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Love Home on the Road Home by Margaret Amatt #Review #GlenbriarBook15

We are returning to the beautiful Scottish Highlands for Margaret Amatt's  fifteenth in her Glenbriar  Series:Love Match on the Road Home. This latest novel was published on 3rd October by Leannan Press   After tennis star Georgie Porter retires at just thirty-one, she buys a campervan and returns to her hometown of Glenbriar, hoping to make amends for the hurts she caused to a former sweetheart. But instead of finding the man whose heart she broke many years ago, she comes face to face with his younger brother, Kerr. Easy-going and quietly loyal, high school teacher Kerr Halley has strong opinions about Georgie Porter – and there are rules about interacting with your brother’s ex, no matter how long ago she split with him. Especially when Kerr has always secretly carried a torch for her. When they’re thrown together to fundraise for a local sports project, old grudges begin to thaw, and Kerr’s true feelings come to light. As Georgie rediscovers the charm of small...

Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye

    In the bicentenary year of Charlotte Brontë's birth, it feels really appropriate to be reading stories which reference her work and which have so many echoes of it within them. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Jane Steele which reimagines elements of the story of Jane Eyre. The first thing that strikes you about the book is that it is great fun. The heroine, Jane Steele, is written with panache and vigour. With a wicked sense of humour, she turns out to be anything but passive.

    I admired how the book captured the feel of its time. Jane Steele admits in the opening pages to having read Jane Eyre and as we see, noticed that parts of their story are similar. However, Jane Steele's reactions are far from Jane Eyre's. Here we have a story in which the heroine has gone to the bad! Incorrigible, Jane Steele charms us the readers whom she addresses directly. Each chapter begins with a quote from Jane Eyre and at times, Jane Steele wonders what Jane would have done. Despite all her deeds, I found myself liking and rooting for Jane Steele.

     Lyndsay Faye writes in a style which perfectly captures the novels of the Victorian era. Jane Steele reminded me of Becky Sharp in Thackeray's Vanity Fair with her irreverence for authority and ability to scheme and survive. The period details are all there and there is a wide cast of eccentric and varied characters whom I am sure Dickens would have been proud of. The melodramatic gothic features are there to be found, from the governess figure, to the forbidding and isolated houses, although I am not sure that Jane Steele fits the bill of the defenceless young woman. I particularly appreciated Lyndsay Faye's descriptions of Victorian London, teeming with all the best and worst of humanity.

In short: Reader, I loved it!
  
Thanks to Caitlyn Raynor and the publishers at Headline Review for a copy of the book.
     

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