Of Mice and Malteasers Two - LadyBee's book

[pooter]

Sorry for starting this LadyBee - hope i haven't missed one somewhere.

I absolutely loved this book. It was set in a very interesting period - just far back enough to feel connected with it by close relatives. The arty/bohemian crowd was fascinating, and I loved how you were told most character's stories from their own perspective.

It made me feel more than a little stupid at times, revealing gaping chasms in my knowledge about history and art. In fact my one slight complaint was that occasionally it lapsed into being like a history textbook. I know the context was vital to get across, but perhaps the detail was a bit overwhelming.

I loved all the budding romances - and the fact that i knew what was coming when the characters didn't, made it very bittersweet. I wanted to change the course of history for them all and i felt myself tensing up more and more as the dreaded year loomed closer.

Great ending. You know how some books make you feel like reading them has improved you in some way - well this is one of them for me! Thank you so much LadyBee. I have already recommended it to a few people.

My heart sank when I got this book, because two friends (who I have similar taste in books to) started it last year and gave up. Another friend finished it, but it took her months.

Anyway, Pooter sent me a lovely card, telling me she'd loved it, so I resolved to read it.

I found it a really challenging read. We studied Scottish history at school, and I'm not at all artistic so all of the background setting was new to me. I do feel I learned a lot, though.

I got horribly confused about who everyone was, and a cast list at the start of the book (a la Wolf Hall) would have been useful. When I read the book in chunks, rather than a few pages in bed at night, I enjoyed it much more. I would have liked some of the characters to have swept less under the carpet - all these children who weren't with their natural parents, and the potter's abused daughters...

I would have liked more about the people and less description of the art. I thought the book was over-long and could have been better edited. I'm glad I persevered though. I felt a real sense of achievement when I finished it.

Finally, did you know that the author is Margaret Drabble's sister?

I finished this today (fortunately having to travel to Manchester and back meant that I had lots of reading time!).

I did enjoy it, and in some ways it's my perfect book - love this period and have read lots about it over the years, love lots of characters in a book, loved E Nesbit as a child. I did have the same problem as pooter tho, with it being just a bit too didactic at times. TBH, tho, the extent to which this bothered me was directly proportional to how interested I was in the subject ASB was determinedly telling me All About. I read the letters of Noel Olivier and Rupert Brooke a few years ago (DP particularly inspired present! I had my EU law supervisions in a room "decorated" by the Bloomsbury set. Amazing chutzpah they had, and that came over in the book I thought) and was reading a biography of Charlotte Despard a few months ago. It is a really interesting period - so much hope coming out of the Victorian period, only to rush into the tragedy of WWI.

It was a really interesting book - I'm not a "decorative arts" person really (not that I don't like, just that I don't know much about) and it was fascinating.

I wish we could have known more about Philip and Elsie Warren though. I did love the Elsie character.

Tho whole German connection was interesting too. For personal reasons I get very fed up with the "we hate the Germans" rhetoric which turns up in the tabloids every so often. A book which (a) paints Germany as an interesting place and (b) shows the parallels between English and German culture is great to see.

In short ( not something I'm good at!) - I thought it was a book with some problems (as AP says, what were the editors doing?), but overall a very enjoyable and worthwhile read. Can see why Wolf Hall won the prize though (looking forward to the next instalment of that one!)