Historical Magical Realism

The Years with Laura Diaz is Carlos Fuentes' most important novel in several decades. Like his masterpiece The Death of Artemio Cruz, the action begins in the state of Veracruz and moves to Mexico City - tracing a migration during the Revolution and its aftermath that was a feature of Mexico's demographic history and that is a significant element in Fuentes' fictional world. Now the principle figure is not Artemio Cruz (who, however, makes a brief appearance) but Fuentes' first major female protagonist, the extraordinary Laura Diaz.

Un viejo coronel retirado va al puerto todos los viernes a esperar la llegada de la carta oficial que responda a la justa reclamación de sus derechos por los servicios prestados a la patria. Pero la patria permanece muda.

Teodora di Sangro is used to hiding her magical ability to transform enemies into music boxes and mirrors. Nobody knows she’s a strega - and she aims to keep it that way. The she meets Cielo - and everything changes. A strega who can switch outward form effortlessly, Cielo shows Teodora what her life could be like if she masters the power she’s been keeping secret. And not a moment too soon: The ruler of Vinalia has poisoned the patriarchs of the country’s five controlling families, including Teodora’s father, and demands that each family send a son to the palace.

Jo, the firstborn, The General to her 11 sisters, is the only thing the Hamilton girls have in place of a mother. She is the one who taught them how to dance, the one who gives the signal each night, as they slip out of their father's townhouse and into cabs that will take them to the speakeasy. Together they elude their controlling father. Meanwhile, they continue to dance, until one night when they are caught in a raid, separated, and Jo is thrust face-to-face with someone from her past: a bootlegger named Tom whom she hasn't seen in almost 10 years.

It’s 1987, and sixteen-year-old Gracie Byrne wishes her life were totally different. Shy and awkward, she has trouble fitting in at her new school, she’s still reeling from her parents’ divorce, and her grandmother Katherine’s Alzheimer’s is getting worse. So when Gracie finds a blank journal in Katherine’s vanity drawer, she begins writing stories about herself—a more popular version of herself, that is. But then the hot guy in her art class describes a dream he had about her—the exact scene she wrote about him in her journal—and Gracie realizes that she can create any reality she wants.

Jane and Vincent have finally gotten some much-needed rest after their adventures in Italy - then Vincent receives word that his estranged father has passed away on one of his properties in the West Indies. His brother, who manages the estate, is overwhelmed, and no one else in his family can go. Grudgingly, out of filial duty, the couple decide to go.

After the birth of the Red Sulphur Twins, the forces of the Subtle Realm conjure a whirlwind of destruction. The Sun King and Prince William of Orange battle over the future of Europe shaping the fate of modernity. In their laboratory our family of alchemists closes in on the ultimate source of the magical red sulphur while struggling with unbearable jealousies.

Alina yearns for freedom. She and her husband, Liviu, are teachers in their 20s, living under the repressive regime of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in the Socialist Republic of Romania in the 1970s. But after her brother-in-law defects, Alina and Liviu fall under suspicion and surveillance, and their lives are suddenly turned upside down - just like the glasses in her superstitious aunt Theresa's house that are used to ward off evil spirits.

When smallpox kills her parents, Camille must find a way to provide for her younger sister while managing her volatile brother. Relying on magic, Camille painstakingly transforms scraps of metal into money to buy food and medicine they need. But when the coins won’t hold their shape and her brother disappears with the family’s savings, Camille pursues a richer, more dangerous mark: the glittering court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Paul is a reincarnated Knight Hospitaller from the 12th century. He is also a nurse, or the historical equivalent, in all of his incarnations. After so many lives, he just wants to die and get off the rebirth wheel. Then he becomes a father, and everything changes. Paul must train his adopted daughter to be the first new K-Nurse since the Crusades, but in teaching her to use her magic and in training her to fight, he must bring her into his own deadly world.

Dr. Waycross knows bleeding and blistering, the best scientific medicine of 1822. He arrives in the Georgia mountains to bring his modern methods to the superstitious masses. The local healers, the Winter sisters, claim to treat yellow fever, consumption, and the hell-roarin' trots just as well as he can. Some folks call the sisters herb women; some call them witches. Waycross calls them quacks. But when the threat of rabies - incurable and fatal - comes to town, Dr. Waycross and the Winter sisters must combine their science and superstition in a desperate search for a remedy.

Buying into the dream that education is the road out of poverty, a teen mom takes a chance on bettering herself, gets on welfare rolls, and talks her way into college. But once she's there, phallocratic narratives permeate every subject, and creative writing professors depend heavily on Freytag's pyramid to analyze life. So Ariel turns to a rich subcultural canon of resistance and failure, populated by writers like Audre Lorde, Tillie Olsen, and Kathy Acker. Wryly riffing on feminist literary tropes, We Were Witches documents the survival of a demonized single mother.

At just six years old, it becomes clear that China Creed's birthright, passed down from her mother's side of the family, is the power to grant wishes with only a touch. In their small Ozark town, where superstition runs rampant, the only person who can be trusted with her secret is the Cherokee midwife and healer who makes China her apprentice. After the tumult of the Civil War, a new doctor arrives in town who is curious about the lovely young woman who can birth babies and banish hexes.

Bristol, 1896. Used to scraping a living as the young assistant to an ageing con artist, Cecily Marsden's life is turned upside down when her master suddenly dies. Believing herself to blame, could young Cec somehow have powers she little understands? Meanwhile Eadie Carleton, a pioneering early film-maker, struggles for her talent to be taken seriously in a male-dominated world, and a brilliant young magician, George Perris, begins to see the potential in moving pictures.

Pregnant at fifteen after gleefully losing her virginity to pansexual neighborhood strongman Francis Anthony Mozzarelli, she is robbed of her baby by a pack of nefarious nuns and her embittered papa has her sterilized without her consent (legal in 1935). With the help of a besotted Francis and her top-secret meatball recipe, a devastated Bella embarks on a riotous quest through Depression-era Coney Island sideshows, the tawdry world of peek-a-boo striptease routines, a queer mob marriage, and a tasty collection of wisdom-filled recipes to find her lost child, herself, and maybe even true love.

Years later, when Grace Laporte Nyberg's grandson refused to go to kindergarten, she remembered the day when the Lake stole her childhood.

Ruth Fitz is surrounded by activism. Her mother is a senator who frequently appears on CNN as a powerful Black voice fighting for legislative social change within the Black community. Her father, a professor of African American history, is a walking encyclopedia, spouting off random dates and events. And her beloved older sister, Virginia, is a natural activist, steadily gaining notoriety within the community and on social media. Ruth, on the other hand, would rather sit quietly reading or writing in her journal.

Fearless Queen Sigrid wants her twin children to fulfill their destinies: her son, Olaf, to become heir to the kingdom of Svealand, and her gifted daughter, Estrid, to secure passage to the underworld as she is promised to Hel, the Norse goddess of death. But Olaf's ascension to the throne depends on Sigrid's former husband, King Erik the Victorious, who despises her and suspects the twins are not his but Sweyn Forkbeard's, Denmark's exiled king.

Set in the early 1950s, this latest novel from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Gayl Jones follows the witty but perplexing army veteran Buddy Ray Guy as he embodies the fate of Black soldiers who return, not in glory, but into their Jim Crow communities. A cook and tractor repairman, Buddy was known as Budweiser to his army pals because he’s a wise guy. But underneath that surface, he is a true self-educated intellectual and a classic seeker: looking for religion, looking for meaning, looking for love.

Thirteen-year-old Reason Nelson attends a party that is busted by the local police. As he flees, he collides with a detective and a Black drug dealer. He snatches up what he believes to be his leather jacket and drunkenly crawls into a doghouse, dragging the jacket with him. In the pocket of this coat, Reason discovers a key that opens a safe-deposit box. The box contains evidence that will solve the murder of a young female informant. The second theme of the audiobook involves the fact-based event that took place in 1966 on the outskirts of Lincoln.