Adriana Kraft

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Book Review

On Tour: The King’s Command, by Rosemary Hayes @HayesRosemary #BookReview #HistoricalFiction #Huguenots #LouisXIV #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub

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Book Information 

Book Title: The King’s Command: For God or Country
Author: Rosemary Hayes
Publication Date: July 3rd, 2023
Publisher: Sharpe Books
Page Length: 415
Genre: Historical Fiction

Blurb:

Sixteen-year-old Lidie Brunier has everything; looks, wealth, health and a charming suitor, but there are dark clouds on the horizon. Lidie and her family are committed Huguenots, and Louis XIV has sworn to stamp out this ‘false religion’ and make France a wholly Catholic country. Gradually Lidie’s comfortable life starts to disintegrate as Huguenots are stripped of all rights and the King sends his brutal soldiers into their homes to force them to become Catholics. Others around her break under pressure, but Lidie and her family refuse to convert. With spies everywhere and the ever-present threat of violence, they struggle on. Then a shocking betrayal forces Lidie’s hand and her only option is to try and flee the country, a decision that brings unimaginable hardship, terror and tragedy and changes her life forever.

“One of the very best historical novels I have ever read.” Sandra Robinson, Huguenot Ancestry Expert

Buy Links: 

This title is available to read with #KindleUnlimited.
Universal Link: https://books2read.com/u/bW6zGG
Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CB4RH68S
Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Command-God-Country-ebook/dp/B0CB4RH68S/
Amazon AU: https://www.amazon.com.au/Kings-Command-God-Country-ebook/dp/B0CB4RH68S/
Amazon CA: https://www.amazon.ca/Kings-Command-God-Country-ebook/dp/B0CB4RH68S/

Review

Do you have French Huguenot ancestors? If so, have any stories come down to you about their experience – what they endured, why they chose the risk of leaving France, how they decided to come to the country where they eventually settled? My answer to the first question is yes, but the scant information that was passed down through family stories and recorded over a century ago turns out to contain many errors. I blogged about my own Huguenot history yesterday and hope you will take a peek at it: https://wp.me/p9O7pv-3sP

In The King’s Command, author Rosemary Hayes has brought us a thoroughly researched and detailed account of life for one Huguenot family in southwestern France. Her story opens in 1680, some five years before King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and required all protestants to convert to Catholicism: “One king, one country, one religion.” That the family are her direct ancestors and she has been able to visit the French town where they lived has added greatly to the richness and veracity of her fictionalized account.

I especially appreciated the author’s careful parsing of each step of the transition from respected freely worshipping tradesmen and professionals to a persecuted minority with no rights to property, profession, freedom of religion, or even life itself that took place in France over the decade of the 1680s and beyond.

The persecution and exodus were not a single event, although the crisis peaked in 1685. By opening her novel five years earlier, the author has succeeded in conveying  not only the gradual escalation of attacks and curtailment of rights that preceded the revocation, but also how news traveled, how families learned what was happening to others like them, how they first attempted to protect themselves and their assets, and how they began to consider whether to stay or flee. The peril and travails of her family in their escape is a story shared by thousands, many of whom did not make it.

The novel is well written, engaging, and rich with accurate historical detail. I found it easy to imagine my own ancestors, likely in a different region of France, gradually learning and observing those same changes and weighing their options as the depredations and dangers increased and came closer to home. A highly recommended read.  Adriana Kraft

About Rosemary Hayes:

Rosemary Hayes has written over fifty books for children and young adults. She writes  in different genres, from edgy teenage fiction (The Mark), historical fiction (The Blue Eyed Aborigine and Forgotten Footprints), middle grade fantasy (Loose Connections, The Stonekeeper’s Child and Break Out)  to chapter books for early readers and texts for picture books. Many of her books have won or been shortlisted for awards and several have been translated into different languages.

Rosemary has travelled widely but now lives in South Cambridgeshire. She has a background in publishing, having worked for Cambridge University Press before setting up her own company Anglia Young Books which she ran for some years. She has been a reader for a well-known authors’ advisory service and runs creative writing workshops for both children and adults.

Rosemary has recently turned her hand to adult fiction and her historical novel ‘The King’s Command’ is about the terror and tragedy suffered by the French Huguenots during the reign of Louis XIV.

Author Links:

Website: https://www.rosemaryhayes.co.uk

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HayesRosemary

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rosemary-Hayes/e/B00NAPAPZC

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/80106.Rosemary_Hayes

Tour Schedule Page:  https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2023/08/blog-tour-the-kings-command-by-rosemary-hayes.html

My Review: The Last Great Saxon Earls, by Mercedes Rochelle @authorrochelle #1066 #KU #MedievalHistory #UKHistory #Review

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The Last Great Saxon Earls, by Mercedes Rochelle

I first “met” Earl Godwine in Helen Hollick’s exquisite fictional account of Queen Emma, The Forever Queen. But the earl and his sons were shadowy figures on the edges of my awareness as I continued to explore more pre-Norman historical fiction. Mercedes Rochelle has knit all the puzzle pieces together marvelously in her three-volume series, The Last Great Saxon Earls.

As the author notes in her opening, it is always the victors who record and pass down the history. The Godwine family, ultimately defeated by William the Conqueror in 1066, have nearly faded into obscurity. Major dates are known – births, deaths, even some marriages – as are their various titles: earldoms, and eventually kingship, for son Harold, briefly in 1066. But the missing details are fertile ground for an author of fiction, and Rochelle fills in the blanks with compelling and engaging motives and actions.

How did Earl Godwine first meet Canute and fall into his favor? Why was there so much conflict between Earl Godwine’s sons Harold and Tostig? Was the Earl truly responsible for the death of Æthling Alfred, Emma’s son by Æthlred the Unready? What was the ultimate fate of the earl’s youngest son, Wulfnoth, a hostage in Normandy for decades?

No one knows the true answer to any of these questions. I do suspect the author’s experience as an actor in Living History has contributed to her ability to place herself – and hence us, as readers – so convincingly in both the inner and outer worlds of these characters from over a millennium ago. It’s a challenge to create a page-turner when the outcome of so many events is already known, but Rochelle’s account has succeeded. I found myself rooting for characters along the way in spite of knowing their ultimate fate, a testament to her ability to evoke empathy for characters long vilified as traitors, at worst, or simply losers, at best.

Five stars, highly recommend.

BUY LINK

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRQMHYWB
Free to read on Kindle Unlimited
$2.99 each to purchase

 

 

 

My Review: Once Upon a Wardrobe, by Patti Callahan (@pcalhenry) #Review #Narnia

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Did you devour C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series as a kid? Or perhaps, like me, you read the books out loud to a child. My husband and I started a chapter a night when our son was about 8 years old, after we’d all been enchanted by a community theater production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. For me, as an adult, the entire series was magical, alluring, and profound.

Once Upon a Wardrobe delivers the same magic. The author, Patti Callahan, came to study Lewis’s life and meet his surviving stepson when she embarked on her earlier book, a biography of Joy Davidman, whom Lewis married in 1956. In Once Upon a Wardrobe, Callahan brings us C.S. Lewis in 1950, shortly after the first publication of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, which he wrote in about 1948.

She does so through the eyes of a fictitious terminally ill eight year old child, George, and his older sister Megs, a seventeen year old Oxford math and physics student who loves her brother fiercely. George has just read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and is desperate to know whether Narnia is real and where it came from. When he learns that its author teaches where his sister is studying, he insists that Megs find him and ask him those questions.

Megs is ever practical, driven by what can be observed, measured, counted. But she knows she must do this for George. Through the interplay between Megs, an Irish fellow student of hers named Padraig,  George, and C. S. Lewis, Callahan draws us into a world every bit as luminescent and profound as the series itself.

In the story, Lewis is more than willing to engage in dialogue with Megs and takes an almost fatherly stance. But rather than answer questions, he tells stories – his early childhood, the brutality of a British boys school, World War I experiences, hosting “refugee” children during World War II, conversations with Tolkien and the Inklings. Megs records as much as she can of Lewis’s stories and returns faithfully to share them with her brother, who is worsening.

The message, which Megs resists but gradually comes to accept, is that truth is not confined to what can be counted and measured. Fairy tales aren’t just for children. As Lewis himself put it in a New York Times essay in 1956, “Sometimes fairy stories may say best what’s to be said.”

Not a fairy tale in any sense of the word, Once Upon a Wardrobe brings Lewis’s purpose and perspective to light in exquisite and richly textured prose, creating an experience reminiscent of Narnia itself. An immensely satisfying and uplifting read.

My Review: Code Girls, by Liza Mundy @lizamundy #WWII #WomensHistory #Review #KU

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Code Girls, by Liza Mundy, is the third book in my current series of book reviews featuring the role of women in the WWII Allied victory. The first two books – The Atomic City Girls, and Daughters of the Night Sky – are historical fiction based very closely on actual events and characters.

Code Girls is not fiction, even though through most of its pages it reads as smoothly and dramatically as any novel. Following interviews with more than twenty participants and years of meticulous research, much of the data having spent decades as classified and unavailable, Liza Mundy has crafted the story of over 10,000 American women, most freshly out of college, who secretly worked during the war to break the German and Japanese military codes. These women saved thousands of lives and in no small part helped to bring down first Germany, and then Japan.

They – and their superiors – could tell no one about it for decades.

In November, 1941, letters began going out to select women who were seniors at several of the nation’s elite colleges. The letters invited the women to an interview, where the questions simply were whether they liked crossword puzzles and if they were engaged to be married. If they answered appropriately, they were invited to further meetings where they learned about “cryptanalysis” and were told never to utter that word to anyone else. They entered on-campus training in code breaking – again, about which they could tell no one, not even family members. Those who passed the rigorous training were the earliest recruits to facilities being readied for them in Washington, D.C., by both the Navy and the Army.

Over the ensuing years, recruitment criteria broadened, but secrecy, the ability to identify patterns, and having a bright mind remained paramount. Mundy’s account traces the initial American codebreaking developments between the wars, then proceeds through the war years chronologically. By weaving together historical data and material from her interviews, she provides a window into the mundane as well as the dramatic. We learn what interaction was like in the cramped working quarters; how the women were treated by outsiders – who could never know how technical and important their work was – how they spent their relatively few free hours; and, for many of them, how their lives unfolded after the war.

Most of them remained unacknowledged and unsung for the rest of their lives. Some family members never learned what a mother – an aunt – a grandmother – had accomplished, how many ships were sunk because the Navy “happened” to be in the right place at the right time, due to intelligence provided by the codebreakers.

I found this book to be both informative and very engaging, and I highly recommend it.

BUY LINK

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316439894/

Code Girls is available exclusively at Amazon
and is currently on Kindle Unlimited

My Review: The Atomic City Girls, by Janet Beard #WWII #WomensHistory #HerStory #ManhattanProject

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This review is the second book in my three review series (so far!) on women who won the war – women without whose contribution we could so easily have lost.

Daughters of the Night Sky, by Aimee K. Runyan Goodreads Review
The Atomic City Girls, by Janet Beard Goodreads Review
Code Girls, by Liza Mundy (review coming 11/19)

Growing up as a baby boomer, I naturally learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the first atomic bomb tests at Alamogordo, NM. Later, while I was studying at the University of Chicago, a Henry Moore sculpture commemorating the first atomic fusion was unveiled. It is situated on the university’s former football field, the site of Fermi’s laboratory in the 1940s. The sculpture’s shape vaguely resembles a mushroom cloud, which caused considerable controversy, as there was no explosion in Fermi’s successful experiment. But everyone involved in Fermi’s labs knew where the work was headed.

In spite of this awareness, until I picked up The Atomic City Girls, I was only familiar with “Oak Ridge” as the name of a famous country band, whose song “Elvira” I often dance to in line dance classes. Though I knew the term “Manhattan Project,” I had never heard of the massive calutrons that were secretly built in Oak Ridge, TN during World War II to enrich uranium for the atomic bomb. I was also unaware of the enormous and crucial role of so many women in the Manhattan Project.

The Atomic City Girls, written by a granddaughter and grand niece of two women who worked for the Manhattan Project in Tennessee, succeeds brilliantly in remedying this gap in my knowledge. Though the main characters are fictional, their experiences mirror the life and reality of the actual participants in the project.

The city of Oak Ridge was built nearly overnight in a remote Tennessee valley selected for the potential of its surrounding ridges to possibly contain an explosion, should there be a disaster in the project. Out of nothing, in very short order, grew a city of over 75,000, complete with housing, buses, movie theaters, bowling alleys, and other recreational venues. All who worked there were sworn to secrecy, and violations were not tolerated.

The project recruited recent female high school graduates chiefly from the surrounding region. For most of them, it was both their first paying job and their first time living away from their families. The ”girls,” most of them under 20, were trained to sit at a display of dials and keep them within a very narrow range of settings. In eight hour shifts, they did nothing but watch the displays and turn the dials when required. They were never told what the dials meant or what their work was producing.

Beard has created fictional characters both black and white, male and female, line workers and highly trained scientists and engineers. Thus she succeeds in conveying not only the daily experience of the young women, but also the inevitable tensions and cross currents of racial and status differences within the milieu. Within her story lies a microcosm of the changes that emerged in our society following the war in the roles of women and African Americans.

It turns out that the secrecy surrounding this project also impacted me personally. Shortly after reading the book, I was going through some family history accounts my mother passed along to me before her death. There I learned for the first time that her older brother, a chemical engineer at DuPont in Delaware, worked on the Manhattan project. DuPont was the US firm that designed and built the calutrons in Oak Ridge. My mother’s notes gave no further details about his role, so I do not know if his work was on site in Tennessee, or in Delaware during the planning and design stages.

In short, I found this book to be well written, thoroughly researched, highly informative, and very engaging, and I highly recommend it.

Buy Link https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062666711/

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/