Heather Marshall’s Liberty Street is one of those dual timeline historical fiction novels that I love. It also taught me something about my own country’s dark history in its treatment of women. Not really a win, but it is still interesting.
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Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Beautiful Ones was originally published in 2017 and is the second to last of her novels that I need to read before I am all caught up on her bibliography. Unfortunately, The Beautiful Ones fell short of my expectations.
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As I said, I am continuing to read Kristin Hannah’s novels (at least the ones that sound interesting to me). I like Winter Garden better than The Four Winds, but like The Four Winds, Winter Garden can’t hold a candle to The Nightingale.
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The Seventh Veil of Salome is Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s last book published before The Bewitching and somehow I only just learned about its existence. I really like Moreno-Garcia’s novels, so of course I had to read it. It is historical fiction like her other novels, but it is missing the supernatural elements that I enjoy about her storytelling.
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The Four Winds is the second novel that I have read that is written by Kristin Hannah. It is a good novel, but I did not feel the same emotional connection to it as I did with The Nightingale (ie. I did not bawl my eyes out at the end).
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Emma Donoghue’s latest novel is about the Montparnasse train crash that occurred on October 22, 1895 in Paris. If you know nothing about this train crash, I recommend waiting until after you have read The Paris Express before Googling it, otherwise you will spoil some of the suspense of this novel.
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The Book of Lost Hours is the imaginative debut novel of Hayley Gelfuso. I am quite impressed by this debut and will definitely be keeping an eye out for what Gelfuso writes next.
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What drew me to Isola is its basis in historical record of a sixteenth-century French noblewoman who survived being marooned on an uninhabited island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence for two years before she was rescued and returned to France. Like the author, I wondered how the heck this woman survived two Canadian winters mostly on her own in the sixteenth-century. Unfortunately, we will never know the true account of Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval’s survival, but I found Goodman’s fictional account of Marguerite’s story compelling.
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V. E. Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil seems to be marketed to readers of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue rather than readers of her YA novels. I am not a fan of Schwab’s YA novels, and I loved The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, so my expectation was that Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil would be a slam dunk for me, but as interesting as I found the novel’s setting, the story ended up falling flat.
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The Safekeep is Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel. It was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and recently won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and I can understand why. It is an exquisite study in character, women’s desire and love.
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