I’m bringing two book recommendations to you today – both of these are new releases off of my fall reading list.
One is a climate fiction (what happens when Florida is no longer sustainable) and the other is one of my favorite genres, WWII historical fiction, but a specific horror I had not read about before.
The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton
Even though I’m not done with my 2022 reading, I expect this book will show up on my favorites from the year. When I was finished I was unmotivated to start anything new because nothing can compare to what I just experienced. (Actually now I am back into reading but I felt like that for a couple of days!)
This book is in emerging genre of climate fiction which is basically dystopia of what the world may look like as the weather gets crazier and life as we know it is no longer sustainable. Floods along the coasts, droughts on land. This is not hard for me to imagine, sadly.
Set in Florida after many hurricanes, the surviving characters make their way in a new “land” where
“This season, more catastrophic storms have made landfall than any other…a record that will undoubtably be broken next year, and then again the next.”
Wanda is an infant born in a hurricane to a family of line workers, who keep the electricity on as they can, until it goes out again. When there is no power, the government can’t keep running. Then businesses fold, money is worth nothing, houses are worth nothing. This is a book of survival about those who stay, and how the survivors forge new relationships to survive together.
I’ve seen comparison to Where the Crawdads Sing (my thoughts on this here), and I can see that.
Now on to book two I am recommending today that is totally different, a horror of the past.
As someone who reads a lot of WWII fiction, many of the books start to seem the same to me. But I hadn’t heard about the Lebensborn Society, where expectant, unmarried mothers who demonstrated the ideal racial characteristics were taken to be pampered until they had their babies, so they could be adopted by Nazi officers. That is the story of this book:
Cradles of the Reich by Jennifer Coburn
Told in the now typical three viewpoints, a picture emerges of these homes for women where the Nazi’s attempted to create their ideal race in several ways. Although its layout was familiar the information provided was new to me, so I do recommend this read for people who read in this genre.
Cradles of the Reich covers a dark part of history, but I hope readers will be heartened by how the connections women forge can carry us through the most harrowing of times and sometimes even drive us to act with heroism we hadn’t realized we were capable of.
from the author’s notes
Both of these books were provided to me early, compliments of NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.