Book Reviews: Fiction

By Meghan Morrow

Typically, I am annoyingly selective when it comes to reading sci-fi/fantasy novels. There are so many cookie-cutter stories out in the world that I have grown to dread seeing the cover of a new fantasy. When I picked up J.E. Browning’s novel, Tales of Roumanhi-Homequest: Liberation, fearing that it was just another attempt at science fiction, I can’t say that I was instantly intrigued, but upon delving further into the novel, I was sorely mistaken. Right from the beginning, Browning introduces her readers to a different world, complete with a mystical terrain and a new language. I have to say that the geek in me did a little flip at the thought of an entirely make-believe language.

Homequest: Liberation opens with a young environmental technician, T’skya, and her crash landing into a strange desert on her way to finding a new home for her people. After mysteriously transporting to the edge of the Roumanhi forest, she is captured by Cail and Hollum then accused of being a member of their enemy clan, the Kházakha. Both technologically superior and devoid of morality, the Kházakha corrupted the land of Roumanhi and continue to tyrannize the inhabitants. T’skya manages to convince the Roumanhis that she means them no harm and works with them. In between her new daily life and worrying about her people, T’skya becomes quickly attached to the Roumanhi clan, even allowing for a romance to kindle.

Days pass and cause T’skya to become more anxious about her ship until she finally warns the Roumanhis that her abandoned ship will alert the Kházakha of her presence so it must be located. The supplies T’skya finds after returning from a less-than-perfect search expedition allows her and the Roumanhis to hatch a plan that will sabotage the Kházakha. The mission goes awry and they lose Cail to the enemy, so T’skya and the rest of the Roumanhis must find a way to bring him back to safety—if he hasn’t already been lost.

In a world of fantasy, Browning has done a wonderful job not to stray into the unbelievable. From start to finish, Homequest: Liberation captured me. Every character had soul that leaped from the page and I found myself emotionally invested in every one of them. The land of Roumanhi is filled with, not only beauty, but dangers as well, and the trek along the terrain had me anxious and excited. Liberation is a maze of stories that take the reader off in several directions, but Browning was able to lead us easily through the labyrinth.

By Carlotta G. Holton

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Robert Hicks’ earlier novel, The Widow of the South, I opened the sequel A Separate Country with great expectations. Set in post-Civil War New Orleans, A Separate Country is a close look at the travesties of war as reflected in the individual, families, and the healing nation as a whole. Hicks’ second novel begins as a promising sequel to his first rich historical drama, following the life and perils of Confederate General John Bell Hood. I was disappointed with this continuing journey.

The novel is structured as a story within a story, and at the core is the atonement of Hood’s sins on the battlefield. The tale of redemption begins on Hood’s deathbed as he summons Eli Griffen, an old war adversary, and charges him with the mission of finding a former comrade, Sebastien Lemerle. Hood hopes this man will see it fit to forgive him and consent to having Hood’s memoirs published.

In flashbacks seen through the eyes of three narrators – Hood, his wife Anna Marie, and Griffen – the readers confront the general as a broken man, both physically and spiritually. He has an artificial leg, a bum arm, and no money, and is earnestly seeking reparation for his war-time mistakes. He and his wife, Anna Marie, who was a society Creole, live in diminished circumstances with their eleven children. His once passionate relationship with his wife becomes strained as he incurs business failures and debt.

This journey of guilt, regret, and salvation begins in Hood’s voice. I found his descriptions long and boring as he tries to redeem his tarnished military reputation, including a bloody battle against the Comanche at Devil’s River. While A Separate Country is peopled with colorful and memorable secondary characters, including Rintra, a dwarf; the burly Father Mike; and Griffen, I was left wanting more from the character of Hood. In particular, I was disturbed by his lack of demonstrative love toward his wife and children.

Though the main character is lacking, Hick’s tapestry of the South rings true. As his characters struggle through the pains of Reconstruction, he evokes the sense of bitterness and disillusion that pervaded the South. He notes, “Southern whites rejected all forms of equality, and blacks wanted nothing but full freedom and land of their own.”

It was a time of confusion and disorder peppered with the infusion of opportunistic carpetbaggers coming from the north, and the white Republican southerners, or scalawags, who sympathized with the Reconstruction effort. The ruined economic South provided a ripe climate for political upheaval. While Hood’s memoirs read dry and wordy, Anna Marie’s diaries are filled with the joys and struggles of her life which begins in the high society of a Southern belle and follows her descent into poverty and societal exclusion. While Hood struggles with good and evil, his wife wrestles with the issue of class. Prior to the Civil War, she was a white Creole-upper class woman who spoke French, attended lavish parties and had servants. She befriended a quadroon, Paschal, who was a piano teacher to her cousin. Though part black, he was light-skinned. After the war, when she encourages him to attend a ball, she places him in danger as he is confronted by a man whose wife Paschal has coveted. Shocked at the violent result, she still does nothing to stop the crime. One has to ask why she did not help him. Is she really a racist at heart?

Hood’s penance over his egregious acts of war and Anna Marie’s guilt about her failure to save Paschal trigger a new-found devotion in them to use their money and time to help poor blacks escape yellow fever. During the sweltering summer, the rich flee the city while the poor remain behind, weak and susceptible to the “yellow jack.” Aside from the verbosity of Hood’s story, there is an understated notion that Hood can only attain happiness by being dirt poor. Toward the end of her life, Anna muses, “I could be happy because I did not miss who I had been. I did not miss the balls and the dresses and the amusements, but most of all I did not miss the girl … She was a traitor to her class, to her people.”

Perhaps the truest character is Griffen, who travels to New Orleans with the intention of killing the man who murdered his family. He perceives Hood as a murderer: “Hood had fixed it so I would never quit seeing the dead and not just the frozen on that battlefield, piled atop each other, but also the face of my sister dead in her bed.” Yet he is unable to kill Hood. His narrative reads easily and is void of the guilt and egoism of Hood’s memoirs and Anna Marie’s sentimentality.

War affects every man. And while the Hood family’s quest for forgiveness remains questionable, Griffen achieves what they failed to do. He says, “what I lost was any expectation of good and right, any faith that I could know these things anymore.” Despite the horrors he has lived through, he defends both of the Hoods’ written words and seeks the truth.

With such rich material from which to draw, Hicks could have been braver and cut more of the story. In this case, less would have definitely been more. For readers of historical fiction I would refer them to his other great work, Widow of the South.

Carlotta Holton is the author of Salem Pact, Touching The Dead and Vampire Resurrection, and is a member of the National Federation of Press Women and an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association.

By Elizabeth Milo

Normally I find memoirs and war stories too contrite or detail-oriented to enjoy, never containing enough of a plot to keep me engrossed. Thus, when Penelope Lively’s novel Moon Tiger was recommended to me, I was skeptical about how much I would enjoy it. Not only were my assumptions proven wrong, but I was also thrilled to find a hidden maze of truly interesting philosophical questions buried within the text. Moon Tiger is the memoir of a dying woman who views the world with a self-conscious awareness of her own narcissism. Claudia, Moon Tiger’s protagonist, recognizes her inability to look at the world without the taint of her own experience. When she imagines history in relation to her own life, she remarks, “Egocentric Claudia is once again subordinating history to her own puny existence.” Claudia’s story-telling method combines facts from history into a jumble of knowledge that all revolves around her own experiences and life.

Peripheral to Claudia’s story are the lives of people who have been significant to her in some way: her daughter, her daughter’s father, her one great love, her brother. Each of these people view Claudia differently and contribute to who she is in some way. Claudia’s first-person narration lords over most of the novel, but a handful of stories told in the third-person are scattered throughout the book, making the reader question whether they are Claudia imagining somebody else’s life, or an authorial voice sharing a new perspective.

Claudia’s awareness of her own narcissism doesn’t diminish how annoying her self-absorption is. To be constantly inside Claudia’s mind can make the reader feel trapped, even suffocated by her. The way she views the relationships she has with other people, especially her daughter, does not cast her in a flattering light. And yet, as the story of her life unfolds, it becomes clear that certain events have shaped her to be this way. Claudia’s strong opinions about life are inevitably undermined by the choices that she makes, which causes the reader to question their own thoughts on these complex ideas.

Moon Tiger can be enjoyed as a memoir of one woman’s remarkable life, or it can be a challenge to the reader to engage in mental exercises that we rarely have occasion to perform. The questions that Lively opens up in Moon Tiger are essentially bottomless pits which the reader can delve deeper and deeper into until they feel the need to surface again. The themes of love, incest, and duty seem paltry and secondary next to the issues of identity and reality that Lively recklessly explores.

By Carlotta G. Holton

Decades before America’s infamous Salem witchcraft trials, men and women were being hanged for similar crimes in England. Such is the case in this fictionalized account of the true story of the Pendle Witches who were believed to be responsible for the murder of seventeen people in 17th century Lancashire.

This spellbinding tale dredges up the very real hysteria and societal pressures that pitted neighbor against neighbor in a time when Catholicism and the old folklore religions were being replaced by Protestantism. The memorable cast of characters is led by widow Elizabeth “Bess” Southerns, aka Mother Demdike. Living with her in a crumbling old watchtower in the countryside of Pendle Forest is her dependent daughter, Liza Device; her dim-witted grandson, Jamie; and her granddaughters, Alizon and Jennet.

Demdike has always had a way with animals, and can calm and heal them with periodic help from her familiar, Tibb. In this time of religious transition under King James I, Demdike must recite her prayers to the Virgin Mary and the saints to help with her healing in secret. She is well aware of her precarious situation. Demdike notes that she is “known as a cunning woman and she who has the power to bless may also curse.”

The wealth of historical research involved in this book is apparent as the reader learns that during the Jacobean era, there was a fine line between being cunning and being a witch. Anti-papism resulted in statues being smashed, and abandonment of the celebration of saints and the recitation of prayers. Priests were driven underground and those who had the means to hide the priests within their own homes did so to save them from being drawn, quartered and beheaded.

If the characters are memorable, so too is the vividly described setting in which nature rules the lives of these poor individuals seeking their daily bread in exchange for a full day’s work in the fields, barns or kitchens of those who are better-off. There is poetry in the magical, Robin Hood-type atmosphere of the forest, described in passages such as, “the air is tangy with wood smoke, filled with wild primrose and violets,” and the “trees are crowned in buds set to burst forth into leaves.”

The reader can relate to Sharratt’s story on many levels. Multiple friendships are ruined over misunderstandings. For example, when Demdike’s childhood friend Anne comes seeking help to protect her daughter from a cruel landlord, Demdike balks at using her powers for evil. Her answer is to teach Anne her spiritual ways so she can work her own herbal magic. When things go awry and Anne cultivates the powers of evil, a downward spiral ensues between the two families. As a result of a man’s death, Anne is labeled a witch and is shunned.

Generational differences occur as Demdike’s grandchildren mature. While dim-witted Jamie seems to have some talent, he is unable to differentiate good from evil. It is Alizon who possesses the true talent. But like her mother Liza, she refuses to learn how to channel those powers – including accepting a familiar in the form of a dog - fearing suspicion and reprisal from the law. Ironically, it is Jamie’s deeds that finally lead to the family’s arrest.
Through all of their tribulations, Demdike remains strong. This trait carries her and her family through much humiliation, starvation, and eventual disaster. In a time when men ruled every facet of the culture, Demdike is a rare and shining example of a matriarch of goodness in a world of drastic change and political upheaval.

Sharratt builds suspense as the family is arrested and innocent intentions are misinterpreted when Alison’s efforts to purchase pins for her dress from an arrogant peddler seem to result in a paralytic stroke and accusations that she bewitched the man. As the women sit in the lice- and rat-infested jail, Alizon notes that her grandmother “worked for good and her every charm was a prayer of the old religion. Yet her many hardships went to show that there was no way you could win at this game.”

Daughters of the Witching Hill is a compelling look at the upheaval and changes of 17th century England that provided a ripe setting for the suspicion and paranoia that resulted in accusations of witchcraft and the murders of innocent men and women. It is a very worthwhile read for fans of historical fiction.

Carlotta Holton is the author of Salem Pact, Touching The Dead and Vampire Resurrection, and is a member of the National Federation of Press Women and an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association.

Sarah Schiavoni

By now, most people have seen Girl with the Dragon Tattoo featured on bestseller lists around the world, heard about the movie version (released in 2009), or read it for their book club. My mother heard of the book through the latter of those three but barely got past the first few chapters before losing interest and passing it on to me. The title intrigued me, and the green Chinese water dragon slithering across the cover caught my eye, so I decided to give it a shot. Like my mother, I was unimpressed and slightly confused by the first few chapters, which consisted of a lot of discussion and debate about financial magazine reporting, a journalist facing jail time for false reporting, and a large corporation fighting against possibly true allegations of some sort of financial scandal. As the book is set in Sweden, I couldn’t get my bearings straight and had no concept of what the towns and businesses were like—forget being able to pronounce the characters’ names properly. Despite this not-so-great start, as I read further, the story quickly became clearer and I became more invested in learning about the lives of the characters.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo follows the stories of Mikael Blomvkist, a financial journalist caught in a journalistic scandal, and Lisbeth Salander, a pierced-and-tattooed 20-something with a knack for spying and using advanced technology. Blomvkist, accused in court of libel, is struggling to put his life back together when he is contacted by Dirch Frode, lawyer for the aged but famous businessman Henrik Vanger. Vanger offers Blomvkist a two-part job that is to last a year in Hedeby, the town where the Vanger family lives: he is to write the autobiography of the Vanger family, but his true purpose is to research the disappearance of Harriet, Vanger’s grandniece, and try to find out what happened to her. Salander, a sullen and difficult ward of the state, works for Milton Security, taking on freelance jobs involving extensive background checks on select individuals. She is first connected to Blomvkist when Frode contacts her to look into Blomvkist’s history before bringing him to Hedeby. When her research is complete, she works on other jobs in Stockholm, facing terrible problems due to her status as a ward of the state. The story is peppered with scandal, familial and romantic tensions, murder, sexual violence, and mystery as Blomvkist steadily works toward finding out what happened to Harriet and reconnects with Salander in order to find the truth.

Though the book had a confusing and slow start, it quickly improved and was incredibly hard to put down. I had a thousand guesses about what happened to Harriet, was caught by surprise when murder enters the already convoluted story and creates an even more expansive mystery, and was curious to learn more about Salander and her sad past. The story is detailed, intense, and, at some points, graphically violent, but it is very well told and maintains a high level of suspense even until the end. I’m most definitely considering picking up the second book of this 3-and-¾-book-long series, though I’m curious to see how Larsson’s death before the completion of the series will affect the whole story.

By Elizabeth Milo

When I picked up The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, I was drawn in by the rich colors and pictures of old books that adorned the cover.  But it only took a few pages before the story drew me in as well.  At approximately 400 pages, The Thirteenth Tale takes its time to work through the multiple storylines that Setterfield masterfully weaves together, but with so much intricacy to the plot, anything less would feel hurried and sloppy.  

The two main characters, Margaret Lea, a bookseller’s daughter, and Vida Winter, a beloved England author, share the spotlight as Miss Winter dictates her autobiography to Margaret.  The juxtaposition of these two characters creates a wonderful tension that prevents the reader from ever getting bored with one storyline.  At first, I was concerned that I would find the construct of The Thirteenth Tale pretentious: it’s supposed to be the narrative of a woman who is one of the greatest living writers of all time.  But as the story progressed, I found it utterly engrossing and completely worthy of such praise, even if it was fictional, intra-novelic praise.

Setterfield’s academic background in literature shines through in the way she utilizes the Gothic tradition.  In homage to the Victorian novels (Jane Eyre, Woman in White) that her characters love so much, she makes use of many of the Gothic tropes that were adopted by sensation novels, adapting them for a contemporary style of writing. In true Radcliffian style, Setterfield hints at ghosts and mysteries that-- for the most part-- turn out to be nothing more than tricks of the mind.  Setterfield strikes a wonderful balance between allowing the reader to make enough connections to feel clever, and still keeping enough hidden so that the twist comes as a  surprise.  Because of the intricacy of the story, once the big reveal occurred, I wanted to immediately go back to the beginning and reread the novel with my new perspective in mind.

The charm of the English culture that Setterfield describes in The Thirteenth Tale  only adds to its allure.  Her debut novel was not quite as successful in the UK as it was in America where it sky-rocketed to 1# on the New York Time’s Bestseller list.  But for an anglophile, mystery-loving, book junky like me, it’s no wonder why it was a break-out hit.

By Chris Stokum

At the conclusion of “Rock Springs,” the title story from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford’s 1987 collection, the narrator is utterly lost. Frantically trying to regain his bearings, he looks to the east -- to the con-man’s life he’s anxious to escape -- to the dull motel that his girlfriend and daughter sleep in, to the car he’s considering stealing. And finally, in desperation, he turns his eyes to the reader. And the reader chokes.

Ford’s protagonists are tired, tragic and deeply flawed, yet the reader sympathizes with them from the stories’ opening lines. Herein lies Ford’s talent for capturing the humanity of the downtrodden and overlooked: men and women and children whose lives are defined by struggle. And these are no Horatio Alger knock-offs in which the pauper becomes the prince. Ford is much too realistic for that kind of dreaming. Some of the happiest endings that he offers involve the protagonist becoming aware of his own mistakes and character flaws.

That is not to say that Ford’s protagonists never break even. But their gains are made more in terms of wisdom and experience than in material objects. In “Going to the Dogs,” the protagonist is robbed by a woman while her friend lies side-by-side with him in the other room, presumably to ease his loneliness. While he loses his money, he reflects upon himself and upon his plot in life for what seems to be the first time.

The other stories in Rock Springs follow similar emotional lines. In “Children,” two young boys entertain one of their father’s mistresses, a girl not much older than them, for an afternoon and struggle to treat her humanely. In “Sweet Hearts,” a man drives his wife’s ex-husband to jail and is torn between acting sympathetically toward the convict and loyally toward his wife. “Empire,” the longest story in the collection, presents a detached, meandering portrait of a married man’s various experiences that approach, but never reach infidelity. His curiosity draws him into a number of questionable situations, though his intentions hardly seem impure. The difficulties in his life result less from his actions than from how those actions are interpreted by others.

Richard Ford’s Rock Springs is initially as sparse as its Midwestern setting, yet life and heart lie just below the book’s surface. Ford’s authorial voice blends regional dialect with true lyricism, and Rock Springs is, in Joyce Carol Oates’ words, “the very poetry of realism.” Though Rock Springs is at times dark, gritty and somewhat depressing, it is gripping in a way that makes it difficult to put down.

By Sarah Schiavoni

Heading home for some sort of school break some time ago—spring, summer, Thanksgiving...who knows?—I complained to my boyfriend that I didn’t have anything new to read. He offered me Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary, and explained that this was the guy who did Fight Club, a phenomenal movie that I hadn’t realized was first a book. Having enjoyed that movie, I was eager to see what Palahniuk’s books were all about. What I found were crazy plot twists, quirky characters, insane stunts, and more. Since then, whenever I’m in a bookstore, I peruse his books and often pick up another to add to my growing collection. The other week, I grabbed Invisible Monsters, attracted to its cover: a black and white picture of a woman’s head with a splash of neon pink splattered across her mouth. Like the three or four Palahniuk books I’ve read before it, I raced to get to the end, stumbling over the twists and turns as they came.

Invisible Monsters opens with a chaotic scene: a house is on fire, Evie Cottrell stands screaming on the staircase, and Brandy Alexander lies bleeding from a gunshot wound, asking the narrator to tell her life story. What occurs after is a series of non-linear stories in which the reader slowly learns about the characters and the circumstances by which they’ve become what they are. The narrator, a former model, unnamed until Brandy gives her a new identity, suffered from what appeared to be a freak accident that left her face mutilated--that made her an “invisible monster.” She hides her face behind veils and sets off on an adventure with Brandy, a pill-popping transsexual, and Manus, her ex-lover, that leads her back to Evie. The story is confusing, sarcastic, odd, and sometimes too graphic, but it kept me on the edge of my seat as I learned more and more about the intricate connections between the characters and the events that have shaped them.

Palahniuk brilliantly leaks out information in his books, slowly explaining the behind-the-scenes of the story but still completely surprising the reader at the end of the book. His interesting writing and the odd characters and events he describes make his books nearly addictive. If you like intense, unique stories, I highly recommend reading Invisible Monsters and all of his other books.

By Carole Shmurak

Josephine Tey (whose real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh) was a recluse, and little is known about her private life. What she did during World War II is unknown. What we do know is that immediately after the war, she published six amazing mystery novels. Miss Pym Disposes was the first of these.

Is Miss Pym Disposes really a mystery novel? No body appears for over 200 pages. Miss Pym herself is hardly a detective. It is much more a novel of character, with an ending that examines how a crime may affect the lives of some of the people involved.

Lucy Pym starts out as a comic character. A French teacher, she inherits some money, which allows her to quit her job. She then reads a book on psychology, which she finds ridiculous, and goes on to read thirty-six more that she finds equally silly. At last she writes her own psychology book and becomes a celebrity, the darling of the British publishing world and a speaker to learned societies. Invited by an old school friend to give a guest lecture at a school of athletic training for young women, Lucy becomes enchanted with the school and especially with its enthusiastic students and ends up staying much longer than she had planned.

Tey herself had attended such a school, and she knew the milieu well. She also had the amazing ability to make almost all the characters at the school both realistic and likable: the irrepressible Dakers, the beautiful and popular Nash, the brilliant Innes, and the somewhat cynical Brazilian student Desterro are the standouts. The latter, known to her classmates as The Nut Tart, serves an important function both to the novel and to Miss Pym; as an outsider who nonetheless lives inside the school, she provides a more objective view of her classmates and the school itself.

The title of the book comes from the quotation, “Man proposes, God disposes.” There is much discussion in the last fifty pages of “playing God,” and indeed, Miss Pym, after much soul-searching, does take actions that are outside the rules of the school and outside the law.

The ending of the book has a devastating surprise for the first-time reader. But even more interesting to me, as a person who has read the book many times, is that there are multiple possible interpretations of what happened. I’ve discussed this book before with one book group, and we had all come to the same conclusion about who did what and why. This time, with another book group, one person in the group (who happens to be my husband) came up with an alternate explanation. Try as we might, none of us could come up with anything in the book that could contradict that interpretation. A wonderful discussion resulted — about psychology, morality, and writing. That this entertaining little book written over sixty years ago could provoke such a discussion is a tribute to the skill of the author.

Carole B. Shmurak, Ph.D., is the co-author of the Matty Trescott series of young adult novels, one of which was nominated for the 2001 Agatha Award for Best YA Mystery. Her book Voices of Hope was named "Critic's Choice" by the American Educational Studies Association. Deadmistress, the first book in the Susan Lombardi series, was named a Notable Book of 2004 by Writers' Notes Magazine.

By Sarah Schiavoni

I’m not quite sure how I got started on Philippa Gregory’s books. I’ve always been interested in England and its rich history, so perhaps I caught a glimpse of one of her titles on a bookstore shelf and thought I’d give it a chance. Even if I can’t remember which of her books I read first, I do remember falling in love with historical fiction and becoming hooked on her writing. I’ve read and bought so many of her works, they now fill up a whole shelf in my bookcase (and are starting to creep onto the shelf below). I hadn’t read any of her books for at least a year, having thought I’d read most of them already. But when I saw The White Queen, a book I was unfamiliar with, displayed in a bookstore, I picked it up. Like her previous novels, this newest book didn’t disappoint me.

The White Queen follows the story of Elizabeth Woodville, of the House of Lancaster, who was recently widowed and left to raise two young sons when her husband was killed in battle. With a great desire to improve her life and gain back her home during the war-filled times, Elizabeth appeals to King Edward IV, of the House of York, for help. Through her beauty and charm, plus a little help from her mother’s supposed witchcraft, she claims the king’s heart and secretly marries him while he struggles to keep his recently attained throne from the ill former king and his wife. The new couple takes their place as the leaders of England, but while the old king and other claimants of the throne still live, the wars between the House of Lancaster and the House of York seem never-ending. Violent conflict, passionate love, betrayal, and murder swirl through Elizabeth’s life as the Queen of England while she tries to keep her family safe and keep her husband on the throne.

What is perhaps most interesting about Elizabeth Woodville is that she is the mother of the fabled Princes of the Tower, whose fates remain unknown. When her brother-in-law, King Richard III, took control of England, he placed her two sons in the Tower of London, where, in 1483, they disappeared without a trace. This mystery has confounded historians for years, but Gregory, with her own extensive knowledge of the time period, suggests her own explanation for what happened, and this is a central part of the story.

I thoroughly enjoyed The White Queen and all of Philippa Gregory’s other historical fiction.  She is an established historian, and her extensive knowledge of the Tudor family and the Plantagenet family shows in each book she writes. She creates engaging stories with facts and history scattered throughout, and I highly recommend her books to everyone, especially those interested in the history of the royal families of England.