dittybox

  This is a lovely book, and because of its length, it's the sort of book that becomes a companion for a few days and allows the reader to gently drift away to another world. It's the same trope as the film Titanic, in that it begins with a very old lady who finds herself transported back to her youth after others start taking an interest in a time in her history that still holds some secrets.   It begins as the Queen Victoria dies and young teen, Grace Bradley, is sent by her mother to work in service for the wealthy owners of the Riverton estate.  If you like stories set in the era of the film Gosford Park or the series Downton Abbey, then this will be right up your street.  The writing fully evokes the social structure of the Edwardian era and the key characters span every rung of the ladder from the landed gentry right down to poor Katie the scullery maid. Grace starts her employment as a general maid and has to learn everything from how to set a fire to hel...

  I think I am a little like the magpie on the front of this book because I was attracted by the pretty gold design on the front cover when I was in the library choosing my books.  The sticker on the front announcing that this was an 'Instant number one best seller' also helped with my choice and I'm glad to say that the story inside did not disappoint. I had been looking for something a bit different, but as it turned out, this book is set in the same century as the book Winchelsea that I read last week, although there is a very different tone to the writing.  Winchelsea was about smugglers and pirates and Pandora has a focus on antiquities and the myth of Pandora's Box.   I enjoyed the style of writing as it was easy to read and the storyline was told along a fairly straight time-line with references to the past only taking the form of memories.  Sometimes that is much easier to get along with as it can be quite frustrating if you come to the end of an ex...

  It's not often that I read a book about pirates but this one has a neat twist as it tells the tale of a woman who joined their ranks and was every bit as bold and bad as the rest of them. Set in the 1700s at the time of the Jacobite uprising, there is plenty of history to create an authentic feel and no sense of dressing things up to make pirate life more palatable.  We meet Goody Brown as a young child at the start of the book and she has been adopted by the local doctor and his wife, which all sounds very respectable, but then the doctor also dabbles in smuggling and brings goods in from the sea via a set of underground tunnels that only he has the key for. The smugglers are a mean bunch and soon the story twists and turns to weave the good people in with the bad, and Goody becomes embroiled in the smuggling as she helps her father give access to the underground passages.  After a while she is trusted with keeping the key and ends up taking the side of the smugglers a...

  I wasn't sure what to make of this one.  I got to the end and I was just a bit stumped.  There were some nice sequences where a young girl makes friends with her very elderly neighbour, Mr Gluck, and I liked the way he encouraged her to use her imagination and take an interest in the arts.  All good.  There were also some interesting bits about pop art and collages, but everything seemed a bit disjointed and I felt I was missing something somewhere.  What on earth was the point of the chapter about electrified fences?    I decided to google the book and see what I was meant to see.  The review published in the Guardian said: "Set after the EU Referendum, the first Brexit novel is a poignant and subtle exploration of the way we experience time." Really? I'm sixty five this year.  Maybe I'm getting to the age when the grandchildren have to start explaining the plot to me when we watch a film.  Maybe I should start reading Barbara Ca...

  Melody is sixteen and celebrating her coming of age, and now she is the same age her mother was when she was born. Iris fell pregnant with Melody when she was just a girl of fifteen.  She had no idea how that would work out for her but she knew she wanted to keep the baby regardless of what anyone else felt about it.   So what did everyone else feel about it?  Her boyfriend, her mum, her dad, her boyfriend's mum?  Jacqueline Woodson gives them all a voice and everyone sees the same situation from a slightly different angle.  Everyone accepts that the baby will come, and they will love it come what may, but other feelings get in there too because everyone has to consider what the pregnancy will mean for all of them.   This was a fascinating read and gives a real insight into what it means when families have to re-define themselves and re-configure their priorities.  

  Ooof.  This one got me and it's still getting to me now.  I didn't expect to have so much in common with a young woman of Korean heritage, but feelings of grief and loss are universal, and in that, we are all one and the same. My mother died ten years ago when I was in my mid-fifties, but as Zauner observed, we are all children again when our parents are dying.  Mum and I hadn't always seen eye to eye but as she declined, an unspoken truce was called, and we suddenly appreciated what we had in each other and tried to make amends.  As I read through the book, I recognised the desire to demonstrate things I had learnt from her.  Zauner cooked traditional Korean food for her mother and I poached haddock and cut little sandwiches for mine. Even when you know it is coming, nothing prepares you for the death of the parent, and I think Zauner was quite masterful in describing the times both before and after her mother died.  When the final breath is taken, ...

  This was a quirky little find.  The New Books shelf in the library was a bit depleted last Friday so I ventured a little further into the main fiction shelves and picked this up after spotting the word 'Pulitzer' on the cover. The book was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 but it didn't win because nobody won.  No prize was awarded for fiction that year because no book received a majority of the votes from the board members.  The board was under no obligation to give a reason for this, so they didn't.  Some things in life must remain a mystery. It's a novella rather than a full novel, but by the end it feels greater than the sum of it's 116 pages.  Set in the American West in the early twentieth century, at a time when a man looking for employment could find work as a logger or bridge builder, and leave at the end of the summer season with enough money in his pocket to buy a bit of land for himself and his family.  In the book, that man is R...