Susie Helme

Award-winning novelist and editorial consultant

Tag: historical-fiction

  • Review: Such a Fantastic Girl

    Review: Such a Fantastic Girl

    E. D. Rich, Such a Fantastic Girl (2025)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/240943127-such-a-fantastic-girl

    Sara was a great mom, until she wasn’t. Now she wants to rebuild broken bridges

    Sara, age 42, is in therapy. She wants to look at why she put herself first, above her children, why she ‘doesn’t feel like a Grade A Asshole’. As a doctor, she’d taken an oath to ‘do no harm’, but she had done harm, to people she loved. All her life she’d been ‘such a fantastic girl’, but then something knocked her back.

    Her children, Jen and Bryan, weigh in. Jen recalls when the family got a horse. Bryan recalls when Mom ‘shut down on doing mom-type things’. Husband Rob knows exactly when it happened. It was the miscarriage. After two years of distancing herself from her family, Sara drops a bombshell. She is joining Doctors Without Borders, in Africa, alone. A divorce follows naturally.

    Jen is dangerously anorexic; Bryan pulls out his eyelashes and cries in bed every night. Sara pays a surprise visit home, and the kids don’t want to see her.

    Eventually, everyone moves on, goes into therapy, finds a new partner.

    The story traces the psychological development of all the characters, tracing forward from the miscarriage, and tracing backward to the early relationship, when it was all ‘babies, puppies, kittens, rainbows’.

    The teenagers are nuanced, and their voices sound authentically young. As they mature, they begin to have more grown-up analyses of their lives. I was fascinated by Jen’s self-talk technique that helped her improve her running. I liked the incorporation of text messaging. I liked Rob’s idea of offering Sara ‘prompts’ to aid her in rebuilding rapport with the kids.

    It’s a pretty ordinary story; it becomes a little bit ‘and-then-one-more-thing-happened’. Though this is a not-uncommon structure for family sagas, I kind of wanted some overarching theme or some big plot twist. Yet it’s poignant how a very ordinary occurrence, a miscarriage, which happens to couples all the time, could be the catalyst for a whole family to fall apart. I was glad to see someone talking about how emotionally devastating a miscarriage is; it is a little-recognised tragedy. Reading this book has helped me with my guilt feelings about all the mistakes I made as a mom.

    This review first appeared in Reedsy Discovery.

  • Review: Under Fluorescent Lights

    Review: Under Fluorescent Lights

    Rafaella Sparkle, Under Fluorescent Lights (2025)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/239665048-under-fluorescent-lights

    An office building in Madrid just before dawn, something stirs under the fluorescent lights. The French girl types at her desk, next to her, her bike. Like the narrator in Rebecca, her identity isn’t recognised, no one knows her well enough to call her by name—no one except Jack.

    The Opening is a bit subdued, but it lends a sense of foreboding, promising future action and intrigue, but the suspense building goes on a bit long. I was kind of expecting something bigger—some final chase scene or ticking time bomb. According to the principle of Chekhov’s Gun, I expected some excitement developing around her bike half-blocking the corridor.

    The climax promised by the foreboding in the Opening never transpires. She gets a promotion which her colleagues resent. She develops a work relationship with a male colleague in London.

    It’s rare to find a novel based almost exclusively on what happens in the office—I like that. And the story shows a deep understanding of the psychology of office politics. Each colleague shows nuanced character development. Despite the office animosity, having once been mates, Ava still sticks up for her. It might not be essential to the story, but I would have liked a bit more detail on what kind of work the company does.

    When an office romance sours, it’s always the woman who pays the price, and that’s unfortunate. But there’s a happy ending for her, after all.

    Very well written. Beautiful word choice and great pacing. I loved ‘sat like a fixed point around which chaos orbited’, ‘every scandal has a soft start’, ‘completely immersed in the sound of her own rise’, ‘walked through the doors, back into the performance’, ‘each floor smelled like printer toner and ambition’, ‘laptops tilted at identical angles’, ‘people trying to outshine their own shadows’.

  • Review: The Sinisterhood of Celebrity Psyclones

    Review: The Sinisterhood of Celebrity Psyclones

    em.thompson, The Sinisterhood of Celebrity Psyclones (Eccentric Directions 2025)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242083329-the-sinisterhood-of-celebrity-psyclones

    Where did kooky Heather Prendergast go to school?–you always wanted to know

    In a remote château in Switzerland, or somewhere, is a ‘Finishing School for Young Gentleladies’. Saint Blaizes promises to turn the daughters of the one percent from ugly ducklings into posh, poised swans, qualified for marriage to some billionaire or celeb. Suitable to ‘marry a nob and have his sprog’.

    Heather Prendergast has a burning desire to become the most famous detective in Britain since Sherlock Holmes, and she would rather be studying to be a police cadet than to be a stuck-up toff, but her rich Aunt Elizabeth—an alum of Saint Blaizes herself—made her attendance here a condition for funding Prendergast’s continued tuition at Merton Police College.

    But nefarious goings-on are going on in the cavernous caverns of the school’s basement, where an evil scientist is plotting to use the little princesses in the dorm rooms above for dastardly purposes.

    Will Prendergast, armed with her trusty Illustrated Sherlock Holmes Omnibus, foil his evil plans before she turns out in a twin set and pearls herself? Or before she herself falls victim?

    Like the rest of the Prendergast of the Yard Series, we are treated to a smorgasbord of witty writing. The characters are all as kooky as Prendergast herself, and the comedic wordplay is genius. The metaphors are all such as you’ve never seen before (‘blended in like a chirrup in a dawn chorus’, ‘a voice less cultured than a Glasgow handshake’, ‘noses in the air like meercats tasting a scent’, ‘chillier than an Englishman’s snog’, ‘trembling like a shrew at a sparrowhawk’s dinner party’), and the puns are all puns of puns. References often reflect erudite authorship, but even ignoramuses will laugh out loud.

    Though each paragraph is peppered with jokes, clever puns, cunning alliterations, funny Franglais, dotty Denglisch, mangled verbs and adjectives and word association football, the plot is ample. There is a crime, and Prendergast solves it—in her own kooky way.

    A panto dame once told me, ‘there’s no such thing as a new joke.’ But he/she/they never read em.thompson. Originality leaps from every paragraph. Another work of comic genius.

    Contains some light profanity and mild drug use, but nothing too graphic.

    I received an advance copy, and I leave this review voluntarily.

  • Review: The King and the Sage

    Review: The King and the Sage

    George Zarkadakis, The King and the Sage (Feline Quanta 2025)

    https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7953675109

    A gem, an exotic tale set in ancient Seleucid India

    The king is Menander I Soter (reigned 160-135 BCE), conqueror of the Punjab, not Meander the Greek playwright. The sage is the Buddhist monk Nāgasena. Their historic meeting was the subject of the Buddhist tract Milindapañha (Questions of Milinda). This is the India of the Seleucids, which I have never read another book about.

    Our narrator is Plato, not the Greek philosopher. Plato grows up feeling that his father Megacles has thwarted his chance for a good life. He wouldn’t let him attend the Academy, where Plato could have developed his innate talent for languages. But Megacles hopes for fame and remuneration for his magnum opus, a ‘true story’ about his trip—to the Moon. On the Moon—he saw them—lived ‘green-skinned giants that exhaled hot steam out of their nostrils, four-armed walruses with transparent tusks who rode on buffaloes day and night, hairy bugs with human bosoms who spoke three languages at once, and plant-people with mouths in their hands’.

    Plato and his father independently have drunken evenings which overlap with larger events happening around them and set them off on new adventures. When Buddhist sages come to town, to bring the Dharma to King Menander, their prospects improve.

    Plato has adorable insights on the differences between Indian and Greek cultures, looking up to the Greeks. I loved the primitive explanations of scientific phenomena. I adored the childhood memory of his father seizing members of the Agora crowd to stage his impromptu plays.

    Seleucid India was so unfamiliar to me that it took me a while to get my bearings. The character is something unusual to me, an Indo-Greek monk, yet his personality shines through, and we feel his emotions from page one. The character of Megacles is wonderful, too.

    The introduction of Buddhist ideas works well, expressed in the context of the lovely story of Nāgasena and the king, but Plato, individually, experiences a sort of nirvana as he gains closure on the events in his life and himself embraces Buddhism.

    The denouement and climax is just fabulous—with Sagala under threat, Plato’s newfound spiritual composure and Megacles’ inventiveness save the day. As well as the magical ending.

    Sumptuous writing, lightly humorous, full of myths and adventures, with beautiful descriptions and metaphors. Sagala, his hometown, is as ‘the ruby in the bellybutton of India’. The rhythmic movements of sex are ‘like those made by shoals of jellyfish as they pulsate through the seas’.

    A lovely, exotic tale, completely unique.

    I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

  • Review: Kings of Stone

    Review: Kings of Stone

    R. Jay Driskill, Kings of Stone (Kindle 2025)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/238611948-kings-of-stone?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=3QW3b2ReEP&rank=2

    Everything we know about the Hittites

    The civilisation of the Hittites, who flourished 1650-1180 BCE in Anatolia, has been shrouded in mystery. Archaeologist Archibald Henry Sayce in 1872 was the first to recognise that the Anatolian carvings on stone represented a distinct, hitherto forgotten culture.

    During the following centuries there have been a number of illuminating archaeological discoveries, notably the decipherment of their early Indo-European language Luwian, which had its breakthough with the discovery in 1946 of the ‘Hittite Rosetta Stone’, the 8th century BCE Karatepe bilingual inscription.

    Hittite studies have been complemented by the Amarna letters from Egypt, Ugaritic archives from Syria and Mycenaean Linear B tablets.

    Archaeologist Driskill outlines what we know about the Bronze Age superpower, from their origins in Anatolia 2300-2000 BCE [debated] to the zenith of their power in the 13th century BCE to their collapse during the Sea Peoples period. Suppiluliuma II (ca. 1207-1180 BCE) was the last documented Hittite king, but the capital Hattuša, intriguingly, was abandoned not destroyed.

    They called their own language Nesili and themselves ‘people of the land of Hatti’, after the non-Indo-European non-Semitic Hattians, whom they had either assimilated or conquered and whose double-headed eagle symbol and chief deities they adopted. Some of the prayers and rituals were conducted in Hattian. Onomastic (placenames) evidence points to a bilingual culture, with borrowing from Sumerian and Akkadian. ‘Hittite cultural development was one of creative synthesis rather than… separation.’ With distinct cultural boundaries (gods were localised) but with extensive borrowing.

    The Hittite Law Code 1650-1500 BCE, as compared to its harsher contemporary Code of Hammurabi, stressed compensation rather than ‘eye for an eye’ punishment. Their pragmatic and accommodating approach to statecraft and diplomacy established precedents across the ancient world. They played a pioneering role in the development of iron (which they called ‘black metal’) metallurgy.

    It charts the history century by century—dry, academic stuff, kings and dates and footnotes, but if you want to learn about the Hittites, it does the business in a cogent style. It goes through it all, language, kingly succession, governmental structures, religious pantheon, trade, agricultural practices and cultural and artistic trends.

    I love how each chapter, representing a particular period, is illustrated by a choice artefact. They are in colour, but I wish the photos were a bit larger, and I would like to have read a description of the object, where it was found etc.

    I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

  • Review: Megalith: Studies in Stone

    Review: Megalith: Studies in Stone

    Hugh Newman et al, Megalith: Studies in Stone (Wooden Books 2018)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56302910-megalith

    This book features chapters by eight different authors on the astroarchaeology of megaliths and stone circles.

    Much can be said about Stonehenge, for example. Astroarchaeology-wise, it’s interesting that the entrance in 3150 BCE was aligned to the Northern-most moonrises, and it was later reoriented to midsummer sunrises. This perhaps indicates a shift from ‘moon worship’ (which may be a misnomer) or at least an accommodation of solar astronomy with lunar astronomy.

    The solar year is 365.242 days, and the lunar month is 29.531 days with 12 7/19 moons per year. On the days when they overlapped, there would be an eclipse. These numbers can be found in several of the constructions. There are 19 bluestones. The ratio of the diameter of the Aubrey Circle to that of the Sarsen Circle is 7/19. Even if one discards Thom’s Megalithic Yard Theory, using our modern inches the circumference of the Aubrey Circle = 10785.82 inches = 365.24 x 29.53 days = solar year x lunar month.

    Some of these number concurrences may be coincidence, but it’s hard to disregard the numerous alignments. Mayday sunrise as viewed from Glastonbury Tor rises over Avebury. Numerous sites are located on the lines running N-S from Isle of Man to Isle of Wight and E-W from Bury St Edmunds to St Michael’s Mount. These lines cross at Avebury.

    I got a bit lost in the maths and geometry, and I did baulk at some of the claims. How would the Neolithic builders of Avebury have known its precise latitude between the pole and the equator? How could measurements of sites in Britain which correspond to measurements of the Great Pyramid be more than coincidence? I’m not sold on the Megalithic Yard theory.

    But like everyone on earth today I am still astounded by the scale of the construction. Stonehenge took 12 million manhours to build. It’s astounding enough that they could predict eclipses that long ago. The stone circles seem to chart intricate astronomical knowledge gleaned over many generations. Göbekli Tepe (9000-7500 BCE) was aligned to the rising of Orion, which has a 25,800 yr cycle.

  • Review: Inside the Neolithic Mind

    Review: Inside the Neolithic Mind

    David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, Inside the Neolithic Mind (Thames & Hudson 2005)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/967815.Inside_the_Neolithic_Mind?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_25

    This is the book I have been waiting for. Finally, an explanation of stone circles and cave art that makes sense. I’ve heard explanations from stupid to stupider. The red handprints were people planting their mark ‘I wuz ‘ere’ or letting their kids muck around with the paint while they drew bison.

    No, this book says, they were representations of early humans’ spiritual experience, attempts to portray altered states of consciousness and get closer to god. That’s why the horses seem to be floating in air; they were paintings of the horse’s spirit animal. That’s why the bison are sometimes left half finished, as if they’re crawling out of the wall; the wall was seen as a membrane into the spirit world.

    This ‘neuropsychological model’ explains the ubiquity of designs—spirals, lozenges, zigzags, cups and rings. It could be that the descendants of Palaeolithic artists in France migrated into Britain, learning megalithic architecture and artistic norms from their ancestors. Or the artists were painting or carving from a similar experience as that of their forebears, one that is hardwired into homo sapiens’ brains, sometimes aided by hallucinogens or other means of altering consciousness. In fact, subjects in altered states of consciousness under laboratory conditions have produced similar images.[1] Or it could be, I think, a bit of both.

    This explains the abstractness, the mishmash of images, why there is no overall composition. They weren’t creating an artwork to be viewed; they were depicting an experience. Much of this is in places too inaccessible for the whole midwinter solstice crowd, deep inside dark passage tombs; it would have been the purview of the shaman or seer.

    It follows an idealistic analysis, proposing that religious ideas preceded the material realities and social relations they expressed. Clearly, humans had religion before they developed agriculture, as Göbekli Tepe shows. Aurochs (wild bulls) were important in Neolithic religion before the domestication of cattle. But I think any argument that ideas precede realities is illogical (and unMarxist). But that is my only criticism.

    It does not examine astroarchaeology (the alignments of stone circles toward solstices), but that is not a criticism. Other books do that. In the light of this analysis, however, I have revised my view of stone circles as ‘calendars’. Their import was probably more religious than as date predictors. The purpose was more to convey the consistency of the cosmos and to symbolise the stability provided by the rule of the religious elite—as above, so below.

    The book analyses in detail major Neolithic sites in the Near East and British Isles. With B/W drawings and colour photos.

    Richly scholarly, densely footnoted. It explains complex philosophical concepts quite cogently (though with some big words).

    [1] See Fig 64 p 262.

  • Review: The Typo

    Review: The Typo

    William Lower, The Typo: In the Name of God (Ink and Pixel Publishers 2025)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/241284986-the-typo

    Florentine Antonio Strozzi is illuminating a manuscript for Abbot Fransisco, he takes especial care with his expensive ultramarine pigment. The abbot is preparing for the following day’s viewing, which Cosimo de’ Medici will attend, of the monastery’s new Gutenberg Bible.

    In Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg is bankrupt.

    Antonio attends the viewing and on page 149 spots a shocking mistake. A ‘deus’ is not capitalised. Blasphemy! He has discovered the world’s first typo. He is commissioned as the world’s first proofreader to check the rest of the book, then to travel Mainz to demand correction, with guard Gabriele to protect him.

    The abbot wants to hush up the heresy, but Prior Lorenzo wants to hush up the travelers. The discovery of Guglielmo’s horse where it should not be sparks a suspicion of the intrigue at play. So, who is going to poison whom? Many trips between Florence and Bologna and much changing of horses will reveal. The chase between Antonio and Gabriele, and Lorenzo and the band of thieves, from town to town, from monastery to tavern, gets a bit long after a while, but it is punctuated by some humorous scenes and dialogues.

    Then, there’s a twist in the intrigue. Lorenzo tries to woo Antonio onto his side. And there’s an interesting twist in the rapport between Antonio and Gabriele. Lorenzo does not acquiesce easily.

    We’re introduced to all the POV characters in the first chapter, which I don’t think is the best way, as it doesn’t allow us time to get to know them, so that as we start chapter 2, we’ve already forgotten them.

    Though otherwise the tale is told chronologically, one-third of the way into the journey, it inexplicably flashes back, which confuses the story.

    It’s a lovely tale, humorous in places, but there’s a tendency to repeat the jokes too many times.

    I didn’t get the Epilogue.

  • Review: Caesar’s Messiah

    Review: Caesar’s Messiah

    Joseph Atwill, Caesar’s Messiah (Ulysses Press 2005)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1350497.Caesar_s_Messiah?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=R6BrRTgD93&rank=1

    This is an interesting exposition of the Jesus-Never-Existed (JNE) conspiracy theory.
    Anyone who has compared the works of Flavius Josephus and the New Testament can’t help but notice. The Gospels write about stuff that supposedly happened during Jesus’s lifetime, in the 30s, and Josephus writes about the same stuff happening during the Great Revolt, in the 60s. Exact parallels, even the same words and phrases are used. What’s going on here? There are at least 115 parallels between the Gospel stories of Jesus in the 30s and Josephus in the 60s. It is very tempting to believe that one of them must have copied from the other.
    Atwill’s answer is—a big conspiracy. The Romans (specifically, their adopted historian Flavius Josephus) invented Christianity as a big con game.
    Typical of conspiracy theories, the basic idea is, on the face of it, credible—it just sounds like something ‘they’ would do. But when you get to the detail, all sorts of silliness ensues. Motive, also—according to Atwill it was either to ‘tame messianic Judaism’ or to ‘prove how clever they were’—is silly.
    The puzzles are ‘solved’ by means of ‘typology’ (peshers) to transfer one story to another to show the hand of God at work. The parallels between Jesus and Titus begin with vocabulary—the word for gospel is ‘euanggelion’ (good news), the same word Titus uses for his military victories—continuing through to dating according to the ‘70 weeks of Daniel’.
    That the Flavians and the Herodians may have mixed genealogically is highly credible. Royal families intermarried all the time, and Herod the Great was keen on marrying kings of the neighbouring ‘Nations’ with his daughters and granddaughters. For generations, Herodian princes had been educated in Rome side by side with the Caesars. Princess Berenice was infamously the long-time mistress of Titus. After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE, the entire Judaean royal family moved to Rome, and the reading of post-war brides of various noble Romans as descendants of Herod the Great is more than reasonable.
    Unfortunately for these juicy-sounding hypotheses, the Arria the Elder and Arria the Younger, proposed by JNE as being Herodian descendants, had well-attested Roman pedigrees.
    The parallels are really remarkable. I do not subscribe to this theory, however. I believe the concurrences can be understood as the authors referring to a common cultural and literary tradition. The evangelists and Josephus all had cultural memories of the war and were party to myths and legends which circulated at the time, a number of which involved characters named Jesus.

  • Review: Dirty Roulette

    Review: Dirty Roulette

    Stephy M. Marie, Dirty Roulette (Kindle 2025)

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/238208053-dirty-roulette

    The early years of college are a lot of fun, sometimes. But they can be a stage for some painful experiences.
    Ryder is still trying to get over the night he saw his girlfriend of 3 years Brittni f***ing the college a***ole Brody. Brody is the dude all the gals go for, and as is often the case in an age group where people don’t yet really know who they are, he’s a piece of work.
    Ryder has seen the casual s**, the jealousies, the breakups, the vendettas, and he’s determined to protect his sister Charlie, who is barely eighteen.
    Then one night a party gets out of control. What starts as a silly game of Strip Poker ends up wreaking havoc on the kids. The wrong people end up having s** together, things are posted on the internet that shouldn’t have been, and their fragile, pressured society is fractured.
    Everything is first-person present tense, alternating chapters between POV characters—Ryder, Payton and Charlie. This gives intimacy to the reader. The writing style is unique. The plotline works in today’s huge role of texting and social media. They all seem barely out of high school maturity-wise, and their emotions are usually turned up to High—shame, jealousy, desire, betrayal. The parents all seem to have their own dysfunction going on, so the young people have to work out their social problems by themselves.
    It’s worth making a little list as you go along to keep in mind whose head we’re hopping into—Who is whose sister? Who has the hots for whom? Who dumped whom? Who f***ed whom, and who knows about it? Old folks like me struggle to catch all the young streettalk.
    The characters are interesting and multi-layered. I love stories like this, where one event ends up having ramifications for each of the characters. It reminded me how painful it was to be young.