Review: Lotharingia by Lara Byrne

Synopsis: Against the backdrop of the Investiture Controversy, a young woman is forging her own special destiny.

AD 1062. One day warrior Countess Matilde will rule like a man, and inherit her mother's mysterious relics, but she cannot escape the marriage arranged for her.

When her enigmatic overlord King Heinrich rescues her from her abusive husband, friendship blossoms into forbidden love. But her personal journey has only just begun.

A medieval tale of love, political intrigue, and relic hunting.

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A fictional account of the early life of Matilda of Canossa, a formidable women who stood up for what she believed in, in the face of opposition from more powerful political players. And that is where my interest started and stopped.

By the author's own words, the plot is entirely fictitious and is her own creative attempt to tie up "historical" loose ends, to provide both herself and the reader a semblance of a satisfactory explanation / conclusion to historical events that actually presented none and to fill in gaps in the historical chronology.

Unfortunately, it read more like a medieval Dan Brown novel than what could have been a more considered and structured historical novel of a woman at the centre of one of the most important political and religious events of not only her time but of our own.

To throw in relic hunting and an undocumented illicit love affair in order to explain things or tie up loose ends is really doing your subject a great disservice - and just didn't work on so many levels.

I will be labeling this one as alternate historical fiction - as that is what it represents, especially for those of us who have actually taken the time to get to know Matilda and invest in her story a little more seriously. I won't be pursuing the second in this series.

If you are truly interest in Matilda, then invest in "The Military Leadership of Matilda of Canossa 1046-1115" by David J. Hay or even "Tuscan Countess: The Life and Extraordinary Times of Matilda of Canossa" by Michele K. Spike

Witch In The White City by Nick Wisseman

Synopsis: Thousands of exhibits. Millions of visitors. One supernatural killer.

Neva's goals at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago are simple. Enjoy the spectacle—perhaps the greatest the United States has ever put on (the world’s fair to end all world’s fairs!). Perform in the exposition’s Algerian Theatre to the best of her abilities. And don't be found out as a witch.

Easy enough … until the morning she looks up in the theatre and sees strangely marked insects swarming a severed hand in the rafters. Before she can scream, the bugs drop and swarm her. And every one of them seems to have a stinger.

They strike fast—it only takes them a moment to inject her with so much venom that the same strange marks begin to rise on her skin. She's horrified, but there's worse to come: once the insects disperse, a Columbian Guard notices her rashes and warns that five people with similar sores have been murdered and dismembered. Before they died, the victims also seem to have lost their minds.

Neva considers fleeing the exposition. But that won't stop her from going mad. So she marshals her powers and searches for the killer. Soon enough, it becomes clear he's searching for her too.

This is truly a blend of real life events, alternate history fiction, fantasy fiction with a splash of the supernatural. If this is your genre, you will love this.!

I will admit that, personally, I guess I am a bit of an old-school fantasy fiction reader (Mists of Avalon, Lord of the Rings, etc), and my only real alternate history outing was a poorly done book about Anne Boleyn and a rather good one from Colin Taber on the Viking settlement of the US. So it was with a little bit of trepidation that I agreed to give this a go when offered by the author, Nick Wisseman.

The premise certainly was intriguing - being a non-US resident, I was not familiar with the names given to these "expos" - so that alone sent me scurrying away to do some more reading. I was delighted to know that this was a real event!

In 1893, an expo (or exposition) was held in Chicago in 1893 - ostensibly to celebrate Columbus' arrival 400 years previous. Here's me thinking it was an expo on actual Columbian culture! Anyway, from my additional reading, the setting is Wisseman's novel really taps into this event, and the events that occurred slightly before and after.

The Columbian Exposition covered 690 acres, made up on nearly 200 temporary neoclassical style buildings, canals and lagoons. The facade of every building was draped in white, giving rise to it's name - the white city. Artists and musicians, and people and cultures from 46 countries were featured in exhibits and many also made depictions and works of art inspired by the exposition. The expo ran for six months - May to October.

There were many "firsts" featured at this expo - the ferris wheel, electricity (which powered the event), the edison kinetoscope, morse code, the travelator and the telegram.

So, was there really a serial killer stalking the exposition grounds. Well, yes and no. Around this time lived a rather odd fellow called HH Holmes, who, it is speculated, may have killed as many as 200 people, in his "hotel" situated about three miles away from the expo. It is said he began construction of this hotel about ten years prior and may have begun his killings in the few years leading up to the expo - he is reported to have left Chicago about a year later when questions began to be asked about not only missing persons but from supplied about unpaid bills.

It is a slow build as the storyline unfolds, with multiple protagonists, each with their own agenda, who both help and hinder Neva (our heroine) in her quest to battle this supernatural enemy before she too, becomes one of its many victims. Throughout it all are the parallel (and challenging) themes of inequality, racism, political and social change, new ideas (including spiritualism) and concepts.

However, the Columbian Exposition was a mirage, an illusion, a temporary idyll - "Chicago changed its spots for a time, but not for long"  and "when the mask comes off, everyone is laid bare" - how very apt. For after the exposition's closure and subsequent fire, the idle smokestacks were fired up once again, blanketing the city in a perpetual grey cloak of fog that hid much from view.

The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch review – the future is medieval

From Books | The Guardian:

Joan of Arc and Christine de Pizan are reimagined in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, in this compellingly ambitious examination of gender, semiotics and warfare.

One premise of The Book of Joan is that the 21st century, for all its technological advances, has returned us to pre-modern levels of brutality and strife. There are children fighting once again; there are religious crusades; land is seized at will. Yuknavitch takes three real people from medieval France and reimagines them in a post-apocalyptic future.

The narrative mode is to show through dramatic, often moving scenes, and then to tell, reflecting on them analytically. This disjunction can be jarring, but it’s knowingly done, because the book’s style is itself a theme.

Review: The United States of Vinland

I loved this "what if" story of the founding of the USA by the Vikings.  I read it in two days - my attention was held from the start.  I have read the sagas of the founding of both Iceland and Greenland, so this extension (if you like) of the Viking journey to the north American seaboard is not really that far-fetched.  In fact, there is some conjecture that "others" had reached these shores long before Columbus - this explores one of those ideas - and well.

The Landing is the story of the first arrivals and their struggles to establish themselves in this new land after such a perilous and tragic journey. We meet the cast of characters and discover that sometimes new beginnings are a lot harder than first visualised.

I am so looking forward to the second installment which, I believe, begins 20 years after the first landings.

Colin's style of writing is easy to read and flowing - not too bogged down with over descriptive narrative and of the land and its peoples, leaving just enough for your imagination to take full flight - which is what a good novel should do.

Highly recommended for those interested in history with a twist.

Colin's website: The Fall of Ossard

About the Author - in his own words:

"I’ve spent most of my life in Australia, sometimes on the west coast, sometimes on the east. Currently, I live in Perth, where I drink far too much coffee, while writing and looking after hundreds of young sapling trees. I also work in a bookshop to keep the cash coming in. Over the years, I’ve done many things, from working in banking, retail, publishing, to dish-pigging, event management, and even running a tree farm. Through it all, I’ve written."