Scan barcode
A review by whatjuliareads
The Briar Club by Kate Quinn
5.0
I love Kate Quinn, her books never miss for me.
The ensemble cast of this novel and the ties back to other books that Kate Quinn has written were just soul food. I also felt like a lot of the sentiments in this book were timely: We're living in an era of fear-mongering and hateful vitriol, of witch hunts and distrust. The idea of getting together with the people around you and making a place a home with shared food, shared support, and holding other people's secrets close to your chest as an act of love and service, was something that I needed to see explored in this week of things going wrong in both my political and private worlds.
As always, I love the casual diversity of Kate Quinn's novels, in particular the casual queerness of her women's circles. So much historical fiction refuses to engage with people who aren't straight and white in the name of "historical accuracy" as if there weren't always people living outside of the lines of an accepted identity. Addressing segregation and the different ways that it impacted people, looking at the anti-immigrant sentiments (Polish and Hungarian people are white, and yet they were still othered) just make it seem so much more like the complicated world that people would have lived in than some sterile suburban fantasy.
When I first read the chapters from the perspective of the house, I was a bit taken aback, but I found myself fond of the house as a character by the end of the book.
I would recommend reading this!
The ensemble cast of this novel and the ties back to other books that Kate Quinn has written were just soul food. I also felt like a lot of the sentiments in this book were timely: We're living in an era of fear-mongering and hateful vitriol, of witch hunts and distrust. The idea of getting together with the people around you and making a place a home with shared food, shared support, and holding other people's secrets close to your chest as an act of love and service, was something that I needed to see explored in this week of things going wrong in both my political and private worlds.
As always, I love the casual diversity of Kate Quinn's novels, in particular the casual queerness of her women's circles. So much historical fiction refuses to engage with people who aren't straight and white in the name of "historical accuracy" as if there weren't always people living outside of the lines of an accepted identity. Addressing segregation and the different ways that it impacted people, looking at the anti-immigrant sentiments (Polish and Hungarian people are white, and yet they were still othered) just make it seem so much more like the complicated world that people would have lived in than some sterile suburban fantasy.
When I first read the chapters from the perspective of the house, I was a bit taken aback, but I found myself fond of the house as a character by the end of the book.
I would recommend reading this!