Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Review #1: A Fine Balance

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Time to start fresh for 2012. This year I’m only going to aim for 40 books as I want to do more creative things in my bits of time between, I hope, gazing at a living, breathing baby.

A Fine Balance is the story of four people living in India at the time of Indira Gandi’s ‘emergency’. It is a part of history I know nothing about, to my shame really, and initially I found the book a little hard to get into, even though the style is gorgeous and it is easy to read. But the pace of the book is part of its beauty and gradually I was sucked in. The description of the caste system, the horror of life in the lower castes, the tiresome difficulties facing women who wanted to be strong and independent and the sheer grim reality of life there were fascinating.

I’ve read reviews that this is one of the most depressing books ever written. It certainly isn’t a laugh a minute, given the subject matter it could hardly be so, but it is incredibly uplifting. It is a tale of people who change, of friendship and family and the overcoming of barriers, whether mental, moral, physical or political. As such it is an epic and an enormous achievement and probably a book every person should read.

Thanks to Love-a-Book for the recommendation.

2012 Reading Challenge

2012 Reading Challenge
Merry has read 1 book toward her goal of 40 books.
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Book Review #47: Black Sea Twilight

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Once I had done reading epics, I went back to the Love-a-Book reading list. I really need to be set challenges to read; one way of doing this is to download random stuff on my Kindle, another is to actually get to the local library but the best way for me is online reading groups. I do hope you carry on with it, Cara.

Black Sea Twilight is a young love story first and an account of life in Romania in the last days of the East/West divide. It combines delicately handled romance and politics and brutality, twisted together with hope and resignation in equal measures. I found it compelling and extra-ordinary and can heartily recommend it.

Which is not a very good review – but I read it a while back now!

Book Reviews #43, #44, #45, #45 & #46 Song of Ice and Fire

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Well, I failed in my attempt to read 60 new books in a year, though I did end up getting to 47 in all and considering it was a busy year and I did a lot of knitting, I think that is okay :) The  main reason I failed though was these 5 books, which range from 800 to about 1200 pages long each. I got completely engrossed in the story and couldn’t stop until I had got through them.

The Song of Ice and Fire series is a fantasy/medieval/magic/alternate world series which starts off with a supernatural threat coming out of the frozen north and centred on a single family of aristocracy. Initially, the story is compact and the characters are (and remain) compelling. It becomes a journey and adventure story quickly and the themes and concepts of the books set out well. It is brutal, no one is safe, but exciting and the world is fabulous. I devoured the first two and went on eagerly to the next. The story telling method of each chapter centring on a character takes some getting used to, but worked well

Sadly the third begins to get rather too complicated as the cast multiplies, the kingdom spreads and the plot thickens and by the 4th (which the author split into two books, 3 and 4 I think) it has become rambling and, to me, impossible to really follow. While it is certainly the type of epic where people drop in and out of the story as they might in real history, it begins to feel a bit too much like he was egging it to produce more books and more royalties. I lost track. I was saved by really very enjoyable writing and great characters and so each piece was enjoyable, but as a whole, I just couldn’t really keep hold of what was going on. I started to find the magic a bit weird too – so much of it was very normal that somehow the supernatural element didn’t fit for me.

Of course, having invested so much time in it all, I will no doubt read the concluding however many books. I do love fantasy and this had such promise. But it used up a few months of pregnancy, so I’m not complaining but in the end, I went from awed by the first two books to deeply disappointed. The 5th was better, so there is hope.

Book Review #42: The Red Queen

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I’m a huge admirer of some of Philippa Gregory’s books, as witnessed by my favourite authors page. I read the precursor to this book, The White Queen in the days following Freddie’s birth and death – and it only shows how shocked I must have been because at the time because it is full of births and longing for son’s and children dying and it didn’t register at all. And it says something that now I was able to read a book that goes on endlessly about “my son” without too much of a flinch. Because The Red Queen really DOES go on.

This is the story of Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, from her girlhood through to the crowning of her son. Historically it is a good and enlightening read and Gregory knows her stuff about the Tudors. It didn’t jar linguistically the way the Weir book I referred to previously did, which had some horrendously anachronistic elements to it and the structure was simple but easy to follow and detailed enough to learn something. Some odd things; Bosworth didn’t seem to be mentioned by name and the second ‘prince in the tower’ didn’t seem to get born, but maybe I’m picky :lol:

The biggest problem with this book, aside from there not being quite enough subject matter to flesh out an entire novel without much bloody religious fervour going ons and weird obsessions with Joan of Arc, was that she wasn’t likeable. Gregory has done this to me before; the character in The Wise Woman was also fairly unlike-able. So, although I’d say read the book if you want to know that era from a slightly new perspective, I’d also warn you that by the end I was so sick of Margaret’s company that frankly…. I wanted Henry to lose!

Book Review #41: The Captive Queen

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Oh dear.

Alison Weir writes fabulous historical biographies; over the years I’ve read 8 or 10 of them and they’ve always been enlightening. But recently, she turned her hand to fiction (well, with all that knowledge and writing ability, why not?) and the results have been… questionable. Her book on Lady Jane was okay, on Elizabeth it was really quite good. But this one, apparently the book she always wanted to write on Eleanor of Aquitaine, was really very poor. Aside from the fact that it told her story in chronological order, it just did nothing very much at all.

Eleanor is a fascinating character and The Captive Queen could have been great. Eleanor’s life was incredibly dramatic; mother of Richard the Lionheart and ‘Bad’ King John, married to the Henry who restored order to England after the war between Stephen and Matilda and an heiress and ruler of much of what is now France in her own right. Oh my, she had a life.

Unfortunately, Weir reduced this to constant crudely dealt with sex scenes, endless drivelling about infidelity and hurt and far too much “and then we went” detail – relevant in a biography, but unnecessary in a novel. What this book needed was a damn good edit – it felt like a first draft, or one by someone now famous enough to get away with length of word count, not quality of writing. The characters were flat and tiresome, with little development and no depth.

The trouble with this era is that is is done far, FAR better by Elizabeth Chadwick. Her bit part portrayals of Henry, Eleanor and the sons are far superior and she has done fantastic novels with William Marshall and Matilda just jumping off the page. Both felt flat and intimidated in this book, like Weir knew those books and felt constrained by them and unable to develop scenes with those people in them for fear of… I don’t know? You can’t plagiarise a historical person really.

I’m not sure what the afterword comment along the lines of “this was the novel I wanted to write first but fr obvious reasons I couldn’t” meant. I can’t help wondering if this was rushed out because the Chadwick version is on the way. I suspect it will be much better though.

Book Review #40: The Glass Room

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I took this away on holiday to read for the Love-a-Book group. I’m really enjoying having books I ‘have’ to read each month. It has been another good way of stretching my limits. Next year, when I’m released from trying to read 60 different authors (looking a tad optimistic tbh) I can go back and pick up more from the people I have enjoyed this year. After several years of sticking within a very few authors, this is good for me :) I’m tempted to try to read my way through the Book or Orange Prize short lists or something too, just to make myself become properly well read. Chick Lit really doesn’t cut the mustard these days.

Anyway, The Glass Room is a fictionalised account of the history of this house in Czechoslovakia (as was). It describes the relationship of a couple (who the author says are fictional rather than a description of the real versions) who build the house in a fictional town, in the run up to the second world war. The book itself is a study in the ideas of contemporary art, relationships between people governed by ideals, the concept of a sort of non spiritually based asceticism, architecture, family and friendship ties, marriage, politics – the themes are a bit endless to be honest. It’s all done through a kind of frosted glass filter of this minimalist house designed to strip away all ornament and fafferery, all nods to the past and all romance. The story at it’s most basic level is how this house, an actual representation of the ideals they say they aim to live by, actually affect themselves and their friends and the way they interact.

In a nutshell, the story follows this group of people through pre-war, occupation, wartime, two Czech revolutions and into the present, with the house as a touch stone (a cold and unemotional one!) for them all. There is the story of a Jewish family, the Nazi’s, scientific and genetic idealism, capitalism and communism, rebirth in terms of the house and also how they all survive such turbulent times. It’s complicated, long and one of the problems I had with it was that he so successfully infuses the novel with the artistic ideal of the theme, that it is really hard to care about that characters. He almost too successfully makes the cold people cold, the hardened indifferent and the colourful loveable. They all feel real, but I didn’t feel much like I cared if any of them made it. This was no Charlotte Grey; I didn’t weep for even the deserving Kata, much less some of the more central characters.

I spent a bit of time wondering why this was. In fact, I think it comes down to very personal affiliations and likes. For one, I am not fond of that style of architecture or art, nor really people who admire it and live by it. For another, I had the great fortune to travel a lot in Europe as a teenager and I must admit I found the ageing, rotting carcasses of such buildings to be a bit of a landscape blot. They do nothing for me; I’m all about beauty and ornament and history and passion. I spent a few week in Germany when I was 14, living with a family and attending a school; both home and school had the sculpted, simplistic, artistic thing going on and I found it cold and uninspiring. I’ll say many things about my school, but it was warm and beautiful and far more inspiring than any rectangle of glass and concrete ever could be for me.

Part of those trips abroad – and indeed my childhood – had much to do with Czechoslovakia. Through his work my dad knew several people living there during Russian occupation, was indeed asked to help people escape. We went to stay there for a week when the last revolution was only over by 6 months. I watched the daughter of our host, 8 years old, spit in the road at a Russian soldier. I saw my host stare across the field at the back of his home and claim not to be able to see the war planes taking off there. I saw the empty shops, the beautiful buildings of Prague held up with wooden scaffolding and with concrete flyovers built through them to humiliate ornate squares and historical architecture. I was asked to sell my trainers and saw Emmanuel XXX on at the cinema, capitalism seeping back in.

They were not a passionless people; they were not people who shrugged at history and beauty. They were not even a people worn flat by Communism, as the books younger characters seem to be by the end. I think the fictional builders of the glass house were perhaps a minority and in my head I think I felt they were rather betraying their wonderful heritage by dismissing it. It made them hard to like, hard to care for and hard to mind about what befalls them all.

That said, though I initially gave the book 3/5, I upgraded it to 4/5. I might not quite have liked it, but it was a good book. It was well written, interesting, something I would recommend. It just did what it set out to do a little too well, a little too coldly. I like to weep for my characters and to be honest, by the end of this, I could barely remember their names.

Books #38 & #39: More Chalet Books.

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Not going into detail with these, but just for the record….

Deira joins the Chalet School – a Caroline German fill in and really excellent. Liked it very much indeed. Caroline, you really are good! Am loving seeing those early years in the tyrol filled in and fleshed out :)

Ruey Richardson – Chaletian; I had the abridged 1980′s paperback of this and always liked it best as one of the Swiss ones (which are not generally so good really). Reading the full text was interesting. Mostly it was either religious references, filling out characters and relationships or talk of uniforms. I love that FOCS and GGB have added forwards and articles to these books and the addition of a an article on uniform in schools was great – thank you :)

Book Review #37: Last Train from Liguria

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Another of my 99p Kindle downloads for the summer, Last Train from Liguria turned out to be the perfect (for me) summer holiday read. It was one of those books which manages to be moving and interesting and yet also gentle and I enjoyed it very much, giving it a 4/5 on Goodreads and Amazon. Yes, I’ve done that a fair bit recently, but I’ve been choosing good books ;)

The story starts by meeting two characters who become central to the plot, both at the end of a period in their lives which has been unsatisfactory or alarming and makes them ready to move on. there are elements of both these characters that you never learn more about, adding a sense of the “snippet of time” theme of the book. A bad back, an eating disorder, a dead sister – all hinted at but unexplained – just part of the baggage people have when they are 30 or so. It moves quickly to Italy, both of them having journeys that in many ways define their personalities, and establishes them in the household of a wealthy and, as it turns out, Jewish, family in Italy during the late 1930′s.

Unsurprisingly the book explores the experience of Jews as Mussolini and Hitler grow in power but also the relationships between the people of the house and family, the love their share for their young charge and the stifling experience of living abroad during times of trouble. It’s a book of understated emotion, of stiff upper lips contrasted with hot and hazy southern European days and the tyranny of idealism and excellent for it.

Interestingly the most dramatic element of the book, one that if it were a film might encompass far more of the action, comes near the end and occupies a very tiny chunk of the narrative. But then, I suppose, life changing events are often like that – just a snippet of life, a moment, that changes everything.

I’d definitely recommend this as a read. it’s not exactly unpredictable but it is well written and moving and definitely a slightly new take of that whole war time troubles scenario.

Book Review #36: Pigeon English

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I feel like I should preface this by apologising for giving it 3/5 on Goodreads. I’ve read a lot of very good, extremely enjoyable books this year, perhaps partly because I vet my choices quite closely and so have ended up awarding lots of 4 or 5 out of 5′s over there.? And Pigeon English WAS good, very good in fact and well deserving of its awards and acolades so far.

The book is written from the point of view of Year 7 Harri, a recently arrived new resident of London who previously lived in Ghana. He’s adapting to a new life, missing his old one (though he is relentlessly positive) and missing his Papa and sister who have not yet come over. His mother is a midwife working hard to pay off a dubious financial arrangement which got them here, his sister is his ally but also struggling to cope with the pressures of teen life in inner-city London. Their relationship is touching in the extreme, perhaps the most identifiable element of the story; they alternately? support each other and try to sit on one anothers head when they drive each other mad. As Lydia gets sucked into gangland secrets, Harri skates along the side of them; he knows that bad things happen, the story opens with him seeing the body of a young friend of his who has become a stabbing fatality, but he has yet to work out that it is not all a game.

The best of this book is the? use of language between the boys Harri is friends with and the portrayal of tower block, inner city life among warring groups who make fights and enemies for something to do. there is no clear criminal activity at fault, no obvious drugs, nothing more than petty theft; what happens is very much the result of boredom, small lives without enough meaning or interest and environments where anything good gets destroyed. Harri is lovely; even when he misbehaves, you just want to whip him away to a place where is soul will be safe, he is likeable and genuine and a proper hero of the story, a champion who knows what is right but is young enough to be swept along on the edges of the politics of where he has found himself. When he gave his sister her birthday present I could have wept for them both; it was a powerful reminder of how innocent children stay even when bad things are happening and how very wrong indeed things have gone when children stop behaving with a moral compass. And I thought the game he and his friend played, investigating the death of the boy, was very clever. You watch him dance ever closer to the truth, knowing he’s stepping on the toes of danger and also knowing that he doesn’t see it – neither of them are old enough to see that their game is a threat to the people around them.

Perhaps that last point made the book hardest for me. I read it when the riots were happening and it was just too painful an illustration of the whys of that. The riots were so impossibly sad, it was so grim to watch kids no older than my eldest two behaving so thuggishly and this book is similarly difficult to read, if like me you are a lucky middle classed person with children who might have had traumas, but are not broken by them. The reason for that lost point was that I didn’t really enjoy it for that very reason; it just hurt a bit too much to face up to that reality. It was a good read certainly, interesting, thought provoking and well written (although I think the criticism I have read that it is rather ‘self-conscious’ is also a fair one) but a book with such painful subject matter is hard to ‘enjoy’. But I recommend it – and if like me you have a teen who has been interested and thoughtful about recent new stories of riots and stabbings, then I think you could hand it on to them too. But watch out for the ending – it will make you cry.

Read as the August LoveABook reading group book.

Book Reviews #26 & #35: Chalet School Fill Ins.

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More for the record in my 60 books in a year challenge than anything else. I’m not expecting to inspire anyone to read Chalet books but they were a childhood love of mine and I still dip in occasionally. over the last few years there has been a good few ‘fill in’ titles written, published fan fic that fits into the holes left in the series by the author, Elinor M Brent-Dyer. All the ones I’ve read have been very close to the original style and really kept to the plots that are alluded to in other parts of the series.

The Guides of the Chalet School is one of the early terms and sees the beginning of the school Guide company. It’s not the most fast moving of plots but the detail is great, clearly well researched and interesting. The first aid from the 1930′s was perhaps more scary than interesting and the book rightly carried a warning not to use such methods today! The characters were all true though and I loved having that extra bit of the early Austrian days which were under-used really and by far the most charming of the Chalet years.

Juliet of the Chalet School was a bit of a triumph and Caroline German should be rightly proud of it. Juliet is a great character and I have no idea why EBD didn’t stretch her and keep her at the school longer, especially as some characters managed to stay till they should have been in their early 20′s! (The notes to this book are also great; here is a woman with full on timeline OCD!) Juliet is very real, the tribulations with various middles excellent and lots of the other characters really come to life. Another book the series is better off for having.