Skip to main content

Featured

Maddy's Christmas Wedding by Rosie Green #LittleDuckPondCafeBook37#review

  Here we are at Book 37 in the Little Duck Pond Cafe series! Maddie's Christmas Wedding is the latest novella by Rosie Green.   With the wedding of the year approaching, excitement is running high at the café! But there's just one problem. Maddy is grappling with a secret. Could it derail all of hers and Jack's glorious plans for their big day? Will there actually be a wedding?   My Thoughts In this latest festive story, we are taken out of Sunnybrook, in fact, out of the country and taken for a wintry stay in Lapland. It is Maddy's hen party gathering so some of the Little Duck Pond characters are along too. The story continues on from the earlier Cosy Nights and Snowball Fights . The setting is idyllic and so different to life at home. Everything shimmers and shines in the snow and the temperatures are extreme. Maddy should be having the time of her life but she finds that she has a lot on her mind and a heartbreaking decision to make.     With the men le...
Post a Comment
Read more
Labels

In a Land of Paper Gods by Rebecca Mackenzie


    In a Land of Paper Gods is set in China during the second Sino- Japanese War and concentrates on the years from 1941 to 1945. It follows the story of Etta, known for the first few years of her life by her chinese name, Ming-Mei. The daughter of English missionaries, Etta (Henrietta S. Robertson), is sent to boarding school as all the missionarry children were.  A six year old, she leaves her parents and travels to the sacred mountain of Lushan a mysterious land of mists, forests and ravines. The landscape permeates the story and Etta ,cut off from her parents, lives in her own world, full of imagination and fantasies.

    In the background and getting ever closer is the threat of the Japanese troops. The book concentrates on Etta's life from the age of ten to fifteen. It starts slowly with accounts of her life with her group of friends who form themselves into 'The Prophetesses' under her leadership. With her friends, she gets into all sorts of scrapes as she imagines that she has a calling from God. She is impulsive and attention seeking. This leads at times to the other girls tiring of her so called 'prophesies'. She is difficult to pin down at first and seems to be full of the vagueness and mystery of the environment. Lushan seems to soak into every page.

    This is a coming of age story as Etta grows up from the impressionable child at the beginning. As the book gets darker and at times, brutal, you see the characters change and adapt. I enjoyed seeing them develop and also how Etta's relationship with Aunty Muriel changes. Aunty Muriel looks after the girls in Dormitory A and scattered through the book are excerpts from her diary. I would have liked more of these. For the most part, we have only Etta's point of view. 

    The strength of the book lies in the characterisation and in the atmosphere which is evoked of longing in separation and loneliness. The two cultures, of the Christianity of Lushan School and the Chinese way of life of the monks and villagers co- exist, with Etta seemingly not really comprehending either. She seems lost but matures as the story develops.  

In short: a coming of age story which is packed with atmosphere and which lingers in your mind after the story ends.

 I received a copy of the book from Tinder Press via Bookbridgr.        

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment