This week’s BotW is Lauren Willig’s The Orchid Affair – the eighth book in the Pink Carnation series. It’s been nearly two years since I read my last Pink Carnation book and I’d almost forgotten how much I enjoy them. One of the really good things about this series is that Willig has come up with a way to generate plots that doesn’t involve breaking up couples that you love.
My copy is the US hardback edition – which is pretty if very different from UK book covers
In part eight, we meet Laura, a governess for more than a decade, who has been recruited to the Pink Carnation’s spy network watching Bonaparte’s Paris. She’s got a post in the household of Andre Jaouen – the right-hand man to the Minister of Police. He’s part of an investigation is underway into a royalist plot – and Laura’s charged with reporting anything suspicious. But, as always, things are more complicated than they seem. Meanwhile back in the modern day, Eloise (the historian who is researching the Carnation’s network) is due to meet Colin’s mother.
This is a fun romp through Post-revolutionary France – with likeable characters and a gripping plot. There’s a great balance of suspense and romance – and although I would have liked to have seen a bit more of Colin and Eloise, I appreciate that Willig is taking her time with those two and not rushing them into things – and that more of them might have slowed the pace of the rest of the book.
My only real problem with this book was that the copy that I got is the US edition and so it was in American English – not British English – which in books like this yanks me out of the narrative abit (sometimes to Google things – like AP French). But hey, when you have a backlog like mine, and strict rules about book spending you can’t be picky. And it’s a very minor quibble really.
There’s another three Pink Carnation books I haven’t read yet – with a twelfth and final volume due this year. I suggest you start at the beginning so that the Colin and Eloise thing works best for you, but really they all work quite well on their own. Although you may not get the running jokes. The Orchid Affair is available from Amazon, Waterstones and Kindle – but I don’t think there’s been a UK edition, which can make the prices a bit.. high (hence why it’s taken me two years to get to the Orchid Affair). But the earlier books in the series did get a UK release, so you should be able to get your hands on them – I got the first couple from my local library.
***Bonus content****
Regular readers know that I like matching books. I have a couple of this series on my kindle (and the novellas), borrowed a few from the library, and then started buying. But due to the vagaries of the book market, I have three different sizes and styles of books – out of three. There isn’t a way to shelve this and make me happy.
I need to move these to the other end of the shelf, then they can be in series order at least…
I had real trouble choosing the BotW this week – because I don’t like repeating – and Gail Carriger has a new book out on Kindle TODAY and in paperback on Thursday (and my pre-order hasn’t dispatched yet – Amazon I’m watching you – you didn’t use to delay posting pre-orders to those of us who refuse to pay postage…) and if Prudence is half as good as her other stuff, it’s going to be a candidate for BotW as well.
But I’ve enjoyed Timeless and the whole Parasol Protectorate series so much, it would have been disingenuous not to pick it as a BotW – especially as it was the my favourite thing I read last week. It’s my own fault for saving Timeless because I didn’t want Alexia’s story to be over.
I don’t love this cover shot – although the costume is one from the book, I think the face is… odd!
Timeless is the fifth and final volume in the story of Alexia Tarabotti – a preturnatural in steam punk Victorian London. And I can’t really say much more than that about the plot of Timeless because anything else would be Spoiling The Previous Four Books. Ms Carriger was on my list of Discoveries of 2014 – and I said then that she was well on course to be on my automatic pre-order list if Timeless didn’t do something dreadful and disillusioning. And it didn’t. It’s not my favourite of the series, but it is still pretty darn fantastic and ties up a lot of the dangling threads from the previous books and then sets up a few new questions too.
Alexia is a fabulous creation – and the world that she lives in is equally brilliant. Carriger has worked out how her world works and wears that very lightly – in fact she’s a big old tease. She really doesn’t want to tell you her secrets – unlike some authors who can’t wait to dump all the rules of the world on you. Even in this last book in the series we’re still discovering new things about Alexia’s abilities – and you get the feeling that Carriger has had this planned all along – none of it comes across as invented for this book. Which either means she’s brilliant at long term plotting – or she’s really good at faking it.
I’ve read all the Finishing School books* that have been released so far – and I can’t wait to see how that pans out – because the world of 20 years before Alexia is very different. And I’m so excited to read Prudence and see what happened next.
My soul is so outrage that the set doesn’t match I can’t shelve them like this
Gosh this review is gushy. Sorry. Now this is where I would usually put links to the book of the week so you can run away and buy it. But if you haven’t read the other four books in the series first, you really won’t appreciate it – so go and buy Soulless from Amazon or Foyles or Waterstones or on Kindle and get started on Alexia’s story. I’m off to re-read them. And don’t tell me off if there’s some more Carriger on here soon…
* In fact Etiquette and Espionage was my first Carriger book – thank you NetGalley for throwing that one in my path – and after I read that and Curtsies and Conspiracies and then started on The Parasol Protectorate. NB in light of the Wrong Size issue in my Parasol set, I am reading Finishing School on Kindle – and waiting til the end of the series to buy myself a matching set. What kind of crazy person am I?!
My Shelving Solution – but I cannot allow a repeat of this situation with the Finishing School books!
We all knew that this was how this would end. Ever since Sir Terry announced he had early onset Alzheimer’s, we knew he would be gone too soon. But I had still hoped it was further away.
Alzheimer’s is always cruel, but it seemed particularly unfair that it should hit a man whose mind was so sharp, so bright, so inventive. I’m terrified of death, but I understood his passionate fight for assisted dying. Pratchett created a flat world carried on four elephants on the back of a giant turtle, where dwarves, trolls and golems lived side by side with people. Why would he want to carry on when his mind was no longer capable of remembering what day it is, or recognising people. I hope it never progressed that far for him.
I was introduced to Discworld by my school librarian when I was about 13 – Jingo was the newest book at the time – although the first I read was Wyrd Sisters. I loved Star Trek, but didn’t really see myself as a fantasy reader. Discworld changed that. I had always read a lot, but Sir Terry’s books introduced me to something new and opened the doors to books I would never previously have considered. Even if few other worlds could compare to the Disc.
Choosing a favourite is near impossible, I love Rincewind, Vimes and the Witches. Tiffany Aching is a joy. Any book is improved by the presence of The Patrician. But Moist von Lipwig was a late arriving treat. I’ve listened to the audiobooks of Going Postal and Making Money more times than I care to count. I wanted the Moist the tax collector book – but Raising Steam was brilliant.
Thank you Sir Terry, for all the joy and pleasure your books have given me and millions of others. I will sit down and read them all again, just as soon as the thought of it doesn’t make me cry.
Every year there are a couple of authors I discover and then rattle through their back catalogue – in 2013 it was Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series, Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next books and Ann Granger’s Mitchell and Markby series. So now we’re at the end of 2014, I had a look back at who my big discoveries have been this year.
Armistead Maupin – I read seven of Maupin’s Tales of the City books this year and only the fact that the others haven’t yet been published in covers that match the ones I already have stopped me buying the rest – my mania for sets and the size of the to-read pile have trumped my need to know what happened next for once! This is another case of me kicking myself for not reading them sooner. Several people I work with were so excited when The Days of Anna Madrigal came out in January that I had to go and see what it was that they were so enthusiastic about. And I’m so glad I did – but equally perplexed that I hadn’t come across them before – this year I’ve seen so many articles about them or references to them in so many places, that I wonder if I was stupid not to have got on this band wagon earlier. I lent Tales of the City to The Boy – and he rattled through it and loved it too. Please Transworld, can we have Mary Anne in Autumn and The Days of Anna Madrigal in the same style as the others soon?
Angela Thirkell – I’ve now read all of Angela Thirkell’s books that have been reissued by Virago and am in the tricky position of trying to work out whether to start looking for the rest in second hand editions or wait for more reissues. They are exactly the sort of book that appeals to me – witty comedies of manners set in a period of history that I love (hence my passion for Golden Age detective stories). Having read Nancy Mitford’s novels this year as well (finally got around to them!) which are similar in some ways, I think I actually like Thirkell more – her characters are more sympathetic even if the world is a little too soft focus and happily-ever-after at times.
Gail Carriger – I discovered Ms Carriger and her works much later in the year than these other two – and have rattled my way through her back catalogue at breakneck speed. Since I read a copy of her first Finishing School YA novel through NetGalley in late September I’ve read practically everything she’s published – that is to say two more Finishing School books, four Parasol Protectorate novels and three short stories. I’m saving the last Parasol Protectorate novel and the novella prequel though – because I don’t want Alexia’s story to be over. Unless something dreadful and disillusioning happens in Timeless, I suspect Carriger is going to join the list of authors that I pre-order as soon as the titles are announced so that I get their books asap. She’s also my first venture into the world of Steampunk – and so who knows 2015’s discoveries could feature more authors from this area of fiction.
So thank you 2014 and here’s to 2015 and its discoveries – who knows what I’ll be raving about in twelve months time – it really could be anything!
This is where my review of Laurie Graham’s latest book The Grand Duchess of Nowhere would usually be – but in exciting news, I’ve actually reviewed it over on the wonderful Novelicious. You can read my thoughts Ducky’s Adventures by clicking here.
And in case you’ve found your way over here after reading Novelicious and come to see what I write about – Hello! It’s lovely to see you. This blog started as a means of forcing me to take action against my burgeoning to-read pile and to try and control my book buying. It hasn’t entirely worked. You’ll find I post a weekly list of everything that I’ve read, a monthly update on the state of the pile and what I’ve bought and then other posts reviewing books that I’ve read, authors that I like and just general recommendations.
Please do go and read my review of The Grand Duchess – and then go and buy a copy. And if you’ve already read (and I hope loved) Ducky’s story, then go and fill in a gap in your Laurie Graham back catalogue. If you’re new to Ms Graham’s work, may I recommend Gone With the Windsors (my favourite) or At Sea or Mr Starlight. But really they’re all good.
Note the colour gradation that my matchy-matchy problem forces me into
I discovered Katie Fforde in my final year at university – when I was stressed, overworked and severely in need of relaxation. At the time I’d been dealing with the stress by watching a lot of DVDs (I had an unlimited LoveFilm membership and boy was I using it) because as a History and French student I was doing a lot of reading for my courses and reading didn’t seem like much of a treat! I was also working on a very limited budget – and I was trying not to buy books. I picked up my first Katie Fforde (Paradise Fields I think) at York Central Library – on a trip to borrow DVDs – and I was hooked. I knew from the start that these would be books that I would re-read over and over and my budget went out the window as I started buying up her back catalogue. As it turns out Paradise Fields is possibly my least favourite of her books now I’ve read the lot – and I think it is the only one that I don’t own – and I did buy myself a copy over the internet but it was the wrong size* and so I got rid of it.
There is a bit of a formula to them – and you’re not exactly going to have trouble working out who the heroine is going to end up with (or at least you’re not once you’ve read a few of them) but they’re brilliantly relaxing reading, which will leave you with a smile on your face and a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.
Stately Pursuits by Katie Fforde
If I had to pick a favourite, it would be Stately Pursuits. It has my favourite type of heroine – Hetty’s fairly close to the age I was when I first read the book (nearly a decade ago – crikey!) and I like my male leads to come from the grumpy on the outside but with a soft centre mould. Connor’s dilapidated stately home – which Hetty is sent to house sit adds to the books charm for me – I love books with houses as a character, that’s why Trisha Ashley’s A Winter’s Tale has been my favourite of hers for so long (although I think I like her “new” one Every Woman for Herselfnearly as much).
Like Hetty, many of Fforde’s heroines have (or get thrown into) interesting jobs – in another of my favourites, Flora in Flora’s Lot inherits a share in a struggling auction house and fights to save it (whilst falling in love), but there’s also wedding planners, artists, cooks on canal boat restaurants and interior designers. Another of my favourite books is Thyme Out – where Perdita, the salad gardener, ends up supplying the restaurant owned by her ex-husband and then working with him rather closer on a TV series.
For me Fforde’s books are great examples of the cozy romance genre – they’re not raunchy or rude and they won’t make you blush on the train – they are entertaining and romantic and do exactly what it says on the tin – what more can you ask for?!
You can find Katie Fforde’s back catalogue in any good bookshop – like Foyles – and her new books are usually stocked by the supermarkets in their multibuy promotions and they sometimes have some of the older ones too.
* I’m planning a post about my OCD tendencies when it comes to book jackets and arranging my shelves. But trust me when I say that I really don’t like it when books by the same author aren’t the same size and cover design!
So, I was crying in the supermarket car park today. Admittedly I’m quite an emotional person and it’s not that hard to make me cry in the first 36 hours after a nightshift, but Maya Angelou’s death really hit me. I sat scrolling through Twitter looking at the tributes that were pouring in to her from all sorts of people – from Joe Bloggs on the street to statesmen and everything in between – with tears in my eyes and no tissues to mop them up with.
Maya Angelou books on my shelf
I read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings when I was in my final year of A Levels. In English Literature we were comparing Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and it was on the suggested further reading list – which, being a book geek, I worked my way through. And her book was the one on that list that touched me more than any other.
I was a white, middle-class teenager from rural England. I’d heard about racism. I’d even studied the Civil Rights movement in GCSE History. Back in Judy Blume reading days I’d first come across segregation in Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself. I’d studied To Kill A Mockingbird in GCSE English. But it was Maya Angelou’s writing that really brought home to me the reality of what people had suffered, how they were persecuted just for the colour of their skin and how they had fought for rights that I took for granted – rights that it hadn’t even occurred to me that it was possible not to have. And it had happened in living memory. It’s still within living memory.
The covers of Maya Angelou’s autobiographies
After I read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, I went out and bought the next book of her autobiography – and the next and the next and so on. The final volume – A Song Flung Up To Heaven – came out during this period and I bought it, in hardback, because I was so desperate to find out what happened next. And I never bought hardbacks – I didn’t have a lot of spare cash and it wouldn’t match my paperbacks – but I didn’t care. Her writing meant that much to me.
There have been a lot of her quotes posted on Twitter and elsewhere since she died, but her own last tweet was only a few days ago and it is great and it is wise:
Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God.
For all the hardships and heartbreaks of her life, her writing was joyous. She wasn’t bitter – although at times she was angry – she rose above and wanted to make a difference and she did, she has. She crammed so much into her life that it really did need all those volumes of autobiography to tell it. If it had been a novel, you would have said it was too far-fetched. Whenever I saw her on the TV or in a video, she was a force of nature, one of those people who you thought would live forever – and through her writing, she will.
Other people will be able to say all this and more much more eloquently than I have, but I couldn’t not say something about the death of someone whose writing and outlook on life had had such an impact on me. I’m off to read her whole story again and to give thanks for a life so well lived.
Between the 1920s and 1970s, Georgette Heyer wrote nearly three dozen novels set Regency or Georgian times, along with a string of thrillers. I love me some Golden Age detective action, but this article is about her historical romances which, in my opinion, are sublime and nearly perfect examples of their type.
Hardback, paperback, different styles – my shelf has editions from the 1940s through til the 2000s
My mum had a shelf of Heyers on the landing the whole way through my childhood, but it was only when I was about 16 that I first picked one up (either False Colours or Cotillion, I can’t remember which) and that one led to another, which led to all of the ones she had and then to buying the ones that she didn’t. When my parents moved house a couple of years ago, mum passed them on to me as she “didn’t have space for them” any more, on the understanding that she could borrow them back if she wanted and that I wouldn’t get rid of them. Since then though, rather than borrowing them from me, she’s started re-buying them!
I have a lot of favourites, but if I was forced and could only have one, it would be The Grand Sophy. Sophy is feisty, independent, well-travelled and used to running her own life – and everyone else’s. She arrives back in England to live with her aunt and her cousins after her diplomat father is posted to South America. She finds them in the midst of a family crisis – with one daughter in love with an unsuitable poet and the eldest son engaged to a disagreeable bluestocking. Sophy proceeds to try to organise the household along more harmonious lines and arrange matches for her cousins and, in the end, herself.
My copy of The Grand Sophy – in what I think is a late 1980s edition
What I love about Heyer’s female characters are that they’re not weak and wishy-washy pushovers, but they also don’t feel like modern women who have been supplanted to the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Her women aren’t simpering misses sitting around waiting for life to happen to them or for a man to make their life complete, but they’re not doing anything that feels jarringly out of period either. I have a weakness for American-written British-set historical romances (you know, the ones with the buxom heroines bursting out of their corsets on the covers) which lead a shamefaced existence* on the uppermost shelf of my tallest spare bedroom bookcase – and that’s a problem I find with some (but by no means all) of their heroines.
One of the feistiest and most independent of Heyer’s heroines is Léonie in These Old Shades – who we first meet as Léon the page when he is bought “body and soul” by Justin, Duke of Avon – known as Satanas because of his lack of morals. Heyer books always have a lot plot and not a lot of yearning looks or heaving bosoms and Shades is a great example of this. At the start of the book Justin is a thoroughly disreputable character who buys Léon not to free him from a life of abuse and mistreatment, but because he sees a method of being revenged on one of his enemies. Léonie is in love with Avon almost from the start, but you’re not sure until the very end, after the plot has taken you from France to England and back to France again, whether Avon’s motives have changed at all. Most of Heyer’s books are standalones, but Shades is unusual in that some of the characters have appeared before, albeit with different names and in a less developed form, in The Black Moth – and Justin, Léonie and Rupert all appear again in Devil’s Cub (which I also love) where Justin and Léonie’s son Dominic – who has all of his father’s faults and his mother’s temper but does at least have a conscience – runs off with a virtuous young lady who is trying to protect her sister’s honour.
My copies of Moth, Shades and Devil’s Cub show some of the range of different editions in my collection!
In Regency Buck (another with a sort-of sequel – An Infamous Army of which more later) another strong minded heroine comes up against a domineering alpha-male and, dear reader, you may start to see a pattern in the sort of heroes that I like. Preferably tall, dark and handsome, he needs to be bossy, clever and with a bit of a dark side or at the least a temper – like Buck‘s Julian St John Audley, the titular Sylvester or best of all Damerel in Venetia. But they also need to be up against a smart woman who is prepared to stand up for herself and what she wants. I don’t want to see any woman being forced into a marriage by a man who holds all the power. The Heyers that come off my shelf the least are ones like Cotillion (Freddy’s too thick), Friday’s Child (Hero the heroine is too wet), Cousin Kate (Kate’s too stupid to see the trouble coming) and A Civil Contract (Adam needs a good slap).
My copy of Devil’s Cub has a note from in the front written by my mum
Those are the exceptions though and just looking along the shelf is like seeing group of old friends – they live in the sitting room so I have them to hand if I need them! If you’ve never read any Georgette Heyer, may I heartily recommend you have a look now – particularly if you are a fan of authors like Eloisa James or Julia Quinn. They don’t have the sex that modern historicals do – in fact there’s barely any kissing, but they’re still breathtakingly romantic in places and have tight well-structured plots – and a wealth of meticulously researched historical detail (An Infamous Army was required reading for trainee army officers because its descriptions of the Battle of Waterloo are so accurate – it also features Julian and Judith from Regency Buck and a cameo from a much older Dominic and Mary from Devil’s Cub) that I can only imagine the current crop of authors have drawn on. It also says a lot that more than ninety years since her first book was published and forty years (this year in fact) since Georgette Heyer died, her Regency/Georgian romances are still in print.
A selection of my favourites in a charming garden setting!
I like them so much I even have a couple of them on my kindle and as audiobooks in case I need a fix when I’m away from home. And, while I was taking the photos for this article I discovered I’ve got a couple of duplicates of my own – I think I bought the pretty Pan paperbacks of The Talisman Ring and The Masqueraders when I was living in Essex – in the days when mum had most of the Heyers…
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 