Hurry Up and Wait by Isabel Ashdown

Hurry Up and Wait is the story of one year in one girl’s life. One pivotal year, absolutely perfectly realised.

In the mid eighties Sarah Ribbons was in her last year of school in a quiet seaside town. Her world was painted beautifully, rich with
so many details of music, fashion, gadgets, all of the things that matter when  you’re sixteen.

And it was easy to warm to Sarah. She was so empathic, so real from the start that I couldn’t help feeling involved and reacting emotionally to everything that happened to her.

She lived with her father, an academic who had become a parent late in life and who struggled with the responsibility for all that he loved her dearly. Even though she was all he had. Sarah’s mother had died soon after she was born, her father wouldn’t speak of her, and Sarah was reluctant to upset him by pressing for answers.

And Sarah had to deal with school-friends who were fickle at best and duplicitous at worst, with strange new emotions, with the behaviour of adolescent boys, with her father’s new lady-friend, with the trials of school and exams …

Every detail is captured perfectly, and every character was utterly believable, and I loved the way that Isabel Ashdown twisted her story, sometimes taking the obvious route and sometimes not.

I hoped that Sarah would forge ahead, but I had to watch her downfall instead.

I knew that it would come – in the opening chapter I met the adult Sarah, coming home for a school reunion after nearly twenty years away, and wondering if she was doing the right thing – but I still hoped that it wouldn’t.

The closing chapter, at the school reunion, tied things up beautifully. It was a  most satisfactory ending, but I was sorry that I had to part company with Sarah.

I had been utterly caught up in her world. Because the people, their relationships, their dialogues were so utterly real. Because I had been swept away to that seaside town in the eighties.

Lovely writing brought everything to life, and everything rang true. It made me believe, and it made me care.

Hurry Up and Wait is, quite simply, a gem.

The Maid by Kimberly Cutter

Jeanne d’Arc.

A famous name, and a famous story.

A peasant girl from rural France. A young woman who claimed that god had spoken to her, that she was destined to fulfil a prophecy. Who rose to lead the French army to a number of significant victories in the Hundred Years’ War. Who made the coronation of Charles VII possible. Who was captured, sold to the English, put on trial, and burned at the stake.

Years later she was exonerated and declared her a martyr. She was beatified, and finally she was canonised.

An extraordinary story. And one young woman’s life.

The story begins in the French village of Domremy, at a time when the country and its inhabitants were suffering at the hands of English soldiers as the Hundred Years War raged.

A young peasant girl named Jehanne was growing up.

I saw, and I understood. A way of life, and a faith, that had been passed down through the generations.

Jehanne was drawn to that faith, and in time she began to hear voices.

“You must raise an army and drive the English from France. Take the Dauphin to be crowned at Rheims. This is God’s command.”

“I’m only a girl, a peasant. I know nothing of cannons or lances. I have no money. I can’t even ride a horse. Please, ask me anything else. I’ll do anything else.”

“This is God’s mission child. we will help you. God will help you. Go to the king, drive the English out of France. Crown the king.”

I watched Jehanne rise, as her purposefulness, her determination, and her unshakeable faith slowly won people over to her cause.

And then I watched her fall. After her victory she struggled with fame and with powerful men whose political machinations she couldn’t understand.

The Maid retells a familiar story, simply and clearly, bringing both people and places back to life.

The author clearly knows the history, the period well, but she wears her knowledge lightly.

And she succeeds in balancing the saint and the fallible human in Jehanne. Almost. The broad strokes were right, but sometimes the details felt wrong. Jehanne was sometimes wise beyond her years and at others ridiculously insensitive to others.

That was maybe because the third person narrative stopped me from getting into her head, really understanding.

It held me at a distance, as an observer rather than a confidante, and now it is leaving me disinclined to analyse things too much.

But the story did sweep me along, and I have to say that The Maid is a fine piece of storytelling to relax with as summer slowly turns into autumn.

 

Not Only But Also

A little while ago I wrote, with great excitement, about the forthcoming reissue of Leo Walmsley’s Love in the Sun by the Walmsley Society.

Publication has been delayed a little, but the book should be with us by the end of September.

And that isn’t all!

Paradise Creek, a companion novel set some years later, is on its way too.

Both books are masterful pieces of piece of storytelling: emotionally involving, simple and utterly believable.

And they capture Cornwall perfectly.

The titles are linked to my original posts about the two books, just in case you haven’t come across the titles or the authour before.

I am thrilled that I shall be able to own copies, instead of visiting them in the library!

ReadItSwapIt Works !

I’ve dabbled in other book-swapping sites, but ReadItSwapIt is the one I always come back to.

I like the fact that it is one-to-one swapping, so you never send a book out without getting one back, and that I don’t end up sending out books and accumulating points without finding books I want to redeem them. And I love the fact that different people love different books, and so I can clear out what I consider disposable for literary gold.

My swapping goes in fits and starts though. From time to time I clear out books and have a burst of swapping, and then things settle down until the next time.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been tidying bookcases and I’ve listed a good number of books. A few of them have been requested,  I’ve requested a couple of books, and now I have a fair sized pile of new old books on our dining table.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgarov

This had been my list of “classics I must get to soon” for a while now, so when this one appeared I checked the translation, and when I saw that it was by Pevear and Volokhonsky I pounced.

The Prestige by Christopher Priest

I loved the film bit I’ve read mixed reports about the book. Recently though I read something that made me decide to go after the book. I had a couple of rejections, but struck it lucky on my third request.

Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman

I borrowed this from the library when it was longlisted for the Orange Prize, but there was a long queue so I gave it back rather than rush it. It hasn’t appeared on the library shelves since, so when it was offered as I swap I grabbed it.

Sing Me Who You Are by Elizabeth Berridge

Now this was a wonderful find – an out of print novel by a Persephone author!

A Very Long Engagement by Sebastian Japrisot

We saw the film last weekend, and it inspired me to look for a copy of the book. There was only one copy available, but happily the owner was willing to swap for one of my books.

Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, edited by Neil Astley

I rarely turn down a poetry anthology, and this one I’d enjoyed perusing in the library.

Stratton’s War by Laura Wilson

Now I’ve always enjoyed Laura Wilson’s books, and the library has this one. Trouble is, it’s long and complex and it always seems to be on the shelf when I can’t fit in that sort of books and absent when I can. So it seemed sensible to accept when it was offered as a swap so I can guarantee the book is on hand when the mood strikes.

And that’s not all!

My mother has a newish Danielle Steele paperback. She doesn’t read much, but she feels left out when lots of books come for me, so when it was offered I asked if she would like it.

And I’ve picked up a few books for my non-fiction reading fiance: a couple of military history books, a New Scientist book of questions and answers, and a biography of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s last hangman.

So we have all done pretty well.

I should mention that most of these offered up for swapping again after reading, and that I do take books to charity shops when they are too big to post or when they look as if they aren’t going to get picked up for swaps.

Now tell me, do you use swap sites – and what so you think of them?

Blow on a Dead Man’s Embers by Mari Strachan

I hesitated before I picked up Blow on A Dead Man’s Embers.

You see, I have yet to get past the opening pages of The Earth Hums in B Flat, Mari Strachan’s previous novel. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, it was that the book just didn’t hold me.

But there was something about this new book - the title, the concept, the cover – I just had to pick it up.

I am so glad that I did. I was swept away by the story of one woman, her life, her family, her times …

I was captivated by Non, a complex and utterly real woman, from the very first page.

At the heart of the story is Non’s relationship with her husband. Davey has come back from the Great War, and he is not the same man who left:

“… not sharing a marriage any more, not sharing conversation and laughter, their hopes and dreams, their fears. She grieves for her Davey, who had loved her, and whom she had loved in return, she grieves for him as if he were dead. More than if he were dead. She may have been defeated by the mystery of what haunts this Davey, by the puzzle of what he has become, but she has no idea how to begin to fight back, how to begin to find the Davey who loved her …”

The portrayal of a man, damaged and changed by his experiences, and a woman, trying to understand, trying to make things better, was pitch perfect. And the story was intriguing, moving in unexpected directions and revealing truths that were quite unexpected. So clever.

And that story was part of a bigger story. A family story. Three generations of Davey’s family and Non’s family. So many characters, simply and yet distinctively drawn, and each with their own story. Those stories took in so much. Love, loss, identity, coming of age, growing old, coming to terms ….

More unexpected directions, more unexpected truths.

And through those stories Mari Strachan paints a wonderful picture of a community, and of an era.

Everything was so real, so distinctive, so utterly believable.

I was completely caught up, believing in these people, and caring about what happened to them.

There are so many details that I would love to write about, but I’m not going to. Because revelations, of characters, of histories, of relationships, come gradually in the book, and that works so very well that I wouldn’t want to spoil it even a little.

And so all I can add is that Blow on a Dead Man’s Embers is a fine, fine piece of storytelling.

It held me from start to finish, and even now that I have put the book down I am still captivated …

Something Rather Unusual Happened in the Park This Morning …

… something involving a certain small brown dog, who goes by the name of Briar.

Briar, like many of the local canine population, has one objective in mind when she is taken to the park.

The squirrel tree!

We call it the squirrel tree because a number of people leave food for squirrels at the base. There is a park bench nearby, and it is a lovely place to sit and watch the squirrels and birds. It’s amazing how much wildlife you can see it a town centre park just by sitting and watching for a while.

Trouble is, one of Briar’s core policies is:

“If it’s smaller than me, and if it moves, I chase it.”

Well, she is a terrier!

I usually get to watch Briar chasing squirrels back up trees, and squirrels teasing her by hanging off the tree just out of her reach.

And Briar sitting patiently at the foot of the tree, hoping that a squirrel will appear ages. It has been known, when the weather is fine and we have time to spare, for me to take a book and get quite a bit of reading done!

Today though things went a little differently. We arrived just after somebody had passed by and left food. We settled in, sure that at least one squirrel would be trying to come down to eat.

Briar was focused on the job in hand, but for a moment she was distracted by a noise on the other side of the park. She turned her head, and at that very moment a squirrel ran down the tree and started inspecting the nuts that had been left.

I was expecting Briar to turn around and chase the squirrel back up the tree, but she didn’t. She leaned forward, and watched intently as the squirrel ate his breakfast.

The picture isn’t too clear – I’m still using a camera-phone and pretty much everything was grey or brown – but that’s Briar leaning as far forward as she can on the right-hand side of the picture, and hopefully you can pick up the squirrel at the base of the tree.

She went on sitting and watching as the squirrel ate several nuts and then retreated a few feet up the tree. He came back, ate and retreated three times before he disappeared back up the tree.

He had been gone some time before Briar moved, and I decided it was time we moved along.

It was lovely to watch.

I suspect though  that Briar hasn’t changed her policy on squirrels, and that she was simply taken aback by the confidence of one particular animal.

Time will tell!

Never No More by Maura Laverty

“You were the purple bog and ripe wheat-field and a crab-tree in May. You were good food, and songs in the night. You were a welcome for my coming and a prayer for my going out. You were Gran.”

Never No More tells the story of  Delia, as she grows up in the 1920s, in the Irish countryside in the care of her beloved Grandmother.

Delia hadn’t always lived with her grandmother, but things had changed when her father died. Her mother, a skilled dressmaker, decided that the family should move to a bigger town where she could trade so much more profitably than she had in a country village.

An eminently sensible plan. But Delia was desperately unhappy at the prospect of leaving, and so her grandmother, unhappy at the prospect of losing all of her family, offered Delia a home with her until the time came for her to be sent to school.

That allows Maura Laverty write much rich, descriptive prose. And she catches everything. There are the rites of passage – births, the marriages, the deaths – that draw the whole community together. There are big events – the ritual that accompanies the slaughter of a pig, the annual cutting of the turf, the visit to the new family home -  and there are the small, important details that make up lives.

Of course, it is the characters that bring all of that to life. So many wonderful characters, so many lives are caught. Because Maura Laverty is one of those special writers who knows that each and every person has their own particular story, and because she has the skill to draw them all out.

At the centre of it all is Delia, a girl with a warm heart and a bold spirit that would sometimes lead her into trouble. She is utterly believable, and oh so easy to love.

Her relationship with her grandmother – a woman so wise, so practical, so compassionate – is maybe a little too perfect, but it was so lovely that I was happily swept along.

Delia’s mother played a minor role, but she was such an interesting woman. Her marriage had not been happy and she struggled with motherhood, but she found her role in life as she built up her dressmaking business and was able to support her family.

That was when I understood why this book was a Virago Modern Classic.

It is a gem: an utterly charming story of a place and of its people, laced with laughter, tears and love.

What more could you need?!

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

A story of sisters, of books, of home. It sounded perfect, and it very nearly was.

At the centre of that story is a father who loves Shakespeare, who regularly speaks in quotations, and who, of course, named his three daughters after Shakespearean characters.

• Rosalind (Rose) was the eldest, and she willingly accepted the role of sensible, steady big sister. She built her life close to home, and followed her father into the realms of academia.
• Bianca (Bean) was the middle child, and she was much less taken with life in a small college life. She grew up dreaming of the big city and she flew the nest for New York.
•  Cordelia (Cordy) was the youngest, and she floating through life with no real ambition, always travelling and never settling.

All three are wonderfully drawn, complex characters. They are so very human, and so very fallible. And all three face crises that draw them homewards at the same time that their mother is diagnosed with cancer.

Meeting the three individually at the start of the book was intriguing, but it was when they were reunited back at the family home that the story really began to sing.

“Would we have chosen to come back, knowing that it would be the three of us again, that all those secrets squeezed into one house would be impossible to keep? The answer is irrelevant – it was some kind of sick fate. We were destined to be sisters at birth, apparently we were destined to be sisters now, when we thought we had put all that behind us.”

The complex relationships between the three – the understanding, the resentments, the fellowship, the role-playing, the support, the love, and so many other sisterly things that I can’t quite put a name to – were quite beautifully drawn.

It was wonderful to watch them, inevitably, fall back into the patterns of their childhood, to watch them realise what was happening, and then to watch them move towards more grown up ways.

Their stories, together and apart, as they came to terms with their mother’s mortality and as they faced their own futures, were perfectly pitched and they stirred so, so many emotions.

At times those stories were a little predictable, a little slow, but that is the only thing that made this book a little less than perfect.

The Weird Sisters is a book to read, not so much for the plot, as for the characters and the emotions.

And for the most wonderful thing of all, that I haven’t mentioned yet. The narrative voice is simply sublime. It is the voice of the three sisters, shifting between them so that one, or sometimes two, always speaks of another.

That allows the three to shine both as sisters and as individuals. I miss the them now that we have parted company, and most of all I miss that voice.

Four Bookcases Down …

… and one room where I can stand and say that every book is accounted for.

From left to right:

The Virago Bookcase contains all of my green Virago Modern Classics. The more recent editions live in the next bookcase along and the my Virago Travellers and Biographies live upstairs.

The skein of yarn on the second shelf up is the closest to Virago green and I have, and I keep it there for that reason, and because it amuses me that the shade is promenade and I live on a promenade

The next bookcase has a lovely assortment of fiction, history and literary biography. I gave up trying to keep order long ago, and learned to love the random!

And then there is the Persephone bookcase. There is some order here, with the dove grey covers sorted in publication order. I had half a shelf free at the end, so a couple of GreyLadies, several Honno Classics, and some Valancourt Books live here too.

The pile of books on the left has duplicate titles that I will pass on to other collectors once I have a job and an income to pay for the postage.

And on the right you will see some palm leaves. My fiance plans to shred them to wrap around a bare patch where the wicker is gone. A good idea and a good match, but I’ll believe it when I see it!

Finally you can see the corner of a double glass-fronted bookcase. It holds two shelves of little paperbacks – a lot of numbered Penguins and some of their lesser know contemporaries. Plus a deeper shelf at the bottom shelf that holds more recently published books, including some Hesperus Classics and the Bloomsbury Group.

The boxes on the top hold circular needles and other knitting paraphernalia.

Briar watched me intently for a while, but she couldn’t work out what I was doing, so she wandered off, chewed up a small pine cone, and then settled down to sleep.

I was pleased to find fewer uncatalogued books than I had feared, and I picked up so many books that I want to read, or reread, right now.

I’ll never give up the library, but I need to visit a little less frequently, and I want to plan less and read a little more spontaneously.

Next I do the books in the living room, and then I have a grand plan to implement for my upstairs books.

Watch this space!

The Sick Rose by Erin Kelly

I’m reading Erin Kelly’s second novel before her first.

I did pick up The Poison Tree last year, from the new books shelf in the library. It wasn’t a book I knew anything about, but striking design and a blurb that referenced both Rebecca and The Secret History pulled me in.

Sadly though, the story didn’t hold me. It was told in the present tense and it seemed to be walking a well-trodden, maybe over-trodden path. I gave up, and took the book back to the library.

Some months later I began to read more about The Poison Tree. Many words of praise, and I was told that there was a very good reason for the present tense narration. I decided to try the book again.

But before it reappeared I spotted the Sick Rose, Erin Kelly’s second novel. A title, and maybe a theme, borrowed from William Blake was much too much to resist.

The book came home, and I am pleased to report that it is a gem. A dark gem.

The Sick Rose twists together two lives. Two lives bent out of shape by distorted relationships.

Louisa is a horticulturist, working on the restoration of historic gardens. But she is haunted, and her life is constrained, by her relationship with a young musician. A relationship that ended, tragically, nearly twenty years ago. And yet she cannot let go.

Paul is a petty criminal, sent to Louisa’s project to keep him safe. Until he gives crucial evidence against a former friend, charged with murder. Paul is terrified that his past will catch up with him.

Louisa is drawn to Paul, who bears a remarkable resemblance to her lost love, and they slowly, tentatively, move towards a relationship.

Meanwhile, just as slowly, the truth about the past is revealed. A past that, maybe, they will be unable to escape…

The Sick Rose is very cleverly structured, moving between two past stories and the present in chapters that are both long enough to draw you in and yet short enough to keep the right sense of dislocation when the scenery shifted.

And the details of young lives, immature emotions, were caught perfectly. The details were right, and Erin Kelly allowed both the emotions of the time and the later, more mature, understanding to shine. Very clever. And clever too how she threaded themes through two very different stories of very different characters.

For me though, the present day story was less successful. It felt a little contrived, and there was less subtlety, less detail, a little less of everything to hold the interest.

But the characters held everything together. Flawed but utterly real characters.

And they held me, intrigued and wanting to know what on earth would happen, through all of the twists and turns of the story.

Sometimes I could see where the story was going, but more often I was taken by surprise.

The ending was unexpected, and yet it was right.

And a postscript tied up the last loose end. I almost wished it hadn’t: it was a little contrived, and I think I would have prefered to be left to wonder …

Because the story was so compelling, the characters so intriguing, that I would have liked to hold on for just a little longer.

But I have The Poison Tree to go back to, and I’ll be very interested to see what Erin Kelly writes next.