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All Historical Fiction Coverage

FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily SagaFamily DramaDebut Fiction

Many voices, one story

Feature by Julie Hale

Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel’s powerful debut, focuses on eight teenage boxers—all women—who are contending for a title at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, Nevada. Bullwinkel skillfully shifts points of view throughout this dramatic, often funny novel, developing a unique identity and personal history for each fighter, as she recounts their boxing bouts in wonderful detail. Against the backdrop of competitive sports, Bullwinkel probes the aspirations and inspirations of an unforgettable group of young women. Their differing motivations and struggles with self-determination will stimulate lively conversation among readers.

The Family Izquierdo by Rubén Degollado chronicles the lives of members of a close-knit Mexican American clan in McAllen, Texas. The novel follows the family across three generations as they contend with a curse they believe has caused the physical decline of Papa Tavo, the head of the family, and the marriage woes of Gonzalo, the eldest son. Narrated by different members of the Izquierdo clan, the novel examines family ties and traditions as well as life on the Texas-Mexico border. Degollado creates a rich chorus of voices in this moving, compassionate novel.

Intricate and enthralling, Megha Majumdar’s A Burning takes place in Kolkata, India, following a terrorist attack. Jivan, a Muslim woman, is implicated in the attack and jailed. Lovely, a trans actress, could clear Jivan’s name, but is reluctant to speak up. Jivan’s former gym teacher, PT Sir, who has been increasingly drawn toward right-wing politics, is also involved in the case. Each character provides a different take on the events at hand, and the result is a nuanced, multilayered tale. The tough questions it raises about justice make Majumdar’s novel a rewarding choice for book clubs.

In Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange continues the mesmerizing family saga that started with his acclaimed novel There There (2018). He resumes the stories of Orvil Red Feather and Opal Viola Bear Shield in modern-day Oakland, California, while also detailing the lives of their forebears, including Jude Star, a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre. Told from the viewpoints of multiple characters, the book weaves together varied voices to create a complex narrative tapestry. Throughout the novel, Orange explores long-standing family conflicts and the enduring legacies of American Indigenous history.

Book clubs will have plenty to debate with these multiperspective and polyvocal novels.
FictionPopular FictionHistorical Fiction

The Lost Passenger

Review by Carolyn Cates

I’ll be honest, at first glance, the synopsis of The Lost Passenger sounds a bit like a sequel to Titanic. But happily, this proves not to be the case. The book begins two years before the doomed voyage and is told in the fresh first-person voice of a likable heroine, Elinor Hayward.

After a whirlwind courtship, 19-year-old Elinor marries Frederick Coombes, an English aristocrat, only to discover that what she thought was a union of love was instead a ruse to get her father’s new money to resurrect the Coombes’ crumbling old English estate. In Frederick’s words, his family’s guiding principle is, “When the place has been in the family for five centuries, it gives one a certain responsibility to the generations who’ve gone before and the ones to come.”

Having realized Frederick’s duplicity, Elinor resigns herself to a loveless life in cold Winterton Hall. She simply does not fit in there, as a woman who speaks her mind and has been taught by her father to have some business sense. She is looked down upon for her accent and her manners (her mother-in-law: “We spoon soup away from us, Elinor”). When she provides the family with a male heir, Teddy, she learns that motherhood, too, will not be as she imagined. A nanny will raise her son without her input.

Then Elinor’s father gives her three tickets for the Titanic’s maiden voyage, and Elinor jumps at the opportunity to escape from Winterton for 16 days. The trip becomes a more permanent escape for her when Frederick goes down with the ship, and Elinor makes an impulsive, brave choice that leads her to a new family in New York.

Readers will enjoy The Lost Passenger’s emphasis on the power of self-reliance and determination, demonstrated through the juxtaposition of Elinor’s unhappy life in England with her happiness in the life she chooses, despite its less favorable conditions. Some may wish to see more of her later life and Teddy’s, but Elinor’s believable voice and sympathetic narrative will have great appeal.

The Lost Passenger begins two years before the Titanic’s doomed voyage, telling the story of a young woman and her son whose lives will be forever changed by the disaster.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Fagin the Thief

Review by Sydney Hankin

Meet Jacob Fagin, pickpocket extraordinaire of 19th-century London. He lives in an abandoned property on Bell Court with a cluster of proteges: children who, with no roof over their heads, no food to eat and no family to turn to, ended up on his doorstep. He is, through one lens, a hero to be admired. Through another, he makes his living breaking the law, harboring and shaping the next generation of criminals. In Fagin the Thief, Allison Epstein’s greatly imaginative retelling of Oliver Twist, it’s left to the reader to wrestle with their verdict. 

After losing his beloved mother to illness, 16-year-old Jacob is thrust into thievery as his only method of survival. The orphan has just begun to settle into a ragged routine when he meets Bill Sikes, another young thief. Having fled an abusive home, Bill struggles to find his place in the world, and as he becomes a notorious housebreaker, he develops an increasing anger that scares Jacob and his circle. Eventually, a burglary gone wrong breaks the precarious company into irreparable pieces when, for the first time, Jacob’s exceptional instincts for self-preservation prove insufficient. 

In Charles Dickens’ original portrayal, the character of Fagin is a famously anti-Semitic caricature. In Fagin the Thief, Epstein reclaims the character’s Jewish identity, threading his upbringing and customs throughout the book, along with the discrimination he faces. This context adds nuance to her depiction—Jacob’s compassion towards his community is even more meaningful in the face of this adversity, yet he remains a morally ambiguous character. It’s an empowering, humanizing portrayal.

Jacob frequently wonders how to classify his relationships with Bill and all the other members of his makeshift group, but to the reader, it’s clear that what they share are the unconditional bonds of family. Painful as it is to watch each of them make their mistakes, it’s impossible not to love these characters through it all. 

In Allison Epstein’s imaginative retelling of Oliver Twist, Fagin the Thief, Jacob Fagin gets his own remarkable story.
FictionHistorical FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

The English Problem

Review by Ember V. Tharpe

“This is how England claimed you—through its rain,” remarks Shiv Advani when he arrives in the country at London’s Victoria Station and finds “thin, fine icicles” pricking his skin. From these opening lines, Beena Kamlani introduces the primary conflict of her debut novel, The English Problem: the tension between the home we are from and the home we have chosen.

This detailed and informative work of historical fiction follows Shiv starting from his childhood in northern India in the 1920s. The doting son of political elites and later a semi-protege of Mahatma Gandhi himself, Shiv is staunchly dedicated to carrying out the wishes of his superiors. But once he arrives in England to study law and support Indian independence, he finds himself in settings where his ambition and his values clash. There lies the crux of Shiv’s journey. Through experiences in shame, violence, love and friendship, Shiv discovers his own moral compass. The direction it takes him in, however, is a departure from his intended path. From the halls of libraries to the quarters of lovers, readers see Shiv confront expectations, disappointment and new personal lessons against a backdrop of actual historical events.

Kamlani’s writing vividly brings us into Shiv’s experience through his senses. That said, the book may appeal more to readers who enjoy history and philosophy, due to its emphasis on both. In particular, conversations with historical figures, including the likes of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster and Gandhi, give readers the opportunity to be immersed in some of the era’s ruling ideas.

The English Problem is a true bildungsroman, as Shiv feels out the lines between desire and obligation, and learns what it means to be at home. Readers will certainly enjoy its language and the subtle complexity of its themes.

Beena Kamlani’s detailed historical debut, The English Problem, follows an Indian man who journeys to England in the 1930s to study law and support Indian independence, but finds himself caught between his ambition, his heart and his values.
FictionHistorical FictionCrime Fiction

Saint of the Narrows Street

Review by Thane Tierney

If you’re in Brooklyn and want to grab a slice of pizza, you go to Totonno’s or L&B Spumoni Gardens. If you’re not in Brooklyn and want to grab a slice of life there, reach for William Boyle’s seventh novel, Saint of the Narrows Street.

Though Risa Taverna’s husband, Saverio Franzone, has plenty of friends in the neighborhood, to his wife, Sav is a terror. She knew he was “a bad man” soon after marrying him, and his abuse has increased since the birth of their son, Fabrizio. When Sav comes home drunk one night, starts an argument and waves his newly acquired gun around, Risa clonks him on the head with a frying pan, and he hits his head for the second time on the kitchen table as he falls to the floor. Goodbye, Sav.

It’s probably not a great loss to the world, but it’s an immediate tragedy for Risa and her sister, Giulia, who witnessed the whole thing. Risa and Giulia are basically upstanding citizens who, in a moment of crisis, did what they felt they had to. Hoping to protect Fabrizio from the fallout, the women enlist Sav’s best childhood buddy, Christopher “Chooch” Gardini, to help them dispose of the deceased and make a pact to let sleeping dogs—and husbands—lie.

Over the next 18 years, Sav’s memory rests uneasily, occasionally threatening to upend the carefully guarded alibi. But the resemblance between father and son goes deeper than just the image in the mirror, and Fabrizio, who never knew his dad, inevitably has questions, some of which might best be left unanswered.

Boyle, who grew up in the neighborhood he depicts, has a pointillist’s eye for detail, with every image meticulously crafted in a way that seems effortless. You can smell the cigarette smoke and desperation wafting from the dive bar, the freezer lasagna being reheated when the priest drops by uninvited, the moist earth covering a grave whose secrets can’t be buried nearly deep enough. Fans of Dennis Lehane or George Pelecanos will find Saint of the Narrows Street as authentic and satisfying as Spumoni Garden’s Sicilian pie, but unlike their menu, there’s no hero in sight.

William Boyle has a pointillist’s eye for detail. In Saint of the Narrows Street, you can smell the cigarette smoke and desperation wafting from the dive bar and the freezer lasagna reheated when the priest drops by.
FictionPopular FictionHistorical Fiction

People of Means

Review by Eric A. Ponce

Anyone who grew up a wealthy or middle-class person of color can attest to particular life problems: You are seen as a representative of your “people” wherever you go, microaggressions are standard fare no matter how much authority you have, and the weight of your ancestors is always heavy on your shoulders. In Nancy Johnson’s second novel, People of Means, these problems are expansively explored. Following a mother and daughter, Johnson details the ways racial discrimination changed throughout the 20th century and the ways it remained very much the same.

Freda Gilroy matriculates at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1959. Regarded as the most famous Black university in the world, Fisk puts pressure on Freda, who was raised among Chicago’s Black elite, to rise to the heights of Black excellence, fulfilling W.E.B. Du Bois’ plan for the “talented tenth.” Nashville is very different from Chicago, though, and in the South, Freda realizes how protected she had been from the realities of racist discrimination and segregation. After seeing “WHITE” and “COLORED” signs on the bathrooms during a date to the state fair, a small fire lights in Freda, one that will be stoked into a full conflagration.

Decades later, in 1992, Freda’s daughter Tulip has also achieved success with her cushy public relations job. Having fought her way to the top, she starts to take inventory of her life, but when she hears the Rodney King verdict and sees the ensuing riots, Tulip realizes that all she’s accomplished might not be that important to her. Across decades, both mother and daughter are called to question what justice really is and to fight for what they believe in.

In our current political moment, People of Means feels vital. Decades have passed since Tulip’s timeline, and still people are fighting for racial equality. Johnson shows us that the fight will go on, because our thirst for justice is unquenchable.

In Nancy Johnson’s second novel, People of Means, she follows a mother and daughter grappling with the ideals of Black excellence and realities of racial discrimination in 1960s Nashville and 1990s Chicago.
FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

Mutual Interest

Review by Laura Sackton

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s sophomore novel, Mutual Interest, is a high-drama romp through wealthy New York society in the early decades of the 1900s. With witty asides and tongue-in-cheek philosophical rambles, larger-than-life characters and vivid, melodramatic scenes, it reads a bit like a dishy soap opera.

Vivian Lesperance is determined to live life on her own terms—no easy task for a woman at the turn of the 20th century. She flees her provincial life in Utica, New York, for the big city, where she meets and marries Oscar Schmidt, a soap company manager in whom she sees a potential future. Vivian and Oscar join forces with Squire Clancey, heir to a fortune, and together they found Clancy & Schmidt, a personal care company that soon rises to astronomical success.

Protected by wealth, Clancey & Schmidt’s three founders form an unusual queer partnership that brings each of them a kind of freedom. Squire, whose eccentric interests and inability to adhere to social norms has left him at odds with his family, and Oscar, who has spent his life in a constant state of fear that his sexuality will be discovered, fall in love. Wrapped up in their newfound happiness, the men hardly notice Vivian, who runs Clancey & Schmidt like an empress while pursuing affairs with women all over the city.

Though we have access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings through Wolfgang-Smith’s omniscient narrator, the three leads remain at a distance. This choice serves the story well, as it’s not so much about individual people as it is about the building of a commercial empire. It’s about consequence and sacrifice, power and secrecy, and how personal choices so often spiral out of control, changing—or destroying—other lives in unexpected ways. 

Though it delves into the very real challenges facing women and queer people in the early 20th century, Mutual Interest never takes itself too seriously. It’s an unconventional saga about the cost of ambition, the relentless American thirst for success, and the invisible, often strange truths that lurk behind the public facades of people with power. 

Though it delves into real challenges facing women and queer people in the early 20th century, Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s witty sophomore novel, Mutual Interest, never takes itself too seriously.
FictionPopular FictionHistorical Fiction

Isola

Review by Melissa Brown

Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval lived in 16th-century France until she set sail with her guardian, who aimed to establish a colony near what is now Quebec. The facts of Marguerite’s true story are tantalizingly few, but, by all accounts, she and her maid, Damienne, traveled to New France along with a man who was or became Marguerite’s lover on board. Allegra Goodman’s eighth novel, Isola, celebrates this lesser-known historical figure in an exciting, imagined narrative.

When Marguerite’s tryst with her lover, Auguste (her guardian’s secretary), is discovered, her guardian banishes the couple and Damienne to an island, where they must survive the winters and wild beasts however they can. Goodman takes elements from 16th-century tales, including an account in The Heptameron, and fills in the many blanks in Marguerite’s story with exquisitely rendered imaginings of her inner turmoil, capturing all the longing and fiery will to survive that Marguerite finds within herself when her life and the lives of those she loves are at stake.

Goodman effectlively dramatizes the precarious position of a female orphan in the 1500s, even one of means, making Marguerite’s anguish and powerlessness palpable. Though she starts as a naive and untested child, she grows in tenacity and faith in herself throughout her ordeal, her anxiety maturing into a determination and defiance that engages the reader’s sympathy and respect. The intertwining of Renaissance religious beliefs and superstitions supplies an irresistible atmosphere of foreboding to Goodman’s tale, while the first-person point of view immerses the reader in what Marguerite is feeling and learning. “I understand what it is to be a man,” Marguerite says after tragedy has struck the island. “To be a man is to have your way.” Damienne, horrified by this unbecoming attitude, responds, “And is that good? . . . Is it right?” to which Marguerite truthfully replies, “It is satisfying.” 

As a novel of adventure and redemption and as a story of a woman coming into her own, Isola is a rewarding read.

As a novel of adventure and redemption and as a story of a woman coming into her own, Allegra Goodman’s 16th-century tale, Isola, is a rewarding read.
FictionPopular FictionHistorical Fiction

Good Dirt

Review by Lauren Bufferd

“History,” one of the characters in Good Dirt remarks, “can only be told through a chorus of voices.” Charmaine Wilkerson’s (Black Cake) second novel reminds us that we need access to a multitude of stories for a full understanding of our country’s rich and complicated past.

On her wedding day, Ebony (Ebby) Freeman, the daughter of an affluent Black family in a seaside Connecticut town, finds herself the center of attention for the wrong reason: Her fiancé, Henry, has left her at the altar. And this is not her first time having her pain put in the spotlight. As a child, Ebby witnessed the murder of her 15-year-old brother, Baz, during a home robbery that also destroyed a valuable family heirloom, a clay pot made by an enslaved ancestor. The violent crime has haunted her for years, and the media focus on the Freeman family because of their wealth and race has also taken a toll. Nine months after the broken nuptials, Ebby plans to manage a friend’s guest house in a French village while she devotes herself to gathering family stories about the pot that was broken during the robbery. But when Henry and his new girlfriend turn out to be the house’s first guests, Ebby’s hopes for a restorative working vacation go awry. 

Wilkerson chose a nonlinear narrative to craft this ambitious novel, reaching as far back as the 19th century when the pot was created and brought from South Carolina to Massachusetts, intertwining its legacy with the story of the Freeman family, Henry and Ebby’s courtship and its aftermath, and Ebby’s attempts to heal. Part romantic drama, part history lesson, Good Dirt dilutes its power with a few narrative missteps, and by overextending its reach with characters that are tangential to the plot (like Henry’s rebound girlfriend, Avery). Though the issues she raises don’t get a completely satisfying exploration, readers will be intrigued by Wilkerson’s efforts to illuminate the complex ways in which American history continuously informs the present.

Charmaine Wilkerson’s second novel, Good Dirt, reminds us that we need access to a multitude of stories for a full understanding of our country’s rich and complicated past.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Casualties of Truth

Review by Freya Sachs

What happens when the past does not resolve, does not leave? In Lauren Francis-Sharma’s Casualties of Truth, Prudence Wright’s seemingly peaceful present is interrupted by a figure from her past who reminds her of the events of a summer she’d long buried in memory.

As the novel opens in 2018, Prudence and her husband, Davis, are out to dinner, joined by a new colleague of his whom Prudence has never met—except, she has met him before. In fact, Matshediso is well known to Prudence from the time she spent as a law student in South Africa in 1996, in the midst of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s hearings. Moving between Prudence’s present with her husband and son in Washington and her summer in Johannesburg, each tense scene brings secrets Prudence had hoped to leave behind closer to the surface. 

Fast-paced, engaging and surprising, Casualties of Truth has some elements of a thriller, while examining whether truth is enough, whether the past can be escaped and whether the personal and political are ever separate. For Prudence, the legacies of racism and apartheid have shaped her own path as well as the intertwining histories of the U.S. and South Africa. The life she’s made in Washington is a dynamic layer of the story, too, as she considers her choice to suspend her career to spend more time raising her autistic son, and as pressure from Matshediso complicates her relationship with Davis.

Emerging connections between the past and present keep the novel unpredictable, and the big questions it raises will stay open well after it closes. 

Fast-paced, engaging and surprising, Lauren Francis-Sharma’s Casualties of Truth examines the legacy of apartheid through the life of a lawyer whose long-ago summer in Johannesburg comes back to haunt her.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionClassics

Plucked from the ashes

Interview by Phoebe Farrell-Sherman

This book was nearly lost to history: It was burned with other papers of Hurston’s after her death, and only rescued, remarkably, by a friend of hers (Patrick Duval), who passed by the fire and was quick enough with a garden hose to save the manuscript. How, from there, did The Life of Herod the Great come to be in your hands? What condition was the manuscript in when you first read it?

From there, Hurston’s friend and neighbor Marjorie Silver deposited the manuscript, along with other items, at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1961. The “Life of Herod the Great” manuscript was placed in the George A. Smathers Special Collections library. Over the last several years, the Zora Neale Hurston Trust has worked to publish Hurston’s unpublished materials. Once the trust was ready to go forward with the publication of the Herod manuscript, I submitted a proposal to edit it for publication.

Overall, given that the manuscript had been pulled from a fire, I’d say that the manuscript was in surprisingly good condition. Yes, sections of several concluding chapters were lost or missing or, likely, simply burned. And a good many pages were singed or burned around the edges. But a major portion of the manuscript was intact. The several hundred pages that survived were a combination of typescript and longhand drafts.

As an editor, how did you approach what was missing in the manuscript, either because of damage or because it was a work in progress?

In instances where a page was singed or burned around the edges, and a word, a part of a word or a phrase was missing, the remaining letters of a word, the remaining words of a phrase, or the context of a sentence or paragraph indicated how I should complete the word, phrase or sentence. This, I would do only if Hurston’s intention was clear.

When I could not discern Hurston’s intentionality, I used ellipses to indicate missing words. One thing I did not want to do was to insert my thoughts or ideas into her work. I wanted only Hurston’s voice to speak, throughout. Whenever extensive passages or sections of a chapter were missing, asterisks indicate missing text or pages. This was the case mainly with the concluding chapters, which are shorter by comparison.

The last chapter, which would have told of the nature and circumstances of Herod’s death, did not survive. However, Hurston wrote about Herod’s death in various letters to her editor and to friends. So I extracted the events of his death from Hurston’s letters and edited them in the epilogue. This way, the readers would have the satisfaction that comes with a clearly stated ending. And Hurston’s interpretation of the events of Herod’s death would be preserved, in her own voice.

Like his life, the fact of Herod’s death had been buried under centuries-old untruths. Hurston found that historical accounts, which echoed the account documented by Flavius Josephus, were unfounded. As she wanted to set the record straight in relation to the biblical account of Herod’s reign, she also wanted to restore his dignity in death. In the absence of her narrative rendering of Herod’s death, Hurston’s letters give us insight into Hurston’s thoughts about the end of Herod’s life, and we can then imagine what she might have written.

“Reading Hurston’s The Life of Herod the Great can contribute to . . . our capacity to become conscious creators of the world we want.”

You’ve spent a great deal of time with Hurston’s writing, as the editor of Hurston’s posthumously released Barracoon (2018), and the author of several books about her (Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit, Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom). I’m curious how your relationship with her work began. How did you decide to make such a deep study of her?

My relationship with Hurston’s work began when I browsed the bookshelves in the Shrine of the Black Madonna Bookstore in Atlanta one day and glimpsed a cover that caught my eye. The green leaves and yellow pears of a tree in the foreground and a shack of a house in the background was the cover art that graced Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. I skimmed a few lines and was compelled to purchase the book.

I had never seen myself, my community, my culture captured so perfectly. I had never read the sounds we make when we talk and joke and pray and fuss rendered so true in written language before. Reading Their Eyes was like looking in a mirror. I was in grad school at Atlanta University, then. I hadn’t known about her, but she seemed to know so much about me. It was uncanny, to me, that she knew me so well. I thought the least I could do was to learn something about her. The Shrine happened to also have a copy of [Hurston’s memoir] Dust Tracks on a Road. I found in her life story so many incidents and events that accorded with my own. My interest in Dr. Hurston and her work would only intensify when I discovered that to study Hurston was to study myself, my culture, American society, the nature of humankind and Creation, Itself.

What would you say to those who might wonder how relevant Herod’s story is to contemporary readers?

Two things:

1. Many contemporary readers still subscribe to the story of Herod as told in the New Testament. As Hurston points out in her preface to the novel, there is much that Herod’s story has to teach about the 1st century B.C.E. which is especially important to understand, given that our culture was influenced by the ideas that were born then, and we’re still embodying and living those ideas now.

2. The sociopolitical dynamics at play in Herod’s day are being played out as we “speak.” Hurston’s work dramatizes the efforts of the West in the domination and control of the peoples of the East. In Herod’s day, we’re talking about Rome’s domination of Persia and Syria and Judea, among others. And today, the conflicts in the Middle East are continuing these ancient wars of domination and resistance to domination. It’s like the names—of the people and the nations—have changed, but the insatiable energy of war has continued throughout the centuries. Hurston bemoaned that history—of war, and death and destruction—continues to repeat itself. But history doesn’t so much repeat itself as it simply continues—until there is a conscious intervention and a commitment to create what we prefer. Reading Hurston’s The Life of Herod the Great can contribute to our knowledge about the world that we inhabit and the worlds that inhabit us, our capacity to become conscious creators of the world we want, and our courage to live in the world authentically.

Where will your work take you next? Will you be working with more of Hurston’s writing, or could we expect another book of your own, like 2024’s Of Greed and Glory?

Well, we’ll see about “more of Hurston’s writing.” I don’t know whether there are more writings, but there is more to say about what we do have. And I know that whatever is next, even a book of my own, it will be inspired by the same ideals that I find compelling in Hurston’s work—a love of freedom, a respect for political and personal sovereignty, the evolution of humanity, and justice.

Read our review of The Life of Herod the Great.

Deborah G. Plant author photo by Gloria Plant-Gilbert.

In a novel never published in her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston presented a new vision of the biblical King Herod. Scholar Deborah G. Plant reveals how the masterwork was saved after Hurston’s death, and what we can learn from these precious pages.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf

Review by Eric A. Ponce

Recently, I was talking with a stockbroker about success. She said that she could never take the risk that actors take: While this sad, cold world will always need stockbrokers, as an actor, it is entirely possible that no casting director will ever call you back. Isa Arsén’s novel The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf shows a group of actors and theater producers trying their best to beat the odds and find success on the stage—or at least avoid absolute failure.

In 1955, Margaret Wolf has moved to New York City and made it, at least in Shakespearean-actor terms. She performs off-Broadway (not off-off Broadway, mind you) in a company of Shakespearean players who take their craft very seriously. Her main friend is also her mentor, Edie Bishop, a bona fide theater impresario who helps Margaret get jobs and navigate the scene. When a new actor, Wesley Shoard, joins the company, the two women do some digging and find out that he is a former film star from the U.K. Margaret and Wesley become fast friends and even better stage partners. Their chemistry in Twelfth Night draws large audiences and lands them the lead roles in the company’s production of Macbeth, the cursed Scottish play. Before rehearsals start, though, Wesley, a gay man, begs Margaret to marry him to protect him from McCarthy-era suspicion. She agrees, and the two begin a life together, helped by the financial support of Edie (who buys them an apartment) and Ezra, their director. However, a mental breakdown after opening night sends Margaret into forced convalescence, and her marriage with social butterfly Wesley starts to get rocky. When Wesley gets an offer to perform in an experimental production in the New Mexican desert, Margaret leaps at the chance to leave the city with him, sending the couple into an even more calamitous unknown.

In the complicated, dramatic theater sphere detailed delightfully by Arsén, Margaret is often caught between the roles she plays and the life she wants to live. She struggles to find authenticity. Arsén beautifully captures the strange kind of love of Margaret’s marriage with Wesley, showing the challenge of caring for someone while letting them be who they are. Though the actor’s life is a risky one, Arsén shows us how richly rewarding the world of theater can be for those who brave it.

Isa Arsén delightfully details the dramatics of the 1950s theater sphere in The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf, which follows the lavender marriage between two Shakespearean players.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionClassics

The Life of Herod the Great

Review by Lauren Bufferd

A trained anthropologist and writer, Zora Neale Hurston worked on a novel about Herod the Great for much of her life. Planned as a companion to her 1939 book Moses, Man of the Mountain, it was unpublished when she died in 1960. The manuscript, part of the Hurston archive at the University of Florida, has now at last been released in a comprehensive edition that includes commentary from editor (and Hurston biographer), Deborah G. Plant and excerpts from letters Hurston wrote to friends and family as she researched the novel. 

The Life of Herod the Great tells the story of the Judean king who lived during the first century B.C.E. and may be best remembered as the man responsible for the building of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. He is also sometimes said to have ordered the execution of all male children in Bethlehem who were 2 years or younger, although many historians do not believe this event occurred.

Hurston did not either. Her novel begins with Herod as a young man assuming the governorship of Galilee under the direction of his father, Antipater. Hurston’s Herod is not only a canny political mind and brilliant strategist, but also a thoughtful man, drawn to the philosophy of the Essenes—a Jewish sect whose piety and devotion to peacemaking had much in common with early Christianity. Herod was ruthless to his enemies, but fiercely devoted to his family and loyal to the Roman leaders who controlled all the Judean kingdoms. His visits to Cleopatra, Marc Antony and Caesar in Rome are the highlights of Hurston’s novel; her familiarity with the political and spiritual workings of the Roman Empire makes this a thought-provoking read. 

Hurston died before The Life of Herod the Great was finished, and though the novel is cohesive, there are some gaps in the narrative. Herod’s first wife, Doris, and their baby son, Antipater, disappear from the book early on, and there are a few undeveloped plot points that the reader imagines Hurston would have tidied up if the novel had been completed in her lifetime. However, there is much here for any reader to enjoy, whether they are fans of Huston’s fiction or eager for a deep dive into a subject rarely seen outside religious texts or histories.

Read our Q&A with Deborah G. Plant about The Life of Herod the Great.

Zora Neale Hurston’s familiarity with the political and spiritual workings of the Roman Empire makes The Life of Herod the Great a thought-provoking read, particularly in her depiction of Herod’s visits to Cleopatra, Marc Antony and Caesar.

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