Fiction
A CURIOUS BEGINNING by Deanna Raybourn
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Veronica Speedwell has no interest in becoming a mother of six. So she tells the Vicar’s wife after her Aunt Nell’s funeral. After all, with Aunt Nell gone, she no longer has ties in England and can immediately undertake another of her expeditions to the tropics, her bread and butter as a lepidopterist hunting rare butterflies. And while she’s abroad, she can engage in some healthy and commitment-free sexual release with a like-minded, anonymous man or two. Marriage to a boring English gentleman with a sizable brood of his own? Thank you, but no.
But before Veronica can embark on her expedition, she is assaulted by a thug and then rescued by a middle-aged German baron who claims to know her parents–of whom Veronica has no knowledge herself. The baron escorts her to London, leaving her in the care of a taxidermist and naturalist named Stoker. Before he can return for her, however, the baron is murdered. Fleeing for their own safety, Veronica and Stoker form a reluctant alliance to find the baron’s murderer and Veronica’s assailant–and on the way, discover a startling truth about Veronica’s parentage.
A suspenseful, action-packed mystery with a touch of romance, A CURIOUS BEGINNING starts off a series with a delightfully nonconformist Victorian feminist for a narrator and a surly but noble love interest/partner in slightly-criminal-criminal-investigation. Very fun read with plenty of thrills to keep you turning pages!
(Just FYI, Book 4 is my favorite.)
A SPY IN THE HOUSE by Y.S. Lee
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Mary Yang should have been hanged. She would have been–in fact–had the headmistresses of Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy for Girls not been interested in her promising skills and personality. Because more than an Academy, Miss Scrimshaw’s is a cover for a feminist spy ring called the Agency. And at 17, Mary (now under the pseudonym of Mary Quinn) is ready for her first assignment. She infiltrates the household of wealthy merchant as a companion for his vapid daughter in the hopes of finding clues as to the whereabouts of missing cargo ships. It is supposed to be an easy job for a beginning agent. But Mary and her supervisors didn’t count on the presence of a charismatic (and persistent) young man. Or on the fact that this particular job has a connection to Mary’s long-buried past….
A fun Victorian mystery with crossover appeal for teens and adults, A SPY IN THE HOUSE is the first in THE AGENCY series. Lee has a PhD in Victorian literature and culture, and her credentials show in her meticulous world-building. Recommend to readers who (like me!) enjoy a touch of romance in their mysteries.
THE DUCHESS WAR by Courtney Milan
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Minnie has worked hard to leave her past behind and carve out a new life for herself. It starts with her new identity: Miss Wilhelmina Pursling, an unfortunate orphan, soon to be engaged to a repulsive but respectable gentleman. But when a local military official accuses her of writing seditionist pamphlets urging workers to unionize, her carefully maintained fiction comes under too much scrutiny. Her only hope is to find and confront the true author of the pamphlets and convince him to either stop writing or confess. But when the author–the handsome, charismatic, kindhearted Duke of Clermont–announces that he plans to combat her attempts at blackmail with an attempt to win her love, Minnie realizes that she may have underestimated her opponent–and her own susceptibility to his charms.
The first of one of my favorite romance quartets (THE BROTHER’S SINISTER), this novel immerses readers in Victorian England and introduces us to a funny, witty, interesting group of friends that will continue to delight us for three more books (plus some novellas). A must-read for historical romance fans!
SOCIAL DISTANCE. READ TOGETHER.
There are two reasons I don’t link to big box stores or book sellers when I recommend a book. Of course, I hope my readers will borrow from their local public libraries (as I do!). But I also hope that when readers purchase books, they’ll support independent book shops.
Patronizing local small businesses is more important now than ever. To find a local bookstore near you, check out this handy search: https://www.indiebound.org/indie-store-finder
LITTLE WOMEN by Louisa May Alcott and LITTLE WOMEN (2019)
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In 1860s Massachusetts, four sisters and the boy next door grow up from a childhood of wild imagination and adventure to an adulthood of loss, love, and hope.
So I may be the only American white girl who was not a fan of LITTLE WOMEN as a kid. I mean, I liked most of the first half (the original Book One) but I never, never, never forgave Amy for burning Jo’s book. And I got very bored by Book Two, and also annoyed that Laurie married Amy (because again, SHE BURNED JO’S BOOK) and also super-super-annoyed that Jo married some random middle-aged German guy she just met because just because she was kind of lonely….
But I think that Greta Gerwig either read my childhood mind, or was also me as a child, because her adaptation was everything I wanted it to be. Florence Pugh made me like Amy. Genuinely understand and like her. The chaos of every scene must have been a nightmare to film, but it created such a joyful sense of community and family and connection between the four girls. I was mad at Amy for burning Jo’s book, but I was also mad at Jo for not noticing how much Amy looked up to her and wanted to spend time with her. And I loved the two-pronged solution to the “random German guy” problem: first, introducing him at the beginning of the film so he doesn’t come out of nowhere, and second, crafting an ending where Jo morphs with real-life Alcott, who didn’t believe women (including her character Jo) should have to get married (as she didn’t) but was forced to marry Jo off in the end to make it palatable to contemporary readers. In the film, you can take some delight in the unbelievable, silly, head-over-heels, love-at-first-sight ending because the director has hinted that it’s a fantasy and that the real Jo that you’ve known and loved is actually off somewhere, self-confident and content, living her dreams, publishing her books, and creating this fairytale ending for us to enjoy and for her to roll her eyes at.
P.S. I should note that I actually enjoy much more of Book Two as an adult. Especially now that I have kids. Especially that scene where Meg and John are trying to get their son to go to sleep and John ends up passed out in bed with his kid and Alcott remarks that trying to get a two year old to go to sleep is more exhausting than an entire day of work. Yeah. That. I read that part out loud to my husband. It’s somehow both comforting and discouraging to know that in 200 years of parenthood, nothing has changed….
MY BEAUTIFUL ENEMY by Sherry Thomas
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Catherine (Ying-Ying) Blade didn’t think anything could unsettle her as much as meeting her daughter’s murderer on the voyage to England. She doesn’t know why the assassin was there–whether he might be after the same jade tablets her stepfather sent her to claim–but as she hurled the assassin overboard, she believed she had drowned the last remnants of her painful past with him.
She couldn’t have been more wrong.
Not only did the assassin survive, but the woman she saved from his clutches has a coincidental connection to the English spy that Ying-Ying fell in love with years ago. They never knew each others names in China, but that hadn’t stopped Ying-Ying and Leighton from betraying each other. Ying-Ying had thought her feelings would have softened over time. Truthfully, she believed she had killed Leighton, and from his pronounced limp, she infers that she came close. But seeing him now, with a fiancee on his arm, is almost more than she can bear. And bear it she must because if she has any hope of retrieving the jade tablets–or even surviving her mission–she’s going to need his help.
Set half in England, half in Thomas’ native China, MY BEAUTIFUL ENEMY is a Victorian Romance twist on the Chinese martial arts genre of wuxia. It is one of Thomas’ best, which given the strength of her canon is saying a lot! It is exciting and romantic, suspenseful with breaks of humor. The characters are strong, and the interweaving of cultures beautiful and engaging. A page-turner and a joy to read. Highly recommend to historical romance readers!
OUTLANDER by Diana Gabaldon
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Claire and Frank are on their honeymoon. Technically, it’s their second honeymoon, but the War came so close on the heels of their marriage, that now they are like strangers. Now that their services to England are complete, this trip to Scotland is a chance to get to know one another again, to rekindle their romance. But when Claire falls through a time portal in a henge, she winds up in the eighteenth century, swept up by a raucous clan and pursued across the moors by Frank’s sadistic ancestor, English officer Jonathan Randall. Though she initially earns her keep at Castle Leoch by sharing her skills as an army nurse, Claire must eventually marry a young Scot named Jamie in order to keep out of Randall’s clutches. And as her relationship with Jamie deepens, Claire begins to lose her resolve to find a way home.
OUTLANDER has everything I love in a novel: humor, romance, suspense, immersive world-building, and deep themes. The contrast between Claire’s “modern” 1940s background and Jamie’s life in the 1700s allows for thoughtful commentary on the shifting nature of love and war as people begin to distance themselves from one another–whether it is the polite distance of Claire and Frank’s marriage or the mechanized distance of bombers and automatic weaponry in the war. Everything in the past timeline, both good and bad, is close and visceral and as much as Claire rejects (for example) the sadism of Randall or the corporal punishment the clans inflict on women and children, the unreserved passion between herself and Jamie (and the closeness of families and clans) binds her to her new life much more fiercely than she initially anticipated.
This novel is difficult to put down, and a great book club book if all of your readers are ok with sex and violence. (As my above expostulations should suggest, it has a thematic purpose and isn’t there gratuitously.) OUTLANDER will appeal to historical romance readers as well as many historical fiction and suspense/thriller readers. The dash of sci-fi/fantasy of the time travel is negligible, so I wouldn’t necessarily plug it to SF/F readers.
MAGPIE MURDERS by Anthony Horowitz
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When an editor receives the final installment in famous author Alan Conway’s Atticus Pünd mystery series, she is immediately sucked into the story. A housekeeper has died falling down the stairs–a seeming accident. But when the wealthy estate owner is decapitated at the foot of the same staircase days later, it must be connected. Detective Atticus Pünd hadn’t intended to take any more cases since he learned he is dying. But the facts of the case are too strange to pass up. It seems everyone in the village had a motive for one or both murders, and yet none of the motives seem to explain all of the events. As the novel draws to a close and Pünd is about to reveal the murderer, the editor realizes that there is a chapter missing. She puts in a call to her boss, asking him to contact the author, and instead receives startling news: the author is dead–an apparent suicide. It turns out that he, like his character Pünd, was dying of cancer. But something doesn’t sit right about the author’s death, and as the editor searches for the final chapter of his manuscript, she begins to suspect that he may have been murdered, as well.
This intriguing double mystery reads a bit like an Agatha Christie. It is riddled with quirky suspects and red herrings–both in the framing story and the mystery “novel” within. I found the Pünd plotline more engaging at first, as it took me a little while to get into the framing mystery once the Pünd story abruptly ended. But it was a neat concept and definitely kept me reading to the end. I recommend it to fans of classic whodunit mysteries.
THE MYSTERY OF BLACK HOLLOW LANE by Julia Nobel
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People think it must be great growing up as the daughter of a famous child-rearing expert. But sometimes Emmy wishes she had a normal mom–or at least that her mom spent less time on her work and more time paying attention to the things Emmy is interested in. When her mom announces that she has accepted a job on a reality TV program and that Emmy will have to go to boarding school on the other side of the ocean, it seems like proof that her mom’s work is more important than she is. It makes her feel a little bit less guilty about the secret she’s been keeping from her mom: the mysterious note and the box of “relics” from her long-absent father. “Keep them safe,” the note commanded. Emmy never knew her father, has no idea what these “relics” are, and doesn’t know who wrote the note or what kind of danger the mysterious writer anticipated. But when she arrives at her new elite English boarding school, she begins to uncover more pieces of the mystery of who her father was, and in the middle of the web of secrets is a danger much more real and terrifying than Emmy could have imagined.
This intriguing start to a mystery series is a great middle-grade page turner. The plot draws on common enough tropes–missing father, secret society, “heroic trio uncovering secrets at a boarding school” with a pleasant Harry Potter vibe–but what it lacks in originality, it makes up for in likable characters and an engaging mystery to puzzle out. I look forward to the sequel!
THE PERFECT COUPLE by Elin Hilderbrand
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The maid of honor’s body washed up on the Nantucket beach the morning of the wedding. It was the bride who found her. Needless to say, the wedding was canceled. Now it is up to the chief and his lead detective to interview the shell-shocked bridal party and figure out what happened. The simplest explanation, of course, would be that it was an accident. Girl has too much to drink, goes for a late night swim, washes up on the beach the next morning. But what about the abandoned kayak that belongs to the father of the groom? Why does the other bridesmaid seem so reluctant to discuss the MOH’s love life? Why was the bride on the beach so early in the morning carrying a suitcase? And where is the best man? As the investigation unfolds, it becomes clear that everyone has at least one secret and no one is as perfect as they seem.
A character-driven mystery, this novel will appeal to some mystery fans, but also realistic fiction fans who like some good old-fashioned family dysfunction. In the end, exactly what happened is less important than the complex web of relationships between the characters. A fast and enjoyable summer read!
Susan the Librarian 