Author Archives: sandradan1

About sandradan1

Novelist. I blog about writing, reading and everything to do with books and writing them at http://www.sandradanby.com/. Come and visit me!

Great Opening Paragraph 123… ‘The Ashes of London’ #amreading #FirstPara

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“The noise was the worst. Not the crackling of the flames, not the explosions and the clatter of falling buildings, not the shouting and the endless beating of drums and the groans and cries of the crowd: it was the howling of the fire. It roared its rage. It was the voice of the Great Beast itself.”
From ‘The Ashes of London’ by Andrew Taylor #1FIREOFLONDON

Read my reviews of the books in this series:
THE ASHES OF LONDON #1FIREOFLONDON
THE FIRE COURT #2FIREOFLONDON
THE KING’S EVIL #3FIREOFLONDON
THE LAST PROTECTOR #4FIREOFLONDON
THE ROYAL SECRET #5FIREOFLONDON
THE SHADOWS OF LONDON #6FIREOFLONDON

And a World War Two novel by the same author:-
THE SECOND MIDNIGHT

Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Personal’ by Lee Child
‘Back When We Were Grown Ups’ by Anne Tyler
‘The Sense of an Ending’ by Julian Barnes

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara THE ASHES OF LONDON by @AndrewJRTaylor https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3Jn via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Museum of Broken Promises’ by @elizabethbuchan #thriller #spy

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The Museum of Broken Promises by Elizabeth Buchan is a disjointed story of Cold War romance and its lingering after-effects decades later. Promises are made and broken, by everyone. The title is misleading, as the sections at the museum in present day in Paris act as bookends to the crucial story in Eighties story in Czechoslovakia. It is 1985, Prague. After the death of her father, student Laure takes a job as an au pair in Paris moving to Prague with her employers. It is the Cold War and the once beautiful city is shabby and grey, an unsettling place to live where the threat of imprisonment or violence always lingers. Laure cares for two small children while their father Petr works, he is an official at a pharmaceuticals company and in a privileged position enabling him to bring a foreigner to work in the country, and their mother Eva is ill. Gradually Laure explores the streets and finds a marionette theatre. There she is enchanted by the folklore tales of the puppets; and she meets Tomas, lead singer in a rock band.
Resistance against the repressive regime in Czechoslovakia is low key, expressed through the arts. In this way, the book reminded me of Tom Stoppard’s play Rock and Roll which tells the story of rock band The Plastic People of the Universe. The Museum of Broken Promises is a story of a young student who falls in love with a bad boy who describes himself as a ‘rock soldier making war on the party’. But these words – soldier, war – are used in a student resistance sense, not actual war. This is quiet resistance rather than terrorism, but is none the weaker for this. Songs and marionettes can spread important messages of defiance, as Laure finds when she goes to a rock concert. Singing and dancing can be subversive. As someone says, it is ‘giving into forbidden yearning and loyalties. Tasting resistance like wine on the tongue’. Laure’s time in Prague echoes throughout her later life and leads her to open her museum in Paris, inviting mementoes from strangers, objects that represent broken promises.
The Museum of Broken Promises is a slow moving contemplative story, without the pace of a thriller despite its Cold War setting and the constant threat to anyone who speaks or behaves out of turn. This lack of propulsion makes it seem a longer book than it is and I wanted it to have some bite. The story moves back and forth from Prague to Paris and more than once I wasn’t sure where Laure was. This adds to the sense that nothing is what it seems.
Laure is an innocent who is sometimes stupidly naïve, unknowingly putting other people in danger. It is an example of the idealism and irreverence of youth ignoring advice. As she is warned on her arrival in Prague, don’t ask questions, don’t answer questions.

If you like this, try:-
‘If I Knew You Were Going to be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go’ by Judy Chicurel
‘The Bone Church’ by Victoria Dougherty
‘Hangover Square’ by Patrick Hamilton

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE MUSEUM OF BROKEN PROMISES by @elizabethbuchan https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4sA via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Mudlarking’ by Lara Maiklem @LondonMudlark #Thames #archaeology

My Porridge & Cream read Rosemary J Kind @therealalfiedog #books

#BookReview ‘The Confession’ by Jessie Burton #romance #contemporary

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The Confession by Jessie Burton is her third novel after The Miniaturist, her successful debut. The Confession is a contemporary romance about relationships; mother/daughter, romantic, between friends. Are daughters destined to repeat the mistakes of their mothers, even if they have never met? This is a dual timeline novel. In 2017, Rose Simmons never knew her mother, who left when she was a baby. Rose’s father has always been tight-lipped until now when he tells Rose that the famous but reclusive novelist Constance Holden may have the answers. Frightened of scaring off Constance with awkward questions, Rose instead gets a job as maid/companion for the reclusive novelist, now in her seventies and crippled by arthritis. Unexpectedly Rose comes to like and admire Connie so the longer she works for her the more impossible it is to admit to her deception [she is known to Connie as Laura Brown]. And all the time she wonders if Connie can see her mother’s face in her own. In 1982, we see the story of her mother and Connie. Part-time waitress and artist’s model Elise Morceau meets the enigmatic Connie on Hampstead Heath. When Connie’s first novel is made into a film, the two women go to LA. That’s where the lies start, the cracks appear. Connie is working, Elise is a hanger-on who learns to surf. The turning point comes when she begins to doubt Connie’s love.
At times, Elise and Rose were inter-changeable in my head. Both women are immature, unsure who they are, searching for something they cannot define except that they don’t have it. Elise is in her early twenties, while Rose is in her thirties. I had some sympathy with Rose’s boyfriend Joe and best friend Kelly who both lost patience with her. Both Rose and Elise seem to play at being adults, thinking they are the centre of the world, not understanding that their own actions also leave ripple effects that cause pain to other people. They obsess about being hurt but do not recognise the hurt they cause. Mother and daughter are both passive characters, drifting in their own lives, running away rather than confront difficult situations. Principally, the novel is about life choices, taking responsibility for one’s own life and own choices [and being passive, not making decisions, is a personal choice].
At the beginning I felt for Rose and her absence of self-identity, ‘I didn’t have a mum, and I’d never had her, so how could I miss something I’d never really lost?… I don’t tell people about the yearning. The wonder. I tell them, You can’t miss what you never had!’ But the pace of the first quarter is very slow, it picks up once Rose, aka Laura Brown, starts working for Connie in Hampstead. Ironically Rose finds her sense of self through the very mode of her deception; by creating a new personality and life for herself, assuming the face of Laura that she presents to Connie, Rose begins to understand who she is.
After really enjoying The Miniaturist, sadly The Confession left me feeling underwhelmed.

Read my review of THE MINIATURIST.

If you like this, try:-
‘Ghost Moth’ by Michele Forbes
‘If I Knew You Were Going to be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go’ by Judy Chicurel
‘The Girl on the Cliff’ by Lucinda Riley

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE CONFESSION by Jessie Burton https://wp.me/p5gEM4-46b via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The House at Silvermoor’ by @AuthorTracyRees #historical

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Expectations and generalisations are an odd thing. When I first read the the blurb for The House at Silvermoor and saw it is set in a South Yorkshire mining community, I hesitated. But I decided to place my trust in the author, Tracy Rees, because I read and loved her Amy Snow. What a good decision it was. Inspired by her grandfather Len, Rees researched coal mining at the turn of the century. This research informs every page but never interferes with her story of Tommy Green from the mining village of Grindley and Josie Westgate of nearby Arden. When they are twelve they meet in a country lane, talking over a dropped bunch of bluebells. Rees is excellent at world creation: the hard grind of the mining families, the lack of options, the durability and sense of inevitability of the families, the autocratic families that rule the mines, the temptation of the unknown. Tommy is destined to work in the pits of the Sedgewick family of Silvermoor where his father and brothers work, where his brother Dan died in an accident. Josie’s father and brothers work in the nearby pits owned by Winthrop Barridge, where standards are lower, the work more hazardous, and no compensation for widows of miners killed at work. Her sisters work at the mine too, above ground, washing coal.
As the story starts, it is Tommy’s last day at school. His destiny is to work in the pits despite wanting more, something different, despite his dreams. Dismissed by his schoolteacher as the best of a bad lot and accused of false pride, Tommy is tongue-tied. ‘In quite real terms, my tongue had lodged in my throat in a glutinous lump, and I could neither swallow nor speak’. That night, in a rite of manhood, he is taken poaching at midnight by his father to Heston Manor, the rundown estate owned by Barridge and patrolled by guards. Entrance is forbidden but food is scarce so the risk is worth it. Josie’s sister Alice is marrying and she runs to her secret place in the grounds of Heston Manor to pick wildflowers. She is caught by the gamekeeper Paulson. She lies her way out of an awkward situation, runs towards home and bumps into Tommy. It is a lovely meeting between two adolescents, on the brink of their lives, both rebels, both smart enough to talk their way out of trouble, and both capable of getting themselves into trouble.
The relationship between Tommy and Josie is at the heart of this novel as they navigate the difficult paths deemed to be their fate. Both want more, both struggle with restriction and each supports the other. Into the picture come Arden shopkeeper Dulcie Embry, who inherits the village shop from her uncle and is determined to prove it is a job for a woman, and who becomes a particular friend of Josie; a mysterious ghost that haunts Heston Manor and rides a white stallion; and Lord Walter Sedgewick, son of the earl and five years younger that Tommy, who was christened on Tommy’s birthday. This connection runs throughout the story in ways I did not expect and opens up new friendships and loyalties that cross the rigidities of class.
It is the turn of the century, the promise of the 1900s brings expectations, new opportunities and tradition challenged. This is a story of love, loyalty, the fight against exploitation, the hope of goodness. It is the story of a family mystery and a romance, bound up with the rapidly changing social history of its time. Excellent. A note about the cover design; beautiful, but completely irrelevant to the story.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

Click the title below to read my reviews of other novels by Tracy Rees:-
AMY SNOW
DARLING BLUE
THE ELOPEMENT
THE ROSE GARDEN

If you like this, try:-
‘The Almanack’ by Martine Bailey
‘The Doll Factory’ by Elizabeth Macneal
‘The Taxidermist’s Daughter’ by Kate Mosse

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE HOUSE AT SILVERMOOR by @AuthorTracyRees https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4lK via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Our Souls at Night’ by Kent Haruf #love #loneliness

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Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf is a simple, straight talking, touching book about loneliness, love and longing late in life. One day Addie Moore suggests to her neighbour Louis Waters that he visit her house each night and sleep in her bed. Both are in their seventies, widowed, lonely and don’t know each other well. Acknowledging Addie’s bravery in asking the question, Louis arrives with his pyjamas and toothbrush in a bag. And so starts this touching novel about relationships, family and morality. Addie and Louis sleep side-by-side, not touching. They ignore the glances of neighbours, fearing censure. But the townsfolk nod and smile at them, while their own children disapprove. And so one generation seeks to control another.
When their new dynamic is disrupted by the arrival of Addie’s six-year-old grandson Jamie, Addie and Louis’s relationship enters a new stage. Jamie’s parents have separated and he is distressed. Addie’s son Gene has asked his mother to help. This new three-person family begins to slowly to heal itself, starting slowly by visiting a family of new born mice in Louis’ shed.
This is a short read, manageable in one sitting. The language is beautiful. Addie’s suggestion does not contain one redundant word. “I mean we’re both alone. We’ve been by ourselves for too long. For years. I’m lonely. I think you might be too. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk.”
Haruf is non-judgmental; he doesn’t point fingers at the small-minded criticism, he simply shows how friendship can be a saviour for the elderly, lonely and forgotten.
A word about dialogue. There are no speech marks and I missed them. In some places it was difficult to know who was speaking, which made me stop and think and took me away from the emotion of the story. Which was a pity.
This is the first book by Haruf that I have read, and the last he wrote; now I’ll seek out the others. It was made as a film in 2017 featuring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Only Story’ by Julian Barnes
‘The Stars are Fire’ by Anita Shreve
‘A Sudden Light’ by Garth Stein

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview OUR SOULS AT NIGHT by Kent Haruf https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3rz via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Miss Austen’ by Gill Hornby @GillHornby #JaneAusten #historical

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What a delicious first chapter there is to Miss Austen by Gill Hornby. Elderly Cassandra Austen arrives unannounced to visit a family friend in Kintbury, endures a parsimonious supper and a difficult evening without much conversation. Why, I wondered, is Cassandra there. And then at bedtime, comes a hint at her reason. Cassandra visits Isabella, a family friend who is grieving the death of her father. Cassandra’s objective, is to retrieve any incriminating letters between her sister Jane and Isabella’s mother, Eliza, before Isabella leaves the family vicarage. With both letter writers dead, and knowledge of the novelist Jane Austen more widely sought than ever before, Cassandra is anxious to protect Jane’s legacy.
What follows is a gentle telling of the sisters’ relationship as Hornby pieces together the real letters of the Austen sisters and the known biography of the family, combined with events and dialogue of her own imagination. This is a meandering read without a real focus, there is the imagined threat to Jane’s reputation as Cassandra searches for the missing letters under threat of exposure by her sister-in-law Mary. But this threat is not wholly formed and the story goes back and forth between Cassandra reading the letters at the dead of night, to key times in the life of Jane.
Not until three-quarters of the way through does the dilemma becomes personal to Cassandra. Until this point, it is oddly numb. Cassandra has been seeking private – and very personal – letters written to Eliza but instead finds letters that cast what she, Cassandra, believes to be a bad light on her own life. Not Jane’s. The stakes are raised and I wanted to see more than a snapshot of the man involved and don’t really care if he was a real person or the author’s invention.
Cassandra in her old age is dismissive of those who do not read or don’t appreciate the art of her sister’s books, and has a lack of interest in anyone not an Austen. ‘Those other mortals, whose poor veins must somehow pulse with no Austen blood in them, always appeared to her comparatively pale’. This quote reminded me of Marianne’s dismissal of Edward’s underwhelming reading of Shakespeare sonnets and made me want a 360 degree picture of Cassandra’s own life.
I finished Miss Austen reflecting on the difficulty of writing this novel. What an awkward task it is for an author, to balance biography and real letters with invention and how strong must be the impulse to stick with the truth. I longed for Hornby to take a bigger risk and show us more of the life, and loves, Cassandra may have had.

If you like this, try:-
‘After Leaving Mr Mackenzie’ by Jean Rhys
‘The Confessions of Frannie Langton’ by Sara Collins
‘Amy Snow’ by Tracy Rees

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview MISS AUSTEN by Gill Hornby @GillHornby https://wp.me/p5gEM4-4iB via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Howard’s End is on the Landing’ by @susanhillwriter #memoir

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I selected this book off my to-read shelf where it has sat for at least two years and, on reading the first paragraph, knew I must read on. Howard’s End is on the Landing by Susan Hill is a gem of a memoir, a year in the life of a crime novelist who decides to read only the books on her bookshelves. But this is more than a review of books – it can be dipped in and out of, the chapters are conveniently short which makes you want to read ‘just another’ – because Hill attaches a personal story to each book, each author. Hill’s first novel was published when she was only eighteen, she lives an ordinary life but mixes with some breath-stopping names. She met and/or knew TS Eliot, EM Forster, Cecil Day Lewis, Penelope Fitzgerald, Ian Fleming, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Bowen; it is a mirror image of my reading list at university, except for the Bond. Above everything though, the book reveals Hill as a reader who devours everything from Dickens to WG Sebald, Anthony Trollope to Anita Brookner, John le Carre to Olivia Manning. Her bookshelves contain signed copies, first editions, expensive sets, anthologies and poetry, plus shabby cheap paperbacks bought at airports and train stations, or second hand in charity shops. She writes in her books, turns down the corners of pages, discovers things used years ago as bookmarks – bills, paid and unpaid; receipts; picture postcards; shopping lists. She is, like you and I, someone who loves reading books. I recognised her description of reading library books as a child.
“Although when I was a child and growing up I could borrow books every week from the library, there was a limit on the number to be taken at any one time and so, as there was not the money to buy many books either, I found myself reading, re-reading and re-reading again. If I liked a library book I simply got to the end, turned it round and began again. It was a bit like sweets. Until I was ten, sweets were rationed. I had a quarter of a pound a week and there were various ways in which they could be made to last. A sweet a day. Buy only boiled sweets which could be sucked for a long time. Suck half and re-wrap the rest until tomorrow. Occasionally I would have such a sugar-craving that I bought something that was gobbled up in a great burst of sweetness that exploded in the mouth like a firework and then was gone. Sherbet lemons were like that. Marshmallows did not last long.” I turned my library books round and began again, too. I also read my mother’s books. That’s how, as a young teenager, I discovered Mary Stewart.
This is a delightful slim paperback which made me want to re-read many novels first read forty years ago, and to try authors I have always meant to read such as Sebald and PG Wodehouse.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Story’ ed. by Victoria Hislop
‘In the Midst of Winter’ by Isabel Allende
‘White Chrysanthemum’ by Mary Lynn Bracht

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview HOWARD’S END IS ON THE LANDING by @susanhillwriter https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3t5 via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Pursuit of Love’ by Nancy Mitford #romance

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A slower, more meditative pace inhabits The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford, less frenetic than her earlier novels. More fond, less satirical. Fanny Logan narrates this story of the Radlett family and, in particular, her cousin Linda’s pursuit of love. The teenage Linda and sisters, and cousin Fanny who visits the Radletts at the fading freezing family pile, Alconleigh in the Cotswolds, want to grow up now. They are obsessed by sex and romance whilst being woefully ignorant of the practicalities. The reality, however, is more difficult and less romantic than they imagined. They form a secret society The Hons. When not out hunting, The Hons spend hours in a large warm cupboard gossiping about love and Fanny’s disreputable mother, ‘The Bolter’, who abandoned her daughter to pursue love. Fanny, raised by her Aunt Emily and stepfather Davey, spends all her holidays at Alconleigh with Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie and their family.
As with all Mitford novels there are many laugh-out-loud moments. Alconleigh is an eccentric world where Uncle Matthew rules his staff and family; he despises foreigners, Catholics, the nouveaux riche and people who say ‘perfume’ instead of ‘scent’. Desperate to find true love and not follow the family black sheep – The Bolter – into leapfrogging from affair to affair, the cousins are woefully naïve and unprepared for meeting men. Linda sums up true love, ‘it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him, and it is not only not the friend, but not even very like him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can’t imagine how you ever mistook that person for him.’
Published in 1945, the story starts in the Thirties and runs through the Spanish Civil War and the start of World War Two and The Blitz. The Radletts may be ‘hons’ but they suffer and slings and arrows of fortune in love. Fanny is the narrator of the family’s story and we are treated to occasional morsels about her own love and life. Like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, the story therefore includes Fanny’s own interpretation of affairs as well as her recounting of Linda’s own stories.
This is a tale of lost aristocracy, and the levelling effects of love and war. Funny, witty and sharp featuring an absent parenting style completely alien today, The Pursuit of Love has at its heart a strong streak of sadness and tragedy. No matter who you are, love cannot always be found; if found, it cannot always be retained.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

Read the first paragraph of THE PURSUIT OF LOVE here.

Read my reviews of these other novels by Nancy Mitford:-
CHRISTMAS PUDDING
HIGHLAND FLING
LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE
PIGEON PIE
THE BLESSING
WIGS ON THE GREEN

If you like this, try these:-
‘Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day’ by Winifred Watson
‘The Ballroom’ by Anna Hope
‘My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You’ by Louisa Young

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE PURSUIT OF LOVE by Nancy Mitford https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3kq via @SandraDanby

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SANDRA DANBY'S BOOK REVIEWS

Sharing thoughts on the books I read, new authors, favourite authors, classics re-visisted

Author Archives: sandradan1

About sandradan1

Great Opening Paragraph 123… ‘The Ashes of London’ #amreading #FirstPara

#BookReview ‘The Museum of Broken Promises’ by @elizabethbuchan #thriller #spy

#BookReview ‘Mudlarking’ by Lara Maiklem @LondonMudlark #Thames #archaeology

My Porridge & Cream read Rosemary J Kind @therealalfiedog #books

#BookReview ‘The Confession’ by Jessie Burton #romance #contemporary

#BookReview ‘The House at Silvermoor’ by @AuthorTracyRees #historical

#BookReview ‘Our Souls at Night’ by Kent Haruf #love #loneliness

#BookReview ‘Miss Austen’ by Gill Hornby @GillHornby #JaneAusten #historical

#BookReview ‘Howard’s End is on the Landing’ by @susanhillwriter #memoir

#BookReview ‘The Pursuit of Love’ by Nancy Mitford #romance

About sandradan1

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