Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel was widely acclaimed in the early half of the 19th century and rightly so. Mary is the daughter of John Barton who becomes suspected of the murder of a rich mill owner’s son. This man, Henry Carson, is seeking to take advantage of Mary. Fortunately, she realises that her ambitions to be rich through him will lead her into trouble and later she tries to avoid him. There is another man, working class engineer Jem, who is in love with Mary but she is unsure about her emotions towards him.
Gaskell often uses the local Manchester dialect when writing the lower class conversations to help distinguish them, which adds a certain amount of authenticity to the story. There is much in it that reveals the harsh realities that face the poor and starving during the Industrial Revolution of Britain in those times. The book came as a shock to the middle and upper classes regarding those conditions, which no doubt was the author’s intention.
Towards the end of the novel the story speeds up a lot when there is a chase to find Jem. The scene moves to the docks and finds Mary relying upon help from an elderly ex-sailor. It became surprisingly exciting considering the slow start to the book. Highly recommended.


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The Citadel by A.J. Cronin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A marvellous mixture of ambition, love and devotion.

Andrew Manson 's dedication towards his patients and Christine, his lovely wife is inspiring and quite captivating. Cronin is able to move the reader time after time throughout the story.With the benefit of hindsight of course the contemporary reader is able to capture the spirit of those pre-war times, leading to the current NHS - brilliant! Such skilful writing. I loved it!

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Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor by R.D. Blackmore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When we first read this great romantic tale in school, some 60plus years ago, I had no idea that it was about the 1600s after the English Civil War. I just remember how much I had enjoyed the adventures of John (or Jan) Ridd in his feud with the evil Doones family. I knew that he had fallen in love with Lorna Doone as a young boy, and that much of the fighting was about her, and against Carver Doone.
There is much to enjoy in the story with elements of 17th century farming as well as hints about politics and royal patronage. Farmer Ridd becomes a knight of the realm while his highwayman uncle, Tom Faggus, receives a pardon for his past crimes. Some of the descriptions of the Devon and Somerset countryside are charming, and I particularly found the dialectal language of some characters entertaining and informative.
Anyone who enjoys historical fiction will love this book. I have had a very nice edition, published by Readers Digest, for several years awaiting my attention. I am so glad that I finally got around to reading it and the details about its author’s life. It was a real pleasure. Recommended.


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Hot Pinks by Samuel Astbury
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hot Pinks is a fascinating story about a futuristic world that has been created by a group or organisation, or even an entity, known throughout the book as the AI. Although the term AI is never actually spelled out as ‘Artificial Intelligence’ the reader has to assume it means that, and that it may control the ‘new world’ with amazing efficiency. Humans are able to live on various, vast, areas of land that have been recreated by the AI to copy their locations and eras from the many once found on Earth. It was not clear to me whether it took place on Earth or some other planet.

Ellen and Chambers are the main characters who open the scene with what seems to be a battle in which they are scavenging for items to improve their lives. Their lives are up-ended somewhat after discovering an artificial girl that closely resembles their lost daughter, Leah. They adopt Leah hoping for an improved family life. When a dangerous character, known as Fielding, comes on the scene this completely disrupts their life and the tale is then one of endless chases from one generated land to another.

I would have enjoyed the story much more if there had not been so many typographical and editing problems all the way through the book. This included punctuation, grammar and misspellings. I also found the writing style often too irritating and over the top with its endless flowery descriptions. It was full of tautological terms for many adjectives, adverbs and nouns that became both tiring and puzzling. The repetition of words like ‘fizzing’ and ‘avuncular’ plus several others lends itself to obvious criticism. There were some occasions when the characters Ellen and Leah were confused in successive sentences, and a quick ‘Find and Replace’ in a word processor could have corrected this well before publishing.

It was a pity that such simple errors had been left in Astbury’s manuscript as the whole concept of the plot, as well as the ending is both intriguing and exciting. My overall rating has therefore been affected by them.


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Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I struggled over several months to read this very long book by George Eliot, one of my favourite authors. However, Daniel Deronda will certainly not be a favourite novel of hers, unlike Middlemarch, Silas Marner or The Mill on the Floss. I found parts of the novel to be very slow and ponderous, as well as confusing. The two main characters, Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth, are brought together at the start of the book, but their own particular stories are soon described separately and in great detail.
Gwendolen’s life as a beautiful, self-centred young woman from an impoverished family, who is seeking both power and wealth, is interesting and intriguing. She reminded me of the kind of heroines you may have met in the novels of Jane Austen or W M Thackeray. The story of her disastrous marriage to Henleigh Grandcourt, a pompously boring nobleman, is yet another example of the terrible mistakes so many ‘society women’ of those times made, or were unfortunately cajoled into by their uncompromising families.
To begin with Daniel Deronda appears to be seeking the truth about his own ancestry, having been brought up by Sir Hugo Mallinger. He was Deronda’s guardian, a man who is both confident and polite and constantly encouraging him to take his place in English gentrified society. Despite Deronda’s generous, intelligent and empathetic understanding of others around him he seems incapable of finding enough confidence in his own position. When he wanders into the world of Judaism, rubbing shoulders with Mordecai and Ezra, a whole new set of tales begin to emerge for the reader.

The author does attempt to twist the tales of Gwendolen and Daniel together when they show signs of attempting to escape from their lot, from their respective places in society. George Eliot goes into great detail at this point. For me the one thing she illustrated so well was the prejudice, racism and general elitism of the Victorian times during the growth of the British Empire. Without going into detail I found the end of this epic novel quite disappointing. Probably it could comfortably lose about a third of Daniel Deronda’s tale and become a more engaging and enjoyable book. But then I think it would need quite a different title. Overall, Gwendolen was a more likeable and real character of those times but not really given enough space compared to Daniel. And Daniel was much too weak and wishy-washy for me. In the end he was a man who typically behaved too unsympathetically towards Gwendolen after all.



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Albatross by Dave Saari
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was quite an interesting tale about golf; spoilt, rich grown-up kids; sexual activity; and – oh yes! a murder investigation. The investigation involved two amateur private detectives, Trey and his mother, Madeline, and an FBI agent, named Sybil, who was known to Trey back in his school and college days. I thought it was only ‘quite’ interesting because about a third to a half of the book could have been left out altogether.

Although in my younger days I played and enjoyed a lot of golf, there was far too much golf detail in the book. At the same time the amount of detail about the travel routes and roads around Grand Marais in Minnesota, USA, was also overdone and felt like it was padding out the story. The ‘sexy’ descriptions of all the female characters throughout the book; plus exposition of any and all, intimate behaviour between Trey and Sybil was quite unnecessary for this reader. That last observation of mine may well apply to anyone over the age of twenty five these days. Such accounts of intercourse could certainly be titillating to many teenaged ‘younger adults’ I suppose.

The unfortunate acronym ‘MILF’ and several other idiomatic terms often occurred in the dialogue during the various conversations between characters. This usually adds a sense of reality and authenticity to a story, and so can be quite understandable and acceptable. However, outside of the locale, or even the USA, it may confuse readers, like me, who reside where the words do not occur - even in their lexicon or thesaurus should curiosity be strong enough to seek their meaning.

There was not enough interest or intrigue in the murder mystery, aside from my negative points above, for me to give Albatross more than 2 or 3 stars. The kindle edition that I read was not user-friendly. It had a table of contents that did not work at all, and was at the end of the book in the back matter rather than the front matter, where it would have been most useful. Every chapter I clicked took me to the list of previous books by Dave Saari. So probably, some more editing, and/or beta-reading is still needed for the novel’s re-publication.


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Alabaster Alibi by S.D. Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read Bloodstone Bludgeon a couple of years ago and enjoyed it. It is the second book in S.D. Brown’s Rock Shop Series, and so I was looking forward to reading Alabaster Alibi, the first book. I was not disappointed. The main character, Allie Renault, becomes the investigating detective in a possible murder case. This is despite threats and demands from Sheriff Stone, the local police officer, to stay out of it as she is his main suspect. Initially there is one dead person, her uncle Jasper, but after a while, well into the story, it becomes a case of two dead people. The whole murder mystery seems to revolve around the rock shop left jointly to Allie and her cousin Colin. The case is not so simple of course and the tale weaves nicely in and out of many twists and turns. Allie is a very likeable character who I found I was rooting for right to the surprising conclusion.
Brown bravely introduces elements of the Viet Nam War that will seriously affect her surreptitious investigations. Some of this information in the book may or may not be true. I can recall incidents – such as the My Lai massacre, terrible and cruel - that occurred during that war. This was reported later in newspapers and TV everywhere and it brought shame upon the US fighting forces. This section of Alabaster Alibi added such sadness to the book that I found difficult to read about.
However, Alabaster Alibi is entertaining, pacey and intriguing. The characters are realistic and often amusing. For Allie many of them slowly reveal motives for murder and capture the reader’s attention. The final twist at the end when the perpetrator is revealed was good if quite confusing and I required more explanation. Maybe that was just me! Several parts of the story had unfortunate typos and the MS needs editing or putting through a word processor once more.


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Half Gate by K.T. Munson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I first read one of the Gate Trilogy novels in 2017, I was completely absorbed by the story because of the author’s fascinating creation of the characters in a ‘Nethergate’ kind of world. The ideas behind it involve demons and trapped spirits, amongst many other-worldly concepts. Half Gate is a short work of three short stories, which illustrates further the various kinds of problems its characters may meet.
In the first short story we meet Aqitaka and Ellaria who seem destined to become lovers. But Aqitaka is from another world. Can he stay? In the next story Azura, a commoner, is suddenly caught in a frozen world, Oran, and discovers a prince in the same situation. His father is determined to prevent the two marrying but Azura has become their world’s Gate Guardian, a powerful influence. Story three is about a student of fringe worlds. She is called Elisabeth, and she discovers a secret and dangerous book. There is a strong likelihood that the spirit trapped within it will ruin her work, maybe cause havoc in their world. Can she create a suitable device to render it friendly or harmless?
Despite the assertions that Half Gate can be read as a standalone book, I disagree. I had some idea about what was going on in this book of three stories but still struggled to understand the overall plot(s). The worlds that Munson creates here are varied and intriguing but I felt all the way through that each story could have been developed much more into a novel of its own. The pace of each is fast and furious but their worlds would benefit greatly for being in much greater depth, with its own twists and turns in my opinion. Somehow, I wanted the main characters to figure more significantly, weaving in and out of new situations developed by this skilled and imaginative author. Her world-building is so fascinating it seemed to me to be a waste to keep them so short.
Unfortunately, once again I find my overall rating reduced through the need for further careful editing in this book. For example when it said ‘palatable’ did it really want to say ‘palpable?’ There were too many punctuation and grammatical errors, with too many US idioms and words throughout the narrative that made it difficult for this UK reader to fully understand what was being explained. I am a firm believer that the patois and dialect for a region should be kept within the written dialogue of a novel. The conversations were real and well done but exposition was not always clear to me. Words in the story like: dove; snuck; sunk; snagged; scooted; and barreled mean something quite different in a UK dictionary.


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White Nights by Ann Cleeves
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

White Nights is quite a different novel to the first book in the Shetland series, i.e. Raven Black, because the season is summer and things are not so gloomy and dark. However, the atmosphere becomes just as unsettling to Jimmy Perez and the perpetual light causes a certain amount of stress to some of the visitors.

An art exhibition, on Shetland, that is not going too well when an unknown man becomes upset, weeping and collapsing in front of everyone. The main artist is Bella Sinclair but a new artist, called Fran that is also present, looks like a woman of interest to Perez. He feels that the mystery man is overreacting but he is curious when the man claims to have completely lost his memory. When the same man is found hanging dead the next day, together with some other strange circumstances, Perez starts an investigation. Was it murder or suicide?

The subsequent case and Jimmy Perez’s romantic involvement with Fran are the main components of the plot from then on. The build-up of the story through the descriptions of the settings, the characters and the intriguing developments in the case are excellent. There is an ongoing feeling of resentment and suspicions from the locals about visitors to the islands, These feelings come through to readers and feels somehow natural and understood. It is down to the writing skill and talent of Ann Cleeves and the tension throughout the book is just what one expects from a crime thriller. Twists and turns occur in almost every chapter! Unfortunately I found the motive behind the murders a little questionable and for me this was the book’s only weakness.
It was still worth reading right to the very end and every bit as enjoyable as the first book in the series.



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Raven Black by Ann Cleeves
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have been a fan of Ann Cleeves’ crime novels, set on the Shetland Isles, for quite a long time. The characters that she creates are so realistic. The reader is led into their lives so well and so subtly that any surprises at the denouement are quite genuine. Jimmy Perez, the police inspector and primary character is a brilliant figure for you to latch onto. He has a real background, along with the highs and lows of a life spent solving crime. The customs of the Shetlands confused me for quite a while, particularly when they became relevant to the suspected murders. But patience was rewarded later!

This was the kind of criminal thriller that I enjoy the most. It has characters you get to care about, both as victims and as possible perpetrators. The plot is both believable and intriguing from the start; full of twists and turns. There is even the hint of a little romance between Perez and a woman involved in the discovery of a dead body. It is a hint that may tempt you to read the sequel or subsequent sequels. Highly recommended.



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