Cinderella meets All-of-a-Kind Family in a new book I loved and recommend. Elinor Hayward, the lovely and intelligent daughter of a prosperous factory owner, is thrilled when she and her father are invited to a New Year’s Ball in early 1910. Even better, she meets an attractive young man, Frederick Coombes, son of an earl, who is not just friendly but clearly interested in her:
It was stupidly easy to fall in love with Frederick; I got halfway there that very evening. But I’d like to point out, before you decide I must have been soft in the head, that I was nineteen, he was the first man ever to pay attention to me, and he was very, very charming.
Although February is a short month, there were some outstanding reads, especially The King’s Messenger, Slow Bomb at Dimperley, and The Spy Coast - links to those reviews are below.Historical Fiction
Slow Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans (2024). A soldier returning to his ancestral home after WWII finds new responsibilities and little in the way of practical help from his family as he copes with death duties and ennui in this amusing story. My review.
An anticipated reunion in the Hamptons turns deadly after a practical joke in this novel by bestseller Burke. May Hanover, a lawyer living in NYC with her fiancé, has been looking forward to and yet dreading a weekend get-together with her two closest friends from summer camp. They were very close once but she hasn’t spent time with them in person for years.
The sun was shining brilliantly and the hedgerows in the lane I had just left had been covered with half-open hawthorn. It was the third of May and I was in Wales, my mother’s country. Wales! I, Catrin Drury, aged just eighteen, was alone and entirely free for the first time ever, with a map in my hand, a few necessities on my back, and the future somehow fluid and unseeable.
It’s time for #6degrees, inspired by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. We all start at the same place as other readers, add six books, and see where it ends up. This month’s starting point is the 2023 Booker winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.I got Prophet Song from the library this week for Reading Ireland 2025 as it is about an Irish family and takes place in Dublin (as I plan to read it I avoided spoilers).
A school story that contains a mystery and is also an evacuation story – who could ask for anything more, as my friend Fred Astaire would say . . .Mrs. Sherbourne has news for her two teenage daughters, Elaine and Moira. She is sending them to Denehurst, a boarding school in Cornwall, because London in war time is dangerous and their father needs to concentrate on his Foreign Office work. The girls are mildly indignant because they want to do their bit but cheer up when their cousin, Captain Deryk Holroyd, says he might need their help from school. He asks them to conceal their fluency in German, where the family spent three years.
I have been reading Susanna Kearsley’s books since 1994, when Mariana was published, and even drove to Rhode Island to meet her in 2015 when she was touring for A Desperate Fortune, so I was excited to read her new book, The King’s Messenger, and was not disappointed. Surprisingly, it is not a dual timeline book, for which she is best known; rather, it is set in the early 17th century during the reign of James I of England.
Maggie Bird is retired and living a quiet life in Purity, Maine with a few chickens and a small group of friends nearby when she gets an unexpected and unwelcome visitor. A woman who calls herself Bianca wants Maggie’s help finding a colleague from her CIA past, last seen in Bangkok.
Spell the Month in Books is hosted by Reviews From the Stacks and occurs on the first Saturday of each month or maybe the third! This month I chose from books I read ten years ago. I read a lot that year because I was between jobs for the first two months of the year and it was an extremely snowy winter. The weekend of Valentine's Day, ten years ago, my brother was visiting with his family and I suggested my parents drive over and spend the night in case it snowed so much they were stranded at home. It was quite a slumber party with five adults and three children. Somehow a coworker made it over with his toddler to decorate heart-shaped cupcakes!
For those of us who read a lot of WWII historical fiction, it is a natural progression to contemplate what happened after the war ended. Perhaps this is why I loved the television show Homefront, set in a Midwest town where everyone is excited to welcome back their menfolk but do not realize how their lives will be affected, especially women who worked outside the home doing war work but are now displaced in favor of the men.
I read 14 books in January: all fiction but one, including three audiobooks and two rereads. The God of the Woods and Frozen River are historical novels which were much hyped, with long waiting lists at the library. I was disappointed in the first and found its ending completely unbelievable. I liked Frozen River and its themes of justice and male dominance provided lots of material for my book group discussion. I also enjoyed the newest Michael Connelly and my reread of False Colours.
When our fellow humans annoy us with their squabbles and predictability, don’t we all fantasize about memorializing them in fiction – to their detriment?*
It’s time for #6degrees, inspired by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. We all start at the same place as other readers, add six books, and see where it ends up. This month, Kate started with a classic, Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, which is about seduction and revenge.
As she spoke, she reached for the phone that had just begun to ring. There were other, more junior officers in the big squad room that housed the Cold Case Review Team, but promotion hadn’t altered Karen’s ways. She’d never got out of the habit of answering any phone that rang in her vicinity. “CCRT, DI Pirie speaking,” she said absently . . . .
In this series launch, a police detective is asked to lead a pilot program examining cold cases with the help of an Artificially Intelligent Detective Entity (AIDE) – basically, a robot – as part of her team, with results that surprise her. Detective Chief Superintendent Kat Frank has been on leave while recovering from the death of her husband and resulting depression of her teenage son but now she wants to return to work.
Kit Fancot is a rising young diplomat, stationed in Vienna, when he senses something is wrong with his identical twin brother back in London. It’s 1817 so he can’t call or text – he uses the recent death of his godfather as an excuse to make the long journey home.
Hercule Poirot excels at cold cases so he is intrigued when Carla Lemarchant turns up for an appointment with a murder from the past. When she was 21, she learned that her mother had murdered her father, Amyas Crale, a well-known painter. Caroline Crale was convicted and died in prison, a year later.
WWW Wednesday is hosted by Taking on a World of Words.The Three Ws are:
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
Currently Reading
Someone recently recommended In the Blink of an Eye by Jo Callaghan (2023), which I am enjoying. The main character, Detective Kat Frank, is a single mother asked to lead a pilot program using a sort of robot with artificial intelligence.
In L. Frank Baum’s final Oz book, published a year after his death, Ozma learns from Glinda’s Great Book of Records that two tribes in the distant Gillikin country are about to go to war. The Skeezers have declared war on the Flatheads, and although Ozma has never heard of either faction previously, she now feels a sense of responsibility:
Somehow in a busy December, I read 12 adult books and four children’s or YA books (two of which were rereads), plus listened to three audio books (all crime fiction) driving back and forth to various places. A few of these were intended as Christmas presents so I was trying to vet them first! Overall, it was an outstanding reading year (see my Best of 2024 list).
It’s 1902 and Florence “Daisy” Harriman, married to a rich banker, could have chosen to live solely as a Gilded Age socialite. However, while she is an accepted member of the New York and Newport ruling class, enjoying her privileges, she is also a social reformer and suffragist, and later a diplomatic envoy. At the time of this book, loosely based on history, she realizes that the ladies of her acquaintance need an elite club in Manhattan, just as their menfolk enjoy spending time at male bastions such as the Union Club or the Princeton Club.*
Nora Noone is a busy architect who recently started her own firm, specializing in building spaces that promote healing, while her equally ambitious fiancé is a chef with a small but highly regarded restaurant in Brooklyn. She is meeting with a new client when her half-brother Sam appears to say he needs her help because he thinks their father’s recent death was not an accident.
It’s time for #6degrees, inspired by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. We all start at the same place as other readers, add six books, and see where it ends up. This month’s starting point is the 2024 Booker winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which follows six fictional astronauts over 24 hours on an orbiting space station.
This is one of 12 light-hearted novels that Noel Streatfeild wrote for adults under a pseudonym, and the only one I’ve read that wasn’t a romance. Instead, this is more of a Tring family story, a grocery business in its fourth generation as backdrop, and the gentle dictatorship of Dad-Tring and Mum-Tring over their adult sons, especially the two who work for their father. George, the eldest, is a solicitor, married to Anna, who believes she married beneath her and feels she is not sufficiently valued in the community. Andrew, the youngest, is married to Doris, who attended the London School of Economics and could have had a promising career.
Wishing you a Happy New Year and many good books in 2025! I read nearly 200 books in 2024 and quite a few were so compelling I kept recommending them to others or thinking about them myself. These are my top ten:
