Category Archives: Review copies

Close My Eyes – Sophie McKenzie – 7/10

Review copies, Thriller May 21, 2013 Leave a comment

“Of course, what I didn’t realise then is that grief, like the seasons, is cyclical. I would just start to feel open to life again, then find myself thrust back under the water, drowning in loss.”

close my eyesGeniver Loxley lost her daughter Beth in a stillbirth eight years ago, and has been struggling ever since. When a stranger turns up on her doorstep, claiming that Beth is still alive and that there was a huge conspiracy to have Geniver believe that Beth is dead, and then that stranger is killed in a hit-and-run, Gen can’t help but cling to the thread of hope, and, terrified of the violence seeking to catch up with her, she starts to try to track down her daughter.

This is a very tightly written thriller; McKenzie steers Geniver neatly down the line between compulsion and madness, between paranoia and reasonable fear. Like Geniver, the reader never knows whether her husband is involved or not, whose information she can trust, or whether Geniver is actually mad. The voice of a child weaves through the story, popping up intermittently, and remains a mystery until the end – enough to keep the reader looking for the next interruption. It reminded me a lot of Louise Douglas’ The Secrets Between Us, although the characterisation is tighter and the mystery/madness angle more delicate than in TSBU.

In a sense, there is a little too much background information on the main characters: so much time and so many words are spent on Art’s background, his rise to money and fame – it’s clear that he is desperate to succeed at all costs. Similarly, we spend just a bit too time in Geniver’s reproductive doldrums; as if a stillbirth wasn’t traumatic enough, she hasn’t fallen pregnant since and remains single-mindedly focussed on Beth, excluded from her friends’ worlds of muddy football kit and birthday parties. In some ways, her exclusion from the world of a mother calls into question her suitability to take charge of a child, should Beth be found alive.

I’d figured out that the villain must be one of three people, given the assortment of red herrings, and was gratified to discover that one of them was the main villain, with a lot of help from a second one! There’s a really chilling ending to this one, after the big climax/shoot-out/confrontation which we all knew was coming, which I didn’t expect and which ends the reading experience with quite a cold, brutal feeling – as if the rest of the book wasn’t brutal enough!

A well-paced, enthralling debut – I look forward to more of McKenzie’s work.

Additional information:
Copy kindly provided by the publisher in return for an honest review.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 390 pages (paperback)
Order Close My Eyesfrom Amazon*
* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards give-aways and site hosting

Simple Saturday – Manuscript Found In Accra part III

Review copies April 27, 2013 Leave a comment

Previous entries: 1, 2

Coelho_ThereisOnlyMo#C92D90
Unlike the previous two of these koans, I pretty much agree with that one. I’ve seen it referred to in The Lady of the Rivers, the idea of a cycle of fortune. Sometimes one is at the top, sometimes at the bottom. It always changes.

Thoughts?

Simple Saturday – Manuscript Found In Accra part II

Review copies April 20, 2013 1 Comment

Last week’s entry

Coelho_LoveisPriceless_webMy cynical world view disagrees with this one. Yes, love may be, like the Mastercard adverts, priceless, just like the Beatles told us, but I think even the most hopelessly romantic among us would agree that there is a cost to any love.

Thoughts?

Simple Saturday – Manuscript Found In Accra part I

Review copies April 13, 2013 Comments: 2

Paolo Coelho’s latest is sitting on my desk waiting to be read, but the publisher has kindly sent through a couple of graphics to go with the book, which I’ll be posting on Saturdays for a few weeks.

Coelho_OnlyDifference_WebThis is a really tricky koan for me, because I love to see things neatly tidied away and smooth and uniform, but I sort of understand where it’s coming from. Thoughts?

 

The Secrets Between Us – Louise Douglas – 6/10

Fluff, Review copies, Thriller January 14, 2013 1 Comment

“I didn’t like the thought of Genevieve’s mother having our boy all to herself. I imagined her dusting him down, metaphorically, and wiping any trace of me from him. I imagined her wrapping him up in Genevieve again like a lamb wrapped in the bloodied fleece of another to disguise its smell.”

secrets between us

Sarah is running away from personal tragedy and relationship breakdown – and runs headlong into Alexander’s life. She eagerly takes on a job as housekeeper and nanny, not quite realising the height of the pedestal on which his presumed-deceased wife was held by the community. Sarah has to win over Genevieve’s family, put her own life to rights, and try to figure out what happened to Genevieve along the way.

There are strong Jane Eyre homage tones here – Sarah is haunted by Genevieve’s ghost metaphorically and a few times believes herself literally haunted; she is hired as a housekeeper/nanny although there’s a romantic angle with the father; she comes to the job running away from another existence and runs away from this job too at one point. But Douglas avoids falling into that trap (after all, with Rebecca enjoying such iconic status, why limit yourself to that story) and introduces a few other strands too.

Sarah herself is a bit odd; moves across the country and into someone’s home at a moment’s notice, and there are occasional doubts cast on her sanity – for a while I wondered if she was actually Genevieve and it was going to turn into a bizarre Stockholm Syndrome novel… She’s deeply affected by her stillbirth and the breakdown of her marriage, but then takes up a holiday fling quickly and the romance element bubbles on through the novel.

The village of Burrington Stoke is quite stifling for Sarah – everyone knew Genevieve and many are suspicious of Alexander, and naturally of Sarah now she has come to fill Genevieve’s shoes. Douglas writes a nearly closed-set of characters well, adding even more to Sarah’s feelings of unease. While the family house seems a little opulent, on the whole it had the feeling of a real place; ambitious, given the range of settings (Alex’s house, the family house, the mine, the school, pub, Claudia’s house… we do move around quite a lot).

This novel was selected for the Richard & Judy book club and while I don’t remember being all that positive about it as I read it, I can sort of understand why, given the various aspects I’ve discussed above. It suffers a little from falling between genres; it’s a thriller/family drama, but starts off as a pretty heady romance and there’s still thick romance strands every now and again, there’s a definite murder mystery angle although it’s not really followed up on… Good holiday reading if you’re not really sure what you want, I guess!

Additional information:

Love Anthony – Lisa Genova – 8/10

Comfort Reading, Review copies October 4, 2012 Comments: 3

“I’m always hearing about how my brain doesn’t work right… But it doesn’t feel broken to me”

Beth is left alone in her large house coping with three children after she evicts her philandering husband; Olivia arrives on Nantucket seeking solitude and refuge after her only child, the demanding and all-consuming focus of her life for eight years, dies young. Beth finds herself turning back to her writing amid a crisis of self, inspired by a unique boy in her dreams who struggles to move between rooms of his brain and loves Always Rules. Olivia discovers a talent for photography which forces her out of her sanctuary of a house. They will be each other’s salvation.

Olivia and Beth are both strong, interesting women who are very normal – both of them sacrificed their identify for the sake of a more demanding section of the family unit. Both have an inherent creative gift which they only discover later in life, but they deal with personal tragedy in very different ways – Olivia’s stoic silence and shut-off-ness from the rest of the island contrasts strongly with Beth and her support network of her children and her friends. As in When It Happens To You, the men in this book are generally negatively characterised – they’re all a bit useless. Jimmy is lazy, smokes, is in an apparently dead-end job, and causes the crisis that takes over Beth’s storyline. Olivia’s husband David is also gone, although I was never really sure why – he seems like a nice guy and nothing seemed to happen to tear them apart other than Anthony’s autism and death (I know is sounds odd to say that’s nothing, but I don’t see why they should have broken up because of it). Beth’s book club friends’ husbands are almost non-existent.

Genova interleaves the lives of the two women skilfully and neatly; it took a while to realise how they would meet and then a while longer before they did, but that their experiences of Nantucket are so different while they obviously visit the same places helps with the dual storyline idea.

I don’t know anyone autistic, so I can’t judge how valid the imagined perspective of Anthony is (although “if you’ve met one child with autism, you’ve met one child with autism”, so maybe Genova could pick pretty much any interpretation and it would be true for at least one child…). But hers was consistent and understandable and rationalised Anthony’s behaviour, so certainly better than I expected.

While Genova spends a fair amount of time with Olivia’s frustrations as parent to an autistic child and then imagines her way into Anthony’s mind, there is also a lot of other stuff going on – especially Beth’s story, her marriage, her children, her friends – which, while well-written and I wasn’t about to put the book down at any time, is a distraction from the autism line and will, I think, negatively impact the reception of the book. Genova has written about Alzheimer’s and Left Neglect syndrome in the past – I’ve only read Left Neglected but it had a reasonable amount of science/imagined experience of a certain mental disability and stuck almost exclusively to that theme. I’m concerned that Love Anthony, while imaginative and looking at the parent’s perspective too, will lose some credibility for its slightly chick-lit style (which is not really alluded to in the blurb); it is a well-written piece of women’s fiction dealing with family issues, rather than a novel about living with autism, in a family context.

I did love the idea of therapeutic cooking though.

Additional information:
Copy kindly provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 303 pages (paperback).
Order Love Anthony from Amazon*
* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards give-aways and site hosting

The Shadow Queen – Rebecca Dean – 8/10

Historical Fiction, Review copies October 1, 2012 Comments: 4

“The day would come when her Uncle Sol would eat his heart out to be publicly recognised as being her relation – and when it did, she wouldn’t even give a nod in his direction.”

I nearly didn’t get my hands on this one; after a FedEx misadventure, there is still a copy of it floating around my office block which remains stubbornly elusive; thankfully Jonathan at Random House was generous enough to send a second copy across the Atlantic.

This beautifully presented novel (how could you not love all the Art Deco/ancient photograph stuff going on on the cover?) fictionalises the life of Wallis Simpson previously Spencer née Warfield, up to the point at which she meets (then) Prince Edward, heir to the throne which she would famously (infamously?) cause him to abdicate. We follow her fraught childhood, caught between the money and glamour of her family and the financial situation of her mother, left nearly penniless by a consumptive husband; her escape to Florida and a number of failed romances, and eventually her move to England in pursuit of the very highest of society.

It’s always hard to know with this style of book what is documented fact and what is author’s literary licence, but Wallis was a strong and well-fleshed out character; proud, strong, vivacious, not cowed by financial difficulty or bullying, always certain she was right but vulnerable as well. I loved the budding romance between Wallis and John Jasper, and was suitably outraged when it came to an end (that’s not a spoiler, right? Everyone knows she ended up marrying no-longer-King Edward).

Her subsequent romances were more difficult to deal with – as we moved into more reliably documented territory (her first and second marriages, her time in Florida, Washington and London), I struggled more to understand her motivations – I think Dean writes better when not constrained so much by documented history. The increasing emphasis on Wallis’ and others’ sexual liaisons also made me lose interest in the book a little – I know she had a scandalous reputation but it seemed like it was the easy thing to write about; I needed more context as to the mores of the time to know what was shocking and what was not.

Definitely worth a read if you are interested in the period, the story, or turn-of-the-century high society in the US.

Additional information:
Copy kindly provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Twice. If you work with me and you know where the original copy is that was Fedexed to me, let me know. I promise not to hurt you. Much.
Publisher: Broadway, 414 pages (paperback).
Order The Shadow Queen: A Novel of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor from Amazon*
* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards give-aways and site hosting

Happier At Home – Gretchen Rubin – 8/10

Non-fiction, Review copies September 4, 2012 Comments: 4

“Yet again, I saw the effect of the resolution to ‘Act the way I want to feel.’ By acting in a thoughtful, loving way, I boosted my feelings of tenderness toward my family. And that contributed more to the happiness of our home than anything else I could do.”

I’ve been reading Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project blog for about 6 months now and I am always struck by how practical and normal and simple and approachable it all is. So I was DELIGHTED when I saw that her second happiness-related book was out of NetGalley.

In Happier At Home, Rubin undertakes another project – a project to make her home happier (having focussed on herself and her general life in The Happiness Project). It’s still quite general and focusses on truths that Rubin learned during her first project. She tackles various themes (possessions, parenthood, marriage, neighbourhood) on a month-by-month basis and while not everything works out how she had planned, she discovers a number of great changes in her life.

“In my mind, the entire globe revolves around a single spot, where a bridge red ‘You Are Here’ arrow hovers undetected above our roof.”

 The writing does seem a little relentlessly optimistic, and I’m a touch suspicious of the alleged perfect relationships with all family members; but it does come across as authentic and real. I found the chapter on marriage particularly touching – Rubin is not always successful in making the more generous choice, but it is very interesting to see someone with Rubin’s talent for articulating feelings examine intra-familial conflict.

“When my days were following their ordinary course, it was hard to remember what was truly important, and my happiness project helped charge my life with more gratitude and contentment.”

I did sit and read this straight through over a number of days (that is, I was reading it as a book rather than a reference text), but I’m very tempted to buy the book in hard copy as a reference text – something to dip into now and again for ideas and inspiration and consolation.

Additional information:
Copy provided by the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.
Publisher: Crown, 320 pages (hardback) – I read it on my Kindle.
Pre-order Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life from Amazon*
* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards give-aways and site hosting

The Girl in the Box – Sheila Dalton – 8/10

Review copies, Thriller June 5, 2012 Comments: 2

“Was it possible to keep loving someone who had destroyed my life?”

I’ve done really badly with review copies from LibraryThing in the past – I had two thrillers turn out to be uber-religious proselytising. However, this one (which I wasn’t all that convinced by on the blurb) was a revelation – it was the cause of failing-to-go-to-bed-because-of-book, which is always a good sign for a book.

Psychoanalyst Jerry goes to Guatemala to track down some shamans and talk to them about the use of drugs in therapy. What he finds is an abused Mayan girl, to whom he could give a better life in Canada. His partner Caitlin is very understanding and co-operates with his plan to bring Inez back to Canada for political refuge and therapy, but when Inez is found holding a marble lamp over Jerry’s dead body, Caitlin’s world is shattered. She can’t figure out why sweet, mute Inez would kill Jerry so violently. And thus Caitlin’s story begins…

The characters in this novel were far better constructed than I had expected. Both Caitlin and Jerry are deeply intellectual, sympathetic people, although Jerry is quite free-spirited and Caitlin more given to unpredictable bouts of anger. Inez is a terrific creation – sweet tempered and loving but with a terrible past which flares in nervous outbreaks. The supporting characters (Margaret, Inez’s live-in nurse; Michael, Jerry’s fellow analyst; Molly, Caitlin’s confidante) are kept to a minimum in number and thus also developed strongly.

As a murder mystery, this one does not play by the rules – we know who the victim and perpetrator are right at the start. The mystery is the motive – and the suspense is kept up throughout the novel; we get an idea of the villain pretty early on but the explanation comes very late.

Definitely worth a read – not a book I would have bought but one I am very glad to have read!

Additional information:
Copy won from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers giveaway program.
Publisher: Dundurn Books, 377 pages (paperback)
Order Girl in the Box from Amazon*
* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards give-aways and site hosting

Take This Man – Alice Zeniter – 9/10

Current Affairs, Review copies May 29, 2012 Comments: 3

“We had the vague impression we could hear the planes flying over Baghdad and the bombs dropping.”

Because the inner cover says it better than I can: Today, Alice is going to marry Mad. They have been friends since childhood. They have played together, laughed together, cried together, and taken stands against injustice together. Today, Alice is going to marry Mad – not because after years of friendship they have suddenly become romantically involved, but because Alice is white and French, and Mad is neither. Despite having spent almost his entire life in France, Mad, born in Mali, is now being threatened with deportation. Today, Alice is going to marry Mad – because getting married seems the only possible solution to Mad’s predicament. Today, Alice is going to marry Mad, and for Alice this steps marks the end of adolescence, the end of her years of innocence and the start of adulthood.

The minute I finished Take This Man, I had to email the publisher (Daniela at Europa Editions) because I was so in love with the book and had to tell someone before I got bogged down in fair value adjustments on acquisition of subsidiaries again…

While there is obviously a strong focus on French immigration politics (which seems to be even more draconian than the current UK immigration politics), Zeniter writes several long passages on the zeitgeist, what it is to be young and passionate in the early years of the twenty-first century.

“My generation saw order restored after May ’68, my generation tried to imitate May ’68, my generation starts daydreaming as soon as May comes around, my generation doesn’t have a clue where these classes that are supposed to be struggling might have gone to.”

It’s so fresh and unusual and rebellious. Of course, the big question is: is it autobiographical? On the one hand – the protagonist has the author’s name; on the other hand, four years from the wedding in 2009 has not yet elapsed, and it would be terribly risky for her to confess all in this novel! A bit of internet searching suggests that it is not autobiographical, so I’m intrigued as to the author’s use of her own name for the protagonist.

I was surprised by the protagonist’s hesitance about marrying her friend to keep him in France – she’s so vehement about her own multi-racial identity and taking the fight to the fascist pigs, but she’s really a frightened girl, scared of the police, scared of shackling herself to someone she loves as a friend but not as a husband, scared of her parents’ reaction. It made her much deeper as a character than I had anticipated.

Additional information:
Copy provided by the publisher in return for an honest review.
Publisher: Europa Editions, 177 pages (paperback)
Order Take This Man from Amazon*
* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards give-aways and site hosting costs.
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