Category Archives: Rating

November 29, 2021 · 3:09 pm

The Lincoln Highway – Amor Towles

The Lincoln Highway – Amor Towles

I really enjoyed both Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow (Rules of Civility is my favourite), so I was very keen to read this one.

Here is the blurb …

Emmett returns home to pick-up his little brother Billy, tie-up his late father’s estate and get out of town for good. Since leaving the Kansas youth facility where he’s served time, Emmett has wanted one thing: to give them both a fresh start – and that means heading out to the sparkling west.

Young, precocious Billy has plans of his own – to get to San Francisco, where he believes their long-estranged mother is waiting for them. However, as soon as they’ve loaded Emmett’s bright blue Studebaker with their few belongings, trouble arrives and brings its sidekick in the form of Duchess and Woolly, two runaways from the very facility Emmett just left behind him.

Insatiable Duchess and his devoted, but slow companion Woolly soon wreck Billy’s plan to get onto the open road, one well-intentioned blunder at a time. Each young man sees this journey as his chance to pursue his dreams, settle scores and find riches. And a simple journey quickly becomes a dazzling odyssey filled with obstacles, villains and ruses fit only for heroes to overcome.

Bursting with life, charm and unforgettable characters, The Lincoln Highway is an extraordinary journey through 1950s America from a master storyteller.

This is a beautiful story told from different view points, each one unique and compelling.

Still Life by Sarah Winman is still my favourite for the year, but this is a close second.

Another review

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November 28, 2021 · 8:28 am

Matrix – Lauren Groff

Matrix – Lauren Groff

I read and enjoyed Fates and Furies, so grabbed this one when I saw it in Dymocks. It’s completely different from Fates and Furies.

Here’s the blurb …

Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies.

Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, 17-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease.

At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie’s vision be bulwark enough?

Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.

I enjoyed this novel – I do like female-centred historical fiction. Marie is a formidable character, full of energy, drive, passion and very cunning. It is beautifully written.

A review from the Guardian

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November 27, 2021 · 12:24 pm

The Librarian – Salley Vickers

The Librarian – Salley Vickers

I have liked Salley Vickers ever since I read Miss Garnet’s Angel and I have blogged about Dancing Backwards (way back in 2010!). I borrowed this one from the library.

Here’s the blurb

A charmingly subversive novel about a library in 1950s England, by the acclaimed author of The Cleaner of Chartres

Sylvia Blackwell, a young woman in her twenties, moves to East Mole, a quaint market town in middle England, to start a new job as a children’s librarian. But the apparently pleasant town is not all it seems. Sylvia falls in love with an older man – but it’s her connection to his precocious young daughter and her neighbours’ son which will change her life and put them, the library and her job under threat.

How does the library alter the young children’s lives and how do the children fare as a result of the books Sylvia introduces them to?

This was written in a contemporary style (it felt very 1950s to me). It is a story about books and reading, but also about relationships and betrayal.

A review from the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/03/mirror-shoulder-signal-curry-eating-reading-and-race-the-librarian-salley-vickersreviews-arifa-akbar

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November 25, 2021 · 3:32 pm

A Town Called Solace – Mary Lawson

A Town Called Solace – Mary Lawson

I have read Road Ends and Crow Lake and enjoyed both, and then this one was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, so I was super keen to read it.

Here’s the blurb …

A Town Called Solace–the brilliant and emotionally radiant new novel from Mary Lawson, her first in nearly a decade–opens on a family in crisis: rebellious teenager Rose been missing for weeks with no word, and Rose’s younger sister, the feisty and fierce Clara, keeps a daily vigil at the living-room window, hoping for her sibling’s return.

Enter thirtyish Liam Kane, newly divorced, newly unemployed, newly arrived in this small northern town, where he promptly moves into the house next door–watched suspiciously by astonished and dismayed Clara, whose elderly friend, Mrs. Orchard, owns that home. Around the time of Rose’s disappearance, Mrs. Orchard was sent for a short stay in hospital, and Clara promised to keep an eye on the house and its remaining occupant, Mrs. Orchard’s cat, Moses. As the novel unfolds, so does the mystery of what has transpired between Mrs Orchard and the newly arrived stranger.

Told through three distinct, compelling points of view–Clara’s, Mrs. Orchard’s, and Liam Kane’s–the novel cuts back and forth among these unforgettable characters to uncover the layers of grief, remorse, and love that connect families, both the ones we’re born into and the ones we choose. A Town Called Solace is a masterful, suspenseful and deeply humane novel by one of our great storytellers.

This is a beautiful book, the story is told from three very different perspectives and each voice was unique and compelling. It moves through different times and places, and it’s about relationships, connections and family (our biological one and the ones we create for ourselves).

Another review

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November 24, 2021 · 5:56 pm

Sorrow and Bliss – Meg Mason

Sorrow and Bliss – Meg Mason

I listened to an interview that Meg Mason did on the ABC Big Weekend of Books and decided I had to read it.

Here’s the blurb …

This novel is about a woman called Martha. She knows there is something wrong with her but she doesn’t know what it is. Her husband Patrick thinks she is fine. He says everyone has something, the thing is just to keep going.

Martha told Patrick before they got married that she didn’t want to have children. He said he didn’t mind either way because he has loved her since he was fourteen and making her happy is all that matters, although he does not seem able to do it.

By the time Martha finds out what is wrong, it doesn’t really matter anymore. It is too late to get the only thing she has ever wanted. Or maybe it will turn out that you can stop loving someone and start again from nothing – if you can find something else to want

This is a fabulous book, incredibly funny, but moving as well. Being inside Martha’s head gives us a chance to understand (perhaps empathise) with mental illness.

A review from the Guardian.

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November 23, 2021 · 1:27 pm

The Mystery Woman – Belinda Alexandra

The Mystery Woman – Belinda Alexandra

A friend lent this to me – she calls it a spacer, something a bit lighter to read between more serious tomes.

Here’s the blurb …

In a small town, everyone is watching … Secrets, scandal and betrayal in 1950s small town Australia: the stunning new novel from bestseller Belinda Alexandra

She had thought Shipwreck Bay was simply a remote town where people were bored senseless with their little lives. Now she saw its virtuous facade hid something darker, more sinister.

Rebecca Wood takes the role as postmistress in a sleepy seaside town, desperate for anonymity after a scandal in Sydney. But she is confronted almost at once by a disturbing discovery – her predecessor committed suicide.

To add to her worries, her hopes for a quiet life are soon threatened by the attentions of the dashing local doctor, the unsettling presence of a violent whaling captain and a corrupt shire secretary, as well as the watchful eyes of the town’s gossips. Yet in spite of herself she is drawn to the enigmatic resident of the house on the clifftop, rumoured to have been a Nazi spy.

Against the backdrop of the turbulent sea, Rebecca is soon caught up in the dangerous mysteries that lie behind Shipwreck Bay’s respectable net curtains.

‘This intriguing mystery with its gothic undertones, its salute to Du Maurier’s Rebecca, and its melange of colourful characters will have readers racing through the pages, trying to piece together the puzzles that have long haunted Shipwreck Bay. They’ll also be cheering for main character Rebecca as she struggles against the societal norms of 1950s Australia, fighting to be true to her unconventional self, and to forgive herself – and to perhaps even find happiness.’ Natasha Lester, bestselling author of The Paris Secret.

I liked it. I always like the trope of moving to a small town and starting again.

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November 22, 2021 · 2:27 pm

Light Perpetual – Francis Spufford

Light Perpetual – Francis Spufford

I really enjoyed Golden Hill and then I listened to this podcast and I was super keen to read this book.

Here’s the blurb …

From the critically acclaimed and award?winning author of Golden Hill, an “extraordinary…symphonic…casually stunning” (The Wall Street Journal) novel tracing the infinite possibilities of five lives in the bustling neighborhoods of 20th-century London.

Lunchtime on a Saturday, 1944: the Woolworths on Bexford High Street in South London receives a delivery of aluminum saucepans. A crowd gathers to see the first new metal in ages—after all, everything’s been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated. Among the shoppers were five young children.

Who were they? What futures did they lose? This brilliantly constructed novel, inspired by real events, lets an alternative reel of time run, imagining the lives of these five souls as they live through the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the bustling immensity of twentieth-century London. Their intimate everyday dramas, as sons and daughters, spouses, parents, grandparents; as the separated, the remarried, the bereaved. Through decades of social, sexual, and technological transformation, as bus conductors and landlords, as swindlers and teachers, patients and inmates. Days of personal triumphs and disasters; of second chances and redemption.

Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, Light Perpetual “offers a moving view of how people confront the gap between their expectations and their reality” (The New Yorker) and illuminates the shapes of experience, the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the mysteries of memory, and the preciousness of life.

This was a lovely book, I particularly enjoyed seeing what happened to everyone after the gap in the narrative – a reminder that things change and life moves forward.

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November 15, 2021 · 12:03 pm

The Good Wife of Bath – Karen Brooks

The Good Wife of Bath – Karen Brooks

I like historical fiction and if it’s women-centred then so much the better. I have never read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but that is not necessary to enjoy and appreciate this novel.

Here’s the blurb …

In the middle ages, a poet told a story that mocked a strong woman. It became a literary classic. But what if the woman in question had a chance to tell her own version? Who would you believe?

England, The Year of Our Lord, 1364

When married off aged 12 to an elderly farmer, Eleanor Cornfed, who’s constantly told to seek redemption for her many sins, quickly realises it won’t matter what she says or does, God is not on her side – or any poor woman’s for that matter.

But Eleanor was born under the joint signs of Venus and Mars. Both a lover and a fighter, she will not bow meekly to fate. Even if five marriages, several pilgrimages, many lovers, violence, mayhem and wildly divergent fortunes (that swoop up and down as if spinning on Fortuna’s Wheel itself) do not for a peaceful life make.

Aided and abetted by her trusty god-sibling Alyson, the counsel of one Geoffrey Chaucer, and a good head for business, Eleanor fights to protect those she loves from the vagaries of life, the character deficits of her many husbands, the brutalities of medieval England and her own fatal flaw… a lusty appreciation of mankind. All while continuing to pursue the one thing all women want – control of their own lives.

This funny, picaresque, clever retelling of Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’ from The Canterbury Tales is a cutting assessment of what happens when male power is left to run unchecked, as well as a recasting of a literary classic that gives a maligned character her own voice, and allows her to tell her own (mostly) true story.

I really enjoyed it – it’s a fast paced, entertaining read about England (rural and London) during the late 1300s.

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November 13, 2021 · 2:17 pm

Reputation – Lex Croucher

Reputaton – Lex Croucher

I saw this one on Jen Campbell’s youtube channel and was keen to read it. And then I found a copy at my local Dymocks.

I would describe it as a ‘woke Jane Austen’ – it was fun

The hilarious debut novel from Lex Croucher. A classic romcom with a Regency-era twist, for fans of Mean Girls and/or Jane Austen.

Abandoned by her parents, middle-class Georgiana Ellers has moved to a new town to live with her dreary aunt and uncle. At a particularly dull party, she meets the enigmatic Frances Campbell, a wealthy member of the in-crowd who lives a life Georgiana couldn’t have imagined in her wildest dreams.

Lonely and vulnerable, Georgiana falls in with Frances and her unfathomably rich, deeply improper friends. Georgiana is introduced to a new world: drunken debauchery, mysterious young men with strangely arresting hands, and the upper echelons of Regency society.

But the price of entry to high society might just be higher than Georgiana is willing to pay …

Entertaining and witty, if you like regency romances then this one if for you.

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November 11, 2021 · 4:41 pm

The Last Book Shop – Emma Young

The Last Book Shop – Emma Young

A friend lent this to me – isn’t the cover photo great? I am going to have to visit that book shop – I believe it’s in Fremantle.

Another friend describes books as ‘spacers’ and that was what this one was for me. A nice interlude between more meaty books.

It was set in Perth and it is always nice to read about places you know.

Here’s the blurb …

Cait is a bookshop owner and book nerd whose social life revolves around her mobile bookselling service hand-picking titles for elderly clients, particularly the grandmotherly June. After a tough decade for retail, Book Fiend is the last bookshop in the CBD, and the last independent retailer on a street given over to high-end labels. Profits are small, but clients are loyal. When James breezes into Book Fiend, Cait realises life might hold more than her shop and her cat, but while the new romance distracts her, luxury chain stores are circling Book Fiend’s prime location, and a more personal tragedy is looming.

There is romance and nice bookish talk. If you like books about books and book stores, then this is for you.

Here is the goodreads page where there are a lot of great reviews

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