![]() In 2004, it was nominated for a Retro Hugo Award (novella category), but lost to James Blish’s “A Case of Conscience.” First serialzed in two 1953 issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Anderson returned to revise and expand it slightly in 1961, years before Tolkien became the fantasy sensation that dominates the genre today. Three Hearts and Three Lions falls into the latter category, a sword-and-sorcery tale featuring a modern man thrown back into a fantasy world which melds Carolingian Europe and Arthurian-style myth with more traditional fantasy elements. Anderson was a jack-of-all-trades who could write a brilliant space opera, a technically sound Hard science-fiction tale, or an authentic Dark Ages fantasy with the crack of sword against shield. ![]() So began a lengthy and productive career, including the gain of three Nebula and seven Hugo awards. He started off writing for pulps as varied as Astounding and Planet Stories as well as a long bibliography of novels that really showcase his talent: The Broken Sword, Brain Wave, Three Hearts and Three Lions, and War of Two Worlds being some of the best of Anderson’s earliest. I’ve never read anything by Poul Anderson that I haven’t liked Anderson is a consistently entertaining author even on his bad days. ![]()
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![]() ![]() Tillingham, and he’s just one of the local stuffed shirts who also happens to have no great opinion of women.Įnter Beatrice Nash, an aspiring writer who has come to Rye after the death of her father to teach Latin to ruffian schoolboys. The Summer Before the War (Random House, 473 pp., *** out of four stars) is set in the picturesque village of Rye, England, which indeed was the adopted home of James. Well, there are certainly worse things in the world of historical fiction. ![]() Throw in a dreamy, Rupert Brooke-like World War I poet and an expatriate novelist modeled on Henry James, and you’ve got a concoction brimming with literary influences. Simonson ( Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand) is a bit like a home cook borrowing from professional chefs: her recipe calls for a dash of Downton-esque wit and gossip, a sprinkling of Virginia Woolf feminism, and a cupful of colorful characters, a la Forster’s A Room With a View. ![]() Forster in The Summer Before the War, Helen Simonson’s overlong but ultimately rewarding and moving novel about the last gasp of Edwardian England in 1914. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Lydia's older brother, Nathan, is certain that the neighborhood bad boy Jack is somehow involved. Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to find a responsible party, no matter what the cost. James, consumed by guilt, sets out on a reckless path that may destroy his marriage. When Lydia's body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together tumbles into chaos, forcing them to confront the long-kept secrets that have been slowly pulling them apart. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue-in Marilyn's case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James's case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. ![]() |