Historical Fiction

Lone Women by Victor LaValle blends the best of several genres, giving us western, historical fiction, horror, thriller, and plenty of social commentary to boot. The year is 1914 and our heroine, Adelaide Henry, is fleeing California – her parents are dead and all she has with her is a suspiciously heavy locked steamer trunk. She makes her way to Montana where, thanks to the Homestead Act, single women were able to claim plots of land, work it for three years, and then “prove up” to owning the land. The harsh Montana environment is difficult enough for anyone to survive, let alone a young

Hello and welcome to #NoWaitWednesdays, where we pick an item off the New Release shelf at one of our library branches that's available for a lucky reader to discover. There are always plenty of gems at the library to find that don't require a two-month wait on the hold lists, and the New Release shelves are always a great place to explore and find your next favorite read.

Medusa is a familiar figure in Greek mythology - a female monster with snakes for hair and a gaze that turns men to stone, usually presented as an antagonist to the hero Perseus, who then cuts off her head to use as a weapon

Hello and welcome to #NoWaitWednesday, where we take a look at a title that's sitting on our New Release shelves that's just waiting for a lucky patron to check it out.

Set in the hills of the Ozarks on the Missouri-Arkansas border during the Great Depression, a young woman, Gracelynn Doherty, lives a quiet life as she helps her grandmother get by as a midwife and apothecary to the local community, supplying herbs, advice, and rudimentary medical care to those around Tin Mountain. Whispers abound that Gracelynn - and her Granny - are actually witches, but people still come to their remote

Here at the library, we love books. We especially love books that we don't have to wait for. This is why on #NoWaitWednesdays, we spotlight a book that - at the time of this writing, anyway - is sitting on the New Release shelf at a local branch, just waiting for someone to come by and check it out. So if this book sounds like something you might be interested in, go ahead and press that hold button! You might be deeply immersed in its pages far faster than you might expect.

Many of our book group patrons LOVE a good multi-generational novel. There's something about a story where one generation

Hello and welcome to the New Title Tuesday for this week! Patrons can't seem to get enough of feel-good reads, and to be honest, neither can we - especially during times of great stress, there's nothing like making a mug of tea and sinking deep into a book that has a heartwarming plot, engaging characters, and a feel-good ending that you just KNOW will lift your spirits. This week, for our New Title Tuesday pick, make sure that you have The Air Raid Book Club by Annie Lyons on your holds lists if that's the sort of thing you're looking for.

The novel begins with a widow named Gertie who owns a

Nobody's Princess is a great historical fiction story about Helen of Troy. It does not support history but tells a mythological fiction story about her based on what we know. This was such a great girls disguised as boys themed book. I am looking forward to reading the sequel about our main woman of steel Helen. It is a very good book but it drops off at the end so you need the sequel about Helen's adventures in the Mediterranean Region.

In this book Helen starts out strong with some great adventures. Long before the Trojan War there was a young girl named Helen who was good at disguises

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of New Title Tuesday, where we take a closer look at a new release that's hitting the publishing world this week.

Summer is in full swing, and some of our patrons might be looking for a deeply immersive novel - something that grabs us and transports us to another place and another time. Banyan Moon, a debut novel by Thao Thai, is a sprawling, epic, multi-generational novel that focuses on interweaving mother-daughter relationships through three generations of fierce, independent women that stretch from the modern Florida coast to back, years ago, to the

Just excellent. Action, suspense, wit, an amazing setting, and great characters.

Safi reimagines the Robin Hood legend during the height of the Third Crusade in "the Holy Land, with all its names for God and all its pilgrims and all its war" with a female Muslim protagonist.

Rahma and her sister must sneak out of the coastal city of Akko (Acre), just recaptured by the Christians, because those Europeans don't recognize female soldiers as legitimate. Through the sleeping armies of Richard I of England (the Lionheart) and Yusuf ibn Ayyub, al-Nasir (Saladin) and on the road to Jerusalem

Witch trials are already a thing of the past in this historical novel set in Salem, Massachusetts during the lifetime of Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter. Witch trials are over; but their memory lives on in Hawthorne’s nineteenth century, with tensions lingering amongst the old Salem families and Hawthorne himself bearing ancestral guilt over his own great-great-grandfather's role in sentencing accused women to death more than a century earlier.

But Hawthorne is not front and center here. He is upstaged by a new immigrant from Scotland, Isobel Gamble, who becomes his lover

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of #NewTitleTuesday, where we take a look at a new fiction release that hits the shelves this week. Today marks the debut of Piper Huguley's BY HER OWN DESIGN, a fictionalized history of a real-life person, Ann Lowe, a dressmaker who worked with some of the most famous and influential people in America but who was all but invisible herself.

Ann Lowe was born and raised in 1918 in rural Alabama to a poor Black family. Growing up, she learned sewing from her mother and her grandmother and found she had a gift for it, but with her opportunities severely

Hello and welcome to #NewTitleTuesday, where we take a look at a new release in the publishing world that will hopefully be a welcome addition to your holds lists.

Today marks the debut of THE HACIENDA by Isabel Cañas, a dark, glittering gem of a debut novel that's already drawing comparisons to Daphne du Maurier's REBECCA by way of Silvia Moreno-Garcia's MEXICAN GOTHIC. This novel, a gothic suspense thriller with hints of the supernatural, is delightfully atmospheric and perfect for those who like thrills and chills that tiptoe up to the line to horror bet never actually crosses that line

Hello and welcome to this week's #NewTitleTuesday, where we take a closer look at a title that makes its debut to the publishing world - and our patron's holds lists!

Jennifer Saint's novel ARIADNE was a powerful word-of-mouth hit last year - the novel from the point of view of a princess of Crete who helps hero Theseus find his way through a maze in the basement of her father's palace - was both a crowd-pleaser and a great book club pick for those looking to dig a little deeper into the character from Greek mythology. Saint is back with a similar novel, this time not only looking at

What do you do when calamity strikes the world yet again? How do you handle the confusion of trying to unravel the news? As someone who works at a library, perhaps it’s not surprising that I turn to...the library. What book or film can I find that connects me to someone’s story so I can more clearly see and hear the events from those involved. 

In recent years, I've needed the library a lot! To better understand the Black experience in America, some helpful reads for me have been “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You” by Jason Reynolds & Ibram X. Kendi, “A Black Women’s History of the

“Witchcraft isn’t one thing but many things, all the ways and words women have found to wreak their wills on the world.”

“A witch is just a woman who wants too much”.

The Once and Future Witches is a deftly told historical feminist fantasy novel about three sister witches who help bring witching back into the world. The story unfolds alongside the late 1800s suffragette movement, and the women's movement soon turns into the witch's movement as the ways of witching slowly spread through town, and women reclaim the power they lost to time.

The novel is rich with historical details but

Valentine, by Elizabeth Wetmore is a hauntingly powerful, and beautiful debut novel set in Odessa, Texas in 1976. Wetmore has created four main characters with deep narratives, and all intertwined in ways that make the reader truly understand them in various ways. The detailed characterizations help to draw an accurate divide between age, class and race in west Texas in the mid-1970’s.

The story takes an emotional toll, right from the start when Gloria Ramirez, a fourteen-year-old Hispanic girl, who projects a tough-girl image, is attacked and raped after getting into a stranger’s truck. So

What a book. What a story. What a family. The Kurcs are a Polish family who will not let the cruelty and dehumanizing Nazi and Soviet rule crush their spirit.  

We see babies born, weddings, and a family desperately wishing they were all together again. They feel lucky just to be with one another.  We follow the lives of the Kurc families’ five children through the war.  

Addy moved to France to finish his studies and stayed after finding a job. Now, he cannot return to Poland because there is no safe way to get there and he doesn’t have the right paperwork. His one hopeful thought is

Deacon King Kong is a sort of love letter to a few blocks of New York City projects in 1969, and to the endearing cast of colorful characters brimming with personality. McBride has a magical touch bringing to life the adage everyone has a story. His descriptions are vivid, engrossing, and entertaining, giving both people and setting depth and truth. His dialogue, as well. It's a hard setting full of people living hard, flawed lives. McBride never ducks the grit and grime, violence and suffering, yet still manages to find some measure of joy and an abundance of humor. He paints a breathing

Gwendolyn Bainbridge and Iris Sparks attend a mutual friend’s wedding and hit it off immediately, both taking credit for the match. After a lovely lunch the pair decide to go into business together opening The Right Sort Marriage Bureau in Mayfair, London in 1946. Their services are much sought after and their pairings have lead to many happy marriages so far. They both have the ability to size people up and get a clear reading of personalities and secrets being withheld. 

Iris doesn’t talk about her training and time spent during the War. But she’s got a lot of particular skills useful for

The historical fiction novel Next Year in Havana by Chanel Cleeton is a fascinating look into Cuba before and after Castro comes into power. The novel is told in split timelines with stories about two women in Cuba: one facing a revolution that would tear apart everything she knows, another facing a Cuba she has only heard about in family stories.

In Cuba 1958, Elisa Perez is a nineteen-year-old sugar heiress when she meets Pablo at a dinner party. Their chemistry is immediate and undeniable. It is love at first sight and the relationship is doomed from the start due to Elisa and Pablo

One of the best things about working in a library is the regular opportunity to talk about books (and other media) with people. Often, I can provide a recommendation for something else to read or try in those conversations, but it isn’t always a one-way street. Sometimes, patrons put books on my radar that I overlooked, either because the cover or description didn’t grab me, or it’s just outside my usual genre preferences. One of these books was Simone St. James’s The Broken Girls.

As a story with a historical fiction subplot and an intrigued journalist starring in the other main plotline,

George Eliot’s Middlemarch regularly ranks as one of the greatest Victorian, greatest British, greatest English-language, or just plain greatest novels of all time. It seems to fare better on critic lists than reader lists, but if it’s a list of 100, Middlemarch is usually on there.

Fairy tales are often dismissed as stories only for children, but I've never been able to stop reading them, even as an adult.  C.S. Lewis said it best when he wrote, "Some day you will be old enough to read fairy tales again."  These types of stories are ones I turn to again and again, whether they be new tales or the dark, Grimm originals.  I especially love historical novels that incorporate fairy tale elements - which is why I was so excited when I heard about the new book by Diane Setterfield.

Set in a small English town on the river Thames, the story centers around a local inn, The

If you are a fan of the western genre, chances are you have heard of Lonesome Dove. Likewise, if you follow award winning books, you may have seen it on a list for its 1985 Spur Award or its 1986 Pulitzer Prize. Some of you may have even watched the CBS miniseries from 1989 starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. Lonesome Dove is not an obscure novel and it has received a great deal of praise, but coming in at a whopping 843 pages it can be daunting to those of us more used to a book in the 200-250 page range. If you, like me, have been avoiding this read because you are scared of the time

The past two months of quarantine shutdown have been bizarre to say the least. Surprised by how hard it's been to focus on simple tasks and know how to deal with whatever each day might bring, I turned to another time in history where the whole world was under threat and people had to deal with a cloud of confusion that hung over everything--World War II. Obviously COVID-19 is not the same as WWII by any means, but I was inspired and encouraged to read the stories of how women in particular faced the challenges of such a world-impacting crisis.

I think my favorite book was A Woman of No

When my friends started raving about the TV series, Outlander, I was more, meh. It sounds a bit outlandish, frankly. A twenty-something combat nurse from England finishes her tour of duty in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. On vacation in the Scottish Highlands with a husband she barely knows, after having been separated for five years during the war, she gets sucked back in time to the 18th century. Great. Another military conflict. Only this time, being English, she's on the side of the occupier in occupied lands. She eventually falls in love with a hunky (and educated, and

Donna Tartt  has been on my radar for quite awhile, and I finally picked up The Secret History at the recommendation of multiple coworkers. To be honest, I finished this novel over a week ago, and I am still unsure how I feel. I was unimpressed with much of the book, but something about it is still stuck in the back of my brain. The entire book is a psychological analysis of the six main characters before and after murdering their friend. Tartt opens the book with a prologue describing Bunny’s murder from the point of view of Richard, the narrator. The rest of the novel is then split up into

The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes is historical fiction at its very best!  Set in 1939 Southern Kentucky, the lives of five strong female characters come together to form and operate the Packhorse Library, where they deliver by horseback, books, magazines and newspapers to those living in remote, rural areas.

One of the main characters, Alice, an Englishwoman, marries an American and is brought to Kentucky where she hopes to start a new, dazzling life with her husband. That is not to be the case.  Alice finds living with her husband and her father-in-law to be stifling and oppressive. Alice

Before We Were Yours is a moving, fascinating portrayal of an upper class Southern family dealing with dementia care, cancer, secrets and a family in 1939 ripped apart just because they live on the river. Have your Kleenex ready and Google pulled up. This novel presents many topics to discuss for book groups.

Dual timelines tell the story of Avery Stafford digging into her Grandma Judy’s past. A woman named May Crandall approaches Avery at a nursing home event, confusing her for someone named Fern and slipping Avery’s bracelet off. When Avery returns the next day to retrieve the bracelet, a

In the late 1800s and early-mid 1900s, the Harvey Girls were considered to be elite hostesses and servers for entrepreneur and businessman Fred Harvey.  Harvey developed the concept of the ‘Harvey House’ dining areas along various railways across the United States, including the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe.  These hospitality restaurants worked in tandem with the railways in order to provide first class service to passengers and railroad employees.  Meals were served promptly on a strict schedule and all Harvey Girls were expected to follow a strict code of conduct that included a

This 5-episode miniseries, featuring two memorable female leads, expertly tackled Wilkie Collins's 656-page suspense novel (published in 1860) and kept me on the edge of my seat even more than many a modern thriller.