Tag Archives: Historical Fiction

Review: A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck

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A Year Down Yonder
by Richard Peck
Rating: *****
Date read 9/2/2013

Listened to this with my true love. I wasn’t the only one sniffling at the ending.

I love this book with all my heart. Grandma Dowdel reminds me a lot of my own grandmother, and listening to this brings her back a little. I love the cats in the cob house, and what happens when the tornado comes to town. I love how Joey is and isn’t here for the whole book, just like real life.

It’s absolutely splendid, and a lovely narrator doesn’t hurt a bit. Highly recommended.

Review: Father Melancholy’s Daughter by Gail Godwin

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Father Melancholy’s Daughter
by Gail Godwin
Rating: ***
Read 9/1/2013

Reading this book was so strange for me. I kept thinking it was set in England, because all of the books I’ve ever read with priest or vicars or what-have-you-Christian-guys were English. It was jarring every single time someone said something that made me remember we were in the States.

I like the characters well enough, it’s just that nearly all of their experiences were completely outside of my own that I couldn’t quite find common ground. I’m fairly certain that I’d have liked this better if I had a Christian background.

Modern/realistic fiction isn’t at all my thing, and I’m pleasantly surprised that I liked this as well as I did. Parts of it reminded me of Madeleine L’Engle at her most spiritual.

Review: The Road Home by Ellen Emerson White

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The Road Home
by Ellen Emerson White
Rating: *****
Read 8/20/2013

8/2013 I had to come back to this and re-read it after reading the four Zack Emerson Echo Company books. I love it more, now that I’ve read them. I’m flummoxed as to why it’s not packaged as part of the Echo Company series, and have been engaged in some fairly robust debates as to whether it truly IS part of the series. When I read it first, I thought it could stand alone. Now that I’ve read the Echo Company books, I think it’s much more satisfying, more complete. The backstory is there, and things which are alluded to in this book are whole and have depth and breadth and, well, mass.

A phenomenal series with a spectacular cap, that’s how I’m thinking of them.

7/2013 I was a little girl when we finally got out of Vietnam. I remember going outside and banging pots and pans together, my mother crying. And so many people I loved just missed being there, through luck. My starter husband had a really high number. My uncle went to Germany. My dad got out just in time. My true love kept Cape Cod safe. And there are people I love who didn’t just miss being there. People who still flinch when a Chinook flies over. People who just don’t talk about it.

So. This book, which starts in country and stays tightly focused on the war throughout, was tremendously affecting for me. It’s also very well-written. The characters are so, so real, and one roots hard for them to be okay. So hard, in fact, that one finds one’s self up all night, holding the book in a death grip, reading in a tiny pool of light. Well, maybe that’s only me. I didn’t get much more than 3 chapters in before I ordered the first 4 Echo Company books through Inter-Library Loan.

By turns brutal and tender and introspective and broken. Incredibly well-done.

Review: The Echo Company books by Zack Emerson

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Welcome to Vietnam
by Zack Emerson (Ellen Emerson White)
Rating: ****
Read 8/13/2013

Oof. Vietnam. So many things in MY head, reading this. The boys, of course, the boys are the ages of my own boys, more or less. Some of ‘em younger, even. And of course I can’t help putting them in this scenario and then I get the shakes. Also, so many of my grown friends, old men now, were there, were these very boys. There’s vertigo. And then there’s Story. And Ellen Emerson White is a storyteller for sure. Even when she’s pretending to be Zack Emerson, writing for boys.

Hill 568
by Zack Emerson (Ellen Emerson White)
Rating:****
Read 8/15/2013

This book brings home what the war in Vietnam must have felt like, smelled like. How terrifying it was, and how the kids fighting it were exactly that, kids. Michael, who I first met in the fifth book of this series, makes a lot more sense to me now. And oh, how I love Snoopy.

Mostly, it’s giving me a horrifying window into the war that loomed large over my childhood.

‘Tis The Season
by Zack Emerson (Ellen Emerson White)
Rating:*****
Read 8/17/2013

This is Rebecca’s backstory, what you miss in The Road Home. Solid characters in an untenable situation, doing the best they can. So achingly true, so well written. I need to have this whole series of books. They surely do pass the 3 a.m. test.

Rebecca is such a wonderful person, complicated and fierce and devoted and broken. I think there needs to be a sixth book. And maybe a seventh.

Stand Down
by Zack Emerson (Ellen Emerson White)
Rating:*****
Read 8/19/2013

This series is phenomenal. Why did it ever go out of print? The fourth installment was every bit as good as the first three, and I grew more enamored of Rebecca. I didn’t think that was even possible. And the guys, oh, how I love the guys. I had to get the fifth book again to re-read, now that I know them all better.

There’s more grim detail here about the everyday business of war in the jungle. And it’s so realistic that there are times I could actually smell it. The guys, doing their heartbreaking best, fighting a war they don’t understand under conditions that can only be called intolerable. Yet they tolerate them, and even find some beauty, some humor.

Georgy Girl! And the shout-out to Sue Barton, Student Nurse made me tear up.

Read these. In order. Because those people who told me I could just read the last one and then decide if I wanted to go back and read the first four? Those people, while technically correct, are wrong.

Review: The Road Home by Ellen Emerson White

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The Road Home
by Ellen Emerson White
Rating: *****
Read 7/15/2013

I was a little girl when we finally got out of Vietnam. I remember going outside and banging pots and pans together, my mother crying. And so many people I loved just missed being there, through luck. My starter husband had a really high number. My uncle went to Germany. My dad got out just in time. My true love kept Cape Cod safe. And there are people I love who didn’t just miss being there. People who still flinch when a Chinook flies over. People who just don’t talk about it.

So. This book, which starts in country and stays tightly focused on the war throughout, was tremendously affecting for me. It’s also very well-written. The characters are so, so real, and one roots hard for them to be okay. So hard, in fact, that one finds one’s self up all night, holding the book in a death grip, reading in a tiny pool of light. Well, maybe that’s only me. I didn’t get much more than 3 chapters in before I ordered the first 4 Echo Company books through Inter-Library Loan.

By turns brutal and tender and introspective and broken. Incredibly well-done.

Review: The Creation of Anne Boleyn by Susan Bordo

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The Creation of Anne Boleyn
by Susan Bordo
Rating: ****
Read 7/9/2013

I really enjoyed this fresh look at Anne Boleyn. Bordo brings all sorts of things to light, things that Tudor aficionados may know already but maybe never put together completely, and things that are accepted as fact that just aren’t true. It’s hard to look backwards without using today as a lens, but Bordo does what seems to me a fine job here.

It was fun to read about the various books, movies, plays, and television shows about Anne, and how she was portrayed. I liked the first, more historical section of the book as well. The photo plates were great, showing me a few portraits I’d never before seen.

I enjoyed the afterword perhaps most of all, where Bordo brings us into the reasons why she chose to write this book.

If you’re a Tudor junkie, this is not to be missed.

Review: Hild by Nicola Griffith

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Hild is a book I’ve been looking forward to with unalloyed anticipation, ever since Griffith mentioned it on her blog a long time ago. I was thrilled to get an early NetGalley copy to read. And then, for awhile, I was floundering. It’s a huge story, populated with a great many characters, many of whom have similar names. Or if not similar, equally unfamiliar to the modern ear. There were a lot of words to puzzle out contextual meanings of (as the glossary in the e-Galley was too complicated to keep flipping back and forth to) and a lot of movements that would have been easier to visualize with a map. All of these things, I think, will be resolved in the final editions.

So I was slow to get into the meat of the story, but I’ve loved Griffith’s past work so much I kept on. About 30% of the way through the book, I was hooked entirely. The characters came alive for me, and I was transported to early England. I could smell the fires (and worse) and the jessamine that Hild and the queen wear. I could hear the sounds of battle and of song.

I fell in love with Hild and with her time. I grew to care deeply about what seemed to me to be happening right now, but really happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago. There are priests of Woden, priests of Christ, alluring slave girls, brave warriors and braver seers. There’s enough botanizing to keep me happy, and sumptuous descriptions of what there was to eat, washed down with mead and small beer. Griffith’s prose can’t be beat.

I can’t wait for the book with maps and genealogy information. 4.5 stars for it as read with no maps, no family trees & a hard-to-access glossary. I will read it again, and no doubt love it more the second time through. I want to read the NEXT Hild book already.

Review: A Part of the Sky by Robert Newton Peck

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A Part of the Sky
by Robert Newton Peck
Rating: ****
Read 5/12/2013

The sequel to A Day No Pigs Would Die is worthy. There’s some harking back to the original book, and there are not a lot of laughs to be had. The Depression is looming on the horizon, and there’s a 13 year old boy and 2 old women trying to run a subsistence farm. There’s a heap of dying in this book, be warned. There’s also a lot of hope, a lot of tenderness, and some plain speaking. I really enjoyed it, and I think from now on, I will read the two back to back.

 

Review: The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson

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The Long Ships

by Frans G. Bengtsson

Rating ****

Read 4/12/2013

Delightful story of Red Orm and his life in the tenth century. The period detail seemed authentic, but since you could tattoo everything I know about the tenth century on my eyeball without causing me the slightest discomfort, I’m not the person to judge. It felt authentic, and that’s what’s important to me in a story. It’s got these flashes of hilarity that are delicious and can be read aloud to great effect. A very absorbing, engrossing romp. Plus swords. And hounds.

 

Review: Jane Boleyn by Julia Fox

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Jane Boleyn

by Julia Fox

Rating: **

 

Read: 4/6/2013

 

I found this purported biography of Anne Boleyn’s sister-in-law Jane to be wildly erratic. First of all, there is little verifiable known about Jane’s life and the author spends a lot of time speculating. The first “if Jane were there, she would have” was barely noticeable, but by the middle of the book it was clear that nobody really can ever know what Jane Boleyn thought, said, or did beyond what’s already documented. I didn’t like the imagined Jane. I also didn’t like what felt like clear bias against the Boleyn clan as a whole. I did like the meticulously researched, historically verifiable parts. But mostly I didn’t like it.