Posted by Marissa Doyle

https://bookviewcafe.com/queen-victoria-part-1-and-the-winner-is/

https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=17569

You’ve heard the expression that “truth is stranger than fiction,” haven’t you? The story of how Queen Victoria came to be born a little over two hundred years ago (that’s Victoria at right as a toddler with her mother, the Duchess of Kent, in 1821, by W. Beechey) is one of the more improbable stories in history. Read this and let me know if you don’t think so too.

It’s late 1817, and there’s just been a death in the royal family of England. Poor Charlotte, granddaughter of King George III and heiress to the throne of England after her dad the Prince of Wales, has just died in childbirth. The country is devastated, because Charlotte was very popular. But more importantly, she had no brothers or sisters because her parents couldn’t stand each other.

So who was going to inherit the throne after the Prince of Wales?

Well…according to the rules in England, if the king’s eldest son has no legitimate children, then the throne is inherited by his next son (and that son’s legitimate children)…and so on down the line. George III had fifteen (that is not a misprint) children, twelve of whom were still living, so that was okay…there were plenty of spare heirs there, right? And most of those children had children of their own. In fact, by 1817 George III had fifty-six grandchildren. You’d think that the last thing anyone had to worry about was the heir supply…but in fact there was a problem.

The problem was that none of those fifty-six was legitimate. Not one. Charlotte had been the only one of George III’s grandchildren whose parents who were actually married to each other. Most of George’s sons had remained single for various reasons, but that hadn’t stopped them from raising fine families. One of them, the Duke of Clarence, had ten children with the famous comedic actress, Dorothy Jordan. It is thought that even one of George’s unmarried daughters, Princess Sophia, secretly had a child.

This just cracks me up. Fifty-six illegitimate grandchildren for a man who was, according to all accounts, as strait-laced and virtuous as they come. Go figure.

So early 1818 saw three unmarried, middle-aged English princes rushing through Europe looking for young, healthy princesses to marry (a fourth had married just a couple of years before). And after that, the race began to see who could produce a legitimate child first. Our Victoria was one of those babies, arriving on May 24, 1819. She wasn’t the first–a boy named (what a surprise) George had been born in March to the Duke of Cambridge–but because her father, the Duke of Kent, was the older brother, she won…and eighteen years later, became Queen.

To be continued…

https://bookviewcafe.com/queen-victoria-part-1-and-the-winner-is/

https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=17569

Posted by Alma Alexander

https://bookviewcafe.com/professional-tumbleweed/

https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=18751

In the context of looking for something else entirely, I came upon a list, in my father’s handwriting,  listing  my family’s perambulations from 1960 to 1995.

starting from the day my parents met, my father noted their respective addresses at the time. Then they married, and he more or less immediately left for California to complete his postgrad degree while mama stayed behind in the old country for the duration. #2 was a period of renting a scrappy place from mid-1962 to mid-1963. THen they separated again, with  my dad in one city and my mother decamping to her parents’ place in her birth city in order to have me. Near the end of 1963 we were reunited as a family back in my dad’s home towh, living in a back room in his mother’s house briefly before moving into our own flat where we lived from January 1964 to July 1969. Then there’s an address I don’t even recognise, a transition point during which we moved to Novi Sad permanently as a family, and then there’s the flat that we lived in when I was growing up, between 1968 and 1973. Then we moved to Africa.

We spent two months living in a hotel, initially, when we got there, which was not ideal.Then we moved into a flat, infested with ticks when we got there, which was NOT fun.  We stayed there for less than a year, and then moved into a house in a brand new development, so new that it smelled of paint when we moved in. that lasted just under two years. Then we moved countries, and for five and a half years we stayed put in a place, which seemed to be something of a record. Then things fell apart a little while Dad settled on a job in yet a third country and while he fussed around in South Africa (for some months) Mama and I went home to the old country and her parents’ house yet again until things were settled. from February of 1982 to july of 1983 we lived in Pretoria, South Africa – technically, anyway, because during that time I was accepted into the University of Cape Town and I moved there and then my parents followed in the second half of 1983. From August of 1983 to October of 1994, we lived for the longest consecutive period of our lives in our house in Cape Town, the one that my mother always considered to be her favourite home. THen things fell apart again. I left for New Zealand in 1994. My parents followed eventually but couldn’t do it all at once so we spent a while apart or in different configurations in our house in Auckland, where we stayed (individually or collectively) until 2000, at which point I moved to the USA. My parents followed (again) a few years later. In the US I lived in two places – a 2-year stint in Florida, to which I then gleefully waved goodbye as I shook its dust off my feet and moved to the Pacific Northwest where I’ve been ever since. Counting up just the places that I myself have physically lived, that makes for sixteen moves into at least five countries across three continents in my lifetime.

I am a professional tumbleweed, it seems.

Oh lord. I really never ever want to move again.

https://bookviewcafe.com/professional-tumbleweed/

https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=18751

Posted by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

https://bookviewcafe.com/bvc-presents-cover-stories-a-princess-of-passyunk/

https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=18931

Greetings, genre fiction fans. Welcome to Cover Stories, in which an author shares a book, what’s on its cover, a hint of what’s inside and some insider info on their creation.

So, what’s the book of the day? 

A PRINCESS OF PASSYUNK by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

What’s on the cover?

Ganady Puzdrovsky has just followed the age old fairy tale custom of firing an object (usually an arrow, but in this case a “magic” baseball) in a random direction, hoping that it will lead him to the girl he is destined to marry. Imagine his consternation when he traces his baseball to an alley where he finds it in the possession of a gleaming cockroach.

Also on the cover is this teaser: Philadelphia. 1950s: A boy, a magic baseball … a cockroach. Unlikely place. Unlikely characters. Unlikely love story.

What’s inside?

The tale begins: “If Market Street ever flooded,” said Stanislaus Ouspensky, “South Philly would be an island. …Water on three sides; history on the fourth. All it would take is a little push and we’re cut off from the present. Because Time gets confused in South Philly.”

Set in Philadelphia in the 1950’s, A PRINCESS OF PASSYUNK is a peculiar coming-of-age tale—a story of faith, love and magic set in an archipelago of immigrant neighborhoods. 

Ganady Puzdrovsky grows from boy to man on a quest for New World magic. He finds it in unlikely places: in his Baba Irina’s stories, in the imaginative ramblings of Stan Ouspensky, in the religious faith of a priest and a rabbi, in a pop foul at a Giants’/Phillies game, in love that goes beyond racial or religious boundaries, in Izzy’s Jewish deli.

Through the agency of a very special baseball, Ganady finds and falls for a peculiar and mysterious princess that no one else believes exists. But when the girl of his dreams vanishes, Ganady goes on a hero’s quest and confronts a Sausage King, a feisty crone, and a winsome bard in order to find her.

Where’d all that come from?

I grew up with tales of Old World magic. Fairy tales, ghost stories, legends of great Slavic heroes like Kralyevich Marko and his marvelous horse, Sharats. Living in the USA, I wondered where the magic went and if maybe just a little of it might have crossed the Atlantic from the Motherland.

A PRINCESS OF PASSYUNK is my answer…

Okay, so my hero, Ganady Puzdrovsky, doesn’t ride a magical horse—but he does have a magic baseball. And he’s not a prince … exactly—but he does fall in love with a Princess … sort of. And he doesn’t slay magical beasts—but he does battle an angry Sausage King and a scheming Crone in order to complete a magical quest … in a manner of speaking.

Well, I guess you’ll just have to read it. Then I hope you’ll believe that there’s New World magic, too.

What else should I know?

My dad was a denizen of Philadelphia and, later, its sister city across the river, Camden, New Jersey. He grew up there in an earlier decade, but he was full of real virtue, Polish jokes, and stories about how he lost his hair. He was a first generation Polish-American—son of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father (who went by Phillip, but whose birth name was Itzak). My dad was a lover of baseball, played catcher, and would have signed with a minor league team were it not for having already wrecked his knees (or so he claimed). He had no middle name (or at least none he’d admit to) but he adopted the middle initial T, which caused him to be called “Tex” and which everyone assumed was adapted from Theodore. Hey, at least it wasn’t Tiberius.

This book is, in many ways, a love letter to my dad, Chief Master Sergeant Henry Theodore Harber (aka, Tex and Hank) from his “Little Chief” who finally learned to love baseball as much as he did, though she couldn’t play it to save her life.

What have reviewers/readers said about A PRINCESS OF PASSYUNK?

“The manuscript is literarily written and lovely—it gave me A Tree Grows in Brooklyn meets To Say Nothing of the Dog vibes” ~ Brit Hvide, editor Hachette Group

“O. My. God. This is such a great book!” ~ Jennifer Stevenson, author of the Hinky Chicago series

https://bookviewcafe.com/bvc-presents-cover-stories-a-princess-of-passyunk/

https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=18931