“A missing girl rewrites an entire story the moment she disappears.” A novel that’s been sitting in my NetGalley queue for too long, Erin Kate Ryan’s Quantum Girl Theory is speculative historical fiction with a vital message. “On December 1, 1946,” as the prologue outlines, “Paula Jean Welden put on a bright red parka, left her dorm, and...” vanished, leaving America to speculate on what happened to the pretty, blonde Bennington College sophomore. Did she have a terrible home life she wanted to flee? Did she leave the country and establish a new identity? Did she meet a violently abusive boy ..read more

Thanks to author Lora Chilton for the guest post on writing a novel about her ancestral heritage, which focuses on an important yet little-known aspect of American history. ~ After the Massacre by Lora Chilton I learned about my Indigenous heritage in my late forties when my father revealed his Patawomeck ancestry to my siblings and me. He had been cautioned since early childhood to never tell anyone he was an “Indian” due to the threat of being kicked out of school and other penalties that had been codified when the Virginia government passed the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. He was born ..read more

It's a brighter than usual Monday this week, because today my blog is old enough to vote! I began actively blogging at Reading the Past on March 25, 2006, with a post about a presentation I'd given at the Public Library Association conference.  Over the past 18 years, I've had 1852 posts, nearly 12,000 comments, and over 2.6 million pageviews. The most popular posts over this time have been: Ten new and upcoming historical novels I found interesting, for my 1000th blog post, from 2014 Author Barbara J. Taylor's guest post about the Billy Sunday snowstorm, also from 2014 Author C.W. Gort ..read more

Historical fiction can restore neglected figures to their rightful place in the public consciousness, and Pataki’s (The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post, 2022) sweepingly urgent, inspiring novel about the astonishing life of Margaret Fuller aims to do just that. American feminist writer, Transcendentalist thinker, journal editor, foreign correspondent: Fuller was all of these and more, blasting through gender-based barriers insufficient to deter a woman of her intelligence and ambition. The prologue dramatizes her friends’ reaction to her tragic early death in a shipwreck in 1850, but whil ..read more

This second in a trilogy (after The Florios of Sicily, 2020) about a real-life Italian industrialist dynasty opens in 1868, as thirty-year-old Ignazio Florio takes the reins after father Vincenzo’s too-early death. “Swear to me that you will never put work before your family,” Ignazio’s grieving mother Giulia demands, but despite their opposing temperaments, Ignazio resembles Vincenzo in his dedication to the firm above all else. Ignazio succeeds beyond anyone’s greatest plans, establishing a shipping empire alongside existing achievements in tuna canning and marsala wine. The Florios’ power ..read more

Decades before the Bolshevik Revolution and the Romanov dynasty’s terrible end, the future Tsarina Alexandra and her older sister, Grand Duchess Elizabeth, were princesses of the small German state of Hesse and by Rhine. Leading us very capably through these young women’s lives, McHugh shows how their marriages into Russia’s imperial family were by no means predestined. Ella and Alix, as they’re called, tragically lose their mother to diphtheria but grow up alongside their siblings and an extended family that includes the rulers of Britain, Prussia, and Russia. (McHugh travels through this p ..read more

Carr’s taut debut recalls Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait (2022) in its evocation of a highborn Renaissance woman trapped against her will and desperately contriving to escape. The setting: Lochleven Castle, a stone fortress on a Scottish island, hauntingly picturesque from outside, but a dank, oppressive prison for Mary, Queen of Scots and her two chamberwomen, Jane and Marie, called “Cuckoo.” In 1567, Mary, the embattled Catholic ruler of a Protestant country, is with child by her third husband, the despised Bothwell, and pressured to abdicate in favor of her one-year-old son, Jam ..read more

Over several standalone outings, Mariah Ellison, the formidable Grandmama of Charlotte Pitt from Perry’s long-running mystery series, has proved to have her own bona fides for detection. This latest holiday novella, set at the end of the Victorian era, sees Mariah arriving at St. Helens, a small Dorset village, after accepting her old friend Sadie Alsop’s invitation to stay with her over Christmas. Mariah senses that Sadie is in trouble and needs her help, and her inner alarm is heightened when she arrives on Sadie’s doorstep and is rudely turned away by her husband, Barton. Clearly not expe ..read more

It's a trend in historical fiction for authors to dig into the roots of vilified characters and examine whether our long-held preconceptions hold true. Feminist reinterpretations of historical women's lives are likewise popular. These two topics converge in four new and upcoming historical novels about the figure best known to us as Lady Macbeth. It turns out that Shakespeare's depiction of the 11th-century Scottish queen—a ruthless and manipulative woman driven to madness—is not exactly historically accurate. Like other writers of historical fiction, he used creative license to tell the story ..read more

With her aptly titled novel, Oliveira (Winter Sisters, 2018) sweeps romantically inclined readers into the spectacular setting of Washington Territory in the 1870s and 1880s, when Seattle was a muddy frontier outpost primed for growth and industrial development. Centering this epic tale is the enduring relationship between Hailey MacIntyre, a prosperous Scottish coal engineer’s daughter, and Samuel Fiddes, an aspiring shipbuilder determined to lift himself and his young sister from poverty. After Samuel saves Hailey’s brother from an accident in Glasgow’s streets, the two fall in love, despi ..read more