Historical mysteries seem to be all the rage at the moment, and fortunately, publishers have yet to monetise and ruin the trend to such a degree that you can't find a selection of well written series to enjoy.  While the quality of cozy mysteries has been abysmal the last several years, Historical Mysteries have filled in the gap nicely for me.

A Lady's Guide to Mischief and Murder is the 3rd in a series I discovered at my first (and so far only) Bouchercon convention.  It's a good series, and this book is a strong 3rd book, moving the characters' arcs along quickly, while presenting an interesting stand-alone plot, with clues easily missed and writing that skilfully misdirected the reader down several false avenues.  As the story moved along, some of the misdirection became obvious, but some of it didn't, rendering a delightful mystery well done.

My only groan over the book was the introduction of Countess Harleigh's mother who was caricatured for most of her page time, only to do the whole mama-lion thing and achieving what to me was an insincere redemption in the final pages.  Fortunately she's not around much in this book and it wasn't enough to really weight the book down.

For more reviews, check out my blog: Craft-Cycle

A great story to share with young readers. These women's journeys are inspiring and show what hard work can accomplish. While it is unfortunate that they were unrecognized for so long, it is wonderful to see their stories told in a variety of formats (picture books, adult non-fiction, film) in recent years.

Overall, the book was well done. Any of the issues I had with it pretty much stem from taking a full chapter book for adults and trying to reduce it down to a short read understandable to children. That's a big task and overall it was done well.

The illustrations were lovely. There was nice detail and I really enjoyed the space-themed/math-themed backgrounds. It was also cool to have other important figures from the time period come up in the illustrations such as Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., and Daisy Bates (although it might have been nice to label them somewhere since they were not explicitly mentioned in the text). These worked as a great point to branch off into discussions of the Civil Rights movements and a few important figures in African American history.

The book nicely incorporates definitions for tricky and unfamiliar works throughout the text. This is a great way to add in some extra teaching moments while still keeping the story going. There is also a glossary of terms at the end of the book.

I also thought the book did well setting the stage in describing segregation in a simple way that would be easy for children to understand. Throughout the book, it showed some of the changes made throughout time in a very simplified way. This worked well and allowed for expansion through discussion and explanation when reading with an adult.

I did find some of the narration choppy because of the time stretch and multiple women highlighted. It may have worked better to incorporate chapters for each woman instead of blurring them all together. Also, because it is so simplified, most of the women are reduced to "good at math. Really good." While this was obviously an important feature, I wish they were more developed and their other characteristics highlighted. One doesn't become NASA's first African-American supervisor or first female African-American aerospace engineer solely because one is good at math. It takes drive, passion, persuasion, persistence, bravery, determination, and a willingness to fight for what you want. I wanted more of these characteristics to come out, but again the small space dedicated to each woman didn't really allow for much elaboration.

At the end of the book are some additional resources for further information about the women. Besides the glossary, there is also a timeline of events including when each woman started and ended their work at NACA/NASA and a brief bio about each woman.

Overall, the book was well done. The short space only allowed for a very simplified version of events, but it is a great introduction to the contribution these women made as well as the history of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement.

The more I read about US history, the more amazed I am at how many children pretending to be adults there were in the government. Reading about these grown men behaving so childishly would be laughable if they didn't have the power they did so that their actions didn't carry so many consequences for everyone else.

And of course, even when things change, they really don't seem to change that much when you really start looking. The introduction even goes into some of the parallels including the fact that a recent congressman would threaten other congressman with knives with no repercussions apparently, so we're not even past the violence part. And we're certainly not past the bullying in the government, unfortunately.

I'll definitely be reading some lighter books this weekend.

This is an entertaining historical novel that hits all the right tropes for me. Agnes Resolute is your typical Victorian pseudo-feminist protagonist. She’s a plucky orphan searching for her long-lost mother, and no matter how rough and sexist the Victorian world is, nothing is going to keep her down. Much adventure (and some romance) ensues. Huzzah!

There wasn’t anything I didn’t like . . . except for the framing device of a present-day woman coming home to take care of her ailing mother and finding a letter written by Agnes’s long-lost mother. Even though the book starts in the present-day woman’s point of view, I never connected with her and I found her chapters to be jarring interruptions. I ended up skimming them. Honestly, I skimmed the letter as well. It’s a bog standard tragic romance, and it wasn’t nearly as interesting as Agnes’s adventures.

In a nutshell: I quite liked Stars Across the Ocean, but I would have liked it even more if Freeman hadn’t tried to pull a Kate Morton and interest me in multiple timelines.

It took off into an entirely different direction than I was expecting.  It seemed to be trying to morph into a romance.  Or maybe  the author was trying to show how the MC had grown.