dittybox

Philippa Gregory is a knowledgeable historian who also happens to be an accomplished writer of historical fiction.  I don't know how many people have this skill but I'm guessing that not many people (apart from Hilary Mantel) could distill all the research into a really gripping novel. I learnt so much from this book, which is set in the 1600s in the time of Oliver Cromwell, and I must confess that there was a gaping black hole in my knowledge of history around this period.  The storyline covers the arrest and trial of King Charles I, but the main focus is on a little family who live in the tidelands around Sealsea on the South coast of England.  Alinor Reekie is a young mother whose husband has disappeared leaving her to fend for herself and try and take care of her two children in a tiny house perched on the edge of the river. The book is filled with detail of what it was like to live in constant hardship where people have to work themselves to the bone just to stay ali...

  I'm still enjoying my run of historical novels, and this time I have moved forward to the twentieth century and the period covering the Second World War.  The setting for the book is Bletchley Park which is famous for being the home of the code breakers who cracked the codes for the German Enigma machines.  Much has been written about Alan Turing and his team, but this book focuses on the work of the women who took on much of the laborious decryption and contributed so much to the success of the Allied Forces. It's quite a long book at 624 pages, but it's easy to read and it gives a good cross section of all the different social classes of the time.  The three main characters are Osla, a debutant whose Godfather is Louis Mountbatten; Mab, an intelligent young woman from the working classes who had to fight for her education and employment opportunities; and Beth, the landlady's daughter who lives in fear of her manipulating mother and has been convinced she will ne...

  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.