All you Southern novelists need to move over and make room for a bright new talent! Kathryn Stockett’s first novel, The Help: A Novel reveals […]
Dave Eggers’s “What is the What”
War and famine and slavery as they come to us in newspaper headlines are troubling events that we puzzle over or analyze or ignore, and […]
Vivid Historical Fiction from Geraldine Brooks
I read Geraldine Brooks’s three historical novels in reverse order–the most recent, People of the Book last–and given the way Brooks likes to scramble the […]
Ripped From the Headlines
Authors often find interesting news stories and incorporate them into their works of fiction. The following two books are based on true crimes that took place […]
“The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” and “Skeletons at the Feast”: two must-read recent novels on World War II
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows Skeletons at the Feast, Chris Bohjalian I stumbled (luckily) on both […]
More Oldies But Goodies
You’ll find these oldies but goodies on library shelves or in your bookstore. Dust them off and give one a try! The Odd Sea: A […]
Outstanding Historical Mystery: “The Tenderness of Wolves” by Stef Penney
If you like quality mysteries, try award-winning The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney. This mystery is also an outstanding historical novel, set in the […]
Past made present….
We RATS have been reading historical fiction lately and I decided that I should wrench myself out of medieval England and read something different. I came across The Women of Magdalene by Rosemary Poole-Carter set in post Civil War Lousiana. Certainly something different. It involves a young doctor, estranged from his family, who is walking to Magdalene, an asylum for women, to take a position as the house doctor. He has been given the job as a favor from one of his father’s former colleagues. On the way he finds the body of a woman in a creek. She is one of the inmates and he arrives carrying her body and thus begins his career at Magdalene.

Be a Heroine, Or a Regular Teenage Girl? Would You Risk It All To Make History?
Sylvia Patterson has a tough decision to make. The schools in Little Rock, Arkansas are integrating. Sylvia is choosen to become one of the first African-American […]