This week

I'm reading

It's been a busy reading week. It always looks even busier than usual when I finish an audio book and start the next one which is what happened this week.

I finished listening to Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman. Given that this book was published in 1995 it is possibly a little surprising that I am only just reading it now. I did enjoy it but I was expecting to love, love, love it! Never mind. The narration was by Saskia Maarleveld as she did a very good job, as she always does. 

For my next audio, I started listening to The Unselected Journals of Emma M Lion Vol 1 by Beth Brower. The good news is that this is a very short book so the audio comes in at around 3.5 hours. I already think I will be picking up the next book in the series. 

In terms of books I read rather than listened to, I finished Twenty Dates by Ko Porteous which was a lot of fun. I reviewed this book here.

I then read The Christmas Rift by K L Crear. If I was going to give a one word review for this book it would be "silly", but it was exactly what I needed. I need to to come up with more than one word for my review which will be up later this week. I do have another review due later this week too. Better start reading that one soon!

It was book club meeting on the weekend. Normally we are a read on a theme book club but every 18 months or so we agree to all read the same book like a more traditional book club. This month, our choice was A Far Flung Life for M L Stedman. Most people liked it well enough, but I absolutely loved it and have given it a 5 star rating! We had lovely weather over the weekend, so it was nice to be able to sit outside and enjoy the fresh air while we met this time. We have never done that before!

I'm watching


We had a pretty quiet weekend but we did go to see an Italian movie called Holy Cannoli on the weekend. It was a really fun movie, with plenty of soccer, religion and cakes! Here's the trailer

Life

All of our visitors left during the week so a quiet weekend really! And most of the major deliverables have been done, so now I have to focus on all the things I didn't get done over the crazy last few weeks!

Posts from the last week


Top Ten Tuesday: Opposites!
Blog Tour: The Twenty Dates by Ko Porteous
Weekend Cooking: The Slow Cooker Supper Club by Sue Heath
Historical Fiction Reading Challenge: September Statistics




I've linked this post to It's Monday, what are you reading? as hosted by Book Date, Sunday Salon hosted at Readerbuzz and the Good Book and a Cup of Tea link up hosted at Boondock Ramblings

The Briar Club by Kate Quinn

So when I sat down to write this post I was intending to do a couple of mini reviews of some historical fiction novels I've read over the last couple of months. However, it turns out that I have plenty to say about this book. The other mini reviews will just have to wait as this is a maxi review!

This the second Kate Quinn book I have finished  over the last few months. The first book I read was The Diamond Eye and then I listened to the audiobook of The Briar Club. I already know that I will be reading more Kate Quinn as soon as I can find space in my reading schedule. It is easy to see why Kate Quinn is such a popular author. 

In this book she bring together a house full of women who are all boarders at Briarwood House. The ladies all live very separate lives with most of their interactions being fights over the bathroom until Grace March moves into the small apartment on the top floor. Soon they are regularly gathering together every Thursday for a supper club and they are sharing their lives and their food. Also joining them are Pete and Lena who are the children of the crusty and judgemental landlady Doilies Nelson. I loved the way that all the boarders become involved in the lives of the young people, providing them with the care and attention that they don't get from their mother and their absent father.

Among the boarders there is Fliss who is a young British mum who is married to an American doctor who is serving in Korea. She is determined that she should be the perfect wife and mother to her baby girl, but that is a hard facade to maintain when you are falling apart. Also living in the house are Reka, an elderly German art professor who is now poverty stricken and who holds a long standing grudge, Claire who comes across as being very tough, Bea who is a former professional baseball player, and Nora who is a policeman's daughter and works at the National library but falls in love with an unsuitable man. Oh, and then there is Arlene, a young Texan woman who is desperate to find a husband. 

I loved the way that Grace is able to break through the barriers that her housemates put up so that soon she knows all their secrets. We hear each of their stories, see them as they fall in love, find their direction, challenge society's restrictive norms, touch on many cultural and historical events and more. Yet, as someone points out, Grace manages to keep all of her own secrets in tact, until her past catches up with her.  

Set in Washington in the 1950s, this is the McCarthy era and lots of people were scared of the Red Threat of communism but there is plenty of other ground covered here too including racism and domestic violence, art and food

One of the surprises in this book is that Briarwood House is a character in the book. As the boarders in the house grow together then the house too begins to come to life. It loves the way that Grace begins painting the walls. It is also the narrator for the shocking events that are unfolding as we hear each of the women's stories. 

Given that one of the keys to this story is the Thursday night supper club, it is probably no surprise that food plays a big part in this story. I probably would have really liked to read this book as well as listen to it so that I could read the recipes. It was interesting how culturally varied the recipes were. Pretty sure I am not too worried about trying Arlene's Candlestick salad though! I did love Lena's story arc particularly in relation to her food journey.

It's fair to say I loved this book. When I finished it I was desperate to talk about it with someone who had read it, about books that one of the stories reminds me of, but I can't even say that now because it will then spoil the twist at the end!

The narrator was Saskia Maarleveld and she did a great job of telling the story. I was interested to hear the additional feature at the end of the book where the author and the narrator sat down to talk about the audiobook process. Kate Quinn even said that when she was writing she was thinking about the audiobook performance so that influenced some of the backstories for the women. This meant that it made it easier for the narrator to have different voices and intonations for each of the character. 

This is another fantastic read from Kate Quinn, and I highly recommend it.

I am sharing this review with Foodies Read hosted at Based on a True Story and with the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge which I host.  

Rating 4.5/5