Category: reviews

blog tour, books, reviews

Blog Tour: One Moment – Linda Green*

ramblingmads

Finn and Kaz are about to meet for the first time…
Ten-year-old Finn, a quirky, sensitive boy who talks a lot and only eats at cafes with a 5-star hygiene rating, is having a tough time at school and home.
Outspoken Kaz, 59, who has an acerbic sense of humour and a heart of gold, is working at the café when Finn and his mum come in.
They don’t know it yet, but the second time they meet will be a moment which changes both of their lives forever . . .

My thoughts:

This is an incredibly moving, heart rending read, so have your tissues on standby.

Beautifully, sensitively written, with both grief and mental illness handled with compassion and understanding by a talented author.

It’s not often you read a book and have to sit quietly with your thoughts after, but I was so moved by the quietly redemptive story and the gentle and kind characters within the pages, that I needed a moment.

Life affirming and genuinely moving.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour but all opinions remain my own.

books, reviews

Book Review: The Mermaid of Black Conch – Monique Roffey

ramblingmads


April 1976: St Constance, a tiny Caribbean village on the island of Black Conch, at the start of the rainy season. A fisherman sings to himself in his pirogue, waiting for a catch – but attracts a sea-dweller he doesn’t expect. Aycayia, a beautiful young woman cursed by jealous wives to live as a mermaid, has been swimming the Caribbean Sea for centuries. And she is entranced by this man David and his song.

My thoughts:

This was a really interesting folktale set in the modern age, where a mermaid falls for a fisherman, who unfortunately decides to take her from the sea.

Others lay claim and she yearns for her watery home.

Akin to the stories of other ocean dwellers trapped on land, like selkies, and indeed other mermaids, the existence of such a beautiful creature stirs desire and greed in the hearts of many and places these mythical beings in peril.

Roffey writes with confidence and assurance – as befits an accomplished writer.

Written in Trinidadian dialect, the cadences of people’s speech really adds to the sense of place and gives it an authenticity and character all of it’s own.

I was kindly sent a copy of this book by the publisher with no obligation to review.

blog tour, books, reviews

Blog Tour: The Slaughterman’s Daughter – Yaniv Iczkovits*

ramblingmads

When Fanny Keismann turns ten, her father, Grodno’s ritual slaughterer, gives her a knife, and she soon develops a talent for her father’s trade. But in nineteenth-century Russia, ritual slaughter does not befit a wife and mother, so when it comes time to marry and raise a family, Fanny abandons her work and devotes herself to raising her five children.

When Fanny’s older sister’s husband disappears, Fanny leaves her own family and sets out for the great city of Minsk in search of her wayward brother-in-law, armed with her old knife and accompanied by Zizek Bershov, who is either a sly rogue or an idiot. Fanny’s mission to help her sister turns into a misadventure that threatens the foundations of the Russian Empire. What began as a family matter in Motol, a peripheral Jewish settlement, breaks the bounds of the shtetl, pits the police against the Czar’s army, and upsets the political and social order they all live in.

My thoughts:

I’m entirely sure what this book is – is it straightforward historical fiction, a family saga, a crime novel?? It’s all of these and more.

The blurb doesn’t do it justice at all. There’s dozens of stories fitted into one over-arching narrative – that of Fanny Keismann looking for her errant brother-in-law in order to help her sister.

Almost every character’s entire life story will be told, battles will be conjured in the air, men and women will die, people will find themselves in strange situations and a very thin man will eat a lot of food.

The writing crackles and sparks, several languages are spoken by the characters and you wonder how they all make themselves understood – although misunderstanding is one of the books many themes.

The power of words is vital, from letters sent from the front, newspaper advertisements, the fact that a mixture of Yiddish, Russian and Polish are spoken, various polemics are written and ignored, the Torah gets quoted a fair bit, and everyone spends all their time exaggerating or not explaining.

For all that the action takes place in about a fortnight, it spans some characters’ lifetimes in explaining who they are and how they became mixed up in all the chaos Fanny is leaving in her wake.

This is an impressive, strong book about a remarkable woman, not just for her time and place, but for every reader who meets her.


*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour but all opinions remain my own.

books, reviews

Book Review: The Wolf of Oren-Yaro – K.S. Villoso

ramblingmads

“They called me the Bitch Queen, the she-wolf, because I murdered a man and exiled my king the night before they crowned me.”

Born under the crumbling towers of her kingdom, Queen Talyien was the shining jewel and legacy of the bloody War of the Wolves. It nearly tore her nation apart. But her arranged marriage to the son of a rival clan heralds peace.
However, he suddenly disappears before their reign can begin, and the kingdom is fractured beyond repair.
Years later, he sends a mysterious invitation to meet. Talyien journeys across the sea in hopes of reconciling their past. An assassination attempt quickly dashes those dreams. Stranded in a land she doesn’t know, with no idea whom she can trust, Talyien will have to embrace her namesake.

A Wolf of Oren-yaro is not tamed.

My thoughts:

This is an excellent start to a new fantasy series, inspired by the author’s Filipino heritage, by a new voice in a growing field of excellent writers from Asia.

Tali is a fantastic character, trained by her father to be a ruler, but now in an unfamiliar place, where despite her title, she has no power.

The plot is gripping, witty and smart, the writing clever and engaging.

I finished it and wanted more but I think I might have to wait a while for book two as this has literally just been published.

I was sent a copy by the publisher (this was originally self published before being picked up and introduced to a wider audience) with no obligation to publish.

blog tour, books, reviews

Blog Tour: Her Husband’s Mistake – Sheila O’Flanagan*

ramblingmads

Roxy’s marriage has always been rock solid.

After twenty years, and with two carefree kids, she and Dave are still the perfect couple.

Until the day she comes home unexpectedly, and finds Dave in bed with their attractive, single neighbour.

Suddenly Roxy isn’t sure about anything – her past, the business she’s taken over from her dad, or what her family’s future might be. She’s spent so long caring about everyone else that she’s forgotten what she actually wants. But something has changed. And Roxy has a decision to make.

Whether it’s with Dave, or without him, it’s time for Roxy to start living for herself…

Sheila O’Flanagan is the author of many bestselling novels including The Hideaway, What Happened That Night, The Missing Wife, My Mother’s Secret, If You Were Me, and All For You (winner of the Irish Independent Popular Fiction Book of the Year Award). She lives in Dublin with her husband.

My thoughts:

There were points reading this book I wanted to reach in, grab Roxy and give her a good shake. Luckily she didn’t continue being a complete wet blanket.

Which of course means there’s some really annoying moments in this book and one very aggravating character!

Otherwise, there’s entertainment to be had from Roxy’s chauffeuring adventures, her personal growth and her lovely mum.

This is a very enjoyable read beyond those few moments of growling “c’mon woman, sort it out!”, which I’m sure is intentional as you root for Roxy to remember that Aretha didn’t sing R.E.S.P.E.C.T to teach you to spell!

I also enjoyed the geography lesson I got from Roxy’s trips around the Dublin area and beyond – I’ve never been to Ireland so everything I know I’ve learnt from Irish novelists!

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour but all opinions remain my own.

blog tour, books, reviews

Blog Tour: Soot – Dan Vyleta*

ramblingmads

Welcome to a world where every desire is visible, rising from the body as a plume of Smoke. A world where bodies speak to one another and infect each other with desire, anger, greed. It is 1909 and this world stands on a precipice – some celebrate this constant whisper of skin to skin, and some seek to silence it forever.

Enter Eleanor, a young woman with a strange power over Smoke and niece of the Lord Protector of England. Running from her uncle and home, she finds shelter in a New York theatre troupe.

Then Nil, a thief hiding behind a self-effacing name. He’s an orphan snatched from a jungle-home and suspects that a clue to his origins may lie hidden in the vaults of the mighty, newly-risen East India Company.

And finally Thomas, one of the three people to release Smoke into the world. On a clandestine mission to India, he hopes to uncover the origins of Smoke and lay to rest his doubts about what he helped to unleash.

In a story that crosses continents – from India to England’s Minetowns – these three seek to control the power of Smoke. As their destinies entwine, a cataclysmic confrontation looms: the Smoke will either bind them together or forever rend the world.

My thoughts:

There were times reading this book that I got a bit bewildered, it’s a bewildering book, and I mean that in a good way.

A lot happens and the plot roams the globe, from Canada to England, India to Brazil, the Himalayan heights and the Northern mining depths, offering an alternative history of the early 20th Century.

There are references to real events and people mixed in with the imagined and it feels like you’re reading a dense involved novel of the 18th or 19th centuries, again a good thing.

This is a book that needs you to focus, to pay attention, but is also a fun, at times irreverent, adventure story, with pirates, miners, strange creatures and actors. There’s a whole world housed between the pages.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour but all opinions remain my own.

blog tour, books, reviews

Blog Tour: The Last Cuckoo – Maria Frankland*

ramblingmads

Do you listen to your mother? Even after she’s dead?

Anna Hardaker is following you …

This seemingly innocent Tweet fills Jamie Hardaker with confusion and fear. After all, his mother Anna has been dead for nearly three weeks.

What follows is an orchestrated Twitter campaign to lead those Anna loved, and didn’t love so much, to the truth behind her “accidental” death.

Amazon

Maria Frankland’s life began at 40 when she escaped an unhappy marriage and began making a living from her own writing and becoming a teacher of creative writing.

The rich tapestry of life with all its turbulent times has enabled her to pour experience, angst and lessons learned into the writing of her novels and poetry.

She recognises that the darkest places can exist within family relationships and this is reflected in the domestic thrillers she writes.

She is a ‘born ‘n’ bred’ Yorkshirewoman, a mother of two and has recently found her own ‘happy ever after’ after marrying again.

Still in her forties, she is now going to dedicate the rest of her working life to writing books and inspiring other writers to also achieve their dreams too!
Twitter Website

My thoughts:

This was an interesting thriller, written with Jamie as our unreliable narrator – the reader only ever sees what he sees, and is he telling the truth?

Family is often the most complicated thing of all and the relationships within a family can be messy and toxic.

Jamie and his stepsister to be hate each other, Claudia hates her soon to be stepmother, Anna is tired of the bickering and Iain won’t tell his ex-wife to butt out.

After Anna’s death, someone is tweeting as her and the tangled family mess gets worse, rather than better as the ghostly tweeter starts to make claims that Anna’s death was no accident.

It was good to see modern technology integrated into the plot, a lot of novels seem to try to act as though social media either doesn’t exist or that characters just don’t use it. Which is weird and when so many people see it as essential, deeply unrealistic.

For a first novel, this reads as though the author has been writing for a while, it’s confident and assured, dangling red herrings and making the reader ask questions of the protagonist.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour but all opinions remain my own.

books, reviews

Book Review: Finding Clara – Anika Scott

ramblingmads

1946. The ruins of Essen, Germany. A place that can’t quite believe the Second World War has been lost.

There’s Clara. Once a wartime icon and heiress to the Falkenberg iron works, she now finds herself on the run from the Allied authorities, accused by the zealous Allied occupiers of complicity in her father’s war crimes.

There’s Jakob. A charming black marketeer, badly wounded in the war but determined to help what’s left of his family survive the peace.

There’s Willy. A teenage boy diligently guarding a mine full of Wehrmacht supplies, his only friend a canary named Gertrud. Convinced the war isn’t over, he refuses to surrender his post.

When Clara returns to her hometown expecting to find her best friend, she finds everything she once knew in ruins. But in war-ravaged Germany, it’s not just the buildings that are scarred: everyone is changed, everyone lives in the wreckage of their own past.

To survive, Clara must hide who she is. But to live, she must face up to the truth of what she’s done.

My thoughts:

At school we learnt about the Second World War, we learnt about its aftermath, but not what was happening in Germany.

This novel explains some of things that were likely happening.

Clara’s family iron works made things for the Nazi army, her father knew many of the high ranking officials, and while she didn’t directly carry out any specific atrocities, she was complicit in some.

This is what she has been running from and what catches up to her when she finally returns to Essen.

Unlike her English mother she cannot claim she knew nothing and carry on with a semblance of her former life; her father placed her in charge of the factory and she saw some of the things the Allies wish to prosecute her for.

But she has uncovered secrets about her own family, secrets unconnected to the war, things she must set right before she will hand herself in.

With time running out she has to use all the things she has learnt to try to rescue a young boy way out of his depths.

Clara is a brave and resourceful protagonist, preparing to accept responsibility for her actions, but also trying to help others caught up in her family dramas.

The book is well written and very readable, the characters elicit empathy, and the author creates a ruined, bombed out city struggling to get by very vividly.

I was kindly gifted a copy of this book and asked to review it to celebrate the UK publication on March 5th.

blog tour, books, reviews

Blog Tour: The Aosawa Murders – Riku Onda*

ramblingmads

On a stormy summer day in the 1970s the Aosawas, owners of a prominent local hospital, host a large birthday party in their villa on the Sea of Japan. The occasion turns into tragedy when 17 people die from cyanide in their drinks. The only surviving links to what might have happened are a cryptic verse that could be the killer’s, and the physician’s bewitching blind daughter, Hisako, the only family member spared death. The youth who emerges as the prime suspect commits suicide that October, effectively sealing his guilt while consigning his motives to mystery. Inspector Teru is convinced that Hisako had a role in the crime, as are many in the town, including the author of a bestselling book about the murders written a decade after the incident. The truth is revealed through a skillful juggling of testimony by different voices: family members, witnesses and neighbors, police investigators and of course the mesmerizing Hisako herself.

Riku Onda, born in 1964, is the professional name of Nanae Kumagai. She has been writing fiction since 1991 and has won the Yoshikawa Eiji Prize for New Writers, the Japan Booksellers’ Award, the Mystery Writers of Japan Award for Best Novel for The Aosawa Murders, the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize, and the Naoki Prize. Her work has been adapted for film and television. This is her first crime novel and the first time she is translated into English.

My thoughts:

This took me a while to get into as the first person, half of a conversation, style it’s written in for the most part, felt quite jarring and I needed to adapt to the rhythm of it.

I still can’t quite work out whether Hisako was behind the murders of her family or not – it’s left slightly ambiguous.

I can see the influences of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in the style and delivery of the various statements made by people involved with, and affected by, the murders.

This is a very clever book, toying with the reader, leading you off on various little detours into the lives of the different narrators. But always circling back round to the horrific events of that summer day.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour but all opinions remain my own.

blog tour, books, reviews

Blog Tour: The Dragon Lady – Louise Treger*

ramblingmads


Opening with the shooting of Lady Virginia ‘Ginie’ Courtauld in her tranquil garden in 1950s Rhodesia, The Dragon Lady tells Ginie’s extraordinary story, so called for the exotic tattoo snaking up her leg. From the glamorous Italian Riviera before the Great War to the Art Deco glory of Eltham Palace in the thirties, and from the secluded Scottish Highlands to segregated Rhodesia in the fifties, the narrative spans enormous cultural and social change. Lady Virginia Courtauld was a boundary-breaking, colourful and unconventional person who rejected the submissive role women were expected to play.
Ostracised by society for being a foreign divorcée at the time of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, Ginie and her second husband ,Stephen Courtauld, leave the confines of post-war Britain to forge a new life in Rhodesia, only to find that being progressive liberals during segregation proves mortally dangerous. Many people had reason to dislike Ginie, but who had reason enough to pull the trigger?
Deeply evocative of time and place, The Dragon Lady subtly blends fact and fiction to paint the portrait of an extraordinary woman in an era of great social and cultural change.

Amazon


Born in London, Louisa Treger began her career as a classical violinist. She studied at the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music, and worked as a freelance orchestral player and teacher.
Louisa subsequently turned to literature, gaining a First Class degree and a PhD in English at University College London, where she focused on early twentieth century women’s writing.
Married with three children, she lives in London.

Website Facebook Twitter

My thoughts:

This was such a fascinating read, mainly covering the Courtaulds’ time in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and their contributions to the cultural and political life of the country; a period I know basically nothing about.

Ginie Courtauld is a very interesting person to read about, and this fictionalised account of her life, from daughter of an Italian merchant and his Romanian wife, to member of an old Huguenot family in the upper echelons of British society was riveting.

She entertained Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, and the future Queen Mother, at their home in the restored Eltham Palace, before moving to Africa after WWII.

Life in La Rochelle, their Rhodesian estate, wasn’t easy and they alienated their white neighbours by being liberal and egalitarian, treating their black employees better than most, building schools and decent housing; even paying them well! How dare they treat people with respect!

It’s hard to understand that mindset from a vantage point in 2020, where we know that colonialism was a bad thing, and where we can see how ahead of their time the Courtaulds were.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour but all opinions remain my own.