Andrea/Cara here. From dragons and demons to cozy country tea shops and literary sleuthing, the Wenches have been enjoying some fascinating reading peregrinations during the month of April, so without further ado, let's take a peek inside the covers!
Pat
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson is a lovely leisurely immersion into a contemporary English village. It’s women’s fiction. The protagonist is a retired Major. He’s recently widowed, set in his ways, as is the village and most of his friends and his son. There’s no sex, no violence, just a gradual exposure of human flaws as the Major comes to know a Pakistani shopkeeper and introduces her into his stuffy society. Little by little, he must face his own prejudices and shortcomings until in the end, he becomes a true hero, one much more heroic than the father he worshipped. If you want to just sink into a book and visit another place for a while, give this one a try.
I also enjoyed a couple of contemporaries but didn't have time to write full descriptions: Twenty-nine and Half Reasons by Denise Grover Swank—romantic mystery; fast-paced. The heroine has a right to be innocent, but she’s not helpless. I get a bit tired of the clumsy stupid "heroines" in some cozies, so this one was a fresh outlook. I always like Beth Ciotta's gentle romances, and Beauty and the Biker, Impossible Dream book #1 looks like the start of another great small town romance series.
Rarely does a book captivate me so much that I can't put it down at night and keep sneaking back to its pages during the day. The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell is one of the best stories - and reading experiences, and that bit is important, hold on - that I've read in a long time. Samantha Whipple is the last in the Bronte line, an American student arriving at Oxford to study literature. Her family's reputation precedes her; she's rumored to have inherited a "vast Bronte treasure" that she knows never existed; and her father, now dead, was a well-known writer. He immersed his daughter in lessons about the Brontes, their books, literary intent, lives, motivations; Dad also taught Sam to think, to question the nature and role of the reader and the writer when studying lit. And off she goes to Oxford, hoping not to be noticed as that Bronte girl.
But her Oxford tutor, James Orville III, a reserved scholar with a notorious past, challenges and presses Sam at every step, making her question all she knows. Sam is quirky, brilliant, irrepressibly unconventional -- and as she follows the mysterious clues her father left, and goes from infatuation to secretly falling hard for a tutor who will not requite, she uncovers a literary mystery that shakes conventional wisdom about the Bronte literary legacy.
Narrated by whimsical and whip-smart Sam, the novel is part literary mystery, part exploration of reading, writing, and literary meaning, part romance, with comic touches and complex, subtle characters who set up camp in the reader's heart. It's also part intellectual journey for its reader, asking questions and prodding - like sitting in a great grad seminar in English lit. Catherine Lowell is a deft and skilled writer with a light yet substantive touch, and The Madwoman Upstairs is one of the best novels I've read in a long time. Brilliant. If anyone borrows my copy, I'm buying another...
Reading is my go-to place for relaxation so I always have a book on the go, even when I'm really busy, as I am at the moment. My top reads this month include Trisha Ashley's The Little Teashop of Lost and Found, which is set in Yorkshire, in Haworth (of Brontë fame) and is about the heroine, Alice finding her place in the world and unravelling the mystery of her birth—she was a foundling. I enjoyed so much it sent me back on a re-read of some of her other books. I find Trisha Ashley's books very "sinkable into" -- her world is usually village-based, with an entertaining cast of characters, cosy (without being at all cloying) and is usually about a woman making a new life for herself. She also has a sharp and witty way with words that often gives me a smile or a chuckle. But don't read her if you're dieting because her books are also full of baking and food. ;)
I also read and thoroughly enjoyed the book that wench Nicola recommended in our last WWR, Love Song, by Sophia Bennett, which is a young adult (or new adult?) book that won the RNA prize for romance. Highly recommended.
You can read what Nicola said about it here.
Finally, I devoured book #10 of Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson series, Silence Fallen and was also tempted to begin a reread of the earlier books. They're werewolf/shifter/vampire/fae books, and I blame Wenches Pat and Mary Jo for getting me started on my Briggs addiction. Mary Jo talked about this book in the last WWR so you can read her review of it here as well.
Do you like dragons? Have you ever dreamed of a heroine who is a cross between Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody (Crocodile on the Sandbank) and a female Indiana Jones?
Dream no more, because I've just described Marie Brennan's "Memoirs of Lady Trent" series, which is told from the point of view of Lady Trent, a Victorian-ish lady whose passion for dragons matches Amelia's passion for Egyptology. I've just finished reading the first book, A Natural History of Dragons, and I'm glad the series has four more books in it!
This is fantasy, of course, so it's not exactly Victorian, but a fantasy reflection of 19th century Britain and that world. Young Isabella grows up in a prosperous household with five brothers and a most unladylike passion for natural history. She collects specimens and muddies her dresses and does many unladylike things that drive her poor mother to distraction. Most of all, she wants to learn about dragons, about which little is known.
The memoirist, Lady Trent, is speaking from much later, when she has become a celebrity for her life's work of studying dragons in their natural habitats and writing about her discoveries. She's even become the subject of penny dreadful pulp stories, which was high fame in the late 19th century. (No, of course she did not lead her own army in an assault on an evil city, as she points out acerbically.)
As Lady Trent says in her introduction, "One benefit of being an old woman now, and moreover one who has been called a "national treasure" is that there are very few who can tell me what I may and not write. Be warned, then: the collected volumes of this series will contain frozen mountains, foetid swamps, hostile foreigners, hostile fellow countrymen, the occasional hostile family member, bad decisions, misadventures in orienteering, diseases of an unromantic sort, and a plenitude of mud. You continue at your own risk."
A Natural History of Dragons begins with her childhood and takes you on her first expedition, where she organizes data and draws illustrations of their subjects and what they learn. (Sketches of her work are scattered through the book.) She gains much knowledge at a steep price, and realizes that the study of dragons is her life's passion, which is how she becomes the foremost authority on dragons in the world--and a "national treasure." <G> I'm about to start the second book, Tropic of Serpents.
In short notes, I heartily endorse Anne's recommendation of Trisha Ashley's The Little Teashop of Lost and Found and Nicola's suggestion last month of Sophia Bennett's Love Song.
I spent most of the last week or so with Anne Dillard’s The Writing Life. It’s half autobiographical and half philosophy, beautifully written. While Dillard speaks specifically of the life of a serious writer of literary fiction, she could be talking about the path of any sort of artist, or athlete, philosopher, or scientist. In Writing Life we see the writer alone in a writing retreat, bent over the typewriter, oblivious to her surroundings, to comfort, regular meals, to the beauty of her surroundings, to the passing of hours. This is more than admirable concentration; it is an almost religious dedication.
Maybe, at the end, Dillard shows us the price of great prose. I found it fascinating to read, a bit dismaying as an ideal to copy.
Andrea/Cara
I don't usually read paranormals, but after hearing mention of The Dark Days Club by Alison Goodman, I decided to give it a try. And am very glad I did! It's a wonderfully crafted story set in 1812 Regency England—but along with fighting Napoleon on the Continent, there was, as Goodman writes on the first page, "another, even older war being waged: a secret battle that had started centuries before against a demonic horde hidden in plain sight across the cities, towns and villages of the world. Only a small group pf people stood in the way of this multitude and its insidious predation upon humankind."
Think of it as Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Jane Austen! Like many aristocratic young ladies of the ton, Lady Helen is preparing for her first Season. She's pretty and an heiress—which her straitlaced uncle and guardian hopes will have her married off quickly. He fears her high spirits and unladylike curiosity and intelligence—combined with the dark scandal surrounding her late mother—will frighten off suitors if he doesn't keep her under strict control. Helen has no intention of rebelling against what's expected of her . . . until she meets the dark and dangerous Lord Carlston, who reveals that Destiny has chosen her to lead a very different life.
Combining meticulous Regency research with well-crafted, complex characters, Goodman creates a world worthy of Heyer, and then the fun begins! I was totally drawn into the story, and have already ordered the second book in the series.
So what about you? What books have you been reading this month that have swept you away? Please share—because, y'know, our TBR piles aren't high enough, ha, ha, ha! (But if you're like all the Wenches, you can NEVER have enough good books to keep you company.)