This review was first published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.

In this epic historical fantasy, the second in the Shadow Histories series (following A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians), H.G. Parry paints intimate portraits of not-quite-historical figures.
After Robespierre broke the Concord by raising an army of the dead, Europe became engulfed in a war of magic for the first time in centuries. Now the blood magician who brought Robespierre to power has allied himself with Napoléon Bonaparte. In England, William Wilberforce's fight for abolition and the free exercise of magic conflicts with the war effort, straining his friendship with William Pitt the Younger, who has his own magical secrets known by only a few. But the blood magician is not interested just in Europe; in Saint-Domingue, Fina works her magic to support Toussaint Louverture while spying on the stranger.
Parry (The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep) blends genres in A Radical Act of Free Magic and its predecessor, and succeeds in all of them. The introduction of a new character, commoner weather mage Kate Dove, opens possibilities for naval battle sequences that will excite any historical military fiction fan. The political issues surrounding magic and who has the right to practice it intertwine with the abolition movement and Enlightenment politics in a way that will strike readers as perfectly natural, in spite of the supernatural material. Most of all, Parry depicts both the original and the fictionalized characters with true heart. Readers should be prepared to shed tears for historical figures. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: This sweeping story of a magical version of the Napoleonic era goes straight to the heart.

This review was originally published in and is reposted with permission from Shelf Awareness.
​In Half Lives, science and popular culture combine in an engaging survey of the radium craze. Lucy Jane Santos makes her debut with an account of the uses and abuses of radioactivity, primarily in Britain, from its rising popularity as an alleged cure-all until it became an object of fear in the wake of the first nuclear bombs. Some of this history will be familiar to readers of The Radium Girls by Kate Moore; however Santos takes a broader, lighter approach. The realization that radium could have medicinal uses and the assumption that it was an unqualified positive brought more than just the frequently told story of the radium watch painters pointing their brushes with their lips. Spa towns such as Bath in Somerset, England, discovered and advertised the radium content in their waters. There was also a surge of sham patent cures implying they contained radium when they did not, alongside dance performances that incorporated radium-based products into the costumes or merely traded on the name.
Santos studies the effect of radioactivity on the popular imagination while striving not to impose hindsight on those who were inspired by its possibilities and ignorant of its dangers, reminding readers that if we and our contemporaries are more likely to be radiophobes, we still have to come to terms with the fact that radioactivity is everywhere. Fans of Mary Roach will find much to enjoy in this intriguing niche history. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library
Discover: A fascinating work of popular science and history looks back on a time when radium represented everything bright and promising about the future.