As Good As Dead by Elizabeth Evans

A shy girl from a small town and working class family, Charlotte is ecstatic to be accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. She heads to Iowa City to find an apartment and meets the beautiful and beguiling Esme. She and Esme move in together and become best friends. Many years  pass and Charlotte is a published author and tenured professor. Her university boyfriend, who was away in Italy completing his doctoral research while Charlotte lived with Esma, is now her husband, and he and Charlotte live a settled life in Tuscon. Charlotte and Esme are no longer friends; Esme moved away from Iowa and stopped answering Charlotte's letters. Out of the blue, an older, fatter, less beautiful Esme turns up at Charlotte's house and all of the wounds she thought had healed from the past reopen, tearing her life apart.

This book has some really good points. It is very well written and it is an excellent evocation of life in academia. I was not surprised to red that Evans herself is an emeritus professor - the academic aspects of the book are incredibly authentic. I also thought it did an excellent job of capturing the rivalries and love in some university female friendships, where neither of you are sure who you really  are yet. It does have a few problems, though. Esme's husband, Jeremy, who Charlotte slept with while he was dating Esme and Charlotte was dating Will (not a spoiler - it's revealed in the first chapter) is so repulsive that it's impossible to understand why he would come between the beautiful Esme and the talented Charlotte. Nor did I buy that Esme would do what she did at the end of the novel - it was set in the 1980s, not the 1950s, and her actions seemed more suitable to an earlier time. Plus I found the ending of the novel such an anticlimax! Because the book starts so strongly but tapers off near the end, I wonder if it just lacked enough meat to be a fully fledged novel and the story might have been better suited to a novella format.

Despite these flaws I enjoyed reading this book and would definitely read another Elizabeth Evans novel. Three stars.

Purity by Jonathan Franzen (2015)

There are many long detailed reviews of Purity on the Internet that discusses the themes, plot and writing of this book in great length. Rather than add to their numbers, I give you this.

Based on reading Purity, here is a list of things that Jonathan Franzen likes:
* writing about penises
* writing about masturbation
* the sound of his own voice
* feeling like he is cleverer than everyone else
* going on and on about the things he does not like

Based on reading Purity, here is a list of things that Jonathan Franzen does not like:
* women
* mothers
* women
* kids today
* the Internet
* women
* modern life
* attempts to address environmental issues
* women

Apparently Jonathan Franzen is married, which surprises me because this book reads like it was written by someone who had never actually spoken to a woman and is attempting to reconstruct them based on what he had read in other books. 

Purity is not good. I strongly advise you to read the Intercept review Stop Sending Me Jonathan Franzen Novels instead of the actual novel - it's eminently more satisfying.

One star.

Purl Up and Die by Maggie Sefton (2015)

You know the concept of hate-reading? I tend to not hate-read much (who has the time? Plus, I at one stage I was hate-reading so much I almost disconnected my right eye by rolling it too much*). However, my exception to the rule has always been Maggie Sefton's Lambspun series. This series of books are so bad! The characters are basically cardboard cutouts that are given really terri;e dialogue, the dialogue is awful (all of the characters sound exactly the same) and the books are so repetitious that about 90% of the story could cut with no noticeable effect on our understanding of the plot. But I keep reading them, bitch about how terrible they are, then put a reserve on the next one as soon as it arrives at the library.

BUT NO MORE! 2015's Lambspun mystery, Purl Up and Die, is officially my last. The novel opens as Kelly goes across the street to work in the yarn store (guys, Kelly likes to work on spreadsheets at the yarn store). She orders an ice coffee (guys, it's hot in Colorado in summer AND Kelly likes coffee). Then a woman who is not in the main group comes into the yarn shop. Because Sefton only introduces two new characters per book, this woman will either be murdered or be the murderer. The only mystery is which one it is. Kelly, who is the literary equivalent to the chewing gum that gets stuck on the sole of your favourite pair of runners, sits in on a class without paying the teacher for it, causes a disruption for the other attendees who actually paid, then leaves.

Next, Kelly goes and visits her client, who is apparently a successful businessman. Not according to this dialogue:

The buzzer on Arthur's phone system sounded. "Oops, that's my secretary. Reminding me that my next appointment is here."
Kelly drained the last of the coffee and gathered her portfolio into her briefcase bag. "I'd best get back, anyway. You're in good shape, Arthur. So now I need to see what Don Warner and company have waiting for me."

While Arthur may be playing a professional businessman, it is more than clear a professional editor never went near these pages. For starters, one doesn't gather a portfolio into a bag - one either gathers a portfolio and places it in a bag or just simply places it there without gathering it first (also, not briefcase bag but either briefcase or bag - briefcase is a noun not an adjective). Additionally, who says "oops" when a buzzer goes? How can you be reminded of something you haven't been told about in the first place? Why are these people speaking in single-clause sentences? It is all so, so bad.

A few pages later, Kelly's boyfriend "smiled into her eyes" (you smile AT someone, not into random physical features), and I was out. Done. Finito. All over.

There's bad which is fun to read and play with and then there's work that is so excrutiatingly bad that you feel bad for the author, publishing house and anyone who has their name attached to the book. The Lambspun series has now reached that point and I am done with it. HereIRead out.


*Not a true story. However, more believable than any of Maggie Sefton's bestselling novels.

Secret Keeping for Beginners by Maggie Alderson (2015)

Secret Keeping for Beginners centres around three sisters: Tessa, Rachel and Natasha. Rachel has just divorced her husband and is juggling a new job in a fantastic PR firm with running and paying for a London household for her, her two children and the manny, Banko. Tessa and her husband Tom own a successful salvage yard and were happy in the country with their three boys until Tom was discovered by television and now hosts his own successful TV show. Natasha is a hugely successful make-up artist who travels the world making up supermodels and high fashion shows. All three women are beautiful, fabulously talented and have heaps of Instagram followers and all of them are in someway at breaking point in their lives.

The central conceit of the book is that despite their closeness, the sisters are keeping big secrets from each other. Rachel is in dire financial straits and is struggling to even find enough money for food. Tessa is incredibly depressed and is withdrawing further and further into her own private world. Natasha is refusing to reveal her sexual identify for fear it will damage her in her business, and the double life she lives creates a barrier between her and her sisters. So far, so good (although I did find hard to believe that Natasha wouldn't talk to her sisters about her sexuality - I can understand not talking about it at work (although of course one should not have to hide any part of one's sexuality for work, which is why there are discrimination laws in place), but not her sisters? I did not buy it). However, it gets more complicated. It turns out that Rachel's boss, Simon, had a brief fling with Tessa  before she was married and he's in love with Rachel and his business is experiencing financial stress and he's carrying around a big secret that he refuses to tell anyone until 10 pages before the end. The mother of the girls, Joy, has been receiving mysterious letters addressed to the person she was before she changed her name at 16 that she refuses to open. Plus Banko is hiding his secret crossdressing from Rachel and then lies about wanting to be a fashion model.

THAT'S TOO MANY SECRETS. Seriously, about seven of these could have been cut and it would have made not one whit of difference. I understand secrets are the theme of the book but there was no need to create a "secrets are the theme of the book" stick and start whacking your readers over the head with it. Joy's secret was frankly stupid and completely unnecessary. Giving Simon four secrets was massive overkill. That said, Alderson writes really well, so the book was lovely to read. There were moments of genuine humour and the relationships between the sisters was lovingly depicted. So, how do I rate this book? Using the patented HereIRead Book Evaluator Tool (TM):

Pros:
Including LGBT characters not defined by their sexuality
Good depiction of relationship between sisters
Enjoyably written
Funny

Cons:
Too much unnecessary plot
Used the annoying trope of a smug wise elderly woman who gives out excellent advice
Alderson cannot write from the point-of-view of a man and should never ever try again. Simon's sections were cringe-worthy
The entire character of Tessa

A book that should only be borrowed from the library but is nice easy reading: three stars.

Gone But Knot Forgotten by Mary Marks (2015)

It's a regular Tuesday and Martha Rose is heading to her weekly quilting session. She is stopped by an unusual phone call - her high school best friend Harriet has been found dead and Martha is the executor of the will. Martha hasn't seen Harriet for decades and in that time dramatic things have happened - her son died, her husband vanished and she became a recluse, roaming the halls of her mansion alone. When she was found, she had been dead for 10 months. Martha feels awful that someone she once loved died so alone and was determined to find out how her gregarious and outgoing friend became someone that no-one missed.

At the same time, Martha has quite a bit going on in her personal life. Crusher, a big biker who she had a steamy night with one book ago, has decided he wants to marry her and is slowly trying to work his way into her life. Her daughter has moved in with a man, so Martha has started a wedding quilt, just in case. Plus, not far into sorting out Harriet's estate she receives another shocking call - Harriet has been murdered, and Martha is determined to find out who the murderer was.

This is the third Martha Rose novel. I realised a few chapters in that I had actually read the first one (review here) and I liked it. I feel exactly the same about this one. It's well written, the characters are engaging and Martha feels like a real person, with both good and bad qualities. I liked that she was spunky enough to stand up for herself but I did wish she'd cut back a bit on the refined sugar and saturated fat (this girl's diet is not good! If she keeps up her current levels of red and processed meats, she's in for a heart attack before too long). The book is a little light on quilting for a title with a thread pun in it but the quilting is there (and there's a free pattern at the back). It is a nice book and a good cosy way to spend an afternoon. That said, I took an entire star off my rating because the author is a gun control advocate who misunderstands the second amendment. I can't be supporting that.

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson (2015)

Two years ago I reviewed Kate Atkinson's Life After Life. Although I thought it was well written, thought provoking and terribly clever, I did not like the book. I felt the trials meted out to Ursula became torturous after a while; when reading about her, I felt sadistic, a feeling I did not enjoy. Hence, when the companion book to Life After Life (which was made very clear is not a sequel or prequel but a complementary novel) was released this year, I was reluctant to pick it up. However, I do love Kate Atkinson and I really hate not having read a book that everyone else has (would I jump off a cliff...) so I borrowed it from the library. It sat on my shelf, borrowed but unread, for about two months until I got an email from the library telling me someone else had requested it and asking that I return it in three days. I reluctantly picked it up and then, within an hour, started kicking myself quite hard in the shins for waiting so long, because this book is excellent.

Like Life After Life, this book does not follow a linear narrative. However, unlike Life After Life, which explored parallel realities, where the different actions of the characters affected that particular reality but were wiped out when Ursula died and was reborn again, A God in Ruins sits within one reality only (thank God). Instead of moving between universes, the story moves back and forth along the lineage of Teddy - Edward Todd - and his parents, children and grandchildren. Broadly, Teddy, who was his mother Sylvie's best boy, goes to war, becomes a pilot, returns from war, marries Nancy, with whom he has Viola, who herself has two children, Sunny and Bea. Although Teddy is central to the story, Viola and Sunny both have chapters told from their perspectives. The story spans Teddy's entire lifetime of 90 years, which combined with the multiple perspectives results in a really full, fascinating exploration of a family and the effect of two terrible wars.

Given that I had to return the book to the library in three days, I read this book much more quickly than I wanted to. It is really beautifully written, with the kind of language that I wanted to savour and take my time with. At the centre of the story is Teddy, who every loves. He promises himself that if he survives the war, if he has an "after", he will be kind. And he is, but kindness and love don't necessary look like he thought they would. Like Life After Life, there is great loss and love throughout the book. In a testament to the power of this book to evoke feeling, for the first time in a long time, I cried while reading a book. I recommend this book strongly: five stars.

Dietland by Sarai Walker (2015)

Plum Kettle lives a constrained life. In the morning, she gets up and eats a Waist Watchers breakfast, before heading to the cafe where she works at her job where she responds to emails from young girls in her role as pretending to be Kitty, the magazine editor of teen mag Daisy Chain. Once a week, she goes to a Waist Watchers meeting, where she is weighed and picks up the latest Waist Watchers recipes. Always dressed in dark-coloured long shirts and ankle-length elastic-waisted skirts, Plum lives her life within a five-block radius, living a half-life while waiting for her real life to begin. You see, Plum is fat and waiting for lapland surgery, after which her inner thin person (called Alicia) will emerge and her life will really begin.

That all changes when Plum notices that she is being followed. She hates being looked at, being seen,  so is incredibly aware of the strange girl with dark eyeliner and bright tights who watches her, always taking notes. One day the girl slips her a book called Adventures in Dietland. Adventures in Dietland is a expose of the diet industry written by Verena Baptist, whose parents found the Baptist Diet, an unhealthy restrictive diet Plum was on as a teenager. Rich from the money her parents made but cognisant of the damage that the Baptist Diet caused, Verena has formed a feminist collective in the heart of New York City. Upon finding out that Plum is planning on doing lapland surgery, Verena offers Plum $20,000 if she agrees to go on the New Baptist Diet, a special plan designed for Plum by Verena which forces Plum to look at her life, how she treats her body and how she feels about herself. Plum agrees, starts the plan and her life begins to change.

While these changes are happening in Plum's life, a terrorist group called Jennifer are enacting violence on misogyny and misogynists - kidnapping and murdering men who have got away with enacting violence on women and using violence to change how women are represented.

I haven't described the plot of this book very well. It's a fascinating exploration of the impact of diet culture on an individual. Like Plum, I have had days where I thought "If only I were x kgs thinner/my boobs were bigger/I was taller/my hair was more blonde then my life would be better." I've tried Weight Watchers, the Liver Cleansing Diet, the 5:2 Diet (actually, I just borrowed the book for that one from the library - the fasting seemed really unhealthily). Every time I turn on the TV or the radio there are ads for meal replacement shakes or Michelle Bridge's 12 week transformation or I Quit Sugar programs. Women are bombarded with images of female perfection all the time while at the same time being told that they aren't pretty/smart/sexy/fuckable enough. Plum's sense of self is so closely tied up with her weight and her idea of what her weight should be that it is emotionally paralysing for her. It is literally stopping her from doing what she wants; not because she physically cannot, but because emotionally she can't. Breaking the years of Dietland training and damage is incredibly hard but so fascinating to read about. The New Baptist Diet challenges Plum breaks out of her shell like a dieting caterpillar into a gorgeous butterfly with a healthy sense of self and relationship with food; Dietland chronicles her journey and whether or not it is even possible to break out of a lifestyle so deeply ingrained.

One of the beset things about this book is that makes explicit the connection between the way women's bodies are portrayed in the media, advertising and television and both the violence women experience and diet culture. Sometimes it does feel like the only way to fix the problem is to tear everything down and start again. I don't think it will happen, but this book raises very interesting questions about misogyny, patriarchy and the everyday treatment of women. Every girl should read this book as a teenager. Five stars.

West of Sunset by Stewart O'Nan (2015)

West of Sunset is a recently published book written by Stewart O'Nan that fictionalises the time that my literary boyfriend F Scott Fitzgerald spent in Hollywood. Now, I usually avoid both books that fictionalise the lives of real people and books written by men, but the cover for this title was so gorgeous that I just couldn't resist.

See what I mean? It's gorgeous. Now, having finished the novel, I kind of do and I kind of don't regret having picked it up. Let me explain.

The novel opens just as F Scott Fitzgerald (Scott) has been offered a contract at MGM for $1,000 a week to fix scripts. He is broke, in debt and struggling with an alcohol addiction. His wife, Zelda, is in an institution and his daughter, Scottie is at boarding school. He packs up his hotel room, gets on a train and moves to Hollywood.

Once there, he starts work at "the Iron Lung" - the MGM building named after its late head Irving Thalberg (whom Scott liked and on whom his final work, The Last Tycoon, was based). He bumps into his old friends from New York, like Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, and moves into the same apartment block as Humphrey Bogart (Bogie) and his second wife Mayo Methot (what a name!). This frequent and excellent research/name-dropping is the absolute best bit of this book. I spent just as much time on Wikipedia as I did actually reading the text and I now have a huge pile of books and DVDs on my desk waiting for me to find the time to read and watch them, starting with Tender is the Night and including Parker, Hemingway and Zelda's novel for good measure. When my eyes are tired from reading too much, I'll watch early Bogart and Crawford films and then the original A Star is Born, which I have (shamefully) never seen but was partly written by the great Dorothy Parker. This book inspired me to re-enter this amazing period in literature and film and for that I am incredibly grateful.

But. BUT! The protagonist of this book is supposed to be F Scott Fitzgerald. It is not F Scott Fitzgerald. Like many Scott fans, my knowledge of him has mainly been cobbled together from articles in Sunday papers, Matthew J Buccoli's biography Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, and reading his novels nine million times. Scott had his faults but he is my true literary boyfriend and I love him completely. One of his faults was his alcoholism, which defined him for much of his career. However, in West of Sunset, booze is just not that big a deal. Sure, references are made to empty bottles of gin and a bender or two but there is no sense of the great thirst that F Scott Fitzgerald was reportedly believed to have destroyed his life and his literary promise. Once he got to Hollywood, he just drank a lot of Coke and had an occasional gimlet. I did not buy that for one second. Alcoholics just don't give up alcohol that easily and with that little drama. 

What's more, O'Nan's Scott just walks around feeling sorry for everyone all the time. He feels sorry for Dorothy Parker, because they slept together a few times in the 1920s and he thinks it's a mistake but she'd go another round if he was up for it (never! Dottie was divine and Scotty was gorgeous; hence, never a regret. He should have been flattered or amused.). He feels sorry for his daughter, his wife, Bogie, Dietrich, Hemingway, Joan Crawford, everyone, including himself. The author of The Great Gatsby, who so exquisitely captured human emotion and the sense of both a particular time and the human condition, would never be reduced to just one key emotion: pity. I would have bought him wallowing in a bit of self-pity, but not all-around self-defining directed-at-everyone pity. Also, Sheilah Graham comes off like a bit of a pill and I just did not get her appeal at all. I know the real F Scott Fitzgerald was infatuated with her but it just did not translate for me through this book at all.

So, I didn't hate the book. I didn't like it and I absolutely would not recommend it but I am thankful to it for reminding me about a period of time I had forgotten about. Three stars.

Threads of Evidence by Lea Wait (2015)

After spending two years in Arizone, Angie Curtis is back in her home town of Haven Habor in Maine. She is taking over as director of Mainely Needlepoint from her grandmother, who is marrying Haven Habor's reverend. Her life is coming together: she has friends, is learning a new and interesting business, and finally feels at home again. 

Angie's world is made much more interesting when movie star Skye West moves into town. Skye has bought a huge run-down mansion Aurora and is renovating it with the help of her very handsome adult son, Patrick. Aurora fell into ruin after the death of its owner, Millie Gardener. Mrs Gardener had refused to leave the house after the death of her only child, Jasmine, in 1970. Jasmine's death had been ruled a accident, but she was convinced it was murder. Millie told Skye her beliefs before she died and Skye was determined to find out the truth of what really happened. After finding out Angie used to work for a private detective (and that her son Patrick thought Angie was the prettiest girl in Maine), she hired Angie to help her solve the mystery of what happened to Jasmine that fateful night 45 years ago.

I love a cosy mystery. If that cosy mystery is somehow connected to something crafty, even better. However, although Threads of Evidence contains needlepoint as a key plot point, there's not any actual needlepointing in it. I was a bit disappointed at that (cosy and crafty just go so well together...) but other than that I don't have any complaints. It was a well-put-together cosy murder mystery, with a compelling story and likeable characters. I read it on a cold winter's afternoon while drinking hot chocolate; I give it three cosy stars.

The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr (2015)

Bernie Gunther has had a tough 20th century. A born-and-bred Berliner, he fought in the trenches in the first world war. Now, in the midst of World War II, he is trying to navigate life in Hitler's Germany - between avoiding joining the Nazi Party and committing crimes for which he could not live with himself, he's not doing too well. Combine that with the food and booze shortages and the horrors he knows are occurring in various parts of Germany, Bernie's life is frankly not very fun. One day his old boss, Arthur Nebe, invites him for lunch. Nebe is a high-ranking Nazi official and, in the summer before meeting Bernie, had singlehandedly murdered 45,000 Jews. Yet, in another example of the moral ambiguity that characterises the Bernie Gunther series, Bernie still enjoys Arthur's company and is prepared to let Arthur buy him a nice lunch. Arthur enlists Bernie to present at an international policing conference being held in Germany (this is no joke - Nazi Germany held an international policing conference in the middle of WW2 which was attended by police from all over the world. If that were a plot point in a movie it would be dismissed for being unrealistic.). Bernie's speech leads to unexpected events, including the murder of a lawyer who wants to challenge the legality of some of the actions of the Nazi government, a liaison with a movie star and a trip into the very dark and very disturbing region of Bosnia and Croatia.

The Lady of Zagreb is the tenth Bernie Gunther novel. Chances are, if you're planning to read it you've read at least one or two of the previous nine (no-one seriously enters a series on the tenth book). Therefore, I think you will agree with me when I say that Bernie is an awesome character. In The Lady of Zagreb, Bernie is as hardboiled as ever, quipping non-stop and conducting himself with the moral code we've come to expect. This book is incredibly well written and well researched, and as with every other Bernie novel, I learned new and horrific things about what happened in Europe between 1939 and 1944. I heart Bernie Gunther, and The Lady of Zagreb did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for him.

However, this book required just a little bit more of me than the other titles in this series have. To be honest, I skimmed over chapters of the description of the horrors that occurred in Yugoslavia. Perhaps I could be accused of putting my head in the sand, but there is only so much evil I can take in one 400-page novel I am reading for enjoyment. Those scenes, while I'm sure perfectly accurately recounted, were really awful. Also, I did find it just a little hard to believe that Bernie would have got away with quite as much sass as he did. He said stuff to some of the most evil men in history that made me blink (and I'm not even a murdering dictator). Finally, Kerr really needs to lift his game in his depiction of women. The two here are complete cardboard cut-outs. One is literally just a plot point (I don't think she even has any lines) and the other sounds like a robot. I would totally sleep with Bernie (phwarrr!) so I get that so many beautiful women want him but even beautiful women can have more than one dimension.

That said, even a not-perfect Bernie Gunther novel is still better than most of the detective novels out there. Three and a half stars (and if you haven't read any Bernie books, start with Berlin Noir. They're really great).

The Wonder Lover by Malcolm Knox (2015)

John Wonder lives an unusual life. He has three families, each living in a different country, separated from each other by oceans. In each family, he has a wife and two children. Each pair of children is made up of a boy and a girl, with the son (Adam) older than the daughter (Evie). John spends one week in three with each family, living a carefully delineated life. This unusual life is possible because John Wonder is an unusual man. John works as an Authenticator, travelling the globe authenticating the type of feats that are recorded in the Guinness World Book of Records. Born without a scent, he makes himself innocuous, unnoticeable and unseen.

The Wonder Lover opens strongly, with the unusual (that word again!) literary device of being narrated collectively by all six children. In full disclosure, I borrowed this from the library thinking it was Marion Halligan's Goodbye Sweetheart, so I had a completely different idea of what the book was going to be about. That said, once I realised I what I had done, I went with it. The first half of the book is very well written and I was fascinated by the story of the determinately non-interesting man who had built up such an interesting life. But then, halfway through the novel, the author commits an unforgivable sin: John's world starts to fall apart because he meets Cucina, whp is thirty years his junior and the world's most beautiful woman.

It's time for some ranting. The year is 2015. Lolita was published in 1955. Since then, there have been many books, so so so many books, where the plot resolves around an old man lusting after a younger woman. This plot line needs to stop. It needs to die. It has been done to death and it's disgusting, creepy, always sexist and often downright misogynist. Worse still, it's boring. I want books to entertain me, engage my mind, make me think, make me care about characters and events and be interesting. THERE SHOULD BE NO MORE BOOKS WHERE OLD MEN LUST AFTER YOUNG BEAUTIFUL WOMEN. The quota of books containing that storyline has been reached. There are enough tales telling that particular story. There is literally no way this story can be retold in a new and interesting way. Please, let no author ever write about it ever again. It's time has come.

I did finish the book because I wanted to see what happened. Unfortunately, the end of the book is quite stupid. The women characters who appeared so intriguing at the start of the story end up as caricatures and it was all strangely unsatisfactory. The Wonder Lovers gets two stars and a time-out in the naughty corner.

The Other Daughter by Lauren Willig (2015)

Rachel is an English governess looking after the children of the wealthy in France. She is situated in an uncomfortable position in the household: betwixt and between, she is neither upstairs nor downstairs. One day she receives a telegram informing her her mother is very sick and urging her to return to England. When her employer refuses to give her time off she quits and leaves immediately, only to arrive home to find out her mother has died of influenza and already been buried. Rachel is heartbroken; her father died when she was a small child and her mother was the only family she had. Even worse, her mother's landlord is evicting her, leaving Rachel unemployed, homeless and with only four days to pack up the house and leave with the few mementos of her parents she has: her mother's piano and her father's chess set.

Exhausted from her travels and devastated by the news, Rachel curls up on her mother's bed, taking comfort from a ritual from her childhood where she would climb into bed with her mother for reassurance. While in bed, something crinkled beneath her fingers. It was a page torn from an expensive magazine, the type her mother never read. On the page, her father's face stared up at her, much older than she remembered, next to a young woman. The caption underneath the photo read "Lady Olivia Standish, escorted by her father, the Earl of Ardmore". Rachel's father was alive, and not who she thought he was.

Rachel dashes to Oxford, to see her only remaining relative, a distant cousin David. She confronts him with the article and he confesses that he and her mother have known the truth all along. Distraught, she flees David's office. David sends one of his former students, Simon Montford, to follow her. Simon, like Rachel's father, is part of the aristocracy, and he knows Rachel's father and his other family well. Between them, they hatch a plan: Rachel will pose as a distant cousin to Simon. Through his connections, she will gain entry into London society and, somehow and somewhere, meet her father again.

The Other Daughter is set in the 1920s in England. It was a time of great change for the country: the Bright Young Things were breaking down conventions and scandalising conservatives while England has a whole was dealing with the aftermath of the Great War and the devastating effect it had on all social classes. I loved the '20s moments, like the two Evelyns canoodling in the corner of a nightclub and the too laugh-provoking language. The tales of fun and champagne were interpersed with moments of genuine pathos and, underlying it all, the search for Rachel's history and truth about her past. I enjoyed this book from start to finish and would readily recommend it for anyone who wants a good historical romantic read. Four stars.

Slush Pile by Ian Shadwell (2015)

15 years ago, Michael Ardenne won the Booker Prize. The years following the Booker Prize were a blur of literary festivals, women and booze. Now, married and living in the countryside near Sydney, he is a drunk, in debt and unable to write a word. Given an ultimatum by his long-suffering wife Tanya to work or get a job, Ardenne starts to read a slush pile - the unpublished novels sent to his publisher. He finds one with some promise and then starts to rewrite it as his own. The book is a huge hit, catapulting Ardenne to the heights of literary stardom once again. But soon, the original writer of the novel makes themselves known...

This is a really strange book. It starts off as a biting satire of the literary novel and the typical literary "hero" (white, male, trying to find himself and obsessed with touching his own penis) before veering into domestic melodrama, crime thriller and Lolita fantasies. It was incredibly readable but the tonal shifts were really disruptive of my reading experience. It's a first novel and Shadwell has a lot of writing skill, so there is some good stuff here but I am hesitant to recommend it. It's just an odd book.

Inside the O'Briens by Lisa Genova (2015)

Joe O'Brien is a cop. He lives in Boston in a house with his wife Rosie, his four children and his eldest son's wife. Lately, Joe hasn't been feeling well. His balance is off and his memory is not what it used to be. He has started to twitch in ways that make him feel uncomfortable and the whole family is made uncomfortable by the uncontrollable rage that bursts out of him at unexpected times. After avoiding the issue for too long, he goes to see his doctor, who refers him to a neurologist. The neurologist runs some tests and delivers Joe some awful, awful news - he has Huntingdon's disease, a terminal neurological condition that "is characterized by a progressive loss of voluntary motor control and an increase in involuntary movements."

While that news is genuinely terrible, the neurologist follows it up with even worse information. Because Huntingdon's is an inherited condition, there is a 50% chance that each of Joe and Rosie's children will also have the disease. The book follows the O'Briens as they grapple with this news. Joe needs to get used to the idea that he has to stop work and will gradually lose control of his own body. Additionally, he realises that his mother, who was sent to an institution for a condition that noone every named, also died of Huntingdon's and no-one told him. Each of the children have to decide whether they want to take the test and find out whether or not they have the disease. Each of them has something at stake: JJ's wife is pregnant with their first child; Meghan is a ballet dancer; Katie is a yoga teacher and Patrick is still finding his place in the world.

This book is meticulously researched and it is one of Lisa Genova's greatest writing skills to be able to personalise debilitating neurological conditions. I learnt a lot about Huntingdon's while reading this book. However, unlike the previous Genova novel I read and really enjoyed, Still Alice, I always felt like the O'Brians were kept at a clinical distance from me. I don't know if it's the novel's Boston setting or that I thought the children should stop dilly-dallying and just make a decision (I'd take the test right away - knowledge is power) but I felt as if I was watching a story play out rather than being emotionally involved. It's a good book, just not as good as Still Alice. Three stars.

Clade by James Bradley (2015)

Clade opens during the solstice. Adam Leith, a scientist, is on an exploration to the Antarctic, trying to understand what happened to the earth during past periods of warming in order to help address present day global warming. He receives a call from his wife, Ellie, telling him that after two years of trying they are finally going to have a baby. According to Wikipedia, a clade is "a life-form group consisting of an ancestor and all its descendants." Clade the novel follows the tale of Adam's family over the next four generations as climate change triggers events that have catastrophic impacts for the human race.

I am finding it hard to describe the novel without giving too much away. Narratively, Clade  works like a spinning wheel turning through time that stops every now and again to show a brief moment in the life of one of its characters: Adam and Ellie's daughter Summer as a toddler then as a child then as a teenager; her son; his family. Due to this fragmentation, it's not the kind of book where one forms a close relationship with a character and follows their story to its end. Rather, we are offered moments in the lives of a number of characters who are part of the same clade and I found the effect of that on me was to care for a family rather than an individual, much like I did in Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. It is beautiful written and exquisitely sad. It shows a future of sadness, hardship and death yet in which life continues; not life as we know it, but a remarkable and incredible persistence of being.

I really enjoyed this book. Five stars.

The Confectioner's Tale by Laura Madeleine (2015)

It's 1909 and Guillerme du Frere is leaving the provincial town of Bordeaux to travel to Paris to work on the railways. At the same time, in 1988 PhD candidate Padra Stevenson is struggling to cope with her grandfather's death. She is also gravely worried, because when clearing out his effects she found an old photo of her grandfather with two other people, with "Claremont" and "Forgive me" written on the back. What did her lovely, kind and brilliant grandfather do in early 20th Century Paris that he needed to ask for forgiveness so blankly?

Guillerme steps off the train from Bordeaux onto a crowed platform in Paris. He is swept away by the crowd and bumps into a beautiful wealthy woman, knocking them both to their feet. Before he can speak, she is pulled to her feet and away, but he remembers her ice-blue eyes. His new job soon dominates his everyday life but, after receiving his first pay packet, he and his workmates go out on the town. After (unknowingly) trying opium for the first time, Gui wakes up in a gutter, with his pockets completely empty. Trying to find help he wanders down an alley, bumping into delivery men delivering sugar and flour to one of the favourite locations of Paris' wealthy: Cremont's Patisserie. To his surprise, standing there with a clipboard monitoring the deliveries is none other than the beautiful woman from the train platform, Jeanne Clermont. The delivery men want to chase him away but seeing the state he is in, she allows him to sit quietly and drink chocolate chaud until he is feeling better. To show his thanks, he agrees to return the following weekend to help with deliveries. From there, his relationship with Jeanne and Clermont's develops.

Back in the 1980s, Padra is not having a good time. She is very behind on her PhD thesis and has been placed on academic probation. Even though she knows she should be working on her thesis, she can't stop thinking about her grandfather's life in Paris and what he did that he was so sorry for. To make matters worse, another scholar is writing a biography of her grandfather and has promised to expose his scandalous secret. Petra is terrified that her grandfather's reputation will be tarnished for the sake of a publishing success. Helped by her friends and supervisor, she starts an investigative race with the would-be biographer to find out her grandfather's secret before he does and, hopefully, also find her place in the world.

The book alternates chapters from Guillerme and Padra. This is the second book I've read with this structure in a month (the last one being The Girl in the Photograph) and, as with that book, I much preferred the story set in the past than the more recent one. Madeleine very effectively paints a picture of Paris just after the turn of the century: the poverty living alongside the wealth; the seediness of the brothels and dancing girls; and the feeling of falling in love. As a postgraduate student, I really understood how Padra feels - the vague sense of panic every time someone brings up your thesis and the constant feeling that you should always be writing. I also loved the 80s touches - typewriters and fax machines and rotary telephones. However, the 80s is just not as fun as fin-de-siecle France!

To me, The Confectioner's Tale felt like a movie. The plot was simple and direct, the secondary characters had no inner life of their own and existed only to help the protagonists and the resolution was obvious but very satisfying. This is not a problem - I love movies! But, although it is very well told and engaging, there is not a lot of depth to this story. I actually kind of hope someone does makes a film of this book because it would be gorgeous, sumptuous and lovely to behold. Three and a half stars.

What She Left by TR Richmond (2015)

Alice Salmon, 25, talented and beautiful, has drowned in the lake in her university town Southampton. Drunk and with cocaine in her blood, her story captures the imagination of the nation's media. Is she a cautionary tale of what happens when girls go wild in a binge-drinking culture? Or did something more sinister cause the inebriated Alice to fall into the freezing cold water in the middle of a dark winter's night?

In the aftermath of her death, Alice's former professor Jeremy Cooke, an anthropologist, starts a new research project. He decides to attempt to map Alice's life using her online footprint as well as information collected from those who knew her and loved her to, as he describes it, "put her back together again." But why is this fusty old professor, who still prefers to write longhand and cycles over campus on an ancient bike, so concerned with telling this story; putting this particular life back together again?

What She Left is the most modern of epistolary novels. It's chapters are made up of blog posts from Alice's best friend Meagan, online forums, Alice's own diary, letters from Alice's boyfriend, transcripts of police interviews, long, pompous longhand letters from Cooke to his best friend, another scientist whose work far outshone Cooke's own and assorted other forms of modern-day communication such as online news articles and Twitter postings. This is very cleverly done, with a complete picture of Alice and the web of relationships surrounding her slowly being built up, all working towards the answer of one question: how did Alice die?

This a really enjoyable, engaging book. Four and a half stars (I dropped half a star because Cooke was such a repulsive character. I don't need to like the characters in the books I read, but he was really icky.)

The Girl in the Photograph by Kate Riordan (2015)

Firecombe is a place of secrets. They fret among the uppermost branches of the beech trees and brood at the cold bottom of the stream that cleaves the valley in two. The past has seeped into the soil here, like spilt blood. If you listen closely enough you can almost hear what's gone before, particularly on the stillest days. Sometimes the very air seems to hum with anticipation. At other times it's as though a collective breath has been drawn in and held. It waits, or so it seems to me

The prologue of the book opens in 1936, in a strange and eerie place that the narrator, Alice, has been in for three years. This place, she tells us, has changed her in imaginable ways, and now, three years after her arrival, it is time for her to acknowledge the uhealed rifts in the valley by telling their story.

The novel then journeys back to London in 1932. Alice, unlike most women in her time, has graduated from grammar school. Educated and intelligent, she is bored in her job as a typist and disconnected from her working class parents (in particular her mother), who thinks she has ideas above herself and should quit her job and work in a shop where she can meet a man. On on "particularly silent, stultifying day", the handsome and charming James Elton walks into her office and Alice is in love. James is married but (in a tale as old as time) he is going to leave his wife...until he doesn't, leaving Alice pregnant and alone in a time where being a single mum is not an option. Alice's mum sends Alice to Fiercombe Manor in the countryside, where an old school friend of hers works as a housekeeper. Once Alice has her baby, she will return to London and put it up for adoption.

Fiercombe Manor is an unusual place, where unusual things happen. It's at the bottom of a valley and, as she descends in an old horse-and-carriage driven by the gardener, Ruck, her watch stops working. The motif time as stopped, stilled or moving in unusual ways continues throughout the novel. The housekeeper and her mother's friend, Mrs Jelphs. Mrs Jelphs is also an unusual character: alternately friendly, open, reserved, withdrawn and oddly over-protective. The house seems to have a life of its own, and at night while she sleeps Alice feels presences wandering around. She is convinced there is a secret to be found and, quietly, she starts to investigate the story of the family who own the house but who never, ever go there.

Once Alice arrives at Fiercombe, a new voice is introduced into the novel. Elizabeth was the mistress of Fiercombe 40 years before Alice arrived there, but a different Fiercombe. She lived in Stanton House, an imposing monstrosity built in the Italian style; a house that was so huge it changed the feel of the valley but now gone, leaving no trace. Like Alice, Elizabeth is pregnant and apprehensive about what will come after her baby leaves her body. Linked by the new lives within them and their strange connection to the place in which they live, The Girl in the Photograph tells Alice and Elizabeth's stories, culminating in a dramatic, shocking end.

The Girl in the Photograph has strongly gothic overtones. These are quite overt: Mrs Jelphs and Alice eat in the Red Room and at one stage Alice jokes about having Mr Rochester as a husband. It reminded me a lot of Rebecca, with an overwhelming sense of mystery and intrigue and hidden knowledge. Unfortunately, with this type of storytelling it's a problem if one of the stories is more interesting than the other one - I liked the Elizabeth storyline a lot better than the Alice one, mainly because the Alice one was all in her own head and she just wasn't as interesting as Elizabeth was! I found the book engaging and well-written but quite slow moving. The author really needed to either cut out about 100 pages or really beef up the secondary characters. Using Rebecca again as a model - it is much shorter than The Girl in the Photograph while covering the same sort of area and it therefore packs much more of a punch.

The Girl in the Photograph was interesting and engaging but ultimately too long and slow-moving book: three stars. I will definitely keep an eye out for this author's work in the future.

Vintage Weddings by Katie Fforde (2015) or, the book that made me bake a loaf of wholemeal bread

Beth, newly graduated from university, has run away from home. Having agreed to organise her sister's wedding on a shoestring budget, her in-laws to be have lent her a cottage in the charming Cotswald village of Chippingford. Looking for work and some social contacts, Beth attends a village function at the falling-down village hall, where she meets Rachel and Lindy, the other young, single women of Chippingford. Rachel and Lindy have their own problems: Rachel is divorced and, although she bought her dream house and is living her dream life, is not as happy as she thought she'd be, while Lindy, at just 23 years of age is (as she calls herself) the youngest middle-aged woman in the world.

To build on their fledgling connection, the three women depart to the local pub and an idea is born: using each of their individual skills - Rachel with numbers and organisation, Beth with her web and marketing skills and Lindy with the local contacts and excellent seamstressing (is that a verb? It is now), the three women start a business that plans weddings on a budget. Frugal and sensible but not cheap, Vintage Weddings begins.

This novel is quite frankly charming and, as befits a charming novel, the highs and lows are gentle and easy. Each of the women is working through issues of their own. Rachel's organisation masks an OCD-like need for cleanliness and order. Beth acts more like a teenager with rebellion issues than a university graduate and Lindy has already given up on life to devote herself to her children. Of course, there are the requisite handsome and charming men to help them exorcise their demons: Raff, the raffish local scrapyard owner with the charming hoarder mother; Charlie, the scampish local farmer and Angus, an architect with an impractical dream. With the support of the village and some very good luck, Vintage Weddings begins to develop from an idea supported by a few glasses of red wine to a thriving business. The question remains, though - will Beth's sister be happy with the vintage wedding she is getting and will each of these women work through their own issues in order to recognise that true love is in their reach?

I read this book while on holiday and it seriously made me want to shift my holiday to a Cotswald village for a month. The descriptions of the village lifestyle - the charming scenery, the excellent local produce, the eccentric local characters - were delightful. Since unfortunately I can't actually head off to England for a month, I settled for making a nice wholemeal loaf of bread instead:

It was a pretty good substitute! A very nice no-stress read, three stars.