Peggy_Kurkowski

BookBrowse Reviewer

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BookBrowse Reviewer Peggy is a BookBrowse Reviewer and has written reviews featured in The BookBrowse Review.

Peggy is a professional copywriter for a higher education IT nonprofit association by day and major history nerd and book reviewer at night. In addition to BookBrowse, she writes for multiple book review publications, including Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Historical Novels Review, Shelf Awareness, Foreward, Independent Book Review, and theWashington Independent Review of Books . She hosts her own YouTube channel, The History Shelf, where she features and reviews history books (new and old), as well as a variety of fiction.

BookBrowse Editorial Reviews (41)

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Scale Boy: An African Childhood
by Patrice Nganang

(2/11/2026)

Of his experiences as a scale boy, Nganang writes with a novelist's perceptive eye for both the absurd and the awful... Nganang has an ear for the spoken word, and his many dialogue scenes are infused with tribal languages, such as Medumba... In addition to Medumba, German and French are used throughout the book, as well as arcane English words (e.g., "axanthic," "phagocytosis," and "allogenous"). Some readers may stumble over these linguistic complexities, but a slow, close reading pays dividen

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: A New Life
by Graham Watson

(8/13/2025)

Watson draws on a wealth of primary sources to describe Charlotte's life, including letters that Charlotte wrote to and received from friends and other women writers such as Harriet Martineau and Gaskell. Watson is an unobtrusive mediator, letting the voices of the women speak through voluminous letter excerpts, and his text paints a rich, brooding portrait of a woman desperately lonely without her siblings, always stranded "on the losing side of love."

BookBrowse Editorial Review

America, América: A New History of the New World
by Greg Grandin

(6/4/2025)

The scope of the book is breathtaking, but equally notable is the proficiency of Grandin's prose and the originality of his thought... What has often been taken for "anti-Americanism" in Latin America, Grandin argues, is more like "a competing version of Americanism"—and, furthermore, this rivalry has played a vital role in the creation of the modern world...

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Sequel: The Book Series #2
by Jean Hanff Korelitz

(11/6/2024)

In Anna, Korelitz has brilliantly created a sympathetic antihero. Her sleuthing into the identity of her nemesis and what they want from her takes from her from New York City to Vermont, where Jake taught, and finally to Georgia; throughout this journey, her intelligence, fiery determination, and savvy instincts are impressive and compelling. Her backstory, which is developed over the course of the novel in tight prose flashbacks and from excerpts of Evan's manuscript, propels the plot hand-in-h

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Kent State: An American Tragedy
by Brian VanDeMark

(9/18/2024)

VanDeMark sets out to tell the story of the Kent State shooting from multiple perspectives, "without taking sides," using previously untapped archival documents and interviews with those who were there. The result is a cogent, clear-eyed, and almost minute-to-minute account of the chaos that erupted when young people on both sides of an American cultural divide squared off on the quad of Kent State... May 4th, the "tragic day," is exhaustively covered with nerve-shredding tension as VanDeMark de

BookBrowse Editorial Review

A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune
by Noliwe Rooks

(8/21/2024)

In this slim volume, Rooks spotlights Bethune's lifelong commitment to Black higher education, which began when she created her own all-girls Black school in Daytona in 1904. She considers Bethune's emphasis on the twin pillars of "the ballot and the book" to achieve a more inclusive democracy but notes how her vision broadened over time to one "where Black women's issues and needs were not confined to specific regions or countries but had national and international resonance." And while Bethune

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Missing Thread: A Women's History of the Ancient World
by Daisy Dunn

(7/31/2024)

The fabric of ancient history is stitched heavily with stories of dramatic politics, conquest, and war, all with men firmly at the center of action. But women played just as vital and central a role in antiquity's most consequential events, as classicist Daisy Dunn (The Shadow of Vesuvius) elegantly details in The Missing Thread. Dunn answers the many male-centric histories of antiquity with this shimmering volume that celebrates women as true "creators of history"

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Holy City
by Henry Wise

(7/17/2024)

What makes Holy City unique for its anodyne "mystery" appellation is its evocation of a Southern town gone to seed, mirroring declining industries, crime, and poverty. Wise's vision is a hopeful one, and themes of faith and forgiveness are redolent throughout, as Will continues to hope that the past does not have to control the future, especially in the heart of the ex-Confederacy. Using multiple POVs from a colorful assortment of characters, Wise captures a range of diverse insights that

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
by Erik Larson

(5/1/2024)

In the aftermath of the 1860 presidential election, the divided United States began to collapse as South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed by another six Southern states. Among the countless contentious points between the Union and the fledgling Confederacy was the existence of a 75-man Federal garrison in Charleston Harbor that would become the flashpoint for civil war. In The Demon of Unrest, Erik Larson weaves a gripping tale of America's slow-motion lurch toward war, pla

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Flight of the Wild Swan
by Melissa Pritchard

(4/17/2024)

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), known variously as the "Lady with the Lamp" or the "Ministering Angel" of the Crimean War (1853–1856), elevated the role of nursing into a profession—especially for women—in an era that had previously regarded female nurses with disdain. Relying on Nightingale's copious letters and journals and other documentary evidence, Melissa Pritchard's dazzling historical novel Flight of the Wild Swan brings this

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Beverly Hills Spy: The Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor
by Ronald Drabkin

(3/20/2024)

When it comes to espionage, not only is truth stranger than fiction, sometimes it can be downright unbelievable. Ronald Drabkin's exceptionally entertaining account of World War I hero Frederick Rutland, Beverly Hills Spy, is all the more jaw-dropping because it's entirely true. Beverly Hills Spy is a rollicking narrative of brazen spy craft, buttressed with new revelations and insights that will significantly add to studies of Pearl Harbor and WWII military intel

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Ascent
by Adam Plantinga

(2/21/2024)

The Ascent stands out not just for its ingenious plot—a winning page-turning equation by itself—but for Argento, a complicated man whose fearlessness is merely the mask for his deep, inconsolable pain. Amid chaos, memories of the woman he loved "so fiercely it scared him" come unbidden. Plantinga creates a love story in retrospect that resonates with the reader and makes Argento's glib quips an obvious band-aid for his numbed existence without her. For this epi

BookBrowse Editorial Review

What the Taliban Told Me
by Ian Fritz

(1/24/2024)

This is a rare inside look at what airborne linguists do, and Fritz excels at describing difficult and highly technical processes in a way most can understand. He is also bitingly funny while doing it. But underneath the pages of sarcastic, stream-of-consciousness riffing, there is a palpable sense of a man grappling with his role in raining death on the heads of human beings below him. The reader sees the progression from the gung-ho airman who believes in the Taliban as "evil" and th

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman

(11/1/2023)

Including such prescriptions as improved technical safety, audits, governmental regulations and international alliances, Suleyman is cautiously optimistic about the ability of the collective "we" of humanity to fundamentally change society. However, Suleyman's recurring mantra that containment might not look possible but must be inevitably leaves the reader feeling less than sanguine about sweeping change in a fragmented, fraught world. The Coming Wave is necessar

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life
by Anna Funder

(9/6/2023)

There is pain, sadness, and anger in Wifedom, an acute recognition of the ways "wifedom" can be a "wicked magic trick" that obscures and omits the sacrifices of women. In retrieving Eileen Blair "from behind the Cerberus," Funder puts her squarely back in frame as her own person and not just "Mrs. Orwell."

BookBrowse Editorial Review

How Can I Help You
by Laura Sims

(8/2/2023)

The characters' dueling monologues are brilliantly arch and bookish, perfect for the story's claustrophobic setting. Margo describes Patricia's searching looks as making her feel "as if she's turning me over in her hands, inspecting my spine and pages for wear, thumbing my table of contents." The thrust and parry of their mutual fascination explores the dirty underbelly of obsession, one that at its heart is selfish and self-centered: what can the other do for me? Patricia is a willing audience

BookBrowse Editorial Review

A Disappearance in Fiji
by Nilima Rao

(6/21/2023)

Rao develops the mystery of Kunti's disappearance slowly, building up tension through the racist scorn Singh endures from the plantation owners, Henry and Susan Parkins, as well as his own biases. Singh is a soft-spoken observer in the uncomfortable exchanges Rao so realistically depicts. As he moves between the worlds of the planter aristocracy with its overt racism and the quiet, bleak despair of the workers, Singh senses that Kunti's disappearance may portend a darker reality on the Parkins p

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Covenant of Water
by Abraham Verghese

(5/3/2023)

Winner: 2023 BookBrowse Fiction Award

Verghese sustains this massive story with numerous enigmatic and vividly drawn characters like Big Ammachi, Digby, a Swedish physician named Rune who runs a colony for lepers, Philipose and his love Elsie, who is born to be an artist of staggering genius if only the world will let her. However, running like a riptide beneath the waters of the Malabar Coast, the Condition strikes the family in new, unbidden and heartbreaking ways. It will reach

BookBrowse Editorial Review

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe
by Caroline Dodds Pennock

(3/1/2023)

The "savage shore" Pennock writes about is Europe, as experienced by various Indigenous travelers. This upends and reframes popular conceptions of the word "savage" and who or what the appellation is often applied to. Along with the travels of Indigenous people, Pennock also exhaustively details the "stuff of life" that traveled from the Americas back to Europe, influencing its culture and pastimes. The relative lack of first-person Indigenous accounts in the book — both current and histor

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family
by Kerri K. Greenidge

(1/18/2023)

Historian Kerri K. Greenidge uses meticulous research to reveal a complex picture of one famous American family and their often-fraught relationships with each other. The Grimkes is a magnificent work of scholarship but equally an indelible human portrait of a family shaped by the same racist, violent world they sought to reshape into something better.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent
by Dipo Faloyin

(10/19/2022)

Joys and revelations abound in Africa Is Not a Country, but perhaps the most satisfying aspect is Faloyin's ability to weave together Africa's painful past with its infinite promise for a brighter future — on its own terms. Highlighting the more positive developments, such as the "significant rise in the number of elected female legislators and women selected for high-ranking government positions" throughout Africa, Faloyin circles back around to the power of individual human beings

BookBrowse Editorial Review

All the Ruined Men: Stories
by Bill Glose

(8/24/2022)

In his closing quartet of stories, Glose lands body blows of brilliant prose that rend the heart. In "The Dead Aren't Allowed to Walk," a character experiences a downward spiral during an addled quest to avenge a friendly fire death. A sister's devastation is eloquently mapped as she observes the objects left behind by her brother in "Her Brother's Apartment." In the collection's longest story, "Penultimate Dad," Mueller reconnects with a daughter he does not recognize, discovering he still has

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Half Life of Valery K
by Natasha Pulley

(8/24/2022)

Caught between the requirements of the Communist state and his own conscience, Valery embarks on the most desperate gamble of his life. Can he and Shenkov escape City 40? At what cost? Together, they confront an imminent man-made disaster and inhuman scientific experiments while finding in each other those things they thought were lost — hope, love and redemption. The Half Life of Valery K is a vivid evocation of the Cold War era with a plausible premise, beautifully rendered charac

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Recruit: A Novel
by Alan Drew

(7/13/2022)

Setting The Recruit 25 years ago lends an eerie sense of prophecy to the story, as the brutish faces of white supremacist movements are an all-too-familiar feature of today's current events. The Recruit is a nail-biter in the classic sense of the thriller, offering taut prose, compelling and diverse characters, and pitch-perfect pacing that delivers an explosive ending reminiscent of real-life events. Despite the unpleasant subject matter, Drew underscores the fact that good people

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Elektra: A Novel
by Jennifer Saint

(6/8/2022)

For the Greek myth and tragedy novice, the ancient stories often present a Gordian knot of deep backstory — who did what to whom and when — requiring skillful fingers to unravel the gnarled threads. Saint is a master at this. She explores the cosmic themes of betrayal and retribution from the female eye with musical prose that cuts with sharp emotional insights. Elektra is a near non-stop reading experience with expert pacing and riveting first-person narratives from the three

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation
by Scott Carney

(4/20/2022)

Scott Carney and Jason Miklian achieve a miracle of sorts in weaving three overarching stories into a convincing, satisfying whole, while expertly ratcheting up tension in scenes reminiscent of thriller novels. Mining more than 750 official documents and sources, as well as conducting more than 200 interviews, the authors reveal the appalling lengths Nixon, Kissinger and Khan went to ensure the "CHINESE CONNECTION" (as Khan named his negotiations with Mao) happened. The Vortex grips the r

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Black Cloud Rising
by David Wright Faladé

(2/16/2022)

Wright Faladé superbly crafts an authentic portrayal of the African Brigade and its harrowing experiences in 1863. Black Cloud Rising succeeds on every level as both history and historical fiction: evocative scenes, nuanced characters and taut writing convey powerful lessons about slavery, emancipation and Black identity. One will be the richer after reading this true story of the formerly powerless wielding weapons "primed with the percussion cap of memory."

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill
by Geoffrey Wheatcroft

(1/19/2022)

As the word "shadow" in the title indicates, there is an ambivalence surrounding Churchill's impact, and it is this "history of opinions" that Wheatcroft elegantly assembles for the reader. With a wealth of resources and razor-sharp wit throughout, he delivers a far more flawed portrait of Churchill, but does so in a way that does not detract from the man's importance in the least. This volume offers a bracingly independent view that should resonate with fans and foes alike.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Amur River: Between Russia and China
by Colin Thubron

(11/3/2021)

The Amur River is a poignant contribution to Thubron's acclaimed career, with his trademark lyricism elevating nature to a central, breathing character that often reflects the ambivalence of its human counterparts. Two minor quibbles are the lack of historical citations and photographs; with as much history as Thubron packs in, a bibliography is essential, as are visual aids for a travel book. Despite this curious oversight, the book will please armchair travelers and longtime fans of Thu

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Lean Fall Stand: A Novel
by Jon Mcgregor

(10/6/2021)

Lean Fall Stand is a linguistically spare and experimental novel that intrepidly embodies the mind and senses of a man suffering a massive stroke and its aftereffects. McGregor reveals the thankless nature of a full-time caregiver's work, but Anna's actions are all the reader is shown. It is not clear if the unsympathetic and shallow portrayal of Anna is intentional, but the effect is the same. Otherwise, the novel is a groundbreaking journey into the ways words can bind up, break apart o

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Lightning Strike: Cork O'Connor Mystery Series #18
by William Kent Krueger

(10/6/2021)

Krueger delivers a masterful strike down the middle with the riddle of Big John's death; Lightning Strike will keep experienced mystery readers guessing until the very end about who was responsible and how it was engineered. For those new to the series, it's a prequel that also works as a powerful standalone novel, richly told and sensitive to the issues of race and class between "The First People" and their white neighbors.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler's War on Art
by Charlie English

(9/8/2021)

English deftly juxtaposes the intellectual and artistic ferment of 1920s Germany with the turgid drawings and morose outlook of a young, adrift Adolf Hitler, at odds with himself and the world after the country's defeat in World War I. He persuasively argues throughout that Hitler's "mass murder programs and his views on art were intimately connected." This little-known holocaust has been sensitively rendered by English in The Gallery of Miracles and Madness, which balances the Hitlerian

BookBrowse Editorial Review

African Europeans: An Untold History
by Olivette Otele

(7/14/2021)

The juxtaposition of the historic lives with the urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as Otele's call for greater Black female representation in academia, will spur many a reader to greater awareness of the past and what work still needs doing to achieve racial equality and justice. Overall, African Europeans is essential if sometimes challenging reading. While the text often seems targeted to a peer-reviewing audience, it is the people of Otele's book who steal the show.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Plot
by Jean Hanff Korelitz

(5/19/2021)

Jean Hanff Korelitz's inimitable and imaginative story-within-a-story sinks its claws in early and doesn't let go until its unforgettable finish. She explores the insular world of her own craft — writers and their ideas — via a chilling twist perhaps as clever as the one Evan Parker shares with Jacob Finch Bonner at an MFA program one fateful day. A truly unique plot in its own right, the novel is a joy in part for its insider look at the writer's solitary craft juxtaposed against the hype and m

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Blizzard Party
by Jack Livings

(4/7/2021)

The task Livings sets himself is a daunting one: how to weave all these uniquely striated lives and damaged psyches into a tapestry that forms a meaningful pattern. It is as if each character we meet in The Blizzard Party is a snowflake pulled from the blinding storm, set upon crushed black velvet and seen through a microscope, brilliantly and uniquely attenuated. How each of these snowflakes, so unique and ostensibly unconnected, swirl and crash into each other over the course of one wil

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Spymaster of Baghdad: A True Story of Bravery, Family, and Patriotism in the Battle against ISIS
by Margaret Coker

(3/3/2021)

In The Spymaster of Baghdad, Coker takes us behind Middle East headlines to get a glimpse of a story most often hidden or obscured in journalistic reporting: the service and sacrifice of hundreds of patriotic Iraqis seeking to defend their country. Through the moving accounts of Munaf, Harith and Abrar, Coker poignantly shows how those notions of patriotism took different forms with divergent ends in a country continually fighting for its existence.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War--A Tragedy in Three Acts
by Scott Anderson

(11/4/2020)

Anderson's overriding argument is that America tarnished its reputation as a defender of freedom in the 1950s. By supporting totalitarian movements and covertly undermining or overthrowing democratically elected foreign governments that might prove troublesome down the road, America abdicated its moral leadership. What makes his case most persuasive are the experiences of the four CIA spies who lived on the front lines and saw the results on the ground. The author draws from their written and ve

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Magdalena: River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia
by Wade Davis

(9/16/2020)

Davis's narrative has a rich rhythm that mirrors the country's energy and flows much like the river itself: brimming with twists and turns that linger on various towns along the way and the many people with stories to share about their Colombia. And what stories! Written like a lovestruck prayer, Magdalena: River of Dreams brings readers deep into the heart of Colombia for an unforgettable journey through its ecology, culture and often beguiling mystery. Far more than a travelogue, it is

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country
by Sierra Crane Murdoch

(4/8/2020)

One of the most riveting and touchingly human true crime stories in recent memory, Sierra Crane Murdoch's Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country, tells a deeply-researched and nuanced tale of two worlds colliding on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation during the early days of the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota. The pulsating heartbeat of this story is the larger than life character of Lissa Yellow Bird, depicted powerfully by Murdoch.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

The Sacrament: A Novel
by Olaf Olafsson

(1/22/2020)

Olafsson treats the uninitiated to rich depictions of endless horizons, mixed with bitter cold and blowing snowdrifts that swirl around one's vision until no light is seen...The Sacrament is a powerful exploration of faith and the crucial role that doubt plays in its inception and maintenance. With its reverent language of memory and regret, longing and loss, justice and vengeance, the book seeks to find its own answer to which is the greatest of these qualities: faith, hope and love.

BookBrowse Editorial Review

Edison
by Edmund Morris

(10/30/2019)

The story of Edison and his inventions is ably told by Mr. Morris in authoritative, commanding prose, but it also is at times technically challenging and gimmicky. What stands out immediately is the author's bold decision to write Edison's life backward. The book begins with the inventor on his deathbed, having already attained fame. Each chapter then jumps back a decade and centers on the scientific problem that preoccupied Edison's attention at the time. This structure is bizarre, disorienting

Reviews (9)

Ordinary Love: A Novel
by Marie Rutkoski

Brought Back Butterflies (5/5/2025)

Ordinary Love is a transcendent and butterfly-inducing love story. I could not put this one down, and I'm normally not attracted (pun intended) to domestic love stories. The themes of regret and repression are redolent, but yet there's this poignant whiff of hope that keeps the reader pushing on through the characters' questionable choices. Even though the love story is one between two women, it is ultimately a story about dealing with the consequences of our decisions. Powerful and potent, this tale will stay with you long after you put it down.

Strong Passions: A Scandalous Divorce in Old New York
by Barbara Weisberg

19th-Century Divorce Court! (1/2/2024)

Strong Passions is an unusual story, both in fact and in the telling. Divorce in mid-to-late nineteenth century was a rare thing, indeed, and Weisberg tells the story in a lively way that allows the reader into the courtroom. Along with fascinating insights into the arcane and biased divorce and child custody laws of the era, Weisberg has a probing nose for the salacious in this extremely juicy family story of love, adultery, paternity, and the helplessness of children when spouses go to war. A fun read that I highly recommend!

Devil Makes Three: A Novel
by Ben Fountain

Haitian History Made Human (10/6/2023)

Ben Fountain's terrific new novel, Devil Makes Three, takes the reader on an unforgettable journey into modern Haiti (with side excursions down the dark alleys of its politically corrupt history. Matt Amaker is copartner of a scuba diving business with his Haitian friend, Alix Variel, when the coup against democratically elected Aristide ends his dreams of a thriving future. Across town, Audrey O'Donnell is a rookie CIA officer intent on a clandestine mission. Paths cross and missions collide as a delightful cast of characters--American and Haitian--all seek to make it rich, find love, and even make a positive difference in the lives of Haiti's long-suffering people.

Fountain stirs up a flavorful étouffée of Haitian politics, history, geography, and language in this substantial novel (544 pages) that both enlightens and entertains. As Matt and Alix shift their focus to diving legendary shipwrecks to find treasure, Alix's sister Misha, finds herself moving away from her PhD plans in America to help at a local Haitian clinic. Fountain weaves in a solid love story, as well, that keeps the novel from being purely a political thriller.

It is also a very chatty novel, but at times the dialogue and descriptions tap the brakes on a complex story that needs movement to survive, much like a shark that needs to keep swimming. Despite moments of flowery exposition and nonessential chit-chat, Fountain puts flesh on the bones of his characters, all of whom have a deep regard for a country in upheaval. Full of underwater adventure and above-water drama, Fountain puts Haiti—in all its multicolored grandeur and pathos—center stage in this fascinating and rewarding long novel.

Clytemnestra: A Novel
by Costanza Casati

A Faithful, Forceful Vision of Clytemnestra's Vengeance (12/27/2022)

Having read another very good novel about Clytemnestra recently, I thought: how can this be any better? I was rightfully put in my place by Constanza Casati in her simply titled "Clytemnestra." Casati provides a much different picture than other recent novels have painted of this formidable Greek figure, a more expansive one that follows existing and alternate tellings of Clytemnestra's life. For one, Casati follows the path of Clytemnestra's first marriage to the mythical Tantalus and their doomed happiness at the hands of the cunning, cruel Agamemnon. Casati's prose is riveting and her characters leap and lunge off the page, much like the young female Spartiates who train daily to be warrior mothers. And that is all in the first two acts alone. This is a rich, indulgent, and shattering novel that is uniquely its own; indeed, Clytemnestra has never been more fierce or her vengeance more patient than in Casati's able hands.

Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China's Civil War
by Zhuqing Li

Two Sisters and the Forces of History (6/17/2022)

Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden is a moving tale of sisters torn apart by the forces of history and an engaging exploration of mainland China and Taiwan during a time of upheaval. Zhuqing Li ties in the history of her family's home in the exotic Flower Fragrant Garden with the ending of WWII and the rise of the Communist Party under Mao Zedong. The tragedy begins when the author's aunt Jun is stranded on the island of Jinmen while visiting a friend and Communist forces seize her hometown…where her beloved sister, Hong, resides. Thus begins a 33-year parallel history of sisters separated by historical forces beyond their control. Blending the personal with the political, Li is a sensitive chronicler as she invites the reader into the pathos of her family's intriguing story. It is ultimately a story of two ambitious, intelligent, and talented women who make the best of their lives. Highly recommend!

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History
by Lea Ypi

A Peek Behind Iron Curtains (12/25/2021)

I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir of Lea Ypi's life under socialism and communism in Albania. Her story is unusual in that, as a child, she was very much a believer in "the Party," and found her parents and extended relatives rather lukewarm about it. Halfway through, when the Party falls under protests and the push for a democratic government, Lea learns some shocking things (to her) about her family. This book is perfect for Cold War history buffs or those who are intrigued by all forms of socialism. It's a well-ordered and personal study into the mysteries families hold and how freedom can be as disorienting as it is liberating.

Ariadne
by Jennifer Saint

Meet the Women of the Myths (4/12/2021)

Jennifer Saint reimagines the myth of Ariadne and her sister Phaedra, daughters of King Minos of Crete and half-sisters to the dreaded Minotaur. It is a thrilling and yet tender tale of two sisters longing for the same thing: a life free of their tyrannical father and the ominous presence of the Minotaur, imprisoned in the stone labyrinth beneath the mosaic tiles of the palace. It is a story of love lost, won, and lost again—told by the sisters themselves. In this way, Saint gives readers a wonderfully feminist retelling of the ancient Greek myths. Highly recommend.

The Widow Queen: The Bold #1
by Elzbieta Cherezinska

More, please (12/25/2020)

For lovers of deep historical fiction with sweeping scope—and a healthy dose of strong, savvy women characters—Elzbieta Cherezinska's The Widow Queen delivers richly. While there are many names and places to keep track of in the book, the story of Swietoslawa is a wryly told saga that only promises more. This is the first book in the trilogy, and I am eagerly awaiting the next installment. Be prepared to be swept off your feet, sometimes forcefully (we are talking about Vikings after all), and absorb the rich history of Poland during the late 10th century. Love, betrayal, war, exile...this story will stay with you. I'm looking to read more about Poland's past as a result of this book. Do not let this one pass you by.

The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir
by Sara Seager

The Universe of Love (7/28/2020)

Contemporary memoirs are usually not my stock in trade, but I am so glad I stepped out of my comfort zone to read it. "The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir" by Sara Seager is a moving story of one very accomplished woman's journey through a devastating loss and how she picked up the myriad pieces of herself to continue the roller coaster ride of life. Seager, an accomplished planetary scientist, is also a very skilled storyteller who deftly moves from the personal story of her love and loss, and then back again to her increasingly successful career searching the heavens for other life and other planets. A deeply inspiring story, it is one that should appeal to many women juggling careers and families. It is also incredibly moving; I found myself wiping away tears at many points in her memoir. The book ultimately serves to remind us of the centrality of hope: the hope to recover from painful loss, to find new beginnings, and, for Seager, to find those smallest lights in the universe.