Welcome back to What Katie Read! I’ve had another wonderful reading month, having at last had time to pick up and read some novels purely for pleasure, rather than research. I tend to stockpile books so I always have plenty of choice, and then I sort them into different shelves according to genre and try to make sure I read a book from every shelf over the course of the month. That way I get a refreshing mix of fiction and non-fiction, historical and contemporary, crime and fantasy and social realism. If I don’t like a book, I put it back on the shelf and choose something else. Life is too short for a bad book!
Here is what I loved this month …
The Last Days of the Romanov Dancers
by Kerri Turner
I’ve always been fascinated by the Russian Revolution, and I’m a true balletomane, which means I love ballet. So this debut novel by Australian author Kerri Turner caught my attention from the outset, and was one of the first books I picked up when I was free to read solely for pleasure once more.
It’s set in Petrograd in 1914. Valentina has risen from grinding poverty to being one of the top dancers in the Imperial Russian Ballet, but the cost is very high – she is supported by rich patrons who can tire of her at any time and sell her on to some other man. Love, freedom, security – these are all impossible dreams. But Valentina lives to dance. Without the ballet, she has nothing. So she endures the degradation and humiliation of her life so that she can continue to dance, even while the opulent world of the Tsar and his family come under increasing pressure from revolutionary ideas.
Then a young man name Luka joins the company, and Valentina finds herself tempted not only by desire and the yearning for love, but the possibility of other ways to live, other ways to dance.
Yet to fall in love is to risk everything …
The Last Days of the Romanov Dancers is a compelling and beautifully written read, and I’m really looking forward to reading more by Kerri Turner. Her voice is deft and assured, her research impeccable.
Buy it here
The Left-Handed Booksellers of London
by Garth Nix
Garth Nix is one author whose books I always buy. And this is not just because he’s an old friend. He writes the very best kind of young adult fantasy – full of magic and adventure and old-fashioned storytelling, but with a very modern sensibility. And he’s always surprising. This new novel has a very intriguing premise. It’s set in 1983, a time I remember well, and centres on a young woman’s quest to find the father she has never known. Susan Arkshaw is tough and fiercely independent. She’s always had to look out for herself, for her father is unknown and her mother is strangely dreamy and vague, to the point of not really being quite there. She sets off to London to meet a man who once sent her mother a Christmas card, but before she can interrogate him he is turned to dust by the prick of a silver hatpin wielded by a left-handed bookseller named Merlin. Turns out he is one of an underworld of magical fighting detectives who conceal themselves behind the façade of bookshops, both dusty-and-cobwebby and brand-new. As Susan and Merlin are chased by hordes of different magical creatures, they team up to solve the mystery of just who Susan’s father might be, in a swiftly-paced, smart and funny romp through old English folklore. I just loved the premise, and am hoping this is the beginning of a whole new series.
Buy it here
The Lantern Men
by Elly Griffiths
This year I’ve been reading my way through the Ruth Galloway series of contemporary British crime novels by Elly Griffiths. The Lantern Men is the twelfth in the series, and just as readable and entertaining as the first. Dr Ruth Galloway is a forensic archaeologist, who began working with the Norfolk police way back in Book 1, The Crossing Places. Along the way she’s had an on-again-off-again affair with the lead detective, borne him a child, raised her daughter alone, and helped him solve a dozen intriguing murder cases. The joy of these books is the characters, who all seem so real, and the muddle they make of their personal affairs. Dr Ruth is clever, overweight, sceptical and determined to make it on her own. DCI Nelson is brusque, drives too fast, loves football and his family, and is prone to ordering people about. There is also the delightful Cadfael, one of Ruth’s best friends, a druid with a penchant for purple cloaks. That makes the books sound very charming and whimsical, which is true – but the mysteries are clever and hard-hitting, and the danger is very real. It’s a beguiling mix, which explains why so many people are as addicted as me. Start at the beginning, though! For the real joy is the developing relationships between the dramatis personae.
Buy it here
Hidden in Plain View
by Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard
In 1993, historian Jacqueline Tobin met an elderly African American woman Ozella Williams selling her beautiful handmade quilts in a market in Charleston, South Carolina. They fell into conversation, and Ozella told Jacqueline that many of her designs had been passed down through her family and had once been used as a visual code to help slaves
navigate their escape on the Underground Railroad. Jacqueline was intrigued but sceptical. How could quilts be maps? And, if Ozella’s story was true, why did nobody know about it? She questioned Ozella, but the old woman refused to tell her anymore. It was meant to be kept secret. When pressed, Ozella said she would tell Jacqueline the rest of the story when she was ‘ready’.
Jacqueline began to investigate the possibility that the story was true. She met with Ozella several times, the friendship and trust between them slowly growing, and she enlisted the help of Dr Raymond Dobard, an art history professor who specialised in African American quilts. They became convinced that the story had some premise in truth, and present the evidence they found to support Ozella’s story. The book was published in 1999, and has attracted controversy ever since. One of the problems is that which always arises when trying to prove oral history, which is by its nature slippery and unreliable – there is little empirical evidence to support the premise. Slave quilts were not preserved, nor their provenance recorded, nor their meaning questioned. Quilt patterns have different names and old ones are often adapted and renamed. Sadly Ozella Williams died soon after the book was completed, and so she cannot be questioned further.
I found the book absolutely fascinating. I am used to studying the way oral history and storytelling shapeshifts and camouflages itself, and I think that a lot of what the two authors have discovered is plausible. Here in Australia, we have the example of Indigenous storytelling where knowledge of country has been passed down word-of-mouth for thousands of years. One myth, from the Gunditjmara people of the south-east Australia, has been shown to carry evidence of a volcanic eruption that had occurred 37,000 years ago. And my sister and I, researching the life of our great-great-great-great-grandmother, found empirical evidence to prove numerous family stories that we had heard from our grandfather, who had heard them from his grandmother who had heard them from hers. To deny the value of oral history is to lose a rich fund of first-hand accounts of history, particularly in cultures where literacy was not the norm.
However, I do understand that many historians find the evidence debatable, and many non-historians wish the authors had just told the story of the quilts and their meaning, without the constant need to support their arguments. It’s the age-old tension between the historian and the storyteller. Read the book and decide for yourself.
Buy it here
The Praise Singer
by Mary Renault
This year, I have been reading a lot of books set in Ancient Greece and particularly loved Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, Madeine Miller’s Circe and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls. Widening my circle, I ordered another book by Mary Renault – The Praise Singer – because it had been recommended to me by a friend.
I enjoyed the book. It’s biographical fiction about a real-life poet named Simonides, who lived during the early classical period of Athens. We follow his journey from a wild and ugly boy, forced to work as a shepherd when all his soul yearns for music and poetry, to his life as an old man witnessing the end of the reign of the tyrant-king of Athens. Her writing is always vivid and vigorous, and the world of ancient Athens is well-drawn. I knew nothing about Simonides, or that particular period of history, and so I did find all the political machinations a bit of a drag. It meant the book did not have the narrative momentum of her Theseus books, and nor did it have the grandeur and mystery of the manifested presence of the old Greek gods in all their dreadful power.
Still, Mary Renault is a wonderful writer and so she manages to pull it off. I plan to read more of her work.
Buy it here
Kate Forsyth
About Kate
Kate Forsyth wrote her first novel aged seven and has now sold more than a million books worldwide. Her newest book, co-written with Belinda Murrell, is Searching for Charlotte, which tells the fascinating story of Australia’s first children’s author (and Forsyth’s own distant relation) Charlotte Waring Atkinson. Her novels for adults include The Blue Rose, inspired by the true story of the quest for a blood-red rose during the French Revolution, Beauty in Thorns, a Pre-Raphaelite reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, and Bitter Greens, which won the 2015 American Library Association award for Best Historical Fiction. Kate’s books for children include the fantasy series The Witches of Eileanan.
Named one of Australia’s Favourite 15 Novelists, Kate has a BA in literature, a MA in creative writing and a doctorate in fairy tale studies, and is also an accredited master storyteller with the Australian Guild of Storytellers. She is a direct descendant of Charlotte Waring Atkinson, the author of the first book for children ever published in Australia.
Find out more about Kate Forsyth here.
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The Blue Rose
Moving between Imperial China and the ‘Terror’ of the French Revolution and inspired by the true story of the quest for a blood-red rose.
Viviane de Faitaud has grown up alone at the Chateau de Belisima-sur-le-Lac in Brittany. Her father, the Marquis, lives at the court of Louis XVI in Versailles. After a hailstorm destroys the chateau’s orchards, gardens and fields an ambitious young Welshman, David Stronach, accepts the commission to plan the chateau’s new gardens in the hope of making his name as a landscape designer...
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