Adriana Kraft

When it's time to heat things up...

Adriana's Library

Review: Book Lovers, by Emily Henry #RomCom #BookReview #WomensFiction

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Book Lovers is a serious book. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fabulous RomCom, with countless laugh out loud moments. But it is never trivial, always raw and honest. Emily Henry has turned a classic trope upside down and given us the other woman, the other man, who don’t abandon the fast-paced city and don’t save a small town business and don’t fall in love with the simple life.

Why, you might ask? She’ll tell us, in her own words:

Romance is treated as a guilty pleasure, and in the last ten years or so I have asked myself a lot of questions about guilty pleasures and why I am made to feel guilty for enjoying these narratives. It’s as though these novels are just candy for your brain, bad for you, and do not teach you anything like a more ‘serious’ book would. I wanted to challenge that notion. [London Magazine Interview with Emily Henry]

She absolutely succeeds, with all three of the romance novels that have expanded her genre niche from YA to women’s fiction/romance. In order, these are Beach Read, People You Meet on Vacation, and Book Lovers.

I’d never heard of her until last spring, when my next door neighbor gave me her copy of People We Meet on Vacation before she headed back north at the end of the season. I don’t own or read many print books – when we sold our house in 2012 and lived/traveled/wrote across the country in our motor home for the next six years, Kindle was the way to go. Our most treasured print books lived in our son’s basement until we settled in 2018, and we now live in a tiny house that doesn’t have room for shelves upon shelves of books.

I packed People We Meet on Vacation along for my flight to visit a Chicago friend in July – and could hardly put it down. I was a convert. I gave it to my friend at the end of my visit, but I immediately downloaded and read first Beach Read, and then Book Lovers. I loved all three of these books. It fascinates me that the heroines in each book make their living in the world of writing: a RomCom author (Beach Read), a travel writer (People We Meet on Vacation), and a romance/women’s fiction agent (Book Lovers). Write what you know. Somehow Henry is able to both be in the tumultuous world of authors-agents-editors-publishers that make up women’s fiction while simultaneously seeing through it, poking fun at it, and challenging its tropes and assumptions. Brilliantly.

I love seeing a best-selling author dare to do that. Her characters are far more clever than any real people I know, but I love their snappy repartee. What especially captures me is the intense honesty in each of her protagonists – they may start off not being honest with either themselves or each other, but the choices they must make force the honesty to surface, and that’s the arc of each book. Oh, and a happy ending, which by then is both deeply sought and desirable.

I highly recommend all three books, and it doesn’t matter which order you choose to read them in.

Beach Read

https://www.amazon.com/Beach-Read-Emily-Henry-ebook/dp/B07XNKRV83/

People We Meet on Vacation

https://www.amazon.com/People-Meet-Vacation-Emily-Henry-ebook/dp/B08FZNYQJC/

Book Lovers

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Lovers-Emily-Henry-ebook/dp/B09BTQ9HW6/

        

#Review: 1066 Turned Upside Down #HistoricalFiction #Midieval #BattleofHastings @AnnieWHistory @HelenHollick

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On my side of the pond, the history lessons I grew up with were woefully inadequate when it came to England. My college Western Civ history began with the Renaissance, as though nothing that came before either was known or would have mattered. I knew nothing about the Norman Conquest or the tribes and kingdoms that had preceded it across the British Isles.

I’ve been filling this gap in the last few years with marvelous history and historical fiction by, among others, Annie Whitehead and Helen Hollick. Annie Whitehead’s Alvar the Kingmaker, suspenseful and rich with cultural details, brings us up to the accession of Æthelred the Unready (978-1016). And Æthelred’s second wife, Queen Emma (984-1052), comes alive in Helen Hollick’s engaging The Forever Queen. It is Emma’s son, Edward the Confessor, whose lack of offspring sets the stage for the Norman invasion of 1066 – and it is Emma’s grand nephew, William the Conqueror, who ultimately won the Battle of Hastings, now being turned upside down in fiction.

So I was intrigued a while back as I scrolled through my morning Triberr posts to discover the title 1066 Turned Upside Down, then further thrilled to realize I was familiar with some of its authors. It takes a special talent to make history come alive, and the nine authors who’ve contributed to this work have succeeded marvelously.

The book is organized chronologically and examines nine turning points in the autumn of 1066, any one of which could easily have led to a different outcome. Each chapter creates a compelling narrative of that different outcome and its consequences.

The stories make great reading, and I was struck that they would be an excellent resource for middle school or high school students to soak up the history that hangs by a thread. But they are also delightful reading at any age. The players were already familiar to me though my earlier reading, and I was entertained and intrigued to explore their actions and motivations at each twist of the story.

Amazon Buy Link:

https://amazon.com/1066-Turned-Upside-Down-Alternative-ebook/dp/B01I1V7G42/

With a forward by C. C. Humphreys, the book brings us stories by the following authors:

Joanna Courtney

Helen Hollick

Annie Whitehead

Anna Belfrage

Alison Morton

Carol McGrath

Eliza Redgold

G.K. Holloway

Richard Dee

On My #Bookshelf: Lilac Girls, by Martha Hall Kelly #WWII #TrueStory #HistoricalNovel #Review

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I was a very young teenager when my mother took me to see the documentary movie Mein Kampf. I’ve never been able to erase those visuals, black and white photographs of concentration camp victims. That was my mother’s point: We must never forget.

Perhaps for that reason, though I choose to read a lot of history and historical novels, I’m never thrilled to encounter Nazi horror up close on the pages I’m reading. I don’t wish to experience it again.

I picked up Lilac Girls on the recommendation of a good friend.

I made it through the early segments – the invasion of Poland, Caroline Ferriday’s work with refugees in New York City, the early violence against Jews in Germany. I set the book down when the narrative placed the German female doctor – Herta Oberheuser – in Ravensbrück. I didn’t want to go there.

When I told my friend, she said to keep reading, that it would be worth it.

And it was. Through the horror, in spite of the appalling devastation and loss, this is a story about redemption. And it is a true story, fleshed out with the author’s narrative of the main characters’ internal thoughts and reactions.

Through tracing the actions (and probable thoughts) of real characters New York socialite Caroline Ferriday and Herta Oberheuser, then weaving them with the narrative of the fictional polish teenager Kasia Kuzmerick, the author plunges us into the horror of the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp for Women.

Fast forward the narrative to the mid-fifties, after the war is over. I was unaware this story was real until I began to read about the role of Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review. My family subscribed to that magazine, and through my early adulthood, I did, as well.

At that point I set down the book again and began chasing links online – yes, true story, impacted by people I “knew,” though not personally. Caroline Ferriday enlisted the help of Norman Cousins and his platform to raise funds to bring thirty five of the Ravensbrück survivors to the US for whatever corrective surgery was possible. In so doing, she was continuing a family legacy of political and charitable activism. Since the publication of Lilac Girls, author Martha Hall Kelly has released two additional books, chronicling the role of Caroline Ferriday’s ancestors during WWI (Lost Roses) and the Civil War (Sunflower Sisters). I highly recommend all three books.

The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah #Review #Mustread #Bookstoreread #MFRWAuthor

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If you’ve hit my blog today, it goes without saying that you’re an avid reader, too. Welcome! My husband and I write together as Adriana Kraft, and you can browse our website and links to learn more about what we write.

When you read, do you typically stick to a single genre? Widely different genres? A Potpourri? I’m pretty eclectic, myself, and a lot of my pleasure-reading is in genres outside romance: history, biography, historical fiction, contemporary mainstream fiction. My Kindle says I have a 236 day reading streak. I don’t doubt that. I thought I’d share some of my favorites from time to time, in no particular order.

I’ll start with the book that got my current kick started, and one of the few in recent years I’ve read a second time: The Nightingale, by Kristin Hannah.

I love historical fiction, and I especially love when the main events are based on something that really happened. I’ve also long been drawn to novels (and history) about World War II, although I didn’t know that was a focus of this work when I started reading it. It was gifted to me by a close friend when I’d just had carpal tunnel surgery on my right wrist, and the surgeon had been unable to do it laparoscopically. I was functionally laid up and unable to write for several days.

I found this to be a five-star book, from start to finish. I’m a fast reader, but this was to be savored, even as I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. Since my first reading, I’ve pondered what the elements were that drew me into the story and back again for another round.

As a writer, I especially admired the structure Hannah used to present her story. She opens in 1995, in the reflective memories of one of the main characters. Here are that character’s opening lines:

If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.

Hannah does not tell us in that scene which of her two main characters is sharing memories – in fact, that discovery, towards the end of the book, is part of the book’s brilliance. We learn what happens across the war years, but we are never clear whose memory and present life we occasionally drop in on in the nineties. So part of the appeal of this book for me is its structure, both the weaving across the five-decade jump in time span, and the secrecy (one of many secrets) about whose memories and current life we are reading.

Two other aspects of the book are equally responsible for my “must read” (and re-read) recommendation. The first of these is her use of language. Of course it’s no surprise that a best-selling author creates magic with her words. When after the first 1990s scene she drops us into the bucolic setting of the Loire valley in 1939, I wanted to be there, in spite of knowing what was coming. Throughout, the text is rich, precise, inviting, invoking, equally powerful when the story is poignant or when it’s devastating. As always when I read a WWII story, there are some things I’d rather not see so clearly, but it’s important. We must never forget.

The final crucial feature of this book for me is that it tells a true story, in the broad sense of that word. During World War II, there were real people who experienced everything Hannah wrote. Everything. Her characters are not the actual heroes who did all those things, but nothing they’ve done across the span of the war was made up. It is all based on Hannah’s careful research and thorough understanding of Nazi-occupied France, Vichy France, and the countless stalwart, courageous ordinary citizens who risked everything to become resisters. Some, but not all, of the secrecy that pervades the story is driven by this fact: resisters must hide what they are doing. To reveal to the wrong person will cost lives – theirs, and those of countless others.

So I will close with another reflection from the opening scene: “As I approach the end of my years, I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.” Some of Hannah’s story is true about the past, but much of it, as this awareness, is equally true of the present.