All three of the books I am about to review were free ebooks at Amazon's Kindle shop, and all three of them Christmas reads. If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know that I enjoy seasonal reading, and around Christmas, I don't shy away from some truly kitschy stuff. I finished reading these stories a while ago but only now got round to typing up short reviews for them.
Donna Douglas
The author has written a series of books set in the East End of London in the 1930s at the Nightingale Hospital. This one is a short Christmas story.
While on duty at Christmas, a nurse is doing her best to make this a special time for the children who are in her care. When a newborn baby is found and brought to the hospital, the young nurse is confronted not only with the immediate care of the little patient, but also with her own past. Will she be able to let the spirit of Christmas enter her heart?
I'd not come across Donna Douglas before and am not in a hurry to seeking out her other hospital books, but this one was nicely written and made for a short, cosy Christmas read, just what I wanted at the time.
I might check out her books set in Yorkshire - she is originally from London but now lives in York, something i have just learned from her website, which you can find here.
# 34, 35: Comfort Crossing Holiday Collection
Kay Correll
Two stories make up this collection. Both are set in Comfort Crossing, a small U.S. town where a close-knit community of families, friends and neighbours lead what goes for typical small-town lives. In both stories, characters from the other story appear, but they aren't installments as such, and it is not necessary to know the other books in the series to understand them.
To her dismay, when she arrives at the cottage that is to be her temporary home while working in the town, she finds everything there ready for Christmas, and her next-door neighbours who own the cottage are as eager to celebrate the holiday as she is to avoid it.
I'm not going to tell you more since maybe you enjoy a kitschy-cosy Christmas read like I do and want to download this one for next Christmas. It was very foreseeable and of course most of the characters are too good to be true, but that's ok - nobody claims that it's a documentary :-)
"The Christmas Scarf" introduces us to another young woman, but this one is actually from Comfort Crossing and home for the holidays - or so she wants everybody to believe while she's sorting out her life after her ambition of making it as a Country singer has failed.
With help from her family and friends as well as from a mysterious stranger, the young woman finds that all she really wants is not so far away from home.
Another author I was not familiar with. Her website is here.
The Genius loci of a story is everything.
ReplyDeleteComfort Crossing or London's East End where so many writers grew up.
In 1970 I visited Fashion Street in Spitalfields where my hero Arnold Wesker was born.
I talked to Wily Goldman another East End author from the Jewish diaspora.
Wesker's mother was from Transylvania, Goldman's parents were Russian-Romanian,
and Wily grew up in Stepney.
Emanuel Litvinoff's parents emigrated from Odessa to Whitechapel.
Alexander Baron grew up in Hackney (born 1917 like my mother) and his father was
a furrier from Poland, a kinder country to Jews than Russia with its pogroms.
Baron was a Labour Party activist, a democratic socialist like Wesker.
London's old East End in colour. YouTube.
London 1945 in colour, Post World War II. YouTube.
Poplar and Bow the real East End. YouTube.
Willy Goldman 2010-2009 born in Stepney, author of the classic memoir,
DeleteEast End My Cradle. Left school at 14 to work in a sweat shop, self educated.
*Willy Goldman obituary The Guardian 2009 online.*
London has always been a true melting pot where people from all corners of the Earth have come to live and make a living.
DeleteI must admit that I have never heard of Wily Goldman, Arnold Wesker, Emanuel Litvinoff and Alexander Baron. My reading will never be on the level you have achieved.
Trying to finish a Jo Nesbo gruesome murder novel before starting Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet, which has been on my bookshelf for months, before seeing the film.
ReplyDeleteI am not familiar with either authors, but a gruesome murder novel sounds... gruesome! A good murder mystery can really capture me; one of my next ebooks will be one. On paper, I am between books at the moment and will probably start on a novel by Ian McEwan today.
Delete