C.P. Lesley's Blog, page 53

The Recipes Project

I know, it’s Valentine’s Day. If I’m going to write about recipes, they should have chocolate in them. Better yet, who wants to cook on Valentine’s Day? A lovely meal in a nice restaurant with Sir Percy—that’s more the ticket.

But after another week of snow and ice and a day without heat, not to mention another cold sent into high gear by the day without heat, I’m just about ready to pull the covers over my head and sleep until spring finally arrives, if it ever does. Yes, there will be chocolates (Éclat,  no less) and a nice meal, assuming we don’t get another blizzard. But for today’s post I decided to feature another blog, one that I learned about when I received an invitation to contribute later this year: The Recipes Project: Food, Magic, Science, and Medicine

For most of history, these four areas of life have been closely connected. Food as medicine, love potions and poisons, “receipts” (the old word for recipes) that were equally likely to address cures for gallstones or blends of pot pourri or pomanders as quince jam or “how to roast your fowl.”

And if you look around, you will even find some posts on chocolate....

The Vacation from Reading

It happened last Monday. The first sign of trouble came when I tried to read my own revised text of The Winged Horse and nearly put myself to sleep. I set it down, depressed. Was my book that bad? Were my critique partners gritting their teeth every time I sent them a chapter? What about the hapless friend on whom I had just unleashed this beast with a request for comments? Should I give up the idea that I could write a decent novel? What about the unfortunates who had already shelled out for the first two?

Well, the world is full of authors, even if I wasn’t sure I could count myself among them. So I set Winged Horse aside and picked up a novel I had started reading a while back. I won’t give the title. I enjoy the book more than not, but I had noticed some writing problems that were causing the book to drag. It dragged even more on Monday, to the point where I gave up after three pages, deciding the thing was no better than Winged Horse.

I moved on to Letters from Skye, which I read last summer and am now rereading preparatory to interviewing Jessica Brockmole, the author, in a couple of weeks. Nope. My brain refused to warm up to that, either. At this point, I began to suspect I was in one of those rare moods when I did not want to read. You see, I love Letters from Skye: tore through it in two days the first time. Ditto my next attempt: Laughter of Dead Kings, which although not the best of the Vicki Bliss mysteries is nonetheless a lot of fun. 

By then, I recognized what had happened. If Elizabeth Peters couldn’t draw me in, no one could. I gave up. Thank goodness for YouTube and social media.

It wasn’t the first time I’d taken a mini-vacation from books. Even under normal circumstances, my reading has a hierarchy based on the amount of mental energy required. If I’m really humming, I read history—even history in Russian, although that demands a day without work, since there’s no way I can spend a full day editing academic prose, then relax with a nice historical study in Russian. Doesn’t matter how good the book is, it might as well be a dose of Sominex.

More often, I read my own books, if they have reached the stage when I can approach them as e-books, or other people’s novels—new ones first, then the beloved old friends. Excluding the history books, that was the progression I followed on Monday. But I just couldn’t get my brain in gear even for the reading equivalent of comfort food: books I have read before and loved.

And that happens so rarely that it still surprises me when it does. Because I grew up as the kid who always had her nose in a book, the kid whose parents had to force her to play outdoors, the kid you had to ask twice (or six times) to do this or that, because her head was in Neverland with Peter Pan or London with the Banks children and Mary Poppins. These days, I do my chores without being prompted, but I’m still happiest when I’m immersed in stories—especially when I’m the one making them up.

Fortunately, my vacations from reading don’t last long. By Tuesday, I was again delighting in Letters from Skye and Laughter of Dead Kings. When we lost our power on Wednesday, and I could read but not work, I discovered that The Winged Horse was in not nearly as bad shape as I feared. With luck, I’ll get back to the unnamed novel in a few days; I’m sure it will move much faster when I do.

And I’ve begun plotting The Swan Princess, which is sending tendrils out into books 4 and 5. Gotta keep those creative juices flowing.

Besides, Nasan and her pals get so cranky when they have to sit on the sidelines for long....

Bright Sleuths

I have to admit that, when I read that agents had complained about JJ Marsh’s Behind Closed Doors—the first book in her Beatrice Stubbs series—being “too cerebral,” my first thought was, “Where do I buy it?” I grew up reading Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and their contemporaries (as well as a ton of historical fiction). In later years, I added Elizabeth Peters, Elizabeth George, Anne Perry, Laurie R. King, and Tasha Alexander to my list of “must read” authors. I have no interest whatsoever in hard-boiled detective novels, never mind the kind that come drenched in blood and gore. Give me a good “cozy” any day—unless the book involves Mary Russell leaping from rooftop to rooftop or Amelia Peabody wielding her famous parasol. I can tolerate some action, so long as it’s the right kind.

Having spent a couple of decades banging my head against the wall as I learned to write a novel, I could imagine that the agents reacting to JJ Marsh meant they wanted more sensation, more emotion, less focus on problem solving, and so on. But really, how much emotion do you need in a police procedural? Detectives have to deal with murder every day; they can’t afford to let it get to them. You don’t see the cops on CSI sobbing in corners; you see them talking about DNA analysis and getting on with the job. So I would have been perfectly happy with Beatrice Stubbs even if she did no more than solve the crime, so long as the author could craft a decent story and distinguish Zürich and Amsterdam from New York.

In fact, JJ Marsh does much more than this. Beatrice has her issues: she’s older and less attractive than she would like to be; and she has a history of emotional problems, never an encouraging sign for police supervisors. Her career, as a result, has stalled. The job in Zürich offers Beatrice a chance to redeem herself, but only if she can fight her way past a colleague determined to obstruct her mission and show her up, not least to convince Interpol that the local staff could have solved this case without outside assistance.

Beatrice rallies her team, never quite sure who’s on her side and who’s not, and sets off to tackle a series of complex, unusual, well-plotted crimes that lead her across half of Europe even as the murderer continues to pile up victims. If that’s “too cerebral,” bring me more Beatrice Stubbs.

And in fact, I have more Beatrice Stubbs waiting on my e-reader. All I need is another batch of free time. I finished Behind Closed Doors before Thanksgiving but held off on posting about the book because I intended (and still intend) to read the sequels, Raw Material and Tread Softly. Thanks to interview preparation, GoodReads challenges, and research for The Winged Horse and The Swan Princess, I haven’t quite caught up. But I will in a few weeks. This series is one of my Hidden Gems, and if you like smart detective novels in slightly unusual settings, it may soon be one of yours.

JJ Marsh is a member of the Triskele (pron. Trisk-EEL) Books writers’ cooperative, and she sent me the copy of Behind Closed Doors for my honest review. I liked it enough that I purchased the next two books in the series and plan to keep an eye out for her novels in the future. Other Triskele authors whose books I have read and enjoyed include Liza Perrat (Spirit of Lost Angels, Wolfsangel) and Gillian Hamer, whose The Charter I discussed in “Long Shadows.”

If you’d like to know more about writers’ cooperatives as a stage between self-publishing and commercial publishing, two good sources in addition to this blog include  The Triskele Trail and “Why Self-Publishers Should Go It Alone, Together,” posted by Jordan Rosenfeld to Joel Friedlander’s wonderfully informative blog, The Book Designer.

UPDATE: I started Raw Material last night, and a hundred pages later I was begging Sir Percy to tear the e-reader from my hands so that I could stop reading and go to sleep. You have been warned...

Revisiting the Jazz Age

As I noted in my review on BookLikes, The Great Gatsby was never one of my favorite novels. I read it too young, before I had much clue about life or people or much of anything, and under the wrong circumstances—as a “classic,” according to my eleventh-grade school curriculum. After I grew up and began writing my own novels, I kept encountering passages from it in the craft books I was reading. I kept thinking I should go back and give it another try. It was short, it was beautifully written, and most of all, it was an American classic. Alas, even after I downloaded it to my iPad, I still could not make myself give it a go. Those teenage wounds strike deep.

That was true until last year, when I was scanning the Algonquin catalogue and saw the entry for Lee Smith’s Guests on Earth, the subject of last week’s post and my latest interview for New Books in Historical Fiction. Guests on Earth deals with the last years of Zelda Fitzgerald, whom I—like many people—knew only as the template for Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. I had no idea Zelda ended her days in a mental hospital, still less that she was a talented writer, dancer, and painter in her own right.

So, when the Dead Writers Society decided to pick The Great Gatsby as its group read for January, the very month in which I was scheduled to interview Lee Smith, the die was cast. I had to stop procrastinating and tackle Fitzgerald’s magnum opus, classic or not.

And … I was pleasantly surprised. No, I was amazed. Fitzgerald describes the privileged, money-obsessed, emotionally twisted world of his imagination in prose so lucid and exquisite that it haunts me long after I have set aside its 150 pages and moved on to other, meatier tomes.

The book is not perfect. It suffers from the racism and antisemitism that were endemic in the 1920s, as well as a sexism so deep that it is not even openly expressed (although Zelda, consciously or otherwise, rebelled against it) but simply lingers in the air like a miasma. Yet it also contains gems like these, with Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby speaking of Daisy:

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of—” I hesitated.
“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.
That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it…. High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl.

This tells us something, not simply about Daisy—perhaps least about Daisy—but about Nick and Gatsby and the society they live in, in which money rules, and old money especially. This image, of the princess in a white palace, also had a special resonance for Fitzgerald in his courtship of Daisy (and annoyed Zelda no end), as Lee Smith explains in her interview. It is great writing, and it deserves the designation of “classic.”

All of which goes to show that sometimes age does bring, if not wisdom, at least a new appreciation of things that at one time went unremarked. I’m glad I revisited Fitzgerald’s world. Perhaps I’ll stop by again sometime.



Challenge Update
As of January 24, 2014, I have read four books for History Challenge 2014: A Sail to the Past (Elizabeth Kendall, Balanchine and the Lost Muse; Nancy Shields Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia; Ian Mortimer, A Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England; and Christina Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin). You can find my reviews on GoodReads and BookLikes. So I have attained the level of Scholar (my grad school professors would be proud). Next up is Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe, as I start to think about the plot for my next novel, The Swan Princess.

I owned those four before January 1, 2014, so they also count for the Reduce the TBR Challenge, together with Bernard Cornwell's The Last Kingdom and Death of Kings. So I am one-quarter of the way toward the Mont Blanc level of 24 books. And I'm tearing through Behind the Shattered Glass—by a perennial favorite author of mine, Tasha Alexander, which is another from the TBR pile. If you'd like to know more about this series, check out her interview from this time last year.

Lots of books to go, but I have hope that I may actually make it through!

Broken Vessels

New Books in Historical Fiction spends lots of time in foreign places. In our fifteen months on the air, we have visited Russia, Scotland, Italy, Latvia, Sweden, China, Malaysia, and the Byzantine Empire—sometimes more than once. We have traveled to Elizabethan England with James Forrester and to Morocco with Laurie R. King. We have even made a stop in Nazi Germany. Future destinations include more trips to England (Saxon, Norman, and Regency), as well as Moorish Spain and Central Asia at a time when the Silk Road was in full swing. And that is far from the full agenda for 2014.

But not all exciting journeys end up overseas. We took a trip to Colonial Pennsylvania with Janet Olshewsky. This month, with Lee Smith’s masterful novel Guests on Earth, we visit the mountains of North Carolina, a world twice removed from our present existence—by time, obviously, since our genre is historical fiction, but also by that imperceptible but inescapable curtain that divides the sane from the insane.

That barrier, which seems so clear on the surface, turns out to be much less so in reality. Some of the characters in Guests on Earth do suffer from identifiable mental illnesses, and others from temporary emotional problems that would endanger their health if left untreated. But many, especially the female patients, seem less “crazy” than reluctant to accept society’s rigid limitations on their behavior. This is, after all, the 1930s and 1940s, when “good girls” were expected to stay chaste, marry young, bear often, and devote their lives to caring for husbands and children. Any deviation from that plan cast doubt on a woman’s sanity, and incarceration in a mental hospital or prison—even forced sterilization—might result.

Lee Smith is a stellar storyteller, both in person and on the page. Don’t miss her interview—or her book. The rest of this post, as usual, comes from the New Books in Historical Fiction site.

On the night of March 9, 1948, fire consumed the Central Building at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Although people at the time recognized that the fire had been set, the local police department never identified the arsonist. Among the nine women who died on a locked floor at the top of the building was Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife (by then, widow) of the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda’s storybook life had led her from the Beauty Ball of Montgomery, Alabama, to marriage at seventeen and the joys and excesses of the Jazz Age (a term coined by her husband). But the early 1930s brought repeated hospitalizations for schizophrenia. Whenever possible, Zelda wrote and painted and danced, yet she remains known to history primarily as the inspiration for Daisy Buchanan and other rich, spoiled, shallow Fitzgerald heroines.

In Guests on Earth (Algonquin Books, 2013), Lee Smith sets out to correct our images of Zelda. In doing so, she raises questions of what it means to be “crazy,” to be called crazy even if you just do a poor job of fitting in with society’s expectations, or to stand by—as family members must—while their loved ones are taken away to institutions and subjected, if with the best of intentions, to barbaric treatments that represent the “progressive” wisdom of the day. What kind of lives can these “guests on earth”—in Scott Fitzgerald’s words, “eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read”—construct in their moments of lucidity?

The characters in this novel—especially the narrator of the story, a young woman from New Orleans named Evalina Toussaint—exemplify both the ease with which we categorize people whose thinking we don’t understand and the extent to which we do so in error. In 1936, at the age of thirteen, Evalina responds to the death of her mother and brother by refusing to eat and by burning her arms. As a result, she spends the rest of her girlhood and much of her young womanhood as a patient, and ultimately a staff member, at Highland Hospital. There she meets Zelda Fitzgerald, together with a cast of troubled misfits, and herself spends some time on the locked floor of the Central Building. But Evalina also learns to play the piano at Highland, and her skills as an accompanist first take her away from the asylum, then bring her back. By the time you finish her story, you will understand why Lee Smith asks, “Are we not, in the end, all ‘guests on earth’?”

A Challenging 2014

I have taken part in reading challenges before, usually as part of the Dead Writers Society, a private Goodreads group. I signed up for two challenges for 2014 before realizing that they were actually being organized somewhere else on the Web. When I investigated, I found this site: http://klasikfanda.blogspot.com/2013/11/history-reading-challenge-2014-sail-to.html. I wasn’t sure I wanted to sign up, but then I figured, why not? All I had to do was write this post and link to it, then post updates from time to time. (There are also questions about each book, but I am not answering questions. You’ll just have to take my word that I read the books.)


So I hereby sign up for the History Reading Challenge 2014. Because I am a historian who is busy researching her current novel as well as planning to work on a new one before the year is out, I figure I will have no difficulty attaining the Historian level of seven books. Here are ten titles that I must read before December 31, 2013.


1. Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present
2. Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia
3. Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice
4. Medieval Islamic Medicine
5. The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England
6. The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia
7. Balanchine and the Lost Muse: Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer
8. Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia
9. Soldiers: A History of Men In Battle
10. Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe


Since January 1, I have finished Balanchine and the Lost Muse and read a quarter of Swans of the Kremlin, as well as one-third of The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England. Stay tuned for updates on the rest.

If you’re a member of Goodreads, you can find my review of Elizabeth Kendall’s Balanchine and the Lost Muse here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... I also tore through Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (#2), because it was due back at the library. That review is here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1....

I also plan to participate in the Reduce the TBR Challenge, although I have listed those books only on Goodreads. My to-be-read pile has become indecently large and grows every day (are they multiplying in the dark, like bunnies?). I’m  aiming to reduce the unread books (print and Kindle) by 24–36 before the end of the year.

The Checklist

Last year at this time, I had a short set of goals that I wanted to meet in 2013. These original goals were: 1. publish The Winged Horse (Legends of the Five Directions 2: East) and begin work on The Swan Princess (Legends 3: North); 2. expand the number of books issued through Five Directions Press; 3. do a better job of promoting my novels; 4. continue and extend my author interviews for New Books in Historical Fiction; and 5. post weekly on this blog. Just for fun, let’s see how I did.

Well, I did not publish The Winged Horse. Work got crazy in the middle of the year and stayed crazy through December, so it’s a miracle I didn’t abandon Legends altogether. But I did go from 1/3 of a rough draft to a complete draft, 1/3 of which is now revised. I need to finish the revisions, read the whole thing for style, give it to my critique partners for comments on the writing and to the historian of medieval Tatars who has promised to fact-check it. Then I will do a final round or two incorporating their corrections, typeset it, and get the book out by the middle of 2014 (I hope). On a more positive note, my ideas for The Swan Princess and, especially, The Vermilion Bird (Legends 4: South) have made huge strides since last year. Only book 5 is still a bit hazy, not least because it will depend on what eventually happens in book 3. So except for some research on Muscovite armies, medieval medicine, and the Lithuanian War of 1535–37, I should be able to dive immediately into book 3.

My slowness in finishing retarded the planned growth of Five Directions Press. Still, we made some progress. We brought out Ariadne Apostolou’s Seeking Sophia in June 2013 and added the e-book versions in December. Ariadne has close to final drafts of two novellas and a preliminary draft of a third, all tracing the different life paths followed by the friends of Seeking Sophia’s heroine. Sometime this year, we should publish all three novellas as a single book. Courtney J. Hall has changed her title and put in a ton of work on Some Rise by Sin (formerly Saving Easton), so we hope to get that one out in the first half of the year as well. With The Winged Horse, that will give us the seven titles by four authors that we hoped to reach by the end of 2013. Courtney is also planning a sequel to Some Rise by Sin.

With a growing number of books, promotion becomes in some ways easier, in others more important. Here I’m still struggling. The Goodreads group read for The Golden Lynx in March 2013 definitely helped sales; the crazy work schedule definitely didn’t. In August, I arranged with a local bookseller to carry the 5DP books, but even she can’t tell me whether she actually sold any. We’re still planning a series of bookmarks in the hope of generating interest and looking into more local events for 2014. I did attend the Slavic studies conference (and received an independent scholar lifetime achievement prize, in part on the strength of The Golden Lynx), where I sold several copies. I became more comfortable with Facebook and Twitter, although social media remain a work in progress for me. And the Unusual Historicals blog featured an interview with me last Sunday. Reduced prices on my e-books for a couple of weeks around Christmas garnered some additional sales. I remained active in several Goodreads groups focusing on readers and became active on Booklikes. Through Goodreads, Five Directions Press made contact with a fellow writers’ cooperative in the UK, Triskele Books, which resulted in a series of interviews and reviews for each cooperative as a group and for individual writers, including one of Seeking Sophia by Words with JAM. So we did improve our marketing, but we still have a long way to go.

One of my main forms of indirect promotion has been New Books in Historical Fiction (NBHF), which has picked up over the last year as publishers and authors discover us and the New Books Network more generally. From Julius Wachtel in January to James Forrester (Ian Mortimer) in December, I had a whole series of fascinating conversations with authors of historical fiction. Expanding from once a month to twice a month proved impossible, and I have no reason to think that will change in 2014, but I am already booked through August and have begun to receive great books unsolicited, so I anticipate another fun year of reading and chatting. Look for discussions with Lee Smith (Guests on Earth), Jessica Brockmole (Letters from Skye), James Aitcheson (Sworn Sword), Pamela Mingle (The Pursuit of Mary Bennet), Tara Conklin (The House Girl), and Bernard Cornwell (The Pagan Lord, Death of Kings, and 1356) in the first half of the year.

Other than NBHF, my biggest success in 2013 may have been maintaining this blog. I posted regularly every Friday, and I hope to do the same in 2014. I even have quite a few ideas that I didn’t need to use, so I should be good for posts until sometime in March. By then, I hope, inspiration will have struck once more.

Happy New Year! Thank you so much for reading my posts over the last eighteen months. I look forward to sharing some small part of 2014 with you, too.

Unusual Historicals

This week, the Unusual Historicals blog is featuring The Golden Lynx as part of its regular series of interviews with authors who write about less-familiar places and times. By the time you read this, the site should include an excerpt from chapter 1. On Sunday, December 29, the same site will post a Q&A with me about Lynx and the series of which it constitutes book 1.

For this, I owe a big thank you to Lisa J. Yarde, who walked me through the process of submitting my files, and to her fellow members of Unusual Historicals, a group that includes fifteen other writers. Of those fifteen, special mention goes to Kathryn Kopple, a Facebook friend whose posting of her own interview alerted me to the site’s existence.

The variety of subjects explored by these authors is impressive: eighth-century Norway, the Frankish kingdom, Ptolemaic Egypt, medieval Spain, Moorish Spain, the ancient Hittites, Troy, Rome and its Teutonic neighbors, ancient Ireland, the medieval West, fourteenth-century Scotland, and seventeenth-century Italy, as well as the American West and England in various periods. It’s encouraging to see such a range, especially in a publishing climate that seems to favor the tried-and-true.

So please, check out the excerpt from The Golden Lynx. Read my questions and answers. If you are not already following me on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Goodreads, and elsewhere, click on the links to change that. Sign up to keep updated on this blog, too. I post every Friday, and I love receiving comments or just knowing that someone has taken the time to read what I write.

But don’t stop there. Click around the Unusual Historicals site, which has been running since 2006. Read the excerpts and the interviews, the posts on historical information (medieval games, Islamic gardens) and on writing. You may find some new authors whose books speak to you and encounter new elements of the human experience in distant times and places that you never considered worthy of your attention until now.

Isn’t that, in the end, what reading historical fiction is all about?

Note that you can find other interviews with me, each one emphasizing different points, conducted by Nicky Ticky, L.M. David, Diane V. Mulligan, and Liza Perrat of Triskele Books. The last includes a review.

And Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, and a wonderful new year to all my readers. May 2014 bring you whatever your heart desires.

Fact and Fiction

Most historical novelists do not first train as historians. That’s probably a good thing, for the most part: historical novels have to succeed as novels first, and as James Forrester notes in my latest interview for New Books in Historical Fiction, historians have to “undo the research” enough to relax and have fun making up whatever they need for the sake of the story. It’s important to keep the details straight and the surroundings realistic, but a light hand on the reins is more important still. The reader who spends the evening asleep over your book may thank you for the pick-me-up but won’t, most likely, finish your novel.

But historians who grasp this essential point—and James Forrester, aka Ian Mortimer, definitely does—can enrich their fiction with their deep and passionate interest in the past. Good historians understand how the past differed from the present and—especially important for fiction—where the cracks and tensions lay in the world being portrayed. The popular image of Elizabethan England is one of peace and tranquillity, religious toleration, Shakespeare and Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake. The reality was quite different. Elizabeth’s fragile polity placed a high value on loyalty—political, religious, and personal—and her subjects paid a high price if the state decided they had failed to meet that standard. High stakes, harsh demands, and intense, prolonged, complicated conflict—these are the elements on which fiction thrives, and Forrester handles them with aplomb. 

The rest of this post is adapted from the New Books in Historical Fiction site.

London, December 1563. Elizabeth I—Gloriana, the Virgin Queen—has ruled England for five years, but her throne is far from secure. Even though Elizabeth succeeded her half-sister Mary, the idea of a woman sovereign still troubles much of the populace. And although the burnings of Protestants at Smithfield ceased with Elizabeth’s accession, religion remains a source of dissatisfaction and uncertainty. Catholics, once protected by the crown, find themselves subject to unwarranted search and seizure, to having their ears nailed to the pillory or sliced from their heads, to arrest and confinement in the Tower on the merest suspicion of intent to foment unrest. Not all the plots are imaginary, either: several rebellions with religious overtones punctuate Elizabeth’s reign. 

Amid this atmosphere of mistrust, William Harley, Clarenceux King of Arms, sits in the light of a single candle, listening to the rain outside his study window, his robe pulled tight against the December chill. A knock on the door sparks in him the fear that would later be familiar to victims of the Soviet secret police: who would demand entrance after curfew other than government troops bent on hauling him in for his allegiance to the pope? But the queen’s forces cannot be denied, so with considerable trepidation Clarenceux orders his servant to open the door.

In fact, his visitor is a friend, a betrayed man determined to pass on his secret mission to Clarenceux. In accepting, Clarenceux has no idea that the mission places at risk his life, his health, his family, his friends, and the safety of the realm. The price of loyalty is high, and betrayal lurks in every corner.

The Clarenceux Trilogy—Sacred Treason, The Roots of Betrayal, and The Final Sacrament—is the work of James Forrester, the pen name of the historian Ian Mortimer, author of The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England and other works.

Those interested in Henry Machyn’s chronicle can find the text online, hosted by the University of Michigan Libraries.

The Love of a Child

It’s always exciting to see a book launch. That’s especially true when the book is one’s own, but watching a fellow writer’s book grow from concept to completion is equally satisfying. So I take a special pleasure in announcing the e-book release of Seeking Sophia, by my friend and writing group member Ariadne Apostolou. The print version has been available since the summer. You can find links to all current formats at the Five Directions Press site.

Seeking Sophia, for those who haven’t encountered it yet, tells the story of Kleio Platon—a former radical feminist and urban commune member who when the story opens seems to have it all. She lives in New York, she works for the United Nations, she travels the world, she has a hot boyfriend who jets in from Buenos Aires or Paris to sweep her off her feet at regular intervals (but not so regular that they get on each other’s nerves). Yes, the boyfriend is commitment-phobic—distressing given that Kleio’s biological clock is ticking—but Kleio herself sees certain advantages to their intermittent relationship. And at least she has escaped the over-regulated world of her childhood, with its assumption that she could want nothing more from life than to keep house for some man.

This is a novel, so by the end of chapter 1, Kleio’s happy bubble has burst. She discovers her boyfriend is two-timing her with men, she receives a diagnosis of metastatic cancer, and her dream job goes to someone else. The cancer surgery stops her biological clock dead, shattering her dreams of motherhood. Just as Kleio reaches her nadir, her friend Mal from commune days invites her to go on a vacation to Greece, the home of Kleio’s grandparents. There, at the sacred spring of Aria, Kleio glimpses the possibility of a different future, one that will be uniquely her own.

Kleio doesn’t have a plan, exactly, but she has a guide: the motto from a fortune cookie. “Plant a tree. Write a book. Build a house. Raise a child”—attributed to Confucius and many others throughout the centuries. Her path leads her into the thicket of international adoption, a world that does not embrace single mothers of a certain age. But Kleio once fought nuclear-power plants. She is not the kind of woman to tolerate outdated prejudices that stand in the way of her achieving her goals. She is searching for Wisdom—in Greek, Sophia—and she seeks it in the love of an abandoned child.

It may seem self-serving for me to call this book a “hidden gem,” since the publisher is our group effort and the author and I have traded writing samples for the last five years. Indeed, my input (and my editing) are woven into the fabric of the novel. But the end result is all Ariadne’s. And in truth, this book is a hidden gem—a debut novel by a writer with an extraordinary gift for description and characterization. It deserves your attention as a reader.

You need not take it from me. JJ Marsh, whose Beatrice Stubbs mysteries are hidden gems themselves, has given it a lovely review in the online magazine Words with JAM. If you don’t know Words with JAM, check it out. They have lots of interesting writer interviews and reviews, among them conversations with Kate Mosse, David Sedaris, and P.D. James. You can sign up to be notified when new posts go up.