Cramlington Book Club

Ooh an Agatha Christie style murder mystery set over Christmas for our December book club (#oneruleofbookclub), and chosen so easily as opposed to previous December book choosings it had to be a winner! And it was for some of us who loved the post war, upper class England setting. It had all the hallmarks of a classic whodunit (the country house isolated by the Christmas bank holidays, the family gathering, the changing of a will) and was peppered with Christmas festivities (do you send a second present if you can't remember whether you sent a first or do you risk not sending any at all?) The book however created a great divide between the group and every 9/10 was countered by a 5 or 6 as those in the against corner couldn’t warm to the self-centred, money grabbing characters who too many times had forgotten something of vital importance as 'they didn’t think it was relevant at the time'. It's a murder investigation why would a car driving away from the scene of the...

On paper (boom boom) this book was right up my street. British soldiers and their families in Germany following the second world war, an angle that I hadn't really read about before appealed to me. However this book left me cold. I found it very predictable, I didn't like Rachel, I didn't get why Ozi and his crew kept appearing. There were too many characters and issues spread across too few pages preventing anything from fully forming. There were good parts, I liked reading how the British wives shopped behind blacked out Windows and were allotted an inventory consisting of champagne flutes and butter knives depending on your husband's rank. I also found it interesting to read how the British dealt with the Germans, camps, questionnaires and cleaning processes are things you don't associate with England during the war. Yet these issues were not given the space they needed to shine. Instead being submerged by German street kids carrying around their dead mothe...

Haven't written anything for a while as I was reading the doorstop that is David Copperfield. 700 plus pages of small writing can often leave you loosing the will to live but this didn't once. Yes I wanted to get it finished but only because I had a stack of other books waiting to be read not because I was finding the book tedious or boring. I believe that the book was initially serialized and I think you can tell as each chapter was a little interesting story all by itself. I loved the characters especially David's (or should I say Trott's) aunt. I was surprised by Dickens at some points - noting that the food in London wasn't as good as the food in the countryside due to the environment the animals had been raised in was way before its time! Yes there was a certain predictability in the book but I really didn't mind. There was enough going on around to keep the reader entertained until you got there. There was humour, villains, tragedy and triump by th...