Book Review of The Bohemian Gospel by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

I chanced onto Dana Chamblee Carpenter’s Bohemian Gospel, part of her Bohemian Trilogy while searching for other novels online, and I’m glad I did. I’ve read the first two books and I’m onto the third, a rare thing for me, as I usually lose interest after the beginning of the second book. It is a dark, historical fantasy that moves back and forth through time, and begins in Thirteenth Century Bohemia. It provides lots of info about old religions, churches and bibles of various types, which might also be a deal-breaker for me, as I am not religious in the typical church-y way. Except it is so interesting!

The trilogy is quite the page-turner. Part of the appeal is Carpenter’s great, quirky characters, and the intensely wrought romance.

A girl simply called Mouse knows no other home than a monastery in Bohemia. And though the priest who cares for her calls her Little Angel, she learns that her father is the Devil himself.

Indeed, she has special powers: of hearing, memory and of healing—both of herself and others. When the young King Ottakar comes to the church badly wounded, she provides healing and intelligent counsel, their bond grows… and grows, to the point of a fierce love. But she has secrets, and he is bound by the parameters of protocol. Even if it includes marrying for tradition, not love.

I highly recommend this series if you like thrills, historical details, deeply wrought characters and intense romantic bonding. I am a third way into the last in the series and it is as good as the first two books.

Putting Real People in your Historical Fantasy

Recently, I attended the Writers’ Digest Book Conference in NYC, and one of the panels that resonated with me was The Thin Line Between Historical Fact & Fiction moderated by authors Crystal King and Anjali Mitter Duva. They posed some interesting questions. Here are a few:

When is it beneficial to use real people in fiction? Are there rules? Can you make a good person into a dubious character—a villain even? How much can you bend the “real” history? Is there any instance it would be unwise to use a real person, or a time you might go too far?



In my Witch of the Cards, set in 1932 I injected multiple real life characters: Salvador Dali, Elsa Schiaparelli, Irene Ware and Bela Lugosi to name a few. They were mainly in the scenes aboard the Morro Castle ocean liner that sailed from Manhattan to Cuba. I wanted to show that even during Prohibition, the glitterati of high society found a way to drink. The laws that held on solid ground, were not punishable when on the high seas, or in Cuba. I also put these creative souls in to lighten the dark days that my poor character Peter Dune endured. He got to party with these folks and lounge on a Cuban beach. Who wouldn’t want to party with the madcap Dali?

Dickens at work

I am now crafting a fantasy set in 1854 Philadelphia and so far I have decided on two characters from real life. One is Charles Dickens and the other is Thomas Mutter. In addition to writing great novels, Dickens wrote an infamous treatise on the cruelty of solitary confinement in prisons. This, after he toured the supposedly humane Eastern State Penitentiary, where my girl, Evalina is serving a sentence. You see, during that time, people believed that forced isolation was a humane way to treat prisoners. But soon, people discovered that it made prisoners go mad. Dicken’s scathing article helped illuminate this. Mutter is most well-known for his strange collection of medical anomalies. Yet, more importantly, he invented cutting edge (pardon the pun!) plastic surgery techniques still used today, like the Mutter flap. Can you tell that my novel will have shady medicine in it?! Uh, huh.

So, the upshot is that one should think deeply about who and WHY they want to write real folks into their historical fantasies. Some benefits are:
*Grounding the story historically and vividly.
*Opening out a period of time in order to look at it from a fresh vantage point.
*Giving a side character his or her due. (Similar to Fan Fic)
*Imagining an alternative history.
*Giving an entire period of history its due using people from the time.
*Imagining two peers who never atually met. Having them meet and carry out a friendship, a love relationship, a rivalry, a freaking crime!

It’s fun to think of angles, right? Can you think of more reasons to utilize real historical characters? Have you ever wanted to put a real person from history into your stories? If so, who might be the most fun? The most unnerving?

Down the rabbit hole to research historical fantasy

Lithograph by J. Childs depicts two of Philadelphia's notorious
Moyamensing gang killers of the mid-1800s

One of the strange and wonderful perks of writing historical fantasy is doing research. Right now, I am developing characters to populate my next witch novel, set in the mid-1800s in Philadelphia. I need con men and women, murderers, petty thieves and prostitutes. Can you tell I like the dark side? And so far, I’m finding excellent, twisty rabbit holes containing lots of skeevy mischief.

Take the typical misbehaviors for women at this time, where the punishment seems out of whack with the crime: a thief getting five years imprisonment for stealing a dress from a tailor, or a large plate of oysters from a tavern.

There were children in prison as well. One of the youngest girls in the records, 11-year-old Ann McQuillan, was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison for 'theft by housebreaking'.

Con men advertised in newspapers to sell “oxygenizing machines” that actually contained laughing gas to supposedly cure folks with lung disease! They hawked counterfeit currency to gullible businessmen, who received a package of green cut paper (thus, the “green goods swindle”). Big Bertha Heyman was so good at conning money from men, she could even pull it off in prison.

Big Bertha, an ingenious swindler of the 1800s
conned a man out of $900 (now about $20,000) while behind bars!

Even in the supposedly civil city of Philadelphia, Irish gangs like the Schuylkill Rangers, began by resisting anti-Catholic attackers, then evolved into organized delinquency.  They became river pirates, demanding a tax from barges heading to the city, and robbing the trade carried across the river at nearby Gray’s Ferry.

One of my characters is a “retired” prostitute, and I hit the mother lode yesterday, when I discovered there were Gentlemen’s Guides to Dens of Iniquity, a kind of wink-wink description of the “worst” establishments in the city. These guides were printed for most big cities. One of the funniest revelations was that a religious seminary on the west side of NYC was once an infamous brothel.

Built in 1819 for a seamstress, this brick house in what is now the New York University area, became a brothel in the mid–1800s—about the time the city’s wealthier citizens relocated uptown.

When I have enough interesting factoids the challenge will be to cull the best of my research and piece together the criminals and cons to form the core band of my players. Each will have their own backstories, flaws and quests.

Do you write historical fiction? If so, do you like doing research? What is the strangest tidbit you’ve unearthed so far along the way?

Fantastical Witchy Factoids!

I recently released my historical fantasy Witch of the Cards.
(For those who are curious, it's 99 cents, free on KU until July 20)
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For fun, I've compiled some fun factoids about witches!
Before people had hospitals and surgeons to fix people, they had midwives and herbalists. When babies or moms died in childbirth, or the herbal fix was insufficient to cure what we would now know was a fatal disease, who do you think was blamed? The same women who delivered babies and gave expert herbal remedies! In a fearful world, they were labeled as witches, or agents of the devil.

A fave "baddie" in Oz

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Bruno Bettelheim was a famous psychiatrist who worked with troubled children and believed fully in the power of myth and fairytales, which include witch stories! In his words: "...the imagery of fairy tales helps children better than anything else in their most difficult and yet most important and satisfying task: achieving a more mature consciousness to civilize the chaotic pressures of their unconscious." Fairytales are spiritual explorations. In the fairy tale we see life divined from the inside.
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Ironically, in ancient Rome even though women were housebound with zero political power, the most revered, influential people were the high priestesses presiding over the oracles, such as the one at Delphi. These women were said to be able to predict the future, wield supernatural powers and have innate knowledge of the divine realms. Greek citizens would go on pilgrimages to seek out their womanly wisdom. Now, that’s what I call some bad@ss white witches!

Fortuna & her wheel

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In Chaucer’s and Boccaccio’s European middle ages (mid 1300s) people were expected to be devout in their Christianity. Many believed literally in the devil and the power of witches. Interestingly, as devout as they were to the going religion, they also prayed to the sprites and night nymphs of their recently dropped Pagan beliefs. They also believed in Fortuna, or the wheel of Fortune—that fortunes rose and fell by the whirl of a wheel, often portrayed by a beautiful woman, Fortuna. How’s that for supernatural female power!
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During the Victorian Era in 1899 Charles Godfrey Leland published a

1899, Aradia cover

book called Aradia or Gospel of the Witches. This Aradia goddess, the incarnation of Diana/Artemis was going to bring magic to the Victorians and hopefully free women from the oppression of the times. Beautiful book cover, right?
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Tamsin Blight 1798-1856 was a famous English witch healer, able to remove curses or spells from a person. She was also said to have put spells on those who displeased her. She was also known as Tammy Blee and Tamson.
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Houdini & Doyle in friendlier times

In the 1920s and 30s there was a craze for psychics, card readers, and mediums who claimed they could communicate with people’s dead relatives. Harry Houdini, the famous magician, ironically made it his life’s work to try and debunk these folks. Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes series was a huge believer in the supernatural. He went head to head in heated debates with Houdini. I found this fascinating, and I wove this into Witch of the Cards, where Fiera, a talented seer meets up with a skeptic. But in my novel, he becomes a believer. LOL.
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The Tarot fascinates me. I collect cards for their variety, beauty and amazing images. They are thought to have originated all the way back in ancient Egypt, as a cosmic source of wisdom and divination of the future. The Egyptian word tar means royal and ro means royal – thus the royal road to wisdom. Later, in northern Italy, a complete deck for card playing and gambling was devised. In France in the 1700s, a “cartomancer” named Jean Baptiste-Alliette created the imagery in the decks we often see today. There are cups, swords, wands, and pentacles. And the Major Arcana cards that hold great symbolism, such as the hermit, the world and the death card (which can also mean rebirth!).

Tarot name origin

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In my novel, Witch of the Cards Peter Dune has a Tarot and Séance shop on the boardwalk, where he holds readings and séances. In walks Fiera, who not only has a mysterious and electric connection to Peter, she can do more outrageous and unexpected things with the Tarot than simply reading them! I won’t give away the surprise here. She’s also a sea witch so her supernatural powers are twofold.
Do you know how to read the Tarot? What’s your favorite card?

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new nonfiction on witchery

Two new nonfiction books on witches launched recently. Amber Mar’s Witches of America and Stacey Schiff’s The Witches: Salem 1692. I am reading both on my kindle.
Mar traveled across the USA to interview a diverse bunch of self-described witches. Here’s a quote from her intro: “There may be hundreds of strands of Paganism, but these super-esoteric paths share a clear core. They are polytheistic and nature worshipping, and believe that female and male forces have equal sway in the universe. They teach that the divine can be found within us and all around us, and that we can communicate regularly with the dead and the gods without a priestly go-between.”
Makes sense to me. Does it to you?

What inspired Witch of the Cards, my historical fantasy

My historical fantasy Witch of the cards launches in mid-March. I want to tell you about specific elements from the real world that inspired this dark fantasy. It's set in 1932 in Asbury Park, NJ, a beach town I've been going to for years. A while ago, I wandered into one of the boardwalk stores and saw old photos of a shipwreck that beached on the shores of Asbury for an entire year.

It was a party cruise boat called the Morro Castle that sailed from New York City to Cuba during prohibition, so high-rollers could drink without penalty. In my novel, the disaster at sea was caused by very different events! Peter Dune, one of the main characters in my novel sails on the Morro for a business meeting. For fun, I added cameos on the Morro of Bela Lugosi (the actor who played Dracula), Irene Ware (a 1930s movie star), the great surrealist Salvador Dali and Elsa Schiaparelli, a famous clothing designer who collaborated with Dali.

Schiaparelli

Ware

 

Dali

Lugosi

From the nucleus of a real life paranormal museum in Asbury Park, I created Peter Dune's Tarot and Seance. A salt water taffy store on the boardwalk got transformed into a magical place with a very strange speakeasy in the basement. 

The novel summary:

Fiera was born a sea witch with no inkling of her power. And now it might be too late. 

Witch of the Cards is historical, supernatural romantic suspense set in 1932 on the Jersey shore. Twenty-two year-old Fiera has recently left the Brooklyn orphanage where she was raised, and works in Manhattan as a nanny. She gets a lucky break when her boss pays for her short vacation in Asbury Park. One evening, Fiera and her new friend Dulcie wander down the boardwalk and into Peter Dune’s Tarot & Séance, where they attend a card reading. 

Fiera has always had an unsettling ability to know things before they happen and sense people’s hidden agendas. She longs to either find out the origin of her powers or else banish them because as is, they make her feel crazy. When, during the reading, her energies somehow bond with Peter Dune’s and form an undeniable ethereal force, a chain of revelations and dangerous events begin to unspool. For one, Fiera finds out she is a witch from a powerful sea clan, but that someone is out to stop her blossoming power forever. And though she is falling in love with Peter, he also has a secret side. He’s no card reader, but a private detective working to expose mediums. Despite this terrible betrayal, Fiera must make the choice to save Peter from a tragic Morro Cruise boat fire, or let him perish with his fellow investigators. Told in alternating viewpoints, we hear Fiera and Peter each struggle against their deep attraction. Secrets, lies, even murder, lace this dark fantasy.

Join the Facebook Witch of Cards launch party! Check when book links go live.

What real life elements would you love to turn into historical fantasy?