Category: Past Tense

Two daughters of a legendary surfer pushing to make a place for herself in a male-dominated sport vie for their mother’s time and affection in this book about California surf culture of the 1960s. As one daughter becomes a celebrity surfer in her own right, the other finds herself swept up in the counter-culture movement full of drugs and cults. But through it all, Mindy and Ginger are connected by the trauma of their unorthodox childhood.

When her friend is shot through the window of a saloon, burlesque dancer Blanche risks everything to bring her murderer to justice. Inspired by a forgotten cold case in San Francisco’s storied history, Frog Music is a tale of notorious women, dangerous men, free-loving bohemians, and murder.

Set in the years leading up to WWII in San Francisco, three girls compete for a role in an exclusive “Oriental” nightclub, the Forbidden City. Grace and Helen are both Chinese American, but Ruby is only passing as Chinese. Her friends both know all too well she’s actually Japanese. So when America enters the war and begins interring innocent Japanese citizens, Ruby will be left wondering: which of her friends betrayed her?

Oak Ridge, Tennessee is a city that doesn’t officially exist. There, in a city that has been created in the course of months, young women like June work massive machines that they know play some role in the war effort. But what exactly they’re doing, they don’t know. Security is everywhere. Secrecy is paramount. It’s only when the bombs fall in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that June will realize the role she’s played. Now, confronted with the truth, she’ll have to reckon with the costs of unquestioned patriotism and war.

This is a book for middle grade readers, but I wanted to include it both because I’m a firm believer that good books transcend their target audience and also because it tells an important story, from a perspective often lacking in historical fiction. Loosely based on the memories of her mother, who survived the bombing of Hiroshima, Burkinshaw shares a glimpse into Japanese culture and life during WWII as well as the horrors that befell Hiroshima and Nagasaki through the eyes of a 12-year-old girl.

First serialized in 1965, Black Rain recounts the devastation of the atomic bombs through the eyes of historical accounts. Told through the eyes of an uncle worrying about his niece’s prospects one year after the bombings, Shigematsu sets out to disprove the rumors she was in Hiroshima on the day the nuclear bomb was dropped on the city. Her diaries from those days, recounting the horrors of the explosion and nuclear fallout, will either cement her prospects or ruin her chances of marriage forever.

Zadie Smith sets her sights and talents on a legal trial that divided Victorian England. When an Australian butcher claims to be the heir to a sizable estate, the Tichborne Trial aims to determine whether he is a fraud or the real thing. One Scottish housekeeper who is nobody’s fool and a formerly enslaved Jamaican man who finds himself acting as star witness are drawn deeper and deeper into a case that questions who has the right to tell their story.

From the author of The Wonder, Room, and The Pull of Stars comes a new historical history novel about two young girls who fall in love at a 19th century boarding school. Drawing on the real-life secret diaries of Anne Lister, Learned by Heart is the story of a young tomboy (Anne) and an orphaned heiress sent to England from India. It’s a love story full of secrets and danger, passion and heartbreak. And it’s sure to stick with you long after you’re done reading.

The acclaimed author of Deacon King Kong and The Good Lord Bird returns for a story about a small town full of secrets. A dilapidated neighborhood in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, known as Chicken Hill, where Jewish immigrants and African Americans live side by side, is rocked by the discovery of a skeleton at the bottom of a well. The residents know all too well who is buried there, alongside all the secrets and choices they’ve had to make to survive. Here, neighbors will do whatever it takes to keep each other safe because they know no one else is going to.

A former British operative in France is still haunted by the war and the gaps in his memory sustained by a head injury that nearly cost him his life. His daughter, Charlotte, is determined to help fill in those gaps and find the agent who saved his life during that final mission. But as she learns more about Chloe and Fleur, two SOE agents stationed in France with a connection to her father, she discovers troubling evidence of a double agent risking all their lives. The truth of what happened in those final days of war is far more shocking than Charlotte — or her father — ever could’ve imagined.

Based on the true story of three nurses nicknamed “the Angels of Bataan,” When We Had Wings follows three women who forge a connection at the Army Navy Club of Manila before being caught up in the combat between U.S. and Japanese forces in the Philippines. Taken into captivity as some of the first female POWs of the Second World War, Eleanor, Penny, and Lita do their best to keep themselves and their fellow inmates alive under the most horrific of conditions.

Like Women of the Post, Sisters in Arms highlights the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion. Grace and Eliza come from very different backgrounds, but in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, they are on even ground. Both women will be among the first female officers the Army has ever seen and some of the first Black women ever allowed to serve. There are many determined to see this so-called experiment fail, but Grace and Eliza are determined to ensure the battalion’s success, even when that means putting their own lives on the line.

Sisters fleeing the fallout of WWI and the Soviet Revolution in Russia are turned away from the U.S. by discriminatory immigration laws and head for Cuba instead. Life in Prohibition-era Havana is just about as far from shtetl life as could be, but soon Pearl and Frieda begin to adjust. Life and love find them on the island, and their plans to rejoin their sister in New York grow more and more complicated.

A family reminisces about the circumstances that brought them from China to Hawaii during their patriarch’s funeral. This family saga spans continents and cultural pivot points, from the Boxer Rebellion to Pearl Harbor. But throughout it all, the Leong family stand together and try to leave behind what they believe is an ancient curse of fate that has followed them all the way from China to the shores of Oahu.

A former “Rosie the Riveter,” Hazel has done her part for the war effort, but now that the men are back, she’s been dismissed. Hazel doesn’t want to return home to become a wife or mother, though; she wants to work. Her love of airplanes didn’t end with the war, and she longs to work with them again, maybe even learn to fly someday. Staying on the West Coast in the bohemian town of Laguna, where she finds work as an artist’s assistant, is better than the alternative. But is it enough when her real dreams remain in the sky?

This entire book is centered around the importance of water to its main characters. An Indigenous foster child in 1940s Vancouver and a refugee in the 1970s find their comfort and belonging when they’re close to the water. For Ronny, the river is where he feels closest to his lost mother. For Chandra, swimming and surfing in the Salish Sea is the only place he doesn’t feel the need to conform. Though their lives are separate, their connection to water tethers them to the earth, themselves, and each other.

For the residents of Winthrop Island, the first summer after the war brings promises of peace and renewal. But a new resident at the Peabody Estate changes the life of the caretaker’s daughter, Olive, forever. Emilia encourages Olive to travel the world, living a life of adventure, but Olive is entangled in a romantic relationship with one of the Peabody sons. When an FBI agent arrives searching for a Russian spy, Emilia’s assistance causes a rift that will resonate through the years.

In 18th century India, a 17-year-old woodcarver is invited into the palace of Tipu Sultan to build a giant tiger automaton to commemorate the return of the sultan’s sons from British captivity. He works alongside a French clockmaker who invites him to one day return to Rouen with him as his apprentice. But by the time they leave, the sultan’s palace has been ransacked and the tiger looted by the British. Now, Abbas is determined to steal it back from a British estate where it resides in a collection of stolen art.

In this historical adventure, the daughter of an esteemed archeologist during the peak of imperialist Egyptology is kidnapped. Her captors believe she can help decipher the key to a prized relic, but her father and sister are determined to catch up to the kidnappers before they can get their hands on it. It’s a tale of adventure, archeology, and sisterhood in the vein of Indiana Jones.

A senator on his deathbed after an assassination attempt asks the Black preacher who raised him to tell him again about their past together. Despite the path of racism his once foster-son has taken, Reverend Hickman tries to save the senator again and again, first from the assassination attempt and then from his hateful beliefs.

In these historical romance novellas, spanning the century from the Civil War to the Civil Right’s Movement, a quartet of romance authors write stories of love, hope, and longing against the backdrop of a history and holiday that’s too often overlooked.

One of my all-time favorite historical fiction books, How Much of These Hills is Gold follows two young siblings as they search for a place in the world of the rough and tumble American West following the death of their father. The novel follows a non-linear timeline as it slowly unravels the complicated history of racism, violence, and misfortune that led the family up to this point. It’s an absolutely unforgettable read told through a stunning narratorial voice.

After moving to Buenos Aires from Italy, a woman binds her chest and changes her name in order to pursue her love of music, knowing she could never perform in public as herself. But the longer Leda lives as Dante, the more the lines between the two begin to blur. Where does Leda end and Dante begin? And perhaps more importantly, does it even matter anymore?

In a coastal Texas town still reeling from a hurricane and the ravages of the Vietnam War, a closeted woman searches for answers when her surrogate mother is murdered. Lou was renovating Miss Kate’s old mansion and dreaming of a better future after losing her brother in the war when her beloved neighbor is found murdered. No one else seems interested in looking for the killer. Parson is a town full of sinister secrets, and Lou is determined to unearth them no matter the cost.

Shagun flees the grief of his family after the death of his twin sisters by enrolling in an all-boys boarding school in 1990s India. But it isn’t until he comes across a traveling theater troupe performing the Hindu myths of his childhood that he finally feels true belonging. He even finds love with a photographer. But shame and fear are keeping Shagun from the happiness just within his grasp. And until he can excise them, nowhere — and no one — will truly feel like home.

A pioneering computer programmer becomes determined to help a man still reeling from his separation from his mother during the Holocaust when she discovers that Hitler’s so-called “Final Solution” was organized with Hollerith punch-card computers. Told from the perspective of two women working in the pioneering field of computers in the ’40s and ’60s, Kim van Alkemade explores the lengths — and risks — people will go to in order to help the ones they love.