Inspired by yesterday’s post about Small Miracles, I thought I’d write today’s recommendsday is a batch of books that are similarly gentle but uplifting, but it was harder than I expected.
So Small Miracles is blurbed by A J Pearce as in the Emmy Lake series – which have more sadness to them than these (or at least more on page sadness) but the first one Dear Mrs Bird is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, so that’s fairly risk free if you’re a KU member.
It’s actually really hard to come up with something that feels really similar – but I think maybe The Diary of a Provincial Lady would work – it’s funnier and also nearly 100 now, but it has a similar gentle, low stakes feel to it. Which also made me think of Miss Buncle – another woman trying to get some money, although in this case because her dividends have failed and Ladies don’t have jobs.
There were a few things in the people also read/bought columns that looked promising Julietta Henderson’s The Funny Thing About Norman Foreman – still haven’t read but kept coming up as a suggestion when I was writing this – so maybe I should get around it to! Also popping up is Claire Pooley’s The People on Platform Five – which I don’t have, but is 99p at the moment, so it’s entirely within the realms of possibility that I’ll end up buying it after writing this post! Again, I haven’t read them, but I know my sister and my mum really like Rachel Joyce’s novels and I think they’re doing something similar too.
Oh, and I’ve pre-ordered the Small Miracle’s sequel…
It’s the second Wednesday of the month again – so you know what that means! Yes, hide your wallets, I’m about to tempt you into some serious buying action with the current crop of Kindle offers. After all, given that I end up buying stuff when I write it, it’s only fair that you buy some too…
Another one I need to get around to reading (but not crime as far as I know) is Small Miracles, which is 99p, I presume because it has arrived in paperback but there is also a sequel is arriving in the autumn, because I saw a proof copy in the office last week. I have Meryl Wilsner’s debut Something to Talk about somewhere in the backlog – Mistakes Were Made ahead of her next one, which is out in September. Also in romances on offer presumably ahead of the next release is Delilah Green Doesn’t Care, which I read recently along with the next in the series, Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail.
I wrote about Mary Balogh’s Survivors Club series not that long ago and this month Remember Me from her Ravenswood series is on offer. It only came out in June and is book two in the series. I of course still need to read book one! As you may have noticed in the weekly posts; I still need to finish The Other Side of Mrs Wood, but its £1.99 at the moment and I think if you liked
If you want some none fiction, Adrian Tinniswood’s The Long Weekend is 99p – I read it back in the pre blog era but if you like history this is the story of the aristocracy and their house parties through the years.
This month we have an increasing number of weird looking Peter Wimsey editions so I don’t even know if I can recommend them at the moment. Oh copyright expiry, how you confuse things! But Cotillion is the 99p Georgette Heyer this month,
I’d been waiting a while for this one to come out in the UK so I was excited to read it – it’s another famous person and normal person type romance, this time the hero is a film star and the heroine is a personal protection agent aka a bodyguard. She’s hired to protect him from a potential stalker and finds herself in Texas after he goes back to his family ranch to see his sick mum. I wasn’t quite sure what Jack saw in Hannah – and vice versa, but I’ve had that issue with a couple of books recently – so it may be that I’ve just been spoilt by so many really good romances. Anyway, I know that lots of other people have loved this and I liked it enough that I’m still going to be looking out for Center’s latest book, which also just came out here!
My Turn to Make Tea by Monica Dickens
This follows the trials and tribulations of a junior reporter at a local paper in the late 19040s and early 1950s. Poppy’s main issue is not her inexperience but her gender. Her colleagues in the office don’t really think women belong in the newsroom, and her landlady views her with suspicion as well. This is based on Monica Dicken’s own experiences at a provincial newspaper and it has some really witty moments and it is interesting to see how life has changed but – probably because it’s semi autobiographical – not a lot actually happens in terms of an overarching plot. Nice but not spectacular.
You with a View by Jessica Joyce*
This is a new release from this month – and while I didn’t love it, I’m giving it a quick mention because I know that road trip romances are really popular and although I’ve read better ones recently (Mrs Nash’s Ashes for example) if they’re your favourite trope, you’ll probably want to read this. Our heroine is Noelle who has recently lost her grandmother, who she was very close to. In her gran’s paperwork she finds some letters that suggest her grandma had a love affair before her grandfather. Noelle sets out to find out what happened by posting a video including a photo of her gran and the mystery man on Tiktok. And it turns out the man is Paul – still around and who offers to take her on the roadtrip he and her grandma had planned to take together as their honeymoon. Only trouble is Paul wants his grandson to come too – and that grandson turns out to be Noelle’s high school nemesis. I loved this as a premise – but didn’t love the execution. I don’t think there was enough insight into the heroine to understand her properly and their super competitive relationship didn’t feel like a great basis for something long term. But I know that competitive relationships are something that don’t really work for me very well – see also pranking as a love language – but are something that other people really love.
As well as one of us is famous romances, the other theme of this summer’s romances (or at least the ones that I’ve read) seems to be romances where people work in publishing. So after the Neigbor Favor this week, The Seven Year Slip the week before, and Business or Pleasure the one before that (!) here are a few more books where at least one of the main characters works in publishing. I’m going to start with romances because hey that’s the trend, but there are also a couple of books in other genres I want to mention too.
Lets start with the obvious one on the romance front- which may also be the one which started the trend (or at least accelerated it) Emily Henry’s Book Lovers. I did a post about it last year when it came out, so you can read that for more details, but it sees a high powered literary agent find herself on holiday at the same place as her work nemesis only to discover that they might have more in common than they think.
Business or Pleasure features a disillusioned ghost writer – and if you haven’t already, Ashley Poston’s (as in Seven Year Slip) previous novel, the Dead Romantics also featured a ghostwriter – this time one with a deadline she can’t make and a family emergency she can’t avoid. And as you might remember when I was writing about Seven Year Slip, it’s playing with ghosts – ghost writer and actual ghosts get it! And a late entry because I finished it this week – Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game, which is about two coworkers at a publishing company who really, really hate each other and are fighting for the same promotion. Now I have some caveats: I have a few issues with it but in the end they actually weren’t about what I was expecting – which was that their work rivalry would push my buttons for unprofessional pranks, but it actually didn’t because they didn’t sabotage each other. Lucinda does freak out a lot though and that did get on my nerves a bit so your mileage may vary – Goodreads tells me most people adore it and it’s also been turned into a film!
On to crime now and I’ve mentioned Anthony Horowitz’s Susan Ryeland books – aka The Magpie Murdersand The Moonflower Murders a few times now (and I’m still hoping for a third book) and there’s also the Hawthorne series of even more meta mysteries from Horowitz. But there’s also Judith Flanders’ A Murder of Magpies. I read it back in 2015 back in the early days of this blog, when I was also reviewing for Novelicious – and wrote about it there rather than here so I’ll give you a quick review. Our detective is Sam, an editor at a London publishing house who thinks her biggest problem is that the new manuscript from her star author is unpublishable – until a police officer turns up asking about a parcel addressed to her. It’s not quite as cosy as the cover might make you expect but it is totally engrossing and has a clever and inventive solution (albeit one that this humanities grad had to read a couple of times). There is a great cast of supporting characters being set up for the series. I read it back when it was released – and there are now four in the series so I may have to get hold of some of the others as I had completely forgotten about how much I’d enjoyed it until I started checking my lists for this post!
I’m absolutely positive that I’ve forgotten something that I should have included, but hopefully it’ll come back to me at somepoint.
It’s that time of the month again, but this time it’s a tricky one as we have prime day offers going on on the ‘Zon so it’s a bit of a lottery which of these are going to last all month… but I have to say it is a really good month for deals on the recent releases.
I have You and Me on Vacation waiting to be read – but if you’ve read some of Emily Henry’s others – like Happy Place and Book Lovers, then fill in a gap! Also waiting to be read is the new Sarah Morgan, Summer Wedding, which is 99p. I’ve read a couple of Sarah Adam’s romances and found them too New Adult for me – but I know they’re super popular so the fact that the latest Practice Makes Perfect is 99p will be good news for them. In historical detective novels, the latest in Nicola Upson’s Josephine Tey series Dear Little Corpses is £1.99.
I bought David Sedaris’s Happy Go Lucky while writing this post, as well as Jarvis Cocker’s Good Pop, Bad Pop. And if that’s not enough books for you, I don’t know what is.
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.
Well after writing my post about great dads in literature and with last week’s BotW featuring a a divorced dad, I thought I’d make this week’s Recommendsday some more romances featuring heroes with kids. I did originally call this single dad romances – but single parent usually implies that they’re not getting any help from the other parent at all, and that’s not always the case on this list.
One of the reasons I widened the scope of this post was that I started thinking “which is the Tessa Dare book with the doll funerals, because that’s a great one” and then when I reminded myself of the plot of The Governess Game I remembered that Chase is their guardian not their dad. Anyway the heroine is the governess trying to tame the wild orphans and it’s got great dialogue, forced proximity, the aforementioned doll funerals and a great romantic ending.
If you want your dad with kids to come as part of a big, melodramatic historical romance that’s pretty Old School (but not rapey like the Old School romances tended to be) then try Kerrigan Byrne’s The Highlander, where you have Great Big Giant Super Strong Scottish Laird paired with an English governess with a secret. It’s not 100 percent my novel – because it’s so dramatic and quite violent, but I know that there are a lot of people who really, really love this series. Also in books that I didn’t love but that other people have is the book zero in Eloisa James’s Wilds of Lindow Castle series – My Last Duchess. It has a Cinderella-y runaway plot with a hero with eight kids and a heroine with one and a potential wicked stepmother. This was actually published after the first few books in the series, so if you’d read those you already knew the couple and maybe gave it a bit of a pass on some of the bits that I didn’t like -I can see lots and lots of 4 plus star reviews.
Lets finish with historical romances with another one of my favourites: To Sir Philip, With Love – from the Bridgerton series. This is Eloise’s story and I really, really love it. Eloise has been writing letters to the widower of her cousin for years and then when things in London get too much for herself she finds herself on her way to marry him. Except that neither of them are what the other expects. I’ve said before that I don’t know how they’re going to work this for the Netflix series, so we’ll see how they pull that off given the way they’ve been adjusting the timelines.
To contemporary romances now, and I’m starting with a novella – Melissa Blue’s Grumpy Jake. Yes, it was a book of the week, but that was two and a half years ago, so it’s allowed. Bailey is a teacher, Jake the Rake is the single dad who has dated most of the single members of staff and whose kid has just hit her class. It’s lots of fun. Then there’s Happy Singles Day by Anne Marie Walker. It’s a sweet, fluffy holiday romance with a widowed hero with a B&B he’s not running and the professional organiser who visits for an out of season holiday.
Also a previous BotW, there is Jill Shalvis’s Forever and a Day from her Lucky Harbor series. It’s a small town contemporary with an overworked single dad and a former career girl reassessing her future, then this might well scratch that itch. The Lucky Harbor books come in groups of three – and this is the last of its trio, so if you’ve read any of the other two you’ve had glimpses of this in those before you get to this happy ending. In Rachel Lynn Soloman’s Weather Girl, Russell has a 12 year old daughter, and one of the reasons why he’s hesitant about relationships is because he doesn’t want to disrupt her life any more. This isn’t however the centre of the plot – which is a fake relationship type thing to try and get another couple back together to help the hero and heroine’s careers.
After having such a lovely time reading Mrs Porter Calling last week, this week’s Recommendsday features some more World War Two-set books that will give you a similar feel. And I had to think long and hard about it – because so many books that sprang to mind at first were Great War books – and that’s a whole other post!
I’m going to start with Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet series, even though I’ve already written a Series I Love post about them. They start in the 1930s, so if you just want the war period you could just start at book two – The Light Years. I mean I don’t recommend it because you won’t get the full impact of it all but you could if you want to. The Emmy Lake books are first person and just follow Emmy and these have a much wider group they follow, but in terms of the mixture of warmth and tears, they are right up there.
Next up: Mary Wesley’s The Camomile Lawn. It has more sex than Emmy Lake, but if you want the Home Front, it has that – people trying to carry on in the most dangerous and uncertain times. It has that sense of normal rules being suspended because the world might be about to end and people doing things that they wouldn’t normally have done.
It’s set in 1946, but Jojo Moyes Ship of Brides is all about the wartime brides heading over to their unknown futures with the soldiers they have married. There are no massive surprises (or at least I don’t remember any big twists, but it’s been a decade!) but you really get to know the women on the boat and care about what happens to them.
If you want mysteries set in this period, may I please nudge you again at Maisie Dobbs. There are lots of bad series set inWW2 (no I won’t name them here) but once this series actually gets to the Second World War (at Book 13 – In This Grave Hour) it is one of the best.
It’s much older and the first section is much grimmer, but I want to give an extra mention to Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice. I’ve mentioned it before but you follow Jean from her life as an English woman living in Malaysia, through her capture by the Japanese and the death march she was put on to her post war new beginning thanks to an inheritance. I like the Alice section best because it is a strong woman paying something forward, but I know that that may be unusual. It is a little of its time, but I’ve loved it for so long I find it hard to be rational about it.
Patrick Radden Keefe is best known (at the moment anyway) for his Empire of Pain, about the opioid epidemic in the US, but this brings together some of his best investigative essays for the New Yorker – covering gangsters, drug barons, terrorism and more including his essay on the late Anthony Bourdain. I sped through some of them (Bourdain, fake wine, Mark Burnett) but found others harder going but that was probably more about my interests and state of mind at the time than anything else. Worth a look if you want some narrative non fiction but not an entire book on the same subject.
The Plantagenets by Dan Jones
I listened to this on audiobook and although it’s long it’s a really well written and understandable look at the Plantagenets – their rise, influence and power. This is an era of English history that doesn’t really get taught at school (there’s often not a lot taught between the Norman conquest and the Tudors) but the Plantagenet dynasty also held extensive lands in France for long periods so even if you do know the basics of the English end of things there is plenty on that here too. I enjoyed it so much I went straight on to Jones’s book on the Wars of the Roses, which picks up where this leaves off.
The Mountbattens by Andrew Lownie
So I read this because as you may remember I read and really enjoyed reading Lownie’s Traitor King a couple of years ago – and it has the same readable writing style, but this is ultimately a less satisfying read. The characters are fascinating – and you’re probably not going to like them much for quite a lot of the time – and their relationship unconventional to say the least. But although this sets out all the controversies and the debates around Mountbatten’s public life and actions – although it drops one major revelation in *very* late – it doesn’t really come to any conclusions, which makes it ultimately more than a bit frustrating. But it is in Kindle Unlimited at the moment – so if you’re interested it’s much more affordable than books like this often are.
There’s also an all time children’s classic on offer because the film comes out shortly – Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I’ve been listening to Dan Jones on audiobook recently, and the next one I have cued up to listen to Power and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages is 99p at the moment. He’s a very good narrator if you get the audio book, but if you find it easier to do monster history books in written form, this is a bargain. Rachel Lynn Solomon has a new book out soon, but one of her older ones, The Ex Talk is 99p – I prefer Weather Girl but if you’re not a journalist, you may be able to ignore the massive ethics violation in this – I know lots of other people have loved it.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 