Tag: England

The House by the Sea by Santa Montefiore

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The House by the Sea is the first book I’ve read by Santa Montefiore. The novel consists of two alternating stories, one set in present day England and the other in Italy several decades earlier. The Italian storyline begins in 1966 with Floriana, a ten-year-old girl who lives with her drunken father in a small village in Tuscany. Looking over the crumbling wall of a beautiful villa by the sea, Floriana comes face to face with seventeen-year-old Dante, whose parents own the house. Floriana dreams of one day marrying Dante and escaping from her lonely, miserable life but unfortunately things don’t go exactly as she planned.

In 2009 we meet Marina, a woman in her fifties who runs a hotel on the Devon coast. The hotel is in financial difficulties and in an attempt to save her struggling business, Marina advertises for an ‘artist-in-residence’ to spend the summer at the hotel teaching guests to paint. And so Rafa Santoro, an artist from Argentina, arrives in Devon and proves to be a big success – particularly with Marina’s stepdaughter, Clementine. But as Clementine begins to fall in love with Rafa, she starts to suspect that he may be hiding something.

What is Rafa’s secret? And what is the link between Floriana’s story and Marina’s? At first I had no idea; I couldn’t understand how the two could be connected. Eventually, though, the answers to these questions started to become clear – and there were a few other interesting sub-plots which also kept me guessing. I found myself completely engaged with both threads of the book. We spend quite a lot of time in each period before switching back to the other one, long enough to really get to know the characters and become absorbed in their lives. All of the characters were interesting to read about, even Clementine, who spent most of the book being completely annoying and irritating.

I thought Montefiore did a wonderful job of bringing two such different locations to life. The Devon chapters, with descriptions of cream teas, fishing trips and the office where Clementine works, have a very ‘English’ feel, while the Tuscan sections conjure up the sights and sounds of Italy. I loved both, though the Italian one felt particularly vivid and magical.

I really enjoyed this book and would be happy to read more books by Santa Montefiore, definitely. With mystery, romance, beautiful settings and well-developed characters, The House by the Sea proved to be a perfect summer read!

I received a copy of this book for review from Simon & Schuster

Powder and Patch by Georgette Heyer

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Philip Jettan has grown up in the country on his family estate and has never shown any interest in fashionable society. As he grows older he falls in love with his childhood friend and neighbour, Cleone Charteris, but Cleone is unimpressed by Philip’s simple country ways and makes it clear she’s looking for a man with better manners and nicer clothes. And so, with the help of his Uncle Tom, Philip goes to Paris to learn how to be a gentleman…but when ‘le petite Philippe’ returns wearing powder and patches, writing French poetry and fighting duels, Cleone starts to wish she could have the old Philip back.

Powder and Patch is a very early Georgette Heyer novel and in my opinion not an example of her best work. If this had been my first experience of Heyer I think I would have been disappointed, but because I’ve read and enjoyed some of her other novels I’m prepared to accept that I’ll come across the occasional book that’s not as good. And having read some of her later books, it was interesting to see an early indication of her storytelling ability and talent for witty dialogue. There’s a lot of humour in the story but I didn’t find it as amusing as it was obviously intended to be – although I have to say, the final few chapters were quite funny and redeemed the book for me.

None of the characters in this book seemed to have much depth, with Cleone being particularly silly, especially in comparison to some of the stronger, more complex heroines in the other Heyer books I’ve read. I found it difficult to warm to her from the start because I thought Philip was fine the way he was: sincere, honest and reliable, and Cleone’s inability to accept him made me feel annoyed with her. The moral of the story is obvious: that outward appearances can be deceiving and it’s what’s inside that counts.

This book is set in the Georgian era, rather than the Regency period which Heyer is more famous for, and this gives the story a slightly different feel, although I don’t personally have any preference for one period over the other. I should point out that if you’re like me and have only a very basic knowledge of the French language (or none at all) be warned that there are a lot of French phrases scattered throughout the book, including an entire poem written in French. I don’t think it actually affected my understanding of the plot at all but I did keep wondering if I might be missing something.

Powder and Patch is a short novel but just the right length really because I don’t think the plot would have been strong enough to sustain a longer book. I found it a very quick and easy read which kept me entertained for a while, but definitely the weakest of the Heyer novels I’ve read so far.

The Novel in the Viola by Natasha Solomons

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I love reading fiction set during World War II and The Novel in the Viola is one of the best I’ve read for a while. The story begins in 1938 when we meet nineteen-year-old Elise Landau, a girl from a rich Austrian family (her mother, Anna, is a successful opera singer and her father, Julian, a famous author). Until now, Elise has lead a secure and comfortable life but that’s all about to change because the Landaus are Jews, and with Europe on the brink of war Austria is no longer a safe place to live. And so Elise is sent away from her home in Vienna and travels alone to Tyneford House, a mansion on the south coast of England, where she will work as a maid for Mr Rivers and his son, Kit. Her parents have remained in Austria while they await American visas and they promise to send for Elise as soon as possible – but as the war continues, she begins to wonder if they’ll ever be reunited.

The portrayal of life in an English country house forms a big part of the story, with insights into the class system, social conventions of the time, and the relationships between servant and master. Elise has to get used to working as a parlour maid after spending most of her life having servants of her own. Her background makes it difficult for her to fit in with the other servants at Tyneford but her status as a maid and a Jewish refugee prevents her from being accepted by some of the Rivers’ upper class friends. Elise is a wonderful character and I enjoyed following her as she settled into her new life – I thought Natasha Solomons displayed a real understanding of what it was like to be newly arrived in an unfamiliar country, feeling homesick and struggling with the language and the culture.

There are lots of beautiful, atmospheric descriptions of the Dorset countryside and coast which gave me a true feel of what it was like to live there during the Second World War. The story also looks at the effects the war had on the village of Tyneford and the house itself. The author’s note at the end of the book was very interesting and explained how Tyneford was based on a real place that became a ghost town because of the war.

There are so many other things I could say about this book – there’s the secret of the ‘novel in the viola’ itself, and I haven’t even mentioned yet the romantic storyline which develops as Elise begins to fall in love with someone she meets at Tyneford. But I don’t want to spoil this book for you, so I’ll just say that The Novel in the Viola was a real pleasure to read, a great story with just the right balance of sadness and humour. And I thought the way the book ended was perfect – the only problem was that I had grown to care for Elise and the others so much I didn’t want to leave them behind.

The Somnambulist by Essie Fox

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With my love of all things Victorian I had high hopes for this book, the debut novel by Essie Fox, and I wasn’t disappointed. The Somnambulist is a beautifully written story with memorable characters, an intricate plot and a distinctly gothic feel.

Phoebe Turner is a seventeen-year-old girl who lives in the East End of London. Her mother, Maud, a member of the Hallelujah Army, has done her best to keep Phoebe from sin and to protect her from what she considers to be the bad influence of her sister, Cissy. Phoebe, though, adores her glamorous Aunt Cissy and she is left devastated by her sudden death early in the novel.

Maud is struggling with the loss of Cissy’s income and when the wealthy Nathaniel Samuels offers Phoebe a position as companion to his wife, it seems this could be the solution to their financial problems. And so Phoebe leaves London behind and travels to Dinwood Court, the Samuels’ mansion in Herefordshire, where she begins to uncover some dark family secrets…

Essie Fox is the author of the Virtual Victorian blog and one thing that is very apparent in The Somnambulist is her knowledge and love of the Victorian period. It was interesting to read the author’s note at the back of the book in which she gives us some of the historical fact behind the fiction and lets us know which of the people and places mentioned in the novel are ones that really existed. I was impressed by the amount of period detail and the vivid descriptions which really brought the settings to life, particularly Wilton’s Music Hall and the magnificent Dinwood Court, two contrasting but equally well-drawn locations. The characters, too, are colourful and vibrant and Phoebe herself is a complex character who grows and develops as a person over the course of the novel.

I guessed one of the book’s big secrets almost from the beginning (a sign that I’ve read too many books of this type, maybe!) but that didn’t matter at all because I enjoyed watching Phoebe as she slowly pieced the parts of her history together. There were other surprises and twists that I didn’t see coming and overall I thought the story was very cleverly plotted. I also loved the sleepwalking theme which is indicated in the title and gently woven throughout the book with references to the Millais painting, The Somnambulist, which is widely believed to have been inspired by either the Wilkie Collins novel The Woman in White or the Bellini opera La Sonnambula. The story itself is often ghostly and dream-like and Phoebe’s world is a place where nothing is exactly as it seems.

The Somnambulist is an impressive debut novel and I’ll certainly look out for any future books from Essie Fox.

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

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North and South is the story of Margaret Hale, a young woman who lives with her parents at their parsonage in the idyllic village of Helstone in the south of England. When Margaret’s father decides to resign as parson and takes a new job as a tutor in the northern manufacturing town of Milton, the Hale family initially find it difficult to adapt to their new environment. It is not until Margaret meets some of the inhabitants of Milton that the town begins to feel like home. She forms a close friendship with the Higgins family – the invalid Bessy, her younger sister Mary and their father, Nicholas, who works at the cotton mill. But when the Hales also get to know Mr Thornton, a wealthy mill owner, Margaret finds herself caught in a conflict between the poor mill workers and their rich masters.

There’s also a romantic element to the novel: Mr Thornton falls in love with Margaret who unfortunately is prejudiced against what she calls ‘shoppy people’. She seems to make up her mind to dislike him before she even gets to know him because he’s a tradesman who has earned his money rather than inheriting it and is not her idea of a real gentleman. And to make things worse, Mr Thornton’s mother thinks Margaret is haughty and wants to stop her son from becoming involved with her.

Although there were also a lot of things to like about Margaret, her attitude towards Mr Thornton prevented me from really warming to her until the second half of the book when after meeting different types of people and being exposed to important social issues she begins to reassess some of her views and starts to grow as a person. By the end of the book I didn’t find her the annoying character I did at the beginning. It was interesting to see how both Mr Thornton and Nicholas Higgins also changed due to Margaret’s influence. There’s a lot of character development in this book, which was one of the things I loved about it.

The book takes place during the industrial revolution, an important and interesting period of history. It was a time of progress, allowing the factory owners to develop great wealth and the country’s economy to grow. However, the factory employees were working under appalling conditions, with absolutely no regard for their health and safety. Bessy Higgins is one example of this: she is only nineteen years old and has already developed a lung disease which she blames on inhaling ‘fluff’ from the cotton in the mill where she used to work.

Most of this industry was concentrated in the north of the country, in towns and cities such as the fictional Milton. Gaskell herself was born in London but spent most of her childhood in Cheshire and then settled in Manchester after her marriage (the town of Milton is thought to be based on Manchester), so she would have had first-hand knowledge of the northern way of life and how it may have differed from life in the south. Even today many people still have certain views and misconceptions about the differences between northern and southern England and even more so at the time when Gaskell was writing this novel, so I did appreciate the way she showed both the positive and the negative things about both regions.

North and South hasn’t become one of my favourite classics, but I did still enjoy it, although I was slightly disappointed by the way the book ended – not because I was unhappy with the outcome but because it seemed too abrupt. After reading The Moorland Cottage in February, I’ve now read the required two books to complete the Gaskell Reading Challenge, but as I’ve enjoyed both of my choices I’m sure I’ll be reading more of Gaskell’s work in the future!

The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag by Alan Bradley

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The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag is the second book in Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce mystery series. I read and loved the first one, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, last year but it’s taken me so long to find time to read this one that the third book has also now been released and is waiting patiently on my shelf.

For those of you who are new to the series, the novels are set in the small English village of Bishop’s Lacey during the 1950s and feature Flavia de Luce, an eleven-year-old detective and chemistry genius. The mysteries are not particularly complex but Flavia’s unique narrative voice makes the books a lot of fun to read.

The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag begins shortly after the previous book ended, but if you haven’t already read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie I don’t think it would matter too much. And if you have read The Sweetness… you’ll find that this book is really very much the same: Flavia is still conducting experiments in her laboratory, her sister Daffy is still obsessed with books, her other sister Feely is still obsessed with her appearance, Father is still collecting stamps. But the tone of this book is slightly darker than its predecessor and I enjoyed the mystery more as there were a lot of possible suspects and the villain wasn’t immediately obvious – at least not to me!

This time Flavia investigates a murder that takes place during a puppet show in the village hall and begins to connect this death with the hanging of a little boy in Gibbet Wood several years earlier. As a detective, the advantage Flavia has is that being an eleven-year-old girl she can ask questions that the police can’t ask and can convince the local people to tell her things they might not tell an adult. Being an expert in poisons helps too, of course!

Flavia hasn’t changed a lot between the first book and this, but she does feel that little bit older and her sense of humour seems sharper. I’m hoping her character is going to develop further as the series goes on. The thing I love about Flavia is that she is somehow both a believable and an unbelievable character at the same time. She has a vocabulary like no eleven-year-old I’ve ever met and both her chemical and general knowledge are exceptional even by adult standards, but despite this she still feels real to me. She also has fears and insecurities (usually covered up by her tough exterior) and this book continues to explore her difficult relationships with her sisters and father, as well as introducing another family member, Aunt Felicity.

I love the old-fashioned, innocent feel of this series, which reminds me so much of the Enid Blyton books I grew up reading. Hopefully it won’t be too long before I can let you know what I think of A Red Herring Without Mustard!

The News Where You Are by Catherine O’Flynn

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Frank Allcroft, the central character in this novel by Catherine O’Flynn, is a local celebrity. He can be seen on television every evening presenting the regional news – or ‘the news where you are’. Amongst the never-ending stream of missing dogs, charity fundraisers and other typical ‘local news’ reports, there’s the occasional item that affects Frank more deeply. These tend to be the stories that deal with deaths and disappearances: the stories about old people found dead in their own homes with nobody having noticed that they were missing. To ensure that their deaths don’t go unnoticed, Frank has started leaving flowers outside their houses and attending their funerals – where he is often one of the only mourners.

There are many important people in Frank’s life, including his depressed elderly mother Maureen, his ambitious co-presenter Julia, his wife Andrea and their little girl, Mo. But equally important are the people who are no longer there: Frank’s friend and fellow TV presenter, Phil Smethway, for example, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident. And his father, Douglas, an architect who died when Frank was young and whose buildings are now being demolished one by one.

This book addresses lots of interesting issues – coping with ageing, adjusting to change and progress, the pressures of being a celebrity – but overall it was a bit too slow for me. The problem I had was that the first 100 pages just felt like a very long introduction to the characters, with no real plot to speak of. Eventually, a mystery began to emerge when Frank decided to investigate the connection between Phil Smethway’s death and the death of one of Phil’s old friends, Michael Church, and at this point I started to find the story more compelling. So, as long as you’re not expecting something fast-paced and thrilling this is an enjoyable enough book with likeable characters (I particularly loved Mo). I did really like the way Catherine O’Flynn writes and am looking forward to reading What Was Lost, which I’ve heard is better than this one.