Book review: The Boy From Reactor 4

The Kindle daily deal seems to do a lot of crime novels, doesn't it? I don't often go for them but I thought I'd give Orest Stelmach's The Boy From Reactor 4 a chance. I actually thought, reading it, that it was at least the second in a series because there's all these references to its heroine breaking up a crime ring the previous year, but it turns out it's the author's first novel. It sees a former banker go on a journey to her parents' birthplace of Ukraine, to find the uncle she thought was long-dead, and his son raised near Chernobyl, while various different gangs chase her for the fortune they believe the uncle has stashed away. It's quite enjoyable although the fact that the quest begins with a dying man telling her "the fate of the free world depends on" her returning to Ukraine meant I couldn't take it entirely seriously from the off.

Book review: For Richer, For Poorer

Rather confusingly, Victoria Coren's For Richer, For Pooerer is variously subtitled A Love Affair With Poker or Confessions of a Player - the kindle edition has one on the cover and the other on the contents page. Maybe it's some kind of bluff or distraction technique. Let's face it, I only read this because Coren's the host of Only Connect and is entertaining in that job, so hopefully would be in a memoir as well; it certainly wasn't through me having any great love or understanding of poker. And I can't say I understand it any better at the other end of the book, but as my other blog will attest, I do know something about getting addicted to a pastime that takes up all your evenings and cash, although theatre blogging is unlikely to turn around and net me half a million pounds one night like poker did for Coren.

So despite not being that interested in the subject I was still interested in Coren's exploration of it, and she makes it entertaining and (almost) comprehensible even for a non-gambler.

Book review: Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands

I've been quite fascinated by Mary Seacole since first hearing about her, and her Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands is free on kindle, and is surprisingly readable for a Victorian autobiography. A mixed-race Jamaican, the self-taught nurse or "doctress" as she described herself is remembered for her work in the Crimean War, where she had a better survival rate than Florence Nightingale, who was later to overshadow her completely. Prior to that though we get her earlier life in Jamaica where she learnt her nursing skills, and in various parts of Central America where she learnt how to run "hotels" that were essentially cheap bars and restaurants. That was the model she eventually used in the Crimea with her British Hotel, a cross between a bar and a hospital, set up independently when her services as a nurse were turned down by Nightingale's hospital and the other official channels.

Though apparently prone to exaggeration about some of her achievements in the Crimea, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands is still a very entertaining read, Seacole comes across as a bit of a shameless self-publicist (the narrative is occasionally interrupted to quote letters of recommendation from former patients and customers) and unapologetic about the fact that the British Hotel was intended to make money (ultimately unsuccessfully - the war ended a bit earlier than she expected, leaving her with a lot of leftover stock and she returned to London destitute.) But she's not entirely Mother Courage, there's also an obvious affection for the men in her care and a genuine wish to do good. She's also a surprisingly funny writer with a witty way with words that goes some way to explaining why she was so much more popular than Nightingale with the soldiers (other than the fact that she sold them booze which Nightingale disapproved of, that is,) she sounds like she'd have been good company who gave as good as she got.

This could also be a good book to have read if you're ever confronted with someone who tells you the world's going to hell in a handbasket and Victorian values were better - Seacole is frequently horrified by the looting and stealing being done by men on all sides, some of the violence and robbing from the dead is still shocking to read today.

Book review: Fold

I don't have any interest in poker or really know much about it but it can provide an interesting metaphor for men's relationships (I love Dealer's Choice) so I gave Tom Campbell's Fold a go when it was a kindle special offer. It follows a year of a monthly poker game between five men ("friends" would be pushing it as they all seem to actively dislike each other) and the tensions between them, gradually trying to build up a picture of the different reasons each of them keeps coming back to the game. Although technically the narrative takes the point of view of all five players at different times, it predominantly focuses on Nick, the bitter loser in the group, and his attempts to take down Doug, the aggressive alpha-male winner, starting by undermining Doug's intelligence and building up to the point of drugging him and trying to seduce his wife.

It's a pretty quick read and the story is interestingly told with some nice character progression but the fact that all the characters are so deeply unsympathetic meant it wasn't a novel I was always that keen to get back into once I'd put it down.

Book review: Winter in Madrid

I've read all of C.J. Sansom's Shardlake novels but didn't really fancy his venture into a different historical period when Winter in Madrid came out a few years ago. But as with so much I've read since getting the kindle, a super-cheap special offer saw me add it to my collection and although I didn't enjoy it as much as his Tudor books I'm glad I gave it a go. It's set partly during the Spanish Civil War, but mostly a few years later, in 1940 with Franco's government wavering over whether to join World War II, and two British people who'd fought in the Civil War returning for different reasons, but both with ulterior motives: Harry's a translator for the British embassy, but in reality has been recruited as a spy, to find out what his former school friend Sandy knows about a gold mine that's rumoured to have been found, and which could affect Franco's decision on the war. And Barbara, Sandy's girlfriend, who is in fact only with him so she can seek the truth about her ex-lover - believed to have been killed in the Civil War, she's recently heard rumours that he's alive and being kept illegally in a prison camp.

The background on the devastated state Spain was left in after the Civil War is probably the most interesting element of the book, like most people I knew that it had a lot of British volunteers but didn't know much else about the background to the war or its longer-term effects, Spain going through its own separate devastation even as the rest of Europe was torn apart. The story itself has some well-constructed characters, the majority fictional but, perhaps inevitably, some of the most extreme characters based on real people; and is interesting enough to have kept me reading but not exactly full of surprises either.