Territory, by Emma Bull

I visited Tombstone, Arizona on my last trip out west, and I will never forget the sun-baked desolation of Boot Hill, with its rows of lonesome graves, or the zombie barkeepers in the saloon, or the giant spiders. OK, so the town was decorated for Halloween, which not only made our visit extra-surreal, but may [...]

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Stalking Ivory, by Suzanne Arruda

To finish out the week, we’ll look at one more historical mystery series that should be better known among readers. Suzanne Arruda’s Jade del Cameron is an excellent addition to the ranks of tough and resourceful, but elegant, female detectives. Del Cameron served in the Ambulance Corps during the First World War, and she learned [...]

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Grave Goods, by Ariana Franklin

Many readers of series fiction hope that over the course of the stories the characters will grow and that the author will continue to explore new facets of his or her characters’ lives. This deepening of character is a major appeal for series fiction of all sorts. This week, BFGB will look at some of [...]

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Fade, by Robert Cormier

Here’s the plot hook: at the age of thirteen, Paul Moreaux discovers that he can turn invisible.
Here’s what would have happened in the hands of lesser writers: the invisible Paul would have stolen lots of stuff and watched girls undress and pulled harmless pranks.
Here’s what happened in the hands of Robert Cormier: the invisible Paul [...]

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City of Thieves, by David Benioff

As City of Thieves opens, an American screenwriter is paid to write an autobiographical essay. He can’t find anything of interest in his immediate background, but he has always suspected that his Floridian grandparents have more to tell about their experiences in Leningrad during WWII. When he asks them, they’re finally ready to tell. So [...]

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A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute

Australia has come up several times in recent reviews here on Blogging for a Good Book and it’s got me thinking about the land Down Under in fiction and on film.
I loved Tim Winton’s Breath, a coming-of-age story about Australian surf culture in the 1970s. Peter Carey is another great Aussie novelist: try The True [...]

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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to  about this delightful book told me that initially they had difficulty getting into the story; there’s a lot of flipping pages and looking at names to get straight who’s sending letters to whom. But after you get the main characters down, the story flows easily and it becomes quite [...]

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The Royal Physician’s Visit, by Per Olov Enquist

Fiction at its best can immerse the reader in another person’s experience, so that even unsympathetic characters become somewhat understandable.  Historical fiction faces the test of maintaining verisimilitude so the reader stays in the setting.  But when historical fiction keeps that sense of reality while finding the universal in real people from a very different [...]

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In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez

In a society that quadrennially pats itself on the back for a “peaceful transition of power”, it is difficult to imagine growing up in a dictatorship.  We have no experience of one person, publicly or behind the scenes, controlling every aspect of life.  Our cults of personality are iffy at best, and our multicultural society [...]

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Killing Rommel, by Stephen Pressfield

Stephen Pressfield is known for his detailed and thoughtful accounts of historical and imagined wars – his Gates of Fire took the romantic gloss off the Spartans’ battle at Thermopylae and showed the hardness of the society that could produce such feared and honored warriors.  Until his most recent book, he specialized in ancient military [...]

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