2020 BookIt List: January In Review

Good golly, Miss Molly...hello, February!

My pride in getting 6 books read in January, despite my neverending sickness, is a little quelled by the fact that each of the books I read was historical fiction. That, in and of itself, isn't so much the problem. It's just that I love historical fiction, and I keep intending to branch out. So, in that sense, I kinda failed in January. Oh well, whatevs. Here's a review of the books I got through:

 The Lady and the Highway Man, The Vanished Bride, and the Widow of Rose House
I'm lumping all of these together, as they all cover my favorite historical time, The Victorian Era. The sad thing is, I'm always looking for a good Victorian novel to devour, but so much of the time, the novels I consume disappoint, somehow. Perhaps it's my expectations that are at fault, and not the novels. The Lady and the Highwayman looks to be the start of a new mystery series involving the headmistress of a lady's school and her partner-in-solving-crimes, a penny dreadful author. It wasn't awful, just not very substantial. Still, I might read a sequel. The Vanished Bride will appeal to those who are in love with the Brontës; in this novel Charlotte, Anne, and Emily, with their nogoodnik brother Branwell, are defying custom and propriety as they scamper about the Yorkshire countryside, trying to solve a mystery. The author does a rather good job with the atmospheric settings, and one does come away with a sense of each of the Brontës as individual--again, I wouldn't be adverse to reading a sequel, should this turn out to be a series. The Widow of Rose House, I found to be the most annoying and disappointing. The plot is okay enough: a scandal-riddled widow returns to America to renovate an old house; old house is haunted and no one will go near it; to avoid financial ruin, Scandalous Widow commences an association with a vaguely Doctor Who-vian Mad Scientist, who is determined to study the ghosts and put them to rest. Of course he's indifferent to scandal, and of course they fall in love. I think my beef is more with the characters--the Mad Scientist is a little to perfect, and the whole thing just felt really insubstantial. 

Basically, The Turn of Midnight is a medieval soap opera about a too-good-(and educated)-to-be-true English noblewoman and her serfs as they try to survive the Black Death and basically revolutionize medieval society. I'm not sure what it is about this book, or its predecessor The Last Hours, that appeals to me. The author does a fine job with the pacing and the unrelenting suspense, and I'm almost disappointed that there doesn't seem to be room or reason for a third book in this series.

Fortunately, not all the historical fiction I read was fluffy. One of the first books I read this year was Homegoing, a family saga that imagines and explores the experiences of Africans involved in the slave trade (both as the perpetrators and the victims), and then follows their descendants through colonisation and decolonisation in Africa, as well as Antebellum America, the Jim Crow and Great Migration years, and well into the 20th century. Now, I've read plenty of books, both fiction and nonfiction, depicting the experience of the people who were enslaved and exploited through these centuries. However, I've never read anything depicting the experiences and histories of the African people who participated in the slave trade, so this is a really valuable addition to the historical fiction genre.

Pachinko was hands -down my favorite book of January. I started reading this just last Friday at lunch, and then brought it home and had this 500+ page book finished by 11 PM that same evening. Set in Korea and Japan, mostly, starting in the 1930s, this story follows the ebb and flow of one family's fortunes as they endure and experience decades of 20th century history. The bonds of this family, fraught with love, loyalty,  conflict, duty, were a profound joy to see unfold.

So! That's my progress on my 2020 Book-It List. What did you read in January, and what was your favorite book?