Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
I clinked the edge of my glass against his and closed my eyes against the potent fumes that floated up from the glass as I took a generous sip. The louche, sophisticated manner of speaking she adopts for Lena contrasts well with a myriad of other voices. She likes Carrie who seems so young and controlled by her family, desperate for some company of her own age. This is a stand-alone novel that switches between a transatlantic sea voyage on the Queen Mary in 1936, and events from a week before.
They'd shoved us at the back with a bunch of nobodies, but I convinced the guy in charge to move us. The Abernathy family characters were very one dimensional and I struggled to stay connected enough to even tell some of them apart. Once people start dying off, Lena puts herself into a bit of a detective mode, but she’s fairly passive about it, mostly trying to keep herself on good footing with the Abernathys and trying to keep herself from being blamed for anything.
The characterisation is very good especially of Lena who trades to worlds with her mixed race background. Having been told by Charlie Bacon, who invites Lena to New York on behalf of Broadway Impresario Benny Walker, that she should impress the rich and influential passengers on board, Lena finds herself on the table of the elderly Francis Parker and his relatives. She also becomes the confidant of everyone associated with the Abernathys purely because she is both of the family (she sits at their table every night, along with Charlie Walker, who urges her to charm them) and not of their family. They exchanged a few words, but I saw his gaze wander as she talked, her conversation slowing to a trickle as she realized he wasn't listening. I looked around and congratulated myself on my timing, darting forward to grab a table as a couple vacated it.
Her career in London comes to a screeching halt when her boss, the husband of her best friend, is poisoned while in the audience. Originally from Warrington, the capital is the inspiration for much of her work, including This Lovely City, which began life after a trip into the deep level shelter below Clapham Common. It took me a few chapters to settle into the book but once I did it was such an immersive read, I loved the luxurious setting of the boat and its contrast to the seedy Soho club where we first meet Lena. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.After a murder at the club, the timing couldn't be better, and Lena jumps at the chance to escape England. But it’s even more interesting to go below decks to The Pig and Whistle, a makeshift pub in a loading dock area that is populated at night by the ship’s staff, as well as passengers from all different levels of the ship who want a more covert and informal experience. Also maybe not that much of a mystery, cause i think alot of people might have guessed who the killer was since the author was trying hard to misdirect but overall engaging and i liked the time spent reading this book. And while I also don't mind that Lena is not the detective and largely reacts to things throughout the story instead of acting--this felt right, as a passenger--I do think that at the end, we needed more of an emphatic statement and proactive decision-making from her. I suppose its a murder mystery and it did have the feel of an Agatha Christie novel at times but I saw it more as a social commentary piece and the prejudice of not only race but also class and indeed sex.
However, theres also he question of race, brought to the fore when Lena encounters one of the ship’s band Will.Poor Lena gets drawn into the family's nightly dinners and also gets pulled into being questioned about the murder of one of their family members. Speaking of which, this book is almost 400 pages long at it has multiple “mysteries” to solve, but really… Nothing happens for most of it. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.
The dynamics in this book take on quite a few different directions, which include morality, alcohol and drugs, racism, class distinction, the unfairness that some women face and much more. While on the ship,Lena gets the opportunity to learn more about her past and the book shows how she was sometimes able to pass as white and how she played on either side of race depending on how it would benefit her. Eat peppermint creams from one of those fancy boxes with the tissue paper while sipping champagne that my steward would fetch whenever I rang the bell.One is fairly easy to guess, and dropped without much fanfare after you find out what happened, but the others seemed more farfetched and needed more groundwork established.
Great Deal 
New Comment