What Keeps You Awake at 2am?

When I was an adolescent, I fell in love with the novels of Elswyth Thane. Her "Williamsburg series" had just enough romance to appeal to my (unrequited) loving heart, while the historical details appealed to the glasses-wearing dork in me who loved school. The series followed generations of a family, starting with the Revolutionary War and working up to World War II. They were adventurous, fascinating, and perfectly calibrated stories, in my mind.

As I've gotten older, I have retained a soft spot for good historical fiction. "Good" is of course subjective. I happen to like novels that make it clear that the writer has spent a lot of time doing research -- not just of the surface kind (when did crinolines come into fashion?) but of the deeper kind (how did it really feel to wear six layers of petticoats in midwinter? what was the consistency of blancmange?). Having spent, myself, countless hours researching the historical period that is the focus of my own work, I have a real appreciation for someone who can capture the nuances of a moment in time, who can spin a tale with the perfect bit of "pointless" scene dressing gracing the narrative, so that it really feels as if one is reading first-hand accounts of lives at a different time. In short, I like writers who can capture the historical equivalent of knowing the difference between WalMart and Target.

I also adore mysteries. From the Bobbsey Twins to Nancy Drew to to Trixie Beldon to Alfred Hitchcock's The Three Investigators to Edgar Allen Poe, I have devoured mysteries since I was six years old. And when I find a book that can artifully combine the period focus of historical fiction with the pace of a mystery, I am over the moon.

Now, I know everyone and her sister were all ga-ga over The DaVinci Code for precisely this reason -- ahhh, such a tour de force of historical detail, WHAT a compelling mystery, oh, the twists in the plot, blah blah blah, etc. BUT. It was not a well-written book. I seriously almost put it down permanently about five times in the first fifty pages. The prose was tortured, the chapter breaks were arbitrary and silly, the metaphors were groan-worthy. However, the man can plot a series of event, I will give him that. And I will freely admit that once I gave myself up to the awful sentences, I hammered my way through the rollicking twists and turns of that novel with the best of them. And in the end, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

But the latest book I've read? Now THIS is fantastic fiction. It's called Interred with Their Bones, and it's a historical/present day mystery focusing on Shakespeare's works. There are interludes set in the Renaissance, though the majority of the story is set in the present. The main character is an ex-literature-professor turned Shakespearean director, who has gotten her big break to direct Hamlet at the newly-rebuilt Globe theater in London, only to have the Globe catch fire almost immediately. This, and a mysterious little box she was given as a gift right before the fire, set her down a fascinating path of intrigue, interpretation of Shakespeare, murder mystery, academia, and treasure-hunt all rolled into one. It's such a fantastic read that I couldn't put it down, and ended up sitting in one spot on the couch for about five hours one night reading it.

It probably doesn't hurt that the main character was once a literature professor, and so was the author. The kind of research and level of detail is precisely what I find appealing, and the settings in college libraries (not just any college libraries either, but places like Harvard which have the richest, deepest collections of fantabulous books you could ever imagine) could hardly fail to draw me in. But more than that, the characters are interesting, the plot twists and turns in ways you couldn't imagine and yet are still plausible.

I recommended this book to one dear friend who has a brand new baby, and she called me the next day to leave me a bitter message about how she was mad at me for sending her to read a book so good that she couldn't put it down to sleep while the baby was sleeping. Any book that keeps the nursing mother of a newborn awake through a precious baby naptime deserves some kind of golden seal on the front cover as far as I'm concerned. Praise doesn't get much higher than that.

If you're looking for a few sleepless nights a great new book to pick up, RUN to your nearest library and get this one. Only please don't call me at 3am to talk about it. I (having already finished the thing) will be asleep.

(For other historical fiction faves of mine, seriously worth reading, check out this post from last summer.)