Book Reviews

Book Review #17 Chances by Freya North

April 22, 2011 by Merry 1 Comment

I’ve always been a huge Freya North fan; she writes great books, her characters are sassy and pithy and her story lines unpredictable and wise and her prose is witty and sexy and makes you want to read more. I’ve loved all the books she’s written and they’ve grown up along side me more or less; Chloe suited me when I was raw and new and Cat when I was ready for a challenge and Thea when I was needing to think about what I wanted and what sacrifices were necessary and reasonable.

I like her too because I once emailed her in response to a dedication in the back of her book and she replied and I appreciate people who make that sort of effort. I’ve enjoyed reading her blog recently too and so was looking forward to Chances coming out. If I was made a bit sad that she deleted a comment I left there (which went something along the lines of ‘I’m really hoping you’ve written a book that isn’t about people dying or babies because I’m really looking forward to enjoying another of your novels’ in what I thought was a cheerful if ironic voice) perhaps I understood better when I’d read it, because in fact the book is about dealing with loss and grief (ha! thanks universe!) and there is even the odd baby. Perhaps she was worried I had secretly already read it 🙂

I did also read that she’d had a hard time personally during the writing of this one. Perhaps it has been obvious from her last couple of characters that’s she’s feeling more melancholy. The women have been a little more squashed in character, a little more broken and the themes of the books has been more about ‘picking up and moving on’. This isn’t a bad thing, in fact, at my age and in my circumstances, I think it might even be a good thing, but they’ve made me laugh less. Perhaps I’m not in the mood for laughing so easily.

Chances is about two people shaking off the tendrils of the past and the relationships they’ve been in which have ended for various reasons and taking the risk of starting again. As far as that goes, it is well drawn and actually I think I believed in the character of Oliver, the potential love interest and Tim, ex-rat, most of all. Vita seemed a little passive but that was okay, because she was being passive and her friends and the people around her gave her a metaphorical slap for it. I think we all have times in our life like that. My favourite character of all was Jonty, Oliver’s son and Oliver was enough like Max for me to honestly believe that Jonty really was as nice and well balanced as he was. I liked Jonty, I wanted it to end well for him. It half made me laugh too that two of the characters owned a crafty shop and go to trade shows. Perhaps she’s been reading my blog…. 😉

Chances isn’t the pacey, sexy novels of Freya’s back catalogue but it isn’t less enjoyable for it. It’s believable and it ticked all my boxes of drawing a picture, making me feel I knew the characters and letting me see the village and a snapshot of a life. It was that, a snapshot, a whimsical, fleeting turning point moment for a five people. It didn’t challenge me and at one point I worried most that it wouldn’t have the ending I was expecting. I liked them all and wanted it to end well for them. For that, if not for a ripping yarn I sighed in satisfaction at the end of, I liked Chances well enough.

I’d like some sassy, sexy characters back now though. I really hope the tough time is past for her and the sparkle flickers back into her next heroines; I always love them, they always feel like friends and I want to keep meeting new people from her imagination.

Book #16: The Hare with Amber Eyes

April 16, 2011 by Merry 6 Comments

The is the story of a family, a Jewish family from… well, all over Europe, the Ephrussi family. It tells the story of them across several generations, how they lived and operated, how they lived an opulent and wealthy life, a powerful family across Europe with banks in all the major capitals and fingers in every money making pie. Beginning with Charles, it describes their art collections, their holidays, the delight of having money, being good at making money, being close to painters, poets and artists, being patrons and collectors and a family who could, by speculating with grain and supply and untold wealth, effectively hold a country to ransom in the name of fairness and saving their people.

It is the story of being Jewish, wealthy Jewish, at the end of the 19th and early 20th century and in some ways, it describes perfectly how the Jews of their class provoked such jealousy and hatred. Anti-Semitism was hardly new, of course, but it is a catalogue of how to be disliked. They were a family who wanted to be ‘assimilated’, wanted to live as the French and the Austrians in the countries they moved to did, but they were set apart by not just success, but attitude, effort and their own unique ability to fashion a world around them.

It is also the story of a collection of netsuke, tiny Japanese figures and how they passed from hand to hand, through the generations until they came to the hands of the author.

I found the early part of the book slowish – interesting, but slow. De Waal has a knack for words and brings the characters to life, he has a talent for painting a picture with his descriptions and in the early part I found myself googling for the painting mentioned and discovering that, yes, the one I had in my head from the bottom staircase at school, was indeed the one her meant. I learned a lot, not least why so many Monet pictures are Japanese influenced. I enjoyed it, I enjoyed following hisjourney in uncovering his past, but I wasn’t grabbed.

Then came, in Vienna, the first world war and that caught me; it keyed into something I knew about, bizarrely enough from Chalet School books and I was fascinated by this different view of a war I know about. I raced through it, keen to know they all survived.

And then… and then… with the inevitable crunch of knowing history… the Anschluss. He can’t hide his emotion and his horror at what happens as the Nazi’s march in with planned and premeditated attacked on the wealthy Jews happening within hours, was absolutely gut wrenching. It is, quite simply, horrific to read descriptions of a house you have come to know being pulled apart and people you care for, with all their quirks, being beaten and rendered to nothing. It touched part of me from other books I know and love; the Chalet School in Exile, the proud and desperate characters of those children’s books and the stoical fortitude of the Jewish characters in The Morning Gift by Eva Ibbotson. It was like lifting a rock you know well and finding the slime and creepy crawlies underneath that you knew about but pretended didn’t exist.

I read the second half of the book in a morning, I simply couldn’t leave them in the limbo of being half read. And The Hare with Amber Eyes went from 3 stars to 5 stars in no time at all.

Book #15 Love Stories in this Town

March 28, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

For reasons which will become obvious, I read this quickly and with one eye slightly shut to minimise the impact; it became a bit of an honour pact with myself to get through it and prove I could do, without falling apart.

Love Stories in this Town is a collection of short stories, focusing first on a set of people and then on Lola, a girl who turns gradually into a woman. As a set of stories, they are well written, tender snapshots of brief moments in the life of people. It struck me this is exactly what I might like to write – and could write. Whether I could do it well enough to get published is of course a moot point, but as a project it felt like someone starting out in writing and doing a good job of their first project. So from that point of view, very well written and worth reading. I’d go and read more of her later works based on this.

From a personal point of view though, it started with ttc, went on to miscarriage, included infertility, marriages falling apart, fear, childlessness, loneliness, lost babies and even a brain damaged one. So not really one for the babylost 🙄

I do think books should have warnings on them sometimes. I picked up one solitary book in the library last week and it was about a Frederick – even Amelie said the other day that both her current reads have Freddie’s in them.

However, an okay book. Not brilliant or unputdownable but a very solid collection of short stories to showcase an undoubted reading talent.

Book #14 Life from Scratch, Melissa Ford

March 22, 2011 by Merry 2 Comments

I’m really quite cross that I liked this; I’m feeling all sucky uppy because of it. The reason? Well the author Melissa Ford, is the owner of the Stirrup Queens Blog which is possibly the absolute default (along with Glow, can you have two defaults?) places on the internet for infertility/loss/associated pregnancy crap. It’s also home of the Stirrup Queen’s Completely Anal List of Blogs That Proves That She Really Missed Her Calling as a Personal Organizer. And you know, I did know about that site and that list, even before Freddie and certainly after, because I intended to submit to her yearly round up – but didn’t. And then her book, Life from Scratch, appeared free on my Kindle one night and I downloaded it and then happened to see a tweet a few days later which meant I realised it was HER book and then I submitted my blog to the list and then I friended her on Twitter and she friended me back because she’s nice and… and… and…

And now I’ve given her book 5/5 on Amazon and I feel like I’m sucking up to the popular girl in class.

Only I’m not. I don’t give away 10/10 or 5/5 easily. To get either you have to pass the read again/have on THE shelf/ recommend to Alison and then some criteria.

Life from Scratch is actually good enough, for me, to do all those things. But it did something else too, something that a book just has to be good for, something a book doesn’t need clever language or even clever ideas for. Something that a person telling their story, or a story with all their heart and soul can do.

It just touched me.

It’s a book about someone who is sad and a little self absorbed, going through a tough time and losing everything. She’s sad because her marriage is gone, she’s sad because she isn’t sure who she is or what she can do. She’d like children, though that isn’t a major theme. She doesn’t quite fit in her family, though she loves them. She’s just a little busy with her own self and sadness and a little blind and trying really quite hard to get back on her feet and not be dumb and to try new things (and new boyfriends) and she gets up and she gets knocked down and then… well… you have to read it.

Of course it also helped that it is a book about a woman with a blog. Heavens, what’s not to like? 😉

I’m not saying this is a brilliantly clever book (sorry Mel!) but it is a brilliantly touching book, especially if you’ve ever sat on your sofa and wondered if you could BE more lonely in a house where the person you love is just across the hall. It’s a brilliantly touching book if you’ve been so sad and so empty and somehow found yourself up and moving the next day. It’s like the book equivalent of not getting out of bed till you actually hate your bed so much you’d rather hoover. it’s the book equivalent of sobbing to Pretty Woman and then getting the hell out on a coach to 5k run.

And yes, knowing enough about the author to know that when she describes the softness of the foot of a child she wishes she was mothering, it is because she has simply ached to have a child, helps. It’s good to read a book knowing the author has been in the depths of where you are instead of secretly grumbling that it ‘isn’t like that’.

It’s a book with depth, and sunken depths, and hope and enlightenment. It didn’t teach me anything new about myself but it reminded me how much I’ve grown.

I guess that makes it a feel good novel.

But it also makes it good enough that it will get out of my Kindle and on to The Shelf at some point too.

*salute*

DBM – you don’t really need to ask. You’ll cry, but with her.

Book #13 The Bonesetter's Daughter, Amy Tan

March 22, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

Amy Tan has made it so quickly into my ‘favourite authors’ list that I’m reading her books regardless of whether that stops me from getting 60 new authors under my belt this year. I don’t want to wait till next year to read what else she has to offer, I want to read them now.

The Bonesetter’s Daughter is… exquisite. The words to describe it are trite really but none the less true for it. It is moving, thought provoking, maybe life changing. As a story and as prose, it is captivating and as a description of a mother-daughter relationship that is difficult, it struck a lot of chords with me, not all of them comfortable ones.

In brief, it tells the story of Ruth, a first generation Chinese American at a pivotal point in her life. She’s not quite happy, not quite fulfilled and uncomfortably aware she is not fulfilling everything she wishes she were, while all too aware of the edges of her comfort zone. And it also tells the story of her mother, a woman slipping quickly into dementia with a history and a past from the days of 1930-1950’s China which needs to be told so her daughter understand who she is and where she came from.

The story slips between the two time periods effortlessly and the characters really do grow and alter before your eyes. So little happens, yet everything changes, in the way that is so often true of life for all of us. It is not always the wrenchingly big things that alter everything. All the characters, all their foibles and flaws, are recognisable from the teen step daughters to the mothers (many of them) who little the story.

I think it would be impossible to do justice to the book; read it, learn a little more about life in a time British school history lessons ignore, stand beside some women who watched everything change. You will not, I think, be disappointed, not least because, without tying the ends up in a pretty bow, there is a sense of something having been accomplished through communication at the end of it. All the people, imperfect as they are, make some effort and there is some reward for that.

It’s a pleasing thought.

BLM index – not bad. It has a bit of this and that in it, as life does, but nothing so terrible as to pull your heart out.