book reviews

Book Review #11 Everyman's Guide to Scientific Living

March 5, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

I picked this up in the library, based on not an awful lot more than the cover (which I would love to show you but I can’t make Amazon do iframes on this blog… I’m calling for IT support!) and on the basis of it having a “Short listed for the Orange Prize” sticker on the spine. These are two commendable reasons for real books and libraries any way. Since it had the prettiest cover, I read it first out of my pile of ‘real books for this month’ and I think it is probably a good job I did, since it rates pretty high on the BabyLostMothers index 😥

The story in a nutshell is of pre WW2 Australia and of trying to carve out a farmers existence in the bush and the wide open spaces. That is the backdrop to the story; what it is really about is the inadequacies of relationships that are not built on anything real, the inevitability of lack of communication and the truths of people who are obsessive – small people trying to work miracles and how alone and lonely that is.

The main character is female and she tells the story with a reservation and quietness that reminded me of some other book – I’m not sure which. I think it is true this book reminded me of A Town Like Alice but I couldn’t say if it were setting or tone or time period that made that happen. Some of each perhaps. It tells the story of her marriage to a man obsessed with the science of chemicals and of farming by numbers not feel and of what happens to their community when he helps the farmers around him to apply his mantras to their lives.

The whole book is infused with a melancholy that is more infectious than was good for me; there is a hopeless determination about Robert and a quiet, passive, reflective air about his wife, Jean. It is a gentle book but that belies a real brutalness to the subject matter. It more than adequately gives a snapshot of a time and place that takes no prisoners. It is less a story than a chance to take a deep breath and sniff the flavour of a moment and a place in time.

From my point of view it touched more than a few nerves; I live in a house where we are divided into head and heart with little compromise – or at least only a learned compromise – and this story was an illustration to me of where we might have gone without the learning. It is about one person who will reduce everything to numbers and another who will try to accommodate that perhaps beyond the point where speaking might have been sensible. By the time she does speak everything about them is, quite literally, dust. The sense of hopelessness is hard to shake off.

I’d give this a 7/10. I liked it, but it made me sad; I’d recommend it but I wouldn’t go back to it. I ‘would’ go back to the author though and I loved that it really had some innovative touches, not least a series of photographs through the novel that I can well believe were the inspiration for the book.

For the BabyLost – you’d be needing to be strong, I’d say. Lots of babies, birth, stillbirth and dying babies. Not for the faint hearted.

Book #10 Wedlock: How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match

March 3, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

You can sum this story up in one phrase: “What a rotter!”

If you want a 400 page documentary on why you are lucky not to live in Georgian times, then Wedlock: How Georgian Britain’s Worst Husband Met His Match is probably it. You’d have to be having a bad life indeed not to feel you got off lightly compared to Mary Eleanor Bowes.

Wedlock is a factual account of the life of the Countess of Strathmore, ancestor of our ‘Queen Mother’ – the Strathmore surname was Lyon and subsequent generations amalgamated the two names, for reasons which become apparent during the book. A woman of quite extraordinary wealth, and apparently either a slight lack of foresight or a very gullible nature, it tells the story of her two marriages, starting with the moment (between the two) of a dramatic duel in her honour and then exploring both her life up to that point and her life afterwards. Despite not being fiction (which I didn’t realise when I started!) the book is engagingly told and contains enough drama, information and salacious detail to rival most stories. Wedlock is as much about the time as the people and the exploration of the changing role of women, their legal status and the way in which Georgian law and society was operating and altering during the late 1700’s. In fact, this is the great strength of the book for me, as some elements of the narrative left me a little cold at times.

The bulk of Wedlock regards her marriage to Andrew Robinson Stoney and it gives no more away than the title does to say he is something of a cad and a bounder! This book was my library reading groups choice after Washington Square but Stoney leave the villain of that piece standing! He is sadistic, vile, manipulative and abusive who really out villains the very worst of fiction. I’d go as far as to say I might have abandoned the book as being unlikely had it been a story rather than history.

The best of this book was certainly the insight into the times. For me, the least appealing aspect was the endless focusing on his cruelty and violence and I did eventually begin to feel I was reading one of those endless “my mother locked me in a cupboard for 18 years ” books. Just as I was beginning to consider giving up though, the plot move on t the conclusion, which was a relief as I thought the endless catalogue of domestic violence was a little overplayed.

For a Kindle reader, the narrative itself stops at 75% (just in case you start to lose the will to live!) and the remainder is footnotes. This type of book perhaps lends itself less well to a Kindle as flipping to the footnotes is not really an option in the same way you can with a paperback. I enjoy being able to do this with historical books and I didn’t bother to look at the sources etc with Wedlock in the way I would have done had I read it conventionally.

My favourite bit? Discovering that the expression “Stoney broke” is attributed to this unpleasant character’s tendency to be in debt and out of cash.

For the babylost? Mild to moderate; there is significant birthing of babies, in a non graphic way, considerable discussion of abortion the 1700’s way and she is separated from her children for many years. But I coped fine with it.

For me – of course virtually every date quoted was either my birthday, or the 2nd, 13th or 28th April! I don’t think I would read it again, but I would certainly recommend it and it whet my appetite for more fiction from that era in a way that nothing else particularly has.

7/10 an interesting read.

Book #9 The Observations by Jane Harris

February 19, 2011 by Merry 2 Comments

Wow.

My first real riveting read of the year; the first book to make me just want to keep going until it was finished, with as few interruptions as possible. The Observations is the type of book which makes you race to reserve their whole catalogue – I was gutted to discover it is her only novel, but I savoured it all the more for it.

The story is told by Bessy, Irish girl with a murky past and a smutty turn of phrase. She’s young and we join her on the run from a past life, already clearly a young lady who knows how to handle herself. The book is set in the late 1800’s in the north of England, an Irish girl on the run from a shaky upbringing in the slums of Edinburgh/Glasgow or wherever she chooses to say she came from at the time. The complex mixture of race and place neatly avoids stereotyping either of herself or the towns while giving the whole scenario a pleasingly unreal, story world feel. Nothing feels quite real throughout the book, nor does it ever slide into the fantastic either.

Bessy finds herself working as maid for a ‘big house’ that she happens upon, where life is definitely not quite as it seems. her ‘missus’ Arabella Reid, slides quickly from aristocratic and aloof to deeply odd and Bessy finds herself sliding around in the clutches of a woman who is both completely convincingly sane and clearly utterly bonkers. Bessy, young, impressionable and confused from an abusive childhood tries her hardest to be loved and needed but is unable to resist a spiteful prank when her feelings are hurt.

The prank goes wrong and Bessy, like so many damaged children, can only see herself as the soul cause of the results and tries, inevitably, to fix it. She is jealous, loving, sassy and determined, foul mouthed and individual and the story is told cleverly through a first person narrative of her writing up her experiences.

The Observations is nearly 500 pages long; at 250 I was thinking that it was beginning to look as if it had a pleasantly interesting, but not unpredictable end in sight – I was reading it on my Kindle, which gives you less focus on how far through the book you are. When I realised I was only half way through I was slightly stunned; what on earth was left? But then, a quirky take on a ‘maid below stairs, hard luck story’ takes a dramatic and sinister turn. It becomes a thriller, a mystery, potentially a ghost story, a tale of mental health and marriage and dysfunctional lives, a story about village hierarchy and over-reaching ambition blotting out the real truths of relationships and love.

Every time I thought I had a handle on how it was all going to untwist, it took another turn; every time it seemed to be on its way to concluding, another tail end of story would worm its way back to the front. It was, in an unassuming, almost clumsy, far from over-worked cleverness way, quite brilliant.

This book passes the Alison test, it passes the recommending test. It definitely passes the “will I read it or the author again test?” I’d say it is a must read.

9/10 for everyone.

(I’d give it a very mild, you’ll probably be just fine, BabyLostMother warning.)

Book #8 Learning By Heart

February 13, 2011 by Merry 3 Comments

Learning By Heart was another library pick, another one I was pleased to bring home and discover is written by someone, Elizabeth McGregor, who has consistently good reviews on Amazon.

This is the book that referred to glass blowers in Murano, is set half in Italy, has two time lines and is about love affairs and lost children across the years. It has also, just for the record, a family with four sisters and a younger brother, marriages in jeopardy and is in fact threaded with a theme of synchronicity, of people just happening to meet people and be in places at the right moment 😆 Oh, and it has a couple with a young son and infertility to go along with it. Oh yes, and it starts with a mourning parade on Good Friday. You have to laugh.

So, you know 😉

I was surprised by how much I was drawn in to this; although it is essentially a book with 2 female characters at the centre, they are relatively hard to know; the book captures both at a ‘moment’ in their life and both are a little adrift in a mess of life and emotions. The story is told more by the 3 men who love them, two husbands and a lover. The plot unravels more of their lives – infidelity, infertility, loss and grief, love and rejection – than it does of the women. It is quite refreshing in a way (and I recognised something of one of them too, which made it all the more compelling) and certainly a different take on a well established format. It was subtly done and all the people and places felt very real, even if it was just a snapshot of lives.

The book is, essentially, the story of Cora and Zeph, at turning points in their life. It follows Cora through her first move from home, the shocking reality of being a single young woman in London and then the change that a safe and ordinary marriage brings. Half of the book is the journal of a man who loved her and the descriptions of Sicily really made me want to pack up and go immediately. I’ve got a feeling Italy is telling me I need to visit. For Zepf, the book is about finding her courage when her marriage fails and finding out more about her mother and everything that was hidden from view in her life.

I’d give this 8/10. I’m not sure I would need to read it again, or own it, but I’ll certainly read more by the author and I don’t hesitate to recommend. A very enjoyable read.

Book #7 The Glassblower of Murano

February 10, 2011 by Merry 4 Comments

The synchronicity in book reading is amazing; co-incidence and books that you happen to pick up and which just hit the moment, or smash glaringly into the moment in the wrong way. Perhaps it happens all the time, perhaps it is ‘meant to be’ – perhaps I just notice when I’m extra sensitive.

The Glassblower of Murano is a story told across two time lines; it follows the story of a Venetian glass blower from the time when Venice was a principality and the glass blowers were virtual prisoners of the city, the prized possession of a city state run by “The Ten” who rule and police the city. Corradino is a talented glass blower who risks the wrath of the city to follow a dream and seek happiness. The story is told in tandem with that of his descendant, Leonora, who follows her heart to find work in Venice following the end of her marriage and finds out not only more than she expected about her famous ancestor, but also a whole new life.

It isn’t a plot with masses of surprises, in fact, a little like The Pull of the Moon, some of it is told from the very beginning, but the writing is elegant and enjoyable and the characters believable and easy to like. None of them are too perfect or too horrid, the nature of ‘The Ten’ fits well enough into the understanding of some governments now to make them a threatening shade and introduce a dimension of tension to the plot and the love affair that begins somehow fits comfortably into the main plot as to not take it over, while still managing to be difficult to gauge how it will end. It is a book with strength in how it is balanced and real colour and atmosphere in the prose and I found it a pleasure to read.

One of the elements I enjoyed was that, although the plot starts with a marriage break up and infertility as a theme, the main character, Leonora, has moved on. She’s still healing, but it isn’t one of the endless ‘hurt, moves to pastures new, meets a man, happy ending’ types of books. Sure, that is sort of what happens, but something in the way the character is drawn means that you aren’t forced to go through it with her – and that appeals to me, because I’ve got all of that type of stuff I can take! The chick lit element of the book occupies perhaps a quarter of it, the rest, historical, literary fiction, mystery, is all there and adds masses of meat to the bones of an already enticing story. I learned something new reading it too, about a place and a time and a people – and that ticks lots of boxes for me.

For the record, this isn’t a book for the most sensitive of my babyloss mother blog friends either. Infertility, child loss, birth and babies all feature. (Yes, I picked another book with all those in it!) But I’d give The Glassblower of Murano a resounding 9/10 – I’m sure I will read it again.

After that, I moved on to another that was recommended to me; I’ve put it on indefinite hold for now though, because it starts with someone in very raw grief over a miscarriage and… well, I’m not ready. I wanted to like it very much, but I was a bit unnerved by a character turning, in a blink of an eye, from likeable to hideous and had to stop. I suspect that says more about me than the book, but the speed of the change felt a little unreal. Still, the book gets good reviews and I’ll give it another go in a few months and report back 🙂 So that made three books with babies in it out of 3 in the last week!

And then I moved on to Learning By Heart which I picked up at the library and needs reading quickly! I think I’ll like this even if it does start with marriage break up, a little boy and a whole lot of loss. It also has a plot run on two time lines, is set in Italy and within the first 3 chapters, mentions the glass blowers of Murano.

Honestly, if you tried to do it on purpose, you couldn’t!