So Many Books, So Little Time

  I'm so excited to welcome Kim Rendfeld, author of "The Ashes of Heaven's Pillar" to the blog today. Charlemagne: Hero or Villain? Did Charlemagne unite his country when he seized his dead brother’s kingdom from his toddling nephews? Did he save Rome from the invading Lombards? Did he destroy the Irminsul, a pillar sacred to the Continental Saxon peoples? Did he have his daughters educated along with sons? Did he cut his eldest son from the succession? All of the above. Whether those actions make him a hero or a monster depends on whose side you’re on. Or in in the case of a historical novelist, which character’s point of view. Alda, a Frankish aristocrat and heroine of my debut, The Cross and the Dragon, sees him as a hero. She follows the gossip about tensions between Charles and his younger brother, Carloman, each of whom inherited a kingdom when their father died. After Carloman’s death from an illness, she is relieved a strong leader take...

I am so excited to welcome Julie K. Rose, author of Oleanna, to the blog today! I'm always fascinated by the little details that make a time and a place come alive, the traditions that express a sense of culture and history. One fantastic way to connect with history is through clothing, and in Norway, the most important expression of culture through dress is bunad . Bunad are special occasion wear based on the folk clothes of centuries past. Norwegians like Oleanna at the turn of century, and Norwegians today, wear bunad for weddings, important events, holidays, and Constitution Day (May 17) to show pride in their country and respect for their history. Below are two fabulous images of the bunad worn at Jølster in Sunnfjord (western fjord Norway), where Oleanna and her family lived. This is the kind of bunad Oleanna and Elisabeth would have worn, inspired most likely by the clothing they'd seen their grandmothers wear. Image courtesy of...

From Goodreads:  For two hundred years, the Terror has haunted the imagination of the West. The descent of the French Revolution from rapturous liberation into an orgy of apparently pointless bloodletting has been the focus of countless reflections on the often malignant nature of humanity and the folly of revolution. David Andress, a leading historian of the French Revolution, presents a radically different account of the Terror. In a remarkably vivid and page-turning work of history, he transports the reader from the pitched battles on the streets of Paris to the royal family's escape through secret passageways in the Tuileries palace, and across the landscape of the tragic last years of the Revolution. The violence, he shows, was a result of dogmatic and fundamentalist thinking: dreadful decisions were made by groups of people who believed they were still fighting for freedom but whose survival was threatened by famine, external war, and counter-revolutionaries within the fled...

From Goodreads:  In the second novel from Ella March Chase, we meet sixteen-year-old Jane Grey, a quiet and obedient young lady destined to become the shortest reigning English monarch. Her beautiful middle sister Katherine Grey charms all the right people--until loyalties shift. And finally Lady Mary Grey, a dwarf with a twisted spine whose goal is simply to protect people she loves--but at a terrible cost. In an age in which begetting sons was all that mattered and queens rose and fell on the sex of their child, these three girls with royal Tudor blood lived under the dangerous whims of parents with a passion for gambling. The stakes they would wager: their daughters' lives against rampant ambition. My Thoughts: If you are looking for a book about Lady Jane Grey's life, this may not be the one for you.  Jane is featured in the story but is dead before the story is half over.  I honestly expected there to be more about her and her interaction with her sisters...