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Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was fabulous.

The book is a composite of four different characters stories set around a play being performed in New York. The Lake Shore Limited is the title of the play as well as this book and the play concerns a terrorist attack on the train with that name which runs from Chicago to New York. In the play inside the book this is a thinly veiled parallel to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in which the play characters work through themes of love and loss and for most of the play live in a world of Schroedinger’s Cat in which they don’t know if a character has lived or died.

In the book it turns out that the playwright is working from her real life to a large degree as she lost a boyfriend she was already falling out with on September 11th. There are huge quantities of emotional layers to this story. It really gets into how complicated relationships can grow to be over long periods of time. I felt all the characters were real people.

The author’s choice of the four characters to focus on seemed a little odd to me each time the voice changed but each time I realised after a while what this character was adding to the overall picture. Each character has a long section from their viewpoint and the only thing I thought didn’t quite work in the book was revisiting each character quickly at the end of the story. I thought this seemed a bit tacked on and added little that hadn’t been said earlier.

Overall a very deep and full story and one I’m glad I picked up.

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The Outcast by Sadie Jones

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book got off to a bad start with me. It hooks you into the story by showing what happens way later on. In this case we see nineteen year old Lewis Aldridge being released from prison in the 1950s. Then we go right back in time to see the events of his childhood starting with when his dad returns from fighting the second world war. I don’t like the ‘flash forward’ device in fiction and rarely think it adds to the story, and I didn’t feel it was needed here. This tale is all about how an ordinary kid gets bashed about by events and ends up living a not quite so ordinary life. I think the title gives enough knowledge to the reader that everything isn’t going to go swimmingly for Lewis and the prologue is unneccesary. I was pleased that the story went on past the events of the prologue.

Apart from that I really enjoyed the story and found the characters very well drawn. Children turn into adults in a realistic coherent manner and the class boundaries of village life ring true. There are people in the story guilty of much worse crimes than Lewis and I found all the family interactions, both within families and between families completely believable. On the whole it was a good book, I think it’s Sadie Jones’ first novel, and I’ll be looking out for more.

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The Twisted Heart by Rebecca Gowers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this up at random in the library, I hadn’t heard of it before. The tagline on the cover about it being a “genuinely puzzling historical murder mystery” pulled me in. Though it’s not actually an historical murder mystery. In the afterword the author admits to having been inspired by Josephine Tey’s book The Daughter of Time in which Inspector Grant investigates Richard III from his hospital bed. This isn’t quite the same but I can see where the idea comes in.

Oxford doctoral student Kit is drawn into investigating, in the course of her literature research, a real life murder that mirrors the death of Nancy in Oliver Twist. Mostly than just seems like a little part of the plot of the book though and it takes a while to turn up in the book. There’s a more interesting not-quite-romance story here about Kit who goes dancing and meets Joe and about families.

Not having known quite what to expect I enjoyed the book, despite the fact that I don’t agree that it’s a “genuinely puzzling historical murder mystery”.

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One Moment, One Morning by Sarah Rayner

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was expecting more of this book really. It opens with a death on the morning commuter train to London, and then follows the aftermath of that sad event in the lives of several people affected by it. There’s some great observations about everyday life and the nature of relationships in here but I never really cared about any of the characters. It never seemed to add up to much and I wanted more from it.

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The Aerodynamics of Pork by Patrick Gale

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ve read this book excruciatingly slowly, over about six weeks, and it’s only short to start with. I managed to miss any possible connection between the two threads of story in the plot and, fairly obviously, got rather bored with the book. I am intruigued to see mention of Gale’s later book Rough Music as a “sequel” though as I loved that book and can’t remember any connection between this and that apart from the Cornish setting. Will have to figure that out.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I finally got around to finishing the series off. I’m probably the last person on the planet to read this… My copy has a “half price at Borders” sticker on it and Borders closed down in the UK a year ago. The first half of the book I found really slow, I kept putting it down and not picking it up again for days. The pace picked up in the second half and the last 150 pages or so were more or less unputdownable. This is exactly how I found book 6 to be as well (and that’s why I like keeping records of the books I read as I wouldn’t have remembered that otherwise).

So, quite enjoyable in the end, but mostly I’m just pleased to be finished with it though. That goes for the book and the series. I can now enjoy knowing all about Harry Potter without having to read about him any more. That seems wrong somehow.

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Angel with Two Faces by Nicola Upson

I really liked this. I enjoyed An Expert in Murder but it took me a long time to get to this. Cornish setting, with real outdoor theatre, was fabulous.

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Surfacing by Margaret Atwood

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This didn’t captivate me really, seemed a bit dated. I’m surprised I finished it really – I start way more books than I finish lately.

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The Winter House by Nicci Gerrard

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I sailed through this faster than anything I’ve read recently. A lovely retrospective over the life of friendship and family.

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The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really wasn’t sure whether I was going to like this but I ended up liking it a lot. The central series character is a bit on the periphery of the action for most of the book – I wonder if that stays that way through the series. Might be quite interesting if he does. I shall read more.

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