Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

January 3, 2015January 3, 201524 Comments

My first introduction to Kate Atkinson’s work was Life After Life, which I read in 2013 and loved. I’ve been wanting to read more of her books and knowing that a lot of people speak very highly of her Jackson Brodie novels, I decided to start with the first one in the series, Case Histories.

In Case Histories, private detective Jackson Brodie is investigating three old cases that have remained unresolved for years:

Case History No. 1 – During the summer heatwave of 1970, three-year-old Olivia Land is sleeping in a tent in the garden with her older sister, Amelia. When Amelia wakes up, she finds that Olivia has disappeared without trace.

Case History No. 2 – In 1994, eighteen-year-old Laura Wyre is murdered on her first day working in her father’s office. Her killer has still not been found and no motive for the attack has ever been discovered.

Case History No. 3 – In 1979, Michelle Fletcher is living on an isolated farm with her new husband and baby daughter. Depressed, lonely and finding it hard to cope, an argument with her husband ends in a brutal murder.

The connection between these three stories is Jackson Brodie, who is contacted by family members hoping to have the cases reopened or looked at again. Amelia and Julia Land want to find out what happened to their little sister, Olivia, and whether she could still be alive; Laura’s father, Theo, wants to know who killed his beloved daughter and why; and Shirley Morrison is searching for her sister Michelle’s daughter, with whom she lost contact after the incident which tore their family apart. But Jackson has problems of his own and as he begins to investigate these three very different crimes, he is reminded of a tragedy in his own past and another ‘lost girl’ who disappeared from his life decades earlier.

I loved Case Histories. I know describing a book as unputdownable is a cliché, but it was true in this case – it really is the sort of book where once you start reading, you don’t want to stop until you reach the end. It’s a crime novel I would recommend even to readers who are not really interested in crime fiction because, while the three mysteries are quite interesting, the real strength of the book is in the characterisation. The story is not so much about the crimes themselves as about the effect they had on the people involved and how they have tried (and often failed) to move on from what has happened.

I liked Jackson and am looking forward to meeting him again in the rest of the series, but my favourites in this book were Amelia and Theo. Amelia, who is approaching middle age feeling friendless and unwanted, has invented an imaginary boyfriend to brighten up her non-existent social life, and Theo, for whom his daughter was the centre of his universe, is neglecting his health while he devotes his life to finding her killer, drawing up colour-coded charts of her friends and teachers and making yearly pilgrimages to the scene of her death. Their lives are sad, lonely and tragic, yet Atkinson injects just enough humour into their stories to turn them into characters who are amusing but not ridiculous, flawed but sympathetic.

I also thought the structure of the book was interesting, because the timeline is not entirely linear. We see events from one perspective in one chapter, then in the next chapter we go back several hours, days or weeks to see those same events from another character’s perspective, filling in gaps and adding to our knowledge of what is going on. Two of the case histories – Olivia’s disappearance and Laura’s murder – worked very well alongside each other, but the third one, involving Michelle and her sister, felt disconnected from the others and didn’t work quite as well. I think I had expected all three cases to be much more closely linked than they actually were and I was disappointed that they weren’t.

At the end of the book, after Jackson is sure he’s solved the crimes, there are still more twists to come. We are given enough information throughout the story so that we can guess at what may have happened and work out some parts of the mystery, but the final pieces of the puzzle are withheld from us until the very end.

That’s two Kate Atkinson books read and two enjoyed; now I can’t wait to read the second book in the Jackson Brodie series, One Good Turn.

Season of Storms by Susanna Kearsley

January 1, 2015January 1, 201513 Comments

Happy New Year! I had considered posting about my reading plans for 2015 today but, to be honest, I don’t really have any. I know I want to do some re-reading this year, as that’s something I’ve been neglecting, but apart from that I don’t have any specific goals in mind. I want to keep things stress-free and just read the books that I really want to read without worrying about challenges and targets. I do still have some December reads to tell you about, so I thought I would get on with writing about those instead…starting with Susanna Kearsley’s 2001 novel, Season of Storms.

Our narrator, Celia Sands, is a twenty-two-year-old actress who has been offered the lead role in a play being staged at an outdoor theatre in the grounds of Il Piacere, an Italian villa. The play – Il Prezzo – was written in the 1920s by the playwright Galeazzo D’Ascanio for his lover, another actress also called Celia Sands. The night before the play was due to have its first performance, the first Celia disappeared and was never seen again.

Now, decades later, the second Celia Sands (no relation to the first despite being named after her) has been invited by D’Ascanio’s grandson, Alessandro, to star in a renewed version of the play. Arriving at Il Piacere, she meets the other people involved with the play and soon becomes aware of tensions within the group; it seems to Celia that everyone has a secret to hide. As the preparations continue and rehearsals begin, strange things start to happen – a servant disappears without trace, a man is found dead, and Celia suspects that her room may be haunted – and the mysteries of the past become entwined with the mysteries of the present.

Season of Storms is the seventh Susanna Kearsley book I’ve read and the first one I’ve been slightly disappointed by. I think part of the problem was that the pace was very slow at the beginning and the story took a very long time to really get started; I think the book could probably have been a lot shorter without losing any essential plot points. By the time the various threads of the novel began to come together in the second half of the book I was struggling to stay interested.

Unlike some of Kearsley’s other books, this one is set almost entirely in the present with only a few flashbacks in which we are given some glimpses of Galeazzo D’Ascanio and the first Celia Sands. The connections between the past and present storylines weren’t strong enough and I felt that the historical one wasn’t resolved properly; I would have liked more focus on solving the mystery of the first Celia’s disappearance and on the supernatural aspects of the novel, which never really came to anything. I was also disappointed by the romantic side of the story – there was no real spark between Celia and her eventual romantic interest and he was not one of my favourite Kearsley heroes.

On a more positive note, Kearsley’s novels always have wonderful settings and this one is no exception! Il Piacere, the playwright’s villa, is on Lake Garda, somewhere I have never been but have always wanted to visit. The descriptions of the estate and the surrounding area are beautiful. Before arriving at Il Piacere, Celia spends some time in Venice, which is somewhere I have visited and I loved watching her explore St Mark’s Square and the Basilica, the canals and the bridges.

There were other things that I liked – the little theatrical touches such as dividing the story into Acts and Scenes and starting the chapters with quotes from plays; and Celia’s relationship with Bryan and Rupert, the gay couple who raised her when her glamorous actress mother neglected her – but there were too many negative points for me to really be able to say that I enjoyed this book.

Not a favourite, then, but I’m pleased I still have two more unread Susanna Kearsley novels to read – and a new one, A Desperate Fortune, to look forward to in 2015.

Winter Siege by Ariana Franklin and Samantha Norman

December 27, 2014December 27, 20142 Comments

I hope everyone had a good Christmas! I have an appropriately wintry book to tell you about today before I get round to posting my end-of-year list, probably on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Ariana Franklin (a pen name of Diana Norman) was the author of the Adelia Aguilar mystery series, of which I’ve still only read the first, Mistress of the Art of Death. As you may know, she sadly died in 2011, leaving Winter Siege unfinished, but the book has now been completed by her daughter, Samantha Norman. Winter Siege is not part of the Adelia Aguilar series, but a standalone novel set during the period of English history known as the Anarchy.

It’s 1141 and the country is in the grip of a civil war as King Stephen and his cousin, the Empress Matilda, are battling for the English crown. In the Cambridgeshire Fens, an eleven-year-old girl is captured by a passing band of soldiers, raped and left for dead. The child’s way of dealing with her trauma is to wipe the whole incident entirely from her mind, so that by the time she is discovered by Gwil, a kind-hearted mercenary, she can’t remember her name, where she lives or anything about her past. Gwil renames her Penda and allows her to accompany him, disguised as a boy, while he builds a new career for himself as a travelling entertainer.

Moving from place to place, the two of them impress the crowds with their displays of archery while Gwil continues to search for any signs of Penda’s attackers – his only clues being a scrap of parchment carrying a message in Greek and the knowledge that the soldiers were accompanied by a monk smelling strongly of an unusual herb. Eventually, fate will take Gwil and Penda to Kenniford Castle, home of Maud, a sixteen-year-old ward of King Stephen.

To ensure the safety of her castle and her people, Maud has been forced to marry a man much older than herself – the brutal, drunken Sir John of Tewing, a supporter of Stephen’s. But when Sir John is struck down by illness and the Empress Matilda arrives at Kenniford asking for protection, Maud must decide whether to switch sides. This is a decision that will place the castle at the heart of the civil war and all of Gwil’s and Penda’s archery skills will be needed to help defend it.

I really enjoyed this entertaining medieval novel. As with Mistress of the Art of Death, I found it very atmospheric and evocative of the time period. The mystery aspect of the novel following Gwil’s search for the evil monk was slightly disappointing, but there was a second mystery that I found more interesting – and this involved the identity of an old abbot who is dictating the story of the Anarchy to his scribe, several decades into the future (in 1180). These sections provide a sort of framework for the rest of the novel and help to explain some of the historical background, while also making us curious as to who the abbot really is and how he knows so much about what happened at Kenniford Castle.

The book is called Winter Siege and so far I haven’t mentioned either winter or sieges, but I can assure you that both do play a part in the story. Snow is falling throughout much of the novel and one particularly snowy night forms the backdrop for one of the book’s most memorable scenes, when Gwil and Penda meet Matilda for the first time. Later in the book, our characters find themselves trapped in a besieged castle, which is when the various threads of the story are brought together.

Bearing in mind that this novel was written by both Ariana Franklin and Samantha Norman, it all seemed like the work of one author to me; it never felt uneven or disjointed. I don’t know how much Franklin had managed to complete before her death or if she would have taken the story in a different direction…but I think she would be pleased if she could read the finished version.

Nora Bonesteel’s Christmas Past by Sharyn McCrumb

December 23, 2014December 23, 20146 Comments

Sharyn McCrumb is a name I remember from about fifteen years ago when I read two of the books in her Ballad mystery series, She Walks These Hills and The Ballad of Frankie Silver, both set in the Appalachian Mountains and steeped in history and folklore. I know that I enjoyed those two books, but the details have faded from my mind now, so when I saw this new novella available on NetGalley I couldn’t wait to read it and reacquaint myself with Sharyn McCrumb’s work. I hadn’t even realised that she had been continuing to write Ballad novels and that there are ten in the series now!

Nora Bonesteel’s Christmas Past is described as a novella, but it’s really two separate short stories which alternate with each other throughout the book. In the first, we join Sheriff Spencer Arrowood and his deputy Joe LeDonne who have been given the unwelcome task of arresting a man on Christmas Eve. Arriving at the alleged criminal’s home – a remote mountain farm – they encounter problems they had never expected and end up spending Christmas Eve in a very unusual way.

Meanwhile, Nora Bonesteel, an elderly woman with the gift of ‘the Sight’, is being visited by her new neighbour, Shirley Haverty, who has moved into the house Nora still thinks of as ‘the old Honeycutt place’. The Havertys have bought the house as a summer home but have decided to stay on this year and experience a traditional Christmas in the mountains. After a few unexplained mishaps Shirley has become convinced that the house is haunted…and that the ghost doesn’t seem to approve of their bright pink artificial Christmas tree! Can Nora use her psychic abilities and her memories of the house in days gone by to lay the ghost to rest?

This is a short book and could easily be read in one or two sittings (though I didn’t manage that due to choosing a busy time to start reading it). It’s not necessary to have read any of Sharyn McCrumb’s previous books, though I did remember the characters of the Sheriff, Joe LeDonne and Nora Bonesteel.

The two stories in the book are, as I’ve said, completely independent of each other and never come together at all, not even at the end. I found this a bit disappointing and I think it might have been better if they had been presented as two entirely separate stories rather than giving us a few pages of one followed by a few of the other. What the stories do have in common is the Appalachian setting and the fact that they both deal with the subjects of Christmas traditions and the mountain lifestyle.

Nora Bonesteel’s Christmas Past doesn’t have the depth or complexity of the longer novels in the Ballad series and unlike the full-length books there’s no mystery to be solved, but it’s an enjoyable, undemanding read and perfect for the Christmas season.

And now I’m going to end this post on an appropriate note by wishing everyone a Merry Christmas! I should be back between Christmas and New Year with another winter-themed review and my end-of-year lists.

England, Arise by Juliet Barker

December 20, 2014December 20, 20145 Comments

After reading Dan Jones’ The Hollow Crown recently, I moved straight on to another non-fiction book on English history while I was still in the right mood! But while The Hollow Crown looked at the Wars of the Roses, a period I’m starting to become very familiar with, this book deals with an entirely different subject and one that I previously knew very little about: the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

The first thing I discovered on beginning Juliet Barker’s England, Arise was that even the little I thought I did know about the revolt was incorrect. To call it the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ is inaccurate because the people involved actually came from a range of different backgrounds and included craftsmen, artisans and apprentices as well as agricultural workers. Peasants’ Revolt was a label used by 19th century historians; Barker replaces it in this book with other terms such as ‘Great Revolt’, which is a more accurate description. I also hadn’t realised that there was not just one single revolt, but a whole series of uprisings, riots and rebellions taking place across large areas of the country.

In the first few chapters of the book, Barker puts things into context for us and explains some of the possible causes and motives for the revolt. First, she provides some political background by discussing the final years of the reign of Edward III and the challenges faced by his successor, his grandson Richard II, who came to the throne at the age of ten. The ongoing war with France meant that money was urgently needed and the solution was to tax the English people…three times, in quick succession. There was widespread discontent and resentment over the collection of the taxes and this is what sparked the rebellion. Of course, it wasn’t quite as simple as that – in some cases the anger was directed at the church or at corrupt officials, and this is also discussed in the book.

Next, we are given some information on living conditions in England at that time: the feudal system and why it was starting to break down, the effects of the plague on the population, the differences and similarities between rural and urban societies, and the types of employment people could expect to find. The author also tries to dispel some popular perceptions of medieval life, suggesting that literacy levels were higher than we tend to think and that travel from one place to another was much more common. People were becoming increasingly literate and well informed but still had little say in how the country was run. All of these things may have contributed to the circumstances that led to the revolt.

I loved reading about the lifestyles of medieval people, but the part of the book dealing with the revolt itself was actually of less interest to me. I found it too detailed for the general reader, describing countless incidents that occurred in each county and giving names of dozens of individuals who rebelled and who they were rebelling against. I didn’t feel that I really needed all of this information and it quickly started to become repetitive. The book does seem to be very sympathetic towards the rebels. At first I thought this was fair but as I read one account after another of their burning and looting, stealing from churches and plundering palaces, beheading the Archbishop and Chancellor, storming prisons, destroying legal documents and murdering Flemish immigrants, I wasn’t so sure!

The only individual name I had ever heard of in connection with the revolt (or the only one whose name has stuck in my mind, at least) was Wat Tyler, but it seems that Wat Tyler played a much smaller part in the revolt than I had imagined. He and two other names commonly associated with the period – Jack Straw and John Balle – are each given their own appendix at the end of the book, but there were many, many other participants in the revolt whose roles are also discussed throughout the text. The reaction of Richard II and the way he tried to respond to the rebels is examined too, and the final chapters of the book look at the aftermath and consequences of the revolt.

England, Arise was a fascinating read and I do recommend it but, as I didn’t find the actual revolt as interesting to read about as I’d hoped, I think a more general social history of the 14th century would probably have been a better choice for me. I would still like to read Juliet Barker’s biography of the Brontës, though – it’s only the length that has been putting me off that one!

I received a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Girl Who Couldn’t Read by John Harding

December 15, 2014December 15, 20146 Comments

Three years ago I read John Harding’s Florence and Giles and loved it, so I was pleased to find a copy of The Girl Who Couldn’t Read in the library. It’s a sequel and will make more sense if you’ve read Florence and Giles first, but don’t worry if you haven’t because it should still work perfectly well as a standalone.

The story is set in the 1890s and is narrated by Doctor Shepherd, who has just arrived at his new job in a women’s mental hospital on an isolated island in New England. Taking a tour of the hospital’s facilities with his new colleague, Doctor Morgan, he is appalled by some of the methods being used to control the patients. When he tells the other doctor of his concerns, Morgan agrees to an experiment: Shepherd can choose one of the women to work with using his own methods in an attempt to prove whether gentle, humane treatment can be as effective as harshness and brutality.

The patient Doctor Shepherd picks for his experiment is a young girl known as Jane Dove – she says she can’t remember her real name, her age or anything about her past. She is also unable to read (and claims that she has never been allowed to learn) and, according to Doctor Morgan, she can’t even use the English language correctly. It seems Shepherd’s task could turn out to be a lot harder than he’d expected! After spending some time with Jane, though, he begins to realise that while the girl’s speech is unconventional, the way she uses nouns and verbs actually makes perfect sense.

She invented new words from old, often by changing the way they were used. She said “we outsided” rather than “we went outside”, or “I downstairsed” in place of “I went downstairs”, both of which I found perfectly clear and actually more economical than the conventional expression.

Jane immediately reminded me of a character from Florence and Giles – another girl who used language in a creative and unusual way. As Doctor Shepherd continues to work with her, encouraging her to search her memory and giving her books to look at, the connection between Jane and that other girl becomes clear. But what about Shepherd himself? It’s obvious from the very first chapter that he is not who he says he is either…and possibly not even a doctor at all!

I love books with unreliable narrators and Doctor Shepherd is a very intriguing one. We know that he is unreliable, we know that he is not being honest with us – but we don’t know why and we don’t know who he really is. The truth about Shepherd isn’t revealed until near the end of the novel, but along the way there are plenty of plot twists and surprises! And to make things even more interesting, Doctor Shepherd and Jane Dove aren’t the only people in the story with secrets to hide; there’s also a third mystery and this one made me think of a classic Victorian novel – an impression that grew stronger as the story progressed.

The Girl Who Couldn’t Read is a great book – it’s maybe not quite as good as Florence and Giles but it comes very close! I did wonder whether the setting might make it too similar to The Asylum by John Harwood, which I read just a few weeks ago, but fortunately they are two very different novels with very different plots and characters. I thoroughly enjoyed them both!

The Hollow Crown by Dan Jones

December 13, 2014December 13, 20146 Comments

A rare non-fiction review here today! Having loved Dan Jones’ book on the Plantagenets, I was curious to see how he would approach the Wars of the Roses, which is one of my favourite periods of English history. I was looking forward to another well written, thoroughly researched book that would make a complex subject accessible and easy to understand – and that’s what I got, although there were one or two problems which prevented me from enjoying this book as much as the previous one.

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors begins with the marriage of Henry V and Catherine of Valois, laying the foundation for the years of conflict that would follow. Best known for his victory over the French at Agincourt, Henry V was considered one of England’s great medieval kings, but when he died in 1422 of a sudden illness with his only heir still a baby, the scene was set for decades of uncertainty and instability. As Henry’s son, Henry VI, grew into an adult it became obvious that he was unfit to rule. Suffering from an unspecified mental illness, he was a weak and ineffectual king, and this paved the way for rival claimants to the throne – Richard of York and his son, the future Edward IV.

From the 1450s to the 1480s a series of battles were fought between the two rival branches of the royal house – York and Lancaster. This book takes us through the entire period in chronological order, detailing each battle and its outcome and examining the reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV, Richard III and finally Henry VII, who defeated Richard at the Battle of Bosworth and founded a new royal dynasty – the Tudors. Naturally a lot of the focus is on the male figures of the period – the kings and dukes and earls – but Jones shows understanding and sympathy for some of the women too: Margaret Beaufort who gave birth to Henry Tudor at the age of thirteen and according to Jones may have been left physically and mentally traumatised by the experience, and Henry VI’s wife, Margaret of Anjou, who found herself with the responsibility of trying to maintain some sort of control of the kingdom during her husband’s long spells of illness.

This is a shorter book than The Plantagenets (and focuses more intensely on a shorter period of history) and, like the previous volume, it’s very readable and even quite gripping in places. There was one area, though, where I felt that this book was not as good as the first one. In The Plantagenets I felt that Jones had given a fair and balanced account of the historical people and events concerned but The Hollow Crown feels very biased towards the Lancastrian/Tudor point of view. The bias is most noticeable, maybe not surprisingly, in the sections dealing with Richard III where Jones makes it clear where he stands on the questions of what happened to the Princes in the Tower and how Henry VI met his death. Now, I know Richard is a controversial figure and it would be difficult for any historian not to have an opinion of him one way or the other, but it would have been nice if some alternative theories could have been explored here as well instead of just being dismissed in one or two sentences!

I did enjoy The Hollow Crown, though. Dan Jones’ writing style is lively and entertaining, which means his books are good choices for someone like myself who prefers fiction to non-fiction. I feel that I’m starting to have quite a good knowledge of the Wars of the Roses now but there was still some information here that was new to me (particularly near the end of the book, where he looks at the fate of the de la Poles, the final Yorkist claimants). This book could also be a good place to start if you know nothing about the Wars of the Roses – it’s a very complex and confusing period but Jones does a good job of making it as easy to understand as possible…I hope you’ll find it as fascinating as I do!

I received a copy of The Hollow Crown for review via NetGalley.