‘The Art of Falling’ by Danielle McLaughlin #BookReview #FridayReads

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Nessa McCormack’s marriage is coming back together again after her husband’s affair. She is excited to be in charge of a retrospective art exhibit for one of Ireland’s most beloved and enigmatic artists, the late sculptor Robert Locke. But the arrival of two outsiders imperils both her personal and professional worlds: a chance encounter with an old friend threatens to expose a betrayal Nessa thought she had long put behind her, and at work, an odd woman comes forward claiming to be the true creator of Robert Locke’s most famous work, The Chalk Sculpture.

As Nessa finds the past intruding on the present, she must decide whether she can continue to live a lie – or whether she’s ready to face the consequences once everything is out in the open. In this gripping debut, Danielle McLaughlin reveals profound truths about love, power, and the secrets that rule us.

This is quite a slow-paced novel, almost gentle in its composition, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an absorbing read. It really is.

Nessa is a well-drawn main character, and it’s a relief to read about a middle-aged woman who has a lot of the faults and worries and insecurities that most of us do. She’s at a point in her life when things should be going smoothly – her career is established, her marriage has survived an affair, her daughter is growing up, she lives in a beautiful house – but it doesn’t take much for it all too start falling apart.

The little details of ordinary life really add something to the narrative. It makes it all feel so real, so authentic. And Nessa isn’t some sugar-coated super woman. She has her faults, can be childish and petty, selfish and shallow. But aren’t we all, sometimes?

It’s skillfully written, every word well-chosen. It’s one of those books that forces you to slow down, to read carefully, to enjoy every page.

My only gripe was that I did feel that Nessa let her husband off the hook rather too lightly, and I did feel we could have known a bit more about him, and his motivations.

But this is a thoroughly enjoyable novel.

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‘Mirrorland’ by Carole Johnstone #TuesdayBookBlog #BookReview

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One twin ran. The other vanished. Neither escaped…

DON’T TRUST ANYONE
Cat’s twin sister El has disappeared. But there’s one thing Cat is sure of: her sister isn’t dead. She would have felt it. She would have known.

DON’T TRUST YOUR MEMORIES
To find her sister, Cat must return to their dark, crumbling childhood home and confront the horrors that wait there. Because it’s all coming back to Cat now: all the things she has buried, all the secrets she’s been running from.

DON’T TRUST THIS STORY…
The closer Cat comes to the truth, the closer to danger she is. Some things are better left in the past…

The most dangerous stories are the ones we tell ourselves…
No. 36 Westeryk Road: an imposing flat-stone house on the outskirts of Edinburgh. A place of curving shadows and crumbling grandeur. But it’s what lies under the house that is extraordinary – Mirrorland. A vivid make-believe world that twin sisters Cat and El created as children. A place of escape, but from what?

Now in her thirties, Cat has turned her back on her past. But when she receives news that one sunny morning, El left harbour in her sailboat and never came back, she is forced to return to Westeryk Road; to re-enter a forgotten world of lies, betrayal and danger.

Because El had a plan. She’s left behind a treasure hunt that will unearth long-buried secrets. And to discover the truth, Cat must first confront the reality of her childhood – a childhood that wasn’t nearly as idyllic as she remembers…

I’m going to use a cliche because it’s true – I couldn’t put this book down. Every page was a pleasure to read.

The narrative takes you from past to present, as Cat returns to her childhood home to try and make sense of her twin sister’s disappearance. But there are so many reasons she left and coming home brings all those things back to the surface. Switching like this can often be clunky and awkward, but here it works so well and the flashbacks, the details of the twins’ strange childhood, are beautifully done, so evocative and detailed.

As the past is slowly revealed, the tension really grows, and the reader is pulled along by the narrative, as almost every page seems to reveal another piece of the puzzle. It’s expertly done, absolutely gripping.

A very impressive debut. Very much looking forward to her next book.

‘Ash Tuesday’ by Ariadne Blayde #RBRT #FridayReads

I read ‘Ash Tuesday’ for Rosie Amber’s Book Review Team.

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In New Orleans, the dead talk and the living listen. 

Giving ghost tours on the decaying streets of the French Quarter isn’t exactly a high-profile career, but the guides at Spirits of Yore Haunted Tours are too strange and troubled to do anything else. They call themselves Quarter Rats, a group of outcasts and dreamers and goths who gather in hole-in-the-wall bars to bicker, spin yarns, and search for belonging in the wee hours of the night after the tourists have staggered home. 

Through the ghost stories they tell, their own haunted lives come into focus. Like the city they call home, these tour guides are messy with contradiction: they suffer joyfully, live morbidly, and sin to find salvation. 

Weaving together real New Orleans folklore with the lives of eleven unforgettably vibrant characters, Ash Tuesday is a love letter to America’s last true bohemia and the people, both dead and living, who keep its heart beating. With her debut, Blayde has carved out a deep and uber-readable interpretation of what it means to live, love, and grieve in New Orleans.

“There’s something about New Orleans. Maybe you can trace it to Latin America or the Caribbean or maybe not, maybe you can’t define it at all. The divine? The diabolical? I don’t know what to call it. But there’s magic, here.” 

New Orleans has a rich and bloody history, so it’s hardly surprising that its streets and buildings should be full of ghosts. And the author of ‘Ash Tuesday’ has found a wonderful way of telling those stories, along with the stories of an eclectic cast of characters, the ghost tour guides of Spirits of Yore.

It is Mardi Gras, and the city is full of tourists. We follow each of the guides as they give their tours, and then stay with them, learning about their lives, their struggles, their hopes, loves, dreams and pasts. And watching over it all is Kat, whose story is saved for the bittersweet ending.

This is one of the most beautifully crafted books I’ve read, every page, every paragraph a pleasure to read. I didn’t know much about New Orleans, but now I feel as though I know it well, and can see it so clearly from the author’s evocative descriptions – descriptions that never interfere with the narrative but provide a clear sense of time and place, conveying the atmosphere of chilly, eerie nights and bright carnival parades with equal skill.

The characters are brought to life with love and honesty. I adored Veda, and lovely Max, and wished so much for the other guides to understand Angela a bit more. The interactions between them all felt so real.

This is a book that will appeal not just to those who enjoy a good ghost story (although there are plenty of those), or those who are interested in history or in New Orleans. Because this is a novel that is fundamentally about people, their faults and their flaws, their mistakes and their victories, their love (and sometimes their hatred) for each other, and the ways in which we can let the past, and the people in the past, break us, or we can find our own ways forward, with people who love us for who we are.

A wonderful book.

‘The Assistant’ by S.K. Tremayne #BookReview #FridayReads

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She watches you constantly.
Newly divorced Jo is delighted to move into her best friend’s spare room almost rent-free. The high-tech luxury Camden flat is managed by a meticulous Home Assistant, called Electra, that takes care of the heating, the lights – and sometimes Jo even turns to her for company.
 
She knows all your secrets.
Until, late one night, Electra says one sentence that rips Jo’s fragile world in two: ‘I know what you did.’ And Jo is horrified. Because in her past she did do something terrible. Something unforgivable.
 
Now she wants to destroy you.
Only two other people in the whole world know Jo’s secret. And they would never tell anyone. Would they? As a fierce winter brings London to a standstill, Jo begins to understand that the Assistant on the shelf doesn’t just want to control Jo; it wants to destroy her.

This is such an excellent premise for a novel. How reliant we have all become on technology, when most of us don’t really understand it or what we’re signing up for. The idea that all those Alexas could turn on us has so much potential.

This has all the elements necessary for a real page-turner. And there are parts of it that work really well. The terror that Jo begins to feel builds and builds and there is real tension. Her frustration and her helplessness in the face of what the Electra’s are able to do to her work, her reputation, her family, her life comes across clearly.

However, there is too much here that just doesn’t feel realistic. Jo isn’t easy to like, and it’s hard to understand why everyone else is so enamoured of her (to the extent that one friend lets her live rent free in their flat, and her newly ex-husband drops his wife and new baby to help her out). The way she treats her mum is awful. And I was quite disappointed in the ending.

So lots of promise that didn’t quite hit the mark for me, but worth a read.

‘The Chalet’ by Catherine Cooper #BookReview #TuesdayBookBlog

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French Alps, 1998

Two young men ski into a blizzard… but only one returns.

20 years later

Four people connected to the missing man find themselves in that same resort. Each has a secret. Two may have blood on their hands. One is a killer-in-waiting.

Someone knows what really happened that day.

And somebody will pay.

This is a solid mystery/thriller from an author who can obviously write well.

The author clearly knows the Alps well, and the sense of place and time is excellent. It’s really easy to picture the chalet and the slopes. It’s a great idea for the setting for a novel of this type.

There is suspense, and there are twists and turns that work really well, and the writing itself is good.

However, while there is always a place for horrible characters in a novel, I just couldn’t like anyone in this story, even the one character that I was supposed to like and to root for. The back story felt rather contrived and cliched unfortunately, and there were too many coincidences to make the set up feasible.

So, all-in-all, a bit of a miss.

‘The Liar’s Dictionary’ by Eley Williams #Fridayreads #BookReview

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Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary is riddled with fictitious entries known as mountweazels penned by Peter Winceworth, a man wishing to make his lasting mark back in 1899. It’s up to young intern Mallory to uncover these mountweazels before the dictionary can be digitised for modern readers.

Lost in Winceworth’s imagination – a world full of meaningless words – will Mallory finally discover the secret to living a meaningful life?

There was a great deal that I really liked about this book. It is really funny and clever in places, and I loved Mallory, the main character.

I rather liked the idea of the job she had – to find fictitious words in Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. Words that, as we find out through flashbacks, have been placed there by lexicographer Peter Winceworth (never was a name more apt) in 1899 – a man frustrated by his work, his workmates and the world, and who wishes to make a mark on that world.

The rogue words are really good fun, and the novel is charming, unusual, witty and clever. However, sometimes the definitions go a little too far and do bog the narrative down a bit.

That said, this is an entertaining and engaging novel.