Title: The Secret Life of Josephine: Napoleon’s Bird of Paradise
Author: Carolly Erickson
Genre: Historical
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Pages: 336
Copy Origin: Bought from Amazon.
Get Your Own Copy From: The Book DepositoryCarolly Erickson is another Historian gone rogue. She has written three historical ‘entertainment’ books as she likes to call them. I am a huge fan of her work. The Last Wife of Henry VIII was the first book I read from Carolly, her brilliant use of language and creative escapades thrown in with a history she actually is deeply knowledgeable about makes her a leading Historical Fiction author.
Erickson shows us that Josephine was more than just the tainted lady she is historically painted as being. She had a heart and children and loved more fiercely than most of her time. She saw Marie Antoinette fall from power into disgrace. She herself was in prison during the revolution for being the wife of a traitor to the cause. She loved many men and married two whom she didn’t love.
My favorite parts of the novel were the explanations of her childhood growing up on the island of Martinique. Her father and mother had a plantation and she had such an easy childhood. Playing on the beach. Climbing mountains to visit sorcerers, I am sure if at any point Josephine had been given a chance she would have stayed a child on that island instead of traveling on a wretched filthy boat to France.
What is great about Erickson is at the end of the books she pens she gives a description of what was historically accurate and what she threw in for entertainment value.
This book really made me want to pick up some more works on Josephine and find out more about her tragic and exciting life. If you like the works of Alison Weir, Philippa Gregory, and Barbara Ewing you will love this novel.
Title: The Heretic Queen
Author: Michelle Moran
Genre: Historical
Publisher: Random House, Crown Publishers
Pages: 464
Copy Origin: Borrowed from my local library.
Get Your Own Copy From: Amazon.com,
The Book DepositoryIn ancient Egypt, a forgotten princess must overcome her family’s past, and remake history.
The winds of change are blowing through Thebes. A devastating palace fire has killed the 18th dynasty’s royal family— all with the exception of Nefertari, niece of the reviled former queen Nefertiti. The girl’s deceased family has been branded as heretical, and no one in Egypt will speak their names. A relic of a previous reign, Nefertari is pushed aside, an unimportant princess left to run wild in the palace. But all of this changes when she is taken under the wing of pharaoh’s aunt, and brought to the Temple of Hathor where she is educated in a manner befitting a future queen.
Soon Nefertari catches the eye of the crown prince, and despite her family’s history, they fall in love and wish to marry. Yet all of Egypt opposes this union between the rising star of a new dynasty and the fading star of an old, heretical one. While political adversity sets the country on edge, Nefertari becomes the wife of Ramesses the Great. Destined to be the most powerful pharaoh in Egypt, he is also the man who must confront the most famous exodus in history.>
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Alexia Tarabotti is laboring under a great many social tribulations. First, she has no soul. Second, she’s a spinster whose father is both Italian and dead. Third, she is being rudely attacked by a vampire to whom she has not been properly introduced!
Where to go from there? From bad to worse apparently, for Alexia accidentally kills the vampire, and the appalling Lord Maccon (loud, messy, gorgeous, and werewolf) is sent by Queen Victoria to investigate. With unexpected vampires appearing and expected vampires disappearing, everyone seems to believe Alexia responsible.
Can she figure out what is actually happening to London’s high society? Will her soulless ability to negate supernatural powers prove useful or just plain embarrassing? Who is the real enemy, and do they have treacle tart?
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Title: Hidden Voices: The Orphan Musicians of Venice
Author: Pat Lowery Collins
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Pages: 352
Copy Origin: ARC picked up amongst many other books at a charity book fair.
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The Book DepositoryWhile studying under Vivaldi, three girls in a Venice orphanage forge their own notions of love in a sensuous, engrossing novel told in three narrative voices. It is a longing and search for love that motivates three girls living in the Ospedale della Pieta, an orphanage renowned for its extraordinary musical program. But for Rosalba, Anetta, and Luisa, the love they seek is not where they expect to find it.
Set in the early 1700s in the heart of Venice, this remarkable novel deftly weaves the history of Antonio Vivaldi’s early musical career into the lives of three young women who excel in voice and instrument. Under the composer’s tutelage and care, the orphans find expression, sustenance, and passion. But can the sheltered life of the orphanage prepare them for the unthinkable dangers outside its walls?
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Title: Innocent Traitor: A Novel of Lady Jane Grey
Author:Alison Weir
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 432
Copy Origin: Purchased from Waterstones UK
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I am now a condemned traitor . . . I am to die when I have hardly begun to live.
Historical expertise marries page-turning fiction in Alison Weir’s enthralling debut novel, breathing new life into one of the most significant and tumultuous periods of the English monarchy. It is the story of Lady Jane Grey–“the Nine Days’ Queen”–a fifteen-year-old girl who unwittingly finds herself at the center of the religious and civil unrest that nearly toppled the fabled House of Tudor during the sixteenth century.
The child of a scheming father and a ruthless mother, for whom she is merely a pawn in a dynastic game with the highest stakes, Jane Grey was born during the harrowingly turbulent period between Anne Boleyn’s beheading and the demise of Jane’s infamous great-uncle, King Henry VIII. With the premature passing of Jane’s adolescent cousin, and Henry’s successor, King Edward VI, comes a struggle for supremacy fueled by political machinations and lethal religious fervor.
Unabashedly honest and exceptionally intelligent, Jane possesses a sound strength of character beyond her years that equips her to weather the vicious storm. And though she has no ambitions to rule, preferring to immerse herself in books and religious studies, she is forced to accept the crown, and by so doing sets off a firestorm of intrigue, betrayal, and tragedy.
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