Category: Reviews

#WWWWednesday – 29th October 2025

whatcathyreadnext1 Comment

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

What I’m Currently Reading

I’m reading The Matchbox Girl from my NetGalley shelf, The Assassin of Verona from my TBR pile and listening to the audiobook of Swan Song, also from my TBR pile.

The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly (Bloomsbury via NetGalley)

Adelheid Brunner does not speak. She writes and draws instead and her ambition is to own one thousand matchboxes. Her grandmother cannot make sense of this, but Adelheid will stop at nothing to achieve her dream. She makes herself invisible, hiding in cupboards with her pet rat, Franz Joseph, listening in on conversations she can’t fully comprehend.

Then she meets Dr Asperger, a man who lets children play all day and who recognises the importance of matchboxes. He invites Adelheid to come and live at the Vienna paediatric clinic, where she and other children like herself will live under observation.

But the date is 1938 and the place is Vienna – a city of political instability, a place of increasing fear and violence. When the Nazis march into the city, a new world is created and difficult choices must be made.

Why are the clinic’s children disappearing, and where do they go? Adelheid starts to suspect that some of Dr Asperger’s games are played for the highest stakes. In order to survive, she must play a game whose rules she cannot yet understand.

The Assassin of Verona by Benet Brandreth (Zaffre)

Venice, 1586. William Shakespeare is disguised as a steward to the English Ambassador. He and his friends Oldcastle and Hemminges possess a deadly secret: the names of the catholic spies in England who seek to destroy Queen Elizabeth. Before long the Pope’s agents will begin to close in on them and fleeing the city will be the players’ only option.

In Verona, Aemelia, the daughter of a Duke, is struggling to conceal her passionate affair with her cousin Valentine. But darker times lie ahead with the arrival of the sinister Father Thornhill who is determined to seek out any who don’t conform to the Pope’s ruthless agenda . . .

Events will converge in the forests around Verona as a multitude of plots are hatched and discovered, players fall in and out of love and disguises are adopted and then discarded. Will Shakespeare and his friends escape with their secrets – and their lives?

Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott (Windmill)

To the outside world, they were the icons of high society – the most glamorous and influential women of their age. To Truman Capote they were his Swans: the ideal heroines, as vulnerable as they were powerful. They trusted him with their most guarded, martini-soaked secrets, each believing she was more special and loved than the next…

Until he betrayed them.

What I’ve Just Read

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie (Bloomsbury)

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel (Vintage)

When a young man’s girlfriend vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own.

When he finally makes it to the city, he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose. (Review to follow)

What I’ll Be Reading Next

Rage of Swords by David Gilman (Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

1368. Amidst the Hundred Years’ War, alliances must be brokered. The Duke of Clarence, second son of King Edward III, journeys from Paris to marry the daughter of the powerful Lord of Milan. Little does he know that he is heading into a trap.

Luckily the Duke is preceded on the road to Milan by Sir Thomas Blackstone, Master of War, on an urgent mission of his own. Blackstone must get his hands on the gold the Prince of Wales needs to wage successful war in France.

But there is a price on Blackstone’s head, and assassins willing to risk everything to claim it before he even gets to Milan. He must outwit a succession of ever deadlier enemies, and the Master of War has other foes to the ambitions of his son Henry, who has inherited his father’s knack of getting into scrapes. Scrapes that could end in a hangman’s noose…

Book Review – For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie

whatcathyreadnext1 Comment

About the Book

In the year of 1413, two women meet for the first time in the city of Norwich.

Margery has left her fourteen children and husband behind to make her journey. Her visions of Christ – which have long alienated her from her family and neighbours, and incurred her husband’s abuse – have placed her in danger with the men of the Church, who have begun to hound her as a heretic.

Julian, an anchoress, has not left Norwich, nor the cell to which she has been confined, for twenty-­three years. She has told no one of her own visions – and knows that time is running out for her to do so.

The two women have stories to tell one another. Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief; revelations more powerful than the world is ready to hear. Their meeting will change everything.

Format: ebook (167 pages) Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication date: 19th January 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain on Goodreads

Purchase For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain from Bookshop.org [Disclosure: If you buy books linked to our site, we may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops]

My Review

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2024.

The book tells the story of two 15th century female mystics – Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe – alternating frequently between the perspectives of the two women. Both names were vaguely familiar to me but I knew pretty much nothing about their lives or their writings. I’m not sure if that was a help or a hindrance. On the one hand it meant I came to the book with no preconceptions but, on the other hand, it made it difficult for me to assess how much of the story was the product of the author’s imagination. Not having much interest in religious doctrine or a belief in visions, I appreciated the book more for the insight it gave into the lives of medieval women than anything else.

I found myself particuarly drawn to Julian’s story. I felt the author really managed to convey in a believable way Julian’s profound religious conviction and suggest credible reasons for her decision to seek a contemplative life. The detail about the life of an anchoress and the process of becoming one was absolutely fascinating and I liked the way the author brought out Julian’s feelings of isolation and her struggles with the daily realities of confinement. ‘I could take ten paces in one direction, turn and take six paces, turn and take eight paces, turn and take six paces. Ten. Six. Eight. Six. Ten. Six. Eight. Six. Ten. Six. Eight. Six.’

Who can say whether Margery’s visions were real – she obviously believed them to be – or the result of some sort of mental disorder, possibly post-natal depression. I found the rigour of her self-imposed regime disturbing. However, the fact she continued to share her visions in the face of suspicion, anger and ridicule, as well as accusations of heresy, speaks to the strength of her conviction. The Margery of the book is a woman of passion in all senses of the word, someone prepared to defy the constraints imposed on her on account of her sex. Apart from anything else, the fact she gave birth to fourteen children suggests remarkable resilience.

The meeting between the two women mentioned in the first sentence of the blurb only features at the very end of the book and is rather fleeting. This made the book feel slightly unbalanced. It also didn’t seem that consequential, just a sharing of their similar experiences.

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain is a fascinating book and taught me a lot of things I didn’t know such as the fact that The Book of Margery Kempe is the first autobiography written in English by a man or woman and Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich is the earliest surviving book in English written by a woman. Its simple prose made it very readable but it didn’t completely enthrall me.

In three words: Intimate, introspective, meditative
Try something similar: The Book of Days by Francesca Kay

About the Author

Victoria MacKenzie is a fiction writer and poet. She has won a number of writing prizes, including a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award, and has been awarded writing residencies in Scotland, Finland and Australia. For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain won the Saltire First Book Award and was a Book of the Year in the Guardian, Sunday Times, Scotsman and Irish Times. (Photo: Author website)

Connect with Victoria
Website | BlueSky