Review – Mariana

Mariana, Susanna Kearsley

This surprised me with the bittersweetness of the ending. I guess I was expecting a happier one after The Winter Sea managed to work it all out. Still, it’s satisfying that this dodged my expectations, and in more way than one — it deceived me all the way through about the identity of a particular character, and yet when it became clear, it was suddenly obvious as anything. And I do care enough about the other characters to be a little sad about the way it works out; not everyone is going to be happy, for sure.

This is a slow build, really, with Julia’s slow feeling her way into the past, the lack of urgent drive in either timeline until pretty late on. It’s not my favourite of Kearsley’s books, perhaps, but it was fun to read, I got involved with the characters, and it definitely manages to pin down that sense of place which I’ve enjoyed in her other books. I could almost drift in Julia’s life, Julia’s house, while reading this, just as Julia drifted into Mariana’s world… It feels close enough to touch.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Named of the Dragon

Named of the Dragon, Susanna Kearsley

Silly story: when I finished The Winter Sea, I thought, darn, I really want a story by Kearsley that is set in Wales, in that landscape, which I love and feel part of. Because she does a great job with landscape, with the feelings it can invoke, but Scotland or Cornwall aren’t my landscapes.

Then I remembered I had already got a couple of chapters into Named of the Dragon. Suffice it to say that the landscape was satisfactory, and I would probably have felt homesick had I read this when not in Wales. Particularly at the bit with the lovely little chapel, St Govan’s — I’ve meant to go there for a while, because of the Gawain link, and this reminded me.

I’m not sure why I stopped at that point, before; while I adore the Welsh and Arthurian aspects of this book, it might have been the characters that didn’t work for me. Mostly the supporting characters: Elen, with her Arthurian fantasy; Bridget, with her flirtations and lack of remorse over basically planning to cheat on her partner; Christopher, with the general veneer of charm that lacked the warmth of (I couldn’t help but make the comparison) Stuart in The Winter Sea. I enjoy Kearsley’s books, but sometimes the supernatural links are too tenuous for me, or rather, too tenuously explained, too tangential to the actual emotional plot.

Because really, it doesn’t matter if Elen and her baby are really somehow related to Igraine and Arthur. What matters is the main character’s gradual acceptance of her own child’s death, her ability to finally put it aside and belong in the present, and help someone else. It doesn’t matter if Gareth and Lyn are somehow linked back to Gareth and Lynette, because their relationship is all their own anyway (and let’s face it, Lyn’s not half as nasty as Lynette, and this Gareth is at least twice as nasty as Fairhands).

I was glad that the romance wasn’t laid on too thick, here. There’s hope, potential, but nothing certain. If the book had been longer, more would have been okay, but for the length and where the story stopped, it was right to stop at that moment of potential.

Rating: 3/5

Review – The Winter Sea

The Winter Sea, Susanna Kearsley

It took me a while to read this one, and I think I was slightly less engaged than with the other books. The Scottish setting is great, and I’m always impressed by the sense of place that Kearsley conjures up. I wasn’t that big a fan of the love triangles and such, though; I-love-you-but-you-love-another isn’t one of my favourite tropes, and though it was light, it was played with her. I’d rather not have two romantic rivals.

It’s still a book by Kearsley, though, so it’s an enjoyable read: details of character and place to make you really feel like you know the landscape and the people, so you can picture the scenes. The supernatural element, well, I’m not a fan of memories-in-DNA as a plot point (Assassin’s Creed gets away with it only because I hold games to different standards, I think), so that link between the main characters wasn’t a big thing for me.

I feel like I liked both halves of the novel — the past and the present — well enough, but I’d have liked them more if either was the whole story. I’m not sure what could be made of the modern story, but it felt like the stakes were low, everything muted; it was just a frame story for the storyline set in the past.

There are some beautiful bits of description about the wintery sea, and I think whoever retitled this as Sophia’s Secret has no soul. The Winter Sea is a perfect title for it.

Rating: 3/5

Stacking the Shelves

Some lovely book-mail awaited me on my return from my month in Belgium, Canada and the US. So excite! Thank you to Susanna Kearsley and to Pan Macmillan for these, respectively.

Aaaand I was happy to reunite with the library, of course.

 

 

One-Eyed Jack is a book I had as an ARC… ages ago. So I figured I’d get it from the library. I don’t know what exactly prompted me to try Sarah Pinborough’s books, but I’m intrigued. Susan Cooper is, well. Susan Cooper. ’nuff said. Been meaning to get to this one for ages. And The Darkest Part of the Forest features queer characters, so why the heck not? The Great Zoo of China… I haven’t heard 100% good things about it, but I felt like giving it a shot anyway.

Aaand just one comic on my pull list this week.

So what’s everyone else been getting? Anything you’re really excited about?

Stacking the Shelves

This week, I got some major goals done — the book I was ghostwriting was finished (well, one of them), I got a lot of transcription work done, and I got an assignment done. So I was allowed some books, and much deserved they were. Also, one of them was bought with a voucher my mother gave me a few weeks(!) ago. Aaand then was Support Tor Day (warning: link to Vox Day’s blog; no, he isn’t supporting Tor, he’s calling for a boycott, which to me is tantamount to asking all reasonable people to support them).

Plus, Susanna Kearsley sent me an Amazon voucher to make up for me getting smacked with a customs charge for a book she sent me. I don’t have that book in my hands yet, but I do have a couple of her others. I had some of these from the library, but…

 

  

 

 

Excite!

Comics

I’m not sure how I feel about this event, but still. Ms Marvel. Yay.

Top Ten Tuesday

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday theme is “beach books”. Which is not something I really do, so instead I shall pick the kinds of books I like to relax with. Whether that looks like your beach reads or not, I don’t know!

1. Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal. Or anything in that series, but the first one is the lightest and closest to Austen and the like.
2. This Rough Magic, Mary Stewart. Or any of her mysteries — they have an amazing sense of place, it’s like going on holiday without leaving home.
3. The Rose Garden, Susanna Kearsley. Another one with a great sense of place, this one in Cornwell. It’s not all happy, but the romance is sweet and it has a happy ending.
4. The Grand Sophy, Georgette Heyer. I have a huge soft spot for these romances. I loved Sophy in particular, though I’m also a fan of…
5. The Talisman Ring, Georgette Heyer. Which is more of a mystery/adventure than some of the primarily society type ones.
6. Magic Bites, Ilona Andrews. Light and compulsively readable.
7. Have His Carcase, Dorothy L. Sayers. Okay, I think you need the background of previous books, but I love the first line and the rest doesn’t disappoint: “The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people seem to think, repose upon a manly bosom. Much more efficacious are honest work, physical activity, and the sudden acquisition of wealth.”
8. Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers. For Harriet Vane in the prime spot, with her final answer to Lord Peter’s proposals at the end of the book… Plus, tons of smart women in academia.
9. Jhereg, Steven Brust. It’s a fun first book of the series, it raced past me, and it’s really easy to read.
10. Soulless, Gail Carriger. Fluffy fun with werewolves.

I don’t think that’d be a bad selection for the beach, right?

Review – The Splendour Falls

The Splendour Falls, Susanna Kearsley

Looking at the reviews for this book, I had to laugh at how many people compared Kearsley’s work to Mary Stewart’s. Including myself, I’m afraid, which leaves me wondering if Kearsley embraces that or is rather sick of it by now. But truly, some of the plot things here are right up Stewart’s street, too: the moment where the villain kisses the heroine, that charged moment between them. Except that there’s something more subtle here: the villain isn’t purely villainous, but motivated by love as well. There seems something genuine in his attraction to the heroine, his interest in her.

And Kearsley is much harder on my heart. As with Season of Storms, I found myself falling for a character who didn’t make it to the end of the book. Kearsley did a great job with character, much more so than Stewart: I can believe in what happens between the protagonists, I adore a lot of the characters, and all of them have an inner life. There is something dreamlike about the whole book, with these moments of clarity where you really get to know characters and see what makes them tick, even less significant ones.

The plot itself is a bit convoluted, and I could perhaps have done without the drama of Hans and Isabelle’s story, the convenient way everything comes back together at just the right time… but then, it was exactly what I expected from the genre, and worked out with sympathetic characters and a sense of place, it doesn’t come off too badly.

Rating: 3/5

Stacking the Shelves

Another week where I’ve been a bit naughty! I have just adjusted my book budget to take other stuff into account, though, so I had the leeway. Thankfully. I hate failing at any challenge! But first…

For review

It was listed as just a preview excerpt, but what I downloaded seems to be the full file. I am immensely excited about this one. My review of The Just City is actually (finally) going live on Monday!

Bought

  

A friend bought me An Ember in the Ashes to comfort me about the election results! A couple of the others were on sale on Amazon or something like that. Aside from Sabaa Tahir’s book, they’re all paperbacks; for some reason I’m not really in the mood to read on my ereader at the moment, much as I love my Kobo.

Library

I got a couple of others, but I’ve featured them here before; I just grabbed ’em from the local library while I’m visiting my parents, to reduce the amount of books I had to haul across the country!

Comics

Yay so many comics! Boo that my pull list is now costing me £10 some weeks. Whoops.

Stacking the Shelves

Is it Saturday again already? Whoa. I’ve been catching up on blog stuff all this week, thanks to the readathon — which is not a complaint.

Review copies

I have finally got round to writing a review of The Buried Life, which will be up soon; Cities and Thrones is the sequel. You can still check out Carrie’s post here from her blog tour for The Buried Life, too! I got The Eye of Strife via LibraryThing; I’ve been meaning to read Dave Duncan for ages, so this should be interesting.

Won

 

I’ve been interested in Sword for a while, so I picked it as my win in one of the readathon giveaways. ❤ Dreams of the Golden Age was my pick for another win; that hasn’t arrived yet, which is probably good, because I need to reread After the Golden Age, and I think my partner has my copy.

Library

Daughter of Smoke and Bone and The Drowning City are both rereads, to get me back up to speed for the next book in the series/trilogy. Crown of Midnight is obvious, since I just read Throne of Glass (but I’m sorry, I just don’t love it as much as some of you guys seem to). I have The Deadly Sisterhood somewhere, but goodness knows where. And I just like Susanna Kearsley.

Bought

Quite a contrast there between the covers, heh. I reaaally need to actually read the issues of Silk I have… I’ve been tearing through Kowal’s series lately, just in time for this last book. I’m excited!

Audiobooks

I usually prefer to listen to audiobooks I’ve already read for myself, hence Among Others and Rivers of London (the latter of which I’d like to refresh my memory on anyway); Epigenetics: How Environment Shapes Our Genes is a new one for me, which I couldn’t really resist because epigenetics! Non-fiction! Science!

How’s everyone else been doing? Behaving yourselves?

Review – Season of Storms

Season of Storms, Susanna Kearsley

There’s so much about reading Susanna Kearsley that reminds me of reading Mary Stewart’s work. Something about the sense of place (this is so firmly Italy, and the house and its grounds are so easy to imagine), the female heroine, the romance… Except it’s better, because it steers away from some of the colonial and sexist attitudes that were still pretty firmly entrenched in Mary Stewart’s work, despite her independent and reasonably proactive heroines.

And this book especially won me over, because the main character has been brought up by two gay men in a stable, loving relationship. Neither of them are stereotyped, and the relationship feels real, lived in, between both them and the woman who is essentially their daughter. I got more caught up by Roo and Bryan than by Celia and Alex, honestly. I also ended up having a conversation on Twitter with the author about which of various characters I’d want to be my dad… (Well, in reality, no one is better than my dad. But shush.) There’s some serious emotional punches there, which really work because of that warmth and family which Kearsley portrays so well.

The plot itself is reasonably predictable; the trick is that I got involved with the characters.

Rating: 4/5