One evening, when Lady Emma Avery, popularly known in the ton as “London’s Least Likely to Misbehave” is getting drunk with her two best friends (who are also wallflowers who will be meeting their intended husbands in later books). While she isn’t noticed by most of polite society, Emma does have a young man whom she dreams of a future with, but after three years, he’s still not shown any signs of proposing to her. Her friends joke about how she might get more attention […]
Meatballs and murder
This is the first book I’ve read in Andrea Camilleri’s series about the laconic and short-fused Inspector Montalbano, and I believe it’s somewhere in the middle of the long-running series. Inspector Montalbano is a man who is afraid of commitment and loves fine dining–which in Sicily means that there is very fine dining indeed, if you happen to like pasta and seafood. He has a tumultuous relationship with his girlfriend, and a relationship of mutual irritation with his colleagues and superiors–and there is something of […]
No, the heroine is NOT a burlesque streetwalker, despite what the cover may imply
In an alternate history Victorian London with Steampunk gadgets, werewolves, a ruling nobility known as the Echelon, where the men are all enhanced with vampire blood, Miss Honoria Todd (who certainly doesn’t in any way dress or appear anything like the burlesque streetwalker on the cover of the book) has been forced to move to the Rookeries of Whitechapel after the death of her father. She is working as an elocution coach under an assumed name to support her younger sister (who also takes in […]
“From chaos climb with many a sudden gleam, / London, one moment fallen and forgot.”
I loved Westwood, and it’s increasingly rare that I love books at first read. I generally rather enjoy Stella Gibbons’s work (and I reviewed The Matchmaker here) but apart from Cold Comfort Farm, which I adore unequivocally, I’ve found Gibbons’s novels to be pleasant rather than stimulating. Westwood (1946) manages to be both comforting and sparkling, a Victorian novel of morality and marriage with a Regency comedy of manners at its heart, and sprinkled with the fragments of a modernist tale of disconnection, dysfunctional marriage, […]