It’s 1915, and Bess Heath is a happy, well-to-do student at Loretto Academy, a Catholic school on a bluff in Niagara Falls, Canada. Her window looks out toward the falls, and she imagines that the flecks of silver she sees in the mist are prayers. When her father loses his job at the Niagara Power Company, [...]
Archive for the ‘Historical Fiction’ Category
The Day the Falls Stood Still
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction, tagged Review Copy on November 28, 2009 | 2 Comments »
The Regency (Morland Dynasty #13)
Posted in Historical Fiction on November 20, 2009 | 4 Comments »
I’m now over one-third of the way through Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s 32-volume historical fiction series, The Morland Dynasty. In less than two years, I’ll be done. Each book covers a period in English history through the eyes of the Morland family, a wealthy, well-connected Yorkshire family. The characters are a good mix of likable and unlikable, the [...]
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (audio)
Posted in Children's / YA Lit, Historical Fiction on November 18, 2009 | 15 Comments »
Nine-year-old Bruno loves living in his five-story house in Berlin, playing with his three best friends for life, and exploring; and he is devastated when his father’s promotion to commandant means that the family must move to “Out-With, ” where the house has only three stories and there are no friends to play with. The only [...]
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (audio)
Posted in Audiobooks, Fiction, Historical Fiction on November 9, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Can a book be done in by good buzz? I was discussing the phenomenon that is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society with another blogger recently, and she commented that she wouldn’t touch this book with a 10-foot pole. “Everyone loves it too much!” was her comment. I’ll confess that I too get [...]
Invention of Everything Else
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Speculative Fiction, tagged Review Copy on November 4, 2009 | 8 Comments »
Nikola Tesla was an inventor and engineer known for his work with alternating current, magnetic fields, and radio. His accomplishments were extraordinary, but before reading The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt all I knew about him was that he was a scientist who discovered some amazing stuff (although I couldn’t have said what). [...]
The House of the Spirits
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction on October 20, 2009 | 13 Comments »
One of the best books I’ve read this year is Love in the Time of Cholera. It swept me away in the most wonderful way. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende reminded me of that marvelous book, but it never quite stirred my soul.
This book, Allende’s first novel, follows the fictional Trueba family through [...]
L.A. Confidential
Posted in Bookish films, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mysteries on October 19, 2009 | 5 Comments »
There’s hardboiled fiction, which portrays crime and violence unsentimentally, and in which the detective is usually cool, cocky, and flippant, but relatively honest. Then there’s noir fiction, in which the protagonist is usually not a detective at all, but a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator — something like James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings [...]
The Victory (Morland Dynasty #12)
Posted in Historical Fiction on October 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Sea battles, cholera, illegitimate children, and a love that dare not speak its name. These are the elements that bring the drama to the 12th book in Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s ambitious Morland Dynasty series. This book covers some of the action at sea during the Napoleonic Wars, as one of the men of the family and [...]
Wolf Hall
Posted in Historical Fiction on October 3, 2009 | 12 Comments »
The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on [...]
The Little Stranger
Posted in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Speculative Fiction on September 24, 2009 | 15 Comments »
The BBAW — and a recent vacation together, during which we did little but talk about books — reminded Teresa and me how much we enjoy the collaborative nature of this blog. We decided, therefore, to do a joint review of Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, which has been shortlisted for the Booker prize and [...]
