FF Friday

Two novels about as different in subject matter and tone as it's possible to be while remaining within the scope of this community. Although both are fascinated with ink and paper (or vellum, as the case may be), now I come to think of it... Anyway, I enjoyed both of them tremendously and found both difficult to put down.

Paper Love (Jae) is a gentle romance between Susanne, a troubleshooting business consultant, and her uncle's employee Anja. The uncle's business is a stationery shop, which is, unbeknown to Anja, being propped up by his savings. Susanne's brought in to sort things out. The problem is, she doesn't really get why people (Anja included) would be interested in pens and ink in the twenty-first century... This isn't so much an 'opposites attract' romance as a 'people get off on the wrong foot and then sort things out' romance, and I enjoyed watching things getting sorted out. It's set in Freiburg; the city is described with affectionate detail, and I found myself wanting to go there. Maybe next year... Recommended if you want something calming where you know everything's going to work out.

The Gospel of Eve (Rachel Mann) is - well, I attended the launch event on Zoom and the author called it a 'theological thriller', possibly by comparison with a 'psychological thriller'? Anyway, it's set in a theological college in the mid nineties, though it opens with a prologue in which the narrator looks back from about now at the moment she discovered her lover's body hanging in the chapel. Kitty, the narrator, is attempting to escape her working class background. Her relationship (first friends, then lovers) with Evie is a step in that direction; her PhD in medieval history gets the two of them the entrée to a clique of
with an interest in rare books and unconventional disciplines. Inevitably, it all goes horribly wrong; the fascination lies in how. Recommended if you like the gothic, and things where you never quite know what's going on or what the characters are up to.

The Morning After (Jae) was a readable and engaging story, though it ran entirely on stereotypes and awkwardness. Woman gets blackout drunk escaping from a bad Valentine's Day date, wakes up in unfamiliar bed, and so on.

DNF Play Me A Song (Jessica Kale), which combined a clumsy style with unbelievable and unsympathetic characters. I'm afraid I got exactly what I paid for in this case.