Christina Baker Kline’s A Piece of the World is a fictionalized look into the life of Christina Olsen, the tough-minded farm woman who became a model, friend and occasional muse for surrealist painter Andrew Wyeth. Compared to Wyeth’s somewhat more exalted status as the son of illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Chistina’s spinsterly life is a long…
A Piece of the World tells the story of Christina Olson, a physically disabled woman who spends her entire life in a small, coastal town in Maine. No one expects much of her, but for twenty years, she serves as muse to artist Andrew Wyeth, and is immortalized in his painting Christina’s World. Weakened as…
Josi S. Kilpack takes on the love life of Sir Walter Scott in The Lady of the Lakes, a fictionalized account of the two defining romances of his life; with Wilhelmina “Mina” Belsches-Stuart, his childhood sweetheart, and Charlotte Carpenter, his eventual wife and his self-proclaimed ‘best love’. Any scholar of Scott will tell you the…
For anyone who enjoys historical fiction, there’s a lot to enjoy about Victoria. However, for lovers of historical romance, there is less so. Ms. Goodwin’s novel follows the young queen from her coronation to her engagement to Albert and is as much about a young woman learning to be queen as it is about a…
I’m hesitant to say that I have an obsession or an addiction to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical masterwork Hamilton: An American Musical; I prefer to say that I have a relationship. I listen to the soundtrack obsessively, I’ve read Chernow’s source material, I’ve watched most of the #Ham4Hams, the usual. So when I wandered into my…
I’m a great fan of Elizabeth Chadwick’s early medieval romances, especially The Wild Hunt, and I liked William Marshal a lot when I came across him in Roberta Gellis’s Roselynde Chronicles. (So I do get most of my fascination with history from reading romances. Sue me.) I was delighted to find out that a favorite…