Black Cake

 by Charmaine Wilkerson

I found this a very interesting story.

It starts with a woman dying and leaving a tape for her children, one of whom she is estranged from.  The daughter comes back reluctantly.  She and her brother had been close but have drifted apart especially since she did not come back for her father's funeral.  We eventually find out she did return for it but had been beaten up by a lover and didn't want people to see her in that state.

The girl had fallen out years before when she couldn't settle on a career and especially when she announced she was gay.  She left home after her parents reaction to this announcement.

The mother's message tells them she had a past and a different name.  As a young woman in the caribbean her father, a gambler, was going to marry her off to the man he owed money to.  The girl is shocked that her father would do this to her.  When her groom dies at the wedding ceremony she runs away.  Everyone thinks she poisoned him.

She flees to England and then is involved in a train crash on a train to scotland.  She is assumed to be her frend, who has died in the crash, and goes along with the misunderstanding.  She gets a job, is raped by her employer and gets pregnant.  She has to give up the baby but is haunted by this especially as she ages.

She eventually runs into a boy she loved in the caribbean.  They both change their names and move to America where they marry and have two children.

The mother tells them she has tried to track down her lost daughter.  

The children are shocked at all this news, it takes them time to digest it.  The lawyer eventually tracks down their sister.  She is shocked by the news she has siblings and comes to meet them but then leaves

Evenutally she comes back and they share some of their mothers black cake.

This was a very interesting story.  I really enjoyed it.

Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

 by Stuart Turton

This is a kind of ground hog day scenario

A group of people as gathered at a family estate on the anniversary of the death of the son of the estate owners years before.  A guest at the estate sees what he thinks is a woman being attacked/murdered and is injured himself.  He manages to make his way back to the house.  Over the next few hours the man finds that he is inside the heads/bodies of several of the guests.  

He finds that he is tasked with trying to find out who murders the daugther of the family.  If he manages to solve this he will be allowed to leave the property.  The man finds it very disconcerting to inhabit these different people, at different times of the day.  He meets a woman Anne who appears to be trying to help him and he wants to save her also.

The book then goes through various times of day and characters as the "main character" tries to figure out what is going to happen.  I appears that the daughter of the family is engaged against her will to a much older man, a friend of the family.  The marriage is being orchestrated so that her husband will bail the family out financially.  The scenario seems to be that the young woman kills herself rather than go through with the marriage.

As the story progresses the main character eventually figures out that the young woman wants to fake her suicide but her brother actually tries to kill her.

It was a novel idea to a story and structured quite well between all the personas.  However by the end it was getting quite confusing as to who did what and who knew what.

Dictionary of Lost Words

 by Pip Williams     

This is the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, told from the point of view of the daughter of one of the men who worked on the project.  The daughter initially started as a young child, hanging out in the workshop where her father and others were working.  She spent a lot of time underneath the table where the men were working.

This project took several decades to complete.

The task was to identify words and then find usage of them in literature, or in newspapers that document the usage.  After that the team members attempted a definition of the term.  Some termswere open to a lot of discussion.

The young girl is sometimes left in the care of a young maid who works in the house on the property.  They become very close friends.  While the maid is only a few years older than the girl she becomes something like a mother figure for her as the young girl's mother is dead.

As time goes by the girl starts to realize that "women's words" do not necessarily make it into the dictionary or if they do they are often disparaged.  The maid takes her to the local market and the young woman starts writing down words she hears there and the sentence in which they are used, then cites the name of the person who spoke the words.  She keeps her precious words in a box under the maid's bed.

Eventually the young girl is given a job helping the men working on the dictionary, sorting words, running the papers with the completed words to the printers.  She meets a young typesetter there and they eventually become close friends and eventually marry.  Her boyfriend/fiance publishes her words into a book, The Dictionary of Lost Words.  She is overjoyed at this wonderful surprise.

The book is well written and gives excellent details as to all the work that went into the compilation of the dictionary.  I had picked it up on a whim and really enjoyed it.

The Messy Lives of Book People

by Phaedra Patrick

This book is about a woman, Liv Green, who is working several demanding jobs as a cleaner while her husband struggles to keep their publishing company afloat. She is frustrated and exhausted worrying about how the family will be able to afford university costs for their two boys. One of her jobs is as a cleaner for a famous author, Essie Starling, an author she adores.

Essie is working on her 20th book and has a tight deadline.  She has been a recluse for many years, much to the dismay of her fans and her publisher.  Essie doesn't speak to Liv much, she ignores her pretty much the same way all her employers and the people she encounters in her cleaning jobs do.  At times Essie disappears from her apartment giving no explanation.

Liv's father was a literature prof, he has died in a car accident.

One day Essie starts to talk to Liv about writing and gives the indication she would like to speak to her more about that.  Liv is excited about this opportunity but before things can go any further she is contacted by a lawyer.  The lawyer tells her that Essie died during/following? a surgery.  In her will she has specified that Liv should complete her final book but that her death should be kept secret until the book is submitted to the publisher on Nov. 1st.

Liv and the lawyer are flabbergasted by the will.  Liv quits her other cleaning jobs and tells her husband that she is now helping Essie as an assitant and will get some more money.  She then takes on th task of reading the draft, incomplete manuscript and realizes that Essie had lost her spark for writing.  So Liv starts making some minor changes to the book plus has the huge task of finishing the last eight chapters since all Essie's books have the same number of chapters.

While Liv is working on the book a reporter starts sneaking around trying to get an interview with Essie.  Liv thinks she has managed to keep her away but the reporter keeps digging and trying to contact people who know Essie for background info.  At the same time Liv starts to do some research about Essie to try to find out what inspired her and why Nov 1st is such an important date for her, other than that she won a prestigious award on that day but immediately after became a recluse.

Liv dresses in Essie's clothes and even goes to a book fair in Croatia pretendting that Essie is there with her.  This is a ridiculous part of the book.... what would make her think to do this.  There is a lot of suspicion that Essie is never seen and the hotel room points out that Essie's room is slept in but not hers.  The reporter also tracks down this info.

Once she is close to finishing the book the lawyer tells Liv what Essie has left her, a small student flat where Essie presumably lived as a university student.  Liv assumes this is where Essie fled when she wanted to get away to write.  As she goes through the things in the apartment she discovers that Essie was a student of her father and was in love with him.

Then she is able to put 2 and 2 together.  Her father died on Nov 1st, after he rejected Essie's desire to have a relationship.  Essie won the literary award on Nov 1st but on that day she found out her current husband was having an affair with another woman and is leaving her.  Now she knows why Essie hired her (she had mentioned her father in her resume letter).  She is the daughter of the man Essie loved and could never have.

Liv decides to end the final book, not with the heroine riding off with a lover, but deciding to make her own life.  A much more satisfying ending.

This was an interesting story, at first you wonder what would have possessed Essie to choose Liv as her ghostwriter. The other question is how did Essie know she was going to die and make the stipulation for Liv to finish her book? Did she have a premonition, given her failing health?

 

Kaikeyi

 by Vaishnavi Patel

This is a book which is based on some ancient Indian texts about a woman, Kaikeyi who banished her own son.  The book has some magical realism including some monsters, monsters that can take on human form and some visits from "the gods" etc. in it.

Kaikeyi is the daughter of a Raja.  She has three brothers.  When she is a young girl her mother leaves without any notice.  The children find out that their father has banished their mother because of a suspected indiscretion.  The girl and one of her brothers are especially close.  They are devastated by the loss of their mother.  The brother teaches her some fighting skills as well as how to drive a chariot in warfare.  Women would not learn these skills normally.

The girl's father doesn't pay any attention to her.  One day he tells her she is to become the third wife of another Raja.  She only agrees to the marriage if the Raja will make her son, if she has one, his successor.  When she moves to her new home she keeps to herself but eventually she comes to realize it is better and expected that she will mingle with the other wives and the court and she finds that they welcome her.  There is no jealousy even when she asks to sit in on meetings of the Raja and his counsellors.  The women eventually set up a women's court to help women.  None of the wives get pregnant so a ceremony is held after which all three women have sons.  Kaikeyi son is born second.  She assumes her husband will honour his promise to her especially since she saved his life in a battle.

Kaikeyi has a special power, she can sense how strong the connections are between herself and others, eventually she can see these connections between other people.

It is interesting that all three women consider all the boys as their sons.  Kaikeyi is disturbed to find that the boys are getting tutored by a man who think women have too much power and that things should return to the ways of old.  She gets this tutor dismissed.  However, later the oldest son and one of the other brothers are sent away for education and she is dismayed to learn their tutor is the one she had fired.

When the oldest son returns he convinces his father, who is still young and healthy, that he should retire and make him Raj.  Kaikeyi challenges this when her husband agrees and calls in two "boons" her husband had offered her when she saved his life.  She uses the two boons to have the oldest boy banned for 10 years.  There is some evidence that this oldest son is a god.  However, she and others think he is too immature to rule.  And she wants her son to rule instead.  Her son doesn't want the responsibility.

Things eventually develop that her brother plans to attack the state because his nephew has not taken power.  There is a battle and one of Kaikeyi's sons kills her brother.  She is so upset she retires to her quarters.  The question arises, did all the manipulations she tried prove for good or ill?

It was an interesting, if someone puzzling story at times.

 

Book Lovers

 by Emily Henry

I am always drawn to books about libraries and bookstores.  When I picked this up I didn't realize it would be a rom-com and a very poor one at that.  This book was SO PREDICTABL!!

It is the story of an uptight book agent in New York who feels responsible for her younger sister and her family.  She is a workaholic, known as "the shark" in the office.  Many of oher love interests have left her and the big city for life in the country in one place or another.

She meets a book editor for lunch one day and the two immediately dislike each other.

Her sister, who is 5 months pregnant with her third child, decides that she needs a holiday so they should go to a town that is featured in a best seller romance novel. The sister also has a to do list for them (her sister) while they are there, including wear flannel, kiss a stranger, save a local business..... see what I mean about predictable.

The main character reluctantly agrees thinking it will be good for her sister.  She finds the town doesn't live up to the rustic charm of the book.  She is shocked to find that the book editor is in the town, trying to help his parents who are running a failing bookstore in town.  Sparks fly of course between them as they agree to work together on editing a book by one of the author's the woman represents.

In the end the woman's sister and her husband decide to move to the small town as it is more affordable for them.  The love interest says he has to stay to help his parents.  But in the end of course he does leave his family in good hands and return to New York to be with her.

Not a very interesting, engaging read as far as I was concerned.  I ended up skipping pages (including the mild juicy bits) just to get to the end.

 

 

The Murdr of Mr Wickham

 by Claudia Gray

This book is a takeoff on Jane Austen, obviously.  The author has done a great job of writing in a similar style to Austen.  Apparently she is a Jane Austen fan and is shows.  The thinking and behaviour of the characters is very much in the style of Austen herself, with the class awareness, consciousness of social norms and not embarrassing oneself or ruining one's reputation.  Wickham, as portrayed in the book is very self-serving, deceitful and mean.

The story centres around a gathering at the home of the Knigtley's where characters from several of Austen's books have come to spend what they hope will be a pleasant month.  However, soon after the holiday starts Wickham shows up univited, as if gloating at the hatred the gathered people have for him, including the Darcys.  He takes special glee in having ruined or potentially financially ruined several of the families present who invested in a money making scheme of his which has been a disaster.  It seems Wickham has received money and many people still owe him money.

The Darcy's son Jonathan is one of the guests.  He seems to be a bit of a social misfit, perhaps a bit autistic.  She doesn't like social situatioins because he never knows what is expected of him.  There is a young lady in attendance also.  The two strike up a friendship.  The girl doesn't seem to mind all his quirks.

The weather is terrible, rain and storms so everyone is stuck inside for days.  Wickham's presence casts a pall over everyone.  One night he is found murdered.  As the book proceeds we find that most of the people in the house have reason to want him dead.  As the local offical tries to determine who killed Wickham, the two young people do their own investigating by listening and watching people.  They have to be careful to not be caught alone together as that would be scandalous.  Eventually they point out the actual murder weapon to the official and one of the guests admits that she killed Wickham because he made unwelcome advances to her. 

The magistrate decides that her actions were justified and it appears there will be no legal consequences for her.

It was an entertaining book and I was very impressed with how the author "channeled" Austin.