This week’s book of the week is Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. In another tale of the state of the pile, this was a Christmas book from my mother in 2014. In my defence, it did get a bit misplaced for a while in a storage box and then got shuffled to the bottom of a pile it shouldn’t have been on – but thanks to my mum’s habit of writing dedications in the front of gift books I have the guilts. Sorry mum.
Anyhow, everyone else read this 18 months ago at least, so I’m behind the curve, but in case you are too, The Night Circus tells the story of Le Cirque de Rêves and some of the people who live there. The circus arrives without warning, is only open at night and is filled with enchantment and wonder. The book focuses on several characters in particular, but to say much more is to say too much. It covers decades in the lives of the key players – starting before the invention of the circus and switches backwards and forwards through time as you learn some of the secrets behind the Circus of Dreams.
I started it before those pesky nightshifts and it took my brain some time to recover so it took me longer to read than how good it is. But once my brain was functioning normally again I gobbled this up. It’s clever and it’s magical but not too far from reality in many ways. It’s romantic and intriguing and I wanted more. I suspect I’ll be going back to reread this again and that I’ll get even more from it second time.
Magic! Illusions! Kittens! Clocks! Scarves! The Night Circus has all this and more – and now it’s got me wanting some more books with magical realism. I listen to Book Riot’s Get Booked podcast and there have been several people asking for books to fill a Night Circus-shaped void in their lives, so once I’ve got the pile sorted a little bit I may have to look into that. In the meantime, I’m ransacking the existing backlog for stuff that might scratch that itch. Luckily I still have some Peter Grant saved on the shelf.
A varied week of reading – with a touch of pretty much everything. And I finally had the time to sit down and concentrate on The Night Circus, so the Still Reading list is down to one…
Read:
The Indecent proposal by Louise Marley
Bella and the Beast by Olivia Drake
Time Travelling with a Hamster by Ross Welford
Ships, Stings and Wedding Rings by Jodi Taylor
Death of a Diva by Derek Farrell
It Happened One Season by Stephanie Laurens, Mary Balogh, Jacquie D’Alessandro and Candice Hern
The Guides of the Chalet School by Jane Berry
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Started:
Along the Infinite Sea by Beatriz Williams
Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham
Still reading:
Freya by Anthony Quinn
The books from last week’s spending spree turned up and I realised that the book piles by the sofa are now getting tall enough (in some cases) to interfere with the curtains. Thus I am seriously contemplating a buying ban on actual books. So this week I only purchased 2 ebooks – and one of them was free. I’ll keep you posted on the piles.
Hello gentle reader. As you may have noticed, I do quite like a good romance novel. I’m more of a historical romance reader than anything else, but I do sometimes stray into contemporary and to a lesser extent paranormal. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why some books linger on the to-read pile and it’s led to me contemplating what my favourite and least favourite tropes are in the romance genre. Once you’ve figured out what you like and what you don’t like, it makes it much easier to wade through a genre where there are so many books to chose from. And it also makes it easier to work out what you might like when you’re trying a different type of romance from the ones you usually read.
Lets start with my pet hates…
Accidental Pregnancies/Secret pregnancies
Oof. I think this is my absolute least favourite. If an author that I adore writes one of these, I’ll probably read it, but apart from that I give these a wide birth. I think this is probably all bound up in my own fear of accidental pregnancy, but these do absolutely nothing for me except make me want to scream with rage. Accidental secret pregnancy plots will have me hurling a book across the room if I happen to encounter them.
Secret Children
Following on from the pregnancy problem, I like secret children only slightly better. It has to be really good for me to be able to get past the fact that you’ve stopped the child’s father from being a part of their life for x years. And given that the whole idea of the plot is usually that the heroine will reunite with the father, then the reason’s for the secret tend to be a bit lame/spurious. And as far as contemporary romances go, in the days of the internet and social media it’s easier than ever to keep in touch with people and harder than ever to keep this sort of secret…
Amnesia
Just no. Luckily you don’t find it very often any more (although there is a bit in one of my favourite author’s latest novels, but it’s a late on twist so I just about coped with it) because people have (thankfully) realised that Amnesia is rare, and if you’ve got it, you may well have other stuff going wrong too which is harder to fix. I can’t think of a single romance with amnesia as a main plot point that I’ve read and enjoyed. And I’ve been down lists of amnesia romances on Goodreads and it hasn’t jogged my memory either. I understand there’s a pregnant-with-amnesia sub-genre, which sounds like my idea of hell, although Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have a very witty review of the hilariously titled Pregnesia.
My favourites:
Girls dressed up as boys
Twelfth Night has been my favourite Shakespeare play since we studied it when I was 11 (side note: check out the amazing Globe production of it with Oscar Winner (squee) Mark Rylance as Lady Olivia – clip below!) and I love plots with girls dressed up as boys. From Leonie in These Old Shades, through Harriet in Duchess by Night, Callie in Nine Rules to Break when Romancing a Rake (and that other Sarah MacLean one which not a traditional “breeches” role and is a massive spoiler if you haven’t read the rest of the series) and many more besides, it’s a plot device that will often get me to pick up a new author. It’s usually only found in Historical Romance although if you know of any good contemporary ones, please put them in the comments!
Fake engagements
This is one has to be deployed cleverly, because breaking an engagement would ruin the heroine socially so she’d have to have a good reason to do it, but it’s popular device in more recently written historicals, there’s something I love about couples who enter into these for nerfarious reasons of their own and get more than they bargain for. Because of the above social consequences, it’s not a plot often employed by my beloved Georgette Heyer – I can only think of one fake engagement in her books and that’s False Colours, which almost doesn’t count because Kit is pretending to be his twin brother throughout in a lovely twist. Julia Quinn’s The Duke and I is a great example
Marriages of convenience
Following on from those fake engagements, I do love a marriage of convenience plot, although conversely I think my least favourite Georgette Heyer is A Civil Contract – but she does have some crackers too like April Lady and Friday’s Child (my mum’s favourite). When cleverly executed they can be wonderful fun – Eloisa James’s The Ugly Duchess, Mary Balogh’s At Last Comes Love and Quinn’s To Sir Philip with Love is a fun twist on the idea. To be honest, it’s fairly hard to mess up a marriage of convenience – there are lots of ways a lady can accidentally get compromised – and there’s lots of reasons why people might enter into one (keep lands, escape an evil guardian, get an inheritance etc).
I do read other stuff of course – I like house parties, rake-y heros, beta heros, guardians and wards (but only the sort who don’t do anything about it until the wards are of age), friends to lovers, best friend’s sibling and much much more. To be honest, beyond my pet hates above there’s not much I won’t give at least one try (except the Tragic Lives aisle of the bookshop). All recommendations for things that might tick any of my boxes are gratefully received – in the comments below please!
This week’s Book of the Week is Mabel Esther Allen’s Chiltern School. Regular readers will already be aware of my love of the classic school story and this one last week was a real treat for my sleepy post-nightshift brain.
Chiltern School tells the story of Rose Lesslyn – who has lived with her grandparents since her mother died and her father moved to work abroad to get away from his pain (as people frequently seemed to do in books in this era). Her father decides that she needs to go to school – much to her grandmother’s dismay – and she’s dispatched from her home on the Isle of Wight to a rather progressive (for the 1950s anyway) school in the middle of the Chiltern hills. There she struggles to fit in but eventually finds her feet, makes friends and (re)discovers a hidden talent.
Chiltern School was written in the 1950s – and sold to a publisher, but never published until Allen published it privately in the 1990s. And she was only able to do that because of the success of a reissue of another of her series – the Drina books in the 1990s. The Drina series (the subject of one of my very early posts on the blog) were written under one of her pen names – Jean Estoril. I had no idea about this until I read the forward of this book – I’d bought it because I’d really enjoyed another of her (many) other books The View Beyond My Father (about a young blind girl escaping from her domineering father in the 1910s) back in primary school days. I was thrilled to discover that my love of the Drina series in the early 90s had meant that Allen had money to do this in her old age – and that someone who’s books I’d liked so much had written so much more than I thought!
And Rose does have similarities to my beloved Drina (that series started 7 years later). Both live with their grandparents – with a stern grandmother and a kindlier grandfather, although both of Drina’s parents are dead as opposed to just one of Rose’s (there are a lot of dead parents in children’s books of this era). And trying not to give too much of the plot away here, Drina doesn’t know about her background at the start of the series but later choses to keep it secret – while Rose knows but doesn’t tell.
Both also feature the Chilterns – Drina’s ballet school has a boarding department there, where she stays in Drina Dances in Exile (the green book as it always is in my head because of it’s cover) and where she returns to several times in later books to visit friends. Now since reading Drina, I have acquired a boyfriend who comes from that part of the world – so I got an extra level of enjoyment from Chiltern School’s mentions of places that his family live or have lived and where we have been. And the area is a big feature in the book – it’s beautifully described – you can practically feel the wind rushing through your hair as Rose and her friends cycle around.
It’s not perfect – it is of it’s time and is not as diverse as you would (hope to) find a children’s book written now would be. But Allen’s writing style is charming and every readable – this is a fun romp that will make you wish you could have gone to boarding school (in the 1950s) with Rose and all her friends. That is if you couldn’t be a ballerina and be Drina…
My edition was published by Girls Gone By – who as I’m sure I’ve said before – specialise in republishing classic children’s stories that are now out of print. They do the same for my beloved Chalet School and for authors like Lorna Hill, Malcolm Saville and many more. Check out their website and see if they’ve done any of your childhood favourites.
I went straight on from this to Allen’s Ballet Family books (bought in the same spending spree back at the start of the year) which appear to have been published under Allen’s name and then reissued under the Estoril pseudonym in the 90s to capitalise on the success of Drina. I don’t know how I missed them at the time – but they are a cross between Drina and Lorna Hill’s Jane goes to the Wells – with a ballet school that’s not The Royal Ballet and a family of 4 ballet students – who’s mother is still a ballerina. And I really want to go back and reread the Drina series too.
Hmmmm. What to say about this week’s reading – distinctly children’s book heavy? I had a spree with a dealer a few weeks back and they were just what I needed for my post-nightshift recovery. And I finally finished The Shadow Hour at the weekend – once my brain had got back in gear!
Read:
Heartsong Cottage by Emily March
The Bronte Plot by Katherine Reay
Chiltern School by Mabel Esther Allen
The Ballet Family by Mabel Esther Allen (Jean Estoril)
The Ballet Family Again by Mabel Esther Allen (Jean Estoril)
The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan
Started:
It Happened One Season by Stephanie Laurens, Mary Balogh, Jacquie D’Alessandro and Candice Hern
Still reading:
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Freya by Anthony Quinn
Time Travelling with a Hamster by Ross Welford
Oh dear. I had a bit of a mega spending spree over the weekend. I paid for it (mostly) with vouchers, but still added a lot more to the to-read pile than I’ve taken off it. Whoops.
Back on the cozy crime for this week’s BotW with G M Malliet’s first St Just mystery. I’ve read a couple of Malliet’s Max Tudor series before – dishy vicar with a Past in rural village – which I’ve enjoyed so I was interested to read more from this author.
Sir Adrian Beauclerk-Fisk is a best-selling mystery writer, who delights in tormenting his adult children by constantly rewriting his will. Then he announces his engagement and the whole family gathers to “celebrate”. But when his eldest son and heir turns up dead, suspicion, greed and malice run riot in the house. Detective Chief Inspector St Just and Sergeant Fear must try to track down the killer before someone else ends up dead.
The whole Beauclerk-Fisk family are hugely dislikeable and this adds a certain something as you read about their machinations (some subtler and cleverer than others). There’s also a lot of references to classic crime – so if you’ve read a lot of Christie you’ll enjoy that too. Sir Adrian has distinct Luther Crackenthorpe tendencies and is stuck writing books about a detecting spinster who he has grown to hate and tried to kill. His writing methods and plot accuracy (as described) also feel like a bit of a comment on someone too.
DCI St Just features less in this than I was expecting, so you don’t really get to know him massively, so I’d need to read another book in the series to make a proper judgement, but he comes across as quite well – fairly inoffensive, not overly flamboyant or extravagant – and obviously as a police officer he has a perfect right to be investigating the crime which was not the case in one of the other cozies I read recently which didn’t work anywhere near as well.
It’s not perfect, but it is a fun mystery with a good few twists before you find out who actually did it. Get your copy from Amazon or on Kindle. My copy was second hand – but I have seen some of Malliet’s books in store in The Works too.
A relatively slow reading week. My second run of nights happened over the weekend and I’m tired and cranky and can’t concentrate on complicated books – my aim for the coming week is to finish The Night Circus and The Shadow Hour – both of which I started and was enjoying before the nights but don’t have the brain power to concentrate on at the moment
Read:
The Record Set Right by Lauren Willig
The Winter Ground by Catriona McPherson
Snowflakes on Silver Cove by Holly Martin
The Jade Lioness by Christina Courtney
Death of a Cozy Writer by G M Malliet
A Death at the University by Richard King
Started:
Freya by Anthony Quinn
Time Travelling with a Hamster by Ross Welford
Still reading:
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan
I was so good and well behaved on the nights – no books bought and not much else either! I did nearly buy a new Kindle (I want a Paperwhite so I can read in bed when I can’t sleep) but I couldn’t quite justify it.
A day late (sorry!) but here are the February stats – no library books or non fiction this month – but quite a lot of progress really, especially if you consider the nightshift factor. Talking of nights, I restrained myself and didn’t buy any books in the early hours – but I had already bought some earlier in the month!
*Includes some short stories/novellas/comics (2 this month)
Oh I do love a good children’s detective yarn – and I had two to pick from when I was selecting my BotW this week. I went with Julia Lee’s latest – because it’s out on Thursday and doesn’t feature any murder – so I think I can give it to my 7-year-old niece who has the right reading age, but who can’t cope with too much peril!
Perfect reading for the train to work ahead of a nightshift!
Nancy Parker is 14 and has just left school. She gets her first job – as a housemaid to the rather glamorous Mrs Bryce. It’s not her dream job (who dreams of cleaning at 14!), but its more exciting than she expects as soon the whole household is living in a rented house at the seaside. There are parties, talk of movie-making, a reputed air-ace but also a cook who seems to be hiding a secret, a string of burglaries and chores – lots of chores. Nancy teams up with two other children from the neighbourhood to try and work out what is going on.
The book made up of a combination of extracts from Nancy’s journal (given to her as a leaving gift by her school teacher) and a third person narrative – which covers what the other children are up to. It’s fun, engaging and fast-paced. As someone who loved all of Enid Blyton’s mystery series (but particularly the Five Findouters) this really worked for me and filled that gap. And unlike those Blyton stories, this books shows the range of experiences in the 1920s – Nancy would only have appeared in one of those as the maid providing the picnics for the other children. And there’s also nice nods to the other realities of the 1920s like shortages of men for women to marry and women having to give up their jobs to returning soldiers.
As an adult, I figured out what Mrs Bryce was up to quite early on – but that’s because I’ve read a lot of the grown-up versions of this sort of story, but I think for a young reader it would be a fun, thrilling and non-threatening mystery. I love Robin Steven’s Wells and Wong series and also enjoyed the second book in Katherine Woodfine’s Clockwork Sparrowbook last week (the other BotW contender) but they are definitely a level up from this in the scares and peril – which isn’t a bad thing, but it does mean that you need to be bit more mature to be able to cope with them. I’m desperate to give my niece Murder Most Unladylike – but murder is quite a big deal for a 7-year old – at 10 I was terrified by some of the Miss Marples*. But Nancy Parker’s adventure feels like a new equivalent of a Secret Seven or a Famous Five – which is A Very Good Thing.
I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advance proof – but you can get your copy from Amazon, Kindle, Waterstones or Foyles. I don’t know if it’ll be in the supermarkets – but it feels like it might as the Katherine Woodfine was. Happy Reading!
Now that is what four nightshifts can do for the to-read pile – I actually finished my 7th book of the week on the way home from the last night shift on Friday morning. You’ll notice that the two books that are still on the go are ones where I need to use my brain a bit – and my brain is frazzled so it was light reading only! But I did finish all my February new releases from NetGalley before the end of the month (with 3 days to spare!) – which is unusual for me. Now I just need to work on the slight backlog from the autumn when everything got a way from me a bit…
Read:
Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes
Nancy Parker’s Diary of Detection by Julia Lee
The Mystery of the Jewelled Moth by Katherine Woodfine
Murder on a Silver Platter by Shawn Reilly Simmons
A Summer at Sea by Katie Fforde
The Duke’s Accidental Wife by Erica Ridley
The Stylist by Rosie Nixon
Ghostwriters Anonymous by Doreen Wald
The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss by Max Wirestone
Started:
The Winter Ground by Catriona McPherson
Still reading:
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan
I was very, very virtuous and only impulse bought non books on the nightshift. The pile is still massive though!
