Chamber Four

This book has been chosen as  a Great Read

Author: Anthony Pagden

2008, Random House

Filed under Nonfiction, Historical

So I’ll say right away that I really enjoyed Worlds at War (I’ve nominated it a Great Read). I don’t have much experience with history books, so writing this review was a tad tricky. It would take 3000 words to summarize this book even cursorily, so I can’t do that.  Therefore, this review is pretty short, but please don’t mistake my brevity for disregard. …
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Author: Peter Ackroyd

2009, Nan A. Talese

Filed under Sci-fi, Historical, Horror

I bought this book on a dorky impulse (it’s the sort of thing that occurs often), mostly because Frankenstein is one of my favorite novels, and because I had recently read John Kessel’s awesome short story, “Pride and Prometheus.” Peter Ackroyd does Shelley’s book justice, deftly weaving historical fiction into the classic’s universe. The book offers a retelling of the famous monster story. In this version, Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory is in a London warehouse (he’s from Switzerland), and he is best friends with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who of course was Mary Shelley’s husband. The mixing in of the biographical fiction is a welcome change for the familiar plot, and Ackroyd’s experience with historical fiction lends a feeling of freshness. …
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Author: M.T. Anderson

2006, Candlewick Press

Filed under Young Adult, Literary, Historical

Right off the bat: this is a YA book with an agenda. If the jacket copy is to be believed (and in this case, as is general, it isn’t really) a shocking twist occurs early on. This happens about 50 pages into the 350 page book, and in order to get through this review, I’m going to have to spoil that one. So if you require twists in your books, perhaps you should skip this review.  I won’t spoil the plot point that catalyzes it however. …
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Author: Iniko

2009, iUniverse, Inc.

Filed under: Historical, Horror, Young Adult

This book is a hard one to categorize, as it’s not really horror until the very end, and it’s less young adult than it is sophomoric. What it is is a somewhat valiant attempt at a novel by a clearly untrained author. A small-run indie book riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, Dark Innocence struggles to pace itself or properly establish narrative tension. It does however, have a fair amount of heart, and I must admit I found myself engaged and compelled to finish it as I was reading. …
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Author: Scott Westerfeld

2009, Simon Pulse

Filed under Young Adult, Sci-Fi, Historical

I don’t really read all that much sci-fi, and even less so niche stuff like steampunk, but if I had to pick a go-to subgenre, steampunk would be my choice. I like the alternate history, low-tech tech, Victorian atmosphere, and funky gadgets. When I learned about Westerfeld’s alternate history of the First World War, battled between an axis of machinists (“Clankers”) and an alliance of nations who rely on biological machines of war (“Darwinists”), I was intrigued. I don’t usually give much credence to book trailers–they are usually rather dumb and tend to commodify books a little more than is to my taste–but the one for Leviathan tickled my fancy. (I’ve embedded it below if you care to watch.) …
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This book has been chosen as a Great Read

Author: Markus Zusak

2006, Knopf

Best ebook deal: Random House

Filed under Young Adult, Literary, Historical

What will instantly grab you about this novel is the identity of the narrator. The story is told by Death. At first this concerned me; I was afraid I was stepping intto a sci-fi-ish story about a child in a terrible war, a la “Pan’s Labyrinth”. However, the book doesn’t go there. The supernatural never enters the story (besides the existence of a sentient Death). Moreover, Zusak’s Death will quickly win you over. He’s one of the strongest narrators I’ve read in a very long while.

The Book Thief is about a young German girl named Liesel living with loving adoptive parents during the second world war. At its heart, this is a coming of age novel and a love story, though it would be doing the novel a disservice to label it solely as either. …
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Author: Ivo Andrić

University of Chicago Press, 1945

Best ebook deal: Not Available

As much as I enjoyed this novel, I want to mention that it took me quite a while to get through. In fact my review was originally scheduled to post back in May. It’s not that the book was laborious or boring, quite to the contrary. The Bridge on the Drina is one of those books that has a very steadfast feeling, and therefore, rather than feeling eager to get back to it, I was content to put it aside for a few days at a time, and visit it when the mood struck me. This is much the same way I approach reading poetry, as if it were a garden I really enjoyed strolling in, but only until my feet get sore.

That said, this is an excellent and engrossing book. Andrić won the 1961 Nobel Prize for it. In some ways (probably those that encouraged me to read it in parceled segments as I did), it is a conventional and comfortable book. It was easy to dip in and out of because the narration is very straightforward and the plot is episodic in nature, with bite-size chapters linked more thematically than anything else. In fact many of the characters and events are not even taken into account by the participants of later chapters. Unfortunately I cannot speak to the historical accuracy of Drina, but judging from the Wikipedia entry, Andrić seems to have kept pretty true to fact (at least at the major points) in his fictional rendering. …
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Author: Barry Unsworth

Nan A. Talese, 2009

Best ebook deal: Public library

When I first read the summary that claimed that  Land of Marvels was “Historical fiction at its finest,” I was hoping for another story like Ron Rash’s Serena—which I really liked—that is to say, another vicious depiction of violent hardscrabble survival in an age whose relative recency (within the century) cannot mask its brutal primitivity.

I was disappointed. Land of Marvels is instead a tale more of premise than plot, frequently described in abstractions (it’s about “power” and “ambition”) because nothing much specific ever quite happens. …
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Authors: Robert Boswell and David Schweidel

Cinco Puntos Press, 2008

Best ebook deal: Unavailable

We all know the traditional arc of a story: beginning, middle, end; goal, obstacles in pursuit of goal, attainment of goal; boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back.

Same goes for any good treasure story. Boy discovers treasure map, boy seeks treasure, boy finds treasure.

The problem that Robert Boswell and David Schweidel had to wrestle with during the fourteen years it took to write What Men Call Treasure was this: how do you successfully tell a true story about buried treasure that doesn’t end with boy finding treasure? …
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Author: Ron Rash

Ecco, 2008

Best ebook deal: Public library

From the title of this novel, I did not expect a brutal story about the often gut-wrenching goings-on at a Depression-era logging camp in North Carolina. Once I got a sense of the premise, I did not expect to love reading it. Serena is not the kind of novel I usually love: it doesn’t have much humor, and it’s not particularly bent on entertaining its reader, although it is quite well written. What it does have is gripping, page-turning, keep-you-up-late drama.

I struggled with whether or not to make this book a Great Read. Ultimately, it’s a little too predictable, and the plot sticks a little too closely to the formulas it establishes early on. However, Serena is very hard to put down. You could finish it in a day if you set your mind to it; if not, it’ll be hard to stretch it past a week.

With summer just around the corner, consider Serena a phenomenal beach book for a literary-minded reader (with a significant tolerance for violence). …
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