Maybe I’m beating a dead horse here. Maybe everybody who reads historical fiction, besides me, is still obsessed with World War II and has no interest in reading about anything else. Certainly the big publishers act as if this is the case: easily half of the historical fiction coming out the first two weeks of August turns on World War II. If you’re one of those WWII historical fiction fans, congratulations! You’ll have plenty of reading matter this month and in the foreseeable future.
If, however, you’re interested in trying to broaden your knowledge of the rest of the world’s history aside from the six years of World War II, you aren’t totally without resources. We’re going to be getting a few new historical novels that involve other periods of world history, and you should keep your eyes out for them.
You can hardly get farther from World War II than the ancient world portrayed in the Bible, so let’s start with Jezebel, by Megan Barnard. Yes, it’s about the infamous Jezebel whose name became a byword as a slut, harlot, witch and general enemy to Yahweh and Israel. However, one of the other trends in historical fiction, especially historical fiction about the ancient world and about mythology, is female authors taking another look at female characters traditionally portrayed as monsters, and that’s where this book fits in. Jezebel, in this telling, is a fierce princess of Tyre (a powerful city on the Mediterranean) who is married off, more or less against her will, to Prince Ahab of Israel. Ambitious (always a dangerous trait for a woman), Jezebel works to gain power and make her new country as prosperous as Tyre, which includes building temples to the gods she worshiped in Tyre. And it works, for a while: the country does well and she’s beloved. But then her ex, who just happens to be Elijah, one of Yahweh’s prophets, turns against her and begins preaching about how horrible she is, and people start to believe him, and that’s how we get to the monster depicted in the Bible. I’m a fan, generally, of these rethinkings of old stories, especially the ones that portray their female characters as flat stereotypes of evil, so Jezebel should be an eye-opening read.
Or, if you’d like something a little more recent than Biblical times, but not quite as recent as World War II, how about Renaissance Florence? In Three Fires, Denise Mina (usually known as a thriller writer) looks at the life of the infamous Girolamo Savanarola, a monk whose hellfire and damnation sermons led him to the “bonfire of the vanities” (the original, not the one publicized by Tom Wolfe in his book of the same name), in which he and his followers burned not just books but clothes, playing cards, musical instruments, mirrors and anything else he considered “vanity.” Savanarola took aim at the ruling Medici family and managed to topple them from control of the city, leaving him, puritanical and fanatical, in charge. Then, of course, he took on the pope and ended up being excommunicated and then executed. Leave it to Denise Mina to take on a story that full of action and emotion and make it relevant to the modern world of “culture wars” and book bannings.
I personally love books that illuminate a period and aspect of history with which I was previously unfamiliar, and when the author is someone as experienced as Jennifer Chiavarini, you can bet the book will be engrossing and revealing. Her latest, Canary Girls, takes place during World War I, and highlights the lives of women who went to work in munitions factories in Great Britain while the men were at war. And you thought Rosie the Riveter and her kind were only around in World War II! The women who went to work in the munitions factories, handling TNT and other chemicals with little or not protective equipment, joined the work for various reasons of their own, and when they started to show signs of serious, unexplained diseases, including their skins turning yellow (hence “canary girls”), the wife of one of the bosses started to suspect a connection between the dangerous work and their health problems, and began advocating on their behalf. Doesn’t that sound intriguing? Don’t you want to find out more about these extraordinary women? Check it out.
California Golden, by Melanie Benjamin, starts in the 1960’s and stars a woman who dared to become a great female surfer in the male-dominated sport, and her two daughters who had to deal with the effects of their mother’s career and fame. One daughter, Mindy, is a naturally gifted surfer herself, and becomes a celebrity with all the perq’s of a high flying woman in the late 1960’s. Her sister, Ginger, feels out of place in the water and spends her life trying to find a place where she does fit in, even if that brings her to the world of drugs and cults. Different as their lives are as they grow up, the two women are connected through the damage they suffered in their unorthodox childhoods.
James McBride’s new book, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, starts unconventionally, with the discovery of a skeleton in a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, during the excavation of a foundation for a new development. Who the skeleton was and how the skeleton got there is the thread that travels through the story, which is a portrait of the residents of the impoverished community of Chicken Hill, where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared their ambitions and their sorrows, their lives tangled together. The author of Deacon King Kong and The Good Lord Bird displays all his love and hope for humanity, and his superb storytelling skills in this new book.
So take a look at the broader field of historical fiction, coming soon to The Field Library.
Bookskill 