Verity Reads Books (lots of them)
In which our heroine attempts to tame the to-read pile
After a nearly two year wait (in which Cartmel released a book in the same universe but with a different cast) we finally have a new Vinyl Detective book. And as I said in my anticipated sequels post, this one is about the dance music scene which should be fun – because Him Indoors did a lot of clubbing in this era so I’m looking forward to seeing what I recognise from the stories that I’ve heard!
Happy Wednesday everyone, I’m back with a few more book recommendations for you, and because it is starting to feel spring like, which means spring cleaning and clear outs, this week’s theme is books with people making fresh starts.
Obviously romance novels are full of these, with tonnes of heroines moving to small towns to start over, so that’s where I’m starting! there are a lot of small town romance series that have elements of this, but it’s not a given because lots of them feature people finding love with people they’ve known all their lives. So if small town fresh starts are what you’re after, try Jill Shalvis’s Simply Irresistible, the first in her Lucky Harbor series, which actually has a fair few escapes to a new place type plots. This one has a heroine who has left LA for a fresh start and to claim an inheritance. The hero is the contractor she hires to help fix up the inheritance. And Shalvis’s Animal Magnetism series also features some new starts, although I’ve only read the first one and found the hero a little too alpha-y for my taste. If you want something really gentle, Debbie Macomber’s Dakota series from the early 2000s is very low stakes from what I remember, and super easy to read.
If you want a historical romance with a fresh start, Beverly Jenkins’s Tempest features a heroine who moves across the country to marry a man she’s never met, on the strength of their correspondence with each other – I’m not sure starts get much fresher than that! Anyway, Regan is a fantastic heroine and I really enjoyed both the romance and the bits where she was establishing herself in the new town. Jenkins did this so well – earlier in the same series is Tempest, is Forbidden, whose hero is a little too alpha for me and heroine a little too sweet, but I know that is personal preference. And Jenkins of course wrote the Blessings series, where the heroine buys a whole town and brings it back to life.
There are also loads of cosy crime series that start with the sleuth moving to somewhere new – Jenn McKinley’s Library Lovers is one of these for a start, as is M C Beaton’s Agatha Raisin, although a warning on the latter, I can’t read too many (or even more than one now) in a row because the formula is very strong in these and you notice it a lot.
There are a couple of former books of the week that fit here to – like Well Met by Jen DeLuca, the first in her Renaissance Faire series, The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by Paterson Joseph – which is completely different to anything what I have mentioned in this part so far. And then there are a bunch of books that feature fresh starts that I still have on the to read pile, waiting for me to get around to – like Linda Holmes’s Flying Solo, Jasmine Guillory’s Party of Two,
Happy Humpday!
This is another one of those weeks where I’m writing about a book that is a curiosity and is in no way good. But it was the thing I read last week that I most wanted to talk about so I’m going with it.
Miss Pickle is an evangelical school story, set in Australia. Our heroine is the plucky Lola, vicar’s daughter, misunderstood by her stepmother, star of her local school and now off to a boarding school as a scholarship girl. On arrival she meets her new roommate Trixie – the school’s problem child, who gets a new roommate every year in the hopes that they will reform her but instead the reverse happens. Oh you know where this is going.
Except this is maybe even more bonkers than you might expect it to be. I did a lot of laughing and Him Indoors got quite annoyed at me for disturbing him. The only surprise is that there isn’t more proselytising in the dialogue. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still quite a lot, but it could have been much worse – the girls do speak like real people on occasion. I didn’t have Trixie being reformed so well that she is made a prefect within a term of her reforming in my bingo card, neither did I have Lola being told that she wasn’t made prefect because it will do Trixie more good than it will her. But I think my favourite piece of madness is a cheating scandal. The culprit is finally made to confess right before she leaves and goes away determined to do better, but no one really believes her and we all forget about her for fifty pages until right before the end we find out she’s died after saving a woman from a shark attack, and then lesson we are meant to learn is that she had truly reformed and become a better person. There is more plot – it gets a lot into 180 pages, but I think that’s the highlight.
I can’t tell you how to get a copy – the one I have came from my Aussie Book Con friends (hi Pat and Sheila if you’re reading this) who brought it over last summer and I have no clue if they’ve had it for years or acquired it specially. But as I’m not really recommending it as a good book – in fact it’s objectively terrible – that doesn’t matter. But I did have a hoot reading it and am now passing it on to a friend who I know will also laugh at it.
Happy Reading!
I actually have no idea what I’m going to write about tomorrow. Well maybe a little idea. Anyway, another super busy week, but still a few things read. I’ve got some days off this week which I’m really looking forward to – and plotting some reading time as part of that. I’ve got to get that long-runners list down. It’s starting to get embarrassing.
Read:
Chillin’ Out by Patti Benning
The Antiques Hunter’s Guide to Murder by C L Miller*
Scales of Justice by Ngaio Marsh
Warned in Wisconsin by Patti Benning
Off With His Head by Ngaio Marsh
Mayhem in Montana by Patti Benning
Miss Pickle by Constance Mackness
Started:
n/a
Still reading:
The Lantern’s Dance by Laurie R King
Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date by Ashley Herring Blake
The Last Action Heroes by Nick de Semelyen
Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd
One book bought. After quite a lot more than one the week before!
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
This Sunday’s post is about Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, which I watched on the flight out to Manila the other week.
The Priscilla of the title is Priscilla Presley, wife of Elvis and the film is based on her own memoir and she’s an executive producer of the movie as well. So you might expect that the movie is pro-Elvis. Except that it’s more complicated than that. Priscilla met Elvis when her father was stationed in Germany when she was 14 and he was 24. Two years later, she is invited to visit him in LA for a holiday, but he actually takes her to Vegas. A year later, he asks her to live with his dad and she goes – attending a private Catholic girls school to finish her education. And while they do get married eventually it doesn’t really get any better for her.
I would describe this as a portrait of isolation and loneliness – it’s a quite a good watch, but it’s really depressing – because Priscilla was a teenage girl with a crush, who ended up married to her first love and caught up in a world that she doesn’t really belong in on her own terms. It stops before Elvis’s death and I’m interested to know what she did after that. And I can see why Elvis and Priscilla’s daughter, Lisa Marie, was not keen on the film – as Elvis does not come out of it that well really. I’d go as far as saying that he was a bit of a creep. Oh and there is no Elvis music in it either!
This one is so new that you’ll still need to pay for it to watch it on the streaming services – or you can watch out for it on your next long haul flight!
Happy Sunday everyone!
So you might have been wondering where I actually went on my trip – well here is your answer: the Philippines! Manila to be exact. And of course I found a book shop and now I’m going to fill you in on it all!
Firstly, there were watch more English language books then I B was expecting, although I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting this considering half the population speak English. Anyway – BookTok is a thing here too – I’m not surprised by that but I was surprised it’s all the same books as UK BookTok. Anyway, what we have is a stack of Colleen Hoover, Lucy Score and Tessa Bailey, plus Rebecca Yarros, Heartstopper and lots of romantasy.
More of the same on the new books table, with Once More With Feeling, even more Tessa Bailey, a boxed set of Shades of London and done horror and romantasy. The book I was interested in was Love on the Second Read by Mica de Leon. But the trouble was that it was only about 200 pages long and it was wrapped in cellophane so I couldn’t have a preview read. My usual trick in these circumstances is to have a read of the kindle sample, but I can’t even tell you how much data costs on a UK phone in the Philippines! So it’s on the list now I’m home – it’s available on kindle here, so I’m sure I’ll get to it eventually.
Lots of Julia Quinn and Elle Kennedy here – at some point I will read her – and Christina Lauren, Red, White and Royal Blue and Ali Hazelwood. The unknown to me was Krista and Becca Ritchie – who seem to have a couple of books in kindle unlimited so I may try them out.
And then this one has got even more Tessa Bailey, Colleen Hoover, Elle Kennedy and the Ice Planet Barbariabs and some more books with dark covers that suggest that I wouldn’t like them!
I did but a couple of books – but from the bargain table and by people that I knew – bravado all the other stuff was cellophane wrapped and really expensive and I was worried about paying over the odds for something I didn’t like. But I did spend about an hour in the shop!
Happy reading!
It’s just over a year since the first book in this series was Book of the Week, and now I’ve read nearly all the books in the series that I can get at a sensible price, so it seemed like a good time to write a series post about them!
At the start of the series, Goldy is a recently divorced single mum running a one woman catering business in a town in Colorado. Her biggest problem is her ex-husband, John Robert Korman aka the Jerk (so named for his initials), gynaecologist and wife beater. In the first book Goldy’s former father in law drops dead at a wake that she is catering and she becomes a suspect. And this is just the first murder Goldy stumbles across in the course of her catering business. They’re not always under suspicion of being poisoned by her food, but in a fair number of cases they could have been – at least initially!
In my BotW post for that first book, Catering to Nobody, I noted my annoyance that the series title gives away a future plot development in the series – aka that Goldy has a different surname and that she gets married again (and to someone you meet in that first book), and I appreciate that I am doing the same here, but that’s how you’re going to find them easiest. And finding these is some of the challenge, because this is a series that started in 1990…
I bought everything I could on Kindle – but as you can see from this picture, of the seventeen books only six of them are on Kindle (in the UK at least) and then the rest I have acquired second hand. And that’s where I have come undone – because some of them are super expensive or impossible to get. I’ve read 13 of the 17, and have one more in the post on the way. But as I’ve read the last book in the series – or at least I assume it’s the last because it came out more than a decade ago – so I’m going for the series post now.
And what I really like about these is the group of regular characters that pop up – as well as Goldy and her son Arch, there is also Tom who she marries, Julian who is almost an adopted son and then Marla, the Jerk’s other ex wife. Between Goldy and the side characters there are plenty of ways to be involved in murders and to get information about them. Also it has recipes. And some of them are recipes that you might want to cook, and actually be able to cook even with the American measurements! I was trying to think of a series to compare them to, but I struggled a little bit – they’re not necessarily funny or witty like some of the other mystery series I like, but they’re not super scary or thriller-y either. I’ll keep thinking!
As I said, these can be a bit of a challenge to get hold of, but here’s the link to the Kindle series list to get you started.
Happy Reading!
We’re a few week behind the US but it’s It’s that time again – the latest Veronica Speedwell has come out in the UK. My love of Deanna Raybourn’s writing is well known here – after all I’ve written an about it Veronica, her Lady Julia series and Killers of a Certain Age (which is getting a sequel). Anyway, this is book nine in the Speedwell series – I have been saving book eight so I think I can read that now – but I always look forward to seeing what she and Stoker are up to.
It’s that time of the month again – where I buy even more books in the process of compiling the list of books on offer on Kindle this month. It is a slightly shorter list this month because there seem to be a lot of repeat offenders (so to speak) on offer this month, so I’ve tried not to duplicate too much this time. It wasn’t any less expensive a post for all that though!
So let’s start with one that I bought – and it’s The Excitements which is about two nonogenarian sisters who are World War Two veterans. On a trip to France to receive the Legion D’Honneur their nephew starts to suspect that they may be hiding some secrets about their past. This has a for fans of Richard Osman tag, but also blurbs from lots of authors that I like including Jenny Colgan and S J Bennett, so I’m looking forward to reading it. Talking of SJ Bennett, A Three Dog Problem, the second in the HM the Queen investigates series is also on offer this month.
Going back a long way to pre-BotW days, and Libby Page’s The Lido was a holiday reading pick – a sequel has just come out which I suspect explains the offer at the moment. A little more recently, I reviewed Tom Hindle’s Fatal Crossing back in January 2022 – he has two more since then, both of which are on my tbr pile, but this first one is on offer at the moment. I read Emily Henry’s Beach Read a bit more recently than that and would recommend it – I’ve read a couple of warring writers books in the last couple of ears and I think this one is my favourite – so 99p is s steal. Coming even more recently in my reading and I read Days at the Morisaki Bookshop not that long ago, and really enjoyed it – it’s 99p so if you fancy a slice of Japanese bookshop fantasy, it’s a steal.
Mhairi McFarlane’s It’s Not Me, It’s You is a book I loved in the days before this blog – I haven’t been back to it since I first read it in 2014, but my Goodreads review is positively glowing and I’ve enjoyed many of her books since so I’m not too worried about recommending it despite that. In a complete tonal about turn, Emma Cline’s The Girls is also on offer – it’s about a sort of Manson-y situation in the US in the 1960s and I enjoyed it but it was on the edge of what I can cope with – so I haven’t read her second novel, The Guest, which looked entirely too creepy for me on the basis of the blurb. Another book I enjoyed in the pre-pandemic days when I still read literary fiction is Brit Bennet‘s The Mothers.
And there is the usual offers on my favourite authors. The cheapest “proper” Georgette Heyer edition is Devil’s Cub at £1.99. And the 99p Julia Quinn is Just Like Heaven, the first of the Smythe-Smith series. This month’s Terry Pratchett is Making Money, the second Moist von Lipwig book and source of this genius quote:
‘Look, I can explain,’ he said. Lord Vetinari lifted an eyebrow with the care of one who, having found a piece of caterpillar in his salad, raises the rest of the lettuce. ‘Pray do,’ he said, leaning back. ‘We got a bit carried away,’ said Moist. ‘We were a bit too creative in our thinking. We encouraged mongooses to breed in the posting boxes to keep down the snakes …’ Lord Vetinari said nothing. ‘Er … which, admittedly, we introduced into the posting boxes to reduce the numbers of toads …’ Lord Vetinari repeated himself. ‘Er … which, it’s true, staff put in the posting boxes to keep down the snails …’ Lord Vetinari remained unvocal. ‘Er … These, I must in fairness point out, got into the boxes of their own accord, in order to eat the glue on the stamps,’ said Moist, aware that he was beginning to burble.
Making Money by Terry Pratchett
Oh and I also bought the latest Mary Balogh, Always Remember while I was writing this. Oops.
Happy reading
As I said yesterday, I didn’t get a lot read last week – but I did finally get around to reading Jennette McCurdy’s memoir (it’s only been sitting on the shelf for fourteen months!) and hoooo boy.
Ok, so if you don’t know who Jennette is, she is a former child actress who played one of the lead characters in the Nickelodeon TV series iCarly. She won four kids choice awards for her work on that show – but as this memoir shows, behind the scenes she was suffering from the abusive behaviour of her mother, who was the driving force behind her acting career.
And this is the point where I tell you that this book needs all of the content warnings. All of them. I hadn’t read any in depth reviews but I knew a bit about what I was getting into because I had seen and heard people warning that it was a really traumatic read but even with that I wasn’t prepared for the full awfulness of what Jennette went through. I’ll put some specific warnings at the bottom for those who want to know more. But now you’re probably wondering why on earth I’ve made this my book of the week if it’s such a tough read. Well it’s just so well written and for all of the awfulness of it all, I read it in one sitting on Sunday afternoon.
I have long been convinced that a lot of the time the parents of child stars are exactly the wrong sort of people to be the parents of child stars. And McCurdy’s mother is absolutely proving that theory and then some. Debra died in 2013, but had had cancer on and off since Jennette was a toddler and weaponised this against her children. In Jennette’s case this took the form of forcing her to become an actress and become the main financial support for the family and then abusing and manipulating her throughout her acting career.
I really, really hope that McCurdy is in a better place in her life now. If I have one criticism of this memoir it’s that there is not enough of what Jennette’s life is like now and if she’s doing better to counteract 300 pages of extremely bleak stuff. But I get that she is someone who lived a life she didn’t want and is taking back control by sharing what it was really like behind the scenes in writing this and that part of the point of all the changes that she’s made in recovery is that she now has control of what she does and what people know about her life.
So if you’re feeling resilient and you want to have all your fears about child stars confirmed and then some, this is a really good book to read. But you do need to go in prepared for a lot of awful. If it helps you work out whether you can cope with this or not, I would say this is worse than Tara Westover’s Educated in terms of what Jennette goes through, but also because (as I said a moment ago) you don’t get quite the same payoff in terms of seeing how she has recovered and overcome it all.
You should be able to get hold of this really easily – it won a lot of acclaim when it came out – including Goodreads awards and the like. It was in the bookshops in the UK – even though I don’t think she was a massively big name here – as well as being on Kindle and Kobo. And Jennette herself reads the audiobook version – I had a listen to the sample and it does make it feel even more immediate and awful. So be warned on that front too.
Have a great Tuesday everyone – happy Reading feels a bit appropriate today!
Here are those more specific content warnings I promised you: emotional abuse, sexual abuse, eating disorders, alcoholism, addiction, manipulation,
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 