A big thank you to poet Angelique Jamail who has chosen one of my poems for her Poem-a-Day series throughout April. Angelique is celebrating National Poetry Month so please check back again to see the other poems she has selected.
[photo: fanpop.com]
To read my poem, click here to visit Angelique’s website ‘Sappho’s Torque’.
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
A #poem for #NationalPoetryMonth: ‘My Mother the Cow’ by @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Ca
Catherine moves house and finds a novel which she can’t remember buying. But this is no ordinary book. It pretends to be fiction, but Catherine recognises herself as one of the characters and the story discloses a secret. “A secret she has told no-one, not even her husband and son – two people who think they know her better than anyone else.” So, Disclaimer by Renee Knight includes a novel-within-a-novel. 
This novel explores how one secret, hidden and almost forgotten, can re-emerge 20 years later to do damage. But it is also a warning about the danger of making assumptions without all the facts. The reader makes assumptions, Catherine’s husband makes assumptions, and the writer of the novel makes assumptions.
Nothing is what it seems, in the tradition of good thrillers, and this book will make you believe first one version of the truth, and then another. Which is the real one? Is Catherine a good mother, or a bad mother?
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON
If you like this, try:-
‘The Returned’ by Jason Mott
‘Girl Runner’ by Carrie Snyder
‘The Lightning Tree’ by Emily Woof
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview DISCLAIMER by Renee Knight http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1wI via @SandraDanby
This book had me gripped from page one. It is difficult to categorize: thriller, yes; beautifully-written, yes; sexually-charged, yes; ghosts and spirits, yes. Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekback is a chilling Nordic thriller set in a bleak winter landscape deep in snow, the mutilated body of a man is found by two young girls and the ramifications reverberate throughout the winter months. 
This disparate community of families, residents and itinerant Lapps, feel threatened by something on their mountain, Blackåsen. It is a hard life for newcomer Maija and her two daughters Frederika and Dorotea. Maija’s husband leaves them for the winter to get a job on the coast, and so Maija deals with the unnamed threat in her own way, a way which some locals see as suspicious, perhaps even witchery.
The mountain is there on every page, the wind, the snow, the cold. The Swedish expression ‘wolf winter’ means two things: an unusually bitter and long winter, and the darkest time in a person’s life. Both apply to this novel. Excellent. This is Ekback’s debut novel and I look forward to the second.
If you like this, try:-
‘Burial Rites’ by Hannah Kent
‘The Killing Lessons’ by Saul Black
‘I Refuse’ by Per Petterson
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview WOLF WINTER by Cecilia Ekback via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Af
I am making a point of reading poets I am unfamiliar with, and wanted to share this poem by American poet Hilda Doolittle.
[photo: Wikipedia]
there would be no gauntleted knock on the door,
or tap-tap with a riding crop,
no galloping here and back;
but the latch would softly lift,
would softly fall,
dusk would come slowly,
and even dusk could wait
till night encompassed us;
dawn would come gracious, not too soon,
day would come late,
and the next day and the next,
while I found pansies to take the place of daisies,
and a spray of apple-blossom after that,
no calendar of fevered hours,
Carthago delenda est and the Tyrian night.
Doolitte died in 1961. I love the transitory passing of time in this poem. And no, I didn’t understand the last line. Google Translate tells me ‘Carthago delenda est’ means ‘Carthage is destroyed’ in Latin, which I didn’t study at school. ‘Tyrian night’ still mystifies me, can anyone else help?
For more about Hilda Doolittle at the Poetry Foundation website, click here.
‘Collected Poems’ by Hilda Doolittle [New Directions]
Read these other excerpts and find a new poet to love:-
‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost
‘Digging’ by Seamus Heaney
‘The Cinnamon Peeler’ by Michael Ondaatje
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
A #poem to read in the bath: ‘Sometimes and After’ by Hilda Doolittle http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1yt via @SandraDanby
After a spell of reading historical books, I needed a comfort read, something familiar. A pageturner, but well-written. So I picked up The Shadows in the Street, fifth in the Simon Serrailler detective series by Susan Hill. And I tweeted about it. Susan Hill replied with the question: “Comfort?!!” 
I know what she means; a crime thriller should not be comfortable reading. I replied: “Okay, discomfort with familiar characters.” I finished the book that same day, but sat back and considered what made me feel comfortable with this series of books. Firstly, the quality of the writing. Hill’s detective Serrailler is a literary gem, he is distinctive but believable, seems ordinary but is extraordinary. And he is surrounded by a close-knit family whose stories I also follow from book to book. Hill is particularly good at creating mood – a skill also used in her ghost stories – and her description of place is minimal but so effective. For example, “It was a damp, mild October night with a thin mist drifting away over the black water of the canal like a spirit departing a dead body. The air smelled green.” And there is depth to her writing, literary and cultural references there for you to delight in recognising but which don’t matter if you don’t get them.
In Lafferton, two prostitutes are murdered. Simon Serrailler is on sabbatical leave on a remote Scottish island. A librarian takes food parcels to the prostitutes, one of whom is beaten up by her boyfriend. As usual with Hill’s books, each new chapter makes you want to devour the book in one sitting as she lays out first one possibility then another. Of course nothing is as it first seems.
Read my reviews of the other novels in the series:-
THE VARIOUS HAUNTS OF MEN #1SIMONSERRAILLER
THE PURE IN HEART #2SIMONSERRAILLER
THE RISK OF DARKNESS #3SIMONSERRAILLER
THE VOWS OF SILENCE #4SIMONSERRAILLER
THE BETRAYAL OF TRUST #6SIMONSERRAILLER
A QUESTION OF IDENTITY #7SIMONSERRAILLER
THE SOUL OF DISCRETION #8SIMONSERRAILLER
THE COMFORTS OF HOME #9SIMONSERRAILLER
THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT #10SIMONSERRAILLER
A CHANGE OF CIRCUMSTANCE #11SIMONSERRAILLER
And also by Susan Hill, HOWARD’S END IS ON THE LANDING
If you like this, try:-
‘The Farm’ by Tom Rob Smith
‘Or the Bull Kills You’ by Jason Webster #1MAXCAMARA
‘Last Light’ by Alex Scarrow #1LASTLIGHT
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE SHADOWS IN THE STREET by @susanhillwriter http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1z1 via @SandraDanby
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson had been on my shelf for a while, bought because of reputation, and anticipated. Perhaps I expected too much of a first novel because, though it has amazing reviews, I struggled to connect with the story. The writing, however, is beautiful, poetic, elegiac. 
It is the story of Ruth and Lucille, orphans, who grow up beside a haunting lake in the vast open countryside of mid-America. The lake dominates the life of everyone who lives around it, it floods every year, and floods the house where the two girls live, first with their grandmother and then with their Aunt Sylvie. We see Sylvie’s attempts at housekeeping dwindle as the house floods each winter, as her care for the house fails, so the two girls are uncared for. Not abused, but not clean, not sent to school, not disciplined. It is a novel about the failure of housekeeping in this house, and in the family, and it is the two who girls who suffer.
The sad story moves at a slow pace, and until halfway through I had no clear picture of how the two girls were different. It is Ruth who narrates, much of which is description of the house which lays at the heart of the story.
All the description, though, is poetic. Ruth’s grandmother in her elderly years “continued to settle and began to shrink. Her mouth bowed forward and her brow sloped back, and her skull shone pink and speckled within a mere haze of hair, which hovered about her head like the remembered shape of an altered thing.”
This is not an easy read, often obscure. There was no strong thread to pull me through the book, to keep turning the pages.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON
Read my reviews of Robinson’s other novels:-
GILEAD
HOME
JACK
Try the #FirstPara of GILEAD here.
If you like this, try:-
‘A Thousand Acres’ by Jane Smiley
‘Summertime’ by Vanessa Lafaye
‘Barkskins’ by Annie Proulx
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview HOUSEKEEPING by Marilynne Robinson http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1zG via @SandraDanby
‘The front cover of Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland features a painting by Dutch master Jan Vermeer called ‘The Painter in his Studio’. In it we see the back of a painter, brush in hand, studying a young girl in blue, holding a book, who stands by a window. This real painting was the inspiration for Vreeland’s novel. 
Scene-by-scene the story takes you back in time, following through the centuries the owners of the painting which author Susan Vreeland imagines Vermeer was painting . First, we meet a maths master who has a secret. A painting, inherited from his father, which came to him in the Second World War. The painting is passed from owner to owner, sometimes as an inheritance or gift, sometimes as payment of a debt, sometimes stolen. Vreeland tells us the story of each owner, what the painting meant to them and how it affected their lives: for some it means quick money, or guilt, or beauty, or a hidden secret. Effectively this is a series of short stories, linked by the painting.
It is a charming tale, set mostly in the Holland of dykes, poverty and farms. The painting illuminates the lives of everyone who owns it, no matter how briefly. A charming story about how a painting is viewed differently by everyone who sees it, starting with the artist’s intentions as he conceives and executes it. Vermeer says: “A man has time for only a certain number of paintings in his lifetime… He’d better choose them prudently.”
If you enjoyed Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring or Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist, you will enjoy this.
If you like this, try:-
‘The Glassmaker’ by Tracy Chevalier
‘Disobedient’ by Elizabeth Fremantle
‘The Figurine’ by Victoria Hislop
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview GIRL IN HYACINTH BLUE by Susan Vreeland http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1mi via @SandraDanby
Forever Fredless is a sunny ‘what if…’ story by Suzy Turner about a girl who longs for a dream, not recognising that her life is offering her something better than that unattainable dream. It is a reminder to appreciate what you have rather than covet something out of reach. 
Kate Robinson falls instantly in love when she is 12. She doesn’t know the boy’s name, they exchange a glance but not a single word, before being whisked away by their parents, destined never to meet again. As Kate grows older, no man matches up to ‘Fred’, as she thinks of him, until a surprise inheritance changes her life and shows her that there are other possible loves in her life than the unknown ‘Fred’.
Forever Fredless is a fast-moving chicklit novel which I read quickly on a flight going on holiday. Exactly the book to pack in your suitcase. It’ll teach you about the perils of celebrity, that money isn’t always a blessing, and that teenage dreams are made of clouds… but are still worth believing in.
Here’s my review of STORMY SUMMER, also by Suzy Turner.
If you like this, try:-
‘A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting’ by Sophie Urwin
‘Butterfly Barn’ by Karen Power
‘The Art of Baking Blind’ by Sarah Vaughan
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview FOREVER FREDLESS by @suzy_turner http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1rN via @SandraDanby
I irritated and intrigued by husband by my constant chuckling while reading The Humans by Matt Haig. I wish I had read it sooner, it was a breath of fresh air. I read it in two sittings over a weekend. If you feel a little jaded with your reading, this is my prescription for you. 
Professor Andrew Martin is not feeling himself. He has been walking naked through the street and finds humans really odd-looking. That is because the real Andrew Martin is dead, and the human who looks like him is really an alien. The alien has come to earth to delete the mathematical breakthrough achieved by Professor Martin before it does damage to humankind. The alien Andrew just does not get humans, in fact his first source of information on human behaviour is from Cosmopolitan magazine.
This is a funny book with a serious message about mental health, about our acceptance of others for what they are, the expectations and selfishness of modern society. Bit by bit, the alien Andrew discovers humans are not as he has been warned; they can in fact be generous, charitable, empathetic and brave.
Here’s a small excerpt. Alien Andrew is recovering from his period of temporary insanity by watching television:
“The term ‘news’ on Earth generally meant ‘news that directly affects humans.’ There was, quite literally, nothing about the antelope or the sea-horse or the red-eared slider turtle or the other nine million species on the planet.”
Read my reviews of these other Matt Haig novels:-
HOW TO STOP TIME
THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY
If you like this, try:-
‘The Diary of a Nobody’ by George & Weedon Grossmith
‘The Blessing’ by Nancy Mitford
‘Trio’ by William Boyd
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE HUMANS by @matthaig1 via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1zD
“One day when Kit was ten years old, a visitor cut her wrists in the kitchen. She was just beginning on this cold, difficult form of death when Kit came in to get a glass of milk.”
From ‘A Change of Climate’ by Hilary Mantel
Try one of these #FirstParas & discover a new author:-
‘Dance Dance Dance’ by Haruki Murakami
‘The God of Small Things’ by Arundhati Roy
‘In Cold Blood’ by Truman Capote 12
And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#Books #FirstPara A CHANGE OF CLIMATE by Hilary Mantel via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-10z
SANDRA DANBY'S BOOK REVIEWS 