Category: Off The Shelf

Off The Shelf bookclub

Elizabeth and Her German Garden

 

Book review: ‘Elizabeth and Her German Garden’ by Elizabeth Von Arnim

This book is a delightful read which gave a glimpse into the life of a wealthy German lady in the 1800s, who gently mocks the conventions of marriage and motherhood. The chapters show her life through the seasons and depict a rural world that seems long past. Elizabeth truly lives for her garden, but her precious time outdoors is often interrupted by her three children and playing a rather reluctant host to visitors and wife to her ‘Man of Wrath’.

The fictional Elizabeth finds consolation in the beauty of nature and keeps her sanity and humour by remaining outside the conventions of society and the demands of ‘feminine duty’. Off the Shelf Book Club gave this book a score of 9 out of 10

 

 

‘The Age Of Innocence’,Novel By Edith Wharton

‘The Age Of Innocence’,Novel By Edith Wharton

This month’s book was ‘The Age of Innocence’, a 1920’s novel by American author Edith Wharton. The book is set in the 1870s, in upper-class New York Society. Although we appreciated Wharton’s attention to detail, we found the book introduced too many characters in the first few pages and we discovered that we needed a family tree to catch up. When we established who was who, we found ourselves immersed in the plot.

The story is centred around Newland Archer a young gentleman lawyer who finds himself attracted to Countess Ellen Olenska, his fiancée’s cousin. The countess has a tainted background and is thus shunned by elegant society. The book demonstrates the boundaries and restrictions associated with wealth and class and one’s position in society. We couldn’t agree whether Archer’s fiancée Mary was actually an innocent in the proceedings (as suggested by the title) or manipulative in trying to save her marriage. We all agreed this was an enjoyable and insightful read and gave it an overall score of 8/10.

 

 

The Cuckoo’s Calling

The Cuckoo’s Calling

This month’s book was Robert Galbraith’s ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’. This is the first of the Strike detective series written under a pseudonym by J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series. Rowling’s identity was leaked before the televised series of her third book was launched.

Cormoran Strike is a war veteran whose injuries resulted in the amputation of a leg. After a period of convalescence, Strike opens a London-based private detective agency on borrowed money. Strike’s story opens with his break-up from his glamorous but disturbed girlfriend and we find him camping out in his office. Robin Ellacott is sent by a secretarial agency to work for Strike and her initiative helps him solve the murder of a supermodel who plunged to her death from her balcony. Despite Strike’s financial difficulties, Robin proves her worth and her position is made permanent.

As with the Potter books, Galbraith’s vibrant attention to detail gives readers a vivid description of the characters and their surroundings. One of our group found this irritating and related that much of the first quarter of the book was distended and longwinded, but thereafter found it to be a page-turner. We all thought that the book was an enjoyable light read and that the protagonist proved to be more than the stereotypical hard-drinking private detective that had fallen on hard times. Galbraith painted a tawdry picture of mostly shallow people and we were all surprised by the choice of crude language which punctuated Strike’s thoughts and conversations. However, this was probably influenced by our knowledge of the identity of the author more than our sensitivity. Overall, we gave the book a score of 7.5 and might take the next book in the series as a holiday read.

 

 

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