​Sarah Bird’s Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen tells an exciting story featuring an indomitable heroine who forges her own warrior path that harkens back to her female ancestors before her.

Cathy Williams is the granddaughter of an African warrior queen & raised by her mother to believe that she’s not a slave: she’s a captive.

In 1864, when Union soldiers led by Sheridan stop by the plantation where she’s held captive, she’s assumed to be a man & becomes contraband of the army where she’ll serve as a cook’s assistant.

What follows is a series of adventures in the army, where she’s eventually revealed to be a woman, followed by her service as a Buffalo Soldier after she cuts her hair & takes on the name of William Cathay.

Told later, when Cathy’s an older woman living in Colorado, Cathy’s story is vivid & revealed by a voice that leaps off the page. African history & culture—as seen particularly through her grandmother’s & mother’s stories & their words Cathy remembers—are critical to Cathy’s story & to how she sees herself: Black women can & do anything, including take on Rebel soldiers, make new lives for themselves, & serve their country.

The book compellingly explores tensions within Cathy’s unit & the unique pressures facing Black soldiers. I found her emotional responses regarding how she identifies as a woman & the gender & racial constraints she faces to be particularly moving.

While I appreciate how Cathy’s views toward Native Americans grow more complicated over time, her degrading reference to homosexuality & overall attitude toward it is disconcerting and lacks nuance, to say the least, particularly given that Lem has been one of the most understanding & generous figures in the book toward her. I think that more could have been done with this aspect of the novel, especially since it comes up over & over again.

Thanks to the publisher for this ARC.

5⭐️.

Tropes: Cross-country Western; historical

After finishing Amy Harmon’s Where the Lost Wander I had a lump of feelings sitting in my throat. This book beguiled me, pulling me in to a story about love and loss and love again both while reading it and in the months since. I haven’t forgotten it.

It’s 1853 and Naomi May is a young widow accompanying her large family to Oregon. The book opens with a group of Native Americans attacking Naomi’s party and Naomi watching as people she loves and has traveled with are struck down until it’s only her and her baby brother left.

From there, we’re taken back even further to the past, to the beginning of the journey west when Naomi meets John Lowry, the white and Pawnee man she was immediately drawn to but who resisted her efforts to befriend him—and more—every step of their trip.

Where the Lost Wander is an immersive experience, from the creaking of the wagon trains to Naomi’s mother’s wise words and the interaction of her loving, large family, to the tentative efforts of Naomi to reach out to John—known amongst Native Americans as Two Feet—and his efforts to box her out.

And the independent, feminist, loving Naomi has her own challenges, particularly those experiences that occur on the journey west. Her stunning resilience gives the book more vibrancy, and her relationship with John—their determination to reach each other—the staying power of a contemporary classic.

CW:


Rape.

​I received a complimentary ARC of this book from Netgalley but all opinions provided are my own.
 
I’ve heard a lot of buzz about John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies and at the end of last week, I took a break from the romances I’ve been devouring and dove in. The story—which spans 70 years—is plainly but powerfully told, each section focusing on Cyril Avery’s life as he moves geographically from Ireland to Amsterdam to the United States and back home again, and more importantly, from a life of devastating secrets to a life where he lives as he is: a gay Irish man who’s made some big mistakes and been in love and tries to be better all the time.
 
Each section of the book focuses on Cyril’s life 7 years later from the previous section. We get his tumultuous birth in 1945, told from information he received later from his mother, his odd and sad childhood years as the adopted child of an unconventional—to say the least—couple, and the first moments he met Julian Woodbead, the child who becomes Cyril’s best friend and then the man Cyril loves throughout his adolescence and most of his 20s.
 
Since this book goes up to 2015 we get much, much more of course, from Cyril’s furtive sexual encounters in Ireland in the dark, to the lengths he’s willing to go to in order to hide his sexuality, and how it ends up hurting the people he cares about most. Also his years of embracing who he is and how those are sometimes threatened too.
 
And throughout it all is Ireland, a country that’s tragic and that’s home, that Cyril misses even as he acknowledges how damaging it was for him to grow up there when he did. Ireland holds the weight of his and other’s secrets, but it also holds Cyril’s potential chance to make amends and to live a life where he’s truly not hiding anymore.
 
Dedicated to John Irving, The Heart’s Invisible Furies feels comparable to Irving’s books I’ve read, from the style in which the story’s relayed to the moments of humor, which break up the quiet and not-so-quiet moments of sadness. Maybe it’s most similar in how it portrays the characters themselves, who are magnetic and entertaining and frustrating and disheartening (sometimes vaguely repulsive) and loveable. Take Cyril himself, who sometimes comes across as the “selfish” person he’s been accused of being, but who also has a huge heart that’s been bruised and crushed and denied, and whose actions are sometimes horrible but also, to some degree, maybe understandable, given his lifetime of hiding/lying/being ignored.
 
In the end, this book is about Cyril’s life, and it felt true to what I’ve discovered about life: there’s capacity for great ugliness, cruelty, and violence, but there’s also capacity for great forgiveness, hope, and love. There’s also the chance to apologize and work to be better, and that’s one of the most encouraging things of all.
 
4.5 ⭐️

You all, I'm so excited about the release of the fabulous Kerrigan Byrne's The Business of Blood. I can't wait to see what the queen of the uber-emotional, holds-your-heart-in-her-hands historical does with a murder mystery...especially one involving Jack the Ripper! Read on for a blurb and info about where to find this beauty (hint, hint: it's even on Kindle Unlimited!). 

​London, 1890. Blood and death are Fiona Mahoney’s trade, and business, as they say, is booming.
 
Dying is the only thing people do with any regularity, and Fiona makes her indecorous living cleaning up after the corpses are carted away. Her childhood best friend, Mary, was the last known victim of Jack the Ripper. It’s been two years since Fiona scrubbed Mary’s blood from the floorboards, and London is no longer buzzing about the Ripper, but Fiona hasn’t forgotten. She hasn’t stopped searching for Jack.
 
When she’s called to a murder in the middle of the night, Fiona finds a victim mutilated in an eerily similar fashion to those of the Ripper, and only a few doors down from Mary’s old home. The relentless and irritatingly handsome Inspector Grayson Croft warns her away from the case. She might have listened, if she hadn’t found a clue in the blood. A clue that will lead her down a path from which there is no return.
 
As a killer cuts a devastating swath through London, a letter written in blood arrives at her door, and it is only then that Fiona realizes just how perilous her endeavor is. For she has drawn the attention of an obsessive evil, and is no longer the hunter, but the prey.
 
Fiona Mahoney is in the business of blood. But she’s not the only one.
 
With intriguing twists, blood-chilling discoveries, and dazzling prose, USA Today Bestselling author Kerrigan Byrne shows that a woman’s work is never done, even when is sleuthing out a serial killer.
 

Download your copy today or read FREE in Kindle Unlimited!
Amazon: https://amzn.to/2W79Brj
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​

​Kerrigan has done many things to pay the bills, from law enforcement to belly dance instructor. Now she’s finally able to have the career she’d decided upon at thirteen when she announced to her very skeptical family that she was going to “grow up to be a romance novelist.” Whether she’s writing about Celtic Druids, Victorian bad boys, or brash Irish FBI Agents, Kerrigan uses her borderline-obsessive passion for history, her extensive Celtic ancestry, and her love of Shakespeare in almost every story.
 
She lives in a little Victorian coast town on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State with her wonderful husband. When she’s not writing you can find her sailing, beach combing, kayaking, visiting wineries, breweries, and restaurants with friends, and hiking…okay…wandering aimlessly clenching bear spray in the mountains.

​Amazon: https://amzn.to/2LsaJTm
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Website: https://www.kerriganbyrne.com/
 

​I received a complimentary ARC of this book from Netgalley but all opinions provided are my own.
 
Alice Hoffman’s The World That We Knew is unforgettable. Set during the years 1941-1944 and featuring several different perspectives, The World answers the question of what we have to live for in a time of terrible loss and sorrow: love.
 
The book opens in Berlin, where Hanni’s husband has recently been murdered and her pre-teen daughter, Lea, attacked. As a Jewish woman, Hanni knows that her daughter will be safer somewhere else, but she also feels that she can’t leave her elderly mother behind to travel with her. In her desperation, Hanni pays someone to create a golem—made of clay, able to speak and to protect but bound by her master’s wishes—to travel with her daughter Lea. After the war, Lea must kill the golem, whom they’ve named Ava.
 
The juxtaposition of someone—Ava—being born into a world where so many are killed and dying is stunning. Devastating. Because Ava’s so very happy to be alive, even as horrific things are happening and even as she fears for her Jewish charge, Lea. Hoffman heartbreakingly complicates this, too; because Ava knows that her greatest responsibility, her obligation, her desire, as she comes to know Lea, is to keep Lea safe no matter what, an act which will eventually necessitate Ava’s own death.
 
Tangled in this story of Lea and Ava are other stories too: of Lea and Julien, a young man she meets in Paris who becomes a lodestar; Ettie, the golem’s creator; and Marianne, a former servant who worked in Julien’s home. Each story is beautifully told; each one tells a version of war where no one is unaffected, where everyone pays a great price but there is some redemption to be found, too.
 
The World that We Knew had my heart in its hands. It’s a big story—one that includes folklore and the concrete details of a people suffering and surviving, one that feels very much rooted within a particular time period and also part of a larger story about how humanity at its worst, and best, treats others. And it’s ultimately a celebration of love, of the sacrifice that love sometimes demands and the bravery that it can engender.
 
5 stars

​Thanks to Grand Central Pub & Read Forever Pub for my complimentary copy of the book. All opinions provided below are my own.
 
Feelings bombarded me after reading the closing lines of Leila Meacham’s Dragonfly. It would have been kind of hard to avoid such a response, actually. At 569 pages, a lot was bound to happen to happen in this book, and if you throw in the fact that it’s WWII-era historical fiction, well, there you go.
 
I was sad, happy, contemplative, mostly satisfied but also a little confused (more to come on this later). Maybe most of all I had that feeling you get when you’ve been immersed in a different place and time and feel like you’ve been reawakened to the present. 

In essence, Dragonfly is about a group of five young American spies who are sent into German-occupied France in 1942, and only four of them return home. In 1962, when the book opens, their case officer known as The Man in Brown reads that the fifth spy was not executed as the other spies and he believed. What could have happened to the fifth spy? Could she/he still be alive? What follows is an answer to the mystery and a reconstruction of sorts: what drew the spies to their work; their training; and their years in France, ending with the culminating event.
 
Meacham compellingly creates characters who are relatively inexperienced, even as they’re skilled and devoted to their mission. I love how she establishes their various personal motivations for wanting to be in France and how those motivations are not only inspiration to them, but possible temptation to deviate from mission rules as well.
 
Any deviation would be superbly dangerous, a fact that’s frequently underlined by the five spies encounters with various Nazis, French collaborators, and even an American traitor while in Paris. There are a lot of characters in this book, and even more than that, a lot of names (each spy has three different names, for ex.), and yet Meacham adeptly establishes connections between them. It’s a literary delight (and also scary since I became invested in the lives of the spies) to see potentially deadly secondary characters popping up in multiple spies’ lives….and contemplate whether it was that secondary character who made the whole mission come tumbling down.
 
The answer to that question is definitely worth reading, though there was one aspect of the plot that didn’t feel fully explained.
 
There are occasional moments in Dragonfly when the writing didn’t feel quite as subtle as I would have liked, but overall, along with feeling superbly researched, Dragonfly is engrossing and well-written. I wanted to keep reading so I could discover the answers to the questions posed at the beginning, and also because I cared about the fate of five young Americans who had their own reasons for going to France, not least of which was discovering intel that could save Americans during the war.
 
TNW Arbitrary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

​When I was around six, I remember watching my mom walk around—probably putting away folded clothes—and I asked her what the word “love” meant. It’s been a long time since that moment, but I still remember the suddenness of it—my feeling, maybe of confusion, maybe a little bit of panic,--that the word meant something even more than what I thought I knew.
 
Elizabeth Gilbert’s compulsively readable City of Girls is about love, in a nutshell. The different kinds of love and the different ways it’s expressed: the love that we stumble into and seek out, that we chase and run away from, and that we deny ourselves or that’s denied us. Outward love and self-love; friendship and physical love and emotional.
 
It’s all there in City of Girls, the story of Vivian and New York City and the men, and importantly for this book, the women, she meets along the way.
 
From the first pages of the novel, I was mesmerized by Vivian’s written response to a woman named Angela; Angela has asked Vivian to answer the question “What was I to her father?” it turns out that the question is pretty complicated. Vivian tells Angela how she came to be in NYC in the early years of the 40s, how she became a costume designer, how she spent her days and nights exploring what made her feel alive, and how it results in a sex scandal that takes her years to recover from.
 
If this were a Thomas Hardy novel, her story would have probably ended soon after, and in a terribly tragic way. But this isn’t ultimately a story about punishment or castigation, even though Vivian regrets the hurt she caused others and is unflinchingly honest about her mistakes, failings, and moments of self-absorption.  It’s a book that’s about love (see above) and growth and connection, about satisfaction, as Vivian says, and happiness, and that’s something that I needed to read.
 
That I wanted to read, as well. City of Girls is beautifully, compellingly written. Vivian is funny and astute, introspective without being dour, and endlessly interesting. I recognized bits and pieces of myself in her—some things that I like and some things I don’t. And Gilbert evokes a New York—of the 40s through 60s primarily—that I’ve never experienced but that I was fully engrossed in, even as it all felt modern. (Which is part of the point, I think. As Vivian says in her narration, we tend to think that belonging to a younger generation means we’re doing something newer, bolder, that we are modern and by default, the people before us weren’t, and of course that’s a silly delusion/lie we tell ourselves).
 
City of Girls was not always easy to read, even as it was. Gilbert pulled at my emotions, and at moments, my uncomfortable secondhand emotions were running strong, but the sentences unfurled smoothly, beautifully, wonderfully, and I couldn’t wait to see where Vivian was going to take Angela (me). 
 
Thank you Elizabeth Gilbert for this lesson in loving others.