The best literary retellings take us to new places and bring new worlds to light. So Many Beginnings does a beautiful job of applying the basic background of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and adding a whole new layer of emotions and experiences to it. I have read many retellings of the story, but this…
I’ve been aware of Lisa Wingate’s writing for many years, but it wasn’t until I picked up a copy of Before We Were Yours in the summer of 2017 that I considered myself a fan. In the almost three years since that day, I’ve read several of her backlist titles and I’m now completely under…
Sisterhood can be a powerful thing, but sometimes it provides a dividing line. Susan Higginbotham’s The First Lady and the Rebel is a fine exploration of familial and romantic love and how its bonds can be strained by the forces of a cruel outside world. Mary Todd and her baby half-sister, Emily, are close even…
Sarah Bird misses the mark by a wide mile as she relates the real-life tale of Miss Cathay Williams (the author persists in misspelling her name as ‘Cathy’ throughout), a prominent figure in the Civil War who was a Buffalo Soldier, living her life posing as a man so she could find her scattered family,…
If you read only one YA novel this year, make it Dread Nation. Part Zombie Land, part Django Unchained, channeling a bit of The Hunger Games and also something wholly original, this is a tale of what happens when the undead rise while America’s race war rages. The Civil War is over. But not because…
In A Hope Divided, we meet Marlie Lynch – a spy for the Union living in North Carolina – and Ewan McCall, an escaped prisoner with a dark past. They’re both brilliant, strong, resilient, and willing to do whatever it takes to stop the Confederacy from winning the war. As they have to flee Marlie’s…
AAR reviewers Shannon Dyer and Em Wittmann are here to share their thoughts about An Extraordinary Union, book one in Alyssa Cole’s Loyal League series. The book is an historical romance set during the American Civil War which tells the story of two unlikely Union sympathizers who team up to help bring the Confederacy to…
I killed a man in the summer I turned thirteen. Sometimes I still see him in my dreams, his eyes as blue as the Gulf on a clear spring morning, his cheeks reddened by the hot Louisiana sun. So begins a powerful story of the U.S. Civil War as seen through the eyes of an…
If you like Jo Goodman, you’re probably wishing there were more Wild West stories in the same vein. Fortunately for you, back in 1996, Patricia Potter wrote Diablo. Kane O’Brien (known as ‘Diablo’) can best be described as ‘white-trash Confederate’: not a former slave owner, he joined up hoping to finally belong to something, but…
R.H. Burkett’s story of war, love and redemption was not at all the book I was expecting. Soldiers in the Mist is a reissue of a book originally published in 2011 and the storyline is what I can only describe as convoluted and pretentious. The book opens with the author herself, Ruth Weeks Burkett, being…