Skip to main content

The Husbands Secret - yes you are seeing right I am posting about this again it's my favourite cover

So for two days running I am banging on about The Husbands Secret. I apologise to those of you who have either read it and didn’t like it or who haven’t read it and have no intention to but todays book a day UK is ‘favourite cover’ and the immediate one that sprung to mind was this one.

Now if you have come here from Twitter (I’ve tweeted everyday this month you really should be coming here by now!) You have already clicked on one link to get here so if I were to turn around and say ‘I’ve already talked about this go to the previous blog’ I think I would be a little annoyed and give up. So to make it easy peasy for you here is what I said last time around about the cover;

They say you should never judge a book by its cover but let us do just that in this case.

The cover is quite simple - a glass jar (not a box) holding a butterfly, a beautiful butterfly.

But oh how that simple jar and butterfly speak volumes (queue the media studies A grade A level student going into hyper drive)

Firstly the jar and how (as Moriarty was quick to inform us) it was a jar that Pandora opened not a box as so commonly quoted. And we all know that Pandora opened the box and let loose all manner of things. Cue Celia opening John Pauls letter

Secondly the jar is a glass one, designed to keep things in, yet so easy to open. Like an envelope.

Yet if the jar is smashed all we are left are its fragments that we have to try to piece back together, possibly injuring ourselves in the process only to find its not repairable. Like Celia discovering that really it’s impossible to recover intact from a secret like John Pauls

Next there is the butterfly, so fragile, so easily broken, like a small child. Cue Polly the helpless victim trapped by her Dads secret.

If you don’t release the butterfly it will die. A bit like Celia saying if she didn’t come clean it would infect her life like poison. So you release the butterfly – such a simple act like opening a letter and everything changes.

This of course is why the creature in the jar is a butterfly and not a bee or a ladybird because this book is magnificent at encompassing the butterfly effect. One small action changes everything.

Again the creature in the jar is a butterfly as it lives for such a short time reminding us that in the blink of an eye something can end, a marriage, a friendship.

But note that in the end what was left in Pandoras jar was hope. Hope that now it is out in the open people can recover from it. I think Rachel beautifully illustrates this at the end of the book by going to sleep at Robs house.

All that in the front cover that you maybe looked at for 3 seconds? Or as a Kindle lover maybe saw once when ordering and then never saw again? Makes you think again doesn’t it?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Mount by Jilly Cooper #inbetweeny

I'll start this blog with a warning, this post does contain spoilers. So if you haven't read the book then please don't read this blog, yet. Of course you should read this post just wait a little while until you've read the latest installment of Rupert Campbell Black (RCB). Warnings out of the way I'll begin. I was massively looking forward to reading this book having hugely enjoyed the previous ones. RCB is my (not so) secret trashy pleasure and has been for many years. This book had all the ingredients of a classic, pages of wonderfully named characters, a few tortured souls and of course RCB with all his horses, dogs and now grandchildren. The book got off to a good start full of characters from old but also plenty of new ones to mix it up a bit. The horse's really played a starring role in this book but I also really loved Gav and at first Gala. Yep only at first as she went strongly down hill and I bet you can guess why. RCB. Here is where I fell o...

Stitch Up (A Best Defence Mystery) by William McIntyre #BlogTour

OK hold on everybody for MY FIRST EVER BLOG TOUR!!!!!!!!! Did I like it? Did I manage to read it in time? Did I forget to post my review when I should have done? Yes, yes and (thankfully) no! Stitch Up is the ninth in the Best Defence Series featuring Scottish defence lawyer Robbie Munro. As a solicitor not a policeman who successfully runs his own law firm, is recently married and has a daughter the book immediately set itself apart from your standard crime thriller. The book begins with Robbie's ex girlfriend asking him to investigate the apparent suicide of her new boyfriend (awkward!). At the same time a convicted child-murderer is attempting to have his conviction quashed (if I remember the term correctly Mr McIntyre?) claiming Robbie's dad ex sergeant Alex Munro planted key evidence at the scene of the crime (double awkward!). I liked the two stories running along side each other which kept the pace of the book moving swiftly forwards. In real life McIntyre is ...

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray and a 30 a day habit.

Nothing like challenging oneself in the New Year and rather than giving up alcohol and only eating steamed kale the Book Club decided on reading the 900 odd page doorstop that is Vanity Fair . I ordered it at once and (using something vaguely like maths) worked out I needed to read 30 pages a day to have it read in time for the meeting. I was surprisingly undeterred by this and thought if nothing else I could use the book as a dumbbell when working off the chocolate orange.   I found I actually liked hitting my 30 a day target (much like all the other New Years' resolutioners like hitting their ten thousand steps) and it motivated me to just squeeze a few more pages in here and there so I was ahead of target. I haven’t really approached a book this way before but then it is longer than my copy of War and Peace and there are over 50 books on my bookshelf waiting to be read (now in 'to read' order due to much prating about over Christmas).        I didn’t kno...