January 11, 2023 · 2:01 pm

The Whalebone Theatre – Joanna Quinn

The Whalebone Theatre – Joanna Quinn

A friend mentioned that she had enjoyed this novel, so I reserved it at the library and my turn came around quickly, I think someone else is now waiting for it. This was great, so much detail.

Here’s the blurb …

A transporting, irresistible debut novel that takes its heroine, Cristabel Seagrave, from a theatre in the gargantuan cavity of a beached whale into undercover operations during World War II—a story of love, family, bravery, lost innocence, and self-transformation.

“The Whalebone Theatre is absolute aces…Quinn’s imagination and adventuresome spirit are a pleasure to behold.” —The New York Times

One blustery night in 1928, a whale washes up on the shores of the English Channel. By law, it belongs to the King, but twelve-year-old orphan Cristabel Seagrave has other plans. She and the rest of the household—her sister, Flossie; her brother, Digby, long-awaited heir to Chilcombe manor; Maudie Kitcat, kitchen maid; Taras, visiting artist—build a theatre from the beast’s skeletal rib cage. Within the Whalebone Theatre, Cristabel can escape her feckless stepparents and brisk governesses, and her imagination comes to life.

As Cristabel grows into a headstrong young woman, World War II rears its head. She and Digby become British secret agents on separate missions in Nazi-occupied France—a more dangerous kind of playacting, it turns out, and one that threatens to tear the family apart.

I found it compelling, there is so much going on – family relationships, theatre, country house between the wars, world war 2, art, french resistance, …

It was beautifully written, despite being long I never thought it could do with an edit (very unusual for me).

If you love big, meaty, with lots of themes historical fiction, then this book is for you.

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January 4, 2023 · 4:12 pm

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals – Oliver Burkeman

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals – Oliver Burkeman

This is my book club’s choice for January. It is an extraordinary book, I am not sure I would describe it as time management that makes me think of spreadsheets and stopwatches.

Here’s the blurb …

The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.

Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.

Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.

As someone who has an over-flowing ‘to do’ list, I found this book refreshing and inspiring. I have already tried to implement some of the suggestions: more patience (things will take as long as they take), fewer goals (I think I am down to five life goals now) and I have deleted social media apps from my phone. I need to read it again because you don’t really take everything in the first time.

A review

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January 1, 2023 · 2:53 pm

2022 – A Review

All of my 4 and 5 star books

2022 was a good year of reading for me, I read (and listened to) 60 books, which is slightly above my goal of one a week.

My favourite books of the year are (in no particular order)

Next year I want to make it some way through my pile of unread books – I counted, I have 178 unread books (at a book a week that’s three and a half years of reading). I am going to try to limit the book purchasing to 1 maybe 1.5 a month (that works out to be 18 for the year).

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December 28, 2022 · 5:37 pm

A Duke in Shining Armour – Loretta Chase

A Duke in Shining Armor – Loretta Chase

I got this one from the library. I have already read Ten Things I Hate about the Duke, which I enjoyed. This one was lots of fun too.

Here’s the blurb…

Not all dukes are created equal. Most are upstanding members of Society. And then there’s the trio known as Their Dis-Graces.

Hugh Philemon Ancaster, seventh Duke of Ripley, will never win prizes for virtue. But even he draws the line at running off with his best friend’s bride. All he’s trying to do is recapture the slightly inebriated Lady Olympia Hightower and return her to her intended bridegroom.

For reasons that elude her, bookish, bespectacled Olympia is supposed to marry a gorgeous rake of a duke. The ton is flabbergasted. Her family’s ecstatic. And Olympia? She’s climbing out of a window, bent on a getaway. But tall, dark, and exasperating Ripley is hot on her trail, determined to bring her back to his friend. For once, the world-famous hellion is trying to do the honorable thing.

So why does Olympia have to make it so deliciously difficult for him . . . ?

It’s witty, fun and well-researched. Imagine a sexy Georgette Heyer novel.

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December 26, 2022 · 2:36 pm

Shrines of Gaiety – Kate Atkinson

Shrines of Gaiety – Kate Atkinson

I like all of Kate Atkinson’s novels – here’s a previous review – and I found this one compelling.

Here’s the blurb …

London 1926. Roaring Twenties.
Corruption. Seduction. Debts due.

In a country still recovering from the Great War, London is the focus for a delirious nightlife. In Soho clubs, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time.

There, Nellie Coker is a ruthless ruler, ambitious for her six children. Niven is the eldest, his enigmatic character forged in the harsh Somme. But success breeds enemies. Nellie faces threats from without and within. Beneath the gaiety lies a dark underbelly, where one may be all too easily lost.

This novel was beautifully written (and researched). It’s all about London night life of the 1920s, everyone is trying to have a good time after the deprivations of the war. But it is also about the seedier elements of the nightlife; the crime, the drugs and the girls (who seem disposable).

This is definitely one of my favourite books for the year.

A review

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December 13, 2022 · 6:14 pm

Beach Read – Emily Henry

Beach Read – Emily Henry

This is the third Emily Henry novel, Book Lovers and People we Meet on Vacation. I like them all.

Here’s the blurb …

A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.

Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast.

They’re polar opposites.

In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they’re living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer’s block.

Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love. Really.

This was a fun, witty and easy read. If you read romance, you will enjoy this, and even if you don’t read romance, this novel has a lot to offer.

A review

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December 7, 2022 · 5:41 pm

Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver

I always like Barbara Kingsolver novels (here’s my thoughts on Unsheltered), so I was very keen to read this, and then a dear friend told me how much she loved it and I moved it straight to the top of the pile.

Here’s the blurb …

“Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.”

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

I haven’t read David Copperfield, I have seen this adaptation though, so I can’t comment on how close it is to Dickens or on any clever literary conversation that might be happening between the two novels.

I loved it, her writing is superb. It is written in the voice of Demon and it is a very compelling voice. I wanted to hear his story and to know how it ended. It is confronting at times, there is so much poverty, neglect and substance abuse, but it is worth persevering.

I have been telling everyone to read it.

A review

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November 24, 2022 · 8:46 pm

Going Rogue – Janet Evanovich

Going Rogue – Janet Evanovich

This is the twenty ninth book in the Stephanie Plum series, an amazing achievement.

Here’s the blurb …

Monday mornings aren’t supposed to be fun, but they should be predictable. However, on this particular Monday, Stephanie Plum knows that something is amiss when she turns up for work at Vinnie’s Bail Bonds to find that longtime office manager Connie Rosolli, who is as reliable as the tides in Atlantic City, hasn’t shown up.

Stephanie’s worst fears are confirmed when she gets a call from Connie’s abductor. He says he will only release her in exchange for a mysterious coin that a recently murdered man left as collateral for his bail. Unfortunately, this coin, which should be in the office—just like Connie—is nowhere to be found.

The quest to discover the coin, learn its value, and save Connie will require the help of Stephanie’s Grandma Mazur, her best pal Lula, her boyfriend Morelli, and hunky security expert Ranger. As they get closer to unraveling the reasons behind Connie’s kidnapping, Connie’s captor grows more threatening and soon Stephanie has no choice but to throw caution to the wind, follow her instincts, and go rogue.

If you have read any of these novels, then you know what to expect. They’re racy and pacy, with laugh out loud moments. Very fun and quick to read.

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November 21, 2022 · 6:53 pm

Lucy By the Sea – Elizabeth Strout

Lucy by the Sea – Elizabeth Strout

I do like Elizabeth Strout’s writing and I was super keen to read this one.

Here’s the blurb

A poignant, pitch-perfect novel about a divorced couple stuck together during lockdown–and the love, loss, despair, and hope that animate us even as the world seems to be falling apart.

With her trademark spare, crystalline prose, Elizabeth Strout turns her exquisitely tuned eye to the inner workings of the human heart, following the indomitable heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton through the early days of the pandemic.

As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For the next several months, it’s just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea.

Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we’re apart–the pain of a beloved daughter’s suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.

This is the first novel I have read with Covid references. It definitely catches the confusion that happened in March 2020. This continues Lucy and William’s story, so I think you do need to have read the previous two. If you enjoyed those, then you will enjoy this one.

A review

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November 15, 2022 · 7:17 pm

Infamous – Lex Croucher

Infamous – Lex Croucher

I read Reputation and really enjoyed it, so when Miss A told me there was a new novel I was super keen to read it.

Here’s the blurb …

22-year-old aspiring writer Edith ‘Eddie’ Miller and her best friend Rose have always done everything together-climbing trees, throwing grapes at boys, sneaking bottles of wine, practicing kissing . . .

But following their debutante ball Rose is suddenly talking about marriage, and Eddie is horrified.

When Eddie meets charming, renowned poet Nash Nicholson, he invites her to his crumbling Gothic estate in the countryside. The entourage of eccentric artists indulging in pure hedonism is exactly what Eddie needs in order to forget Rose and finish her novel.

But Eddie might discover the world of famous literary icons isn’t all poems and pleasure . . .

I enjoyed this one too – it was fun, very decadent (there was a lot of drinking and some mushrooms). If you like regency romances (Heyer, Austen, Quinn, etc) then this is for you.

A review

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