Review

Review: Visceral and muscular prose

Posted on Jun 30, 2015 | 0 comments

Bottle and Glass is a tantalizing work of fiction anchored in careful historical research.  In visceral and muscular prose, Morgan Wade paints a sea-salted and gripping portrait of early nineteenth century English empire on Turtle Island.  In his second novel, the master storyteller compels our attention using thoroughly grounded and unromantic brushstrokes that depict early colonial life, with all of its messy and at-times violent implications.  Readers will revel in the evocative and palpable descriptions of life at sea under the thumb of the British navy.  Wade revels in his command of period English, and his raw talent for paced, fluid writing never disappoints.

Review: Exquisite attention to historical detail

Posted on Jun 30, 2015 | 0 comments

I remember my first encounters with history. Grade Five it would have been and we called it Social Studies. Miss Kolton taught the class. I recall names, places, facts: Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, the Ghengis Khan; Persia, Venice, Mongolia. To tenderize their meat, the armies of the Great Khan would place slices between horse and saddle.

Now, a few decades later, it is a different kind of history that holds my attention. I prefer to leave the big players aside to focus on the minutae, how people lived, what they ate and drank, how they got from one place to another, how they organized their societies, courted, married, raised children. I am a sucker for those BBC shows, the ten-parters that explore every aspect of a Tudor privy.

Review: Utterly realistic novel

Posted on Jun 30, 2015 | 0 comments

If, like me, you read historical fiction because we lack time-travel machines, you will devour Morgan Wade’s Bottle and Glass. Here’s a round-trip ticket to the War of 1812 as Canadians, kidnapped—a.k.a. “impressed”—recruits, and their wives and mothers experienced it. You’ll despair with the hero as the Crown’s officers rip him and his cousin from their family, lie sleepless with them in their hammocks aboard ship, feel their desperate hunger and thirst—for this utterly realistic novel reminds us that victuals were scanty or altogether absent for earlier generations—, taste the alcohol that drowns their many miseries, pine with them for home. Disdaining to romanticize the past, Bottle and Glass instead dramatizes the fears, disasters and petty struggles for survival when an empire’s war ensnares the innocent—and the love that vanquishes such daunting hardships.

Becky Akers – author of Halestorm and Abducting Arnold