"The Dream Diviner" by Charity Bishop

It's been a while since I read a Charity Bishop book, mainly because her last few books have been horror-ish fantasy and that is not my jam.  So I jumped at the chance to read an ARC of her new historical fiction book, because I love her historical fiction.

The Dream Diviner does not disappoint.  It's the first in a new Biblical fiction series called The Claudia Chronicles that will fictionally explore the life of Claudia Procula, wife of Pontius Pilate.  Charity Bishop wrote a book about this same historical figure ten years ago, but realized she had a lot more to say about Claudia and wanted to delve more deeply into the world she inhabited.  Well, that's great news for all of us who enjoy Biblical fiction, because it means we have lots of good stuff coming our way, beginning with this book!

In this fictional imagining of what her life could have been like, Claudia is the illegitimate daughter of Roman Emperor Tiberius's wife.  Not his daughter, but his wife's daughter.  Tiberius likes her anyway, and his heir Drusus loves her like a full sister, so Claudia lives at the palace.  Drusus's wife Livilla hates Claudia, mostly because Livilla's son Gemellus loves Claudia more.  Claudia is kind, sensible, and warm-hearted, so it's not hard to see why her little nephew loves her... or why the resourceful and ambitious soldier Lucius Pilate grows to love her too.

Claudia often has disturbing dreams that obviously contain meanings about future events, but she can never decipher them in time to make the dreams useful.  She seeks out wise men and teachers of many faiths in hopes that they will help her interpret these dreams.  When she listens to a Jewish teacher, Avram, she realizes he could be the one to help her.  While seeking his guidance for interpreting her dreams, she comes to believe that the God he worships, Adonai, is the one true God.  She stops worshiping all the Roman gods she grew up with, but her decision comes at great cost.

Bishop excels at writing about palace intrigue and politics in a way that humanizes them and keeps me invested, and she uses that ability to great effect here.  I never got lost in who was conniving against whom, or which person was planning to trick which other person.  That's not always the case for me and books that involve a lot of that, so I think it's a testament to Bishop's writing that I remain engaged and unconfused.

Particularly Good Bits:

"If Adonai gave you these dreams, it is to call you to him, not to make you a seer for Rome.  He is a jealous God.  He will not share you with idols of stone."

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for mentions of illegitimate children and extramarital affairs, plus violence and a scene of flogging as punishment.  No cussing and no smut.

I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher, but was not asked or required to review it.  All opinions are my own.

Top Ten Tuesday: The Monster Mash

For Top Ten Tuesday this week, That Artsy Reader Girl has given us a Halloween freebie.  I'm choosing to share my Top Ten Favorite Monster Books.  By which I mean, books that have monsters in them.

If the song I used for a title for this post is getting stuck in your head, you can listen to a really fun version right here on YouTube to see if that will help.

I don't read much horror.  At all.  I don't do well with modern horror, as my imagination is just too vivid.  I'm haunted by memories of the three or four modern horror movies I foolishly watched while in college.  The one exception tends to be vampires --  I understand how to defeat vampires, so they don't terrify me, generally.  (This may come from being a firm fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer [1997-2003] and its spin-off Angel [1999-2004].)  You'll notice that there are multiple books involving vampires on this list, heh.

All those links lead to my reviews here on this blog, if you are curious about them.  The movie-style ratings are how I rated them when I wrote those reviews, but I haven't always done ratings, so one of these doesn't have one. 

1. Break the Beast by Allison Tebo (PG-13) -- Beowulf retelling in which Grendel gets a chance to learn how to be something other than a monster

2. Dracula by Bram Stoker (PG-13) -- evil, as personified by a vampire, cannot defeat humans who trust in God

3. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (PG-13) -- an orphan is raised by ghosts and a vampire and various monsters

4. Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (PG) -- wizards and witches and sentient scarecrows and fire demons all are no match for the power of kindness and good sense

5. Crack the Stone by Emily Golus (PG-13) -- retelling of Les Miserables in which Jean Valjean is a goblin

6. From the Dust Returned by Ray Bradbury -- an undead family protects a human boy, who writes down their life stories as he grows up

7. Coraline by Neil Gaiman (PG-10) -- a girl stumbles into a nightmare parallel universe trying to usurp reality

8. Night of Wonders by Charity Bishop (PG-13) -- a love story set in India with creepy ghosts who have backwards feet

9. The Goblin and the Dancer by Allison Tebo (PG) -- "Steadfast Tin Soldier" retelling where the villain/goblin isn't evil

10. The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald (PG) -- a princess and a commoner become friends and have some adventures which tangentially involve goblins 

Have you read any of these?  Are you also a horror lightweight?  Did you do a TTT post this week?  If so, what was it about?  Do share!

"Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing" by Lisa R. Howeler

Mysteries are my favorite genre, but I'm not usually a fan of books labeled "cozy mysteries."  I've tried a few over the years, and they tend to be cutesy in a way that grates on me.  So I have been hesitant to read the Gladwynn Grant books because they do have that Cozy Mystery label.

However.

I follow author Lisa R. Howeler's blog, Boondock Ramblings, as well as her Instagram, and she's really fun.  We're into a lot of the same kinds of movies and books.  And she tends to describe this series as having a vintage feel, which absolutely attracts me.  Plus, my 14-yr-old is really into mysteries right now and has been reading her way through all the teen-appropriate mysteries I've got.  (Don't think she's ready for hardboiled detective fiction yet.)  I knew the Gladwynn Grant books are Christian fiction and have a reputation for being clean, so I thought, I will read this and see if my daughter will like it.

I think she'll like it, but also... I liked it!  

This book has none of the twee things I associate with cozy mysteries.  Oh, there's a small town, and there are cats.  It's also cozy in that there are no gory murders.  But the small town feels like a real place, not a weird fictional town where everyone dresses up like Santa on December 1 to go to the coffee shop or competes to see who can pile the most pumpkins on their porch, etc.  And, since I don't enjoy reading about gore, I appreciated its absence here.  

This really did feel like it could have been written in the 1940s, like a Nancy Drew book starring an adult.

Gladwynn Grant has just moved in with her grandma because she just lost her job and broke up with her boyfriend, and she needed a fresh start.  So she gets a job as a reporter for the local newspaper in her grandma's small town and starts over.  The first thing she reports on is a near-fatal car wreck, which leads her to meet an attractive fireman AND an attractive state trooper.  And leads her to start asking questions about some strange, seemingly unrelated occurrences elsewhere in town.  (There's also an attractive single pastor at her grandma's church.  I laughed aloud at one point during the book where Gladwynn points out what a high percentage of the small town's single men are hot.)

I really liked that Gladwynn did not try to keep information she uncovered as secret from law enforcement, but consistently did her best to leave the real detective work to detectives.  And she didn't do dumb things like fail to tell anyone where she was going before marching straight into obvious danger.  Howeler neatly sidestepped a lot of those female-detective tropes and traps.

I liked this book so much, I ordered the next two books as soon as I finished reading this one, and they landed on my doorstep last night :-)

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-10 for some mentions in dialog about people having extramarital affairs, plus some attempted murders.  No cussing or smut or on-page violence.

Top Ten Tuesday: Autumn Serenade

Today's Top Ten Tuesday prompt is "Book Covers Featuring Autumnal Colors."  I think that red, orange, yellow, and brown are the most autumnal colors, so today, I'm sharing my ten favorite books that have covers featuring those colors!

But first, here's the song I referenced in my post title, in case you want to listen to it:

All titles are linked to my full reviews, but I've provided a thought or two about each book here too.

1. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -- the ultimate October read!  A classic Sherlock Holmes mystery with an eerie setting, a spectral opponent, and a thrilling mystery to solve.

2. Shane by Jack Schaefer -- a deceptively quiet and simple western with deep and rich emotions under the surface.

3. The Black Stallion by Walter Farley -- a teen boy forges a friendship with a wild horse thanks to both surviving a shipwreck and life on a deserted island by working together.  The first half of the book is my favorite, but the later horse racing stuff is pretty cool too, if somehow less believable. 

4. The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laure R. King -- Sherlock Holmes takes a teen girl under his wing during WWI, and they discover an unlikely and marvelous kinship.  I'm reading this aloud to my daughters right now.

5. The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks -- a magical cupboard makes toys come to life, which ends up teaching a boy a lot about responsibility.

6. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury -- burning books is bad; this book is good; every time I read it, it gets more eerily prescient of modern life.

7. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling -- my favorite Harry Potter book, largely because it revolves around my favorite character.

8. Up from Dust by Heather Kaufman -- Biblical fiction about Martha from Bethany.

9. A Flame in the Dark by Sarah Baughman -- historical fiction about a German man living during the Protestant Reformation, occasionally interacting with Martin Luther.

10. The Man in the Box by Marylois Dunn -- a Vietnamese boy and an American soldier forge a friendship despite the Vietnam War raging around them.

That's all for me this week!  Do you agree that the colors of these covers look autumnal?  Did you do a Top Ten Tuesday list this week too?  Let's chat in the comments!

"Liberty's Children: Stories of Eleven Revolutionary War Children" by Scotti Cohn

I picked up this book while in Colonial Williamsburg over the Fourth of July weekend this summer.  It looked like it might provide some different perspectives on the American Revolution than the other books I'd been reading, most of which focus on adults or fictional children.  And that's exactly what it did.

The wartime experiences of eleven different children are told in this book.  They come from a pretty wide cross-section of the country -- there are city kids and country kids, free white kids and enslaved black kids, teenagers and kids in the single digits, boys and girls.  And all of them were new to me -- although I had read about many of the broader events they were involved in, none of these specific historical figures were people I'd read about before.

All of that combined to make this slim volume -- a little over 120 pages, not including the endnotes -- a fascinating addition to my quest to read at least thirteen books set during the American Revolution in this, our nation's 250th year.  

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for descriptions of wartime violence and danger.

This is book 10 of my #RevolutionaryWarReads quest!

"Murder at Somerset House" by Andrea Penrose

The Wrexford and Sloane Historical Mystery series still has not disappointed me once.  These books are a continual delight, and I am collecting them up now so that I can reread them in the future because I know I will want to.

Murder at Somerset House is no exception.  To the quirky, blended family that Wrex and Charlotte have formed, we get a new addition: a preteen girl with a passion for raising and training carrier pigeons.  It may take her a while to grow accustomed to a family that includes a notoriously volatile Earl who dabbles in chemistry, an unconventional artist skilled at both the art of satire and the art of disguise, two former street urchins who love mathematics and art and mischief, and a biracial scientific prodigy... and all of whom have a penchant for pursuing truth and justice by solving crimes together.  Who wouldn't be daunted?  And who wouldn't love them?

As usual, the plot revolves around the cutting-edge science and technology of Regency England, this time with a healthy dose of Napoleonic danger added to the intrigue.  Spying, secrecy, and science make for a combustible combination, and no mistake.  Also, this may sound really weird, but the stock exchange played a vital role in this book, and I now actually kind of understand how trading stocks and bonds and such works, for the first time in my life.  That's pretty nifty.

Particularly Good Bits:

"Self-reliance -- the art of knowing how to think through problems and solve them -- is a fundamentally important skill to have in life" (p. 167).

"Taking joy in each other's passions is part of the bonds that tie a family together" (p. 250).

Henning let out a rusty laugh.  "Is there anyone normal in this family?"

"Heaven forfend," drawled the earl.  "They wouldn't last long" (p. 286).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for murder, violence, and some era-appropriate cussing.

"The Secret Adversary" by Agatha Christie

I'm a Tommy and Tuppence fan now.

I'd read a few short stories about them previously, but this is the first of their books I've read.  And it's the first book Agatha Christie wrote about them, so I guess it was a good place to start.  I am now on the hunt for the rest of the series.  Can't decide if I want to track them down one by one or just buy a boxed set.

Anyway!  The Secret Adversary is actually almost more a spy novel than a mystery.  It's all about trying to find a female passenger of the Lusitania who disappeared while carrying very important diplomatic papers.  Those papers are still vitally important even though the war was over, as Soviet Communists are trying to find and use them to take down the British government.

Tommy Beresford and Prudence "Tuppence" Cowley are two young adults who are kind of at loose ends now that the Great War has ended.  They decide to become Adventurers, and end up trying to find this missing woman, rescue each other from various predicaments, and save Great Britain.  And gradually realize they may have a future together as more than good friends, too.  Honestly, the understated but realistic unfolding of their romance was one of my favorite things about the whole book.  We readers could see they loved each other, but it took them until nearly the end of the book to each independently realize they loved the other person, and make their feelings plain.  Really good stuff.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for threats of torture, some violence, and lots of perilous situations.  I think there were also a few mild cuss words.

This is my 9th book read and reviewed for my fifth Classics Club list.