NOTE: After further consideration, I've decided not to continue to review every book or short story I read. I don't think anyone reads my reviews anyway, particularly on this blog. My life became very stressful at the end of 2022, when my spouse broke the top of his left femur, leading to an emergency partial hip replacement, three dislocations within the next seven weeks, a revision surgery two weeks later, and eight weeks after that in a heavy metal and plastic brace. There was barely any time for reading, let alone writing reviews of all I read.
I will continue to write reviews for any book I receive through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Those reviews are also posted in my LibraryThing accounts (one concentrates on children's books), as well as reviews for other books I deem worthy (particularly any book challenged or banned here in Texas). In this blog, I will continue to list (and count) all the books and short stories I read, although I will probably not enter all of these into my LibraryThing accounts.
The Spanish Daughter by Lorena Hughes (February) - Amazon Prime Reading, fiction
Twinkle Twinkle Daylight Star by Elizabeth Everett, illustrated by Beatriz Castro (February) - children's board book, early reviewer
Rhyming couplets in the meter of the well-known nursery song of the title provide facts about the sun, the daytime star in our solar system. The illustrations by Beatriz Castro include diverse children. I especially like the shading of light in the child's bedroom at the beginning and end of the book.
This children's board book by former classroom teacher Elizabeth Everett is from Science Naturally, a publisher of STEM books for young readers. The book is also available in a bilingual English/Spanish edition (which I wish I had requested).
Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty by Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe (March) - Amazon Prime Reading, nonfiction
CNN anchor and CBS 60 Minutes journalist Anderson Cooper is the great-great-great-grandson of the tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. Along with historian and novelist Katherine Howe, he traces the history of his family. This is an excellent nonfiction counterpart to the fiction books I've read about Vanderbilts and their descendants (see A Well-Behaved Woman below as well as American Duchess).
The Rail Splitter by John Cribb (March) - early reviewer, advance reader edition
Excellent biographical novel about the early years of Abraham Lincoln. It starts in the summer of 1826, when he was 17 and living with his father, stepmother, and step-siblings in the Indiana frontier. It ends in December 1859, when he was a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, and thinking about running for President of the United States. It's the prequel to author John Cribb's Old Abe, which covers the campaign and presidency. The short chapters and conversational tone make the book easy to read.
A Well-Behaved Woman: A Novel of the Vanderbilts by Therese Fowler (April) - Amazon Prime Reading,
A biographical novel about socialite Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, A Well-Behaved Woman paints her in a little better light than American Duchess (about her daughter Consuelo Vanderbilt Spencer-Churchill Balsan). As with that book, I had a hard time getting interested in the first world problems of the incredibly wealthy. Late in life, Alva is involved in the women's suffrage movement, but the book ends at that point.
The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn (April)
The Diamond Eye is historical fiction by Kate Quinn about the real Lyudmila "Mila" Pavlichenko, a female Soviet sniper in World War II who became a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt during a goodwill tour in 1942. Parts of the book read like a biographical novel, but other parts are straight fiction. Be sure to read Quinn's author's note at the end of the book, where she details what's real and what's not. Quinn's primary source (she provides a bibliography of further reading at the book's end, as well as some historic photos) was Pavlichenko's own memoir, Lady Death.
The Lioness of Leiden by Robert Loewen (April) - early reviewer
The Lioness of Leiden is clearly a labor of love by its debut author, Robert Loewen. In it, the retired lawyer relays the writings and stories told by his mother-in-law, Hetty Steenhuis Kraus (1920-1994), a Leiden (Netherlands) University student who served as a courier in the Dutch Resistance during the Nazi occupation in the early 1940s.
I would agree with some other reviewers that the other characters in the book are not particularly well-developed, but that is not surprising, given that Hetty "did not like talking about her wartime experiences because of the painful memories it elicited." More biographical novel than historical fiction, the chapters are short, and it is an easy and compelling read.
© Amanda Pape - 2023
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