Featuring . . . The Kingdom of Ohio by Matthew Flaming

This Friday and every Friday for the next couple of months, I will be featuring a book that was published under the Amy Einhorn Books imprint. I am starting with the 2009 books and will spotlight them in alphabetical order.

The Kingdom of Ohio by Matthew Flaming is a little bit of everything: historical fiction, alternate history, time travel, and love story. Here's the publisher's summary:

After discovering an old photograph, an elderly antiques dealer living in present-day Los Angeles is forced to revisit the history he has struggled to deny. The photograph depicts a man and a woman. The man is Peter Force, a young frontier adventurer who comes to New York City in 1901 and quickly lands a job digging the first subway tunnels beneath the metropolis. The woman is Cheri-Anne Toledo, a beautiful mathematical prodigy whose memories appear to come from another world. They meet seemingly by chance, and initially Peter dismisses her as crazy. But as they are drawn into a tangle of overlapping intrigues, Peter must reexamine Cheri-Anne's fantastic story. Could it be that she is telling the truth and that she has stumbled onto the most dangerous secret imaginable: the key to traveling through time?

Set against the mazelike streets of New York at the dawn of the mechanical age, Peter and Cheri-Anne find themselves wrestling with the nature of history, technology, and the unfolding of time itself.

I read and reviewed Kingdom of Ohio last month and can definitely recommend it. You can also find a review at S. Krishna's books.

What I didn't talk about in my review is that I grew up in a small town outside of Toledo, Ohio. Part of the novel is set close to my home turf. I loved the descriptions of Toledo, the Maumee River, the shores of Lake Erie, and the area around Cheri-Anne's family estate--all places that I am very familiar with. I know that made the book extra fun for me. But you don't have to be from Ohio to find something to connect to in this debut novel.

Matthew Flaming was a website, where you can find a short bio and a few other bits of information. But if you go to the book's website, you'll find some great photographs of the turn-of the-century New York and an excerpt from the novel.

This book was featured as part of the Amy Einhorn Books Reading Challenge (click to join the fun). For information about the imprint, please read Amy Einhorn's open letter posted here on January 25, 2010.

The Kingdom of Ohio at an Indie

The Kingdom of Ohio at Powell's
The Kingdom of Ohio at Amazon
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Published by Putnam/Amy Einhorn, 2009
ISBN-13: 9780399155604