https://blog.vollink.com/tags/book-review+historic-fiction/ Recent content in book-review+historic-fiction on On My Mind... Hugo -- gohugo.io Wed, 20 Feb 2019 12:00:00 -0500 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/02/catch-22/ Wed, 20 Feb 2019 12:00:00 -0500 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/02/catch-22/ Book Cover This is a different form than my normal reviews.  I usually don't go back to old books to add to my reviews, but this is a touch-stone.  It's a book that a LOT of folks have read, and I hope it might help someone who also read this book tune in on where I'm coming from.  I read this book several years ago, and though I flipped through it to refresh my mind for this entry, I didn't just read it again in full. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/01/hotel-on-the-corner-of-bitter-and-sweet/ Wed, 09 Jan 2019 12:00:00 -0500 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2019/01/hotel-on-the-corner-of-bitter-and-sweet/ Book cover Seems an appropriate way to start off the first book review of 2019 with a book that came out in 2009.  On top of that, it's a book that I really, really enjoyed reading. This book follows the protagonist, Henry Lee both as a 13 year old in 1943, and an adult in 1986.  If you have been reading my reviews for a while, you'll note that I get picky when time starts jumping around, and I'm really happy to say that this book gets this simple detail absolutely right: Every chapter title includes the year. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/12/there-there/ Wed, 12 Dec 2018 12:00:00 -0500 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/12/there-there/ Book cover I will start by noting that this book started slow for me.  It took me over two weeks to read the prologue up through the fourth chapter.  Once I passed that, I read the next 80% of the book in two days finishing on a third. Every character in this book is a Native American either from or converging on Oakland California.  There is a lot of exploration, especially among the young characters, of what it means to be Native in the city. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/09/insurrecto/ Wed, 05 Sep 2018 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/09/insurrecto/ Book cover Even though I'm reviewing an Advance copy, this story is surprisingly nonlinear, and I doubt that will change, though - really - it could.  The book starts, like a 1970s movie, listing the cast of characters in the approximate order in which the characters appear.  It's a story about two people, writing screenplays that are not exactly about the same thing, but are derived from a shared starting point and past. https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/07/the-remains-of-the-day/ Wed, 11 Jul 2018 12:00:00 -0400 https://blog.vollink.com/post/2018/07/the-remains-of-the-day/ Book cover (paperback) This is the 1989 book that later became a movie (which I never saw).  This won the Booker Prize.  We follow a quintessential British Butler named Stevens sometime after World War 2 on a journey to look up an ex-employee.  The journey itself is beautifully and descriptively written. While the main thread is the journey, the bulk of the story is Stevens' recollection of his past.