Tag Archives: female author

Constance Harding’s Rather Startling Year – Ceri Radford – 6/10

Fluff April 3, 2013 1 Comment

“I am still alive. That is about the most positive thing I can say about my current situation. Even this state of affairs may not endure: an obstreperous airport security official confiscated my water-purification tablets. Once, in happier times, I visited the Rodin museum in Paris. There I observed the famous sculture The Gates of Hell, which featured writhing, contorted, debased and demented human forms. That is what Ibiza reminds me of.”

constance hardingConstance Harding is a little perplexed by the current state of her life. Her husband is a little absent, which may have something to do with the presence of a lithe Lithuanian housekeeper; her daughter seems to be spending a lot of her gap year not in France, not helping an ecological survey, and her son seems mysteriously averse to settling down with a lovely domestic girl. When her son Rupert sets her up with a blog to document her daily happenings, she finds an outlet for her thoughts for the year.

This fluffy little domestic drama is just the thing for a lazy weekend morning. Constance is vacuous, self-obsessed and unbelievably snobbish – and highly amusing. She seems to run into a large number of obstacles, entirely of her own making, and her son’s self-imposed exile to Milton Keynes seems very wise. There were any number of clever little twists and pieces of writing; Constance’s mystification with blogs, Facebook, mobile phones – technology in general – is very funny. Mark and Tanya moving in, and Tanya’s subsequent entrepreneurial flourishing, was a poignant interlude in the superficiality of Constance’s life.

I raced through January to May without any difficulty… it was only when Sophie’s adventures went from the absurd to the ridiculous and the village antics reached their strange peak that I tired of Constance’s self-indulgent tone. I’ve only given this 6/10 because I feel it’s too light and fluffy to get more, but it is an entertaining work. Tomorrow I’ll be posting a Q&A with the author, and if this sounds like fun to you, you might like to check out Constance’s latest adventures – a blog on the Penguin website, with parenting advice for the Duchess of Cambridge…

Additional information:
Copy kindly provided by the publisher (Penguin USA) in return for an honest review.
Publisher: Penguin, 273 pages (paperback)
Order Constance Harding’s (Rather) Startling Yearfrom 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

Until Thy Wrath Be Past – Asa Larsson – 3/10

Thriller March 16, 2013 Leave a comment

“There was “an incident” in the village. A story that’s told behind the brothers’ backs.”

until-thy-wrath-be-past

Two teenagers go missing in winter; their village concludes that they must have run away together. Until a body washes up in a river far from the village in question when the winter snows melt in spring…

Good parts of this book:

1. I loved the police detectives; they were strong individual characters with plenty of back story. Often the police in these things all become one personality.

2. The grandmother. Every police procedural should have an elderly relatives who doesn’t follow any of the rules at all.

3. The dynamic between the Krekula brothers: Larsson puts a lot of time into their story and the relationship between them. The younger becoming the bully, the older one constantly atoning for his failings.

Issues I had with this book:

1. the ghostly visitations: we really didn’t need them. What did they add? It was sweet to see the comforting aspect to the grandmother, and I suppose if a ghost is going to appear to her grandmother, she might as well appear to the police team trying to solve her murder. But still.

2. Cover art: I have some issues with the cover for this book. Why isn’t the girl wearing gloves if it’s so cold? She looks like a teenager, so the only person from the story she could represent is Wilma, in which case where is Simon?

3. The conclusion went on for ages and ages and Rebecka seemed to really enjoy throwing herself into the path of danger for no good reason at all just because she was too impatient to wait for any sort of backup. We knew who the bad guys were for so long… somehow the suspense was all a bit wrong.

I’m not going to write off this author altogether, but I preferred the writing of the other author with the same surname.

Additional information:
Copy from Iris On Books.
Publisher: Maclehose Press, 322 pages (hardback)
Order Until Thy Wrath Be Past: A Rebecka Martinsson Investigationfrom 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 Silence – Alison Bruce – 7/10

Thriller March 14, 2013 Leave a comment

“He looked around to see Elizabeth Martin herself eyeing him. She was a woman in her mid-fifties, with grey-flecked blond hair and a passion for knitwear. Skirt, top, scarf; all knitted. Even her boots had a roll-over top that looked knitted too. Beach holidays must be tricky.”

silence

When a student in one of the myriad student houses in Cambridge is found dead after a quiet weekend, suicide is the obvious verdict; particularly given the assortment of substances lying around her she could have used to overdose. When DC Goodhew meets her housemate Libby, whose two older siblings also committed suicide, he’s not so sure about this one any more. Could there be a terrible theme connecting the unusually high number of accidental deaths recently?

This took a little while to get going but I was absolutely gripped once it did. The “cold open” scenes were too disjointed and took a long time to fit into the rest of the story; then Libby seems to have a long Facebook conversation with a dead girl. After 25 pages I was quite disappointed, thinking this crime noir was just teenage witterings that didn’t make any sense. DCs Goodhew and Gully to the rescue.

Goodhew is a great police character – stubborn, prepared to bend the rules a little bit to get to the truth, passionately determined to hunt down the killer, particularly when on suspension, but underneath everything just a really good person. I’d point the “this character is too good to be a human” finger at him if he wasn’t so stubborn. And Gully is a sweetie with a core of steel; too embarrassed to experience actual emotion in the context of other humans, as soon as someone else is threatened, she’s in there sorting it out with nary a thought for her own safety. More please.

Plotwise, this simmered along at just the right level for most of the book; as I said, it took a while to get going, and then the bodies really piled up at the end. That might have been me reading faster and faster  though as I got to the dramatic climax. Murder weapon of choice was unusual (always good), and Bruce clearly knows Cambridge inside-out and gave us a very strong local grip on events.

A solid, enjoyable thriller – I’d love to read more by Bruce, particularly if it involves Goodhew and Gully!

Additional information:

Copy from Ellie of Curiosity Killed the Bookworm for a guest review.

Publisher: Constable, 292 pages (hardback)

Order The Silence 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

Lavender Lies – Susan Wittig Albert – 5/10

Comfort Reading, Thriller February 21, 2013 Leave a comment

“Damn it. This is my wedding. Why can’t the week be normal?”

lavender lies

After I discovered Thyme of Death, I went a little overboard and tried to get the whole China Bayles series – I ended up with one paperback and two audio downloads. This was the paperback… Eminently readable (this was one of 2 1/2 books I read on New Year’s Eve, content on the chaise longue outside my uncle’s caravan at Tuross), yet missing something in that fantastic idea collection of the first book.

So China Bayles has quit her toxic lawyering in Houston for Mean Nasty Companies and retired to a little place called Pecan Springs where she runs a herb shop and her shop-neighbour is a crazy new Age lady called Ruby, and they are about to open a joint tea room. Local real estate mogul found dead. Most residents think “Good riddance”, but it transpires rather quickly that Mr. Coleman was having a number of affairs and was blackmailing city council members for their support on a dodgy land investment deal. And then a few more bodies pile up…Oh and China is planning her wedding (at last) to McQuaid, acting chief of police, so the case needs to be wrapped up by Saturday otherwise China’s honeymoon is going to get derailed.

I love a single lady investigator, and I’ve raved about the first book in this series; something in this one left me underwhelmed. It might have been that there was too much side chatter and not enough actual case; Ruby seems to have got even more mad and tipped over into caricature territory, and Wittig Albert is a little heavy-handed with the emotional preaching (China fiiiiiiiiiiiiinally gets over her issues with her mother).

That all notwithstanding, there are any number of red herrings, I didn’t guess the bad guy, China’s life is quite amusing to read about, Ruby does provide a lot of amusement and China does a nifty amount of sleuthing in a rather clever manner.

It’s a decent detective story, it’s just not as good as the first one in the series was.

Additional information:
Copy from Bookmooch.
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime, 297 pages (paperback)
Order Lavender Liesfrom 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 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:

The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood – 6/10

Advent with Atwood, Modern Masters December 26, 2012 Comments: 2

“Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?”

margaret-atwood-blind-assassin

Iris Chase, heiress to the Chase family button-making business and married off to rival Richard Griffin, takes the opportunity towards the end of her life to revisit her story. Along the way we are treated to excerpts from the book penned by her prematurely deceased and decidedly odd sister Laura, newspaper clippings telling of the untimely demise of multiple family members, and Iris’ life as an elderly lady back in the town where she grew up.

If you’re interested in my thoughts as I went along, here are links to read-along parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.

The strands of the book varied greatly for me; I loved Iris’ story as an old lady, reminding me of Moon Tiger, one of my favourite book, as well as having strains of The Help. Gentle, smooth, comfort reading. The newspaper articles were intriguing, moved the plot along smartly and added a sense of location and community and times. Iris’ memories of childhood were the best part for me; Very Dead End Gene Pool with overtones of Blackberry Winter, but more positive. She tells this section very slowly, which strings out the reading pleasure and increases the bitter anticipation of the tragedy we already know will happen. In terms of the pulp novel/sci-fi subplot: I never connected with the people or really understood the relationship – there was a neat twist at the end but I could have lived without it; as for the dreadful fantasty writing…

It became more and more readable as it went along; possibly because there is less and less of the sci-fi story and more of the slow-motion train wreck of Iris Chase’s life. Interspersing it with her days as a pensioner is sort of reassuring because we know that she’s going to get through all the mildly unpleasant parts of her life intact, and we already know that Laura will drive off the bridge so now we’re sort of just waiting for it to happen.

Atwood writes fluently and elegantly but without much showiness; I only noted a few quotes:

“On the main street of Port Ticonderoga there were five churches and four banks, all made of stone, all chunky. Sometimes you had to read the names on them to tell the difference, although the banks lacked steeples.”

“Alone and therefore neglected, neglected and therefore unsuccessful. As if I’d been stood up, jilted; as if I had a broken heart. A group of English people in cream-coloured linen stared at me. It wasn’t a hostile stare; it was bland, remote, faintly curious. No one can stare like the English. I felt rumpled and grubby, and of minor interest.”

and my favourite, which tops this review.

It’s a sad novel; an inevitability of tragedy hangs over the protagonist. I did enjoy the description of life in between-war Canada, the life Iris had before and after marrying new money (it reminds me of something I’ve read recently, a woman who marries for money rather than love… ah – Wallis Simpson).

It turns very interesting from a semi-unreliable narrator point of view;  Iris is quite happily telling us all her marital woes while she fails to notice anything about Laura at all, and fails to protect her from the Richard and Winifred double act. Old Iris’ morbid (she even calls it lugubrious) discussion of her own death interspersed with her observations on her very unhappy marriage adds even more darkness to the domesticity. The marriage is quite oddly unhappy, actually – the dynamic of the traditional over-bearing mother-in-law who won’t let go of her son is occupied by Winifred (“Freddie” – really?) the older sister, which struck me as very strange. Why would Richard choose a wife so far his junior if he enjoys the company of his older sister as a peer? Or is it just poor coincidence that the age gap was so large and really it’s just the Chase business that Richard wanted?

I was so pleased when the sci-fi stopped. I know it was intentionally awful, but still.

The twist in the The Blind Assassin affair reduced Laura as a character for me; she became a little girl once more. The slightly autistic, reserved but also impetuous trouble-maker of the family; no longer a sophisticated woman of intrigue. Iris grew in my eyes to become much stronger, with backbone (which is an odd reaction for me. I abhor infidelity in novels).

The ending felt very rushed. Suddenly Laura was dead, and Richard was dead, and Iris is clearly on the way out herself; either Atwood ran out of time (highly unlikely) or simply decided she was done with the part of the story she wanted to tell.

Thoughts? Thoughts on the book as a whole? on the read-along experience if you joined in? (as a straight-through sort of reader, read-alongs are a very different animal for me).

Additional information:

Before I Met You – Lisa Jewell – 6/10

Current Affairs December 20, 2012 Leave a comment

“I am living in Zone Three,” she said with a grim smile. John winced sympathetically.

before I met you

Having looked after an Alzheimer’s-riddled step-grandmother for five years, Betty can’t wait to dash off to London when a will mystery needs to be resolved. She finds herself in 1990s Soho struggling to make ends meet, dealing with a mad neighbour, falling in love with a rock star, and slowly solving a mystery from her grandmother’s heyday.

I love these back-and-forth through history books (e.g. Russian Winter, Blackberry Winter, The Sandalwood Tree). It feels like two stories for the price of one; although, in this case, the two stories felt unrelated for quite a long time – Betty takes ages to get anywhere with her search (which is, perhaps, for plausibility). Both Betty and Arlette are strong, gutsy women with cracks in their veneer; both girls go to London to make their fortune and fall on their feet, but trip over a fair amount. Jewell writes realistic women who screw up their lives, who don’t live perfectly, who don’t always get their happy ending. The men were stronger than in other such books I’ve read (particularly Blackberry Winter) but still mostly boorish and minor; Godfrey is very much the exception, and the racial/social politics was a good serious note to a fairly fluffy read.

Things I loved? 1920s London. 1990s London. London London London. This book knows where it’s set. Oh, and Guernsey too, but I don’t know Guernsey. The London of this book is not quite my London (2010s London), but I know it pretty well and Jewell writes it so enthusiastically – she clearly knows the city very well. Also – Arlette’s glamour – her perfumes, her wardrobe, her friends – she embodied the 1920s London so well. Things which irritated me? The rock star side plot. Betty behaved a bit stupidly on several occasions for no reason that I could discern except that the author wanted to fit some romance into the modern story (the old story had romance aplenty, and well written). 6/10 feels a bit harsh, but the novel lacked something – substance? Grit? I’m not sure, but I came away feeling a bit unsatisfied.

Oh, and that quote at the top? I chose it because I live in Zone Three. And I love it. No sympathy needed (although a little travelcard subsidy wouldn’t go amiss).

Additional information:

Copy kindly provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review – quite some time ago.

Publisher: Random House, 456 pages (paperback)

Order Before I Met You 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 Edible Woman – Margaret Atwood – 2/10 (DNF)

Advent with Atwood, Modern Masters December 19, 2012 1 Comment

“I had returned from lunch and was licking and stamping envelopes for the coast-to-coast instant pudding-sauce study, behind schedule because someone in mimeo had run one of the question sheets backwards, when Mrs. Bogue came out of her cubicle.”

edible woman

From the blurb: What happens to someone who has been a willing member of consumer society when she suddenly finds herself identifying with the things consumed? … The witty and diverting story of a young woman whose sane, structured, consumer-oriented world suddenly slips strangely out of focus. As a result, Marian McAlpin finds herself unable to eat: first meat, then eggs, and finally even vegetables become abhorrent to her. In this tour de force, Margaret Atwood presents a striking condemnation of contemporary society and of the rampant consumerism that deprives people of both soul and sustenance.

Well, I don’t know at what point Marian starts identifying with the consumer products, but it hadn’t happened by page 100. Until then, she had just pottered along with her existence, her quite strange boyfriend, her fairly dead-end job, her bizarre housemate… so far, the setting has been confusing rather than dystopian. So I lost patience and gave up.

Additional information:

The Penelopiad – Margaret Atwood – 8/10

Advent with Atwood, Current Affairs December 5, 2012 Comments: 2

“Now that I am dead, I know everything.”

200px-ThePenelopiad

My first foray into Atwood (planned as part of Advent with Atwood) was the simplest of hers that I own – a retelling of The Odyssey from Penelope’s point of view. Atwood imagines Penelope in the Underworld thousands of years later (in our modern day), telling the story of her life, with interjections from a Greek tragedy-style chorus. Penelope airs her thoughts on her cousin Helen, the gods’ fickle and mischievous interventions in human life, and sets us straight on some parts of her story. It’s not a long novel, with barely 200 small pages of largish print.

While there were certain aspects of the myth that I had forgotten (Odysseus’ long stay with Calypso being one of them) and others that I did not know as they were a little gruesome for the children’s book of Greek myths I read as a child (the hanging of the twelve young maids), the story was mostly familiar to me. Atwood throws in asides and remarks which reference other myths or characters from the myths, such as Clytemnestra, which make the reader quite smug with recognising them!

Atwood’s characterisation of both Penelope and Odysseus is consistent with my memory of the myth – both wily, fairly quiet, greatly in love and never forgetting a grudge. Penelope’s father is set up as a buffoon and Eurycleia as a meddling but loving old crony. A suspenseful ending was always going to be prohibited by the widespread knowledge of the story, but the dread and fear as the suitors eat up more and more of Penelope’s resources is real.

Somehow there’s not much to say about this. It’s faithful to the original although clever and witty in its own capacity; the characters started by Homer are consistently and congruously transferred, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I read the first hundred pages without interruption; it is perhaps the fact that I was returning to it rather than already being engrossed that made me feel the second half was weaker. In any case, the whole thing is a very quick read as it is both short and captivating.

Additional information:

The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D – Nichole Bernier – 8/10

Comfort Reading October 31, 2012 1 Comment

“She had a fleeting thought of the things that had not happened – a self-detonating martyr, Chris’s burned wallet returned to her by the embassy – and wondered if things would ever be simple again, a trip just a trip a sound on the porch.”

The key to this novel is whether you can ever really know what someone else thinks of you – or whether you can ever really know them at all. Elizabeth has died in a plane crash and left her life’s journals to her best friend Kate rather than to devastated husband and now single dad-of-three Dave. Dave’s peeked and found a man’s name, not his own, and is pretty grumpy about it. Kate takes the trunk of journals on holiday with her family for the summer and becomes absorbed in the history of her friend, discovering that things were not at all as they appeared.

Elizabeth is a real piece of work (in a crazy but good way) – but I suppose she has to be or this wouldn’t be much of a book. Kate strikes me as much more ploddy and calm, but then Elizabeth writes about how her friend took down some precious comments in the playground, or Kate  recounts moments in fast-paced kitchens – so I suppose self-image is under consideration here too. I love the idea of learning about a person through their journals – it’s so honest and unflinching and unfiltered. Kate discovers lots of things she had no idea about, realising that maybe Elizabeth wasn’t just the perfect housewife she appeared to be, but had struggled with grief and solitude and a career behind the scenes.

Bernier writes at length and often and with real emotion about the struggle of a mother – whether to go back to work or not, how to balance her own needs with those of her children and husband. Fear is also a recurring theme – the novel is set in “the nervous summer after 9/11″ and Kate is constantly scared of terrorism. Or disease. Or fire. Or anything really, she’s just afraid. These themes are some of the best parts of this book; Bernier approaches them from a number of angles and puts her characters in difficult situations to test out their responses.

As with other books I’ve read recently about women, the men are a little flat and predictable. Don’t go back to work. We don’t need the money. The kids need you. Or do go back. Whatever. I don’t care if you’re worried that I’m travelling in Bali and Jakarta and Cambodia. Don’t mess up my memories of my dead wife. Have another kid. Don’t tell me when you might have cancer. I just felt that Bernier made them much less intricate than Kate and Elizabeth so that they could cause actions by the women, but not make any real contribution to the plot themselves.

Lastly, the setting – how are there this many idyllic islands in the US that I didn’t know about? Other novels with islands: Love Anthony, Blackberry Winter, Snow Falling on Cedars. Ideally, the protagonists should have a part of the island that is little known, not overrun with tourists. There must be seclusion but also neighbourliness. Is this a thing over the pond? I’m a little flummoxed because it seems a bit twee. Anyway, it’s all pretty and serene and relaxing.

I don’t seem to have justified an 8/10 rating here. Put in this way – I cracked it open about 4.30 on Friday. At 6.10 I looked up, a bit choked up.

Additional information:
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 554 other followers