The new vicar of Ledwardine is a young widow with a turbulent past and a "difficult" daughter. A village festival is to be held focusing on the mysterious death of a previous minister duing the witch-hunts of the 17th century. Tensions tighten, a girl disappears and a tree bears unlikely fruit

RELEASE NOTES:

AS an RABCK for Lisagt in apology for forgetting her books recently

Oohh! A murder mystery. Actually the title made me think it was a romance but now I've read the blurb I beg to differ...Thanx woosang, really not necessary, but still appreciated!

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

Left with Kirkles and Carlienka on the MV Doulos today.

Received from Lisagt at the Doulos / Sydney meet up - glad you could make it to the Doulos Lisagt!

sent out for the UK SMILE day RABCK

I enjoyed this book. It was a bit slow moving in places and I'm not sure it quite concluded, but it was nice escapism.

Thanks Kirkles. I enjoy a well-travelled book!

Now this was a bizzare book, with some unusual ingredients: vicars (sorry.... priest-in-charge), village politics, cider, murder, and magical apple trees. I did find that the plot dragged a bit, but overall I enjoyed it. For some reason the cry of "Auld Ciiiiiiidaaaarrr!" keeps going round my head this morning. I hope it leaves soon. I really didn't like Dermot Child, the sex-obsessed church organist! But Gomer was a sweetie:-)

Can this be described as a crime book? There's very little detective work going on, and a lot of fantasy elements. There's an awful lot of 'Vicar of Dibley' or 'Home is Where the Heart is' moments too.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

To be released at meetup

Caught at the Edinburgh meet up. Thanks.

Hmm, this was a funny mix. I think it could have benefited from being a little shorter to tighten up the story a bit. By the time I got towards the end, I was thinking "Oh, get on with it". Still, part were quite good, and I liked that Merrily's Christian beliefs weren't shown as creepy or that she was oblivious to the real world, but that her faith was a real and tangible thing. Not very often that Christians are protrayed as real people. They usually turn out ot be the villains, so that wa a refreshing change.
Will offer at the next meet up.

Wow, what a load of books there were to choose from tonight at the Edinburgh BookCrossing Meetup. Too many for every book to find a reader. For being book crossers we optimistically bring many more books to share than we intend taking away…

Not that those intentions are always acted upon. Many of us leave with bulging book bags as we cannot bear to see books abandoned at the end of the evening. So we take away books to pass on else where! Also allowing an important opportunity to write catch & release journals, thus giving the Bookcrosser who brought it to the meeting, and any other bookcrossers who have journalled it, the chance to know where it’s travelled today at least.

In this instance as I have surpassed myself by the removal of twenty one books, good grief! Quite when or where the passing on of these shall occur, I have yet to decide. This book could be left on a café table tomorrow, be placed on an Official BookCrossing Zone shelf in either Edinburgh [Always Sunday Café, The High Street] or Aberdeen [Belmont Cinema Café, Belmont Street], or it may head off to Somerset or perhaps even Orkney in the coming months?

OK, OK, OK, that was my pre-prepared bit as I was wanting to hurry up the registration of these twenty-one books, but right now I’m just thinking OH WOW it’s a book registered by woosang! A name I’ve oft noticed on the BookCrossing mothership site! WOW!

OK what’s that quote about… “Tears are the Wine of Angels… the best… to quench the devil’s fires.”
Tears, sad things, I would have thought or certainly expressions of distress, here are equated with wine which is generally enjoyable. Yum. But this suggests the distressed tears of angels are viewed as wine and are pleasurable? Uck! Or angel tears are somehow different, and we would welcome drinking these? No. I’m still with the, uck there! And these tears from angels would be best for quenching the devils fires? I don’t understand, Angels tearful in distress, and I’d imagine the devil would think brilliant! Yes, everyone in pain and torment, business as usual in hell. So angel tears would be instantly vaporised. I’m c-l-e-a-r-l-y missing something there…?

Tense, convoluted and intriguing I really was wondering where this author was talking me? A slight hint of light cosy, country tale with a flurry of romantic moments seemed to morph into a troubled literary suspense which verged on horror… a curious mix. Two or three people got decidedly swirrly or ought that be, squirrelly at points. Were we getting into the depths of some disordered minds or was this just deep distress? And generally being in a fraught state of mind at the moment myself I found on a number of occasions I couldn’t handle what I felt was highly cranked tension and had to check forward a few pages just to reassure myself we weren’t about to be dealing with a corpse. Exceedingly unusual behaviour for me.

Also for some reason, I was expecting that Merrily would have a more solid investigatory role so had expectations thwarted there though on reflection I liked the way that she was really busy with the every day business of getting settled into a new job while the juggling her personal distress, vague doubts about her vocation, and the trickiness of local politics. Though some fairly convincing portraits were created I was not entirely persuaded by the central characters. However, deciding this was a primarily plot driven fan-dango meant that’s didn’t seem such a big deal. Lots of description spent on both the utterly repulsive Dermot Child, the organist, and the manipulative and menacing, Karl Winding that didn’t appear to go anywhere much so that fell a little flat and hardly any time what so ever was spent on, others who turned out to be altogether nastier cups of tea. So they suddenly seemed to lurch out of the undergrowth like zombies in a horror movie.

I liked the way the investigatory storyline waxed and waned, with different characters working on various angles of the different mysteries, Lucy Devenish ferreting around local history archives and dropping her suspicions like bombs into others lives, hazy Jane struggling to be grown up and assertive and the stumbling Lol, finally functioning on another speed while the rye and resourceful Gommer took some initiatives. The Wine of Angels was certainly engrossing and I won’t be slow to pick up another Rickman novel.

My sister’s moved to a traditional Cider making county so it feels right to pass this onto her next!

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

I’m passing this into the paws of Flutterbies9 on Wednesday the 22 of April 09, with a couple of other books as well. It’s always great to have lots of holiday reading in your luggage!

Apologies. I obviously forgot to register this book when we got bak to Somerset six weeks ago.

BTW, the book has a different cover to that illustrated.

This was a new author for me and in all truth I'm not sure what to say about this one that has not already been said. Agree with several earlier points by LittleSuz, bookfrogster and rainbow3.

Curious book. There were times I thought "why am I reading this, I don't like this" and other times I was thinking it was a curiously childlike romp in the country with Christian overtones ~ nothing in this book being really in your face other than the somewhat gross sexual advances of the young males of Ledwardine and Dermot Child! The central characters Merrily, Jane and Lol all had issues which were well described (but were they ever resolved? I think not) but somehow they did not seem well rounded to me. The orchard descriptions I can equate with as I can see many old apple orchards here and recognise the strange stunted shapes of the old gnarled trees, but I cannot answer for the traditions. The mysticism element threw me off track at various points and I thought it did not gel with the rest of the book for me as there were enough other elements to keep the plot afloat and running. So some of this I liked, other bits I did not; overall ~ still undecided.

I may try another Phil Rickman book but will probably not read a third if a second leaves me as curiously undecided as this one! Will mark this as available meantime and decide if I release this elsewhere or not.

Had this for far too long and cannot recall why I had not released this earlier now. However, a random book for a random bookbox!

Happy travels little book.

Taken out of the random bookbox, thanks:-)