New Reviews: Historical Fiction

Dual narrations by Sophie Roberts and Justin Avoth make following this twisty historical confection an absolute treat. Roberts hits all the right notes for Hannah, who, when widowed by her husband's murder in eighteenth-century London, is left with a confectionary shop, mounting debt, and hostile suppliers who want her out of the business. Avoth embodies Devereaux, a... Read More

A tour-de-force performance by Gemma Whelan makes listening to this audiobook worthwhile. Jane Boleyn--Lady Rocheford--is a canny observer. She watches, she waits, she gathers information, and she reveals secrets to her spymaster, Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell then uses the damaging particulars against his enemies. Whelan portrays each character with enthusiasm, growling... Read More

Emily Sutton-Smith narrates a story of Auschwitz and the Nazi regime throughout Europe in a low, wistful tone without an accent. The novel features Rachael, a Jewish woman imprisoned in Auschwitz who finds a diamond ring in the mud, and Samual, a Jewish man living and working in Prague who is in love with a woman named Hanna. Sutton-Smith's slow-paced delivery portrays... Read More

English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald took a mostly undocumented half-year sojourn to Mexico in the 1950s, and this new story by Jessica Francis Kane is a fictional account of that visit. Cerris Morgan-Moyer narrates as Fitzgerald and her young son become guests of two capricious spinsters who are distant relatives in small-town Fonseca. Their ambiguous invitation implied the... Read More

Helen Laser is a good narrator, but her skills are not put to full use here. It's 1963, and Barbara Feldman has been processing her husband's sudden death for two years. Now her mother-in-law, Ruth, moves in, disrupting Barbara's attempts to forge a new path and sowing seeds of chaos. This audiobook is fairly predictable in its plot and delivery. There are few surprises, and... Read More

Golden Voice Cassandra Campbell gives a splendid performance of this historical fiction audiobook with a touch of romance. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Harvey Houses, with their all-female waitstaffs, offered excellent employment opportunities for women in their restaurants at train stations in the southwestern U.S. This novel revolves around two new... Read More

Relationships between women can sometimes be difficult. And that's the case with this nonlinear LGBTQ+ story. Grace Lynn Kung captures the tricky friendship between Lane Warren, a Hollywood outsider, and Gala Margolis, an adventurous Hollywood socialite. During the 1960s, the women discover they're both aspiring writers. Kung depicts their initial awkwardness, which is followed... Read More

Kristin Atherton narrates the story of Grace, a young woman who is isolated at her unpleasant aunt's rambling English mansion at the close of the Victorian era. Grace's obsession with secretly painting perfect copies of famous works of art is interrupted when a man claiming to be her long-lost cousin Charles arrives to claim his inheritance. Atherton portrays the self-possessed... Read More

The compelling voice of skilled narrator Almarie Guerra transports listeners to the physical and spiritual world of a Taino village in early 1500s Cuba, where the supernatural is ever present in daily life. After Spanish forces attack the village, four young survivors undertake a grueling quest to preserve the Tainos' sacred heritage. Three are from different Indigenous... Read More

John Ridge, son of a Cherokee leader, finds himself at odds with the Christian values he's learned at a New England school. They don't align with the realities he's come to observe: racism and attempts at sowing tribal division. The strength and hope in narrator Cameron DelGrosso's voice gradually fades when Ridge returns home and the brutal seizure of Cherokee lands begins.... Read More

In a soft, melodic voice, Saskia Maarleveld breathes life into this novel set in 1895 London. Lady Duxbury, a three-time widow who survived an abusive marriage, shelters three vulnerable young women under the guise of a book club. Eleanor, a physically and emotionally abused mother; Rose, an American dollar princess; and Lavinia, a bullied young woman with a domineering father,... Read More