dittybox

I suppose if I'm going to pick up a book with Granta written on the spine and a dead bird on the cover, then I ought to be prepared for something challenging, but this story is just weird.  I suspect I think it's weird because the whole thing just sailed right over my head, but generally speaking, I like to read for pleasure and there is not much of that to be found in here. It's one of those books that is not about just the story-line but has references that are used to hammer home a heavier point.  In this case, there are pointers towards anti-Semitism, which is a topic that is very much front and centre at the moment, but I'm not convinced the narrator of this story will have said anything to resolve that issue (well not to me anyway). We never know the narrators name, or where the book is set, apart from a mention of it being a northern territory cut off from most of the population.  The story tells of a woman who is the youngest of several children who has come ...

  Charles Ignatius Sancho was a real person who lived in the eighteenth century, and the author has taken the few details known about his life and turned them into a work of fiction.  According to the Preface, Sancho was 'a lucky African orphan, who despite being born in abject slavery, rose to become a leading light of the early abolitionist movement.' The content of the book comprises of Sancho's diary pages written for his son Billy, and he really did have an extraordinary life for a black person living in London at that time.  He became so well known that he had his portrait painted by Gainsborough, and in addition to his campaign for the abolition of slavery, he also composed and played music and had his writing published. He was married to Anne Osborne and they had eight children, although not all survived to adulthood.  Anne doesn't appear in the book until the second half, but their exchange of letters while she is attending to a sick relative on a sugar plan...

Imagine Hugh Grant wearing those big black spectacles that he wore in the film, The Gentlemen , then make him as angry and moody as Gordon Ramsey and as terminally selfish as Boris Johnson, and you might start to get a feel for the ageing artist Ray.  Ray is one of the London Arts crowd and, although he hasn't actually done much in way of art over the last few years, he considers himself to be a notable artist and he rules his family through his manipulative behaviour. His wife, Lucia, is also an artist (think Helena Bonham-Carter), who is actually quite successful in her own right, but she and her three adult children have been conditioned by Ray to see themselves as lesser beings, barely worthy of his attention. His daughter Leah is completely absorbed in Ray's constant needs and rages against her two siblings for never doing enough to help daddy.  As you read through the book, there will be plenty of times where the whole family dynamic will infuriate you, but never too the...

I had high hopes for this one, but I'm sorry to say that it fell short of my expectations. The story is set in France during the Second World War, and describes the period when the Germans invaded France and stationed hundreds of soldiers in St Malo.  The Nazis had decreed that any books found in France that were deemed to be subversive were to be gathered in and destroyed and the local librarian, Jocelyn, sets about saving as many as she can.   The author is Spanish, so the book has been translated into American English and, to me, that didn't sit very well as the language of French and German people. The outline of the story sounds good, but I found the characters one dimensional and some parts of the plot were not very credible.   Mario Escobar has a masters degree in modern history, so he has a good working knowledge of the facts relating to the Second World War, but I found myself constantly questioning whether some of the events would ever have happened....