WIFE AFTER WIFE by Olivia Hayfield

 What a cracking great read this was! Enormously enjoyable retelling of What a cracking great read this was! Enormously enjoyable retelling of the real life story of Henry VIII and his six wives in a modern day setting. Yes,  it is very contrived, and of course you know the general layout of what is going to happen - divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.  But how is this going to translate to how marriages and their ends happen today? The author must have had huge fun coming up with the various means of wife disposal, and as bizarre as a couple of them are, it does all work. 

Harry Rose is Henry. It is the hedonistic days of the 1980s in London. Harry has inherited a magazine publishing empire from his father, he is married to Katie Paragon. Life is great, truly fabulous. He has a roving eye - how surprising, but when the story opens, life is peachy. But not for long. His marriages and other dalliances all take place against the backdrop of 1980s-1990s (mostly) London and his growing publishing business. He is doomed of course to suffer much, mostly brought on by his own silly male hand. His pride and self esteem is dazzling to behold, his lack of empathy with absolutely everybody legend. His treatment of women is appalling, nowadays he would be well and truly called out on his behaviour and attitudes, but 30-40 years ago not so much.

All the characters are based on the real life characters, made very modern in name, profession/occupation and what they get up to. I loved making the comparisons, doing the odd Wikipedia for fact checking. It is clever, fun, and hugely entertaining. Now there is a sequel - Sister After Sister - all about Harry's daughter Eliza and her running of the publishing empire with her cousin MacKenzie- based of course on Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. Oh let me get my mitts on this one! 

BIG LITTLE LIES by Liane Moriarty

 

Cracking good read, best Liane Moriarty I have read to date. And bonus - the TV series did a magnificent job of turning the novel into a gripping, intelligent and good to look at series. Of course I visualised the various TV characters in their book character, and none of them jarred. So good. Even if it was set in the US and not a seaside town in Australia. 

The story itself is a great piece of domestic noir, centred on the mums at the school gate dropping off/collecting their small children. As any Mum of small children at the school gate will attest to, this environment is a ridiculous breeding ground for all sorts of bizarre scenarios. I look back with a sense of craziness on my years being part of the primary school community - your children making friends and you in turn meeting their mums and families, the physical pain when your child is not invited to a birthday party, the social functions, the PTA, sports day. The weirdness of some mothers - the verbal war that broke out one day with one mother accusing the other of producing a daughter who was the devil's spawn! Nuts.

This novel has all that rumour, emotional intensity, friendship, power games so intrinsic in any group that women belong to. It's just like Mean Girls for grownups. Threaded through the story are universal themes of domestic violence, Mums trying to find a niche for themselves, solo parenting, bullying, new kids in the class. All so relatable which would be a ratings winner in a book, but with Moriarty's clever writing and great characters, this is engrossing and fabulous. 

THIRTEEN MOONS by Charles Frazier

 

This had been sitting on the ToRead shelves for far too long. I bought it in 2007. Way too long ago. Being in lockdown requires one to look at life differently, take a chance or two, be a bit serendipitous. So I picked this off the shelf and started reading. It is quite different in tone and style from the much more famous novel of Frazier - Cold Mountain, set in a similar period in American history - Civil War - but a very different story. The narrative moves slowly, but always compelling, and also quite mesmerising. One review of this I read says you want it to end because it is rather long, but on the other hand you don't want it to end because it is just so immersive. 

The story is told in the first person by Will Cooper, reflecting back on his life as his final days are closing in. Before beginning his own story he sets the scene in the southern Appalachians, Cherokee country, where the white man is slowly making inroads. There is a lot of history in this book, and I did use Google too to get the picture of this devastating period of time for the First Nation peoples. Here in NZ we have our own brutal stories resulting from the arrival of the white colonisers, but of course, even though the theme is the same, the roll out is different in each tract of land. Importantly, we are introduced to two important Cherokee men who become a bit part of Will's life. 

The story starts properly, I am guessing around 1820, with Will, a 12 year old boy, being indentured to a trader, requiring him to make a lone journey of some days with little in the way of supplies or even navigation to a trading post in the mountains that he is to be in charge of. Talk about baptism by fire and survival of the fittest. Off you go Will... let's see if you make it! Obviously he survives, and so begins his life immersed with the Cherokee of what is now North Carolina. He is a clever lad. learning from local Indian leaders, and also taking the best of what the white man's world offers. He becomes a successful trader himself, and a lawyer of sorts, ending up as the spokesman and negotiator for his tribe as the government ruthlessly pursues its goals of relocation of the Cherokee people and the taking of land. It is not pretty, and as we know much tragedy ensues.  Will himself comes in for plenty of criticism and conflict, placed in a moral dilemma that he never really gets over. 

There is love too, Will falling crazily for Clare, the ward of his nemesis the powerful Featherstone. This love will haunt him all his life, a beautiful and tragic love story.

This book is a saga, a story of a life - Will's - and the loss of a hugely important way of life - that of the Cherokee nation. Similar stories are told the world over, but this has such a human quality to it, striving to be doing the right thing, doggedly, naively, not always successfully, but always with passion and drive. The novel is very much a potted history of the expansion of America to the west, taking the mountains, moving settlers in, and the locals out. 

The author states that the character of Will Cooper is based on a real life person - William Holland Thomas - you can google him to find out more and get considerable background to this story. But the author does say this is a work of fiction. 

TROY by Stephen Fry

The face that launched a thousand ships - really, who would want to be that person? Poor Helen, her face the cause of so much war, violence, death, suffering. And yet Paris of Troy, who stole her from the Greeks,  was also a victim - a spell had been put on him which lead to the unfortunate events resulting in the ten year Trojan War, the Trojan Horse, the glory days of Achilles and of Ulysses. Troy - where so many of the Greek legends and myths that are part of our Western Civilisation grew from. Especially 'beware of Greeks bearing gifts'.

This is the third book in Stephen Fry's Greek Mythology series. The first two - Mythos and Heroes - provide the background to this story of Troy. I have read Mythos, had forgotten much of it by the time I read Troy, and still haven't read Heroes. All the gods and heroes who appear in this book are well documented in the first two, but it is not absolutely necessary to have read the two earlier books. Fry provides lots of footnotes references if you do want to read further. All the gods and heroes in this last book are very well rounded and more than adequately described. 

Reading this is a very immersive experience, very vivid in its telling, very blood thirsty and vengeance - after all everything is about men - yes, it is all about men and how amazing they are - and their competitive streaks. Revenge being the sweetest drug. Who cares whether any of this is true or not? The story is spell binding, we know it is doomed, but we keep reading anyway. It is fascinating to learn the background story to the siege of Troy, how Helen managed to launch a thousand ships, why that particular part of the foot is called the Achilles Tendon. I love all this history stuff - fairy tales for grown ups, with messages and a moral 100% relevant for any civilisation since the Ancient Greeks, including ours. Very entertaining.