Book Reviews

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series caught my attention by its lovely cover jacket and an intriguing premise — a young governess hired to educate three children who appeared to be raised by wolves. While I rarely wade into children’s books, I have to say this was a joyful discovery. In The Mysterious Howling, the first book in the series, a very young Penelope Lumley of Swanburne Academy finds employment at Ashton Place. She is to…

So this is a bit of rant and I usually stay away from really negative reviews, but I just couldn’t get over how appalling I found these books. And I admit I haven’t read only two-thirds of the Meluha Trilogy, but that’s enough to conclude that these are not for me. Before I make a case for why these were not worth my time, the series has been constantly on the best-seller list and is…

Alan Bennett is most famous for his Olivier & Tony Award-winning play, The History Boys, a dramedy on the trials of high school boys heading to college. With The Uncommon Reader he veers into lightweight literary territory, distinct in his charm but low on gravitas. In The Uncommon Reader, we enter the royal household of England, where the Queen has just discovered the joy of reading on a visit to a mobile library. To accept…

Like much of USA, I have been glued to the television and phone over the last few days. Afraid that this might become an unhealthy habit, I determined that a good distraction was in order. So here I am attempting to do a round-up of all the books I read in the last two months, with the hope I might pick another shortly. Kiddo started school and work picked up pace, so reading was SLOW.…

Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London (Midnight Riot in US) suffers a bit from an identity crisis. It tries to be a fantasy-fiction novel, a police procedural, a London guide, a commentary on race all at the same time, but never quite succeeding. There is so much going on in every single page, that it was often hard to remember how I arrived at a particular point in the story and whether it was significant. The…

September is here, and we are heading towards the last quarter of this very strange year. I have never more adhered to the ‘one-day-at-a-time’ philosophy as I have in the last six months. And there appears to be no end in sight. The only upside (and I use that word extremely cautiously, as the world is literally dying from COVID), is that all this staying at home is forced us to lean into habits and…

Thomas Cromwell Finds A Sympathetic Portrayal in ‘Wolf Hall’ In Wolf Hall, Mantel takes us back in history when Henry VIII was shaking the very foundation of the Church in his bid to marry Anne Boleyn. Fun times, huh? Historians and storytellers have already written much about one of the most reformative and turbulent periods of the Tudor rule that it is challenging for a writer to leave their own mark and bring some freshness…

In The Lost Queen, Signe Pike dives deep in Welsh and Scottish myth to bring a fresh look at the legend of Arthur & Merlin.  Pike takes us back to 550 A.D to Goddeu, a small kingdom in Scotland, where  Languoreth, a ten-year-old princess and her twin brother, Lailoken, are mourning the death of their mother. Bereft and grieving, both the young kids are fearful of what the future holds for them. Plot Summary In…