Tag: series I love

Children's books, children's books, series

Girl’s Own Series: Dimsie

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Happy Friday everyone. If all goes to plan I should be on my way to Book Con at the moment, so in honour of a long weekend of bookish delights focused on literature for school girls in the twentieth century I’ve got a Girl’s Own boarding school series for you this week.

Dimsie is Daphne Isobel Maitland and she is the heroine of nine stories – seven set at her school, The Jane Willard Foundation, and two at her family home. As you can see from the photo I’ve read six of the and the missing ones are on my purchase list for conference this weekend. The name Dimsie comes from her initials D I M in case you hadn’t realised and the books follow her from her first year at the school all the way through to her final year as Head Girl. There were originally seven books in the series, but the final two were written in response to reader requests and the final one is actual set during World War Two when Dimsie is married. They were published across a 20 year period starting in 1921, and as was often the case with school series in this era there were also short stories published in various annuals.

Dorita Fairlie Bruce is one of the names when it comes to Girl’s Own boarding school books for girls along with Angela Brazil, Elinor M Brent Dyer (Chalet School), Elsie Oxenham (the Abbey books) and depending on your point of view Enid Blyton. The Chalet School will always be my favourite (and in writing this I’ve astonishingly realised that I’ve never written a proper series post about them so I must rectify that at some point) because those are the ones that were still in print when I was little and so were the ones I could get hold of from the library or buy for myself (see also Drina and Sadlers Wells) but DFB is my favourite of the ohers, all of which I first read as an adult, which is obviously a different experience to when you’re seven or eight and you first come across the idea of a boarding school.

I wrote about Dimsie, Head Girl back when I first read that and it’s fair to say that Dimsie is, like many other a boarding school heroine, a girl that somehow manages to get away with things that others wouldn’t for: Reasons. Dimsie is able to talk to prefects on their level when she’s a junior and have conversations with teachers (and the head!) that others wouldn’t be able to get away with. And yet you still like her. She’s a good friend, she’s not annoyingly smart or talented, and she cares about people. The thing you will have heard of from Dimsie (if you have heard of anything that is) is the Anti-Soppists League – which is Dimsie and her friends in league to not to go soppy over senior pupils or teachers or anyone. And the books follow the usual rules of boarding school – inter pupil drama, trouble with the juniors, trouble with a pupil who isn’t quite undertanding the rules of the school or is out for herself not the group, sports rivalries and illnesses, with the odd exceptional event thrown in – which are where they can be a bit bonkers. The Chalet School has handy mountains and lakes (and Nazis) to provide opportunities for drama, but being set in Britain, DFB has had to come up with her own ideas – which include stolen old masters and secret passages.

As ever there are some old fashioned stereotypes and language that isn’t acceptable today in here which means that I won’t be lending them to the young readers in my life, but they’re also unintentionally hilarious at times and I find them really really readable. This is another day when its not so much a suggestion to read if you’re not already interested in this sort of book, but if you are you really should try one. They’re miles better (to my mind) than Elsie Oxenham! Fingers crossed that I can lay my hands on the missing ones in the book sale.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Series I love

Series I love: The Reidverse

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Happy Friday everyone, and what a great Friday it is because yesterday evening Taylor Jenkins Reid announced that her next book is out in March. More on that at the end of this post, but I’ve taken the opportunity to make today’s series about the Reidverse novels.

What I’m talking about with the Reidverse are the full length novels The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones and the Six, Malibu Rising and Carrie Soto is Back. It’s slightly tenuous as a series in away because they’re all standalone and you don’t have to read them in order – but they do contain easter eggs and crossovers for each other. Goodreads also has the short story Evidence of the Affair featured in the series – but I’d need to read that again to figure out how it’s connected because unless I’m being very stupid, I can’t remember any of the characters from the others popping up in it.

As you can tell from the fact that all of those novel titles are hyper links, I really, really liked all of them. And I was sad when TJR announced that Carrie Soto was the last book in that world, but I get it. I still need to read Atmosphere – I tried during the Artemis mission but it turns out I’m not good at reading about peril in space when there’s actual astronauts doing a perilous mission. Maybe now is the time though after England’s defeat in the World Cup maybe a cathartic cry is what I need – and I think all of these made me cry at some point or another!

And now to the new book: It’s called The Last Days of Vic and Coco and it’s coming out in early March. In her email Jenkins Reid says she’s always “wanted to write a story about how friendship is its own kind of romance” and that this is that novel. According to the blurb it’s the summer of 1974 and is about two best friends who are also pool hustlers. They’re both untrustworthy and word is starting to get around about them – so they set in motion the plan for their biggest payday yet – but can you ever trust a hustler?

I can’t wait to read this – and I’m sure it’s going to be everywhere when it comes out. But in the meantime, if you haven’t read the Reidverse novels you should. If you like stories about Old Hollywood, read Evelyn Hugo try and figure out which bits of real stories she’s adapted for various parts of Evelyn’s life. If you like messy rock bands, read Daisy Jones, which is so inspired by Fleetwood Mac you wouldn’t believe. If you want some 1980s drama, its the beachy, sunny world of Malibu Rising and the complicated Riva siblings. And if you’re in tennis withdrawal after the end of Wimbledon, it’s Carrie Soto which has a tennis comeback fuelled by anger.

Have a great weekend everyone.

historical, Series I love

Mystery series: Brighton Mysteries

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Given that I binged three of this series just last week, today’s series pick may not surprise you. The only downside to having read three of them last week is that I’ve now run out and read another Elly Griffiths series from start to end and there are No More. Hey ho.

The Brighton mysteries start in 1950, when DI Edgar Stephens finds a body of a girl that’s been cut into three – which reminds him of a magic trick invented by a friend of his that he served with during the war. Edgar goes to hunt out Max for his help and finds him still touring the variety circuit of seaside towns around the country. And that’s how the seven book series gets underway – initially with Edgar and Max and mysteries and as you go through the seven books more characters joining them. Max’s involvement becomes a little less central to the mysteries in later books where you see more of Edgar and WPC Emma Holmes at work – but he’s always part of the mysteries because they are all so connected to the theatre and entertainment industries.

The seven books cover more than 16 years, so a lot changes in the characters lives as you follow them through – but also you see the world changing too: from post war austerity through to the swinging sixties and the changes in attitudes that that brought with them. Brighton also changes a lot during that time – with the rise of TV, the death of end of the pier variety and vaudeville and the coming of cheap package holidays. It’s a great time to set a book – and the mysteries are good too. I think they’re pretty good on accuracy too – I spotted one complete howler* in the last book but it’s the first time I remember finding one of those in all seven of the books, so I’ll let it off. Anyway, these are good very readable mysteries that you can get sucked into reading one after another – the way you can with Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway series too.

You should be able to get hold of these fairly easily- they’re on Kindle and Kobo and I’ve been able to buy them in bookshops too.

Have a great weekend!

*a price that would be insane in a pre-decimalisation world – so possibly some confusion about when that happened.

Authors I love, series

Series Redux: Lady Julia Grey

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There is a new Veronica Speedwell out this week and it features an appearance from Lady Julia Brisbane (formerly Grey) and so I’m taking this opportunity to remind you about my post about the Lady Julia Grey series. Yes it’s only a year since I wrote it (to coincide with the release of the Killers of a Certain Age sequel, which I still haven’t read and is out now in paperback) but how could I resist the opportunity to write about Julia (especially given that I’ve written about Veronica quite a lot). There are five full length books about Lady Julia and her continuing encounters with mysteries and corpses. They are set earlier in the Victorian era, than Veronica, so I’m expecting an older (though probably not more wiser) Julia in her appearance in A Ghastly Catastrophe. They have the wit and snark that you get from Veronica, but the romantic element is quite different because Julia and Nicolas get married about half way through the series, whereas Veronica and Stoker have… a different relationship dynamic. And yes, I know that’s a spoiler for the Julia books, but her married name is in Deanna’s post, and it’s a series that started 20 years ago. All of that said, these are really cheap on Kindle at the moment – you could pick up all five full length novels for well under £10 at the moment, which is a total bargain and will give you many hours of happy reading.

Books from the Lady Julia series
romantic comedy, Series I love

Series I Love: Spoiler Alert

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Happy Friday everyone and I have a romance series for you this week, because all three of these are in Kindle Unlimited at the moment and so now is an ideal time to read them if you haven’t already.

So Olivia Dade’s Spoiler Alert series is three connected romances featuring cast members from a TV show that is somewhat Game of Thrones inspired. God of the Gates has been wildly popular but some of the actors (and the fans!) aren’t happy with the turn that the plots have taken. In Spoiler Alert, one of the stars is taking out his frustration with that by anonymously writing fan fiction, which is how he meets April although of course she doesn’t know who he really is. Then – both unknowingly – they meet in real life when Marcus asks April out after one of her fan costumes goes viral because she is plus size. When they start dating, he realises who she is and how is he going to detangle that one. All the Feels was a BotW, so there’s a full review of that already but it sees Alex assigned a minder by the show runners to keep him out of trouble until the final season airs. And Shipwrecked finds two actors who had a one night stand who find themselves co-stars and stuck filming together on a remote island for the duration of the series (because their characters are shipwrecked there) and so really need to not do anything that could end up in them hating each other and still having to work together. But when the series ends, they finally give in – but the trouble is they both have very different plans for the future.

You don’t really need to read these in order – but they do all take place at basically the same time (or at least parts of them take place at the same time) which makes for a really fun experience if you do read them all even if not in the proper order. Olivia Dade writes rom coms – these are funny as well as sexy and I like her characters who aren’t cookie cutter romances heroes and heroines. She was one of the first romance authors who I read who was regularly writing plus sized heroines or slightly older couples, by which at this point I mean in their 30s or up*, and I appreciate that too. I think I’ve re-read the first two twice each now – and probably the only reason I haven’t re-read Shipwrecked is because I own it in paperback so it’s not handy on my Kindle in the same way. They make great sunlounger books, so if you’re planning a late summer trip, these might be a good choice for you.

These are available in paperback as well as on Kindle Unlimited, and surprisingly given they are in KU at the moment, they are still on Kobo, although they are somewhat pricey there and they aren’t linked together as a series, so here is Spoiler Alert, All The Feels and Shipwrecked over there too.

*which given the amount of romances that have early 20s or college age characters at the moment is very welcome to me. New Adult seems to have subsumed the who genre.

detective, series, Series I love

Mystery series: Flaxborough

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Happy Friday everyone, it’s the last working day of August and I’m back with a classic and amusing mystery series.

Flaxborough is a sleepy English market town, in the sort of Lincolnshire-East Anglia part of the world. Our detective is Walter Pirbright, a CID inspector who is polite and decent and solid, if not the cleverest and most exciting detective you will ever read. But his down to earth normalcy means that there can be some quite outlandish happenings that go on around him without it seeming ludicrous. As you go through the series other regulars join him – including Miss Teatime, who arrives as a conwoman but nearly gets herself murders and yet still decides to stay in town. They also do a nice line in split point of view which means that the reader knows more than the police do, which is a lot of fun. Colin Watson apparently took a lot of inspiration from real people who lived in his town and if you’ve ever lived in a small town (or large village) you’ll be familiar with the idea of the local characters complete with their idiosyncrasies- and here they are amped up to eleven!

The first of these was originally published in the 1950s and the last in the 1980s, but I don’t think the same amount of time passes in the books! They were reissued a few years back at which point I read all of them as they came out, mainly from NetGalley but enjoying them so much I bought the ones I was missing, which tells you something about how much I enjoyed these. The twelfth and final one is 99p at the moment, but don’t start the series there – most of the rest are not £2.99 so go have a read of the blurbs and pick one that appeals if you don’t want to read them in order, although the first one is good so you could totally start there.

My favourites included Lonelyheart 4122, where middle aged women start disappearing after signing up to a lonely hearts agency; Charity Ends at Home which is a fun romp through charitable works turned vengeful and murderous; One Man’s Meat where a private investigator finds himself in over his head at a pet food company where the MD’s marriage is falling apart.

These are all available on Kindle and Kobo and I think I saw some in paperback when they first came out. But haven’t recently.

Happy Reading!

historical, series, Series I love

Series Update: Emmy Lake

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Happy Friday everyone! After breaking the rules on Tuesday with my book of the week, I’m back with another later in series book for this Friday’s series post, but I have a reason for this. It’s two years since the previous book in the Emmy Lake series and book four came out last week and I have read it and I wanted to report back.

So the first thing to say is that my prediction that the fourth book would arrive in 2025 was right, and the second thing is that this series is now complete! We rejoin Emmy and the gang in 1944 and by the end of Dear Miss Lake we finally reach the end of the war. In book four, Emmy and the team at Woman’s Friend are trying to find ways to keep morale up on the Home Front as the war drags on, but also starting to think about what might happen afterwards when it’s all over. Emmy’s journalistic career continues to flourish, and her husband Charles* is finally posted back in the UK. But there are still some challenges for the team to face before Victory in Europe finally arrives.

I’ve enjoyed reading this series so much, but every one of them has made me cry at some point – and this one is no exception. And without spoilers, it wasn’t (only) happy tears about the war finally ending for everyone. There is still peril in this one and it’s not insignificant peril. But it’s a book set in wartime, so it wouldn’t feel real if no one in the core group was ever in danger. I’m probably the most avoidant I’ve been of books with potential for deaths of key characters at the moment (murder mysteries don’t count) but I enjoy this series so much that I read it in the run up to release last week (thank you NetGalley for coming through on the copy for me) because I wanted to see how it ended. I’m sad it’s over, but I enjoyed it so much, and I look forward to seeing the characters that A J Pearce creates next.

As I just said, my copy was a preview copy, but it is out now in hardback and on Kindle and Kobo. You really should read the other three books first though to get the most out of it and the good news is that I’ve seen them in in shops on the regular so if you want to read them you shouldn’t have too many issues. Side note: the Audiobook for this series is read by Anna Popplewell, who was Susan in the three Chronicles of Narnia movies that came out about a decade ago.

Have a great weekend everyone!

*yes that’s a spoiler, but it happens in book 2 so what can I do?

series, Series I love

Series I Love: Dr Ruth Galloway

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I did have a debate with myself about whether this should be a Series I Love or a mystery series or a bingable series post, but given that I read all fifteen books in the series in less than six weeks and kept going out to get more of them so I could find out what happened next it has to count as a series I loved surely.

Ok so first book in the series, The Crossing Places was a BotW at the end of February, but I’ll recap you the set up any way. Dr Ruth Galloway is a forensic archaeologist who teaches at the (fictional) University of North Norfolk. At the start of the series she is in her late 30s, single and living in a cottage in a pretty bleak area of the Norfolk coast that she fell in love with while working on a dig some years before. She’s fiercely independent and the isolation of her house mirrors the life that she has created for herself. In The Crossing Places she is called by the local police when the bones of a child are found on a beach. This is how she meets Detective Inspector Harry Nelson, originally from Blackpool but who moved to Norfolk to run the Serious Crimes Unit. Ruth becomes the North Norfolk force’s resident forensic archaeologist, which means their paths keep crossing every time historic remains are found and and through the cases Ruth’s life starts to change and expand in all sorts of ways, personal and professional. There are fifteen books in the series, which cover about the same period of time – starting in around 2008 and taking us right through the pandemic – which is quite the experience to revisit in a book!

This has got a lot of things that I love in crime books as well as a good mystery to solve – namely a great cast of supporting characters that form a sort of found family, lots of links and call backs to previous books in the series which reward reading in order and a romantic thread with a strong will-they/won’t-they vibe. Now I know I review a lot of romance books and so some of you reading this are going to be romance readers (as well as crime readers) so please follow this * to the bottom of the post for a spoiler-y point that may be a deal breaker for some of you.

As I’ve said, I binged my way through all of these in about six weeks to the detriment of my other reading plans – and it would have been quicker if I could have got hold of some of the books faster. And yes, it gave me a massive book hangover when they were over because I’d grown so attached to the characters and enjoyed being part of their lives. However, I’m glad that I came to them when the series was already complete because it meant I could just gobble them up and not have to wait a year to find out what happened next – and there are a couple of these that end of cliff hangers which would have driven me mad!

I’d read four of the seven books in Elly Griffiths’s Brighton Mysteries before I came to these – and as I said in the BotW for Crossing Places, I think I had been avoiding these because the covers looked like they would be too dark for me. But they’re no darker than the Brighton ones (which I started because I spotted the first one on NetGalley back in the day) and although they’re darker than most of the American cozy crimes I read, they’re not dark-dark. They’re probably somewhere around the Hawthorne and Horowitz and Thursday Murder Club point in the scale, if such a scale existed.

These are really easy to get hold of – I bought several of these from various Waterstones and Foyles around central London when I finished the one I was reading while I was staying in London. Do read them in order if you can because as I said there are lots of links between them. And of course they’re on Kindle and Kobo too – including omnibus editions of some of them if you want to save some cash on buying them individually.

Have a great weekend!

*As you’ve probably guessed Nelson is the love interest here – but he’s also married and if cheating/infidelity is a deal breaker for you in your reading you will not like this series, do not read, do not pass go, do not collect £200 etc.

books, historical, series, Series I love

Series I Love Redux: Dandy Gilver

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After reading Catriona McPherson’s new book last week, I went back and checked where I was at with the Dandy Gilver series – and lo and behold there was a sixteenth book in the series out in paperback for me to read to complete the set. It’s been three years since I last wrote about Dandy – at which point I was one down on the then fifteen books in the series. We’ve now followed Dandy’s adventures from 1923 all the way through until 1939 and seen her go from a bored wife at home with her boys away at school through to a grandmother worrying about the likelihood of her sons being killed up to fight in another war. And given that there are a bunch of throwbacks her first case in this one, it does feel like this could be the last book in the series, but who knows. I would definitely read about Dandy taking on the Home Front, but I don’t want her boys to be killed – so maybe it’s best to stop? Anyway, you can go back and read my previous posts about the series – consistently darker than you expect them to be, and with far too many different cover designs!

Have a great weekend.

Series I love

Series I Love: Discworld

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My brain can’t quite get it’s head around it, but Wednesday just gone marked ten years since Terry Pratchett died, and I couldn’t let that pass without writing something about the Discworld and my enduring love for it.

— Terry Pratchett & Rob Wilkins (@terryandrob.bsky.social) 2025-03-12T10:15:15.279Z

I’d like to start by pointing you at my Where to Start with Terry Pratchett post for my suggestions about not starting at the beginning of the series unless you’re a frequent fantasy reader, but actually starting with one of the mini-series within the Discworld. It’s six or so years since I wrote that, and since then I think I’ve re-read most of my favourite sub-series, but not the series as a whole. And I think I’ve re-read or re-listen the first two Moist von Lipwig books and The Truth every year – and helped by the fact that there have been fresh audiobooks released I’ve also added in the early watch books, which were a very hard listen on the digital transfer of the original Nigel Planer recordings – or at least they were so hard a listen on Guards! Guards! that I never bought any others and just stuck to the ones that were narrated by Stephen Baxter.

Discworld hardcovers

I love the way that Pratchett skewers the modern world and the things that he picks out to create an alternative version of. I do wish we had got the Moist takes on the Tax system that was hinted at in the final stages of Making Money, but Raising Steam was fun instead. Basically I wish we had more. I wish so the Embuggrance hadn’t happened and we had another ten PTerry books by now rather than only having the old ones to re-read.

I’m also really glad that I went to see him and Rob Wilkins at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 2011 to talk about Snuff. Because I’m an electronic hoarder I went back and checked my emails – and the event was to mark the fact that snuff was his 50th book – but I know that I went because I wasn’t sure how much longer he was going to be able to do events and I wanted to hear him speak. It was four or so years since he’d made the dementia diagnosis public at that point, Rob did the reading from the book and Terry had already stopped signing books – he was stamping instead. My only regret from that night is that I didn’t queue up to get the book stamped and meet him – but it was a work night, it was already after 10pm when it finished and I had come from one 12 hour shift and had another one the next morning. But I went, it was great and I was right – there weren’t many more chances, because I didn’t manage to do another one.

And I really respect the job that Rob and Terry’s daughter Rhianna have done looking after the Pratchett estate – they’ve been really thoughtful and careful about what they do with it and tried to follow his wishes – right down to steamrollering his hard-drives so that nothing else could come out that he hadn’t approved. And judging by Rhianna’s post this week, hopefully we may have a new adaptation of something coming at some point in the relatively near future.

Anyways, I’m off to think about whether I should but some more of the pretty hardbacks, which will lead to me looking at the Discworld Emporium website and then maybe do a Discworld jigsaw under my framed picture of Errol the Dragon. I’ll leave you with the links my original tribute post and my BotW post for Shepherd’s Crown – which I still haven’t been able to re-read.

GNU Sir Terry.