Books shelved under “Historical Fiction”

Ordinarily I love meta stories and stories that play with unreliable narration. Stories about stories. Cloud Cuckoo Land sounds like it should be my cup of tea. It’s reminiscent in some ways of Sea of Tranquility. As gripping as some parts of this book were, other parts were a snooze fest. Anthony Doerr has clearly put a lot of work into this story, from research to setting and characters—and I want to be clear…

My bestie Rebecca lent this to me, and I am glad she did—I don’t think I would have picked it up otherwise, and that would have been my loss. Lessons in Chemistry stands out. It is quite a literary novel, full of narrative tricks and idiosyncrasies and enough contrived character circumstances to make John Irving or Heather O’Neill jealous. But Bonnie Garmus is on a mission in this book. She’s laser-focused on the unfairness of…

Sometimes truth is more interesting than fiction. Sometimes fictionalizing the truth—books based on a true story, if you will—helps highlight true stories that have yet to receive their due. History is seldom boring. The Rose Code is that type of historical fiction. Set primarily in Bletchley Park during the Second World War, this book is not about the genius of Alan Turing or Dilly Knox. It’s about love and sex and betrayal. Kate Quinn follows…

Alas, for the first time in over a year, I must shelve another book as “did not finish.” I am loath to do this with an eARC I received from NetGalley—I try my best only to apply for books I will hopefully like, and even when I don’t like them, I do my best to finish them and provide a full review. That being said, I have no problem with DNFing a book if it…

This was one of those cases of the cover truly attracting me while in my local indie bookshop. I hadn’t read anything by Alix E. Harrow previously, but the title, description, and cover sold me on The Once and Future Witches. And, given the climate of hostility towards women and people of marginalized genders in the United States in 2022, this book set in 1893 feels oddly, uncomfortably familiar.

Taking place from the spring…

I was somewhat skeptical about this book going into it simply because of how it was marketed as a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare retellings can be hit-and-miss. Thankfully, These Violent Delights is a hit! Chloe Gong takes the broad strokes of Romeo and Juliet but adapts the story quite heavily. There are some subtle nods (like a bar named Mantua) and some really nice set pieces (like the mistaken-for-dead moment) that Gong…

Heather O’Neill wormed her way into my brain with Lullabies for Little Criminals. I missed The Lonely Hearts Hotel when it first came out, but when I saw she has a new book coming out soon, I finally learned about this one and jumped on borrowing it from my library. Also set in Montréal, albeit decades prior to Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Lonely Hearts Hotel echoes motifs from O’Neill’s earlier work. Once…

Over a decade ago, I read Lilith’s Brood. I immediately recognized the power of Octavia E. Butler’s writing, her utter willingness to exploit science fiction to the fullest extent that it can comment on our society. Since then, I have always nodded along and agreed every time someone calls Butler a grandmaster of science fiction and fantasy. She is an icon. But I didn’t read anything else by her.

Until now.

Kindred is the…

Every so often I just love to put myself through the experience that is reading the sequel to a book I read nearly 6 years ago! That is the case with The Crown’s Fate, which picks off where The Crown’s Game left off. Somehow, that first book and the description of this one were enough to keep it on my to-read list after a massive purge I did shortly after joining the StoryGraph. Then…

This book was recommended to me by a comment on my Goodreads Review of For Today I Am A Boy. As I said in that review, we need more trans people telling trans stories. Confessions of the Fox is exactly that: author Jordy Rosenberg is a trans man, the frame story protagonist is a trans man, and the protagonist of the inner story is a trans man. More incredibly, however, this book does something …

A few years ago, I read The Hate U Give and liked it enough that I have multiple copies of it (various special editions). Angie Thomas then followed it up with On The Come Up, a spin-off set in the same neighbourhood but with a different cast and a focus on hip-hop, something Thomas cares about deeply on a personal level. Now we have a third novel that is clearly the result of a…

Two years ago I picked up, on a whim, Sarah-Jane Stratford’s Radio Girls, and I fell in love. The book was the perfect blend of history, politics, and feminism. I’m pleased to say that with Red Letter Days, Stratford has done it again. While the protagonists share some superficial qualities—both move from North America to Britain, both work in communications industries in some capacity, both become somewhat embroiled in espionage and skullduggery—Stratford has…

Every so often, I consider dropping the star ratings from my reviews. After all, ratings are a convention, not a requirement. Novels like A Suitable Boy confound the one-dimensionality of a 5-star rating system and leave me stymied. This is a 5-star novel. It is also a 1-star novel. Do I split the difference, give it 3 stars? Or do I depart from tradition and leave it unrated? You already know the answer, of course,…

This is a book by a Black man about slavery in the United States, and I wanted to open this review by boosting the thoughts of Black reviewers—after all, their take on this book is going to be more salient than the opinion of a white woman like me. Unforunately, as I browsed reviews of The Water Dancer on Goodreads, I was dismayed to see that the majority of them are from white people (mostly…

Ever wondered, “What would Jane Eyre have been like if Jane Eyre had been a serial killer?” That’s the basic premise of Jane Steele, although if I’m being honest, the serial killer aspect was not as intense as I had thought it would be. As a feminist retelling of Jane Eyre this book leaves much to be desired. However, as a kind of mystery/thriller/romance, Jane Steele is a lot of fun. I came to…

This is an own-voices review for being a transgender woman, but I am white and do not share the protagonist’s ethnicity. For Today I Am A Boy left me unsettled in ways I didn’t expect, and not entirely in the good kind of unsettled you want from some literature. I’m going to be harsh here because it’s how I feel, having read the book, but I would like to disclaim up front that even though…

I first read and reviewed Middlemarch in 2009, so you can read my first review if you like. This review will reiterate some of the points of my earlier review, but enough time has passed and I have changed enough that I definitely took different things from this book this time. Nevertheless, still a classic and a masterpiece.

Middlemarch is a sublime example of Victorian authors recognizing and attempting to chronicle a disappearing lifestyle. Eliot…

I do so enjoy stories set during World War II that are not about battles or even soldiers. (One could make the argument, of course, that the people in this tale are soldiers, albeit of a different sort.) The Ventriloquists is a based-on-a-true-story story that will appeal to those of us who believe the pen is mightier than the sword. It’s a story about stories, about writing, about propaganda and other dark arts. E.R. Ramzipoor’s…

Code Name Verity was some of the best WWII fiction I’ve ever read. So I’ve had this prequel on my to-read list for a while. Elizabeth Wein in general seems like an author I should watch, and I finally tackled The Pearl Thief with no small amount of trepidation: how could this possibly measure up to Code Name Verity? Indeed, if that’s your metric, you will necessarily be disappointed. Obviously this book is…

Sometimes novels are really philosophy tracts in disguise. If you’re Neal Stephenson, this usually turns into an unwieldy doorstopper that uses its tremendous bullk to beat the reader into submission. If you’re Herman Hesse, you write a kind of novella that is also pretty dense yet somehow manages to be simple and light at the same time. Siddhartha is one of those delightful early twentieth-century novels that by modern standards do not work at all…