Tag: Wales

Review 2558: Reading Wales Month ’25! How Green Was My Valley

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

I didn’t intend to participate in Reading Wales Month ’25 this year, but when this novel fit into my A Century of Books project, I decided to fit it in for Reading Wales, too.

Such a lovely book this is, especially in the music of its language. It’s the story of the Morgans, a family of Welsh coal miners, told by one of its youngest members, Huw.

Huw is six when the novel begins. His family and those of the others in the valley are relatively prosperous, but there are signs that with the mine owners, profits are becoming more important than the lives of the men. Huw’s older brother Davy has been reading socialist literature and is talking about a union, but his father is against it.

It’s difficult to summarize this book because it’s full of family events, one of the first being Huw’s brother Ivor’s marriage to Bronwen. And there is the arrival of Mr. Gruffydd, the new preacher. But overarching everything for the men is the work, as pay gets lower and the valley begins experiencing periods of hunger and want.

I was as entranced by this novel as I ever was, the family so upright, god-fearing, and loyal, Huw’s experiences as he grows up. All the while, the fate of the valley is foreshadowed as Huw speaks from his 60s, returning just as his house is being destroyed by a mountain of slag.

It’s a real page-turner, not in terms of action, but for other reasons.

Related Posts

Germinal

That Lass O’Lowries

Country Dance

Review 2547: Howl’s Moving Castle

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

I noticed that this book filled a hole in my A Century of Books project. I found the images from the movie fascinating when it came out years ago. So, although I don’t often read children’s books, I got a copy from the library.

Sophie lives in a sort of fairytale world of wizards and spells and witches. Because she is familiar with fairy tales, she knows that as the eldest sister, she would fail at any attempts to find her fortune. It’s always the youngest who is successful. So, when the family fortunes falter, she agrees with her stepmother’s plan to apprentice in her hat shop, while one of her sisters is apprenticed to a baker and the other to an herbalist.

Sophie has a talent for trimming hats, but she is still finding life a bit dull until she has an encounter with the Witch of the Waste about one of her hats. The witch puts a spell on her and turns her into an old lady.

All the girls in the country are afraid of Wizard Howl, who lives in a moving castle. He is reputed to kidnap girls and steal their souls. But Sophie thinks the only way to throw off the curse is to get help from Howl. The castle is in the area, so she bangs on the door until Howl’s apprentice Michael opens it, and then she makes herself at home as a housekeeper.

Howl has imprisoned a demon in his fireplace to move the castle, so she makes a deal with the demon. If she can break his contract, he’ll break her spell.

Otherwise, things in the castle seem quite different than she expected.

I think some of the ideas in this novel are imaginative, but otherwise, it seemed as if everyone was running around aimlessly most of the time. There is a contract to be broken, for example, but Sophie and Michael only make one attempt to break it, and the rest just seems to happen. I’m sure children would find the novel fascinating, but to me it seemed too loosely plotted and could have been about half as long.

Related Posts

The Golden Compass

A Stranger Came Ashore

Victorian Fairy Tales

Review 2539: A Morbid Taste for Bones

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

I didn’t really like the Cadfael series on TV, and I thought I had read at least one book long ago and decided not to pursue it. However, I saw that the first book filled a hole in my A Century of Books project, so I thought I’d give it another try. Now, I’m not sure I ever read any, because this book is pretty good!

In 1137, Brother Cadfael is a Welsh monk in a Benedictine order in Shrewsbury. He has led an exciting life, but now a quiet one taking care of the monastery garden suits him. He has two young assistants. Brother Columbanus is from a family of high Norman blood who seems almost too devout and eager to please. Brother John is practical and full of mischief.

Brother Columbanus is stricken with something that seems like epilepsy, so Prior Robert, an ambitious, proud man, suggests sending him to the Shrine of Saint Winifred in nearby Wales. When Brother Columbanus is miraculously cured, Prior Robert suggests that what the order needs are some relics, and Saint Winfred’s bones may answer the case.

Although Prior Robert wouldn’t normally include Cadfael in his expedition to get the bones, he needs him as a translator. Brother Columbanus is allowed to go as the subject of the miraculous healing, and Brother John offers to take care of the livestock. After getting permission from the Welsh authorities to remove the bones, the party encounters opposition from Rhisiart, the major landowner in the area, and thus from the rest of the locals.

Prior Robert meets with Rhisiart to try to talk him around, but he mishandles this discussion badly by trying to bribe him. They schedule a second meeting, but Rhisiart never arrives. Once they learn he left home for the meeting and never returned, everyone goes out to look for him. They find him shot in the chest with an arrow that belongs to Engelard, a Saxon boy who wants to marry Sioned, Rhisiart’s only child and his heir.

Suspicion immediately focuses on Engelard, but to Cadfael that doesn’t make sense. Even though Rhisiart opposed the marriage, he has treated Engelard like a son since he arrived, in a country where you usually must belong to a family to get work.

Does the murder have to do with the marriage? with Sioned? a love triangle? the monk’s expedition?

I enjoyed this mystery. It seems well-researched and is written with a wry sense of humor. Although I did guess the murderer, Peters tricked me enough to move my guess to two other people before I returned to my original suspect just about the time Cadfael did.

Related Posts

A Murderous Procession

Grave Goods

The Serpent’s Tale

Review 2308: One Afternoon

~ whatmeread ~ 1 Comment

One afternoon Anna Goodhart, a widow in her mid-thirties with three daughters, runs into Charlie, a young actor whom she met years ago at some event of her husband’s. He invites her to a party. She agrees to go but almost backs out. However, she goes and they soon begin an affair. Although she doesn’t expect it to last, she is wild with joy and makes no secret of their relationship.

This is the story about a woman who begins to rebuild her own life after her husband’s death, to realize things about her marriage, and to identify what she wants her life to be. Although attitudes had begun to change for women in 1974 when this book was published, it reads like a much more modern novel. I was surprised how the people in Anna’s life, with a couple of exceptions, take her affair and her subsequent decisions.

This is a lovely book filled with mostly kind people. It explores memory and how it tangles with reality as well as the complexities of love.

Related Posts

Four Letters of Love

The Transit of Venus

The Women’s Room

Review 2299: The Salt Path

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

The Salt Path is Raynor Winn’s memoir of walking with her husband the 600+-mile Salt Path from Wales around the tip of Cornwall and back to Devon. This may not sound extraordinary or appealing to everyone, but the circumstances that initiated the walk were difficult.

It must have been the worst few days of their lives to date. For years, Raynor Winn and her husband Moth had been fighting a lawsuit that, through no fault of their own, threatened their home and livelihood. They went to court having found a document that proved they owed nothing, but because they didn’t follow the proper procedures, they were not allowed to admit it as evidence. They lost the farm they built up from nothing and were homeless.

As if that weren’t enough, a few days later some pain Moth had in his arm for years was diagnosed as a terminal illness that would result in the degeneration of his muscles and end with him choking to death.

The Winn’s reaction to these circumstances was unusual. With a very small income and almost no ready cash, they decided to walk the Salt Path. And although Raynor wanted to walk it the easy way, from the southeast westward, because the best guidebook went the other way, they went that way.

This book is compulsively readable, as the couple deal with grief, bad weather, physical problems, lack of food and water, poor equipment, difficulty finding camp sites, and general bad treatment of the homeless. It is vividly written and although I tripped over some misplaced modifiers, impels you along with them on their journey.

Related Posts

Notes from a Small Island

Vanishing Cornwall

Wild

Review 2146: Country Dance

~ whatmeread ~ 12 Comments

In the mid-19th century, Ann Goodman is a young woman whose shepherd father is English and whose mother is Welsh. At the beginning of this novella, Ann lives in Wales near the English border. Although she speaks and understands Welsh, she’s been raised by her father to despise the Welsh. She is promised to Gabriel Ford, an English shepherd who is jealous of her.

Ann has been living with her cousins for 15 years when her father summons her to the English side of the border to help care for her ailing mother. At that time, Gabriel gives her a journal so she can write what she is doing and he can check up on her. Ann faithfully records her life, giving us great insight into farm life at the time.

Ann’s father works for a Welsh farmer, Evan ap Evans. Evans begins to pay attention to her, but she avoids him or is rude to him and says she hates Welshmen. When Gabriel comes to visit her, Evans speaks an endearment to her in Welsh, which makes Gabriel break up with her.

After her mother’s death, her father sends her back again to her cousins—in fact, never shows her any affection—and Gabriel attempts to court her. But Ann is angry that he wouldn’t take her word that nothing was going on with Evans, and also that when Evans tried to put things right, Gabriel attacked him.

As Ann relates her everyday activities, a feeling of dread grows in the reader. It’s no surprise to us that things go badly wrong, because the Introduction tells us so. But Evans, the author not the shepherd, gives this simple story depth by bringing in Ann’s ambivalence about her Welsh/English mixed heritage. This is a deceptively simple, sparely written story that I enjoyed reading for this month’s Reading Wales

Related Posts

Fair Helen

The Unquiet Grave

See What I Have Done

Review 2059: The Fortune Men

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

I didn’t read what The Fortune Men was about ahead of time, because I was reading it for my Booker prize project. That meant that at first I wasn’t sure why the novel switched between the stories of two characters, Mahmood Mattan, a Somali stoker who is a gambler and a petty thief, and Violet Volacki, a middle-aged Jewish storekeeper. However, when I turned to the back of the book, I learned that Mattan was the last man in Cardiff to be sentenced to death for the murder of Violet Volacki in 1952 and that years later he was found to have been wrongfully convicted.

Mahmood is not a perfect man. He has quit going to sea to be near his Welsh wife and children, but work is hard to find for a black man, and he has too much time on his hands. He spends it gambling and womanizing and occasionally stealing. He has a big mouth and he lies a lot. But he is not a murderer.

When the police come to see him because a woman was robbed and her throat cut, he doesn’t tell the exact truth about where he was, because he was dangling after a Russian woman and he doesn’t want his wife to know. A black man, possibly a Somali, was seen outside the store, but even after the victim’s sister and niece say it was not Mahmood, it’s pretty clear that the police decide it was him and look for people to place him there. After a reward is announced, plenty of them pop up.

This novel is well-written and should have been haunting, but first I kept having problems staying with it, and later, even after I got more interested, I felt distanced from the characters and the story. Mohamed went on side trips through the memory of Mahmood’s life that should have made readers feel closer to him, but I did not, and I noticed Goodreads reviewers complaining about the same thing.

Related Posts

Burial Rites

The Burning of Bridget Cleary

Famous Trials

Day 1286: The Murder of My Aunt

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Cover for The Murder of My AuntI’ve read quite a few of the British Library Crime Classics and enjoyed their beautiful covers, but The Murder of My Aunt is the first that has been darkly comic. Edward sees himself as fashionable and too good for the sleepy Welsh village of Llwll where he lives with his aunt. His aunt supports him but not well enough for him to live in London and indulge himself.

Edward is not a nice person, but he turns malicious after his aunt pulls a prank to get him to walk into the village instead of driving his car, La Joyeuse. He decides to murder her to get control of his life and her fortune.

link to NetgalleyIndeed, if we are to believe Edward’s version, his aunt is not much more likable than he is. But are we to believe him?

The novel is very entertaining until it bogs down a bit with a change of narrators. The Murder of My Aunt was considered a genre breaker in its time and was praised for its freshness and originality. Certainly, I found Edward’s machinations amusing, but the barbs directed at his effeminate nature are also mean-spirited.

Related Posts

The Iron Clew

The Moving Toyshop

Portrait of a Murderer

Day 472: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

~ whatmeread ~ 14 Comments

Cover for Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar ChildrenThe inception of this novel is extremely creative. Ransom Riggs began collecting unusual old photos from bins in resale shops. Then he became acquainted with similar collections owned by other people. He noticed that many of the more interesting photos were of children and decided to write a story around them (some having been lightly edited).

Jacob Portman has grown up hearing his grandfather Abe’s stories about life in a children’s home during World War II after he escaped the holocaust. These stories featured children with seemingly magical abilities all staying in a lovely school on an island off Wales. As he grows older, he dismisses these stories as fairy tales.

Now Abe is getting paranoid and senile, and 16-year-old Jacob is trying to keep his parents from putting him in a home. One day Abe calls Jacob demanding the key to the arsenal of weapons he keeps in his shed. Jacob’s father has hidden the key for fear his father could be dangerous. When Jacob arrives at his grandfather’s home, the old man is dead, and in the woods Jacob thinks he sees a monster with tentacles in its mouth.

Jacob suffers from horrible nightmares after this incident, so his parents put him into treatment with a Dr. Golan. Not so sure he was hallucinating, Jacob decides he wants to travel to the island in Wales and try to find out about his grandfather’s past. His father agrees to take him only after Dr. Golan decides it is a good idea. When Jacob arrives on the island, though, all he can find is a ramshackle old house destroyed in a World War II bombing containing a chest full of odd photographs of children.

Of course, there is more to it than that, and eventually we find ourselves back in the past and in the requisite battle of good against evil. That’s where the creativity of this novel breaks down for me. I love the Harry Potter books, which also have this theme, but they have a richness of detail and originality that is lacking in many other works in this genre. Perhaps I am a poor audience for books written for teens, too, for I often feel they lack fullness of characterization and have a certain first-person teenage narrative style that I find irritating (adult author pretending to be a teenager). This novel also callously discards Jacob’s parents, those too cumbersome quantities for fiction for this age. First, the parents are flat ciphers, and finally we leave them behind altogether.

This is not to say, though, that older children and teens won’t enjoy this novel. I think they will, and they’ll be entertained by looking at the pictures. I think young children could get nightmares from some of them, though.

Perhaps this is unfair, but I’m an adult, and I’m only going to give the best reviews to books that entertain me as an adult, even if they’re for younger people. That’s a high standard but one that is possible to meet and that is a characteristic of the best children’s and young adult fiction.

This book was written to have a sequel, by the way, so don’t expect the ending to be neatly wrapped up.