A few months ago, I was helping pack up my father’s house because, at age ninety-two, he was moving to a retirement home. He had always been a great reader and bibliophile, so we had to go through his library and decide what we would keep and what we would give away. I stumbled on an old paperback of Rosemunde Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers, which must have belonged to Dad’s late girlfriend. 

Published in 1987, The Shell Seekers was an international bestseller. I hadn’t read it in decades and had forgotten what a jewel of a book it was – a 500-page tome of a family saga. Rereading it around a recent Christmastime, I couldn’t wait to go upstairs in the evening and delve back into its pages  despite being surrounded by family and friends,   

The Shell Seekers has beautiful descriptions and many memorable characters. The story reflects the tapestry of life — good times and bad, heartbreak, and passion. Read More→

It’s never too soon to introduce young readers to classic authors. Angelica Shirley Carpenter’s The Secret Gardens of Frances Hodgson Burnett, a picture book biography (Bushel & Peck Books, 2024) does so in an immensely engaging way.

Vivid illustrations by Helena Pérez García that burst with colorful expression on every page. Angelica presents the story of Frances Hodgson’s insecure childhood on both sides of the Atlantic, and her challenges and triumphs as a writer.

Marrying Dr. Swan Burnett, having two sons, experiencing triumph as well as hardships and tragedies and writing through it all is part of the fascinating story of this author’s life. Frances’s story is one of perseverance, finding moments of joy in complicated circumstances, and the solace of creative pursuit. Read More→

In the 1920s, urban American women experimented with sexual freedom more openly than ever. Popular novels by writers — male and female — held up a mirror to the times. Despite its provocative title, the forgotten bestselling 1928 novel, Bad Girl by Viña Delmar, wasn’t one of them.

Dorothy, or “Dot,” as she’s familiarly called, has one instance of premarital sex, marries the guy (who’s not a bad sort, but not very bright), and after a respectable period of time, becomes pregnant. The novel is then preoccupied with her pregnancy and childbirth. The cover of a later edition, at right, sensationalizes the contents, as was typical of pulp novels.

There’s nothing scandalous about this middling novel, but the realities of a young wife’s pregnancy and her experiences in a birthing hospital were enough to catch the eyes of The New England Watch and Ward Society. Read More→

Ramie Targoff begins Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance (Knopf, 2024), her fascinating exploration of four female writers of the English Renaissance, not with a reference to a 16th-century woman, but to Virginia Woolf.

The title of Targoff’s book comes from Woolf’s assertion that if Shakespeare had had a sister, whom she names Judith Shakespeare, who shared his talent for writing, she never would have been able to achieve anything like her brother’s success, given the oppressive conditions women faced in sixteenth and seventeenth century England.

In fact, Woolf claims, she would have “gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at … so thwarted and hindered by other people … she must have lost her health and sanity.” Read More→

The Paris Bookseller by Kerry Maher is a novelization of the life of Sylvia Beach, who in 1919 cofounded the legendary bookstore Shakespeare and Company. She’s also known for publishing Ulysses by James Joyce in 1922, at great personal and financial risk.

This review of The Paris Bookseller is contributed by N.J. Maher, from her site, Herstory Revisted: Biofiction Book Reviews. Reprinted by permission.

Certain people stick with you, whether you meet them in person, or, as with historical fiction, you meet them on the page. Such is the case for me with the protagonist in The Paris Bookseller, by Kerri Maher. It isn’t often a reader gets a front-row seat to a period in literary history, but Maher gives us one through Sylvia Beach, an American living in post-World War I Paris.

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