Book review – Jenny Wren and a terrible slip-up in the bookshop …

A bit of a change to the usual way of reviewing things – just one book in this one and one in the next. See, I read “Jenny Wren” and its sequel, “The Curate’s Wife” one after the other. But it’s hard to review the second one without issuing terrible spoilers for the first! So I’m going to review them separately (but possibly on the same day, if I can type fast enough). In this post, you’ll also get a bumper crop of horrendously naughty book acquisitions, after really not taking many new ones on board for quite a while (2 in June, 4 in July) …

E.H. YOUNG – “Jenny Wren” (Virago)

(25 December 2014, LibraryThing Virago Group (Not So) Secret Santa gift from Laura)

Jenny and Dahlia are moving with their mother into a house intended to host lodgers at the opening of this book, set in the Clifton area of Bristol, clearly recognisable in “Upper Radstowe”. But their house is feared sullied by their neighbours, because their uneducated mother, married in error to a higher-class and fastidious man, had an affair when her husband was alive and accepted money from her lover to set up her current establishment. He now visits every Saturday, intent on some form of repayment, and the girls – Dahlia casual and blowsily attractive like their mother and Jenny quiet, fastidious, small and neat like their father – despair of being able to progress to love and marriage from such a background.

So, when Jenny, out for a walk with their suitable lodger, the lovely and kind Edwin Cummings, encounters the son of the local manor, on his horse, all gilded and glowing, she’s vulnerable to falling (in several different ways) and to give herself a better chance, instinctively lies about her family and brings despair to herself, while Dahlia, straightforward, mocking and honest, prefers to reserve her love and be loved instead. With horrible Aunt Sarah and her plans for all three of them in the mix, their mother desperately straining for any connection with her girls, local gossip running wild and things not being as they should, the scene is set for heartbreak and sacrifice.

With nature and inner selves beautifully described, this novel set in the 1930s seems more archaic (as someone commented when I posted up this set of books for #20BooksOfSummer, it’s more like Hardy than a novel of the 30s, and they were right), yet of course the women characters have more freedom, even if it still leads to their downfall.

I immediately rushed to read the sequel, and you can read that review now.

This was Book 11 in my #20BooksOfSummer project and also filled in 1932 in my Reading a Century project.

This book will suit … People who like reading Virago books or books set in country towns.

Now, oops …

I met up with Sian and Gill in the local cafe on Friday for a catch-up and to stock the BookCrossing shelves. I also needed to pass Tracey Thorn’s autobiography to Sian, swapping it for her newer book on singing. She had brought along a Jonathan Franzen novel for the shelves, which I immediately snapped up, as I really enjoyed his first novel, “The Corrections” (which I must have read aaaages ago as I can’t find a review on here).

Anyway, that was bad enough, then …

I’ve had most of the weekend off work, so was quite relaxed wandering down the High Street, thought I’d pop into The Works to see what was in their new 3 for £5 batch … and came out with FIVE books. Hm.

The Ranulph Fiennes biography, “Cold”, I’ve had my eye on for a while, and it fits in with my collection of books on exploration, especially Polar. Arnaldur Indriadson’s first novel “Silence of the Grave”, although a modern crime novel, has the attraction of being set in Iceland, and the bit I quickly read that had bodies in it didn’t seem tooo bad (maybe you could comment below if you think I can cope OK with him – I’m OK with dark stuff esp as it’s from the land of the Sagas and Halldor Laxness, as long as it’s not too gruesome or explicitly violent) and all of his novels appear to be in the special offer, so if I like this …

Going a little more fluffy, “A Cornish Affair” appealed because it features a library cataloguing project and we’re planning a trip to Cornwall, so it will be appropriate to read there. Cathy Kelly is a light-reading favourite of mine, and “Too Many Cooks” is about a cookery book ghost-writer, so again, couldn’t resist. And remember how I picked all the light reading off my TBR when I had that flu? So it needs replacing, right?

Have you read any of these? What are you currently reading? I’m still on “Doctor Thorne”, and I think I’ll have a good go at that now, as I have another Virago and a Persephone ready to review …