I’ve always enjoyed a well-written historical romance set in the time of the Peninsular Wars (1809 – 1814) and the battle of Waterloo a year later, especially if the hero is a military man. I remember thinking a couple of years ago that it might be good to learn more about the day-to-day life of…
The Dress Lodger is a tour de force, a boldly imaginative novel that is nonetheless based on fact. Reading it is like biting into a rich, dark chocolate: almost too delicious to bear, all sorts of scents and tastes rushing throughout your mind. The writing is sumptuous, conjuring up the period with a wry, unerringly…
Attention single women: if you think that things are hopeless and you will never find a mate, get thee to The Wedding Dress. In this tale, two sisters are making their youngest sibling a dress, despite the fact that, due to the Civil War, there are no prospective suitors. The older sisters aren’t doing much…
I once read a facetious remark that there are only two plots in all of fiction: somebody goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. Both of these happen in Lake in the Clouds, Sara Donati’s third installment in the story of the Bonner family of Paradise, New York, and at times I…
It is the 1540s. Suleiman the Magnificent is the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The tsar of Russia is a man who will someday be known as Ivan the Terrible. England is ruled by the boy-king Edward VI. Mary Queen of Scots is four, and she will be used as a pawn in the high-stakes…
I can be very patient when it comes to holding out for sequels to books and movies I love, and The Shelters of Stone was well worth the 12-year wait. If you demand that it must be 12 times as good as a sequel you’ve anticipated for a single year, you will be disappointed. Ignore…
I find stories of spiritual discovery and renewal of any faith appealing. Moreover, I really like well done historical novels, romance or otherwise, especially those featuring more common folk as opposed to the elite classes usually shown. Thus I requested to review A Place Called Trinity by Delia Parr, which tells the story of middle-aged…
Our Yanks is subtitled A Love Story, but it can’t be considered a romance. Instead it is the story of one small English village and how it reacted when U. S. troops come to stay during World War II. It’s a story about a place and its people during a difficult, trying time. In the…
“On April 5, 1768, Johann Friedrich Struensee was appointed Royal Physician to King Christian VII of Denmark, and four years later was executed.” I found myself fascinated by the above quote at the beginning of The Royal Physician’s Visit – struggles for power can make for delicious reading. Booklist magazine, a veritable librarian’s bible, recently…
Letters from an Age Of Reason is a big (648 pages), sprawling literary novel set mostly in England but featuring American characters. Protagonists Arabella and Aubrey do not conform to society’s expectations, like Edith Wharton’s character, Lily Bart. The novel is told through a combination of Arabella’s journal entries and Aubrey’s letters like Samuel Richardson’s…
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