Tag: historical fiction

My review for KBR of Logos by John Neeleman

March 10, 2015

NOTE: The Kindle Book Review received a free copy of this book for an independent, fair, and honest review. We are not associated with the author or Amazon.

Like many of those who wandered away from Christianity, I am fascinated by any close examination of the life and times of Yeshua bar Miriam. This well-researched, sprawling historical novel (and yes, it is required to describe historical novels over a certain length as “sprawling”) aims to put the reader deeply in first-century Palestine and Rome, when people first came to debate among themselves what Yeshua was.

The hero, Jacob, begins as the weakest point in the novel. He is too much of an Everyman, too eager to fight for the right at every turning point in the dark history of Jerusalem’s revolt against Rome, and too easily taken to the bosom of major historical figures.

Nonetheless, the pace picks up considerably when Jacob stumbles across the story of Jesus as the Christ. Then the novel offers a fascinating rendering of life with the Essenes and with pre-Islamic Bedouins, and becomes a much more compelling read. The novel’s theory of the “invention” of Christianity as a syncretic, Hellenized religion is thoroughly plausible. I recommend this read as a primer or a companion primer for those with an interest in the birth of Christianity.

My review of At the End of the Line by Kathryn Longino for The Kindle Book Review

January 5, 2015

NOTE: The Kindle Book Review received a free copy of this book for an independent, fair, and honest review. We are not associated with the author or Amazon.

In this cinematic novel of the ’50s and ’60s, Beanie, a teenage Mormon girl, is sold into plural marriage by her parents. Desperate, she tries to make a long-distance call to the only person she knows outside the hell of Utah. It’s a wrong number. Instead, she reaches an aristocratic Boston lady who has been chafing at the confines of her manicured life. The lady hears the panic in her voice, responds with concern and with kindness – and their years-long story begins.

The beginning of the novel is suspenseful, heartrending, difficult to turn away from. The main characters, Beanie and Adeline, are well-drawn and appealing, although Adeline is the only one who is complicated and occasionally unlikable. Beanie’s evolution into a civil rights worker is too quickly done, especially for a girl who would have been taught all her life that African-Americans were lesser beings in God’s sight. The ending twist is too neat by half; life is never wrapped up so neatly – and yet there was a great deal of potential in it.

This book is a quick, gripping read that would make a fine movie, if it avoided making Nice White Ladies of Beanie and Adeline. I would give it 3.85 stars if I could.

My review for KBR of Burning Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Carl Waters

July 16, 2014

NOTE: The Kindle Book Review received a free copy of this book for an independent, fair, and honest review. We are not associated with the author or Amazon.

This vigorous retelling of Uncle Tom’s Cabin focuses on George Harris, the young and innovative enslaved worker who ran away to find Canada and freedom for his family. Waters aims to find the story still alive behind the outdated original novel. Unlike the original, this book does not need to rely on the persuasion of white characters (or readers) of the essential equality of mankind. It tells a tense and nerve-wracking story of brutality and escape. The dialogue is a little weak, and I would have appreciated a darker, more lyrical prose. Nonetheless, I am looking forward to the sequels for a full reexamination of the themes that Stowe did not have the perspective to face.

My review for KBR of Per-Bast: A Tale of Cats in Ancient Egypt by Lara-Dawn Stiegler

June 25, 2014

NOTE: The Kindle Book Review received a free copy of this book for an independent, fair, and honest review. We are not associated with the author or Amazon.

As someone who loves historical fiction about ancient Egypt, I was quickly and easily drawn in, but this is Egyptian high fantasy, a little something different. It is a mythological tale, full of gods and monsters. I have to admit that I initially judged this book by its concept, because: cats. Talking cats. It did not sound promising. However, the strength of the prose and the solidity of the setting won me over. Besides, if you have ever known a “supervisor cat,” the kind of cat who watches everything you do, it is not hard to believe they are well up on human and divine affairs. I was also interested in the use of the actual drama between Ramesses III and Queen Tiye – a true story that did not end well. In sum, I recommend this book as a real departure from the run of ancient Egyptian novels.

– L.T. Patridge (The Kindle Book Review)

My review for KBR of St. Bartholomew’s Man by Mary Delorme

June 20, 2014

NOTE: The Kindle Book Review received a free copy of this book for an independent, fair, and honest review. We are not associated with the author or Amazon.

This book reminded me of the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy in its constant examination of faith as the cornerstone of daily medieval life. It does not examine faith as deeply and bitterly as those books, however. Rahere is almost too good of a protagonist, but he was very much a real person, and it is amazing what he achieved in the days before people had careers, or could choose very much how they governed their lives after they began.
I wish we had seen more of how difficult it was to master early medieval instruments, how rudimentary and difficult they were, the callouses on the fingertips, etc. But overall I was impressed with the firm grasp of contemporary history. The reign of William Rufus and the following years must have been rough on the peasantry, and Delorme depicts that unflinchingly, especially in the case of William Rufus. I am definitely interested in checking out more of the works of Mary Delorme.

The Amarna Period: Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth, by Naguib Mahfouz, trans. Tagreid Abu-Hassabo

May 30, 2014

If I were to recommend only one novel about the Amarna Period to anyone, it would be this slender novel by Naguib Mahfouz. This is not because I enjoyed it the most, or because it was the most exciting. It is because it is by a Nobel Prize winner and, more importantly, an actual Egyptian.
The novel is written in a Rashomon style, with the literary care that most ancient Egyptian historical novels lack. There is no dwelling on splendid palace grounds, lush ancient nights or grand monuments; Mahfouz felt no need for this. The evanescence and delicacy of his straightforward prose is enough. Salacious details and invented love triangles are beneath him. He worked with the archaeological evidence known best to him at the time.
However, like archaeological evidence, the novel itself leaves one strangely unsatisfied, and wishing that there had been more.

The Amarna Period: Akhnaton, King of Egypt, by Dmitri Merezhkovsky, trans. Natalie Duddington (1927)

May 27, 2014

Thanks to this list, I was able to find some more fiction for this project of mine.   Merezhkovsky’s novel is one of the earliest listed that is available to me in English.  Nonetheless, it is Russian through and through.

Historical accuracy is beside the point in this work.  Tutankhamon-Tutankhaton is not depicted as a little boy or teenager, but as an officious ambassador of Egypt under Akhnaton.  In a previous book, not available to me, he had gone to Crete and rescued a Cretan dancer named Dio from her execution.  Why he did so is not made clear; he doesn’t have much interest in her, and his personality switches from generous to self-interested to murderous at the touch of narrative need.  The characters wander in and out, ebb and flow from decent to wicked.

This is, however, beside the point.  Unlike most other authors of novels on the subject, Merezhkovsky does not write this book to tell us What Really Happened.  It is a mystical work, jumbling characters and religions from the ancient Near East to ramble towards its thesis – Akhnaton was a pre-incarnation of Christ.  I do not suggest that Merezhkovsky believed this literally, in the way that Ahmed Osman believes that Moses and Akhnaton were the same person, but I also doubt that Merezhkovsky would put so much importance in the question of what he literally believed.

I am not terribly familiar with Russian literature, but this is unmistakably a book written by someone in exile from the Soviet regime, as Merezhkovsky was.  In no other book have I read about a quarrel with a minor bureaucrat to secure a pass to visit the palace.  One lost and despairing character soliloquizes to the dead king: “This is what I am driven to in my dreariness!  It is dreary, Enra, very dreary.  Can it be as bad in your world?  Always the same thing – rotten fish in eternity . . .  Or is it rather different with you?  Is it worse or better?  You are silent?”  Two pages of this.  It’s like an ancient Near Eastern Tolstoy novel, and about as easy to love.

You’re unlikely to run across a copy of this, except perhaps in a good used bookstore.  But if you do, and you pick it up, it shouldn’t be for the experience of typical ancient Egyptian historical fiction.  Merezhkovsky wrote from a time and a perspective that we do not now have, and yet we are no farther or closer to the real people of the Amarna Period than he was.  The book is valuable in itself for other reasons, and those are perhaps best appreciated by a reader of Russian, not myself.

My review for KBR of Mardi Gras Two-Step by Barry M. Vass

May 20, 2014

NOTE: The Kindle Book Review received a free copy of this book for an independent, fair, and honest review. We are not associated with the author or Amazon.

This dark 1970s police procedural gives way to an otherworldly horror. I found it a fast, gripping read, well painted in broad strokes and decently characterized. The madness of Mardi Gras is so well evoked that it becomes unclear whether the town is in turmoil because of the constant unsolved murders of young women or simply because it is Mardi Gras.

Female characters don’t come off well in this novel, although it is most likely because cops in the ’70s tended not to get on well with them. The ending was a slight disappointment, leaving loose ends untied, but nonetheless as full of dark, weird action as the rest of the book. I was left wanting more of this book, perhaps even a sequel.

My review for KBR of Earthquakes (a prequel to Resurrecting Arcadia) by Melissa Miles McCarter

May 16, 2014

NOTE: The Kindle Book Review received a free copy of this book for an independent, fair, and honest review. We are not associated with the author or Amazon.

This brief, warm novella introduces the reader to the world of Arcadia, Missouri, a struggling and struggled-over Ozark town.  Three women separate in time, from the 1840s through the present day, will find their lives intertwined and affected in the coming novel, Resurrecting Arcadia.
The characters are a little flat as yet, and the exposition about Arcadia itself might have been better saved for the novel following.  But the novel has ample chance to remedy this.  Although I have not yet had a chance to read Resurrecting Arcadia, I would certainly want to begin with this novella.

My review for KBR of The Wrath Inside by RR Gall (2014)

March 2, 2014

NOTE: The Kindle Book Review received a free copy of this book for an independent, fair, and honest review. We are not associated with the author or Amazon.

This novel of Roman-occupied Palestine, circa 15 A.D., is a sharp and engaging read.  It does not, despite its setting, foreshadow the events of the life of Jesus.  Instead, it focuses on Ezera, a teenager with an ordinary, troubled family and dead-end life, who wanted nothing to do with politics and treachery.  The threats of a mysterious stranger and the ensuing wrath of the occupying Roman forces push him into increasingly desperate schemes to keep his village safe.
Despite a few linguistic anachronisms, easily overlooked, the historical setting is firm and well established.  The action is constant, grim and gripping.  The outcomes of the teenagers’ plots to help each other and the town only increases the pathos of life under Roman rule, with its constant and shocking brutality.  For anyone with an appetite for realistic historical fiction of the period, I recommend this book.