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.