dittybox

  I picked this one up because I thought it was written by David Mitchell the actor and when I got home and looked at it properly I realised it wasn't the same Davis Mitchell and I was a bit disappointed.  However, that disappointment did not last very long as I only had to get a page or two in before I was totally absorbed in it. Black Swan Green is a fictional village in Worcestershire and home to young Jason who is thirteen and living comfortably among a group of friends who all go to the same secondary school.  The book is set in the early 1980s, which is close enough to the 1970s when I was at secondary school, for me to find everything very familiar.   Back then, no-one was very interested in the mental health of teenagers and bullying was largely accepted as a fact of life unless it tipped over into something really noticeable.  Jason has a stammer which he is able to conceal most of the time by swapping out difficult words for something else, but if...

  An historical novel where the story takes place in the Spitalfields district of London in the second half of the 1700s.  At that time, Spitalfields was known for its silk weaving and the population was made up mostly of journeymen weavers and silk merchants.  In the years leading up to this time the silk they produced was considered to be some of the best in the world and commanded a very high price, but suddenly cheaper fabrics such as calico became available and many of the silk weavers were struggling to find work. The story follows a young woman called Sara who has been sent to London by her mother in the hopes that she will meet up with a cousin and make a good life for herself.  As Sara steps down from the cart that bought her in from the country, she is clearly alone and lost in the unfamiliar streets, and it isn't long before she is lured away by an older woman who claims she will look after her. Sonia Velton has done a good job of conjuring up the mix of e...

  This had me gripped from the very first line.  A woman has been admitted to to an Intensive Care Unit with breathing difficulties, and to complicate matters, she is thirty three weeks pregnant and her condition is deteriorating rapidly. What follows is a detailed account of all the tests and treatments the doctors carry out on Karin to try and establish what is happening.  Her partner Tom is also present and the book is written entirely from his point of view.  This is not the first time that Karin has been seriously ill, but none of her symptoms seem to be related to her past medical history, and just a few hours earlier she had nothing more serious than flu-like symptoms and a bit of a cough. I am always fascinated by anything related to medicine and I was impressed by the level of detail that the author managed to get into the narrative without making it seem like pages ripped from a medical textbook.  The tension is so real that it felt as though harm woul...

  I didn't find this a comfortable read.  Whereas some books make you feel as though you are sitting in front of a warm fire all wrapped up in a blanket, this is more like sitting in a cold outbuilding where you can never gather in any warmth. The review from The Times on the front states: ' This book demands to be savoured ' but right from the start I wasn't sure if I even wanted to read it.  It's set in the 1930s when many areas were plunged into poverty due to pit closures and the world-wide depression, and the British Government was setting up schemes to try and kick-start the economy and give people from deprived areas some form of employment. One of the schemes was set up by the Land Settlement Association that bought up farmland across Britain and then trained specially selected families how to work the land and make a profit.  The book tells the story of Lettie and Tommy who have come down from the north to take up a tiny piece of land in Essex.  They mo...