Review: Spare Brides by Adele Parks

Adele Parks is appearing at the Essex Book Festival, at Raleigh Library on Tuesday 4th March, to discuss her new novel, Spare Brides.  I was very pleased to be asked to review Spare Brides, and interview Adele Parks in advance of her event. Today is ‘release day’ for the novel, and so, here is my review…

New Year’s Eve, 1920.  The Great War is over and it’s a new decade of glamorous promise. But a generation of men and women who survived the extreme trauma and tragedy will never be the same.
With countless men lost, it seems that only wealth and beauty will secure a husband from the few who returned, but lonely Beatrice has neither attribute. Ava has both, although she sees marriage as a restrictive cage after the freedom war allowed. Sarah paid the war’s ultimate price: her husband’s life. Lydia should be grateful that her own husband’s desk job kept him safe, but she sees only his cowardice.
A chance encounter for on elf these women with a striking yet haunted officer changes everything. In a world altered beyond recognition, where not all scars are visible, this damaged and beautiful group must grasp any happiness they can find – whatever the cost. Continue reading “Review: Spare Brides by Adele Parks”

Black Roses Blog Tour: the Q&A

Here’s the second part of the Black Roses Blog Tour here on Adventures With Words, to celebrate the fact that Jane Thynne’s insightful and unusual novel is now out in paperback.

We were really pleased to have the opportunity to put a few questions to Jane about her choice to set the story in Berlin in the years leading up to World War Two, her characters Clara and Leo and why she decided to focus on the women behind the big names of the Third Reich.

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Continue reading “Black Roses Blog Tour: the Q&A”

Black Roses Blog Tour – the review

It’s the first stop on the Black Roses blog tour!  Earlier in the year, Kate read and reviewed Black Roses by Jane Thynne, which is now out in paperback.  We’d love to share with you again our review, and then later we have a Q&A with Jane herself, about some of the key themes of the novel…

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Nearly time for the Black Roses Blog Tour…

Adventures With Words is thrilled to be the first stop on the Black Roses Blog Tour, as Jane Thynne’s fascinating novel based in late-Thirties Berlin will soon be out in paper back.  We’ll be reposting Kate’s review of the book and we were lucky enough to be able to ask Jane some questions about it too – they’re coming up on the blog from 6pm tonight.

In the mean time, check out where else the blog tour is heading…

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Review: Black Roses by Jane Thynne

blackrosesBerlin, 1933. Warning bells ring across Europe as Hitler comes to power. Clara Vine, an attractive young Anglo-German actress, arrives in Berlin to find work at the famous Ufa studios. Through a chance meeting, she is unwillingly drawn into a circle of Nazi wives, among them Magda Goebbels, Anneliese von Ribbentrop and Goering’s girlfriend Emmy Sonnemann. As part of his plan to create a new pure German race, Hitler wants to make sweeping changes to the lives of women, starting with the formation of a Reich Fashion Bureau, instructing women on what to wear and how to behave. Clara is invited to model the dowdy, unflattering clothes. Then she meets Leo Quinn who is working for British intelligence and who sees in Clara the perfect recruit to spy on her new elite friends, using her acting skills to win their confidence. But when Magda Goebbels reveals to Clara a dramatic secret and entrusts her with an extraordinary mission, Clara feels threatened, compromised, desperately caught between her duty towards – and growing affection for – Leo, and the impossibly dangerous task Magda has forced upon her. Continue reading “Review: Black Roses by Jane Thynne”