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Category Archives: Fiction – Historical
A Review of Avi’s The Button War
Summer is here and I’m reading like a maniac. At least half of the books I’ve read this month are for kids, since I just finished my first year teaching elementary and middle school (after ten years at the high … Continue reading
Concluding thoughts on Diana Gabaldon’s Drums of Autumn (by Jill)
The last few hundred pages of Drums of Autumn definitely went much more quickly than the first few hundred, which was a good thing. But the plot point that made the action pick up was possibly the worst kind … Continue reading
A Brief Review of Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine
This is one of those “quietly good” books I keep meaning to read more of. Though only 144 pages long, it tells a complex story from five distinct points of view: one chapter each from the third-person perspective of a … Continue reading
A Review of Cecilia Ekbäck’s Wolf Winter (by Jill)
Wolf Winter has the odd distinction of being both the last book I started in 2016 and the first book I finished in 2017. It often annoys me if the last book/first book spends too much time on either … Continue reading
A Review of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad
The greatest trick Colson Whitehead ever pulled was convincing this bookblogger that he had written a realistic novel. Yes, yes, I know that the fact the railroad in this novel is a literal series of tracks running under the nineteenth-century … Continue reading
A Review of Anthony Marra’s The Tsar of Love and Techno (by Jill)
My boss brought me this book to borrow a few months ago. I had to tell her that I had already bought it but hadn’t read it. This sort of thing annoys her—wasting paper and money (in that order) … Continue reading
A Review of Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice; Or, On the Segregation of the Queen
This is the first installment in a series about a young woman who becomes Sherlock Holmes’ apprentice and, later, his lover and wife. The fact that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character is pooh-poohed at the beginning of the novel, … Continue reading
A Review of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (by Jill)
If my review of All My Puny Sorrows was sparse on details, it’s nothing compared to how sparse this review is going to be. I read this book on vacation with my parents. My parents go to bed really … Continue reading
A Review of Christopher Moore’s The Serpent of Venice (by Jill)
It’s a testament to how far behind I am on my blogging right now that I had to look in my 2016 reading list on the blog to remind myself which book I read after Ripper. And when I … Continue reading
Postcards From Purgatory 