Tag: book round-ups

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: November Quick Reviews

veritywilde

Happy first Wednesday of the month everyone. It will be no surprise to you that two of my quick reviews this month are books that ticked off missing states in this year’s reading challenge! Without further ado, here are the reviews.

The George Eliot Murders by Edith Skom

College professor Beth Austin is off to Hawaii for a vacation during her term off teaching. At the resort on the island she takes part in a tennis tournament and comes into contact with some of the hotel’s highest spending guests. When a woman falls from a balcony, everyone thinks it’s suicide or an accident, but Beth isn’t convinced. And then another body is found and she starts investigating for real, with the help of two friends that she’s made at the resort. This is as bit of a strange one because it was first published in 1990 and is quite dated and of its time in some ways, but actually in others it feels more modern. I also didn’t think it needed the Middlemarch tie-in, but I get that that’s the conceit of the series and so it has to be there. I’m not massively familiar with Middlemarch (I think I read the book after I watched the TV adaptation in the mid 1990s!) so it also didn’t really make a huge amount of sense to me either! But I liked Beth as a character and the mystery was good with a neat conclusion. I wouldn’t rule out reading more of these, but given that I picked this up from a bookswap bookcase I suspect I won’t be come across them any time soon!

Death and the Final Cut by G M Malliet

I wanted to report back in on this one because I mentioned it when it came out earlier this month. A reminder of the plot: an actress is found dead late at night in the Round Church in Cambridge, which is being used at the set of a Viking epic movie. As St Just investigates it becomes clear that there is plenty of conflict among the cast and crew and reasons why a murder could have happened. Despite having missed three books in the series, it was pretty easy to pick up the threads of the main characters and the mystery itself is pretty good interesting and I really like the Cambridge setting. I’ve got back and bought one of the ones in the series that I’ve missed to try and fill in some gaps.

Animal Attraction by Jill Shalvis

This is the second in Shalvis’s Animal Magnetism series which is set in the town of Sunshine, Idaho. Our hero is Dell, the town’s vet and the heroine is Jade, currently working as his receptionist after having mysteriously appeared in town one day. Dell knows that Jade has a secret – she’s overqualified for the job that she’s doing and doesn’t want to let anyone into her life. Jade has always said her time in town is temporary, but as the deadline from her family to leave approaches she realises that she doesn’t want to go. Jade has some trauma in her back story which is a fairly major plot point, but it never gets as far as romantic suspense and there are plenty of cute animals and a kind and sensible hero to even that out.

And that’s your lot for this month – the other Recommendsdays in November were First in Mystery series and Dysfunctional Families and the BotWs were Murder at World’s End, Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge, Buffalo West Wing and Death in High Heels.

Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Dysfunctional Families

veritywilde

It’s Wednesday again everyone, and tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the US so I did think about doing a recommendsday post about books with Thanksgiving, but I don’t actually have a lot to add to the one I did a couple of years back. And so instead, I thought I’d do dysfunctional families because I know there is a lot of conflict over family dinners at events like Thanksgiving.

I think dysfunctional families come on a scale. So I’m going to start with the light(er) and fun(ner) ones. The ones that are a bit soapy and more on the family drama end of the spectrum and it often that comes with a side order of Rich People Problems. So there is The Paradise Problem by Christina Lauren with a grocery store heir trying to get his inheritance from his family with a fake marriage that’s got to survive scrutiny at a family wedding on a tropical island. Then there’s Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan with another rich old money family who are trying to get rid of their son’s girlfriend because she’s not from a rich Singaporean family. There’s also Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple, where Bernadette is the mum of our protagonist, who disappears after a disastrous school fundraiser leaving her daughter behind to try and work out where her mum has gone.

Slightly less soapy but still not grim, and you have The Vacationers by Emma Straub which is about a family with a lot of secrets on holiday in Mallorca. It seems to be a divisive book – some Goodreads reviewers hate it (typically saying nothing happens or they hate all the characters) but I enjoyed it – there’s a steady drip of revelations that kept me turning the pages even as I liked the characters less! Then there’s also two Taylor Jenkins Reid books – Malibu Rising, which had the messy lives of the Riva siblings and impact of their famous dad; or The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo with the many marriages and relationships of a Hollywood star.

Getting grimmer there is The War that Saved my Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley which is a middle grade book but which I described as Goodnight Mr Tom but amped up somewhat. It’s got a satisfying ending but the early stages are heavy going. And then about as grim as I will go today on the fiction side we have The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel where a woman returns to the house she spent a summer as a teen after her cousin goes missing.

Over in the non fiction world it’s all a bit grimmer: Educated by Tara Westover and I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy were on the edges of what I could cope with, especially because you know it’s a memoir and really happened. And because I want to end on a bit of a lighter note Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher is very funny even as it’s dealing with growing up the child of famous parents, her struggles with addiction and her mental health as well as just generally being Carrie Fisher.

Happy Humpday everyone!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: September Quick Reviews

veritywilde

It’s the start of October today, so I’m back with the Quick reviews for September, and stats will pop up later in the week. And September was quite a ride on the reading front. It really has. I’ve read some good stuff and some less good stuff, I’ve struggled with books for BotW at some points, but I’ve ended up at the end of the month with plenty of books on the list to chose from to talk about here, but I’ve decided that this month it’s a follow up special…

Chris at the Kennels by Patricia Baldwin

It’s been a while since I did a Girl’s Own book, and a year since I did my post about Girl’s Own career’s books, and so I’m popping this one in here as a follow up. This is another evangelical career book – so Chris finds God while she carries out an apprenticeship at a kennels. Because in the 1960s it seems that breeding dogs and showing them and doing a little bit of boarding for other people’s dogs was enough to pay two salaries as well as supporting the owner. Chris is a twin and grew up on a farm, but instead of staying on at school and trying to get into university she wants to leave and work with dogs. I have no idea how accurate this is on a life of a kennel maid front, but I enjoyed seeing what drama Baldwin had found to keep the plot moving and break up the dog care info! Additionally, unusually for the Baldwins that I’ve read, Chris’s religious awakening happens from reading the Bible and from the other kennel maid’s scepticism about religion, rather than a religious person coming in and converting her!

Island Calling by Francesca Segal*

I mentioned that this was coming out back in June and now I’ve read it, I am reporting back. I really think you need to have read the first one to make the most of this but it is part two of a trilogy, so that’s not really a surprise. But for me, having enjoyed Welcome to Glorious Tuga, it was lovely treat to return to the characters and the great setting and get another slice of island life. This time we have the addition of Charlotte’s bossy mother unexpectedly arriving on the island. There is some peril here, but it never feels too awful so it’s a charming and relaxing read. As far as I can tell there’s no news yet on a date for part three, but if it follows the pattern of this one, it should be next summer sometime.

The Paris Spy by Sarah Sigal*

And I’m also reporting back in on this one which came out a couple of weeks ago. The follow up to The Socialite Spy takes Lady Pamela More to Paris on the eve of WW2, and back into the orbit of Wallis Simpson, now Duchess of Windsor. I didn’t think this was as successful as the first book because it has a less defined task for Pamela to do, and it also covers a much wider and more chaotic time. It continues to follow fairly closely to what I have read about the antics of the Windsors after the abdication, so it feels pretty accurate on a history front, I just think it’s trying to do too much and doesn’t always resolve things as successfully as you want, although I suspect there’s a third book in mind… and I did enjoy this enough that I would read it though if there was!

That’s your lot today, but a reminder if you need it that this month’s books of the week were: The Last Supper, A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever, Breakneck and Entitled.

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Books set in Hotels

veritywilde

Happy Wednesday everyone! After a week in a hotel, with a sense of serendipity between life and reading, I’m back with a post about books set in hotels.

The Listeners by Maggie Steifvater*

So this is the book that first got me thinking about this post. As I mentioned on my preview post, this is set in a West Virginia hotel that’s been commandeered to hold Axis diplomats in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. It covers the staff as they try to deal with providing luxurious accommodation to people who are part of the enemy, but in particular the hotel’s manager June and FBI agent Tucker. For me this was a case of the blurb being better than the book itself. The pacing of this was too slow for me, and the magical realism elements didn’t ever seem to come to fruition the way that I was expecting them too. But it inspired the rest of this post so that it something!

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor

I read this a lot longer ago, but there’s a reason that this has been adapted for TV, made into a film and was nominated for the Booker Prize when it came out. Mrs Palfrey moves into the Claremont after the death of her husband. The characters are really well drawn and the picture of life presented is so vivid that you really can imagine the inmates of the Claremont going about their lives. The ending is somewhat melancholy – but not entirely unexpected. THis was my first Elizabeth Taylor when I read it and I have gone on to read more – including At Mrs Lippencote’s, which I wrote about not that long ago.

Bellweather Rhapsody by Katie Racculia

Hundreds of students have gathered at the Bellweather hotel for a statewide festival. Among the attendees is Minnie Graves, who 15 years ago was at the hotel when a notorious murder-suicide took place. She’s back to face her demons, but when a music prodigy disappears from the same room that the tragedy took place in, the hotel is once again the scene of an investigation. I didn’t like this as much as I did Racculia’s Tuesday Mooney, but it’s a bit like a Wes Anderson film but in a book. The cast is quirky, the plot is twisty and it’s funny as well as mysterious. Also it’s six years now since Racculia’s last novel, so I do hope there’s another one soon.

I’m currently revisiting Agatha Christie’s At Bertram’s Hotel for the first time in probably 20 years and for the first time as an audiobook, which is also a lot of fun especially as I’ve watched the TV adaptation a bunch of times and it’s fun remembering what the differences are. And of course The Body at the Library, which also features a hotel as a major part of the plot and there’s also Nita Prose’s The Maid and its sequels (which I still need to read).

If you’ve got any more books with hotels as a major plot point (and I’ve read A Gentleman in Moscow already) do put them in the comments!

Happy Reading!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: June Quick Reviews

veritywilde

It’s July so I’m back with the quick reviews from last month.

The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym

I love the way that Barbara Pym looks at slices of normal (or normal-ish) women’s lives and relationships in ways that are witty and also sad. Leonora is a middle-aged woman who is attractive and knows it. She’s got a collection of male admirers, but her latest are an antiques dealer and his nephew. She prefers the nephew, James, although the uncle (Humphrey) is more “suitable” and plays the two of them off against each other, whilst trying to detach James from his other relationships. It’s darker than some of Pym’s earlier novels, but it’s very good.

Copper Script by K J Charles

The new book from K J Charles has Aaron, a Met Police Sergeant, who is trying to figure out how Graphologist Joel is able to tell people’s lives and personalities from their handwriting. Aaron is convinced it’s a con, but Joel’s skills are very real. And soon the two of them are trying to solve some crime. I read this in single day and enjoyed it a lot. If you like K J Charles, this will probably work for you.

The Chow Maniac by Vivian Chien

I read the first two in this series a few years back (I bought the first one back when I was in Washington) and spotted this eleventh and most recent in the series in Foyles last week so took the opportunity to check in again as they’re quite hard to get hold of over here. And Lana’s life has moved on quite a bit – she’s still got the boyfriend but she’s much more established in her sleuthing. This sees her investigating whether a series of deaths among the Asian community in Cleveland might actually be murder, and connected to a secret society. Lana is still verging on too stupid to life, but I enjoyed reading it.

And that’s your lot this month

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Habemus Papam

veritywilde

It’s Wednesday, and as we have a Papal conclave starting next week, I’m bringing you a Recommendsday themed around the Vatican City and or the Catholic Church. You’re welcome.

Of course one of the big movies of Oscar season was Conclave, which is based on a book of the same name by Robert Harris. So you could read that or if you haven’t already seen the film, now might be the perfect time! But before Conclave, if you’d asked me to think of a book that’s set around the Vatican I would have said Angels and Demons, which is the first book in Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon series. This has the Illuminati and a bomb in the Holy See on the eve of Conclave. This was the third Dan Brown I read, 20 or so years ago and I had started to spot his tropes and patterns by that point, but there’s a reason he’s sold so many books – he’s very easy to read, particularly if you’re not a big reader. There’s a sixth book coming in the autumn – and all of the others have also had strong links to religion in some way. I still think the Da Vinci Code is probably the best of them though.

After not having thought about these books for probably actual years, I’m now mentioning Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde myseries twice in just a couple of weeks – as book five in that series The Vatican Murders (if you’re buying on Kindle) or Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders (if you’re buying in paperback) sees Wilde and Conan Doyle in the Holy See in the aftermath of the death of Pope Pius IX – my review from all the way back in 2016 (!) says it’s a bit like a Victorian Da Vinci Code, so it would seem like a really apt choice for this post!

Not set in the Vatican, but very much about the Catholic Church is Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose. I mentioned this last year in my post of books set in Italy, but it also fits here. Like The Da Vinci Code, it’s one of the best selling books ever published – with about 50 million copies worldwide compared to 80 million for the Da Vinci Code – but people are a lot less sniffy about this one than they are about Robert Langdon. As I’ve said before I read it as part of my history degree because of all the research and detail that Eco put into this, and its set in the fourteen century during the Avignon Papacy. Fun fact: there hasn’t been a French Pope since all of that went down, which didn’t stop the French media from really, really hoping the new Pope would be French during their coverage of the Conclave after the death of Pope John Paul II, which happened while I was living in France. Ahem. Anyway, back to In the Name of the Rose: this has got lots to unpick in it – from the Sherlock Holmesian hero – William of Baskerville – to spotting the deliberate anacronisms and errors and working out why they’re there. There was a TV adaptation five or so years ago (which I found way more gruesome than the book) which was an Italian and German co-production but also featured Rupert Everett in the cast. It was shown on BBC Two (that’s how I watched it) and I enjoyed it but thought some of the dubbing was clunky as well as the simplification of the plot but it’s very expensively done (and they spent the money better than Disney+ did on the Shardlake adaptation) – it’s still available to rent from Amazon should the mood take you.

On my to read list in this sort of area is Katte Mosse’s Labyrinth which has got an archaeological mystery set around some bodies discovered near Carcassone and a crusade 800 years earlier. To be honest the only reason I haven’t read this yet is because it is absolutely huge and my record with very long books right now is not great. I’m pretty sure I’ve got some Medici fiction somewhere on my shelves too – but I can’t remember if it’s Papal-Medici or other Medici doing things around Florence! And I’m also pretty sure I’ve got some Father Brown on my shelves somewhere too.

But what I’m actually doing at the moment is listening to Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, which is his satire on religion and philosophy and the role of religion in politics. It would have been Sir Terry’s birthday this week and it’s been ages since I read this – and the shiny new recording has Andy Serkis narrating it which is a lot of fun. And in a weird quirk of fate, I’ve just had an email saying it’s actually the Audible Daily Deal today (Wednesday) so if you don’t already own it, now is your chance…

Happy Humpday everyone.

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: January Quick Reviews

veritywilde

The first month of 2025 is over and so I’m back with another whistle-stop tour through a couple of books that I read last month that I didn’t already tell you about.

Vanishing Box by Elly Griffiths

Let’s start this month with a rule breaking mid-series book. But there’s a reason for this I promise. Vanishing Box is the fourth in Griffiths’ series set in Brighton in the early 1950s. It’s been five years since I read the third book but my mum’s book club picked the first one just before Christmas and it reminded me that I had forgotten to go and read any more of them. And this is a good instalment in the series. The general premise is that Edgar Stephens is a police detective but in World War 2 he worked in a shadowy unit with Max Mephisto who is a magician. They fall back into each other’s orbit during the first book (The Zigzag Girl) and have stayed there since. This book sees Max performing on the bill of a variety show in Brighton and Edgar investigating the death of a flower shop worker who happened to be living in the same boarding house as some of the other performers on the bill with Max. You could read this without reading the rest of the series, but it will definitely work best if you’ve got the background.

Natural Selection by Elin Hilderbrand

A short story on the list this month – this is an Amazon Original that follows Sophia, a New Yorker who has finally found a man she can see herself settling down with, but who finds herself on a couples trip alone after an emergency means he has to bail on her as they’re about to board the flight. This sends Sophia on a journey of self discovery – the holiday was his choice – so Sophia finds herself the fish out of a water on a once in a lifetime trip to the Galapagos Islands – without her boyfriend, without her phone signal (most of the time) and too embarrassed to talk to anyone about what’s going on. Hildebrand packs a lot into just over 50 pages and I found it surprisingly emotional as well as satisfying.

Not in My Book by Katie Holt*

As I previewed this when it came out, I thought I ought to follow up now I’ve read it. This is an enemies to lovers romance about two writers who are forced to write a book together after they take their classroom rivalry one step too far for their professor to let slide. If New Adult was still a thing, I would say that this is squarely in that area, but it’s not really any more so I don’t really know what to call it. And I think for some people this is going to work really well. It’s being compared to Sally Thorne‘s The Hating Game in the blurb and I think that’s pretty fair, but I think these two are maybe meaner to each other than those two. And that was my problem: they’re awful to each other and although I enjoyed it once they started getting along, as soon as there is any hint of conflict they revert to saying the most hurtful things they can to each other, and that’s just not my thing. Maybe it’s the age of the main characters and I’m just too old for that now – but it ended up being the end of the trope that I find hard to get on board with.

And that’s your lot for this month – a reminder of the Books of the Week from January: White House by the Sea, Deadly Summer Nights, Dark Tort and The Paradise Problem.

Happy Reading!

Best of..., book round-ups

Best Books of 2024: New to Me Fiction

veritywilde

As ever, as well as reading a lot of new fiction, I’ve read a whole bunch of not new fiction that is still very good, and given that the non-fiction best of was a mix of new releases and old, it would be remiss of me not to complete the set with the old (so to speak) fiction. And I’m working from published longest ago to most recent for reasons that will become obvious very shortly…

Rivals by Jilly Cooper

TV-tie in cover of Rivals

Ok, I’m starting with the one on this list that I should absolutely have read before now, and which you’re going to have the least trouble getting hold of because the adaptation is (rightly) everywhere at the moment. As I said in my BotW review at the start of December the very 80s attitudes in the adaptation are there (and even more so) in the book. So if you didn’t get on with that aspect of the TV version (or don’t like books like that in general) than your mileage may vary. But I absolutely raced through it – Goodreads tells me it’s the longest book I’ve read this year (over 700 pages) and yet I read it in under three days. And only one of those days was a weekend (and that was the one where i only had about 100 pages to go and finished it on a plane) – so that’s fast even for me. Season Two has now been announced for the adaptation, and we can only hope that the scripts are already written (or at least part written) and so they can get on with filming it asap…

The Golden Hour by Beatriz Williams

Paperback copy of the Golden Hour

Beatriz Williams’s 2019 novel fits neatly into a couple of my reading interests – fiction set in the first half of the twentieth century, Edward and Mrs Simpson-related fiction and spy and espionage stuff that’s not too, too terrifying. This has a split narrative between Nassau in 1941, where Lulu has been sent to write an article about the former King and now governor of the Bahamas and his wife; and a sanatorium in Switzerland atthe start of the twentieth century. The blurb majors on the Windsor connection, but they’re not really the centre – that’s Lulu. I continue to be about three books behind on Williams’ solo releases because they just seem to be harder to get hold of here, but whenever I read them I really do enjoy them.

A Murder Inside by Frances Brody

Paperback copy of A Murder Inside

It’s the late 1960s and Nell Lewis has just been made governor of a new women’s open prison in Yorkshire. The job was going to be challenging enough before a body was found on the grounds and so Nell sets out to solve the crime and protect the women inmates from the suspicion of the local community. I really liked the set up and the 1960s setting – I haven’t read a lot of mystery series set in this time period, or at least not stuff that wasn’t contemporary to it when it was written. I’m not sure how many books it’s going to be possible to set around this one prison, but there are currently two of them we’ll see how the second ends when I get around to reading it. Frances Brody has published another in her Kate Shackleton series since this came out, so it may be that she’s going to try and run the two series in parallel to start with and see how it goes. I hope so, because I do like Kate, and I think there’s plenty more that she can investigate too.

Flying Solo by Linda Holmes

Laurie has just returned to her home town in Maine to sort out the estate of her 90-year-old aunt. She’s also recently cancelled her wedding and ended that relationship and is about to turn 40. Among her aunt’s possessions and mementos of travels around the world she finds a wooden duck and a love letter that references “if you’re desperate, there’s always the ducks”. And so Laurie sets out to discover the history of the duck – and in doing so gets caught up in antiques dealers and con artists and late night dates at the library with her high school boyfriend. This was Holmes’s follow-up to Evvie Drake Starts Over, and although both of them have A Novel written on the front, I would say this is further towards the Women’s Fiction end of the spectrum than the other one was. It has a satisfying ending, but it’s a grown up one – not a throw everything you know about yourself away and give yourself over to The New one. I really enjoyed it – and the only reason it wasn’t a BotW is because I read it the same week as The Rom-Commers (which is on the best new fiction list). Was my late November-early December holiday a real high point in my reading this year or is it recency bias – who can tell, but I did read a whole bunch of books I’d been saving on that holiday as a treat.

The Reunion by Kayla Olsen

Liv was the star of a hit teen TV show and grew up on screen. Twenty years on, a reboot is in the offing and she finds herself back on set with all her old castmates – including her former boyfriend. She’s built herself a new life since the show – but this is her chance to try and get closure on what happened with her on and off screen love interest when the show ended. Once they’re back on set together, they fall into old habits – but will this time have a different ending? This was released in January 2023 and is part of what is now a growing collection of novels set around nostalgia for TV shows or movies – whether it’s characters transported into them, or former stars of them involved in romances some how. I’ve read a few of them, with mixed success, but this is a really good one*. Like Flying Solo it has “A Novel” written on the front of it – and in this case it means that the novel is more about Liv finding herself than completely centred on the romance between her and Ransom. This one is harder to get hold of I think – I bought it in Foyles and it’s definitely an American paperback size, but if you do spot it, I think it’s worth it.

Have a great day everyone!

*so is yesterday’s BotW pick, but it is much more Christmas-themed and also a new release so doesn’t fit in to this post.

Recommendsday, reviews

Recommendsday: November Quick Reviews

veritywilde

Another month over, and as you probably saw on Monday, a mega reading list to finish the month off, because we were on holiday. Only one of these is actually something finished on the holiday – but I promise you will hear more about a bunch of those holiday books at some point. However in the meantime here’s a three of the books I read in November and haven’t told you about yet!

Frequent Hearses by Edmund Crispin

I’m slowly working my way through the Gervase Fen series – so slowly in fact that they’ve now started a fresh redesign since I started reading them. I’ve now read six of the ten slightly out of order as this is in fact book seven. It sees Gervase entangled with the movie making set and trying to untangle the mystery around the death of a young actress who threw herself from Waterloo Bridge one night after a party. I had part of the solution figured out, but not all the whys and wherefores so it was a good read finding out.

Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans*

The Second World War is over and Valentine Vere-Thissett is on his way home. Except the war has changed his world – his elder brother has been killed, leaving him with a title he doesn’t want and and now the fate of his family home, built in the 1500s, in his hands. I have really enjoyed a lot of Lissa Evans’s novels, but for some reason this one didn’t quite work as well as I wanted it to. It’s got all the elements – a reluctant younger son taking over, post war setting, an ill-assorted group of people thrown together, but just this time, it didn’t provoke as strong a set of emotions as her books usually do. It’s still good, don’t get me wrong, it’s just not brilliant, and I was hoping for brilliant.

A Body on the Doorstep by Marty Wingate

It’s 1921 and Mabel Canning has moved to London to try and strike out on her own and be a Modern Woman. To this end she’s got a job with the Useful Women’s Agency, but one one of her assignments a dead body turns up on the doorstep when she answers the door. And of course she can’t help but get drawn in to trying to figure out what happened to him. This was the latest in my quest to find a new historical mystery series to fill the gap left by the end of the Daisy Dalrymple books. And it’s not bad – the mystery isn’t the most complicated, but it’s got a fair bit of set up to do and characters to introduce as the first in the series so I don’t mind that too much. It’s in KU so I will likely read more of them as and when I get a chance.

And there you are, that’s your lot today – but a quick reminder of the November Books of the Month, which were Rivals, Top of the Climb, The Anti-Social Season and Death at the Dress Rehearsal

books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: June Quick Reviews

veritywilde

As I said on Sunday, I’ve already written about so many books this month that I don’t have much left to tell you about. But I’ve managed to write a few sentences about a couple more books from the June pile for you!

Jean Tours a Hospital by Doreen Swinburne

I’m starting with something completely left field that I’m not expecting any of you will ever read. This was one of my purchases at Book Conference last summer and as the title suggests is a career book encouraging girls into nursing for a profession. It’s not a great work of literature, but it is a fascinating look at what nursing was like in the 1950s – lots of cleaning, nothing disposable, lots of people on bedrest and not a drop of blood insight on Jean’s tour! Of course nursing is for girls and doctoring is for boys and there is the usual suggestion that if you’re a good girl you might get to marry a doctor but there’s also some interesting (for the time) ideas from the Matron about nursing becoming a degree subject. Not a masterpiece, but fun half hour for what I paid for it!

Final Acts ed Martin Edwards

This is another collection of classic crime short stories all set in or around theatres. I know I mention the BLCC stuff a lot – but usually in the context of the novels (see last week’s BotW for example) because I find the short story collections can be a bit patchy. But this one is a good one, with some big names you’ll recognise including Dorothy L Sayers doing a not Wimsey story and Ngaio Marsh Alleyn short, and some smaller names you may have read full length novels from like Christianna Brand. I do like a theatre-set story (be it murder mysteries or romances) so maybe that biased me, but it’s in Kindle Unlimited at the moment so worth a look.

Piece of Cake by Mary Hollis Huddleston and Asher Fogle Paul*

This is a contemporary romance set in Nashville about a woman working at a struggling wedding magazine who has to work with a social media star on a video series that they hope will secure the magazine’s future. I read the previous book from these authors (borrowed it from the library) and liked the premise but thought that there was too much going on and that the romantic element was unsatisfying because all the options had issues. So I read this to see how the authors managed to redeem Claire – who was the villain of the piece in the last book. And the answer is: they didn’t really. And therein lies the problem. If you haven’t read the previous book, you spend a lot of the time wondering how bad she could really have been – and then when you find out what she did, I assume you lose any sympathy you have left for her – if you’ve managed to keep any with the “oh I’m so poor” thing, whilst living in a flat of her own and driving an expensive car. But, on the plus side – this has less plot elements and there is only one romantic option and he seems like an OK kind of guy – it’s just the heroine that’s the problem. So all in all, I think this is probably a sign that these authors are not for me. But it may work better for other people as these things often do and so I mention it anyway.

And that’s your lot. As I said on Monday, we have half year review posts coming, but a quick reminder of the Books of the Month from June: A Calamity of Mannerings, The True Love Experiment, Mrs Nash’s Ashes and Twice Around the Clock. And don’t forget there was also a new Summer Romance round up and Romances with heroes with kids too if you need a reminder of why I had so few options for this month’s quick reviews!