I feel a bit bait-and-switched by this one. Expected soothing commentary on Auste, Burnley, Edgeworth - or, hell, even Heyer - and got blistering expose of 18th cent rape culture.

It was the worst century to be female in (see How To Create The Perfect Wife by Moore, or The Provoked Wife by Nash) but even knowing that, was not prepared for this hard, angering read. McGee links misogyny then to today.

It feels like a fanfic. I loved flambards - it was a craze in my teens when the TV show aired, and I had horsey friends who were drawn in by that element. And I expected to love this more. Linda Newbury is superb, flambards is iconic: this was going to be great.

However.

This is an authorised fanfic in that Newbury is working off Peyton's notes for what happened after the books. The modern day thread of the story, about Grace Russell in 2018, was both too much and too little - the 2018 story was not gripping. It involved disability dislocation ptsd and swags of genealogy research, but I didn't buy that a 14 year old was that obsessed by her great grandparents On the other hand, like Grace, I felt more interested in Christina than any of the other characters. Christina, by the way, seen through other people's eyes and written by a fan, has become a flawless fearless ravishing MarySue. I did want maximum Christina and I got it. Now I wonder what this book would be like if Newbery had a free-er hand to make stuff up.

The Austen connection touted on the cover is really a tenuous (some parallels with Anne Elliott.)

Apart from that, this biography of a sussex baronet's daughter in the early 19th century, who faces family opposition to her choice of husband, is moderately interesting. It's not about historical celebrities - at one point, her landlord is Shelley's father, at another, she goes to a ball attended by Jane Austen's brother - but it uses heavy quotation of letters and diaries to bring ordinary regency/early victorians to life.

The classism was intense and the horror of mesalliance alienating to the point I hated the read so that is also an aspect of the book.

If you are going to set a book in Ireland, please set it in Ireland not the home counties. Try and research journey times, landlord-tenant and English/Irish relations, the recent memory of the 1798 rising : don't curtsy to the goddess Heyer and call it job done. This book is soooo English.

And yes it's a genre romance. But the background world building was terrible and the Big Misunderstanding that drove the plot was one of the worst ever.

Celebrity cash-in. Illustrations zesty and engaging but text banal.

A picturebook pretending to be a wild rumpus hullabaloo. Child chases adorable mammoth through museum. Pictures are lovely, crowded double page spreads. Writer sneaks in education via pictureflaps with random nuggets of data ; very ingenious, but any child can spot the pill hidden in the jam.

Artwork is enchanting. Minimal text, using group-names of animals (pod whales, unkindness of ravens) in sequence to suggest story.

The pictures range from unusual candids of the actors before fandom was uncontrollably vast, when they were less wary of the crazy and protected their privacy less, a few gorgeous fanarts by the likes of Conniue Faddis and Joni Wagner, to blurry screenshots apparently kodak'd off a family TV.

The text... eh. It has the hearty tone of a parish newsletter : actresses are beautiful and actors are talented. Some of the captions read as if the author didn't know which ep a picture came from and tried to cover up via grandiose but studiedly vague adjectives.

I had a copy of this in 79 or 80 and spent hours poring over the pages.

Back in the 1980s when i was doing childrens bookselling, a lot of teenfics were very, um, issue led. Each publisher had a list of novels that were market researched right-on carefully focussed hack work from the very latest word processor. There'd be an anorexia story, a kindly objectifying story about a wheelchair user, a terminal illness romance, and one about fighting the system of the american high school. Maybe a lesbian story.

They were generally uninspired. Even the dutifully included humourous element would be flabby. They were as sanctimoniously moral as Newberry's goody two shoes.

Which is why I'm nervous of reviewing this. Reduced to bullet points, it sounds like bibliotherapy hell.

Heroine's mum stresses about diets and being fat. 16 year old heroine is mildly regretful she has plump metabolism but not remotely stressed about it. I loved the heroine; she was a good person without inducing eye rolling, mature without beiing unconvincing. She wants to learn hebrew from the granny substitute she visits regularly. She loses patience with aerobics-mad friend but bonds with the friend's hippy mum. She gets into belly dancing where being curvy is a plus, fights to maintain boundaries with her mum, and comes out of it all okay.

The background is terribly 80s. There's a bit in a department store where they debate makeup and the colours they mention are pumpkin mustard and camel.

The cover made me think this was a story of decades of hypochondria, but Pennac is an exhilarating read, often apparently drunk on vocabulary, so I went ahead. And was reminded of Adrian Mole. A gallic Adrian Mole, living inside his head and vehemently self absorbed, how strange. (The jacket text, which I hadn't read, made the same connection/comparison.)

But Pennac is less distanced from his hero than Townsend is, and so the book's more moving when the man ages. Towards the end, I cried; but can't tell why I reacted so strongly. The story is more than the sum of its parts.

Uglow is a fantastic mass market historian, and her book on Gaskell is one of the best biographies I've ever read; her book on Hogarth I recommend immensely, but..

This, about the Napoleonic home front, is so diffuse. Uglow's writing is as lucid as ever and she has a journalist's eye for expressive details. It covers over 2 decades. It covers rich and poor, rural and city, military and civilian, north and south, and you can hardly see the overall picture for the anecdotes.

I don't usually like to link offsite in this box but as this book doesn't have any reviews here, I'll link to lj where I whined a lot about having bought this.

Spoiler: I hated it, but if I'd got it as a kindle (cheaper) I might have not read in such a demanding and bad tempered way

http://nessreader.livejournal.com/209262.html

The part of this I was most touched and moved by was at the beginning. The authors, a husband-wife writing team, talked about how much they loved each other and what a thrill it was for them to collaborate on a project. I really wanted to love this.

And a steampunk alternate Victoriana with magic and gaslight is a huge draw, and the cover is gorgeous.

I did not want this to become a romance between the two leads and did not buy the UST the authors were pushing. In fact neither of the heroes came entirely alive, off the page for me; nor did the secondary characters. This was where the book stood or fell for me as I'm very stupid at following out the clues of a crime plot and only judge mysteries on characterisation.

The world-building of this fantasy city was the best thing, but could not save the book fro me.

I think Ozment was aiming for a massmarket readership with this, which may be why his style is overly exclamatory!!! with the !!! all over the place. There are also slangy stylistic noodles, for instance the way he refers to his subjects as the "Wittenberg Brains Trust," which are amusing the first time, but pall on repetition.

Also - to cut back on footnotes, perhaps? - he makes what seem to me subjective statements about how much more deeply committed Cranach was to the ideology in woodcut example A versus woodcut B, and then gives no reason or evidence for the judgement. The book is much more about Cranach than it is about Luthor, and possibly more about Ozment than it is about either of them.

Do you know what Pride & Prejudice has been missing all these years? Austen said: a serious and definitive essay about the Napoleonic wars, but ah, what did she know.

What it needs, really, truly, is highwaymen.

Also ~
a ransom plot,
some easily duped conmen,
and a sprinkling of mentions of Almacks.

Hahn has generously improved the second half of P&P by adding all of this and more, in a prose style chockfull of awkward "archaic" grammar and slightly ajar vocabulary.

Lizzie Bennet loses her gumption and intelligence, is buffetted by outside elements while stupid misunderstandings contrive to set up a love triangle so that Darcy can Brood Moar.

She loses Lizzie's social acuity, her ability to analyse conversations - or remember them clearly. This 1st person pov summarises meetings Austen might have done in reported speech if only for cameos of the bystanders. I miss all the minor characters you'd expect in an Austen novel. This book is only interested in its romantic leads. Consequently it loses Austen!Lizzie's interest in other people's feelings.

It also sheds Austen!Lizzie's rigorous self control of her face and speech. She acquires Jane Bennett's near dimness and adds to it a self absorption Jane never had.

Because everything is subordinated to the happy ever after of romance Hahn!Lizzie skips the emotional and rational journey of being told Wickham's sins - disbelieving it, unable to dismiss it, re-evaluating, re-assessing, judging and deciding. What a timesaver, in this show more story, for her to believe Darcy the minute he tells the truth without any thinking about it. This Lizzie is all nerves and no brain, her mother's daughter but not Austen's.

Jane Bennet stops making heroic efforts to think the best of everyone and dwindles into a generic confidante sister. Darcy has dimples and a snowball fight in a public London park. (To quote Princess Bride: in-con-CIEV-able.)

Which were my favourite bits.. hmm, let me think. Perhaps the scene where Lizzie got doorstopped by hanoverian papparazi, or no - then there was a 48 hour sequence when the couple's only meal was a lapful of blackberries at the end of which Lizzie wanted Darcy to stagger into a storm and comb the district for medical help.

I'm trying to forget the highwayman's plot arc. At some stages his risk of being hanged is an important plot point which we should care about, but then people are mean to our heroine at the opera and that means blond scarred hunk is forgotten again.

The excitingly dramatic geography of the home counties, swamp, cave, jungle-forest and thousands of miles of solitude, all disposed as best suited the story, was a pleasure.

Mostly, I loved the subtlety of the courtship. The following quote takes place in front of Lizzie's mother.

How skillfully he struggled to repress his emotions, the only clues being his sudden intake of breath and consequent heaving chest.
"Goodnight Fitzwilliam," I whispered, and climbed into the cab. show less

Introduced and annotated with qualified enthusiasm by E M Forster (she is "underbred" he says) this collection of journal-letters by Eliza Fay, each signed off at a cliffhanger,evoke an angry bustling woman with a hint of Austen's Aunt Norris.

Alternately sanctimonious and vindictive, martyred and acquisitive, she's always alive to the main chance. Or just alive, really; her energy crackles off the page. There are suggestions throughout that her companions' sympathies were worn out listening to her catalogue of sorrows. She is notably stoic about the sorrows of others.

But what a resource for a historic novelist of her place and time - dresses worn, meals eaten, how much for a dish of asparagus, the relative comfort of houses - all itemised in period idiom. No wonder EMF pestered Woolf to republish these letters.

The text is taken from the king james edition of the bible, and I can see many adults retelling the story in their own words rather than reading for younger children, but the pictures tell the story anyway, so a bit of mystifying vocabulary probably wouldn't matter with this pictorial context.

As for the pictures, they are beautiful, luminous watercolours. The figures are gawky and tender, both funny and moving. I bought my copy just for Vivas' art. By the way, she also illustrated another delicious book, Gordon Wilfred McGonegall Partridge.

A brilliant book about the retail industry. It's about daring schemes to cut prices to the bone, and how that means pressure to increase turnover so that a smaller percentage of profit on many sales outweighs a larger profit on few. And it's about how it feels to work in retail, the necessary small insincerities, the infuriating situation of not being able to answer back no matter what, the office politics on the shop floor, the exhaustion and sore feet and meticulous tedium of keeping control of the stock, the mutual disdain between big store and independent shop.

It's a negative take on the job, but recognisable.

Oh, yes. There is a love story in there too. This grips me less, as the principals are exasperating.

The heroine Denise is Cinderella, she's Patient Griselda, she's King Cophetua's beggar maid. She is abused and overwrought and made a drudge by family, by bosses, workmates, customers and passing strangers. Her angst is vast. She's fate's punchbag.

The hero, if I must call him that, treats her appallingly too. All through the insults, the sacking (unmerited of course) the starvation, the reputation for whoring, the consumptive cousin, the explosive umbrella carver, the crisis scene when she has to fit a haute couture coat on the shoulders of her rival, Denise remains brave, noble, uncomplaining and with - her one identifying feature - great hair.

Mouret - Henry VIII to her Anne Boleyn - is not much of a prize. He's a visionary businessman who rants and struts the show more Paris afternoon tea party scene. A less charismatic business partner functions to worry over the balance sheets. It takes Mouret a long time and chapters of pining to work out that offering Denise's own weight in gold will not get her in bed. She wants enough gold to go round the third finger of her left hand and that's it.

The book is studded with set pieces; detailed verbal pictures of habedashery displays, the forming of an architectural facade, the dispersal across town of horsedrawn delivery vans. The foreword assures me these are much admired. show less

More testosterone than you'd think would fit on a page.

Exhausting to read, trying portray sleep deprivation via the device of runon sentence. I wanted to know how it felt to work there, and he told me, and I wanted to know a layperson take on the fishery industry, but he was still on at the runon sentence of horror, + I wanted to know about the background of the trawlermen, but we were all still remorselessly immersed in Redmond's psyche.

I am dying to know what his shipmates made of the eventual book.

A mean and modern wouldbe writer might dismiss this monster epic as 600+ pages of tell not show. I'm thinking back to a certain writing site where that rule is god, hence my bringing the rule to mind now. It doesn't matter. There is so wide a world in this book that a bit of info-dumping must be endured.

Also the sentence structure is more formal, harder to read than Austen, but it's worth it. It is enormously rewarding to read. You can see why Edgeworth mattered all through the 19th century to the reading public including the major novelists. It felt like a prototype of Victorian novels - all of them. At points I was thinking "Anthony Trollope got his clergy-on-the-make tribulations from this" or "Eliot and Gaskell and all the rest got their world in microcosm, all the social classes represented, thing from this" or "Yonge got tips on how to make ensemble dialogue forward a plot and expose character simultaneously here"

The two brothers from the virtuous family (the doctor and the lawyer; the soldier is offstage for most of the story) are hard to tell apart but convincing enough nice (forgettable) young men. The secondary heroine Rosamond has an endearing Miss Bates line in babble. The chief heroine Caroline is a paper cutout dressadoll straight out of Burney; she is prim, self obsessed, at once excelling all others yet officiously humble, described as charming but never says a memorable or striking thing. Her father has the same personality with a little added pomposity show more to show he is a man. The baddies - a wonderful scheming mama generalling her daughters into worldly marriages, an embittered statesman and the aforementioned clergy who's gone to the dogs - have all the charisma and the comedy. The hero is the purest of stuffed shirts.

The scope is magnificent, exhilarating - men's issues, women's concerns, economics and morality and anything else that came to mind was grist to her mill. The law niggles are poorly handled - inaccurate, apparently, though E made a great flourish of having included such arcane material. She certainly uses more dramatic and melodramatic elements than her contemporary Austen does - a shipwreck, a coup d'etat, bankruptcy, prison, politics. She goes from the individual to the abstract and bounces back again over and over, carving gender roles more untidily than some contemporary novelists do - her heroines are interested in politics (though, poor girls, only allowed speaking looks during the drawing room debates) and how fast, on making a new acquantance of the opposite sex, Edgeworth's young men as well as the women start gauging them as marriage partners, lovelorn and anxious for domesticity as they are.

Entertaining beyond what I expected. show less

Yes, this is by Saki.

Have wanted to read this since mentions of it in introductions to his fiction, and then his biography included some quotes which whetted my appetite further. This was a whole book of Saki I hadn't read and could not find, a history of Russia with bits of snark. It was a 15 to 20 year search until I got my mitts on the book. In the end I picked up as a print on demand. No book could live up to that kind of build-up.

It's (as suspected) not brilliant, written before he'd found his spiritual home in short story land.

He seems to have researched his facts thoroughly then dumped the info randomly on the page, chronologically. I found it hard to tell the why of the sequence of events. There is some happy phrase making, for instance I enjoyed

Among the expedients for obtaining [money] which met with the approval of Christ's Viceregent, was the barter of indulgences, conducted in such wholesale manner that none but the very poor, who could not afford luxuries, were excluded from the attainment of eternal glory.

Most of his jokes came up when he was being blackly sardonic at the expense of the church militant. (He SO wanted to be gibbon when he grew up) Hence, I suppose, the pondorously augustan sentences and purple vocabulary

As the Polish eagles went winging homeward the land settled down, almost for the first time in the century, to a period of peace and security, and the figurative 'voice of the turtle' arose once more in the forests and fields of Moskovy. show more

It's told as a series of biographies of reigns, from grand princes to tsars. (The cut-off point where his history ends is 1619 when the Romanov dynasty became secure in power.) Saki is shocked, shocked! by Ivan the Terrible, in a tabloid editorial way that forces him to dwell on the despot's torture techniques. The early centuries, short on records, are eked out with a lot of geographical detail.

He had personal ways of transliterating russian words, some subvocalising might be needed to work out names at points. show less

I bought this for two reasons. The cover is splendid; it's pretty and it hints at historical fiction, romance and escapism.

The other reason? I have a shallow fondness for the word scoundrel.

The cover did not lie. This is a victorian empire that never was, where the sun does not set because God wouldn't trust an Englishman in the dark.

Specifically: picture this. Greece, 1875. We have a group of baddies who are named the Sons of Albion. They go about the world stealing magical artifacts from other ethnicities to shore up the power of the British Empire. (This reminds me of the set-up of Hoyt's trilogy about weredragons; Heart of Light and so forth) Opposed to them are another group, the Blades of the Rose, also English I notice, who respect foreigners and foil the Sons of Albion. I hardly need to tell you that the Blades are mostly very dishy young men who will in the course of the series be assimilated in the bonds of holy matrimony.

Our heroine, London, has torn loyalties up the wazoo. Her dad is the leader of the Sons of A. In the course of about 48 hours (a chapter in book time) she is told about the existence of both groups and asked to join the Blades. We are told it is a difficult decision but she abandons her father and her life very quickly. The author set her up as wanting autonomy more than anything else, and being denied it within a very traditional-gender-roles family, but still..

The mcguffin of the plot never really came into focus for me. I think it was show more greek fire, but the sequence of events was mainly of chasing from one island to another via fisherman's smack with a gunboat looming in the wake of the adventurers. It was clearly handwaving to fill in between smoochy scenes.

There was a bit of sex, and a lot of detailed planning of sex. My suspension of disbelief takes a hammering when people under imminent danger of death take time out to admire each other's thigh muscles or go into a reverie about shagging. I think, and this is a your milage may vary thing, they would be paying attention to the bullets. show less

Alas for my girlish hopes.

I heard about this one online many months ago and had been promising myself an uncharacteristically sappy Wellington of Waterloo fame. It was NOT wellington, but a made up duke.

This made up duke was also a pirate, as this is a reasonable job combination in romancelandia.

The love story consisted of her going nonoIcan't and him going butyouWILLmypretty, over and over again. Which palled.

But it was the steampunk world which grabbed me, not the romance. It is integrally steampunk, by which I mean that the steampunk is built into the plot and fundamental to the characters' lives and not a decorative extra. I'm delighted that this is the first of a series, as this is a tempting world to explore, at least on paper. To explore it for real, one would have to face down zombies, war and sea monsters, alongside the usual Victorian era unpleasantnesses such as industrial pollution, classism and racism. On the other hand, the women in this version of England do get to have careers without raising an eyebrow, which means we get a marvellous piratical lady airship captain, and the female lead of this book, a homicide investigator.

Setting: unspecified late victorian, tensions between longtime occupants of an england that has been occupied territory and the returned descendants of colonists who fled occupation. Which reminded me of how irish americans used to say I'm Irish too! and we'd think No you're Not. It had a class system and industrial pollution and show more people worrying about money and while heroine's family came from sunnybrook farm school of unrelieved lovableness there were enough people around being horrid to offset the cloyingness of that.

But! Zeppelins! A kraken! I will forgive much for zeppelins and a kraken who is used in plot. I will even forgive romance, am very open minded like that show less

Gillespie has written a couple of Austen sequels - Uninvited Guests was about Northanger Abbey, and Teverton Hall, Pride and Prejudice.

This early 19th century-set story, populated by the impoverished genteel, has Mrs Norris and Maria (Mansfield Park) as background characters.

It's clearly inspired by Austen in setting and the way the heroine is focussed on autonomy rather than romance reminds me of Austen, too.

The romance element seems a minor part of the story, more minor than in many Austen sequels.

This book has a younger target audience than the prev (light romance) books in the sequence, but it's fun to see the wicked marquess and his Kate from a different point of view.

The softening, for modern children's sensibilities, of horrors of workhouse and deadening effect of total emotional neglect, was niggling at me as I read (had recently read biography of real workhouse boy of same era, and it was considerably less happy story as in real life the world was not populated mainly by people of good will.)

The hero is a brutal pragmatist and the tone reminded me a lot of Diana Wynne Jones - which is a very good thing in a ya fantasy.

The africans are exuberant, the australians free-wheeling, americans brash, japanese cruel and the english, wait for it, dogged.

An exjournalist with daily mail and daily telegraph, Tyrer is not afraid of the sweeping stereotype. Nor is she afraid to kill a noun by applying the most numbingly predictable adjective.

The way she writes in cliches and generalisations infuriates because the story she has deserves better; astonishingly sheltered upper class gels pitched into an ordeal no-one could have anticipated, and how the stiff upper lip patriotism of that era sustained them through it.

The passages where the nurses own words are quoted, from interviews and autobiographies, are where the book is best.

Kicking off from the end of the second world war, each chapter in this surveys the bestselling books and characterises the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s in terms of what the bulk of the UK were buying and reading. The fashions changed over time and Sutherland makes some guesses at the reasons for the developments he charts.

He has been reading widely and attentively all his life to build up so wide a frame of reference, and although there are tin-eared sentences (usually when he is trying too hard, extending a metaphor or doing wordplay that doesn't come off) his opinions are interesting.

What I love about this is the fact that he focussses on massmarket reading patterns - a lot of books about hist of reading are about the first and revolutionary instances of an idea or trend, overlooking a tiny printrun which surely means the permeation of that idea/trend into society would not have happened in the year cited, but filtered through later..

JS however does not get SF&F. His comments on it seem obtuse. His knowledge of the development of childrens' books seems superficial and flippant, which leaves me less trusting of his judgements on the genres I am even more ignorant about.

Also, he generalises from his own life - english coffee was drinkable by the 60s (that is a fragment of autobiography not a pronouncement on UK culinary standards, Y/N?) Some of his subjective personal opinions (Terry Pratchett is not at all funny: Germaine Greer's take on feminism is representative show more of the whole movement: children's books can be summed up by Blyton and Dahl) are presented as hard FACT.

He has a theory about the readership of Pelzer's misery memoir (that it is read solely by males, what's more by bitter men smarting from the effects of modern life) which is not borne out by my experiences of bookselling - or by the sales patterns of that book as seen by any other bookseller I know. Again, Sutherland presents this as a statistical fact, not a guess. show less

Too much of Duncan looking, not enough of Enid found. This is a tiresomely whimsical travel/memoir by a narcissist whose one joke was to keep coupling Blyton with sex. It was a bit amusing at first, but I wish he had talked more about the hundreds of books she wrote and the cult status she achieved in children's literature. Simplistic, snobbish and limited she may have been, but she deserved more of a spotlight in this book, and her fatuous seeker deserved less of one.

No. I did not think this one worth my time or money.

Late victorian Boys Own Paper-ish anthology of chivalry stories, knights, castles, Froissant, directed at young male empire builders. Illustrated by Gordon R Browne.

One of the better P+P sequels I've read; this focuses on Mary Bennet rather than Elizabeth. Mary was given short shrift in canon, but this is a sympathetic take on her, without rewriting her so's to be unrecognisable. As it's a sequel, Ward has allowed herself a maturer Mary, who, like Fanny Price, has been affected by the evangelical revival that was becoming stronger towards the end of Austen's life. In fact Mary B's earnestness and anxiety to be good reminded me of Charlotte Yonge's heroines, written in the following generation.

As it's from Mary's pov, the reader gets a sense of her unawareness of Lizzie's private life, and also of why Mary might behave the way she does. Ward clearly has a soft spot for her heroine, offering her a buffet of 3 rival suitors of varying dispositions, one of whom she chooses at the end. Marrying single P+P characters off is the preoccupation of the book, along with the usual machinations from Wickham and a family crisis for Col Fitzwilliam.

The last pages hastily tie off what loose ends there are in somewhat bullet-point style - a bit too hastily.