I enjoy Charles McCarry’s Paul Christopher series, a great blend of espionage intrigue and commentary on American foreign affairs. Many consider The Last Supper to be his magnum opus. While I enjoyed parts of the book, I will not be one of those people. The Last Supper is not a conventional Christopher novel in that there’s a case and he’s working it. Instead, it’s kind of a biographical work that traces his father’s life and his own. Throughout it are multiple espionage cases handled by the OSS and […]
Accessible, exciting historical fiction for the tween set
Almost accidentally, author Susan Hood stumbled upon a historical event that has gone mostly overlooked and it is the basis of her exciting middle grade novel Lifeboat 12. The book is told in verse format by narrator and actual survivor Ken Sparks, who is thirteen years of age right before London is destroyed in the Blitz. His life in London is troubled by things large in scope (like running to bomb shelters nightly when the alarms go off and living off rations and hand-me-downs) and […]
Disturbing parallels to modern-day society
I liked this one well enough, but I can’t say it wasn’t a little bit of a disappointment after liking Faye’s other books so much. The pacing was very uneven here and I wonder if cutting some of the material (the book is about 400 pages) would have helped. There’s a great book in here somewhere, surrounded by too much extra. One thing I really loved? The setting. I don’t think I’ve ever read pre-civil war historical fiction that isn’t pioneer-ish before. This takes place […]
12th Century Boss Lady
Even as a self-proclaimed Anglophile, and British history major in college, I must admit that I did not know much about Eleanor of Aquitaine. I am very glad to have stumbled upon this completed three-part series by Elizabeth Chadwick. Chadwick is a new author to me, but I enjoyed her style of writing and great attention to historical detail. Historical fiction cannot be easy to write but is so wonderful to read when an author gets it right. The books begins when Aelinor (the actual […]