So, if this post had been two days ago there would only have been two books in this photo – the Martha Wainwright and the Nancy Spain. But then I made a trip to Wilkos on Good Friday, and there is a The Works in the same shopping centre and: Voila. Book purchases ahoy. The Frances Brody is the first in a new series that I’m trying because I like her Kate Shackleton books, Christina Lauren I’ve written about before, Castle Shade is the latest Mary Russell and the other was just a whim which could go either way. We’ll see!
The thirteenth in the series has just come out (Thursday in fact) and I’m on a bit of a binge, so here we are with a series I love post about the time travellers, sorry historians who investigate in contemporary time at the St Mary’s Institute for Historical Research. If I had to describe these in a sentence I would go for: time travel adventure books with a comic (mostly darkly comic) twist.
Now this is one series where you definitely want to read in order, because it’s complicated and there is a running plot and a running enemy. And at the start of the first book, Just One Damned Thing After Another, we are introduced to St Mary’s as Max joins the staff – which is great because it means that you get everything explained to you as it is explained to her and you meet all the characters you’re going to get to know and love as you go through the series. And then soon you’re hurtling through history with the disaster magnets of St Marys as they try to find out what really happened at various historical events or research what life was really like centuries ago.
A couple of warnings: there’s some sexual violence in the first book that may be a no no for some people. And when things go wrong, they really go wrong – and some times it’s not fixable. Oh and Jodi Taylor is also not averse to killing characters off. Try not to get too attached to anyone. I also think that the series has gone way beyond what Taylor was originally anticipating – and sometimes when you read a lot of them back to back you can see that a little bit.
But either all that out of the way, this series is a rollicking ride through history – which is accurate enough about the things I know about not to make me ragey, is able to make you cry as well as laugh and isn’t afraid to make major changes to the lives of its characters – no endless love triangles a la Steph Plum here. Taylor seems able to write a couple of novels a year and there are also stacks of short stories that fit in between the full length novels. Oh and there’s a spin of series which I own but haven’t started reading yet. So if you do get into it you have plenty to work your way through.
Here’s a confession. I meant to read Mhairi McFarlane’s new book well in advance of its release date. But that pesky Covid thing that’s making me binge reread things I’ve read before got in the way. So I started this on Tuesday night, read about 50 pages before bed and thought “well I’ll keep reading it tomorrow and write a post saying I haven’t finished it yet but on past record I trust that it’s going to be great.” I’d even stated the draft of a post saying just that.
Except on Wednesday night I finished it. I was glued to my sofa reading it from the moment I put the dinner in the oven. I read 350 pages basically in one big gulp – ok I stopped to eat dinner and there were a couple of loo breaks in there too, but that’s it. The TV was in on the background, but I think Him Indoors could have been watching a gory movie and I wouldn’t have noticed. I stayed up late to finish it because I couldn’t bear to Lea it it to the train in the morning – and as it made me get all weepy at the end, I think I made the right choice. It’s that type of book.
And now I realise I’ve written two whole paragraphs without telling you what on Earth the plot is. So, here we go: Harriet is a wedding photographer in Leeds. Business is booming, but despite being around happy couples at work all day she doesn’t want a marriage of her own. When she finds herself in need of a new place to live, she moves in with Cal. He’s handsome and charming and his love life is also a complete mess. But is this the start of something good for both of them?
Now there’s a lot more to the plot than that – but I’ve tried to stick with not giving anything more away than the blurbs on Goodreads and Amazon do. Harriet is a brilliant heroine – she’s independent, resilient and smart and she and her friends have some great one liners. Cal is an attractive hero too – mysterious (until he’s not) with a ride or die best mate of his own. The Amazon strap line calls this a romantic comedy – and it is – but a big part of the book is a Harriet dealing with issues in her own past so that she can move on and move forward – and there are some tricky issues in there which definitely aren’t funny. But the resolution is punch the air brilliant and it all ends up alright in the end.
Now I realise in writing this that I’m doing myself out of a book of the week option on Monday, but hey, sometimes I break with my own rules and traditions – and it’s nice to mix it up a bit and do a review on release day – especially when it’s a book that I’ve enjoyed so much. Mad About You is out now in Kindle, Kobo and paperback. Enjoy!
Long title I know, but all the shorter versions didn’t really cut it! Two weeks ago for Recommendsday we had Reformed Rakes in honour of Anthony Bridgerton. Today’s post is in honour of Kate – who in the book is 26 and on the shelf, but in the TV series is putting her younger sister first. So I went looking for historical romances with characters who are unmarried and trying to save someone important to them from marrying someone they think is unsuitable (and end up marrying the unsuitable person themselves) Before I get to my suggestions, I’ve read a lot of articles with reaction to the Sharma family in series two Bridgerton and what it means for South Asian representation – among them this one from Bustle and this from Glamour. Well worth a look. Anyway, to the books!
And it turns out it’s actually really hard to find heroines who aren’t desperate to jump off the shelf and who are saving someone from their heroes. I thought this was going to be a walk in the park – after all, I’ve read a lot of romances over the years. But I’ve put in proper time on this and unless I’m missing some super obvious options – or my search strings are out – it’s a tougher ask than I thought! I can find plenty of spinsters who want one night to find out what passion is (but aren’t expecting it to go beyond that), or who enter marriages of convenience because it’s the least bad option and then fall in love. But not a lot of Kates. But maybe that’s why the Bridgerton series are special?
In The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting, Sir John Hartlebury is definitely not a spinster but he is uninterested in marriage and High Society – so KJ Charles’s novelis actually quite close – Hart is trying to rescue his niece from dashing fortune hunter Robin Loxleigh, but ends up falling for Robin himself. There’s a slight Pretty Woman type situation that ends up going on, but handled well and without many of the pitfalls of that sort of thing.
The Georgette Heyers that are closest are probably Black Sheep or Lady of Quality – the key difference from The Viscount Who Loved me being neither of them end up marrying the man they’re trying to save their relation from. In Black Sheep our heroine, Abigail, is busy saving her niece from a fortune hunter when she falls in love with the fortune hunter’s uncle – just returned from India having made a packet. In Lady of Quality, Annis rescues a runaway heiress and falls in love with the heiress’s guardian. Ok so they’re not quite the same, but it’s closer than some of the other options – Frederica is trying to get her sister a dashing match and ends up falling for the cousin who has agreed to help them (rather than stopping her sister from marrying him), Hester in Sprig Muslin is an older heroine who is not expecting to marry, but she’s not trying to save anyone from Gareth – in fact she turns down his first proposal because although she (secretly) loves him, he doesn’t love her and Mary in Devil’s Cub is not so much determined to not to marry as doesn’t like the options she’s got, and although she does marry her sister’s original beau, he wasn’t planning on marrying her sister just absconding with her (Vidal, such a dastardly rake until he falls in love. Ahem).
In other slightly tenuous options, you could also probably count Alexa Tarabotti, the heroine of the Parasol Protectorate is a confirmed spinster at the start of the series in Soulless – but she’s not looking or trying to save anyone. Ditto Amelia Peabody in Crocodile on the Sandbank – whose age ends up being quietly reduced once it’s clear it’s gong to be a series and we’re going to keep going through til Ramses is an adult… Phyrne Fisher is also determinedly unmarried, but it doesn’t stop her from having as many boyfriends as she wants, so it really doesn’t count for this purpose!
And there you have it. An awful lot of work on my part, for not a huge amount of results. Tell me all the books that do this that I’ve forgotten about – or that I should have read – in the comments!
I said on at the weekend that it’s sometimes been a struggle to finish something that’s not a reread and isn’t a later in series book that breaks a bunch of my rules do BotW posts. And this week was looking very like that, until I finished A House in the Country on Sunday evening.
A House in the Country is set in 1942, at the time of the fall of Tobruk. The titular house is a large, attractive country pile run by Cressida, a widow with an unhappy past. She is looking after it for its real owner who is away, and is supporting it by letting rooms. It’s filled with characters and types and shows the different ways that people are affected by wars. At times it’s comic, at times tragic. There is not a lot of Big Plot Action – although six bombs are dropped nearby one night they’re in the countryside and the war can feel a long way away from their every day lives – but it somehow manages to feel like everything is happening at the same time as well.
It was written in 1943, so at a time when no one knew which way the war was going to go and this gives it an underlying thrum of uncertainty that you don’t see in similar books set after the period. It’s like a little slice of some of my favourite things in the Cazalets – a dashing brother descends on his sister and wants advice on a love affair, young men picking the wrong women to propose to, older relatives not understanding the difficulties and shortages of war – but without the definite endings that strands of the Cazalets get. It will make you think and maybe break your heart a little bit, or a lot.
A weird old week. Not even sure what was going on with me to be honest, except being really busy and doing a lot of house cleaning as everything was a state after all the covid. Onwards and upwards etc.
It’s not quite a month since my (first) positive covid test, but I’m interrupting your regularly scheduled programming for an update, because hey, why not.
I think I’m mostly back to normal. I’ve got a slight residual cough and the back of my throat still feels a bit raw. I’m probably still blowing my nose a bit more than usual. I’m still getting quite tired and i got a bit puffed out going up all the stairs at work the other day – but that could just be me talking and walking up stairs too fast… I’m also sticking to that recommendation from some cardiologist somewhere that you’re less likely to get long covid if you avoid strenuous exercise for six weeks. It’s not just that I hate running and it’s a good excuse not to go do it – I’ll have you know I bought new running shoes the weekend before I caught covid and I haven’t had a chance to try them out yet!
In reading terms, I’m struggling to focus a little bit and the temptation to reread stuff is near impossible to resist sometimes. I was doing really well in early March with the NetGalley list and then it all came undone because almost everything I had due next required more brain power that I had to give – or wasn’t certain to have a resolution. But I think I’m clawing it back around slowly. Of course the difficulty with this is making sure that I’ve read something each week that I like enough to write about for Book of the Week, but I’ve managed it so far. Although this week may yet be the exception of course.
Even pre my covid I had cut back a bit on my podcasts in favourite of audiobooks and that trend has only continued. I’m working my way through the theatrical Inspector Alleyns at the moment with a side order of Gaudy Night when needed (plus ça change etc) and then Amelia Peabody as well (we’re back in 1914 again and oh my goodness Thunder in the Sky is so good). I’ve started a couple of Angela Thirkells but they just haven’t hit the spot so far in the way that the murder mysteries and Amelia do. My brain. Such a weird place.
Anyway, that’s the update from me. I’ve been very fortunate – now that I’ve had it with the tests to prove it I am fairly sure I had It but worse in January 2020, so thank goodness for the vaccines etc and may I be fortunate enough not to catch it again for another two years – if at all.
This is the current fancy hardback pile in the corner of the fancy bookshelf. This is the bottom right of the shelves, top left is the Virago shelf and next to that are the Fancy Pratchetts. I mean I know I’ve had Bookshelfies featuring a lot of previous books of the week before, but this might be a new record for books I have previously written about! I think the only book on here I haven’t written about already is Theatre for Dreamers, and I’m not 100 percent sure that that one is a keeper tbh. But it’s here until I find a hardback that I want to replace it with – at which point it moves to the lower shelves in the back room until I do the next cull, at which point it will be reevaluated!
Anyway, there is no rhyme or reason to this pile – it’s just hardbacks that I have liked and which don’t fit in with any of the other collections of that makes sense. So we have Rodham, which was my first hardback Sittenfeld, the two Jasper Ffordes which are here because they don’t match the crime ones and The Starless Sea because I don’t really have a hardback fantasy and magical realism shelf. Then there are The Girls and the Vanishing Half because I don’t have a lot of literary fiction hardbacks and the Katie Racculia because I didn’t know where else to put it. The Andrew Lownie and the Anne de Courcy are here because I don’t have space on the history book shelf and so I need to have a reorganise, but I just haven’t yet. So basically this is a bit odds and endsy at the moment – but I fully intend to fix this at the next clearout. When that is going to be, I am not currently able to say!
It’s been nearly five years since the first in the Maisie Dobbs series was my BotW and as the seventeenth in the series can out recently, it seemed like an opportune time to feature the series here.
At the start of the series it’s 1929 and Maisie is setting up a private investigation firm in London. As I said in my review at the time, the mystery in that book is slighter than you expect because the book is also doing a lot of heavy work in the set up for the series itself. Over the course of the rest of the series Maisie has carried out all sorts of different types of investigations – some murder, some not – but a lot of them using her experiences and contacts made during the Great War. Time moves by as the series goes on (yes, I know that sounds obvious but it’s not always the case!) and by book 17 we’ve reached 1942. This passage of time has enabled a huge variety of different set ups as well as meaning that historical events can be woven into what’s going on. And of course there have been developments in Maisie’s personal life.
This is one of my favourite series to dip into. They’re basically very easy to read historical mystery novels. They don’t have the hint of humour that you get from Royal Spyness or Daisy Dalrymple, but they’re not gruesome-gruesome either. I think there’s bits of it that need to be read in order, but I certainly haven’t done that – at the moment I’ve read 13 of the series – but the books I haven’t read are 9, 14, 15 and the newest one and I’ve read some of the others in the wrong order too! If you don’t read them in order you will get spoilers for Maisie’s personal life, but to be honest that may not necessarily be a bad thing. If you read them you’ll understand, but anything else I say will be a spoiler!
In terms of getting hold of them, it should be fairly easy – I’ve seen them in bookshops (new and used), libraries (physical and virtual) and they’re all on kindle and Kobo too. And because of all the factors mentioned above, if you want to see if you like them, you could just start with whichever one you can get hold of easiest. As I write this the cheapest on Kindle and Kobo are books 11 and 12 weirdly.
Happy Friday!
Bonus picture: Fitzroy Square on Thursday morning – the location of Maisie’s office.
And I’ve already got my copy of Amongst Our Weapons in my grubby little hands as you can seee! I told you that I’d got a signed copy pre-ordered from Big Green Books – and they appear to have some of them left if you’re in the market. As it’s the ninth book in the series, it’d be breaking all my rules if it ends up being a Book of the Week – but I’m not ruling it out, although if previous books are anything to go by, you really need to have read at least some of the others to get the most out of. So instead, I’m going to remind you that I have a Series I Love post about them from two years ago from not long after the False Value came out.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 