I had trouble picking my Book of the Week this week for various reasons, and I’m sorry that this post is a bit short. Anyway, this week’s BotW is Our Own Private Universe by Robin Talley. I read this last week, and while bits of it didn’t work for me (of which more below) it’s a story that I haven’t read before (maybe I haven’t been looking in the right places!) and that needs to be represented more in fiction – particularly YA fiction.
15-year-old Aki is bi-sexual, but so far she’s only told her best friend Lori. She’s off to Mexico for the summer with her church youth group and the pair have a plan to start getting out there and living an interesting life. At the camp, Aki meets Christa and the two have a connection. But it’s not easy trying to navigate your first relationship with everyone watching you – especially if you’re trying to keep it quiet. And how do you know if it’s love anyway?
There was a lot about this that I liked. It’s a diverse (in every way) queer coming of age story that (spoiler alert) doesn’t end in deaths and disownment. But that’s not to say there isn’t plenty of angst, because there is. In fact that was my main gripe with the book – that at times Aki just went too far over my whining teenager limit and there was a lot of petty drama that I could have done without. But I have a low tolerance for that sort of thing – so it may work much better for the target market of angsty teenagers than it does for me!
But although it’s not perfect, stories like this need to be told and need to be out there. And the world needs more happy YA love stories (or at least I do!)- whether they’re F/F, M/M or M/F.
This week’s BotW is the latest from long-time auto-buy author of mine, Trisha Ashley. If you’ve been here a while this choice will not surprise, you because you’ll know that I’m a big TrishaAshley fan. I’m on her mailing list, I go to her London readers’ tea party, I keep her books on the special downstairs bookshelf of books I might need to have handy to read again AND I have copies of most of them on Kindle. So you can imagine how delighted I was when I got an advance readers copy of her new book The Little Teashop of Lost and Found – and how much willpower it took not to squeal all over the place, read it straight away and then immediately blog about it. But I have been restrained. Very. It helped that I had to pack all the book piles away for the fireplace work – and that they still haven’t been properly unpacked. It helped that I knew I had nights coming right before it was due out and that this would be the perfect book to save as a post-nights* treat to myself. But still. Points for will power for waiting to read it so that I could post this the week that it comes out. Anyway, you want to hear about the book, not about my crazy fangirling, so here we go.
Check out my attempt at pretty photography. I like the contrast of the daffodils and the book cover.
The Little Teashop of Lost and Found tells the story of Alice, abandoned on the moors above Haworth as a baby, adopted and then abandoned again in various ways by various people as she grows up into adulthood. Always feeling like an outsider, after her latest setback she buys a rundown cafe in Haworth in the hope that being close to where she was found might help her find the home and the family that she’s been searching and longing for. While she’s setting up her tea emporium – and writing her book – she makes friends and starts to try and unravel the mystery of who she really is. But will she get her happily ever after?
Trisha Ashley’s heroines tend to be looking for a second chance at love and have tragedy in their past – and Alice is no exception.** She’s had so many knock backs and tragedies that it’s a wonder she’s still in any way optimistic about the future. And life in Haworth isn’t plain sailing at first, although she soon acquires a surrogate family to help her along. I liked the interludes with extracts from the dark and twisted fairy tale that Alice is writing and I loved the secondary characters – the Giddings family, Lola and the rude waitresses with the hearts of gold are all brilliant. And I really liked the other intercut sections that I can’t talk about without giving too much of the plot away – they’re so cleverly done that I had to go back and reread some of them at the end in shock to check I hadn’t missed something earlier!
This is warm, witty and uplifting as well as being a great slow-burn romance where the reader and every one else around the heroine can see what’s going on so much more clearly than she can. This is also (obviously) set in Yorkshire rather than the more traditional Trisha-world of Lancashire but there are some familiar faces here despite that. If you’ve read the novella Finding Mr Rochester you’ll spot some characters from there – in fact I need to go back and read it again to see exactly how many characters from that pop up in this.
The Little Teashop of Lost and Found is out in hardback on Thursday (the 9th) and you can get your copy from Amazon (for a bargainous £6.99 at time of writing), Waterstones and Foyles or buy it on Kindle or Kobo. The paperback isn’t out until June, but you can pre-order that from Amazon, Waterstones and Foyles too. I need to get myself a copy too – because the ARC doesn’t have all the recipes in the back!
Happy Reading!
*Proof reading this was a real hoot – I wrote this when I was still quite nightshift-brainy and when I came back to check it, well lets just say it was a haven for unfinished sentences, typos and mismatched tenses. I think I’ve fixed them all, but hey, if a few have crept through, I’m sorry!
**In fact I think the heroine’s backstories are getting sadder – Tabby from Christmas Cracker had been in jail (she was someone else’s dupe), Cally in Wish Upon a Star had a seriously-ill daughter, Izzy in Creature Comforts had been involved in a serious car crash, now Alice abandoned at birth. I don’t know how the books still end up being so cheerful and uplifting!
I know. This is a day late. What can I say – nightshifts really wiped me out. I have spent so much time sleeping – and then a lot of life admin to do to try to catch up after two weeks of living nocturnally. So this is a Recommendsday post instead – and you can wait until tomorrow for February stats. Sorry. Anyhow, this week’s BotW really brightened my nightshifts commutes up last week – Lucy Parker’s second book, Pretty Face.
You know its in London because of the bridge!
Lily Lamprey is an actress. Unfortunately she’s handicapped by a sexy voice and curves that saw her cast as a man-stealing bitch in a popular period drama. But now she’s leaving the show and she wants to do something different. Respected theatre director Luc Savage has poured his heart and soul into restoring his family’s London theatre and now he’s casting the opening production. Some of his partners think that Lily giving a role would be a great way to sell tickets. But he’s not convinced she can pull it off. When the two meet there are sparks – and instant attraction. But Lily’s mum has a reputation for getting ahead through her relationships and Lily knows what people will say if she starts seeing Luc. Luc’s long-term relationship has just finished and he’s older than Lily – he’s sure it’s just a mid-life crisis and he’s not willing to risk his career and reputation on it.
This is just what I like in a romance. It’s an enemies to lovers story with witty banter, plenty of snark and a great set up. Both characters have their issues and their reasons for avoiding a relationship with each other and the way things are worked out and worked through is fun to read about. Parker’s depiction of the world of the theatre is great – full of well-rounded characters and personality. If I have a problem with the book it’s that a few of the British references and British-isms jarred for me and didn’t ring entirely true. But that’s little nitpicky details that most people probably aren’t going to spot/be annoyed by.
Pretty Face was just what I needed last week – fun and romantic, with a bit of emotional peril and a satisfying conclusion. And I liked it more than I liked her first book, Act Like It, too. I just hope we don’t have to wait too long for another one.
My copy came via NetGalley, but you can get an ebook copy from Kindle or Kobo, who also have Act Like it as well (Kindle, Kobo).
I’m on my second week of nights, so I’m hoping that when this publishes, I’ll be asleep. Or if not asleep, just waking up well rested and raring to go. Fat chance Fingers crossed. Anyway, this week’s BotW returns to a familiar face to regular readers – yup, it’s another Fahrenheit Press book. In fact I had to go back through the archives to make sure I hadn’t already talked about Christy Kennedy, aside from the brief mention in last week’s Half-Term Reading* because The Ballad of Sean and Wilko is the fourth in the 10-book series.
The covers are all quite dark and brooding – and Camden
In the Ballad of Sean and Wilko we rejoin Christy Kennedy as he investigates the murder of the frontman of a 70s band who is found dead in his locked dressing room mid-show. Kennedy has to pick his way through a tangle of complicated relationships – professional and personal – to try and figure out what happened. Then another body turns up, in another locked room.
Christy Kennedy is a Northern Irish detective with a fondness for the Beatles and a soft spot for a local journalist called ann rea (no capital letters – like kd lang). He has a methodical approach to solving mysteries and you know as much as he knows (most of the time). There’s a collection of supporting characters who are interesting in their own right and who never feel like fillers. And late 1990s Camden is a character in itself, painted with love and affection
Paul Charles started writing the Christy Kennedy series nearly 20 years ago and they have aged well. The music may be on CD or vinyl and there may not be many mobile phones, or much talk of the internet but because it was written at the time it all feels perfectly natural. Charles has worked in the music industry and boy does it show. I’ve learned so much about the mechanics of the industry from these books – particularly this one – but it’s all worn very lightly so you only realise later how many facts are packed in there.
Anyway, to summarise: good murder, great setting, excellent detective. What more could you want. The Ballad of Sean and Wilko is available on Kindle for the bargain price of £1.99. I got my copy as part of my Fahrenheit Book Club subscription which I have banged on about enough already.
Now I’m off back to bed. I can only hope this post makes sense. My brain is not a very coherant place right now.
Happy reading.
*Which I’m obviously now regretting because it’s making me sound repetitive and I hate that. But I did like it best out of last week’s books so sod it, and let it be a lesson to me to plan better in future.
Another half-term bonus post. As I was dusting my bookshelves the other day, I was looking at my collection of history books. I’m a history graduate and have read a lot of history writing over the years. In fact for portions of my university career I hardly read any fiction because I was so burned out on reading from doing my coursework. These days my reading is mainly fiction, but a lot of it is historical fiction and when I do read non-fiction, a lot of it is historical biography or about history. And although I don’t tend to reread nonfiction, there are a few books that I have kept hold of – and not because I worry that people will judge me based on my bookshelves*. So what have I kept and why?
Elizabeth by David Starkey
This was the big history blockbuster when I was doing A-levels. And as it happens, I was studying Tudor history. This was one of the first really readable “proper” history books I had come across (it was much easier going that GR Elton’s Henry VII which I also had to read) and it and John Guy’s Tudor England formed the basis of a lot of my essays at the time. This is full of research, but wears it lightly – if you want a readble way of fact-checking portrayals of Elizabeth in popular culture (like say the Cate Blanchett Elizabeth films) this will do that for you. I’ve kept reading Starkey since – particularly on Henry VIII and his wives – and have a couple of others around the house, but it’s Elizabeth that I’m sentimentally attached to.
Bright Young People by DJ Taylor
I have an enduring fascination with the inter-war period. I love novels – particularly detective novels – written in that period and set in that period and the actual history and reality of that era fascinates me too. I have a little collection of books about the Roaring Twenties and this is possibly my favourite. It’s the most Britain-centric – which means I can use it to get the background on some of the people who crop up in the novels and similar. It’s also got a very thorough bibiliography and further reading list which I always appreciate and there’s a few books on that list that I still want to read. Also on my shelves (still) are Flappers by Judith Makerell, Anything Goes by Lucy Moore (which is more America-centric), Mad World by Paula Byrne and Queen Beesby Sian Evans. And I’ve got the new Evelyn Waugh biography on the to-read pile too.
An Uncommon Woman: The Empress Frederick by Hannah Pakula
Now bear with me on this one because it’s slightly odd. As a child I was a little bit obsessed with Queen Victoria. Well, quite a lot obsessed. You know how some children are into dinosaurs or trains? That was me and Queen Victoria. I could recite dates, I knew the middle names of all her children, I had it marked on my height chart how tall she was so I knew when I was taller than her and when we visited the Isle of Wight, all I wanted to do was visit Osborne. As an adult this has left me with more knowledge than I care to admit about the genealogy of the royal family, although I did win money by correctly predicting Prince George’s name – and my pick if it had been a girl was Charlotte, so you know, it has some uses. I was also big into pretend games when I was little – but I always pretended to be Princess Victoria, the Princess Royal, not Queen Victoria. Yeah. I know. I was a very strange child. Still I turned out all right really. Anyway, there aren’t many proper biographies of Princess Victoria – who was the mother of Kaiser Wilhelm II (him of World War One) and who died less than 8 months after her mother – but I picked this up secondhand at university to get my head around who she actually was – rather than the crazy ideas that 8-year-old Verity had – and although she actually had a sad and tragic life in the end, I keep it on the shelf as a reminder of the weirdly obsessed child that I was. Also on the shelves as remnants of that childhood obsession are Julia Gelardi’s Born to Rule (about five of Queen Victoria’s Granddaughters), Princesses by Flora Fraser (about George III’s daughters) and Helen Rappaport’s Magnificent Obsession (about Victoria and Albert’s marriage).
*People are welcome to judge me on my bookshelves – if you look at the big downstairs bookshelf you’ll find Georgette Heyer, Dorothy L Sayers, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Laurie Graham, Maya Angelou, Barbara Pym and Ngaio Marsh amongst others. I think that’s a pretty accurate picture of me.
Bonus post ahoy! Yes, I know we’re already well into half term (my bad) but here are some reading suggestions never the less.
Firstly, there’s a new Sinclair’s Mystery out from Katherine Woodfine. I’ve mentioned this middle-grade historical mystery series set in the Edwardian era before (in my Christmas books post), but they’ve never got a proper review for some reason. Book Three is The Mystery of the Painted Dragon sees Sophie and Lil and the gang investigating the theft of a painting from an exhibition at Sinclair’s department store. There are a lot of mystery books aimed at this age group – I’ve spoken at length about Robin Stevens’ Wells and Wong series (for example here, here, here and here) and obviously there’s lots of Enid Blyton mysteries, but this is unusual in that the teenage characters are neither at school nor on school holidays – they’re out at work. This makes for different challenges and opportunities as well as for an exciting air of independence for the characters. If you’ve got an upper primary school child who’s bored this holiday, this would entertain them for an hour or two. And if you’re a big kid like me, it’ll do the same for you too.
Off to the beach? Then try Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife. I finished this last week and it’s a big old doorstop of a book telling the story of a fictional First Lady. It’s very clearly based on Laura Bush – in fact when I went to read Mrs Bush’s biography after reading the book I was surprised how very close it was and it made me feel a little uneasy. But then I read books that are fictionalised versions of historical people’s lives all the time and that doesn’t make me feel squicky, so it’s a bit of a double standard. Anyway, Alice is a great character to spend time with – although I liked the two thirds to three quarters of the book where she’s not in the White House much more than I liked that final section.
If you want something historical, I’ve just finished Beatriz Williams’ latest The Wicked City. This is a time slip novel involving a flapper in 1920s New York and a forensic accountant in the city in the late 1990s. If you’ve read any of Williams’ other novels there are a few familiar faces popping up too. It’s been a while since I read my last novel and I’ve missed a couple so I’m starting to lose track of which Schulyers are which – I think that means I need to do a re-read!
And if you fancy some crime, Fahrenheit have just pubished the fourth Christy Kennedy book, The Ballad of Sean and Wilko, I haven’t read it yet, it’s waiting for me on my kindle for one of my nightshift commutes, but I’ve really enjoyed the first three, and there are 10 altogether, so if you’re in the mood for a new series to binge read, this could be for you.
Nightshifts are well underway here, so hopefully I’ll be asleep when this publishes. I say hopefully, if day one is anything to go by I’ll have been woken up half a dozen times by assorted phone calls, tradesmen and delivery people. Anyway, as I said last week, I’ve been looking for a new cozy crime series. And as you know, I’m always looking for new historical crime series. So this week’s BotW is a new historical crime novel from the cozier end of the spectrum which I’m hoping is going to be the start of series.
Cover of The Riviera Express
The Riviera Express is the first book from TP Fielden* about Judy Dimont, a newspaper reporter in a south-coast seaside town in the 1950s. Miss D has a nose for a scoop, an editor who doesn’t always appreciate her and a rivalry with the paper’s other lady reporter. The Riveira Express is both the name of the paper and the name of the train which brings holiday-makers to the resort of Temple Regis and one of Miss Dimont’s regular jobs is meeting the train if it’s got a celebrity on board. But when she and her photographer arrive to meet film star Gerald Hennessey, they find him dead in his first class compartment. Called away from the scene to a second death, Judy becomes convinced that there is a link between the two – even though the police aren’t convinced that either is the result of foul play. Soon she’s investigating the links between the film star and the seaside town as well as between the two men and dealing with a couple of highly strung actresses who are mourning the dead star. Will Judy find out the truth – and if she does will her editor let her publish it?
I hope that sounds like fun, because this book is a lovely romp through an English seaside town with pretensions of grandeur led by a charming character in Judy Dimont. One of the toughest things to do in stories like this is create a leading character with an excuse to go poking about in murders and mysteries – and a reporter is an ideal one. Judy has a perfect excuse to nose around and to get information from the police and the authorities. It also means that she is going to keep coming across bodies in a more natural way than a private citizen would. And it makes a change from private detectives of all shapes and sizes well. The secondary characters are well drawn and there’s plenty of potential here for on-going plot strands without it feeling like there’s lots of set up being done. I’m looking forward to finding out more about Miss D’s past in the next book.
Here’s the rub – The Riviera Express isn’t actually out for another 9 days yet – but you can pre-order the hardback from Amazon or Waterstones and hope it turns up on the day or on Kindle or Kobo and it’ll download itself on the 23rd as a lovely treat.
Happy reading.
*I would love to know who TP Fielden is – this doesn’t feel like a first novel and there’s very little information that I can find on TP, but their Goodreads biography says that they are a “leading author, broadcaster and journalist” so it feels like a pen name – and I’d love to know who is behind it!
Last week was almost entirely taken up with cozy crimes, many of them the first in series as I’m on the hunt for another one to add to my lists. It’s proving a harder quest than I had imagined. Quite a few of the books that I read last week had a problem (or two). But in the end I settled on the first book in Cynthia Kuhn’s Lila McLean series – mostly on the basis that I went out and requested the second book from NetGalley after I finished it – which is out later this month – and then read that too.
I like the simplicity of the cover – it looks classy to me.
So, in the Semester of Our Discontent we met Lila, newly appointed English professor at a small but prestigious university. But no sooner has she arrived at Stonedale than she has more to worry about than whether she’s going to get enough published to get tenure when she finds one of her colleagues dead. Her cousin (also on the staff and up for tenure) is one of the prince suspects, so Lila starts gathering evidence alongside teaching and settling in to her new job.
Now as a Brit, I had to google tenure the first time I can across it in a book a few years back, because it wasn’t something I had come across in the UK system, but this actually explains it really quite well and it made sense to me (or at least as much sense as it can make!) without slowing down the plot or doing an info dump. There’s a large cast of characters in this, who don’t always get a chance to become more than just names* but the people you do get to know are engaging and three dimensional. There’s definitely set up here for running threads for the series, but it’s done much less obviously than some of the other books I read last week.
There are a couple of moments that are a bit over the top (and I can’t tell you what) but Lila’s investigations are sensible enough and she never strays over the Too Stupid to Live or the Why the Monkeys Hasn’t She Been Arrested lines – which again was a problem in some of the other books that I read this week.
The Semester of Our Discontent isn’t perfect, but it’s engaging and readable and the depiction of campus life feels like it has plenty of potential for plots that don’t neccesarily revolve around loads of bodies**. And at time of writing its available for the bargain price of 99p on Kindle. It’s also available, but more expensive (£2.04) on Kobo. The second book, The Art of Vanishing, is available on the 28th – Kindle and Kobo are taking pre-orders now, and again at time of writing Kindle is the cheaper. They’re both published by Henery Press, who were the source of a fair few of my cozies last week, and they have more links to outlets where you can buy on their websites as well as sign up to their newsletter, which sometimes has freebies. Wink wink.
I had such a tough job picking a book for BotW this week, because I really didn’t read anything that I whole-heartedly loved. I started reading a lot of books and then gave up on them, and I finished a few – including a real stinker. But in the end I plumped for Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars by Miranda Emmerson.
As I mention below, Im not quite sure the cover for this is quite right.
Anna Treadway is a dresser, working in a London theatre and living above a Turkish cafe in Soho in 1965. When the actress who she works with disappears, she sets out to try and find her as the trail grows cold and the newspapers lose interest. As she hunts for the mysterious Iolanthe Green she finds herself in new world of jazz clubs, police cells and backstreet doctors.
Whilst this wasn’t perfect, it was an interesting idea and a great cast of diverse characters. It’s got an interesting mystery that’s well thought through and several different plot strands which tie together quite nicely. Underneath the mystery of where Iolanthe has gone there are issues of prejudice and race and people struggling to be heard and believed. From the look of the (UK) cover and some of the write ups I was expecting it to be ultimately more uplifting, but perhaps given the issues that it’s dealing with, I was being unrealistic.
This is Miranda Emmerson’s first novel and it does a great job of creating the atmosphere of 1960s London and the grimier side of life. In fact that was what I liked best about it – the mix of people thrown together, some times living side by side without ever intersecting. I think I would have liked more of Anna’s backstory and I wanted a bit more of what happened next at the end, but I pretty much always want more of what happened next at the end!
My copy came via NetGalley, but you can get Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars from Amazon, Foyles and Waterstones or on Kindle and Kobo. It only came out a couple of weeks back so it’s hardcover and the ebooks are priced accordingly too I’m afraid. The paperback is out in July, so it may drop a little then, if you want to add it to your wishlist and wait it out.
So, you may have noticed from yesterday’s WiB that I didn’t finish that many books last week. But that was not a problem when it came to picking a BotW, because one of the books that I did finish was Norman Ohler’s Blitzed.
It’s only in hardback at the moment I’m afraid, but I’m just happy it’s been translated at all.
Ohler’s thesis is that large amounts of drugs were consumed by Nazi troops as they steamrollered through Europe, that drugs were equally consumed by people on the homair front and that during the latter stages of the war (from around 1941 onwards) Hitler himself was dependent on hard drugs. Ohler backs up his assertions with primary source research using documents held in archives in Germany and in America and makes a persuasive case.
Now before I go any further, I need to say that although I have a history degree, I have, in the main, avoided study of Nazi Germany because I find it too unbearably terrible. Luckily my school stopped studying WW2 Germany at A-Level the year before I started sixth form* and at university I managed to avoid Twentieth Century history for all but one term** so I am no expert.
I found Ohler’s book incredibly readable and very well researched. It’s an appealing idea. The Nazis were off their heads on drugs. That’s why they did it. It’s comforting and reassuring – it was the drugs which made them do it – and means that you don’t have to worry about what you would have done in their place. I don’t think this is what Ohler is trying to say. In the case of Hitler he’s very specific that it doesn’t explain all of Hitler’s actions – just enabled him to maintain and continue his rule. As for the man on the street, or the soldier in a panzer regiment, the drugs enabled them to keep going for longer than otherwise. So I suppose what I’m saying is that this book shouldn’t be seen in isolation or viewed as the whole story. That would be far too simplistic. But it has new ideas and research I haven’t heard about before and is worth reading, if only so that you know what the historians are arguing about. Because they are going to argue about this.
Get your copy of Blitzed from Amazon, Waterstones or Foyles or on Kindle or Kobo. The paperback is out in May – pre-order on Amazon. Or if you don’t want to read the whole thing, Dan Snow interviewed Norman Ohler on his History Hit Podcast and it was reviewed in the December issue of Literary Review (subscription needed).
Happy Reading!
*We did Tudor England, the French Revolution, France 1814-1914 and the Italian Risorgimento which was much more to my taste.
** the second term of my first year, where my seminar tutor was a German Post Grad whose thesis was on “images of death in 20th Century Germany”.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 