Month: August 2024

Inheritance by Nora Roberts

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  I don’t usually read ghost stories – this was a “reading challenge” book, not my personal choice – but this one actually isn’t bad.   A young woman in Boston catches her fiance in bed with her cousin, and throws him out.  Shortly afterwards, she receives a visit from a lawyer from a small town in Maine, who tells her that her late father, who was adopted at birth, had a twin brother who’s left her his enormous house.  OK, OK, not very likely!

She moves to Maine, and immediately starts a romance with the lawyer’s son.  And finds out that the house is haunted, due to a curse placed by a jealous woman who murdered the bride of the man she fancied.  Six more brides in the family have all since died either on or within a year of their wedding days, one in each generation.   Their ghosts haunt the house, along with the ghosts of a child and a housemaid.  The housemaid’s ghost does all the housework, which is good.  Another ghost keeps playing music.  Various other spooky things happen.

It ends on a big cliffhanger, which is obviously to push the reader into buying the sequel, which is coming out in a few months’ time.  It’s a reasonable enough marketing ploy, but it’s still quite annoying.  Even when there are sequels planned, books don’t usually end quite like that.   Also, there are some silly spelling mistakes, e.g. “peddling” a bike rather than “pedalling” a bike.

As I said, not really my sort of thing.  However, if you like ghost stories, this isn’t a bad one.

Nothing Daunted by Dorothy Wickenden

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  This is the fascinating true story of two New York society girls, university graduates, who, rather than settling down to a life of marriage, committees and ladies’ luncheons, spent the academic year of 1916/17 “teaching school” in a remote part of Colorado.   At that time, it was still very much a “pioneer” area, with few facilities and at the mercy of the element.  They seemed to have a whale of a time, though.  You don’t get all night parties in Little House on the Prairie!

It was only for a year, and then they both did the expected thing, got married and settled down to keeping house and raising children, but they both said that that year in Colorado was the best time of their lives.   It’s a lovely book, written by the granddaughter of one of the girls, and an unusual but true story.

101 Dalmatians – Palace Theatre, Manchester

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This was a very strange version of 101 Dalmatians, clearly aimed at kids.  It was entertaining enough, although the music had been written especially for the show, so anyone hoping to hear the iconic Cruella de Vil song from the 1961 cartoon was disappointed!   And the puppet dogs were very cute – much, much nicer than real dogs.   But it’d been moved into the present day, so the characters were talking on their mobile phones and bemoaning the fact that they hadn’t had the puppies microchipped!    Why do scriptwriters seem to think that kids can’t cope with anything not set in their own world.  The story’s set in the 1950s.  What would have been wrong with leaving it in the 1950s?!

The dogs’ owners had been renamed Tom and Danielle, and moved in together rather than getting married.  And they lived in a small flat.  With no nanny/housekeeper.   And he owned Perdita and she owned Pongo, rather than the other way round, presumably to avoid “gender stereotyping”.   He was an unemployed fashion designer, who talked a lot about PETA and recycling, rather than a songwriter.  Er, yes, you get the idea.   Again, why couldn’t the story just have been left in the 1950s?!

Cruella de Vil was now the owner of a fashion house, rather than being a socialite.  This actually worked quite well!  She was dressed in skintight leather and high-heeled leather boots, which, er, possibly wasn’t so much aimed as kids.  And hung around in pubs with Boris Johnson.  Seriously.  And she’d been given two camp nephews, rather than the Bad Uns.  It was all a bit pantomimish, including a totally bonkers scene in which Cruella drank some strange liquid and started behaving like a dog, but Kym Marsh did a really good job as a baddie!

The search for the puppies, with the dog puppets, and a few cat puppets thrown in, worked brilliantly, with a cute scene in which one of the puppies couldn’t keep up but Perdita said that no-one’d be left behind.   Overall, it was a good night out, but it did annoy me that they didn’t leave the story in the 1950s.  There’s just no need to “update” everything.

 

Vienna Blood – BBC 2

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  This is the final series, which is a shame.  And it’s only two episodes, which is also a shame.  We’re now in 1909, the year after Austria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina.  The Empire is seething with tension as different national groups seek self-determination, and our mates Max and Oskar, seeking to solve yet another murder, find themselves drawn into strange goings-on at the casino.  And a Serbian mercenary ends up being splatted on the ground after falling off the top of St Stephen’s Cathedral.

They discover equipment clearly intended for a terrorist attack, and it’s a strange coincidence that the first episode of the two was broadcast just before news broke of the planned attack by Islamic fundamentalist terrorists on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna.  After what happened at the Arena here in 2017, I’m just so grateful that the plot was foiled and no-one was hurt, but how awful that people can’t even go to a concert without this sort of thing going on.  And what a shame for all the people who were looking forward to it.   We never seem able to free ourselves from the scourge of terrorism, do we?

The twist in the tale was that what seemed to be a nationalism-motivated attempt by a Serbian mercenary (annoyingly, it wasn’t made clear whether he was a Bosnian Serb, like Gavrilo Princip, or from Serbia proper.  Or indeed from Austro-Hungarian-ruled Croatia.) to assassinate the Emperor turned out to have been set up by a wealthy industrialist, who was hoping to start a war in order to boost her business.  There are plenty of conspiracy theories over what happened in Sarajevo in 1914, but that’s a new one.

And poor Max was nearly bumped off, but, needless to say, lived to fight another day.

This isn’t the fastest-moving detective series on TV, but the glorious Mitteleuropean backdrops make it well worth watching, and the plots are generally quite interesting.  I’m sorry that this is the last series.  I’ll miss it.

Fifth Year Friendships at Trebizon by Anne Digby

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  I’ve never read this one before.  It was published in 1990, when I was going through my phase of being way too cool and grown up for reading children’s books 🙂 .  The Trebizon girls, like the Kingscote girls, seem to age in a very strange way – so, having started secondary school in the late 1970s, Rebecca & co are now taking their GCSEs in 1990.  Well, it could be 1988 or 1989, but it certainly can’t be any earlier, as the first GCSE exams were only taken in 1988.  I prefer to think that it’s 1990, because that’s the year that I took my GCSEs, making this the first school story I’ve ever read that’s exactly contemporary with me!

Like Rebecca, I spent much of 1990 thinking about tennis.  However, unlike me, Rebecca was actually playing it, and thinking of turning pro.  The main plot of the book, about the choices young athletes face between continuing their education and focusing on their sporting careers – it’d be nice if we could have a university tennis system like they’ve got in America, but we just don’t have enough people – is genuinely interesting, although I’m not sure that Rebecca’s decision works in the context of the times.  But there’s also some lazy stereotyping, and a ridiculously silly sub-plot involving very unoriginal boarding school story tropes.

The sub-plot, then.  A junior, who is a scholarship girl, is accused of stealing.  It then turns out that the thief is not her, but her identical twin sister, who, upset that she didn’t get the scholarship – they tossed a coin for it! – has been sneaking into the school and taking other girls’ things.  Oh please!   Was that the best that Anne Digby could come up with?!

Rebecca’s storyline is much better.  Should she turn pro, or should she stay on at school and do her A-levels, to give her more back-up options, and then make a decision about her tennis career?  Things come to a head when she’s offered a contract by a sports agent.  Unfortunately, the sports agent is a real stereotype.  Of course, all sports agents have Jewish-sounding names, wear loud, vulgar clothes, and are only interested in exploiting naive young athletes for as much money as they can make out of them.   Could we just lose the lazy stereotyping, please?  Not impressed.  But the actual storyline of Rebecca’s dilemma is good, and there’s an amusing moment when she throws a McEnroe-esque tantrum at a match.

In the end, she decides to stay on at school.   Hmm.  That might be good idea now, but this was the era of female players winning Grand Slam events in their mid-teens.  Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario won the 1989 French Open at 17, and Monica Seles the 1990 French Open at 16.  1990 was the year in which Jennifer Capriati turned pro at 13, although she’s probably been regretting it ever since.  In 1988, Steffi Graf won the calendar year Golden Slam at 19.   So I don’t know that Rebecca staying on at school was a very sensible idea, although keeping your options open *sounds* sensible.

It’s a very short book, and the rest of the “Six” don’t feature much, which is a shame.   Nor does the annoying Robbie, which is less of a shame!   But it was really nice to find a school story that was set in my era!   And I must see if I can get hold of any more of the later Trebizon books cheap.

Chevalier

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  I missed this at the pictures, but I watched it on a long flight.  It tells the story of Joseph Bologne, born in Guadeloupe as the son of a plantation owner and a slave, and sent to school in France by his father, where he had success in violin playing and fencing.  He later attracted the attention of Marie Antoinette, who gave him the title of Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and also of a French noblewoman with whom he had an affair and by whom he had a child – which does seem to be a true story.   However, he was unable to become director of the Paris Opera because he wasn’t white, and he later joined the revolutionaries.   His music was widely acclaimed at the time, but faded into obscurity, possibly because of racism.   It was quite an interesting film, without being preachy.  Worth seeing.

Green Dolphin Country by Elizabeth Goudge

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  This, set partly in Guernsey and partly in New Zealand, is a fascinating and unusual book … although it loses points for making an utter mess of the history of Georgian Manchester.   Some of the events seem unlikely, but we’re told that most of them were genuinely based on the life of the author’s great-uncle.   The characters, not only the main characters but also the supporting cast, are intriguing, and the twists and turns of their lives keep the reader intrigued.

Marianne and Marguerite are the daughters of the le Patourels, an upper middle class couple in 1830s Guernsey.   When Marianne’s 16 and Marguerite a few years older, their mother’s old flame, Dr Ozanne, a widower, returns to Guernsey from England, with his son, William.   Both Marianne, who’s plain but intelligent and stylish, and Marguerite, who’s pretty and lively, fall in love with William.  Which seems a bit unlikely.  William falls in love with Marguerite.  Dr Ozanne then dies, and le Patourels pay for William to enter the Royal Navy.  Which seems a bit unlikely.   William is then drugged by thieves in China, and misses his ship, which … you get the idea.

Instead of going to the British consul for help, he stows away on a ship … which just so happens to be the Green Dolphin, a ship which he and Marianne had come across in Guernsey years before.   The ship’s captain points out that he’ll be seen as a deserter, and suggests that he begin a new life in New Zealand.  At this point, it’s just before the Treaty of Waitingi, but a number of British settlers are living there.  William is initially taken under the wing of a missionary from Manchester … at which point the book really annoyed me by making a mess of Mancunian history.  It was only a couple of paragraphs, but it seriously annoyed me!

William becomes friends with a mysterious man from Cumberland, who also turns out to be connected with the Green Dolphin.  After a few years, he decides to write to the le Patourels to ask if Marguerite would be willing to come out to New Zealand and marry him.  Only he accidentally writes “Marianne” instead of “Marguerite”.   Which seems rather more than a bit unlikely.  Marianne duly arrives, and, as he can hardly send her all the way back to Guernsey, he marries her, and they eventually have a daughter.  The marriage is difficult.   Marianne is convinced that William is her soulmate, but her attitudes are very different to his.  William is unhappy because he’s married to the wrong woman.  And then they get caught up in the Maori Wars.  Meanwhile, Marguerite converts to Catholicism and becomes a nun.

There’s an awful lot more to it than that, and the supporting cast have a big role to play.  Whilst a lot of the events are unlikely, to say the least, the characters are very well-drawn, as are their struggles in unexpected circumstances.   It’s a long and complex book, but well worth persevering with.

Denver by John Dunning

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  What a depressing book this, set in Denver during the 1920s, was!   Rape, murder, suicide, extremism, corruption, people being locked up in asylums by vengeful relatives.   It was an interesting story, but it certainly wasn’t an easy read or a pleasant read.

During the 1920s, Denver, which was past its beginnings as a frontier town but nowhere near becoming the prosperous city it would become in the Dynasty days of the ’70s and ’80s oil boom, was pretty much taken over by the Ku Klux Klan, who took control of local and state politics, the police and the judiciary.   Asked to name a state associated with Klan activity, I don’t think too many of us would name Colorado; and it’s quite frightening to read about just how powerful the Klan became in parts of the West.   It’s not something that’s that well-known.

Someone writing this book now would probably centre it around an African-American family.  This, published in 1980, was centred around a mixed Protestant-Jewish family, the main character, Tom, being a journalist who was determined to expose the Klan.  It was fascinating in its way, but all the sub-plots were about violence and misery as well.  Tom’s stepsister was raped by an ex-boyfriend, and, in her terrible distress, committed suicide.  Her grieving husband then shot the rapist dead, and was hanged.   Meanwhile, Tom’s estranged wife was committed to an asylum by her controlling father.   Did we really have to have all this on top of the main storyline about the Klan?   Couldn’t there have been a cheerful sub-plot instead?

Interesting story, but stay well clear of this if you’re looking for a comfort read!   There was barely a cheerful moment in it.