• About
  • Listening
    • Baroque
    • Bluegrass and Country
    • Classical Fusion
    • Classical Period
    • Early Music
    • Film soundtracks
    • Folk Music
    • Jazz
    • Modern Classical
    • Modern Pop Fusion
    • Musicals
    • Romantic Classical
    • Spoken word
    • World Music
  • Reading
    • Fiction
      • Children’s and Young Adult Fiction
      • Classic writers and their works
      • Contemporary Fiction
      • Crime and Detective Fiction
      • Fictionalised Biography
      • Historical Fiction
      • Horror
      • Lighter-hearted reads
      • Literary Fiction
      • Plays and Poetry
      • Romance
      • SF
      • Short stories
      • Western
      • Whimsy and Fantastical
    • Non-Fiction
      • Arts
      • Biography and Autobiography
      • Ethics, reflection, a meditative space
      • Food and Drink
      • Geography and Travel
      • Health and wellbeing
      • History and Social History
      • Philosophy of Mind
      • Science and nature
      • Society; Politics; Economics
  • Reading the 20th Century
  • Watching
    • Documentary
    • Film
    • Staged Production
    • TV
  • Shouting From The Soapbox
    • Arts Soapbox
    • Chitchat
    • Philosophical Soapbox
    • Science and Health Soapbox
  • Interviews / Q + A
  • Indexes
    • Index of Bookieness – Fiction
    • Index of Bookieness – Non-Fiction
    • Index of authors
    • Index of titles
    • 20th Century Index
    • Sound Index
      • Composers Index
      • Performers Index
    • Filmed Index

Lady Fancifull

~ adventures in a mainly literary obsession

Lady Fancifull

Monthly Archives: February 2018

Robert Dinsdale – The Toymakers

08 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by Lady Fancifull in Fiction, Literary Fiction, Reading, Whimsy and Fantastical

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Book Review, Historical Fantasy, Robert Dinsdale, The Toymakers

Sensing the life in everything : Magic for adults which will make, and break, your heart. Repeatedly.

Who did not, as a small child, believe their toys were alive, or, at least, HOPE they came alive when your back was turned…….and so, yes, reading the synopsis of this book, my heart quickened a little in anticipation of recovering that state of ‘magic, real magic IS the world’, that was some of the place of that child, not ‘pretending’ a toy was alive, but, even if only momentarily, believing.

The fact that this book was being compared to The Night Circus (which I adored, and catapulted me back into that place) was also appealing. The fact that it was compared also to The Miniaturist gave me pause (lacked it, in my opinion). I needn’t have worried. The Night Circus pleasurable shivers of delight up the back of the neck started very early with The Toymakers.

Primarily taking place in 1917 and making a journey TO that time and place from some 11 years earlier, the Toymakers is set in what any toyshop should really be – a magical place where the maker-of-those-toys really is a true mage and can make the toys live.

Though the period of the First War will occupy a bulk of the book, it will end in the 1950s.

The most terrible things can happen to a man, but he’ll never lose himself if he remembers he was once a child

And that ‘primarily set in the period of the First War’ gives, I must warn, a lot of heartbreak to readers. A good author will have us invested in many of their characters – and Dinsdale, on this showing, is a very good author indeed.

Mightn’t it be…that until you’ve seen the dark, you don’t really know the light

Do take delight, as much as you can, in the playfulness and yes, that childhood remembered magic in the early part of the book, because payback time of grief will come. Without this reader feeling in any way manipulated, or in any way that the author was mechanically moving any of his sometimes surprising cast of characters around, my heart was being swung between imaginative delight and ‘I can’t take the sorrow of this’ moments.

Readers’ Appropriate Behaviour In A Public Place warning : Do not read in a public place.. If you must, ensure you have a ready supply of tissues.  Involuntary cries of ‘oh no, no, no’ whimpers of grief and the like can alarm innocent bystanders.

Brief synopsis and subject matter, avoiding spoilers :

Cathy, a young girl, pregnant, single, disgraced, runs away from home in Leigh-on-Sea to London, after seeing a curious, alluring advertisement in a local paper

Help Wanted…Are you lost? Are you afraid? Are you a child at Heart? So are we. The Emporium opens with the first frost of winter. Sales and stocktaking, no experience required. Bed and board included. Apply in person….

Cathy becomes winter help in a most extraordinary toy shop, Papa Jack’s Emporium. Papa Jack, originally a man with a different name, and we suspect, a tragic story, set up his extraordinary toyshop, after arriving in this country from Eastern Europe, and Tsarist Russia, the father of two young boys he had not seen for many years.

Papa Jack, originally a carpenter, crafts exquisite toys, out of quality material when he can, but he can also create something extraordinary out of found materials such as pine cones, twigs and grasses. Really extraordinary.

By the time young Cathy reaches the Emporium, it is a famous and established place, financially successful, fabulously strange. Those two young boys, Kaspar and Emil are now also extraordinary toymakers, a little older than Cathy. Fast, loving, supportive brothers; fierce, struggling sibling rivals, both as inheritors of Papa Jack’s love, Papa Jack’s dream for the stability and future of the Emporium, and … well, much more.

A secret has been revealed, and finally I understand the true meaning of toys….When you are young, what you want from toys is to feel grown-up. You play with toys and cast yourself as an adult, and imagine life the way it’s going to be. Yet, when you are grown, that changes: now, what you want out of toys is to feel young again. You want to be back there, in a place that did not harm nor hurt you, in a pocket of time built out of memory and love

There are toys here, of course; there is magic, too. What is this book? It is a story of war, it is a story of the tangled web of relationships – parents and children, brothers and sisters, men and women. Not to mention toys themselves. What relationships might they have? What relationships could they have? Dinsdale makes us think about Creation itself, question who we are. He creates puzzles of time and space for us …..we just need to let our imaginations surrender to what once they were

I can’t praise this highly enough. I’m intrigued to discover Dinsdale has written earlier books, and  I shall nervously explore them…….nervously because this book is so extraordinary that I would be surprised to have missed a writer so fine, for so long

The challenge is the one a reader has with a book which makes its own world so very much realer than the world we know. What on earth can I read next, that will not disappoint and seem pale and insubstantial? Poor author who has to follow Dinsdale. Not fair!

I received this from NetGalley as a (very well done) digital ARC

Lucky, lucky readers about to start their journey with this one

The Toymakers UK
The Toymakers USA

Advertisement

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Print
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Mick Herron – London Rules

01 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by Lady Fancifull in Fiction, Reading, Thriller and Suspense

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Book Review, London Rules, Mick Herron, Slough House Book 5, Spy thriller

Official (Mick Herron Avoider of Spoilers) Secrets Act Signed!

Mick Herron’s marvellously funny, horribly plausible, politically too close for comfort, twisty, turny sequence of spooks-on-the-prowl novels continues, all guns effortlessly blazing for another 5 star review with this one.

For those new to Herron’s ‘Slough House, Jackson Lamb’ series, good though Book 5 (this one) is, and despite the fact that yes, each book can be read as a stand-alone, I would strongly, strongly suggest you race away and get the first book in the series, Slow Horses, and then, with increasing immersion and enjoyment, book on book, work your way through Dead Lions, Real Tigers and Spook Street, in order. This one will still be waiting for you, and you will enjoy it even more as you will be meeting old friends and foes, and come to this one with even more pleasure than would have been the case if you began in the middle.

Herron with each book is rather taking on the changing political events that have happened since he wrote the previous book.

His books follow MI5 (his version of it) here cited as ‘Regent’s Park, and the various power struggles that might exist between M15 and the Home Office, not to mention the Prime Minister, and the police, in defence of the Realm.

However – don’t think anything like the glamour world of espionage. Rather, what goes on at the grubby (very grubby) edges. ‘Slough House’ is where those who failed, spectacularly, to make the grade, get shunted, to carry out the tedious work which the glamorous ones will need – the checking of licence plates, the trawl through electoral registers, the watching of hours of video footage. These are the sorry Z listers of MI5. Each of them has a back story, each a present which seems hopeless, each still hopes, somehow, to get back to the cutting edge of spookiness.

The band of marvellous failures are led by a gargantuan figure. Jackson Lamb is Falstaff without the joy, cruel as a shark, savage in his wit, – he comes out of the same reprehensible mould as another much loved monster Gene Hunt from Life of Mars – except, Jackson is far far sharper in devious intelligence.

                       (I couldn’t resist a glance back at the Gene Genie)

In this series Herron has a chilling finger on the button of the dangerous society we are sometimes aware we are living in, whilst managing to crack open the kind of back stabbing, juggles for power and position which we know goes on in large organisations, all wrapped up with cutting edge humour. And a delicious number of twists, turns, feints and dives to have the readers’ jaws dropping over and over. Nothing will be quite what it seems, and Herron will have done something coming out of left field again. And will get this reader, almost every time. Sometimes with an ‘oh no, oh NO’ moment – the life of a spook is a dangerous one, after all – sometimes with a shout of joy at the audaciousness of an event.

For firm fans of the series – the Slow Horse in the spotlight here is geeky Roderick Ho. Against the odds, Ho, imagining himself as the cool, sexy Rodster (this one really does think he is James Bond) has acquired a girl friend. The other horses in the field at the end of book 4, Spook Street, are all in place. And back at ‘Regent Park’ Lady Di, still second desk, is plotting and planning as only she can…….

and with no need to caricature these caricatures, you might just spot not-a-million-miles-away…………………………..

In the world of Westminster and party politics are various figures who might seem more than a little familiar, or conglomerates of such figures. For example, the hail fellow-well met leader of a populist party and a vituperative columnist on a tabloid newspaper who is not at all averse to the spinning of fake news, especially if it will help her man into power. Any resemblance to any real figure is probably quite deliberate………

I received this, very gratefully, as a digital ARC via NetGalley and the publisher, John Murray Books, and sincerely hope Mr Herron is well along with book 6.

London Rules UK
London Rules USA

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Print
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • Pocket
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Page Indexes

  • About
    • Index of Bookieness – Fiction
    • Index of Bookieness – Non-Fiction
    • Index of authors
    • Index of titles
    • 20th Century Index
  • Sound Index
    • Composers Index
    • Performers Index
  • Filmed Index

Genres

Archives

February 2018
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728  
« Jan   Mar »

Posts Getting Perused

  • Philip Glass - Glassworks
    Philip Glass - Glassworks
  • Cormac McCarthy - The Road
    Cormac McCarthy - The Road
  • Joanna Rakoff - My Salinger Year
    Joanna Rakoff - My Salinger Year
  • Janine Jansen - Bach: Inventions & Partita
    Janine Jansen - Bach: Inventions & Partita
  • Virginia Woolf - The Voyage Out
    Virginia Woolf - The Voyage Out
  • William Butler Yeats - Vacillation
    William Butler Yeats - Vacillation
  • John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
    John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
  • Barbara Vine - House of Stairs
    Barbara Vine - House of Stairs

Recent Posts

  • Bart Van Es – The Cut Out Girl
  • Joan Baez – Vol 1
  • J.S.Bach – Goldberg Variations – Zhu Xiao-Mei
  • Zhu Xiao-Mei – The Secret Piano
  • Jane Harper – The Lost Man

NetGalley Badges

Fancifull Stats

  • 162,934 hits
Follow Lady Fancifull on WordPress.com

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Follow on Bloglovin

Tags

1930s setting Adult Faerie Tale Andrew Greig Arvo Pärt Autobiography baroque Beryl Bainbridge Biography Biography as Fiction Bits and Bobs Bits and Pieces Book Review Books about Books Cats Children's Book Review Classical music Classical music review Classic Crime Fiction Colm Toibin Cookery Book Crime Fiction David Mitchell Dystopia Espionage Ethics Fantasy Fiction Feminism Film review First World War Folk Music Food Industry France Gay and Lesbian Literature Ghost story Golden-Age Crime Fiction Graham Greene Health and wellbeing Historical Fiction History Humour Humour and Wit Ireland Irish writer Irvin D. Yalom Janice Galloway Japan Literary Fiction Literary pastiche Lynn Shepherd Marcus Sedgwick Meditation Mick Herron Minimalism Music review Myths and Legends Neil Gaiman Ngaio Marsh Novels about America Other Stuff Patrick Flanery Patrick Hamilton Perfumery Philip Glass Philosophy Police Procedural Post-Apocalypse Psychiatry Psychological Thriller Psychology Psychotherapy Publication Day Reading Rebecca Mascull Reflection Robert Harris Rose Tremain Russian Revolution sacred music Sadie Jones Sci-Fi Science and nature Scottish writer Second World War SF Shakespeare Short stories Simon Mawer Soapbox Spy thriller Susan Hill Tana French The Cold War The Natural World TV Drama Victorian set fiction Whimsy and Fantasy Fiction William Boyd World music review Writing Young Adult Fiction

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Lady Fancifull
    • Join 771 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Lady Fancifull
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

You must be logged in to post a comment.

    %d bloggers like this: