In Those People Behind Us, author Mary Camarillo writes of Wellington Beach, California, a beachside community caught in the crossfire between liberals and Trumpsters during the summer of 2017, but the story could be set in any American town. She builds multiple...
Fencing with the King is a fascinating story of Amani, a young Jordanian-American poet exploring her Jordanian roots. She has found a poem that appears to have been written by her paternal grandmother in one of her father’s old books. On the occasion of King Hussein’s...
In The Rule of Thirds, the third (and, alas, the final) book in the Annie Hawkins series, author Jeannée Sacken again draws upon her experience as an international photojournalist to heighten the reality she creates. Annie is a veteran photojournalist who's been...
Beneath the Lion’s Wings is set between Venice and Los Angeles. The novel does an admirable job of capturing the essence of Venice. The female protagonist, Victoria, is a thirty-something woman who works as an executive assistant in a talent agency, who visits the...
Though Loki’s Deceit is the second in the Charlemagne Cross Series series, I was able to get the gist of things without any problems having done a good bit of reading in Norse myths and historical fiction. The book relates European history just after the time of...
Ithaca (The Songs of Penelope #1) is an interesting retelling of The Odyssey, centered on Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, who he left behind when he went off to fight the Trojan War. Eighteen years later, she is still alone. Her son Telemachus is growing up, but her...
There’s a lot to like about This Terrible Beauty. It is historical fiction at its finest, filled with injustice, sacrifice, and redemption. I was drawn to it, as a former photographer, because Bettina Heilstrom, the female protagonist, is a photojournalist, and I was...
The Resurrectionist is a gritty, ominous, atmospheric, bleak gothic novel filled with multiple unreliable narrators and dislikable if not despicable characters. Set in London in the early nineteenth century, it shows the life of people surviving in London’s worst...
Dream Wheels is my second novel by Richard Wagamese (the first being Indian Horse), and I’ve now put all this other works on my to-be-read pile. In both novels, I was impressed by his prose and his storytelling. I sat up most of the night reading it and had to fight...
Cities of Women is a multiple point of view novel that shifts between Verity Frazier, a modern academic, Bèatrice, a medieval French artist, and Christine de Pizan, the French-Italian writer for the court of Charles VI, during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth...
Don’t Forget to Write is a witty, funny, wry, poignant coming-of-age story with marvelous characters and a bittersweet ending. When the protagonist, Marilyn Kleinman, is caught making out with the rabbi’s son in a conservative synagogue in New York City—then refuses...
This is a review of the four-book Jacqueline Kirby mystery series by Elizabeth Peters (The Seventh Sinner, The Murders of Richard III, Die for Love, and Naked Once More). I started them after really enjoying her Amelia Peabody, Egyptologist, mystery series. I found...
Paris in the 1930s was a temple of all cultural forms: music, art, literature, film. Unfortunately, as Nazis moved into occupy France, they dimmed the City of Light. Star Crossed is the story of a Jewish family, the Zelmans, as they intersect first with Paris and then...
Maddalena and the Dark is a dark fantasy or a dark academia-type story set in eighteen-century Venice, mostly at the Ospedale della Pietà, a cloistered school for foundling girls. Most are abandoned at the doorstep and have no known family. As they are raised, if they...
Vincent van Gogh, the most iconic of the Post-Impressionist artists, spends the last few months of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, painting the countryside some thirty kilometers from Paris. He lives in the Ravoux family’s inn. This book is a fictional account of...
The Shadow of Perseus is another female-centric retelling of ancient Greek myths, this one the story of Perseus, the purported son of Danae and Zeus, slayer of Gorgons (Medusa) and all-round hero. Author Heywood leaves the Greek gods in the background, having them...
This is a review of Elizabeth Peters’ six volume set of Vicky Bliss mysteries and the prequel The Camelot Caper. Bliss is a typical Peters heroine, beautiful, brainy and sexually liberated—with lots of courage and an expertise in medieval art history to boot, with her...
For some reason, I thought Eye of the Beholder was art-related historical fiction; however, it is a nonfiction look at art, mapmaking, optics, and learning to see through the new devices: telescopes, microscopes and camera obscuras. I found it fascinating, none the...
The Dollmaker of Krakow takes a difficult subject, the Holocaust, and through the use of fantasy and a smidgeon of magic, makes it palatable enough for children to serve as an introduction to genocide. But, just because this is a children’s story, doesn’t mean adults...
Poor little orphan Evie is taken in by her wealthy aunt and uncle. To show her appreciation, she’s tried to be compliant and helpful, to the point of journeying to England to learn to be a secretary and work in her uncle’s company. Her wealthy cousin Aimee convinces...
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