Tag Archives: historical fiction

November 8, 2025 · 3:45 pm

Curiosities: Delightful

So you have to trust me that it’s worth getting into Anne Flemming’s Curiosities. You’re going to start it and think ‘this reading old english-style spelling is too annoying’ or ‘the narrator as archivist is a bit of a gimmick’ but then! It’s going to be so great. You’ll get to romp through the plague, and arctic exploration/starvation, and witch trials, and romance – and you’re going to be rewarded with a fantastic love story OR WAIT fantastic love stories that offer the wide range of ways people love and are loved.

Past-Erin who geeked out endlessly historical fiction surfaced throughout reading Curiosities imagining what a fun addition this could be to any seminar on the genre for its playful engagement with the making of history. Read in that genre it does the usual work of acknowledging the limits of the historical record, the ways we have to interpret scraps to piece together a full picture, the way perspective of the writer limits what and how something is told (and who gets full voice).

Celebrated among reviewers for its exploration of sexual and gender identity, I found this part of the book a welcome inclusion but as a background to other questions about care, community, and – yes- curiosity.

So please – put aside your initial irritation at having to Really Focus on the reading (cough, clearly some self-reflection here) and enjoy.

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Filed under Book Club, Canadian Literature, Fiction, Giller prize, Governor Generals, Historical Fiction, Prize Winner

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April 25, 2025 · 1:53 pm

North Woods: Do you believe in ghosts.

It’s an odd time to be Canadian and reading a deeply American novel. Is there such a thing as reading patriotically? Even when you’re someone who feels discomfited by nationalism and patriotism? I suppose there must be if my reading of Daniel Mason’s North Woods is to be believed.

The book itself – held apart from reading it in Ontario in 2025 – is beautifully written. The kind of thing where you admire the writing as art and pause at particularly striking descriptions and are moved.

And then the story – or many stories, I guess – is one of all the lives that pass through a particular patch of forest and a house built there in the New England woods. Each chapter offers a new moment in time and new lives led there (sometimes the decedents of previous owners, sometimes newly ‘discovering’ the house and its forest). While each chapter brings a selection of plot and affect (ambition, murder, betrayal, madness, grief) the thematic question of *what endures* persists both bubbling below the surface and explicitly called up in the form of ghosts, found artefacts, bones and hallucinations.

It’s an American novel for its geography, to be sure, but also for this fascination in legacy and ambition – of conquering and taming the land (though the land has something to say about that) and ownership and triumph. So you can know that going into it and read it alongside whatever feels you may have about that nationalist aspiration.

And you can also read it as an ecological narrative of land and nature having a much, much more expansive sense of time and scale. Where the house crumbles, where the sharp focus of one life that we intimately explore in a chapter is literally and figuratively subsumed under layers of dirt, where the trees persistently enclose and crowd out the human. And while their are moments in reading that this expansive sense of time and natural power reads as (unexpectedly, perhaps) claustrophobic, for the most part this reader found it entirely hopeful. Perhaps its the Unitarian in me that believes in that interconnected web of all living things less troubled by the smallness of one life and more optimistic in the eventual and inevitable dissolution of the one life into the natural whole. Or perhaps this is what the book best offers: you are small, your time is small, and yet all still vivid and worthy.

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Filed under American literature, Fiction, New York Times Notable, Prize Winner

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January 5, 2025 · 2:13 am

The Women: I Just Knew It

(Spoilers ahead) Kristin Hannah’s The Women looked like a book I would not like. But so many best of lists promised greatness (and marketers did their best with prominently featured placement on shelves at book stores) and so I went in for it. And I should know enough of what I like now to have known better. Alas. Here we are 500 pages later and this will not be a popular post because everyone else on the internet loves this book, so okay, hate me and move on.

Why do they like it? Well as historical fiction mashed with romance it has genre going for it. With a plucky heroine in Frankie McGrath who follows a character arc we just know – we just know – from the outset is going to be fine in the end despite all the Trials and Tribulations we have character going for it. Add in the unbeatable combination of the untold story of American women in the Vietnam War with an almost-critical-but-never-quite-unpatriotic view on the American role and we have plot and theme.

And sure. There’s appreciation for the centralizing – from the boldness of the tile allllll the way through – of the role of women in the war and the way their experience after the war was forgotten, marginalized or dismissed. And how women, don’t you know, just stick together and are there for one another. And there’s something to be said for the propulsive first part that has Frankie in Vietnam with plot and character developments fast and fierce.

But from the moment Jamie’s near-dead body gets on the plane I knew. I just knew there was no way this book was ending with anything short of a miraculous resolution where Frankie and Jamie would end up together and ride off into the sunset. And while the sunset doesn’t quite materialize, the end is exactly that – a triumphant tying up of all loose threads into something more than a bow, something like an artistic arrangement where every string has become a thing of beauty.

I don’t know. Is it wrong to dislike a book for being so obviously saccharine? For being so outrageously committed to making sure Everything Works Out? When – and here’s an obvious point – for most in the Vietnam War everything did not work out.

Better and other complaints could be in the boring writing that is straightforwardly narrative with little to get excited about. Or the wooden secondary characters that are only present to do their specific secondary character thing – an emotionally dead mother, a traditional father, a consistent and steadfast best friend, a rakish boyfriend, an honourable fiancé – YAWN – with nary a complexity to their name. Or that the politics of the book is bland and ultimately committed to American exceptionalism.

So learn from my mistakes. Do not be drawn in by the prominent placement on any table or any best of list. This is one to skip.

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Filed under American literature, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Worst Books

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May 10, 2024 · 1:04 pm

The Adversary

When I was wide awake and alert, reading Michael Crummey’s The Adversary was a total joy. Fantastic descriptions, layered scenes where every action and reaction has triple meaning, beautiful language. Too often though I was reading it just before bed and my half-awake brain didn’t have enough focus to attend to the layers and I’d find myself having ‘read’ three pages and not remembering at all what had happened or to whom and so re-reading it again the following night (to much the same effect).

Which is to say – this is a great book that you should read when conditions allow you to slowly and carefully appreciate it.

When I did have those occasions what I enjoyed most was the tension between individual characters and the Fates (classic man versus nature / man versus god conflict structures) whether that was plague, or storm, or ice. The resignation of the individual characters to accepting these bigger-than-self constraints stands against the quotidian conflicts on their daily lives, eruptions of brutal violence, and, as the title suggests, the structuring conflict between the Widow and her brother Abe. While the Widow is hardly an easily sympathetic character, I nevertheless found myself frustrated for her – that so much of what she attempts to do is constrained by gender – but in the end I suppose it’s her hubris rather than her gender that gets in the way. And the birds.

Enjoyed, too, the references to the orphans of The Innocents a fantastic companion piece to this historical drama. So take both with you on vacation this summer and give in to the unique pleasure of reading about 19th century Newfoundland – which I get it, does not sound like it’s going to be gripping. But it is! Unless you’re very tired. I don’t know anyone tired these days. All of us: sharp, alert, ready to read.

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Filed under Canadian Literature, Fiction, Historical Fiction

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