The year in books: March
My book for March is going to be The Chilbury Ladies' Choir by Jennifer Ryan. I saw a tweet from the publisher offering copies for review and it seemed interesting - will let you know!
My book for February was The Hourglass Factory by Lucy Ribchester, and very good it was too. Young reporter Frankie gets caught up in events when Ebony Diamond, performer and suffragette goes missing in 1912. There are several intertwined stories about action taking by suffragettes, the role of the media and police, as well as what's going on at the corset shop. I'd definitely read something by this author again.
See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt* was excellent.
Most children probably know the rhyme 'Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother 40 whacks/When she saw what she had done she gave her father 41.' Other than that, I didn't know anything about the actual story and if you'd asked me, I probably wouldn't have been able to tell you whether or not the crime actually happened (it did, in 1892). The story starts with Lizzie discovering Mr and Mrs Borden's bodies and then introduces the main characters (sister Emma, Bridget the maid, uncle John and mystery Benjamin) as the reader learns more about the family dynamics and what motivation (if any) Lizzie may have had for killing her father and stepmother in such a violent manner. Slight spoiler coming up (only if you know nothing about the criminal case, and this doesn't spoil the book): Lizzie was arrested for murder, but eventually found not guilty as the jury (of men) couldn't believe that a young woman would murder her parents, even though the general public opinion was that she did it. I'd definitely recommend this.
Everyone I know who's read See What I Have Done has raved about it - and I hated it! I found the narrative style really irritating and the characters all thoroughly unpleasant.
ReplyDeleteI read a review on GoodReads (or maybe Amazon, can't remember now) which said pretty much what you did. I think it helped that I read it in a couple of sittings, rather than keep coming back to it, which may have helped, I had to get into her style of writing.
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