Rumor has it that Imelda Marcos, former first lady of the Philippines, owned more than a thousand pairs of shoes. That is so not me, I wouldn’t know where to start. But when it comes to books, I can give Marcos a run for her money. The thought of downsizing terrifies me, not least because it will require packing and finding homes for shelves and shelves of books. So I decided to leave the print books for another day and start slow, after realizing I had 600+ Kindle titles that were “uncollected,” never mind all the ones that I’d already assigned to one category or another. And as the post title suggests, I found more than a few buried treasures.
The fun part of this colossal chore was discovering books I had intended to read years ago but had long since forgotten I’d ever purchased. So I thought it might be fun to review some of the gems I uncovered and am now working my way through.
The first one that caught my eye was Jane Johnson, The Tenth Gift (Crown, 2008). A dual-time story based on an actual event from 1625 in which Moroccan pirates kidnapped sixty residents of Cornwall, England, while they were at Sunday service in their neighborhood church, this novel (recommended to me by a friend) drew me in with the author’s skill at managing the difficult task of balancing the modern and historical threads in such a way that neither overwhelms the other.
We meet Julia, the contemporary heroine, at the moment when her best friend’s husband, with whom she has had a years-long adulterous affair, decides to call it quits in hopes of saving his marriage. As a parting gift, he hands Julia, who runs a small shop selling her hand-crafted embroidery, a seventeenth-century book of patterns called The Needle-Woman’s Glorie. This book turns out to contain a series of notes detailing the story of Catherine Anne Tregenna, aged nineteen, and how she comes to be captured and enslaved by the Moorish pirates mentioned above. Julia, enthralled and in need of distraction, sets out to find out more—all the while trailed by her ex-lover, who has decided for financial reasons that he wants the book back. The ending is somewhat predictable, but the journey kept me utterly engrossed, and that’s what counts as far as I’m concerned.
I followed that up with Paullina Simons, The Bronze Horseman (HarperCollins, 2009). I can see why I bought it—acclaimed Russian historical set during the Siege of Leningrad in 1941–42—but I must not have noticed at the time that it ran to more than eight hundred pages. Good thing, too, or I might have left it on the shelf and missed out on this story about a well-intentioned young woman who falls in love with her older sister’s boyfriend just before the Nazis launch their surprise attack on the Soviet Union, whose citizens have believed themselves protected by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
The first weeks and months following the invasion devastate the Red Army, and Leningrad, in particular, suffers through daily bombing raids and increasing starvation as food can’t get through the blockade. Only when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brings the United States into the war do Tatiana Metanova and her family see hope of deliverance, but the Road to Life, as the ice passage across the river is called, is also within the range of German aircraft.
Even making allowances for their youth and inexperience (Tatiana is seventeen at the beginning of the novel, and her beloved Alexander twenty-two), the central romantic relationship—a combination of selflessness, passion, and anger bordering on abuse—didn’t quite work for me. The first half I found utterly gripping; the second was easier to skim. Yet the novel kept me reading to the end, and I’m glad I unearthed it after so long.
Of course, since I am a historian and write historical fiction, many of the Kindle books I have purchased over the years are nonfiction. One example of the latter is Xinru Liu, The Silk Road in World History (Oxford University Press, 2010). Although the heyday of what we now call the Silk Road predates the period that forms the backdrop for my novels—by the 1550s, much of the trade in luxury goods went by water—the interactions among merchants and the support systems that sustained those relationships continued to operate. If nothing else, a book like this exemplifies how far our ancestors traveled in pursuit of profit and how ready they were to interact with others culturally unlike themselves. That should give me something I can apply to my next set of characters.
And those three together are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s no way I could detail all my unexpected finds, but I had no difficulty accumulating another short list of hidden gems, which I will share next week.
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