I started reading The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore yesterday afternoon and it is, as every single reviewer assured me, wonderful. But, like all things Romanov-related, it is also rather overwhelming:
The Romanovs inhabit a world of family rivalry, imperial ambitions, lurid glamour, sexual excess and depraved sadism; this is a world where obscure strangers suddenly claim to be dead monarchs reborn, brides are poisoned, fathers torture their sons to death, sons kill fathers, wives murder husbands, a holy man, poisoned and shot, arises, apparently, from the dead, barbers and peasants ascend to supremacy, giants and freaks are collected, dwarfs are tossed, beheaded heads kissed, tongues torn out, flesh knouted off bodies, rectums impaled, children slaughters; here are fashion-mad nymphomaniacal empresses, lesbian ménages à trois, and an emperor who wrote the most erotic correspondence ever written by a head of state. Yet this is also the empire built by flinty conquistadors and brilliant statesmen that conquered Siberia and Ukraine, took Berlin and Paris, and produced Pushkin, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky; a civilization of towering culture and exquisite beauty.
The sheer level of violence is extraordinary and the drama of the dynasty is completely absorbing. I fell into the book for a few hours and emerged able to think of nothing else but the blood-thirsty early Romanovs and their supporters.
With impalements by the dozen fresh in my mind, I decided something a little – a lot – gentler was needed before bed. I wanted something that was all the things the Romanovs were not: peaceful, good-humoured and non-homicidal. But I wasn’t quite ready to leave Russia so I turned to that most comforting of authors, Eva Ibbotson, and her first adult novel, A Countess Below Stairs. Its fairy-tale like beginning was the perfect antidote:
In the fabled, glittering world that was St. Petersburg before the First World War there lived, in an ice-blue palace overlooking the river Neva, a family on whom the gods seemed to have lavished their gifts with an almost comical abundance.
It was back to The Romanovs this morning but, I suspect, it will be back to Ibbotson tonight. A perfect balance.
Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from 
The weakest of my recent sampling – and the only one where the heroine actually purchases a house with her own money – was The House That is Our Own by O. Douglas. After helping her friend Kitty, a charming middle-aged widow, find a flat in London, twenty-nine year old Isobel decides she needs a change of setting. On Kitty’s recommendation, she goes to stay in the Scottish Borders and falls in love with a house there, put up for sale by its young owner who has recently moved to Canada. Isobel throws all caution to the wind and purchases it. My financially responsible self shuddered whenever Isobel blithely commented that she didn’t really have the money to keep the house going in the long run but I read on regardless. It is classic O. Douglas, with lots of lovely, sensible tea-drinking, Shakespeare loving characters of Scottish extraction being lovely together en masse, but I found it numbingly dull. The final act, with a journey to Canada and the inevitable romantic conclusion, was a little more fun but overall not a keeper.
I had been a little hesitant picking up The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge because of its religious overtones but was delighted to discover a beautifully-written story with interesting, developed characters. When fifty-year old Mary Lindsay inherits a country house from a distant relative, she decides to embrace her inheritance recklessly. She retires and sets out, after a lifetime of town living, to enjoy country life. And along with rural quiet and rich new friendships, she finds herself reflecting on the relationships she has had, learning to love even more deeply those who have now passed out of her life. A really lovely book.
The best by far, as will come as no surprise to those who have read 
