books

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 Review #18 A Perfect Proposal by Katie Fforde

May 1, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

Katie Fforde has long been one of the authors I rely on for a cheerful easy read that makes me feel good. I bought my first book of hers, The Rose Revived, when I was at college and it has remained one of fail-safe favourites through the years. Up until a few years ago, I read each one as it came out and always enjoyed them; then there was a period of time when her heroines became women ahead of me in their time line and I couldn’t relate and a couple of novels where perhaps I had read too many by one person and they lost their magic. On reflection, I think that says more about where I was at the time and how my reading changed; I wanted to be surprised more and stretched more and perhaps you shouldn’t look for that in books which are unashamedly chick lit 🙂

Katie is a friendly soul on Twitter and I’ve been enjoying chatting to her, which motivated me to download some of her back catalogue on to my Kindle. A Perfect Proposal is a return to her ‘young slip of a thing’ characters and, with daughters growing up around me, they are somehow appealing again. It feels like the days of working in cafes might be behind me, but they probably aren’t far off becoming part of household life again and Sophie was believable, if something of a cautionary tale in how not to become a pushover. The story had a flavour of American, New York life to it, reminiscent of some of Jane Green’s novels, which made for a change of scene that was fun and if the love story twists didn’t stun me into gobsmacked silence, there was plenty of familiar ‘oh god, will this work out… is he a rat or a duck?’ to it. The two older members of the cast, around whom the plot revolves to a greater extent, were lovely – I wanted to go and meet them – and I was giggling at the description of a really hideous element to Sophie’s family, who made a cameo appearance 😆

What I missed for a while in her stories was some of the “let’s do the show right here!” immediacy; I loved the way her original books focused on detail down to ‘clean the boat, make the tea, what the hell am I doing on this side of town with no money?’ – it always feels like I am right in the book when a story is like that, the nitty gritty of problem solving and life all laid out to sink right into. A Perfect Proposal had more of that again and I enjoyed it more for the descriptions of train journeys and trying to find places to stay for the night.

I’m back to enjoying her books again and am now rightly pleased to have several more that I can wile away the Summer on – hurrah for Kindles and Katie Fforde!!!

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.