Death of an American Beauty (Jane Prescott #3) by Mariah Fredericks (2020)

 

Death of an American Beauty is Fredericks’ third novel about lady’s maid Jane Prescott who has a knack for becoming involved in and solving mysteries. The series takes place in New York in the early 1900s. The year of this book is 1913, the fiftieth anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation speech and Dolly Rutherford, wife of the wealthy owner of Rutherford’s Department Store, has gathered society’s ladies to put on a play in honor of the anniversary.  The star is Jane’s employer Louise Tyler.

Jane is on holiday, staying with her uncle who runs a refuge for fallen women where Jane grew up. Her uncle is the only family she knows. When one of the women from the refuse is horribly murdered, Jane’s uncle falls under suspicion.  Jane is determined to prove her uncle’s innocence and is assisted by old friends and new acquaintances.  At the same time Jane finds herself helping with the costuming for the play and is drawn into the drama of Rutherford’s, including the annual pageant for Miss Rutherford, the face of the department store for the coming year.

The writing is very detail oriented; Fredericks’ characters are independent, intelligent, and resourceful. The book is a well-paced whodunit full of amateur sleuthing, red herrings, family dynamics, duty, racial inequality, sexism, romance, violence, and murder. Readers would benefit by reading the first two books in the series beforehand, but Death of an American Beauty can stand on its own. All three books are in the library’s collection.

3.83 stars on Goodreads, 4.4 on Amazon

The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by VE Schwab

 

A young woman in France, during the 1700s, fears how short a lifetime can be and how little can be accomplished. Addie is unwilling to settle down and accept small-town life in the 1700s. Instead she discovers what happens when you pray to the gods at night, and why you never make deals with them. In exchange for never ending life, Addie will have to live a life where no one can remember her. Everyone who knew Addie up until this point in her life has now completely forgotten her existence. Also, anyone new Addie  meets will forget her after she leaves their presence. Until 300 years later, when Addie encounters a boy in a bookstore who doesn’t forget.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it. While this novel can easily be labeled as Fantasy, I would say it is light on those elements, and can easily be enjoyed by those who don’t want to be bogged down in fantasy worlds. The book also has elements of historical fiction and recounts moments of Addie’s life over the 300 year span. If you enjoy this book, and want something with more fantasy elements I’d suggest checking out VE Schwab’s Shades of Magic Trilogy.

4.39 stars on Goodreads, 4.6 on Amazon

The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel (2020)

 

Inspired by an amazing true story, a young woman with a talent for forgery helps hundreds of Jewish children flee the Nazis during World War II. Eva Traube Abrams is that woman.  When we meet Eve, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, she happens across an image of a book she hasn’t seen in sixty-five years—a book she recognizes as The Book of Lost Names.

The accompanying article discusses the Nazis’ looting of libraries across Europe during World War II and the search to reunite the true owner with these stolen texts. The book in question is an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France near the end of the war.

The book is now housed in Berlin’s Berlin Central and Regional Library and appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don’t know where it came from—or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer, but it will mean confronting her buried past, a past not even her son knows about.

As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew. She finds refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone and begins forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. But changing a person’s identity comes with a price, and along with a mysterious, handsome forger named Rémy, Eva finds a way to preserve the real names of the children who are too young to remember who they really are. The records they keep in The Book of Lost Names will become even more vital when the resistance cell they work for is betrayed and Rémy disappears.

The Book of Lost Names is an utterly captivating read.

4.36 stars on Goodreads, 4.7 stars on Amazon.

The Forgotten Room by Karen White, Beatriz Williams, and Lauren Willig (LT) (2016)

 

Three stories, told by three different authors, with one common thread, an address in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Combined their stories become a complex mystery connecting three generations of women in one family to a single extraordinary room in the Gilded Age mansion at that address.

In 1945 the mansion is being used as a private hospital to which a critically wounded Captain Cooper Ravenal is brought. He carries a portrait miniature featuring a woman who looks very much like his young doctor Kate Schuyler. And the ruby pendant she is wearing looks a lot like the pendant handed down to Kate by her mother.

In their pursuit of answers, the pair find themselves drawn into the turbulent history of the mansion. The reader learns about Olive Van Alen, a woman driven from riches to rags in the latter 1800s, who hires out as a servant in the very mansion her father designed. During the 1920s Lucy Young comes to the house in pursuit of the father she had never known.

Are Kate and Cooper ready for the secrets that will be revealed in the Forgotten Room? Find out for yourself.

White, Williams, and Willig have written two other historical novels together and each of them are very prolific as  solo authors in the field of historical fiction.

3.90 stars on Goodreads, 4.4 on Amazon.

Winter Garden by Kristen Hannah (2010)

 

“Mesmerizing from the first page to the last, Kristin Hannah's Winter Garden is one woman’s sweeping, heartbreaking story of love, loss, and redemption. At once an epic love story set in World War II Russia and an intimate portrait of contemporary mothers and daughters poised at the crossroads of their lives, it explores the heartbreak of war, the cost of survival and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit. It is a novel that will haunt the reader long after the last page is turned.” So starts the Amazon review and I couldn’t agree more.

Meredith and Nina Whitson are as different as sisters can be. One stayed at home to raise her children and manage the family business while the other followed her dream and traveled the world becoming a famous photojournalist. The sisters find themselves reunited when their beloved father turns ill. They are also reunited with their cold, disapproving mother, Anya, who even now, offers no comfort to her daughters. As children, the only connection with their mother was the Russian fairy tale she sometimes told them at bedtime about a beautiful Russian girl who lived in Leningrad a lifetime ago….

On his deathbed, their father extracts a promise from the women: the fairy tale will be told one last time— and all the way to the end. Alternating between the past and present, Meredith and Nina hear the harrowing story of their mother’s life, beginning in World War II Leningrad and spanning more than sixty years to modern day Alaska. The story will shake the very foundation of their family and change who they believe they are.

Kristin Hannah, the author of more than twenty books, started out writing romances but has since changed her focus to stories of women's lives and relationships, particularly in families. Her character-driven novels wrestle with universal issues surrounding parenthood, marriage, infidelity, and loss. Many of Hannah’s books can be found on the libraries’ shelves.

4.18 stars on Goodreads, 4.6 on Amazon