Catching up - two reviews

Two 'catching up' reviews today. First up, Serpents in Eden: Countryside Crimes edited by Martin Edwards.

This collection of crimes stories is exactly what it says on the tin (to quote a well-known advert): an anthology depicting heinous misdeeds, murder and mayhem, which all take place in the countryside. In his introduction Martin Edwards provides an appropriate Sherlock Holmes quote:

"You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there. They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."

And these stories, naturally, prove his point. The collection includes stories by some well known authors, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margery Allingham, Gladys Mitchell and some not so famous ones. Glancing at the notes I made as I read each one (otherwise by the time I get to the end I've forgotten what I read at the start) it seems, in general, that I liked the lesser known authors better. E.C Bentley's The Genuine Tabard told of an American couple visiting a quaint English village and buying an ancient herald's tabard off the vicar. But is it genuine? I liked The Long Barrow by H.C. Bailey for its archaeological bent and rather creepy atmosphere, R. Austin Freeman's The Naturalist at Lew was a clever story about a man being found dead in a ditch and how something as simple as duckweed is not actually simple at all! A Proper Mystery by Margery Allingham was not a murder story, it was about rivalry in village shows and I loved it. Inquest by Leonora Wodehouse (P.G.'s neice) was a story about a big house and will changing and had an excellent twist at the end, and The Scarecrow by Ethel Lina White about an ex-boyfriend who tries to strangle his girlfriend, is locked up in an asylum, escapes, and is coming to get her, was genuinely scary.

All in all, this was an excellent anthology. A well chosen selection, each one beautifully written, which is what I love about these vintage crime short stories or novels: although it does spoil you a bit for some of the modern stuff which is not as well crafted in my opinion.


Lastly, Absent in the Spring by Mary Westmacott (a pseudonym of Agatha Christie's). This is my fourth book for the What's In A Name? reading challenge which is being hosted by The Worm Hole. It covers the category, 'A Season'.

Joan Scudamore is crossing Iraq by train after a lengthy visit to her daughter in Baghdad. She's married to a lawyer, Rodney, and they have three adult children, all left home and living independently. They're a typical middle-class English family of the 1930s. The train is held up because of flooding and Joan finds herself stranded at a rest house not far from the Turkish border. It seems she'll be there for several days, what will she do with herself when the few books she has run out?

It turns out that the only thing Joan can do to while away the time is to think. Not just vague thoughts but serious, introspective thinking about her life. She's one of these people who're able to ignore realities or simply don't see what's happening in front of them. She thinks she has the perfect life, the perfect family, but we all know nothing is ever as it seems and so it turns out to be. It might sound like a quite a boring plot for a book, a woman stranded in the desert 'thinking'... but it's not at all. Slowly but surely Joan's personality is revealed and the way in which her husband and children have learned to deal with her and keep things hidden. The writing is quite masterful to be honest, the reader starts out thinking that this is just rather a smug woman but we're drip fed information and eventually realise that there's a real story to be told here, sad and tragic in its own quiet way. And one that really makes you think about your own life and things you might have done or said... or ignored because it's too difficult to think about. I read this because I saw Margaret's review here and like her I feel I really must find more of the six books Agatha Christie wrote as Mary Westmacott.

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La Petite Josette En Provence

The author of La Petite Josette En Provence is Ashley Davidson-Fisher. We follow each other on Twitter and I've enjoyed her photos of Provence (and this summer, Norway) for quite a while now. She's lived in Provence, off and on, with her family for many years and still does. She asked me if I would read and review her new children's book, La Petite Josette En Provence, which has been illustrated by her daughter, Martinique Louise Fisher, and naturally I was very pleased to do so.

La Petite Josette (little Josette) is incredibly excited. Her parents are taking her and her older sister, Anne-Laure, out for the day to visit the hill-top village of Les Baux-de-Provence. She's so excited that when her sister comes to collect her she's already dressed under the bedclothes! The girls help their parents get the picnic ready and load the car and they're off.

After a longish journey they arrive here:

This is Les Baux-de-Provence, (pic from TripAdvisor) which as you can see, is rather spectacular; it has a medieval castle, a very ancient history, and by the sound of it, lovely shops and cafés. I gather it's been named one of the most beautiful villages in France. Anyway the family set about exploring the castle, enjoying a picnic, buying souvenirs and having a reviving drink. In other words a really lovely day out.

This children's book is pure charm. Ashley's beautifully written story is also superbly illustrated by Martinique Louise Fisher. To be honest, the illustrations are a real feature of the book, I sat looking at them for ages. Her website is here if anyone is interested in seeing her work. The paintings in this book made me wish adult books came with pictures like this! How nice to see exactly what the storyteller has in mind.

But not only is the book charming it's also educational. I did French at school and although I haven't kept it up the knowledge is still part of me and I didn't have too much trouble understanding the French. What I didn't know was explained in the story so I feel like I learnt quite a bit. For instance, we're all familiar with the French 's'il vous plait' for 'please'. I've always wondered what families say for this because they wouldn't use 'vous' they'd use the more personal 'tu'. Apparently families say, 's'il te plait'. So now I know. A simple thing but it pleases me. I learnt that sausages are 'des saucisses', peanuts are 'cacahvétes', fab word but my keyboard won't do the accent the other way round, and yoghurt is 'yaourt'.

I think this would be an excellent book for children just starting to learn French or perhaps with a little experience of the language. (My grandson has just started in fact, he did a little at primary school but has started in earnest at comprehensive and loves it.) French makes up a small percentage of the story and there are clear explanations in dialogue for all of the French terms.

I really really hope that Ashley and Martinique are thinking of doing more books about 'La Petite'. I think it would be a gorgeous way to introduce children to the language but also to the beauty and culture of La belle France. And not just children... aged grandmas with a thing about European geography too.

~~~oOo~~~

Books read in August

August was a busy month for me and that's reflected in the number of books I managed to read: four. It felt like more, and really it was as one of the books was two books in one and another was quite long. But four in number it is and that's fine. These are they:


41. The Voyage of the Basilisk - Marie Brennan

42. Magpie Murders - Anthony Horowitz

43. The Olive Tree - Carol Drinkwater

44. The Shadow Land - Elizabeth Kostova


The four are a mix of my own books and library books. I've done very well reading my own books this year, admittedly not always ones that have been on my tbr pile since time immemorial... I do tend towards the newer purchases... but so far this year I've read 44 books, 22 of which have been my own. I've also managed 16 non-fiction books so far this year... it could be more, I realise that, but it's not too bad.

Anyway, hard to name a favourite as none of them were standout wonderful, all good but not really amazing. I think it would have to be The Shadow Land by Elizabet Kostova.

It did ramble on rather a lot but it was excellent on Bulgarian history and landscape and I was pleased to get an unusual country for the European Reading challenge.




These are the books I'm reading at the moment, not sure how I managed to be reading 3 books of short stories all at once but there ya go...

My bedtime book is a reread of this, inspired by Nan at Letters From a Hill Farm:

And as with my first read of it, it is once again pure delight to read. I feel a reread of Susan Hill's The Magic Apple Tree coming on and am wondering about getting back to the crime series she writes... I read one but didn't get any further.

And now autumn is here. Hooray! Couldn't be more delighted.

(Burnham Beeches - Myles Birket Foster)


~~~oOo~~~

The Shadow Land

My sixth book for the European Reading Challenge 2018 is The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova and it covers the country of Bulgaria. (For those who're not sure where that country is, it's on the Black Sea, sandwiched between Romania in the north and Greece and Turkey in the south.)

Alexandra Boyd is from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, brought up very simply by her parents, with one older, adored brother, Jack. Jack, aged 16, disappears while the family is out hiking in the mountains one day, he's never found and naturally it changes the lives of those left behind. Now grown up, Alexandra decides to go and work in Bulgaria, teaching English. It's a country her brother had always wanted to visit because as children the two of them always had fun with maps and imagining what various countries looked like: Jack had always fancied Bulgaria.

Arriving at her hotel in Sofia, three people are just leaving... two of them very elderly, one much younger. They're having trouble with their luggage and the taxi and Alexandra steps forward to help. She takes a photo, waves goodbye, and then realises she still has a piece of their luggage. They had mentioned they were going to a local monastry so she gets a taxi and meets driver and poet, Asparuh Iliev, known to all as Bobby, who has worked in England and speaks excellent English. Together they open the case and find someone's ashes inside. They make for the monastry to try and return the ashes to their rightful owners but things take a sinister turn when they're locked in a room and only just manage to escape.

Thus begins a long journey of discovery. Alexandra is still grieving for her brother, Jack, but this quest to catch up with the Lazarovi family is the beginning of a healing process for her. What they thought might be an imagined danger is in fact very real. Someone in authority is very interested in the urn that Alex and Bobby are carrying and is willing to do anything to get it. But where have the family gone? Their search will take them from one end of Bulgaria to the other.

Elizabeth Kostova is of course the author of the very well known book, The Historian, which I read and loved in 2007. One of the most interesting aspects of that book for me was all the travelling the characters did around Eastern Europe and naturally that's exactly what appealed to me about this as well, ie. all the traipsing around Bulgaria. The author clearly knows the country well - I gather she married a Bulgarian - and brings it to life vividly. I was unaware of exactly how mountainous the country is, it's clearly rugged and stunningly beautiful, and because of fifty years of communist isolation, pretty much untouched too.

I almost want to say that this reminded me a bit of a Mary Stewart adventure where a 'naice gel' gets into a spot of bother abroad and doesn't know who to trust. And it's true, the book is like that. But when it starts to get a lot more serious about life under communist rule, that's where it diverges from a Mary Stewart yarn and becomes frightening and sinister. It brought me up sharp as I knew nothing about labour camps and who they shoved into them and what their fate was. Those parts of the book were not a comfortable read, but then they're not meant to be. We're a mite too complaisant and comfy, those of us who live in countries where this kind of thing doesn't happen, does us good to get a dose of reality from time to time.

The book is certainly beautifully written, possibly the author's tendency to describe every last little thing in minute detail is a tad too much at times. Some will think it's too long and get bored because sometimes little happens... plenty on Goodreads seem to have had this experience with it. Personally, I find that as long as I'm aware a book is like that before I start then I'm ok with it.

The Shadow Land is not a supernatural book like The Historian but it still has that feel to it somehow, perhaps because of the subject matter but also I think because the Bulgarian landscape lends itself to the supernatural... like Transylvania which is not a million miles from Bulgaria of course. For me the book was rich in history and atmosphere and I liked it very much indeed. I think I may have to reread The Historian quite soon - with autumn coming on I tend to slip into creepy book mode and that would fit the bill very nicely.

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What I've been reading so far this month

I'm really behind with reviews at the moment, due to being quite busy, so I thought I'd just do a quick post about the three books I've read since the start of the month.

First up, Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan:

This is book 3 in the author's Lady Trent series.It's a kind of alernate reality, Victorian, type setting wherein women are not supposed to have an intelligent interest in dragons or anything else really. In fact, the books are as much about Isabella's struggles against the restrictions on women as they are about dragons. In this one she goes off to an archipeligo on a ship called The Basilisk to look for dragons, accompanied by her young son and the usual suspects. All kinds of adventures ensue and I really enjoyed the sea-voyage, 'try to blend in with the natives', travelogue-ish, theme to this story. If you're looking for books about dragons where they feature a lot, this series is probably not for you, try Anne McCaffrey, Naomi Novik, Robin Hobb. But if you're a fan of Victorian female travel writing and think you might like a touch of fantasy thrown in, you could do worse than this series. At the very least the covers are just gorgeous.


Next, Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz:

This book is a one-off - the first I've come across where you have two books, not one, in one complete story. Editor, Susan Ryeland, is given a manuscript to read, the latest by her publisher's star writer, Alan Conway. He writes a crime series about a German detective, Atticus Pund, who lives in England. Susan reads the latest instalment but finds, to her horror, that the last chapter of the manuscript is missing. Where is it? And more to the point, whodunnit? I'm a bit worried about spoilers here so I'm not going to say any more but seasoned crime fic readers will guess that there will be deaths and all kinds of Rum Goings On, and it's all very engrossing. And almost as soon as the book begins the reader has the manuscript of the new book to read... when that finishes Susan's investigations begin, so really it is two books in one. I won't pretend I didn't get confused, because I did. I occasionally had to stop and remember which characters belonged in which book, which were fictional and which... well... they're all fictional so you can see where the confusion comes in. It's beautifully written by the creator of the wonderful TV series, Foyle's War, very clever and enjoyable.


Lastly, a non-fiction, The Olive Tree by Carol Drinkwater. This is my third book for my What's in a Name? challenge, covering the category, 'A fruit or a veg'.

In her book, The Olive Route, which I read two years ago, Carol Drinkwater went looking for the origins of the olive tree. In that book she travelled to the eastern Mediterranean, covering The Lebonan, Irael, Palestine, Libya and so on. In its successor she tours the western Med starting by touring Spain, mainly by bus. Morroco follows Spain and then Algeria, two countries where it can be difficult for western women travelling alone. In fact in Algeria it's arranged for her to be escorted by a network of bee keepers, who take her safety very seriously; despite that, it's not a country that she felt comfortable in. From there Carol is back in Europe, touring Italy. This was my favourite section and she clearly adored it too... I thoroughly enjoyed all the island hopping. I think I probably enjoyed the first book more than this, but only slightly. The olive is not as centre stage as it was in book one and I have to admit that her experiences in Morroco and Algeria took up more of the book than I would have liked. That said, Carol Drinkwater is a superb writer, lovely observations of simple things, of people, of quirky happenings and stunning landscapes. She may not think of herself as a travel writer but she surely is.


~~~oOo~~~

More jigsaw puzzles

It seems I last did a jigsaw puzzle post in February so it's more than time to inflict another one upon you. *Coughs* I've slowed down a bit this past few weeks as summer is always a bit busy with grandkids and the garden. Also I usually do them in our conservatory and it's just been too hot in there for weeks on end; the heatwave has now ended thank goodness.

Anyhoo, a few puzzles (not all) that I've done since February.

These two were charity shop buys, both unopened. They're from W.H. Smith and both 1000 pieces. I tend to think I'm not a cottagey person when it comes to jigsaws but I think I must be lying to myself as I love this kind of nostalgic scene.

I love maps so this 2000 piece one was a joy to do. Quite tricky with all the sea but I like a challenge.

A dear friend was clearing out some puzzles and sent me a lovely surprise parcel of them (the joy!!) and this was one. I loved how difficult it was with all the rigging and the tricky sky.

A painting by Monet which was a gift from one of my daughters (the jigsaw not the painting, sadly) and a lovely collage of American lighthouses, both 1000 pieces.

Another gift from my daughter, a scene of a garden in Thailand. 1000 pieces and quite a challenge with all those hedges that look the same.

Finished this one a couple of days ago. Took me three weeks which is hardly surprising looking at the cartoon picture and how much detail is in it. Loved doing it. 2000 pieces, art by Jan van Haasteren, puzzle by 'Jumbo'.

Sometimes I wonder if I have too many indoor hobbies and ought to get out more and, although I do work in the garden a bit, this is probably the case. The trouble is my natural inclination is to get comfy in my favourite chair with a book, a puzzle, a computer game, or something detective-ish on the TV. I like being outdoors but I don't love it as much as I love being warm and cosy indoors with things that interest me. Something to ponder.


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Books Read in July

July was a fairly average reading month for me, six books read and enjoyed. All fine and dandy. Except... I really hate the month of July. And this year it was especially bad with very little rain and high (for us) temps. The countryside is all yellow and brown from lack of water and so is our grass. Veggies struggling, we have watered a bit but you can't go mad in case there's a water shortage. Horrible. I can't wait for autumn to be honest, although thankfully we've now had a fair bit of rain and it's a bit cooler.

Anyway, these are my books for July:

35. Blood on the Tracks - edited by Martin Edwards

36. Death on the Riviera - John Bude

37. The French Riviera - Ted Jones

Blurb from Goodreads: The French Riviera: A Literary Guide for Travellers is a reader's journey along the fabled coast which has provided the inspiration and setting for some of the greatest literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From Hyères and St. Tropez in the west to the Italian border in the east, Ted Jones introduces the lives and work of writers who passed this way, from distinguished Nobel laureates to new authors who discovered their voices there. His encyclopaedic work covers them all: writers such as Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham, who spent much of their lives there; F. Scott Fitzgerald and Guy de Maupassant, whose work it dominates; and the countless writers who simply lingered there, including Louisa M. Alcott, Albert Camus, Bruce Chatwin, T. S. Eliot, Ian Fleming, Sylvia Plath, Jean-Paul Sartre, Leo Tolstoy, Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde - and countless others.

That sums it up much better than I ever could. I enjoyed this journey along the coast of the French Riviera, reading about individual writers and their connections to certain towns. Perhaps it wasn't quite a as rivietting as I was hoping it might be, but there you go. I read it at the same time as Death on the Riviera by John Bude so I could see that the observations he made about the British expats there were spot on. I have The Riviera Set by Mary Lovell to read so that should increase my knowledge a bit more.

38. Valour's Choice - Tanya Huff

39. Busman's Holiday - Dorothy L. Sayers

40. I Feel Bad About My Neck - Nora Ephron

I'd heard of Nora Ephron but wasn't quite sure who she was. Apparently, she's a screenwriter and film director of films such as Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally. She's also a fine essayist. I really enjoyed this books of her essays, covering all kinds of subjects but especially female experiences, marriage (I think she's been married several times), and life in New York. If I'm honest I liked her writings about New York more than those about the female body. I'm not really into make-up, trying to look younger and glamorous and so on but I was fascinated to hear about the famous appartment block she lived in, what happened, and other tales of New York. I think I don't read enough of this type of book, *note to self* search out more.

Favourite book of July? Hmm, difficult as all the vintage crime yarns were terrific. But, by a small margin, I think it would have to be this:

Because, when all's said and done, who doesn't love a bit of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane?

So, that was July and now it's August and hurray for that as I can see Autumn at the end of the tunnel! Let joy be unconfined.

~~~oOo~~~