Historical Fiction Reading Challenge: 2011 Wrap-up & 2012 Sign-up

In January 2011, I joined the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge for the first time.  I love many genres of fiction, but my ultimate favorite genre is historical fiction.  I joined this challenge with the goal of reading 20 historical fiction novels in 2011.  I reached my goal by reading a total of 24 historical fiction novels this past year.  The novels I read were as follows:

1.  Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
2.  Pale Rose of England by Sandra Worth
3.  I am the Chosen King by Helen Hollick
4.  Sins of the House of Borgia by Sarah Bower
5. To Defy a King by Elizabeth Chadwick
6.  Legacy by Jeanette Baker
7.  A Race to Splendor by Ciji Ware
8.  A Fierce Radiance by Lauren Belfer
9.  The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott by Kelly O'Conner McNees
10.  When We Danced on Water by Evan Fallenberg

11.  Mary of Carisbrooke by Margaret Campbell Barnes

12.  The King's Witch by Cecelia Holland
13.  Queen of the Summer Stars by Persia Woolley
14.  Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
15.  Sea Witch by Helen Hollick
16.  Before Versaille by Karleen Koen
17.  Becoming Marie Antoinette by Juliet Grey
18.  Bath Tangle by Georgette Heyer
19.  Lady of the English by Elizabeth Chadwick
20.  The Betsy-Tacy Treasury by Maud Hart Lovelace
21.  Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
22.  A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick (audio)
23.  The Help by Kathryn Stockett (audio)
24.  My Love, My Enemy by Jan Cox Speas

I read many excellent historical fiction novels this year, there is not a bad one in this bunch!  Which ones were my favorite?  Stay tuned the next week or so for my top ten books from 2011.  More than one book from this list is on my top ten for the year!

Twenty-two of these books were old-fashioned paper novels, while two were audiobooks.  The two audiobooks were books I had read in the past that were chosen for one of my book clubs this year.  I chose to explore them in a new format this time around.  Five of the twenty-four books were re-reads for me including Water for Elephants, Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, A Reliable Wife, and The Help.  It's safe to say these are some of my favorite books of all time.

I read a few children's historical fiction novels this year including Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie to my children and The Betsy-Tacy Treasury for me. The Little House series is how I started my love for historical fiction.  I'm now hoping to foster the love in my children.

It's no secret that I love to read historical fiction novels related to kings and queens, but I also enjoy historical fiction novels set in America (Little House, Betsy-Tacy, My Love, My Enemy, A Fierce Radiance, The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, The Help, A Reliable Wife, and Water for Elephants).  My Love, My Enemy was the most surprising book for me this year.  The cover screamed trashy romance, but the inside was a quite good historical fiction novel set during the American war of 1812.  I would love read more novels by Jan Cox Speas and I hope they find a more suitable cover.

I very much enjoyed this challenge and I'm signing up for the Historical Fiction Challenge 2012 also hosted by Historical Tapestry.  This year I'm aiming for  level 3, Struggling the Addiction: 10 books.  I'm going to focus on the Victorian Challenge this year so I'll hopefully be reading more classics and straight non-fiction history this year. 

I'm hoping that I'll be reading more of one of my favorite sub-genres, the historical fiction thriller this year.  It is a favorite of my Kewaunee Library Book Club.  Now that the club is back on track after a 1.5 year hiatus, I can hope that we get back to some great books!

Winner of Sins of the House of Borgia by Sarah Bower!

The lucky winner of Sins of the House of Borgia by Sarah Bower is Julie of Knitting and Sundries. Congrats to Julie! She has been notified via email and has until next Wednesday, April 13th, to email me her mailing address. If I don't hear from her by that time, I will draw a new winner. Julie was selected using random.org.

I'm running a bit behind on blog entries as work has been a little hectic lately. Combine that with three kids five and younger and there just doesn't seem to be enough time in a day to get everything done!

Thank-you to Beth from Sourcebooks for allowing me to host this great giveaway. Thank-you to Sarah Bower for the great guest post and for writing such and intriguing book. And thank-you to all who entered the giveaway and left great comments.

I currently have one giveaway going (as seen on the right bar) for another great historical fiction novel, To Defy a King by Elizabeth Chadwick. I will also have a new giveaway posted this Friday.

Sins of the House of Borgia by Sarah Bower

Sins of the House of Borgia is exactly as the title sounds – a juicy historical fiction novel that explores the naughty lives of the infamous Borgia family in sixteenth century Italy.

As a young Jewish girl in Spain, Esther is forced to flee the country with her mother after the Jewish people are expelled by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (I felt like this was part two of the great historical fiction novel about this period of trial in Spain By Fire, By Water by Mitchell James Kaplan). After her mother dies during the flight, Esther is raised by her father in Italy. Her father decides to use her as a pawn to advance his standing by arranging to have her baptized as a Christian and placed in the household of Lucrezia Borgia.

Lucrezia is the daughter of Pope Alexander VI. Pope Alexander VI lived in a decadent Vatican court and had numerous illegitimate children including Lucrezia and her older brother Cesare. While serving as one of Lucrezia’s ladies in waiting, Esther falls in love with Cesare. Cesare is a ruthless man of mystery that women across Italy and Europe are swooning over. After Esther is unable to meet Cesare for a horse race, he renames her “Violante” or breaker of promises.

After Lucrezia’s third marriage to Duke Alfonso, Violante moves with Lucrezia to the Estense Territories and pines for Cesare to visit. Violante finds her fortunes tied to that of the Borgia family and is swept away in the rise and fall of their ever changing fates.

I really enjoyed Sins of the House of Borgia. It was very readable book and was hard for me to put down. Unlike some historical fiction novels where character development suffers after the story gets bogged down in the details, Sins of the House of Borgia had the details included in a great plot and riveting characters. This novel reminded me of the style of a Philippa Gregory historical fiction novel – the kind of novel that gives you the juicy side of history that you weren’t taught at school and that is immensely fun to read.

I really liked that Bower wrote the novel through the eyes of Esther/Violante. Although the sins of the Borgia family were titillating to read about, I really was intrigued with the struggle of being a Jewish convert in the early sixteenth century. Esther was effectively cut off from her family, traditions, and way of life. It was devestating to watch her growth and to see her fully realize what her conversion and connections with the Borgia had done to her birth family and her inability to connect with them as an adult.

Cesare was a great hero. A handsome leader of men, he was alluring and mysterious. I must admit that overall though, I really loved Gideon, the awkward gawky Jewish goldsmith that loves Violante. I can’t really say more though or I’ll ruin the plot!

SPOILER ALERT I just have to say this . . . this book confirms the fears of every adolescent girl after you’ve taken your sex education class when Violante gets the Pox and pregnant after only one intimate encounter with Cesare. It was kind of refreshing after reading so many romances were there are never any consequences of your actions, although I did feel really bad for Violante. SPOILER END

Overall, Sins of the House of Borgia is an enthralling, juicy historical fiction novel with great characters and plot. I look forward to reading more works by Sarah Bower – starting with her other novel, The Needle in the Blood.

Sins of the House of Borgia is my fifth item in the Historical Fiction Challenge 2011.

To see a great guest post from author Sarah Bower and for a chance to win a copy of this novel, please check out this link.

Book Source: Review Copy from Sourcebooks. Thank-you!

Sarah Bower Guest Blog (and GIVEAWAY), author of Sins of the House of Borgia

I am honored today to have Sarah Bower, author of Sins of the House of Borgia on Laura's Reviews today. My questions to Ms. Bower were as follows:

What first got you interested in the nortorious Borgia family? What do you think is the most interesting fact that you learned about them? Will you be watching "The Borgias" on Showtime?

She wrote a fascinating piece about the Borgia family and I loved her novel (my review will be posted next week). So without further ado, Sarah Bower!

The Borgia Family by Sarah Bower

Thanks very much for inviting me to write a guest piece for your blog, and for your lovely, broad questions, which I shall do my best to answer.

You ask what interested me in the Borgias and I can tell you my fascination with the family goes way back to reading Jean Plaidy’s Madonna of the Seven Hills and Light on Lucrezia under the bedclothes at my boarding school. I had never heard of the Borgias before then, and my subsequent research into them has made me admire Plaidy more and more for her ability to transform their history into romance. I have tried and – I hope – succeeded in doing something similar in my own novel, SINS OF THE HOUSE OF BORGIA.

My gratitude to Plaidy is, however, a little mixed because the effect of reading these two novels was to throw me off reading fiction entirely for a few years, while I began researching the Borgias in earnest. I read everything I could find, from Pastor’s History of the Popes (well, the relevant volumes – I’m not sure, to be honest, how long the book is in total!) to Rafael Sabatini’s somewhat daft hagiography of Cesare Borgia, in which Machiavelli’s scheming prince is transformed into a hero of the Risorgimento not unlike Sabatini’s most famous swashbuckler, Scaramouche. I managed to temper the extremes with the magisterial The Borgias by Michael Mallett and Sarah Bradford’s beautifully balanced and articulate biographies of Cesare and Lucrezia – far and away, in my view, the best factual books written about these two enigmatic and fascinating figures.

Mallett’s book is subtitled The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Dynasty, and I think one aspect of the Borgias that makes them so attractive is how briefly they held power, yet how absolute that power was while they had it. From the election of the first Borgia Pope, Calixtus III, in 1455, to the death of Alexander VI in 1503 is a period of less than fifty years. The period during which Alexander and Cesare were jointly unassailable as Head of the Church and commander of its armed forces lasted a mere three years, from 1500 to 1503. The dynasty was like a shooting star, glamorous, spectacular and invested with many powers, some real, some imagined and most hedged about with superstition.

Lucrezia, of course, lived on as Duchess of Ferrara until 1519 and helped to perpetuate a distinguished dynasty there. One of her sons was the great Cardinal Ippolito d’Este II, builder of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Her survival, however, depended on her distancing herself from her notorious relatives and forging a new identity for herself a long way from Rome. When I visited Ferrara for my research, I realised how successfully she had done this. There she is remembered, not as a prominent member of the sensational Borgia clan, but as a loyal wife and devoted mother, who presided over a cultivated court, patronising in particular the poets Ariosto and Pietro Bembo. She also proved herself a gallant defender of Ferrara against a Papal force, under the command of Julius II, even pawning her jewellery to buy ammunition for artillery. At her death, in childbirth, aged only 39, it was discovered that she had been wearing a hair shirt beneath her clothes, possibly for many years. Her tomb, in the Convent of Corpus Domini in Ferrara, is, today, a site of reverence.

Perhaps, then it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to me that the Borgia family does, indeed, boast one genuine, bona fide saint. He is San Francisco Borja (the original Catalan spelling of the family name), the grandson of Cesare and Lucrezia’s brother, Juan, who became the third general of the Society of Jesus and was the confessor of Queen Juana ‘La Loca’ of Spain. Cesare’s illegitimate daughter, Camilla, also took to the religious life, becoming Abbess of the Convent of Corpus Domini in Ferrara, where she died in her seventies with a reputation for saintliness and good works, as well as a shrewd administrative capacity more likely to have come from her father.

So, I shall be watching Neil Jordan’s new TV series about the Borgias with, I’m sure, huge enjoyment, but also keeping in mind that the family was more complex than their notoriety leads us to believe. There is no doubt that Cesare and his father got up to all kinds of nefarious tricks to gain and hold on to power. In that they were both typical of their time yet set apart by their brilliance and, I think, the fact that the Borgias had come from Spain and made only limited efforts to fit in. They always spoke Catalan among themselves, which exasperated many visitors to the Vatican who struggled to understand what was being said. There is no doubt that Lucrezia, when young, was a great flirt and had a string of admirers. I think it is safe to say Cesare was jealous of his sister’s ‘gentleman friends’ but, even now, not quite safe to speculate as to why; while socially assured, he was emotionally inept, so let’s leave it at that, shall we?

On the other side of the coin, we have San Fransisco, Camilla and several other respected figures in both religious and secular life. It is also worth remembering that, for all his worldliness, Pope Alexander was a devout man who introduced to the Church both the Index of banned books and the custom of ringing the Angelus in honour of the Virgin to whom, ironically, he was particularly devoted.

For me, one small piece of Vatican art sums up the contradictions. In the Borgia apartments, above the door of the Pope’s bedchamber is a devotional painting of the Virgin by Pinturicchio. It has the face of the love of Alexander’s later years, Giulia Farnese, La Bella Giulia, whose brother, Alessandro, also became Pope. What a great illustration of the spiders’ web of devotion, intrigue, sex, nepotism and sheer brilliance that lies at the heart of the Italian Renaissance!

Giveaway Details
Sourcebooks has been kind enough to offer one copy of Sins of the House of Borgia by Sarah Bower for a giveaway.

If you would like to win a copy of Sins of the House of Borgia, please leave a comment about what intrigues you about the novel or this guest blog.

As part of your comment, you must include an email address. If I can't find a way to contact you I will draw another winner.

For an additional entry, blog about this giveaway or post it on your sidebar. Provide a link to this post in your comment.

I will be using random.org (or a monte carlo simulation in excel) to pick the winners from the comments.

This contest is only open to US and Canadian residents (Sorry!).

No P.O. Boxes.

The deadline for entry is midnight, Friday April 1st. (No Foolin'!)

Good luck!

Winner of Sins of the House of Borgia by Sarah Bower!

The lucky winner of an early copy of Sins of the House of Boriga by Sarah Bower is Shannon. Shannon was chosen using random.org and has been notified via email. She has until this Friday, February 18th, to send me her mailing address. If I don't hear from her, I will draw a new winner!

Sad you didn't win this novel? It will be released in bookstores everywhere on March 8th. I also have a giveaway going for The Mistress' House until this Friday as seen on my sidebar. Stay tuned and there will be a new giveaway on this blog today and one later this week.

Thank-you to Beth from Sourcebooks for this great giveaway and to all who entered!

Giveaway - Sins of the House of Borgia by Sarah Bower

Beth from Sourcebooks has graciously allowed me to giveaway one copy of Sins of the House of Borgia by Sarah Bower. This novel will be released on March 8th so the lucky winner will have a chance to get a head start on this novel!

I will be posting a review of this novel in March and will be hosting Sarah Bower on March 16th so stay tuned!

Book Description (from Sourcebooks):
Violante isn’t supposed to be here, in one of the grandest courts of Renaissance Italy. She isn’t supposed to be a lady-in-waiting to the beautiful Lucrezia Borgia. But the same secretive politics that pushed Lucrezia’s father to the Vatican have landed Violante deep in a lavish landscape of passion and ambition.

Violante discovers a Lucrezia unknown to those who see only a scheming harlot, and all the whispers about her brother, Cesare Borgia, never revealed the soul of the man who dances close with Violante.

But those who enter the House of Borgia are never quite the same when they leave—if they leave at all. Violante’s place in history will test her heart and leave her the guardian of dangerous secrets she must carry to the grave.

About Sarah Bower (from Sourcebooks)
Sarah Bower is literature development officer for Creative Arts East and teaches creative writing at the University of East Anglia. She was the UK editor of Historical Novels Review for two years, until the beginning of 2006, when she stepped down to make more time for her own writing. With the highly talked about Spring 2011 premiere of Showtime’s new series The Borgias, there is no doubt this notorious and legendary crime family will soon be in the spotlight.

Giveaway Details
Beth of Sourcebooks has been kind enough to offer one copy of Sins of the House of Borgia by Sarah Bower for a giveaway.If you would like to win a copy of Sins of the House of Borgia, please leave a comment about what intrigues you about the novel.

As part of your comment, you must include an email address. If I can't find a way to contact you I will draw another winner.

For an additional entry, blog about this giveaway or post it on your sidebar. Provide a link to this post in your comment.

I will be using random.org (or a monte carlo simulation in excel) to pick the winners from the comments.

This contest is only open to US and Canadian residents (Sorry!).

No P.O. Boxes.

The deadline for entry is midnight, Friday February 11th.

Good luck!