Teaser Tuesdays – September 9, 2014

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

Anyone can participate.

If you’re new to Teaser Tuesdays, the details are at MizB’s Should Be Reading or on my Teaser Tuesdays Page.

 

A Free Man of Color
by Barbara Hambly

Gaslights were a new thing–when January had left in 1817 everything had been candlelit–and in the uneasy brilliance couples moved through the lower lobby and up the curving double flight of the main stair to the ballroom on the floor above. As a child January had been fascinated by this festival of masks, and years had not eroded its eerie charm; he felt as if he had stepped through into a dream of Shelley or Coleridge where everything was more vivid, more beautiful, soaked in a crystalline radiance, as if the walls of space and time, fact and fiction, had been softened, to admit those who never existed, or who were no more.

 

A Free Man of Color is the first book in Barbara Hambly‘s Benjamin January series. I’ve intended to try this series for a long time since I’ve enjoyed several books by Hambly, including her novelization of the original Beauty and the Beast television series. What always put me off is that I’m not fond of historical works in general. New Orleans has such a fascinating cultural history though that this finally decided me to give it a try. Hambly’s writing is so very rich and descriptive that it is easy to imagine myself there in the past.

 

Do you enjoy books set in the past or do you prefer to remain in the present? What are you reading now? Do you have a TT to share with us?

Please leave a comment with your link on MizB’s Teaser Tuesday post or below. If you don’t have a blog, you can share your Teaser here in the comment section instead.