This book has EVERYTHING. There is simply no other author doing what Courtney Milan is doing. She wears her heart and her mind on her sleeve, and in doing so, my heart and mind are engaged to their fullest capacity when devouring her stories. The amount of romantic passion, intellectual rigor, and political zeal that she includes in her characterization is astounding, and even more so because as overbearing as any one of these can be in less skilled hands, in her texts the complement […]
Boring & Boring
I really enjoyed Setterfield’s debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale. It was a book as much about the love of books as it was the dark tale it was telling, and telling it with an unreliable narrator to boot. It left a lasting impression and when I spotted her follow up, a ghost story no less, on the shelf in Foyles, I had to buy it. I bloody love ghost stories. I love being scared when I’m reading or watching something, it’s the best. I haven’t had […]
The one where I think I’m glad I didn’t live in 16th century England…
The Queen’s Fool is one of those books that sat on my bookshelf for awhile, getting passed over time and again for something else. I don’t know if it was the cover (it does look a little romance-y) or the blurb on the back, but it never really jumped out and demanded to be read. Then one day, I found myself reaching for it, and I couldn’t put it down. Set during the tumultuous years after King Edward’s death in the sixteenth century, the novel […]
“It was a horrible time to be alive”
In her Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, author Fay Weldon calls the Regency era “by our standards, a horrible time to be alive.” She also writes that the class society was “fair enough if you were Jane Austen, but supposing you were the maid?” That is what Jo Baker’s Longbourn does: supposes you were the maid. And it does the supposing brilliantly. For me, this was one of those books where the reading experience is so emotionally magnificent, it seems like a […]
Wolf Hall, or the redemption of Thomas Cromwell
The tour de Mantel continues with Wolf Hall, about the rise of Thomas Cromwell (no spoilers here, but the fall of Thomas Cromwell comes in another book). We learn a bit about Cromwell through flashbacks – the abuse at the hands of his father, running off to France to become a mercenary, learning about culture and banking in Antwerp, and generally becoming a Renaissance man. He returns to England, becomes a merchant, and eventually ended up working for Cardinal Wolsey, advisor to Henry VIII. Cromwell […]
What the Dickens?
Well, I said 2014 would be a year of Big Books and you really don’t get much bigger than this. Last year, when I bought my copy of The Luminaries, a colleague said to me “you know, if you really want to read a proper faux Victorian novel, you should check out The Quincunx”. As I pondered whether something could be proper and faux at the same time, I wandered into my nearest bookshop and picked up a copy. It is a HUGE book in every sense of the […]
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