Category: Reviews

My Week in Books – 23rd April 2023

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MyWeekinBooksOn What Cathy Read Next last week

Tuesday – I shared my review of historical mystery, Rivers of Treason by K. J. Maitland.

Wednesday – I published my review of thriller, No Place To Hide by JS Monroe as part of the blog tour. And as always WWW Wednesday is a weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading. 

Saturday – I shared my review of Bone China by Laura Purcell.

New arrivals

The Voluble TopsyThe Voluble Topsy by A. P. Herbert (ARC, Handheld Press)

The Voluble Topsy collects A P Herbert’s The Trials of Topsy (1928), Topsy MP (1929) and Topsy Turvy (1947) in one volume for the pleasure and admiration of a new generation. For lovers of Nancy Mitford and the Provincial Lady Topsy will be a fresh delight.

It is the late 1920s. Topsy is a girl about town, a society deb, a dashing flapper. She writes breathless, exuberant letters to her best friend Trix about her life, her parties, her intrigues, and the men in her life. She deploys her native acumen and remarkable talent for kindness as well as being a doughty fighter for what she thinks is right (she hides a fox from the Hunt in her car). Then Topsy is unexpectedly drawn into politics, and to her amazement, she is elected as a member of Parliament.

Topsy’s extensive social life, her adventures in and out of the House of Commons (and her audacious attempts to legislate for the Enjoyment of the People), and her wartime activity as the mother of twins were recorded faithfully by the great comic writer A P Herbert as a series of satires in Punch.

Wild with All RegretsWild with All Regrets by E. L. Deards (eARC, She Writes Press via NetGalley)

A decade has passed since Lucas Connolly lost his best friend—and the only man he’s ever loved—in World War I, but he still can’t shake his guilt over Jamie’s death. In fact, ever since losing Jamie, Lucas has heard his friend’s voice inside his head—confused about what happened to him, begging him for help. And now, suddenly, it’s not just Jamie’s voice anymore; now, a specter who looks and acts exactly like Jamie did before his death, and who is demanding answers from Lucas about what happened to him, has begun to haunt him.

Concerned about Lucas’s deteriorating mental state, his friend Angela encourages him to move on with his life, and even sets him up with a coworker whom she suspects is also gay. But Lucas is too consumed with the secret he still keeps about the part he played in Jamie’s death to even begin to form a healthy connection with someone new—and as Jamie’s ghost begins to recover his memories and get closer to the truth, Lucas’s obsession only deepens.

Ultimately, Lucas realizes that his only path forward is to first go backward—that only in examining his troubled youth, facing his deepest self, and shining a light on the shadowed parts of his past will he finally be able to set his old friend, and himself, free.

Unnatural EndsUnnatural Ends by Christopher Huang (eARC, Inkshares)

Sir Lawrence Linwood is dead. More accurately, he was murdered — savagely beaten to death in his own study with a mediaeval mace. The murder calls home his three adopted children: Alan, an archeologist; Roger, an engineer; and Caroline, a journalist. But his heirs soon find that his last testament contains a strange proviso — that his estate shall go to the heir who solves his murder.

To secure their future, each Linwood heir must now dig into the past. As their suspicion mounts — of each other and of peculiar strangers in the churchless town of Linwood Hollow — they come to suspect that the perpetrator lurks in the mysterious origins of their own birth.

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Book Review: The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry 
  • #TopTenTuesday – Favourite Audiobook Narrators
  • Book Review: The Letter Reader by Jan Casey
  • Audiobook Review: The Warlow Experiment by Alix Nathan

#BookReview #Ad Bone China by Laura Purcell

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Bone ChinaAbout the Book

Consumption has ravaged Louise Pinecroft’s family, leaving her and her father alone and heartbroken.

But Dr Pinecroft has plans for a revolutionary experiment: convinced that sea air will prove to be the cure his wife and children needed, he arranges to house a group of prisoners suffering from the same disease in the cliffs beneath his new Cornish home. While he devotes himself to his controversial medical trials, Louise finds herself increasingly discomfited by the strange tales her new maid tells of the fairies that hunt the land, searching for those they can steal away to their realm.

Forty years later, Hester Why arrives at Morvoren House to take up a position as nurse to the now partially paralysed and almost entirely mute Miss Pinecroft. Hester has fled to Cornwall to try and escape her past, but surrounded by superstitious staff enacting bizarre rituals, she soon discovers that her new home may be just as dangerous as her last.

Format: ebook (448 pages)                        Publisher: Raven Books
Publication date: 19th September 2019 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find Bone China on Goodreads

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My Review

The book alternates between three different timelines, curiously in the reverse order to what you might expect based on the blurb, opening with the woman who now calls herself Hester arriving at Morvoren House.  The events forty years earlier involving Louise Pinecroft’s efforts to help her father in his experimental treatment of patients with tuberculosis don’t appear until later in the book. This part is fascinating as it illuminates the lack of knowledge about the causes of the disease at the time (probably late 18th Century) but it is also rather distressing to witness the “treatments” Dr. Pinecroft inflicts on his patients in an increasingly crazed desire to succeed in finding a cure.

I was particularly drawn to Hester’s story as we find out more about the reasons for her sudden departure from her previous employment as maid to Lady Rose. I thought the author did a great job of making us feel sympathy for her whilst at the same time introducing a sense of unease as we learn what has occurred in previous positions she’s occupied. Her desperation to be valued by Lady Rose and her disappointment when she realises the difference in their social position can never bring about the sort of relationship she desires is painful to witness. At the same time, she commits an act that has dire consequences and I liked that the author challenged the reader’s view of Hester in this respect.  The later parts of Hester’s story and, in particular, the final scene, I found less credible.

The ailing Miss Pinecroft that Hester encounters is very different to the Louise Pinecroft of forty years before and I wasn’t totally convinced by her transformation from down-to-earth capable young woman to a Miss Havisham type figure sat in a gloomy room full of china.

The book certainly has many of the ingredients you look for in a Gothic novel: a chilly brooding house in a remote location, unexplained noises and locked doors that don’t seem to keep things out. In fact, Hester’s first impression of Morvoren House is as something ‘not just bricks and pebbles but a living thing’. And Creeda, employed as nursemaid to Miss Pinecroft’s ward, with her strange ways, belief in fairies, changelings and the need for protective talismans, makes for an unsettlingly creepy character. (With her black gown and habit of suddenly appearing, she’s a bit Mrs Danvers from Rebecca, a bit Grace Poole from Jane Eyre.) But are the strange goings-on the result of malicious human agency, the product of a disturbed imagination or an actual supernatural presence? It’s up to the reader to decide. For me it all got a little bit bonkers towards the end but if you’re looking for a dramatic climax to a book then you won’t be disappointed.

I received a digital review copy courtesy of Raven Books via NetGalley

In three words: Atmospheric, chilling, unsettling

Try something similar: The Coffin Path by Katherine Clements

Laura PurcellAbout the Author

Laura Purcell is a former bookseller and lives in Colchester with her husband and pet guinea pigs. Her first novel for Bloomsbury, The Silent Companions, was a Radio 2 and Zoe Ball ITV Book Club pick and was the winner of the WHSmith Thumping Good Read Award, while Laura’s Gothic chiller, The Corset, was acclaimed as a ‘masterpiece’ by readers and reviewers alike.  (Photo: Twitter profile)

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