Mailbox Monday/It's Monday! What are you reading?

Good things courtesy of Netgalley!

                

Reading Boarding House Reach and its good.

On a weather note, it has started to rain. I am too nervous to be happy over it as I know it can become dry in a few minutes! I just wish the rain would stay.....

A Distant Dream by Vivienne Dockerty

The year is 1847 and it is the time of the infamous potato famine in Ireland. My knowledge of the period is sketchy and I fell in love with this cover. The somber tones perfectly convey the feeling of despair and almost resignation that the emigrants have.

We have scores of people moving out of Ireland and underscoring the famine and hunger, is also the fact that most of them are farmers who love the land but who are just tenant farmers. They long for their own land, something that they could nurture, protect and enhance and then hand over to their children.

Clarence and Bessie have no children - they actually abduct Molly while her sister is at her mother's funeral and very quickly whisk her away from the home she has always known. Molly is just three. The story follows with a tiring, eventful journey across the seas to Australia. There the family like scores of their fellow countrymen try to settle down to the life they are dreaming about. Molly's death is an act of murder covered up by her adopted parents as well as by Hannah who is cowed into covering up the actual facts. Molly's death is also the death knell for Bessie and Clarence who reverse their plans, move out and establish themselves elsewhere.

The book is one of a trilogy and I do hope I can track down the other books in the series. Very evocative and very descriptively told of the trials of average human beings. How even a very normal person like Bessie, can turn into something she is normally not. She was not maternal, she had motherhood thrust on her and she did not take to it. The difficulties facing farmers in a land totally different to what they knew is a subject that fascinates me. I have problems being an agriculturalist in a land I know. Imagine not knowing terrain, temperature, wild life (of which everything was different and strange), the hazards of no civilization, no doctors, no schooling. People faced all this and overcame these obstacles and did wonders for their adopted land.

This was a very good read.

Courtesy of Netgalley via Troubador Publishing Ltd.  

The Seasons of Trouble by Rohini Mohan

The subject was known to me very well (no Sri Lankan will ever not know this particular subject) and though handled through not just books but through the media umpteen times, not one we get tired of because there are so many aspects and variations to this story that each one is unique. Rohini  Mohan has taken this subject, albeit a difficult one and handled it delicately, sensitively and at the same time its an in your face of all the facts as it happened.

The story deals with the civil war which lasted for three decades and its effects on Sri Lankans. However it deals in this book with particular characters and its effect on them individually. Both are Tamils and so the war looks at it from the perspective of only one race and not both. The Singhalese are seen as the aggressors and the judge and jury. The Tamils are the victims here. I do not personally think that is quite the way it should be but that is another story.

Sarva is a young man of Tamil ancestry. He is from the highlands of Sri Lanka and his story is a painful though common one. Taken in for brutal questioning which involves a great deal of torture, the boy and his family comes out of the episode hating the Singhalese and just wanting to get out of the country. He succeeds after a great deal of trouble, involving his family particularly his mother who never gives up (what mothers have done for centuries), and finds his way to Cardiff eventually.

The story of Mughil is a very interesting one. She was a cadre in the feared LTTE army. At the very end of the war, she realizes that she is on a losing wicket. She gives up all pretense of being a member of the LTTE and goes back to her village and her family. Detailing the last stages of the war which were horrific from a refugees point of view,( this was the first time I read of it from an individual's angle) Mughil and her two young sons along with her sister and family, her mother and father live in appalling conditions both on the run and in the Government run camp which is more or less an open prison. Mughil's instinct for survival is very strong and she is more determined than ever that her two sons will survive and prosper. That they will be educated and not even think of a war and anything that is war related.  How she achieves this and reconciles with a husband whom she hasn't seen or heard of for years, gets back to civilian life and then eventually gets arrested as being a former cadre is heartbreaking. All she wants is to be is a a "normal young woman:". She never achieved that and that was very difficult for me to accept. 

I liked the detailing of everyday life - both in prison, in the camps and then back in civilian life under a military regime. It seemed so far removed from my own life - living just 200 kms away it seems like another world.  Makes me appreciate the life I've had in Sri Lanka despite the war going on. It also shows how one can grow a skin of a kind of indifference to that which is happening so close to one and yet so far. 

The book is I think of special interest to Sri Lankans. I do not know whether the same appeal and interest would be there with others. You have to live through a conflict like this to understand the nuances of this story and I liked the book very, very much. Painting the Singhalese as villains is not something I appreciated but that is that. There are always faults on either side. No one is ever literally so clean that they can point the finger at others.

This was a download from Netgalley courtesy of Verso Books (US).

A Beast in Venice by Michael E. Henderson

I chose this book because if I see Venice in a title I want to read it. I did not check out the genre of the book and it surprised me.

Brigham Stone is a modern artist. His wife is a Professor. They live in Venice. He is trying to get a gallery to showcase his art and he is failing miserably. Art gallery owners belong to a cartel (or so it seems) and choice of artist is strictly determined by some rules governed by a kind of Mafia.

Brigham is also on the way to becoming a drunk.  He sees a man walking through a brick wall, confides in his wife, who puts it down to the drink, confides in a friend a gondolier Mauro who believes him intensely and who says that it is all linked to the current events in Venice - bodies being fished out of the canals, gutted, crucified and eaten. Referred to as shroud eaters Mauro insists they exist despite Brigham's initial skepticism.

Brigham is later befriended by Charles - seemingly a kindly, rich man who likes his art and is willing to help him along. His kindly exterior of course conceals more sinister workings and Brigham is drawn into a private, hidden world in Venice. The world of clubs where vampires, blood sucking, crucifixion and death is also involved.

How to exist in this world to which he is drawn, how to reconcile with his wife Rose who has gone missing, and how to get back to normality because Brigham knows definitely that continuing down this path is going to lead to his own demise.

The vampire bits left me unmoved but the story of a sometimes bumbling Brigham, was amusing.

A download from Netgalley courtesy of Gemelli Press.

Night Drop by Michael W. Sherer

Blake Sanders has not put the pieces of his life together quite like it was before. He has lost his only son Cole and he is now divorced. Molly and he maintain a cordial relationship but when she is abducted from her high profile law firm, Blake steps in as the person who will maintain contact with the kidnappers.

The kidnapping seems a run of the mill one - the demand for money with detailed, convoluted instructions on how and where the money is to be placed and delivered. Following the instructions to the letter but giving his own twist to the tale, Blake is determined to find the identity of who has kidnapped Molly because both the FBI and the law firm have not clue as to why Molly was abducted.

Slowly emerging from the very complicated background is an international Middle Eastern (and a Bangladeshi) group intent on creating mayhem in America Al Quaeda style. Using a system of trained dolphins and blackmailing a former Navy Seal into helping them, they use the dolphins to retrieve canisters of nuclear material which they intend to use to pulverize American cities. 

Getting Naval intelligence into the act Blake and Reyna realize that their goal is not just freeing Molly if it is at all possible but also to prevent another huge attack on Seattle. 

Starting slow but building up the heat as it went on this was a good thriller. I did not much care for the racial profiling of Muslims - it seemed a bit trite but other than that a good read.

This was a book from Netgalley courtesy of Cutter Press.

Family Inheritance by Terri Ann Leidich

Another family story involving a dying mother and her three daughters. 

The story when it opens seems very dreary. All three girls have left home as quickly as possible. They couldn't wait to get out of home - a drunkard, abusive father and a mother who was not interested in the nurturing part of motherhood and who only sought escape from the misery of her marriage. 

At this point I almost gave up. The book seemed so weighted down with sadness and was very heavy with so much guilt and sorrow even thirty years later. Fast forward and we have the three girls married but with severe emotional problems of their own. This was the part that I felt that it was overloaded with emotion.

Going on, all three girls return home as their mother has gone into a diabetic coma and they have to decide her future. Coming together is not easy, communicating is even harder. Each one is antagonistic of the other - one believing that the other is very rich, the other thinking she is obese and ugly and so on. The good thing is that they look back on their lives and though they realize the huge shortcomings in their childhood, they also remember the good things that their mother tried to provide for them and gradually they each open up to each other.

Lots of pitfalls in the process of getting together but they do come back together as a family - as an extended family with in laws and children as well.

Not an easy read but an eye opener about families!

Thanks to Netgalley BQB Publishing.

Mailbox Monday/It's Monday! What are you reading?

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Hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Read two books over the week end (reviews due). Reading one which is an absolutely new genre for me. I picked it because of the title but did not know it was about vampires and the like!!!! three quarters of the way through.

Late to the meme as just returned to Colombo after a very circuitous tour!