Just Like Tomorrow by Faïza Guène

“I wonder why they call them wisdom teeth… The more they grow, the more you understand stuff? Personally, I’ve learned that learning hurts.”

It’s an understandable sentiment. Fifteen year old Doria’s life is far from perfect. She lives with her mother in a tower block on the outskirts of Paris.

Her father has returned to his Moroccan birthplace to find a new wife who will provide him with the son he so badly wants. And so mother and daughter are left to subsist on the meagre wages that a woman who doesn’t speak the language can earn as an office cleaner.

Understandably Doria is angry. With her father’s abandonment. With the casual racism that she and her mother regularly encounter.  And with all the people who say they understand when they clearly don’t.

But this isn’t an angry book. It’s a slice of the life of a fifteen year old girl who doen’t stop for too long to think about hows and whys. She just gets on with things.

There are dark theme: poverty, opression, racism. But they are balanced by humour, emotional ties, and a wonderful sense of community.

Doria holds it all together. She has a black sense of humour, a strong moral compass, and wonderful powers of observation. I loved her and I believed in her completely.

I loved watching her interact with a broad cast. Mrs Burland, a counsellor who clearly cares but doesn’t quite understand. Hamoudi, her closest friend, Their lives are moving in different directions, but the bond between them remains. Shopkeepers, neighbours, aunties …

Yes, community is so important.

And there was plenty going on. This is one of those books you can open to any page and find a great one liner, a perfect observation or a memorable incident. Sometimes you’d find all three! 

A little more plot, a little more structure wouldn’t have gone amiss though. The story dropped into Doria’s and Yasmina’s lives, and then it dropped out again with a little progress but no real conclusion.

But the rich content, beautifully balanced with a great authorial touch, did balance that.

And it was lovely to meet Doria and Yasmina. Their relationship was the best thing of all. Doria’s pride in her mother and how she was working to support them both. Yasmina’s confidence in her daughter, tempered with concern and uncertainly about what the future might hold.

That’s what is staying with me, and making me smile when I think about the book.

The Coral Thief by Rebecca Stott

Daniel Connor, a very bright young man, is a student from Edinburgh Medical School, and he is setting out on a great adventure.

He is going to Paris.

Paris at a turning point in its history. The year is 1815. Napoleon has been defeated and the city is occupied by his conquerors. Change is in the air.

Daniel is travelling on the mail-coach, carrying letters of introduction to the great Georges Cuvier, professor of comparative anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes.

He is carrying rare fossils to the professor and dreaming of forging his own successful career in Paris.

But dreams are easily derailed.

A young woman, her face obscured by her cloak, takes the seat next to Daniel. She introduces herself. Her name is Lucienne, and she is a student of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle.

The two travellers are students of two prominent men with opposing views of evolution and inheritance.

Coincidence? No!

Daniel falls asleep and when he wakes both his specimen case and his fellow traveller have vanished. Disaster!

But then Lucienne reappears. Why? Of course Daniel follows her, hoping to recover his losses, and hoping to learn more about the coral thief.

He finds himself caught up in an extraordinary mystery in underground Paris.

The course of his life is changed.

It’s wonderful tale of drama, passion, art, science ….. and theft.

Daniel drew me in. I shared his excitement on his way to Paris, his attraction to Lucienne, his distress at his loss, his anxiety at what to do when he arrives in Paris, his anger when he sees Lucienne again …..

I couldn’t find the same connection with Lucienne, but she was a wonderful creation, a compelling character with a wonderful story.

But Paris was the star. A wonderful city at a wonderful point in its history came back to life. The mail-coach. the streets. The museums. The underground passages. I saw the bright lights, I saw the dark shadows, and I saw everything in between.

And I met a wonderful cast of characters. Students, spies, policemen, philosophers, revolutionaries …..

So much history, so much knowledge, so much story.

This really is a book that sings!

Florence and Giles by John Harding

Florence and Giles?

Now doesn’t that sound like Flora and Miles?

Is it a coincidence, or are the two pairs of names connected?

Well no, it isn’t a coincidence. And yes, the names are connected. But not as you may think.

If one is a true story then the other would be a variation on that story far from the truth as it has been told, misheard, distorted, embellished so many times.

Or, I like to think,  neither is a whole truth. Both are distortions of another story  that has never been told.

John Harding’s version of the story, unlike Henry James’, is told by somebody who was there, at the heart of everything that happened.

“It is a curious story I have to tell, one not easily absorbed and understood, so it is fortunate I have the words for the task. If I say so myself, who probably shouldn’t, for a girl my age I am very well worded. Exceeding well worded, to speak plain. But because of the strict views of my uncle regarding the education of females, I have hidden my eloquence, under-a-bushelled it, and kept any but the simplest forms of expression bridewelled within my brain.”

Florence. A strange and utterly engaging heroine.

She lives in a large secluded house in New England with her beloved young half-brother Giles. They are orphans, left by their uncle in the care of a small group of servants. He never visits, but he lays down strict rules. Giles, the boy, is to be educated but Florence, the girl, is not. She is not even to learn how to read: the extensive library is out-of-bounds.

How can you not weep for her?

And how can you not cheer as Florence, precocious and self-possessed,  subverts her uncle’s rules?

She enters the library. she pulls out books and reads them, utterly entranced by the people she meets and the tales that unfold.

And she finds so many wonderful words to twist into her own rich and lovely dialect, nouns, verbs and adjectives trading roles back and forth, as she wanders through so many lonely rooms. 

“No maid ever ventures here; the floors are left unbroomed, for unfootfalled as they are, what would be the point? The shelves go unfingerprinted, the wheeled ladders to the upper ones unmoved, the books upon them yearning for an opening, the whole place a dustery of disregard.”

It is clear from the start that this will be a dark and gothic tale. 

There will be questions:

Why is the children’s guardian is so remote?

What lead to the untimely death of the their governess?

There will be drama:

A  new governess arrives. Florence believes that she is dangerous, and that she must fight for herself and for her brother.

Is she right? Is she deluded? Or is she just plain unreliable? She is so compelling that whatever the answer is you can do nothing but turn the pages until her tale is told.

It’s very readable and very, very effective. Not necessarily great literature, but definitely great entertainment.

And it stands up as fine tribute to the Turn of The Screw and as a novel in its own right.

But I’m still clinging to the hope that both are echoes of a stanger tale yet to be told…

Eating Your Greens

One of the smaller pleasures of blogging is perusing the many different terms typed into search engines that have brought people to see you.

Some are unsurprising, some are strange, and a few are utterly bewildering.

Buy yesterday, for the first time I was alarmed. By these six words:

the joy of eating the virago

A horrible image formed in my mind ….

 Surely this wasn’t what my mother had meant when she told me to eat my greens!

Was there some terrible cult out there muching on lovely green books?

Was that why some of them are so very hard to find?

I worried for a while, but then the light dawned …

The Virago Book of Food: The Joy of Eating

 

I breathed a sigh of relief: it’s a lovely book!

Gigi by Colette

Oh Gigi, why did I wait so long to meet you?

It is many years since I met the wonderful Claudine, and I really should have sought you out back then.

Paris at the turn of the century was always going to be wonderful, but it was the people who made this trip so special.

Your family was marvellous, and I was particularly entranced as I watched your Great Aunt Alicia, a courtesan of the old school, try to mould you in her own image.  I shall remember so many of your exchanges with a wry smile.

She only wanted what was best for you but, of course,  you grew up in a different world. You were much too bright for that and I always knew that you would follow your own heart.

The greatest pleasure was watching you grow from a schoolgirl into a young woman ready to step into a wonderful future.

I’m only sorry that we had just sixty pages together. They were such beautiful pages, and they just flew by.

So now we much say goodbye, but please know that you will always have a place in my heart and that I wish you happiness always.

Translated by Roger Senhouse

Highland Fling by Nancy Mitford

“… this was all very sudden and unexpected and has caused us inconvenience in a thousand ways, but the most unfortunate part of it is that we had arranged, as usual, several large hunting parties at Dalloch Castle, I wrote and asked your father and mother if they would go up there and act as host and hostess, but Sylvia tells me that they have to pay their annual visit to Baden just then. It occurred to me that perhaps you and Walter are doing nothing during August and September, in which case it would be a real kindness to us if you would stay at Dalloch and look after our guests… If you decide to go we will send you up in the car and you must invite some of your own friends…”

Sally and Walter jumped at the chance. They were young, madly in love and very poor. Well, in London in 1931 a thousand a year wasn’t a lot to live in. Walter had tried working, but with the cost of a new wardrobe, taxis and lunches it was never going to pay, was it?

Yes, they were totally irresponsible, but I couldn’t help but be charmed.

They took up the offer to bring some of their own friends.

There was Walter’s school-friend, Albert, a surrealist painter home from Paris for his first London exhibition. And there was Sally’s good friend Jane, who found Albert quite irresistable.

And so it was that four bright young things set out for the highlands to meet the hunting, shooting and fishing set. They really didn’t understand each other at all, and that led to some wonderfully entertainment.

Jane couldn’t get to grips with shooting etiquette at all, while Albert was quite taken aback by some of the conversation about art. But they entertained wonderfully with some brilliant pranks.

Just occasionally things dragged a little, but there was always the promise of something more interesting around the corner.

Yes, this was definitely the kind of house party that would be the subject of anecdotes for many years to come.

It all ended with great drama. But, of course that wasn’t really the end. There were consequences for everybody and when the story ended all of the loose ends had been tied very nicely.

Along the way there was dazzling wit, high comedy, great drama and pitch perfect dialogue.

Experienced Mitford watchers may well be able to see echoes of the family and roots of characters from later, better known books. Certainly the characters rang true, but they were very simply drawn, and that lack of definition may have stopped this book from really singing.

And so I couldn’t say that Highland Fling is a great book, but it really is great fun.

You really do need to read it to enjoy all the details!

The Ninth Wave by Russell Cellyn Jones

The Mabinogion: eleven tales handed down through the generations in Wales at the very heart of Welsh literature.

They were translated into English by Lady Charlotte Guest in the mid 19th century. A Victorian copy is still in the shelves in my library, and it is utterly beautiful. A recent, highly praised translation by Sioned Davies sits on my shelves. It looked wonderful, and yet it just sat there. Until another book arrived and inspired me.

This book: the Ninth Wave by Russell Celyn Jones. The first is a series commissioned by Seren Books, reinventing the eleven stories of The Mabinogion to be heard more clearly in this age.

It pulls you into an extraordinary world. Religious wars have been raging and oil supplies have been exhausted. The medieval has returned, but the landscape is still modern. Imagine riding your horse along a road littered with discarded appliances to drink coffee at Starbucks!

The wildness of nature and the desolation of the post-industrial society are perfectly juxtaposed, and utterly alive.

Into this world rides Phywll, Welsh lord and landowner, home from war and heading full tilt into the future. The energy was palpable and I flew through the pages, as Phywll fell foul of neighbouring lord, Arawen; became entangled with Arawen’s wife Alma; and then breaks away when he meets Alma’s wilder sister, Rhiannon.

There was a problem: Rhiannon had a powerful fiance. But she had a solution too, a wonderful plan for Phywll to execute. The story moved into a new phase, the energy was still there, but there was dark humour too and a lovely twist. I was still completely engaged, but I turned the pages more slowly, reacted more emotionally.

Phywll and Rhiannon married and had a son. Happy ever after? Not quite. When their son was four he disappeared.

And this is when The Ninth Wave really sings. When it tells of he distress of both parents, the tension between husband and wife, and, eventually, the difficulties that arise when the child returns, on the verge of manhood with no memory of his mother and father.  The emotional and psychological insight is acute. And as the story draws to a close with father and son struggling to understand each other it is quite impossible to not be moved.

The whole story arc very cleverly echoes the first branch of the Mabinogion.

The insight into the characters, their emotions, their motivations brings it to life in a way that a traditional telling never could, and the vivid, and utterly plausible, setting allows you to believe utterly.

Wow!

I shall be making way through this series and through The Mabinogion, story by story. The second in the series is waiting for me and I am looking forward to the publication of the third and fourth in the autumn.

Visiting Paris by Book

I’m a little late, but I just can’t say no!

The invitation has been extended by Karen at BookBath and Tamara at Thyme for Tea 

The aim of the month is to celebrate our French experiences through reading, watching, listening to, observing, cooking and eating all things French!

Simply irresistable!

There are so many possibilities, and I’m sure I’ll discover more along the way, but here’s a selection of possibilities from my shelves:

I fell in love with Colette may years ago, but for some strange reason I have never read Gigi. The time is now! And of course there’s the film as well…

And then there’s The Châtelet Apprentice by Jean François Parot – crime at the carnival in 18th century Paris, courtesy of the lovely Gallic Books.

Just Like Tomorrow by Faiza Guene has been lurking in my TBR for ages. A fifteen year old Moroccan immigrant living on the outskirts of Paris.

Or I could go back in time to the 1920s with Nightwood by Djuna Barnes.

Murder in the Eiffel Tower by Claude Izner is another historical mystery from Gallic Books. A bookseller is caught up in the investigation of a strange death at the Universal Exposition of 1889.

And finally there’s Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roché – I have to confess that I didn’t realise that there was a book before there was a film until I founs a copy in a charity shop a while ago…

And I’m going to tinker with the priorities on my LoveFilm rental list to pull in some French films before the end of the month.

Yes, lots of lovely possibilities…