Adriana Kraft

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review

Celtic Fervour: Series by Nancy Jardine @nansjar #5Stars #Review #Historical #Fiction #Celtic

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I downloaded the first book in this series because I have Scottish/Celtic roots in my ancestry, and I’m always curious to know what my ancestors’ life was like. I was vaguely aware that Rome had attempted conquest of much of what is now Scotland but then had withdrawn to Hadrian’s Wall by the time they began its construction early in the second century AD. I had no idea how far north the conquest actually advanced, and I knew very little about how my ancestors might have lived in Roman Britannia.

Since retiring from teaching elementary students, Scottish author Nancy Jardine has immersed herself in research and publications about the Roman Empire and Roman Britannia. In this five-book Celtic Fervour series, she has expertly woven both historical characters and the few actual events about which some detail is known into her fictional saga. We experience Iron Age tribal life through her fictional Brigante warriors and their families, from 71 to 89 AD – the era when the Roman general and governor Agricola tried unsuccessfully to conquer all of what is now Scotland.

The Brigante tribe itself is real and was quite large. When the Romans began advancing north, the Brigantes covered Eastern Britannia between the firth of Forth in the north and the Humber estuary in the south. Their lives, their culture, their beliefs and their struggles came to life and pulled me in throughout the entire series.

The series has already received high praise from many authors of historical fiction. I highly recommend this read for any who love historical fiction grounded in facts, and especially any who are curious about Roman Britain.

Five Stars.

SERIES BUY LINK

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D313CWC

Free to read on KU

 

My Review: #5Stars for the Lydiard Chronicles, by Elizabeth St. John @ElizStJohn #HistoricalFiction #UKHistory #KU

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When you read historical fiction that’s anchored in real events, do you ever wonder where your own ancestors were at that point in time, what their role was, what they were doing? My husband and I each have UK and European ancestors, and we’ve been able to follow some of their lines back farther than we’d ever hoped. A distant relative traced one my husband’s lines all the way back to England’s Edward III, through Edward’s second son, John of Gaunt, and John’s mistress, Katherine Swynford (later his wife).

So when the two of us delve into books about UK royalty during the War of the Roses, the Tudor era, and beyond, we’re reading about (very) distant relatives, and yes, we wonder where our related ancestors were and how they fit in with those events.

MY REVIEW

When I downloaded The Lady of the Tower, by Elizabeth St. John, I didn’t know what to expect. I was immediately pulled into 17th century England. The opening lines bring us a woman entering the Tower of London, uncertain what will happen to her next. I feared for her and kept reading. You will, too.

It turns out that the Lady who looks to be in peril is Lucy St. John, a descendent of the St. John family who owned the Lydiard estate, now preserved as Lydiard Park, some 85 miles east of London. The author is a present day descendent of that same family.

In her three-book series, aptly named The Lydiard Chronicles, Elizabeth St. John traces four generations of family members who, as relatives of Elizabeth I, were close to that court and continued to be connected to royalty throughout the 17th century during the reigns of James I/VI, Charles I, and later Charles II. During the civil war and the Commonwealth era, family members took opposite sides, with sometimes tragic results.

The works are thoroughly researched, and the major events are historically accurate. The prose is so engaging and the details rich that I was compelled to stay in in the 17th century through all three books in her series. I didn’t want to set them down, and I know I will go back and re-read them.

Highly recommend.

Five Stars.

BUY LINKS

The Lady of the Tower

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1523417889/

The Lydiard Chronicles

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GRDP6QP/

PORTRAITS

Author Elizabeth St. John has graciously sent me the following three photographs of portraits several major characters in the Lydiard series. The portraits were commissioned by their older brother, John St. John, for a family Polyptych which now hangs in St. Mary’s Church, Lydiard.

The Lady St. Johns (Lucy St. John is on the left, Barbara next to her.

The Original Polyptych

John St. John, painted when he had just acquired his title of Baronet in 1611:

The Huguenot Chronicles, by Paul C. R. Monk @pcrmonk: Review and Reflections #Huguenot #HistoricalFiction #KU

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Both my husband and I have French Huguenot ancestors. Each of our mothers carried the original immigrant’s Huguenot surname, though anglicized. Not long after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes, his mother’s ancestor emigrated from Normandy, France, to the Northern Neck of Virginia. He arrived sometime between 1687 and 1693. It is thought he may have come through England, possibly via Jersey in the Channel Islands. We have no family stories about this trip.

My mother’s ancestor arrived somewhat later. Along with his two brothers, he landed in Philadelphia in 1752, having set sail from Antwerp, Belgium. The story we have is that the boys’ mother had fled France with her family many years earlier and settled in Geneva, Switzerland. After her death, the three sons, by then adults, chose to come to the Colonies.

We have no records of the financial situation of either family at the time they left France or arrived in the Colonies. My mother’s ancestors, like many Huguenots, were well educated and quickly found jobs teaching in the Pennsylvania Dutch region west of Philadelphia. My husband’s ancestor must have come with resources. Though he had previously married in France, he fairly quickly married a Virginia woman. By the time he died some 35 years later, he had become the owner of a vast tobacco plantation in Westmoreland County, which he purchased from from Catherine Culpeper and her husband, Thomas Fairfax, 5th Lord Fairfax. His neighbors included the Washingtons, the Monroes, and the Lees.

So it was with great personal interest that each of us read a fairly recent release, The Huguenot Chronicles, by Paul C.R. Monk. The fictional story is, according to its description, “based on true events.” I do not know if this means it is true of a particular family, or more generally true. I certainly believe that every event reported in the series actually happened, over and over, to countless Protestants of conscience during the years preceding and following the edict’s revocation.

This series is a chilling story about a treacherous and hazardous period of history. Thousands of French Protestants did not survive the harsh turnabout that took place in 1685. Thousands more converted to Roman Catholicism to save their lives and those of their families.

As I read these books, I was constantly imagining the experience and journey of my ancestor. Did that family, like the heroine, have a long trek on foot through France to reach the refuge offered by Switzerland? Did they, like her, travel with a small band of refugees, walking by night, hiding by day? Since I do not know when my ancestor’s mother fled with her three sons or how old they were then, I wonder how much her experience paralleled the travails so vividly brought forth in Monk’s work.

My husband’s ancestor likely travelled a different route; much of Normandy is not far from England. Perhaps he, along with other refugees, was able to cross the channel furtively and proceed with less threat from there. It is not clear from existing records whether his first wife had died in France, or whether he left her behind. Records do show that three children of that union reached adulthood in France. Perhaps, as with some of the families in Monk’s story, his wife was unwilling to make the sacrifice and chose instead to remain in France with her children and convert.

Can the fictional family in Monk’s series possibly have a happy ending? Odds are definitely against them; but so were the odds against safe and successful flight from persecution in France for my ancestor and my husband’s. Were this not true for thousands more, the early colonies and our infant nation would not have benefitted so greatly from the significant contributions of Huguenot immigrants.

In short, I found this trilogy of books to be well-told, gripping, and realistic. I highly recommend it, especially to anyone with Huguenot ancestry. More generally, it offers a vivid picture of prejudice, hatred, and power in a tumultuous period of history that many Americans know little about.

Five Stars.

Buy Link:

https://www.amazon.com/Huguenot-Chronicles-Merchants-historical-fiction-ebook/dp/B09J3RYL5G/

Read for Free on Kindle Unlimited

 

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

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.

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