Category: Reviews

No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes

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I’ve read and enjoyed two of Natalie Haynes’ previous novels, A Thousand Ships and Stone Blind – both Greek mythology retellings, inspired by the Trojan War and the story of Medusa, respectively – so I was looking forward to this one, No Friend to This House. It retells the myth of Medea and is based on Euripides’ classic play.

Medea, however, doesn’t appear until halfway through the book. The first half is devoted to describing the journey of the Argo, the ship which carries Jason and his men, the Argonauts, to Medea’s home in Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece. Rather than telling this part of the story through the eyes of the Argonauts, though, it’s told from the perspectives of the various women – both mortals and goddesses – whose lives are touched in some way by the Argo‘s journey. This narrative structure is similar to the other two Haynes novels I’ve read and in all three it’s very effective as the actions of those on the peripherals can be just as important as those at the centre of the story.

Some of the characters we hear from are names everyone will know, such as the goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, but others are less famous – for example, Erato the Muse, the priestess Iphias and even the dove, Peleia! One of these lesser known characters, Kleite, is particularly grateful to be given a voice at last…

That’s right, I’m just glossed over every time – Kleite with the beautiful hair – as if that tells you who I am or why I did what I did. So if you didn’t know me until I got your attention just now, well isn’t that more reason to include me, not less? What’s the point in telling the old stories all over again in the same way?

Once Medea makes her appearance, the book begins to feel different. We spend longer with Medea than with any of the other characters, seeing multiple chapters from her perspective, and I missed the wide range of voices we heard in the earlier sections of the book. Still, I found this retelling of the Jason and Medea story much more enjoyable than the last one I read (Savage Beasts by Rani Selvarajah). There were also some other little touches that I loved. For example, every chapter is headed with a word or string of words in italics which, taken on their own, make no sense at all, but when put together tell a story-within-a-story. There’s also a fascinating ‘interlude’ in the middle of the book which describes the origins of the Golden Fleece itself.

Overall, I think I enjoyed this book more than A Thousand Ships but not quite as much as Stone Blind, although all three are excellent. I still need to read her earlier novels and her non-fiction, but I would also like to hear any recommendations of other Jason and Medea retellings! Have you read any good ones?

The Lost Château by Dinah Jefferies

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Last year I read and enjoyed Dinah Jefferies’ The Greek House. The Lost Château is a sequel of sorts, but it’s not necessary to have read the previous book first.

Most of the novel is set in 1936 and follows one of the characters from The Greek House, Thirza Caruthers, who is now living with her Italian husband, Emilio Bellini, at Merchant’s House in Corfu with their five-year-old daughter Romi and Emilio’s two twin daughters from his first marriage, Lucia and Valentina. When nineteen-year-old Lucia becomes a supporter of Mussolini’s Fascist movement and runs away to Spain to get involved in the Civil War, Emilio insists on going after her to bring her home, much to Thirza’s horror. However, Thirza will be kept busy during Emilio’s absence, because her great-aunt Berenice has been in hospital and needs someone to care for her when she returns home.

Berenice lives in France, in an old château in the Dordogne, leading a solitary existence since the death of her daughter, Sophie, and the disappearance of her husband many years earlier. Accompanied by Valentina and Romi, Thirza goes to stay with Berenice, where she continues to worry about Emilio but finds distractions in trying to keep the crumbling, neglected château clean and tidy and in delving into the mystery of Berenice’s past. Why is Berenice so hostile and withdrawn? Who is the mysterious Géraldine who once lived in a cottage on the estate? And what really happened to Sophie all those years ago?

I’m counting The Lost Château towards Paris in July hosted by Emma of Words and Peace as most of the book is set in France, mainly in the Dordogne region near Sarlat-la-Canéda. As usual with Dinah Jefferies, everything is beautifully described from the 17th century stone château surrounded by forest to the cobbled streets and busy shops of Sarlat. We also briefly see Paris when Thirza and Valentina are invited to visit Jean-Paul, a widower whose mother is hoping to buy Berenice’s château. Thirza is immediately attracted to Jean-Paul and spends the whole book battling with her feelings for him, a storyline which annoyed me as Thirza claims to love her husband but makes no attempt to understand why he’s prepared to enter a dangerous warzone to rescue his daughter and accuses him of being selfish. Thirza herself was the one who seemed selfish to me – although to give her some credit, she does start to think differently about things by the end of the book.

Although I loved the French setting, Lucia’s story sounded fascinating and I was sorry that we only hear about it from a distance as news from Spain reaches Thirza. I would have liked some chapters from Lucia’s point of view to see the Spanish Civil War unfold at first hand and to understand what drives a vulnerable young woman towards radical politics. I suppose that would have made the book too long! We do, however, get some chapters from Berenice’s perspective, set several decades earlier when she first comes to live at the château as a young wife and mother. Berenice’s story is sad and shocking and explains why she has become the unhappy, prickly person we meet in the 1930s timeline.

This isn’t my favourite book by Dinah Jefferies but I did find it interesting. I wonder if there will be a third novel about these characters; the way this one ended made me think that there could be, as various family members are now positioned in different places around Europe with the outbreak of the Second World War approaching.

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

Book 6/20 of 20 Books of Summer

This Dark Night by Deborah Lutz

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My favourite of the three Brontë sisters has always been Emily; although I love Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I love Wuthering Heights more and I also find Emily herself the most interesting and intriguing person of the three. When I came across this new biography by Deborah Lutz, then, I knew I wanted to read it. I’ve read other books about the Brontës – mainly fictional ones such as Dark Quartet by Lynne Reid Banks and The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan (see my Top Ten Tuesday post for a full list) – but I liked the idea of one with a specific focus on Emily.

The book takes us through Emily’s entire life, beginning with her birth in 1818, the fifth of six children. When Emily was three, her mother died, leaving the children to be raised by their aunt and their father, Patrick Brontë, an Irish clergyman. Growing up in a parsonage in Haworth, West Yorkshire, Emily and her younger sister Anne developed their writing skills with a series of poems and stories set in the imaginary world of Gondal. Although most of this material has been lost, some of Emily’s Gondal poems still exist and Lutz uses them to explore what they can tell us about Emily as a person and how they provided the foundation that led to the writing of Wuthering Heights.

Emily’s early life was marked by various tragedies – just a few years after her mother’s death, her two eldest sisters also died of tuberculosis, having fallen ill at Cowan Bridge School (the model for Lowood School in Jane Eyre). As Patrick was reluctant to let his three surviving daughters attend school after this, Charlotte, Emily and Anne were largely educated at home. Rarely mixing with people outside the family, Emily didn’t make friends easily and was seen as a quiet, reclusive, fiercely private person. As an adult, although she briefly worked as a teacher and studied in Brussels with Charlotte, Emily continued to spend most of her time at home, managing the household and caring for her father and brother, Branwell, who was descending into alcoholism, having failed in his attempts to establish a literary career of his own.

Emily died in December 1848 at the age of thirty, just three months after Branwell and five months before Anne, all probably of tuberculosis. Charlotte, the only sibling to marry, died seven years later from complications during a pregnancy. It’s thought that the insanitary conditions in the village of Haworth, including a water supply contaminated by the nearby graveyard may have contributed to the poor health of the Brontë family.

As Emily left so little of her own work and correspondence behind, most of what we know of her comes from letters written by Charlotte and her friend, Ellen Nussey. Because we don’t have much insight into what Emily herself may have been thinking or feeling, a lot of this biography is based on speculation – ‘Emily probably thought’ or ‘it’s possible that Emily felt’ – as well as a general overview of the world in which Emily lived and how things she saw or experienced may have influenced her character and work. It also seems that almost as much attention is given to Charlotte and Anne, although that’s understandable as the lives and careers of the three sisters are so closely connected.

Something that comes across strongly is how exceptionally talented Emily was. Obviously, her writing is discussed in detail: her poems including the Gondal poetry; Wuthering Heights, the difficulty she had in getting it published and the way it was reviewed at the time; and the second novel she was working on at the time of her death, which has sadly never been found. However, Emily was also an accomplished pianist and a gifted artist – some of her artwork is reproduced in the book, including her wonderful drawings of her dogs. Her achievements are particularly impressive when you remember that she spent very little time at school and was mostly self-educated.

Although I can’t say that I learned a lot from this book (maybe because, as I’ve mentioned, there’s simply not that much we can learn due to the limited information available), I did enjoy reading it. It doesn’t feel too academic and is an easy book to read. For those who want to dig deeper, there are notes, references and a bibliography at the end of the book, but otherwise I think this would probably be a good introduction to the lives of Emily and her siblings.

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

Book 5/20 of 20 Books of Summer

A Far-flung Life by ML Stedman

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I remember really enjoying ML Stedman’s first novel, The Light Between Oceans, which I read when it was published in 2012. It’s been a fourteen year wait for her second book, but I’m pleased to say that it was definitely worth waiting for! Like the first book, which followed the lonely lives of a lighthouse keeper and his wife, A Far-flung Life (as the title suggests) is set in another remote location – a sheep station in rural Western Australia.

The novel opens on a hot summer’s day in January 1958 with Phil MacBride and his two sons, twenty-two-year-old Warren and eighteen-year-old Matt, on their way to a meeting in the nearest town – a journey that takes hours due to the vastness of the landscape. Phil’s wife, Lorna MacBride, is waiting at home on the family sheep station, Meredith Downs, with their daughter, Rosie, unaware that a terrible tragedy is taking place on the road – a kangaroo has jumped in front of the MacBride’s truck, causing an accident in which Phil and Warren are both killed and Matt, the only survivor, is left suffering from head injuries and memory loss.

As Matt begins the long process of recovery, he’s forced to come to terms with the fact that his life has now changed forever. Being the youngest son, he had been looking forward to leaving Meredith Downs and seeing the world, but that’s no longer an option – now he’ll have to step up and run the sheep station, continuing his father’s work and providing for his remaining family members. However, there’s still more trouble ahead for the MacBrides…but I’m not going to say much more about the plot, as the next traumatic incident is another pivotal moment that causes a sequence of serious effects for everyone involved.

This is a book with a lot of misery in it, then, but although it’s certainly heartbreaking at times and uncomfortable to read at others, it’s written with a warmth that stops it from becoming too unbearably bleak. I loved the characters – a lot of the focus is on first Rosie and then Matt, both people who make mistakes, do bad things (mostly unintentionally) and then have to deal with the consequences. They find different methods of coping, but each of them, in his or her own way, ends up making huge sacrifices. I was also very fond of Andy, a second generation character whom we first get to know as a child, obsessed with his rock collection, and watch grow into an adult, carrying the story forward into the future.

The secondary characters are strongly drawn as well, particularly Pete Peachey, the ‘roo shooter’, who was a prisoner of war in Japan and now lives alone in a tent at Meredith Downs, culling the kangaroos on the station. Pete offers support and friendship to the MacBride family, but is also struggling with his own problems and his own identity. Then there’s Bonnie Edquist, a geologist working for a mining company who are beginning to explore the Meredith Downs lands in search of valuable minerals. Bonnie’s arrival opens up several storylines: a possible romance; the unwelcome impact of mining on people’s homes (the MacBride’s sheep station, like many others, was leased by the government rather than owned by the family); and the devasting health impacts of asbestos.

I also loved the setting, which is vividly described, capturing the sheer size of the million-acre sheep station and the isolated lives of the people who live there. It reminded me of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds, another family saga with a similar setting – although the plots are very different. A Far-flung Life is one of the best books I’ve read this year and despite the misery I do recommend it!

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

Book 4/20 of 20 Books of Summer

The Unicorn Hunters by Katherine Arden

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This was one of my most anticipated new releases of the year, having loved first Katherine Arden’s Winternight trilogy and then her standalone novel, The Warm Hands of Ghosts. The Unicorn Hunters promised the same blend of history, fantasy and folklore and sounded just as fascinating.

The novel is set in 15th century Brittany, at that time an independent duchy. Following the death of Duke Francis II, his daughter, Anne, has succeeded him as Duchess of Brittany. She believes she will be able to govern Brittany well and had promised her father she would never allow it to be conquered, but naturally a land ruled by a young, unmarried woman quickly comes under threat from other, more powerful nations. Determined to avoid a union with France at all costs, Anne secretly marries Maximilian of Austria by proxy but as she waits for her new husband to join her in Brittany, Charles VIII of France and his forces draw closer to the duchy.

As a delaying tactic, Anne suggests a unicorn hunt in the enchanted forest of Brocéliande. She’s sure the king and his men will be unable to resist the temptation of capturing a magical beast – and according to legend, a unicorn can only be tamed by a virgin, which means Anne should be able to avoid being forced into marriage with Charles until Maximilian arrives and her secret can be revealed. No one is really expecting to see a unicorn – until one emerges from the trees and allows Anne to take a lock of its mane. With Anne under increasing pressure to agree to the French marriage, it seems there could be a way to save Brittany after all, but it will mean delving further into the world of magic.

I really enjoyed The Unicorn Hunters, although I found it a bit uneven. The first half is mainly concerned with the politics of Brittany and France, with only a few fantasy elements: the brief appearance of the unicorn, whom we don’t see again until later; the role of diviners who use dice, wine or beetles to spy on rival courts and coloured cloths to communicate what they’ve learned; and a man who stumbles out of the Lost Lands, a sinister realm that borders the forest of Brocéliande and is inhabited by korrigans (Breton fairies or spirits). I was reminded very much of Guy Gavriel Kay’s books, which are mostly set in thinly disguised worlds based on real countries and real historical periods and have subtle supernatural touches. In the second half of this novel, though, the fantasy elements become much stronger as Anne and her friends and enemies move in and out of the Lost Lands.

I liked Anne as a character, but I should point out that the Anne of Brittany in this book is not quite the same as the historical one and her story follows a different path, so be aware that you aren’t learning the ‘real history’ here. For example, the real Anne was eleven when she succeeded to the duchy, but Katherine Arden’s Anne is an adult. Other characters, such as Louis of Orléans and Anne’s sister Isabeau, have also had large parts of their stories altered – and Charles VIII’s sister, Anne of France, is renamed Marguerite to avoid confusion. Arden explains some of her choices in an author’s note at the end of the book, although I wonder whether it would have been more sensible to have just changed the names of all of the people and places, like Kay does, and set the book in an entirely alternate version of history.

Something I really loved about this book is the way so many aspects of Breton myth and legend are incorporated into the story: the mythical lost city of Kêr-Is, swallowed up by the sea in the Bay of Douarnenez; the presence of the korrigans and the anaon (spirits of the dead); the ancient forest of Brocéliande, associated with Merlin and the Arthurian legends; and of course, the unicorn – but unicorns obviously appear in the myths of other cultures as well. The real Anne of Brittany does actually have a connection with unicorns as it has been speculated that she commissioned the famous set of tapestries known as The Unicorn Tapestries, although this has never been proven.

I preferred the earlier sections of the book as I felt there was a definite shift in tone and pace in the second half, but I’m sure other readers will have the opposite preference depending on whether you like your fiction to be more grounded in history and politics or more fantasy-heavy. The Winternight books are still my favourites by Katherine Arden (start with The Bear and the Nightingale and read all three in order) but this was enjoyable as well and I’ll be looking out for her next book.

Thanks to Random House UK/Century for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 3/20 of 20 Books of Summer

She Walks at Night by Seishi Yokomizo

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Translated by Jesse Kirkwood

I love Seishi Yokomizo’s Kosuke Kindaichi mystery series and have read all the books currently available in English from Pushkin Press, of which this is the eighth. Originally published in 1948, She Walks at Night has a slightly different feel from most of the others in the series and it’s one of my favourites so far.

The novel is narrated by Torata Yashiro, a struggling mystery writer, who is approached by a friend, Naoki Sengoku, to ask for his opinion on a series of strange incidents involving members of Naoki’s family. Like many people, Naoki thinks that because Torata writes mysteries he must also know how to solve them – but of course that’s not necessarily the case, and when Torata hears the story he’s just as confused as his friend.

It seems that Naoki’s father, once a servant of the wealthy Furugami family, has grown close to the widowed Lady Oryu since her husband’s death. In fact, Naoki believes that the relationship started earlier than that and Lady Oryu’s daughter, Yachiyo, is actually his father’s child and therefore his own half-sister. A family prophecy has stated that Yachiyo will marry a hunchback – and, surprisingly, there are two of these in the Furugami household. One is Morie, another half-brother of Yachiyo’s who developed rickets as a child; the other is Koichi Hachiya, an artist who has just become engaged to Yachiyo.

The reason for Naoki’s concern is that Yachiyo shot Hachiya in the leg at a nightclub the previous year and hasn’t given a satisfactory explanation for what she did. She has also been receiving anonymous letters warning her not to ‘walk at night’ – a reference to her habit of sleepwalking. Torata agrees to accompany Naoki to his family home to meet Yachiyo and see if he can provide any answers, but almost as soon as he arrives the mystery deepens when a dead body is found with the head removed. How can they track down the murderer when they can’t even be sure who the victim is?

You may be wondering where Kosuke Kindaichi comes into all of this. In some of the books, he’s there from the beginning, but in others we don’t see him until later on – this is one of the latter and our dishevelled, stammering private detective makes his appearance almost exactly halfway through the book. People often underestimate Kindaichi, as Torata and Naoki initially do here, but his talents are hidden beneath his unimpressive exterior and as soon as he begins to investigate, the mystery starts to unravel. However, I felt that things unfold too quickly and easily once Kindaichi arrives on the scene and with the whole story told from Torata’s perspective, we don’t really get to see how the detective reaches any of his conclusions. The final solution, when it’s revealed, is clever and surprising, though, and I certainly hadn’t guessed it (it had crossed my mind once or twice, but I’d quickly dismissed it).

Japanese crime novels tend to focus more on the plot than on the characters, but I’m finding that Yokomizo’s books have a better balance and there are several interesting characters here, as well as Kindaichi himself, including Naoki’s father, the drunken, sword-wielding Tetsunoshin, and the bitter, vengeful old family nurse, Okita. This book overall has many of the same elements as a typical country house mystery by authors like Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr, with some Gothic touches such as sleepwalking, family curses and the murders being carried out with a legendary Muramasa sword.

Jesse Kirkwood is the latest of several translators who have worked on this series and although I’ve been happy with all of the translations, this one feels particularly smooth and easy to read. The use of a first person narrator also gives it a more intimate, personal feel than some of the other books (I think The Village of Eight Graves and The Honjin Murders are the only other ones written in the first person). If you’re new to the series, this could be a good place to start, but as they’re all separate mysteries you could really start anywhere. I’m already looking forward to the next one to be translated, The Queen Bee Mystery, coming next year!

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

Book 2/20 of 20 Books of Summer

The Inner Clock by Lynne Peeples

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I’m someone who often has trouble sleeping so when I came across Lynne Peeples’ book, The Inner Clock: Living in Sync with Our Circadian Rhythms, I decided to read it in the hope of getting some tips and advice. It turned out to be more of a science book than a self-help book, but I found it absolutely fascinating.

Lynne Peeples is a writer and journalist based in Seattle and goes to impressive lengths in order to carry out her research for this book. In the first chapter, she describes how she spent ten days in an underground bunker in Arkansas with no access to clocks or any natural light at all as part of an experiment to see if she could guess the time of day based only on her own body’s circadian rhythms. The circadian clock is the part of the brain that controls our sleep-wake cycle, hunger, metabolism, hormone production and other important functions; we also have other local clocks in almost every organ and tissue of the body and sometimes these clocks can get out of sync with each other which causes all sorts of problems. Peeples’ experiment helps her to understand the natural patterns of her own clocks and how they can be affected by light, food and drink, activity and other factors. This forms the basis of the rest of the book.

Peeples gives most attention to the effects of light, both natural and artificial – not just the amount of light we’re exposed to, but the type and quality of the light. The ‘bad’ kind of light, as we all know, is the blue light from phones and laptops, which is one of the reasons we’re told to limit their use before bedtime. However, we can counteract the effects of screens and artificial lights later in the day by making sure we get plenty of natural light throughout the day. Working in an office with windows is good for your circadian clock, but Peeples suggests that your distance from the window and even the angle of your desk can also make a big difference. Of course, sometimes a lack of daylight or exposure to too much artificial light is out of our control and there’s an interesting section where she discusses the inequalities experienced by people living in urban areas compared to rural ones.

If you’re looking for lots of practical advice on managing your circadian rhythms and improving your sleep, I think there are probably better books you could choose than this one. She does give some tips, based on things she herself discovered throughout her research, such as going for a walk in the morning rather than the evening, narrowing the window of time between your first meal of the day and your last, and waiting 90 minutes after waking before drinking tea or coffee. Most of the book, though, is spent exploring the science behind these things. I got bored at times, such as when she goes into a long discussion of photoreceptors in the eyes, but mostly it’s all very readable and often quite gripping. I was particularly fascinated to learn that fruit and vegetables have their own circadian clocks, even after being harvested, and storing them under bright lights can disturb their rhythms, affecting their nutritional value.

The main conclusion Peeples comes to is that not everyone’s circadian rhythm is the same and people’s internal clocks can run slightly differently (some of us are night owls and some are morning larks). We need to find routines and schedules that work for us, but unfortunately the way society is structured can make that difficult, particularly if you’re someone who struggles to wake up early in the morning. Peeples also looks at disruptions to these routines, such as jet lag, and considers evidence of sports teams performing better or worse depending on the direction in which they’ve had to travel through time zones.

The Inner Clock is a long book and contains a lot of information, but I’m sure most readers will find at least some of it useful and interesting, regardless of whether or not you have any problems with your sleep.