A lovely, muscular novel that takes a look at life in Louis Comfort Tiffany’s workshop during its late 1800s heyday, The Tiffany Girls finally gives a voice to the unsung designers and artists who helped put together the glass king’s most famous pieces. Responsible widow Clara Walcott Driscoll is running the women’s division of Tiffany’s…
The Secret Book of Flora Lee is a genuinely interesting mystery that keeps the reader focused and keenly flipping the pages, even when the answers are sometimes frustrating. Young Flora Lee Linden is out in the middle of a wooden copse one day when she sees them. The Whisperwood, the magical creatures that she and…
Did You Hear about Kitty Karr? is a great idea that suffers from a disorganized storytelling and a weak modern framing story. But its portrait of colorism, racism, and life lived in a segregated America is compelling. When storied actress Kitty Karr Tate passes away and wills her $60 million fortune to the St. John…
The winner of multiple awards, Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club is the beautifully written narration of a young Chinese-American teen’s queer coming-of-age in 1954 California. The story is set in a richly depicted Chinese-American San Francisco of the 1930s through 1950s, including flashbacks to LIly’s parents and her aunt, whose career working…
Renée Rosen turns her wise, wry eye to the making of cosmetics giant Estée Lauder in Fifth Avenue Glamour Girl, a fun little slice of historical fiction that takes you directly to the heart of the founding of Lauder’s empire. Gloria Downing is in the middle of coping with a horrifying scandal – her father…
Emily Hourican’s Mummy Darlings – a continuation of her Glorious Guinness Girls series, which follows the adventures of three real life Guinness heiresses and their (fictional) housemaid – explores what it’s like to go from a single, light-heeled party girl to a mother with responsibilities and marital obligations. But it’s a book that definitely won’t…
Being an American, my knowledge of Scotland’s historical relationship with England is, sadly, limited to what I’ve gleaned from romance novels, movies and TV programs. Think Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, Liam Neeson’s Rob Roy and, of course, the mother of all Scottish dramas, Outlander. Patricia Bernstein’s A Noble Cunning: The Countess and the Tower does a…
Two Wars and a Wedding is a loose prequel to Lauren Willig’s delightful Band of Sisters. This epic tells us the backstory of Dr. Ava Stringfellow and Betsy Rutherford, née Hayes, who led the Smith College Relief Unit that was the focus of that novel. It’s an interesting look at how history often repeats itself…
Jennifer Robson’s The Gown was told from the point of view of those constructing the future Queen Elizabeth II’s wedding dress. Her latest slice of historical fiction focuses on in three wholly different people living life in London during the year of the Queen’s coronation, with the story climaxing on the very day Elizabeth takes…
What a feast for the mind! Stephanie Marie Thornton has previously brought real-life heroines as different as Alice Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy to life in her novels. In Her Lost Words, she does perfect credit to the worlds of seminal feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter, science fiction novelist Mary Godwin-Shelley. We learn immediately about…
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