A bit of a bitty week of reading, but some interesting stuff in there. I’m trying to do better with getting to my NetGalley Books on time so that’s a fair few of this week’s books too.
Read:
A Scot in the Dark by Sarah MacLean
The Linking Rings by John Gaspard
The Phantom of Oz by Cindy Brown
A Fourth Form Friendship by Angela Brazil
A Week to be Wild by JC Harroway
The Spiritual Poems of Rumi by Rumi
Started:
The Riviera Set by Mary S Lovell
Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks
Stiff by Mary Roach
The Mitford Murders by Jessica Fellowes
Still reading:
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler
The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson
The Vanity Fair Diaries by Tina Brown
A couple of ebooks bought, but no actual books, so that’s progress in a way!
Welcome to the first BotW post of 2018. It feels like ages since I wrote one of these – ad it has been nearly a month – but I hope you’ve enjoyed all the bonus posts over the festive period. Anyway, normal service now being resumed and I’m back to talk about my favourite book that I read last week. And in keeping with my current obsessions, it’s a Jill Shalvis book.
I was aiming for artistic with this picture. Not sure if it came off!
Quinn is finally starting to get her life back on track after her sister was killed in a car accident. The two were best friends as well as sisters and after losing Beth, Quinn has lost herself as well. A sous-chef in a cool restaurant in LA, she’s got a family friend and ex-boyfriend who is desparate to marry her. But something still feels wrong in her life – something is missing, beyond the fat that she’s missing her sister. Then an unexpected inheritance throws what she knows about herself up in the air all over again and she heads up the coast to the small town of Wildstone to try and rediscover who she is. Once she gets there she discovers an even more earthshattering secret that brings with it the chance of a new life. But is it the life that she wanted?
Lost and Found Sisters is billed as Shalvis’s first “women’s fiction novel” (as opposed to a straight up contemporary romance) and I sort of agree with that. There is a romance here, and it’s fairly central, but actually the main theme of the book is Quinn’s voyage of discovery. When I was writing about Sarah Morgan’s Moonlight over Manhattan I said that one of the things that I liked about it was that the heroine fixed herself and found love as a side effect of that and I think this is the next step on from that. Quinn is more broken than Harriet was and there’s more to her story than just getting over something – she finds out something completely new about herself that reshapes her whole idea of who she is and that takes a lot of adjustment. The Quinn you see at the end of the book is a very different person to the one at the start, with a whole new set of priorities and responsibilities.
However, Lost and Found Sisters wasn’t as different from Shalvis’s other novels as I was expecting from the women’s fiction label, so I think that if you only read romance, you will still enjoy this – there is a romance here as well and it’s a very nice one, with sections of the book written from the hero’s point of view (he has stuff he’s working out too) – so don’t be put off. This isn’t the miserable, super-worthy stuff that you might be imagining. I picked this up from the bookshop on a whim on Sunday morning and polished it off that day – it is a summer-set book but it was a lovely way to spend a couple of train journeys in the miserable January weather.
Lost and Found Sisters came out in June – I found my copy in The Works, but it may also still be in the other bookshops. Amazon have it in paperback and on Kindle, and it’s also available on Kobo too. If you don’t read summer books in winter, I suggest you add it to your watch list and see if it drops in price as we get towards the nicer weather (or when the sequel comes out!).
Here is the final WiB of 2017 – ending neatly at the end of the year precisely. And everything that I finished this week was to try and finish ReadHarder – and it worked! As it’s the end of the year, I’ve rationalised the ongoing books – and given up on the Rushdie – I wasn’t enjoying it and I’ve got lots of other things I’d rather read in 2018.
Read:
Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
Meridian by Alice Walker
French Poems of the Great War translated by Ian Higgins
Revolutionary Ride by Lois Pryce
Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
Started:
Second Grave on the Right by Darynda Jones
Still reading:
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler
The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson
The Vanity Fair Diaries by Tina Brown
I was so busy trying to finish ReadHarder that I only bought one book – in the Waterstone’s sale and no ebooks. Not too bad really.
Yeah. This is a day late, but you had a nice bonus post yesterday, so I don’t feel too sorry for you. And as it’s been another one of those weeks – all reading plans derailed by the need to catch up on Christmas preparations – you weren’t really missing out on much anyway!
Read:
Christmas at the Grange by T E Kinsey
A River in the Sky by Elizabeth Peters
Started:
The Vanity Fair Diaries by Tina Brown
Still reading:
The Golden House by Salman Rushdie
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler
The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson
French Poems of the Great War translated by Ian Higgins
Meridian by Alice Walker
A couple of books bought – but I blame the stress of Christmas!
Yes. I know. This is late. And short. But Christmas preps + work + Noirville = stressed and behind Verity. Sorry. Normal service will be resumed soon. I hope. Or at least if it doesn’t I’m going to cry. Any how. It was also a hard choice this week – I loved the new Gail Carriger novella, Romancing the Werewolf, but it’s only been a few weeks since Imprudence was my BotW. I also read a lot of Christmassy books – some of which you’ll be hearing about soon so I couldn’t use them either. So this week’s BotW is the very unseasonal Suddenly Last Summer by Sarah Morgan, because I read two of the three Snow Crystal books last week, back to back, because they were so much fun.
Suddenly Last Summer is the middle book of the three – the other two are Christmas-themed – and I read the first one in December last year and then the third one last week when it was on offer for this Christmas and I discovered I already had this on my kindle waiting for me. Yes. I have so many books on my Kindle that I don’t know what’s on there. I don’t know why that surprises you given everything you know about my to-read pile. Moving on, so this is the story of Sean-the-surgeon and Elise-the-French-chef. Sean is too busy for a relationship – not that that stops women from trying – and Elise has sworn off relationships for good. They had a fling the previous year – and spark is still there. Will they be able to work things out to get a happy ending?
Well they do of course, because this is Romancelandia, but the fun is watching them get there. The chemistry between Sean and Elise is great – they have a firey passionate relationship that starts out as just a physical thing (or at least they tell themselves that) but develops into something more than they were expecting or can handle. This also has a really strong sense of place and family ties. It’s set in and around the Snow Crystal resort that Sean’s family owns and he has a very conflicted relationship with the resort and it affects how he gets on with his family. Sean loves the place – or at least he does when he spends enough time there to remember how much he likes the outdoor life and the things that come with it, but he hates the responsibility that comes the family’s ownership of the resort and how it affected his father and stopped him from being able to do what he wanted. Elise is French and is struggling with events that happened in Paris in her past and that is colouring how she makes all of her relationsjips. Watching the two of them work through their issues – because as always with Sarah Morgan, love doesn’t solve the problem – is really rewarding.
I read this at totally the wrong time of year, but I still really enjoyed it. In fact it made a nice break from Christmas stories and Noir. As I’ve said before, Sarah Morgan writes great romances where characters have real problems to solve and where finding love isn’t the protagonist’s main goal – they’re trying to sort their lives out in some way and finding love is a delightful side effect of that. Morgan is a prolific writer and there always seems to be one of her books on offer for 99p on Kindle – as I write this it’s former BotW Moonlight over Manhattan, which I highly recommend.
Suddenly Last Summer is available on Kindle, Kobo and in paperback if you can find it – Amazon have it, but I suspect you’ll have to order it in to your local bookshop rather than find it on the shelves.
Still reading #Noirville entries this week and less of everything else. Still a nice week of reading though, even if I do have way too many books on the go at once as I try and finish off my #ReadHarder challenge. I suspect this week won’t be much better – because it’s Christmas party week.
Read:
Maybe This Christmas by Sarah Morgan
Paris for One by Jojo Moyes
Suddenly Last Summer by Sarah Morgan
Christmas in New York by Holly Greene
Romancing the Werewolf by Gail Carriger
Started:
Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookshop by Robin Sloan
Meridian by Alice Walker
Still reading:
The Golden House by Salman Rushdie
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler
The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson
Runout Groove by Andrew Cartmel
French Poems of the Great War translated by Ian Higgins
A couple of Christmas ebooks bought or preordered, but really quite restrained.
As we get closer and closer to Christmas, it’s getting harder and harder for me to pick BotW’s that don’t infringe on my Christmas reading suggestion posts. Hence why this week’s choice is Rumer Godden’s China Court – a book which I still can’t make up my mind what I think about it, several days after I finished reading it.
Another train based photo…
China Court is the story of the homecoming of Tracy, who arrives back at her grandmother’s house the day after her grandma has died. Brought up in America, Tracy spent the favourite part of her childhood living at China Court and is worried about what her grandmother’s death may mean for the old house. But as well as being about Tracy’s return, the book is also the story of family who have lived in the house over the years and their trials and tribulations.
Regular readers will know that I love a good family saga, and that I love time slip novels, and this is a bit of both – a huge cast of characters and two timelines, one present, one past – although the past one moves through time rather than being the story of just one person in the past. And although it took me a while to get into it (as evidenced by the length of time it spent in the Week in Books posts), once I had got into it, I didn’t want to put it down* because I wanted to know what happened.
At the start, there is a family tree, but also a note from the author asking you to only look at it if you really have to because her aim is for the family and their relationships to unroll in their own time and for you to work it out for yourself. I mostly managed that, but I did have to have a few looks at the family tree when I was picking the book back up again after a few days break.
I haven’t read a lot of Rumer Godden’s books – and most of what I have read have been her children’s books. And as I said at the start, I still can’t work out what I thought. The ending isn’t as satisfying as I wanted it to be – even though all the ingredients seem to be there for it to work. I didn’t like a lot of the characters – or what they were doing – but I really liked Tracy and her story line. Even writing this hasn’t really helped me work out what I though of this and whether I liked it or not. I still don’t know if it’s going to go on to the bookshelf, or get lent to mum or sent straight to the charity shop. Puzzling.
Coming soon: Christmas reading recommendations. While you’re waiting, don’t forget the Christmas gift guides – Him, Her and Me are still here.
Happy Reading!
*but I did, because I had to go to work. And I didn’t like it *quite* enough to break my rules about not taking books that I have less than 100 pages left to read to work with me.**
** Because it’s a waste of bag space if it’s not going to last me all the way down and most of the way back.
So I may have slipped up a bit in the book buying stakes this week – but it’s nearly Christmas and there are offers. My main task in the next few weeks has got to be finishing off #ReadHarder2017 – I’ve really got to pull my finger out now…
Read:
The One that Got Away by Melissa Pimentel
Need You Now by Emma Douglas
China Court by Rumer Godden
The Finch that Stole Christmas by Donna Andrews
The Christmas Surprise by Jenny Colgan
Marling Hall by Angela Thirkell
Started:
Runout Groove by Andrew Cartmel
Paris for One by Jojo Moyes
French Poems of the Great War translated by Ian Higgins
Maybe This Christmas by Sarah Morgan
Still reading:
The Golden House by Salman Rushdie
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler
The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson
1 book and 3 ebooks bought – and 4 collectable Girl’s Own books, which count but sort of don’t!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 