Happy New Year! This has been an enormous year for me in terms of both reading and writing. I completed two biographical entries for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 391, due to be printed in 2023. I researched and interviewed two prolific YA authors whose novels I’ve enjoyed for years, Maggie Stiefvater and Elizabeth […]
I just finished Lauren Groff’s Matrix and wow! Here’s the review I posted on Goodreads: Marie de France has been imagined in historical fiction before; she’s a tempting subject because her life story is a blank and we have only her gorgeous writings: Lanval, Bisclavet, the Fables, the lais, the legends of the saints. Lauren […]
Here are a few of the recent reviews I’ve posted on Goodreads that are not for Historical Novels Review — my favorite reads of 2021 so far… The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue (Little, Brown & Co.) Even putting aside this astounding novel’s accidental timeliness, it renders with laser focus a historical moment […]
Another favorite, reviewed in the November 2019 issue of Historical Novels Review — Sarah Donati’s Where the Light Enters (Berkeley, 2019): This long, absorbing novel is the sequel to Donati’s enthusiastically received The Gilded Hour, a multi-family epic centered on the lives of Anna and Sophie Savard, cousins who attempt to further the cause of medical […]
The final 40 days of this unprecedented — and for many of us, unprecedentedly awful — year are upon us. It’s also the close of my sabbatical semester, one activity of which has been getting this blog and website up and running again. I thought I’d make it easy on myself by starting out with […]
I had the pleasure of interviewing bestselling author Gregory Maguire for a feature on his new novel, A Wild Winter Swan, for November 2020 issue of Historical Novels Review. You can read it here: Re-Imagining New York: Gregory Maguire’s Novel, A Wild Winter Swan