Talking at Night by Claire Daverley – Bookish Playlist

Hey there,

Every two months we host a book club on our Instagram page and at the end of the month I will bring you a bookish playlist to go with the book we just finished reading.
Book club pick for the month of May 2024: Talking at Night by Claire Daverley

 

(The moodboard credits are mine. Please give rights if you use it. The singular photos are not mine, all credits to the owner)

 

  PLAYLIST

 

– Mirroball by Taylor Swift
“I’m still a believer but I don’t know why
I’ve never been a natural
All I do is try, try, try
I’m still on that trapeze
I’m still trying everything
To keep you looking at me”

 

– All I Want by Kodaline
“All I want is nothing more
To hear you knocking at my door
‘Cause if I could see your face once more
I could die as a happy man I’m sure”

 

– Nothing by Bruno Major
“Dumb conversations
We lose track of time
Have I told you lately
I’m grateful you’re mine”

 

– Birds of a Feather by Billie Eilish
“Birds of a feather, we should stick together, I know
I said I’d never think I wasn’t better alone
Can’t change the weather, might not be forever
But if it’s forever, it’s even better”

 

– This Is Me Trying by Taylor Swift
“They told me all of my cages were mental
So I got wasted like all my potential
And my words shoot to kill when I’m mad
I have a lot of regrets about that”

 

– Iris by Goo Goo Dolls
“And I don’t want the world to see me
‘Cause I don’t think that they’d understand
When everything’s made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am”

 

–  I Will Wait by Mumford and Sons
“These days of dust
Which we’ve known
Will blow away with this new sun
But I’ll kneel down
Wait for now
And I’ll kneel down
Know my ground
And I will wait, I will wait for you
And I will wait, I will wait for you”

 

– Hero by Charlie Puth
“I don’t need a hero, I don’t want to be saved”
But I said, “I’ll be here every night and day, ” oh
I don’t need a hero, but if you let me stay
Oh, I can still be here every night and day, oh”

 

– Matilda by Harry Styles
“You can let it go
You can throw a party full of everyone you know
You can start a family who will always show you love
You don’t have to be sorry for doing it on your own”

 

– Stick Season by Noah Kahan
“And I love Vermont, but it’s the season of the sticks
And I saw your mom, she forgot that I existed
And it’s half my fault, but I just like to play the victim
I’ll drink alcohol ’til my friends come home for Christmas
And I’ll dream each night of some version of you
That I might not have, but I did not lose”

 

–  Holocene by Bon Iver
“And at once, I knew I was not magnificent
Strayed above the highway aisle
Jagged vacance, thick with ice
But I could see for miles, miles, miles”

 

–  Little Freak by Harry Styles
“I was thinkin’ about who you are
Your delicate point of view, I
Was thinkin’ about you
I’m not worried about where you are
Or who you will go home to, I’m
Just thinkin’ about you“

 

–  Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus by Taylor Swift
“So if I sell my apartment
And you have some kids with an internet starlet
Will that make your memory fade from this scarlet maroon
like it never happened
Could it be enough to just float in your orbit”

 

 

The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers by Sarah Tomlinson – ARC Review

 

 

Title: The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers

Author: Sarah Tomlinson

Publishing House: Flatiron Books

Genre: Fiction

Synopsis (from Goodreads): Perfect for fans of Daisy Jones & The Six and Almost Famous, a gripping debut about the complicated legacy of a legendary rock band and the ghostwriter telling their story

Three Rock & Roll icons. Two explosive tell-all memoirs. One ghostwriter caught in the middle.

Mari Hawthorn has just landed the biggest job of her ghostwriting career. Anke Berben, the legendary model and style icon, needs someone for her hotly anticipated memoir. In the 1960s, Anke reveled in headline-grabbing romances with three members of the hugely influential rock band The Midnight Ramblers. The band became as famous for their backstage drama as for their music. Outside of the bandmembers themselves, Anke is the only one who fully understands the tangled relationships, betrayals, and suspicions that has elevated the Ramblers to mythological status. That could not be clearer than in the enduring mystery around the death of Mal, the band’s lead singer and Anke’s husband, in 1969.

In the decades that followed, rumors have swirled about Mal’s demise, but Anke and the surviving members of the Ramblers have all kept silent. Until now. As her ghostwriter, Mari must ingratiate herself with Anke, coaxing out the stories she needs to write a memoir worthy of such an important band. Mari is deft at navigating the fatal charms of the rich and famous, having grown up with a narcissistic, alcoholic father. But she soon stumbles upon secrets more explosive than anyone could have imagined. It’s now not just about celebrity tell-alls–this is about redemption.

Rating: 2.25/5 stars

Publishing Date: 13^th of February 2024

A huge thank you to NetGalley and the publishing house, Flatiron Books, for providing me with a digital ARC of this book, in exchange for an honest review.
All opinions, however, are completely my own.

 

TW: alcohol, drugs, mentions of suicide, mention of sexual assault, cheating

 

This review will be completely spoiler free

 

What do you do when you get the chance to accept the work of a lifetime as a ghostwriter and you have to pen the memoir of the most famous muse who ever existed?
That’s the question that Mari rushes to answer, and of course she says yes, when she’s given the opportunity to work with Anke Berben, a legendary muse of the most famous 70s band, The Midnight Ramblers. She’s a charismatic figure, and she carries the secret of how her husband, Mal, the singer of the aforementioned band, died. His body was found at the bottom of their swimming pool, but is it really all there is to this mystery?

As soon as I got the chance to collaborate with the publishing house to write a review about this new release, I was so excited. Fictional memoirs about fictional bands are some of my favourite things to exist (see Daisy Jones and The Six, for example), but I’m sad to say this book did not quite land for me. From the synopsis I was expecting a glamorous tale about a band at the top of the world in the 70s but sadly that’s not what happened.

This is of course not a bad book, but it’s just something very different from what I expected. The tale takes on a turn that resembles a thriller story, with Mal’s death becoming the main center point of Mari’s life, and so also of the reader’s reading experience. She becomes obsessed with this band, and that is quite interesting since she’s ghostwriting a story about them, but her wanting to discover this secret at all cost, at some points felt very out of touch and repetitive in my eyes.
The music aspect is somewhat non-existent, and that quite bothered me, since the main theme of the book revolves, again, about what was described as one of the biggest bands of the days past.

I also had quite a bit of a problem with the main character, and that is also connected with the obsession she comes to have with this unsolved mystery. I think she is very unlikable, but not in a way that you feel the writer wants her to be unlikable (at least that’s what I gathered from it), it’s more like her mind is completely taken by this that she forgets about the people around her, and really nothing else matters beside her work. She comes off as someone who would do anything to reach her fame, and while she forms some connections with some members of the band, at the end I never found her motivations selfless. And again, her compulsion about Mal’s death was just too much, considering she didn’t even know him. She was just quite murky to me.

The aspect that I came to enjoy the most was the dive into the ghost-writing world, something I’m not familiar with, but that I found fascinating, not in the method acting way Mari seems to adopt, but in general. I was curious to get to know more about it and I would have liked to read even more about this particular topic.

In the end, I think sadly this book wasn’t the best one I read on this topic, but if you feel like you might like a bit of a memoir about fictional rockstars mixed with a bit of a thriller aspect, you might still want to pick this one up.

And with that, we have come to the conclusion of this review. I hope you enjoyed it.

Thank you so much for reading,

 

 

The Man I Met on Holiday by Fiona Gibson – ARC Review

Title: The Man I Met on Holiday

Author: Fiona Gibson

Publishing House: Avon Books UK

Synopsis (from Goodreads): Is he just a summer fling? Or the one she’s been waiting for…

How Lauren thought her summer holiday would go: Priceless mother-son memories of swimming and sunshine before Charlie leaves for university.
How things actually are, now they’re here: Charlie refusing to speak to her, locked in a darkened room in their Corsican cottage, and a creeping sense of dread contemplating the rest of her life alone.
Although Charlie has decided that holidays with mum are now deeply uncool, Lauren is determined not to waste this trip. Then she meets James, who was supposed to be holidaying with his daughter but is now, like her, unexpectedly flying solo.
Lauren is soon sneaking away for romantic dinners under the stars. Instead of the end of something, she hopes this could be a new beginning.
But what happens when Lauren and James pick up their emotional baggage back home? And what will their kids make of their mid-life rom com in the making?

A hilarious and heart-warming tale of second chance love, perfect for fans of Sophie Kinsella, Kristen Bailey and Jill Mansell.

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

A huge thank you to NetGalley and Avon Books UK for providing me with a digital E-Arc of this book, in exchange for an honest review.
All opinions, of course, are completely my own.

 

This review will be completely spoiler-free.

“The Man I Met on Holiday” is part summer romance, part post-holiday trying to deal with the real world novel. It follows Lauren, whose parents moved to Corsica, and now she goes there every year on holiday with her teenage son Charlie. There she meets James, a divorced veterinarian who will make her believe in love again.

I didn’t love this book but I think this was mainly a me problem. I was I think kind of detached from the parental/son/daughter element that this book goes to touch upon for the most part of the story, maybe because it is not something I can so much relate, not having children of my own for now, and having surpassed my teenage years.

The first part of this story is mainly focused on the summer romance and Lauren and James getting to know each other, and that was completely fine, but it’s just maybe the 20% of the novel.
From then on the two of them go back to England and try to manage their newly-sprung relationship with the distance and their role as parents, and this is also the point where we get the other two POVs, Charlie and Esther’s, respectively Lauren’s son and James’ daughter. One thing I did not appreciate was that the parents’ POV were in first person, while Charlie and Esther’s were in third person. Something took me out of the story for some reason. And this is the point where the book kind of lost me.

I think I enjoyed the daughter and son’s POV way more, but at the same time, while I was done with their chapters, I had no interest whatsoever to focus back on Lauren and James. Their relationship is barely touched upon in this second and third part in my opinion. It’s not something I expected going in, I expected way more romance and maybe that was my fault, but at the same time I wasn’t the biggest fan of the shift between their POVs and the younger’s POVs.
Also, another thing that quite bothered me was that for the majority of the novel Esther, a girl in her early twenties, engages in a serious relationship with a man that’s said being of the same age of her dad, so in his early fifties. It’s just something I don’t personally enjoyed, and it gave me chills to think about, I always hoped she got away from that relationship and that man as fast as she could.

Charlie’s chapters, Lauren’s son, really grabbed my attention, and I think they were my favourite in the whole novel.  He’s very different from how his mother sees him at the beginning of the story, and I was glad I had his POV to read about.

The third part conflict was barely touched upon, so I didn’t even consider it to be there. It is resolved off-page and so I didn’t believe in its resolution, it was way too quick, and while I liked the ending, I felt it was definitely lacking something.

Like I said, though, I think the problems I had with this book were mostly mine, it still is an enjoyable read if you want to read about a summer romance, and you want a book you can read basically in one sitting.

Okay guys, these were my thoughts on “The Man I Met on Holiday” by Fiona Gibson. Thank you so much for reading this review.

I’ll talk to you soon,

Mr Wilder and Me by Jonathan Coe – ARC Review

Title: Mr Wilder and Me

Author: Jonathan Coe

Publishing House: Viking (Penguin General UK)

Genre: Fiction

Synopsis (from Goodreads):In the heady summer of 1977, a naïve young woman called Calista sets out from Athens to venture into the wider world. On a Greek island that has been turned into a film set, she finds herself working for the famed Hollywood director Billy Wilder, about whom she knows almost nothing. But the time she spends in this glamorous, unfamiliar new life will change her for good.
While Calista is thrilled with her new adventure, Wilder himself is living with the realisation that his star may be on the wane. Rebuffed by Hollywood, he has financed his new film with German money, and when Calista follows him to Munich for the shooting of further scenes, she finds herself joining him on a journey of memory into the dark heart of his family history.
In a novel that is at once a tender coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of one of cinema’s most intriguing figures, Jonathan Coe turns his gaze on the nature of time and fame, of family and the treacherous lure of nostalgia. When the world is catapulting towards change, do you hold on for dear life or decide it’s time to let go?

Rating: 3.25/5

A huge thank you to NetGalley and Viking (Penguin General UK) for giving me the chance to read this book as an E-Arc before the release date. All opinions, however, are completely my own.

This review will be completely spoiler free

TW: Cheating, descriptions of concentration camps, description of corpses (not in details), talking about abortion.

Mr Wilder and Me is a title I set my eyes on as soon as I saw it on NetGalley. If you know me by my reviews even a little bit, you know that I love everything that has to do with the show business, Hollywood, and the big names of stardom.

This book in particular talks about Calista, a girl who for fortuitous chances meets director Billy Wilder while on a vacation in America. I admit I was not particularly informed about Wilder’s figure, but I was pleased to know more about him, since his movies actually made the history of cinema.

I saw through this girl’s eyes how a movie is made, how external locations work, how amazing it would be to work on a set, but most of all, I got to see some brilliant minds doing their job. Billy had always worked with his best friend, the screenwriter I. A. L. Diamond, and their works together will last through ages.

I have to say Mr Diamond was probably my favourite character. He was the one who truly took Calista under his wing and gave her the possibility to work in the cinema industry.
Calista has always composed music since a young age, but she never actually thought of doing it for movies. It was a passion she took when she started working as a Greek interpreter for these very big names.

I liked how the book was set in two different timelines: the past and the present. Calista, now in her late fifties, is recalling the time she spent with the crew of Fedora, the movie Mr Wilder was shooting at that time, when she was just a young girl, and all the countries she visited because of that amazing opportunity she got.

This book is also first and foremost, though, a coming-of-age story about a girl who doesn’t really know what her ambitions in life are at the beginning, but she finds them along the way and she decides to grab the opportunity and do what she does best for a living: playing and composing music.

I’ve never read anything by Coe, but I have to admit I really liked his writing style. It flows really well and it helps the reader getting into the story without any trouble.

There was something off with this book in my opinion, though. I think it was the pacing. In certain parts I felt like the story dragged way too long without a particular reason and a lot of the scenes were kind of repeated over and over.

One thing I really enjoyed was how the book was divided in different settings, the various cities Wilder shoots in for his movie. It was really nice seeing these cities through the eyes of Calista, and also how she approached and lived the differences between them.

It was also really interesting, but also heartbreaking, to read the part about how Wilder lived the Nazi time in Germany. I felt so sorry for him, and it’s always devastating to read about that history time period, but it’s also so important to never, ever forget.

Also, this is the story of a man who knows that he has given all that he could in terms of his work, so it’s also really sad to see him realizing that he no longer could bring something new to the cinema market. He and Mr Diamond, though, were the creators of some true masterpieces that the world will never forget, so I was really glad to see that the author really pointed that out. Movies as The Apartment and Sabrina made Hollywood’s history, and they will forever be in the hearts of the people.

In conclusion, I would recommend this novel if you’d like to know more about this legendary director and if fictional biographies about real life people are something you enjoy.

I thank you so much for reading this article, see you next time,