What I am reading Wednesday
Jan. 4th, 2017 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scripsiSo, back to this. I have missed it. This last week I have read:
The Serpent Garden by Judith Merkle Riley Merkle Riley wrote a couple of historical novels with a whiff of the supernatural, all following the same basic lines; A young woman with some kind of gift, sometimes supernatural like healing or just something out of the ordinary, like painting. She will be, for no fault of her own, destitute, but through her gift and the friends she picks up along the way, she will end up quite prosperous. She will also, eventually, fall in love with a young man who usually is quite antagonistic towards her in the beginning. There will also be magic involved, some way or the other. But despite this formula I enjoy these books a lot. The herones are personable and the hero’s decent men. There is also a strong element of women helping and supporting each other and some nice depictions of friendship. The real historical elements are well-researched and, to my intense pleasure, the author display real knowledge of historical fashion.
The Serpent Garden is set in England and France around 1514. Susanna Dallet is the daughter of a talented painter who has secretly taught her to paint as well. She is now married to another painter who has married her only to get access to her father’s trade secret. He is abusive and cheats on her, but Susanna tries to be a good wife nevertheless. But when her husband is murdered her world turned upside down and suddenly she is painting miniatures for the high and mighty under the patronage of Cardinal Wolsey. She is attached to the wedding entourage of Princess Mary, and well in France she gets entangled in the ins and outs of Princess Mary’s marriage to the king of France. There is also a subplot where her husband is involved in freeing a demon and the angel of inspiration’s work to set things right. I enjoy this book a lot and it’s one I re-read on a semi-regular basis.
The Harvest of Scorn by F G Cottam This is the third of The Colony books, and is very much the third part. The premises is an island outside the coast of Scotland where the members of aspect completely disappeared in the early 19th century. SInce then a lot of other people have gone missing too. I liked the first book and disliked the second. This one was ok. Things are finally settled and the death count, which was rather extreme in the second novel, a lot more temperate. There were also fewer characters which gave room for some more character development. All in all a rather satisfying end to the trilogy.
The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton A young girl, Nella, arrives in Amsterdam in 1686. She has married a wealthy merchant, a man she doesn’t know and whom she has not seen since the wedding ceremony a month earlier. In her husband’s house she meets her sister-in-law, Marin, a secretive and rather difficult woman, as well as a maid and her husband’s African servant. As a wedding gift she is given a miniature copy of the house and she contracts a person to provide miniatures to the house. They are beautiful and skillfully made, but Nella also receives minutes she hasn’t ordered, but seems to convey a knowledge of the household in a very uncanny way. Quite soon she also realises she it watched by a very odd woman.
All the inhabitants in the house has secrets, more or less dangerous ones. Nella slowly starts to entangle them, and while doing so, also finding her own worth. I found the book beautifully written and Nella a likeable heroine. I especially liked how she, despite in a marriage of convenience, doesn’t have an illicit love affair. However, I found the end rather abrupt, leaving me with a feeling the story wasn’t fully told yet.
Death Notes by Sarah Rayne I’m a sucker for historical mýsteries and I like novels with multiple timelines. Rayne’s books always contain those. They also, always, contains a character who is more or less mentally unstable, which I don’t like much at all. Her books are very uneven and more often than not, she misses the mark. This book is partly about eh mystery of a violinist who has been hanged in St Petersburg in the 1880’s. It’s also a contemporary story about a woman who has lost her husband and daughter in an accident and now return to their holiday cottage in Ireland where the accident took place. It begun quite interestingly, but both timelines made use of amnesia as a plot point which felt both heavy handed and unbelievable. Especially the solution to the modern storyline felt very unbelievable.
An Absence of Light by F G Cottam This is a novella and the second one of those who involves a mysterious sect, so I suppose there will be more novellas to make a whole in the end. The characters are completely different, though. This one is about a man who move into a flat and finds it haunted. It was quite an effective horror novellas and on the whole I like Cottam’s shorter stories better than his novel. Horror usually are more effective in the short format.
The Serpent Garden by Judith Merkle Riley Merkle Riley wrote a couple of historical novels with a whiff of the supernatural, all following the same basic lines; A young woman with some kind of gift, sometimes supernatural like healing or just something out of the ordinary, like painting. She will be, for no fault of her own, destitute, but through her gift and the friends she picks up along the way, she will end up quite prosperous. She will also, eventually, fall in love with a young man who usually is quite antagonistic towards her in the beginning. There will also be magic involved, some way or the other. But despite this formula I enjoy these books a lot. The herones are personable and the hero’s decent men. There is also a strong element of women helping and supporting each other and some nice depictions of friendship. The real historical elements are well-researched and, to my intense pleasure, the author display real knowledge of historical fashion.
The Serpent Garden is set in England and France around 1514. Susanna Dallet is the daughter of a talented painter who has secretly taught her to paint as well. She is now married to another painter who has married her only to get access to her father’s trade secret. He is abusive and cheats on her, but Susanna tries to be a good wife nevertheless. But when her husband is murdered her world turned upside down and suddenly she is painting miniatures for the high and mighty under the patronage of Cardinal Wolsey. She is attached to the wedding entourage of Princess Mary, and well in France she gets entangled in the ins and outs of Princess Mary’s marriage to the king of France. There is also a subplot where her husband is involved in freeing a demon and the angel of inspiration’s work to set things right. I enjoy this book a lot and it’s one I re-read on a semi-regular basis.
The Harvest of Scorn by F G Cottam This is the third of The Colony books, and is very much the third part. The premises is an island outside the coast of Scotland where the members of aspect completely disappeared in the early 19th century. SInce then a lot of other people have gone missing too. I liked the first book and disliked the second. This one was ok. Things are finally settled and the death count, which was rather extreme in the second novel, a lot more temperate. There were also fewer characters which gave room for some more character development. All in all a rather satisfying end to the trilogy.
The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton A young girl, Nella, arrives in Amsterdam in 1686. She has married a wealthy merchant, a man she doesn’t know and whom she has not seen since the wedding ceremony a month earlier. In her husband’s house she meets her sister-in-law, Marin, a secretive and rather difficult woman, as well as a maid and her husband’s African servant. As a wedding gift she is given a miniature copy of the house and she contracts a person to provide miniatures to the house. They are beautiful and skillfully made, but Nella also receives minutes she hasn’t ordered, but seems to convey a knowledge of the household in a very uncanny way. Quite soon she also realises she it watched by a very odd woman.
All the inhabitants in the house has secrets, more or less dangerous ones. Nella slowly starts to entangle them, and while doing so, also finding her own worth. I found the book beautifully written and Nella a likeable heroine. I especially liked how she, despite in a marriage of convenience, doesn’t have an illicit love affair. However, I found the end rather abrupt, leaving me with a feeling the story wasn’t fully told yet.
Death Notes by Sarah Rayne I’m a sucker for historical mýsteries and I like novels with multiple timelines. Rayne’s books always contain those. They also, always, contains a character who is more or less mentally unstable, which I don’t like much at all. Her books are very uneven and more often than not, she misses the mark. This book is partly about eh mystery of a violinist who has been hanged in St Petersburg in the 1880’s. It’s also a contemporary story about a woman who has lost her husband and daughter in an accident and now return to their holiday cottage in Ireland where the accident took place. It begun quite interestingly, but both timelines made use of amnesia as a plot point which felt both heavy handed and unbelievable. Especially the solution to the modern storyline felt very unbelievable.
An Absence of Light by F G Cottam This is a novella and the second one of those who involves a mysterious sect, so I suppose there will be more novellas to make a whole in the end. The characters are completely different, though. This one is about a man who move into a flat and finds it haunted. It was quite an effective horror novellas and on the whole I like Cottam’s shorter stories better than his novel. Horror usually are more effective in the short format.
