The Gentleman's Gambit

 The Gentleman's Gambit (The League of Extraordinary Women #4)- Evie Dunmore

Berkley Publishing 

Release Date: December 5, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚

Synopsis: Bookish suffragist Catriona Campbell is busy: An ailing estate, academic writer's block, a tense time for England's women's rights campaign--the last thing she needs is to be stuck playing host to her father's distractingly attractive young colleague.

Deeply introverted Catriona lives for her work at Oxford and her fight for women's suffrage. She dreams of romance, too, but since all her attempts at love have ended badly, she now keeps her desires firmly locked inside her head--until she climbs out of a Scottish loch after a good swim and finds herself rather exposed to her new colleague.

Elias Khoury has wheedled his way into Professor Campbell's circle under false pretenses: he did not come to Oxford to classify ancient artefacts, he is determined to take them back to his homeland in the Middle East. Winning Catriona's favor could be the key to his success. Unfortunately, seducing the coolly intense lady scholar quickly becomes a mission in itself and his well-laid plans are in danger of derailing...

Forced into close proximity in Oxford's hallowed halls, two very different people have to face the fact that they might just be a perfect match. Soon, a risky new game begins that asks Catriona one more time to put her heart and wildest dreams at stake.

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I had mixed reactions to this book. Some of it I liked. I liked Catriona and Elias, two people trying to figure out where they belong in the world and how to do what they think is right to the best of their abilities. Catriona is a brilliant linguist and suffragist, she's been trying to find the time to write a book but keeps getting pulled into other people's projects instead. She worries she falls for the sort of person who just wants to take from her, never accept her as she is, and leaves her heartbroken- so when she meets Elias Khoury and feels a familiar spark, she is determined not to fall for him. Elias is charming and brilliant, he has ethics that challenge everything the scholars of Oxford and their collections have never bothered to think about. He knows he shouldn't be attracted to Catriona when he's in England to take back artifacts, but the two definitely have a slow-burn attraction that's hard to avoid. The circling they do is interesting, as each tries to figure the other out, and Catriona tries to figure out her own reactions as well.

I loved the discussions Elias brought up about repatriation and who owns artifacts, and the fact that Catriona and her friends could see this in terms of the suffrage work they'd been doing and see the similarities was a great way to bring the two together. 

The book did drag in places, and while trying to give Catriona and Elias their own bubble for a romance to grow, the rest of the book felt like it suffered as a result. There were ups and downs to it, since they got to know each other better at the same time. By the end, I was frustrated with Catriona not being brave enough to trust Elias and needing a pretty huge grand gesture to fix things (no further details because of spoilers!). I don't know if that was me being frustrated that the book kept on going when it could have ended earlier, or what. In some ways, this book felt like it was crammed with too many things going on, so not everything got the full development it could have. The result was a bit of a flat book for me, but hopefully, others will like it more.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

There Should Have Been Eight

 

There Should Have Been Eight- Nalini Singh

Berkley

Release Date: November 21, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis:  They met when they were teenagers. Now they’re adults, and time has been kind to some and unkind to others—none more so than to Bea, the one they lost nine long years ago. They’ve gathered to reminisce at Bea’s family’s estate, a once-glorious mansion straight out of a gothic novel. Best friends, old flames, secret enemies, and new lovers are all under one roof—but when the weather turns and they’re snowed in at the edge of eternity, there’s nowhere left to hide from their shared history.

As the walls close in, the pretense of normality gives way to long-buried grief, bitterness, and rage. Underneath it all, there’s the nagging feeling that Bea’s shocking death wasn’t what it was claimed to be. And before the weekend is through, the truth will be unleashed—no matter the cost.

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A reunion for a group of university friends turns into much, much more in Nalini Singh's latest psychological thriller, There Should Have Been Eight. 

Drifting apart after graduation is normal even among a tight group of friends, but what cracked this group was the suicide of their group's center, Bea. A young woman who loved life, light, and people, her disappearance and subsequent suicide, and losing the chance to have a funeral for her due to her sister Darcie's choices, have always haunted the group- especially main character Luna. She's hoping to confront Darcie and get some closure at the reunion on Darcie's family estate. But things are odd almost from the beginning, and soon accidents are happening with increasing severity. As a freak snowstorm traps the group inside, past and present collide and Luna will have to discover the truth before it's too late to save the innocent.

There's nothing better (for me) than a locked house mystery where you know not everything is what it seems, and some people are lying- but you aren't sure who is lying and whether their secrets are personal or deadly. Nalini Singh hits all the perfect notes in There Should Have Been Eight: a group of people who think they know each other, a crumbling gothic mansion providing its own atmosphere of neglect and ghostly terror (complete with past family secrets of madness and murder), and then a snowstorm to add an extra layer of being cut off from the world. Luna's personal secret, that she is suffering from a disease that is causing her to slowly go blind, adds a layer of personal panic and claustrophobia from the narrator's perspective that ups the emotional atmosphere for the reader. 

This was a slow-burn thriller in the beginning, as Singh brings her characters into the mansion at the edge of the world and the hints and red herrings begin, then mind-tricks and incidents ramp things up to the subtle yet shocking conclusion. I thought the pacing and writing was brilliant, the story and characters haunting me long after I'd finished reading. This incredibly powerful book is one I'll be recommending to thriller/mystery fans and rereading many times!   

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

A Rome of One's Own

 

A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Romane Empire- Emma Southon 

Abrams Press

Release Date: November 7, 2023

Rating:📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: The history of Rome has long been narrow and one-sided, essentially a history of “The Doing of Important Things,” and as far as Roman historians have been concerned, women don’t make that history. From Romulus through “the political stab-fest of the late Republic,” and then on to all the emperors, Roman historians may deign to give you a wife or a mother to show how bad things become when women get out of control, but history is more than that.

 
Emma Southon’s A Rome of One’s Own is the best kind of correction. This is a retelling of the history of Rome with all the things Roman history writers relegate to the background, or designate as domestic, feminine, or worthless. This is a history of women who caused outrage, led armies in rebellion, wrote poetry; who lived independently or under the thumb of emperors. Told with humor and verve as well as a deep scholarly background, A Rome of One’s Own highlights women overlooked and misunderstood, and through them offers a fascinating and groundbreaking chronicle of the ancient world.

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Emma Southon is my absolute favorite historian when it comes to exploring ancient Rome. First off, she literally wrote a book on murder in Rome (A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) and I feel like that is a book everyone needs in their life.  I know I did. Secondly, she examines Roman history a)within its historical context b)looking at the historical sources in their context and c)with a dry wit and humor that makes me feel like I'm having a conversation with a friend about something that I would actually regularly talk to a friend about (because that's the kind of person I am). It's also the sort of humor that would make people not necessarily interested in ancient history really get into it. And have I mentioned that she doesn't look at what Traditional Historians usually look at: Important Battles In History? 

Instead, Emma Southon has been on the cutting edge of examining ancient Roman history from the point of view of women since her fabulous book on Agrippina came out in 2019 and she hasn't looked back since. In A Rome of One's Own she builds on Agrippina's success by exploring the lives of 21 Roman women who historians both past and present have relegated to footnotes (if they get mentioned at all) and reframe the story to remind us that really, it's the women who are incredibly important in the story of Rome. Even the Romans knew that, little though some of them liked to admit it. 

A Rome of One's Own spans the entire length and timeline of the Roman Empire, from the early women of Rome (Tarpeia and Hersilia- you probably never heard of them) to one of the most famous (Lucretia- Roman men loved to turn her into a literary trope and make it all about them). From Boudicca (you might have heard of her, here's as close to the real story as Southon can get) to Julia Felix (a Pompeii businesswoman you've never heard of, but she'll make you question what you think you know about Romane women) and into the strange world of Christian martyrdom (Perpetua, in her own words) and the end of the Roman Empire, when Christians ruled and everyone was still fighting (Galla Placidia). Some of these women ruled behind the scenes, or not so behind the scenes, some just wanted to run a business and stay away from the murder-happy aristocrats. But Southon gives us compelling arguments that their stories, and the thousands like them that are not told here, are more the "real" Roman Empire than all of the Important Things and Battles we read so much about. Here are the true people of Rome, the lives both small and large, overlooked and misunderstood, and completely fascinating to read.

Full of fascinating facts and delightful humor, A Rome of One's Own is one of those books everyone should read!

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review

Hunting the Falcon

 Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and the Marriage that Shook Europe- John Guy & Julia Fox

Bloomsbury

Released: September 14, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: The story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn is one of the most remarkable in a long courtship followed by a shotgun wedding and then a coronation, ending just short of three years later when a husband's passion turned to such hatred that he simply wanted his wife gone. In Hunting the Falcon, John Guy and Julia Fox examine the most recent archival discoveries and peel back layers of historical myth to present Anne and Henry in startlingly new ways. They show how Anne and Henry's relationship was tied almost completely to the major events of international politics at one of the great turning points of European history, and dispel any assumptions that a sixteenth-century woman, even a queen, could exert little influence on the politics and beliefs of a patriarchal society. Anne was in fact a shrewd and ruthless politician in her own right, a woman who steered Henry and his policies - and whom Henry seriously contemplated making joint sovereign.

Hunting the Falcon sets the facts and some completely new finds into a wide frame, unearthing the truth about these two extraordinary lives and their tumultuous times. It pays particular attention to the seven 'missing' years that Anne spent in France, and explores how she organised her side of the royal court in novel ways that ultimately sowed the seeds of her own downfall. In this feat of historical research and analysis, Guy and Fox offer a sumptuous retelling of one of the most consequential marriages in history and an exhilarating portrait of love, lust, politics and power.

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I've read a number of biographies on Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn recently, and Hunting the Falcon has to be right up at the top. I love how historians John Guy and Julia Fox take the wide view of the relationship. It wasn't ever just about love, or even lust, it was always about power and politics- both on the small family scale and on the European scale.

Guy and Fox do an excellent job of describing Anne's life in Europe before coming to Katherine of Aragon's court and Henry's attention, and how what she learned there greatly influenced what she herself would do when she was queen. She modeled her court on Queen Claude, who she served in France, allowing both women and men into her court. This probably allowed her access to more information than she might otherwise have gotten, certainly made her feel more accessible to those who wanted to ask for favors and knew the Queen was the one to go to, and in the end, helped Cromwell exploit chinks in Anne's armor that led to her execution. We see what Anne did as queen for those around her, the changes she made and those she tried, but failed, to make.  

But more than focusing on the power Anne wielded in England, Guy and Fox help the reader understand the ever-shifting power plays going on between England and France, the pope and Charles (Katherine of Aragon's nephew, Holy Roman Emperor, Hapsburg emperor, etc.). Who sided with who, when, where, and why changed regularly and Guy and Fox do the best job of explaining the players and their motivations (at any given time) that I've read yet. I think that was what impressed me the most in Hunting the Falcon. I always knew that Anne was pro-French, but here we get deeply into why sometimes it was to Henry's advantage to side with Francis and France, other times with Charles, who might support him against the pope, and who's wars in Europe would benefit him the most.

Whether you think you know all there is to know about Henry and Anne, or are looking for a good book to start your exploration of this explosive relationship, Hunting the Falcon is definitely a book I recommend!

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

The Exorcist and the Demon Hunter

 

The Exorcist and the Demon Hunter- Amy Kuivalainen

BHC Press

Release Date: September 26, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚

Synopsis: My name is Jael Quinlan and I’m a freelance exorcist, no matter how much the churches in Melbourne hate it. There’s a darkness growing in my city and my boss Uriel, the sternly handsome and badass Archangel of the North, is expecting me to get to the bottom of it.

The problem is these demons are unlike any I’ve ever seen and they are all giddy about an upcoming apocalypse. On top of that, I’ve been having some crazy visions about a demon hunter on the other side of the world named Mychal. He’s frighteningly scary and has a serious depression problem. 

It turns out I’m caught up in one of those special missions from a higher power (you got to hate those) and I know I’m going to need Mychal’s and Uriel’s help in order to stop two rampaging Watcher angels and Hel’el (the big bad Devil himself) from kicking off a new apocalypse. 

I honestly don’t know what a human exorcist can do in a battle of supernatural good and evil, but all I know is finding out is going to be one hell of a ride.

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Amy Kuivalainen is a go-to fantasy author for me, and I was excited by the idea that in this book we would finally get to learn Mychael's full story. Having read the Firebird series, I had some definite theories about him, but that just led to more questions. Cleverly, this book was written enough as a standalone that if you haven't read the Firebird series (which is great, and you should read), you don't come to this one feeling lost. If you have read it, you know there are mysteries surrounding the Demon Hunter before you meet him, but you only have suspicions and aren't actually ahead of any new readers.

The first half of the book was a surprise to me (which I don't mean in a bad way) because it focused entirely on Jael, the exorcist. A freelance exorcist with a rather Buffy-like attitude to authority and tradition, Jael isn't connected to any particular church or religion, but just believes demons shouldn't be possessing people. She has the ability to get rid of them and has been trained since she was a teen by the archangel Uriel to do so, and as far as she's concerned, that is that. Melbourne seems to be dealing with a particularly severe demon infestation and Jael is trying to handle that and understand why those demons are so fixated on her. At the same time, she's trying to hang on to shreds of a normal (or semi-normal) social life to balance her out, and it isn't always working. 

Surprisingly, we don't meet Mychael until about halfway through the book, when things get even worse in the supernatural world. The book changes up at this point: Jael tells her story from the first person, while Part Two alternates between Jael's first-person and different third-person POVs. Mostly it worked, but I was thrown by it once and awhile, especially at first. It took a little adjusting. 

Kuivalainen's other books have all been more Finnish or Russian mythology-related, including the Firebird series with Mychael, so I was intrigued by the idea of her expanding her world-building here to focus on a more  Judeo-Christian theology. Jael isn't specifically of any church or belief, but the monotheistic God of Abraham is clearly the way she feels comfortable relating to the divine, and we are talking to priests, rabbis, demons, and archangels here. I don't know if everyone will be comfortable with this approach, but I thought it worked pretty well.

While her Magicians of Venice series is still my favorite, I enjoyed this book. People who have read the Firebird series will definitely want to read it because it happily wraps up a few loose ends that you thought had just been given endings in the last book. No further spoilers than that though!

Thanks to BHC and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review

Worst Medieval Monarchs

 

The Worst Medieval Monarchs- Phil Bradford

Pen & Sword

Release Date: September 30, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: Stephen. John. Edward II. Richard II. Richard III. These five are widely viewed as the worst of England’s medieval kings. Certainly, their reigns were not success stories. Two of these kings lost their thrones, one only avoided doing so by dying, another was killed in battle, and the remaining one had to leave his crown to his opponent. All have been seen as incompetent, their reigns blighted by civil war and conflict. They tore the realm apart, failing in the basic duty of a king to ensure peace and justice. For that, all of them paid a heavy price. As well as incompetence, some also have reputations for cruelty and villainy, More than one has been portrayed as a tyrant. The murder of family members and arbitrary executions stain their reputations. All five reigns ended in failure. As a result, the kings have been seen as failures themselves, the worst examples of medieval English kingship. They lost their reputations as well as their crowns.

Yet were these five really the worst men to wear the crown of England in the Middle Ages? Or has history treated them unfairly? This book looks at the stories of their lives and reigns, all of which were dramatic and often unpredictable. It then examines how they have been seen since their deaths, the ways their reputations have been shaped across the centuries. The standards of their own age were different to our own. How these kings have been judged has changed over time, sometimes dramatically. Fiction, from Shakespeare’s plays to modern films, has also played its part in creating the modern picture. Many things have created, over a long period, the negative reputations of these five. Today, they have come to number among the worst kings of English history. Is this fair, or should they be redeemed?

That is the question this book sets out to answer.

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This was a really excellent look at 5 medieval English monarchs: Stephen, John, Edward II, Richard II, and Richard III. The author states up front that labeling people (maybe especially monarchs) 'best' or 'worst' anything is fraught with all sorts of problems but since that's the kind of age we live in now, he's looking at five medieval kings who are generally argued to be pretty bad. He explains that they will be looked at in the context of their time and then tells us what kingship meant in that time and how their people would have been judging them. Seems like a concept that should be obvious, but so many don't do this to put us all on a level playing field that I was both amazed and delighted to find this book doing so!

Bradford kept on delighting me by taking each monarch and giving a brief summary of their lives, then following how chroniclers treated their legacy, how they were viewed through the centuries, and how that view could shift (occasionally dramatically) through time depending on what different historians were trying to prove. Which usually had more to do with the historian and their viewpoint or propaganda than the monarch and his original life. How has popular culture treated each king? And then Bradford's final verdict on whether the king deserves to be known as among the "worst" medieval monarchs or not. 

I loved the sections where Bradford follows the king's legacy through the centuries and how historians have argued over them and used them to show different angles. Likewise, the sections on popular culture really help you understand how, while some kings aren't hurt by it, others are forever branded in popular opinion in certain ways. No matter what historians may decide, poor King John is never going to be seen in popular culture as anything other than the easy villain of Robin Hood stories. Almost more a stereotype than an actual person. And let's not even talk about Shakespeare and Richard III!

Well-researched, well-written, with arguments clearly expressed for you to agree or disagree with (or inspire you to read more about), Bradford does an excellent job of presenting pretty balanced accounts for each king. His emphasis on placing each man in their historical context to be judged in medieval context alone was excellent, and something I wish was done more often when it comes to history.

I definitely recommend this book to history lovers, those looking to start exploring medieval times and their monarchs, and people just looking for a good book!

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes

 

The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes- Kate Strasdin

Chatto & Windus/Vintage/Pegasus

Release Date: February 23, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of her life and times. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes.

Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Strasdin spent the next six years unravelling the secrets contained within the album's pages.

Piece by piece, she charts Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years. Fragments of cloth become windows into Victorian life: pirates in Borneo, the complicated etiquette of mourning, poisonous dyes, the British Empire in full swing, rioting over working conditions and the terrible human cost of Britain's cotton industry.

This is life writing that celebrates ordinary people: the hidden figures, the participants in everyday life. Through the evidence of waistcoats, ball gowns and mourning outfits, Strasdin lays bare the whole of human experience in the most intimate of mediums: the clothes we choose to wear.

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This was a book I was excited to read since I first heard about it through social media. Author and fashion historian Kate Strasdin was given an album, a 'dress diary' in 2016. The album consisted of swatches of fabrics from the 1830s through about the 1870s and, with the exception of brief captions identifying the fabric in a way only the album's creator would have recognized, there was no writing. Strasdin spent years researching the people named in the captions and the stories she could connect to them and their fabrics. The result is the fascinating book The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes: Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe (called The Dress Diary: Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe in the US). 

Anne Sykes grew up in Lancashire, the daughter of a cloth merchant in a part of England focused at the time on the cloth industry. She married a cloth merchant from a family of fabric printers, so needless to say Anne understood the importance of fabric in daily life- both as fashion, gifts, and probably the basis for family economics. Anne and her husband Adam traveled to Singapore for his work and lived there (and briefly Shanghai) for nearly ten years before returning to England. Strasdin scoured records, newspapers, ship's logs and more for hints of the Sykes and other names that appear in Anne's diary, often with surprising success. While no letters have been found from Anne, Strasdin helps us discover what her life in Singapore might have been like through letters of other women who lived there at the time, and who knew Anne and donated fabric to her album.

But this book isn't just a biography of a middle-class cloth merchant's wife. It is a history of the textiles and fashion in England during Anne's lifetime. From the textile mills of northern England to the machines that increased production and put hundreds of employees out of work; to a chapter on how the patterns were created (which I'd always wondered about!) and how the printing of cloth changed over time; the change in colors with the discovery of aniline dyes in the 1850s and 1860s (along with the associated poisons for both the workers and occasionally the wearers of the material); and the fancy dress costume balls that became the rage in both England and Singapore, Strasdin connects each chapter of fashion history to swatches of fabric in Anne's diary. The fabric acts as a starting point in each chapter for something Anne would have known about or been affected by, from mourning clothes to Singaporean pirates (there's a piece of a pirate flag in the album that an admiral gave her!)

The Dress Diary of Anne Sykes and Kate Strasdin proves beyond a doubt that fashion history stands as a part of the social history of any time period that must be considered when we truly try to know a time and place. Women were hugely influential in the choices connected to fashion, letting us find some of their stories within the shadows of "important" history as so often focused on by men, but Strasdin reminds us in this book of the huge web of social and global economic influences a phrase like "fashion history" truly means. Not something to be scoffed at, it is a growing field of study that should be both celebrated and encouraged.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the social or fashion history of the Victorian era. It is a great adventure that Strasdin allows us to share along with her.