Lois Leveen takes a little-known historical figure and makes her come alive in The Secrets of Mary Bowser. Working carefully researched events and other historical figures together with richly nuanced creative details and fictional elements, Leveen weaves a wonderfully engaging tapestry that honors her subject and treats difficult material with sensitivity and honesty. Through Mary's experiences, the reader is compelled to confront the usual ideas about North and South, slave and free, and comes away with a completely different understanding of this complex period of history. This is historical fiction at its best: it teaches, enlightens, delights, challenges, and entertains.

Replete with vivid descriptions of the beautiful city of Siena, well-researched details of horse racing in the Palio (an event that continues to this day), and tidbits from the captivating intrigue of the Medici family, Daughter of Sienna has the potential to be a fascinating treat of historical fiction. Against this richly textured backdrop, however, the characters Marino Fiorato has created seem oddly one dimensional. Pia is the typically good, beautiful, and slightly rebellious historical heroine. Riccardo as her love interest and potential hero of the tale is served up as a literary metaphor for the figures of Romulus and Remus, sons of Rome and victims of familial intrigue that is echoed predictably in Fiorato's tale. Zebra is a classically Dickensian street urchin. Villains are not characterized beyond their distinctive peccadilloes. By far the most interesting character is Violente whose personal story is a welcome counterpoint to the less-well developed plots lines with which her story connects. Overall a reasonably satisfying read for a lazy summer afternoon, but not as stimulating or engaging as one might hope.

"The Lost and Languages of Shanghai" is a hauntingly beautiful tale through which author Ruiyan Xu explores the subtle nuances of language and the role it plays in culture, identity, and relationships. When an accident severs Li Jing from his ability to speak Chinese, he is forced to communicate only in his nearly forgotten childhood English. Although physically able to recover, Li Jing's ability to interact with those around him is irreparably damaged. Li Jing and his beloved wife Meiling are trapped in their separate prison houses of language, to use Fredric Jamison's metaphor, unable to break through the walls of silence that now engulf them. The magic of this remarkable work lies in Xu's ability to capture the interior monologues of the characters in ways that engage the reader in their painful struggle to communicate that which they feel deeply but have no words to express.

The reader feels the anguish of Li Jing and Meiling because she, too, longs to cry out to them both and communicate what the other is feeling; but she too is mute, separated as she is from them by the construct of the reader/character relationship. Xu skillfully weaves flashbacks of the couple's relationship into the ongoing story of the way in which their inability to communicate with one another bifurcates their relationship and forces them to follow separate paths in search of new identities. More insidiously dangerous than the English-speaking doctor who threatens to come between them, is language, which inserts itself as a character in its own right. Language is vividly portrayed through the sensory imagery of an author who fully understands the power of the medium with which she works, but who also understands the power of love to overcome the insurmountable.

With Pearl of China Anchee Min claims author Pearl Buck, who is Western by appearance, but who has " Chinese soul," as a legitimate voice for the Chinese people of whom she wrote so lovingly. Grounded in the perspective of the imaginary Willow Yee, the story follows the girls' early escapades as playmates in Chin-kiang. They reunite as married women upon Pearl’s return from her education in the States and find comfort in their friendship and an outlet in their respective writing.

Through her skillful weaving together of historical events and the parallel threads of the lives of these two resilient and indomitable women, Min crafts a story that offers a Chinese perspective on the essence of the woman whose perspective on China was, and perhaps still is, completely unique among Western writers. Pearl of China affirms Buck’s place among a generation of Chinese who are at last able to read her works and allows Western readers a brief glimpse of the complex cultural history of China.

Melanie Benjamin weaves historical anecdotes, her impressions gleaned from an art exhibit of Dodgson's photography, and her incredible imagination to take the reader on a journey beyond the looking glass into the reflections of “the real Alice.” Looking back over her 80 years as the most famous little girl in England, Alice Liddell Hargreaves struggles to come to terms with her relationship with Charles Dodgson and the story she urges him to write down for her. Benjamin skillfully captures the voice of Alice at each of three stages in her life and gives the reader no more information than Alice herself would have had or let herself acknowledge. The result is a highly engaging, very satisfying narrative adventure that sensitively and believably provides a richer perspective on this famous literary duo.