Colorways by Vicki Welsh

What a weird reading month. I only finished 4 books and that’s because I wasted time on 3 others. I’ve never given up on 3 books in one month. Of the 4 books I finished I can’t say that any of them have a chance at my 2025 top 10 list. If I have to name a favorite, I’d probably pick Glorious Exploits.  The Stolen Queen was the most fun.

If you are wondering how I can find so many undesirable books, it’s because I spend too much time watching book reviews on YouTube. Every one of these were BookTube recommendations. I probably need to spend less time there.

Tell me the good books that you read this month. Your recommendations are more reliable! 

DNF Books:
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr – I was so looking forward to this one because I loved All The Light We Cannot See. This one was too hard to follow with frequent hoping between 3 time periods. It would have worked well done sequentially.
Frog Music by Emma Donoghue – A mystery set in 1876 San Francisco. Might have been interesting with some serious editing.
Hula by Jasmin Iolani Makai – I think this would have been interesting to read in paper but, in audio, I couldn’t keep up with the Hawaiian names and language.

TLDR: A good easy historical fiction centered on the MET Gala and Egyptian artifacts. 

In 1936, 19-year-old charlotte Cross is offered a position on an archaeological dig in Egypt. It’s the perfect trip until tragedy strikes and she returns to New York City alone. Eventually she lands a job at the Metropolitan Museum working in the Egyptology department. In 1978, Charlotte is still at the museum when she meets 19-year-old Annie Jenkins. Annie had landed a coveted job as an assistant for Diana Vreeland as she’s organizing the Met Gala. Because of the fervor around the King Tut exhibition, the Gala theme is Egypt and Vreeland wants to use an ancient collar as part of the fashion display.

The night of the Gala goes horribly wrong when another rare antiquity goes missing amid chaos at the Gala. Soon Charlotte and Annie are off the Egypt to look for the stolen artifact.

There’s nothing realistic about this story unless you believe that artifacts can be verified in a few hours but the characters are nice and everything wraps up beautifully at the end.

TLDR: Read it in paper, skip the audio version.

It’s the Peloponnesian War and the Athenians have invaded Syracuse. Syracuse beat them back and have take the Athenian hostages and out them in a vacant mine to be starved. Enter Lampo and Gelan, two unemployed potters who love poetry and are bored. The decide to visit the Athenians in the mine and bribe them with food just to hear lome lines of Euripides. Eventually the get the idea to put on Medea with the Athenians as the actors.

The soon learn that this whim is going to be more difficult that thought and will set some very dangerous events in motion.

I think this is a very unique and fresh story and it’s gotten a lot of great reviews and promotion on BookTube. The problem I have with it is the author’s narration. He has a beautiful Irish voice but it comes off as too “Dumb and Dumber” for me. 

TLDR: Historical fiction novel about an amazing WWII heroine told in an unnecessarily disjointed way.

Nancy Wake was born in Australia but in 1936 she was a journalist living in Paris and writing for the Hearst corporation. She married a wealthy businessman, Henri Fiocca. When Germany invades France, Henri goes off to war and Nancy becomes an ambulance drive. The eventually turns into a job working with the French Resistance delivering messages and helping people escape. 

As the war continues, she finds herself in the British Special Operations and is parachuted back into France to assist behind the lines. It’s an absolutely amazing story and, even in novel form, most of the events are factually true. Some have been compressed in time or changed in other minor ways to make the narrative move better.

The characters are very rich and there are a lot of them, most with multiple names. That would be OK but the narrative structure made this book hard to keep up with. It jumps back and forth in time from her pre-war life, her early war assignments to the SOE assignments. It is completely unnecessary and really takes away from Nancy’s story. I can’t imagine why the author did the book this way. I read another of her books, The Frozen River, last month and it was a much better narrative. This is a story work reading but I’d recommend reading a paper book so you can easily refer back in the book.

TLDR: This is for people who love Canadian history or industrial history or histories of famous families.

This is a book that I picked up in a library book sale for $2. It’s clear that it had never been opened and that’s too bad because someone missed an interesting read.

Robert Dunsmuir immigrated to British Columbia, Canada in the 1850’s from Scotland. He was from a mining family and started working in the coal mines near Vancouver when he arrived in BC. He eventually owned his own mines, was instrumental in the expansion of the railway and became one of the richest men in Canada. The book tells of how Robert built his wealth and how succeeding generations were unable to preserve it. It’s a common story but still interesting.

There was one interesting little factoid. Robert’s son James was sent to Virginia for his education. He went to the school that became Virginia Tech for his mining degree.