This is Book 3 in the Nell Drury mystery series. It can be read as a standalone. It is 1926 in Kent, which is still adjusting to post-war life. The book opens with Chef Nell Drury preparing for Lady Ansley’s luncheon to welcome their new neighbors, Sir Gilbert and Lady Lisette Saddler. As they attempt to entertain the eccentric pair, they learn Sir Gilbert is organizing a Summer African Art Festival at his home, Spitalfrith Manor. The festival would feature the “Artistes de Cler.” The festival is the talk of the town and everyone is invited. When a murder occurs at the festival, Lord Ansley’s valet is arrested. Can Nell clear his name?
This is a nice historical cozy mystery. The characters are well developed. I loved the author’s description of Lady Saddler “…She smiled, but it wasn’t the kind of smile that warmed the cockles of one’s heart. It was more the smile of a crocodile….” The members of the “Artistes de Cler” are an interesting group of characters as well. The story is told from several points of view, but it works well and is not confusing. In fact, it gives us more knowledge of some of the characters. The author also provides a helpful cast of characters list at the beginning of the book. I was hoping to read more about food since Nell is a chef, but the story centered more along the lines of art and investigation with just passing references to food. The mystery is well done, with plenty of red herrings thrown in. Recommended for fans of historical mysteries.
This is Book 3 in the “A Matter of Class” series, set in 1800s Ireland. It would be beneficial to read the first two books in the series before reading Book 3, as there will be major spoilers for the first two books. This was also a book I reviewed for Historical Novels Review Magazine. They chose this book as another “Editor’s Choice.”
Escaping authorities in England, Bridget and Cormac flee home to Carlow, Ireland , with their daughter Emily. They return to Cormac’s former cottage, but his mother and siblings are gone, forced out years ago by Bridget’s embittered mother, who is lady of the manor. Many changes have occurred at Oakleigh manor and Bridget must face off with her mother in an attempt to save the tenants from her harsh management. At the same time, Cormac is determined to find his family. The saga follows Bridget, Cormac, and Emily to Dublin, where they encounter evil people of all classes as they attempt to find Cormac’s mother and sisters.
I found this to be a well-written and entertaining love story. While it is a love story, it is also a scathing look back at the treatment of the so-called lower classes by the rich and entitled of the era. At the same time, the author brings forth a thread of hope in the form of Bridget. Although Bridget was born in privilege, she can see the humanity of every person and has already cast her title aside for love. The characters are all well developed and the desperation of the time is well conveyed. The novel is fast paced and full of obstacles and adventure.
Highly recommended for fans of historical romance and Irish history.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susie Murphy
Susie Murphy is an Irish historical fiction author. She loves historical fiction so much that she often wishes she had been born two hundred years ago. Still, she remains grateful for many aspects of the modern age, including women’s suffrage, electric showers and pizza. Susie’s published novels, A Class Apart, A Class Entwined and A Class Forsaken, are the first three instalments in her seven-part series A Matter of Class, a sweeping saga which begins in Ireland in 1828.
To find out more, visit http://www.susiemurphywrites.com, where you can join Susie’s Readers’ Club and receive a collection of five free short stories which are prequels to the whole series.
I received a free copy of this book via Historical Novels Review Magazine. My opinions are my own.
The Children’s Blizzard is the story of the devastating blizzard of 1888, which swept across the Great Plains with no warning and killed hundreds of people, many of them children on their way home from school. This is a fictionalized account of that devastating storm, but is based upon actual events and oral histories of the survivors.
This book is exquisitely written. Melanie Benjamin does an incredible job of connecting the reader with the characters. She shares the backstories and inner thoughts and feelings of pretty much every character in the book. Even the animals have something to say. And her stories delve deeply into the characters’ lives.
The main characters are two sisters who are both schoolteachers. Although they have so much in common, they experience very different outcomes during the storm simply based on last minute decisions. There is also an immigrant family led by a stressed out mother and a dallying, irresponsible father, and a young girl who has been sold to them by her mother for next to nothing. We meet an African American bar owner, who gives us the perspective of how people of color were treated in the late 1880’s. After the storm, a great newspaperman arrives. He comes to the area in search of the next big story, but instead experiences a life-changing connection with one of the victims.
Benjamin’s account of the harrowing experiences of the young people struggling though hazardous conditions, blinding snow, and freezing weather to try and find their way home, sometimes in vain, leaves us on the edge of our seat, feeling as if we are traveling with them.
Benjamin has written a book based on true events that cannot be missed, and I recommend everyone read this story, which is both heartbreaking and inspiring.
I received a free copy of this book from the publishers via Netgalley, and originally reviewed it for Historical Novels Review Magazine. My opinions are my own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Melanie Benjamin is the author of the New York Times and USA Today bestselling historical novels The Swans of Fifth Avenue, about Truman Capote and his society swans, and The Aviator’s Wife, a novel about Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Her novel, Mistress of the Ritz, is a taut tale of suspense wrapped up in a love story for the ages, the inspiring story of a woman and a man who discover the best in each other amid the turbulence of war. Photo by Deborah Feingold
Previous historical novels include the national bestseller Alice I Have Been, about Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland; The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb, the story of 32-inch-tall Lavinia Warren Stratton, a star during the Gilded Age; and The Girls in the Picture, about the friendship and creative partnership between two of Hollywood’s earliest female legends—screenwriter Frances Marion and superstar Mary Pickford.
Her novels have been translated in over fifteen languages, featured in national magazines such as Good Housekeeping, People, and Entertainment Weekly, and optioned for film.
Melanie is a native of the Midwest, having grown up in Indianapolis, Indiana, where she pursued her first love, theater. After raising her two sons, Melanie, a life-long reader (including being the proud winner, two years in a row, of her hometown library’s summer reading program!), decided to pursue a writing career. After writing her own parenting column for a local magazine, and winning a short story contest, Melanie published two contemporary novels under her real name, Melanie Hauser, before turning to historical fiction.
Melanie lives in Virginia with her husband. In addition to writing, she puts her theatrical training to good use by being a member of the Authors Unbound speakers bureau. When she isn’t writing or speaking, she’s reading. And always looking for new stories to tell.
No Ordinary Thing was #1 on my list of my Top 7 Books of 2020. At the time I made that post, I couldn’t post the review because I was required to wait for it to be published on the Historical Novel Society website. The time has finally come when I can post my review, which is below. The Historical Novel Society must have agreed with me on this one, because they made this book one of their Editor’s Choices. For this blog, I gave it my extra “diamond” rating because I think it’s over and above 5 stars. It’s historical fiction with a time travel twist, which is my absolutely favorite thing to read.
REVIEW
No Ordinary Thing by G.Z Schmidt is a delightful middle grade time travel fantasy. It is 1999 and Adam lives at his uncle’s bakery, the Biscuit Basket, in New York City. Adam is missing his parents, who passed away years earlier in a plane crash. Then a mysterious stranger visits, holding a snow globe. He tells Adam that adventures await him, and that he should go up to the attic. When he does, Adam finds the snow globe, which immediately takes him back in time to Times Square in 1935 and then later a candle factory in 1967. Adam soon realizes the people and places he is visiting are all connected, more magical objects exist, and a dark presence wants to control it all.
I adored this wonderful, enchanting time travel adventure. The characters are so well developed and the plot is very engaging. The author’s ability to connect characters from different backgrounds and time periods will leave you spellbound. Every time travel story has to have a means of or explanation for the time travel, and this one does it so well. The snow globe is sometimes curiously blank, but then the traveler’s destination will appear without warning and the holder will be whisked away to another time. This book is everything that fans of fantasy and time travel could wish for. It is a magical journey that will appeal to people of all ages. It is one of those books that I will read over and over again, and I will remember fondly the first time I read it. I can’t wait to share it with others and I sincerely hope I see this world and these characters again.
I received a free hardcover copy of this book from Holiday House via Historical Novels Review Magazine. My opinions are my own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
G.Z. Schmidt
Gail Zhuang Schmidt was born in China and immigrated to the U.S. when she was six. She grew up in the Midwest and the South, where she chased fireflies at night and listened occasionally for tornado/hurricane warnings. She received her BA in Economics from Wellesley College in New England. After working for four years as an analyst, she began her new chapter in life by moving to Europe. She currently lives in Switzerland with her husband and their tuxedo cat.
She fell in love with reading after discovering the Arthur books by Marc Brown. Her first stories were written in a spiral-bound notebook in third grade.
When she’s not writing, she enjoys going to museums, playing the violin, biking, and eating pizza.
I have been doing reviews for Historical Novels Review, the quarterly magazine of the Historial Novel Society, for about 6 months now. They have just published the February reviews online, which means I can now put all or some of the 20 reviews I did for them last quarter on my blog. I’ll be posting one or two every day, starting with the ones they chose as “Editor’s Choice” this time.
If you are interested in the Historical Novel Society as a writer or as a reader, you can find them at the link below. They take submissions from authors and publishers of historical novels who would like their books reviewed in the magazine. They accept historical novels with many sub-genres, such as Historical Romance, Historical Fantasy, Historical Time Travel, etc. For readers, their magazine provides hundreds of reviews of historical novels published in the past year so you can choose which books you might want to read. You can ask about doing member reviews, as I did. The reviews are published on their website as well as in the magazine. Their membership includes a year of the quarterly magazine. I highly recommend you check it out.
The first link below will take you to all of the reviews I have done for historical novel society. The second link is to the website’s main page. The most recent reviews I have done for them indicate they have been published in issue 95 (Feb 2021).
Village Teacher by Neihtn, who also writes as Nguyen Trong Hien, is a well-written novel set in Vietnam in the late 19th or early 20th century while Vietnam was under French colonization. Teacher Tâm has traveled to the Imperial City of Hue to take the national examinations, challenging tests that help the country choose its leaders. He meets Giang, the daughter of a powerful Frenchman and a wealthy Vietnamese woman. The teacher becomes the student as Giang begins teaching him to write Vietnamese in Romanized script without using the Chinese characters. Outside forces begin to intervene in Tâm’s life in many ways, and the reader is taken on a journey through Vietnamese history, language, and customs as the Village Teacher and those who love him fight for his life and his rights.
This is such a beautiful historical love story. The author is an expert in Vietnamese history and I learned so much in this book. The struggles of Teacher Tâm are struggles that are being repeated even today as the wealthy and powerful try to hold down those of lesser means, especially the smart and talented. Over and over again we see in this book how some of the rich and powerful will use any means to try and destroy anyone who they believe threatens their total control. The love story is beautiful, and the reader gets a master class in Vietnamese history, language, and culture. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about the history of Vietnam or anyone who just wants to read a well-written historical love story.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nguyễn Trọng Hiền is originally from Vietnam. In the United States, he is known as Hien Nguyen, or Hien T. Nguyen. neihtn is his Vietnamese first name (Hien) and initials, spelled backward. Why backward? One reason is to indicate that he now lives on the opposite side of the world from where he was born and spent over two decades of his life.
Hein wrote Village Teacher at night and on weekends over four years while he worked a full-time job. He is now retired and spends his time writing and taking photographs of birds, wildlife, flowers and landscapes. He posts the photos on his blog, Village Teacher. He also published another novel, The Siege of An Loc, in 2020.
The Book of Uriel begins in World War II Poland, when a Jewish village is destroyed and its people slaughtered. A little boy, Uriel, finds himself on his own. Unable to speak, Uriel has always written stories in his golden notebook, stories of angels and demons. Taken in by Uwe, a linguist for the Nazis, Uriel sees his stories coming alive. He begins an amazing mission to find the missing Archangel Michael and strikes a bargain with the Angel of Death.
This is an intricately woven tale that shows the cruelty of the Nazis and the horrors of the holocaust while at the same time portraying the spiritual war that is being fought alongside the physical war. Hoffman weaves together historical facts, the Bible, and Jewish folklore to create a written tapestry that you won’t want to put down. Her ability to combine historical fiction with a rich spiritual world is awe-inspiring. As a Christian, I don’t know anything about Jewish folklore, but I do know the Bible. The prophet Elijah, the Archangel Michael, and more familiar Biblical characters are also part of this story. It is a fascinating read, and I definitely believe that the actual battle of good vs. evil is both physical and spiritual.
Fans of the Book Thief will love The Book of Uriel. I also see just a tiny bit of a reminder of Christian author Frank Peretti’s writing, as he too shows the spiritual world alongside the physical world in some of his books.
I downloaded this book on Kindle Unlimited. I also received a free copy from the publishers via Reads and Reels. My review is voluntary.
Elyse Hoffman strives to tell historical tales with new twists: she loves to meld WWII and Jewish history with fantasy, folklore, and the paranormal. She has written three books in The Barracks of the Holocaust series, with more on the way. Her first full-length novel, The Book of Uriel, is set to be published on January 26th. If you love history and want to read some completely unique stories, follow Elyse at Project613Publishing.com.
Leviathan is a fascinating ride with a young pilot through the British skies during World War I. The thoughts of the pilot flash back and forth from his BE2 single engine biplane, to his mission, to events from his past. He’s chasing a Zeppelin, the Leviathan that has come to invade his country and attack its people.
The author’s description of flying the World War I era biplane was so meticulous and detailed that I felt like I was in the cockpit of the plane, learning to fly. At the same time it was filled with emotion. The pilot’s thoughts flashing back and forth from his plane and his surroundings to events from his life seemed so real to me.
I was completely impressed by the author’s ability to transport us into this plane and into this pilot’s emotions and experiences. I would highly recommend this for anyone interested in World War I historical fiction or aviation, or anyone who just wants to read a great story.
I downloaded a copy of this novella on Kindle Unlimited, where members can read it for free.
Note: Indie authors work very hard to get exposure and to get reviews for their books. If you read this novella and love it, please post an Amazon review and tell others about it.
Great Books Available on Kindle Unlimited: Juche: Books 1 and 2
Our Spotlight falls on two Dystopian Gems from an Indie author, The Juche Series by Adria Carmichael, Books 1 and 2. The Author is working on three more. These books are available to borrow and read on Kindle Unlimited at no additional charge to KU members. For those wanting to purchase them, the digital copies are also going on sale on Amazon worldwide from tomorrow, December 28th, to January 1st. During this time, Book 1, The Demon of Yodok, will be free, and Book 2, the Sufferings of the Strayed, will be just .99
These books are not standalone and both of them end in cliffhangers, so they need to be read in order and as a continuing series. They will be followed by book 3 on February 28, 2021. Books 4 and 5 and will follow later. You will find this series very addictive! See my 5-star reviews below:
Areum lives with her parents and her twin sister Nari in the Kingdom of Choson in the Year 83. This kingdom is ruled by the Great General, who is the wise, omniscient, and immortal leader of their free and fair nation, the most successful nation in all the world. Areum is immersed in preparing for gymnastics tryouts for the Great General’s National Olympic Team. She is greatly devoted to her god, The Great General, and refuses to think about the fact that her father has disappeared and her twin sister is ailing. Then the day comes that changes her life for good.
This is a great combination of both dystopian and historical fiction, as it is really 1994 and the Kingdom of Choson is, of course, North Korea, and the Great General is their leader at the time, Kim Il Sung. This is not just about an evil Communist dictatorship, although much is exposed. It is about the great resentment Areum feels towards her parents and sister and the fact that she doesn’t feel a part of her own family. Her resentment is shocking at times and is so well described. The descriptions of the horrible treatment of the citizens of the “Kingdom of Choson” and the way that evil actions are described as good things is heartbreaking. The story is riveting from start to finish. This is a great debut novel from Adria Carmichael. My review of the second book in the series is below.
I received a free copy of this book, but also picked one up on Kindle Unlimited. My review is voluntary and my opinions are my own.
In this second book of the Juche series, the circumstances of Areum and her family in the Great Kingdom of Choson have changed, but her resentment of her parents and sister lives on. She is also clinging almost desperately to her beliefs, although reality does not seem to match what she has been taught. As Areum and her family become part of “The Strayed,” they undergo extreme circumstances and witness horrific acts. Areum is still very naive and selfish, but she grows stronger and begins to use her talents to survive.
Again, I was riveted as this part-dystopian, part-historical fiction saga continues. Adria Carmichael paints a vivid picture of a society filled with fear, and leaders who look on those in their charge as less than nothing. Through it all runs the concept of Juche, a North Korean version of communism/totalitarianism as invented by Kim Il Sung. Carmichael takes us to a society that tells its people how great it is while they starve and murder them. Her idea to present North Korea as the setting of a dystopian novel is a good one, because it really is a dystopian society right here on Earth. Any fans of dystopian or historical fiction will be captivated by this novel.
I received a free copy of this book, but also picked one up on Kindle Unlimited. My review is voluntary and my opinions are my own.
Juche Part 3, The Weeping Masses, will be available on Amazon on February 28, 2021. Preorder below.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adria Carmichael is a writer of dystopian fiction with a twist. When she is not devouring dystopian and post-apocalyptic content in any format – books, movies, TV-series and PlayStation games – she is crafting the epic and highly-addictive Juche saga, her 2020 debut novel series that takes place in the brutal, totalitarian nation of Choson. When the limit of doom and gloom is reached, a 10K run on a sunny day or bingeing a silly sitcom on a rainy day is her go-to way to unwind.
Here are my favorite books of this year. Everyone else is doing a Top 5 or a Top 10. I’m doing a Top 7, mostly because I couldn’t narrow it down to five. Although I have them numbered, those numbers could change on any given day and I just couldn’t leave any of them out. These are all books I read in 2020. Since I’ve been doing reviews for the Historical Novel Society, I’ve found some great historical fiction. I also found an Indie book that I really loved. Below is a list of my favorites with their Amazon links and Amazon book descriptions. Three of them were read for the February issue of Historical Novels Review, so I can’t post my reviews for them until they are published in the magazine. Look for my reviews of those three books in February.
7. Set the Stars Alight
This is riveting dual timeline historical fiction. My Review
6. Doing Time
Jodi Taylor is probably my favorite author. She writes the Chronicles of St. Mary’s, a popular time travel series, and Doing Time is the first in a new spinoff series, The Time Police. My Review
5. The Milk Wagon
This is a great book from an Indie author who wrote a fantastic 80’s thriller, mostly revolving around a group of high school boys. This book has not gotten the attention it deserves and is a hidden gem, in my opinion. My review
4. The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop
I can’t post my review for this title until it is published in Historical Novels Review magazine. For a book description on Amazon, click on the cover.
I cannot post my review until February, but I will say this is an epistolary historical novel, done solely in letters and written communication. You can check out a description on Amazon by clicking on the cover.
No Ordinary Thing
Again I cannot post my review until February, but this is a Middle Grade Time Travel Fantasy revolving around a snow globe! Click on the cover for the Amazon link and description.
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