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A Decade, and Done: The Tenth Blog Birthday | Novelhistorian
With this post marking Novelhistorian’s tenth anniversary, I’m calling it quits. I’m sad, because this blog has been a significant presence in my life and taught me a lot about historical fiction, publishing trends, and the novelist’s art. Even so, to find fifty novels a year worth reviewing and write 800 thoughtful words about one…
Vengeance Is Mine: Chenneville | Novelhistorian
Review: Chenneville, by Paulette Jiles Morrow, 2024. 307 pp. $28 In September 1865, John Chenneville wakes in a Virginia military hospital, unaware of how he got there or how long he’s been there. He hears that the war in which he fought on the Union side ended months before, and he may leave for home—St.…
Finding Her Place(s): Restless Dolly Maunder | Novelhistorian
Review: Restless Dolly Maunder, by Kate Grenville Canongate, 2024. 256 pp. $24 When Sarah Catherine (Dolly) Maunder turns fourteen, the law says she may leave school, but she’d rather not. She excels in the classroom and wants to become a teacher. However, this is rural Australia in the 1890s, and her father’s an abusive tyrant.…
Men, Women, and Money: Mrs. Gulliver | Novelhistorian
Review: Mrs. Gulliver, by Valerie Martin Doubleday, 2024. 304 pp. $28 Lila Gulliver runs a brothel on the fictional tropical island of Verona. The publisher calls this novel historical, for the year is 1954, but since nothing in the narrative defines that era, consider it timeless, a depiction of the oldest profession and its implications.…
Colonial Misfit: Burma Sahib | Novelhistorian
Review: Burma Sahib, by Paul Theroux HarperCollins, 2024. 400 pp. $30 In 1922, nineteen-year-old Eric Blair sails from England to Burma for training to become a colonial police officer. More comfortable with books than people, he does his best to hide, for he fears being noticed and questioned. But there’s no hiding in Burma. His…
Novelhistorian Will End Next Month | Novelhistorian
With mixed feelings, I must tell you that in about a month, October 21, I’ll post here for the last time. Novelhistorian has had a good run, and I’ve gotten a lot out of bringing you my thoughts about historical fiction, but I think it’s time for me to stop. After reviewing more than five…
Good Provider: The Trouble with You | Novelhistorian
Review: The Trouble with You, by Ellen Feldman St. Martin’s, 2024. 338 pp. $31 It’s 1947, and Florence (Fanny) Fabricant thinks she has it made. Her physician husband, Max, has returned to New York from the war, and life will be better now. No more worrying about his safety, while their daughter, Chloe, will be…
Test Case: The Evolution of Annabel Craig | Novelhistorian
Review: The Evolution of Annabel Craig, by Lisa Grunwald Random House, 2024. 296 pp. $30 One spring day in 1925, a group of men gather in Robinson’s Drugstore to discuss how to put their town, Dayton, Tennessee, on the map. Their plan is unusual, to say the least. The state government has just passed a…
Abandoned: The Things We Didn’t Know | Novelhistorian
Review: The Things We Didn’t Know, by Elba Iris Pérez Gallery, 2024. 304 pp. $28 In the late Fifties, Woronoco, Massachusetts, a company town for a paper manufacturer, is a constricting place in which to grow up for nine-year-old Andrea and her younger brother, Pablo. These children of Puerto Rico might consider themselves fortunate their…
A Rollicking Mystery: A Most Agreeable Murder | Novelhistorian
Review: A Most Agreeable Murder, by Julia Seales Random House, 2023. 352 pp. $18 The news that Edmund Croaksworth will be revisiting Swampshire for the first time in years to attend the Ashbrook family’s ball has the town in a tizzy. As the narrator of this tale observes, “It is a fact known throughout Swampshire…
How Do I Love Thee?: The Swan’s Nest | Novelhistorian
Review: The Swan’s Nest, by Laura McNeal Algonquin, 2024. 298 pp. $29 Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning have never met, but they like each other through their poems. Each one feels as if the other has shown something new, led him or her to a different, stimulating place. And when Robert returns from Italy to…
Great Leap Over a Cliff: Dreams of Joy | Novelhistorian
Review: Dreams of Joy, by Lisa See Random House, 2011. 349 pp. $18 It’s 1957, and nineteen-year-old Joy, daughter of Chinese refugees, decides she’s had it with the University of Chicago, her Los Angeles home, and the United States. She flees to the old country, which she’s never seen, to help the fledgling People’s Republic…
The Loneliness of Power: Augustus | Novelhistorian
Review: Augustus, by John Williams NYRB, 2014. 305 pp. $16 It’s 44 B.C.E., and conspirators have assassinated Julius Caesar in Rome. Where that leaves the slain general’s nephew, Octavius, is anybody’s guess, assuming they even think about him, for he’s never shown much promise. Most notable Romans would have said he belongs in a secluded…
New on GeezerVision! | Novelhistorian
Geezervision on Substack: twice-a-week insights into life’s daily dramas and what they reveal about aging gracefully. Check out these recent posts: What’s in a Namesake? In late 1944, the news came to my father’s army base in England that Vivien Leigh, the beautiful, charismatic star of Gone With the Wind, would visit. . . .…
Small Moments, Great Meaning: The Road from Belhaven | Novelhistorian
Review: The Road from Belhaven, by Margot Livesey Knopf, 2024. 255 pp. $29 Growing up in rural Scotland in the late 1870s, young Lizzie Craig doesn’t remember her mother, who died when Lizzie was two. But she has her grandfather, Rab, and her grandmother, Flora, who raise her on their farm, Belhaven, and who make…
Fighting Fate: All Our Yesterdays | Novelhistorian
Review: All Our Yesterdays, by Joel H. Morris Putnam, 2024. 354 pp. $28 She’s only twenty-six, but a lifetime of misery has haunted this eleventh-century Scottish noblewoman. Raised by a cruel, neglectful father who couldn’t wait to see her married young to a great lord, she suffers abuse afterward from that worthy’s cold temper. Now,…
Announcing GeezerVision! | Novelhistorian
I invite you to read "Why I Get Out of Bed," my first post in GeezerVision, which went live today on Substack. https://geezervision.substack.com/ Why GeezerVision? Because if you reckon you're getting older--or expect to one day--GeezerVision will tell you how that inevitably humbling process may also enrich us, and how our past contains treasures worth…
The Nature of the Beast: The Fox Wife | Novelhistorian
Review: The Fox Wife, by Yangsze Choo Holt, 2024. 384 pp. $28 It’s 1908, and the Qing Empire is dying, as China cracks under stress. In the Manchurian city of Mukden, an unidentified woman is found frozen to death in a doorway. The owner of a nearby restaurant, fearing for the reputation of his business—and…
A Different Drummer: Followed by the Lark | Novelhistorian
Review: Followed by the Lark, by Helen Humphreys FSG, 2024. 224 pp. $27 In 1822, five-year-old Henry Thoreau sets eyes on Walden Pond, and since he’s never seen a pond before, for all he knows, it could be the “wild ocean.” But the sensations from that moment strike him vividly: the water’s silver flash, the…
Sacrifices for Art: The Passion of Artemisia | Novelhistorian
Review: The Passion of Artemisia, by Susan Vreeland Penguin, 2002. 315 pp. $16 In 1611, a Roman ecclesiastical court examines eighteen-year-old Artemisia Gentileschi as if she, not the man accused of raping her, were the criminal. And examine is the word, for not only do the good clerics ask prosecutorial questions while tightening a leather…
No Safe Place: Jamaica Inn | Novelhistorian
Review: Jamaica Inn, by Daphne du Maurier Morrow, 2015. 347 pp. $15 Before Mary Yellan’s mother dies, she insists that after her funeral Mary will go live with Aunt Patience and Uncle Joss Merlyn in the northern part of Devon. Mother’s sister and brother-in-law run an establishment called the Jamaica Inn, and though Mary has…
Russian Wunderkind: The Winter Queen | Novelhistorian
Review: The Winter Queen, by Boris Akunin Translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield Random House, 2003. 242 pp. $13 One fine May afternoon in 1876, a young man of wealth and excellent prospects shoots himself in Moscow’s Alexander Gardens. At first, the police assume that his suicide is merely an instance of youth disaffected…
The Victor Owns the Spin: The Songs of the Kings | Novelhistorian
Review: The Songs of the Kings, by Barry Unsworth Doubleday, 2003. 336 pp. $10; may be out of print A strong, persistent wind at Aulis has kept the Greek forces from sailing to Troy, and in their restlessness and boredom, contingents from the various city-states bicker and occasionally fight. If the army is to remain…
Seeing Things: Girl with a Pearl Earring | Novelhistorian
Review: Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier Dutton, 1999. 233 pp. $22 originally; may be out of print Leaving her family to work as a maid in the painter Johannes Vermeer’s house, sixteen-year-old Griet anticipates nothing but trouble. Like everywhere in Holland in 1664, Delft makes a practice (or pretense) of tolerance—and yet,…
What’s Worth Saving: We Must Not Think of Ourselves | Novelhistorian
Review: We Must Not Think of Ourselves, by Lauren Grodstein Algonquin, 2023. 294 pp. $29 In November 1940, the German authorities in Poland decree that all Jews in Warsaw must live within a ghetto. Adam Paskow doesn’t understand what the Germans gain by this, and he’s never taken much interest in his Jewish heritage or…
Partition Agony: Moth | Novelhistorian
Review: Moth, by Melody Razak Harper, 2022. 353 pp. $27 Some novels have such a visceral effect that no matter what else they lack, they grab you by the scruff of the neck and compel you to finish them. Moth is one. Delhi in 1946, like the rest of India, is seething as independence from…
Speculation: The Coffee Trader | Novelhistorian
Review: The Coffee Trader, by David Liss Random House, 2004. 432 pp. $17 Amsterdam, 1659, the heyday of the Dutch Golden Age, is a city devoted to commerce and speculation in a remarkable array of goods, such as spices, sugar, tobacco, liquor, whale oil, metals—anything and everything. Miguel Lienzo, who trades on the Exchange, affects…
Hey, Let’s Put on a Show!: Glorious Exploits | Novelhistorian
Review: Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon Holt, 2024. 304 pp. $27 It’s 412 BCE, and the tide has turned against Athens in the Peloponnesian War, while the city of Syracuse, Sicily, is rising. Gelon and Lampo, two out-of-work Syracusan potters, bring meager rations to the quarry where hundreds of Athenian prisoners-of-war are dying in shackles.…
Tenacity: The New Detective | Novelhistorian
Review: The New Detective, by Peter Steiner Severn, 2023. 181 pp. $32 Munich in 1913 is a corrupt place, much in need of the policing it never seems to get, for no cop in his right mind will offend the men in power. Nineteen-year-old Willi Geismeier doesn’t see law enforcement that way, however, and when…
Men, Women, and Animals: The Dolphin House | Novelhistorian
Review: The Dolphin House, by Audrey Schulman Europa, 2022. 307 pp. $15 In summer 1965, Cora quits her job as a waitress at a men’s club in Tampa, Florida, and buys a one-way ticket to St. Thomas. At twenty-one, she doesn’t know what to do with her life. As a deaf person, she feels at…
Murder in Little Tokyo: Evergreen | Novelhistorian
Review: Evergreen, by Naomi Hirahara Soho, 2023. 280 pp. $28 It’s 1946, and Aki Nakasone and her family have finally been permitted to return to Los Angeles after their imprisonment at Manzanar internment camp and forced relocation to Chicago. But nothing’s the same in LA. Like other Japanese Americans, they’ve lost jobs, property, and their…
The Eye of the Storm: A True Account | Novelhistorian
Review: A True Account, by Katherine Howe Holt, 2023. 268 pp. $29 One blistering Boston day in June 1726, Hannah Masury attends a hanging of three pirates, whose sendoff is ministered to by no less a personage than Cotton Mather. Having played hooky from a wharfside inn where she toils for pennies, that night she…
Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary | Novelhistorian
Review: Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary, by Laura Stanfill Lanternfish, 2022. 334 pp. $19 The nineteenth-century French village of Mireville has a peculiar destiny and makeup. Not only does the sun never shine, which makes growing anything edible a pointless chore; the key industry, so to speak, is fabricating elaborate music boxes called serinettes.…
Celebrity Murder: The Golden Gate | Novelhistorian
Review: The Golden Gate, by Amy Chua Minotaur, 2023. 362 pp. $28 It’s March 1944, and Walter Wilkinson, a frequent guest at the fancy Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, California, is found murdered—shot at twice, surviving the first confrontation but not the second. However, Wilkinson is more than just a prominent out-of-towner; he ran for president…
Nobody’s Noble: Essex Dogs | Novelhistorian
Review: Essex Dogs, by Dan Jones Viking, 2022. 450 pp. $30 In July 1346, King Edward III of England invades France, claiming that the throne of that country belongs to him, igniting what would later be called the Hundred Years’ War. Among the invading host landing on the Norman coast is a band of men…
War and the Mind: Sergeant Salinger | Novelhistorian
Review: Sergeant Salinger, by Jerome Charyn Bellevue, 2021. 286 pp. $29 When we first meet Sonny Salinger, he’s twenty-three, it’s April 1942, and he’s not liable for military service because of a heart murmur. He has the luxury, therefore, to visit the Stork Club, the famous Manhattan night spot, to see his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, the…
Island Hypocrisy: The Marriage of Opposites | Novelhistorian
Review: The Marriage of Opposites, by Alice Hoffman S&S, 2015. 362 pp. $28 The second line of this novel reads, “I rarely did as I was told.” No kidding. Rachel Pomié, growing up in St. Thomas in the early nineteenth century, has a hard road ahead. Born to a family of Marranos, Portuguese Jews who…
Man of Mystery: City of Ink | Novelhistorian
Review: City of Ink, by Elsa Hart Minotaur, 2018. 338 pp. $26 The year 1711 sees Li Du in Beijing, the place from which he was exiled, and to which he has returned, hiding the past two years in a modest clerkship at the North Borough Office. But when a double murder occurs at a…
Survival Stories: Once We Were Home | Novelhistorian
Review: Once We Were Home, by Jennifer Rosner Flatiron, 2023. 267 pp. $28 Marseille, 1946. Roger, a young Jewish boy who lives in the convent that protected him during the war, hears that he’ll be saved. Since the war’s over, this seems odd, because he thinks he already is saved—and then, a monk spirits him…
Fragments of a Famous Life: The General and Julia | Novelhistorian
Review: The General and Julia, by Jon Clinch Atria, 2023. 256 pp. $27 It’s 1885 in upstate New York, and time is running out. Former President Ulysses S. Grant is struggling to finish writing his memoirs, knowing he has weeks to live. He cares little for posterity. Rather, he wishes to secure his loved ones’…