Andrew Miller, PURE

1785 Paris. A young, ambitious engineer named Jean-Baptiste Baratte is commissioned to remove all the bones from the cemetary Les Innocents in the middle of Paris to the outskirts. A broad cast of characters and some brilliant writing. My favorite description of a man's visage: "Two black nails hammered into a skull." This is not a plot-driven book; but it's a book to savor. Won the Costa Best Novel Award 2011.

Annemarie Selinko, DESIREE

The fictionalized autobiography of Eugenie Desiree Clary, daughter of a silk merchant of Marseilles, former fiancee to Napoleon, and wife of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, later King of Sweden. (Yes, she was a real person, with an almost unreal life.) One of my favorite novels as a teen, it was written in 1951 and translated from the German; it's a good old-fashioned, well-researched, thoroughly engaging read. Takes you through French history from the late days of the Revolution through Napoleon's campaigns, and his death, yet remains Desiree's story. First lines: "A woman can usually get what she wants from a man if she has a well-developed figure. So I've decided to stuff four handkerchiefs into the front of my dress tomorrow; then I shall look really grown up."

Gil Adamson, THE OUTLANDER

The author is a poet (*Primitive*, 1991 and *Ashland*, 2003), and some of the language makes me a bit envious, wishing I'd written it myself. It never sounds as good out of context, but here's some excerpts: "the horses began to walk alert, their ears scissoring with curiosity"; "the ground around them [was] poxed with fallen fruit that lay in layers of years, squelching beneath the horses' hooves"; he had a "look on his face that would etch glass." Much of it made me want to reread the lines for their sound and freshness.
But the plot felt thin to me. A woman kills her husband (he's unambiguously rotten; he abandons her on their honeymoon night to gamble, losing $50 and a watch, and then cheats on her); and his two brothers chase her through the West in 1903. That's the story. In the wilderness, she meets a man who takes care of her and sleeps with him; she meets a man who takes care of her and then meets his wife; she meets a man who takes care of her and moves in with him. (The narrator recognizes the repetition: "Here she was, wandering behind a man again.") Finally she gets caught by the two brothers. Breaks out of jail. Hooks back up with man #1.
There's plenty of tension in the "chase" narrative ... I (for one) know those frightful nightmares of being chased by someone who comes closer and closer and nearly nabs me. But aside from the fact that she's not very good with horses or snares, we don't know much about the widow Mary. Maybe that's why I just didn't care that much about her, whether she lived or died, whether she was caught or not. Another reader might feel differently, maybe especially if they like stories set in the American West at the turn of the century.
But this was Adamson's first novel, and I would give her next one a look.

Geraldine Brooks, CALEB'S CROSSING

Another wonderful historical novel from Brooks, this one set in the 1660s on the small island of Noepe (Martha's Vineyard) and at Harvard. Narrated by a Calvinist minister's daughter, Bethia Mayfield, it begins with pages that she writes, from the time she is 15, as she looks back on her friendship with a boy she calls Caleb, a Wampanoag who eventually goes to the "Indian College" at Harvard, created for their conversion. As usual with Brooks, many of her sentences sing: "The tasks stretch out from the gray slough before dawn to the guttered taper of night. ... I love the fogs that wreathe us all in milky veils, and the winds that moan and keen in the chimney piece at night." Caleb's father Tequamuck is a seer who predicts the destruction the Europeans will bring; it's embodied in the brilliant, passionate boy who tries to cross from one culture to the other. Knowing how the story would end didn't matter; I found myself dreading it all the way.

Jeff Shaara, THE FINAL STORM

The battle of the Pacific in WWII.
This is how I get my history lessons, having done a bad job with social studies in high school. But I have to say I've been disappointed in his last two books. The first ones Shaara wrote--particularly on the Civil War and WWI--were so tightly woven, and layered, with the story told from a variety of perspectives and every voice different. War is a horror, of course; but these earlier books were more about history and individual experiences and fears. These last have felt rushed and less carefully written, and capture much less of the personal experiences of the soldiers and airmen involved. I found myself missing them.

C.S. Forester, MR. MIDSHIPMAN HORNBLOWER

I was looking for a tale about 1790s British nautical history and found it here. Swashbuckling popular yarn, complete with a gangly hero who proves his worth unexpectedly. Dated 1948.

David Liss, THE DEVIL'S COMPANY

Usually I love anything David Liss writes ... and I've recommended his books, particularly THE WHISKEY REBELS, to many friends. But this one ... was it just the holidays? Is that why I couldn't quite slip into his world, because I was too busy in my own? Not sure. But I didn't enjoy this one nearly as much as some of his others. It felt to me ... almost as if he weren't very interested in the fate of Mr. Weaver anymore. Plenty of twists and turns to the plot, though, and as usual, his historical setting feels very rich.

Tatiana de Rosnay, SARAH'S KEY

Like HOTEL, this book takes as its topic another powerful moment in history--the night when French police conspired with Nazi Germany to round up hundreds of Jews and put the on busses into the Velodrom d'Hiver, an enclosure in Paris, where there was no sanitation, next to no food or water, and many died ... and from thence, to Auschwitz. Told in a double-narrative (we're seeing so many these days) between Sarah (1940s) and Mlle. Jarmond (2000s). The personal story at the core of the narrative concerns young Sarah, who, instead of bringing her little brother along when she and her mother and father were dragged out of their apartment, locked the boy into a secret cabinet, promising to return. He died there. Years later (again, the parallels with HOTEL!) an American-French journalist, Jarmond, discovers that her husband is renovating that apartment, bequeathed to him by his father. She is determined to find out what happened to Sarah's family and discovers that Sarah went to America and passed herself off as non-Jewish and French. This is a remarkable story. But I found myself bothered by the romance/baby plotline ... her husband is having an affair with an old flame, a midlife crisis, and Jarmond becomes pregnant; her life-and-death decision about whether to keep the baby (her husband doesn't want, and will divorce her over) is, I think, somehow supposed to parallel and add depth to her decision about whether to pursue the story of Sarah, which her father-in-law is dreading (because he was there at the apartment the day Sarah came back, opened the compartment with her key, and found her brother dead). There are some wonderful sections, especially in the Sarah parts; but the ending (SPOILER ALERT) in which Jarmond ends up marrying Sarah's son feels too tidy to me.

Laura Joh Rowland, BEDLAM: THE FURTHER SECRET ADVENTURES OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE

I'm sorry to say I would not recommend. The premise is fun: the novelist Charlotte Bronte's secret life as an adventuress/secret agent, saving the royal family of England, dashing around the countryside in hot air balloons. While Rowland is very good at period detail--she includes a great deal of interesting information on Victorian England, from Whitechapel to broughams--the plot and narration is clumsy, and the psychology fails for me. For example, on a visit to Bedlam with her publisher, to gain information for her next novel, Charlotte just happens to see a man being brutally tortured with electric probes by a vicious looking Russian--and that man being tortured is John Slade, with whom she has been desperately in love with for three years, though she has had no word and has been terribly worried about him. !!! Goodness, shouldn't she do something? And she does. She and her publisher immediately go off to view the Great Exhibition (of 1851) at the Crystal Palace. Her comment: "I was so impressed by the Crystal Palace that I almost forgot about Slade." My heart is hammering with worry about the poor man, and she's going to the Exhibition? And then, because the most interesting part of the story belongs to John Slade (who dashes between England and Russia, playing double agent, with three different names) she is forced to resort to this sort of maneuver: "Here I must describe other events that occurred outside my view. The details, based on facts I later learned, are as accurate as I can make them. Reader, you will see ... I was in grave danger." For those of us who know and love JANE EYRE, the phrase "Reader, I married him" is etched in our brains, and the apostrophe was used to wonderful effect. Rowland uses it when she wants to remind us that this is Charlotte Bronte's voice. It didn't quite work for me.

Tracy Chevalier, BURNING BRIGHT

I found this book on the Bargain table, which surprised me because I remember loving GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING. But while TC is still the master of historical detail ... and she's got the 18th century down ... Astley's, Vauxhall, pubs, carpenter's tools, how to make buttons, the kinds of wood used in chairs ... this book felt somewhat plotless and lacking in suspense. The entire plot consists of a family moving from Dorsetshire to London and then back again; the time period is 1792-93 (surely an exciting time in England); and the next door neighbor is William Blake (hence the title ... from his poem "Tyger, Tyger"). But paradoxically, although not particularly well-plotted, the book felt formulaic: lots of historical detail + famous, eccentric artistic personality + everyday characters. For me, it wasn't enough. Add to that the contrivances ... young Jem believes that two sides of the road aren't opposites because they're both sides of the same road ... he espouses this belief to young Maggie, just as Mr. Blake is wandering by and is struck by how the young man's philosophy matches own! This might work if the three of them gathered together at the Blakes' house, but this scene happens on a bridge, in London, after Jem has left a circus where there are thousands of people milling around. Similarly, at Astley's Amphitheater, with hundreds of people jammed around him, Jem looks up from the pit by the stage to find "Maggie's face up in the gallery, poking out between two soldiers." Really? Amidst all those people, he can find her face?? Hate to be so critical ... but after GIRL, I was hoping for better ...

Thomas Mullen, THE LAST TOWN ON EARTH

Very good debut novel, historical fiction. In 1918, at the end of WWI, a small lumber town in Washington state decides to quarantine itself from the Spanish Influenza, but a soldier comes, breaks the quarantine and is killed; then another solider apears. This is about how panic infects the town and why a quarantine fails. It's a dark book, about selfishness and cruelty and inhumanity under duress. Reminds me of Geraldine Brooks' YEAR OF WONDERS (plague, quarantine, 1666 England) in some ways.

Chris Bohjalian, SKELETONS AT THE FEAST

Engrossing historical novel of WWII from an East German perspective, which is refreshing, because most WWII literature is either Holocaust literature or describes the war from the Western perspective. This book is told through four different perspectives, done well, with the changes in voice indicated by cues instead of labels. But it's heavy-handed in some of its criticism of the Nazis (via the voice of a Scottish POW), and puts up a bad straw-woman in the clueless East German mother who asks, wide-eyed, "They're Jews? Really? Those girls?" and "Why do people hate us?" It's based on a diary, so there is a good primary source. Engrossing and at times heart-rending.