One last bookshelf to share with you, and you may remember it because it used to be the to-read shelf at the old house in the very early days of the blog! Now it lives in the attic. And while the landing bookshelf is meant to be tempting books for people sleeping in the room to read, this is very much odds and ends. So there’s travel books from various trips, the last remains of my university French book collection – a few Agatha Christies, some history books, grammars and dictionaries. Then there are some odds and ends of novels that don’t really fit anywhere else, but that I still want to keep. I keep thinking about getting some proper shelves built in along this wall, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to win Him Indoors over to that plan because he slay thinks I have too many books. As if there is such a thing!
The first part of series three of Bridgerton has hit Netflix, so today seems like the ideal time to remind you about my series post about the books that inspired the Shondaland series. We’ve reached Colin and Penelope’s story, which means we’re getting closer to my favourite book in the series When He Was Wicked, and I’m optimistic that we might get some of the set up for that in series three as well, as we’ve hardly seen anything of Francesca so far, and they need to get her married off ready for that now. I am sort of fascinated by how they’re going to deal with the parallel timelines of these three books.
Anyway, as I said in my other post, the books are very much the basis for the series – they’re 20 years old now and the romance world has moved on a little bit. The Netflix version has fixed some things on that front, so don’t go in to the books expecting them to be just like the show. But they’re still a nice read – especially if you want to see what the series might do next!
Have a great weekend everyone – especially if you’re watching Bridgerton – and as a little bonus, here’s a set tour from Architectural Digest!
It’s new Christina Lauren time! This summer’s novel is The Paradise Problem – whose Amazon strapline tells me is an opposite attracts, fake dating romance. Going further and the blurb tells me it’s about a pair of exes who married in college so she could get access to subsidised housing and he could fulfil a clause in his grandfather’s will to get access to his (massive) inheritance. She thinks they’re divorced, he thinks he’s home and clear until his family start asking to meet his mysterious wife. Doesn’t that sound fun? I find modern marriage of convenience type novels to be a bit hit and miss, but Christina Lauren did a really good one in Roomies, and I’m loving fake relationship novels at the moment so I’m really looking forward to reading this, and I’m hoping that it’ll be in a bookshop where I am soon!
After picking Happy Medium for Book of the Week yesterday, today we have some more books with ghosts in them for Recommendsday.
In that post yesterday I mentioned The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston, so that’s almost cheating at this point, but here we are, I’m doing it anyway. Obviously, it’s hard for a romance to have a happy ending when one half of the pairing is a ghost, so the romance end of this is slightly tangential. Also, I haven’t read this one yet because it’s not out til next month, but Kirsty Greenwood’s new book Love of my Afterlife has a heroine who meets the man of her dreams in the waiting room for the afterlife, and then has ten days to find him on earth and have a fresh start. So that totally counts right? It has a dead person back on earth…
In a screeching about turn in terms of tone, is Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders which has Abraham Lincoln’s son stuck in a purgatory-like space with a bunch of other ghosts in a graveyard in Washington, while the civil war rages. It is more than a little strange, but it is one of the few award winning books that I’ve read over the last just-less-than-a-decade, and the audiobook has a properly starry cast.
It’s a long time since I recommended Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghostsin one of these Wednesday posts, but that still holds as a recommendation, as does Grave Expectationswhich was a BotW last year – and now has a sequel out!
There are also quite a lot of cozy crime series that feature ghosts somehow. Many of them were extremely not my cup of tea, but what I’ve read is Susan M Boyer’s Liz Talbot series (all the titles have Lowcountry in them) have been quite fun. And you could probably add Charmaine Harris’s Harper Connelly series, although she can find dead people, which isn’t quite the same as ghosts!
And finally, let’s not forget the Parasolverse, where people with excessive soul can become ghosts when they die – although they tend to be more side characters than main ones.
Oh I’m cheating. You know it, I know it and I don’t really care. I finished this on Monday but I read more than half of it last week and it was one of those preorders that dropped onto the kindle so a review is timeline and yah boo sucks I’m doing this!
Gretchen Acorn is a fake medium, except she’d like to think she’s an ethical fake medium – because she tries to leave her clients in a better state than she found them, even if she is being paid for her services. When one of her wealthiest clients asks her to go and help her bridge partner by stopping the hauntings that are stopping him from selling his goat farm, she expects to be working with an OAP. But what she gets is Charlie – handsome, young and absolutely convinced that she’s a fraud. Which of course she is, except that as she’s leaving the farm she meets her very first real ghost, who it turns out has been causing havoc at the open houses to protect Charlie from a curse. Now all Gretchen has to do is convince Charlie not to sell – but how can she win over someone who had her pegged as a fake at first sight?
As regular readers will know, I have a somewhat chequered relationship with books that feature the paranormal or supernatural – in that I can never really work out which ones I’m going to like and what it is that I do like in them. But Mrs Nash’s Ashes was one of my favourite books of last year and I reminded myself how much I had enjoyed The Dead Romantics and put on my preorder despite my issues above. And I’m so glad that I did. This is funny and charming and, yes, quirky but not so quirky it made my teeth itch and its also funny and has enough darkness in it to counter act a possible overload of sweetness (goat farmer! Medium! Con artist! Ghost!).
It’s got some dementia in it, so if you’re dealing with that in your life at the moment approach with care, and Gretchen spends a lot of the book keeping everyone at arms length for reasons that absolutely make sense – and at times it was so touching it brought some tears to my eyes. But I came out the end with a big smile on my face – and convinced that Gretchen and Charlie were perfect for each other, which is quite a feat based on their first meeting!
My copy was a Kindle edition, but it’s also on Kobo and in paperback. Mrs Nash’s Ashes was in all the shops last year, so I’m expecting this to be too.
Not going to lie, there was a slightly fatal flaw in my reading plans this week – I bought two books in Foyles and started reading one of them – forgetting that I was going away at the weekend and that I was going to be too far through it for it to be worth carting it away with me for more than a week (I would have finished it before the end of the first day). And so there we are – a shorter list, with one book that was in contention for BotW unfinished, and no idea what I’m going to do tomorrow. Why am I so bad at organising my reading? Actually it’s not bad at organising. I know what I should be doing, it’s just that I am so easily tempted by shiny new books and then it derails all my plans!
Four books bought – two in Foyles and two at the weekend – and two preorders dropped onto my kindle!
Bonus picture: I do love a mews. And I was wandering near work one evening last week and took this one. I could fancy living in one of these. Sadly I do not have the requisite millions!
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
A somewhat perplexing theatre trip this week. Opening Night got 1* and 4* reviews when it opened, and it seems like the audiences have paid more attention to the ones than the fours, as its closing early at the end of this coming week, instead of running though til the end of July.
This is a musical adaptation of a John Casavetes film, with music by Rufus Wainwright, starring Sheridan Smith and directed by Ivo Van Hove. Now I love to go and see a flop – I saw the X factor musical twice, and the spice girls musical to name a few – and I do actually really like Rufus Wainwright’s music, so of course I rocked up to see this before it finished to see what I thought.
And the answer, five days on, is that I still don’t know! It’s not so bad it’s funny. It’s not a misunderstood masterpiece. But it is incredibly confused, and (sadly) the music is ultimately pretty forgettable. I’m not even sure what I can say about the performances – everyone is giving it their all, but I’m still not sure what they were meant to be working towards! But I got a good discount on my seat, and I’m glad that I can say I saw it. And sometimes that’s all you’re after!
If this had been last weekend, there would only have been two books in this picture. I bought the Roman Beaird and the Rory Carroll at the airport on the way to Pisa. But then I went into Foyles on Monday night, and bought the new Alexandria Bellefleur and the Kayla Olson, and when I got home on Thursday the other two had arrived – after taking so long (in the way that second hand orders often do) that I had forgotten I had ordered them in the first place!
As I mentioned yesterday, the second in what looks to be Frances Brody’s new series is out this week, so this Friday, I want to remind you about her other series – about Kate Shackleton, daughter of a senior police officer who finds herself solving crimes and becoming a private detective in 1920s Yorkshire. The series is not the fastest to get going, but i did also read them out of order which never helps! I really like them – there have been a few set in places that I know quite well, which is always fun.
As Murder Inside made it to the Quick Reviews back in February, I though I ought to mention that the sequel comes out today in the UK. It’s called Six Motives for Murder and according to the blurb sees the women of Brackerly Open Prison catering for a wedding in the village when a murder takes place – and so of course they fall under suspicion, even though there are plenty of guests at the event who have more motive than they do. I really liked Nell as a character – and also the detail of her life as governor of the prison and the group of prisoners are also interesting. There’s loads of potential in this series -although I’m still not 100 percent sure how France Brody will keep finding scenarios for the women to be mixed up in murder – although outside work as part of their rehabilitation (which presumably the catering is) seems like a promising avenue.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 