The Will of the Many by James Islington

It was everywhere, so I finally borrowed it: ancient Rome turned into a power system, with a whole vocabulary the book never stops to explain. Two of those made up words sent me to Google.

I reviewed The Will of the Many and its sequel, The Strength of the Few, in my September reading recap, along with everything else I read this month.

Format: eBook

Source: Library

Rating: 5 stars

Is “vek” a real curse word?

Vek gets thrown around as a curse all through the book, so I went looking for whether Islington borrowed it from a real language. As far as I can tell, he didn’t. I couldn’t find it anywhere outside the book.

Are alupi real animals?

Alupi show up in the book as animals, and I wanted to know whether they came from some real legend. They don’t. Islington made them up, and I couldn’t find a real animal or folklore creature by that name anywhere. Hold onto that one, though, because it comes back later in this post.

Grab a copy of The Will of the Many

Library first. But if you’re buying, this link supports indie bookstores and me.

The Mad Wife by Meagan Church

It’s 1955, Lulu Mayfield has the perfect house in a perfect suburb and a brand new baby, and something is slipping. If that sounds familiar, it’s because I keep reading this story: here’s what Mad Honey sent me googling and the essay where The Yellow Wallpaper came in.

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Susan Bennett)

Source: Library

Rating: 4 stars

Want the spoiler free version? My full review of The Mad Wife is in my September reading recap, along with the other seven books I read this month.

“Housewife syndrome” was a real diagnosis

From roughly the 1940s into the 1970s, American doctors had a catchall label for women at home who were anxious, exhausted, sleepless or just unhappy. They called it housewife syndrome, or housewife’s nerves, or the trapped housewife. It took over from hysteria as the go-to diagnosis for women, and the suggested fixes included having another baby or moving to the suburbs.

Moving to the suburbs was the prescription. Lulu already lives there.

When a baby or a new zip code didn’t fix her, the options got a lot darker, and The Mad Wife puts all of them on the table. Electroshock therapy came to the US around 1940 and was used on women diagnosed with depression and nerves. Then there was the lobotomy. Walter Freeman did his first transorbital lobotomy, the version done through the eye socket, in 1946, and a 1951 study found that nearly 60 percent of American lobotomy patients were women. Around 40,000 people in this country were lobotomized in all. And a woman could be sent away to an institution on her husband’s say so and a doctor’s signature.

Miltown, the “emotional aspirin”

The drug is spelled Miltown, with one L, named after Milltown, New Jersey, which has two. Wallace Laboratories launched it in 1955, the same year the book is set, and it became the first blockbuster psychiatric drug in the country. By 1957, Americans had filled more than 36 million prescriptions for it.

Cosmopolitan called the pills “emotional aspirins” in 1956, and by 1960 women were about twice as likely as men to be taking tranquilizers like it. The ads sold it as relief for women overwhelmed by housework and children.

Can you smell colors?

The book made me wonder, so I looked it up. What I found is called synesthesia, where one sense sets off another, like seeing colors when you hear music or tasting words. Somewhere around 3 to 5 percent of people have some form of it, and it is not a mental illness.

⚠️ SPOILER ALERT FOR THE MAD WIFE

Stop here if this book is on your list. Everything below this line until the Demon Copperhead section is tied to the ending. Scroll down to Demon Copperhead to keep going spoiler free.

Lupus can look like madness

Lupus is an autoimmune disease, and it can attack the brain. When it does, psychosis, hallucinations and confusion are all documented symptoms. A 2025 study of 566 lupus patients found about one in five had experienced hallucinations, and 11 percent had hallucinated smells.

Many of them never told a doctor. One patient in that study said, “I’ve never told a medical doctor because they love to tell me I am crazy.”

So Lulu, a woman in 1955 with a real disease, gets treated as a mad wife. It’s the same story The Yellow Wallpaper and Mad Honey told, one more time.

Lupus means “wolf”

Lupus is Latin for wolf. A 13th century physician named Rogerius used the word for facial lesions that looked like a wolf’s bite. Last month I figured out I google words more than I google history, and this one went straight onto that list.

And remember the alupi from The Will of the Many? Alupi sounds an awful lot like lupus. I couldn’t find anything saying Islington meant that, so I’m just going to enjoy that two of my September books accidentally met in the middle.

Grab a copy of The Mad Wife

How I think about buying books: the library is always the right answer if it’s an option for you. But some books you just want to keep. If this is one of those, my Bookshop.org link supports independent bookstores and tosses a few cents to me.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Twenty-one hours with Damon Fields, a kid born in a trailer in Lee County, Virginia, talking straight into my ears through foster care, football and the arrival of OxyContin. The book tosses out a word and a war like everybody already knows about them, and I didn’t know either one.

My full review of Demon Copperhead, along with every other book I finished in September, is in my September reading recap.

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Charlie Thurston)

Source: Library

Rating: 5 stars

Melungeon

The book uses this word for Damon and his father like everyone already knows what it means. I didn’t. Melungeon is the name for about 40 families of mixed ancestry who lived along the Tennessee and Virginia border, mostly in Hancock and Hawkins counties. It started out as a slur in the early 1800s, and for generations the people it was aimed at didn’t fit any box the law had room for.

So they built a story that protected them. A lot of Melungeon families said they were Portuguese, because in courts that punished any trace of African ancestry, being dark and Portuguese was safer. In 1874 a lawyer named Lewis Shepherd won a Melungeon woman named Martha Simmerman her inheritance by arguing that her family descended from ancient Phoenicians who reached America by way of Portugal.

The real answer took until 2012. A DNA study led by genealogist Roberta Estes and published in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy traced the core families back to relationships between sub-Saharan African men and northern or central European women in colonial Virginia. Plenty of people who had grown up on the Portuguese version were not happy about it.

A war over coal

A line in the book says the second biggest war in America after the Civil War was fought over coal, and I assumed someone was exaggerating. It’s real, it happened in 1921, and I had never heard of it.

It’s called the Battle of Blair Mountain. From August 25 to September 2, 1921, about 10,000 armed coal miners marched through southern West Virginia toward Logan County. They wanted to unionize the coalfields and get out from under companies that paid them in scrip and could evict their families along with their jobs. Waiting for them were about 3,000 deputies and company guards gathered by Logan County sheriff Don Chafin and paid for by the coal operators.

Private planes dropped homemade bombs on the miners. President Harding sent federal troops, and Army bombers flew over the mountains to watch. When the soldiers arrived, most of the miners put down their guns rather than fight the US Army. Nobody agrees on how many people died, and the estimates run from about sixteen to more than a hundred.

The miners wore red bandanas around their necks so they could recognize each other, which is one of the stories behind the word redneck. Blair Mountain is usually called the largest armed uprising in this country since the Civil War, and it went mostly untaught for decades. The battlefield wasn’t put back on the National Register of Historic Places until 2018.

Grab a copy of Demon Copperhead

Get it from the library if you can. If not, Bookshop.org over Amazon, always.

Three books sent me looking things up in September. Five more went by without a single question, and all eight are in the full September recap, with the reviews and the month in numbers.

Read the September recap

Subscribe and the October one lands in your inbox at the start of November.

Subscribe now

This is why I love reading. One story turns into ten tabs open.

Tell me in the comments: have you ever looked something up in a novel expecting it to be made up, and found out it was real? Which book?

Leave a comment

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

I came to this straight off Stone Blind, because I loved that book and wanted more Haynes immediately. If you liked The Silence of the Girls and wanted it angrier and funnier, this is that. It gives the women of the Trojan War their own space instead of leaving them standing around as scenery, and it left me with the specific feeling of having been handed back a story I thought I already knew.

Wanting more land than you need

There is a section about men taking and wasting more land and resources than they need, and I stopped the audiobook over it. Not because it is a surprising idea, but because it is sitting inside a story set right at the end of the Bronze Age, and it turns out that is an argument real historians have been having for a long time.

The Late Bronze Age collapse happened somewhere around 1200 to 1150 BCE, and it took down a set of connected societies across the eastern Mediterranean in a span short enough that people still argue about what did it. The candidates are all the ones you would expect, and they are all unsatisfying on their own: prolonged drought, failed harvests, movement of peoples, warfare, and trade networks so interlocked that when one part failed the rest went with it. The version I keep coming back to is the systems argument, which says no single thing killed it. The whole thing was simply built too tightly to survive any one bad decade.

The Egyptians recorded fighting off the Sea Peoples on the northeast wall of Ramses III's mortuary temple at Medinet Habu, c. 1180 BCE. It is one of the few things anyone wrote down while the world was coming apart. Drawing of the relief, via Wikimedia Commons

So a novel about a mythological war is set at the exact hinge where a real world came apart, and a line about taking more than you need lands differently once you know that. I do not think Haynes put it there by accident.

I have not written the essay this wants to become. It is sitting there and I know it, and I am not ready.

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Natalie Haynes)

Source: Library

Rating: 4 stars

Grab a copy of A Thousand Ships

Library first, always. But if you’re buying anyway, my Bookshop.org links support indie bookstores and a sliver comes to me. No pressure.

My Friends by Fredrik Backman

My first Backman, and now one of my favorite books I have ever read, which is an annoying thing to say about a book everyone already told me to read. A girl piecing together what happened around a famous painting and the four teenagers who were there when it was made. If you loved A Man Called Ove but wished it hurt more, go here. It left me wanting to stand in front of a painting that does not exist, and irritated that I could not.

The name on the cover did not write the sentences I loved

Here is the thing that sent me looking. What got me about this book was the cadence. Not the plot, the rhythm of the sentences, the way they carried me instead of just informing me. I finished it, went to look something up, and found out it was written in Swedish. The original is called Mina vänner. The English I fell in love with was made by a translator named Neil Smith.

I had a genuinely embarrassing moment of realizing I had spent thirteen hours admiring prose and giving all the credit to a man who did not write those particular words in that particular order.

Literary translation is a craft and a career, and it is not a swap of one word for another. Rhythm, register, where a sentence breathes, what a joke does in one language and what you have to build to make it do the same thing in another. Translators make thousands of decisions a book, and the good ones are invisible in exactly the way that means nobody thanks them.

I now check the translator’s name before I start anything translated. That is a permanent change and it took one book.

This one is also going into a words and etymology grouping I have been slowly building, because it turns out I google language more than I google history.

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Marin Ireland)

Source: Library

Rating: 5 stars

Grab a copy of My Friends

Borrow it if you can. Buy it if you must. And if you’re buying, my Bookshop.org link keeps it with the indies.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Third stop on a Patchett run I only took because Threads told me to after I DNF’d Tom Lake earlier this year. A birthday party in an unnamed South American country, an opera singer, a Japanese businessman who came only to hear her sing, and then armed men coming through the air vents after a president who never showed up. If you liked the slow claustrophobic middle of Station Eleven, this is that feeling for four hundred pages.

I paused it a third of the way in to ask whether any of this was real

It is.

In December 1996, members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement took over the Japanese ambassador’s residence in the San Isidro district of Lima, Peru, during a party for Emperor Akihito’s 63rd birthday. Fourteen militants. More than six hundred guests inside.

About half of the hostages were released within days. Seventy-two were held to the end, and the end took a long time to arrive. The siege ran 126 days. In that time the thing everyone remembers happened, which is that the hostages and their captors began to know each other, because four months is longer than most people can sustain being strangers.

A commando carries a hostage out of the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima on 22 April 1997, at the end of 126 days. Photo credited to César Astudillo, archives of the Peruvian Joint Command of the Armed Forces, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It ended on 22 April 1997, when roughly 140 Peruvian commandos came up through tunnels that had been dug under the building. The operation was called Chavín de Huántar. All fourteen militants were killed. One hostage died, a Supreme Court justice named Carlos Giusti Acuña. Two soldiers died, Lieutenant Colonel Juan Valer Sandoval and Captain Raúl Jiménez Chávez.

I had gone in knowing nothing, which I still think is the right way to read this book, and then found out the least believable part was the part that was reported.

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Anna Fields)

Source: Library

Rating: 4 stars

Grab a copy of Bel Canto

I’ll always tell you to check the library first. If you’d rather own it, this Bookshop.org link supports independent shops and helps me out a little.

Beartown by Fredrik Backman

Somebody in this book asks, with a completely straight face, whether da Vinci got a discount on brown paint. It is a throwaway piece of sarcasm inside a novel about a hockey town, and I could not tell whether it was a joke everybody already knows or something Backman made up, so I went looking. On the book itself: my second Backman of the month, and it is Friday Night Lights rewritten as literary fiction and moved to a Swedish forest. A five star that is not remotely comfortable.

Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, c. 1503 to 1506. Louvre. via Wikimedia Commons

The Mona Lisa really is brown, and there is a second one in Madrid that is not

The first answer is that it does not appear to be a stock art world joke. I could not find it anywhere as an established line, so I am giving it to Backman.

The second answer is the one that ate my evening, because the premise is completely correct. The Mona Lisa does read brown and dim and murky, and that is not Leonardo’s palette. It is roughly five centuries of varnish going yellow on top of his paint, and nobody is going to strip it off, because the risk of taking the painting with the varnish is not one the Louvre will ever accept.

The Prado copy, painted in Leonardo’s studio at the same time and cleaned of its overpaint in 2012. Museo Nacional del Prado, via Wikimedia Commons

Which would be the end of it, except there is a second one. One of Leonardo's own students, most likely Salai or Melzi, painted a near twin alongside the original starting around 1503, and that panel hangs in the Prado in Madrid. For a long time it sat there under a flat black background that somebody added later. In 2012 conservators took that overpaint off and the landscape came back, and so did the color. In places it is better preserved than the Louvre painting, down to the spindles of her chair, the frills across her chest, and the veil at her left arm.

So we do know what she looked like before she went brown. It just is not the famous one.

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Marin Ireland)

Source: Library

Rating: 5 stars

Grab a copy of Beartown

A note on my links: I'm a library person first, always. If you can borrow it, borrow it. But if you're buying anyway, my Bookshop.org links support indie bookstores and send a little back my way. Both can be true.

Four books sent me looking things up in August. Three more went by without a single question, and all seven are in the full August recap, with the reviews and the month in numbers.

Read the August recap

Subscribe and the September one lands in your inbox at the start of October.

Subscribe now

This is why I love reading. One story turns into ten tabs open.

Tell me in the comments: what is the last thing a novel made you go look up, and did it turn out to be real?

Leave a comment

El-Arifi writes Cleopatra’s story as though someone who actually knew her was finally allowed to speak, and not the Roman version or the Hollywood version but the one where she is a mother and a ruler and a sister and a strategist, all at once, all the time. The footnotes throughout the book, where El-Arifi flags which pieces of history were probably exaggerated and then lets Cleopatra correct the record inside the narrative, made me question everything I thought I knew.

Here are the five things I Googled.

Sennedjem and his wife harvesting grain in the Field of Reeds, a facsimile of a painting from his tomb at Deir el-Medina (original c. 1295 to 1213 BC). The Egyptian year, Shemu included, was built around the harvest. Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

What is Shemu?

The book references Shemu frequently, and I had no idea what it was. Turns out, Shemu was the third season in the ancient Egyptian calendar: the harvest season. It ran from roughly May to September, during the period when the Nile was at its lowest before the annual flood.

Ancient Egypt did not use a four-season calendar the way we do. They had three seasons, all tied to the Nile: Akhet (the flooding), Peret (the growing/emergence), and Shemu (the harvest). Their entire agricultural cycle, and by extension their entire economy, revolved around the river. Shemu was when farmers harvested emmer wheat, barley, flax, and vegetables from the nutrient-rich soil the floods had deposited months earlier.

What struck me is how different this is from the planting-and-harvesting cycle I grew up understanding. In Egypt, you planted after the floods receded and harvested in what we would think of as late spring and summer. The Nile dictated everything.

A hakawati in an old Damascus cafe, keeping the centuries-old storytelling tradition alive on the nights of Ramadan. Photo: [photographer] via Wikimedia Commons.

What is a Hakawati?

This word appears in the book and I had to look it up. A Hakawati is an Arabic storyteller. The word comes from a fusion of two Arabic words: hekaye, meaning “the story,” and haki, meaning “to talk.”

For generations, the Hakawati was a central figure in Arabic culture. People would gather in coffeehouses, homes, or outdoor spaces, and the Hakawati would narrate stories of heroism, romance, tragedy, and comedy. These storytellers represented the collective memory and imagination of their communities. They brought historical figures to life, spun tales from the Quran, and breathed humanity into legends.

The tradition has faded with modernity, though there has been a revival in recent years. Reading about it in the context of Cleopatra’s story felt fitting. El-Arifi is doing something similar: taking a story that has been told a thousand ways by a thousand people and giving it back its original voice.

Cleopatra and Caesar (1866) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the earliest paintings to show her emerging from the carpet. The "carpet" detail itself traces back to an 18th-century translation of Plutarch more than to history. Image: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Was Cleopatra actually Caesar’s lover?

The book portrays a romantic relationship between Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, and I wanted to know how much of that was historically supported.

The answer: quite a lot. Cleopatra and Caesar’s relationship began around 48 BC, when he was 52 and she was 21. Caesar had pursued Pompey to Egypt during the Roman Civil War, and Cleopatra, locked in her own power struggle against her brother Ptolemy XIII, saw an opportunity. She famously had herself smuggled into Caesar’s presence, rolled in a carpet (or possibly a linen sack, depending on the source).

In 47 BC, Cleopatra gave birth to Ptolemy XV, known as Caesarion, whom she claimed was Caesar’s son. Caesar never formally acknowledged him as his heir, but in 46 BC, Cleopatra and their son visited Rome and stayed at one of Caesar’s estates.

The relationship was both political and personal, and it lasted until Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC. What El-Arifi does with this in the novel is make it feel like more than a political alliance without losing the political dimension.

The Death of Cleopatra (1874) by Jean-André Rixens

The painting of Cleopatra and the cobra

The book references a famous artistic depiction of Cleopatra’s death, and I went looking for it. What I found was not one painting but an entire genre.

“Cleopatra with the Asp” has been painted by dozens of artists across centuries. Guido Reni painted a version in the 1620s showing Cleopatra pressing the snake to her breast. Jean-André Rixens painted a lavish version in 1874. Guercino, Michel Corneille, and countless others took on the subject.

The traditional story is that Cleopatra killed herself by allowing an asp to bite her rather than be paraded through Rome by Octavian. But here is where El-Arifi’s footnotes become so valuable: the historical evidence for this specific method of death is thin. It is one of those details that became “fact” through repetition, not through proof.

What fascinated me most is how these paintings, created centuries after her death, shaped the popular image of Cleopatra far more than any historical source did.

The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, 41 B.C. (1885) by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Cleopatra’s barge

The book also references Cleopatra on a ship, and I Googled the classical paintings of this scene. The most notable are “The Triumph of Cleopatra” (first exhibited 1821, now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery) and “Cleopatra’s Barge” by Frederick Arthur Bridgman.

These paintings illustrate one of the most famous scenes in ancient history: Cleopatra sailing to Tarsus to meet Mark Antony. According to Plutarch, her barge had purple sails, silver oars, and was perfumed so heavily that people on shore could smell it before they could see it. She arrived dressed as the goddess Aphrodite.

Whether or not Plutarch’s account is accurate (and El-Arifi has thoughts about that), the image has persisted for two thousand years. It is another example of how the art and literature about Cleopatra have overshadowed the historical reality, which is exactly the tension El-Arifi explores throughout the entire novel.

The review

Format: Physical | Source: Library | Rating: 4 stars

If you like your historical fiction anchored in real research, this belongs on the shelf with Kate Quinn’s Mistress of Rome and Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra, the strong-women-of-the-ancient-world group. The love story threaded through it kept the politics from ever reading like a lecture. The only reason it’s four stars and not five is honest and a little hard to explain: I loved it the whole time I was in it, but it didn’t stay with me in the days after the way my five-star books usually do. Still, very few novels have ever sent me to my phone five separate times, and that alone tells you how alive it felt.

Grab a copy of Cleopatra.

Get it from the library if you can. If not, Bookshop.org over Amazon, always.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what's a "fact" from history you believed for years before finding out it was mostly myth, the thing everyone repeats that turns out to be thin on proof? Tell me in the comments.

Leave a comment

But the male lead is an arborist, which means there are tree facts woven into every other conversation, plus more tree puns than I knew existed. So naturally I paused to look up redwood trees, and that little detour turned into a whole situation.

Redwoods at Tall Trees Grove photo by Shaina Niehans

Redwood trees can live for over 2,000 years

This is where it started, as a basic fact-check I fully meant to close out in thirty seconds, and then I just kept scrolling.

Redwoods are among the oldest living organisms on the planet, and some individual trees have been alive since before the Roman Empire. They can grow over 350 feet tall, and their bark can be more than a foot thick.

What surprised me most was how they survive. They grow these things called burls, which are basically backup systems built right into the tree. If the main trunk gets damaged, or fire comes through, or something goes catastrophically wrong, the burl can sprout a brand new tree. The redwood has a plan B going the whole time. I don’t totally know why, but reading that felt weirdly reassuring.

A tree's rings record the seasons it lived through, wide in good years and narrow in drought. Photo: via Wikimedia Commons.

Epigenetic memory in trees

Then I fell into the question of whether trees can actually “remember” stress, and the short answer seems to be maybe.

There’s emerging research suggesting that trees respond to environmental stress in ways that shape how they grow and defend themselves later on. It isn’t memory the way we usually think about it, but it does look like an inherited biological response to past conditions.

This is all still being studied and not much of it is settled science. But the idea that a tree could carry the effects of old droughts or fires in its biology, and then pass those effects on to future generations, kind of blew my mind for a Tuesday afternoon.

Male catkins releasing pollen, the spring haze a lot of cities accidentally engineered. Photo: via Wikimedia Commons

Cities plant too many male trees

And then, right after a particular scene in the book, I ended up reading about urban tree planting policies. Apparently a lot of cities preferentially plant male trees, because female trees drop fruit and seeds that cities consider messy, and male trees produce significantly more pollen. Which means allergies, everywhere, basically by design.

This one is debated, and some arborists push back on how much of the problem actually comes down to gendered planting versus other factors. But it’s a real pattern that’s been documented across multiple cities.

I came for a cute romance and left thinking about municipal tree selection committees. Not mad about it.

The review

Format: eBook | Source: Library | Rating: 3 stars

It’s a short, fast novella, charming and low-stakes in the way Abby Jimenez does well. The characters are easy to root for and it moves quickly. I didn’t realize going in that it’s the second in a series, but it reads fine on its own. It isn’t deep, and it isn’t the kind of book that’s going to stay with me, so three stars feels right. But it did its job, and apparently it turned me into someone with opinions about urban tree biology.

Grab a copy of Fall Risk.

I'll always tell you to check the library first. If you'd rather own it, this Bookshop.org link supports independent shops and helps me out a little.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what's a subject you now know way too much about because one book sent you down a hole? For me it's apparently urban tree planting. Tell me yours in the comments.

Leave a comment

So I Googled it: was the Black Swan based on an actual person?

That’s how I found Josephine Baker.

Josephine Baker in the banana skirt from the 1927 Folies Bergère revue "Un Vent de Folie." The fame this image gave her later became the cover for her Resistance work. Photo: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Josephine Baker and the French Resistance

Baker was an American-born dancer and entertainer who became one of the most famous performers in France in the 1920s and 30s. She was also, secretly, a spy for the French Resistance during WWII.

She used her celebrity to travel to neutral countries, attend diplomatic events, and gather intelligence. She smuggled information written in invisible ink on her sheet music. She pinned notes inside her underwear. She used her fame as the cover, because nobody suspects the woman everyone’s watching.

Genevieve in the novel isn’t Josephine Baker. But the inspiration is unmistakable. A performer whose public life is spectacle and whose private life is resistance. Once I made the connection, every scene in the book where Genevieve moves th

Carrying full equipment, American assault troops move onto Utah Beach on the northern coast of France, with landing craft jamming the harbor in the background. Photo: U.S. Army, National Archives (SC189902), public domain.

Utah Beach

Later in the book, a specific location comes up repeatedly and I realized I didn’t actually know enough about it. So I Googled Utah Beach.

Utah Beach was the westernmost of the five D-Day landing beaches on June 6, 1944. It was assigned to U.S. forces, supported by airborne divisions that dropped behind enemy lines the night before.

What surprised me was that Utah Beach was actually one of the more successful landings that day. Strong currents pushed the landing craft about a mile south of the intended target, which accidentally put them in a less-defended area. Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. famously assessed the situation and decided to “start the war from right here” rather than trying to redirect to the planned landing zone.

Casualties at Utah were significantly lower than at Omaha Beach. That context helped me understand why the scenes set near the end of the book carried both tension and a thread of hope at the same time. There was danger, absolutely. But there was also this sense that survival was possible if everything lined up.

Why the real history matters

Some of the details vary depending on the source, and the novel takes its own creative liberties. But the bones of it are real. Real people risked their lives in exactly the ways this story describes. Real performers used their public personas as covers. Real soldiers landed on real beaches not knowing if they’d make it past the morning.

Once I knew that, The Black Swan of Paris stopped feeling like just a story and started feeling like it was pulled from actual lives people lived.

The review

Format: Audiobook | Source: Library | Rating: 5 stars

Seventeen hours on audio and it never once dragged. The narration is a big part of why, especially the French and German accents, and Robards writes scenes you can practically see staged in front of you. I hit the halfway mark sure the book had already peaked, and I was wrong. It kept deepening instead. Underneath all the tension runs a steady current of love, both romantic and familial, and a real hope rooted in the courage of the Resistance, which is what keeps the heartache from sinking it. This was my first Karen Robards and I’m already working through her backlist. One note going in: there’s wartime violence and real emotional loss here.

Grab a copy of The Black Swan of Paris.

A note on my links: I'm a library person first, always. If you can borrow it, borrow it. But if you're going to own a copy anyway, my Bookshop.org links support indie bookstores and send a little back my way. Both can be true.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what's a novel that turned out to be standing on a true story, the one that sent you looking up whether it really happened? Tell me in the comments.

Leave a comment

“Birth of Athena,” black-figure amphora, c. 550 BC. Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

How Athena was born from Zeus’ head

Stone Blind mentions this almost casually, like of course you already know Athena sprung fully formed from her father’s skull. I did not already know this. I knew Athena was Zeus’ daughter, but the specifics? Zeus swallowed Athena’s mother Metis (a Titan goddess of wisdom) because of a prophecy that her children would be more powerful than him. Classic Zeus move. Later, he developed a splitting headache, and Hephaestus (the god of the forge) cracked open his skull with an axe. Out came Athena, fully grown, in full armor.

The part that stuck with me: Zeus literally consumed the mother to claim the child. And then the mythology credits him as Athena’s sole parent. Metis gets erased. Knowing this makes Athena’s role in Medusa’s story hit differently. She’s a goddess who was herself born from an act of patriarchal consumption, and then she punishes another woman for being victimized by a god. The cycle is right there.

Athena with owl, detail from terracotta lekythos by the Brygos Painter, c. 490 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Athena’s owl

I knew owls were on ancient Athenian coins and that they symbolized wisdom. What I didn't know was that the Little Owl is literally named after Athena (Athene noctua) and was considered her sacred companion, representing the ability to see in darkness. The owl shows up in countless sculptures and became one of the most recognized symbols in Western civilization.

What I found interesting is that the owl-as-wisdom symbol isn’t just decorative. In some tellings, the owl gave Athena the ability to see the whole truth, even the parts hidden in shadow. Which makes it even more pointed that Athena, goddess of wisdom, chose not to see the truth of what happened to Medusa.

Stheno and Euryale chasing Perseus, detail from the Eleusis Amphora by the Polyphemus Painter, c. 650 BC. Archaeological Museum of Eleusis.

Medusa’s sisters and the connection to sea mythology

This is the rabbit hole that really got me. In Stone Blind, Medusa’s sisters Stheno and Euryale are the other two Gorgons. All three were sea creatures in the oldest versions of the myth, connected to a broader network of ocean mythology including the Graeae (the three gray sisters who shared one eye and one tooth) and various other sea-creature figures.

I started wondering: did The Little Mermaid or other ocean mythology stories in modern media take any inspiration from the Gorgon family tree? The connections are murky but fascinating. The Gorgons were daughters of Phorcys and Ceto, ancient sea deities. Phorcys and Ceto also parented the Graeae, the sea serpent Ladon, and Echidna (mother of many Greek monsters). So the Gorgons sit in this massive family tree of ocean-dwelling mythological creatures that predates almost every mermaid story we know.

Hans Christian Andersen’s original Little Mermaid draws more from Scandinavian folklore than Greek myth, but the broader tradition of dangerous, beautiful, powerful ocean women? That thread runs all the way back to figures like the Gorgons and the Sirens. The sea has always been the place where mythology puts its most threatening feminine figures. Medusa’s family tree is one of the oldest branches. I need to dig into this more.

The review

Format: Audiobook | Source: Library | Rating: 4 stars

What Haynes pulls off is making you feel for Medusa from the very start, so that by the time the famous part of the story arrives, you read it as a wrong done to a person rather than a monster getting what it deserved. Along the way you get attached to some of the other gods and goddesses and grow to genuinely dislike others, which is half the fun. The narration carried it for me, strong with urgency and sarcasm and distinct character voices, and I devoured the whole thing because I needed to see how it landed even though I already knew where it was going.

Grab your own copy of Stone Blind

Library first, always. But if you're buying anyway, my Bookshop.org links back indie bookstores and a sliver comes to me. No pressure.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what's a myth or story you grew up thinking you knew, then found out the real version was darker or stranger than the one you were told? Tell me in the comments.

Leave a comment

A three-star read that still sent me down three separate Google holes. I came in with Fourth Wing expectations, and what hooked me wasn’t the romance so much as the ballet world underneath it, which was so specific it kept pulling me out of the story and onto the internet.

I had to pause the audiobook because: wait. There are different kinds of pointe shoes?

I was on pointe for five years. And in my brain there was just one shoe. And it destroyed my feet. That was the whole experience.

So naturally, I Googled it.

There are different kinds of pointe shoes

The same shoe in four vamp heights. I genuinely did not know this was a choice you got to make. Image via Só Dança (sodanca.com).

Turns out, there’s a whole world I missed.

Different shanks: flexible, medium, or hard, depending on how strong your arch is. Different box shapes for different foot types: tapered, square, wide. There’s something called the vamp (the top of the shoe), which can be U-cut with a drawstring or V-cut for a more tapered look.

Some shoes have a low-profile box, some have a high one. And the construction varies too: traditional pointe shoes are made with paste and burlap that break down over time, but there are modern ones now made with polymer materials that actually last longer.

I just sat there like, oh. That explains a lot actually. Maybe my feet didn’t have to suffer quite that much.

The road back from an Achilles rupture runs 12-plus months, not two weeks. Graphic via 416 Physiotherapy (416physio.ca).

Achilles tear rehab timelines

Then something happens in the book (minor spoiler territory) and suddenly I’m Googling Achilles tear rehab timelines. PT requirements. How long recovery actually takes for a dancer.

The answer is: a long time. Full ruptures often mean 6 to 12 months minimum before return to activity, and for a professional dancer, the timeline can stretch even longer because the demands on that tendon are so specific. Some dancers never return to the same level.

Knowing that made the stakes in the book feel much more real. This isn’t a “rest for two weeks and come back” injury. This is a potential career-ender.

Sara Faulkner, the first woman to complete Coast Guard rescue swimmer training. Photo via aborderlife.medium.com.

What it takes to be a rescue swimmer

And somehow that led me to rescue swimmers. The male lead’s job in the book. The swim tests are genuinely unreal.

Coast Guard rescue swimmer candidates go through one of the most demanding training programs in the military. The attrition rate is extremely high. You have to be comfortable being uncomfortable in water in ways that most people would panic through.

I am a terrible swimmer. So reading about this was humbling to say the least.

Why this all matters

None of this makes me an expert on anything. It’s just curiosity. But once I knew the real stakes behind both characters’ worlds (ballet and rescue swimming), the story felt grounded in a way it hadn’t before. The injuries meant something. The training meant something. The fear of losing it all meant something specific.

The review

Format: Audiobook | Source: Library | Rating: 3 stars

The story weaves past and present with a quiet thread of mystery running underneath, and that mystery is mostly what kept me turning pages. The male lead is patient and caring and refreshingly blunt about how he feels, which I liked. Two honest notes though. The intimate scenes were awkward to sit through on audio, and I think I’d have liked the whole book more on the page than in my ears. Good, not great. But the world it’s set in was worth every tab I opened.

Borrow it if you can. Buy it if you must. And if you're buying, my Bookshop.org link keeps it with the indies.

Grab a copy of Variation.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what's a job or world from a novel that sent you straight to Google because you had to know if it was really like that?

Leave a comment

I picked up Girl at War because Julia Whelan narrated it. That’s it. That was the whole reason. I’ve been going through her audiobooks and this one popped up and I thought, sure, why not.

I didn’t even know what it was about.

Turns out it’s about the Croatian War of Independence, which is part of a larger set of conflicts I’d vaguely heard called “the Yugoslav Wars,” and I realized within the first few chapters that I knew almost nothing about any of it.

So I started googling.

What even were the Yugoslav Wars?

Okay so Yugoslavia was a federation of six republics in southeastern Europe that held together under Tito from after WWII until the early ‘90s. When it started falling apart, it fell apart violently. Croatia declared independence in 1991 and what followed was brutal. We’re talking ethnic cleansing, siege warfare, civilians targeted. The war in Croatia lasted until 1995, but the broader Yugoslav Wars stretched across multiple countries and conflicts through the decade.

I’ve probably read fifty WWII historical fiction novels. I’d never once picked up a book about this. And this was happening in the ‘90s. While I was alive. While I was old enough to have been paying attention.

The Vukovar water tower, heavily damaged during the Croatian War of Independence (1991-1995). Photo by Seiya123

The cyclical violence thing

There's a line of thinking in the book about how the Balkans seem to cycle through conflict every fifty years or so. Different faces, different names, same patterns. I went down a rabbit hole on this and it's... a lot. The region has been a fault line between empires, religions, and ethnic groups for centuries. The Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, both World Wars, and then the breakup of Yugoslavia. It doesn't excuse anything, but it gives you context for why Ana's story feels so heavy. She's not just carrying her own trauma. She's carrying generations of it.

Damaged roofs in Sustjepan, a village near Dubrovnik, December 1991. Photo by Bracodbk

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West

This book comes up in Girl at War because Ana is a literature student and her professor gives her books about the Balkans. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is Rebecca West's account of traveling through Yugoslavia in the 1930s, right before WWII. It's supposedly this massive, sweeping look at the culture and history of the region. Published in 1941. It's on my reading list now.

Sara Novic’s other books

After finishing Girl at War I immediately went to look at what else Sara Novic has written. True Biz (2022) is about a school for the deaf and has really strong reviews. She's also an advocate for disability rights and Deaf culture. Totally different subject matter from Girl at War but I'm interested.

The thing I keep thinking about

I keep coming back to how much historical fiction exists about wars I know nothing about. I've been living in this WWII bubble and there are entire conflicts, entire countries' worth of stories, that I've never touched. This book cracked that open for me, and that's the part that earned the fifth star. It didn't just tell me a good story. It showed me a hole in how I read. I'm planning to put together a reading list of historical fiction set in the Balkans and beyond for anyone else who's been stuck in the same bubble.

The review

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Julia Whelan) | Source: Library | Rating: 5 stars

Structurally it moves between Ana’s childhood during the war and her life years later as a college student in the US, with flashbacks filling in what she can’t yet say out loud. Underneath the plot it’s about buried trauma, grief, and the lies we tell ourselves to keep functioning, and how all of that eventually comes unwound. It’s somber, and I was completely inside it the whole time, needing to know what happened next. My one complaint is that I wanted a book two. I finished it still wondering about Ana, her sister, and the people she left behind.

Grab a copy of Girl at War

How I think about buying books: the library is always the right answer if it's an option for you. But some books you just want to keep. If this is one of those, my Bookshop.org link supports independent bookstores and tosses a few cents to me.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what’s the war you know almost nothing about, the one your reading has somehow skipped right over? Tell me in the comments. I’m building that Balkans list next, and I’ll build the one after it from whatever you name.

Leave a comment

I started typing things like “history of not believing women” and “where does hysterical come from” and ended up somewhere I wasn’t expecting.

1. The word “hysterical” is worse than I thought

The word hysteria comes from the Greek “hystera.” It means uterus.

I had to read that twice.

Ancient Greek physicians, Hippocrates included, believed that when a woman’s uterus physically wandered through her body, it caused emotional instability, anxiety, irrational behavior. The prescribed cure was pregnancy. Put the uterus back to “work.”

Hippocrates, engraved by Paulus Pontius after Peter Paul Rubens, 1638. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

That’s not ancient trivia. That etymology is still in the word every time someone uses “hysterical” to shut down a woman who’s upset, angry, or saying something inconvenient. I’d used that word my whole life without knowing what it literally meant.

2. The rest cure

By the 1800s, “hysteria” had become a catch-all diagnosis for women who were anxious, depressed, angry, exhausted, or just difficult. And the treatment was something called the rest cure, developed by a doctor named Silas Weir Mitchell.

Total bed rest. No reading. No writing. No visitors. No intellectual stimulation. Force-fed. Sometimes for months.

The logic was that women’s brains couldn’t handle the strain of thought. Thinking was making them sick. So the cure was to remove them from the world entirely.

I kept looking for some version of this that felt exaggerated or fringe. It wasn’t. This was mainstream medicine.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, c. 1900. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Yellow Wallpaper

This is where the rabbit hole turned into something I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Before she got married, Gilman studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. She was a painter, designed greeting cards, taught art. She was building a creative life.

Then she married, had a baby, and developed severe postpartum depression. Her doctor, Silas Weir Mitchell, prescribed the rest cure. He told her to live as domestic a life as possible and to never touch a pen, brush, or pencil again. An artist told to stop creating. A thinker told to stop thinking.

She almost lost her mind. So she wrote a short story about it.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) is about a woman confined to bed rest who slowly descends into hallucination and obsession with the wallpaper in her room. It reads like horror. It is horror.

You know that trend where people try to “rawdog” a flight? Just sit there. No phone, no book, no music, nothing. People film themselves doing it for an hour like it’s an accomplishment. Now imagine that hour is your entire life. No end date. No one asking if you’re okay. Just you and the walls and the slow understanding that this is what they think will fix you. That’s the rest cure. That’s what Gilman lived.

She sent a copy of the story to Dr. Mitchell after it was published. The story goes that he changed his treatment approach afterward, though whether that’s true or just a satisfying ending is debated.

The Yellow Wallpaper comes up in Mad Honey, and I went and read the whole thing that night. It’s free online (Project Gutenberg) and takes about twenty minutes. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

4. Why this came from Mad Honey

Mad Honey never directly lays out this history. But the book kept circling this question: whose version of events gets taken seriously? Whose pain is real and whose is performance? Whose story gets to be the truth?

That’s the same question that runs through the entire history of “hysteria.” The language changes. The mechanisms update. But the pattern of deciding that a woman’s account of her own experience isn’t credible? That hasn’t gone anywhere.

I picked up a Jodi Picoult novel and ended up tracing a line from ancient Greek medicine to 19th-century psychiatric abuse to a short story I should have read years ago. Books do this to me.

Has a book ever made you see a pattern you’d been living inside without recognizing it? Tell me which one.

Grab a copy of Mad Honey here.

Here’s where my brain went.

1. Do authors actually steal other authors’ work?

There’s a plot point in this book (mild spoiler, but it’s hard to talk about my rabbit holes without it) where a character passes off someone else’s writing as their own. My first thought was: does this actually happen?

Turns out, yes. More than you’d think.

The most famous recent case is probably Cristiane Serruya, a romance author who was caught in 2019 plagiarizing from dozens of other writers. We're not talking about borrowing themes or being 'inspired by.' She was lifting entire passages. Nora Roberts was one of the authors she copied from, and Roberts did not let it slide quietly.

Then there’s Q.R. Markham (a pen name), whose 2011 spy novel Assassin of Secrets turned out to be a patchwork quilt of stolen passages from James Bond novels, John le Carre, and others. The book was pulled from shelves within days of publication. He’d literally stitched together sentences from other people’s books and called it his own.

The more I dug, the more cases I found. Some were clear-cut theft. Others lived in that gray area where “influence” and “borrowing” start to blur. Which brought me to my next search...

2. Are authors using AI to write their books?

This one spiraled. I started Googling whether AI ghostwriting is becoming a thing in publishing, and the answer is: it already is, and it’s messy.

Amazon had to cap the number of self-published books an author could upload per day because people were using ChatGPT to churn out entire novels and flooding Kindle Unlimited. Some authors reported finding AI-generated books published under names suspiciously similar to theirs, clearly designed to siphon off sales.

Then there’s the philosophical question that I couldn’t stop turning over: if there are only so many stories to tell, and AI is trained on all of them, does “original” even mean anything anymore? I don’t have an answer. But the question felt different after reading a book where a character literally steals someone else’s words to try to salvage a dwindling career. Feeney probably didn’t write this as a commentary on AI in publishing, but the timing made it hit that way.

3. Is the island in the book a real place?

The island in Beautiful Ugly is described as this remote, windswept Scottish island you can only reach by ferry. Standing stones. Dramatic cliffs. The kind of place that feels ancient and alive. I needed to know if it was real.

The short answer: it’s fictional, but it’s clearly inspired by real Scottish islands. The descriptions remind me most of the Outer Hebrides, particularly Lewis and Harris, which is home to the Callanish Standing Stones -- a stone circle that predates Stonehenge. You can only get there by ferry from Ullapool or by a small plane, and the landscape is exactly the kind of stark, beautiful, edge-of-the-world terrain Feeney describes.

Callanish Standing Stones, Isle of Lewis, Scotland. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

There’s also the Isle of Skye, which has the Fairy Pools, the Old Man of Storr, and that same mythic quality. And smaller islands like St. Kilda, which was evacuated in 1930 and is now uninhabited -- just ruins and seabirds. The idea of a community choosing to live on a remote island, cut off by choice, felt very St. Kilda to me, except these women chose to stay rather than leave.

I spent about an hour looking at ferry schedules and Airbnb listings on Lewis. So that happened.

4. The idea that wouldn’t leave: can the same story belong to more than one person?

This wasn’t a single Google search so much as a thread I kept pulling. The plagiarism angle, the AI angle, and even Feeney’s fictional island all circled back to the same question: who owns a story?

There's a concept in folklore studies called 'polygenesis.' It's the idea that similar stories arise independently in different cultures because humans share the same fears, desires, and experiences. Flood myths appear in Mesopotamian, Hindu, Greek, and Indigenous traditions, not because anyone copied anyone else, but because floods are terrifying and universal.

So maybe the question isn’t whether someone stole your story. Maybe it’s whether any story was ever just yours to begin with.

I don’t know. But I like that a thriller I mostly read as a palate cleanser sent me here.

Grab a copy of Beautiful Ugly

Here’s where my brain went.

1. Wait, “mad honey” is real?

I typed “mad honey real” into Google expecting to find out it was loosely inspired by something. Instead I found out it’s an actual product with an actual underground market. It’s honey made from rhododendron nectar, and the flowers contain toxins called grayanotoxins. In small amounts, it causes dizziness and hallucinations. In large amounts, it can kill you.

And then I found the military use history and things got wild.

In 67 BC, a king in what’s now Turkey left honeycombs of this stuff in the path of Roman soldiers. They ate it, collapsed and were slaughtered. It’s considered one of the earliest examples of biological warfare, and I sat there staring at my phone like, this was a plot device in a Jodi Picoult novel and it actually happened in 67 BC?

It still happens today. In Nepal and Turkey, people called “mad honey hunters” climb cliff faces to reach the hives of the world’s largest honeybee. There’s a whole market for it. I watched way too many videos of this at midnight.

And it’s not just ancient history or distant countries. During the American Revolution, a beekeeper named Charity Crabtree was tending her hives when a wounded soldier told her to ride to General Washington with a warning about an incoming British attack. When Redcoats showed up to stop her, she beat her bee skeps with a stick until the bees swarmed out, threw the stick at the soldiers, and rode off while they were getting stung. She made it to Washington in time.

I sat with that one for a while. Bees used as a weapon in 67 BC Turkey. Bees used as a weapon in Revolutionary War Philadelphia. And people still climbing cliffs for hallucinogenic honey today. Nine thousand years of humans and bees, and we’ve never stopped finding ways to use them.

2. 3,000-year-old honey that’s still edible

The book mentions honey’s antimicrobial properties, and I thought okay, I know honey lasts a long time. But I didn’t know how long.

Archaeologists have found honey in Egyptian tombs that’s over 3,000 years old. Still edible. Honey’s low water content, high acidity, and natural hydrogen peroxide production make it basically inhospitable to bacteria. Nothing can grow in it.

Gathering Honey, Tomb of Rekhmire, c. 1479-1425 BC. Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

That’s how I ended up reading about Alexander the Great supposedly being preserved in a honey-filled coffin for transport back to Macedonia. Whether that one’s true is debated, but the fact that it’s even plausible tells you everything.

3. How far back does beekeeping actually go?

Picoult’s Olivia is a beekeeper, and the book is packed with specific apiary details. I wanted to know how old this practice actually is.

At least 9,000 years. There’s rock art in Spain showing honey harvesting from wild hives around 7000 BC. The ancient Egyptians kept bees in clay cylinders and moved them up and down the Nile to follow the flower blooms. They basically invented migratory beekeeping thousands of years ago.

Honey hunter, Cuevas de la Araña, Bicorp, Spain, c. 8000-6000 BC. Drawing by Achillea/Wikimedia Commons, GPL.

The part that got me: before 1851, harvesting honey usually meant killing the bees. The modern hive design changed that. Beekeepers could finally inspect and harvest without destroying the colony. Nine thousand years of beekeeping, and we only figured out how to do it without killing them less than 200 years ago.

Has a book ever made you Google something you were sure was fictional? Tell me which one.

Grab a copy of Mad Honey here.