A Bluethroat Morning

Rating:
Summary: A book for a cold winternight!
Review: I couldn't stop reading, I needed to know what was going to happen. Just read it! it stays in your head for a long time.

Rating:
Summary: Couldn't sleep until morning...
Review: I had this book for 3-4 weeks before I really started reading it. I picked it up read the first few pages and would put it down only to pick it up and few days later and try again. When I finally read past the first few pages I was enthralled and did not put it down until I had read it cover to cover.

Bluethroat morning... mesmerizing... in it's picture's, descriptions, interwoven stories. I can see the painting of the sea at Glaven so clearly in my mind. I can identify with Harry's aloofness to the world... Harry's love for his wife was a mystery, uncovered it really seemed distant and above it all...it made me wonder was it love or something else...

Lofthouse's descriptions stay with me... Harry with Helen feeling like he was already decaying flesh and she young, innocent and fresh...

I also had the desire to refresh myself with or read every author that Lofthouse quoted...

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic.
Review: Jacqui Lofthouse, Bluethroat Morning (Bloomsbury, 2001)

Jacqui Lofthouse's second novel has faded into obscurity at an amazing rate (Amazon will still let you add it to your cart, but when it comes to actually shipping the thing...). This is truly a travesty of justice, for Bluethroat Morning is the best literary mystery I've read in a very long time.

Harry Bliss' wife, Alison, committed suicide six years ago by the rather odd method of stripping, walking into the ocean, and drowning. It takes a lot to drown yourself while not weighted down. (Try it sometime.) His life since has been almost cloistered, nothing but work and sleep. Until, that is, he meets his best friend's daughter, a nineteen-year-old who happens to bear a striking resemblance to Harry's grandfather's second wife, about whom Alison's second novel was going to be about before she killed herself in the middle of writing it. Helen, the daughter, is vicariously attracted to Harry through being one of Alison's legion of fans; it's almost inevitable the two of them begin a torrid affair. This is the lynchpin that drives Harry to the understanding that he must find out what happened in the two weeks before Alison's death, while she was on working holiday at the resort town of Glaven, in order to get on with his own life.

Bluethroat Morning is plotted with such an intricacy that the reader will start seeing symbolism in every word (how much of it is red herring I will leave to you to discover) and start reading ominous gestures into every action taken by every character, major or minor. The subplots and various threads of the mystery are skillfully woven, with nothing left unresolved at any point and every character eventually finding a use, even the red herrings. All this combines with Lofthouse's easy economy with words and direct approach to the subject matter to create a book both complex and readable, not an easy thing to find. Hovers a little on the "tell" side of "show, don't tell" now and again, but that's the book's only flaw (and it is a minor one; never more than a few toes over the line). Absolutely astonishing, and highly recommended. A candidate for the year's ten best reads list. ****

Rating:
Summary: A book for a cold winternight!
Review: Other reviews have outlined Harry's search into the suicide of his novelist (shades of Plath) and ex-model (shades of Kate Moss?) wife, so I will leap to my conclusions. As things narrow down to old man Ern (the keeper of secrets), factors and facts about the past begin to pull together, and I came completely under this Bluethroat Morning's spell.
I was gripped not only by the storyline but by some magic of the narrative voice. There is something of John Fowles's The Magus about it: a man, set apart, seeking in a strange isolated setting, worlds within worlds, time within time, though without The Magus's conspiracy element or high mythology. Even the protagonist has similarities.. an egocentric, self-pitying, sex-solves-things guy... yet I was still hooked on his search. The evocation of Norfolk and area is brilliant, Ern is a superb character, and the boat scene and climactic scene at Ern's cottage complete with ancient clocks, an obsessive newspaper collection and glass cases full of eerie stuffed birds -- wow. I was less enthralled with Alison herself, what we knew of her; perhaps she deserves a novel of her own?
Lofthouse isn't afraid to create lush, nearly gothic settings and makes them a good and believable read. I agree with some of the customer reviews that some of the overwriting or repetition could be edited down, but forgive this because I was grateful and intrigued to read a book that, quite simply, got me and wouldn't let go.

Rating:
Summary: Under a Spell
Review: Other reviews have outlined Harry's search into the suicide of his novelist (shades of Plath) and ex-model (shades of Kate Moss?) wife, so I will leap to my conclusions. As things narrow down to old man Ern (the keeper of secrets), factors and facts about the past begin to pull together, and I came completely under this Bluethroat Morning's spell.
I was gripped not only by the storyline but by some magic of the narrative voice. There is something of John Fowles's The Magus about it: a man, set apart, seeking in a strange isolated setting, worlds within worlds, time within time, though without The Magus's conspiracy element or high mythology. Even the protagonist has similarities.. an egocentric, self-pitying, sex-solves-things guy... yet I was still hooked on his search. The evocation of Norfolk and area is brilliant, Ern is a superb character, and the boat scene and climactic scene at Ern's cottage complete with ancient clocks, an obsessive newspaper collection and glass cases full of eerie stuffed birds -- wow. I was less enthralled with Alison herself, what we knew of her; perhaps she deserves a novel of her own?
Lofthouse isn't afraid to create lush, nearly gothic settings and makes them a good and believable read. I agree with some of the customer reviews that some of the overwriting or repetition could be edited down, but forgive this because I was grateful and intrigued to read a book that, quite simply, got me and wouldn't let go.

Rating:
Summary: Mesmerizing, Spellbinding!
Review: The book is about a model, Alison, who struggles with anorexia, then becomes a successful author when she writes a semi-autobiographical book about the fashion industry. She finds an old photograph in her husband's house of one of his ancestors with his wife and becomes intrigued with the unhappy-looking woman in the photo. She finds out that the woman in the picture committed suicide by walking into the sea and goes to the town where it all happened to do research and write her second book about this woman, Arabella. The twist, which you learn very early on in the first chapter (so I'm not giving anything away here), is that Alison ends up committing suicide by doing the exact same thing in the very place that Arabella did it and her husband is left to unravel the mystery of her death.

This was a real page turner and very well written. The plot sucked me in like a Hoover and didn't let go until the very end when it builds to a dramatic conclusion. Wonderful read!!!!!

Rating:
Summary: Drags on and on at times
Review: Unfortunately, despite its literary deftness, this psychological suspense/mystery novel is like so many others of its type, i.e., it builds up the reader's expectations to a high pitch, and then peters out at its conclusion, as if the author had simply run out of ideas/interest/time, and decided just to be done with the thing.

I heartily concur with the previous reviewers regarding Ms. Lofthouse's exceptional writing talent, but it is wasted here. Her plot revolves around the efforts of Harry, the widower of Alison, a famous model who had abandoned the fashion world to become a novelist, to discover the reason(s) for her suicide and to come to terms with it. Complicating Harry's search for answers are Alison's posthumous idealization by the reading public and a relentless media scrutiny, coupled with the fact she went to her death in the same manner and at the same place as did an ancestress of Harry's, who also happened to be the subject of Alison's current novel-in-progress at the time of her death.

While I generally feel that the most compelling fictional characters are those who are portrayed as flawed, just like regular folks, Ms. Lofthouse's cast is primarily a self-centered, self-seeking, whining bunch. I am old enough to have witnessed the human wreckage and waste that has been left in the wake of those who lived by the '60's slogan, "If it feels good, do it," and am disappointed to find it alive and well, albeit in a fictional tale. Frankly, by the time I reached the conclusion, I would not have minded if a few more of these people had walked into the ocean so that they could not inflict any more pain those around them.

Lastly, a pet peeve -- I find it extremely irritating when a writer with an exceptional command of language resorts to using male locker room vocabulary to refer to male and female anatomy, sexual activity, etc., especially when it occurs in a third-person narrative format, as it does in this case. Judging by her novel as a whole, Ms. Lofthouse can certainly do better than that.