I am beginning to feel confident that Kate Quinn is a writer that I can rely on to churn out a great historical fiction novel. The Alice Network, The Huntress and now The Rose Code are all novels that I very much enjoyed reading. These three novels all have World War II as the backdrop, but each focuses on a different aspect of the war, and each one is well researched and intricately plotted. The Rose Code is about the people who worked at Bletchley Park during the war and helped win the war by cracking enemy military code and deciphering enemy communications.
Novels with dual timelines where the protagonist in the present timeline is trying to solve a mystery from the past timeline are like catnip to me. When I read the synopsis for The Lost Apothecary, I thought, yes, this is going to be good. And the reviews that I read for it were all very positive. But unfortunately, I ended up being disappointed by this novel. It has the potential to be a good novel, but it seems like the author was in a rush to tell the story and sacrificed a richer plot and stronger character development. There are other authors who tell this type of story much better, such as Kate Morton, Eve Chase and Susanna Kearsley (although her novels have a supernatural slant).
I just finished reading Chain of Iron, book two of The Last Hours, the latest trilogy in The Shadowhunter Chronicles by Cassandra Clare. I figure it is as good as time as any to write an all-encompassing review of the many Shadowhunter books that are out there, or at least the ones I have read. If you like YA fantasy, but have somehow not read a single Shadowhunter book (there are a lot of them), or you know a teenager looking for a new book series to binge, then you may be very interested in the interconnected fantastical world that Clare has created over the span of 14 novels (that I have read so far) and several short stories and novellas.
The Map of Salt and Stars is a moving story about the Syrian refugee crisis. Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar is Syrian American and she has never been a refugee, but she wrote The Map of Salt and Stars to bring attention to the refugee crisis and to share her grief over the Syrian war and the loss of Syrian people, places and heritage. Her novel also teaches us that home is not a physical place, but rather home lives inside of us. It is in our memories and the stories we tell ourselves and it is in our relationships with our loved ones.
Lately, I seem to be reading a lot of novels by women that are a revival of Greek mythology, novels based on classical Greek literature written mainly by men. There is Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (the first review I published on my blog) and Circe, and now A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes. I really enjoyed reading A Thousand Ships. It’s a feminist retelling of the Trojan war which focuses on the women who are usually side-lined in epic tales about the male heroes of Greek and Troy, and it’s purpose is to show that women can be heroes too even if they don’t fight in wars (with the exception of the Amazons).
The Vanishing Half is a fascinating read and I highly recommend it. It is a novel about how identity is constructed. The central focus of The Vanishing Half is racial identity. It is about the Vignes sisters, identical twins Desiree and Stella, one of whom lives as a black woman while the other lives as a white woman and follows their lives through the decades spanning the 1950s to the early 1990s.
Yellow Wife is at times a difficult novel to read. Not because it’s boring or poorly written, but because of its honest depiction of its subject matter: slavery in antebellum US. Sadeqa does not shy away from vividly describing the horrifying treatment of African American slaves by their white masters. I’m not going to go into detail as it was difficult enough to stomach it while reading it. There were a few scenes in this novel where I had to stop reading for a moment and talk myself back into reading more. I’m not sharing this with you to turn you away from reading this novel. I think you should read it. I just can’t believe that people would treat other people the way white slave owners treated their slaves. But I don’t want to turn this review of Yellow Wife into a discourse on slavery. This novel speaks for itself on that subject.
The Golem and the Jinni is a long read, but worth every moment I spent on it. I really enjoyed this novel! I was first interested in reading this novel when it was published in 2013, but unfortunately never got around to it at the time. Silly me! I could have had this novel in my life for so many years! If you enjoy historical fiction and are interested in supernatural creatures from other cultures, then I highly recommend you read this novel.
The Devouring Gray isn’t a standout young adult novel, which is probably why I hadn’t heard of it until I came across it while browsing books on Book Outlet. Or maybe Herman’s publishers just didn’t do a good job of advertising it. However, I did enjoy reading this novel and became invested in the characters and the story, so if you also enjoy reading YA novels, you should give this novel a read.
The only book I had my furbaby Kika model before he passed away in May 2020 🙁
I originally wrote this review in January 2020, back when this website was still a twinkle in my eye (ahh I miss those pre-COVID days). I love, love, love this novel:
Leigh Bardugo is a bestselling YA writer known for her “Grishaverse”, an alternate universe she has created through her novels, starting with the Shadow and Bone trilogy, continuing with Six of Crows, Crooked Kingdom, and more recently King of Scars, which is based on Tsarist Russia and is full of magic and the supernatural. Her books are being made into a series on Netflix (yay!), and I highly recommend them, if you are into the YA genre.
When I first heard that she wrote an adult novel, I wasn’t immediately excited. I realize that adult novels can contain magic and the supernatural, but that’s not what I think of when I think of adult novels, and I don’t read a lot of adult novels with supernatural and/or magical plots. For some reason I expected Bardugo’s “adult” novel to be completely different from her YA novels and more grounded in (our) reality. When I realized that it would, in fact, contain supernatural elements, then I became eager to read it, and I had a really hard time putting down this novel until I finished it.
