The Breakdown by B.A. Paris

Cass was on the wrong road during a terrible storm. She saw a woman in a car in the middle of the woods, in the middle of the night. She did not stop long enough. She was too scared. It was raining so hard she could not understand why the woman did not ask her for help. Neither of them left their cars. The storm was rolling over them, preventing them to make contact, get out. When she arrived home she could not remember the mundane little things and needed her husband to remind her of appointments, events, invitation, setting the alarm clock. What was wrong with her? Why was it so difficult to pull herself together? And why could she not trust herself?

The answers came unexpectedly and too late.

I knew since the very beginning what was going on, but did not know how the drama would play itself out. Curiosity let me into almost the same predicament as the protagonist. Hers was serious. Cass was riddled with confusion and guilt. So was I, but for very different reasons. While she struggled to escape her situation, I had no intentions whatsoever to leave this psychological thriller and surface before the very end.

What a sad ending it was! I just wanted to cry for them all, while being relieved that it was over. What if she took a different route? What if ...

Water under the bridge, yes. For Cass the solution brought new possibilities and a new future. So it was a good ending. But was it really? After all that she went through Cass deserved a new tomorrow. An innocent, new born day...

This afternoon it was raining outside. Wonderful rain after three years of devastating drought. The four cats and two dogs were on the bed with me, listening to the storm outside. I was under a light blanket, reading as though my life depended on it. It was the perfect book for the perfect day.

I actually smiled when I finished this cozy book. Sadly I cannot tell you why ... :-))
I can tell you this, though, I will absolutely read this author again.

Excellent!

B A Paris grew up in England but has spent most of her adult life in France. She has worked both in finance and as a teacher and has five daughters. Behind Closed Doors is her first novel.

My Not So Perfect Life by Sophie Kinsella

Just like the alphabet, bitch, I come before U. 

Yep, Demeter Farlowe(the goddess of the harvest, but also Mrs. Wilton in her other life), a proper Godzilla II, heads a team of pretty, but nasty nails on parade in the advertising world; a goopy pudding of gals, fluffed up by high heels, the secret Wednesday Bacchus devotion, and Ya Ya-sisterhood to die for. 

Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game, can be regarded as the general mantra for the miniskirt brigade coming with the high-prized hype and pretentiousness. Welcome to Cooper Clemmow branding company. 

When something goes wrong in your life, just yell 'plot twist' and move on. Katie Brenner, a wanne-be Londoner is forced back to the farm, out in the British sticks, when her low-paid, struggling, position as a research associate in the prestigious advertising company becomes redundant. What feels like the end of her London-ness(which gives her a spring in her step, it's so intangible, so buzzy), is actually the beginning of a new challenge, when she helps her father and stepmother to put glamorous into glamping on their farm, with proper wi-fi, 400-count must-haves on the yurt beds, and a new yoga discovery, called Vedari, for the upper- and middleclasses who's stomach sensitivity grows with their income. 

Out with the serum in the curls, the unfamiliar straight, tortured hair, the most important steps at a front door, away from the biscuit people, the naked-man coat stand, the amazing giant plastic flowers, and in with a little bit of amorous huffing and puffing in the cow dung on her way to find a considerate man, number one, but, number two and three, a man of quality who values her. Fun becomes such a last-year's kind of vintage rhetoric in the end, oh so like Alex Astalis, for instance. But wait, that's only in the hunt for the perfect partner. On the farm fun is the buzz word for chia seed, organic ginger, and special seaweed-groupies with a Gwyneth Paltrow-lifestyle craze. 

It's the brochure for Ansters Farm that got the moss on the rolling stones to scatter in totally new directions for the Somerset girl.

This is a satire in the rom com literary genre with a touch of Hollywood fluff in the ending. However, it comes with a little more substance, meat to the bones, and I loved that. I'm somewhat subjective and biased too in my rating. My daughter took a sabbatical from her 18-hour days in the advertising world to tour the world. She is the Katie Brenner in our own story. 

Cozy and quaint. A cutesy kind of fun read. Really enjoyable and good. A few good laughs came with the experience. Yes, and you will find me in Katie's helicopter dad, but without his crazy schemes. :-)) 

                                                                                   

The Chilbury Ladies' Choir by Jennifer Ryan

First funeral of the war, and our little village choir simply couldn’t sing in tune. “Holy, holy, holy” limped out as if we were a crump of warbling sparrows. But it wasn’t because of the war, or the young scoundrel Edmund Winthrop torpedoed in his submarine, or even the Vicar’s abysmal conducting. No, it was because this was the final performance of the Chilbury Choir. Our swan song.

...It was the funeral of Edmund Winthrop, the Brigadier’s despicable son who was blown up in a submarine last week. Only twenty he was—one minute a repulsive reptile, the next a feast for the fishes.

...Beside her, that foreign evacuee girl looked petrified, like she’d seen death before and a lot more besides.

And so begins a novel, with Miss Edwina Paltry's letter to her sister (quite a fitting surname given the different meanings: small, meagre, trifling, insignificant, negligible, inadequate, insufficient, scant, scanty, derisory, pitiful, pitiable, pathetic, miserable, sorry, wretched, puny, trivial, niggardly, beggarly, mean, ungenerous, inappreciable, mere).

The fictional tale and characters are based on the real diaries and journals which were written during the first year of WWII in Britain for an organization called Mass Observation. They published a newsletter in which the hearts, minds and souls of the ordinary citizens were shared.

The epistolary character of the novel is the result of the author's commemoration of these writers, and the stories her grandmother shared about the war. Four main narrators share through their diaries and letters the funny, racy, touching or terrifying events in Chilbury during 1940, leaving the reader in the midst of a richly textured novel populated by the citizens of the fictional village of Chilbury. 

The main narrators are:
Miss Edwina Paltry - in letters to her sister:

Brace yourself, Clara, for we are about to be rich! I’ve been offered the most unscrupulous deal you’ll ever believe! I knew this ruddy war would turn up some gems—whoever would have thought that midwifery could be so lucrative! But I couldn’t have imagined such a grubby nugget of a deal coming from snooty Brigadier Winthrop, the upper-class tyrant who thinks he owns this prissy little village. I know you’ll say it’s immoral, even by my standards, but I need to get away from being a cooped-up, put-down midwife. I need to get back to the old house where I can live my own life and be free.

Mark these words: her little scheme would have her flustered like a bluebottle in a jam jar in the end.

Kitty Winthrop - in her diary - thirteen years old: she saw people as beams of a rainbow, and her eighteen-year-old sister, Venitia, as simply a vile beast.

I like to see people as colors, a kind of aura or halo surrounding them, shading their outsides with the various flavors of their insides.
Me—purple, as brilliant and dark as the sky on a thundery night
Mama—a very pale pink, like a baby mouse
Daddy—soot black (Edmund was also black, but black like a starless sky)
Mrs. Tilling—light green, like a shoot trying to come up through the snow
Mrs. B.—navy blue (correct and traditional)
Henry is a deep azure blue, to match his eyes.

Silvie - in her diary - the much younger Jewish evacuee from Czechoslovakia with her terrible secret.

Venitia Winthrop - in her letters to the vicar's daughter, Angela Quail.

Mrs. Tilling - in her journal - a nurse and the local billeting agent.

Two male voices appeared in their own letters as well.

Flt. Lt. Henry Brampton-Boyd - the most sought-after bachelor in the village. He had many a nasty nail out on dainty little ladies' fingers and a lot to answer for. Even Elsie the parlour maid got her head around something.

Colonel Mallard - in his letters to his sister Mrs. Maud Green. He arrived as curmudgeon old Mr. Bear, and left as snuggly Mr. Toodles, well .... sort of. Life would drastically change for him in Chilbury, that's for sure. 

Miss Primrose Trent from London moved into Chilbury to become the Professor of Music at the Lichtfield University. She revived the choir, now deprived of all the men who went off to war. The Vicar Quail was convinced that all the oxygen and raison d'etre left town with the men. The women would prove him wrong. The choir gave women their voices. The voices they thought they never had. And therein lies the charm of this story of courage, endurance, resilience and hope.

The peripheral characters brought much more color to Kitty's rainbow. They read like the Chilbury telephone directory, but what a wonderful, unbelievable, atmospheric tale they all brought alive.

I'm not going into the plot or storyline. It is for the readers to discover and enjoy through the picturesque prose.

GREAT READ!!! Just absolutely BEAUTIFUL!

RECOMMENDED

Hello, and thank you for being interested in my author page. I'm the author of The Chilbury Ladies' Choir, which came out in February, 2017. It is my very first novel. Before becoming a writer, I was a nonfiction book editor, editing books about politics and economics, travel and health, and biography and memoir. I worked in London before moving to the Washington, DC, area ten years ago with my husband and two children.

I was born in a village in Kent, England, not too far away from the fictional village of Chilbury. The novel is based on the stories of my grandmother who was twenty when the Second World War began, mostly hilarious tales about bumping into people in the blackout, singing in the air raid shelters, and the freedoms women had during the war years--the excitement and romance. She also belonged to a choir, and her choir stories dramatized the camaraderie and support they all took away; the knowledge that they weren't in this alone. The Chilbury Ladies' Choir uses my dear grandmother's stories as its backdrop. 

If you have read The Chilbury Ladies' Choir, thank you. I very much hope that you liked it. And if you have yet to read it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I loved writing it. Please visit my website: www.jenniferryanbooks.com

Into The Water by Paula Hawkins

Paula Hawkins, a freelance journalist from London, firmly proved herself as a versatile writer by publishing romantic comedies under her pen name Amy Silver, as well as huge successful thrillers under her own name. Girl On The Train was a phenomenal bestseller, which she followed up with this second thriller Into The Water.

This book reminds me a lot about The Casual Vacancy by J.K.Rowling(a magnificent read in itself). Both books have the community of a small town in common, who address the impact and involvement of all the inhabitants in solving a mysterious death, with various narrators relating the events to authorities and readers.

From the book's epigraph:

"We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection. Hallucinations ~ Oliver Sacks"

Breckford, a small town in the British Isles must come to terms with the death of a single mother. A multi-character tale is told in which the truth and the memories populating it, become a conundrum of regrets, secrets, lost opportunities and redemption. Everyone feels guilty, nobody is willing to take the blame.

Erin: "It's a fucking weird place, Beckford. It's beautiful, quite breathtaking in parts, but it's strange. It feels like a place apart, disconnected from everything that surrounds it. Of course, it is miles from anywhere - you have to drive hours to get anywhere civilized. That's if you consider Newcastle civilized, which I'm not sure I do.

Beckford is a strange place, full of odd people, with a downright bizarre history. And all through the middle of it there's this river, and that's the weirdest thing of all - it seems like whichever way you turn, in whatever direction you go, somehow you always end up back at the river.

Those who stayed behind after the latest death of Nel Abbott had to deal with the mysterious attraction to the Drowning Pool in the river for women committing suicide. It was the legends surrounding these mysterious deaths that attracted Danielle(Nel) Abbott to the pool for the book she was writing about these women and their demises.

After her own death, she leaves the unfinished manuscript, as well as a fifteen-year-old daughter behind, who has no father listed on her birth certificate.

Nickie: "Some of them went into the river willingly and some didn't, and if you asked Nickie - not that anyone would, because no one ever did - Nel Abbott went in fighting. But no one was going to ask her and no one was going to listen to her, so there really wasn't any point in her saying anything. Especially not to the police..."

From Nel's manuscript:

The Drowning Pool', Danielle Abbott (unpublished):
I decided, while in the process of trying to understand myself and my family and the stories we tell each other, that I would try to make sense of all the Beckford stories, that I would write down all the last moments, as I imagined them, in the lives of the women who went to the Beckford Drowning Pool.

Its name carries weight; and yet, what is it? A bend in the river, that’s all. A meander. You’ll find it if you follow the river in all its twists and turns, swelling and flooding, giving life and taking it, too. The river is by turns cold and clean, stagnant and polluted; it snakes through forest and cuts like steel through the soft Cheviot Hills, and then, just north of Beckford, it slows. It rests, just for a while, at the Drowning Pool."

As atmospheric as you can wish for; picturesque as you can get, and intriguing as you cannot imagine.

Although the numerous narrators created constant confusion, the storyline was never broken, and the suspense kept flowing strongly along the river of words pulling this gripping saga together.

This is an excellent crime thriller. One of those sleep-snatchers.

Another book in the same genre, worth reading is
Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg.

RECOMMENDED!!!

Paula Hawkins is a British author, best known for her best-selling psychological thriller novel The Girl on the Train, which deals with themes of domestic violence, alcohol, and drug abuse. Wikipedia

Born: 26 August 1972 (age 44), Harare, Zimbabwe

Education: Keble College, Oxford

Movies: The Girl on the Train

Awards: Goodreads Choice Awards Best Mystery & Thriller, Glamour Award for Writer

Everything But The Truth by Gillian McAllister

REVIEW

In the Highlands of Scotland two people fell in love like two peas in a pod. Only to discover that they're going to have a baby and don't really know anything about each other, apart from knowing that they were meant to grow old together. 

In the picturesque little village, Oban, an old mansions and its inhabitants had a secret to protect, and in the city of Newcastle the young woman had her reasons for leaving her dream world of being a dedicated doctor. Relationships within Rachel's own family handicapped her efforts to move on and just be happy, trust people, fall in love with love and commitments in itself and feel comfortable with the life she chose to share with Jack, the freelance journalist.

The harder Jack tried to escape his history, the more obsessively Rachel delve into his past. She just could not stop herself, yet could not scrape enough courage together to tell him her own secret.

This atmospheric psychological thriller centers around forgiveness. In order to forgive others, one has to forgive oneself first and before that can actually happen, many mistakes are made and bad memories created. Lives can get ruined and futures can become meaningless, null and void, in the process. 

Richly textured and complex in character, the secrets in the book are slowly revealed. This beautifully written book leaves the reader with thought-provoking questions for which there are no easy answers. I did not like Rachel for most of the book, but in the end it was easy to understand her, and most IMPORTANTLY ... forgive her for rubbing me the wrong way. 

The ending was just perfect. I closed the book with an 'awwwwwww' that left me feeling optimistic and excited about life. 

Thus, a wonderful entertaining, suspenseful, compelling read; tense and intriguing, without ripping my guts out. 

An absolute YES! YES! YES!

BLURB

It all started with the email.

It came through to her boyfriend's iPad in the middle of the night. Rachel didn't even mean to look. She loves Jack, and she's pregnant with their child. She trusts him. But now she's seen it, she can't undo that moment, or the chain of events it has set in motion.

Why has Jack been lying about his past? Just what exactly is he hiding? And doesn't Rachel have a right to know the truth at any cost?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gillian McAllister graduated with an English degree in 2006 and is now a lawyer with a large law firm.

Her blog has been featured in various publications including Company magazine. You can find it at www.gillianmcallister.com

She lives in Birmingham with her boyfriend and cat.