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The Posh, the Privileged and the Paranormal

The Posh, the Privileged and the Paranormal

Monthly Archives: September 2014

The Riot Club and The Cavaliers – dining societies in fiction and in life

24 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by georgianaderwent in Uncategorized

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Tags

cavaliers, dining societies, Oxford, posh, riot club

Here’s the trailer for The Riot Club, a film that’s just been released this week. Look at the beautiful Oxford buildings. Look at the handsome but psychotic boys in white tie. Look at the girl with the (dodgy) northern accent. Oh, they are all members of some sort of evil dining society. If you want a synopsis of the Riot Club, think Oxford Blood without the vampires.  Basically, I like to sit back and pretend this is a trailer for the film adaptation of my books. That’s not so wrong, is it? (Seriously, watch and allocate characters to actors. It’s quite astonishing how well they map together- check out Harriet at 0.17 and Augustine at 0.43, for a start!)

I haven’t yet seen the film (it’s so on this weekend’s to do list), but the plot isn’t new to me, and not just because it’s eerily similar to the sorts of plot that tend to flow out of my brain. Before it was a film called the Riot Club, it was a play called Posh. And let me tell you, when I see adverts for a play about an Oxford dining society featuring attractive young actors, nothing and no one is capable of keeping me away from the box office. I went to see this in 2012, when I was busy finalising Book One. As I sort of knew what was coming, just for fun, I dragged Freddie along, we wore black tie, and he walked round in the interval drinking champagne and drawling, like an extra or a piece of interactive performance art.

In between deliberately trying to provoke the rest of the audience, I had mixed feelings about the play, and from what I’ve seen and read so far, I imagine my reaction to the film will be broadly similar. On the positive side, there were the aforementioned formally dressed men. On a less shallow note, the writer had also clearly researched certain aspects of Oxford life rather well, and there were some very clever lines and some very funny comments. On the negative side, it’s probably some of the least subtle satire I’ve come across, and it relies far too much on the idea that posh=bad, and membership of a dining society=outright evil. I also got the distinct impression that 90% of the point of the play was to create a stick to beat the ex-Bullingdon Tories with.

It never ceases to amaze me the extent to which so many people are absolutely fascinated with class, and have such a love-hate relationship with aristocratic trappings. Dining clubs are admittedly a bit of an odd phenomenon, and when I started writing the Cavaliers, I was very much playing up to the media controversy around the Prime Minister, the Mayor and the Chancellor all having been part of the same club (for anyone not familiar with the concept, see my article here – weirdly, it’s consistently one of my most visited web pages).

But do I really think there’s a conspiracy? No. Do I really think that the Bullingdon (or indeed the Piers Gaveston or the Stoics or anything else) is the route of all inequality in our society? No I do not. Yes, it’s a little disturbing that the Government is currently dominated by both a certain type of person and, perhaps more oddly, by what sometimes appears to be a group of old friends and rivals. But unlike in the Cavaliers, in real life, a dining society isn’t a gateway from obscurity into power. Rather, the only people asked to join the big societies are those who are already rich and well-connected. They’d have got on just fine without the club – they really are a symptom, not a cause of the old boys’ network.

In my experience, most dining societies are borne neither from a desire to rule the world nor an urge to smash things up and humiliate “poor people.” Rather, just like football fans, sports teams or political gatherings, they are about two things – getting drunk with likeminded people, and a sort of tribalism that divides the world, at least for one night, into a safe categorisation of them and us. And in the case of dining societies, there’s some extra fun to be had from dressing up and showing off. To the best of my knowledge (based on both personal experience and extensive book-planning research) the smashing places up, while true and abhorrent, is also very rare – a few isolated incidents over decades, not a systematic campaign of violence. The murdering, which we get in both the Riot Club and the Cavaliers (and in it’s American incarnation, in Donna Tartt’s the Secret History) has no basis in fact whatsoever.

When I created my imaginary dining society, I made the members vampires. As a consequence, I made most of them be awful human beings most of the time- I cannot abide overly friendly vampires. My books are paranormal romance/urban fantasy first and foremost, but they also contain a hint of satire – and hopefully, it’s all so exaggerated that everyone can see it’s not a genuine attack on Cameron and Boris and Osborne. In keeping her characters as broadly realistic humans while still having them do and say terrible things, the Riot Club’s writer ultimately sacrifices the clever social commentary of the premise and the opening, for cheap, overblown attacks which hint at a genuine belief that the Prime Minister once entertained himself by beating pub landlords to death.

In conclusion, dining clubs are a bit ridiculous, but not actively evil or a direct cause of any of societies problems. And based on my experience with Posh, the Riot Club is probably worth a watch for the scenery and the eye candy and the wonderful Oxfordyness, but pretty heavy-handed. And most importantly, it would have been much better with vampires.

Holiday Reading Update 3 – Outlander

13 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by georgianaderwent in Uncategorized

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Tags

book review, holiday reading, outlander, scotland

Over the course of this week, I’ve been working through the back-log of reviews of books I read during my honeymoon to Bali. Now, The Luminaries (which I loved) had won the Booker Prize. We Were Liars (which I was ambivalent about) had received rave reviews on several of my favourite blogs.But neither of them had been recommended to me anywhere near as frequently or as evangelically as today’s holiday read, Outlander. In fact, I’m not sure that any book has ever been recommended to me as often as Outlander has. You love eighteenth century history? Outlander. You like time-travel? Outlander. You enjoy romance, as long as it’s done well and had a three-dimensional hero? Outlander, Outlander, Outlander.

So, safely ensconced on my sunlounger, I finally decided to bow to the collective wisdom of Goodreads and WordPress. And while this was a good holiday read in the sense that it combines being reasonably light while providing hours of reading time, rarely can a book have been less suited to a location. It’s the sort of book that’s best read by a warm fire on a stormy night or out on a moor on a wild day. And ideally, it’s probably best read in Scotland. Considering I live in England, none of those conditions would be too difficult to arrange most of the time,  but being difficult, I waited until I had tropical heat and the smell of spice and incense everywhere.

None of those drinks behind us are whisky, and this is definitely not Scotland.

None of those drinks behind us are whisky, and this is definitely not Scotland.

On a similar note, I like to read and drink things that either conjure up the spirit of a book or that characters in a novel particularly enjoy. And in this case, that meant one thing – whisky, and lots of it. The problem being that whisky was not particularly easy to get hold of. Luscious cocktails? Yes. Fresh coconut water? Yes. Locally produced beer and wine? Absolutely. Finest Scottish malts? Not so much.  As a result, I may have ended up panic buying a £16 shot of whisky when I finally saw some on a menu.  (It could have been worse. I could have been reading Book Two which is set in France and involves copious quantities of brandy, which was even more of a challenge to procure).

Though I think the characters roast a whole boar at one point, so I managed one meal that sort of tied in at least

Though I think the characters roast a whole boar at one point, so I managed one meal that sort of tied in at least

OUTLANDER (DIANE GABALDON) 4 STARS

Oh no, it's my pet hate: a cover showing a scene from a film or TV adaptation of a book. Still I (just - by about a week)) read this in time to be a smug "book fan" when watching the tv show!

Oh no, it’s my pet hate: a cover showing a scene from a film or TV adaptation of a book. Still I (just – by about a week)) read this in time to be a smug “book fan” when watching the tv show!

Despite all those recommendations and the fact that I was quite intrigued by the premise – 1940s army nurse finds herself in 1740s Scotland and ends up torn between two husbands in different centuries – I waited so long to read this as I was worried that the romance might be cheesy and the history badly researched. I was also rather put-off by the 900 page length, which seemed a bit over-the-top for what I was expecting to be a light, escapist read.

Firstly, if you’re going to read it, I strongly suggest that you do what I did and save it for a holiday or a time when you’re able to spend hours reading. Its sheer length means it takes ages to get through (and I say this as a very fast reader), plus, it’s the sort of book where you really need to absorb yourself in the world, not dip in and out.

Secondly, I’ve seen some debate about the genre of this book, but in my opinion, it’s predominantly a romance. It’s a well-done romance, and there are certainly also aspects of straight-up historical fiction, of paranormal/fantasy, and of adventure, but frankly, if romance leaves you cold, I really wouldn’t recommend this one. Similarly, I struggle to imagine many men enjoying it.

So, with those two points, out of the way, what did I think about it? In short, there were lots of things I loved and some that I hated, but the story sucked me in to the extent that I was able to happily overlook flaws that would have had me throwing a different book across the room.

For me, the best things about the book were the prose – which is much better than you might expect in this sort of genre novel – the main character (Claire) and the setting. Enjoyably tough and mostly unfazed by the increasingly strange things that happen to her, Clare was also just vulnerable enough to be likeable and believable. I also loved that she was sexually confident and happy to induct a virgin husband into the delights of the flesh – a nice change from all the painfully virginal heroines that seem to be the current trend. The other characters were generally interesting too, though some of the clansmen started to blur into one. Jamie, the main love interest, isn’t really my literary type. I generally prefer suave, charming and slightly edgy men to the rugged but adorable sorts, but while I wasn’t swooning on the floor, he was a strong romantic lead and definitely made me smile. If he could get a response out of me, then if hulking kilted warrior types are your cup of tea, you’re going to be in love.

The setting – both in terms of history and geography – was lovingly described and seemed well-researched. I really felt like I was right there in eighteenth century Scotland. The author mostly resisted the urge to over-romanticise the period, giving readers the danger and dirt as well as the excitement. In-between several dramatic episodes, there are enlightening scenes of everyday life: delivering a foal, preparing for a feast, treating minor injuries.

I felt that having Claire time-travel from the 1940s rather than from the present day was a stroke of genius, for several reasons. Firstly, it gives readers who love history two beautifully depicted periods instead of one. Secondly, it helps to stop the book from having dated. Thirdly, I found it slightly more believable that someone who has lived through WW2 could cope with the deprivations of eighteenth century life, compared to someone from today.

Moving onto the bad. Firstly, while I liked the way the book spent time fully immersing the reader in its world rather than dashing from plot point to plot point, I thought it was a bit too long overall, and got repetitive in parts. I think it would have felt a lot sharper with, say, 150 fewer pages.

Secondly, I found the way that Claire was constantly bouncing from one disaster to another – including seemingly endless attempted rapes – to not quite work. It felt oddly episodic. I also felt the time-travel elements were underplayed. I’d loved to have seen more use made of the fact that Clare knew things about the characters and knew things that would happen in the future.

Thirdly, there was a rather odd obsession with beatings of every kind – from parents chastising their children, to the clan punishing a teenager for indecency, to a brutal flogging, to a torture session, and perhaps most oddly, a scene that sat uncomfortably between a kinky spanking and straight-up wife beating, leading straight into a scene that equally uncomfortably blurred the lines between rough sex and marital rape. Along with the scenes of gratuitous Catholicism, while it may have had some basis in period accuracy, it sometimes felt like a not altogether pleasant look into the author’s psyche.

Above all, the main villain, Randall, was a bit of a let down. The idea that the sadistic English army captain who is oppressing the highlands is Claire’s loving 1940s husband’s ancestor was a brilliant one, but ended up being underused. It would have been brilliant if he was charming as well as cruel and if Claire was having to fight an attraction to him and stop herself from linking him with her husband in her mind. One scene almost suggested things were about to go down that route, but no. He ended up being the most horribly one-dimensional villain I’ve come across in a long time. He literally seemed unable to hold a conversation with someone (male or female, young or old) without attempting to rape and/or beat them, and he didn’t appear to have any sort of grand plan beyond finding more people to rape and beat. This irritated me more than it usually would, as it seemed to be at least partly playing up to the “English=evil, Scottish/Irish = good” stereotype so beloved of Hollywood directors. At times, this book made Braveheart look non-partisan – not always a comfortable read as an English woman.

Overall, despite those issues, I’d recommend this, and I haven’t been able to resist starting Book Two. I’d suggest you consider whether these are things that would put you off a book completely, or whether, with strong characters, a well-realised setting and a generally interesting plot, you’d be able to overlook them.

For what it’s worth, I did end up diving straight into Book Two, which I’m probably enjoying even more, and  I have found myself thinking about the books when I’m not reading them, which is always a good sign – although not wildly helpful when I’ve had to do pieces of work relating to the Scottish Referendum!

Holiday Reading Update Part 2 – We Were Liars

09 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by georgianaderwent in Uncategorized

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beach reads, holiday reads, we were liars

Yesterday, I talked about my thoughts on holiday reads as a concept, listed the books I’d read on my recent honeymoon to Bali and reviewed the first book on the list, The Luminaries, a big, heavy read I’d picked up because I felt I should and ended up loving. 

Today’s read is at the other end of the scale. I’d heard it was about a rich American family staying on their sunny holiday island, and it sounded like a perfect bit of light relief. Some of the descriptions of the island and the happier times the characters spent there fitted the bill, but as the book went on, it got both darker and less interesting. Lots of people seem to have loved this, but for me, it was a bit of a failure, both as a book and as a choice of holiday read. I finished it, sat on our veranda sipping a glass of wine in the summery warmth – and was left feeling rather depressed and very cheated. On the plus side, if I’d read it anywhere else, I’d probably have felt rather jealous of the characters (at least in the early stages of the book). Instead, I had the rather unique reading experience of thinking that my Bali villa beat their Cape Cod mansion hands down!

IMG_0411

This is how pretty the veranda was, and the book still left me feeling a bit deflated. 

WE WERE LIARS – 3 STARS

liars

THE BLURB

A beautiful and distinguished family.
A private island.
A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.
A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.
A revolution. An accident. A secret.
Lies upon lies.
True love.
The truth.
 
We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from National Book Award finalist and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart. 

Read it.
And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.

THE REVIEW

When I started this book, I knew only two things about it. Firstly, that it focussed on a rich family on a summer holiday. Secondly, that it had a major twist. Beyond this, thanks to what seemed to be a deliberate policy by both publishers and reviewers, its content was a bit of a mystery. I wasn’t even entirely sure of the genre or of what age group it was aimed at. Still, that bit of information I had sounded promising. I usually enjoy reading about upper class lives (do I even need to clarify that on this blog?), I was looking for a beach read so the summery theme appealed, and above all, I love a well-executed twist.

While I hate spoilers, I don’t think it’s necessary to be quite as cautious as some reviewers have been. I think it’s fair to say that it’s YA, that it’s mostly about families and growing up, but that teenage romance plays a large role.

The seventeen year old narrator, Cadence, is one of seven grandchildren of an incredibly rich WASPy-type, who owns a private island off Cape Cod. Every year since she was a child, the whole family has spent the summer on the island, having a seemingly idyllic time. The family are outwardly perfect. Not only rich, but tall, blonde, intelligent, good-looking and sporty. The are also quite obsessed with keeping up appearances, maintaining a stiff upper lip in the face of emotional upheaval and keen to perpetrate their own mythology of gilded perfection. From the first page, however, it becomes clear that, inevitably, there are problems behind the facade.

When she was fifteen, the narrator had the usual summer of spending time with her beloved cousins, as well as starting an intense relationship with Gat, the Asian best friend of one of the cousins, and a frequent visitor to the island since they were all children. Then, she had some sort of swimming accident, which has left her with debilitating migraines, little interest in her old life, and little memory of that summer. Most of the action focusses on the summer when Cadence is seventeen. Back on the island for the first time since the accident and convinced that there are things people aren’t telling her, she tries to piece together what happened two years before, while trying to rebuild her relationship with Gat and her friendship with her cousins, and deal with the interesting dynamics of the rest of the family.

Some people don’t like to know that a twist is coming, but in this case, I was very glad I did. I started off really enjoying the book, mainly because the brutally honest prose style caught my attention. And throughout, there were passages that were really clever and that caught my imagination. “We believe in outdoor exercise. We believe that time heals. We believe, although we will not say so explicitly, in prescription drugs and the cocktail hour.” I also enjoyed the world-building. The island and the family dynamics felt very well-realised and have stuck in my memory. However, I was bored and mildly irritated by the time I made it halfway through the book. At that point, I was only really continuing to read because I wanted to know what the twist was going to be.

It was difficult not to feel irritated by Cadence. Despite some bits of clever writing, at times, listening to her bare her soul felt a bit like reading over a particularly pretentious and over-emotional section of a seventeen-year old’s diary (and believe me, if I ever wanted to do that, I’ve got plenty of my own raw material locked away!). The trouble was, she got so emotional over relatively small things (a boy she likes having a girlfriend, being “forced” to go on a trip to Europe with her father instead of back to the island when she was sixteen) that I found it difficult to feel much sympathy for her when genuinely bad things happened, like the after-effects of her accident. Her response seemed the same whenever anything upsetting happened, regardless of the magnitude – unleash the “shot through the heart” and “bleeding to death” metaphors. And the only thing more irritating than listening to the over-privileged narrator’s first world problems was listening to her sanctimonious love interest calling her out on it.

The other problem was that for most of the book, relatively little happened. It was mostly just Cadence and her family spending uneventful days on the beach and in the beachhouses – again, the effect was a bit like reading someone’s day-to-day diary. I think part of the problem was that I couldn’t get really emotionally invested in the key relationship. As a cynical 28 year old, I can’t help but think that a relationship between two fifteen or seventeen year olds is probably not going to last forever. I read a lot of YA/NA, and usually I manage to push these thoughts away and buy into the love story, but for some reason (probably the narrator’s whiny tone) I couldn’t do it here.

Finally, there were the interludes in which Cadence talks about her family using the language and imagery of fairytales, “once upon a time there was a king who had three beautiful daughters.” In part, it was quite clever and fun, but they were a bit overdone and started to add to the general vibe I was getting of pretentious teenager who mythologises her life.

And so to the twist. Firstly, it genuinely caught me by surprise despite my best efforts to guess it in advance, and it made me reconsider everything that had gone before. On the other hand, I found it pretty hard to reconcile with the rest of the plot, and sort of felt that for one “oh my god, are you kidding me?” moment, the author had undermined much of the point of the story.

Overall, this is a well-written novel, but I enjoyed the prose much more than the plot and characters. It’s not a bad beach read and it does have a surprising twist, but it ultimately didn’t quite work for me. It frustrated me to the extent that I was tempted to give it two stars, but when there are so many awful books out there, that seemed a bit unfair on a book that does have a few flashes of brilliance, so I’ve gone for a grudging three.

***

Tomorrow, it’s time for a review of my final read of the holiday (and one that several people have begged me to read): Outlander. Because nothing puts you in that tropical island mood faster than reading out eighteenth century Scotland…

Holiday Reading Update 1 – The Luminaries

08 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by georgianaderwent in Books, Personal

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IMG_0480

Got my Kindle, got my giant coconut and got my floppy hat. I am good to go.

Ahh, holiday reading. Every summer, with weary predictability, the recommended beach reads appear in all the papers, the highbrow equivalent of all the “get a beach body fast” articles in the fluffier magazines. 

There seem to be two broad schools of thought on what constitutes a beach read.

For some people, it’s about choosing the biggest, hardest, most literary tomes they can lay their hands on, on the basis that they’d never have time to get through them during the rest of the year, and don’t really have the energy for such things after a long day of work.

For others, beach reads are pretty much synonymous with “light hearted trash.” It’s hot, you’re wearing a bikini, and you may well have drunk a cocktail or two. Concentrating on something heavy is not going to happen, and why spoil the mood of relaxation and joy anyway?

As a general rule, I take a similar approach to my beach reading as to my beach body – pick up my Kindle, put on my bikini and work with what I’ve got. 

But this year, it wasn’t just a holiday. It was a honeymoon. And seen as I’d obsessed over every other conceivable detail of the wedding, there didn’t seem much point in skimping on my beach reads (or my beach body for that matter, but that’s a whole other story…)

Now, some of you might want to know why on earth I was spending time reading on my honeymoon. Firstly, apart from the literal beach reading, there was a 50 hour round trip to get through, during which I clung to my Kindle for dear life. Secondly, I love reading almost as much as my wonderful new husband, and for me, no perfect fortnight would be complete without a good book or two. And thirdly, rest assured that I did lots of other things, like visiting a monkey forest and a snake temple and surfing and swimming and eating lots of delicious food. And all sorts of things you’re meant to do on honeymoon, which I won’t go into, though if you’re curious, Chapter Eight of Oxford Blood (amongst others) will give you a general sort of overview 😉

IMG_0498

See, I told you I visited a monkey forest.

In the end, I got through three books, which equated to about 2000 pages. The first of these, The Luminaries  definitely fell into the first category – literary fiction I wouldn’t usually have the energy for. I expected it to be like swallowing vitamins and it turned out to be like devouring a box of chocolates. The review’s below, and then over the next two days, I’ll review the other two books, We Were Liars (which I had filed in the “light read” category but which turned out to be rather darker than I was wanting or expecting), and Outlander, which is more historical romance than literary fiction, but which, at 900 pages, I classed in rather the same way as something I’d never get through in a working week.  

THE LUMINARIES – ELEANOR CATTON – 5 STARS

LUMINARIES

 

I approached this book with some degree of trepidation. Several reviews from hardened literary critics implied that while its technical merits made it worthy of its Booker Prize win, actually reading it was a bit of a hard slog, thanks to its length and its complex structure. It sat on my Kindle for several months, until, confronted with the prospect of a 27 hour plane journey, I decided that it was now or never.

From the first page, I was astonished by how much I enjoyed it, not in an cold, “appreciating great literature” sort of way, but simply in the sense of getting wrapped up in the plot, speculating about the mysteries and feeling strong emotions towards the characters. It was beautifully written, apeing a late Victorian style perfectly, but the story drew me in and kept me turning the pages as if it were the most salacious, trashy thriller. The plot is complex, featuring at least twenty fairly major characters, but while it requires a fair degree of concentration to keep track of everyone’s comings and goings, I never felt lost or overburdened with detail, just fully immersed in a well-developed world.

It’s a tricky tale to summarise, but basically, on the same night in a nineteenth-century goldmining town in New Zealand, a hermit dies alone, only for both a stash of gold and a long-lost wife to appear; a prostitute collapses from an apparent opium overdose and is arrested, and the richest man in town disappears. There are mysteries underlying all three of these events (and several others) and endless connections between these three characters and the rest of the sprawling cast. With so many characters, it’s perhaps inevitable that some of them were more interesting and memorable than others, and that some of the supporting cast blurred into one slightly. But the best characters were very well done with some interesting nuances – and less nuanced, but just as enjoyable, was a wonderfully villainous sea captain.

I didn’t know much more about the plot than the book’s setting, and on paper, it wasn’t a period or location that really appeared to me. However, the author really brings the town of Hotika to life and really piqued my interest in a piece of history I had no prior knowledge of. While the plot is mostly rooted in the gritty realism of life in a frontier town, there is also a slight touch of the paranormal, which I suspect some people will dislike, but which I quite enjoyed.

I’d heard that this book was heavily based around astronomy, another factor that seems to have daunted some critics and put off some readers. If you have no interest in the subject, then don’t worry. The plot and the prose are perfectly enjoyable without this knowledge, and although the strange chapter titles and shortening chapters make you aware that something strange is going on, for the most part, it doesn’t get in the way of the story, just leaves you with a vague sense that the author has probably pulled off something quite clever. I’m by no means an expert, but I had some interest in astronomy in my teens, and had just enough remembered knowledge to get something extra from the book. I’m sure that anyone who is genuinely knowledgable about the subject would be fascinated by the way it is handled. As far as I could tell, the idea is that some of the characters represent signs of the zodiac (I had fun guessing who was which, until I noticed there was actually a chart – woops) and some other represent the planets. Mostly, the planetary ones are the ones doing things and moving the plot along, while the stellar ones are caught in the fall out of their actions. I think the latter were acting according to the general attributes of their star sign, and also been affected by the position of the actual planets and stars on any given day. I suspect that a greater knowledge of astronomy would help to explain what sometimes feels like odd behaviour and U-turns on the part of certain characters, as well as some of the stranger coincidences and plot twists. To reiterate though, all this underlying cleverness doesn’t get in the way of the story and it isn’t necessary to even vaguely understand it in order to follow the plot.

The other noteworthy thing about this book is the structure. It’s in twelve parts (presumably another reference to the signs of the zodiac). The first part has twelve chapters, the next eleven, and so on, until part twelve only has one chapter. At the same time, the chapters get notably shorter as the book goes on (part 1 finished 48% of the way through the book, according to my Kindle, part twelve is one page long) and though I didn’t bother to count, I’m reliably informed that each is half the length of its predecessor. I didn’t feel that this structure added much, but like the astronomy references, neither, for the most part, did it get in the way of the reading experience. My only complaint is that the book reaches its climax at the end of Part Five of twelve- (although to be fair, that is 90% of the way through the book). At that point, most of the mysteries are revealed and loose ends tied up. The following sections then go back in time to fill in some of the gaps. To some extent, this was interesting, but a lot of it felt like rehashing old ground or needlessly spelling out things that had been clearly implied beforehand. I was hoping that these flashbacks would put a new spin on events or characters, but with the exception of the interesting sections explaining how Anna (the prostitute mentioned above) came to be in her current situation, they felt extremely redundant and repetitive, which slightly dulled my love for the book. It felt like the one time the author really put structure over storytelling.

This book is undoubtedly long and clearly very cleverly written. But I’d emphasise once more that it’s far more enjoyable, far more of a page-turner and a far easier read than either its length or its reputation would suggest. Marvel at its structure and style, puzzle out its astronomical mysteries or simply enjoy a riveting historical drama – whatever level you choose to read it on, I’d highly recommend this book.

 

Tales from my wedding

01 Monday Sep 2014

Posted by georgianaderwent in Personal

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

black tie, Oxford, personal, photographs, posh life, wedding

WARNING – it’s probably best to avoid this post if a)you have absolutely no interest in my personal life and/or b)weddings leave you cold. But I’d assume that anyone who reads this blog ormy books has some taste for romance and some interest in pretty pictures of Oxford and people in black tie.

You may have read the section of my bio that states, “Georgiana lives in London with her fiance.” You may have noticed the nauseatingly sweet dedication at the front of Oxford Blood, “To F, the man of my overheated teenage dreams.”  If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you might remember the post from December 2012 in which I excitedly announced my engagement. If you’re a newcomer, you might have been introduced to the blog and the series via my recent, wedding-themed giveaway. In short, you may have noticed that for quite a while now, there’s been a wedding on the horizon. 

Well, it’s on the horizon no longer. So, in what I like to think looks remarkably like stills from an Oxford Blood movie, here are  pictures from my amazing wedding on August 16th at Magdalen College, Oxford. 

The bride and groom

 

with assorted bridesmaids and ushers

My parents

My parents

 

With some friends

With some friends

 

Aggressively cute cake

Aggressively cute cake

Yorkshire roses for the bridesmaid

Yorkshire roses for the bridesmaid

Overly long train

Overly long train

And then in the evening, we changed and we danced

And then in the evening, we changed…

...and we danced...

…and we danced…

And everyone was so beautifully dressed up

And everyone was so beautifully dressed up

Finally, I leave you all with one amusing book and wedding related fact. The service was conducted by a Bishop who is my now-husband’s Godfather. Bizarrely, he’s read my books – well, one and two anyway. Even more bizarrely (and wonderfully), he referenced them in his sermon, explaining that he hadn’t yet read Ivory Terrors, but could only hope that the heroine ended up with the character who was clearly based on the groom. Cue slightly horrified looks from those members of the congregation who have finished the series, and a gentle shake of the head from the long-suffering man himself!

Anyway, it was a great day, and I had a lovely honeymoon in Bali afterwards. I’ve got lots of reviews to post over the next few days thanks to all my holiday reading, and after such a relaxing time I’m feeling invigorated and ready to make a start on my next writing project. Oh, and you might have noticed that in honour of my Oxford wedding, Oxford Blood was free for a few days. Thanks to everyone who downloaded it and who bought one or both of the sequels afterwards. Just to perfect an already amazing month, August 2014 has been pretty much my most successful ever month for book sales – and all with me not going anywhere near a computer for nearly three weeks!

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Previously on the Posh, the Privileged and the Paranormal…

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