Tag: Reading Challenges

#BookReview The Reading Party by Fenella Gentleman @MuswellPress

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The Reading PartyAbout the Book

It is the 1970s and Oxford’s male institutions are finally opening their doors to women…

Sarah Addleshaw – young, spirited and keen to prove her worth – begins term as the first female academic at her college. She is, in fact, its only female ‘Fellow’.

Impulsive love affairs – with people, places and the ideas in her head – beset Sarah throughout her first exhilarating year as a don, but it is the Reading Party that has the most dramatic impact.

Asked to accompany the first mixed group of students on the annual college trip to Cornwall, Sarah finds herself illicitly drawn to the suave American Tyler. Torn between professional integrity and personal feelings, she faces her biggest challenge yet.

Format: Paperback (352 pages)    Publisher: Muswell Press
Publication date: 14th June 2018 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

I hosted a guest post by Fenella as part of the blog tour when The Reading Party was first published and having said at the time I was looking forward to reading it I’m disappointed (and a little ashamed) it’s taken me so long to pick up my copy.

I was at university in the late 1970s but one which had never been single sex and where the academic staff included plenty of women, so the situation Sarah Addleshaw finds herself in when she arrives at her Oxford college was not one I recognised.  Oxford has its own rather individual customs and vocabulary so the glossary at the back of the book will prove useful for those who’ve not come across them before. Having watched plenty of episodes of Inspector Morse I was familiar with some of them.

Although Sarah’s appointment as the college’s first female Fellow might seem like reason for celebration, she suffers from a degree of ‘imposter syndrome’ fearing that if she is unable to achieve what is expected of her it will demonstrate that the ‘experiment’ of admitting women to the college has been a failure. She certainly encounters some rather outdated views about women from her male colleagues. (Interestingly Sarah’s male academic colleagues are often referred to by their specialisms, such as ‘the Medievalist’, rather than by name.)

Sarah’s diffidence and constant worry about what others will think of her made it a little difficult for me to warm to her, even more so given the rather unwise decisions she makes in her personal life. Prominent amongst the academic staff are the Dean who’s a bit of a lothario and reminded me of Howard Kirk from Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, and Hugh Loxton, the Senior Fellow who has led the Reading Party for many years (of whom more later).

I confess I struggled a bit with the whole concept of the Reading Party which seemed to be more about outdoor activities and socialising than preparation for Final exams. Besides Sarah and Hugh, I found there were few members of the party I really got to know in any detail, the exception being Priyam who finds herself weighed down by the expectations of her family to achieve academic success. Even Tyler, who Sarah finds herself drawn to, seemed a rather remote figure, always on the periphery.  Having said that, I liked the way the author explored the dynamics of the group: the alliances, the disagreements, the contrast between the passive and the dominant characters, the risk-takers and the more hesitant. Even where the various members of the Reading Party choose to sit to pursue their reading – alongside others or in a room on their own – gave little hints about their character.  Sarah finds herself having to tread the fine line between being ‘in charge’ of the group or being one of them.  It’s a particularly difficult line when it comes to her relationship with Tyler.

I enjoyed seeing Sarah gradually warm to Hugh, recognising that he is not the stuffy old man stuck in his ways and hidebound by tradition she’d thought he was initially. In fact, Hugh became much the most interesting character for me, especially when the discovery of a journal suggests that many of Sarah’s assumptions about him are completely wrong.

Those of us who lived through the 1970s will be taken back in time by the references to singing along to music on a cassette player, eating Bird’s Eye custard, listening to the album Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, and celebrating Virginia Wade winning Wimbledon. The very scholarly discussion about the nomenclature of the dish ‘toad-in-the-hole’ made me chuckle. I was also struck by the analogy between refining an academic paper and pruning roses. First trimming new shoots and snipping off dead wood to see the shape of the whole better, then removing old branches or stems that are too close together and then finally standing back to assess the result. I think this could easily apply to writing book reviews as well!

For readers who’ve grown attached to the characters in the book, the Epilogue acts as a ‘Where Are They Now?’ potted history of  their post-university lives.

The Reading Party is a gently paced novel that contains some interesting insights into the development of women’s equality in academic institutions and illustrates how women’s behaviour has often been judged to different (higher) standards than that of men. There are also some wonderful descriptions of the landscape of Cornwall, the location of the Reading Party. You can find a reading guide on the website of the author’s publisher, Muswell Press.

In three words: Insightful, gentle, eloquent

Try something similar: The Glittering Prizes by Frederic Raphael

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Fenella GentlemanAbout the Author

Fenella Gentleman studied PPE at Wadham College, Oxford, when it became mixed. She participated in two reading parties in Cornwall. After graduating she worked in publishing before moving into marketing and communications in the professions. She lives in London and North Norfolk. The Reading Party is her first novel.

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#BookReview The Porcelain Doll by Kristen Loesch @AllisonandBusby

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The Porcelain DollI’m delighted to be celebrating publication day of The Porcelain Doll by Kristen Loesch by sharing my review of this captivating historical novel. My thanks to Christina at Allison & Busby for my review copy.

The Porcelain DollAbout the Book

‘She was called Kukolka,’ he says. Little doll. It’s an unwelcome reminder of Mum’s porcelain prisoners back in London. Of all the things we could have brought with us from Russia – and we weren’t able to bring very much – she chose them.

Rosie’s only inheritance from her reclusive mother is a book of Russian fairy tales. But there is another story lurking between the lines.

Not so long ago, Rosie lived peacefully in Moscow and her mother told fairy tales at bedtime. But one summer night, all that came abruptly to an end when her father and sister were gunned down. Years later, Rosie is a doctoral student at Oxford, with a fiancé who knows nothing of her former life and an ailing, alcoholic mother lost to a notebook full of eerie, handwritten little stories.

Desperate for answers to the questions that have tormented her, Rosie returns to her homeland and uncovers a devastating family history which spans the 1917 Revolution, the siege of Leningrad, Stalin’s purges and beyond. At the heart of those answers stands a young noblewoman, Tonya, as pretty as a porcelain doll, whose actions reverberate across the century.

Format: Hardcover (384 pages)           Publisher: Allison & Busby
Publication date: 17th February 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

I often find that in novels with a dual time structure one of the timelines – usually the earlier one – is more engaging than the other. This was definitely not the case in The Porcelain Doll because the author has managed to create two equally compelling storylines that blend past and present in a deliciously satisfying way.  The structure works because the connections between the two stories are so strong that  one never seems secondary to the other. Indeed, it feels that one could not exist without the other.

Starting in Russia in 1915, Tonya’s story spans decades encompassing the Revolution of October 1917, the Russian Civil War, the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, the siege of Leningrad during World War 2 and beyond. All of these events impact on Tonya and those close to her in dramatic ways, forcing her to make almost impossible choices to protect herself and those she cares for. As she observes at one point, ‘the choice in this country is not between right and wrong. It is between life and death’. Hers is a powerful, often harrowing, story of betrayal, loss, sacrifice and the sheer will to survive, often against seemingly insurmountable odds. It’s also a heart-breaking love story that brought to mind elements of Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak.

Rosie’s story takes place in 1991, an equally pivotal time in Russian history. It’s the era of perestroika and glasnost that would ultimately result in the collapse of the Soviet Union. But a new regime does not mean that old wounds can be forgotten. Far from it. The turbulent events in the country of Rosie’s birth reflect that in her own life. She continues to be haunted by memories of events earlier in her life, events that have left her with unanswered questions and a kind of survivor’s guilt. At one point Rosie is warned, ‘There is no enlightenment to be found in the past. No healing. No solace. Whatever we are looking for will not be there’. However, that warning doesn’t stop Rosie trying to find out more about her family history and to decode the answers she believes lie hidden in her mother’s stories.  What she discovers will change everything she thinks she knows and thought she wanted.

As the two storylines interweave, nothing is quite what it seems – and often no-one is quite what they seem either. The way the author has crafted the multi-layered plot is akin to a Rubik’s Cube where you think you’ve just about arrived at the solution only to find there’s a piece out of place. There are some moments of breathtaking revelation and twists that I certainly didn’t see coming.

Storytelling is an underlying theme of the book whether that’s stories created to entertain, to pass on cultural myths and legends, to record for posterity life experiences, to act as propaganda or set out a vision for the future.  Storytelling itself may even be a means of survival. And sometimes stories are the only way traumatic events can be processed and communicated.

I absolutely loved The Porcelain Doll. It kept me enthralled until the very last page.

In three words: Dramatic, emotional, captivating

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Kristen LoeschAbout the Author

Kristen Loesch grew up in San Francisco. She holds a BA in History, as well as a Master’s degree in Slavonic Studies from the University of Cambridge. Her debut historical novel, The Porcelain Doll, was shortlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award and longlisted for the Bath Novel Award. After a decade living in Europe, she now resides in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and children.

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