The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains

The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains by Neil Gaiman

Published by Headline

17th June 2014

Hardback Edition

 

  

You ask me if I can forgive myself?  I can forgive myself for many things.  For where I left him.  For what I did.

And so begins The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, a haunting story of family, the other world, and a search for hidden treasure. 

 

Neil Gaiman has done it yet again, and written something that is like no other.  The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains was first published in All New Tales in 2010.  This new version, fully illustrated in colour, by Eddie Campbell is the first time it has been published as a stand-alone story.

This is not a long book, just 74 pages in total but that doesn't mean that you don't get a full and thought-provoking story because you do.  It tells the tale of a man, a small man, but a man no-less and his search for gold on the Misty Isle.  He bids Calum MacInnes, a man who has been to the isle before, to be his guide in his quest.

As the book unravels, we learn both more of the narrator and his companion and of how their paths are intrinsically linked by an earlier fate.  As with many tales, what goes around, comes around and the balance of karma is restored at the end of the story.

I love Scotland, and I love the Isle of Skye, where my ancestors landed as Vikings many centuries ago.  This is not a fairy tale for children by any means but a book for grown-ups; a tale of travel and darkness with pictures of all kinds.  On the 4th and 5th July, Neil Gaiman will read this story to two audiences at the Barbican and Usher Hall, accompanied by the illustrations from the text, and a new underscore by the FourPlay String Quartet.  I envy those audiences the performance that will befall them.

 

Happy Reading

 

Miss Chapter x

Into The Trees

Into The Trees by Robert Williams

Published by Faber & Faber

3rd April 2014

Hardback Edition

 

Harriet Norton won't stop crying.

 

Her parents, Ann and Thomas, are close to insanity and only one thing will help.  Mysteriously, their infant daughter will only calm when she's under the ancient trees of Bleasdale forest.

 

The Nortons sell their town-house and set up home in an isolated barn, secluded deep in the forest.   They are finally approaching peace when one night a group of masked men comes through the trees, ready to upend their lives.  With their new-found security under threat, the Nortons desperately try to recover what they've lost - risking family, friendships and love in the process.

 

Into The Trees is an interesting book as it's more the tale of four individual people who just happen to be connected by one event.  The story begins with Ann and Thomas and the birth of their second child Harriet.  She does not stop crying, or screaming.  They have not slept.  They cannot sleep.  The doctors say it will pass but they don't know what to do or try next.  One evening, Thomas takes Harriet out in the car for a drive, a long drive.  He ends up in Bleasdale forest, and for the first time in forever, Harriet stops crying as the trees surround her.  Thomas repeats this experiment again, and again, finally bringing Ann in to witness this event too.  He then comes up with a plan - to build a house within the forest.

So far, so good.  The plan works and the family are happy; sort of.  Then one night, Harriet opens the door to a group of masked men who want Thomas to take them to his bank so they can rob it.  He obeys.  This event then turns the lives of this family, one of the criminals, and those who befriend the Nortons, upside down. 

Raymond is a recluse.  He is a larger than normal, and deemed slower than normal, individual who has reached the conclusion that to remain outside of society is the best way to live.  He walks, and works, within Bleasdale forest, and becomes friends with Thomas and his family - until the night of the robbery that is, when he becomes pushed aside.

Keith is a chancer, a bully and an alcoholic.  He beats his wife, his children have no manners and he suffers from 'small-man syndrome'.  The night of the robbery is also going to change his life, in more ways than one.

I did enjoy Robert Williams' book.  It's an interesting read.  I initially though it was going to be a sort of thriller novel, but it's not.  In my opinion it's a study of social behaviour.  Of how events can ultimately change people, relationships and lives and whether or not we can control our destinies.

 

Happy Reading

 

Miss Chapter x

The Winter Garden

The Winter Garden by Jane Thynne

Published by Simon & Schuster

13th February 2014

Hardback Edition

 

 

Berlin, 1937.  The city radiates glamour and ambition.  But danger lurks in every shadow...

Anna Hansen, a bride-to-be, is a pupil at one of Hitler's notorious Nazi Bride Schools, where young women are schooled in the art of being an SS officer's wife.  Then, one night, she is brutally murdered and left in the gardens of the school.  Her death will be hushed up and her life forgotten.

Clara Vine is an actress at Berlin's famous Ufa studios by day and an undercover British Intelligence agent by night.  She knew Anna and is disturbed by news of her death.  She cannot understand why someone would want to cover it up, but she soon discovers that Anna's murder is linked to a far more ominous secret.

With the newly abdicated Edward VIII and his wife Wallis set to arrive in Berlin, and the Mitford sisters dazzling on the social scene, Clara must work in the darkness to find the truth and send it back to London.  It is a dangerous path she treads, and it will take everything she has to survive...

 

I've not read anything by Jane Tynne previously (she's written 4 other novels) but as this one features Diana and Unity Mitford, it was recommended that I do as I'm a huge Mitford admirer.  What can I say? I really enjoyed it.

The historical content in this novel is huge, let's not pretend otherwise.  If you know nothing about Nazi Germany prior to reading The Winter Garden, you will come away with an understanding of the way life was for people in Germany prior to the start of the Second World War.  As a former History teacher, for me this was an added extension of my own knowledge, and I loved the book for that.

Clara Vine, the central character, is a successful actress, but also an undercover agent for Great Britain and she manages to involve herself in the apparently random death of a bride at one of the Bride Schools that were set up in Germany at the time.  Little does she know where this interest will take her.  And of course, being a spy, who can she really trust?  Interspersed with this are the real life characters who made up Hitler's entourage, plus his foreign admirers, including the Mitfords and Edward VIII and his new bride Wallis Simpson, all ready to add a bit of glamour to Nazi Germany.

This is the second book featuring Clara Vine, the first being Black Roses, and I'm now off to hunt this one down.  If you like historical thrillers, then this one will be right up your street.

 

Happy Reading

 

Miss Chapter x

 

p.s. I've changed the format slightly on this review - what do you think?

The Sacred River

The Sacred River by Wendy Wallace

Published by Simon & Schuster

24th April 2014

Paperback Edition

 

 

The Egyptians had written their magic for the dead.  But Harriet wanted assistance now.  It was life she longed for…

 

Harriet Heron’s life is almost over before it has even begun.  At just twenty-three years of age, she is an invalid, over-protected and reclusive.  Before it is too late, she must escape the fog of Victorian London for a place where she can breathe.

Together with her devoted mother, Louisa, her God-fearing aunt, Yael, and a book of her own spells inspired by the Book of the Dead, Harriet travels to a land where the air is tinged with rose and gold and for the first time begins to experience what it is to live.  But a chance meeting on the voyage to Alexandria results in a dangerous friendship as Louisa’s long-buried past returns, in the form of someone determined to destroy her by preying upon her daughter.

As Harriet journey's towards a destiny no one could have foresee, her aunt Yael is caught up in an Egypt on the brink of revolt and her mother must confront the spectres of her own youth.

 

‘Oh, Lord, what is that?’

     Louisa, out in the fog with a pair of scissors, explored the soft obstruction with the toe of her show.  A rag, she decided.  A cloth dropped by Rosina from a window, back in the summer.  Stooping to pick it up, feeling for it on the brick path, she gasped.  The thing was warm under her fingertips.  She crouched down and peered though the vapour at a yellow beak, jet plumage around a glassy eye.  It was a blackbird.  Newly, beautifully, dead.

     The fog was sour on her tongue.  It tasted of iron and smoke mixed with a primeval dampness, made hr eyes water and her cheeks sting.  Enveloped in the yellow cloud, Louisa could make out nothing.  Her own garden might have been a limitless place stretching to eternity in all directions or it might have shrunk to the very spot where she stood.

     All over London, birds had been dropping from the sky – thudding on to the leather roofs of carriages, falling down chimneys and splashing into lakes in the great parks under the gaze of statues.  Everyone said that they were an omen although there was no agreement on its meaning.  Louisa wouldn’t allow this one to be an omen.  She would rid them of it.

     Pulling on a glove from her pocket, she made herself pick up the bird.  It was light for its size, all feather and quill and claw.  Balancing it on her palm, she made her way along the path to the wall at the end of the garden and stretched out her arm to toss the corpse into the mews.  As she did so, she felt a scrabble of claws, sudden and intimate against her wrist.  The creature lurched, unfurled its wings like a black umbrella and vanished into the morning.

 

This is Wendy Wallace’s second book in a trilogy of Victorian novels.   Focusing on three very different women, she weaves an intricate tale of life, love and strength starting in London and culminating in Egypt.  The principal character is Louisa.  Suffering to breathe in the fog-filled air of London, she longs for change and begs her doctor to recommend that she go to Egypt, county of her dreams.  As this is the Victorian era, of course she cannot travel alone, so to accompany her are her mother and her aunt.  Both are very different people but agree to go with Louisa.

On the boat to Alexandria, we meet a whole host of characters who are to feature again later on in the story; newlyweds Mr and Mrs Cox, the dashing artist Eyre Soane and upon departure, a mysterious man with a piano.  Aunt Yael decides that she will not journey down the Nile with her sister-in-law and niece, so remains in Alexandria to do God’s work, leaving Harriet and Louisa to travel alone to Luxor. 

Wendy Wallace entwines the lives of these three very different women into this tale of discovery.  All three find a new purpose and sense of life outside the rigidity of their environment in Victorian London.  This is a tale of being able to escape from the binds that tie you, of being able to breathe fully and to take chances and risks that you may never have imagined before.  It is also a reminder that the past can sometimes come back to haunt you, with horrendous consequences. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, set in the beautiful country of Egypt which Wendy Wallace depicts so distinctly.  I liked the way that she manages to separate the stories of the three women, yet at the same time, keep them together.  I’m looking forward to the next chapter!


Happy Reading


Miss Chapter x

Cozy Classics: Huckleberry Finn & Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Jack and Holman Wang

Published by Simply Read Books

22nd May 2014

Board Book Edition

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 





Jack and Holman Wang are back with more classic board books in their Cozy Classics range of books.  If you aren't familiar with them, they are board books made up of 12 beautiful needle-felted images and 12 accompanying words so that children are encouraged to tell a story simply through the beauty of a picture. 

 

I love the stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and remember avidly watching the television series when I was a child.  My girls (who are 5 and 7) also love these books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think these books are perfect for anyone with young children who aren't quite ready to read the original versions themselves yet. And with images this detailed and beautiful, you don't really need words, do you?

 

 

Happy Reading

 

 

Miss Chapter x

Ammonites and Leaping Fish

Ammonites and Leaping Fish - A Life in Time by Penelope Lively

Published by Fig Tree

10th October 2013

Hardback Edition

 

In this charming but powerful memoir, Penelope Lively reports from beyond the horizon of old age. She describes what old age feels like for those who have arrived there and considers the implications of this new demographic. She looks at the context of a life and times, the history and archaeology that is actually being made as we live out our lives in real time, in her case World War II; post war penny-pinching Britain; the Suez crisis; the Cold War and up to the present day. She examines the tricks and truths of memory. She looks back over a lifetime of reading and writing. And finally she looks at her identifying cargo of possessions - two ammonites, a cat, a pair of American ducks and a leaping fish sherd, amongst others. This is an elegant, moving and deeply enjoyable memoir by one of our most loved writers.

 

This is not quite a memoir. Rather, it is the view from old age. And a view of old age itself, this place at which we arrive with a certain surprise - ambushed, or so it can seem. One of the few advantages of age is that you can report on it with a certain authority; you are a native now, and know what goes on here.  That, and the backwards glance - the identifying freight of a lifetime.  A lifetime is embedded; it does not float free, it is tethered - to certain decades, to places, to people.  It has a context; each departure leaves a person-shaped void - the absence within a family, the presence lost within a house, in a community, in society itself.  We go, but hang in for a while in other people's heads - something we said, something we did; we leave a ghostly imprint on our backdrop.  A very few people go one further and are distilled into a blue plaque on a building.  I began on a spring morning in the Anglo-American Hospital in Zamalek, which was a residential suburb on Gezira, the island in Cairo's Nile; 17 March 1933.  Elsewhere, things were going on that would lead to turmoil in North Africa in a few years' time; my parents' lives would be affected, and mine, but they were comfortably oblivious that morning, and I was tucked up in a crib, the feet of which stood in tin trays of water, because there had been instances of ants getting at newborn babies.

 

Towards the end of my own stint I find myself thinking less about what has happened to me but interested in this lifetime context, in the times of my life.  I have the great sustaining ballast of memory; we all do, and hope to hang on to it.  I am interested in the way that memory works, in what we do with it, and what it does with us.  And when I look around my cluttered house - more ballast, material ballast - I can see myself oddly identified and defined by what is in it: my life charted out on the bookshelves, my concerns illuminated by a range of objects.

These, then, are the prompts for this book: age, memory, time, and this curious physical evidence I find all around me  as to what I have been up to - how reading has fed into writing, how ways of thinking have been nailed.

 

I really enjoyed this memoir by established author Penelope Lively.  Originally titled Dancing Fish and Ammonites, it appears to have been re-named Ammonites and Leaping Fish.   At the grand age of 80, she has decided to look back on her life, and focus on the elements that made it what it is.  She begins by recounting her childhood - her days growing up in Egypt, of the Second World War breaking out and the tensions caused by the Suez Crisis.

The book is divided into four section: Old Age, Memory, Life and Times and Six Things.  Lively discusses how she uses memory, and how that features in her writing.  This isn't a plodding, heavy-handed look back at a life that has been well-lived, but rather like having a chat with your grandmother about her memories.  Penelope Lively 'chats' to the reader rather than spending page after page going into great reams of details about an event or moment of her life.  There is enough information to keep you satisfied, rather than too much to leave you bored to tears.  My favourite section was where she looks back on the books that have made up her life, both good and bad for over 8 decades.  The final chapter focuses on those artefacts that are important to Lively herself, including, a leaping fish and two ammonites!

Happy Reading

 

Miss Chapter x

And We Stay

And We Stay by Jenny Hubbard

Published by Delacorte Press

28th January 2014

Hardback Edition

 

 

 

 

 

When high school senior Paul Wagoner walks into his school library with a stolen gun, he threatens his girlfriend Emily Beam, then takes his own life. In the wake of the tragedy, an angry and guilt-ridden Emily is shipped off to boarding school in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she encounters a ghostly presence who shares her name. The spirit of Emily Dickinson and two quirky girls offer helping hands, but it is up to Emily to heal her own damaged self.

This inventive story, told in verse and in prose, paints the aftermath of tragedy as a landscape where there is good behind the bad, hope inside the despair, and springtime under the snow.

 

There are rumors the day Emily Beam arrives at the Amherst School for Girls - in January, halfway through her junior year.  She doesn't look like the other girls, who look like girls in magazines.  She doesn't sound like them, either, and she wears different shoes.  As she sits on a bed she's never slept in, in the first room she's ever shared, Emily announces to the tall, curly-haired blonde standing by the window that she's come from Boston.  This isn't a lie.  It is where she's stayed for the past month.

     K.T. nods and looks down at Emily's feet. "What shoe size do you wear?"

     "Seven," Emily says.

     K.T. walks over to her closed and digs out a pair of navy-blue clogs with wooden heels.

     "Here," says K.T. "Wear these."

     Emily takes off her rubber-soled Mary Janes.

     "They'll be a size too big," K.T. says, "which will make it tough to walk on those little pebbles out there, but at least no one will talk shit about you."

     As Emily slips on the clogs, K.T. takes the black Mary Janes and drops them - clunk, clunk - into the steel trash can.

     "You can wear your pj's to class if you want," K.T. says. "A lot of us do."

     Emily takes in her roommate's casual elegance: the untucked white button-down, the people cashmere cardigan, the necklace of turquoise beads, the brown suede boots with scuffed toes. Emily looks down at her new giant feet. "I have to go to the bathroom," she says.

     "Do you remember where it is?! K.T. points. "Just at the end of the hall."

     In the bathroom, Emily sweeps her long hair up into a messy ponytail, which is the style here, she's noticed.  In the morning - her first day of class - she'll wear the Harvard sweatshirt she got in Boston.  As far as boarding schools go, Emily has no idea how Amherst School for Girls ("ASG," K.T. calls it - like ask but with a g) compares.  Boarding school?  It wasn't even in the realm of possibilities; it wasn't even on the radar screen.  And by the time Aunt Cindy convinced Emily's parents that it was necessary, ASG was the only school that would take her, and that was only because there was an extra bed since K.T.'s prior roommate, Hannah, had been expelled for sneaking out late at night to meet townies.

 

I really enjoyed this novel by Jenny Hubbard, set in Massachusetts, America, primarily at Amherst School for Girls.  Emily Beam has started the new term there following the tragic death of her former boyfriend Paul.  It has been decided by her family that she is better off starting a new life for herself, rather than returning to her previous school where Paul killed himself in the school library.

At Amherst, Emily stands out.  She neither looks, dresses or speaks like any of the other girls and can often be found writing frantically in her room rather than talking of her past to any of her new school friends.  Will they discover who the real Emily Beam is, and why she has had to move so far away from home?

Luckily for Emily, a previous pupil with an interest in poetry is her saviour both in and out of school.  Emily Dickinson was born and raised in Amherst and thanks to the school's French teacher, who sees something of the poet in Emily herself, the spirit of Emily Dickinson captures and moves Emily to write more and more poetry to express how she feels.

The story weaves both back and forth, telling of Emily's life in the here-and-now at Amherst, but also of her previous life, and of her relationship with Paul and what led up to his suicide.  Jenny Hubbard tackles some very relevant themes in this story of love and heart-break and mixes it in with some beautiful poetry too. 

 

Happy Reading

 

Miss Chapter x