I’m very ambivalent when it comes to this book. I keep thinking, I liked this part, but, then I start thinking, I don’t think that was good, but…. – and in the end I’m basically not sure. 🙂
Let me try and explain. It is historical romance but set a bit earlier than what I usually read so lovers while one is married are common, and encouraged. Ok, we then learn that our main characters might not be in that vein but still, many others featuring in the story are. Or at least seem to be.
Then, Roberta first seems rather silly with her notions of love only to learn seriousness and more about herself in a matter of days making her into a complete person. The story keeps being light-heartedly funny and then trying to look serious so you’re never sure what exactly it’s supposed to be.
I realize Mrs. James is a Shakespeare connoisseur and the story shows it but I’m not sure it works that well. Although I’m not sure it has actually anything to do with Shakespeare, it’s more like the moving ground you’re on is not making this an easy-to-like novel.
But once we get past the initial adulterous inclinations (they are like teenagers, lusting, loving, liking not being sure what is which), the contours of romantical love start to appear. I just can’t seem to reconcile the different points into a satisfying whole. That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the story, but it does mean I am not sure I will be picking up another book from the series. I believe I might enjoy Jemma’s story but I’m not sure I can read more about that particular type of marriages and extra-marital activities.
I guess it bothers me in my romantic inclinations. 🙂
What I could do is read more of the wonderfully funny and convoluted dialogues. Those were great.
We’ll see if another Eloisa James book review appear here, you’ll know then if I succumbed. 😉
The strange thing is, I want to talk about wine actually. 🙂
Yesterday I was lucky (well, IÂ consider that luck) to try 3 rather expensive wines, all of which were good and all of which would work great as perfume drydowns.
But the third one we tried, said on the bottle it should be decanted, and once we poured it into glasses after decanting, I noticed a rather interesting smell. A manure type of one. 😀
Honestly, I never thought I would smell a wine with such a note and consider it a more interesting aspect of the wine.
I know it probably sounds disgusting but the wine smelled reminiscent of it, not really as manure. I have to admit, smelling it and identifying it made me feel rather good about my nose. 2 years ago, I don’t think I would have been able to distinguish it. And I know the only reason I was able to now was because I’ve been smelling perfumes every day for years now.
Btw, decanting helped lose that particular note (we guessed that was why it was recommended).
Happy Easter to all my readers celebrating Easter.
A little postcard from our day today
The winner of the spikenard oil is : Rosiegreen62
One bottle of Spikenard Foot Oil from Brie in New York is yours.
But Brie has also made a more complex blend called Alabaster Wrists. It is an anti-anxiety blend. A sample of this will be included with the Spikenard foot oil.
Please send your address by Tuesday, otherwise a new winner will be drawn.
From the start you can tell this will be a medically-oriented novel, even the metaphors are going in that directions. But what you don’t know is how fast-paced, intriguing and scary it will get. And when I say scary, I don’t mean horror but real-life possibility. Which I find to be even scarier.
“The South Pole’s Amundsen Scott Research Station is like an outpost on Mars. Winter temperatures average 100 degrees below zero; week-long hurricane-force storms rage; for eight months at a time the station is shrouded in darkness. Under the stress, bodies suffer and minds twist. Panic, paranoia, and hostility prevail. When a South Pole scientist dies mysteriously, CDC microbiologist Hallie Leland arrives to complete crucial research. Before she can begin, three more women inexplicably die. As failing communications and plunging temperatures cut the station off from the outside world, terror rises and tensions soar. Amidst it all, Hallie must crack the mystery of her predecessor’s death. In Washington, D.C., government agency director Don Barnard and enigmatic operative Wil Bowman detect troubling signs of shadowy behavior at the South Pole and realize that Hallie is at the heart of it. Unless Barnard and Bowman can track down the mastermind, a horrifying act of global terror, launched from the station, will change the planet forever—and Hallie herself will be the unwitting instrument of destruction. As the Antarctic winter sweeps in, severing contact with the outside world, Hallie must trust no one, fear everyone, and fight to keep the frigid prison from becoming her frozen grave.”
At some point you realize there must be a previous book featuring Hallie and Wil Bowman meeting and having an adventure after which they become an item. That book is now on my TBR list (and it does exist). 🙂
But, you don’t actually have to read the first one in order to fully enjoy the second one. The only reason I felt bad for not reading it is because I believe it might be great and I missed it (but not for long).
Hallie is a wonderful character, a military brat grown into an intelligent, fit and extremely capable woman (that is what I read from the story). At some points, her adventures are more of the James Bond type but they are nevertheless great.
Basically, it’s a very good thriller, featuring more or less realistic characters (I believe there are many gifted people in the world but some seem to have been gifted by their writers rather well), nevertheless, it feels realistic and unfortunately believable.
I wonder if as I grow older I’ll start believing in conspiracy theories. If I keep reading things like this it’s quite possible…
The world population is a rather big issue and seeing morals and ethics being put aside for the greater goal makes me feel scared that it might easily happen.
A Guest Post that will be appearing on several blogs today in preparation for the celebration of Easter. Featuring my favourite character from the New Testament, one whose name I share (my Christening name that is).
Today we taking a fragrant journey back in time with Jordan River from The Fragrant Man.
We also have a gift to give away. 🙂 Brie in New York has made some spikenard foot oil especially for this post. If you would like to encounter this scent and look after your own or your loved one’s feet please leave a comment below.
The gift recipient will be announced on Easter Sunday and mailed to you on Tuesday.
Spikenard or nard originates in India and Nepal, high in the Himalayas. The root of the plant is the source for one of the rarest and most precious oils.
Brie would like to say that she is not a professional perfumer. This is an interest for her. She blends with the best of intentions, carefully choosing oils for their healing properties as well as for the enjoyment of smelling. Brie says that spikenard is quite tenacious and challenging to work with as in her experience it takes over the blend (similar to tea tree oil).
Are you spending too much on perfume? Here is a scented tale for you.
The Oil in the Alabaster Box
There are many faiths in this world. There are also many myths and legends. It’s up to you to find the truth on your fragrant journey. Let’s travel to the east this Easter to visit with a woman living on the boundaries of her culture. She has recently met a man. She believes him to be her spiritual guide. He is surrounded by men at a dinner party. She is uninvited and has to make her way past the guests to be able to offer her teacher a scented gift. The gift is spikenard oil, a costly perfume ingredient which at this volume, a Roman litra, costs the equivalent of spending a year’s salary on a scent; a scent so potent that the home where this story takes place becomes filled with fragrant air.
The room grew still
As she made her way to Jesus
She stumbles through the tears that made her blind
She felt such pain
Some spoke in anger
Heard folks whisper
There’s no place here for her kind
Still on she came
Through the shame that flushed her face
Until at last, she knelt before his feet
And though she spoke no words
Everything she said was heard
As she poured her love for the Master
From her box of alabaster
Don’t be angry if I wash his feet with my tears
And I dry them with my hair
You weren’t there the night He found me
You did not feel what I felt
When he wrapped his love all around me and
You don’t know the cost of the oil
In my alabaster box
– lyrics: Janice Sjostran
for chanteuse Cece Winans
– an interpretation of Mark 14:3-9
Judas the accountant thought this money would have been better spent feeding the poor. Nevertheless the teacher accepted this gift from a woman’s heart.
Jesus looked at her with a smile “your deed will never be forgotten. Your story will be told throughout all the lands and for all time and in ways you have never even dreamed of“.
Little could she have imagined that one day the story of her alabaster box would be told on the World Wide Web.
– a Roman litra ~ 327 grams
Album Version – Cece Winans – The Alabaster Box
A more melodic version.
Ines:
I’m guessing that by now you all know who was the person I spoke of in my introduction. Long before I had any connections to the world of perfume, back when I was a child choosing to have a baptism after the fall of communism, my heart chose the name of Magdalene. She was the character from the New Testament I somehow understood the best and felt a connection to. It was only recently I learned she was also the patron saint of perfumers (shame on me for being so slow in learning that information).
Although that is no wonder if she chose such a precious fragrant gift for Jesus. 🙂
Visit other participating blogs for more chances to win. 😉
I still think my blog is a work in progress and keeping it personal allows me to get away with not writing regularly or about perfume as much as I’d like to.
Which is why I want to thank you, all my readers, for sticking with me and still checking out my musings even though they don’t come often.
And to celebrate another blog year gone by – I’m giving away a Croatian box of chocolates and an 8ml roll-on bottle of Dawn Spencer Hurwitz Festive perfume to one lucky commenter.
Sometimes I look back on a book I read and find it funny that I read it. 🙂
I mean, there’s nothing really to recommend this book but the story. Ok, that is something. You don’t learn anything from it, the characters are annyoing the first half of the book (the two main characters, and they’re not even teenagers) and then the premise is rather shaky when you consider how Sapphire acts in her day to day life.
But, the story is actually interesting and fun to read and certainly makes for a more interesting night than what is usually on TV here.
Despite the illusion Sapphire Dubois presents to the rest of the world, she is not just your stereotypical 22-year old Beverly Hills heiress; she hunts serial killers. While her fellow heirs spend their nights with trending celebs and drugs at the hottest club, Sapphire secretly spends hers luring, capturing, and anonymously handing over So-Cal’s most wanted killers to the police — just your average Tuesday night.Â
What Sapphire doesn’t know is that one of her adversaries is watching her every move, aware of both her true identity and her unconventional hobby. Needless to say, he doesn’t approve. Used to being the one who redefines the definition of predator and prey, Sapphire’s world abruptly shatters when a gruesome ‘gift’ arrives for her at the Beverly Hills Country Club. With her involuntary crush, handsome Detective Aston Ridder, close on her tail, Sapphire now has to rethink her routine strategy and figure out how to capture a killer who already knows she’s coming.
Now, it might seem I am not very satisfied with the book when actually I am. I am already looking forward to the second one (the ending of the first one implied it) and hopefully we’ll get some better characterisation of basically everyone except for Julia (that character is the only one who seemed well done).
This book should be taken as a light read and you shouldn’t expect much from it aside some fun storytelling. And that is in the end why I enjoyed it – I had fun reading about a serial killer not killing his  secretary because she finally learned her job (so choosing somebody else instead), or wondering who is the killer stalking Sapphire or reading about what an idiot Aston is (not that Sapphire lags much behind).
I said recently for The Romanov Cross how it comes off as very realistic and possible. Well, this one doesn’t but still, if you take it as a fun and easy read, you won’t be disappointed (probably).
So many times in my life I thought about how I wished I knew if I was going to like a book or not. Reading blurbs just doesn’t happen and often I finish a book and then I have this terrible problem of deciding what next might prove interesting.
I am ashamed to say that I have quite a lot of titles I received from NetGalley and I’m not really going through them in a timely fashion – I can’t decide from the blurbs which one might be very good. So I decided to randomly start reading them and see how it goes.
It proved to be a rather good idea as I quickly both discarded some and found an interesting one to read. 🙂 The Romanov Cross.
“Nearly one hundred years ago, a desperate young woman crawled ashore on a desolate arctic island, carrying a terrible secret and a mysterious, emerald-encrusted cross. A century later, acts of man, nature, and history converge on that same forbidding shore with a power sufficient to shatter civilization as we know it.”
What I liked about this book is that even though there are some “supernatural” parts to the story, the rest seems realistic. People and their actions sound real which is usually something I find  lacking in novels taking place in the real world. And the fact that it deals with the possible outbreak of the Spanish flu only makes it even more interesting in my mind.
If you’re wondering where do the Romanovs feature in the Spanish flu outbreak, I am not going to tell you, and you will never guess either.
I find the whole idea of the novel very intriguing and I finished the book wanting to learn more about what happened in Russia and with the Romanovs, just so I could check whether the ideas I got from this book are based in fact or the author made it work for him.
It takes a while for the story to pick up pace, in the beginning you have no idea why are you reading two different stories but once they start coming together, you’re hooked.
And now I’ve said that the story seems realistic, I should add that the storytelling has some horror elements. 🙂 The horrifying part being they seem possible.
Also, at some point, before you realize there are some supernatural parts to the story, you start wondering how some things would be possible (a pack of wolves surviving on a rather small island for decades?) but once the story gets you to realize there are some unexplained spiritual things happening in this world, you just go with it.
Which brings me to the fact that after reading the book, I was left wondering about the religious/spiritual inclinations of the author. There is a mention of both in the novel, but in a positive way when it’s spiritual, and less positive when it’s religious in the modern-day sense (being a believer of a particular religion).
well. Although I’m not sure it has actually anything to do with Shakespeare, it’s more like the moving ground you’re on is not making this an easy-to-like novel.
All I am - a redhead 