Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling
by Michael Boccacino
Genre: Gothic, Fantasy
Publisher: William Morrow
Publish Date: July 24, 2012
Format: Paperback | 320 pages
Rating: 5 of 5
Charlotte Markham, the newly hired governess to young James and Paul Darrow, finds herself taking on additional responsibilities when Nanny Prum is discovered murdered in the nearby forest. The children’s mother has recently passed away and their father has little time for them.
Charlotte, now both governess and nanny, spends much of her time with the boys. As a break in the monotony of their lessons Charlotte has them describe their previous night’s dreams in a drawing. Paul claims to have visited his mother’s new home and draws a map detailing its location in a nearby woods. Charlotte takes the children on a walk following the directions on the map and along the way they cross over to The Ending, a mystical place in another world where they are greeted by Lily, the boys’ mother, looking very much alive.
Lily has made a sinister bargain with the owner of The House of Darkling where she now resides. The boys are not to tell anyone they have seen her, it’s part of the deal she made, and that is all she will say. She begs Charlotte to bring the children back for another visit. Charlotte suspects that some of the evil that has been plaguing the local town is connected to The Ending, but agrees to return anyway for the sake of the children. Charlotte soon becomes caught up in her own deadly game with the master of Darkling. As she begins to put her plan in place, the true horror of Darkling is revealed.
Part Victorian Gothic and part dark fantasy, this is a wonderfully creepy tale told from Charlotte’s point of view. With beautiful writing and lyrical prose we are introduced to an amazing land populated by a cast of unusual and sometimes ghastly creatures in an alternate world called The Ending, a place where time doesn’t exist, and where no one can die.
The story was richly detailed with well-developed characters and just enough world building to set the tone, bringing out the macabre aura of The Ending. Lily would read bedtime fairy tales to the children from a book called Laura Parker Wolfe’s Tales of The Ending, creepy stories within the story. I loved the atmosphere the author created, the descriptions of the alien residents of Darkling, noises in the night, objects that came to life, moving walls that open and close at will, strange paintings that become animated and a most unusual library.
Initially the story has a Jane Eyre feel to it but soon becomes more magical as we spend time in The Ending, with the tale turning darker as it progresses. Even though it does have some moments of horror, there is enough mystery, charm and even weirdness to appeal to a wide range of readers. An enjoyable book which I heartily recommend. I am looking forward to future work from Michael Boccacino.
About the Author
Michael Boccacino’s poetry has been published in the St. Petersburg Times. He currently works and lives in New York City. This is his first novel.
Connect with the author:
Click HERE for the tour schedule.
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Source: Review copy.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Thanks to the publisher, I have three copy of Tigers In Red Weather, to give away to my readers with a US or Canadian address. I haven’t read my copy yet and am looking forward to digging into it in the next few weeks.
Following is a little information about the book and the author.
Tigers In Red Weather
by Liza Klaussmann
Genre: Historical Fiction, Suspense
Publisher: Hachette Books
Publish Date: July 17, 2012
Format: Hardcover | 368 pages
About the Book
Nick and her cousin, Helena, have grown up sharing sultry summer heat, sunbleached boat docks, and midnight gin parties on Martha’s Vineyard in a glorious old family estate known as Tiger House. In the days following the end of the Second World War, the world seems to offer itself up, and the two women are on the cusp of their ‘real lives’: Helena is off to Hollywood and a new marriage, while Nick is heading for a reunion with her own young husband, Hughes, about to return from the war.
Soon the gilt begins to crack. Helena’s husband is not the man he seemed to be, and Hughes has returned from the war distant, his inner light curtained over. On the brink of the 1960s, back at Tiger House, Nick and Helena–with their children, Daisy and Ed–try to recapture that sense of possibility. But when Daisy and Ed discover the victim of a brutal murder, the intrusion of violence causes everything to unravel. The members of the family spin out of their prescribed orbits, secrets come to light, and nothing about their lives will ever be the same.
Brilliantly told from five points of view, with a magical elegance and suspenseful dark longing, Tigers in Red Weather is an unforgettable debut novel from a writer of extraordinary insight and accomplishment.
About the Author
Liza Klaussmann worked as a journalist for the New York Times for over a decade. She received a BA in Creative Writing from Barnard College, where she was awarded the Howard M. Teichman Prize for Prose. She lived in Paris for ten years and she recently completed with distinction an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, in London, where she lives. She is the great-great-great granddaughter of Herman Melville.
Giveaway Information
- Contest is open to those with an address in the US or Canada.
- To enter fill out the form below. For an extra entry, tweet or blog the giveaway.
- The deadline for entry is Sunday, August 19th. I will draw three random winners who will be contacted by email and will have 48 hours to respond with a mailing address. One winner per household.
Contest is now closed
Winners: Cassandra, JJT and lila
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Source: Review copy.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Mailbox Monday
Mailbox Monday was created by The Printed Page. It is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their home last week.
Mailbox Monday is currently on tour, hosted by a different blog each month. The July host is Mrs. Q Book Addict.
I have been listening more than reading so I was happy to once again receive some audiobooks.
From Penguin Audio for review:
City of Women
by David R. Gillham
It is 1943—the height of the Second World War. With the men taken by the army, Berlin has become a city of women. And while her husband fights on the Eastern Front, Sigrid Schröder is, for all intents and purposes, the model soldier’s wife: She goes to work every day, does as much with her rations as she can, and dutifully cares for her meddling mother-in-law, all the while ignoring the horrific immoralities of the regime. But behind this façade is an entirely different Sigrid, a woman who dreams of her former Jewish lover, who is now lost in the chaos of the war.
From Audiobook Jukebox for review:
Earth Unaware
by Orson Scott Card
When Ender Wiggin saved the human race by annihilating the alien Formics, he ended a war that had begun a hundred years before. Earth Unaware is the first of three novels that will tell the story of the First Formic War, humanity’s first encounter with the Formics. This is the background against which Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is set, the war that unified Earth and set humanity on a search for the greatest general they could find or breed: a search that culminated in Ender.
A win from BookJourney. Thanks Sheila!
A Night to Remember
by Walter Lord
She was the world’s biggest-ever ship. A luxurious miracle of twentieth-century technology, the Titantic was equipped with the most ingenious safety devices of the time. Yet on a moonlit night in 1912, the “unsinkable” Titantic raced across the glassy Atlantic on her maiden voyage, with only twenty lifeboats for 2,207 passengers. A Night To Remember is the gut–wrenching, minute-by-minute account of her fatal collision with an iceberg and how the resulting tragedy brought out the best and worst in human nature.
From the publisher for review:
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
by Jon Meacham
In this magnificent biography, Jon Meacham, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the bestsellers American Lion and Franklin and Winston, gives us an intimate portrait of Thomas Jefferson, the human being, the president, the politician, enabling us to understand Jefferson as never before. “A true triumph. In addition to being a brilliant biography, Thomas Jefferson is a guide to the art of power . . . a fascinating look at how Jefferson wielded his driving desire for power and control.”
From the publisher for review:
Gross America
by Richard Faulk
GROSS AMERICA by Richard Faulk is a coast-to-coast catalog of the most grandly gross science experiments, beautifully bizarre art, and delightfully disgusting historical sites that America has to offer. Part travel atlas, part trivia guide, it presents these United States as you’ve never seen them before—weird, wonderful, and totally, utterly gross.
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It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?
It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.
Share what you read last week and what you are currently reading.
We had rain and cooler temperatures last week, if you can call upper 80s cooler, so it was back to the garden and more audiobook listening time. The year is only half over and already I’ve listened to 33 audiobooks. Yesterday I posted a few photos of the garden that’s been keeping me so occupied.
Reading/Listening Last Week:
Last week I posted reviews for Overseas, which I was disappointed in, and Tubes, an interesting look at the infrastructure of the internet. Overseas turned out to be heavy on the romance and light on historical fiction; not my type of book. This week I’ll have a review of Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling, a richly detailed Victorian Gothic, a real page-turner.
This Week:
I’m listening to the wonderful Shine Shine Shine, and it’s every bit as good as I was expecting.
Next up in print is The Violinist’s Thumb (non-fiction) and the new Nicci French novel, Tuesday’s Gone.
Giveaways Ending This Week:
I have three giveaways ending in the next few days. Click the cover to go to the entry page.
Later this week I will have a new giveaway posted for Tigers in Red Weather.
What Are You Reading?
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© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
During the summer I like to spend my free time outdoors reading on the back deck. But this summer it has either been way too hot or I’ve been working endlessly in the garden. It seems wrong to complain about warm weather and endless sunshine, but that’s what happens where there is almost no rain for a month.
In the spring I was busy planting the veggie garden, herb garden, perennial gardens and flower boxes. I feel like I’ve spent most of June and July watering to keep them alive. The photo above is the perennial garden off my back deck. This is its third year and it has filled out nicely. The snapdragons and spider flowers, which are annuals, were volunteers that came back on their own.
To the right is one of my flower boxes on top of the deck railing. Those are begonia, a favorite of mine because they are so easy to grow and tolerate sun or shade, they only demand water. In the background the tall yellow coneflower is in full bloom in spite of receiving very little water, proving that it really is a drought proof native plant.
On the left is a close-up of the Coreopsis, also in full bloom, cutting a nice yellow swath across the back of the garden. It also is native and tolerates dry soil. Below to the right is my new perennial garden out front. It’s only half done because of the drought, but it’s the one that has taken up the most time. The grass had to be removed, holes dug, soil amended, plants purchased and in some cases divided from plants in the back garden. Phew.
All this activity in the yard has given me a lot of time to listen to audiobooks.
While updating my list of books completed for the audiobook challenge I realized that I was now listening to my 34th book for 2012. That’s almost half of what I’ve read this year. Now I can truly call myself and Audio Fiend!
How is your summer reading going? Audio or print?
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© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
The nestling House Wrens emerged from their nestbox right on schedule early Thursday morning, 15 days after they hatched. I watched the box on and off on Wednesday in case I was wrong about the hatch date and was able to get some nice shots of the parents feeding the already large babies. Wrens eat insects so that’s what was on the menu.
Both parents worked tirelessly in the 100F degree heat feeding three hungry babies all day. I was very proud of the dad who stayed with his mate and didn’t run off to start a second family as sometimes happens with wrens.
Here’s one of the parents with a bug. Not sure whether this was the male or female. Once the female stops sitting on the nest I can only tell by sound. They look the same. The male sings, the female makes a chattering noise. (No comments from the men about female chatter!)
There were three babies in the box continuously jockeying for position at the door. Once they begin hanging out the nestbox opening, fledging is a day or so away. When wrens leave the box, they usually pop out one after another and are gone in minutes. The last two years I did not see them leave so I was determined to get photos this time.
I set my alarm for 6am on Thursday morning. Yes, 6am, ugh. I was that sure they were going to leave. At 6:50am I spotted a tiny bird on the fence. I grabbed my binoculars… yes, it was a fledgling. A second bird popped out of the box as I was grabbing my camera and running out the door. By the time I got set for a shot, all three had left the nest and were trying to fly. With those tiny little tails it’s not easy.
One of them was nice enough to pose for me before taking off for a nearby pine tree. I could hear the dad singing from a tree in the distance calling them to follow him. They began flying from tree to tree and within minutes they were gone.
Wrens usually don’t come back to visit or hang out in the yard like House Sparrows, Robins or Doves, so I probably won’t see them again. They head to a wooded area where the babies can grow and mature. In September or October they will migrate to a warmer climate south of the frost line where they can readily find insects. In the spring the males will return to the same area and being searching for nesting sites. The females arrive a few weeks later and are attracted by the male’s song.
I had a nestbox up for a few years before the wrens found it. Now they return every year. If you want to attract wrens, the entrance hole to the box should be no larger than 1⅛ inches. Anything larger and House Sparrows will claim the box.
Saturday Snapshot is hosted by Alyce at At Home With Books. Visit her blog to see more great photos or add your own.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
by Andrew Blum
Narrated by Andrew Blum
Genre: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Harper Audio
Publish Date: May 29, 2012
Format: Audio, 7 hours | 25 minutes
Audio Listening Level: Easy – Intermediate
Rating: 3 of 5
Do you ever wonder how the internet works? We press the enter key and the data goes where it’s supposed to go. Most of the time, anyway. We are becoming more and more dependent on the internet in our daily lives and for many of us its inner workings are a mystery.
Andrew Blum takes us back to the beginning of the internet, to the very first connections, and gives us a tour of its evolution into the global resource it is today. Internet data centers and miles of cable span the continents connecting people around the planet. Our data, the bits and bytes that make up our photos, email, phone calls, finances, essentially our lives, is stored in what is commonly referred to as ‘the cloud’.
The cloud is nothing more than a giant data center, a nondescript building, housing a multitude of servers and cables. The author was able to get access to a few of these centers and speak with some of the engineers resulting in a fascinating story. (My favorite section of the book). His tour of a Google data center consisted of only the parking lot. They are so secretive they would not let him inside the building. On the other hand, Facebook was open and accommodating, sort of the same way they are with our personal data!
The material is informative and well-researched, the writing is excellent, but this is a technical subject and at times it reads like a text book. The author does a nice job with his explanations and while he attempted to make it entertaining, his side stories were more about the people he met on his travels to see data centers than on the structure of the internet itself. My interest in the subject matter kept me engaged but I would have enjoyed it more if the technical narrative was a little more entertaining and less dry.
The title of the book comes from a comment made back in 2006 by former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens, who said, “the internet is a series of tubes”. In some ways it is, as Andrew Blum explains, but the senator was widely ridiculed none-the-less. A YouTube remix of his comments has over 4 million hits.
I listened to the audiobook, which was read by the author himself. Sometimes this works beautifully, sometimes not so well. While his speaking voice was fine, his words were often over-enunciated and it took me the first hour to get accustomed to the flow of the words. The seven and a half hours of listening time proved to be the right amount to hold my interest.
Techie types should enjoy the detail and the history presented in Tubes. If you don’t consider yourself a techie but you are curious about how things work, this is a good introduction to infrastructure of the internet without a lot of technical jargon.
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Source: Review copy.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
Overseas
by Beatriz Williams
Narrated by January LaVoy
Genre: Romance
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Publish Date: May 10, 2012
Format: Audio, 15 hours | 49 minutes
Audio Listening Level: Easy
When twenty-something Wall Street analyst Kate Wilson attracts the notice of the legendary Julian Laurence at a business meeting, no one’s more surprised than she is. Why would this handsome British billionaire—Manhattan’s most eligible bachelor—pursue a pretty but bookish young banker who hasn’t had a boyfriend since college?The answer is beyond imagining… at least at first. Kate and Julian’s story may have begun not in the moneyed world of twenty-first-century Manhattan but in France during World War I, when a mysterious American woman emerged from the shadows of the Western Front to save the life of Captain Julian Laurence Ashford, a celebrated war poet and infantry officer.
For the first quarter of the book I was glued to my headphones. The story was told from Kate’s point of view alternating between the present and 1916 France. The beginning was so compelling: A mixture of time-travel, historical fiction and a timeless romance. I was expecting something like Now & Then by Jacqueline Sheehan.
From the synopsis, all the story elements I like were there, but for me the story never reached its potential. When the romance kicked in it became over the top syrupy sweet and at times annoying. A lot of Kate’s actions were unbelievable, especially for an independent woman, and the story became like a fairy tale. There is very little meat to the historical fiction and the time-travel was totally implausible and circular, not even remotely believable. There were a couple of interesting supporting characters that I thought could have been better developed instead of focusing almost exclusively on Kate and Julian.
You’re probably wondering why I kept listening.
Even though this book was not for me, it was compelling enough that I wanted to know how it ended. There was enough of a mystery to keep me engaged in spite of the overwhelming romance.
The audio was very listenable. The narrator did a nice job of differentiating between the characters and her voice for Kate was a very believable twenty-something. The British accent for Julian was acceptable and I really enjoyed Charlie, Kate’s co-worker, who called everyone ‘dude’. In spite of some corny romantic dialog, at almost 16 hours and a bit too long, my listening time passed at a nice pace.
I was expecting something in this book other than what I got. The cover and the blurb were a bit misleading. Romance as the main focus of a novel is not my genre although I don’t mind it as part of the story. I wanted more historical detail and more about the time travel, but it was mostly a fairy tale love story.
I’m fairly certain romance readers will enjoy this book; time travel and historical fiction fans, maybe not.
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Source: Review copy.
© 2012 Under My Apple Tree. All rights reserved.
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