This is my first Cannonball read and I can’t believe I picked a book–sort of at random, I admit–that I love this much. It’s a story of the Northwest frontier at the turn of the twentieth century so lumberjacks, railroad laborers, miscreants, drunks, and a few coyotes and wolves are par for the course. But there’s also a (maybe real/maybe an apparition) wolf-girl and a sort of carnival side-show version of a wolf-boy. In a book that’s just 125 pages long. I’ve never read anything by Denis Johnson […]
Book Two of the Century Trilogy
Book Two of the Century Trilogy takes us through the time between the World Wars and all the way through World War II. Lady Maud Fitzherbert is married to a German, and struggling in Germany with her family – trying to survive and fight the Nazis at the same time. The American Dewars end up fighting in different theaters (one Pacific, one European). The Russian Peshkovs (well, the one that stayed behind) are part of the Communist regime. This book features most of the main […]
Book One of the Century Trilogy
Ah, Ken Follett. Writer of decent spy books, and sweeping historic epic novels. I have no idea how he gets these things done, they’re so bloody huge. So, this is the first of what Follett is calling the “Century Trilogy.” It follows five families through the 20th century, this book covers 1911 through 1924. We’ve got World War I, the Russian Revolution, women’s suffrage, mining strikes, and also just general life stuff like unwed mothers, gays, and religion. The families come from Wales (the poor, […]
Religious fear & murder mystery in 12th century Cambridge
Mistress and the Art of Death is first book of in this series from Ariana Franklin. I didn’t quite know what to expect – a pure historical fiction or a paranormal mystery? It’s actually more akin to a modern murder mystery simply set in 12th century Cambridge. Four children have been murdered and the English community, rife with religious prejudice, blames the ghetto-ized Jewish community. Henry II is forced to step in and quarantine the Jewish people in a nearby castle. Lest they be lynched by the Catholic […]
More like drums of melodrama.
And so concludes another installment of the madcap adventures of that time-traveling Highlander clan, the Mackenzie-Fraser whatevers. This was the least weird, but most melodramatic of the books so far. It was wacky and I enjoyed it, despite some issues. In 1767, Claire, Jamie and Ian are fresh from being shipwrecked off the coast of Georgia. In 1969, Jamie and Claire’s grown daughter, Brianna, grows closer to Roger Wakefield, the only other person who knows her family’s secret: they are time-travelers. And Roger, too, is a […]
The beginning of an excellent series
I stumbled on this one, as I often do, through a Kindle deal. It’s a great way to discovery a new author or a new genre without spending a bunch of money, or at least without a trip to the library. Martin Jensen is a Danish novelist (there are a lot of really good Scandinavian writers, aren’t there?) who has written a bunch of books. From what I can tell, these books are the first to be translated into English. There are two right now […]
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