LAKE OF WIDOWS by Liza Perrat #RBRT

 4 out of 5 stars

On Amazon (universal link)
On Goodreads

How I discovered this book: it was submitted to Rosie's Book Review Team, of which I am a member.

In a Nutshell: Emotional family drama.

Lake of Widows is set in France in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when not all attitudes had caught up with the Swinging Sixties and Women's Lib movement elsewhere in the West.  The main character is Adrienne, a timid woman lacking in confidence, who doesn't realise how much her whole personality has been subtly eroded by her manipulative husband, until an event when out shopping sends her head into rebellious overdrive, and she doesn't go home.

Then there is Blanche, who lives by a lake dear to Adrienne's heart; she is struggling with the reality that her husband is a treacherous conman.  Most of all I was interested in the story of Suzanne, a First World War wife whose life takes a turn for the worst when her husband returns from the Front.  All three women's lives intertwine in this beautiful setting, as they discover their own expectations for themselves, finding courage they did not know they possessed.

I found the part set in an insane asylum most interesting - I've read and watched a few books and documentaries that show how the treatment of the emotionally sick was, even in the 1970s, positively Dickensian.  I also loved Suzanne's story - I would have liked to read more about her and her husband.  As for the writing itself, it will make you want to visit L'Auberge de Léa, and stay there!

ALL THE TOMORROWS by Nillu Nasser @nillunasser

4 out of 5 stars

On Amazon UK
On Amazon.com
On Goodreads

How I discovered this book:  it was submitted to Rosie Amber's Book Review Team, of which I am a member. 

Genre: Romantic suspense, family drama.


Set in Bombay, the novel starts when Jaya, one year into an arranged marriage, discovers that her idealist, undemonstrative husband, Akash, has a lover.  Criticised by her parents and feeling uncared for, her torment results in a truly shocking action, so stomach-turning I wondered if I could actually carry on reading the book.  Brave of the writer to include it, and that I reacted so strongly shows that it was well-written; I did continue, anyway.

Akash is knocked sideways by Jaya's extreme reaction, and his life takes a swift, sharp turn downwards.  In short, this novel is about a falling apart and slow coming together... several of them.

The first twenty per cent is about Jaya and Akash's younger years and the immediate fall-out of 'the event', after which we are moved swiftly on by being told that 'the years sped by', and suddenly it's twenty years later, when we find out how the characters' lives have fared in the interim, and what happens when they collide once more.

Nillu Nasser is a talented writer, without a doubt.  One of the reasons I chose this is because I like to read about other cultures, and this book taught me stuff I didn't know, so that's a tick from me.  Her storytelling ability held my interest, which is good for another big shiny red tick.  On occasion the dialogue felt a little stilted, or a teensy bit Hollywood, and she fell into the debut novelist trap of using dialogue to impart information to the reader rather than keeping it realistic, but I'll cut her some slack with this; it was not constant, and, as I said, it's a debut novel, and a good one (nb, this is not her first published work, but her first published novel).  Her characterisation was good; Jaya, her sister Ruhi, and their mother, were real, as were Akash, his friend, Tariq, and his lover, Soraya; Ms Nasser writes them all in clear definition, and even the secondary characters were completely convincing ~ another big tick!

I was, however, less sure about the pacing and structure.  With the younger lives of Akash and Jaya taking up only around the first fifth of the book, I was given little time to care that much about what happened to them before suddenly they were older, and little had gone on in the intervening twenty years except more of the same.  How much more effective it would have been to have cut the line about speeding years, and have a couple of interim chapters showing their lives after five, ten or fifteen years, too.  Akash tells Soraya all he has suffered in those years, but I wanted to see it, not just read it in a spoken report.  I loathe clichés, not least of all book reviewing ones, and you can't play out every scene or the book would be a thousand pages long, but in this case I needed to be shown, not told.  For me (and a review is only ever a personal opinion), a slow build up could have turned this 4* book into a 5* one. 

As the rest of the story unravels, Ms Nasser continues to write with authenticity, care and sensitivity, and I'd say that if you like emotional family dramas, you'll love this.

 

DOPPELGANGER by Jenny Twist

4 out of 5 stars

Short story: parallel lives

On Amazon UK HERE
On Amazon.com HERE
On Goodreads HERE

This is a most entertaining long-short story with the element of dark humour and tongue-in-cheek that I recognise from Jenny Twist's non-fiction articles ~ it's a fab one to snuggle up in bed with for an hour before sleep :)

Favourite quote, about a love rival:
"Daphne had nothing about her ~ no personality, no intelligence.  Kevin said she was his muse.  You'd think a muse ought to at least be able to do joined up thinking"

I get that you have to be of an age where one was taught to do 'joined up' writing to get that!   Anyway, Christine's life is going to pot ~ but is that life the only one she might have had?  She has occasion to fall into a deep sleep, but where does she wake up?  

I've always enjoyed thinking about what might have been, had I chosen different paths in life (and indeed have written about it myself), so I loved the subject matter of this story anyway, and it's a jolly good yarn to get stuck into, as well!   Recommended to anyone who likes good, light-ish contemporary fiction.

AN OPEN LETTER TO STEPHEN KING AND OTHER ESSAYS reviewed HERE

TALES OF THE MANTEQUERO reviewed HERE

OUTBACK PROMISE by Maggie Bolitho

4.5 out of 5 stars

Contemporary drama, Australia

On Amazon UK HERE
On Amazon.com HERE

Reviewed by me as part of Rosie Amber's Book Review Team

I liked this book a lot.  Maggie Bolitho has the sort of innate gift for the written word that makes my editing/critiquing hat fall off unnoticed, allowing me to just read and enjoy, which is, of course, the best way.

Outback Promise is about the marriage of Ros and Grady.  Six years after their four year old son, Cadel, was killed in a tragic accident, their marriage has faltered, and they decide to go on a three month trip across the Australian Outback to 'find each other' again.   This story was not one that immediately appealed to me as the subject matter of a family losing a child is possibly the last I'd want to read about (I am childfree and like to read for escapism, mostly!), but the Outback aspect appealed a great deal, as it's something I'd love to do. 

I was pleasantly surprised.  The first half of the book follows one of my favourite structures: alternating chapters between past and present, to show how the characters got to where they're at now.  I didn't find the bits about Cadel's death and Ros and Grady's subsequent pain to be something I had to wade through at all, as I'd feared; Ms Bolitho's writing is clear and spare, never wordy or contrived, and it was actually very moving.

The Outback trip starts approximately half way through and at first I worried that I was about to read pages and pages of emotional zig-zagging, but it picked up quickly, with two notable highlights: a ghastly couple called Nestor and Max who they met at one campsite (I loved them, a terrific piece of writing, they were drawn so perfectly I could actually see them!), and an encounter with a couple of poachers.

I very much enjoyed reading about the trip.  My favourite characters tended to be the secondary ones, but they all 'worked'.  I didn't particularly warm to Grady, and only a little more to Ros, who I found a trifle self-absorbed, though this isn't a criticism of the book; Ros is a woman with much 'baggage', and she began to understand herself better as the story came to a close.  There was one incident near the end that really spoke to me.  Grady had been out on a boat with friends, she'd stayed behind because she suffered from seasickness.  Afterwards she was expecting him home and wanted to do the romantic dinner thing, but he stayed in the pub, having a rip-roaring time with his friends.  He wanted her to join him, but she said no, because it didn't fit in with her idealistic image of how their evening would be.  I wanted to shout at her, "Go!  He wants you to be there, think about what he wants and be spontaneous!" ~ because Grady didn't want a 'romantic' meal, he just wanted her to join him.  

I was completely absorbed in the story all the time I was reading this book, and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a well-written, contemporary, relationship-based drama.  I'll certainly read more by this author.