Category: Reviews

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

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I feel embarrassed admitting that I still haven’t read all of Jane Austen’s books, knowing how popular she is both with book bloggers and the world in general. The reason for that is because although I enjoyed Pride and Prejudice I was less impressed with Mansfield Park and Emma. I didn’t dislike them but I didn’t love them, so I haven’t been in any hurry to read the rest of her books.

Northanger Abbey is the story of Catherine Morland, a seventeen-year-old girl who is obsessed with reading gothic novels. On a visit to Bath with some friends of the Morland family, Mr and Mrs Allen, Catherine gets to know Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor. The Tilneys invite Catherine to stay at their family home and she is thrilled to discover they live in an abbey! But when on her first night at Northanger Abbey, in the middle of a thunderstorm, she finds a mysterious cabinet in her bedroom, Catherine’s imagination starts to run away with her…

This seems to be a book of two distinct halves. The first half, set in Bath, follows Catherine as she begins to fall in love with Henry Tilney and tries to escape the unwelcome attentions of her brother’s obnoxious friend, John Thorpe. She also meets John’s shallow, self-absorbed sister Isabella, who quickly becomes her ‘best friend’. In the second half, after Catherine accompanies the Tilneys to Northanger Abbey, the book becomes a parody of the gothic novel for a while before everything starts to tie together at the end. I’ve read a lot of gothic novels (including Catherine’s favourite Ann Radcliffe book, The Mysteries of Udolpho) and I think this probably helped me understand the humour, although all you really need is a basic knowledge of what a gothic novel involves (crumbling castles, dark passageways, sinister secrets, a gloomy atmosphere, melodrama etc). I imagine a lot of people are inspired to pick up a gothic novel for the first time after reading this book, rather than the other way round though!

Northanger Abbey could also be described as a coming of age novel. At the start of the book Catherine is very naïve and innocent, with romantic notions and an over-active imagination. As the story continues she begins to discover that there are some big differences between the world she lives in and the world of Ann Radcliffe’s novels. She also learns to be a better judge of character and to understand other people’s motives. Catherine is not a particularly strong character but she’s amusing and likeable, and so is Henry Tilney.

I found this a lot easier to read than the other Austen books I’ve read. The writing feels very bright and lively. This is the first Jane Austen book that I’ve really found funny and been able to understand why her wit and irony are so highly regarded. I know a lot of people don’t like it when an author ‘intrudes’ into the story and speaks directly to the reader, but it’s not actually something that bothers me at all. Austen does quite a lot of it in this book, particularly in chapter 5 when she defends novel-reading:

There seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader — I seldom look into novels — Do not imagine that I often read novels — It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss — ?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

I think I can see why this is considered one of Austen’s less popular books, because although it was a fun, entertaining and relatively quick and easy read, it did somehow feel less satisfying than the other books of hers that I’ve read. The ending seemed slightly rushed and some of the characters not as well developed as they could have been. But those are only minor criticisms because overall I loved this book. I still have two more Jane Austen books left to read and as I enjoyed this one so much, I’m now looking forward to reading the other two!

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

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The Queen has never had much time for reading but when she discovers a mobile library parked behind Buckingham Palace and decides to borrow a book, a whole new world is suddenly opened to her. With the help of her new friend Norman she reads one book after another and discovers that she has a real passion for literature. Unfortunately, not everyone shares her enthusiasm – and some people are prepared to do whatever it takes to stop Her Majesty from reading.

I have a feeling I’m one of the last people in the world to read this book (as usual) but I’m so glad I finally got round to it. Alan Bennett is one of my sister’s favourite writers and as we have such different reading tastes I never thought I would like him too. I’ve never been more pleased to have been proved wrong! This is a lovely, light-hearted, whimsical story that still contains a lot of witty observations, profound insights and wisdom.

In The Uncommon Reader, Bennett takes a humorous look at what it’s like to be the Queen and the pressure she’s under to conform to other people’s expectations. She is portrayed as an endearing character discovering the joys of reading for the first time and who just wants to be left alone with her books! It was interesting to watch the Queen progress as a reader, from being initially overwhelmed by the number of books available and relying on Norman to choose titles for her, to being able to make her own choices and develop her own tastes. Eventually, her reading begins to change the way she approaches her public duties and the way she views herself and the world around her.

There are some very funny moments, such as when the Queen perfects the art of waving from the royal carriage while holding a book in her other hand below the level of the window, and when one of her books is exploded because security think it’s a bomb.

Being a bookworm myself, I loved Bennett’s insights into the philosophy of reading and on almost every page there were quotes that every book lover will be able to identify with. I’ll leave you with a few of them…

‘I think of literature’, she wrote, ‘as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.’

‘Can there be any greater pleasure’, she confided in her neighbour, the Canadian minister for overseas trade, ‘than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen?’

‘Books are wonderful, aren’t they?’ she said to the vice-chancellor, who concurred.
‘At the risk of sounding like a piece of steak,’ she said, ‘they tenderise one.’

The Wilding by Maria McCann

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The Wilding is set in England in 1672, just after the end of the Civil War. Our narrator is Jonathan Dymond, a young man who works as a cider-maker. Jonathan lives with his loving parents and leads a quiet, happy life, travelling around the neighbouring villages with his mobile cider-press. But when Jonathan’s father receives a mysterious letter from his dying brother, Jonathan grows suspicious and decides to visit his uncle’s widow to investigate. At his Aunt Harriet’s house he meets Tamar, one of his aunt’s servants, and begins to unravel the circumstances surrounding his uncle’s death.

Due to the fast pace and the plot twists, I would recommend reading this book in as few sittings as possible. I had started off reading it in small portions alongside another book and found it difficult to get into the story; when I decided to put my other book to one side for a while and concentrate solely on this one, I found that I flew through the rest of the novel. The story was entertaining, very compelling and kept me turning the pages.

McCann evokes the period very well. I liked the way she portrayed a small rural community in 17th century England. I also learned more than I could ever wish to know about cider-making and apples…

What does Solomon say? ‘Comfort me with apples.’ Everything about them is kind and comforting: the mild eating apple, the sharp or bitter fruit that crushes to a miraculous sweetness, the homely apples, like tried and trusted friends, that serve all purposes.

But to me, the difference between a good book and a great book is having strong characters that I can connect with – and unfortunately I felt that most of the characters in The Wilding had very little depth. As the narrator, Jonathan was boring and not very engaging. Tamar and her mother were both interesting, well-drawn characters, but as we only saw them through Jonathan’s eyes, I didn’t get to know them as well as I would have liked to. It would have been nice to have had part of the story told from Tamar’s perspective, because Jonathan was just too weak and I felt no emotional involvement with him at all.

So, I thought The Wilding was a good book but not a great one. I would recommend it to people who like well-written, fast moving historical fiction with plenty of twists and revelations.

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

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Kate Morton’s latest book, The Distant Hours, is getting a lot of attention at the moment but I thought that before I decided whether to buy it I should really read the previous two books of hers that have been sitting on my shelf unread for a long time. I’m so glad I finally decided to pick up The Forgotten Garden because, although it wasn’t perfect, I loved it overall.

In 1913, just before the beginning of World War I, a port master finds a little girl with a suitcase sitting alone on the docks at Maryborough, Australia. With no sign of the child’s parents and no clue to her identity, he takes the girl home with him, where he and his wife name her Nell and raise her as their own daughter. But what was Nell doing in Australia? Who were her real parents? And what is her connection with the mysterious Eliza Makepeace, writer of fairy tales?

When Nell dies in 2005, she leaves everything to her granddaughter, Cassandra – including a cottage in Cornwall, England. When Cassandra travels to Cornwall to investigate, she begins to uncover some secrets about her grandmother’s identity and attempts to solve the mystery of Cliff Cottage.

At first I thought I was going to have a problem with Kate Morton’s writing style. She has quite a flowery, descriptive style which you’ll either love or hate. For example:

Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death’s silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?

As the book went on though, the writing bothered me less, because I was becoming so absorbed in the story. It had a wonderful atmosphere and was very reminiscent of The Secret Garden in places (the manor house, the invalid cousin, the walled garden – and Frances Hodgson Burnett even makes a brief appearance!) It also felt a bit like a Daphne du Maurier book in places (particularly the Cornwall scenes) and the Swindell family whom Eliza lives with in turn-of-the-century London could have come straight from a Dickens novel. Some of Eliza’s fairy tales are even included in the book which I thought was a nice touch although I wasn’t too impressed with the stories themselves.

The biggest problem I had with this book was the constant jumping around in time and place. One chapter would be set in London in 1900, the next in Brisbane in 2005 and the next in Cornwall in 1975, which disrupted the flow of the story and made it difficult to follow. We also switch narrator with every chapter, which made me even more confused, particularly as there was almost nothing to differentiate between the voices of Cassandra, Nell and Eliza. It was too easy to forget who I was reading about. Eliza’s storyline was by far the most interesting of the three though and I think it would probably have worked on its own as a straight historical fiction novel.

The solution to the mystery was made very obvious to the reader from early on in the book, so when it was finally revealed it came as an anti-climax. This didn’t really spoil the story for me but it was slightly frustrating to watch Cassandra trying to solve the mystery and knowing that she was getting it completely wrong. I would have appreciated it if some of the clues could have been kept from the reader until nearer the end.

Other than those few points, I loved this book, which was great because I really hadn’t expected to. For such a long and complex book it was surprisingly quick to read.

Those of you who have read all of Kate Morton’s books, how does this one compare to The House at Riverton or The Distant Hours?

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

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When journalist Gayle Lemmon was looking for a subject that hadn’t already been given a lot of news coverage, she became intrigued by the topic of female entrepreneurs working in war zones. Travelling to post-Taliban Afghanistan, Lemmon intended to report on women who were running their own businesses. Unfortunately finding female business owners at first proved more difficult than she had expected, but eventually she heard about Kamila Sidiqi. In The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, subtitled Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe, Lemmon tells Sidiqi’s amazing story.

After receiving her teacher training certificate from college in 1996, Kamila Sidiqi was looking forward to going to university and becoming a teacher like her elder sisters, when the Taliban took control of Kabul and everything changed almost overnight. Suddenly women found their freedom stripped away from them. Required to wear the chadri (full-length burqa) and unable to go outdoors without being accompanied by a male relative, the options available for a woman to earn her living became very limited.

Trying to find a way of making money that would still comply with the Taliban’s rules, Kamila decided to set herself up as a seamstress, making clothes in her own living room and selling them to local tailor’s shops. As the weeks and months went by, Kamila’s dressmaking business grew in size and reputation until eventually she and her sisters and several of their neighbours were working round the clock to meet their orders. Kamila also came up with the idea of starting a school to teach other girls from the neighbourhood the basics of dressmaking, enabling them to support themselves and their families.

Throughout the book you can never forget the danger Kamila was in and the risks she was taking. For example, there’s a frightening moment where she and two female friends are caught taking a bus to Pakistan without their mahram (male companion). Kamila’s courage and quick-thinking really shines through in situations like this.

Lemmon has a nice clear writing style, and the book is as easy to read as fiction. As well as being a fascinating story, I also found The Dressmaker of Khair Khana completely inspiring. Kamila and her sisters refused to be defeated, searched for solutions to every problem and managed to prosper despite the oppressive conditions they were forced to live under.

Recommended.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana will be published by HarperCollins in March 2011. I received a review copy as an ebook from NetGalley.

Blacklands by Belinda Bauer

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Twelve year-old Steven Lamb’s family has never recovered from the disappearance of his Uncle Billy almost two decades ago. Billy, who went missing aged eleven, was thought to have been murdered by the serial killer Arnold Avery. However, although six of Avery’s other victims were found buried on Exmoor, Billy’s body was never found.

Steven’s grandmother still can’t accept that her son is dead and stands at the window every day watching for him coming home. In an attempt to set his Nan’s mind at rest and restore some peace to his family by finding out where Billy is buried, Steven decides to write a letter to Arnold Avery in prison – but what he doesn’t realise is that by doing so he could be putting his own life in danger.

Blacklands is a dark and atmospheric psychological thriller, but due to the subject matter it won’t appeal to everyone. Although there’s nothing very gory or graphic, the book does takes us right inside the head of Arnold Avery, getting much closer to the mind of a serial killer than I was comfortable with. Of course, this type of thing should be disturbing and chilling, so I think the author has done a great job of creating a character who is genuinely frightening to read about.

Belinda Bauer said in her author’s note that this was originally intended to be a story about a boy and his grandmother and not a crime novel at all, which I thought was interesting because the family scenes were the aspect of the book that I really liked, rather than the crime plot. I was impressed with the way Bauer portrayed twelve-year-old Steven’s sad, lonely life and showed us the long term effects one tragic incident can have on future generations of a family.

The book explores Steven’s relationships with each member of his family. His Nan, still grieving for her lost son, is distant and detached, unable to move on with her life. His mother, a stressed single parent finding it difficult to cope in the aftermath of Billy’s murder, doesn’t have much time for Steven and lavishes most of her attention on his younger brother, five-year-old Davey. To make things even worse, Steven is being bullied and doesn’t feel he can tell anyone about it. His only moments of happiness come when he’s working in the garden with Uncle Jude, one of the many boyfriends who pass in and out of his mother’s life. Although he sometimes seems older than twelve, I found him a very believable character and it’s sad to think that all over the world there are real-life Stevens.

I can’t say that I ‘enjoyed’ this book, because how can you really enjoy reading about a child killer? But I did find it very gripping and didn’t want to put it down until I was finished. This was an impressive debut novel and although I don’t usually read a lot of crime fiction, I’ll look forward to reading more of Belinda Bauer’s books.

I received a review copy of this book from Transworld

Final thoughts on Bleak House by Charles Dickens

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I was hoping to have this review ready to post at the end of Amanda’s readalong, but as usual things didn’t go according to plan and I’m almost a week late!

I had tried to read Bleak House once or twice in the past but gave up after a few chapters, so I hoped that taking part in the readalong would give me the motivation to actually finish the book. And it did. However, I was reminded of the reasons why I had given up on the book on my previous attempts. Dickens’ writing can be very long-winded, descriptive and detailed, even in comparison to other Victorian authors, and there were many parts of the book where I really had to force myself to concentrate – particularly during the first two chapters.

The plot is so complex I’m not even going to try to write a summary, other than to say that the story revolves around a court case called Jarndyce and Jarndyce with which many of the characters are in some way involved. The action moves back and forth between the foggy streets of London and a quiet country estate in Lincolnshire. Half of the story is told by an unnamed narrator in the third person present tense, and the other half is narrated by Esther Summerson. There are some characters who appear in only one of the narratives and some who feature in both, so that the two cross and intersect from time to time.

If you’re thinking of reading Bleak House you should be aware that a huge number of characters are introduced throughout the first half of the book. As I mentioned in one of my readalong update posts, it felt as if storylines were being started then abandoned for hundreds of pages at a time. It takes a long time for the separate storylines to start coming together so you’ll need to have patience, but when they do the book becomes much more enjoyable.

Although many of the characters lacked depth, they were all different and memorable enough that I never had a problem remembering who was who. There were some that I liked (Mr Jarndyce, Inspector Bucket and George), and some that I hated (Skimpole, Smallweed and Tulkinghorn). As for Esther, she appeared to be Dickens’ portrayal of what an ideal woman should be like (i.e. perfect in every way, loved by everyone, happy to be nicknamed ‘little housewife’ and ‘Dame Durden’). But although Esther irritated me, I would probably have enjoyed the book more if it had all been told from her perspective. I found I could get more absorbed in the story while she was narrating and her chapters were much easier to follow than the others.

Bleak House has everything I would normally love in a book: an intricate plot, secrets and revelations, humour, a mystery, unusual characters. Unfortunately there was something about the book that didn’t quite work for me; I’m not sure whether it was the writing style or the narrative structure or a combination of both. But although I didn’t love it, I didn’t dislike it either and as this was only the second Dickens book I’ve read (the other being A Christmas Carol), I’ll definitely be giving him another chance.