Tag: historical fiction

Book of the Week

Book of the Week: Cape May

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Yes, I’m cheating because I finished this on Monday, but as ever they’re my rules and I’m allowed to break them if I want and nothing else on last week’s list qualifies for a variety of reasons. So here we are.

It’s 1957 and Henry and Effie are on honeymoon in Cape May, New Jersey. They’re staying at Effie’s uncle’s house, where she spent some of her childhood summer holidays. Except the season is over and the place is deserted. Or nearly deserted. Staying at the house down the street is Clara, now a beautiful socialite but formerly one of the children Effie used to sometimes play with. With her are her lover Max and Alma, Max’s half sister. Over the course of their trip, under the influence of a lot of gin, Effie and Henry’s marriage will be tested and the pattern of their lives will be set as they run riot through the town, swept up in the glamour and decadence of their new friends.

This has been sitting on the tbr pile for some considerable time, but this weekend I felt in need of something a bit different. The cover has a blurb that compares it to The Great Gatsby, and I can sort of see why – Clara’s world is a heady alcoholic world of yachts by day, illicit wanderings by night and gallons of alcohol. Effie and Henry are the outsiders – from Georgia compared to the other three’s big city sophistication and the reader can see that they’re heading for trouble and heartbreak.

The narrative follows just Henry and his actions, which is a little frustrating because I wanted to know what Effie was thinking and doing, but given that the author is a man, possibly for the best as I didn’t always love the way the sex scenes were written as it was so maybe I would have liked the book less if I’d been given more of Effie’s inner life. So, not perfect but I still read it in just over 24 hours so it’s very readable despite that. It’s not really Rich People Problems, because Effie and Henry definitely aren’t rich, but it is Rich People Problems-adjacent – in that the rich people are the ones who are causing the problems!

This was Chip Cheek’s debut – and I’d read more from him if/when it appears. I had my copy of this in the NetGalley backlog (!) but it’s on offer on Kindle and Kobo for £1.99 at the moment which is a pretty good deal. I can’t say I remember seeing it in bookshops, but I’m also not sure I ever specifically looked for it and it’s had a couple of different covers now too. Anyway, worth a check if you’re at a shop with a fairly decent literary fiction selection.

Happy Reading!

books, Recommendsday

Reccomendsday: Cold Weather Reading

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It’s turned terribly cold here this week. The car is frozen in the mornings when I head for the station and I’ve caved in and cracked out the big coat. So today my recommendations are books ideal for reading while wrapped in a blanket, maybe in front of a fire, ignoring the cold outside.

Is it cheating to start with Murder on the Orient Express? Because the train literally gets stuck in a snow drift on the night of the murder. It’s also one of my all time favourite murder mysteries for reasons that I can’t explain without spoiling the plot. And I know it’s nearly ninety years old and if you’ve only read one Agatha Christie it’s probably this one, but it’s so clever I don’t want to ruin it for any first timers even now!

A similar sort of age but completely different, Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca is creepy and atmospheric and for some reason just feels like a book to read as the nights are closing in and it gets dark early. Be grateful you don’t have a creepy house keeper watching your every move as the second Mrs de Winter discovers a few things her new husband hasn’t told her about.

And now for something much more recent, and a former Book of the Week back in 2019. Evvie Drake Starts Over was Linda Holmes’ debut novel and features a widowed older heroine and an injured baseball player in Maine. They have actual conversations, they seem to like each other and it’s just a big warm hug, despite the death in the backstory. Also a romance, but a very different end of the gene, I want to give a mention to Nora Roberts – I know sinner people like romantic suspense at this time of year, but I’m never a big romantic suspense reader, so I’m going for a straight up romance and The Next Always which features a heroine with kids, a bookstore and a possibly haunted hotel. Perfect for a rainy day and if you like it, it’s the first in the Inn at Boonsboro trilogy.

Now I know it has its issues, but there aren’t many books that have transported me to a world like Memoirs of a Geisha did. Arthur Golden’s novel is about the life of a young woman in Kyoto in the run up to the Second World War as she trains to become a Geisha. It’s much better than the movie was. I promise. Just writing this has made me want to read it again. And that’s your lot, i hope there’s something that appeals to you.

Happy humpday!

Book of the Week, books

Book of the Week: From Dust to Stardust

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Back in old Hollywood for this week’s BotW. It might have taken me a couple of weeks to actually get time to properly sit down and get into this, but once I did, it was worth it.

As I mentioned in my post about this on release day, this tells the story of Eileen Sullivan who made her way to Hollywood via Chicago as a 14 year old chaperoned by her grandmother where she became a silent movie star with the stage name Doreen O’Dare. When the reader meets her, it’s the 1960s and she’s on her way to a museum in Chicago where a dolls house she created is on display. The model then jumps backwards and forwards between Doreen’s early life and film career and her conversations with the museum curator about her dolls house which she built during the Depression to house her collection of miniatures and toured it around the country.

Doreen/Eileen and her dolls house are based on the real life silent movie star Colleen Moore – at least in terms of the Hollywood career, dolls house and some aspects of her later life. I didn’t know anything about Moore before I read the book – and was astonished when I went to read up afterwards how much of the story was based on truth. This is my first book by Kathleen Rooney and I enjoyed the writing style as well as the Old Hollywood setting. It’s hard to tell how you’d find this if you did know more about stars of silent movies, but given that I’m fairly into stuff like this and didn’t know anything about her – despite the fact that it turns out that she’s credited with popularising the bob (and in the pictures it’s basically Phryne’s bob) – I reckon people who do know about her may be in the minority!

So I would rate this as well worth a read if you liked Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and want more movie stars – even if this has less twists and secrets, and is set in a different time. It also has the added bonus of being in Kindle Unlimited, although my copy came via NetGalley .

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, books

Book of the Week: The Lost Summers of Newport

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As I mentioned yesterday, I read both of the physical books that I took with me on holiday this time – and today’s pick was one of them. To be fair, I did pick what I was taking quite carefully and this was one I’d been looking forward to reading.

The Lost Summers of Newport is a three-stranded story about a Gilded Age Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. Set in three different points in the mansion’s life, each is connected to the other, and you move between the three. In 1899, Ellen is just started a job as a music teacher at Sprague Hall, to help an heiress snag an Italian prince. In 1959, Lucky is living at Sprague Hall with her husband Sty, who she married when she and her grandmother fled Mussolini’s Italy. Her husband is a womaniser and an alcoholic but she’s worried what a divorce would do to her young daughter. In 2019, Andie is working on a TV home makeover show that’s featuring Sprague House as its latest project. She wants the programme to focus on the history of the house and restoring it – but the network higher ups have different ideas. On top of that, the house’s reclusive owner has two conditions to filming – don’t talk to her, and don’t go near the boathouse. And she has two grandchildren who don’t want the TV crew there at all.

This was a really good book to read on the beach or by the pool. Because you’re switching between timelines it comes in nice sections so you can read a bit, go for a swim, read a bit more while you dry off, go for an ice cream, read a bit more – you get the idea. And in case you didn’t get it from the description, this has got some Gilded Age Rich People problems stuff going on. And there are Vanderbilts and society rivalries here galore in the two plots in the past. My enjoyment of books set in periods like this is well known – whether it’s novels or non-fiction – and so that worked well for me, particularly with the element of high society rubbing up against the seamier side of life. The different story lines gives more scope to layer secrets and see characters at different stages of their lives.

But of course the downside of having three plot strands to a book is that you can often wish that you got more time with each strand – or with one strand in particular. And there is a little bit of that with this, but it actually works together really well, especially when you consider that the book has three authors – and that each author writes one storyline (or at least that’s what the readers guide at the end says).

I read Beatriz Williams‘ and Lauren Willig‘s solo novels – and have written posts featuring some of them – although I haven’t read any of Karen White’s other books. This is the second of their joint efforts that I’ve read and I liked it more than I remember liking the first one. If you’ve read Beatriz Williams other novels you’ll spot some of the same families popping up here, which is a nice Easter Egg.

The paperback of this came out in July – and I had it preordered and so I’ve actually got to it quite quickly in the grand scheme of things – but it’s also available in Kindle and Kobo as well as in an audiobook with a different narrator for each strand.

Happy Reading!

not a book, tv

Book Adjacent: Wolf Hall

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As I wrote about Crazy for You the other Sunday, rather than Dr Semmelweiss, I thought I’d redress the balance this week and add a bit of Mark Rylance to the blog. As I said last week, I think he’s the best actor I’ve ever seen in person and I count Wolf Hall as the start of when he started to cross the path of non-theatre people.

Wolf Hall is the adaptation of the first two books of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. Thomas Cromwell rose from obscurity to be Henry VIII’s chief minister and then fell from grace after the failure of Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves. The mini series opens as Cardinal Wolsey is about to fall from power because of his failure to get the King’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled and follows Cromwell’s rise to power up until the death of Anne Boleyn. You see his origins in flashback and how he exploits the rivalries and networks of the Tudor Court.

I studied this period at A-Level and I can tell you it is some acheivement to make Thomas Cromwell a sympathetic figure, and yet the combination of Mantel’s writing and Rylance’s acting does it. I still haven’t read the final book in the trilogy because I’m not sure I want to see it all fall apart – and I’m struggling so much with reading things that are not cheerful or that I don’t know end well at the moment (by which I basically mean the last three years). When Hilary Mantel died almost a year ago, Peter Kominsky who directed this said that the script for the final book was underway, but there’s still no news on whether it is happening, and given that it was meant to film this year and Rylance has been in the West End all summer you can’t help but feel that it may not year have happened. But after the way they did Anne Boleyn’s beheading, I’m not sure I can bear to to see how they would do Cromwell’s execution anyway. We rewatched the series recently and I had to look away for that section.

Anyway, that aside, it’s well worth watching if you like historical dramas – and probably easier to watch it than read the books – which are very long and although beautifully written (two Booker wins and nominated for the third too) are not light reading. And you can play spot the locations too – I’ve been to Montacute House, Lacock Abbey and Barrington Court which are among the National Trust Houses that feature in the progamme, and the photo below is the steps leading up to the Chapter House at Wells Cathedral which we visited in January.

If you’re in the UK you can watch Wolf Hall on the BBC iPlayer, if you’re elsewhere, it’ll likely be on whichever streaming service gets BBC or PBS programmes where you are.

books

Series: A trilogy of Lissa Evans novels

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Ok – lets start with the elephant in the room, I don’t think these have an official title as a group – but they’re three interconnected novels and they’re by Lissa Evans, and so I christen it thusly. And I’m recommending them today because when I was thinking about stuff you might like if you like Emmy Lake and the World War Two novels from the other week, these came to mind.

The three novels are Crooked Heart, Old Baggage and V for Victory and they cover an interconnected group of characters. Noel and ace appear in the first and third which are set in the Second World War and Mattie, Noel’s former guardian is the centre of Old Baggage, which is set in 1928. The themes running through all three are about finding your place in the world, what family means and breaking the rules in various shapes and forms. I think they would work in chronological order as well as publication order if you wanted to meet Mattie first, but I think in terms of character development you probably want to meet Noel first and then read about Mattie to discover why he is the way he is.

And I should say as well that they’ve also all been Books of the week – so you can also read more thoughts at length on Crooked Heart, Old Baggage and V for Victory in those posts. But basically, if you want some beautifully written historical fiction which will make you laugh and cry, this will do it for you. They’re great and I’m so glad that I found that proof copy of Crooked Heart on the shelf at work back in the day (I miss the shelf still, although it’s probably better for the state of the pile that it’s gone) and started me on the journey even if my set doesn’t match and you know how much that annoys me!

You should be able to get hold of these fairly easily even though they’re a few years old – they were published by Penguin and I’ve seen them all over the place, including in Foyles relatively recently. And of course then you can go and read Their Finest Hour and a Half, Lissa Evans’ other World War Two-set novel which was turned into the film Their Finest. And that’s your weekend sorted isn’t it?!

Happy Reading!

Book previews

Out today!

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The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatio Sancho by Paterson Joseph is out today! I’ve started this but I haven’t finished it yet but I’m really enjoying it. This is another fictionalised real person novel – and you know how I love them. This time it’s a writer and composer who lived in Regency London. I hadn’t heard of him, but he’s been on a postage stamp, on a list of Great Black Britons and was a google doodle on October 1 2020 to mark black history month. His Wikipedia page is quite something. Obviously I need to finish it, but so far I think it would make a great candidate for your Christmas book list.

book round-ups

Favourite not-new books of first half of 2022

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So yesterday we did the new releases, and today I’m back with my other favourite books of the year so far – the ones that aren’t new, but that I’ve read for the first time this year. And it’s a slightly random mix of the nearly new and the really old.

I’m going to start with the really old – and that’s two of my Persephone subscription picks. I’ve had five of my six books through now and read three of them and A House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair and The Young Pretenders by Edith Henrietta Fowler both got five stars from me. The Two Mrs Abbotts got four stars – and that was mostly because I wanted more Barbara herself and even as I write that I wonder if I was being too harsh and I should upgrade it! All three of them – and the other two Miss Buncle books are great if you want low peril reading in your life at the moment – and who doesn’t to be honest.

Then there are two nearly new books that I’ve given five stars as well so far this year – there’s Greg Jenner’s Ask a Historian answering fifty questions about history that people have asked Greg. And then there’s very recent BotW pick Acting Up by Adele Buck, which is a theatre-set romance which I loved so much I immediately bought the next book in the series. Honestly June was such a good month of reading for me.

Close behind these there is also Emily McGovern’s Bloodlust and Bonnets if you want a gothic-spoof graphic novel – I mentioned Julia Quinn’s Miss Butterworth… in Quick Reviews the other day and they’re actually quite and interesting pair. Or there is Roomies by Christina Lauren if you want another hit of theatre-set romance after Acting Up. And an honourable mention to to Julia Claibourn Johnson’s Better Luck Next Time and Stephen Rowley’s The Editor.

It’s been a good year in reading so far folks.

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: June 2022 Quick Reviews

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I read a lot of books last month. But there were also a lot of rereads, and I do have this terrible tendency to have already written about al lot of books by the time we get to this point in the months. But I have a plan to try out for that in July, so I’ll keep you posted…

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Cover of Lessons in Chemistry

Elizabeth Zott is a scientist. The trouble is that it is America in the 1960s and women apparently women aren’t meant to be scientists. Her Nobel nominated colleague Calvin can see that she’s a scientist and a lot more and the two of them start a relationship. But three years later Elizabeth is a single mother and is presenting the world’s most unconventional cooking show on regional TV. I need to give you a warning serious sexual assault early in this book and a death a little while after, but if you can cope with that once you get out the other side you’re ok. And we all know that I’ve had trouble with dealing with stuff like that recently and I was find with this. Elizabeth is an brilliant character – she knows what she wants to do and refuses to understand people who tell her no or change what she’s doing if she thinks she is right. The book is told from various different character’s perspectives, including her dog and her daughter and it’s just a delight. Six Thirty is the smartest of us all. This s Bonnie Garmus’s debut novel and it’s such a delight it was nearly BotW yesterday. It’s had a lot of buzz so you should be able to get it really easily – and if you are going on holiday, it was definitely in the airport bookshops when we were there!

Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron by Julia Quinn and Violet Charles

This is much referenced in the later Julia Quinn novels, and now we finally have (a graphic novel version of) Miss Butterworth! In the books it’s a romantic and gothic novels – much play is made of its outlandish plot – a character is pecked to death by pigeons for example. And it’s everything you would expect – utter, utter madness, beautifully illustrated by Quinn’s sister Violet Charles. I enjoyed this and I’m so glad it got published – for reasons that will become clear if you read to the end.

The Intoxicating Mr Lavelle by Neil Blackmore

Benjamin and Edgar Bowen head out into Europe on a Grand Tour that their mother has devised for them to help them meet People of Quality so they can come back with an enhanced social standing to help the family. But when Benjamin meets Horace Lavelle, the brothers’ paths and goals diverge. This came out in 2020 – I got a copy from the work book sale a few weeks back and then realised that I had it in the NetGalley backlog as well. Oops. Anyway, I liked the premise and the writing style, but it was a bit too bleak for me in the end. I don’t do well with books that are hurtling towards disaster at the moment, even if they are dealing with expectations and society and judgment and constructs and stuff that I am interested in. I wanted it to be ok for Benjamin; but I knew it wouldn’t be. But historical fiction isn’t always neat and happy, and may be that is the point. I suspect that pre-pandemic I would have been more enthusiastic about it – so I suspect other people who are not in need of neat resolutions and/or happy endings at the moment may really enjoy it.

Paper Lion by George Plimpton

So this was one of the longest of the long runners on the still reading pile. And that’s partly because it was a paperback so didn’t go in the work rucksack but mostly because I managed to lose it for ages! Anyway, this is a legendary book about American football in the 1960s when a journalist managed to persuade the Detroit Lions to let him join their preseason training camp as a quarterback. Obviously a lot has changed in professional football since then, but this is a fascinating glimpse of how sportsmen trained and lived at the time as well as the workings of an NFL team. If you like sport it’s definitely worth looking out for.

Enjoy!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Mysteries set on Cruise Ships

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Well the clue is in the name this week – I am all about mysteries set on cruise ships. I nearly said books on boats and then ships, but I realised I could be more specific than that… and then even further – they’re all murder mysteries too!

Miss Aldridge Regrets by Louise Hare*

It’s 1936 and Lena is on the way to New York. She’s leaving her troubles behind and moving on from her job singing in a nightclub in Soho to a role on Broadway. But first she has to negotiate a luxury cruise ship journey and when a wealthy and aristocratic family take her under their wing things start to get complicated. Then someone dies. This has glamour, intrigue, a whole bunch of secrets and a slowly unravelling mystery. If you look at the list you’ll see it’s took me a while to read – but don’t let that distract you – really I started it, got distracted by other books and then came back to it and read most of it in a week. It would be a great book to read on a sunlounger this summer. But maybe not on a cruise ship!

A Dangerous Crossing by Rachel Rhys

It’s been a couple of years so it’s safe to mention A Dangerous Crossing again. It’s got a new cover since I read it, but this was a BotW back in 2017. A slight 1930s theme to the start of this post as this is the story of a journey from the UK to Australia in the summer of 1939. Lily, our heroine is going down under on an assisted passage scheme to work as a domestic servant (despite having previously said she wouldn’t return to service) and the journey throws her into contact with all sorts of people she wouldn’t normally have come across. The normal rules of society are suspended and there is a gathering sense of unease as the news from home gets worse at every port they stop at. It’s tense and twisty and I really enjoyed it once I got a chance to have a run at reading it. I’ve got another Rachel Rhys on the Kindle waiting to be read and this has reminded me that I really must get around to it…

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

Still in the 1930s, but this time actually written in the 1930s with the granddaddy of all cruise ship Murder mysteries. If you’ve never read it, Hercule Poirot finds himself on a Nile cruise with a newly married couple and the wife’s former friend who used to be engaged to the husband. Murder ensues. I’ve been listening to this again on audiobook recently – I have the version read by Kenneth Branagh, which is really good and you’ll probably see it on next week’s week in books because I’m nearly finished it. I revisited it because I want to see the new film version and wanted to remind myself what was in the book as opposed to the 1978 film with Peter Ustinov and a very starry cast, or the 2004 TV version with David Suchet and Emily Blunt – both of which I’ve seen recently!

Several mystery series have books set on cruise ships too – Terns of Endearment in Donna Andrews’ Meg Langslow series sees the gang on a cruise holiday because Grandfather is due to give a lecture series. So of course there is a murder! I’ve said before that you really need to read these in order to understand who everyone is and all the running back stories but this is a relatively self-contained story, considering it’s the twenty fifth in the series!

And I haven’t quite reached it in my reread yet, but the fifteenth in Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series, Death by Water sees our heroine take a trip on cruise ship to catch a jewel thief. I also need to reread Ngaio Marsh’s Singing in the Shrouds, where Roderick Alleyn has to catch a multiple murderer who is attempting to make his escape on a ship to Cape Town. I remember it being a clever mystery but with some Of It’s Time attitudes that I didn’t make a note of in my goodreads review. And as ever if you have any more for me, put them in the comments!

Enjoy!