Category Archives: Historical Fiction

All the historical fiction genre book reviews.

by

The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey

I’ve never read Jane Eyre. There, I said it. I’ve never read it and I was worried that might have an effect on how much I enjoyed this book. Would I be able to love it, even if I’ve never read the novel it’s a retelling of? Would I even be able to understand the impact of the original on this book? If the story has already been told before, would it even be a good book?

The answers to those questions are yes, yes, and yes.

I loved this book and it actually has me wanting to read Jane Eyre. I fell in love with Gemma and her determination to not be a victim of her past. There were so many parts of the story when it would have been completely acceptable for Gemma to take a look at her circumstances and life and decide to just give up hoping for better things. But she fought forward instead and took ownership of her life and made things happen for herself instead of sitting idly by and hoping something came along.

I loved how Gemma was developed as a person before introducing the romantic element of the story. Yes, she’s still young, but she knows more of herself than a lot of girls her age. She’s had time to grow before falling in love and she doesn’t let that love change the major parts of who she is. When something doesn’t feel right to her, she makes the decision to maintain who she is and what she believes, even though it ends up hurting more than anything else in her life.

I was a little worried I’d be too bothered by the age difference in the love story, but I surprisingly wasn’t. It somehow felt right and made sense. In the life of Mr. Sinclair, he has had to face just as many difficulties as Gemma, and even though it took longer for him to find a companion that understood and saw him for him, it fit and was wonderful to read.

I adored this book and definitely think people should read it. I can’t make any comparisons between Jane Eyre and The Flight of Gemma Hardy, but as its own novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy was superb and certainly one of the best books I’ve read.

by

Allegiance by Cayla Kluver

I rarely like the second book in trilogies. They generally feel like a bridge to get from the end of book one to the beginning of book three without anything happening. It usually feels like a waste of a full book when simply making books one and three just a little longer would have worked just fine.

Allegiance is nothing like that.

There is not one part of this book that felt like that. I could not stop reading. The only times I was forced to put the book down were driving home from the coffee shop and when I grabbed the bag of pepperonis that classified as my dinner. The rest of the past 10 hours has been spent reading this book.

Allegiance picked up right where Legacy left off and while it would have been easy for Kluver to follow the recent novel trends and make this the book that introduces the typical love triangle, she doesn’t. Instead, she builds the characters and makes you like people you couldn’t stand in the first book. Kluver was able to take characters and make them people. They have flaws and you’re still rooting for them in some capacity or another.

Alera grows up in this book and it’s easy to see from start to finish. She becomes the person she needs to be rather than the person she wants to be. The wonderful thing is that in the process, the two becomes the same. Even Steldor grew on me and I find myself wanting even more from his character.

There’s a nice mix between the romance aspect of the story and the action. It never gets overloaded with the love story, but it’s never too action heavy. There’s enough of both to keep the hopeless romantic in me happy, and the fight scene lover engaged. It’s amazingly mixed and only adds to the story.

I can’t wait for November to get my hands on the last book. I’m incredibly impressed with how Kluver has written the story thus far and will be anxiously waiting to see how she concludes this fantastic series.

by

Anastasia’s Secret by Susanne Dunlap

The entire time I was reading this book, I found myself wishing I didn’t know how it ends. Dunlap wrote a book that had me dreading each turn of the page, and yet I couldn’t stop reading.

Everyone knows the story of Anastasia and her family. It’s been done many times, and yet this book was different. It took the events and history everyone knows, and added a personal element to it. Dunlap added the thrill of first love and secrecy. It brought the story to life in a whole new way.

The characters have new life as well. It’s easy to understand each person and how their actions helped shape the perception the public had of them and the eventual uprising. I loved how Sasha brought the real world to Anastasia and made her think about her life compared to those of everyone else. She goes from being very naive and thinking her life is just like that of the people, only slightly more privileged, to realizing just how wrong she was yet wishing for that life she thought she had. Anastasia really grows through the entire book and I really liked that.

The only thing I didn’t really enjoy was the amount of summary that existed in the novel. I understand why it’s there, because it’s hard to condense 4, almost 5, years into one book, but I wish some of it had been broken up by more interaction with her family and dialogue. Even though there was a lot of summary, I was incredibly grateful Dunlap didn’t use too much artistic freedom and rearrange all the events that unfolded just to make it fit. She stuck to the real history, for the most part, and the few things she did change or add didn’t impact the novel in any way.

This was a great book about one of, what I consider to be, the most interesting times in European history. It really shows how just a few actions can set off a snowball that ends tragically. I especially enjoyed the ending, even though it is one of the saddest conclusions I’ve read, simply because you know what happens next, even without being told. For anyone that loves history, this is a fantastic book to read.

by

Becoming Marie Antoinette by Juliet Grey

While there wasn’t anything necessarily wrong with this novel, I just couldn’t get into it. As someone who greatly enjoys history, I usually know quite a bit about the people typically written about. What I find most enjoyable is when those facts are told through new and interesting ways, and there wasn’t much of that in this book.

It seemed very, “and then this happened, then this and then this followed,” without really building up the story. It felt more like a biography than a novel, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it just wasn’t what I was looking for.

This book was a very well-written, factually correct book about the earlier years of Marie Antoinette, but if you’re looking for something on Marie that reads more as a novel, I’d consider something else.

by

The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory

This book took me a little longer than usual to read, not because of the quality of the writing, but because this was a part of Tudor history I didn’t know much about and I found myself constantly looking up the characters and places Gregory mentioned in the book.

I think writing this book from 3 different first person perspectives gave an interesting view of the time period. Three different people have three very different views of the same event. I found myself constantly thrown for a loop by Mary. She never thought twice about lying and it was interesting to see how she would portray an event to others, and then how she actually thought of the same event.

Bess is one of the best historical fiction characters I’ve read in a long time. From Gregory’s book, as well as the researching I did on my own, I’ve come to really love her strength and determination. She was a smart business woman and used that to her advantage. She worked her way up and earned the things she had, even if it was through marriage, and worked hard to keep herself safe and secure for the future. I think more women in books should be like her.

Yet again, Gregory has me thinking about the little things in history and how one simple decision can change the fate of a country, and the world. While not my favorite book (The Queen’s Fool has that title), it was a great read and sheds more light onto the Tudor era of history.

by

The Red Queen by Philippa Gregory

The one thing I usually don’t like when reading books that are a part of a series is repetition of events. Hearing the same thing over and over doesn’t really appeal to me. However, even though this book covers the same events as The White Queen, I’d hardly call it repetitious. The events are looked at through such different lenses, that at times I forgot I had already read about the history.

The White Queen was written from the view of the York side, from Elizabeth Woodville’s point of view, and I found the contrast between her and Margaret wonderful. Elizabeth isn’t afraid to make her own future, and embraces that. Margaret makes her own future, but refuses to call it that. She’s acting for God, doing what He commands her.

Margaret, as a character, is hard to like. She says she is the most faithful and good girl, serving her God, but she is jealous, prideful, vengeful and even a little vain. Even though I did not like her as a person, I could feel for her. She did not have the easiest life. She wanted to mean something more to the world than just a way to continue the Lancaster line. If she needs to disguise this need as serving God, I can understand that.

This is yet another hit for Gregory and I’ll be anxiously awaiting Elizabeth of York’s story.

by

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

Yet another amazing Gregory book. Her writing makes me think about history and I perform more Google searches when I read her books than at any other time. I love finding more about the people she writes and the places her stories take place. There is so much history that happens in such little time, but Gregory makes it all interesting.

It was fascinating to read about Elizabeth’s life. Gregory wrote her as an ambitious woman who knows what she wants and works to get it. She knows that while men hold the most visible power in the world, the women hold a secret power that can change lives.

Even though we may never know exactly what happened during these times, the motivations of people, or the true emotions involved in their lives, Gregory is able to weave such a wonderful tale, even tying in a magical element which makes it nearly impossible to put this book down.

by

The Lady of the Rivers by Philippa Gregory

I adore Philippa Gregory and will read pretty much anything she writes. She is able to bring such life into the history and brings light to those stories that aren’t very well known in the history books.

This book was wonderful. I had known a bit about the War of the Roses, but this book brought a whole new light to the conflict. I will admit to sitting down and drawing out a chart just so I could keep all the players in this war straight. Add in the touch of magic and I was completely drawn in.

Jacquetta is a strong, smart woman in a time when that was looked down on. She knows she needs to hide the power she has from the important men in the country, but she doesn’t hide so much that she comes across as weak. She knows how to get things she wants using her head and not her body, which is a wonderful change from Gregory’s Tudor series and I think it makes her a better character overall.

Overall, this was a fantastic book and Gregory has yet again drawn me into her writing and I can’t wait to finish the rest of this series.

by

Ghost on Black Mountain by Ann Hite

This is a book I will be thinking about for a long time. It’s the kind of book that makes you stay up until 2am reading it because you just have to know what happens on the next page. There wasn’t a place where I could stop reading and <i>not</i> think about it.

The web that surrounds Hobbs Pritchard draws you in slowly and before you know it, he’s managed to ensnare you, just like he does his ladies in the book. The different perspectives each woman gives of the same man shows just how complicated a person can be. There isn’t one true Hobbs, in my opinion. Each woman sees a different version of him, and they’re all right and wrong at the same time. As much as I disliked him as a person, his character is one of the best I’ve read.

As for each of the women, my heart went out to each and every one. They all had secrets that eventually came back to bite them, some worse than others. It didn’t matter what the reasoning was behind keeping the secrets, be it good or bad, the secrets ate at each woman and her life.

Something else I found wonderful was how strong the females are in this book. They might make bad choices, but who doesn’t in life? However, these women overcome these weaknesses and stand up for themselves, taking charge of their situation and doing what they need to do to make their lives better. I know I say it a lot, but I love real characters, and these women fit the bill. They found strength in their weaknesses, and transformed from characters in a book to real people in my mind.

This was not the simple read I thought it was going to be. It deals with the dark side of human nature, how keeping secrets can destroy good things and many women’s issues. This was a fantastic novel and Hite’s next book cannot be released soon enough.

by

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I’m not really sure what my expectations were when I started this book. All I know is every single one of them was shattered.

This is not a book you can just breeze through and understand. It makes you really read and drown in the rods on the page. There is so much emotion in every word, you can’t just skim it. this is a book that demands you read it.

The whole book is narrated by Death as he “works” through World War II. He tells Liesel’s story as she grows up during the war. She begins as an orphan, heading to her foster home but becomes so much more.

The one thing that I loved and hated about Death telling the story, was how well everything was foreshadowed, or in some cases, announced. Knowing what was coming just made me dread it more, because I knew there wouldn’t be a different outcome. If Death announced something, it was coming. It just made the emotional shock value increase, and tied a connection between me and war going on in the book. People die in war. You can’t change that. Knowing what will happen is sometimes worse than not knowing.

As depressing as the subject matter of the book is, somehow, the book itself is never completely depressing. It is not morbid. Liesel provides what this book needs to save it from being a depressing read. She and her Papa’s relationship is one of my new favorites. The love they had for each other nearly jumped off the page. In between all the ugly in the book, there was good.

This book made me feel more than most books in recent memory. The story grabs you by the heart and does not let go. It squeezes hard and tugs at you, but through the entire story, you are being held captive by the words that play so important a part within the story itself. This is not a book for young adults. It is a book for anyone. It will leave an imprint on you long after you finish reading the last page.