Historical Fiction Archives - Page 14 of 20

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney: Book Review

Laurent Jammett is a French trapper living in a little Canadian community in 1867. He mostly keeps to himself, so everyone is surprised when his neighbor, Mrs. Ross, finds him murdered. Since he worked for them occasionally, the Hudson Bay Company is called in to investigate. When the Hudson Bay officials find out that Mrs. Ross's teenage son vanished around the same time that Jammett was killed, they're naturally curious and start looking for him. Mrs. Ross is worried too and sets out to find her son first and prove his innocence. There is so much more to this book than I could write in the synopsis without spoiling anything. It's much more than just a murder mystery. In fact, the mystery felt sort of secondary to me. I was more interested in reading what I can only call the mini character studies. The story is told from many shifting points of view, but it works. I was never confused as to who I was following in each chapter. That's probably because the story only follows one character in the first person point of view--Mrs. Ross. So, in addition to furthering the mystery, we get to read a little about many different characters, how they think, what their lives have been like, etc. That was probably the most interesting part. I was left hungry for more backstory. I mostly mean that in a good way. Had every character's backstory been explored, the book would have been impossibly long. As it was, there were only a couple of loose ends that I really wish had been tied up that weren't. Not bad. There is such a strong sense of place in this book that the setting could almost be a character in itself. The Canadian winter is written about so well…

The King’s Mistress by Emma Campion: Book Review

"When had I a choice to be other than I was?" So begins this fictional autobiography of Alice Perrars' life. And that's about where I stopped caring overly much. That's harsher than I mean to be, because the book was okay, but I have very, very little tolerance for excuses. And this was a running theme throughout the book. That's where my biggest problem lay. I have to say that I don't recall ever coming across Alice Perrars before. She was married to a merchant but then became Edward III's consort. Apparently, the people blamed her for a lot of things that the king did and that went wrong in the country, but "what choice had she?" It's been months since I finished reading this, so all I can say is that, aside from the excuses that turned me off, Alice had an interesting life. She rose higher than any commoner should have been able to. In this book, she didn't ask for any of it. She only wanted a quiet life with her children away from the public eye. The other thing that I didn't like was the amount of detail. It took me forever to get through this book! It felt like every little possible meeting with the king and/or queen was detailed here. I quickly lose interest if a book is moving too slow. Historical England is always interesting to me, so the book still gets three stars. Those who don't mind excuses will probably be more interested than I was. Thanks to Crown Publishing for sending me a copy for review via Shelf Awareness. Read an excerpt. Find author Emma Campion on her website and her blog. Buy The King's Mistress on IndieBound | Book Depository | Better World Books I have an affiliate relationship with…

Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin: Book Review

I don't even know where to start with a synopsis for this book, so I'll just skip that. I have a feeling that the reason I'm not giving this book 5 stars shows more about what I'm lacking than about what the book is lacking. I felt myself on the verge of a huge epiphany throughout the book, but I just never got there. That has left me incredibly frustrated. Maybe reading through other reviews will help me see what I'm missing. The language is absolutely gorgeous. It's just one of those books that is so dense and beautiful that you feel like you could eat it. This was partly a love letter to New York. The author doesn't blindly love his city, he loves it warts and all and sees its potential to be something so much more than it is. Mostly this was a book full of beautiful symbolism that I think was trying to tell me something about life, love, justice, time, immortality, and faith in mankind. Maybe. I was tempted to put this on my "mythology" shelf, because it felt like Helprin was creating something of a modern, American mythology. I have notes scribbled here about what I think this means or that means, but something would always happen to show me that I was wrong in my interpretation of something. I finally just gave up and read the book without trying so hard to figure everything out. I hoped that everything would come clear to me in the end, but it didn't. Readers who enjoy lush language, people who love New York, and people who want a book to chew on for a while will probably love this. I truly hate to admit it, but this one defeated me. Reviewed March 30, 2009 Read an…

The Mischief of the Mistletoe by Lauren Willig: Book Review

Arabella Dempsey has just seen all her hopes dashed. She's been a companion to her aunt since she was a child and fully expected to inherit from her. She realizes that isn't going to happen when her aunt marries a much younger man--the very man that Arabella has been fantasizing about. Does it get any crueler? But Arabella is nothing if not determined and she determines to make her own way in the world and goes to work as a teacher in an all-girls school. Her first day there she literally bumps into everyone's favorite bumbling idiot, Reginald Fitzhugh. You might know him as Turnip. Turnip because he has the brains of one. But Turnip has a big heart and a younger sister and a secret message in a Christmas pudding, and it all adds up to one very fun book. I confess that I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to Turnip in the other books, but I did love the big doof in this book. He's handsome, and not the brightest crayon, but he has a gigantic heart. He's wrapped around his younger sister's finger, he's rich but doesn't even think about class as a general rule. Everything he's thinking moves across his face, and he's not afraid to defend a lady's honor. Heck, he's willing to play an even bigger idiot and thus put his life on the line for his country! A gentleman indeed! The action in this book takes place in between The Seduction of the Crimson Rose and The Temptation of the Night Jasmine. Well, it actually overlaps with Night Jasmine. It was interesting to see some of those events from a different perspective. Oh, and another thing. Jane Austen as a character. Need I say more? I always read Lauren Willig's books…

Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin: Book Review

Children are missing from Cambridge, the town's Jews have been blamed, and King Henry II is receiving less revenue while the Jews are in hiding. Clearly something must be done. Enter Adelia Aguilar. She has been trained at the world-renowned and forward-thinking school of medicine in Salerno, Italy. Her specialty? Corpses. She is a mistress of the art of death and the dead "speak" to her. She's called in to examine the body of the one child who has been found and, along with her friends, try to find the killer. This was a page-turner for me, mostly because of Adelia. She feels completely real. She's super-intelligent but hopeless in society. She's great with her patients but clueless as to how to interact with them outside the examining room. She's a feminist in a time before the word was dreamed of. She tries to hold herself aloof from everyone, but her heart's too big for that and she ends up caring in spite of herself. She feels like someone I would like to know in real life. The other characters are a great supporting cast. For the most part, they're reasonably well-rounded and I wound up caring about them too. My favorite was the little urchin, Ulff. The mystery was solid. I did guess part of it, but not the whole thing. I did end up being very surprised by the end. One thing that did bother me, and I'm not quite sure who to "blame" for this, is that this book takes place around the time that The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett ended, but this one felt like it could have been centuries later. Maybe it was just me, but Follett's England under Henry II was a brutal, hopeless, scary place, and Franklin's England at the…

The Gendarme by Mark Mustian: Book Review

Emmett Conn is 92 years old and he has started having seizures and disturbing dreams/flashbacks. His early years are a mystery to him anyway. He awoke in a British hospital in WWI, a Turkish soldier mistakenly picked up after he was severely wounded. That's as far back as he can remember. But now in his dreams he seems to be re-living a past where he was a soldier in charge of a group of Armenian people in what later came to be known as the Armenian genocide. Are these real memories? And what of the beautiful girl with different-colored eyes? Was she real and did he love her? I feel like this is a very literary book and I should have something very smart and literary to say, but that's just not my style. I can only tell you what I liked and didn't like. I had never even heard of the Armenian genocide until sometime in the past year or two. It was actually a passing reference on GoodReads. I left it at that. I'm disappointed in myself. I'll be the first to spout off with how we have to remember the Holocaust so we don't repeat history, but I didn't bother to at least look at Wikipedia and see what happened to the Armenians. And they are in danger of being forgotten. I saw this author (who is of Armenian descent) speak at the Decatur Book Festival, and he said that Hitler, only about 20 years after all this happened, even said something like, "Who even remembers the Armenians?" Shameful. Anyway. This book is told from an aggressor's point of view. He personally didn't feel strongly one way or the other about the Armenians, he just wanted to join the army and fight in WWI. Before that could…

The Outer Banks House by Diann Ducharme: Book Review

Abby Sinclair is the neglected daughter of a plantation owner. Three years after the end of the Civil War, she is still mourning the loss of her uncle and her family is still adjusting to the loss of their slaves. When her father decides to move the whole family out to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for the summer, Abby is excited to see the ocean for the first time. Something about the wildness of the ocean stirs up a wildness that had almost been lost in herself. And then she meets "Banker" Benjamin Whimble, a dirty, uneducated young man who nevertheless has something to teach her. I loved the descriptions of the Outer Banks in the 1860s. It's hard to think of them as they are now, crowded with houses up to the water's edge in places, and read about how no one built close to the water in this time period because of the harshness of the storms. At the very beginning, Abby runs clear across Nags Head from the sound to the ocean, finding nothing but sand on the way. I'm thinking about the traffic, outlet malls and shops and restaurants, and the Wright Brothers Memorial that she would meet today. "Progress" is of course inevitable, but reading something like this makes me wonder if it's worth the cost. I liked watching Abby come into her own. The loss of her uncle, who was more truly her father than her father is, has left her reeling. She's withdrawn and bookish, and she's starting to be pushed around a little too much by her parents. She slowly and believably starts to regain her old confidence and to even make some surprising decisions for herself. I liked Benjamin a lot. He sees the world clearly through his intense…

The Bells by Richard Harvell: Book Review

Moses Froben, an opera singer of world-renown, raised a son who could not possibly have been his own. When his son asked how they had come to be together, Moses would studiously avoid the question. On Moses's death, however, his son found a memoir that told of Moses's humble beginnings and how father and son found each other. The side of me that loves dark, convoluted, Gothic stories absolutely loved this book! A mother widely believed to be mad, an evil father, life with monks, and love against all odds just add up to the perfect read when I am in the right mood. And I was in the right mood for this one. Gothic doesn't feel like exactly the right word to describe this book, but melodramatic has a negative connotation, at least to me, so I'm going to stick with Gothic. Moses is a sensitive soul, and I found myself wanting to protect him in his childhood years. As he grew up and started to go after what he wanted, I was firmly on his side, cheering him on through everything. I won't get into the supporting characters too much for fear of giving something away, but I even loved and loathed them as I was supposed to. I will give you this quote about a bookish monk*: "And sure enough, the next Thursday, when Nicolai had fetched me from rehearsal and scrubbed my face and combed my hair, there stood Remus, dressed in hat and cloak and carrying a satchel full of books as though we would be traveling for many days, as if running out of books were tantamount to running out of air." Who among us can't relate to that? And they were only going to be away for a couple of hours! Moses' descriptions…

The Ice Soldier by Paul Watkins: Book Review

William Bromley is a World War II veteran living in 1950's London. In the war, he led a mountaineering expedition that ended disastrously. He has never moved past this and started living again. He's just existing--teaching school, admiring the secretary from a distance, spending Friday evenings with his one friend, and visiting his father on school breaks. There's nothing exciting in his life and that's the way he likes it. Notably, he has also completely given up mountain climbing. Then something changes and he is left wondering if his life is really enough and does he have the courage to start truly living his life again? I enjoyed this. The story itself was very well-written and easy to read. The pacing was good and the way that things were slowly explained really worked. Probably the best part was that within this very straightforward story, the author manages to explore big themes like man vs. nature, the nature of friendship among men, and what war can still do to those lucky enough to survive. In other words, it works on many levels. If you want a simple adventure story, that's in here. If you want something to chew over and think about for a while, that's in here too. Reviewed June 21, 2008

Annexed by Sharon Dogar: Book Review

In Annexed, author Sharon Dogar imagines what life in the Annex with Anne Frank must have been like for young Peter. We know all about Anne's thoughts and feelings, but surely Peter needs a chance to tell his side of things too. The novel begins as Peter is dying and looking back on his life, desperate to tell someone his story. The first part of this book was really about 4 stars for me. It wasn't anything hugely different from what I would have imagined, but it was nice to see a different perspective on the other housemates. Anne frequently used her diary as a place to vent, so we tended to see the worst parts of everyone. In this book, Mrs. van Pels is shown as a caring mother who frequently says inappropriate things to help draw attention away from shy Peter. She steals the Franks' sheets to help him out too. His dad makes his awful jokes as a way to try to break tension. Mr. Frank is a wise, understanding mentor. Margot is inscrutable, but Mrs. Frank and Mr. Pfeffer are still pretty difficult to live with. Anne herself isn't always easy to live with, with her high ideals and mercurial personality, but she always makes life interesting, even within the confines of the Annex. The second part left me feeling shattered. Anne Frank's diary is a difficult read, because you do know how the story ends. But the diary just stops and, in the edition I read anyway, there was a very dry summation of what happened to the inhabitants of the Annex after their capture. If you've read any Holocaust literature at all, you can fill in the blanks, but it's easy just to not think about it and feel sad that Anne didn't live…