Mandy

I very rarely give books 5-star ratings on Goodreads. I don't think I've even left a review here.

Middlemarch deserves both.

I generally like reading English novels from the 18th to 19th century, and I thoroughly enjoy most of those that I have read so far. Middlemarch is my first foray into George Eliot's work, but I expected a similar, serene vibe that I usually get from novels of this time period. What I got was akin to a 19th century soap opera. I would say that this was a 19th century Days Of Our Lives, except the storyline was so much tighter than any soap opera I've known.

Middlemarch is subtitled “A Study of Provincial Life”, and that's a great summary of what it is. It's a panoramic study of life in the fictional English village of Middlemarch, with not just one or two, but at least four central characters, and a whole intricate background of secondary, tertiary and other minor characters spreading out from there like concentric circles. With such a busy canvas to work with, I was simply bowled over by George Eliot's masterful way of weaving her tale. The book was 782 pages long for my edition, but shit was going down in almost every chapter, there were plot twists, and new developments that never seemed to stop coming.

Even more amazing was how Eliot did not compromise on the characterisation despite all the action in her story. The central characters were well fleshed out, their growth and maturity throughout the novel flowed naturally from their changing situations, and their every action throughout the story was realistic and unforced. The parts that every character played in every crisis or new development fit together seamlessly. Sometimes, small gestures that appear insignificant at first are revealed to have larger consequences later, yet everything was always believable. I've never read a truer representation that captures the elaborateness of human nature and social reality, and I'm awed by Eliot's mastery over realist writing.

I think when it comes to reading older English novels, I am always captivated by its characterisation most of all, as there is certainly a different flavour to how it was done in previous centuries than it usually is in contemporary novels. Middlemarch illustrates everything I love about this aspect, which explains why I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I will certainly be checking out more of Eliot's other works, but this book's reputation as “one of the greatest novels in the English language” is certainly not undeserved.

The only little thing was, I spent probably 90% of the book expecting and wishing that Dorothea would end up with Lydgate because they always seemed so suitable for each other, but ah well. Lydgate's life ended up more pitiable than I would've wished.

I didn't really like Margaret Atwood's writing style in Oryx and Crake and I'm not a huge fan of it here, but I have to say there are glimmers of enjoyment in the writing in this book.

I've never been a dystopia fan, but there is something chilling about the realism of some aspects of Gilead that might very well happen in our world, any time in the near future - all this despite the fact that this book in itself was published almost 2 decades ago.

I almost consider my aversion to spoilers as an integral part of my identity, but there is a point where I am so desperate to want to read a book but find myself so unable to that I voluntarily spoil myself so I'd be more motivated to find out how the characters get there.Doomsday Book was just such an example.And guess what, after reading the spoilers, I decided just to DNF it.This was the first book from Connie Willis I purchased because I was so intrigued by the ploy synopsis and it had every element that usually interests me - fantasy, historical fiction, time travel, academia-setting. Well, I found myself DNF'ing it within 10% of the book. At that time, I attributed it to my lackluster knowledge of and interest in the Middle Ages.In the intervening years, two things happened to motivate me to give Doomsday Book another go: 1) I purchased To Say Nothing Of The Dog and thoroughly enjoyed myself. 2) I started learning much more about the Middle Ages and got interested in that period of history.I excitedly started Doomsday Book again, convinced that I would enjoy myself this time. After all, it had 4 stars on Goodreads, right?!I struggled so hard to get to the 25% mark that I find myself at. With any other book, if I find myself thoroughly uninterested and unengaged by the plot and the storytelling by 10-15%, I'd just DNF it and not waste my time. It's reflective of how much I wanted Doomsday Book to work out for me that I persevered past the boring first 10-15% and even at 25%, I was still on this page reading all the raving reviews about how awesome the book was, trying to convince myself to get back to it. At this point, though, I was so bored by the book that I allowed myself to get distracted by a random 400-page book in the library which I snapped up in less than 2 days.After finishing that one, I found myself dreading the prospect of returning to Doomsday Book. Why can't I get through it!? What am I missing about this book that everyone seems to be getting?That's when I decided to read the spoilers and, well, while I'm curious about how certain events unfolded, I decided that the payoff for all the boring build-up is just not enough and I'm probably going to DNF this book for good now.But no shade on Connie Willis though. For anyone who feels the same way as I do, don't write her off as an author and try [b:To Say Nothing of the Dog 77773 To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2) Connie Willis https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1469410460l/77773.SY75.jpg 696]. Now that was a great book with the same time travel premise, and I would gladly re-read.

This was a perfect short re-read for Halloween this year! Fall of the House of Usher was my first Poe story and one of my very first few brushes with horror as a child, and certainly one of the most vivid. I remember it so well that I've only wanted to re-read it just a couple of times since to refresh my memory on it.

The prose in here was more challenging than I recall. I'm no stranger to 19th century works, but Poe's writing, in this story in particular, is more purple-prosey than I expected. I'm glad that I had read an abridged, simplified version as a child (with illustrations too), otherwise I'd never have understood a thing about it. Even now, I found myself having to re-read sentences and whole paragraphs to really get what was going on. In that sense, it reminded me quite a bit of the writing style of Jane Eyre, which checks out given that both are such mainstays of Gothic literature.

There's also a lot more symbolism and imagery here that I never fully appreciated, but I won't delve into it here for fear of sounding pretentious.

This is deservedly a classic in horror and gothic lit, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in those genres.

My second romance title from Tessa Dare but I remain impressed by them, despite their sleazy covers. I can't say it's entirely free of tropes and genre cliches, but she side-steps most of them and turns the typical romance expectations around on its head, which I'm very much down for. True, some of the plot elements may be a little anachronistic as Dare evidently writes with a modern point of view, but I'd rather be reading this than badly handled gender stereotypes.

I've really liked all of Tessa Dare's heroines so far. From the bushy-haired and plain-looking Izzy Goodnight in the first title of the Castles Ever After series, to the non-svelte and fiercely self-reliant Clio Whitmore in this one. They don't fit into the marble statue standard of beauty that typically describes what most romance heroines are, but I like them all the more for it.

Some side characters that I also really liked in this novel are Clio's sister, Phoebe, with all her eccentricities and genius, Ellingworth the bulldog, and Montague/Bruiser with his ridiculous quizzing glass. They all added little quirks and touches of humour that actually worked. I love how Dare's works don't take themselves too seriously and that makes them such a fun, light-hearted read. I'll certainly be reading more from her, and from this series!

What worked for me in this book:- I thought Lady Whistledown's Society Papers were a great little treat. Like an early Gossip Girl, if you will.- I read this book at the same time as reading Julia Quinn's latest work [b:Because of Miss Bridgerton 25657772 Because of Miss Bridgerton (Rokesbys #1) Julia Quinn https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1458871065s/25657772.jpg 45479802] and I found this one a lot more structured with better flow.- I am absolutely in love with Violet Bridgerton (the mother) and the badass way she keeps her grown-up sons in order. Reminded me of Molly Weasley.What didn't work for me in this book:- I felt that Daphne and Simon's chemistry was rushed and I didn't quite understand why they would either of them fall in love with the other.- Some scenes felt a little forced and contrived, and such scenes increased in frequency as the book progressed.- That non-consensual scene when Daphne pretty much forced Simon to finish inside her, and then being almost completely non-repentent about it, and the whole thing being swept under the plot carpet like it was no big deal. That was really disturbing.

Originally published on Unravellations.

Was Indiscreet disappointing? Yes and no. Yes, because it was pretty much submerged in every single trope and cliché of the genre. More alarmingly, it almost seemed anti-feminist in its way of handling certain issues like female consent. I have to admit I rolled my eyes tons along the way. But yet, it had to hold a certain kind of charm because I actually felt myself compelled to continue the story and to finish the book. Maybe I have a hardy stomach for some appalling anti-feminist ideas (“No” means “yes”). I can't tell you why I managed to make my way through it, but if I find myself racing against myself to finish a book (mostly because I wanted to find out Catherine's true background), I've got to give it some credit.

Social IssuesBefore I start on this huge area, I'm going to try to be fair to Mary Balogh and state that this book was published in 1997. This is nearly a decade ago, and this past decade has seen the Internet take a huge leap forward and greatly raise awareness about certain social issues around the world. So perhaps, perhaps, at the time of writing, certain mindsets which have since been attacked and weakened, had firmly been in place.That being said, I'm going to go ahead and list down all the problematic points of this book.Firstly, consent. When a woman says no, it means no. Whether she second-guesses herself or isn't sure about her denial is irrelevant. Here, though, it apparently doesn't seem to matter. Here, we are expected to give Rex, Viscount Rawleigh, credit for holding himself back from raping Catherine Winters, just because she's oh so desirable and he's oh so bored and needs some female company during his visit to Bodley. We are expected to find it manly and righteous that Rex takes responsibility for apparently ruining Catherine's reputation in the village, because he had insisted on bringing her back to her house (for which he had ulterior motives though not acted upon), despite her saying no. Sure, he could've done much worse to Catherine, and others before him have, but that doesn't make him a hero nor does it make him more attractive or admirable.It was humiliating and uncomfortable to see the author take pleasure in really nailing down how helpless Catherine is when even her dog Toby, whom she had been raising and feeding since he was a puppy, is more willing to take orders from Rex than her. Also, I don't think most dogs would behave that way. Catherine really had been "letting life happen to her", which is fine and dandy if that's the way she wanted it, but the few instances when she had expressed a preference of any sort, her consent or lack thereof usually gets steamrollered into oblivion by any and every male around her.The female objectification and issue with gender roles could be disguised or explained by the Regency setting of the novel, so I could deal with that. But when it comes to consent - it's just such a troubling issue up till today that I didn't feel comfortable at all reading a book with a premise based on men taking a woman's consent for granted.Secondly, male and female promiscuity. We all know that this has always been a salient site of gender inequality throughout history. We all know that since time immemorial, it had always been more acceptable for men to sleep around, regardless of their marital status, but if a woman so much as has the tiniest blemish on her social reputation, she is as good as done with society. What I had issue with in this book, as well as countless many other romance novels, I'm sure, is that they still continue to make these "rakes" appear attractive because of their promiscuity. Every leading male character in every romance novel is either a "rake" or still somehow more sexually experienced than the female (also regardless of her virginity status). In this book, they do call attention to how unfair it is for men to get away scot-free with their philandering but women bear the brunt of the shame and consequences, but what is perplexing is that the entire premise of this book precisely does the same thing. Rex is never censured or judged for his promiscuity, and in fact still applauded and admired for it, whether by his peers or by the author, whereas Catherine is forever relegated to the side as a helpless, aimless female without the ability to have an opinion or make any kind of decision without a man's help. There is in fact an entire passage in this book talking about how silly it was for rakes to still be so popular despite their potential for destruction and the unfairness of it all, and all I could think about during that passage was: ISN'T THAT WHAT YOU'VE BEEN TELLING US FOR THIS ENTIRE TIME?Thirdly, the issue of rape. Yes, this book should have a trigger warning. Catherine's past involves her rape by another rake, Copley, during her debutant Season in London, during which she got pregnant and gave birth to a baby son who only lived for three hours. Despite all this, however, Catherine is at first confused about where the blame lies. She blamed herself because she had consented to get into the carriage alone with Copley, though she is subsequently persuaded otherwise by Rex (because she needs a man to remove that burden of guilt and self-blame for her). And then despite her rape, she doesn't seem to have any fear or phobia of sexual acts subsequently. She goes straight into lusting after Rex from the first moment she sees him, and then muses about how she's new to all these overwhelming physical desires for men (or a man, i.e. Rex, because she can't be seen as a whore, right?) because she is no longer the innocent that she was. During their wedding night (because of course, all sexual encounters must take place within the sanctity of marriage), Catherine is a "passive lover" but she is described as having had a wonderful time and that it was an amazing night for her. How...? You would expect someone whose virginity was taken by an incident of rape would have developed a lot more emotional and mental trauma than that. It felt like the issue of rape was taken and bandied about lightly, and like just another plot device to make Catherine un-virgin, but yet also delightfully inexperienced, again via circumstances that she could not help (the female helplessness is so pervasive). If Catherine had any scars, visible or otherwise, from the incident, it was not shown at all in the book. She went immediately straight to becoming as sexual a woman as Rex could ever desire.Physicality and Insta-lust/loveNow, don't tell me it's not insta-love just because they apparently hated each other from early on in their acquaintance and had to grow into loving each other. From the first moment of their acquaintance, Rex and Catherine have been lusting for each other in a way that was almost embarrassing. Their emotions also go through this unexplainable rollercoaster. One moment, Rex cares enough for her to rush back to Bodley when he discovers he had accidentally ruined her reputation in the village. The next moment, he keeps declaring that he didn't want to get married to her in the first place (even though he had already offered it a few nights before when he wanted to bed her) and was just doing the honourable thing to salvage her rep. One moment, Catherine does not want to marry Rex because she was apparently done with men and marriage. The next moment, she cries herself to sleep after their wedding night because she's upset that he only wants her body. What on earth is going on here?! The emotions were all over the place and inconsistent from one moment to the next.Perhaps I am expecting too much, but I disliked how so many pages and so much verbiage was poured into detailing every single groin-heating, heart-fluttering moment of their physical attraction towards each other from the start, but yet their journey from apparent hate to love was cut short into a few brief lines to summarize how well they could converse with each other on intellectual topics. At one point, Rex muses on how Catherine isn't a woman to bed for one night, but a woman to accompany him for life, but I couldn't understand how he came to that conclusion. All we could see her do was talk politely to the housekeeper and ask to be introduced to the female servants, a gesture that was apparently enough to win her the approval and admiration of the household staff. There is literally no intellectual conversation going on in this book that we can see. There is no visible build-up to Rex and Catherine's affectionate relationship. From where I am as a reader, it just seems that marriage and sex were the only ingredients they needed to reverse their feelings for each other, which is so eye-rollingly incomprehensible to me.Even more eye-rollingly incomprehensible was when Rex offered to marry Catherine after ruining her reputation in the village, and Catherine's first response was "No, take me as your mistress, I don't want to marry you". What?! Why on earth would Catherine want to be his mistress? Was it supposed to show that she was at the end of her tether and didn't know where else to go besides being his mistress? That she was desperate enough that she was willing to essentially sell her body for a roof over her head? And then Rex, who had already declared that he didn't want to marry her at all, didn't take her up on that offer and instead insisted that she marry him - even though before and after this whole exchange, he continued musing on how he hadn't wanted to marry her at all, and he only did so because it was the right thing to do.CharacterisationHonestly, I never found Rex admirable or swoon-worthy. I also found Catherine vapid and helpless as always. I found Mrs Adams's viciousness lacking. I found Mr Adams almost entirely redundant throughout the story besides a few salient points here and there. Although I have to say, at least Mr and Mrs Adams had some form of character growth and development in the book. Rex remains Rex and Catherine remains Catherine throughout, annoyingly so. Almost all the characters were flat and lacked depth.I guess my favourite character is Toby the dog.Closing ThoughtsThere were a lot of stomach-turning and infuriating moments in this book, probably almost to put me off the romance genre but I will persevere. Perhaps I am being optimistic but one of the next titles on my list will be more recent titles by some renowned romance writers, written post-2010. I hope that there will be a better handling of the social issues as described above, and that it'll make for a better read. Maybe. Also, Mary Balogh's romances are one of the easiest to get into primarily because her book covers tend not to be the sleazy types with a half-naked man and a scantily clad woman in varying states of undress on the cover, which can be very embarrassing to hold and read, whether it's at home or outside in public.

I was so excited to start on this series but I couldn't make it through a few chapters. The female protagonist is supposed to be a 30 year old lady apparently yearning so much for adventure she's trade places with her “twin” in an alternate dimension, and then immediately finds herself getting married to a guy whom she can only use two words to describe: scary, or hot. Those two words were repeated to no ends to describe his every change of expression or perfect features.

You know what else is always repeated? “That is so... cool!” Oh my god. The female protagonist uses this whimsical exclamation for every single thing, even something as huge as being whisked away into a different dimension. She sometimes changes it up with “awesome” but I don't count that one. I could've handled it the first one or two times but by the 3rd time onwards I had had enough.

Props to Tillie Hooper for the narration, however. She did her best valiantly and her voice acting at least perked up the lifeless dialogue and lines.

Originally published on Unravellations.

I find myself at a loss of what to say about The Investigation.

At first it was like an Alice-in-Wonderland-esque tumble down a rabbit hole into infinite loops of absurd nonsense, but then in the second half, it takes a grimmer turn and tone and by the end of the book, you're really left questioning what was the point of it all. Or was that the point?

A lot of online comments mentioned how The Investigation was Kafka-esque. I'm going to admit here that I've never read Kafka (shame on me) so I can't concur or rebutt any of these statements. What it did remind me a little of was Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot, except not as absurdist, and it didn't quite leave me with a feeling of liberating self-doubt as Beckett's play did.

The Investigation starts off only mildly absurd. The Investigator, as he is known, arrives at an unnamed town where he is supposed to find his way to the Enterprise to investigate a series of suicides amongst its employees. Everything in the book is named that way - the Waiter, the Server, the Guard, the Guide. Things turn topsy-turvy for the Investigator as nothing seems to happen according to plan. He gets a creepy feeling of being watched. It raised a lot of questions about personal identity in today's world, are we defined by our functions in society, have we all lost our own individuality in capitalism, so on and so forth. Side note: the Enterprise always reminded me of Google for some reason.

Things get from crazy to batshit insane. Allegories either become too convoluted or simply collapsed under themselves. I was left feeling as lost as the Investigator, all my previous predictions for the ending of the book fell through. If anything, this book had the ability to keep me reading and reading, fuelled simply by the curiosity of finding out what exactly is going on. I finished the book within 24 hours, but the ending fell a little flat for me. I'm not even sure if the author intended to clear anything up by the end. I know explanations are sometimes not necessary for complex works like these, they're deliberately left open-ended in order to facilitate thought and discussion, but when I look back and can't seem to connect any dots, or to find out any sort of message behind it all, I begin to question the efficacy of the ending. Maybe it's me?!

Originally published on Unravellations.

WOW I'M FINALLY DONE WITH THIS BOOK.

I began this book with very high expectations and it didn't fail me for the first half. But for some reason, my attention and interest started wavering around the middle and I was stuck on it for a really long time - I felt no urge or excitement to pick it up and continue, but I didn't want to abandon it either. I'm trying to cultivate a habit of not abandoning books halfway unless it really called for it, which this book, thankfully, didn't. I finally sat myself down on a gloriously empty Sunday afternoon and finished the second half of the book in one sitting. The thing is, when you're actually reading it, it's not too difficult to get the momentum going.

Anyhow, A Darker Shade Of Magic is the first of the Shades of Magic trilogy by author V. E. Schwab and introduces a fascinating magical world that caught my attention and interest the moment I read the synopsis. It introduces a universe where there are 4 alternate universes: Grey, Red, White and Black (not official names, just the nicknames given to them by the main magician, Kell). Each London has varying degrees of magic flowing through it, Black being the one that had been so consumed by magic (a powerful force with a mind of its own, but that is delightfully neither good nor bad, and one that had to be wielded and dealt with with caution), White being almost like a troubled, chaotic and parched world, Red being a thriving “goldilocks zone” and Grey (our human world) being the one with the least/no magic at all. As different as those worlds can be, they have certain fixed points within them that change minimally throughout the 4 dimensions - one of them being the city of London.

Kell hails from Red London, but being Antari, a special and rare breed of magicians that are born with magic in their blood (non-genetically inherited), he is able to move between the different Londons, carrying messages and other things. Things go to shit when he is tricked into picking up a dangerous artifact and an equally foolhardy street urchin from Grey London, Delilah Bard. They spend the rest of the book attempting to dispose of said artifact a la Lord of the Rings, Mount Doom, “THROW IT INTO THE FIRE, MASTER FRODO” style.

This book thread a fine line and could've sank into a cliched sort of plot line but it always narrowly misses that, which I appreciate. Despite some criticism about Lila, I didn't find her characterization overly annoying or stupid. Yes, there were times when she needed saving, but so did Kell and every other major character in the book. Whatever sexual tension or romantic interest may have been breeding in the book was kept to a very subtle minimum and didn't feel too much like insta-attraction. I thought some things about Lila could've been improved or explained (was she a kleptomaniac?) but she didn't fall into the usual pitfalls that would've made me give up on or dislike this book immediately.

Kell was suitably mysterious as the main character. I sometimes found him a little over-dramatic about things, and too much in a rush to (attempt to) kill himself for the sake of others. He's proven that he's smart enough, so why doesn't he think of alternative plans to save everyone which don't involve him dying in the process? But oh well, I guess he won't be in a rush to be killing himself any time soon after what happens at the end of the book.

The action was all right, although I guess it got a little draggy in the middle. I'm not sure what it was about it - I simply felt no urge to know what was going to happen at the end. It felt a little - predictable? I knew something had to happen to the stone for it to be gotten rid of by the end of the book, and even though I couldn't tell whether Kell was or was not going to go along with it, I couldn't find it in myself to care. To be fair, by the time I reached the end, it did upheave some of my expectations and things turned out slightly different from what I thought it would be.

Would I recommend this book? If you're a huge fan of period-setting magical worlds and fantasy, yes. It has its flaws but it was a much better-written work than many others out there. But as a point of note, this book doesn't quite hold back when it comes to violent deaths, of which there are many. Would I continue reading the trilogy? Maybe, I don't know. I realise that the next book is going to be set on Lila's adventures, and I'm not sure if I'm interested enough to know more about what's going to go down with her. The short excerpt of the next instalment didn't really excite me either.

And now, for the spoiler section!

One of the foremost things in my mind right now is: WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED WITH HOLLAND? I couldn't believe my eyes when I read that Kell simply put the stone into Holland's hand and basically Portalled him out into Black London. THAT IS SUCH A BITCHTASTIC THING TO DO. I actually thought Holland might have some redeeming factor - I mean, yes, he killed Barron (though I didn't buy into the whole Lila sentimentality thing so I didn't really care) and he tortured Kell and all that, but Schwab spends a lot of Holland's on-page time talking about how he was compelled to do all these nasty things and all that. He was even described as looking "relieved" when Kell finally decided to kill him, which I think breaks his soul seal or something and releases him from the spell that the Dane twins cast on him?? Anyway even if it didn't, Kell had already killed the Dane twins so I assume that would've broken the seal too? So Kell basically sends a barely-alive Holland who had the potential to regain his health and consciousness and MORALITY into the abyss of Black London along with the stone?!?!?!?! I don't know, but Holland could've at least restored some balance to White London????? What was Kell thinking????? WHAT?That bit made me so uncomfortable and bewildered.I also really enjoyed Rhy and Lila's bantering at the end, but being a mainstream junkie like I am, I still kinda hope Lila and Kell would end up together.I was secretly hoping Lila would remain a magic-less Grey Londoner but be able to somehow wield her barren magic state into an interesting puzzle piece within the magicky Red and White Londons. I thought that perhaps that was the reason why she didn't seem infected with the black stone's magic. Like how fire can set many things alight but won't affect stone much? I was even a little disappointed when Tieran told her that she had unnurtured magic within her. I feel like we need some characters who really and truly possess nothing to come into their own with the people who appear to have been born with everything (like Kell), instead of abruptly discovering that they had a well of talent buried in them all along.

This book is crying out for a movie adaptation. And I'm going to champion for Eddie Redmayne to take the character of Kell, and Tilda Swinton the character of Astrid Dane.

I borrowed this book from a friend because The BFG and George's Marvellous Medicine were those two Roald Dahl books that I didn't get a chance to read as a kid, so I wanted to catch up on that. I never realised until now, now that I am reading it as an adult, the dark undertones of Roald Dahl's stories. The BFG and George's Marvellous Medicine, especially the latter, had plenty of those. This collection also included Matilda which I enjoyed a whole lot as a kid, but now that I am forced to look back on the stories I enjoyed as a kid with an adult's perspective, I discovered that Matilda wasn't all that happy fantasy that I used to think it was either.

Originally published on Unravellations Reviews.

I borrowed this from my friend because I was interested in finding out more about the Borgias. The television show aside, any one who has studied or taken an interest in history or early modern Europe would not have been able to avoid the mention of the house of Borgia, more specifically Lucrezia Borgia, who has gone down in the annals of time as a femme fatale. Otherwise, you may have heard of Cesare Borgia, widely speculated to have been the inspiration for the figure of Jesus in paintings (a highly ironic premise, to say the least, considering his real personality and misdeeds). Nevertheless, the Borgias have been renowned for some reason or other through the centuries and I was curious to find out why.

The book begins with a long and rather tedious introduction into the Catholic church. It wasn't immediately apparent to me why they had to go into cardinals and Popes and the convocation of electing a new Pope when one died. I have to say, I almost gave up at that point. But I persevered and finally saw my first Borgia mentioned a few chapters in. Roderigo Borgia was an up and coming cardinal, handsome and knew where to make his alliances. The book continued plodding on about the politics within the Catholic church, none of which was particularly memorable to me. I also got very very confused with all the Italian names mentioned. Finally, finally, when Roderigo Borgia was elected Pope, that's when the real action starts.

Unlike previous Popes, who would masquerade their illegitimate children (vow of celibacy, remember?) as their nephews and nieces, Roderigo Borgia, or better known as Pope Alexander VI, paraded his illegitimate offspring publicly. He boosted his eldest son Cesare in the profession of the church, making him a cardinal, and somehow or other bestowed titles or negotiated advantageous marriages for all his other children. Cesare later resigns his cardinalship and concentrates on being the military general of the church, a post which allows him to sleep around more freely than he could as a cardinal. He marries, but spends most of his time away from his wife, sleeping with whoever he wanted and constantly contracting syphilis. The Pope himself also had his fair share of syphilis throughout his life. Through the book, Cesare impressed me with being something of a dickhead. He has no hesitation murdering, raping and plundering whoever or whatever village he saw fit. When he sacked various cities in Italy in the name of the church, the atrocity of the crimes his soldiers wreaked upon the local natives made me very uncomfortable. Young girls being raped and then murdered, or women who were raped and then robbed of their jewellery, getting their fingers chopped off if they refused to give up their rings. ALL THIS MADE ME VERY UNCOMFORTABLE. Worse still that all the perpetrators of this violence was closely associated with the Catholic church.

Also, part of the reason why I was interested in the Borgias was because of Lucrezia. Her name has reached a level of fame that neither her father nor her brother has, and I was curious to know why. I don't know if the author was particularly biased towards her, and I probably should read up more about her from other authors before I form a more solid opinion on her, but she appears to have done nothing in the least bit as heinous as her brother and father have. She marries at least 3 times, her first 2 husbands ending up either deposed or murdered. But she's not the one who plots to depose or murder them. Her second husband, in fact, was apparently murdered by her brother because the alliance with him no longer served a purpose. According to Hibbert, Lucrezia was mad with grief from it, but there was nothing much she could do, given the limited amount of infleunce women had at the time. There were rumours of incest between her, her brother and her father as well. It does seem a little strange to me that her brother, being as violent and tyrannical as he is painted to be, should have such a soft spot for his sister, even going out of his way to visit her when she fell severely ill after a botched delivery. It also seems strange to me that Lucrezia, despite probably knowing that her brother was behind the murder of her husband, should still remain so close and affectionate towards him. But well... I guess we'll never know. Even if Lucrezia was guilty of incest towards her brother and even her father, I don't see it as a crime remotely on the same level as the violence and tyranny that Alexander VI and Cesare wreaked upon Rome and Italy at the time.

After Pope Alexander VI's death (with descriptions of his gruesome funeral), things went quickly downhill for the Borgias. Cesare made the mistake of attempting to ally himself with the next powerful Pope (discounting Pius III), Pope Julius II, who has long held a grudge against the Borgias for exiling him. As a result, the Romagna empire that he had built for himself went crumbling to the ground within a short span of time and he eventually died in battle. Lucrezia did not long survive him.

All in all, the book was uncomfortable to read but did give me a much better idea of the Borgias. I would recommend sticking it through till after Roderigo Borgia gets elected Pope. It does get better, I promise. I am interested in finding out more about the Borgias, but I don't think I'll read this one again.

I first picked up Wilkie Collins's The Woman In White many, many years ago under the misinformed assumption that it was a Victorian horror story. (I may also have mixed it up with Susan Hill's The Woman In Black...) How wrong I was. After the titular woman in white appeared and after it was certainly established that she was a very real human being, I put the book away with such disappointment that I think I've lost my original copy.

Fast forward to the present, I have developed a better taste for classic literature and wanted to revisit The Woman In White even if it may not involve supernatural beings. I started with listening to the free audiobook from LibriVox and got so caught up in the narrative that I had to continue with the book. This time, I was very far from disappointed!

The first thing I noticed about this book is the amount of foreshadowing and suspense used. According to Wikipedia, “it is considered to be among the first mystery novels and is widely regarded as one of the first in the genre of sensation novels”, so perhaps it was the first novel that used foreshadowing in the way that we commonly associate it with today. It's a novel told from the first-person perspective of many different characters (all somewhat unreliable narrators) in the story, and usually written at a later date, so the characters always refer to some mysterious unknown later event like: “Thank God I agreed, after what would happen later.” It made me want to just skip to the ending and find out what happened, but I persevered.

This book takes a while to warm up, though. The half, I would say, is spent mostly in expositing background story, establishing characters and just paving the way for the excitement that was to come. I don't know if it will be to everyone's tastes, but I enjoyed it. This is my first time reading a novel by Wilkie Collins and I'm rather taken in by his writing style. It's humourous, it's satirical and it's powerful in terms of evoking emotions. Once you pass the halfway mark and when things start coming to a head, however, the book becomes a real page-turner. I took about 1.5 weeks to get through the first half (mostly by audiobook when I'm driving), and less than 2 days to finish the second half. In fact, I have to confess that I stayed up till 6.45am this morning just trying my utmost best to finish the book because I want to find out the damned ending!! (In the end, I gave up and went to bed, but finished it the next day at about 6pm)

Of the characters, my favourite has got to be Marian Halcombe. I was rooting for her from the very beginning, though Walter Hartright (our first and main narrator) described her as looking almost like a man. She is the heroine of the book, through and through. Although the mystery and adventure centers around her pretty half-sister Laura Fairlie's interests, I felt not even half as much interest in her. Laura Fairlie came across to me as a bit of a Mary-Sue, and I would even go so far as to feel that she was a little dim-witted. The two characters that got on my nerves the most were Mr. Frederick Fairlie, Laura's rich uncle, and Sir Percival Glyde. In Mr. Fairlie's case, he is one of the most self-centered characters I've come across in a while. Other malevolent characters may also act purely in their own self-interest, but for Mr. Fairlie, he is both indolent and self-centered, which meant that he doesn't act for anything at all. Somehow, that irritates me even more than active malevolence. At least in a book. As for Sir Percival, to list out his wrongdoings might be to spoil the plot a little so I won't do so here. Suffice it to say that he's the worst sort of coward.

On one hand, I would say that Marian Halcombe presented an interestingly feminist portrayal of a woman. In the Victorian times, the “ideal” woman would be someone like Laura Fairlie - pretty, somewhat empty-headed and can't do anything to save herself. Marian Halcombe is none of these things. She is confident, intelligent, affectionate and also incredibly resourceful and courageous in adversity. This portrayal is probably why I always found myself firmly in #TeamMarian, but yet the way she kept belittling her own sex and being described by others as “being like a man” or “looking like a man” disturbed me a little. She would keep saying, “even though I am a helpless woman”, “even those these hands are a woman's”, etc. as if to acknowledge that she is frustrated with being a woman and feels restricted by her own gender. I would like to see a woman who is comfortable with herself and her gender, and then to be independent by her own right, and not because she resembles a man, but I guess I have to make allowances for the time that this book was written, and the fact that the author was a man.

For a Marian Halcombe with an arguably feminist portrayal of a woman, there are always the Laura Fairlies and the Madame Foscos that reverse this feminist portrayal. Laura is pretty much always helpless, relying either on Marian or Walter Hartright to save the day. Madame Fosco, meanwhile, went from being a headstrong, opinionated and outspoken girl with feminist ideas that Laura and Marian remember from their childhood (she is Laura's aunt), to being a completely submissive wife with literally no mind of her own. She always looks to her husband for instructions and is completely at her husband's disposal and leisure. Neither kith nor kin had any hold on her if her husband said to the contrary.

I found the ending of the book satisfying, though I have read reviews from people who found it rather anticlimactic. However, keeping in mind the social context in which the book was written, I would say that the Secret is sufficiently shocking enough in that time and era, even if it may not be so today.

I also read someone on Goodreads saying that Wilkie Collins is a double-edged author. If The Woman In White doesn't get you, The Moonstone will. Well, I have already purchased The Moonstone in readiness, as well as No Name. I can't wait to dig into more of his work!

Spoiler section:
I was incredibly frustrated with the Walter/Laura love-line. I can find no basis for such deep and lasting affection besides Laura being such a pretty young thing. I suppose I am affected and influenced by our modern ways and mindsets, as well as my own slight dislike for Laura. I confess I was rooting for a change in the wind and the ending to become Walter/Marian, but I wasn't optimistic. Fidelity in mind and in action was utmost in Victorian novels, and since Walter had carried his flame for Laura for a whole year despite his self-imposed exile to Central America, I knew it was hardly likely that he would suddenly change his object to Marian instead (unless Laura died - but even then, that's doubtful). Even more so in the last third of the book, when Walter and Marian are engaging in all these secret to-dos to bring down their enemies, they were so reliant and dependent on each other, they understood each other so perfectly, while Laura was basically treated (and enjoyed being treated) like a child. I was so frustrated!Laura had zero input in the entire adventure. The only few times she had a backbone and I had some semblance of respect for her was when she opposed Sir Percival in the signing of the legal document, and when she opposed him again in supposedly following Marian back to Limmeridge. It just struck me that Laura was actually incredibly like Anne Catherick, not just physically but also mentally as well. They described Anne as being half-witted and incredibly fixated on ideas once they got into her head. Perhaps Laura isn't quite as half-witted as Anne, but she never seemed to show any kind of quickness of wits or intelligence as Marian does. Also, Laura was incredibly devoted to Marian (the few times she opposed Sir Percival was either instigated by Marian, or for her own concern about her) as well as to Walter, much like how Anne was devoted to Mrs. Fairlie even though she had only met her briefly once, and forever wore white simply because Mrs. Fairlie had said she looked nice in it. So I guess Laura and Anne actually shared more similarities than simply the physical resemblance that was acknowledged in the book.Regarding Sir Percival's shameful secret, I tried to imagine it in a modern context: a CEO who got his position by forging his credentials. A current reigning monarch (enjoying riches and taxes from the people) discovered to be an illegitimate child and having forged his/her parents' wedding certificate to claim the throne. Seeing as the aristocracy back then were always well-off and lived in the lap of luxury without doing a day's work in their lives, and how Sir Percival had claimed his place amongst this class by illegal means, I can see how and why this Secret would've been seen as a shocking one at the time the book was published.

Originally published on Unravellations.

I wish this book had a more interesting cover. In any case, the mystery was an interesting premise, and easily the best thing about the book.

It starts off with Bobby Jones having a game of golf with his friend (I had to wiki an inside joke here - he was most probably named after a famous American golfer in the 20's and 30's) and hits a ball off the edge onto a sharp drop. He discovers an unconscious man who seems to have fallen off earlier. His friend, also conveniently a doctor, checks the man and pronounces that there's no hope for him, and then rushes off to get help. Bobby is left to stand guard. The dying man recovers his consciousness for only a glimmer of a moment, just enough time to pronounce (dramatically, I imagine) the enigmatic titular phrase: “Why didn't they ask Evans?” and then dies.

Bobby then goes off with his childhood friend Lady Frances Derwent, better known as Frankie, to uncover the mystery.

Characters and some plot elements were a little cliched (feisty rich girl, feisty poor boy, sinister people, un-sinister people whose motives you still question, misunderstandings, dangerous situations, eventual romance). Still, it kept me reading through all the way to the end. The cast of characters isn't large, so if you've been reading too much Agatha Christie like me, you've probably suspected any and all the characters at some point or other, so while the ending and solution wasn't a huge surprise, I have to give props to Christie's expert manipulation of the readers' suspicions to bluff and double bluff and triple bluff us.

I also love how Christie uses such a seemingly trivial phrase like: “Why didn't they ask Evans?” to keep the whole plot together. It's really one of her signature styles. When the whole adventure begins, more and more suspects are introduced (but not a single one named Evans) and a whole mystery is unravelling but this phrase is never fully explained - right till the end of the book.

“There's one thing you must tell me,” said Frankie. “I've been driven nearly mad with curiosity. Who is Evans?”“Oh!” said Bassington-ffrench. “So you don't know that?”He laughed–and laughed again.

This exchange happens on page 241 of 279, so you can imagine how late we find out the identity of this mysterious Evans. But when we do, it ties in everything so nicely and everything makes perfect sense.

P.S. I also love the name Bassington-ffrench. Double lowercase f's are so quirky.

Originally posted on Unravellations.

Endless Night is a relatively unknown piece of work from Agatha Christie, or at least it was to me. I'd never heard of it before, and I only found the title when I was desperate and searching through lists to find more interesting Christies to read. I'm so glad I did.

It's a first-person narrative told by the main character, Michael Rogers, one of your typical young men who can't seem to hold down a job, and simply want to spend their time as a ‘rolling stone' (someone who floats here, there, everywhere with no goal or purpose in life). We first meet him when he is rhapsodizing about a beautiful piece of land in a small town, Kingston Bishop, with a house on it called Gipsy's Acre. He is warned by a local gipsy, Mrs. Lee, that he has bad luck and should get away from Gipsy's Acre as soon as possible. However, there, he meets a girl by accident, Ellie, and they soon fall in love and get married. It soon turns out that Ellie is not just a rich girl, but a tremendously rich girl, one of the richest in America, in fact.

They buy the land and house at Gipsy's Acre, pull down the old house and build a new one, designed by his friend, Rudolf Santonix. The gipsy, Mrs. Lee, repeats her warnings to Ellie, and begins to visit Gipsy's Acre occasionally to deliver the same threats and warnings to Ellie to leave the house and property. More and more characters begin flitting in and out of the narrative at this point, mostly Ellie's relations though they are not related to her by blood. One of them even flits in to settle in their new marriage home, Greta Andersen, a half-Swedish Valkyrie of a girl who served as Ellie's companion and on whom Ellie is largely dependent on. However, strange things begin to happen at Gipsy's Acre, and Michael and Ellie begin to wonder if the curse is true.

So far, the whole premise of the story doesn't seem to have an ounce of mystery in it. In fact, the actual mystery only comes into view rather late in the book, but it is testament to Christie's writing that she is able to create a thick atmosphere of suspense and tension throughout the narrative despite there being nothing actually unusual happening. Every character left me guessing as to what their motives were, whether it was Ellie's pretentious stepmother, or even her shrewd lawyer, Mr. Lippincott. Everyone seemed to be hiding secrets. Christie expertly conveyed through a narrative in which nothing much actually happens the falseness of the veneer of tranquility and bliss in the newlyweds' country life, as well as the sense of something sinister just beneath the surface.

I felt also that Christie paid a lot more attention to character development in this book. The first half of the book or more felt like a case study on the social and psychological aftermath of a poor man who happened to fall in love with and marry a rich girl. She fleshed out the psyche of the main character, Michael Rogers, rather well. I liked that it differed from her usual style of concentrating largely on the mystery at hand rather than the characters involved. Here, I felt that I understood their human predicaments much better than her usual sort of characters. One thing to note, as well, is that Christie is a lot less censored in this book. She talks about, mentions and alludes to sex more than she usually does, and even uses ‘bitch' a few times. It added to the freshness of the tone of this book.

But the mystery also did not disappoint! I had a fleeting idea of the true solution at some point halfway through, but had immediately dismissed the idea as impossible and had nurtured other more likely hypotheses. I was then happily bamboozled by the plot twists that came thick and fast at the last lap of the book, feeling that urge to go back and re-read certain segments of the book that would now be read in a different light now that I know the solution - and this urge is always a good sign.

This book had a very good mixture of two things: first, the comforting familiarity of Agatha Christie's style of mystery, intrigue, as well as the reassurance that the ending is going to be something really unexpected, and therefore I didn't feel too much like I was wandering into disturbingly unknown territory; secondly, a freshness despite the familiarity in the way the narrative was handled. It was undoubtedly an Agatha Christie style, but yet it was still surprisingly a breath of fresh air from her usual formula, which I have gotten used to by now, having consistently read most of her books over the past year.

Absolutely loved it. I wonder why it's not more well-known!

Halfway through the book, I began to wonder if it was Michael that was the source of all this sinisterness, much in the line of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I dismissed the idea because, while in Ackroyd, the narrator was a detached observer and more of an investigator for the central mystery, Michael here was an involved narrator, getting not only physically but also emotionally and mentally into the heart of things. However, I hadn't considered the possibility that he might have been lying, or been putting on a show before he finally confessed at the end.I did actually suspect that he might've fallen in love with Greta when he met her for the first time, but was surprised when he didn't. I never thought he'd have met her earlier and then pretended to dislike her. For all his so-called devotion to Ellie, I was thoroughly shocked when he suddenly announced that he was going to marry Greta immediately after Ellie's funeral in America. Even then, I had no suspicions. I simply thought that he had transferred his affections quickly and suddenly, as sometimes characters in Christie do (I'm always amazed at how quickly they can fall in love and get married to one another). It never occured to me that Christie was going to pull a Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill with Michael and Greta.I had initially suspected Santonix, since he was described as having a streak of evil in him, but I suppose he was meant to have shown what might have happened if Michael had instead "gone the other way", i.e. the other shop, the way of good. Dedicated himself, as Santonix had, to a proper profession or career. Perhaps he may even have achieved the success and recognition that Santonix did.Then I had also suspected Claudia Hardcastle, because of the cigarette lighter that she had left in the Folly, and the fact that she had been married to Ellie's banker, Lloyd. I was really shocked when Claudia went down on her horse as well. It took me a while to figure out why she was even killed at all, but then I remember that bit in the solution where they mentioned that she smoked in the Folly and happened to see a capsule left over there when Michael and Greta had prepared to murder Ellie, and had probably guessed the whole thing.

Originally published on Unravellations.

I'm not sure what made me pick up this book, so different as it is from my usual reading. However, it wasn't a bad choice at all. Books That Changed The World is basically a comprehensive list of books that have asserted a great influence on thought and literature, and Andrew Taylor also provides concise and relevant background information regarding the time period and culture that the book was written and published in. He does not center his list around books of literary importance, also including those of scientific, philosophical and political importance.

I like that he also disclaimed in his introduction that this list was, of course, subjective and that it was his own take of what were the most influential books in history. If this disclaimer had been missing, I would have things to say about the subjectivity and Eurocentric view of history the book posits. In any case, he also provides evidence of the influence that each book enjoys and how it has altered humans' way of thinking over time.

Confession: I did skip past certain books that I wasn't interested in, particularly the ones on economics but also some others. Nevertheless, I gleaned plenty of interesting facts and cleared up some of my own misconceptions about certain books (especially the Greco-Roman classics which I am very unfamiliar with) along the way. For example, I never knew that the Kama Sutra was actually an unillustrated volume of text, and much like the rest of the world, I had thought it only to be some kind of kinky sex manual. I was enlightened on this point. I did not know also that before William Harvey's groundbreaking work on hemology, men thought that an infinite supply of blood was made from the liver. I also learned that William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge paved the way for poetry as it is written today, an intimate way of looking at human experience, and that before Lyrical Ballads was published, poetry were usually story-like epics dealing with philosophy, religion or history, such as in Iliad or Paradise Lost.

The only complaint that I have, I guess, isn't really much of a complaint - I was spoiled for Madame Bovary before I even read it! :( If there are any books on the list that you have yet to read and want to remain un-spoilt, I would recommend that you skip its relevant chapter in this book. Taylor provides a short synopsis of each book's plot, which may reveal important plot points.

Contents:
1. Homer - Iliad (c. 8th century)
2. Herodotus - The Histories (c. 5th century BC)
3. Confucius - The Analects (5th century BC)
4. Plato - The Republic (4th century BC)
5. The Bible (2nd century BC - 2nd century AD)
6. Horace - Odes (23 - 13 BC)
7. Ptolemy - Geographia (c. AD 100 - 170)
8. Mallanaga Vatsyayana - Kama Sutra (2nd or 3rd century AD)
9. The Qu'ran (7th century)
10. Avicenna - Canon of Medicine (1025)
11. Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales (1380s-90s)
12. Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince (1532)
13. Gerard Mercator - Atlas, or, Cosmographic Meditations (1585-95)
14. Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote (1605-15)
15. William Shakespeare - First Folio (1623)
16. William Harvey - An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (1628)
17. Galileo Galilei - Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632)
18. Isaac Newton - Principia mathematica (1687)
19. Samuel Johnson - A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)
20. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
21. Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations (1776)
22. Thomas Paine - Common Sense (1776)
23. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Lyrical Ballads (1798)
24. Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice (1813)
25. Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol (1843)
26. Karl Marx - The Communist Manifesto (1848)
27. Herman Melville - Moby-Dick (1851)
28. Harriet Beecher Stowe - Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
30. Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary (1857)
31. Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species (1859)
32. John Stuart Mill - On Liberty (1859)
33. Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace (1869)
34. New Haven District Telephone Company - The Telephone Directory (1878)
35. Sir Richard Burton (translator) - The Thousand and One Nights (1885)
36. Arthur Conan Doyle - A Study in Scarlet (1888)
37. Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)
38. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1905)
39. Wilfred Owen - Poems (1920)
40. Albert Einstein - Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (1920)
41. James Joyce - Ulysses (1922)
42. D. H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)
43. John Maynard Keynes - The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
44. Primo Levi - If This is a Man (1947)
45. George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)
46. Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex (1949)
47. J. D. Salinger - The Catcher In The Rye (1951)
48. Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart (1958)
49. Rachel Carson - Silent Spring (1962)
50. Mao Zhedong - Quotations from Chairman Mao (1964)
51. J. K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)

One thing that I realised from reading this book, however, is that there is usually great resistance and controversy whenever a new revelation is made that contradicts everything that people at that time thought to be true, as in the case of medical experts denouncing William Harvey for his discovery of the way blood is circulated, or the Catholic Church's anger and rejection of Galileo's heliocentric theories on astronomy, or even the ban on D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, the overturning of which paving the way for the modern attitude to sexual openness.

It makes me question the things that we consider “controversial” and defying reason in our time and age. Would they one day also become known as works of genius or progressive thought, and the rest of us derided by posterity for our backward thinking?

This is more of a collection of random Agatha Christie short mystery/suspense stories. They were entertaining enough, but I found that most of them tended to revolve around the same few plot lines. For example, “The Girl In The Train” and “Mr Eastwood's Adventure” revolved around a genteel young man who is cast out by a rich older relation and gets into a scrape of sorts, and finds himself making his fortune through the exact same ‘unexpected' way (won't spoil it for people). Then “The Rajah's Emerald” and “The Manliness of Edward Robinson” revolved around jewellery (it's always jewellery if it's not money or an inheritance in Agatha Christie) that are misplaced in the exact same manner. The very similar plot lines and undeveloped characters lead me to wonder if these were almost a sort of reject pile for Agatha Christie. That is not to say that they weren't entertaining though.

“The Listerdale Mystery” and “Philomel Cottage” were the stand-out stories for me, especially the latter. I even went to Google the story after that because the ending was rather uncharacteristically ambiguous, but I liked the whole air of horrific suspense throughout. It was a little reminiscent of an Edgar Allen Poe short story.

“Jane In Search Of A Job” reminded me strongly of The Case of the Red-Headed League in the Sherlock Holmes canon at its beginning, but later it panned out in a very different way and I enjoyed it too.

Originally published on Unravellations.

It was all right. I skipped over some pages with what I found to be unnecessary details. Not sure if I'm just an impatient mystery reader or if I'm just not used to Wentworth's style of writing. I've been reading tons of Agatha Christie before, so while there are elements of similarity, the narrative style and plot structure are significantly different.

The mystery in itself was somewhat interesting. I agreed with the main character Hilary when she said, “Too many alibis all over the place”. A man is shot ostensibly by his favourite nephew, the case is closed and said nephew has already served his jail sentence for a year before the action of the novel begins. I found that the details of the mystery was repeated just a tad too much, though. I get that things have to be clarified and details emphasized for the reader (also so they might have a go at picking out fishy loopholes for themselves), but I found myself skipping pages because the repetitions were getting tedious and boring.

Regarding the characters, we have Hilary, who is this nephew's cousin-in-law, and her on-and-off-again fiance Henry Cunningham, are the main characters. Hilary and Henry's relationship dynamics tended toward a chauvinist male and trying-to-be-spunky-but-failing female which was a common enough trope in the 1940s, but it wasn't overly irritating to me. I particularly remember a line where Wentworth described Hilary as having flashes of thoughts about the inquest: “There was of course no logic in this, but Hilary had not a very logical mind.” Couple this with the fact that Hilary is impulsive and reckless, apparently heedless of potential dangerous situations, constantly getting herself into scrapes, and then generally requiring the assistance of her man, Henry, to get her back to safety... I guess I shouldn't expect much more from a novel from the 40's.

Miss Silver only appears in the middle of the book. While Christie's detectives tend to have some point of interest or memorable quirk that engages me and gives me a pleasant pattern to look forward to in future stories, Miss Silver appears to have none of these. I don't mean to say that Christie's detectives are the only allowable type of detective characters, but I found nothing about Miss Silver to engage me or make me interested in reading more of her cases. The plot and action really revolves around the main characters, who certainly won't be recurring in other novels and therefore also give me no reason for me to continue.

My review sounds unfavourable so far, but the book redeemed itself in enough moments of suspense and excitement. The plot twists were somewhat good, though few in number. Though some points about the two main characters chafed me, it wasn't to the point where I found them outright annoying and difficult to swallow. Miss Silver was almost a non-entity besides providing an input for plot twists, so while she made little impression on me, she didn't annoy me either. I'm not sure whether I will continue to read more Miss Silver stories, I would recommend this book for those who love mystery stories from this era.

Originally published on Unravellations.While I was reviewing [b:Death on a Pale Horse: Sherlock Holmes on Her Majesty's Secret Service 14458877 Death on a Pale Horse Sherlock Holmes on Her Majesty's Secret Service (Sherlock Holmes, #6) Donald Thomas https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1346415560s/14458877.jpg 20101318], my attention was frequently directed to what a lot of reviewers viewed as a superior Sherlock Holmes canon extension - this book: The House of Silk, by Anthony Horowitz. Luckily, I had already borrowed it from the library and had lined it up behind Death On A Pale Horse on my reading list.In many ways, The House of Silk would definitely come up as superior if you're a bit of a purist. This is a good old-fashioned Sherlock Holmes romp, with our dear bungling narrator Dr. Watson, Holmes landing himself in trouble, the story setting never leaving England (unlike Death On A Pale Horse) and barely leaving London, a quest to uncover what lies behind a secret conspiracy and all that. I was very entertained throughout, and the plot chugs along at a pace, never leaving a boring moment.There are two things I'd like to point out about The House of Silk, though.Firstly, like most other spin-offs of famous works, there is a self-conscious way in which defining characteristics of Holmes are brought up, or canon stories are mentioned to. For example, the novel begins with Holmes deducing Watson's thoughts, Watson exclaiming at the devilry of it all, Holmes explaining his logical processes, and Watson finally admitting that it was simplicity itself. This famous scene from the canon is so frequently used in spin-offs, adaptations and anything depicting Sherlock Holmes that I could honestly have done without it. It was done once, and brilliantly, in the original books. Enough of that. It is too fantastical to assume that such a specific scene could be replicated so many times in real life between two people. If I had been Watson, if Holmes tried to intrude upon our thoughts in such a manner for the second time, I certainly wouldn't have been as surprised and incredulous as the first time, and would've been less than polite in extricating his methods from him. In my opinion, if a spin-off work aims to fit itself into a canon chronology of an original work, then it should note that these little references and scenes, of which the original work is famous for, is really unlikely to happen again at another time period, even if one would've liked to use it as a signifier that hey, this is the famous mind-reading Sherlock Holmes that we're writing about.Secondly - and this isn't a negative point this time - Horowitz injects certain points of reflections in the story which I found interesting. In the novel, Watson is supposed to be writing about this adventure of the House of Silk from his declining years, when his wife, all his friends, including Lestrade and Holmes, have passed on. As such, it is realistic to assume that Watson would be looking back with a broader perspective of a wizened elderly man, so I liked this bit. It also served as a reason for Horowitz to criticize Doyle and the times he lived in. The poignant reflections I can remember off hand are: 1) the state of the London child beggars, treated as part of the streets itself and handled almost thoughtlessly by Doyle in the canon; 2) the personality of Lestrade, described as incompetent by Doyle, but Horowitz redeems him here and portrays him not only as being effective and resourceful for someone who doesn't have a brain like Holmes's, but also someone who, though he is frequently a mildly antagonistic competitor, is also a firm ally of Holmes to the end; and 3) the flitting presence of Mrs Hudson throughout the canon - Horowitz's interpretation of Watson acknowledges that he barely took the time to get to know his landlady and didn't know much about her beyond her showing in clients at Baker Street. I enjoyed reading these little points, though it pertains to the author's own interpretation and criticism of the Holmes canon, but it ended a nice extra dimension and food for thought for fans reading this book.Although the revelation that the House of Silk was actually some sort of whore-house where young homeless boys were presumably forced into prostitution, I thought that was a slightly disappointing resolution. Perhaps it had to do with my expectations being something along the lines of an international criminal syndicate, which would run closer to the Holmes canon. Doyle rarely, if ever, wanders to the particular part of London that deals with sex crimes and sex-related vices. However, I acknowledge that such a concept is conceivable for the Victorian era; though they prided themselves on morality, such a strait-laced society bred a lot of perverseness.I enjoyed the ending where surprise after surprise comes in. Along with Watson, I was also duped into thinking Dr Silkin's House of Wonders was where the answer to the mystery lay. I also believed that Holmes escaped prison by hiding in a coffin exiting the prison mortuary. Being befuddled and told I was wrong is always good in any mystery novel. The Carstairs mystery was at once mystifying but also obvious. I knew something was wrong with either Edmund or Catherine Carstairs (or both) from the beginning, but I couldn't make up my mind what. At the beginning, I found Catherine Carstairs suspicious because of how she happened to enter the exact same room that the burglary took place, and she conveniently lost her key. Perhaps readers were meant to feel that way. Later on, when she comes to Watson telling him about her sister in law Eliza Carstairs's illness, I began to wonder if it was perhaps Edmund Carstairs that was the suspicious character, secretly poisoning his own sister. After all, the street urchin Ross recognised Edmund Carstairs and feared him. I thought Edmund was the one who had killed Keelan O'Donaghue, through some elaborate scheme. It was only when we returned to the Carstairs at the very end of the novel, after the House of Silk is revealed, that I suddenly made the link that Edmund must've been a patron of the House of Silk, before Holmes explained it in the narrative. That part didn't catch me by surprise. The bit about his wife actually being Keelan O'Donaghue did, though! I had no expectation of that, maybe because I may have missed a description talking about how Keelan was slimmer in stature and so on. The part about poisoning her sister in law by her bath salts was also interestingly novel, though I'm not quite sure if it is physiologically possible.All in all, I would recommend this book for lovers of mystery novels, and especially those who are already fans of the Holmes canon. It wouldn't disappoint.

Originally published on Unravellations.

I have been strongly attracted to this cover for some time, but the reviews on Goodreads didn't seem great so I had passed up on this book until I decided to throw caution to the winds and give it a go.

One of the most major problems about this book is the overload of information and details. It is clear that Thomas knows his stuff about English military history, and even other things like the anatomy of a paddle steamer and how its crew work. He shows it, and he shows it abundantly. The first third of the book was honestly a bit of a drag because it detailed specific battles that the English army fought in Zululand and other places in South Africa. Of course, these battles were central to the main plot line, which was that of Col. Rawdon Moran (brother of the infamous Sebastian Moran) being a background puppeteer of all these spectacular English defeats in South Africa. But I felt the language here far too technical, and it lost my attention many times. I fairly skipped over paragraphs and paragraphs of strategies and men being killed in the carnage of war. Names were thrown around that never had any relevance to the central plot, and only served to confuse me further. I almost gave up at this point. However, I persevered and was rewarded for my determination.

When I was wading through the military history bits of the novel, though, I decided to look up this whole period in history on Wikipedia. I was fairly sure that it was inspired by real-life historical events, and I was right. Reading up on the death of the Prince Imperial Louis Napoleon of France, as well as that of his main escort, Captain Jahleel Brenton Carey, certainly helped a lot in the understanding of plot events that unfolded after. If I hadn't, I would be even more lost than I was.

I was also pleasantly surprised at some of the plot twists, like the Rev. Dordonan actually being Major Putney-Wilson, and Josh Sellon turning up dead. Thomas also likes to weave in a sort of timeline into the story. This entire case was supposed to have happen shortly after Holmes and Watson meet, so there were some brief mentions of the “Brixton Road mystery”, Mary Morstan and a commissionaire who featured in a small role in one of the earlier cases, Albert Gibbons, makes a bigger appearance. I was neutral about this timeline thing – it wasn't a distraction, but it wasn't necessary either.I also thought Mycroft Holmes served up a deus ex machina, revealing a large part of the backstory when he appears halfway through the investigation. I thought the rivalry between Mycroft and Sherlock slightly too overstated in this book, though. Whatever rivalry there was in the original canon, it was kept very subtle and under wraps. Here, Sherlock looks at his brother “coldly” and Mycroft comes across as a pompous know-it-all.Watson, being our faithful narrator as always, remains completely in the dark most of the time. It is good and well that us readers remain in the dark with him, which is the whole point of him being a narrator. Plot twists were not so easily guessable that we would think Watson being deliberately obtuse. At one point in the story, Watson receives a ciphered telegram from Holmes, which he takes about 2 pages of soliloquy just to decipher. While I like that Watson shows his struggles as a mere mortal with a brain that works at a normal speed, but this also exemplifies the problem with Thomas's writing. There is just too much detail. A few lines would've sufficed to let the reader understand how much problems Watson encounters with the cipher, rather than pen down his stream of consciousness.

Luckily, I found that his writing, during the more exciting parts of the book, was sufficiently in tune with that of Arthur Conan Doyle's, so much so that sometimes I forgot that I'm not actually reading an original Sherlock Holmes story. This in itself is a great plus point for me, though it didn't mean that I managed to sit through every word in the novel. I would certainly pick up more of Donald Thomas's books in the future, and in fact I have already borrowed another one from his Lost Sherlock series, Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly. I would still try out more of Thomas's books, in the sanguine hope that if his stories didn't center so much around military history, they would read better.

Originally published in Unravellations.

Since this is my very first introduction to the Inspector Pitt series, I get this feeling that I've missed out a lot, but the book explains its own sprawling backdrop and history pretty well and I never found myself confused, though I did find myself extremely curious. I am going to set about tracking down the very first novel in the series once I work my way through the pile of library books I've borrowed and need to finish.

As fate would have it, though, I think this book is a nice inflection point in the entire story arc as a whole to start off a new beginner with. Inspector Pitt has now been newly promoted to the Head of Britain's Special Branch (something like an internal security department) and consequently the problem(s) in this book have much more far-reaching political ramifications. Anne Perry wields her strong knowledge of the history of European politics to great effect here, and I am impressed and drawn in by the political web that she weaves around the central mystery. Now this is what I call a “stunning backdrop” to a piece of historical fiction, rich with exquisite detail but yet not overwhelming at the same time.

Allusions drawn to Inspector Pitt's past as well as the detective and policeman he used to be made me guess that perhaps books prior to this one would deal with more home-grown detective mysteries. As such, I'm pretty glad I started off with this book, because as a starter I can appreciate it on its own without comparing it to previous stories. I'm sure that my love for familiarity and my comfort zone would lead me to lament the more serious direction and political concerns that the plot arc has taken with this book. However, having started on this book and appreciating it for what it is, I can happily continue on chronologically with the Inspector Pitt series with all its political intrigues, and check out the earlier Inspector Pitt stories with its traditional detective mysteries. I'm really excited about both of these different threads.

Anne Perry's writing style is elegant and confident. She does not aim to make this novel sound like it came out of the Victorian era. Her language is generally modern, but written with a self-assured and well-practised hand so that it does not contrast too jarringly with the era she is writing about. Her focus is not on replicating the era itself in terms of linguistics, but in revolving around the human drama as well as the restricting hierarchies of society at that period. Her narrative style takes one into the minds of several different characters, jumping from Thomas Pitt, to his wife Charlotte, to his ex-boss Victor Narraway, to his aunt-in-law, Lady Vespasia, and so on. We are told the story from the perspectives of several different characters, and as such have a peek as to how they see the problem, themselves, and other characters, while also finding out what other characters think of them in turn. Though the narrative jumps around to different characters, I never found it confusing or hard to follow.

The plot in itself centers around what appears to be two different lines of mysteries. The first one is uncovered by Charlotte's aunt, Lady Vespasia, who is informed that her former friend and acquaintance, Serafina Montserrat, is unwell and unlikely to recover in her old age. She visits the ailing Mrs. Montserrat, who is not only suffering from the pangs of dementia, but also the paranoia and fear that she might let slip dangerous secrets in her memories to the wrong person when she is unaware of whom she is speaking to. The entire scene, describing the bitterness of aging for such a once-brilliant personage, was heartfelt and impactful. Lady Vespasia, however, is not inclined to completely dismiss Mrs. Montserrat's fears, although she mostly thinks it might just be pure fancy. She brings it forth to Victor Narraway, ex-Head of the Special Branch, who sets about doing his own investigative work just for the sake of having something to do, having lately resigned from a post he had held for 20 years previously.

Meanwhile, Thomas Pitt, now Commander of the Special Branch, is informed of some suspicious increase of interest regarding train signal points, and is led to believe that a possible assassination attempt might be made there against a minor Austrian Duke, due to visit England relatively soon. Though the Duke himself holds no political significance, but his assassination on English soil would carry with it widespread repercussions throughout Europe, with England at the heart of the mess. He finds trouble getting the Foreign Secretary, Lord Tregarron, to take his fears seriously. These two threads of mysteries seem wholly separate and irrelevant to each other at first, but as the book progresses, they are brought closer and closer to each until their intertwined nature and connection is revealed.

I particularly also love how Thomas Pitt encounters some very realistic problems with taking over a new, powerful position. His ex-boss, Victor Narraway, had held the position of Commander of the Special Branch for nearly 2 decades before him, and as such is given the respect that his post calls for. Thomas Pitt, however, finds that people generally think he might have been promoted before his time, and that he did not have what it takes to fill Narraway's shoes, which consequently raises self-doubt within him. Most interestingly, Pitt reflects that perhaps it might be his own humble beginnings as a son of a gamekeeper that had held him back in gaining the social standing that his post deserves, rather than experience and skill as people claim. Victor Narraway, after all, was born a gentleman, and after his retirement from the Special Branch, was inducted into the House of Lords. Indeed, various allusions as to social standing is drawn through the novel, giving the world Anne Perry creates yet another facet.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed this book, though admittedly it took me some time to really get into it. Once the momentum started though, it was impossible to put down. I would definitely be finding more of Anne Perry's books to read.

Originally published on Unravellations.

The Anatomist's Wife is a period mystery semi-romance novel set in 1830, Scotland. The writing was all right, wasn't tedious, though can sometimes be bogged down by superfluous descriptions or scenes that I scanned through and skipped over. The style of the narrative and dialogue were not particularly true to the era (I wouldn't expect most contemporary novelists to be able to pull that off anyway). In a sense, I was almost thankful that Huber didn't even try that hard to make the language more fitting for the time the story was set in. From what I've read so far, contemporary novelists who attempt that tend to fall flat on their faces and make it that much harder for me to digest the story. The characters were generally believable, most of them were not extremely in-depth or versatile, but they worked for what they were meant for. What's more important was the mystery! It kept true to its word, with the plot firmly centering around the mystery instead of sidelining it in favour of pursuing romantic subplots which some novels may do. The mystery itself, though not difficult (I guessed the solution at around 45% of the book, though it might have to do with me reading so much Agatha Christie recently), was at least intriguing and engaging enough to press me forward to finish the novel.

(Spoilers ahead!)

Lady Keira Darby is a painter, lives for painting and - shock shock horror horror - has no interest in men or romance! She entrusted her future partner to her father, who matched her up with Sir Anthony Darby, a famous anatomist. Sir Anthony really only bothered marrying her for her artistic talent, because he needed someone to help him illustrate his dissections and was too stingy to hire one. As such, Lady Darby was subjected to the shocking sights of cadavers in mid-autopsy, and the horrors of the dissection room, things that were absolutely taboo for women to have anything to do with. In fact, just the thought of murder was vulgar to women, much less anything else to do beyond death. Sir Anthony apparently didn't care two hoots about Lady Darby, and died soon after, leaving his wife in ignominy as it is uncovered by his former colleagues that she had been assisting him in his anatomical sketches. Lady Darby's reputation in high society is ruined, and she retires to her sister, Alana, Countess Cromarty's seat, Gairloch Castle in Scotland.Reticent and antisocial, Lady Darby wills herself to endure a house full of guests for her brother-in-law's sake, though most of them whisper spiteful comments about her unnatural disposition behind her back. She avoids them as much as possible, being sure that none of them miss the pleasure of her company anyway. On a fateful day, she hears a scream from within the garden maze and goes to investigate. It had been a Lady Lydia who screamed, and had fainted in the arms of her male companion. They had just discovered a body, that of a fellow guest at Gairloch Castle, Lady Godwin.It is abundantly clear that Lady Godwin had been brutally murdered, judging by the amount of blood on her dress and the gash on her neck. Servants are dispatched to fetch the magistrate, but by some legal procedure that could be either invented by Huber or one that I'm unaware of, it would've taken the magistrate at least 4 days to arrive at the Castle. In the meantime, Philip, Count Cromarty, engages the services of Mr. Sebastian Gage, yet another fellow guest in the house, to investigate the murder as his father is a celebrated investigative agent. Lady Darby has her misgivings about Mr. Gage, with his reputation as a rake in society, but is then privately asked by Philip to assist Gage in his investigations. Not wanting to disappoint her brother-in-law, and also wanting to restore the safety and security of Gairloch Castle for her sister, and clear her own name which had been unofficially smeared by the vile gossips running around the guests, Lady Darby agrees.The crux of this novel is supposed to be how Lady Darby uses her experiences as an anatomist's assistant to clear her name. However, there is only one murder in the entire story, and Lady Darby only sees the dead body once, and makes some pretty superficial deductions from it. The rest of the novel runs like any other murder mystery, uncovering clues and discovering what lies people have been telling. As the novel progresses, she deduces that: 1) Lady Godwin had been killed by a slit along the throat (I guess since there's a gaping gash at the throat, that's fairly obvious); 2) Lady Godwin had been struck along the eye shortly after death (because there was a bruise... At first, Lady Darby and Mr. Gage wonder if the murderer had a strong aggression towards Lady Godwin to have wanted to punch her in the eye after killing her, but Lady Darby later connects the kohl make-up on Lady Godwin's eyes with a similar black smudge found along the garden bench where her body was discovered, realising then that the bruise was caused by her body falling forward after her throat had been slit. Plausible, but not an impressive deduction); 3) Lady Godwin was expecting, and her baby was taken from her womb after she was killed (this was treated as the crowning glory of Lady Darby's deductions, though - seriously - anyone who was going to examine the body would've come to that conclusion any way, owing to a T-shaped jagged gash around her pelvic area, and a severed umbilical cord that Lady Darby spotted. It really wouldn't have taken much); 4) A different weapon was used to slit her throat, and then to open her womb (this could've been an important point and pointed to more than one person involved in this murder, but since Lady Darby could not give any firm answers as to whether certain potential murder weapons found had actually been the murder weapon. I get that she's not an experienced investigator, but still... unimpressive).I would say the gimmick about her being an anatomist's wife (or ex-wife, since the anatomist in question is dead) is mostly intended to give her a reason to be that shunned, mysterious beauty with torment and suffering in her past. She really doesn't use much anatomical knowledge throughout the entire novel to solve anything. It is possible that Huber isn't versed in anatomy herself, and didn't want to flounder with inaccurate information, opting instead to veer away from the subject all together. Personally, I think this was a good move. If Huber had managed the put in the anatomical bit well, it would've been the crowning glory of the book. However, if she had not been confident of being able to do it well, I would rather not have read any of it and taken the story simply as a murder mystery, instead of enduring ill-informed and inaccurate anatomical knowledge and information.The little romantic tension between Mr. Gage and Lady Darby, I could smell from a mile off. I knew it from the blurb already. There were plenty of cliches in this book, with Lady Darby being sexually pursued by a rogue, Lord Marsdale, and a rake, Mr. Gage. I wasn't sure what Lord Marsdale's pursuit of her was for, since nothing happened between them and he didn't add much to the plot besides being a suspect himself (though quickly cleared from the crime), making Mr. Gage jealous. Thankfully, the cliches were kept to tolerable levels and I didn't feel too bothered by them. I would've indeed rolled my eyes if there had been an irrelevant sex scene in there somewhere, but there wasn't. Mr. Gage, in fact, went away after the investigation after a poignant meeting with Lady Darby (electric eye contact!) at the end.(Speaking of electric eye contact, I remember reading a Goodreads reviewer say that he lost it after how Lady Darby described her hair as "my chestnut tresses" twice in two different chapters.)This was an OK book. I finished it within a night because I wanted to know if there might be any plot twists, and whether my guess at the solution was right. I scanned and skipped lots of passages in the second half as long as I was sure there wasn't anything relating to the murder happening (mostly to do with how everyone was victimizing Lady Darby and the increasing attraction between herself and Mr. Gage). It wasn't bad, but it wasn't particularly good either. I sympathized a bit with Lady Darby when she was being openly attacked by the other women in the house, but I didn't develop much attachment to her or any of the other characters. I may or may not pick up another Lady Darby novel in the future.

I am fast becoming a fan of Jasper Fforde's. The world that he imagines is just as crazy, vibrant and downright addictive. This time, the action is centered around Great Expectations, with some bonus scenes from Kafka's The Trial and Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. Miss Havisham from Great Expectations seems like she would become a recurring character in future books, while the Red Queen and the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland also make appearances.

The humour in this book was on-point for me, the characters were full of life and jumped out of the pages (ironic considering this book is all about jumping into books). Reading more Jasper Fforde novels are fast becoming a priority in life.

Enjoyed this book thoroughly, primarily due to the frolicking and engaging narrative voices of both protagonist Anne Beddingfield and secondary character, Sir Eustace Pedlar. Sometimes the adventure got a little too out of hand and I started to lose track of exactly which African city were our characters in now, or heading towards, but it didn't take away anything from the mystery and the plot.

Originally published in Unravellations.

I did not like it.

The plot was thin, the characters were unlikeable and unrelatable, everything was somewhat unrealistic, the dialogue was uninteresting and flat and it just didn't work. I was really excited to read it because it had such a luxurious-sounding title, the blurb sounded interesting and the cover was gorgeous. Unfortunately, though... Sigh. I won't write off Barbara Taylor Bradford just yet, because I've heard good things about the rest of her work, and how some reviewers say this book was an anomaly from her usual, but I was really quite disappointed and annoyed with this book, despite wanting to give it a fighting chance.

I don't like to write a negative review because I feel a sort of empathy towards authors. I'm not an author, nor am I even close to being one, but I love writing and have done a fair share of amateur writing myself, so I can at least appreciate how difficult it is to write an engaging novel while balancing all kinds of factors. No author would like to read a negative review of a work they've spent at least months preparing and writing for, and I empathize with that.However, since I'm writing a review, I might as well write my honest thoughts.This book was a let-down. I saw the reviews and ratings for it on Goodreads, but thought I shouldn't let others' opinions be my benchmark for how much I would enjoy a book. After all, it's not like I haven't enjoyed a book that's been negatively reviewed somewhere or others (hell, even Jane Austen has her own fair share of detractors). I started the book excited, being sucked into the glitz and glamourous world of the Inghams and the Swanns. I even took a used piece of paper and began to draw out a family tree just to keep track of who's who, how old they were and who's died and who hasn't. The Inghams are an aristocratic family living in their family seat of Cavendon Hall, while the Swanns are yet another family who have served the Inghams for centuries. Their current patriarch, Walter Swann, is valet to the 6th Earl of Mowbray, Charles Ingham.Then the awful event takes place that is so shouted about in the synopsis. Lady Daphne, Charle's beautiful 17 year old daughter, gets raped by a man, one of her neighbours and someone she knows, and on Ingham land. Honestly, I almost put the book down after this event. Trigger warning, please?! This came out of nowhere and I really don't enjoy reading about this subject matter. Nevertheless, I pressed on with the book, deciding to accept the event and see how the families deal with it. There's appropriate sorrow, grief, shame and all that, but everything seems very nicely resolved in the end. Charles and his wife, Felicity, only have kind words and love for Lady Daphne when they (eventually) find out about not only her rape, but her resulting pregnancy. Before her own parents find out about it, though, at least 3 members of the Swann family already has, and it is one of them, Charlotte, closest in age and platonic relationship to Charles, who breaks the news to the parents.Now, I don't know much about this period of English history, in the 1910s. But I'm pretty sure something as horrific as a rape on an Earl's daughter would have a whole lot more repercussions than it does in the book. Lady Daphne's rapist is Richard Torbett, of the Torbett family living neighbouring to Cavendon Hall. Her childhood best friend is Richard's youngest brother, Julian, who suddenly and very coincidentally dies soon after the rape, after an accident while horseriding. Because Richard has threatened to kill Lady Daphne's mother and her youngest 5 year old sister if any word of his identity is breathed, Lady Daphne conveniently pushes the blame onto Julian, recently deceased. What? As if it's not enough that this whole thing happened, she was willing to sully a childhood best friend's name? A childhood best friend who was actually happily engaged to another girl before his untimely death. She could've easily denied it was Julian and said she didn't see the identity of the other man, if she was afraid of Richard's threats. It's not even that their friendship has cooled and distanced, as she had been to Julian's house to visit and was raped on her way back to Cavendon Hall. I just don't understand.Meanwhile, there's a new maidservant in Cavendon Hall, Peggy Smith, who has the hots for Gordan Lane, another servant. Peggy is a single mother whose child has either been adopted or left to her sister to rear. Lady Daphne sees Peggy's sister and the baby when she comes to visit and instinctively knows that the child is really Peggy's, which creates a sort of sympathy for her since she's pretty much in the same plight. Nothing is known about why Gordon Lane or Peggy Smith fell for each other (aside from the momentous revelation of This is the woman I must marry at one glance under the moonlight, because such thoughts occur irrevocably in everyday life), and their relationship just seems unnecessary in the whole book except to provide a little forbidden sex scene in the woods. Throughout the whole of that scene, I kept thinking – why am I reading this? Who are these people? I'm not emtionally invested in them, why am I reading this explicit scene about them having sex?But then, after further thought, I realised I'm not emotionally invested in any of the characters. The characters are generally one-dimensional, and some characters are almost non-entities. You are introduced to 10 or so characters within the first 20 pages, but almost none of them have much role to play. Charles and Felicity Ingham have 6 children, Guy (22), Deidre (20), Daphne (17), Miles (14), DeLacy (12), Dulcie (5). Guy, Deidre and Miles are almost non-existent throughout the book, their appearances more like cameos than actually playing a role. Daphne, of course, plays the biggest role since the most major event in the book surrounds her. Then we have the Swanns. Walter Swann is valet to Charles Ingham, his wife Alice is the house's seamstress or something (I didn't know noble families employed live-in seamstresses?), they have a 12 year old daughter Cecily who is DeLacey's best friend and playmate, and also Miles's childhood girlfriend (they eventually grow up with the hots for each other but – whatever).The matriarch of the Swann family is not Alice, however, but Charlotte, whom I can't figure out is Walter's sister or aunt. Whatever it is, Charlotte grew up with Charles and his sisters when they were children, and when she was 17, she entered the employment of Charles's father, David, the 5th Earl of Mowbray. Not-so-secret rumours flew regarding the relationship between Charlotte and the 5th Earl but this is already history by the time the book starts. Eventually, later, when Charles's wife Felicity leaves him for inexplicable reasons, Charlotte somehow develops a relationship with Charles. OK, what the fuck? Sleeping with the father before the father died 8 years ago, and then sleeping with the son almost a decade later??? I know all kinds of weird shit happened back in the day, but this development just happened too suddenly and was just another thing to pile on the WTF-ery. Also, I don't even get why Felicity left Charles. Nothing is really known about her except that she's been spiritually absent, a pretty convenient excuse to have her character like a wallpaper in the background, because of her sister Anne suffering from a terminal illness and being at death's door. Interestingly, Anne is always just dying, but is never said to have actually died in the entire book – another convenient excuse. Felicity tells Charles that she is no longer interested in him sexually and wants a divorce – on the day that 5 year old Dulcie almost got abducted by who is presumably Richard Torbett, rapist of Daphne. God knows what horrors might've been in store for Dulcie if Percy Swann (I have no fucking idea how he's related to the Swanns and I gave up keeping track by that point) hadn't showed up in time and driven the villain away. So this horrific event was just narrowly prevented and one would imagine a mother would have more to think about on a day like this, and chosen another day to coldly and unfeelingly break up with her husband. IT JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.You know what else doesn't make sense? This relationship between the Inghams and Swanns. It's not unusual for a family of lower social standing to become loyal and serve the same aristocratic family for generations, centuries. What is unusual, though, is when said family start crossing the lines. Out of goodwill, the aristocrats may consent to fund their servants' children's education – but to allow their children to be educated under the same governess as their own aristocratic daughters? To be brought up on an equal footing with their daughters? I'm sorry, but this is beyond the limit of realism for that time period. Social class was rigid as fuck in English history, and not even the wildest acts of generosity could break the class barrier to that extent. This story took place in the year 1913, where arguably social mobility was at its most fluid it has been for centuries past, but not to this extent. I argue that even now in this modern day and age, this kind of relationship would never exist between two similarly juxtaposed families in England. Furthermore, the Swanns' family motto is apparently Loyalty binds me, and they have to take some stupid oath when they come of age to swear to protect the Inghams? If there's going to be this kind of high-flown cheesy concept going on, I would at least want to know why. Generations of servitude under this aristocratic family isn't going to breed this kind of fierce loyalty. It might've been passable with a family of warrior knights sworn to protect another family of nobles back in the Middle ages, but – in Edwardian England? I can't see this happening. In any case, we have no plausible reason for this amazing loyalty of the Swanns towards the Inghams, despite being reminded of this repeatedly every two pages. What's even more amazing is that none of the Swanns waver from this one-track loyalty. When 12 year old Cecily is willing to take the rap for DeLacy Ingham's mistake of spilling ink on an old, fragile but well-preserved and beautiful lace ball gown, her mother Alice nods and says that she's a “true Swann” because she's willing to give up everything to protect an Ingham. So... this blind loyalty is written into the Swann genetic code or something? There better be some sorcery somewhere up the line, because I can't see this ever happening in real life. And of course, it seems that Swann women are irresistible to Ingham males, once again crossing the boundary of master and servant.I read excitedly through about 50% of this book and kinda gave up, but I was curious to know the ending so I flipped forward about 110 pages. To my extreme surprise, the characters were still talking about the exact same events as 110 pages ago. LOL. That was when I realised that I don't really want to bother properly reading the last half of the book. I skimmed through the rest just to get an idea of what happened, and finished the entire thing within 2 or 3 hours. The only big things that happened was Dulcie's near-abduction, Felicity's inexplicable request for a divorce from her husband, Charles and Charlotte's equally inexplicable sudden attraction towards each other, and Hugo and Daphne's marriage (saw that coming from a mile off anyway). Oh, and even though the blurb mentioned something about WW1 looming ahead, it only had a few cursory scenes in the book. By miracles and more miracles, Charles and Miles Ingham are spared from having to serve their country, saving the incumbent Earl and his spare heir. Unsurprisingly and to no one's anguish, Guy is killed in WW1. He barely appeared in the book anyway. Hugo signs up to serve (he's a cousin of Charles's who was exiled to America 16 years ago, did well in business, took a wife and had a happy marriage for 9 years until said wife died a year ago, then he expressed a wish to come back. Upon which, he proceeded to quickly and immediately fall head over heels for Daphne, and unsurprisingly accepted her previous rape and current pregnancy without much struggle), since he is bursting with patriotism for England even though he hasn't come back for the past 16 years, living in America since he was 16 years old. The only purpose for WW1 in this book, therefore, is to have an obligatory sad mournful family death (Guy) and to have Hugo a chance to meet Richard Torbett, Daphne's rapist and also serving in the army. Richard Torbett is very dramatically and conveniently killed, not by Hugo's hand but by Hugo's friend misdirecting him towards the German lines where he is bombed up quickly. Fantastic! Exit primary villain without staining our hero with the foul name of murder.