Chanticleer Book Reviews

Tag: Historical Fiction

THE VINES by Shelley Nolden – Medical Mystery, Suspense, Historical Fiction

Shelley Nolden’s debut novel, The Vines, embraces multiple genres as it chills, fascinates, and horrifies, from historical and magical realism to fantasy and horror.

Nolden has melded fanaticism, medical anomalies, and the frailties of human behavior together with a historic setting, creating a narrative Kudzu vine that grows rapidly and spares nothing in its path. This particular vine consists of two main branches that intertwine, bridging time and linking parallel realities, one past, one present.

The Gettler men of Long Island, New York have shepherded a secret medical research project for generations, with the exception of Finn, the youngest man in the family.

Beginning with Otto, Finn’s great-grandfather, who worked at the Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island at the turn of the 20th century, this family has been consumed by unanswered medical questions about universal conditions that impact the human race.

Years after Otto’s death, the Riverside Hospital was ultimately closed, leaving North Brother abandoned, subject to the ravages of rats, birds, and vines. However, Finn’s father and grandfather secretly continued Otto’s research at the now crumbling, empty medical facility.

Although aware of their secret research, Finn had always been excluded from the details, despite his curiosity. What exactly were they doing? And why?

In 2007, the 28-year-old Finn clandestinely crosses the East River to North Brother. Instead of learning about his family’s secret research, he encounters an unfriendly, mysterious woman, her body scarred from previous physical abuse, yet fit and strong, bathing in one of the abandoned buildings.

More than a century ago in February 1903, Coraline McSorley, Cora to most, is infected with typhus and quarantined at Riverside Hospital, New York City’s most notorious pesthouse.

The ensuing story skips back and forth in time, slowly revealing itself through flashbacks, real-time, and places in between. As it grows, The Vines becomes more engaging. Nolden utilizes historical people, places, and events associated with North Brother Island to create a story in which Cora, along with the island itself, are sympathetic characters irrevocably tied to a family whose fanatical, convoluted curiosities dominate every aspect of their lives.

Several chapters into the book, the hook is set deep, pulling the reader in close and holding them there.

The Vines offers readers a mystery to be unraveled, connecting dots back and forth in time as the pace and action increase. Rather than ending with a conclusive resolution, The Vines leaves questions for the reader to ponder, matching the curiosity of the story’s characters.

Readers pulled into this mystery will be glad to find another baited hook dangling just beyond the gateway to the future, as Nolden suggests a sequel is in the works.

The Vines by Shelley Nolden won Grand Prize in the 2021 CIBA CLUE Awards for Suspense and Thriller Mysteries.

November 4, 2022
AFTER The RISING And BEFORE The FALL by Orna Ross – Historical Fiction, Irish Civil War, Family Saga

Award-winning Irish author Orna Ross has created a volume comprising the first two novels of The Irish Trilogy, drawing from her Irish birth and upbringing for a special grasp of the country’s history, how its wars and political strivings have affected its people directly, personally, over multiple generations.

Her two books take on a span of time rooted in the early 1920s and delve deeply into the interlocking fate of the extended family and ancestry of Jo Devereux. Jo, the book’s central narrator, leaves Ireland in her twenties, only returning in her forties in 1995 when she learns that her mother is near death.

The journey back will draw her into the family’s complex relationships, and reacquaint her with Rory, her former, and perhaps only, true love.

Reading through old family papers, Jo will find out more about her mother, her grandmother, and some of the men from her past. These family secrets are compelling and often painful, driving Jo to discover more, eventually uncovering a murder with people she knew and cared for possibly at its center.

Underpinning the drama among her closest and most cherished people is her growing understanding of her home country. Ireland’s war for independence from England has always found most emphasis in its popular lore, but the far-less publicized conflict that followed, the Civil War, may have killed more people than the one that preceded it and lingers even today in bitter memory.

Jo will have to absorb all of these revelations about her forebears while she copes with the ever-changing modern culture in her new home of San Francisco.

The insider’s gaze at 1960s gay culture and feminism are significant sidebars in both past and present portions of Ross’s vibrant and varied narrative. The book ends with Jo contemplating her future, with some crucial questions yet unanswered, begging a sequel.

Ross is a highly practiced wordsmith; this series has already garnered recognition, awards, and the attention of the media.

She is able to mix, match and contrast evocative elements of romance, warfare, women’s rights, men’s feelings, historical nuance, and human-scale humor (especially highlighting that aspect of the Irish conversational flow), all in their appropriate historical niches, developed deftly to keep her story in full motion. This is a book for dedicated readers of any age or clime and will have them waiting attentively for the final installment.

After the Rising by Orna Ross won Grand Prize in the 2021 CIBA Goethe Awards for post-1750s Historical Fiction.

October 26, 2022
SEEING GLORY: A Novel of Family Strife, Faith & the American Civil War by Bruce Gardner- Christian Historical Fiction, Civil War, American Slavery

Seeing Glory by Bruce Gardner is a sweeping, thought-provoking Christian historical novel of the American Civil War. The novel portrays the critical roles of family ties and religious faith in shaping personal attitudes and actions towards the horrors of slavery and the war itself.

Spanning the era from the famous abolitionist John Brown’s Pottawatomie Massacre in 1856 through the end of the war nine years later, Seeing Glory focuses on the gut-wrenching conflicts over slavery and the southern way of life faced by David, Emma, and Catherine Hodge, fictional siblings, raised on a wealthy plantation in Virginia.

David returns home from a prestigious northern college filled with radical new perspectives. He challenges his father’s and his southern church’s assurances that the Bible says slavery is approved by God. When David calls out the truth as he now sees it, he ignites a firestorm that tears him away from his family at the beginning of the Civil War, sparking huge changes in their individual destinies. Soon after meeting Abel Bowman—an ardent abolitionist and follower of John Brown—David moves north to Ohio and becomes an embedded war reporter with Abel’s Union army regiment. Mutual zeal for the abolitionist cause abounds, but will it help or hinder the two men’s endurance of horrific battlefield violence and scandalous personal accusation?

Devastated by David’s departure from the plantation, his younger sister Emma is torn between the realities of slavery and her Christian faith. Unable to bear the cruelty that she sees her family’s slaves being subjected to, Emma flees north with her maidservant Sallie, one seeking freedom, the other seeking purpose.

Meanwhile, the elder Hodge daughter, Catherine, strives to be the perfect southern plantation mistress after her mother’s death. After marrying a Confederate officer, she is forced to manage both her ailing father’s and her 0wn plantation once her husband is off to war. The pressure of her siblings’ abandonment weighs on her as the war creeps closer, threatening to destroy everything she’s worked for.

Christian beliefs were a big part of the historical abolitionist movement. In Seeing Glory, each of the Hodge siblings and Abel Bowman face their own personal issues of faith, privilege, and forgiveness. It is through the lens of faith that these engaging characters discover their unique paths for surviving the war and supporting the abolition of slavery in the United States. On their journeys, they become involved in many historical events, interacting with famous people like Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Angelina Grimké—a former plantation daughter from South Carolina who eventually became a nationally known abolitionist, journalist, teacher, and women’s rights advocate.

Although Seeing Glory falls within the Christian Historical fiction genre, Gardner doesn’t shy away from describing how the Bible was too often used by southern politicians, pastors, and churches to justify slavery—but on the other hand how ardent commitment to a “glorious cause” like abolition could at times be taken too far. Likewise, Gardner doesn’t downplay the brutality of slavery nor the destruction and devastation of the Civil War, though his novel is not excessively gruesome or overly explicit in its descriptions.

Fans of historical fiction will appreciate the compelling mix of fictional and historical characters woven through the emotion-packed saga of Seeing Glory, eager to discover what will happen next. Highly recommended!

October 10, 2022
DELPHIC ORACLE, U.S.A. by Steven Mayfield – Small Town Fiction, Family Saga, Contemporary Fiction

The Coen Brothers meet Garrison Keillor in Steven Mayfield’s quirky, offbeat, and often hilarious Delphic Oracle, U.S.A.

One June afternoon in 1925, seventeen-year-old Maggie Westinghouse, out walking alone as was her custom, comes upon a stranger in a railroad switch-house asleep on a pile of gunnysacks. Maggie, who has always stood a little apart from the town, has recently begun to experience visions that come upon her “in a leisurely way,” ending in a swoon and a restless sleep filled with exotic talk of which she later has no memory. No one knows what to make of it, but they soon will. After this afternoon’s chance encounter with July Pennybaker, a charming grifter on the lam, her world will never be the same. Neither will the town of Miagrammesto Station.

Eighty-nine years later, in the days leading up to and following the July 4th weekend, domestic dramas are playing out across Delphic Oracle, Nebraska (nee Miagrammesto Station).

Teddy Goodfellow, given to periodic fits of restlessness, has done a runner only days before the Fourth of July parade. Francis Wounded Arrow, attempting to change the battery in his nearly cherry 1929 Chevy pickup, has gotten his arm stuck and remains there at Peaseblossom Implement & Auto Parts throughout the afternoon, chatting nonchalantly with the various townsfolk, some of them family who wander by. Beagle Gibbs embarks upon his Religious Period and begins interviewing the different denominations in the town, to see which might suit.

When Teddy bolts, the town responds as it always does. They hold a pool, friends and neighbors, and family each predicting a date and time for his return. The countdown begins. When Francis holds court in Big Bob’s garage, pretending that nothing is amiss—and after he’s privately called upon the Great Father and several of the pantheon of Blessed Uncles to no avail—the entire Delphic Oracle Fire Department is galvanized into action and very nearly saves the day. And Beagle, after a tour of all that the different churches in town have to offer, loses his religious ardor in an unfortunate and rather painful mishap with a nail-gun on the roof of his mother’s house.

But what happens is only part of the fun. It’s how it all happens—the droll language, the turns of phrase, the reactions of the townspeople—that makes the story.

This is not a novel to be rushed. This is a novel for those who love tall tales, yarns, sitting on a summer evening on the wide porch, fanning against the heat, and passing the time telling stories. It’s a novel of reflection and escapade. A novel to be savored.

Structurally, the story is a twist of two timeframes, two narratives. In one, a story that began three generations in the past unfolds. In the other, a bustling town is brought to life through the concurrent stories of several members of the same extended family. The historical strand drives relentlessly forward, those two lives unfurling and intertwining, time passing. The contemporary strand ripples outward, taking in the town and its inhabitants in a luxurious and unhurried manner over a period that encompasses, in storytime, only a few weeks, but that covers, in reflective time, much more than that.

Time, too, is in a twist.

It sieves back and forth and collapses in on itself. The past informs the present; and the present (for us readers), the past. Most of our primary present-day characters, the ones we live with over the course of a few weeks in July and August of 2014, remain anchored solidly in time. But the many characters who move like constellations about those steady poles—those we often encounter plucked out of their own timelines—are typically out of sequence.

This is a novel where a child new to the world, a toddler wailing in a crib, is elsewhere in the tale of the grandfather, long deceased. The stalwart man remembered in the present as the founder of the town puts in an appearance in the past, sixty-odd years after that founding, as a doddering grandfather who’s soiled himself. Another of those long-ago individuals was the flesh and blood precursor to the decades-old human skeleton partially unearthed by Regretful Peasebottom’s dog in a nearby vacant lot two days before the parade.

The same events sometimes reappear from different perspectives, and we put the full stories together like puzzle pieces, fitting now a future piece, now a past. A prism-puzzle, these pieces twirl and refract the light off themselves and one another, until we understand that the story of one forms a part of the story of all and the story of all reaches into the story of each.

The effect is a fully fleshed-out town of long acquaintance, filled with people who seem to live and breathe on the page. The author becomes not so much a novelist, as through his narrator an amanuensis. And to spend time with this novel is not so much to read a story as to take up residence in the town for several madcap weeks, every bit at home as though, like the narrator, you’d never truly lived anywhere else.

Delphic Oracle U.S.A won Grand Prize in the 2022 CIBA Mark Twain Book Awards for Humor and Satire.

September 26, 2022
TOO SOON The NIGHT: A Novel of Empress Theodora (The Theodora Duology Book 2) by James Conroyd Martin – Historical Fiction, Eastern Roman Empire, Women Leaders

Too Soon the Night by James Conroyd Martin shows the thrilling heights to which Empress Theodora rose and the crushing depths to which she fell, in the latter half of her life. This story picks up from Fortune’s Child, the first volume of this epic duology.

This half of Theodora’s incredible journey opens at its close – as she succumbs to the cancer that drove her to dictate the record of her life. She left the task of recording her meteoric rise from actress to empress in the hands of the scribe and historian Stephen, even though she imprisoned him for several years out of fear that he would reveal her greatest secrets.

But as much as Stephen should hate her for her cruelty, he has his own axe to grind against the man who would slander Theodora after her death with a scurrilous character assassination disguised as biography. So he takes up his pen and continues his recording of – if not Theodora’s unvarnished truth – at least something closer than whatever her enemies would conjure to blacken her name.

Where Fortune’s Child focused on Theodora’s early years and her rise to power with Emperor Justinian, Too Soon the Night follows her many attempts to consolidate power, protect Justinian, and secure their legacy – even with no direct heir for their throne.

In spite of the chasm of time between the mid-first century A.D. and the early 21st century, Theodora’s drives and fears are easy to empathize with and understand, even as her complex machinations push the story forward.

The story is split between Theodora’s history as she tells it to Stephen, and Stephen’s perspective of Theodora as he carries out her will.

He provides insight into Theodora’s motives and the court and city in which she lives, allowing the reader to see the Empress both as she wants to be seen and as she truly is.

The story’s setting shows people jockeying for positions in Justinian’s court, unrest among the populace, and the Emperor’s unrealistic dreams of turning the Mediterranean back into a Roman sea. These struggles and desires give the story its tension, framing the life of a singular woman, uniquely powerful for her time.

This is a long and complex journey, befitting an equally long and complex saga. Those who start at the epic’s beginning will be rewarded with an utterly compelling immersion in a fascinating life.

Too Soon the Night by James Conroyd Martin won Grand Prize in the 2021 CIBA Chaucer Awards for pre-1750s Historical Fiction.

September 19, 2022
WINTER’s RECKONING by Adele Holmes – Southern United States Fiction, Women’s Historical Fiction,

In Winter’s Reckoning by Adele Holmes, a mercurial new pastor in town threatens the families of two women.

Welcome to 1917. A time of suspenders for men and, in the cities, bloomers for women. Horse-drawn wagons range the landscape, stoves burn wood, and people have to use outdoor facilities. A time of few vaccines and no antibiotics. People understood little of most diseases. Germ theory still had ground to cover. Women routinely died in childbirth. Life could vanish in a moment.

In rural Jamesville, a Southern Appalachian town, Madeline Fairbanks does what she can to make the lives of friends and neighbors more comfortable. She works as the healer in this community – and has for the past quarter of a century. Madeline eases the passage into and out of life, treating aches and pains in between.

Maddie comes from a long line of healers. Her grandmother taught her, and she’ll pass along what she knows to her granddaughter in turn. Hannah already has the inclination. The time has almost come to give her the ancestral box, which holds herbal remedy recipes and sketches and notes. That box contains all the learning from the women in their family who came before them.

Maddie has also trained an apprentice, Renetta Morgan, who is just about ready to begin working in the community, her own community, alone.

Maddie is white. Renetta is Black. They walk through town together, brazenly traversing from North Main (the white section of town) to South Main (the Black) and back again. Sometimes they go to tend the sick. Sometimes, to the fields and hillsides, gathering the healing flowers and roots and herbs. Other times, they work in Maddie’s cabin, creating tinctures, potions, and ointments. When Renetta learns enough, the two of them must no longer work together.

The long-promised railroad has recently bypassed the town, spelling a slow death for the community, cut off now from the lifeline of the new transportation. With their Main Street shops shutting down, the townsfolk face hard times. In the South, rigid segregation, Jim Crow laws, black codes, and the Klan divide the community. In Jamesville, the pointy hat boys haven’t been active in recent memory, but that’s about to change. Not everyone turns a blind eye to the flagrant close fraternizing of Maddie and Ren, two uppity women who don’t seem to know their place. Tempers are fraying.

Into this small town closing in on itself rides a lone horseman one day, who, after a brief look around, announces that he’s the new pastor. Reverend Carl Howard is the match to the powder keg.

As the town adjusts to this new pastor in their midst, and Reverend Howard takes his measure of the place, we will watch events unfold from the vantage point of three characters, all of whom have secrets to keep. Secrets that could be their undoing.

With the loss of the railroad, another potential casualty looms – one of education.

The town is divided on whether to invest in secondary education or not. Currently, only the primary school offers its young charges the most rudimentary learning. Nothing to build on. With more education, Maddie thinks, real change might be possible. Greater equality between peoples, despite their gender or skin color. Greater freedom for women. Or at least a good step in that direction.

The theme of education and what it can bring – more profound understanding, greater personal freedom and fulfillment, and economic opportunities – underlies the struggle of those for and against keeping women and Blacks “in their place.” One side looks forward to what could be; the other looks back to what has been. The balance of power always tilts in favor of those who have always held it. As the tension mounts, where words fail, violence threatens.

When a severe winter storm hits, everyone’s lives are suspended.

As they wait out the freeze, rationing their supplies and tearing up the porch for firewood, Maddie and Ren will come to know things about each other and themselves. And Hannah will grow up a little.

Set in the brooding rural South, and for a good portion of the novel in the challenging and crystalline world of a deep snowstorm, Winter’s Reckoning is rich in storyline and character with plenty of mystery woven throughout. Simply put, here’s a story that takes on issues whose harm remains with us today. With a climactic pulpit scene that’s not to be missed – and one novel we can highly recommend!

Winter’s Reckoning was a First Place Winner in the 2021 Goethe Awards.

July 20, 2022
DILLION And The CURSE Of ARMINIUS by John Middleton – Historical Fantasy, WWII, Young Adult Fiction

Hang your disbelief by the door, pull up a chair, and prepare to step back in time to a period of unrest that would forever change the world In Dillion and the Curse of Arminius by John Middleton.

British and European legends set the stage for ancient warriors with a clarion call to re-awaken to battle—and only the innocents can intervene.

In 1936, the children of the privileged le Close family pursue their interests and enjoy their lives at their patriarchal home, gifted to the original Baron le Close by King James centuries ago. Since Oakholm Abbey lay on the border of England and Wales, everyone looked to the Baron to protect the surrounding farmlands from Welsh raiders. They would slip down from the wilds of the Welsh hills and valleys just beyond the old monastic estate and do their damage on the population.

By virtue of their lineage, the youngest generation of the le Close family, Gilbert and Emelia, have certain special abilities. Gilbert is attuned to the animal kingdom—and it to him—and wanders fearlessly into deep forests on the Welsh borderlands where he discovers magical places. These places exude an aura of intense spirituality, bringing Druids and secret ceremonies to mind. On the other hand, Emelia is percipient, although she is only just learning how to understand the meaning of her experiences.

Unbeknownst to Gilbert and Emelia, trouble brews across the channel.

They will soon become integral in saving both the lives of their good friends, Axel and Rebecca, German refugees now living in Amsterdam, and in helping good conquer evil in their part of the world.

Meanwhile, at Schloss Wewelsburg, a centuries old castle in south-western Germany, Heinrich Himmler, the commander of Hitler’s SS, has turned to the occult to realize a dream. He believes in the supernatural and wants to contact and enlist the aid of the fabled Cherusci warriors who conquered the Romans centuries ago to assist in Germany’s attempt to rule Europe.

Himmler connects with a revenant whose ancestor was second in command to Arminius, the chieftain of the fierce Cherusci tribe that freed the Germanic people of Roman rule.

What happens next, when the bucolic world of life at Oakmont Abbey collides with the occult, is the stuff of legends.

Gilbert and Amelia will discover their connections to their ancestral history, and are called upon to fulfill their predestined roles as guardians of a sacred place. They will be sorely tested, and must call upon everything in their beings to survive, to secure the survival of their friends, and to save their way of life.

In Dillion and the Curse of Arminius, author John Middleton has created a work of fantasy fiction with a plot that will appeal to pre and early teen readers. Much of the writing is lyrical with vivid imagery, creating a mystical mood—set up with a complex storyline and sophisticated language.

Dillion and the Curse of Arminius won 1st Place in the 2019 CIBA Dante Rossetti Book Awards for Young Adult Fiction.

July 15, 2022
Part Two of The 2021 Chanticleer International Book Awards (#CIBAs) Overall Grand Prize and Division Grand Prize and First Place Category Winners
We are deeply honored and excited to continue to announce the 2021 Winners of the Chanticleer International Book Awards (The CIBAs) with our second of three official postings.

The winners were recognized at the CIBA ceremony held on June 25th, 2022 In-Person and broadcast live via ZOOM at the luxurious Hotel Bellwether, Bellingham, Wash.

The CIBA announcements were made LIVE with Chanticleerians flying in and watching from around the globe and North America.

We cheered on the CIBA winners with our drink of choice, whether in-person or Virtual!

Btw, Kiffer’s favorite Champagne!

We want to thank all of the CIBA judges who read each and every entry and then comment, rate, and rank within each of the 25 CIBA Divisions. Without your labors of love for books, the Chanticleer International Book Awards would not exist. THANK YOU!

We want to thank all of the authors and publishers who participated in the 2021 Chanticleer International Book Awards (the CIBAs). Each year, we find the quality of the entries and the competitiveness of the division competitions increasing exponentially. We added a new level to the judging rounds in 2021—the premier Level of FINALIST per each CIBA Division. The CIBA judges wanted to add the Finalist Level of Achievement as a way to recognize and validate the entries that had outstanding merit but were not selected for the very few First Place Award positions within each genre division.

This post will recognize the First Place and Grand Prize Winners for the Laramie, Chaucer, Goethe, Hemingway, Chatelaine, Mark Twain, and Somerset Awards.

For the Cygnus, Ozma, Paranormal, Global Thrillers, M&M, Clue, Little Peeps, Gertrude Warner, and Dante Rossetti Book Awards, please click here for Part 1.

For the Journey, Hearten, Nellie Bly, I&I, Mind & Spirit, Harvey Chute, Military & Frontline, Series, and Shorts Book Awards, place click here for Part 3

Coveted Chanticleer Blue Ribbons!

We are honored to present the

2021 Chanticleer International Book Awards

Grand Prize Winners

The 2021 CIBA Winners!

The LARAMIE Book Awards for

American, Western, Pioneer, Civil War, and First Nation Novels

The Grand Prize Winner is

TOM SAWYER RETURNS by E.E. Burke
- Chris Bennett – Road to the Breaking
- George T. Arnold – Wyandotte Bound
- Pamela Nowak – Never Let Go
- David Fitz-Gerald – The Curse of Conchobar: A Prequel to the Adirondack Spirit Series
- Glen Craney – The Cotillion Brigade: A Novel of the Civil War and the Most Famous Female Militia in American History
- T.K. Conklin – Outlaw’s Redemption
The CHAUCER Book Awards for

Pre-1750s Historical Fiction

Grand Prize Winner is

TOO SOON THE NIGHT by James Conroyd Martin
- John A. Martino and Michael P. O’Kane – Olympia: The Birth of the Games
- Janet Wertman – The Boy King
- Wendy J. Dunn – Falling Pomegranate Seeds: All Manner of Things
- Rebecca D’Harlingue – The Lines Between Us: A Novel
- Patricia Bracewell – The Steel Beneath the Silk
- James Hutson-Wiley – The Travels of ibn Thomas
The GOETHE Book Awards for

Post-1750’s Historical Fiction

Grand Prize Winner is

AFTER THE RISING by Orna Ross
- Ron Singerton – The Refused
- Drema Drudge – Victorine
- Lee Hutch – Molly’s Song
- Adele Holmes, M.D. – Winter’s Reckoning
- Mike Jordan – The Freedom Song
- Michelle Rene – Maud’s Circus
The HEMINGWAY Book Awards for

20th Century Wartime Fiction

Grand Prize Winner is

EO-N by Dave Mason
- Murray Pura & Patrick E. Craig – Far On The Ringing Plains
- Marian Exall – Daughters of War
- Marina Osipova – Too Many Wolves in the Local Woods
- Richard Alan Schwartz – The Soldier: A Novel of the Vietnam War Era
- Jerena Tobiasen – The Emerald, Book II of The Prophecy
The CHATELAINE Book Awards for

Romantic Fiction and Women’s Fiction

Grand Prize Winner is

THE LONG DESERT ROAD by Alex Sirotkin
- Deborah Swenson – Till My Last Breath, Book One in the Desert Hills Trilogy
- Valerie Taylor – What’s Not Said — A Novel
- Evie Alexander – Highland Games
- Tina Sloan – Chasing Cleopatra
- Kana Wu – No Secrets Allowed
- Emma Lombard – Discerning Grace
- John W. Feist – The Color of Rain
The MARK TWAIN Book Awards

for Humor and Satire

Grand Prize Winner is

CERTIFIED by Roger Wilson-Crane
- Charlie Suisman – Hot Air
- Elizabeth Crowens – Babs and Basil, and the Hounds of the Hollywood Baskervilles
- Lou Dischler – My Only Sunshine: Getting Straight with the Bomb
- Andy Becker – The Kissing Rabbi: Lust, Betrayal, and a Community Turned Inside Out
- Anne Pfeffer – Binge
The SOMERSET Book Awards

for Literary, Contemporary, and Mainstream Fiction

Grand Prize Winner is

LIES IN BONE by Natalie Symons
- Alex Sirotkin – The Long Desert Road
- Robert Gwaltney – The Cicada Tree
- Judy Keeslar Santamaria – Jetty Cat Palace Cafe
- Kent Politsch – Beebe and Bostelmann, a historical novel
- Douglas Green – A Dog of Many Names
- Barbara Linn Probst – The Sound Between the Notes
- M. J. Simms-Maddox – The Mysterious Affair at the Met
Congratulations to ALL!

We will email each winner with more information about their prize packages and more information.

Be sure to FOLLOW and LIKE us Facebook and on Twitter @ChantiReviews

Not seeing your Division? Try the links below!

For the Cygnus, Ozma, Paranormal, Global Thrillers, M&M, Clue, Little Peeps, Gertrude Warner, and Dante Rossetti Book Awards, please click here for Part 1.

For the Journey, Hearten, Nellie Bly, I&I, Mind & Spirit, Harvey Chute, Military & Frontline, Series, and Shorts Book Awards, place click here for Part 3

And the OVERALL GRAND PRIZE for the 2021 CIBAs!

Stay Tuned for Part 3 which will announce the Overall Grand Prize Winner!

We are now accepting entries into the 2022 and 2023 Chanticleer International Book Awards.

Click here for more information and submission deadlines: https://test.chantireviews.com/contests/

As always, if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions, please email us at Chanticleer@ChantiReviews.com — We will try our best to respond within 3 business days.

Thank you for joining us in celebrating the 2021 CIBA Winners! – The Chanticleer Team
July 12, 2022
MORAL FIBRE: A Bomber Pilot’s Story by Helena P. Schrader – Historical Fiction, WWII, Historical Aviation

In Moral Fibre: A Bomber Pilot’s Story, Helena P. Schrader takes readers to 1943 England, where deeply held values of honor and bravery mingle with the importance of one’s place in society. It was a time and place where failures of the former could shatter the latter and change a man’s life forever.

Within this psychological landscape, the reader is led to wonder, in the case of RAF pilot Christopher “Kit” Moran, will the war break him?

With thirty-six missions under his belt and as a decorated veteran, Kit suddenly refuses to fly another mission. Although a shock to everyone who knows him, Kit has his reasons. The new assignment comes less than one day on solid ground and two hours of sleep since returning from his most recent bombing sortie over Berlin. In itself a harrowing experience, the mission ended with his best friend, the plane’s skipper, being mortally injured and ultimately dying. The RAF hierarch deems Kit LMF (Lacking Moral Fibre) – a term introduced in 1940 to address those who refused to fly without having a verifiable medical reason. He is sent to a diagnostic center and examined by a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist understands. Kit is not insane nor lacking in moral fibre. He was simply “wiped out.”

So Kit is declared capable and fit for duty and given the opportunity to train as a pilot. This outcome was a far cry from what he, an experienced flight engineer, expected after the incident that sent his career off track.

The novel really takes off in 1944 when, after completing pilot training in South Africa, Kit returns to England for the final stages of training and ultimately a return to operations. Now he must put his experience and training into practice while sublimating his lingering self-doubt and anxiety about his own resilience. Should he fail, people will die, and his dreams will die with him.

What ensues takes the reader into the English psyche of that time, tapping the depths of human emotions, holding them up to the light, and revealing their concomitant beauty and ugliness in times of fear and crises.

Before the war is over for Kit, he finds his inner strength, finds love, and learns the true meaning of sacrifice.

Meticulously researched and skillfully written, Schrader’s Moral Fibre steps off the pages and comes to life. Her nuanced characters and authentic dialogue also provide a glimpse of Britain’s stratified class-conscious culture during the WWII era.

Schrader picks a critical period during WWII for the setting and, in so doing, educates today’s readers about the horrors of a war that was and what it takes to save a nation – and perhaps the free world.

In Moral Fibre: A Bomber Pilot’s Story, Helena P. Schrader again reaffirms George Santanya’s position, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

June 29, 2022
TROUBLE the WATER by Rebecca Dwight Bruff – Black & African American Historical Fiction, Biographical Fiction,

Robert Smalls’ life should have been one for the history books.

Smalls was born a slave in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1839. When the first shots of the Civil War were fired upon Fort Sumter, Smalls was an experienced helmsman aboard a small cargo ship plying the coastal waters of South Carolina and the neighboring states. Once the war broke out, he found himself working to support a cause that kept him, his wife, and their children locked in chattel slavery.

But in a daring escapade that fell somewhere between a raid and a rescue, Smalls planned, with the help of his fellow crew members (also slaves) aboard the CSS Planter, to abscond with the ship, its cargo of munitions taken from Fort Sumter, and bring their families. The plan was to sail the ship as though its white officers were still on board, pretending to be carrying out their orders—at least until the ship was out of the reach of Fort Sumter’s guns.

If they failed to fool the Confederate batteries as they passed by in the night, the crew planned to set fire to the munitions in the hold rather than return to slavery. If they didn’t manage to strike down the Rebel colors and raise a white flag of surrender before they reached the Union blockade of the harbor, they’d be killed.

But no price was too high to pay for the hope of freedom.

This is the story of Smalls’ life from his childhood enslaved to Henry McKee through his hiring out in Charleston to his well-planned, well-executed and incredibly lucky escape, told in this fictionalized autobiography as if seen through the eyes of Robert Smalls himself.

The reader is inside the protagonist’s own thoughts and feelings as he grows from a childhood of slavery under the watchful eyes of his mother to learn at a very young age that the world in which he lives is designed to keep him in a cage. The unfairness of his world is in the very air that everyone around him breathes. To the point where those who benefit from that unfairness don’t even recognize that they are perpetuating the problem—no matter how good or how righteous or God-fearing they believe they are.

The lessons are hammered home as Smalls grows up to be a man who can never chart the course of his own destiny or make his own decisions—until he takes that destiny in his own hands at the wheel of that ship.

Smalls’ well-planned escape is the pivotal point of this true story. That desperate night makes for gripping, edge-of-the-seat reading as the small ship and its anxious crew, along with their praying families, ride the edge between hope and terror for a chance at freedom—no matter the cost.

But the heart and soul of the story are in the hero’s journey from a childhood as he grasped the cruel institution of slavery through growing consciousness of his precarious place in a world set against him. It’s not just that the reader is able to walk with him, but in this first person perspective his thoughts are laid bare and the reader can feel him reach for his own truth – and his own answers. Rebecca Dwight Bruff wrote a timely and brilliant debut novel that captures the lion-hearted Congressman Robert Smalls who continued to push boundaries for the political rights of African Americans.

Trouble the Water is an inspiring story of courage and grace under fire in its many forms. It rings with a voice of heroism along with thoughtfulness and sincerity. Stories matter.

Trouble the Water won the Chanticleer Int’l Book Awards Overall Grand Prize for 2020.

May 13, 2022