Christine Beyleveldt

Whenever exams are upon me I have to fight the urge to curl up with a book and escape from the drudgery of studying. Well, the other day I got sidetracked during an online chemistry lecture and retreated to my bed with a new book. I finished it by the time the lecture was over. Oops.

Alchemy and Rose, Sarah Maine

It’s a wild, wild west adventure down under. The year is 1874 and Will Stewart, in a desperate bid to escape his bleak life in Scotland, commits a horrific crime to seize the money he needs to travel to New Zealand and stake his claim in the last great gold rush. Two years later, we meet him on the shore in Hokitika, where he rescues a young woman named Rose—the granddaughter of a convict transported to Australia—from a shipwreck.

Will marries Rose to keep her from the whorehouse and promises to build a life for them. He leaves her in Hokitika and travels to Kumara in search of gold. Rose soon joins him in the mining camp. Just as the two start to fall in love, a dreadful misunderstanding leaves Will assumed dead and Rose left to fend for herself. 

Will’s old mate discovers Rose and Will have struck gold and they’ve been hiding their riches from the rest of the camp. He abducts her, claiming he’s rescuing her from a worse fate if any of the other miners, particularly lascivious old Dan McGrath, find out about their secret hoard. Will is forced to accept help from his foe, Fraser. Together they give chase across the Tasman Sea to Melbourne and across oceans back to Scotland, a place Will swore he would never return to, to find Rose.

Props to Sarah Maine for creating a gorgeous atmosphere in the wilderness of New Zealand. I could practically hear the howling gales rattling the windowpanes, the white breakwater of the Tasman Sea battering the shore, and feel the silt under the characters’ fingernails as they panned for gold at the riverbed. Having spent time in Melbourne and in New Zealand, this book brought back a flood of memories of both places. The character growth was excellent. Will’s repulsive mate, Robbie, and poor, poor Rose, a girl who has every reason in the world to distrust the people who claim to be helping her, held my attention from start to finish.

At the end, though, I must admit I felt let down. My heart was pounding as I raced through the final few chapters, promised a spectacular showdown after a chase of epic proportions across oceans and continents. It wrapped up altogether too quickly and neatly for my tastes. But then again, Sarah Maine set the bar too high.

Pandora, Susan Stokes-Chapman

Pandora Blake is an aspiring jewellery designer who lives with her uncle, Hezekiah. He is a foul, uncouth man who has turned her late parents’ reputable shop of antiquities into a black market hovel for forgeries. Knowing that his activities put her at risk, she looks for a way out by creating beautiful designs for jewellery to sell.

But after a mysterious shipment, retrieved from the wreck of the HMS Colossus, arrives to the shop, Dora enlists the help of aspiring scholar, Edward Lawrence, to uncover the truth about the ancient piece of pottery. While her uncle wastes away of a horrible affliction, he becomes desperate to be rid of his meddlesome neice. Time is ticking. Can Dora find out what happened to her parents, and the vase’s true origins, before it’s too late?

I firmly believe that a debut novel is often an author’s best work because it is a true labour of love, and newbie author Susan Stokes-Chapman has created an exquisite mystery surrounding the fate of Pandora’s vase (for it was indeed a vase rather than a box) set in Georgian London.

The Georgian period is actually the perfect setting for the re-telling of a Grecian myth. The end of the eighteenth century was a time of enlightenment. Ideas put forth by philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau were gaining ground and democracy beginning to take hold. A time when fashion shifted away from the oppulence that defined the baroque and rococco periods and toward loose-flowing, less cumbersome Grecian styles.

Stokes-Chapman captured this time period perfectly. The gloomy London weather, the deserted shop with snow piling up on the windowsills and the corrupt, raving Hezekiah who reminded me so much of a bitter old Scrooge lent Pandora a cozy wintertime ambience. You can bet I snuggled up with this book and a cup of hot cocoa. It was a delight to watch Dora’s and Edward’s romance blossom from wary professionalism into something much deeper.