Friday 27 August 2021

Paint and Nectar - Ashley Clark

Paint and Nectar isn’t the kind of book I’d usually pick up, which just goes to show it’s always worth reading outside your immediate comfort zone.

In 1929, William is hired to produce forged copies of the paintings of gifted artist Eliza.  Taking the job to help his desperate sister, he thinks it will be a ‘one off’.  Little does he know it will change his life.


In modern day Charleston, Lucy Legare unexpectedly inherits a tumbledown historic property and its overgrown garden, along with a beautiful old ring.  She meets the engaging Declan Pinckney, but Declan has been instructed by his formidable father to buy the house no matter the cost, and the likely cost is rising all the time.


I enjoyed this not just because the story (stories?) itself is so very well constructed, but because there are flashes of absolute joy in the phrasing of Ashley Clark’s writing.  And not just in the notes and letters between William and Eliza, which are enchanting.  (How much are we losing in these modern days with the loss of actual letter writing, I wonder?)

 

The elements of retaining history, and yet aligning it with progress, are well laid out and I loved the themes of inheritance, hope and beauty.  Inheritance is shown to be about more than just the most obviously valuable, and hope shown as not always easily found.  There are lots of layers, so you need to keep your focus while reading, but it is SO well worth it.

 

But I do wonder what happened about the bricks…



9780764237614, Bethany House, £10.99 pb, Jun21

Thursday 19 August 2021

Mosaic - Chris Aslan

“When a pot breaks, it’s useless; at best there might be a shard that you can use to scoop grain.  But what about a broken life? What about me? I feel so fragmented. Can I be repaired somehow? How do I live with the hate I fell towards those I'm supposed to be closest to? My life is in pieces and I don't know what to do..."


Tabita is growing up in a mountain village in the Middle East.  When a tragic accident results in the death of her closest friend Sholem and the paralysis of her brother Phanuel, Tabi’s life is shattered.  When word comes of a miracle-working teacher it’s not only Phan who needs healing. 

 

The author’s childhood in Turkey and Lebanon is reflected in his immersive descriptions of the people and landscape.  Although I found the early chapters a bit hard going, before long I was captivated.  When Tabi and the four friends who with Phan make up ‘The Hand’ take him to the Teacher, it’s far from being the end of the story.   Influence for The Hand comes from Luke 12:52 and the overall story arc includes events from Mark and Acts which are woven in very well.  I like ‘biblical novels’ which don’t follow key characters, they give their authors scope for wider turns in the storytelling.

 

Mosaic gives the reader an insight into what life may well have been like for many in Jesus’ time.  It clearly describes the rift between those who followed The Way and the Jewish leaders, while making people on both sides of that rift ‘real’.  When reading the Bible we often go quickly through its stories.  Here, we’re aware of how tensions would be building over time, and the struggle of knowing what was right not just in the bigger things, but in individual lives where many broken pieces can be restored and create a beautiful mosaic.



9781782643388, Lion Fiction, £9.99, pb, Apr21

Wednesday 18 August 2021

If it Rains - Jennifer L Wright

A story of resilience and redemption set against one of America's defining moments - the Dust Bowl.


It’s 1935 and in Oklahoma drought is in its fourth year.  14 year old Kathryn, born with a club foot, loves the land her family lives on, despite the increasingly desperate and precarious situation they are in as the land turns to dust.  She doesn’t love her stepmother Helen, but Helen is struggling to adjust to a life very different from her childhood, and grieving the loss of her third baby, stillborn on the day Kathryn’s sister Melissa makes her fateful vows to Henry Mayfield.

 

Driven by desperation Kathryn’s father James takes Helen and Kathryn and heads for Indianapolis, but disaster strikes on the way and Kathryn’s journey will be longer and harder than she ever imagined.  Meanwhile, Melissa is finding Henry is far from the charming and loving man she thought she was marrying.  Soon, she must decide how big a risk she will take to help others and follow God’s call.

 

This is a superb novel by a debut author. She portrays the desperation of the Dust Bowl period perfectly. You can almost taste the dust and feel the longing for rain.  This is a book of hardship, yet it’s also one of hope, and there are little gems from The Wizard of Oz scattered through it.  The faith elements are well woven through, and the author has earned many stars from me by writing a book in which all the characters are believable in both their struggles and joys.

 

An excellent book, perfect for those who like a book which introduces them to historical details which they didn’t know about before, and also like a strong and engaging story.


9781496449306, Tyndale House Publishers

Home Fires and Spitfires - Daisy Styles

This book was lent to me by a friend who knows I've an interest in things WWII related.  Following the midwives and mothers-to-be of a Lake District Mother and Baby Home is an interesting premise, although aligning the story to Call the Midwife is a very big stretch in my opinion. Anyway, my interest was piqued enough to spend a solid period of time reading it, and on the whole I enjoyed it.

The girls who find themselves at Mary Vale Mother and Baby Home are each interesting, especially Zelda, a Jewish German refugee who arrives at the Home starving and traumatised after fleeing Nazi Germany when her husband is shot in the street for being Jewish.

Diana is pregnant and planning her imminent wedding when her fiancé sets out on a secret mission from which he goes missing, and she must leave the WAAF role she loves to move across the country to have her baby.

Gracie works in the shipyards and dreams of operating the huge dockyard cranes, but when she discovers her dashing suitor is married, and she is pregnant, what direction will her life take?

Their stories are interwoven with characters introduced in the first book in the series, but this book reads very well as a stand alone novel.  There is plenty of wit and humour as well as grief and loss, and the setting is very well described.  It's very clear that the author knows this area of countryside well and describes it so that you can see it through her eyes.  

This is an easy read and I enjoyed it although the style of language used for a 1940's tale and how people are sometimes referred to (ie Harry referring to his senior officer as 'Derek')  grated here and there, as did some of the story elements for me.  

For instance Diana would have been dismissed from the WAAFs as soon as her pregnancy was known, and she wouldn't have had loose hair at work, it would have been tied or pinned back and not 'falling in a  silky curtain over her face'.  The SOE Lysanders flew from Tangmere not Duxford, pilots didn't work on the Operations Room balcony where Controllers, Tellers, Liaison, Warning and Recorders worked so Harry being 'recalled' there is highly unlikely, the mountain-rescue team mentioned by Sister Mary Paul wasn't formed until 1953, and church bells certainly wouldn't have been rung for a wedding, as their ringing during wartime was to announce an invasion. 

I also found the repeated reference to 'pouting' lips off-putting, together with some of the other descriptions of the women of Mary Vale.  At one point I checked to see if the author was female because the descriptions of the girls in the story seemed more like they'd been written by a man!

I both loved and was disappointed by Zelda's story, which felt like it had two distinct halves.  It all started very strongly and realistically.  She's introduced as a terrified, exhausted and grief-stricken Jewish German refugee who barely speaks English and is viewed with hostility and suspicion by women within Mary Vale and some of the locals in nearby Kendal. This is an interesting angle in a WWII-era novel and could have been better explored.  Yet we very quickly move to there being almost no references at all to her German accent or speech patterns.  And it seemed to me that after the trauma of losing her beloved husband and fleeing for her life and that of her unborn child the decisions she makes later on in the book are highly unlikely within the time scale described.  I'm not against the story's direction for her, just the speed at which it happens.

The Spitfires of the title and cover are noticeably absent from the story, except by association with Duxford. There are certainly some spitfire characters though!

All that said, this is a well-told story with some interesting characters.  Perhaps a little too much romance for me, but I'd while away a few more hours reading another of Daisy Styles' books.


9781405945196, Penguin