The fourth book in Jasmine Guillory’s series focuses on Maddie’s mum Vivian Forest and her meeting a smart and handsome British man.

I like the way throughout the series the author created diverse characters that do not often get enough representation in romance books. This time she concentrates on slightly older protagonists – Vivian is 54 and has been divorced for more than three decades. She has also been working hard as a social worker in a busy hospital, raising her daughter as a single mother and taking care of her sister Jo who has had serious health probems. All this meant that she hasn’t had much time for travelling or holidays.

When Maddie Forest unexpectedly is invited to step in and substitute her mentor on a work trip to the UK which is scheduled around Christmastime, Maddie knows she can spend New Year with her boyfriend Theo, but Christmas…Christmas is for family, Christmas is for her mum. Luckily, Vivian is all in. The job is high profile as it involves the royal family and Ms Forest and Ms Forest get to spend a part of their holiday at a royal residence in the north of England. We do not see much of Maddie in this book as she is way too busy with clothes alterations and fittings, so Vivian has a lot of free time to explore the house and marvel at neverending cultural differences. Vivian’s meet cute, Malcolm Hudson has an important job- he is a private secretary of Her Majesty. He has been divorced for six years, and his private life very much centres around his sister and his 19 year old nephew Miles. Malcolm is charmed by Vivian’s smile and positive attitude: ‘She had such a strong and playful sense of self…She was neither demanding nor bashful; just friendly and inquisitive and smiling’. Christmas holidays and New Year are a special time when unusual things can happen and even the most careful and realistic people decide to give in to romance. Malcolm takes time to get to know Vivian and what is important to her, as much as it is possible in the short time they have together. I love the way Vivian vents her feelings on the subject of surprises and how they are often about what the other person wants, not the person they are surprising, and Malcolm takes it aboard to make sure she feels comfortable with the things he suggests.

The fairy-tale setting and royal guest appearances in the book might make you think that this romance is too far away from real life and difficult to relate to, but it isn’t the case. Vivian and Malcolm live thousands of kilometers away, but, ultimately, they will understand that the connection they have is special and worth the risk. You don’t have to be based in different countries to experience this feeling: No, we are too different…No, there is no way it will work… He/She is too set in his /her ways. His job/ college/family is too important for him…The logistics would be a nightmare… And another potentially beautiful relationship bites the dust before you’ve even given it a chance. Yes, our life experiences teach us that we have to be realistic and pragmatic, and avoid risks, and this is how we may end with a job that brings more money, but less joy and happiness, or refuse to apologise to a relative or a friend who might just have a different point of view, but be as right as we are. Vivian and Malcolm knew from the very beginning the risks, but, still, they decided to give it a try, and they certainly deserve their own happy ever after.

This was not a laugh out loud book for me, but Jasmine Guillory’s trademark sense of humour is still there, coupled with her impeccable writing style. If you loved her previous books, and the diversity of her characters and settings, you will definitely appreciate this slightly more mature romance. And if you love tea, scones, cucumber sandwiches and all things British, you will have even more reasons to enjoy this last instalment of Jasmine Guillory’s hugely successful Wedding series .

Thank you to Edelweiss and Berkley for the ARC provided in exchange for an honest opinion.

I enjoyed reading THE WITCHES OF NEW YORK by Ami McKay and found it interesting, engaging, informative and well written. I liked the historical references, and was intrigued by the three main characters and Perdu, who looks like a raven, but is not a bird.
Adelaide Thom, claiming to be a mind reader, and Eleanor St. Clair, a keeper of spells, have a tea shop specializing in cures, potions, and palmistry and cater to Manhattan’s high society ladies. When Beatrice Dunn, a girl of sixteen and interested in magic, shows up at the tea shop, something happens!
Having enjoyed reading this book and The Birth House by Ami McKay, I wish to read The Virgin Cure also written by her.

A little tune that Eleanor’s mother used to sing at the onset of a thunderstorm,’a reminder of the dangers of getting caught in a tempest.’
‘Beware the oak, it draws the stroke. Avoid the ash, it prompts the flash. Creep under the thorn, it saves you from harm.’
Page 357

Some more of my favourite quotes from this book :-
“They’d lived there, just the two of them, in a house so large that even their shadows occasionally got lost.”
Page 13

‘May you rise with the sun, ready to make hay.
May the rains come at night to wash your cares away.
May you sleep with the angels sittin’ on your bed.
May you be an hour in Heaven a’fore the Devil knows you’re dead.’
Page 31

“Careful what you wish for, lest you receive it.”
Page 504

I am excited to add that I did get to meet Ami McKay and hear her read from this book! I think that everyone present enjoyed listening to her talk about her interest in witchcraft and extensive research in preparation to write this book. She welcomed and answered questions until there were no more.
As an aside, that same evening, I had the pleasure and surprise of a private encounter with Ami McKay. She is lovely!

This is the final installment in ‘Napier’s trilogy on one of the most famous non-Roman historical figures.
It starts off reasonably well enough with the siege of Viminacium, a legionary fortress though one which is nevertheless incredibly provincial in comparison to what it would have been like at the apogee of Roman might.
Napier’s sporadically used abilities for deep characterisation are at their most evidenced for the characters who feature predominantly in this part of the story – though a number of survivors do feature more or less throughout the rest of the book.
Sadly, that level of characterisation isn’t sustained through the rest of the book as it feels like the story is going through the motions to close the loop of the story rather than being driven by intrigue or passionate story-telling.

There are times when it actually becomes something of a slog just to keep going with the story and, I’ll be honest, if I didn’t already know that this was the end of the trilogy and the climax to the tale, I would quite easily have bailed midway through.
As it was, it was ultimately the final reckoning for both Aetius and Attila which kept me slogging through this book, which was at times more pompous and possibly even pretentious, certainly more so than I recall the author’s previous works being.

If I have to read one more case of a warrior quoting poetry to himself like some cheesy 50s MGM sword-and-sandals epic, I might just throw the book out the window. Not to mention that there is also a rather glaring error in that the characters refer to Constantinople as Byzantium, even though it had changed names almost a century earlier than the events in the book.

Overall, an initially appealing but gradually underwhelming, increasingly tepid affair which is also a relatively sound summary of the trilogy itself.

I first became aware of ‘Napier’ after reading his book on the Siege Of Malta in 1565 and, while there was still occasions where the pretense and poetry loving got a bit OTT, it was still a relatively rip roaring read. There’s relatively little, if any, of the same compulsion to this story. If I was being harsh, I could sum it up basically as a “by the numbers” story; average, standard fare. Kind of like the jacket potato of the historical fiction world.

If you’re genuinely interested in Attila the Hun, Aetius or the fall of the Roman empire, frankly a good non-fiction book would do a far better job of engaging with the reader than what’s on display here.

Distinctly average & bland.

In every way a leap up from the first.

For thirty pages I was uncertain; before page fifty I was won. Won by Attila, whom Napier has ambition to portray as a truly great man – and succeeds, for me. Won also by description of the steppe. The first had an element of fantasy; this doesn’t, but I was put in mind of fantasy whenever we journey over the steppe: description both very real in local detail and a little surreal, and just the sense of the unexplored, the strange (yet not fantastic) landscapes to be met with. Won, thirdly, by a philosophical vein in the book.

That’s largely from the person of Attila. Attila gave his first speech around page fifty, or more of a contemplation aloud over the campfire, for three pages. Near the end of the book we have a chapter called, ‘Attila Speaks, the Council Listens’ and that’s his fieriest speech, for seven pages. I was electrified by both. But it’s daring, isn’t it, it’s stretching the expectations of histfic – Attila speaks, for several pages, and when I tell you he quotes from a kindred spirit, he gives you a couple of proverbs from ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, you’re going to talk about trespasses against histfic, maybe. I happen to be an admirer of William Blake as of Attila, and I can see where their thoughts about the world might intersect. Does that make me the audience for this book?

There are two ways in which this is not the straightest of straight histfic. I can get bored with the straightest of the straight, so I’m happy with both of these: they either crank up my brain or they fire my imagination. I’ve told you one; the other has to do with history.

The plot of this second is, Attila unites the steppe. Black Huns, White Huns, the monstrous Kutrigur Huns, once-Huns who have settled and corrupted: by means fair or foul he has them declare a brotherhood, to be one army, Huns undistinguished, against the settled world. We visit the steppe from end to end; Attila has travel tales from his thirty years of exile, he has seen the Yellow River and the Great Wall, he has been to the Huns’ lost home in the Ordos. There you have it. Attila’s Huns keep a memory of China, and the name of China does not cross their lips – until Attila is bold enough, not only to remind them of their old humiliations, but to forge a nomad army and march, first against Rome and next, against the original enemy, the other empire that has done the Huns wrong. For Rome and China are two imperial peas in a pod, to nomad eyes, and Attila has speeches to tell you why.

Now, this can’t exactly be called historical. It draws on history before and after. I think he has drawn on Attila’s later distant cousin, Genghis – both for Attila’s life story, and for this grand conception of conquest east and west. These Huns can sing the Mongols’ origin legends, and the Turkic epic Manas. Of this I’m going to say, Napier widens history. He fits more history in. He has a time period, but he draws into that strands from before and after, because he wants to talk about historical issues – large ones. He wants to talk about the settled and the steppe, and to that end Attila, steppe spokesman, knows things he can’t have known, travels further than in any likelihood he did. As I say, this is fine by me, and makes for a fiction that comments on history.

There’s a Roman interlude, to keep us up to date with Rome and Constantinople. This wasn’t a trot-through, for me; I cared about the people we meet – Aetius and Athenais – and I’m glued to the page by his style. The scandal-sheet was a riot, as were the deviant adventures of Galla Placida’s daughter. Though the latter stopped being funny when she has a hideous forced abortion. Napier always has a heart for the unfortunate, and though awful things happen in this book, he writes about them with humanity. Only once or twice do I think his love of description runs away with him so that he glories in the porridge brains out the saucepan of the skull. With descriptive skills like his, I understand an ill-judged one or two.

Despite the subtitle, I bought this book expecting it to be more of a memoir than it actually is. I think Amy Tan’s main purpose in writing it was to set the record straight on a variety of topics, beginning with an inaccurate summary of her life that turned up in an edition of CliffsNotes. She does so in essays that directly address the points that need to be made, and also tosses in other writings that range from a college commencement address to an item she wrote for the newspaper when eight years old.

As such, it’s somewhat disjointed and uneven. Some parts appealed to me much more than others.

Early on, she provides some personal and family history, which includes plenty of elements readers will recognize from her fiction (a character who goes one day each year without speaking, for example, and most certainly the memorable voice of her mother). This is followed by a section in which she argues that readers ought not assume that her stories are autobiographical. (Maybe they aren’t, but reading between the lines in yet another section one can conclude that she sees a self-portrait in The Kitchen God’s Wife.) There’s also an eloquent rebuttal to the people in publishing and educational circles who insist on pidgeon-holing her as a representative of her ethnic group, gender, color, etc. and looking to her for politically correct lessons. That kind of writing, she feels (and I agree) amounts to propaganda, not literature. She says, “I write stories about life as I have misunderstood it. To be sure, it’s a Chinese-American life, but that’s the only one I’ve had so far.”

There are points at which it seems the lady protests too much. She mentions a journalist friend who says, “Any attention is valuable … If you receive any, you should be grateful.” I rather agree with that as well, because Tan’s path to literary success appears to have been unusually smooth. Better to be misunderstood by some harebrained people than completely ignored. This is not to suggest that she doesn’t deserve success; she emphatically does. But she too acknowledges that she has been lucky.

Her luck has not been only literary, since apparently she’s had more than her share of close brushes with death. For me, the final section is devastating. It describes a mysterious illness that overtook her and the frustratingly slow process of getting a diagnosis. Because of the story described in my own book, I recognized her discovery that most doctors and even professional medical societies are clueless when presented with something out of the ordinary. I recognized the cynical but helpful voices she found on Internet discussion boards, and her conclusion that, rare or not, this thing afflicts a heck of a lot of other people.

I found most of this book utterly fascinating. It sparked an interest in going back and rereading her novels. It reaffirmed an earlier impression that Amy Tan is someone I’d be glad to know (an impression that faded when I later visited her Facebook page). Most importantly, in discussing her life and what has been important to her, she shows how much of the joys and fears of this existence are common experiences