Book Reviews

Book Review #1: A Fine Balance

January 20, 2012 by Merry Leave a Comment

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

Merry has read 1 book toward her goal of 40 books.

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Book Review #47: Black Sea Twilight

January 20, 2012 by Merry Leave a Comment

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

January 20, 2012 by Merry Leave a Comment

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

September 5, 2011 by Merry 3 Comments

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 😆

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

September 5, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

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.