“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.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop and look it up right away?

Never. I might note it with a sticky tab and look it up later if I wasn’t able to understand its meaning from the context, but I would never stop reading to look a word up.

However, I might well stop to look up a concept or event on Wikipedia, particularly if it is important to the story (eg. the assassination of the human rights activist in The Help, whose name, I am ashamed to admit, escapes me).

I don’t read much non-fiction and I have very little patience for difficult fiction, so I don’t run across all that many unfamiliar words!

Violet tweeted today “Judging by all the tweets mentioning sunshine in England, I get the impression you guys don’t see the sun very often. “

So. True. This week has been gloriously, divinely sunny, and we don’t trust it to stick around for very long. I’m so afraid that it’s going to get cold and rainy again that I’m not enjoying it while it lasts! Although I did sit on the roof terrace at my client the other day for lunch and exposed my lower legs to the sunshine for 20 minutes. I looked like a suicidal vampire auditor.

Not least because  this has been me for the past few days week months:

swiftly followed by

(credit 1, 2)

So a weekend at home of pottering and reading and writing reviews is exactly what I need. England is walloping the Windies at Trent Bridge, which is keeping The Physicist happy (speaking of which, when is Australia going to play some more Test cricket? Where have my cricket men gone? They are supposed to entertain me from a great distance?!)

For some Sunday funnies (courtesy of Liburuak’s About page) – check out the reviews for this Swiss army knife. Seriously, just read the reviews. I have no idea who’s rigged it, but hat tip to them.

I never used to be much of a walkreader – TNLRC used almost walk into people while reading between the station and our flat when she lived with us, but I’ve always been too scared of walking into obstacles. Turns out that being able to operate the Kindle with one hand makes the whole process a lot easier than walkreading with a paper book, and now it’s quite tempting.

I’ve been reading Gretchen Rubin’s Happier at Home; I follow her Happiness Project blog. I’m enjoying the book, but the Kindle is really not doing it justice – often the illustrations come out wonky, or not at all, and I don’t feel like on the Kindle, it’s a volume I can refer to and dip in and out of in the future – a book that (while entertaining and enjoyable to read in big gulps) should be sipped from needs paper.

I love this breakfast table/bookcase:

This week’s BTT is:

Do you have any pet that has a name inspired by your readings?

If not, what would you pick if you DID?

Do any of your friends have book-based names for their pets? (Or their children?)

No, my pets are/were called Mandy and Mindy. Imaginative, I know. I plead the fact that I was 6 when we got them.

The Physicist decided long ago that if I am to be allowed a cat in a house in which he lives, it must be called Yoda and I must only speak to it Yoda-style (“Feed you I shall” “The fur is soft with this one” etc). So that may or may not put paid to any literary pet naming.

I would definitely name a large dog Timmy and a small one Scamper, after the dogs in Famous Five and Secret Seven respectively. I think I’d call a cat something glamorous like Estella or Antigone or Hermione, but equally it could be Ron.

As for children – being blessed/cursed with an… unusual… name myself, I’m greatly in favour of the old-fashioned, dime-a-dozen names! I love that Dead White Guys has named her boys after two well-loved literary characters; I’m not sure I’m that brave!

“Who would have thought the orphaned daughter of a Moorish slave could find such favour at the English court?”

Lucy Morgan, a young Moorish singer, finds herself catapulted into the Queen’s favour at a summer progress. She becomes a secret emissary between lovers and spies; with assassination plots abounding, it won’t be long before Lucy’s world comes crashing down around her ears…

I gave up on this after about 180 pages; I got fed up of the constant to-and-fro of the love triangle of Queen Elizabeth I, Robert Dudley and Lady Essex (Lettice Knollys); while Lucy was a sympathetic character with interesting friends, too much of the plot revolved around the women’s jealousy. Meanwhile, Walsingham is either plotting with the assassins or blissfully ignorant of their presence. The book failed to sustain my interest – I can’t pinpoint anything particularly deficient, it simply bored me.

Additional information:

Copy provided by the publisher in return for an honest review.

Publisher: Transworld Books, 359 pages (hardback)

Order The Queen’s Secret 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.

What do you do with the book before you start reading it?

It would never have occurred to me that this is a question – my answer is “open front cover, flip past all the copyright and acknowledgements and introduction to where the story starts, and start reading.

I *never* read an introduction before I read the book as there are often spoilers hiding in there. In fact, if I already own the book, I rarely even read the blurb for fear of spoilers! If it’s on the shelf, it’s to be read, so just start…

Hammering this out quickly while sitting at gate B32 at Hamburg airport…

A quick weekend (Friday night to Sunday evening) with the family to attend Mini-Me’s confirmation. A happy and solemn ceremony this morning in a church packed to the rafters. I laid my hand on my little sister’s shoulder (not that I could see over the top of her head – she’s going to be taller than me very soon) and stood right behind her – a good place for a big sister to be.

I had done her hair in a special Katniss braid, inspired by Jennifer Lawrence’s sideways braid in the Hunger Games films – photos later when I can hook up my phone and computer!

A big lunch with the family and assorted friends (including the lovely Twin).

The Book Accumulator cooked lots of great food. My Yorkshire puddings totally failed to rise. Brownies were more successful, as were the efforts, led by the Musician, to finish multiple cryptic crosswords out of the Sydney Morning Herald over the course of the weekend.

Bright pink fingernails as a result of a girls’ afternoon in the cool district of Eimsbuettel. Latte macchiato, Apfelschorle, U-Bahn efficiency and a gorgeous cycle ride on the very civilised suburban streets of Hamburg.

Not much work done (I blame the family internet). But lots of fun.

1. less/fewer – gets top billing because of how common it is. Drives me crazy every time.

2. using “enjoy” as an intransitive verb. I cannot simply enjoy, I must enjoy my dinner, my food, my evening, my grammar dalek habits.

3. using an apostrophe to indicate a plural. There have been angry review notes about this one on my audit files. Worse when the rule about words ending in s followed by an apostrophe is correctly used while making a mistake (e.g. There were two thesaurus’).

4. there/their/they’re

5. it’s/its

6. were/we’re

7. refusing to acknowledge that “data” is a plural noun and therefore claiming that “these data” is wrong. I’ll accept “this data” as common usage, but don’t tell me the plural is wrong.

8. amount/number. Amount of cheese, number of cheeses. It’s really not that hard.

Any travesties I’ve missed?

No, I haven’t just posted a sign about potential blockages. Read it again.

“Sanity” towels.

If there were towels out there that conferred sanity upon their owners, they’d be worth their weight in gold. Move over Egyptian cotton, we’ve got clarity of mind and absence of nonsense here.