Accidents of Providence

This is the story of Rachel Lockyer, a glovemaker's apprentice in 17th century England. It's not a cool time to be living in England - Cromwell and his crazy Puritans are in power, and they've pretty much banned everything fun - even Christmas! Being a woman during this time is even worse, since anything you do can be construed as "lewd."

So what does Rachel do? She falls in love with a married older man and gets pregnant. Then when the baby dies in childbirth, she secretly buries her. But of course someone sees what happens, digs up the baby, and Rachel is made to stand trial for murdering her bastard child.

I found the book hard to get into - the language is a bit stilted. But once I got into it I really enjoyed it. The males characters are sort of accessories - and they are actual historical people - but the author, Stacia Brown, really develops the female characters, mostly Rachel of course. And I'm glad I stuck with it, because the ending of the book was a real surprise, and a really cool surprise at that. Definitely an intriguing read.

Accidents of Providence

Shadow of Night

This is book two of Deborah Harkness' All Souls Trilogy, the first book being A Discovery of Witches. Having just finished it I now can't wait for the final book! This book started just where the first book ended, with Diana and Matthew jumping back in time, and I was drawn in from the very beginning and loved every bit of it.

In case you've forgotten, Diana is a reluctant witch and Matthew is the vampire who loves her. They aren't supposed to be together, and there are creatures who want to tear them apart, so they go back in time to see if they can figure out what to do. That they go back to Elizabethan England, and that Matthew turns out to be Matthew Roydon, an actual historical personage, is awfully cool in my opinion. And since Matthew was an historical figure, it made sense that he hung out with other historical figures, right? So we also meet Christopher Marlowe (a daemon, by the way), Walter Raleigh, and others, collectively known as the School of Night. We also meet Queen Elizabeth herself.

I love that the people of the 16th century know that creatures exist, and while they don't love that they're around, they acknowledge their existence and for the most part tolerate them (although persecution of witches is heating up). But really, what's NOT to like about a novel about witches, vampires, daemons, time travel, Elizabethan England, mysteries, and love??? Absolutely nothing.


Shadow of Night

The Gilly Salt Sisters

Oh my gosh... what a wonderful book! Tiffany Baker has written an entertaining, engaging, and intriguing story of small-town life on Cape Cod, mixing reality, mysticism, and religion to create a novel that I just couldn't put down.

Jo and Claire Gilly live on the salt farm in Prospect, a sad little coastal New England town. The other townspeople aren't quite sure what to make of the sisters, and question whether or not they're witches and if the salt itself might be magical. Jo is at home on the farm, one with the salt, but Claire yearns to escape to something better. A horrible fire, and rich-boy Whit Turner, make that escape possible, and the sisters don't speak for years. Then Dee moves to town with her father who opens a diner, Claire's high-school sweetheart returns, and all of their lives are changed.

I loved the way this book was written, told in turn from all three of the women's perspectives, and dipping back-and-forth in time, which only added to the magical quality. And the characters are strong, distinct, and interesting - there are no cookie-cutters here. I also liked that the story is set in the era before cellphones and laptops became ubiquitous - that's something else, I think, that adds to the magical feeling.

It's not a particularly happy story, but it's super entertaining. I highly recommend it, and I'll be looking for other books by Baker.

The Gilly Salt Sisters

Killing Lincoln

I loved this history by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard about the assassination of President Lincoln. The authors do a wonderful job of driving the story, so it reads more like a novel. We all know the story of John Wilkes Booth assassinating Abe Lincoln, but I learned a great deal about how many others were involved, and also learned more about the players involved. I love the way the authors bring these very real characters to life.

I love historical fiction but I don't read a lot of historical non-fiction, but I thought the way O'Reilly and Dugard wrote this book made it feel like fiction. It's packed with information but it's never dry. If you're a fan of American history, and the Civil War era in particular, you do not want to pass on this book.

Thanks to Shari for the tip!

Killing Lincoln

The Birth of Venus

I really enjoyed this novel by Sarah Dunant about pampered teenager Alessandra Cecchi in 15th century Florence. The story and the characters are beautiful, intriguing, and I felt a real sense of the history of the period.

Alessandra is the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and she is beautiful, brilliant, and artistically talented. She's also rather naive. But when her parents marry her off to the much older Cristoforo, her eyes are opened to the wider world. Along the way she also finds herself drawn to the painter her parents hired to paint their chapel.

Meantime things in Florence are changing, from the lush life of the Medicis to the extreme piety of Savonarola. Alessandra and Cristoforo must do what they can to survive, and to be able to live life the way they want to live it.


The Birth of Venus

Outlander

Okay, so I realize this book is 20 years old, but I must have missed it back then because I don't remember reading it. And I think I would have remembered this 700-page, lose-yourself-in-it page-turner.

It's 1945, and English nurse Claire Beauchamp Randall is on a trip to Scotland with her husband following their separation during WWII. While there she walks through a standing stone and finds herself back in the Scotland of 1743 - a very different time. There she meets her husband's nasty ancestor Jonathan Randall, a likeable but suspicious bunch of MacKenzie's who take her under their collective wing, and a handsome young man named Jamie who offers a little something more.

I am a sucker for time-travel novels, particularly when the traveler goes back to some particularly interesting era of British history, and author Diana Gabaldon does it particularly well. The characters are really complex and likeable, and pretty realistic from my assessment. And the story just sweeps you up - it's really a page turner.

If you like British history with a little romance and fish-out-of-water thrown in, this is the novel for you. And apparently the first in a series... I just put the second one on hold at the library. That's a testament to how good these are - they're 20 years old and still on reserve!

Outlander

The Space Between Us

This is a really lovely, moving novel by Thrity Umrigar, about two women in modern-day India. Sera is a wealthy Parsi woman, and Bhima is her illiterate long-time servant. Umrigar tells the story from the perspective of both women, and in doing so shows how people's lives can be both very different and eerily similar at the same time.

Bhima has been Sera's servant forever, and they have seen each other through the hardships of each other's lives. Bhima has endured more than many women could - the betrayal of her husband, the death of her child, and the descent from the lower class into the life of the slum. But Sera has helped along the way, and has even paid to send Bhima's granddaughter to college, so that Maya will have a better life than her grandmother. Sera's life hasn't been easy, either, with a crazy, evil mother-in-law and an abusive husband, but Bhima has been there to nurse her through the pain, and Sera's daughter, Dinaz, views Bhima as almost a second mother.

But when something happens to come between the two families, we see who really is stronger, and we see who is more deserving of respect. It was a really great read - I couldn't put it down.

The Space Between Us