Tag: historical fiction

Twelve Novels that Blend History and Fantasy

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, is a “genre freebie”. I decided to write about something that I’ve been reading lately, historical fantasy novels. By this I don’t mean fantasy novels set in the past, I mean books that are primarily historical fiction, focusing on actual history and real places,…

Review: No Quiet Water by Shirley Miller Kamada

I had mixed feelings about this book, which I received as an advance review copy. Kamada’s novel provides a close look at what life was like for a family in the Japanese internment camps. I wish there were more stories about this, so we could have a better understanding of the terrible things that happened…

Review: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver rarely disappoints, but I was nervous about reading this adaptation of David Copperfield, a favorite classic.  Copperfield is considered to be most autobiographical of Dickens’ works, which explains why it feels much more “real” to me. I don’t always love adaptations, because they often hew so closely to names and details that the…

Best Reads of 2022 (so far)

I’ve read 65 books so far this year.  Of these, StoryGraph characterizes my reading as predominantly “emotional”, then “reflective”, “funny”, “mysterious”, “light-hearted”, and “informative”. My most frequent categories of books are romance, historical, contemporary, memoir, and literary (as categorized by StoryGraph, which isn’t necessarily the way I’d categorize each book). I’ve read more nonfiction than…

Review: The Scent of Burnt Flowers by Blitz Bazawule

I appreciate books that are hard to categorize because they cross genres. Not surprisingly, this debut novel by Blitz Bazawule, a musician, artist, and filmmaker, does exactly that. The Scent of Burnt Flowers tells the story of a young Black couple, Melvin and Bernadette, who flee the United States in 1966, after a violent altercation with…

Review: Bloomsbury Girls by Natalie Jenner

I liked the idea of this book better than I liked the book itself. It’s set in 1950’s London, in a fictional shop called Bloomsbury Books. It centers around three women: Grace, who’s in an abusive marriage; Vivien, who longs to write and to manage the bookstore rather than merely stand at the cash register;…

Review: Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu

This is the kind of historical novel I love – it’s a decades-spanning family saga that builds on the author’s own family history.  In this debut novel, Fu tells a story that parallels that of her father, who is born in China during the Japanese War of Aggression in the 1940s and the Chinese Civil…