From the Heart – Susan Hill

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Rating: 3.5 stars

I should have recognised the author’s name here and known from the start what the content of this book would be. Susan Hill is, of course, the author of The Woman in Black, which I always confuse with Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, and eagerly anticipate histrionic Victorian japery feat. madness instead of illegitimate-child-related ghoulishness.

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There is neither ghoulishness nor histrionics in From the Heart. It is a simple, touching book that follows the story of Olive Piper who, on account of her passion for literature, is encouraged by a teacher to go to university. At university, she strikes up an awkward romance with a trainee doctor (or, rather, he strikes one up with her) which ends rather poorly for reasons that I will not spoil. I think we are supposed to mildly dislike Malcolm, this doctor, but Olive old-school ghosts him by ignoring his letters, so unfortunately I ended up on his side and did not particularly like Olive, despite the book’s dust jacket promising me that ‘everyone’ likes her.

Olive eventually goes on to become an English teacher herself, during which time she embarks upon another romance. I thought this was well-done and quite moving, only here Olive (despite purportedly now being a woman of the world) ignores some pretty obvious red flags, and despite her experiences behaves in a rather coltish way that once again I found hard to engage with.

There are many things to recommend this book: its engaging style, its snapshot of a life over many years, its delicacy in dealing with tragedy and trauma. However, for a book published this year, even one set in the 1950s, it reads as peculiarly dated, and doesn’t have much to engage a modern reader looking for a woman with a shred of initiative.

Of course, not everyone is looking for that, and I did enjoy the book. It just left me very frustrated, and I found, in the end, that though I liked the book, I did not like Olive at all.

Louise CAV ReviewsReviewed by Louise

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Greatest Hits – Laura Barnett

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Rating: 5 stars

Greatest Hits is the relative rarity – a second novel which totally lives up to the hopes and expectations brought about by a massively successful first novel – in this case The Versions of Us, a book I loved in all its kaleidoscopic versions of the main characters’ lives. Greatest Hits isn’t offering readers a Sliding Doors version of life this time (if you’ve never seen this film, why not?), but is telling us the life story of Maria Cassandra Wheeler, a fictional singer-songwriter known to her legions of adoring fans worldwide as Cass Wheeler, who is now spending a day in her music studio selecting tracks for her own Greatest Hits album, choosing songs she’s written which have the greatest meaning and emotional connection for her. She’s been away from her public for a long time, and anticipation is running high. We know that she has loyal friends, amongst them Alan and Kim, and that this whole process is going to stir up memories, some of which she’d prefer to have left buried.

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The novel moves through Cass’s life in sixteen chunks, each one opening with one of the songs she’s choosing, and then recounting why this particular one has been selected, what memories it evokes, from her very earliest days in the south London vicarage where she grew up with her rector father Francis and mother Margaret, going into her relationships with them and with her close friend Irene, whose family she loves and feels very much at home with. Cass has had a difficult childhood with a strained relationship with her mother right from birth and up to her mother’s desertion of the family when Cass was just ten. A loving aunt and uncle – photographer Lily and her architect husband John – stepped in and took Cass to stay with them for that first summer.

All the time the memories of Cass’s past are linked by snippets of her day spent selecting the tracks she will have on her very personal Greatest Hits. Her friends are planning a party that evening at her house, while we know that Cass is longing to hear from Larry, who is in Chicago. The music of Cass’s songs is interlinked with her memories, ranging from her early piano lessons, to the gift of a guitar from John when she went back to live with him and Lily when she was 14 years old, to disgracing herself in front of the altar of her father’s church with 18-year-old Kevin. Life in the swinging 60s and dissolute 70s in the music and arts world is vividly created, as is the stuffy rectory of the 50s.

Barnett has created a great range of characters who inhabit Cass’s world from her early days through to the present, when she is in her mid sixties and has been living as a virtual recluse for over a decade. There are the friends who work with her (her manager, Alan, and personal assistant, Kim), along with producers, designers, photographers – a host of loving loyal friends. She’s had a long and troubled relationship with fellow singer-songwriter Ivor Tait, whom she married despite knowing full well how difficult her life would be with him, and from whom she fled with their eight-year-old daughter Anna on finally admitting to herself that he couldn’t be part of her life any more. You can tell how credible I found all these people: I wept with Cass at the death of some of her closest friends and family; I rejoiced in the happiness of some and the downfall and later reformation of others; I despaired over Cass’s inability to admit to herself truths about herself and about others; I cheered her on from the sidelines and was totally involved throughout. And because of the clever structure, I kept thinking… I’ll just get to the next track; I’ll just move on to the next segment – and suddenly realised the whole evening had vanished into Cass’s world.

And to make it even better Laura Barnett has written the sixteen songs which Cass chose, and now they’ve been recorded by Kathryn Williams under the title, Songs from the Novel Greatest Hits – what more could I wish for! Greatest Hits is very definitely a great hit with this happy reader.

Daisy Chapter and VerseReviewed by Daisy

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The Watchmaker of Filigree Street – Natasha Pulley: Lavinia’s Book Pick, April 2018

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This book recommend is one that I’d be really interested to hear what other people thought about!

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The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is a steampunky historical/magic realist novel that tells the story of Nathaniel a (sometimes) synesthetic telegraph operator who becomes (guess what) unwittingly embroiled in international intrigue and magic clockwork japes.

There were some great things about it: it had an engaging aesthetic, and there was a truly unexpected surprise that both came out of nowhere and made perfect sense when it was there. Nathaniel and the watchmaker himself were great characters and the historical detail on a period I knew little about was genuinely fascinating.

But I also had some niggles with it that wouldn’t go away. There was a really good female character in it, Grace, a science student at Oxford struggling to be recognised among the men. But two-thirds of the way through the book her character did a bunch of insane stuff for no reason. And even though the book was written by a woman, a lot of the female characters were just stereotypes – the neurotic mother, the fussing maid, etc. etc.

It felt as if it was ratcheting up for a big, elaborate conclusion. And there was a dramatic conclusion. But after that it kind of unravelled and a lot of the trails laid in the earlier parts of the book seemed to go nowhere. It was quite frustrating at the end, when I’d loved the first three quarters.

But I’d still recommend it! I’m dying to know if I missed something, or if other people thought it was more tightly plotted than I did.

You’ll love this book if: 
– You like vivid historical settings
– You’re digging that steampunk aesthetic

You might want to avoid this book if:
– Coincidences as plot features put you off
– You’re not digging that steampunk aesthetic

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And find me at my blog here: laviniacollins.com

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Reservoir 13 – Jon McGregor

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Rating: 4 stars

Reservoir 13 isn’t a book that I would have picked up of my own accord. Our local book group chose it for their reading, and so I dived in.

It’s a prizewinner, and experience has taught me to be sceptical of these in the past. But anything for book group.

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Reservoir 13 focuses on life in a small town after a young girl disappears while on holiday there. It places the ongoing cycle of human existence both in rhythm with and in contrast with the natural world, as the cycles of the rural landscape turn on and on and the human world struggles to make sense of itself. It follows a vast cast of characters (seriously, if you care about remembering who is who, then make a list) and spans thirteen years. Each chapter follows that yearly cycle, beginning on New Year’s Day as the clock strikes midnight. Towards the end, I began to find this pattern a little wearing, but I could see how the idea of the ongoing passage of the years was central to the book’s themes. In general, I loved the style: it was delicate, descriptive, and quite poetic in places.

What I struggled with more was the lack of a driving plot. Although I was interested in the lives of the characters and I loved the way the book entwined rural rituals with human drama and the wildness of nature, I wouldn’t have said that I was gripped. I appreciated the style and what is was trying to do, but I didn’t find myself seeking out time to read it, and if it hadn’t been for my book group I probably wouldn’t have finished it.

It was a great book for discussion, partly because of the huge cast of characters – everyone had a favourite and different ones that they found convincing or unconvincing. People had strong feelings either way about the style and format of the book, and how the ostensibly central plot (the missing girl) fitted in.

Despite my reservations about Reservoir 13, I would recommend it, and I’d love to hear what others thought of it, and how they got on with it. A thought-provoking and beautifully written novel, if not a page-turner.

Louise CAV ReviewsReviewed by Louise

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A Snow Garden – Rachel Joyce

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Rating: 5 stars

snow garden.jpgWell here’s an appropriate book to have been reading on March 1st and 2nd 2018, when what should be the first days of spring turned out to be the coldest March days in living memory. Snowed in and unable to get out of the house, what else could I turn to but these short stories by Rachel Joyce, widely known as the author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry? (This was a long-list finalist for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, and won Joyce the UK National Book Award for New Writer of the Year. It was also the best-selling hardback book in the UK from a new novelist in 2012.) As a great fan both of Rachel Joyce and of short stories I was delighted to be given A Snow Garden and had been saving it to read when I next had long train journeys.

It’s a set of seven exquisite and very different stories, taking place over a fortnight at the end of the year and all slightly interlinked. Each story shows the delicate touch of humour and empathy that typifies Rachel Joyce’s work, and her ability to plunge us right into the lives of others. She has a great way of thrusting her readers right into the heart of each tale. A Faraway Smell of Lemon, the first story, opens thus:

It is half past nine and Oliver will be eating porridge in his Asterix bowl. At the age of thirty-three he has no regular habits but these – the porridge and the bowl – and he is faithful to both. ‘Sod him,’ Binny snorts, striding into the morning traffic.

Instantly we are placed into the difficult world of Binny, coping with her children and Oliver, trying her best to make some sort of sense out of it all and to take the practical steps she needs in order to be ready for Christmas, when it’s already the last day of term and she’s done nothing at all so far. An unexpected encounter in a shop makes her see her life differently and find a way to go on.

The stories frequently have similar twists – people muddling through their lives, as we the readers all often feel that we do ourselves, suddenly finding new ways of dealing with events and emotions, perceived obstacles and real ones, finding strengths and admitting weaknesses and the need to accept help from outside. In the title story, A Snow Garden, divorced father Henry is expecting his sons Owen and Conor to stay for several nights just after Christmas and has rashly promised them there will be snow.

The boys kept asking if there would be snow at the new flat. ‘Yes,’ he told them. It began as a joke but then it got to be serious.

This clearly isn’t something over which he has any control, and he knows all too well that he was crazy to promise it. Luckily, in Rachel Joyce’s fictional world miracles can happen and his promise finds a way to become true, when he has no control over events and just lets things happen.

The stories end, as they began, with Oliver, but in Trees he’s the central focus of the story whereas in A Faraway Smell of Lemons our focus has been squarely placed on Binny. Like Binny, Oliver is trying and struggling to cope with the recent changes in his life and in Trees it’s his father who provides the unexpected twist when on New Year’s Eve he announces:

‘I wish I’d planted more trees.’
Oliver dug his fingers through his hair. It was what he did when he was confused. ‘Trees?’
‘Yes, trees.’
‘You didn’t plant any trees, Dad.’
His father groaned as if he’d been punched.

Over the next few hours, as the year runs to its end, Oliver and his dad work together to remedy this and to heal both their fractured relationship and their individual lives.

Joyce isn’t saying that things will run smoothly for any of her characters from here on. Instead her characters come to accept that things are as they are – life just is – and we can accept our lives and welcome change or not. The whole collection of stories captures what Joyce is so wonderful at evoking – possibilities of new beginnings even in extraordinarily painful endings.

Oliver’s story was not over, it was still happening, and the night he planted the trees was just a new twist. He could learn from it or ignore it. The choice was his.

Daisy Chapter and VerseReviewed by Daisy

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Birdcage Walk – Helen Dunmore

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Rating: 5 stars

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This is the final offering from the wonderful novelist and poet, Helen Dunmore, who died last June. And what a fine last novel it is.

I was gripped right from the outset when the author explains what led her into wanting to find out more about one of the characters, Julia Elizabeth Fawkes; after seeing her grave in a Bristol cemetery, with the inspiring headstone, bearing the words “Her words remain our Inheritance”, Dunmore first wanted to find out more about her and then imagined the world she inhabited.

Julia is central to the novel, but it is her daughter, Lizzie, whose moves we follow intensely, taking us with her on a dangerous journey with her husband John Diner Tredevant. Diner, as he’s known, is a property developer in Bristol in 1792, just as the French Revolution is coming to a head, with disastrous consequences for the Bristol property market, while Lizzie, his young wife, comes from a revolutionary background, and at first supports the changes in France. Lizzie is torn between her feelings of duty and loyalty, both to her husband and to her mother and stepfather Augustus. When Julia dies after giving birth to Lizzie’s half-brother Thomas, Lizzie feels compelled to take care of him, despite her knowledge that Diner strongly disagrees with her. Over the months that follow, matters come to a head for Lizzie and her loved ones, and she finally learns more about Diner and his first wife, who was French, and whom he’s told her has died in France.

As ever, Dunmore creates fully credible characters, from Lizzie and Diner to their servant girl Philo, Julia and Augustus, their servant and companion Hannah, and Augustus’s friend Caroline Farquhar, who has plans of her own for baby Thomas. The background of the French Revolution threatens and rumbles, sometimes in the foreground and sometimes quietly in the background, making lives which are unstable already even more so. As winter approaches and settles, life becomes more and more arduous for Lizzie.

The descriptions of life in Bristol in 1792 are so vivid I really felt as if Dunmore had been there and experienced the cold hard winter days herself, and understood exactly how tough life had been for Lizzie, isolated in her brand new house on a street which Diner has been developing at great personal cost, both emotional and monetary. His schemes fail. In the wake of the Revolution, workers are laid off and not replaced, and his grand plan cannot be completed. His own house, built to be a show home of sorts, has its furniture removed.

Dunmore was noted for undertaking intense research, absorbing it and then using it to breathe life into every tiny detail in her novels. In The Siege she brought to life the appalling war-time years in Leningrad when hundreds of thousands of people were trapped within the city for long months. In Birdcage Walk, it’s the dual background of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, with its creation of new levels of wealth and poverty, which comes to life in the pages. Diner’s increasingly menacing presence and Lizzie’s bravery are compelling forces, working together and against each other by turns. And we feel Julia’s presence through Lizzie long after Julia has died.

I shall miss Helen Dunmore’s piercing intelligence and humanity, and her ability to weave life and magic into imagined people in real situations, and real people in imagined situations. For now, it’s time to turn back to her earlier works, starting with Zennor in Darkness, and reread them, savouring each in turn.

Daisy Chapter and VerseReviewed by Daisy

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The Stopped Heart – Julie Myerson

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Rating: 5 stars

When Paula Hawkins said this book was “bloody brilliant” she was absolutely correct. This was one which I couldn’t put down, so long as I was reading it in the daytime. At nighttime, though, I had to stop reading it in the hope of getting some undisturbed sleep.

Some chance!

There are two parallel and overlapping stories, set many years apart, but with time not seeming to be a barrier recognised by some characters in the way that most people experience it. In the past story, Lottie is one of seven children of a hard-working rural family, whose lives are thrown upside down by the arrival one stormy night of a mysterious red-headed man calling himself James Dix. Lottie is not an ordinary child; she talks of lives before and lives to come after in a most unsettling way.

“When I was in heaven, I saw it.”
Jazzy frowned. “But only dead people go to heaven, Lottikins.”
“That’s right. I died… I did! After the bad man hit me with the knife, I did.”

In the present time, Mary and Graham Coles are moving to the country to make a fresh start, and get away from their past. But what they find instead is that a different past comes to haunt Mary in their new home. Like Lottie, she sees glimpses of the past, but in her case it’s not her past which is haunting her. Her step-daughter Ruby turns up unexpectedly to stay and also feels uneasy about her father’s new home, saying she’s seen a man outside staring at the house.

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Over the course of the book the two tales collide and impact on all the lives of the characters in ways which are often deeply unsettling. Eliza, the oldest daughter of the farming family, gets slowly drawn into a web laid by James Dix, and the consequences are catastrophic. Mary Coles tries to come to terms with her own past and the past of the house in which she is now living. She and little Lottie see it all: their own lives and the lives of others, and are unable to change the course of what must happen.

This is an absolute must-read novel, which sent shivers down my spine and set me listening to every noise in the house. Read it: but not late at night.

Daisy Chapter and VerseReviewed by Daisy

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Lavinia’s Book Pick, January 2018: First Love – Gwendoline Riley

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This book was given to me by my good and dear and true friend Kay, and it turned out to be a good and dear and true gift.

First Love Riley.jpgFirst Love is a snapshot into Neve’s marriage via a flashback into her first love. It’s a simple concept, and the style itself is not wordy or flowery, and yet it communicates something real and complex. Riley has a talent for writing speech that reads as real, and for communicating relationships clearly but not explicitly.

First Love is one of the best novels I have ever read. I do not want to give too much away about it, but it was a true and painful and subtle and beautiful picture of a relationship that was told with a delicacy that it’s rare to see in literary fiction now.

Go out and read it immediately.

You’ll love this book if:
– You like literary fiction
– You are interested in what makes people tick

You might want to avoid this book if:
– You do not like books

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The Good Guy – Susan Beale

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Rating: 3.5 stars

good guy.jpgThe Good Guy is described on its back cover as a ‘slightly gossipy summer read’ and tells the story of a tyre salesman called Ted who, through absolutely no fault of his own, ends up cheating on his wife Abigail with an impressionable young woman named Penny who he – completely by accident – tells that he is a widower raising a young child alone.

The Good Guy is an interesting read, and I spent the whole book trying to understand why I was (unsuccessfully) being apparently strongarmed into seeing Ted as a decent person when from start to finish he lies to both women and berates his wife for not cleaning the house when she is the sole carer for their young child. He seems to feel entitled to his affair, and again and again the narration seems to be pushing us towards seeing him as a genuine “good guy”. Ted was an interesting character, a portrait of inadequate American masculinity, the crushing pressure of expectation, the ability of ordinary people to commit heinous acts of deception, but what he was not ever was a “good guy”. And yeah it’s set in the 1960s in the suburbs, but that doesn’t make much of a difference.

Then I read the author’s note at the back, and it became clear to me that this book was something of a passion project and deeply personal. I certainly felt a little uneasy about my own readiness to judge this story harshly – it felt, as I read it, like a story I had heard a thousand times before. Perhaps because I read this right after Because I was Lonely, another disheartening story in which men are presented as biologically incapable of fidelity.

I can see what Beale has done here. She has written with compassion for all her characters and created a world in which she genuinely sees everyone as well-intentioned but easily misled. What this book did well was portraying the focus on social appearance vs reality, and the way in which people were trapped by these pressures in the sixties.

My reservations with this book were just that I found it impossible to like Ted, and I didn’t feel like the title was meant to be as ironic as it should have been. But this was an interesting read, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes a vintage aesthetic. And who knows, perhaps many of you won’t judge Ted as harshly as I did. After all, for many people being a “good guy” is in the eye of the beholder.

Louise CAV ReviewsReviewed by Louise

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Today will be Different – Maria Semple

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Rating: 5 stars

If ever a book were crying out to be made into a film, this is it.* The action – and there’s lots of action – all takes place over the course of a single day in Seattle, where Eleanor, Joe and their son Timby have been living for nearly ten years.  Eleanor resolves at the outset that “Today will be different. Today I will be present.”

How she copes with her resolution and what happens when she tries to follow its idea through to reality is by turns hilarious and sad, uplifting and sorrowful. At nearly fifty years old her life to most people who know her now seems to be a bed of roses, with a highly successful career as an animator and a charming and caring surgeon husband. But she knows what her personal demons are and have been, and struggles to make sense of them and deal with everyday life.

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Along the way, we meet Alonzo (“my poet”) with whom Eleanor gets together weekly to discuss a different poem he’s asked her to learn and think about.

Then there’s Sydney Madsen: “for ten years I haven’t been able to shake her… the friend I can’t be mean enough to so she gets the message… I keep saying no, no, yet she still chases me”.

And Spencer Martell: he’s a former intern whom, over ten years previously, she had to let go after his eight weeks finished. But he’s now about to open a “solo show at the Seattle Art Museum”.

All these and many others are characters who made me laugh out loud. Maria Semple is witty and empathetic to her rich cast of characters, and has an artist’s eye for detail – a pen Eleanor is given is described by “The weight of it, the unlikeliness of its clownish color, the double-click of its top coming off and on in my hand.” All this combines into a hilarious novel which I devoured in a couple of long train journeys.

Daisy Chapter and VerseReviewed by Daisy

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*It transpires that Today will be Different is actually being turned into an HBO series starring Julia Roberts. Hurrah!