First Edition ‘The Age of Innocence’ by Edith Wharton #oldbooks #bookcovers

#BookReview ‘Amy & Isabelle’ by Elizabeth Strout @LizStrout #contemporary

The mother and daughter portrayed in Amy & Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout are at odds with each other. The events of one long sweltering summer in Shirley Falls are simple, familiar across the ages, but are told with a hefty emotional punch. So strong is this book it’s difficult to see that it was Strout’s first novel, published in 2000 to be followed only eight years later by her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge. Strout is adept at peeling away the layers of character and events to show the raw emotion, shame, guilt and pain beneath. When Isabelle Goodrow arrived in Shirley Falls with her baby daughter, she took a job at the local mill. Now, in a time that feels like 1970s America, Amy is sixteen and has a summer job in the same office as her mother. They sit and fume at each other, barely talking, brushing past each other without a word. Amy, who has fallen in love with her maths teacher, believes her upright, unemotional mother, has no idea of what she is feeling right now. Isabelle despairs of her daughter’s behaviour. Told in absorbing detail, switching between the two viewpoints, the trauma of the two women is revealed. Shirley Falls is an evocative setting, an industrial town with a river flowing through it. As the temperature rises, the river begins to stink adding to the stresses not just on the Goodrows but on the small community in which they exist. Strout excels at portraying the circle of characters which make the world of a novel so believable – Amy’s friend Stacy, Fat Bev and Dottie Brown at the mill, Isabelle’s boss Avery Clark.
Isabelle finds it difficult to fit in, has always felt like an outsider. As she judges others, she assumes others judge her. This is more about her own experience and inadequacies than about anyone else. As the summer days plod on and Amy’s affair unravels, we see hints of the truth of Isabelle’s past that go some of the way to explaining why she is as she is.
Difficult to put down, I enjoyed Amy & Isabelle very much. Both women are so real, their situations are real, you want to slap them both and hug them both. Strout writes in an extraordinarily perceptive manner about ordinary people in ordinary places, so real you feel you are in the room too.

Read my reviews of these other books by Elizabeth Strout:-
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE
LUCY BY THE SEA
MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON
OH WILLIAM!
OLIVE KITTERIDGE
OLIVE, AGAIN

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 Museum of You’ by Carys Bray
‘When All is Said’ by Anne Griffin

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview AMY & ISABELLE by Elizabeth Strout @LizStrout https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5id via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘A Room Made of Leaves’ by Kate Grenville #historical

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When she is 21, a moment’s dalliance in a bush forces orphan Elizabeth to marry soldier John Macarthur. The story of their marriage in 1788, journey to the colony of Australia on board a convict ship and life in the new settlement called Sydney Town, is told in A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville. Elizabeth was a real woman but little is known of her, though her husband features in Australia’s history books as the British army officer who became a politician, legislator and pioneer of the Australian wool industry. Grenville is free to imagine what life must have been like as a white settler, and a woman, in a rough, uncultured town where the native people are viewed as animals.
Very quickly Elizabeth finds her new husband is a bully and her new home is a brutal, unforgiving, judgmental place. She spends much time alone with her sickly son and survives by disguising how clever she is, particularly from her husband. More children quickly follow and she bonds more with the convicts who work for her as servants, than she does with the wives of her husband’s friends. An outlier, she decides to improve her learning and seeks lessons on astronomy from an officer in her husband’s corps. What follows changes her understanding of her new country and her place in it.
The pacing seems at times off kilter, a trifle slow in places and rushed at the end, but the writing is as beautiful as I remember from Grenville’s earlier books. Of the book’s two halves, I wanted less of the first half and more of the second about Elizabeth’s role in developing breeds of sheep suited to the wool trade.
Essentially this is a delicately-written story of a young woman who, after making one mistake, is trapped in a loveless marriage far away from her Devon home. She learns how to manage her husband without him realising he is being managed, she tempers his outbursts and steers him out of trouble. Perhaps this fictional account of Elizabeth’s life will mean more to Australians who have grown-up with the historical story of the real John Macarthur.
A good read but not my favourite Grenville book.

Read my review of another Kate Grenville book, RESTLESS DOLLY MAUNDER.

If you like this, try:-
‘Dangerous Women’ by Hope Adams
‘The Pearl Sister’ by Lucinda Riley
‘Rush Oh!’ by Shirley Barrett

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview A ROOM MADE OF LEAVES by Kate Grenville https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5jI via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Moonflower Murders’ by Anthony Horowitz @AnthonyHorowitz #crime

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Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz is a sandwiching together of two mysteries – one murder, one disappearance – that take place eight years apart in the same place. Second in Horowitz’s crime series featuring literary agent Susan Ryeland and Atticus Pünd, the fictional hero of her client Alan Conway’s 1950s detective books – are you keeping up? – this is at the same time a page-turning read and a mystifying Rubik’s Cube challenge. Definitely a book that will reward re-reading. Susan’s, now deceased, author Conway loved word play and riddled his short novels with in-jokes, complicated clues and witticisms. Many of these only make sense at the very end of Horowitz’s book. Susan, now living in Crete with boyfriend Andreas, running the just-surviving Hotel Polydorus, is asked by the owners of Branlow Hall hotel in Suffolk to investigate the disappearance of their daughter Cecily. Eight years earlier, one of the hotel’s staff was convicted of murdering a guest, Frank Parris. Shortly after the trial, Conway visited the hotel after which he wrote, Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. The book was edited by Susan who knew nothing about the links to the real-life crime.
Cecily, who manages Branlow Hall with her sister, reads Conway’s novel and is certain the wrong man was convicted of the crime. And then she disappears. How did Conway use the real crime in his fictional Atticus Pünd mystery to reveal the true murderer? What did Cecily see in the book that convinced her of the convict’s innocence? How can Susan unravel the clues and fit together two completely separate stories? And what has happened to Cecily?
The story is littered with clues, everyone has something to hide and it seems everyone is lying. Alongside the detecting we have the continuing story of Susan’s life – did she do the right thing in moving from London to Crete, should she marry Andreas or leave him, can she really be happy running a hotel and not editing books? And like the first in the series, Magpie Murders, there is also a book-within-a-book; we also get to read Atticus Pünd Takes the Case.
Layer upon layer, at times there are so many twists and turns it seems tortuous. Yes, there are coincidences and convenient secrets but if you enjoy Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot you will enjoy spotting the Christie links. If you go-with-the-flow and don’t get caught up on keeping track of the details, this is a fun read.

Read my review of MAGPIE MURDERS, first in the Susan Ryeland crime series.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Mystery of Three Quarters’ by Sophie Hannah #3POIROT
‘A Gift of Poison’ by Bella Ellis #4BRONTEMYSTERIES
‘Lord John and the Private Matter’ by Diana Gabaldon

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview MOONFLOWER MURDERS by Anthony Horowitz @AnthonyHorowitz https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5j9 via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Cecily’ by @anniegarthwaite #historical

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Cecily by Annie Garthwaite was a gradual falling-in-love process for me as I became so immersed in the story and fell in fascination with the character of Cecily Neville. What a wonderful fictionalised account of the Duchess of York it is. Mother of two kings, equal partner to her husband Richard, mother, politician, diplomat, kingmaker. I started knowing nothing more of her than that she was mother to both Edward IV and Richard III. Garthwaite paces herself in the telling of Cecily’s story and there were times when the [necessary] exposition of England’s 15^th century politics and the seemingly endless battles and arguments of the Wars of the Roses, seemed to pause the narrative. But as the pages turn, the tension builds as you wonder how the family will survive. The politics and family connections of the time were intricately linked and can be confusing, so the exposition is a necessary part of the novel.
Cecily is a gift of a character who was somehow overlooked in the history books, as Garthwaite explains in her afterword, ‘Writing Cecily’. “Cecily lived through eighty years of tumultuous history, never far from the beating heart of power. She mothered kings, created a dynasty, brought her family through civil war…. Last woman standing.”
This does not feel like a debut novel. Cecily comes alive off the page and it’s clear that Garthwaite lived and breathed in Cecily’s shoes. She creates a modern woman, a strong woman in a man’s world which, given Cecily’s history, she must have been to survive. This is an epic story starting in 1431 as the teenage Cecily watches as Joan of Arc burns at the stake, ending with the coronation of her eldest son as King Edward IV. On the way, family alliances are sundered, friends become traitors, battles are won and lost and Cecily gives birth to thirteen children. Through it all, she believes her husband has a stronger claim to the throne than the current king, Henry VI. The tension between husband and wife ebbs and flows throughout the years as Cecily encourages and pushes Richard to claim his rightful place.
There are so many twists, betrayals, secrets and threats that I found myself just reading one more page, one more chapter, even as my eyes closed late at night. I did not want this book to end.
And what a stunning cover!

Here’s my review of THE KING’S MOTHER, also by Annie Garthwaite

If you like this, try:-
‘Orphans of the Carnival’ by Carol Birch
‘Dangerous Women’ by Hope Adams
‘Rush Oh!’ by Shirley Barrett

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview CECILY by @anniegarthwaite https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5it via @SandraDanby

A poem to read in the bath… ‘Invisible Man’ by @MargaretAtwood #poetry

#BookReview ‘Dangerous Women’ by Hope Adams @adelegeras #Rajah

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Like Adèle Geras, who as Hope Adams wrote Dangerous Women, I saw the Rajah quilt at an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2009. What a fascinating piece of history, and what a twisty fictional story Geras has written using the quilt as inspiration. Dangerous Women is set in 1841 aboard the transport ship Rajah as it sails from Woolwich, England bearing 180 female convicts to Van Dieman’s Land [today’s Tasmania]. What a fascinating piece of history this is. Geras takes the true story of the ship – some of her characters are real, including matron Kezia Hayter – and tells a tale of troubled, sometimes wronged and abused women, confined together on a ship for three months. Miss Hayter is the only free woman on board and, at the behest of the British Ladies Society for the Reformation of Female Prisoners, organises a team of 18 women who can sew. Every day they stitch patchwork, creating the now famous quilt, but also stitching together the truth of their own lives, their crimes and hopes for a new beginning in a strange country. Miss Hayter is a young well-meaning woman, perhaps naïve, but with a strong belief in what is right.
The story of the voyage is told through three viewpoints – Miss Hayter and two prisoners, Hattie Matthews and Clara Shaw – and at two points on the timeline of the voyage, ‘Then’ and ‘Now’. The alternating passages of each women are quite short, telling chunks of back story. These slipped by too quickly and I would have welcomed longer sections. There were also so many peripheral characters that I got them mixed up, a female love triangle and various women with torrid pasts and mental health issues.
We learn early on that Clara should not be on board and is masquerading as someone else. She has been violent in the past, so should we believe anything she says? This matters because Dangerous Women is not just a glimpse of history, it is also a murder mystery. And this is where I ran into difficulties. When one of the women is stabbed on deck, Miss Hayter is appointed to the on-board committee, also including the captain, doctor and minister, to solve the mystery and find the attacker. The number of female convicts plus the sailors means the list of potential criminals is long and the lack of strong characterisation meant I confused Marion with Joan, Becky with Rose… and some of the admittedly low-level tension was lost.
The pace is slow for a locked room murder mystery, despite the suggestive title. But Dangerous Women creates a snapshot of an unfamiliar piece of history; the standards on the ship, and the stories behind the convictions of many of the women, are startling. This is a gentle story about a brutal, difficult subject, told through the eyes of the gentle, well-meaning Miss Hayter.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

If you like this, try:-
‘The Almanack’ by Martine Bailey [#1 Tabitha Hart]
‘The Miniaturist’ by Jessie Burton
‘Gone Are the Leaves’ by Anne Donovan

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview DANGEROUS WOMEN by Hope Adams @adelegeras https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5hN via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Waiting for Sunrise’ by William Boyd #WW1 #spy

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Determined to deal with my overflowing to-read shelf, I picked up Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd. Thoughtful with a twisty plot, we follow actor Lysander Rief from Vienna to the trenches as he tries to identify a traitor passing war secrets to the enemy. It is Vienna 1913. Actor Lysander Rief has gone to Vienna seeking help for an intimate problem. In the waiting room he encounters two people who will determine the course of Rief’s life in the forthcoming Great War. Rief falls head over heels in lust with Hettie Bull but when Rief is thrown into prison charged with rape, he feels abandoned. He is extricated from Austria thanks to the help of a shadowy British government officer and Rief’s own ingenuity. But he owes a debt and is drawn into the shadowy world of wartime spies. Someone is sending coded messages about essential infrastructure, supply and troop movements to the enemy, and Rief is charged with hunting down the traitor.
Boyd is one of my favourite writers, his writing flows and there are multiple layers to consider long after finishing the book. All concocted with a skilful touch of humour in the right place. It all starts in the consulting room of Dr Bensimon who suggests that Rief’s delicate problem, based on an unfortunate but funny episode in his youth, can be solved not by drugs or hypnosis but by his own theory of Parallelism. Rief must revisit his memory of the incident and reconstruct the story of what happened so that today his dreams are about the changed story and his little problem stops happening. Smoke and mirrors. Rief, as an actor, is adept at pretending to be what he is not and there are countless characters he meets who do the same. He is good at spotting some people who are acting, but misses others. But unlike on stage, missing the clues can lead to hurt, separation and death. And at stake in the bigger picture of the war are the lives of allied soldiers.
This is a book about deception; lies to others, lies told to oneself. Small lies told for convenience. Big lies told to disguise treason. Along the way, people get hurt.
So much more than a conventional spy thriller from a master author. 4* for me rather than 5* because of the slow beginning. It pays to be patient.

Here are my reviews of other books by William Boyd:-
ANY HUMAN HEART
LOVE IS BLIND
NAT TATE: AN AMERICAN ARTIST 1928-1960
ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS
SWEET CARESS
THE BLUE AFTERNOON
THE DREAMS OF BETHANY MELLMOTH
TRIO
… and try the first paragraph of ARMADILLO.

If you like this, try:-
‘Wake’ by Anna Hope
‘The Lie’ by Helen Dunmore
‘Corpus’ by Rory Clements #1TOMWILDE

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview WAITING FOR SUNRISE by William Boyd‪ https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5hB via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The City of Tears’ by @katemosse #historical

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Steeped in the historical detail of sixteenth-century religious tension and war in France, The City of Tears by Kate Mosse continues the story started in The Burning Chambers. Through the eyes of Minou and Piet we experience the Saint Bartholomew’s day massacre of Huguenots and its aftermath as the story moves from Paris and Chartres to Amsterdam, home to refugees and a protestant uprising. It is 1572 and the action starts in Puivert, Languedoc, where the Reydons have found a fragile peace from Catholic persecution of the Huguenots. Minou and Piet take their family to Paris to witness the diplomatically-sensitive royal wedding of catholic King Charles’s sister Marguerite to the protestant Henry of Navarre. Unknown to the Reydons their old enemy Cardinal Valentin, also known as Vidal du Plessis, is in Paris planning to kill Huguenots. What follows drives the old enemies together and sets in motion Mosse’s story. The Reydons are forced to flee to save their lives, leaving behind one daughter possibly dead or missing. They run to Amsterdam where they establish a new life though their grief for Marta ruptures their previous marital harmony. But religious extremism follows them and once again they must face the threat of violence. As Piet’s past catches up with him, an uncomfortable family secret is revealed. The need to find the truth once and for all takes them to Chartres and the home of a hunter of religious relics.
These books need be read with full concentration. This period of history is a gap in my knowledge, which made The City of Tears an interesting read. The story lacked drama, though I find it difficult to pin down why. Minou is the heart of this book and it is she who pulled me on through some of the heavy historical detail. I settled into the book better when I gave up trying to remember the historical fact and let Minou’s fictional story take over.
As in The Burning Chambers, the Prologue is set in South Africa two centuries later. And still the woman featured in 1862 is a mystery. The City of Tears is set at a time of change in French Protestantism and the birth of the Dutch Republic and is one of a series of novels covering 300 years of religious turmoil in Europe. Mosse follows the geographical movement of the Huguenot refugees from sixteenth-century France and Amsterdam to the Cape of Good Hope in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. No word on how many novels this series will finally comprise.
I think I will always prefer Labyrinth.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

And here are my reviews of other novels by Kate Mosse:-
CITADEL [#3LANGUEDOC]
THE BURNING CHAMBERS #1JOUBERT
THE TAXIDERMIST’S DAUGHTER

If you like this, try:-
‘The Ashes of London’ by Andrew Taylor
‘The Witchfinder’s Sister’ by Beth Underdown
‘The Last Hours’ by Minette Walters

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE CITY OF TEARS by @katemosse‏ https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5gU via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Royal Secret’ by @AndrewJRTaylor #Historical

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The Royal Secret is another excellent instalment in the historical drama series by Andrew Taylor that started in 1666 with the Fire of London. I hesitate to call The Royal Secret a thriller as these books cross historical sub-genres and are consequently fulfilling on a number of levels. Crime, political intrigue, social commentary, architecture, strong characterization and a dash of romance all set in the post-Restoration excess, poverty and turmoil of Charles II’s rule. Every successful thriller needs a villain to hate and Dutchman [or is he?] Henryk van Riebeeck certainly gives James Marwood the run-around. Marwood, now working for Secretary of State Lord Arlington, is charged with investigating the disappearance of top secret papers and the sudden death of a palace clerk. As Marwood follows the trail across London via a gambling club and Smithfield meat market, Cat Hakesby pursues success as an architect. Having completed a successful commission – a rather grand poultry house – her next project is a bigger, grander poultry house for a French aristocrat who is also sister of King Charles. Nothing is as it seems in this series so when Cat travels to France to show her plans to her client, we know she must unwittingly be caught up in a political intrigue. But what exactly? And how does this connect with Marwood’s pursuit of missing state papers which threaten a diplomatic treaty being negotiated between the English and the French? Is van Riebeeck a villain or a hero?
Based on the machinations of a real treaty between France and England, Taylor has once again combined a sharp plot with colourful characters [one gentleman is a collector of exotic animals] and, of course, Marwood and Cat. The will-they-won’t-they thread which runs throughout this series faces a chasm here not helped by copious misunderstandings, jealousy, Cat’s stubborn independence and Marwood’s dedication to the secrecy of his employment.
Excellent. Bring on the next one.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

Read my reviews of the other books in this series:
THE ASHES OF LONDON #FIREOFLONDON1… and try the first paragraph of THE ASHES OF LONDON.
THE FIRE COURT #FIREOFLONDON2
THE KING’S EVIL #FIREOFLONDON3
THE LAST PROTECTOR #FIREOFLONDON4
THE SHADOWS OF LONDON #FIREOFLONDON6

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

If you like this, try:-
‘The Doll Factory’ by Elizabeth Macneal
‘The Taxidermist’s Daughter’ by Kate Mosse
‘The French Lesson’ by Hallie Rubenhold

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE ROYAL SECRET by @AndrewJRTaylor https://wp.me/p5gEM4-5fe via @SandraDanby

	#BookReview ‘Death C… on #BookReview ‘Murder on the Dan…
	#BookReview ‘Death C… on #BookReview ‘Murder in the Sno…
	#BookReview ‘Death C… on #BookReview ‘Agatha Raisin and…
	#BookReview ‘Death C… on #BookReview ‘The Killing of Po…
	#BookReview ‘Death C… on #BookReview ‘The Marlow Murder…

SANDRA DANBY'S BOOK REVIEWS

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

First Edition ‘The Age of Innocence’ by Edith Wharton #oldbooks #bookcovers

#BookReview ‘Amy & Isabelle’ by Elizabeth Strout @LizStrout #contemporary

#BookReview ‘A Room Made of Leaves’ by Kate Grenville #historical

#BookReview ‘Moonflower Murders’ by Anthony Horowitz @AnthonyHorowitz #crime

#BookReview ‘Cecily’ by @anniegarthwaite #historical

A poem to read in the bath… ‘Invisible Man’ by @MargaretAtwood #poetry

#BookReview ‘Dangerous Women’ by Hope Adams @adelegeras #Rajah

#BookReview ‘Waiting for Sunrise’ by William Boyd #WW1 #spy

#BookReview ‘The City of Tears’ by @katemosse #historical

#BookReview ‘The Royal Secret’ by @AndrewJRTaylor #Historical

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