Welcome to Litsy!

A book of 12 short stories built around the 12 days of Christmas & also interconnected & set in the fictional town of Merrywake.

My first thought on this was it's very Downton Abbey meets Pride & Prejudice! In fact it was very P&P coded for me: five daughters (the pretty one, the vivacious one, the studious one, the two rather silly younger ones), one of the stories was even called 'First Impressions'. (continued)

After joining his best friend Sol & his family on a camping trip, Adam is feeling a bit bored & restless. He decides to go for a walk & Sol tags along, & in the middle of nowhere they happen upon a strange town. All the houses & shops are cheerily decorated but eerily silent with no people around & there is a bandstand in the middle of the town square with an odd statue in it.

This was a fascinating read both about Will Rohrbein & the expedition & discoveries of William Beebe, a naturalist & pioneer of deep-sea diving using his invention - the bathysphere. I can only imagine how bewildering it must have been for a young boy to have lost his father, then see his mother & sister go abroad whilst he had to wait to join them, & then was sent on aboard a ship for months where he didn't speak the language of most of the crew.

Lily is transferred to the asylum partway through her prison sentence & is chosen as the first prisoner to speak to the new female psychiatrist as she seems to have shown little of the 'hysteria' she was sent there for. The psychiatrist believes that if Lily tells her her life story, then she can make up her mind about whether to recommend Lily for release.

Summer 1985, & two young mountaineers, Joe & Simon, set off from camp to climb a route no-one had conquered before. After several days they reached the summit with a few minor issues, but when setting off back down Joe has a catastrophic accident resulting in him breaking his leg. Disaster! Although Simon initially tries to belay Joe down the mountain, a snow storm develops which results in him having to leave Joe for dead.

#ReadAway2025 #Wardens2025 #SeriesLove2025

Visitors to London, especially those from outside of the UK, who wish to see the remnants of early Victorian London are probably going to be somewhat disappointed, although this is not just a recent thing, As the author argues, the truth is that the London of Dickens's time was already being lost before the end of the Victorian era & his writing was beginning to be thought of as 'old hat' by then too.

TLDR: This is very much a historical fiction novel with elements of horror towards the end. Overall, I thought it was nicely done with the dual timelines of present-day & London 1769 working well here & a fitting, if slightly rushed ending. 3.75🌟

My thanks to #NetGalley & publishers, VERVE Books, for the opportunity to read an ARC.

Full Review & TWs: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7463737218
Read 17th - 19th Sept 2025