The Alchemist's Daughter

The Alchemist's Daughter by Katharine McMahon

I bought this after having read another book by this author - The Rose of Sebastapol, which I'd bought from a charity booksale for 10p, thus proving that such second-hand book sales CAN benefit the author! I was so taken with The Rose that I bought 2 further books by the author from Amazon.

This one's set in the early 1700s. The heroine is Emilie who's been brought up by her alchemist father, pretty much isolated from the rest of the world. When, aged 18, she meets a dashing young man who comes to learn from her father, the inevitable happens and she falls in love. He is only interested in alchemy if it can make him money, but when he meets the pretty young heir to a large estate he sees another way of making money, and seduces her. She falls pregnant and marries him. Her father apparently casts her off, wants nothing more to do with her. She loses the baby and over the next year or two the marriage breaks apart. Emilie's father dies, and so her husband takes over the estate and begins to shape it into the fashionable country retreat he dreams of. He's having an affair with Emilie's maid Sarah, who becomes pregnant. Emilie, meanwhile, is beginning to notice the local rector, a widower who has an interest in scientific experiment (though not alchemy!) She realises her father was right, she's married the wrong man. She sends Sarah away, but then, after nearly blowing herself up in an alchemical experiment, she discovers that she herself was the daughter of a fallen woman who turned up at her father's door, heavily pregnant and very sick. Her father had taken the woman in, and adopted the child. She decides to go to London to find Sarah and help her. Her husband, now broke, goes off in a slaving voyage in an attempt to make his fortune. Emilie finds Sarah, sick and dying but with the help of a midwife manages to save the baby. The ending is open - but we can assume the husband won't make it back and Emilie can make a new life with Sarah's baby and the rector, and an annual allowance her father had set up for her in the event of her husband leaving her....

Ooops, I seem to have given away the entire plot. Well, no one reads this blog anyway. It's a good book, with a reasonably satisfying ending though not as good as The Rose of Sebastapol. I did enjoy the depiction of the early 18th century - a very different feel to it than to the 19th century books I've been reading a lot of lately. The experiments of Emilie and her father bridge the gap between earlier witchcraft and later true science. A very interesting time, and the book came across as well-researched and well-written.

Christmas Holiday reading

I only read a couple of books on the skiing holiday - too busy drinking vin chaud and going to bed early to nurse my knackered knees to read much. Enjoyed the books I did read though:

Dance Your Way to Psychic Sex by Alice Turing
I can't add a link for this one because it is out of print - the author self-published and only printed a hundred or so copies. I got to hear of it via her blog and thought it the wackiest title I'd ever heard of, so I just had to buy a copy. It's really well-written and certainly quirky. Full of new-age cults and magic and mind-reading and plenty of gay sex. It really isn't possible to do the plot justice in a short review so I won't even try. But I do hope the author writes more books and manages to get a mainstream publisher interested - the world needs her sparky prose and fantastic imagination.

The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse
Bought this in a 3 for 2 deal when I was supposed to be buying Christmas presents. It is always dangerous to wander into a bookshop while Christmas shopping. I always end up buying loads for myself. I've previously read Labyrinth which I liked but didn't love, though I can't remember now what it was I didn't love about it, as I always enjoy time-slip novels where historical and present-day stories unfold at the same time. In The Winter Ghosts, it is the 1930s and the hero is still mourning the loss of his brother in the Great War. He finds himself snowbound in an isolated Pyrennees village, and there meets a young woman. They spend the night talking and she helps him to come to terms with his loss. But in the morning she disappears, and he goes searching for her. He uncovers a 700-year old tragic mystery - a community was buried alive in caves in the mountainside...

This is a deliciously creepy, short but satisfying ghost story. Definitely one to read by the fireside during the next snowfall.

Broken Things

Broken Things by Padrika Tarrant

Bought this one more or less at random from Salt Publishing. I thought I was buying a novel, as it was described as the author's 'first full-length work' but it isn't a novel. It's a collection of beautifully written but weird and somewhat disturbing short pieces. Some are subtly connected to others, and all are connected by their themes of broken things - both objects and minds. They're not really stories - many have no plot. They're more like cameos.

It's the kind of book where every now and again you have to read a sentence several times, because you just love the phrases used. And some of the images will stay with me for a long time. See the excerpt on the link above, for an example.

This Thing of Darkness

This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson

My 15-year old bought this one for my birthday. It's a whopper of a book, nearly 800 pages. And every one of them brilliant.

It covers the story of the voyage of the Beagle in the 1830s. Yes, that Beagle, which carried Charles Darwin on the journey which helped him formulate his theories of evolution. It is the tale of both Darwin and Robert FitzRoy, the captain of the Beagle and a scientist in his own right. The book follows them both during the voyage and in the years afterwards, until FitzRoy's death thirty years later. It is action and adventure on the high seas, and also shows the unfolding of ideas which ultimately led to The Origin of Species.

I can't do it justice here, but if you like action, if you like science, if you like historical, you'll love this book. (If you're into fluffy romance give it a miss!)

Homecoming

Homecoming by Catrin Collier

My 12-year old bought this for me for my birthday. He was enticed by the cover, read the blurb and decided it was a Mum book.

It's the third in a series, which I didn't realise, though part way through I guessed it must be. The characters were related to each other in such complex ways - two friend married to two brothers, a third friend married to the father of the first, and a fourth friend whose mother is married to the uncle of the second. And they all live in each other's basement or attic flats. I was confused for a while, but now I realise it's part of a trilogy that explains it all!

It's set in the 1950s, and deals with the subject of pregancies, wanted and unwanted. Helen's husband is back from his National Service in Cyprus. While there, he had a brief fling with an officer's widow which has left her pregnant, while Helen can't have children. Two of Helen's friends are also pregnant. As is another girl, the flatmate of the fourth friend, out of wedlock. The plot rattles along at a fair old pace, much of the story being told via dialogue between the various characters. I didn't get much of a sense of place, though the book is set in South Wales. I also found the overuse of dialogue tags quite overbearing after a while - my personal preference is to stick to 'said' most of the time, use other tags sparingly.

The best thing about this book (apart from it being a thoughtful present from my darling!) is the depiction of 1950s attitudes towards pregnancy. The unwanted babies are born in a home for unmarried mothers, and reading about it made me very glad to have been a product of a different, more accepting era.

The Dog with Nine Lives

The Dog With Nine Lives by Della Galton

Lovely heart-warming true story of how Della rescues a dog and her puppies from a beach in Greece, then brings the mother home to England. The dog, Lindy, seems to have more than her fair share of luck and survives all sorts of near-death experiences, from being swept away in a river to cancer.

You definitely need a box of tissues to hand - Della is the queen of writing powerful emotional womag fiction and brings all her experience with her writing this non-fiction.

It's a short book, easily read in one or two evenings, and highly recommended.

Tipping the Velvet

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

I'm a fan of Sarah Waters and rate her book Nightwatch as one of my all-time favourites. It took me a long time to get around to Tipping the Velvet though - sounded too raunchy and lesbian for my tastes! But when I came across it in my local WHS and felt desperate for a book I knew would be brilliantly written, I decided to go for it.

Raunchy - yes, lesbian - yes, well-written - yes. Not as good as her other books though, but then it was written earlier and most writers improve over time!

It's 1895. Nancy Astley falls for a variety show star - Kitty Butler whose act is to dress up as a man and sing saucy songs. They meet, and Nan becomes Kitty's dresser and moves to London with her to play the bigger theatres. In time they become lovers, and partners on stage. But Kitty is ashamed of her sexuality and eventually drops Nan to marry her agent. Heartbroken Nan finds comfort in continuing to dress as a boy, and becomes a 'male' prostitute, providing hand & mouth jobs in back alleys. She then gets picked up by a rich sapphist, and spends a year or so as a live-in plaything, until after being caught with the maid she's thrown out. Finally she finds friendship which grows into love with another girl.

The novel is an enjoyable read, and as you'd expect, romps along. It's not without its flaws though - there's a scene near the end where all Nan's ex-lovers just happen to be all attending the same socialist rally, so Nan can meet with all of them and gain closure.

But for fans of Waters or anyone with an open mind and a love of Victorian-set fiction, read it and enjoy!