in recent years has been primarily focused on shutting off the outside world, but the demands of a six

In The Trackers, Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier offers historical fiction featuring a Great Depression-era If you're interested in Great Depression-era historical fiction like I am, you might also like the books

builds the pool of potential culprits for Nathan to examine in this story of uncovering truths, family history I listed this book in the Greedy Reading List The Six Best Mysteries I Read Last Year.

the Sheriff of Nottingham, things get complicated for both Mariel and Clem in this sassy, fun, queer historical

The Whalebone Theatre begins with offbeat children's performances on a lazy, decadent English estate in the 1920s and builds to the young-adulthood of each of three characters, which are deeply shaped by World War II. The war and all its deprivations seem relentless, but for Cristabel, there is a strange and guilty thrill running through it, for it is exactly this thinning of the ordinary that allows the unordinary through. Joanna Quinn's debut novel is a hefty 558 pages, and the story sweeps through time from the 1920s malaise of the children and the excess of the adults on a secluded English estate, Chilcombe Manor, on to World War II, as experienced by a community of family and friends. Quinn traces the lives of the unflappable orphan Cristabel Seagrave, her stepsister Flossie, and her cousin Digby (raised in the same household as siblings); as well as their inept parents, their parents' unpredictable friends--mainly artists and partiers--that flock to Chilcombe and stay and stay; and the servants who make possible the family's privileged life of debauchery, boredom, and flashes of thrill. Cristabel, Flossie, and Digby are often uncomfortable with the roles placed upon them by others (the difficult and wild orphan, the pleaser of a daughter without a backbone, and the cherished, golden male heir) as they seek to establish their own identities. The nontraditional parental figures--a Russian artist and frequent visitor, a rough-edged maid, a figurative uncle--exert occasional, sometimes powerful influence over the children and how they consider their places in the world. The beginning of the book moves quite slowly, which is fitting for the decadent, ongoing series of lavish dinner parties, hangovers, persistent hangers-on, and malaise occurring for the adults, who are largely without pressing business or life missions where they might direct their generational wealth. The children are largely unattended during this time, but their bonds to each other are solidified. The pacing of the story picks up, appropriately, when World War II begins to shift the world, exerting changes that finally trickle down to Chilcombe and its inhabitants. I loved reading as the children come into themselves--in fits and starts--as young adults, and I came to care deeply about them, their roles in the wartime efforts, and their potential for various happy-ever-afters. The Whalebone Theatre meanders from children's makeshift performances put on in a theatre framed by whale ribs to spy missions related to the French Resistance and the tragedies of war. This is a lovely book to sink into. I listened to The Whalebone Theatre as an audiobook, narrated wonderfully by Olivia Vinall. Do you have any Bossy thoughts about this book? The Whalebone Theatre is Joanna Quinn's debut novel. For books I've read and reviewed about World War II, click here.

Edan Lepucki's science-fiction time-travel novel, Time's Mouth; I'm reading Paulette Jiles's newest historical Loss, and Vengeance by Paulette Jiles I got full-body chills when I saw that Paulette Jiles had a new historical

If you like books about music, you might also like the titles on the Greedy Reading List Six Rockin'

If you like compelling nonfiction, you might also want to check out the post Six of the Best Nonfiction

Lauren Groff's beautiful and brutal novel The Vaster Wilds follows a young servant girl running from the Jamestown colony's disease and starvation; she reveals her secrets while scrabbling for survival in the unforgiving wilderness. The world, the girl knew, was worse than savage, the world was unmoved. It did not care, it could not care, what happened to her, not one bit. She was a mote, a speck, a floating windborne fleck of dust. Lauren Goff's novel The Vaster Wilds begins in the Jamestown colony in the early 1600s. A servant girl is fleeing her early colonial household in the brutal aftermath of plague and starvation. Our main protagonist knows she is being chased because of something she's done, but the facts of the situation aren't revealed to the reader until late in the book. (She doesn't realize, as the reader does, due to the omniscient narrator, that her pursuer succumbs to death early on, and that she is evading new dangers but has no need of pushing on to escape threats of repercussions from her household.) The orphan girl is essentially nameless--she doesn't attach to any of the insulting, ridiculing, or general names adults have carelessly thrown at her in her short life. She is uneducated but thoughtful, and she frequently considers issues of faith and life, separating these from the faulted holy men who introduced her to such concepts. She has visions of the past and of versions of the future in which her spirit transcends the pain and violence and knife-edge of death upon which she has survived. Upon being on her own for the first time, she discovers that she is capable of cleverness in the wild as she dives deeper and deeper into the unforgiving wilderness. She manages to problem-solve enormous challenges and, against all odds, survive. Her life in the wild consists of scrabbling for sustenance and carving out shelter; floating deadly cold rivers; and fleeing from wild strangers and beasts. Hers is a brutal existence buoyed only by meandering thoughts of the past--including her life's one tender connection, to the young daughter of her former household, her former charge--and her growing wonder at the mysteries of the natural world, which are wonderfully imperfect and beautifully wrought by Groff. I listened to The Vaster Wilds as an audiobook. Do you have any Bossy thoughts about this book? Groff is also the author of Fates and Furies, Matrix, The Monsters of Templeton, and other novels.

Lisa See offers a vivid peek at the lives of women in 15th century China, complete with a fascinating female-doctor element that kept me captivated. No mud, no lotus. Lady Tan's Circle of Women is my first book club read of 2024, and wow, does this one start off with a bang. Full-force details of foot-binding, and See doesn't stint on the page time spent on the topic. Whew! Tan Yunxian's grandmother is one of only a few female doctors in 15th century China, and Yunxian is learning all she can from her beloved family matriarch. When terrible tragedies strike, Yunxian's comfort comes in the unlikely form of her father's kind and caring concubine. Yunxian's eventual arranged marriage means she lives under the thumb of a controlling mother-in-law, who severely curtails her ability to practice medicine, as in the family's opinion, Yunxian's main goal should be to birth sons. See presents Yunxian as a feminist in many ways, but doesn't allow her to feel more modern than might seem plausible. She resists some of the constraints put upon her, particularly those credited to tradition rather than wisdom, yet she feels authentically of this time period. The title is interesting; since finishing I have thought more about the eclectic community of women that make up Yunxian's world and the deep ties she builds with some characters that often feel unexpected. I love a female-doctor and medical storyline, and I was particularly captivated by that aspect of Lady Tan, including the treatments, techniques, and beliefs that feel of the time period at hand. I listened to this as an audiobook. Do you have any Bossy thoughts about this book? Lisa See is also the author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane.

I mentioned my love for Hart's book The Last Child in the Greedy Reading List The Six Best Mysteries

The Books I'm Reading Now I'm reading Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier's newest historical fiction 01 The Trackers by Charles Frazier In The Trackers, Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier offers historical

Meanwhile Jude is coming to terms with the implications of her history in this town, and she's regretting

ICYMI: The Winter Soldier is a World War I tale full of medical details and lovely, unlikely bonds. This is a five-star read from the author of North Woods. Lucius is a young medical student when World War I sweeps across Europe. With romantic notions in his head about noble work in a field hospital filled with brilliant surgeons, he enlists and heads to his post in the remote Carpathian Mountains. But there he finds one solitary nurse, Sister Margarite, bravely keeping together the makeshift clinic, which has been decimated by typhus. The other doctors have all left. Lucius is surrounded by grave injuries but has never even wielded a scalpel He'll learn more from Sister Margarite--who he's falling for--than he ever could have in his classes. She's been building an immense wealth of practical knowledge while trying to save the broken soldiers. This was wonderful. The details of World War I injuries and methods of treatment were fittingly grim and sometimes gruesome, but Mason's writing is beautiful and evocative, conveying the cold and brutal nature of war and loss, the chilling nature of acts done in coldhearted necessity, and the warm, promising hope of love. The novel began a little slowly for me, but when it got going I became completely lost in it. I read this with my book club. Do you have any Bossy thoughts about this book? Daniel Mason is also the author of North Woods, The Piano Tuner, A Far Country, and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth.

We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout In Elizabeth Strout's newest novel, we meet Artie Dam, high school history

That intense desire to rework history carries them through various difficulties and surprising challenges

book has a major twist, made even more interesting by listening to the audio version. 03 Office of Historical She uses everyday moments to illustrate how the truth of history can be skewed and determined by who title novella, a black student from Washington, DC, finds herself involved in unraveling a complicated historical bravery; a mystery with a twist; and a collection of stories about race, relationships, and the power of history

If you like stories about music, you might like the books on the Greedy Reading List Six Rockin' Stories

In Robert Jackson Bennett's novel, The Tainted Cup , he blends a rich, historical fiction-feeling story

was listed in the Greedy Reading List Three Books I'm Reading Now, 10/13/20 Edition, as well as in Six

This book is part of my Greedy Reading List Six Riveting Time-Travel Escapes.

Are you interested in a historical fiction retelling of the story of King Edward, Lady Jane Grey, and #historicalfiction, #fantasyscifi, #series, #fourstarbookreview 03 Soulless: The Parasol Protectorate #historicalfiction, #fantasyscifi, #series, #fourstarbookreview Any new-to-you or longtime favorite oddball

tensions and factors that led the town of Tombstone to live on in infamy in this very thorough look at the history At times the retracing of the town's history and the backgrounds of those involved in the climactic ride Reading this book reinforced the fact that my personal taste leans more toward character-driven historical

Ryan moves the reader through some of the simmering resentments borne of close-knit histories, professions

June struggles with the complicated implications of her family's curse of hallucinations and mental illness...until she realizes that the red door and visions of the past are real memories from her own time-travel experiences. I wasn't the first Farrow, but I would be the last. June Farrow is biding her time on her family's flower farm in the small town of Jasper, North Carolina. But she's been seeing and hearing visions for a year now, and she believes they're linked to the curse that the community believes has its hold on the Farrow women. June would love to end the curse, the fraying of the Farrow women's minds, once and for all--by never having a child and allowing the mental illness to die with her. But when she realizes she can walk through a magical red door, she finds unexpected circumstances--and realizes that she may be able to reinvent her path forward--and possibly also shift the events of the past. Young builds a story of traveling through time and of shimmers of other realities that might have been--or possibly did occur; whether they happened or not is not always clear. The Unmaking of June Farrow involves some maddening determination on certain characters' parts to keep the time-travel element wholly secret from those who would ultimately be faced with it. (If even the bare bones of this crucial information were shared on a need-to-know basis, a character's possibility of showing up as herself in a dangerous point in time--for example, a time in which she may have been accused of a grave crime--could help secure her own safety and preserve her existence through various timelines and her implications on others.) It was tough not to feel frustrated at characters' reluctance to even allude to the giant elephant in the room, once the situation was laid bare for the reader. Receiving only vague advice (which initially feels faulty, to say the least) about simply walking through the vision of a red door that appears to her leads June into a dangerous situation in the past--a past from which she built deep roots at one point, then simply disappeared. The mystery of why June left a past timeline is intriguing and keeps the story going. The story shifts between events of 1912, 1946, 1950, 1951, and 1989. Late in the book, June begins to understand the "folding of time" and intuits how timelines may have combined. It's a complicated web of cause and effect, and for much of the book I wasn't certain that the bundle of events affected by time-travel added up (which age and version of which person exists in which time, and how does the interaction between different versions affect everything else), but I was willing to roll with it. The circumstances of the ending are largely satisfying, the emotional connections June ultimately makes are poignant, and there's a character-reveal twist that was sweet and lovely. I received a prepublication edition of this book courtesy of NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group: Ballantine, Delacorte Press. Do you have any Bossy thoughts about this book? Adrienne Young is also the author of Fable, its sequel Namesake, and The Last Legacy, loosely set in the worlds of Fable and Namesake, and Spells for Forgetting.

This book is part of the Greedy Reading List Six Book Club Books I Loved Last Year.

protagonists, developing depth to her characters and their relationships amid the secrets, lies, and hidden histories

(I mentioned her Shadow and Bone series in the Greedy Reading List Six Royally Magical Young Adult Series

Nothing to See Here and Alice Hoffman's The World That We Knew--featured in the Greedy Reading List Six

This was also listed in my Greedy Reading List of Six Riveting Time-Travel Escapes.

This month my favorite reads were a historical-fiction fantasy set during the Spanish Inquisition; an I love a mix of historical fiction and fantasy, and while this novel isn't as layered and complex or the Sheriff of Nottingham, things get complicated for both Mariel and Clem in this sassy, fun, queer historical

Kosta digs into his history as a young professional tennis player--including the unglamorous early tour

also wrote the fantastic Spinning Silver and Uprooted, both of which appear on the Greedy Reading List Six

also wrote the fantastic Spinning Silver and Uprooted, both of which appear on the Greedy Reading List Six

I mentioned my love for Hart's book The Last Child in the Greedy Reading List The Six Best Mysteries

This book made my Greedy Reading List of My Six Favorite Summer 2020 Reads.

loved A Curious Beginning , the first book in Deanna Raybourn's feisty Veronica Speedwell series of historical

Julia Fine's Maddalena and the Dark is a gothic story set in 1700s Venice in which two young women's lives and destinies become intertwined through a series of dark, magical promises designed to secure the elusive destinies they desire. There has already been a bargain, and this is something else that Luisa does not know. It's early 1700s Venice at a prestigious music school for orphans, the Ospedale della Pietà. Quiet, unassuming Luisa has always aimed to be the best at the violin. She wants to join the famed girls' orchestra and to one day become a protégé of Antonio Vivaldi. But her meek and mild manner invites only cold shoulders and contempt from her fellow students. That is, until the mysterious Maddalena arrives. Maddalena is sent to the Pietà temporarily after scandal threatens to ruin her family's longstanding reputation. Her attendance at the school is a last-ditch attempt to preserve her marriage prospects and assert some sense of propriety. Yet she desperately yearns for some measure of independence, which is not easily available to the women of that time. And what is there to trust? A mother who runs out on you? A brother who sells you like chattel and a father too busy to care? The other girls at school only know that Maddalena draws them into her orbit, and everyone wants to be near her. Some are puzzled when she chooses Luisa to be her bosom friend. Nevertheless, Luisa and Maddalena become fast friends, and their link grows every deeper. Then Maddalena hatches a plan in which each of them might help the other achieve her ambitious dream. But a young woman in that time has little say over her destiny. The girls make dark deals and may need to give up all that is precious in order to secure the power they need to determine their fate. Why is it that a girl must always lead the way into unpleasantness?... So many of the girls she grew up with have already been given to old widowers--no one says a word if a husband is sixty and his new bride is sixteen. So many of the girls she grew up with die in childbirth, to be replaced by fresh blood, ad infinitum, until the old man finally dies. Maddalena and the Dark has a distinct gothic tone, and the story treads ever deeper into seedy, suspect, forbidding scenes of magical realism that seem to foretell certain destruction. Do you have any Bossy thoughts about this book? I received a prepublication version of this book courtesy of NetGalley and Flatiron Books. Julia Fine is also the author of The Upstairs House and What Should Be Wild.

The desire to rewrite history in this way reveals a silly, petulant wealthy main character who is easy

This title was listed in the Greedy Reading List Six Newish Young Adult Mysteries I Want to Read. 03

This month my favorite reads were a retelling of a Mark Twain story; historical fiction set in North 01 What the Mountains Remember by Joy Callaway The historical fiction story about the building of the Novel of Maria von Trapp by Michelle Moran I was hooked on the behind-the-scenes feeling of Moran's historical-fiction

I mentioned this book in the Greedy Reading List Six Newish Young Adult Mysteries I Want to Read as well

been sooooo excited to read this final installment in Freya Marske's Last Binding trilogy, a queer historical

Sure that it's an error, Polly digs into her family history to make sure she is who she has always thought

like to read fiction about music, you might also like the titles I included in the Greedy Reading List Six

attempted to work through the pain and complications of her past by fictionalizing elements of her personal history

importantly for me, the adventure, elite training, secret powers, double-edged quest, unrevealed personal history

This book made my Greedy Reading List for My Six Favorite Summer 2020 Reads.

Atkinson is also the author of Shrines of Gaiety , Case Histories, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Life

The janitor is a cultural outsider with a complicated history, and what he lacks in training he makes