"The Nonesuch" by Georgette Heyer

I mentioned "The Nonesuch" by Georgette Heyer in my last post but I wanted to devote some more paragraphs to it, because as you could tell, I really enjoyed it! So much so that I spent two night in a row reading with a torch under cover of the duvet so as not to keep my boyfriend awake with the light. 

As with so many other Heyer's novel the centre of this story is a romance - well more than one romance actually - but what I found more interesting was the dynamic between the two central female characters.

Ancilla Trent is a genteel 26-year-old woman who has fallen on hard times and has taken up a role as a governess in Yorkshire - truth be told, she is more than a governess, she is a companion and guide for a young woman who is so self-obsessed and wild than only Ancilla can control her. Tiffany Wield is the young woman in question. She is beautiful beyond belief but her beauty is also her weakness as she is so used to being admired and spoiled that she has developed into a narcissistic and cold young woman with no thoughts for anyone but herself. She looks up to Ancilla and allows herself to be guided by her advice but even this slight degree of control is tested when two men come to the neighbourhood. 
Sir Waldo Hawkridge, known as the Nonesuch due to his athletic skills and popularity in society, comes to the neighbourhood with his nephew, the young Lord Lindeth. They are expecting to spend only a short time int he countryside but they are quickly accepted into the upper circles of the neighbourhood and Lindeth becomes taken with the beautiful Miss Wield. 
Sir Waldo sees through the beautiful exterior of Miss Wield and senses her lack of feeling and her need for attention and he does what he can to spoil their blossoming romance. Meanwhile, Ancilla is struggling to keep up her self-imposed role as old maid and strict governess and finds herself yearning for her carefree days as a young gentlewoman. 

The differences between the misses Wield and Trent provide the dynamic that drives the story forward. The message is clear - what counts is not what is on the outside but what is on the inside. It's not a new or original message but it's true and here it comes wrapped up in a great story so I can only recommend that you give it a go.

Women in a Time of Change

A while back I read "The Best of Everything" by Rona Jaffe and my review was pretty raving: I loved it! So when I heard that others who like "The Best of Everything", also liked Mary McCarthy's "The Group", there was no way around it. I had to have it. Last week, when my boyfriend and I went on vacation, I started reading "The Group" on the train to Gatwick airport and pretty much from the first page, I was hooked. 


"The Group" is a eight young women, all graduates of Vassar, who become close friends during their college years. The novel follows them as they leave their college days behind to pursue love, careers and plans for the future. As characters, they are very different and the focus of the novel shifts from one girl to the next so that we get to understand their individual stories one at a time while glimpsing the all of them in each others stories. It is a genius way to to tell the story of this group of girls and it kept me reading furiously, as I tried to understand how their lives interwove and how their actions impacted each other. 


What becomes very clear from the stories of these girls is, that they are living in time of change. World War I, the depression, the changing roles of women, of marriage, of sex. These are a generation of women who have to find their own way in life because the world has changed tremendously since their mothers were young. They are all keen to make a difference, to do something meaningful with their lives in a world where nothing is as it once was. As a historical novel, it works beautifully. 


For me, however, the history aspects were an advantage but not the main advantage. I found that one of the best things about "The Group" is that there are no clear goodies or baddies emerging from the stories, each of us readers will root for a different girl and who we root for might change. Personally, I found the bohemian "women who loves too much" Kay slightly exasperating and Priss made me want to shake some sense into her. However, I suspect that many others will see Kay as a hero because of her fierce pursuit of her ambition to "do good" in New York. 


My favourites changed a bit as I read but at the end of the book, I was found that three girls had made most impression on made and had come closest to my heart: 


Dottie for her robbed innocence and her steely character as she realizes that sometimes the happy ending will look different to what we imagined. 


Polly for her maturity and her insistence that what counts is that she is happy - not other peoples perception of her or her circumstances in life. 


And last but not least the beautiful and fascinating Lakey who is understood to live a charmed existence in glamorous Europe but who turns out to be the girl who may have most to fight for. 


Read it if: You like "The Best of Everything" by Rona Jaffe, "Valley of the Dolls" by Jacqueline Susann. You wouldn't mind going back in time and visiting 1930s New York. 

Review: "The Best of Everything" by Rona Jaffe

Some books  retain their freshness decade after decade, never losing their relevance. "The Best of Everything" by Rona Jaffe is one of those books. It is truly special. Published in 1958, it was written during the 1950s when women wore smart skirt suits to the office and only worked to fill the time until they could get married. Preferably to a man with a good enough job to fund a house with double-garage and school fees for two children. Last year, apparently, the book got a bit of a renaissance because it was featured on Mad Men - however, I found it thanks to you wonderful people in the blogosphere!

Every day young women flood out of the subway stations in central New York making their way to the city's offices. One of them is Caroline, a young graduate from a good college, who discovers that she has ambitions and slowly starts to work her way up in the world of publishing. While working for a publishing company in the glamourous Rockefeller Center, she meets the obsessive actress Gregg who becomes her flatmate, the beautiful April who is as terrible with men as she is with personal finance and the successful single mother Barbara, divorced at the tender age of 21.

As chapter after chapter weaves their stories together into one story, I felt like these girls became my friends. Their world absorbed me completely and as they experienced bad romances, difficulties in their careers and worry about families and futures, I became more and more enthralled to the story. When the last page turned, it felt completely wrong. I just did not want to let go. I craved knowledge of what happened next and the last few days, I have been thinking about all of them, especially about Caroline and Barbara.

It is a story of looking for love and finding instead sex, friendship or rejection. Of trying to figure out whether to pursue a career or while away the hours until a walk to the altar. It is absolutely fascinating and many of the observations are as relevant today as they were then. Like the lecherous senior executive who will grab any female thigh when he's had a bit too much to drinks or the girl who brings even her bridal underwear to work in order to get the approval and envy of her colleagues. It resonates with me as a modern office girl and I found the office politics very familiar, just as the trouble that these girls experience with prioritising family, work and boyfriends is just like the stuff that my friends and I talk about today.

The beauty of this book is in its relevance, in the way that all girls will recognize something of themselves in these girls even though the books was written over fifty years ago. Also it is beautifully written with every girl's voice being distinct and characteristic.

Read it if: You enjoyed "The Rules of Civility" by Amor Towles" or "Valley of the Dolls" by Jacqueline Susann. You prefer a good book to a re-run episode of Sex & The City.

Review: "Rules of Civility" by Amor Towles

Show me someone who claims to have never dreamed of time traveling and I will show you a liar - because come on people, time traveling would be so cool!! Of course we only dream of traveling to the good times in history, the masked balls, the celebrations and the events that will go down in the history. The lack of opportunities for a shower and brushing teeth and the option to pop a pain killer the day after the party is something that we conveniently forget.

Luckily we have books that allow us to travel through time from the comfort of our warm chair with a hot cup of coffee next to us and the opportunity to brush our teeth at any time we should feel so inclined. Thanks to the authors of historical fiction we get to soar through the most interesting parts of history and dream ourselves away. 

Recently I bought a ticket for the "historical fiction time traveling machine" when I picked up "Rules of Civility" by Amor Towles. The destination was New York in the 1930's and as soon as I had read the first line, I was lost in a different world, off on adventures with a young lady called Katey Kontent. 

Katey Kontent is in her 20's, a daughter of Russian immigrants who left the land of samovars and revolution to seek their fortune in the land beyond Ellis Island. She is a girl who knows how to have a good time and during night out with her beautiful, charismatic friend Eve, she treats New York as her playground. Thought money is tight, these girls know how to party and when on New Years Eve they meet the rich, waspy banker Tinker Grey, they become fast friends with him and doors are opened to a different type of life. 

The story follows Katey through that fateful year of 1938 where her life changes, some parts for the better, some for the worse, and where events transpire that will set her on the path that will shape the rest of her life. It is a year of sorrows and joys, of gin martinis and silk stockings, of country clubs and scruffy flats, of women in pearls and young men with the world at their feet. 

Katey becomes increasingly entangled in this world of privilege and Tinker is always there in the back of her mind... 

It is an amazing book, a really fascinating beautiful story of life and what it does to us. It is about surviving and making the best of what you get given. About grabbing life in the moment and shaping it to your wishes. It is a reminder of the importance of enjoying yourself even when you have little money for rent and food and none for martinis. 

This is retro Manhattan. It is the clever entertainment for girls who find Gossip Girl and Sex In the City a little too pop culture and glossy. 

It is the book that you long to come home to because it takes you to a different world - a glamourous, tough New York where men are gentlemen and women are enjoying an new-found freedom. It is the ultimate time traveling experience.

Read it if: You enjoyed "Valley of the Dolls" by Jacqueline Susann. You love New York and have a secret longing for a life full of martinis, silk stockings and elegance. 

Review: "Untold Story" by Monica Ali

There is something about book based on real persons... By using figures that are essentially real, they inhabit a strange land inbetween fiction and non-fiction and I have always found this grey-zone really interesting. One of the books that I found does this really well is "Life Mask" by Emma Donoghue about the actress Eliza Farren and the sculptress Anne Damer - it had me heading straight for the National Portrait Gallery to see sculptures.


"Untold Story" by Monica Ali is pure fiction but it is based on Princess Diana. The Diana. Princess of Wales. And to be honest, I had no idea to how to handle this. Is it wrong, is it right? Is it disrespectful or is  she making use of the artistic right of an author?
In "Untold Story", Ali speculates what would have happened if Diana if she had survived the car crash in Paris and had instead staged her own death to flee to a small town in America to live a normal life. Lydia is the name that Princess Diana takes on as she lives what is a typical life, working at a dog shelter and spending time with her girlfriends who think that she has fled from a powerful husband. It is American surburbia at its finest that has replaced the role of Kensington Palace.


As the story evolves we get the story from Lydia herself and from her former secretary who is the only person she has trusted with her secret. It is the story of a women so fed up with the difficulties of life in the spotlight that she is willing to give up everything, including her children, to start over. It is a choice that comes at a price, a high price and when a British paparazzi surfaces in this oh-so-normal American backwater (incidentally also called Kensington), it could all have been for nothing.

It is an interesting read - the story itself somehow does not come across as dramatic. It is very well-written but the beautiful literary style is very much at odds with the content. Because as much as I enjoyed reading Ali's well-crafted sentences and stylistically superior prose, I did not enjoy the use of Diana's name. The story could have been told just as well had it been based on a fictional character and I have to admit that I found the book an invasion of privacy. This feeling of partaking of something not quite right ruined the reading experience for me and the insensitivity in using the Diana icon overshadows what could have been a good read.

Review: "Lady of Quality" by Georgette Heyer

It has almost become a bit of Christmas tradition for me, going to bed with a Georgette Heyer Regency novel and not turning off the light until the last page is turned. A bad habit actually and one that I cannot recommend as it means reading until the early hours (unless you go to bed early, which I never do...) and missing the morning more or less entirely. However, it is also incredibly satisfying. I feel so safe and comfortable and essentially book-happy when I lie there, snuggled under the duvets in the room where I was a girl and read what is (again) essentially safe and comfortable books. One of the great things about Georgette Heyer's Regency novel (in my opinion) is that there are no surprises. Well maybe a few but none that really matter. From the first page you know who the heroine is, who the stiff-upper-lip types are and who the heroine will end up marrying. For love. Though he is usually very well-to-do and very well-dressed. What's not to like? This is as comforting as a large glass of red wine in front of a cosy fire on a rainy night, people.

Anyway, I was in bed sans the red wine but very much avec the Georgette Heyer novel this Christmas - the novel of choice being "Lady of Quality". This was the last Regency novel by the highly productive Heyer and it was published in 1972 but the Regency feeling is all there. From the horses to the boots to the drinks and food. It is pure historical bliss. Not that I am a historian, mind you, but I have read a fair few regency novels...

The heroine is Annis Wychwood who at the ripe old age of 26 has accepted her spinsterhood fate. I know. Crazy to think that you were officially off the shelf at 26 but quite lucky for the dear Annis as this means she is considered old and matronly enough to run her own household. This may sound like a lot of work but it definitely beats living with her stuffy older brother and his lovely but slightly dim wife. So off she has gone to Bath, Annis, to set up home - and having a considerable fortune, this is not a problem. With her, she has taken a chaperone, a rather annoying creature who by the virtue of being her cousin has secured the difficult position of keeping Annis on the straight and narrow road of propriety.

All the propriety and sensibility begins to unravel when Annis takes it upon herself to save a young and very dramatic young heiress who is fleeing a meddling family. However, soon in the footsteps of the heiress follow her uncle, the infamous rake Oliver Carleton. Oh yes, a rake has arrived on the scene and I have to say that the battle of words between these two (lasting for several pages) is pure, enjoyable Heyer. They argue so skillfully that it made me want to join a class - imagine being able to fight so masterfully with one elegant repartee after another?!

The rest of the story, you will have to read for yourself but trust me when I say that it is great. Pure Regency classic.

Read it if: You like you heroines opinionated and your heroes rakish. You prefer Ratafia wine to a normal "house red" and always carry smelling-salts in your purse.

Review: "The London Satyr" by Robert Edric

Hello again, it's been a while since I last blogged. My only excuse is that it has been really really busy. December always is, isn't it? So have done very little reading and even less blogging and I've missed it. One of the books I have recently finished reading is "The London Satyr" by Robert Edric, a book that I had wanted to read badly for a few months and that I had really high hopes for... Unfortunately it just did not do it for me.

The plot was definitely good, a good story. The narrator, photographer Charles Webster, is a rather anonymous man. He has a nice house and a nice wife and a daughter that he doesn't understand but that he... well... likes. He has a good-enough job and colleagues that he likes. And then he has a little job on the side that is the only exciting thing going on in his life. Working as the in-house photographer at the Lyceum theatre in London, he has access to costumes and props and once in a while, he secretly loans out to a rather creepy man named Marlow. Marlow, you see, is in quite a different line of business... He runs a pornography business and needs the props and costumer to spice up the photographies that he makes a fortune producing and selling illegally. Not the sort of man that a good, proper Victorian middle class man should associate with.
As the summer heat scorches London, Webster is sweating - but not just because of the weather, also because the authorities have decided to crack down on the illegal pornography trade and his whole life would tumble down like a house of cards caught by the wind.

So far so good. I really liked the plot and as I work very close to the Lyceum, I enjoyed reading about all the places that I visit every day. However, the let down (for me) was in the characters. Charles Webster is just not a character that I would want to know in real life, to tell you the truth, he is rather boring and that made it a bit hard to really get interested in the story... What frustrated me was that the characters I found interesting were the least developed characters. I especially found Webster's domineering, annoying and not-that-bright daughter interesting because she really changes her behavior and grows (though not in a good way) but Edric does not really take the opportunity to explore this or give us an insight to why this is or how it affects the family. Too bad because that would have been quite interesting. Instead the focus is on the chase which leads to dramatic-ish end which I did think was really good. However, not enough to make it a book that I would re-read, unfortunately...

Read it if: You are going to London soon and plan on visiting the Lyceum theatre. If you love your men middle-aged, spineless, bad at showing emotions and somewhat boring...

Review: "Purge"

Finding Finnish author Sofi Oksanen's novel "Purge" in a second-hand bookshop for a few pounds was a real find! It's been on my TBR ever since I read a review of it in the Sunday paper and when I bought it, I couldn't keep myself from reading it immediately because I was so curious about the story.

This is a dark novel on several levels with two stories intertwining, both very dark tales of women whose lives have not been easy. Aliide Truu is an elderly lady living in an old farmhouse in the Estonian countryside. She lives in a rather old-fashioned way and is largely self-sufficient and withdrawn from the world. So one day when Aliide finds a young woman outside her house, a woman in strange Westernized clothes who behaves really strangely, she is obviously suspicious. There is something about the woman though, that means that Aliide can't just leave her to her destiny so she takes her in, feeds her and chats with her while trying to figure out what has happened to this young woman, Zara, to leave her in such a difficult situation.
Aliide's and Zara's stories are very dissimilar. One is the story of living in a country where communism pervades everything. Where husbands spy on wives and village men rape girls to torture their parents. It is such a strong, emotional story of lives being torn apart, love having to give up when faced with such strong adversity, it is raw and painful to read, yet impossible to put down. And this is something that Aliide's story shares with Zara's story. Zara's story is about being a trafficking victim, about a naive, young girl who has always been deprived of the Western luxury who jumps on the chance for a new start in the West and ends up losing everything except her life. It is as painful and raw as Aliide's story even though the two stories are very different. It almost physically hurts to read it.

The strengths of "Purge" are many. It is not sugarcoated, everything is exposed, all human flaws are there in plain view and even the main characters that as a reader, I sympathized with, are full of flaws. Another strength is the historical aspect. As a historical story, it works really well because it envokes an Estonia of the past (luckily) that is so different from modern-day Estonia, yet gives you a better chance of understanding Estonia and the other countries that suffered during the dark days of communism and Stalin. It is truly a scary read on so many levels, from the explicit violence and the vulnerability of the women in this story to the political environment and the men that will do anything for money, power, status or a casino.

A quote to give you a taste of "Purge":
"too many people had dirty flour in their bags, and people with filthy fingers are hardly enthusiastic about digging up the past . . . those who poke around in the past will get a stick in the eye."

This is one of the best novels I have read in 2011 and I will definitely re-read it and buy it as a present for many of my friends.

Read it if: You enjoyed the movie "The Lives of the Others" or if you love your books to leave you with a lot to think about.

Review: "Passion"

So now the time has come to review "Passion", the third book in the series about the eternal love of Daniel and Luce which is written by Lauren Kate (btw. such a cool name for an author!). The first books "Fallen" and "Torment" had something. I loved the black school uniform in book one and the graveyard and the firsts meetings between Cam and Luce. "Torment" was good as well, it had something. The last scenes were powerful and that leads me nicely to "Passion" which starts where "Torment" began. However, the plot of this one is quite different and if you are a huge Lauren Kate fan, then please forgive me for this review. I am going to be honest (because otherwise what's the point?) and it is not really going to be nice...

The plot is ridiculous. At best. The idea is actually good but the actual story is not only unimpressive, it is downright awful. In order to understand the eternal love of Daniel and Luce and the curse that means that Luce dies whenever their love becomes to passionate, Luce travels through time. Literally. She uses the announcers to travel through her past lives and observe or even take part in her past lives and what lives, she has led... And boy has she led some interesting lives. She seems to have been in all the right places on the right times, at least in a historical context. Thinking about this in a reasonable way, one would assume that she had had maybe one exciting life and a lot of normal lives outside of the main historical events. Not so Luce. She was lady of the manor in Victorian England, a friend of Shakespeare and the reason for the fire of the Globe Theater, a slave at the court of Pharaoh, a Chinese king's fiancee, a Princess of Savoy at the court of the Sun King... She has experienced quite a bit! And I can see why otherwise this plot may have become boring quite fast because Kate doesn't take the time to really explore any of these lives, instead she seems to try to fit as many past lives into one book as possible. And feature the devil as well plus a strange dialogue featuring God... Have to say I don't like it. At all.

If you loved "Fallen" and "Torment" please don't get your expectations up... If you loved films such as "Shakespeare in Love", "Mulan" and "The English Patient" then you might like it because the author seems to have borrowed a bit from these and other movies. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, except that she has not done it in a very elegant way and that rather annoys me. Honestly, this book seemed to me as if it had been written in a hurry and that's really too bad. I hope that the next book, "Rapture", will be better because even though I was less than impressed with "Passion", I still have to find out what happens to Luce and Daniel.

Review: "The Grand Sophy" - A Grand Story

Do you know that feeling when you get a book in the mailbox that you have really really looked forward to? I had that feeling when The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer landed in my mailbox. I really enjoy Heyer's book, they are like a mug of hot chocolate on a really cold, snowy day. Until reading The Grand Sophy, my favourite Heyer novel was Regency Buck but after turning the last page of Sophy yesterday that had changed.

I have to say that at first I didn't go for the title. For some reason, the grand Sophy had manifested herself in my mind as somebodys great-aunt with arthritis and a pronounced deafness. The kind who's repulsed by anything "the young people" do... I couldn't have been more wrong. At all. The grand Sophy is Sophia Lacy-Stanton, 20-years old, grown up with her widowed father Sir Horace on the continent, able shot, clever, not one to mess with.

Sophy is sent to stay with her aunt and uncle and cousins in London while her father travels to Brazil. She takes the house with storm and is soon friends with her cousin Cecilia and a favourite with her other cousins - except from her eldest cousin Charles, the man of the house, who does not like her free, wild ways. Charles's fiancee, the snobbish and cold Eugenia, does not like her ways either and she soon sees it as her job to "help" Sophy fit in to London society.
However, Sophy does things her own way. All things. She sees a lot to be corrected and changed in the house that she now calls home and she soon takes it upon herself to stir things up and change it for the better. And what Sophy wants, she gets. Or rather, she makes happen. As she says herself, she is not missish and she does not care for the ideal feminine ways of the time which prescribes that she should be mild and submissive.
Soon Sophy is meddling in the forbidden romance between Cecilia and the poet Fawnhope who lives in his own mind, she tackles cousin Hubert's gaming debts and she has heated discussions with cousin Charles. Not to mention the fact that she gets into quite some verbal fights with his fiancee.

Every page of this book was a delight. Every single one. Sophy is a joy, I wish I was like her. She is like Elizabeth Bennett but less restrained by the customs of the era. She possesses a cool, a will and a heart that makes her irresistable and has given her the nickname the grand Sophy. She is the girl that girls want to be friends with and boys propose to. She has such integrity.

I will be returning to The Grand Sophy again and again, I can predict that already. This book will go on my shelf and I will look at it as a close friend. I might even have to buy an extra one to let people borrow because I can't imagine not having The Grand Sophy ready at hand when I need a friend to spend a quiet evening with. If you like Pride and Prejudice or any Heyer novel, please please please give this one a try.

Review: "Frederica" - She who rules the roast

About ten years ago I stumbled across a really cheap version of "Regency Buck" by Georgette Heyer and in my teenage years, I read this one again and again. So now I have decided to read some more of Heyer's hopefully delightful works. Since Jane Austen did not write nearly enough books, I am very happy that Heyer was a more prolific writer who has gifted us with many novels which will definitely warm me up in the these winter months.
The book I have chosen to start off with is "Frederica" - and I have to admit that I chose it almost solely based on the cover. The cover is just so pretty!

The storyline is rather simple. Frederica is a 24-year-old woman who due to her parents' deaths have become the head of a family of five and who have moved them all to London to give her little sister Charis a London season. Charis is a beautiful but rather dull and silly girl and Frederica is hoping that her kindness, charity and her awestriking beauty will be enough for her to make an eligible match. However, in order to be introduced into the London ton, Frederica calls upon the self-indulgent and rich Lord Alverstoke, an old friend of her father. Lord Alverstoke has lived his whole life in indulgence caring for nothing but his own entertainment so even he is surprised at himself when he lets Frederica talk him into introducing the two girls on the London scene. What seems like a small task at first quickly grows as Frederica's two younger brothers Jessamy and Felix continously gets into scrapes from which Lord Alverstoke is called upon to save them. As the weeks flow by, Lord Alverstoke finds himself getting more and more fond of the little family and of Frederica in particular.

What I loved about this books was the characters. To be honest the plot was nothing special, even a slight bit easy to guess but the characters lifted this one out of the normal run-of-the-mill girl-meets-boy stories. Frederica is an independent woman - or as it is put in the book: She rules the roast. She has no care for herself but takes on her responsibilities for her younger siblings with love, passion and maturity. Furthermore she is the queen of witty repartee and it was pure joy to read the conversations between her and Lord Alverstoke. Lord Alverstoke is your typical hero, a 37-year-old Marquis with a stern exterior and a soft heart. What makes him different is his sense of humour. It is so dry and he says the most rude things at the worst timings and get off with it because of his humour. I adored him. Would love to sit next to him at a dinner party!
Frederica's siblings are also wonderfully sketched. Felix is adorable like only a 12-year-old can be, Jessamy imagines himself a scholar and future parson and Charis is as bird-witted as can be.
Heyer also manages to evoke London at a time where industrial innovation with running high and she gives us a rare insight into the going-ons of the London drawing rooms.

If you like Jane Austen novels and adore history and romance, this book is for you!

Review: "The Book of Fires" - Smouldering

I picked up "The Book of Fires" at a Waterstones in Twickenham some months ago while out on a long walk. They had one of those "buy 3 for the price of 2" offers and as I wanted two of the books in the selection, I picked this historical novel by Jane Borodale as the third. Not really sure why but it had something.
The story is sets out in a poor village in Sussex where Agnes's family is struggling to make ends meet. For Agnes life has turned bleak as she has accidentally become pregnant without being married - a fate that could ruin her and her family. So when she finds the opportunity, she flees to London where she finds work for the pyrotechnician Mr. Blacklock. The household is dominated by a nosy and domineering housekeeper and a sour housemaid and the silent, introverted Mr. Blacklock. As the months pass, Agnes is struggling to find a solution to her predicament - what will happen when her pregnancy is discovered? How will she and her baby fare in the world? At the same time she discovers a passion and talent for making fireworks and she eagerly sucks up all knowledge that Mr. Blacklock imparts.

This is one of those tales where the drama is constantly lurking beneath the surface and I was constantly waiting for disaster to strike Agnes. The potential tragedy is smouldering in all corners of the story. As a character I found Agnes really easy to like and to get to know but the other characters never really came to life. They kept being a bit two-dimensional and I was really wanting to understand especially Mr. Blacklock better.
Agnes is a girl like you and me, a normal girl with a normal life who just happens to have fallen on hard times and who has to make the best of a bad situation. She is not fighting to come up in the world or to find love or fame or fortune. She is fighting to survive and to make a life for herself and the baby she is carrying. She is a real person with heart and a clever head.
The plotline is great and I loved the ending, loved it. I just wish that a bit more had been done to make the characters come to life and to invoke historical London. This book has some of the same qualities as "The Crimson Petal and The White" by Michel Faber but it lacks that magic which makes Faber's book a classic.

For a second opinion on this book see http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2010_02_015801.php

Review: "Wedlock" - I now declare you husband and prisoner

If you - like me - have an interest in womens right and the history of England then you need to read this book: "Wedlock - How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match" by Wendy Moore.
In Georgian times matrimony was serious business - a contract that once ventured into it would almost impossible to get out of again, especially for women for whom marriage meant effectively becoming their husband's possession. When venturing into marriage, a womans possessions were transferred to her husband and from then on she lived at his mercy.

For Mary Eleanor Bowes, the heroine of "Wedlock", this was the case as for all women at the time - but not all women (luckily) were married to men like Mary Eleanor's husband... Mary Eleanor, one of the richest young heiresses of her time, married young to the Earl of Strathmore. An unhappy union and when the earl died Mary Eleanor took her life and fortune in her own hands and married a the self-styled Captain Stoney. This choice is a testament to Mary Eleanor's very flawed ability to judge characters because Stoney turned out to be a fortunehunter who speedily turned from ardent admirer into a cruel, bullying, vicious husband who specialised in both physically and mentally tormenting his wife.

I really enjoyed this book even though it was unsettling and upsetting at times. Getting a better understanding of how little rights women had in Georgian times. They were basically on par with children and some were treated with even less respect and understanding. Women were possession, trophies, things to be owned. One woman, however, stood up against her scoundrel of a husband and went to court to fight for freedom, fortune and family and that was Mary Eleanor Bowes. I was impressed by her courage and stubbornness, she really did fight like a tigress for her children and herself even though she knew that her husband was scheming to kill her.
Inspiring and impressive and very well-written. No dust lingers on these pages, I even sacrificed sleep last night to follow and cheer for Mary Eleanor as she fought for her liberty and for justice.

Review: "The Blue Flower" - Blossoming Love

I found this book of one of the lists of "100 Best Novels by Female Authors" and decided to give it a try - and I am really glad I did because it is a beautiful and moving little story, written by Penelope Fitzgerald who won the 1979 Booker Prize for the novel "Offshore".

"The Blue Flower" is the fictious story of the historical figure Friedrich von Hardenberg, who found fame as a writer and poet under the name Novalis. Hardenberg was born in 1772 in Germany and the family though nobility were very poor so even though Hardenberg was highly educated, he still faced having to work for a living. In "The Blue Flower" we meet the 22-year old Hardenberg as he is having to make choices about work and his future but the most important storyline in the book is about his meeting with 12-year old Sophie von Kühn. It is love at first sight for him and maybe for her as well?

Sophie is a young girl, not even mature for her age, of little education and little beauty. However, this does not seem to matter to Hardenberg who loves her passionately and when Sophie is 13 years old, they get engaged. It is around this love that the story revolves and the characters evolve.
And actually the characters are a very important part of this story. I soon came to feel that I knew Hardenberg's and Sophie's family. The strong sisters Sidonie and the Mandelshloh who take charge when their mothers give up, the little brother the Bernhardt and Erasmus who looks up to his brother Hardenberg. Their voices are so strong and they provide a great cast for this novel.

Fitzgerald's prose is beatiful, she really manages to conjure up Germany in the time of romanticism where science was still young and the students philosophised and discussed the great matters in life. I could almost smell the dirt and taste the beer, hear the horses. The prose is what stood out for me because it captures these star-crossed lovers - the educated gentleman and his somewhat dimwitted childbride. It is lovingly fun, subtlely pointing out the follies of man while revering the love of Hardenberg for Sophie von Kühn.

"A Company of Liars" - Truth Will Out

There are so many novels about medieval times but to be honest, I only enjoy a small amount of them. Many of them are either too focused on war or too focused on love and chivalry - or maybe I'm just not that easy to please. So when I was lent "A Company of Liars" written by Karen Maitland I didn't really know what to expect but actually, it was really quite good.

A lone camelot is travelling through medieval England, fleeing the plague and making a living by selling fake relics to naive people at fairs and gatherings. A series of incidents leads to him being joined by several other travellers and toghether they try to avoid the dangers of the road while keeping free of plague-ridden villages. But the people of the travelling party are not at all what they appear to be as it is slowly revealed. A magician with an embalmed merchild, a pregnant woman and her husband, two musicians, a midwife, a story-teller, an old camelot and a strange-looking child. They are all hiding something, however, one of them has a secret that is darker and more vicious than the secrets of all of the others.

I liked it, I really did. I liked the fact that it was not too easy to guess the secrets and how they would impact the travellers. It kept me on my toes guessing and following the plot as it was all unveiled.
If you like "The Owl Killers" by Karen Maitland or "Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follett, you will probably like "A Company of Liars" as well. It paints a picture of the medieval times which is believable yet easy to understand and it's explanation the role of religion in village life is really interesting.

"Wolf Hall" - Redeeming Thomas Cromwell

Last year there was a lot of fuss surrounding "Wolf Hall" and it got some really great press. I was not convinced though as I thought it sounded a bit dull. So I started out getting to "know" Hilary Mantel, the author, by reading one of her other books "Beyond Black". I really enjoyed that book so I thought I would give "Wolf Hall" a go and see if I liked that as well.

Thomas Cromwell, the main character in Hilary Mantel's novel "Wolfh Hall" has been often been treated as a villain in historical fiction. Little is know about his personal history and so no real biographies have been written about him. This, however, has not stopped Hilary Mantel from writing an astonishingly good novel with Thomas Cromwell as her main character. A likeable main character. Her prose is great, I like the language, the way her characters come to life.

Thomas Cromwell was a key figure at the court of Henry VIII and he lived an incredible life, rising from the lower social classes to becoming one of the most powerful men in the kingdom. He first worked for cardinal Wolsey and then went on to serve Henry VIII as a personal advisor.

His father was a blacksmith - and he managed to become the confidante of a king. Today that may be a bit of a story, in those days it was unthinkable. Thomas Cromwell was feared in his own time and he's reputation has been less than rosy. Mantel has made him both a professional diplomat and a likeable, warm man.
Before reading "Wolf Hall" I had already read "The Six Wives of Henry VIII" and other books about Tudor England so I knew the background pretty well and this I think was an advantage. Made it easier to put the plot into context.

"Wolf Hall" charts Thomas Cromwell as he rises in society, navigating the difficult waters of the court where lords and ladies fight for power. It is all down to pleasing the king, a king who after years of marriage to Katherine of Aragon still has no male heir and who is now determined to obtain a divorce and marry Anne Boleyn. Thomas Cromwell has to play his cards well to not only further his own career but also to fight for what he considers right. Religious turmoil is breaking out and Cromwell's own opinoins place him dangerously close to breaking a law.
Along the way we read about Cromwell's household, how he suffers when disease hits his family and how he manages to rebuild his life.
The main part of the plot, however, is the story of how Cromwell opposes Thomas More. A conservative Catholic who is highly opposed to translating the Bible to English, something that Cromwell is very much for. Much is on stake in this religious and political game - the penalty for treason is death and these gentlemen are walking close to the edge.

The story of the Tudors and life at the court of Henry VIII has been told often, still Mantel manages to make it an exiciting tale of love and lust, power and politics.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book - especially the picture it paints of Tudor life and times - and I'm looking forward to the sequel.