Category Archives: Fiction – Light

October 4, 2010 · 2:26 am

Book Of Lost Threads – Tess Evans

My mother picked this book – based on the cover and truth be told I would have picked it too. It’s been sitting in my pile for a while and I’ve overlooked it several times. However, once I started I was hooked. It’s a gentle story about loss, grief, guilt and redemption.

Here’s the blurb …

‘It was so long ago. The person he was then no longer existed. What was he supposed to say to this … this interloper who had materialised on his doorstep? Crouching down on his haunches, he poked at the fire and looked at her covertly from under his eyebrows. She was obviously waiting for him to say something. He frowned. There was something not quite right … What was it?’

Moss has run away from Melbourne to Opportunity on the trail of a man she knows only by name. But her arrival sets in train events that disturb the long-held secrets of three of the town’s inhabitants; Finn, a brilliant mathematician, who has become a recluse; Lily Pargetter, eight-three year old knitter of tea cosies; and Sandy, the town buffoon, who dreams of a Great Galah.

It is only as Moss, Finn, Lily and Sandy develop unlikely friendships that they find a way to lay their sorrows to rest and knit together the threads that will restore them to life.

Moss has two mothers and no father. When she discovers the secret of her conception she breaks off contact with one of her mothers and goes in search of her father. Finn, who was once called Michael, was involved in a dreadful accident and hasn’t been able to forgive himself. Lily’s husband was killed during the war and their child was still born. Sandy’s father abused his mother and he did nothing. These four people are lost, lonely and guilty, but through simple acts of kindness to one another they heal themselves and create a new family.

Dark things have happened to these people – particularly Lily – but this novel focuses on what happens after the event. How people move forwards (or not) and how to make amends.

I loved the story of Lily, her tea cosies and the ‘quartermaster of the United Nations’ and Sandy and his desire to build the Great Galah tourist attraction (a bit like the big pineapple). I didn’t want to put this novel down. I wanted to know how all the stories merged (or knitted) together and would they all find peace and happiness?

Here are some other reviews …

http://alainereading.blogspot.com/2010/05/book-of-lost-threads-by-tess-evans.html

http://www.australianwomenonline.com/book-review-book-of-lost-threads-by-tess-evans/

http://mandythebookworm.wordpress.com/2010/07/11/review-of-book-of-lost-threads-by-tess-evans/

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September 29, 2010 · 2:11 am

Wicked Appetite – Janet Evanovich

Janet Evanovich can certainly write an entertaining (and compelling) read. I’m not saying she’s an Austen or Bronte, but her novels are full of laugh-out-loud moments – racy and pacy as a friend says.

Here’s the blurb …

Seven Stones of Power

No one knows when they were created or by whom, each said to represent one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

For centuries, treasure hunters have been eager to possess the Stones, undeterred by their corrupting nature. The list is long – Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, to name a few. Now the Stones have found their way to Salem, Massachusetts, and so has Gerwulf Grimoire, adding himself to this rogue’s gallery of power seekers. He’s an uncommonly dangerous man with a hunger for the forbidden and a set of abilities that is way beyond ordinary. Abilities that he feels entitle him to possess anything he might desire.

That would include Elizabeth Tucker, the woman he needs to find the Stones. She’s freshly transplanted from New York City to Boston’s North Shore. With a new job as a Pastry Chef at Dazzle’s Bakery and an old house inherited from her Aunt Ophelia, her life is pretty much on track … until it’s suddenly derailed by a man named Diesel, a rude monkey and a ninja cat.

Lizzy can handle the monkey and the cat. She’s not sure about Diesel. He’s offering up his own set of unusual talents and promising to protect her from Grimoire, the kind of protection that Lizzy suspects might involve guarding her body day and night.

The Seven Deadly Sins are pride, greed, lust, envy, wrath, sloth and gluttony. That pretty much covers everything that is wicked. Diesel thinks it also pretty much covers everything that’s fun. And Lizzy thinks Diesel and the Seven Deadly Sins cover everything her mother warned her about.

In this novel Evanovich embarks on a whole new series (Seven I imagine given the ‘Seven Stones of Power’) with a new heroine and a new setting. Elizabeth Tucker lives in Marblehead  and makes exceptionally good cupcakes. Our hero, Diesel, we’ve met  before in the Stephanie Plum between the numbers novels; he has special powers and his job is policing other people with special powers.

Elizabeth is an unmentionable (i.e she has special powers); she can locate special objects like the stones of power (and her amazing cupcakes might also be part of her power). Only two people in the world have this talent – her and a strange man who lives in Florida. Gerwulf (called Wulf for short), an evil and scary man who kills people by burning them with his hands, wants all of the stones so that he can create hell on earth. Diesel wants to find the Stones and hand them over to BUM (Board of Unmentionable Marshalls). What follows is a riotous romp involving, a one-eyed cat, a monkey, explosions, gluttony of various different kinds (food, punishment, etc), spells gone wrong (performed by Glo, Elizabeth’s work colleague, – the Lula of this series) and a bit of sexual tension. Apparently unmentionables can’t have sex because one of them will lose their powers.

If you like the Stephanie Plum novels, then you will enjoy this one.

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September 28, 2010 · 2:50 am

Started Early, Took My Dog – Kate Atkinson

I’ve always liked Kate Atkinson’s novels. Whenever I see a new one I have to grab it straight away. This one was no exception – I really enjoyed it.

Here’s the blurb …

A day like any other for security chief Tracy Waterhouse, until she makes a purchase she hadn’t bargained for. One moment of madness is all it takes for Tracy’s humdrum world to be turned upside down, the tedium of everyday life replaced by fear and danger at every turn.

Witnesses to Tracy’s Faustian exchange in the Merrion Centre in Leeds are Tilly, an elderly actress teetering on the brink of her own disaster, and Jackson Brodie, who has returned to his home county in search of someone else’s roots. All three learn that the past is never history and that no good deed goes unpunished.

The story is told from the view points of the three protagonists; Tilly, Jackson and Tracy. Each of them have a unique voice and are believable as characters – I particularly enjoyed Tilly’s descent into dementia.

Tracy, as a young police officer, attended the scene of a murder (the body was undiscovered for three weeks). The victim had a young child who managed to survive for the three weeks on the food he could scavenge or reach in the flat. This child enters the welfare system and effectively disappears. Jackson Brodie is trying to trace the origins of Hope McMaster who was adopted and now wants to know about her past. Tilly is an aging actress fending off senility.  Their paths cross in unusual and unexpected ways and the ending although appearing to head in a particular direction is surprising.

Alongside the three main people, there is a cast of well written characters – the dodgy (and incredibly sexist) police, Julia (Jackson’s ex-lover), the actress with whom Tilly shares a house, I could go on for ever.

Atkinson creates a real sense of place – a grim, dark and dirty place.

Although this is quite a dark novel, there are a few light-hearted moments that keep it from being too depressing.

Here are some other reviews …

http://www.readings.com.au/review/started-early-took-my-dog-kate-atkinson

http://afocusonfiction.blogspot.com/2010/09/started-early-took-my-dog-kate-atkinson.html

http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/started-early-took-my-dog-by-kate.html

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September 23, 2010 · 11:19 pm

Bookshop on Jacaranda Street – Marlish Glorie

I selected this book for my book club. I went to the book shop and asked for something that wasn’t depressing and this was what they suggested. I didn’t really like it, but I didn’t hate it either. I didn’t care about the characters at all – the dialogue (particularly between Vivian and Gabriel) was wooden. It started well – the first chapter was great and I had such high hopes. I was also hoping for more Perth/Fremantle imagery – this novel could have been set any where.

Here’s the blurb …

Meet the Budd-Doyles: a suburban family in shambles, and about to unravel further as Helen Budd-Doyle in one fell swoop destroys her bed, abandons the family home, and buys a second-hand bookshop form a man in a pub – leaving her bewildered junk-collecting husband Arnold to sort out his life.  But he can’t.  Enter Gabriel, one of their sons, wreaking havoc as he pushes his father to sell off the accrued junk of a lifetime.  Add a little sibling rivalry with his brother Vivian fresh home and licking his wounds from a life in far north . . . and watch the fireworks on Jacaranda Street.

The Bookshop on Jacaranda Street is a brilliant black comedy by a unique new Australia voice, its world peopled by an extensive cast of misfits – eccentrics, innocents, cranks and pariahs – and driven by an inexorable urge to make order out of chaos.

If only life was like a book . . . in that everything made sense and you know all will be resolved in the end.  If only life was like a book so that, if you decided you didn’t like it, you could take it back and get another one.


Here are some other reviews …

http://chrlreviews.blogspot.com/2009/07/bookshop-on-jacaranda-street-by-marlish.html

http://rodneylibraries.blogspot.com/2009/09/book-review-bookshop-on-jacaranda.html

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August 16, 2010 · 6:37 am

High Wages – Dorothy Whipple

I’m still on my Persephone marathon (and I just bought another three). I think I bought this one because Jane Brocket wrote the preface.
Here’s the blurb from Persephone …

It is about a girl called Jane who gets a badly-paid job in a draper’s shop in the early years of the last century. Yet the title of the book is based on a Carlyle quotation – ‘Experience doth take dreadfully high wages, but she teacheth like none other’ – and Jane, having saved some money and been lent some by a friend, opens her own dress-shop.

As Jane Brocket writes in her Persephone Preface: the novel ‘is a celebration of the Lancastrian values of hard work and stubbornness, and there could be no finer setting for a shop-girl-made-good story than the county in which cotton was king.’ And the cultural historian Catherine Horwood has written about this novel: ‘Dorothy Whipple was only too well aware that clothes were one of the keys to class in this period. Before WW1, only the well- off could afford to have their clothes made: yards of wool crepe and stamped silks were turned into costumes by an invisible army of dressmakers across the country, and the idea of buying clothes ready-made from a dress shop was still unusual. Vera Brittain talks of “hand-me-downs” in Testament of Youth with a quite different meaning from today. These were not clothes passed from sibling to sibling but “handed down from a rack” in an outfitter’s shop, a novelty.’ High Wages describes how the way people shopped was beginning to change; it is this change that Dorothy Whipple uses as a key turning point in her novel.

I loved the social history aspects of this novel. I had no idea that the shop girls ‘lived in’ (and were paid appallingly and half-starved). I enjoyed reading about the changing times – how people were going from made for them clothes (by the local seamstress) to off the rack items.  The writing was beautiful and the characters are wonderfully portrayed. However, it was quite a sad story and I’m at a point in my life when I want happy endings (does that make me a philistine?).

Here are some other reviews …

http://dovegreyreader.typepad.com/dovegreyreader_scribbles/2009/11/high-wages-by-dorothy-whipple.html

http://fleurfisher.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/high-wages-by-dorothy-whipple/

http://theliterarystew.blogspot.com/2010/04/high-wages.html

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August 9, 2010 · 5:15 am

Someone at a Distance – Dorothy Whipple

 

I’ve been continuing my Persephone reading feast. Someone at a Distance was my free classic. 

Here’s the blurb …

‘A very good novel indeed about the fragility and also the tenacity of love’ commented the Spectator recently about this 1953 novel by Dorothy Whipple, which was ignored fifty years ago because ‘editors are going mad for action and passion’ (as she was told by her publisher). But this last novel by a writer whose books had previously been bestsellers is outstandingly good by any standards. Apparently ‘a fairly ordinary tale about the destruction of a happy marriage’ (Nina Bawden in the Preface) yet ‘it makes compulsive reading’ in its description of an ordinary family (‘Ellen was that unfashionable creature, a happy housewife’) struck by disaster when the husband, in a moment of weak, mid-life vanity, runs off with a French girl. Dorothy Whipple is a superb stylist, with a calm intelligence in the tradition of Mrs Gaskell (both wrote in the Midlands and had similar preoccupations). ‘The prose is simple, the psychology spot on’ said the Telegraph, and John Sandoe Books commented: ‘We have all delighted in this unjustly forgotten novel; it is well written and compelling.’

The thing I noticed most in these days of common divorce was how no one not even Ellen think she is entitled to some of the family assessts. Alimony is offered and refused, but the house is his as are the publishing company and his share of the hosiary company.

The writing is beautiful and the characters are real living and breathing creatures. In some way English good manners brought about their downfall. Ellen should have made Louise leave even if she had no where else to go.

Here are some other reviews …

http://stuck-in-a-book.blogspot.com/2009/03/someone-at-distance.html

http://family.jesterworld.net/2manybooks2littletime/2010/07/30/someone-at-a-distance-by-dorothy-whipple/

and a review at the Persephone forum

http://thepersephoneforum.co.uk/2010/08/01/persephone-book-no-3-someone-at-a-distance-by-dorothy-whipple/

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August 6, 2010 · 12:43 am

Making Conversation – Christine Longford

This is another of my Persephone purchases.

Here’s the blurb …

Making Conversation(1931) by Christine Longford (1900-80) was first reprinted in 1970 after the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson reassessed it in the Times Literary Supplement. She wrote: ‘This ought to be regarded as an English comic classic, which I suppose, unlike the ravishing Cold Comfort Farm, it is not. I hope time will redress the neglect.’ The heroine, Martha, is plain, with curly hair, small eyes which she tries to enlarge in a soulful manner by stretching them in front of the looking glass, and very little chin. She is extremely clever and totally innocent. Her besetting trouble is that she either talks too much, or too little: she can never get right the balance of conversation.

‘The genteel school Martha goes to is run by Miss Spencer and Miss Grossmith. Martha doesn’t mind them. Indeed, she doesn’t really mind anything; she is a most detached girl, letting even their idiotic sarcasms slide off her back. “Now Martha,” said Miss Spencer, “what is adultery?” Martha had not the faintest idea. “It is a sin,” she said, “committed by adults,” putting the accent on the second syllable. “That is a parrot’s answer. You think you are very clever, Martha, attempting to conceal your ignorance and your lack of thought. The attempt at concealment is not better than a lie. Adultery is self-indulgence. It is the extra lump of sugar in your tea. It is the extra ten minutes in bed in the morning. It is the extra five minutes a girl wastes by dawdling up the High Street and gaping at the shop windows….” Martha accepts this Chadbandery in the same way as she accepts the constant nagging that she should be keen on netball, and the gossip she hears around her concerning her preceptors.

I didn’t like this one as much as Miss Buncle’s Book in fact at times I was quite confused and needed to go back and re-read sections (possibly had something to do with the conditions under which I read it).  There are some laugh out loud moments and Martha’s attempts at sophisticated life at Oxford are amusing – the high heels and the face powder. I prhrobably won’t read this one again, but I would be interested in reading a biography of Christine Longford.

Here are some other reviews …

http://stuck-in-a-book.blogspot.com/2009/05/making-conversation.html

http://desperatereader.blogspot.com/2010/05/making-conversation-christine-longford.html

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August 4, 2010 · 2:25 am

Miss Buncle’s Book – D E Stevenson

I bought this book from Persephone press when they had their free classic give away (I received Someone at a Distance). The image above is from the endpaper. Persephone books have the most beautiful endpapers.

The book was delightful – light, entertaining and very quick to read. The period detail is fantastic – I love to read about middle-class England between the wars! Everyone has help. It would be outrageous to be required to do anything domestic for yourself!

Here’s the blurb …

The storyline of Miss Buncle’s Book(1934) is a simple one: Barbara Buncle, who is unmarried and perhaps in her late 30s, lives in a small village and writes a novel about it in order to try and supplement her meagre income. In this respect she is at one with Miss Pettigrew and Miss Ranskill, two other unmarried women who, not having subsumed their existence into that of a man, have to find a way of looking after themselves. There are some serious moments, for example when the doctor’s children are, very briefly, kidnapped (as a way of trying to force their mother to admit that she wrote the book; which she did not). But the seriousness is minimal – mostly this is an entirely light-hearted, easy read, one of those books like Mariana,Miss Pettigrew, The Making of a Marchioness and Greenery Street which can be recommended unreservedly to anyone looking for something undemanding, fun and absorbing that is also well-written and intelligent.

I can’t recommend this book enough for anyone who enjoys frivolous enjoyable novels.

Here are some other reviews …

http://stuck-in-a-book.blogspot.com/2008/11/miss-buncles-book.html

http://eachlittleworld.typepad.com/each_little_world/2009/07/summer-reading-miss-buncles-book.html

http://bookssnob.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/miss-buncles-book-by-d-e-stevenson/

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August 3, 2010 · 2:15 am

Remarkable Creatures – Tracy Chevalier

In one of those strange bits of concurrency I read this book right after Richard Dawkins The Greatest Show On Earth. One thing I really noticed was the conflict with the religion. Living in quite secular times it is hard to imagine being concerned that a creature existed that was now extinct and what did that mean about God and man?

Here’s the blurb …

In 1810, a sister and brother uncover the fossilized skull of an unknown animal in the cliffs on the south coast of England. With its long snout and prominent teeth, it might be a crocodile – except that it has a huge, bulbous eye.

Remarkable Creaturesis the story of Mary Anning, who has a talent for finding fossils, and whose discovery of ancient marine reptiles such as that ichthyosaur shakes the scientific community and leads to new ways of thinking about the creation of the world.

Working in an arena dominated by middle-class men, however, Mary finds herself out of step with her working-class background. In danger of being an outcast in her community, she takes solace in an unlikely friendship with Elizabeth Philpot, a prickly London spinster with her own passion for fossils.

The strong bond between Mary and Elizabeth sees them through struggles with poverty, rivalry and ostracism, as well as the physical dangers of their chosen obsession. It reminds us that friendship can outlast storms and landslides, anger and and jealousy.

This novel has two different narrators; Elizabeth and Mary (they alternate chapters). The voices of the two narrators are remarkably different and it adds depth to the story to have two different points of view.

I found this to be a quick read and I enjoyed the historical aspects (I didn’t know anything about Mary Anning or Elizabeth Philpot). Having said that the best I can say is that it is a light, easy read.

Here are some other reviews …

http://anokatony.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/%E2%80%9Cremarkable-creatures%E2%80%9D-by-tracy-chevalier/

http://www.curledup.com/tcremark.htm

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July 24, 2010 · 1:04 am

Sizzling Sixteen – Janet Evanovich

 

I know it’s July because the Tour De France is on and Janet Evanovich has another Stephanie Plum novel out. I was a late arrival to the Stephanie Plum novels a member at my book club recommended them as ‘racy and pacy’. I’ve been addicted since I read the first one.

These are light novels – I think I read this one in three hours – but they’re witty and fun to read.

Here’s the blurb …

It is summertime in Jersey and our favourite bounty hunter Stephanie Plum is up to her old antics, joined by her gang of memorable characters: Grandma, Lulu, Connie, Vinnie and Mooner. Someone wants to kill Vinnie, Lula s involved in a shabby investment scheme while Stephanie is chasing a dangerous crim. Adding even more heat to Stephanie s life are those two sizzling hot heroes… it s Ranger days and Morelli nights (Or perhaps it’s the other way ’round). Get ready for some grand-scale fun. With hilarious capers and action galore, this is a laugh-a-minute Stephanie Plum novel not to be missed!

There are a lot of hilarious moments in this novel and Lula and Stephanie are as incompetentant as ever. However, there isn’t as much Morelli and/or Ranger action in this one and that’s what I like the best.

These novels are a guilty pleasure; completely over the top and a bit trashy. I like to think of them as the white bread of the reading world and I’m definitely looking forward to them being made into movies.

Here are some other reviews …

http://www.booksandotherthoughts.com/2010/07/sizzling-sixteen.html

http://tansyrr.com/tansywp/how-stephanie-plum-lost-her-sizzle/

http://lightheartedlibrarian.wordpress.com/2010/07/13/just-read-sizzling-sixteen-by-janet-evanovich/

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