Latest Additions to My TBR Pile

It’s hard enough restraining myself from buying books normally, but when you settle me in front of the Historical Fiction section in a used bookstore … well, that’s just a battle I can’t win.

While on my way back from Venice (Florida) with my mom and sister, we stopped off at a used bookstore called Copperfish Books and, well.

I picked up two books. There was some restraint!

They’re both Historical Fiction, like was mentioned, and I’m pretty sure they’re both Adult and not YA? It’s a little difficult to tell, they’re not labelled on Goodreads.

Anyway, here’s what I got:

First up is The Heretic Queen by Michelle Moran.

In ancient Egypt, a forgotten princess must overcome her family’s past and remake history.

The winds of change are blowing through Thebes. A devastating palace fire has killed the Eighteenth Dynasty’s royal family—all with the exception of Nefertari, the niece of the reviled former queen, Nefertiti. The girl’s deceased family has been branded as heretical, and no one in Egypt will speak their names. A relic of a previous reign, Nefertari is pushed aside, an unimportant princess left to run wild in the palace. But this changes when she is taken under the wing of the Pharaoh’s aunt, then brought to the Temple of Hathor, where she is educated in a manner befitting a future queen.

Soon Nefertari catches the eye of the Crown Prince, and despite her family’s history, they fall in love and wish to marry. Yet all of Egypt opposes this union between the rising star of a new dynasty and the fading star of an old, heretical one. While political adversity sets the country on edge, Nefertari becomes the wife of Ramesses the Great. Destined to be the most powerful Pharaoh in Egypt, he is also the man who must confront the most famous exodus in history.

I don’t read many books set in Egyptian times despite the fact I enjoy the era, so this one is exciting, even though it’s a romance.

And the second is Daughters of the River Huong by Uyen Nicole Duong.

Daughters of the River Huong by Vietnam-born, Houston-based writer Uyen Nicole Duong is a richly woven tapestry of family, country, conflict, and redemption. A saga spanning four generations of Vietnamese women, we discover lives inextricably tied to their country’s struggle for independence. Narrated by the teenaged Simone, a girl who flaunts convention and enters into a forbidden relationship of love and sensuality, readers are drawn to the lives of four of Simone’s ancestors, from Huyen Phi, the Mystique Concubine from the extinct Kingdom of Champa, to Ginseng, the Mystique Concubine’s second daughter and a heroine of the Vietnamese Revolution. Duong tells a tumultuous story of power and lust that transports us from the Violet City of Hue to the teeming streets of a Saigon at war, from the affluence of Paris’s St. Germain des Pres to Manhattan. Love, war, capitalism, revolution—this novel delivers a chronicle of history as fascinating as it is memorable.

Doesn’t have the BEST ratings on Goodreads, but that’s never stopped me before.

Have you read either of these? Let me know if you have, and what you thought of them!

Thanks for reading!