Not by Sight by Kate Breslin is the story of WWI suffragette Grace Mabry and agent for the crown Jack Benningham. Grace crashes a high society masquerade ball as Pandora and from her box she withdraws white feathers to give to the rich young men who are dancing while her brother fights in the trenches….
For the longest time, Susanna Kearsley, Lauren Willig and Susan Meissner were the only authors I regularly encountered who wrote dual timeline novels. However, they seem to be everywhere all of a sudden. I love this device, so I’m certainly not complaining. In fact, I was quite eager to read Secrets of Nanreath Hall, with…
Many, many novels have claimed to be “for fans of Downton Abbey.” Most of those tales do not live up to the hype but Helen Simonson’s The Summer Before the War, while making no such claim, actually delivers on that promise. Beginning, quite literally, in the summer of 1914, before war is declared, this is…
The renewed interest in recent years in all things interwar and post-war means that those who used beg for more cultural artifacts from 1914-1950s need beg no longer. I, personally, am having a blast on the audiovisual front — not a fan of Downton Abbey, but I love Parade’s End and Foyle’s War. I’ve been…
I think one of the most horrifying things in the world would be to be away from home when war broke out. Suddenly, your visit to a foreign land turns into an unintended stay. You find yourself trapped in an unfamiliar area, with the very real possibility that you might be killed before you can…
Like many other readers, I long for books that have unique settings. While small town USA in 1918 is not an exotic location, it is a most under-utilized one. When I saw that Alexis Harrington’s Home by Morning was written around World War I and the influenza epidemic of 1918, I knew I had to…
In 2007 Nina Berman won the World Press Photo competition with the wedding portrait of Ty Ziegal and his bride Renee Kline. You can see the winning portrait here. There is another, more romantic portrait here. Be Warned, these pics have some aspects that make them a bit different from your average wedding photos. Some…
C+ looks like such a tepid grade. In fact, my reactions to Silent Surrender were extremely strong. Some parts of it I loved; others annoyed the heck out of me. It is 1917, and Liana Wycliffe is a second-rate stage actress. She belongs to a theater company that is in Paris during World War I,…
A Countess Below Stairs was the first Eva Ibbotson romance I ever read, and I’ve been an avid fan ever since. Why? Because her stories are so vivid. In A Countess Below Stairs, Anna Grazinsky, a White Russian in exile goes to work as a housemaid in a beautiful mansion called Meersham. The owner is…
The overwhelming feeling I got when reading Cross the Line was that it was a first draft. Not a bad first draft, but one in need of lots of refinement and judicious pruning. However, it’s not a first draft, but a finished product, available for you to purchase. And unless you like to read books…