Coming to this highly hyped book by Jessie Burton later than other keen historical fiction readers, I had to try and avoid the effusive five pages of blurbs in my edition and make my own mind about it.

Country girl, Nella Oortman, has an arranged marriage with Johannes Brandt, a successful VOC (Dutch East India Company) merchant and she moves into his house in Amsterdam. Her husband is strangely distant and seems to avoid her and she is left to struggle on her own with the house’s other inhabitants; her husband’s enigmatic sister and manager, Marin, sassy maid Cornelia and Johannes’ black manservant, Otto. Johannes gives Nella a cabinet house as a wedding present and she finds a miniaturist to make furnishings for it, but when it becomes clear the miniaturist knows about the strange secrets and undercurrents in the Brandt household, Nella is alarmed as to what her future holds.

The historical background was brilliant and I was thoroughly immersed in the atmosphere of Amsterdam during the era of the VOC and also the mores and societal strictures of the late 1600s. Likewise, I loved the concept of the cabinet house which was based on the real one in the Rijksmuseum that belonged to a woman with the same name as the leading character. Equally fascinating was the mysterious and elusive miniaturist.

Apart from Nella, and perhaps Cornelia, the other leading characters had frustrating qualities that didn’t create as much sympathy as perhaps they deserved. Johannes and Marin were both distant and spoke in riddles and their elusiveness did not combine well with certain scenes involving them which were graphic 21st Century. The practical business matters relating to sugar in the Brandt warehouse, which is a major focus of the plot, also felt out of sync with the magic realism aspects.

This a strange hybrid of a novel - absolutely brilliant for its inventiveness and on the historical side, less satisfying or convincing elsewhere. Still, a highly memorable read not easily forgotten.

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I love a good time-travel or time-switch story and I downloaded this novel by Pamela Harsthorne from my local library’s e-books catalogue.  (The attractive cover was a good drawcard.)

Grace is a young woman who has been living in Indonesia and has just inherited her godmother Lucy’s house in York. She moves in with the aim of doing it up to sell, but almost as soon as she arrives she is haunted by strange whisperings for someone called “Bess” and the bizarre appearance of rotten apples in unexpected places.

It isn’t long before she finds herself being possessed by the mind of Hawise, a servant of the Tudor age, who may be the mother of Bess. Grace struggles to deal with these out-of-time experiences, and resorts to consulting both a sympathetic modern-day witch as well as a sceptical psychologist, who believes her visions are all part of post-traumatic syndrome suffered after Grace was caught up in the famous Boxing Day Tsunami in Thailand.

There is much to enjoy in this story, especially the vividness of life in York during a long-gone age, but Hawise is a warmer and more appealing heroine than Grace, who is “all about me” and I really don’t know what her attractive neighbour Drew sees in her. Drew’s daughter Sophie is the usual teen in identity crisis at the mercy of some wicked Goths. (With Goths in my family who are nothing like the stereotypes, I still despair of the clichés and myths surrounding them!)

As is often the case with complicated time-switch or parallel universe stories, it feels a bit hasty towards the end and certain aspects aren’t resolved to the reader’s satisfaction. In this case, some historical evidence that the dastardly Frances and wife Agnes got their just desserts for what happened to Hawise: perhaps literally via a dessert, e.g. long and agonising deaths as a result of eaten rotten apple pies!

Apart from these issues, this is an enjoyable well-paced read and it’s very likely I’ll read more of this author’s books if their historical aspects are as good as this one.

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This is another novel that has two titles (see earlier post here). The Rebel Queen by Michelle Moran was renamed The Last Queen of India when published in the UK and Australia, possibly because there is another “rebel queen of India” who was the subject of this recent film and the UK publishers wished to avoid any confusion.

The UK title is still a problem for anyone who is a fusspot history buff. Technically, the last Queen of India was the wife of the last King-Emperor George VI, ie the late Queen Mother. In the 1850s, which is when this novel is set, India wasn’t the entity we know today but a collection of princely states. India only came into its own right as an independent nation in 1947. And if you are even more pedantic about the 19th Century situation, there were subtle dynastic differences of status in those states with rulers who were often called Princes by the British, and many Princes had more than one wife … just let’s say with a more judicious choice of title this whole argument could have been avoided!

The rather florid taglines of “Queen” - Sovereign of the East, Defender of an Empire - may match the alluringly romantic cover, but the American “Rebel” cover with its sword is slightly better suited to Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, the woman famous for her fight against the British during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, which is now called either the Sepoy Rebellion or First War of Independence.

Whenever I approach an historical novel such as this, I always do my best to push aside any preconceptions or prior knowledge and judge it on its merits solely as a story and not a retelling of history. I am firmly of the belief that any good historical novel will always inspire readers to search for the truth.

The story is told from the point of view of Sita who lives in a small village and seems destined for a life hidden from the world in purdah, being forced into an arranged marriage when still a child. But Sita has an enlightened father. She has been well-educated, can speak English, is an accomplished archer and so is a prime candidate for the elite female guard known as the Durga Dal who protect the Rani of Jhansi. As she enters the court, Sita has to learn how to negotiate the politics and various intrigues and how to use her skills to advantage in serving the Rani.

The finer detail and descriptions of life in the village and at court are  excellent, the dialogue and pace are also good. Sita is, for the most part, an appealing narrator who weaves her tale smoothly between her relationships with her family, her lover, and the court. Unfortunately, as a result, this novel turns out not to be about Rani Lakshimbai herself, she is only the backdrop to Sita’s own journey. The Rani remains a shadowy and vacillating figure who fails to display any solid warrior queen qualities until towards the end when it is already too late. Sita’s character also falters when she is up against the traitor in their midst and her fighting prowess never quite fulfilled.

I was prepared to ignore much of this and rate the novel highly for its pace and informative readability, until the closing chapters regarding the fate of Sita’s sister. In the notes at the end of the book, the author does admit to including a certain event that didn’t actually happen until nearly thirty years after the Indian Mutiny! So why do it then?

Frankly, there was no need for this at all as it had little bearing on the outcome after everything else nasty that had happened. Anyone who is familiar with the Indian Mutiny or Sepoy Rebellion knows that terrible atrocities were committed on all sides, but this extra dollop smacks of a snide Americanized "Hollywood version of the truth" in order to make the British look even worse than they were. Disappointing.

(Thanks to Hachette Australia for sending me a copy for review.)

The serendipity in family research led me to discover this remarkable novel by Loretta Proctor that features an aspect of World War I that is little-known, the Salonika Campaign (my aunt served as a VAD nurse there). It is also an exploration about identity, belonging and sense of place, and it delivers on all counts.

My aunt’s old photo albums show the primitive conditions living in tents that the soldiers and nurses endured, and it is as if the author had these self-same photos at her fingertips as she describes the frustrations of this stop-start campaign, the filth and endemic diseases such as malaria that took a heavy toll.

The first half of the book is in diary form and concentrates mainly on the love affair between Dorothy, an English nurse, and Greek fighter and spy, Costas. The second half tells how Andrew, their misfit son, travels from England to Greece in an effort to find his roots.

Descriptions of the countryside and the old city of Salonika (Thessaloniki) prior to its destruction by fire are just superb and while some readers may find the pace is slowed by too much detail, others will be thoroughly absorbed in the author’s finely-written and sympathetic insights into modern Greek history.

The main characters all have their individual flaws, but are believable. The doctor, Ethan, is a reflection of British grit and decency while Andrew’s anarchic friends, the displaced and impoverished family from Smyrna, can’t afford such niceties of morality but are appealing in their own way.

This is a book to be savoured and not rushed, yet strangely by the end I felt that the characters’ personal stories had an ephemeral quality and were secondary to the fierce landscapes with its violent history and the generations that have inhabited them. It left me with many thought-provoking images that will linger for a long time.

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