Quick Book Reviews Blog

Locking her sights on the historical fiction genre, Lyndsay Faye has already birthed a few bestsellers, with The Paragon Hotel now joining their ranks as well. Taking place in 1921, it introduces us to Alice James, a fresh arrival in Oregon with a bullet wound and five thousand dollars in cash. Soon she finds her way to the titular hotel, but at the same time tensions start rising in the city with a flood Ku Klux Klan members making a home for themselves.

Joshilyn Jackson Ventures to the Middle of Nowhere The Southern United States, though plastered with stereotypes and generalizations, is a complicated and unique enough place on this Earth with its own sort of internal system that has remained the same throughout the years, even as one government took over after another. Joshilyn Jackson, like a few other authors, has used the South as a setting for her stories on more than one occasion, being perfect for family dramas and sagas because of the traditions found in it. In The Almost Sisters she takes us into a little town located in Alabama, one that personifies what that part of the world is all about.

Slavery is without a doubt one of the least pleasant parts of American history, forever casting a shadow of guilt and shame on future generations, one that persists to this very day. As much as we would all like to forget any of that ever happened, we owe it to all the ones who suffered as well as ourselves to remember forever the brutal and unforgivable mistakes of our ancestors... after all, if we don't keep our own history in mind, we are indeed doomed to repeat it.

Though the law in the United States may very well dictate that everyone is to be considered equal, I believe we all know that in practice, many people simply don't see things that way. Racial relations have come a tremendously long way in the past century, but nevertheless things continue to be more difficult for minorities from a socioeconomic standpoint.

It is somewhat fascinating that regardless of the fact that we are all humans, we always managed to find ways to differentiate and categorize ourselves, whether it is based on gender, race, age, political alignment or religious beliefs. One of the least explored aspects of World War II was the treatment Asians had to endure back in America; the Japanese were shipped off liberally to special camps (not concentration camps, but not exactly your jolly summer camps either) because they were suspected to be with the enemy.