Tag: Historical Fiction

Book Review

Daisy by Katie Cotugno

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Daisy by Katie Cotugno is a psychological thriller that reimagines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in contemporary America, picking up two years after Jay Gatsby’s death. Daisy Buchanan is still married to Tom, still surrounded by extraordinary wealth, and still grieving the man she loved. But when her best friend, Jordan Baker, is found murdered in a swimming pool, the circumstances bear an unsettling resemblance to Gatsby’s death. With so many tragedies already connected to Daisy, the police investigation brings renewed scrutiny to her life and the secrets surrounding it. As questions about Jordan’s murder mount, Daisy begins to realize that someone may be watching her, and that the past she thought she had left behind is far from finished.

Book cover for Daisy by Katie Cotugno.

The magic trick of Daisy is that everyone thinks they’re her best and most beloved. Everyone thinks they know her inside and out.

Katie Cotugno, Daisy

I was immediately drawn to this novel because I love reimaginings of classic literature, and The Great Gatsby has a particularly special place in my heart. Fun fact: it was the first book I actually read for an English class instead of relying on SparkNotes to get me through the test! I wasn’t exactly a stellar English student back then (even funnier now, considering I have a Ph.D. in English literature). But something about Fitzgerald’s novel clicked for me. I scored a 100% on the test, answered every bonus question correctly, and ended up being the curve buster for the entire class. I still remember how proud I felt because, for the first time, I had concrete proof that I could actually be good at literary analysis. It’s a core memory, and I think I’ll always have a soft spot for The Great Gatsby because of it.

Anyway, one of the things I appreciated most about Cotugno’s reimagining is how naturally Fitzgerald’s world translates into a contemporary setting. The extravagant parties, carefully curated social lives, performative marriages, and casual entitlement of the extraordinarily wealthy feel remarkably familiar. There’s something almost reality-TV-esque about this version of East Egg, where appearances are everything and scandal is both a threat to social standing and a form of entertainment. Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age excess becomes a world of conspicuous consumption, manufactured glamour, and carefully maintained public personas. I thought this was a particularly smart creative decision because it demonstrates how little the underlying dynamics of wealth and privilege have changed, even as the cultural markers of status have evolved. The original novel’s critique of a society in which money insulates people from the consequences of their actions feels just as relevant a century later.

What I found even more interesting, though, was how shifting the narrative perspective changes our relationship with these familiar characters. In The Great Gatsby, Daisy exists primarily through Nick Carraway’s narration, filtered through his observations, assumptions, and judgments. We know what Nick thinks of Daisy, what Gatsby believes she represents, and what Tom expects of her, but we have comparatively little access to her own understanding of her life. By placing Daisy at the center of this narrative, Cotugno gives her an opportunity to define herself rather than remain an object of other people’s fascination. That shift becomes particularly compelling in a psychological thriller concerned with surveillance, obsession, and possession. There’s a meaningful connection between the power to tell someone’s story and the belief that you have the right to determine how that story unfolds. The novel explores how easily fascination can become a form of control, particularly when a woman’s desires and autonomy are treated as secondary to the narratives others have constructed around her. I enjoyed how Cotugno uses the conventions of the thriller to reconsider these dynamics within Fitzgerald’s original story rather than simply transplanting its characters into a new genre.

It’s too late for him, she knows, for what they might have had together. But maybe it isn’t too late for her to have a life of her own.

Katie Cotugno, Daisy

I also loved the way Cotugno establishes suspense from the very beginning. The prologue introduces what appears to be someone obsessively watching Daisy, immediately creating the sense that she’s in danger before we even understand what that danger might be. It changes how you approach the rest of the story. Every interaction becomes potentially suspicious, and even familiar characters take on a more unsettling quality. I especially enjoyed how the novel uses our existing knowledge of Fitzgerald’s characters to complicate our expectations. The central mystery itself was somewhat predictable, and I had my suspicions about the person responsible fairly early. But I didn’t find that particularly disappointing because the novel’s appeal extends beyond the question of who committed the murder. The more interesting questions, for me, concerned the motivations behind the violence and what they revealed about the characters’ relationships with Daisy.

And can we talk about that epilogue?! Without spoiling anything, I absolutely loved it. There’s something especially satisfying about a retelling that not only invites us to reconsider familiar characters but also allows us to imagine possibilities that the original story denied them. Fitzgerald’s novel is, in many ways, a tragedy of longing, idealization, and the impossibility of recovering the past. Cotugno’s ending offers a tantalizing alternative to that inevitability, and I am completely on board! I love that it leaves just enough to the imagination while offering the possibility of something I’d always wanted for these characters. It was such a delightful final surprise, and I couldn’t have asked for a better way to end this reimagining.

Overall, I had so much fun with Daisy! I loved recognizing the connections to Fitzgerald’s novel, but I also think Cotugno provides enough context for readers unfamiliar with The Great Gatsby to enjoy the mystery on its own. More importantly, I appreciated that this retelling does something interesting with the source material rather than simply recreating its most recognizable moments. By reconsidering who gets to tell the story, whose perspective we trust, and whose desires ultimately matter, Cotugno offers a fresh way to think about characters I’ve known for years. And for someone who has loved The Great Gatsby since that very memorable high school English class, revisiting East Egg from an entirely different perspective was an absolute treat.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for sharing an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review

Rottenheart by Kat Dunn

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Rottenheart by Kat Dunn is a sapphic gothic reimagining of Hamlet set in the 1890s, following Odette after the death of her mother, Lydia. As Odette grieves, her aunt Claudine begins taking her mother’s place in the household, while her relationship with her childhood love Cecilia becomes increasingly strained, and Lydia proves considerably less gone than everyone believed. What unfolds is a story of grief, revenge, madness, complicated mother-daughter relationships, and the increasingly uncertain boundary between mourning someone and being haunted by their memory.

Book cover for Rottenheart by Kat Dunn.

The question is: which can she bear? The loss of self or the loss of her mother?

Kat Dunn, Rottenheart

First, I think it’s worth clarifying that although Rottenheart contains a love story, I wouldn’t approach it expecting a romance. Hamlet is a tragedy. Shakespeare’s comedies are the plays that traditionally resolve themselves through a happily ever after (i.e. marriage), and Hamlet very much is not built to deliver any kind of HEA. So Odette and Cecilia’s relationship is supposed to be complicated, unhealthy at times, and deliberately difficult to understand as something we should simply root for. I struggled with their relationship occasionally, but I also think some of that discomfort is built into the material Dunn is adapting.

One of Dunn’s most interesting changes to Hamlet is giving Lydia a much fuller life, personality, and relationship with Odette. The ghost in Hamlet exists largely to give Hamlet his impossible task: remember me, avenge me. We know relatively little about King Hamlet as a person, but Dunn gives us something much messier in Lydia. Because the novel moves between different points in Odette’s life, we meet Lydia as the living mother Odette loved, resented, and rebelled against, while also seeing how Odette remembers her after death. Grief can soften, distort, or rewrite the dead, but Rottenheart adds another layer of tension by making Lydia’s ghost a seemingly sentient presence with desires, anger, and a personality of her own. Odette, therefore, has to contend with who her mother actually was, who grief and memory are turning her into, and a ghost that refuses to let death end their relationship.

How is it possible to love and to hate the same person so completely?

Kat Dunn, Rottenheart

That mother-daughter focus transforms Hamlet’s obligation to his father into something much more intimate and psychologically tangled in Rottenheart. Odette is trying to mourn her mother while also being pulled back into the expectations, resentments, and obligations that shaped their relationship when Lydia was alive. The gothic elements of this retelling further strengthen that ambiguity. The haunting makes Odette’s grief feel physical and inescapable, while the novel’s treatment of madness makes it harder to tell where mourning ends and something supernatural begins. That uncertainty gives the story the creeping sense of dread I love so much in gothic literature.

For all the elements of the retelling that worked for me, I never felt quite as immersed in the story or its relationships as I wanted to be. The nonlinear structure was a huge part of that because the story repeatedly jumps backward and forward, and I often found myself trying to reorient myself instead of getting pulled deeper into the narrative. I also never became as emotionally invested in Odette and Cecilia as I wanted to be. I certainly don’t expect a Hamlet retelling to turn Hamlet/Ophelia into an aspirational love story. But I wanted the connection between Odette and Cecilia to affect me more than it did, especially because their relationship is one of the places where this retelling has the opportunity to reshape the original.

If a woman is to be free, she must have her own means.

Kat Dunn, Rottenheart

And maybe this is where Rottenheart ultimately fell a little short for me. Dunn’s prose is lovely, the historical and literary influences are obvious, and there are some genuinely unsettling moments as grief tips into gothic horror. But with a gender-swapped, sapphic Hamlet, I kept waiting for the adaptation to become even more transformative. I wanted more feminine rage. More interrogation of revenge, inheritance in all its forms, and what changes when Hamlet’s burden is passed from father and son to mother and daughter. Dunn absolutely edges open those doors, but I wanted her to kick a few of them down.

Overall, I liked Rottenheart, particularly as a gothic exploration of grief and the complicated ways daughters remember, resent, love, and inherit their mothers. I just found myself more interested in the possibilities of the adaptation than completely satisfied by where it ultimately took them.

Thank you to NetGalley and Zando for sharing an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review

The Gods Will Sing Our Song by Autumn Krause

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The Gods Will Sing Our Song by Autumn Krause is a YA historical fantasy romance about two Japanese American teenagers, Ren and Violet, who are imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II. Against this devastating backdrop, they find themselves drawn to one another while confronting uncertain futures and a strange magic tied to their cultural heritage. Both are living through a moment that has stripped away so much of their freedom, dignity, and safety. And yet, they are still teenagers who fall for each other, dream about what comes next, and find moments of beauty within circumstances designed to deny them exactly that.

Book cover for The Gods Will Sing Our Song by Autumn Krause.

Magic, in this city of oranges and opportunity, is like that big black dot you see after looking at the sun. It’s the aftereffect of something brilliant, a negative image that’s dwindled over time.

Autumn Krause, The Gods Will Sing Our Song

One of the things I appreciated most about this book is how approachable it makes this history without ever making it feel less horrific. I knew about the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, but I realized while reading that I couldn’t think of another novel I had read centered on it. Whether that says something about my own reading or about how few of these stories reach a wide audience, I’m not sure. Either way, this feels like such an important entry point. Krause gives us a story we can move through within the covers of a single novel while still asking us to sit with how something this unconscionable was allowed to happen at all.

Part of what makes all of this work so well is Krause’s prose. Her writing is so vivid and distinctive that there were moments I had to stop just to appreciate the images she created. At one point, Ren thinks, “I’m going to punch him in the mouth and watch his teeth drop like autumn leaves,” and I have genuinely not stopped thinking about it. The gruesomeness of that potential violence juxtaposed with something as beautiful and inevitable as falling autumn leaves? What an image! And that’s just one example. That kind of unexpected juxtaposition happens again and again, giving the writing this gorgeous sharpness even when the story itself is painful.

If you understand only your own side and cannot grasp the other, I fear you can’t say you know either one, yours or theirs.”

Autumn Krause, The Gods Will Sing Our Song

I also loved the yearning between Ren and Violet. Their romance is incredibly sweet, even as they live through something so dehumanizing and terrifying. They’re teenagers who want to flirt, fall in love, spend time together, and imagine what their lives might look like in the future. There’s something important about how familiar those desires feel. History can flatten people into what happened to them, especially when we’re looking back at an atrocity from decades ago. But we understand what it’s like to have a crush, to wonder if someone likes us back, to imagine a future we haven’t lived yet. And that recognition closes some of the distance between reader and history. Alongside the profound violations of freedom, dignity, safety, and autonomy, the novel reminds us of all the ordinary, deeply human parts of a life that internment disrupted, too.

Knowing that Krause drew from her own family’s experiences made the story even more affecting for me. There is something so powerful about taking an inherited family history this painful and turning it into a story that can carry those experiences forward. These histories deserve to be remembered, especially when forgetting makes it easier to distance ourselves from how something like this was even allowed to happen in the first place. I thought Krause honored the people who lived through internment while still asking difficult questions about the fear, racism, and failures that made it possible.

Some people go to war out of hate. But some people go to war out of love.

Autumn Krause, The Gods Will Sing Our Song

My one real wish is that we had gotten more of the fantasy and mythology. The gods, relics, and culturally rooted magic were such a compelling way into Japanese traditions, and I would have loved to see that part of the story developed even further. At the same time, I understand how much the novel is already balancing between its historical, romantic, and fantastical elements. Mostly, I wanted more because I was so interested in what was already there.

Overall, The Gods Will Sing Our Song is a triumph! It finds beauty without romanticizing its history, hope without diminishing the horror, and tenderness in a story about people whose humanity was so profoundly disregarded. It makes this history approachable without making it easy, and I’m incredibly glad I got to read it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Delacorte Press for sharing an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review

Babel by R.F. Kuang

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Babel by R.F. Kuang is a dark academia historical fantasy about language, empire, and the uneasy relationship between knowledge and power. I think what surprised me most about this novel is how gripping it is despite how dense it can be. This is a long, research-heavy novel about translation, colonialism, and academia that reads like historical fantasy on the surface. Underneath, it feels like a sustained argument about language and power, wrapped inside a dark academia setting that the book both loves and interrogates at length. Kuang invites readers to admire the beauty of scholarship while also confronting the systems that make that beauty possible, which gives the entire book a sense of urgency and forward motion.

Book cover for Babel by R.F. Kuang set against a pink background.

Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?

R.F. Kuang, Babel

One of the ideas that runs through the entire story is that language is never neutral. In Kuang’s version of Oxford, translation quite literally fuels empire through silver-working, a magical system powered by the subtle gaps between languages. It is such a smart way to make an abstract idea feel tangible. Language already shapes whose histories are recorded, whose stories are believed, and whose perspectives are centered. The novel simply makes that power visible.

The book also feels very in conversation with criticisms of the dark academia aesthetic in general. The libraries and lecture halls remain intoxicating and nostalgic, but the story refuses to romanticize the institution behind them. Academia is shown as a place that produces knowledge while also benefiting from colonial extraction. That tension gives the novel a sense of urgency that feels very current.

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

R.F. Kuang, Babel

While reading, I kept thinking about Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind (even though the text isn’t directly referenced). His argument that language carries culture, hierarchy, and systems of domination feels central to every character arc. Separate from Ngũgĩ’s work, but very much in conversation with it, is the historical reality that colonial translation was rarely neutral or precise. British officials often depended on local printers, teachers, and scholars to translate English texts into regional languages, and because those officials were not fluent themselves, the results could be uneven, interpretive, or simply wrong. Those translations were then printed and reprinted until they became their own authoritative versions. Even Shakespeare exists in radically different forms across languages because of this history. That reality makes the novel’s focus on translation feel especially sharp. Language becomes both a tool of control and a site of slippage. Over time, that same linguistic space was sometimes used to resist colonial oppressors. People learned the language of power and then used it in ways the empire never intended. The characters in Babel follow that same trajectory as they begin to realize that the skills meant to sustain the system might also be used to challenge it.

The question of violence sits at the center of the novel and will likely be the most divisive aspect. Kuang pushes the story toward a conclusion that refuses easy or comfortable resolutions. One line in particular captures the book’s moral tension perfectly:

This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.

R.F. Kuang, Babel

That idea connects closely to the novel’s recurring claim that translation is a form of betrayal. Every act of translation alters the original, reshaping it for new audiences and new purposes. By the end of the novel, that concept extends beyond language. The characters themselves are forced to confront what it means to reshape their loyalties, their identities, and the institution that shaped them.

It’s also worth noting that Kuang’s style may not work for every reader. The narrative includes footnotes, linguistic digressions, and historical context that slow the pacing at times. For me, this was one of the book’s strengths. I studied postcolonial theory during my doctoral work, so the intellectual foundation felt purposeful and familiar rather than overwhelming. I think the academic texture gives the novel a sense of conviction that fits its subject.

What stayed with me most after finishing Babel is how deliberately it dismantles the romantic fantasy of academia while still acknowledging the beauty of language itself. The book never suggests that learning, scholarship, or translation are inherently harmful. Instead, it asks what happens when those pursuits are shaped by systems of power and inequality, and it pushes that question toward an agonizing conclusion. It is a dense and demanding novel, but also a deeply rewarding one. It feels especially resonant right now, and it left me thinking long after the final pages.

Book Review

Where There’s Room for Us by Hayley Kiyoko

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In a reimagined 1880s England where same-sex love is accepted yet the patriarchy still rules, Hayley Kiyoko delivers a tender romance between two young women navigating the tension between selfhood and social expectation. Where There’s Room for Us follows Ivy, an outspoken poet from New York who relocates to England, and Freya, a dutiful socialite who’s expected to marry a lord and produce heirs in order to secure her family’s legacy. What begins as curiosity quickly deepens into a slow-burn sapphic romance filled with charm, social commentary, and a quiet but persistent sense of rebellion as Ivy and Freya begin to imagine a life that might finally be their own—if they can bear the cost of claiming it.

Book cover for Where There's Room for Us by Hayley Kiyoko.

It’s not every day a whole prime minister accuses you of being a harbinger of sapphic doom.

Hayley Kiyoko, Where There’s Room for Us

Ivy and Freya feel like two different versions of girlhood crashing into each other at the exact right moment. Ivy already knows who she is. She’s flirtatious, outspoken, comfortable sinking into her love for women without apology. She walks into a room and you can practically feel all the air shift her way. Freya, by contrast, has spent her life doing what she is told and calling it love. She reveres her father and plans to marry Lord Montgomery because that is the path laid out for her. But when she meets Ivy, she has to name what she wants for the first time in her life, and that awakening is honestly so satisfying.

Freya’s mostly peripheral relationship with her father is also more layered than I expected. She loves him and wants his approval, but eventually begins to see that his approval comes with a cost she can no longer keep paying. He is obsessed with securing an heir who can inherit his title, and because he only has daughters, he pushes Freya toward a marriage she does not want. There is one particular moment when he discovers how Freya feels about Ivy, and his reaction is ugly. Freya runs, and for one fleeting instant, she imagines what might have happened if her sister hadn’t found her and taken her in, how easily she could have been left with nowhere to go. That brief beat in the story brushes against something painfully real for many queer readers: the fear of losing home, safety, and family simply for being honest about who they are. Kiyoko weaves moments like this throughout the story, grounding the romance in quiet echoes of real-world anxieties and creating an emotional connection that feels both tender and true.

What a thing, to just be accepted like she belongs.

Hayley Kiyoko, Where There’s Room for Us

By removing homophobia from this fictional world yet leaving sexism intact, Kiyoko forces readers to see how privilege and oppression can coexist within the same structures. It reframes Victorian England through a speculative lens that feels both fresh and hauntingly recognizable. Marriage equality exists, but equality itself does not. A woman may love another woman, but she cannot inherit her father’s title or estate because that privilege is only afforded to men. This results in an intriguing tension between freedom and frustration, where Ivy and Freya’s hearts are liberated but their fates are not. It’s a subtle but biting commentary on how reform without equality still reinforces old hierarchies.

The romance is where the book falters slightly. Ivy and Freya are undeniably sweet, sometimes so sugary it almost made my teeth ache. Their early scenes together are tender and full of kissing in gardens, along forest paths, against trees—everywhere—and while that has its charm, I kept wishing for a little more tension beneath all that softness. Time jumps also rush past key emotional turns. Conflicts flare, confessions are made, family drama erupts, and then suddenly it’s two weeks later and everything has quietly resolved itself. I wanted to linger in those rough edges and actually see Ivy and Freya fight for what they keep saying is worth everything.

The novel’s closed-door romance approach adds to that sense of restraint. It’s likely a deliberate choice to make the story accessible to younger readers, and that’s understandable, but it leaves a noticeable gap between what’s shown and what’s implied.

If security comes at the cost of your soul, then it is not a choice you can make freely.

Hayley Kiyoko, Where There’s Room for Us

For all its emotional depth, the story’s conclusion feels too tidy and rushed. Some conflicts wrap up too neatly, and some emotional threads, especially between Freya and her father, never really get revisited. I kept waiting for the book to force her father to face his hypocrisy, but instead, he is mostly allowed to stay himself. On one hand, that is realistic. A lot of queer readers know exactly what it’s like to love a parent who will never meet you in the middle. On the other hand, I wish the story spelled out what that means for Freya long term. Sometimes I want to see plots like that buttoned up in fiction since real life isn’t required to make sense or be fair. Alas!

Still, this book reads like a love letter to queer readers. Ivy and Freya are adorable together, but it’s the context around their romance—the inheritance laws, the rigid gender roles, the quiet heartbreak of disappointing a beloved parent simply for being who you are—that really resonates. Kiyoko’s world doesn’t fix everything, but it gives us space to imagine better. And for that alone, it’s worth a read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Wednesday Books for sharing an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.