Guest review by Berlie Doherty: THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES by Sue Monk Kidd

Berlie Doherty writes novels, plays, stories and poetry for all ages, and is

translated into over twenty languages. She has written over 60 books, several

of which have been dramatised for radio, television and the stage. She has won

many awards around the world, including the Carnegie Medal twice (for

Dear Nobody andGranny was a Buffer Girl). Her subjects cover many different

genres, from folk and fairy tales and historical fiction to enduring contemporary

novels. Her most recent children's novel is Far From Home, a companion book

to Street Child. Her adult novel Requiem was recently re-published by

Cybermouse Books.

www.berliedoherty.com

I picked up the book because the title intrigued me. The fact that it

was published 15 years ago, and had been on the New York Times
best-seller list despite being a debut novel, won awards and had been
made into a major film had completely passed me by, maybe because
there are simply so many excellent and award-winning books around.
We can't read them all, never mind giving ourselves the luxury of
loving them. I read this book quickly and compulsively, enjoying the
rare condition of having become completely absorbed in a novel.
It doesn't happen so often these days. I think my delight in the book
has as much to do with the beguiling voice of the narrator as with
the plot itself, which is both harrowing and uplifting. When I tell
people about the best books I've read this year, and many of them 
very powerful and memorable pieces of writing, this is the one I want
to hug.

In many ways The Secret Life of Bees affected me as much as To Kill
a Mocking Bird did many years ago, though it is less ambitious and
distressing in its political message. It is set in South Carolina in 1964,
the year of the American Civil Rights Act.  The 14 year old white central
character, Lily Owens, is told by her abusive father, T-Ray, that she fatally
shot her mother when she was four years old. This is the central motivation
of the plot, which takes Lily on a personal mission away from her home
to try to discover the truth.  She has in her possession a photograph of
her mother and a picture of a black Madonna. Hitch-hiking with her is
the family's black maid, Rosaleen, who had been arrested and attacked
for spoiling a white man's shoes on her way to registering to vote for the
very first time. Lily rescues her from hospital, sure in herself that the only
hope for either of them is in leaving her father and the home-town of
Sylvan. The honey-farm in Tiburon where they end up is run by the black
Boatwright sisters, and it is here that Lily begins to find peace and a
knowledge of self-value. It is a coming-of-age novel in which we share the
experience and personal journey of a teenage girl who has seen and
experienced violence, death, grief, loss and love. I have no intention of
plot-spoiling by telling any more of what happens.

So what about this intriguing title? The story begins when Lily is woken up
by a swarm of bees in her room. When she drags T-Ray in to help her get
rid of them, the bees have gone. Her totem, hidden in a box that is buried
in her garden, is a picture of a black Madonna, with Tiburon written on the
back, and it is only when she arrives in that town that she discovers the same
label on a jar of honey. When she is given shelter by the Boatwright sisters,
she helps with the tending of the hives and the harvesting of honey. Every
chapter begins with a fascinating little piece about the behaviour of bees,
and the metaphor of the beehive is realised in the Boatwright household,
the symbol of companionship, community, busyness, female power
and ultimate reward.

I have recently seen the film, and was relieved to see that it is a very faithful
portrayal of the novel, at times deeply moving, and with some beautiful
performances. Visually of course the film gives us a much stronger impression
of the period; in the novel the characters are timeless, especially Lily and the
Boatwright sisters, and it comes as quite a surprise to see them dressed in
sixties clothes and enjoying sixties music. The film gives a vivid visual reminder
of racial hatred and ignorance which is extremely painful to watch. But then,
of course, it goes for a slightly softer ending, with just a few more
heart-warming tweaks than the novelist imagined.

Guest review by Sally Prue: Mr WESTON'S GOOD WINE by T.F. Powys

"A book I have come back to again and again over the years, partly because it’s so funny, but mostly because I’m bedazzled and bewildered by it."

Sally Prue is a writer for children of all ages, from picture books up to Young Adult fiction. Her novel Cold Tom won the Branford Boase Prize and the Smarties Silver Award, and Song Hunter won the Historical Society’s Young Quills Award. Her other jobs have included being a Time and Motion clerk, an accompanist, and a piano and recorder teacher. Sally is married, has two grown up daughters, and lives on the edge of a small but very beautiful wood in Hertfordshire, England. She  blogs at The Word Den. She is also to be found at http://www.sallyprue.co.uk/ and @sally_prue.

Writers are encouraged by their publishers to sum up each new book in a single sentence. This is partly to provide a strap line to put on the press release and cover (it’s more or less the equivalent of telling the prospective buyer whether the tin contains treacle sponge or axle grease) but it also happens to be good discipline for the writer: it’s generally useful if he or she has managed to work out what the book’s about before it goes to press.

How might T.F. Powys’s have summed up his novel Mr Weston’s Good Wine? 

Well, the nearest I can get is Cold Comfort Farm meets The Revelation of St John.

The set-up of the book is simple. Through the 1920s November mists Mr Weston, a travelling salesman, arrives among the inhabitants of the village of Folly Down. These villagers include an atheist vicar; his neglected daughter (‘If a girl is not taught hockey,’ says a well-meaning neighbour, ‘she might be found in a wood, talking to a serpent’); a wicked procurer of maidens for the amusement of the farmer’s unthinking sons; a love-lorn mystic; and the family of an innkeeper. 

Now, as it becomes clear very soon, Mr Weston is God the Father in disguise, and his sales assistant is the Archangel Michael. More disconcerting still is the fact that Mr Weston keeps a lion in his delivery van (a sign, as St Peter tells us, that we must be sober and vigilant because the devil, as a roaring lion, goes about seeking whom he may devour).

But how can anyone bear – or dare – to be sober when Mr Weston has brought his good wine to Folly Down? There is truth in wine, and Mr Weston’s good wine is as sweet as love and as strong as death; and the truth of death as well as of every kind of love (there’s lots of amorous tumbling in the village’s oak tree bed) are revealed during a timeless November evening full of tenderness and horror. 

Mr Weston may be white-haired and kindly, but he is also the terrible god of Isaiah: ‘I form the light, and create darkness,’ he says. ‘I make peace, and create evil: I, the Lord, do all these things.’

Mr Weston’s Good Wine is a book I have come back to again and again over the years, partly because it’s so funny, but mostly because I’m bedazzled and bewildered by it. It’s haunting, tragic, horrifying, joyful, silly and wise, all in the space of 232 pages, and its inhabitants are by turn lusty, bewildered, and cruel. I could say more, but am abashed by Mr Weston himself, who doesn’t argue when someone suggests changing the last verse of Psalm 104 to ‘let the critics be consumed out of the earth’.

 Mr Weston’s Good Wine is a hugely rewarding read. It gives us Tamar, who believes she’ll soon meet her longed-for blue-trousered angel; the bereaved Rev’d Grobe, who is fascinated by Coleridge’s poem Christobel and tenderly preaches a gospel in which he no longer believes (Mr Weston, by the way, prefers Cowper); Mr Grunter, who discovers there are worse things than being nobody; Luke Bird, who needs a miracle to attain his bride; the truly terrible Mrs Vosper; and poor Ada Kiddle, who…but I mustn’t give too much away.

So I’ll finish where everyone begins, with the title, Mr Weston’s Good Wine. The title is an echo of Jane Austen’s Mr Weston, of course, and as soon as I’d finished Powys’s strange story for the first time I re-read Emma to find the whole quotation.

It comes as Emma rides home in a carriage, alone except for the amorous Mr Elton, who ‘had been drinking too much of Mr Weston’s good wine, and [Emma] felt sure he would want to be talking nonsense’.

So: is Powys saying that Emma’s Mr Weston is god-like in some way? I wouldn’t have said so, but now I come to think about it…

Or does Powys only mean that Mr Weston’s Good Wine, the book, is nonsense (though Ronald Bythe called Powys the least-modern of writers, and what’s more modern than nonsense?)?

Or is Powys’s title just one more go at putting off the critics?

I’ll have to read both books again, one day, to see if I can work it out.

Mr Weston’s Good Wine is published by Vintage. Sally Prue's  own theological comedy is called Goldkeeper.

Guest review by Paul Dowswell: THE DARK STUFF by Nick Kent

"Kent always wrote about the more damaged end of the rock star fraternity and had a gift for bringing their bizarre lives and characters vividly to life."

Paul Dowswell writes historical fiction and is a frequent visitor to schools, both home and abroad, where he talks about his books and takes creative writing classes. His novels Eleven Eleven and Sektion 20 won the Historical Association Young Quills Award and Auslander won the Hamelin Associazione Culturale Book Prize. Paul is a Fellow of the English Association and reviews books for Armadillo and Carousel. 

When I was 16 my idea of good writing boiled down to The King James Bible, George Orwell and Nick Kent. The King James Bible gave me a love of flowing, musical prose, Orwell taught me about clarity, and Kent was a master of the gripping introduction and striking image.

Kent is now in his 60s, having survived over a decade of full-blown heroin addiction and a hair-raising early adult life as a journalist with the New Musical Express in its ’70s heyday. As fellow rock journalist Mark Ellen put it ‘If there was a story involving Keith Richards, naked groupies and a flaming carpet, Kent was the man to tell it.’

He had a style best described as baroque, his endless sentences flowing from one clause to another. He never learned to type and delivered his work in dense, spidery biro scrawl, sometimes on the inside of a dismantled cornflake box. Kent loved the sort of words and phrases you can relish and run around your tongue: ‘languishing’, ‘denizens’, ‘vortex’, ‘the Babylon sweepstakes’, ‘lounge lizards’, ‘burlesque nadir’… Robert Plant described him as ‘one of the real poets’ of rock journalism and that certainly chimes with me. Kent always wrote about the more damaged end of the rock star fraternity and had a gift for bringing their bizarre lives and characters vividly to life.

His book The Dark Stuff, an amended compilation of his best newspaper and magazine articles, was first published in 1994. It’s a master class of gripping titles: ‘Sid Vicious – the exploding dimwit’, ‘Twilight in Babylon – the Stones after the ’60s’, ‘The Bewildering Universe of Roky Erickson and his two-headed dog’, ‘Lightning up with the Prince of Darkness: Miles Davis approaches 60’, ‘Going to Hell with Jerry Lee Lewis’… Anyone with a love of rock music could not fail to be intrigued.

And the articles that follow rarely disappoint. Take that last one on Jerry Lee Lewis where Kent describes a 1989 encounter with this titan of ’50s Rock and Roll, brilliantly capturing his intimidating manner and the cadence of his Memphis accent. It begins ‘He was trying to be courteous, but you could tell almost at once that being courteous wasn’t really part of his basic nature.’ Kent describes him as radiating waves of random hostility, like static on the radio. ‘Even wearing a white ski jersey with gambolling reindeer knitted on the chest, he still looked like Murder Incorporated.’ Lewis is torn apart by his deep Christian beliefs and the ‘devil’s music’ he plays. Writing about the recordings he created in his prime, Kent says “… now more than ever it sounds like the mad abandon of a man throwing coals into the furnace of a runaway train that’s dragging him straight to hell.”

How could you read that and not want to listen again with a fresh ear to this extraordinary music?

Facing stiff competition (Stanley Booth’s ‘True Adventures of the Rolling Stones’, Robert Greenfield’s ‘STP A journey through America with the Rolling Stones’) Kent writes better than anyone about the Stones in their drug soaked prime: ‘… the music seemed to drip from their fingers like dark honey. It all seemed so effortless yet so all-consuming in its intensity. And Jagger knew all about this music, how to inhabit its sharp angles and bleak crevices, how to caress it with his voice and ride its terrible momentum…’ all of which explains why the Stones, even now much copied by musicians a third of their age, are still filling enormous venues in their 70s.

He always wrote with great sympathy for his subjects, apart from Sid Vicious, who famously attacked him with a bike chain. Here’s the introduction to a piece on the tragic, acid-inspired demise of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett: ‘First came the Floyd. Then came the void. And sometimes, in between this tragic passage, the omens were there for all to see… As anarchy came screaming through his psyche, so the sound it made overwhelmed his muse and its music.’

I even met him once, at a literature festival in France. They say never meet your heroes, but he was charming and perfectly happy to chat and sign my dog-eared copy of The Dark Stuff. It’s my bedside comfort read and I’ve never grown tired of it.

Guest review by Jon Appleton: COMMONWEALTH by Ann Patchett

Jon Appleton worked in-house in publishing for 20 years and has been a buyer for a book club, reviewer and speaker on children's books and publishing. He is now a freelance editor and writer with a particular interest in helping new authors pitch and publish their work. His debut novel, Ready to Love, was released in Summer 2016, and he blogs regularly on writers and writing at https://jonappletonsbooks.com/.

It’s for her novels with exotic locations – Bel Canto (set in South America) and State of Wonder (along the Amazon) – that Ann Patchett is best-known for winning prestigious prizes. But everyone should read the books that are set in more familiar territory, her own United States, and you should start with her seventh novel, Commonwealth.

It’s the story of two families fused together as the result of a kiss at the christening of Franny Keating back in 1964. Marriages fracture and reform, but most significantly of all, a brood of six children coheres into a tribe and their feral bonds exist independently of (though of course also influenced by) their parents’ divorces and remarriages and inevitable ageing. For fifty years, until the present day.

Commonwealth is a big novel – there are a lot of characters, a lot of time is covered, and the title itself promises vastness. Just as Run (an earlier Patchett novel) is a beautiful word, so too is Commonwealth, which in America describes Virginia, one of the two key locations in the book, a designated ‘commonwealth’ state. Of course, it also conveys the common wealth of a family with its secrets, betrayals, punishments, tragedies and the rest, that burden and enlighten members in different ways. At the heart of the novel is the devastating death of a child, but that’s nearly eclipsed by a great betrayal, spurred by Franny and her relationship with a much older man, a writer called Leo Posen, who turns the family story into a bestselling novel – called Commonwealth – which forces all the children to confront the chronology and interpretation of their lives.

Although the canvas is large, it’s not an epic novel. Ann Patchett scoops chunks of time out of the narrative, and drops us back into stories at their end, or at the beginning of the next one. (It’s no surprise to learn she has a file of off-cuts – whole deleted scenes which she removed, with the proviso that she could reinstate them if required – which didn’t happen).  You need to backtrack at times and remember which sibling belongs to whom and where they’ve ended up and what they recall. But her touch is light and her movements skilful so we have complete faith in her ability to carry us through the years.

Patchett’s great skill is her ability to illuminate her subject from all sides with a kind of ‘admiration and disbelief’ as she writes in this novel. (Perhaps all her books could be called State of Wonder.) Here’s how Patchett describes Franny’s relationship, at 29, with the much older novelist:

‘After all this time he could not believe that she was with him: not only was she young (not just younger but categorically young) and more beautiful than he had any right to deserve at this point, but she was the cable on which he had pulled himself hand over hand back into his work: she was the electricity, the spark. Franny Keating was life. For her part, Franny could say the name Leon Posen, like she was saying Anton Chekhov, and find him there in the bed beside her. It did not cease to be astonishing with time. And more than that, he had found her life meaningful when she could make no sense of it at all.’ She goes on to tell us, ‘Which is not to say they were without problems …’

There are plenty of stories about novelists out there but what is most interesting about Commonwealth is that it really is, apparently, faithful to the story of Ann Patchett’s own parents’ divorces and remarriage. She wrote the book because she felt that until she’d addressed her own story she’d be unable to develop new fictional worlds. Patchett is Franny, who is as laconic and bitingly funny as Patchett appears when she writes in her own voice in works of non-fiction such as This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (which, incidentally, contains ‘The Getaway Car’ which is the best account of a writer’s journey I’ve ever read).

Of all the books published in 2016 Commonwealth is the novel I was most looking forward to, and (with two months to go) I can safely say it’s my book of the year. 

MILLER'S VALLEY by Anna Quindlen reviewed by Adèle Geras

Anna Quindlen is an American writer who ought to be much better known in this country. Her last novel, STILL LIFE WITH BREADCRUMBS, is very good indeed and I will be posting a review I wrote of it from my own website very soon.

This book is the last novel I read and it impressed me hugely, moved me and made me realise how very restful it is to read a book that is a) beautifully written b) quite devoid of stylistic tricks or special effects c) quite small and limited in its scale while encompassing so many emotions and d) so much in tune with the normal run of the  daily life of ordinary people.

We exist in families. We have houses. Those houses are in communities, large and small. We live in the city or the country or a small town, but wherever we come from, what we remember of the place where we were children is in our DNA. For me,  for example. Jerusalem is imprinted in my mind like nowhere else, even though I stopped living there when I was five.

The eponymous Miller's Valley is home to the Miller family which has been there for generations. Now, it's about to be flooded in a government plan to develop the area. The inhabitants will be compensated and moved to higher ground. Natural floods do occur in Miller's Valley  and our narrator,  Mimi, has lived through  quite devastating ones.

She tells us about her life. Her parents, her brothers, (one who returned from Vietnam a changed person) her best friend, LaRhonda, her aunt Ruth, her mother's sister, who lives in a house on the Miller property and is severely agoraphobic.   We meet her teacher. We learn to find our way round the streets of the town. We follow Mimi from childhood, through her teenage years and on to college and a career. Her love life, her disappointments, her triumphs: Quindlen brings them so vividly to life that you feel you are yourself, as a reader, inhabiting the town, sharing in its doings and privileged to be the  confidante of such a careful, kind and sympathetic narrator. I defy anyone not to fall in love with Mimi. At the end of the book the valley is indeed under water and we knew this was going to happen from the first page, but Quindlen has put in a last-minute surprise that leaves the reader stunned and looking back at everything they've learned so far with entirely different eyes. 

This is a beautiful novel and if it's not on the Bailey's Prize shortlist next year, I will be very disappointed. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. 

Guest review by Sophie Masson: READY TO LOVE by Jon Appleton

"The city background of these contemporary thirty-something professionals is painted with a light yet vivid touch, adding to the enjoyment of a novel that is both most entertaining and elegantly written."

Born in Indonesia of French parents, and brought up in France and Australia, Sophie Masson is the award-winning and internationally-published author of over 60 books for children, young adults and adults. Her latest young adult novel is Hunter's Moon, (Random House Australia) while her latest adult novel is Trinity: The False Prince, (Momentum.) Sophie is also a founding partner and co-director of Christmas Press, a boutique publishing house producing acclaimed children's picture-books and fiction. She holds a BA and M.Litt from the University of New England in Australia and is currently undertaking a PHD in Creative Practice at the same university. She is on the Boards of the Australian Society of Authors, the New England Writers' Centre and the Small Press Network. She has also served on the Literature Board of the Australia Council and the Book Industry Collaborative Council.

Writing about nice, ‘ordinary’ people, in a way that will make readers want to keep turning the pages, is not easy. And writing about nice people made tentative and ineffectual by life’s defeats and challenges—and other people’s attitudes and expectations--is harder still. In many ways, it’s so much simpler to write flamboyant, selfish, silly or psychopathic characters: those extreme personality traits can be very useful characterisation shortcuts. So it’s a real achievement when a writer not only pulls off the difficult task, but does it with keen observation and generous wit, as Jon Appleton does in his debut novel, Ready to Love.

As its title indicates, Ready to Love can broadly be described as a romantic comedy. Set in contemporary London, it’s centred around two main characters: Minna, who’s just ended a relationship with self-absorbed Julian, latest in a short line of unsatisfactory lovers; and Jeff, still hurting from the breakup with his equally self-absorbed wife Sarah a year ago. Neither Minna nor Jeff have been ‘high-flyers’ or ‘movers or shakers’ in the world of work anymore than they have been marked successes in their love lives, but they are good people who try to do the best they can by their colleagues and families and friends. Unfortunately, that can lead to them being patronised or even bullied by stronger personalities who think that they know better than Minna or Jeff what each of them are like or should do.

The reader hopes of course that these two nice yet rather bruised and tentative—but never pathetic or unsympathetic-- people will eventually find the beginnings of happiness with each other once they realise that they are, indeed, ‘ready for love’, but it’s not just that, pleasant as it is, which keeps you absorbed in the novel. In an interview I conducted recently with Jon Appleton, he said that, Ready to Love is about the way we see ourselves and how we think other people see us, and the different kinds of attachments we form to those around us: family, friends, lovers, colleagues. And that is what makes the book so satisfying: too often, in romantic comedies, the focus is just on the search for love, but in this novel, the author does not forget the other large chunks of life, including the everyday world of work, which in real life takes up so much of people’s time, thoughts, and emotional energy. And the great cast of secondary characters, from all the different areas of Minna’s and Jeff’s lives, are deftly sketched in with telling detail.

Jon also mentioned in the interview how important the novel’s London setting was to him, as the idea for it came out of a feeling of homesickness when he was living away from his London home for a year, but was developed fully later, when he was back. That development is evident in the novel, where the city background of these contemporary thirty-something professionals is painted with a light yet vivid touch, adding to the enjoyment of a novel that is both most entertaining and elegantly written.

Author site: www.sophiemasson.org

Blog: www.firebirdfeathers.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SophieMassonAuthor/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sophiemasson1

THE QUIET MUSIC OF GENTLY FALLING SNOW by Jackie Morris. Reviewed by Adèle Geras

"The ingredients of fairy tales (towers, snow, forests, ships, trees) fill the narrative, skilfully woven into something singular and strange."

I came home one day from a trip to London to find a huge parcel waiting for me. It was this book: THE QUIET MUSIC OF GENTLY FALLING SNOW, written and illustrated by Jackie Morris,  the very well known artist and writer of many wondrous books for children. The volume  measures 37cms by 28cms. It's a   a picture book for adults and I believe it would be good if there were more of these published, because we don't stop appreciating beauty when we leave our childhood behind.  It's published by  Welsh publisher,  Graffeg, and they've done Morris proud. It costs £25 which seems to me to be excellent value. 

The book has an  usual genesis. Since the year 2000, a charity called HELP FOR MUSICIANS UK has commissioned Jackie Morris to create a Christmas card for them. All of the cards are reproduced at the back of the book. This book knits and crafts those cards together into a single volume made up of many stories, weaving their threads (a favourite word of Morris's) into a beautiful tale (or tales)  of loss and love and music. Because of the origin of the cards, the stories are about music; its creation, its destruction; its fragilities and strengths. Morris's love of music comes over in every story and there's a sort of counterpoint that runs through them.  

Morris has added pictures as well as stories. The creatures who inhabit these tales are ones we know she loves from her other books: bears, swans, hares and birds. The ingredients of fairy tales (towers, snow, forests, ships, trees) fill the narrative, skilfully woven into something singular and strange. Reading the book is very much like listening to different songs, different tunes drifting into your consciousness.They're described as lullabies for grown ups and that's very accurate. The narratives are loose and flowing. The characters appear and reappear and disappear and the animals change and become creatures different from the ones we first thought we'd met. The rhythm of the prose sets out to lull the reader and succeeds in doing exactly this. 

The instruments, depicted many times in the wonderful paintings on every page, are fiddles, flutes, lutes and drums. Anyone interested in identifying them can spend many happy hours looking at each double page spread and seeing what can be found in each one. 

The pear tree in the  'partridge in a pear tree' illustration is also the Singing Ringing Tree which goes on to create forests which it takes seven weeks to walk through. That seven is of course another link with the world of the fairy tales.

This book would make a most beautiful Christmas present for any adult who enjoys fairytales, music, and above all, rich and gloriously coloured illustrations which depict people, creatures and places which are buried in our imagination and which, thanks to Morris, we can pretend are real.  She has moved the fantastical from the realm of our dreams and into the light of our real world.

VISIT:  helpmusicians.org.uk 

Hardback published by GRAFFEG

£25

ISBN: 9781910862650