Six More Great Bossy Historical Fiction Reads
It's March, and I'm still spending Fridays obsessing over my favorite reads of the past year in different genres. I loved so many historical fiction books last year, this is my second list of favorite reads. You can find the first list of favorites here.
If you've read any of these books, I'd love to hear what you think! What are some of your favorite historical fiction reads?
01 Miss Morgan's Book Brigade by Janet Skeslien Charles
This historical fiction story in two timelines introduces the little-known real-life figure of librarian Jessie Carson, who traveled from the NYPL to war-torn France and introduced a novelty to communities there during World War I: children's libraries.
I love a book about scrappy librarians, and Janet Skeslien Charles's novel Miss Morgan's Book Brigade takes that setup farther into favorable Bossy territory by sending an idealistic, headstrong young librarian from the US to Europe and into a World War I setting.
The story is told in two timelines. The past timeline is based on the real-life NYPL librarian Jessie Carson, and Charles tracks Carson's journey to work for the American Committee for Devastated France, funded by billionaire heiress Anne Morgan.
In France, Carson not only helps rebuild communities destroyed by war, but along with her ambitious, inspired team of women, establishes something never before seen in France: children's libraries, where kids in war-torn communities can dream, lose themselves in fictional worlds, and try to recapture some carefree hours of their youth.
The more modern timeline introduces Wendy, a NYPL librarian in the 1980s. In a book-within-a-book structure, the aspiring author Wendy is searching for a book topic when she stumbles upon the bare-bones story of Jessie and the Cards, as the group of women working in France were informally known.
The more recent timeline allows for context for Jessie's story--little known and not well documented--beyond our reading of the original sequence of events, but the more recent story otherwise feels somewhat thin. Much of it centers around Wendy's falling in love with her vivacious coworker Roberto.
I listened to Miss Morgan's Book Brigade as an audiobook. Charles is also the author of The Paris Library.
Click here for my full review of Miss Morgan's Book Brigade.
02 The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen
Pylväinen's novel explores the cooperation and conflict among cultures in a mid-nineteenth century community in the Arctic Circle, immersing the reader in a cold, unforgiving climate and in the long-held traditions of its varied characters.
...she wondered, was this what love was, to persist when you didn't want to, to try for patience another time....
In Hanna Pylväinen's The End of Drum-Time, it's 1851 in the Arctic Circle, and a small community of reindeer herders, a minister's family and his flock of followers, and a local shop owner whose greatest profit comes from liquor are all trying to get through the winter.
In their remote location in the Scandinavian tundra, they're each carving out lives shaped by the unforgiving snow and cold.
Their cultures are sometimes mysteries to each other, and at times conflict greatly with others' traditions. I was fascinated by Pylväinen's explorations of how the old ways and new ways pushed against each other, as did the Finn, Lapp, Sámi, Swedish, and Russian influences of the region. Religion is a particular conflict in the novel, with the Christian characters proving themselves to be naïve, rigid, judgmental, greedy, vain, and foolhardy.
The End of Drum-Time was intriguing and kept me interested throughout; it was brutal and frustrating (these foolish men--!) but its setting was beautifully crafted.
For more cold-setting stories, check out my Greedy Reading List Six Books with Cold, Wintry Settings to Read by the Fire.
For my full review of this book, please see The End of Drum-Time.
03 Table for Two: Fictions by Amor Towles
Amor Towles revisits a character from the wonderful Rules of Civility and also offers multiple New York-set tales. Towles's evocative stories drew me in, sometimes made me uncomfortable, and illuminated characters' true natures.
In Table for Two: Fictions, Amor Towles offers six short stories set in New York City and a novella featuring a beloved Towles character that's set in the Golden Age of Hollywood. (The novella's historical fiction setting is what earned Table for Two a spot on this list.)
In the novella Eve in Hollywood, Towles imagines the events following Rules of Civility, which ends with Evelyn Ross's departure from New York in 1938 and the train journey she extends to Los Angeles.
The six New York-set stories all take place around the year 2000, and they consider the impacts of chance encounters, the complications of modern marriages, and more.
Towles's writing is so lovely, I'm willing to follow his stories and his characters anywhere. This one took me a while to finish, but I savored each word.
Amor Towles is also the author of The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, a book I really liked, and Rules of Civility, which I was even more taken with--the old NYC setting was so vivid, it felt like its own character.
Please click here for my full review of Table for Two.
04 The Phoenix Crown by Kate Quinn and Janie Chang
Quinn and Chang share an adventure- and danger-laden story of women artists, women of color, and women of various social classes--as well as their determination to find justice--in San Francisco just before the Great 1906 Earthquake.
In 1906 San Francisco, two very different women seek new beginnings: Gemma is a gifted soprano whose career is in need of an overhaul, while Suling is an embroideress in Chinatown who is set against entering into the marriage that's been arranged for her.
Henry Thornton is a wealthy railroad magnate and owner of the mysterious Phoenix Crown, an artifact legendary because of its origins in Beijing's Summer Palace. Thornton draws both Suling and Gemma into his world by offering to be their patron. But Thornton isn't a selfless, kind benefactor--he's a cruel, cutthroat, flighty villain holding deadly secrets.
When San Francisco is devastated by an earthquake and the widespread destruction of its aftermath, Thornton disappears--and the Phoenix Crown with him.
At times the story felt as though it was shifting into overly dramatic soap-opera territory for me, and while I understood the buildup to the earthquake, I didn't enjoy the interjections of multiple omniscient countdowns to the event.
Yet I loved the rich early-1900s San Francisco setting, the focus on the arts, the strong women characters, and the varied representation of classes and circumstances, so I was willing to go wherever Quinn and Chang were taking me.
It's evident that the authors exhaustively researched the era, prominent figures, and circumstances within San Francisco for women, artists, people of color, and others.
For my full review, please see The Phoenix Crown.
Kate Quinn is the author of the fantastic titles The Diamond Eye, The Huntress, The Rose Code, and The Alice Network.
05 Maria: A Novel of Maria Von Trapp by Michelle Moran
I was hooked on the behind-the-scenes feeling of Moran's historical-fiction conversations between Maria von Trapp and an assistant to Oscar Hammerstein.
In Michelle Moran's novel Maria, she uses two timelines to shape the story of the real woman behind Julie Andrews's legendary depiction in The Sound of Music.
In the past, richly built period, we track Maria's path from the nunnery to her position at the heart of the von Trapp family.
In the 1950s timeline, Oscar Hammerstein is striving to bring Maria's story to life on the stage--but is tempted to rework some of the facts to heighten its impact. The demanding, exacting, elderly Maria insists that the depiction track more closely with her real life, and she furiously shares detailed notes with Fran, an up-and-coming young assistant in Hammerstein's office.
I was fascinated by the script and production's departures from the facts within the story--most of which track with the movie version--which Maria highlights in her conversations with Fran. For example, the depiction of the Captain in the script at hand is as the family disciplinarian, but Maria asserts that she was the more strict and demanding parent.
The family's singing is romanticized, but Maria reveals that one daughter had extreme anxiety about performing, and that while the singing was well received by the American public, the grueling touring schedule was rooted in a desperate bid to put food on the table for the family when few other prospects existed.
This is compelling reading, and for all who consider The Sound of Music sacred holiday viewing (and an essential singalong opportunity) like I do, it's irresistible to learn more about Maria through the "behind the scenes" feeling of the book.
I listened to Maria as an audiobook. For my full review, please see Maria.
06 Unsinkable by Jenni L. Walsh
I loved each of the historical fiction story's two timelines--following a stewardess on board The Titanic as well as a British spy working with the WWII French Resistance--and the details of life in each time, but I found the ending's resolutions too easy.
The book's past timeline is set in the early 20th century, as Violet, a young ship's stewardess bent on providing for her family after her father's death and mother's onset of illness, works aboard ships including, as the story sweeps along, The Titanic. I love a ship-life story, and I was taken with the details of Violet's caring for the elite passengers.
The story's later timeline takes place in the time of World War II as Daphne, an intelligent and educated young woman who is emotionally closed off and desperately trying to impress her estranged, famous father, serves as a spy assisting the French Resistance.
Throughout Unsinkable, Daphne and Violet fought through unimaginable difficulties, focused on their duties at the expense of their romantic happiness, witnessed various horrors, and yet recognized and cultivated an unlikely spark of hope for themselves and their futures that felt hard-won and intriguing.
The final scenes felt oddly clean and neatly wrapped up with a bow as though according to a formulaic "happy ending" equation, and I found this shift from the appealingly messy, imperfect, wonderful, adventurous, tragic lives shown in the bulk of the book to a smooth, no-loose-ends set of outlandish coincidences and resolutions jarring rather than wholly satisfying.
Please click here for my full review of Unsinkable.
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