January Monthly Recommendations| Historical Fiction

 In this group we will have a monthly theme for book recommendations to share on your BookTube channel or blog. It is pretty relaxed with when you can upload, but we recommend that you upload the first full week of each month. You are welcome to recommend as many books as you want.  We would love for you to share the books you would recommend based on each months topic, no matter how many you have.  For more details visit the a group on Good Reads named Monthly Recommendations. This group was created by Trina from Between Chapters and Kayla Rayne.

 "Historical Fiction"

      Ok, when I have read about the topic for January I was all exited. Yey! It is going to be easy. Past is my favorite topic, so what I should recommend you guys from my favorite books. And then suddenly I had this thought: how we define the book as historical fiction? You would ask: Is it not obvious Julie? A book set in the past. Ok, I would agree with you. Yes when Kerri Maniscalco publishes the book “Stalking Jack the Ripper” in 2016 and it is about Victorian England I totally agree – it is historical fiction, but say when Jane Austin publishes “Pride and Prejudice” for her it is a contemporary novel, yes for us it is in past, but still the novel is not historical. So I tried to find the definition of the notion “historical fiction”, here comes almighty wiki:

Historical fiction is a literary genre in which the plot takes place in a setting located in the past. Historical fiction can be an ambiguous term: frequently it is used as a synonym for describing the historical novel.

Historical novel. Definition:

Definitions differ as to what constitutes a historical novel. On the one hand The Historical Novel Society defines the genre as works "written at least fifty years after the events described", whilst on the other hand critic Sarah Johnson delineates such novels as "set before the middle of the last [20th] century in which the author is writing from research rather than personal experience." Then again Lynda Adamson, in her preface to the bibliographic reference work World Historical Fiction, states that while a "generally accepted definition" for the historical novel is a novel "about a time period at least 25 years before it was written", she also suggests that some people read novels written in the past, like those of Jane Austen (1775–1817), as if they were historical novels.

    So even according to "generally accepted definition" the setting of the book should be at least 25 years prior the publish date, which actually cuts a great amount of books I was thinking about as Jane Austin’s, sister Bronte’s, Remarque’s and so on.

    Still, I have some suggestions left, which fit the pattern. Please check my previous post on historical fiction. 

1. The Mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley
2. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
3. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
4. Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini
5. Richard Sharpe series by Bernard Cornwell
6. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
7. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
8. Aubrey/Maturin Book by Patrick O'Brian
9. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell