Category: History (Page 5 of 6)

I enjoyed The Kennedy Debutante  as much as any book this year!!

This novel focuses on the life of “Kick,” the daughter of Joe Kennedy Sr, American Ambassador to the Great Britain, and sister to Joe Jr., Jack, Bobby, etc. She was charismatic and beautiful, and she captivated London society in the late 1930s when the family was stationed abroad. The book begins as she and her sister Rosemary are “presented” to the King and Queen as debutantes. Another fun work of historical fiction I read this year covers this annual spectacle.

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This summer I have been pleasantly surprised by the books on my summer reading list, and I have been reading more than ever because these books are keeping my attention, one after another.

Today I’m recommending The Lost Vintage: A Novel. 

I admit this book initially caught my attention because it’s about wine!!

Kate is trying to earn her Masters of Wine (M.W) which is awarded after an extremely strenuous and comprehensive exam; only around 300 people in the world hold a M.W. She will have to identify wine blindly naming the exact region it is from and its vintage. Ironically, she is doing well in identifying all varieties except for wine from the region of her family’s vineyard (Burgundy). It’s almost like she has something against Burgundy…

Alas, Kate will need to visit her family’s property in Burgundy to study this wine. And conveniently her first love runs the neighboring winery. This part of the story did not disappoint. But there was a whole other aspect of this story I was not even expecting:

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Culturally and emotionally fulfilling, The Prague Sonata: A Novel is a quest set around music and war.

A young musicologist receives a gift of a hauntingly beautiful 18th century sonata manuscript, with the request she locate the other two movements to the sonata and put it into the hands original owner who separated it during WWII to protect it from the Nazis. The work is clearly the composition of a master composer but who?? And because the manuscript obviously has value she isn’t the only one trying to locate it.

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I just finished reading The Women in the Castle: A Novel, a solid addition to the WWII fiction genre that filled the void since I enjoyed The Nightingale and several others from the past few years.

In fact I am working on a WWII fiction reading list and I am going to keep this post short so I can get back to compiling that before Memorial Day! I have been compiling this reading list for several months now but keep wanting to “add one more” to the list…

The beginning of this new novel by Jessica Shattuck reminded me of Belgravia, where socialites are enjoying a party – this time in a Bavarian castle – and love is in the air. But war is on the horizon, so the fun is short lived and duty calls both soldiers and resistors away.

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Apparently during WWII 100,000 European women married American soldiers! So after the war, the U.S. government sent thousands of these women to America on The Queen Mary luxury liner, which is now docked in Long Beach, CA.

The latest of my many WWII fiction reads, A Bridge Across the Ocean by Susan Meissner, follows the stories of three war brides as they experience the horrors of the war, meet their husbands, and later make the trip on the Queen Mary “across the ocean.” Of course as in many modern novels the chapters jump back and forth between past and present so a reader learns key information at various times to make the story most intriguing.

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Like one of the characters in The Orphan’s Tale: A Novel, I didn’t expect to find myself in a circus during a WWII read.

“…it is hard to believe that such a world still exists even during the war. I might have been less surprised to find myself on the moon,” says Noa after finding refuge in a circus troupe.

Not to be confused with the previously bestselling Orphan Train, especially since the cover of this newer book has a train and instead of a circus, The Orphan Tale by Pam Jenoff is set in WWII Europe.

Noa, cast away by her family for becoming pregnant, rescues another baby boy from a boxcar of Jewish infants headed towards a concentration camp. Then, taken in by a German circus, Noa gets training in the art of trapeze and also finds deep friendship from her mentor Astrid, who has her own secrets and heartaches.

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