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 Roald Dahl wrote some of my favorite childhood books. I’ll never forget James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Witches, or any of the other amazing books that he wrote for children, and I fully intend to share them with my own children someday. But a couple of the ones I found most interesting were the memoirs he wrote about himself, Boy and Going Solo. I was naturally very eager to learn more about his life, and Sturrock’s biography was a brilliant choice for doing exactly that.
Charting Roald’s life, from his immediate ancestry to his death, Sturrock does an amazing job communicating what sort of man Dahl was. He doesn’t shy away from some of the more difficult aspects of his life, or the way that he manipulated his own past when it suited him – mainly, it becomes clear that Dahl was a storyteller in all respects, and if he thought he could make his life more interesting by telling tales about it, he was happy to do so. While I wasn’t thrilled to discover that both Boy and Going Solo had a large degree of fictionalization, I was still eager to discover the actual, documented truth, and indeed there is a considerable amount of that here thanks to archives, research, and interviews consulted and conducted by Sturrock. Sturrock had also met Dahl before his passing, and so shares personal knowledge of him with us.
There is so much here that I’d never really guessed at it; I knew he’d written darker stories for adults, but I had never really known about his many love affairs, the true misery of his childhood, the losses he suffered in his own life both as a child and an adult, nor his crotchety and sometimes difficult personality. Sturrock liberally quotes from the author’s letters and documents, and I felt like I was genuinely getting to know him and connect him with the author I knew. His writing style is distinctive, and the picture Sturrock tells is cohesive. It’s in no way idealized; it makes him into a fully rounded person, which I think is the best possible result of a biography such as this one. Sturrock is equally praising of the author’s merits, especially his unflagging commitment to children’s literature and charitable work, as he is critical of other aspects of his life.
Naturally, I also found the circumstances around Dahl’s life to be fascinating. An attendee at a British boarding school, a pilot during World War II, and then an up-and-coming writer with a Hollywood star as his wife, Dahl lived through a considerable amount of exciting twentieth century history. I enjoyed Sturrock’s distillation of the facts and the way he built the background around Dahl’s life; it helped ground me and made the rest of the book wonderful reading.
A detailed and intensely appealing biography about one of the world’s best known children’s writers, Storyteller is worthy of a place in the library of any Roald Dahl fan.
Growing up moderately wealthy in Venice, Iago has always been something of a disappointment to his father. Fifth son and a clever mischief maker, Iago ropes his friend Roderigo into misdeeds while using his clever words to escape blame. His life changes dramatically when he goes to join the Artillery and develops a well-deserved name and reputation for himself, even as his father continues to use him to achieve political success. Iago’s forthrightness and history gain him an unexpected position with the new General, Othello, and the love of his beautiful wife, Emilia. But Iago’s jealousy is a banked ember just waiting to burst into flame, with deadly consequences for all who hold him dear.
I read Othello back in high school, and I thought I’d forgotten most of it, but a book focused purely on Iago and just how he got to the point where he became obsessed with twisting the truth and destroying people’s lives was something that immediately appealed to me. I knew he was a great villain, and having read Galland’s previous books, I knew I was in for a treat. This book fulfilled all of my expectations, providing a fascinating view into the psyche of a man who is compelled to lie, to twist the truth, to plant insinuations, all because he is jealous and insecure in himself.
I can’t remember whether anything was specifically mentioned in regard to Iago’s past in Othello, but Galland imagines his insecurities traced back to his childhood, where his father simply refuses to believe in him and forces him to do the family’s bidding even at the potential expense of Iago’s career. Moving forward, he has difficulty believing in himself and seeks sole appreciation; his jealousy leaps out whenever his wife talks to another man, and the constant hints that his wife is actually Othello’s mistress lay the groundwork for all that is to come. The characters are the star of this show, particularly Iago as he spends plenty of time inside his own head. We can see when he is jealous and when he restrains himself, which happens increasingly over the course of the novel.
For me it was fairly clear when Galland was required to take on Shakespeare’s mantle and tell his story through her eyes; everything speeds up and becomes dramatic, and events begin to happen outside of Iago’s own head, most of them in the space of a single day. His own insinuations begin to spark Othello’s own insecurities and the denouement of the play comes to a rapid conclusion, resulting in a very speedy and tense read for the end of the novel. I knew what was going to happen, vaguely, but I can imagine the events being as surprising for a first time reader as they would be for someone who had seen the play. It is a Shakespearean tragedy, and I found myself dreading the ending as the characters became ever more familiar to me and Iago’s deception became clearer and more defined.
With well-defined characters and believable motivations for one of Shakespeare’s greatest villains, I, Iago is a fantastic read.
All external links are affiliate links. I received this book for free for review.
 Good morning Saloners! I’ve had a computer-filled weekend which, after some stress on Friday and Saturday, has ended very well. I have been without a proper computer of my very own for a while now. My old laptop, which I used in college and graduate school, still actually functions, but it crashes too often for me to use it reliably, and we’ve never actually been able to figure out what is wrong with it. In lieu of my own computer, my husband and I have generally been sharing his top-spec desktop PC, which has led to some frustration. Recently I discovered that one of my friends had a cast-off older computer, which he was kind enough to give to me. I bought some new parts for it over the past week, and was all excited to have it working on Friday night at long last, exactly the way I wanted it.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the new processor I’d purchased was dead before it ever made it into the PC. At one point we didn’t know what was wrong and I’d potentially have to wait even longer, spend more money, and have an uncertain result even at that stage. So after a ton of testing, we put the old processor back in and the computer finally worked; it’s not up to the spec I’d planned, but it’s now running smoothly and happily and I am independently on my own PC once again. The dead processor has been sent off for a return, and I will probably end up with a better one in a couple of months when I can afford it. I’m very excited about this, as you can imagine; I’m hoping to do all sorts of things now that I don’t have to share, and blogging definitely has a place amongst them.
In reading news, I’m deep into a reread of all the Harry Potter books, thanks to their launch in ebook form last month. I’ve been alternating one of them in between review books and it has been fantastic getting re-acquainted with this world. I’m on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the moment and, while I recall this being the most annoying of all of them, I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It’s appropriate to spend this weekend reading as we’re currently drowning in the UK. The river nearby – the Ouse in York – and many of the fields are flooded and it’s still raining. To give you some perspective, here’s the river – those are submerged benches on the right. The river is usually a good six feet below the grass, if not more, and yesterday it was right at the edge and ready to spill over.
It’s also very chilly, which makes us reluctant to go outside and do much, truly the perfect day for holing up with Harry, Ron, and Hermione.
I have a couple of reviews already scheduled this week and I’m hoping to update with a third at some point too. I have only been reading a couple of books a week, and I look forward to actually getting caught up now that I have a computer and the time to do it. My last client visit for a while is tomorrow, and I’m blissfully not scheduled for anything else throughout the month of May.
Wishing you all a very lovely week and some good reads for your free time!
 Like many of the women who are the new focus of popular history, Mary Boleyn has left a very slim paper trail. There are entire periods of her life where no one is quite sure where she actually was, let alone what she was doing or feeling. Only two of her letters survive, to our knowledge, and our ideas of her as a legendary whore are based mainly on much later opinions of her. With very little to work with, Weir attempts to reconstruct Mary’s life and, in several cases, set the record straight.
In a lot of this book, Weir engages in one of my favourite things, evaluation of other historians. I love historiography, and she does a good job picking apart others’ arguments and showing what was based on actual source and what wasn’t. Unfortunately, a number of the historians she chooses to engage with were working a considerable amount of time in the past, rather than those who are working now and would be more likely to follow current standards for documentation and analysis. Saying that, I’m not sure how many historians are presently working on the Tudors and Mary Boleyn, as popular culture is not necessarily connected to academic culture, so it’s possible she didn’t have much more recent to work with; her main focus is revising people’s opinions of Mary as an infamous whore, and I did enjoy her investigation of how that reputation came about.
Unfortunately, because of the scarce information, some flaws pop up in Weir’s work; it’s extremely repetitive, as she has the need to make an assumption about Mary’s past, then treats it as fact and tells us about it over and over again. Her reputed affair with the French king is constantly discussed, for example. I’ve definitely appreciated some of Weir’s other works more than this one in this respect. There just isn’t much here. I felt like Mary’s life would have been much more suited to a longer article or inclusion into a collection, instead of a book on its own. I failed to really get a sense of who she was; the most affecting and interesting part of the book, for me, was when Weir actually quoted a letter that she wrote. I understand that there are only two letters, but the difference really demonstrated to me how little I’d felt for Mary up until that point.
Mary Boleyn was a book I didn’t mind reading; it may be considered dry by others who aren’t particularly used to reading history and expect it to be more like a novel (there are pages of speculation about Mary’s birthday, for instance), but if you do enjoy biography you won’t have any trouble getting involved here. Unfortunately, I found the end result ultimately disappointing, and I hope Weir chooses a better documented subject for her next full-length work of popular history.
I received this book for free for review. All external links are affiliate links.
 In Hannah Payne’s world, a dystopian United States set in the future, criminals are punished by having their skin turned various colours, length and colour determined by the severity of the crime. Chromes, as they’re called, are society’s outcasts, shunned and often killed for their crimes. When we join her story, she’s been turned red, indicating that she is guilty of murder. She is guilty of aborting her child – the product of her adultery with one of the foremost religious figures of her day, whom she absolutely refuses to turn in, even though it would make her sentence more bearable. This cross between The Scarlet Letter and The Handmaid’s Tale has a considerable amount of power as we follow Hannah into defying her upbringing in a world that has startling parallels to our own.
When She Woke is a book that gained a lot of praise when it first came out, and I’ve been looking forward to it for a while. I loved The Handmaid’s Tale - as much as you can love a book in that vein – and I’m alternatively fascinated and horrified by these indications of where society might go. In light of the recent controversy in the United States over birth control, this book seemed like an incredibly timely read, and the implications not entirely far-fetched, either, certainly not when a debate I thought (hoped) was in the past has turned out to remain relevant. The book certainly has a pro-abortion slant, and would likely go against the beliefs of many conservatives.
While I don’t think it’s quite as powerful as the two books I mentioned in the description, particularly not The Handmaid’s Tale, it is a worthy addition to that crowd. I found the scenes after Hannah is released from her initial imprisonment to be the most powerful – her father finds her a safe house, which turns out to be a place where women are brainwashed into feeling incredibly guilty and traumatised over their sins, to the degree of creating dolls to represent their aborted children and telling the story of their abortions over and over again.
I did have some trouble with Hannah’s choices – at one point, she risks her life and those of many others simply to see the man she loves again – especially at the end of the book. After all that had happened to her, I simply don’t think I would have done that, even though it’s clear she loves him beyond all degree of sanity. But overall, I really was swept away by the story and found myself absorbed and disturbed by the book as I read. This is an emotional read and I did really feel for Hannah throughout the very large majority of the book, alongside her fellow suffering women.
When She Woke is indeed a fantastic read, and Hillary Jordan remains an author I’ll be watching.
I am an Amazon Associate. I received this book for free for review.
Good morning Saloners! I hope you’re all doing well, and that those of you who have been participating in this weekend’s Readathon have had a lot of success and amazing reading.
I intended to participate myself, as I have in all of the Readathons since 2009, and it was kind of strange not to do so, but there was simply no way I’d have been able to. I came back from the US on an overnight flight on Monday, got home Tuesday around when I’d get home from work, worked for 2 days, and went to Brussels for work on Friday, which was a day lasting from 4:30 in the morning until 9:30 at night, and I simply needed this weekend to have a break. NOT stay up for 24 hours tied to the computer. I’m still disappointed that I missed it, but I hope it was wonderful for everyone who did participate.
I did manage to read, though. I read quite a bit while I was at home, and yesterday I sat down with Chime by Franny Billingsley and completed it in a single sitting. What an amazing book – I am so glad I paid attention to Ana’s excellent review. I have also been re-reading the Harry Potter series since I purchased all of the ebooks, and have really delighted in spending more time in that world. It’s been too long – and I suspect that I’ll have forgotten much of what happened in the sixth and seventh books as I read them quite a while ago.
As always, I brought some books back from the US – the 15 I took with me this time is dwarfed by some older numbers, but I’ve virtually stopped accepting physical review copies from US publishers unless I am incredibly eager to read the book. Here’s what snuck into my suitcase – let me know how you’ve felt about these books!:
 I’m really looking forward to a lot of these reads; you’ll probably see I, Iago on the blog first, as I’ve enjoyed Nicole Galland’s previous books a lot, and the publication date for this is coming up very soon. Several of them came from The Strand in New York City, which has to be one of my favourite bookstores, and where I could happily spend far more time than the half hour to hour I get to browse on our visits.
Today, I’m hoping to spend some time catching up on reviews, as usual, and also finishing Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire. Since I’ve become involved in the Newsflesh trilogy, and the next October Daye comes out in September, I decided I didn’t need to save it (am I the only one who sometimes puts books off to avoid a long wait for the next in the series?). I’m really enjoying it so far; Verity still has the attitude of McGuire’s other main female characters, but she’s refreshingly different at the same time, and the world is stunning.
Wishing you all fantastic Sundays and a great week ahead!
One reason why you should not let a bird, even as cute as this one:
Near your book:
 Seven portraits of women reading, seven stories imagined by the author, Katie Ward, about the history of each painting. This brief, beautiful book captures the universal emotions of women throughout history, at all different stages in their lives, all centered around that one activity which many of us love above all others. The stories range in date from the fourteenth century to the imagined future, where the author cleverly ties together all of the paintings and their stories. Each chapter, focused on the imagined history of one painting, is a kind of short story, and can easily stand alone as well as part of the wider collection that is concluded to some degree at the end.
The writing in this book is beautiful and I just adored the way it was structured. I had a good look at the source behind each of the stories – both the real paintings and the inspirations for those which don’t exist or are conglomerates – and thoroughly enjoyed the connections and the differences in style as the novel progressed. Each chapter does feel like its own little story, with its own world and characters. The ending ties them up neatly, but so does the universal female emotion that pervades each. For me, each story highlighted how much we all exist in our own worlds, but how we are all tied together by our very existence. For example, in one of the stories, a teenage girl obsesses over an older painter, imagining herself in love, her feelings so reminiscent of my own immature years that I was completely taken aback. In another, a mourning aristocratic lady asks her artist friend to finish a painting of her female lover, who has recently passed on, and the grief and the emotion contained within just that one story was incredibly moving.
Several reviews of this book have highlighted the fact that it doesn’t contain quotes for speech, and that this makes it difficult to follow; I did not have this problem at all, and I actually enjoyed the flow of the writing. It’s worth noting, though, if that is something about a book that will bother you, but I didn’t even think of it as a complaint until I’d looked at other reviews. All of it was breathtaking, I thought, and Ward’s narrative voice was gorgeous enough to keep me pinned to the pages. It’s as though Ward gave me a window into the minds of the women in each of the paintings, and those thoughts were simply stunning.
I really can’t praise this book enough – Girl Reading is perfect for women who love to read, who love history, who are looking for a book that reminds them of our experiences throughout history. Very, very highly recommended.
I received this book for free for review.
 Battista della Paglia is an art collector, a thief, and a secret agent for François, the king of France. His mission is to find the most valuable artifacts, paintings, and sculptures for the king’s growing art collection. When Battista is instructed to find a mysterious sculpture, his quest brings him into contact with a woman with a secret. This is the Lady Aurelia, who accompanies Battista on his quest to find the sculpture. Aurelia has been living under the watchful eye of the Marquess of Mantua, her guardian, and has never felt anything like the freedom and emotions she experiences with Battista. But Aurelia’s secret could put all that they’ve built together in jeopardy, should she reveal it to Battista and the world.
I was very much intrigued by this book when I first heard of it; having read and enjoyed one of Donna Russo Morin’s earlier books, I was looking forward to reading another of them. Morin’s most recent effort is not a disappointment, but is quite a creative take on Dante’s Inferno. Combined with some of the adventure from one of the author’s favorite video games, The Legend of Zelda, the book finds our two heroes thrown into some serious, death-defying situations, which may not entirely reflect real life, but which provide a lot of entertainment for the historical fiction reader. Tied in with this is a romance between our two main characters, who naturally feel themselves drawn to one another after the harrowing experiences they’ve had searching for these objects. Mainly, the book is a lot of fun, very much a historical romp, which requires the reader to let go a little bit and simply enjoy the ride.
While I did enjoy the book, I found the author’s prose a little bit hard to get into at times. It’s not necessarily a book that you can just pick up and put down again; some immersion into her world is definitely required. The main character, Battista, was a real person, and an art thief at that. One of my favorite Renaissance artists, Michelangelo, also makes a substantial appearance, as do a few of his pieces. I’m always happy to see known historical characters appear in the books I’m reading and I was pleased to see him depicted. He definitely added to the overall atmosphere. I also enjoyed Battista’s band of fellow thieves; there’s an air of male camaraderie amongst them that means we – and Aurelia – immediately fall in love with a few of them.
All in all, The King’s Agent was an enjoyable read, and a pleasurable immersion into the world of early sixteenth century Florence. Recommended for historical fiction fans who are able and willing to suspend disbelief to enjoy a fun book set in a fascinating historical world.
I read this book as part of a tour with Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours. For more information and the full tour schedule, please go here. To read more about the author, visit her website.
All external book links are affiliate links. I received this book for free for review as part of the tour.
 Adoulla Makhslood is the last real ghul hunter in the city of Dhamsawaat. All he wants is to retire, but protecting the city is a job that one cannot retire from. The threat is worse than ever, and Adoulla and his partner Raseed, a god-fearing young warrior, have their hands full. These two ghul hunters, plus a young girl who has lost her Bedouin-like tribe and has the ability to turn into a lion, and Adoulla’s friends, are soon swept up with preventing a devious plot to take the throne from its rightful heir.
I’m going to admit something completely, 100% shallow; I became interested in Saladin Ahmed because of his name. The Saladin who fought against the crusaders in the Middle Ages has long been one of the people in history who fascinates me, and so this author’s name stuck in my head far easier than others had been able to. I listened to a couple of his stories which were available for free online, enjoyed them, and pre-ordered this book. As you may be expecting, I was rewarded.
Far from the typical pseudo-European fantasies (which I’m not disparaging, as I love them very much), this one is set in the middle of a desert, in a pseudo-Middle East, although still at the same time period as most fantasies. This makes the book feel very distinctive immediately; and so does the fact that the main hero is over 60, approaching retirement, but still spry and brave, determined to fight. He is balanced out nicely by his younger partner, Raseed, who is so religious that it stifles his emotional life. Together, they make a formidable team, but potentially not formidable enough for the enemy they face.
Despite the very short length of the book for a fantasy novel, each character is distinctive and well-drawn, and reading about them and their world is a pleasure. The plot is not particularly complex but it does draw the reader in, as it is certainly life-threatening and suspenseful for the characters, and they are the stars of the show here. Raseed wrestling with his religion and his desires, Zamia’s quest to avenge her tribe, Adoulla’s longing for a rest and for the love of his life, and almost all of the characters’ love for their city and homeland – this is what makes the novel a worthy read.
An adventure fantasy novel that seems to delight in turning some of the conventions of the genre on their heads, Throne of the Crescent Moon is a worthwhile read, and Saladin Ahmed is an author to watch for a lot more than his name.
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