WELCOME TO RACHEL’S FICTION WRITING AND REVIEWS BLOG
This is where Rachel keeps you up to date with her novels and stories and also shares reviews, highlights and extracts from other authors.
Medieval Succession: When Henry II’s Empire Imploded
When Succession first aired, audiences were transfixed by its portrait of a modern dynasty at war with itself: scheming heirs, a manipulative patriarch, and a fortune vast enough to make loyalty negotiable. But centuries before Logan Roy was terrifying his children in glass-walled boardrooms, another ruthless family feud was playing out across medieval Europe.
In 1173, the most powerful man in Christendom—King Henry II of England—faced a rebellion led not by rivals or barons, but by his own wife and sons. Chroniclers called it the Great Rebellion; historians often dub it the Revolt of the Eaglets, after the young “eagles” who turned on the parent bird.
And just like in Succession, the real question was: who inherits the empire?
Finalist in Book of the Year! 🥳
I was overwhelmed last night to receive this surprise email:
“I am pleased to announce that your book, Lady of Lincoln, is a Finalist in The Coffee Pot Book Club Book Of The Year Awards 2025.”
Lady of Lincoln is a finalist for Book of the Year Award with the Coffee Pot Book Club
I’m overjoyed and delighted. 🎊🎊🎊🎊🥂🥂🥂🥳🥳🥳
In particular, I’m so pleased that Nicola (Nicholaa) de la Haye’s story is gaining recognition! 🏰
Seeds of the Pomegranate by Suzanne Uttaro Samuels
I’m very pleased to be hosting Seeds of the Pomegranate on the blog tour today, a novel not just in the historical Fiction genre, but also women’s fiction, immigrant (Sicilian, no less…) fiction, heritage fiction, and gangland crime fiction!!
I’ve got an excerpt from the author (see below), but first, the blurb:
A gritty story of a woman learning to survive in 20th century Gangland New York
In early 20th-century Sicily, noblewoman Mimi Inglese, a talented painter, dreams of escaping the rigid expectations of her class by gaining admission to the Palermo Art Academy. But when she contracts tuberculosis, her ambitions are shattered. With the Sicilian nobility in decline, she and her family leave for New York City in search of a fresh start.
Instead of opportunity, Mimi is pulled into the dark underbelly of city life and her father’s money laundering scheme. When he is sent to prison, desperation forces her to put her artistic talent to a new use—counterfeiting $5 bills to keep her family from starvation and, perhaps, to one day reclaim her dream of painting. But as Gangland violence escalates and tragedy strikes, Mimi must summon the courage to flee before she is trapped forever in a life she never wanted.
From Sicily’s sun-bleached shores to the crowded streets of immigrant New York, Seeds of the Pomegranate is a story of courage, art, and the women who refused to disappear.
Zenobia of Palmyra: the Queen Who Defied Rome
In the third century CE, as Rome teetered on the brink of fragmentation, a woman from the desert city of Palmyra rose to challenge the empire itself.
Her name was Zenobia — scholar, strategist, queen, and for a brief, extraordinary moment, empress of the East.