Woman Zone CT
  • Home
  • About
    • Vision
    • The WZ Team
    • Background
    • Projects >
      • Artscape Womens Humanity Walk
      • The Everywoman Project
      • Women's Walks
  • The Women's Library
  • Book Club
    • About
    • Book Reviews
  • Podcast
  • Blog
  • Contact
WELCOME TO THE WOMAN ZONE BOOK REVIEW PAGE.                   
​This is where members of the WZ Book Club get to share their thoughts on titles seen on the shelves of our Women’s Library. All reviews are unsolicited and only those attending the WZBC may borrow and review books.
The Woman Zone Book Club meets on the 2nd Saturday of every month between 2pm and 4pm at The Women’s Library, ground floor, Artscape.  All are welcome.
​
COVID19 ALERT! Please note that while the Women's Library is closed during lockdown, we welcome your reviews of women-authored books. Send between 200-500 words and cover pic if possible to info@womanzonect.co.za or hipzone@mweb and we will post it here! 

RUN For the Love of Life

1/16/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Author: Erica Terblance
Publisher: Quickfox
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
I am both incredulous, and exhausted. I have just finished reading Erica Terblanches’s book RUN: For The Love of Life – and have been transported into another world, worlds actually.  Other planes and places – way out of my comfort zone, deep in fact, into discomfort zones. Imagine, just imagine if you can, running 56kms across the salt flats of the Atacama Desert in Chile on Day four of six. Or 
127kms along the Lycian Way in Turkey – Day one of six. Or 41 kms through the Kalahari, along what she calls Death Valley – Day two of seven. I could go on, but you get the picture. More astonishing still is that these cross-desert runs took place in 2009, 2015 and 2019 respectively, with many, plenty of others equally challenging, in between. Erica’s levels of endurance seem to know no bounds – her descriptions of tent-sharing sleeping, eating and competing in these events are breathtaking. They are also written with such immediacy and detail that you can all but smell the sweat and feel the grit – fresh from the pages of the journal she must surely have kept. Because Erica is also a writer. A writer who runs or a runner who writes? The question comes up in the book and certainly her style, of writing that is, is evocative, colourful and agonizing.
It’s not just the running that is agonizing, her own emotional life during these last twenty years or so (she is just 50 and only started running at 30) also suffers some extreme peaks and dips, and she very openly shares the passion and the pain that some of her partners have both given and caused her.  Adding to the texture of the copy is her liberal sprinkling of quotes and poetry: ‘Only those who risk going too far find out how far they can go.’ TS Eliot; ‘As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler…what I found in simplicity was fullness’ Henry Thoreau; ‘I know you are tired but come, this is the way.’ Rumi. There are also lots illuminating, um, ‘footnotes’ on all things from nutrition and equipment to politics and philosophy for anyone who may even be contemplating following in her tracks.
You have to admire the commitment to putting across the full story of her running life, which is not just about running. Aside from her family and partners, Erica describes in detail the physical and mental approach, the strengths and weaknesses of several of her fellow athletes – some of them in their seventies (just in case you were feeling comfortable that at your advanced years you have moved beyond such madcap activity). But above all, the running journey has enabled her to look deeply into her own approach, strengths and weaknesses, and she is again, very open to sharing. ‘As I grow older’, she concludes ‘…I have found that in the moments when I shift my attention of worldly preoccupations…the greater the peace and the more my life seems to right itself.’ And as she grows older one of her other preoccupations is to encourage others to benefit from running – not hundreds of kms through unforgiving landscape – but Couch to 10kms in 10 weeks through her Thrive Run Club. You might like to check it out on facebook – or take a trot along the Sea Point promenade where you just might find her like a pied piper with a new and enthusiastic set of followers. Erica is an athlete in the extreme. ​
0 Comments

69 Jerusalem Street

1/12/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
​Author: Lindiwe Nkutha
Publisher: Modjaji books
Reviewer: Hazel Makuzeni
An accountant by profession, Lindiwe Nkutha’s book is a vivid collection of eight short stories that will move you in a profound way. The stories are about the daily struggles of ordinary people living in an unjust world. She covers (amid other things) issues of patriarchy, sexuality, abuse, love, loss, marginalisation and faith. She’s unpretentious in her writing describing her characters and their circumstances in great detail.  Her sharp, humorous writing style 
and use of poetry makes the book that much more addictive. 
Some of the stories that still linger in my mind long since reading the book:
Confessions of Karelina.  A guilt ridden story about a woman caught between her Catholic faith and her unwonted desire and love for a woman.
69 Jerusalem Street.  That’s the number of a house in Phomolong Township, where on one fateful Saturday in August, a mother found courage she never thought she had to fight back against her rapist - who was also her tormentor and husband; father to her child.
The Glasspecker. A sad account on loss and grief.  A story about a young woman drowning her sorrows in liquor and cinnamon cigarettes – mourning her youth, the loss of her life and that of her lover. When all is lost, she makes the ultimate human sacrifice.
The Reader. An intriguing tale of spirituality and divination in this century. A company is in desperate need to have its aura cleansed after hitting financial difficulties. The Reader, needing plenty of cash fast, takes the job. As the week from hell comes to an end, The Reader exposes embezzlement of company funds and who the culprit is.
Black Widow. The author here not only tackle issues of love, betrayal, loneliness and death but, sensitive matters of transgender and gender reassignment.  
Jocasta’s Hairballs. A heart wrenching story of violence and patriarchy that had me both furious and shattered from begin till the end. The story is about Jocasta, a woman who endures two miscarriages, a loveless marriage and, appalling abuse from her adulterous husband. There are many characters in this story but the least said about the misogynist Pastor Paul the better. I do not know who’s more vile him or the husband.     
It’s always wonderful hearing African women’s voices coming to the forefront and Lindiwe Nkutha is a remarkable story teller. Her exhilarating stories in this book jump out of the pages and you can see them playing in your mind like a movie. She has a wealth of insight into the human psyche. I can’t wait to read more from her in the near future. ​
0 Comments

Go Away Birds

1/10/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
​Author: Michelle Edwards
Publisher: Modjaji
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
If Go-Away Birds were a recipe for a dish, the list of ingredients would be long. Created in the kitchens of trendy Cape Town, cool Misty Cliffs and alternative White River, in this dish is the social-media-intense world of foodie magazines; the competitive Cape Town restaurant industry; Taiwanese cuisine; allegations of slave labour; veganism; lowveld farming; mixed and mixed up relationships 
and messy marriage; a mugging; wanted, unwanted, missed and nearly missing children; sibling closeness and distance; emotional poverty; lost and found selves and souls. And coping with family. And the residual hangover of politics. ‘I think everyone in South Africa needs counselling round the clock, quite honestly.’ Tshidi suggests, ‘We’ve all got some kind of PTSD, even when there’s nothing specific that’s happened to us, personally.’  There’s a lot going on here. There are also sustainability concerns and sonnets, and a writing group – with issues.
Dealing with all kinds of her own issues, those above and more, is protagonist Skye, Karoo-Skye or just ‘Roo’, who we first meet heading to her childhood home near Hazyview for a break from the strain.  And as her taxi trickles up main road White River, ‘memories flood in, all tastes and textures’.
It feels like there are a lot of memories in here, the authors own, and those of others - not least the ‘single piercing kweeeeeeeeh’ and ‘mohawk of a go-away-bird in a palm tree’. ​
0 Comments

How I Took Back My Power

12/28/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Author: Nompumelelo Runji
Publisher: Tafelberg
Reviewer: Hazel Makuzeni
I’m always in awe of people who brave the unknown and bare their souls to the world by sharing their utmost personal stories. People who are not afraid to tell their truth no matter how traumatic and intimate some of the details are deserve our undying support. Esteemed socio-political analyst and academic Nompumelelo Runji has done just that with this brutally honest and inspiring book about her life. Her journey begins at home where she takes the reader through the destructiveness of the relationship her 
mother and father had while she was growing up. Theirs was a toxic mix. With no stability at home, and with parents who at best of times were unresponsive, happiness was in short supply. Emotionally neglected, she was filled with void and loneliness from a young age. She lived in constant fear of abandonment and rejection thus seeking other people’s approval and validation became her addiction. “Always afraid that people wouldn’t stay, I worked hard to keep them around, even when it hurt,” she says. Nompumelelo continues, “I gave away my power very easily and became the plaything of toxic and difficult people.”  
To protect the identity of the people mentioned in the book, names have been changed. Nompumelelo’s husband is Sheffield - the person who will finally push her over the edge leading to her admission (not once but twice) to a psychiatric hospital. At the beginning theirs read like a fairy-tale that descends into a nightmare bit by bit. They met at church. He was a striking man, very charismatic, eloquent and full of surprises. He’d been a student at the University of Pretoria since 2002, while she started in 2005. Two years into their courtship, he proposed.  To this the author says, “I felt like the luckiest woman in the world, as if I’d run a race and won first prize.” After the lobola was settled, that feeling didn’t last very long. Sheffield increasingly started showing his patriarchal views on marriage. High on his agenda was a wife well trained domestically. He could never be satisfied with her efforts of trying to please him. Always pointing out her shortcomings and making her feel inadequate in every turn. The wedding finally did take place (after three postponements) on 23 September 2012. In her view, they should have gotten married in 2010.
The author chronicles her years of emotional abuse from the man who was Prince Charming in public but cold and uncaring at home. A man who couldn’t be bothered with intimacy but was manipulative, insensitive and controlling. Self-doubts, anxiety and loneliness were the hallmark of her existence. She could do no right. He would compare her to other women who were always greater than her in his eyes. All this trauma took a heavy toll on her health and mind. Compounding this was the fact that she was suffering in secret – to the outside world they were the perfect couple and he was everyone’s darling in church. “I felt increasingly unstable, emotionally and psychologically,” she says. She was losing weight, suffering from chronic fatigue, muscle tension and sleep disturbances amongst other physically devastating conditions. It took her second stint at a psychiatric hospital for her to see the light and leave her husband for good. Through therapy she also strengthened herself, learning to cut off old habitual patterns that no longer serves her. “To this day, therapy is my safe space,” she says.
By reading this book you get an understanding as to why for many women it is not easy to walk away from toxic and abusive relationships. And as someone who’s been in toxic relationships, I fully relate to everything she says. Mental abuse is the worst kind as it is unseen and remains a secret for a long time until you start falling apart. Abusers of this kind are the worst deceivers.  In public they’re Mr Nice Guy but behind closed doors, it’s Mr Nasty. Constantly undermining you and belittling your intelligence and efforts. You start to self-criticise everything you do and your confidence goes to the pits.
I thank the author for being so candid in telling her story - from her childhood pain to her difficult relationship with her mother. It must not have been easy, but by sharing her memoir she’s helping others to open up and no longer live in shame. ​
0 Comments

This Might Sting a Bit

12/28/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
​WOMAN ZONE BOOK REVIEW
Title: This Might Sting a Bit
Author: Claire Adlam
Publisher: Quickfox
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
‘Bloody Hell!’ I found myself muttering, frequently, as I read through this roller-coaster tale of heavy-duty opiate addiction. Prescription drugs on steroids, washed down with copious swigs of vodka and the familiar fragrance of a joint. But eliciting the ‘bloody hells’ (and a few Hail Mary’s not to have been there myself), was not the combo so much as the sheer quantity. 
So our addict is Kat or Kit-Kat as she’s known in the family. A farming family living in Zimbabwe at the time of Mugabe’s land reform. As a backdrop, edgy enough to drive any white farmer to drink I would imagine. But political stress is not the trigger – instead a flying rugby ball and a pair of teetery stilettos are what cause Kat to start on the long slippery slope of painkillers. A slope littered with lies, wrecked relationships, a crooked pharmacist and some institutionalized wake-up calls of note.
While Kat’s experience forms the core of this drug drama, she’s not the only one with a ‘problem’ and there are some other pretty harrowing skeletons rattling in the family cupboard as well.  But aside from the expletives, what also kept going on in my mind is How Does Claire Adlam Know All This? Originally from Zim herself, her descriptions of incidents and individuals are enormously convincing. I know only a few Zimmbos well, so its maybe just coincidence, but I’ve always found them to be disarmingly honest and open – and apart from the deceit around her dependency, Kat is gobsmackingly frank with a wicked wit and way with words – especially insults. But the slippery slope? There’s definitely been some research here.
To say things get really bad would be an understatement - the title phrase comes from injections around the eyes to numb the pain. Without giving too much away, she does end up in rehab, and again Claire appears to have an insider’s knowledge of these things (I won’t mention the ‘fishbowl’), so there’s a lot to be learned here, and much of it cautionary. It’s a clever plot with ends all tying up neatly. Apparently Claire wrote it a few years back, so for some time she says, ‘it’s been a footrest under my desk’. I imagine she’s feeling much relieved to finally have it out there. At over 460 pages it was no small book to write, and as her first novel, almost certain to have liberated her to write another.
​
0 Comments

Never Tell a Lie

12/20/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Author: Gail Schimmel
Publisher: Pan MacMillan
Reviewer: Beryl Eichenberger
Gail Schimmel nails it every time. She takes current themes and marries them skilfully into an absorbing story that is as real as it gets. She says she is lazy to do research but as I turned these pages my feeling was that she has kept herself exceptionally well informed; with her legal background she understands the intricacies of how lies are not only perpetuated in Gender Based Violence victims but also have their place in what purports to be everyday family life.
‘
Never Tell a Lie’ is a revealing, sometimes quizzical, sometimes uncomfortable story about how we protect ourselves and our loved ones.  Another one of these page turners that makes you reflect on your own life and perhaps those of your friends.
We are all probably guilty of telling little white lies to cover our backs or mask some (hopefully) minor transgression. But what happens when that lie grows bigger and bigger? Because that’s what so often happens. And when we mask the real truth in the hope that no one will see the cracks, cuts and bruises that show evidence of our real world, that’s when the trouble starts and life spirals out of control. We live in a world where truth is often hard to discern, take fake news or celebrity gossip – gossip – well there’s a thing that can lead to big lies. What goes on behind closed doors…as the saying goes…and hiding behind those doors are some vicious secrets.
Meet Mary Wilson. After a traumatic marriage to an emotional abuser who, thankfully, meets his end in an accident, she and her 12 year old son have finally come to a place where life is giving her joy and not angst. Her relationship with her Dad is enviable – the man who brought her up, picks up the pieces and supports her through thick and thin. But when she finds an old postcard which calls into question everything that she has grown up with, it’s time to call up the past and get at the truth. A high school reunion brings her into contact with an old school classmate, April, who becomes a new friend – but there are some anomalies which Mary can’t quite put her finger on. Perfect marriage, gorgeously perfect husband - revered for his work in women’s rights – but the niggling doubt that all is not right pervades.
No spoilers, but this a very worthwhile read,  exposing as it does the ills of our society and the lengths that we ourselves will go to hide the imperfections of our private lives to protect those we love . But what it also reveals is how easy it is to fall into the trap of self-doubt and undervalue our own humanity at sometimes terrible cost.  ​
0 Comments

Boiling a Frog Slowly

12/16/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
​Author: Cathy Park Kelly
Publisher: Karavan Press
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
Someone once explained to me the frog in increasingly hot water concept - that he won’t notice till he literally boils to death. I remember being horrified that such an idea could have been put to the test – poor frog, for heaven’s sake.
More shocking though is the thought that such a concept could apply to a human being – but seems it can.  Despite an increasingly hot water relationship, Cathy Park Kelly, hung on in for eight tortuous years with a man she 
calls here Karl. Her book, a vivid recall of the undermining, violent and over-heated treatment she tolerated, just made me want to weep for her. And lash out at the perp.
The slow rising temperature analogy is an apt one. Things started sweet, romantic, fun even – play pillow fights. But with the wisdom of hindsight, she describes the warning signs, like watermarks. The cruel teasing, the disproportionately angry outbursts, the accusations, the manipulative, psychological language designed to lay blame – ‘You are pulling on me’ a recurring chant. As things heat up, there’s hair pulling, a first glancing blow, harder blows to the skull where bruises don’t show, and trying to cover up where they do. It’s dark and devious stuff. One can only assume that the man has serious psychological problems. Though the damage he inflicted makes one disinclined to feel much sympathy.
But the learning lies in how Cathy responded – forgiving, excusing, accommodating, self-blaming, trying, lying – to herself and to others. Eventually out of desperation, retreating to sleep in the car, driving around the streets at night, agonizing. All this while holding down a job helping juvenile offenders, trying to write a book about the experience and putting on a brave, if weary, sometimes battle scarred, face.
Mercifully she does finally climb out of the ‘hot pot’ relationship. So what helped with the healing?  Journaling, which in part gave her the insight to share this story. That and what she took from the writing groups she’s been part of. Expressive, I found, is her line, ‘Memory is like a basket filled with beads…some are shiny from being picked up often…unchanging, fixed in our life story…others have fallen to the dusty bottom of the basket…but they can be retrieved…polished up once more to a glossy shine.’
Cathy crystalizes all the lessons in the last section of the book, called What I Know Now. She cites ‘Learning a new vocabulary’, ‘How red flags can look like green flags’, ironically how unhelpful self-help books can be and ‘Lying because I couldn’t face the truth.’ Her happy ending (thank the lord there is one), includes Biodanza dancing, a healthy new relationship and a small boy – plus the opportunity to finally be the sunny, giving person she clearly always was. ​
0 Comments

Manifesting Motherness: Healing from Infertility

12/14/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Author: Rekha Ramcharan
Publisher: Self
​Reviewer: Nancy Richards
​‘It’s a rare couple trying to conceive who doesn’t at least sometimes look around the world and wonder why they are being singled out for this particular heartbreak.’ Just one of the nails that Rekha hits so accurately on the head in this careful book about infertility – or as she later refers to it more hopefully, as about fertility. If you’ve been there, you will know the distinction.
But primarily, she describes it as ‘a story….simply my experience rendered as 
honestly as anyone can tell their own story.’ So, expect no miracle cures or solutions. She emphasizes that her journey may not be yours. Nor her final attainment of what she calls ‘motherness’, your ultimate experience. Rekha’s daughter Aarya was born on December 17 2016 after four long years of infertility when she herself was 45.  But there are an extraordinary number of lessons to be learned along the way – and not all that pertain exclusively to becoming pregnant.
She starts simply with her own background by way of context. She shares that surprisingly, until her late thirties and her second marriage she had never really wanted children. She also shares a sort of spiritual awakening – and then the long and winding road that she trod with all the dark tunnels and cul de sacs along the way.
She confesses, ‘I’m an intellectual magpie and a reading addict, so now and then there are references to statistics and research, as well as to other books on fertility and healing.’ Personally I am both in awe and appreciative of writers who read a great deal and then synthesize what they’ve learned so that it can be easily grasped for the lay person. To this end she has investigated all manner of contributing factors that lead to infertility – environmental, chemical (beware BPA chemicals found in plastics), and above all emotional. She looks deeply into this and gives a 6 step guide to releasing emotions – ‘an iterative process’ she emphasizes. There are no quick fixes.
To each of the eight parts of the book she gives a guiding introduction as well as a conclusion to tie it all up. Of particular note, with our without fertility being an issue, are the parts on Transforming Limiting Thoughts and Beliefs as well as Understanding Personality. In this last she gives a helpful breakdown of the Enneagram types with special focus on her own, Type 8. I will confess she lost me a bit on the Metaphysical adventures – but nobody could accuse Rekha of being anything other than completely thorough in that no leaf is left unturned, no avenue unexplored.  As a business leader she says, she was interested in the ‘pathfinder phenomenon’, while I don’t know exactly what that is, it sounds as if her book clearly exposes that interest.
Finally, what I found extraordinary is not just her journey, but the depth with which she has examined and shared it – and found the time to do so, as a, presumably, working mother. Although it’s an intensely personal book, in her acknowledgements she closes by thanking you, ‘I never realized’, she says ‘how much The Reader, that imagined person who will choose to share a writer’s world by picking up her book, becomes part of the writer’s life.’  There is a sense of community amongst those who’ve known infertility – and in these pages, dear Reader, you may well feel embraced. 
0 Comments

Female Fear Factory

12/12/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
​Author: Pumla Dineo Gqola
Publisher: Melinda Ferguson books
Reviewer: Hazel Makuzeni
Female Fear Factory could not have come at a better (or maybe worst) time in our country as we emerge from the 16 Days of Activism against gender based violence – a focus that should remain throughout the year in South Africa as we battle the scourge of sexual violence. This is a follow-up book by Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola to her 2016 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award winner Rape:  A South African Nightmare.
Writing the book during the COVID 
pandemic “was not one of my best ideas,” Professor Gqola confesses. Despite this, the book is so insightful with extensive research on global patriarchal violence, its myths, lies and stronghold on women. She gives bona fide examples that expose the construction of the ‘female fear factory’ and how it is institutionalised and maintained throughout the world. It’s not all doom and gloom though as the author offers possible remedies.
She looks at public spaces and how these spaces are taken away from women. Take street harassment – as one example. On a daily bases many women face sexual harassment from men while walking down the street, going to a taxi rank or simply jogging. As a woman you have to mentally prepare yourself to be vigilant at all times - a walk to your corner store is not that simple. I was reminded of this just the other day while going to a store near where I live.  A guy I barely know grabbed me by the arm and didn’t let go for some time because he wanted to talk to me. In the process he also yanked off my sunglasses because he wanted to see my eyes. Even though I was in a hurry and very much upset about his behaviour, I had to plead with him with a smile so as to not make him angry. This is a daily battle. Reading this book made me realise how much patriarchy is normalised in our public spaces. There are routes in my neighbourhood that I totally avoid because of guys who terrorise me with their unwanted sexual advances. Even though people see what is going on, nobody ever intervenes.
Patriarchy runs on fear and it is fear that keeps women under control. Women have to constantly self-police. We have to watch the way we dress, wear make-up, talk and behave. You do not want to run the risk of being labelled a whore. As Professor Gqola writes, “Women are made whores in order to justify their violation.” The book also talks about why the criminal system fails women in cases of rape, with many of these cases disintegrating on the requirement of evidence.
It was also interesting reading about the #SexforGrades and #SexforMarks scandal in Nigeria. What this shows is the unreasonable demands placed on women who speak out against sexual harassment. Fear and violence are a necessity for patriarchy to thrive. Women who challenge the status quo are put in their place. The case of Mona Eltahawy, the journalist who was arrested by police in Cairo during a protest, illustrates this. They broke her arms in detention and sexually assaulted her.
What the author explicitly prove in this book is that patriarchy is brutal and that there are no safe spaces for women – anywhere. Even though the battle is long, if we’re committed to a fair world, we have to soldier on.  “Although patriarchy uses violence to enforce fear, and to punish those who will not successfully be made female, and submissive, it cannot kill feminism.  Although agents of patriarchy and the state – through the courts and police force – may kill and attempt to silence and bankrupt those who rise against it, hundreds of thousands more will sprout and amplify the project of disrupting patriarchy, interrupting the Female Fear Factory, and unlearning its fluencies everywhere,” she says. Gqola is a feminist writer and Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies. She is the SARChl Chair in African Feminist Imagination at Nelson Mandela University.
​
0 Comments

State of Terror

12/12/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Authors: Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Reviewer: Beryl Eichenberger
‘Noli Timere’ - ‘Be Not afraid’, is a poster that Louise Penny, creator of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec  Sureté, has hanging above her writing desk.  Because political thrillers are not her genre when it was suggested she collaborate with her close friend Hillary Rodham Clinton, to produce ‘State of Terror’ she had to conquer that fear.  She had once asked Clinton about her time as Secretary of State and what had been her 
worst nightmare. This is the answer – a blockbuster if ever I read one.  The combination of these two women has produced an explosively plausible novel. While I am sometimes sceptical of these collaborations the expert inside knowledge brought by Clinton, her reputation as a formidable politician and strategist coupled with Penny’s skill has produced a huge winner.  
Hold on to your nerves as you venture into this all too real world! A new administration has just been sworn in following  the lunatic former presidency (we know who that refers to!). Secretary of State Ellen Adams is unravelling the damaging effects of the previous administration. The withdrawal of American troops in Afghanistan has given power back to the Taliban, nuclear warfare is on the Middle Eastern table and the shadowy figure of unscrupulous arms dealer, Bashir Shah, haunts her. When two bus bombs explode in London and Paris and a lowly US foreign service officer receives a baffling text, it looks as if a rogue terrorist organisation is intent on developing their own nuclear arsenal.  It is a race against time as Adams moves from one leader to another tracking down the White House traitor and averting international horror. With her trusted counsellor Betsy, and a President who is none too keen on Adams, instinct, intelligence and intuition are put to the test.   
Breath taking in its scope one of the things I enjoyed was the solid friendships between the female  characters, the many twists and turns, country hopping and the authenticity of the plot. Penny cleverly brings Gamache into the cast, as the Intelligence centres of the world are brought into play. The pace is fast, tension builds and this is a book to read in one sitting. Reading the two author’s notes sheds enormous light on the task undertaken and the development of the characters.
One of the best thrillers of 2021.  ​
0 Comments
<<Previous

    Author

    Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.

    Archives

    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • About
    • Vision
    • The WZ Team
    • Background
    • Projects >
      • Artscape Womens Humanity Walk
      • The Everywoman Project
      • Women's Walks
  • The Women's Library
  • Book Club
    • About
    • Book Reviews
  • Podcast
  • Blog
  • Contact