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Friday, April 10, 2026

A woman's adventures in Gold Rush California: Mary Smathers' Unfamiliar Territory

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Reinvention is the name of the game in Smathers’ fabulous epic of Gold Rush California, which sees her heroine, Juanita Castro de la Cruz, f...
2 comments:
Sunday, March 29, 2026

Twenty years of Reading the Past: some highlights and reflections

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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...
8 comments:
Saturday, March 21, 2026

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

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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 nov...
Sunday, March 15, 2026

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

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If you love reading author’s notes in historical novels, learning about the background to writers’ research processes and the factors affect...
2 comments:
Sunday, March 08, 2026

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

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For Inés Camargo de Scala, a young wife and mother in early 20th-century Colombia, certain things have always come easy. The youngest daught...
Friday, February 27, 2026

A preview of spring & summer 2026 in historical fiction

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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 spr...
Friday, February 20, 2026

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

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Sequels to classic literature can vary in quality. At one end is lightweight fan fiction that pales in comparison to the work it continues....
4 comments: