The Briar Club by Kate Quinn

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Kate Quinn’s new novel, The Briar Club, begins with a murder in a Washington, D.C. boarding house on Thanksgiving, 1954. We don’t know who the victim is – that will be revealed later on – but it does seem that the killer is likely to be one of the seventeen people gathered in the kitchen waiting to be interviewed by the police. To get answers, we have to go back to the day four years earlier when Grace March arrives at Briarwood House and agrees to take the tiny apartment in the attic…

Grace is just one of several women living in the house, all of whom are hiding secrets and in some cases are not quite what they seem. There’s Nora, who works at the National Archives and is in love with a gangster; Bea, a former baseball player forced to give up her dreams; Claire, who is desperately trying to save to buy her own home; Fliss, an Englishwoman with a baby and an absent husband; unhappy, spiteful Arlene whom nobody likes; and Reka, an elderly Hungarian refugee. The novel unfolds through a series of interlinked short stories each focusing on one of these women, interspersed with chapters describing the aftermath of the Thanksgiving murder. The latter are narrated by Briarwood House itself, because the house knows better than anyone else what has been going on within its walls!

I enjoyed The Briar Club, but found some of the women’s stories much more engaging than others. Nora’s story came first and was completely gripping, which maybe raised my expectations too high for the rest of the book. By the time I reached Bea’s section in the middle, I was starting to get bored, although things did pick up again later on. Despite the brief chapters about the murder that are scattered throughout the book, I think anyone who starts to read this expecting a mystery novel or a thriller will be disappointed – but if you like character-driven novels with a slower pace it will probably be more to your taste. Speaking of taste, food and drink play a big part in the story, with each character sharing some of their recipes with us! So if you want to know how to make Bea’s ragù, Arlene’s candle salad or Claire’s potato pancakes, the instructions are all in the book (and even if you’re not a cook, I recommend skipping to the end of each recipe where you’ll find a suggestion for a suitable song to accompany the meal).

Although each woman in the house has her own individual story to tell, they all get together for weekly social gatherings in Grace’s attic room (the ‘Briar Club’ of the title) and over the years most of the women begin to form close bonds. A very different kind of relationship that also develops is between the women of the Briar Club and the two children of their landlady, Mrs Nilsson. Pete Nilsson gets a chapter of his own, but I particularly loved seeing how his younger sister, Lina, grows in confidence (and improves her baking skills) due to the friendship and support of the Briar Club. The novel also provides us with a snapshot of life in America in the early 1950s, with a focus on McCarthy and the fear of communism.

The Briar Club was an enjoyable read overall, but I would have preferred some of the women’s stories to be cut short or left out altogether. So far, The Rose Code is still my favourite of the three Kate Quinn books I’ve read (the other is The Diamond Eye).

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

This is book 16/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

Book 34/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Favourite Books from Ten Series

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This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, is “Ten Favourite Books from Ten Series” (submitted by A Hot Cup of Pleasure).

I have limited this to one series per author and have only included series where I have read most or all of the published books. I’ve linked to my reviews where available.

1. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series: A Murder is Announced

2. Alison Weir’s Six Tudor Queens: Katharine Parr, The Sixth Wife

3. Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles: The Disorderly Knights

4. Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire: Doctor Thorne

5. Sharon Bolton’s Lacey Flint series: The Dark

6. Lucinda Riley’s Seven Sisters: The Shadow Sister

7. Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series: Dragonfly in Amber

8. Andrew Taylor’s Marwood and Lovett series: The Royal Secret

9. Anthony Horowitz’s Horowitz and Hawthorne series: Close to Death

10 M.M. Kaye’s Death In… series: Death in Kashmir

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What do you think? Have you read any of these series – and if so, do you disagree with my choices?

The King’s Witches by Kate Foster

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Historical novels based on real-life witch trials seem to be very popular at the moment; I can think of several I’ve read just in the last two or three years. The King’s Witches is another and takes the slightly different approach of telling the story not only of the so-called witches, but also of the woman married to the man behind the witch hunts, King James VI of Scotland.

The novel opens in Denmark in 1589, where Anna, daughter of King Frederick II, is preparing for the arrival of the Scottish ambassador who will escort her across the sea to her new life in Scotland. Anna is betrothed to James VI and before leaving Denmark, they undergo a handfasting ceremony by proxy, with the Earl Marischal standing in for James. Setting sail for Scotland a few days later, Anna’s ship is hit by violent storms and is forced to turn back several times. Witches are blamed for summoning the winds in an attempt to stop the new queen from reaching her destination and by the time Anna eventually arrives in Scotland the fear of witchcraft is becoming widespread.

In the town of North Berwick, another young woman, Jura, is working as a maid in the Kincaid household. Jura has inherited her mother’s skills as a healer and knowledge of herbs and charms, but when the whispers of witchcraft grow louder – and the unwanted attentions of her master become more difficult to avoid – she is forced to flee to Edinburgh. However, escaping both the witch hunts and the Kincaids is not going to be easy…

The King’s Witches is narrated by both Anna and Jura, as well as a third woman, Kirsten, who is Anna’s lady-in-waiting and accompanies her on the journey from Denmark. Kirsten has been to Scotland before, but is very secretive regarding what happened during her previous visit and we will have to wait until later in the book for her full story to emerge. Kirsten and Jura are both fictional characters, but Anna (usually known as Anne of Denmark) was obviously a real person. However, Kate Foster doesn’t stick entirely to historical fact; for example, the real Anna was only fourteen years old when she married James VI, but Foster makes her slightly older at seventeen. She also uses the Celtic tradition of handfasting, which expires after a year, to introduce the idea that Anna was ‘on trial’ and the marriage would only go ahead if she managed to please James. I didn’t feel that this – or the fictional lover Foster creates for Anna – was really necessary or added much to the book and I would have preferred Anna’s story to follow the facts, considering we already had two other entirely fictional viewpoint characters.

The witchcraft aspect of the book is interesting, particularly the connection between the North Berwick witch trials, in which Jura is involved, and previous trials in Germany and Denmark which inspired James VI to take similar action. The storms that delay Anna’s voyage to Scotland in the novel really happened and really were blamed on witches. The King’s paranoia increases until he decides that the town of North Berwick (not to be confused with Berwick-upon-Tweed, by the way) is a nest of witches plotting to kill him, possibly in league with the Earl of Bothwell, and eventually more than 70 people are implicated. Foster explores all of this not just from the perspective of Jura, who is directly affected as a suspected witch, but also Anna from her position close to the King, and Kirsten, who provides a sort of bridge between the two worlds.

Even with the addition of the Anna and James angle, this book felt a bit too similar to other books I’ve read about historical witches, but obviously that won’t be a problem if you haven’t read as many of them as I have! I did still find it enjoyable and will have to look for Kate Foster’s first book, The Maiden, which I haven’t read.

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

This is book 15/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

Book 33/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

Six Degrees of Separation: From The Museum of Modern Love to The Woman in Black

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It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we’re starting with The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose. I haven’t read it, but here’s what it’s about:

Arky Levin, a film composer in New York, has promised his wife that he will not visit her in hospital, where she is suffering in the final stages of a terminal illness. She wants to spare him a burden that would curtail his creativity, but the promise is tearing him apart. One day he finds his way to MOMA and sees Mariana Abramovic in The Artist is Present. The performance continues for seventy-five days and, as it unfolds, so does Arky. As he watches and meets other people drawn to the exhibit, he slowly starts to understand what might be missing in his life and what he must do.

I’m going to start this month’s chain with a book that shares a word in the title: Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson (1). This was Atkinson’s first novel, published in 1995, and is narrated by Ruby Lennox, who lives above a pet shop in York with her parents and two older sisters. The book takes us through Ruby’s life from birth to adulthood, while also moving backwards and forwards in time to tell the stories of previous generations of the family.

Ruby is also the name of a character in Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple mystery, The Body in the Library (2). When a young woman is found dead on the floor of the library of Gossington Hall in St Mary Mead, she is identified as Ruby Keene. Dolly Bantry, who lives at the Hall with her husband Colonel Bantry, calls in her friend Miss Marple to help investigate.

From a library in a country house to a very different kind of library: the Seward Park branch of the New York Public Library, where Zia de Luca works in The Orchid Hour by Nancy Bilyeau (3). This historical thriller set in New York’s Little Italy during Prohibition is maybe not one of my favourites by Bilyeau but it does have a fascinating setting and some interesting facts about growing orchids!

There are lots of books with flowers in the titles (I put a list together for a recent Top Ten Tuesday post), but the one I’m going to link to here is Rose Cottage by Mary Stewart (4), in which a young woman returns to her grandmother’s cottage at the end of World War II and makes some unexpected discoveries about her past. This is a lovely, gentle novel but has none of the suspense and mystery I love in Stewart’s other books.

The next book in my chain is by another author with the surname Stewart, although as far as I know they’re not related. In Ill Will (5), Michael Stewart creates a story to fill in the gap in the middle of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, where Heathcliff disappears for three years with no explanation. Although the Brontë novel is one of my favourite classics, I didn’t like this book much at all, mainly due to the language and the fact that the characters barely resembled the originals.

The cover of Ill Will, with a tree that has lost its leaves, reminds me of the cover of The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (6). In this ghost story, Arthur Kipps, a young lawyer, has several encounters with a mysterious woman in black while staying at Eel Marsh House to sort through the papers of a client who has recently died. I enjoyed it, although I didn’t find it as frightening as I was expecting!

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And that’s my chain for August! My links have included: the word ‘museum’, characters with the name Ruby, libraries, books with flowers in the title, the surname Stewart and trees with no leaves.

In September we’ll be starting with After Story by Larissa Behrendt.

House of Shades by Lianne Dillsworth

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I enjoyed Lianne Dillsworth’s first novel, Theatre of Marvels, so I was looking forward to her new book, House of Shades, which sounded like an atmospheric Gothic mystery. It turned out to be not quite what I expected, although that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The setting is London, 1833. Hester Reeves is a young black woman whose mother has recently died, urging Hester to take care of her younger sister, Willa. Unfortunately, Willa already seems to be getting herself into trouble, having caught the eye of Rowland Cherville, the manager of the factory where she works. Rowland is running the factory on behalf of his invalid father, Gervaise, and with the differences in race and social status, Hester is sure his intentions towards her sister are not good. If only Hester and her husband, Jos, could improve their financial situation, then they could move out of the slums of King’s Cross and get Willa away from Rowland’s influence…

Hester’s chance to make some money comes when the local vicar puts her name forward for a job at Tall Trees, home of the elderly Gervaise Cherville, who has a serious medical condition and wants someone to nurse him through it. Hester is considered suitable for the position as she is a ‘doctoress’ – not really a female doctor, as it will still be several decades before the first woman earns her medical degree and even longer for the first black woman to do the same, but someone with a knowledge of herbs and healing potions. However, Hester soon discovers that Mr Cherville has another task in mind for her.

The Chervilles made their fortune through mahogany and they own slaves on a plantation in Honduras. With the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 stating that slavery is to be abolished across most of the British Empire, it seems that Gervaise has developed a conscience and wants to give compensation to his slaves – not the ones in Honduras, though, whom he has never met, but two who once lived at Tall Trees before running away. Aphrodite and Nyx have been missing for many years and Gervaise wants Hester to help track them down so he can make amends.

If you can accept the rather unlikely plot (for a start, is it really believable that a wealthy 19th century gentleman like Gervaise Cherville would bring an unknown young woman from a slum community into his home as a nurse?), this is quite an entertaining novel. Like Dillsworth’s first book, it has a likeable heroine, it’s easy to read and the pages go by surprisingly quickly. There are a few twists, although they’re fairly predictable and I was hoping for one or two more! Apart from Hester herself, most of the other characters lack depth and nuance – there’s no real explanation for why Rowland is such a wicked person with seemingly no redeeming qualities at all, and we don’t see much of Willa’s good side either, which makes it difficult to understand why Hester views her as such a beloved sister, putting her needs above those of herself and her husband.

The most interesting aspect of the book is Gervaise Cherville’s desire for atonement and his attempt to make reparations for the harm he has caused. It seems clear that, at least at first, Cherville’s main motive is to assuage his own guilt, but Hester reflects that “maybe when it came down to it, all apologies were like that, even when they were heartfelt.” I would have liked more depth here as well, but maybe that would have been difficult as the whole novel is narrated by Hester and we never get inside Cherville’s head to see what he’s really thinking or whether his feelings are genuine.

House of Shades is a book with lots of good ideas and interesting themes, but I struggled to get past the implausibility of the plot and on the whole I preferred Lianne Dillsworth’s first book.

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

Book 32/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

My Commonplace Book: July 2024

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A selection of quotes and pictures to represent July’s reading:

commonplace book
noun
a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.

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To know when to use the truth was the essence of successful deception.

N or M? by Agatha Christie (1941)

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“Mom says life isn’t fair and that’s all there is to it.”

“Your mother says that to justify the fact that she isn’t being fair to you,” Mrs Grace said calmly. “Which is mostly what people mean when they say ‘life isn’t fair’. It isn’t, which is why people should endeavor to be more fair to one another, not less.”

The Briar Club by Kate Quinn (2024)

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Part of the Inner Temple, printed in Old and New London vol 1 by George Walter Thornbury

No harm in that, thought Gabriel. I, too, read to escape; and dreams are so often more satisfying than the reality that awaits us when we stop reading.

A Case of Mice and Murder by Sally Smith (2024)

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“And while I was becoming interested in the business, I discovered something else: some books are for selling and others are for keeping. Becoming a book collector is like joining a religion: it’s for life.”

The Dumas Club by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (1993)

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‘Travelling is all very well,’ she said at last, ‘but it is a fine thing to have a home.’

The Trouble with Mrs Montgomery Hurst by Katie Lumsden (2024)

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Cecily Neville, from the 15th century Neville Book of Hours

‘I’ll give you a rule, Edward, one your father taught me, take it to heart. Only fight when you have to. Though always look ready, and as if you would win.’

The King’s Mother by Annie Garthwaite (2024)

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That Lady Blakeney was in love with her own husband, nobody could fail to see, and in the more frivolous cliques of fashionable London this extraordinary phenomenon had oft been eagerly discussed.

“A monstrous thing, of a truth, for a woman of fashion to adore her own husband!” was the universal pronouncement of the gaily-decked little world that centred around Carlton House and Ranelagh.

The Elusive Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy (1908)

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I could see that, on their own, fine words of regret and sorrow were not enough but I couldn’t help but feel that if truly meant, they were the start, otherwise there was no acceptance of wrongdoing.

House of Shades by Lianne Dillsworth (2024)

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Favourite books read this month:

The Trouble with Mrs Montgomery Hurst and A Case of Mice and Murder

Authors read for the first time this month:

Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Sally Smith

Places visited in this month’s reading:

England, US, Spain, Portugal, France

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Reading Notes: My 20 Books of Summer reading is continuing to go well: I have now read 16 books from my list and have reviewed 14 of them. I think I actually have a good chance of completing this challenge for the first time ever! I was pleased that I also managed to fit in a book for Spanish and Portuguese Lit Month (the Pérez-Reverte), even if it wasn’t a complete success.

In August, as well as trying to complete my 20 Books of Summer I’m looking forward to joining in with Moomin Week and have Finn Family Moomintroll lined up for it. It’s also Women in Translation Month, so the Moomins book will count towards that – and maybe I’ll also have time for The Black Lake by Hella S. Haasse.

How was your July? What are you planning to read in August?

The Elusive Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

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Since reading Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel several years ago, I have been slowly working my way through the rest of the Pimpernel series. There are various recommended reading orders – some following publication dates and others attempting to follow an internal timeline – and I’m not sure if I’ve chosen the best route through the series, but The Elusive Pimpernel is the fifth book I’ve read. Like the others, this one revolves around the efforts of the English adventurer known as the Scarlet Pimpernel to rescue aristocrats from the guillotine during the French Revolution.

*If you have not read the first book and would prefer not to know the identity of the Scarlet Pimpernel, you may want to avoid the rest of this review as I can’t really discuss this book without naming him!*

First published in 1908, the novel begins in September 1793 with Citizen Chauvelin, the Scarlet Pimpernel’s arch-enemy, receiving orders from Robespierre in Paris. Having failed to capture the Pimpernel in the past, Chauvelin is being given one last chance. He must go to England as a representative of the Committee of Public Safety, responsible for the interests of French citizens who have settled in England. The real reason for his mission, however, is to hunt down the Scarlet Pimpernel and bring him back to France dead or alive.

As the action switches temporarily to England, we meet a French actress, Désirée Candeille, who has been befriended by Marguerite Blakeney, wife of Sir Percy, the Scarlet Pimpernel himself. Unknown to Marguerite, Désirée is in league with Chauvelin and part of the scheme to lure Sir Percy to France. Will their scheme be successful – and could Marguerite unintentionally be the one to lead her husband into the trap?

Although it’s not quite as good as the original book, The Elusive Pimpernel is probably the best of the sequels I’ve read so far. The plot Chauvelin comes up with to capture Sir Percy is so fiendishly clever I couldn’t see how he was going to find a way out of it. Of course, I knew that he probably would find a way out, because he’s the Scarlet Pimpernel, after all, and there are more books in the series, but it seemed to me that he was well and truly trapped this time! One of the things I like about these books is that Chauvelin is by no means portrayed as a bumbling idiot who is easily outwitted; his plan would almost certainly have succeeded against anybody less brilliant than Sir Percy.

We don’t see very much of the other members of the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, although we are briefly reunited with some characters from the previous book, I Will Repay (so I would recommend reading that book before this one, if you can). Marguerite, though, plays a big part in the story and is one of our main viewpoint characters. It’s frustrating to see how easily she is manipulated, but she does mean well and her love for Percy isn’t in doubt, so I can forgive her!

Continuing chronologically, the next book for me to read will be Lord Tony’s Wife. Have you read that one – or any of the others in the series?

This is book 14/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

Book 31/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

This is also book 44/50 from my second Classics Club list