Ariadne's reads 2008

[Ariadne]

Links lead to reviews in the few cases where they're freely available online.

1 - The Secret Familiar, Catherine Jinks
2 - Cheat and Charmer, Elizabeth Frank
3 - Mademoiselle Boleyn, Robin Maxwell
4 - The Healing Season, Ruth Axtell Morren
5 - Black Ships, Jo Graham
6 - Chateau of Echoes, Siri Mitchell
7 - The Serpent Garden, Judith Merkle Riley
8 - The Other Queen, Philippa Gregory
9 - The Blood Ballad, Rett MacPherson
10 - Pinkerton's Secret, Eric Lerner
11 - Ilario: The Lion's Eye, Mary Gentle
12 - Bound, Sally Gunning
13 - Again, Sharon Cullars
14 - The Texicans, Nina Vida
15 - The Rebirth of Venus, Linda Proud
16 - Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander, Ann Herendeen
17 - The Duke of Shadows, Meredith Duran
18 - The Romanov Bride, Robert Alexander
19 - The Queen's Bastard, C. E. Murphy
20 - Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin
21 - The Little Book, Selden Edwards
22 - Forbidden Frontier, Zana Bell
23 - Mistress of the Revolution, Catherine Delors
24 - The Scent of Rosa's Oil, Lina Simoni
25 - The Aviary Gate, Katie Hickman
26 - The Toss of a Lemon, Padma Viswanathan
27 - The Lace Reader, Brunonia Barry
28 - Everything Under the Sky, Matilde Asensi
29 - The Wise Woman, Philippa Gregory
30 - Spellbound, Margit Sandemo
31 - Company of Liars, Karen Maitland
32 - Winnie and Wolf, A.N. Wilson
33 - Woman of a Thousand Secrets, Barbara Wood
34 - Innocence Unveiled, Blythe Gifford
35 - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
36 - Devil's Brood, Sharon Kay Penman
37 - The Memorist, M.J. Rose
38 - Midwife of the Blue Ridge, Christine Blevins
39 - The Cloister and the Citadel, Brigid Knight
40 - The Spanish Bow, Andromeda Romano-Lax
41 - The House of Allerbrook, Valerie Anand
42 - Land of Marvels, Barry Unsworth
43 - Lucky Billy, John Vernon
44 - Raquel: The Jewess of Toledo, Lion Feuchtwanger
45 - The Tomb of Zeus, Barbara Cleverly
46 - Cassandra and Jane, Jill Pitkeathley
47 - Writ on Water, Melanie Jackson
48 - The House at Riverton, Kate Morton
49 - Indochine, Christie Dickason
50 - The Last Queen, C.W. Gortner
51 - Winter on the Plain of Ghosts, Eileen Kernaghan (historical fantasy set in the Indus Valley some 4000 years ago)
52 - Vengeance Valley, Richard S. Wheeler
53 - The Exile, Richard S. Wheeler (I'm doing a "readalike" article on him for NoveList - he's my favorite Western author)
54 - Rendezvous, Richard S. Wheeler
55 - The Time of Singing, Elizabeth Chadwick
56 - The Hummingbird's Daughter, Luis Alberto Urrea
57 - The Bride Bargain, Kelly Eileen Hake
58 - The Boundless Deep, Kate Brallier
59 - A Silent Ocean Away, DeVa Gantt
60 - Last Night at the Lobster, Stewart O'Nan
61 - Figures in Silk, Vanora Bennett
62 - The Minutes of the Lazarus Club, Tony Pollard
63 - The Black Tower, Louis Bayard

[Ludmilla]

I see you've read Gentle's Ilario. Did you like it? I've been debating whether to buy it (in the US, they split it into two volumes, I think). I enjoyed her Ash quite a bit, and suspect I would like this one as well.

[annis]

I'm trying to work out whether Christie Dickason's "Indochine" is either one of her books about Vietnam which i read years ago, "Dragonriders" and "Tears of the Tiger", or both of them together?
http://www.christiedickason.com/books.html

[Ariadne]

Ilario was very good, to a point, but was it ever strange. It had one of the richest, most realistic-seeming descriptions of 15th-century Carthage that I've come across, but reading it made me feel like I was part of a compelling, phantasmagorical dream. Everything is skewed from our own world just slightly. I haven't read Ash, but I understand Ilario is set in the same alternate history world. I bought it while vacationing in Bermuda last March, so read it from the British edition (one super-long volume which was hard to hold open). I made it 3/4 way through before giving up, and I was sorry to do so, but after a while it got too outlandish for me, as if the author was choosing dramatic effect over plot/character.

Indochine is the same as Dragonriders, so says the title page, along with a note that it the US edition takes a slightly different form. I'm not sure what the differences are.

Also just updated my list, above, with a few new titles.

[Ludmilla]

Thanks for your reply, Ariadne. In addition to the alt history, there is a SF element in Ash, which accounts for a good bit of its weirdness, so it's not surprising that Ilario would be strange, too.

BTW -- interesting list. I'm getting too many ideas reading people's reading lists and top 10s, etc.

[Ariadne]

There's some SF in Ilario, in the scenes dealing with the stone golem (hopefully not a spoiler, as it's the title of book 2). Aside from the skewed history, a good part of the weirdness and unpredictability in Ilario comes from the fact that the main character's a hermaphrodite.

I try to read all over the place in terms of settings, though most of them have been historical - I'm going to try to branch out more in 2009, though (one of my resolutions!).