Category: Book of the Week

Book of the Week, new releases

Book of the Week: Philippa Flynn’s Year of Panic and Piracy

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I’m actually following up on a new release I mentioned a couple of weeks back for this week’s pick, because it really lived up to the promise of the blurb and the gorgeous cover and was a really great read.

At the start of the book Philippa is cycling to work as a university professor when she narrowly misses falling into a sinkhole as it opens up. This near miss gives her a wake up call and suddenly she doesn’t want to put up with the frustrations of her academic job any more – whether it’s the office that’s actually a cupboard or the (male) colleagues who seem to only value her for the fact they can force her to do the jobs they don’t want to. So she hands in her notice and throws her life in to chaos. Luckily she inherited her romance-author grandmother’s house (and boat) and so she moves back there to regroup. Unluckily the house is in need of some serious repair and also comes with a sitting tenant – her grandmother’s former co-writer (and cover model). As Philippa and Dylan start to navigate their awkward co-habitation situation they also get to know each other and eventually find outlines for six more novels in Philippa’s grandmothers fantasy pirate romance series, which they start to write together. But can Philippa actually find a new future outside of academia?

This has a really good slow burn romance with two characters who have a lot of issues to work through, but because Philippa has the backstop of selling the house (which is on prime ocean front land) the stakes are lower than you might expect. She does have the most awful parents that I have recently encountered in literature and I really, really wanted them to get a lot of comeuppance (more than they did get, I’m warning you). But Philippa and Dylan’s slow dance towards each other is worth putting up with the rage that her mother will generate in you (her siblings are better than her parents, mostly, but that’s not saying much). Philippa’s disillusionment with academia felt very real – as did her difficulty in letting go of her plan for her life and figuring out a new one. I think that’s very relatable for millennials especially, who graduated into the financial crisis of 2008 and feel like they’ve been trying to make their lives more secure ever since then.

And as a romance reader, I loved that Philippa’s grandmother was a romance author of the old school type and that romance novels were the answer to Philippa figuring herself out and finding love. This is a warm hug of a novel – well except for the leaking roof, and bracing sea breezes – and would make a great autumnal read as you curl up on a sofa and hide from the changing seasons. I haven’t read any of Jacqueline Firkins’ other books but I’m pretty sure I have at least one of them on the TBR so you may see that popping up on the weekly list soon too!

My copy came from NetGalley but it was an Amazon First Reads pick in August before it came out at the start of September and is now in Kindle Unlimited so if you’re in that you can get it. That does mean it’s not on Kobo at the moment, and I also don’t have much of a sense of how easy it might be to find in the shops but I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: The Author’s Guide to Murder

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For the second week running I’m picking a book I finished on Monday. I did this to myself last week by picking Vagabond and now I’m creating another potential problem for Future Verity. Fingers crossed the train journeys this week help me with a bigger reading list to chose from and break the cycle…

On a remote island off the Scottish coast, Castle Kinloch is a gothic mansion that’s been turned into a writers retreat in the hands of a literary superstar. Except Brett Saffron Paisley has just been found dead in the folly in the grounds and three American writers who were staying at the castle are among the prime suspects in the case. Kat de Noir writes erotica, Cassie Prigle writes cozy mysteries and Emma Endicott writes historical fiction – but the three of them say they’re working on a novel together, but the detective in charge of the case is suspicious.

This says “A Novel” on the front, but actually this is Williams, White and Willig doing a murder mystery that’s also a satire about the literary world. Now I will say that this is a big shift from what the three of them usually write – which is timeslip historical fiction like The Lost Summers of Newport – and I’m not sure they did a good enough job of setting that up for the regular reader. The characters are very caricaturist and I found it pretty hard going for the first half or so, then it improved as I realised that they were going for maximum ridiculous. Or at least I hope that’s what they were going for. By the end I was won over by the absolutely bonkers finale to the mystery strand and the fact that everyone got a happily ever after.

Basically I liked it when it was over more than I had during the reading process which makes this a bit of a strange one, but hey this has got very, very mixed reviews on Goodreads, so I thought it was worth writing about because I think that says something about the expectations management on this one for regular Williams, Willig and White readers and the blurb saying it’s Agatha Christie meets Murder, She Wrote which really doesn’t describe what’s going on here either. I did love the nods to their other characters and real life authors in this but I definitely prefer their historical fiction – and I suspect if we get another book from the trio (and their usual publication schedule was every other year which should have made this year a year but I don’t see one on the schedule) then they’ll go back to that.

This one is an import from the US if you want it in an actual copy so you’re probably going to have to order it rather than stumble across it in a shop, but it is on Kindle and Kobo – although I think £6.99 is probably a bit much for how much I liked it!

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, memoirs, reviews

Book of the Week: Vagabond

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As I said yesterday, it was a bit of a grim week on a lot of fronts, one of which was the celebrity death front. And although I finished this on Monday so it’s technically cheating, it feels somehow right to make Tim Curry’s memoir this week’s pick.

In case you missed the last fifty years of pop culture, Tim Curry was an actor who first rose to prominence as Frank N Furter in The Rocky Horror Show in a role he reprised in the movie version The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He went on to play an eclectic range of characters across his career – and if you’re a millennial he will likely have been a key figure in one of the movies or TV shows that defined your childhood – whether it is Muppet Treasure Island, Home Alone 2, Annie, The Wild Thornberries, The Worst Witch or Clue. And there are more I could have picked – he was that prolific. He had a stroke in 2012 but continued to do some voice work and occasional appearances after that.

Vagabond came out last autumn and was much awaited as Curry didn’t give a lot of interviews (although he was always great value when he did) and rarely revealed anything about his personal life. And if you’re looking for juicy scoops on that front, this is not that. He warns you right at the start he’s not talking about his love life and he sticks to that. What this is is a gallop through the rest of his life with a look at his early years it feels mostly because he thinks it helps you understand his attitude to life: his father was a navy chaplain whose job meant they moved around a lot and then died young (in his late 40s from a stroke), quite a distant relationship with his mother who didn’t understand him and a boarding school education all of which added up to a very self contained and independent adult. He does a really good job of making you feel like he’s revealing a lot about himself while actually keeping a lot back – basically a memoir on his own terms, which he sets out very clearly at the start.

I am one of those who first saw him in one of those 80s and 90s roles and then graduated to Rocky Horror as a teen and then missed out on seeing him as King Arthur in Spamalot because I was a penniless student at the wrong end of the country at the time. So I learned a lot about his career from reading the book but what I enjoyed the most about it was how much it felt like it was really in his voice. And I know I said that he didn’t give a lot of interviews, but the ones he did were memorable and of course he’s done so much voice work over the years that it is easy to imagine him saying the words as you read it – and he did read the audiobook and I can’t tell you the willpower it took not to also buy the audiobook when I had the hardback on the pile.

I’m glad that he got to tell his story on his terms – even if he wasn’t entirely sure about the whole concept as he said several times through the book. I’m annoyed at myself for the fact that it took him dying for me to bump the book to the top of the to-read pile but strangely it did feel like a good time to read it and having read all the obituaries and watched all the clips this week it was nice to read about his life in his own words – and spot where quotes had been lifted for the obits or stories that he had told in interviews popped up or were lightly referenced. But I enjoyed reading it and it’s out in paperback now and if I was running a bookshop I’d be putting it in an obvious place for people to happen across right now.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, Fantasy, romance

Book of the Week: Swordheart

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This was a really easy pick today. Yes I read books last week that are out this week, but actually this was my favourite thing I read AND it has a sequel out today, which I’m going to have to sit on my hands not to buy straightaway because I loved this so much. And you can hear about one of this week’s new releases tomorrow, because I wrote a Recommendsday for three of the new August books that I’ve read and you can thank me for that later.

Halla has been housekeeper to her great uncle since her husband died. But now Uncle Silas is dead, she’s inherited his property and her cousin and his mother have locked her in her room until she’ll agree to marry him. She’d rather die than marry clammy handed Alver, so after a few days imprisonment and increasingly desparate she takes the sword that’s mounted on the wall in its scabbard to see if she might be able to use it to commit suicide. But when she unsheathes it, a man appears. Sarkis is an immortal warrior trapped inside the enchanted sword. He is usually fighting battles or carrying out assassinations but now he’s bound to protect Halla. What follows is a journey back and forth across the land to try and secure Halla’s safety and her inheritance and an experience quite unlike anything Sarkis has had in the centuries since he was trapped in the sword.

I really, really enjoyed this. It’s got great characters, a good central problem to solve and brilliant world building that is never info-dumped on you. This is set in the same world as some of Kingfishers other series but I haven’t read any of them (yet!) and I didn’t feel like I was missing anything. I’m on a big run of cozy fantasy at the moment and this was exactly what I was hoping it might be. I’ve written before about my patchy record with fantasy and also with knowing what I’m going to like in the genre, but this hit smack into my reading wheelhouse and was just what I needed after a distinctly mixed week in some of my other reading. It was a brilliant palate cleanser after a book that I really, really disliked and I would happily have followed Halla and Sarkis around for another hundred pages – and it’s already a 400 page book.

I picked this up in The Spicy Librarian after seeing it in various shops for ages – including reading the first few pages in Foyles a year or so back and enjoying it but not being able to justify buying it at the time – and seeing various people in my bookish communities raving about them for a while. On the one hand, I regret not reading this sooner, on the other, as I said at the top I now don’t have to wait to read the next in the series- and for people who read this when it first came out it’s been an eight year wait! The new one is called Daggerbound, and it’s about The Dervish, one of Sarkis’s comrades – and there’s a third one coming next year about Angharad. I’m already very excited.

Swordheart should be super easy to get hold of – I’ve seen it in almost every bookshop with a fantasy or romantasy section for the last year or so – and it’s in Kindle and Kobo. I had been waiting for it to go on offer since I read the start in Foyles, but I hadn’t spotted it happening yet, so maybe the new one will be the moment for an offer?

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: Honey Bee Mine

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It’s Tuesday again and I’m back again with another romance book pick – but this time it’s a bit of a weepy one, in a good way though, not in a not-really-a-romance-because-someone-dies way. I previewed Sarah T Dubb’s second book in the lookahead at the start of the year and so it’s probably not a surprise that this would be my pick once I read it.

Penny Becker is a bee keeper, and she’s also trying to keep her family’s farm going. She grew up on the farm with her mother and grandmother – after her grandfather and her father upped and left their relative partners. Penny never stops working – and she never relies on anyone other than herself because it always ends in tears. The last time she did try to let someone in, it resulted in a failed expansion plan, the loan for which is the reason the farm might be about to be foreclosed on. She really needs the annual honey festival to be a success to save the farm. Zander Bouras spent his childhood summers on his grandfather’s farm next door and he really, really hated it. He is not at all happy to be back in town for the summer, but his ex-wife wants to spend summer in town with her parents and where his son goes, Zander goes. And so he’s back in town and he’s taking the summer off from his life as a restauranteur to deal with the property his grandfather left him. As a teen he hated Penny for her perfect life, but his son is really into bees and so he and Penny are forced into each other’s orbit and need to learn to work together.

I was expecting the enemies bit of the enemies to lovers trope to last a bit longer than it did, but actually Zander and Penny get past their issues relatively quickly and this is more of a small town romance where one half of the couple really, really isn’t planning on staying in town and where the other is keeping some pretty big secrets. And I’ll admit I did want Penny to use her words and explain what was going on to someone, anyone other than just her co-worker, but he was encouraging her to let people in and Penny’s reluctance to ask for help felt very logical given the circumstances of her life. And this isn’t always doing what you expect it to do, and there’s one particular thing I was half expecting to occur that didn’t and in the end, I didn’t really mind because I was too invested in how Zander and Penny were going to find their way to a happy ending.

Sarah T Dubb says at the start of the book that this wasn’t the second book that she was planning to release after Birding With Benefits and this did make me a bit teary eyed at times – in a good way, not a miserable one which I don’t remember from Birding, but honestly, like her prior novel this has relatable characters who are imperfect and dealing with it – even if it’s a completely new group of people in a completely different state to Birding – and maybe one day we will see the original second book too. Either way, I’ll be looking for the next book from Dubb whenever it appears.

This one is available in Kindle and Kobo. I pre-ordered the paperback but when it turned up (back in March!) it was definitely an American edition and I don’t think I’ve seen this in a store yet so I don’t know how easy it will be to get a proper copy. If I spot it I’ll try and mention it though.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy

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Happy Tuesday everyone, this week’s choice was one of the easiest that I have recently made. I started this one on Sunday night and finished it on Tuesday and I would have finished it sooner if I hadn’t had to work. Anyway, to the book.

Osric is a member of an order of assassins, Aurienne is a healer and a member of an enemy order. But Osric needs an expert healer – he’s injured and his order doesn’t let members retire. Luckily Aurienne desperately needs funding to help find a cure for a disease that’s ravaging children. And that is how the two of them find themselves flung together. As Aurienne (reluctantly) tries to heal Osric, the two of them discover that there may be some thing bigger behind the reoccurrence of the Pox. The trouble is that the longer the two of them spend in each other’s company, the harder it is to ignore the attraction between them – no matter how much they want to ignore it.

This was just a total delight. Really, it absolutely was. It’s got witty banter, two main characters who really don’t want to like each other but who really need each other and the forced proximity is truly epic. If I have a gripe with it, it’s that you don’t get all the answers in this book – but that’s also good news because it means there is a sequel, which came out in July. I wish I’d read this sooner – because the sequel was on NetGalley if only I’d known and now I’m going to have to pay money (and quite a lot of money) for it if I want to know what happens next any time soon.

I have a very mixed record on fantasy, but this is exactly the sort of end of fantasy that I like. It’s not cozy but it’s not to terribly high concept for me to deal with. Snarky banter is one of my favourite things in books and this has some of the best banter I’ve recently encountered as well as a brilliant inner monologue from the two leads to keep you going when they’re not actively fighting with each other. And the slow burn and forced proximity is excellent. it’s just so good. So, so good.

This one is super easy to get hold of – I’ve seen it in bookshops all over the place in the last year and just never got around to picking it up (more fool me) and of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too. Place your bets now on how long I manage to resist the sequel!

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, new releases, reviews

Book of the Week: A Wedding Planner’s Guide to Stealing the Bride

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Happy Tuesday and my pick today is back to romance and it is one of the new releases that I read last week and there’s another coming up tomorrow in the quick reviews too.

Kalpana is planning the wedding of her dreams, or at least the wedding of her fiancé’s dreams. Marcus is a literary fiction superstar and Kalpana is a romance writer. He’s from old money and she’s the third generation of her family born in the UK but they’re in Sri Lanka with their wedding planner Sampath to plan the big traditional Sri Lankan wedding that Marcus wants – even though Kalpana isn’t sure those traditions feel right for her. Sampath is a great listener – and seems to hear what Kapana wants in a way that Marcus seems not to be.

I read it across less than twenty four hours over the weekend and it was a real treat. As you can tell from the title this is a love triangle type situation, but I don’t think this is going to ping anyone’s cheating monitor for reasons that I can’t really explain without it being a spoiler. As well as the romance, Charika is exploring feelings of identity and culture and also looking at the place of romance and commercial fiction in the bookish infrastructure all of which is right up my street. It also really made me want to visit Sri Lanka – it paints such a vivid picture of the future places they visit and the potential wedding venues.

My copy came from NetGalley but this came out last week and I’m not sure how easy the paperback will be to find but it’s on Kindle and Kobo for £1.99 at the moment as are some of Charika’s previous novels some of which I’ve written about here like Picture Perfect and Knowing Me, Knowing You.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: American Fantasy

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Yes, yes, yes. I finished this on Monday. But I would have finished it on Sunday if I hadn’t been watching the World Cup final and also reading Dimsie. It happens. Anyway, this is still relatively new (it came out mid-May) and as this peak summer holiday season (it’s the first week of the school holidays in a lot of places in the UK this week) this would also be a great book to read on your sunlounger.

So the plot: American Fantasy is a cruise ship, and for the duration of this cruise it’s going to be filled with fans of the 90s boyband Boy Talk, among them Annie. She was meant to be on the cruise with her sister, but after her sister broke her leg, she’s there alone. Annie is also newly divorced, newly empty nested and wondering what she’s doing on this cruise full of people who are clearly bigger fans than she is (or was). But with the help of her roommate, she starts to embrace the break from reality and the opportunity to re-examine her life as she takes a break on the sea. Also on board are said boyband, and when Annie accidentally connects with one of the members, it seems like there might be a whole new world out there .

I was expecting from the blurb that this could be a bit of a Romantic Comedy situation, but it keeps you guessing a bit more than that. We’re following the cruise from three points of view – Annie’s but also Sarah who works for the production company in charge of the boyband side of the cruise and Keith one of the members of the boyband. All the action takes place across the cruise and I’ve seen a lot of people saying that there isn’t a lot of plot or action. I’d disagree with that a bit – but I’d agree that a lot of what happens is internal to the characters. Annie’s situation I’ve already mentioned, but Sarah has just been dumped by her girlfriend and Keith is stuck in a bit of a rut in his life. Annie and Keith are doing the most reflecting on their lives, but Sarah is doing some too – along with providing the reader with a slightly different view point of the cruise and its attendees.

I’m a bit younger than Annie but I was a boyband teenager and so I really enjoyed reading about a fandom that’s been with a band for decades and is willing to shell out thousands of pounds/dollars to spend some time in proximity to them. I’m not that person – and Annie wouldn’t have been if her sister hadn’t wanted her to go, so I really felt this description of Annie as she waits to have her photo taken with the band:

Annie felt her heart rate increase. She wasn’t sweating anymore, she wasn’t hot, she wasn’t excited, exactly. It was the clickclickclick of a wooden roller coaster climbing to its first drop. Dread. It was one thing to be here—to admit to herself that this one group of men still mattered to her for whatever combination of reasons. Still, it was something else to actually meet them. Annie was comfortable with Boy Talk existing as an idea, a sort of inner party trick, like knitting or knowing something by heart. This was what she had known by heart for so many years, and hearts were meant to be kept inside.

Straub has talked about being a fan of New Kid on the Block and going on an NKotB cruise in the publicity tour for this book but contours of Boy Talk’s back story – one member of the band leaving and doing other things/becoming the break out success – is actually more similar to other bands – primarily N*Sync and Justin in the US but also Boyzone and Ronan, Take That and Robbie in the UK. I really enjoyed that Straub isn’t mocking the women for their fandom she’s leaning into it. There is some crazy in here, but it’s not about them having something that they are fans of. And that’s nice because liking boybands is often one of those things that’s framed as a guilty pleasure – like reading romance novels, or going to events for things that you like. I’ve certainly felt that.

I don’t think this is my favourite Emma Straub and I think what she’s trying to leave the reader with is more open-ended than I’m ever going to prefer, but it was a lovely reading experience and I only wish I’d been reading it on a sun lounger at the beach and not on the sofa and the train.

This is going to be super easy to find in shops – I’ve already seen it in several not just the time I mentioned in this post where I’ve reused the photo of the UK cover above from. I like the US cover better, which is why I used it at the top of the post and I think it is more reflective of the tone and genre of the novel that this one, but I wanted you to know what you’re looking out for. And of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo and in audio. My version came from NetGalley, even if I didn’t get to it before publication.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, crime, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: The Verdict of Twelve

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Happy Tuesday everyone, it’s due to be sweltering again today and it’s also the France v Spain semi final so I suspect nota lot of reading is going to be occurring. But I do have something from last week’s heat affected list to talk about.

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I’ve struggled with how to describe the plot of this because the blurb really doesn’t give anything away. So here is what the blurb says:

A woman is on trial for her life, accused of murder. The twelve members of the jury each carry their own secret burden of guilt and prejudice which could affect the outcome. In this extraordinary crime novel, we follow the trial through the eyes of the jurors as they hear the evidence and try to reach a unanimous verdict. Will they find the defendant guilty, or not guilty? And will the jurors’ decision be the correct one? Since its first publication in 1940, Verdict of Twelve has been widely hailed as a classic of British crime writing.

So as you can tell this is an unusual type of murder mystery. Postgate introduces you to each juror – their backgrounds and the things that might influence their opinions as they are sworn in, and then jumps to the events leading up to the crime (without telling you who did it) and then the trial itself.

This was originally published in 1940 and as the blurb says murder was still a capital crime, so the defendant’s life is in the hands of the jury. It’s really well written to give the reader plenty to think about as you’re reading the book and I found the ending really clever too. If I had one problem with it, it’s that in the Kindle edition I read, there seemed to be an element missing from the graphics in the deliberation section, but I need to go and look at a paperback copy to see if that’s an issue in those, or maybe even a deliberate thing. This actually came out nearly ten years ago, when the BLCC range was a lot smaller, and is one of the genuinely forgotten but deserving reprints.

It’s in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, which means that the only version you can get through Kobo is the audiobook one, and of course it’s also in paperback and is one I’ve seen fairly regularly in stores. You can buy it directly from the British Library in their store at the library on the online one where it’s only £8.99 and is also in their 3 for 2 deal. Bargain.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, new releases

Book of the Week: The Shampoo Effect

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Yes I know, this is the least unexpected BotW pick since, oh I don’t know, the last time I previewed a new release book on the Thursday and then promptly had it on the read list on Monday. But in my defence, I do try not to do this and pick my previews accordingly – and indeed when I went back and checked this the last time it happened is more than a year ago with A Murder for Miss Hortense (but only because I spaced out reading Dolly All the Time, The Paris Match and Finders Keepers from their previews – mostly because those were paperback preorders and not *right there* on my Kindle tempting me). But although there were a lot of books out last week, this was the one I was most excited about given how much I loved Pineapple Street. And also one of those other books that was out last week was a second Miss Hortense book – and was trying not to repeat on that front too. Anyway, with that slightly defensive opening over, to the review:

Caroline has always wanted to be a writer and when she gets a year long writer’s fellowship, she gives up her job in publishing and moves to Greenhead, Massachusetts and the cottage that writer the fellowship is endowed for once lived in. In Greenhead she meets Van. Van is one of the locals – an outdoorsy, ecologist who is like a big friendly dog made human. Soon they’re seeing each other and and Van is including her with his group of friends – including Bailey, who he’s been falling into bed with ever since they were at school. Van’s friends aren’t overly pleased at the advent of this rival to Bailey, and this only gets worse when Bailey realises that she’s pregnant with Van’s child. She’s definitely only in their circle because Van wants her to be – and what she does when she’s not anymore throws everything in the group up in the air even more than her presence did in the first place.

The blurb doesn’t reveal what it is that Caroline does – and as it happens a long way into the book (I want to say after the 60 percent point) I’m not either because it’s a huge spoiler, but it’s totally delicious and turns what was already a really good read into something truly excellent. This is very much a rich people problems novel as well as the Greenhead group with their family summer homes and ski trips, Caroline’s mother is a hugely successful writer and there’s never any sense that Caroline’s finances are dependent on whatever she writes on the fellowship being a success and so she’s an outsider only in that she doesn’t know them, not so much in status or class. And so it’s all about relationships and drama on that front and even if people break up you know they’re going to be OK financially, even if they’re upset interpersonally.

All of which makes it exactly my sort of soapy, beach read and I absolutely devoured it, messaging various people as I went along with choice quotes and how much I was enjoying it. It would be a perfect sun lounger read – and I can see why it’s the July pick for Jenna’s book club* because it’s a summer read and I can see people having diverging views about it – and in fact if you look at the goodreads reviews you will see that! If you liked Pineapple Street (which obviously I did), I think you’ll like this. That was about Rich People Problems in Washington DC, this is about Rich People Problems on the coast. The relationships are dysfunctional – and apart from Caroline that’s because they all have so much history together – and do they even really have that much in common any more aside from that shared history? Read it and find out, if you like the same sort of books that I do (and maybe that’s why are you here?) then I don’t think you’ll regret it.

My copy came via NetGalley but I think this is going to be everywhere. Pineapple Street was, and as previously mentioned, this has been picked by one of the big US book clubs so I’m expecting this to be as everywhere as Pineapple Street, if not more so. And of course it’s also on Kindle and Kobo and in audiobook.

Happy Reading!

*Jenna is Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of George W Bush and presenter of the Today Show on which her book club is a feature.