Lady Clara Fairfax, eldest daughter of the Marquess of Warford and sister to the Earl of Longmore, was raised to marry a duke. The Duke of Clevedon, to be precise, but he ended up falling in love with a dressmaker instead. Not that Clara is lacking in high-born suitors. Twice a week they show up in her mother’s drawing room to ask for her hand in marriage and Clara, well bred lady that she is, politely refuses them. Clara wants to make a difference. She […]
Unlike death I’m late to the party
This is a sweet story set in Germany during World War II. Death starts the tale with his musings on life and color before launching into the tale of a young girls named Liesel. Death meets Liesel just threes times in her life, yet from those instances and a story written in a basement he creates a story and a world. For accurate summary see here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/387598058?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1 The book, while revered by many, was just too obnoxious for me. A little too see through. And […]
The Daylight Gate is Dark
Jeanette Winterson’s work is known for postmodernist lyrical prose. She has never flinched away from darkness and gore, exploring various aspects of being human, and the human past. However, this novella is not lyrical; there is no beauty in the writing to alleviate the heaviness in the lives of the characters. It’s not that the writing is poor, only that it is straightforward. In this piece historical fiction, Winterson weaves the aftermath of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot into the 1612 Pendle witch trials, with brief […]
1920s Haunted Assylum? Yes, Please!
This is the second novel by Simone St James I’ve listened to, and both were gripping. A little bit of a slow start, but they pick up and just race to the finish. I picked a good one to start my Cannonball Read adventure! We start with Kitty Weekes, a poor London girl on the run, pretending to be a nurse at a psychiatric facility for Shell Shock patients returned to Britain after the first World War. But of course, not everything is as it seems […]
Kids — Keep Your Dirty Hands Off ’em
This is another graphic novel for tweens and older, but unlike Marzi, a memoir, War Brothers is a fictionalized account of real events that have occurred in contemporary Uganda. War Brothers is about the fates of four friends as they fall under the domination of Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army. The LRA fills its ranks with kidnapped children who are tortured and traumatized until they either die or become child soldiers for Kony, who thinks of himself as some sort of anointed representative […]
Didn’t quite live up to the hype
I have heard a lot about Kristen Hannah’s The Nightingale, and I have read a lot of World War II historical fiction lately (plus I’m almost done with with book #2 in the Chaos Walking series, which is basically “Nazis on another planet”), and I think a combination of those factors led me to enjoy this less than I could have otherwise. “Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals […]
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