dittybox

  First published in 1953, this is a reprint of a novel that had largely slipped under the radar but is rightly being given a second chance.  Reading it is a bit like flipping through someone's old family photographs where each little scene tells a much bigger story.  The narrative is broken down into small chapters, mostly no longer than two or three pages but by the end of the short book you can clearly see her world and understand what she thinks about it. Maud Martha is black (too black she says) and she wonders if she will be too black to find a good husband from all the lighter skinned people of her community.  She has her dreams of getting married and moving into a nice little house with pretty children, but she is wise enough to realise that these things have to be worked towards and will not just fall into her lap. When she does find a man to marry her, she is glad that her Paul managed to see past her dark skin and heavy features, but she constantly wo...

  This turned out to be a little gem, and one of those books that make you feel as though you have read something important.  At first I thought it was going to be one of those books that are beautifully written, but never really goes anywhere, but the further you go, the deeper it gets. As the title suggests, its an imaginary tale and it is about the poet Ovid during the time of his life when he was in exile.  David Malouf tells the reader in his notes at the end that very little is know about Ovid's life, so he had plenty of scope to make it up any way he wished but the environment feels very real.   There are no real markers in the book, so you don't know the exact date when the story takes place, and you don't know where he has found himself, and that helps because as a reader you don't start padding the narrative out with detail that you think you know.  Everything is as new to you as it is to Ovid.   He is living in a compound with an extend...

  When one of my sons asked me if I would like a book for Christmas, I chose this one, and I have not been disappointed.  Rory Stewart has written an excellent account of life in Parliament during the period between the UK leaving the European Union (Brexit), and Boris Johnson being selected as leader of the Conservative Party, and there was no shortage of startling material to write about. The book greatly increased my respect for Rory Stewart as he comes across as a very honest man who just wants to get things done without playing games.  It would be nice to think that he was one of many MPs who operate in this way, but political moves in recent years suggest otherwise. One of the most troubling messages that comes from his recollections is the apparent uselessness of Ministers of State.  People can be chosen for these high profile positions as a reward for loyalty rather than expertise in the political area they will represent, and many talented people are often o...

The storyline  for The Mad Women's Ball was inspired by actual events in the Salpetriere  Asylum in Paris, where the patients were all women who had been deemed mad or hysterical.   During the latter part of the nineteenth century a celebrated neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, was famous for his work on female hysteria, and he presented a program of lectures to large numbers of fellow physicians where patients suffering from seizures were used as live demonstrations.  The women would be hypnotised to encourage seizures on demand, and one or two of the patients became famous as a result of it.  The patients in the hospital were commonly referred to as madwomen, and some had genuine reason to be there, but others found themselves locked up by their families if they became difficult to manage for any reason.  Every year the Asylum held a ball and invited the citizens of Paris to come in and observe the patients who were dressed in colourful cost...

You know, I think I may have read too many historical novels because I'm starting to get a little underwhelmed by them.  This is not a bad book, and the quality of writing is good, but somehow it failed to hit the spot and I ended up feeling that it was a little over-stuffed. The book is almost four hundred pages in length, but I recon you could safely chip away about a quarter of it and still have a workable story.  It's another one of those 'Quest' type novels where everyone is living a happy life, then some great injustice is done that puts one of the key characters in peril, then everyone else has to put themselves in danger on a misguided rescue mission. The story is set in Norway in the mid sixteen hundreds when everyone believed in witches and witchcraft, and every time something bad happened, an innocent woman had to be declared a witch and burned at the stake. In this case, a regional governor has declared that he will rid Vardo of all the witches he claims to ...

This is such a good book that all the time I was reading it I was wondering who I could give it to as a present.  I suppose the target audience would be millennials who grew up playing computer games, but I was hooked right from the start and I am someone's great grandmother and I don't play computer games. There is such a sensitivity in the character descriptions that you can almost feel the presence of Sam and Sadie who meet by chance in a break-out area of a hospital children's ward and find themselves bonding over a video game.   They are only about ten or eleven when they meet, and Sam is there because his foot has been crushed in a car accident, and Sadie has to spend time at the hospital with her parents because her sister is being treated for cancer.  It's a rough time for both of them but playing the games allows them to escape into another world for a while and they are comfortable in each other's company.  Normally this wouldn't seem so extraordinary,...