Historical fiction award winners from ALA Midwinter 2019

Greetings from the frozen Midwest!

On Sunday and Monday, a number of literary awards were announced at the American Library Association's Midwinter conference in Seattle. Although I wasn't in attendance, I was following along as best I could on Twitter.

Here are the historical novels that were honored at the conference (and please let me know if I've missed any). Links go to the ALA press releases.  I had reviewed some of them, too, and will link to the reviews where applicable.

On the 2019 Reading List, which selects the best in genre fiction for adult readers:

In the Historical Fiction category, the winner was Amanda Skenandore's Between Earth and Sky (Kensington), which focuses on a woman, her childhood friendship with a Native American man, and the forced assimilation taking place at Indian boarding schools in the late 19th century.

On the shortlist for Historical Fiction were:
The Butcher’s Daughter, by Victoria Glendinning, set in Tudor England;
Circe by Madeline Miller, a retelling of the Greek myth;
Dear Mrs. Bird, by AJ Pearce, about a young woman who becomes an advice columnist in wartime London; and
A Well Behaved Woman: A Novel of the Vanderbilts, by Therese Anne Fowler, about Alva Vanderbilt.

In the category of Horror, the winner was The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell, a creepy and unusual haunted house story set in 1860s England.

In Mystery, The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey, a mystery about the first woman lawyer practicing in 1920s Bombay, was the category winner.

The winner of the 2019 Sophie Brody Medal for Achievement in Jewish Literature was The Watchman of Old Cairo by Michael David Lukas, a multi-period novel about a university student discovering his family history in Cairo, Egypt.

On the 2018 ALA Notable Books list were two historical novels:
Esi Edugyan, Washington Black, about a young boy's flight from slavery; and
Michael Ondaatje, Warlight, literary fiction set after WWII.

Among the Alex Award winners, for adult fiction that appeal to teen readers, were Madeline Miller's Circe and Naomi Novik's historical fantasy Spinning Silver.

Both Newbery Honor books, geared toward young readers, were historical fiction:
Veera Hiranandani, The Night Diary, a middle-grade novel set during the Partition of India in 1947;
Catherine Gilbert Murdock, The Book of Boy, a medieval adventure novel.

... and the Margaret A. Edwards Award, for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults, went to M. T. Anderson, who has written many historical novels for that age group, including The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.

Which ones have you read?

A Love Letter to Houston: a guest post by Dawn Adams Cole, author of Drops of Cerulean

Dawn Adams Cole is stopping by today with an essay about the historical background to her new novel, Drops of Cerulean, which is published today.  Set in Houston over seven decades in the 20th century and beyond, the novel is a family saga with a reincarnation theme.

~

"A Love Letter to Houston"

Dawn Adams Cole

"A love letter to Houston” is how I describe my novel, Drops of Cerulean. And true to form as any good love letter, memories and a spirit of hope permeate the family saga that spans 1930-2014, highlighting the city as both the setting and a prominent character in its own right.

The 1930 start date served as an intentional nod to the city’s ethos. The Houston Metropolitan Research Center, an archival branch that focuses on the history of Houston and located in the Julia Ideson Building of the Houston Public Library, offered a wealth of resources, including newspaper articles, photographs, and letters relating to prominent city events. Although the novel begins in 1930 at the onset of the Great Depression, research confirmed Houston’s unique reaction to this tumultuous time. Before the crash, many Houstonians remained optimistic regarding their future, oil and the Port of Houston serving as indicators of the city’s resilience. Jesse Jones, prominent Houston businessman and philanthropist, brought together city leaders to ensure that no banks in Houston failed during the Great Depression. While the city was not unscathed from the financial crisis, the city was spared the full devastation.

1930 marked the opening of the Merchants and Manufacturer’s Building, now known as the University of Houston Downtown, a building that helped inspire the narrative. Originally planned as a multi-use, commercial building, it welcomed retail, offices, suites, clubs, restaurants, and lounges. Located at the meeting of White Oak Bayou and Buffalo Bayou with railroads bordering the first floor of the building, the structure was amenable to rail and water commerce.

Records of the initial details are limited, but I found the original tenant list and real estate advertisements, which corroborated the aspirations for the building. I embraced the skeletal findings as an opportunity for creative freedom while keeping with the intended spirit – a place that embodied hopes and dreams of a generation, a place that failed in its original aspirations but experienced redemption, albeit decades later, as an educational institution. In this way, the building mirrors the reincarnated souls of the narrative in that it finds resolution and purpose in the next stage.

The Niels Esperson Building appealed to me from the time I was a child frequenting downtown, the bronze color and cupola marking it from its peers. Mrs. Mellie Esperson’s story of boldly erecting the building in her late husband’s name provided a sharp contrast to Ilona’s story as a reticent soul tethered to the memory of her disgraced late husband. While there are an abundance of supporting articles in the archives, a tour of the private building served as the highlight of my research. Jano Nixon Kelley, Director of Marketing for Cameron Management, graciously indulged the request, which included a tour of Mellie Esperson’s private office suite, the floor redesign belonging to an architectural firm, the floor that was intended to serve as a private apartment for Mrs. Esperson, and a vacated 2-floor law office on the top floors. The stories shared and the personal experience of the tour itself supported and enriched the family saga.

author Dawn Adams Cole

Confirming and learning more of the history of the city supported the lore and historical record of my family’s Houston roots, a history infused by the ethos of the city. My great-grandfather immigrated to Texas and founded a machine shop in East Houston in 1929, around the time Jesse Jones helped spare the city from full impact. Although I never met my great-grandfather, I grew up hearing stories of his work ethic and grit. I only knew the machine shop as its location a block from the interstate, but I recall my grandfather sharing his recollections of the time before the interstate when the streetcar ended in East Houston at Wayside. My family’s bold move to continue pursuing their dreams despite the times folded into the spirit of the Petrarkis and Doyle families, a sentiment not unusual for optimistic Houstonians of the time. Personally, this spirit struck a different chord from my paternal side of the family who were once well-to-do New Yorkers prior to the economic crash.

The intentional starting point of 1930 anchored the timeline, and while I knew the general course, struggles, and sentiments of the characters, I enjoyed researching historical and cultural influences to compliment the story. The Flood of 1935 offered a striking setting for Cadmus’ birth, a narrative that lent itself to his father being an active part of the delivery, which was unusual for the time. Researching popular songs during the early '60s provided inspiration to Ilona’s reincarnation as Delphina, and I was pleased with the connection that the Broadway hit Cats debuted around the time Delphina received her First Communion, her struggle on committing to a faith she doubted accented the rebirth she intuitively sensed. Similarly, the James Turrell exhibit in 2013 created the symbolic context for Robert’s passing and supported the idea that there is no death.

While a part of me regards the cultural findings as serendipitous, I believe artistic pursuits mirror our innate, universal desire for hope and redemption. The search may take different forms in different times and different cultures, and perhaps there are periods when the drive is more pronounced. Connecting the dots between the cultural representations during the course of the narrative proved reaffirming and rewarding, and it fueled my belief in our interconnectedness.

In “Love Letters,” an article featured in the Saturday Evening Post, Nina Sankovitch states, “The qualities of a good letter are also the qualities of a good relationship. Letters are the tangible manifestation of the singularity of our kinship, the importance of our shared experiences…” If Sankovitch’s thesis is a litmus test, then I hope my novel fits the bill. I believe Drops of Cerulean embodies the historical ethos of Houston, with the memories and sentiments of the characters a reflection of what we, as humans, continue to experience.

~

About the Novel:

Spanning the years 1930–2014, Drops of Cerulean (on-sale January 29, 2019; Greenleaf Book Group Press) chronicles the lives of Ilona, the daughter of a Greek restaurateur, who marries into a prominent Houston family; her son, Cadmus, who becomes a professor and then moves into a retirement home after his husband passes away; and Delphina, an anxiety-ridden woman with a mysterious recurring dream.

Ilona and Cadmus have a falling out when Cadmus is a young man, and before they are able to reconcile, Ilona dies. Cadmus is plagued with guilt and feels responsible for the death of his mother. Two worlds collide when, years later, Delphina comes to understand that she had been Ilona, Cadmus's mother, in her previous life.

Set in Houston and revolving around the city's ever-changing skyline, Drops of Cerulean is an amazing debut from a gifted writer.

About the Author:

Dawn Adams Cole was born and raised in Houston. She received her BA from the University of St. Thomas and her MEd from Harvard University. She lives in The Heights with her husband, Burton, and her daughters, Caroline and Elizabeth.

Alan Brennert's Daughter of Moloka'i, about the Japanese-American internment, and a companion to the bestselling Moloka'i

Brennert’s Moloka’i (2003), which followed the life of Rachel Kalama, a native Hawaiian sent to the Kalaupapa leper colony on Moloka’i as a child, became a bestseller and word-of-mouth book-club hit. Since then, fans have been clamoring for more about his realistic characters.

His latest focuses on Ruth, the baby Rachel and her Japanese husband were forced to give up. More a companion novel than a sequel, Ruth’s story, beginning in 1917, is compellingly told and strikes all the right emotional notes.

Cherished by the Watanabes, the Japanese couple who adopts her, Ruth still feels like an outsider sometimes, due to her mixed heritage. Her sensitive, compassionate nature carries on into adulthood, making it easy to warm to her. After relocating to California, Ruth’s proud family faces internal turmoil and racial prejudice, and their forced internment in camps after Pearl Harbor is rendered in poignant detail.

Scenes of her reunion with Rachel and their blossoming relationship are immensely touching. A historically solid, ultimately hopeful novel about injustice, survival, and unbreakable family bonds. Expect high demand.

Daughter of Moloka'i will be published next month by St. Martin's Press, and I reviewed it (as above) for Booklist's Dec 1 issue.  I had previously read Moloka'i, which happens to be a longtime favorite, but believe this novel will stand just fine if read on its own.

I often recommend Moloka'i to readers looking for novels that follow a single character through his/her entire life, and Daughter of Moloka'i works as an excellent companion to it, filling in gaps in the narrative related to Ruth's firsthand experience and the relationship between her and her birth mother after they're reunited.  If you're a fan of Moloka'i, you'll want to read it!

Moloka'i is on sale for $2.99 on Kindle (US) over the next few days, for those who haven't read it yet.

Interview with Clarissa Harwood, author of Bear No Malice, set in Edwardian England

Clarissa Harwood's Bear No Malice is an entrancing historical novel set at the same time as her debut, Impossible Saints, but with the antagonist from that book, the arrogant Tom Cross, transformed into a hero -- and it works!  Kidnapped away from London and badly beaten, Tom recuperates at the quiet Surrey cottage of his rescuers, siblings Miranda and Simon Thorne. They have taken up residence in this out-of-the-way locale for reasons having to do with secrets in Miranda's past. Tom, who has just broken off an affair with a married female parishioner, decides to keep his own identity secret from them, including his status as a canon of St. John's Cathedral. The story of Miranda and Tom's growing friendship is moving and unexpected, and the dilemmas they face aptly reflect their personalities and the social mores of the early 20th century.  I'm grateful to Clarissa for answering my questions about her writing.

Bear No Malice may be a companion novel to Impossible Saints, but for new readers, it does stand alone equally well. How challenging was this to accomplish?

When I first started writing Bear No Malice, I didn’t realize I was writing a companion novel: I thought I was just having fun with a writing exercise to see if I could turn Tom, the “villain” of Impossible Saints, into a hero. Or to put it another way, I was trying to view the conflicts between rival clergymen Paul and Tom from Tom’s point of view for a change. I didn’t realize the writing exercise would turn into a whole new novel! Although I always saw the two novels as connected, I worked on them at different times and treated them like separate novels, not thinking about the potential challenges that could arise should they both be published.

The real challenge came after Impossible Saints was published last year and I was working on revisions to Bear No Malice. Because two scenes are the same in both books (but told from different characters’ points of view), and they cover the same time period, I had to change the time frame of Bear No Malice. The biggest difficulty in this respect was having to change the seasons: the original opening chapters of Bear No Malice were set in rural England in the summer, and I had to change them to winter scenes. I nearly despaired when I realized that a gardening scene had to take place in late November, but after an intensive bout of research, I was saved by the hardy parsnip! As someone who hates gardening, I now know far more than I ever wanted to about vegetables that can be harvested in England in November!

This novel shows readers a different side to Tom Cross, the nemesis of Paul from Impossible Saints. I think he makes for a terrific hero! What new aspects of his character did you learn about during the writing?

Thank you! It took me ages to warm up to Tom because I’d thought of him as a villain for so long while inhabiting Paul’s point of view in Impossible Saints. I had to interview Tom many times and learn how to listen to him (to this day he is the only character in any of my novels who ended an interview abruptly by cursing me and walking out!). Many times I rued the day I cavalierly imagined an annoying colleague for Paul while writing the first draft of Impossible Saints without thinking that someday I might need to spend a great deal of time with that annoying colleague. Now I love both Paul and Tom equally: it’s as if they’re two squabbling sons of mine!

My first impression of Tom was of a womanizing, arrogant, domineering man, but as I got to know him better with each draft of the novel, I saw how complex he really was underneath his lies and masks, and his good qualities began to shine through: he’s a genuinely warm person, the best kind of extrovert who wants to help others. And yes, he is deeply flawed, but he’s also willing to learn and change.

What new research did you have to conduct for this novel? What was the most fascinating thing about the research process?

Some of the research was the same for both novels: I needed to know Church of England history as well as the history of penitentiaries, which figure prominently in both novels. (By penitentiaries, I’m referring not to prisons but to the charities first established in Victorian England to reform “fallen” women.)

New research for Bear No Malice with respect to Miranda, my female protagonist and artist, had me delving into the art world of Edwardian England. And without giving too many of Tom’s secrets away, I needed to research social reforms and reformers of the era. I learned about child labor, the slum areas of London, prison reform, and illegal boxing clubs. The most fascinating discovery I made was a real-life historical person, Osborne Jay, who was the perfect mentor for Tom and an important influence on Tom’s work at the end of the novel. This is not the first time I’ve imagined a character who would fit perfectly into my novel’s world, only to find in the course of my research that such a person really existed! What I love most about writing historical fiction is the way research and imagination trigger and feed off each other in an endless cycle.

As a historical novel heroine, Miranda is an original character: she’s reclusive, highly observant, and needs her solitude, and that’s on top of her difficult-to-overcome past. How did you develop her personality?

Some characters seem always to have existed in my mind and are just waiting for a story. Miranda is one of them. I always wanted to write about a Lady of Shalott figure who is isolated from the world because of a secret or curse in her past. Miranda was also an easy character to develop because I can relate to her personality very well. I can understand her better than Lilia (the suffragette protagonist of Impossible Saints) because she’s more conventional on the surface, whereas Lilia is always storming around doing things that scare me. I love Miranda’s quiet strength and stubbornness, and she’s just as much a feminist as Lilia in her own way. In the first stages of writing Bear No Malice, my biggest challenge with Miranda was trying to figure out what she saw in Tom, despite his obvious physical attractiveness. But even that was not so much a problem with Miranda as it was with my reluctance to really get to know and understand Tom.

Since both novels involve cathedral canons, I can’t resist asking: do you have a favorite English cathedral?

York Minster! No question. York is an amazing city, and the cathedral there has a beauty and ambience like no other. I could spend weeks wandering around inside it. St. Paul’s in London gets an honorable mention: I’ve visited it several times and especially love the whispering gallery. My first day visiting a new city always starts at the cathedral (if there is one), so if I had the time and money, and if my traveling companions didn’t object, my trips would be all cathedrals all the time!

Thanks very much, Clarissa!

~

Bear No Malice was published by Pegasus Books this month. For more information, visit the author's website at www.clarissaharwood.com.

Espionage in full color: The Blue by Nancy Bilyeau, set in 18th-century England and France

“… Color is the next field of battle in the porcelain wars. He who is able to produce the most porcelain in this new revolutionary color of blue will control the market.”

As we learn in The Blue, the color blue surrounds us in the natural world – the sea and the sky, for example – but is surprisingly difficult to capture in physical form. The quest to create a chemically stable form of deep blue for use in art and textiles lasted for centuries. In the 1750s, when this story takes place, delicate porcelain creations are in great demand in high society. If porcelain designs could be painted with this new shade of blue, it would be a lucrative triumph for the firm to accomplish it first.

Nancy Bilyeau has taken a fascinating footnote from the annals of international commerce and transformed it into a captivating story of espionage, obsession, and love. A twenty-something resident of Spitalfields parish in late 1750s London, Genevieve Planché unexpectedly finds herself at the epicenter of the race to develop this elusive blue.

Genevieve is a woman of her time yet with enough feminine spunk to also give her viewpoint contemporary resonance. A descendant of French Huguenots who took refuge in England, she holds fast to her Protestant beliefs. She’s also a talented artist, but no one is willing to help her advance in her craft. Her late father’s cousin is a principal at the Derby Porcelain Works, but she fears that spending her days in the dreary act of painting porcelain would stifle her creativity.

However, an encounter with the debonair and sympathetic Sir Gabriel Courtenay creates a new opportunity: if Genevieve accepts the position at Derby, and secretly infiltrates the factory to discover the formula for blue from a chemist there, Sir Gabriel will help her establish an art career in distant Venice. Her employers are suspicious about possible French spies, but her mission proceeds as planned – until she meets the chemist himself, Thomas Sturbridge, who is the antithesis of the stodgy, self-absorbed scientist she expected.

Genevieve is a resourceful creation who proves capable of thinking with her head even when her heart is engaged. As the story twists and deepens, she must make tough decisions to ensure her safety. Along the way, readers experience the Huguenots’ delicate situation through her viewpoint. Even two centuries after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the Huguenots have never forgotten the deadly persecution they faced. With England and France now engulfed in the Seven Years War, Genevieve – with her French name and heritage – must continually defend her loyalty to her birthplace of England, to her chagrin, and despite her revulsion for the French king.

Not only does The Blue cover fresh ground in a genre that often returns to the same well-trodden subjects, but it’s plain fun to read. Historical fiction readers are in for an exciting treat.

The Blue was published by Endeavour Quill in 2018; I read it from a personal purchase and coordinated the review to be published during the author's blog tour.

Giveaway: During the Blog Tour we will be giving away an eBook of The Blue by Nancy Bilyeau! To enter, please use the Gleam form below.

Giveaway Rules:
– Giveaway ends at 11:59pm EST on January 18th. You must be 18 or older to enter.
– Giveaway is open internationally.
– Only one entry per household.  All giveaway entrants agree to be honest and not cheat the systems; any suspect of fraud is decided upon by blog/site owner and the sponsor, and entrants may be disqualified at our discretion.
– Winner has 48 hours to claim prize or new winner is chosen.

The Blue

Historical fiction cover trend for 2019: bold colors that pop!

In putting together another visual preview post for 2019, I came upon some historical novel covers with bright colors and designs that refuse to be ignored.  And then I found a few more.  Here are ten, below.  You can make almost a full rainbow with all of these.  What do you think - does the effect work on you?  Just the settings and the book's publishers are listed below... head on over to Goodreads for more.

A family saga set during the Depression-era Dust Bowl. Central Avenue, June 2019. [see on Goodreads]

A scientific race across Russia in 1914, at the time of a major solar eclipse. Grand Central, May 2019. [see on Goodreads]

A controversial art scandal involving Van Gogh's paintings, set in decadent and dangerous 1920s Berlin. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, July 2019. [see on Goodreads]

Glamour, passion, and coming of age in New York's exciting theater world in the 1940s. Riverhead, June 2019.  [see on Goodreads]

Historical fantasy involving aerial adventure in WWI France; second in a series.  Simon & Schuster, July 2019. [see on Goodreads]

The female divers of the Korean island of Jeju, spanning from the 1930s through 1950s. Scribner, March 2019. [see on Goodreads]

Two American sisters' lives, from the 1950s going forward. June 2019, Atria. [see on Goodreads]

Events from the life of future poet Elizabeth Bishop, during her time in Paris in 1937. Simon & Schuster, June 2019.  [see on Goodreads]

Espionage and scandal in the Bahamas in 1941, when the Duke and Duchess of Windsor are in residence there. William Morrow, July 2019.  [see on Goodreads]

An independent African American woman in small-town North Carolina, between 1941 and the 1980s.  Bloomsbury, June 2019. [see on Goodreads]

Review of A Murder by Any Name by Suzanne M. Wolfe, first in an Elizabethan spy mystery series

London is drenched with atmosphere and deadly intrigue in this debut entry in a new Elizabethan mystery series.

The time is the 1570s. The body of Lady Cecily Carew, an innocent young lady-in-waiting to the queen, is found spread across the high altar of Whitehall’s Chapel Royal, her limbs arranged as if in effigy. The Honorable Nicholas (Nick) Holt, brother to the Earl of Blackwell and clandestine agent for spymaster Robert Cecil, sees political motivation in the terrible crime, since sweet, trusting Cecily would have had no enemies.

Both he and Queen Elizabeth realize that either the Catholics or the Puritans could try to use the sacrilegious nature of the murder to discredit her and throw her reign into chaos. With the assistance of two friends, a Jewish brother and sister who saved his life in Spain, and the protection of his shaggy companion, an Irish wolfhound named Hector, Nick must sort out truth from lies to root out a killer. One immediate clue is an unusual love note found clutched in Cecily’s hand; its tone is more clinical than affectionate.

Nick is a genial, compassionate sort with the capability to move among different strata in society, from the royal court with its oily toadies to the squalid lanes of Bankside, which gives him an advantage. In addition to his noble birth, he’s the proprietor of a tavern, the Black Sheep, which serves to hide his role as undercover spy. The way he goes about his investigation is typical for a mystery of this sort – interviewing different parties as new clues are unveiled – but Wolfe does a good job keeping the culprit (or culprits) concealed until the end. This is the type of historical mystery that lets you sink into the historical setting, though anyone ambling down the street should be attuned to possible surprises from above (gardez loo!).

The stakes are high, not only for Nick, a former Catholic, but also for his physician friends Eli and Rivkah, since anti-Jewish paranoia is rampant. (On that note, anyone knowing their names would be aware of their religion; they can't exactly blend in.) I’m guessing romantic intrigue will play a bigger role in future books. While Nick has a regular bedmate in brothel owner Kat, Rivkah’s beauty and kindness attract him.

Wolfe lightens the mood periodically through gleeful evocation of the era’s repellent odors and colorful curses, of which Elizabeth herself is a master (she “swore like a dosshouse toper” – terms worth the time to look up and note for future use). The author admits that her depiction of the Virgin Queen’s disdain for bathing is exaggerated for comedic effect, but hers isn’t an unflattering portrait overall. Elizabeth is craftily intelligent, and Nick knows never to underestimate her.

In all, it’s well-wrought Tudor entertainment; I’ll be back for book two.

Suzanne M. Wolfe's A Murder by Any Name was published by Crooked Lane in October; thanks to the author for supplying a copy for the blog tour via Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours.  See also my earlier review for the author's The Confessions of X, which was a fabulous read set in a completely different period (the 4th century).

During the tour, we will be giving away 3 hardcover copies of A Murder By Any Name! To enter, please use the Gleam form below.

Giveaway Rules:

– Giveaway ends at 11:59pm EST on January 17th. You must be 18 or older to enter.

– Giveaway is open to US residents only.

– Only one entry per household.

– All giveaway entrants agree to be honest and not cheat the systems; any suspect of fraud is decided upon by blog/site owner and the sponsor, and entrants may be disqualified at our discretion.

– Winner has 48 hours to claim prize or new winner is chosen.

A Murder By Any Name

A dark American heritage: Kent Wascom's The New Inheritors, part of his Gulf Coast quartet

The third in a projected quartet, following Secessia (2015), Wascom’s latest literary saga is his strongest yet. Spanning the years 1890 to 1961, it focuses on two lovers and offers a skillful intermingling of character and place.

After surviving a bizarre, peripatetic Florida childhood, young Isaac is adopted by a caring Mississippi couple. Later, as a reclusive artist, he grows enraptured by Kemper Woolsack, a shipping heiress. However, the coming world war and her brothers’ mutual animosity (Angel is secretly gay; Red is a vicious criminal) disrupt their peaceful lives.

Whether describing the Gulf Coast’s lush vegetation or acts of sudden brutality, Wascom’s writing burns with a raw, elemental power. The story encompasses the era’s white privilege and anti-immigrant stances, letting readers make the contemporary connections, while pondering what it means to be American.

In an inspired move, The Blood of Heaven (2013), the first in Wascom’s series and a Woolsack ancestor's wild, dark narrative, has become his descendants’ origin myth. It all leads to a potent question: Can a family, or country, ever escape the violence in its blood?

The New Inheritors was published in 2018 by Grove; I reviewed it for Booklist last year.  I reviewed The Blood of Heaven back in 2013 (see the link for some additional comments, too).  As a sidenote: I'm not fond of this cover, which seems very generic.

Interview with David Blixt (part 2), author of What Girls Are Good For: A Novel of Nellie Bly

And here's the second half of my interview with David Blixt about his new novel What Girls Are Good For.  If you missed the first part, it was online yesterday and can be found here, along with a tour-wide giveaway.

Although some editors warn Nellie not to become part of the story she’s writing about, she (fortunately) doesn’t listen. How groundbreaking was her approach/style to journalism, not just the fact that she was female?

Elizabeth Cochrane
(aka Nellie Bly)

She may not have been the first undercover journalist, though I’d be hard pressed to name anyone before her. She was certainly the pioneer of the field. And what’s astonishing is how long she was able to carry it off. The Madhouse exposé was just the start of a two-year run of stories with her infiltrating one illegal or immoral situation after another. At the start of the second novel (which I’ve only just begun writing), she foils a serial rapist in Central Park by posing as a potential victim and catching him!

So it was certainly groundbreaking. But I’m not sure a man could have done it – or, at least, done it so dramatically. There’s something viscerally attention-grabbing about her gender and size being seen as at odds with her experiences. Little wonder that Pulitzer and Colonel Cockerill adored her.

Yet I think what really set her apart was her choice of stories, and I worked to make it a big part of her character. She was a champion for the poor, the dispossessed, the downtrodden. It was not lost on her that the majority of these were women. And I just don’t think a man could have written those stories.

I also think she had to insert herself into the stories to be taken seriously. A woman writing about women in workshops or Mexican natives being denied their rights would sound moralistic from on high – there were plenty of editorials like that. The fact that she put herself into danger made her experiences immediate for the readers, and while she was certainly derided for being a thrill-seeker, I think it also allowed her topics to have an actual impact.

A side effect of this was that she set the tone for what became known as “stunt journalism”. Everyone wanted a “stunt girl." Two years after the Madhouse story, Annie Laurie fainted in a San Francisco street to infiltrate the local hospital. In St. Paul, Eva Gay imitated Nellie’s Workshop Girls series. In Chicago, Nora Marks got into the prison to report on children being held for trial. Everyone wanted a sensation, thanks to Nellie Bly.

My favorite quote about her comes from the humor magazine Puck: “When a charming young lady comes into your office and smilingly announces that she wants to ask you a few questions regarding the possibility of improving New York’s moral tone, don’t stop to parley. Just say: ‘Excuse me, Nellie Bly,’ and shin down the fire-escape.” She terrified the male establishment.

Authors’ background knowledge can inform their writing choices and approaches, and along these lines, I caught a number of allusions to Shakespeare’s plays that were cleverly worked into the novel. Did you find that your experience as an actor influenced in any other way your approach to telling Nellie’s story?

*Sigh* I’m never as clever as I think I am. Yes, I found uses for my vast experience with Shakespeare, and also even a Dante reference, as nods to my readers. At least I didn’t hide any anagrams this time!

I hope that acting has influenced my writing in terms of looking at each person’s motivations, and how motives can be misinterpreted or misconstrued. I want every character to have their own life, even if it’s not part of Nellie’s story. They aren’t just there for her, or to move the plot along. I want us to feel for the people she leaves behind, the ones she writes about and then forgets. I hope they linger for my readers in the way she hoped they’d linger for hers.

In the author’s note, you mentioned that “female characters drive historical fiction,” and you found your ideal subject in Nellie Bly. In addition to the sequel that you mention will be next (and I’m looking forward to it!), do you plan to continue writing novels with women at the center? Do you have any other thoughts on this focus/trend within the historical fiction genre?

Wow. A potentially fraught question.

The simple answer is, yes. I’m working on a non-historical novel starring a women right now. It’s a story I’ve been planning for around fifteen years, and I hope to finish it this coming year.

As for trends in general, historical fiction is one of two or maybe three writing fields where the gender gap is reversed. Whereas in fantasy J.K. Rowling hid her name with initials, in historical fiction men do it. I can count on one hand the popular male historical authors who use their first names. Women dominate the genre as writers, and there are certainly more female readers of historical fiction than men (though I think that’s true of nearly every genre).

So it’s natural – and quite fantastic – that there are so many novels starring women. Historical fiction nearly always passes the Bechdel Test. And stories about women sell better! When the study came out last week saying that female-led movies do better box office than male-led films, it wasn’t shocking to me. Everyone is longing for good stories starring women.

My trouble until now has been, simply, the female figures I’m interested in have been written about before, and often far better than I’d do it. Cleopatra, Helen, Boadicea, Elizabeth – they’ve been done.

But that’s true of male figures as well. I was incredibly lucky with the Star-Cross’d series to discover a leader no one had yet tackled in Cangrande della Scala. But I covered the same ground as several others (including the amazing Margaret George) when I wrote about Nero in the Colossus series, and didn’t much care for it. I feel the same about King Arthur – I have some ideas, but why bother if I’m just treading familiar territory? I want to explore, not emulate.

Which is why I was so excited, late one April night in 2016, to find Nellie Bly. A terrific character, part of her appeal was that she hadn’t been done yet in any real way. That’s about to change. There are two more novels coming next year, and a TV movie on Lifeline, and talk of a whole TV series. Just this once, I wasn’t chasing a trend, but setting one. If I’d found her today, I wouldn’t have written this novel. Timing is everything.

So for me, it’s less a question of gender than of having the right story to tell. Or rather, gender was just one factor in my mind when I was looking for stories. I was keenly aware that I hadn’t written a woman lead, and wanted to correct that, so I was on the lookout. But I was on the lookout for the story more. I knew about the Madhouse exposé. It was reading about how Nellie got the job in the first place that grabbed me. In that moment, I had a story I felt compelled to tell – her story. I couldn’t not tell it.

So next time I write a historical novel with a female lead (and I’m sure I will), it won’t be just for the sake of writing about a woman. It will be because her story is one I simply have to tell.

Thanks so much, David - it's been great having you here again and hearing more about Nellie and your writing process.

Interview with David Blixt (part 1), author of What Girls Are Good For: A Novel of Nellie Bly

It's hard to believe that it's been 11 years since a copy of David Blixt's first novel, The Master of Verona, showed up in my mailbox. This sweeping historical epic of 14th-century Italy was a wonderful reading experience, and it prompted me to arrange for an interview with the author; you can read part 1 and part 2 of the interview here.

David's newest release is another fantastic read. What Girls Are Good For moves over five centuries ahead in time to America during its Gilded Age; the focus is Elizabeth Cochrane, who used the pen name of Nellie Bly for her groundbreaking investigative journalism at a time when female writers were typically relegated to the "women's pages" of newspapers.  It immersed me in Nellie's story, including her family background, courageous ambition, battles against gender discrimination and other forms of social injustice, and her enthusiastic determination to live life on her own terms. She was a woman who set out to change the world, and did. I highly recommend it.

Thanks so much to David for his detailed and thoughtful answers to my questions!

Since your earlier novels have been set further back in the past, did you find it an adjustment to research characters and settings of the late 19th century? Had you had an interest in the American Gilded Age before discovering Nellie Bly?

A passing interest at best. I tend to look at periods by the art they produce, and I’m not a huge fan of Stephen Foster (ironic in the extreme, given he inadvertently gave my lead her nom de plume). But that’s part of the joy of writing historical fiction – discovery!

As for the adjustment, it was a very large one. While I was free to invent dialogue, all of the people in the novel were quite real – no inserting fictional characters into historical settings to fill a gap in the historical record! There is a vast and deep pool of research about the period, meaning endless rabbit holes. What buildings were where, and when? What train lines got her from place to place? I became fascinated with Pullman cars, and also with Newspaper Row in New York. It means there are more mistakes to be made, and for a historical perfectionist, that’s daunting. I don’t like getting my history wrong, so I put two years of work into the research and writing.

What was the experience like, putting yourself in Elizabeth/Nellie’s shoes as she fought against gender bias and the unjust treatment of women, especially on Blackwell’s Island? How did it feel to write those scenes?

That’s the question I’m most aware of, because it’s the thing I fretted over most. Not only am I a man writing a woman’s point of view, I’m a 21st-century man writing a 19th-century woman’s POV. Add to that I’d never written a 1st person novel before, and I had a lot of trepidation.

I’m quite the humanist. I believe deep-down all people experience the same feelings and thoughts. That said, I was acutely aware of not being a woman. So I listened. A lot. I am fortunate in the women in my life, and all of them have experiences that, while awful, were also true. I started this over a year before the #MeToo movement grabbed headlines, but the stories that were coming out at the end of 2017 certainly influenced my writing and revisions. The thing that seems to be resonating the most with readers was that I allowed her to be angry.

The best boon I had was in my subject. Nellie Bly was forever seeing the injustices perpetrated upon her gender, and commenting on it. So it felt right to comment upon them, not by imposing modern values, but rather her own. She’s wonderfully contradictory – she’s this incredible champion for women, but she’s perfectly willing to judge other women by their appearances, and she lied about her age, even under oath.

How did it feel writing those scenes? Thrilling, and terrifying. I was excited by the story I was telling, and how I was telling it. It felt raw and honest. But I was utterly terrified that I would make a hash of it, and that my wife would mock me forever. (I wrote a scene between two women for The Master Of Verona that did not end up in the final version because of her remorseless ridicule. She brings it up to this day). Like I said, I’m fortunate in the women in my life.

Strangely, the scenes on Blackwell’s might have been easier for me because, awful as they were, she had already written them. She didn’t lay them out chronologically, and there’s a lot in other reports that she omitted from her book and articles – it was exciting reconstructing it from several sources at once. But how she felt about it was plain and clear, and one of the reasons 10 Days In A Madhouse continues to be popular today. I just tried to capture it in the context of the life she never shared with readers. There was her Nellie Bly persona, and there was Elizabeth Cochrane. I think the former came out of the madhouse stronger and more dominant. But she never quite lost the Lonely Orphan Girl.

I enjoyed the depiction of Nellie’s relationship with her mother, who is a brave woman in her own right. How did you get behind the scenes to reveal more about these characters and their personalities than Nellie’s own writing did?

I’m so glad you like Mary Jane. As complex as Nellie was, her mother was far more of a puzzle for me. All I had were the raw facts: twice widowed, once divorced, with five children. We have the testimony from the divorce. We have her going to Mexico with her daughter, and living with Nellie on and off throughout the newspaper years. A lawsuit towards the end of her life. That’s it.

author David Blixt

From just those facts I had to extrapolate a woman who would both inspire and infuriate her daughter, a woman who was both guide and a figure to rebel against. Nellie doesn’t want to be her mother, yet in so many ways they are incredibly alike.

It all came together during the trip to Mexico. We have Nellie’s articles from that trip, but she never mentions her mother in them. Yet her mother was there as her chaperone, which allowed me to explore one huge aspect of that experience that her own readers were denied. Putting them in close proximity for months in a strange land led to all the various personal revelations and debates that, to me, are the best part of writing.

Nellie’s narrative voice was one of the highlights for me, since it felt fresh and lively, but also very evocative of the period. What were some of your favorite 19th-century turns of phrase or expressions you came across in your research?

I had the incredible advantage of her own body of written work to draw upon. Her writing is very conversational, likely due to her on-the-job training. Poring through her works, I looked for her particular writing tics, words she preferred, her style of expression. For instance, she likes to begin sentences with conjunctions – And, But– which told me her head was always halfway through the conversation before she opened her mouth. She loves her adverbs – Vehemently, Spitefully, Incredulously– which to me speaks of passion. And she has certain small phrases she likes in inject: Strange to say, Not to mention, Here and there.

I ingested all this information, then let it go. The end result, I think, is that rather than attempting to write in an “oldey-timey” way, I was able to interpret and inject her style without trying to imitate her.

I was also fascinated by things that were new in 1885. Everyone in the novel compares things to locomotives, or electricity. The scene early on in the roller rink was hilarious to me – roller-skating in January, when you could far more easily be ice-skating outside? But it was all the rage!

I also get fascinated by how language evolves. Today we say, “I fell for him” and it sounds romantic. Not so in the 1880s. To “fall” was to fall from grace, to become a “wanton” woman. Therefore falling for someone is not a phrase used lightly.

(To be continued!  This concludes part 1 of the interview; look for part 2 tomorrow.)

About the author:  

David Blixt's work is consistently described as “intricate,” “taut,” and “breathtaking.” A writer of Historical Fiction, his novels span the early Roman Empire (the Colossus series, his play Eve of Ides) to early Renaissance Italy (the Star-Cross'd series) up through the Elizabethan era (his delightful espionage comedy Her Majesty's Will, starring Will Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe as inept spies). His novels combine a love of the theatre with a deep respect for the quirks and passions of history.

Living in Chicago with his wife and two children, he describes himself as “actor, author, father, husband. In reverse order.”

For more information, please visit David Blixt’s website. You can also find him on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.

During the Blog Tour, we will be giving away 4 paperback copies of What Girls Are Good For! To enter, please use the Gleam form below.

Giveaway Rules:

– Giveaway ends at 11:59pm EST on December 28th. You must be 18 or older to enter.
– Giveaway is open to US residents only.
– Only one entry per household.
– All giveaway entrants agree to be honest and not cheat the systems; any suspect of fraud is decided upon by blog/site owner and the sponsor, and entrants may be disqualified at our discretion.
– Winner has 48 hours to claim prize or new winner is chosen.

What Girls Are Good For

Finding the Fantasy in Hittite History, an essay by Judith Starkston, author of Priestess of Ishana

Thanks to Judith Starkston for contributing a new essay for my site today.  Her new historical fantasy novel, Priestess of Ishana, is set in a land based on the history and culture of the ancient Hittites.  She explains her world-building process below...

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Finding the Fantasy in Hittite History

Judith Starkston

“I invoke you, Lelani, Sungoddess and Queen of the world below. May this witchcraft be undone. May the tongue that spoke this evil and the hand that worked it burn into ash which I will bury in the world below.”

With this incantation, the main character of my historical fantasy, Priestess of Ishana, begins a rite to cleanse her city of the deadly pollution of a burn curse. Tesha is a priestess and this magical performance is her duty. The curse might turn against her and torch her in a burst of demonic flame. That is all part of the excitement of fiction set in a historical world that believed in magical rites and supernatural interventions of gods and goddesses.

In Priestess of Ishana, I wanted to immerse my reader in the Near Eastern Bronze Age of the Hittites (~1200 BCE), but at the same time gain the storytelling power and freedom of fantasy. Guy Gavriel Kay, a renowned writer of historical fantasy, adopted the phrase “a quarter turn to the fantastic” to describe his melding of history and fantasy—that is, fiction that is “nearly our known history but not quite.” A blend of fantasy and history came naturally to writing the Hittites, steeped as their culture is in practices we call magic. Historical people and places lurk as inspiration behind my fictional world. That’s reflected in changed names that hint at the original (for example, Hittites to Hitolians).

Well-written fantasy has “rules” for the magic therein. My fantasy uses primary historical sources and Hittite beliefs for that framework. The novel’s magical rites are based on specific details taken from the written records—far stranger than anything I could have made up.

In my Hitolian fantasy world, curses are the last remaining magic (or so the characters assume), and the priestesses learn rites to counteract this pervasive danger. This focus arises from historical reality. Translations of the vast collections of clay cuneiform tablets from the royal archives reveal a Hittite obsession with curses in the prayers and rites.

In constructing a “How to Undo a Curse” scene for Priestess Tesha, I dug into the available fragments of curse rituals (nothing is complete or simple in Hittite primary texts). The opening lines in this post, for example, are adapted from a couple sources. The notion that words have tangible power is found in almost all Hittite rites; evil tongues and counteracting magical words abound. Words were the bridge to the gods, the road to accessing supernatural power. They are especially powerful when said in conjunction with analogical magic—actions that reflect what the practitioner wants to happen.

~

Tesha crept next to the dead man. She raised the loaf high over him. “I invoke you, Lelani, Sungoddess and Queen of the world below. May this witchcraft be undone. May the tongue that spoke this evil and the hand that worked it burn into ash which I will bury in the world below.” The words calmed the beating of her heart.

She shut her eyes and knelt on the damp floor, wincing as the muck penetrated her gown.

She held the bread stuffed with absorbing chickpea paste. The rite decreed she start at the dead man’s forehead. The reek of burnt flesh tortured her nose and pulled her stomach.

She leaned over the body, touching with the bread what was left of the brow below his graying hair. The horror held her gaze. She hesitated. The rite had to be done perfectly. Usually this requirement for proper order gave her joy. Now she clung to it for courage, but something was wrong and she could not say what. Had she skipped a step? She hadn’t. She went on, bread held to the corpse.

“Come into this bread, foul curse. Your pollution endangers all who come near. I bind you into this bread.”

She moved downwards to the man’s chest and shoulders where his tunic had burned away, revealing flesh and bone, charred black.

“Come out of this body, evil curse, so that when this loaf is burnt into ash as you have burned this man, you may return to the dark realm below where you belong. As the smell of bread entices both the good man and the bad to eat, so let the smell entice you into this bread.”

Tesha rose and moved to the altar holding the chickpea stuffed loaf in front of her to avoid the pollution it contained.

~

Tesha moves the curse from a dead body into a loaf of bread stuffed with chickpea paste, while saying, “As the smell of bread entices both the good man and the bad to eat, so let the smell entice you into this bread.”

The “stuffing” is meant to absorb the evil like a sponge and contain it until the priestess can burn the loaf and thus send it back to the Underworld where curses were thought to originate.

At this point you might be scratching your head, chickpea paste, curses in loaves of bread? I couldn’t make this stuff up. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. Careful reading of Hittite rituals provided me with great source material for fantasy. My Hitolian priestess is a skillful practitioner of magic that would sound very familiar to a Hittite priestess.

~

Judith Starkston has spent too much time reading about and exploring the remains of the ancient worlds of the Greeks and Hittites. Early on she went so far as to get two degrees in Classics from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Cornell. She loves myths and telling stories. This has gradually gotten more and more out of hand. Her solution: to write fantasy set in the exotic worlds of the past. Fantasy and Magic in a Bronze Age World. Hand of Fire was a semi-finalist for the M. M. Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction. Priestess of Ishana won the San Diego State University Conference Choice Award. Judith has two grown children and lives in Arizona with her husband. For a free short story set in her Bronze Age historical fantasy world (and a cookbook of foods in her novels), sign up for the newsletter on her website.

The historical novels of Beverly Swerling (1941-2018)

I was saddened to learn, via her official page on Facebook, that author Beverly Swerling Martin had passed away on December 3rd. The four novels in her City series (City of Dreams, City of Glory, City of God, City of Promise) are enjoyable reads for anyone interested in exploring Manhattan's history in fiction; they follow the stories of several families from the 17th-century colonial period up through the late 19th century. 

I reviewed books 2 and 4 for Booklist and thought I'd reprint those reviews below. Each book works as a standalone. What I remember most is included in the last line of my City of Glory review: "The perfect antidote for readers who mistakenly believe American history is either boring or unromantic." At the time, while historical fiction was growing in popularity, American settings were still uncommon; they were perceived as dull in comparison to novels about glamorous royal courts. Swerling proved that assumption wrong.

For City of Glory:
In this smartly executed, highly entertaining sequel to City of Dreams (2001), Swerling continues tracing the physical, social, and moral development of Manhattan through the stories of the fictional Turner and Devrey families. Nearly all the action occurs over 10 days in mid-August 1814, a critical period during America’s “second war of independence.”

The numerous characters, all fascinating and distinct, include a brothel owner, a sly merchant prince, an Irish ship’s captain, and a devious young widow, not to mention John Jacob Astor himself. At their center is Joyful Patrick Turner, a multilingual trader, businessman, and ex-surgeon who sets out to preserve the family shipping company, save his country from secessionists, and win the hand of Manon Vionne, a jeweler’s lovely daughter, in the bargain.

As the characters scheme among themselves, hoping to leave their mark on the growing city, the plot fairly gallops along, and historical novel fans will relish the bountiful period details of old New York. The perfect antidote for readers who mistakenly believe American history is either boring or unromantic.
(written for Booklist, December 15, 2006)

For City of Promise:
In 1864, New York City overflows with opportunities for those with foresight, acumen, and ambition. Joshua Turner, the hero of the fourth entry in Swerling’s enormously diverting saga, fills the bill. Manhattan must expand upward, northward, and underground to accommodate its growing population and their housing and transportation needs, and Josh doesn’t let his wartime disability stand in his way.

His marriage to Mollie Brannigan, a Macy’s shopgirl and spinster niece of an Irish brothel-keeper, unexpectedly aids his transformation into a real estate mogul. She is a savvy businesswoman, as he discovers to his dismay. With his motley associates, he harnesses the strength of steel to construct multi-storey apartment buildings and entices middle-class residents to move in, but old enemies scheme to bring his family down.

With a fast-paced, complex plot showcasing opulent Fifth Avenue mansions, Wall Street pandemonium, deals both fair and underhanded, and the rising influence of ethnic gangs, Swerling expertly interlaces the stories of a Gilded Age couple and their magnificent city. Compulsive reading that informs and entertains.
(also written for Booklist, August 2011)

Swerling's most recent novel was a multi-period thriller spanning five centuries in England, Bristol House, and she wrote other historical sagas as Beverly Swerling or Beverly Byrne. Many of her older titles were re-released as ebooks. Read more about them at her website.

Undoing complicity: Up from Freedom by Wayne Grady, a saga of antebellum America

Drawing on research into his mixed-race family history, which he unexpectedly discovered as an adult, Grady evokes the complicated psychological terrain of antebellum America. He shows how simply living in this time and place forces everyone into a culture built around slavery’s existence, and how denying people agency causes harm regardless of intentions. Opening in 1848, the story follows farmer Virgil Moody as he tries to right a dreadful wrong and awakens to the mindset that prompted his original choice.

Born the son of a Georgia plantation owner, Moody had fled westward with a young enslaved woman, Annie, to save her from a cruel overseer. Along with the child Annie was carrying, they settled first in New Orleans and then along the Rio Brazos in Texas, where slavery had expanded following the recent war with Mexico. Moody abhors slavery, thinking of Annie and her son Lucas as his family, and is shocked to realize they feel differently. When Lucas falls in love with a young woman owned by a neighbor, devastating events occur, spurring Moody across the South and Midwest in search of Lucas.

Across these diverse landscapes and waterways, he encounters many well-realized characters, like a Quaker widow named Rachel and a sympathetic German-born store owner, Solomon Kästchen, who works with the Underground Railroad. “Indiana is, generally speaking, antislavery, but it is also antislave,” Kästchen tells him, succinctly illustrating people’s complicity in a system they are supposedly against.

Along the way, Moody grows increasingly fond of Tamsey Lewis, a freedwoman he meets along with her family. Their story, both heartrending and inspirational, culminates in a riveting courtroom scene. This is a timely novel about the deep roots of America’s racial divide, strong in the eloquent truth expressed in individual sentences and in its overall storytelling power.

Up from Freedom was published by Random House Canada in August 2018 (it's also sold in the US). I first reviewed it for November's Historical Novels Review, based on a NetGalley copy I'd requested. It's highly recommended for readers of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad.  Read more about the author in an interview conducted by the CBC for his first novel, Emancipation Day, which is based on his father's story.

Enchanting storytelling: Diane Setterfield's Once Upon a River, set in Victorian England

Both a Victorian-set historical novel and a delicately rendered adult fairy tale, Diane Setterfield’s third novel sits easily in both spheres.

Not only is it a beautiful story, but it’s an ode to storytelling itself, one knowingly structured similarly to the river in its title. Beginning at an old inn alongside the Thames, in a small town upriver from London, the tale follows a sinuous path, splitting off into tributaries that visit nearby residents and places before they rejoin toward the end.

On the night of the winter solstice in the year 1887, an injured man carrying what seems to be an overlarge poppet – a doll in peasant clothing – bursts into the Swan, a pub where locals rehearse their storytelling prowess. To the surprise of the innkeeper and her large family, the doll is soon revealed to be a lifeless young girl of about four. Their surprise turns to shock when she revives, and word about this mysterious happening quickly spreads.

As if that wasn’t strange enough, three families claim the girl for their own. To Mrs. Helena Vaughan, the mute, blond-haired girl must be her daughter, who went missing three years earlier. For Rob Armstrong, who farms pigs with his beloved wife and large family, she could be the grandchild whose existence they just discovered. And for the parson’s middle-aged housekeeper, Lily White, the girl is her sister, Ann, who she lost long ago.

And so we have a related set of mysteries to uncover as the stories wind their way downstream. Which family does the girl belong to, and what happened to the other missing girls?

Within this partly historical, partly fey setting, many characters come to life. In addition to the revived girl, there’s innkeeper Margot Ockwell; her husband Joe, who has a kind of wasting sickness; and their only son and thirteenth child, Jonathan, who acts differently than other children. The ferryman Quietly, who’s rumored to travel between earth and the afterlife, is a figure of local myth.

In a welcome switch, there’s no stereotypical insularity in the riverside English communities. Rita Sunday, once a foundling from a distant town, finds her nursing skills welcomed at the Swan. Full of scientific curiosity, she looks for explanations for why the girl had appeared to be dead. Helena’s husband is a native New Zealander, and while Rob Armstrong’s appearance (he’s black) initially alarms people, his kindness and noble bearing assuage their concerns.

All of their backstories are revealed at the right moment while the plot winds back and forth.  The language echoes the novel’s quasi-mythic atmosphere. Settle down into this enchanted corner of the literary world and linger a while, listening to a good, satisfying well told.

Once Upon a River was published yesterday by Atria in hardcover.  Thanks to the publisher for an Edelweiss copy; after I'd requested one, I was given the opportunity to participate in the blog tour, so I jumped right on.

With the tour comes a giveaway: Win 1 of 5 prize bundles of one finished copy of Once Upon a River and one Once Upon a River bookmark! Contest is open until 12/24.  Enter via the Rafflecopter below.

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Interview with Carrie Callaghan, author of A Light of Her Own, a novel about artist Judith Leyster

In today's hyperactive world, it's a pleasure to read a historical novel that carefully draws you into the very different atmosphere of nearly four centuries ago. At the center of Carrie Callaghan's debut are two young women in 1630s Haarlem: Judith Leyster, a talented painter who became the first of her sex to belong to the city's artists' guild, and her art master's daughter and friend, Maria de Grebber, whose Catholicism sets her apart.  Carrie's A Light of Her Own was published by Amberjack in November, and for her blog tour, I had the opportunity to ask her some questions about her characters, themes, and inspiration.

Why do you enjoy re-interpreting the lives of historical women in fiction?

Women’s stories have often been obscured or forgotten by history. For about two hundred years, no one knew Judith Leyster’s paintings had been painted by a woman, much less her. By reclaiming those stories and interpreting them for a modern audience, I hope I’m helping today’s readers think about all the challenges women have faced and overcome throughout time. And hopefully that’s inspiring.

What made you decide to tell the story from the viewpoints of both Judith Leyster and Maria de Grebber?

This story started as an exploration into ambition and dedication. I realized quickly that for Judith to break through societal barriers, she probably had to make some sacrifices. I wanted to showcase the impact on her two closest relationships – her friend and her brother – and I liked the idea of focusing on the friendship. (An earlier draft did have Abraham’s perspective too, actually.)

How did you fill in the blanks in re-creating Judith’s life?

There are many blanks in Judith’s life. We have her baptism, marriage, and death records, as well as some legal documents and real estate transactions, but not much more than that. Given all the questions, I kept returning to her paintings. If you look at that amazing self-portrait, you see a bold, confident woman who is nonetheless trying to impress you, which suggests some vulnerability. I tried to channel that woman.

I always enjoy how good historical novels can depict the similarities we share with people living long ago as well as their differences from us, and you’ve definitely accomplished this in A Light of Her Own. Maria’s perspective – including her religiosity and sense of self-sacrifice – can feel particularly foreign to a modern reader. How did you delve into her mindset?

author Carrie Callaghan

I wanted to explore a character who had a lot of personal and religious pressure but few options to find forgiveness. Maria is very self-aware, so she notices every temptation to evil that flickers across her mind and every personal short-falling, but she also doesn’t have a support network to help her understand those failings. Her mother died when she was young, her father is distracted, and she has no other friends, because of the social restrictions of the time. Her religion is important to her, but it was illegal to openly practice at the time, so she didn’t have easy access to spiritual succor. It was hard!

In addition to the larger theme of women’s agency at a restrictive time, I appreciated all of the finer domestic details that made the setting feel real, like the hand-painted blue and white tiles around the floor of a house, baked goods of the period, and so forth. How did you research this aspect of the novel?

I had an excellent book that provided a lot of daily-life details, and then I also had the pleasure of scrutinizing all those beautiful paintings we have from the 17th century. I love seeing and writing details, so the world-building was one of the most fun aspects for me.

As you immersed yourself in the customs and society during the Dutch Golden Age, did you find anything that surprised you? Did you have any favorite discoveries?

Research is so delightful partly because it is a never-ending process of surprise. My favorite discoveries were the ones that illuminated how the embroidery around human life has changed over the years – how daffodils meant grief for a youthful death, or how napkins were viewed as a French affectation – but the deepest human emotions are unchanged. Those commonalities are why I love historical fiction. We get to learn all the varieties of human behavior in our similar yet unique worlds.

Since you’re both a book reviewer and a mentor to other novelists, you have a unique perspective on the publication and writing process. Do you feel your additional experience with the industry has been helpful and/or insightful for your role as an author? 

Absolutely. Writing and publishing are hard and deeply subjective. I appreciate the effort that people put into getting art out into the world, and I’m grateful to be part of a community that values stories and reading.

Thanks, Carrie!

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Carrie Callaghan is a writer living in Maryland with her spouse, two young children, and two ridiculous cats. Her short fiction has appeared in Weave Magazine, The MacGuffin, Silk Road, Floodwall, and elsewhere. Carrie is also an editor and contributor with the Washington Independent Review of Books. She has a Master’s of Arts in International Affairs from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

For more information, please visit Carrie Callaghan’s website and blog. You can also connect with her on Twitter and Goodreads.

During the blog tour for A Light of Her Own, we will be giving away 2 signed hardcovers of A Light of Her Own! To enter, please see the Gleam form below.

Giveaway Rules:

– Giveaway ends at 11:59pm EST on December 7th. You must be 18 or older to enter.
– Giveaway is open to US residents only.
– Only one entry per household.
– All giveaway entrants agree to be honest and not cheat the systems; any suspect of fraud is decided upon by blog/site owner and the sponsor, and entrants may be disqualified at our discretion.
– Winner has 48 hours to claim prize or new winner is chosen.

A Light of Her Own