The Museum of Extraordinary Things Alice Hoffman Scribner First Edition: February 18, 2014 ISBN 978-1-4516-9356-0 Part fairy tale, part morality play, part historical fiction, Alice Hoffman’s 31st novel, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, pays homage to New York City in 1911. While much of the action takes place prior to […]
Hild Nicola Griffith Farrar, Straus and Giroux First Edition: November 12, 2013 ISBN 978-0-374-28087-1 Seventh century Britain: a time when men’s ambitions were larger than their means, when life was simple and hard and brutal. There was beauty, too, but it rarely lasted. Illiterate kings warred, scheming religions undermined each […]
Longbourn Jo Baker Alfred A. Knopf Publication Date: October 8, 2013 ISBN 978-0-385-35123-2 The promotional tagline for Jo Baker’s new historical fiction novel is “Pride and Prejudice is only half the story.” I would put forward that Pride and Prejudice is merely the polished flooring that this marvelously realized story […]
Thieves’ Quarry DB Jackson Tor Books ISBN-10: 0765327627 Ethan Kaille isn’t the likeliest hero. A former sailor with a troubled past, Ethan is a thieftaker, using conjuring skills to hunt down those who steal from the good citizens of Boston. And while chasing down miscreants in 1768 makes his life […]
The House Girl Tara Conklin HarperCollins Publishers First Edition: February 12, 2013 ISBN 978-0-06-220739-5 Mister hit Josephine with the palm of his hand across her left cheek and it was then she knew she would run. She heard the whistle of the blow, felt the sting of skin against skin, […]
Last March—as readers of this blog may recall—Jennifer Lawrence climbed the stairs to accept the Oscar for Best Actress, and tripping on the hem of her voluminous gown, fell on her way to the stage. But like the young and seemingly unflappable person she is, she gamely brushed herself off […]
Blood Makes Noise Gregory Widen Thomas & Mercer First Edition: April 30, 2013 ISBN 978-1-6110-9899-0 Is it truly “historical fiction” if someone takes a gap in history and fills it with a seemingly plausible set of events, using speculation to connect the dots between the points that are known to […]
Without A Summer Mary Robinette Kowal Tor Books 1st Edition: April 2, 2013 ISBN 978-0-7653-3415-2 —♦— Let me say this: I utterly enjoyed Mary Robinette Kowal’s second novel in her Glamourist Histories series, Glamour in Glass, with its early 1800s historical intrigue and cultural exploratives, but after the initial Shades […]
Freeman Leonard Pitts Jr. Agate Bolden ISBN-10: 1932841644 — ♦ — With the movie “Django Unchained” sparking so much debate in America about the “real” lives of slaves, I found Leonard Pitts Jr.’s novel Freeman to actually be a perfect companion to the movie, minus the extreme violence that Tarantino […]
In celebration of Black History Month, we are honored to feature works by and/or about the civil rights movement and those writers and characters who have sacrificed more than their hearts and lives in the name of racial equality. Equality, in all facets, is not wholly complete and it is […]
On this day, December 3, in 1857, Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Imperial Russia (modern
Ukraine, then a part of Poland). While he settled in England and wrote in English, he always considered himself a Pole. Heart of Darkness, one of the most famous of his 20 novels (which explores colonialism and the attitudes regarding what constitutes a barbarian versus civilized society) is considered one of the best English novels of the 20th century, as is his novel Lord Jim, which chronicles a crew’s abandonment of its disabled ship. Conrad died in England in 1924 at age 66.