Tag: Family

Posted in Random Things Tours

Boys Who Hurt by Eva Björg, Ægisdottir

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Translated by Victoria Cribb

We’re back with Detective Elma in the fifth of the author’s Forbidden Iceland series and she is just returning to work from maternity leave when a body is found in a holiday cottage by a lakeside. The victim’s name is Thorgeir, he has grown up in Akranes and in a coincidence typical to small towns, his mother is Elma’s neighbour. The holiday cottage belongs to the family and the evidence suggests Thorgeir was not alone – there were two wine glasses and a lacy thong is found under the bed. He is found in the bed, with stab wounds and the line of a well known hymn written on the wall behind the bed, in blood. With Saever on paternity leave with their daughter Adda, Elma works alongside her boss Hörour to solve the murder. Several leads come to light. Thorgeir was working with his friend Matthías on an exercise and well-being app and had secured a large sum of money as an investment, but from an unexpected source. The hymn is well known, often sung at a popular Christian camp for teenagers and refers to the washing away of sin – had Thorgeir needed such forgiveness? Matthías and his wife Hafdis mentioned a young woman that Thorgeir had been seeing recently, but there is no sign of Andrea anywhere. The friends had often attended camps together as teenagers, but on one such occasion a young man had died out on the lake in the night, in similar circumstances to Thorgeir’s father’s death a few years before. It’s soon clear that many secrets are hidden in Akranes, some of them within Elma’s own home.

I love Elma’s character and what a refreshing change to read about a working woman whose partner is providing the childcare. There’s also none of the usual guilt or tension around her return to work, even as the case becomes more intense and late nights become the norm. She seems to have taken motherhood in her stride and she and Saever seem settled and happy. It’s sad that in the 21st Century this should stand out so much. Usually I read female characters caught between home and work, struggling from lack of sleep and feeling guilty. It’s great to see a woman who is a new mum, as well as a competent detective. The mothers in this novel and their relationships with their children were incredibly complex and psychologically fascinating. I was intrigued by Thorgeir’s elderly mother Kristjana, who happens to live next to Elma and Saever. She’s known as a drinker and is familiar to most people as the owner of a dry cleaners in town. She and Thorgeir didn’t seem close, but she had helped him financially. Was this out of love or guilt? There was something fishy about the business’s finances too, a thread that Höreur picked up and investigated. Kristjana’s home isn’t lavish and she doesn’t look like someone with the sort of money the accounts suggest. Saever finds her behaviour bizarre, even to the point of having to intervene one afternoon when he notices she’s dancing naked with the curtains open. She’s had tablets and alcohol, possibly due to grief and hinting at a troubled inner life but when questioned there’s a wall she puts up that’s metres and years thick. Hafdis is also a fascinating character, she asks for a divorce at the beginning of the book but where has she found the money to move on so quickly. Her relationship with Matthías is already over in her eyes, but I was shocked by her coldness towards her daughter Olof. The family have been having therapy, because Olof has been self-harming but Hafdis doesn’t even seem to have factored her daughter into her plans. Olof confides in her father about her mother, not that she gives her a hard time but that she looks at her daughter as if she’s nothing. What else might such a ruthless woman be capable of?

Saever is at home, but when he’s unpacking he comes across a box that doesn’t belong to them. In fact it belongs to previous residents, full of school exercise books and a holiday journal from the very year that the boy was killed on the lake. It belongs to Mani, one of the group staying in the same cabin as the dead boy, alongside Heioar, Hafdis, Thorgeir and Matthías. This draws him into the investigation and Elma isn’t surprised to find him at the station researching, while bouncing Adda on his knee. I loved the little Icelandic details on child care, such as wrapping the baby up warmly then popping them in the open air for a sleep. I didn’t expect to enjoy Elma working without Saever, but I really enjoyed Höreur being a part of the investigation and found myself amused by his grumpiness. His hip injury brings out a resistant and stoic side to his character, the pain making him increasingly snappish. The case has so many twists and turns that it’s hard to put down and little clues that seem to snag in your brain. I spent most of the book wondering about a second large bloodstain in Thorgeir’s family cottage, strategically covered with a rug. I was sure it was important and every time we got closer to the truth I kept thinking ‘but what about the bloodstain?’

Elma is perfect for the more complex investigative work because she occupies a liminal space in town, she’s both known and not known. Having been born in Akranes and having family that goes back generations in the town, there’s an element of belonging that gets her in the door. However, she’s spent her career so far in Reykjavik meaning she isn’t so involved that she can’t ask difficult questions. She doesn’t have the deference to the elders of the town that others might so she’s bold and doesn’t mind stirring things up a little. She definitely riles the old police chief Otto, so much so that he lets his true nature show. He is so angry that he verbally attacks Elma where it really hurts referring to her previous partner’s suicide and implying she should look closer to home for people who are keeping secrets. It sometimes feels like every home in Akranes holds an ocean of pain and unresolved trauma. There’s so much going on just under the surface, an intergenerational trauma that seems to come partly from religion and partly from rigid expectations. Elma is horrified when Heioar’s parents seem like good people, they adopted him and it seems to have been a good fit, but behind this surface is a very different family life and a total rejection of anything or anyone that doesn’t fit their ideals. I wondered how these women like Kristjana and Heioar’s mother were able to look the other way when their men are treating their children badly. Whether through religious conviction or control the fathers have ruled their homes quite literally with a rod of iron. One of the most complex relationships is between Thorgeir and his new girlfriend. I was fascinated with her narratives showing how attraction and repulsion can co-exist between two damaged people. Also, one terrible deed doesn’t define a person. This was a brilliant thriller, exposing a dark underside to Akranes and keeping me guessing to the very end.

Out from Orenda Books on June 20th 2024

Meet the Author

Eva is an Icelandic author of the bestselling Forbidden Iceland series and her books have been published all over the world. Her first book, The Creak on the Stairs, won the Crime Writers Association New Blood dagger, the Blackbird Award and was shortlisted for the Amazon Publishing Awards and the CrimeFest Specsavers Debut Awards.

In the series she writes about my hometown Akranes, a small town just forty minutes outside of Reykjavík with population of around 8000 people. She writes about dysfunctional families and relationships. She has a degree in Sociology and Criminology and is very much interested in human behaviour, which is perhaps evident in the books.

Eva grew up in Akranes and fell in love with reading at the age of 5. She moved to Norway in her twenties to study her Masters Degree and lived there for two years. When she moved back to Iceland she began writing her first novel, as she had always wanted to write a book. She has been a full time writer ever since it was published!

Posted in Netgalley

Cross Bones (The Accidental Medium 3) by Tracy Whitwell

Posted on by thelotusreaders

There’s a queue at her door, and not all of them are living …

If you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Tracy Whitwell’s character Tanz yet, you’ve been missing out. This bold, sweary Geordie actress and accidental medium is a delight and this is her third adventure in the series. Tanz is being torn in two directions as she reluctantly agrees to do a fringe play in London, but is also suddenly ‘activated’ as her spirit guide Frank explains. She is sent a new guide who she calls ‘Soft Voiced Lass’ and her flat is suddenly teeming with visions and apparitions, including a nurse who is on duty and walks through the wall into Tanz’s bedroom, which is quite a feat when you don’t have any legs! Luckily she has friend and fellow medium Sheila to rely on, but there’s a lot of sleeping with the light on too. As the play she’s been cast in becomes more dramatic off stage than on, Tanz has time on her hands and is guided down to Southwark and a cemetery known as Cross Bones. This is the burial place of the Winchester Geese, so called because they were prostitutes licensed by the Bishop of Winchester. After their deaths it was decided they could not be buried in consecrated ground and so this small burial ground became theirs and many of the poor in the same parish. Tanz is greeted by a horrific vision of the ground in the Victorian period, when overcrowded tenements spread diseases like wildfire and deaths from cholera, typhus and consumption were the daily norm. What Tanz sees isn’t an ordinary graveyard though. The smell hits her first; death, smoke and sewage creates a miasma that seems to cling to your clothes. In the yard Tanz can see a grave digger with a woman screaming at him, when she looks down she can see some fingers and a skull where he has been digging a body up to make room for more. She is overwhelmed and doesn’t really know what her purpose is here, just that it isn’t going to be easy.

The gates at Crossbones Graveyard

I love Tanz because she’s one of the most real people I’ve ever met in a book, despite the spooky stuff that surrounds her. She’s very down to earth, independent and has a few vices. She’s also very compassionate with the living people she helps and the dead ones too even if they do scare her. She has a couple of solid friends, especially Sheila, but sometimes she gets lonely, especially as she gets older and sees friends pairing off and making new lives together. She’s in the same flat, still scraping by with no big break in sight. The play she’s rehearsing is comical and the small company has such vivid characters they leap off the page. Gerald is a particularly fun addition to her circle – an elderly actor with the old school manners of a man who was inspired to act by Olivier and Gielgud. Everyone except the playwright knows the play is rubbish and the sexual politics in the company are impossible to work with. At home different visions pop up, from an Irish family who look like they’re starving, to a woman at a sewing machine and very strangely, a ghost that lurks in the hallway with a blackened face. She knows all of this must make sense to someone and keeps visiting Southwark and doing her research into the area. The history behind the story is fascinating and had me searching and reading for information afterwards. Eventually the graveyard was used for all the poor in the area and with an influx of families from Ireland, escaping the dreadful famine ( to quote Sinead O’ Connor ‘there never really was one’) overcrowding was common. The place inside that should have been somewhere to view the dead, especially for Catholic families who prefer to have an open coffin, became a charnel house. There were rotting bodies everywhere from those they had no room to bury and those who’d been dug up to make room for more. It’s a vision of hell, made worse when the traumatised gravediggers, dulled by compassion fatigue and possible PTSD, started playing skittles with human skulls. No wonder the woman in Tanz’s vision is screaming.

No 2 in The Accidental Medium Series

Tanz thinks her visions relate to a single Irish family, the family she sees in a tenement room starving and looking completely shell-shocked by their circumstances and their losses. When Tanz sees a soldier called Robert, shot in the head and looking for his wife she starts to piece things together. Could this be several generations of the same family and could any of them still be alive? Between the spooky action there’s a huge injection of dark humour that I really appreciated. I love Tanz’s slightly prophetic phone calls from her ‘mam’ who strangely seems to always know when her daughter’s up to something while scolding Tanz for meddling in spooky situations. Thank God she doesn’t find out about the black faced woman, the homeless man and the knife! There’s also a side order of romance in this novel, with a younger police officer stirring up rather unexpected feelings for Tanz. Usually she wouldn’t consider a younger man, especially one of the good guys, but maybe now is the time for changing habits. It’s nice to see Tanz meet someone who likes and respects her for a change. Maybe Tanz has developed some boundaries and boosted her self-worth enough to accept that someone like this could like her. She’s also stopped the habit of always keeping her eye on the exit in her romantic affairs. She’s taking her gift seriously and maybe has to accept that it’s this type of work that she finds most fulfilling. Although, she also makes a radical move in her acting career too. It’s lovely to see Tanz in such a strong position in life, she’s ready to take on the world and I can’t wait for her next adventures.

Out on 17th July from MacMillan

The first novel in the series.

Meet the Author

Tracy Whitwell was born, brought up and educated in the north-east of England. She wrote plays and short stories

from an early age, then moved to London where she became a busy actress on stage and screen. After having her son, she wound down the acting to concentrate on writing full time. Many projects followed until she finally found the courage to write the first in her Accidental Medium series, a work of fiction based on a whole heap of crazy truth​. Apart from the series, Tracy has written novels in several other genres and also writes mini self-help books as the Sweary Witch.

Tracy is nothing like her lead character Tanz in The Accidental Medium. (This is a lie.)

If you’d like to know more about Crossbones Graveyard this is a great site to start with:

History

Posted in Netgalley

The End of Summer by Charlotte Philby

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Judy left England as a teenager and is lived with her aunt In New York City. Looking for ways to survive she starts scamming and stealing. Judy’s mother drummed it into her that it was wise for a woman to have her own money and never rely solely on a man. This lesson was well learned, but without any real qualifications or means of making money Judy has to be more creative. She’s a grifter, stealing here and scamming there. So when she sees a story in a newspaper about a rich resident of Cape Cod becoming a widower, she decides on her next mark. Judy finds her way to a vineyard in the same area, taking a job there and making herself known until the inevitable happens and she meets Rory. She plays it clever, doesn’t ask for anything and is never pushy or monopolises his time. She’s playing the long game because she wants him to fall for her, hook line and sinker. What she didn’t bank on was falling in love with him. When they marry she has access to some of the wealthiest people in the area so she’s easily sneaking the odd item from their home and from other society people to sell on through a fence. Every summer they spend in their chateau in France and one summer Rory’s asked to hold the local Wine Appreciation Society ball. Judy is left with a dilemma. Her fence in London is blackmailing her, asking her to provide details of the ball including exits and entrances of the chateau and a guest list of who’s attending. She doesn’t want to help, but when he threatens to tell husband Rory about her past she has no choice. As the burglary takes place, Judy is locked in a toilet cubicle listening to the melee. She’s devastated to hear shots and when she runs to look for Rory she finds herself in the aftermath with a man bleeding out on the floor who turns out to be one of the robbers. When he dies she laments that a young man has died because of her and she can’t shake it off. Years later, it’s in her French home that Judy receives the phone call, the one she’s dreaded and expected all at the same time. The police are looking into a murder, but is the victim the man in France?

When Judy’s daughter Francesca gets a visit from the police and journalists it’s like a bolt from the blue. She’s a lawyer, in London and is aghast when police inform her that her mother seems to have fled the country and is wanted for murder. Francesca is left bewildered and unsure what to do. Yet she knows she must protect her mother, after all her mother has always protected her. This is a smart thriller, that doesn’t fall into cliché territory. The two women’s narratives are layered over each other, with some in the present and others set in the past, taking us from the 1960s in Cape Cod, the 1980s in the South of France and the 2000s in Kensington, London. The author is very adept at giving out just enough information, drip feeding little clues here and there that keep you reading and keep you guessing. Then, suddenly, she wrong foots you with a different direction. I found Judy so fascinating that Francesca suffered a bit in comparison. Not only is Judy beautiful, she’s a smart cookie. She can think on her feet and gets out of the tightest spots, her adrenaline running so high that my heart raced on occasions. She’s the female equivalent of the ruggedly handsome rogue, with a habit of stealing from the rich like a modern day Robin Hood. I love that the author gives her this free-spirited autonomy. She wears a mask at times, but after several years with Rory has relaxed a bit, only for a person from the past to find her. There is only one woman who suspects Judy might not be all she seems and she won’t let go of her suspicions, even taking them to the grave. I loved the allusions to Lady Audley’s Secret a Victorian ‘sensation’ novel based around the fact that Lady Audley is living a lie and may be found out. It’s a book I read at university and I was so shocked by how easy to read it was. It wasn’t slow and ponderous like other Victorian novels, it had pace and excitement just like a contemporary thriller. This is in that same tradition, but Judy has more freedom and status in today’s society. There’s less to lose, thanks to never relying solely on a man, but I was pretty sure that Judy would try her hardest to find a way out anyway. Is it wrong that the thought of her getting away with it made me smile?

Out on 20th June from The Borough Press

Meet the Author

Charlotte worked as a newspaper reporter and editor for years before moving into magazines, and then turning her hand to fiction after having her third baby. As a journalist, her work varied from undercover investigations to celebrity interviews – but what really interests her is seemingly ordinary people who do extraordinary things. This is definitely the springboard for the ideas in her novels, which she hopes are as pacey and entertaining as they are transportive. She’s inspired by favourite books including Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty, Restless by William Boyd, Alys, Always by Harriet Lane, The Secret History by Donna Tartt and The Constant Gardener by John Le Carre, but she’s also inspired by (and unashamedly addicted to) compelling TV drama, with favourite series including The Night Manager, True Detective, and The Honourable Woman. After spending time exploring the legacy of her grandfather, the double agent Kim Philby, she became interested in spy fiction and decided to write the books she longed to read: female-led stories that are twisty, stylish and multi-layered, tying together global espionage with haunting domestic noir.

Posted in Netgalley

Sandwich by Catherine Newman

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One week in Cape Cod. The perfect family holiday. What could possibly go wrong…?

For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their rustic beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, its quirky furniture and mismatched pots and pans greeted like old friends.

Now, sandwiched between her children who are adult enough to be fun but still young enough to need her, and her parents who are alive and healthy, Rocky wants to preserve this golden moment forever. This one precious week when everything is in balance; everything is in flux.

But every family has its secrets and hers is no exception.

With her body in open revolt and surprises invading her peaceful haven, the perfectly balanced seesaw of Rocky’s life is tipping towards change…

Rocky and her husband Nick have reached that middle point in life where adults seem to be at their most stretched. They’re coping with children who have left home or are living at university as well as increasingly elderly parents who need more help than they have before. This is the sandwich of the title. The emotions are conflicting, from the parental support a fledgling teenager still needs to the worry about their independence, as well as the feelings of loss that that come from empty nest syndrome. As for parents, it’s like a whole new stage in the relationship defined in the novel as ‘anticipatory grief’ because as they become increasingly frail there’s a constant reminder that the clock is ticking. This reminder of their mortality brings up feelings of loss and a sense of our own life being at their point where more is behind us than in front of us. I’m saying ‘we’ because I fall bang in the middle of this category. I have parents who have endless medical appointments, particularly Dad who seems to have surgery on a yearly basis like some sort of annuity. However, I also have one stepdaughter away at university, really stretching her wings as she ends her second year and moves in with her boyfriend. We’re only a quick call away though and we’ve gained a third child in the boyfriend. We miss her more than I can express. Then we have my other stepdaughter, one of the generation whose education has been massively affected by COVID. She has so many plans with friends that we now see her less so the loss is twofold. Then there’s the menopause, from sweating to vaginal atrophy it’s a veritable shitshow of symptoms that we’re just supposed to manage alongside everything else. To say I felt a kinship with our narrator Rocky, is an understatement. Again Catherine Newman has managed to put something on the page that’s raw, emotional and relatable. So much so that there were points in the book where I burst into tears.

Rocky is a great narrator in that I was immediately comfortable with her and believed in her world. This book was such an easy read and flowed so beautifully that I finished it in a day. A family trip to the Cape Cod holiday home they’ve rented since the children were small throws a family that’s scattered to the four winds, under one roof. Eldest child Tim is there with girlfriend Maya and student Willa has travelled from her college and meets them there. Later in the week grandma and grandad will join them for two days and of course there’s the ancient cat. They are rather piled in on tap of one another but they couldn’t come here to a different, bigger rental because so many of their memories have been made in this house. During the course of the week Rocky will learn and divulge some secrets, all of them filtered through her anxiety and what husband Nick calls a hint of narcissism. This family were so like my own that I deeply appreciated my upbringing, even though some of it wasn’t easy – we never had money, found a secret sibling then happily lost them again, mum and dad had their turbulent years. Yet I always felt loved and that’s what there’s a surfeit of in this family, everyone loves everyone else even when they disagree. Rocky is a passionate and emotionally intelligent mother, the sort of mum you might go to with a secret. She also happy to be schooled where she gets it wrong, especially where daughter Willa is concerned. She might use the wrong pronouns and need to check her privilege occasionally but largely she’s the sort of mum you want. She feels things almost too deeply and I understood that in her. She wants to breathe in her children when they’re little. She reminds me a little of something my mum and Mother, my great-grandmother, used to say when my brother and me were little: ‘ I could eat you on a butty without salt’.

I think Catherine Newman is brilliant when it comes to trauma and intergenerational family dynamics. There was a moment, as Rocky was reminiscing about a time when she miscarried that made me feel like she’d read my mind. I had recurrent miscarriages in my twenties and I’d never been desperate for children till I lost the first one. No one explained that grief can manifest in strange ways, in fact after my operation (which I’d had to consent to on a termination form) I was told when it would be physically possible to try again, but never that it might be a good idea to grieve first. To take time. As far as emotions went I was given a leaflet of phone numbers of women who’d had miscarriages – with the warning that in a lot of cases I might hear children in the background. I couldn’t bear to hear that so I didn’t call. What I do remember from that time was buying pregnancy tests in bulk and checking frequently whether I might be pregnant again, even if I’d already checked yesterday and knew I wasn’t. The author writes about Rocky staring at pregnancy tests, imagining she can see the second line in the window and trying again for the answer she really wants. I truly felt her pain in those moments and my own. I felt slightly less mad. To realise this was an understandable response to grief was so comforting. Every emotion I felt in those terrible couple of years was due to grief. I felt a failure, defective and terribly separate from people as if I was looking at life through a glass screen. Now thirty years later I’d like to thank Catherine for the way she handled this difficult story line because I finally felt less alone. I really admired the way she wrote about post-natal depression too. When my mum had my younger brother I was only four years old, but for years afterwards she had a morbid obsession that he was going to die. Every time something happened in his life she worried that this would be it. Now he would be taken away from her. I have to say that sometimes this felt very dismissive of me. Her explanation when I asked if she’d ever thought the same about me was that I could look after myself, despite me spending a long time in hospitals. This aspect of PND is something I’d never considered before and helped me to understand where she was coming from a little better.

I thought the author beautifully described how women are more aware of their bodies because we’re trained to be. In a medical world that’s often dismissive of things like period pain ( or anything that falls into the category of gynaecology and obstetrics) as a natural process, the author shows how these things truly feel physically and mentally. We have to ‘know’ as soon as we’ve got our period because the shame of being seen to bleed is fierce, especially as period shaming seems to be rife in secondary schools. Our minds and bodies are connected so we know if something is a normal pain or a pain that has a different feeling or intensity. As Rocky loses the idea of the baby she’s carrying, she’s also physically losing the baby. These moments are raw because the emotions are. There’s a desperation in physically losing a baby. The mind does gymnastics trying to find a way to keep them inside you where it’s safe. As Rocky reminisces about this time, the unresolved emotions are clear and perhaps stirred up by menopause symptoms and having her babies under one roof. I enjoyed Rocky and Nick’s marriage too. It’s not perfect and they haven’t really connected for a while, physically or mentally. When he stumbles on a long held secret it throws their dislocation into the spotlight and gives them the opportunity to talk. He still loves her, despite the fact she’s a bit of a narcissist. She recognises that throughout the holiday Nick has been cooking, organising, driving everyone and just quietly looking after everyone. They’ve been in their mum and dad roles for so long they’ve forgotten how to be Rocky and Nick. It’s something of a relief for Rocky to know that Nick still desires her, despite the expanding waistline and loss of libido. Also, as Nick points out, it’s hard to get close to someone when there’s a huge secret between them.

I connected with this novel so deeply and I raced through it in a day. I simply sat and read without music or any other distractions, that’s how engrossed I was in this family’s story. Each generation had it’s own issues to deal with. The grandparents are facing health issues and their eventual loss of each other, brought into sharp focus when grandma faints at the beach. Ricky’s son and his girlfriend are facing some huge life choices. Even great-grandparents cause a drama when Rocky’s dad lets slip that they were in a concentration camp, something Rocky’s never known. Rocky and Nick are the meat in this emotional sandwich. Catherine Newman has once again written a novel about family that is truthful, funny and life-affirming. I can easily see this being on my end of year list.

Published on 6th June by Doubleday

Meet the Author

Catherine Newman is the author of the kids’ how-to books How to Be a Person and What Can I Say?, the memoirs Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdy, the middle-grade novel One Mixed-Up Night, and the grown-up novels We All Want Impossible Things (Harper 2022) and Sandwich (Harper 2024). She edits the non-profit kids’ cooking magazine ChopChop and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, Cup of Jo, and many other publications. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her family.

Posted in Random Things Tours

Toxic by Helga Flatland

Posted on by thelotusreaders

When Mathilde is forced to leave her teaching job in Oslo after her relationship with eighteen-year-old Jacob is exposed, she flees to the countryside for a more authentic life.

Her new home is a quiet cottage on the outskirts of a dairy farm run by Andres and Johs, whose hobbies include playing the fiddle and telling folktales – many of them about female rebellion and disobedience, and seeking justice, whatever it takes.

Toxic was a perfect read for me because the author creates such psychologically detailed characters and a setting so real I felt like I was there. Helga never underestimates the intelligence of her readers, assuming we’ll make sense of these complex characters and their backgrounds. The story is structured using two narrative voices, that of Mathilde and Johs. Johs’s narrative establishes both his family and the setting of the farm where Mathilde will make her new home. At first the narratives seemed completely divorced from each other; life at the farm is only just starting to undergo change after the rather stifling management of their grandfather Johannes, whereas Mathilde is a city dweller who seems hellbent on pushing boundaries and pursuing freedom. It is that search for freedom, during the COVID pandemic, that starts Mathilde hankering after a more rural life and losing her job is the catalyst for taking action. Quickly I became so drawn in by the two narratives that I stopped worrying about a link and once Johs and Mathilde are on the same farm their differences create a creeping sense of foreboding.

Mathilde is a teacher by profession, teaching students up to the age of 18. She is approached by a student, Jakob, and doesn’t even seem to stop and think about what the consequences of a potential affair might mean either for him or for her job and reputation. I was shocked that when called in by the school’s principle she doesn’t even try to deny it. She rationalises that he’s an adult, over 18, so it isn’t illegal. Everything was consensual and in fact Jakob approached her and she has proof of his pursuit in their messages. She was no longer teaching him directly when their affair began. Yet she doesn’t seem to be defending herself with an underlying awareness that what she’s done is at least unethical and an abuse of power. It’s as if she really can’t see the problem. Mathilde has very few boundaries it seems and allows her wants and needs to become her driving force. She doesn’t seem to recognise that she’s made an active choice, instead assuming their encounters were inevitable or ‘just happened’. Her indifference in the meeting at work, becomes obsession afterwards as she messages Jakob frantically wanting to talk. Jakob isn’t an innocent party in this, to me he seems largely indifferent emotionally even when the relationship is at it’s peak. It’s lust rather than an emotional connection on his part and I even felt there was an element of pride that he’s bedded a teacher. He rather likes the status the conquest gives him amongst his friends. He comes across very cold. I was interested to see if she would hear from him again, once she leaves Oslo.

The farm and it’s family are a world of difference to Mathilde’s city routine. Their life is regimented, ruled by the routine of the dairy cattle and the calendar for their arable crops. Andres is the brother who inherited the farm, but it is a family concern and even their elderly mother has the same hardened attitude and work ethic. Even if Johs has decided to take his day off, he often sees his mother rather pointedly starting tasks she thinks he should be doing. There’s a definite imbalance between the way Johs and Andres are treated by their parents. Johs is often quietly infuriated by his brother, who is paranoid about COVID symptoms and often takes sick days when there’s very little wrong. Yet on those days their mother happily picks up Andres chores without any of the attitude she gives Johs. He sees his mother as a cold woman and I would have to agree. She doesn’t show her love for her husband or Johs and even though she appears to spoil Andres she sometimes barely talks to them, just silently follows the routine the farm has always had probably since she was a little girl. Grandfather Johannes looms like a dark shadow over everything, not just the small house where he lived his final years, but the main house too. Johs feels his presence strongly in the living room, where he spent his final days in a hospital bed largely silent except for sudden, shocking expletives and insults about their grandmother. One evening he suddenly yells that he doesn’t want to spend eternity in the same grave as that ‘whore’. There’s an unspoken code here, one that’s different for men and women.

The author uses local Nordic myths and songs to give us a sense of the history of the area, but also the attitudes towards modernity and women. I found these songs harmless at first, simply an understandable part of a community where families have remained for generations. However, the more I heard, especially with their interpretations from granddad Johannes who performs them on his Hardinger fiddle, the more the content felt controlling and misogynistic. He seems to prefer women who are seen and not heard, who don’t interfere in the business of men but work hard and remain loyal to their husbands. All the songs seem to reference young women who want more than the traditional life, who might fall in love with the wrong man or try to leave. They always end with the woman suitably punished, imprisoned somewhere or even killed. I felt that Johannes actively believed in these values and indoctrinated his family with them. That’s not to say his grandsons had an easy life, because he expected hard work on the farm, excellence on the fiddle (Johs is considered not good enough) and feats of strength and masculinity when out in nature, such as making them dive naked into a high waterfall when they were only boys. Johannes was a bully and I hate people who bully. Johs believes his grandad is responsible for his mother’s coldness, towards him and his father. If you never receive love, how can you give it? While Andres has a wife and child, Johs has remained single and lives alone in the big house. He wants to make changes to modernise how they farm and has succeeded in getting the milking process mechanised. Now he wants to rent their grandparents small house next door to his and this brings Mathilde into their orbit.

This is where the book’s tension starts to build and I couldn’t imagine how Mathilde’s lack of boundaries and open sexuality would fit in here. Johs is drawn to her and watches her from his windows that overlook her garden. He seems to find her differences fascinating, although the more everyday aspects of her character do irritate him. She wants to make changes to the house, which he doesn’t mind, in fact the more she erases the smell of his grandfather the better. It’s her lack of work ethic and her waste that he finds difficult. In the spring she asked to plough up some of the lawn to create a vegetable patch, but then never plants anything. By the autumn it’s a muddy patch of weeds but still she sits by it reading a book with no attempt to clear it. She doesn’t cut the lawn and the property is looking shabby. This brought back a reminder of living with my Polish father-in-law who couldn’t understand why we were remodelling our garden but not planting a single vegetable. I was creating a garden we could sit in, enjoy the fresh air and beautiful flowers. He saw it as a waste of land when we could have been self-sufficient. He loved that his other son had bought a property and immediately ploughed up the tennis courts and planted potatoes. It was simply a different background and life experiences coming up against each other. It’s the same here, two totally different upbringings have created different values and lifestyles. Yet I felt that an antipathy was building towards Mathilde and that one wrong move could cause this tinder box to ignite. With her lack of boundaries, that wrong move seemed very possible. I was surprised by where the ending came, although not shocked. As I took a moment and thought back, every single second we spend with each character is building towards this moment. Utterly brilliant.

Meet the Author

Helga Flatland is one of Norway’s most awarded and widely read authors. Born in Telemark, Norway, in 1984, she made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Stay If You Can, Leave If You Must, for which she was awarded the Tarjei Vesaas’ First Book Prize. She has written six novels and a children’s book and has won several other literary awards. Her fifth novel, A Modern Family (her first English translation), was published to wide acclaim in Norway in August 2017 and was a number-one bestseller. The rights have subsequently been sold across Europe and the novel has sold more than 100,000 copies. One Last Time was published in 2020 and also topped bestseller lists in Norway. Helga lives in Oslo.

Out on 23rd May from Orenda Books

Posted in Netgalley

House of Mirrors by Erin Kelly

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Erin Kelly’s latest novel is a return to characters who started life in The Poison Tree. Rex and Karen are a bohemian couple, who like a quiet life and love their daughter Alice who has flown the nest to live in London with her boyfriend Gabe. Karen is still living with the secret of what she did years ago, constantly worrying that Rex or Alice will discover the truth. Rex came from the wealthy Capel family, but the couple are far from comfortable. Rex is estranged from his wealthy father Roger Capel who has new and much younger wife and family. There’s a reason the couple keep a low profile, as a young man Rex was convicted of double murder. What happened on ‘The Night Of’ has overshadowed them all. Rex and his sister Biba were alone at the family home, when Biba’s boyfriend turned up and an argument ensued. The disturbance alerted the neighbours and one came round to see if everything was okay. Within minutes both Biba’s boyfriend and the neighbour are dead. There are so many questions about what happened that night. What was the argument about? Where did the gun come from? Were Rex and his sister the only ones there that night? Rex took the blame for the murders and served his time, with Karen staying faithfully by his side throughout. Did Rex really commit the crime? However, the mystery that has haunted the family for years is what happened to Biba? After that night she has never been seen again.

Rex and Karen’s daughter Alice is starting a vintage dress shop called Dead Girls Dresses. Strange things have happened since the opening though. Alice has had dropped phone calls at the shop and an oddly dressed woman with her face covered visited the shop. Could it be her Aunt Biba? Then Alice’s grandfather Roger Capel dies and leaves his granddaughter all of the womens clothes from the family home and it’s a treasure trove! Trawling through these pieces and trying them on brings Alice even closer to Biba. I thoroughly enjoyed the Alice in Wonderland details in the book, from the mirrors and chequered floors of the ‘the night of..’ to an Alice themed event at the dress shop. There is a sense, as the story goes on, that we are falling further and further down a rabbit hole. I’m a sucker for fashion and vintage so Alice’s shop was a glorious pick ‘n’ mix of beautiful pieces. This was a shop I would visit and the aesthetic sounded like my study – taxidermy, a white rabbit, antique inkwells, Venetian masks and a candlestick that’s in the shape of a monkey wearing a dress are just some of my weird objects! I thought the general shabbiness of Alice’s apartment was very believable. It’s in a large house where the ground floor is uninhabitable, so they have to squeeze upstairs having no money for repairs. I thought that the author captured Alice’s naivety very well and I could easily believe she would end up in a relationship with Gabe who’s a militant climate change activist. I felt like his activism and relationship with best friend Stef came first in his life, despite professing to be madly in love with Alice. I know that once you start siding with parents in novels and films you’ve reached ‘old’, but I had the same misgivings as Karen. I thought Gabe was gaslighting Alice and making her doubt herself, I just didn’t know why. I kept wishing that Alice would have the strength to recognise and resist him.

Erin Kelly is an author I’ve read since her very first novel and she has a way of writing something utterly compelling and full of tension, but also full of unusual details. There’s the quirky references to Lewis Carroll’s Alice and funny little everyday instances, like trying to unmask the dog constantly using the opposite shop’s doorstep as a toilet. There were also those ideas about twinning, doppelgängers and mirrors that added an uncanny element to the story. Using Alice and Karen to narrate the story in alternate chapters means we can see the relationship between mother and daughter. Karen’s fears for Alice with regards to Gabe and his coercive control really amplified the tension. We see Alice’s frustration with her mum, but also her concern for her father who she believes was innocent of murder. She knows that Rex is loyal to those he loves and she starts to suspect he may have been covering for someone else. I also sensed that there was so much more to the double murder then either Rex or Karen were admitting to, especially to Alice. Possibly something to do with aunt Biba? As Biba started to overshadow Alice’s thinking and the strange calls continued I was on tenterhooks waiting for the truth to be revealed. It’s a massive shock when someone from the past does turn up, but it’s not anyone the family expected. For Karen and Rex this newcomer is an eerie reminder of his sister. They also upset the dynamic of Alice’s relationship and Gabe feels very put out when his attempts to control their role in the group fails and it looks like Alice might become influenced by someone else. I would have thought that Gabe being pushed out would be exactly what Karen wanted but strangely she seems concerned too. I kept remembering that someone in this family is a murderer and they could strike again. I also wondered what those involved might be driven to, in order to keep their secrets. As the final pages came I was still shocked by what actually happened! It’s amazing the lengths people might go to for someone they love.

Out now from Hodder & Stoughton

Meet the Author

Erin Kelly is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Poison Tree, The Sick Rose, The Burning Air, The Ties That Bind, He Said/She Said, Stone Mothers/We Know You Know, Watch Her Fall and Broadchurch: The Novel, inspired by the mega-hit TV series. In 2013, The Poison Tree became a major ITV drama and was a Richard & Judy Summer Read in 2011. He Said/She Said spent six weeks in the top ten in both hardback and paperback, was longlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier crime novel of the year award, and selected for both the Simon Mayo Radio 2 and Richard & Judy Book Clubs. She has worked as a freelance journalist since 1998 and written for the Guardian, The Sunday Times, Daily Mail, New Statesman, Red, Elle and Cosmopolitan. Born in London in 1976, she lives in north London with her husband and daughters. erinkelly.co.uk twitter.com/mserinkelly

Posted in Personal Purchase

My Favourite Mistake by Marian Keyes

Posted on by thelotusreaders

I’m going to say it.

I am a Marian Keyes superfan.

I love her tweets or whatever the hell we call them now. I love her honesty. I love her Strictly fandom. I especially love her sense of humour. I love that her books have drawn my stepdaughter into daily reading, because of course more than anything I love her writing. She puts all her quirk, wit and self-awareness into the characters she writes. She is a writing goddess! She gets better year on year and I loved this dive straight back into the Walsh family after Again, Rachel. Rachel has always been my favourite Walsh, but in this latest novel Anna really did steal my heart. Anna is nearing her fiftieth birthday and her high flying PR role in the beauty business is wearing a little thin. Although she’s always loved living in NYC, the pandemic left her feeling the distance from her family in Ireland. After losing her husband Aidan in a terrible car accident several years ago, her contact with his family in Boston has waned. Her subsequent relationship with Angelo – a ‘feathery stroker’ – has been conducted with respect, equality and a deep fondness, but never passionate, all consuming love. With a need to be near those she loves, she gives notice on her job, her apartment and her relationship.

Her family think she’s gone mad and she almost starts to think she’s made a huge mistake when a sudden job opportunity comes her way. Her sister’s friend Bridie has been building a luxury hotel and spa on farmland near the coast, but the project has hit the buffers. Locals have vandalised the site leaving machinery sabotaged and the luxury bungalows daubed with paint. Bridie and her husband have had the worst news, their daughter has been diagnosed with cancer and needs their total focus. What they need is an experienced but down to earth PR who will be able to converse with the locals in town, find out what their grievances are and hopefully, get the project moving forward again. Anna is booked into the local hotel and can be ready to hit the ground running, but there’s just one snag. The finance broker who has put together the deal for Bridie’s project is Joey Armstrong. Joey was part of the Irish ex-pat community in New York when Anna and Rachel first moved out there. He was also one of the ‘Real Men’, a group of long haired, tight jeaned, rock gods who included Rachel’s husband Luke. Joey was hot. All tawny haired, with the most kissable mouth Anna had ever seen, not to mention his jeans which were just on the wrong side of decent. The first night they met Anna felt an immediate vibe and was full of anticipation until her sister Helen walked in. She saw Joey’s eyes immediately slide over her and become laser focused on her beautiful sister. Anna was immediately slighted and when Helen and Joey left together she decided to dispel this particular lean hipped rock god to the back of her mind. However, this wasn’t the last time their paths crossed. Joey has always been a mix of old flame and thorn in Anna’s side. Can she put aside their past and work together on this project?

Anna has that wonderful characteristic that can’t be taught, she has an easy charm and an ability to talk to anyone from building contractors to the lady of the manor. She takes to M’town straight away, working out who are the cornerstones of the community and who has something to lose from the development at Bridie’s farm. Knowing that her NYC clothes won’t work in rural Ireland, she dresses in jeans and a waterproof coat and pulls her hair back in a ponytail. Minimal make-up leaves her looking fresh-faced and the facial scar from her accident with Aidan is exposed. She’s shrewd enough to realise that it gives her an advantage, no matter whether they people feel sorry for her, are curious or think it shows honesty and openness. She’s smart and has similar skills to her sister Rachel when it comes to communication. The openness, lack of judgement and appreciation that Rachel shows her clients in the counselling room, is equally fruitful when trying to get to the bottom of why certain people in town are against the development. Anna genuinely cares and within days can see where mistakes were made, where a concern was overlooked or an individual was inconvenienced. She can make the most insignificant person feel like the centre of her world and is soon making friends. We follow her investigation and watch her become more and more embedded in this quirky but beautiful little place. In between we see glimpses into Anna’s past, from the before and after devastation of Aidan’s death to her relationship with best friend Jackie and her daughter Trea. Jackie has been her best friend, a relationship that even survived Jackie’s fraught relationship with Joey. When Jackie becomes pregnant, Anna puts aside her own feelings for Joey and becomes her birthing partner and almost a co-parent to Trea. However, something happens to jeopardise their friendship and the women have barely spoken since.

A Marian Keyes romance is never just heart and flowers. It’s always about the heroine’s personal baggage and need for self-growth too. Often I prefer the inner growth to the potential relationship, but not in this case. I absolutely loved this couple and their story. We all have that someone who got away. For me it was a lanky and eccentric music lover called Glynn who would turn up at the door unannounced – often sporting flowers from the graveyard or my dad’s own flowerbeds. There was rarely any warning with Glynn, he might be waiting for me at school having invited himself for tea or have walked five miles from town with some song lyrics scribbled on a postcard that I just had to have. We would lie on my bed and listen to the Cocteau Twins, Ride and The Smiths. My dad would despair at his Joe Bloggs wide leg jeans with frayed hems that dragged mud and grass into the house. He had hair like Clint Boon from the Inspiral Carpets and a huge billowing parka that I stole and wore for two years straight. He also had a complicated home life and often reminded me of Snufkin from The Moomins, who loved the solidity and dependability of Moomin House but also needed time to wander alone whenever it suited him. I was hopelessly in love with him, but it took him three years to finally ask me out and I was scared that it was finally happening that I panicked and refused. Even now, every few months or so he sends me a Spotify track by House of Love or Northside and I love that little reminder of teenage love. Similarly, Joey and Anna have a very long history with several near misses and a deep friendship when he let her close. Although they’ve never had a romantic relationship it is Anna and not one of his many lovers who knows the truth about his upbringing and how damaging those years were. He has trusted her with his deepest secrets, but he has also hurt her, possibly more than anyone else in her life. He has also caused her to lose her closest friend. Yet Anna knows that once she also wounded Joey deeply, the details of which we only find out late in the story.

I loved the pace of the romance, with Marian Keyes knowing exactly when to drop in a flashback that explains everything and keeping that ‘will they/ won’t they’ tension without it seeming artificial. Often with rom coms I feel like obstacles are there just for the sake of it, but the flow is natural and I never felt like the outcome was a done deal. There were so many obstacles and items of baggage it felt like they were on the luggage conveyor belt at Gatwick. There’s everything from the past – him choosing Helen, then Jackie and then most of NYC if Mrs Walsh is to be believed, before Anna. Joey has so much work to do, not just about his childhood but about the here and now. Blending families isn’t easy and he has three adorable boys as well as Trea to think about. They’re both temporarily working on this project and in M’town so what happens when the hotel is built or if Birdie has enough and changes her plans? Anna might be healed physically, but her scar does bother her and has changed her life in ways she didn’t imagine. It does work as a filter, anyone it clearly bothers has no place in her bed. However, at times it does play on her confidence and when she sets up an online suggestion inbox for the locals there are enough hurtful comments to remind her of a time when she wasn’t okay. Joey is fit to murder the culprits but Anna rises above it and keeps moving forward, despite the hurt and the reminder that Joey didn’t even choose her before the accident. So, why would he choose her now? Is it possible to remain friends when they’re so close? Finally, there’s the beautiful setting, nobody does small town Ireland like Keyes and these people are imperfect, but hilarious. Some of their concerns are petty, but others are grounded in years and years of tradition. Work is hard to find in a small town so local tradesmen not being asked to contract was a huge mistake, but easily smoothed over once Anna explains the artistry and level of finish expected. Could Anna thrive somewhere like this, or is she just passing through? I loved, loved, loved this book and being on holiday I had the luxury of sitting in the garden in Glastonbury and reading right through to the end. This is peak Marian Keyes and if you don’t fall in love with Anna or her love story with Joey there’s clearly something a little bit wrong with you.

Meet the Author

Marian Keyes is the international bestselling author of Watermelon, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, Rachel’s Holiday, Last Chance Saloon, Sushi for Beginners, Angels, The Other Side of the Story, Anybody Out There, This Charming Man, The Brightest Star in the Sky , The Mystery of Mercy Close, The Woman Who Stole My Life, The Break and her latest Number One bestseller, Grown Ups. Her two collections of journalism, Making it up as I Go Along and Under the Duvet: Deluxe Edition are also available from Penguin.

Posted in Random Things Tours

The Garnett Girls by Georgina Moore

Posted on by thelotusreaders

Regular readers will know how much I love stories of large families, their complicated dynamics and the psychological ins and outs of why they are, the way they are. This was the perfect read for me and I was immediately intrigued by the deep family secrets at the centre of the three sister’s relationships with their mother Margo. The three sisters are: eldest, Rachel married to Gabriel with two small girls and a career as a lawyer; Imogen, the playwright who is anticipating long term boyfriend William to conduct the perfect proposal while being unsure whether it’s what she wants. Then there’s Sasha, the fierce and rather wild youngest sister, who is struggling between her family and her coercive husband Phil while family friend Johnny watches on, wildly in love with her. The sisters live in the shadow of their mother Margo and father Richard’s tempestuous love affair and marriage which sadly ended in divorce. His drinking and their arguing lead to Richard walking out, to join his secret other family. None of the girls have ever seen their father since that day. Rachel remembers moving to their holiday home Sandycove from their house in London and Margo being unwell. She and Imogen, along with their Aunt Alice try to keep the house running, but Sasha is still a baby struggling to cope with Margo’s unavailability. In the present day, every one of the Garnett girls is carrying a secret, but Sasha’s secret has the potential to blow the family apart.

I loved the community on the island, where the family home has always stood. Rachel and Gabriel now live in Sandycove with their children. Rachel works in London during part of the week and Gabriel works as a counsellor but also looks after the home and the girls. Sandycove is still the official place where the Garnett family get together for special occasions and Margo is constantly popping in and out, helping with cooking and childcare. She now lives at at The Other Place, a bungalow up in the village. It’s here she conducts day to day life and her illicit love affairs, kept separate from her family, who often know a lot more than she realises. Because they’re together in the week, Gabriel and Margo often plan family get togethers and outings. This bothers Rachel who knows they’re only trying to take the burden from her, but she often feels like Sandycove isn’t their own, it belongs to everyone. In gaining the family legacy they’ve also lost something. Their close knit days of just the four of them are gone. Imi’s story starts in beautiful Venice where her perfect boyfriend William is set to propose. She knows this because Margo and Rachel are calling on a daily basis to hear what they’ve been up to. They’ve been a couple for a long time now and her family love William. They think he’s perfect too and Imi knows that if she vocalised her doubts to her mum or one of her sisters they’d think she’s lost her mind. On her return the read through of her play is set to begin and an up and coming Hollywood star has been cast in the lead role. Imi isn’t sure about Rowan and worries that it may be the worst kind of stunt casting, but from the moment she meets the actress, she can’t stop looking at her. Having always felt her relationship falls short of her parent’s great love, finally Imi knows what a coup de foudre feels like. Sasha has had a radical and fierce short haircut that she knows Margo will hate and will make her look very different from her sisters. Sasha is holding on to something else they’ll hate too, she is in contact with their father Richard and his family. Over the course of the novel, all the secrets hoarded by the sisters will come out. Can their close knit relationships survive?

Each of the three sisters are beautifully drawn by the author and became completely real to me very quickly. I loved their family dynamic too, even though I might find it a little bit suffocating if they were mine! Margo especially is a lot to take, with her daily phone calls and constant ‘pop-in’s’. There’s also the potential embarrassment of her sexual adventures, although I did enjoy her liberation and openness about having an active sex life as a grandmother. Sandycove has so many deep emotions buried in it’s walls. It almost runs like a stately home, with a list of annual events for family and friends that are a fixture in the village calendar. The family’s parties are incredible and I’d love to go to one! I thought the way the author used flashbacks was clever, because they helped me understand each of the women. So we see Sandycove as the home of 16 year old Margo who thinks she’s met the love of her life. Margo’s mother is unconvinced and is determined to keep this older man away from her daughter. Margo isn’t easily dissuaded from her love affair and ropes her sister Alice into helping her, eventually fleeing her childhood home with Richard in tow. Her self-awareness doesn’t stretch to realising that she’s now doing just the same with her own daughters – so sure that William is the one for Imi she’s planning the wedding before the proposal. We also go back to the moment when this family fell apart; this past event answered a lot of questions for me. I loved the moment of realisation for Rachel that her need for independence lies back there, in fact it was about survival. Yet she knows her independence made Margo feel unwanted and also masked a need to live up to her mother’s expectations and a fear of being unable to. She didn’t want to live somewhere that people came up to her in the street to tell her how like Margo she was. She wanted to live somewhere there was no Margo, maybe then there’d be enough space left for her to be Rachel. She knows that now these old feelings put a distance between her and Gabriel, in fact the whole family see strong, capable Rachel without thinking how exhausting it must be at times, how she can never be vulnerable.

Imi longs for someone to listen, so much so that on the day of her Venice proposal she drinks at the hotel bar with a young man just because he doesn’t talk over her, or assume what she wants in her life. When William proposes he uses the words ‘it’s what everyone wants’ before asking if it’s what she wants. It’s as if she’s ripe for rebellion, but doesn’t know how yet. Sasha’s rebellion is rather more visible, the short platinum blonde crop is a backlash against the long flowing hair that makes her a Garnett girl. Her identity is visible in the way she looks, with her slightly severe and spiky clothes and her red-soled high heels. She picks at Imi for accepting Margo’s bullying and interference, knowing straight away that Margo had bought Imi’s dress for the engagement party. Sasha can see that though she is beautiful she isn’t comfortable in it. In fact Imi wasn’t even comfortable with the party. Yet Sasha soon returns to Phil’s side, as he lurks in the doorway looking put out. He hates Garnett parties and prefers to have Sasha to himself; there are deep-seated reasons why Sasha has fallen into this possessive relationship, mistaking control for love. I thought these labyrinthine dynamics were brilliantly done, so real and perfectly in tune with coercive control and how intergenerational trauma works. I knew it was going to take the revelation of all the family secrets, probably in an explosive Garnett way, for these dynamics to change and for the girls and Margo to heal. I was so sucked into their world that I read the book in two sittings, desperate to see the girls speak their truth and start controlling their own lives. I also wanted healing for Margo too, because she’s been at war with an idea for the past twenty years. Her impression of the man who left her and the life he left her for is all in her head and it’s maybe time to face reality. The Garnett women can only move forward by being honest and real with each other and themselves. This was a wonderful read for people like me – the nosey and psychologically trained. It’s astute, beautifully written and full of strong women who are talented, ambitious and intelligent. It was a joy to read.

Published in paperback this month by HQ Stories.

Check out the rest of the blog tour

Meet the Author

Georgina Moore grew up in London and lives on a houseboat on the River Thames with her partner, two children and Bomber, the Border Terrier.   The Garnett Girls is her first novel and is set on the Isle of Wight, where Georgina and her family have a holiday houseboat called Sturdy. Georgina is working on her second novel, Walnut Tree Island, which will be published in 2025.

Posted in Netgalley

Goodbye Birdie Greenwing by Ericka Waller

Posted on by thelotusreaders



Birdie Greenwing has been at a loose end ever since her beloved twin sister and husband passed away. Too proud and stubborn to admit she is lonely, Birdie’s world has shrunk. But then some new neighbours move in to the house next door. 

Jane has come to Brighton for a fresh start, away from her ferociously protective mother Min. While Jane finds it hard to stand up for herself, her daughter Frankie has no problem telling people what she does and doesn’t want. Ada Kowalski has come to England to follow her dreams, but her new life is harder than she expected.

When a series of incidents brings their lives crashing together, the three find that there is always more to a person than meets the eye …

Goodbye Birdie Greenwing celebrates relationships in all their quirky, complicated uniqueness. It is a story about the choices we make and how we justify them. About finding out who we are, not who other people think we should be.

I read Ericka’s novel in a day because I simply loved being in the presence of these lovable and contrasting characters. As I met each one I could see the impact they could have on each other’s lives. As the author takes us inside their everyday lives, their inner worlds and their pasts she looks at family dynamics, sisters, mothers and daughters, but also the whole question of being a woman in the 20th and 21st Century. In fact there was a point when I was reminded of America Ferrara’s speech in the film Barbie. It addresses the choices we make, the expectations placed on us within our families, by other women and by society at large. She takes us into that contrast of who we are, how we compare that to our internal and learned ideas of what the word ‘woman’ means. Birdie, our central character, is a elderly woman living alone in Brighton with her little dog Audrey. She lost her sister Rose and husband Arthur several years ago. She is stunned when tests at hospital confirm she has cancer, but before the doctor can give her more information and make a plan Birdie has walked out. Her oncologist Ada recognises that determined walk and the lift of Birdie’s chin. She realises that Birdie is going to face this alone and she worries that she will struggle without the help that can be offered. In fact Ada realises that Birdie lives on her street, so takes to walking past and checking for telltale signs that Birdie is struggling. Ada is also lonely after relocating to Britain from Poland. Used to life on an isolated farm and a very different society, Brighton can be a lot to take on. Despite friendly overtures from her secretary Denise and Connie in the WRVS cafe Ada is solitary, except for the time she spends helping Aleksey and Lech in the Polski Sklep. When a new intern starts on her team Ada’s teamwork skills will be tested, not to mention her social skills. Finally, there’s Jane and her daughter Frankie who have recently moved in next to Birdie from Bristol. Jane is struggling with the guilt of moving away from her mother Min, although her sister Suki is out in Asia just living her life as she chooses. They used to be so close, but now all she gets are emojis. Her daughter Frankie’s bluntness and practical nature might seem like a hindrance when forming new connections, it certainly gets Jane called into school enough, but could her lack of inhibitions and tact actually help them make friends?

There are two mysteries in the novel and I enjoyed watching them slowly unravel. There’s the mystery of what has happened to Birdie’s husband and sister, Arthur and Rose. At first I wondered if they’d run away together but Birdie’s guilt seems to have lasted for decades. The other mystery is what has broken the relationship between Jane and her sister Suki? Suki is distant and even when she rings to speak to Min, she’s very quick to end the call if Jane is present. Jane tries hard, sending her sister funny videos, memories of their childhood and information about Min but only gets emojis or a thumbs up in return. Each of the women have a sister and their relationships with them are fascinating. Birdie always felt responsible for Rose as she had rheumatoid arthritis. When she met Arthur and fell in love she hadn’t imagine she might have to make a choice, so when Arthur asks her to marry him she hesitates. What about Rose? Luckily Arthur had realised that the two sisters were a package deal. Birdie felt guilty that Rose wouldn’t have the same choices in life and whether there was something she did wrong, before they were born, that led to her sister’s disability. Birdie worried that she’d somehow pushed herself forward in the womb and take more than her share. Now Rose was ill as a result. Jane and Suki’s rift seems to date back to when the sisters went travelling together. Jane returned from Thailand with Frankie and moved back in with Min, but Suki stayed. They are very different women, with contrasting life choices but that shouldn’t stop them being sisters. Ada has a sister called Ania, but she has chosen a very different life. While Ada is saving lives in a different country, Ania lives close to their parents and is married with children.

I’ve never had a sister, but it seems as if they provide an instant comparison; they are the mirror in which your own life is reflected. Ada feels like the ‘bad’ sister, the one who followed her own dreams rather than staying to work the family farm. This choice has cut her off from the family in a way. She knows they sacrificed a lot for her education, so she sends part of her salary home every month and when she visits takes them gifts. She wants to show them that their sacrifice was worth it and she is doing well. However, this changes her standing in the family and while there’s no red carpet for Ania, when Ada comes home she is treated like a guest, placed in the best room and given the special soap saved for visitors. She feels like a stranger in her childhood home. She would be happy to throw on jeans and help with the animals but they won’t let her. It’s hard for her to accept these two sides of herself; the Ada who would happily muck out the cows and the Ada who wears a suit and saves lives. She thinks that her parents value Ania more because she made the ‘right’ choices and is still part of the community. Whereas Ada’s life is outside their experience and difficult to understand, her ambitions are perhaps unnatural as opposed to motherhood. Similarly, Jane had wanted to have children, a revelation that took her by surprise, whereas Suki knew she didn’t want motherhood. Could there misunderstanding be explained by this difference? Could Suki feel guilty or even selfish for not having children and making life choices based on what she wants? However, just because you’re childless, it doesn’t mean you can’t ‘mother’ people. There’s also a generational difference in the way they mother, with Min’s tactless and sometimes hurtful words seeming like they belong in another century. There’s a way in which Min and Frankie are very similar in character, but now everything has to have a label. Jane wonders why Frankie has to be pigeon-holed and defined in some way. Why is it always Frankie that’s in the wrong? She has a much softer way of mothering that ironically Frankie often sees as fussing and she much prefers the more practical attitude of grandmother Min.

Where Waller really moved me, was where these quirks of character benefitted someone else. Where even those aspects that you’d struggle to call positive found their place in the world. Frankie has no inhibitions and Jane is called into school when she gives a classmate a frank assessment of her braces, including the trapped cabbage. She doesn’t understand why the things she says are wrong when they’re true. When Birdie has a short stay in hospital and has the realisation that she might be in her final days it’s not medical professionals Jane or Ada that she needs. At first it’s Frankie who goes in and decides to help, making Birdie comfortable and making her some lunch. The two rub along nicely together, probably because there’s no fuss with Frankie and I understood that need for someone who isn’t flowery, overly chatty or phased by her illness. Similarly Min is the perfect carer for Birdie, she suggests that being of the same generation might make Birdie feel more comfortable and even Ada has to agree that their dynamic works. Min and Frankie’s help reminded me of how Ada’s parents would help their neighbours out. On her visit to family in Poland, Ada noticed how her mother’s farmhouse provided a quiet place for people to get away, like the neighbour who comes in on Saturday mornings to read his paper. This communal way of living is echoed by Aleksey and Lech who happily feed Ada; their fondness is shown in a practical way. Ada’s secretary Denise is stunned when, after years of finding her a bit of a cold fish, Ada offers her a home after the split from her husband. It shows we should accept people as they are, because we all show emotion and affection in different ways.

I felt like this was another book about connection, both with others and with ourselves. It’s a subject I find fascinating and I’m picking it up a lot lately in fiction. I wonder whether this is an unconscious response to the isolation of the pandemic. The author is brilliant at depicting those little inhibitions and we hear them in each woman’s narration. Jane hovers on the edge of a ‘huddle’ at work because she doesn’t know if she’ll be welcome or not. Ada doesn’t knock on Birdie’s door for professional reasons but also because she doesn’t want to impose. They all have to learn how to connect with who they are. Jane needs to learn to assert herself more, to accept her life choices and explore why she’s spent years of her life as a single woman. Suki’s guilt over the choices that were right for her stop her having a relationship with Jane and Frankie, but it was the right choice. As Ada compares herself with Ania she needs to see that it was right for Ania to stay near family and become a mum, but that moving away and using her skills to help others was the right choice for her. Even Birdie, who is the central character around which these interesting women revolve but she too has a lot of acceptance to do. She must accept this new vulnerability and need for help from others, as well as accepting she deserves it. Mostly she needs to forgive herself, for something that wasn’t even her fault. She has punished herself for years and it is the lovely Connie (whose collection of innuendo laden mugs rivals my own) in the hospital’s WRVS café who helps her see that while she still has time this is her time. While we still have life, we must live it. Whether we have months, days or hours left, we must live them.

Meet the Author

Ericka Waller is 38 and lives in Brighton with three daughters, too many pets and a husband.

She is an award winning blogger and columnist.

When not writing she can be found walking her dogs, reading in the bath or buying stuff off eBay.

Posted in Throwback Thursday

Just Between Us by Adele Parks

Posted on by thelotusreaders

For some reason, I wasn’t fully engaged with Adele Parks’s last novel Both of You and I wasn’t expecting a sequel. I didn’t really like any of the characters involved. Kylie has two pseudonyms and two lives: half the time she’s Leigh, wife to Mark and stepmum to Oli and Seb; the rest of the time she’s Kai, wife to Dutch banker Daan Jaanssen and lives in an upmarket apartment with luxury clothes, cosmetics and holidays. The two seem to balance Kylie’s complicated needs, she’s equally at home having dinner in a Michelin starred restaurant as she is eating sand filled butties on a cold beach with the kids. Kylie’s other important relationship is Fiona, her friend of many years who has become part of the family and unofficial aunty to the boys. There isn’t a single person in Kylie’s world who knows about her double life, until one day she disappears. Now the whole world knows about Kylie’s bigamous marriages and the husbands and children are dragged into a police operation and a media frenzy. This sequel picks up after the first, when we’ve just found out who has been keeping Kylie prisoner. Just when we think it’s all over, we’re only halfway there.

I won’t ruin any of the twists and turns of either book, because this is one of those you need to start without any idea what’s going on. We have the original characters including the rather wise and interesting DCI and we have small chapters from every point of you. However, there are some newbies too and it was here where the book really took off for me. I was so eager to know what the hell was going on and where these people fit into the original story. We are in the depths of lockdown and Kenneth has been shielding alongside his grown-up daughter Stacie. Stacie is in the early stages of recovery from cancer treatment and she has fought hard to keep living. She deliberately doesn’t look at herself but knows she looks a little beaten up with her shorn hair and the scarring. Sadly, she has the added complication of amnesia after falling so dangerously ill so she doesn’t even remember treatment or anything before that. Thankfully she has Kenneth to fill in the blanks and he seems like such a caring and loving dad, luckily he’s also a retired GP so he’s perfectly placed to reassure Stacie and support her recovery. They have a quiet routine of daily dog walks, cooking and board games. They’re in the town of Lyme Regis and Stacie does feel like she knows the place and her dad has told her about her engagement to local lad Giles. She called the wedding off two weeks before the date and moved to Paris. Then something odd happens. Stacie is on the beach when she feels a sensation of being watched. Up on the promenade there is a woman staring at her with a fierce intent. She wonders if this is someone who knew her from before. So, she makes her way over, keeping a safe social distance and introduces herself, explaining that she might look a little different, because she’s had cancer. No, the woman says, you’re not Stacie. This is a moment where the hairs go up on the back of the neck, but we don’t know who the woman is or how well she knows Stacie and Kenneth. What possible reason could she have to confuse a woman who’s had cancer treatment and lost her memory?

I enjoyed having more input from the husbands and Kylie’s two stepsons this time around. The boys are incredibly loyal to her, despite being hurt by finding out about her second husband and let’s not forget, all of them are grieving. Daan Jaanssen also shows an incredible amount of loyalty and concern, especially considering he’s being charged with Kylie’s kidnap and murder. Does this mean he didn’t do it or is he putting up a smokescreen in the hope of walking free? Mark is angry and bitter, perhaps because he’s was her husband first. He is on the verge of making mistakes because of that anger. Seb and Ollie show maturity and enormous love beyond their years and put their own Dad to shame. The short, sharp chapters keep the momentum going and definitely have that ‘one more chapter’ addictive quality. Be prepared to set aside a day to finish it when you can’t put it down. This is definitely one of those sequels where you need to read the first novel, there’s a little bit of exposition about Kylie’s ordeal but not too much. The main question is what happened to her afterwards? Is she dead as the police think? This is a great thriller from Adele Parks and it made me feel back on track with loving her writing.

Meet the Author

Adele Parks MBE is the author of twenty-three bestselling novels including the recent Sunday Times hit Just Between Us and the audible Number One sensation One Last Secret. Over 5 million English editions of her work have been sold and she is translated into 31 different languages.

Her number one bestsellers Lies Lies Lies and Just My Luck were both shortlisted for the British Book Awards and have been optioned for development for film & TV.

41,000+ 5 star reviews have kindly been written by her fans on Amazon 🙂

She is an ambassador of the National Literacy Trust and the Reading Agency: two charities that promote literacy in the UK.

Adele was born in North Yorkshire and has lived in Botswana, Italy and London and is now settled in Guildford, Surrey.

In 2022 she was awarded an MBE by King Charles III for services to literature.

Connect with Adele Parks on Twitter @adeleparks, Instagram @adele_parks and Facebook @OfficialAdeleParks or visit her website for more information.