Wrap-Up of the 2023 What's in a Name Reading Challenge

Six titles were required to be read for this challenge.  Each book title had to contain a word from one of the following categories: 

• punctuation
• 7 deadly sins
• you or me
• chess piece
• celebration
• q, x, z

I met the challenge with eight books! Here is what I read:

Keeper of the Queen's Jewels by Adrienne Dillard

Zemindar by Valerie Fitzgerald

Someone Else's Life by Lyn Liao Butler

The Godmother's Secret by Elizabeth St. John

Sea of Greed by Clive Cussler

The Importance of Pawns by Keira Morgan

Follow You Home by Mark Edwards

Dinner Party by Sarah Gilmartin

I have been participating in the challenge for years.  I hope that it will continue in 2024 but I have not heard anything yet.

The Importance of Pawns

I have not read any books written by Keira Morgan before.  In fact, I never heard of her until I was searching for a book title with a chess piece in the title for the What's in a Name Reading Challenge.  Two date, she has published two novels and a third will be published soon.  Morgan writes historical fiction and does it well.  The Importance of Pawns was a satisfying read.

The publisher's summary:

Step into the lavish world of sixteenth-century French court, where danger lurks beneath the glittering facade. In this enthralling tale, Claude, a queen in name only, must navigate treacherous waters to outwit her rival, win her husband to her side, save her sister, and assert her power. Amidst the backdrop of a dying queen, Claude and young Renée find themselves as heiresses to the coveted duchy of Brittany.

Their guardian, Countess Louise, harbors envy and schemes to steal their inheritance. With cunning and ambition, she plans to marry off Claude to her own son, seizing the opportunity presented by her unexpected guardianship. But standing in Countess Louise's way is Baronne Michelle, a devoted protector of the princesses and their interests.

As political tensions escalate, the futures of Princess Renée and the Baronne hang precariously, threatened by the countess's machinations. Will timid Claude unravel the treacherous intrigues woven by Countess Louise? Can she outmaneuver her and safeguard young Princess Renée? And most importantly, will she find the courage to defend those she loves?

"The Importance of Pawns" is a gripping historical fiction novel inspired by real events and characters. It weaves a timeless tale of envy, power, and intrigue, where loyalty and the strength of women's friendships are put to the ultimate test. From revenge and deceit to love and bravery, this mesmerizing story will hold you captive until the very last page.

Join in this remarkable journey where history comes alive. Discover the indomitable spirit of Claude and her fight for justice. Immerse yourself in a world where alliances are fragile, secrets abound, and the strength of one woman's resolve can change everything.

The story takes place in 16th century Renaissance France. I enjoyed reading about the sumptuous banquets, gowns and chateaux apartments of this era.  I had not heard about any of these characters in history before and believe that Ms. Morgan is the first author to write about them.  In this respect, she made a great choice to write about them.

So, who were the pawns in the story?  Just about every character is a pawn of someone else.  In general, the ladies were pawns of the men but they were the greatest manipulators of events and overshadowed the men.  Louise and Michelle were the biggest manipulators but they themselves were manipulated by others. Princess Claude and her young sister Renee were the biggest pawns in this story. Claude eventually overcame her timidity in the last chapter. Renee was too young to gain mastery over her life.

The book ended abruptly with Claude entering her confinement. It was an odd place to end a story.  The reader does not know if she gave birth to a boy or girl of whether the child lived.  Even if there was a sequel to this novel, this was still a weird place to end. Thus, I am rating the book 4 out of 5 stars.    

Dinner Party

Dinner Party is the debut novel of Irish author Sarah Gilmartin. I selected the book for the What's In a Name Challenge's celebration category. It was published on March 7, 2023 by Pushkin Press.

The publisher's summary:  

A riveting, beautifully written, and poignant coming-of-age story about the heartrending complications of sibling relationships and the trauma of family secrets, perfect for fans of Kate Atkinson, Maggie O’Farrell, and Anne Enright.

Kate has taught herself to be careful, to be meticulous.

To mark the anniversary of a death in the family, she plans a dinner party - from the fancy table settings to the perfect Baked Alaska waiting in the freezer. Yet by the end of the night, old tensions have flared, the guests have fled, and Kate is spinning out of control.

But all we have is ourselves, her father once said, all we have is family.

Set between the 1990s and the present day, from a farmhouse in Carlow to Trinity College, Dublin, Dinner Party is a dark, sharply observed debut told with sharp, elegant humour that thrillingly unravels into family secrets and tragedy.

I had a hard time maintaining interest in this novel. It started out great with a chapter about Kate and her twin Eileen in the 1990s before Eileen passed away. The story then shifted to the present with the dinner that Kate hosted in Eileen's memory. 

The characters were dull. I felt no attachment to any of them. Kate's mother could have been a wonderful villain.  Mom was self-centered and was constantly criticizing her kids. While she gave them the best she could afford, Mom was physically and emotionally abusive.

The story is told from Kate's perspective. The reader slowly understands that she has an eating disorder. If this would be a trigger for you then you will want to avoid Dinner Party.  The plot premise is a good one and if the book was written entirely in the present it could have been fantastic. It's slow pace is not helpful for the reader either.

Dinner Party was a miss for me. I am rating it 2 out of 5 stars.

Sea of Greed

I chose Clive Cussler's Sea of Greed for the What's In a Name Challenge. The specific category this was chosen for was one of the deadly sins in the book title. 

The publisher's summary:

After an explosion in the Gulf of Mexico destroys three oil rigs trying to revive a dying field, Kurt Austin and the NUMA Special Projects Team are tapped by the President of the United States to find out what's gone wrong. The trail leads them to a brilliant billionaire in the alternative energy field. Her goal is the end of the oil age; her company has spent billions developing the worlds' most advanced fuel-cell systems. But is she an environmental hero...or a rogue genetic engineer?

The NUMA crew discovers that the oil fields are infected with bacteria that are consuming the oil before it can be pumped out of the earth--a bacteria originally lost decades ago when two submarines vanished in the Mediterranean.

With hired killers on his trail, can Kurt Austin locate a submarine that's remained hidden for more than fifty years? And even if he can, can the biological terror that's been unleashed be stopped?

The story opened with alot of action. Because it has been a long time since I have read a NUMA story, I did not remember who the main characters were. I was further confused in the beginning because the opening chapters were from different points of view. It was hard to follow. Once I understood who was who, the story was fun to read. The pace was extremely fast and more than held my interest.

The plot concerns drilling for oil. I thought it was creative to have a bacteria infect the oil wells. I don't know whether this is something that can actually happen or not but it was interesting to read about. I would imagine it's a real problem since Cussler writes about current issues. 

Aside from my confusion in the beginning, Sea of Greed is a fantastic novel. I am rating it 4 out of 5 stars.

Follow You Home

Follow You Home is an eerie psychological thriller by Mark Edwards that was published in 2015. I selected it for the What's in a Name Reading Challenge and, boy, am I glad that I did. It was fantastic.  The story begins with Brits Daniel Sullivan and Laura Mackenzie traveling to Romania at the end of a two month trip through Europe.  Planning to marry and have children, they decide that they should have one last holiday together before family issues come in the way. They have already visited Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Hungary and Belgium and want to see Eastern Europe as a contrast to the traditional European sites. Daniel is an app developer and Laura works in marketing for a children's charity. After boarding a train to Romania, the couple meets Ion and Alina. Alina is a comic writer and Ion, well, he is a professional bully. When Ion convinces them to take a nap in a sleeping car that is unused, they wake up to find that their passports, credit cards, and phones are missing from their bags. Soon they are confronted by a train conductor who is checking tickets. After explaining that they were robbed, the conductor throws Daniel, Laura and Alina off the train. The terror begins but when the return to London, Daniel and Laura are emotionally unable to even mention what happened after they were let off that train in Breva, Romania. Laura begins to see ghosts and is the first to realize that something evil followed them home.

This is an atmospheric thriller. We don't know what actually happened in Breva until the midway point of the story when Daniel finally tells his psychologist what happened. I expected the couple to have seen something pretty horrific in order to substantiate their diagnoses of PTSD and Daniel's excessive drinking. Laura began seeing ghosts, something that she also dealt with in childhood. While it was bad, I expected more. The eerie atmosphere begins when they get home and Laura starts seeing Alina, who was killed in Breva, and other men whose faces they both remember seeing in Breva. Daniel believes that every person he tells about the horror he experienced is being murdered and he feels that all these events are connected. His psychologist is killed in a fire and his best friend kills himself one night when he was should actually be happy about getting a record contract. Connected? Maybe. I don't want to be a spoiler.  

I thought this was a fantastic story.  It kept my interest from the first pages all the way to the end. I am rating it only 4 out of 5 stars because I wanted the Breva horror show to be more dramatic.

Someone Else's Life

Annie Lin’s life crumbles. Her dance studio goes bankrupt. Her mother and beloved dog are gone the same year. Then a terrible accident leaves her young son traumatized. It’s time for a change. Palm trees, mai tais, peace and quiet―Annie should be at ease, safe in her new Kauai home with her husband and son. She hopes proximity to her family can provide them all with a sense of belonging and calm. But soon items from her past start turning up―her dog’s collar, a bracelet that disappeared years ago―and she has the unnerving sensation she’s being watched. Reality begins to fracture, and Annie’s panic attacks return. When, during a brewing storm, a woman appears on her doorstep looking for shelter, Annie is relieved to have the company and feels an unexplainable bond with her visitor. As the night progresses, Annie realizes the woman is no stranger. Their lives are inextricably intertwined―and Annie might just lose everything.

Atmospheric and Hitchcockian. Both of these descriptions of the book are accurate. I couldn't put the book down and was extremely interested in figuring out what was happening. I couldn't believe that Annie let Serena into her home and knew that Serena was going to be the villain. However, some of the red flags that Annie ignored were unbelievable. While Annie knew what was happening was questionable she continued to let it happen. Annie should have trusted her instincts and made her leave. Of course, we wouldn't have a great story if she had and this is a fantastic story. It's always amazing to me when an author's debut novel is so good.  I expect nothing but suspenseful stories from her in the future. She has two more novels ready to be published in the next year.  Check this book out.

5 out of 5 stars.

Zemindar

Zemindar was published in 1981. I selected it because I needed a book title beginning with Z for the Alphabet Soup Reading Challenge. It is an epic story (1,031 pages) of a family that moves from England to India just before the Indian Mutiny. The book won the Georgette Hayer Historical Novel Prize that same year. The main character is Englishwoman Laura Hewitt. Laura accompanies her cousin Emily and Emily's husband Charles to Calcutta which is a wedding trip, not honeymoon, where Laura is a paid lady's companion for her cousin. She is also in love with Charles. After several months the group meets Charles' half-brother Oliver Erskine who is the zemindar, or hereditary ruler, of a vast estate called Hassanganj. Charles had never met Oliver before but receives an invitation to visit Hassanganj. While they are there, Emily gives birth and the Sepoy rebellion and siege of Lucknow occurs, known in history as the Mutiny, the Sepoy Rebellion and The First War for Independence. Zemindar has been republished several times in the past forty years. Each time the font gets bigger and the book has grown from its original 799 pages to the current 1031 pages. I am glad for the font size and cannot imagine how hard it would be been to read this after its initial publication. 

I finished the book in just 3 days. The story moved along quickly but there was a lull in the action when the characters were escaping from Hassanganj, which was about 200 pages long. Other than that, Zemindar was a captivating read. The characters were well developed and all of them were kindhearted to each other. They had opposite personalities which gave the novel some flavor. Laura is the main character and her point of view dominates. She is the character who grew the most during her nine months in India. Laura had an independent mind before the trip. Her cousin Emily and husband Charles were stuck in the rigid mindset of the British upper classes and could not adjust to India's culture. Oliver was the villain of the story but he wasn't really a villain. His reputation was rough, having had many sexual affairs with both British and Indian women. Even though he was born into a wealthy British family, he was raised in India and spent his entire life there. He understood the importance of independence to the Indians as well as their customs. Oliver was respected by them for accommodating their religious traditions but also by living their lifestyle. The reader learns about their side of the story on independence from Oliver's dialogue. The reader also learns about the history of the Mutiny, although it is from the point of view of the British. Still, there are aspects of what happened that are true to history. 

The descriptions of India were on point. It is an exotic destination for me and I never tire reading about it. In every book set in India that I have read, the British characters are incredibly bored. None of them have much to do and partying becomes a must. Zemindar shows this the best, perhaps because of the page count. The oppressive heat in India is best described here also. The author has the characters removing their excessive clothing at certain times of the day, napping during the warmest part of the day and sipping water at the right times in order to stay healthy. 

I loved Zemindar and am rating it 4 out of 5 stars. It lost one star for the dull escape they made from Hassanganj.

Keeper of the Queen's Jewels

Adrienne Dillard has published four books to date, three of them historical fiction accounts of Jane Seymour, Catherine Carey (Anne Boleyn's niece) and Jane Boleyn.  Keeper of the Queen's Jewels is her most recent novel, which was published in 2022 and it is about Jane Seymour.

The publisher's summary:

Two women with opposing allegiances are bound together by desperate circumstances: one must birth a son to secure the throne. The other hides a dangerous secret that could cost them their lives. No longer the meek and mild, the ineffectual queen of the history books, Jane Seymour is reimagined as a woman on the precipice - one misplaced step away from oblivion. 

In the maid's dormitory, Margery Horsman struggles as she comes to terms with the fallout of her careless words, uttered recklessly in a fit of envy and greed, ending in the ruin and death of her first love. Surrounded, yet feeling alone and abandoned, Margery searches for her place in the world. When a young widower still grieving over the loss of his wife asks for her hand, Margery steps into a role she never imagined, that of mother to a half-orphaned boy.

As religious rebellion threatens to tear the country in two, fortune's wheel turns, and formerly rising stars of the Tudor court tumble. Amid the upheaval, a queen and her devoted maid will unite to preserve the legacy of Anne Boleyn for England's once and future queen:  Gloriana. 

Each chapter alternates between the points of view of Jane Seymour and Margery Horsman. Margery was one of the ladies in waiting for Anne Boleyn who stayed on at Henry VIII's behest after Anne's beheading. For some reason he kept on all of Anne's attendants. I can only presume that there were political reasons for this but the book doesn't go into it. At first Margery handled the wardrobe but later became in charge of the jewelry. She was adept at picking out the right jewels for the right gown. 

The characters were taken from real life. I was not familiar with them in depth, particularly Jane Seymour, and I learned alot about her political ability. Yes, she did have some ability. I was not aware that she was terrified of ending up like her predecessor but I probably should have known that she would be afraid. Any woman would mistrust Henry VIII considering how he disposed of two prior wives. The Tudor setting is always going to be exciting for me. I love reading about the dresses that the ladies wore, and the jewels of course, as well as descriptions of the food offered at feasts. 

Keeper has a nice take on often told stories of the wives of Henry VIII. With the perspective of someone with real power, the power of holding the jewels, the reader learns everything that that entails.

5 out of 5 stars.