May Books
The Coach Trip, Izzy Bromley
The Nightbird, Monica Edwards
A Thatched Roof, Beverley Nichols
A Village in a Valley, Beverley Nichols
Crooked Heart, Lissa Evans
V for Victory, Lissa Evans
The Great Passion , James Runcie
What Might Have Been ed. Andrew Roberts
Operation Seabird, Monica Edwards
No Going Back, Monica Edwards
Precious and Grace, Alexander McCall Smith
Time to Shine at The River School, Sabine Adeyinka
The Coach Trip was a ‘read now’ offer from NetGalley. At first, I thought I’d made a mistake in accepting it and it was just silly chick-lit. Then I found half an hour had whizzed by while I was reading it and decided it couldn’t be that bad. Scatty Emma double books herself for a coach tour with her recently widowed Grandma and a weekend away with best friend and flatmate Mel. They decide to combine the trips and join a party of old people on a coach tour of northern cathedrals and castles. Really, what are these young women like? They’re in their late twenties yet totally prejudiced against the ‘old people’ (apart from Grandma) and so ignorant, they don’t even know that the country didn’t always use decimal currency.
Old people, they find, are rude, fussy and miserable. As the tour continues, they have a complete change of heart, finding (gosh!) that old people may have had interesting lives and are perhaps miserable because of tragedies and the annoying decrepitude that comes before they’re ready for it. So, the girls learn some life lessons as well as some interesting facts about old buildings.
I was then stuck for reading, with nothing new, so turned to my shelves and picked a couple of books by Beverley Nichols. It’s amazing how Nichols was able to write a whole book which is just froth and, if you know anything about his life, some of it downright lies and yet keep you reading because something about it is irresistible. How to be a best seller.
More about Beverley Nichols here.
A more modern favourite is Lissa Evans. This was probably my third reading of Crooked Heart and I loved it as much as ever. Then, oh joy, I looked up Lissa on my blog and found that I must still have the sequel, V for Victory (she’s fond of punning titles) on the Kindle. I can never have too much of Noel. There’s a line I love, where Vee (now masquerading as his dead aunt), thinks that if she died that minute, she’d never know what happened to Noel and it would be like watching only half a film and not knowing the ending.
What Might Have Been is about the What Ifs? of history; counterfactuals as they are called. Typically, in his introduction Roberts lambasts both Marxist determinism and the Whig tradition of perpetual improvement. Historical events, he says, are far more likely to be the result of accidents or cock-ups. He says that fiction writers are good at ‘What If?’, citing Robert Harris and Kingsley Amis as examples, which I would agree with. Silly me, I thought the essays in this book would be rather like fiction; that is, describing the writer’s chosen events as though they had really happened. The first essay, about the Spanish Armada, does just this, describing a successful invasion and occupation of England, the restoration of Catholicism and the knock-on effects for Europe. In the other essays I read, the author was writing, ‘this is what really happened but this is what might have happened if such and such had/had not occurred’. I thought this misunderstood the brief. I got so bogged down in Norman Stone’s Serbian/pan-European essay (Archduke Franz Ferdinand was not assassinated), that I abandoned the whole book. I may thus have missed a really good essay but since the book was a Kindle deal, the thought of all that clicking through to find the other chapters was just too wearying.
I stand by everything I wrote here about the 16th book in the No 1 Ladies’ Detective agency series, but it didn’t stop me enjoying book 17. Really, Mma Makutsi is getting above herself! But it’s pleasant, for a change, to read about a truly nice people like Mma Ramotswe and Mr J L B Maketoni.
I was given the first Jummy book and I don’t think I wrote anything about it. I was delighted to find a second book is out. Sabine Adeyinka has written what are in many ways traditional boarding school stories, (aimed at younger girls, I think), with the twist that they are set in Nigeria. You’ve probably seen those charity ads on television where a young African girl says she feels she is falling behind her friends because she can’t continue her education. All too often, young girls are forced to leave school to work or even get married against their will. In Jummy at the River School, Jummy passes the exams for the prestigious River School but her best friend Caro has to leave school because her parents can’t afford more education for her. At the River School there’s a lot of fun but also a nasty rich girl and a lot of unfairness. So typical of so many boarding school stories.
By this second book, Caro has been able to join Jummy and they set off full of excitement for the last term of their first year. ‘This book in three words: Friendship, Mystery, Environment’ it says on the cover. There’s a new girl, who’s rather a mystery, a midnight feast on the first night, a gang of nasty girls in Zambesi House out to damage Jummy’s Nile house, someone stealing and the new girl Donga, suspected (but not in Nile House, where she’s quickly become popular). Just what you might expect in a boarding school story but there’s also a corn planting competition, a canoe race, a rescued turtle, amazing hair styles, unusual chants and lessons in Yoruba. This is Africa.
The term is overshadowed by an environmental disaster. Shine-Shine river, pride and joy of the River School girls, shines no more but smells terrible and the fish, birds and other wildlife have disappeared. The water supply to the school has almost dried up. The girls have always had to fetch all their own water in buckets for washing and cleaning but there’s now so little that a fire truck is delivering water. This is a man-made problem and it’s up to the girls to solve the mystery. Can they do it? ‘Winner!’ as they would say. I love these fun, giggly, feisty girls.
