I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

Fast, easy, entertaining read. Frequent and interesting use of light (and how light falls on objects) in much of the description ... obviously, the author is also a photographer. Lots of dialogue. Much of the plot is told through dialogue. Novel also reads very much like a YA novel. All in all an entertaining, quick story. ( )

Maude Brown’s Baby by Richard Cunningham is a well-researched and extremely well written story of a baby orphaned in the Great Storm in Galveston in September 1900. Whenever I read a book that I really love, I e-mail the author if possible. This time however, I didn’t wait for the end of book. This the first book in a series about the fictional life and career of Donald Brown. I want to read all of them. I am now a Richard Cunningham fan.

An orphaned baby is passed to a nurse during the terrible storm in Galveston in 1900 along with a photo. Someone had written in pencil at the bottom of the picture “Maude Brown’s Baby”. That clue is what lent Donald Brown to hope that he would someday find out about his birth parents.

Eighteen years later, Donald Brown, still has the picture of him in a chair and yearns for more information about his birth parents. His hunt for information is coupled with a sweet love story and loads of engrossing details about the Great Storm of Galveston, of Galveston eighteen years after the storm including the tactics to get young men to sign up the fight the Great War. This includes the terrible effect of nerve gas on the troops. I was very interested in that because of a relative who was exposed to nerve gas and was never the same again. Also, for anyone who loves the history of photography, this book will be a pure joy.

This book will not let go of you, after you have read the first page, you will definitely not want to lay it down. The characters are so real that I felt transported back to 1918 in Galveston and Houston and I did not want to come back! I really connected with the characters in this book.

I strongly recommend this book to all historical fiction fans and anyone with an interest in the historical Great Storm of Galveston.

I received an ARC of Maude Brown’s Baby from the author but that had no influence on my feelings or thoughts in this review. They are my own. ( )