strange and random happenstance

The English Wife by Lauren Willig
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: January 9th, 2018
Format: Hardcover, 384 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

Bayard Van Duyvil has the perfect life. The sole male heir of an old Knickerbocker family he has a beautiful English wife, for whom he's recreated her ancestral home on the banks of the Hudson, and two beautiful children, three-year-old fraternal twins Viola and Sebastian. But there are rumors that everything isn't as perfect as it seems. Why would Bayard and his wife Annabelle hide themselves away in Cold Springs? A beautiful house is no excuse to being a recluse when New York society thirsts for your lifeblood. Soon New York society will get exactly what it craves when during a lavish ball to celebrate Twelfth Night Bayard is found with a knife in his chest and the name Georgie on his lips while his wife has disappeared. Everyone believes that the rumors about Annabelle and the house's architect at true. She has murdered her husband and absconded with her lover! The only one who doesn't believe the salacious lies all the newspapers are printing is Bay's younger sister, Janie. She is expected to keep calm and wait for the scandal to die down. But it pains her to see Annabelle's name dragged through the mud, they didn't know her like she did. A chance encounter with a reporter from The News of the World, a Mr. Burke, leads Janie to form a tenuous alliance with a man who represents the scandal rags that are pulling her world apart. Before too long Janie realizes that perhaps she didn't know Annabelle or even Bay. But with the tenacious and increasingly devoted Mr. Burke helping her she will get to the bottom of her brother's death and perhaps solve the mysteries of his life.

Having first read Lauren back in 2007 a short time after her third Pink Carnation book, The Deception of the Emerald Ring, had hit bookshelves I don't want to claim I'm an expert on her writing, but I have been along for the ride for a decade now. She's even one of the reasons I decided to start my blog! While I have loved reading every single one of her books, finding characters to love and to hate, ones to root for and ones that I long to see fall flat on their faces, the greatest joy was seeing her mature as a writer. When she wrote her first standalone, The Ashford Affair, back in 2013 she tapped into something new. Her writing started to move beyond the dual timeline narrative where despite troubles everyone gets a happily ever after. While I am a fan of this wish fulfillment in writing sometimes I feel that it's unsatisfying. That it doesn't actually reflect the world around us. Sometimes I don't want everyone to get a happy ending. This was very much showcased with That Summer, Lauren's 2014 standalone which might just be my favorite book she's written. Here Lauren had matured to a point that she was willing to kill off characters that we, the readers, had very much fallen in love with. Thankfully after going a little darker Lauren didn't reign it in. She continued this exploration of the underbelly of humanity in The Other Daughter and now in The English Wife. Sometimes good intentions lead to death. Sometimes love can't conquer all. Sometimes there are secrets that will out no matter what. As for me, I loved every second of the seedier side, it's like Gossip Girl 1800s.   

If there is one linking thread through Lauren's work it would be her love of Shakespeare. Of course, seeing as he helped forge the very language we all use he could be considered important to every book ever written, but with Lauren it's special. I dare you to count the number of times her characters have had their mouth's stopped with a kiss as Benedick does to Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. Here though we've reached a whole new level wherein Shakespeare seems another character in the story. Annabelle and Bay meet in London where she is working on stage in a musical evisceration of Twelfth Night at the Ali Baba Theater. If the play's the thing, Twelfth Night is the thing in The English Wife. Bay meets his death on Twelfth Night, their palatial recreation of Lacey Hall is renamed Illyria, and Bay and Annabelle's children are named after the hero and heroine of the play. But the references aren't just about infusing The English Wife with a bit of Annabelle's homeland via Shakespeare. The play itself is filled with confusion, merriment, love, gender, orientation, romance, and thankfully not a random lion like in As You Like It. These are themes that are all seen in Annabelle and Bay's story. Lauren has mined Shakespeare to help not only create a mirror to her story but to show the universality of it. I could quote Shakespeare here, but instead I feel like quoting Battlestar Galactica, "All of this has happened before and will happen again." Humanity has a basic universality to it. The building blocks are all the same. Shakespeare knew this and so does Lauren. Sure, everything is a tale as old as time, but it's how you go about telling it that makes it unique.

While Shakespeare is classic, there's another author to whom this moniker belongs that The English Wife shares some DNA with and that's Daphne Du Maurier. I'm going to say this right out, there is no one like Daphne Du Maurier. Therefore when any book that is mildly Gothic and has a house starts throwing around comparisons to this unparalleled author I just want them to shut it. Because whatever they have written will be a disappointment because comparisons are nothing more than a marketing ploy. The book won't deliver and you'll spend all your time wondering why you're just not re-reading Rebecca. When I read The English Wife back in August there were obviously no reviews yet. No one proclaiming that The English Wife is in the least like Du Maurier. Nothing to taint or sully my initial impressions. Therefore I was wonderfully surprised that the denouement of the book set during the inquest and a subsequent blizzard trapping our cast of characters at Illyria felt like a modern interpretation of Du Maurier. I'm not sure if Lauren purposefully set out to do this, because most attempts fail in the execution, and yet, here she is, bucking the odds. What I think helped is that instead of going for the big similarities, she started small, with Giles Lacey, Annabelle's cousin from England, who happens to share a name with Maxim de Winter's brother-in-law. Though THIS Giles would be mortified that I called him small! Instead of reminding me of Rebecca's former in-law, he reminded me of Rebecca's cousin Jack Favell, and in particular George Sanders's portrayal of him in the Hitchcock film. From there it snowballed into other similarities to the book and Hitchcock's adaptation, but always still being Lauren's voice. How Lauren has mastered this, I do not know, but she gets a tip of my hat.

Yet that isn't the only doffing of my hat that I must do in reviewing The English Wife! Now this isn't a brag, or even a faux humble brag, the fact is I'm just really good at figuring out plot lines. Be it a procedural show or a whodunit, I will solve it so fast that you won't know what hit you. A recent example of my weird "gift" was when I was watching Big Little Lies. Now I hadn't read the book but in a seven episode miniseries I was able to put ALL the pieces together and proclaim them as fact before the end credits rolled on the first episode. Six more wasted hours later and I was proven right. Sometimes to try to make things harder on myself I'll tune into a show halfway through and see if I can figure out what's going on without any exposition. Ironically Elementary has proven to be the easiest to crack. Now I think you can see why I like character driven stories that are quirky. Humor goes a long way to fill plot holes. So why am I going on about this bizarre quirk of my analytical brain? Because when someone actually pulls one over on me I feel this need to give them a standing ovation. In The English Wife I was so involved in two of the reveals that it's like Lauren smacked me upside the head with the biggest one and I didn't see it coming. At all. Bravo Lauren! It's like there were these shining motes of dust alighting on Bay and his wife and their marital woes and I was linking a to b to c and going ah yes, I see how it is, and yet I didn't see! It was there, looming right around the corner, and it pounced and got me. If Lauren were a lion I would be a goner.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Daphne Du Maurier, Gossip Girl, Hudson Valley, Lauren Willig, Maxim de Winter, Rebecca, Shakespeare, That Summer, The Ashford Affair, The English Wife, The Other Daughter, Twelfth Night, Willig Winter

The second time I went to New York it was more than just a rushed trip tacked onto a family vacation to Washington. The second time was magical, going to all the museums and looking at all the art I'd spent years reading about. During that trip I discovered The Frick Collection, which is located right on fifth avenue and was the home of Henry Clay Frick. It's not just the art that is amazing, though seriously you will be shocked by the number of pieces you recognize from Ingres to Renoir to Vermeer to Rembrandt, but the house itself is a work of art preserved in time. It's like really cheap time travel! You feel as if Edith Wharton were about to hold court over high tea in the luxurious indoor garden. Years later when I went back to New York I discovered the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, which is located in the Andrew Carnegie Mansion. Again I was walking in another era. These homes were built by the New York upper crust as they slowly started moving to the Upper East Side. I was so pleasantly surprised when I picked up Lauren Willig's latest book, The English Wife, to slip back into this world again. A world of excess and elegance, fortunes lost and gained, and secrets, but all contained within this other time. So whether you knew about Lauren Willig's new book yet or not, I think you can feel the theme month coming on right? The English Wife is Lauren's fourth stand-alone and therefore a fourth theme month was not just necessary but vital. It's in another time and another world, but one I hope you've been wanting to explore as much as I have over the years. 

But enough from me, let's hear from Lauren as we welcome in Willig Winter!

"When Miss Eliza asked me if I would recommend six or seven books I’d used in writing The English Wife for a companion read, I thought, easy peasy!

Then I looked at my bookshelf.

I’d forgotten just how much went into The English Wife. My research pile included book-length accounts of infamous murder cases in turn of the century New York (of which there were more than you would expect), oversized coffee table books with pictures of mansions and marquetry and jewels and gowns, extensive histories of Dutch New York, biographies of robber barons, sociological studies of nineteenth century women’s charitable organizations, memoirs of nineteenth century authors and socialites, unpublished dissertations about specific towns in the Hudson Valley in the mid to late nineteenth century, and books on topics that I can’t go into without giving plot twists away.

And that’s just the New York end of things. We won’t even get into all the Newport research, the gossipy accounts of past residents and glossy pictures of “cottages”. A chunk of the book takes place in England and a smaller chunk in France, so I also have shelves and shelves of books on topics like theatre in Victorian England, monographs about Paris in the Belle Epoque, and biographies of Proust. I may have gotten just a little carried away while reading up for this book....

So, in the interest of brevity, I’m sticking to the New York-centric books for this particular list and keeping it to non-fiction. With one exception at the end. You’ll see why.

At some point, I’ll try to put up a more comprehensive list on my website. If I don’t get crushed beneath a giant pile of research books along the way." - Lauren Willig

Literally the seven books Lauren has selected look beyond tempting, but in the interest of full disclosure, unlike Ashford April (The Asford Affair), This Summer (That Summer), and Jazzy July (The Other Daughter), I have been unable to read them all and write reviews because this year has been a personal as well as a global dumpster fire. But my guilt is your reward, because this means I feel obliged to do a giveaway!  

Giveaway Prize:
A copy of The English Wife personalized TO YOU from Lauren's tour stop at Murder by the Book in Houston on January 17th, 2018

The Rules:
1. Open to EVERYONE (for clarification, this means international too).

2. Please make sure I have a way to contact you if your name is drawn, either your blogger profile or a link to your website/blog or you could even include your email address with your comment(s) or email me.

3. Giveaway ends Sunday, December 31st at 11:59PM CST (Yes, that's New Year's Eve folks!)

4. How to enter: Just comment on this post for a chance to win!

5. And for those addicted to getting extra entries:

• +1 for answering the question: What is your favorite house turned museum?
• +2 for becoming a follower
• +10 if you are already a follower
• +10 for each time you advertise this contest - blog post, instagram (@miss.eliza), twitter (@eliza_lefebvre), etc. (but you only get credit for the first post in each platform, so tweet all you like, and I thank you for it, but you'll only get the +10 once from twitter). Also please leave a link! 
• +10 for each comment you leave on other Willig Winter posts with something other than "I hope I win!" 

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 7 comments  

Labels: Ashford April, Cooper Hewitt, Edith Wharton, Giveaway, Jazzy July, Lauren Willig, New York, That Summer, The Ashford Affair, The English Wife, The Frick, The Other Daughter, This Summer, Willig Winter

The Other Daughter by Lauren Willig
ARC Provided by the Publisher
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: July 21st, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

Rachael Woodley has spent seven long years on the continent away from her beloved mother working as a governess. Rachael wanted to take a typing course and work as a secretary but her mother thought that was too modern. Perhaps if Rachael had been a secretary she would have gotten to her mother's sickbed in time to be there when she died. Rachael is unmoored by her mother's passing. They had a poor if peaceful life after Rachael's father died and they moved to the little village of Netherwell. But now that life is forever shut to her. The landlord wants Rachael gone, yet where is she to go? In her mother's sickroom she finds something perplexing. It's a clipping from a recent newspaper showing her father. But not her father as she remembers him, but her father as he would be now if he had never died. That isn't possible! Her father died, he's not Lord Ardmore, the man escorting his daughter Olivia, but a botanist who died an ocean away. But it looks like him... and she can't let it drop. Going to her only relative, her cousin David, she learns that it is indeed her father in the clipping. He has another life and she is nothing more than a by-blow. David asks his friend, the gossip columnist Simon Montfort, to escort the by now distraught Rachael to her train. Instead Rachael and Simon concoct an elaborate plan wherein Rachael will infiltrate the ranks of the Bright Young Things as a Vera Merton in order to accost her wayward father. But things rarely go as planned and soon the glittering world Rachael has been thrust into is a welcome distraction from the truth of her life which she would sooner forget.

Having spent the better part of the last year re-reading Lauren's oeuvre, I think I'm uniquely qualified to praise her third stand-alone. While I won't say it's my favorite of her books, that would be too hard to choose, I will unreservedly say that I think The Other Daughter is Lauren's most accomplished book to date. While I was one of Lauren's readers championing her use of a modern framing device in her Pink Carnation series, I think that carrying this device into her non-Pink books had made the these new books feel too much like the rest of her writing. While there are many authors who have never broken free of this convention, Kate Morton comes to mind, I feel that this framing had become a crutch for Lauren and was holding her back. By getting ride of this prop she has freed herself to concentrate all her energy on the one story. This made her narrative stronger and gave her the ability to have more depth, insight, and heart. I'm not trying to denigrate her other books, which I love, but sometimes a story is best served by just living in the moment and not thinking about what the future holds. Often a modern narrator limits the ability of the storytelling by being the definitive end point. The story must end in such and such a way because we've seen the future. Sometimes not knowing, sometimes having the happily ever after be a ship sailing off into the sunset is what a story needs, instead of ancestors picking over the past.

The 1920s have always fascinated me, but as for the literature of the time and the people who characterized this bright, young, and lost generation, my wheelhouse was limited to those in the Mitford circle, thus including Evelyn Waugh and his cronies. Having spent "Jazzy July" reading the books that sparked Lauren's imagination I now have this new insight into the 1920s and its trailblazers. What is wonderful about Lauren is she knows her history and knows when to tweak it. But she also knows how to artfully drop in a cameo or two without having it overpower the narrative. Brian Howard, Evelyn Waugh, even Tallulah Bankhead make amusing appearances, but they are limited to fully realized furniture. They add to the experience but never take over the plot. But more than that, they also don't feel gratuitous. Sometimes a historical cameo can feel trite. Here's Tesla just because I wanted Tesla to wander in. Lauren over the years has developed a knack for just how the historical cameo should work in her writing, and I can think of no better example than here. The pinnacle of her achievement is at the famous Impersonation Party of 1927, where people all came as each other. Not only do we get the cameos, but the swirling whirling world that Rachel has been moving in is captured perfectly in this one scene that while historically accurate could also be straight out of Alice in Wonderland. 

Reading so many books of this period makes you realize the flaw in this generation. They burned bright and fast and if someone was left by the wayside, well, they burned out and were forgotten. There was a pain that was masked and glossed over. The majority of these people were too young for the Great War, but they lived ever in it's shadows. Instead of acknowledging this pain, instead of self-analysis, they just partied harder and louder. I can think of no better example then the two startling deaths that happen in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. Two characters die, rather horrifically, one by his own hand, and never once do the characters mourn. They just party on. This, more than anything, made it hard for me to connect to some of the books. I am not callous. If someone dies, even in fiction, they should make an impact. And not to put too fine a point on it, Evelyn's work was nothing more then writing what he saw, so those deaths did happen, that callousness did exist. And that's what makes The Other Daughter so much more. Comparing Lauren's book to the literature of the day you see the depth and insight, you see that Lauren isn't masking the pain, she is exploring it. Simon suffered horribly during the war and his unburdening himself to Rachel is such a real and true connection in a time of shallow characters that you connect to these characters and this book in a way you never could to other books of that period. Lauren has taken a shallow world and made it lush and dimensional.

Looking to the zeitgeist of the 20s I can think of no better way to sum up this generation then by saying these are people who have never grown up. They haven't and won't take on responsibility and therefore live in a suspended childhood. Waugh chose a quote from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There to begin Vile Bodies. Though Waugh's reason for choosing it had more to do with the logic of the set he found himself it. The nonsensical parties, the backward logic, that is what Waugh saw in this book. But I dearly hope that he was aware of the other implications this quote gives, that of people forever trapped in childhood. Lauren expands on this other aspect of this generation not just by quoting Carroll, but by bringing in other fairy tales and children's stories. "Hansel and Gretel" is the fairy tale that is most alluded to. This story is not only appropriate for the Bright Young People, but for Rachel as well. Hansel and Gretel were set loose in the wilderness by their father and wicked stepmother because of the poverty they found themselves in. Before Rachel has all the facts of her situation this is exactly how she views her life as she now knows it. She was abandoned for money. Her father unceremoniously tossed her aside to get the better wife with the rich coffers and the two perfect heirs. You can see the appeal to Rachel to go back to a time when she didn't know the truth, back to a childhood of happiness. That is why she is able to slip in among the Bright Young People so well, she has the same desires, but in the end knows she must grow up.

Much like Lauren's previous stand-alone, That Summer, The Other Daughter is about finding your place in the world, a place to belong. Your family isn't necessarily the one you are born with but the one you find. Rachel's childhood, while missing a father, wasn't sad, she made a family in her small town with the Vicar and his daughter Alice. But on discovering what she knew to be a lie Rachael needs to build a new life for herself. She needs to find her new family, and much of that is tied up with Simon. Simon is a refreshing hero. For once I was very happy not to have access to his inner workings. I didn't want to know what he thought, I liked him as a little bit of an enigma. He has a past that must be uncovered so that he can grow and be willing to return to his family. Because the truth about families are they are messy. No one is perfect, as we see with Rachel, she wants revenge, she wants to hurt her father, even though she knows it's wrong. As we work through this with her we see that she is building the future she will inhabit. She inspires Simon to fix his life and then there's a place for her there. I don't think it's so much the shock of her father being alive that jars Rachael, it's that she had her place in the world and this knowledge changes that. She must struggle through this new information to find the place where she now belongs. We all struggle to find that place. The greatest thing fiction can do is show us that this is possible.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 1920s, Alice in Wonderland, Bright Young Things, Evelyn Waugh, Jazzy July, Kate Morton, Lauren Willig, Pink Carnation, Rachael Woodley, Simon Montfort, That Summer, The Other Daughter, Vile Bodies

The Other Daughter by Lauren Willig
ARC Provided by the Publisher
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: July 21st, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

Rachael Woodley has spent seven long years on the continent away from her beloved mother working as a governess. Rachael wanted to take a typing course and work as a secretary but her mother thought that was too modern. Perhaps if Rachael had been a secretary she would have gotten to her mother's sickbed in time to be there when she died. Rachael is unmoored by her mother's passing. They had a poor if peaceful life after Rachael's father died and they moved to the little village of Netherwell. But now that life is forever shut to her. The landlord wants Rachael gone, yet where is she to go? In her mother's sickroom she finds something perplexing. It's a clipping from a recent newspaper showing her father. But not her father as she remembers him, but her father as he would be now if he had never died. That isn't possible! Her father died, he's not Lord Ardmore, the man escorting his daughter Olivia, but a botanist who died an ocean away. But it looks like him... and she can't let it drop. Going to her only relative, her cousin David, she learns that it is indeed her father in the clipping. He has another life and she is nothing more than a by-blow. David asks his friend, the gossip columnist Simon Montfort, to escort the by now distraught Rachael to her train. Instead Rachael and Simon concoct an elaborate plan wherein Rachael will infiltrate the ranks of the Bright Young Things as a Vera Merton in order to accost her wayward father. But things rarely go as planned and soon the glittering world Rachael has been thrust into is a welcome distraction from the truth of her life which she would sooner forget.  

Having spent the better part of the last year re-reading Lauren's oeuvre, I think I'm uniquely qualified to praise her third stand-alone. While I won't say it's my favorite of her books, that would be too hard to choose, I will unreservedly say that I think The Other Daughter is Lauren's most accomplished book to date. While I was one of Lauren's readers championing her use of a modern framing device in her Pink Carnation series, I think that carrying this device into her non-Pink books had made the these new books feel too much like the rest of her writing. While there are many authors who have never broken free of this convention, Kate Morton comes to mind, I feel that this framing had become a crutch for Lauren and was holding her back. By getting ride of this prop she has freed herself to concentrate all her energy on the one story. This made her narrative stronger and gave her the ability to have more depth, insight, and heart. I'm not trying to denigrate her other books, which I love, but sometimes a story is best served by just living in the moment and not thinking about what the future holds. Often a modern narrator limits the ability of the storytelling by being the definitive end point. The story must end in such and such a way because we've seen the future. Sometimes not knowing, sometimes having the happily ever after be a ship sailing off into the sunset is what a story needs, instead of ancestors picking over the past.

The 1920s have always fascinated me, but as for the literature of the time and the people who characterized this bright, young, and lost generation, my wheelhouse was limited to those in the Mitford circle, thus including Evelyn Waugh and his cronies. Having spent "Jazzy July" reading the books that sparked Lauren's imagination I now have this new insight into the 1920s and its trailblazers. What is wonderful about Lauren is she knows her history and knows when to tweak it. But she also knows how to artfully drop in a cameo or two without having it overpower the narrative. Brian Howard, Evelyn Waugh, even Tallulah Bankhead make amusing appearances, but they are limited to fully realized furniture. They add to the experience but never take over the plot. But more than that, they also don't feel gratuitous. Sometimes a historical cameo can feel trite. Here's Tesla just because I wanted Tesla to wander in. Lauren over the years has developed a knack for just how the historical cameo should work in her writing, and I can think of no better example than here. The pinnacle of her achievement is at the famous Impersonation Party of 1927, where people all came as each other. Not only do we get the cameos, but the swirling whirling world that Rachel has been moving in is captured perfectly in this one scene that while historically accurate could also be straight out of Alice in Wonderland.

Reading so many books of this period makes you realize the flaw in this generation. They burned bright and fast and if someone was left by the wayside, well, they burned out and were forgotten. There was a pain that was masked and glossed over. The majority of these people were too young for the Great War, but they lived ever in it's shadows. Instead of acknowledging this pain, instead of self-analysis, they just partied harder and louder. I can think of no better example then the two startling deaths that happen in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. Two characters die, rather horrifically, one by his own hand, and never once do the characters mourn. They just party on. This, more than anything, made it hard for me to connect to some of the books. I am not callous. If someone dies, even in fiction, they should make an impact. And not to put too fine a point on it, Evelyn's work was nothing more then writing what he saw, so those deaths did happen, that callousness did exist. And that's what makes The Other Daughter so much more. Comparing Lauren's book to the literature of the day you see the depth and insight, you see that Lauren isn't masking the pain, she is exploring it. Simon suffered horribly during the war and his unburdening himself to Rachel is such a real and true connection in a time of shallow characters that you connect to these characters and this book in a way you never could to other books of that period. Lauren has taken a shallow world and made it lush and dimensional.

Looking to the zeitgeist of the 20s I can think of no better way to sum up this generation then by saying these are people who have never grown up. They haven't and won't take on responsibility and therefore live in a suspended childhood. Waugh chose a quote from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There to begin Vile Bodies. Though Waugh's reason for choosing it had more to do with the logic of the set he found himself it. The nonsensical parties, the backward logic, that is what Waugh saw in this book. But I dearly hope that he was aware of the other implications this quote gives, that of people forever trapped in childhood. Lauren expands on this other aspect of this generation not just by quoting Carroll, but by bringing in other fairy tales and children's stories. "Hansel and Gretel" is the fairy tale that is most alluded to. This story is not only appropriate for the Bright Young People, but for Rachel as well. Hansel and Gretel were set loose in the wilderness by their father and wicked stepmother because of the poverty they found themselves in. Before Rachel has all the facts of her situation this is exactly how she views her life as she now knows it. She was abandoned for money. Her father unceremoniously tossed her aside to get the better wife with the rich coffers and the two perfect heirs. You can see the appeal to Rachel to go back to a time when she didn't know the truth, back to a childhood of happiness. That is why she is able to slip in among the Bright Young People so well, she has the same desires, but in the end knows she must grow up.

Much like Lauren's previous stand-alone, That Summer, The Other Daughter is about finding your place in the world, a place to belong. Your family isn't necessarily the one you are born with but the one you find. Rachel's childhood, while missing a father, wasn't sad, she made a family in her small town with the Vicar and his daughter Alice. But on discovering what she knew to be a lie Rachael needs to build a new life for herself. She needs to find her new family, and much of that is tied up with Simon. Simon is a refreshing hero. For once I was very happy not to have access to his inner workings. I didn't want to know what he thought, I liked him as a little bit of an enigma. He has a past that must be uncovered so that he can grow and be willing to return to his family. Because the truth about families are they are messy. No one is perfect, as we see with Rachel, she wants revenge, she wants to hurt her father, even though she knows it's wrong. As we work through this with her we see that she is building the future she will inhabit. She inspires Simon to fix his life and then there's a place for her there. I don't think it's so much the shock of her father being alive that jars Rachael, it's that she had her place in the world and this knowledge changes that. She must struggle through this new information to find the place where she now belongs. We all struggle to find that place. The greatest thing fiction can do is show us that this is possible.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 1920s, Alice in Wonderland, Bright Young Things, Evelyn Waugh, Jazzy July, Kate Morton, Lauren Willig, Pink Carnation, Rachael Woodley, Simon Montfort, That Summer, The Other Daughter, Vile Bodies

Marrying the Captain by Carla Kelly
Published by: Harlequin Historical
Publication Date: December 1st, 2008
Format: Kindle, 288 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

"One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn’t belong…. 

A Regency romance in a list of 1920s and 30s novels? It may look out of place, but there’s a reason, I promise. Bizarrely enough, this Carla Kelly novel is where The Other Daughter began. Way back in spring 2013, as I was great with child and finishing up revisions on That Summer and vaguely contemplating beginning The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla, I took a break by reading a novel my friend Vicki had just sent me. It wasn’t meant to have anything to do with my own work. It was just for fun. But the book happened to be about the illegitimate daughter of a viscount, living in poverty with her grandmother, who discovered, rather belatedly, that she had sisters.

I couldn’t stop my mind churning over it. How would it feel to learn, out of the blue, that you were the daughter of a viscount? How would that affect your idea of who you were? What would it be to be, by blood, the highest of the high, but, by birth, the lowest of the low? And how would it feel to suddenly learn that you had siblings? What if the viscount wasn’t evil? What if it wasn’t the Regency, but the 1920s? What if….

The next day, I sent an email to my editor, telling her I knew what I was going to write next. And here we are!" - Lauren Willig

Nana and her grandmother are just scrapping by running an inn in Portsmouth. Not located directly on the water, they rarely have guests and it's even more rare that they have full stomachs. Nana could have had a comfortable life, she was educated at a private academy in Bath by her father. But little did she know that this education of his by-blow was so that he could sell her off to the highest bidder when she was of age. He doesn't know why she would choose a life of penury instead of being a well placed mistress. But Lord Ratliffe is still curious about his illegitimate Nana. Perhaps she just might be desperate enough now that it's been a few years to agree to his original terms and as an added bonus help with his debts. To judge the lay of the land he asks one of the Captains in the Royal Navy who reports to him, Captain Oliver Worthy, to stay at Nana's inn while he's in Portsmouth waiting for his ship to be overhauled. He agrees and Captain Worthy's arrival heralds a new dawn and new prosperity for the inn. It also signals a change in Captain Worthy, the one man vowed never to marry least he brings sorrow to someone he loves. It is a harsh life at sea, and during a time of war it is even more dangerous. He falls hard for Nana and she for him. But will their love be thwarted by Napoleon, by Lord Ratliffe, or by the vicissitudes of fate? Only time will tell.    

I'm not a straight up romance girl. This has happened, more likely then not, by being around two women my entire life, my mother and paternal grandmother, who loved mysteries and if they veered even a little into romance they would deride the book till the end of days. NEVER get my mother started on J.D. Robb, aka Nora Roberts. Therefore I've never delved into romance, I've skated around the edges with historical fiction, but this was my first foray into a book published by that behemoth of the romance genre, Harlequin. And it is not what I expected. At All. It wasn't bodice ripping and corsets being flung to the floor. I mean, yes, it had sex, but nothing that racy. It was escapism in the extreme with everything being seen through this rose tinted haze where even poverty wasn't that onerous. Marrying the Captain was all about wish fulfillment and fantasy and this was just something I couldn't take. This unreality that jarred me so much went beyond saccharine. Everyone was just so dang good and earnest and unrealistic that there was no way I was buying any of it. I am not the kind of person who can read a book that is so completely fantastical, even fantasy has to have that harsh underlying of reality to make a connection with me. Really, a unicorn wandering the streets of Plymouth would have been more realistic then half of what happens in this book. By the end of the book my teeth hurt from this sugarcoated story and unless someone tells me this book is an aberration in the romance genre I don't think I'll be picking up a Harlequin book in the near or distant future.

Oddly enough, despite my dislike of the ludicrous plot, that wasn't what annoyed me the most. Let's talk about names. Names are important. Very important. To a fairy a name could be your or their undoing. To a reader, a bad name can be the game changer between a good book and a laughable book. This, this isn't a good book, which I think I've already established. Therefore we are left with a laughable book. Why is it so laughable? Well, perhaps because the heroine's name is Nana. Um, yeah. So, you're writing a romance book and you think, what's a good name? Nana should NEVER be on this list. NEVER. And it REALLY shouldn't be used when that heroine lives with her grandmother. Because, really, it sounds like there's two grandmother's in the house, or inn in this case. Plus, Nana screamed out in passion? Laughable. Maybe Kelly was trying to be atypical, but if this was the case, it's not working. Or maybe she was trying to go for a name that conveyed the heroine's personality, Nana is short for nursery maid, and Nana nurses Oliver back to health... OK, I'm stretching credulity, I can't even buy that and I just wrote it. I think Kelly is the Australian version of "nana" to use this name in her book. So you don't have to look it up, that means crazy. Plus, Nana's full name, Nana Massey... don't impugn the name of the greatest Miss Marple ever played by Anna Massey! Just don't.

To continue with the naming of characters I want to talk about seeing my last name in print. My last name is Lefebvre. Rarely do I see it used in books spelled the EXACT same way as I spell it. Needless to say, I know a lot about the history of my last name and it's very obvious that Kelly does not. In fact, I'd say she's completely ignorant about the name Lefebvre and that she did absolutely no research whatsoever and yes, this is me calling her out! Just because she wanted to make a link to the less important French general Lefebvre-Desnouettes doesn't mean she can then do no research on the name Lefebvre! In fact, I think it means she must do research, or at least the basics. The first big ugh moment was when the painter Henri Lefebvre told Nana how to say his name. "Le...feb...vre...Ah, yes. You purse your lips as though you were going to kiss some lucky gentleman." NO! No no and no! Firstly, the "B" is ALWAYS SILENT! ALWAYS! Even said with a French accent it is silent. Either it is Americanized and said "le...fave" or it's said as it is in it's country of origin, which is "le...fev...rah." Do you see a freakin' "B"? Because I sure as hell do not. And when you say it this way are you pursing your lips? NO! I dare anyone who reads this to try to say "Fave" or "Rah" while seductively pursing your lips. It can't be done. Especially on the "Rah" which is more a war cry then anything else. If I had liked or bought into anything previous to this incident in the book I would have been alienated instantly by the authors ignorance, which actually goes even further if you can imagine it. She states that Lefebvre must be a very uncommon name in France and therefore Henri and the French general must be related. While yes, most Lefebvres are related, the name Lefebvre is basically Smith. Would you call Smith an uncommon name? Nope.

Now I just want to rant about something in this rather ranty review that has always bothered me and is a plot point in this book, and that's women's hair. Why is long hair in woman so important? In The Gift of the Magi the cutting off of her long luscious tresses is something akin to a crime and is seen as the final marker of how desperate she is. Even Jo in Little Women has her hair wept over. Seriously, it's just hair people! IT GROWS BACK! It doesn't contain a magical life force! In fact, I like my hair short. Long hair is annoying and oh so very very heavy. When my hair is long it literally weighs around six pounds. Six pounds pulling on my head. Why would anyone want this? Is this more male bullshit that they like long hair? Because then it's just another standard of beauty that I just can't get behind. You know who needed my hair more then me? That kid with Cancer who I donated my hair to. Plus it's hot in summer and gets in the way if you want less altruistic reasons. Also, I want to make a bigger point beyond women being defined by their hair and that historically short hair was coming into vogue at the time this book is set. Therefore Nana's short hair wouldn't have been all that tragic. In fact it would have been chic. Instead we get everyone talking about it's loss and that very creepy scene where Oliver goes to the wigmakers and fondles her cut locks. Women shouldn't be defined by hair and they definitely should avoid men who fondle their hair when it's no longer attached to their scalp. This isn't romantic, this is pathological. This is serial killer in the making. This is creepy.

Finally, let's talk about sex. Sex is quite common in books nowadays. So it makes it easier to judge a good sex scene from a bad one. Nana and Oliver's wedding night should be romantic, tender, sweet, it should, going with the rest of this book's saccharine sweetness, instead it's perfunctory and all about male fulfillment. I'm sorry, say what? There's only one deduction that can be taken away from this and that if this book is female wish fulfilment incarnate then all women want to do is satisfy their men and their needs don't matter. Um, again, a resounding no. Is this book secretly written by a man? Because the sex scene sure doesn't come across as written by a woman with a woman's needs. One of the reasons for years I think I shied away from Harlequin books was this idea that all it would be is sex. For me books need many layers and sex is just one of them. But apparently I had nothing to be worried about. If this is the standard of love making, well, I can get racier stuff in fiction... and far more satisfying if that's what you're looking for. Marrying the Captain though is just one big tangled mess of dissatisfaction. Disgruntled reader and reviewer here, please send quality reading material STAT!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Hair, Harlequin, Jazzy July, Lauren Willig, Lefebvre, Little Women, Marrying the Captain, Nana, Napoleon, Regency, Sex, Ships, That Summer, The Gift of the Magi, The Other Daughter

So my literary love of Lauren Willig should by now be fairly obvious. Even if I didn't have two months this year devoted to her books, as well as the year long Pink for All Seasons re-read that has been going on since last September, I hope my previous efforts haven't been overlooked by my readers. Back when Lauren first said her third stand-alone would be set in the 20s I might have gotten more then a little excited. The 20s is an era that I just have a natural affinity for. Perhaps it's because I was raised on stories of my grandmother in her youth being a rebellious flapper and sneaking out of school only to show up in a cell in Chicago after being detained after a raid on a local speakeasy. Or perhaps that mobsters held a special appeal. What started as a love for a distinctly American era has grown more and more to encompass the unique "Bright Young People" era of England. Therefore, even if the two previous theme months dedicated to Lauren's first two stand-alones, Ashford April and This Summer, didn't exist, well, Jazzy July would have happened. I also illogically insist that her publishers knew of my struggle trying to find a good title for my theme month when the book was slated for a May release and moved it back just so Jazzy July could exist. I did say it was illogical.

What I love about doing these specific theme months is that it gives me insight into Lauren's process and into her finished work. I shoot her an email and she shoots me an email back suggesting books to read that inspired or informed her newest book. I narrow the selection down, in this case a nice balance of biographical, historical, and contemporary books, and give her the final list, she writes a little something about them, and then I sit down and devour them, ending in a review. This year I decided to do something a little different. Usually I sit down, read Lauren's book, write the review, then go on to read all the other books, because I don't want any outside source tainting my reading of Lauren's book. But the last two times I did this I noticed that re-reading the book later after having read these other books gave Lauren's book even greater depth. And in the case of The Ashford Affair, I feel like I might have done the book a disservice with my review. So I had a new idea. I've read The Other Daughter, I mean, seriously, there was no waiting on reading that book. BUT as I write this I have still to write my review. I jotted down notes and have a vague outline, but so it will remain until I read all the other books for this month. I then plan on re-reading The Other Daughter and finally writing my review. Personally, I don't think in this instance my opinion is going to change, but I do feel my understanding of the world Lauren has brought back to life already expanding. This is going to be a fun month and I hope you'll join me. Flapper costume optional. Mainly because I don't think I could fit the one I have anymore.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Ashford April, Bright Young People, Chicago, Flappers, Jazzy July, Lauren Willig, Pink for All Seasons, Stand-Alones, That Summer, The Ashford Affair, The Other Daughter, Theme Month, This Summer

Illusionarium by Heather Dixon
Published by: Greenwillow Books
Publication Date: May 19th, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 368 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"What if the world holds more dangers—and more wonders—than we have ever known? And what if there is more than one world? From Heather Dixon, author of the acclaimed Entwined, comes a brilliantly conceived adventure that sweeps us from the inner workings of our souls to the far reaches of our imaginations.

Jonathan is perfectly ordinary. But then—as every good adventure begins—the king swoops into port, and Jonathan and his father are enlisted to find the cure to a deadly plague. Jonathan discovers that he's a prodigy at working with a new chemical called fantillium, which creates shared hallucinations—or illusions. And just like that, Jonathan is knocked off his path. Through richly developed parallel worlds, vivid action, a healthy dose of humor, and gorgeous writing, Heather Dixon spins a story that calls to mind The Night Circus and Pixar movies, but is wholly its own."

OK, yes, perhaps I'm hoping to find the next Night Circus...

The Hanged Man by P.N. Elrod
Published by: Tor Books
Publication Date: May 19th, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 336 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"On a freezing Christmas Eve in 1879, a forensic psychic reader is summoned from her Baker Street lodgings to the scene of a questionable death. Alexandrina Victoria Pendlebury (named after her godmother, the current Queen of England) is adamant that the death in question is a magically compromised murder and not a suicide, as the police had assumed, after the shocking revelation contained by the body in question, Alex must put her personal loss aside to uncover the deeper issues at stake, before more bodies turn up.

Turning to some choice allies--the handsome, prescient Lieutenant Brooks, the brilliant, enigmatic Lord Desmond, and her rapscallion cousin James--Alex will have to marshal all of her magical and mental acumen to save Queen and Country from a shadowy threat. Our singular heroine is caught up in this rousing gaslamp adventure of cloaked assassins, meddlesome family, and dark magic.

"Murder, mayhem and tea--a well-bred Victorian urban fantasy thriller. Prepare, o reader, to be enthralled."--Patricia Briggs, #1 New York Times Best Selling Author of the Mercy Thompson series on P.N. Elrod's The Hanged Man."

Patricia Briggs recommends, well I must listen!

That Summer by Lauren Willig
Published by: St. Martin's Griffin
Publication Date: May 19th, 2015
Format: Papervack, 368 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"2009: When Julia Conley hears that she has inherited a house outside London from an unknown great-aunt, she assumes it's a joke. She hasn't been back to England since the car crash that killed her mother when she was six, an event she remembers only in her nightmares. But when she arrives at Herne Hill to sort through the house--with the help of her cousin Natasha and sexy antiques dealer Nicholas--bits of memory start coming back. And then she discovers a pre-Raphaelite painting, hidden behind the false back of an old wardrobe, and a window onto the house's shrouded history begins to open...

1849: Imogen Grantham has spent nearly a decade trapped in a loveless marriage to a much older man, Arthur. The one bright spot in her life is her step-daughter, Evie, a high-spirited sixteen year old who is the closest thing to a child Imogen hopes to have. But everything changes when three young painters come to see Arthur's collection of medieval artifacts, including Gavin Thorne, a quiet man with the unsettling ability to read Imogen better than anyone ever has. When Arthur hires Gavin to paint her portrait, none of them can guess what the hands of fate have set in motion.From modern-day England to the early days of the Preraphaelite movement, Lauren Willig's That Summer takes readers on an un-put-downable journey through a mysterious old house, a hidden love affair, and one woman's search for the truth about her past--and herself."

The original cover I don't think did justice to the awesomeness of this book. I approve of this new cover!

Sidney Chambers and The Forgiveness of Sins by James Runcie
Published by: Bloomsbury USA
Publication Date: May 19th, 2015
Format: Paperback, 416 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"The loveable full-time priest and part-time detective, Canon Sidney Chambers, continues his sleuthing adventures in 1960's Cambridge. On a snowy Thursday morning in Lent 1964, a stranger seeks sanctuary in Grantchester's church, convinced he has murdered his wife. Sidney and his wife Hildegard go for a shooting weekend in the country and find their hostess has a sinister burn on her neck. Sidney's friend Amanda receives poison pen letters when at last she appears to be approaching matrimony. A firm of removal men 'accidentally' drop a Steinway piano on a musician's head outside a Cambridge college. During a cricket match, a group of schoolboys blow up their school Science Block. On a family holiday in Florence, Sidney is accused of the theft of a priceless painting.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Sidney's new curate Malcolm seems set to become rather irritatingly popular with the parish; his baby girl Anna learns to walk and talk; Hildegard longs to get an au pair and Sidney is offered a promotion.

Entertaining, suspenseful, thoughtful, moving and deeply humane, these six new stories are bound to delight the clerical detective's many fans."

For any of the Grantchester withdrawal ills, from missing the show or needing a new book, this will help with what ails you!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Grantchester, Heather Dixon, Her Majesty's Psychic Service, Illusionarium, James Runcie, Lauren Willig, P.N. Elrod, Sidney Chambers and The Forgiveness of Sins, That Summer, The Hanged Man, The Night Circus

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
Published by: Oxford University Press
Publication Date: 1848
Format: Hardcover, 486 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Wildfell Hall has a new resident. A mysterious widow and her young son who want nothing to do with the outside world. The outside world disagrees. The nosey neighbors must know everything they can about the mysterious Mrs. Graham. Young Gilbert Markham wants to know everything but for a very different reason, he is inexorably drawn to the young widow and cannot understand why she remains aloof and detached, craving solitude over companionship and love. But soon Helen Graham realizes that her feelings for Gilbert mean that she must disclose her past so that he can move on and realize their love is doomed, and not just because her husband isn't dead.

Mrs. Helen Graham is really Mrs. Helen Huntington, the wife of a cruel man who has more vices then she could enumerate. She has fled her husband because he was trying to imprint their your son with his own dubious morals.  Helen could have suffered anything if it was just herself that was the target of Huntongton's malice, she stubbornly married him after all, but their son is another matter. After years of feeling trapped and hunted in her own home, can she remake her life, or will the old one haunt her?

Sometimes I am a very contrary person, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a case in point. Instead of reading the book before watching the miniseries I decided to watch the miniseries first which then put me off the book. For some reason I view the steadfast rule of reading the book first not applying to the Brontes. I had seen so many adaptations of their books prior to ever picking one up that they are grandfathered into my weird reading habits with this clause. Yet I still question how an adaptation with Toby Stephens and James Purefoy, not to mention Rupert Graves, Pam Ferris, and Paloma Baeza, could be so bad. It was dull and lifeless and I remember barely being able to finish it.

The miniseries turned me off the book and because of this the book has languished for years waiting for the time when I would pick it up and love it. I seriously can not think of any reasonable excuse why it took me this long to read it. I was under so many misconceptions about this book that I should have just trusted to my gut which tells me that Anne Bronte is awesome. I am serious when I say that I think Anne might just be my favorite Bronte. This isn't just me routing for the underdog, though she is the least embraced of the sisters, this is totally to do with how awesome her books are.

There's a part of me that knows Anne's desire for "truth" in this novel comes from a desire to counter the pro bad boy image her sisters had created in their works. But there's a deeper part of me that wonders if she's not just messing with Charlotte and Emily a little. Who, given the chance, wouldn't try to mess with their siblings a little? Her sisters did everything to make this bad boy redeemable by love trope and then in comes Anne and blasts them out of the water. Huntington is a bad boy to equal Heathcliff and Rochester, but love is unable to sway him. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is an opus to the irredeemable. I can just picture the sisters sitting around their fireplace on a cold night in Haworth talking about their dream men and Anne just looking askance at them and plotting how to prove them wrong, preferably in three volumes, she was, after all, a silent plotter. I don't think anyone has ever summed this up better then Kate Beaton in her "Hark, a Vagrant" comic, "Dude Watchin' with The Brontes" so I won't attempt to and move onto other things.

So, other things! What I find amazing in this book, and in fact all the work by the Brontes, is how they were able to capture an entire world from outside their cloistered lives and put it on the page. It just goes to show that sometimes writing what you know isn't the only answer, but writing what you feel is. Over a hundred and fifty years later this book pulses with life. It was criticized at the time for being too repulsive and scandalous, but that is why it resonates till this day. It is the truth of human nature and fallibility that Anne sought out to capture and did. Infidelity, adultery, drugs, drink, games of chance, everything not written about in literature of it's day that still causes so much heartbreak.

The degraded life that Helen lives made me connect to her because, not only did I pity her, I worried that she wouldn't make it out of this situation, ironic because having watched the miniseries I knew the outcome, but still I worried. But as to the debauchery, one problem I have always had and mentioned repeatedly in literature set during this time is the overuse of the Hellfire Club. It seems if you are debauched during the Regency or early Victorian eras you therefore have to belong to some incarnation of said Hellfire Club. But here I make an exception. Usually the Hellfire Club is just a trope used by modern writers, as in those still currently writing. Think of the spunk it took for a little ex governess to allude to the Hellfire Club in a book written in 1848! You Anne Bronte are the exception that proves the rule! When you wrote those few lines alluding to fire and brimstone it was not yet hackneyed, it was controversial. I wish I could tell you how much you mean to me and literature, this poorly written review will have to suffice.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Anne Bronte, BBC Miniseries, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Emily Bronte, Hark a Vagrant, Hellfire Club, James Purefoy, Mary Barton, That Summer, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, This Summer, Toby Stephens

That Summer by Lauren Willig
ARC Provided by the Publisher
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: June 3rd, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

Julia Conley has inherited a house in England. A house on Herne Hill has been left to her by an unknown great-aunt. Julia and her father left England when she was six and her mother was killed in a car crash. Since her life in New York hasn't been going that well lately as one of the many unemployed, she decides to go to England and spend a few months sorting out the house and hopefully sorting out her life. For Julia who has viewed her family as just her and her father she finds it hard to come to gripes with the fact that this was where her mother came from and she still has family here with a few cousins, who of course feel slighted with great-aunt Regina's will. The more time Julia spends in the house the more she wishes she had been given the chance to know her great-aunt.

For Regina might have held the key to a lovely Pre-Raphaelite painting in one of the rooms of the house, which has a matching painting hidden deep at the back of one of the cupboards. Why was the one painting displayed and the other hidden? Who is this artist Gavin Thorne? Going back to 1849 we learn about the painter Gavin Thorne and his muse, Imogen Grantham, who happened to be the mistress of the house on Herne Hill and married to a wealthy and significantly older collector who was occasionally visited by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who doted on his historical relics. Yet why hide the painting? What connection does this painter and this wife have to Julia? More importantly, after 160 years can Julia find out?

Sometimes life is staggering in it's synchronicity. The very day that I received That Summer in the mail my Great-Aunt Vicki died. My family got the call that she had passed in her sleep and that the rest of the family was to descend on Madison to take care of her estate. My Great-Aunt was the last of the older generation, being preceded in death by all my Grandparents and even an Uncle. While sadly I have never been bequeathed a mysterious house, because she was the last of that generation I have gotten quite used to clearing out ancestral homes, my Grandparents farm having accumulated over a hundred years worth of ephemera, with sadly not a rare painting or a secret stash of cash in sight, but a random piano being used as a tool bench and much mouse effluvia. As I spent the following weeks sifting through the rooms of her house, picking what to keep and what to give away, I couldn't help but think of all the things I don't know about my family and where I come from. There is a strong ancestry bug that my family has, but I have not yet been bitten, and there's a part of me that keeps thinking, better now before it's too late.

The detritus is all we have left of our family's history. Random paintings around the house, Aunt so and so painted this, Cousin so and so did that one; just what if the painting was something more? What if the painting was a closely guarded secret that would unlock some mystery about yourself? The search for your own identity is caught up in the past, in where you come from. While Julia's search for what happened in her own past with her mother as well as to her ancestor's is something that might be uncommon, the search is something we can all identify with. Lauren has tapped into something deep within everyone, a longing to know where they're from in order to find out where they belong. This gives us a strong connection to the characters, we are on their journey with them and I wouldn't want it any other way.

While the time slip genre is nothing new, Lauren is able to create a more accessible story then some authors who mire their books in overly flowery details and descriptions that go on for so many pages you lose the thread of the story. This isn't to say the writing is sparse, it's exactly what it needs to be to conjure this world, no more and no less. Though there is a part of me that wishes at some time in the future Lauren would go all out and write a doorstop of a novel. Yet in Lauren's time slip she is able to capture the best of all worlds, with a little Kate Morton, a little Somewhere in Time, a nod to Du Maurier's Rebecca, a Keats Bridget Jones call out with a wink to Nancy Mitford's silly season. There are also echoes of Victorian literature, from Imogen's marriage mirroring Dorthea's in Middlemarch, to Gavin bringing a little of the John Thornton vibe from North and South. Yet these homages aren't derivative, they give us a touchstone for the time period but then become so distinctly their own story that while you remember the connections at the back of your mind they are inconsequential as the story takes on a life of it's own.

As for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, I will admit that this subject matter is what made me swoon when I heard over a year ago about Lauren's next planned stand alone. I think that I have adequately covered my love of them in previous posts and writings, but I will say that even in the BBC production of Desperate Romantics, they have always been a band apart. Outsiders who verged on Gods in their ways of self aggrandising each other and mythologizing their lives and works. They were Romantics in every sense of the word, demanding the capital letter "R". Yet Lauren brought them down off their pedestals. Packed into the snug sitting room on Herne Hill we see a human Rossetti with his schemes and ideas and his future spiraling out before him. The ways the Brotherhood sought out collectors of antiquities to give an authenticity to their paintings adds a realism to them and their works.

These men aren't Gods, no matter how many posters in English classrooms and dorm rooms might say otherwise, they are men. They have loved and lost and with Gavin we have a true romantic hero that is swoonworthy. And like all good writing, this one aspect of the book, the Brotherhood, it doesn't overpower the story, it compliments it, it strengthens and adds to it. You will fall into this book and even if you are just a fraction of a romantic the Pre-Raphaelite's were you will find yourself falling in love with both couples in the different time periods. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did, and if you're coming into this book from Lauren's Pink Carnation series, there are a few gems hidden in the book, but like these painters who would hide the Brotherhood's initials in their paintings, you might have to have a keen eye to spot them.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Bridget Jones, Daphne Du Maurier, Desperate Romantics, Kate Morton, Lauren Willig, Middlemarch, Nancy Mitford, North and South, Pink Carnation, Pre-Raphaelite, Rebecca, Somewhere in Time, That Summer

The Immorality Engine by George Mann
Published by: Tor
Publication Date: September 27th, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

A certain criminal, Edwin Sykes, has turned up dead. Only after his body is found a burglary with his signature all over it is perpetrated. Is this a copycat or something more sinister? Sykes was a member of The Bastion Society, an organization that seems a little too highbrow for such a criminal lowlife. The head of the society, an Enoch Graves, gives Sir Maurice, Veronica, and Bainbridge a run around that convinces them that somehow these two crimes are connected to not only each other, but to the society. When Sykes turns up dead a second time, despite erroneously thinking perhaps this is a case of twins, the erstwhile investigators turn all their attention to the society. But soon Bainbridge is distracted by an attempt on the Queen's life, and Newbury and Hobbes take some risks that might prove their downfall. One thing though is known, that whatever happens Veronica's sister Amelia will pay the price with her life.

It has been my experience that there comes a point in a series of books that will either cement the longevity of the series and make it a viable franchise or will make you inherently know that the storyline is bound to collapse and fail miserably. This is the book in the Newbury and Hobbes series in which I just knew that this series had wings. While this in no way is throwing shade at the previous two volumes, there was just an extra something that made this book spark with the potential this series will achieve. I personally think that it all comes down to the expansion of the universe of these characters that leads one to feel that longevity is possible. What made me most excited was that the narrative isn't contained to the events in the books. What I mean is that Sir Maurice and Veronica often reference events and cases that we haven't heard about while not detracting from the narrative.

While yes, these might be out there as short stories which I haven't read yet, what I adore is that their narrative lives aren't bound by just the stories in the three volumes I have read so far and the allusions to other adventures aren't clumsily inserted making it necessary to find out if indeed you missed something or were supposed to by an anthology for the one story you wanted. I like to think of the characters I know and love in a book are having adventures when I'm not around, it makes them more realistic if you will. Many series recount all the adventures, one after the other in volume upon volume, and there's just something so restricting about this. Something contained and episodic. By lacking this restrictive container the series has so much more potential for expansion, I just thrill at what is to come!

What drew me into the book most of all, aside from that heart stopping flash-forward, was The Bastion Society. The real reason I was interested in them wasn't the megalomania of their leader Enoch Graves with his delusions of being King Arthur, oh no, but their underlying belief system? Oh yes. The Bastion Society's tenants are that great deeds should be done to keep England the England of myth and legend. By doing what needs to be done in this life, our next life shall be better. Earlier this year when I did a theme month for Lauren Willig's book That Summer, I spent a lot of time researching and reading about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They believed in chivalry and deeds worthy of myth. Truth in art that will withstand time and show the past for those in the present. All beliefs that are eerily similar to The Bastion Society.

Therefore I was thrilled when Newbury and Veronica were lurking around Packworth House and many of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings were strewn about the meeting house's walls. Of course none of the art was mentioned by name, but by golly, I can recognize their artwork my the meanest description there is, and there it was. There was a frisson of happiness that I saw this correlation and then George took it one step further by placing the artwork on the walls. It felt like a special in joke just for me and anyone else who might get it. Plus, the fantastical imagery thus created in my mind of, what if the Brotherhood did take up arms like The Bastion Society did... Rossetti, Hunt, and Millais on real horses, not just posing for each others paintings, I literally can not stop smirking at this idea.

Yet there was an aspect of this chivalry that I think went to far, and that is Veronica as the damsel in distress. She has never been one of those swooning women in these paintings! If anything the men are more liable to swoon. But in this book where she has finally taken center stage she seems somewhat watered down. When the time comes she is able to kick the arse and take the names that we know she has always done, but there's some underlying current that second guesses her that I just don't like. Newbury, who has always been solicitous is almost overly protective, which could be written off as his growing feelings for Veronica coupled with the mores of the day, but it just didn't sit right this time around. Veronica herself seemed to even wonder at her own abilities and this I shall not tolerate! A kick ass character can have self doubts but there's a point you reach when their acts of daring do and chivalry outweigh any possible doubts, and The Immorality Engine was weighted a little lopsidedly...

But in the final analysis, it all comes down to the fact that George is able to handle concepts and characters better then most writers out there. While reading The Immorality Engine I was reminded of a show that just aired on BBC America, Intruders, which I watched solely for John Simm. The show was about rebirth and resurrection, and the idea that there is a secret society that has found the secret to immortality, all high and mighty concepts that in the end was a hot mess with plot holes and a narrative disaster that even the best of actors couldn't act their way out of. The third volume of George's series handles similar concepts and conceits and in such a clear and profound way that at one time I literally looked up to my friend who was working on a project while I was reading (at a Steampunk Convention no less) and said, "If Intruders could have captured these concepts half as good as George did here it would have been an awesome show." Instead we are just left with the consolation of an awesome book. I know, it's such a disappointment.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Bainbridge, George Mann, Intruders, John Simm, Lauren Willig, Newbury, Newbury and Hobbes, Pre-Raphaelite, Queen Victoria, Teslacon, That Summer, The Bastion Society, The Immorality Engine, Veronica Hobbes

Today is the day! Today all the discussion questions I have toiled and fretted over shall be actually discussed! But more importantly all these burning questions I have will be talked about amongst you, my fellow readers! I'm so excited it's like a book lover's Christmas! So come join me over on the That Summer Read Along Event on Facebook, I will be there all day, meaning, ungodly early for me because my night and day are somewhat reversed to other peoples... but that doesn't matter when there's a book to discuss! Also, it makes it even more like Christmas when you'd wake your parents up before there was even a sun in the sky. So I shall be a gracious hostess and try not to fall asleep on my keyboard... as if I could!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 2 comments  

Labels: Christmas, Discussion, Event, Facebook, Lauren Willig, Read Along, That Summer

It's time to have some more fun over on the Facebook Event Page for Lauren Willig's That Summer Read Along! This week I've taken over the reigns as moderator from the lovely Christina and Ashley and prepare the discussion for our final week next week with Céline where all your burning questions will finally be answered! But this week, besides leading the discussion, it's time to talk Dream Casting! I adore playing "what if" games with the characters in books and That Summer is no exception. This painting by John Everett Millais entitled "Mariana" is the basis for the fictional Gavin Thorne's picture of the same name with added sewing box that upsets Imogen at the RA Show. Now I want you to think about what actor could portray an artist capable of painting such beauty and a young actress who could capture the hurt upon seeing her life laid bare on a canvas. Think of who could portray the modern generation finding another painting not on a gallery wall but hidden in the back of a dresser. I know who I think is perfect, but I'd love to hear your opinions too. So head on over to the Facebook Discussion and add your two cents!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Dream Casting, Facebook, Gavin Thorne, John Everett Millais, Lauren Willig, Mariana, Pre-Raphaelite, Read Along, That Summer

At the beginning of last month, after a horrid June I might add, I had a wonderful email waiting for me in my inbox which made me instantly know that July was going to be a far far better month. The email was from the lovely Lauren Willig telling me about an idea that was bandied about on her website and that the St. Martin's folks liked. The idea was for a "That Summer Read Along." Read alongs are a big trend right now online, whether it's a combination re-read/read along in anticipation of the newest volume in a series, or just a virtual book club, they are très chic. What makes them better then book clubs is that you can have immediate discussions with people all over the world and by having a little structure, like with moderator, or with a certain number of chapters per week you get to read together at the same pace instead of having people skip ahead or fall behind. Which brings me to the That Summer Read Along!

Starting today, August 1st, there is going to be an official That Summer Read Along on facebook. There will be giveaways, prizes (one person who signs up by Monday, August 4th will be chosen to receive a signed copy of The Mark of the Midnight Manzanilla, a five star book if ever there was one), discussions, answers to burning questions, you name it! I am honored to be one of the four moderators of this bookish event. I am joined by Ashley of The Bubblebath Reader, Christina of Austenprose, and Céline, an ardent Willig fan. To read Lauren's full announcement, head on over to her website, join us on Twitter (#ThatSummerReadAlong) or just join us on facebook! I'll be the moderator for the third week (August 16th-22nd), because all my favorite parts (which was hard to pick in a book with so much awesome in it) of That Summer happen to happen then (happenstance I tell you!) Re-reading the book and taking copious notes was a joy, as was my theme month "This Summer," and I can't wait to discuss this book with all you fellow readers! Also, don't think I won't be popping in all month to talk about the book even though I only moderate one week! I can't wait and hope to see you all there!

And speaking of read alongs... I met fellow That Summer moderator, book addict, and blogger Ashley through our mutual love and admiration of Lauren Willig's Pink Carnation series. Ashley started her blog, The Bubblebath Reader, back in January, featuring many of the authors I love, so obviously you must now all go and follow her blog! She was kicking around the idea of having a year long Pink Carnation re-read/read along because the final (weep wail) volume, The Lure of the Moonflower, is out in a year and it will be the twelfth book... exactly enough for a year of Pink. I was more then a little excited by this idea, and totally in love with her proposed title of "Pink for All Seasons." I quickly said that not only was I for it, but I might have begged to be a part of it, quickly claiming next April and The Orchid Affair as my book, and then going so far as to design the banner... because once a graphic designing book lover gets an idea in her head she can't let it go! Starting in a month, aka September, aka right after the That Summer Read Along ends and you are feeling bereft, the re-read/read along begins! So I ask you to join me and Ashley reading a volume of the Pink Carnation series each month, with lots of fun discussions, casting ideas, giveaways, and who knows what else we'll think of, as we count down to the final (weep wail) book!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Austenprose, Facebook, Lauren Willig, Pink Carnation, Pink for All Seasons, Re-Read, Read Along, That Summer, The Bubblebath Reader, The Lure of the Moonflower, The Orchid Affair, This Summer

That Summer by Lauren Willig
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: June 3rd, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
" 2009: When Julia Conley hears that she has inherited a house outside London from an unknown great-aunt, she assumes it’s a joke. She hasn't been back to England since the car crash that killed her mother when she was six, an event she remembers only in her nightmares. But when she arrives at Herne Hill to sort through the house—with the help of her cousin Natasha and sexy antiques dealer Nicholas—bits of memory start coming back. And then she discovers a pre-Raphaelite painting, hidden behind the false back of an old wardrobe, and a window onto the house's shrouded history begins to open...

1849: Imogen Grantham has spent nearly a decade trapped in a loveless marriage to a much older man, Arthur. The one bright spot in her life is her step-daughter, Evie, a high-spirited sixteen year old who is the closest thing to a child Imogen hopes to have. But everything changes when three young painters come to see Arthur's collection of medieval artifacts, including Gavin Thorne, a quiet man with the unsettling ability to read Imogen better than anyone ever has. When Arthur hires Gavin to paint her portrait, none of them can guess what the hands of fate have set in motion.

From modern-day England to the early days of the Preraphaelite movement, Lauren Willig's That Summer takes readers on an un-put-downable journey through a mysterious old house, a hidden love affair, and one woman’s search for the truth about her past—and herself."

I think by now you will have realized that this is your mandatory reading for this summer, right?

A Barricade in Hell by Jaime Lee Moyer
Published by: Tor Books
Publication Date: June 3rd, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 336 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"In Jaime Lee Moyer's Barricade in Hell, Delia Martin has been gifted (or some would say cursed) with the ability to peer across to the other side. Since childhood, her constant companions have been ghosts. She used her powers and the help of those ghosts to defeat a twisted serial killer terrorizing her beloved San Francisco. Now it's 1917—the threshold of a modern age—and Delia lives a peaceful life with Police Captain Gabe Ryan.

That peace shatters when a strange young girl starts haunting their lives and threatens Gabe. Delia tries to discover what this ghost wants as she becomes entangled in the mystery surrounding a charismatic evangelist who preaches pacifism and an end to war. But as young people begin to disappear, and audiences display a loyalty and fervor not attributable to simple persuasion, that message of peace reveals a hidden dark side.

As Delia discovers the truth, she faces a choice—take a terrible risk to save her city, or chance losing everything?"

Looks so good, also love the cover art correlation to the first book. LOVE a unified look!

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King
Published by: Scribner
Publication Date: June 3rd, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 448 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"In a mega-stakes, high-suspense race against time, three of the most unlikely and winning heroes Stephen King has ever created try to stop a lone killer from blowing up thousands.

In the frigid pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, hundreds of desperate unemployed folks are lined up for a spot at a job fair. Without warning, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging again. Eight people are killed; fifteen are wounded. The killer escapes.

In another part of town, months later, a retired cop named Bill Hodges is still haunted by the unsolved crime. When he gets a crazed letter from someone who self-identifies as the “perk” and threatens an even more diabolical attack, Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, hell-bent on preventing another tragedy.

Brady Hartfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. He loved the feel of death under the wheels of the Mercedes, and he wants that rush again. Only Bill Hodges, with a couple of highly unlikely allies, can apprehend the killer before he strikes again. And they have no time to lose, because Brady’s next mission, if it succeeds, will kill or maim thousands.

Mr. Mercedes is a war between good and evil, from the master of suspense whose insight into the mind of this obsessed, insane killer is chilling and unforgettable."

Stephen King equals a good summer read!

My New Friend is So Fun! by Mo Willems
Published by: Disney-Hyperion
Publication Date: June 3rd, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 64 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Gerald is careful. Piggie is not.
Piggie cannot help smiling. Gerald can.
Gerald worries so that Piggie does not have to.

Gerald and Piggie are best friends.

In My New Friend Is So Fun!, Piggie has found a new friend! But is Gerald ready to share?"

I adore Piggy and Elephant!

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Barricade in Hell, Jamie Lee Moyer, Lauren Willig, Mo Willems, Mr. Mercedes, Piggy and Elephant, Stephen King, That Summer, This Summer

That Summer by Lauren Willig
ARC Provided by the Publisher
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: June 3rd, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

Julia Conley has inherited a house in England. A house on Herne Hill has been left to her by an unknown great-aunt. Julia and her father left England when she was six and her mother was killed in a car crash. Since her life in New York hasn't been going that well lately as one of the many unemployed, she decides to go to England and spend a few months sorting out the house and hopefully sorting out her life. For Julia who has viewed her family as just her and her father she finds it hard to come to gripes with the fact that this was where her mother came from and she still has family here with a few cousins, who of course feel slighted with great-aunt Regina's will. The more time Julia spends in the house the more she wishes she had been given the chance to know her great-aunt.

For Regina might have held the key to a lovely Pre-Raphaelite painting in one of the rooms of the house, which has a matching painting hidden deep at the back of one of the cupboards. Why was the one painting displayed and the other hidden? Who is this artist Gavin Thorne? Going back to 1849 we learn about the painter Gavin Thorne and his muse, Imogen Grantham, who happened to be the mistress of the house on Herne Hill and married to a wealthy and significantly older collector who was occasionally visited by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who doted on his historical relics. Yet why hide the painting? What connection does this painter and this wife have to Julia? More importantly, after 160 years can Julia find out?

Sometimes life is staggering in it's synchronicity. The very day that I received That Summer in the mail my Great-Aunt Vicki died. My family got the call that she had passed in her sleep and that the rest of the family was to descend on Madison to take care of her estate. My Great-Aunt was the last of the older generation, being preceded in death by all my Grandparents and even an Uncle. While sadly I have never been bequeathed a mysterious house, because she was the last of that generation I have gotten quite used to clearing out ancestral homes, my Grandparents farm having accumulated over a hundred years worth of ephemera, with sadly not a rare painting or a secret stash of cash in sight, but a random piano being used as a tool bench and much mouse effluvia. As I spent the following weeks sifting through the rooms of her house, picking what to keep and what to give away, I couldn't help but think of all the things I don't know about my family and where I come from. There is a strong ancestry bug that my family has, but I have not yet been bitten, and there's a part of me that keeps thinking, better now before it's too late.

The detritus is all we have left of our family's history. Random paintings around the house, Aunt so and so painted this, Cousin so and so did that one; just what if the painting was something more? What if the painting was a closely guarded secret that would unlock some mystery about yourself? The search for your own identity is caught up in the past, in where you come from. While Julia's search for what happened in her own past with her mother as well as to her ancestor's is something that might be uncommon, the search is something we can all identify with. Lauren has tapped into something deep within everyone, a longing to know where they're from in order to find out where they belong. This gives us a strong connection to the characters, we are on their journey with them and I wouldn't want it any other way.

While the time slip genre is nothing new, Lauren is able to create a more accessible story then some authors who mire their books in overly flowery details and descriptions that go on for so many pages you lose the thread of the story. This isn't to say the writing is sparse, it's exactly what it needs to be to conjure this world, no more and no less. Though there is a part of me that wishes at some time in the future Lauren would go all out and write a doorstop of a novel. Yet in Lauren's time slip she is able to capture the best of all worlds, with a little Kate Morton, a little Somewhere in Time, a nod to Du Maurier's Rebecca, a Keats Bridget Jones call out with a wink to Nancy Mitford's silly season. There are also echoes of Victorian literature, from Imogen's marriage mirroring Dorthea's in Middlemarch, to Gavin bringing a little of the John Thornton vibe from North and South. Yet these homages aren't derivative, they give us a touchstone for the time period but then become so distinctly their own story that while you remember the connections at the back of your mind they are inconsequential as the story takes on a life of it's own.

As for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, I will admit that this subject matter is what made me swoon when I heard over a year ago about Lauren's next planned stand alone. I think that I have adequately covered my love of them in previous posts and writings, but I will say that even in the BBC production of Desperate Romantics, they have always been a band apart. Outsiders who verged on Gods in their ways of self aggrandising each other and mythologizing their lives and works. They were Romantics in every sense of the word, demanding the capital letter "R". Yet Lauren brought them down off their pedestals. Packed into the snug sitting room on Herne Hill we see a human Rossetti with his schemes and ideas and his future spiraling out before him. The ways the Brotherhood sought out collectors of antiquities to give an authenticity to their paintings adds a realism to them and their works.

These men aren't Gods, no matter how many posters in English classrooms and dorm rooms might say otherwise, they are men. They have loved and lost and with Gavin we have a true romantic hero that is swoonworthy. And like all good writing, this one aspect of the book, the Brotherhood, it doesn't overpower the story, it compliments it, it strengthens and adds to it. You will fall into this book and even if you are just a fraction of a romantic the Pre-Raphaelite's were you will find yourself falling in love with both couples in the different time periods. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did, and if you're coming into this book from Lauren's Pink Carnation series, there are a few gems hidden in the book, but like these painters who would hide the Brotherhood's initials in their paintings, you might have to have a keen eye to spot them.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 2 comments  

Labels: Bridget Jones, Daphne Du Maurier, Desperate Romantics, Kate Morton, Lauren Willig, Middlemarch, Nancy Mitford, North and South, Pink Carnation, Pre-Raphaelite, Rebecca, Somewhere in Time, That Summer