A Good Read

The 24 Hour Cafe by Libby Page

Stella’s cafe never sleeps, it’s a venue for the lost and lonely, the early starters, the late finishers and the night owls, everyone is welcome, it’s a place where life can be put on hold at the door. The colourful London cafe is full of interesting characters, many of whom put on a good show of hiding their problems, as many people do, and using the cafe as a haven.

Running the café are Hannah and Mona, best friends, waitresses and dreamers, their small kindnesses make a difference to the lives that they briefly intertwine with, but they long for the chance to leave the café and follow their dreams. Hannah is a wannabe singer and Mona is a dancer.

I enjoyed the book and liked reading about the customer’s stories. I had to keep turning the pages to find out more about them.

∼ Happy Reading ∼ 

Polly x

A Good Read

An Unwanted Inheritance by Imogen Clark tells the story of three siblings and a suitcase full of cash.

When their father dies unexpectedly, siblings Max, Ellie and Nathan can’t even contemplate emptying his house - not least because he spent his last decade curating what feels like a museum, so it is Max’s wife, Caroline, who offers to make a start and finds the suitcase under a bed.

The source of the money is a mystery to them all, and each has a strong opinion about what to do with it. Ellie and her husband James have an expensive lifestyle to maintain and could do with their share of the windfall - James in particular, for reasons he doesn’t dare reveal. Nathan can’t be trusted with money, as the others all know; he’s desperate to get his hands on some (or all) of the cash. But Caroline is the one guarding the suitcase, and she’s insisting to Max that they keep everything above board and take it to the police.

The siblings have always been close. But now, with this money threatening to topple everything they thought they knew about their father and their family, nothing seems certain.

The story is filled with moral dilemmas and explores relationships between the siblings, as well as the couples.

I enjoyed it.

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Good Read

The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods
     
On a quiet street in Dublin, a lost bookshop is waiting to be found…
   
The Lost Bookshop is a story about three strangers, Opaline, Martha, and Henry. It’s a mixture of historical fiction, mystery, and good old fashioned romance.
   
Martha has escaped an abusive marriage and finds employment working as a housekeeper to the eccentric ex-actress, Madame Bowden.

Henry is a Ph.D. student who is obsessed with an old manuscript, and is ready to do anything to locate it. He is convinced that Charlotte Brontë wrote a second book.

In 1922 Opaline flees her childhood home to escape an arranged marriage to a stranger. She finds refuge in Paris, where her love of rare books earns her an apprenticeship in a bookstore, the perfect training ground for a young woman who is also convinced that Charlotte Brontë wrote a second book, which is waiting to be discovered.

     

It took me a little while to get into the story because of the different timelines but once I did I enjoyed it.

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Good Read

The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

After a long and eventful life Allan Karlsson ends up in a nursing home, believing it to be his final destination, but he is still enjoying good health and isn’t remotely interested in the big celebration being organised for his 100th birthday, so he decides to escape. He climbs out the window in his slippers and embarks on a hilarious and entirely unexpected journey. It would be the adventure of a lifetime for anyone else, but Allan has led a mercurial existence, with a larger-than-life backstory.    

The first stop as he leaves the home is the railway station, intending to travel as far as his available cash will allow. There he meets an angry young man who asks Allan to look after his case while he goes to the toilet. The train arrives before the man returns so Allan just takes the case with him. He leaves the train at a remote abandoned station and starts walking until he reaches a cabin in the woods lived in by an old man similar to himself. Meanwhile the young man asks the whereabouts of the old man and leaves the train at the same stop. He then guesses where Allan has gone and finds the cabin. He is even more angry by now and demands the return of his case. A fight ensues, the old boys overpower him and lock him in a fridge. They drink a lot of alcohol and forget about him.

He was a bad man anyway.
There then follows an unlikely but very amusing story of Allan getting mixed up with drug dealers, a motley crew of flawed but interesting characters, and an elephant! The story is also interspersed with flashbacks of Allan’s life and how he inadvertently managed to be in the right place at the wrong time and helped influence a number of events that changed the course of twentieth century history.

Quirky and ludicrous, this is a fun read.

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Good Read

I, Mona Lisa by Natasha Solomons 

It is widely thought that Lisa del Giocondo was the inspiration for Leonardo da Vinci's most famous painting The Mona Lisa. She was the wife of wealthy Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. The painting is thought to have been commissioned for their new home, and to celebrate the birth of their second son, Andrea.

Imagine da Vinci's studio, bursting with genius imagination, towering commissions and demanding patrons, as well as discontented muses, friends and rivals, and in the midst of all this sits the painting of Mona Lisa. For five hundred tumultuous years, amid a whirlwind of power, money and intrigue, the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo was sought after and stolen.

Weaving through the years, the story takes us from the dazzling world of Florentine studios, via rivalry, murder and heartbreak, to the French courts at Fontainebleau and Versailles, and into the Twentieth Century.

This is the story of the painting narrated by the painting.

The majority of my book club friends didn’t like this, they thought a talking painting was silly, but I liked it. I thought the journey of the painting that Solomons created was quite clever.

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Good Read

Be Careful What You Wish For by Jeffrey Archer is the fourth book in the Clifton Chronicles series.

     

This is the one I was meant to request instead of the other Be Careful What You Wish For! 

When Ross Buchanan is forced to resign as chairman of the Barrington Shipping Company, Emma Clifton wants to replace him. But Don Pedro Martinez intends to install his puppet, the egregious Major Alex Fisher, in order to destroy the Barrington family firm just as the company plans to build its new luxury liner, the MV Buckingham.

Back in London, Harry and Emma's adopted daughter wins a scholarship to the Slade Academy of Art where she falls in love with a fellow student, Clive Bingham, who asks her to marry him. Both families are delighted until Priscilla Bingham, Jessica's future mother-in-law, has a visit from an old friend, Lady Virginia Fenwick, who drops her particular brand of poison into the wedding chalice.

Then, without warning, Cedric Hardcastle, a bluff Yorkshireman who no one has come across before, takes his place on the board of Barringtons. This causes an upheaval that none of them could have anticipated, and will change the lives of every member of the Clifton and Barrington families. Hardcastle's first decision is who to support to become the next chairman of the board: Emma Clifton or Major Alex Fisher? And with that decision, the story takes yet another twist.

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Fairly Good Read

Be Careful What You Wish For by Vivien Brown
Two women swap homes for a month, each wanting a bit of time away from their normal everyday lives and problems.
Former actress Madi is recovering from cancer and wants to escape from her lonely London life. She has started to forget things and has a feeling that she is being watched.
Prue feels suffocated by her claustrophobic village life and has suffered a devastating public humiliation. All she wants now is anonymity in London.
Two strangers, a chance to escape …. Or is it?

I thought I had requested Be Careful What You Wish for by Jeffrey Archer, but it wasn't until I got home and actually looked at the book that I realised my mistake!! So I thought I might as well read it. It was ok. I liked the main characters and it was interesting, if a bit predictable, reading how they each settled into their new habitats. There were hints that something was afoot but halfway through nothing significant had happened, it did pick up a bit though.

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Good Read

The Women of Troy by Pat Barker continues the story after The Silence of the girls.

Troy has fallen and the victorious Greeks are eager to return home with the spoils of war - including the women of Troy themselves. They wait for a fair wind for the Aegean, but it doesn’t arrive because the gods are offended. The body of King Priam lies unburied and desecrated and so the victors remain in suspension, camped in the shadows of the city they destroyed. As the coalition that held them together begins to unravel old feuds resurface and new suspicions and rivalries begin to fester.

Largely unnoticed by her captors, the one time Trojan queen Briseis, formerly Achilles's slave, now belonging to his companion Alcimus, quietly takes in these developments. She forges alliances when she can, with Priam's aged wife the defiant Hecuba and with the disgraced soothsayer Calchas, all the while shrewdly seeking her path to revenge.

I have read reviews that have described this as boring. I don't agree but .... not much happens, there isn't a plot, but I didn’t mind that, I was interested in the post-war logistics, and the lives of the women, particularly Briseis.

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Good Read

The Silence of The Girls by Pat Barker is the story of the Trojan women taken prisoner during the Trojan War, a legendary conflict in Greek mythology, where the Greeks besieged the city of Troy in Turkey.
Pat Barker writes about the effects of war very well, never labouring the pointlessness of this Greek-Trojan war which, as the foreword describes "is the result of a bar-room brawl over a woman". That woman being Helen.

The war began when Paris, a Trojan prince, abducted Helen, the wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta.

The story is famous for its key characters - Achilles, Hector, and Odysseus, and for the iconic Trojan Horse, a ruse used by the Greeks to infiltrate and conquer the city. 

In the Greek camp, Briseis watches and waits for the war's outcome. She was queen of one of Troy's neighboring kingdoms, until Achilles, Greece's greatest warrior, ransacked her city and murdered her husband and brothers. Briseis becomes Achilles's concubine, a prize of battle, and must adjust quickly in order to survive a totally different life, and when Agamemnon, the brutal political leader of the Greek forces, demands Briseis for himself, she finds herself caught between the two most powerful of the Greeks.
Observant and unflinching about the daily horrors of war, Briseis finds herself in an unprecedented position, able to observe the two men driving the Greek army in what will become their final confrontation, deciding the fate not only of Briseis' people but also of the ancient world at large.

Briseis is just one of thousands of women living behind the scenes - the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead. Pat Barker brings the teeming world of the Greek camp vividly to life.

With complex portraits of characters and stories familiar from mythology, it's a very good read.

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Lovely Read

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

This is a beautiful heartwarming story about a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors - until he meets Tova, and a unique friendship develops.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Good Read

Finding Hildasay by Christian Lewis is a true story of survival and finding a way back from crippling depression.

Christian Lewis, a former paratrooper, had hit rock bottom, facing eviction and losing his daughter, he shut himself away in his bedroom for weeks. The day his daughter left he went down to Llangennith beach on the Gower Peninsula to do some surfing - his only respite. He looked out along the beautiful coastline of south Wales and realised this was the only place he really wanted to be. There and then he impulsively set himself a challenge - walk the entire coastline of the UK. In the next few days he rustled up a tent and walking boots, and with just £10 and two days worth of food he left. Little did he know what lay ahead of him - mountains, dangerous peat bogs, savage weather, the kindness of strangers, and adopting a dog named Jet.

But it was an uninhabited island called Hidasay that re-kindled his pride and respect. Happiness and hope were on the horizon.

Christian’s goal was to raise £100,000 for SSAFA, the Armed Forces Charity. To date he has raised over £500,000.

I really enjoyed this. At times I was exasperated with him. He is a very proud man and wouldn’t ask for help, he didn’t even sign on for unemployment benefit. He suffered broken tents, leaking boots and frost bitten toes. But no matter how many hardships he endured his beloved dog Jet was always well fed and cared for. I was a bit concerned about her skinny legs on some of the terrain, but she was ok. I've since seen a documentary about his next walk with his wife and child, and Jet was fine.

Christian Lewis is a hero.

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Good Read

Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult

and Jennifer Finney Boylan
   

Olivia McAfee knows what it feels like to start over. Her picture-perfect life - living in Boston, married to a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon, raising a beautiful son, Asher - was upended when her husband revealed a darker side to his character. She never imagined she would end up back in Adams, her sleepy New Hampshire hometown, living in the house she grew up in, and taking over her father's beekeeping business.

Lily Campanello is also familiar with starting over. When she and her mom relocate to the same town they both hope it will be a fresh start. And for a short while, these new beginnings are exactly what Olivia and Lily need. Their paths cross when Asher falls for Lily, and Lily can’t help but fall for him too. With Ash, she feels happy for the first time. Yet at times, she wonders if she can trust him completely.

Then one day, Olivia receives a phone call: Lily is dead, and Asher is being questioned by the police. Olivia is adamant that her son is innocent. But she would be lying if she didn’t acknowledge the flashes of his father’s temper in him, and as the case against him unfolds, she realises he’s hidden more than he’s shared with her.

I enjoyed this but it is sad.
   

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

An OK Read

The Swimming Pool by Louise Candlish
Oh this was tedious. It was a fairly good plot, which I quickly picked up on, but at 457 pages, a lot of the dialogue was superfluous.
It's summer when Elm Hill Lido opens, having stood empty for years. For Natalie Steele - wife, mother, teacher - it offers freedom from the tightly controlled routines of work and family. Especially when it leads her to Lara Channing, a charismatic former actress with a lavish bohemian lifestyle, who seems all too happy to invite Natalie into her elite circle.
Soon Natalie is spending long days at the pool, socialising with new friends and basking in a popularity she didn't know she'd been missing. Real life, and the person she used to be, begins to feel very far away.
But is such a change in fortunes too good to be true? Why are dark memories of a summer long ago now threatening to surface? And, without realising, could Natalie have been swept dangerously out of her depth?

   

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Very Good Read

Lessons In Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Believe all the plaudits, this book is brilliant, I knew I was going to love it from the first page. The writing is sharp and delicious, laugh-out-loud funny and shrewdly observant. One minute I was laughing, the next I was plotting revenge on the odious, misogynistic creeps that dominated the workplace. Dr Mason, the obstetrician, was the only kind, decent man Elizabeth met.  

   
Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one, Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with, of all things, her mind. True chemistry results.

     
But life, like science, is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show 'Supper at Six'. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking -“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride”- proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy, because Elizabeth isn’t just teaching women to cook, she’s encouraging them to change the status quo. Elizabeth is a heroine, she refuses to be quashed.

   

I thoroughly recommend it.

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Good Read

Fatal Isles by Maria Adolfsson
A remote island. A brutal murder. A secret hidden in the past... 
In the middle of the North Sea, between the UK and Denmark, lies the beautiful and rugged island nation of Doggerland. Detective Inspector Karen Eiken Hornby has returned to the main island after many years in London and has worked hard to become one of the few female police officers in Doggerland.

When she wakes up in a hotel room next to her boss, Jounas Smeed, Karen knows she's made a huge mistake. But things are about to get worse: later that day, Jounas's ex-wife is found brutally murdered. And Karen is the only one who can give him an alibi.
The news sends shockwaves through the tight-knit island community, and with no leads and no obvious motive for the murder, Karen struggles to find the killer. Soon she starts to suspect that the truth might lie in Doggerland's history. And the deeper she digs, the clearer it becomes that even small islands can hide deadly secrets...
   
I really enjoyed this, it’s a good plot with excellent characters. I enjoyed reading about Karen’s life, and the commune. I worked out some of the plot but not who the killer was.

    

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Good Read

Murder Before Evensong

by Reverend Richard Coles
Canon Daniel Clement is Rector of Champton. He has been there for eight years, living at the Rectory alongside his widowed mother - opinionated, fearless, ever-so-slightly annoying Audrey - and his two dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda.
When Daniel announces a plan to install a lavatory in the church, the parish is suddenly (and unexpectedly) divided. Long-buried secrets come dangerously close to destroying the calm of the village. And then Anthony Bowness - cousin to Bernard de Floures, patron of Champton - is found dead at the back of the church, stabbed in the neck with a pair of secateurs.
As the police move in and bodies start piling up, Daniel is the only one who can try and keep his fractured community together... and catch a killer.
   
A delightful, cosy murder mystery with a sharp edge.

   

∼ Happy Reading∼ 
Polly x

A Good Read

Love Marriage by Monica Ali tells the story of two people, two cultures, two families.

Doctors Yasmin and Joe are engaged to be married. Their families are quite different. Yasmin is part of an Indian family and is a second-generation doctor while Joe was raised by his mum, Harriet, a world-famous firebrand feminist. However, both Yasmin and Joe are harbouring secrets, and as the wedding day draws closer both families are forced to confront the unravelling of those secrets.
   
I enjoyed this, there’s a lot going on, it covers a lot of territory and multiple storylines. But it is mostly Yasmin’s story, how her view of the trajectory her life is taking makes her realise that what she truly wants may not be what she thought.

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Lovely Read

Dreaming of Flight by Catherine Ryan Hyde

Eleven year old Stewie never knew his parents, he was a baby when they died, he and his brother Theo have been raised by their older sister Stacey. Stewie steadfastly and lovingly tends the chickens left by his beloved late grandmother. Every day he collects the freshly laid eggs and goes door to door selling them from his wagon. One of his new customers, Marilyn, is prickly and guarded, but he finds her company comfortable, she reminds the grieving Stewie so much of his grandmother, and the connection between them becomes the saving grace for both of them.

There is sadness but overall this is a beautiful, soothing story with lovely characters. Stewie is an  adorable, sweet little boy.

   

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Good Read

A Dangerous Education by Megan Chance
  
Our protagonist Rosemary is not one to be told what she can or cannot do, she prefers to follow her own mind. But in the oppressive McCarthy-era of America that can be dangerous.
  
Rosemary Chivers is haunted by the choices she made as a teenager, and by those made for her by a controlling mother. Now, in the Cold War era of conformity and suspicion, Rosemary is a modern reformist teacher at a school for troubled girls, where she challenges the narrow curriculum meant to tame restless young minds. She also has a devastating secret. She knows one of the students is the child she gave up. But which one?
  
Ignoring warnings, Rosemary forms an impenetrable bond with the three girls who are the right age: shrewd runaway Maisie, alcohol-indulging Sandra, and overly flirtatious Jean. But these are no ordinary girls, and what begins as an effort to bring closure to her own rebellious youth soon spirals dangerously out of control. Rosemary is prepared to do anything to find her daughter. What she isn’t prepared for are the deadly consequences that come with discovery, or just how wicked wayward girls can be.

    
I enjoyed this but became frustrated with Rosemary’s behaviour, she made bad decisions and I often felt like shaking her and say "Don't do it!" occasionally her behaviour was just silly.
  
I was frustrated with the injustice of being an intelligent woman in that era.

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x

A Good Read

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

In 1830 the last public execution in Iceland took place. (You can still see the specially commissioned axe in the National Museum of Reykjavik here). A man and a woman were beheaded for a murder committed on a remote farm. There being no prisons in Iceland in those days, the condemned woman had been held for the winter before her execution at a farm where she'd lived as a young girl, guarded by the farmer's wife and daughters. Hannah Kent has written her version of the real life story.

Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family avoids Agnes as much as they can. Only Tóti, a priest Agnes has chosen to be her spiritual guardian, makes an effort to understand her. But as Agnes's death looms, the farmer's wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they've heard, and after learning more about Agnes’ story the family become more understanding of her. 

It’s a very good read. The author has captured a dramatic existence in a hostile environment, beginning with the the endless days of an Arctic summer, "the sun warming the bones of the earth"; then, as Agnes's end approaches, "autumn has been pushed aside by a wind driving flurries of snow up against the croft, and the air is as thin as paper", and, by her last days, "snow lay over the valley like linen". The rhythms of farm work: shearing, lambing, milking, slaughter, and then the interval of the Icelandic winter when even in an emergency there is nowhere to go and no possibility of getting there anyway. I could feel the starkness of the time, the place and their lives.

∼ Happy Reading∼ 

Polly x