Mailbox Monday

This is what appeared in my mailbox last week (which is pretty good in my books - no pun intended ;)





Palace Circle by Rebecca Dean
The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry
Mutiny on the Bounty by John Boyne (which is a win from the LTER programme.

Check out Marcia at The Printed Page. She hosts this fun weekly meme.

Review: WINTER IN MADRID by C.J. Sansom

Thank you to Julie at FSB Associates for the opportunity to read and review this great book!

I love it when I unexpectedly come across a book in which the author tells a story around events that actually happened and people who really existed. It makes me want to learn more about the events and how they shaped the lives of the people affected. This is one of those books.

During Spain’s civil war Bernie Piper, a communist from Britain, joined the International Brigades and was sent to fight against the fascists. The last he was heard from was at the battle of Jarama in 1937. Bernie’s parents and his girlfriend, Barbara Clare, ask an old public school friend to help search for him. They come up empty.

Several years later the old friend, Harry Brett, is wounded at Dunkirk and suffers post traumatic stress disorder. Recovering at home in England, he is contacted by the British Secret Service. They are interested in Harry because he can speak several languages and therefore can be put to use - ostensibly as a translator. In reality however, Harry is instructed to spy on another old school friend, Sandy Forsyth, who is busily scheming to take financial advantage of the political situation during World War Two.

Harry is surprised to discover that Barbara is still in Spain and has paired up with Sandy. As the story evolves the reader discovers that all three characters, Harry, Sandy and Barbara are concealing secrets from each other that when revealed, will irretrievably alter the course of their lives.

This book is written in a tone that evokes the era in which it takes place like none other that I’ve read in a long time. Written in period detail and expertly researched, it was easy to picture the cold streets of Madrid, the poverty and desperation of the people, the hopes and fears. I could feel the terror of the children as they were unceremoniously rounded up and delivered to church orphanages for ‘processing’ after their parents, who were deemed enemies of the state, disappeared forever. In fact the author dedicates the book:

“to the memory of the thousands of children of Republican parents who disappeared into the orphanages of Franco’s Spain”.

The politics in Spain during its civil war and the role it played during the Second World War is complicated to say the least. There is a short historical note at the end of the book explaining the political atmosphere during the years the story takes place. This was helpful in giving insight into some of the real people depicted in the book.

Having read Guernica by Dave Boling not long ago, my interest in what happened in Spain during these difficult years was piqued. As a result, I was very pleased to have the opportunity to read C.J. Sansom’s Winter in Madrid and I highly recommend it.

If you would like to read other reviews of Winter in Madrid, click on the following links:

My Friend Amy

Euro Crime

A Reader's Respite

Mailbox Monday

This is what appeared in my mailbox last week:

The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro
Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung
The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer
The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker (which I won from a contest on Avis's blog)

Check out Marcia at The Printed Page. She hosts this fun weekly meme.

Guest review by Pierre: THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN by Simon Winchester

This is my husband's review of this book.

The book begins with a fascinating scenario to hook the reader and then takes 80 pages of mediocre prose to inform the reader that it’s quite untrue. Well, not all untrue, but almost everything that is charming and startling in chapter one is gradually revealed to be apocryphal. One is tempted to excuse this journalistic deceit, however, because without it the story is unremittingly sad.

Mr. Winchester is not a bad writer, despite his breathless treatment of the subject and his forays into graveyards to look for headstones to compensate for the dearth of primary research sources. There is much padding. His treatment of peripheral subjects is dismal, and rather than entertaining vignettes we are served instead with incongruous whiplashes of clinical facts with no color, character or context. Mr. Winchester the journalist presumes to summarize the history of psychiatry, ostensibly to provide context but really to darken those awful white spaces on the page.

Finally, one cannot help noticing that Mr. Winchester’s wide-eyed and innocent treatment of his subject is a disingenuous slight of hand that serves to distract the reader from his sensationalistic methods. It is difficult to forgive his gratuitous introduction of salacious but completely unfounded gossip that is almost certainly untrue but serves to add a further layer of disgrace to the pathetic Dr. Minor.

As stated, this review was written by my husband, Pierre. He will also be doing another guest review of 'The Strain' in the near future. If this keeps up, he'll have to get his own blog!

Mailbox Monday

After reading everyone else's Mailbox Mondays for awhile now, I finally had enough books (in other words, more than none) to join in on the meme hosted by Marcia at The Printed Page. So here is what I received last week in the mail (Feb 16 - 20th):

Winter in Madrid by C.J. Sansom
A World Never Made by James LePore
The first 6 books in the 'Kitty' series by Carrie Vaughn:
Kitty and the Midnight Hour
Kitty Goes to Washington
Kitty Takes a Holiday
Kitty and the Silver Bullet
Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand
Kitty Raises Hell
The Local News by Miriam Gershow

Review: THE LAST TESTAMENT by Sam Bourne

After a year in Washington, DC, Maggie Costello is smothering under the control of her boyfriend, Edward, and her job as a divorce mediator. Until Washington she had been another kind of mediator, one involved in big stakes in the high-pressure world of international politics. When the US government needed someone to bring two opposing sides together, they called Maggie. And it worked well until something went very wrong and real people paid the price with their lives and so she ended up in Washington with Edward mediating fights between couples instead of countries.

One morning Maggie receives a visit by a government agent who convinces her to return to her first natural talent and she quickly finds herself in the midst of a tense standoff between Israel and Palestine. When a murder of a prominent right-wing activist stalls the talks, Maggie steps in to investigate. What she finds leads her on a spine-tingling, intensive hunt for the murderer and where at times she becomes the hunted. Along the way Maggie has the help of Uri Guttman, a man who is trying to discover what role his father played in the sensitive mid-east peace process.

A blurb on the back cover of this novel says it is “The biggest challenger to Dan Brown’s crown”. I can see why. It’s similar in that there are two characters who follow the trail of an ancient artifact knowing that what it reveals will change the course of history. And like Dan Brown’s book, The Last Testament also has plenty of short chapters with most having cliff-hangers at the end of them. But the similarity ends there. It does after all take place in the Middle East. I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet that if you liked the Da Vinci Code you will also enjoy this book.

I WON!!!

I'm very excited that I won The Little Giant of Aberdeen County from Avis! I love contests - well, especially when I win them, which is not all that often. Thanks Avis! I’m really looking forward to reading this book. It’s got such great reviews. You can read Avis’s review of this book here.

Review: REPLAY by Ken Grimwood

Jeff Wintson dies at work of an apparent heart attack at the age of 43 while talking to his wife on the phone. She had been telling him what it was that they needed but he died before she had a chance to say exactly what that was. No matter though, because as he lay slumped over his desk, dying, he knew what she’d been about to say; something mundane like picking up milk or bread.

Jeffs wakes to the realization that he hadn’t died after all; he must be in a hospital because he was thinking he couldn’t breathe. Realizing that his head was deep into his sheets, he turned and looked at the room around him. That’s when he discovers he is back in college and eighteen years old again. The story follows Jeff through life again – hindsight does actually help him in his second chance but, as he learns, it can also hurt.

This book is a page turner – you can’t help wanting to know what is going to happen next and how it will all turn out in the end. The possibilities of what Jeff could accomplish with the opportunity of having a second chance are intriguing to say the least.

Review" ORYX AND CRAKE by Margaret Atwood

Barely surviving in a devastated and de-populated world, a man called Snowman recalls the events of his life that have led to what he is now: a shadow of his former self, slowly starving to death. Snowman thinks about his best friend Crake, an intellectual (otherwise known as a geek), who, despite his perplexing and secretive manner, was nevertheless on the road to greatness. Oryx, the only person of his generation Snowman could truly love, seemed so unreachable. His mother, a riddle, vanished, and though he tried to put her memory behind him, he continued searching for her for years. His father, cold and distant, considered his only son an afterthought.

As snowman searches through his memory, he looks for clues, the what ifs, to help him understand how the world changed so suddenly. He ponders how if he’d only read the signs, had not ignored the portentous dropped phrase from Crake here and there, he might have known what was coming. But then what? Could he have stopped it? Now all he has for company are the Crakers, a race of beings who are dependent on Snowman for answers to their questions about a world that they were born into, a world innocent of war, famine, violence and all the other outrages and misfortunes the human race brought upon itself.

Review: UNLESS by Carol Shields

Fear of the unknown suddenly plays a significant part in Reta Winters’s life as she struggles to cope with her eldest daughter’s odd behaviour. This nineteen year old woman, Norah, abandons her life – university and her boyfriend as well as her parents and two sisters to sit on a street corner in downtown Toronto begging. She wears a sign around her neck with the word ‘goodness’ written on it. No one in Norah’s family, including her boyfriend, knows why she is doing this. They try to talk to her and Reta does attempt to forcibly remove Norah from her perch, and fails miserably when her daughter begins screaming. Reta, in dismay and embarrassment, flees in her car, alone.

Reta’s ruminations on her daughter’s behaviour causes her to reflect on her own experiences dealing with the male-dominated book publishing world. She sees in Norah’s stance an acting out of her own frustrations in dealing with a society that relegates women to an afterthought. As Reta and her family try to carry on their day to day activities in view of Norah’s self-placement in society, Reta undertakes a series of letters to various male writers for columns, reviews and in one case, an obituary, thereby soothing herself for the wrongs she is feeling. She never mails the letters and in fact, signs them with a variety of pseudonyms, signaling her intentions not to send them out.

This is not a book for someone who enjoys fast-paced reads but it is definitely thought-provoking.