All my sisters spans over about ten years, before and during World War I. The Maclise sisters, like the Little Women, are four sisters, with very different tempers, dreams and ambitions. Iris is the eldest, and the most beautiful of the Maclise daughters, at least in her opinion. Although we will discover in the course of the novel that she is much less shallow than she thinks, her ultimate goal is to find a rich husband and enjoy a wealthy life. But fate has something else in store for her. Rejecting her suitors, never good enough, she ends up proposing her friend Ash, the only man who resists her, and meets his rejection. Out of spite, she becomes a hospital nurse, far from the easy life she had dreamt for herself…

Marianne is the romantic one: she reads novels all day long and dreams of true love. She finally meets the one, Arthur, a wealthy and gentle man, who loves her as she loves him. But unfortunately, the fairytale does not last, and soon Marianne will find herself in a dreadful situation, isolated and threatened, far from her beloved sisters…

Eva is the artistic one, she is also a feminist, who has friends amongst the suffragettes. Despite the initial reaction of her father, she finally attends and Art school in London but after meeting Gabriel, a married man with a passion for his female models, she loses her ambition and her faith in herself as an artist…

Clemency is the discreet one. The one without talent or beauty but the real pillar of the Maclise family. She tries to soften the rivalries between her three brothers, the tempestuous temper of her father, and the pains of her mother, a hypochondriac woman who tries to make her feel guilty about her own small aspirations. But even Clemency will end up finding happiness in life, after years of sacrificing herself for her family.

All my sisters is a novel that, despite its length, keeps the reader interested and entertained until the end. The narration focuses on each of the sisters in turn, and all their stories are equally enthralling. The historical background is accurate and always well integrated in the story: Judith Lennox never makes too much of a digression, as many authors inserting history in fiction do.

All my Sisters is good old-fashioned storytelling at its best…

Rating: 4/5

1- Paul Auster, Moon Palace

2- Kate Morton, The Distant Hours

3- Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry

4- Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

5- Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio

Happy reading and a happy new year 2011 to all!

All true readers have a book, a moment, like the one I describe, and when Mum offered me that much-read library copy mine was upon me. For although I didn’t know it then, after falling deep inside the world of the Mud Man, real life was never going to be able to compete with fiction again.

Edie Burchill works in a small publishing house. Her boyfriend recently left her, and she shares her boss’s sofa with his dog, because she does not want to disappoint her parents with the news of her breakup. She has always had an uneasy relationship with her mother, who one day receives a letter which had been lost for 50 years. The letter brings her mother to tears, but she is unwilling to talk about it with her daughter. Edie only knows that it is a letter from a young woman named Juniper, who welcomed her mother to live in her castle in the English countryside when she was a teenage evacuee from London.

One day, Edie finds herself in the neighborhood of Milderhurst Castle and can’t resist visiting it to learn more about her mother. Juniper, now about 70 years old, still lives with her elder twin sisters. Edie learns that she has lost her mind after a fateful night of 1941, when her fiancé, who was supposed to be introduced to her sisters, never showed up. The three women, Persephone, Seraphina and Juniper, are the daughters of a writer, Raymond Blythe, well known and appreciated for his famous tale The Mud Man, a story that enchanted Edie’s childhood and was at the root of her love of books and reading.

To Edie’s surprise, when a new edition of The Mud Man is about to issue, Percy Blythe, the twin who struck Edie as the dominant one, asks for Edie to write the introduction, wanting nobody else to undertake the task. Edie hopes that this opportunity to approach the sisters once more will enable her to solve the mysteries that have been intriguing her ever since her mother got her belated letter: what the inspiration behind the Mud Man’s story was, why Juniper’s fiancé did not show up all those years ago, and why Edie’s mother is so secretive about her time as an evacuee…

Kate Morton, author of The House at Riverton and The Forgotten Garden, had us readers getting used to her wonderful, enthralling, beautifully-written stories. So the expectations were high for this one, and once again, Kate Morton does not disappoint. The Distant Hours is a story with gothic undertones, owing its inspiration to such works as The Mysteries of Udolpho, Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. The plot is suspenseful, intricate and well crafted and, as the narration switches between past and present, we are kept guessing until the very end. Due to the fact that the novel is also a wonderful tribute to books, and a celebration of reading and writing, The Distant Hours might even be my favorite of the three…

Rating: 4,5/5

This comments being made, I will get to the novel itself. This Body of Death follows two narrative threads: in the first one, we follow the story of three young boys about to commit, by idleness and accumulated anger, terrible and horrifying acts. Let the reader be warned: this part of the story may be hard to stomach, especially for people who have young children… The other storyline is about a young woman found dead in a London cemetery. The connection between the two stories is ultimately revealed. In the second storyline, the suspects are numerous, some of them from London, where the young woman was living, and others in Hampshire, where she used to live. The Hampshire storyline revolves around Jossie Gordon, the dead woman’s ex-boyfriend, and his new girlfriend, attractive and mysterious Gina Dickens…

Barbara Havers and N’Kata handle the Hampshire side of the investigation, soon being recalled to London by  Isabelle Ardery, who is trying to fill the Superintendant’s position that Linley does not want anymore. Ardery is an interesting new character, with a strong personality and a drinking problem. If trouble between her and Barbara can be foreseen, her relationship with Linley, whom she calls to assist her, despite the fact that he is still on compassionate leave, will be more ambiguous…

This Body of Death is a strong, interesting detective novel, raising, behind a fascinating plot, some difficult questions (I cannot say more about the underlying theme, which becomes obvious only in the last part of the novel…). I cannot say that this is Elizabeth George back to form, since, unlike many readers, I consider her only real mistake to be With No One As Witness (and, I admit, I was not interested in reading its sequel What Came Before He Shot Her). If it is true that maybe her recent novels are not quite as good as Playing for the Ashes or For the Sake of Elena, which were truly excellent, but there are still several steps above most detective novels on the market. And there is also the fact that, along with many other readers, I like to follow what happens in the lives of Linley and Havers, and keep hoping for Havers to “get a life”, although the last pages of this novel are not too optimistic on that score…

Rating: 4/5

The second part of the book concentrates on the character of Thomas Effing, a blind old man in a wheelchair who later employs Marco to keep him company, read to him, and write his obituary. Effing’s life was unusual: as a young man he was a promising painter who went to travel to wild America, in the deserts of the West. After the young man accompanying him and  trusted to his care dies, Effing (who was Julian Barber then), feeling responsible for this death and too ashamed to face returning, decides to steal someone else’s identity and to pass himself for dead…

Later in the novel, a third character appears: Solomon Barber, son of Thomas Effing, a huge man in size and weight who became a teacher specialized in native Americans. Solomon Barber also has an unexpected story to tell…

Through these three characters, Paul Auster has been able to develop his themes of predilection, such as how chance and coincidences lead our lives, making for the most unexpected connections and accidents: Fogg is always looking for signs as a way to lead his life, and indeed, chance encounters only will determine the unexpected turns it will take. Fogg’s main sign is the moon, as in his uncle’s band, the Moon Men, as in the similarity of the American West, where his destiny will eventually take him, looking “so much like the landscape of the moon”, as in selling his last books on the day the astronauts landed on the moon, or as in Moon Palace, the Chinese restaurant whose sign is visible from the window of his studio.

Another favorite theme in Paul Auster’s fiction is the fragility of the self. Hence, Marco as a student without means reduces first his spending habits, the his food intake, his books collection, his movements, etc. until he almost becomes a non-entity, until he is unable to read, to move or to think straight:

I was trying to separate myself from my body, taking the long road around my dilemma by pretending it did not exist. […] In order to rise above my circumstances, I had to convince myself that I was no longer real, and the result was that all reality began to waver for me. […] Then there were the periods where I simply lost track of myself.

For Thomas Effing, this confusion about the self takes the form of a forged identity, of killing oneself in order to become someone else, and to start anew. For Solomon Barber, the oblivion of the self comes with him becoming fatter and fatter, losing his own identity into a distorted body and altered features. It is only when, in hospital, Barber loses weight that who he really is becomes obvious to Marco: he sees it in the shape of his eyes finally obvious in a thinner face…

The New York of Paul Auster, which is another recognizable feature of the author, is extended, in this novel, to Central Park, Central Park as a place where you can be different but still unnoticed, where you can be a vagrant without striking out  as one, a place also where you can hide, almost as well as in the caves of the West… Both Marco and Effing find themselves in caves, at one point in their lives, a cave where they will be reborn, as in a second womb, one into another man, and the other through the caring of friends. A place also where it is not possible to hide forever, a place standing for the inside of the soul, where you can paint the walls, a place never to be found once lost, like mythical Eldorado, but the goal of a quest nonetheless…

Moon Palace is a story but it is also stories, and both the big story and the stories within the story have the power to grip you and to transport you into Paul Auster’s unique world (I particularly loved the fiction Solomon Barber wrote about his missing father…)

Moon Palace is a brilliant novel, another masterpiece by an outstanding author, whose literary world is truly unique and unusual…

Rating: 5/5

Thanks to Dilys, a reader of this blog who recommended this novel to me…

But it is another mystery that also takes Erica’s interest: while sorting through her grandmother’s stuff, she finds a photograph of Caroline, her great-grandmother, who lived to be more than a hundred and died when she was small. On the photograph, a young Caroline is holding a baby. The photo is dated 1904 and Caroline was not married before 1905. Erica wonders who this baby could be…

The narration switches between the present and the past. The present is a first-person account  of the two sisters’s Christmas vacations in Storton Manor, with one trying to recall while the other strives to forget the day in their childhood that changed everything. The past tells, in the third person, the story of Caroline, a young woman from New York who, against her aunt and legal guardian’s wishes, marries a man who raises cattle in Oklahoma Territory. Caroline follows her heart, and finds a life of hardships she was not raised for…

The Legacy is a gripping story of guilt and forgiveness, enduring friendship and family binds, that takes us through the history of pioneer women at the turn of the last century. Although not as good as Kate Morton’s novels, The Legacy should appeal to fans of The Forgotten Garden.

Rating: 4/5

Authorized to spend a couple of days digging into his suspicions, Duncan, helped by Gemma, learns what he can about Jasmine’s past, partly by reading the diaries she had written throughout her life, and discovers that he knew almost nothing about this secretive woman, who lived her childhood in India, and then moved to cold England after the death of her father to live with an aunt she despised…

All Shall Be Well is a very interesting story, Deborah Crombie’s characters are well drawn and the two main protagonists, Duncan and Gemma, are likeable, with a relationship hovering between friendship and mutual attraction. I usually like twisted mysteries, with more narrative threads than in this one, but there is a simplicity to Crombie’s novels that I also enjoy, “simplicity” in the sense that the narration focuses on the investigation, and does not digress on other themes, not “simplicity” as in predictability of the outcome. I liked All Shall Be Well better that Crombie’s first novel, A Share In Death, therefore I have a lot of hope for the novels that follow…

Rating: 4/5

But Helen Yardley has been found dead, with a card and the same 16 numbers that Fliss received shortly afterwards. DI Proust, who was investigation the deaths of Helen’s two children several years ago, is also convinced of her innocence and wants her killer brought to justice. But Simon Waterhouse, who hates his boss beyond measure, is not ready to take what Proust says at face value. Looking for Helen’s killer might well signify asking the question of the three women’s innocence…

I really like Sophie Hannah’s novels, I think that in the new wave of mystery writers, she is one of the best. But I was disappointed by this novel. I think that what happened to Sophie Hannah is what often happens to authors when they are really passionate about the subjects they are writing about: the thoroughness takes precedence over the plot… Hannah succeeded in presenting the subject from all points of views: the grieving mothers, the suspicious doctors, the well-intentioned social services, and the family members divided between loyalty to the accused carer and justice for the dead babies. Hannah did a lot of research but neglected the plot: it was unnecessarily twisted (and unfortunately not in a “wow! I never saw this coming”-way), trite, almost like out of a bad TV scenario, and ultimately unconvincing… Also the main characters in Hannah’s fiction, Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zeller, are less present in this one. I thought at first that it would make a nice change, but I finally missed them, and there is no evolution to their unusual relationship.

A Room Swept White is not Sophie Hannah’s best effort, despite what some of the critics say. I personally preferred, by far, The Other Half Lives which has been generally unappreciated. Read  it or The Point of Rescue instead…

Rating: 3/5

I did not like In the Woods as much as The Likeness, and I waited some days before writing the review. I mention this because my opinion of it changed a bit in the meanwhile: the more I thought about  it, the more details came back to me and the more the general impression of the novel improved…

The narrator of In the Woods, Rob Ryan, is a detective in the Dublin police. What nobody knows, except his partner and best friend Cassie Maddox, is that he was part of a local tragedy, a mystery never solved, that happened years ago. When he was twelve, he and his two best friends went missing in the woods. The day after he was found by a tree, wearing his shoes soaked in blood. He was deeply traumatized and to the present day, has been unable to remember what happened in the woods. He was then sent to England to study, and changed his first name from Adam to Rob, ensuring that nobody connects him with the tragedy before coming back to Dublin and joining the police.

On the site of the old tragedy, a young local girl, Katy Devlin, is found dead. She was a local star as she was a gifted dancer about to join a famous ballet school in London. Ron and Cassie immediately sense something amiss in the Devlin family, without being able to say exactly what…

When I read this novel, I had read reviews and knew that there was no closure to the old tragedy, so I knew what to expect and tried to get focused on the Katy Devlin case. The trouble is that it is impossible not to wonder what happened in the woods, and also that the culprit in the Devlin case is not so hard to figure out (mostly after reading The Likeness, where a single little sentence was enough to give me a hint, but even without that, I suppose).

But, what is deeply interesting in In the Woods, is the choice of Rob as a narrator, which both compensates and explains the two “weak points” of the novel: by presenting the facts from Rob’s point of view, Tana French has made some choices, and we, as readers, have to accept: that because of his personality, Rob will be blind to some things that are more obvious to us (the culprit in the Devlin’s case), and that Rob is too deeply traumatized to ever accept to face what happened in the woods. I really liked how Tana French exploited the theme of the woods as something traditionally associated with the unconscious, the wilderness, the darkest side of man: this reminded me of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story Young Goodman Brown. I really like an unreliable narrator, unreliable narrators generally ensure that the novel is more challenging, and therefore more interesting…

However, as an unreasonable and demanding reader, I still want to know what happened in the woods (though I have some, maybe misguided, suspicions…). I understand that Tana French could not unveil this through Rob, but hopefully in a future book, with Rob as a character and another narrator taking charge, this will maybe happen? What is really original in French’s mysteries is that with each book there is a different narrator, and the previous narrator slips into the background. Hence, in The Likeness, Rob is mentioned a couple of times, Cassie even phones him once (without talking to him), but he is otherwise absent while Cassie takes the center stage. Apparently, in the next novel, Faithful Place, the story focuses on Cassie’s former boss Frank, from when she was working undercover, and who has been introduced in The Likeness. Faithful Place is about Frank Mackey’s past: I am looking forward to reading it. I am glad to have discovered yet another writer from the new generation of mystery writers. My old winning podium of mystery writers (Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, Elizabeth George), is slowly replaced by a new one: Susan Hill, Sophie Hannah and Tana French…

Rating: 4/5

But Margaret seems to have lost confidence in the police, to the point that she hides things from them: strange phone calls, and disturbing photos she gets in the mail. A psychiatrist, Margaret knows a lot about psychopaths and she wants for the one who killed her daughter to pay…

Despite the good reviews and the fact that Julie Parsons has been compared to Ruth Rendell or Minette Walters, and despite my own efforts to enjoy it, I found this novel extremely tedious and disappointing. The comparison to Rendell is particularly unfair, since Rendell’s writing style is flawless, simple and effective, straight to the point, whereas Julie Parsons’s long-winded sentences are really counterproductive in terms of suspense and atmosphere. I also disliked her way of constantly inserting flashbacks at odd moments, without warning, making an already uninteresting plot even harder to follow. The whole story was slow going and unengaging, as were the characters.

I went though with the reading for two (bad) reasons: the first is that originally, I had bought I Saw You, by the same author, and when I realized that it was a sequel, I looked for Mary, Mary, to read it first. So that I now “have to” read the sequel to a book I did not like, which I might attempt since Mary, Mary is the author’s first novel and maybe with more experience Parsons improved her style… The second reason is that the reviews promised  twist and turns during the course of the novel, and although there are some, it did nothing at all to raise my enthusiasm or interest…

Rating: 2/5