It’s nice to pick up some fresh, interesting historical fiction about a character who has always interested me. I’ve been wanting a good Mark Antony novel for years, and these two books have definitely addressed that wish! (I’m assuming they’re the first two of a trilogy and there’s something like Caesar’s Avenger or something coming to complete it, since Caesar’s General ends with the assassination of Julius Caesar).

As the titles suggest, these books are very much focused on Antony’s military career and have a lot of battle scenes — which is fair, that was the main thing the man did with his life and certainly what he was seen as being best at. If I’d have liked a little more focus on his political and his personal life — especially his marriage to Fulvia, who absolutely deserves her own historical novel and I can’t believe I’ve never been able to find one!! — that’s just a classic case of a writer writing the book they wanted to write, not necessarily the specific one I wanted to read. Despite that, these are two enjoyable, highly readable books about Antony, and I will definitely be first in line to read a third book if and when it comes out.

Cecily and its sequel, The King’s Mother, are two stellar examples of the very best of historical fiction, which I could not put down once I started. This is another take on the Wars of the Roses, seen through the eyes of one of the most central and yet enigmatic female characters, Cecily Neville, Duchess of York. Wife of Richard of York, who might have been king, and mother of two English kings — Edward IV and Richard III — she has been depicted in various tellings of their stories, but always on the edges, rarely at the centre as she is here. I’ve read a lot of novels about the Wars of the Roses, and one exception to that rule is Anne Easter Smith’s novel Queen by Right, which does focus on Cecily as the main character. While I enjoyed that novel when I read it many years ago, it doesn’t stand out in my mind the way I suspect these two books will.

We often hear that before the 20th century, most women who exercised power had to do it by being “the power behind the throne” — working with, through, and around men. In the case of dynasties, the men involved were often their husbands and sons, and though Cecily Neville was the first English woman to use “The King’s Mother” as a official title, stories from all around the globe remind us that being the mother of a king or an heir to the throne can be a powerful position for a woman. These two novels show just how a woman like Cecily Neville could exercise that kind of power — as well as that power’s limitations.

Well, how could I resist a book with this title?

This is one of those novels that unlocks a nearly forgotten part of history — in this case, the American women who went to France near the end of and after the First World War to offer aid and help rebuild communities devastated by war. The “Miss Morgan” of the title was a real woman, a famous philanthropist who was the daughter of the wealthy banker J.P. Morgan. While Morgan and her partner, Dr. Anne Murray Dike, are characters in this novel, the main character is a lesser-known (but still real!) member of her book brigade, a librarian named Jessie Carson who, unlike most of the other women involved, was working-class rather than wealthy, and did much to create the library system in France after the war.

The historical story is interspersed with a later story of a librarian in the 1980s who begins researching the documents related to Jessie Carson and the other members of “Miss Morgan’s book brigade.” I’d never heard of any of these women or this story before, so I’m glad to have read the book and learned about it.