A somewhat steady week in books because it was an incredibly busy week in reality life – I went to a concert on Monday night, my sister came to visit, I had two leaving dos to go to, we went to see Dr. Strangelove and then went to see Him Indoors’ family for Mother’s Day. And when I write it all out like that it’s suddenly not a surprise that the list is a little shorter than usual. And it’s nearly the end of March and I have no idea what’s going to go in the quick reviews on account of the fact that a good proportion of the books I’ve read this month have been Ruth Galloway ones. And I’ve got tickets to a show tonight so not a huge amount of time to finish anything else…
It’s a theatre in your cinema pick this week – and I actually only saw this yesterday, but because there is a very small window to see these in cinemas I’ve bumped it straight to the top of the list.
This is the stage version of Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr. Strangelove, with Steve Coogan in the starring role as not one, not two, not three but four different characters. If you haven’t see the original movie, it’s a political satire and very black comedy about nuclear war, when a general goes mad and orders a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union and the efforts to try and stop the attack happening.
It’s been a long time since I saw the movie – when I was at uni I think – but despite the fact that this is set in the Cold War, there’s a lot about this that feels quite applicable to the world we live in today. And the staging is really well done too, with a clever use of screens to create various different things including the iconic big board in the war room. As well as Steve Coogan, this also has Giles Terera who I first saw back in Avenue Q days but has now had a long career with plenty of dramatic roles as well has his Olivier award winning performance in Hamilton.
It’s basically a really solid two and a bit hours of theatre with good performances and a clever adaptation of a movie classic. Definitely worth a look if it’s coming near you.
Back in January I did a couple of posts about new books coming this year – the standalone stuff and the series – and now we’re a few months into the year there are a bunch more books that I’ve got on the list as coming this year I thought it was time for an update/extra post. This mostly straight up romances – with a side of a romance author writing their first contemporary fiction novel. I think that’s probably because most of the mystery authors write in straight up series which I’m better at keeping track of, so I covered those off at the start of the year. Or my brain could have just been a bit broken and I forgot about a bunch of authors I really like in January – or maybe some these books really weren’t available to preorder when I was writing that original post. Anything is possible…
Lets start with another book from Jen DeLuca that’s set in Boneyard Key, following on from Haunted Ever After last autumn. Amazon is currently claiming Ghost Business comes out in the UK in Mid August, but given that the actual author says September, I know who I’m trusting on that one. And it should also be noted that DeLuca is now writing a fifth instalment in the Ren Faire series and I cannot wait for that to arrive (presumably in 2026).
Next up, and it should be noted that this was announced last year, and I’m really not sure how it didn’t make it into either of the earlier posts, but Sarah MacLean has her fist contemporary fiction novel coming out in July. It’s called These Summer Storms and it has the children of a billionaire on the family’s private island after their father’s death only to discover that he’s left one final challenge for them to complete in order to receive their inheritance. Yes. Rich People Problems on a private island. It sounds great. I can’t wait.
Also left off that earlier list is the new Elissa Sussman, which I pre-ordered a full year ago, which was already nearly a year after Once More With Feeling Came Out. Totally and Completely Fine is due on July 8 – the same day as the Sarah MacLean – and this makes me very happy. Funny You Should Ask was a Book of the Week and Once More With Feeling would have been except that it was only a few months after I read Funny You Should Ask, and I have rules about repeats (that I sometimes stick to) so it went into a Recommendsday post for new romances instead. Anyway, the blurb for Totally and Completely Fine has the widowed younger sister of mega star Gabe (our hero from Funny You Should Ask) meeting a handsome (and also famous) actor on the set of her brother’s new movie. I am very optimistic about this one.
We also have dates and titles for the new books from Katherine Center and Annabel Monaghan. Center’s new book is The Love Haters which has a video producer trying to save her job by making a profile of a coastguard rescue swimmer (another job that I didn’t know existed until I read the blurb and had to google) and Monaghan has It’s a Love Story which features a former teen sitcom star who is trying to get her career as a producer off the ground and goes too far in her quest to get her first movie greenlit. They’re out a week apart at the end of May. Also in May is Dream On, Ramona Riley by Ashley Herring Blake – which is set in New Hampshire (which is great for my 50 states challenge!) and about a small town waitress and a Hollywood star who comes to town to film a rom com – but the two of them have met before. There’s a trend going on for time travel or time skip romances and joining that club is Time Loops and Meet Cutes by Jackie Lau, which is coming in June.
And finally (for now) in November we have the second Harlot’s Bay book from Olivia Dade. I loved At First Spite and Second Chance Romance features Karl the Baker from that and his former high school crush, who thinks he’s dead after his obituary mistakenly appears in the local paper. It sounds utterly delightful and I wish I didn’t have to wait so long for it, but hey, it’s good that books I want to read are spaced out!
Happy Friday everyone, another week, another romance series for you today.
Beverly Jenkins’s Women Who Dare trilogy is three books set in the aftermath of the Civil War in the United States. First there is Rebel, which is set in New Orleans in the aftermath of the Civil War. Our heroine is Valinda, a transplant from New York in town to teach the newly emancipated community while she waits for her fiancé to return from abroad. Our hero is Drake LeVeq, an architect and son of an old New Orleans family descended from pirates. Second is Wild Rain which is set in Wyoming and is that rare thing: a western historical romance that I liked – so much so that I made it a BotW! And finally To Catch a Raven – which is set back in New Orleans and has a hero and heroine who are forced together in order to reclaim a stolen copy of the Declaration of Independence. Raven comes from a family of grifters, Braxton emphatically does not and as they fake marriage as part of the job they start to discover that perhaps they’re more suited to each other than it seems.
I don’t read a lot of American-set historical romances but I will always make an exception for Ms Beverly Jenkins. I love her writing and characterisation – her Blessings contemporary series is one of my favourites as you know – and she brings all that to the historicals but with interesting settings and premises that you don’t see a lot in the genre. I don’t think you have to read these in order to appreciate them – I didn’t – but you’ll probably get a better experience if you do.
They used to be quite hard to get hold of – but they’re all on kindle now, and they seem to rotate on offer fairly regularly so you can pick up the set.
The final event of the figure skating season is taking place as this publishes. The best skaters in the world at the moment are in Boston in the US to compete for the world title. Today (Thursday) sees the Men’s short programme and the medals being decided in the Pairs, which is not to be confused with Ice Dance which is the subject of today’s bonus review – of Layne Fargo’s The Favourites. I started reading this with a plan to possibly write about it to coincide with the European Championships at the end of January – but then the American Eagle crash happened in Washington DC, which killed a number of skaters – including former world champions and aspiring juniors and I didn’t feel reading a fun skating novel for a few weeks. But it is really good, and it does deserve a mention here, so I’ve found a chance to do it after all.
Katarina Shaw wants to be an Olympic skater and when she meets Heath Rocha, a lonely teenager stuck in the foster care system, the two of them become an ice dancing partnership – and a real life partnership. They don’t have money, they don’t have the best equipment or the best coaches, but they’re determined to make it to the top and they do right until they don’t. The framing device for this book is that it’s the tenth anniversary of their final skate at the Olympics when it all fell apart – and there’s an unauthorised documentary being made about them. This means that you follow their story from their initial meeting all the way to the Olympic games, inter cut with interviews from other people who were there – their rivals, the judges, the journalists.
Now I watch a *lot* of figure skating, and although I’m not a skater, I know a fair amount about how the sport works and the politics of it all. And my experience of fiction featuring skating has been a bit mixed – but I couldn’t resist this because it was getting comparisons to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, which as you know I really, really loved. So I took a chance. And it’s really good. Everything is turned up to eleven, but apart from all the (on ice) partner swapping, the skating details felt pretty flawless and Fargo has done a really good job of creating an alternative universe of the early 2000s Olympic cycles.
It’s also a real page turner, which doesn’t require you to know about figure skating to enjoy it – it will create the world for you. But if you are into skating, the areas of the sport where Fargo has taken liberties and made changes have been picked really well (and are often areas that fans of the sport complain about). And like another TJR novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, you can also have fun spotting which real life incidents and characters she has been inspired by when creating the storyline. I wouldn’t say that all the characters are tremendously deep or well developed, but there’s so much plot and it moves so fast that you don’t really notice until you’re looking back at the end.
My copy of The Favourites came from NetGalley, but it’s had a big, buzzy release and I’ve seen it in a whole load of bookshops over the last month and a half since it came out. And of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too at a pretty good price (for a hardback release anyway) of £3.99.
It’s daylight during my train ride to work at the moment (until the clocks change at the weekend, but lets gloss over that) and the weather is improving (mostly) so today I’ve got some spring-like books for you.
Obviously lets start with Elizabeth von Arnim’s Enchanted April. I’ve written a whole post about it already and I really do love it. I actually (finally) have the movie version to watch on the Tivo (it was shown on BBC Four a few weeks back) and I have been saving it until it started to feel spring-y. Which is maybe this weekend?
I did a whole post of books about fresh starts last year, but the other sort of book that I like to read at this time of year are coming of age or people discovering themselves type novels so books like Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle or Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm or even Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.
It’s also a great time to read soothing books set in the countryside – often the sort of books where not a lot happens – like Diary of a Provincial Lady or some of the early Angela Thirkell Barsetshire novels.
And of course there are plenty of boarding school books set in the spring term – I honestly thought I had a list somewhere of which Chalet School books where set in which terms, but I cannot find it anywhere. This is very annoying to me. And I don’t have my actual collection to hand right now so I can’t even pick one and be sure-sure because the internet is not helpful for this. Urgh. Shall I just punt at Chalet Girls in Camp because by the nature of camping in Austria (in 1930) it has to have been Easter or later? Well I’ve done it now haven’t I?! It should at least be marginally easier to get hold of than Juliet Overseas because it was reprinted a lot more times. I’ve got at least two copies myself…
It’s Tuesday again and that means it’s review day. And today I’m back in Girl’s Own territory with a boarding school story that I picked up after one of my friends gave a talk about the author at Book Con before last. Yes it’s taken me more than two years to get to it, but that year was a particularly large haul. I braced myself and checked the photos from that one and the last one – I’ve got one left to read from the each. I should work on that…
Anyway: Juliet Overseas. The Overseas of the title is England – for Juliet is from New Zealand. She’s been sent over to go to her mother’s former school, which was actually founded by her grandfather and three of his friends, but when she arrives she discovers that things in her house have gone downhill – they’ve got a reputation for being the slack house and a severe shortage of seniors to try and pull things back together. And so of course Juliet throws herself into restoring the house to former glory with the help of hockey, cakes and some no nonsense behaviour.
This is such a good example of a boarding school story. I tend towards series because I like to see characters progress though the school (and I guess because all the early one so read were from series) but this does such a good job of setting up the school and the rules but without info dumping on you. The talk about Clare Mallory at Bristol was called “Salvation through Hockey” and although I wasn’t a hockey lover at school (more of a cricket and tennis girl) the match sequences in this are really good and show the power of a sport to bring people together.
I appreciate that this is a bit of a niche recommendation, but sometimes I do that and I’m not even sorry about it! Anyway this is going to be on the harder end of things to get hold of – specialist vendors only really or a book conference…
Another good week – nice books and good entertainment when I wasn’t reading with a theatre trip, Formula One on the TV (albeit still in a somewhat antisocial timezone) and a bit of a day out on Sunday too. And it’s starting to feel like spring. The temperatures have improved and it’s light when I catch the train to work now. Of course the clocks haven’t changed yet, so I’m about to be plunged back into darkness but I’ll enjoy a few days of being able to see the alpacas in the field when I go passed them while I can – it’s been a long old winter.
Ummmmm. A few. Because y’know I’m reading the Elly Griffiths back to back and acquiring the next one(s) in the series as I go…
Bonus picture: Kirby Hall this weekend, where we went out to get some culture
Hilariously, the secondhand book sale selection had one of the Puffin Island books in it – the first time I’ve seen any of them in person for ages. It’s like I willed it into being by writing about them on Friday!
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
Happy Sunday everyone, and I’m back in the theatre for this week’s post. And I’m writing this a few weeks after the actual concert, but as it was a sold out, one night only type thing, this is more a reflection on a night out than anything else.
Patti LuPone, for those of you who have never come across her, is somewhat of a legend of the theatre. If you’re not a theatre fan, but you are a Marvel fan, you will have recently seen her in Agatha All Along but trust me when I say that she’s Broadway icon. She has three Tony Awards, two Oliviers and a couple of Grammys. She was the original Eva Peron in Evita on Broadway, the original Fantine in Les Miserables when it started at the Barbican and the original Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. She’s played Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes, Rose in Gypsy and Joanne in Company. She’s also in her mid-seventies now, so you don’t know how many more chances you’ll get to see her sing live. So of course I bought myself a ticket for this as soon as it went on sale.
Now I saw her do a concert in London more than a decade ago – with Seth Rudetsky playing the piano and in conversation with her and I was interested to see how this show differed from that one. In fact, I still have the set list from that Leicester Square Concert in my phone – where she did the big hits from her career – including for the first time in nearly 20 years some Sunset Boulevard in London (which was a whole thing given how badly that ended) and which I still can’t believe that I was witness to. A Life in Notes does still have songs from the musicals that she’s been in, but is mostly Patti singing songs that are important to her or make her think of a moment in her life. Now some of these were a little obscure for me – and could potentially have used a little more explanation – but I would have paid the whole ticket price just to for the songs from the musicals – which included Some People, On Broadway, Don’t Cry for Me Argentina, I Dreamed a Dream, Anything Goes and The Ladies Who Lunch.
She’s still in great voice – probably in better shape vocally than Bernadette Peters, although you could argue that Bernadette’s voice was quirkier to start with – and when she does talk she’s witty and fun. It was a totally sold out crowd at the Coliseum – more than two and a half thousand of us turned up for it, including a few celebs, although probably not as many as if it hadn’t been the same night as the Baftas. But I spotted her Company co-star Mel Giedroyc in the foyer along with Marianne Elliot. And once again it was a delight to be at a concert where there were no queues for the ladies – although there were for the mens! All in all I had a ball even if it did make me wish she’d do another show in the West End soon.
Happy Sunday – as a treat before I go, here’s a recording (not mine) of the Sunset Boulevard from that 2013 concert. Totes Emosh.
Happy Saturday everyone, this weekend we’re celebrating the fact that I found a new bookshop near me!
The Reading Tree is a second hand bookshop in part of an old military depot that’s been converted into workspaces for local businesses – some are offices or workshops, others are shops. It’s not as big as Bookends/Bookcase in Carlisle (but honestly what is) but it’s probably the biggest second hand selection I’ve found near me.
As you can see it’s a really interesting building from the inside – the bookshop in in the upstairs (there are antiques and vintage shops downstairs in this building) and it’s got big windows and loads of light. It was a depot for ordnance, so if I was a betting person I would say that the roof looks so light and flimsy (relative to the rest of it) because of the risk of explosion – like buildings that store or manufacture fireworks: light roof so if there’s an explosion it goes up not out.
Anyway, what you can’t see here is that there’s a cafe too so that you can sit and read your new purchases. In terms of the stock it’s a real mix of relatively recent releases in lightly used condition and older books. It’s got a mix of fiction and non-fiction – it’s probably 40% of the space to the fiction, but given that fiction books are often smaller than non-fiction ones (especially cook books and military history ) it’s probably aout 50/50 split overall.
We wandered in here as part of a walk along the canal, so for once I didn’t buy any books because I had to walk another couple of miles back to the car carrying anything I bought and I only had a tiny bag (with no space for anything else), but I endorse this flow chart and I will be back…
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 