Well, my 2023 reading is off to a good start. I was not sure what to expect of Babel, but it was one of Indigo’s picks for best books of 2022, which intrigued me enough to read it. I enjoyed every second of reading this novel. The novel’s full title is Babel or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. If you do not mind a bit of magic mixed into your historical fiction, I highly recommend that you give this novel a shot.
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The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is my last completed book of 2022, and the third novel by Silvia Moreno-Garcia that I have read this year, after Mexican Gothic and Velvet Was the Night. Out of the three, I like this novel this best. If you are familiar with the works of H. G. Wells, then you will immediately realize that The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is inspired by The Island of Doctor Moreau. I have read The Island of Doctor Moreau, so long ago, though, that I cannot remember if I read it in high school or college, and I only have a vague recollection of not liking it and feeling sorry for Doctor Moreau’s hybrid creatures. On the other hand, I enjoyed reading The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, although I still feel sorry for the hybrids.
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The Hacienda is a gothic novel set in Mexico, along the same vein of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic; however, I like this novel better. It features an actual haunting, not a haunting imagined by the protagonist, that made my skin crawl (although it would have been even more creepy if I had read this novel at night instead of in the bright afternoon), and it has vibes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
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I think fans of historical fiction will love Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait. One of the year’s more buzzed about releases, The Marriage Portrait is set in 1550’s Florence and is inspired by the short life of Lucrezia de ’Medici, who was married at age 13 to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, and died at age 16. The official cause of her death was “putrid fever”, but it was rumoured that her husband murdered her. The Marriage Portrait is a well written and immersive novel, but how does it feel to read a novel knowing that the main character died young in real life? I spent the entire time reading The Marriage Portrait in nervous anticipation of Lucrezia’s death, but also hoping that O’Farrell would change the fictional Lucrezia’s fate and give her a happy ending.
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I decided to read The Ghost Woods by C.J. Cooke because the reviews I read about it said things like “Gothic”, “creepy” and “terrifying”. The Ghost Woods definitely has a Gothic vibe to it, but is it creepy and terrifying? Unfortunately, no. There was maybe one scene in the entire novel that had my skin crawling just a little it. But I still think The Ghost Woods is a good read. It had me fighting off sleep so could read just a little bit more each night before I went to bed. I appreciate how it leans hard into the supernatural elements of the story.
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If you have been following my blog this whole time, then you have probably noticed by now that I have a predilection for Greek mythology. Daughters of Sparta is about two sisters, Klytemnestra and her younger, more infamous sister, Helen. Helen is “the face that launched a thousand ships” and caused the Trojan War. Daughters of Sparta is presented as historical fiction, though; the Greek gods do not appear as characters in the novel. The gods are prayed to, and sacrifices are made to them, but they are otherwise useless and do not influence the outcome of the story. I read Daughters of Sparta because I was interested in reading about Klytemnestra and Helen from their own perspective, but I found this novel to be somewhat lacking.
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The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs is the sequel to Katherine Howe’s first novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which I will admit I did not realize until I started reading it. I read Deliverance Dane over ten years ago, so I kind of wish I had re-read it before reading Temperance Hobbs, but there were enough details in Temperance Hobbs to remind me of what happened in Deliverance Dane. The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs is an okay book. It is not as interesting as The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and I think I prefer Brunonia Barry’s Salem-set novels over Katherine Howe’s (as a side note, I have also read Howe’s The House of Velvet and Glass, which was an interesting novel, but it depressed the hell out of me and so I donated it because I never want to read it again).
…I just went on a ten-day vacation to New York City, Boston/Salem and Montreal, and I managed to read FOUR books during my vacation (I spent a lot of time on planes and a train):
Set almost entirely within a maternity ward at an Irish hospital during the 1918 influenza pandemic, The Pull of the Stars is an engrossing and rich reading experience, and I feel as though I have come out of the experience of reading it like the novel’s narrator, Nurse Julia Powers, with a deeper understanding of how the world operates.
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I watched Lovecraft Country the TV show on HBO back in 2020 and thought it was pretty good. It is too bad the TV show was cancelled before it got a second season. I have had Lovecraft Country the novel on which the TV show is based sitting in my TBR pile for a long time and finally got around to reading it. It is too bad I took so long to read it because I really enjoyed the novel and was disappointed that it had to end. As is usually the case, I thought the novel was better than the TV show.
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