Posts filed under 'Historical Fiction'
Susanne Alleyn has written two books so far in her series set in post-revolutionary France featuring police agent and investigator Aristide Ravel. In a world turned upside down with “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” gone bad and with Madame Guillotine waiting around the corner, trust and confidence in one’s fellow citizens is hard to come by.Â
In A Game of Patience the investigation into a double murder is complicated by uncertainty as to who the intended victim was and by Ravel’s internal doubts and worries about having sent innocents to their deaths via the guillotine. In the sequel A Treasury of Regrets, a servant girl is accused of poisoning the master of the house by adding arsenic to his food. Ravel doesn’t believe that the simple peasant girl was capable of the murder. The victim, a money lender, was not short of people who did not like him, including in his own family. Intricate and detailed historical mysteries with an interesting, even compelling detective can be hard to come by but these certainly qualify.
January 5th, 2009
Liz C. - Alicia Ashman
Award-winning Welch poet Owen Sheers’ debut novel, Resistance, is an 
alternative history of the Second World War. The story opens in the fall of 1944 after the German invasion of Great Britain. While Nazi troups are spreading across southern England, after the failure of the Allies at Normandy, a long-planned British Resistance Organisation’s Auxiliary Units Special Duties Section, is set in motion.Â
One morning a group of women in the remote Olchon Valley on the Welch border awaken to find their husbands gone to join the Resistance. Left to manage the work of tending crops and animals alone as the winter sets in, the women soon encounter five German soldiers in the valley on a secret mission. English-speaking Captain Albrecht Wolfram has grown skeptical of the Nazi party teachings and views this location as a safe haven from the war. The soldiers and women soon face a severe blizzard , an event which isolates the valley from the outside world while bringing them closer together.Â
Eventually the War arrives in the valley but not before several friendships have formed between the Welch women and German soldiers. Based on little known events of the British resistance and the author’s extensive research, this novel also includes rich details of the beautiful Welch landscape and customs.
December 10th, 2008
Lesley - Central
Dennis Lehane’s new book The Given Day, is historical fiction that truly brings an era from our past alive, in this case Boston in 1919. This long and engrossing book left me wanting to read more about this very turbulent time. Many of the events that occurred still impact our lives today.
Lehane skillfully weaves real life events into his character’s fictional lives. There are several plots threads, including the story of the Coughlin family, beginning with Thomas who is an Irish emigree, and including his three sons. Thomas is a captain in the primarily Irish police force, and his son Danny is also a police officer, but has taken a very different career path and is a leader in the fledgling union, known as the social club. Luther Lawrence, another main character, is a black man on the run from a crime he committed in Tulsa. And Nora is the Coughlin’s housemaid who has also run away from a grim life in Ireland.
This was a turbulent time in American history: there was unemployment, police corruption, labor unrest, anarchists, the influenza epidemic, sweatshops, and a wide class divide. The intertwined stories all lead to the Boston police strike, which ends the book. The life of a police officer with its less than ideal working conditions is depicted in great detail. When the police strike, the city quickly deteriorates into chaos and anarchy.
The Given Day is a departure from Lehane’s other excellent books, two of which have been made into great movies (Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone). Not surprisingly, The Given Day is going to be made into a movie as well, to be released in 2010. Lehane has clearly mastered historical fiction as well as the suspense novel. We will just have to wait to see what direction this gifted author will go in next.
December 3rd, 2008
Mary K. - Central
Long before Mean Girls and Heathers were popular slumber party fare and the concepts of Queen Bees and Wannabes peppered modern psychology and the study of interpersonal relations, cliques were wrecking havoc on ye olde Salem. You know the girls I’m referring to. Led by the scorned Abigail Williams from The Crucible, this group would not stop at teasing, idle gossip and tarnishing reputations. These lovely girls kept up their theatrics until their victims got sent to the gallows.Â
Interwoven with the history of the Salem witch trials and the chaos that surrounded life at this time in Massachusetts comes the fictional account of Sarah Carrier in The Heretic’s Daughter by Kathleen Kent. Sarah writes to her granddaughter upon the occasion of her wedding and tells the story of her youth, shuttling between Billerica, Andover and Salem. She then confesses her involvement in the hanging death of her mother, Martha Carrier, one of the first to be accused and tried of witchcraft in Salem in 1692.
The book starts out with the family trying to outrun smallpox.  Life is difficult, with the family struggling to work the fields and maintain their stay at Sarah’s grandmother’s home.  When Sarah’s brother Andrew is discovered to have small pox, Sarah and her baby sister are sent to stay with her Aunt and Uncle Toothaker.  The Toothakers and the Carriers have been feuding over land and there is much ill will, but Sarah is comforted by her relatives and so enrapt with spending time with her cousin Margaret that she is only resentful when they are eventually separated and she must go home to her own family.Â
Her father is a giant of a Welshman and does not adhere to the Puritan ethics or attend church.  Rumor has it that he may have been involved in the death of King Charles the First and everyone steers clear of him. He makes an imposing partner with Sarah’s mother, a strong, hard woman with a sharp tongue. Even though Sarah is only ten years old, the reader understands that she and her mother are exactly the same.  Sarah and Martha both have red hair, keen senses and a way with herbs and healing. They are also at odds constantly. Sarah is rebellious and hurtful to her mother, but soon realizes the depth of her mother’s love.
A combination of events involving a scandalous servant girl named Mercy Lewis, the vengeful Uncle, a neighbor’s runaway cow, liquor and jealousy collide. Soon, Sarah’s mother is on her way to Salem in shackles, accused of witchery. She has sworn Sarah to agree to whatever the magistrates ask of her in order to save herself and her siblings.Â
The witch trials would be laughable if we didn’t already know that they, in fact, happened and innocent men, women and children died because of outrageous false accusations. What’s most stunning about the actions of the girls responsible for the initial witch-hunt, beyond the fact that no one had the sense or wherewithal to reign them in, was that they had the energy for this sort of mayhem to begin with. This richly detailed fictional account reinforces that life was not easy in the early colonies. Everyday living was rife with hard labor and disease and the struggle to stay fed, warm, clothed and out of the way of the warring Wabanaki. It seems impossible that there would be much time for making mischief, but as they say, there’s no rest for the wicked.
November 24th, 2008
Molly - Central
No need to apply the 50-page rule here! The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows had me laughing and crying in the first 50 pages and thanking my lucky stars I started reading it on a Sunday, so I could settle in and keep reading all day.
This enchanting epistolary novel is set post WWII in London and on the English Channel Island of Guernsey. A Guernsey farmer named Dawsey Adams obtains a used copy of Londoner Juliet Ashton’s Selected Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb and they begin corresponding after he finds her name and address written inside the cover.  Soon, Dawsey’s friends and neighbors are writing to Juliet as well. Juliet’s weekly newspaper column about the war has recently been compiled into the book Izzy Bickerstaff Goes to War and the islanders are thrilled to make the acquaintance of a famous authoress. Juliet starts answering the many questions the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society have concerning the war; the Channel Islands were completely cut-off from the rest of the world during the German occupation.
In the course of their correspondence, Juliet poses three questions to the society members as well: Why did a roast pig dinner have to be kept a secret? How could a pig cause the islanders to begin a literary society? What is potato peel pie and why is it included in the society’s name?
All of these questions and more are answered in this book that is sure to become a classic in the way of 84, Charing Cross Road. One cannot help but fall in love with each and every bright, quirky, endearingly flawed, open-hearted character. Without a doubt, this is my favorite book of the year and one of my new all-time favorites. This is how much I love it: I checked it out from the library and read it, then I went to the bookstore and bought it, and now I am waiting for the audiobook so I can listen to it. And then I may read it again.
September 26th, 2008
Molly - Central
Samantha Hunt’s first novel, The Seas, is one of my all-time favorite books, and her second novel, The Invention of Everything Else, is almost as good. It’s a fictionalized account of the later life of inventor Nikola Tesla, someone I knew very little about before reading this book. Actually, most of my information came from the movie The Prestige. I probably should read a biography of Tesla to get my facts straight, but I think the most important thing to know about Tesla is that he basically invented alternating current electric power. This is what powers nearly all electrical devices today, but at the time he invented it, there was some controversy over whether his method or Thomas Edison’s direct current was most effective. Though Tesla’s system ultimately won, he didn’t fare well during the media circus of the “war of the currents”, and spent the latter part of his life living in a hotel in New York as a mad scientist, nearly penniless.
It’s a pretty depressing story, and Hunt’s version is fittingly bleak, but she invigorates the truth with a story about Louisa, a maid who becomes an unlikely friend to Tesla; her boyfriend Arthur, who may or may not be from the future; and a time machine. It sounds a little out there, but it works. Hunt vividly captures New York in the 1940s, and the characters she creates are fascinating. The entire novel is elegantly stylized (much like the gorgeous cover), creating a surreal, engrossing atmosphere. Even if you’re not a fan of science fiction, or even books about scientists, the way Hunt transforms science into magic is simply beautiful, and not to be missed.
September 9th, 2008
Kylee
 Satchel Paige: Striking out Jim Crow is a fast read (less than 90 pages) which is more a story of the segregated South than a biography of Satchel Paige. The author, UW-Madison alumnus James Sturm, throws a curveball with his title: it showcases the celebrity of Satchel Paige through the eyes of an imagined contemporary. It is an odd blend of fiction and biography, telling a bittersweet, fictionalized story of segregation and oppression while providing teasing glimpses of the famed pitcher.
The story is narrated by Emmet Wilson, a sharecropper from Tuckwilla, Alabama. In 1929, Emmet is a young man full of hope, dreaming of making it big in baseball’s Negro National League. His career is cut short by a knee injury sustained when sliding into home plate during a game pitched by the rising young star, Satchel Paige.
Emmet returns to Tuckwilla, raising cotton on land owned by two other former baseball players — the wealthy, white Jennings twins. The 1930s and early ’40s fly by, with the inequities sharecropping and the menacing dangers facing blacks in rural Alabama scarily presented. Emmet’s attempts to keep his son in school during during cotton picking season are horrifically squashed by the twins.
The story jumps to 1944, when the Jennings brothers arrange a local baseball event featuring the now-legendary Satchel Paige and his traveling All-Stars playing against a team of local (white) heroes, The Tuckwilla All-Stars. Baseball long behind him, Emmet is loathe to attend the game but is pulled along by his beloved son, Emmet, Jr. The kid had heard rumors of his father’s baseball past, but nothing firsthand from his dad: “I don’t talk about my days as a ballplayer. It’s like talkin’ about a dead man.” And Emmet is almost a dead man, he has been beaten down by day-to-day life, by segregation and discrimination and the hardships of trying to raise his black child in a white man’s world. The ball game does and does not change all of that…
Rich Tommaso’s illustrations are as understated and roundabout as the story, with heavy black ink and strange pea-green washes of color (deepening to swampier tones during the darker parts of the storyline). This is not a “pretty” book, but the somber colors and simple drawing style elegantly compliment the text.
The last four pages of the book are “panel discussions”, with text providing additional information on topics touched on in the graphics and story. This is a weirdly moving book. Once you get in there, it does not let you out until the end. It is good!
It is a story of many defeats, both large and small — yet ends triumphantly. As an introduction to segregation and Satchel Paige, it serves more to intrigue than to inform, but any title that raises topics that lead to further reading is a good read in my book.
August 19th, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
New York author Pete Hamill returns to Manhattan in his latest novel; a story of Depression-era doctor James Delaney’s life on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village. The North River (what “real” New Yorkers call the Hudson) is only 2 blocks from the doctor’s home and office and is a presence throughout the story.
Delaney, a wounded World War I veteran, treats the indigent poor in his neighborhood as well as gangster Eddie Corso, a fellow soldier in the trenches of France. The doctor’s return from the war has been one of loss and grief with the disappearance of his wife and daughter.
Delaney’s life changes dramatically on New Year’s Day 1934 when he returns home to find his two-year-old grandson Carlito on the doorstep. With him is a note from his daughter, Grace. She asks that he take care of Carlito while she’s in Spain in search of her husband, a Mexican revolutionary.
With the help of Sicilian housekeeper, Rose, Delaney is given a second chance at a family life as Carlito’s presence eases the pain of his loss. Rose and the doctor eventually become lovers and the “new” family is caught up in the gangland wars between Eddie Corso and his rival.
Hamill’s story is an interesting, well written account of Depression-era life in Greenwich Village. If you like this one, I would recommend Beverly Swerling’s City of Dreams and City of Glory. Although these are span the 17th-19th centuries, the locale on the Southern end of Manhattan is the same as in Hamill’s book.
August 4th, 2008
Lesley - Central
In her debut novel, Nicola Upson puts classic mystery author Josephine Tey to work as a detective. In An Expert in Murder Tey is journeying by train from Inverness to London where her play Richard of Bordeaux is entering its final week. She makes the acquaintance of a young woman also heading to London with plans to attend the play and who is extremely thrilled to meet the playwright.Â
Upon arrival in London, Tey is met at the station by friends and whisked away but not before she has agreed to meet the young woman at the theatre. However, by evening the body of the young woman is found by cleaning staff in their train compartment, and Tey finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation. A fascinating blend of fiction and historical fact based on the life of mystery author Elizabeth MacKintosh (aka Josephine Tey).
July 18th, 2008
Liz C. - Alicia Ashman
Jo Graham undertook a difficult, challenging task with her debut novel, Black Ships. Using historical fact and Virgil’s epic Aenied she has written a fascinating novel of what might have been from the point of view of the Sybil who led Aeneas through the Underworld. The Sybil who was also known as Pythia, the Lady of the Dead is a young woman named Gull.
Gull is the daughter of a slave taken from Wilusa (the Hittite
word for the city of Troy) who at a young age was badly injured in an accident. Since Gull is now unable to perform the duties needed of a slave, Gull’s mother takes her to the Pythia to train as an apprentice. In her first attempt to read the future Gull sees the arrival of nine black ships that will change the world.
These ships, led by the Prince Aeneas, are the last remnants of the Wilusan (Trojan) civilization and Gull embarks on a quest with them to find a new home for the people of Wilusa. Their journey will take them into a city of pirates, the Egyptian empire at its prime, and near Mount Vesuvius.Â
This was a great read. Graham’s research is apparent in each leg of the journey and where she departs from fact (or Virgil’s version) she has good reason.  But if all the historical names and places sound too intimidating, fear not. The story is made accessible by Gull’s narration of her personal journey and her observations of the people around her. And Graham makes Virgil’s epic story wholly accessible.Â
June 19th, 2008
Jane J. - Central Library
Previous Posts
Susanne Alleyn has written two books so far in her series set in post-revolutionary France featuring police agent and investigator Aristide Ravel. In a world turned upside down with “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” gone bad and with Madame Guillotine waiting around the corner, trust and confidence in one’s fellow citizens is hard to come by. 
