Tag: England

Emma

3 Comments

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Jane Austen
Genres: Fiction, Classics
Pub Date: 1815 (read June 2018 as an audiobook)
Audio Narrator: Nadia May

Whyyyy is this book so loooong?! This was my first Jane Austen and I really wanted to like it, but I feel like I just did everything wrong with this novel.

First of all, I listened to it in Audiobook, and while I did get a laugh out of the narrators british enthusiasm, I just couldn’t keep track of the characters or who was narrating. Plus it took me like 2 months to listen to and the plot is so low key that I kept forgetting what had happened before or who any of the characters were. So audiobook was probably a bad format for this one, but I’m still not convinced I would have liked it much better in print. There’s some classics I like, but a lot of them just make me feel bad and uncultured because they’re supposed to be good literature, but I just find them so unbelievably boring.

I do get it though. I can definitely appreciate what Austen does with this novel. She is very clever with her writing and her characters and I laughed a lot at Emma, although mostly just at how stupid she was. It’s a little mind boggling that this was first published all the way back in 1815. That is over 200 years ago and people are still reading this and the setting wasn’t even that different from today! There is definitely still a class of rich british aristocrats that get caught up in this gossipy matchmaker stuff and making sure that everyone sticks within their “class”.

I forget how old Emma is, but she lives at this english estate called Hartfield and goes about her life until she makes a new friend Harriet and endeavours to play matchmaker for her. Emma has decided to never marry herself and throws all her energy into her friendship with Harriet. Then there’s a series of hi jinx in which Emma repeatedly tries to set Harriet up with men who run in a much higher class than Harriet and she constantly misinterprets everyone’s intentions, even though she believes herself to be the highest and best judge of character.

Anyways, I may have enjoyed this more as a print book and even thought I didn’t really like it, I don’t really have much bad to say about it. I do get why this is a classic, I just personally struggled with the pacing and seeming lack of plot. I feel like not very much happened in this book, and yet it’s still almost 500 pages. So not a favourite from me, but it wouldn’t deter me from trying Austen again in the future (but NOT as an audiobook).

What’s your favourite Jane Austen book?

The Death of Mrs. Westaway

2 Comments

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Ruth Ware
Genres: Mystery
Pub Date: May 29, 2018 (read Apr. 2018)

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster Canada for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. 

Okay, first off I love Ruth Ware and I don’t know why! I generally give her books 3 stars and yet I find them so compulsively readable that I always come back for more. I should probably start rating them higher because I cannot say no to a Ruth Ware mystery.

The Death of Mrs. Westaway was quite different from all of her other novels. It still features a young English woman as the protagonist, but the mystery element was structured differently in this book and I wouldn’t call this one a thriller. At times the central mystery seems quite obvious, but you’re never really sure what is going on or if you have it right.

The Death of Mrs. Westaway tells the story of Hal Westaway and the Westaway family. Hal is just 21 years old and after losing her mother 3 years prior in a hit and run, she is very much alone in the world. She has no family and in her struggle to make ends meet and pay the bills, she has lost contact with any friends she once had. Her mother was everything to her and she takes over her mothers booth as a tarot card reader on the Brighton Pier to survive. But Hal is falling further and further in debt and they are starting to catch up with her.

Then one evening she receives a letter about the death of Mrs. Westaway, her grandmother, and that she has been named in the will and requested at Mrs. Westaway’s estate. The problem is that Hal’s grandparents have been dead for 20 years and she believes she must have received the letter in error. But the promise of a handout is too alluring and Hal wonders if she can trick this estranged family and walk away with enough money from the will to pay off her debts.

Things are definitely off with the rest of the Westaway family though and Hal quickly starts to wonder whether everything is actually as it seems. I think Ware does an excellent job writing Hal in this story. She is totally believable and I could totally empathize with the financial mess she’s found herself in and the desperation of trying to do whatever she can to pay her bills. I enjoyed her story arc and growth throughout the novel.

I didn’t like the rest of the Westaway family though, which I guess is kind of the point because they’re all flawed and their flaws make you wonder what is actually going on with this family and what is their real history. But I found it hard to connect with any of the other characters and I didn’t find the main twist very surprising. It’s more of a “wtf is going on in this book” moment and when the twist is finally revealed it’s not really that shocking – it was totally what I was expecting, I just wasn’t really sure how the author would take me there. I also thought the red herring was super obvious, although still pretty ominous and I do think it added to the story.

Overall not my favourite Ruth Ware book, but don’t doubt for a second that I won’t still be first in line to read whatever she writes next!

Ink and Bone

Leave a comment

 

 

 

 

 

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Rachel Caine
Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult Fantasy
Read: Dec. 2017

The only other Rachel Caine book I’ve read is Stillhouse Lake, which I understand is quite a departure from her other works, but this was so different and I’m impressed Caine is able to bridge both the mystery/thriller and fantasy genres so well.

I thought this was a pretty good novel. It has a bit of a slow start after a pretty intense prologue, but once the action gets going it’s pretty much non-stop throughout the rest of the book. Ink and Bone is the first in a fantasy/dystopian series called The Great Library. The book is set in 2025 between parts of the UK and Alexandria, Egypt. At some point in the past it seems this story has diverged from our history and in order to preserve knowledge and protect against heresy, the library has become the world’s dominant power. The library safeguards human knowledge and teachings by collecting and producing all books and academic studies and forbidding the ownership of original books.

I thought the set-up for the story was a bit weak and as such I was a bit confused in the first part of the novel about what was going on and whether people actually had access to books or not. It seems everyone has a “codex” which is a kind of e-reader and can access some library books, but the ownership of any original book is forbidden, as is the writing of any original works outside of keeping a personal journal that is turned over to the library upon your death.

The main character of the story is Jess, who is a book smuggler in London, selling valuable original books on the black market to collectors as part of the family business. Jess loves books more than anything and hates the smuggling business. So when his father suggests to send him for training to work for the library, he finds himself happy to travel to Alexandria for the library training course.

This is where I thought things got fun and interesting. The training course starts off with a huge group of students competing for only 6 placements at the library, under a very tough scholar, Christopher Wolfe. Things get really intense and the students start to realize the dark underside of the library and just how far the library will go to maintain power. I liked the introduction of the other students, although I feel I didn’t learn enough about any of them. Dario was an intriguing character, as was Morgan Hault, but I haven’t learned enough about their backstories to really understand their characters. Khalila and Glain were totally forgettable characters; they both had really interesting introductions when Jess meets them on the train, but I feel like they were both lacking in personality and depth. Even Jess’ family is a bit of a mystery. I have no idea what’s up with Brennan, but I feel like he’s going to play some larger role in the next books.

That said, I loved Wolfe, Santi, and Thomas! Thomas is just so precious and idealistic. He’s a genuinely kind person and I loved his thirst for knowledge and his naive belief that things could be better. Plus he was an engineer, so I obviously loved him. Wolfe was my favourite though. He was such an asshole at the beginning of the book and I loved how Caine grew his character and slowly showed us his humanity and the depth of his love over the course of the story. I can’t wait to learn more about him in the rest of the series and I hope we learn a little more about Santi too.

Mostly I’m just disappointed that this book has no memorable female characters, which is a bit surprising for this genre and for a female author. The book is interspersed with messages sent between different library officials and starts off with the library forbidding women from contributing to the collection of knowledge and then receiving a message insisting women and girls be allowed to obtain education as well, so I thought this book was going to go in a bit of a different direction. Caine introduces Glain, Khalila, and Morgan early in the book, but Morgan’s really the only one who matters and we learn very little about her. So I really hope Caine remedies this in the next book. I need more info and female character development!

The series definitely raises some interesting questions about knowledge though. I was confused at first because you couldn’t own books, but it seems you could still access everything on the codex, so I didn’t really see why it mattered that much. But the more worrying concern is that the library basically controls the flow of all information. Yes, you can always access things on your codex, but there’s nothing stopping the library from changing what information they distribute or manipulating your writings (if you happen to work for the library and are allowed to publish ideas). Obviously that’s the biggest problem with the library having all the power. The people don’t have the ability to share new ideas or speak out about that which they don’t understand or agree with. The library dictates everything. So I’m interested to see where Caine goes with this in subsequent books.

To finish, this was a pretty good book and I think it has a lot of potential. I will definitely be picking up the sequel!

The Alice Network

1 Comment

 

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ 
Author: Kate Quinn
Genres: Historical Fiction
Read: Oct. 2017 on audiobook

 

I listened to The Alice Network on audiobook, so I’ve slowly been making my way through this one for ages. It’s a historical tale set in France in both 1916 and 1947 and tells two stories simultaneously. In 1916, Evelyn Gardner was a British spy who operated in the french town of Lille, posing as a waitress and collecting information the German officers would spill over their meal. In 1947, Charlie St. Clair is searching for her cousin Rose who disappeared during the war. It turns out that Rose and Eve had a shared connection in that they both spied and worked under the same man in 2 different wars and Charlie pairs up with Eve to try and find her cousin.

I really liked Eve’s story. She was a part of the Alice Network, which was a real network of female spies in WWI, lead by Louise de Bettignies, alias Alice Dubois, or as she’s known to Eve, Lily. Louise was a real person and I found Eve’s story of spying on the German officers and how she would pass information fascinating. I don’t know how much of Lily’s character was fabricated, but hopefully not very much because she was an inspiring woman with her eternal optimism, humour, and spirit.

I didn’t love Charlie’s story. She was pretty annoying at the beginning of the novel (although I did feel for her and her predicament) and I found her story much slower moving. It only got interesting during the end and while I understand why Quinn decided to run their stories parallel, I felt that Charlie added very little to the story for most of the novel. I was disappointed at the end of each of Eve’s chapters when I knew I had to read a whole chapter about Charlie and I felt that little happened in her chapters to advance the plot. They went from town to town aimlessly and her story didn’t become engaging until the point when Eve started telling Charlie her story and they starting syncing up as Eve revealed more and more information to Charlie about her experience during WWI.

Definitely an interesting read though. I’ve read a lot of WWII books set in France so sometimes I get a bit fatigued with the “next big WWII book”, but I’ve read substantially less on WWI, which was another reason why I liked Eve’s story. That said, this was a well written book and I did enjoy it!