Fresh FIction Box Not To Miss
Julia Justiss | A RANGE OF LIVES
Author Spotlight / November 16, 2022

This month’s novels demonstrate that it isn’t one’s place in life, but one’s story, that fascinates. From the rich and privileged to maids who serve royalty, from genius to everyday workers, the complex tapestry of their lives draws the reader in, eager to know how each story ends. We begin with the privileged in THE LAST DANCE OF THE DEBUTANTE by Julia Kelly. When it’s announced that 1958 will be the last year high-society debutantes will be presented to the Queen, the events of the Season, during which families will vie to obtain one of those coveted invitations, become even more frenetic.  Kelly wonderfully captures the feel of the era—when the correct designer gown, the best perfume, the perfect accessories, and the right man on your arm meant everything for a girl’s future.  Into this mix, are Leana Hartford, an entitled aristocrat prepared to do anything to be named “Deb of the Year,” ambitious, nouveau-riche Katherine Norman, who dreams of a career, and Lily Nicholls, forced to put on hold the university education she craves and submit to the Season her purse string-controlling grandmother demands. Forming a group called “the Imperfects,” Lily and her friends are pitched into the rounds…

Julia Justiss | LESSER-KNOWN LADIES
Author Spotlight / October 19, 2022

October, the time of witches, spooks, and people dressed up as something/one else provides a great backdrop to this month’s selections of books about ladies who existed in the shadow of more famous husbands or siblings.  Overlooked?  Underappreciated?  Have a read and decide! We begin with LANDSCAPE OF A MARRIAGE by Gail Ward Olmsted.  When Mary Olmsted’s husband dies, leaving her a young widow with three children, she agrees to a marriage of convenience with her late husband’s brother he had urged her to consider before his death. But Mary wants more than security: she wants to win her new husband’s love and share in his work.  Frederick Law Olmsted dreams of creating a green space in the center of every city.  Beginning with Central Park in New York City, Frederick spends the next forty years designing parks for cities, private estates, and the nation, a loving Mary at his side.  Though remaining in a traditional wife’s role, Mary’s organizational skills and business acumen provide essential, if unsung, support for his career.  Their personal journey, highlighted by the momentous events that shaped the nineteenth century, illumines her husband’s dream of a country filled with public landscapes that embrace a “beating…

Julia Justiss | FRANCE – DRAMA AND INTRIGUE
Author Spotlight / July 20, 2022

“French” is often synonymous with romance, passion, drama and intrigue—concepts borne out well in this month’s selections!  In honor of Bastille Day, we present stories that look at four very unique situations and personalities. Moving chronologically, we begin with JOAN: A NOVEL OF JOAN OF ARC.  Author Katherine J. Chen produced a revisionist look at this classic French heroine.  Chen’s Joan is a larger-than-average girl, strong and strong-willed enough to defy her tyrannical father.  And rather than a soul guided by her voices, Chen’s Joan is a secular figure who depends on her strength and fighting ability, not her faith, to protect and guide her.  This recreated Joan is set into the meticulously researched details known about her life, beginning with her teen years through her travels to the court, her support of the Dauphin, and her life as a warrior, ending before the events that lead to her death.  Was she merely an accomplished warrior?  Or a leader instructed by God to save the French nation?  Chen’s unique perspective may have you questioning all you thought you knew about the mythic Joan. We jump ahead several centuries to the court of Louis XIV with THE MENAGERIE: PASSION, POISON AND…

Julia Justiss | PERILS OF AN ENGLISH ROSE
Author Spotlight / June 15, 2022

Many romances feature dukes, princes, and other highly placed aristocrats, spotlighting the luxury, excess and intrigue of life at court.  But for the Grey family in Tudor times, being high-born and close to the throne became a deadly peril.  This month’s selections feature stories of the Nine Days Queen Lady Jane Grey, her sisters, and her mother. We begin with HER HIGHNESS, THE TRAITOR, a story that despite the title focuses on the Nine Days Queen from the perspective of her mother, Frances Brandon Grey, (Countess of Suffolk, daughter of King Henry VIII’s sister,) and her mother-in-law, Jane Guildford Dudley, (wife of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, mother of Guildford Dudley, who marries the doomed queen, mother also to Robert Dudley, Queen Elizabeth’s great love, and Mary Dudley Seymour, one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting and good friend.)  The story is told in alternating diary entries by the two women, giving a sense of immediacy and realism to the story.  Rather than appearing as a shy, bookish puppet, the Lady Jane portrayed here is as difficult and militant about her Protestantism as Mary Tudor is about her Catholic faith, believing that Mary’s adherence to the old religion makes her unfit to be…

Julia Justiss | Fresh Tales of Exceptional Women
Author Spotlight / April 20, 2022

As the world endures once again the recurrent tragedy of war, this month’s stories remind us of those exceptional individuals who still manage to display courage and compassion despite cruelty, horror, destruction and loss.   We begin with one of the most unusual of these women – Mila Pavlichenko, heroine of Kate Quinn’s THE DIAMOND EYE, which is based on a true story.  Quiet Kiev history student Mila is completely absorbed by her library job and caring for her young son when Hitler’s invasion of Russia upends her world.  Called up like many women to join in the defense of the Motherland, she becomes one of the deadliest snipers on the Eastern front, named “Lady Death” by her Nazi foes.  But after her three hundredth kill, a government needing a rallying point turns her into a national heroine and sends her on a goodwill tour to the U.S. She’s feeling alone and lost in Washington, DC, until an unexpected friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt and a link born of shared experience with a fellow sniper brightens her world.  But wounds, loss, and a determined enemy from her past will show her that though she may have left the battlefield, the struggle…

Julia Justiss | Famous And Fascinating – Real and Fictional Historical Figures
Author Guest / March 16, 2022

A trio of real-life personages followed by fictional characters who illumine a dramatic period of British history – the abdication of King Edward VI – make up this month’s selection of historical fiction.   We begin with THE GOLDEN PRINCE by Rebecca Dean. Seventeen-year-old Prince Edward is already chafing at the stifling role he’s being pressed into, feeling unloved by the disciplinarian father he can never please and his cool and unsympathetic mother.  When a car accident makes him an unexpected house guest at Snowberry Manor, he is brought into the “ordinary,” less complicated world of the Houghton sisters, granddaughters of Lord May of Snowberry.  Free for once to just be himself, he’s particularly drawn to Lilly, the talented and artistic youngest daughter, who is equally drawn to him.  Soon the two fall headlong into love.  Dean adds layers to her story by including the lives of Lilly’s sisters: Rose, the suffragette and journalist who wants to avoid romantic entanglements; Marigold, a “fast” girl interested in men, parties and high society, and Iris, who longs only for a home and family of her own with the man she loves.  But much as Lilly brings out the best in Edward, can…

Julia Justiss | A Valentine To Remarkable Women
Author Guest / February 16, 2022

How great a debt we owe to valiant women of the past, who strained against conventional rules to expand a woman’s ability to be independent and direct her own life! In honor of the recent trend to offer valentines to our BFFs, this month we look at stories about three real and one fictional woman who pushed the boundaries of their eras. We begin chronologically with MONTICELLO by Sally Cabot Gunning.  Gunning’s story focuses on the relationship between Jefferson and his eldest daughter, Martha. After her mother’s death, young Martha accompanied the father she idolizes on his diplomatic posting in France. Returning to Monticello at age seventeen, she is married a year later to Thomas Randolph, a charming but difficult man. Though both Martha and her father have anti-slavery leanings, Jefferson ultimately decides emancipation is not politically possible and Martha, charged with running both her husband’s properties and Monticello while her father pursues his political career, finds she cannot make a plantation function without slave labor. Even with her best efforts, the Jeffersons and Randolphs fall farther into debt.  Often working almost independently to manage family property while giving birth to eleven children, intelligent, competent Martha, like most women of…

Julia Justiss | History ReFreshed: New Year, New Worlds
Author Guest / January 19, 2022

Although the societal shifts that happened after World War I might have been more ground-breaking, by the 1940s, women were still mostly confined to traditional roles as wives and mothers or to a few “approved” careers, such as secretaries, sales clerks, or nurses.  The advent of World War II and the resulting manpower shortage once again opened opportunities—and challenges—for women to explore vastly different and sometimes dangerous occupations.  This month’s selection of stories transports the reader from England to Russia to the Hawaiian islands as intrepid ladies in difficult times take on exciting, essential, and unprecedented work. In roughly chronological order, we begin with THE ROSE CODE by Kate Quinn.  As German submarines ravage British shipping, Bletchley Park, a stately house in Buckinghamshire, is converted into the top-secret headquarters of a group of academics, scientists, mathematicians, and puzzle fanatics whose goal is breaking the German military communication code.  Included in this group are three very unlikely code-breakers: Canadian debutante Osla, beautiful, wealthy and one of Prince Phillip’s flirts; East-Ender Mab, who burns to utilize her wits and expertise to rise from poverty to make a genteel marriage, and shy spinster Beth, whose brilliance at solving puzzles soon turns her into…

Julia Justiss | History ReFreshed: Pomp and Pageantry
Author Guest / December 15, 2021

For most of us, one of the delights of the holiday season is the yearly celebration of traditions, both personal family ones, and ones like holly, Christmas trees, carols, and decking the house with greenery that have been passed down for generations.  Which makes the holiday season the perfect time to delve into that time of tradition and pageantry, the medieval past, where brave and determined women defied the norms of their times to exercise power and influence. Beginning with the earliest, we have THE IRISH PRINCESS by Elizabeth Chadwick. War is the norm of the day, both in England, where Henry II has prevailed in the civil war between his mother Empress Mathilde and her cousin, Stephen of Blois, and in Ireland, where Diarmit, King of Leinster, is forced into English exile after losing his battle against the Irish High King.  Seeking support to recover his lost lands, Diarmit appeals to Henry, who is still sorting out how to control and reward those who fought for and against him. With Henry’s permission, he recruits Richard de Clare—later known as Strongbow—the former Earl of Pembroke who was stripped of his title for supporting Stephen.  In return for his fighting prowess,…

Julia Justiss | History ReFreshed: History’s Twilight in Ancient Greece
Author Guest / November 17, 2021

As we approach the long grey months of winter, this month we’ll extract from the dim past some new and fascinating versions of Ancient Greece’s legends and myths from Ancient Greece, told from the perspective of little-known participants.  Were these slaves and queens real historical characters, or only the legends from a myth?  Regardless, their stories are compelling and offer a on the dynamic of male power that is still a force today. We begin in nearer times with a more classic love story, Taylor Caldwell’s GLORY AND LIGHTNING: A NOVEL OF ANCIENT GREECE.  Born in the Greek city of Miletus to a wealthy father who refused to raise any female children, the infant Aspasia was spirited away.  Growing up in the Persian harem of Al Taliph, she is trained to become the most seductive and intelligent of courtesans. It is there that she meets and captivates Pericles, ruler of Athens. She will become his lover, confidante, friend and advisor who sees him through the political upheavals of Athens, the Peloponnesian War, revolt, and natural disasters. Based on the life of a real but obscure woman, Taylor’s novel immerses us in the richness of ancient Greek and Persian culture, where…