Tag: Book of the Week

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: The World’s Wife

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I’m a bit off-piste with this week’s BotW choice – because it’s poems.  It’s not the first poetry to be BotW- because Sarah Crossan’s One was free verse – but Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife is the first poetry collection to get the nod from me.

Copy of The World`s Wife
My copy of the World’s Wife -it isn’t the latest edition which I think is prettier.

The World’s Wife is a collections of poems about the women behind famous men, or in some cases changes famous men into famous women.  It’s on the AS level syllabus these days – I think my sister studied it, although I got stuck with Wordsworth back in my day – so I’m not going to pretend to any profound knowledge or insight.  In fact I feel like I need to read them again already, with whatever the modern equivalent of York Notes is to help me get the most out of them.  But I enjoyed reading them – and I’ve been off down the internet rabbit hole afterwards to find out who some of the men I didn’t know were.

I have studied Carol Ann Duffy though – at GCSE.  In the big orange English Anthology, as well as Poems from Other Cultures and Traditions, there was a selection of poems from 3 poets – Simon Armitage, Ted Hughes and Duffy – and you had to study one of them.  Carol Ann Duffy was the one we had to do.  Towards the end of our two years, a local theatre held a GCSE poetry day – with a selection of the featured poets on stage reading from their works and answering questions.  And Ms Duffy was one of them – she read a few poems (I can’t remember which) and was generally very tolerant of 1400 teenagers’ questions she’d probably heard a hundred times before*.  My friend’s question wasn’t answered and at the interval, she wanted to see if she could get an answer, so dragging me with her, we scoured the theatre for the green room, and found it and waited for Ms Duffy.  My friend was much braver than me and she did all the talking, but Ms Duffy was friendly and gracious towards the two of us – and we even ended up with an address to write to her if we had any more questions.  I kept the scrap of paper it was written on for years – although I’ve lost it now – and have never forgotten my brush with the now Poet Laureate.

*Not all of the others were!

 

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: American Housewife

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I know. I know. This is a day late. And I’m sorry. It’s been one of those weeks. Work has been quietly bonkers, I’ve been exhausted and time got away from me. Rather than rush something out to keep to schedule, I thought I’d take the extra time and do it properly.

So the BotW is Helen Ellis’s short story collection, American Housewife. These a a series of deliciously dark and funny bite-sized  tales, which I mostly read before bed. I’m not a massive short story reader, but they do make good bedtime reading because they have good obviously stopping places. And while these blackly humorous, there’s nothing here that’s going to give you nightmares. That said, Ellis doesn’t give you all the answers, some stories have distinctly ambiguous endings. Or even ambiguous middles.

Copy of American Housewife
I love the cover design – so simple and striking but appropriate for the book

I think my favourite story was the email war between two New York neighbours over their shared hallway. Or maybe the instructions on how to be a patron of the arts. Or the very unusual book club. Basically, there’s a lot of good stories here and I’m spoilt for choice.

If you fancy dipping your toe in the short story pond, this would be a very good place to start. And if you’re a short story fan, this should definitely be on your list. In fact I’d be surprised if it isn’t already. It is a hardback at the moment – and you’ll probably need to look in a proper bookshop for this (ie not the supermarket) or you can order it from Amazon, Waterstones and Foyles. It’s also available on Kindle and Kobo – at the much friendlier price of £2.99 at time of writing.

Book of the Week, fiction

Book of the Week: The Canal Boat Cafe

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This week’s BotW is Cressida McLaughlin’s latest novel, The Canal Boat Café.  With the exception of this, I had a bit of a lacklustre week of reading last week – so I was glad to have something that I enjoyed and could actually recommend!

Paperback copy of The Canal Boat Café
Say hello to my garden table and my copy of The Canal Boat Café!

Summer Freeman returns to the waterside village of Willowbeck after her mother’s death to sort out her mother’s narrowboat, the titular Canal Boat Cafe.  Summer has been avoiding returning to the boat, but the family friend who has been keeping it going has run into some difficulties and needs Summer to take the reigns.  Soon she and her dog Latte are moving on board and making new friends as Summer tries to work out what her future holds and what part the canal plays in it.

This originally started out as a four part ebook story, but is now out in proper paperback format.  It’s still split into sections and there is a little bit of repetition of previous events, but as I was in the post-nightshift, too little sleep, too many hours at work haze it didn’t bother me because my concentration span was so shot!  What it doesn’t have are the big, jarring cliff hangers that you often get at the end of sections in these novelisations – the sort of thing that are designed to get you to buy the next part to see what happens, but are then resolved within a few pages.   And that is definitely a good thing.  That’s not to say that there isn’t drama – because there is, but it happens at the point that it needs to happen for the story – not at where a part needs to end.

Summer and her friends (and not friends) have distinct characters and problems and points of view and the canal makes for a really appealing setting for them all to play out.  It’s a lovely summer read, ideal for sitting out in the garden enjoying the sunshine – and it will probably make you want to go for a walk down the canal towpath, or even go on a holiday on the waterways.

You can get your copy of The Canal Boat Café from Amazon, Kindle, Foyles, Kobo, Waterstones – or like me from a large supermarket with a name that begins with T.

American imports, Book of the Week, new releases, romance

Book of the Week: Daughters of the Bride

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This was a tricky decision, but I had a Margery Allingham as BotW a couple of weeks back so I went for a romance option instead.  And it’s another contemporary romance as well! Daughters of the Bride is the latest from Susan Mallery – who has more books than I can count on Goodreads, even if this was the first of hers that I have read.

Courtney, Rachel and Sienna are preparing for a wedding  – their mother’s.   After their father died when they were young she’s found love again.  But each of the three sisters has a secret (at least) from the others.  Courtney is the misfit – she doesn’t feel as together as her sisters and she’s got a plan to prove to her family that she’s not the failure they think she is.  Sienna’s boyfriend just proposed in front of all her friends and family, but with two failed engagements behind her, has she picked the right man this time?  And Rachel has been divorced for a while now – but as her husband takes a more active role in her son’s life, she’s forced to reexamine the reasons for their break up and whether she’s ready to move on.

I really liked this book – all the sisters have strong stories and have been affected by the death of their father and the ramifications on their lives differently and it is a rollercoaster of emotions watching them work through their issues to get their happy endings.  I had a favourite (I think you always do!) but the other two behind were pretty level.  Their mum is a little harder to like at times – she’s tough and no nonsense and can be a bit self-centered, but as a reader you can understand why she behaved the way she did when her first husband died, even if you don’t understand her (seeming) inability to fully realise and acknowledge the effect it had on her children.

So there you have it – another contemporary romance book of the week and another book that would make a great beach read if you’re off to sunnier climes.  My copy came from NetGalley, but you can get it on Kindle or Kobo, although the hardback price on Amazon is ridiculous (£20.40 as I write this) so don’t do that – it’s not long enough to be twenty quids worth of book!

Happy reading

Book of the Week, new releases, romance, women's fiction

Book of the Week: Sunset in Central Park

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This week’s BotW is Sarah Morgan’s latest book – Sunset in Central Park.  This is the second book in her new series – about three young women who leave Puffin Island (the location of her previous series) for the bright lights of New York and a career in events management.

This is Frankie’s story – and Frankie is extremely wary of relationships after watching the fallout from her parents’ divorce when she was a teenager.  She avoids emotional attachments to anyone except her two closest friends – who she works with – and garden designer Matt, one of her friend’s brothers and the owner of the brownstone where they all have flats in Brooklyn.  She’s determined to keep their relationship strictly platonic, even though he makes her insides feel a bit odd, because all relationships end and she wants to keep him in her life.  But what she doesn’t know is that Matt’s been crazy about her forever, but has kept quiet because he knows how fragile she is.  But as he finds out more about her hidden depths as they work together on a project, the sparks fly.  Will he be able to convince her to take a chance on what they have?

This is romantic, fun and satisfying.  You know where it’s going, but it’s so much fun watching the characters work through all their issues to come to a happy conclusion.  Sarah Morgan has created a great group of strong competent women and is busy pairing them up with the men they deserve – equally strong and competent, and who compliment the girls – who definitely don’t need a man to complete them or fix their lives.  They can fix their own lives and problems, but the men will support and help them as they do it.  I did want to give Frankie a bit of a slap at times, but I always understood why she was behaving the way that she did.  I think I preferred the first book in the series slightly* – but that’s because I’m more of a Paige than I am a Frankie.

Copies of two Sarah Morgan books
I don’t have a paperback copy of Sunset in Central Park, but I do have other Sarah Morgans!

If you asked me, I would probably tell you that I don’t like contemporary romances, but that’s because when people say contemporary romance I think of billionaires and secretaries, doctors and nurses, nannies and lonely widowers, secret dukes and princes, secret babies and accidental pregnancies – none of which float my boat. I like smart heroines getting a happy ending – and if the books have a touch of humour, so much the better.   Thinking about it – and looking at the downstairs keepers bookshelf – there’s a lot of contemporary romance there – the sort of books that 10 years ago would have been called chick lit.  I don’t like chick lit as a term – but women’s fiction is too broad a description – so they probably would fall under the contemporary romance banner.

I only started reading Sarah Morgan because I met her at Sarah MacLean’s London tea-party and got given a free copy of one of the Puffin Island books (although I then went out and bought the first in this series and read that first after hearing Sarah Morgan talk about it on Smart Podcast, Trashy Books at the end of May) but it turns out that her latest books are exactly what floats my boat.  There was a sampler for Eva’s book at the end of this one and it left me desperate to read a Christmas-themed book – in July.  And you know my feelings on starting to read about Christmas too early.

My copy of Sunset in Central Park came from NetGalley – but you can get a copy from Amazon and Kindle (actually cheaper in book form at the time of writing) and I suspect possibly in supermarkets and other bookstores.  Don’t be put off by the Harlequin logo on the spine – if you are, you’ll be missing out.  I’m off to mine more of Sarah Morgan’s back catalogue – although I’ll never get through all of it and some of them are medical romances…

Happy reading!

*I read Sleepless in Manhattan the same week that I read The Rogue Not Taken or it would probably have been BotW that week.

Book of the Week, Fantasy, graphic novels

Book of the Week: Ms Marvel

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As I said yesterday, it’s been a tough decision about what to pick as BotW this week.  In the end I settled on Ms Marvel, because it was my favourite thing that I read last week, even though I don’t always have a lot to say about graphic novels/comics when I write reviews.  But then as I’m thick with cold and cough (in July! I know! So ridiculous) perhaps its the lurgy blocking my creative juices.  Lets stick with that.

 So, Ms Marvel.  I am not up on the Marvel Universe – I’ve seen a few films (they didn’t have Ms Marvel or Captain Marvel in them), but then who hasn’t, but I think this may be my first actual Marvel Comic.  I believe – although I may be wrong – that this is a reboot of an earlier character, but I haven’t read any of the earlier stuff so I don’t have the full back story.  But then I don’t think it affected my enjoyment not knowing any of the rest of the history.

 So, the story.  Kamala Khan is a Pakistani American teenager in Jersey City.  She’s Muslim and her parents are very protective of her.  She chafes at some of the restrictions placed upon her by her family – and ends up with superpowers after an incident at a party she sneaked out to.  In the first trade – No Normal – she gets her powers and starts to get entangled with the Inventor (who we assume is a villain).

I enjoyed this – Kamala is fun and multi-dimensional and she has real-life as well as superhero-y conflicts in her life.  The supporting characters are also great and I learnt a few things as well  but in a subtle way.  It ends in a bit of a cliff-hanger and I’m fairly sure I’ll be buying Volume 2 when I next get to the comic book shop.  I’m not putting any links to buy – because I want you to go down to your comic bookstore and do it there.   Find your local comic book store here.

Book of the Week, holiday reading, new releases, romance

Book of the Week: The Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts

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Such an easy decision for BotW this week – I absolutely loved Annie Darling’s Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts.  It is so much fun, and ticked so many of my book buttons.

Posy Morland loves her job at Bookends – a crumbling bookshop tucked away in a Bloomsbury mews.  But when the shop’s owner, Lavinia, dies and leaves the shop to Posy her life is turned upside down.  Posy’s got  lots of plans to turn the ailing bookshop around, but she’s also got to contend with Lavinia’s autocratic grandson Sebastian – nicknamed The Rudest Man in London by one of the papers, and seemingly searching for the national title.  With her friends and co-workers to help her, can Posy turn the shop around as well as dealing with Sebastian’s machinations?   And why is she having lurid fantasies?

Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts proof copy.
  Isn’t my proof copy gorgeous? I do love a good cover – and the proper cover looks lovely too.

The back of my proof copy says it’s for fans of Georgette Heyer (waves) and Jenny Colgan (waves) and for people who’ve dreamed of opening their own bookshops (falls over waving so hard) and I would totally agree.  Posy is a great heroine – she’s likeable, a little bit damaged and totally relatable.  It was great fun reading about her figuring out what to do with the bookshop and trying to stand up to Sebastian.  It’s also crammed full of gems for the romance reader – whether it’s obvious ones (like name checks for historical romance authors) or more subtle ones (not telling, find them yourself).

This whistles along at a tremendous pace, with twists and turns and heaving bosoms in empire line gowns (you’ll understand if you read it).  I was cross it was over so quickly – because I could have spent another 200 pages with Posy and her band of misfits at the  bookshop and as there’s an ad at the end for a sequel, my wish may yet come true.  The back of my advance copy also has the author’s top five novels in it which include Heyer’s Regency Buck – which I adore – Pride and Prejudice (ditto) and a Courtney Milan.  What’s not to love.  And on top of that it has a bookshop list which includes not one but TWO name checks for my beloved Chalet School so basically I think Annie Darling and I would really get on.

I got sent an advanced copy by a publicist who I chat to on Twitter – who had spotted that I love Georgette Heyer.  It’s not out in paperback yet (August 25th) – but it is out in Kindle (£2.99 at time of writing!) and you can pre-order the paperback on Amazon and Waterstones and Foyles will email you when they get it in stock.  I suspect as it’s published by Harper it may make it to the supermarkets too.  I would’ve saved my ravings for closer to the time, but as the Kindle is out and I think that this would make a great beach read I thought I’d alert you all now. Go forth and read it!

Authors I love, Book of the Week, historical, reviews, romance

Book of the Week: The Rogue Not Taken

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I retreated into the world of happy endings this week – and treated myself by letting myself read the new (well relatively new) Sarah MacLean which I have been saving for a Time Of Real Need.

This is the first in her new series – Scandal and Scoundrel – and after the massive high of the surprise reveal and general excitement of the final book of the Rules of Scoundrels, I wasn’t sure this could live up to my massive expectations.  And then I found out that the new series was inspired by celebrity scandals of today and got a bit worried.  But I really didn’t need to.  Sarah MacLean knows exactly what she’s doing.

Paperback copy of The Rogue Not Taken
The cover model is just a bit to… meh. All downcast eyes and no personality – completely un-Sophie like!

Sophie Talbot is the youngest of a line of scandalous daughters of a noveau riche peer.  Her sisters revel in their notorious reputations, but she’s not keen.  She’s the most retiring member of the family right up until she pushes her elder sister’s cheating husband into a pond at a party.  He’s a duke – old family, old money – she’s not.  Suddenly she’s the biggest scandal in society and facing being an outcast.  So she makes a run for it.  But she makes her escape it using the carriage belonging to the Marquess of Eversley, who’s fairly scandalous himself.  He thinks she’s trying to trap him into marriage.  She knows she definitely isn’t. But then Things Happen.

I enjoyed this so much. The characters are engaging, the dialogue is witty and fun.  There’s lots of proper plot – no wishy-washy misunderstandings that could be solved by one person asking the other a question.  And just when you think it’s nearly fixed, MacLean throws in another twist to the tail.  I was a little hesitant about one of these which happened towards the end of the book, but it was dealt with so neatly and resolved so satisfactorily that by the time the book was over I’d almost forgotten it had annoyed me.  I was also desperate to read the next in the series which isn’t out until August, but I’ll try and contain my impatience.

I still prefer the US cover to the UK one – cheesy thought the American romance covers are, they have no shame about what they are – there’s heaving bosoms, unlaced corsets that improbably reveal no under garments, ridiculous muscles and flowing locks, but they’re unapologetic about it, where as the ones here are misty and coy and undersell the contents.  But hey, at least with a British edition we don’t have to pay silly money to get them shipped in anymore.  Although – full disclosure – I got my copy from the publisher who gave them to everyone who went to Sarah MacLean’s London teaparty (she’s lovely) so I may yet buy a US version to match the rest of my books of hers…

Get your copy from Amazon, Foyles or Waterstones, or for Kindle or on Audible.  If you’re in the States, it should be everywhere fine, fine romances are sold (to quote Sarah Wendell.). Happy Romancing!

American imports, Book of the Week, new releases

Book of the Week: The Tumbling Turner Sisters

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Sometimes I sit for ages and think about what I’m going to pick for my Book of the Week, but sometimes I just know.  This week is one of the latter – by the time I was halfway through The Tumbling Turner Sisters I was fairly sure it was going to be this week’s pick. And that was on Tuesday.  Sure enough, here it is.

It’s 1919 and Gert, Winnie, Kit and Nell end up performing a vaudeville gymnastics act to try and make ends meet after their father injures his hand and is unable to work as a boot-stitcher.  As they travel around the US they experience the highs and lows of show business, make new friends, encounter prejudice and the seedier side of life.  Told by Winnie and Gert, you see them grow up as well as their differing perspectives on life on tour.

I love historical novels and I’m always looking for new authors who write good ones.  I’ve never read any of Juliette Fay’s books before – although reading the blurbs for them on Goodreads, this looks like it’s not precisely like any of her previous books anyway. This reminded me in some ways of Laurie Graham – who I love – it’s not laugh out loud funny as her characters often are, but there’s a similar tone and slightly sardonic world view.

I  really enjoyed this and although I had a few reservations about the end – which I won’t go into here because spoilers – they weren’t enough to annoy me and drive my overall impression of the book down.  I’ll be looking out for more from Juliette Fay – and maybe working my way through some of her back catalogue too.

You can get The Tumbling Turner Sisters from Amazon – but it’s only in hardcover and it’s not on Kindle at the moment, so I suspect it’s an American import.  Sorry. I try not to do this, but I really did enjoy this so much I wanted to write about it.  I’ll try and pick something easy to find next week!

 

Uncategorized

Book of the Week: Naked in Death

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A somewhat brief and atypical BotW this week as it was a bit of a strange week in reading – a holiday where I didn’t read as much as usual, and where a fair bit of what I read exasperated me.  I would have chosen Vienna Waltz by Teresa Grant, but it’s only a few weeks since I picked Beneath a Silent Moon which is the same series and which I enjoyed more – not least because I’m used to Malcolm and Suzanne being called Charles and Mélanie and it really confused me – for the backstory, see my previous post.

So by default almost, Naked in Death is the BotW.  I haven’t read a lot of Nora Roberts – although she writes these as J R Robb (authors writing under different names clearly a theme this week) – and many people on the various romance sites I frequent have raved about her and suggested her.  I read her latest romantic suspense last year (The Liar, which I reviewed for Novelicious) and quite enjoyed it, so I thought her long running detective-centric romantic suspense series might be a good choice as I’m not a huge straight contemporary romance reader.

And I quite enjoyed it – it certainly kept me turning the pages – right up until I finished it just as the plane arrived on the stand at Gatwick on the way home.  It’s a little too gritty for me and Roarke is a little too close to the controlling manipulative billionaire trope that I hate, but I was intrigued to see what happened next and who was responsible for the crime.  Eve gets points for being a strong woman who is good at her job (if you can discount sleeping with a suspect, which you kinda can, mostly, but the paragraph I wrote explaining why spoils the plot, although I’m sure you can work it out) and I quite liked the futuristic world she lives in – contrary to all my expectations when I realised it wasn’t set in the here and now.

But I’m not rushing out to glom on the rest of the series – if a few come my way, then I’m sure I’ll read them, but there’s enough really good stuff on the pile already (and waiting for me in bookshops!) that it can wait.  And I won’t be devastated if I don’t read them in order – or really at all.  So that’s why I say this is a bit of an unusual book of the week.  There was nothing I read that I wanted to rave about, and having written this, I’m not expecting you to rush out to by Naked in Death on the strength of my review.  But hey, I’ve been lucky to get this far without having a week like this.  If I could have got another book in to rave about I would have done – I tried, but the romance I was hoping was going to fix the problem turned out not to be the solution and I ran out of time.  Here’s hoping normal service will be resumed next week…