Twenty years of Reading the Past: some highlights and reflections

I started posting regularly at Reading the Past twenty years ago this week, in late March 2006. This was during the heyday of blogging. The historical fiction blogosphere was a vibrant place, with new reviews going up daily and avid discussions taking place online across the globe.

The publishing industry didn’t know what to do with book bloggers, these so-called amateur reviewers who set their own rules and didn’t answer to an outside authority. Newspapers’ book sections were being eliminated (sound familiar?), and so the groundswell of individual, enthusiastic online voices could no longer be ignored. We had several hugely popular BookBloggerCons in NYC, held just before BookExpo at the Javits Center, as well as meet-and-greet opportunities where I met reviewers and publicists I’m still in touch with today. The book blogging community is awesome.

In some circles, though, bloggers weren’t exactly seen as respectable. Even by (especially by) many literary authors with new books out.

Writer Richard Ford, famously, had strong opinions about bloggers. To quote from the NYT article linked above (“Are Book Reviewers Out of Print,” Motoko Rich, May 2, 2007):

Of course literary bloggers argue that they do provide a multiplicity of voices. But some authors distrust those voices. Mr. Ford, who has never looked at a literary blog, said he wanted the judgment and filter that he believed a newspaper book editor could provide. “Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership,” Mr. Ford said, “in a way that some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute maybe doesn’t.”

Living here in the Midwest, on the outskirts of a small university town 45 miles west of Terre Haute, this was starting to feel personal, but these comments were more galvanizing than discouraging. Reviewing skill isn’t based around geography. Bloggers continued to write and review as we’d always done.

A corner of my bookish basement in the rural Midwest. It’s not a bad place to be.

And now, a couple decades later, as publishers continue to adjust to the myriad ways books are being discussed and discovered, individual voices have become more important than ever.

Book blogs still exist, of course, though the terminology and format have adapted to reader preferences. I remember the first time, a few years ago, I got an email from someone saying she enjoyed my historical fiction newsletter. It hadn’t occurred to me beforehand that my blog had become a newsletter, but the posts did go out over email, so a newsletter it now was. I’m happy with that.

For this major anniversary, I decided to dig through the archive and highlight 20-odd posts that felt significant or memorable in some way, or at least representative of the different types of content I’d been writing. These are in no particular order. For longtime readers of this site, some may be familiar, but hopefully recaps from these older posts will draw your attention to interesting books you haven’t read before.

In 2010, I interviewed author Sarah Dunant about her novel Sacred Hearts, historical fiction about a reluctant new arrival to a convent in 16th-century Ferrara. This was pre-Zoom. For this low-tech interview, I phoned her at her hotel room on one of her US book tours (arranged through her publicist), and I scribbled things down as fast as I could.

Years ago, I wrote up a series of posts called “Reviews of Obscure Books,” covering novels that were super rare, long-forgotten, or both. I may revive it someday. Diana Norman’s witty and profound King of the Last Days, set during the reign of England’s Henry II, is a book I wish would be brought back into print. For a time it had been reissued as an ebook, I believe, but I can’t find it anymore. Her Adelia Aguilar medieval mysteries written as Ariana Franklin, set during the same era, are easier to find.

A favorite review, from 2007, for Jude Morgan’s The Taste of Sorrow, about the Brontë sisters. Loved this book! The US title of this novel is Charlotte and Emily (poor Anne, always getting left out).

All the historical novel titles you could ever need. Are we sensing a trend in book naming conventions here? This started with All the Light We Cannot See and went absolutely crazy.

In 2013, I took part in the online historical fiction course called Plagues, Witches, and War run by professor and historical novelist Bruce Holsinger from the University of Virginia. It was on the Coursera MOOC platform. This course is still free and still running, so if you’re in search of deeper background on the genre, its history, and its practitioners, I recommend it. As one of the course assignments, we were asked to describe a primary source we’d found in an archive and write about it. I found an interesting one housed at the Library of Congress website, but deeper investigation led me down an unexpected path. Read more at A Puritan Maiden’s Diary: The Early American Primary Source That Wasn’t. The title gives away my conclusion, and the research was fascinating. I emailed the LC afterward about the supposed primary source, and they removed it from their archive.

Sharyn McCrumb’s The Devil Amongst the Lawyers, set in the Blue Ridge Mountains during the Depression, is based on a real-life court case. I enjoy reading McCrumb’s novels not only because of her beautiful settings, but because they offer plenty to talk about, even if not everything works for me. Her The Ballad of Tom Dooley, based on a traditional Appalachian folk ballad, is another such.

Reading lists covering trends and other popular topics: women in science and math, Jewish historical fiction, women and WWII, the Tudor era, and books with memorable cover designs.

Unintentional travel-by-novel. I have a habit of doing this, visiting a place and discovering afterward that I’d recently bought a novel set there. Such was the case with Chris Nickson’s The Crooked Spire, set in medieval Chesterfield, England, and with Elizabeth St.John’s The Lady of the Tower, set partly at the Lydiard Park estate in Wiltshire. In the instance of Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code, I visited Bletchley Park over a year before reading the novel, and memories of the trip definitely enhanced the reading experience.

Just because these are really good books: Lynn Cullen’s Twain’s End (about Samuel Clemens’ relationship with his secretary Isabel Lyon); Maryse Condé’s re-creation of her grandmother’s life, My Mother’s Mother; Sujata Massey’s The Widows of Malabar Hill, a mystery of 1920s Bombay (which now has many sequels); and Sally Gunning’s The Rebellion of Jane Clarke, one of the author’s winning historicals of colonial Massachusetts.

And to wrap things up, some more recommendations, all set in the agricultural regions and towns of the Midwest: Laird Hunt’s Zorrie, a woman’s ordinary yet uncommon life across 20th-century Indiana and Illinois; Laurie Loewenstein’s Unmentionables, in which a progressive female lecturer finds herself stuck in small-town Illinois in 1917; Michelle Hoover’s The Quickening, about women’s lives in the farming region of early 20th-century western Iowa; my interview with Rosslyn Elliott about Fairer than Morning, her inspirational romance set in Rushville, Ohio in the 1820s; The Island of Doves by Kelly O’Connor McNees, set on Mackinac Island (Michigan) in the 1830s; and Evergreen by Rebecca Rasmussen, who pairs her offbeat characters with a setting of the northern Minnesota backwoods in the late 1930s. If you think of this region as “flyover country,” read these novels to get a glimpse of the cultural history and fascinating stories found in smaller places.

Whether you’ve been visiting this site for twenty years or only the last twenty minutes, or something in between, thanks very much for reading.

A problem like Medea: Natalie Haynes and her new Greek myth retelling, No Friend to This House

Unless you’ve been chained to a rock off the Mediterranean coast for the past decade, you’ll likely have seen the growing cluster of new novels reinterpreting the lives of women (goddesses included!) from classical mythology. They look at the ancient tales through a female lens, allowing us into the perspectives of unfairly sidelined characters or those not granted sufficient voice by their original male authors. Andromeda, Circe, Ariadne, Aphrodite, Phaedra, Hera… they’ve all had their turn, some more than one.

The story of Medea poses a conundrum for a feminist reboot. The daughter of King Aietes of Colchis, she gave vital, magical help to Greek adventurer Jason after he and his Argonauts set sail to steal the golden fleece from her royal father. She also fell in love with Jason and wed him. Considered an barbarian foreigner after the couple moved back to Jason’s homeland, he abandoned her to pursue marriage with a princess of Corinth – after which Medea took drastic, violent revenge against him via their sons.

Medea is an infamous example of a bad mother. How do you rehabilitate that?

Enter Natalie Haynes: broadcaster, classicist, and experienced chronicler of other mythological lives via novels such as Stone Blind (2023), about the tragedy of Medusa, and A Thousand Ships, about the Trojan War’s women. No Friend to This House, a polyphonic tale like its predecessors, doesn’t so much reinvent Medea and other female figures from Euripides’ original text as much as bring them to the forefront and explore their actions and motivations. In doing so, she offers much to think about.

Haynes follows the myth’s standard outline, beginning with Jason’s sea voyage to distant Colchis, on the Black Sea. Departing from tradition, nearly all the viewpoints are female, and they switch off with each chapter. Those familiar with the source material are best equipped to follow the narrative thread through this labyrinth of stories. They all connect to Jason’s trip, not always to each other, so the uninitiated may find the telling a bit choppy – at least until Medea makes her first appearance, around halfway through.

With the men’s quest decentered, this approach allows for the discovery of interesting, previously tangential characters. Among them are the murderous women of Lemnos and the odd backstory to their crime. With deep grief and anger, a woman named Theophane shares a lament for her son, imprinting her forgotten existence (and his) on the reader’s memory:

No one speaks of the golden ram, they prefer to focus on what was important to Jason and his Argonauts: the golden fleece. Such a simple shift in emphasis, you scarcely notice a living creature becoming the remnant of a dead one. And perhaps you also don’t notice the small slip of the tongue, either? Because fleece is not the right word to use … [Jason] was on a quest to find the skin of the creature who wore it, a mythical creature, who was mine, my child, taken from me when he was still so new.

The dove sent to test the Argo’s passage between clashing rocks observes what she sees, as does the goddess who caused Medea’s terrible lovesickness for Jason. Likewise the river Phyllis, Medea’s sister Chalciope, and even the Argo herself. And many more.

As for Jason – the man Medea loves who so cruelly betrays her – he returns to Greece in valiant triumph, but as the years pass, he finds life as a former hero confusing and difficult. His ego is hungry, so he looks for people to feed it. It’s his fate to have his story seen through the female gaze in this revamped version, and the novel’s core tragedy ultimately turns on his actions.

You may be curious how Haynes handles the act that transformed Medea, in the popular mindset, from a sympathetic witch into a murderous one. No spoilers here, but the novel’s nail-biting finale fits with Haynes’s portrayal of this multifaceted and complex woman.

No Friend to This House was published by Harper (US/Canada) in March 2026, and by Mantle (UK) last September. This review is an expansion and substantial reworking of a much shorter review I’d written for Booklist which appeared in their February 1, 2026 issue.

Self-discovery in Tudor England, times two: Wendy J. Dunn's Shades of Yellow

If you love reading author’s notes in historical novels, learning about the background to writers’ research processes and the factors affecting their choices, Wendy J. Dunn’s Shades of Yellow will be an ideal choice for your TBR pile.

This uniquely constructed multi-period novel opens in 2010. Lucy Ellis is nearly done with the manuscript for her first novel, a work of biographical fiction about Amy Robsart, the heiress wife of English nobleman Robert Dudley. Amy’s shocking death and the resulting scandal – she was found with a broken neck at the bottom of a short staircase at her residence, Cumnor Place, in 1560 – put an end to his future marriage prospects with her rival for his affections, Queen Elizabeth I.

Dunn sets up interesting equivalences between her modern heroine and her 16th-century subject. Lucy is a breast cancer survivor, a disease Amy may have suffered from herself, and they were both betrayed by their husbands (Lucy’s soon-to-be-ex-husband, Ben, cheated on her with her good friend). Lucy feels these similarities give her unique insight into Amy’s mindset, though she’s self-aware enough to question how much of herself she’s putting into her depiction of Amy.

A consummate researcher dedicated to historical accuracy (in other words, she’s a writer after our own heart), Lucy insists on flying from Australia to England for a six-week trip. She knows a firsthand view of Amy’s former haunts will add color and depth to her story, and she hopes to make it easier to visualize Amy living there in her own time.

But Lucy arrives across the globe under a cloud of worry. She has a small brain tumor, meaning her cancer may have returned, and her headaches are worsening. After they learn the truth, her friends and family are distraught that Lucy’s delaying her biopsy.

Readers may find Lucy’s choice unwise at best, but she’s a determined woman. Lucy presses on with her novel regardless, perhaps sensing it may be too late if she doesn’t seize every moment to complete it. At the same time, Lucy faces memories from her own past, including that of a long-ago teenage romance, and persistent emails from her estranged husband.

The stakes are high in both accounts, as the two women strive to take control of their lives as best they're able. In recounting the parallel journeys of both Lucy and Amy, Shades of Yellow doesn’t use the story-within-a-story structure we’re most familiar with, but something more original and effective in showing how a historical novel comes to be.

The scenes involving Amy don’t always occur in chronological order but arise organically via Lucy’s writing journey and as she reads parts of her manuscript to family members, including her English grandfather, himself a writer.

We see Amy in the afterlife, speaking with her Angel, desperate for a word from her husband now that he’s also passed into the beyond. As Lucy visits Amy’s burial site, we see Amy kneeling in church, desperate and frightened, while Lucy tunes into the emotions she senses from that mental image and gains new understanding about her subject. Amy as an adolescent, during her first bloom of love with her Rob. Amy on her last day of life, sending her servants away. And in the modern strand, Lucy revises her book, pens new chapters, considers new angles, adjusts her timeline, fills in “these vast gaps of unknowing with her imagination.” 

It all gets wonderfully meta. Lucy’s grandfather questions why Amy’s guardian angel needs to be included (“So, you’re certain you want to write a more experimental historical novel?”), and Lucy ponders a suggestion from her grandfather’s literary agent, who spurs her to consider adding a witchcraft thread to attract an editor. “How on Earth do I weave these witches into my story without having to pull everything apart?” she thinks.

Walking through Tudor England on two levels, both firsthand and via the stories revealed later through its artifacts, is an affecting, multi-dimensional experience. Not all answers are forthcoming, which seems appropriate for a novel presenting the ways that people come to grips with the unknown.

Shades of Yellow was published by Other Terrain Press (Australia) in September 2025.

A passionate woman's pursuit of love and art: Orange Wine

For Inés Camargo de Scala, a young wife and mother in early 20th-century Colombia, certain things have always come easy. The youngest daughter of five in a blended family, she’s beautiful and artistically talented and has no problem attracting men.

She has more trouble maintaining relationships, like with her ordinary-looking sisters and with her romantic partners. She also runs afoul of the Catholic church, even though her path into a “sinful” life was caused by someone else. Married to a handsome guitar player who soon reveals himself as a hot-tempered slacker, Inés struggles to balance her pursuit of love with societal expectations.

Described by the author as inspired by her grandparents, Inés’s story takes place mostly in the small town of Paipa (“located in a part of Colombia that few people visit more than once”) and the capital of Bogotá, intermingled with whirlwind trips to Europe.

From the opening pages, in which Inés leaves her bed after childbirth to discover her husband, Alessandro, has run off with her sister, it feels we’ve entered an Isabel Allende-style generational saga of women’s self-actualization, complete with family ghosts and claims of second sight.

The style here, however, sets it apart. Inés’s narration is unpretentious and brisk, reading like an idiosyncratic memoir. She dwells much on her emotions, but it’s hard to feel the impact of pivotal life events when they’re skimmed over in a few paragraphs. Inés’s children get little opportunity to show personality; likewise for her unmarried sisters, who work for a living while Inés inherits the family mansion.

The sense of place is strong, creating appeal for readers who enjoy uncommon settings, but the timeframe feels indistinct. More fleshed-out situations and characterizations—and more showing instead of telling—would have lent the novel more weight. That said, it holds one’s attention well and makes eloquent points about gender-based double standards.

Orange Wine (Bindery Books, Sept. 2025) is the author's debut novel, and I'd reviewed it originally for the Historical Novel Society. The author is a native of Bogotá, Colombia and now lives in the US.

The press has a publishing model that's been gaining attention. Bindery Books, based in San Francisco, incorporates online influencers (called "tastemakers") into key roles in the acquisitions and marketing process. In addition to hosting a membership platform for bookish communities and content discovery, they've offered tastemakers with significant followings the power to create their own branded imprints, with support from the press. Their site lists 12 such imprints, and Orange Wine is published under the Mareas imprint, which has published five books so far. Alongside traditional marketing and publicity from the press (I discovered this book on NetGalley), the tastemaker promotes their books to their social media followers.  

Read more at an article from the Los Angeles Times from Feb. 18th: Malia Mendez, "This publisher enlists 'bookfluencers' to choose its titles. Is it working?"  The press aims to support underrepresented voices through this model, and unlike with many publishers, the authors aren't expected to shoulder any marketing load. I imagine many will find this a refreshing change.

Orange Wine was an agented submission to the press, as are two-thirds of all submissions, per the LA Times article. With the strong Gen Z involvement and vibe, fantasy (including historical fantasy and romantasy), SF, gothics, and contemporary fiction are well-represented in their list, mainstream historical fiction not so much, aside from this one example.  Even though aspects of this book didn't work for me, I'm interested to see what the press does next and am midway through watching a fascinating video from Marines, the tastemaker who chose Orange Wine, who speaks about her selection process and what she's learned about the industry.

A preview of spring & summer 2026 in historical fiction

It’s already been a long winter. The weather here in east central Illinois has perked up a bit recently, which has me looking forward to spring and summer. (My commiserations with those back east who are still digging out from the huge snowstorm; winter isn’t over here yet either.) In terms of historical fiction, the coming months offer a good variety of upcoming novels. Below are sixteen that looked especially enticing. Usually for these previews I feature either ten or twelve books, but I had trouble limiting myself. They’re in order by publication date. I’ve read three of them so far.

The Lost Girl of Craven County, Emily Matchar (Putnam)
Release date: April 14
New Bern, North Carolina, has had a small Jewish community for centuries; I appreciate learning about lesser-known Jewish history via fiction. Set during the Depression, Matchar’s second novel (after In the Shadow of the Greenbrier) is a historical mystery about a young woman from New Bern’s Little Jerusalem and a shocking discovery she makes.

Margery & Me, Maryka Biaggio (Regal House)
Release date: April 21
Biaggio writes historical novels based on real people (see her earlier guest posts on this site: The Risks of Writing about Real Historical Figures and Fidelity to the Truth in Biographical Fiction). Her latest should interest anyone fascinated by the spiritualist movement in 1920s America, as it looks closely at psychic medium Margery Crandon, a woman previously unfamiliar to me, and Harry Houdini’s determination to debunk her.

The House of Boleyn, Tracy Borman (Hodder & Stoughton/Atlantic Monthly)
Release date: April 23 (UK); August 4 (US) 

Have you been noticing a mini-Tudor renaissance in fiction? In a decades-spanning generational saga, historian Borman zooms in on Anne Boleyn’s family story, starting when her determined father arrives at Henry VIII’s court in 1509.

Edmonia, Brianne Baker (Dafina/Kensington)
Release date: April 28
Baker’s debut is biographical fiction about Black-Ojibwe sculptor Edmonia Lewis, a woman whose artistic accomplishments and eventful life and travels deserve greater attention. In mid-February, Lewis was the subject of an article in the New York Times written as a lead-up to a new museum exhibition about her work.

Mrs. Benedict Arnold, Emma Parry (Zando)
Release date: April 28
Literary agent Parry investigates the inner life and motives of Peggy Shippen of Philadelphia, aka Mrs. Benedict Arnold, in a novel that asks how large a role she played in her husband’s treason. Having read and enjoyed Allison Pataki’s The Traitor’s Wife, I look forward to this new retelling.

A Founding Mother, Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie (William Morrow)
Release date: May 5
A timely publication for the semiquincentennial (a word you’ll be seeing frequently this year) of America’s founding, Dray and Kamoie’s latest collaborative biographical novel focuses on Abigail Adams: wife and mother of presidents and a smart political voice in her own right.

Daughters of the Tide, Arianne James (HQ/HarperCollins Australia)
Release date: May 26
A gothic family mystery (and a debut) set in 1920s Tasmania, featuring a seaside mansion and eerie dreams of seals and selkies. It won’t be spring in Australia when it’s released, but it’s expected out in a few months wherever you’re located.

A Fortune of Sand, Ruta Sepetys (Ballantine)
Release date: May 26
The adult debut from an author celebrated for her YA historicals. During Prohibition, Marjorie Lennox, youngest daughter in an eccentric, wealthy family from the Detroit suburbs, stumbles into odd mysteries when she accepts an artistic residency. I’ve just finished this; all I’ll say for now is that I’m glad to have read it early, without having seen any spoilery reviews online.

Land, Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf/Tinder Press)
Release date: June 2
O’Farrell may be best known for Hamnet these days, but Land – her most ambitious novel – is different in scope and more personal. It covers, primarily, the decades after Ireland’s Great Hunger and centers on the uncanny aftermath of a quiet man’s mapmaking trip to western Ireland.

Children of the Wild, Kevin Powers (Harper)
Release date: June 9
WWII novels proliferate; there are noticeably fewer WWI novels. This work of literary fiction tells the story of three young people from the mountains of rural Virginia whose lives, overseas and at home, are altered with the world at war.

Daughters of the Sun and Moon, Lisa See (Scribner)
Release date: June 9
See writes gorgeous novels about women in Chinese and Chinese American history. Her new novel opens in Los Angeles in 1870, when anti-Chinese prejudice was pervasive, and follows three different women beginning new lives there.

Mrs. Dickens, Emily Howes (Phoenix/W&N UK)
Release date: June 11
Posterity hasn’t always been kind to Charles Dickens’ wife, Catherine (Kate), whom—after a loving start to their marriage and many children—he left for another woman and tried to have committed. Howes’ (The Painter’s Daughters) second novel illuminates Kate’s viewpoint as a wronged woman and cookbook author. Per the author’s website, recipes are included. No US edition that I could locate, though I’m happy to be corrected.

Consider the Ravens, Cressida Downing (No Exit Press)
Release date: July 16
This first in a new series set on Holy Island – Lindisfarne, off England’s northeast coast – in the late 15th century features a female scribe, her secret past, a monastery, and murder. Lindisfarne is a beautiful, memorable place that I’m eager to revisit via fiction.

The Story Keeper, Kelly Rimmer (MIRA)
Release date: July 21
Rimmer’s dual-period Australian gothic centers on a crumbling mansion called Wurimbirra, the modern art restorer who purchases her childhood home, a long-lost manuscript, and the family secrets it dredges up. Its title is The Midnight Estate in Australia and the UK. 

Runner, Ashton Lattimore (Ballantine)
Release date: July 28
Lattimore’s debut novel, All We Were Promised, was a fast-moving tale of Black women’s friendship in 1830s Philadelphia. In Runner, set during Prohibition, a young Black woman turns rumrunner along the northeastern seaboard, taking her father’s place after his suspicious death.

The Ladies Hall, Vanessa Miller (Thomas Nelson)
Release date: August 11
The origin story of three future civil rights leaders—Black women of different backgrounds who became classmates and friends while attending Oberlin College in the 1880s. Based on a true story. After reading the author’s previous novel The Filling Station, about two sisters in the aftermath of the Tulsa Race Massacre, this one is on my list.

Back in Kansas, darkly: a review of Gordon McAlpine's After Oz

Sequels to classic literature can vary in quality. At one end is lightweight fan fiction that pales in comparison to the work it continues. On the other, we find clever gems that honor the originals while leading us in unconsidered directions … novels that affect what we take away from the stories they’re based upon.

Gordon McAlpine’s After Oz is one of the latter. It’s a grimly atmospheric tale, a rural noir that opens in one genre and spirals into another, thanks to the foresight of one of its main characters. Some of the twists it takes are unexpected, but its most surprising aspect may be that Dorothy Gale, the delightful eleven-year-old girl who was front and center in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (and the movie adaptation), has little on-page time.

How would the residents of an insular Kansas settlement, circa 1896, react when an orphaned child raised by an elderly couple mysteriously reappears on a neighbor’s property, unharmed, four days after a destructive tornado swept through the prairie? McAlpine took this question for his premise and ran with it, crafting an edgy story about small-town prejudice and harmful delusions.

Dorothy doesn’t waver from her story of meeting talking animals and visiting an emerald city. She speaks of befriending a good witch and killing a wicked one, completely by accident, by throwing water at her. The girl’s nonsensical remarks have the townsfolk, especially the local reverend, concerned about her state of mind—especially when she proclaims, blasphemously, that “not all witches are bad.”

Things worsen after a reclusive spinster in her fifties—a crotchety woman nobody much liked—is found dead in her home. Hearing Dorothy’s comments about having “melted” a witch, the authorities get involved, and all’s not looking good for the young girl. Not only does she have visions they find demonic, but she may be a murderer.

The narration alternates between an unnamed resident of Sunbonnet, Kansas, who hardly emulates the Christian values he espouses—or maybe the collective voice of many such residents; it isn’t clear—and a 28-year-old psychologist from back East, Dr. Evelyn Grace Wilford. She arrives in town to interview Dorothy for her research after learning about her case from her cousin, a Chicago-based newspaper reporter. Readers of classic literature should recognize his name.

There are no chapter headings to distinguish their sections, but there’s really no trouble telling the two voices apart. With Dorothy’s Aunt Emily ill after a stroke, and her uncle taking to the bottle after his farm was obliterated, Evelyn realizes she’s the only person who can save Dorothy from permanent institutionalization—and the only way to do so is discover who killed poor Alvina Clough herself.

And so we find ourselves in a murder mystery with Evelyn as detective, sorting through whatever clues she can discern. Not a simple task as a woman and an outsider in an unfamiliar, close-knit place, but she willingly takes up the role she needs to play. Those with malign intent, of course, fail to recognize their villainy. Many villains don’t.

Part of the ending is a bit far-fetched and doesn’t feel necessary, but among literary sequels, this stands out for its complex plotting and originality. Sadly, the author passed away three years before his final novel, After Oz, was published.

Gordon McAlpine's After Oz appeared from Crooked Lane in 2024 (reviewed from a personal copy).

Gish Jen's genre-bending novel about her Chinese immigrant mother (and herself), Bad Bad Girl

As she details in the beginning of her fictionalized memoir, the author, Gish Jen, was constantly scapegoated by her mother, Agnes, who was born into a well-to-do banking family in Shanghai in 1925 and died in New York during Covid. Why did a woman treated so dismissively by her own mother, and who endured difficulties throughout her life, act so harshly toward Gish, her American-born daughter?

“Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk.” This refrain echoes from one generation to another, directed toward females too outspoken to be controlled.

Within this book, Jen performs an extraordinarily generous act, seeking to understand the circumstances that shaped Agnes and the origins of their troubled history. She invents storylines and motivations when needed, since her mother remained tight-lipped about much of her background.

Through Jen’s first-person voice, her mother’s story unfolds, interspersed with imagined conversations between them: Gish gently probing for explanations, and Agnes reacting to her writing choices— “tactful as a sledgehammer,” judgmental, and silently vulnerable in turn.

Named Loo Shu-hsin, her mother grows up knowing her sex is a disappointment. She adores books and receives an education at a modern Catholic school, where she’s renamed for St. Agnes. Her childhood nursemaid’s abrupt firing remains a traumatic memory.

She bravely boards a ship for America in her twenties, alone, to pursue a PhD, never returning to China; overwhelmed with childcare soon after her marriage, she also never finishes her doctorate, a constant regret. Abandoning her past isn’t easy, since letters from her family, wanting money and trapped during the Communist takeover, frequently arrive, using discreet language for their self-protection.

Some later sections, breezing through years at a stretch, read rather dry. But this unique account, which is pointed and unguardedly honest, shows how fiction can illuminate truths too complex and deep-rooted to be spoken.

I reviewed this novel originally for the Historical Novels Review.  You may be wondering about the original cover design. Having read the book, I think it perfectly captures the novel's themes: two individuals, intertwined with one another in a difficult relationship they can't escape. Yet both still exult in their own freedom of thought, as shown through the lines of a Tang Dynasty poem spoken by the novel's characters:

Goose, goose, goose!
You lift your neck to the sky and sing--
White down bobbing on the green water,

Red feet pedaling the clear waves.

Gish Jen's Bad Bad Girl was published by Knopf in October 2025. The UK publisher is Granta.