The Blurb (From Goodreads):
In the land of dolls, there is magic.
In the land of humans, there is war.
Everywhere there is pain.
But together there is hope.
Karolina is a living doll whose king and queen have been overthrown. But when a strange wind spirits her away from the Land of the Dolls, she finds herself in Krakow, Poland, in the company of the Dollmaker, a man with an unusual power and a marked past.
The Dollmaker has learned to keep to himself, but Karolina's courageous and compassionate manner lead him to smile and to even befriend a violin-playing father and his daughter--that is, once the Dollmaker gets over the shock of realizing a doll is speaking to him.
But their newfound happiness is dashed when Nazi soldiers descend upon Poland. Karolina and the Dollmaker quickly realize that their Jewish friends are in grave danger, and they are determined to help save them, no matter what the risks
My Thoughts:
A beautifully produced and heartrendingly poignant novel for children that delicately weaves together history and fable to create something quite profound.
I was drawn to buy this book because of its beautiful cover, designed by Lisa Perrin, and exquisite internal illustrations by Tomislav Tomic, a fairy-tale-inspired artist whose work I’ve long admired. It’s dedication by the author reads: ‘for the children who were lost in the Holocaust’ and the back cover begins: ‘There is war. There is pain. But there is magic and there is hope.’ So I knew what to expect between the covers – a story of sorrow and strength, wonder and woe - and R.M. Romero did not disappoint me.
Set in Kraków in 1939, the story explores the friendship between a dollmaker whose fingertips carry magic and the beautiful little doll he brings to life. ‘Karolina awoke in her new world with a glass heart. It felt as if both roses and their thorns grew within that heart, for it held all the happiness and sorrow she had ever experienced in the Land of the Dolls.’
The dollmaker is by nature shy and retiring, but Karoline helps him make new friends and begin to open up to life. Then Kraków is invaded by the Nazis. The beautiful city is bombed, soldiers in jackboots march the cobbled streets, and their Jewish friends face unspeakable danger. Both the dollmaker and the doll will learn how dark the human heart can be, and also how courage, kindness and self-sacrifice can triumph even in the most terrible of times.
‘Please, be kind.
Please, be brave.
Please, don’t let it happen again.’
It reminded me of ‘The Devil’s Arithmetic’ by Jane Yolen and ‘The Museum of Mary Child’ by Cassandra Golds, two of my favourite children’s’ authors – that is very high praise indeed.
You might also like to read my review of The Sequin Star by Belinda Murrell:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-sequin-star-by-belinda-murrell
On the Trail of Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force
The primary character in my novel Bitter Greens is the scandalous 17th century writer, Charlotte-Rose de la Force, who wrote the version of the Rapunzel fairytale that we know best.
She was one of those fascinating women that have been forgotten by history. She was related to the Sun King, Louis XIV, and became lady-in-waiting to the queen at the age of sixteen, living the next thirty years in the glittering royal courts of Paris, Versailles, Fontainebleau and Marly-le-Roi.
At the age of forty-seven, she was incarcerated by the king in a tumbledown old convent as punishment for her wild and wicked ways. She had had an affair with an impoverished actor, used black magic to try and ensnare herself a husband, disguised herself as a dancing bear to gain access to her much younger lover, and written a series of titillating novels about the king’s most notorious ancestors.
While locked away in the convent, Charlotte-Rose wrote the collection of fairytales that included ‘Persinette’ (later renamed ‘Rapunzel’ by a German author Friedrich Schultz).
Dramatic and fascinating as Charlotte-Rose de la Force’s life was, it was very difficult to research. Usually she is given nothing more than a biographical paragraph in encyclopaedias and fairytale scholarship.
After long months of detective work, I found a biography of her life, Mademoiselle de la Force: un auteur mèconnu du XVIIͨ siècle, by the French academic Michel Souloumiac. However, it was only published in French and despite my expensive and prolonged education, my French is very poor.
So I enlisted the help of a translator, Sylvie Poupard-Gould, who not only translated Michel Souloumiac’s biography, but also translated an autobiographical sketch written by Charlotte-Rose and a number of her fairytales, which had never before been translated into English. This took a great deal of time, because the biography was written in dense academic terminology, and the second was written in Old French, complete with the letter ‘f’ looking like the letter ‘s’.
Michel Souloumiac’s book Mademoiselle de la Force gave me the basic framework for my story, though there were many times when I had to use my imagination to fill in the gaps. For example, he says that Charlotte-Rose “came to the attention of the king” during the infamous Affair of the Poisons, a scandal about witchcraft, satanism, and murder that led to the execution of hundreds of people.
From those seven small words – “came to the attention of the king” - I wrote three whole chapters, in which Charlotte-Rose is interrogated by the terrifying Chambre Ardente and locked in the Bastille.
In April 2011, I packed up my three young children and we travelled to France on the trail of Charlotte-Rose de la Force. We went to the Louvre, where she came as a frightened sixteen year old country girl to work in service of the terrifying king who had locked up her mother against her will. It was easy to imagine the women in their wide silken gowns and tall lace headdresses, strolling along on the arms of men in heavy wigs and full-skirted satin coats, their high heels clacking on the stone floor, their shrill voices trying to fill the vast echoing space of the galleries of that old palace.
The children and I visited the Place des Vosges, where Charlotte-Rose’s cousin Henriette-Julie de Murat, another fairy tale teller, had lived with her elderly and aristocratic husband. I sat with my notebook and pen, writing away, while my children played tip in the garden and clambered over the modern climbing equipment.
We went to the Église Saint-Sulpice, the grand and gloomy church in Paris where Charlotte-Rose finally married her young lover, Charles de Briou, a few weeks after he reached his majority at the age of twenty-five. It was no use. They had ten days of happiness before the marriage was annulled, and her husband locked away in a madhouse by his parents.
Of course a trip to Versailles was de rigeur. My children suffered the stuffy, crowded tour of the gilded palace, having been promised bike riding around the lake. By the time we turned back to the train station, our feet were so bruised and swollen from the tiny cobblestones that we could barely walk. What must it have been like to have been a lady-in-waiting to the queen, never permitted to sit in the royal presence, all while wearing ridiculously high-heeled shoes that showed her noble lineage and enormous heavy skirts. Charlotte-Rose’s feet must have hurt all the time, I thought.
Finally, we travelled down to Gascony for a week, staying near where Charlotte-Rose spent her childhood. With a French translator accompanying us, we were given a private tour of the Chateau de Cazeneuve by its owner, the Comte de Sabran-Pontevès. One of the oldest privately owned castles in France, the Chateau de Cazeneuve was once the hunting lodge of Henri of Navarre, who became Henri IV of France. When he moved to Paris, he gave his castle to his cousin, Charlotte-Rose’s great-grandfather. It is an extraordinary place, built for strength on a bluff overlooking the wild Ciron River. I saw Charlotte-Rose’s baptismal records, her pram, and the room in which she had been born. I was able to see where the secret passage where Queen Margot, Henri IV’s wife, used to sneak through to rendezvous with her lovers. It was the most amazing and beautiful place, steeped in history and old tales, and the children and I were incredibly privileged to see it.
Writing the story of Charlotte-Rose de la Force was the most extraordinary adventure, both imaginatively and in actuality. I hope that Bitter Greens will ignite new interest in her life and her work, so that her name becomes as well known as the far less interesting Charles Perrault, who published his fairytales only a year earlier than she did.
This blog post was originally published on Gillian Polack’s Live Journal blog at
On the Trail of Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force - Live Journal
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
Daughters of the Witching Hill brings history to life in a vivid and wrenching account of a family sustained by love as they try to survive the hysteria of a witch-hunt.
Bess Southerns, an impoverished widow living in Pendle Forest, is haunted by visions and gains a reputation as a cunning woman. Drawing on the Catholic folk magic of her youth, Bess heals the sick and foretells the future. As she ages, she instructs her granddaughter, Alizon, in her craft, as well as her best friend, who ultimately turns to dark magic.
When a peddler suffers a stroke after exchanging harsh words with Alizon, a local magistrate, eager to make his name as a witch finder, plays neighbors and family members against one another until suspicion and paranoia reach frenzied heights.
Sharratt interweaves well-researched historical details of the 1612 Pendle witch-hunt with a beautifully imagined story of strong women, family, and betrayal. Daughters of the Witching Hill is a powerful novel of intrigue and revelation.
My Thoughts:
In the early 17th century, during the last years of the Elizabethan era, a witch craze hit Lancashire and a dozen men and women were brought to trial accused of black magic and Satanism. Six of the accused came from just two families who lived near to each other at Pendle Hill in Lancashire. Elizabeth Southerns (called Mother Demdike) was in her eighties, and was accused along with her daughter (also called Elizabeth) and her grand-children James and Alizon Device. A neighbour Annie Whittle (called Mother Chattox) was also in her eighties and was accused along with her daughter Anne. The other six also lived nearby, and included a mother and her son. One died in prison, and one was found not guilty, but the rest were hanged on 20 August 1612. The two women in their 80s were both acknowledged village healers and cunning-women, and their tsti9mony is a fascinating glimpse into the magical thinking of England in the 1600s.
Mary Sharratt has taken the story of the Pendle Witches – the most famous witch-trials in British history – and brought them to vivid and heart-rending life. Most of the narrative is told through the eyes of Bess Southerns, cunning-woman and widow, who ekes out a living on the edge of Pendle Forest by healing the sick, making love spells and foretelling the future. As her grand-daughter Alizon grows up, Bess begins to teach her the secret of magic but finds herself at odds with her neighbour, Mother Chattox, who turns to the dark arts in her desire for revenge and power.
When a peddler suffers a stroke after an exchange of hot words with Alizon, the family finds themselves drawn into accusation and counter-accusation, which leads them inexorably towards tragedy.
I knew the story of the Pendle Witches well, having read a great deal about it over the years, but it is not necessary to know the background to be drawn into this powerful and beautifully imagined novel. This is a story about love, compassion, strength and betrayal, and a must-read for anyone who loved Hannah Kent’s The Good People or Kathleen Kent’s The Heretic’s Daughter.
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
With stunning locations and page-turning tension, The Paris Secret is an intense and gripping tale from bestselling author Karen Swan.
Somewhere along the cobbled streets of Paris, an apartment lies thick with dust and secrets: full of priceless artworks hidden away for decades.
High-flying fine art agent Flora from London, more comfortable with the tension of a million-pound auction than a cosy candlelit dinner for two, is called in to assess these suddenly discovered treasures. As an expert in her field, she must trace the history of each painting and discover who has concealed them for so long.
Thrown in amongst the glamorous Vermeil family as they move between Paris and Antibes, Flora begins to discover that things aren't all that they seem, while back at home her own family is recoiling from a seismic shock. The terse and brooding Xavier Vermeil seems intent on forcing Flora out of his family's affairs - but just what is he hiding?
My Thoughts:
‘Down a cobbled street in Paris, a long-forgotten apartment is found. Thick with dust and secrets, it is full of priceless artworks that have been hidden away for decades.’
It was these words – the opening sentence of the blurb on the back of the book – that sold me on this book. It’s just such a fascinating premise. I would love to find such an apartment myself – just imagine the forgotten stories hidden within.
The Paris Secret is probably best described as a contemporary romance, and so it’s full of descriptions of gorgeous designer clothes and handbags, and has a brooding French bad-boy millionaire as the romantic interest. It’s not my usual kind of book at all, but it was perfect for a plane trip of a few hours (I bought it in the airport bookshop). I ripped through it in a few hours, and enjoyed it immensely. I loved the Bindinside view of the international art world, and the scenes set in Paris, one of my favourite cities in the world. I enjoyed the romance too, which was deftly done. All in all, it was a great light read, perfect for a beach holiday.
You might also like to read my review of Star Crossed by Minnie Darke:
BOOK REVIEW: Star-Crossed by Minnie Darke
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
The Ties That Bind is an emotionally riveting debut novel about the power of a mother's love and the bonds among family that, though severed, can never be fully broken.
On opposite sides of the world, two lives are changed forever. One by the smallest bruise. The other by a devastating bushfire. And both by a shocking secret . . .
Miami art curator Courtney Hamilton and her husband David live the perfect life until their ten-year-old son Matthew is diagnosed with leukaemia. He needs a bone-marrow transplant but, with Courtney being adopted, the chances of finding a match within his family are slim.
Desperate to find a donor, Courtney tracks the scattered details of her birth 15,000 kilometres away, to the remote town of Somerset in the Victorian bush.
Meanwhile Jade Taylor wakes up in hospital in Somerset having survived the deadly bushfire that destroyed the family home and their beloved olive groves. Gone too are the landmarks that remind her of her mother, Asha, a woman whose repeated absences scarred her childhood.
As Jade rallies her fractured family to rebuild their lives, Courtney arrives in the burnt countryside to search for her lost parents - but discovers far more . . .
My Thoughts:
I met Lexi Landsman at the Melbourne Jewish Writers Festival, and bought her book there (I always come home from a festival with a suitcase laden with books!) The Ties That Bind is her first novel, but I can guarantee it won’t be her last. From the heart-rending opening scene, when a child is stolen from her pram, to the emotional lump-in-the-throat ending, the story unspools swiftly and surely, the pages seemingly turning themselves.
It’s the story of a young mother, Courtney, who discovers that her ten-year-old desperately son needs a bone marrow transplant. His best chance of surviving is to find a familial match – but Courtenay is adopted and knows nothing about her birth family. She sets out on a quest to discover her origins, and uncovers all sorts of dark secrets. A really engaging and heart-warming read.
You might also like to read my review of Nine Days by Toni Jordan:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-nine-days-by-toni-jordan
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
The ancient city of Troy has withstood a decade under siege of the powerful Greek army, which continues to wage bloody war over a stolen woman—Helen. In the Greek camp, another woman—Briseis—watches and waits for the war's outcome. She was queen of one of Troy's neighboring kingdoms, until Achilles, Greece's greatest warrior, sacked her city and murdered her husband and brothers. Briseis becomes Achilles's concubine, a prize of battle, and must adjust quickly in order to survive a radically different life, as one of the many conquered women who serve the Greek army.
When Agamemnon, the brutal political leader of the Greek forces, demands Briseis for himself, she finds herself caught between the two most powerful of the Greeks. Achilles refuses to fight in protest, and the Greeks begin to lose ground to their Trojan opponents. Keenly observant and coolly unflinching about the daily horrors of war, Briseis finds herself in an unprecedented position, able to observe the two men driving the Greek army in what will become their final confrontation, deciding the fate not only of Briseis's people but also of the ancient world at large.
Briseis is just one among thousands of women living behind the scenes in this war—the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead—all of them erased by history. With breathtaking historical detail and luminous prose, Pat Barker brings the teeming world of the Greek camp to vivid life. She offers nuanced, complex portraits of characters and stories familiar from mythology, which, seen from Briseis's perspective, are rife with newfound revelations. Barker's latest builds on her decades-long study of war and its impact on individual lives—and it is nothing short of magnificent.
My Thoughts:
I’ve been reading a lot of books set in Greece in recent months, including books by Mary Renault and Madeline Miller which are inspired by Ancient Greek myth and the great Homeric poems ‘The Odyssey’ and ‘The Iliad’. I’d seen reviews that compared The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker to both of these amazing writers, and so I thought I’d give it a go. I’m very glad I did as it’s a wonderful book, and I’m keen to read more by Pat Barker now.
‘The Iliad’ is famously the story of a bitter and futile war between the Greeks and the Trojans, sparked by the abduction of Helen, whose “face launched a thousand ships.” It is mainly concerned with the violent struggles between the heroes of either side, in particular Achilles, Greece’s greatest warrior, and Hector, a prince of Troy. Few women are mentioned in the poem, apart from Helen and a few goddesses, but Pat Barker has chosen to tell the story of one of those women.
Briseis was the young queen of a neighbouring kingdom to Troy, until Achilles invaded her country, sacked the city and murdered her husband and brothers. The women are all taken as prizes of war. Briseis is forced to become Achilles’s concubine, and so is enslaved by the man she most hates and fears in the world.
Held captive in the Greek war camp, Briseis is witness to the long brutal siege of Troy and the heartless machinations of men and gods. In a world where women are seen only as objects or commodities, she must find a way to build a new life for herself – if she can survive.
Pat Barker’s writing is simple, luminous, and compelling – a wonderful read!
You might also like to read The King Must Die by Mary Renault:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-king-must-die-by-mary-renault
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers' demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale. . . .
Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family--their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts).
When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen." With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.
The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.
My Thoughts:
Arundhati Roy burst onto the literary scene with this Booker-Prize-winning novel in 1997, which became the biggest-selling book ever written by an Indian author still living in India. She received half a million pounds as an advance, and the book was sold into eighteen different countries within two months. It’s the kind of dream run every writer longs for, yet Arundhati Roy has never published another novel.
Perhaps this novel was so deeply felt and personal to her that it was the one book of her soul, never to be repeated.
I bought it in 1997, and tried to read it then. I disliked it emphatically. I found it faux-naïf: awkward, self-conscious, disjointed. There were so many characters – ten introduced in less than five pages! And the narrative structure was kaleidoscopic, making it difficult to connect to either the characters or their story. I put it away, thinking I’d try it another time (this is my rule with books I don’t like.) So it sat on my to-be-read-one-day bookshelf for twenty years. I pulled it out a dozen times, hesitated over it, then put it back. I almost gave it to charity once. But something made me keep it.
Then, one day, determined to read some of those books I’d bought but never read, I took it down again. This time I read it swiftly and eagerly. I found the jumps about in time and point-of-view fresh and exhilarating. Her boldness and originality struck me forcibly. No-one has ever written like this before, I kept thinking. The naivety and awkwardness now seemed a perfect choice for a story told from a child’s point-of-view.
It is not an easy book to read, both because of its subject matter – the tragic consequences of violence and cruelty and small-mindedness – and because of its repetitive and disjointed narrative structure. And I felt as if Arundhati Roy set out deliberately to shock and provoke, breaking as many taboos as she could, from the Indian caste system to incest. I have read that the book was inspired by true events in Arundhati Roy’s life. I can only hope it was the setting and not the events of her life.
The God of Small Things is undeniably brilliant, innovative, and thought-provoking. I was moved and troubled by it, and found tears in my eyes at the end. And I can only applaud her virtuosity and boldness with language. A truly astonishing book.
You might also like to read my review of Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland:
VINTAGE BOOK REVIEW: The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London’s most desirable areas. One evening her husband Gabriel returns home late from a fashion shoot, and Alicia shoots him five times in the face, and then never speaks another word.
Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London.
Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations—a search for the truth that threatens to consume him...
My Thoughts:
I love a good psychological thriller, and The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides has been gaining a lot of buzz. The premise really intrigued me – a psychologist is obsessed with a young woman who shot her husband dead and then never speaks another word. I’ve always been interested in selective mutism, having had troubles of my own in this area, and so I was eager to read a book which features it.
The book is told from the first-person point-of-view of the psychologist, Theo Faber. He takes a job at The Grove, a secure psychiatric hospital in London, in the hope of being able to work with this silent patient – even though The Grove is in financial trouble and the job is perhaps not very secure.
Alicia Berenson has not responded well to treatment. Despite all attempts to reach her, she remains silent. Before she killed her husband, she was a well-known artist. There were no signs of any psychological cracks – she was beautiful, talented, and seemingly happily married. No-one can understand what led her to tie her husband up, then shoot him five times in the face. It’s seemingly inexplicable.
Theo’s journey to fathom the dark depths of Alicia’s psyche is told in brief, swift, compelling chapters, occasionally interspersed with excerpts from her hidden diary. The novel is literally un-put-down-able – I don’t think I’ve ever raced through a book so fast. And it has a cracker of a plot twist. I usually see such narrative surprises a mile off, but this one took my breath away. Absolutely brilliant!
You might also like to read my review of The Scholar by Dervla McTiernan:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/book-review-the-scholar-by-dervla-mctiernan
The Blurb (from Goodreads):
'All in?' Kieran pulled me up, and the others followed. We gathered around the bigger tree. No one asked Matty - he just reached up and put his right hand on the trunk with ours.
Kieran cleared his throat. 'We swear, on these trees, to always be friends. To protect each other - and this place.'
Finding those carved trees forged a bond between Jay and her four childhood friends and opened their eyes to a wider world. But their attempt to protect the grove ends in disaster, and that one day on the river changes their lives forever.
Seventeen years later, Jay finally has her chance to make amends. But at what cost? Not every wrong can be put right, but sometimes looking the other way is no longer an option.
My Thoughts:
A beautiful meditation on the Australian landscape and the Aboriginal connection to it, Where the Trees Were is a must-read for anyone who has ever swung on a tyre over a slow-moving brown river or lain on the ground looking up at a scorching blue sky through the shifting leaves of a gum tree. Told in Inga Simpson’s deceptively simple style, the novel moves back and forth between the adulthood and childhood of a Canberra art curator called Jay. In the past lie tragedies and misunderstandings that shaped Jay’s psyche and still have ramifications on her life today. Jay is searching for a way to make amends for what happened, but her quest may cost her everything she most cares about.
You might also like to read my review on The Passengers by Eleanor Limprecht:
https://kateforsyth.com.au/what-katie-read/vintage-book-review-the-passengers-by-eleanor-limprecht
