Historical – Everything Is Better With Dragons

·

·
**Publisher:** Independently published

**Publication Date**: 25th November 2018

**Format:** Paperback

**ISBN-13:** 978-1790331239

**Price:** £6.99

Buy Link

BLURB
The Pluckley Psychic Historical Society is based in Pluckley, Kent, the most haunted village in England. Its founding members are the noted academic, historian, and Cambridge scholar Winston Hatherton, the white witch Florence Dearden, and the celebrated medium Jocasta Bradman. They are assisted by an 18th-century super-ghost called Jasper Claxton, although none of the society members are aware that Jasper is a ghost.

This is the third book in ‘The Ghost from the Molly-House’ series,and this book describes how the Psychic Historical Society was set up and goes back to the group’s first two official cases in 1919, just after the end of the first world war. The first story, ‘The Jewellery Box’ involves a 16th-century jewellery box made from precious metals, which is found buried in a garden and reveals a 400-year-old mystery.
The second story, ‘The Book of Souls’ is set in Huddersfield,England, at a place called Jubilee Tower or Castle Hill, which was built to commemorate the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria and is on the site of ancient bronze and iron age settlements dating back 4000 years. An old book of spells is found, and once opened, it appears to have released something ominous.

The Ghost from the Molly-House series is a collection of amusing paranormal mysteries, which will appeal to fans of history, period detective novels, tales of haunted houses, and all things that go bump in the night.Although this is the third book in the series, the novel can be enjoyed as a stand-alone story in its own right.

I had planned to review this book, but I’ve been ill and my depression is bad so I’m not managing to keep up with my schedule. Instead, the author has provided an extract from the book to whet your appetites.

Published By: St. Martins Press

Publication Date: 22nd November 2016

I.S.B.N.: 9781250045461

Blurb

“They think I am still a little girl who is not capable of being a Queen.”

Lord Melbourne turned to look at Victoria. “They are mistaken. I have not known you long, but I observe in you a natural dignity that cannot be learnt. To me, ma’am, you are every inch a Queen.”

In 1837, less than a month after her eighteenth birthday, Alexandrina Victoria – sheltered, small in stature, and female – became Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Many thought it was preposterous: Alexandrina — Drina to her family — had always been tightly controlled by her mother and her household, and was surely too unprepossessing to hold the throne. Yet from the moment William IV died, the young Queen startled everyone: abandoning her hated first name in favor of Victoria; insisting, for the first time in her life, on sleeping in a room apart from her mother; resolute about meeting with her ministers alone.

One of those ministers, Lord Melbourne, became Victoria’s private secretary. Perhaps he might have become more than that, except everyone argued she was destined to marry her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. But Victoria had met Albert as a child and found him stiff and critical: surely the last man she would want for a husband….

Drawing on Victoria’s diaries as well as her own brilliant gifts for history and drama, Daisy Goodwin, author of the bestselling novels The American Heiress and The Fortune Hunter as well as creator and writer of the new PBS/Masterpiece drama Victoria, brings the young queen even more richly to life in this magnificent novel.

My Review

Biography in novel form. Not half bad either. The development of Victoria during her first few years as queen is developed and explored in a sympathetic manner and with skillful storytelling. Occasionally the biography breaks through the novelisation and it becomes very obvious that the author is dumping information rather than telling the story, but it only happens three or four times and barely detracts from the flow at all.

Definitely one for fans of Victorian history and Queen Vicky herself.

3/5

Tag Archives: Historical

Extract: ‘The Pluckley Psychic Historical Society’, by Grahame Peace

Review: ‘Victoria’, by Daisy Goodwin