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Well, lots of things have been happening chez Bride, including preparing for an interview and getting myself properly promoted into the job that I’ve been doing for just over a year. Massively exciting and not a little stressful which is why I haven’t been reading, blogging or commenting but hopefully things will settle down now that I’ve been successful, especially now that another big decision has been made, which is that the Book God will be retiring from the wonderful world of work in the early summer.
I don’t know about you guys but when I’m going through periods of change I find it difficult to settle to read. But I have a plan; I am hoping to carve out proper time for reading every day from now on and set myself sensible goals, even if it’s just “read 20 pages of x today”.
And all I need to kickstart myself is another book as good as Rivers of London.
I have to give thanks to Silvery Dude who bought this for me as a birthday present, for two reasons really (1) it’s a cracking story and (2) it was exactly the right thing for the two days on which I succumbed to my horrible cold and sulked in my tent until I felt better. So I read this in two sittings.
Peter Grant is a probationary police constable in central London who discovers he has some interesting talents (basically he can speak to the dead) when a strange crime is committed on Covent Garden. He comes to the attention of Inspector Nightingale (who just happens to be the last wizard in England) and a whole new world opens up to him.
This is a fabulous story; a quote on the cover suggests that this is what it would be like if Harry Potter grew up and joined the police and I can understand where that’s come from but this is remarkably inventive and enjoyable in a totally different way; for a start it’s considerably more violent than HP (bit not excessively so). It’s a serial killer novel with magic and mythology. And I loved it.
For a start, most of the action takes place in Covent Garden and The Strand, both of which are close to where I work, and it was great fun to imagine the rather strange plot unfolding in such familiar surroundings. And then there’s the whole mythology of the Thames, with the rivers in human form, which I thought worked wonderfully well.
I haven’t said much about the plot, but it’s a great story of the supernatural and mythological punching through to the real world (no pun intended…)
I loved it so much that I’ve pre-ordered the sequel, and it definitely took my mind off my unwellness. You should really, really get this.
The Winter Ghosts was my first experience of Kate Mosse, though I have both Labyrinth and Sepulchre somewhere in the stacks but just haven’t got round to them yet. I may have been slightly put off by comments from friends that her writing style wasn’t great and although I don’t usually pay attention to that sort of thing (our tastes are all different after all, and sometimes a story transcends the style in which it was written) it possibly prevented these floating to the top of the TBR pile.
However, I was looking for something reasonably short and suitably wintery to lug around in the old handbag to read on the commute, and this seemed to fit the bill.
So the story is that Freddie Watson is on holiday in the French Pyrenees in winter. Even though its 1928, he is still mourning the loss of his older brother in World War I; he’s emotionally paralysed by his grief, compounded by the fact that his brother’s body was never found so for a long time he didn’t accept that he was dead, and so ended up in a psychiatric hospital. But here he is, after the death of parents who don’t seem to have loved him as much as their dead son, trying to achieve some semblance of normality.
But he hears voices in the mountains, and on a lonely road in the middle of a snowstorm he crashes his car and has to take refuge in a small village where at a feast to mark St Etienne he meets a young, beautiful but sad woman and unburdens himself of his grief and escapes with her when strange events begin to unfold. And of course in the morning he finds himself in his room with no sign that he had been anywhere the night before, and no-one knows who the girl was. A mystery to be unravelled – will he solve it and bring peace to the village and himself?
Of course he will.
I actually rather enjoyed this. It had a nice atmosphere, the story was nicely book-ended and it does have a basis in historical events in the area. It was a nice melancholy read for a dark night; I read it over two sittings and might have enjoyed it more if I had been able to read it all in one, as the atmosphere builds nicely and can get lost if you take a break. It’s not ground-breaking and the central mystery about the girl isn’t in some respects a mystery at all, but the tension where it exists is all about Freddie – will he get to the bottom of things and will it help him?
So on the basis of this I’m going to give her other works a go this year (though having looked at some of the reviews on Amazon I may have to manage my expectations…)
Update: this is part of the TBR challenge – the book has been on my stacks since November 2010.
Despite a TBR list that is in danger of constituting a library in its own right I haven’t stopped buying books, although I’m about to enter the pre-Christmas moratorium where the Book God and I swap our wish lists and sit on our hands until Santa has been.
And in advance of that looming date I really have been unbelievably bad on the purchasing front:
- The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse – “It’s 1928. Freddie Watson is still giving for his brother, lost in the Great War. Driving through the foothills of the French Pyrenees, his car spins off the road in a snowstorm. Freddie takes refuge in an isolated village and there…..” I have her two previous books but haven’t read them yet, and this looks like it might be fun (and is far less chunky than the others)
- Nancy Mitford: The Biography by Harold Acton – “This intimate biography draws a witty, real-life portrait of Nancy, based on the letters she intended to use for her autobiography…….” Sparkling and irresistible, apparently, and totally part of my current obsession with all things Mitford.
- Changeless and Blameless by Gail Carriger – novels of vampires, werewolves, dirigibles and afternoon tea…… Again I have the first one in this series about Alexia Tarabotti but haven’t read it, so this is a bit of a chance, I suppose (what if I hate it??).
- Blue Eyed Boy by Joanne Harris – “Once there was a widow with three sons, and their names were Black, Brown and Blue. Black was the eldest; moody and aggressive. Brown was the middle child; timid and dull. But Blue was his mother’s favourite. And he was a murderer.” Couldn’t resist it.
- Sourland by Joyce Carol Oates – it’s a new book of short stories by the great JCO so of course I was going to get it.
- Dreadnought by Cherie Priest – the sequel to Boneshaker which I got for Christmas (I think, may have been my birthday, too close to call) and still haven’t read. But I feel that I’m going to enjoy it when I get there.
- Plain Kate by Erin Bow – I saw this on another blog but can’t remember whose (sorry); loved the cover and bought on impulse when in Forbidden Planet with Silvery Dude just after Hallowe’en (I bought The Unwritten 2 at the same time)
- Decca edited by Peter Y Sussman – see Nancy above. I’m sure I’ll grow out of this at some point….
- Coco Chanel by Justine Picardie – there was absolutely no way that once I’d got my hands on a copy I would be able to walk out of the bookshop without it. It’s important to recognise one’s limitations….
- Tamara de Lempicka by Laura Claridge – “Born in 1899 to Russian aristocrats, Tamara de Lempicka escaped the Bolsheviks by exchanging her body for freedom, dramatically beginning a sexual career that included most of the influential men and women she painted.” Irresistible.
So while on holiday I finally got around to reading Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger.
Now, this was always going to be a bit of a big deal because I had so enjoyed The Time Traveler’s Wife, which I read before starting this blog and have never reviewed here – suffice to say (as I’m sure I already have) that I became heavily emotionally involved with that novel to the point of almost disgracing myself by crying on public transport over the ending.
And I suspect that’s why I waited until this came out in paperback and even after I bought it didn’t leap into reading it immediately, concerned as I was that I might hate it. But thankfully I didn’t (though I get the impression that some other readers were disappointed in it.)
In terms of plot, this is really a story about two sets of twins, Edie and Elspeth, and Edie’s daughters Valentina and Julia. Elspeth dies at the beginning of the novel, never having reconciled with her sister after an estrangement lasting 20 years, and leaves her flat overlooking Highgate Cemetery to her American nieces, with the proviso that Edie never goes there and that her papers are removed by her neighbour and lover Robert. The only fly in the ointment is that Elspeth comes back as a ghost.
Will her presence become known to the other inhabitants? Will the big secret she has been hiding come out? Will there be unintended consequences?
Well, yes, of course there will.
I took absolutely ages to read this, not because I wasn’t enjoying it or didn’t want to know what was going to happen, but possibly just because it was not sufficiently light for a holiday read. I was determined not to set is aside, though, as whenever I did pick it up I enjoyed reading it. It’s fair to say that I didn’t connect with it the way I did with TTTW but I enjoyed the story, though I found Valentina and Julia really annoying at times and was in many ways more interested in Robert, Martin (another neighbour, one with OCD who compiles crosswords), the setting and the practical problems around corporeality in ghosts. I’m ashamed to say that I have lived in London for over 20 years and never once been to any of the great cemeteries, though the pull of both Highgate and Kensal Green is now very strong.
The big secret didn’t really come as a huge revelation; I had already wondered if it was going to be along the lines that it eventually turned out to be (grammatically awful way of expressing it, but I’m sure you know what I mean), although I didn’t get the details exactly right. I also found the ending a little abrupt.
But I have to say that I enjoyed it, and may even pick it up again in the future as, now that I know the story, I’m sure there are nuances that I missed on the first read.
If I had been participating in Carl’s RIP V challenge I would certainly have tried to claim this as my second read.
Bride of the Book God 