by Barbara the Bibliophage | Apr 11, 2021 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
Chris Bohjalian’s new book, Hour of the Witch, is proof to me that even a beloved author sometimes writes a book that feels like a dud. Your mileage may vary, but despite having elements I usually love, this book just didn’t do it for me. I love journeying back in...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Apr 1, 2021 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
As a first-time author, Julie Wu draws on family history in her historical fiction novel, The Third Son. Set initially in 1940s Japanese-occupied Taiwan, it follows the life of Saburo. He’s not a favored son. In fact, his mother only occasionally deigns to give him...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Mar 28, 2021 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
Amitav Ghosh creates a compelling multi-generational narrative in his historical fiction, The Glass Palace. As the book opens, Rajkumar is an 11-year-old boy from India stranded in Mandalay, Burma (now Myanmar). He finds himself in King Thibaw’s Glass Palace in 1885...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Mar 23, 2021 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
Author Lauren Willig just didn’t deliver what I hoped for in The English Wife. It’s historical fiction and mystery, set in The Gilded Age of New York City, Newport, Rhode Island and country houses. The Van Duyvil family is “old money,” having come to America from...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Mar 17, 2021 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
Alka Joshi is a debut novelist who used her mother’s life and her imagination to create The Henna Artist. It’s a very strong story that entranced me from moment one. In a nutshell, our heroine is Lakshmi and the time is 1950s India. Women still aren’t treated like...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Feb 28, 2021 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk is a stroll down memory lane, created by Kathleen Rooney. If you’re curious about the life of women in various decades of the twentieth century, this is for you. Especially if you love melodic language and poetry. Lillian is 84, or...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Feb 22, 2021 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
Well-loved Turkish author Ayşe Kulin illustrates another angle on the early years of World War II in her 2002 book Last Train to Istanbul. (Translated to English in 2013.) The story is set partly in Turkey and partly in the Nazi-occupied French cities of Paris and...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Feb 18, 2021 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
The Language of Threads is a continuation of Gail Tsukiyama’s excellent book Women of the Silk. I’m glad to have read both in sequence, which immersed me in the main character’s entire life. In the first book, Pei is taken from her small China village, sold to work...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Feb 12, 2021 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
M.L. Stedman creates historical fiction based around a unthinkable choice in The Light Between Oceans. Set in the years between the World Wars and along the coast of South West Australia, it’s a unique period piece. And the choice its main characters make reverberates...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Feb 11, 2021 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
In Women of the Silk, a 1991 book from Gail Tsukiyama, times are hard. It’s China in the late 1920s and especially in the small villages nature and politics affect everyone. Our main character is a young girl named Pei. As the story opens, she’s about six, and her...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Feb 9, 2021 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
Shuggie Bain, the debut novel from author Douglas Stuart is a gut punch on nearly every page. It’s the story of a kid growing up in Glasgow, Scotland during the 1980s. He’s the youngest of three kids born to an alcoholic mother. His older siblings have a different...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Dec 26, 2020 | RELAX: Historical Fiction, RELAX: Mystery-Thriller
C.J. Sansom creates an unlikely hero in his character Matthew Shardlake. In Dissolution, the time is Tudor England, and Shardlake is a lawyer working in the service of Thomas Cromwell. He’s just two degrees from King Henry VIII. But he’s still just a lowly guy charged...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Dec 6, 2020 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
The Arctic Fury, the latest from Greer Macallister, is a hybrid of adventure and courtroom drama. The story centers around Virginia Reeve, who leads a group of women north into Canada and towards the Northwest Territories in 1853. If you look on a map today, you see...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Sep 16, 2020 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
In The Sandcastle Girls, Chris Bohjalian crafts a skilled and sad historical fiction novel. It centers on the little-known Armenian genocide around the time of World War I. Tragically, the Ottoman government expelled and mass murdered 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Aug 2, 2020 | RELAX: Historical Fiction
The Deep from author Alma Katsu is the perfect example of a genre I like to call Historical Fiction with a Twist. To qualify, that twist needs an element of fantasy or supernatural. In this case, Katsu imagines the lives of Titanic passengers and crew. With the hint...
by Barbara the Bibliophage | Jul 11, 2020 | RELAX: Historical Fiction, RESIST: Social Justice
The Nickel Boys is the third Colson Whitehead book I’ve read. It’s a joy to watch his skill as a writer improve each time. Of course, two of the three won Pulitzer Prizes, so I’m not the only one noticing. And this book evoked a range of emotions from cheers to jeers...
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