Book Review: Hastings: a boy’s own adventure by Dick Frizzell – an entertaining memoir of growing up in 1950s provincial New Zealand

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Gosh life in the 1950s could be dangerous. Kids jumping on bikes and disappearing for the day, nobody really knowing where they were, mowing the lawns with bare feet, impromptu caving adventures under a mountain known as The Peak. Somehow the author managed to survive childhood to write this entertaining memoir about growing up in his home town of Hastings – that’s Hastings, Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand – not the one in England or any of the other Hastings around the world.

Dick Frizzell is one of New Zealand’s most instantly recognisable artists – his paintings, that is. When you read this book, you’ll discover that not only did he win an art prize at his high school, but an English prize as well. As a writer, he has a chatty style, the kind that you can imagine him using to tell a funny anecdote over a beer. It’s also very descriptive, with many original and quirky turns of phrase that help you imagine what things look like. The visual artist coming out in his prose.

Although I missed the 1950s entirely, my quite a bit older siblings would tell similar tales from their childhood and a similar picture of New Zealand would emerge. This book begins with Dick’s early years, and the arrival of a whole bunch of sisters, his parents’ concern that he needed a brother and the sudden arrival (and departure) of Ray. The book is full of characters, beginning with his parents – his engineering father’s ability to build and fix, and to get through large amounts of beer during a rabbit hunting excursion. Or his mother’s love of entertaining, her cottage art and determinedly sunny nature.

These characters – neighbours and kids from school, elderly aunts and teachers – emerge in the stories, which are often wild and whacky tales, capturing the young Richard as an innocent at large. The decision of Dick and his mates to test the saying ‘like shooting fish in a barrel’, which of course meant ‘borrowing’ a gun and fish; the unusual ‘mates’ he makes in hospital on a men’s ward following a burst appendix; joining a theatre troupe performing South Pacific as a call boy and painting on tattoos.

A couple of days later we got the fish into the barrel. Well, we got one fish into the barrel; the other one was dead when I retrieved the bucket from its hiding place. Maybe the crushed-up Snax biscuits didn’t suffice. Could’ve been the salt.
So now we had a fish in a barrel and were beginning to feel a bit half-hearted about the whole enterprise. The actual logistics were starting to look a bit daunting too. Just how do you shoot a rifle into a barrel? We were going to have to stand on boxes. Maybe it was meant to be ‘shooting fish in a half-barrel’.

Such a busy time, and all through it a nostalgic look at how we lived. New products at the corner shop, like the arrival of the first popsicles (marketed as TT2s), driving his mother’s 1936 Austin Sherborne, saving up to buy Beano, Phantom and Uncle Scrooge comics, teenagers with motorcycles at the milk bar. Through it all lots of drawing and art, the future painter starting to develop. It all seems so innocent now.

Did the outside world impinge at all on any of it? As a kid, I remember being very aware that my older brother could get drafted into the Vietnam War, that there was a nuclear arms race, pollution and not enough food for countries in Africa, George Harrison singing about Bangladesh. I remember getting really worried before I even got to high school. It was a different time, I guess.

Hastings: a boy’s own adventure is a fun read though. I chuckled my was through the thirty stories, some of them quite hair-raising. A trip down memory lane, or your parents’ memory lane. It’s the kind of book you can pick up and put down as each story is a separate vignette, which makes a nice bedside read, or gift, I should think. The first in a series of planned memoirs, Hastings: a boy’s own adventure is a four-star read from me,

Book Review: Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty – a gripping novel about superstition, mortality and fate

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

It takes a smart novelist to write an engaging story with multiple characters and viewpoint switches. Liane Moriarty pulls this off really well in her novel, Here One Moment, about a passenger on a short intercity flight who predicts the ages at which her fellow passengers will die and the cause of death. We follow a selection of these passengers in the days, weeks and months following the “Death Lady”‘s predictions as they assimilate what they’ve been told.

Honestly, this is such an original and clever story and Moriarty really pulls you in wth short chapters that flit between Cherry’s story – she’s the Death Lady – and one of a small group of passengers who have been given the short straw – a death predicted for the near future. Understandably their responses vary from being a bit worried, angry, or shrugging the predictions off as nonsense. That is until some of the predictions begin to come true.

Cherry is a pleasant looking, reserved woman of around seventy who arrives on the plane tired and a bit dehydrated. Her mother was a well-known fortune-teller in the Sydney suburb where Cherry grew up. You might think that Cherry has inherited this profession and continued to practise. But Cherry’s a maths geek from a young age. How her life develops takes the reader through the sixties and seventies and on, so that we eventually form a clear picture of why she had her ‘funny turn’ on the plane.

The lady sighs. She turns to appraise Leo.
Leo says, ‘You’re telling us how and when we’re going to die?’
Later he will berate himself. He will think he should have followed Sue’s lead and shut her down, but his feelings are mixed up with memories of his beloved grandmother’s confused face and how he – Leo! – could make it smooth and peaceful when he went along with her delusions. He was better at it than his sisters. Those were the last gifts he gave her. He will do the same for this lady. It doesn’t matter what nonsense she is talking.
‘Cause of death. Age of death,’ says the lady. ‘It’s really very simple.’
‘Sounds very simple,’ agrees Leo. ‘Give it to me straight.’

Meanwhile we get to know the half-dozen or so “doomed” passengers and how they deal with what they’ve been told. There’s Allegra, the cabin manager, stunningly beautiful, loves her job and yet has a family history which includes depression. Is she really likely to taker her own life in the next year? There’s engineer Leo, a loving family man, late for his daughter’s performance in a school production, supposedly going to die in a workplace accident. He chums up with Ethan, 30 years old and returning from the funeral of a friend, who has died suddenly, leaving Ethan to wonder about seizing the day.

There’s also the ER nurse in her sixties, still fit and active, as well as the bride, with her new husband, still in their wedding regalia, both women given terrible predictions. But possibly the most difficult to hear is the young mother, Paula, who has had to deal with an unsettled baby through the whole flight, which included a two-hour delay, only to learn at the end of it that her boy will die by drowning, aged seven.

We follow each of these characters, their stories woven in with Cherry’s, as their ‘death-day’ looms. It’s nail-biting stuff, as they’re all likeable people with busy lives, loves and families. You get to the middle of the book as the first predictions seem to come true, wondering if you’re going to like what happens next. Is this some kind of ‘And Then There Were None’ (Agatha Christie) scenario?

Well, you’ll have to read it to find out. I will say that it was interesting to read a book that deals with our mortality, an issue we tend to put to the back of our minds. But in the cases of Leo, Ethan, Allegra and co, death is suddenly there in their minds all the time. And the idea of what you might do differently if you knew what was in your cards, or tea leaves. The question of how much of our destiny do we hold in our hands.

I enjoyed all these character’s stories, even Cherry’s, who seems unlikeable at first, cruel even. I galloped through Here One Moment, desperate to find out the what happened – so it’s a four-star read from me. If you’re doing the 52 Book Club Challenge, Liane Moriarty has a sister Nicole Moriarty who also writes fiction.

Book Review: No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes – an evocative reimagining of the story of Jason and Medea

~ Judith ~ 4 Comments

Natalie Haynes really knows her classics. Inspired by a performance of Euripides’ Medea with Diana Rigg in the lead role, it’s the novel, she says, she had wanted to write her whole life. She’s studied the original in Greek and her knowledge comes through in the way the story is layered with history and mythology going back in time.

Many stories about Jason focus on his adventures on his ship, the Argo, with his famous Argonauts who even include Heracles, and their quest to obtain the Golden Fleece. He has to fight a dragon, slay a field of warriors and sail his ship through the crashing rocks of the Symplegades, plus a whole lot more. But in this book, Natalie Haynes switches the focus onto Medea, the princess who defies her father to help him.. And it’s not a happy tale.

Before all that, Haynes weaves in a ton of backstory so that we learn about the fleece itself, the ram it came from and why it was so special. The actual taking of the fleece doesn’t happen until the middle of the book. There are tyrannous kings, including Jason’s uncle who steals the kingdom of Iolcus from Jason’s father. Perhaps it’s this trouble at home that urges Jason to want to seek adventure.

We’ve also got Aietes, king of Colchis, and owner of the fleece, who doesn’t hesitate to dispose of family members. We discover the backstory to why Medea chooses to help Jason and how she becomes besotted with the hero. There’s some meddling from the gods here as Medea is no pushover. She’s an interesting character, a powerful witch who worships Hecate.

It was hardly the fault of the Argo.
This was the kind of thing people said in those days: if you couldn’t blame anyone, you’d say it was the ship. But Jason didn’t set his Argonauts to row across the oceans because he was captain of the Argo; the men built the Argo because Jason wanted to find the fleece. So if you were trying to find the beginning of this story, then that’s where you would go: to the glimmering softness of the golden ram. Would you choose the day it was born? Or the day it appeared in Hellas to rescue two children, about to lose their lives?

Jason is a great leader, handsome, charismatic and skilled enough to win through – although he gets a lot of help, from the gods as well as Medea. But it’s really the story of Medea that anchors the novel. She’s interesting in that she has to deal with being wary of Jason as well as besotted with him – thank you, Cupid. She’s in survival mode a lot of the time, figuring things out, calling upon her magic. She’s clever and strong, but she’ll need to be as going off with Jason is no plain sailing.

If you know anything about the origins of this story, you will know that Medea has been given a lot of bad press. She does some truly terrible things, so she’s not your most likeable heroine. And in this world of legend, not many characters are as heroic or even as kind as you might expect. There’s a ton of characters too. Haynes piles in short episodes from the past to fill you in on why this happened, and why fate decrees that something else has to be the way it is. It’s complex and you will find yourself riffling back to the helpful List of Characters and the map at the start of the book time and time again.

No Friend to This House is a very readable and different sort of novel, abundantly well researched and this gives it that ring of authority. You come away feeling you know the real Jason and Medea, the way the ancient Greeks would have known them. It also shows how women can be marginalised in our histories, and what they may suffer because of the grand schemes of men. It’s a stunning read and stacks up well among other novels based on ancient legends – a four-and-a-half star read from me.

Book Review: Traitor’s Legacy by S J Parris – a fab new series of historical thrillers set in Elizabethan England

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I’ve been a big fan of S J Parris’s Giordano Bruno series of historical thrillers, which follow a heretic priest on the run from Rome, recruited by Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham. In this new series S J Parris has shifted the narrative along a decade or so and reintroduced a peripheral figure from the Bruno books as her main character, sleuth and spy. This would be Sophia de Wolfe, now thirty-five and a woman of means, living quietly in London. Queen Elizabeth is in her final years, but the threats to her sovereignty have not gone away, particularly since there is the big question of who will succeed the throne when the queen dies.

Traitor’s Legacy begins with the burial of a body – just a young girl – at a site where a band of players, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, has just removed its theatre, ready to rebuild on the other side of the Thames. It’s winter, and the dismantling of the theatre happens quietly, undercover of darkness, with a young boy called Badger paid to keep a look out. What Badger also sees, is the two men who hide the girl, as well as the jewelled clasp one of them leaves behind. There are documents with the body, too, written in code.

We flip to Sophia’s home where she is being tutored in the skill of swordsmanship. She wears her specially made duelling breeches, not an outfit any right-minded woman of the age would be seen in, but the canny reader knows they’re going to come in handy later on, along with her skills with the sword. Her session is interrupted by a visit from Thomas Phelippes, an envoy from Robert Cecil, Walsingham’s replacement. He has news of the body, an Agnes Lovell, and Cecil wants to see Sophia immediately. The coded documents are in Sophia’s cypher, from her days as one of Walsingham’s spies.

Thinking her days of espionage long over, Sophia is now tasked with discovering who might have written a warning in her code and left it with the girl’s body. Sophia will have to dig into who might have killed the girl and why, and whether the warning has links to the Queen’s determination to bring the Irish into line. Or something else entirely. Young Agnes was a ward under the guardianship of the powerful North family, and Sir Thomas North and his son had both served in the Irish War. But Agnes’s uncle was a known Catholic sympathiser – so there’s that. And then there’s the theatre company whose site was so convenient to the murderer – so many threads to unravel.

Sophia’s own history will come into play, particularly when the son she gave up for adoption at birth, now a teenage boy and member of the Chamberlain’s Men, becomes accused of the murder. There are threats against Sophia herself, some daring rooftop escapes and more bodies turning up to keep the story humming along. In the background you have Parris’s depth of research which brings Tudor England to life, not just the powerful players at court, such as Cecil and the Duke of Essex, but the ordinary folk – the street kids, like Badger, living off their wits, the servants that know more than they’d like to let on, the women working in brothels. There’s lots of insight into the precarious place of women in all levels of society too, something Sophia understands only too well.

This is such a rich and layered novel, keeping the reader on their toes, with a cast of interesting characters. I loved the scenes in the theatres – the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were Shakespeare’s troupe. But there’s also a rival group, the Admiral’s Men, and their playwright, Anthony Munday – a former spying colleague of Sophia’s who gets involved in the case. There’s some unfinished business for Sophia to sort out with both her son and with Munday – so plenty of interesting threads as the series continues.

I was delighted to listen to this as an audiobook read by Kristin Atherton, who does all the voices so well, it’s hard to believe they’re all the same narrator. And I’m also delighted that the next book in the series, Rebel’s Gambit, is out in May. Traitor’s Legacy is a five-star read from me.

Book Review: Belgrave Road by Manish Chauhan – an engrossing novel about love across the cultural divide

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

This debut novel describes the immigrant experience from two quite different points of view. It begins with Mira’s arrival from India to make a new life in Leicester with her husband. She’s twenty-three, and this is an arranged marriage. In itself this would be fascinating for a reader from a culture where arranged marriages, apart from those on reality TV, don’t really happen. What can it be like to suddenly share a bed, a home, a life with someone you hardly know? Mira has to remain married to Rajiv for five years to stay in England, if that’s what she wants. Somehow you get the feeling though, there’s no turning back – that she could never face returning home to India to be a disappointment to her parents.

Mira had hoped she could use her beauty therapy diploma to start her own business – she’s bright and ambitious – but beauty therapists are a dime a dozen in this part of Leicester, an area that is surprisingly full of Indian people, Indian shops, Indian food outlets. It could even be a lot like home, if only it wasn’t so cold. An opportunity arises for Mira to work in the kitchens of a sweet shop, where she makes friends with the other workers and where, across the yard, she first sees Tahliil.

Tahliil is a young man who has recently had a harrowing journey from Somalia with his sister and lives with his mother in a tiny flat. He’s not legally allowed to work, has not even registered as an asylum seeker when we first meet him, but picks up several part-time jobs, paid in cash, no questions asked. He’s diligent and well-mannered, so is kept on. It’s at the cash-and-carry where he shifts stock, sometimes delivering grocery items to the sweet shop next door, where he meets Mira.

Mira begins to question her marriage. Rajiv is older and has a history with a woman who secretly texts him, and friends he sees without Mira. So it’s easy to fall into a friendship, and then something more with Tahliil. The story includes Tahliil’s struggles as an asylum seeker, the lengthy wait for his paperwork to go through, the worry that he could be sent home. The fact that he’s Muslim means any relationship with Mira would be unacceptable to his family.

This is such a compelling novel, beautifully written, with its two very different characters, who find themselves in desperate situations. Perhaps an older version of themselves would think twice, but when you’re in your twenties it’s so easy to let your heart hold sway. And why wouldn’t they? They’ve both travelled so far. Why would they settle for anything less than a life lived on their own terms? As a reader you can’t help thinking of the roadblocks, and whether each has the fortitude for the journey ahead of them if they want to be together. This drives the story and keeps you engrossed to the end.

Other characters have their struggles too. Mira’s mother-in-law seems to be eternally optimistic rather than seeing the reality of what’s going on with her family, with her marriage. Rajiv’s cousin Rupal is in a same-sex relationship she’s completely committed to, but struggles to formalise before her family. Tahliil works for an old man who hardly ever sees his daughter, and is estranged from his son.

I found the setting of Leicester, with its huge immigrant population, quite fascinating, a place that must seem cold and physically inhospitable to those from warmer climates, and yet which offers opportunities and safety. Belgrave Road is a brilliant story, and Manish Chauhan really gets into the heads of his characters, making their lives believable. If you want to understand what makes people leave their country for new beginnings in the West and the struggles they face, this is well worth reading – a five-star read from me.

I read Belgrave Road courtesy of Netgalley and Faber & Faber (UK). The book is due for release on 29 January.

Book Review: Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton – the best-selling memoir about the unexpected bond between the writer and a wild animal

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I don’t often read non-fiction, preferring to immerse myself in the art of the story, the development of characters, atmosphere and mood. But Raising Hare has been such a popular hit, I was intrigued.

It begins during lockdown, when the author leaves her busy life in the city for a rural retreat, an old converted barn surrounded by farmland and woods. It’s wintertime when, out on a walk, she comes across a baby leveret sitting in the road – potential fodder for hawks or foxes, or in danger of being crushed between vehicle wheels. Chloe knows a thing or two about wildlife – her mother has a way with animals – and so realises she should leave it alone, that if she picks it up to put it somewhere safer, it’s mother will smell Chloe on the leveret and abandon it.

But returning from her walk, hours later, the leveret is still there, so against her better judgement, Chloe takes it in. The events that follow are fascinating as she learns how to care for the animal, accommodating it into her busy life as the lockdown ends and normal life is expected to take place again. You learn a lot about hares – how endangered they are in England, but also considered a pest by farmers and so aren’t protected by law with a dedicated hunting season. They’re also not typically thought to be easy to befriend, so Chloe’s experiences are enthralling.

The leveret was particular in its tastes. A ripe strawberry left out to tempt it was disregarded. But it loved an occasional raspberry. The sticky, squishy sound of a hare eating a raspberry has to be heard to be believed. Since hares don’t use their paws to help them eat, in the way that dogs or parrots grip their food at times to gain a better purchase, it would pick up the thimble-shaped cone in its mouth by one edge and slowly mash its jaws, drawing it in bead by bead while the raspberry bobbed up and down in front of its nose. There was something serious, almost ponderous, in the slow and methodical manner in which the leveret ate a berry.

Although Chloe doesn’t try to domesticate or keep the hare once it is ready to take care of itself, it still visits, barging in through its specially made door, making itself at home, quite some time later. It’s interesting to read about the effect on Chloe of having an animal, particularly a wild animal, in her life. How she changes from living for her work, which often takes her on special assignments overseas, with the thrill of new environments and political landscapes. How the hare makes her rethink what she wants from life, her growing fondness for the animal, and how it makes her so much more aware of the nature around her, not just animals, but also vegetation and seasons.

I came away from the book wishing the very best for the survival of the hare Chloe Dalton takes in, but also really feeling for the author. Her awakened awareness regarding how we treat the natural environment and her wanting to be a spokesperson for change, particularly in the way it’s always open season for hare shooting, but also how we farm and take so much from the landscape at the cost of lives we cannot see. But you can’t help but feel that with ever diminishing habitats, hares are up against it. Brilliantly written, Raising Hare was such an engaging read, with a ton of emotional heft, I know it will stay with me for a long time. So it’s a five-star read from me.

Book Review: The Elopement by Gill Hornby – an engaging story inspired by Jane Austen’s family

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

I’d already enjoyed Gill Hornby’s earlier book, Miss Austen, a novel about Cassandra, Jane Austen’s sister. But there’s obviously a lot more to tell, for the Austen’s are an interesting bunch. The Elopement is the third book about the family by Hornby, picking up their story with Fanny Knight, Jane Austen’s favourite niece, and Mary Dorothea, Fanny’s step-daughter.

This is a story of country life among the gentry in the early 1800s, large families and the rocky path to love. It begins with Fanny, in her late twenties, feeling as if she has missed the marriage boat, having spent many years mothering her younger brothers and sisters. When she is courted by an older neighbour, the politically ambitious Sir Edward Knatchbull, she accepts his hand.

Married life at Hatch, the Knatchbull manor house, includes five motherless children but somehow Fanny never quite takes a shine to the Knatchbull offspring, particularly the eldest, Mary Dorothea, the only girl. The boys get sent off to school from a young age, so are barely there. Fanny and Sir Edward contrive to have Mary educated with Fanny’s younger siblings at Godmersham Park, where Mary Dorothea becomes a firm favourite.

The story flips mostly between the two female characters: Fanny’s marriage to the pompous, devout and domineering Sir Edward, with whom she finds contentment, her avoidance of maternal responsibility for his children, her own struggles to be a mother; and Mary Dorothea, who seems like two – people quietly inoffensive with Fanny, and fun-loving and gossipy with Fanny’s sisters, particularly Cassie. As Mary and Cassie grow up, they bloom and go to balls – there’s a hint of a Jane Austen novel here, with suitors appearing in the wings. But no one is ever good enough to please everybody, particularly parents.

Sir Edward finds the young male Knights flippant and too fun-loving, particularly the eldest, Ned. So of course, Mary finds them charming, Ned in particular. The story follows the problems of making a match agreed on by the girls’ families. Not just Mary and Cassie but also Marianne, who ends up stepping in as a mother figure for her younger siblings after Fanny’s marriage.

Of course, when hunting or killing or hitting a thing, Ned moved like quicksilver. In the world beyond sport, though, he knew no sense of urgency and was rarely disturbed. Yet here he was, eschewing all greetings – Fanny prayed Sir Edward would opt, just on this one occasion to not take offence – and – what was this? – spluttering about yet another drama of Marianne’s making.
‘A proposal?’ Fanny fell back into the depths of the worn leather sofa. ‘A proposal from whom, might one ask?’
It was to her eternal credit that Fanny’s first thought was given not to Godermersham’s domestic arrangements and her own convenience, but that the gentleman’s identity did, in fact, take priority.
‘Billington,’ she repeated, once informed. ‘Billington?‘ Now she was thoroughly mystified. ‘But, Ned dearest,’ she explained in her patient voice, ‘we have no knowledge of any Mr Billington.’ As if that put an end to the matter.

It all gets a bit fraught for the young couple at the centre of the story, Sir Edward remaining intransigent, while Fanny is caught in the middle. A dutiful wife, she’s also strangely unaware of the secret trysts going on under her nose. You want to like Fanny, who means well, but it’s hard to see in her the niece of Jane Austen. She must have been brought up on the famous stories, and the recurring theme of the difficult path to love. Couldn’t she have a little more sympathy? More mettle?

I enjoyed The Elopement, but although the story is full of drama and conflict, the plot is a little slow-moving at times, sticking closely, it would seem, to events noted in Fanny’s collection of diaries. But you do get a good sense of the time, particularly of a woman’s lot; whether as wife, unmarried and useful relative, or as a mother. Hornby notes that giving birth was like Russian roulette, with dying in childbirth a distinct possibility even after a number of healthy births. The Austen’s were particularly fecund, producing endless large families – ample opportunity for losing a mother.

With the recent Jane Austen commemorations – 250 years since Jane Austen’s birth on 16 December – it was a good time to revisit her world. I enjoyed meeting Cassandra Austen again, still stepping in with wisdom and caregiving, an ageing mother at home, nieces requiring guidance, to say nothing of visits to the deserving poor. Gill Hornby does a brilliant job of capturing the tone of an Austen novel, and the book has the ring of authenticity, reflecting solid research. I’ve still Godmersham Park to read by Hornby, and wonder if there will be more Austen stories to look forward to after that. The Elopement is a four-star read from me.

Book Review: June in the Garden by Eleanor Wilde – a heartwarming story with a memorable protagonist

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I’d heard such a lot of good things about this novel, particularly about the wonderful character of June Wilson – her unique point of view, her determination. June in the Garden is told from June’s perspective, describing the weeks following the death of her mother and her bid to find her biological father. At 22, she is bright and has a good eye for details, but is unable to filter out what matters or socialise well with others. When things are stressful, everything goes dark, and she loses it, not always able to remember what happened afterwards.

What June is really good at is gardening. So when her social worker tells her she must leave her council house in Scotland and offers her a bleak flat without a garden, or a hostel, June packs a bag and heads for the station. A letter with an address is all she has to go on, but there will be a few missteps along the way, including a ride in a police car, before she finally makes it to her father’s Notting Hill address. She’s not exactly welcomed here, but sneaks back to take up residence in the garden shed. Here at least she has an opportunity to be in her element – a rambling, if poorly maintained, garden.

The story follows June’s little adventures as she settles in and makes do with very little, the people she meets, including her young stepbrother and his dog, and her attempts to understand the common interactions of others, but which are often beguiling to June. Slowly she begins to make sense of this change in her life, particularly how things stand for her father and his second family. Will she ever win them over?

It all adds up to a charming feel-good story, with a brilliant neurodiverse character. We get June’s need for routine, her regimen of meals at a particular time each day, part of what keeps that crippling anxiety at bay. June still misses her mother, so she’s dealing with grief as well. But Mother is never far away, her urn safely in her bag or on a shelf in the shed. I loved her developing relationship with her stepbrother, twelve-year-old Henry, a sad and lonely boy, but someone she has to learn to trust.

We sit outside the house watching the policemen drive away. Mrs Wilson – not the Mrs Wilson that is my mother, but another one – is inside, in the living room, hovering near the window, staring at us. Mr Wilson is sitting on the doorstep beside me, gazing out past the red rose bushes and the copper-rusted gate to the street lined with dawn redwood trees and pink cherry blossoms. He is still very pale.
After a heated back and forth between the officers and my relatives of 16 Lansdowne Road, it was finally decided that no further action would be taken with regard to the ‘train station incident’. It was concluded that it was a ‘family matter’.
Family.
A word that has always sounded very strange to me. I looked it up once in a dictionary, which defined it as ‘descendants of a common ancestor‘. I am still unable to ascertain who this common ancestor of ours is.

But while the book is sympathetic and sensitive, it is not at all morose because June is such a triumph, so determined and honest. This adds to the humour of the story – not that we are laughing at June, but more at the way other people obfuscate, hiding their motives and feelings behind a facade of manners. June just blows a hole right through all that. And then there’s the gardens, particularly the flowers that June knows such a lot about. She’s got that botanical encyclopaedia with her for reference which she puts to good use.

If you feel like a charming, feel-good read, or have ever secretly thought a garden shed would be a nice place to live (with a few modifications, of course), June in the Garden might just be the thing. It’s a four-star read from me.

Book Review: The Silence In Between by Josie Ferguson – a remarkable historical novel about a family divided by the Berlin Wall

~ Judith ~ 2 Comments

I’ve read quite a few books about World War II from the Allies’ point of view – the families caught up in the war, on either side of the Channel, the people who helped Jewish children escape at risk of their lives and the SOE recruits dropped behind enemy lines to help the Resistance or lead downed Allied airmen out of occupied territory. Loads about Bletchley Park too. But I haven’t come across nearly so many about what it was like from the German perspective.

While The Silence In Between describes what happens to ordinary people in East Berlin when the Wall went up, it also dips back to follow the lives of a mother and daughter during the war and the terrible treatment they received at the hands of Soviet forces in 1945. Events of both periods are firmly linked.

The book opens in 1961 with the Wall. Lisette has just had a baby, and while she is ready to take little Axel home, the hospital want to keep him in for a bit longer. She goes home to fetch some things for him and to spend the night with her husband and daughter, and that’s when the Wall goes up. Overnight, Lisette and Axel are separated. The situation is made more poignant by Lisette’s admission to herself that she loves Axel more than her daughter, teenage Elly. As the days and weeks pass with no means of contacting the hospital or any news of Axel, Lisette sinks into despair, losing her speech.

Elly’s life goes from carefree outings with friends to trying to manage her mother. She decides the only way to save her family is to bring Axel back herself. The Wall is patrolled by armed Soviet officers sent over from the USSR, ordered to shoot anyone attempting to cross the border. By chance Elly meets the one soldier who doesn’t shoot. She has a gift for hearing music in other people, and the music the soldier Andrei has tells her she can trust him. In the background is the awareness that there are people watching and reporting back, a spy in every apartment block. Secrecy is of the essence.

The voice on the radio crackles, static eating the man’s words. I recognise the presenter, but his voice sounds more high-pitched than usual, as if he’s being strangled.
‘A fence…barbed wire? What’s he talking about? When did this happen?’
‘Elly, please, stop with the questions.’ Papa is still crouched down beside Mama. ‘There will be a way to cross,’ he says. But I can hear he doesn’t believe his own words.
‘Come, let’s go down,’ he says, gently touching Mama’s shoulder. ‘We’ll speak to them at the border. Explain.’
Mama won’t look at me. She simply howls once more and it’s then I see the empty wooden cot in the bedroom beyond, the crumpled sheet poking through the bars. I finally understand the full horror of the situation.
‘Axel?’ My voice is a whisper.
Papa looks at me, his eyes strained. ‘He’s on the other side.’

The story follows Elly’s plan to cross to West Berlin, which is told from Elly’s perspective, interwoven with Lisette’s narrative of her survival in Berlin during WWII. Lisette witnesses many terrible events, the barely acknowledged rounding up of the Jews; the pressure from nosy neighbour, Frau Weber, to meet her nephew, a Nazi officer; the lack of food; the fear of bombing, which becomes a reality as the war progresses. We learn why she never bonds with Elly, her worries for Julius, the boy she loves, fighting on the Eastern Front in a war he doesn’t agree with.

Throughout the book is music. Lisette is an accomplished pianist and gives lessons to a young girl who becomes like a sister. Elly has her own kind of musical synasthesia and a keyboard in her bedroom, which she loves to play, but for reasons she doesn’t understand, it only upsets her mother. If you check out Josie Ferguson’s website, there are pieces of music you can listen to that relate to some of the characters, composed by the author’s brother.

The Silence in Between is a gripping novel, beautifully written that had me constantly on edge. On the one hand I couldn’t wait to see what happened next, while also being almost too anxious to find out. I almost broke my rule about not reading the back of the book to see how it ended. But the book is much more than its story, and gives a good picture of what life was like on either side of the Wall, and the lot of women in Berlin during the war. Some of this makes for grim reading.

The Silence in Between is a brilliant debut, well-researched and gripping, offering a different view of the war as well as Berlin in 1961. Well recommended, it’s a five-star read from me.

Book Review: The Wolf Tree by Laura McCluskey – a did he fall or was he pushed, Scottish Noir mystery

~ Judith ~ 1 Comment

An island can provide just as much of a locked-room mystery as one in any building, particularly when it’s a remote island like Eilean Eadar, a wild and isolated spot off the West Coast of Scotland. In The Wolf Tree, we are in the shoes of DI Georgina (George) Lennox, who is just getting back to work after an attack that left her badly injured. This new case is supposed to be a box-ticking exercise, and she’s here along with her partner DI Richie Stewart to sign off on a probable suicide – a case to ease George back to work gently.

Of course, the reader knows that isn’t going to happen and things look problematic from the start. Even the boat crossing is wild and treacherous, the weather when they arrive, wet and freezing, the accommodation inconveniently at some distance from the little township. The two cops settle in, George doing her best to disguise from her older colleague and mentor her dependency on painkillers. The island has had to manage without a police presence, without a doctor, a school or social services of any kind for so long, so it isn’t surprising that the locals have learned to manage everything themselves. So they’re understandably reluctant to accept the interference of two cops from Glasgow.

Then there’s the case. Young Alan Ferguson, eighteen and busy applying for places at universities, had supposedly flung himself off the top of the island’s lighthouse. Alan was handsome and amiable, the only child of a widow, but she puts up a wall of animosity when George and Richie show up to ask questions. Hot on their tails, the priest arrives – a hearty, gregarious man, keen to help oil the wheels of the interview. The islanders, like Alan’s mother, are hostile towards mainlanders. It’s only the priest and the postmistress who are welcoming, or is that just nosiness?

People think that death by drowning would be peaceful. But if there is any truth to that, it’s a peace that comes after the worst thirty seconds of your life. And it’s a fate that, until today, George Lennox never considered might befall her.
With her jaw clenched against both the biting cold and sudden dips, George stands on the heaving deck of the police launch; constricted by the bulk of an orange life vest, a duffel bag over her shoulder. She clutches a leather briefcase in one hand, the slick railing with the other. The weather has changed dramatically in the last few hours. The soft white clouds that farewelled her on Skye have turned black and heavy, and the waves that claw at her feet are splintered iron, threatening to drag her down all twelve thousand feet to the sunless floor of the North Atlantic Ocean.

Wariness towards incomers goes way back – the islanders had seen off the Protestant Reformation which turned the other western isles and much of Scotland. But Eadar is still staunchly Catholic. Or is it? What is the strange design that adorns the lintels of many of the houses, and why is George warned not to go anywhere near the woods. Pagan beliefs, mythology and superstition seem to hover on the fringes of everyday life. Then there’s the sound of howling wolves that disturbs George at night in a place where surely no wolves exist.

At twenty-eight, George is young to be a Detective Inspector, so it’s easy to imagine in her a tenacity her partner, eager to get back home with his family, seems to lack. It’s this tenacity that sees George asking awkward questions that Richie has to smooth over to avoid unpleasant confrontations. What will she have to do to earn the locals trust enough to talk to her? And what of the three lighthouse keepers who disappeared a hundred years ago? Can this mystery possibly have a connection to the death of Alan Ferguson?

It’s hard to determine which is more hostile and dangerous, the weather on Eadar or the people who live there. By the time we get to the end of the book, there are some stunning revelations and some spookily atmospheric scenes. George, in spite of terrible headaches, manages to think on her feet and probe the truth out of people in a case that will shock the whole community and mainlanders alike. She upsets Richie again and again with her disregard for her personal safety, and this looks unlikely to change anytime soon.

A first of a series, The Wolf Tree is a suspenseful and entertaining read, promising more tricky investigations for our two very different DIs. The Cursed Road is due for publication early next year. I particularly enjoyed the audiobook version of The Wolf Tree, which was read by Kirsty Cox. It’s a four-star read from me.