February books
Categories: uncategorized
Date: 28 February 2009 23:45:08
The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff is a fab book.... but very unexpected. It is one of Richard and Judy's Book Club books which means it is a book I probably wouldn't have picked up automatically.
I expected a murder mystery which is set in a strict Mormon community. Well, I got that, but I also got so much more. It is really two parallel stories and I had to work hard to keep that in mind. The modern story is about Jordan, a young gay guy who was excommunicated from the strict Mormon sect he grew up in. His mother, the 19th wife, is in prison, accused of murdering her husband. He sets out to prove her innocence. That is kind of the easy bit of the story.
The second part of the story is set 100 years previous and it follows another 19th wife, Ann Eliza Young and her story of being a wife in a polygamous family. The author has taken huge liberties and embellished her real life story, and padded out what might have happened.
I was absolutely fascinated by this book and it's commentary on what living in polygamous families was like. Really worth a read if you like historical novels.
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Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult is a fascinating book. Katie Fisher is a young, unmarried Amish woman who is convicted of murdering her baby. A baby that no-one knew she was having, who she delivered in a cow barn. Katie is adamant that she was not responsible for the murder. Cue Ellie Hathaway, a disillusioned lawyer who happens to be distantly related to Kate. As part of the bail conditions Ellie has to move into the Amish community to live with the family. This was a fascinating book, not least because I knew next to nothing about the Amish, but also how thier faith and way of life meant they related to what they called 'the English', the non-Amish people. Good book, with a fab twist at the end (although I kind of saw it coming!)
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A Special Relationship by Douglas Kennedy is about a foreign correspondent called Sally who manages to get pregnant by another journalist. As a result they get married and move to England to allegedly live happily ever after. However, she ends up with major postnatal depression and in hospital and her vile husband takes the baby and files for custody. I have to admit that when i started reading this book I couldn't bear the main character Sally, I though she was crass, rude and I just didnt' like her. However by the end of it, my opinions of her had changed. It's a good story and well written, even if it goes on a bit long!
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The Alchemist's Daughter by Katharine McMahon is a historical novel set in the 1700's. Emilie Selden is a young girl who has been shut away by her father since the day she was born. He has educated her and trained her in natural philosophy and alchemy and as a result her ability to function in the real world is severely limited, especially when a dashing but flighty young man arrives on the scene. I also have read one of Katharine McMahon's other books, The Rose of Sebastopol which I loved. This book, however, left me slightly cold, maybe it was because it was so scientific that I actually found it a bit trying to get through all that science to find the story!
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I listened to Tell it to the Skies by Erica James on CD audio book during my recent road trips. It is a bloody long audio book, running to just over 18 hours. The story focuses around Lydia, a 40 year old English woman who lives in Venice. She trips and injures her ankle after she sees someone she thinks she knows from her past, she thinks she sees her teenage boyfriend Noah. It turns out to be his son, but from there the story all gets a bit weird. It flicks back to when Lydia was about 9 years old and takes you through her traumatic upbringing, through losing her parents and being sent with her sister to live with their religious grandparents. The historical story culminates in a murder. Of course it all ends happily, it has to, it is a nice romance novel. I did enjoy this book, but the length of it made it somewhat difficult to keep up with it, especially as I was doing short car journies towards the end.
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Ghostheart by R. J. Ellory was a disappointing book. It tells the tale of Annie O'Neill, a 30-something woman who own a bookstore in Manhattan. She had a strange childhood, only met her father when she was tiny and her mother died when she was younger. One day a stranger turns up in her shop and shows her some letters her father wrote to her mother and gave her the first chapter of a story to read. She becomes obsessed with this story, and ultimately finding out who her father was.
The problem with this book is that I just didn't like it, I only enjoyed about the last 30 pages and that was only because I wanted to find out what happened. I knew that I had read a book by the same author, but couldn't remember whether I liked it or not. Well, my Reading Challenge review of A Quiet Belief in Angels showed me that I didn't like that one either, so maybe it is just the style of the author I didn't like. I don't think I will be reading any more of his books.
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I listened to A Long Way Home by Victor Pemberton on audio book during my last couple of weeks driving. It is 1939 and Hannah and her sister Louie are evacuated from Holloway to Redbourne in Hertfordshire. They go to live with a couple called Mr and Mrs Bullocks who run the local pub and who are stern people who make 16-year-old Hannah work extremely hard. Louie is very unhappy and homesick and ends up going to live with another family called the Beedles who have an older son called Sam who Hannah starts a relationship with. In the end Hannah decides that she simply cannot stay living with the Bullocks so she decides to walk all the way back to bomb-stricken Islington.
I really enjoyed this story, not least because I am fascinated by this particular period of history. It made me think a lot about how I would have coped if I had had to live through the Second World War and whether I would have been quite so determined and stoic about the situation. This book also had quite a lot of information about The Quakers as the Beedles were Friends. It was fascinating to hear their take on conflict and how it affected them taking in evacuees etc. Good story and worth a read/listen if you can get hold of it.
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