Rainy Day Reads

As you can tell from the title I DNF’ed this book. The story was about a young girl in what I believe was 16th century England. The summary said the book would detail how she was left alone and penniless on the streets of London and how she rose above that and came to be the king’s mistress. It had all the makings of a trashy period romance and I imagine it would have been almost like a “Gone With the Wind” in a different setting. And when I decided to pick up this book I felt like I was in the mood for just that. But moods change and once I had started this book I just wasn’t feeling it. At all. So I decided to put it down after just a few chapters.   What I did read was well written, but the main character of Amber really annoyed me. She reminded me of Lydia from “Pride and Prejudice”, petulant and selfish and feeling herself too good for her circumstances. She throws away everything to follow some random man who straight out tells her he won’t marry her, but she is just int...

I expected this to be fiction based on true events, but actually it is a non-fiction book detailing the life and love of James Kirkpatrick in India. It is marketed as a great love story between an English man and an Indian woman, destined to be kept apart by race, religion and social standards but overcoming the odds to be together anyway.   The book is very detailed and built mainly on letters, many of which survive in estates and the East India Company’s files. This makes for an accurate, but sometimes slightly dry retelling of actual events. There is so much detail about people and politics that the love story drowns in it. I would say this book is mainly about James Kirkpatrick and his life. His lover Khair features very little in it.  It takes a while for the book to get to James, as it first sets up the entire backdrop of the British in India and the principle figures, both political and familial. This just doesn’t really interest me and for this part of t...