This week’s BotW is Christina Jones’s Stealing the Show. Now Jones is a long time favourite author of mine – back since I discovered Heaven Sent via the Melissa Nathan Prize (god how I still miss Melissa Nathan. I bought everything she wrote. I cried in Tescos when I read that she’d died).
Stealing the Show is an early CJ book – and if you’ve been reading the later books in the series, this one is the origin of the Memory Lane Fair that crops up in so many. It’s a look at the life of travelling show people – and it’s a great love story. I absolutely gobbled it up. It’s maybe not as funny as some of her later books, but it’s dealing with more serious issues than they are – there’s domestic abuse tangled up in this as well as inheritance and family pressures.
But don’t let me make that sound like it’s a weighty tome that’ll drag you down. It’s totally not. It’s so much fun. If you haven’t read any Christina Jones before, this really might be a good place to start – even if Heaven Sent is still my favourite.
Accent Press have been republishing some of the harder to find Christina Jones novels as ebooks – so this is easier to get hold of than ever. Go read some of her books – you won’t regret it.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 