Category: Rezensionen / Reviews

Tracy is worn out from caring for her young daughter Hayley, the fruit of a drunken teenage binge. She’s also fed up with the judgemental remarks not only from her relatives but even from strangers in the street. Pious churchgoers criticise her immoral behaviour and foul language. Her boyfriend Davy is neither very bright, nor at all romantic and doesn’t help with the housework, but he loves Tracey and Hayley.

It’s a total surprise when Kate, the beautiful and well-off mother of another daycare child, Corbin, invites her out Continue reading “What Friends Are For, by J.B. Reynolds”

Barely recovered from almost drowning when she went out at night to welcome her dear father back from his fishing, a new tragedy shatters eight-year old Freya’s heart: her mother is taking her away from her beloved Cornish village to London – for ever, it seems.

Her father Matthew is also broken with remorse, as he admits his unrestrained drinking was responsible not only for his family’s breakup but Continue reading “Penhaligon’s Attic by Terri Nixon”

Gripping from beginning to end, we follow the tense developments of the Papist struggle to overpower the Huguenots in France and reclaim the English crown from Protestant sympathiser Queen Elizabeth I in the late 16th century.

Lawyer Christopher Radcliff finds his life threatened when he is sent by his patron, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, on a secret mission to Paris at the height of the religious conflict, then makes use of dubious intelligencers to investigate rumours of a massive plot in London, involving murder, torture and executions.

Swanston has developed the historical scene very well, as also the key characters.

 I bought this book mainly because of the subtitle: A Story of France in the Time of the Huguenots. That was the subject of interest to me, as some of my ancestors in Jersey were forced to flee France during the persecution after the Edict of Nantes was repealed in 1685. The fact that the story was apparently told through the life of a child, and claimed to be suitable for reading to 7 year olds, was an added benefit; my grandson is almost seven.

The book is beautifully and vividly written, both as regards descriptions of the rural scenery and depictions of the convictions and tortured emotions of the main players, and contains a wealth of information about the sufferings of the Huguenots under the obsessive and paranoid King Louis XIV. Continue reading “True to Her Faith by Harriet Gabourel”

Another dip into the complete works of this great author. The plot of The Old Curiosity Shop is intricate, if somewhat long-winded. In addition to the very well developed primary players – we quickly come to empathise with the charming Nell and the faithful Kit – we meet a host of interlocked secondary characters, some of whom tend to emerge in exaggerated black or white and to sport rather unbelievable eccentricities.

Throughout the book we are enchanted by the vivid scene-setting, whose interminable and multiply convoluted sentences do, however, challenge one’s breathing when reading aloud. Another quirk for the modern reader are the frequent remarks addressed to himself, some of which are inclined to be preachy.

All in all, a very rewarding novel with a distressingly abrupt ending.

Seven-year-old Katharina is fascinated by the story of Noah’s ark, the first part of which she heard in Sunday school, before being sent with her little brother to stay with her granny on the hill until her new brother or sister is born. She is a bright and somewhat withdrawn girl, reflecting on such mysteries as how babies are made and how it is possible to die of goitre, rather than playing blind man’s buff with other school children. Continue reading “The Stone Flood by Franz Hohler”

Fascinating for nostalgic classicists!

Prudencia Prim wants to escape the boring, superficial business world and unexpectedly finds herself in a small village that seems to have got stuck in a previous century. We are introduced to her boss, ‘the Man in the Wing Chair’, his protegé nephews and nieces, who enjoy the Latin Masters, and several other personages, who all have chosen to follow the same culturally refined but old-fashioned lifestyle. Continue reading “The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera”

This book is appropriately subtitled “The Road Where Childhoods are Stolen”. Movingly written, we are brought to love and agonise with little lilac-dressed Leilah, desperate-to-start-a-new-life Mariana and all the other broken girls we meet along that tragic highway BR116. Continue reading “Highway to Hell by Matt Roper”