Books like Julie and Romeo

It might not be Korean, but the same feeling is there. So many fangirls dream of visiting their favorite stories—and the main character Jane—in the book Austenland gets to do just that. When Jane’s grandmother buys her a trip to Austenland—the place where any girl’s Jane Austen dream can come true, she feels rude turning it down. Although, she’s enamored by men wearing smart coats and cravats, she’s also keenly aware of how fake everything is. It only takes a few days, however, to get swept up in the realness of the scene. A fangirl can hardly control her desire to be in her favorite book. This adorable and funny romance is exactly my cup of tea. 

I fell for Baroness Orczy’s dashing fictional hero—the Scarlet Pimpernel—after watching the 1982 film by the same name starring Anthony Andrews and Jane Seymour. I then went on to read the entire book series he was based on! It wasn’t until I came across Lauren Willig’s charming Pink Carnation series, which pays homage to clever and elusive British spies like the Scarlet Pimpernel, that I found a new historical spy hero to delight in. I loved the modern-day protagonist Eloise Kelly, who’s in present-day England working on her dissertation, as well as her historical counterpart Amy Balcourt, who leads the fascinating and romantic parallel story in this very enjoyable dual narrative novel.

When I first came upon Sarah Shoemaker’s novel, I felt myself issuing a silent challenge: Can the author really inspire my sympathy for the gruff and tormented hero of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre? While I’d always loved the atmospheric moodiness of the novel and could empathize to a degree with Jane Eyre herself, Mr. Rochester’s dark, brooding, and secretive nature made me uneasy, and I wasn’t quick to find him as endearing as some other classic literary heroes. However, it was fascinating to be brought into the point of view of this particular Edward Fairfax Rochester! I appreciated experiencing the world of the novel as he might have perceived it and found the detailed background on his life to be an enjoyable addition.

Having been a huge fan of Kwan’s incredibly popular Crazy Rich Asians, I was already inclined to like this new book. Once I realized it was directly inspired by one of my longtime favorites, E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View (which I’d loved enough to write a modernization based on the original novel as well), I was immediately interested to see how Kwan would handle it. The comedy of manners and the exploration of cultural values and differences were the most intriguing aspects of the story to me. The focus on the ultra-wealthy—and all the toys and privileges that come with it—was less appealing, but it was still a thought-provoking element, given the context of the characters’ lives. Definitely worth checking out!

The biggest unsolved art crime is the 1990 robbery of the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston, during which two men disguised as policemen stole 13 works of art worth an estimated $500 million.

Not one of the stolen paintings has been recovered, and rumors about their whereabouts and the identity of the thieves continue to fuel investigations across the globe. This book is a rapid-fire read and a terrific crash course in the many challenges involved in tracing lost art, let alone ever catching the thieves.

I love how this book asks big and fundamental questions about the relationship between work and education and grounds them in such careful and extensive historical research. It challenges some of the things we think we know about the relationship between the economy and education and makes a powerful case that we fall into a “trap” when we ask education to fix inequalities that are rooted in and best addressed in our economic system.

I love how this book looks broadly and deeply across sectors of the economy, public and private schools, higher education, and K-12 schools at a critical moment of transformation to ask important questions about the sources of inequality and the best ways to address it.

Lehane, one of my favourite authors, introduces the crime writer’s device of the duo, in his first Kenzie and Gennaro novel. For me, as in my own DCI Steel novels, the duo in writing can work to inform, or mislead, the reader and, if handled well, the reader doesn’t notice, seeing the interaction between characters as normal. Clichés abound in crime fiction, especially in lead characters, but Lehane avoids this with P.I. Patrick Kenzie, and his lifelong friend, Angie Gennaro. Given the area they inhabit, with its racial and gang tensions, added to the clients they have, clichés would seem unavoidable, but—once again—the lesson here is to write multi-faceted characters, which Kenzie and Gennaro emphatically are. They are flawed, but in Lehane’s hands, triumphantly human, and very believable.

I deeply enjoyed Archer’s book for its intimate depiction of Boston’s life under British occupation from 1768 until mid-1770.

It was a city under siege in many respects, with four thousand troops in a community of only sixteen thousand souls. The city’s streets –mostly paved with oyster shell—come to life with details on tavern fare, street life, troop encampment, epidemics, the violent celebrations of the annual Pope’s Day, popular song parodies, and the three hundred women who initiated a boycott of foreign tea.

Here too you can meet early patriot leaders like James Otis, who was rendered “insane” by a blow to the skull by a furious tax collector and wandered, raving, for years, until he was struck down by a lightning bolt. Archer’s book pulls you into the torment and the glory of life in a powder keg destined to explode.

What do we know about the Revolution, and why do we think we know it? Sometimes, even canonical events we think we know are not nearly as well-documented as we might think, like the Boston Tea Party.

This book is about history and memory, the gap between what happened when colonists threw the East India Company’s tea into Boston Harbor, and how that event was remembered decades later. Drawing on the as-told-to-reminiscences of Tea Party participant George Robert Twelve Hewes, which were written down over half a century after the Tea Party took place, Young plumbs the gap between the “destruction of the tea,” as the event was known at the time, and the “Boston Tea Party,” a name which only emerged in the 19th century as Americans reimagining that revolt into the story of how America was made. 

Young shows us that accounts like Hewes’s had as much to… show more.

This book reminds me of a spell in Boston, in my first job, and I acquired it then as I was eager to take the opportunity to explore its famous park system. This title was recommended to me as the main source of reference. I was immediately attracted to it because it was well-illustrated and with a direct, clear, and accessible text that explained the progress of the project.

To me, it provided a concise context and background for the park system that became prototypical as ‘the emerald necklace,’ not only in the USA but also internationally. I like the way it also addressed the theoretical development, the design process, down to the very detail of the project, in what remains one of the few such critical monographs of a single landscape concept.