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Virginia Company, Jamestown, 1621. The once struggling colony is now thriving, and the arrival of a ship full of potential brides has all the single men rushing to put on their best and meet the ladies in hopes of finding wives. Captain Ralph Percy, hardened soldier, gentleman farmer, and avowed bachelor, watches from the sidelines, marveling as his comrades make fools of themselves over the women. He has no need of a wife and can’t understand the sense in asking a perfect stranger to marry him . . . until he catches sight of Jocelyn Leigh.

Struck by her uncommon beauty, quiet grace, and regal bearing, he wonders why a woman such as she would need to brave the sea voyage and the wilds of the new world to find a husband. And then he finds himself doing the unthinkable, asking for her hand in marriage before another man can snatch her up! But he was right to suspect that Jocelyn was not as she seemed, and he soon discovers that his new wife fled England in a desperate attempt to escape an arranged marriage. Ralph vows to protect her, not knowing how soon he will be called upon to do so, or how dangerous it will be to him.

Jocelyn’s jilted fiancée is coming to find her, and when Lord Carnal lands at Jamestown, he brings dubious tidings. A handsome lord with the wealth and power of the king at his disposal, he informs Ralph that he has married a ward of the king without the king’s permission, a treasonous offense. But all will be well—all Ralph has to do is hand her over and Lord Carnal will sail away with her as though nothing ever happened. But if Ralph does not comply, he is to be clapped in irons and bound for England and the Tower, and Lord Carnal will take Jocelyn by force. The choice seems clear enough—who is Captain Ralph Percy to go against the king’s orders? But one look at Jocelyn’s fear-stricken face decides his fate. This solemn and stoic woman has woven herself into the fabric of his life, and he’s not going to give her up so easily.

Ralph and Jocelyn defy the king’s command and fight for their right to stay together, but it soon becomes evident that their only course of action is to flee. As they make their way through the dangerous wilderness, battling the king’s men, Indians, and even pirates, what started out as a marriage of convenience becomes a true love match, and Ralph discovers that what is worth having is worth holding, no matter the cost.

To learn more about this book and other very interesting ones who are being released by The Vintage Reader, please visit their website: http://www.thevintagereader.com/

The Tory Widow by Christine Blevins

On a bright May day, Anne Peabody receives an unexpected kiss from a stranger. Bringing news of the repeal of the Stamp Act, Jack Hampton, a member of the Sons of Liberty, abruptly sweeps Anne into his arms, kisses her-and then leaves her to her fate of an arranged marriage...

New York City, 1775

Anne, now the Widow Merrick, is struggling to survive in a city on the brink of war. In a time when Loyalists are tarred and feathered, Anne continues her late husband's business, printing Tory propaganda, not because she believes in the cause, but because she needs the money to survive. When her shop is ransacked by the Sons of Liberty, Anne once again comes face to face with Jack Hampton. But he is no longer the optimistic youth she remembers. Despite her better judgment, Anne finds herself drawn to both the ardent patriot and his rebel cause.

As shots ring out at Lexington and war erupts, Anne is faced with a life-altering decision: sit back and watch her world torn apart, or take a stand and fight for both her country's independence and her own.

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed The Turning of Anne Merrick which is the second book by author Christine Blevins to feature Anne Merrick and Jack Hampton. Because that review was for a blog tour, and I hate to read out of order, I had to read this book before I could even think about starting Turning. Unfortunately I ran out of time to review this one first, so now I am reviewing out of order! Oh well.

The book opens on the wedding day of young Anne Merrick. She is marrying a much older man in a marriage that has been arranged to benefit both Anne's father and her new husband. The only person not obviously happy with the arrangement is Anne herself.

It so happens that on the same day the hated Stamp Act has been repealed and the Sons of Liberty are celebrating. One of the Sons, Jack Hampton, brings the news and in the excitement of the moment grabs Anne and kisses her!

Fast forward to 1775, and Anne is now not only a widow, but she has also lost her child. Now she is running the printing press that she took over from her husband, assisted by his former slave Titus, and her servant and friend Sally. Her most important priority is keeping the business running, and in order to do so she has been printing Tory propaganda - a very risky business in these days of tar and feathering.

When her property is searched by the Sons of Liberty, she once again comes face to face with Jack Hampton, but just like Anne, he has matured in the intervening years and is now a much more jaded and sceptical man.

Anne knows that she needs to find another way to protect her income and so opens a coffeehouse as a front which, once the city is taken over by the Redcoats, gives her the perfect way to spy for the opposition.

Anne and Jack circle around each other warily. They are both attracted to each other, but he isn't sure of her loyalty to the cause, and she most definitely doesn't trust him - with good reason. In the early parts of the relationship, Jack is something of a jack-the-lad, drinking too much, spending time with whores and more.  To be honest, I think that Anne is a little too easily forgiving of this, but I guess the book wouldn't have moved forward if we had to wait too long for the relationship between the two main characters.

Anne walks a dangerous tight-rope between the two sides of the conflict, and if she falls the consequences could be terrible. The author does a great job of showing life in New York during a time of great uncertainty for everyone, as the city changes hands, as areas of the city become dangerous even when just running simple errands, and as you don't know who you can trust from one day to the next.

Even without the added incentive of having a blog tour post coming up, I would have picked up the sequel to see what happened next. Now I guess, I just have wait even longer to see exactly how Anne and Jack's story concludes.

Rating 4/5

Click here to read a quote from the book.

Review originally posted at www.theintrepidreader.com

Announcing HT's 2012 Season

In 2012 one of our most successful features is back - the Season - a month long event dedicated to one author. In 2012 it will be Daphne du Maurier!

Are there any fans around? Anyone wants to participate? It is held in June so there's plenty of time for you to catch up on her books and join us in discussing her work. If you are interested in writing an article or a review about her historical books send us an email at historical.tapestry @ gmail.com. We would love to have everyone join us in this celebration of du Maurier's work.

We usually also have a couple of giveaways so if you're a publisher and are  interested in donating some copies feel free to contact us too.

Winners!

First, the winner of the stationery pack that we were giving away as part of blog tour for The Turning of Anne Merrick.

The winner is Angela


Whilst the winner was chosen using a random number generator, I thought I would share Angela's answer to the question we asked - "Which historical character would you write to if you could" - Laura Ingalls Wilder and Abigail Adams

The second giveaway that we were running was associated with the blog tour for By the King's Design by Christine Trent

The winner of this giveaway is Maria



Congratulations to the winners! Please do send us your address details.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the giveaways!

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

For very-nearly-eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, the discovery of a dead snipe on the doorstep of Buckshaw, the crumbling de Luce country seat, was a marvellous mystery - especially since this particular snipe had a rather rare stamp neatly impaled on its beak. Even more astonishing, however, was the effect of the dead bird on her father, Colonel de Luce, a man usually untroubled by emotions of an kind (unless you count gloating over his stamp collection), but who now appeared to be genuinely frightened.


Sure enough, soon Flavia discovers something even more shocking in the cucumber patch, and it's clear that the snipe was a bird of very ill omen indeed. As the police descent on Buckshaw, and Colonel de Luce becomes the centre of a murder investigation, hostilities between Flavia and her unbearable older sisters, Daphne and Ophelia, are briefly suspended as the dire realisation sinks in: having lost their mother, Harriet, when Flavia was only a baby, they could soon be about to lose their father too.


As the noose tightens, helped by Colonel de Luce's grim-faced silence, Flavia decides it is up to her - using a long-abandoned but fully-equipped Victorian chemical laboratory - to piece together the clues and solve the puzzle.


Who was the man she heard her father arguing with after the snipe had been found? What was a species of bird that wintered in Scandinavia doing in England at all? Who or what is the Ulster Avenger? And, perhaps most peculiar of all, who took a slice of Mrs Muller's unspeakable custard pie that had been cooling by the kitchen window?

Not too long ago on my personal blog I shared a teaser and in that post I talked about the fact that this book has been a long time favourite in blogging circles, and I can totally see why.

The star of the book is nearly eleven year old Flavia de Luce. Her passions are chemistry and bedeviling her older sisters, Ophelia and Daphne. She lives in country England at a sprawling house called Buckshaw with her father, and the aforementioned sisters.

Flavia is an unusual girl to say the least. She is far more precocious* than any eleven year old I have known, and to be honest would probably get on my nerves a little in real life. As a sleuth though, she is an awful lot of fun to read about!

Our story begins with the arrival on the kitchen step of a dead jack snipe. There are a couple of things that are odd about that. That particular bird winters in the Scandinavian countries and so is a long way from home, and there is a very valuable and rare stamp impaled on it's beak. Also a bit odd...someone has taken a piece of the custard pie that the cook Mrs Muller makes on a semi-regular basis but no one in the family will eat!

It doesn't take long before the plot thickens though. Soon after Flavia discovers the body of a man in the cucumber patch. She found him just in time to hear his last word ... "vale".

Armed with her notebook, taking full advantage of her chemistry lab and transported around her local district thanks to her trusty bicycle Gladys, Flavia sets her considerable intellect to the task of solving the murder, a task made much more urgent by the fact that her father is one of the prime suspects. Her very particular personality traits mean that she is not afraid to ask questions where they probably should not be asked, and to take action where it probably would be better to wait, but it mostly works out in the end.

It soon becomes clear that the current day mystery has its roots back in the past, going back to the 1920s, but the book is also quite evocative of it's time in ways that it is easy to forget would have existed now. For example, both Flavia's father and the man about the house, Dogger, have come back from WWII as quite different men, and the influence of the war just five short years later is obvious throughout the book. Here is a short passage from  pages 178-179:

A cool, dim corridor stretched away in front of me, to infinity it seemed, and I set out along it, lifting my feet carefully to keep from making scuffing noises on the slate floor.

On either side, a long galley of smiling faces - some of them schoolboys and some masters - receded into the darkness, each one a Greyminsterian who had given his life for his country, and each in his own black-lacquered frame. 'That Others Might Live', it said on a gilded scroll. At the end of the corridor, set apart from the others, were photographs of three boys, their names engraved in red on little brass rectangles. Under each name were the words, 'Missing in Action'.

'Missing in Action?' Why wasn't Father's photo hanging there, I wondered.

Father was generally as absent as these young men, whose bones were somewhere in France. I felt a little guilty at the thought, but it was true.

There is a full cast of supporting characters that may have limited page time, but they leave a good impression on the reader. I am pretty sure that we will meet many of them again in future books, especially Inspector Hewitt, Mrs Muller and Dogger

By turns amusing, touching and always filled curiously fulfilling, this was a really great introduction to a new series, and I can't wait to see what Flavia gets up to next! We even got to find out why Mrs Muller continues to bake the custard pies even though no one in the family will eat them!

And now I think I might go and see if I can buy an custard tart from somewhere, or maybe even just have some fruit and custard as an unworthy substitute

Rating 4.5/5

*I don't believe that it is possible to review this book without the precocious or a synonym for that word appearing somewhere in the review!

Adapted from the original post which appeared at The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader

The Black Pearl by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

The saga of the Morlands continues, with hope reborn as the monarchy is restored after Cromwell's Commonwealth. For Ralph Morland, the return of the King is a chance to rebuild the family estates and fortune, and for the beautiful and ambitious Annunciata, the Restoration brings a journey to London...

I am not 100% sure why, but it has been more than 18 months since I read The Oak Apple, which is the fourth book in the sprawling Morland dynasty series. I can assure you that it will not be that long before I read the next one! I reviewed the first four books in the series here.

The previous book in the series, The Oak Apple, covers the events leading up to the removal of Charles I from the throne and the establishment of the English Commonwealth as headed by Oliver Cromwell. This book mostly skips the Commonwealth years, although it does deal with the tail end of that era, but then picks up speed as Charles II is called back from exile and ascends to the throne!

When the book opens the main focus is on Ralph Morland. He is head of the family, but the influence that once would have accompanied that position has been somewhat diminished as a result of having supported the Royalist side during the Civil War. Like other Royalists the Morlands were forced to pay huge fines, and large sections of Morland land has had to be sold off to meet these costs.

Ralph is married to Mary, who is quite a devout Catholic, which was still very dangerous during the end days of the Commonwealth. He has also drawn the enmity of the local magistrate who would love to see nothing more than himself becoming the owner of Morland.

As it seems is normal, in a Morland novel, some characters are introduced and others are killed off, and as always there are cousins falling love all over the place which is hard for us to necessarily understand but was seemingly normal at the time.

One character who was in little danger of being killed off, in this book at least, is cousin Annunciata. She is the daughter of Ruth, a wealthy spinster, but no one except Ruth knows exactly who her father was and Ruth isn't telling! Annunciata is headstrong and beautiful and captures the hearts of all the men around her at Morland with the utmost of ease. When Charles II returns to the throne she makes her way to London to join the Court. Given Charles' notorious reputation when it comes to women, it was something of a relief to see that Harrod-Eagles didn't take the most obvious route and make Annunciata one of his mistresses. That doesn't mean to say that Annunciata doesn't manage to stay out of trouble completely!

I have posted before about how much I enjoy reading about the Restoration court of Charles II and this book was no exception. I was also glad to see more of Charles' cousin Prince Rupert of the Rhine, a man that I would be just as happy to find out more about! The other major historical event that occurs in the pages of this volume of the saga is the onset of the plague, but I am not telling exactly how the plague affects all of our characters!

I really enjoyed this instalment of the Morland story! On to The Long Shadow now.

Rating 4.5/5

You can read Ana's thoughts about this book by clicking on this link.

All the Flowers in Shanghai by Duncan Jepson

In 1930's Shanghai, following the path of duty takes precedence over personal desires for every young Chinese woman. For Feng, that means becoming the bride of a wealthy businessman in a marriage arranged by her parents. In the enclosed world of the Sang household  - a place of public ceremony and private cruelty - she learns that fulfilling her duty means bearing a male heir. Ruthless and embittered by a life that has been forced on her, Feng plots a terrible revenge. But as the years pass, she must come to a reckoning with the sacrifices and the terrible choices she has made to assure her place in family and society, before the entire country is engulfed in the fast-flowing tide of revolution.

Some times you read a book that makes you grateful that you live in this time and this place. Sure, in 50 years time our grandkids might look back and wonder how we put up with .... whatever, but for the most part here in Australia we have a pretty free and easy lifestyle. I do know though that some times that is not always the case. For example, when I was pregnant and having my ultrasound scans, there were signs everywhere which advised us not to ask to find out the sex of the child as we wouldn't be told. When asked why I was advised that it was to prevent people who didn't want a girl to do anything untoward. That was only 14 or so years ago. And, of course, there are millions of women around the world who have little or no freedom to make choices regarding their own lives.

This book is set in the late 1930s in Shanghai, where life was lived by very strict rules and traditions, especially for girls. Feng is a young, very naive girl who has grown up in the shadow of her elder sister, who in the novel goes only by the name Sister. Sister has been trained from a young age to be all that is desirable in the eyes of the richer families in Shanghai. She knows how to dress, how to perform ancient traditions like the tea ceremonies, how to catch a rich and influential husband for one reason and one reason only - to raise her family up the social ladder.

Feng on the other hand has been left to grow up under the much more relaxed rules of her grandfather; spending time in the gardens, learning the names of flowers etc. It is not expected that she will marry but rather that she will look after her parents when the time comes.

One of the most important things for a socially ambitious family is to never lose face or cause offense to those who are better than them. Therefore, when Sister is unable to fill her obligation to marry, Feng is forced to do so instead despite the fact that she has had barely any training and that she is very, very naive.

She marries into the wealthy Sang family, where traditions are expected to be maintained diligently and her sole reason for existence is to provide an heir. Her husband is initially understanding of her shyness when it comes to intimate matters but things change once the pressure builds from his family.

I found the initial parts of the book to be quite interesting. The author spent a lot of time drawing a picture of what it was like to be a young Chinese woman in those time with no choices over their future and by looking at both Feng and Sister we get to see the two different sides of that. We get details of the lavish efforts that went into attracting the right kind of suitors for a socially ambitious family include the beautiful wedding dress that must be made. For Feng there is also a nice friendship with Bi, the son of the seamstress.

It is after the marriage, and when Feng moves into the Sang home that the narrative started to falter. Part of that reflects the restrictions that were placed on Feng. She was barely allowed out of the home and so we no longer get to see anything of Shanghai through her eyes. In addition, Feng quickly transitions from an innocent young girl to a very bitter woman, from a naive young girl to a woman who knows how to titillate and humiliate her husband, who as a character is very one dimensional throughout the novel. In fact, most of the characters outside of Feng seem somewhat limited. Perhaps this is as a result of the fact that we only get to see these people from her view point, but perhaps there was not enough page time given to them to develop.

It was also difficult to empathise with Feng when she makes a decision in the middle of the book (to say anymore would be spoiling). Yes, we knew why she had made the decision that she had made, but it was not one that I could have made, and her initial actions and reactions were quite hard to believe. It was a relief when the book progressed a bit further and it was at last clear through her thoughts that she was haunted by the decisions that she had made. There were some plot holes in relation to this, particularly in terms of when the husband finds out what she has done, but before she can find out his reaction she fled so as not to have to face the consequences of her actions.

I came to this book as a reader of historical fiction, so I was a bit disappointed to see that after the initial set up, the historical details seemed to fade into black, especially given that there were pretty significant events taking place at the time. For example, the Japanese invasion of China was glossed over in just a couple of sentences and the lead up to the Cultural Revolution was pretty brief. By the end of the novel though, I was glad to see that Jepson did spend some time talking about the Cultural Revolution and the effect that those events had on Feng's life even if the mechanism to get her to that point was a little clunky. Feng looks back on her former life and it is clear that she comes to the realisation of how bitter and terrible she was to the people around her, which is very lucky because otherwise she would have been a completed unlikable narrator.

Whilst this book didn't completely work for me, there were glimpses of promise that included an interesting setting. If you are looking for historical fiction with a Chinese setting I would probably recommend Lisa See, or The Good Earth books by Pearl Buck before this one.

Originally post at The Adventures of An Intrepid Reader