World War I

B+
The Porcelain Moon

The Porcelain Moon splits its focus between two different Chinese women living in France at the end of World War I. They are related and harboring secrets from each other which are threatening to slip out. Easy to read and beautifully sculpted, the book provides an experience that moves with grace f ...

B
The Captain's Christmas Homecoming

Lauri Robinson has been reviewed several times at AAR and received wildly divergent grades. The Captain’s Christmas Homecoming falls somewhere in the middle of our rankings. Emma Leigh (Emily) Ellis has placed herself in a precarious position. After inadvertently introducing her engaged cousin ...

A-
The Fossil Hunter

The Fossil Hunter splits its point of view between two different timelines and characters connected by a fossil. Cooper manages to keep this deft balancing act going, creating three very interesting and worthwhile heroines.  Dark and engrossing and with dual timelines that are expertly captured in ...

B
The Woman at the Front

I associate Lecia Cornwall’s name with historical romances, although I confess I haven’t read any of her work in that genre.  The blurb for her latest book, The Woman at the Front, caught my eye because of its First World War setting; I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Northern France (pre-C ...

B+
An Irish Hostage

The Great War has finally come to an end, but that doesn’t mean army nurse Bess Crawford’s days of fighting crime are finished. In An Irish Hostage, Bess travels to Ireland for the wedding of an old friend only to discover a missing groom, distraught bride and a village seething with rage regard ...

B+
Band of Sisters

I love heroines who display spirit, backbone and intelligence with ease and elegance. We’re given several such extraordinary women in Lauren Willig’s Band of Sisters and I found myself completely enthralled by the story as a result. Kate Moran had attended Smith College, the women’s univers ...

A
Band of Sisters

In recent years, the bookshelves have practically overflowed with stories set during the Second World War, but if your interest lies with World War I, you probably had a harder time finding something that appealed to you. Fortunately, author Lauren Willig is releasing the perfect novel to scratch th ...

B
The Radium Girls

Narrated by Angela Brazil Corporate greed led to mass murder before our current legal protections came into play and perhaps no group exemplifies that better than The Radium Girls from the early Twentieth Century. In 1898, Marie Curie and her husband Pierre discovered radium. By 1901 it was kn ...

B+
The Last Kiss

Sally Malcolm’s latest novel is something of a departure for anyone familiar with her excellent New Milton series. The Last Kiss is an historical romance set in England immediately after World War One, and it features two characters for whom the class divide is as insurmountable an obstacle to the ...

B+
All the Ways We Said Goodbye

Powerhouse authors Beatriz Williams, Karen White, and Lauren Willig have teamed up for their third collaboration, a triple timeline story about three women whose lives are inexplicably bound up in the somewhat tragic history of Paris' Ritz Hotel. The sweeping tale spans fifty years, introducing read ...