#Review - Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower by Tamsyn Muir

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower

Tamsyn Muir (narrated by Moira Quirk)

Recorded Books Inc, 30 November 2020

Available as: Audio, 4 hours 9 minutes

Source: Audio subscription

ASIN: B08N2L23D4

I listened to Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower as an audio book.

I have to admit that I listened to Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower because I've been reading Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series as audio (if that makes sense) so it popped up as a recommendation. Keen to see what else Muir had written (and given Quirk's excellent work on those stories) I downloaded it.

The first things to say is that this is a very different - and simpler - story than the Locked Tomb books. It's basically a fairy-story crossed with a D&D session, as Floralinda, abandoned at the top of her tower by a witch, gives up on a prince rescuing her and has to fight her way down to the bottom, overcoming a different monster on every level. She shows great ingenuity doing this and it's fun seeing her outwit worse and worse monsters and accumulate some useful resources.

In doing this Floralinda also meets and befriends a fairy with broken wings, and learns a lot about being practical, strong and un-Princesslike.

Then things turn dark.

Through the progression of monsters, variously despatched by skill, guile and luck, we see a slow transformation of the princess. This is reflected not only in her fights with monsters but in other respects too - her developing relationship with that fairy, and her attitude to her own life. What with injuries, holdups while weapons are honed or resources gathered, and close scrapes with injury or death, there is both time and cause for reflection by Floralinda on what she wants. 

And when she decides what that is, there is nobody who can stop her.

One of the really fun things about this book was seeing Floralinda develop into somebody who can honestly admit that there are bad things she must do, and other bad things that she wants to do and that she is going to do. And then seeing her emerge as a person who can put her own life, and that change, into wider context and decide that perhaps, no, some of those are things she won't do. While she does develop in skill and strength, it's also a moral process, a coming of age, that makes her question who she is and what she wants from life.

If that makes this book sound over solemn and freighted with Messages, it really isn't, it is immensely pacy, enjoyable to read and really funny, if inevitably gruesome in places. While it was a bit of a shock at first to hear Quirk's palate of voices used in a different context from her Locked Tomb readings, and I did initially associate them with the characters form those stories, the personalities here are very different and very quickly came to stand apart.

Recommended, and hearing this made me realise afresh what a wide-ranging and flexible writer Muir is. 

You can get the audio of Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower here.

#Review - Daffodils by Louise Beech

Daffodils
Louise Beech
Bolinda Publishing
Available as: Audio (narrated by Lesley Harcourt), 9 hours 48 minutes
Source: Audible subscription
ASIN: B09TG3FPMJ

I have been a fan of Louise Beech's books for some time. Her fiction combines real, believable characters in all their human muddle with gripping stories and they always, always have such heart.

In her memoir  Daffodils, Beech pulls the curtain aside and invites us to see some of her own life. It's a difficult story, kicking off from the moment when, in 2019, Beech's mother attempted suicide and loosely following her mum's hospitalisation and - sort of - recovery. We see the author's process of coming to terms (sort of) with what happened in 2019 and also, as part of that, her recollections of and attempts to understand her own earlier life. We also get to meet her younger sisters and brother, who share their own takes on that story, and (inevitably, look at the date) we see life overturned by the covid pandemic and by the lockdown measures necessary to address it.

I thought this book was beautiful, fierce and brave. It keeps coming back to mysteries - the mystery of Beech's mum's behaviour and treatment of her children (which often makes for hard and painful reading) and the gaps's in Beech's own recollection of that. Those gaps might not be surprising, given it was a life split across different houses and children's homes, sometimes with siblings, sometimes not, involving both periods spent at her grandmother's and occasions when her mum's raucous living arrangements disrupted all their lives.

Behind all that, though, Beech suspects things, and people, that she has has blotted out and there are  hints of painful events and possibly even abuse. After consulting everyone who might be able to explain, and all the records that are available, and going over all the different versions, significant gaps remain. This leads to a book that is both raw and painful and yet calm, collected and focussed and it sets down the evidence and speculates. You can see in some of this the the hand of the excellent novelist that Louise Beech is - employed here not to decide how the gaps may be filled, what the plot ends, but to identify them as gaps and catalogue the potential dangers therein. It felt to me a bit like a mine clearance operation, as Beech sifts through the landscape of her memory, raising flags and barriers to show the dangerous ground, the paths to avoid. And then she ventures inside to these dangerous places, not exactly defusing and rendering safe, but exploring the landscape for us and showing how she is transforming it and succeeding in living there.

I want to stress here that you shouldn't read this book thinking, oh look, that's where she gets this incident or that episode from one of the books. Yes, of course, obviously Daffodils does highlight events which have inspired Beech's writing, but I had a sense reading this that the real truths exposed here - sometimes painfully - are moral truths, truths about persistence, integrity, and love. Those are qualities which her readers will recognise at once from her novels and which are more important I think and much more fundamental than details of plot. Yes, reading this book did shed light on the novels, but not in such a cause and effect way.

And it sheds light on much else: the (sometimes amusing) background to being a hard-working author, the frustrations of negotiating for her mother's care with an overstretched and wilting NHS (this even before the pandemic), the solidarity and humour of the sibling group in the face of that adversity, and, in the end, the unknowableness of another human being - even one as supposedly close as a parent. You can feel the struggles that Beech has on this last conundrum, as she wrestles both to see her mother safe and cared for, and counts the cost of what that same mother has done, and not done, to and for her kids. 

Not, as I said, remotely an easy read, but a heartfelt book and I am so grateful to the author and rather humbled that she (and of course also her super sisters and brother) have been willing to let us into their lives in this way. 

The audio is read excellently by Lesley Harcourt, including a variety of voices for the family members - in a story where we get numerous, sometimes contradictory, accounts of past events, as well as flashbacks and a great deal of authorial comment, it's always clear what perspective we are hearing and the story came over naturally and clearly. 

Finally, and not least, I know a lot more now about daffodils than before I listened to this book!

For more information about Daffodils, see Louise's website here. You can buy Daffodils from only retailer sites such as Amazon.