Category: Reviews

The Sea Sisters by Louise Douglas

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I’ve read several standalone novels by Louise Douglas and enjoyed them all, but haven’t tried any of the books in her detective series set in France until now. This is the fourth in the series so I hoped it wouldn’t matter that I hadn’t read the other three – and it didn’t, although there’s one ongoing storyline that would probably have meant more if I’d read the previous books.

Mila Shepherd works at Touissants Detective Agency in the Britanny coastal town of Morannez with her stepmother Ceci and their colleague, Carter Jackson. Mila came to France after the tragic deaths of her stepsister Sophie and her husband in a sailing accident and is looking after her orphaned niece, Ani, as well as taking Sophie’s place at the agency. Mila has discovered that Sophie was trying to contact her on the day of the accident and when she comes across a note left in Sophie’s kitchen – Call Mila. Tell her the truth. Ask her to help – she is filled with guilt, convinced that if she’d answered her phone that day she could have saved her stepsister.

Meanwhile, Mila, Ceci and Carter have an intriguing new case to investigate, which begins with a young woman, introducing herself as Nicole Stevenson, arriving at the detective agency. Nicole claims to have discovered that she is really Evie Albert, who disappeared from a festival in Morranez twenty-five years ago as a two-year-old child. The case was never solved at the time and Evie has never been found, so Mila and her colleagues agree to look into Nicole’s story. Their investigations take them to the Holywell Commune, a former convent which is now home to a group who are hostile to strangers and reluctant to answer any questions. But as Mila continues her search for proof of Nicole’s claim, she begins to find links to Sophie’s death. It seems the two separate mysteries are somehow connected, but how?

Although I haven’t read the previous novels, it seems that the storyline involving the deaths at sea of Sophie and her husband, Charlie, has been running throughout the whole series, presumably with a few more details emerging in each book. At the start of this one, Mila still doesn’t know what happened, why two experienced sailors went out in bad weather or why Sophie had been trying to speak to her. Maybe because I haven’t been following this story from the beginning, I found it less interesting than the Nicole/Evie one, which was fascinating. Is Nicole really Evie, kidnapped as a child and raised under a new name? Is she just so desperate to escape from her own past that she’s convinced herself she’s someone else? Is she deliberately lying for some unknown reason – or could there be another explanation for the whole thing?

I enjoyed the book overall, but it felt a bit longer than it really needed to be; for example, there’s an interlude in the middle where Mila goes home to England to visit her mother, which had no relevance to the rest of the story and did nothing to move the plot along at all. I also didn’t quite understand the tension in Mila’s relationship with Carter, who seemed like a good person – maybe that’s another thing that would have made more sense if I’d read the earlier books. I did love the setting; Louise Douglas is always so good at bringing a place to life and here she combines the beauty of the Brittany coast during a hot summer with more sinister undertones, as she describes the oppressive, cult-like atmosphere of the Holywell Commune or Mila’s discovery of a dolmen – one of the ancient stone tombs found in that part of France.

Both mysteries are brought to a satisfying conclusion by the end of the novel. I don’t know if there are plans for more books in this series, but I would like to go back and read the first three at some point and also still have some of the author’s other standalones to investigate.

Thanks to Boldwood Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Crownless Queen by Elizabeth Chadwick

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This is the second of Elizabeth Chadwick’s two novels about Jeanette of Kent. If you haven’t read the first, The Royal Rebel, it’s not essential, particularly if you’re already familiar with this period of history, but I would still recommend it so that you can enjoy the whole of Jeanette’s story. The first book introduced us to Jeanette (usually called Joan, but I’ll stick with the name Chadwick uses in the novel), a granddaughter of Edward I, and took us through her nine year struggle to get her secret marriage to Thomas Holland, a knight in the royal household, officially recognised and declared valid.

The Crownless Queen begins in 1361 with Jeanette, now thirty-four years old and a mother of four children, awaiting news of Thomas, who is in Normandy on military duty. Sadly, when news eventually arrives, it’s the last thing she wants to hear – Thomas has caught a fever and died. Jeanette is heartbroken but understands that due to her position and wealth, she’ll be expected to marry again, so when the king’s eldest son and heir – Edward, the Black Prince – makes her an offer of marriage, she accepts. Edward’s father isn’t pleased and believes he could have made a better match, but Jeanette and Edward have been close friends since childhood and there’s genuine love and affection between them.

All of this happens very early in the book, so there’s a lot more to follow including Edward and Jeanette’s time in Aquitaine, where Edward has been sent to govern; the lives of their two young sons and of Jeanette’s children from her previous marriage; Edward’s mysterious illness which shortens his life; the death of Edward’s father, King Edward III, and the accession to the throne of the young Richard II at the age of only ten. Most of this is written from Jeanette’s point of view, but we do occasionally see things from the perspective of other characters such as Edward himself and Jeanette’s eldest son, Tom Holland. I enjoyed watching Tom grow up and mature into a young man, learning to love and respect his wife Alys FitzAlan, to whom he is married while they are both still children. Tom’s brother John (referred to as Johan in the book) enters the service of one of the king’s younger sons, John, Duke of Lancaster – better known today as John of Gaunt – and would later marry John’s daughter Elizabeth. Their story is told in The King’s Sister by Anne O’Brien – one of the things I love about reading historical fiction is the way so many books by different authors overlap and intersect providing different angles and approaches.

Chadwick has a real talent for bringing her characters to life, so even if you already know what happens, it’s still possible to become emotionally invested in the story. We know from history that Edward would die a year before his father and would never become king, but that doesn’t make the story any less interesting or the descriptions of his long illness and Jeanette’s despair any less tragic. We also know that it would be their son Richard who would come to the throne instead; child characters can be difficult to get right, but Chadwick does a good job of showing the flaws already present in the young Richard’s character that would make him an unpopular king later on, such as an obsession with the outward symbols of power and wealth.

Another aspect of this book I loved was the relationship between Jeanette and her brother-in-law John of Gaunt, beginning with suspicion and disapproval, but developing over the years into a friendship based on mutual trust and respect. Although John is married twice over the course of the novel, first to Blanche of Lancaster then Constanza of Castile, his affair with Katherine Swynford is also touched upon and apparently John and Katherine are going to be the focus of Chadwick’s next novel, which I’m already looking forward to!

Book 19/20 of 20 Books of Summer

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

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Since reading The Help, which was published in 2009, it’s been a very long wait for Kathryn Stockett’s second novel. The Calamity Club finally arrived earlier this year, after a seventeen year gap, and I put it on my list for the 20 Books of Summer challenge – which maybe wasn’t a great idea as it was so long I could probably have read two or three other books for the challenge in the same length of time! Anyway, I loved it so it was time well spent.

The book is set in Oxford, Mississippi in 1933. Many families are struggling financially as the Great Depression tightens its grip and Birdie Calhoun’s mother and grandmother have sent her to Oxford to ask her wealthy sister Frances to lend them some money. However, Birdie quickly discovers that her sister’s life isn’t as perfect as she would like everyone to believe and she and her husband are having difficulties of their own.

Meanwhile, in Oxford’s Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur is still hoping that her mother will come to reclaim her. Abandoned on Christmas Eve, Meg has been living at the orphanage for two years and is now one of the ‘big girls’, considered almost unadoptable as most people would prefer a baby or toddler. For some reason, she has also become the main target of Garnett Pittman, the cruel and abusive woman in charge of the orphanage. Miserable and isolated, Meg is given a glimmer of hope when she meets Birdie, who has taken a temporary job as bookkeeper at the orphanage.

The novel is narrated by both Birdie and Meg and each has her own narrative voice (Meg’s is particularly distinctive). As the book has more than 600 pages, there’s obviously a lot more to the plot than the brief summary I’ve given above, but I don’t want to spoil things by going into too much detail. The way in which Birdie sets out to make the money she and her family need, while also trying to help Meg, is unexpected and daring, so I’ll leave you to find out what it is for yourself if you decide to read the book. What I can tell you is that it’s a book which touches on lots of interesting but serious topics including prostitution and what drives a woman to it, views on homosexuality at a time when it was considered an illness that could be cured, alcoholism and how it can break up a family, and of course dealing with poverty and everything that comes with it. However, it’s not as depressing as it sounds and there’s plenty of humour to lighten the mood, mostly provided by the unusual group of women who form the Calamity Club of the title.

I liked Birdie, who is outspoken, loyal and courageous, but it was Meg who really won me over. I thought Stockett perfectly captured her vulnerability, her longing to feel loved and wanted and her desperation to get away from the orphanage and never be sent back. She’s also intelligent, resourceful and, due to her circumstances, often seems older than her years, so she’s a child character with a lot of depth and complexity. There are other characters who, although much less sympathetic, are equally memorable: Garnett Pittman is a truly horrifying villain, while Birdie’s shallow, self-absorbed sister Frances is a constant source of frustration for both Birdie and the reader!

So, does the book feel too long? I think at times, yes, it does, and could probably have been condensed a little bit, but on the other hand it means there was plenty of time to become fully drawn into the story and the world Stockett was building. I loved the insight this book gives us into life in 1930s Mississippi and I’m hoping we won’t have to wait another seventeen years for Kathryn Stockett’s next book!

Book 18/20 of 20 Books of Summer

By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie

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The August theme for the Read Christie challenge is ‘Beloved Duo’, so one of her Tommy and Tuppence books was the obvious choice for this month! I’ve read the first three in the series, which made this an ideal opportunity to pick up the next one, By the Pricking of My Thumbs.

Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, unlike Christie’s other detectives, age in real time throughout the series. When we first meet them in The Secret Adversary, published in 1922, they are young people in their early twenties; in By the Pricking of My Thumbs, published in 1968, they’re now in their sixties. Christie herself, of course, was also growing older and the topic of ageing forms a prominent part of this novel. It begins with a visit to Tommy’s elderly Aunt Ada at Sunny Ridge Nursing Home, where Tuppence falls into conversation with another resident, a Mrs Lancaster. She’s a sweet, friendly old lady and the two are getting along well – until Mrs Lancaster suddenly refers to something hidden behind the fireplace and asks Tuppence, “Was it your poor child?”

Tuppence is still thinking about those words several weeks later when Aunt Ada dies and she and Tommy return to Sunny Ridge to collect her belongings. Tuppence hopes to speak to Mrs Lancaster again, but is told that she has gone, having been taken away by a relative. Instinctively feeling that something is wrong, Tuppence tries to track down Mrs Lancaster but no one seems to know exactly where she could be. The only clue is a painting Mrs Lancaster gave to Aunt Ada before her death, showing a house by a canal. Tuppence is sure she’s seen that house before, possibly from the window of a train, so while Tommy is away from home attending a conference, Tuppence decides to find the house again in the hope that it will lead her to Mrs Lancaster.

This is a particularly dark Christie novel, which is to be expected considering the title comes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (“by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes”). I found it creepy and unsettling, with all the talk of dead or missing children, Mrs Lancaster’s complete disappearance, and the descriptions of the house, partially abandoned and, as one character says, ‘put to the wrong use’. The scenes at Sunny Ridge also show, quite disturbingly, how the concerns of elderly people can easily be dismissed as confusion or dementia. Tommy and Tuppence themselves, though, are a delight to spend time with, as always, especially Tuppence who has to learn to accept that although she may still be a lively, adventurous young woman at heart, her physical limitations are catching up with her and she can’t do all the things she used to do.

Although this book is maybe not as tightly plotted as some of Christie’s others and not one of her absolute best, it’s still very enjoyable. I found the ending quite chilling – I hadn’t guessed the solution and the culprit was someone I had never suspected. Now I only have one Tommy and Tuppence book left to read: Postern of Fate, which I’m hoping to read for the Read Christie challenge later this year.

Book 17/20 of 20 Books of Summer

Little Spark by Jess Kidd

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A new Jess Kidd book is always something to look forward to and this year we’ve had two of them: first, Murder at the Spirit Lounge, the second book in the Nora Breen Investigates series, and now Little Spark, a standalone novel set in Victorian England.

Little Spark is the story of Bodkin Bell, a young woman with the unusual ability to generate powerful currents of electricity within her body. Bodkin has no idea why she has this particular skill – or curse, as it often seems to be. In fact, she knows very little about herself at all, except that she’s an orphan who has been taken under the wing of Cornelius Bell, a travelling showman. Cornelius has taught Bodkin how to pick pockets and use her wits to survive and together they travel the country with a sideshow act so Bodkin can perform as ‘Little Spark’. One day, however, things go wrong and Bodkin finds herself arrested.

Separated from Cornelius, her only friend, Bodkin begins to serve a prison sentence until she is rescued by Lady Hesperia Haseley who is making a charitable visit to the prison and takes a liking to her. Bodkin is offered a position as a servant at Point Mote, the Haseley estate, but once she arrives at her new home, she begins to wonder whether Lady Hesperia may have had another motive for bringing her there.

Point Mote is a neglected, crumbling mansion situated in the Kent marshlands, an appropriately atmospheric setting for a novel like this one. The former owner, Spendlove Haseley, was an inventor of automata, and his work is being continued after his death by his son, Ramshaw. Almost the first thing Bodkin sees when she enters the house is a disembodied mechanical hand stirring a pot of stew in the kitchen – and there are other machines and devices like this all over the house and its grounds. I was reminded of Anna Mazzola’s The Clockwork Girl, another dark historical novel about a creator of automata, although the settings and plots are quite different. Bodkin’s new job is to assist Ramshaw with his inventions and as she does so, she makes some discoveries about her employer, his family and herself.

Bodkin herself is an engaging heroine and although I’d expected more focus on her strange powers, it was interesting to watch her trying to solve the various mysteries of Point Mote with the help (or hindrance) of its other inhabitants, the usual cast of colourful characters you would expect to find in a Kidd novel. I was particularly intrigued by the two maids, sisters Coralie and Claudine, who have each lost an eye, one on the left and one on the right, although they won’t say exactly how it happened. There’s also Huffkin the dog, who may or may not be real! It’s such a fascinating, imaginative story; my only criticism is that I guessed the twists too easily – one in particular is a twist I’ve come across in several other books. Still, I found this a very enjoyable, entertaining novel, probably my favourite by Jess Kidd since Things in Jars.

Thanks to Canongate for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Story of Tudor Art by Christina J. Faraday

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In this interesting and ambitious book, Christina J. Faraday explores the history of Tudor England through its art and objects. The artwork of a particular period can tell us a lot about key historical events, how important figures chose to be portrayed and how people lived, worked and worshipped. Faraday looks at all of these things, moving chronologically forward through time, beginning with art associated with Margaret Beaufort, mother of the first Tudor king, Henry VII, and ending with the reign of Elizabeth I.

Paintings and portraits are naturally given a lot of attention, but Faraday also includes many other types of art from sculptures, tapestries and clothing to jewels, embroideries and furnishings. To show the range of items discussed, some examples include the Dacre Beasts, four 6ft tall figures carved from a single oak tree, now on display at the V&A in London; the Great Bed of Ware, a huge, ornate four-poster bed so famous Shakespeare mentioned it in Twelfth Night; and Cope’s Cabinet of Curiosities, a collection of rare antiquities and artefacts from around the world, reflecting the increase in global exploration during Elizabeth I’s reign.

There’s a fascinating chapter on the emerging class of people known in the 16th century as ‘the middling sort’ – similar to today’s middle class. During the Tudor period, these people began to purchase artworks for their own homes to display their growing wealth and culture. Mostly, though, Faraday focuses on works of art produced for the Tudor monarchs and displayed at court or in churches.

The book looks at the work of the various court painters, many of whom came to England from other European countries, bringing different styles and techniques with them. Some, such as Hans Holbein the Younger, are very well known; others, for example, William (or Guillim) Scrots, are less famous. Little is known about Scrots, but he caused a sensation with his 1546 anamorphic portrait of Edward VI, which is distorted so it can only be viewed clearly from one particular angle. As you would expect, most of the artists at that time were men, but the contributions of female artists Susanna Horenbout and Levina Teerlinc are also discussed.

At first this appeared to be quite a long book, but I found that I got through it much more quickly than I’d expected as around half of the book is made up of notes, a bibliography, a list of image credits and an index. The actual text of the book moves quickly from one monarch’s reign to the next, covering a huge amount of art in each chapter, and it ended up feeling too short rather than too long as there’s not time to go into much depth on anything. Still, it’s a good introduction to the subject and succeeds in showing the overall scope of Tudor art and how things changed between the beginning of the period and the end. Lots of photographs are included, but as I was reading the ebook version I don’t think I could fully appreciate some of these and I’m sure a physical version of the book would work better visually. I think it would make a nice gift for someone studying art history, but for the general reader with an interest in art or the Tudors (or preferably both) there’s a lot to enjoy here as well.

Thanks to Head of Zeus for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 16/20 of 20 Books of Summer

Troubled Waters by Ichiyō Higuchi – #WITMonth

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Translated by Bryan Karetnyk

August is Women in Translation Month and I’ve chosen to start with a collection of short stories by an author often described as Japan’s first professional woman writer of the modern era. Born Higuchi Natsuko in 1872, she was the daughter of a peasant who had just managed to achieve samurai status a year before the Meiji Restoration period began, leading to the samurai caste being abolished. After her father’s death, Higuchi and her mother and sister were left struggling financially and Higuchi decided to support her family through her writing. Using the pseudonym Higuchi Ichiyō (in Japanese, the first name comes last), she had her first story published in a magazine in 1892 and went on to write more stories, poems, essays and a diary before dying from tuberculosis at the age of just twenty-four.

This new collection from Pushkin Press contains five of her stories published between 1893 and 1895. The first, A Snowy Day (Yuki no hi), is a beautifully written story in which our narrator looks back on her school days, when she fell in love with an unsuitable man, and reflects on the disillusionment she now feels due to decisions made during that time. Although it’s the shortest story in the book, it has a powerful emotional impact and was the perfect introduction to Higuchi’s work. The second story New Year’s Eve (Ōtsugomori) was even better – probably my favourite of the five. It follows O-Mine, a young woman working as a maid in a rich household, who asks her employer for an advance on her salary so she can help her uncle who is ill and struggling financially. Her employer agrees then cruelly pretends to forget, leaving O-Mine contemplating stealing. I particularly loved the ending which is ambiguous but also very satisfying.

Growing Pains (Takekurabe) is a novella-length story and another I enjoyed. It tells the story of a group of young people living in Yoshiwara, Tokyo’s red light district, and revolves around a feud between two rival gangs, one led by Chōkichi, the son of a construction foreman, and the other by Shōtarō, a pawnbroker’s son. We also meet the shy, serious Nobu, whose father is the local priest, and fourteen-year-old Midori, a bright, lively girl who is being groomed to become a courtesan like her older sister. As this group of children grow older they begin to discover that their hopes and dreams for the future are unlikely to come true as their paths have already been laid out for them by their parents and society. I loved all the insights we get into Japanese culture and the summer and winter festivals, and because this is the longest story in the collection, there’s more time for character development as well.

Karetnyk states in his introduction at the beginning of the book that he has tried to preserve Ichiyō’s classical Japanese writing style, which means there are no quotation marks around dialogue, with sentences and paragraphs often running together into one long section of prose. I found the first three stories easy enough to follow, but for some reason the style was more of a problem for me with the fourth, Troubled Waters (Nigorie), and I sometimes struggled to tell where one person had finished speaking and another had started. For that reason, this story wasn’t one of my favourites, but it’s still a striking depiction of the fate of courtesans, focusing on O-Riki and one of her clients, who has become infatuated with her.

The final story is This Mortal Coil (Utsusemi) and it’s another very short one. It explores a young woman’s overwhelming feelings of guilt that cause her to descend into mental and physical illness. I found it the weakest of the five stories in the book, but it was still interesting and apparently this is the first time this particular story has been translated into English. I would definitely recommend this collection as a whole for what it tells us about Meiji-era Japan and the lives of women during that period. For me personally, most of the Japanese literature I’ve read has been crime, so it was good to have the opportunity to try something different!

Thanks to Pushkin Press Classics for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 15/20 of 20 Books of Summer