Weekly Reading Round-Up
Happy Friday, all!
This week started out with a whimper for me when I bounced hard off two recent, high buzz thrillers (no, I’m not naming either– that’s between me and my local librarians who see my summer reading log). There went this week’s reading plan….
But then I landed on B.K. Borison’s Lovelight Farms, and it turned out to be just the book I needed right now, even though it’s a Christmas book and this is July edging towards August. The heroine is attempting to save her struggling Christmas tree farm by winning a contest hosted by a travel influencer– but she needs her longtime best friend to pose as her boyfriend in order to win the contest. For those of you who remember Miles from The Masque of the Black Tulip, the hero, Luka, is pure Miles: floppy hair and a heart of gold.
This book reminded me– in the best possible way!– of early Kristan Higgins.
After that, I snuck back to the village of Taviscombe with Mrs. Malory, although it turned out that The Fatal Legacy of a famous friend’s papers meant less Taviscombe and more London in this one. In Mrs. Malory and The Fatal Legacy, Mrs. Malory places her animals in the care of her son and heads to London when her Oxford friend Beth dies unexpectedly, leaving Mrs. Malory as her literary executor– and to wonder whether Beth’s death was accident or something more sinister.
I rounded off the week with an old favorite: Barbara Michaels’s The Walker in Shadows, in which the arrival of new neighbors awakens long dormant spirits in the house next door. (I would like to point out that the house on that cover is all wrong. It’s supposed to be a gothic faux Scottish castle in Maryland, complete with tower, not Twelve Oaks. Just saying.) Newly widowed Pat finds herself plunged into a historical mystery as she and the craggily handsome Josef and their teenaged children try to solve the haunting before the spirit can wreak its worst….
What have you been reading this week?
Re: The Walker in the Shadows, agree a bad /incorrect book cover is really a drag, and sometimes downright comical; I’ve got a Georgette Heyer regency novel where the heroine is sporting a 1960s bubble hairdo while dressed in a crinoline on the cover. Makes me chuckle every time!
Which Heyer? I just realized I completely forgot to put my reread of “The Corinthian” on this week’s round up….
The Grand Sophy (one of my faves, despite that particular cover, lol). Never did read The Corinthian, how was it?
I love “The Grand Sophy”! I still have mixed feelings about “The Corinthian”…. It’s never been one of my favorites and I’m still a little divided on it, although I liked it better on a reread. Lots of madcap scenarios and mixed up identities and all that. Definitely worth a read! But low on my personal Heyer hierarchy.
It’s been a long time since a book kept me up past midnight, but MM Kaye’s Trade Wind did that for me this past week. I adored it, a sprawling historical novel where I was never once pulled from the narrative due to a glaring inconsistency of historical detail or a character’s choice. I would certainly class Emory Frost in the “problematic” hero category, but his actions had an internal consistency with the time period the book was set in and his established character in the book (in this case pirate, and not the Disney kind). For me it’s reminiscent of other favorite historicals of mine, Bond of Blood by Roberta Gellis or The Bastard by Brigitte von Tessin to name a couple, where the respective heroes are not guys I’d want to pull an Outlander and go live with myself, but who fit their specific books perfectly.
Anyway, loved Trade Wind, and now have another historical fiction author (I somehow only read MM Kaye’s mysteries before now)!
5th Mr Darcy/Miss Tilney mystery also good, the dynamic between the two leads reminds me of Claudia Gray’s Constellation series, and she gets Mr. Bingley and Mrs Bennett (who both appear in this one) spot-on.
I did it the other way around– “Shadow of the Moon” was my gateway drug for M.M. Kaye, then “Far Pavilions” and “Trade Wind” and the mysteries later, but “Trade Wind” has always been my favorite. Hero and Rory are just so gloriously imperfect and I love at the end when she comments that there will be times that their personalities will rub and they’ll drive each other nuts but for some reason they’re each other’s people. (I also adore the redemption of Olivia and Therese and how they become a team under stress.) And, of course, Cressy and Dan are adorable.
Have you read Valerie Fitzgerald’s “Zemindar”? I’ve always felt it has a similar vibe.
Olivia and George were such a sweet surprise, yes. Therese I felt sorry for at the end, which I didn’t expect. Batty was another standout, in the “faithful old retainer” mold.
Haven’t read Zemindar, but that may need to be my next read –not ready to leave the historicals, and my mom probably already has a copy!
For paper I just started A Novel Murder by E. Nevil, and book on tape (I know! I still call them that , lol) I re read All The Light We Cannot See because we were once again traveling in St Malo (stunning!!! Highly recommend) … but now as I’m coming to its end it made me realize that for all the million ww2 books I read I never read one about the lives of the young German soldiers AFTER the war, or life in Germany for that matter, anyone has something to recommend?? Thanks 😊
I remember those actual tapes!! I tend to avoid WW II books so can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but that’s a really good point and I wonder if there are books out there (not in German) about life in Germany after the war…. Ellis Peters’s mysteries– the ones that weren’t Cadfael– dealt with Germans in England after the war.