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Historical Novel Society | Book Reviews - History
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Words Matter: The Story of Hans and Sophie Scholl, and the White Rose Resistance - Historical Novel Society
This fictionalized biography in verse for middle-grade readers narrates the story of siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, members of the White Rose Resistance that circulated leaflets about the truth of Hitler’s genocidal war. Pazner sets the stage with Hitler’s takeover of a Germany struggling through the Great Depression, preaching hatred against traditional scapegoats—Jews, Romani, LGBTQ […]
Serpent Visions - Historical Novel Society
While most can recall the Greek heroes Odysseus and Oedipus, most (including me) would not remember the name of the blinded seer who appears as a side character in both stories. Teiresias, that hobbling old man who is the deus ex machina in stories stuffed with “deus,” has an extraordinary story himself. In Bronze Age […]
Rapture - Historical Novel Society
Emily Maguire’s new novel, Rapture, takes as its inspiration the legend of Pope Joan, reworking key elements of the myth to create a brilliant work of great power and beauty. The story starts in 9th-century Mainz, Germany, where Agnes lives with her father, an English priest. Although his vows include celibacy, Agnes’s father has slept […]
State of Emergency - Historical Novel Society
Singapore, 1963. What can you say about a young woman, Siew Li, who walked away, without warning, from her twin children and husband? Jeremy Tiang says a lot as he weaves an always gripping and mostly grim story of people caught up in the long conflict between the forces of the right and left. That […]
The Antidote - Historical Novel Society
Fans of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead will want to grab this gorgeous magical-realist novel set on the Nebraska prairie during the height of the Dust Bowl climate disaster. Russell, a MacArthur grant winner, is best known for her collections of short stories, and this is only her second novel after the 2012 Pulitzer finalist Swamplandia! […]
The Ballad of Mary Kearney - Historical Novel Society
Ireland, 1765. When young Mary Kearney is sent to work at Goward Hall, she joins her brother and sister in service and lightens the load of her impoverished father, who has too many mouths to feed. She begins to wait on the very married Lady Mitchelstown, who is involved in a scandalous romance with Lord […]
Jack Absolute - Historical Novel Society
Jack Absolute is a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The Rivals, and this novel makes him a real Army officer. As the novel begins, Jack Absolute has just returned to London in 1777. He has been out of the Anny for many years, away in India with his spectacle-wearing, Shakespeare-quoting, romantic-novel-reading chum, the Iroquois […]
The Specimen - Historical Novel Society
In Georgian Edinburgh, Isobel Tait quietly endures anticipatory grief – her son’s rare heart defect is fatal. Isobel’s last hope is dashed when famous anatomist Dr. Burnett examines the eight-year-old and, though intrigued by his defective heart, can offer no treatment. Isobel has the rug pulled out from under her when she loses the child […]
A Song to Drown Rivers - Historical Novel Society
Two and a half thousand years ago, a Chinese peasant sends her daughter to the river to wash silk. There is a problem: the girl is beautiful; dangerously beautiful. Her mother veils her. Despite her mother’s precautions, danger finds Xishi. There’s a fight. Blood is shed. But Xishi embraces it, steeled by the resolve to […]
What They Said About Luisa - Historical Novel Society
Reimagined voices in the life and times of Luisa Abrego in 16th-century Spain come astonishingly to life in this novel of historical fiction. It offers readers an imagined backstory to a real woman’s existence during the course of one decade that took her from Spain to Mexico and then back again. The voices are the […]
Shelterwood - Historical Novel Society
This richly imagined dual-timeline tale introduces eleven-year-old Olive Peele and her adopted Choctaw sister, Nessa Rusk. In Oklahoma in 1909, they escape the abusive household where Olive’s brutal stepfather, Tesco, has already used and discarded Nessa’s older sister. When Olive catches Tesco eyeing six-year-old Nessa one night, she takes the little girl and flees. Their […]
The Thirteenth Husband - Historical Novel Society
“It turned out that no matter how low my expectations of marriage, I expected too much.” Such is the perspective of Amy Crocker, a Gilded Age debutante left fabulously wealthy by the death of her magnate father. On the night of her father’s death, she’s visited by the Woman in White, a specter who portends […]
Maria: A Novel of Maria von Trapp - Historical Novel Society
It’s the 1950s, and your life’s about to be made into a musical by the Tony Award-winning team of Rodgers and Hammerstein. It will turn out to be one of the most successful musicals of all time, be adapted to film, and become beloved worldwide… but it’s actually a lie. Your husband is portrayed as […]
The Tower - Historical Novel Society
A pregnant Mary Stuart, known usually as Queen of Scots, is taken to the isolated, bleak water-girt island of Lochleven Castle in the summer of 1567. Having just married the violent Bothwell after the murder of her favourite, Rizzio, Mary is forcibly imprisoned in the damp and gloomy tower, along with two chambermaids, Scottish Jane […]
Ladies' Rest and Writing Room - Historical Novel Society
The Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room is located in Farmer’s department store in Sydney, Australia. After spending the day spending their money, Sydney’s wealthy women can sit comfortably, drink tea, eat scones, write letters, and gossip without leaving the store. Every Tuesday, Dotty Bluebrook stops in the room to write a letter to the secret […]
The Unearthed - Historical Novel Society
Old bones – ‘mossed and soft’ – are discovered in the wilderness near Queenstown. Forensic scientist Antonia Kovacs arrives from Hobart to investigate them, also to see her father, retired policeman, Dicky Nolan. Tom Pilar inherits a house from Slavko Cicak, a man he can barely remember who was a friend of his late father, […]
The American Queen - Historical Novel Society
1865: Enslaved twenty-four-year-old Louella yearns for freedom. The selling of her mother which wrenched her family apart, the horrific lynching of her father, and the welts and scars she bears on her own back and within her psyche cannot extinguish her vision of a “Happy Land” where people can live freely with dignity and respect. […]
The Frozen River - Historical Novel Society
The frozen body of a man is captive in the ice of Maine’s Kennebec River. Once he is cut free and laid out in the Hallowell village tavern, Martha Ballard, a well-respected midwife, is called upon to examine him. It is murder, she announces, and many in the village are relieved to know that Joshua […]
Iris - Historical Novel Society
Iris by Miles Franklin short-listee and multiform artist, Fiona Kelly McGregor, trails the journey of eponymous protagonist, Iris Mary Webber (née Shingles). Iris is a frank and gutsy country girl from Glen Innes, who arrives in Sydney in spring 1932 to a city in the throes of the Great Depression. Her incredible conviction, street-smarts, loyalty, […]
The Square of Sevens - Historical Novel Society
A girl called Red writes a memoir. It begins in 1730 with her hard, nomadic life as the child of a gypsy fortune teller. She learns to read people’s futures with ordinary playing cards, using her father’s system of cartomancy called the Square of Sevens. When he dies, she becomes the ward of an antiquarian, […]
The Isolated Séance (An Irregular Detective mystery, 1) - Historical Novel Society
London, 1895. Twenty-six-year-old Timothy Badger was a street urchin of twelve when Sherlock Holmes began using him as his spy. The Baker Street Irregulars find clues Holmes and his Dr. Watson need because, to the everyday person, they are an invisible nuisance. For the last five years, Tim and his talented Black friend, Benjamin Watson, […]
A Secret Garden Affair - Historical Novel Society
Suffolk, 1981: whilst the entire country seems gripped by Royal Wedding fever, Libby, the heroine of James’s 25th novel, wants to get as far away from it as possible, for on the brink of marrying her fiancé, she has discovered him in flagrante with her best friend. Libby takes refuge with two eccentric old ladies […]
Wild Song - Historical Novel Society
Candy Gourlay returns to the history of the Bontok, an Igorot people in the Philippines, whose lives she previously wrote about in her 2018 novel Bone Talk. This is a companion novel rather than a sequel and describes how some Igorot people were taken to America in 1904 to be put on display at the […]
Kantika - Historical Novel Society
Kantika means “song” in Ladino, the language spoken by the richly drawn characters of this sweeping novel. Ladino is to Spanish as Yiddish is to German. And Ladino (or “Latin”) is a Judaeo-Old Spanish language dating from the expulsion of Sephardic Jews from Spain, over 500 years ago. From Spain they traveled mainly to eastern […]
Julia Prima (Roma Nova Thriller Series) - Historical Novel Society
This is a stunning historical novel set in the 4th century. Julia, the daughter of the ruler of the provincial town of Virunum, worships the Roman gods at a time when Christianity has become the official religion of the Empire. She considers herself divorced, under Roman law, from her Christian husband, the bishop’s nephew, but […]
This Other Eden - Historical Novel Society
In 1793, when Benjamin Honey, a former slave, and his wife Patience, an Irish immigrant, arrived at an abandoned Penobscot island off the coast of Maine, it was to escape intolerance and cultivate his dream of an apple orchard – an Eden of his own. Through the decades, his mixed-race descendants became more isolated, only […]
Case Study - Historical Novel Society
An author researching a notorious and now-forgotten British psychotherapist unexpectedly receives a series of notebooks written by a former patient. Thus begins Graeme Macrae Burnet’s metafictional novel, presented as the footnoted second edition of a biography written by the slyly named G.M.B. The unnamed writer of the notebooks is a young London woman looking for […]
Marmee - Historical Novel Society
Readers of Little Women are well aware that Louisa May Alcott based the beloved characters of that classic novel on her own family. Sarah Miller has drawn on Alcott’s mother Abigail’s memoirs to create an enthralling alternate version of the fictional March family. The events of Marmee dovetail exactly with those of Little Women, but […]