First of all, yes, this is essentially a five star review, but please note, it’s five stars with reservations. The five stars is almost entirely due to the first 1/3 or so of the book (and maybe a little past that) and how it absolutely took over my life. If I could, I’d probably rate the first 1/3 six or seven stars, and the rest four, but that’s obviously not possible, so here we are. The rest of the reason that I settled on five […]
The further adventures of Jamie and Claire Fraser – we’re getting closer to the American Revolution
3.5 stars This is the sixth book in the Outlander series, and really not the place to start reading. You will have missed out on literally thousands of pages of plot developments, intrigue and characterisation. If you are interested in checking out the series (which thanks to the current TV show, I suspect more and more might be), start at the beginning with Outlander. Ok, where do I even begin to summarise the plot here. The mass market paperback is over 1400 pages long and the action spans […]
Okay, I’m in this now. Dammit.
August might as well have been Outlander month, for all I paid attention to anything else. I read Outlander late last year and enjoyed it, but I also found it very strange and disturbing in parts (and not in a way that I found altogether explicable). Ultimately, despite my reservations about some of the content (not the things that happened, necessarily, more the way Gabaldon treated them in her prose*), I decided to continue the series, probably one a year to stay current with the show, […]
That Time Lady Macbeth Went Hunting
Serena is described on the cover as a “retelling of Macbeth in Appalachia” and that is the most accurate five-word description that can be given to this book, except in this version, Lady Macbeth quickly outdistances her husband. George Pemberton is the owner of a timber business in 1929, and he and his new wife Serena seek to dominate and to expand this business by any means, often ruthless, necessary. When Serena discovers she cannot bear children, she turns this same ruthlessness towards Pemberton’s illegitimate […]
Uninvolving
When this book came out three years ago, it got a lot of attention, it won some prizes, it garnered excellent reviews and word of mouth. I put it straight on my to read list, as I love a bit of a historical novel and this one sounded kind of gruesome with it, which is always a winner. Yet somehow I only just got round to reading it now. I don’t know why. It was only after I started reading that I discovered it’s the […]
“On sweet silk grass I stretch me at mine ease,…”
Like J. Courtney Sullivan’s The Engagements, reviewed here, Kate Beaufoy’s Liberty Silk is a tale of different eras and generations connected by a single object–in this case, a beautiful, shimmering, colourful silk dress from Liberty of London. Bought in 1919 by Jessie, a young lady of patrician English background who marries a penniless artist and spends her honeymoon deliriously happy in the summery South of France, it’s eventually inherited by Baba, born Lisa, who is a starlet with an empty life in Hollywood in the 1940s, […]
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