My Bookish Weekly Wrap Up – Week 30 2018

Hello all! Happy weekend!! Hope the past week has treated you well! Despite the heat it’s been a pretty good week for me – and was in plant heaven yesterday as visited RHS Hyde Hall with my parents for the Summer Flower Show! Gorgeous flowers and displays everywhere and a fabulous time was had by all – there may have been some plant purchases and cake eaten as well!

And things have been good on the book front too! Thanks to the rain (YAY!!) last weekend I managed to have a good spell of reading and with very little on TV most nights this week – did anyone see the Scoobynatural episode?! loved it! – I’ve found myself reading more! So 5 books got finished this week, a few more were added to my bookshelves – both in real life and in virtual life too – and all is good in bookland! Here’s my look back!

BOOKS FINISHED

At Mrs Lippincote’s by Elizabeth Taylor – 4 stars

Really enjoyed this and a great start to the Elizabeth Taylor Reading Project – a year of reading different novels from Elizabeth Taylor

Mariana by Monica Dickens – 4 stars

This was easy to read and a gentle story of a girl growing up and her thoughts on the world and society around her and her quest to find true love

Girl with Dove by Salley Bayley – 3 stars

A dark memoir of a girl growing up in a dysfunctional family and finding escape and solace in the world of books

The Moby-Dick Blues by Michael Strelow – 3 stars

Another dark book with a literary theme! Thought provoking and bleak!

Smart Moves by Adrian Magson – 3.5 stars

Pacy thriller!

BOOK HAUL

While catching up with some reviews on NetGalley this week I made the mistake of taking a little browse at the new books… here’s the result!

Summer at Hollyhock House by Cathy Bussey

Faith Coombes should have been over the moon when her long-term boyfriend proposed to her. But instead, she broke up with him. Rob was safe, reliable, nice and … boring. Nothing like the only person who had ever broken her heart… Unable to afford the rent on another flat and desperate for a new start, Faith takes the plunge and moves back to the village she grew up in, returning to the house that holds so many memories for her.
Hollyhock House, the family home of her best-friend Minel, also belongs to the boy who meant so much to her all those years ago…
As Faith falls back in love with the sprawling surroundings at Hollyhock she also finds herself falling all over again for the only person who has truly hurt her.
Can Faith come to terms with her past? Did she make the wrong decision in breaking up with Rob?

Or does her heart really lie at Hollyhock House?

Foe by Iain Reid

We don’t get visitors. Not out here. We never have.

In Iain Reid’s second haunting, philosophical puzzle of a novel, set in the near-future, Junior and Henrietta live a comfortable, solitary life on their farm, far from the city lights, but in close quarters with each other. One day, a stranger from the city arrives with alarming news: Junior has been randomly selected to travel far away from the farm…very far away. The most unusual part? Arrangements have already been made so that when he leaves, Henrietta won’t have a chance to miss him, because she won’t be left alone—not even for a moment. Henrietta will have company. Familiar company.

Told in Reid’s sharp and evocative style, Foe examines the nature of domestic relationships, self-determination, and what it means to be (or not to be) a person. An eerily entrancing page-turner, it churns with unease and suspense from the first words to its shocking finale

The Book Ninja by Ali Berg

Frankie Rose is desperate for love. Or a relationship. Or just a date with a semi-normal person. It’s not that she hasn’t tried – Frankie is the queen of online dating. But she has had enough.
Deciding to embark on the ultimate dating experiment, inspired by her job at The Little Brunswick Bookshop, Frankie places her hope in her favourite books to find her the perfect man… Secretly planting copies on trains, trams and buses, Frankiehopes to find the man of her dreams through a mutual love of good books.
But one spontaneous kiss later and Frankie begins to fall for a guy called Sunny. There’s just one tiny problem – Frankie is strictly a Jane Austen kind of woman and Sunny is really into Young Adult. Seriously, obsessively into it…
Can Frankie overcome her book snobbery for the man of her dreams? Or will she be left searching the trains for her modern-day Mr Darcy forever?

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

The eagerly awaited new novel from the author of The Age of Miracles.

Imagine a world where sleep could trap you, for days, for weeks, months… A world where you could even die of sleep rather than in your sleep.

Karen Thompson Walker’s second novel is the stunning story of a Californian town’s epidemic of perpetual sleep.

And via snail mail I’ve been lucky to get these goodies in the post to review!

Snap by Belinda Bauer

On a stifling summer’s day, eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters sit in their broken-down car, waiting for their mother to come back and rescue them. Jack’s in charge, she said. I won’t be long.But she doesn’t come back. She never comes back. And life as the children know it is changed for ever.
Three years later, mum-to-be Catherine wakes to find a knife beside her bed, and a note that says: I could have killed you.
Meanwhile Jack is still in charge – of his sisters, of supporting them all, of making sure nobody knows they’re alone in the house, and – quite suddenly – of finding out the truth about what happened to his mother.
But the truth can be a dangerous thing . . .

The Amber Maze by Christopher Bowden

While staying in a Dorset cottage, Hugh Mullion finds a mysterious key down the side of an antique chair. No one can say how long the key has been there or what it opens. Hugh’s search for answers will unlock the secrets of the troubled life of a talented artist, destined to be hailed a neglected genius fifty years too late. And no secret is darker than that of The Amber Maze, from whose malign influence he never escaped.
The trail takes Hugh from Edwardian Oxfordshire to 1960s Camden Town, where the ghosts of the past are finally laid to rest.
Delicately crafted noir fiction at its best

CURRENTLY READING

The Librarian by Salley Vickers