Ok – lets start with the elephant in the room, I don’t think these have an official title as a group – but they’re three interconnected novels and they’re by Lissa Evans, and so I christen it thusly. And I’m recommending them today because when I was thinking about stuff you might like if you like Emmy Lake and the World War Two novels from the other week, these came to mind.
The three novels are Crooked Heart, Old Baggage and V for Victory and they cover an interconnected group of characters. Noel and ace appear in the first and third which are set in the Second World War and Mattie, Noel’s former guardian is the centre of Old Baggage, which is set in 1928. The themes running through all three are about finding your place in the world, what family means and breaking the rules in various shapes and forms. I think they would work in chronological order as well as publication order if you wanted to meet Mattie first, but I think in terms of character development you probably want to meet Noel first and then read about Mattie to discover why he is the way he is.
And I should say as well that they’ve also all been Books of the week – so you can also read more thoughts at length on Crooked Heart, Old Baggage and V for Victory in those posts. But basically, if you want some beautifully written historical fiction which will make you laugh and cry, this will do it for you. They’re great and I’m so glad that I found that proof copy of Crooked Heart on the shelf at work back in the day (I miss the shelf still, although it’s probably better for the state of the pile that it’s gone) and started me on the journey even if my set doesn’t match and you know how much that annoys me!
You should be able to get hold of these fairly easily even though they’re a few years old – they were published by Penguin and I’ve seen them all over the place, including in Foyles relatively recently. And of course then you can go and read Their Finest Hour and a Half, Lissa Evans’ other World War Two-set novel which was turned into the film Their Finest. And that’s your weekend sorted isn’t it?!
A bunch of Beatriz’ Williams’s books have featured on the blog over the years. I’m enough of a fan of hers that I was on her mailing list, back in the time when authors had actual, physical lists and still sent stuff to readers abroad – so I have a postcard from her for the release of A Certain Age. Her Last Flight and A Hundred Summers were Books of the Week and a couple of others have featured in various recommendsdays and roundups. And of course she also writes books with Lauren Willig and Karen White. Her earlier books tended to be interlinked, but more recently they’re more standalone. And The Beach at Summerleys looks like it’s a standalone-y one. The blurb is promising Cold War intrigue, New England rich people and secrets and a split timeline between 1946 and 1954. I’m also really interest that the cover art is quite different to her other novels – in colours and design so I’m wondering if that’s indicating a change too. I’m looking forward to reading it – when I can justify getting my hands on it!
It’s the end of June, so it’s probably about the right time for a Summer Romance recommendsday. After all I’ve been reading them for months at this point – and as I’ve said already – I’ve read most of the ones you’ll see on the romance tables in the bookshops. And yes, these are all longer reviews than I usually do in Recommendsday posts – but that’s because all of these could have been Books of the Weeks in their own rights.
Same Time Next Summer by Annabel Monaghan
Our heroine is Sam, visiting her family’s Long Island Beach house with her fiancé to tour wedding venues. But back at the house next door is her first love, Wyatt, who she spent every summer with as a child and teenager until suddenly it was over. But Sam’s got her life on track now – and there’s no reason to be this affected by the guy who broke her heart when she was 17… As you all know I loved, loved, loved Nora Goes Off Script when I read it at the start of the year and immediately pre-ordered this and then read it within three days of release. And it’s good. For me, it’s not quite as good as Nora, but then Nora was just so in my wheelhouse. This is different – it’s a second chance romance with big flashbacks of the before so although the relationship between Wyatt and Sam is complicated in the present day bit, you get to see the past bit to understand what went wrong. I’m not 100 percent that you can still be in love with your first – teen – love so many years on and that you’re still going to fit together, but Monaghan was clever enough with this that you just get swept along reading it and don’t notice all of this until you sit down to write a review afterwards and think about it! Perfect for the beach.
Once More With Feeling by Elissa Sussman
On to another second book from an author whose (adult) debut I read and loved earlier this year and another that is a second chance romance (if you’re only going to read one of them from this post, then make it this one) because it’s so good – I read it in one evening. As a teenager, Katee Rose was a one of America’s biggest pop stars. She was touring the country, scoring number ones, surrounded by screaming fans and papped by photographers everywhere she went – with or without her boyfriend Ryan LaNeve – the hearthrob from an equally adored boyband. But it all blew up after she found herself in the arms of Cal, one of Ryan’s bandmates. But that was then. Now Kathleen Rosenberg is ok with her life and with her popstar life being in the past. Then Cal shows up to offer her a starring role in the Broadway show he’s about to produce. Each blames the other for what happened before, but they find themselves working together and it seems that not everything is really in the past. If the hint of cheating in that plot description is worrying you, don’t worry. And if you lived through the Britney and Justin situation in the early 2000s, you’ll also get a lot out of this. Or at least I did. And I love a Broadway/theatre-set romance so it ticked so many of my boxes and pulled it off so well. perfect for a sun lounger by the pool.
Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood*
Elise is an adjunct professor with a secret second life as a fake girlfriend to make ends meet. Everything is going swimmingly – at least with regards to keeping her two lives separate – until the brother of one of her regular clients turns out to be one of the physicists on the panel for her dream job and also the man who ruined her mentor’s reputation. I read this really fast across about 36 hours. Yes, it’s another tiny heroine and Great Big Man (which I am getting a little fed up of in general as I said the other day) but I found the relationship between extreme people pleaser/adapts herself to fit who she thinks people want her to be Elsie and Jack to be interesting to watch, even though I wasn’t ever 100 percent sure why Jack had originally been attracted to her. I wanted a little more resolution to Elsie’s issues with her family, and I could see one of the plot twists coming a mile off – so this is probably more of a 3.5 star read – but I’m nice so I round up. If you’ve liked Hazelwood’s other stuff, you’ll probably like this although it is a little repetitive in terms of academic feuds, misunderstandings and the aforementioned tinyHUGE. Nice cameo from Adam and Olive though.
And as I mentioned at the top of the post, I’ve been reading summer romances for months, and a bunch more of them have already been BotW picks or otherwise recommended – so I’m going to leave some more links here too: Mrs Nash’s Ashes from last week, The True Love Experiment from the week before, Happy Place and Romantic Comedy from April – and those are just the new ones that I’ve been prepared to recommend!
It’s been a few weeks, so it’s about time we had another British Library Crime Classic to break up the summer romances, right? But don’t worry, if you want some more sun lounger recommendations, I have the very thing for you tomorrow never dear!
A reclusive scientist is found dead in his study during a storm, hours after a dinner to mark his daughter’s engagement. The dinner guests are stranded in the house because of the weather – and the telephone line has been cut. There are clues and motives a plenty, which of the closed group of suspects carried out the crime?
Twice Around the Clock is Billie Houston’s only novel – and it’s really quite impressive. She was an actress and singer who was part of a variety act with her sister in the 1920s until she retired because of ill health in the mid 1930s – as far as I can work out at a similar time to when she wrote this. The title comes from the amount of time that the novel covers – you start with the murder then the clock rewinds twelve hours to show you the lead up to the murder and then carries on until twelve hours after the death. It’s fast paced and has a bit of humour to it. It also has a murder victim who you are delighted to see dead after you see him alive and tormenting people and animals*. Basically it’s a good enough read that you wish Houston had written more!
*there is a scene featuring animal cruelty in this but it’s brief and also clear that everyone else in the book finds it abhorrent – it’s just the victim who thinks it’s ok
The heatwave continues. I feel like shouting “I’m meeeellllting” all the time it’s so muggy. But hey, that’s British summer these days. And it also usually only lasts about a week – and we’ve had that now so presumably the rain is back next week! Anyway, book wise it’s been an interesting week with some classic crime and a career novel for wannabe nurses along with some of the Wimsey continuations. So all in all, not bad.
I actually had a couple of things I was noodling about writing about today. But in the end, I’ve gone for the new Wes Anderson movie because it came out in theatres here this week.
So lets do the plot – and it should be said that this may be the most Wes Anderson-y of all of his plots – it starts with a TV host introducing you to a tv production of a play in which a war photographer’s car breaks down in the town where he and his family were heading for the junior Stargazer’s convention. The action from the play is interspersed with the history of the play’s original production complete with recreations of what was going on backstage. Or at least that’s what I think is going on. Have a watch of the trailer.
If you’re ticking off Andersonian tricks and tropes it’s got the changes in aspect ratios, the vivid color pallettes, completely stylised universes etc. Not that you see all of that in the trailer – which is entirely of the production of the play. So that was a bit of a shock for me when the film started! If you like Wes Anderson, this is absolutely Peak Wes Anderson and the critical response appears to be: if you like Wes Anderson already, then you’ll like this but it probably won’t convert anyone new. And I would agree with that – I enjoyed it and it was fun, but it wasn’t my favourite. Him Indoors said on the walk home that he preferred The French Dispatch – and Grand Budapest Hotel over both of them. I could have used a bit more plot but I love the whole look of it and I also loved spotting all the regulars and all the quirky weirdness of it. Like the roadrunner.
Basically if you want a Wes Anderson coming of age movie set at an Astronomy convention in the desert, this is that.
Long time readers will recognise this bookshelf – it use to be the to-read shelf back at the old house.* Or at least one of the to-read shelves… Anyway, in this house (I can’t call it the new house any more because we’ve been here since before the pandemic and that’s like another lifetime) it lives in the spare bedroom and it’s a mix of stuff I don’t need very often – like the travel books – stuff I can’t bring myself to part with – like the French language stuff from uni – single issue comics, coffee table books and a small selection of books that don’t belong anywhere else or that might be of interest to anyone sleeping in that room. That’s why you can see stuff like The Night Circus, Confessions of a Southern Lady, Finn and Lady and Where’d You Go, Bernadette? on there. It’s not the neatest or most coherent – and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to post it at all – but hey, I have my reputation to maintain of having bookshelves everywhere so I’ve just gone for it and leaned into the chaos of it all. I’m sure everyone has an equivalent thing – whether it’s a drawer or a cupboard stuff with oddments related to their hobbies!
Have a great Saturday!
*yes I tried to find a picture of it back then, but for some reason WordPress wasn’t showing me any… whether that’s a glitch or whether it’s because the site design has changed since then, who knows and I’m probably not going to investigate!
Mary Balogh has a new book out this week – Remember Me is the second book in her Ravenswood series, so today I’m taking the opportunity to talk about one of her other series – the Survivors Club books.
The six novels and one novella in the series follow six men and one woman who are injured in the Napoleonic Wars and end up convalescing at the same place – the home of the Duke of Stanbrook. In the way of such series, each book follows one of the group as they find love, with glimpses of previous couples as you go through as well and building to the final romance as you get to know the whole group.
I’ve read five of the novels and the novella as well and like reading Mary Balogh when I want something a bit less dramatic than some of the other equivalent historical romances. The heroes and heroines are a little older – old enough to have been soldiers for the men, and som of the women are widows, others have remained unmarried for Reasons. They all have real problems to overcome, but the angst is low and there don’t tend to be many stupid misunderstandings that could be solved with a conversation along the way. Basically you’re getting non-cookie cutter heroes and heroines and characters who grow and fall in love and mature without much melodrama. Although at the end of the series there is a touch of that. But by that point if you’ve read most of the others, then you’ll let it off because you’re getting the romance you’ve been waiting for for a couple of books!
These should be fairly easy to get hold of, I’ve seen all of them in the shops in paperback – although they came out a few years ago (the series was completed in 2016) so it may be slightly trickier now. But they’re also all on Kindle and Kobo.
Today I wanted to mention Gail Tsukiyama’s new novel The Brighest Star which came out this week. It tells the story of Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first Asian American movie star from her childhood skipping school to go to the movies and dodging bullies to success on screen, even if behind the scenes things are still difficult. I love a Novelised Real person novel, and I love books about Hollywood, so I don’t think it will be a surprise that I really want to read this one. The only question is how long it will take me to get hold of it because it’s a hardback release and we all know I’m not meant to be buying any more of them because they take me so long to read and the Kindle edition is priced accordingly. Maybe it’s one for the Christmas list. And yes I know, it’s June but I really do plan ahead with these things!
Well after writing my post about great dads in literature and with last week’s BotW featuring a a divorced dad, I thought I’d make this week’s Recommendsday some more romances featuring heroes with kids. I did originally call this single dad romances – but single parent usually implies that they’re not getting any help from the other parent at all, and that’s not always the case on this list.
One of the reasons I widened the scope of this post was that I started thinking “which is the Tessa Dare book with the doll funerals, because that’s a great one” and then when I reminded myself of the plot of The Governess Game I remembered that Chase is their guardian not their dad. Anyway the heroine is the governess trying to tame the wild orphans and it’s got great dialogue, forced proximity, the aforementioned doll funerals and a great romantic ending.
If you want your dad with kids to come as part of a big, melodramatic historical romance that’s pretty Old School (but not rapey like the Old School romances tended to be) then try Kerrigan Byrne’s The Highlander, where you have Great Big Giant Super Strong Scottish Laird paired with an English governess with a secret. It’s not 100 percent my novel – because it’s so dramatic and quite violent, but I know that there are a lot of people who really, really love this series. Also in books that I didn’t love but that other people have is the book zero in Eloisa James’s Wilds of Lindow Castle series – My Last Duchess. It has a Cinderella-y runaway plot with a hero with eight kids and a heroine with one and a potential wicked stepmother. This was actually published after the first few books in the series, so if you’d read those you already knew the couple and maybe gave it a bit of a pass on some of the bits that I didn’t like -I can see lots and lots of 4 plus star reviews.
Lets finish with historical romances with another one of my favourites: To Sir Philip, With Love – from the Bridgerton series. This is Eloise’s story and I really, really love it. Eloise has been writing letters to the widower of her cousin for years and then when things in London get too much for herself she finds herself on her way to marry him. Except that neither of them are what the other expects. I’ve said before that I don’t know how they’re going to work this for the Netflix series, so we’ll see how they pull that off given the way they’ve been adjusting the timelines.
To contemporary romances now, and I’m starting with a novella – Melissa Blue’s Grumpy Jake. Yes, it was a book of the week, but that was two and a half years ago, so it’s allowed. Bailey is a teacher, Jake the Rake is the single dad who has dated most of the single members of staff and whose kid has just hit her class. It’s lots of fun. Then there’s Happy Singles Day by Anne Marie Walker. It’s a sweet, fluffy holiday romance with a widowed hero with a B&B he’s not running and the professional organiser who visits for an out of season holiday.
Also a previous BotW, there is Jill Shalvis’s Forever and a Day from her Lucky Harbor series. It’s a small town contemporary with an overworked single dad and a former career girl reassessing her future, then this might well scratch that itch. The Lucky Harbor books come in groups of three – and this is the last of its trio, so if you’ve read any of the other two you’ve had glimpses of this in those before you get to this happy ending. In Rachel Lynn Soloman’s Weather Girl, Russell has a 12 year old daughter, and one of the reasons why he’s hesitant about relationships is because he doesn’t want to disrupt her life any more. This isn’t however the centre of the plot – which is a fake relationship type thing to try and get another couple back together to help the hero and heroine’s careers.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 