Book Review

I have finished two great books this week and would love to share them with you.  The first one I LOVED!!!  It is The House At Riverton by Kate Morton.  It starts off with a little old lady who is almost a hundred years old and living in a nursing home.  She is meeting with a producer about a movie that they are making about her past.  She meets with them to help with the movie and begins remembering all of the memories of her past.  It goes back and forth between past and present and slowly the whole story unfolds.  As she gets closer to the end of her life she continues remembering the events leading up to a fateful night at the Riverton House.  She had been a servant in the house and gets to know the rich children who inhabit the house.  She grows up with them and tells us the story from the perspective of a servant (or outsider).  It goes through both world wars and how these wars changed the world for the working classes and the aristocracy.  It was one of those stories that keeps unraveling until the VERY last page----which was a huge surprise to me.  I usually can guess the end of most mysteries, but this one kept me wondering.  LOVED IT!!!

The 2nd book was The Queen's Governess, by Karen Harper.  It was a Historical novel about Katherine Ashley who became the governess to Queen Elizabeth of England. It follows her from her youth all the way through her beginnings at Court with Queen Anne Bolyn.  It is a great inside look at the crazyness of King Henry the 8th and his Court.  It goes all the way through her adult life, workings, spyings, time in The Tower, and in prison, and the ups and downs of being at court.  I find everything about the many wives of Henry fasinating and this follows through them all and his death.  If you enjoy history, this is a great book--it does read more like a history and less like a novel though.

Finally a couple of books I can recommend.  I hope you try one and enjoy it.