"Williamsburg at War: Virginia's Colonial Capital in the Revolutionary War" by Michael Cecere

I picked this book up while at Colonial Williamsburg last month to celebrate July 4th.  And started to read it while staying in a house that was build in the 1750s on the other side of the James River from Williamsburg.  And then it took me more than a month to finish it, but it still seemed like the perfect time and place to start reading.

Williamsburg at War was particularly interesting to me once we got past the lead-up-to-the-war part.  Having been to Colonial Williamsburg dozens of times, I know a good bit about the Powder Magazine Incident and Lord Dunmore (who the colonists all wished had done less) fleeing Virginia and so on.  But everything past that point was pretty new to me, and I liked getting to learn new and interesting things about a place that is dear to my heart.

I particularly liked the author's point at the very end of the book, that the fact that the capitol of Virginia was moved to Richmond during the war meant that Williamsburg sank into relative obscurity... which made many parts of it remain fairly unchanged over the next hundred and fifty years, allowing for the Rockefellers and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to create the most amazing living history experience right where history happened, without having to tear down a lot of skyscrapers or something.  I had always felt kind of sad for Williamsburg, getting left in the dust back then, but now I see that it was actually a blessing for us today.

Also, I was greatly amused by this one bit of complaining from a European officer, Captain Ewald, about the misery of summer in Virginia:

"For six weeks the heat has been so unbearable that many men have been lost to sunstroke or their reason has been impaired.  Everything that one has on his body is soaked as with water from the constant perspiration." (p. 187).

I regret to say Virginia summers have not changed.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for discussions of warfare, including things written about war and death by people who experienced it.

This has been my 8th book read and reviewed for my #RevolutionaryWarReads challenge.  I've bought a lot of new books about the Revolution this year, because of it being American's 250th birthday, so I've made an entirely new graphic to display just the books I have read for this challenge, not the ones I might read.  I'm still aiming for thirteen by the end of the year, one for each of the original colonies.

"The Leavenworth Case" by Anna Katherine Green

I probably never would have read this if it hadn't been for Patricia Meredith's book A Deed of Dreadful Note.  That book is a fictional imagining of how Green could have gotten the ideas she needed to write The Leavenworth Case.  It took me a few years to get around to reading the original, but I'm very happy I kept it on my TBR and finally made time to read it, because I very much enjoyed it.

A wealthy merchant is murdered.  His two nieces, whom he has raised, are the prime suspects.  Particularly since one of them has become an heiress thanks to this murder.  We get two detectives in this book, one professional and one amateur.  The professional is a New York police investigator named Ebenezer Gryce, while the amateur is a young lawyer named Everett Raymond, who also narrates the book.  Gryce has the wisdom and experience needed, but Raymond has a personal stake in things that aids his natural cleverness.  He falls in love with one of the dead man's nieces over the course of the book.

From what I have read, The Leavenworth Case was a really popular book when it was released in 1878.  Green has been called the Mother of Detective Fiction because her Detective Gryce books (she wrote quite a few more) made the genre popular almost a decade before the first Sherlock Holmes stories appeared.  She made the detective series popular in particular, and also is credited with inventing the "girl detective" type in a later book.

For me, The Leavenworth Case was remarkable not just for being so seminal to my favorite genre, but also for being a really satisfying mystery.  A lot of very early detective fiction can feel simplistic or even a bit twee, but this book kept me guessing until the big reveal.  I will say it's got a slow and contemplative pacing that some modern readers might not appreciate, and there was also a long letter of confession from the murderer at the end that felt unnecessary, but those weren't big enough detractions to make me dislike the book as a whole.  I hope to find more of the Detective Gryce books to read in the future.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for murder and related subject matter.  No cussing, gory violence (though blood spatter and brains are briefly mentioned) or smut.

This has been my 7th book read for my 5th Classics Club list.

Top Ten Tuesday: Bygone August Books

This month's Top Ten Tuesday prompt from That Artsy Reader Girl is "Books I was reading on this day mid-August over the past ten years."  I keep a monthly record of what books I read and what movies I watched, and it's really fun to go looking back through that for things like this!  But it does mean I don't necessarily know what I was reading on a specific day, so I just aimed for things toward the middle of my list for each August.

I've linked the titles to my own reviews, in case you want to know more about any particular book.

2016 -- Rainbow Valley by L. M. Montgomery (classic, coming-of-age, World War One, Canada)

2017 -- Rules of Murder by Julianna Deering (Christian, mystery, historical fiction, 1930s Britain)

2018 -- Famous Gunfighters of the Western Frontier by W. B. "Bat" Masterson (non-fiction, Old West history, essays)

2019 -- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (classic, Russian, Napoleonic Wars)

2020 -- Rook di Goo by Jenni Sauer (fairy tale retelling, sci-fi + fantasy, strong heroine, found family)

2021 -- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (classic, swashbuckler)

2022 -- Rose Petals and Snowflakes by Kendra E. Ardnek (fairy tale retelling, fantasy, Jane Austen retelling, sisterhood)

2023 -- The Last Atlantean  by Emily Hayse (Christian, historicalesque fantasy)

2024 -- The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (classic, fantasy)

2025 -- The Case of the Footloose Doll by Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason, mystery, courtroom drama)

Do you keep track of what you read?  If so, how?

"Grits and Glamor" by B. R. Goodwin

Because I enjoy cooking and love to bake, I always like reading books where the main character's job involves the kitchen.  B. R. Goodwin writes quite a few characters who have mad culinary skillz, and Grits and Glamor fully lives up to my expectations in this department.

Chloe Garland is a professional private chef.  As in, went to fancy cooking schools and everything.  She's also awkward, funny, kind, helpful, and a strong Christian woman.

Roman Rivers is a famous movie star who is famous for playing a pirate hottie, but prefers to keep his personal life very cool indeed.  Particularly because that helps keep his young half-sister protected and out of the spotlight.  

Chloe becomes Roman's chef.  Sorta.  Sparks fly.  His best friend doesn't like her.  His half-sister adores her.  Bunnies erupt everywhere.  (Not even joking -- there are a lot of bunnies in this book.)  Grits and ice cream and latte art abound.  It's a jolly time.

Also, this is SPOILAGE, but there is NO third-act break-up.  I repeat: zero breaking up over nonsensical and contrived "problems" occurs.  So refreshing.  I want to hug B. R. Goodwin super tightly for that one.  END OF SPOILERS.

Grits and Glamor kind of ties together Goodwin's two Christian romcom series, Sugartree Romance and Happy in Honey Hill.  I loved that.  I've read a book or two from each series, so it was really fun to see characters from them pop up in this.

I really appreciate how Goodwin doesn't write perfect characters or cliched ones.  Her Christians walk the good walk and fight the good fight, and they know how to talk the good talk, too.  But they aren't perfect.  Nor do they stew in their own sinfulness and say it's just "human nature."  They make mistakes, and they learn from them.  They sin and stumble and stray, repent, forgive and are forgiven, and move forward in redemption.  That's too hard to find in Christian fiction.  That's what makes Goodwin's books must-reads for me, even though romcoms are not a genre I routinely gravitate toward.

Particularly Good Bits:

Being loved fully by the people in your little world who matter most has a way of erasing the background noise of voices suggesting you deserve otherwise (p. 213).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for a lot of kissing and lightly described makeouts, talk of needing to set physical boundaries so they can keep their bodies and minds pure, and discussions of appreciating people of the opposite sex.  It's tasteful, but not something I would hand a tween.

"Setting Time Free" by Sarah Everest

Each installment in the Untouched serial series is more taut and exciting than the last!

Breaking Triviality was a fun adventure.  Sifting Through Chaos turned serious fast.  And Setting Time Free was so suspenseful that I read the second half of the book in one sitting!

In this third and final installment, modern-day teens Marit and Cas are still trying to help 1940s Dutch teen Anneliese and a few new friends survive in newly occupied Rotterdam.  The Nazis have overrun the city and are an ever-present menace.  Anneliese's new friend Bastiaan and his resistance buddies try to help Marit and Cas find the mysterious locket that could return them to their own time.  But there are enemies on all sides, more even than Marit and Cas really realize.

Even more so than Sifting Through Chaos, this book brought to life the heartbreak and horror of war.  There are on-page deaths and some realistic descriptions of the struggle to find food and remain humane in the midst of scrabbling for survival.

As a whole, this serialized trilogy is a thrilling, suspenseful adventure story for teens that I very much enjoyed.

This book releases on Tuesday, August 11. I was privileged to be selected to read an advance copy from the publisher, but I was not requested or required to review the book; all opinions are my own.

Particularly Good Bits:

It was as though someone had cut a hole in my stomach and pulled everything out, leaving me a hollow cocoon, my butterfly soul having flown off to chase the light of my handsome prince (Marit, chapter four).

It would have been easy to slip back into the fearful girl I had once been, but I was not that girl anymore.  I had walked through the fire and felt the devil nipping at my heels.  And despite all the evil we had witnessed, the words Betje had sent us off with rang true.  The Lord was with us, no matter how dark the night (Annelies, chapter eight).

He had stepped out of the pages of my life as quickly as he had entered them, leaving the story unfinished (Annelies, chapter seventeen).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-13 for wartime violence, including on-page shootings and death.  No cussing or smut.

"Farewell, My Lovely" by Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler's crisp, laconic, sharp, caustic, dazzlingly evocative writing is always good for what ails me.  Especially when what ails me is a mild case of summertime SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and its accompanying discomfort in my own skin.

I try to limit myself to one Raymond Chandler book a year so that there is always enough time between my reading of any single book to make it feel fresh again with each reread.  So far, that's been working pretty well.

In Farewell, My Lovely, private investigator Philip Marlowe accidentally encounters an ex-con named Moose Malloy.  Moose is fresh out of prison and single-mindedly hunting for the love of his life, a singer named Velma.  He corrals Marlowe into helping him look for her, then accidentally commits a murder while trying to get information out of a black saloonkeeper.  Marlowe has to report the murder to the cops, but this is early 1940s California, and nobody really cares about an accidental murder of a black man who wasn't rich or famous or important in anyway.  Marlowe is told to forget about it, and the cops will track down Moose in their own good time.  The injustice bothers him, and he makes a lot of snide remarks about it to various authorities, to no real avail.

But Marlowe keeps getting sucked back into Moose's quest to find Velma.  Sometimes things happen to him that seem unconnected to Moose, like getting hit on the head and waking up to discover a murder, or getting hit on the head and waking up in a private hospital for recovering drug addicts.  But he starts to realize everything is all connected, eventually.  It feels for quite a while like a meandering spiral of a story, but that spiral is getting pulled tighter and tighter and tighter like a watch spring the whole time.

Particularly Good Bits:

I didn't say anything.  I lit my pipe again.  It makes you look thoughtful when you are not thinking (p. 91).

Aster Drive had a long smooth curve there and the houses on the inland side were just nice houses, but on the canyon side they were great silent estates, with twelve foot walls and wrought-iron gates and ornamental hedges; and inside, if you could get inside, a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-proof containers just for the upper classes (p. 119-120).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG-16 for violence, including not-overly-detailed descriptions of some gory murders, as well as innuendo (mainly in dialog) here and there, some bad language, and the aforementioned casual racism and some racial slurs common in the era.  This is hardboiled detective fiction from the 1940s, so it's not actually smutty, but most of the characters Marlowe encounters are not nice people.

This has been my 6th book read and reviewed for my fifth Classics Club list.

"Secrets of the Revolution" by Megan Soja

This second book in the Harbor of Spies series by Megan Soja did not disappoint!  It builds upon the first book, Spark of the Revolution, but could also be read as a stand-alone.  (But you do find out how the first book ends, if you care about spoilage.)

This book centers around William Abbott, older brother of the main female character of the first book.  His plans for the future entirely change with the receipt of a single letter, and he wholeheartedly embraces the Patriot cause as a result.  He stays in Boston and becomes a spy.

Along the way, he meets Hannah Pierce, who runs her aging father's apothecary shop.  Not only is she keeping her father's failing health and mind a secret, but she becomes involved in the growing Patriot spy ring as well.

And, of course, William and Hannah fall in love.

I especially enjoyed how many real historical people, places, and events Soja includes in this series.  And I appreciate how the Christian faith of both main characters grew and changed over the course of the book.  I liked book two even better than book one, and I'm glad I'm only halfway through the series, because that means I still have two books to look forward to!

Particularly Good Bits:

Silence hovered between them, begging to be filled (p. 29).

"Perhaps many memories hold a touch of the bittersweet, but I believe that makes them all the more precious.  They remind us of the experiences that shaped us.  And in recognizing how fleeting and fragile life is, they spur us on to fully live each day that God gives us" (p. 91).

It was not a failure to close one chapter of her life and begin another (p. 276).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for sweet romance including lightly described kisses, plus some descriptions of mild violence.  No cussing or smut.

This has been my 7th book read for my #RevolutionaryWarReads challenge!