspense as the plot proceeds, with believable dialogue and vivid descriptions of fights, chases, and the eventual sex between the unlikely lovers. Wakefield’s respectable reputation is of course destroyed, but he hopes to manage without his family’s goodwill, and to find a new source of income.
I felt the historical background was very solid, with one exception – in 1812 a bath with running hot water would surely have been unknown. Still, this remains an escapist read with propulsive action, humour and eroticism balancing each other to ensure the reader’s avid attention.
Ben Bergonzi
BOOKSHOP CINDERELLA
Laura Lee Guhrke, Forever, 2023, $16.99/ C$22.99, pb, 336pp, 9781538722626
In this Victorian romance, Evie Harlow is a strong and independent woman, a source of consternation to her family and society. She took over her father’s rare book store when he died and has been happily ensconced in that ever since. She has no need of male companionship beyond a dear childhood friend and can’t imagine herself in any sort of long-term relationship. So, imagine how flustered she is when she finds herself in the acquaintance of Maximillian Shaw, Duke of Westbourne. Max is determined to win a bet proving that Evie can become a debutante and take the London season by storm.
This is a fun rags-to-riches story. The basic cast of characters are well developed and have plenty of interesting personality quirks, which helps move the plot forward. Evie and Max are both likeable characters in their different ways, and secondary characters feel like actual people and not placeholders needed to fill a crowd. The slow-building passion between Evie and Max makes the anticipation a pleasant ride. My one quibble is that there isn’t much resolution with the villain. I wanted a proper comeuppance! Overall, the plot is engaging, readers are treated to details about daily life among the peerage and the working classes, and the ending is everything it needed to be. Recommended.
Kristen McQuinn
THE MIDWIFE’S TOUCH
Sue Harrison, Shanty Cove Books, 2023, $18.99, pb, 342pp, 9781504076258
China Deliverance Creed was born with a little bit of magic. Anyone who touches her
receives, willingly or not, the thing they wish most in that moment. Afraid of those who might take advantage of China’s gift, her mother Yvette hides them away in a little cabin high in the Ozarks. Yvette makes China gloves and avoids kissing her on the forehead, lest an inadvertent brush of skin brings treasures that can’t be explained to neighbors.
As a young girl, China is apprenticed to the local Cherokee healer, learning herbalism and midwifery and how to manage the town’s superstitions and prejudice. Under both her mother and her mentor, China grows up with love and knowledge, but without human touch. When, years later, she meets a man willing to give her that, China shares the secret hidden for decades, opening herself up to dangers both emotional and physical.
From this intriguing premise, of a woman craving touch so much that she gives up her freedom, Harrison delivers an introspective and well-written novel. She lets the reader get close to China, feel her yearning and her isolation, and then empathize. The Midwife’s Touch is undoubtedly a novel about magic, but it’s not fantastical. Rather than being merely a plot point, the magic is a part of China’s character, her motivation, and the obstacle to her happiness. This is a characterdriven novel, and a good one, but it’s more than just character and emotion. It’s also a story of family—both those we’re born to and those we create—as well as love, hope, and sacrifice. As a bonus, Harrison offers extensive author’s notes on the history and culture of the nineteenth century Ozarks. A thoughtful and interesting novel.
Jessica Brockmole
THE HOUSE OF LINCOLN
Nancy Horan, Sourcebooks Landmark, 2023, $27.99, hb, 352pp, 9781728260549
Nancy Horan, best-selling author of Loving Frank, offers a captivatingly sweeping historical novel centered on Abraham Lincoln, 19 th -century Springfield, Illinois, and early American race relations.
We first see Lincoln—an up-and-coming eccentric lawyer and soon-to-be famous President—through the eyes of young Ana Ferreira, a domestic servant in Lincoln’s expanding household. Herself a daughter of Portuguese Protestant exiles, recently migrated from Madeira via Trinidad, Ana’s best friend is an African American girl, the equally “coltish” Cal Patterson. These two fictional characters introduce us to others, some invented but mostly historical. There is Lincoln’s troubled
wife Mary (Todd); sons Willie, Tad, and eldest Robert; even Fido, the family dog. Famous figures from Lincoln’s times include Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the so-called “Little Giant,” and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Several important characters are lesserknown-folk, like the Donnegan brothers: Spencer, founding pastor of Springfield’s African Methodist Episcopal Church (a barber, he advertises as a “Tonsorial Professor”); and cobbler William, a secret “conductor” for the Underground Railroad.
Horan’s narrative begins in the politically fraught 1850s—taking in, for instance, the Fugitive Slave Act, the American Colonization Society initiative, and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. We watch political machinations develop as unrest turns to Southern succession and the horrors of Civil War. With balanced and efficient prose, Horan seamlessly intertwines invented dialogue and historical documents, such as Lincoln’s farewell address to Springfield delivered the morning of 11 February 1861 from his departing train as the newly elected President sets off for Washington, DC, confidently hoping “that all will yet be well.” Later, through an aged Ana’s eyes, we experience the 1908 Springfield Race Riot, learning with her that racial discrimination did not end at Appomattox. The House of Lincoln provides a compelling but tragic story, artfully conveyed by Horan who interweaves daily lives of various stripes with the glory and despair of 19th-century American history.
Mark G. Spencer
NAPOLEON’S SPY
Ben Kane, Orion, 2023, £16.99, hb, 305pp, 9781409197898
Having produced 13 books set in classical times and a further trilogy set in the 12th century, the prolific Kane here turns his attention to the comparatively modern year of 1812 and the epic canvas of Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Our protagonist, a reluctant spy against Napoleon, is Matthieu Carrey, a louche gambler, half-French and half English. He starts the book seeking relief from his debts by smuggling French prisoners back home across the channel, but later finds himself stranded in Paris. Debts again force his hand, so a British agent makes him enrol in La Grande Armée on the understanding that he will pass information to the Russians. This rather passive character arc is presented as a moral progression, though I was not entirely convinced that Matthieu’s flexible conscience would in practice have been sufficiently stiffened. Also, the strategic purpose of his espionage is never fully explained.
The bulk of the book is a recreation of the incompetent leadership and intense suffering that, for the French, are hallmarks of the 1812 campaign. Matthieu’s pride involves him in a series of duels with a rival officer (named Daniel Féraud in tribute to Joseph Conrad’s famous story ‘The Duel’, filmed as The Duellists). By not making Matthieu a
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trained soldier, Kane forgoes the opportunity to describe sword fights, something I have enjoyed from his previous writing. Instead they duel with pistols, sometimes absurdly close to the Russian Cossacks.
I was a little disappointed that this novel finishes with the crossing of the Berezina, whereas in fact the diminishing rump of Napoleon’s army, reduced to starving scarecrows, still had miles of frozen ground to cover before reaching safety. However, putting us ‘on the ground’ amidst this exceptionally lethal campaign, Kane has delivered a book replete with grim fascination.
Ben Bergonzi
A PERSISTENT ECHO
Brian Kaufman, Black Rose Writing, 2023, $25.95, hb, 226pp, 9781685132682
As this haunting and suspenseful novel opens, August Simms arrives, seemingly as a stranger, in the town of Rhome, Texas. We follow the mystery of his arrival and his intentions over the course of one month in the spring of 1897. He finds his way to the Murphy boarding house on the edge of town. Layer by layer, readers learn the alleged purpose of his trip.
In newspapers, Simms has read of sightings of airships in the area and seeks the truth of these peculiar stories. He enlists the aid of a local man to drive him in a buggy from one witness to another so he can interview them to determine the veracity of their stories. Slowly, Kaufman reveals Simms’s complicated history with Rhome, with boarding house owner Nadine Murphy, with Black residents of the town, and with a past episode of injustice. When threats to Nadine and others come to Simms’s attention, he defies his eighty-six years and his advanced cancer, and vows to protect his friends. He will try to deter a mob through persuasion, but, if necessary, he stands ready to use violence.
Kaufman writes beautifully, with spare prose, well-paced surprises, period-appropriate language, and a sense of foreboding. He sets the story in historical context, with references to the Civil War and to the looming wars in Cuba and the Philippines. Dialogue about the role of progress, the meaning of free will, and ambiguous lessons from scriptures do not slow down the plot. Even though readers can anticipate Simms’s likely fate, they will not anticipate the twists along the way.
Marlie Wasserman
BELLE NASH AND THE BATH CIRCUS
William Keeling, Broadsheet Books, 2023, £12.95, pb, 306pp, 9781915023117
Bath 1835: this, the second of Keeling’s Gay Street Chronicles, is great fun. Bellerophon (‘Belle’) Nash, the fictional grandson of Beau Nash, has returned a little too early from his banishment to the West Indies.
He had been sentenced by his friend, the redoubtable lady magistrate Gaia Champion;
her object was to get him out of the way to avoid a more serious charge related to his ‘bachelor ways.’ But the normally ebullient Belle suffers from the absence of his love, Pablo Fanque. He strives to cope by projecting Pablo’s identity onto another man, a Norfolk circus performer. Belle and Pablo’s story is told against the backdrop of the movement for the abolition of slavery, and the payment of reparations, not to the formerly enslaved but to their erstwhile owners. Belle’s circle are abolitionists, but their lives are overshadowed by his nemesis, the sinister Lord Servitude, and his depraved son Cecil, whose response to being deprived of other humans to do their every bidding is to take the law into their own hands – culminating in a dramatic rescue operation that could only have been staged by circus acrobats (helped by Ira Aldridge, the real-life African-American actor and theatre manager).
I initially thought that the historical notes at the end of each chapter were going to irritate, but ultimately, they fascinate, for they contain such nuggets as James Lackington, pioneer of discount bookselling, and the inventor of mothballs.
Gaia’s presence is the most obvious departure from historical fact, because there were no women magistrates before 1919, but her appointment is explained by a head of the City Corporation in his dotage – with failing eyesight.
Katherine Mezzacappa
CHANGING WOMAN
Venetia Hobson Lewis, Bison Books, 2023, $24.95, pb, 248pp, 9781496235138
This novel presents the Camp Grant massacre of Apaches, in April 1871, from two points of view: those of Nest Feather, a young Apache girl who has just completed her womanhood rites, and Valeria and Raúl Obregón, new arrivals in Tucson. The latter learn that the people of Tucson are angry that the leader of the Camp Grant post is unwilling to fight the Apache, who are blamed for the killing of settlers and livestock thefts. The territorial governor claims not to have the money to protect everyone, and that the politicians back East don’t understand local conditions. The Tucsonians decide to take matters into their own hands and form a posse. Unbeknownst to Valeria, Raúl joins the raiders and, in the heat of the conflict, commits violence against one of the many female Apache victims. Nest Feather is kidnapped during the raid and brought back to Tucson to be fostered by a childless couple. Raúl’s guilt about his part in the massacre affects his relationship with Valeria, and the aftermath of the event reverberates among major and minor characters alike.
The author’s note says that Lewis wanted to give a voice to the women and Indians who suffered in the massacre and depict life in Tucson 150 years ago, and she succeeds admirably. The reader gets a vivid picture of life on the Arizona frontier. The main characters are fictional, but some minor characters were real people, and Lewis provides information
on what happened to them after the massacre, plus an extensive bibliography. Serious scholarship is behind this story. Lewis had sensitivity readers give input on her depictions of Apache and Hispanic characters. Readers don’t have to be fans of westerns to appreciate the well-drawn characters and setting. Strongly recommended.
B. J. Sedlock
MISS MORTON AND THE SPIRITS OF THE UNDERWORLD
Catherine Lloyd, Kensington, 2023, $27.00, hb, 281pp, 9781496740618
This is the second mystery in the Miss Morton series, and it is a thoroughly captivating Victorian whodunit. Lady Caroline Morton, the abandoned daughter of a scandalous duke, is a paid companion to Mrs. Frogerton, a charming but shrewd widow who continues to successfully run her husband’s business empire and makes no apologies for it. The pair are in London, where they are managing Mrs. F’s daughter’s debut Season, and daughter Dorothy does take a great deal of work to manage. Each of the three central women in this novel is bright and lively and fully engages the reader’s interest. Their actions paint a vivid picture of the Victorian beau monde. Sharply developed minor characters like a butler and maid add their own color to the plot. Lloyd’s dialogue is pitch-perfect.
The novel quickly takes a dark turn. Madame Lavinia, a spiritualist whom the older women visit, is discovered dead, and she leaves a note asking Lady Caroline to find her killer; the note promises the heroine a much-needed financial reward for doing so. The hunt for the killer is on! Caroline discovers that the spiritualist had a nasty habit of blackmailing some of her more affluent clients: Aha! Another obstacle to complicate the mystery! A couple of Madame’s relatives turn up… and then the intrepid sleuth finds Madame’s secret strongbox. Each hurdle realistically enriches the tale.
The plot introduces several suspicious people and their reasons for doing away with Madame in classic mystery mode. Lloyd shows a deft hand at building these difficulties. The story follows each person with intriguing clues about means, opportunity, and motive. Of course, the Peelers are working on their own to nail the culprit and don’t want any outside interference from an amateur sleuth; the author’s treatment of these gentlemen adds a bit of spice to the investigation. What adventures will this intrepid heroine face in the next Lloyd installment?
Joanne Vickers
THE ICE HARP
Norman Lock, Bellevue Literary Press, 2023, $17.99, pb, 240pp, 9781954276178
A reader would have to be a dedicated fan of Ralph Waldo Emerson to appreciate this novel.
It is 1879, Concord, Massachusetts. Lock’s
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Emerson, the Father of Transcendentalism and perhaps the greatest moral philosopher produced in the United States, is a seventysix-year-old, confused by dementia and tormented by aphasia. He has frequent conversations with long-dead cohorts, like Thoreau, Whitman, and John Muir. He reflects on friendships with deceased luminaries such as the tragic Margaret Fuller, who still haunts the beach looking for the remains of her drowned son and husband. He imagines that his first wife Ellen has come to console him. He even imagines a talk with Samuel Long, a runaway slave he tried to help escape on the Underground Railroad.
Emerson is cared for by his second wife, Lidian, who was an energetic abolitionist long before he became involved in the movement. She comes across in the novel as a no-nonsense woman who knows her worth even though she has plaintive regrets about not being physically attractive. Also on scene is James Stokes, an appealing man who was a former slave and Union corporal. Stokes is trying to reach Canada after killing a white man who assaulted him. Emerson’s relationship with Stokes is fraught with conflicting feelings about justice and mercy.
These various interactions have a distinctive charm as they reveal the characters of some of the period’s notable personalities. Perhaps more importantly, these exchanges, along with Emerson’s solitary musings, reveal a man still deeply troubled by serious questions and regrets about his life’s work, particularly his lack of meaningful action in the matters of slavery and civil rights. Dementia is his “ice harp,” a symbol of his frozen mind. Lock is to be credited with capturing a great mind in distress, though the subject limits the novel’s approachability. But Emerson probably would have loved the novel.
Joanne Vickers
THE SPANISH DIPLOMAT’S SECRET
Nev March, Minotaur, 2023, $29.00, hb, 320pp, 9781250855060
This is the third mystery featuring Captain Jim Agnihotri (or Agnes O’Trey, as a befuddled U.S. immigration official recorded his name) and his wife, Diana. It’s not necessary to have read the previous books in the series (Murder in Old Bombay and Peril at the Exposition) to appreciate this one. An aging Spanish gentleman is murdered onboard a ship crossing the Atlantic to Liverpool in the late 19th century, and Jim takes on the case. The author seamlessly blends in the resulting onboard action with the larger international relations implications, making this a pleasure to read. March also deftly combines subgenres so that we have a locked-room puzzle, some supernatural guidance, and elements of horror as well as the expected details of daily life onboard a naval vessel. We get an education on aspects of late 19th-century
history from a variety of perspectives, which is an added bonus.
I do wish the mystery’s solution were a little less obvious; the murderer is quite clearly identifiable three-quarters of the way through the narrative. But I wanted to complete the book in part because I liked observing Jim and Diana continue to grow as individuals. Their opinion of Sherlock Holmes’s approach to crime detection continues to evolve as well, adding an additional layer of enjoyment. Recommended.
Kishore Krishna
THE NIGHTINGALE AFFAIR
Tim Mason, Algonquin, 2023, $28.00/£22.00, hb, 400pp, 9781643750392
In 1855, the Crimean War still rages, and within the walls of the Barracks Hospital, another war takes place between the male doctors and Florence Nightingale and her band of brave nurses. Recently that secondary war has escalated. Nurses are being murdered— strangled, with an embroidered rose sewn to their lips—and Inspector Field is sent from England to find the culprit. But Field gets no help from the male doctors, and clues are few and far between. With a combination of guile, experience, and luck, Field tracks down the killer, who commits suicide. Everything is neatly tied up and the murders are solved—or are they?
Twelve years later in London, Field encounters another murder victim with the tell-tale rose on her lips. The last time he saw such a rose was in the Crimea, where he’d been sent to protect Florence Nightingale and her nurses. Did they get the wrong man then? Is this the same ruthless killer he met before, or is a copycat killer now on the loose in London? This is a fast-paced, compelling novel with historical fact and fiction expertly interwoven. The historical characters never overpower the story, nor does the fiction detract from fact. If The Nightingale Affair has a fault, it is lack of detail in the clothing. For instance, we’re told the Nightingale nurses have horrible uniforms but not why they’re horrible, nor how they differ from regular women’s clothing. The sense of long, full skirts is totally absent, and the author missed a chance to enhance an already fine novel with these extra details. I will certainly look for the author’s other books!
India Edghill
EDUCATING ELIZABETH
Jennifer Moore, Covenant, 2023, $15.99, pb, 224pp, 9781524424008
Elizabeth Miller runs a much-needed school for underprivileged girls in London’s East End, but the costs are overwhelming. She reluctantly turns to a man she dislikes. Lord Charles Chatsworth is a rich and scandalous bachelor with a rakish reputation. He is willing to help, but in exchange, Elizabeth must tutor his relative, Alice, in elocution. As Elizabeth begins to realize that Charles is nothing like his reputation, she also discovers her school is
being sabotaged. This is the fourth book in the Blue Orchid Society series and can be read as a standalone.
This is a pleasing romance with captivating subplots. Elizabeth and Charles are likable characters, and the child Alice is absolutely engaging and memorable. The lessons between Alice and Elizabeth are fun and will touch the heart. There is also an intriguing mystery surrounding Elizabeth’s school. The romance is sweet, clean, and charming. Victorian London, with its alternating decadence and poverty, comes alive in this book and the reader will be quickly transported there. There is also a bit of London politics included. Fans of the genre will enjoy this.
Bonnie DeMoss
THE BEASTS OF PARIS
Stef Penney, Quercus, 2023, £20.00, hb, 496pp, 9781529421552 / Pegasus, 2023, $26.95, hb, 496pp, 9781639363766
Against the backdrop of the FrancoPrussian War and the Siege of Paris in 1870/71, a number of mostly unconnected characters are drawn inexorably into the war. Anne, a Salpêtrière resident, becomes the head veterinarian’s housekeeper at the ménagerie. In a peaceful Paris, the ménagerie is a sanctuary for her and particularly Marguerite, the aloof tigress whose vicinity Anne craves. Other visitors just come to taunt the feral creatures for personal entertainment. Victor, a keeper and like-minded animal lover, expresses his fondness for Anne, although she is reticent about his advances. Ellis, a disillusioned American surgeon, reluctantly finds he holds the key to life and death in his hands. Lawrence, a struggling gay Canadian photographer, falls in love with Ellis. Fanny, a nude model for a studio producing furtively sold postcards, is employed as the studio owners’ housemaid when the market runs dry. She befriends Anne during encounters in the bread lines.
As human survival patterns align more closely with the animal world, one wonders whether the watchful Marguerite is any more imprisoned than the stranded citizens of Paris. Penney has skillful command of the interplay between her characters as they negotiate an upended world, where humans collectively devolve into feral behaviour, fighting over food and survival. Profiteering quickly separates rich from poor, and the unequal hierarchy within both the human and bestial worlds becomes clearer. Themes of unrequited affection and unspoken feelings meander through a complex narrative about belonging and fitting in, why we so often don’t, and the importance of finding a safe haven in our lives. As indiscriminate violence escalates, readers may wonder who the real beasts of Paris are. A graphic representation of the city, showing the novel’s locations, is a welcome addition.
Fiona Alison
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THE DUKE GETS DESPERATE
Diana Quincy, Avon, 2023, $9.99/C$12.99, pb, 384pp, 9780063247499
Yorkshire, 1886. As if it were not bad enough to inherit an impoverished estate, Anthony Carey, Duke of Strickland, is stunned to learn that his stepmother has bequeathed his beloved family castle to her American cousin. His resentment is slow to fade, but Raya Darwish turns out to be a beautiful ArabAmerican woman, and their mutual physical attraction is immediate. Since she is also an astute businesswoman, she is just what the estate needs to recover, he grows to recognize, but can they get past their distrust of each other?
Though it is never really in doubt, misunderstandings and personal issues delay the happy outcome, as does the mystery surrounding the stepmother’s death and thefts from the castle. Strick and Raya gradually learn to appreciate one another’s abilities, but the pattern of increasingly passionate encounters, followed by retreat into suspicion of each other’s motives, does become repetitive. There is valuable insight, however, into the causes for the economic decline of great estates in England during the 19th century, and Raya’s solution of opening the castle and selling refreshments and souvenirs to a paying public anticipates what became a widespread trend.
Ray Thompson
THE HUSBAND LIST
Ella Quinn, Zebra, 2023, $8.99, pb, 368pp, 9781420154481
Harry Stern is in London to take his seat in the Commons and find a bride. Madeline Viviers fits the bill. Madeline is torn; Mama wants a titled peer, but Harry meets all the requirements on Madeline’s list. Should she please Mama or follow her heart?
Readers who delight in the high-class Regency world will adore Madeline’s busy schedule of balls, calls, dinners, shopping, and dawn gallops in Hyde Park. Harry woos her with waltzes, rides, chocolate ices, and his assistance as Madeline rescues the occasional downtrodden person in distress. References to events in The Marriage List will puzzle those not familiar with sister Eleanor’s story, and only dedicated fans will keep straight the enormous cast of characters, all couples from previous Quinn books. While the plot and the prose tread the genre’s familiar, pleasing patterns, the gentle attraction between the leads, lack of urgency or emotional turmoil, and exploits of clever children make this book a light-hearted, winsome treat.
Misty Urban
QUEEN OF EXILES
Vanessa Riley, William Morrow, 2023, $32.00, hb, 448pp, 9780063270992 / Mills & Boon, 2023, £8.99, pb, 448p, 9780008636944 Hayti (Haiti) became a sovereign nation in 1804, free of slavery, after defeating Napoleon’s
forces. The formerly enslaved now rule the new nation. In 1811 amidst continuing political unrest, King Henry Christophe sets up a monarchy modeled after European royal courts. Henry’s vision for Hayti was to raise it to a distinguished nation under Black rule, respected by the white nations of the world. But he never gains the respect of his subjects, who feared and disliked him. His tenuous rule is overthrown in 1820, and his surviving family escapes.
Queen Marie-Louise tells her story in firstperson narrative. We meet her in England after she arrives, a widowed, exiled queen accompanied by her daughters, Princesses Améthyste and Athénaïre. As a devoted and loving wife, she recounts Henry’s rise to king and her efforts to play a meaningful role as queen. Shifting between Hayti when her husband ruled and her life in exile, the pieces of her life fall into place. But what happened to bring about the downfall and death of King Henry I and his son? This is the most painful part of Louise’s story, and one she vows never to tell… until 1847, after living many years in Italy.
Vanessa Riley has done a remarkable amount of research in giving Louise a more visible place in history. Louise was respected by her subjects and stood with majestic pride among her peers of Europe’s royalty, not bending to anyone who treated her less than she deserved. Her love and loyalty to Henry was unshakable, so the reader does not see much of the despotic Henry. Impressive is Louise’s strong sense of her Black beauty, which she also instills in her daughters. Do not miss this historically rich book of a remarkable Black woman who should not disappear from history.
Janice Ottersberg
THE BURNING LAND
David O. Stewart, Knox Press, 2023, $18.00, pb, 310pp, 9798888451533
Henry Overstreet and Katie Nash fall in love in the small town of Waldoboro, Maine, during the American Civil War. When Henry decides to enlist in the 20th Maine regiment, their romance must be conducted via letters. The couple marries when Henry gets a brief leave in July of 1864. Soon after he returns to duty, Henry is gravely injured. Katie travels to Washington, DC, to lovingly nurse him back to health. But the full extent of how much their lives have changed only becomes apparent later.
Henry is restless after his recovery and discharge. He is a ship joiner, and the Maine
shipbuilders can no longer compete with bigger shipyards, so work is scarce. When Henry hears from an old Army buddy about opportunities in the growing town of Chicago, he is determined to migrate west. Katie is reluctant to leave their families and their hometown, but Henry insists.
Despite the limitations of his war wound, Henry works hard, and the family slowly beings to prosper in Chicago. But Katie is unhappy raising their two small boys in a dirty, noisy, ramshackle frontier town full of strangers. And then their hard-earned prosperity is destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
The plot of this novel could have been tighter. The young couple face many different challenges, but there was no strong single theme that ran through the story. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book. Katie and Henry are very appealing and sympathetic characters. And the historical research that went into this book is evident. The author gives just enough detail to bring the times to life, and is particularly good at battle scenes.
Kathryn Bashaar
BENEATH THE DARKENING CLOUDS
Juliane Weber, Independently published, 2022, $11.50, pb, 383pp, 9798848309829
In 1845 Ireland, Quin and Alannah have dealt with loss and heartache and have overcome difficulties in order to be together, but then the potato harvest fails, leaving many peasants in a desperate situation. Ireland is already in political upheaval, and the response of the government is insufficient and harmful. Fighting against the odds, Quin and Alannah work to save the people on their estate, wishing they could help everyone. At the same time, enemies lurk nearby as Quin revisits his past. This is book two in the Irish Fortune Series. It can be read as a standalone, but reading book one, Under the Emerald Sky, is recommended.
This captivating novel is set during the devastating Irish potato famine. The plot is gripping and full of bravery, grit, intrigue and evil. The cast of characters, from the strong couple of Quin and Alannah to the diabolical man plotting against them, is powerful and compelling. The description and historical detail will transport the reader to Ireland during a devastating time in history. The points of view used are interesting. Some chapters are in first person from Alannah’s point of view and the rest are in third person. This occurs seamlessly and is not at all distracting. The strong bond between Quin and Alannah sets the stage for a thrilling novel. The meticulous research
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done by the author is evident, and the book is informative as well as entertaining. This intriguing, well-written novel is recommended to anyone interested in Irish history and family sagas.
Bonnie DeMoss
THE ISOLATED SÉANCE
Jeri Westerson, Severn House, 2023, $31.99/£21.99, hb, 229pp, 9781448310746 London, 1895. Twenty-six-yearold Timothy Badger was a street urchin of twelve when Sherlock Holmes began using him as his spy. The Baker Street Irregulars find clues Holmes and his Dr. Watson need because, to the everyday person, they are an invisible nuisance. For the last five years, Tim and his talented Black friend, Benjamin Watson, have been scraping by, detecting for Holmes whenever summoned. Now, however, Holmes trusts them to solve a case entirely on their own: the murder of Horace Quinn in his own home during a séance.
Only five people are in the room when the lights go out: Quinn, the medium, his housekeeper, his maid, and Thomas Brent, Quinn’s valet and the one person that police suspect of the crime. Holmes believes Badger and Watson can clear Brent using their own unique means of combing the streets for clues, including finding the elusive medium and uncovering the murder weapon and the motive for the deed. The pair employ their deductive skills, charm, and the unwitting help of a female reporter to ferret out why the Ouija board spelled out “A-T-I-C.”
Westerson has created an endearing ensemble cast at 49b Dean Street that should delight audiences for as many crimes as she wishes them to solve. The action scenes are replete with tension, and the interplay of the main characters teems with authenticity of the period. Highly recommended.
Tom Vallar
BURKE AND THE LINES OF TORRES VEDRAS
Tom Williams, Big Red, 2023, $9.99/£9.50, pb, 197pp, 9781838397579
British officer James Burke and his sergeant-manservant William Brown have been sent to Lisbon to catch spies. These are Portuguese spies betraying their country—and Portugal’s British allies—to the Napoleonic French. In Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras, Tom Williams’s seventh spy novel detailing Burke’s adventures, the action consists of the bureaucratic maneuvering
behind intelligence work. Burke and Brown deal with their indifferent, even hostile, British superiors, and with the anxieties and idle larks of the Portuguese aristocrats as they settle into pursuing the mole they suspect of passing information on the eponymous defensive line to the French. They have the good fortune to recruit a pleasant and talented young Portuguese woman to assist them, and the passages recounting that are among the novel’s most engaging. William Brown is a Jeeves-like delight to read about, too. Most of the story takes place within the limits of Lisbon over the early fall of 1810; the actual military lines are minor to the main plot. As tends to be true of thrillers and mysteries, James Burke himself remains a steady presence as he goes about his task. Williams succeeds in showing how ordinary and yet thrilling the work of yeoman’s spy-craft is in its close-in, muted way. I picked up this novel hoping for more detail of life in the Napoleonic age, and Williams completely delivered.
Irené Colthurst
20TH CENTURY
DYING IS EASIER THAN LOVING
Ahmet Altan (trans. Brendan Freely), Europa, 2023, $18.00, pb, 556pp, 9781609458294 / Europa, £14.99, 2022, pb, 560pp, 9781787704398
This massive novel richly repays the effort of overcoming its daunting title, 556 pages, and initially unfamiliar Ottoman setting. Imagine plunging into War and Peace midway: this novel, too, abounds in characters with challenging names, grim battlefields, obsessive love affairs, and long philosophical passages. But once you find your feet, you luxuriate in the poignant, intricately interwoven stories and the acute psychological analysis.
Published in Turkish in 2015 and ably translated by Brendan Freely, it is the third of a projected four volumes depicting the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire. But after the attempted coup of 2016, historical fiction became a crime in Turkey. The Erdogan government accused the author, Ahmet Altan, of sending seditious “subliminal messages,” and sentenced him to life in prison, where he stayed until released in 2021 after an international outcry.
“My life imitates my novel,” Altan has said. Not exactly this novel—except for the political intrigue. Those unfamiliar with early 20thcentury history may be surprised to learn that in 1913 the Ottomans lost a war with Bulgaria. Subsequent unrest in the Balkans helped precipitate World War I.
The Ottoman Quartet rotates around a modern-day recluse, Osman, who is visited in his crumbling Istanbul mansion by “his dead”—the characters of the novels—still vociferously telling their stories even though they are insubstantial, like cobwebs. The action shifts between the horrors of war
and the fashionable corruption of a casino, where a mysterious Russian pianist, Anya, mechanically plays. Other characters include pashas, dervishes, an ex-Sultan, a highhanded aristocratic grandmother, and a French journalist hopelessly in love with an independent Ottoman woman. Altogether, it is a fabulous literary experience, much better than prison—or becoming a cobweb.
Susan Lowell
THE FIRST LADIES
Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, Berkley, 2023, $28.00, hb, 352pp, 9780593440285
The First Ladies is a riveting look at Eleanor Roosevelt’s political rise to First Lady and her eyebrow-raising friendship with civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. From their first awkward meeting at a national luncheon for the heads of women’s clubs in 1927 to the joyous day the two unite to vote for the Charter of United Nations in June 1945, authors Benedict and Murray are successful in capturing the emotional connection between these two impactful women.
Through alternating points of view, readers come to know Eleanor and Mary as their relationship blossoms. Mary, born of enslaved parents, became a supporter of education, a builder of schools and hospitals. A calm, understated, burning desire is exposed in Mary, showing her indelible spirit and confidence as she gets well-known businessmen to serve on boards and contribute to her causes. Meanwhile, readers are provided with a detailed historical background leading to Eleanor becoming the First Lady. By 1927, Eleanor’s painful memories of Franklin’s affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, have the couple unified only in beliefs. Taking a tactful and delicate approach to Eleanor’s relationship with a female journalist, the authors portray her as unlike any other First Lady.
Historic and political events are recounted as the memories of the “first ladies” are used to fill in background. Readers experience Mary’s pain in racially explosive situations and will appreciate her ultimate poise and absolute pride in her beliefs. The scene of Eleanor and Mary at Tuskegee Army Airfield highlighting the discrimination against Blacks in the military, though hypothetical, is superb and the outcome rewarding. The concluding historical notes are informative and supportive of this extraordinary partnership.
The women’s friendship helped form the foundation for the modern civil rights movement. Historically illuminating; recommended to fans of The Personal Librarian by Benedict and Murray.
Dorothy Schwab
PROUD SORROWS
James R. Benn, Soho Crime, 2023, $27.95/£24.99, hb, 360pp, 9781641294157
May 1942: a German bomber struggles to stay airborne over the coast of Norfolk,
A publication of the Historical Novel Society | www.historicalnovelsociety.org 33
England. People from the village of Slewford see or hear the burning plane and rush to where it might come down. Two years later, in November 1944, a brutal storm and extreme tides uncover the wreckage previously buried in a tidal estuary. The body of a British officer, Stephen Elliot, sits in the pilot seat. Elliot grew up and lived in that area. Slewford is also home for German POWs and a joint U.S./British intelligence operation. England’s royal family owns properties in the area and visits from time to time.
U.S. Army Captain Billy Boyle and his British lover are on well-earned leave at the nearby country estate owned by her father, but now the U.S. orders Billy to investigate the new mystery. Many theories rise up about how and why Elliot got on that plane before it plunged into the tidal waters. Did the crash or another person kill him? A key witness is suddenly murdered, local law officers act strangely, and a variety of villagers come under suspicion. British Nazi sympathizers and the deep history of the estuary make for a bigger story than Elliot’s death alone.
The dialogue, settings, and the many characters all feel authentic. Tension builds to a rousing conclusion in Boyle’s Poirot-like quest to find the killer or killers and the motives. A glossary of the many characters would have helped to follow the many subplots. Overall, though, this is an interesting page-turner about little-known aspects of WWII. The historical note at the end helps separate overlapping true facts from fiction.
G. J. Berger
THE PARIS ASSIGNMENT
Rhys Bowen, Lake Union, 2023, $16.99/£8.99, pb, 383pp, 9781662504235
Paris, 1931. Bowen’s story has a conventional beginning: Naïve young English girl, Madeleine Grant, goes to Paris to study at the Sorbonne and immediately falls for a charming French journalist, Giles Martin. He disappears, reappears, gets her pregnant, and marries her. Flash forward eight years when the Nazis overwhelm Paris. Giles, half-Jewish and rising star of the political left, joins the resistance forces, and sends his wife and their son Olivier back to her family in England.
The novel becomes compellingly complicated at this point. Madeleine must deal with the Blitz in London and decides to send her son to the country for safety. Almost immediately, she learns that he has been killed when his train was bombed. Heartbroken, she enlists in the British secret service. Bowen painstakingly describes the difficult and extensive mental and physical training that women candidates receive before they are allowed to go to France to work undercover against the Nazis. The women Madeleine trains with are an engaging group of different personalities who enliven the plot.
Meanwhile, the reader discovers that Olivier’s identity has become confused with another boy. Surviving a concussion, but
confused about his circumstances, he is sent off to Australia as an orphan where he lives on a farm run by brutal Irish nuns.
The novel alternates between Olivier’s and Madeleine’s experiences. Bowen perfectly develops both narratives with absorbing details about several characters and different geographical environments. And she tops her story off with a realistic, satisfying ending!
Joanne Vickers
CROSSWIND
Karen K. Brees, Black Rose Writing, 2022, $22.95, pb, 337pp, 9781685130916
The invitation to present at a botanical conference is in direct opposition to Dr. Katrin Nissen’s research, but it provides the MI6 agent with the perfect cover for visiting Germany in June 1940. Another American agent has gone missing; Katrin must determine why, find him, and recover missing microfilm. His half-sister may be helpful, but she is a staff photographer for Heinrich Himmler. Or there is the mole within the University of Berlin’s Physics Department if Katrin can determine who he is. Soon after her arrival, small items go missing, her room is searched, and she happens upon the body of a murdered professor. The deceased is neither the first nor the last victim, and most are in direct opposition to current Nazi thinking. The mystery intrigues her, and there are many suspects, but solving it is not her primary objective.
Crosswind is an entry in a well-researched World War II series, but it is not a spy thriller. There are occasional passages filled with information readers may find themselves skipping over, and the author occasionally repeats explanations about cultural differences within the narrative and the afterword. The story unfolds from three perspectives – Katrin’s is in first person, while the missing agent and his half-sister are in third person – which is the only justification for using similar names for Katrin and the half-sister (Kristine). Although reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Crosswind lacks as much tension as readers may expect. The most compelling scene unfolds during a side trip in which the Gestapo arrest Katrin, yet her extrication from the situation seems contrived. For readers seeking an interesting tale without full immersion or who want to see the seemingly innocuous ways in which the Nazis manipulated research to reinforce their goals, Crosswind is worth the read.
Cindy Vallar
TOWARD THE CORNER OF MERCY AND PEACE
Tracey Buchanan, Regal House, 2023, $18.95, pb, 240pp, 9781646033379
Widow Minerva Place is used to a quiet, orderly life, and she prefers it that way. She has little interest in idle chit-chat with her neighbor Nella, or the Baptist Minister of Music, Brother Larson. She teaches piano lessons to the local
children out of necessity rather than genuine affection for young people. In her free time, she visits the nearby graveyard, finding names to research at the library. To Minerva, the tales of the dead are far more intriguing than the living, and she writes down their stories based on her findings and a bit of imagination.
But sometimes, she gets the facts wrong, and lately, the dead have been visiting her to make corrections, making her question her sanity. On top of this worrisome complication, a new man moves into town with his six-yearold son, and even with her discouragement, they take a liking to Minerva and try to include her in their lives. Can these two strangers interest her in the world of the living?
Set in 1950s Paducah, Kentucky, this novel is full of small-town charm and quirky characters. Cantankerous Minerva is endearing despite her ways, and the supporting characters are funny and memorable. The vignettes about the town’s past residents provide another emotional layer to the story, as some had tragic lives, and the ghosts have many issues left to resolve. Humorous and heartwarming, this is perfect for fans of found family stories. As a debut novelist, the author is off to a strong start, and I can’t wait to see what she has in store for readers next.
Janice Derr
THE LIE
Mary Chamberlain, Magpie, 2023, £9.99, pb, 288pp, 9780861543588
The story centres on two sisters, Joan and Kathleen. Beginning in the Second World War, the plot takes the reader through their lives up until the 21st century. Joan was a successful singer and entertainer in ENSA, The Entertainments National Service Association, established in 1939 to provide amusement and diversion for British troops during the conflict. Her career flourished until the 1950s, when it went into decline and she drifted to obscurity and poverty. Kathleen, on the other hand, had a successful career in medical research in the US. Their relationship improves as they age, but is threatened when an event from Joan’s past causes unforeseen upheaval. This is the lie of the title, and their good relationship is put in danger.
This is a deftly written and executed novel, interesting and provoking. It demonstrates the challenges facing women who wanted to make their way in a world where the rules and conventions were drawn up by men. It also examines how deception and secrecy can be seen to be necessary while showing clearly the tempestuous effect that exposure of hidden pasts and secrets have on close family relationships. The historical elements are well researched and convincing – there is good historical detail, albeit the milieu and subject should now be vastly familiar to readers of female-oriented historical fiction set during the Second World War.
Douglas Kemp
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RAVAGE & SON
Jerome Charyn, Bellevue Literary Press, 2023, $17.99, pb, 288pp, 9781954276192
With biting humor and fierce tenderness, Jerome Charyn builds the world of Manhattan’s Lower East Side Jewish ghetto from 1883 onward, rife with crime, passion, and the competition of shrewd businessmen and immigrant gangs. The dark wrestling for room to prosper in such a crowded district offers Charyn, a seasoned author, room for his own version of Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward
Charyn’s Cahan is an idealist determined to build the Jewish immigrants into a selfaware community. “He’d been an outlaw before he was an editor,” Charyn insists. Half his news is made up, half cobbled quickly from revelations around him, all tinged with the literary that he loves. What saves his bottom line is the remarkable Yiddish advice column he devises. (This is not fictional at all—the Bintel Brief lasted from 1906 until 1970.)
Charyn provides a right-angled line of plot and character with scrap dealer and powermonger Lionel Ravage and probable progeny Ben, whom Cahan rescues and pushes into law school. “Cahan was at his best as the penny author Max Vilna,” Charyn proposes, and the romantic heroism of the newspaper editor is inextricably tied to the surging power of Ben Ravage. Add the violence of poverty and that of ethnic snobbery—it’s the German Jews who live uptown, prosper, and form a vigilante gang, the Kehilla, while the downtown Eastern Europeans starve, bleed, and suffer from burgeoning crime.
Charyn’s narrative is strongly inflected with the Yiddish tongue and mode of revelation. This calls for patience and more than the usual suspension of disbelief. Nor is there any way to guess how close the fictional Abraham Cahan comes to the biographical. Yet the suspense of each chapter suggests that it’s up to us to enfold this hero anyway.
Beth Kanell
LONG GONE, COME HOME
Monica Chenault-Kilgore, Graydon House, 2023, $18.99/C$23.99, pb, 368pp, 9781525804762
Mt. Sterling, Kentucky in the 1930s is a quiet place, one that teenaged Birdie Jennings longs to escape. She dreams of big cities, of travel, of music and dancing, of opening her own restaurant. When she meets Jimmy Walker, an idealistic man who admires Marcus Garvey and quotes Langston Hughes, she feels that such a life is possible, and they quickly marry. Jimmy is well-traveled and well-read, brimming with enthusiasm about a future free from the oppression known by his ancestors. But he’s full of more promises than plans. Without steady work, Jimmy disappears for weeks at a time, chasing jobs he won’t discuss. Just a few years after they marry, he stops coming home, leaving Birdie to cope with two toddlers and few employment opportunities for a young Black woman. Married and abandoned
before she’s twenty, Birdie must, for the first time, make her own decisions, for better or for worse.
Monica Chenault-Kilgore writes an effective and emotional novel, populated with big characters and vibrant settings. Birdie is a character to hope with and grieve with. Even as readers might worry over the choices she makes, it is a worry brought upon by compassion as they watch Birdie grow and learn, despite having few options as a Black woman in the 1930s and 1940s. The supporting characters are just as complex, looking for happiness and success in an America that does not offer them easy choices. From the closeness of small-town Kentucky to the jazz of Chicago, from sharecropping and factory work to the dangerous glamour of bootlegging, Chenault-Kilgore gives us a sweep of Black experiences in a thoughtful and vivid narrative.
Jessica Brockmole
CANARY GIRLS
Jennifer Chiaverini, William Morrow, 2023, $32.00/C$39.50, hb, 432pp, 9780063080744
With Great Britain’s involvement in the Great War ramping up, April Tipton, a housemaid, and Lucy Dempsey, a housewife whose architect husband is also a famed amateur footballer, join the war effort by taking jobs at Thornshire Arsenal, a munitions factory outside London. As the working-class April and the middle-class Lucy find common ground in their grueling, dangerous job, Helen Purcell, an Oxford don’s daughter married to a wealthy manufacturer, becomes concerned about the mysterious condition that causes the factory workers’ skin to take on a yellowish hue. Once active in the suffrage movement, Helen decides to take a position at her husband’s factory to investigate for herself.
Like Jennifer Chiaverini’s other novels, Canary Girls unfolds at a stately pace, with more emphasis on character than on plot, and its occasional long stretches of thirdperson narrative may be off-putting to those readers who prefer a lot of snap and crackle in their historical fiction. But for those who are content to settle in for a long ride, this is a well-researched and engaging novel with sympathetic lead characters and a vivid supporting cast. You’ll come out with a greater appreciation of the sacrifices made both on the battlefield and on the home front during the First World War—and you’ll also learn a bit about football.
Susan Higginbotham
THE DAZZLE OF THE LIGHT
Georgina Clarke, Verve Books, 2022, $16.95/£9.99, pb, 320pp, 9780857308306
When we first meet Ruby Mills with her black bob and movie star looks, she is so dazzling that a young clerk in one of London’s smartest department stores cannot see the
theft about to take place. Ruby is good at what she does, which is to steal (or hoist), pickpocket, and swindle at every opportunity. When we first meet Harriet Littlemore, she is alone in the newsroom of The Evening Gazette, having recently bribed a shop girl to explain how she lost her job when a young woman walked out with a mink coat, a sable muff, jewelry, and some silk scarves.
Thus begins Harriet’s fascination with Ruby, a member of the notorious (real-life) allfemale gang, the Forty Thieves. Clarke’s book, set in 1920, is a marvelous study in contrasts. The squalor and brutality of Ruby’s life are never glossed over. She’s ignored by the man she cares about, coerced into sex by brutes, and beaten up by those who should have her back. Through it all, she never loses her spirit. Even prison cannot break her. Harriet’s life is filled with comfort and luxury. However, she is as much a pawn in other people’s games as Ruby, perhaps more so. She is browbeaten by her mother, lied to and cheated on by her fiancé, and dismissed by her boss. Ruby is hobbled by poverty while Harriet is hobbled by privilege.
While the subject may sound depressing, it is not. Adroitly capturing class distinctions, moving with ease from the highest echelons to the lowest, Clarke immerses the reader in a society trying to regain its equilibrium after the devastation of war and a world-wide pandemic. Best of all, the writing is terrific.
Trish MacEnulty
THE FAREWELL TOUR
Stephanie Clifford, Harper, 2023, $29.99, hb, 352pp, 9780063251137
Set over a period extending from the main character’s childhood in the Great Depression to her late singing career in the 1980s, The Farewell Tour is rich in historical touches and will appeal to fans of American culture and country music alike.
The novel is the second by a New York Times bestselling author with a no-nonsense ear for both narrative and dialog; the style is well-paced and accessible without sacrificing depth. The story follows the life and challenging career of Lillian Waters, a country music singer with roots reminiscent of Coal Miner’s Daughter and an arc which resonates more with that of the character played by Bette Midler in The Rose
Like the latter story, the pseudonymic “Water Lil” opens the novel with a singing tour taking her back to her hometown and forcing her to seek closure in confrontation. Lil is suffering from medical issues with her vocal
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cords, a device familiar to fans of diva vocalists, and facing the end of her career in her mid-50s as a result. Perhaps the richest characters are the small towns and honky-tonks themselves, giving voice to the surprising and fascinating regional cultural diversity of the American West still discoverable in the last century. The diversity does not disguise the structural racism and sexism of the time, however, and characters such as the Asian-American bluegrass fiddler Kaori, whose parents were shipped to an internment camp during the war, frame Lil’s own struggle to survive in the fact of the conflicting themes of sexualization and shame that marked the public perception of women performers of the time.
Her final tour stop is both book-end and epiphany for a woman who had sacrificed selfawareness for a life lived in the minds of others. Recommended reading.
Jackie Drohan
A REAL SOMEBODY
Deryn Collier, Lake Union, 2023, $16.99/£8.99, pb, 319pp, 9781662512643
June works in the typing pool of McAulay Advertising in downtown Montreal in 1947. Following WWII, her father is unable to find work, and June must support her parents. June is single and likes a McGill University law student, Jack, from Toronto. Since he’s also Catholic, their mothers are pleased. Her married elder sister Daisy is well off with two intelligent kids but remains aloof. June works diligently at her job and explores other avenues, such as copywriting, which were not accessible to women at that time. Then, June discovers a hidden side of her sister’s life, which is not all it is made out to be. This upends what June thought she knows about Daisy, and the revelation also makes her think about her own desires instead of living up to expectations. It seems that being a dutiful wife could mean something entirely different.
A former resident of Montreal, Deryn Collier mentions that she based this story on her great-aunt June’s life, gleaning details from her archives. June had worked for an advertising agency in Montreal and wrote stories and novels in her spare time, but they were not published. It was only following her retirement that the producers of a CBC radio show discovered her. Collier has fictionalized some of the events, including Daisy’s character, which indeed adds appeal to the novel. The novel takes us on an enjoyable tour of Montreal as it would have been in 1947, with original English street names that were later changed to French. The formal societal norms of those days are well displayed to transport readers to that era. June’s life, when she dared to enter the male world of copywriting, is fittingly recounted. The story is narrated aptly in June’s first-person voice—a pleasurable read.
Waheed Rabbani
DON’T FORGET TO WRITE
Sara Goodman Confino, Lake Union, 2023, $16.99/£8.99, pb, 335pp, 9781662512223
In 1960, rich and spoiled Marilyn Kleinman is caught making out with the rabbi’s son during services when they crash through the stained glass in full view of everyone. Scandal erupts, and the boy in question is soon on her doorstep, along with stern but anxious parents and a marriage proposal. After refusing to marry the young man, Marilyn is sent to stay with her Aunt Ada in Philadelphia. Aunt Ada is a matchmaker, and Marilyn becomes her temporary assistant, wooing young men to the business in order to match them with Ada’s endless list of female clients. Before long, Ada follows her clients to the Jersey Shore for the summer with Marilyn in tow.
This is a bright, humorous, and sometimes sad coming of age story that will keep the reader captivated. The characters absolutely spring to life. Marilyn begins as the epitome of a rich, naïve, self-involved young woman, but we soon see other sides to her. She does not want to be married off, wants more control over her own life, and wants to become a writer. Ada is the most intriguing and captivating character of all. She is strict, outspoken, sometimes hypocritical, and downright funny at times. Her unyielding façade sometimes slips to reveal a big heart, but she does not hesitate to make Marilyn face the truth about herself. Marilyn and Ada are surrounded by a strong cast of characters that includes controlling parents, old and new friends, and potential love interests. This is a funny but realistic look at the more restricted lives of women in the 1960s. It will instantly transport you to Philadelphia and the Jersey Shore, and to a time when a decade of change for women was just beginning.
Bonnie DeMoss
THE SPECTACULAR
Fiona Davis, Dutton, 2023, $28.00/£24.99, hb, 368pp, 9780593184042
The Spectacular takes place over a few months and is a brief 1990s story incorporating long retrospective flashbacks to 1956, when 19-year-old Marion Brooks successfully auditioned for the Radio City Rockettes, much to the chagrin of her father. The restrictions of her patriarchal family cause Marion to defy expectations and take her future into her own hands, and the ensuing issues are integral to the story.
Quite apart from the magical pull of the Radio City Music Hall itself, the meticulously detailed reflections on dance rehearsals, synchronisation of eye-high kicks and smiles, and clever height adjustments, using line placement and costume, are fascinating. Four shows a day, seven days a week, three weeks on, one week off – this gruelling regimen drew me into Marion’s and her friend Bunny’s world. I felt deeply involved in this part of the novel: the camaraderie, the troupe mentality, the slightest mistake exposing human fallibility in clockwork precision, and how the visual lure
of synchronised harmony in human movement touches the deepest part of our psyche.
Hence, for me, the first half of the book is the most compelling. Following a terrible tragedy at Radio City which affects Marion personally, the latter part of the novel delves into family drama. Marion’s behaviour, though fully understandable emotionally, doesn’t feel credible. With a fraught relationship already in tatters, references throughout the book to Marion’s father as Simon distance him from the usual nuclear family father-daughter connection.
The novel dwells on historical events from 1956, when the New York City police hired a psychiatrist to help identify the Mad Bomber who terrorised NYC for sixteen years. The history behind these events was the leadin to criminal profiling. In The Spectacular, Davis continues to shine the spotlight on extraordinary New York landmarks.
Fiona Alison
BROADWAY BUTTERFLY
Sara DiVello, Thomas & Mercer, 2023, $28.99, hb, 432pp, 9781662510137
Dot King, a flapper, kept woman, and gal around town, is found murdered in her bed in midtown Manhattan on March 14, 1923, by her AfricanAmerican housekeeper and confidante, Ella. Who is responsible – her extremely wealthy married lover, John Kearsley Mitchell, or Arthur Guimares, another lover with inexplicable cash who has a history of beating his girlfriends?
DiVello, an accomplished true crime writer, takes us on a whirlwind and captivating ride with true historical figures: Julia Harpman, crime reporter with the Daily News, who is laser focused on finding Dot’s killer; Detective Coughlin, who wants to see justice done but is hamstrung by NYC politics; and Mitchell and Guimares, who are the focus of the investigation. The novel, which is a fictionalized account of the infamous Broadway Butterfly murder, is chock full of historical figures and events, the smell and intensity of a big city newsroom, and the politics of an easily manipulated police department. Through Harpman’s unrelenting and courageous investigation—where her very life is threatened—is revealed the extent of corruption and the level of absolute rot to the very pillars of “nice” society and the seats of government.
This isn’t just about a “loose woman” being murdered. DiVello also frames the murder investigation around the issues of racial and class prejudice which become stark reminders
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of how deeply imbedded these social ills are in our society.
In her epilogue and additional materials, DiVello provides an expansive overview of her process during the nine-year journey to uncover the unadulterated story of Dot King’s unsolved murder. It is clear that DiVello doesn’t want us to forget her. I certainly won’t—and I’ll be looking forward to DiVello’s next novel. Highly recommended.
Ilysa Magnus
MURDER AT A LONDON FINISHING SCHOOL
Jessica Ellicott, Kensington, 2023, $27.00, hb, 288pp, 9781496740144
In the tranquil village of Warmsley Parva in post-World War I Britain, Edwina Davenport and her American friend and former classmate, Beryl Helliwell, run a “private enquiry” business. When Miss DuPont, the headmistress of their old London finishing school, contacts them for an unusual job, they head for the capital city. Strange goingson, including petty thefts and ghostly noises, have frightened away Miss DuPont’s students and faculty, threatening the school’s financial stability.
As Beryl and Edwina dig in to conduct interviews and pinpoint the source of the trouble, the mother of a prospective student stumbles and drowns in the school grotto. Or was she pushed? The police dismiss it as an accident, but Beryl and Edwina suspect foul play, and their enquiry turns from mischief to murder.
This is the seventh Beryl and Edwina mystery, but new readers won’t be left scratching their heads; in fact, they will likely seek out the earlier volumes in this delightful series. Polar opposites Beryl and Edwina make a dynamic investigative duo who may disagree about their business but also care for each other as chosen family. Edwina is an introvert who loves gardening and shies away from romance, while Beryl has made a name as an adventurer with multiple highprofile divorces behind her. The colorful cast of supporting characters supplies a wealth of possible culprits. As Miss DuPont notes when even she appears to have a motive for murder, “When it comes to suspects, one is spoilt for choice.” This classic historical cozy is topnotch fun.
Paula Martinac
THE HOUSE OF DOORS
Tan Twan Eng, Canongate, 2023, £20.00, hb, 306pp, 9781838858292 / Bloomsbury, 2023, $28.99, hb, 320pp, 9781639731930
Tan Twan Eng is not a prolific writer, but his books are worth waiting for. The House of Doors is set mainly in his native Penang, Malaysia, in the 1910s and ´20s. It is based on three real-life events; the writer Somerset Maugham’s visit to Penang in 1921, the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat Sen’s visit in 1910, and the trial of Ethel Proudlock, a European wife from Penang
accused of murder in 1911 (shifted to 1910 for reasons of dramatic unity).
Each story is interesting in itself, but they never really hang together, linked only by the narrator, Lesley Hamlyn, Maugham’s hostess. The book is structured as a double flashback; Lesley in 1947 remembers Maugham’s visit in 1921 and the stories she told him about the events of 1910. Intriguing but confusing. Also, Lesley speaks in the first person and is paralleled by a narrative from Maugham’s point of view in the third person.
The strength of the book is its evocation of the lives of the small European elite in early 20th-century colonial Asia – a gracious, pampered, narrow, convention-bound lifestyle which flourished even in my parents’ lifetime and has now gone with the wind as utterly as the plantation lifestyle of the antebellum South.
Edward James
THE ALL-AMERICAN
Susie Finkbeiner, Revell, 2023, $16.99, pb, 368pp, 9780800739362 1952. Bertha Harding is a 16-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan with her parents and her little sister Florence (Flossie). Her married brother visits often. Bertha’s dreams do not align with most other girls her age. She dreams of baseball and of playing for the Workington Sweet Peas, a team in the All-American Girls Baseball League. Flossie dreams of books and writing, and frequently flees bullies. Overall, though, they live a sweet life in a close-knit neighborhood. But then their father is accused of being associated with the Communist Party by the Un-American Activities Committee. Overnight, life changes drastically and their family is hounded out of the neighborhood, relocating to a small town in northern Michigan to start over.
What a powerful look at the American dream and what it means to be all-American! This novel is so well woven, with points of view switching mostly between Bertha and Flossie, with epistolary work in the form of letters and articles adding another element to the story. That feeling of knowing for sure what your life is about and who your friends are, and then having that pulled out from under you, is a punch in the stomach that the reader will experience along with the family. The American way of rebuilding and fighting back under stress and tremendous odds is also very evident in this book. A question the reader may ask is “Who is All-American?” Is it baseball
player Bertha, reader and dreamer Flossie, or their father, the author William Harding, whose very patriotism has been challenged? The answer is all of the above. Richly layered, beautifully written, and oh, so American, this one shouldn’t be missed.
Bonnie DeMoss
MURDER ON OAK STREET
I. M. Foster, Independently published, 2022, $19.99, pb, 503pp, 9781733337571
Jilted at the altar, Daniel O’Halleran accepts a job that combines his two passions: medicine and criminal investigation. He moves to Patchogue, Long Island, where Kathleen Brissedon, the daughter of a wealthy resident, asks him to look into an unsolved murder for her desolate stepbrother. The case is one that has haunted Daniel for two years; he did the autopsy and was frustrated because the New York City police gave the crime only a cursory examination.
Before Daniel has a chance to delve into the mystery, a new murder occurs. On a hot summer night in 1904, someone slits Thomas Brissedon’s throat. With the help of a local police sergeant, as well as an uncle who works for New York’s police department, Daniel learns the victim collected secrets and was willing to use anyone, including his own children, to get what he wanted. Daniel discovers there is a connection between the two murders, but how and why must wait until he figures out who killed Thomas. Was it the angry stepson? The callous, drunken son with gambling debts? The guttersnipe wooing Kathleen? The cousin in love with the maid, whom Thomas fired? The wife whose husband has what Thomas wanted? The partner he ruined? Or is Kathleen the murderess?
While it takes one third of the book to introduce the characters and set the stage for the murder, once Thomas succumbs, the pace quickens and it becomes an intriguing who-dun-it. This first book in the South Shore Mystery series interweaves murder, mayhem, and romance with well-drawn characters rife with foibles and a vile, despicable villain. Foster, a historian and librarian, brings the Edwardian period and bygone Patchogue to life, and readers will look forward to Daniel’s next mystery as well as his developing relationship with Kathleen.
Cindy Vallar
LADIES OF THE LAKE
Cathy Gohlke, Tyndale House, 2023, $16.99, pb, 384pp, 9781496453549
In 1903, orphaned Adelaide Rose MacNeill leaves Prince Edward Island at the command of her guardian and travels to Connecticut to begin a new life as a student at the Lakeside Ladies Academy. There Adelaide meets three true friends—Dot, Rose, and Susannah—and, as their school days draw to a close, the four resolve to remain the “Ladies of the Lake,” friends forever. Adelaide looks forward to teaching, and to a writing career, inspired by
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her mentor, Lucy Maud Montgomery. She also looks forward to love.
By 1935, the friends have scattered. Adelaide is believed dead, a victim of the horrific 1917 Halifax explosion. Dot, headmistress at the Lakeside Academy, is haunted by a shameful secret she fears could destroy her marriage. Rose practices social work in Canada, while Susannah juggles motherhood and the social demands of life in the Deep South. Dot finds that one of her Canadian students, Bernadette, unaccountably reminds her of Adelaide, and grows suspicious when Bernadette’s mother refuses to attend the graduation of her valedictorian daughter. The two timelines converge. Will the “Ladies of the Lake” reunite and will their friendships endure?
I immersed myself in this novel, reading it in one day. The depth of the friendships between the four women, the misunderstandings that arise—and the damage and guilt such obstacles can cause—will ring true to anyone who has been fortunate enough to share such friendships. Christian themes of forgiveness and redemption are woven throughout the book, but the depth of the emotional struggle will resonate with many readers, no matter their religion. Lovers of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s work will also find much to appreciate and enjoy in this novel.
Susan McDuffie
PROMISE
Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Random House, 2023, $28.00, hb, 336pp, 9780593241929
/ John Murray, 2023, £16.99, hb, 336pp, 9781399809818
A searing account of how racism reaches its long arm into all corners of American life, Griffiths’ first novel also honors the love cradled within Black families and how it grants them inner strength and the power of defiance. Promise opens with glorious scenes of a late summer idyll in coastal New England in 1957. It’s the day before school begins in Salt Point, Maine, and Hyacinth “Cinthy” Kindred and her sister Ezra, thirteen and fifteen, are becoming young women, which their devoted parents, Heron and Lena, realize will make the world look at them differently. Ezra’s best friend Ruby Scaggs, a poor white neighbor whose father beats her, refuses to acknowledge their differences, but Ezra knows their closeness will soon run its course. The world is too much with them.
Within a week, life turns threatening. Cinthy’s favorite teacher commits suicide and is replaced by a snooty bigot. Ruby makes an unforgiveable mistake. The Kindreds’ good friends, the Junketts – the only other Black family nearby – are terrorized by a white police deputy. President Eisenhower has just signed the Civil Rights Act, and repercussions bubble forth. Realizing he can no longer shelter his daughters as he’d prefer, Heron reveals the personal and ancestral tragedies that spurred his move from Delaware to the isolated north,
a supposedly safer place. Cinthy and Ezra must decide how to react to it all.
Promise holds nothing back in terms of circumstance, language, and emotion, creating a hard-hitting read that compels with its fully fleshed-out characters: Black and white, old and young. Griffiths’ background as a multi-published poet shows in many quote-worthy lines (“To claim herself was the sweetest and most dangerous theft”), and the ending, full of sadness and triumph, sings like an invocation. An assured debut about generational trauma, finding home, and the importance of nourishing joy.
Sarah Johnson
HULA
Jasmin ‘Iolani Hakes, HarperVia, 2023, $32.00, hb, 400pp, 9780063276987
Hakes reflects the complex cultural and political changes in Hawai’i during the 20th century through the lives of three generations of Naupaka women: matriarch Hulali, troubled hula champion Laka, and Laka’s daughter Hi’i, who isn’t sure where she belongs but who loves her island and its stories. The unifying experience for all three is the beautiful tradition of hula, a combination of dance, religious chant, and storytelling that is deeply misunderstood by non-native observers. Each character uses her immersion in hula study and traditions to help define her own complex relationship to the island and its people.
“Some families, they get that curse that circles down the drain . . . Different generations, same flight patterns.” All three women struggle to balance the comfort of belonging to a community that is small and getting smaller with each generation, and a desire to be true to their own sense of what is best for the island. To communicate the indigenous outlook, much of the narrative is told in the third-person point of view, connecting the reader to the people the three characters live among and draw their sense of identity from.
It’s a choice that could be confusing for some readers, along with the way the story jumps back and forth in time from the 1940s to the 1990s, but the overall effect creates a huge emotional impact. Hakes skillfully switches between Hawai’ian pidgin English and a more standard-English style depending on whose thoughts she’s expressing; her use of indigenous voices includes the reader, creating a sense of intimacy that is supported by her vivid descriptions of island landscapes. Memorable diction such as the term “interruptors” to describe the haole (non-native) tourists
reminds the reader that the novel’s characters are dealing with personal issues that also reflect the long history of Western exploitation of the island’s people and resources.
Kristen McDermott
HOTEL CUBA
Aaron Hamburger, Harper Perennial, 2023, $16.99, pb, 400pp, 9780063221444
Aaron Hamburger’s novel is rich in character, plot, and setting. Its basic ingredient is a detailed exploration of a young woman’s psychological, religious, and social development. The novel is leavened with great sensory details about immigrants’ experience in a vibrant Cuba, an overwhelming New York City, and an opportunity-oriented Detroit. The novel also adds irresistible dollops of wry feminine humor.
Hotel Cuba is the saga of sisters Pearl and Frieda, who flee from a Russian shtetl in 1922 on a ship bound for the United States and a new life of religious safety and financial opportunity. Because the States will not admit Jewish refugees, their ship ends up in Havana. The girls find refuge with a married couple of Jewish hat makers. Frieda, the pretty baby of the family, pines for her lover who has already made it to America. Pearl, a talented seamstress and budding clothing designer, is determined to earn enough money to smuggle them across the water.
Their adventures in this pursuit make up most of the narrative and are enlivened by the various characters they meet—Mrs. Friedman, the ailing wife of an optician, who bilks Pearl of her smuggling money; Rabbi Singer, whose motivation in helping is suspicious; and Alexander, a charming Jewish GermanAmerican expatriate who tries to convince Pearl to stay in Havana and enjoy a good life with him.
Once the sisters make it to New York City, their adventures continue while they pursue a complicated life as poor immigrants with limited English skills and formal education. Hamburger shows a deft hand in painting the details of their struggles, which are offset by traditional comforts of food, family, and prayer. The novel ends in Detroit where both sisters find surprising but well-plotted rewards. The reader can close this book with a satisfied smile!
Joanne Vickers
SIMLA MIST
Liz Harris, Heywood Press, 2023, £8.99/$11.99, pb, 354pp, 9781913687267
In a mansion in Calcutta in 1908, a pretty young Indian girl, Binita, is getting married to Frederick Hunt, a British Civil Service officer. Only his best friend, Wilfred Chatsworth, stands beside him. The bride’s family and primarily other Indian guests are unusually silent, showing their disapproval.
In 1932, best friends Lilian Hunt and Daisy Chatsworth are in Simla, the summer capital of British India. They are there, from Delhi,
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with their parents and looking forward to a glorious summer. Ambitious Frederick Hunt wishes Lilian to marry Eric Stanford, the son of his superior. Eric is drawn more to Daisy, but his father disapproves of their friendship for unknown reasons. However, Lilian plays Cupid to help Daisy win the man she loves. Meanwhile, Frederick is threatened by a mysterious person, and the mystery of his past unravels.
While this is the fourth book in Liz Harris’s The Colonials series, it can be read as a standalone. The settings are superbly presented to transport readers to Shimla (formerly Simla). This is undoubtedly due to the extensive research and Harris’ “magical trip to India,” with its views of the surrounding Himalayan mountains and mist-covered valleys. Although the multi-character plot has the feel of a soap opera, this is an appealing historical romance. Lives of the British in the Shimla hills unfold nicely with all their opulent norms. The love triangle and mystery grab our attention. Much of the story takes place in 1932 and in Simla, rather than Delhi, and therefore the complexities of the Indian Independence Movement only get a passing reference in drawing-room conversations. An interesting holiday read.
Waheed Rabbani
HOTEL LAGUNA
Nicola Harrison, St. Martin’s, 2023, $29.00/£24.99, hb, 288pp, 9781250277381
Hazel Francis is a heroine for any woman who has been told, “Well, no, you can’t do that.” She’s an intrepid soul whose headlong sense of adventure leads her to her first sexual encounter with a boyhood friend, who now assumes they will marry. He leaves for war, she writes him a Dear John letter, he is killed, and the sense of being responsible (another thing many women will empathize with) haunts her.
The war offers a chance to flee Kansas to do meaningful work in California. In Los Angeles, Hazel builds airplanes and regains a sense of self, until the war ends and all the women are shooed home to have babies and keep house, the jobs now belonging to the men who return. Rootless, jobless, and penniless, she lands in the artists’ colony of Laguna Beach, with work as assistant and model to a crusty artist with a long-ago death on his conscience.
With engaging characters and a romance to complicate things, Hotel Laguna is a spirited tale of a woman who insists on being her own person without putting overly 21st-century ideas in a mid-20th-century head. A missing painting and a Hollywood starlet fallen out of favor add mystery to the mix. The first-person prose is skillful and the dialog deft. A reader who enjoys a well-drawn sense of place will appreciate settings like the Laguna Beach art scene of the late Forties and the wartime aircraft plants where women built the planes men would fly, until being told they were no longer needed.
Amanda Cockrell
THE HOUSEKEEPERS
Alex Hay, Graydon House, 2023, $30.00, hb, 386pp, 9781525805004 / Headline Review, 2023, £16.99, hb, 416pp, 9781472299338
Only a few weeks after the death of her father, Miss de Vries nonetheless decides to hold an elaborate costume ball in her mansion on Park Lane in London. The objective—to show off her wealth in order to negotiate marriage with a suitable lord and his family. The recently dismissed housekeeper Mrs. King has other plans for the ball: with the help of current and former staff, she will orchestrate a heist that completely cleans out the premises right under the noses of the partygoers.
Hay’s debut novel has all the trappings of a good heist tale—detailed and complicated planning with unexpected obstacles along the way—that keep readers in the thick of it while they wonder: can the thieves really pull this off?
Set in June 1905, the novel also captures the setting and times: the tension between nouveaux riche and landed gentry, the limited opportunities for the working class, particularly women, the machinations of those who operate on the other side of the law. Plotting is fast-paced and gripping, the plan for the heist deliciously elaborate. A few tangential side plots are not particularly necessary and therefore distract. But on the whole, The Housekeepers is a bang-up buster. And a word to the wise lord and lady of the house. As one character notes: “Never underestimate the kitchen girls. They’ve got brains same as anyone. They see everyone coming and going.” Indeed.
K. M. Sandrick
EVERGREEN
Naomi Hirahara, Soho Crime, 2023, $27.95, hb, 312pp, 9781641293594
The intrepid hero of Clark and Division returns to post-WWII Los Angeles with her parents and new husband only to discover their hometown full of new faces and dangerous associations in Naomi Hirahara’s Evergreen.
In 1946 Los Angeles, Aki Nakasone (nee Ito) and her parents have returned home to California after four years away. Aki soon lands a job as a nurse’s aide at the local Japanese Hospital and searches for a home for her parents and husband Art, still awaiting Army discharge. Though the war is over, nothing in Los Angeles is the same for Aki and thousands of others. Hirahara masters the time jump by musing “while we were gone, our competitors took over our farming operations and produce markets… while we were gone, thieves plundered our storage units…” and captures the historic reality of the changing makeup of “Little Tokyo” where thousands of Black defense workers from the South moved into the vacant buildings. Just as Aki is reunited with Art and living comfortably with him and her parents in a new home, their bliss is cut short when Art’s army friend and best man, Babe Watanabe, comes around. Aki suspects that Babe’s father may be a victim of domestic
abuse at the hands of his son after showing up at the hospital with bruises he refuses to explain. Soon, the old man returns to the hospital with a fatal gunshot wound, Babe disappears, and strange men in threadbare police uniforms knock on the Nakasones’ door asking for Babe’s whereabouts. Aki’s natural curiosity leads her to the heights of City Hall and the lows of impoverished Japanese refugee camps to find the truth.
Evergreen is a brilliant sophomore outing that brings back old faces and introduces new ones for a sharply plotted mystery and a historically rich story.
Peggy Kurkowski
THE BALLROOM GIRLS
Jenny Holmes, Penguin, 2023, £7.99, pb, 400pp, 9781529176537
Set in Blackpool during the summer of 1942 we follow three friends – Sylvia, Pearl and Joy –as they learn, or in Sylvia’s case teach, dance… and the relationships that subsequently unfold with their dance partners. A subplot which explores the terrors of being a gay couple in this era is particularly evocative and frightening. Blackpool itself is almost another character in the story, and so descriptive is the writing that the reader is on the beach with the tired donkeys, strolling along its promenade, at the arcades, amidst the elephants from the circus who were kept beneath the tower presumably to protect them from the bombs. There are some small signs the war is on: a couple of inconvenient air raids; the GIs in the background who’re also to be found at dance classes; an Italian immigrant sent off to a camp; and the ever-present fear of being called up – but otherwise it doesn’t much impinge on the story.
Jenny Holmes has cornered the World War Two historical fiction market in writing about plucky friends living through the war but somehow remaining upbeat through all their trials and tribulations. The descriptions of dance, including the differences between Standard and Latin, are engaging, and this story should appeal to fans of Strictly Come Dancing as much as fans of historical fiction set in the Second World War.
V. E. H. Masters
FLATLANDS
Sue Hubbard, Pushkin, 2023, £16.99, hb, 528pp, 9781911590743 / Pushkin, 2023, $16.95, pb, 272pp, 9781911590842
1939: World War II has broken out, and twelve-year-old Freda is evacuated from her working-class East End home to the Flatlands, the Wash in East Anglia. Her host family are the Willocks, living on the edge of wild, windswept marsh and sea and eking a hand-to-mouth existence from the land. They force Freda to work for them and are abusive. Wandering alone, Freda meets Philip Rhayader, a conscientious objector who has had fled Oxford University and lives in an abandoned lighthouse. The young man is very different from her, a middle-class student
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who had a nervous breakdown, partly brought on by a complicated love triangle.
Philip, a painter, and ornithologist, provides sanctuary for wintering birds, and when Freda rescues a goose shot by Mr Willocks, they try to nurse it back to health. Philips broadens Freda’s horizons as they sit in the lighthouse, a place of escape, reading poetry and listening to Chopin while having tea and toast. But war isn’t far away, and the Dunkirk evacuations loom. This causes a crisis for Freda and Philip.
The book was inspired by Paul Gallico’s children’s novella The Snow Goose. It featured the characters Philip and Fritha, and was written after Gallico visited his friend, the ornithologist Peter Scott, who lived in a deserted lighthouse on the Wash and created his first bird sanctuary there.
Flatlands is slowly paced to start with, and Philip and Freda don’t meet till halfway through, which seems disjointed. However, it is a poignant and beautifully written story of friendship amid the horror of war which vividly describes the natural world. You feel you are on this exposed, remote land with Philip, Freda and the birds.
Kate Pettigrew
THE QUEEN OF THE VALLEY
Lorena Hughes, Kensington, 2023, $16.95, pb, 352pp, 9781496736284
This rollicking tale set against the colorful background of Colombia has three principal narrators: a photographer, Lucas, and two nuns, Puri and Camila, one of whom is fake. They each have hidden links to cacao plantation owner Martin Sabater, who has mysteriously disappeared after a lavish fundraiser gala. When Martin’s hacienda is turned into a cholera hospital following a disastrous earthquake and ensuing epidemic, Puri is the most determined to find out what really happened to him.
Readers familiar with the author’s earlier title, The Spanish Daughter, will have an advantage in grasping the intertwined family history and back stories of the main individuals as the drama switches from the 1910s through to 1925. For others, it will take some time to get your head around the intricate family feuds and business deals, furtive disguises, thwarted love affairs, and secret babies. The elaborate plot also features some missing emeralds and other unexplained disappearances.
The writing style is quirky but exuberant and the imaginative or perilous situations this range of eccentric characters find themselves in all contribute to a most enjoyable, escapist melodrama.
Marina Maxwell
THE BLOOD OF OTHERS
Graham Hurley, Head of Zeus, 2023, £20.00, hb, 381pp, 9781801108478
The Blood of Others recounts the 1942 Dieppe landings from opposing perspectives. From the Allied side, George Hogan, a Canadian journalist under the wing of Lord Beaverbrook,
starts to discover the plans for Dieppe through his Canadian armed forces contacts and his romantic connection with a member of Mountbatten’s combined operations group. The Axis perspective is provided by Abwehr officer Wilhelm Schultz and his plans to lure the Allies into an assault on the heavily fortified town of Dieppe. For each of the protagonists Hurley provides a rich background setting. Hogan, starting out as a talented young reporter in Canada, moves to the East End of London and establishes himself with the Daily Express. Simultaneously, Schultz is moving in occupied Paris society as an intelligence officer plotting and scheming against the Allies and his rival S.S. organisation.
The narrative maintains a steady pace throughout, culminating in the description of the brutal beach engagement and reactions in the immediate aftermath. I wondered initially how the two characters related to each other but was drawn in as the book progressed and the storylines converged. It’s a compelling retelling of an Allied disaster and makes for a gripping read.
Sean Churchfield
TO DIE BEAUTIFUL (US) / THE GIRL WITH THE RED HAIR (UK)
Buzzy Jackson, Dutton, 2023, $28.00, hb, 409pp, 9780593187210 / Michael Joseph, 2023, £18.99, hb, 464pp, 9780241553060
This poignant and powerful novel is based on the true story of Hannie (Jannetje) Schaft (1920-1945). A somewhat shy and reserved University of Amsterdam student, Hannie finds herself increasingly revolted by the conditions imposed on her country by the German invaders. Many of her contemporaries and student friends are Jewish, and she begins to view the occupation’s restrictions and atrocities firsthand.
Initially somewhat ambivalent, she finds herself drawn into that shadowy and dangerous world known as “the resistance.” Forced to abandon her university career because she will not sign a declaration of allegiance to the Germans, she embarks on a very dangerous path. The questions of who to trust and what can actually be physically accomplished, and at what personal cost, begin to consume her very being. How might a young single woman help defeat the powerful occupiers while, at the same time, spiriting away these marked for transportation to the overcrowded concentration camps?
Donning various disguises, she becomes a thorn in the side of the invaders by partaking in assassinations and other violent acts of defiance. Targeted by the Germans as a provocateur (and identified as the “Girl with Red Hair”) that had to be caught, her life descends into adventures that define her inner strength and foreshadow her country’s growing resistance.
At its heart, this is a novel of strength and loyalty that graphically demonstrates how
committed single individuals can indeed impact much larger configurations.
Jon G. Bradley
THE WOMAN IN THE CASTELLO
Kelsey James, Kensington/John A. Scognamiglio, 2023, $16.95/£15.99, pb, 304pp, 9781496742919
Rome, 1965. When Cinecittà Studios cancels the movie Silvia Whitford has been hired for, she seeks out her reclusive, estranged aunt Gabriella in the village of Castello del Lago in a last-ditch attempt to find financial help. She is shocked by Gabriella’s terse rundown of her past acting career, but since her aunt has agreed to hype her castle to a group of movie executives looking for a horror movie venue, Silvia may yet find work. Gabriella’s brooding medieval castle-home with its scuffed terra-cotta flooring, damp peeling walls, meandering rooms, and faded rugs and tapestries is the perfect setting. Sitting high above a steep walled garden of strangling vines and shrubs, the opaque stillness of the vivid turquoise volcanic crater lake beckons silently. The contract is drawn up, Silvia signs on as lead, and Gabriella disappears without explanation.
As is often the case with gothic mysteries, the castle and lake are compelling characters in their own right. The movie dialogue is weak, although that is probably on point for a B-rated 1960s horror. I was left with a sense of unfinished business from a few loose ends, and despite Silvia’s endearing attributes as mother and daughter, I couldn’t see her as a lead actress. That said, the first part of the book is grippingly sinister and dark, fluidly written with a creepy foreboding hanging over castle, lake, and village, all eerily quiet, unwelcoming and preternaturally atmospheric. The cobblestone paths, narrow shadowed alleyways, and scars of war visible in random bullet holes give the village a feeling of life on hold, a place not comfortable with its history. James has pitched her novel straight into the Sixties with twotone op-art dresses, large framed glasses, and era-sensitive attitudes towards birth out of wedlock. An enjoyable mystery with a number of unexpected twists.
Fiona Alison
THE BLACK CRESCENT
Jane Johnson, Apollo, 2023, £20.00, hb, 392pp, 9781804546215
Set in 1950s Morocco, amid growing resistance to French rule, The Black Crescent is a novel about family ties, societal change and contrast between traditional village and city life, as well as being a political thriller with an appealing protagonist.
Hamou, a young man from a Berber village, is a Casablanca policeman caught between cultures and loyalties at a time when the secret insurgent group, The Black Crescent, is engaged in violent resistance to the colonial government. Peaceful demonstration against
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the regime brings dire consequences, and Hamou grows conflicted, fearful and angry.
This is a vivid novel with a strongly defined political background, fascinating characters, and a hero whose life comes undone when he cannot be complicit with the French police. A shocking incident places Hamou in serious danger. Through good fortune and a previous encounter he becomes a Hakam, an official solving community problems, but he is still in jeopardy.
Johnson is expert in the history, politics and traditional culture of Morocco. She tells Hamou’s story beautifully and with empathy. Hamou won this reader’s heart. There are terrifying scenes when he falls foul of the authorities but also endearing, humourous episodes when he adopts a cat and falls dangerously in love. The author draws out the contrast between Western society and an older society where one might tie a knot in wild broom to make a wish, become amused by a mother’s list of marriageable women for her son and appreciate the traditional notion of a zouhry, the finder of treasure. Like his cat, he has many encounters with death and survives. This is an important novel containing a great story with a satisfactory conclusion.
The Black Crescent transports the reader to the scents and sounds of the Medina, to Berber traditions and a deeper understanding of imperialism and conflict. It will linger in one’s thoughts long after the final page. Highly recommended.
Carol McGrath
GOOD FOR A SINGLE JOURNEY
Helen Joyce, Amsterdam Publishers, 2023, $19.95, pb, 348pp, 9789493276611
Good for a Single Journey is the novelization of a true story: that of the author’s family. From her great-grandparents down the years to her own presence, Helen Joyce weaves an intriguing tapestry. Their story begins as World War I is ending when her great-grandparents fled Galicia to escape the Russian pogroms, winding up in Vienna. All is peaceful for a time, but their children don’t want to follow in their old ways, strictly following Orthodox Jewish rules. But after much anger and compromise on both sides, a new way of living is hammered out.
The 1930s sees the rise of Hitler and fascism, and once again the family is torn between those who don’t want to leave their homes – not even to move to Israel – and those of their children, who desperately urge them to emigrate.
This section is particularly compelling; I kept wanting to scream at the characters, “Get out of Hitler’s path and go to Israel!” Some of the family survives World War II; some do not.
Then we follow the family as they settle into a new life in the new state of Israel. And as the family continues to adjust to yet another new land, and continues to grow…
Good for a Single Journey is a fascinating, compelling saga of a real-life family. None of them are notable save to their family, but in the skilled pen of Helen Joyce, they become notable to the reader. This is a story of faith and hope, of despair and loss. I heartily recommend this book!
India Edghill
BESSIE
Linda Kass, She Writes Press, 2023, $17.95, pb, 240pp, 9781647425401
This fictionalized history closely follows Bess Myerson’s life from age twelve in 1936 through her Miss America victory in 1945, followed a year later by a grand performance at Carnegie Hall. She is tall, thin, and reclusive in her youth, and top grades at school and superb playing of the piano become her only comforts. The daughter of poor and demanding Russian Jewish immigrants cramped into a small apartment in the Bronx, she must share a bedroom with two sisters until they leave for marriage.
Disdain of independent young women and hatred of Jews creep in everywhere. Bess refuses urgent advice to change her last name in beauty contests and thereby mask that she is Jewish. She carries her religion and its people proudly as not only the first Jewish Miss America but as national spokesperson for the Anti-Defamation League. She deeply feels the agonies of WWII, visits war-wounded young soldiers, and includes them in some of her appearances. She notices and is disturbed that there are no beauty contestants of color. Yet at times, she believes only her stunning face and figure matter in the world.
Kass draws on many biographical and historical sources to create this enthralling portrait of a courageous history-maker. Every scene brings to life the people around her, whether family members and schoolmates, pageant judges and other contestants, or leering sponsors. The crowded and hot Atlantic City venues, a summer camp in Vermont, and other settings are well done. Bess’s joy in and deep connection to music and playing her instruments come through. An epilogue summarizes Bess’s later television appearances, political positions, and multiple marriages. Readers who appreciate this work on her early years will want a similarly rich treatment of her later years. Recommended.
G. J. Berger
DEATH OF A LESSER GOD
Vaseem Khan, Hodder & Stoughton, 2023, £16.99/$26.99, hb, 355pp, 9781399707602
This is the fourth in Khan’s Malabar House
series, following the career of the fictional Persis Wadia, the first female police inspector in postindependence India. The story follows a course familiar from many other police procedurals; an honest and conscientious police officer is eager to bring criminals to justice and protect the innocent only to find that some of his/ her superiors, professional and political, are complicit in the crimes being investigated and become the investigator’s most dangerous enemies.
The distinctive feature of Khan’s series is the setting. India in 1950 still lives in the shadow of the struggle for independence and the internecine violence of Partition. Can the former colonial masters, the ‘lesser gods’ of the title, expect justice in the successor state?
Persis fights for justice for a ‘lesser god’, James Whitby, sentenced to death on flimsy evidence for murdering an Indian lawyer. Ultimately, of course, she is vindicated, but not before a series of adventures in Bombay, Calcutta and elsewhere, in which she comes close to losing her own life. As she says ‘only blind luck prevented a tragedy’. I suspect that Khan left his heroine in such a tight corner that only a near-miracle could save her, which is what happens.
I think this is cheating, but this a good police procedural with a complex plot and an unusual setting.
Edward James
THE GLASS CHÂTEAU
Stephen P. Kiernan, William Morrow, 2023, $30.00, hb, 384pp, 9780063227316
After the end of World War II, as France celebrates and begins to recover, a Frenchman named Asher grieves in the seaside town where he’s lived all his life. Asher has lost much in the war, including his sense of peace and of morality, and he impulsively sets off walking across the country, seeking refuge, forgiveness, and a place where he can begin to rebuild his life. He finds such a place in Le Château Guerin, where others have also come for solace. At the château, Asher and other men carrying wartime secrets and loss find food, compassion, and hard work to strengthen both body and mind, creating stained glass windows for France’s cathedrals to replace those lost during the war. But the château is not just a sanctuary. It is a place to grow, and its residents must learn to trust before they can begin to heal.
Inspired by the artwork of Marc Chagall, particularly his innovations in stained glass later in life, The Glass Château is a beautiful novel about recovery, both of a landscape and a
A publication of the Historical Novel Society | www.historicalnovelsociety.org 41
people ravaged by war. Kiernan writes so vividly that readers can see the rich colors of the glass, feel the heat of the kilns, and taste the produce of a newly replanted French countryside. The characters are sympathetically wrought as they each struggle with their own frailty, anger, and regret, but the reader can see how they strengthen one another through their work. The fragility of the glass cradled in the hands of the artists, sensitive to the slightest tremor from outside, is a beautiful metaphor for the fragility of emotion in men and women who are grieving and healing. A marvelous and moving book.
Jessica Brockmole
HAMLET’S CHILDREN
Richard Kluger, Scarlet Tanager Books, 2023, $21.00, pb, 465pp, 9781734531367
Recent attention to Danish life has focused on hygge, the coziness that’s said to define Denmark’s culture. Historian and novelist Richard Kluger proposes instead that, as Hitler came to power, the Danes embodied a canny patience intended to save their nation over the long run.
Kluger spends the first quarter of Hamlet’s Children introducing an American nearorphan, Terence, to his formidable grandfather, as well as lively younger relatives, in a coastal town about 50 km from Copenhagen and with a view across the strait to Sweden. The book creeps steadily for a long time before it erupts in the turmoil and terror of Nazi occupation. Nobody wants Terence to be a hero. They just want him to listen to his family and try, as much as his American personality will allow him, to act like a sensible Dane. As Denmark yields, Terence listens to a painful argument between his grandfather, Gideon, and an astute diplomat friend of the family, Gus, who tells Terence, “You’ve just had a stark lesson, young man, in what it’s like to live in a proud but powerless country in a dog-eat-dog world—a fate that I hope your America the Beautiful never has to suffer.”
It’s soon clear that Germany will continue to devour Europe and beyond unless America joins the war. Terence finally realizes he has “imperceptibly become more Danish than American … all of us were victims.” Of course, this becomes the point at which he seeks some way for his Danish community to regain self-respect, and the remaining two-thirds of the book displays a lively coming-of-age challenge. Trauma alert: Kluger doesn’t avoid violence. But he makes it worth enduring with the Danes, and at least seeing them emerge from the shadows.
Beth Kanell
8 LIVES OF A CENTURYOLD TRICKSTER
Mirinae Lee, Harper, 2023, $30.00, hb, 304pp, 9780063240421 / Virago, 2023, £16.99, hb, 304pp, 9780349016740
Embittered by her divorce, housewife Lee Sae-ri seeks distraction by helping the residents
at the Seoul elder hospice she works at compose their obituaries. In the process she meets “Mook Miran,” a woman who claims to be a centenarian and promises an epic tale of her life under Japanese, North Korean, and finally South Korean rule. She describes herself initially in eight words: “Slave, Escape-artist. Murder. Terrorist. Spy. Lover. And Mother.”
What follows is an extraordinary literary experience: eight separate but interconnected fictional stories explain the identity of the mysterious and charismatic character that Mirinae Lee has created out of the real life memories of her great-aunt, one of the oldest women to escape alone from North Korea. “Miran” takes on a number of identities in the course of the narrative, but her fierce and unsentimental voice remains the same throughout her childhood escape from an abusive father, her capture by the Japanese, her exploitation by the Americans, and her training as a spy in the North Korean Secret Service.
The narrative requires careful attention: points of view shift from one story to the next and include not only Miran’s alternate identities, but also her husband, daughter, and other characters, and the reader usually has to get several pages into each section before figuring out who is speaking. The action is harrowing at times, with descriptions of sexual and many other kinds of violence, but 8 Lives is ultimately a story of survival, achieving intense beauty (violence and joy alike are poetically rendered), as well as a glimpse into the isolated culture of post-1950s North Korea. Fans of Pachinko will embrace this unusual but unforgettable story.
Kristen McDermott
THE WIDE WORLD
Pierre Lemaitre (trans. Frank Wynne), Tinder Press, 2023, £25.00, hb, 506pp, 9781472292100 / Little, Brown, 2023, $29.00, hb, 512pp, 9781472292100
The French call this type of book a roman fleuve, and it certainly is, a great broad river of a book spreading wide and flowing through multiple channels, and this is only volume one of a quartet, The Glorious Years, which will take the saga through the 30 years following WW2.
The book follows the fortunes of the Pelletier family. The pater familias is Louis, the well-todo owner of a soap factory in post-war Beirut (1948). The youngest son, Etienne, follows his legionnaire lover to Saigon, where he is drawn into the intrigues and atrocities of the IndoChina war. The other three children, Jean,
Francois and Helene, migrate to Paris for their separate careers.
The story is narrated in a light, almost satirical style which hides an increasingly grim tale. Everything is deeply unfair. The guilty go unpunished of even the most terrible crimes, and the corrupt prosper. Of course, retribution may come later in the quartet, but Englishlanguage readers will have to wait. The richness of the work lies in its characterisation of the Pelletier family. They may not be loveable characters but the reader cannot but share their joys, frustrations, guilts and fears, their loves and hatreds and their loss. It will be a challenging book, but I hope to read the next volume.
Edward James
IT HAPPENED ONE FIGHT
Maureen Lee Lenker, Sourcebooks Casablanca, 2023, $16.99, pb, 384pp, 9781728267883
Joan Davis and Dash Howard are 1930s America’s favorite on-screen couple, starring together in a string of romantic screwball comedies. But when the cameras are off, the scripted romance disappears, and the fights begin. Dash thinks Joan is an icy perfectionist, putting career over relationships. And Joan thinks Dash is a playboy and carouser, who disrupts the set with constant pranks. When one of his practical jokes goes wrong and the two find that they’ve been accidentally—and legally—married during a film wedding, the studio packs the two and their latest project off to Reno to wait out the six-week residency requirement for a quick Nevada divorce. But the getaway, far from the spotlight of public attention and the Hollywood gossip machine, lets Joan and Dash drop their studio-created personas. For the first time in years, they finally get to know one another and wonder if their on-camera chemistry might be real.
From the title to the absurdity of the inciting incident to the reluctant falling-in-love, Lenker’s debut pays delightful homage to the 1930s screwball comedy. But It Happened One Fight also adds in a good splash of Hollywood history as the characters confront sexism in the film industry, the restrictions of the studio system, and the power of gossip columnists in both creating and destroying stars. Joan and Dash are strong characters, easily recognizable and believable as products of the studio system. I couldn’t help but picture Dash with the suaveness and charisma of William Powell, and Joan with the haughty poise of Bette Davis. The romance builds believably as they learn to trust one another with their real
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selves but has just enough mishaps to keep the narrative rolling. Fun from beginning to end!
Jessica Brockmole
THE LOST DAUGHTERS OF UKRAINE
Erin Litteken, Boldwood Books, 2023, £12.99/$17.99, pb, 420pp, 9781804157725
Through the late 1940s and into the 1950s, while much of Europe was picking itself up and dusting itself down, Ukraine continued to suffer a relentless succession of violent incursions. Both German and Russian invaders exploited the situation, inflicting major atrocities and mass deprivation on the Ukrainian population. While many of us in the West assumed “war” was over, for Ukraine it was not and, of course, still is not.
Based on the history of the writer’s family, this novel focuses on the experiences of three girls, whose ages range from 12 to 17, and those who loved them. We follow the girls and their family members, forced to abandon their homes, ambitions, and livelihoods, in groups or individually as they make an epic trek across the war-ravaged, chaotic countries which border their own.
Always searching for their lost ones, always at the mercy of occupying regimes, militias, and corrupted refugees, often narrowly avoiding death, they persist. Starved, injured, sick and desperate, even through the horrors and rubble of the bombing of Dresden, the journey and the searching continue.
Time passes. “peace” is declared, and official postwar efforts to reunite refugees begin to bear fruit. Lists are scrutinised. Burials are checked and the lost are painstakingly accounted for. There are astonishing and heartening reunions and some sad “closures”. Eventually, the reunited family members have difficult decisions to make, regarding emigration to distant, safe, welcoming countries.
This is a vivid, heartfelt, and informative piece of work, ably constructed, convincingly researched, and nicely written. If, like me, some of its readers are not as well-informed as they could be regarding Ukraine’s recent history, The Lost Daughters of Ukraine will trigger a greater and well-deserved interest in it.
Julia Stoneham
THE AMERICAN WIFE
Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger, Bookouture, 2023, $10.99/£8.99, pb, 330pp, 9781803147369
The American Wife is the tumultuous tale of Kitty Larsson, the privileged daughter of an American senator and aspiring foreign service worker in the late 1930s. Her whirlwind romance with Dr. Edgar Ragatz, a wealthy Austrian bureaucrat, propels her to Vienna on the eve of the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, testing her loyalties to both her husband and friends.
Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger is an accomplished writer who excels at creating nuanced, likeable
characters. Kitty is at once worldly and sheltered, spoiled yet aware of her privilege and eager to help to others as a result. The plot is fast-paced and not overburdened by extraneous details. Unfortunately, the pace of the novel renders many of the relationships somewhat superficial. Kitty impulsively plunges headlong into a relationship with Edgar based on one magical night; while not an unlikely scenario, their interactions have little depth beyond signaling to Kitty that Edgar may not be the person she thinks he is. It comes as no surprise that after their hasty marriage, he is basically a stranger. Similarly, Kitty’s relationship with “The Gang,” a motley group of social outcasts, does not have much substance. She becomes deeply invested in helping them flee the Nazis, and yet her interactions with them are limited. Despite this drawback, Kitty’s willingness to take risks to save both friends and strangers alike makes her a true heroine and keeps the reader engaged.
The American Wife is a welcome entry to the crowded field of World War II fiction and will appeal to readers who love a good plot filled with action, suspense, and mystery.
Caroline D. Wilson
LETTERS FROM MY SISTER
Valerie Fraser Luesse, Revell, 2023, $16.99, pb, 352pp, 9780800741600
With appealing characters and lush period description, this is an enjoyable story of family and a convincing portrait of early 20th-century Alabama. Callie Bullock is the somewhat unconventional daughter of a prominent farming family. Callie’s more at home up a tree or out in the fields with her father than drinking tea with other young ladies. She’s close to her sister Emmy who is engaged to marry Knox Montgomery, an idealistic lawyer. But Knox’s twin brother Ryder is a very different man. A known predator, when he targets Lily, the beautiful granddaughter of the Bullock’s Black housekeeper, Callie, Emmy, and their mother are determined to keep the girl safe.
The story that unfolds is at times tragic and moving. An accident causes Callie to experience memory loss, and other hardships and losses trouble the family. Faith is an important part of life for the white characters, but Callie’s mother, particularly, is also open to the spiritualism of Lily’s great-grandmother, and the connection between the two families— Black and white—in a time of segregation and racial tension makes for interesting reading. Letters from My Sister covers some hard ground: grief, sexual assault, racism and murder, but with sensitivity. Well-developed primary and secondary characters, a dash of humor, and a gentle romance for Callie, round out this engaging tale.
Kate Braithwaite
THE BURNING BRIDE
Trish MacEnulty, Prism Light Press, 2022, $17.99, pb, 396pp, 9781737575153
Stories of two different but equally appealing women intertwine in MacEnulty’s engaging historical novel, set in Manhattan and St. Augustine, Florida in 1914. Louisa Delafield, a mother, newspaper columnist, and part-time detective, travels to Florida to report on the society wedding of Daphne Griffin to a handsome Frenchman. Daphne’s father, suspicious of the Frenchman’s motives and character, asks Louisa to learn what she can and report back. In the meantime, Louisa’s assistant, Ellen Malloy, remains in New York where she finds herself drawn into the dangerous activities of activists whose methods range from essay writing to explosives.
Several historical figures make cameo appearances, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. The chapters alternate between Louisa’s point of view and Ellen’s, but their two seemingly separate tales come together in the dramatic conclusion to the novel, a conclusion involving stolen gems, an alligator-ridden island, and a conflagration.
MacEnulty excels in several areas. She writes for those readers familiar with her Delafield and Malloy Investigations series, and those who are not. Her occasional references to her earlier books do not interfere with the smooth narrative, and she leaves a few loose threads at the end to entice readers toward her next installment. Also, fans of historical fiction will admire MacEnulty’s treatment of the historical record. Although she imagines most of her characters, she places them in the context of class warfare, as activists demonstrate for better working conditions and wages. Readers may also welcome her treatment of love entanglements, with women loving men, women loving women, and men loving men. Although some readers may question whether these relationships fit the era, more will find MacEnulty’s treatment a convincing portrayal of what might have been hidden at the time. Highly recommended.
Marlie Wasserman
THE GRACES
Siobhan MacGowan, Welbeck, 2023, £14.99, hb, 388pp, 9781787397330
1918. Mount St Kilian Abbey, Dublin. Brother Thomas is visited by Father Sheridan, who has come to speak to him about Rosaleen Moore, revered at the abbey as “the Rose”. Father Sheridan explains that he had heard Rosaleen’s dying confession three years earlier.
Father Sheridan then proceeds to relate the confession of Rosaleen as if it is Rosaleen speaking. She tells how she had to leave her family in Clare because she was ostracised for ‘seeing’, for having been touched by the Graces. She goes to live with her Aunt Ellen in a guest house in Dublin and is attracted to Lorcan Mulhern, a resident. He invites her to attend a meeting run by Mairéad Kinsella,
A publication of the Historical Novel Society | www.historicalnovelsociety.org 43
who is an ardent follower of Dr Franz Mesmer. Rosaleen finds herself being revered by the group, and she soon begins to believe in her own powers of faith healing, of mesmerism. Until, that is, the healing of a young girl goes tragically wrong.
Towards the end of her short life, Rosaleen regains her powers of ‘seeing’, and her final prophecy of the destruction of the city during Easter Week 1916 elevates her to the divine, one worthy of homage.
My main problem with this book is that Rosaleen’s story is told through the voice of her confessor. I found that I was totally disengaged from her; after all, she had been dead for three years. In addition, interspersed with her firstperson story are small sections telling of the actions of other characters, which neither Rosaleen nor the Father could possibly have known about.
The topics covered by this well-written book – mesmerism, faith, guilt, prejudice, sacrifice and love – could have made an exciting novel, but I just found that the method of telling through the voices of men who are not involved didn’t excite me at all.
Marilyn Pemberton
THE FORGOTTEN SHORE
Sarah Maine, Hodder & Stoughton, 2023, £18.99, hb, 355pp, 9781399717618
If you love Newfoundland you will love this book. If you don’t love Newfoundland, that is probably because you have never been there. If so, this book should encourage you to visit.
The book is structured as three parallel narratives; Scotland in 1940, Newfoundland in 1966, and Scotland and Newfoundland in 1980. The Newfoundland sections are the best, and I suspect that this is where Maine’s heart lies. Her father was a doctor in Newfoundland and Labrador in the 1970s and ´80s, so she witnessed the collapse of the fishing industry and of a centuries old way of life.
The Newfoundland narrative centres on a derelict middle-aged man, on the run from his life in Scotland, who finds redemption through his friendship with the doctor’s 11-year-old daughter. The Scottish narrative is a very different tale of a disputed inheritance and doubtful paternities – a game of who’s your father. Intriguing but not convincing.
Newfoundland is now not such a forgotten shore, but it is still a near empty island as big as Britain with a fringe of coastal villages dating back to the first European settlement. Maine gives us a vivid picture of an isolated and melancholy community at a crisis in its history.
Edward James
THE CONTINENTAL AFFAIR
Christine Mangan, Flatiron, 2023, $27.99, hb, 320pp, 9781250788481 / Bedford Square, 2023, £16.99, hb, 320pp, 9781915798046
Christine Mangan is masterful at creating alluring characters and atmosphere with a hint of the sinister, as done so well in Tangerine. She does not disappoint in her latest, The Continental Affair. Henri and Louise play a cat-and-
mouse game traveling by train and bus across Europe from Granada to Paris to Belgrade to Istanbul. Henri lives in Spain with family and is involved in their business of organized crime. He had escaped his life in Armenia when the interrogation tactics required of him as a gendarme were intolerable. Louise is running from her restrictive, suffocating life in London caring for her demanding invalid father. With so little money, survival is a concern, but still, she is compelled to abandon her old life immediately after her father’s death.
Henri’s family sends him to the Alhambra for a money parcel. At the same time, Louise is visiting the historic site because of its association with her dead mother. Henri waits in the shadows, the courier drops the parcel and walks away, but the money scatters. Before Henri can act, Louise, in an impulsive move, snatches up this much-needed windfall. The chase is on – his family’s money must be recovered – but his mission is complicated by his growing fascination for Louise. Opportunities arise for him to retrieve the money, but he waits and follows and the game goes on.
The structure of the novel is complex and requires close reading. Pivoting on a mysterious event in Belgrade, the narrative switches between two legs of the journey – before Belgrade and after. Also, the perspective switches between Henri and Louise as they travel from train stations to busses and taxis, hotels and restaurants, bars and cafes. Plot moves slowly, but Mangan will keep you hooked with the tension and interplay between Henri and Louise. This is a novel worthy of your time.
Janice Ottersberg
THE KEEPER OF HIDDEN BOOKS
Madeline Martin, Hanover Square, 2023, $30.00, hb, 416pp, 9781335005779
Zofia Nowak and her friends love to read, but in Warsaw in August 1939, reading is becoming a radical activity. With a Nazi invasion imminent, Zofia and her friends scramble to read as many Hitler-banned books as they can before they’re confiscated. When the inevitable invasion arrives, Zofia and her father hide banned books beneath the floorboards in their apartment, hoping to preserve them for a time when Poland might be free again. But when her father, a physician, is dragged off to prison along with so many of Warsaw’s intellectual elite and her best friend, Janina, is confined to the Jewish ghetto, Zofia realizes she must join the resistance against the Nazis.
As the Nazis seek to control the Polish people by controlling the ideas they have access to, Zofia and a few other librarians find stealthy ways to continue getting books into hands and education into minds. As the crackdown against the Jewish people intensifies, Zofia puts her new skills to work squirreling away not only banned books but also Jews she’s helped smuggle out of the ghetto.
Martin has penned a novel that is both
heartbreaking and timely. Through Zofia’s eyes, readers experience the agonizing separation of families at the hands of the Nazis and the anger that so many Poles had to tamp down in order to survive. Martin captures the fear that so many families must have felt as friends and neighbors disappeared and there was no way to know who might be next. And through it all, Zofia recognizes the hope and love her beloved stash of hidden books represents and understands that love is precisely why Hitler wanted the books stamped out. Because, as Zofia reflects, “Books inspired free thought and empathy, an overall understanding and acceptance of everyone.” Highly recommended.
Sarah Hendess
WHITE FOX
Owen Matthews, Doubleday, 2023, $28.00, hb, 283pp, 9780385543446 / Bantam Press, 2023, £18.99, hb, 304pp, 9781787634985
Former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1959 and lived and worked in Minsk until he returned to the U.S. in June 1962. The possibility that Oswald carried out his assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963 as a Soviet operative is at the center of this suspenseful historical thriller that convincingly demonstrates that nowhere is knowledge more dangerous than in the realms of the postStalinist KGB.
When disgraced agent Vasin is exiled to run a Soviet penal colony above the Arctic Circle and takes custody of a prisoner who knows about the hit on Kennedy, he soon finds himself on the frozen tundra, running for his life. The author has a knack for describing the hopeless, desolate land, where in “the deep blackness of the Arctic sky, green wisps of the northern lights flickered like cosmic ghosts.” His portraitures of cunning and ruthless KGB agents, jockeying for position among the most powerful, are chilling. Punchy dialogue and settings in frigid Soviet train stations, sparse hotels, a seedy brothel and worker dachas seem perfect for the chase.
The result is compelling storytelling that merges a thoughtful alternative explanation of a major historical event with fast-paced, immersive action in the shadowy and unforgiving world of Soviet espionage. White Fox is the third book in the author’s Black Sun Trilogy.
Brodie Curtis
DEATH ON THE RIO CHIQUITO
Susan McDuffie, Liafinn Press, 2023, $16.95, pb, 341pp, 9780999768280
By the river near the New Mexico village Pueblo of San Antonito, schoolteacher Emily Schwartz discovers a body. She recognizes Juan, the nineteen-year-old son of the alcalde of the Pueblo. Who would have killed him and why? Wanting to help solve the murder, Emily
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becomes more involved with the Pueblo than she had previously.
Susan McDuffie weaves in the customs and personalities of the Keres-speaking tribal community and the natural beauty of the Pueblo, set in a canyon amidst striking bluffs and mountains. Emily’s friendships develop, and she comes to rely on the tribal sheriff.
Emily meets the other two Anglos living in the village: the mysterious Mr. Shepherd, who takes her to Santa Fe on a date of sorts, and the anthropologist Professor Bateson, who’s off most of the time exploring remote ruins. As the investigation widens, Emily feels threatened—which doesn’t stop her from doing all she can to discover who murdered Juan and created a dangerous atmosphere in San Antonito.
These elements drive the mystery and build suspense and surprise. At first, the writing seems wordy, but Emily’s character, the environment and characters, and the plot keep our interest. By the end we not only care about the Pueblo villagers but are drawn into their worries about World War II. Many of the young men are off fighting, and New Mexico itself has a role in that terrible time. The tantalizing subtitle, “A New Mexico Homefront Mystery,” suggests sequels.
Jinny Webber
ALCHEMY OF A BLACKBIRD
Claire McMillan, Atria, 2023, $28.00, hb, 288pp, 9781668006559
Spanish surrealist artist Remedios Varo left Spain for Paris to escape the Spanish Civil War, then fled Paris for Mexico when the Nazis moved through France. As a young woman, she often supported the men in her life, creating forgeries or working as a commercial artist instead of focusing on her own creative artistry.
At an opportune moment, she is drawn to a Tarot deck. She learns to read the cards and does so, sometimes as a game with friends, sometimes as a way to uncover truths. Remedios’s dear friend, artist and writer Leonora Carrington, joins her in Mexico City. The two grow in their friendship, their understanding of the Tarot, and the spirituality of nature and the universe. Remedios finds her center and her art.
This is a character-driven novel, and Remedios is a fascinating study. The author has found a perfect structure for this amazing story. Remedios’s life is told in third person, until interrupted by an illustrated Tarot card. The message of the card relates to a person or other influence in her life, at which point the narration changes to that influence, in first person.
These first-person sections shift perspective and widen the world of the story, giving readers a second look at the time, place, people, and events. It is a masterful telling of a story, like being in an extraordinary house
and then looking out different windows with spectacular views.
This is a brilliant novel about a captivating yet lesser-known artist, and her growth as a painter and as a person. I recommend the print version; I read this on a small e-reader, and the Tarot illustrations were difficult to see.
Elizabeth Caulfield Felt
THE MURDER WHEEL
Tom Mead, Mysterious Press, 2023, $26.95, hb, 288pp, 9781613164099 / Head of Zeus, 2023, £20.00, hb, 320pp, 9781837932528
This novel, a follow-up to Death and the Conjuror (2022), follows the continuing adventures of retired professional magician Joseph Spector. Returning to help Scotland Yard investigate a baffling series of seemingly unconnected mysterious deaths, Spector re-enters the complex world of magic and illusion. Set in the late 1930s, the reader is immersed in Depression-era London with its own internal tensions and political intrigues.
A strange death at the top of a Ferris wheel, along with a corpse apparently appearing out of thin air in front of a packed auditorium, set the scene for this complex interwoven narrative. Peppered with a wide range of theatre-like characters, the reader enjoys a twisted road to an unexpected denouement.
Nothing seems real as Spector, with the able assistance of Yard Inspector George Flint and lawyer Edmund Ibbs, attempts to determine how these murders occurred. Equally challenging: Are they somehow connected, and what might underlie these heinous acts? Mead is not a straightforward storyteller. Rather, he attempts to engage the reader on a far more personal plane with interesting sidebars, diagrams, and even lists of participants. Further, his vivid descriptions of illusions (and the oft-secret illusionary world) offer the reader a rare glimpse into the hidden realm of magicians.
Jon G. Bradley
LOVE, HONOR, BETRAY
Mary Monroe, Dafina, 2023, $27.00, hb, 320pp, 9781496732644
Love, Honor, Betray is Mary Monroe’s third novel in her Lexington, Alabama series. This award-winning African-American author has penned a Depression-era story jammed packed with drama and suspense in a Southern town. It features a husband-wife pair, Hubert and Jessie, each hiding a secret lover from the other. Both their lovers are male. Hubert risks his jobs and his status as the son of a fiery preacher if the community finds out. Jessie risks her pristine reputation as an upstanding Christian woman.
The tension in each page is palpable. Hubert sneaks into a nearby town for trysts with his lover, praying that no one sees them together or recognizes him. He has told Jessie he is unable to consummate their marriage, and she is desperate for sexual release. Her lover is from their own small community, and every meeting is a threat to their secrecy. The
reader knows a crisis is coming, and yet clever plot twists hold it off time and again.
This story is filled with details from the economic disaster of the Depression in the South, the discrimination prevalent against Blacks, the easy availability of moonshine and hidden establishments as a chance to let loose and enjoy life, the importance of one’s stainless reputation, and the unending curiosity of friends and neighbors about each other’s activities. Diving into these details is a significant part of the pleasure of reading this book.
Lorelei R. Brush
UNDER THE JAVA MOON
Heather B. Moore, Shadow Mountain, 2023, $26.00, hb, 384pp, 9781639931538
“Each night as the moon rises, look up at it, and I’ll do the same. Thinking of you and the children. Under the Java Moon,” says Dutch Navy engineer George Vischer to his pregnant wife, Mary, before departing Java for service on a minesweeper. In 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Holland also declares war on Japan.
Despite extensive defensive preparations, and fierce land and sea battles, the Japanese capture the Netherlands East Indies. The Dutch islanders are sent to POW camps. Among them are the Vischers—Mary, her mother, and her children, little Rita and Georgie. There they must endure the hardships of imprisonment in the overcrowded camp and face starvation and disease. Mary gives birth to a baby boy and, with Rita’s help, does her best to keep her family alive. Meanwhile, George’s ship is bombed, and he and some fellow seamen float helplessly on a raft. In order to survive, they must reach an island and evade capture by the Japanese.
Moore wrote this gripping novel after extensive research and discussions with Mary Vischer, her grandson, and good friends. The real stories add realism and appeal to the narrative. Furthermore, the inclusion of chapter notes and a bibliography provides an opportunity to further explore the events of that theater of WWII. The harsh handling of the prisoners in the POW camp is told bluntly and, although well known, the inhumane treatment by the Japanese is disturbing. The novel includes a good overview of the Dutch arrival and colonization of Indonesia. Although there is mention of the permuda— the Indonesian rebels—at the end of WWII, the coverage of their four-year struggle is light. Interested readers will need to learn of Indonesia’s independence elsewhere.
Waheed Rabbani
THE LAST MASTERPIECE
Laura Morelli, William Morrow, 2023, $18.99, pb, 416pp, 9780063205987
In spring 1943, Eva and her brother Gerhard live at their grandmother’s house in Austria, while their father oversees the storage of various art treasures deep within the nearby
A publication of the Historical Novel Society | www.historicalnovelsociety.org 45
salt mines. Eva has been told that the Germans are saving the art from being stolen by the Allies. Across the ocean in America, Josie lives with her mother in New Haven, Connecticut. Then, Josie gets the chance to volunteer for the Women’s Army Corps and is sent overseas. She cannot, however, envision how she will play a part in thwarting Hitler’s scheme to requisition all the major artworks of Italy for his own.
As the story unfolds with the progression of WWII, German Eva and American Josie will each be dedicated to saving Italy’s most precious masterpieces. The plot races against time to see which artworks might be saved. But saved for whom? The story whisks the reader across Italy with rich descriptive language that brings the settings to life with characters so real you can feel their emotions, and scenes so raw that you’ll feel the horrors of war.
The novel is fascinating in telling a littleknown story about WWII and the Women’s Army Corps. Art lovers will delight in reading about the many Italian masterpieces intended for Hitler’s museum, but rescued by the Allies. If you have seen the movie The Monuments Men, this is the other half of the story. And although the novel starts off slow, the events gather the right pace as the chapters progress. A very good read.
Linda Harris Sittig
CAST A COLD EYE
Robbie Morrison, Macmillan, 2023, £16.99, hb, 480pp, 9781529054064
Ex-boxer ‘Gentleman’ Jimmy Dreghorn, battle-hardened from the First World War, gets his second outing as a murder Detective Inspector in 1930s Glasgow. The discovery of a body aboard a canal boat leads Jimmy and his man-mountain bagpiper Sergeant, Archie McDaid, into the dangerous world of religious and political violence and hatred. Dealing with treachery and betrayal from within his own force, as well as having to deal with suspicious and violence-prone Special Branch operatives, makes the search for the murderer(s) a gargantuan task. Add into the mix an IRA cell seeking revenge for the past misdeeds of Black and Tan members during and after the Civil War in Ireland, and this is a compelling story full of twists, turns and trinitrotoluene.
Taking place over approximately two weeks in the spring of 1933, the novel is exceedingly well-researched, with believable characters on all sides of the sectarian divide. It highlights the religious and sexual bigotry of the time and simultaneously takes the reader to the inside of a murder investigation, with hard-hitting characters in all directions.
For this reviewer, the end of the book is so much better than the start. At the beginning, there are far too many clichés (some of which would not even have been known in 1930s Glasgow). At times it seems that every page has at least one. The book also contains a lot of background information, that whilst fascinating, slowed the pace and felt like ‘info dumping’. Cast a Cold Eye is a very good novel that would have benefitted from some tighter
editing. If only the first 330 pages had moved along at the pace and quality of the last 150, this would have been unputdownable.
Aidan K. Morrissey
THE FORGER OF MARSEILLE
Linda Joy Myers, She Writes, 2023, $17.95, pb, 342pp, 9781647422318
In the autumn of 1939, Europe is in chaos. The German blitzkrieg has struck with lightning force and catastrophic consequences. Thousands of people are uprooted from their homes and forced, many in disguise, to flee the advancing SS and Wehrmacht. Capture means imprisonment or death. A talented young artist named Sarah and her surrogate father, Mr. Lieb, are among the disenfranchised and homeless whose lives hang in the balance.
It is bad enough that Sarah is Jewish. Worse, she is being stalked by an infatuated SS officer, who has cornered and sexually assaulted her in Berlin, before she has had the chance to escape the city. She and Lieb flee to Paris and then on to Vichy Marseille when the German army enters Paris. On the way, she falls in love with Cesar, a doctor who has fled Franco’s Spain. Despite the great dangers, Sarah and Cesar take up work as forgers, providing the necessary documents to allow Jewish exiles, and others at risk of deportation to concentration camps, to avoid capture.
Author Myers takes the reader on Sarah’s arduous and risky journey from Berlin to Paris to Marseille with great skill. We experience Sarah’s paranoia and her sense of impending doom along with her heroic ascent from frightened refugee to determined underground resistance fighter. The novel also highlights the activities of real historic figures who put their own lives at risk to help others. A few plot tweaks might have generated more pageturning tension. The jeopardy could have been ratcheted up focusing throughout solely on Sarah. After all, she is the eponymous Forger of Marseille. Instead, the novel navigates between Sarah, Cesar and, at the end, Mr. Lieb. Pertinent especially today, The Forger of Marseille eloquently shows how much the world needs brave people to stand up against evil.
Peter Clenott
THE ENEMY AT HOME
Kevin O’Brien, Kensington, 2023, $16.95, pb, 416pp, 9781496738509
As if Nora Kinney’s new job as a riveter at a World War II Seattle aircraft factory is not intimidating enough, she soon finds herself dead center in the hunting ground of an increasingly prolific serial killer who preys on women with her occupational profile. Nora is just one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of women working at the plant, but the killer’s victims seem strangely connected to her, either geographically or socially.
She has a plate that could not be much fuller, with two teenaged children who have troubles of their own, a doctor husband away in North Africa fighting the Axis, and neighborhood
youths with a grudge against her for renting out her family’s garage apartment to a Japanese-American couple. Against the backdrop of a nation at war, Nora fights her own personal battle for survival as a wife, mother, line worker, and—most crucially—a potential homicide victim.
Veteran novelist Kevin O’Brien does a masterful job of building suspense while developing a group of characters that will pull the reader close in empathy and interest. O’Brien’s fans will find this latest novel a worthy addition to his earlier works, one that should provide hours of the kind of uneasy tension that readers of historical suspense crave.
Loyd Uglow
THE PAPER MAN
Billy O’Callaghan, Jonathan Cape, 2023, £18.99, hb, 288pp, 9781787333772 / Godine, 2023, $28.95, hb, 248pp, 9781567927856
Austria in 1938, and the Anschluss with Germany is underway. Matthias Sindelar, the eponymous Paper Man (his nickname), is a gifted football player who plays for the Austrian national team. In the celebratory Anschluss game between Austria and Germany in Vienna, Sindelar demonstrates his mastery of the game and humiliates his inferior German opponents. A brave act indeed, especially for a man who has made his disdain for the Nazi regime clear. The story dissects his growing relationship with Rebekah, a much younger nineteen-year-old Jewish woman, with whom he starts a passionate and loving relationship.
In a parallel narrative, Rebekah’s son Jack Shine (formerly Schein) is in Cork in Ireland in 1980 living in the small Jewish community in the city. He discovers a box of letters, photographs and newspaper cuttings that belonged to his deceased mother. Hitherto, he had no idea who his father was, and the revelations contained in the box unsettle his quotidian life as he unravels his unsuspected backstory. The novel’s account of the absorption of Austria by Germany is engaging, as is the research into the notorious Anschluss football game, as well as life for notable football players in the years leading up to the war. Sindelar is based on a real man, and his footballing skills and career are based upon fact, though his relationship and child with the Jewish Rebekah appears to be fictional. This is a moving and fascinating novel of emotional depth.
Douglas Kemp
A HISTORY OF BURNING
Janika Oza, Grand Central, 2023, $29.00, hb, 400pp, 9781538724248 / Chatto & Windus, 2023, £16.99, hb, 400pp, 9781784744793
The history of Indians who lived in East Africa may be little known, but there are still many alive today who were sent into exile in 1972 by the Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin. Earlier in the 20th century, their ancestors had arrived in the country, often as indentured railway workers under the British colonial system.
In 1898, the teenaged Pirbhai from Gujarat is one of them. Though he suffers indignities
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and exploitation, he prevails and establishes a good life for himself and his descendants until the turbulence and changing fortunes of Africa force the Indian community to be displaced yet again to other countries, including England and Canada.
Slow to begin with – not helped by the affected overuse of obscure Swahili and Gujarati words – the novel tightens considerably as the story moves into the politics, racial conflicts and dramatic happenings of the 1960s-70s before settling into a family relationships drama with a diversion into Toronto’s 1992 Yonge Street Riot and a somewhat disjointed conclusion.
Viewed through the eyes of several generations, the opinions and experiences of some of these individuals will touch you more than others, but at its heart this is a story of belonging and “how the leaving was protection, a kind of survival. How sometimes, holding on required letting go.” An ambitious, salient novel that gets a little entangled in its own complexity.
Marina Maxwell
THE DARK EDGE OF NIGHT
Mark Pryor, Minotaur, 2023, $28.00, hb, 352pp, 9781250825049
This riveting, fast-paced thriller, the second in Mark Pryor’s Henri Lefort series, finds the wily French Parisian police inspector again enmeshed in a complex web of mayhem and murder. In December 1940, while on routine assignment investigating the beating and brutal killing of a French citizen, Lefort is ordered by the Gestapo to probe the disappearance of Dr. Victor Brandt, a neurologist working on a covert project at a local hospital. As the detective scours the dangerous, dreary neighborhoods of German-occupied Paris, Lefort discovers a bizarre relationship between his murder victim’s brother and the missing physician.
This shocking revelation triggers a perplexing sequence of life-threatening events. When Lefort also uncovers the grisly homicides of disabled, orphaned children used by the German doctor in clandestine experiments, the inspector faces the almost impossible task of unraveling these mysteriously linked cases within days, not weeks or months—that is, if he survives.
Pryor’s action-packed plot, structured within a ten-day time frame, compels the cunning Lefort to use his ingenious inquiry methods and bold, unorthodox sleuthing skills to solve these interrelated acts of violence. Lefort’s gritty, brusque, yet entertaining personality is complemented by a robust cast of quirky, engaging characters revealed through lively, often ironic, witty, and humorous dialogue.
Pryor masterfully portrays the devastating impact of World War II and the fortitude of the French people during these dark, sinister times. His vivid, descriptive settings, be they crime scenes, meetings at local cafes and brothels, or the depiction of dismal Paris streets in the dead of winter, are memorable.
An exciting, tension-filled mystery not to be missed.
Marcy McNally
POE STREET
Michael Raleigh, Level Best Books, 2023, $16.95, pb, 280pp, 9781685122997
Poe Street is a quirky little road, barely a block long, with a sharp dogleg that makes it hard to see if someone is lurking just out of sight. It’s populated by six- and eightflat buildings; some, now with boarded-up windows, have seen better days. A few yards away, on Seminary Avenue, a red-brick mansion is on fire. Inside is the body of the owner, Cary Morrison, stabbed to death. A heist gone wrong? Or something else?
Poe Street is Raleigh’s 11th novel. Known for his Paul Whelan novels set in 1980s Chicago, Raleigh this time takes readers to the postWWII Windy City where the Normandybeach veteran Ray Foley is trying to put his life back together in his old neighborhood. When men he’d known in his youth turn up stabbed to death, Ray is determined to find out how they were involved in the Morrison case, and who’s killing them.
An interesting addition to hardboiled fiction, Poe Street introduces readers to an independent, solitary, and tough dog-witha-bone vet who won’t let up as he follows the trails of old friends, runs afoul of dangerous strangers, walks along the edges of organized crime, bobs and weaves with police, and falls in step with the close-to-the-vest private eye Max Silver.
Atmospheric: the novel leads readers along now-forgotten parts of Chicago like Riverview amusement park, and rail cars that housed the homeless after the Great Depression and war.
Flatfoot detection: the storyline highlights missteps and sidetracks that draw shadowy tails onto Ray’s heels. Plot twists: a missing statue (à la The Maltese Falcon?) reminds readers that an object doesn’t lead to killing unless the killer wants the victim dead. Hardboiled fans, get ready for Raleigh’s Ray Foley mysteries.
K. M. Sandrick
MURDER UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN
Rachel Rhys, Transworld, 2023, £9.99, pb, 352pp, 9781529176575
Tuscany 1927, and 49-year-old widow Constance Bowen, living in pedestrian Pinner in Middlesex, answers an advertisement in The Lady requesting a nurse/companion. Her patient, as such, is William North, an Englishman and art expert in his fifties who is recovering from a stroke. He has members of an extended family living with him in a substantial castle-like house near Florence. Constance’s new life in Italy is a sudden and delightful change to her unexciting existence in England, as she immerses herself in her
new role as part of the life of the castle and its family.
The rise of Mussolini’s Fascists affects Constance’s experience, and together with a ghostly noise of a child crying, and violin music which she hears in the castle at night, and instances of what are known as gaslighting in modern parlance, we have a finely-researched and attuned historical gothic mystery that is pleasingly set in the customs and conventions of the 1920s. However, it should be made clear that the murder that is crisply informed in the title of the story does not happen in the narrative, and the reader’s attentions are directed towards who is to be the victim, and wondering just when the violent deed will take place; it is a strange and perhaps misleading title for the book. If the reader is expecting a murder mystery to solve, then they will be sadly disappointed!
Douglas Kemp
MADAME POMMERY
Rebecca Rosenberg, Lion Heart Publishing, 2023, $17.99, pb, 347pp, 9781732969940
In spite of opening on a dark note, here we move crisply into more vivacious territory, passing through a multiplicity of contrasts to a nice finish that embodies lightness and joy. Effervescence and sweetness, however, are always tempered by a strong mineral edge. Rebecca Rosenberg’s Madame Pommery is the fictionalized biography of an extraordinary Frenchwoman. Widowed in 1860—under 19thcentury Napoleonic law, widowhood was the only time women could own property and run businesses—Louise Pommery, following in the footsteps of her predecessor, the Widow Clicquot, took over the small family winery and transformed it into an international success.
The history of Champagne (the region) and champagne (the beverage) is long and occasionally mythological. Madame Pommery did not, in fact, invent brut champagne. (For millennia, champagne was a still, often sweet wine.) But she cleverly commercialized it, especially in the English market, where the term “brut” was actually coined. Champagne, she said, should be “joyful” and exhibit “lightness.” She also built extensive cellars in Reims’ chalky bedrock and a Victorian Tudor-style chateau above ground, married her daughter into French nobility, and was, as a business genius, the first Frenchwoman to receive a state funeral.
Rosenberg’s novel is strongest when depicting the processes of winemaking and marketing, and her main character’s personality, convincingly portrayed as both steely and sensitive. Most outstanding are the chapters where Louise Pommery’s wily courage carries her through the FrancoPrussian War. Less successful are the scenes set in high society (ducks aren’t hunted with rifles!). Overall, however, this is a zesty, bubbly novel to be savored with pleasure. A final caveat: after finishing it, one reader shopping for champagne found herself involuntarily,
A publication of the Historical Novel Society | www.historicalnovelsociety.org 47
inexorably, joyfully reaching for a bottle labeled “Pommery.”
Susan Lowell
SINNERS OF STARLIGHT CITY
Anika Scott, William Morrow, 2023, $18.99/ C$23.99, pb, 337pp, 9780063306226 / Duckworth, 2023, £9.99, pb, 352pp, 9780715655023
This riveting story plays out at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago (Starlight City), but its setting also encompasses Sicily during the years of Mussolini’s rise in Italy. The main character, Rosa, both belongs and does not belong to each of these worlds. Born of mixed heritage in the United States, she and her Sicilian-born mother flee Chicago when she is nine years old. The following six years are spent in Sicily, where she crosses paths with a cousin who is a Mussolini supporter. Tragic events unfold in Sicily, with Rosa forced this time to flee on her own. Joining a circus, Rosa becomes an exotic dancer who returns to Chicago for the World’s Fair where she meets her Sicilian cousin again. While there, her American cousin gives birth to her own mixed-heritage child and comes to Rosa for shelter.
Illusions, magic, and kinship strongly reverberate throughout this novel. Rosa incorporates tricks of illusion and magical interludes into her act which dazzle, amaze, and distract her audience. The question of what is real and what is not flows into familial relationships as well. Navigating a world of fascists, racists, and mobsters, Rosa must decide who can be believed, who can be trusted, and if she can distinguish justice from vengeance. Her choices are fraught with danger. In the end, who the sinners really are is left up to the reader to decide. Highly recommended for its fast-paced narrative, its memorable cross-cultural characters, and its striking setting.
Karen Bordonaro
AFTER ANNE
Logan Steiner, William Morrow, 2023, $18.99/£10.99, pb, 368pp, 9780063246454
After Anne opens in 1942, with the son of a famous mother who has just died, arriving at her home and fearing she has taken her own life. It’s a scene that sets the tone for the novel, which, moving forwards and back through L. M. Montgomery’s life, offers a tender, complex, and surprising portrait of the author
of the much-loved Anne of Green Gables series of novels.
In November 1907, L. M. Montgomery, known as Maud, is turning thirty-three. After years of struggle and rejection she has secured a publisher for her first Anne novel. She’s also engaged to be married. She’s happy but feels a tension between creativity and domesticity that will stay with her. She thinks of her creative side as The Fox, who loves to write and longs to make her mark on the world. But there is also the Old Hen, a persistent voice, suggesting that having children should be her goal, that motherhood would be “the balm to her woes.”
The non-linear narrative adds interest and tension, especially as it seems the older Maud spends much of her time re-writing and editing her old journals, which we assume we are reading the originals of, in concern for her legacy.
As a fan of Anne Shirley, I enjoyed the way Steiner interwove Anne’s thoughts and story into Maud’s thinking, but it’s not necessary to know about Green Gables to enjoy this novel. After Anne is a well-written and thoughtful look at a woman trying to balance a challenging marriage, motherhood, and a demanding writing career.
Kate Braithwaite
THE STOLEN HOURS
Karen Swan, Pan, 2023, £16.99/$27.99, hb, 406pp, 9781529084412
1929. As the oldest daughter of a family of nine, Mhairi MacKinnon knows her father is struggling to support his large brood on the isolated island of St Kilda. The obvious solution is for her to marry, but choice is limited in their tight-knit community. So when the chance comes to accompany a married neighbour to Harris to meet a possibly eligible bachelor, Mhairi feels she has no choice but to go. At first glance, Alexander McLennan seems an attractive proposition, but when events take an ugly turn, Mhairi discovers too late where her affections truly lie. A harsh winter and the impending evacuation of the Kildans to mainland Scotland delay the fate she has come to dread, but she cannot put it off forever…
This is the second in Swan’s Wild Isle series about the interweaving fates of a group of Kildans and the mystery surrounding events on their last night before the evacuation, but it’s not necessary to have read The Last Summer to enjoy this novel (though perhaps it would have been easier to remember who was related to whom if I had read the first book).
The characters are complex, and the author is adept at evoking the rugged landscapes and wild seascapes, possibly because of her Scottish roots. Mostly she has succeeded in portraying the pre-industrial lifestyle of St Kilda, which is the only reason why occasional lapses are so noticeable. Farmers have known for centuries about the benefits of interbreeding livestock, but would someone living so far from the modern world really talk about the need to ‘pass on the best genes’ at a time when the
study of genetics was in its infancy? But that’s a minor quibble. I’ve already bought the first book in the series and am looking forward to the third.
Jasmina Svenne
THE SECRET SISTER
Liz Trenow, Bookouture, 2023, $10.99/£8.99, pb, 278pp, 9781837903351
The Secret Sister is a WWII story of the Bevin boys, unsung heroes who served on the home front. Twins Lizzie and Ed have enjoyed a peaceful, happy life with their family in southeastern England. Even amid the war, they are relatively unaffected until the call comes for anyone with a seaworthy craft to go quickly to Dover. Thirteen-year-old Ed insists on joining his father, and the horror he sees at Dunkirk traumatizes him for life.
When the twins turn 18, Ed receives his first official letter to report for military service. But he is still haunted by nightmares of Dunkirk and is terrified of facing the blood and death of combat, so he runs away. As his reporting day approaches, the family is anxious; Lizzie secretly intercepts his mail. Ed has been selected by lottery to join the Bevin boys in the coal mines. The war brought a shortage of mine workers, and coal is critical to the war effort in making steel for planes and armaments. So, the Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, set up a lottery to conscript men to the mines. This means no combat for Ed, but he will not know since he is out of contact. Lizzie, realizing how easy it is to be mistaken as Ed given the right clothes and haircut, decides to take Ed’s place at the mine until he returns. This scenario tips into the farfetched, but the story will carry you onward.
Trenow does a great job of merging Lizzie’s and Ed’s story with that of the Bevin boys, who were never given the recognition and accolades that combat soldiers received and often harassed as cowards and conchies – do not miss the author’s note. This is an enjoyable, effortless read to sink into with natural flowing dialogue and a touch of romance.
Janice Ottersberg
THE BRIGHTEST STAR
Gail Tsukiyama, HarperVia, 2023, $32.00/£22.00, hb, 352pp, 9780063213753
Anna May Wong was the first Chinese American actress to become an international star, making movies in Hollywood, Berlin, Paris and London. Her first adult role was at age sixteen, and she made the jump smoothly from silents to talkies. Hampered by the Hays Code miscegenation clause, Anna May was repeatedly denied important roles. Hollywood preferred ‘yellowface’. Unable to kiss a Caucasian actor onscreen, her characters had to be secondary. Nevertheless, she was a huge success and confident she would be accepted for the leading role in The Good Earth in 1937. She was the obvious choice, not only the same nationality as the lead character, but a multi-talented, beautiful actress with years of
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experience. Being snubbed may have spelled the downhill slide in her career and health.
Undoubtedly Anna May was a fighter, but she lived in an era where her Chinese heritage put her at an immediate disadvantage. A third-generation American, she fought her whole life to prove she was as Western as anyone else, and her Chinese history held great importance for her. This is a detailed look at her film career, family, friends, travels, her mindset, her triumphs and her disappointments.
In this scrupulously researched novel, Anna May tells her backstory during a train journey to New York in 1960. It is lovingly written with meticulous detail, and the author’s devotion to her subject shines through. The emphasis on certain aspects feels very intense at times, as though the author had to include every minute detail to tell her story correctly. Hence, I noticed repetition, particularly around Anna May’s relationship with her father, her early childhood, anti-Chinese sentiment, and film costumes. Tsukiyama’s novel illuminates an important milestone in history for which Anna May was perhaps born twenty years too soon. This is a good addition to any readers’ library of early Hollywood fiction.
Fiona Alison
THE PARIS DECEPTION
Bryn Turnbull, MIRA, 2023, $18.99/C$23.99, pb, 464pp, 9780778333418 / Headline Review, 2023, £9.99, pb, 464pp, 9781035406319
During WW2, Paris was filled with German military forces. Some focused on more than warfare – they saw potential for personal profit from selling many artworks, especially from France’s National Gallery and the museum of modern art, the Jeu de Paume. Worse, Hitler was contemptuous of modern art, calling it degenerate and ordering the burning of thousands of art works.
Watching in horror is Sophie, art restorer at the museum. Sophie’s beloved brother Dietrich had been killed while working for the resistance. She blames his wife, now his widow, Fabienne. The two women have not spoken since his death. In spite of this, Sophie recruits Fabienne, a talented artist, to fake the paintings of modern art masters so the original can be hidden and saved. Fabienne, meanwhile, has her own problems trying to return the family vineyard to profitability again.
The novel covers many aspects of the Nazi occupation of Paris including the persecution of the Jews. Sophie and Fabienne realize their saving of modern masterpieces, while extremely dangerous, has a minute impact on the German occupation. They agree, however, that “it is something.”
The blending of the experiences of these two women covers a wide swath of Nazi atrocities in France. The tale is told with imagination and empathy as friends, husbands, and lovers fall to bullets or are hanged in the street. The sense of fear and outrage is strongly portrayed. Contrasting with the poverty
and desolation of most of the population is Sophie’s agonizing dalliance at elegant social events with a German officer she despises. It conceals her mission. The author interweaves many facets to create a sense of impending disaster for thousands of works of art and also for the story’s characters, who represent French people of that time and place.
Valerie Adolph
COUNTING LOST STARS
Kim van Alkemade, William Morrow, 2023, $19.99, pb, 448pp, 9780063289918
This dual-time novel starts in 1960 New York City when aspiring college student Rita Klein finds herself pregnant. Sent to a home for unwed mothers, she is pressured into giving up her baby for adoption, then struggles with the guilt. A few weeks later she meets a young man, Jacob Nassy, who is also struggling with guilt from being separated from his mother in a Holocaust concentration camp as a child.
The story then switches to 1941 Holland. Young Cornelia Vogel is working as a punch card operator for the Ministry of Information, as the Nazis have started a census of all Dutch citizens. Cornelia soon learns the object of the census is to identify all Jewish citizens for deportation to labor camps. The machine she uses is the Hollerith – which will become the precursor to the computer technology that Rita Klein will study in college. And Cornelia cannot quit her job because of her father’s position in the Ministry.
As the novel progresses, going back and forth through the two time periods, the two women’s lives eventually converge in an unexpected way. Rita attempts to use computer technology to try and discover what happened to Jacob’s mother but needs the old punch cards saved by Cornelia to obtain the data she needs.
This novel is well-paced, and the characters are very believable. Although the details are disturbing, I appreciated learning about how punch cards were used by the Nazis in WWII to track Jewish citizens. I did not find anything in the writing of this story that would have improved it. Highly recommended.
Linda Harris Sittig
CROOKED PLOW
Itamar Vieira Junior (trans. Johnny Lorenz), Verso, 2023, $19.95, pb, 288pp, 9781839766404
Teen sisters Belonísia and Bibiana have a unique bond. After an accident involving the ivory-handled knife their grandmother has hidden in her suitcase under her bed, Belonísia is mute, her tongue slashed and lost. Bibiana speaks for her, translating her body language and gestures into words. Though the two leave the fields of Fazenda Água Negra to live their own lives, they return after their father’s death and together act as one when the livelihoods of their families and others on the plantation are threatened.
First published in Brazil in 2018, Crooked Plow received the Jabuti literary award for best
Brazilian novel of the year as well as Portugal’s prestigious Prémio LeYa award. The novel describes the mid-20th century Quilombola communities, descendants of African slaves working as tenant farmers in Bahia, Brazil, three generations after the country abolished slavery in 1888.
The novel is personal – relating external rivalries as well as internal conflicts over duty, forgiveness, and responsibility. It is also mystical – tracing the path of the enchanted spirit Santa Rita Fisherwoman as she wanders, witnesses, and shelters in one of the believers of the African religion Jarě, then another.
Crooked Plow brings to vivid light the harsh realities of tenant farmers exploited by land owners who enrich themselves on the backs of the workers and yet still take much of what little the farmers save for themselves. The novel resonates with the “sounds of animals, of rustling leaves, of flowing water… the sound[s] of the world” – an illuminating journey in a dark time.
K. M. Sandrick
THE WORLD IN A SANDBAG
John Ware, Page d’Or Books, 2023, £13.99, pb, 458pp, 9781915654144
Knowledge of the military history of the British army during the First World War and the part played in it by Irish battalions were not subjects in which I was more than marginally interested. Then along comes John Ware with his captivating A Green Bough and now its splendid sequel, The World in a Sandbag
Many of the personalities to whom readers were introduced in A Green Bough shine brightly in its sequel and are headed, as we would expect, by Lieutenant-Colonel Hugh Fitzmullen-Brophy himself. Irish to his armpits, endearingly implacable and always benign, he is now wounded and ageing, as he wantonly ploughs his course through the idiocy of his superiors. Amongst his prodigies we soon reencounter 2nd Lt. Daniel Wyndham, a young, wandering American, searching for himself in the mêlée of an Ireland already seething with complicated allegiances to its military history and its troubled relationship with the British establishment.
We also rediscover the unforgettable Moriarty, unutterably Irish, possessed of a foul mouth, a fouler breath, a huge appetite for whisky and an understandable capacity for self-preservation. We learn more about Miss Nora Maxfield, she of the VAD detachment of the Red Cross, and the quirkily enigmatic object of Daniel Wyndham’s passionate affections.
Surprisingly and despite its underlying themes, this novel is full of humour, real laughout-loud moments. Many are one-liners. Others develop into whole scenes.
The plot is lifelike in the sense that any expectation of standard resolutions will be disappointed. Fond as we have become of Daniel Wyndham, he will cope with what life deals him and we will follow his experiences
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with affectionate concern. So… more please, Mr Ware.
Julia Stoneham
PATH OF PERIL
Marlie Parker Wasserman, Level Best, 2023, $16.95, pb, 318pp, 9781685122409
In January 1947, Maurice Cooper Latta reveals information he witnessed and kept secret as the president’s secretary for 41 years: threats to the life of Theodore Roosevelt from anarchists Arthur Sitwell, assuming the alias Magnus Gustafsson, and Alberto Agresti, received while Roosevelt was in Panama in 1908.
Although the assassination scenarios in Path of Peril are wholly fictional, they are built from actual incidents: rumors about a bombing along the railroad tracks that would carry Roosevelt’s train through Lincoln, Illinois, in 1903, and threats to the president from the Chilean anarchist Jerome Kehl. (Theodore Roosevelt in actuality was wounded by an assassin’s bullet in Milwaukee in 1912.)
While the plans and actions of the wouldbe assassins are drivers of the book’s plot (and generate page-turning action), the novel offers much more: vivid details about the construction of the Panama Canal, including the desperate conditions for many of the workers and shady dealings and bid rigging among building supply contractors, as well as the actions of on-the-scene newspaper and magazine reporters, secret service agents and operatives, and medical personnel on the frontlines of recognizing and confronting the cause of yellow fever.
The result is a see-it-now type of experience that relives the past in the words of those who viewed it. Fascinating, informative, and thoroughly entertaining.
K. M. Sandrick
THE BOOKBINDER OF JERICHO (UK) / THE BOOKBINDER (US)
Pip Williams, Chatto & Windus, 2023, £18.99, hb, 448pp, 9781784745189 / Ballantine, 2023, $28.00, hb, 448pp, 9780593600443
Oxford 1914, and Peggy Jones’ job involves folding folios of paper and making up volumes in the Clarendon Press bindery in Oxford. She is an orphan and also has the responsibility of looking after her twin sister Maude who, while working alongside her, is what was then termed “feeble-minded”, but today would probably be recognized as having some form of autism. Peggy has an appetite and a passion for learning and finds it frustrating that she can only glimpse short sentences and parts of the books she works upon, and hence furnishes the narrow boat she shares with her sister with parts of books in various conditions that have been rejected as substandard by her employers. Peggy is also a supporter of the suffragette movement and sees an opportunity to advance herself in her place of employment as the country enters the Great War in an orgy
of patriotic enthusiasm. She volunteers as a reader and writer for patients at a local hospital and there becomes very close to Bastiaan, a severely damaged Belgian man.
There are excellent details on the painstaking process of bookbinding by hand, as well as the challenges and pressures that the country’s entrance into the conflict present to those left to keep affairs running. It is a well-written and thoroughly engaging story, and although the themes of social inequality, emancipation and the horrors of the Great War are essential and relevant, the general subject, style and mood of the novel felt like so many similar books I have read in recent years.
Douglas Kemp
THE HAUNTING SCENT OF POPPIES
Victoria Williamson, Little Thorn Books, 2022, £4.99, pb, 98pp, 9798367079098
Hampshire, Christmas 1918: lying low to avoid the consequences of a botched job back in London, criminal Charlie Briggs thinks his fortune is made, when in a small town bookshop he stumbles on a rare volume of great resale value.
Briggs is an unsympathetic character, physically unprepossessing and without scruple; he avoided conscription through a lie, not out of principle. This makes what happens to him after he steals the book feel like just retribution, for the reader is unlikely to feel much empathy for him.
The publicity for this novella compares it to M.R. James and Susan Hill, with the former being the most apt match. Handling the book causes him physical pain, but Briggs does not heed the warning. He is then followed, in a series of nightmarish sequences in which his sense of current reality recedes entirely, by ‘a figure lurking in the shadows… [with] “a shambling gait… hunched and twisted, swathed in loose bandages that trailed and flapped in the breeze”. This motif is familiar to readers of James’s “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” in particular, and to a degree, “Count Magnus”.
The narrative departs, though, from James’s more restrained style, perhaps to meet the expectations of a modern reader, shaped by a century of horror films; the figure that pursues the hapless Briggs is graphically described rather than glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. But, of course, James’s collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary was published in 1904, and the plot of this novella hinges on the actual, not imagined effects on the human body of mustard gas use in World War I.
Katherine Mezzacappa
THE PRESIDENT’S WIFE
Tracey Enerson Wood, Sourcebooks Landmark, 2023, $27.99, hb, 352pp, 9781728257846
In 1915, Edith Galt, a wealthy widow living in Washington, DC, is introduced to Helen Bones, a cousin to President Woodrow Wilson, who is new in town and in need of female company.
When Helen takes her new friend to the White House, the two run into the recently widowed President—an encounter that will transform the independent-minded Edith’s life.
Tracey Enerson Wood appears to know her subject very well, and I especially appreciated her refusal to make her characters more palatable to modern readers by whitewashing their views on matters such as race and suffrage. But the pivotal episode in the novel— centering around Edith’s actions as “shadow president” when Wilson suffers a stroke in 1919—comes very late in the narrative and is given short shrift, especially when compared to the more than ample time allotted to the couple’s courtship. Because of that, it is difficult to believe in Edith’s later self-doubt and regrets. Indeed, Edith’s character feels undeveloped, so that it is difficult to fully engage with her. When we meet her, she’s already achieved the task of turning her late husband’s failing business into a thriving concern, but we learn little of how she managed this. Similarly, while a few minor characters stand out, such as the President’s physician and Edith’s acerbic mother, for the most part the supporting characters, including the ones we are supposed to regard as villains, are a blur. Still, this novel offers some interesting glimpses into wartime Washington, and it’s good to see a neglected First Lady getting her turn in the spotlight.
Susan Higginbotham
THE GIRL FROM THE PAPERS
Jennifer L. Wright, Tyndale House, 2023, $16.99, pb, 362pp, 9781496477569
In 1929, Beatrice Carraway seems to be going nowhere. Her glory days on the child beauty pageant circuit are long behind her, the college boys she meets at her waitressing job are interested only in good times, and her modest acting talents aren’t enough to take her out of the slum of West Dallas, Texas. So when Beatrice meets attentive, well-dressed, and big-spending Jack Turner at a party, she’s not inclined to worry too much about the source of his income—or to heed the warnings of Jack’s sister-in-law, Alli, who’s concerned for Beatrice’s soul.
Loosely based on the story of Bonnie and Clyde, The Girl from the Papers has both a fast-moving plot and complex characters, particularly Beatrice, to whom Wright gives a compelling back story. Beatrice, who narrates, has an authentic voice, leavened by a dry humor (she describes her father’s death as “an unfortunate alignment of my father, a frayed rope, and a pallet of bricks on a construction site”). The one quibble I had with this novel is its back-and-forth timeline. Though much in vogue, it doesn’t add anything to the story and in fact detracts slightly from the suspense, which nonetheless is still considerable. Only the call of duty toward an impatient fourlegged housemate prevented me from reading this in a single sitting.
Susan Higginbotham
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LOST BELIEVERS
Irina Zhorov, Scribner, 2023, $28.00, hb, 320pp, 9781668011539
Sometime after Stalin’s death, in the slow warming of Soviet society, a worn woman, Agafia, walks the Siberian taiga. It had been a long winter spent in her family’s rustic hut with her sister, brother, and their aged father, and now summer is dawning on their isolated farmstead. But they are not as isolated as they once were, Agafia soon learns. A team of geologists from Moscow has arrived.
Galina, the lead geologist on the team, has always loved the systematic examination of striated minerals, frozen waves of rock, and soaring mountains that yield up their resources. On this trip, she also comes to love the mysterious helicopter pilot who ferries her across the beautiful land. Together they discover the cabin of four “Old Believers”— Orthodox Christians who rejected reforms proposed centuries earlier, and who fled worldliness by retreating to Siberia in search of the promised land.
Agafia and Galina’s lives intersect in beautiful and distressing ways. The 20th century challenges both of their preconceptions: Agafia is haunted by a worldwise Peter the Great, and Galina is troubled as the costs of her profession come to light. The results are a perfect blend of hope, banality, and devastation.
Irina Zhorov’s debut novel glitters with lustrous prose wound through the novel like abundant veins of precious metals. This is a character-based novel at its finest, with meandering explorations of various lives that manage to be both unhurried and captivating. Zhorov brings life to a time, place, and profession previously neglected in fiction but that now shine in the light of her deft treatment.
Carrie Callaghan
MULTI-PERIOD THE POSTCARD
Anne Berest (trans. Tina Kover), Europa, 2023, $28.00/£18.99, hb, 464pp, 9781609458386
After a postcard without a sender arrives at her mother’s house inscribed with the names of relatives who perished at Auschwitz, life is forever changed for Anne Berest in 2003. Uncertain whether the missive is intended as a fond memento or a sinister threat, she embarks on a belated journey into the past to uncover the fates of her great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma Rabinovitch, as well as of her grandaunt and granduncle, Noémie and Jacques.
With the help of her mother Lélia, Anne reconstructs their biographies, a process that enables her to reconnect with her long-buried, cosmopolitan, Jewish identity. But as the reader discovers, the postcard is not the only reason why Anne reappraises her fascinating ancestry. Rather, an antisemitic incident at her daughter’s school, as well as a verbal attack on herself, prompts Anne to investigate what
it means to her to be Jewish. Whilst she comes to understand that her extraordinary heritage is ingrained in her psyche, Anne learns to reconcile the seemingly contradictory strands of her provenance in the recollection of her beloved grandmother, Myriam Picabia Bouveris—last known address, Provence, France, but born Mirotchka Rabinovitch in Russia—the family’s only Holocaust survivor. Bringing Myriam’s remarkable story to light allows Anne to examine France’s complex and controversial 20th-century history; the horrors committed by the collaborationist Vichy Government versus the heroism of a group of surrealist artists-turned-resisters, which Myriam and her first husband Vincente Picabia joined and for which they risked their lives. Equal parts Shoah testimonial, autobiographical novel, and detective mystery, complete with gumshoe investigator and graphologist, The Postcard is a brilliant addition to French Holocaust literature, a gripping work of autofiction by a thirdgeneration, profoundly thinking descendant.
Elisabeth Lenckos
THE MOTHER GENE
Lynne Bryant, Atmosphere Press, 2023, $18.99, pb, 330pp, 9781639886838
Three generations of Virginia women meet looming life challenges by looking to the past and reminiscing about their formative years in northern Virginia, via flashbacks that span the time between 1938 and 2010. Two of the three, matriarch Lillian and her daughter Miriam, are rural midwife/doctors. The third, Women’s Studies Ph.D. candidate Olivia, rejoins them when a minor injury puts Lillian in Miriam’s care. All three are at crucial turning points in their lives: Lillian is facing a decision about whether she can continue to live on her own; Miriam has reluctantly retired from practice; and Olivia and her partner Amy are attempting pregnancy through artificial insemination.
The plot jumps frequently from the “present” of 2010 into the memories of all three characters. Sorting out which point the story is in, from which point of view, is a task that some readers will enjoy but others might find tedious. The historical background is an important one to remind readers of—all three characters must deal with the lasting harm caused by the American eugenics movement of the Depression era. Most of the conflict in the novel is internal and character-driven rather than plot-driven, and the various family secrets obviously telegraphed. However, the warm interactions of the three women, the thoughtful depictions of how each has lovingly built her own “found family” in unconventional ways, and the descriptions of the beautiful Shenandoah Valley landscape so clearly beloved by the author, make this worth reading.
Kristen McDermott
BEETHOVEN’S ASSASSINS
Andrew Crumey, Dedalus, 2023, £12.99, pb, 512pp, 9781912868230
The opening to this book reminded me of Monty Python’s Beethoven’s Mynah Bird sketch. Beethoven’s sister-in-law complains of how difficult he was to live with. To ensure that we know she is untroubled by higher intellectual capacity, her voice has traces of a northern accent. Thus begins a long and meandering tale, featuring a multitude of characters and a definitely non-linear timeline.
Like Beethoven’s music, the first impression is of an assault on the senses. Chapters leap from 1820s Austria to pandemic-bound Northeast England, with an interlude in a 1920s new age commune near Paris, and a slice of life from a Jane Eyre-like 1820s governess. Other characters include a 1920s journalist, and, in the present day, a philosopher and a sitcom script writer. The themes seem at first chaotic. Hoarding, the pandemic, ageing, quantum theory, mesmerism and mystic sects all feature in what ultimately proves to be a meditation on the meanings of both art and time.
Individually, chapters are well-written, immersive in their setting. Frequent references to Beethoven’s works, and works by his biographers and critics, demonstrate the author’s homework. Eventually, the Beethoven references link the characters. And when two of them meet, they are not shy of discussing the man still regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Western World.
Their stories gradually coalesce around the secrets of a remote country house, somewhere in the borders between England and Scotland – borders being another of the themes of this book. What are they? Do they exist outside the minds of those who believe in them? What is existence, anyway? This is a book to appeal to readers who enjoy time-travel, mystery, illusion – and no clear-cut answers.
Helen Johnson
THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Siddhartha Deb, Soho Press, 2023, $27.00/£24.99, hb, 458pp, 9781641294669
Deb’s latest novel, his first in over a decade, is not for the faint-of-heart reader. It is an edgy, kaleidoscopic whirlwind of history, politics, culture, and mythology set in 19th- and 20th- century India. The novel is divided into five sections, each of which could be read as a discrete story. It begins in a future in which India, like the rest of the world, is suffering the catastrophic effects of unchecked climate change. Former journalist Bibi finds herself caught up in a bizarre conspiracy of alien wrecks, laboratory-mutated creatures, and a host of other incredible occurrences as she tries to find a colleague who has disappeared. The novel then shifts to three other narratives: one about the Indian Rebellion of 1857, another about the 1947 Partition of India, and the third about the Bhopal chemical disaster in 1984, before concluding with Bibi in a post-
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apocalyptic world. Throughout the novel Deb repeatedly weaves characters and events from India’s past into the tales—a Gandhi look-alike, a shapeshifting “Monkey Man,” a Vedic flying machine, among others.
The result is a visionary dreamlike panorama of India, but one that readers unfamiliar with Indian history and culture may find confusing. Still, for the adventurous reader, The Light at the End of the World is a fascinating read.
John Kachuba
ESCAPE TO FLORENCE (US) / ESCAPE TO TUSCANY (UK)
Kat Devereaux, Harper, 2023, $18.99, pb, 272pp, 9780063321311 / Aria, 2023, £9.99, pb, 352pp, 9781804549858
In Escape to Florence, Kat Devereaux has created an ambitious, moving novel that toggles between German-occupied Italy in 1944 and Italy in 2019. In one era, teenage Stella daringly works undercover for the Resistance; in the other, floundering, thirtysomething Tori leaves her unpleasant Scottish husband for a new life and love in Florence. Will these two stories ever connect? At first, they seem totally separate. Suspense propels both plots, producing a mystery novel as well as vivid portraits of Stella, Tori, her angry estranged husband, her psycho-babbling sister, and two hunky Italian men.
This is not Eat, Pray, Love, although it unfolds under the Tuscan sun and will charm any lover of Italy and particularly of Florence. There isn’t a lot of food. It’s more “Research, Write, Love,” since Tori is a writer. (The love explored is fraternal as well as romantic.) Suddenly unmoored from her home, marriage, and book in progress, which fizzles, Tori faces many questions. What should she do with her life? Why did her late grandmother love Florence? What has Formula 1 racing to do with this? Where—and who—is Stella? After delving deep into her own past as well as Italian culture and history, Tori finds answers.
Perhaps there are too many writer novels already, but Devereaux manages the challenge well, giving an excellent sense of the labor (and thrill) of research and the struggles of composition. Her picture of Italy includes the broiling sun and maddening bureaucracy as well as the ineffable magic. The sequences set in war-torn Tuscany are probably the strongest in the book, highlighting the important role women played in the Resistance.
Altogether, Escape to Florence is an excellent way to go there… except perhaps to stage an escape yourself.
Susan Lowell
CITIES OF WOMEN
Kathleen B. Jones, Keylight Books, 2023, $30.99/£21.99, hb, 272pp, 9781684429998
University professor Verity, unable to finish the book she needs for tenure, is captivated by an exhibit on the works of Christine de Pizan and becomes convinced that the Anastasia whom Christine references is responsible for
the exquisite illuminations of works like The Book of the City of Ladies in BL Harley 4431. Verity’s search for proof takes her to London and Paris, with visits to William Morris and the pre-Raphaelites. Her pursuit of the vanished Anastasia, and her passion for a present-day fellow scholar named Anastasia, give new direction to Verity’s career and life.
Unlike some dual-timeline novels where alternating chapters lean on each other, discoveries in one timeline moving the other forward, the life of Beatrice, a 13thcentury Frenchwoman, unfolds side-by-side with Verity’s search for her. Apprenticed to master illuminators, Beatrice takes the name Anastasia after a stay in a convent and then moves to Paris, where she establishes her own atelier and meets Christine de Pizan. Christine is pictured as a forceful, intelligent woman who makes her own way after her beloved husband dies but relies on Beatrice-turnedAnastasia for inspiration, companionship, and occasional deliverance.
The style varies from passages lush with radiant imagery to brisk, businesslike prose, and dialogue occasionally sounds quite formal, even rehearsed. The modern-day Anastasia is suspiciously insouciant, but Verity’s dry wit is a joy. For both Verity and Beatrice, their quiet, almost anti-climactic triumph comments on how women’s scholarship is valued. Hardcore Christine fans might complain there aren’t nearly enough Easter eggs, but in Verity’s defense, she is new to the study of this woman lauded in her own time as Europe’s first female professional writer. A delightful narrative and a satisfying journey, Cities of Women celebrates the rich history of women’s scholarship, female achievement, and the bonds of love.
Misty Urban
NO ONE PRAYED OVER THEIR GRAVES
Khaled Khalifa (trans. Leri Price), FSG, 2023, $30.00, hb, 416pp, 9780374601928 / Faber & Faber, 2023, £14.99, hb, 416pp, 9780571364640
In 1881, a young Syrian boy, Hanna, is the sole survivor of a massacre of a Christian landowning family by Ottoman soldiers. A Muslim household in Aleppo takes him in. Their young son, Zakariya, and his sister, Suad, become Hanna’s good friends. Their other friends include a Jewish boy, Aza, and William, a Christian who falls in love with a Muslim girl. Later, Hanna uses his inheritance to build a pleasure palace, and Zakariya becomes a prosperous horse trader. Both marry and have children, yet lead a life of illicit pleasure, visiting courtesans.
In 1907, while Hanna and Zakariya are away, the Euphrates River floods the village, drowning their families, except for Zakariya’s wife and a Christian woman. A decade later, more tragedies, a famine, and an epidemic hit the region.
This novel, set mainly in Syria from 1881 to 1951, was longlisted for the 2020 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. The early period, when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in peace, is
appropriately narrated. The natural disasters and calamities that befall the residents are told through the lives of six main and several minor characters. The story depicts changes in Syria from the Ottoman era through WWI, to the French mandate and the struggle for independence. However, the novel deals more with religion and love than historical events.
Written in the typical Arabic lyrical style and accordingly translated, it’s a long novel that requires careful reading to keep track of the multiple storylines and changing time periods. The story would be of much interest to those unfamiliar with the culture and norms of that region.
Waheed Rabbani
A COUNCIL OF DOLLS
Mona Susan Power, Mariner, 2023, $30.00, hb, 304pp, 9780063281097
A story told through the eyes of three young girls, each a generation apart, struggling with the impacts of colonialism on Yanktonai Dakota families. The book opens in 1969, with young Sissy navigating a confusing and sometimes dangerous relationship with her mother. We then fall back in time to the 1930s, where we witness Lillian and her sister experience the horrendous treatment given to students at a residential school far from home. Then we join Cora, born in 1888, when they send her across the country to “educate” away her native ways. On the way, she will befriend Jack, a boy who will shape her life and those of her children.
For a time, each of the three girls possesses a doll that can read their hearts, communicate with their souls, and possibly save them at their worst moments. In the last section of the book, Sissy is reunited with the dolls, who once again work their magic to save her from the trauma inherited through many generations of women. The unique structure of storytelling works well in the first few parts. While I liked the idea of the dolls coming together in the end, the last section of the book felt quite different and a bit disconnected from the earlier sections.
Power’s writing is evocative, emotional, and heartrending. Told in the first person from a child’s point of view, her narrative brings you right into the confusion and long-lasting pain that each woman endured. It obviously should come with a trigger warning for a broad range of traumas, and I recommend preparing yourself for the difficult emotions it will evoke. That said, it is such a beautifully written story that touched me deeply. Highly recommended.
Shauna McIntyre
THE SCARLET PAPERS
Matthew Richardson, Michael Joseph, 2023, £14.99, hb, 592pp, 9780718183455
Dr Max Archer has never forgotten the injustice of being turned down by the intelligence services as a young man, so now writes about them instead as an academic at the London School of Economics. He’s also thwarted in his career, not achieving the professor’s chair he
52 REVIEWS | Issue 105, August 2023
wants so badly, and his wife has just divorced him. But then he is approached by Scarlet King, a high-ranking spy in her nineties. She was the first woman head of the Soviet desk at MI6 during the Cold War. She wants him to write her memoirs – The Scarlet Papers of the title. They hold a mind-blowing secret about British intelligence. Max is hooked. This is his chance to show the secret services and his wife what they’re missing and win that professorship. However, there’s a problem – life in jail for breaking the Official Secrets Act. Can he and Scarlet manage to publish and be damned before the secret services get onto them?
The novel is Tinker, Tailor, meets James Bond as a bitter, middle-aged lecturer with dreams. It’s sprinkled with well-known espionage figures and events ranging from Kim Philby and Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who came in from the cold, to Sergei Skripal and the Salisbury poisonings. It weaves descriptions of tradecraft – secret meetings, letterbox drops and bugging – amid the intricate and deadly workings of the secret services. There are also worried politicians – Richardson was a Westminster speechwriter and researcher –and a lot of red herrings. A good, but long, read at almost 600 pages. Be prepared for a marathon rather than a sprint.
Kate Pettigrew
A BAKERY IN PARIS
Aimie K. Runyan, William Morrow, 2023, $18.99, pb, 384pp, 9780063247710
A little bakery in the heart of Montmartre is the way forward for Aimie K. Runyan’s dualtimeline novel set in Paris during the FrancoPrussian War and the post-World War II era. Lisette Vigneau is the fiercely independent, mostly ignored daughter of wealthy parents living in Place Royale in 1870. On an unlikely errand Lisette meets Théodore Fournier, a young National Guardsman. Runyan develops a believable, understandable relationship between Lisette and Théo, a revolutionary and believer in a Paris of the People, who forever changes Lisette’s destiny. During the Prussian siege the main supply lines are blocked, causing famine and leading Lisette to open a bakery to feed her starving neighbors.
The second character is Lisette’s 19-yearold great-granddaughter, Micheline Chartier, now living in the same narrow, crooked streets of Montmartre in 1946. Micheline, raising two sisters since her father’s death and her mother’s disappearance, is befriended by her mother’s friend and neighbor, Madame Dupuis. Central to Micheline’s future, Madame Dupuis lends wisdom and encouragement by sharing memories, cookbooks, and providing tuition for baking school. Runyan’s key plot ingredient is the discovery of Micheline’s great-grandmother’s red leather-bound journal of recipes and kitchen notes. Lisette’s journal connects the timelines in the narrative
by transporting readers with the practices of bakeries in 19th-century Paris.
Runyan uplifts characters through meaningful, sympathetic dialogue that is endearing and emotional. Especially wellscaled is Pierrine, an acerbic prostitute Runyan develops into a surprising and supportive sister for Lisette, a story to celebrate. Runyan brings Micheline’s war-ravaged emotions full circle from abandonment issues, jealousy, and guilt to a need for forgiveness. Through the dark green door of A Bakery in Paris, readers will discover chaotic political scenes, second chances at life and love, and the choices and courage of two young women facing the consequences of war.
Dorothy Schwab
THE CYPRESS MAZE
Fiona Valpy, Lake Union, 2023, $16.99/£8.99, pb, 303pp, 9781542035200
The Cypress Maze is an intensely moving dual-timeline novel set in World War II and 2015, at a lovely villa in Tuscany. In 2015, Tess comes to stay at the villa to heal after the tragic death of her husband. She meets the caretaker, Beatrice, a childhood friend of her grandmother’s, who tells her the owner of the villa has been found at last. But the owner, Marco, wants to tear down the villa to build a golf course. Before she is forced to leave, Beatrice tells Tess about her experiences there during World War II. As a young British woman in Italy, Beatrice is trapped there when war breaks out, only to be rescued by Francesca, who brings her to her villa, which serves as a refuge to children whose homes were bombed. Among the children is a Jewish boy, Alfredo, who will become the father of Marco. There is danger from the local Fascist leader, who is aware of Alfredo’s identity.
Valpy’s writing is beautiful, and she makes this villa, with its spectacular garden and, especially, the cypress maze at the heart of it, come to life. The maze, which has become impenetrable in 2015, holds a terrible secret, and Valpy keeps up the reader’s suspense as we try to figure out what happened there. That is only one of the villa’s mysteries. We also wonder why Beatrice’s version of events is so different from Marco’s, or at least what he learned from his father, Alfredo. Beatrice says the children were happy and loved, while Marco says his father hated the place and wanted nothing to do with it. Above all, we see the courage of people like Francesca and Beatrice, who took in these children at considerable risk to their lives. I highly recommend this book.
Vicki Kondelik
WHERE WATERS MEET
Zhang Ling, AmazonCrossing, 2023, $28.99/£28.99, hb, 283pp, 9781662510380
This is Zhang Ling’s first novel in English, following her earlier successes written in Chinese and translated. Like her protagonist Yuan Feng, Zhang was born in China and now lives in Toronto. Yuan—Phoenix in English—
was indeed a firebird of rebirth to her mother Chunyu, whose name means Spring Rain. From the beginning of Phoenix’s marriage to George in 2004, Rain lived with them, moving to a nursing home only when her dementia became severe. She dies at the age of 83, leaving Phoenix her grief and a battered old suitcase, the ‘memory box’ Chunyu brought from China. Phoenix’s inability to talk with her mother in her final days and two photos she finds in the suitcase arouse her curiosity. Flying to China with her mother’s ashes, she pieces together the mysteries of Rain’s life. Thus, this novel is an epic about storytelling with layers gradually revealed from Chunyu’s girlhood on, augmented by her sister Mei’s memories. Phoenix wants to tell the truth of her mother by writing it—in essence this novel—but secrets continue to appear almost to the end. Calamities of war haunted Chunyu’s life. Phoenix’s trip to China opens her eyes to the realities of the Chinese Civil War between Nationalists and Communists and the brutal Japanese occupation of China, both in the 1940s, which profoundly affected Chunyu, her sister, and her war-wounded husband Erwa, calling on Chunyu’s “quiet reserve of endurance.”
Zhang’s strengths in Where Waters Meet are her intriguing interwoven plot; vivid, surprising characters; and evocation of the political crises during Chunyu’s lifetime. However, her style can be clunky at times with colloquialisms that do not work in context. But, the story itself keeps us reading.
Jinny Webber
HISTORICAL FANTASY
VAMPIRES OF EL NORTE
Isabel Cañas, Berkley, 2023, $28.00, hb, 384pp, 9780593436721
The spark of the Mexican-American War has not yet roared into full conflagration, but tensions are high along disputed Texas boundaries. Nena, daughter of a Mexican rancher, finds her home threatened by Anglos looking to expand from the North. She and her childhood friend, Néstor, are inseparable, even though her parents consider him below her station. When Nena is attacked by a halfseen creature, Néstor believes her dead and blames himself. He flees north, becoming a vaquero who drowns his pain in liquor, women, and the endless range. Years later, when the Mexicans and Texans begin fighting in earnest, Néstor travels home to protect Nena’s father’s land, and is astounded to discover Nena alive. Meanwhile, Nena has been training as a curandera, not only to treat battlefield wounds, but also to heal the increasing number of mysterious susto cases – a fatal malaise afflicting those bitten by the creatures that attacked Nena as a child. Can she and Néstor survive war, vampires, and their own misunderstandings to rekindle their closeness?
In this Western horror mash-up, Cañas
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approaches the Texas border clash through a Mexican lens: there are two types of “monsters” – eyeless, blood-sucking creatures and Anglos, represented by the Rinches (Texas Rangers). It is the Anglo vampires who are soulless, while Cañas takes pains to humanize the creatures. These are not the typical sophisticated vampires masquerading as humans, but rather iterations of Spanish folkloric boogeymen such as El Cucuy. The choice to present them sympathetically, while understandable given the novel’s message, does rob the storyline of some innate tension and horror. The setting is well-realized and, combined with the folkloric elements and Mexican-American conflict, results in a refreshing read from a growing subgenre: colonial Gothic/Western horror. I look forward to more offerings in this… vein.
Bethany Latham
THE FIRST BRIGHT THING
J.R. Dawson, Tor, 2023, £16.99, hb, 336pp, 9781035018192 / Tor, 2023, $27.99, hb, 352pp, 9781250805546
The circus train arrives in town as if by magic. No one sees it come or go. Each night, there is a special guest in the audience whose life has taken a bleak turn. The circus provides an experience that mends the ill. The circus is run by three women – Ringmaster (or Rin); her wife, Odette; and their friend, Mauve. The circus acts are all ‘Sparks’, possessing a superpower. Odette is a healer. Mauve is a seer – looking through time. The Menagerie Woman can turn into any animal. The production manager, Maynard, can replicate himself to produce a full circus crew. Kell has real wings. They are a close-knit family of ‘freaks’ who, outside the world of the circus, would be hunted down by wagon men (reminiscent of dog-catchers), and sent to sanatoriums.
Mauve’s ability to look through time and Rin’s power to ‘jump’ to other places take them backwards and forwards in time from 1926. There is a dark threat and an abusive relationship lurking in Rin’s past. The women encounter the horrors of the 20th century in brief flashes: gas in the First World War trenches; Nazi book burnings; the Holocaust; the Blitz; D-Day beaches; and Hiroshima. Rin hopes to intervene in the hellscape of the future and stop the Second World War: ‘But what good was she, jumping around and staring at scenes like a tourist?... Sometimes, it felt like as soon as you outran yesterday, it was right back in front of you.’
The three lead characters are well-drawn, and the circus performances are vivid. The villain is spine-chilling. There is plenty of convincingly drawn pain and motivation mixed in with the magic, although an occasional overemphasis on dialogue slows down the pace.
J.R. Dawson’s first novel is an accomplished dark fantasy, exploring mitzvah, the good deed.
Tracey Warr
THE CARNIVALE OF CURIOSITIES
Amiee Gibbs, Grand Central, 2023, $29.00, hb, 448pp, 9781538723937
With atmospherically rich effect, Amiee Gibbs’s The Carnivale of Curiosities combines gothic Victorian historical with dark fantasy. Among entertainments offered in Gibbs’s fantastical London of 1887, one stands out, the carnivale of the novel’s title. Gibbs interweaves a biting social critique into her plot as the highest echelons of society voyeuristically attend, “slumming it” in the worst city district to see freakish bodies performing astounding stunts and more. In contrast to that dark satire, Gibbs reveals the central theme of importance of family when she takes readers inside this circus’ life. These “freaks” with conjoined bodies, dog fur, the ability to generate fire from fingertips or disappear in an instant, have built a family by choice that understands love and loyalty far better than the natural families also depicted. Gibbs builds this heartwarming strand without sentimentality.
Family is both a source of strength and the primary driver of conflict in the novel. Another of its premises, created organically and believably, is that magic is real, and interacting with magic has genuine consequences, both good and bad. At the circus’s core is Aurelius Ashe, a character drawn in the tradition of Dr. Faustus. He grants wishes. When approached to restore the health of a young woman, ward of an influential banker, Ashe gradually realizes he has agreed to more than he bargained for. In essence, the novel asks, will the evil that bubbles just below the surface of humans win out, or will magic? And that magic is wielded by a suspiciously devilish man, but one who has built a remarkable family. If good and bad are hard to define in this world, that is clearly Gibbs’s clever intent. A nuanced dive into humanity by means of fantastical history.
Judith Starkston
THE WEAVER AND THE WITCH QUEEN
Genevieve Gornichec, Ace, 2023, $27.00, hb, 432pp, 9780593438244 / Titan, 2023, £9.99, pb, 512pp, 9781803361390
In tenth-century Norway, young Gunnhild Ozuradottir leaves her abusive mother and the family hall to flee with the elderly seer, Heid. For twelve years she lives in the far North and learns magic. Meanwhile, sisters Oddny and Signy Ketilsdottir, linked with Gunnhild by a bloodoath of mutual protection, remain on their family holding. They are raided by a warriorfilled longship commanded by the vicious Kolfinna and her two witch henchwomen, Thorbjorg and Katla. Gunnhild is able to see what is happening, and shapeshifts into a bird to assist her friends in the battle. Oddny escapes, but Signy is captured to be sold as a slave.
Gunnhild and Oddny grow and mature as they try to discover where Signy has been taken and figure out how they can rescue her. Nordic
mayhem ensues in a maelstrom of violence, intrigue, romance, and magic that Gornichec has based on the old sagas. I liked Gunnhild less as the story continued and she became nasty, self-centered, and demanding. This was historically accurate; she was a real person, and eventually became Queen of Norway. The fictional Oddny is more pleasant and relatable—a more conventional woman of her time, who likes weaving, is loyal to the love of her choice, but can still throw a mean ax or do a bit of magic when needed.
Just some minor, personal nit-picking: I’ve lived in Scandinavia, and would have liked a bit more textured detail about the natural world of the sea, the forests, and especially the night sky. Having quibbled about that, I would still recommend this well-researched story to anyone who would like an entertaining, wild ride through Norse history and folklore.
Elizabeth Knowles
MORTAL FOLLIES
Alexis Hall, Gollancz, 2023, £16.99, hb, 392pp, 9781399616430
Mortal Follies is set in Regency-era Bath, with fleeting visits to London and the Yorkshire countryside. It follows the fortunes (or misfortunes) of Maelys Mitchelmore, a young debutante who is determined to rid herself of a curse that has inexplicably descended upon her. She is aided – or perhaps hindered – by her friend Lysistrata Bickle, whose head is full of romantic notions of love, magic, and improbable adventures. And by the ‘Duke of Annadale’ who, despite the name, is an ostracised female aristocrat. The result is a romp through a world populated by spirits and eccentric characters as Maelys discovers magic, mischief and murder, and starts to fall in love with the enigmatic ‘Duke’.
This is the 19th century, but not as you know it. The supernatural world is taken for granted, sexual ambiguity is mostly tolerated, and there are lots of bizarre and free-thinking characters. All the ingredients are in place for an amusing read with deep themes, but somehow the novel fails to deliver its full potential. The characters are not fully rounded and not always particularly likeable. And the story is not grounded in any kind of recognisable world (some physical description of the locations might have helped here). As a result, I found it hard to empathise with the characters or even to believe that Maelys was ever in any real danger. I also found the constant interjections by the narrator, a hobgoblin named Robin, slightly irksome.
However, others may disagree. If you are looking for a light read with an entertaining situation and an alternative reality, you will enjoy Mortal Follies
Karen Warren
THE GIFTS
Liz Hyder, Sourcebooks Landmark, 2023, $27.99, hb, 448pp, 9781728271705 / Manilla Press, 2022, £8.99, pb, 512pp, 9781786580757
A fascinating mélange of gothic fiction
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and magical realism, The Gifts unpacks the bizarre Victorian obsession with angels— celestial angels, the perfect domestic angel every man supposedly wanted in a wife, and the “alternate fact” that actual women could sometimes sprout actual wings.
Hyder interlaces the stories of four women in gritty 1840s London. Etta is the “exotic bastard,” daughter of an enslaved Jamaican mother and landowner father, a gifted amateur botanist. Mary, a brilliant young writer, sleuths out an angel-based crime, seeking to launch a journalistic career. Natalya comes to London seeking a kinsman and finds imprisonment with Edward, a crazed surgeon. Annie, a fine artist, is the bewildered wife to the surgeon. Imagine the astonishment when two of these women sprout wings. Edward embodies the frantic Victorian struggle to meld science with faith, to prove the existence of a God that has blessed Edward with (illicit) possession of anatomically correct female angels—how fortunate for Edward’s vaunting career ambition.
Hyder interweaves these stories in very short chapters, each a miniature jewel of world-building, unique characterization, and dramatic intrigue. The rapid flipping of point of view is a reader challenge—one doesn’t want to leave each woman—and requires holding distinct four plots in mind. However, as the novel barrels to conclusion, the reader’s utterly engrossed. The Gifts is Liz Hyder’s first novel for adults. Her 2020 young adult novel, Bearmouth, was chosen as the Children’s Book of the Year by The Times (UK).
Pamela Schoenewaldt
MORGAN IS MY NAME
Sophie Keetch, Magpie, 2023, £16.99, hb, 348pp, 9780861545193 / Random House Canada, 2023, $18.00/C$24.95, pb, 368pp, 9781039006492
This is a stunning retelling of the story of Morgan le Fay from a talented debut author. Morgan’s story has been told many times, but this interpretation restores her humanity. Instead of painting a magical villain as many have done before her, Keetch presents Morgan from childhood as a frightened girl who sees her mother manipulated and forced into marriage by Uther Pendragon. Uther is the man who killed her father and took his crown. Morgan grows up caged and restricted until she finds love, first with a palace guard and then at the convent where she discovers her magic and finds companionship with Alys. However, Uther continues to control her life, sending her north to marry and create an alliance with King Urien of Gore. While Morgan is determined to make the best of her situation and continue to study magic and the healing arts, she discovers that the man who has made her a Queen will never see her as an equal and she will need to forge her own path. This is the first in a trilogy and will be a mustread for fans of Natalie Haynes, Lucy Holland and Madeline Miller.
Lisa Redmond
OUR HIDEOUS PROGENY
C. E. McGill, Doubleday, 2023, £16.99, hb, 398pp, 9780857529046 / Harper, 2023, $32.00, hb, 400pp, 9780063256798
England and Scotland in the 1850s. Mary Elizabeth Sutherland is an ambitious and feisty natural history illustrator married to Henry, a rather combative but feckless scientist, who struggles to make his name within the maelstrom of British scientific endeavour. Their marriage is a tempestuous relationship. Mary’s grandfather was brother to a certain Victor Frankenstein, and when his hidden notebooks are discovered, Mary has an idea about a project that will make both their reputation and fortunes within the deeply conservative British intellectual community –the secret and creation of life itself.
The author has deployed excellent research with the account of the state of mid-19thcentury European scientific endeavour, and the jealousies and rivalries that permeated the ambitious community of (nearly all) men. The book is narrated with consummate skill, and McGill is a highly talented story-teller. But because the book is so well written and plotted, when the fantasy element enters the narrative, it does come as a bit of shock to the reader, a wrenching departure from the hitherto plausible storyline. What the Sutherlands achieve is simply impossible from a scientific perspective; hence the reader has to stop their response of incredulity and carry on. Occasionally, Mary comes across as being just a little too 21st-century in her enlightened, progressive outlook and views, while it is such an easy target to attack the antediluvian and wincingly awful customs and conventions of previous ages. This, McGill’s first novel, shows extraordinary talent and promise.
Douglas Kemp
THE GHOST THEATRE
Mat Osman, Overlook, 2023, $28.00/C$35.00, hb, 303pp, 9781419767838 / Bloomsbury, 2023, £16.99, hb, 320pp, 9781526654403
In a fantastical yet mostly recognizable Elizabethan London, teenage Shay, a member of a bird-worshipping religion, joins up with a troupe of boy actors. She finds the theater world exhilarating, though seedy and terrifying at times because of the troupe’s violent patrons. At the center of this world is Nonesuch, a charismatic and enigmatic actor with whom Shay falls in love. Various forces, including an outbreak of plague that closes the theaters, lead Shay and Nonesuch to create the Ghost Theatre, which stages ephemeral, experimental plays in situ. Their rebellions land them in hot water and lead to a painful revelation for Shay.
This is a story of Elizabethan theaters that, refreshingly, does not center Shakespeare, who is mentioned glancingly only once. Instead, it highlights the sinister, and very real, early modern practice of kidnapping children to form acting troupes. Although the action of the book escalates more and more improbably—the book’s main flaw—
it’s difficult to resist its charms. Among them is the author’s imagining of the birdworshipping Aviscultans, an ingenious and plausible creation that lends magic to the story. Another is the undeniable air of punk rock in the characters’ art and rebellion.
Elizabeth Crachiolo
HE WHO DROWNED THE WORLD
Shelley Parker-Chan, Tor, 2023, $28.99, hb, 400pp, 9781250621825 / Mantle, 2023, £20.00, hb, 496pp, 9781529043433
Parker-Chan completes her awardwinning historical fantasy epic begun in She Who Became the Sun, returning to its fascinating blend of medieval Chinese history, wuxia martial fantasy, and gender-bending character study.
The narrative reimagines the 15th-century founding of the Ming Dynasty by conflating its first emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, with an earlier legend of a female emperor. In the first volume, the central character, Zhu Chongba, is an orphaned peasant girl who leads the (historical) Red Turban rebellion against the dominant Mongol Empire and claims the Radiant Throne of the Han Chinese.
Zhu’s interior development takes a back seat in the first two-thirds of the second novel, and therefore familiarity with the first book is important. Zhu’s rivals in her quest to defeat the Great Khan take center stage: the vengeful Ouyang and the scheming spy Baoxiang are both, like Zhu, driven by a compulsion to sacrifice everything and anyone to get what they want.
All three, not coincidentally, are considered insignificant in the masculine world of rulers and warlords: Ouyang is a eunuch, Baoxiang a pansexual seducer, and Zhu a woman in male disguise. All three take advantage of their culture’s tendency to underestimate them to create unlikely alliances and challenge a monolithic empire.
Although there is plenty of military action, the focus on the psychology of the tormented, self-hating, and self-harming Ouyang and Baoxiang robs the epic of the wit and wonder of the first volume. The multiple points of view are handled thoughtfully and give the reader an impression of a vast and complex culture. The patient reader will ultimately find Zhu’s character development in the final third of the novel, and the greater role played by her beloved wife, Ma Yingzi, satisfying and worth the wait.
Kristen McDermott
TIMESLIP
THROUGH THE VENEER OF TIME
Vera Bell, Champagne Book Group, 2023, $3.99, ebook, 470pp, B0BZNHSM8N
Modern-day artist Siena has always felt an unexplained connection to Ireland, but lately, it has been even stronger. She begins
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having dreams about a 16th-century Irish noblewoman, Neave, and her passionate marriage to the new King of Tyrone, Aedan. The dreams start out sexy and fun, although a little bewildering, because where are they coming from, and why do they feel so real? Siena begins researching past life regression. Is it possible she has lived before? The dreams become more sinister as Adean’s enemies plot an attack.
Siena longs to tell her FBI agent husband about her mysterious and sometimes frightening dreams, but he is overwhelmed by his latest case, tracking down a serial murderer and rapist. But she can’t keep things a secret any longer when her past and present violently collide in unexpected ways.
Vera Bell’s novel successfully combines historical fiction, romance, and a contemporary thriller. The flashbacks to Ireland are particularly engaging, with detailed and vivid descriptions. The characters are, unfortunately, a bit one-note, but as this is the first book in a trilogy, one hopes they will be fleshed out more in subsequent offerings. Readers easily triggered by sexual assault and violence against women may need to skip this book, though. The author does let the reader know from the beginning that the lasting impact of trauma will be a significant theme. However, even with this warning, I found some of the scenes shockingly violent and gratuitous.
Janice Derr
ANTIGONE
R. X. Karvanis, Markosia, 2023, $19.99/ C$22.99/ £13.99, pb, 506pp, 9781915860033
Antigone offers modern readers a reimagining of the well-known tale from Greek mythology in which a young woman knowingly breaks the law of her tyrant uncle by burying her brother in order to follow her own higher moral code of conduct.
In this novel, a modern-day Antigone travels to present-day Greece to find her twin brother in an effort to reconnect with him after a tumultuous family past. Once found, they stumble together into a time warp that sends them back in time to Knossos in ancient Crete. This novel tells the story of their arrival and their subsequent life and death adventures in this lost civilization balanced on the brink of destruction. The twins must find a way to survive, to navigate the culture of the bull god, to connect with each other, and to determine their own futures.
Filled with suspense, fast-paced action, and memorable characters, this fantasy novel weaves a spellbinding tale. It also makes deft use of its historical setting to highlight the constancy of human nature concerning questions of fate and choice. Through all of the period detail, readers may also appreciate the rich descriptions of everyday life over three thousand years ago. From clothing to armor to food to housing, this novel evokes a strong sense of lived human experience as an authentic background for the story.
An overarching sense of Greekness pervades
the plot, the setting, and the characters. Drawing from her own family history, the author artfully combines elements of ancient Greek mythology and legend with modern sensibilities and attitudes. The result is a compelling novel of a new Antigone for our current age.
Karen Bordonaro
ALTERNATE HISTORY
THE APPLE AND THE TREE
Clemmie Bennett, Independently published, 2023, £13.99, hb, 325pp, 9798391454168
This Tudor timeslip story takes London nanny Ella Buckley, whose modern life is blighted by the recent death of her adored grandmother, and thrusts her back into the court of King Henry VIII. She falls asleep in the grounds of Eltham Palace, twisting her grandmother’s ring around her finger, and awakes in the same spot in 1510. The first person she meets is indeed His Grace the King himself, but this Henry is 19 years old (as is Ella), ‘his eyes so blue and his gaze so intense it was impossible to focus on anything else’. As the book proceeds, this sympathetic portrayal of the King is maintained convincingly enough.
Ella tells the court she has amnesia but is otherwise found to be in good health. The ring that allows time travel has vanished in the Eltham woods, and so Ella must embrace life as a lady in waiting. In due course a suitable marriage is arranged for her – though her real fascination remains His Grace. The author delivers a believable counter-factual narrative whereby Queen Catherine of Aragon has two healthy sons with Henry. Ella is knowledgeable about the Tudor period – we are shown in flashbacks how her grandmother had educated her during childhood visits to museums. At last Ella’s own role becomes too close to the alternative history for comfort, but unless she can find the elusive ring she is doomed to remain stranded.
There is some unevenness in the editing, typos slipping through. The denouement in which, having located the ring, Ella discovers how harsh had been the fates of those she had loved in the 16th century, is rather rushed. Still this author has made a very promising debut. This is an entertaining tale, well-researched in its own terms. I found it gripping, thoughtprovoking and consistently enjoyable.
Ben Bergonzi
HALF-LIFE OF A STOLEN SISTER
Rachel Cantor, Soho, 2023, $26.00, hb, 384pp, 9781641294645
An ailing mother describes her children: Annie who will always be the baby; Em who cares less for people than places; Branny, the only boy, whose big heart will always try to please; Lotte who cares more about what she doesn’t have; Liza who will not mind being forgotten; and mother Maria’s namesake,
baby Maria, who fills the spaces. These are the Brontë children, and as their mother notes, they cannot live without each other.
Cantor’s third book continues her adventures in storytelling. Her 2014 debut novel, A Highly Unlikely Scenario, time traveled in science fiction. Her second book in 2016, Good on Paper, straddled the line between fiction and reality. Half-Life of a Stolen Sister traces the paths of the Brontës through their youth, their sense of duty, their hope, work, life (and death), and love. The presentation is eclectic, including memos, postcards, diary entries and biographical notes, scenes from a stage play, letters, a radio broadcast, and a job interview. The vignettes capture the voices of the storytellers across time, from childhood imaginings of wild woods and evil lords to adult contemplations of mortality and loss.
The narrative departs from the strictly historical, slipping in modern-day references to email messaging and trips to the Dollar Store for Spaghettios. Yet the reader is never lost in time, continuing to connect deeply with the characters, their thoughts, and experiences.
Innovative. Infectious. Insightful. Indelible.
K. M. Sandrick
SUNSET EMPIRE
Josh Weiss, Grand Central, 2023, $28.00, hb, 448pp, 9781538719473
In an alternate 1952, Joseph McCarthy, architect of the communist-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee, becomes President amid a wave of postwar xenophobia and antisemitism. Suspicion is an American way of life, and those who look, sound, or pray differently live in a state of constant anxiety in McCarthy’s United States.
It is in this atmosphere of fear that private detective Morris Baker operates his Los Angeles detective agency, a haven for those on the outside of this new intolerant and distrustful society. As a Holocaust survivor, Baker finds the blind prejudice, injustice, and violence on the streets of Los Angeles a portent of darker things, especially when a brutal act of terrorism by a Korean-American man leads to the reopening of American internment camps. When a woman steps into his office and asks him to find her missing husband, a minor state department official named Henry Kissinger, Baker discovers that the disappearance may be connected to the terrorist and to a series of murders across the city.
Sunset Empire is an effective and inventive alternate history, showing the rippled effect of postwar hate amplified by a fictional McCarthy White House. Historical figures make cameos in Weiss’s history, often in different roles than they would come to play in real history. Aside from this fascinating premise, Sunset Empire is a solid crime thriller, evoking the noir style of a hard-boiled detective novel. Baker is a complicated character. He is short-tempered, perpetually drunk, and keeps everyone in his life at arm’s length. But, beneath that hard exterior, he is compassionate and unable to resist helping those who have no one else to
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turn to. The demagogy, the blind patriotism, and the distrust of difference in Weiss’s alternate America feels all too relevant and timely. A prescient, untiring thriller of a novel.
Jessica Brockmole
CHILDREN & YOUNG ADULT
FAR OUT!
Anne Bustard, Simon & Schuster, 2023, $17.99/ C$23.99, hb, 224pp, 9781665914192
In 1964, the residents of Totter, Texas, are absolutely enamored with UFOs—so enamored, in fact, that they’ve organized the First Annual Come on Down Day, when they expect to host the aliens they’re certain are ready to visit Earth. Eleven-year-old Magnolia Jean Crook is hoping to get a front-row seat to all the action because her grandmother, Mimi, is vice president of the town’s UFO club. But just as the festivities are about to begin, a meteorite that had been on display in the library goes missing, and Mimi is the prime suspect. It’s up to Magnolia Jean and her best friend, Nick Lawless, to prove that while Mimi may be a Crook, she’s no thief. But it’s tough when Mimi keeps disappearing and can’t answer any questions on where she went and why.
Bustard’s delightful novel is a terrific spin on the “kid sleuth” trope. Magnolia Jean’s parents, even her father, who’s the town sheriff, fully support her inquisitive nature, and while Magnolia Jean believes Mimi is innocent, she occasionally battles doubt and discouragement. The period details, such as beehive hairdos, measles, and garish greenand-gold furniture sink the reader into the mid-1960s. Frequent, but not excessive, use of terms like “y’all” and “I might could” keep the Texas setting clear, while multiple Hispanic names and bits of Mexican culture add both diversity and realism. Young readers will cheer for Magnolia Jean and Nick, while adults will love how fully convinced the townspeople are that aliens are going to land in the town square on some randomly selected day. Themes of friendship, family loyalty, and the changes that come with old age tie it all together. This one is a delight.
Sarah Hendess
LIGHT COMES TO SHADOW MOUNTAIN
Toni Buzzeo, Holiday House, 2023, $17.99, hb, 272pp, 9780823453849
In 1937, eleven-year-old Cora Mae Tipton dreams of becoming a newspaper reporter—a dream for which she knows she’ll need at least a high school education. But Shadow Mountain in southeastern Kentucky doesn’t have a high school, and in order to study at night for the tests that will win her a scholarship to the nearest boarding school, Cora needs electric lights. Fortunately, a local electric cooperative
is finally coming to Shadow Mountain, and they only need three households to join.
Desperate to electrify their little community, Cora and her best friend, Ceilly, cook up plans to raise the money needed to include their school as one of the three members. But Cora’s mommy, heavily pregnant and fighting depression sparked by the death of Cora’s older sister, is hard set against any changes coming to the mountain. Cora finds herself caught between her dreams and her mother, who she wishes more than anything could smile again.
This immersive novel captivates readers with its charming characters and atmospheric setting. Middle-grade readers will relate to Cora’s dreams and inquisitive nature, as well as her clashes with her mother and the occasional failures of her schemes. Adults will appreciate that Buzzeo shows both sides of the debate of electrification. Rather than merely writing off the people opposed to it as ignorant hillbillies, Buzzeo, through Cora, validates their concerns and treats them with respect. Most importantly, the novel explores what can be made possible through compromise. The author’s note and additional back matter provide further information about the Rural Electrification Administration, settlement schools, the Frontier Nursing Service, the Pack Horse Library Project, and herbal and plant medicine. This book is a treat.
Sarah Hendess
A SEASON MOST UNFAIR
J. Anderson Coats, Atheneum, 2023, $17.99, hb, 288pp, 9781665912358
Only child Scholastica (Tick) grows up in the town of St. Neots in 13th-century England. She and her father toil long days to make candles from foul-smelling tallow and charms out of beeswax. Papa’s eyes are failing, and Tick has taken over painting the charms and other tasks requiring attention to detail. Every year, Tick and Papa haul their charms and five hundred pounds of candles to Cambridge for the Stourbridge Fair. If all goes well, they’ll earn enough to see them through one more winter.
But not this year. Papa has taken an apprentice, Henry, to work with him and live in the family house. Girls have no place as apprentices to candlemakers. Besides, Tick constantly stinks of the tallow, so her friends and even adults keep their distance. Papa now assigns all candle-making tasks to Henry. Tick’s stepmother, Mama Elly, encourages the new arrangement and shoos Tick out to work the garden. Headstrong Tick won’t let Henry take her place next to Papa or at the fair.
With help from her old friends, Tick develops an elaborate plan to make the charms and secretly get to the fair on her own, where a series of obstacles confound her.
Through Tick’s first-person present-tense narration, Coats gives readers an in-depth view of the lives of young girls in that time and place, of coping with losing the affections of fathers but attracting young men, of limited life-paths, of trying to be kind in a world that’s not always kind. Coats tells Tick’s story without injecting forced drama through gratuitous violence or overt sex. This is an informative and thought-provoking work for fourth- to sixth-graders.
G. J. Berger
UNTIL THE ROAD ENDS
Phil Earle, Andersen Press, 2023, £7.99, pb, 272pp, 9781839133169
Beau, a tired and hungry street dog, is saved from the wheels of a lorry by Peggy, who persuades her parents, her brother Wilf and his grumpy cat, Mabel, that they should give the dog a home. Peggy and Beau become inseparable. While Mabel remains aloof, Beau is soon befriended by Bomber, a homing pigeon who is named after his excremental habits as well as his ambition to be a soldier. Bomber is inspired by his heroic World War One ancestors, who carried messages across battle grounds. His wish looks soon to be fulfilled as the Second World War breaks out and society mobilises. Beau’s worries become a trauma of separation as Peggy and Wilf are evacuated to Dorset without Beau and Mabel, who then narrowly escape the mass euthanasia of family pets recommended by Chamberlain’s government. Beau accompanies Peggy’s father on his ARP duties and proves himself an expert search and rescuer, digging Blitz survivors out of the rubble. But when tragedy strikes Balham High Street, Beau, Mabel and Bomber begin a quest to be reunited with Peggy and Wilf. On the road, they meet with many perils: a wild crocodile caged for entertainment, brutalized hounds, fox hunters and aerial battles.
Readers of Phil Earle’s earlier wartime stories will be familiar with his exploration of compassion, sacrifice, courage and resilience in overwhelming circumstances – qualities which are not only experienced by human animals. The journey on which Beau, Mabel and Bomber embark is reminiscent of Russell Hoban, as they must adapt emotionally to survive a world which seems profoundly indifferent to their suffering. They never cease in their quest to be reunited with their human friends; but by the time the road ends, they have also realised their best selves. Very highly recommended.
Louise Tree
DIGGING FOR VICTORY
Cathy Faulkner, Firefly, 2023, £7.99, pb, 281pp, 9781915444110
In this brilliantly engaging verse novel,
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twelve-year-old Bonnie is frustrated. Her brother, Ralph, is going off to fly for the RAF. Why does he get to be a hero and she doesn’t? All that she is allowed to do is dig for victory and she finds this incredibly inane. Then Mr. Fisher is billeted with them at their North Devon farm. Bonnie must clean his muddy shoes every night and ask absolutely no questions. Mr Fisher has an RAF uniform but doesn’t appear to fly. What is his story and is he a spy?
This book covers a little-known facet of World War Two: the role of the decoy men. They had to go to fake airfields and maintain them to look like they were fully functioning, with the aim that the enemy would drop their bombs on the disused airfields rather than the real ones. Faulkner portrays this as the dangerous and heroic job it was. The decoy men were one of a few groups who were required to go outside during an air raid to draw the enemy bombers towards them and away from the working airfield and other sensitive targets. The relationship between Bonnie and Mr Fisher, as it develops, is one of deep trust and friendship. In the end Bonnie is able to be a hero, although she cannot boast about it or accept praise because of Mr Fisher’s occupation. This is an interesting concept to introduce to children, to do something good without the expectation of reward.
The novel will be very useful to widen children’s knowledge and understanding of World War Two and to encourage a new and less polarised view of the period.
Rebecca Butler
FINDING MOON RABBIT
J. C. Kato and J. C.², CHB Media, 2022, $14.99, pb, 211pp, 9798985237443
The story opens with Koko Hayashi, her sister, and mother on a train on their way to the Heart Mountain World War II internment camp with other Japanese Americans who were forced to relocate. Their father, Koko is told, has been sent away on a photography assignment by the government, and she misses him terribly. She tries to remember her father’s advice to have gaman, patience. The family encounters flimsy barracks living quarters, mud everywhere, shortages of paper, coal, and other goods; and hostility from the locals. Koko tries to make the best of things, using the backs of food can labels for writing paper, joining the camp Girl Scout troop, and helping elderly Mr. Yamamoto with his quest to start a garden. But when Koko finds out her father has been detained as a Japanese spy, and her mother winds up in the camp hospital with a possible case of TB, she fears she and her sister might be taken into foster care.
Koko is an engaging and resourceful character, a normal preteen who squabbles with her sister and complains about the food in the dining hall. But she has to endure abnormal conditions, such as interacting with a military policeman and worrying about being shot if found outside the barbed wire. Readers get a clear sense of what life in the internment camps was like for the residents.
Both authors have family members who were interned during the war and discuss in the authors’ notes their families’ reluctance to speak about the experience. They provide maps, a chronology, and a bibliography for young readers who wish to learn more. This would make good supplementary reading for a World War II history lesson, but it’s also great as a standalone adventure story. Recommended.
B. J. Sedlock
I’LL TAKE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE
James Klise, Algonquin, 2023, $17.99, hb, 280pp, 9781616208585
In 1934, during the Great Depression, sixteen-year-old Joe Garbe takes a summer job at a hotel in Chicago to earn money to save the farm downstate where he and his widowed mother live. He shares a room with his older cousin, Bernie, who lures him into ever more illegal and dangerous schemes to earn money quickly. But Joe has another reason to be in danger. He is “queer,” which in the 1930s was a slur, rather than a term the LGBTQ+ community claimed with pride. He finds himself attracted to Eddie, the working-class deliverer of the hotel’s liquor, and when he takes a French class in order to spy on wealthy families for Bernie’s burglary ring, he strikes up a relationship (under a fake name) with Raymond, whose lifestyle and opportunities he covets. However, an unfortunate visit to a local gay club puts a blackmailer on Raymond’s trail, with Joe becoming an accessory to his friend’s retaliation at the same time as he gives information about Raymond’s family to Bernie and the burglars.
In a novel full of period detail, Klise explores the moral and physical jeopardy that his sympathetic young protagonist faces. Joe wants to do the right things—help his mother, save the family farm, go to college to make a better life for himself. He’s also an innocent entranced by the big city, where he can be his true self rather than pretending to love his high school sweetheart. He feels guilt for his bad choices, and often his efforts to make things right only make things worse, especially since one of the main things he needs to learn is to stand up for himself.
Lyn Miller-Lachmann
THE VIKING ATTACK
Josh Lacey, illus. Garry Parsons, Andersen Press, 2023, £7.99, pb, 240pp, 9781839133336 Twins Scarlett and Thomas are hurtled back in time to the year 859 AD in a somewhat cavalier manner by means of their grandfather’s homemade time machine (shades of Doc Brown in ‘Back to the Future’!). Equipped only with the knowledge gained through their school Vikings project and each furnished with devices that enable them to speak and understand any language, they arrive at different places, albeit in the same year.
Thomas finds himself on board a ship
with a band of Viking warriors and Scarlett in a Saxon village with the scholarly Alfred, recuperating from illness, a king’s youngest son who believes he will never be king himself (and who lets the bread burn!). Their journeys bring them together but, as they are attached to warring communities, will they be able to reunite in order to use their grandfather’s device to return simultaneously to their own time? At one point they become embroiled in a battle, bringing the salutary realisation that it’s not like a computer game.
This is the first in a proposed series featuring historical topics prescribed in the English National Curriculum and aiming to show two sides of history. While readers will learn about aspects of Anglo-Saxon and Viking lives from this illustrated story, the Vikings are very much presented as villains apart from an acknowledgement in the endnotes that ‘Some of them preferred not to fight at all, instead farming or trading.’
The Roman Invasion, the second story featuring the Time Travel Twins, will be published in September 2023.
Ann Lazim
THE ELEMENTAL DETECTIVES
Patrice Lawrence, illus. Paul Kellam, Amanda Quartey and Luke Ashforth, Scholastic, 2022, £7.99, pb, 424pp, 9780702315626
A sleeping sickness has fallen across London, and the city’s elementals – spirits of Air, Water, Fire and Earth – worry that they will be blamed (again) by the ‘Solid human folk’ for the catastrophe. Marisee Blackwell’s grandmother is Keeper of the Wells of London, human guardian of the Water elementals; but as the city succumbs to sleep and maddened sleepwalkers, Marisee realises that her grandmother is also protecting something very special: the ancient Freedom of London. When her grandmother disappears, both friends and enemies want to find her. Marisee sets out to find her first and to uncover the culprit causing the sleeping sickness. In this quest, she enlists the help of a new friend, Robert Strong – an enslaved boy imported from a Barbados cocoa plantation to be a servant to an aristocratic family. Robert and Marisee share the same ‘brown skin’ but the difference between them is a potential rift: Marisee is free but Robert was born into slavery. As the sickness sends Londoners into a dream world rich with their deepest desires – warmth, food, or the presence of a lost loved one – the children discover the sleepers are being controlled by a mysterious Shepherdess. When she lures Robert with dream visions of the brother he lost to his slave owner’s cruelty, his commitment to Marisee and to saving the Freedom of London is tested. This is tight and persuasive world building; but pace is lost between the first and final acts. I would also refer young readers to the ‘Know your Elementals’ back section before they begin, as they may find the opening chapters confusingly crowded with Elemental backstories. But Lawrence does conjure
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tempting dreamscapes and genuinely frightening spirits as she explores themes of freedom, courage and the loss of loved ones.
Louise Tree
THE BOY WHO STOLE THE PHARAOH’S LUNCH
Karen McCombie, illus. Anneli Bray, Barrington Stoke, 2023, £7.99, pb, 83pp, 9781800902015
Seth is always naughty, and he doesn’t like school. While waiting for a telling-off for his latest prank, he picks up a curious golden beetle from the teacher’s desk – and promptly finds himself waist deep in the River Nile. Seth hadn’t enjoyed the lessons on Ancient Egypt one bit, but he soon finds his scraps of knowledge have new meaning. Even more importantly, his humour and particular approach to solving things come in very useful in this new setting.
Our unlikely hero gains in confidence enough to make some crucial decisions that actually save lives. So when he finally returns to that meeting with his teacher he finds the courage to speak up about the difficulties he has with reading and writing,
Clearly this Barrington Stoke chapter book has a strong and appropriate theme for reluctant readers. It is also a pacy, wellconstructed story with moments of high danger, humour and pathos that all readers can enjoy. Through Seth’s amazed eyes we see life in an ordinary farming family – their amulets, their work, their food and houses, the games they play – and learn something about the beliefs and politics of the time, thereby touching on relevant National Curriculum areas. A short fact sheet at the end is also helpful. But this time-slip adventure is far from a box-ticking exercise. It is skilfully written by the well-liked Karen McCombie who has created some engaging and unusual characters here, most notably the giggling pet hyena who so very nearly becomes that Pharaoh’s lunch.
Marion Rose
ENTER THE BODY
Joy McCullough, Dutton, 2023, $18.99/ C$25.99, pb, 336pp, 9780593406755
The conceit of this young-adult narrative, told almost entirely in verse, is that several characters from Shakespeare’s dramas gather in a room underneath a stage and discuss the stories the playwright has given them. Juliet, Ophelia, and Cordelia—all young women whose plot trajectories lead toward death and possibly maiming—express modern ideas about women’s place in society, trauma, and relationships, and devise new endings for their stories.
McCullough’s verse does not rival Shakespeare’s, but it is very clever and, at times, very beautiful. She picks up on imagery in the plays and reworks it to better serve her characters. For example, Ophelia develops a metaphor in which she functions like water, not being overpowered by it as she is in Hamlet but drawing strength from it that nurtures life and sunders mountains. The first part of the
narrative, when the characters retell their stories from their own perspective, is engaging if not enlightening.
The second part of the narrative, in which the characters decide to take ownership of their stories, retelling them with changes that minimize or eradicate the traumatic events, suffers from being slightly predictable and possibly trite—Juliet, for example, asserts herself to her father, explaining that she can’t marry Paris because she’s already married to Romeo, and her father accepts this.
Another character is also present: Lavinia, whose tongue has been cut out and whose injuries do not magically heal like those of the other characters. She is unable to tell her story and seems to represent the effects of trauma that are so deep and irreparable they will never go away. This exception in the narrative is important, since otherwise it risks treating trauma too lightly.
Overall, McCullough’s experiment is successful, reflecting the marvelous plasticity of literature that continually yields new meanings.
Elizabeth Crachiolo
A SKY FULL OF SONG
Susan Lynn Meyer, Union Square, 2023, $16.99, hb, 272pp, 9781454947844
After marauding Cossacks in the Russian Empire leave her mother with a head injury, eleven-year-old Shoshana, called “Shoshi,” and her Jewish family take a ship to the United States to be reunited with her father and brother, who immigrated several years earlier. Papa and Anshel are now homesteaders on the North Dakota prairie, living in a rodentinfested dugout which Shoshi, her mother, and her other siblings are now trying to make into a home (with the help of a cat she rescues on the way). Enrolled in school where they are the only Jewish students, Shoshi quickly learns English and makes a Christian friend who teaches her the dominant holidays and customs. But older sister Libke struggles to fit in, causing a rift between the two sisters who were always so close. The antisemitic brother of a classroom rival further tests their bond with his violent behavior, so similar to the Cossacks whom the family fled, until a blizzard shows all of them the importance of forgiveness and working together.
Gorgeous, immersive prose captures the closeness of the family’s village, the everpresent threats of violence, and the vastness of the Great Plains. The tension between those who want to preserve their customs and those who want to assimilate as soon as possible is a common theme in Jewish immigration stories, one that Meyer makes fresh and tangible through her focus on a little-known experience and her weaving of music into the story. While Shoshi tries to fit in, she also remembers the old country, and her father’s violin is her way of expressing what she has left behind as well as what she has gained in freedom, opportunity, and confidence.
Lyn Miller-Lachmann
THE MANY ASSASSINATIONS OF SAMIR, THE SELLER OF DREAMS
Daniel Nayeri, illus. Daniel Miyares, Levine Querido, 2023, $21.99, hb, 224pp, 9781646143030
In the 11th century in western China, angry monks chase and throw stones at a young orphaned boy. The monks had taken the boy in and educated him but later accused him of blasphemy. The boy stumbles into a trading caravan where a passenger, portly old Samir, rescues the boy and names him Monkey. Narrated by Monkey, their journey takes us eight hundred miles on the Silk Road through central Asia.
Along the way, Monkey develops a deep crush on the daughter of the caravan metalsmith. A few years older than Monkey, she disdains him but must hide her own secrets. Samir has talked his way into unfair, even fraudulent, exchanges over many trading trips and in many places. Now rumors abound that multiple wealthy victims have hired a string of six assassins to find and kill Samir. As thanks for his rescue and hoping to buy his freedom, Monkey promises to help him. Multiple attempts on Samir’s life by larger-than-life killers play out in astounding ways, some ingenious, but several work only as fantasy.
Nayeri pulls readers in with a fast pace and details that ring true. Beautiful color illustrations and author notes enhance the many boisterous encounters, harsh settings, and interesting characters. Monkey’s telling of the story is engaging and sometimes beautiful, though jarring modern-day expressions intrude (e.g., “his big score”; “scattershot”; “For a short second, I wondered . . .”; “shorter by an inch”). Seconds and inches were not known back then in central Asia. Overall, Nayeri’s treatments of human relations, love, life, and death set in faroff places will appeal to and educate middlegrade and older readers.
G. J. Berger
YOURS FROM THE TOWER
Sally Nicholls, Andersen Press, 2023, £14.99, hb, 368pp, 9781839133190
1896, various British locations. Three 17-year-old girls leave school and embark on Life. Tirzah has had a turbulent childhood; her mother is an alcoholic and usually in debt. Tirzah now lives with her strict, unloving grandmother, whom she hates, and has grown up, in modern terms, neurotic and dangerously impulsive. Sophia’s wealthy Aunt Eliza is giving her a Season; Sophia is expected to land a rich husband who will pay for her younger sisters’ schooling, and ensure that they, in turn, will make advantageous marriages. In the previous generation, Aunt Eliza had sacrificed herself this way, but Sophia’s heart is already taken – and he is not rich. Polly teaches children in an orphanage for a pittance.
As the girls exchange letters, we gradually
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realize that their ‘ladies’ education won’t support them financially – they’ll all need to find husbands. The correspondence gradually expands as various young men enter the story and the girls struggle to face the challenges of the adult world.
I loved Yours from the Tower, which reminded me of one of my favourite childhood books, An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870) by Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women. What impressed me was that all Nicholls’ characters have genuine late 19th-century mindsets, with moral standards which are important to them; the young men’s concern for the girls’ reputations, for example. There is a lot of emotion in the book but no explicit sex.
Nicholls asks the teenage reader to make an imaginative leap back 150 years to enter what may feel like an alien and unnecessarily restricted world, and I was worried whether it might not be too quiet, or labelled ‘boring’ for today’s young adults. In my view, it’s well worth the effort; Sally Nicholls transports readers to a very different world and holds them gripped.
Elizabeth Hawksley
FABLEHOUSE
E. L. Norry, Bloomsbury, 2023, £7.99, pb, 320pp, 9781526649539
Emma Norry has that endearing ability in a writer of weaving in reflections on life and what it throws at you, without it sounding out of place. “Trust… That meant she’d leave me alone until I messed up,” thinks Heather, the latest youngster to be taken into care at Fablehouse. This novel partly charts her ‘trust’ journey – learning to trust friends, trust adults and ultimately trust herself.
When I began this middle-grade book, it felt like a slow burn, and I had no sense of the direction it would take. Norry takes time to establish the anger-fuelled Heather and her reluctant engagement with the three other characters who become the ‘Roamers’. Fablehouse specialises in taking in the mixedrace children of G.I. fathers who returned to America after World War 2. The children’s freedom to roam is encouraged and food for picnics is dispensed in lashings like an Enid Blyton story. The four are drawn to a cairn, which has special properties – to calm, or to lighten their sadness at their personal situations. Then one day they find Pal there, a man with dreadlocks, beaten up and wearing strange clothes. The story becomes a magical tale linking their world with the time of King Arthur and a Fae underworld which has breached a portal, bringing mortal danger.
The writing beautifully fuses the outdoorsy life of a 1950s childhood (bicycles and plaits), with the imagery of a legend containing knights, magical swords, and a lady in the lake. The Roamers are given enchanted weapons and have to face dilemmas and personal challenges as they follow their quest to a high-stakes finale. It is wonderful to have four, rounded, mixed-race characters carrying the story. For boy or girl readers who like an
adventure story that engrosses, this novel delivers big time. Looking forward to a film!
Marion Rose
THE WICKED BARGAIN
Gabe Cole Novoa, Random House, 2023, $18.99/ C$25.99, hb, 386pp, 9780593378014
Gabe Cole Novoa’s The Wicked Bargain is an action-packed pirate adventure and so much more. It is a tale of acceptance and transformation. Novoa’s main character, sixteen-year-old Mar León de la Rosa, is a seasoned Caribbean pirate who is part of an unstoppable crew captained by Mar’s father. Together, they raid Spanish ships and aid revolutionaries throughout the region, working fearlessly to end Spanish rule. However, it all ends one terrible night when el Diablo arrives to settle a deal he made with the captain long ago.
Mar is the sole survivor of el Diablo’s wrath and is plucked out of the wreckage by the last pirate crew on the Caribbean Sea. Wracked with grief and overwhelmed by the task of hiding both their transmasculine nonbinary identity and supernatural abilities from the crew, Mar embarks on a secret journey to save their father. Despite Mar’s godlike abilities to control the elements, their self-loathing is nearly their undoing. It takes the unlikely team of a handsome pirate and stylish demonio to help Mar accept themself and unearth the magic required to save their father.
This novel is an excellent addition to any classroom library. The themes of family, acceptance, and friendship leap off the page with the same intensity as the swashbuckling action. The pirates are as kind as they are fierce, and this novel reminds readers that queer people have existed throughout history. Inclusive stories teach all of us that selfacceptance is the path to belonging.
Melissa Warren
BERNICE AND THE GEORGIAN BAY GOLD
Jessica Outram, Second Story, 2023, $12.95, pb, 190pp, 9781772603187
Bernice, the eight-year-old protagonist, lives with her siblings, her parents, and her beloved grandmother in the lighthouse that her father tends on Georgian Bay, close to the U.S.-Canada border. Her family are of Métis heritage, a centuries-long blend of indigenous people and French-Canadian settlers with their own distinct culture. Listening to her grandmother’s stories, she has grown up with a deep love of nature, music, and family.
One night her father rescues a canoeist caught in a storm and brings him home for dry clothes, food, and a good night’s sleep. Bernice is intrigued by this man, who is grateful but who leaves next day mentioning only a treasure he has left in the boathouse. There Bernice sees just a painting of trees on an island. She recognizes the island and believes this to be a clue to finding treasure that could only be gold. She carefully plans to find the gold so she can help her family.
The story covers her careful preparations and, incidentally, much about her heritage.
It’s an exciting tale, covering the man who drinks rattlesnake soup and Bernice’s near shipwreck in stormy Georgian Bay. As a story, it will interest readers of all ages, moving deftly between the warm family scenes, industries across the water, and the dangerous storms of Georgian Bay. Interwoven are tales of Métis history and culture, which add to the depth of interest of the story.
Valerie Adolph
ESCAPE ’56
Richard Panchyk, Triangle Square, 2023, $16.95, pb, 224pp, 9781644212530
At ten years old, Erzsi Molnár has known nothing but oppression at the hands of the communist regime that rules Hungary. But rebellion is in the air, and her sister Lili, eight years older, has joined the 1956 student uprising to bring a more liberal government to power. A cousin, who is an Olympic athlete, is debating whether to defect or if Hungary is worth saving. Then, in November, Soviet tanks roll in, one parking outside the window of the Molnárs’ Budapest apartment. Lili fears arrest because of her participation in the demonstrations since the summer. The girls’ father fears losing his job as a salesperson in the department store that his family once owned but was expropriated by the communist government. One step ahead of the secret police, the family takes a train to a border town and escapes through the woods to Austria, from where they travel to the United States as refugees.
This novel is based on the story of the author’s mother, Elizabeth. Most of it is narrated from her point of view, but the author also gives us the thoughts of Lili, their parents, and even a pair of Russian soldiers stationed outside their apartment. While this technique distances the reader from the main character, who is mostly an observer of events, it also gives us a sense of the drama and peril, the hope and disillusionment, of living through the failed revolution. Equally dramatic and revealing is the experience of the family upon arriving at a crowded New Jersey refugee camp after a long, perilous, and disorienting journey, where a form letter from President Dwight D. Eisenhower becomes a source of welcome, comfort, and hope.
Lyn Miller-Lachmann
CLOUDS OVER CALIFORNIA
Karyn Parsons, Little, Brown, 2023, $16.99, hb, 320pp, 9780316484077
Stevie, a shy sixth grader, has just moved to a new neighborhood and school in the Los Angeles area in the early 1970s. Biracial, with a Black mother and a white father, she is the only student of color in her class. Class bullies make fun of her hair while the other kids ignore her. Even worse, her best friend from her old school won’t return her phone calls. Her parents are fighting, her mother may be having an affair with a Black librarian named Clarence, and her father, a former CIA operative, is secretly recording all her mother’s phone calls. Despite
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the instability of her parents’ marriage, they’re now the guardians of Stevie’s fifteen-yearold cousin, Naomi, whose widowed mother in Boston can’t handle her. Naomi has her own secrets—she’s dating a boy involved with the Black Panthers and volunteers with the group’s childcare program after school.
Period detail, major historical and cultural figures, and slang root this story in a time and place in which women’s roles were rapidly changing. Stevie’s father wants a traditional marriage with a stay-at-home wife who cooks and takes care of the children, and Stevie’s very conservative aunts (her mother’s two sisters) reinforce him in these beliefs. But Stevie’s mother and cousin see education and political activism respectively as means of expanding their place in the world. Stevie is drawn to a sporty white classmate, and through her budding friendship with Ally, she develops confidence. Will sports be the means by which she asserts herself? Parsons leaves the possibility open, showing middle-grade readers the multiple ways in which women fought for equality during this tumultuous decade.
Lyn Miller-Lachmann
FRIENDS AND TRAITORS
Helen Peters, Nosy Crow, 2023, £7.99, pb, 256pp, 9781788004640
Sidney Dashworth is being evacuated with her school, St. Olave’s, located in Sussex, to Stanbrook House, a dilapidated country mansion owned by Lord Evesham and his family. Nancy, a poorer but well-educated girl who could have gone to St. Olave’s had her parents been able to afford the fees, is employed at Stanbrook as a housemaid.
When the girls meet, what will they discover and are the residents of Stanbrook House all to be trusted?
This is an absolutely gripping, fast paced read. One of Peters’ great strengths is her depiction of Sidney’s grief when tragedy strikes and her realisation of the very different way in which adults dealt with children’s grief in the 1940s. The relationship between Sidney and her beloved brother, Dordy, commonly known as George, seems deeply felt.
The denouement of this book, complete with its twist, is thrilling and it discusses a rarely seen facet of World War Two in middle grade literature. Fifth columnists or British people collaborating with the Nazis are dealt with in some depth. It must have been a challenge for Peters to write pro-Nazi dialogue which fits her characters authentically. If younger readers enjoy school stories, ghost stories and history, they should read this book and they will not be disappointed.
Rebecca Butler
THE NIGHT RAVEN
Johan Rundberg (trans. A.A. Prime), Amazon Crossing, 2023, $17.99, hb, 192pp, 9781662509582
Mika is a twelve-year-old orphan in
Stockholm, Sweden, in 1880. She has never known life outside the orphanage. She doesn’t even know her own surname. Yet she and her friend Rufus have taken on the roles of carers and protectors of the younger children, roles that motivate them to investigate a series of threats and murders, as well as a mysterious baby who shows up one night. Mika has an eye for details, so when the police arrive to investigate, she offers to help Detective Hoff and his forces, who seem completely baffled and helpless. If they executed a serial killer, why are these deaths still happening? And what is Mika’s connection to the deaths—and to the frail baby now in part in her care? This book is the first volume in the popular Moonwind series in Sweden, featuring the young orphan who uses her fascination with details and her connections to aged-out orphans living on the streets, to solve crimes.
Over the past decades, dark Scandinavian mysteries, both historical and contemporary, have become popular, and The Night Raven brings the genre to a younger readership. Despite the gruesome deaths, the violence and threats, and the Dickensian urban setting, the descriptions and events are age appropriate, most of the violence off the page. At times, Mika seems a bit too wise beyond her years, an adult investigator in a child’s body. Nonetheless, middle-school-age historical mystery fans will appreciate the fastmoving story and intriguing setting, as well as the splashes of humor throughout.
Lyn Miller-Lachmann LIES WE SING TO THE SEA
Sarah Underwood, Electric Monkey, 2023, £14.99, hb, 488pp, 9780008558536
This is the story of Melantho and Leto and their quest to end the annual ritual hanging of twelve maidens of Ithaca, and the casting of their bodies into the sea, to appease the god Poseidon. The curse was brought upon the kingdom centuries ago when Odysseus returned to his wife, Penelope. He discovered that many suitors had appeared for her hand, during his ten-year absence, but Penelope had deterred them by weaving a shroud, unpicking it each night, and vowing she could not wed until the shroud was complete. The suitors grew restless and turned their attentions to the queen’s handmaidens. When Odysseus returned he ordered the handmaidens, whose honour had been sullied, to be hanged and cast into the waves.
Leto is one of the current twelve and, even though her mother had been the Oracle, cannot save herself. She is surprised to find, after her death, to be upon the lonely island of Pandou, rescued by its only inhabitant, Melantho. She teaches Leto the power to control the sea and grow scales of a sea creature. Melantho also tells Leto that her task is to kill the prince of Ithaca to destroy the curse. The current prince is Matthias, who has tried to stop the hangings, but he has learnt that the sea finds the victims anyway
and wreaks more destruction. Matthias’s own sister, Selene, was one of the ‘chosen’ girls. The story reveals Leto’s changing feelings for Melantho and Matthias, but will she succeed?
The story is an enjoyable read, with some touches of humour. There is a content warning at the front of the book for: ‘violence, death, graphic injury, non-graphic sexual assault and suicide’. The quotation preface, together with the chapter headings, are from a 1900 translation of the Odyssey
Julie Parker
THE CELTIC DECEPTION
Andrew Varga, Imbrifex Books, 2023, $18.99, hb, 320pp, 9781945501869
Dan Renfrew is a seventeen-year-old time jumper. To say Dan’s life is dangerous, complicated, and hyperadventurous for a teenager would be an enormous understatement. He has taken on a mission of not only saving the world’s history but also thwarting a supremely evil villain, Victor Stahl, in his ongoing quest to control the planet. Dan’s companion, the red-haired Sam, is highly intelligent and formidable. She is close to his age though acts more mature and proves to be an invaluable asset, even if she seems somewhat reluctant in reciprocating his youthful attraction to her.
The two must travel to Britannia in AD 60 to repair a glitch in time, which is essentially any artefact that is out of place for the period. This trip, though, the two have jumped into the midst of turmoil as two ferocious Roman legions march to annihilate Celtic native tribes and druids on the island of Anglesey. The two young people must deal with the loveable but stubborn Celts, their mysterious druids, and the murderous Romans before they can find and fix the glitch. Even if they succeed, they must return to danger in the present time from Stahl and his evil minions.
Billed as a historical fantasy for young adults, this enormously entertaining novel is all that and much more. The history presented is genuinely rendered alongside the captivating fantasy and fictional elements. The storyline is replete with ancient battle action and tactics, flashes of romance, clever humor, and unexpected turns in events. Second in a series, it reads just fine as a standalone. Exceeding my expectations throughout, the book delivers not only fast-paced fun and adventure but engaging historical insight into a time of turmoil and change. Unreservedly recommended for readers of all ages.
Thomas J. Howley
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© 2023, the Historical Novel Society, ISSN: 1471-7492 | Issue 105, August 2023
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