Category: Reviews

The Corpse in the Snowman by Nicholas Blake

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Nicholas Blake was a pseudonym of the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis under which he wrote a series of mystery novels featuring the private investigator Nigel Strangeways. It seems there are sixteen in the series, published between 1935 and 1966, which is good news for me as The Corpse in the Snowman is my first and I enjoyed it so much I will certainly be reading more of them!

This book is set in winter, as you will have guessed from the title – and yes, there is a snowman and yes, there’s a dead body hidden inside it. We know this from the very first chapter, but what we don’t know is whose body it is and how it has come to be in such a strange and macabre hiding place. To find out what is going on, we have to go back several weeks to the moment earlier in the winter when Nigel and Georgia Strangeways arrive at Easterham Manor in Essex, home of the Restorick family. They have been invited by Clarissa Cavendish, an elderly cousin of Georgia’s who lives on the estate and who has become convinced that there is something badly wrong at the Manor.

Clarissa’s fears are proved correct when, the day after the Strangeways’ arrival, the beautiful Elizabeth Restorick is found dead in her bedroom. It looks like a suicide, but Nigel is sure it is murder – and with a large party of guests gathered at Easterham for the festive season, there are plenty of suspects to choose from.

All the elements of a classic mystery novel are here – a country house cut off by snow; a locked room murder; an amateur detective working alongside the local police; family secrets, clues and red herrings – but a lot of attention is also given to themes such as drugs and drug addiction (with some interesting insights into the attitudes of the time). Published in 1941, the war is in the background but doesn’t really have any influence on the story; it’s set in those early days of the war when not much seemed to be happening and apart from a reference to blackout curtains and Nigel’s complaint at having to travel to Essex in wartime on an old woman’s whim, it is barely mentioned at all.

Although Nigel Strangeways is very ordinary as far as literary detectives go (there’s nothing to make him stand out amongst the Poirots, Campions and Wimseys of the genre), I did like him and will be happy to spend more time in his company. I was intrigued by mentions of his wife Georgia’s past career as an explorer; she doesn’t have a very big part to play in the novel, but I enjoyed what we do see of her. As for the other characters, there are a good variety of them within the Restorick household, ranging from an author who is in love with Elizabeth to a doctor whose speciality is ‘nervous disorders’ in women. I particularly loved Clarissa Cavendish, who is obsessed with the Georgian period and speaks of it as ‘in my day’ as if she had actually been alive at the time.

I am so pleased to have discovered Nicholas Blake and I’m sure I’ll be trying another of his books soon!

Note: This book has also been published as The Case of the Abominable Snowman.

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

Rum Affair by Dorothy Dunnett – #1968Club

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I am, after all, the only really photogenic coloratura soprano alive. My only problem, just about then, was in staying alive.

It’s been a while since I read my first of Dorothy Dunnett’s Johnson Johnson mysteries and this week’s 1968 Club (hosted by Simon and Karen) seemed the perfect opportunity to read another one. Rum Affair – originally titled Dolly and the Singing Bird and then The Photogenic Soprano – was the first in the series to be published (in 1968 obviously), although Tropical Issue, the other one I’ve read, was the first chronologically.

Dunnett is better known for her historical novels, some of which have recently been reissued, but the seven books in her mystery series have contemporary settings. They are each narrated by a different young woman and all feature the portrait painter Johnson Johnson and his yacht Dolly.

Rum Affair opens with Tina Rossi, a Polish-Italian opera singer, arriving in Scotland where she is due to give two performances at the Edinburgh Festival. During a break in her schedule, she has arranged to meet her lover, Kenneth Holmes, at his friend’s Rose Street flat. However, there’s no sign of Kenneth – just a card with the three handwritten words, “Darling, I’m sorry”. Searching for clues to explain his absence, Tina opens a wardrobe door to reveal the body of a man, a stranger, who has been shot in the chest. When the police unexpectedly arrive, making enquiries about a robbery in the neighbourhood, she quickly makes the decision to conceal what has happened – to try to save her own reputation, she tells us, and Kenneth’s.

Instinct is a marvellous thing, I dare say; but I prefer to use my good sense. You, perhaps, with a strange man lying dead at your feet would have welcomed the police with an exhibition of nervous relief. I, on the other hand, kept my head.

On the same night, Tina’s path crosses for the first time with that of Johnson, who is staying nearby. Tina is immediately intrigued by Johnson, a mysterious man who wears bifocals and introduces himself as “thirty-eight. Painter. London. On holiday.” When Johnson invites her to join him on a yacht race to the Isle of Rum, she is quick to accept. Rum is where Kenneth is currently based, working on a highly sensitive project for his employers, although she doesn’t admit this to Johnson. However, it seems that Johnson has a reason of his own for wanting Tina to sail with him on board Dolly – and it’s not just so that he can paint her portrait!

I won’t go into any more detail regarding the plot because I wouldn’t like to inadvertently give too much away and spoil the mystery – and I don’t want to say much more about Tina Rossi either as I’m finding that part of the fun of reading the Johnson novels is in getting to know the woman who is narrating the story. What I will say is that Tina is very different from Rita Geddes of Tropical Issue and that their narrative voices reflect their different personalities and backgrounds (while I liked Rita immediately, I never connected with Tina at all, but I suppose you can’t like every character in every book). As for Johnson himself, even though I have now read two books in this series, he is still very much an enigma to me. Of course, we only see him through the eyes of the narrators so we only know what they choose to tell us and are reliant on their observations and interpretations of his character, which may not always be correct or true.

I also found the setting interesting; the race in which Johnson and Tina are participating takes them around the west coast of Scotland, visiting several islands of the Inner Hebrides, of which Rum is one.

In the summer night, the Inner Hebrides lay all about us, black on the indigo sea. Above us, the uninterrupted sky stretched, a light, dense ultramarine, its ghostly clouds and small, sharp white stars suspended over the bright winking lights, near and far, of a constellation of lighthouses, and the grey, dimly voyaging waves here below.

I particularly enjoyed the scenes set at Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa!

Although I don’t think these books come close to the brilliance of Dunnett’s Lymond or Niccolò series, or King Hereafter, they are still quite enjoyable in a different way. I am looking forward to reading the rest and meeting the other five narrators.

Witch Week: The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart

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This week Lory of The Emerald City Book Review is hosting her annual Witch Week event, a celebration of fantasy books and authors. This year’s theme is Dreams of Arthur – books which draw on the Arthurian legends. Having read and loved Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy a few years ago, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to read The Wicked Day, another of her Arthurian novels.

There is some overlap between The Wicked Day and the events of the final Merlin novel, The Last Enchantment, but in this book the focus switches to Mordred, the son of King Arthur and his half-sister, the witch Morgause. At the beginning of the novel, Mordred is being raised by peasants in the Orkney Islands and is unaware of his true parentage. It is only by chance that he is brought back into contact with his real mother, Morgause, by now the widow of King Lot of Lothian and Orkney, with whom she has had four more sons. Aware of Merlin’s prophecy suggesting that Mordred will be the cause of Arthur’s death, Morgause takes the boy into her household, sensing that he could be a useful weapon against Arthur.

Eventually, Morgause and her sons are summoned south to Camelot and Mordred will have to decide where his loyalties lie. But even if he chooses Arthur, will he be able to defy the prophecy or will he prove to be his father’s downfall after all?

I enjoyed this book, though maybe not quite as much as the three Merlin novels, which is probably because I found Merlin himself a more appealing character than Mordred. Having said that, Mary Stewart’s portrayal of Mordred is much more sympathetic than I had expected. Although my knowledge of Arthurian legend is very limited, I had gained the impression from other sources that Mordred was a villain, a traitor who betrayed Arthur. Stewart’s Mordred is not like that at all. He’s by no means perfect – he does have flaws and makes mistakes – but he always has the best of intentions and although he is ambitious any trouble he does cause for Arthur is largely due to circumstances outside his control.

As well as Mordred’s relationship with Arthur, his interactions with his four half-brothers – Gawain, Agravain, Gaheris and Gareth – are also explored. Their attitudes towards Mordred range from suspicion and rivalry to reluctant acceptance and respect. As I’ve said, I don’t know a lot about the Arthurian legends, so although I had heard of King Lot’s four sons and had a basic idea of how their stories would play out, it really was only a basic idea! The advantage of going into a book knowing very little about a subject is that you can be kept in suspense wondering what is going to happen and enjoy the story for its own sake, without any preconceived opinions; on the other hand, it would have been nice to have had other versions of the story and characters in mind so that I could have made comparisons and looked for similarities and differences.

At the end of the book we are given brief retellings of the sections of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain which deal with the Mordred legend. Stewart then goes on to explain why she chose to interpret Mordred’s character the way she did; I found it interesting to read that while she was writing the earlier Merlin novels she had accepted the traditional view of Mordred as a villain and only changed her mind when she came to research his story in detail.

As with Mary Stewart’s other Arthurian novels, the elements of fantasy in The Wicked Day are very subtle and understated, amounting to not much more than a few prophecies and visions. The 6th century Britain that she recreates is a real, believable place and her books feel much more like historical fiction than fantasy, which is possibly why I like them so much. I am planning to read her final Arthurian novel, The Prince and the Pilgrim, and will then see how other authors have approached the legends. When I reviewed The Last Enchantment I received lots of ideas for future reading in the comments, so I have plenty of books and authors to explore. Chris of Calmgrove has also put together a very informative guest post for Witch Week with more suggestions and recommendations.

Chocky by John Wyndham – #1968Club

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When I read The Day of the Triffids earlier this year a few people recommended Chocky as my next Wyndham. Chocky was published in 1968 (developed from an earlier novella which appeared in the magazine Amazing Stories in 1963) so it seemed a perfect choice for this week’s 1968 Club, the latest of the events hosted by Karen and Simon in which participants read and write about books from a chosen year.

David Gore, the narrator of Chocky, becomes concerned when he overhears his adopted son, Matthew, having a conversation with what he assumes is an imaginary friend. Apart from the fact that Matthew is almost twelve years old and is surely past the age when he should be playing this sort of game, it also seems to be a very strange conversation, not the sort you would expect children to have. Soon Matthew is asking some unusual questions: Why are there only seven days in a week and not eight? Where is Earth? And, more bizarrely, why do cows stop?

David and his wife, Mary, have had some experience with this sort of thing. Just a few years earlier, their daughter Polly had been inseparable from her own invisible friend, Piff. They can sense, though, that this is different. While Polly – who had been five years old at the time – had been very much in control of Piff, it appears to be the other way round with Matthew and Chocky. Matthew is unable to tell his parents Chocky’s age, where Chocky comes from or even whether Chocky is male or female (he eventually settles on female). It’s all quite worrying for David and Mary who don’t know how to help their son – or even if he really needs to be helped at all.

Who or what is Chocky? Is she a positive influence on Matthew or a harmful one? And what should his parents do about it? This is a very short novel – about 160 pages in the edition I read – so I am not going to say much more about the plot. What I will say is that it’s not difficult to guess what is going on; I made my mind up about Chocky almost immediately and I was right. David and Mary, however, are unaware of the truth and so the interest is in watching them each try to deal with the situation in their own way. Should they just ignore all mentions of Chocky and hope she goes away, as Piff did? Do they need to get a doctor involved? The only thing they agree on is that, although Matthew doesn’t seem at all frightened or unhappy, his behaviour is certainly not normal.

I loved Chocky; it’s the perfect sort of science fiction for me – that is, for someone who doesn’t usually choose to read it! Like The Midwich Cuckoos (my favourite of the three Wyndham novels I’ve read so far), this book features ordinary people living quiet, uneventful lives…until something slightly out of the ordinary happens and shakes them out of their peaceful existence. The science fiction elements are subtle – in fact, until the final chapter, it’s as much a domestic novel about the relationship between parents and children as it is a science fiction one.

This was a great choice for 1968 Club and I’m already looking forward to my next John Wyndham book, whichever that will be. I have also read another book from 1968 for the club, but haven’t finished my review yet so that one will be coming later in the week.

~

More 1968 books previously read and reviewed:

Cousin Kate by Georgette Heyer

Usually I am able to post a list of books from the relevant year which I’ve previously reviewed on my blog, but this time I can only find one. It seems that 1968 books have not featured very strongly in my reading until now!

A Halloween Treat: Six stories by Edgar Allan Poe

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It’s been a while since I last read anything by Edgar Allan Poe so I decided to pull my Complete Tales and Poems off the shelf this weekend to re-read a few of his stories. With Halloween on its way, I thought I would concentrate on some of his spooky, unsettling or gothic stories rather than the mysteries, science fiction, essays and other genres which are also included in the collection. Maybe I will write about some of those in a future post, but for now, here are my thoughts on the six stories I’ve managed to re-read over the weekend:

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Ligeia – This has always been one of my favourite Poe stories. It begins with the narrator describing his beautiful, talented, intelligent wife Ligeia, whom he met in a ‘large, old, decaying city near the Rhine’. When Ligeia dies, the heartbroken narrator retreats to England where he buys and restores an ancient abbey. Marrying again, he brings his new wife, the Lady Rowena, to live with him at the abbey where he prepares for her a chamber which sounds wonderfully sinister and eerie. The rays of the sun and moon fall ‘with a ghastly lustre on the objects within’, in each corner stands ‘a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite’ and an artificial current of wind behind the tapestries gives a ‘hideous and uneasy animation to the whole’.

The story is notable for the unreliability of the narrator and for the inclusion of one of Poe’s poems, The Conqueror Worm.

– 5 Ravens

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The Masque of the Red Death – This is a story I’ve always found slightly confusing. A prince and a thousand friends (could anyone really have a thousand friends?) lock themselves away in a castle while a terrible plague devastates the rest of the country. The moral of the story seems clear enough to me, but I’m not sure I’ve ever understood all of the symbolism, such as why the prince has seven chambers each decorated in a different colour – That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example in blue — and vividly blue were its windows. That’s maybe why this one has never been a favourite.

– 3 Ravens

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Metzengerstein – In this story, set in what I assume is medieval Germany, the young Baron Metzengerstein witnesses a horse in a tapestry take on human characteristics: The eyes, before invisible, now wore an energetic and human expression, while they gleamed with a fiery and unusual red; and the distended lips of the apparently enraged horse left in full view his sepulchral and disgusting teeth. Moments later a strange horse appears in his stables outside. Is it just an innocent animal or is it something more sinister? Again, this is not a favourite, but it’s an interesting story with lots of gothic elements.

– 3 Ravens

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The Oblong Box – I found this the weakest of the stories I’ve read this weekend. The narrator takes passage on a ship from Charleston to New York City and meets an old friend aboard. The friend is accompanied by his wife, his two sisters…and an oblong-shaped box made of pine. I thought it was quite obvious what must be inside the box – and I guessed correctly. The most interesting thing about the story is that the narrator comes to entirely the wrong conclusion!

– 2 Ravens

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Silence: A Fable – This is a very short story (three pages long in my edition) but one that I’ve always loved, mainly for the language Poe uses to create atmosphere. The story is narrated by a Demon, who is describing a region of Libya where giant water lilies ‘stretch towards the heaven their long ghastly necks’, the river ‘palpitates forever and forever beneath the red eye of the sun’ and ‘strange poisonous flowers lie writhing in perturbed slumber’. With its rhythm and repetition it has the feel of a poem in prose. It was night, and the rain fell; and, falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood.

As it’s so short, I don’t want to spoil the plot (not that there’s much plot to spoil). Without going into details, I think there are different ways you could interpret this story, but I see it as meaning that while humans may not necessarily be afraid of chaos, noise and destruction, what they fear most of all is complete and utter silence.

5 Ravens

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The Oval Portrait – Another very short story, at two and a half pages long. Our narrator becomes injured during a journey and takes refuge in a château, a place of ‘gloom and grandeur’. A portrait of a young woman in an oval frame opposite his bed catches his eye and he is fascinated when he learns the tragic story behind it. The similarities between The Oval Portrait and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – and what they each have to say about art and artists – are striking.

– 4 Ravens

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Have you read any of these? What are your favourite Poe stories?

If I’ve got you in the mood for more Poe, here are some of my older Poe-related posts which you may find interesting:

Mrs Poe by Lynn Cullen

Dragonwyck by Anya Seton (Poe makes a few brief appearances in this one)

The American Boy by Andrew Taylor (the title character is the ten-year-old Poe)

Ulalume: A Poem for Halloween

Small and Spooky (a short story anthology including Poe’s Morella)

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (re-read)

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When I joined the Classics Club in 2012 and put together the list of books I wanted to read, I decided that, whichever order I read the others in, I would save my re-read of The Count of Monte Cristo until last. It’s one of my favourite books (I had already read it twice) and I thought it would be something to look forward to, even if some of the other classics on my list turned out to be disappointing.

Picking it up to start reading for the third time, I did have a few doubts – there’s always a chance that a book you once loved might have lost its magic – but of course I needn’t have worried. The opening line (“On the 24th of February 1815, the lookout at Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the arrival of the three-master Pharaon, coming from Smyrna, Trieste and Naples”) is hardly the most scintillating or memorable in literature but reading it, knowing what is to come, gives me the same feeling as when I re-read the first line of other favourite books, such as Rebecca (“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”), Jane Eyre (“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day”) or Watership Down (“The primroses were over”).

Anyway, back to The Count of Monte Cristo! Our hero, or anti-hero (he can be considered to be both), is Edmond Dantès, a young sailor who, at the beginning of the novel, feels that he is the luckiest man in the world. Not only is his marriage to the beautiful Mercédès approaching, but following the death of his captain, he is also about to be given a ship to command. Things couldn’t be better…until the day of his wedding, when he is arrested on suspicion of conspiring against the king with the exiled Napoleon Bonaparte. Of course, Edmond has done nothing of the sort – it is all part of a plot by his jealous shipmate, Danglars, and his rival for Mercédès’ love, Fernand Mondego.

A third man, Villefort, has reasons of his own for wanting Dantès imprisoned and safely out of the way, so with these three enemies ranged against him, Edmond is thrown into a dungeon in the Château d’If where he remains for the next fourteen years. Although he does eventually find a way to escape, his life has been ruined: all of his hopes and dreams have been destroyed, Mercédès is lost to him and he can never get back the years of his youth that have been stolen from him. Vowing to punish his enemies for what they have done, Edmond transforms himself into the Count of Monte Cristo and launches an intricate and carefully planned system of revenge.

The events I have described above take up only a relatively small section of the novel; most of the book is devoted to following the Count as he sets his plans into action. It takes a long time before he begins to see results, but if there is one thing he has learned in prison it is how to be patient – and so he is prepared to spend years devising the perfect methods of revenge. This means the reader is faced with a series of seemingly unrelated subplots and a huge cast of characters; it can be quite overwhelming on a first read, but when you’re reading for the second or third time you can appreciate how things that appear to be irrelevant actually have great significance. This time round, without the same urgency to turn the pages to ‘see what happens next’, I was able to read at a slower pace and enjoy some of the episodes I had previously seen as unnecessarily long digressions, such as Franz and Albert’s adventures in Rome, La Carconte and the diamond ring, and the story of the bandit Luigi Vampa.

Does the Count achieve his aims – and is he happy with the final outcome? I’m not going to tell you (and if you haven’t read the book I’m sure you don’t want me to) but I will say that he does have some doubts along the way, particularly when he discovers that innocent people he never intended to hurt have also become caught up in his web of revenge. “What a fool I was,” said he, “not to tear my heart out on the day I resolved to avenge myself”. I always find it sad to see how he has changed as a result of his imprisonment – when we first meet him again after his escape from the Château d’If, the lively, optimistic young man has disappeared, to be replaced by someone much more cynical and bitter – but towards the end of the book there are signs that the old Edmond is still there, beneath the surface. Most people think of this as a revenge novel, which it certainly is, but we should remember that the Count also takes care to help and reward the friends who stayed loyal to him throughout everything.

Although The Count of Monte Cristo was published around the same time as Dumas’ d’Artagnan series, I think this is a much more mature novel, dealing with serious issues and raising some thought-provoking questions. There are moments of reflection and philosophy like this:

“The friends that we have lost do not repose in the bosom of the earth, but are buried deep in our hearts, and it has been thus ordained that we may always be accompanied by them.”

And this:

“It is the way of weakened minds to see everything through a black cloud. The soul forms its own horizons; your soul is darkened, and consequently the sky of the future appears stormy and unpromising.”

And this:

“Joy to hearts which have suffered long is like the dew on the ground after a long drought; both the heart and the ground absorb that beneficent moisture falling on them, and nothing is outwardly apparent.”

The novel takes the reader through a range of emotions, from anger to pity to frustration to sadness (some of Edmond’s scenes with a certain other character always bring tears to my eyes, thinking of everything he has lost and can never regain). As always with Dumas, though, you can expect an exciting and entertaining read, so there are also murders, poisonings, court cases and duels, thefts, anonymous letters, illegitimate children and searches for buried treasure. Not everything that happens feels entirely realistic and you do need to suspend disbelief now and then, but I don’t mind that when a book is so enjoyable to read.

I haven’t said very much about the other characters in the book (and apart from Edmond Dantès himself, whom I have always found fascinating and complex), I have to admit that most of them don’t have a lot of depth. There are two, however, that I do particularly love. The first is the Abbé Faria, a fellow prisoner of Edmond’s in the Château d’If, an extraordinary man who acts as inspiration, adviser and teacher to Edmond and without whom he would have lost the will to live. The other is Monsieur Noirtier, an elderly man who has been left unable to walk and talk, but who devises an unusual form of communication and forms a special bond with his granddaughter, Valentine.

There is so much more I would like to say about this wonderful book, but I would have to give spoiler warnings, and I think this post is long enough now anyway! I will leave you to read The Count of Monte Cristo for yourself, if you haven’t already. I know the length of the book can seem off-putting, but I wouldn’t recommend reading an abridged edition as the story is so complex I think you would be missing out on a lot.

This is book 100/100 read for the Classics Club, which means I have now completed my list! I’ll be posting a summary of my Classics Club experience soon.

The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley

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This is Natasha Pulley’s second novel. I remember seeing lots of very positive reviews of her first, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, a year or two ago and thinking it sounded interesting. I never got round to reading that book, but when I heard about her new one, The Bedlam Stacks – which sounded just as intriguing – I decided to give it a try.

Set mainly in Peru in 1860, The Bedlam Stacks is narrated by Merrick Tremayne, a former opium smuggler and an expert in botany. Confined to his family estate in Cornwall due to a leg injury, Merrick is trying to come to terms with the fact that he will now have to put his adventuring days behind him and find something else to do with his life. Just as he is beginning to lose hope, his old friend Clem Markham arrives with a request from Merrick’s former employers, the East India Company. To tackle the problem of treating malaria in India, a supply of quinine is urgently needed – and Merrick’s expertise with plants makes him the ideal person to travel with Clem to Peru to take cuttings of the quinine-rich cinchona tree.

At first Merrick is reluctant to agree, knowing that his disability will make it difficult for him to travel through dangerous terrain – not to mention the fact that the Peruvians have a monopoly on the trees and are not about to let anyone else steal them. The alternative, though, is to stay at home and follow his brother’s suggestion of becoming a parson, so it doesn’t take him long to reach a decision! Venturing into the uncharted depths of Peru, Merrick and Clem finally arrive in the holy town of Bedlam, a place where the boundaries between magic and reality begin to merge.

The magical realism elements in The Bedlam Stacks are much more dominant than I had expected. There are moving statues, exploding trees and several other surprises which I will leave you to discover for yourself! This wasn’t really to my taste – I think I would have found it just as enjoyable to read a novel about an expedition to Peru that was based entirely on fact, without the touches of fantasy – but it was certainly imaginative and original. I did love the concept of the Markayuq statues, which apparently really exist and are still found in the countryside in Peru, originally thought to be guarding the villages. Natasha Pulley finds a clever and fascinating way to incorporate these into the story, but again I don’t want to say too much.

The sense of place is very strong – there are some wonderful descriptions of the Peruvian landscape as well as vivid accounts of more practical considerations such as the altitude sickness experienced during the journey – but I was slightly disappointed that there wasn’t a stronger sense of the time period. Neither Merrick’s narrative voice nor the dialogue between the characters felt convincingly Victorian to me; the choice of words and phrases, the grammar and the structure of sentences just weren’t right for the 19th century. I’m aware, though, that I can be a bit pedantic about anachronistic language used in historical novels and I know it’s not something that bothers everyone!

I did find a lot to enjoy in The Bedlam Stacks, although I’m sorry that I couldn’t quite manage to love it. Maybe I’m just not the right reader for Natasha Pulley’s books, but I’m still glad I’ve tried this one – even if not everything worked for me, I can understand the appeal!

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