Fitzroy Square (location of Maisie’s office) in the sunshine
It pains me to say this, but the final Maisie Dobbs book has hit the stores this week. We know it’s the last one because Jacqueline Winspear has told us it is – in her newsletter and in the blurb for the book. We’ve reached the end of the Second World War and Maisie is looking to the future, so it does seem like a good point to end because the world is about to change, but that doesn’t stop be being sad about it. I’ve loved following Maisie’s life over seventeen books so far, there has been triumph but also quite a lot of tragedy and I’m hoping that book 18 sends her out to a bright new (happy) future. I’m hoping that this doesn’t mean that Jacqueline Winspear is stopping writing – although obviously I’ll live with it if she is retiring – but I’m holding on to the fact that she put out a standalone mystery last year, and that maybe she’s got a new idea that she wants to explore.
As you may have realised, May has been a really busy month – and I’ve already written about a lot of the new-to-me stuff that I’ve read this month, so only two books here this month in the quick reviews.
Lips Like Sugar by Jess K Hardy
This didn’t make it in to the Summer of Sequels post, because it actually came out in February and it just took me a while to get to it. Also it’s not really a sequel because it’s a romance series so it’s a fresh couple that are linked to the one in Come As You Are. Anyway, we’re back in the same town in Montana – but this time our heroine is Mira, bakery owner and mum to a teenage boy. Our hero is Cole, grunge-band-drummer turned music-studio-owner. It starts as a fake date to Madigan and Ashley’s wedding, but obviously it turns into something more. It’s lots of fun and really easy to read – and hopefully setting up for a third because there’s a big old loose end dangling I think – although it’s would be a bit of a pivot for the series.
Cut and Thirst by Margaret Atwood
Every now and again, Amazon pops up with a new short story from Margaret Atwood and I rush out to read it. I have a somewhat mixed record with her novels but I really like her short stories. This one is about three older women who are plotting to take revenge on the men who did one of their friends wrong years ago. It’s just dark, and funny and delightful. If you’ve got Kindle Unlimited, then this is really worth a read.
And that’s it – like I said, only two reviews this month but hey, what can I do. There have been some other great books in May that I’ve already written about – so if you’re not caught up on my reviews of Happy Medium, Mona of the Manor, You Should Be So Lucky and The Reunion, go check them out as well as my Recommendsday post about Books with Ghosts.
As if you didn’t know this was coming from my post on Thursday. I mean. Unless the sample was a total swizz this was odds on for the pick today. And here we are, and I feel fully justified in my decision to impulse purchase this in paperback after reading the aforementioned sample, which turns out to be up until page 47 of the paperback.
It’s the summer of 1999 and Sawyer is living in New York with her fiancé Charles. They’re getting married in the autumn and Sawyer is working in publishing, he’s got a job at a law firm – but he’s working ever longer hours, which he says is on a big case, but which Sawyer suspects may be linked to his co-worker Kendra. When Kendra’s boyfriend Nick reaches out to her about his suspicions, they meet up – and don’t get on. But when he finds her online to apologise, the two start to develop a friendship – as they spend their summer Friday afternoons together while their partners are working. They’re just friends – but what happens at the end of the summer.
I think this book is possibly one which should have “A Novel” on the front of it – because the signalling I get from the cover is that it’s a romance and I described it as such in my post on Thursday, but I think this is going to be a divisive one in terms of genre. And that’s because as you can tell from that plot write up, our central characters are in a relationship with other people at the start, and that is a state of affairs that does continue for a while (I can’t tell you more than that without spoilers) and that is going to violate some people’s no cheating rule. Now given that it is right there in the blurb that this is the case, you should be going in forewarned, but I’m mentioning it anyway.
For my part, I couldn’t put this down. I thought it was incredibly well written and really evoked a specific time period – pre-mobile phones, dial up internet – and place. I could have spent another 100 pages with Nick and Sawyer wandering around New York, and I thought the way that their relationship developed was nuanced and at times messy in a way that real life can be – especially when you’re in your early 20s and figuring yourself out but also have big life events hurtling towards you. I thought it was brilliant – and I hope Suzanne Rindell writes more in this sort of area, because I liked The Other Typist, but I loved this. And now I want to buy Three Martini Lunch and see where that fits into to the spectrum between the two!
Summer Fridays is out now. It’s 99p on Kindle today – which is a massive drop from when I read that sample on release day last week and I would absolutely have bought the ebook if it had been that at the time I read the sample – so this sounds like your sort of thing (and bearing in mind that warning) then it’s totally worth that. It’s £3.99 on Kobo and it’s also in paperback as you know. I couldn’t spot any physical copies in Foyles when I was in there yesterday, and Waterstones isn’t claiming ot have Click and collect copies, so you’re probably going to have to order it.
I’m hoping I’m getting into my summer reading stride. Of course it could all go terribly wrong – and it frequently has in the past – but I’m choosing to be optimistic. I think the weird and unpredictable weather has helped with this, because when it’s not sunny outside it’s nice to read summer-y books to hope that the nice (but hopefully not too boiling) weather is coming soon.
I braved the theatre during half term week and lived to tell the tale! I wish I could say I was being strategic with my show pick and picked one where I thought there would be less children, but I would be lying – I went to Sister Act because it’s a short summer run and there’s a cast change coming at the end of this coming week, and the fact that there was a front row ticket in the lottery on the day was an added bonus!
This is the musical version of the 1992 Whoopi Goldberg movie about a lounge singer who sees her casino boss boyfriend have someone murdered and is hidden in a convent for her own safety until she can give evidence at his trial. The first thing to note is that there are a fair few changes between the movie and the musical – the most obvious being that it has an all new set of songs written by Alan Menken, the composer who wrote the music for a string of Disney movies in the early 1990s, like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Do not go expecting to hear any of the Motown hits from the movie – or Hail Holy Queen etc. it’s also set in the late 1970s rather than the early 90s, Doloris’s boyfriend owns a club that he won’t let her sing at – rather than a casino where she does sing at – and it’s set in Philadelphia rather than Reno and Adam Francisco.
I thought the changes really worked – if you can’t have the music from the movie – which I assume would have been near impossible on a licensing front for the Motown front, especially given that there were a few jukebox musicals using some of the artists music at around the same time – then make some changes to make it its own thing. It was obviously going to need more music than the movie had – and more characters were going to need to sing, so it worked really well.
I didn’t see this when it was in the West End originally – I didn’t have the budget for theatre going at the time and I was also working a job where I started at 4 am so late nights were not my friend – but this has got a cracking cast at the moment, so I feel like I might have picked the right time. Beverley Knight is playing Doloris and Ruth Jones is playing Mother Superior – later on this summer Alexandra Burke takes over as Doloris and Lee Mead joins as Detective Eddie Souther. It’s also got Lemar – who I always thought deserved a bigger music career than he got – playing Doloris’ boyfriend.
Basically this is a big, fun, colourful night in the theatre – in fact in a theatre where I spent a lot of time as a teenager, but that’s a story for another day.
Most read author: Margery Allingham because of the ebooks
Books bought: 5 books and 6 ebooks and one preorder
Books read in 2024: 171
Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 740
I’m going to call this the month of Kindle Unlimited, because it’s true really. I’ve read so much from there this month for various reasons, but it’s really justified its subscription price.
Bonus picture: another Lagos picture. Not that you can really tell!
*includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – including 8 this month!
I mean this is slightly late because it was early May that I started this endeavour, and this is the very last day of May, but it’s still May so it still counts. Anyway, it’s been a decade since I started this blog – can you believe it? I can’t for sure. Anyway, the to-read pile that I started this blog to try and guilt myself into reducing remains enormous, but I don’t think there is anything left on it that was still there at the start so that’s something.
It’s quite a small something because the pile has graduated from the little shelves and a stack hiding behind the sofa to a big (if narrow) Billy bookcase and another (little) stack in front of it, but the main thing is that I’ve had a blast writing about all the things I’ve read, and I’m still enjoying it as well. Thank you for reading – I’m off to have a small celebration.
Honestly this post has made me laugh. I had a whole thing written about this book and I was just waiting for it to publish so I could grab a good picture of the cover. And then I read the whole sample while I was doing that and had a whole conversation with a friend about whether I could break my rule about how much I pay for kindle books to buy it so I could keep reading. The verdict was no, so I bought the paperback instead which hopefully I’ll get so I can read this over the weekend. And yes, the paperback was more expensive than the kindle but it’s a real thing I can own forever if I want. Anyway, this is a new book from the author of The Other Typist, but where that was historical suspense-y, this is a romance novel being described as “You’ve Got Mail for a new generation” and if that and my poor impulse control doesn’t convince you to buy it then I don’t know what will!
After last week’s post with the notable sequels this summer, it seems only fair to also do the other books I’m looking forward to this summer – or expecting to see all over the place – because it’s nearly June and a lot of them are about to appear.
Let’s start with Welcome to Glorious Tuga by Francesca Segal, which is out on June 6, has a tortoise on the cover and is about a zoologist who takes up a fellowship on a remote island ostensibly to study an endangered species, but actually also because she has a secret that connects her to the island. It has blurbs from Marian Keynes, Nick Hornby, Jessie Burton, Naomi Alderman and more so I feel confident in predicting you’ll be seeing this around a lot this summer.
Another book I’m confident to predict is going to be all over the place is the new novel from Kevin Kwan, the author of Crazy Rich Asians. Lies and Weddings follows a former model and future earl with a cash flow problem and on the hunt for a rich woman to seduce at his sister’s wedding to solve it. But nothing goes to plan and the write up promises money, murder, sex and lies in locations like Hawaii, Marrakesh and Beverley Hills. Expect to see this on a lot of sun loungers from late June.
Heading into July, I think Chris Brookmyre’s The Cracked Mirror might be the poolside book for the crime readers. The blurb promises a mashup of Agatha Christie and something more hard boiled as an elderly lady who solves murders in her village crossed paths with an LAPD homicide detective who will do whatever it takes to get to the truth. I’m interested to see this – although given my reading preferences I’ll need it to be closer to the Marple end of the gruesome scale!
In August we have a new Rainbow Rowell novel which is always exciting. Slow Dance is the story of star crossed best friends who everyone thinks should be together except each other. Emma Straub and Gabrielle Zevin have blurbed this one if that helps you figure out where we’re at – but it feels like it’s been a while since a proper Rowell adult novel so I’m excited.
And finally jumping back to the near future and something that I’ve already started, there’s a new novel coming from Kirsty Greenwood in late June. I used to review (occasionally) for Kirsty’s old site Novelicious in the early days of this blog, and she writes romantic novels that are also very funny. The Love of My Afterlife has a heroine who wakes up in the waiting room for the afterlife only to run into the most handsome man she’s ever met – and he seems to be into her. Then whoosh – he’s gone again and Delphie is offered a ten day return to earth to try and get him to fall in love with her and win a second chance at life. I’m about halfway through as I write this and it’s so much fun!
And that’s your lot – but I’m fairly confident that even if you don’t read them yourself, you’ll spot at least a couple of these four out in the wild over the next few months!
As I said yesterday, it was a busy week last week, but I did have time to finish The Reunion – which I started before the Lagos trip, but couldn’t take with me because I was too far through to make it worth it. And given how much I enjoyed it, it was an obvious choice for today’s pick.
Liv is an actress working in LA. As a teenager, she was star of a wildly popular TV show – Girl on the Verge – and she spent a lot of her teenage years having to live up to and in the shadow of her character on the show. Now it’s twenty years since the show’s premiere and a streaming service is getting the original cast back together for a reunion episode. The fans are excited to see some unfinished business from the original finale resolved, but for Liv, it’s about seeing Ransom Joel again. He was her character’s love interest on the show – and her best friend and confidante in real life. But as the show ended he told her he needed space from her and left her reeling. Once they’re back on set together, they fall back into their old habits – but can this time have a different ending?
If you watched any of the WB shows back in the day, you’ll understand what this is trying to evoke – and there have been enough old tv shows getting reunions like this since the advent of the streaming services that it all feels pretty plausible. I was a teenager in the heyday of these sorts of series so I was a total sucker for the premise of this, but The Reunion has the worrying words “a novel” on the front – which can sometimes mean “we’ve written a blurb that suggests it’s a romance novel, but don’t get your hopes up for a happy ending” so I was slightly apprehensive going into this. But I think in this case, “a novel” is warning you more that this is about Liv and how she grows and develops as much as it is about her relationship with Ransom. There is not a lot of tension in their relationship – and when there was an issue, I had the culprit pegged pretty fast. But I still enjoyed it – I’m at a place at the moment where I don’t really want high angst and drama in my reading, so a meander through the life of an actress and a reunion of a show that reminded me a lot of the sort of thing that I used to watch was pretty perfect for me at the moment.
This looks like Kayla Olsen’s first book in this sort of area – I see some dystopian future type stuff on her good reads page, but nothing else giving these sorts of vibes – so I hope she does more because this was a really nice way to spend a few hours. My copy of The Reunion came from Foyles (in store, although they claim to have no click and collect copies at the moment), but it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.
