‘While Paris Slept’ by Ruth Druart #bookreview #WWII #HistoricalFiction

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Paris 1944
A young woman’s future is torn away in a heartbeat. Herded on to a train bound for Auschwitz, in an act of desperation she entrusts her most precious possession to a stranger. All she has left now is hope.

Santa Cruz 1953
Jean-Luc thought he had left it all behind. The scar on his face a small price to pay for surviving the horrors of Nazi Occupation. Now, he has a new life in California, a family. He never expected the past to come knocking on his door.

On a darkened platform, two destinies become entangled. Their choice will change the future in ways neither could have imagined…

This started really well, with Jean-Luc’s intriguing arrest, and then with the events in Paris in 1944. The fear and desperation that Sarah and David feel is palpable, and Sarah’s selfless decision is heartbreaking. And Jean-Luc and Charlotte’s decision to save a stranger’s baby, despite the danger it will put them in, paves the way for what sound be an emotional, heart-in-the-mouth read.

But I didn’t quite feel the terror during Jean-Luc and Charlotte’s journey – everything felt a little too easy. And then the events after the war, from 1953 onwards, just felt very unrealistic. I hate to be negative, because I think there is a really heartfelt story here and one that has a huge amount of potential, but would Jean-Luc really have been arrested? Would he have been punished the way he is? Would he and Charlotte have kept their secret and not tried to get in touch with Sarah and David? Would Sarah and David be so resentful? It just didn’t add up – from all the characters being selfless and putting Sam first, they all seemed to become horribly selfish in the second part of the book.

This was definitely a missed opportunity, in my opinion.

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‘The Mother Fault’ by Kate Mildenhall #TuesdayBookBlog #BookReview #thriller #dystopian

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To keep her children safe, she must put their lives at risk …

In suburban Australia, Mim and her two children live as quietly as they can. Around them, a near-future world is descending into chaos: government officials have taken absolute control, but not everybody wants to obey the rules.

When Mim’s husband Ben mysteriously disappears, Mim realises that she and her children are in great danger. Together, they must set off on the journey of a lifetime to find Ben. The government are trying to track them down, but Mim will do anything to keep her family safe – even if it means risking all their lives.

Can the world ever return to normality, and their family to what it was?

This was a bit hit and miss. There are some aspects of the story that are brilliant, and scary, and very, very human. Mim is a great main character and her fear for her children and her need to keep them safe are really relatable.

The future world in which she lives feels, unfortunately, very real, and it isn’t hard to imagine things going the way they have in her life – with the government taking over everything, tracking every move, and those who don’t fit being sent off to ‘BestLife’ facilities. It’s all very eerily believable.

The novel moves at a pace to begin with and is very dramatic and exciting. but once Mim is at sea, it all slows down a great deal and the details about the technicalities of sailing drag the story down, unfortunately.

When Mim is back to tracking her husband, the pace picks up again, and the ending is really good, very exciting and fast-paced.

While there was, in my opinion, too much detail of the intricacies of sailing, there were other aspects of the story that I felt didn’t get the depth they needed. There were hints that Mim was frustrated and unhappy at home, that things in her marriage weren’t all they appeared, and I felt this could have been explored a little more, as could the relationship she had with her brothers. I do thin this would have helped me to care more about Mim, and what happened to her.

So definitely worth a read, but not quite as gripping as I’d hoped – but I’d certainly read more by this author.

‘Fallen Angel’ by Jenny O’Brien #bookreview #crimefiction #wales

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She looked like she’d drifted off to sleep, curled up in her white dress, blonde hair floating in the breeze. They called it the Angel Murder.

Eighteen-year-old Angelica Brock is found dead at a local beauty spot, dressed in a pure white nightgown, her white-blonde hair arranged around her. For years her death is a mystery, her killer the one who got away for a whole generation of police.

For DS Gaby Darin, it’s not just any cold case – the victim is intimately linked to someone close to her, and emotions are high. But just as the team finds a breakthrough clue on Angelica’s nightdress, another case crashes into the station. Could they be linked? After all this time, can Gaby finally discover what really happened to Angelica?

There was a lot that I really enjoyed about this novel – the setting was great, the main character was believable and interesting, the plot was intriguing and well-constructed.

The idea of a cold case, where the victim is personally connected to the team working on the murder, works very well, and adds a depth to the narrative. The pace is good, too, after a bit of a slow start, and everything moves along at a steady rate, keeping the reader interested and engaged.

That said, there were some aspects of the story that I didn’t enjoy quite so much. The pace was slow to begin with (although things did get better). This is the third book in the series, and while it can be read as a standalone, I feel I would have got more out of it if I had read the first two and had been more familiar with the characters’ backgrounds. And I was quite irritated by Bates’ wife Kate’s attitude to the investigation and the hours he puts in – in the circumstances, it seemed quite out of order and that did spoil things for me a bit.

So, overall, this was okay and there were definitely aspects of the story I enjoyed. But it did just miss the mark a bit for me.

‘The Ends of the Earth’ by Abbie Greaves #bookreview #friday reads

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Some love stories change us for ever.

For the last seven years, Mary O’Connor has waited for her first love. Every evening she arrives at Ealing Broadway station and stands with a sign which simply says: ‘Come Home Jim’.

Commuters might pass her by without a second thought, but Mary isn’t going anywhere. Until an unexpected call turns her world on its head.

It will take the help of a young journalist called Alice, and a journey across the country for Mary to face what happened all those years ago, and to finally answer the question: where on earth is Jim?

This is a very unusual novel, well-written and thoughtful, and it handles mental health issues with compassion and understanding, and without judgement.

I did find Mary a bit frustrating at times, but she has made her own choices and has her own reasons, and she is firm in that, which gives her agency in a life that often feels pointless. Her work at the helpline gives her another dimension, and her burgeoning friendships there give us hope that there is more for her.

Alice is lovely, and her back and forth with Kit is a highlight of the novel, providing some needed lightness and humour. I felt too that Jim was drawn with sensitivity and care, and that his character was an interesting portrayal of the difference between what people might want and what they need.

An intelligent book, the author’s love for her characters is clear. I really enjoyed it.

‘Midnight’s Children’ by Salman Rushdie #BookReview

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Born at the stroke of midnight at the exact moment of India’s independence, Saleem Sinai is a special child. However, this coincidence of birth has consequences he is not prepared for: telepathic powers connect him with 1,000 other ‘midnight’s children’ all of whom are endowed with unusual gifts. Inextricably linked to his nation, Saleem’s story is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirrors the course of modern India at its most impossible and glorious.

It feels a bit ridiculous that I’ve got to the ripe of age of fifty-three without having read any books by Salman Rushdie. I have had this one in my bookcase for about five years! And I decided that 2023 would be the year I would finally read it.

Well, it certainly got the year off to an excellent start. This is one of those books that, when you read reviews on Amazon, you wonder what the people who have given it less than five stars are reading. I know everyone is entitled to an opinion, and that reading can be subjective, but the moment I opened this book I was completely and utterly captivated.

The writing is breathtaking, absolutely on another level to almost everything I’ve read before. That this won the Booker of Bookers is no surprise. Every page, indeed, every paragraph, contains something that makes you stop in your tracks (at least if you are a nerdy, book obsessed person like me).

Saleem, with his huge, dripping ‘cucumber’ nose and amazing sense of smell is such an unusual narrator – if you want a masterclass in how to write an unreliable narrator, then this is the place to find it. Do these things really happen to him? Is he telepathic? Is he linked to the other ‘midnight’s children’? Or is he weaving a tale to make his life seem more interesting, as he recounts these events to Padma, delighting in surprising and shocking her as he does.

The parallels of his life to the changes in India after independence and through partition are beautifully woven throughout. I learned more about the history of India than I ever did at school. If you want to get the most from this book, you will need to not mind looking up things as you go – but it is really well worth it.

The writing is unconventional, and breaks all the rules – but this is a writer who knows how to break those rules, and certainly doesn’t do so for the sake of it. The narrative is carefully and beautifully constructed, metaphors, similes, imagery, vocabulary all working seamlessly together to create a wonderful story.

The people that populate this extraordinary novel are gorgeously drawn – like ayah Mary Pereira, who infuses her pickles with all her bitterness, hurt and love; Parvati-the-witch, who loves Saleem; Naseem, who really begins it all; and gorgeous Aunty Pia; Picture Singh the world’s most charming man; Uncle Hanif, film director; Shiva, Saleem’s huge-kneed rival, the novel is bursting with life and all the human emotions you can think of – love, hate, jealousy, empathy, cowardice, fear, sadness, joy, the list goes on and on.

I was genuinely sorry to get to the end – and very sorry I had taken so long to read it. I’m also very glad that I have a whole back catalogue of Rushdie to enjoy.

‘Deadly Games’ by Steve Frech #BookReview

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I know everything about you.

I know your name, your birthday, your kids’ names, where you live, where you work. I know when you get that big promotion, or when you argue with your spouse.

But someone knows everything about me too. Someone knows all my secrets and they’re using them against me. They’re setting me up.

The police think I murdered Emily Parker. To prove my innocence I need to find the real killer.

I need to beat him at his own game

Bartender Clay gets caught up with a murderer and finds himself the suspect. He goes on the run, accompanied by a journalist trying to make a name for herself, and the pair track down the real killer.

This is an exciting and gripping novel, and great fun to read. I did enjoy it. It’s well-written, and is an easy read. The denouement (which is not quite the ending) is great, very well-executed.

That said, there were a few things that I didn’t like so much. There were grammatical errors that were hard to avoid. I also didn’t really buy the involvement of Clay’s best friend and her new boyfriend. Why would they risk helping him? And their involvement didn’t amount to very much, even though it put them at a huge risk, so I wasn’t sure why that particular plot line was necessary; the novel would have worked better without it.

So overall, not perfect, but very definitely worth reading.

‘Dancing in the Mosque’ by Homeira Qadari #BookReview #FridayReads

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In the days before Homeira Qaderi gave birth to her son, Siawash, the road to the hospital in Kabul would often be barricaded because of the frequent suicide explosions. With the city and the military on edge, it was not uncommon for an armed soldier to point his gun at the pregnant woman’s bulging stomach, terrified that she was hiding a bomb. Propelled by the love she held for her soon-to-be-born child, Homeira walked through blood and wreckage to reach the hospital doors. But the joy of her beautiful son’s birth was soon overshadowed by other dangers that would threaten her life.

No ordinary Afghan woman, Homeira refused to cower under the strictures of a misogynistic social order. Defying the law, at the age of thirteen, she risked her freedom to teach children reading and writing and fought for women’s rights in her theocratic and patriarchal society.

Devastating in its power, Dancing in the Mosque is a mother’s searing letter to the son she was forced to leave behind. In telling her story – and that of Afghan women – Homeira challenges us to reconsider the meaning of motherhood, sacrifice, and survival.

This is a beautiful book. It is not simply a memoir of misery and gloom, although there is sadness and grief and loss and anger here. This is much more. This is a real story, about a real woman, who had to make an incredibly difficult decision.

Because it is real, and because life is so much more complicated than simple ‘good’ and ‘bad’, there is humour here too, and laughter, and love and friendship. There are wonderful family relationships, and insights into a world that feels very different but that, in some ways, shows how similar people actually are.

The writing is absolutely beautiful in places, and this is a story that carries you along, caring so deeply about the writer and what happens to her.

I find it difficult to review books like this because it is all to easy to point out the faults in another country when we don’t acknowledge the slow erosion of rights in our own country – particularly those of women and the LGBTQ+ community (especially when situations in other countries are often partly or wholly caused by the actions of this country). I prefer to let the women of these countries speak for themselves. Books like this are so important because they allow women a voice.

Highly recommended – a very important and beautiful book.

‘She Lied, She Died’ by Carissa Ann Lynch #BookReview

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Best friend. Teenager. Murderer.

A young girl found dead in a neighbour’s field.

A fourteen-year-old who confesses.

Just a child herself, could Chrissy Cornwall really be a cold-blooded killer?

Years later, the murderer is getting out and Natalie Bryers, unable to forget the night of Jenny’s murder, still has questions.

Did Chrissy lie then or is she lying now?  Did she really kill Jenny?  And if so, will she kill again?

Aspiring writer Natalie Bryers feels like life is at a standstill. She’s going nowhere, living alone at the old family home, in a dead end job, and making no progress on her writing career. She’s haunted too by the memory of the discovery of the body of a murdered teenager in a field belonging to her family. Years later, her father and brother are dead, and her mother left years ago.

Now the murderer, who was a teenager herself, has been released, and she claims that she was innocent. For some reason, Natalie thinks she might be telling the truth – something about the murder just doesn’t add up. Could hearing Chrissie’s story put those ghosts to rest? And could it kickstart Natalie’s dream of a career as a writer?

This novel has some very good moments, gripping, creepy, intriguing. Natalie is a complicated main character, uncomfortable with her own questionable motivations, selfish at times, but ultimately sad and lonely – you can’t help but hope that things get better for her.

You can’t help but feel sorry for Chrissy, either, even though she is quite hard to like.

So good, well-written characters, an interesting plot, and plenty of twists and turns. The issue for me, however, was that the ending felt very rushed. After a big build up and lots of drama, everything was just tied up very quickly, and I was left feeling a bit ‘meh’ if I’m honest.

So a good story, an entertaining read, but a bit let down by the ending.

‘Stolen Summers’ by Anne Goodwin @Annecdotist #RBRT

I read and reviewed ‘Stolen Summers’ for Rosie Amber’s book review team.

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All she has left is her sanity. Will the asylum take that from her too?

In 1939, Matilda is admitted to Ghyllside hospital, cut off from family and friends. Not quite twenty, and forced to give up her baby for adoption, she feels battered by the cruel regime. Yet she finds a surprising ally in rough-edged Doris, who risks harsh punishments to help her reach out to the brother she left behind.

Twenty-five years later, the rules have relaxed, and the women are free to leave. How will they cope in a world transformed in their absence? Do greater dangers await them outside?

The poignant prequel to Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home is a tragic yet tender story of a woman robbed of her future who summons the strength to survive.

It isn’t all that long ago that women who stepped outside of convention were ‘sent away’ for the good of society. This is what happens to Matilda in this short novella that explores how someone can be institutionalised in such a cruel and unfeeling way, but still manage to keep that spark of who they really are.

Told from Matilda’s point of view, this is a really well-written story, that deals with its subject matter sympathetically and unflinchingly. The coldness with which she is treated is horrible, but completely believable, unfortunately, and is written with authenticity. That aspect was, for me, the strongest part of this story and the writing – the way in which Matilda is tossed aside and treated as if she has no feelings, no worth.

There are moments of real humour and levity here too, which are a relief and which lift this novella above those that dwell in misery.

I would have liked more exploration of the way Matilda felt about giving up her child – for me this wasn’t developed enough. But that aside, this is a well-written and worthwhile read, and one that I definitely recommend.

‘Open Water’ by Caleb Azumah Nelson #BookReview #TuesdayBookBlog

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Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists – he a photographer, she a dancer – trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.

At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years.

This is such an unusual book. On the surface, it is a simple story, of two young people who fall in  love. But it is so much more than that. Through the two protagonists, the author explores so much of life, and love, and society – it’s expectations, it’s cruelty, the freedoms it seems to offer that can be utterly superficial. It’s a story about being young, and hopeful, and about trying to make a life, a good life, in a world where those hopes are dashed.

I can’t fully understand the complex issues that this book raises – I have never had the experiences that are written about here, but this novel, as well as being utterly compelling and a joy to read for the beauty of the writing, goes a long way to show these experiences. It is written in second person – which does really take some getting used to – but it is so worth persevering, because the writing is so good. Not many authors could have done this so successfully, and it is a testament to the author’s talent that this is such a beautiful novel.