“When the house was complete, in February of 1870, Eleanor Starling took up residence and stayed there until her death in 1886. There is substantial evidence that she devoted the remaining years of her life to the study of the place she later called “Underland.” She believed, according to the notes and journals found by her successors, that there was another world beneath, or maybe beside, our own—a terrible, vicious world, populated by monstrous beings. She believed that there were cracks between that world and our own, places where things might leak through, and that one of these rifts lay underneath Eden, Kentucky.”
Starling House sits on Starling land and can’t be fully seen from the roadside, except for a pair of iron gates that are so intricate and sinuous it wouldn’t be a surprise if they started to move and become a living, writhing being. Opal passes the house daily as she takes a short cut from one of her jobs to another and she’s intrigued by the house, especially the one amber lit window, high up in the attic room. There she imagines Eleanor Starling, living the solitary life of an author trying to follow up their first extraordinary book. Opal loved Eleanor’s children’s book Underland described as a much darker Alice in Wonderland where a girl called Nell is under the ground with a weird array of beasts (all of which look like a member of the animal kingdom, but at the same time not at all). Opal’s life is a gruelling slog from the motel room she shares with brother Jasper, to her cleaning jobs then back to supervise homework and share their measly evening meal. It only takes one small difference in their routine to shake everything up and bring huge change to their lives. Opal pauses her route home and stops at the iron gates of Starling House. She holds on to the iron, but immediately finds her hand is slick with blood. More disturbingly, she feels the gates give, almost as if her blood is the key. She looks up to see that a tall, thin and rather bedraggled man has appeared in front of her. He looks her in the eye and says one word. Run!
[The town] “liked the Starlings even less. They’re considered eccentrics and misanthropes, a family of dubious origin that has refused for generations to participate in the most basic elements of Eden’s civil society (church, public school, bake sales for the volunteer fire department), choosing instead to stay holed up in that grand house. […] It’s generally hoped that both they and their house will fall into a sinkhole and rot at the bottom, neither mourned nor remembered, and—perhaps—release the town from its century-long curse.”
Arthur, the bedraggled man, is the current Starling living in the house and it isn’t long before Opal is drawn back into his presence. Arthur seems to be torn. He’s drawn to Opal, but so is the house. It seems unfair to strike up a friendship with her knowing that the house wants her and what that will mean for her life. Yet he asks her if she will clean for him and offers enough money that Opal can’t refuse. He is concerned about this flame haired waif that is now in his midst and he can’t help but offer her a winter coat, then his old truck. Are these genuine gifts, or is Arthur trying to assuage his guilt for doing the house’s bidding? The house almost seems to sigh and settle as Opal cares for it, like a cat stretching with pleasure when stroked. She does wonder about the crude symbols scratched into the wooden doors, that match Arthur’s tattoos. Every conceivable symbol to ward off evil is either scratched, painted or hung around the house. How do you ward off something that strikes from within? Opal is then approached by a woman in a suit, who seems to know a lot about Opal and the Starling House. She wants Opal to take photographs and pass on information from the inside of the house. Firstly she seems like any old local official, but becomes more sinister when Opal is reluctant to help, finally making threats against Jasper. Now she has no choice, but she’s surprised by her own emotions; it’s harder to betray Arthur Starling than she expected. Is it really the house she’s drawn to, or is it Arthur?
“Eleanor Starling left no record of why she built such a vast and strange house, but the oldest and best-loved book in her collection was a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It has been suggested by subsequent Starlings that she was not building a house but a labyrinth, for much the same reason the King of Crete once did: to protect the world from the thing that lived inside it.”
Opal isn’t easily afraid and I knew, just from that opening, she wasn’t done with Starling House. More to the point, the house isn’t done with her. I admired this plucky girl who is only just getting by in life and does everything for her brother Jasper. She desperately wants him to get away from Eden, Kentucky, because he has so much talent but also because nobody with any sense stays in Eden. She is saving for the fees of a private school she has seen, somewhere that would give him prospects and he would meet the right sort of people. She’s so set on this plan, she hasn’t bothered to ask what Jasper wants. Her heart is in the right place though. She doesn’t love many things, but when she does Opal loves like she does everything else – fiercely. Her existence is all work, striving just to survive but Opal is so intelligent, in fact one of the only places in town she visits religiously is the library. The librarian Charlotte is perhaps the closest thing to a friend she has. The truth is that Opal feels enormous guilt over the terrible car accident that killed their mother and what she sees as the decision she made to survive:
“ I’m fifteen and cold water is pouring through the windshield. The glove box is open, spewing pill bottles and plastic utensils. Mom is beside me, her limbs drifting gently, her hair tangling with the tacky dream catcher she pinned to the car roof. I’m reaching for her hand and her fingers are slick and limp as minnows and I might be screaming—Mom, come on, Mom—but the words can’t make it past the river? Then it goes very quiet and very dark. I don’t remember letting go of her hand, but I must have done it. I must have crossed her name off the list in my head and swum for the surface, abandoning her to the river bottom.”
I loved the psychological aspects of the story. The house has an identity and it knows who has the right stuff to live there and keep up the fight. I wondered whether the monsters were real or a manifestation of the occupant’s mental state. The thought of the monsters in our heads being able to run free in the world is definitely a terrifying one. The author builds the two worlds within the novel with contrasting techniques: short, blunt descriptions create Eden with it’s power plant and functional buildings, whereas Starling House and it’s labyrinthine tunnels are given long, descriptive passages that bring it to life. If something in Opal or Eleanor’s world is inexplicable she allows it to be unfinished or confused. Some of the monsters are beautifully described as ‘like a cat, but not quite’ or other strange combination that leaves gaps in the image for the reader to fill with their own imagination. This is an author that knows, the things we can’t see or comprehend are the most frightening.
When we finally get to Eleanor’s life story it is disturbing and sad, showing how unresolved trauma can project outwards into something monstrous. There’s a feminist thread here too in the truth about Eleanor’s life with the Gravely men and Opal recognition that her mother was shunned by the town, not just for liking sex but for not being sorry about it. In a reversal of the usual damsel in distress story, Opal is the architect of her own life and is determined to rid Starling House of it’s monsters and save Arthur. I was biting my nails in the final chapters, desperately wanting her to succeed! I’ve never doubted Alix E. Harrow’s talent or imagination. I’ve been a fan since her first novel, but this is her best yet. I’ve been reading that it’s a reimagining of Beauty and the Beast, and I can see that. However, Underland felt like the very darkest Alice in Wonderland to me. In both cases, all the ‘Disney-fied’ prettiness has been swept away. In it’s place are monsters that defy all description and a love story that’s more swords and thorns than hearts and flowers. It’s an absolute feast for the imagination and the perfect dark fantasy read for October.
After a few years building on the Practical Magic series, I was looking forward to seeing what Alice Hoffman would come up with next. She has based her story around the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne and his classic novel The Scarlet Letter and introduces us to two young women facing difficulties. Ivy is from a rich Boston family and when she finds herself pregnant at 16, she truly expects support. The father of her baby retreats into his wealthy family and the elite university he’s due to attend, taking no responsibility for the predicament they’re both in. Facing her pregnancy alone she talks to her parents who also wash their hands of her, not wanting the stigma or embarrassment. Ivy decides to leave home and climbs out of the bedroom window, setting out to see a friend who she knows will have an idea. She suggests they leave together and make their way out to a religious community she’s heard of in Blackwood, Massachusetts, with a charismatic leader called Joel Davies. When her father decides to look for her several months later he finds the worst, Ivy has a little girl called Mia and has become the leader’s wife. Mia grows up in Joel’s community and he decides who is in favour and what is a transgression. Everyone is punished, but the women particularly so – they might have their hair cut off or even be branded with a letter. Women are not allowed reproductive rights, but nor do they get to keep their children. Children belong to everyone and after a few days with their mother, sleep in dormitories. Books are not allowed and as she grows up books are Mia’s particular downfall. She finds her way to the public library and starts to read American classics like Little Women and Huckleberry Finn. Then she finds a copy of The Scarlet Letter, beautifully bound and very old. On the fly leaf is a dedication:
To Mia. You were mine and mine alone.
Is it perhaps her mother, who does show her special attention despite the rules. She tucks the book into her dress and keeps it. Reading in the barn, where she has loosened a board to keep her treasures behind. She has a small landscape painting of the view from the community’s buildings. Land that was left to Joel by his first wife Carrie. Carrie was also a rich girl, but one who had assets to bring to this Puritan community. Carrie was a great painter, but was often punished lest she become too vain about it. On the back of this painting is an inscription about the lands she owns and a promise that Joel will get to keep it ‘as far as the eye can see’.
One day during the apple harvest, a terrible accident happens and Ivy is killed. Mia is distraught, but as her mothers body is carried away she grabs the red boots that Joel uncharacteristically bought for her mother to have as a keepsake. She knows that now it’s either run or stay forever. Grabbing The Scarlet Letter and the painting she takes a leap, out of the bedroom window and across the fields to the library. The librarian had noticed Mia lurking in there, reading in the warmth. She had a feeling the girl was in trouble so she gave her a key and invited her to let herself in if she is ever in danger. She understands that to keep Mia safe they mustmove quickly, so she packs up the car and takes her somewhere he won’t know, because nobody knows. She has a long-term partner, a woman she doesn’t live with but trusts implicitly. She knows that with them, Mia should be able to thrive without the community breathing down her neck, to go to school and read to her heart’s content and have the life she has dreamed up for herself.
She also sensed that Joel was a man who wouldn’t give up Mia without a fight.
Of course it wouldn’t be an Alice Hoffman without something magical happening and here Mia experiences a time slip and finds herself in the same time and place as her hero Nathaniel Hawthorne. He hasn’t yet written The Scarlet Letter, in fact he’s on the verge of giving up writing altogether. When he meets Mia their connection is instant despite the centuries between them. They start a love affair, but what will the consequences of that be? Anything they do will change the future. Could her presence in his world mean that the very book that brought her here, no longer exists? In fact the consequences of their love could be even more life changing for both of them. Can she stay in his world? Is there any way he could come into hers? Mia is becoming aware that Nathaniel may have to sacrifice his writing for them to be together and she’s not sure she can let him do that. All the while, her father Joel is still watching and waiting.
I loved the play on The Scarlet Letter here because it shows us how powerless women have been across the centuries. I loved how Alice Hoffman creates this magical setting. The landscape, particular the woods and river, feel like something out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It would be easy to dismiss her work as whimsical and romantic, but underneath is a fierce feminist manifesto and an equally fierce defence of the written word. I was aware as I read the novel that it could go the same way as other books that have supported women’s reproductive rights and end up banned. The way the religious community prevent women from controlling their own fertility is a representation of what’s happening in some states of America. Abortion has always been a controversial topic in the US and the rights of women in some areas have reverted back to the early 20th Century. Jodi Picoult often cites Alice Hoffman as her favourite writer and a huge influence on her own work. In some states of America Jodi Picoult’s work is banned from libraries and schools because it concerns issues like abortion, teenage pregnancy, fertility treatment and same sex marriage. Here Hoffman is hugely critical of a community that doesn’t value women’s education, burns books and leaves them with no rights over their own bodies. There’s a part of her magical landscape where desperate women have taken matters into their own hands. They’ve taken herbs or potions to end their pregnancies and have created a burial place for the children they’ve lost and those they can’t bear to have.
Mia’s surrogate parents are the antithesis of Joel’s community. They are intelligent and progressive women who actively encourage questioning and reading. They remind Mia that no matter how moral and righteous a community might seem, if it restricts education, burns books and controls women, believing them to be inferior to men, then it is on the way to being fascistic. It’s so sad that Joel won’t let women read but then uses letters to punish them and control their behaviour, by literally branding them into the skin in a ceremony. Instead of wearing a scarlet letter, an adulteress would be branded on the upper arm with a letter ‘A’. Words and books are the source of our knowledge and that scares men like Joel. This is a brave book and will probably be underestimated, but women have been speaking their truth in ways that fly under the radar for centuries; films or books dismissed as ‘chick lit’ or ‘rom coms’; jingly, bright pop music with dark or subversive lyrics; pretty pink fashion branding the wearer as stupid, like Elle in Legally Blonde. I think there are people who will see the beautiful landscape, the time travel and magical feeling of this nook and underestimate it. I’m hoping readers look for the deeper themes here and see what Alice Hoffman was doing when choosing to use The Scarlet Letter. It’s a much beloved classic that she clearly loves, but it’s also a perfect basis for a story about these women. The ending is perfect for the autumn in that it’s bittersweet. We love the beautiful fall colours, particularly in the part of the USA where the book’s set. Those brightly coloured leaves bring us joy, but they’re also signalling an ending. The beauty of loss. 🍂
Published on 17th August by Scribner
Meet the Author
Alice Hoffman is the author of thirty works of fiction, including Practical Magic, The Dovekeepers, Magic Lessons, and, most recently, The Book of Magic. She lives in Boston. Her new novel, The Invisible Hour, is forthcoming in August 2023. Visit her website: http://www.alicehoffman.com
I’ve had this fascination with Henry’s wives and the whole Tudor dynasty since primary school, as I wrote about earlier in the week. It was my introduction to Philippa Gregory when I was in my twenties that really started the ball rolling. I started to learn about the women’s perspective behind these historical facts we all learn. I’d never known that Henry VIII had an affair with Anne Boleyn’s younger sister Mary or that it’s possible she had the King’s children just like Bessie Blount. I learned more about the political and religious machinations that hide behind the six marriages and their tragic ends. I hadn’t known about the uneasiness within Henry’s aristocratic courtiers and advisors about the commoners he was bringing in to advise him, such as Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell. There were aspects of the Queen’s roles in events that opened up to me, such as their religious allegiances and how the marriages cemented Henry’s beliefs at the time and signalled his intentions to the rest of the world. I’d never known about how ladies in waiting were chosen or trained, often shipped to grand houses with aristocratic women overseeing their education. I’d also become fascinated about women on the periphery like Jane Rochford, who’d been married to Thomas Boleyn and had to give evidence against her own husband, then years later oversee the young Queen Katherine Howard only to be drawn into treachery yet again. I’d become interested in Bess of Hardwick after buying a book about her at Chatsworth House then going to an exhibition about her, including the household accounts written in her own hand. I knew that Chatsworth had been one of the houses where Mary, Queen of Scots was held, but not what her captivity did to her marriage and her reputation with Elizabeth I. There is such a rich seam of Tudor fiction in these areas, but I’m going to recommend some of my favourites that you will probably know, then some you might not as well as those still sitting on my TBR.
Great for Beginners
This is a great beginning because it’s outside the Queen’s series and deals with characters outside the actual court. Set in 1568, Elizabeth I has been on the throne for ten years, but hasn’t married and won’t choose a successor. Mary Queen of Scots has been forced to flee her own lands, due to rebellions and rash actions in her choice of husband. Her enemies have used her weaknesses and their perceptions of women to unseat her, leaving her on the mercy of her cousin, Elizabeth I. However, Mary is Catholic and advisors to the Queen don’t want to risk their already weak position against Catholic France and Spain. They also worry about her infant son James, another threat to the throne. Elizabeth’s advisor and spy master William Cecil comes up with a plan, Mary will be kept under house arrest, living with all the luxury a Queen should expect but unable to leave. He has to find a suitable couple to house Mary and decides upon Bess of Hardwick and her new husband George Talbot, who reside at Chatsworth House. Mary does not accept her house arrest though, bringing George Talbot under her spell and plotting to regain her throne in Scotland. Bess sees her husband’s deference to the young Queen and knows that if they are linked to her plotting, William Cecil will make sure they face the Tower or even the block. This is an interesting angle on Mary as we see her through the eyes of another woman, a very shrewd and intelligent woman who has managed to amass her own fortune along with estates and land left to her by her previous husband. I felt pulled into Mary’s story and despite feeling very sympathetic towards her I also felt angry on Bess’s behalf. Neither woman wanted to be in this position and I felt that frustration.
Set in 1539. It’s time for Henry to find a fourth wife after the tragic death of Jane Seymour. He has the heir and now he needs to have a spare. Since he is head of the church in England, it seems wise to take a Protestant Queen and Anne of Cleves fits the bill. Chosen from the painted likeness on the book’s cover and organised by Thomas Cromwell. The marriage falters immediately, when Henry dresses as a commoner to surprise his newly arrived wife to be she doesn’t even recognise him. Aggrieved, Henry tells Cromwell he finds her undesirable because she has too much flesh and smells unpleasant. His advisors are asked to pay court to the teenage Katherine Howard while a divorce agreement is reached. Anne Boleyn’s sister-in-law Jane Rochford returns to court and becomes close to the new Queen, desperately trying to cope with a young naïve and rather silly girl on one hand and the tyrannical Henry on the other. When Katherine starts to play dangerous games with Henry’s servant Thomas Culpepper, will Jane be able to avoid the block a second time? I love this period of the wives’s story because I think Anne of Cleves is the shrewdest of his wives, accepting his terms to live alone like his sister immediately and setting up home in palaces vacated by Wolsey and the Boleyn family. In fact the King got along very well with Anne and often joined her for dinner or to play chess in the evening. By contrast Katherine Howard’s tale is tragic and her eventual death is desperately sad as her courage fails her and she begs for her life.
Wider Reading
I have so much sympathy for this poor girl who is caught in a power play between political and religious factions. Jane Grey was the great niece of Henry VIII, a descendent of his closest friend Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk and Princess Mary – Brandon didn’t seek permission to marry Henry’s sister and their friendship faltered. Jane was actually the cousin of Edward IV, Mary I and Elizabeth I. At only 16 years old she is forced to marry into a powerful family – the Dudleys – as part of a plan to usurp the throne. When Edward IV dies, they decide to install Jane and her husband Guildford Dudley on the throne before Edward’s sister Mary can travel to London. The book is fascinating even if you do know the story of this nine day Queen and adds that human element behind the facts. Weir presents Jane as manipulated and physically abused by the powerful men who were desperate for her to take power on their behalf. There was the religious concern about having a Catholic queen on the throne and her allegiances with Spain. Would Mary return England to the Catholic faith? Might she seek a Catholic marriage with one of her European allies? Jane was a devout Protestant to the end, in fact it sustained and strengthened her when held in the Tower of London. I felt her dread towards the end and I felt so sad for her because she had so little control or peace in her short life.
The woman who outlived Henry VIII still had a tragic end. Her true love was Thomas Seymour and she expected after her first husband had died that she would have a husband of her choosing. Unfortunately Henry got there first with a surprise proposal and no one is allowed to refuse the King. Clever and sensible, she is known for being able to appease an increasingly cantankerous Henry. However, there is so much more to Katherine Parr than being a nursemaid to elderly husband. She published a religious text and proved a great stepmother to all of Henry’s children who joined them at court. It seemed as if love and motherhood had passed this woman by. After Henry’s death Thomas Seymour does jump in, determined not to miss the moment but with almost unseemly haste. Katherine thinks that finally she can have a husband of her choosing and love is on the cards. However, does Thomas have other plans? Could it be that Katherine’s house guest, the very young and spirited Elizabeth, is the reason he’s so keen on a quick marriage? As they marry and live together, Katherine soon becomes pregnant but her age and health are against her. With a wife on bed rest, Thomas has plenty of time on his hands and too little to do. Will Katherine know the happy family she always wanted? This book sticks closely to historical fact and is a fascinating read about one woman’s hopes and dreams dashed by duty.
The Tudors in Context
Hilary Mantel’s incredible Tudor trilogy starts with this introduction to Thomas Cromwell, set in the 1520’s when he was clerk to Cardinal Wolsey. His rise from lowly blacksmith’s son is a fascinating one and his eventual succession to Wolsey’s role as chief advisor to Henry VIII was not liked by aristocratic courtiers. Usually appointments like this were filled by dukes or earls, often from very specific families who traditionally held senior roles at court such as the Seymours. Wolsey is removed from office for failing to secure an answer to the King’s ‘Great Matter’, his divorce from Katherine of Aragon based on a biblical verse that states if a man should marry his late brother’s wife they will be childless. Henry did receive a special dispensation to marry Katherine when she was his heart’s desire, but several miscarriages later and only one daughter to succeed him, Henry is desperate for a male heir. Thomas is ambitious. He’s also a bully, with the ability to charm and manipulate to get the result he wants. He handles the King’s vacillations between romantic desire and murderous rage. He is pursuing Anne Boleyn who is not succumbing to his offer to be his exclusive mistress. She’s seen many women discarded by Henry, including her own sister and she’s playing a different game. Thomas is keen to install Anne as Henry’s wife because she shares his Protestant leanings and has a reformer’s agenda. Can Thomas secure Henry’s divorce and set in motion the English reformation? This is a different viewpoint on Henry and the turbulent moods that are starting to control both him and the court.
Elizabeth is a fascinating woman who grows up in the most tumultuous period in royal history: the Wars of the Roses or the Cousin’s War as it’s also known. She was the daughter of Edward IV and his wife Elizabeth Woodville, sister of the two lost princes in the tower, courted by her own uncle Richard III, but eventual wife of Henry VII and mother of Henry VIII. As Henry VII takes the throne from Richard III in battle, Elizabeth and her family are in a very precarious position. Her father’s death left the family fleeing to sanctuary as allegiances changed all around them. There are rumours she has been the mistress of Richard III. There is still no sign of her two younger brothers, Edward IV’s rightful heirs who were placed in the tower by her uncle and thought to be dead. As the Lancaster side take the throne she expects to live in sanctuary again, but her mother Elizabeth Woodville is a survivor and is in correspondence with the new King’s mother, the formidable Margaret Beaufort. She knows that her son’s reign is controversial and he needs to create a more peaceful England in order to secure the throne for his successors. Lancaster and York need to unite and Elizabeth is the last York princess. Their marriage is a symbol of peace an to represent that the white rose and the red rose are combined to create the symbolic Tudor rose, visible in many Royal palaces and historic buildings. Elizabeth presents a united front to the country, but their union was difficult. Henry was a paranoid man who dreaded Elizabeth’s brothers being found and was often suspicious of her mother too. This novel takes us into that marriage and sets the scene for Henry VIII’s unexpected reign, after the death of his brother Arthur, Prince of Wales. See also Philippa Gregory’s novel The White Princess.
My Tudor TBR
This is the third and final book in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy on Thomas Cromwell and takes us into his final years as Henry’s advisor. The book starts in 1536 when Anne Boleyn is decapitated with a french sword when Cromwell’s fortunes may be at their peak. Henry is settled with Jane Seymour who is expecting a baby. Calm reigns at court. Behind the scenes, Cromwell still has much to think about: rebellion, traitors and spies both at home and abroad. Can the nation shake off it’s Catholic past and move on? Or do the dead continually return to haunt us? The execution of Thomas More is playing on Henry’s mind particularly at this time. For Cromwell, the Spanish ambassador whispered something in his ear. A though that will not go away. Henry will turn on him too. As he always does in the end. With no family, title or private army behind him, Thomas has no one to defend him. It’s a lonely place to be, reliant solely on your own cunning to survive. This thought comes to life as the Queen dies and the lives of predator and prey move to their inevitable end. I know what happened to Thomas Cromwell, in fact I had to close my eyes when watching The Tudors and seeing his fate. That doesn’t stop me from wanting to read this book though, because Mantel’s research is extensive and she has an almost spooky ability to get inside a character’s mind and portray what those dry historical facts felt like. I must admit to being a little daunted by the size of this, so I think I’m going to separate it into readable sections and make it a daily reading goal.
I have this on the pile of books by the bedside, mainly paperbacks I’ve picked up from charity shops and second hand bookshops. It seems to provide or imagine a back story for Henry’s fifth wife that makes her plight even more tragic. Katherine is only twelve when she is sent to the home of the Duchess of Norfolk, a place where girls from aristocratic families go to train as ladies in waiting. As a member of the Boleyn family, this is a normal placement but she must have been aware of the terrible end her cousin met at Henry’s hands. Cat Tilney, another girl living in the house, is suspicious of Katherine. She thinks she’s only interested in clothes and boys, but is eventually drawn in by the young girl and they become close confidantes. When Katherine is called to court and drawn into the King’s orbit, Cat becomes her lady-in-waiting. Henry has set aside Anne of Cleves and despite Katherine only being 17 his advisors present the young girl as a possible successor. Henry is charmed by this charming young girl and at first married life is enjoyable on his side. However, Katherine is married to a much older man who is now in ill health and has a permanent leg ulcer that smells terrible. A rumours start to filter through the ladies-in-waiting that Henry can’t perform in the marital bed, whispers start to reach courtier’s ears about Katherine’s conduct. Girls that came from the Duchess of Norfolk’s home may have been entertaining much older men. In fact her present conduct is worse, because she’s already having an affair with King’s manservant Thomas Culpepper. Katherine is terrified and implicates others, including her childhood sweetheart Francis. Unknown to her though, Francis is now in a serious relationship with Cat Tilney. With Francis in the tower, Cat could save him, but but only by implicating the Queen and ensuring her death. I’m fascinated in reading this take on Katherine’s early life, which seems to show how vulnerable young women were at court and how they were always blamed for men’s actions.
I hope this gives you some ideas about where to start with historical fiction about The Tudors. It isn’t an exhaustive list and there’s plenty of non-fiction from various historical that’s equally fascinating, not to mention the debate on how male and female historicans often interpret material very differently and with potential bias. I do think Henry is more understandable when put in the context of his father’s reign. Henry wasn’t meant to be King and was allowed to spend time carousing with friends like Charles Brandon rather than learning about the constitutional obligations of the crown. Henry was an intelligent young man in terms of history, philosophy and religion, but wasn’t schooled in duty and service in the same way as his brother Arthur. He was also left at court with women: his mother, both grandmothers and his sisters were said to have spoiled him. His relationship with his father was complex considering he was the spare, but he was at court to see his father’s paranoia, his alleged affairs and his vacillating over whether Henry could marry Katherine of Aragon.
I’m interested in research that looks at the Tudor’s medical history. Henry’s jousting accident during his relationship with Anne Boleyn was a bad one, with Henry knocked out for some time afterwards. It is very possible he sustained a head injury at that time, not to mention the leg injury which became ulcerated and impossible to heal. The pain and restrictions of this ulcer certainly contributed to his obesity and terrible mood swings in later years. It is likely he was also impotent after his marriage to Jane Seymour, providing more insight into his comments on Anne of Cleves’s desirability; there was nothing wrong with him, she was too unattractive. I have also read about possible chromosomal abnormalities that might explain why both his first wives were unable to produce a male heir, with all male babies being miscarried or dying within a few days or weeks of their birth. Edward IV was a sickly child and died very young too, while his sisters Mary and Elizabeth lived into adulthood. All of this adds to our understanding of the Tudor’s reigns, but can’t fully excuse a man who was cruel and tyrannical. It does however give us insight into the experiences of the Tudor Queens and their daughters, most of whom met tragic ends either wholly or in part caused by men.
Sometimes as book bloggers we struggle with maintaining our blogs, for many different reasons. Illness, bereavements, family issues, working lives, caring duties, mental ill health are just a few reasons – most of which I’ve encountered over the past four years – but there are others. Most book bloggers, have at various points in their reviewing journeys, had a complete crisis and felt imposter syndrome. We might question our abilities, feel burned out or just wonder why we spend so much of our time pursuing a hobby that can be thankless. Recently I’ve struggled with the double whammy of undergoing hospital treatment, feeling unwell and experiencing a loss so some authors and publicists perhaps didn’t get everything they’d asked for. I’ve been going back over my work and trying to fill in those gaps and now that my brain’s firing again, some of these books have inspired me to spotlight a review again and take them a bit further. So this week, thanks to going back over my review of Clemmie Burton’s The Apple and the Tree, I realised I needed to publish my Q and A with this lovely author and perhaps highlight a little bit about my favourite books set in the Tudor period, one of the biggest collections of books I have. So this week on The Lotus Readers blog it’s Tudor week!
We’ll be starting with a second look at Clemmie’s first novel in what will be a series, following 21st Century Ella when a piece of jewellery seems to transport her back to the Tudor court. This is a familiar place to Ella because her grandmother Lolly had spent time walking around Hampton Court with her, talking about Henry VIII in particular and all his wives. You will see from my Q and A with Clemmie tomorrow, that her inspiration for this time period came from watching Showtime’s The Tudors. For me, my interest came very early on a family day out to Chatsworth House where a portrait of Henry VIII stands in their library. I thought it was a copy of the Hans Holbein portrait, but the artist is Hans Eworth and it’s thought to be painted around 1560. In style it’s exactly like the famous Holbein painting, the stance and richness of the clothing is so similar. It exudes power, strength and wealth. I knew from school that he had six wives, but being primary school age I didn’t know any details about that. However, being a rather macabre child I did think a lot about ghostly Tudors wandering around with their heads under their arm. Living near to Gainsborough’s Old Hall with it’s resident Grey Lady, ghostly women were definitely on my radar.
I began to read historical fiction when I was a little older and a friend decided to lend me The Wise Woman by Phillipa Gregory. This interesting and slightly disturbing novel is set in Tudor England rather than the court, but Henry VIII’s policies directly affect the events of the story. Our heroine is Alys, a wise woman expelled from her sanctuary in a nunnery by the Reformation. Without a penny to her name, Alys has to return to the old cottage where she lived before and with only her own skills to support her, she returns to the magic and healing that are her natural gifts. However, when she falls for Hugo who is a feudal Lord and already someone else’s husband. She is tempted to use her gifts in a darker way, to remove her rival and secure the object of her desire. This then took me into reading her Wideacre series and eventually The Other Boleyn Girl, thought of as the start of her Tudor novels. While I was consuming the Phillipa Gregory series, I was also reading non-fiction by authors such as David Starkey and Alison Weir, giving me the facts behind the fiction. I loved the amount of reading that Philippa Gregory did to make her novels as authentic as possible, but it was also fascinating to read about those events where even historical researchers differ on their interpretation of primary sources like Henry VIII’s own letters. When Alison Weir moved into fiction I began to read her novels too, starting with a novel about Lady Jane Grey Innocent Traitor. I found myself enjoying these novels that gave voice to the women in and around the Tudor court. These novels explored what events must have been like from their point of view, bringing the human side of these, often silent, women to life. As Philippa Gregory moved into the years before Henry, exploring events of the Cousin’s Wars, it was interesting to follow the thread of events – to surmise who and what laid the groundwork for the Tudors and how their reign had stabilised England even though many noblemen resented Henry VIII and his father.
I will be talking about my favourite historical novels set in Tudor England later in the week. However, I can’t deny that I was also fascinated by television and film that portrayed this time period and controversial monarch. Like the author Clemmie Burton I was glued to The Tudors and yes, a lot of my fascination was down to Henry Caville as Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. In the late 1990s there were so many great films that fired up public interest in the reign of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth. Shakespeare in Love was something widely used at university when looking at the Tudor theatre and Shakespeare in particular. It’s essentially a romance, but it’s period detail was brilliant and it was perfect for presenting post- modern representations of Shakespeare at university. For me Cate Blanchett’s turn as Elizabeth I in two films about her life that was more Oscar worthy. Again, they were largely inaccurate, but glorious to look at and with an incredibly strong performance from Blanchett especially in The Golden Age. A similarly strong performance was Anne Marie Duff as Young Elizabeth following the years before she became Queen and her love of Robert Dudley. I was so glad I’d done the reading when it came to Renaissance Literature at university, I had so much background knowledge in my head that I was easily able to place a poem or play within it’s historical context. It was like I’d done half the work already. Later in the week I’m going to list my favourite novels set around the Tudor period and perhaps inspire you to delve into this turbulent historical period a little more.
‘This is my family story. From all I’ve sown together, through all I couldn’t ask. I want to be the bud who makes it.’
In Blooms tells of strength, survival, forgiveness, resilience and determination, and the fierce love and unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters.
Ever since Sol’s untimely death left her pregnant and alone at twenty-two, Delph’s kept herself small as a form of self-protection. Now, over a decade later, she lives with their daughter Roche and her new partner Itsy, a kind and protective cabbie, on the fourteenth floor of Esplanade Point on the Essex coast.
But Delph’s protective bubble bursts when Roche moves in with her estranged nan, Moon. Feeling on the outside of the bond between her fierce-yet-flaky tarot-reading mother and volatile martial-arts-champion daughter, Delph begins questioning her own freedom. And when Roche’s snooping into her grandmother’s past unearths a familial line of downtrodden women; a worrying pattern emerges. Has keeping small and safe truly been Delph’s choice all these years…?
I don’t believe in trigger warnings, despite their intended purpose to flag up material that may ‘trigger’ difficult emotions in the reader, I feel that they might stop someone experiencing a connection with a text. It might well be a trigger, but that doesn’t always have to mean it’s a negative one. It might be a trigger that starts a healing process. If anyone should have avoided this book it was me, because I was Delph. I lost the love of my life in my early thirties and then sleepwalked into a coercive and damaging relationship. Yes, it was a hard read at times, but it wasn’t remotely negative. Moon, Delph and Roche are three generations of a family. Each woman has her own issues, but they all stem from one place. Right back at the beginning. As the book opens Roche can no longer live with her mother and Itsy, the man she’s been living with for most of Roche’s life. So she decamps to her grandmother Moon’s house. Roche can’t stand Itsy, he dislikes her and wishes she wasn’t there. In fact what he wants is Delph all to himself, it’s easier to control someone who’s isolated. Delph has had a glazed over look ever since he arrived in her life and she doesn’t seem like her mum anymore. Delph has done everything she can to keep Itsy happy. She’s changed how she dressed, made herself less beautiful, stayed at home and stopped going out with friends. Every day she makes herself smaller to make more space for him and Roche can’t watch it anymore. However, things are changing slowly. Delph has a job she enjoys at B & Q, new connections with her colleagues and today she has made a choice. Delph is pregnant and she knows deep down in her soul that ‘the thought of more years, more life, tied to him’ is more than she can bear. She goes secretly on her own for an abortion, the quietest but most powerful act of rebellion she can make. Then comes her opportunity, Itsy receives a phone call from Jamaica to tell him his mother is dying. He must jump straight on a flight, so Delph lets him go alone, knowing that now she has several weeks to herself. She doesn’t stop Roche from moving out and accepts this as her time to heal, time to be the parent that so often Roche has to be for her. However, this isn’t the only recovery needed in the three generations of this family thanks to the actions of men.
I felt at first that I was slowly piecing together the story of a client. Being a person- centred therapist means letting the client choose what they want to talk about. I would use my counselling skills to tease out that story and ask questions where it needs to be clarified or where I might only be getting one perspective. Here the story has it’s own pace and each woman narrates her own section. We flit back and forth between the women, also delving into the past here and there. It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle but only being handed one piece at a time, then another from a different place. It takes some time to perceive the whole and that was definitely the case here. Only we the reader can see where they all are in relation to one another. The reality of being a woman in today’s world is explored fully, there is no doubt that these women’s lives would have been immeasurably better had they not encountered the men they do. It takes Roche to articulate this properly with the words and wisdom of her generation.
“Roche knows, remembers, how her life changed at around the time she started secondary, and her bubble of invisibility popped. How, despite the school uniform screaming otherwise, she very suddenly became the inhabitant of a woman’s body, complete with a depressing self-awareness that this was now Roche’s life until one day men deemed her invisible again. In fairness, it’s not her contemporaries who usually do the perving – no, it’s men, grown–ass men who have always done the bulk of the wolf–whistling, the innuendoes and basic compliments that they expect her to ‘smile, love’ and be grateful for.”
As a middle aged woman I now know the power of that invisibility and how, in many ways, it’s a blessing.
I love how carefully the author drew the threads between generations, those behaviours that create a pattern of intergenerational trauma. There are moments in her journey where Delph needs her daughter by her side, but she recognises that it’s a selfish need. Delph’s lived experience stops her; “is not for a child to fix the parent. Nor is Roche the ointment to Delph’s current troubles”. She’s spent enough time trying to help Moon. Then we go back into Moon’s early years, when her grandmother is in hospital, suffering from mental ill health. Her name was still Joy back then and her job is to dispense sunshine to a women who can’t even remember her name. ‘Come on,’ Ma says, in a giddy-up way. ‘You know how happy your little face always makes her.’ This a learned behaviour, people pleasing and exactly what Delph is trying to avoid for her own daughter, three generations later. By sitting with her own pain, Delph is avoiding instilling that behaviour in Roche, she’s actively breaking the cycle. Yes, there are traumatic moments in these women’s lives, Moon’s story being particularly harrowing, but we can also see the women’s determination to change. It’s that change and what it means for Roche that brings such an uplifting feeling to the book. For me it’s Delph’s struggle that touched me deeply. The loss of Sol, who’d been there her entire life, is devastating. So moving out of Itsy’s orbit and the mental paralysis she’s been living with means opening up her emotions. That’s all of the emotions including her grief, but it’s a process that needs to happen so that Roche can talk about her father openly and in a joyful way. I found myself more engrossed in the later stages of the book as I had to see whether these women could heal together. This is beautifully written and manages to be funny, moving and hopeful.
Meet the Author
Eva Verde is a writer from East London. Identity, class and female rage are recurring themes throughout her work and her debut novel Lives Like Mine, is published by Simon and Schuster.
Eva’s love song to libraries, I Am Not Your Tituba forms part of Kit De Waal’s Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers. Her words have featured in Marie Claire, Grazia, Elle and The Big Issue, also penning the new foreword for the international bestselling author Jackie Collins Goddess of Vengeance.
Eva lives in Essex with her husband, children and dog.
When Ella from Hachette Books messaged me to say there was a book she thought would be right up my street I was a little surprised. I didn’t think the publicists would know me and my book choices well enough to make predictions about what I’d like. I was wrong. She knew exactly who this book was for. ‘It’s about a man turning into a Great White Shark’ she told me, well what’s not to like? I was hooked on the idea before the book even arrived. Lewis and Wren have fallen in love. They’ve no idea that their first year of marriage will also be their last. It’s only weeks after their wedding when Lewis receives a rare and shocking diagnosis. He has an unusual mutation. Although he might retain some of his consciousness, his memories and possibly his intellect, his body will become that of a Great White Shark. Lewis is complicated, an artist at heart he has always wanted to write the great American play for his generation. How will his liberal and loving heart beat on within the body of one of the earth’s most ruthless predators? He also has to come to terms with never fulfilling his dreams, but expressing that anger with shark DNA in his system has huge repercussions. He has to come to terms with leaving Wren behind, for her own safety. Wren wants to fight on. To find a way of living and loving each other as Lewis changes. She is told that there will come a point when this will be too dangerous. Lewis will then have to live in a state run facility or free in the ocean. It’s when she sees a glimpse of his developing carnivorous nature that a memory from her past is triggered. Wren has to make a terrible, heart-wrenching decision.
I felt emotionally devastated by this beautiful novel that uses a fantastical premise to unleash experiences of grief, love, loss and potentially, healing. Wren and Lewis reminded me of my relationship with my late husband. We married after six weeks and even then I knew I wouldn’t have him forever. I had almost seven years until I lost him. This book explained how my own grief experience felt. After Jez’s death I felt furious with anyone who said ‘Jez would think..’ or claimed they could sense his presence. I could feel nothing. No voice, no presence, nothing. It was as if he had never existed. For Lewis there becomes a point when his incessant desire to feed will become his overriding thought, strong enough to wipe out all others, will that include his love for Wren? He will not exist as Lewis anymore, the doctors tell Wren, he will not even know who she is, because he will be all shark. Wren has to come to terms with letting Lewis go, but how do you walk away from the most precious thing in your life? I had a point where I had to decide that I couldn’t look after my husband any more. I was exhausted, we had no carers in place and it didn’t feel safe to try and go it alone. Besides, as his brother told me, I had to start building a life without Jez. I cried more the night he went into nursing care, than when he died, because I felt I’d let him down and I knew he would die. He did, only six weeks later. Wren is told the same after a terrible violent incident occurs at the after-party for the play Lewis’s students have worked on. Wren calls the specialist nurse for advice, but she urges Wren that it’s time. Will they be able to say goodbye?
Despite these similarities to my life, it wasn’t Lewis’s story that broke my heart, It was Wren’s story. This is not the first time Wren has had to say goodbye. When she was barely a teenager her mother also had a rare diagnosis, but her mutation was that of a Komodo Dragon, equally deadly and impossible to live with. One scene between Wren and her mother, as she leaves her in the state facility, was so deeply moving I cried. I found it unbearable. This is what’s astonishing about Emily Habeck’s debut. It seems so fantastical, yet is utterly real in it’s experiences and emotions. Using such unusual animals as the mutation/illness creates a distance from the feelings involved. Some readers might even think the premise ridiculous – but the terrible anticipation, the moment of loss, the grief and relentless momentum of life are exactly the same. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the decision to put an elderly parent in a home or a Komodo Dragon into a facility, the guilt and pain as you walk away feels identical. It isn’t all relentless misery though. We meet Wren’s mother as the teenager she once was, experiencing love for the first time. We also go back to Lewis and his new life in the ocean, as his emotions flit between loss and what’s for dinner. His friendship with Margaret is so funny. She was once a human too and she’s been looking for another hybrid to talk to, and boy does she talk?! She’d try the patience of a shark. In a beautifully unusual way and in an almost poetic prose, this beautiful debut is about life. It’s ups and downs, the horrendous losses and the gains: the naivety of first love, becoming a mother, our love and care for an elderly parent, friendships and realising that a special little girl sees you as her dad. Life is constant adaptation, evolving and developing all the time. Every end is a beginning. This is such a special novel, an incredible debut with such a keen grasp of what being human is all about. I can see this becoming an all-time favourite for me. It quite simply took my breath away.
Meet the Author
Emily Habeck has a BFA in theater from SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts as well as master’s degrees from Vanderbilt Divinity School and Vanderbilt’s Peabody College. She grew up in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Shark Heart is her first novel.
I spent some of my recent holiday going back to the earlier books in a series I picked up half way through. I often review for Orenda books blog tours and this has meant picking up on some fabulous authors who are on the fourth or fifth book in a series. I then slowly buy the previous novels in the series and take them on holiday so I can wallow in them for a couple of days. So, it was with no idea of the subject matter, except it would be a mystery and was being revisited by a podcast called Six Stories where Scott King interviews six people connected to the case. It’s not that he expects or aims to solve the case, although that’s a possibility, it’s about hearing different voices, perhaps ones that haven’t been heard or have something to add to their original evidence. I had no idea of the geographical location in The Changeling, nor could I have predicted reading it when I did. The case begins on Christmas Eve 1988 when Sorrel Marsden is travelling along the Wentshire Forest Pass, a road between Chester and Wrexham in North Wales. He hears a knocking sound in the car and decides to pull over in a lay-by to investigate. As he gets out he glances back to check on his son Alfie who is fast asleep in his booster seat in the back. Sorrel checks under the bonnet of the car, but not seeing anything obvious he decides to continue his journey. However, as he drops the bonnet he notices the rear passenger door is open and Alfie’s booster seat is empty. He looks for his son on the edges of the forest, but with no clue where Alfie has gone he goes to the phone box and calls the police.
We holidayed on the welsh borders, with the River Wye running through the garden of the cottage. We were travelling back from Chester Zoo when I started to read The Changeling and I’d passed navigation duties to my stepdaughter so I could put my feet up in the back. So I read Sorrel Marsden’s account of his son’s disappearance as we drove from Chester into Wales! Wesolowski is skilled at creating a setting that slowly unnerves the reader and I felt this as I read about the history of the forest and the interview King does with a contractor working on the construction of a holiday park. He was working in the forest at the time of Alfie’s disappearance and tried to help with the search for the boy. Not that searching was easy, as floodlights that worked earlier that day completely malfunctioned when needed. It was also impossible to move vehicles from the area of the search, the very embodiment of a ghost in the machine or gremlins in the works. The builder claimed that strange events started happening when they tried to remove ancient trees from the woodland. With normal tools not working, they were reduced to hacking at the trunks of the trees with little success except for a few blood injuries. They were sleeping onsite in temporary buildings when the knocking started, insistent and gaining in volume despite having no visible source. Most fanciful were his stories of seeing an animal out the corner of his eye, possibly a goat or wild boar. What i found most chilling though were the voices, whispery and urgent little voices that were indecipherable but angry in tone. Sorrel Marsden has made a point of walking the pass every year on the anniversary of Alfie’s disappearance. He never claims to hear or see anything on his treks, but they do serve a purpose. They set him up as the victim, the hero of the piece, especially then compared with Alfie’s mother Sonia who has never taken part in the search or been interviewed about her son. Until now.
The character’s in the novel are open to interpretation and our impression of them might change, depending on whose account we are listening to. Part of Sorrel’s story of that night is as damning for Sonia as her absence at memorials and other events. He claims to have suggested to spend Christmas with his estranged wife and son, but as Sonia’s drinking worsened he decided to remove Alfie from his mother’s care and return with him to his own home in Wrexham. This would have given people a terrible impression of Sonia and as an uncaring and unfit mother. Yet we haven’t heard her or anyone else’s opinion, only Sorrel’s. People tend not to question or accuse the bereaved and with Sorrel being found by police curled up in the phone box in a foetal position, it’s hard to blame those in attendance for treating him with care and compassion. Yet Sonia does consent to meeting King and talks for the first time about that awful Christmas. She doesn’t deny drinking, but has some explanations for her actions. She claims that Sorrel is an unusual man, with an ability to draw people to him that goes beyond his looks or personality. She recalls being belittled and controlled. Yes she struggled as a very young and isolated mum, but no help came. Despite claiming she was a bad mother, Sorrel left her alone with Alfie and rarely visited. I loved the women who contacted Scott King to tell their story of encounters with Sorrel. Like a mini ‘Me Too’ movement these women come together to talk about coercive control, psychological abuse, strange knocking sounds keeping them awake and leaving them unnerved. These women have incredible strength and having experienced a relationship like this I had my suspicions about Sorrel Marsden.
Sorrel is controlled, especially in his work as a chef. Other kitchen workers comment on his admiration for the military way of running a kitchen, a system of rules and regulations he also expects in his kitchen at home. Women refer to an unusual feeling they’d experience, as if he had them in an enchantment. It made me think of the word ‘glamour’ in the way it’s applied to witches – folk tales tell of a witch’s ability to ‘glamour’ people, to only show those sides of themselves they wish to be seen, often appearing as a beautiful young woman when they are in fact a shrivelled old woman. If we look at it realistically, Sorrel is a master manipulator and serial abuser able to charm and convince women to trust him. He then slowly isolates them, breaks down their confidence, gaslights them and convinces them they are worthless. When his story is picked apart there are holes everywhere, including a past link to the forest. When Alfie is a toddler he suggests a family camping holiday to the forest, with a friend of his called Wendy to help with the childcare. On this trip Alfie ‘disappeared’ into the forest for the first time, found by Sorrel who walks back into the clearing with his son in his arms. Both Sonia and Wendy claim that Alfie was never the same after this trip. I could only wonder why Sorrel would have taken them to a wood with no facilities and such a haunted reputation. Did Sorrel know what was in the woods? Was Alfie some sort of sacrifice? From then on Sonia would hear strange voices and knocking when no one was there.
The section that genuinely lifted up the hairs on the back my neck seemed a bit tenuous at first. King interviews a man whose mother has recently died. She was a teacher back in the 1980’s and as part of her training she was gathering research on pupils who had behavioural issues. When she died her son found the research in the attic and was intrigued by her notes on Child A, because Child A was Alfie Marsden. Delyth recorded his behaviour on several occasions and the more she saw, the more scared she was. Alfie would turn his back on other pupils, deliberately not participating in what everyone else is doing. Alone with him, Delyth heard muttering and although he wasn’t moving, she could hear a strange knocking. There were times where she was scared to look him in the face. Yes, other teachers warned her that he might bite or lash out, but with her he was unnaturally still as if he was listening somewhere else or to something else. Did Alfie just have behavioural issues or was there something more sinister at play? Were the knockings and strange voices similar to those mentioned by the building contractors or by the women who knew Sorrel?
By the final stages of the book I was wondering exactly who is The Changeling of the story? Was Alfie’s sudden change after visiting the forest on the camping trip a sign that he was possessed or changed in some way? Or was Sorrel’s affinity with the forest a sign that he’d been there before? A Changeling is a child swapped in it’s infancy by the fairy folk, either because something wrong or because fairies want to strengthen their fairy blood. The behaviour of a Changeling is ‘unresponsiveness, resistance to physical affection, obstreperousness, inability to express emotion, and unexplained crying and physical changes such as rigidity and deformity.’ Some are unable to speak at all. I was also a little unnerved by the psychic who was brought in after Alfie’s disappearance, then stalled proceedings by saying Alfie was ‘in a Royal Court.’ It has never made sense and it never changed. As she corresponds with Scott I was unnerved by her, what does she know and how? There are a couple of utterly brilliant twists towards the end, neither of which I’d expected and one made me rethink everything I’d read up to that point, in a Sixth Sense way. I wanted to go back and reread with that knowledge, to see how I’d missed it. This was a brilliant and disturbing novel, a clever mix of psychological and supernatural elements that’s very addictive and will stay with you long after the book is finished.
Out now from Orenda Books
Meet the Author
Matt Wesolowski is an author from Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK. He is an English tutor for young people in care. Matt started his writing career in horror, and his short horror fiction has been published in numerous UK- and US-based anthologies, such as Midnight Movie Creature, Selfies from the End of the World, Cold Iron and many more. His novella, The Black Land, a horror set on the Northumberland coast, was published in 2013. Matt was a winner of the Pitch Perfect competition at the Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Festival in 2015. His debut thriller, Six Stories, was an Amazon bestseller in the USA, Canada, the UK and Australia, and a WHSmith Fresh Talent pick, and film rights were sold to a major Hollywood studio. A prequel, Hydra, was published in 2018 and became an international bestseller. Changeling, the third book in the series, was published in 2019 and was longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. His fourth book, Beast, won the Amazon Publishing Readers’ Independent Voice Book of the Year award in 2020. Matt lives in Newcastle with his partner and young son, and is currently working on the sixth book in the Six Stories series. Chat to him on Twitter @ConcreteKraken.
As we pass the half way point of the reading year, I’m reading so many great books that I’m panicking about my end of year favourites. There wasn’t a bad read at all this month, but these are my absolute favourites of the bunch. With all the wet weather there isn’t a great deal to do outdoors so it’s been a blissful month for reading. Although, I must admit to a little bit of FOMO as people pop off to various festivals that are currently prohibitive due to cost and the fact I’m still recovering from my back procedure. Currently I can manage to be up and about for about 15 minutes at a time, but I’m hoping that will improve soon. I hope you’ve all had a brilliantly bookish July!
I loved this rather gothic dual timeline mystery from Freya Berry, with a fascinating setting of taxidermy and exotic animals. In 1932, Heinrich Vogel employs adventurer Emily Blackwood to come to his castle in Scotland and catalogue his taxidermy animal collection. She soon realises that she’s looking for a rather different treasure and through a book called The Birdcage Library, she follows the clues of another woman to bunches of paper secreted around the castle. In these papers is the diary of Heinrich’s sister-in-law Hester Vogel, who committed suicide by throwing herself from the Brooklyn Bridge. Emily becomes immersed in Hester’s life, as she is separated from the work she enjoyed to be a society wife and becomes stuck between two Vogel brothers. This is a fascinating story with amazing set pieces involving hummingbirds and the menagerie of animals in Vogel’s collection. As she reads Emily becomes increasingly suspicious about the remaining brother and exactly what is the real treasure he seeks? Sinister, intriguing and with two intelligent heroines.
This is another mysterious house with lots of conundrums to solve and isn’t this beautiful Art Deco cover incredible too? Sarah is a new employee arriving at Darkacre, the family seat of the Stilwells. Like many aristocratic families, WW1 has wreaked havoc on the men in this family. When their father died, the eldest son Hugo became the heir of Darkacre. Yet his time as heir was very short – he was killed on his return to the front leaving middle brother Maurice as heir to the Stilwell estate. Maurice was not prepared to be the master of the house and with double death duties already crippling the estate, he has learned fast. Unfortunately, he has returned from war a changed man too, plagued by nightmares, flashbacks and extreme responses to loud noises, an ailment then referred to as shell shock. With youngest brother Leonard severely disabled by his war injuries and struggling to come to terms with the loss of his limbs, the family are depleted and barely coping. However, as Leonard so cryptically tells us, perhaps it is no more than they deserve? Sarah’s arrival is the catalyst for this story and it isn’t just the relationship between family members that points to there being issues at Darkacre, soon a series of unexplained happenings start to gnaw away at the nerves of even the most stoic inhabitants. Especially the arrival of a mysterious, masked detective who claims to be trapped by rising water as a storm descends. A storm that rumbles all night, both outside and inside Darkacre. Exactly what is this family hiding? Brilliantly set in it’s time, with issues of loss and disability handled incredibly well
Wow! This is a searingly raw story, simmering with righteous anger and injustice. Set on a boiling hot summer’s day, you can almost smell the tarmac and diesel fumes. You can hear the traffic noise and feel the agitation and impatience of people trying to get to work without exchanging a word with anyone else. It’s too hot to breathe let alone exchange a friendly word. Em needs to get through her day at work, stay smart for her appraisal then find her way across London to reach the airport to catch an evening flight to Spain for her sister’s wedding. What follows is a total clusterfuck! This book is impossible to put down as the heat, her appraisal and strikes on public transport conspire to ruin her day. Not to mention the psychopath running round London and strangling women. Then she gets her period. I finished this book overnight because I just had to know what happened next. Em is determined and with the help of some new friends she is reminded that she doesn’t have to keep her landlords secrets, nor is it her fault that her much older, married boss sexually harassed her. It’s time to stop accepting the state of things and fight back. As Em becomes an unlikely heroine, this is a shocking indictment of the world we inhabit as women and a reminder not to accept it. Powerful, visceral and thought provoking.
This story is a slow burn, dual timeline mystery set in small town Australia. Katherine has moved to her husband James’s hometown of Lowbridge, a town with a very clear line between ‘the haves and have-nots’. Katherine is struggling with her mood and self-medicating with drink. James is hoping that the move will help her and has made it clear that they can’t continue as they are. He encourages her to get dressed and leave the house or go for a run like she used to. It’s clear something momentous has happened and their lives have imploded, but they are each dealing with it in different ways. When she does leave the house, Katherine accidentally stumbles across the town’s historical society and shows an interest in the exhibition they’re putting together. It’s something she can potentially help with and it’s enough to get her leaving the house. However, when she comes across a thirty year old mystery, problems start to arise. The disappearance of a young girl called Tess during the summer of 1987 has remained unsolved and Katherine thinks it may be time to highlight the case and perhaps jog people’s memories. She knows she must involve Tess’s family in the decision, but she doesn’t expect opposition from anyone else. It’s James’s opposition that surprises her most. He tells her to leave the mystery alone, that it will stir up trouble and it’s would be unhealthy for her to become wrapped up in another family’s grief. Katherine is determined though and with Tess’s family on board she starts to research what happened in 1987. Who has the most to lose from her findings? A brilliant depiction of how loss affects individuals and a whole town. Thoughtful, honest and addictive.
73 Dove Street is Julie Owen Moylan’s third novel and I thought it was a brilliant depiction of ordinary women’s lives in post-war Britain. What an incredible writer Julie Owen Moylan is, because within a few pages I was absolutely immersed in 1950’s London. This is a London I haven’t visited too often in literature, the haunted and broken post-war period rather than the glory and the drama of the the war itself. Here the war has a ghostly presence, shown by children climbing piles of rubble or an incomplete street that looks like a mouth with one of it’s teeth missing. The story is told through three women; Edie, Tommie and Phyllis. It’s Edie we follow to 73 Dove Street where she hopes to look at a room, with just a single suitcase and an envelope full of cash. Edie is almost put off by the mattress and pile of men’s clothes burning fiercely just outside the yard, but a voice summons her from an upstairs window and she recognises a place she can lie low. What is she hiding from? Tommie lives in the room below and works for an eccentric socialite who was once wealthy and popular. Outside work Tommie is lured to the seedy nightlife of Soho and the man she can’t quit. Phyllis is the landlady of 73 Dove Street, burning her husband’s belongings in the street after she discovered a terrible betrayal. She puts on a good front, an armour that she needs to cope with a past she won’t talk about. Slowly each woman’s story is unravelled and as we hear them it is so emotional, I found it deeply moving. It isn’t just the bombed houses that are missing. There are people locked in wartime, trying to carry on by avoidance, distraction or stepping around something there’s only one way through. I found this part of the book so beautifully rendered by this wonderful writer that the emotions were deeply felt.
A catastrophic climate emergency has spawned a one-child policy in the UK, ruthlessly enforced by a totalitarian regime. Compulsory abortion of ‘excess’ pregnancies and mandatory contraceptive implants are now the norm, and families must adhere to strict consumption quotas as the world descends into chaos. Kai is a 25-year-old ‘baby reaper’, working for the Ministry of Population and Family Planning. If any of her assigned families attempts to exceed their child quota, she ensures they pay the price. Until, one morning, she discovers that an illegal sibling on her Ministry hit- list is hers. And to protect her parents from severe penalties, she must secretly investigate before anyone else finds out. Kai’s hunt for her forbidden sister unearths much more than a dark family secret. As she stumbles across a series of heinous crimes perpetrated by the people she trusted most, she makes a devastating discovery that could bring down the government … and tear her family apart. I LOVE that Eve Smith doesn’t baby her readers. If there are hover cars that’s what she gives us. A two word description. No long flowery explanations of how they came to be, she just tells us what IS. She expects our own imaginations to keep up. The immediacy of her writing brings us slap bang in the middle of this alien world and it’s exhilarating. This is a great addictive thriller, involving one of women’s most emotive issues. It’s an emotional, intelligent and imaginative read from a writer who’s fast becoming my go-to for speculative and dystopian literature.
I LOVED the first two books in the Forbidden Iceland series, featuring detective Elma, recently returned to her home town of Akranes after several years working in Reykjavik. This story is a prequel and we meet her eventual partner Sæver as he looks into some very strange events surrounding a family reunion. This is not your average family though and I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to be at a party less! My sympathies were largely with hotel employee Irma who views the Snæberg family as if they are a totally different species. In a way they are, set apart by their successes and their wealth from the everyday hotel employee. So wealthy in fact that they’ve hired this entire luxury hotel for the weekend, with a full itinerary of activities and boozy dinners at night. It isn’t long before tensions and differences come to light: judgements and opinions on each other’s partners; family members who’ve lost touch and resent each other; teenagers who’d rather be elsewhere; parents who can’t connect with their children or each other. All cooped up together for a whole weekend. As the author moved our point of view from one character to another we realise this family has so many secrets. As a storm begins to roll in, cutting the hotel off from civilisation, horrifying truths bubble to the surface. Someone who has been waiting a long time for their moment makes their move in this complicated chess game. We don’t always see those who hide in plain sight and those we think we know could be monsters in disguise. I love this author’s ability to get inside the heads of her characters and pull the reader along with her. Here she builds a labyrinth of clues, red herrings and suspicious characters that I found absolutely impossible to resist. That’s why I was awake at 3am, with my attention split between the page in front of me and my ears attuned to even the slightest creak downstairs. After all you never know who might be watching….
I’ve looked forward to the new Polly Crosby novel for a while. I love her writing so I gave myself a lovely sunny weekend to completely wallow in the story. Eve has felt adrift since her mum Angela died, so her four brothers think it might be good for her to take a trip to the coast and clear out their grandmother’s studio. Grandmother Dodie was a painter and lived a fairly basic life in a small ramshackle studio just off the beach and all have fond memories of childhood holidays there. Close by is the strangely alluring Cathedral of the Marshes, a glass building so imposing it has the presence of such a holy building. Once, when she was a teenager, Eve had taken a dare to go into the cathedral with Elliot, one of the local boys. She remembers being terrified and running, but doesn’t remember much else about that night apart from seeing a painting standing on an easel – a portrait of her. How will it feel to be back in the place that still holds some of her best childhood memories? She finds a box under the sink filled with Dodie’s letters and reads of a hidden relationship and is plunged into a completely hidden part of her grandmother’s life, a powerful love affair with repercussions that lasted decades. We’re pulled back into the past to see what happened. As I was reading about the past I kept wondering who owned Goldsborough Hall now? The answer took many unwashed dishes and unhoovered floors to unravel. This was a beautiful hidden love story and an intriguing mystery as well, told with compassion and empathy.
What a brilliant month and as we creep closer to the end of the year I’m even more worried about how I’ll choose between them for the best of the year! I’ve been away this month and wanted to catch up on some books in series that I’ve only partly read. So I have to mention Matt Wesolowski’s Six Stories series. I took the remaining four books to Shropshire with me and out of all of them, it was Changeling that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Not helped by the fact we were out in the very area between Chester and Wrexham featured in the story. This was a brilliant mystery and supernatural thriller combined and I can honestly say Ive never been disappointed by one of his books. I also enjoyed a paperback from Elizabeth Noble with the title Other People’s Husbands where the balance of a group of couples shifts when two people decide to have an affair. This was a brilliantly balanced novel that gives us the viewpoint of the two adulterers as well as other members of they’re social group. Can friendship and marriages triumph over this mistake, or has it blown everything apart? Both will appear in the next month on Throwback Thursday with a full review. Finally I must mention this lovely novel which was a Squad Pod Collective choice for July that I’m a little late starting. Minor Disturbances at Grand Life Apartments by Hema Sukumar was a very enjoyable holiday read about the residents of a an old set of apartments in Chennai, South India. This is a relaxing read, full of incredible detail with each resident facing a personal dilemma as well as the possible compulsory purchase of their homes. Review to come in the next few days. See you next time and here’s a peek at next month’s TBR!
Dear Reader, the man I love is trying to kill me ….
In 1932 Emily Blackwood, an adventurer and plant collector, is employed by Heinrich Vogel to solve a puzzle. A treasure is hidden in his remote Scottish castle and he has employed her to find it. Her excavations take us back several years to New York and a young woman called Hester caught between two brothers and the family business of supplying rare animals to society homes and show business. As Emily follows the clues she discovers torn out clumps of pages from their hiding places around the castle. These tell Hester’s story in her own words and Emily starts to piece together this part of the Vogel’s family history. However, the discovery means she also starts to question her host, the isolated place she’s staying and whether or not she is safe within it’s walls. As Emily solves the clues and we race towards her final conclusions I found myself anxious and thoroughly addicted to Freya Berry’s intriguing and puzzling mystery.
I also found myself rather spellbound by the a book because it features one of my more macabre favourite things – I have to admit that vintage taxidermy has a strange fascination for me and the quirkier it is the better. Victorian tableaux with their anthropomorphised animals really do make my heart flutter. Rationally, I know it’s horrible and undignified for these beautiful creatures but I can’t resist a squirrel tea party. This book is set at a time when killing these beautiful living creatures and posing them for the collections of rich men is huge business. The Scottish castle has it’s owncollection, but we are also taken back a few years to Heinrich Vogel’s youth when he and his brother were the source of all these wondrous creatures. In one example, sourcing a vast collection of hummingbirds to be the talking point of an exotically themed gathering for the great and good of New York Society.
Emily rather reminded me of another incredible heroine, botanist Alma Whittaker in Elizabeth Gilbert’s wonderful novel The Signature of all Things. Like Alma she is intelligent, curious and forges her own path in the world of scientific discovery. I loved that Emily wasn’t like other women in society, usually depicted in fiction as diverted by dances and adorning themselves for the marriage market. She is an academic and sets foot in places across the world that many men haven’t yet reached, never mind the supposed fairer sex. That said, her biggest adventure and challenge is trying to be acknowledged for her expertise within an academic system that’s firmly a patriarchy. It is a lack of funds that put Emily in Vogel’s orbit, when he hears of her employment cataloguing the Rothschild’s butterfly collection. He feels that only the intelligent and ingenious Miss Blackwood will do as he wishes to catalogue his own incredible collection of taxidermy creatures. It doesn’t take long for Emily to discover there’s a more intriguing task though. Heinrich Vogel’s sister-in-law Hester famously threw herself to her death from the Brooklyn Bridge. From an old book entitled The Birdcage Library, Emily deciphers clues that lead her to the remains of Hester’s diary and her words pull Emily into a past filled with clues, explaining all that happened to the Vogel brothers and Hester’s relationship with them.
The highest form of love is indistinguishable from liberty.
Freya Berry uses her historical knowledge perfectly. It grounds the story within it’s time, using real people and places to anchor Hester’s account until it feels like part of history rather than fiction. The world she describes is so rich, alive with sound and colour, creating an all round sensory experience for the reader. I felt like I knew this world inside out. As many of you know, the birdcage is a potent symbol for me, one that I have tattooed on my body as a reminder to never let anyone put me inside one again. Here Freya Berry uses it as a metaphor for the way high society and wealth keep women from living the fullest lives they could. A cage is a cage, even if it’s a gilded one. The women in New York society may have money enough to adorn themselves with the feathers of birds of paradise, but they would never have the freedom that Emily has had to travel abroad and see these birds living in their native habitat – something infinitely more valuable than wearing them as a hat. Despite having a central role in the Vogel’s business operations, Hester is soon relegated to the parlour when her brother-in-low returns to New York. The business is going in a different direction, as her husband pursues the kind of fame and fortune earned by Barnum. Her creativity, business acumen and financial know how are sidelined and she finds herself bored and dissatisfied. Her distraction from the boredom and bewilderment of being relegated to the parlour, is a destructive one.
As Emily gets closer and closer to the final parts of Hester’s diary, she realises that the repercussions of what happened in New York are still playing out, but now she is in the middle. I was actually starting to be scared for her safety. The arrival of Vogel’s nephew Yves made me wonder if Emily could find an ally in this isolated castle? Or is she doomed to live out Hester’s life, caught between two Vogel men? The novel is the perfect combination of historical novel and mystery, with just the right edge of gothic darkness. There are echoes of bothJane Eyre and Rebecca here, two of my all time favourites. Freya Berry has created two interesting and intelligent heroines in Hester and Emily, and I was enthralled by their stories till the final page. I think you will be too.
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Meet the Author
Freya Berry always loved stories, but it took several years as a journalist to realise she loves the kind of truth that lies in fiction, not reality. (Or, to put it another way, making stuff up is more fun.)
Her second novel, The Birdcage Library, is out now, a gothic mystery and literary treasure hunt packed with twists. A 1930s adventuress discovers an old book containing clues about the disappearance of a woman who vanished 50 years before. Set between a Scottish castle in the 1930s and an exotic animal emporium in Gilded Age New York, it’s a gothic tale of secrets, obsession and murder. Oh, and taxidermy.
Her first novel The Dictator’s Wife, a high-stakes exploration of power, glamour and complicity, was published in 2022. It was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club First Novel Award, a pick for the BBC’s flagship book show Between The Covers, and The New European’s novel of the year.
Freya lives in London and graduated with a double first in English from Cambridge. She spends more time reading smutty fantasy novels than she likes to admit.
What an incredible writer Julie Owen Moylan is, because within a few pages of starting her new novel I was absolutely immersed in 1950’s London. This is a London I haven’t visited too often in literature, the haunted and broken post-WW2 period rather than the supposed glory or the drama of the the war itself. Here the war has a ghostly presence, shown by children climbing piles of rubble or an incomplete street that looks like a mouth with one of it’s teeth missing. The story is told through three women; Edie, Tommie and Phyllis. It’s Edie we follow to 73 Dove Street where she hopes to look at a room, with just a single suitcase and an envelope full of cash. Edie is almost put off by the mattress and pile of men’s clothes burning fiercely just outside the yard, but a voice summons her from an upstairs window and she recognises a place she can lie low. What is she hiding from? Tommie lives in the room below and works for an eccentric socialite who was once wealthy and popular. Outside work Tommie is lured to the seedy nightlife of Soho and the man she can’t quit. Phyllis is the landlady of 73 Dove Street, burning her husband’s belongings in the street after she discovered a terrible betrayal. She puts on a good front, an armour that she needs to cope with a past she won’t talk about.
This author is absolutely brilliant at creating a feeling and time period, from the dark and depressing post-war London to the interiors of both No 73 and the more upmarket house where Tommie works.
“It was one of those London streets that had become a canvas of tatty boarding houses: windows filled with crooked pieces of cardboard saying ‘Room to Let’. The houses all looked the same: bay-fronted with scruffy front gardens filled with dustbins, and children loitering on doorsteps with their runny noses and scraped knees.“
She makes a beautiful observation about these streets, that where once there were hints of colour, London is now bombed back to dreary black and white. People are trying to drag their lives out of wartime monochrome, but fail every time. There are houses with the front ripped off and the contents still inside, looking like a grotesque full-size doll’s house. Through Tommie’s childhood experiences we can see what it was really like to be in one of those houses as she remembers a direct hit on her family home and being sat in the suffocating dark rubble until a hand breaks through to save her. These memories are so powerful and evocative, they really bring the reality of the Blitz to life. It’s clear that one of the reasons why London is so bleak is that it’s people are traumatised and numb. As well as the lack of money, rationing and their surroundings, these people haven’t even begun to recover. They’re vulnerable and in the case of our main characters, they’re trying to battle on alone.
I was immediately on board with Edie and loved the way the author built up her relationship with Frank. It was one of those situations where I could clearly see what was going to happen and I was mentally screaming at Edie to walk away. This is a man who knows how to choose the right woman, the one who will fall for his charms and become hooked on the way he operates. He likes to keep a woman on edge, waiting for his affection and easily moulded to what he wants by withholding that affection. Sadly it’s a pattern that’s only noticeable when you’ve been through it and Edie is a quiet, inexperienced girl who’s bowled over by his subtle manipulations. She’s so unformed and brought out such a protective mode in me. In a typical pattern he follows any glimpse of anger or violence with apologies and huge gestures.
“Frank’s pale blue eyes never left Edie’s face. Pleading with her without saying a word, desperate to make everything right between them. ‘Will you marry me, Edie? Say you will . . .’ The words tumbled out before Edie could stop and think about them. ‘Yes, of course I will.’ Her arms wrapped around his neck; her good wrist covering the bruises on the other one. His mouth felt tender and warm on hers and for that moment she couldn’t hear the daft comments or applause from the pub, it was just her and Frank”.
The abuse Edie suffers is a hard read, but such an authentic representation of domestic violence in all it’s forms. I am from a working class family, with some very strong women on both sides especially in those aunties old enough to get married during the war. They often comment on how the generations beneath theirs are too quick to split up or divorce and that marriages in their generation tended to stay together. Yet, when I hear the reality of some of their marriages – the drinking, gambling, physical and sexual violence, financial abuse and infidelity – I wonder what’s the point of a long marriage that has only left them grieving and traumatised? The author shows how economic and psychological difficulties prevented women from leaving terrible relationships. I was interested to read the author’s comments about her own family and how the strong women in it had given her inspiration for the book.
I haven’t spoken about Phyllis much, although towards the end of the book it was her experience that had tears pouring my down my face. At the beginning we see through Edie’s eyes the burning pile of men’s clothes outside No 73 and we could guess at what had happened in her marriage. She’s full of anger at her husband, but as the story develops we get the feeling there is something more underlying her feeling of being wronged. We get the picture of a marriage rather like the bombed out houses – a facade remains but it’s been empty for some time. When we hear the full story it is so emotional, I found it deeply moving and could identify with this woman whose abrupt manner is simply the amount of protection she needs to get through each day. It isn’t just the bombed houses that are missing. There are people locked in wartime, trying to carry on by avoidance, distraction or stepping around something there’s only one way through. I found this part of the book so beautifully rendered and deeply felt. Julie has dedicated this book to her grandmother and the strong, working class women in her family. She has really done them proud with this wonderful historical novel.
Published by Michael Joseph 20th July 2023
Meet the Author
Julie Owen Moylan was born in Cardiff and has worked in a variety of jobs, from trainee hairdresser and chip shop attendant at sixteen to business management consultant and college lecturer in her thirties.
She then returned to education to complete her Master’s degree in Film before going on to complete a further Master’s degree in Creative Writing. Julie is an alumna of the Faber Academy’s Writing a Novel course. She lives in Cardiff with her husband and two cats.
The Lotus Readers 