Message from an unknown chinese mother Xinran

This was next to read on my bookshelf having been passed to me a while ago from my auntie. It was a thin book which greatly appealed to me following on from SPQR.

As a mother to three girls I found the stories of Chinese women killing their new born baby girls because they were not male absolutely heart breaking. This was a non fiction book and it honestly had me in tears at the thought of all those tiny babies being dumped in slop buckets or smothered by their own mother's.

I did find the structure of the book and the narration slightly weak. The arc of the book just didn't seem to fit right and the random letters at the end made me think it would have benefited from further editing.

There were some horrifically sad, sad stories in this book, certainly do not read if you are feeling slightly emotional. I can't say I enjoyed the book (I challenge anyone who does) but don't think it was in depth enough to really provide the platform against the importance of a male heir, the terrible conditions in chinese orphanages and the harrowing fates of the baby girls that it should/could have been.

For that reason I don't recommend it, it left hideous images without the knowledge or impetus to do anything further. I'm left feeling uncomfortable, disturbed yet slightly helpless which is no good to anyone least of all to those poor children.

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Lock down book club - books from a different country

So we continued with the Zoom version of book club this month and it was lovely to see so many of us tackle it. The theme was books set in a different country (if you can't travel, let a book take you). I read The Accident on the A35 by Graeme Macrae Burnet, a detective story with an element of tricksy fiction set in France. I really enjoyed it and you can read my full review here. We travelled to America a couple of times most interestingly to see whether Hilary Clinton (or Bill for that fact) would have made President if they had not got married. Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld is out in hardback now. Norway was a popular spot - Norwegian Nights by Derek B Miller about a retired american marine who moves to Norway and intervenes to save a young boys life sounded interesting. So much so that at least one member of the group has gone on to buy the first in the series, American By Day. We even made it as far as Japan and Botswana (and discovered a Scottish connection for Alexander McCa

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Village Christmas: And Other Notes on the English Year by Laurie Lee #BookOfTheMonth #OneRuleOfBookClub

When suggested last month we snapped up this 150 page or so collection of Lee's descriptions, memoirs and musings. Consisting of Chapters of no more than a few pages, topics included the river Severn, a pub and the landscaping of a garden! Winter, including Christmas, was the opening section so more than met the one rule of book club requirement (we review a Christmas book at Christmas). Spring, Summer and Autumn sections followed and one of the group chose to stop reading after the Winter section in order to read each section in its correct season. I love this idea but would either forget and end up reading them all in Autumn or would get frustrated that I still hadn't finished such a slim book that I had started in 2018. "Children trapped in new concrete estates will be denied the freedom we knew. They'll become prisoners of television, as most children are today, and as they grow up they'll start hanging about the streets in gangs and stealing cars."

Cramlington Book Club

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