Stephanie Dray's Books of a Lifetime

Stories are about the soul. They tell us who we were, who we are, and who we want to be. I suppose I’ve always loved historical fiction because it’s sometimes too painful to look at who I am and too scary to look at who I might still be, but the past gives me clues to both. 

When I started this list, I was certain that all those literary novels I read in college would end up on this list. They were important award-winning books, many of which made me feel very smart to have read. But when I look at the books that I actually treasure, I realize that they are the not the polite and quiet little novels about ennui. The novels I treasure are the ones that elicit some very powerful emotion from me.

The first Roman era historical I ever read was Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewics. I’ll confess right now that I was an impatient teenager and skipped over some of the long drawn-out descriptions. Moreover, the deeply religious theme of this novel did not touch my soul. However, this was a book I shared with my father and my sister. It was the first time we all read a book and started talking about it together. That bonding experience was special for all of us. The second thing that made this book so important to me is that for all it was set in ancient Rome, the politics were surprisingly modern to my ear. That people who lived so long ago and in such an alien culture could be so similar to me was an eye-opener. For those of you who have read the book, you know that it’s a total nail-biting thriller towards the end. It captured my attention and wouldn’t let go; it may even be responsible for my lifelong love of classical historicals.

Much later in life, I stumbled over Wilbur Smith’s River God. Now, as historical fiction, this novel falls afoul of all kinds of rules. It’s really a melding of historical time periods with a mix of fantasy thrown in. It’s an adventure story aimed squarely at the masses. It’s accessible and beautiful and probably considered low-brow in some literary circles, but this was the first book to teach me how much fun historical fiction could be. I swooned over the narrative voice of an arrogant slave telling me the story of two star-crossed lovers in ancient Egypt. And I cried when things went terribly wrong. And I didn’t care that it wasn’t all true, because it should have been.

Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, for me, was a revelation. We have in this book two characters who are god-like and one of them is both evil and sympathetic. It’s a science fiction book--I suppose I should say that up front. Doro is a being who farms people. You read that right. The heroine is a shapeshifter, but not of the variety you typically see in commercial fiction today. It’s a story about slavery, gender, race and … desire. Because of that, I never remember that it’s science fiction and always think of it as a psychological drama, a power struggle both epic and tragic. It’s historical, fantastical, and allegorical. Can you both love and hate someone at the same time? This book says that you can. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it captured mine.

Making up this list makes me realize that I’m more demented than I realized. Apparently, books that make me cry are books that I love. And one has to truly be a little deranged to love Philippa Gregory’s Wideacre the way that I loved it. I love books about bad girls and you just don’t get any worse than Beatrice Lacey. The narrator of Wideacre is unlike any main character I have ever encountered before with the possible exception of The Marquise de Merteuil from Dangerous Liaisons. At first, I read Wideacre because I was shocked. Then I kept reading because I couldn't wait to find out what awful thing she'd do next. But eventually, I became so absorbed in the darkness of her heart and the desperation of her struggle that I was unaccountably moved to tears. Ultimately, Wideacre must be understood as a woman's fable. A lesson in violent passions unrestrained by conscience. A myth of epic proportions. And though it purports to be historical fiction, there are some plausibly deniable fantasy elements that make it more speculative fiction than anything else. Beatrice is a woman and a goddess, with all the potential for destruction that entails and this book still haunts me.

About Stephanie…

Stephanie graduated with a degree in Government from Smith, a small women’s college in Massachusetts where–to the consternation of her devoted professors–she was unable to master Latin. However, her focus on Middle Eastern Studies gave her a deeper understanding of the consequences of Egypt’s ancient clash with Rome, both in terms of the still-extant tensions between East and West as well as the worldwide decline of female-oriented religion.

Before she wrote novels, Stephanie was a lawyer, a game designer, and a teacher. Now she uses the transformative power of magic realism to illuminate the stories of women in history and inspire the young women of today. She remains fascinated by all things Roman or Egyptian and has–to the consternation of her devoted husband–collected a house full of cats and ancient artifacts.

Blurb

Sorceress. Seductress. Schemer. Cleopatra’s daughter has become the emperor’s most unlikely apprentice and the one woman who can destroy his empire…

Having survived her perilous childhood as a royal captive of Rome, Selene pledged her loyalty to Augustus and swore she would become his very own Cleopatra. Now the young queen faces an uncertain destiny in a foreign land.

Forced to marry a man of the emperor’s choosing, Selene will not allow her new husband to rule in her name. She quickly establishes herself as a capable leader in her own right and as a religious icon. Beginning the hard work of building a new nation, she wins the love of her new subjects and makes herself vital to Rome by bringing forth bountiful harvests.

But it’s the magic of Isis flowing through her veins that makes her indispensable to the emperor. Against a backdrop of imperial politics and religious persecution, Cleopatra’s daughter beguiles her way to the very precipice of power. She has never forgotten her birthright, but will the price of her mother’s throne be more than she’s willing to pay?

Berkley Trade October 2011 (Trade Paperback)
# ISBN-10: 0425243044
# ISBN-13: 9780425243046

Purchase Info

Amazon
B&N
IndieBound
Borders
Constellation Books
Powell's

The Personal History of Rachel duPree by Ann Weisgarber

When Rachel, hired help in a Chicago boardinghouse, falls in love with Isaac, the boardinghouse owner's son, he makes her a bargain: he'll marry her, but only if she gives up her 160 acres from the Homestead Act so he can double his share. She agrees, and together they stake their claim in the forebodingly beautiful South Dakota Badlands.

Fourteen years later, in the summer of 1917, the cattle are bellowing with thirst. It hasn't rained in months, and supplies have dwindled. Pregnant, and struggling to feed her family, Rachel is isolated by more than just geography. She is determined to give her surviving children the life they deserve, but she knows that her husband, a fiercely proud former Buffalo Soldier, will never leave his ranch: black families are rare in the West, and land means a measure of equality with the white man. Somehow Rachel must find the strength to do what is right-for herself, and for her children.

Reminiscent of The Color Purple as well as the frontier novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Willa Cather, The Personal History of Rachel DuPree opens a window on the little-known history of African American homesteaders and gives voice to an extraordinary heroine who embodies the spirit that built America.

Recently, I was asked the question 'Why do you read historical fiction?' I think my answer was something along the lines of being able to eavesdrop on history. Really, the answer could have been to read books like this to find out about little known facts from history. My knowledge of homesteaders in America is very limited and I certainly hadn't given any thought to the fact that there were African-American homesteaders,or to the life that they and their families would have lived.

Rachel and Isaac DuPree are living in the Badlands of South Dakota,  a land that is beautiful but also harsh at the best of times but is especially harsh during a long drought. The novel opens with a disturbing episode as one of the smaller children, Liz, is sent down the well to scoop out what little water remains at the bottom because the bucket can't be used in such a small amount of water as the well is practically dry.

Rachel tells us of her life in the Badlands but also flashes back to episodes from her past, especially back to when she was working in the Chicago boarding house owned by Mrs DuPree. When Mrs DuPree's son Isaac returns on leave from his duties as a buffalo soldier, she has grand ideas of marrying him off to a nice young lady from an acceptable section of society. She certainly doesn't want him marrying the help, but that is exactly what happens when Rachel agrees to join the parcel of land that she is entitled to under the Homestead Act to that which Isaac has already claimed, thus doubling his land size. They initially agreed to a limited time marriage, but they are still together, working hard to maintain their constantly expanding land holdings and their expanding family.

Rachel is in the latter stages of pregnancy when we meet her, and already has several young children, but this life that she has chosen with Isaac was not an easy one and she has also lost two children. She is however proud of the life that she has built with Isaac, having started with nothing, then living in a sod dugout until finally she is living in a wood house that they built themselves. That begins to change however when she begins to questions Isaac's priorities.

I loved reading about Rachel. She was strong enough to make the decisions that need to be made, both for herself and her children. It took her a while, but she got there in the end.

The character that has me thinking the most though is Isaac. I can't quite decide if he is such a driven man that he can think of nothing but acquiring and holding on to land, or if he is just a guy who doesn't easily show or communicate his emotions. He is hard on all of his family but I don't think he is blind to them and just making them do things that they won't like just for his own selfish ends. For example, with sending a terrified Liz down the well, the fact of the matter was that without doing this there would be absolutely no water for his family and they would all die of thirst.

In his mind, he thinks he is doing the right thing by contemplating going off to work in the mines to bring in a steady income and leaving Rachel to cope despite the fact she is telling him quite plainly that she won't be able too. It is obvious though that he is capable of physical affection with Rachel which he shows just by the touch of his hand on her back when she needs it. He does have feelings about his children, evidenced by the tears he sheds at one of the key moments in the book.

Isaac is particularly rigid when it comes to the rules in his own house. He seems to me to be very much of a generation where the father in the house must be obeyed by everyone, including his wife. Some of his rules make sense, but we did get to see more emphasis on the idea of persecution of a minority group with his own refusal to allow agency Indians into his home, or even to meet his own responsibilities in relation to certain Indians who make their way to him. He is discriminated against by certain towns people but he in turn is intolerant of others who he sees as beneath him for whatever reason.

I didn't actually realise for a few chapters that the characters in the book were African-American, and for me, that can be seen as quite a good thing. Whilst a big part of the subject matter of the book is both the isolation that Rachel felt not only living in the middle nowhere with few neighbours, but even more isolating is the fact that there are no other African-American people living anywhere near her. At it's heart though The Personal History of Rachel DuPree is a human story - a woman who is struggling to get by in a difficult situation and making the difficult but necessary choices to get the best outcome for both herself and her children. A story of endurance, of courage and of knowing when it is time to make changes.

A couple of years ago I was visiting Perth and I spent some time listening to the stories that my grandfather told about some of the jobs he has done over the years. One of his earliest jobs was clearing areas of land in some of the hilly areas nearby. He had a horse and cart, and himself, and that was it. In another example is having to walk from one town to the next in the country areas of Western Australia in order to get to the next job, and these towns were not close together. All of his work as a farmer and a shearer was hard and it was physical, and is really pretty foreign to the kind of work that his grandchildren get to do. I found myself thinking of his stories as I read this book, mainly because of the sheer physicality of their day to day lives! I suspect that I would be a bit too soft from modern city living to live this kind of life.

When I think of pioneers and homesteaders in Australian terms I think that we are talking more than 150 years ago, and yet this book is very much talking about life in the wilderness, about making a life for yourself in the isolated rural region of the Badlands of South Dakota in America. 100 years ago was a long time ago, but by that time in the cities there was electricity, there was running water, there were cars on the street. It was therefore something of a shock to me to realise that timewise, The Personal History of Rachel DuPree was in my grandfather's lifetime! In 1917, he would have been 8 or 9 years old. Giving it some kind of context makes it feel as though it happened very recently indeed.

This is a book that I would highly recommend to anyone who loves to read about times gone by. I am sure that you will cheer for Rachel, just as I did.

Rating 4.5

I am reviewing this book today as part of the TLC Book tours blog tour, although I obtained the book from my local library. To see other stops on the tour click on the following links.

Tuesday, November 1st:  nomadreader
Wednesday, November 2nd:  Peeking Between the Pages  
Thursday, November 3rd:  Linus’s Blanket - author Q&A
Monday, November 7th:  A Bookish Libraria
Tuesday, November 8th:  Man of La Book
Thursday, November 10th:  Unabridged Chick
Monday, November 14th:  Book Dilettante
Tuesday, November 15th:  Book Chatter
Wednesday, November 16th:  She is Too Fond of Books- Spotlight on Bookstores guest post
Thursday, November 17th:  Book Club Classics
Monday, November 21st:  Raging Bibliomania
Tuesday, November 22nd:  The Brain Lair
Wednesday, November 23rd:  Historical Tapestry – author guest post, “Why I Love Book Groups”
Wednesday, November 23rd:  Broken Teepee
Friday, November 25th:  Historical Tapestry
Monday, November 28th:  A Bookworm’s World
Tuesday, November 29th:  My Bookshelf
Wednesday, November 30th:  Elle Lit.
Thursday, December 1st:  Melody & Words
Monday, December 5th:  Book Snob
Wednesday, December 7th:  Life in Review
Thursday, December 8th:  The 3 R’s Blog

Why I Love Book Groups by Ann Weisgarber

Today we welcome Ann Weisgarber to Historical Tapestry as part of her blog tour for The Personal History of Rachel DuPree. My review of the book will be up in a couple of days time as part of the same tour.

~~~~~~

I joined my first book discussion group soon after I moved to Des Moines, Iowa. It was sponsored by one of the branch libraries, and I wanted to meet people who were not work-related. The group had been meeting for years, but the members welcomed me as though I were a cherished friend. After they settled me in with coffee and cookies, all thoughts turned to Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. They saw Robinson as the local author since she lived in Iowa, and they considered her a neighbor. They didn’t spare her feelings, though. A major point of discussion: the title. They weren’t crazy about it.

At that time, I hadn’t thought about writing a book but years later, when I had to think about a title for Rachel DuPree, the voices from that discussion group pounded in my head. I love that group for reminding me about the importance of titles.

We also read Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, another author who lived in Iowa. This, too, was an eye-opening discussion. The portrayal of farmers hurt the members’ feelings. “We aren’t all like this,” the readers said. “Some of us travel to Europe, we go to New York for Broadway shows. We know the world beyond our farms.”

This was another valuable lesson for a writer. When writing about a real location, that place is home to many people. I thought about this when writing Rachel DuPree, a story located in the South Dakota Badlands. There needed to be a sensitive balance when portraying the Badlands. It was not perfect, but it had its beauty. It was a difficult place, but it offered opportunity and hope for some.

When I moved back to Sugar Land, Texas, I immediately joined a library-based book discussion group. A few years later, I joined a second library-based group. Our reading lists included Socrates, Hemingway, and J.K. Rowling. We’ve read books of which I had never heard. There were some that I didn’t like, but I came to appreciate them after hearing my fellow readers’ comments. Once I waltzed into a meeting in love with the selected novel. I was sure everyone else felt the same. They didn’t. I was the only one who liked it.

A book doesn’t glow for everyone. Writers need to remember that. But when a book does glow, the reader connects and is passionate about the characters. Characters stay fixed in the reader’s mind long after the book ends.

Book discussions highlight the personal relationship between readers and books. Each person brings her own perspective to the book. Each carries her life experiences and those shape her view of the story. Someone might see a theme that no one else notices. Another reader will underline a sentence that moves him to tears while the rest of the group glosses over that sentence. It is not the same book for each person.

I love my two groups, and I’ve scheduled trips and vacations so I can avoid missing meetings. Now we have even more conversations about books through blogs. We are talking, analyzing, and giving meaning to words on the page. Readers are voicing opinions, and those opinions remind me that readers are central characters in every book.



To find out more about Ann, visit her at http://www.annweisgarber.com/.

Alice, I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin

Alice, I Have Been by Melanie Benjamin

Completion Date: November 7, 2011
Reason for Reading: Fun!

Few works of literature are as universally beloved as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Now, in this spellbinding historical novel, we meet the young girl whose bright spirit sent her on an unforgettable trip down the rabbit hole–and the grown woman whose story is no less enthralling.

But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful?

Alice Liddell Hargreaves’s life has been a richly woven tapestry: As a young woman, wife, mother, and widow, she’s experienced intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. But as she nears her eighty-first birthday, she knows that, to the world around her, she is and will always be only “Alice.” Her life was permanently dog-eared at one fateful moment in her tenth year–the golden summer day she urged a grown-up friend to write down one of his fanciful stories.

That story, a wild tale of rabbits, queens, and a precocious young child, becomes a sensation the world over. Its author, a shy, stuttering Oxford professor, does more than immortalize Alice–he changes her life forever. But even he cannot stop time, as much as he might like to. And as Alice’s childhood slips away, a peacetime of glittering balls and royal romances gives way to the urgent tide of war.

For Alice, the stakes could not be higher, for she is the mother of three grown sons, soldiers all. Yet even as she stands to lose everything she treasures, one part of her will always be the determined, undaunted Alice of the story, who discovered that life beyond the rabbit hole was an astonishing journey.

A love story and a literary mystery, Alice I Have Been brilliantly blends fact and fiction to capture the passionate spirit of a woman who was truly worthy of her fictional alter ego, in a world as captivating as the Wonderland only she could inspire.

Earlier this year I read The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb and considered it one of my favourite reads of the year. I knew I was going to have to finally read her earlier book after having it out from the library a couple times since it was released. The truth of the matter is, I am not a big fan of Alice in Wonderland. I am not sure what it is, but I have just never enjoyed that book. I have always been more interested in Lewis Carroll as a person and the life of Alice Liddell. This book was written to explore the relationship between the two and the events that lead to the hugely successful book and its sequel. She obviously takes some liberties with the story, but it all works out well in the end.

The only thing that turned me off about this book was how pronounced the child molestation was in the book. It has always seemed so strange to me that young children were allowed to spend so much time with a grown man that wasn't even related to them. Obviously the truth of the matter is not known, but there are lots of theories about what might have happened. The scene where Alice and Mr. Dodgson stop talking in the book is imagined based on plausible ideas. It is imagined, though. Their really was a strong friendship between the Liddell girls and Dodgson, though. There are many pictures from those times and it is obvious that Alice had some favoured status based on her having a book about her and the nature about some of the pictures.

One of the ideas in this book I really appreciated was how when Alice was a little girl she wanted the story to be written down so she was always immortalized as the young girl of the tale. When she gets older, though, she starts feeling the pressure of being forever young. She gains a lot of attention later in life when she sells the original manuscript, but instead of the young girl that everyone has read about for years they are faced with an old woman just trying to survive during difficult financial times. Alice had a hard life in many respects. It is entirely possible that there is some truth to the tales of her relationship with her mother following the revelations of her relationship with Dodgson. If that is the case it must have been hard. Then, she falls in love and is denied that love because of her rocky past. This love will haunt her for the rest of her life until she comes to terms with the fact she did in fact love the man she ended up marrying. She also loses two of her sons during the war leaving only one surviving. That is never an easy hardship to endure and ultimately leads to her husbands decline and eventual death.

The book also captures the times well. The dresses, the parties, the outings, the method of speaking. It is all captured for the audiences enjoyment in Benjamin's wonderful book. Even if this was not a book based on notable characters, it would still be enjoyable because it is so well written. Alice lead a life both real and imagined that captures the hearts of anyone. I appreciate the importance of the ground-breaking novels even if I could never get myself to love them like others have. Benjamin has once again written a book I mostly enjoyed. She is a very talented author and I cannot wait to see what she comes up with next.

Recommended for those interested in Alice and Lewis Carroll, for those that enjoy books with a literary connection, or just for people that enjoy an interesting story written well and set in late 19th and early 20th century England.

Cross-posted at The Written World.

Why I Love Unreliable Narrators by Rebecca Johns

As a reader, and most especially as a writer, I like to be surprised by characters. If I know for certain who someone is at the beginning of a story, and then they don’t challenge me to rethink those assumptions, then I’m disappointed. I want characters to startle, to change and shift in my perceptions of them, which is why I love unreliable characters, and most especially unreliable narrators, and why I chose an unreliable narrator for my latest book, The Countess: A Novel of Elizabeth Báthory.

Character is always paramount to me when I’m mulling the decision to start a new story, especially a new novel. My first book, Icebergs, was about nice people trying to get by in some not-so-nice circumstances, and after spending three long, exhausting years with them, I was aching for the chance to write about some not-so-nice people for a change.  Bad people doing bad things makes for good fiction. One of my favorite books is Lolita, precisely because it demands a lot from a reader. Just when you think you’ve got Humbert Humbert figured out, he manages to surprise you, even move you. The end of that book is one of the saddest, most pathetic (in the classical sense of the word) endings I’ve ever read. His life, and the lives of all he touches, are in ruins, and yet he’s able to accept his own responsibility for causing that ruin, and to recognize that everything he’s said until that point is merely self-justification. He is a slave to his passions—he can’t be trusted—and yet he is as much his own victim as Lolita is, as Clare Quilty is. Even now I can’t stop thinking about that book. Every time I read it, it brings me to tears.

So in the fall of 2008, when I first came across the story of Erzsébet (Elizabeth) Báthory—one of the most notorious serial killers in history—I was intrigued. All the books about her I’d been able to find were third person, with someone else telling her tale for her, a classic example of history being written by the victors. When I read about her legend, and how it had expanded during the Victorian era to include the outrageous idea that she must have bathed in the blood of her victims to preserve her youth and beauty, I was hooked. She’s supposedly this human vampire, and yet she was fluent in four languages and a capable businesswoman, a loving mother, very well educated for her time. So how could she be both—a loving mother and a psychopath? How could someone lavish love on her children while justifying the murder of dozens of servant girls?

So when I started the book, it was with this question in mind: Is it a lie if you believe it?

The best liars are people who believe, really believe, what they’re telling you. Sympathy for the narrator of The Countess was a deliberate choice—not because I believe her when she says she’s innocent, but because I want the reader to want to believe her, if that makes sense.  For most of us murder is so foreign to our understanding of ourselves—something we can’t imagine ourselves actually committing—that I think it’s only natural to place murderers in a category as people completely separate from ourselves.  In this book I wanted the reader to get uncomfortably close to her view of the world, see things through her eyes, but who’s going to do that if they don’t like her, at least a little bit?  She starts off in the novel telling us about her childhood, and it’s hard not to sympathize with a child.  But as the story goes on, that sympathy starts to erode.  It’s a little bit like sitting next to someone on an airplane as he tells you his life story, and little by little you realize he’s completely nuts.  You don’t start out wanting to dislike him, but that’s where you end up.

Was she a psychopath? Yes, I think so, in the truly psychological sense. I think she was capable of great violence, and of viewing people, especially servants, as possessions, which then would give her the ability to look on their suffering as insignificant. When the tables are turned on her, of course, she demands our compassion and is surprised when we find it difficult to give. But she doesn’t look at herself as a liar or a murderer, because she doesn’t believe, even at the end, that she’s done anything truly wrong. That’s the greatest tragedy of all. Almost everything she’s lost, she owes to her own failures as a human being. Like Humbert Humbert, Báthory has two kinds of victims—her servants, and herself.

 

__________________________________________

 

Rebecca Johns's first novel, Icebergs, was a finalist for the 2007 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction and a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Award. Her second, The Countess—a fictionalization of the life of Elizabeth Bathory, the “Blood Countess”—was published in October 2010 from Crown Books. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, the Harvard Review, the Mississippi Review, the Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle, Ladies' Home Journal, Self, and Seventeen, among others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Missouri School of Journalism, she teaches in the English Department at DePaul University in Chicago.

To learn more about Rebecca, you can visit her website: http://www.rebeccajohns.com/index.htm

Secrets of The Tudor Court by D. L. Bogdan

When young Mary Howard receives the news that she will be leaving her home for the grand court of King Henry VIII, to attend his mistress Anne Boleyn, she is ecstatic. Everything Anne touches seems to turn to gold, and Mary is certain Anne will one day become Queen. But Mary has also seen the King's fickle nature and how easily he discards those who were once close to him. . .


Discovering that she is a pawn in a carefully orchestrated plot devised by her father, the duke of Norfolk, Mary dare not disobey him. Yet despite all of her efforts to please him, she too falls prey to his cold wrath. Not until she becomes betrothed to Harry Fitzroy, the Duke of Richmond and son to King Henry VIII, does Mary finds the love and approval she's been seeking. But just when Mary believes she is finally free of her father, the tides turn. Now Mary must learn to play her part well in a dangerous chess game that could change her life--and the course of history

I just can't resist books where the author grabs a little known historical character and writes a story, within history, for her. That's why I decided to pick this one up. The main character here is Mary Howard, the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. As his nieces Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard she will also be a pawn in her father´s plans to maintain his powerful position with the King.

Unfortunately I didn't find Mary all that appealing as a character. She was a bit too good to be true and she endures too much to be true. Well about that last part maybe her father is too bad to be true. Norfolk is painted as a true villain who spends his time abusing women. Mary's mother first - he even beats her while she is in labor - and eventually Mary herself. All this written with modern of undertones, suggesting a pattern of domestic violence which, although I'm sure it happened in other eras, sounded too contemporary in its description.

Despite how he mistreats her and controls her life, making her miserable, Mary still loves her father and ends up being a victim of his schemes one time after another. I felt that went on for too long and that Mary never really rises from being a victim to being her own woman. I ended up thinking Norfolk was one creepy man and vowed to stay away from books about him in the future.

History wise, the background of this story is a well known one. The story of Henry VIII and his wives has been the main or secondary interesting of many historical fiction novels and I think Bodgan failed to bring us something different with this one. All that plotting for power on Norfolk's part is well known and it ended up not being enough to capture my interest and make me ignore who I didn't love Mary.

Lovers of the Tudor period might find this one an interesting read, because it is from a minor character point of view, but lovers of "meatier" historical fiction will probably find it a bit too light and, eventually, a bit disturbing.

Grade: 2/5

The Royal Oak by Gillian Bagwell

It’s likely you may have seen a pub or something else called the Royal Oak, and not given it much thought. But do you know that there really was a Royal Oak – one single tree – which spawned so many namesakes?

In 1651, the young King Charles II of England – the exiled son of Charles I, who had been executed in 1649 – made a valiant attempt to take back his throne. His defeat by Oliver Cromwell’s forces at the Battle of Worcester on September 3, 1651 set off one of the most astonishing episodes in British history – Charles’s desperate odyssey to reach safety in France, which came to be known as the Royal Miracle because he narrowly escaped discovery and capture so many times.

One of Charles’s companions during his flight from Worcester on September 3 was the Earl of Derby, who had recently been sheltered at a house called Boscobel in Shropshire. He suggested that the king might hide there until he could find a way out of England. But also present was Charles Giffard, the owner of Boscobel. He said his house had been searched lately, and that it might be safer for the king to shelter at nearby Whiteladies, a former priory.

Charles and a few companions arrived at Whiteladies in the early morning hours of September 4. George Penderel, a woodsman who was a tenant there, and one of five surviving brothers of a staunchly Royalist family, sheltered the king – and his horse – in the house overnight. But Parliamentary cavalry patrols were searching for Charles, so at sunrise Richard Penderel, another of the brothers, took him into the woods surrounding Whiteladies, where he stayed all day, in the rain.

That evening, Charles and Richard Penderel walked nine miles to Madeley, hoping to cross the Severn River and get to Wales where Charles might find a boat that would take him to France or Spain. But the river was well guarded, and there was nothing for it but to return to Shropshire.

Penderel tract

Charles and Richard Penderel arrived at Boscobel House at about 3 a.m. on Saturday, September 6. As it happened, another Royalist who had escaped from the battle was also there – Colonel William Carliss, who Charles knew well. Once more it was thought too dangerous for the fugitives to stay inside the house during daylight hours. Boscobel was surrounded by woods, and as dawn was breaking, Carliss and the king, carrying some bread, cheese, and small beer, used William Penderel’s ladder to climb “up into a greate Oake that had been Lop’t some 3 or 4 Yeares before, and being growne out again very Bushy and Thick, could nott be seen through,” as Charles later told the diarist Samuel Pepys. From their perch, they could see “soldiers goeing up and downe in the thickest of the Wood, searching for persons escaped.”

Memorabilia: salver

Charles had spent three days and nights with very little sleep, and now, with nothing to do but hide, he went to sleep on the broad branch of the oak, lying on a couple of pillows that had been handed up into the tree and resting his head on Carliss’s arm. After a while, Carliss’s arm grew so numb that he couldn’t hold onto Charles and keep him from falling out of the tree. He had to wake the king, but was worried that if he spoke, he might be heard by the searching soldiers. So he pinched the king, waking him silently.

Charles and Carliss were not discovered, and when it was dark, they came down out of the tree – which came immediately to be known as the Royal Oak – and ravenously ate the chicken dinner that Mrs. Penderel had prepared. As it turned out, the 21-year-old king was on the run for six weeks, until he was able to sail for France from Shoreham near Brighton on October 15. During his perilous travels, he was sheltered and helped by dozens of people – mostly simple country folk and very minor gentry – who could have earned the enormous reward of £1000 offered for his capture, but instead put their lives in jeopardy to help him.

Boscobel - Royal Oak

When he was restored to the throne in 1660, the five Penderel brothers were among those he summoned to Whitehall to be honored and rewarded for their part in saving his life and the future of the monarchy. He gave Colonel Carliss permission to change his name to “Carlos,” i.e., Charles, and awarded him a coat of arms featuring an oak tree and three crowns. And he commissioned a series of paintings from Isaac Fuller depicting highlights of his escape – one of which showed him asleep in the Royal Oak with his head on Carliss’s lap.



Carlis arms and crest

Almost immediately people began cutting wood from the Royal Oak, to make souvenirs. Charles gathered acorns from it when he visited Shropshire in 1661, and planted them in St. James’s Park and Hyde Park. The tree eventually died, but a sapling that had grown from it was protected and cherished. Eventually it, too, succumbed, but one of its offshoots still stands, carefully fenced off, behind Boscobel House, now maintained by English Heritage.

On January 15, 1661, Pepys recorded in his diary that he “took barge and went to Blackwall and viewed the dock and the new Wet dock, which is newly made there, and a brave new merchantman which is to be launched shortly, and they say to be called the Royal Oak.”

That ship was probably the first of many namesakes of the tree in which Charles had spent a day, but it was to be far from the last. There were eight ships of the Royal Navy named the Royal Oak, the last launched in 1914. There are numerous pubs and inns all over England called the Royal Oak, as well as some called Penderel’s Oak.

But the Royal Oak’s fame didn’t stop in England. There are many things called Royal Oak, in places where people likely don’t know the origin of the name. A quick Google search brings up a suburb of Detroit, Michigan; streets in Encino, California Wyoming, MI; Albuquerque, NM; Roswell, Georgia; and Vancouver, Canada; hotels in Adelaide and Sydney, Australia; pubs, bars, or restaurants in San Francisco and Napa in California, Brooklyn; Lewiston, Maine; Ottawa, Canada; a book shop in Virginia; a manufacturer of charcoal and grills in North Carolina; construction companies in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Canada, and Australia; a home developer in North Carolina and a realty company in San Rafael, California, and a flooring company in Australia.

______________________________________

Gillian Bagwell’s second novel, The September Queen, the first fictional accounting of the story of Jane Lane, an ordinary English girl who helped Charles II escape after the Battle of Worcester, was released on November 1. Please visit her website, http://www.gillianbagwell.com/, to read more about her books and read her blog Jane Lane and the Royal Miracle http://www.theroyalmiracle.blogspot.com/, which recounts her research adventures and the daily episodes in Charles’s flight.

Kommandant's Girl by Pam Jenoff

September 1939. Overnight, Jewish nineteen-year-old Emma Bau's world is turned upside down when Germany invades Poland. And after only six weeks of marriage, her husband Jacob, a member of the Resistance, is forced to flee.


Escaping the ghetto, Emma assumes a new, Christian identity and finds work at Nazi headquarters. As secretary to the charismatic Kommandant Richwalder, Emma vows to use her unique position to gather intelligence for the Resistance, by any means necessary.


Poignant, affecting, and gripping, Kommandant's Girl is the beautifully written story of one woman's struggle to survive one of the darkest periods of human history.

Whilst it wasn't a deliberate choice on my part, it does seem very fitting to be posting about this book on Remembrance Day, where we remember all those who have fought and died for their countries over the years. In this case, those we are remembering are the Polish resistance who fought so hard for their country during World War II.

When I started to think about what I was going to write for this review, I realised that most of the time when I do read a book about Polish history I am mainly concentrating on the events of World War II. That doesn't discount what I am sure is a fascinating history of the country before that but rather even nearly 70 years on, the terrible events that took place there are still very much in the modern consciousness. I suspect another factor may well be that the country itself was relatively closed off during the Communist regime in effect blocking readers around my age from knowing too much about the country. Thinking about it, there are very specific times in interest in several other country's histories that I concentrate on too.

This main character in this book is Emma Bau. She is a young, recently married Jewish girl living in the city of Krakow just before the invasion of Poland by the Nazis. She has been married to Jacob for a few short weeks. He is something of an activist so when the invasion comes, he knows that he will be targeted and so he has to leave Emma as he goes into hiding. Initially, she heads for the ghetto in the city to be with her parents, but it isn't long before she is found alternative accommodation with his Catholic aunt Krysia. When she is smuggled out of the ghetto she is also given the responsibility to look after a small orphan boy by the name of Lukasz.

Obviously living outside the ghetto means that she needs to assume a new identity and so she becomes Anna Lipowicz. All evidence of her marriage to Jacob must be removed. It isn't long before Anna catches the eye of Herr Kommandant Georg Richwalder, a very important figure in the Nazi administration of the city. He is immediately attracted to the young woman and so employs her as his personal assistant to work at Nazi Headquarters. This gives Anna the perfect position to be able to provide information to the Resistance movement, at great personal risk to herself.

It isn't long before Anna is asked to obtain information by any means necessary, even if that means that she must do the unthinkable and break her marriage vows. Anna is conflicted though. She loves Jacob, but she is attracted to the Kommandant, and she knows that by getting closer to him and becoming more trusted by him means that she needs to not get caught by the Kommandant, not catch the attention of the informers at work inside the headquarters, or outside when she is meeting the members of the Resistance, all in order to keep herself, and Krysia and Lukasz, alive.

Anna not only has to answer the question how far would you go for the cause of freedom, but also what happens when you are attracted to the wrong man at the wrong time and can she face the consequences, whatever they are going to be, of the risks that she takes in order to survive during the darkest days of World War II.

One thing that the author did seem to take a lot of care with is giving the Kommandant a human face which is something you don't often see. That doesn't mean that his role or actions are glossed over or denied but he is shown as being conflicted at times and certainly unlucky in love.

This is the kind of novel that I love to read - history, drama, romance, tension all rolled up into a book that you can get lost in and from purely that perspective I really enjoyed this book. In the Author's Note Jenoff explains that the story is fictional, although some of the events are true, but that she tried to remain true to the spirit of the Resistance, and as long as you read the book with that framework in mind, then you will enjoy it. There are some plot holes, some lucky coincidences and the ending is conveniently neat in some ways but for all that I am glad to have finally read Jenoff after talking about it for ages now. I will definitely be reading more!

Some times it must be tricky for an author to keep readers happy. For example, in this book I both liked the fact that the ending is kind of vague in that you know that the book is over and the characters will go off into their sunset whatever that happens to be, but in other ways I really wanted to know exactly what happened to them. Maybe I will get some resolution in relation to this when I read the connected book, The Diplomat's Wife. I've already requested it from the library.

Rating 4/5

Don't forget to check out Pam Jenoff's recent guest post for us. Another book with a similar setting but a very different feel is Douglas W Jacobsen's book The Katyn Order. Check out my review here.

The Historical Fiction Challenge- November Reviews

In October, we collectively read 54 books! That makes our total for 2011 so far, 756 books!

There is still time to join the challenge, go to Historical Fiction Reading Challenge to sign up and then come back to leave your links each month.  There is a new post for your links each month.

Please leave your links for your November reviews in Mr. Linky, below or, if you don't have a blog, in the comments below.

*Note: if you missed posting your links last month, please always post "late" links in the current month's Mr. Linky.  For example, if you forgot to post a link in February, please post it on this Mr. Linky in this post.

Why I Love Novels That Jump Between Past and Present by Pam Jenoff

I noticed the pattern a few years ago – that while I loved reading historical novels, my very favourites were those that jumped back and forth between the present and past, such as Susan Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue and Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book. These stories usually shift between present and past (either staying with one period in the past or moving throughout different eras) in alternating chapters and there is almost always an inanimate object, such as a book or painting, that one sees at various points in time and which acts as a continuum between past and present.

My own opportunity to write such a book came about a few years ago when my husband bought me a beautiful antique clock, known as an anniversary clock or 400-day clock (because it only needs to be wound once a year) for our first wedding anniversary. Looking at the century-old timepiece, I became intrigued with the history of the clock: Where had it been over the years? What kinds of things had it seen? And so I began fashioning a history for the clock of places and events throughout 20th century of Europe. To hold it all together, I gave the book a present day story of an elderly man accused of collaborating with the Nazis, who refuses to help with his own defence but claims that a missing antique clock holds all the answers. The result was The Things We Cherished. It was a joy to finally write the kind of book I most love to read and while I’m proud of my earlier books, including the historical ones (Kommandant’s Girl) and more modern (The Officer’s Lover), I must admit that I have a special affinity for this latest, hybrid tome.

There are so many reasons that I love reading – and writing – books that shift between past and present. First, they allow me to time travel. I can experience different periods in the past and learn about various eras. I can visit the lives of many different characters and hear their voices, enjoying many stories in one. And it doesn’t stop there – I can read a compelling present day story, with all of the complexities of modern life and relationships, while enjoying the historical bits. I don’t have to choose – I can have my cake and eat it too!

I also love books that travel between past and present because the break in each respective story to shift to the other propels me through the pages. It’s almost like awakening from a dream too soon and desperately wanting to go back to sleep to resume it – I have to keep reading to get back to the other story. (And in a really good book of this sort, both storylines will be equally compelling, so that I can’t wait to read both.)

As I mentioned before, most of these types of books seem to have an object that appears in the various past and present chapters. The object becomes a character in its own right, a kind of “witness” to history and a narrator to accompany the reader. As with my own clock, I love finding out where the object has been, revealing its unique history in an Antiques Roadshow sort of way. (And yes, even as the writer, the story does reveal things to me I hadn’t consciously known!) These past-and-present, object-driven stories are fertile grounds for mystery and intrigue, which can be unravelled through the object and its history.

Finally, I love stories that jump between past and present because, by showing people in different times and circumstances, they also allow the reader to draw parallels in characters’ experiences and explore timeless themes such as love, friendship, choice, betrayal, consequence and redemption. Perhaps that universality across the ages is at the heart of what makes the very concept of time travel so appealing.

____________________________________________________

To learn more about Pam Jenoff and her novels, don't forget to visit her website: http://www.pamjenoff.com/