Caroline Herschel’s prospects as a plain, poor and pox-scarred woman in 19th-century Germany are not good. Living in a cramped home surrounded by siblings and an affectionless mother, her only saviors are her brilliant older brother William—who moved to England—and her loving but sickly father, who after attending the wedding of a neighbor’s daughter wails to Caroline, “Oh, my dear. You are neither handsome nor rich. What is to be done?”

After Caroline sends her attractive, eccentric brother a letter in which she pleads, “Save me,” he brings her to England to serve as his assistant. An astronomer of growing renown, William teaches Caroline (he calls her Lina) to help him chart the skies. She also cooks, cleans, handles his records and keeps the household accounts, while managing to become an accomplished astronomer in her own right. When William decides to marry—it is not coincidental that his betrothed has inherited a sizable estate—Caroline finds herself on her own for the first time in her life, faced with deciding who she is.

The Stargazer’s Sister is a lovely addition to Carrie Brown’s works of historical fiction. Brown brings the true story of the Herschel siblings to life in exquisite detail and deftly explores what it meant for Caroline to be an intelligent woman far ahead of her time. 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kristina McMorris evokes such a strong sense of place in her writing that to open her books feels less like reading and more like traveling.

Her absorbing new novel, The Edge of Lost, opens on Alcatraz Island in 1937, where on a foggy night the warden’s 10-year-old daughter has gone missing. An inmate working in the warden’s greenhouse is hiding information about where she is. We are quickly zipped back to 1919 Dublin, meeting Shanley Keagan, a 12-year-old orphan whose vicious Uncle Will forces him to perform in pubs for spare change. Shan grabs an opportunity to get on a ship to America, scrabbling to forge a future in New York.

How those two storylines intersect is at the heart of this epic, deeply felt tale of struggle and second chances, where Shan goes from a boy with dreams of Broadway to an inmate who “waited for the steel bars to slam” while he served 15 to 25 years.

McMorris has made a name for herself with beautifully written World War II fiction, including her debut, Letters from Home, which was based upon her grandfather’s wartime letters to a girlfriend. Her latest novel was inspired in part by McMorris’ reading about children who grew up on Alcatraz Island, whose parents were employed at the infamous prison. Some of the children claimed to be friends with inmates, although they were forbidden to talk to them.

But Alcatraz is just one of many places in The Edge of Lost, a transporting piece of historical fiction in which America is a melting pot, a place of supper clubs and Model Ts, Prohibition and fedoras, dreams and disappointments. 

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One of fiction’s greatest powers is its ability to allow writers and readers the opportunity to examine the question of “What if?” In The Hours Count, Jillian Cantor revisits a pivotal moment in American history and asks: What if Ethel and Julius Rosenberg—the only Americans to ever be executed for spying during the Cold War—were actually innocent?

To explore this idea, Cantor transports readers back to the time of Truman and Eisenhower, an era when fears of smallpox and atomic bombs ran rampant and all things Russian were eyed with deep suspicion. Here we meet Millie Stein, mother to a young son named David who refuses to speak and a Russian husband whom she does not love. Due to David’s unusual behavior, Millie is rejected by the other mothers in her neighborhood and made to feel that his issues are the result of her own failures. When an enigmatic psychologist enters her life with claims he can help David and a chance meeting with her neighbor Ethel (herself the parent of a difficult child) sparks a genuine friendship, Millie feels she’s been thrown a lifeline. Initially both of these relationships are a boon to Millie, but when the FBI turns it attention to her husband and her neighbors, she soon finds herself unsure whom she can trust and forced to question her own loyalties.

It’s a tricky business blending fact with fiction, but Cantor—who imagined the life of Anne Frank’s sister in her previous novel, Margot—manages to do so beautifully in The Hours Count. Although Millie is Cantor’s creation, she is brought brilliantly to life and her emotional struggles as a young mother in a loveless marriage provide an interesting lens through which to view the historical events of the novel. Millie doesn’t know who the villains are and we must watch as she lets her heart guide her. This ambiguity and uncertainty feels true to life and results in a story that is filled with plenty of surprises, where the stakes feel impossibly high and stolen moments mean the most. A domestic spin on a spy thriller, The Hours Count is an affecting and effective piece of historical fiction that begins with readers asking “What if?” and ends with them wondering “What might have been?” 

Writers have been known to embellish facts for dramatic purposes. A possible embellishment provides part of the drama of Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise, the final novel by Oscar Hijuelos. This posthumous work, set in the late 19th and early 20th century, is more restrained than previous Hijuelos books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. And the protagonists are as un-Hijuelos as you can get: Mark Twain and Henry Morton Stanley, the Welsh explorer who achieved fame for his search for David Livingstone.

Three years after Stanley’s death in 1904, his wife, artist Dorothy Tennant, discovers a manuscript that contradicts his official biography. In the hidden version, he wrote that Henry Hope Stanley, “the merchant trader from New Orleans whom he considered his second father,” had not vanished during a visit to Cuba in 1861, and that the young Stanley had traveled there with Samuel Clemens (Twain) to search for him. Tennant asks Clemens: Is it true? What follows is a chronicle of the decades-long friendship between these two very different men.

Hijuelos was still working on this novel at the time of his death in 2013, and Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise is clearly an unfinished manuscript. Descriptions go on for too long, and dialogue often sounds written rather than spoken. Despite its flaws, however, the book entertains. Hijuelos beautifully dramatizes Stanley’s discomfort with women and his struggles with celebrity. Clemens is the swaggering Twain of legend—until the moving passages that depict the deaths of his eldest daughter and beloved wife. And the scenes from Stanley’s final months, when he has trouble recognizing Dorothy, are heartbreaking. 

Late in the novel, Clemens says that books will last as long as there are people to read them. One could add that, as long as people read books, they will read books by Oscar Hijuelos. In its better moments, this novel shows you why.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The Works Progress Administration of the 1930s and ’40s was a savior for American artists. Those meager checks alleviated financial concerns enough that the artists could pay rent and spend their off-hours drinking, cavorting and exploring their artistic passions.

For Alizée Benoit, that driving passion is abstract painting. And the opinionated Alizée—French by birth, all-American by spirit—isn’t one to keep her head down at work. As her interest in abstraction grows, Alizée persuades Eleanor Roosevelt to allow WPA artists room to break from realism. 

In the present day, Alizée’s great-niece, Dani Abrams, works in an auction house. One day, several squares of an abstract painting arrive, tucked into envelopes that were taped to the back of paintings that may be works by Alizée’s friends. Dani is certain these squares are part of her mysterious aunt’s oeuvre, and she dives into research, in direct defiance of her boss’ wishes. The only member of a Jewish family to escape Europe, Alizée disappeared in 1940, and Dani can’t help but wonder if something nefarious occurred.

In The Muralist, novelist B.A. Shapiro deftly layers American art history, the facts of World War II and the fictitious stories of Alizée and Dani. As was the case with her previous book, the bestseller The Art Forger, Shapiro’s understanding of art is clear. Also like that 2012 tale, The Muralist is a compelling mystery. But even though The Art Forger  was a smashing success, readers should be prepared for something different here: The Muralist elevates Shapiro to an even higher plane and is sure to be a crowning touch in an already celebrated career.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If James Joyce can devote an entire novel to one day in the life of the people of Dublin, why can’t Homer Hickam devote a novel to the delivery of Albert the alligator to Florida? Especially when that journey treats readers to labor strikes, car chases, hijinks on the high seas, Hollywood movies and a fateful hurricane—not to mention cameo appearances by literary competitors John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. Add to this a rooster perched imperturbably on Albert’s head, and you have the makings of an intentionally improbable, bizarre trip through Southern Americana that is a tall tale blend of fact and fiction.

Homer Hickam Sr., father to the author, is a coal miner from West Virginia. His wife, Elsie, is an aspiring writer and friend to God’s scalier creations. They decide that Albert should be restored to his proper habitat and embark on a journey south. Along the way, they are derailed by the unlikeliest of misadventures, but ones that bring the estranged couple closer together.

Carrying Albert Home is set in the early 20th century, when the coal mines of Appalachia were a focal point of American radicalism, when Mother Jones prowled the hills and mine workers fought pitched battles with the owners of company towns. America’s various Red Scares and concessions by capitalists and governments alike have erased much of this history, but Hickam reminds us that there was once a formidable and violent opposition to capital in the US of A.

But that’s about as serious as Hickam gets. The novel is mostly a lark or a farce, an amalgam of fact and an almost Walter Mitty-esque degree of fancy, evoking (because of the deadly yet indispensable animal) Life of Pi and (because of the trope of life as journey) Huckleberry Finn. Indeed, it might appeal most to younger readers, for whom the recurring joke that nearly every character seems to think Albert is a crocodile, only to be mildly corrected by Homer, will never get old.

The poignant parts for adults, however, will be the interstitial chapters, reminiscent of Hemingway’s In Our Time, when Hickam writes about the real Homer and Elsie, his late parents. In these spare and sad vignettes of two beloved real-life characters, Hickam provides epiphanies that at times approach those of Joyce, that clairvoyant of the dead.

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In novels like Year of Wonders, People of the Book and the Pulitzer Prize-winning March, Geraldine Brooks has demonstrated an ability to transform history into compelling, distinctive fiction. That talent is undiminished in The Secret Chord, a vivid re-creation of the life of King David.

Anyone even passingly familiar with the Hebrew Bible’s account of David’s life in the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles knows the highlights: the slaying of Goliath, the unifying of the Israelites after the death of King Saul and his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba, the mother of King Solomon. But the achievement of Brooks’ narrative, channeled principally through the perceptive eye and voice of the prophet Natan, is to create a David who is much more than the traditional brave warrior, powerful ruler and singer of psalms.

Marked by fratricide, attempted parricide, bloody hand-to-hand combat and ceaseless political intrigue, the energy of Brooks’ novel rarely flags. “Whatever it takes. What was necessary,” was David’s guiding principle as Natan describes it, and that credo is reflected in both the decisiveness and ruthlessness of Brooks’ character. David’s path to power and his rule were notable for great achievements and great sadness. Especially poignant is the fourfold retribution he endures after Natan, through a parable, forces him to face his duplicity in dispatching Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah the Hittite, to certain death in battle. 

One aspect of Brooks’ novel that likely will spark controversy is her frank claim that the deep affection between David and Jonathan, Saul’s son, was anything but platonic, and was what Natan calls “a love so strong that it flouted ancient rule.” The biblical evidence supporting this view has been vigorously debated, and Brooks’ assertion hardly will resolve those arguments.

But none of this would matter if Brooks were not so adept at deploying the skills of the novelist to explore the traditional concerns of serious fiction, like character and motivation. She does so in language resonant of biblical diction and imagery, while approaching that time with the benefit of modern psychological insight. The Secret Chord may send some readers back to the biblical account of David’s life, and when they return to it, they will see that story with fresh eyes. 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Clare Clark’s novel of the dislocations that befall an aristocratic English family during and right after World War I is beautifully written and enjoyable, but the reader has to wonder if it would have been published had we not been living in the age of “Downton Abbey.” Of course it might have, as the popular TV show has plenty of collateral ancestors of its own: Think Brideshead Revisited and those nice books by Nancy Mitford. Still, the full name of one of the characters of We That Are Left includes the name Crawford. It’s not Crawley, but it’s close enough for jazz, as they say.

Other parallels include the noble title and the great old estate that comes with it, both slated to be passed on to a distant cousin—though in this case there are very interesting twists. There’s the feckless head of the family who has, like his fathers before him, mismanaged the place to the point that the death duty taxation will make it unsustainable. There’s the sister who becomes a wartime nurse and the sister who may be good, but is not at all nice. One nod to Brideshead is that part of the story is seen through the eyes of an outsider. That would be Oskar, an Anglo-German math and science prodigy who’s in love first with one sibling, then the other.

But Clark’s novel does its forebears proud, for We That Are Left is engrossing. As in her acclaimed debut, The Great Stink, the characters are vivid and her feel for place is equally superb; the reader experiences the sourness of a London fog, the chill of English rain, the play of light on hair and skin and stone. Clark also seems to know every inch of Cambridge University as well as the arcana of the British system of higher learning. Her sense of humor is as dry as the Queen’s gin and tonic: Consider the banter between one of the sisters and her creepy, aging suitor/boss, or disenchanted Oskar’s fixation on the pimple growing on his former crush’s chin during a soirée.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a tale of the British upper crust without tangled, tormented, transgressive love affairs and buried family secrets. Clark joins a long line of writers who show us that the myth of the British stiff upper lip is indeed just that.

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.