Beautiful Star & Other Stories by Andrew Swanston Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

History is brought alive by the people it affects, rather than those who created it.

This is a moving and affecting journey through time, bringing a new perspective to the defence of Corfe Castle, the battle of Waterloo, the siege of Toulon and, in the title story, the devastating dangers of the life of the sea in 1875.

January has become the month of short stories for me, and Beautiful Star is one of them. This is another January 2018 want to read novel, and one of the ones I knew very little about prior to reading. 

I admit, I was a tad disappointed when I started reading because I still had The Maze at Windermere stuck in my head. This is more, shall we say simplistically written than the above work. That is not say that this is a poorly written novel, but that the writing style is not what I expected and it took some time to get used to. 

One of the best things about Beautiful Star is that each short story is based on a true, under-known historical event and it's apparent through his writing that Swanston wants to do them justice. Even The Flying Monk is treated with a certain respect as opposed to someone who might in today's society be considered a laughingstock.

My favorite short stories in this collection were Beautiful Star- the titular story-, The Tree, and The Castle. The other stories, like HMS Association and The Button Seller and the Drummer Boy, were good technically but couldn't hold my interest, and A Witch and a Bitch could have been better than it actually was, though it did hold my attention. I also found The Flying Monk to be interesting but not as memorable as my favorites.

Something I noticed about two of my favorite short stories, The Tree and The Castle, is that both of them take place during a time I personally have little interest in and, judging by the lack of historical fiction novels or even historical nonfiction works about it, it would appear that I'm not alone in that opinion. That time period is the English Civil War, which took up most of the 1600s. But I really liked the little boy character in The Tree, and the dame in The Castle is one of history's forgotten bad asses. 

So Beautiful Star & Other Stories is solid collection of historical fiction short stories, one I would definitely recommend to any history lover. My only reservation about recommending it out is that I don't think it would appeal as much to an average reader just looking for a quick read.

8 out of 10