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The Thread Collectors is an historical novel set during the Civil War. It is co authored by Shaunna J Edwards and Alyson Richman. Each of them were inspired by their individual family histories to weave together a fiction story about their heritage. Edwards is a black woman and Richman is a Jewish woman. In the novel Stella is a black woman in New Orleans and Lily is a Jewish woman in New York. The men they each love are both musicians and meet just before the Battle of Port Hudson. The story line intertwines the four young people's lives and vividly brings home the horrors of the Civil War. Both Stella and Lily support the union through their work with textiles. While the women are quilting, rolling bandages, and embroidering maps on bits of cloth the men are waking the troops, entertaining officers in the evenings and leading the troops into battle with their instruments. This book is an easy quick read and has a lot of material for discussion therefore would be a good book group selection. Please click on the four links above to sites with further information and enjoy the short video that follows.
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I really enjoyed this historical novel about life in an American leper colony in the 1920s. Historical fiction is my genre but add the sub category of medical history and and I am sucked in every time. The main character of The Second Life Of Mirielle West is a fictional wife of a silent film movie star who is used to a glamorous life in Los Angeles when she goes to the doctor because she accidentally burns herself on her curling iron getting ready for a glamorous Hollywood party. Soon she finds her self riding in a box car to a leper colony in Louisiana that is filled with disfigured individuals. When they arrived their box car was burned to ashes. The next couple years of her life is detailed in the book as she adjusts to life in a leper colony. She begins as a spoiled person who thinks only of herself and matures into a much more well adjusted person emotionally. She makes real friends instead of the surface relationships she had back in LA. Although the story is not a true story the descriptions of life in Carville are well researched. The author, Amanda Skenandore, is an RN who has written several books with medical history as the theme and I will be reading more of her work. Carville Leper Colony is now a National Historical Site with a museum that can be visited. They have a website HERE. Please click on the book title and authors name above to follow the links to more information and enjoy the video about Carville below.
