Tag Archives: historical fiction

My Porridge & Cream read: Julie Stock

Today I’m delighted to welcome romance author Julie Stock. Her ‘Porridge & Cream’ read is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

“My ‘Porridge and Cream’ book is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. The first time I read it was at secondary school, when I was about 14 years old, in the late 1970s. I went to a girls’ school and romantic love seemed very elusive and also illusory. What captivated me about the story was that it seemed so real. My school was nothing like Jane’s experience, thank goodness, although I might have felt like it was at the time but I appreciated the truth of the story, like the author was treating the reader with respect by drawing characters to whom life had not been kind, who were quite ordinary in their way, but had the potential to be extraordinary by their actions.

Julie’s copy of ‘Jane Eyre’

It was many years before I picked the book up again but I find myself moved to reread it regularly these days, especially when the real world becomes a bit too superficial and I need an escape to a world where people rose above their suffering and survived despite it because of the power of love. I love Jane most of all. I feel sorry for her, but I also admire her for surviving all the awful things life throws at her. And even at the last, when anyone else would be weeping with despair, she is happy to find Mr. Rochester again. What a woman!

The plot: Jane Eyre – an average woman of low means, destined to live her life alone but with a determination to make something of her situation.

Edward Rochester – a bitter man, whose wealth has brought him no advantages. Can he be saved by the love of a good woman?

This is an epic love story that will show you how love can overcome all obstacles, and save even the most desperate souls.”

Julie Stock’s Bio
Julie Stock is an author of contemporary romance from around the world: novels, novellas and short stories.She indie published her debut novel, From Here to Nashville [above], in February 2015 and published her second novel, The Vineyard in Alsace in March 2017. A follow-up novella to From Here to Nashville is also in progress, as well as the next novel. Julie is a proud member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, The Society of Authors and The Alliance of Independent Authors.

Julie Stock’s links
Website
Facebook
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Pinterest

Julie Stock’s latest book
The Vineyard in Alsace is a contemporary romance, telling the story of Fran and Didier who have a second chance at love when she goes for a job on his vineyard. When fate throws them together again, will they be able to put the past behind them and forgive each other enough to build a new life together?
‘The Vineyard in Alsace’ by Julie Stock [UK: Clued Up Publishing]

What is a ‘Porridge & Cream’ book? It’s the book you turn to when you need a familiar read, when you are tired, ill, or out-of-sorts, where you know the story and love it. Where reading it is like slipping on your oldest, scruffiest slippers after walking for miles. Where does the name ‘Porridge & Cream’ come from? Cat Deerborn is a character in Susan Hill’s ‘Simon Serrailler’ detective series. Cat is a hard-worked GP, a widow with two children and she struggles from day-to-day. One night, after a particularly difficult day, she needs something familiar to read. From her bookshelf she selects ‘Love in A Cold Climate’ by Nancy Mitford. Do you have a favourite read which you return to again and again? If so, please send me a message here.

‘Jane Eyre’ by Charlotte Bronte [UK: Penguin Classics]

Discover the ‘Porridge & Cream’ books of these authors:-
Tracey Sinclair
Laura Wilkinson
Rachel Dove

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
Why does #romance author @wood_beez48 re-read JANE EYRE? https://wp.me/p5gEM4-3d2 via @SandraDanby #books

#BookReview ‘The Slaves of Solitude’ by Patrick Hamilton #WW2 #wartimefamily

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Patrick Hamilton is a new author for me. The Slaves of Solitude, published in 1947, is a novel about wartime in which war is deep background. The setting is Thames Lockden, a small town in the Home Counties, which Hamilton based on Henley-upon-Thames. It tells the story of Miss Roach – Enid, though hardly anyone knows this is her first name – and her life at a boarding house, The Rosamund Tea Rooms. This is a war novel with a difference, focussing on the people at home, not fighting but getting on with their lives in a world turned upside down, managing on a day-to-day basis, life is dreary and bare. Miss Roach, former schoolmistress, is single, 39, and fiercely independent. She has been bombed out of her London flat and has fled from the bombing. Life is dark. ‘The earth was muffled from the stars; the river and the pretty eighteenth-century bridge were muffled from the people; the people were muffled from each other. This was war late in 1943.’
Hamilton is a wonderful observer of human behaviour, he shows the nasty politeness between the residents at The Rosamund Tea Rooms, the bullying, the toadying, the power struggles and how the quiet ones are trampled over by the arrogant bullies. It is fascinating to see how the war makes things which seemed impossible before the war, possible. Miss Roach is a quiet, gentle woman, who over-thinks situations and constantly revisits things that happened and what she might have said. She is bullied at her shared dining room table by the odious Mr Thwaites who dislikes her democratic values, mistreated by ‘her’ American, the inept Lieutenant Pike, and stabbed in the back by her supposed ‘friend’ Vicki Kugelmann. Mr Thwaites is a clever portrayal of a man secure in the knowledge that he is always right and everyone else is wrong and inferior, reinforcing this position by snide comments to Miss Roach which, not wanting a confrontation, she sidesteps. The appearance in her life of the Lieutenant briefly gives Miss Roach’s confidence a boost, until she realizes that his compliments are always spoken in moments of drunkenness. She so longs to believe his protestations but is wary of his inconsequence so, when Vicki sets her sights on the Lieutenant, Miss Roach doesn’t know whether to be jealous or relieved.
Hamilton is a fine writer. He writes about the detail of everyday boring life and enlivens it with observations of human behaviour which are spot-on. The ending is satisfying and realistic.

For a taster of this novel, click here to read the first paragraph of THE SLAVES OF SOLITUDE.

Read my review of HANGOVER SQUARE by the same author.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Paying Guests’ by Sarah Waters
‘At Mrs Lippincote’s’ by Elizabeth Taylor
‘The Heat of the Day’ by Elisabeth Bowen

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE SLAVES OF SOLITUDE by Patrick Hamilton http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2AH via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘How To Stop Time’ by Matt Haig @matthaig1 #humour

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How To Stop Time is another hugely inventive novel by Matt Haig with a thoughtful message about identity. Tom Hazard is a history teacher with a difference. He can talk authoritatively about the Great Fire of London, because he was there; about Shakespeare, because he met him; about witchfinders, because he was terrorised by one. Tom Hazard is 439 years old but he looks forty one. When he was thirteen, the process of ageing slowed down. Tom and his mother are protestant Huguenot refugees in England when their life falls apart; his impossibly youthful looks draw accusations of witchery. We see snapshots of Tom’s past life as he teaches history to bored teenagers in London. And all the time he struggles with the past, so much so that he is unable to live in the present. So he exists, rather than lives, changing his identity to survive and losing sight of who he is.
This is a fascinating study of humankind, our development through history and inability to learn from what went before. Tom encounters threats and suspicions in the 21st century. Is he safe? Is a sinister bio-tech company searching for albas – short for ‘albatross,’ ie. long-lived – to use for experiments? And is the mysterious Hendrich, founder of The Albatross Society, a mentor or a threat? At the core of the novel is Tom’s love for his wife Rose, a mayfly – ie. short-lived – who dies of the plague, and their daughter Marion, an alba. Where is Marion now? Will Tom become reconciled with his past enough to live his life to the full, whether it be a long life or short, and will he ever feel free enough to love again?
A philosophical novel about making the best of what you have now without dwelling on the past, which cannot be changed, or worrying about the future, which cannot be predicted.

Read my reviews of these other Matt Haig novels:-
THE HUMANS
THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY

If you like this, try:-
‘Burial Rites’ by Hannah Kent
‘The Photographer’s Wife’ by Suzanne Joinson
‘Pod’ by Laline Paull

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview HOW TO STOP TIME by Matt Haig @matthaig1 http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2Ts via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Anderby Wold’ by Winifred Holtby #historical

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I was a teenager when I first read South Riding by Winifred Holtby but, until now, hadn’t read her earlier novels. Anderby Wold is her first; published in 1923 it is a portrayal of a Yorkshire Wolds village in the first years of the twentieth century. I was struck by the similarity to Jane Austen: both focus on the personalities, tensions, the pettiness, resentments and emotions of small communities, and both combine acute social observations with sharp humour. The novel opens with a family party at the farm, Anderby Wold, as Mary Robson and John, her husband of ten years and also her cousin, are celebrating a decade of hard work and penny pinching to clear the mortgage on the farm they had inherited. We are introduced to Mary and the family from the viewpoint of John’s sister, the spiteful Sarah. If ever there was a negative first chapter that makes you think the story is going to be full of unlikeable characters, this is it. It is, perhaps, a sign of its times; I am not sure a novel would be published today with such an ill-feeling introduction. But do persist, this novel is worth reading.
We are slowly introduced to each key character with their own viewpoint and take on their agricultural world, where hard toil, tough weather and difficult land unites – and separates – the community. Mary thinks of herself as a considerate benevolent mistress, she sits with sick people, visits the old, supports the school, and distributes gifts at Christmas. But she is unaware that some of the farm labourers resent what they see as her Mrs Bountiful role, a vision of her behaviour to which she is blind. She feels dissatisfaction with the minutiae of her life, dissatisfaction she pragmatically ignores. At a gathering of the village ladies, she listens to the gossip, ‘Mary shivered. They were as lifeless as the uprooted trees, carried from the wold side and laid in the back garden of the farm, awaiting destruction for firewood. Their talk was as meaningless as the rustle of dry leaves on brittle twigs.’
Into this fragile world where people speak bluntly and behaviour can be brusque, comes a writer from Manchester. He is researching the lot of the agricultural labourer with an eye on social change. When he comes into conflict with Mary, the beliefs and assumptions of both are challenged in an Austen-esque manner. As an outsider, David Rossitur is treated first with silence, then with suspicion. The innkeeper’s wife worries about his motivations, ‘Mrs Todd, being a personal of small imagination, had divided mankind into two classes, those who had designs on Victoria [her daughter], those who had designs on her Beer. Last night she had come to the regrettable conclusion that David had no true appreciation of Beer.’ A trade union for agricultural workers is formed, followed inevitably for a strike. At harvest time. Anderby Wold will be changed forever.

Click the title to read my review of POOR CAROLINE, also by Winifred Holtby.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Ballroom’ by Anna Hope
‘Time Will Darken It’ by William Maxwell
‘Under a Pole Star’ by Stef Penney

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview ANDERBY WOLD by Winifred Holtby https://wp.me/p5gEM4-353 via @SandraDanby

My Porridge & Cream read: Margaret Skea

#BookReview ‘The Blue Flower’ by Penelope Fitzgerald #historical

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If ever there is a book to persevere with, to have patience with, and to go back and re-read again, it is The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. When I bought it, I didn’t realize it was the last novel by the Booker prize winner; published five years before her death in 2000 aged 83. For someone about to read it, it can seem a trifle intimidating. Set in 18^th century Germany, Fitzgerald tells her imagining of the teenage story of real German poet and philosopher Fritz von Hardenberg, later called Novalis. He is a young man so self-contained, so absorbed in his thoughts, that I wondered where the drama would arise. But it does, because he falls in love.
The Blue Flower is a short novel, 223 pages. The chapters are concise [mostly only two or three pages each] and this encouraged me to ‘just read another’ and so, gradually, almost without realizing, I fell into the story. Fitzgerald recreates this particular time in German history with a delicacy that, despite the language and sometimes confusing names, makes the people become real.
It is 1794 and Fritz, an idealistic and passionate student of philosophy and writer of poems, stays with some family friends and meets their youngest daughter, Sophie von Kühn. Love is instant for Fritz and, despite a little bemusement on the part of Sophie, and astonishment by his siblings and friends, he proves himself constant.
It is the sort of novel that, when you are reading it you ‘get’ it but afterwards, when trying to describe it to someone else, you struggle to grasp it. I still do not really understand the meaning of the blue flower. But although the deeper meaning may elude me, there are passages I love. Particularly the opening chapter when a guest arrives at the Hardenberg house in Kloster Gasse; it is washday, the annual occasion for washing personal and household linen, and his arrival effects an introduction to the household. This starts a juxtaposition which runs throughout the novel, of the ordinary everyday mundanity of life alongside Fritz’s poetic sensibilities. He calls twelve-year old Sophie his Philosophy, his guardian spirit. Knowing he must wait for her, he trains as an official in the salt mines and Fitzgerald treats us to some of the practicalities and science of this industry.
This is not a lazy read. Be prepared to invest something into it yourself. Fitzgerald does not put it all onto the page, she expects the reader to think, to research, to work it out, as she did when writing. If each book is the visible bit of an iceberg above the waterline, with the research submerged, The Blue Flower is the snowball on top of the iceberg.

Read my review of OFFSHORE, also by Penelope Fitzgerald.

If you like this, try this:-
‘The Ballroom’ by Anna Hope
‘The Past’ by Tessa Hadley
‘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 THE BLUE FLOWER by Penelope Fitzgerald https://wp.me/p5gEM4-2Zr via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Walworth Beauty’ by Michèle Roberts #historical

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From the first page, I knew this was going to be one of those reads rich in historical scents and sensations, a story to lose yourself in. The Walworth Beauty by Michèle Roberts is set in the London district of Walworth, just south of the River Thames and part of the Borough of Southwark. It tells the story of Joseph Benson in 1851 and Madeleine in 2011, 160 years apart but experiencing so many similar things. Madeleine loses her job as a lecturer of English literature, as a result she moves to a garden flat in Apricot Place, Walworth. She is delicately attuned to the history of London, walking its streets and seeing Virginia Woolf walking ahead of her, Hilda Doolittle passing her by, and, in a basement kitchen in Lamb’s Conduit Street, a mistress instructing her new housemaid. Just how closely Madeleine is connected to the past becomes clearer in the second half of the story as she explores Walworth, researching its local history and meeting her new neighbours.
Joseph and his family live in a rented house in Lamb’s Conduit Street. He works for sociologist Henry Mayhew, researching the working conditions and social backgrounds of prostitutes in Walworth. Joshua is a contradictory character, perhaps a man of his time with contemporary attitudes and assumptions about women. Still mourning his idolised first wife Nathalie, he is outwardly respectable but has money problems. He is a spendthrift and betrays Cara his second wife [and Nathalie’s older sister] by visiting prostitutes, viewing it as a necessity so Cara will not conceive again, rather than unfaithfulness. His research takes him to a house in Apricot Place where he meets landlady Mrs Dulcimer, an exotic brown-skinned woman who Joshua mistakes for a madam but who in fact helps struggling young women to establish themselves with jobs and homes.
The theme of classification runs throughout this novel, the formal type of labelling as in Mayhew’s study and the Dewey Decimal labelling system for libraries, but also the informal way of labelling people, pre-judging, jumping to conclusions. Mayhew classifies prostitutes as criminals and it is with this view that Joseph conducts his first research. In meeting Mrs Dulcimer, however, he learns the true stories of struggle and abandonment in the lives of many of the women he labels so easily as whores. He is an unreliable judge of women’s characters, however, even those closest to him.
We see similar classifications in Madeleine’s story in modern-day Walworth. There are themes of grief, longing for what is out of reach, women’s position in society and men’s attitudes towards women and sexuality. Judgements based on class and sex. The two storylines are connected in places by hints of ghosts or presences, which I found a little unsatisfactory. This is a novel about the different parts of society, some isolated, some overlapping like a Venn diagram, and as true today as in Victorian London.
I enjoyed unpicking the connections between 1851 and 2011, handled so delicately that it would be easy to pass them by. Such as Mrs Dulcimer’s missing earring, surrendered as an identifying token at the Foundling Hospital when she handed in her baby, is seen by Madeleine in a display at the Foundling Museum. There are countless examples like this of mirrored details and parallel experiences, connecting Joseph and Mrs Dulcimer with Madeleine.
The Walworth Beauty is one of the most enjoyable books I have read this year and is worth re-reading to absorb the beautiful detail written by a novelist entwined with her story and subject.

Read my review of FAIR EXCHANGE also by Michèle Roberts, and try the #FirstPara HERE

If you like this, try:-
‘Frog Music’ by Emma Donoghue
‘Birdcage Walk’ by Helen Dunmore
‘The Western Wind’ by Samantha Harvey

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE WALWORTH BEAUTY by Michèle Roberts http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2SQ via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Garden of Evening Mists’ by Tan Twan Eng #Malaya

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This is another enchanting novel by Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng. The Garden of Evening Mists focuses on the post-Second World War period in Malaya. The Japanese occupiers have gone and local communist fighters are challenging British rule. In the hills of the Cameron Highlands, next to a tea plantation, lies a delicate Japanese garden created by Nakamura Aritomo, a man who was once gardener to the Emperor of Japan. Decades later when Yun Ling Teoh retires as a Supreme Court judge in Kuala Lumpur, she re-visits the garden at Yugiri. This is her story.
In the 1950s Emergency, the people who lived in Malaya’s hill villages grew to fear the communists. Homes were raided and destroyed, people killed, women raped. This is the setting in which Yun Ling first visits Yugiri to ask Aritomo to build a traditional Japanese garden in memory of her sister Yun Hong. This is a novel about memory, things remembered and things denied, and about loyalty. Yun Ling’s loyalty to her sister who was killed in a Japanese labour camp and her guilt that she could have done more to save her, and loyalty to Arimoto who she loved and thought she knew.
Judge Teoh returns to Yugiri as an old woman approaching death, many years after Arimoto walked into the jungle and never returned. She is forced to relive her past when a historian arrives to assess Arimoto’s engravings. As she relives the years of her imprisonment at the hands of the Japanese, and the post-war years when she first worked at Yugiri’s garden, Judge Teoh questions her perceptions of the past. This time, there is no avoiding the truth.
Tan Twan Eng discusses big issues. He explores the moral dilemmas of war and peace after war, considering the murderous actions of the Japanese at war, the same Japanese who love traditional gardens and the rituals of archery. This novel is rich in history, both of the Japanese Occupation of Malaya, the labour camps, lost war treasure, and of the Emergency. The lush countryside is offset by the tales of horror and abuse told. As with Tan Twan Eng’s first novel, The Gift of Rain, the beauty of the setting is juxtaposed with cruelty and violence.
A deep, thought-provoking and at times difficult novel, the writing is beautiful.

Read the first paragraph of THE GARDEN OF EVENING MISTS.

And here are my reviews of two other novels by Tan Twan Eng:-
THE GIFT OF RAIN … and try the #FirstPara HERE.
THE HOUSE OF DOORS

If you like this, try:-
‘The Aftermath’ by Rhidian Brook
‘Homeland’ by Clare Francis
‘The Book of Lies’ by Mary Horlock

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE GARDEN OF EVENING MISTS by Tan Twan Eng http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2qf via @SandraDanby

My Porridge & Cream read: Catherine Hokin

#BookReview ‘At First Light’ by Vanessa Lafaye #Florida #historical

1 Reply

Having loved Summertime, the debut novel of Florida-born Vanessa Lafaye, I was looking forward to reading At First Light. I was not disappointed. As with her first book, Florida in the period after the Great War is the setting. But the story starts with a bang in 1993 when an elderly Ku Klux Klan official is shot dead at a rally in Key West. The murderer is a 96-year old Cuban woman. At First Light is the story of Alicia Cortez. This is an intense story in many ways. Love, politics, racial hatred, prostitution and Prohibition. In 1919 Alicia arrives on a boat from Cuba, running from shame though for a while we don’t know the exact details. On the same day, John Morales disembarks from the troop ship which brought him from Europe where he fought with distinction in the Great War. Watching from the dock is fourteen-year-old Dwayne Campbell, who falls a little in love with Alicia, is in awe of John, and who becomes entangled in what is about to unfold. When John, a white man, a local man, is seen with a ‘brown’ stranger, Alicia, the newly established Klan of the Keys takes notice.
Although we know from page one that Alicia shoots someone, we do not know the identity of the victim. As she will not talk to the police, her motivation is unknown. So as the story of her arrival in Key West in 1919 unfolds, the guessing game begins as the Ku Klux Klan plans its attacks. This story segment takes place over a short few months and the speed at which events unfold is mesmerising. There are many thematic contrasts: the beauty of the location, the poverty and depravation; the global politics of war, the local politics run by corrupt men; the lack of women’s rights, the moral and emotional strength of women.
Inspired by a true story – the murder by the Ku Klux Klan of a white man in 1921 because he refused to end his relationship with a mixed-race woman – this is a novel about freedom. The freedoms fought for in war which are too often, and too rapidly, forgotten in daily life when hate is allowed to overcome tolerance and people become too quick to judge. And once a wrong is committed, who has the right to determine the nature of justice and how it should be implemented? Once the police cannot be trusted, the disintegration of society begins.
I read this book very quickly and didn’t want it to end. Second novels are often a disappointment, this one is not.

And here’s my review of SUMMERTIME, also by Vanessa Lafaye.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Ways of the World’ by Robert Goddard
‘Curtain Call’ by Anthony Quinn
‘Time Will Darken It’ by William Maxwell

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview AT FIRST LIGHT by ‪Vanessa Lafaye‪ via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2zh

	#BookReview ‘The Sil… on #BookReview ‘The Stolen Heart…
	#BookReview ‘The Sto… on #BookReview ‘Murder at the Gra…
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SANDRA DANBY'S BOOK REVIEWS

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

Tag Archives: historical fiction

My Porridge & Cream read: Julie Stock

#BookReview ‘The Slaves of Solitude’ by Patrick Hamilton #WW2 #wartimefamily

#BookReview ‘How To Stop Time’ by Matt Haig @matthaig1 #humour

#BookReview ‘Anderby Wold’ by Winifred Holtby #historical

My Porridge & Cream read: Margaret Skea

#BookReview ‘The Blue Flower’ by Penelope Fitzgerald #historical

#BookReview ‘The Walworth Beauty’ by Michèle Roberts #historical

#BookReview ‘The Garden of Evening Mists’ by Tan Twan Eng #Malaya

My Porridge & Cream read: Catherine Hokin

#BookReview ‘At First Light’ by Vanessa Lafaye #Florida #historical

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