Genre: Fiction

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Bread and Butter

Bread and Butter

Bread & Butter meshes a restaurant/chef story in the vein of Kitchen Confidential with a more traditional family drama to create a new take on the culinary drama.  While not everything in this book really works I can see what the author was going for and commend her for it. Two things are clear from reading this book.  One is that Michelle Wildgen is a foodie and has a real passion for the subject.  Her descriptions of the food and the cooking of it are the literary version of food porn.  You can almost taste the meals from her descriptions.  Her ability to describe food is what I enjoyed most about the book.  After reading a chapter of Bread & Butter what I really wanted to do is get into the kitchen and cooks something. The other thing that is obvious from reading this book, at least to someone who… Read more »

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I Shall Be Near To You

I Shall Be Near To You

I Shall Be Near To You brings historical fiction to an interesting yet not often talked about occurrence from the 19th Century, women pretending to be men in order to enlist.  Erin Lindsay McCabe manages to make the subject both historically interesting while presenting a story that was interesting and moving. Something many may not know is that woman masquerading as men to enlist was a real event.  In the Civil War alone there are many recorded cases of it happening, and almost certainly many more that were never recorded.  It is clear that McCabe did solid research not just of Civil War battles but of the home life of the time.  Everything beat felt historically right, which is something I often feel is missing from much of the historical fiction I read.  This book also manages, with one exception, to avoid the trap of having the book involve major… Read more »

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The Wife, The Maid, and the Mistress

The Wife, The Maid, and the Mistress

Books that revolve around fictionalizing a real life mystery have always fascinated me, as do books set in the 20s and 30s with their iconic art styles.  Those two things come together in The Wife, The Maid, and the Mistress in a way that, if not completely amazing, were at least enjoyable. This book manages to take the style that I love of that time period and really bring it out on the page.  Through the dialogue and the attitudes you get a feeling of this world and in Ritzi and Maria Simon you get head strong female characters that embody everything I like about the changes in society at the time.  Lawhord really does an excellent job in pulling the reader into the New York of that Era and gives you both the glitz and grime that really make it so enjoyable to read about. The real historical mystery… Read more »

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The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

A fictional take on a real mystery, The Ghost of the Mary Celeste takes a strange nautical event and turns it into a ghost story.  I was really excited by the premise of this book as I love it when a writer plucks a real history out of history and turns it into an intriguing ghost story.  That unfortunately is not what this book is. One of the biggest problems with this book is the overall structure and how disjointed it feels.  This book is really not a cohesive story but rather tales that are barely related to each other being mashed into a single story.  While the delineation between stories is clear, so at least the reader isn’t confused, it makes it both hard to care about what is happening and keeps the book from feeling like a real take on the mystery.  And if you make it through… Read more »

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