book reviews

Book Review #23: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

June 12, 2011 by Merry 2 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve read fiction that has absorbed me to the point of ignoring everyone else. I love books that utterly pull you in so that all you ant to do is lie on your bed, or curl up on the sofa and read. Water for Elephants was so good that despite it being on my Kindle, I didn’t even knit while I read and I finished it in 24 hours, which is no mean feat if there are 4 children and a house to deal with too!

The story follows Jacob, a young Polish origin vet in America who experiences a huge life changing tragedy and runs away to the circus, quite by accident. (As you do!) The book is a snapshot of life in a travelling circus in 1930’s America, the brutality, the incestuous relationships within people, the partition between performer and worker and the camaraderie that lies along side all the darker elements of a group of people pressurised into being together all the time. Jacob experiences all of these things, fresh from the real world and able to see things with both the clarity and naivety of being a young man with ideals and ethics that have not yet been corrupted.

Water for Elephants is also a love story, a tangled tug of war and an exploration of numerous twisted characters and relationships. It is beautifully narrated by the 90 year old (or 93!) Jacob, sitting out the end of his life in a care home and alongside the story of his past, is a delicately drawn picture of how life can end for even the most vital of people, people who had a youth which seemed it could never end in solitude. The brief and touching friendship that develops in that part of the story is heartbreakingly and heartwarming.

I’m incredibly grateful to Cara at Freckles Family who invited me to her book group and recommended this to me. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Book Review #20 Lady Chatterley's Lover – DH Lawrence

June 3, 2011 by Merry 1 Comment

Even if I was academically up to the task, (which I’m not!) a review of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in terms of themes, message and relevance to the world wouldn’t suit this blog for one and is hardly a world requirement for another 😉 The literary world does not need to know what Merry thinks of a classic in order to sell more of it 😆

Probably more relevant is what I got from it anyway. And that was a lot; my age old apathy about reading ‘classics’ or ‘worthy’ books was not so in force here, as I read another DH Lawrence as an S Level book while in my final English A Level year. I loved Sons and Lovers, one of the few books, along with Cider with Rosie, that really spoke to me in those years. Perhaps it is that I like a connection to an author who write autobiographically or partly so; I seem to remember really enjoying the Sheila Hocken books about Emma and Blue Above the Chimney’s too. Plus DH Lawrence was writing about a landscape familiar to me, as I grew up in Nottinghamshire and in fact went to the school opposite his too. As did my uncle. (And Ed Balls, but we won’t dwell on that!)

So, having enjoyed Sons and Lovers, I did expect to enjoy Lady Chatterley – and I did. What really struck me though, was my preconceived ideas and also the hang over of ideas and misconceptions and downright prejudices that lurk in my brain.

What I thought I knew of Lady Chatterley was that it was a book about a woman who has an affair with the gardener and that it was salacious in the extreme at the time it was published. I’m a bit old to get the trembles from that and didn’t expect it to be exactly shocking in this day and age (it isn’t, unless you could the talking to willies bit!) but what I didn’t know was anything about why she has the affair or how it ends.

What Lady Chatterley really is is “desperately lonely and unhappy woman who wants to be adored, held and have a baby” something many if not most women can probably relate to at some point. And what really struck me is that buried somewhere in my brain is still some outdated, repressed private school and middle class notion that if a woman has an affair, it is her failing and her fault and she’s in the wrong and if the affair is saucy, it’s probably sordid and she’s just a no good from the start.

I love the book on many levels, the characters, the language, the rude and brutal sexuality of it, the coal miners and the images of pit heads and dirty villages I can still recall. But what I liked the most was it reminded me again to keep my mind open, not judge, check why I believe why I do – and celebrate myself for being a woman who loves rude and dirty passion, deserves to be wanted, acknowledged and respected for herself (I am) alongside cuddling, being loved and longing for happiness.

Book #19 The Elegance of the Hedgehog

May 15, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

This book is responsible for putting me a long way behind in my goal of reading 60 new books this year. I found it a stodgy and difficult read for the most part and irritating when it wasn??t that. I had one conversation about it, the upshot of which is that it is difficult to take a book seriously when the title is intentionally pretentious ? and really, that about sums it up.

From the various reviews on Amazon, I think this is a love it or hate it book. Well, I say that; I didn??t actually love it OR hate it, so maybe it isn??t but it would be fair to say I really don??t know why it has been such a best seller. I??m not a huge lover of philosophy I suppose, so perhaps that is why, maybe I simply missed the point. Or perhaps the pace and style, translated from French, was just too much to easily get in to. Or perhaps I am just an uneducated and impossible to inspire heathen. I??m not sure that a book likely to make a reasonable quantity of readers feel that way has masses to recommend it. The author is clever, better read than me and has a more elegant turn of thought in her head ? fair enough ? but I??m not sure I wanted my nose rubbed in that.

The story focuses on a concierge and a 12 year old girl; both are recognisable enough, if not particularly people to warm to. The supporting cast of friends are a little more endearing and well drawn though. The story centres around their relationship and circumstances which bring them together. It took too long to get going and neither was likeable for me to care much, but the story picked up quickly in the second half. I could happily have read more of that element of the plot, which had it in it to be charming and thought provoking but which was just dealt with too quickly, almost like something as mundane as emerging love was not worthy of thought and exploration.

Annoyingly, right at the end, the book gave me something, a pair of quotes which gnawed right into my heart and earned the book a whole extra star over on Goodreads.

??For the first time in my life I understood the meaning of the word ??never??. And it??s really awful. You say the word a hundred times a day but you don??t really know what you are saying until you??re faced with a real ??never again??.

??From now on, for you, I??ll be searching for those moments of always within never??.

I can??t honestly say you shouldn??t bother to read this. It WAS, in its way, charming and interesting. I don??t mind being charmed and I like being educated. I just like a little more pace and plot to go with it. But I may, it is fair to say, have missed something. I??m not overly sold on being left feeling I??m a Philistine though.

(This post was recreated from a back up following a server crash. As such, it is missing comments and hits and would love to get some back!)

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 #12 Started Early, Took My Dog

March 11, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

The first time I read a Kate Atkinson book, it was because Max, having heard a review of it on the radio, bought me Behind the Scenes at the Museum. It remains one of my all time favourite books. After that came another couple by her, neither of which caught me enough to read them again (although now, I wonder if I was just a bit young, I might try them again) and then she moved on to her Jackson Brodie series.

Jackson is a private detective; he’s a decently good one too, without being a Poirot style, wrap it all up character. Bits of story trail through the books so that you can never be entirely sure that something, or someone, is finished with – unless they are dead. Which does, admittedly, happen a fair bit. Even to Jackson. Set in the UK, mostly in the north, they are the definition of gritty and it is hard to imagine Jackson having a day that is light hearted and in bright sunlight. He’s always up against it – and it is usually raining.

It is impossible not to like Jackson. He’s remained endearingly the same throughout the series, while also changing as his experiences go from the bizarre to the slightly insane and surreal. He’s recognisable from the first book, certainly, and the cast of characters surrounding him fleshes him out enough that I always feel he could potentially just turn up at my house and I’d find myself asking about his daughter and ex-wife.

Kate Atkinson has a great style; it’s neat, funny in a razor at your throat for a joke sort of way and reads as if she is speaking. Phrases drop in and out of it like afterthoughts but they are beautifully placed so that reading her work is pacey but a delight. I’d kill to write like she does, to be quite honest.

Started Early, Took My Dog is certainly more out of the same mould; it’s a good story and perhaps more than ever it has a huge sense of who Jackson Brodie is. He’s at a cross roads in his life, brought to a particular place by circumstances that have left him rootless and bemused and it shows. His detective work is less clinical than previously and you sense that he’s a man with much on his mind who happens to get answers by luck and experience as much as by cunning. The strength of the book is in fact in the characterisation of some of the other people, Tracy and Tilly in particular. You really get to know them even though, in some respects, they are almost incidental to the plot. Tilly in particular is the most extra-ordinary characterisation of an elderly woman plummeting fast into dementia. She’s beautifully drawn despite having just two moments where the plot actually pivots on her at all. Tracy, well, I sense she has more to tell us yet.

There were aspects of this I found less perfect. For the first time, Atkinson seemed determined to place the novel in time, with lots of references to the current financial crisis (I’m sensing she’s angry!) and recent programmes like Life on Mars. It made me wonder how well it will age, in some respects. Some of the cast, a nondescript bunch of thuggish policemen, were hard to grasp and separate – this may have been deliberate, as a device it would certainly work, but their identities were important at various parts and I struggled to keep hold of who was doing what.

A solid 8/10, maybe even close to 9. I’d read it again, I’d happily recommend it, I read it on my Kindle but it could well end p on my bookcase too.

For BabyLostMamas – this is a bad one; there is a mother mourning her baby, a host of lost/gone/missing children and babies, grief and emptiness, abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth and even a little white coffin being carried in loving arms. So err… you know…