Cristina Henriquez and the secret to writing a (good) historical novel

Whenever I see a historical novel that’s clearly a historical novel — the curlicue cover fonts, windswept beaches, hooped dresses, moody Renaissance hues, tall-masted schooners, maybe a helicopter to suggest Vietnam — I cringe. I feel bad for the writer. Because the idiot part of myself whispers that historical fiction was a terrible mistake. It’s one of those residual, myopic cultural prejudices, the kind that equates the value of a piece of music with its complexity and tells us not to take comic books seriously. I forget momentarily that genre has nothing to do with quality, and that, in the past decade alone, more than a few National Book Award winners (“Blackouts,” “The Good Lord Bird”) and a large