Tag: contemporary fiction

#BookReview Connectedness (Identity Detective 2) by Sandra Danby

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ConnectednessAbout the Book

To the outside world, artist Justine Tree has it all… but she has a secret that threatens to destroy everything.

Justine’s art sells around the world, but does anyone truly know her? When her mother dies, she returns to her childhood home in Yorkshire where she decides to confront her past. She asks journalist Rose Haldane to find the baby she gave away when she was an art student, but only when Rose starts to ask difficult questions does Justine truly understand what she must face.

Is Justine strong enough to admit the secrets and lies of her past? To speak aloud the deeds she has hidden for twenty-seven years, the real inspiration for her work that sells for millions of pounds? Could the truth trash her artistic reputation? Does Justine care more about her daughter, or her art? And what will she do if her daughter hates her?

Format: ebook (366 pages)              Publisher: Beulah Press
Publication date: 10th May 2018  Genre: Contemporary fiction

Find Connectedness (Identity Detective Book 2) on Goodreads

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My Review

Connectedness is the second book in Sandra Danby’s series featuring freelance journalist and ‘identity detective’ Rose Haldane. Readers like me who haven’t read the first book, Ignoring Gravity, can be reassured that Connectedness works perfectly as a standalone. However, you may well find yourself wanting to go back and read the first book to find out more about how Rose’s own personal experience fuelled her interest in helping others to reunite with lost family members.

Connectedness moves between London in 2010 – when Justine, now an established artist, hires Rose to search for the daughter Justine gave away over twenty-five years earlier – and Spain in the 1980s. The impulse for Justine’s decision after all those years is the recent death of her mother and a feeling that now is the time to confront the mistakes of the past. She also feels increasingly aware of the contradiction between the emotional openness others see in her art and the secrets she keeps hidden away.

I particularly liked the parts of the book in which the young Justine travels to Málaga to study art, in the footsteps of Picasso. The reader experiences alongside Justine a different climate, food and lifestyle. It’s during this time that Justine falls in love for the first time but also makes a series of decisions that will change her life forever.

Back in the present day, it has to be said that Justine isn’t the easiest of clients and Rose is initially frustrated by Justine’s reticence and unwillingness to impart information. Gradually, Rose manages to break down the barriers Justine has erected around her earlier life. Eventually the pair find a common bond and Rose is able, with the assistance of some useful contacts, to make progress with her research. I won’t reveal the results but safe to say there are touching scenes towards the end of the book which also sees Rose pondering a new venture.

For Justine, her experiences inevitably provide the inspiration for making new art. “So she was exploring the idea of things that belonged together, which could be separated in space but never detached, because they were attached invisibly, forged together, welded, melded, stitched and linked. Flesh, stone, metal, biological matter, timber, people, family. Memories, knowledge, thoughts, experience, history.” In other words, connectedness; something I think we all cherish at this particular moment in time.

My thanks to the author for my copy of her book via NetGalley and for her patience in waiting for it to reach the top of my review pile.

In three words: Engaging, touching, emotional

Try something similar: The Vanished Child (Jayne Sinclair Genealogical Mystery #4) by M. J. Lee

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Sandra DanbyAbout the Author

Sandra Danby is a proud Yorkshire woman, tennis nut and tea drinker. She believes a walk on the beach will cure most ills. Unlike Rose Haldane in her ‘Identity Detective’ series, Sandra is not adopted. She writes about family secrets, identity and adoption reunion mysteries.

A dairy farmer’s daughter from the East Yorkshire coast, Sandra turned her childhood love of stories into an English degree and became a journalist. Now she writes fiction full-time. Her short stories and flash fiction have been published online and in anthologies. Sandra is now writing Sweet Joy, the third in the ‘Identity Detective’ series, set in London during the Blitz. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association ‘New Writers Scheme’. (Photo credit: Goodreads author profile)

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#BookReview Elmet by Fiona Mozley

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ElmetAbout the Book

Daniel is heading north. He is looking for someone. The simplicity of his early life with Daddy and Cathy has turned sour and fearful. They lived apart in the house that Daddy built for them with his bare hands. They foraged and hunted. When they were younger, Daniel and Cathy had gone to school. But they were not like the other children then, and they were even less like them now. Sometimes Daddy disappeared, and would return with a rage in his eyes. But when he was at home he was at peace. He told them that the little copse in Elmet was theirs alone. But that wasn’t true. Local men, greedy and watchful, began to circle like vultures. All the while, the terrible violence in Daddy grew.

Format: ebook (320 pages)            Publisher: John Murray
Publication date: 27th July 2017 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction

Find Elmet on Goodreads

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Hive | Amazon UK
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My Review

Elmet is the story of two children – Daniel and Cathy – who live with their father in a house in a forest, largely apart from the rest of society.  It’s a strange, rather spartan life in which their father seeks to keep them separate from the world but also to protect them from some undisclosed danger. As fourteen-year-old Daniel, the book’s narrator, says, ‘Everything he did now was to toughen us up against something unseen. He wanted to strengthen us against the dark things in the world.’  Despite their very basic lifestyle and lack of creature comforts, the two children have a strong bond with their father.   ‘Cathy and I did not mind taking orders from Daddy. Sometimes we were more like an army than a family and he was not the type of leader to make you do anything for nothing.’

An interesting aspect of the children’s upbringing is the way it has blurred, even removed, gender distinctions.  As Daniel observes, ‘You have to appreciate that I never thought of myself as a man. I did not even think of myself as a boy… It is not as if I had ever actively rejected that designation. I just never thought about it. I lived with my sister and my father and they were my whole world. I did not think of Cathy as a girl nor a woman, I thought of her as Cathy. I did not think of Daddy as a man, though I knew that he was. I thought about him, likewise, as Daddy.’ 

Whilst an intense and, at times, disturbing read, I liked the way the author introduced themes such as concern for the environment.  In contrast to the local landowner, who regards the land merely as a source of profit, the children’s father carefully tends the forest and teaches his children the skills to do the same.  ‘In order to let new growth fight through, overhanging branches, crumbled bark and fallen trees must be cleared. Weeds in the undergrowth must be managed. The right shoots must be let through and the wrong ones discouraged.’  Much like indigenous people in other parts of the world, the children’s father cannot understand the concept of ownership of land. “It’s idea a person can write summat on a bit of paper about a piece of land that lives and breathes, and changes and quakes and floods and dries, and that that person can use it as he will, or not at all, and that he can keep others off it, all because of a piece of paper.”

When resistance grows to the landowners who wield power over the local community, the stakes are raised and events take a dark turn. As one of the leaders of the resistance, the children’s father becomes a target for retaliation of the most brutal kind and the children’s ability to respond to ‘the dark things in the world’ for which their father has prepared them is finally put to the test.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of John Murray via NetGalley.

In three words: Dark, chilling, unsettling

Try something similar: The Wanderers by Tim Pears

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Fiona Mozley authorAbout the Author

Fiona Mozley grew up in York and lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Elmet, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Polari Prize. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dublin Literary Award and the International Dylan Thomas Prize. In 2018 Fiona Mozley was shortlisted for the Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. (Photo/bio credit: Publisher author page)

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