The Ordinary Princess by MM Kaye
Synopsis: A princess is gifted by her fairy godmother to be ordinary—and who ever heard of a princess with mouse brown hair and freckles?
Category Archives: British Literature
Glittering Images by Susan Howatch
Synopsis: When the Archbishop of Canterbury sends a canon to uncover evidence of sexual misconduct in the home of one of his bishops, a mare’s nest of scandal erupts and the canon must face hard truths about the hypocrisies in his life.
The Brimstone Wedding by Barbara Vine
Synopsis: An elderly woman’s recollections of a love that ended in tragedy shed new light on a married woman’s illicit affair. Review: Wordpress keeps eating this review, and I don’t have the energy to write it a third time. Suffice it to say that it’s very good, with great characters, wonderful postwar detail, and a riveting story. Meanwhile, check out Sheila for a nice post about Margaret Atwood.
Eleanor’s Victory by ME Braddon
Synopsis: A naive young woman loses her beloved father to scoundrels in a Parisian back alley, and decides to devote her life to seeking vengeance.
Gallowglass by Barbara Vine
Synopsis: A suicidal teen is rescued by a charismatic drifter with designs on a woman he calls “The Princess.” Review: Gallowglass has not been my favorite Vine (the alter ego of crime writer Ruth Rendell), but subpar Vine is still head and shoulders above most of what’s out there in the mystery genre. Where Vine succeeds best in this book is in depicting Joe’s thralldom to Sandor, the man who rescued him from jumping front of a train. An orphan raised by loveless foster parents,…
I Don’t Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson
Synopsis: A working mother of two finds her life teetering out of balance as she struggles to succeed in finance without feeling guilty that the nanny is raising her kids. Review: I sometimes have anxiety dreams where I’m working. I’m either behind the counter at the video store I clerked at in grad school, or posting things in Moveable Type for my work blog, or reenacting a specific job (like an event I’ve planned) in what feels like real time. While the dream is going…
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
White Teeth: A Novel by Zadie Smith Synopsis: 3 families–one Bengal, one white English/Jamaican, and the third white English–twist and turn throughout one another’s lives over the decades in and around a multicultural neighborhood in London. Review: Smith has a stellar knack for portraiture, with all of her characters being wholly unique, and capturing subtle aspects of character psychology in novel ways. My favorite has to be the long-suffering Alsana, mother to two twins as different as night and day. After her much-older husband Samad…
Aspects of the Novel by EM Forster
Synopsis: A collection of lectures given by EM Forster at Trinity College in Cambridge in 1927, touching on all aspects of the novel from story and people to what Forster calls “fantasy” and “prophecy.” Review: A delicious gem of a book. Forster’s prose is gorgeous, and I want to read every book he mentions that I haven’t already. I will be ruminating on what I’ve read in here for quite some time, and this is a book I will revisit many times. Rather than try…
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Synopsis: Aimless Tom Ripley has been dispatched to Italy to bring feckless playboy Dickie Greenleaf home, but when Dickie rejects Tom’s friendship, Tom chooses a darker course. Review: I have read and enjoyed several books by Highsmith, but stayed away from the Ripley books because in the crime and mystery genres, I tend not to like the recurring character, like Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford, to give another example from an author I admire, and when I heard about Ripley, I assumed the same. I learned…
His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
Synopsis: The setting is the Napoleonic wars, in a world where dragons exist and are part of military operations. An English naval captain captures a French vessel, and on board is a particularly valuable treasure: a dragon’s egg, and joins the Aerial Corps with Temeraire, a very rare Celestial breed, and together they join the fight. Review: I loved this idea the minute I read about it in one of Entertainment Weekly’s capsule reviews. The book reads more like an adventure tale than a fantasy–lots…