Tags: Milford

Book Reviews for Booklovers from The Booklover • July

This Months Must Read:

Sweet Sorrow
David Nicholls  $35

From the much-loved author of the international bestseller One Day. During one life-changing summer, 16-year-old Charlie meets Fran... Charlie Lewis is the kind of boy you don’t remember in the school photograph. His exams have not gone well. At home he is looking after his father, when surely it should be the other way round, and if he thinks about the future at all, it is with a kind of dread. Then Fran Fisher bursts into his life and despite himself, Charlie begins to hope. But if Charlie wants to be with Fran, he must take on a challenge that could lose him the respect of his friends and require him to become a different person. He must join the Company. And if the Company sounds like a cult, the truth is even more appalling. The price of hope, it seems, is Shakespearean. Poignant, funny, enchanting, devastating, Sweet Sorrow is a tragic-comedy about the rocky path to adulthood and the confusion of family life, a celebration of the reviving power of friendship and that brief, searing explosion of first love that can only be looked at directly after it has burned out. 


The Blue Rose
Kate Forsyth  $37

Viviane de Faitaud has grown up alone at the Chateau de Belisima in Brittany, for her father, the Marquis de Ravoisier, lives at the court of Louis XVI in Versailles. After a hailstorm destroys the chateau’s orchards, gardens and fields, an ambitious young Welshman, David Stronach, accepts the commission to plan the chateau’s new gardens. David and Viviane fall in love, but it is an impossible romance. Her father has betrothed her to a rich duke who she is forced to marry; she goes to court and becomes a maid-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette and a member of the extended royal family. Angry and embittered, David sails away from England with Lord Macartney, the British ambassador, who hopes to open up trade with Imperial China. In Canton, on receiving the first reports of the French Revolution, David hears the story of ‘The Blue Rose’, a Chinese fable of impossible love, and discovers the blood-red rose growing in the wintry garden of the British embassy. He realises that he is still in love with Viviane and must find her. Viviane escapes the guillotine and returns to the ruin of Chateau de Belisima to rebuild her life. David carrying a  cluster of rosehips finds her there, and together they decide to grow the fabled red rose of China in France. This captivating novel is filled with danger, intrigue and romance.


Deep River
Karl Marlantes  $37

The acclaimed author of the bestseller Matterhorn, hailed as a modern classic of war literature, now turns to another mode of storytelling – the family epic – to craft a stunningly expansive narrative of human suffering, courage and reinvention. In the early 1900s, as the oppression of Russia’s imperial rule takes its toll on Finland, the three Koski siblings – brothers Ilmari and Matti, and their politicised young sister Aino – are forced to flee to the United States. Not far from the majestic Columbia River, they settle among other Finns in a logging community in southern Washington, where the first harvesting of the colossal old-growth forests begets rapid development, and radical labour movements begin to catch fire. The brothers face the excitement and danger of pioneering this frontier wilderness, while Aino devotes herself to organising the industry’s first unions. As the Koski siblings strive to rebuild lives and families, they also try to hold fast to the traditions of a home they left behind. Layered with fascinating historical detail, this novel bears witness to the stump-ridden fields the loggers, and the first waves of modernity, leave behind. At its heart, Deep River is an ambitious and timely exploration of the place of the individual, and of the immigrant, in an America still in the process of defining its own identity.


Expectation
Anna Hope  $35

Hannah, Cate and Lissa are young, vibrant and inseparable. Living on the edge of a common in East London, their shared world is ablaze with art and activism, romance and revelry – and the promise of everything to come. They are electric. They are the best of friends. Ten years on, they are not where they hoped to be. Amidst flailing careers and faltering marriages, each hungers for what the others have. And each wrestles with the same question – what does it take to lead a meaningful life? Expectation is a novel of the highs and lows of friendship – how it can dip, dive and rise again. It is also about finding your way – as a mother, a daughter, a wife, a rebel. Most of all, it explores that subliminal space between expectation and reality, the place – full of dreams, desires and pain – in which we all live our lives.


CONGRATULATIONS
The Booklover congratulates Benefitz on attaining the milestone of 100 Channel publications.
We are proud to have been an anchor partner of this outstanding community-oriented magazine since its inception in July 2010. We thank Aidan Bennett and his talented team for the significant contribution to Channel readers’ knowledge and appreciation of the appealing culture of our North Shore.


Issue 100 July 2019