5 Star #review for #historicalfiction novel THE SOLDIER’S RETURN #germany

Author’s new book receives a warm literary welcome.

Readers’ Favorite announces the review of the Fiction – Historical – Personage book “The Soldier’s Return” by Laura Libricz, currently available for Kindle and in paperback at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0999146017.

Readers’ Favorite is one of the largest book review and award contest sites on the Internet. They have earned the respect of renowned publishers like Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Harper Collins, and have received the “Best Websites for Authors” and “Honoring Excellence” awards from the Association of Independent Authors. They are also fully accredited by the BBB (A+ rating), which is a rarity among Book Review and Book Award Contest companies.

Reviewed By Arya Fomonyuy for Readers’ Favorite:

After ten years, a young Dutchman, Pieter van Diemen, is returning to Amsterdam in chains, after being captured and imprisoned in the Spice Islands. But he can’t stay in Amsterdam. After his escape, the only place he hopes to find solace is Sichardtshof, a farm in Franconia, Germany. But after being away for ten years, will it still be the same and will he still find the hospitality and warmth of the patrician, Herr Tucher, and his maid, Katarina? Follow the protagonist during a period of turbulence, of conflict between Catholics and Protestants. It is against this backdrop that Pieter navigates through deadly traps and dangerous terrain to find refuge, but can he? The Soldier’s Return by Laura Libricz is a powerful historical novel with a strong setting and memorable characters.

The language is what first caught my attention: it is beautiful, at times poetic, and it unveils elements of the religious, historical, and cultural settings in intelligent and relevant ways. Apart from writing a gripping story, Laura Libricz has taken readers on a historic ride to relive the religious conflicts of the seventeen century, weaving into her narrative great social, religious, and political commentaries. I enjoyed the descriptive style of the narrative, the well-written dialogues, and the surprises and twists in the plot. The tone is unique and compelling, the conflict huge and masterfully handled. It is no wonder that The Soldier’s Return will appeal immensely to fans of historical novels with great settings and compelling characters.

 

“Exquisite, expansive narrative.” Read the latest 5* #review for #histfic THE SOLDIER’S RETURN #RWISA #RRBC

Exquisite, expansive narrative

“An expansive saga of early 17th Century Germany during the Catholic Counter-Reformation, The Thirty Years’ War, and the Witch Trials of Bamberg – one of the most destructive conflicts in human history. This exquisite narrative follows the travails of a kept farm maid, an alcoholic soldier on the run, and a sadistic Jesuit priest hellbent to rid the region from pestilence, famine and evil through tortuous and murderous forms of purification. Through the lives of these characters we experience the vermin-infested life on the farm replete with bedbugs, lice and fleas; the soldiers’ disease-ridden life on the march, and the zealot’s monastic life of prayer and inquisition. Written from the omniscient perspective of a credible researcher of history, the author pulls no punches in her vivid, sometimes purplish, depictions of plunder, torture, rape and murder, and she portrays the desperate plight of women and children trying to survive against the random vagaries of marauding armies, starving vagabonds, sweeping famine, incest, and the drunken forays of virtually every man in their cloistered lives. Glimpses of love, joy and hope are quickly trampled under the grind of survival, but like the sun, they rise again and again, as does the indomitable spirit and work ethic of the Germanic people. The primary characters’ lives have brutally collided in the past, and their trajectories propel them toward violent ruin. Who will survive? The history books will relate the choices of kings and pope, but if you want to know how their decisions were felt on the ground at the human level, read The Soldier’s Return.”

Review by author Douglas C. Gilbert

THE SOLDIER’S RETURN:

The year is 1626. A senseless war rips through parts of Germany. Ongoing animosity between the Catholics and the Protestants has turned into an excuse to destroy much of the landscape situated between France, Italy and Denmark. But religion only plays a minor role in this lucrative business of war.

The young dutchman, Pieter van Diemen, returns to Amsterdam in chains after a period of imprisonment in the Spice Islands. He manages to escape but must leave Amsterdam in a hurry. Soldiers are in demand in Germany and he decides to travel with a regiment until he can desert. His hope of survival is to reach Sichardtshof, the farm in Franconia, Germany; the farm he left ten years ago. His desire to seek refuge with them lies in his fond memories of the maid Katarina and her master, the humanist patrician Herr Tucher. But ten years is a long time and the farm has changed. Franconia is not only torn by war but falling victim to a church-driven witch hunt. The Jesuit priest, Ralf, has his sights set on Sichardtshof as well. Ralf believes that ridding the area of evil will be his saving grace. Can Pieter, Katarina and Herr Tucher unite to fight against a senseless war out of control?

Available in paperback and for kindle right here: mybook.to/SoldiersReturn

Book #Review : Discover authentic, 5***** #GeorgianEra #HistoricalFiction by G.J.Griffiths @gjgfh_g

Available here!

What did I like about this book? Easy: its authenticity. This is what I expect from historical fiction: an authentic, realistic account of the time period with all the uncomfortabilities that go with it. I haven’t read The Quarry Bank Runaways (Book 1 of the series) yet but Mules; Masters and Mud can be read without having read the first book. Give this book a chance and don’t feel daunted by the dialect! The dialect adds flavor and flair and it may be challenging but I don’t want to be spoon-fed a story. I feel this is a very loving tribute to those western European workers of the 19th century that fought to make our western 20th century factories safer and somewhat human to work in. Highly recommended!

Here’s the book blurb: WARNING! This book may contain NUTS! (Non-Uniform Text Speech) In other words speech in what some have called “Olde English Vernacular.” It is spoken by characters in the book from the North, the Midlands and the South of England. There is a glossary at the end of the book to help if you can rise to the challenge. It adds shades of colour to this 19th century story that you may not be expecting.

When Mrs Alexander wrote about “the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate” and declared that “God made them, high or lowly, and order’d their estate” in the ever popular hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful, she was probably reflecting one of the mores of the times. It would fit in well with prejudices and beliefs of the middle and upper classes that paternalism had indeed been intended by God, thus laws protecting the workers in their fields, mills and factories were not necessary. In the words of Browning so long as “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world!”

The continuing story of the Quarry Bank Runaways is about what happened to two cotton apprentices over three decades during the Industrial Revolution; first as qualified young men with hopes and later when they are full grown. By the start of the Victorian period the fates and their ambitions would have collided. Serious events and incidents, both personal and national, were about to impinge upon the lives of Thomas Priestley and Joseph Sefton, who had earlier run away from their apprentice master, Samuel Greg. What would cause a qualified mule spinner to give up his comparatively safe job and risk failure, ridicule or destitution? Ambitious and determined working class individuals like Tommy and Joe had to carefully step through a pathway involving love, loyalty and legal persecution and prejudice, from within the social hierarchy of the times.

The inspiration to write The Quarry Bank Runaways and Mules; Masters & Mud came about after reading The Real Oliver Twist by John Waller, a biography of Robert Blincoe, and acting as a tour guide around the Quarry Bank Mill Museum in England. There to discover the existence of the real apprentices and the lives of many child cotton apprentices during the Industrial Revolution.

Check out G. J. Griffiths’ home page here: https://www.gjgriffithswriter.com/ 

About the Author: G. J. Griffiths is a retired science teacher with some early working experience of the photographic industry. Born in the UK he enjoys reading most genres of fiction such as sci-fi, crime/detective thrillers, historical and wildlife stories. Non-fiction reading mainly includes scientific or historical books. Walking in the English, Scottish or Welsh countryside with binoculars ready for bird-watching or other wildlife is a particular pleasure. Seeing badgers and otters in the wild recently was an exciting first.

His first novel was Fallen Hero and the So What! series of three books followed and which are all focussed around the fictitious Birch Green High School. They include: So What! Stories or Whatever!, So What’s Next! and So What Do I Do? Each book is quite different in its overall context, e.g. a collection of the teachers’ experiences, creation of a school nature corner, and arson, fraud and murder. More recent works include poetry: Dizzyrambic Imaginings, two illustrated children’s sci-fi stories about ant-size aliens and a historical fiction based upon real characters from the Industrial Revolution period: The Quarry Bank Runaways.

Drop Dead Gorgeous: 19th Century #BeautyTips for the Aspiring Consumptive @DrtySexyHistory

“Although having an active (rather than latent) case of consumption was all but a death sentence, it didn’t inspire the revulsion of other less attractive diseases until the end of the 19th century when its causes were better understood.”

Dirty Sexy History

Picture the ideal nineteenth century English beauty: pale, almost translucent skin, rosy cheeks, crimson lips, white teeth, and sparkling eyes. She’s waspishly thin with elegant collarbones. Perhaps she’s prone to fainting.

It shouldn’t be difficult to imagine; numerous depictions survive to this day, and the image is still held up as the gold standard for Caucasian women. At this point, it’s so embedded in the Western psyche as beauty that it doesn’t occur to us to question it. Of course that’s beautiful. Why wouldn’t it be?

By the nineteenth century, beauty standards in Britain had come a long way from the plucked hairlines of the late Middle Ages and the heavy ceruse of the Stuart period. Fashionable women wanted slimmer figures because physical fragility had become associated with intelligence and refinement. Flushed cheeks, bright eyes, and red lips had always been popular, particularly among sex workers (they suggested arousal), and women…

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#Belthane blessings for this 2018 Walpurgisnacht #MayDay #Witches

Laura Libricz, Authoress

What comes to your mind when someone mentions the 8th century? Could it be the introduction of the triangle harp by the Picts in Scotland? Or maybe the reign of Charlemagne, King of the Franks. Or the popular epic poem Beowulf, which could be as old as the 8th Century? Or marauding Vikings invading the coasts of Europe? Or of the Bendedictine nun and English missionary to the Frankish Empire Walburga, later to be canonized on May 1, 870, one hundred years after her death?

St. Walburga was born in Devonshire in 710. She was raised in a Benedictine Abbey during the time her father and brothers travelled as pilgrims to far-away holy lands. After twenty-six years in the abbey, she joined her brother St. Boniface in Germany to help with his missionary work there.

The goal was to strip the Germanic tribes of any pagan tendencies that might still…

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Discover #RRBC author Laura Libricz in this interview with @DianneAscroft @HFVBT THE SOLDIER’S RETURN blog tour

Today, I’m over at Dianne Ascroft’s blog for an interview! Read more here:

Today I’ve invited Laura Libricz, author of The Soldier’s Return, the second book in the Heaven’s Pond trilogy to Ascroft, eh? to tell us about her latest novel.

Welcome Laura.

Thank you so much for having me over today, Dianne!

Let’s get started, shall we?

Tell us about your novel.

LL: The Heaven’s Pond Series is a three-part historical series set in Franconia, Germany, in the early 17^thcentury during the Thirty Years War. These are the novels I have always wanted to read. Written in English and taking the German viewpoint of the war, the story is told by a young maid, a patrician, a Jesuit priest and a young Dutchman. The Master and the Maid is the first book in the series and begins the story in 1616. It’s about a young woman who loses her home, her job and her freedom. Harboring…

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How to cope with #cancer #treatment : @BlueHeronBW author Fanny Barry’s new release

Today I’d like to welcome Blue Heron Book Works author Fanny Barry to talk about her re-release of I Wish I Knew:

Fanny: “So proud that my I Wish I Knew books for breast cancer patients, family, and friends have been republished! Nearly 15 years after the event, they are all together and in color, and available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0999146025 

“So blessed to still be here with them with the hope that they help others.
Thank you Blue Heron Book Works and my cousin and graphic designer extraordinaire Megan for making this happen. They could be the best thing I have done! But who knows, I am not done yet!”

Fanny Barry’s trilogy, I Wish I Knew…Notes from a Breast Cancer Survivor is now in one full-color volume. Fanny gives wise and witty advice on coping with treatment, how to help friends who are undergoing treatment, and how to make sense of who you’ve become after undergoing cancer treatments.

About the author: Fanny Barry, a native of Boston, Massachusetts, is a writer, artist, engineer, and yoga teacher who wrote the I Wish I Knew books as part of her recovery process from breast cancer. She moved to Tulum, Mexico shortly after surviving cancer where she re-built her life from the ground up, literally. She recently published her memoir about her adventures in survival called Map of Life and Beauty. She manages a yoga studio and shalla in Tulum, Mexico called Tribal tribaltulum.com. She blogs at her website thatbarrygirl.com.

Discover “Songs of Ourselves” #memoir #anthology A Great Read @BlueHeronBW

“Songs of Ourselves is a real trip into and across Americana. If you haven’t read it, I compare it to about two dozen Blue Highways wrapped into one volume.”

Susan Feathers

In 2015, Blue Heron Book Works published a collections of blog posts, journal entries, and other writing forms from writers across the nation. Bathseba Monk, the intrepid and visionary editor of Blue Heron Book Works, and her editor Mary Lawlor, put together a book of American voices as varied as the landscape between our coastlines.

Songs of Ourselves is a real trip into and across Americana. If you haven’t read it, I compare it to about two dozen Blue Highways wrapped into one volume.

Listen to Tomas Benitez: Quietude in the Gully. No moaning animals or ruckus. It’s as if the Pomona Freeway Ocean knows and slows to a steady heartbeat rhythm. The waves rumble with a distant peace. La Luna is framed by the dark outline of the palm fronds on the left, the Yucca tree on the right seems to be reaching up like a hand holding…

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Read LuAnn’s #review for #histfic novel THE SOLDIER’S RETURN @KentuckyGal @HFVBT

Today I’d like to welcome LuAnn Braley and share her wonderful review of THE SOLDIER’S RETURN! Please take the time to visit her at Back Porchervations.

LuAnn’s Review:

The second book in Laura Libricz’s “Heaven’s Pond Trilogy”, The Soldier’s Return, pulls no punches when it comes to describing some of the more horrifying aspects of war in the early 1600s.  Granted, there were no air strikes or nukes, but plenty of damage was done to the countryside and the people living there nonetheless.

The whole Catholic vs Protestant issue was cooking on high heat and littlle bits of land would go back and forth from the control of one religion to the control of another.  And wo to the Catholic who found herself in a Protestant village, and vice versa.  It was as bad back then as it is these days between gangs in many areas.  And interactions could be just as deadly.

And Ralf, the Jesuit whom I grew to dislike intensely in the first book of the trilogy, The Master and the Maid, doubled down on his fanaticism when it came to ferreting out ‘witches’, which a rather disproportionate amount of the time were Protestant sympathizers.  If the suspect in question did not give an answer that Ralf wanted, he would apply various ‘methods of persuasion’ to ‘drive the devil out’ of said person.  I remember a vivid description of thumb screws…and he just got nasty from there.

Herr Tucher and Katarina (the titular master and maid of the first book) were still at Sichardtshof farm, trying to hold things together for the little group of people living and working there.  Not an easy job when army after army comes through.  In those times, the soldiers were not paid their promised wages very often, and scant if any rations were provided, so they took what they wanted from farmers and villagers – food, drink and women.  I am glad the author did not resort to the crass terminology that seems to be prevalent in some modern erotic romances, but the scenes are quite disturbing nonetheless.  That is not a criticixm, but an observation.

Pieter had gone back to Amsterdam shortly before his father passed away, ran into all kinds of trouble shortly after and after a stint in jail in the Spice Islands, returned but had to leave town fairly quickly again.  He wanted to go back to the farm (probably the closest thing to family he had left), and joined up with various military units on the way south to Sichardtshof.  He changed units as often as needed to suit his purposes.  Unfortunately, he did not resign or ask for re-assignment first…which tends to upset the commanders of said units.  Deserters faired no better, and probably much worse, than they do today.

Reading the book, which was difficult to stop, I felt like I was there – slogging through mud, feeling fear for the women and children on the farm when soldiers and ‘camp followers’ marauded through.

I do wonder about the title, a wee bit.  The story seemed to have as much or more to do with the goings on at Sichardtshof itself, than with Pieter’s return to the farm.  For me it’s one of those ‘it would be interesting to know someday’, but had no bearing on my enjoyment of the book.

The Soldier’s Return is not always an easy read.  Don’t get me wrong, the story is wonderful … but life for the people living in that area and at that time was not..  There was not a ‘HEA’ ending, but the core group of characters (Tucher, Katarina, Isobel, her father and Pieter) were still standing.  If you are a reader, The Soldier’s Return is a satisfying, filling read.

And now I’m really looking forward to the last installment of the trilogy, Ash and Rubble, to see how Isobel fulfills the White Witch’s predictions for her!

Join me on this stop of my @HFVBT #book tour for the latest review of #histfic The Soldier’s Return

Please join me today in welcoming Rachael from Rachael’s Ramblings for this wonderful review!

“One thing I felt Laura Libricz did superlatively was create a gritty sense of realism. This is war and religion at their least glorious; there are no great victories or dashing heroes to be found here. Throughout the novel she explores how very low mankind can sink in its darkest times and how brutal people can be with very little provocation, especially to people they consider ‘other’.”

Continue reading here:

Rachael's Ramblings

This was meant to be up much earlier in the week, but life got somewhat in the way! I was kindly sent this book by Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours.

The Soldier’s Return by Laura Libricz

Publication Date: September 15, 2017
eBook & Paperback

Series: Heaven’s Pond Trilogy, Book Two
Genre: Historical Fiction

The year is 1626. A senseless war rips through parts of Germany. Ongoing animosity between the Catholics and the Protestants has turned into an excuse to destroy much of the landscape situated between France, Italy and Denmark. But religion only plays a minor role in this lucrative business of war.

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THE SOLDIER’S RETURN receives 5 stars from @AmyBooksy @HFVBT

Read the latest review for THE SOLDIER’S RETURN from Locks, Hooks and Books via Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours!

Amy’s Review: 

The Soldier’s Return is the second installment from the intriguing The Heaven’s Pond Trilogy. I enjoyed this one as much as book one, The Master and the Maid. The author masterfully crafted a wonderfully written historical. I felt like I was right there living among the people experiencing the struggles and horrors of the time.

I am anxiously awaiting for the third book from The Heaven’s Pond Trilogy to release and find out where the author takes the reader next.

I highly recommend it.

Five stars.

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