#the mermaid and mrs. hancock

[ijustkindalikebooks]

Current listen.

[nefarious-hopes]

[motherofkittens94]

23 Books in 2023

I was tagged by @readingaway

i have a bunch of book i want to read this year im already behind a bit but im gonna do it here is some

hare house sally hinchcliffe

daughters of izdihar hadeer elsbai

Shield maiden sharon emmerichs

meet me in another life catriona silvey

station eleven emily st john mendel

The shards bret easten ellis

spare prince harry

unwell woman elinor cleghorn

testimony mark hardbourn

the three body problem cixin liu

the women could fly megan giddings

Agatha christie lucy worsley

midnights children salman rushdie

the Parisian isabella hammod

wild and true relation kim sherwood

house of ghosts w c ryan

the mermaid and mrs hancock

the confessions of frannie langton sara collins

babel r f kaung

ithaca claire north

the long way to a small angry planet becky chambers

the marriage portrait maggie o farrell

what can you see from here marianna leky

tagging @mrs-storm-andrews @saltwaterwoods @lyledebeast @duchess-of-tales @softironman

if you like to :)

[little-randomness]

I found the book The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock to be incredibly boring and, at times, needlessly graphic.

[stmaryslibraryios]

The Mermaid & Mr Hancock’ by Imogen Hermes Gowar

Our two most recent reads were ‘Tulip Fever’ by Deborah Moggach and ‘The Mermaid & Mr Hancock’ by Imogen Hermes Gowar when we were transported back to the 17th & 18th centuries respectively.

Imogen Gower’s book opens in Deptford in 1785 at the home of Mr Jonah Hancock, a mild-mannered merchant. He is visited by Captain Tysoe Jones who tells him that he has sold his ship to purchase a ‘mermaid’. Jonah is aghast but is persuaded that he could make his fortune by showing his ‘mermaid’ to the curious public.

The gamble pays off and Mr Hancock becomes a wealthy man. This catapults him into the orbit of Angelica Neal, the most well-known and desired courtesan in London. What follows is a mixture of myth and legend surrounding mermaids and the story of a woman who is determined to survive despite her reduced circumstances.

This was a lengthy book and there was general agreement that it could have been shorter as a number of characters were not fully developed and could easily have been the subject of another story. The descriptive writing is often exquisite – London from the eye of a crow flying overhead to Angelica’s boudoir; ‘’Her table is strewn with ribbons and earrings and tiny glass bottles…. On the floor the crushed triangles of curl-paper are dense with the Wesleyan homily, snipped as they are from pious tracts passed out daily to the whores of Dean Street’’. 

Like ‘Tulip Fever’ we thought that the book could easily be adapted into a film and wondered if this had been in the mind of the author from the beginning. Maybe it will one day.

Review by U3A

[shortskirtsandsarcasm]

The Weather Woman

The Weather Woman by Sally Gardner falls into one of my favorite sub-genres: early modern creepy fantasy, alongside The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, The Familiars, and The Miniaturist. I have a YouTube video about this sub-genre which you can watch on my channel. Now technically, this book starts in the late early modern period and continues into the early modern period, but I think it still counts.

The Weather Woman follows Neva, a young Russian girl suddenly orphaned in London who can predict the weather. She is taken in by a craftsman of clocks and automatons and together they seek their fortune by combining their respective talents in the Weather Woman, an automaton who predicts the weather, and present it to stunned audiences. Unfortunately for the entrepreneurial family, there are agents who wish them harm. When Neva falls for a man related to one of her ill-wishers, their situation only worsens.

For the full review of this title, see my Medium page and my website.

[sixofravens-reads]

19, 24, and 25 please 😀

Hi!!

19. Did you use your library?

Yes! Though much less than 2021 (which is kind of a good thing, I went a little nuts with holds in 2021). I still got 10ish books from it though!

24. Did you DNF anything? Why?

Quite a few things! I'm getting better at DNFing things I don't want to be reading:

Masquerade by Laura Lam - didn't like the writing style in the first 2 books of this series, and gave up partway through this book because it didn't improve and I wasn't interested in the plot.

Nightmare Fuel by Nina Nesseth - my library hold ran out because I was trying to juggle it, Nona the Ninth (and post-Nona brainrot lol), and another library book I really wanted to read. I will have to check it out again someday and finish it!

Wizard of the Grove by Tanya Huff - read the first couple chapters and just found it extremely boring

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake - another one that I just got bored of. The author set up so much cool worldbuilding and so many cool characters, and the premise was interesting...but all she focussed on was the rivals-to-lovers romance between two of the MCs. It was deeply annoying.

The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson - this book is just punishment after punishment for the MCs, and I understand why (a "you won, but at what cost?" kind of thing) but it was just...brutal and put me in a bad brainspace. Also, Dickinson's writing style didn't really work for me. It just didn't flow as well as I liked and made me feel like I was reading agonizingly slow. I should give this series a try again, though. Maybe when book 4 comes out...

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley - realized partway through that I wasn't in the mood for a locked-room mystery with rich people and sent it back to the library. I should try one of her other books sometime, though.

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar - realized a few chapters in that it's about a fake taxidermy mermaid and not a real one and got disappointed lol (of course I didn't read the blurb beforehand lol, this was a cover-buy). Another one I should try again someday when I'm in the mood for historical fiction.

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack - had this out from the library when the war in Ukraine started, and I tried a few pages but really was not in the mood for reading (I don't think I read anything for like, 3 weeks after that because I was too worried about my coworkers in Ukraine and Eastern Europe and the world in general). That said, I bought a copy and it's waiting on my TBR for when I get in a science-y mood again!

25. What reading goals do you have for next year?

Nothing concrete yet, but I'm leaning towards a goal of reading all of the books already on my TBR (not including ones bought in 2023), maybe with the exception of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, because it's massive. I would like to have this TBR gone so I can stop feeling guilty about ignoring books I spent money on...

[nefarious-hopes]

[athenianwit]

atticus needed to know how the other godlings fought, how their gifts worked, and what worked well together. that was why he usually watched them alone in the stands, taking notes. with more and more of the godlings he started out with either dying or leaving without a word and more taking their places, he felt like it was more important than ever to piece things together. he was their tactician afterall. 

"just some light reading," atticus flashed the cover of the book to calvin, it was the mermaid and mrs hancock. something he'd found while stumbling through the library just a few days ago and was one of the pieces of fiction he hadn't read yet. at this point, olympia stretched from her seat and approached calvin to sniff him. smelling milo, she started to get excited and wag her tails while waiting for pets. "you alright?" something seemed to be on his mind, though atticus wasn't sure. getting out of his seat, the son of athena approached calvin with the bag of baby carrots to offer him one. 

Calvin had steadily been spending more and more time at the training grounds recently. As much as it was his usual desire to observe how the other demigods fought together, try to figure out where he fit in to that flow of things, he also needed the distraction. Needed a way to stop himself letting his mind wander. Ignore how certain things crept their way in when he wasn't providing himself some form of distraction.

"Well, for one thing you are, but secondly I'm also curious what you're reading." It was easy to flash a smile up to the seats, even as he continued moving with well practiced movements. Still learning just where to hit, but he figured he made up for it with the speed of his strikes. The constant dance of sword strikes form himself and his copy, switching places, a mental game to keep targets guessing. "Wasn't hungry yet, figured I'd just... Make something later."

[spindleprick]

She is such a conduit of rage, it is a wonder she does not catch alight.

The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, Imogen Hermes Gowar

[evenaturtleduck]

When I don't know what to get from the library next I put a favorite author's name into the literature map and see what names are both in the same cluster and on the shelves at my library. So I found Imogen Hermes Gowar somewhere between Bridget Collins and Natasha Pulley and took home The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock.

It's the same kind of leisurely-paced historical-ish fiction-with-a-fantastical-element as The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Binding, but with more (and I say this in the most affectionate way) frivolous characters. I loved them all, even the awful ones. The story wanders but it doesn't drag, it's funny and sad and hopeful, and there's no great romance but it's still a love story. It's one of those books that seems really light and fluffy and then you realize it's actually got a really substantial core about the relationship between grief and happiness.

Also there are paragraphs of gorgeous jewel-like descriptions of the inside of a sweets shop that made me dig around in my top dresser drawer for the secret candy I hide there where the kids can't find.

[hailbabel]

The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, by Imogen Hermes Gowar

If anyone is looking for a Harlots-esque novel, this would be a good read. Set in London in the 1780's, it's set a bit later than the Harlots universe, but I can absolutely see Charlotte as Angelica Neal, and Mrs. Chapel would fit right in between Margaret Wells and Lydia Quigley. It also explores similar themes of classism, racism, and the limited opportunities for wealth and success available to women, in addition to obsession, loss, and the way the things we want sometimes slowly try to kill us.

Thank you to @julie-slamdrews for recommending it to me in the first place. It was a lovely read, and I think I need to include the phrase "screaming hell bitches" somewhere in my own writing.

[nerdragon]

Watch "Favorite reads of 2020 (Fiction) : 2020 Favorite books : THE BOOK DRAGON" on YouTube

Today's video is my favorite fiction reads of 2020 ❤❤❤

[stmaryslibraryios]

Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach

Our two most recent reads were ‘Tulip Fever’ by Deborah Moggach and ‘The Mermaid & Mr Hancock’ by Imogen Hermes Gowar when we were transported back to the 17th & 18th centuries respectively.

In Amsterdam, fortunes were being made by speculating on the price of bulbs and it is in this febrile atmosphere that we meet Sophia who has married a much older, wealthy merchant. Cornelius is very much in love with his wife and commissions a portrait of her with the young artist Jan Van Loos. Very quickly Sophia and Jan begin a passionate affair which leads them both into dangerous territory.

The author uses clever devices to engage the reader. Throughout the book, she has included photos of contemporary paintings which evoke the atmosphere of 17th century homes – very sombre but with faces and costumes lit with subtle shafts of light. Studying them does give the reader the sense of a moment captured and frozen for eternity which is a recurring theme in the book.

Our group agreed that there was an inevitability about the outcome but not everyone had anticipated the actual ending.  Another comment was that some of the narrative was irrelevant to the main story but the drama was relieved by one moment of humour thanks to the unreliable and drunk Gerrit, Jan’s servant. There was agreement that the book may have been written with a view to being adapted for film. This did happen in 2018 but I felt, as I often do, that the book was far more interesting than the film.

review by U3A

[imagardenrose]

New book 📖

[sixofravens-reads]

Finished Gallant! Now I'm torn between starting Where the Drowned Girls Go or The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock. I'm excited for Drowned Girls but in true Seanan McGuire fashion I'm sure it will destroy me emotionally, so I'm thinking I'll take a detour into some fun historical fiction instead...