This month in BookTrib, we are celebrating women’s fiction titles that showcase 20th Century Historical Fiction (1900 – 1989). We all stand on the shoulders of individuals from the past. Show us their triumphs and losses, their expectations and beliefs. Shine a light on the societal barriers they scrambled over on their journey to live and love as fully as possible.
The Foreigner’s Confession by Lya Badgley
After a horrific accident shatters her world and leaves her an amputee, American attorney Emily Mclean moves to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to work with landmine survivors. She hopes to reinvent herself in this new land, leaving behind her sense of culpability in the death of her husband and the loss of her unborn child.
While visiting the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, Emily discovers that she shares an eerie resemblance to a portrait of a former prison inmate, Milijana Petrova, a Yugoslavian communist revolutionary who, in the 1970s, became fatally enmeshed with the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. Emily is not the only one who notices the astonishing similarity — her Cambodian driver insists she is the ghost of Milijana, returned to complete a mysterious task. This unexpected discovery consumes Emily, who searches historical documents for answers about Milijana. As she begins to uncover more clues about Milijana’s life further similarities between the two women start to emerge, and their stories become intertwined.
Set in both 1977 and 1993 Cambodia, The Foreigner’s Confession explores what happens when life is turned upside down and the boundaries between past and present, life and death, are blurred. Will Emily’s discoveries help her to emerge from the pain of the past, or does Milijana’s tragic end foretell her own?
The Model Spy by Maryka Biaggio
Based on the true story of Toto Koopman, who spied for the Allies and Italian Resistance during World War II.
Celebrated model Toto Koopman had beauty, brains and fame. Born to a Dutch father and Indonesian mother, she took up the life of a bon vivant in 1920s Paris and modeled for Vogue magazine and Coco Chanel. But modeling didn’t satisfy her. Fluent in six languages, she was adventurous and fascinated by world politics.
In London, she attracts the attention of Lord Beaverbrook, the William Randolph Hearst of England. She becomes his confidante, companion and translator, traversing the Continent and finds herself caught in the winds of impending war. Beaverbrook introduces her to influential people, including a British Intelligence Service director, who schools her in espionage. When Germany invaded Poland, Toto came face to face with reality: either fight the Axis powers or lose the world she loved. She moved to Florence, joined the Italian resistance and began sending intelligence to London. But as Mussolini’s Blackshirts and the Nazi’s military intelligence pursued her, her courage was tested to the limit.
The Wrong Kind of Woman by Sarah McCraw Crow
A powerful exploration of what a woman can be when what she should be is no longer an option.
In late 1970, Oliver Desmarais drops dead in his front yard while hanging Christmas lights. In the year that follows, his widow, Virginia, struggles to find her place at Clarendon College, the elite men’s college where Oliver was a professor. While Virginia had always shared her husband’s prejudices against the four outspoken women on the faculty — dubbed The Gang of Four by their male counterparts — she now finds herself depending on them, even joining their work to bring the women’s movement to Clarendon.
Meanwhile, Virginia’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Rebecca, is adrift in a world without her dad and hates the woman her mother is becoming. And junior Sam Waxman, reeling from the death of his favorite professor, falls in love with a magnetic activist. Soon, reports of violent protests across the country reach this sleepy New England town, stirring tensions between the fraternal establishment of Clarendon and those calling for change. As authorities tamp down “radical elements,” Virginia must decide whether she’s willing to put herself and her family at risk for a cause that had never felt like her own.
Told through alternating perspectives, The Wrong Kind of Woman is an engrossing story of grief and renewal, of shedding old identities and finding new ways to belong, beautifully woven against the backdrop of the rapid changes of the early Seventies.
Andrea Hoffman Goes All In by Diane Cohen Schneider
For everyone who’s had a love/hate relationship with their job, this smart, funny novel from a former Wall Street sales professional reveal what it was like for a woman to build a successful career and a satisfying personal life in the macho world of 1980s Wall Street.
Andrea Hoffman is an overeducated, underemployed and unmotivated recent college graduate. But a harrowing armed robbery blasts her out of her funk and into a job in the finance world of early-1980s Chicago. At first, it seems like a bad fit. But the world of finance has its own weird charm. She grows increasingly fascinated by the strange language of trading, the complexity of the stock market and her colleagues, who navigate it all with ruthless confidence. Even though she has two strikes against her — Jewish and female — Andrea’s quick wit and strong work ethic propel her into an actual sales job and her career takes off. But this is the Wall Street of the eighties, and along with making a lot more money, Andrea, drunk on her achievements, adopts a new, fast life of cocktails, cocaine and casual sex. Gradually, however, she realizes something: she’s going to have to decide what success really means to her — before all this hard living catches up to her.
The Unlocked Path by Janis Robinson Daly
Meet a “New Woman” of the 20th century: educated, career-minded, independent Eliza Pearson Edwards. In 1897 Philadelphia, after witnessing her aunt’s suicide, Eliza rejects her mother’s wishes for a society debut, and at a time when five percent of doctors are female, she enters a woman’s medical college. With the support of a circle of women and driven by a determination to conquer curriculum demands, battle sexism and overcome doubts, Eliza charts her new life path. Combining science and sympathy, she triumphs to heal others and herself.
Spanning a twenty-three-year period, 1897-1920, The Unlocked Path follows a woman determined to study and practice medicine. As a young intern, she summons a forthright confidence asserting her abilities to those mistrustful of a female doctor. Through her work with poverty-stricken patients, she defines her version of suffrage work to champion women’s rights for and beyond the right to vote. When global events devolve into chaos with the 1918 influenza pandemic and a world war, Eliza renews her vow to help and heal.
A Lady Newspaperman’s Dilemma by Eileen Joyce Donovan
Six years after women won the right to vote, one woman is determined to make her mark in the male-dominated world of newspaper reporting.
1926. A world of flappers, speakeasies and bathtub gin. A year when Alex, a cocky college graduate, arrives at a small Montana newspaper as a cub reporter. She plans to use this job to jumpstart her future career with a metropolitan paper. However, those plans go awry when she’s told she’ll be covering the local bake sales and other community news. But all that changes when on her first day, a courthouse shootout thrusts her into the lead reporter’s role. It also pushes her into the path of the town’s most eligible, and handsome, cattle rancher. Riddled with self-doubts, she doesn’t know if she can handle this major story or the budding love she feels for the cowboy.
That spring, an ice jam on the Yellowstone River causes a major flood, which threatens to drown the town. Only US Army bombs can save it. Alex’s reporting on this bombing draws national attention and a job offer from the San Francisco Chronicle. So, she’s faced with a choice. Her dream job or her dream man.
Breaking through the roar of the 1920s, award-winning novelist Donovan singles out one woman’s journey of self-empowerment that is both heartbreaking and familiar to any woman trying to make it in a man’s world.
The Weight of Flowers by D.K. Silver
Born in 1900, Jamison Jones Davenport grew up believing that there were two categories of people: those with value and those without. Her misogynistic father’s dictatorial rule of their Kentucky stud farm reminded her every day that she belonged to the latter because she wasn’t born a boy.
Determined to control her own fate, Jamison secures an assistantship with a successful feminist author in Switzerland, only to find that within days of her arrival, her position has been mysteriously withdrawn. When her father descends upon her Swiss hotel with a suitor in tow, Jamison realizes she has become a pawn in another of his self-serving schemes. A party invitation from a stranger introduces her to the world of rubber tycoon J.D. Roe, the man who believes his redemption is in her hands. And between them all is Jamison’s childhood friend, Carrington Marcs, who spent his young life pining for her and plans to prove himself on a hunting trip with her father.
Against the background of Swiss neutrality, Jamison takes a stand against her father, against the restrictive social mores of the times and against her own fears in a bid for independence and value. The Weight of Flowers tells Jamison and Carrington’s story and how far the Colonel will reach in bringing everyone into his own damnation.
The Good Time Girls by K.T. Blakemore
A novel of wild women, the bonds of friendship, a harrowing road trip and help found in the least likely places.
In 1905 Kansas, ex-dancehall girl and outlaw Ruby Calhoun settles into a (mostly) quiet and (mostly) lawful life. But out of the blue, her past comes hustling into town when her ex-friend and ex-dancehall partner, Pip, shows up with a grim message and dangerous mission: Cullen Wilder, an old enemy with a long memory, wants them dead and the only way to survive is to kill him first.
With Cullen’s henchman hot on their heels, Ruby and Pip hightail into the hinterlands of Kansas to save another friend from Cullen’s vengeance. Unprepared for the journey, their trip is filled with mishaps and mayhem, blunders and bounders, con artists and the circling noose of the law. Through it all, Ruby is tormented by the memories of her life years ago in Arizona Territory, when the upstairs girls at the Paradise Saloon and Dancehall kept her safe, and the dreadful day when it all went wrong. Will Ruby have the guts to face her turbulent past, or will she cut and run like a coward one more time?
The Cost of Electricity by Kathryn Holzman
The Cost of Electricity tells the story of a coming-of-age love triangle set at the University of Oregon in 1902. Rebellious Lulu, the daughter of pioneers, befriends Al, the son of a state Supreme Court judge. Their mutual friend Roy, a talented writer and speaker with a troubled past, works with Lulu on the literary magazine. Lulu and Roy share a powerful attraction, but she seduces sensible Al.
After graduation, the newly formed Portland Electric Company recruits Al. Lulu talks her way into a job editing a monthly magazine run by a shady entrepreneur. Overwhelmed by a pressing deadline and the publisher’s unrealistic expectations, Lulu reaches out to Roy. With his help, the first edition of the magazine is published to great acclaim. Late one night at the office, Roy declares his love.
Lulu and Roy move to Southern California where Roy sells a movie script based on Calamity Jane. Lulu attends library school and joins the women’s campaign for the vote. But their tempestuous relationship is tested by her new-found independence. In the end, she faces a painful choice.
Suddenly That Summer by Lori Handeland
1967.
They called it the Summer of Love …
For small-town Wisconsin siblings Billy and Jay Johnson, it’s a summer of change, confusion and self-discovery.
Billy enlists in the army and is soon on his way to Vietnam. The letters and sketches he sends home tell the story of the crack-shot soldier he has become. ‘Slayer’ is a sniper the Vietcong both fear and loathe, an enemy they will never stop hunting. But the more violence Billy sees, the more he kills and the farther he drifts from who he thought he was — or at least who he thought he wanted to be. He draws strength from the friends he makes on his journey and the camaraderie he finds. Billy begins to wonder if he is there for the mission or the men or if, maybe, his mission has become these men.
Jay expects to enjoy the summer with her three lifelong friends, but the Four Musketeers have grown up and grown apart leaving Jay adrift and alone. Then she meets Paul, the dazzling new boy from California, whose anti-war views make her question if things are as cut and dried as she’s been taught. Shouldn’t she be on the same side of this war as her brother, who believes just as strongly in the right of the conflict as the protestors believe in the wrong of it? Torn, Jay struggles to make sense of her lifelong beliefs versus the turning cultural tide when surprising support comes from the friends she thought she’d lost.
From the voice of New York Times bestselling author Lori Handeland, a heartfelt, coming-of-age story that brings back the feelings of innocence, fireworks and fireflies, warm summer sun on your skin — and the moment you realized everything was about to change.
