Women Of The Dunes by Sarah Maine (Flash Review)

Flash Review

This book went as fast as freshly baked short cake and tea on a chilly afternoon in the Scottish highlands, a place where "the wind never ceases, the sun never shines, and where the past won't let you go...". An ingenious trifold mystery plot and an enchanting setting...perfect for lovers of all-things Scottish and fans of historical fiction ever so slightly infused with romance. Loved it! 5 stars

About the Book

WOMEN OF THE DUNES

By

Sarah Maine

Published by Atria Books on July 24, 2018

Paperback, 373 pages

Historical Fiction, Contemporary, Mystery

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From the author of the acclaimed novels The House Between Tides and Beyond the Wild River, a rich, atmospheric tale set on the sea-lashed coast of west Scotland, in which the lives of a ninth-century Norsewoman, a nineteenth-century woman, and a twenty-first-century archeologist weave together after a body is discovered in the dunes.

Libby Snow has always felt the pull of Ullanessm a lush Scottish island enshrouded in myth and deeply important to her family. Her great-great-grandmother Ellen was obsessed with the strange legend of Ulla, a Viking maiden who washed up on shore with the nearly lifeless body of her husband—and who inspired countless epic poems and the island’s name.

Central to the mystery is an ornate chalice and Libby, an archaeologist, finally has permission to excavate the site where Ulla is believed to have lived. But what Libby finds in the ancient dunes is a body from the Victorian era, clearly murdered…and potentially connected to Ellen.

What unfolds is an epic story that spans centuries, with Libby mining Ellen and Ulla’s stories for clues about the body, and in doing so, discovering the darker threads that bind all three women together across history.

Infused with Sarah Maine’s signature “meticulous research and descriptive passages of lush, beautiful landscapes” (Publishers Weekly), Women of the Dunes is a beautifully told and compelling mystery for fans of Kate Morton and Beatriz Williams

DREAMS OF FALLING by Karen White (A Review)

About the Book

DREAMS OF FALLING

By

Karen White

Published on June 5, 2018 by Berkley Books

Hardcover, 416 pages

Women's Fiction, Contemporary, Mystery

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My Review

    Quintessential "Karen White": Three childhood friends growing up together, weathering storms of all kinds side by side and yet keeping secrets from each other. Juvenile dreams going west and a wish granted at the tragic price of loss and grief. A young woman who, for the first time in her life, pays attention to her past and to the people who have been loving her all along despite her antics. A family heirloom (a 19th century rice plantation and its neoclassical mansion) hiding more secrets than its charred walls will ever be able to reveal even if they could talk...

     "Secrets can be used for subterfuge. But secrets kept out of love are different. In their own way, they keep us sane. They tell us that love isn't about doubt, but believing in spite of it." 

    Dreams Of Falling doesn't go off the beaten and successful path of Karen White's signature storytelling, a distinguished narrative blend that embraces all the core themes of unadulterated women's fiction (the complex nature of family and friendship bonds, an odd mixture of happiness and grief, all the wonderful and sometimes complicated, messy ways love shows up in our lives), a strong Southern flair, and a sensibility finely tuned to mystery plots. 

    White delivers a novel awash in forgiveness dealt out in spite of betrayal and brimming with secrets alternately covered and exposed by waves of memories and flashbacks: the story is, in fact, narrated by three different POVs and spans over a period of sixty years. For this reason, the narrative frame demands a constant shift of attention between the 1950s events, plots/subplots unfolding in the present time (2010), and a relatively recent past (2001). And although this writing technique can trigger anticipation, increase suspense, and offer a few edge-of-your-seat thrills, it may also deter readers who are not partial to dual timelines and multiple perspectives. My issue was rather with one of the female lead characters, (Larkin sounds too immature for her twenty-seven years), but I understand that the author has intentionally painted her in such a way, as the scarred product and recipient of everybody else's emotional traumas and misconceptions. My interest in the story was nonetheless unwaveringly fueled throughout its entire 416 pages. 
My rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars. 

From the Cover...

    From the New York Times bestselling author of The Night the Lights Went Out comes an exquisite new novel about best friends, family ties and the love that can both strengthen and break those bonds.

    It's been nine years since Larkin fled Georgetown, South Carolina, vowing never to go back. But when she finds out that her mother has disappeared, she knows she has no choice but to return to the place that she both loves and dreads--and to the family and friends who never stopped wishing for her to come home. Ivy, Larkin's  mother, is discovered in the burned-out wreckage of her family's ancestral rice plantation, badly injured and unconscious. No one knows why Ivy was there, but as Larkin digs for answers, she uncovers secrets kept for nearly 50 years. Secrets that lead back to the past, to the friendship between three girls on the brink of womanhood who swore that they would be friends forever, but who found that vow tested in heartbreaking ways.

The English Wife by Lauren Willig (Flash Review)

Flash Review

A relentlessly readable and absorbing novel! The way the author untangled the seductive plot of this Gilded Age historical mystery transfixed me throughout its tantalizing dual-timeline structure, its rapid fire plot twists, and its "literally" explosive final revelations. The plethora of literary references to Shakespearean plays (The Twelfth Night in particular), the witty banters and lively dialogues (loved the erudite exchanges between Bay and Annabelle, Janie and Burke) were just the icing on an already elegant and well thought out confection. My verdict: 5 stars!

About the Book

THE ENGLISH WIFE

By 

Lauren Willig 

Published by St. Martin's Press

January 9, 2018

Hardcover, 376 pages

Historical Fiction, Mystery

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From the New York Times bestselling author, Lauren Willig, comes this scandalous New York Gilded Age novel full of family secrets, affairs, and even murder.

Annabelle and Bayard Van Duyvil live a charmed life: he’s the scion of an old Knickerbocker family, she grew up in a Tudor manor in England, they had a whirlwind romance in London, they have three year old twins on whom they dote, and he’s recreated her family home on the banks of the Hudson and renamed it Illyria. Yes, there are rumors that she’s having an affair with the architect, but rumors are rumors and people will gossip. But then Bayard is found dead with a knife in his chest on the night of their Twelfth Night Ball, Annabelle goes missing, presumed drowned, and the papers go mad. Bay’s sister, Janie, forms an unlikely alliance with a reporter to uncover the truth, convinced that Bay would never have killed his wife, that it must be a third party, but the more she learns about her brother and his wife, the more everything she thought she knew about them starts to unravel. Who were her brother and his wife, really? And why did her brother die with the name George on his lips?

The Little Shop Of Found Things by Paula Brackston (Flash Review)

Flash Review

Fascinating premises! An antiques store in a Georgian redbrick town, a ghost, a seventeenth century chatelaine, and a love story that spans the ages, with the promise of more instalments to come...perfect read for lovers of Diana Gabaldon (Outlander) and Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife). 4 full stars!

***ARC copy generously provided by the Publisher via NetGalley in return of an unbiased and honest review

About the Book

THE LITTLE SHOP OF FOUND THINGS

Found Things Series Book 1

By

Paula Brackston

Published by St. Martin's Press 

October 2, 2018

Kindle Edition, 336 pages

Historical Fiction, Contemporary,

Fantasy, Paranormal, Time-travel,

Mystery

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Xanthe and her mother Flora leave London behind for a fresh start, taking over an antique shop in the historic town of Marlborough. Xanthe has always had an affinity with some of the antiques she finds. When she touches them, she can sense something of the past they come from and the stories they hold. So when she has an intense connection to a beautiful silver chatelaine she has to know more.

It’s while she’s examining the chatelaine that she’s transported back to the seventeenth century. And shortly after, she's confronted by a ghost who reveals that this is where the antique has its origins. The ghost tasks Xanthe with putting right the injustice in its story to save an innocent girl’s life, or else it’ll cost her Flora’s.

While Xanthe fights to save her amid the turbulent days of 1605, she meets architect Samuel Appleby. He may be the person who can help her succeed. He may also be the reason she can’t bring herself to leave.

With its rich historical detail, strong mother-daughter relationship, and picturesque English village, The Little Shop of Found Things is poised to be a strong start to this new series.

FEEL FREE: Essays By Zadie Smith (A Review)

About the Book

FEEL FREE

By

Zadie Smith

Published on February 6, 2018 by Penguin Press

Hardcover, 452 pages

Essays, Non-fiction

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My Review

    "...you can't fight for a freedom you've forgotten how to identify. To the reader still curious about freedom I offer these essays—to be used, changed, dismantled, destroyed or ignored as necessary!"—Zadie Smith

    I enjoyed this collection of essays: Smith weaves all kinds of themes into its fabric (from the wry and yet poignant portrait of a generation, Generation Why?, lost in the hedonistic values of the social network to the elegiac tones of Love In The Gardens), but my favorite moments are the diaristic ones (The Shadows Of Ideas, Find Your Beach, Joy) and those where she narrows her scope down to a more autobiographical and self-revealing narrative.
 
    Above all others, I loved the retrospective lucidity, emotional intelligence, and lyricism of "The Bathroom", a touching family portrait reminiscent of that time of her childhood when her family raised from an impoverished background to the British "lower middle class", a change of social status that brought a great sense of liberation to the Smith family, but came also at the high price of self-sacrifice and nearly self-obliteration of at least one of her parents. Echoes of her signature themes (family, multiculturalism, race, social displacement, search for identity) reverberate across the essay with that exquisite harmony of social satire and compassionate remembrance that is so typical of her writing. The acquisition of a larger home (not quite a mansion, and yet a maisonette with four bedrooms and two bathrooms) was, in the 80s, one of the points of pride of the "unlovable lower middle class", and a spare room or an extra toilet represented for the Smiths the passage to a higher social status, a notion somewhat bemusing nowadays to some, but a milestone sort of achievement for a family that was not exactly enjoying the contentment and freedoms of the British bourgeoisie.

    "When I think of my parents it's often with some guilt: that I did the things they never got to do, and I did them on their watch, using their time, as if they were themselves just that—timekeepers—and not separate people living out the evershortening time of their own existence. [...] no matter how many rooms you have, and however many books and movies and songs declaim the wholesome beauty of family life, the truth is "the family" is always an event of some violence. It's only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly."

    As the author herself claims in her forward, essays about one person's experience have, by their very nature, not a leg to stand on. In Feel Free, though, the intimate tone of Zadie Smith's memoires and the insightfulness of her social commentaries imbue this collection (earnest musings on matter of culture and politics) with erudite authority and soulful humanity: "I'm a sentimental humanist. I believe art is here to help, even if the help is painful—especially then." 

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

From the Cover...

From Zadie Smith, one of the most beloved authors of her generation, a new collection of essays 

Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.

Arranged into five sections--In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free--this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network--and Facebook itself--really about? "It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore." Why do we love libraries? "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? "So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes--and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat."

Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, "Joy," and, "Find Your Beach," Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith's own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive--and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith. 

The Man Who Made The Movies: The Meteoric Rise And Tragic Fall Of William Fox by Vanda Krefft (A Review)

My Review

He never intended to shake up the movie industry. At heart, he was and would always be a social conservative who wanted to change nothing except his own status from outsider to insider. William Fox's life might have turned out to be like many marginalized, unassimilated immigrant sons driven to derangement by their disappointment in America, but his energy, ambition, and hope didn't allow it. "He loved America, its values, its processes, its definition of culture. Consequently, in starting Fox Film, he aimed to create a respectable image by translating high-minded literary and stage plays into motion pictures...". "I was put down as the craziest man in the city," Fox recalled, "...a nut who thinks he can delude us into believing that pictures can be made into movies." They used to say the same about Walt Disney and look at the contribution these path-breakers gave to the evolution of a medium from new technology to a modern and original art form. Not to mention the monumental importance of a public social experience that helped millions of Americans and immigrants throughout decades of unsettling cultural, social, and political turmoil.
A deeply exhaustive and meticulous portrait of an era, its most emblematic industry, and one of its most fascinating figures. 5 stars!

About the Book

The Man Who Made The Movies:

The Meteoric Rise And Tragic Fall Of William Fox

By

Vanda Fox

Published by Harper Collins 

November 28, 2017

Biography, Non-Fiction

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A riveting story of ambition, greed, and genius unfolding at the dawn of modern America. This landmark biography brings into focus a fascinating brilliant entrepreneur—like Steve Jobs or Walt Disney, a true American visionary—who risked everything to realize his bold dream of a Hollywood empire.

Although a major Hollywood studio still bears William Fox’s name, the man himself has mostly been forgotten by history, even written off as a failure. Now, in this fascinating biography, Vanda Krefft corrects the record, explaining why Fox’s legacy is central to the history of Hollywood.

At the heart of William Fox’s life was the myth of the American Dream. His story intertwines the fate of the nineteenth-century immigrants who flooded into New York, the city’s vibrant and ruthless gilded age history, and the birth of America’s movie industry amid the dawn of the modern era. Drawing on a decade of original research, The Man Who Made the Movies offers a rich, compelling look at a complex man emblematic of his time, one of the most fascinating and formative eras in American history. 

Growing up in Lower East Side tenements, the eldest son of impoverished Hungarian immigrants, Fox began selling candy on the street. That entrepreneurial ambition eventually grew one small Brooklyn theater into a $300 million empire of deluxe studios and theaters that rivaled those of Adolph Zukor, Marcus Loew, and the Warner brothers, and launched stars such as Theda Bara. Amid the euphoric roaring twenties, the early movie moguls waged a fierce battle for control of their industry. A fearless risk-taker, Fox won and was hailed as a genius—until a confluence of circumstances, culminating with the 1929 stock market crash, led to his ruin.

Death Of An Unsung Hero by Tessa Arlen (Flash Review)

Flash Review

"What a tale! What a frightful story of betrayal and cowardice." Apparently, my infatuation with "all things Downton Abbey" hasn't fizzled out yet. Edwardian England glamour has still a strong hold on my reading preferences. My expectations in terms of authenticity of historical setting and language were not disappointed. Boldly reminiscent of Julian Fellowes' popular drama (season 2 in particular), Tessa Arlen's streamlined narration features a dynamic sleuths duo (a landlady and her housekeeper) and consistently shows robust knowledge of time period and historical events. An engrossing read. 4 full stars! ***Review copy graciously offered by the Publisher in return of an unbiased and honest review. About the Book DEATH OF AN UNSUNG HERO Lady Montfort Mystery #4 By Tessa Arlen Published by Minotaur Books on March 13, 2018 Hardcover, 302 pages Historical Fiction, Mystery Goodreads Amazon Lady Montfort and her pragmatic housekeeper Mrs. Jackson investigate a murder of a WWI officer with amnesia in the 20th-century English countryside. Building on the success of her last three mysteries in the same series, Tessa Arlen returns us to the same universe in Death of an Unsung Hero with more secrets, intrigue, and charming descriptions of the English countryside. In 1916, the world is at war and the energetic Lady Montfort has persuaded her husband to offer the dower house to the War Office as an auxiliary hospital for officers recovering from shell-shock with their redoubtable housekeeper Mrs. Jackson contributing to the war effort as the hospital’s quartermaster. Despite the hospital’s success, the farming community of Haversham, led by the Monfort’s neighbor Sir Winchell Meacham, does not approve of a country-house hospital for men they consider to be cowards. When Sir Evelyn Bray, one of the patients, is found lying face down in the garden with his head bashed in, both Lady Montfort and Mrs. Jackson have every reason to fear that the War Office will close their hospital. Once again the two women unite their diverse talents to discover who would have reason to murder a war hero suffering from amnesia.