THE CASEBOOK OF VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN by Peter Ackroyd
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in 1818, and it stands as a classic marker of the intersection between the Romantic and Industrial Ages. The most superficial aspect of her idea — a being created from human corpses by the use of electricity that turns out to be a monster — has been transformed by Hollywood into a cliché of the horror genre. Yet Mary Shelley’s original work has profound moral and philosophical implications that shed a great deal of light on the thought of the time, and are relevant in many respects to debates in our own age, such as cloning and stem-cell research. Peter Ackroyd’s retelling of the story might seem superfluous, except that for modern readers it manages to cut even closer to the heart of what made the original novel so important, not least in its pitch-perfect evocation of early 19th-century style and intellectual portrait of the age.
December 11, 2010
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Judi Clark · 
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Tags: 19th-Century, Gothic, Real People Fiction, Time Period Fiction · Posted in: Facing History, Reading Guide, y Award Winning Author
REMARKABLE CREATURES by Tracy Chevalier
Mary Anning may be one of the most famous real-life heroines you’ve never heard of. She was the first to discover an ichthyosaurus and complete pterosaur in Lyme, Great Britain, as well as the squaloraja, a transition animal between sharks and rays. he and her older friend Elizabeth Philpot – a middle-age spinster whose fossil fish collection ended up in Oxford – are now given their due in this complex and fascinating novel by Tracy Chevalier.
November 20, 2010
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: 19th-Century, Real Event Fiction, Real People Fiction, Time Period Fiction · Posted in: Class - Race - Gender, Facing History, Reading Guide
THE WAKE OF FORGIVENESS by Bruce Machart
Family bonds, particularly between fathers and sons, and mothers and sons, are explored with great sorrow and depth in this elegiac and epic tale of the Skala family, hard-working Czech farmers in Lavaca County. In the fertile flat lands of South Texas, in the fictional town of Dalton, 1895, Karel Skala is the fourth son born to Vaclav and Klara, and the one that results in Klara’s death. Vaclav’s pain shuts him down, and he forsakes holding his son.
November 17, 2010
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: 1920s, 19th-Century, Fatherhood, Ranch Life · Posted in: Debut Novel, Family Matters, Reading Guide, Texas, Wild West
EMILY HUDSON by Melissa Jones
The heroine of EMILY HUDSON, by Melissa Jones, is a nineteen-year old orphan forced by tragic circumstances to live in Newport with her stern, condescending, and verbally abusive uncle, distant aunt, and two cousins, William and Mary. The year is 1861, just before the outbreak of the Civil War. Emily is immature, high-spirited, and moody, with a tendency to blurt out whatever she thinks, regardless of the consequences. Since she has no fortune and her relatives care little for her, it would seem that Emily’s future will be bleak. However, William, an aspiring writer loosely modeled on Henry James, decides to finance art lessons and a stay in Europe for his cousin. Before she leaves, Emily has a brief relationship with a kind and agreeable gentleman soldier named Captain Lindsay.
October 11, 2010
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: 19th-Century, Newport, Real Event Fiction, Real People Fiction, Time Period Fiction · Posted in: Coming-of-Age, Facing History, NE & New York, Reading Guide
A CURABLE ROMANTIC by Joseph Skibell
Science, religion, and language intersect in this edgy, Judeo-mystic satire about love, brotherhood, and neuroses in fin-de-siècle Vienna. In 1895, oculist Jakob Sammelsohn meets Sigmund Freud on the same night that he eyes and falls in love with Freud’s primary patient, Emma Eckstein. As Jakob is guided into Freud’s world of psychoanalysis, he reluctantly becomes a guide himself. He plunges into the mythological realm of a dybbuk, the dislocated spirit of his dead wife, Ita, who possesses and inhabits Emma. Or so Ita-as-Emma claims. As the relationship intensifies between Jakob, Freud, and Emma, Ita’s haunting voice lures Jakob into a psychosexual seduction.
September 9, 2010
· Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: 19th-Century, Algonquin Books, Freud, Real People Fiction, Sciences, Time Period Fiction, Vienna · Posted in: Contemporary, Facing History, Literary
MY NAME IS MARY SUTTER by Robin Oliveira
Sometimes the reader is lucky enough to pick up a book that they can get lost in. Place and time disappear and all that is left is immersion in the written word. We become one with the book. MY NAME IS MARY SUTTER is such a book. From the time I started it until the very last page, all that existed for me was the story – the ebb and flow of events. I was transported.
May 26, 2010
· Judi Clark · One Comment
Tags: 19th-Century, Civil War, medical, Time Period Fiction · Posted in: Debut Novel, Facing History, NE & New York, Reading Guide, Washington, D.C.
