Imagine what it would be like for Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s grandchildren to deal with the messes their grandparents made 80 years ago. The eponymous piece of jewelry of Claire McMillan’s absorbing novel is what remains of another Gatsby-esque Jazz Age tragedy made by another bunch of careless people.

Nell Merrihew has come to the family seat in Ohio after being tapped as the executor of her great-aunt Loulou Quincy’s will. This is viewed with some dismay by her upper-crust Quincy cousins, for Nell isn’t considered one of the clan. When Nell’s statuesque, snobbish cousin Pansy finds out that Loulou gifted a fabulous and valuable Indian necklace to Nell, Pansy has no problem threatening to haul out the big legal guns. Anyone who’s had to deal with a passel of greedy and/or irrational kinfolk when it comes to the fine print of a last will and testament will identify, painfully.

Alternating with Nell’s chapters are those focusing on the triangle involving Nell’s long-dead maternal grandparents. Loulou’s brothers, Ethan and Ambrose Quincy, contend for the love of May, a nice girl from another well-heeled family who’s going to marry one or the other anyway. When the restless Ambrose decides to head to Asia for some culture and big-game hunting, May stays behind with the dutiful Ethan. In the fullness of time, Ambrose returns with the necklace meant for May, his new sister-in-law.

McMillan impresses with her knowledge and interplay of both timelines: Ambrose’s handwritten letters versus the texts between Nell and her love interest; the golden sheen that surrounds a family at the height of its pre-Depression power and wealth versus the aggravations of having to find ways to get rid of every unwanted, moth-eaten thing in that family’s crumbling old mansion. Throughout, McMillan reminds the reader that the bonds and misunderstandings among families continue from generation to generation.

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Historical fiction is all about blending the original with the familiar, about those delicate new stitches woven into the tapestry. The best practitioners of this often subtle art can sew those new threads without ever breaking the pattern, until the new and the old, the real and the fictional, are one and the same. With her latest novel, Kate Quinn announces herself as one of the best artists of the genre.

The Alice Network jumps deftly and briskly between two tumultuous periods of European history: 1947, in the wake of the second world war; and 1915, in the heat of the first. After World War II, Charlie St. Clair—a young American woman being shuffled off to Europe by her family due to a surprise pregnancy—is searching for her lost French cousin, and her quest leads her to the London doorstep of a prickly, drunken woman named Eve Gardiner.

In 1915, a much younger Eve is working as a file girl for the war effort when her multilingual skills and ability to go unnoticed (helped by her stammer) earn her the opportunity to work as a spy in German-occupied France. Eve wants to be on the front lines, but she may be unprepared for how far she’ll have to go.

Quinn’s novel links the two women across time, as it becomes clear that something from Eve’s dark past lingers in Charlie’s present. The plotting is seamless, the pace breathtaking, and the prose is both vivid and laced with just the right amount of detail. Charlie is a fiercely entertaining narrator, and Eve is one of the most complex and rewarding characters you’ll find in a new novel this year.

Fans of historical fiction, spy fiction and thrilling drama will love every moment of The Alice Network. It’s a masterful novel that will leave you craving more.

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, April 2017

What was Germany like for regular citizens in the months and years after World War II? In the enthralling The Women in the Castle, Jessica Shattuck paints a portrait of a postwar country wracked with guilt and confusion, trying to regroup and rebuild even as Allied forces require Germans to watch footage of the liberation of Buchenwald and paper villages with photos of concentration camp victims. In this uncertain world, where many Germans still believe these actions to be propaganda and don’t yet understand the full horror of what has transpired, three women come together through unlikely connections.

Marianne von Lingenfels is an aristocrat whose husband died due to his involvement in an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life. Before he dies, Marianne pledges to take care of the wives and children of other resisters. Making good on that promise, Marianne retrieves Benita, who is being abused by Russian soldiers in Berlin, and locates Benita’s son, who’s being held in a Nazi children’s home.

The group makes its way to the von Lingenfels’ castle, where Marianne’s children also live. Then quiet Ania and her two shell-shocked boys arrive, ostensibly fleeing the Red Army. But there’s more to her story, and Benita’s, and it will take years for Marianne to fully understand the pasts of the women she’s been charged with protecting.

Shattuck, whose novel The Hazards of Good Breeding was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award, sheds new light on World War II’s aftermath and the families left behind, and raises poignant questions about blind loyalty: “Could you see a person’s soul in their face? Marianne and Albrecht had often argued about this. Yes, she had insisted. Didn’t you know from the moment you saw Hitler’s photograph that he was bad? Albrecht wasn’t sure. If it was so obvious, he pointed out, how did he fool the rest of Germany?”

The Women in the Castle is haunting, a beautifully written and painfully vivid glimpse into one of the most horrific times in world history.

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Paul La Farge has always drawn the thinnest and most permeable line between biographical fact and historical fiction. Both in his previous novels and in a set of poetic dreams he “translated” from a non-existent French poet of the 19th century, La Farge illuminates over and over again the superior strangeness of “real life” over anything he brilliantly devises as a writer of boundless imagination.

Now the author has surpassed himself. The Night Ocean is the ultimate crossing of the hazy boundary between reality and fantasy. It unflinchingly and comically diagnoses the emotional wonder and chaos unleashed by any troubled writer who fabricates an evil reality all his own. H.P. Lovecraft was such a person, and this novel is a mighty boon to horror geeks like me who misspent a good portion of our youths reading the pulp fiction of Lovecraft and his unholy minions, and surrendering to the cult of “fandom” that grew up around his bizarre personality and cosmically evil inventions. But La Farge’s novel goes further than celebrating the legacy of this especially deranged and popular storyteller. It is told by a psychotherapist, whose husband’s career and sanity have been destroyed by Lovecraft & Co. For this devastated couple, there are dark boxes within Lovecraft’s dark boxes, forcing a delightfully unsteady movement of the novel toward two associated characters: Lovecraft’s friend (and possible lover) Robert Barlow, who is a richly historical figure, and L.C. Spinks, an entirely unreal figure who becomes diabolically “real” to us, as the novel unfolds layer upon layer of Spinks’ truths and untruths, heartbreaking facts and wild fabrications.

Best of all is the way The Night Ocean addresses the real horror of H.P. Lovecraft’s vile hatefulness against African-Americans, Jews and other minorities. As in Matt Ruff’s recent novel Lovecraft Country (which I also recommend), Lovecraft’s demons are nothing more or less than us.