The Popularity of Historical Novels, Part 2

I posted last week about the publishing trend over the past two decades toward historical novels. This week my focus is a specific historical period: the decade after World War II, a time of immense cultural change, both in a devastated Europe and in the United States, which sent soldiers to the war. I recently read two novels set in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

The Tobacco Wives     Adele Myers     (2022)

In 1946 North Carolina, a war widow dumps her daughter, Maddie Sykes (age 15), at the house of Aunt Etta, in a town totally dominated by the tobacco industry. Maddie is expected to assist Etta with sewing gowns for the wives of local executives, but when Etta becomes seriously ill, all the work falls to Maddie. She rises to the challenge, all the while dealing with a secret that she’s stumbled upon about the harmful health effects of tobacco. (The total obliviousness of the characters to the hazards of smoking seems incredible today, but it was the norm until near the end of the 20th century.) Despite some anachronisms and unlikely coincidences, Myers draws her characters well and propels the plot along with realistic dialog.

Jacqueline in Paris     Ann Mah     (2022) 

It’s a historic fact that Jacqueline Bouvier (later Kennedy, and even later, Onassis) spent her junior year of college, 1949-1950, studying in Paris. Although Europe was still recovering from the destruction of WWII, Paris was magical for Jackie O, as she attested many times. Novelist Mah spins out this year in France, reconstructing and imagining the details, as Jacqueline attends lectures, dances in jazz clubs, falls in love, and encounters the post-war conflicts between democracy and communism. Any fictionalized version of the life of a famous person is risky. This one hits the mark and is highly recommended.

In the archives of the Cedar Park Book Blog I found a number of other novels set in post-WWII Europe. Click on the title to be taken to my review. 

Freya     Anthony Quinn     (2017) The friendship of two British women, traced from the end of World War II through the 1960s, with insights into feminism, marriage, and culture.

The Women in the Castle     Jessica Shattuck     (2017) Hardscrabble life in Germany in the aftermath of World War II, with reflections on the rise of Hitler.

The Italian Party    Christina Lynch     (2018) As effervescent as the Campari-and-soda drinks that the characters order constantly, but the sunny picture darkens as we learn the many secrets of an American couple living in Siena, Italy, in 1956.  

The Right Sort of Man     Allison Montclair     (2019) In post-WWII London, two bright women start a marriage bureau and end up solving a crime. Spunky and sparkly. This is the first in the Sparks and Bainbridge Mystery Series, which includes A Royal Affair (2020), A Rogue’s Company (2021), and The Unkept Woman (2022), all of which I’ve reviewed. For best enjoyment, read the books in order.   

The Popularity of Historical Novels, Part 1

If you look beyond science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels (as the Cedar Park Book Blog does), your options for current fiction reading are weighted heavily toward the historical. Why? This podcast from On the Media suggests a few possible reasons. For example, fiction can draw attention to neglected parts of history. And some authors want their work to be more timeless, not dated by references to modern technology, which changes rapidly.

So it isn’t just my imagination that historical novels have been proliferating for the past two decades! In my scanning of book-lovers’ sites such as The New York Times, BookPage, and Goodreads, I’ve found that history is hot. In particular, there’s recently been a glut of novels about women spies during World War II. I haven’t reviewed many of these spy novels because they’ve proved too violent or sad for my taste—plus I don’t like to get stuck in one time period with my reading.

Over the past six years, I’ve featured a wide range of historical novels and historical mysteries, set from ancient times up into the 20th century. This week, I scoured the Cedar Park Book Blog archives to highlight some of my best-loved historical reads, in random order. Click on the title to be taken to my full review!

News of the World Paulette Jiles     (2016) In post-Civil-War Texas, a traveling performer agrees to make a dangerous journey to deliver an orphan to her aunt and uncle. (The film, with Tom Hanks, is also terrific.)

The Hearts of Men     Nickolas Butler     (2017) Starting in 1962 at a Boy Scout camp in northern Wisconsin, this novel follows a boy’s difficult life in a complex United States.

Where the Crawdads Sing     Delia Owens     (2018) The Marsh Girl roams the lush swamps of coastal North Carolina and meets both friends and foes. Evocative nature prose and a devilish mystery.

Peculiar Ground     Lucy Hughes-Hallett     (2018) A densely layered novel set on a fictional Oxfordshire estate in 1663, 1961, 1973, and 1989. Features walls—border walls, the Berlin Wall, walls of inclusion, walls of exclusion, and many others. 

The Light Between Oceans     ML Stedman     (2012) In the 1920s, a lighthouse keeper and his wife, on a remote island off the coast of Western Australia, find an infant in a boat that washes ashore.  Melodramatic but worth the anguish.

The Golden Age Joan London     (2014) In 1953, two adolescents with polio meet in a rehabilitation center in Perth. A moving story that won top prizes in Australia.

The World Of Tomorrow     Brendan Mathews     (2017) Rollicking action at the fabulous New York World’s Fair, in June of 1939, when the Great Depression has eased and World War II was still unimaginable to Americans.

The Ninth Hour     Alice McDermott      (2017) The pros and cons of being Catholic in early 20th-century Brooklyn. Exploring the intersections of morality, religion, and culture in resonant language.

Little Fires Everywhere     Celeste Ng     (2018) Teens in late-1990s Shaker Heights, Ohio, confront incendiary issues of the upper-middle-class: bigotry, greed, and a disdain for those who diverge from the norms set by their communities. 

Pachinko     Min Jin Lee     (2017) A sweeping saga about the struggles of Korean immigrant families in Japan throughout the twentieth century.

A Gentleman in Moscow     Amor Towles     (2016) The amazing adventures of a Russian aristocrat under house arrest in a Moscow hotel from 1922 to 1954.

The Last Painting of Sarah de Vos     Dominic Smith     (2016) The story of a painting and its impact on families in three settings:  The Netherlands 1636-49 (dark, burgher-ruled); New York, 1957-8 (shiny, jazz-filled); and Sydney, 2000 (sunny, cosmopolitan).

West     Carys Davies     (2018) Preposterous plot, peculiar characters, spare language, in a tale that’s akin to ancient myth, set on the North American continent in about 1815.

Barkskins     Annie Proulx     (2016) An expansive account of two French Canadian families and their relationship to the forests of North America over three centuries. Love all those trees!

Watershed     Mark Barr     (2019) In 1930s rural western Tennessee, an impoverished agrarian community is confronted with technology that will profoundly change lives.

Varina     Charles Frazier     (2018) A fictionalized version of the troubled life of the second wife of Jefferson Davis, set in the aftermath of the American Civil War.

The Vineyard     María Dueñas     (2017)     Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza García A swashbuckling historical romance that travels to Mexico, Cuba, and Spain in 1861.

The Fortunes     Peter Ho Davies     (2016) Interlocking stories about the experiences of Chinese immigrants in America over the past century.

In a special category, four historical murder mystery series:

The Marco Didius Falco Mystery Series and the sequel Flavia Albia Mystery Series     Lindsey Davis     (1989-present) Complex, fast-paced, satirical, and outrageously funny mysteries set in first-century Rome. Bonus: Learn some Roman history and geography.

The Brother Cadfael Mystery Series     Ellis Peters     (1977-1994) Meet the brilliant and compassionate monk Cadfael, who lives in a monastery in 12th-century Shrewsbury, England, tending his herb garden and rooting out evil.

The Dame Frevisse Mystery Series     Margaret Frazer     (1992-2008) Dame Frevisse, a nun at a fictional Oxfordshire convent in the 15th century, is a practical and clever sleuth, solving personality clashes as well as crimes.

The Roger the Chapman Mystery Series     Kate Sedley     (1991 to 2013) Roger is an engaging, burly fellow with a large backpack of wares. He tramps all around England in the 15th century, unravelling mysteries. 

My recent posts on this blog have also had lots of short reviews of historical fiction. For example:

Historical Fiction, 7th Century to 20th Century

Strong Women of Yore

Historical Fiction Sequels That Can Stand Alone

Dystopian Fiction: A Commentary

Our Missing Hearts     Celeste Ng     (2022)

The Handmaid’s Tale     Margaret Atwood     (1985)

I ordered the latest Celeste Ng novel from my library reluctantly, because dystopian novels set my teeth on edge. But I had reviewed Ng’s previous non-dystopian works (Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere) very positively, and I did not doubt her ability to deliver quality prose, so I steeled myself for a dystopian world of her creation. It was well worth all the cringing that I did.

The setting for Our Missing Hearts is an undefined time, not too long after the present day, in the Boston area and in New York City. Bird Gardner, age twelve, and his father scrape along in a grim student dormitory on a campus that closely resembles Harvard’s. Bird’s father had been a linguistics lecturer but now shelves books in the campus library.

The two keep their heads down and try not to attract attention in a society that has adopted a law called PACT, Preserving American Culture and Traditions. Under this law, Asian Americans suffer particular discrimination, and children deemed at risk of “anti-American” indoctrination can be forcibly removed from their parents. In Ng’s dystopian society, the PACT law is accepted by most of the public as a reasonable response to a previous period of civic unrest and economic crisis. Those who resist PACT are severely punished.

Bird’s mother, who left the family three years before the start of the story, was Asian American, and hence the lives of both mother and son are at risk. As Bird sets out on a journey to find his mother, the novel builds to a chilling climax.

Ng explains the basis of her plot in an Author’s Note at the end of the book: “There is a long history, in the US and elsewhere, of removing children as a means of political control.” She cites the compulsory separations of families in the years of slavery, the punitive boarding schools where Native American children were placed against the will of their parents, and the recent seizures of refugee children at the southern border of the US. These are well-documented cases, and Ng’s fictional world in Our Missing Hearts doesn’t exaggerate the dangers of such abuses of power.

As one character muses, “Is anyone listening out there? Are people simply rushing by? And how much of a difference can it really make, just one story, even all these stories taken together and funneled into the ear of the busy world. . . It is hard for anything to be heard and even if anyone hears it, how much of a difference could it really make, what change could it possibly bring . . . “ (299)

Our Missing Hearts joins the ranks of the classics of dystopian fiction that I read in high school and college: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (published in 1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953). And, then, of course, there is The Handmaid’s Tale, which Margaret Atwood published in 1986. Until this week, I had never read Atwood’s bestseller. (Okay, okay. I really dislike dystopian novels. Even though I lived in Toronto in the 1970s, when Atwood was an up-and-coming Canadian writer and could often be spotted on downtown streets, I never got past her initial fiction offering, The Edible Woman.)

The video streaming adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale that started in 2017 has amplified Atwood’s message, bringing her warnings to a much wider public. But the original novel, which focuses on the subjugation of women in the realm of Gilead (a remade United States), is even more disturbing than Our Missing Hearts. I was struck by Atwood’s prescience, nearly four decades ago, in constructing a fictional world that predicted toxic destruction of the global environment; extreme fundamentalist censorship of written and visual materials; inequitable stratification of society; and, most shockingly, pregnancies forced on women.

Why do people write dystopian novels? Why do they create alternative histories? It’s often to send a message about totalitarian societies. The emphasis of the work can be political, economic, scientific, environmental, technological, religious, or a combination of these aspects. Dystopias are usually constructed by those with left-wing views, but they need not be—witness Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047. I reviewed this 2016 novel which, despite the horrors of racism and poverty that Shriver depicts, is fascinating in its exaltation of a libertarian utopia that contrasts with the dystopia that she fashions.

I don’t plan to read a lot more dystopian fiction. It gives me nightmares. But I take the point that citizens in democratic societies need to be vigilant and activist if they want to protect their civil rights—indeed, their human rights. And authors like Atwood and Ng have chosen fiction as their medium of alarm, not articles in the New York Times. 

The Blogger Reflects

The Cedar Park Blog has reviewed 257 books over the past three years. I’ve written all of these reviews except for a handful that my guest reviewer, Paul R Schwankl, stepped in for. (Thanks, Paul!)  

The focus of my blog has been

• historical novels

• mysteries, especially historical mysteries

• contemporary fiction, mostly novels plus some short story collections

• a few biographies, memoirs, and social histories

Hundreds of other books have returned to my local library unreviewed and mostly unread. The trend in fiction publishing today seems to be toward thrillers, horror, fantasy, and science fiction. These genres either disturb my sleep with nightmares or simply don’t capture my interest. Dystopian futurist novels are especially popular, perhaps as warnings about the trajectory of our society or perhaps as a way of saying, “It could be worse.” I reviewed one of these futurist books and decided that one was enough. Among memoirs, I’ve gravitated toward those by women who have triumphed over difficult circumstances in their childhoods.  

It’s now time for me to move on to other writing projects. In suspending my book review blog, I plan to devote more of my time to my own fiction and nonfiction writing. Stay tuned for news of

• a novel set in Detroit in the 1960s

• a guide to visualization for pregnancy and birth (with Johanne C Walters)

• a liturgical pageant for the Christian season of Advent

Meanwhile, you can check out my recent publications: a coming-of-age novel, Adventures of a Girl Architect, and a musical pageant, The Medieval Twelve Days of Christmas, both of which are available on Amazon.com.

This blog will be active until at least November 2021. The Archive of reviews, in the right-hand column, will be available for your browsing pleasure.

Thanks for checking in with the Cedar Park Book Review Blog!

Bonus Post: Blogger Reflections, Part 2

The Ann Arbor District Library recently (January 2020) released lists of the most requested books in its collections. Of the top twenty fiction titles that Ann Arborites want to read, I’ve reviewed eight on the Cedar Park Book Blog:

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Normal People by Sally Rooney

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

Significantly, seven of these eight books were also included in one of my own end-of-the-year list of favorites, for 2017, 2018, or 2019.  

I’m still waiting for my turn to read several other fiction titles on the library’s “most requested” list. A couple of other novels I’ve checked out and read but decided not to review. Why? Well, Jennifer Weiner’s Mrs Everything rubbed me the wrong way with its multitude of factual errors in its supposedly realistic setting. Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, though masterful, was too dystopian for my taste. I wanted very much to review Tommy Orange’s There There, but I couldn’t get a handle on the narrative. On my blog, I review only books that I can strongly recommend to my followers.

Although I post primarily about fiction on the Cedar Park Book Blog, I managed to review five of the Ann Arbor District Library’s top twenty requested nonfiction titles also:

Educated by Tara Westover

Becoming by Michelle Obama

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Reading with Patrick by Michelle Kuo

Women Rowing North by Mary Bray Pipher

And I loved another nonfiction title on the AADL list, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo. My reading selections seem to align pretty well with those of my neighbors!

FAQs at the One-Year Mark

The Cedar Park Book Blogger Answers Your Questions

What are your goals in posting on the Cedar Park Book Blog?  I select and then discuss books that I hope my blog-followers will enjoy reading. I also want to draw attention to the activities of Cedar Park Press, which hosts the Cedar Park Book Blog. Plus, I find it helpful to my own future reading choices if I analyze a book once I reach the final page!

What genres do you review?  I review literary fiction, plus some social history and biography. Within literary fiction, I gravitate toward historical fiction and mysteries, but I review quite a few novels set in the present day, including some fiction in the subgenre known (unfortunately, I think) as chick lit. I avoid science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers, and graphic novels, so I don’t even crack open a great many of the books being published.

Why do you avoid reading and reviewing certain genres?  I find it amazing that today’s reading public eats up fiction that contains so many gruesome or violent scenes. When this fiction is well written, it can be so realistically scary that it gives me nightmares! Is this public taste for the grisly, the macabre, and the shocking a way for people to feel better about the difficult world we live in? In other words, does reading about a fictional world that is much worse than the actual world make the readers feel better somehow? I prefer books that treat the human predicament more subtly. I also admit that I’m a sucker for happy endings.

What about dystopian fiction?  Dystopian fiction can be part of the landscape of horror, as Jill Lepore wrote in an insightful piece for The New Yorker in 2017. I did venture to review the dystopian novel The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver, though I found it creepy at times. I don’t plan to pick up more books like that one.

Why do you review so many British and American books?  British and American publications are the ones most available to me, but in the blog mix you’ll find a fair number of novels by authors from other countries. In the Archive in the right-hand column, you can click on “Irish Novels,” “Australian Novels,” and “International Novels.” The “International Novels” section includes fiction written in English (like Stay with Me from Nigeria) and fiction translated into English (like Ties from Italy and A Man Called Ove from Sweden).

Do you review only books that were written recently?  I do focus primarily on books that have come out in the past few years. Sometimes, however, I’ll review a classic (like Pat Conroy’s 1986 The Prince of Tides) or a series of books that has continued to the present (like Alexander McCall Smith’s novels about Isabel Dalhousie). I’ve also reached back into the 1990s for reviews of some series of mystery novels that I’ve enjoyed (like Margaret Frazer’s series starring Dame Frevisse).

How do you decide if you’ll review a series of books?  If I find a book in a series that I particularly like, I may binge-read the entire series and then review it as a whole. More often, though, I’ve been following a series for a decade or more, and my review on the Cedar Park Book Blog is triggered by the publication of a new entry in the series. For example, I reviewed the Maisie Dobbs mystery series by Jacqueline Winspear when the latest title, In This Grave Hour, came out in 2017. I found this book the weakest of the series, but I recommended the series as a whole very highly.

Why do I see so many reviews of medieval mysteries on the blog?  This sub-genre is a special interest of mine, partially because of my academic background in medieval studies, so I’ve re-read some of my favorite titles from a decade or so ago and offered recommendations. I’ve also reviewed a good mystery series set in Tudor England, by CJ Sansom.

Within the genres that you review, how do you choose specific books?  I scan the New York Times and my local library’s lists of new books for titles. I read book blurbs, those brief summaries of plot put out by Publishers’ Weekly or Goodreads.com, to help me find suitable reads. I put off reading full reviews of a book until I’ve reviewed the book myself, so that I’m not swayed by the opinions of others. I’m surprised at how many reviews by others are positive. Often (often!) I’ve found a title execrable only to discover that many reviewers at places like the New York Times and the Guardian praised it to the heavens. Ben Yagoda echoed my thoughts in a good article for Slate.com called “The Reviewer’s Fallacy: When Critics Aren’t Critical Enough.” You can rest assured that I’m not receiving kickbacks from publishers or pressure from superiors to praise a book that’s poorly written!

Do you post a review for every book that you read?  I post a review for every book that I finish reading. Every week I haul home from the library six to ten books from my chosen genres. One by one, I stack them into the pile to go back to the library, most rejected after a few pages or a couple of chapters.

What would make you abandon reading a book?  Oh, disgust will do it. For example, I recently started to read Tom Perrotta’s 2017 bestseller, Mrs. Fletcher. Right away, there were sex scenes. I usually like the sex scenes in novels, and I review a lot of fiction with erotic components. But the exploitative sex in Mrs. Fletcher repulsed me so much that I gave up on this book. Scenes of extreme violence work the same way. And I’ll sometimes abandon a novel because the narrative line is murky, as in Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13. Even if a book has great lyricism,  I still want to be carried along by a solid plot, with well-developed characters. I fully understand that there are schools within modern fiction where traditional plotting is disdained. Sorry, friends, but humans have loved plots for thousands of years. I have stories in my life, and I like to relate to the stories in the lives of others.

Why don’t you use a “star” system for rating titles?  I find it deceptive to collapse assessments of plot, characters, descriptions, imagery, historical accuracy, and other aspects of a book into one rating. I addition, I think that star ratings tend to be inflated, that reviewers hedge by granting mediocre books three stars out of five. Instead of this system, I aim for nuanced and candid reviews, to help you decide if you’d want to read the book yourself. If I give a title a full review on the Cedar Park Book Blog, you can be assured that I found the book worth reading. If the book rises into my “favorites” category, I’ll tell you that in my post. If the book is worth reading but I have some caveats, I’ll tell you that, too. For example, check out the caveats in my review of Zadie Smith’s Swing Time.

What are you doing to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Cedar Park Book Blog?  I’m reading more books! And I leave you with a wise sentence from Claudia Roth Pierpont, applicable to both writers and readers: “Words ordered on a page may supply some order for one’s life, may assuage and even redeem tragedy.” (The New Yorker, March 6, 2017)

Cedar Park Press is pleased to announce the publication of Adventures of a Girl Architect by Hazel Harzinger. Click here to purchase this title in digital or paperback format.

Reflections, Part 1

Reflections on Six Months of Blogging

At the six-month mark in the history of this book review blog, I’ve posted reviews of 68 books, and that’s counting as one book each book series that I’ve reviewed, such as the Maisie Dobbs mysteries by Jacqueline Winspear, the Sister Frevisse mysteries by Margaret Frazer, and the 44 Scotland Street novels by Alexander McCall Smith.

photo: Lavender Labyrinth in Shelby, Michigan

As I’ve mentioned in my description of this blog, I don’t post star ratings of books but rather seek a more nuanced approach. If I give a book a full review, I recommend that book to blog readers who have tastes similar to mine, though occasionally with caveats.  In the posts called “Books in Brief” I offer short reviews of books that I found less satisfying for some reason, and I state the reason clearly. It might be that the topic was too melancholy or that the writing was too long winded for my tastes. Some of you in my blog audience may still like these books, so I don’t want to discount them totally.

I reject a great many more books than I review. You’ll never see the titles of the hundreds of books each year that I abandon after a couple of chapters. There are so many excellent writers producing fine prose; why spend time on a mediocre book?

I scan the New York Times and my local library’s postings of “Hot New Fiction” for notices of books that I’d like to take a look at, but I try not to read full reviews of a book until I’ve formed my own opinion. Short summaries of a book help me to determine if it fits my general criteria. I eliminate thrillers, horror novels, science fiction, fantasy, and books with excessive violence. I review recent fiction, with an emphasis on historical novels and mysteries, plus a few social histories and biographies. Literary fiction is my mainstay, though I’ve also ventured into chick lit and young adult romance a few times.

One aspect of my reviews that has surprised me is the number of novels about New York that appear on my blog. (I have an entire category for “New York Novels” that you can click on HERE to read these reviews.) I think that this is partly because a lot of New Yorkers write about their city and its 8.5 million inhabitants and partly because the US publishing industry is centered there. In any case, I love those descriptions of snowflakes falling in Central Park or ships passing the Statue of Liberty or high heels clicking on a sidewalk shadowed by the Empire State Building.

If you’re new to the Cedar Park Blog, be sure to check out the Archive of Book Reviews, located in the right-hand column below Latest Posts. The archive’s categories will help you navigate to the books you like best, whether it’s “Road Trip Novels” or “Social Histories” or “Family Sagas” or “Irish Novels.”

What’s coming up on the Cedar Park Blog? I’ll be continuing to review individual books and book series. In addition, I’m planning some posts called “Faves,” in which I’ll talk about my favorite authors, providing an overview of their works and telling you why I love their writing. Watch for these posts among the Friday regulars. And be sure to follow the Cedar Park Blog on Facebook or set your feed reader to ping you when a new post appears. Thanks for reading the Cedar Park Blog!