Hey there, Pat here, bringing you the Word Wenches comments on what we’ve been reading this month. I’ve been hunkered down trying to fine tune my new release while reading up on the next book set in Victorian Edinburgh--my main reading this month. I really don’t think you want to hear about the archives of the University of Scotland, although they are fascinating!
But I discovered I’d missed a Terry Pratchett book and grabbed a copy of RAISING STEAM when it crossed my radar. This is one of the later volumes written with his wife, so the puns aren’t there except in some of the names. What was really interesting about this read is that I started it in e-book format and was feeling a bit let-down and disappointed by it. We have all my favorite characters (except the witches!) and Disc World has just discovered steam engines, which is throwing everything into a tizzy. But I just wasn’t getting into it. Because we have a library of Pratchett books, we ordered a print copy to fill the missing gap. So I opened the book to where I was in the e-reader and tried reading on the page and lo and behold, the experience was utterly different.
Of course, the footnotes are much easier to read in print. My Nook app loses my place if I try to go back and forth between footnotes and page, and the book has no chapters, so I can’t use the menu. I figured out the bookmark, but it became too much of a hassle. But footnotes really were just a minor issue. For some reason, my brain saw the deeper elements in print, the subversive issues Pratchett loves to play with in his fantasy world. In the e-reader, I was just skimming along, seeing words, and not really grasping the big picture.
Have you ever experimented with reading the same book in both formats?
Anne’s turn:
Two of the books I'm talking about this month I had preordered ages ago, but somehow lost track of them until something jogged my memory. The first is a contemporary romance called REPEAT by Kylie Scott, a favorite author of mine. She writes edgy, sexy, emotional books with wonderful characterization. This is an amnesia story, but one with a difference. From the blurb: When a vicious attack leaves 25-year-old Clementine Johns with no memory, she's forced to start over. Now she has to figure out who she was and why she made the choices she did - which includes leaving the supposed love of her life, tattoo artist Ed Larsen, only a month before. Highly recommended.
The other preordered book that slipped unnoticed into the TBR pile was by our own Susanna Kearsley - BELLEWETHER. As always with Susanna's books, there is an interwoven story from two time periods. The setting is Long Island (USA) where in contemporary times a historical museum is being set up. The historical story takes place in 1759 when war has come to North America courtesy of Britain and France, and people's loyalties are challenged. A wonderful book, highly recommended.
Another stand-out read for me this month was DAISY JONES AND THE SIX, by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Not a romance, though there is a thread of romance; it's a kind of fictional memoir, told in snippets of recorded recollection of the rise and fall of a rock band. That sounds dull, I know, but I found it totally engrossing.
Finally, I've been rereading some old historical romances that have now been reissued as e-books, and the standout was Patricia Potter's DIABOLO, a classic western historical that had all the feels — adventure, heartache, romance, redemption — a wholly satisfying read. Next in line is LAWLESS which I read and loved many years ago.
Andrea here:
This month I have been reading historical fiction, and have two fabulous reads to recommend. I had read Kate Quinn’s THE ALICE NETWORK, and loved it, so grabbed her latest, THE HUNTRESS. It’s a riveting story of bringing a war crime to justice after WWII, with a wonderful weaving together of four completely different people and how the murder of six young children and young escaped British POW in Nazi Germany brings them together in a quest for justice. The protagonists include a Siberian girl who leaves the wilds to become one of Russia’s legendary women bomber pilots, a war wary aristocratic journalist and his ex-GI American partner who've dedicated themselves to tracking down Nazi war criminals after the war, and a young Boston woman who dreams of being a photojournalist like Margaret Bourke White, even though her widowed father won’t allow her to attend college because he wants her to marry her high school sweetheart. It may sound grim, but in Quinn’s capable hands, the powerful story is full of life-affirming friendships and joy amid the horrors of war.
I also read THE GIRL FROM THE SAVOY by Hazel Gaynor, a beautifully-written rags to riches story of a young maid at the famous Savoy Hotel in 1920s London who dreams of being an actress on the London stage. The hotel plays host to all the rich, glamorous people of the era, and she sees them from afar . . . but a twist of fate connects her to the most famous actress in London, the daughter of an earl who has defied the conventions of her class, and the cold disapproval of her mother to live her own life according to her own rules. The complex backstory of the characters is slowly revealed, showing the unexpectedly similar hopes and heartaches that tie them together. The twists are so well-done and add richness and texture to the story. Gaynor’s writing is captivating, with wonderful dialogue and descriptions. I will be glomming her other books. (And I was lucky enough to meet both authors at the recent Historical Novel Society conferences and hear them speak about their writing. Lovely people as well as fabulous authors!)
From Nicola:
I’ve just started reading THE GLITTERING HOUR by Iona Grey and already I am completely enchanted. The book is a dual time narrative set in the 1920s and ten years later. In 1925, Selina Lennox is a Bright Young Thing whose social set parties hard as a reaction to the horrors of the First World War. Ten years later, nine-year-old Alice is staying at her grandparents’ austere country house Blackwood where she pieces together the secrets of the past through following the clues in her mother’s precious letters. Iona’s previous book, LETTERS TO THE LOST, won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award and was absolutely stunning. I’m enjoying this one even more if that were possible; her writing is so beautiful and the evocation of 1920’s society is brilliantly drawn, as is the contrasting bleakness of Alice’s life in the apparent sterility of Blackwood in winter. What is most compelling, though, is the deep insight into the characters and their lives and emotions. I was pulled in from the start and totally engaged. One of those books where when you put it down and emerge blinking into real life you feel utterly bereft.
A totally glorious book I’ve been dipping into (because it’s that sort of book) is Carry Akroyd’s FOUND IN THE FIELDS. It’s a book full of gorgeous landscape paintings and also includes some nature writing and poetry by John Clare as well. Carry talks about finding inspiration for her art in the landscape, and as I love walking in the countryside and also find it good for inspiration and plotting, I loved this idea. I was excited to find you can buy Carry’s paintings as notecards as well as the book!
Mary Jo presents:
Open Road Media publishes backlist e-books for authors, and Pat Rice is the one who told me about their daily discount newsletters.
There's a mixture of titles: mostly but not all fiction, some classics, others are backlist titles of authors who are still actively writing. The price is most often $1.99, and the downside is that they only guarantee the price for that day.
But I've acquired e-book editions of books I've read and loved, and found some new authors I'm enjoying. In the former category is Lian Dolan's ELIZABETH THE FIRST WIFE, a very funny women's fiction novel set in the author's hometown of Pasadena, California. Quiet Elizabeth Lancaster teaches Shakespeare at the local community college and is the least successful in a family of wild over-achievers. (For starters, her father is a Nobel Prize winner in Physics.)
But she's content with her quiet life until her college boyfriend/ex-husband, now one of the hottest and most successful action movie stars in the world, blazes back into her life, wanting her scholarly expertise to help him succeed in a theater production of Midsummer's Night Dream in hopes that he'll look like a more serious actor. This is all kinds of a bad idea for Elizabeth, but she takes the job to earn enough to pay for her kitchen remodeling.
And she's off to the races. The story is great fun, and between chapters are her snarky translations of Shakespeare's language as it would be rendered today. (For example, the flowery Bard's words that translate into modern "Want to hook up?" <G> ) Highly recommended if you enjoy fun characters and a woman finding a new path in life.
I've also found new mystery writers. Husband and wife Charlotte and Aaron Elkins have teamed up to write art history mysteries. (She was an art curator and he has written a lot of forensic mysteries.) I really enjoyed the four-book Alix London series. Alix is a young art consultant who is trying to establish a business despite the fact that her father was a very well known art forger, recently released from prison.
Alix has the "connoisseur's eye," meaning that she's really good at spotting fake paintings—which can be A DANGEROUS TALENT , which is the title of the first book in the series. The four books are fast moving fun with a romantic thread and a mix of colorful settings, and not too gory. I like Alix and her friends and really enjoy the art bits. (Shades of my art school past!) Worth checking out if this is the sort of thing you like. Elkins' Alix London books are 99 cents each till the end of June.
And last but not least, Jo:
I’m Joanna, and I’m a book wallbanger.
Probably 99% of the books I pick up I reject in the first look-through. Maybe 30% of the books I take home and try to read I give up in the first chapter or two.
There. I’ve admitted it. I feel better for getting that off my chest.
Why do I toss the books out? It’s almost always for what I’d call general subpar writing. Not because I don’t like the plot. Not because I want the book to tell a different sort of story — I’m pretty flexible about story lines and genre. I can even manage to get to the last words of the endless, pointless, much-over-my-head literary works my friends foist upon me. (Y’know, I don’t have much occasion to use the word "foist" in writing. I don’t think I ever actually have.) It’s not because the relationships are too sexy or not sexy enough.
It’s unpolished writing. It's technical faults in how a story is presented. It's lack of skill in the craft. This bothers me because writing is my trade. Just as a surgeon sunning himself at the beach may gaze upon gall-bladder-removal or appendix scars and deplore the clumsiness of the incision, I notice bad backstory and hackneyed language.
So I am picky in the extreme when I select books.
BUT, if you are a very skilled writer I will follow you through the book even if my teeth are continually on edge from your deliberate grammar choices.
I will name names. Ilona Andrews and Ben Aaronovitch. They (Ilona) have come down heavily in favor of “like” as a conjunction. Aaronovitch consistently substitutes the objective pronoun for the nominative, especially as the subject of a sentence.
Ilona: He hefted his vorpal blade like it was a feather.
Ben: Jason and me took off after the Golden Fleece.
They are such astonishingly skilled writers they can get away with it. They’re forging ahead toward the future of English. I read these guys with delight.
But don’t let any lesser writer try this on me. That’s all I got to say.
Your turn! What have you been reading this month?