This well written historical novel gives a glimpse into a less well known aspect of slavery namely, the slave trade in England. The depictions of life in 18th C Bristol are believable. The follies of the newly rich are applicable to all times and were amusing. The romance between the Yoruban slave and the mistress of the house is a bit overdone but a useful vehicle for the plot. What kept this from being really excellent was the somewhat superficial characterizations.

This book was very well written, but also very stark and unflinching in its portrayal of the slave trade in the city of Bristol at the end of the eighteenth century. It was not a nice time, and the city was neither genteel nor polite, no matter how much it pretended to be. The book captured this roughness, as well as the political maneuverings of the very rich, who managed to use everyone who was not included in their select circle for their own personal gain.

Enter into this scene one impoverished lady with only her good name, an ambitious merchant and his sister, and a highly educated slave, and you get a story filled with complicated loyalties and difficult questions. What impressed me about this book is that it offered no trite answers to these questions.

A Respectable Trade is a book that will definetly shock you. It is the story of two people - Yoruban seer and healer Mehuru, and the repressed English lady Francis Scott. In the beginning of the novel, Francis is thirty four, and becoming desperate for a husband. When she gets an offer from the social climbing merchant Josiah Cole, she quickly accepts. She finds out early in her marriage that Josiah has made most of his money from the "respectable" business of slave trading. At this same point, Mehuru has been captured, thrown on a boat bound for England... and the household of Josiah and Francis. This book is interesting more for its historical deatils and insight than for its (admittedly rather silly) romance. But the history is enough to make it an extremely thought provoking and intelligent book.

I suppose that if you read this book by itself, it would be tolerable, but after reading Wideacre, it only seemed like a weak echo, the same story being played out yet again at Wideacre.

12 year old Julia Lacey is haunted by dreams of the past and premonitions of the future. All she wants is to see the town of Wideacre flourish again and put food in the mouths of the hungry.

She is named as joint heir for Wideacre, along with her cousin, Richard. Because he is the boy, he gets the education and the freedom. He indeed seems to be the favoured child. Meanwhile, Julia has to be content with becoming friends with the townfolk, learning the history of Wideacre and the Laceys and unravelling why she seems to have 'the sight'. Why she seems to have the power of her predecessor, Beatrice to make the crops grow.

I really enjoyed the return of Ralph in this sequel, and the struggle that Julia had to fight as a woman with virtually no rights in a man's world. Philippa Gregory is very talented at writing a story of nasty people with bad intentions.

I couldn't wait to begin this book after finishing Wideacre. I
was not disappointed. This book was as enjoyable and engrossing
as the first book in the triology.

I bought this book because the description on the cover made it out to be a great romance novel about love and war. Instead, this book is twisted, dark and just a big let down. The many tragic events in the book are just too extreme and depressing. Not only that, but once you get to the last chapters the ending becomes very predictable and feels as though it was done in a rush because the author already drove the book into such darkness that she needed to find something (no matter how unimaginative) and quick. I would'nt recommend this book to anyone looking for something romanic or uplifting and I don't think that publishers should mislead buyers with their book descriptions.

Fallen Skies is a delicately written book full of dark and terrible imagery. The main character of the book is Lily Valance, a naive young singer who longs for fame. Lily catches the eye of WWI vet Stephen Winters, a middle class man who has been scarred beyond belief by his fighting experiences. He determines to marry her, despite the fact she herself is more concerned with singing and the elusive, attractive piano player Charlie. The lives of these three people intertwine, and lead both to tragedy and joy. A word of warning - the story is wonderful, yet some of the images (Stephen's flashbacks from the war) are explicit and brutal. If you are looking for a fascinating read that studiously avoids cliches, then I would definetly reccommend this book!

I discovered Philippa Gregory within the last year and have now read five of her books, Fallen Skies being the most recent. As always, she has created multi-dimensional characters where it's possible to even feel some sympathy for the "villain" of the piece. The heroine of the book, Lily Vallance, is very much a product of her times when roles for women were quite restrictive. Gregory does a great job of portraying just how much power husbands had over their wives in the early part of the last century. Her husband, World War I vet, Stephen Winters, is a tragic figure although to state he was purely a product of the horrors of the war may not be quite true. His own upbringing and profound sibling rivalry also had to have played a part in the man he became in the trenches of Belgium.

The supporting characters of Charlie, Lily's true love, Muriel, Stephen's mother and Coventry, Stephen's chauffeur/best friend are wonderfully written. I especially enjoyed Gregory's constant reference to the food that "Cook" served the family during the rigidly proscribed meal times. She ably described the societal customs of the upper middle class and how Lily constantly chafed at them.

This is not a romance novel, by any means, but a fascinating story of what happened to the generation of men who fought in World War I and the impact of this on those left on the home front.

There isn't much to this novel. I found myself skipping pages just so the story would advance. The plot was predictable from the first few chapters. I was hoping the story would take a turn for the better, perhaps turning into an Ethan Frome type novel, only to be disappointed. Not worth the time or effort.

I kept wanting this book to improve upon itself. It has an interesting premise and a very catchy ending, but there are too many problems in the writing for me to give it a strong recommendation. The author is trying to make parallels between the life of her protagonist, Isabel Latimer, and Isabel's writing (she specializes in high-toned fiction about moral choices). Now, of course, Isabel has a moral choice to make. What will she do?

Unfortunately, she drags out the story and the point of view from which the story is told isn't consistant. The writing ranges from very good to downright trashy. When the story goes into somewhat deviant sex scenes it just gets silly. There are also holes in the story that a truck could be driven through (a man puts on woman's clothes and makeup in ten minutes, and fools an entire television studio. Yeah, right).

It was interesting enough to keep me reading, but was a lost opportunity for what could have been a boffo story.

The author of a large body of truly outstanding historical fiction, Philippa Gregory has also written several novels which are set in the modern day. The tone of these books vary a great deal. On one end of the spectrum, there are her cheery feminist fairy tales, Mrs. Hartley and the Growth Centre and Perfectly Correct - on the other, the dark domestic realism of her novel The Little House. Sitting rather uneasily between these two extremes sits Gregory's new novel, Zelda's Cut. Zelda's Cut starts promisingly, with an examination of the strains and stresses put on a loving marriage by the ravages of illness. Isobel Latimer deeply loves her ailing husband, Philip. But the pain he suffers daily has changed him so completely - from the light-footed, light-hearted man that she knew and loved and married into a man who is bitter, reproachful, and sad - that some days she finds it hard not to give into despair. This section of the novel is truly heart-breaking - a realistic, no-holds-barred look at the toll that chronic illness takes on both the patient, and the loved ones who care for them. And then - the mood changes; turns surreal. Within a few chapters, a slow, sad realistic story about the pressures put on people when one of their loved ones is in pain and facing the possibility of death turns into a tale of risk, deception, cross-dressing, literary impersonation, and sudden switches of identity. Zelda's Cut is, like all of Gregory's books, a real page-turner - filled with interesting characters, intriguing situations, and a (at least for me!) truly surprising ending. But unlike the finest of her previous works - the quiet, philosophical Earthly Joys, and the demented, impassioned Wideacre, Zelda's Cut cannot seem to decide what kind of book it wants to be. Is it a serious examination of what a marriage is like after love and hope are gone, or is it a more light-hearted piece about the redeeming virtues of adultery and a new hairstyle? Even after having read this interesting but uneven book, I'm not entirely sure.