Review: - Olga: A Daughter's Tale by Marie- Therese Browne

I have to admit to being totally rubbish about blog stuff ever since I got back from honeymoon. I have no excuses, but the putting away of wedding presents in amalgamation with the working full time has taken up lots of my energy. Also, since getting married (and I know this is really cliché and probably very anti-feminist of me), I’ve felt more like I need to work on our house, and make it more a home and less a place that’s full of stuff. To be honest I think that’s a feeling also shared by my husband, but anyway! Here I am, and I’m going to attempt a long overdue review of Olga: A Daughter’s Tale by Marie- Therese Browne. This book was sent to me many months ago by the author, and I’ve been terrible at getting my act together to first read, and now review it. However, here I finally am, and despite the madness of life at the moment, I read and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I come from a really big, crazy family, and the fundamental sense of knowing who I am and where I belong has always been hugely important to me. On top of that, I am also very interested in genealogy, and have been compiling my family tree from a really young age – thanks to research done by my grandfather, I’ve traced on branch of it all the way back to the 1700s. The premise of this novel greatly interested me, as it is all about a woman discovering her mother’s past and family for the first time, and about the things which can happen to split even the closest of families up.

From Goodreads:

Based on a true story, Olga Browney born in Jamaica into a large close-knit, coloured Catholic family was a kind naive, gentle girl who came to London in 1939 intending to stay only six months with her malevolent, alcoholic aunt. But world events, personal tragedy and malicious intent prevented her from returning home to Jamaica until over half a century later when her past caught up with her.

The story starts off with Lucy, Olga’s aunt, and her arrival in Jamaica. It tells of how Lucy’s sisters, Martha and Becky, come to visit her, and of Becky’s love affair and eventual marriage to  Henry, a black man. In 1900 this was totally scandalous, and Becky is completely cut off by her entire family except Lucy, however, she stays in Jamaica with her eleven children, despite eventually splitting up with Henry. The majority of the novel focuses on Olga, Becky’s ninth child and mother of the author, and her story. Told through diary entries and starting with her life in Jamaica, the story recounts her journey to England, to stay with drunken, cruel Aunt Martha, her decision to train as a nurse, and her prevention from returning to Jamaica due to World War 2. It follows Olga through brutal events, the birth of her daughter, and her eventual reunion with her family, fifty years after her last contact with them.

The novel reads like a story that has been told countless times before. It is a family saga in the proper sense of the word . When I was a child, there was a certain story my dad used to tell, about ‘the time Uncle John took him fishing’, which he had told to us so often we could basically narrate along with him, and this novel brought that to mind. Knowing that it was a story which the author was hearing pretty much for the first time as she was writing it, I was very impressed with the sense of nostalgia and historical immersion that she portrays. For me, the book was very well written, and I did feel transported at times while reading it, to Jamaica, a place that I’ve never been, but also to 1940s London.

Everything within the novel is told from the point of view of the women; Lucy, Becky, and Olga herself primarily, but with an introduction and epilogue by Marie- Therese Browne. In fact, the only men to feature in the novel at all are presented in an almost totally negative light. However, it does give the feeling of being an honest telling of a story, and it doesn’t dwell on the meanness of men. The men who feature – Olga’s father, Henry, her brother, Sydney, and the father of her child, John Edward, are talked about only when they are present within the story. There is not much thought about them when they are not there, nor really much dwelling on things which have happened, and I liked that. Despite the extreme difficulty of her circumstances at times, Olga’s story always moves forwards, and by the end of the book I had developed a tremendous amount of respect for a woman raising a child in such difficult circumstances.

It is a very eventful novel, which was one of the things I found engaging about it. It was very easy to read because to a certain extent, it picked you up and carried you away with it. It was also a really interesting look at the way in which non-British people were treated during and immediately after the war, and throughout the often terrible situations and events, Olga retains a certain naive innocence which I loved.

It’s a fairly short book, and a very quick read, and if you are interested in the 1940s, or in family sagas, then I would fully recommend reading it. You can find out more about the author and her novel over at her blog www.olgasdaughersblog.wordpress.com.

Married :-)

Hey everybody, I'm back! The wedding and honeymoon were awesome, and now it's back to work and business as usual :-) Unfortunately, though, I will still be less active than usual on the blog front. Some things have happened which require my time. I can't talk about them, but basically there are a few people who need looking after, and I need to be available to be there for them. I will still be posting at least once a week, and hopefully more often when possible, and am by no means going 'on hiatus' or anything so drastic, but just wanted to explain (ish) why I may be around less than usual! I am missing blogging loads, and miss keeping up with all your awesomeness. I promise I will be back soon. Meanwhile, here is a picture from the wedding :-)

This is me doing my 'aren't I so awesome' face... it's hugely sarcastic, and basically what I do whenever someone points a camera at my face, or gives me a compliment...

Review: - The Lady of the Rivers by Philippa Gregory

I'm not actually back yet, I'm just posting this as it should have been posted last week but I ran out of time with all the wedding madness going on! There will be a specific post about all that craziness for those of you lovely supportive people who are interested, and I will be back to regularly (ish) scheduled posting next week. For now, I'm going to get back to the wonderfully relaxing Yorkshire countryside, and leave you with this!

The Lady of the Rivers is the new book in Philippa Gregory’s series about the women involved in the Wars of the Roses. It comes out on September 15^th, and I would have posted about it sooner except that as many of you know, I got married on Saturday and have been stuck in wedding chaos/on honeymoon ever since! However, I did manage to finish the book in the run up to the wedding, and it did a great job of calming my nerves!

The two books in the series so far – The White Queen and The Red Queen – have focused respectively on Elizabeth Woodville the wife of Edward IV, and Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII. The Lady of the Rivers is about a woman whom I found to be profoundly interesting throughout both of the previous novels; Elizabeth Woodville’s mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg. Many of Gregory’s novels highlight the religious and the supernatural and the differences between devoutness and witchcraft, and this novel does so in possibly the most positive way of any of her novels I’ve read so far. As I already knew from reading The White Queen, Jacaquetta’s family are supposedly descended from Melusina, a spirit of the water who married a man on the condition that he never come into her rooms on a Sunday. For many years they were married, but eventually he broke the condition and saw her in her natural form; half woman, half serpent. He was unable to accept her for what she truly was. Desolated, she left him taking their daughters with her but returned to sing around the house whenever a member of her family died. This mystical lineage has also left many of the women of the family with some supernatural powers, and Jacquetta is one of them. As a young girl, she reads the tarot cards for Joan of Arc, and accidentally foretells her death, and this is just the beginning of her forays. At the age of 17 she is married to the Duke of Bedford, who wants to use her powers, along with her innocence and purity in his quest for the elixir of life. Following his death, Jacquetta falls in love with his squire, Richard Woodville, and they eventually marry. The marriage was fairly epic, producing something like sixteen children, and the novel spans many years, many battles, and many births. It tells the tale of the very beginnings of the Wars of the Roses; when England began to fight itself.

In previous of Gregory’s novels concerning witchcraft, such as The White Queen and The Wise Woman, the supernatural has felt very sinister at times, but in The Lady of the Rivers, with the exception of one particular time, the mysticism feels very benign. Jacquetta learns early on that cursing people is unpredictable, and only uses her powers for herself or in extreme need from that point onwards. I really liked that about her – there is nothing evil about her, she uses her abilities only in order to help her family.

I really enjoyed this book. For me, the amount of work and research that Philippa Gregory obviously puts into her books is just phenomenal. Alongside The Lady of the Rivers, I was also sent a non-fiction book entitled The Women of the Cousins War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King’s Mother, which is three essays – one each about Jacquetta Rivers, Elizabeth Woodville, and Margaret Beaufort. I’ve just started reading it, and it is absolutely fascinating. Because there is often nowhere near as much research on the women of the time as on the men, there is a lot more work to be done in uncovering their stories, and Gregory does such a good job with merging fact and fiction that it is almost impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.

The thing that I loved most about the novel was the development of Jacquetta herself. The novel begins with her as a young girl and ends with her as an older woman, watching her daughter and her grandchildren go out to meet a king, and her progression from innocent child to strong, dignified and almost regal woman who can survive anything is really thoroughly done and very believable. The story immersed me without me even noticing, and as always with Gregory’s books, I came away from it feeling immeasurably more informed than when I began. I will be very interested to see where she goes next after this novel, as she comes pretty much full circle to the beginning of The White Queen.

There is a lot more that I could say about The Lady of the Rivers, but I don’t want to ruin it for anybody. With every book I read I become a bigger fan of Philippa Gregory’s work. I was really overly excited when I got the book from Simon and Schuster, and if they hadn’t sent it to me I would have been out the door to buy it the moment it came out! It’s a brilliant blend of scandal, intrigue, betrayal, and brilliant women standing up for themselves, and I loved it.



Rating: *****

I'm About to Be an Absenteeeeeeee!

Hello all. Sorry I've not been so bloggy lately, and that this is going to be (yet another) apology for lack of forthcoming bloggyness, but tomorrow will be my last day of work for two weeks, as I'm going off to get married!! I am so excited it's actually beyond all belief, and I am going back to my mums for a week before the wedding to hang out with my family and generally prepare, plus having my first fitting for the dress, which I'm a bit scared about (don't worry, my Aunty is making it, so it's ok that I've left it this late..). I've just sorted out a big pile of books to take with me for this week, and the week of honeymoon following our wedding, and caused my fiance to sigh heavily, while then immediately going 'oh, actually, can you add those graphic novels we bought yesterday? and that Neil Gaiman book in the front room? Oh! And also, also, I might go and buy The Carpet People tomorrow'. These are the things that make me happy.

Speaking of things that make me happy, I arrived home today to find not only my next book from the Transworld Book Group Challenge, but ALSO two unrequested books from the lovely people at Simon & Schuster. Such a brilliant day! I should really be packing, as I'm leaving straight from work tomorrow and as yet my 'luggage' is a pile of stuff surrounding a holdall in the middle of the bedroom floor, but instead I'm going to show you guys a pretty picture of the pile of books I'm hoping to read in the next two weeks. I will hopefully be posting the odd review, but I know you'll understand if I'm a bit silent!

The top one is my next Transworld Book Group book, and the bottom two are the ones from Simon & Schuster. I won't lie, I'll probably be reading the Philippa Gregory next, and I'm also very excited about Fun Home, as it's part of my recent desire to expand the kinds of graphic novels I read. I know I won't read all of these but I do like to have some variety!

And now I'm off to do my packing. Or eat pasta bake, get stuck into my new book, and generally ignore everything wedding related I have to do! See you all in a couple of weeks :-)

Review: - Black Swan Rising by Lee Carroll

In the interest of full disclosure, let me just say that I read Hanna’s review of Black Swan Rising before I had actually started the novel. Although I try not to let other people’s opinions influence my reading of books, I did agree with many of the point she made about this one. I did enjoy the novel, but parts of it weren’t quite enough for me. Personally, I’m massively interested in jewellery design – it was the thing I wanted to do at college but couldn’t face asking my parents to pay the stupidly huge studio and use of equipment fees – and I would have loved it if the book were a little more centred around that. As it was, Garet’s jewellery design business seemed nothing more than a premise to kick the action off, and after that it just became a sort of ‘by the way’. I wouldn’t have minded this so much if the blurb hadn’t made such a big deal of her being a jewellery designer –it made it seem like jewellery design would be integral to the story, and it just wasn’t.

The novel opens with Garet James on her way home to her father after hearing from their lawyer that they are in such bad debt that they are in danger of losing their home, which also doubles as an art gallery, Garet’s workshop, and their major source of income. Sheltering from rain, she finds herself in an antique jewellers shop, where a mysterious old man presents her with a sealed silver box with a seal which matches the pattern on her signet ring. Intrigued, she takes the box, promising to open and return it. Later that evening, she returns home and manages to open the box, somehow causing the contents to burn up, leaving only the name Will Hughes recognisable. Later that night, the house is broken into by terrifying men, who steal some paintings from the gallery, and escape through her skylight, taking the silver box and leaving her father wounded. With her father in hospital, Garet gets in touch with Will Hughes – a millionaire hedge fund manager whose company, Black Swan Partners, bears a logo of the same image as that on the box and her ring. She hopes that Hughes can help her find out who is behind the robbery, but what he really does is open the door to a whole new world for Garet...

I have to say, I kind of hated the character of Will Hughes. Like Hanna, I really didn’t see the point of him, and it kind of seemed like Carroll was trying to do a bit of a Twilight on me. I just don’t buy that all vampires are that sexy. The Cullen family are enough, no more please. Get a new love interest. Eurgh. It was odd, because I really liked the way that mythology and fairyland were incorporated into the story as a whole. I enjoyed the character of Oberon and lot, and also Ariel and Melusina were quite cool. I also liked the whole idea of Garet’s ancestors having passed on this task of being the Watchtower to her, but I have to say I didn’t really like her all that much. I have this thing, sometimes, where I just don’t believe a character – whatever they say, whatever they do, they just never quite become three dimensional for me, and that’s what happened with both Garet and Will. The only characters who really came alive for me, oddly enough, were Jay and Becky, Garet’s best friends. Maybe because they were the ones to whom traits of humanity were attributed – they are the ones who suffer for Garet, who help her through the death of her mother, who stay with her after the robbery and visit her father in hospital, and who just support her through everything she does, no matter how crazy. I think the major thing about the book was that I really wanted Garet and Jay to get together, and for her to stop being so completely self absorbed that she just didn’t care about her ‘best friend’s pain, and kept running off with some guy who basically had no personality, because let’s face it, nothing seemed to matter to her except that he was goodlooking. Bleh.

Having said all that, I did enjoy reading the book, and I finished it wanting to read the next in the series, despite thinking that I’ll probably feel let down by it, just by virtue of it being about Garet trying to find Will Hughes (what’s up with the continual use of both of his names, too?). I do wish that they’d used more of the swan mythology that was vaguely present throughout the novel, and I hope that the next novel will develop the mythological aspect of the story a bit more, because then I think I could really enjoy it. I really did, except for the niggling things which bothered me about it. Basically put, it had great potential, but didn’t quite live up to it for me.

Review:- East of Eden by John Steinbeck

This is the third Classics Circuit Tour I’ve participated in, and I’m ridiculously glad I discovered it. Every book I’ve read for a tour has not only been one that’s been sat on my shelves for far too long but has also been a book I’ve loved. This is exactly what happened with East of Eden.

Prior to this, the only Steinbeck I’d read was Of Mice and Men, which was unlike anything else I’d ever read in its’ depth of character and setting, not to mention the masterful build up of tension. It lulled me into a false sense of security and then knocked me for six; I had to go back and re-read the ending three times before I could fully take it in. Given that Of Mice and Men is so very short though, I was unsure about Steinbeck’s ability to immerse me in landscape and story over a longer period of time, but I shouldn’t have been.

A basic synopsis of East of Eden would be that it tells the story of the Hamilton’s and the Trask's, and their lives in the Salinas Valley. It is the tale of unlikely friendships and unnatural actions, and is pretty much a study of all the weird and wonderful things human beings do.

Steinbeck is a brilliant and beautiful writer – possibly the most beautiful writer I have ever read, and I know people take issue with him for not writing about happy stuff, and for writing about ‘abnormal’ people, but for me it’s the emotion and the struggle which makes his writing so raw and cleansing to read. After finishing this novel, I am desperate to read more Steinbeck, which is odd because when I was younger, I started The Grapes of Wrath several times but could never get past the first few pages, and I also started East of Eden twice before finally settling down to it. I feel like reading Steinbeck is something you really have to commit to and focus on, because once I did that, it suddenly got really good.

East of Eden is basically about life in small town America, and Steinbeck portrays the history of the country through his characters. War is present in East of Eden, but it is removed from the story by virtue of letters. Adam serves in the army and hates it. He doesn’t understand the point of killing, and so it’s ironic that he is then suckered in by Cathy Ames; murderess, adulteress, and at the very least, sociopath. At the heart of the story lie Samuel Hamilton and Adam Trask, but the reason for the story to be told at all, and the primary motivation for much of what many of the characters suffer and do, is Cathy – both her presence, and the fallout it creates.

Following the death of her parents in a thinly veiled arsonous house fire, Cathy becomes the mistress of a brothel owner, thinking she can make him do what she wants, but when he sees through her she finds herself badly beaten and in need of help. Injured, she drags herself to the doorstep of Charles and Adam Trask. Charles remains suspicious, but Adam takes pity on her and nurses her back to health, eventually marrying her. Adam and Cathy relocate to the Salinas Valley, where Cathy gives birth to twins, eventually named Caleb and Aron, before leaving them and their father for good. She goes on to commit many other heinous acts, without a single moment of redemption. She does provide the counterpoint for judgement of all the other characters in the novel, all of whom are flawed, but none to such a chronically soulless extreme as Cathy. The way that Adam and his sons never stop wanting her, while she barely thinks of them and has no qualms about how much she hurts them, was painful. Towards the end of the novel Adam is finally freed from her hold over him, and I nearly cheered.

For me, possibly the most important relationship in the novel, though, was the relationship between first Samuel Hamilton, and later Adam Trask and Lee. Lee is an educated Chinese man with a capacity for logic and the dream of some day owning a bookstore, in a period where most Americans apparently expected the opposite to be the case. He is the glue holding the Trask family together. When Adam fall apart after Cathy leaves, it is Lee who raises the boys, and Samuel Hamilton who knocks sense back into Adam and makes him behave like a father.

Interestingly, Samuel Hamilton was a real person; John Steinbeck’s maternal grandfather, and Steinbeck himself makes a (very) brief appearance in the novel. The inspiration for the novel apparently came from the book of Genesis, from the story of Cain and Abel. This is mentioned in the novel, and Adam is quite rightly dubious about the overtones suggested if he calls his children Cain and Abel, although this cleverly does rear its head throughout Caleb and Aron’s relationship, and have a brilliant bearing on the ending. It is noteworthy, though that their initials are still C and A. The religious template ties in with first Adam, and then Cal’s striving for forgiveness and acceptance, and also with the struggles in the relationship of the twins.

It’s not a book that makes you want to read it for its happiness, but one that absorbs you in the lives and troubles of its characters and leaves you hoping against hope that the good in the characters will win out. It shows the struggles of real, flawed people, and I think that’s what made the book so thoroughly enjoyable for me.

Thanks again to Rebecca at the Classics Circuit for hosting such brilliant events, and keeping classics on our TBR's! My companions today are Laura's Reviews and The Blue Bookcase, so if you haven't been following the tour so far, start now! :-)

Top Ten Tuesday - Books I Loved but Didn't Review

It's been ages since I've done a Top Ten Tuesday, and since I'm not in work till later today, I thought I'd put my time to good use! Here are my top ten books I read and didn't review - most are pre-blogging but not all!

1.       To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – I first read this when I was around 11 and fell in love with it. I re-read it about eight times before I had to study it for GCSE when I was 15, and then didn’t read it for years because my copy was impossibly annotated and highlighted. Last year I finally got myself a new copy and fell in love all over again.

2.       Harry Potter by J.K Rowling – I have talked about these books on the blog, as they’re such a part of my life now. When the first one came out, I was still young enough (just) for bedtime stories, and my mum used to read them to us. Now they’re my lifeline and the books I turn to whenever times are stressful. I’ve been waiting for my Hogwarts letter since I was 11...

3.       Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger – I first read this age 14, and literally ran around telling everyone who would listen that Holden and I were exactly the same. Aaah to be a teenager... I then passed it on to my younger sisters, who all loved it!

4.       The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald – I read this book in college, and didn’t even have to check it out.

5.       Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen – a recent discovery, I just never quite got around to reviewing it, but I am now firmly in loved with Addison Allen’s books. The mixture of food, magic, and romance is just irresistible to me.

6.       Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas – and anything by Scarlett Thomas at all, really. I picked up The End of Mr Y at Borders (when it was still around in the UK!), on a whim, and haven’t looked back. Our tragic universe is probably my favourite purely by virtue of being the least scienc-ey of her recent novels. Also, it has knitting in it, and at the time I read it I was just getting into knitting.

7.       Ravenheart by David Gemmell – this is the book that gave my siblings and I something to talk about, back in the distant past, where we really really hated each other... I have Gemmell to thank for the fact that at least two of my very dyslexic siblings read at all, and his characters are just so immense. This is the book that breaks my heart a little bit every time I read it, but I can’t help coming back for more!

8.       The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams – the first book recommended to me by my dad when I was about 10. This is a big deal, as my dad doesn’t really read fiction, and this book made me laugh out loud from the first page to the last. Still a favourite today and one I recommend to everyone. I found out the other day my fiancé hasn’t read it, so he’s reading it now, in time for the wedding....

9.       The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R Tolkien – Another dad recommendation. He tried to read us Lord of the Rings as a bedtime story after The Hobbit was fairly successful (I say fairly – I enjoyed it, but thought it was about a worm.. In my defence, I was four). The bedtime project never quite took off but when I was around 11 I read them for myself and now they are a firm favourite.

10.   Wild Swans by Jung Chang – after saying my dad doesn’t read, this was another one he recommended. I’m really interested in Chinese history, and he’d just finished this and passed it onto me when I was about 14. I love the way that it spans three generations and brings them together. Just beautiful.