reading

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 #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!

Book Review #6 The Pull of the Moon

February 5, 2011 by Merry 4 Comments

The Pull of The Moon is probably the perfect example of why a Kindle has been good for my reading habits; I really don’t think I would have come across this had it not been for having my Kindle and it isn’t a genre of novel I tend to go for either. One of the habits I’m getting into, especially in the ‘late at night, can’t sleep, can’t quite be bothered to read’ bits of time, is to comb through the best seller lists on there, the recommendations and the new books that have been released too. Quite often, there are temporary free books within those lists and I’ve taken to hoarding them when I see them; I’m not averse to spending a little if I see something on a big discount too and there are plenty that fall into that category if you keep an eye out. I do have a rule that new authors need at least 6 reviews and at least 4 starts though, to avoid buying stuff I don’t have much chance of enjoying. It would be easy to spend a LOT on a Kindle without thinking anything of it, so I’m being strict 😆

I’m still struggling to pigeon hole The Pull of the Moon. It is written by someone who also does historical murder mysteries, so I guess it lends itself to that, for one; it isn’t chick lit, though it does centre around a girl and a relationship, it is psychological thrillerÂ but it isn’t gut clenching stuff because it is narrated by the main character as a retrospective narrative. In fact, the anxiety is taken out of it by knowing from the start by knowing what happens to nearly all of the main protagonists. That doesn’t detract from the story though and there are a good number of plot layers, cleverly done and all intriguing; even with my nose on full alert for potential wail inducing plot lines, the final one wasn’t obvious enough to be a cliché.

Naturally, as all random books do, it had at least 3 spectacular babyloss mum triggers in it, so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone in that category unless forewarned is forearmed enough. I’m not really giving any plots away with that, as it isn’t what you’d expect – and it didn’t make me cry, so that was good 🙂

The end point of a review is probably “would I read it again”, would I look for more by the same author and in my case, would I actively recommend it to my friend Alison 😉 – and yes, it would get yes’s in all those cases – so a definite thumbs up.

As an aside – the little book plug-in on the side of the blog is great – I recommend that too 🙂