Celia Brayfield

This is a thorough guide to writing. The author has a clear, very readable style. She covers almost every aspect of writing a novel, with the aim of inspiring people to come up with successful - even bestselling - books.

The focus is on fiction, with sections on characters, place, plot, avoiding distractions and more. It's thirty years old, so inevitably somewhat dated; there's almost no mention of computers, and nothing about the distractions inherent in social media or online gaming. The show more book is also written before the advent of free, easy self-publishing online.

But most of the content is still relevant, and worth perusing even for someone who has already read other writing books. While much of the same ground is inevitably covered, the style and main focus of each is slightly different.

Recommended.

Longer review: https://suesbookreviews.blogspot.com/2025/05/bestseller-by-celia-brayfield.html show less

Is it fair to write a review about a book on writing reviews? Perhaps not, but I will attempt the feat nonetheless. In this work, British author Celia Brayfield offers her readers wisdom and experiences from her career of writing arts reviews for periodicals. (She has since moved on to writing full books.)

She spends first eight of the ten chapters sharing the rules of the road for writing arts reviews. She fills in these rules with examples from her life experience. While this was show more interesting at first, I grew tired of hearing story after story. I wanted Brayfield to put forth an argument or, at the very least, to cite someone else who is putting forth an argument. Without a strong central narrative, the book seemed to ramble at times. Being more familiar with the American arts scene than the British one, I had trouble sifting through the unfamiliar names.

Although I thought about putting the book down as I labored through the chapters, the last two chapters redeemed it to me. In the next-to-last chapter, Brayfield provides a detailed history of arts reviews. She displays erudition about the major writers who shaped our perception of this practice. In the last chapter, she provides helpful and practical advice for starting out in the field. Such pragmatism is always welcomed.

I wish she would have taken the perspective of writing to help the reader understand how to perfect the art instead of just sharing story upon story. This book is not a total failure as the last two chapters illustrate. Still, it could have been stronger to meet my desires and my American cultural experience. show less

Pearls by Celia Brayfield
Story starts out with the pearls and they have been examined and the results are told to Catherine, the Mona Lisa of Wall Street and her sister Monty, the rockstar have lost their father and pearls have magically shown up under their pillows.
Love the clues of the pearls themselves....they hire a PI to find out why their father killed himself.
The story then goes back to when James, their father was alive and his wife would rarely spend time together, but he was show more heavily involved in the girls education, even when Monty got caught smoking.
Liked antics of the girls while attending boarding school with nuns teaching them...
Gets a bit confusing at times as the story follows the older days of the father growing up and the kids in their lifes growing up.
They find many secrets as the story goes back to reveal them. They find ways to get out of how society has placed them in their roles.
Like the story especially the world wide travel and facts about the pearls, xrays and what the rings mean... book was over 24 hours listening to the tapes.
I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device). show less

Too similar to other books i've read and doesn't really get going. Didn't really enjoy it