Sharon Reviews Wynfield's Kingdom

Today Sharon reviews Wynfield's Kingdom: A Tale of the London Slums by M.J. Neary. The author has kindly offered an e-book copy as a giveaway. To be in with the chance of winning this amazing book, simply leave a comment below, or on our Facebook page. The draw will be made on 7th December. Good luck!!!

 A Tale of the London Slums Welcome to 1830s Bermondsey, London's most notorious slum, a land of gang wars, freak shows, and home to every depravity known to man. Dr. Thomas Grant, a disgraced physician, adopts Wynfield, a ten-year-old thief savagely battered by a gang leader for insubordination. The boy grows up to be a slender, idealistic opium addict who worships Victor Hugo. By day he steals and resells guns from a weapons factory. By night he amuses filthy crowds with his adolescent girlfriend—a fragile witch with wolfish eyes. Wynfield senses that he has a purpose outside of his rat-infested kingdom, but he never guesses that he had been selected at birth to topple the British aristocracy.

Wynfield's Kingdom: A Tale of the London Slums is one of those amazing books which makes you feel like you've discovered something really special. Set mainly in the slums of Bermondsey and Southwark in South London, it paints an image of Victorian London which will stay with you for days - and nights - afterwards. The novel is an amazing story of human existence and endurance, with so many twists and turns that it will not fail to surprise and mesmerise you. The fact you never quite know what the next chapter will bring keeps you hooked and curious to the very end.

Tom did not trust Diana. She might have been helpless but certainly not harmless. Feebleness and innocence are not synonyms. She was dangerous precisely because of her physical weakness. One could expect anything from her. Tom feared that she would torch the tavern out of sheer spite.

"She's your burden now," he told Wynfield. "I wash my hands. You brought her here, so you watch over her now. If she starts making trouble, I'll kick both of you out on the streets. I won't have any nonsense in my house. You both came here as patients. I allowed you to stay here and that alone was unwise on my part."

It was a pity that Tom renounced Diana so categorically. They shared one thing in common - profound mistrust for the human race. Had Tom exhibited a little more interest in her, he would have gained a loyal partner in misanthropy. He could have instructed her in the philosophy of Schopenhauer. They could have sat and ranted for hours about the evil nature of human beings and the futility of life. What a satisfying feast of pessimism it would have been! Yet Tom had denied himself this joy.

Being a fanatic for cleanliness, Tom made the children bathe once every three days, even during winter. He did it not because they were filthier than any human beings. He simply wanted to get that children's smell out of them. Tom insisted that all children had that peculiar smell about them. It was similar to that of wet sparrow feathers.

Thanks to Tom's persistence, Wynfield and Diana were the cleanest children in Bermondsey. Their clothes might have been threadbare, but their skin and hair always smelled of soap.

If Tom's feelings had ever evolved into anything remotely kin to paternal affection he hid it at all costs. The softer he felt, the sterner he spoke. The children communicated between each other in their own language of riddles and metaphors.

Tom did, however, allow the two children to take his surname.

"If anyone asks you what your surname is, just say Grant. With such things I'm not greedy, I won't be richer for poorer for that."

His surname was his gift to the children, along with the mattress, the blanket and the night lamp.

The story focuses on a totally dysfunctional family; a disgraced doctor and the two orphans he took in after they practically fell into his lap. They have a mutual indifference - and yet, also a mutual need - for each other. Dr Grant is a quiet, single, anti-social man who now runs a tavern and has a dog to which he shows no affection. He has deliberately turned his back on society, living an ascetic life among the unloved and forgotten. However, he is still a sympathetic character, all the more so because he has hidden his own feellings so deep that he is barely aware of their existence.

Wynfield is the star of the show; a young man of keen intelligence and a natural dramatic flare. While Diana is a waifish, almost ethereal young woman who is obsessed with Wynfield in a love-hate relationship which shapes their lives as they grow from children to young adults. They are a family with enough troubles, without the self-destructive effects of opium being thrown into the mix.
The characters are all too real; each is unique, with their own secrets and a future informed by their past. 

 As you read the story, you get the impression that you're a witness to a life that once existed, but is now lost in the sands of time. The interpersonal relationships, the sense of loss and of lives that had potential that was never realised - nor could ever be - leaves a lasting impression on the reader long after the book is finished.
MJ Neary weaves a spell over the story, the unique language style and attention to detail in this unique and enthralling novel. The slums of Southwark and Bermondsey are brought to life, the Victorian world recreated to the minutest detail. The reader feels themselves walking through the desperate, sad streets of South London; the despondence and desperation oozes through her words. The author has captured the desperation of the times; the changing political situation and the plight of those with nothing and no one.
 Wynfield's Kingdom: A Tale of the London Slums is more than just a book, its a glimpse into a life long lost and an experience that will invade your thoughts long after you've turned the last page. I can't wait to get stuck into Book 2: Wynfield's War. Thank goodness for a sequel!

About M.J. Neary:
An only child of classical musicians, M.J. Neary is an award-winning, internationally acclaimed expert on military and social disasters, from the Charge of the Light Brigade, to the Irish Famine, to the Easter Rising in Dublin, to the nuclear explosion in Chernobyl. Notable achievements include a trilogy revolving the Anglo-Irish conflict - Martyrs & Traitors, Never Be at Peace and Big Hero of a Small Country. She continues to explore the topic of ethnic tension in her autobiographical satire Saved by the Bang: a Nuclear Comedy. Her latest release is a cyber mystery Trench Coat Pal set in Westport, CT at the dawn of the internet era. Colored with the same dark misanthropic humor as the rest of Neary’s works, Trench Coat Pal features a cast of delusional and forlorn New Englanders who become pawns in an impromptu revenge scheme devised by a self-proclaimed Robin Hood. A revised edition of Wynfield’s Kingdom, her debut Neo-Victorian thriller, was recently released through Crossroad Press. Wynfield’s War is the sequel following the volatile protagonist to the Crimea.
Wynfield's Kingdom is available on Amazon

The Reviewer: Sharon Bennett Connolly has been fascinated by history for over 30 years. She has studied it at university and worked as a tour guide at several historic sites. She has been writing a blog entitled 'History...the Interesting Bits' for almost 2 years and is currently working on her first non-fiction work, 'Heroines on the Medieval World' which will be published by Amberley in 2017.

Sunday Wrap Up: Week ending July 6, 2014

This being a pretty fab week for our American friends, who have been preparing for their Fourth of July hols, it's also been a semi-relaxing week here at The Review. Who doesn't want to get in on celebrations of independence? After all, we celebrate the freedom to read books of our own choosing: banned, unapproved, controversial--all kinds of literature that unfortunately in some spots on the globe are permitted only when approved by the government. For all of us here at The Review this is a sad state of affairs and we did a bit of contemplation over the week. 

While nothing in this week's Wrap Up is banned or unapproved in any way (as far as we know), we celebrate them because they, like the other magnificent books and interviews we have reviewed and conducted, add to the lexicon of knowledge, curiosity, creativity and sharing of ideas and fascinations across the world, person to person, in turn inspiring others to seek and achieve their own dreams. 

Happy birthday, America! And may all peoples achieve the freedom to read whatever it is they choose to do. 

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Babus Reviews: Wynfield's Kingdom by Marina Julia Neary


Wynfield's Kingdom by Marina Julia Neary is a dark historical novel set from 1830, Victorian England. Dr. Thomas Grant, a newly qualified young physician from Cambridge, is relieved of his position in the household of a nobleman; he also is relieved of his license to practice medicine.

Marina Julia Neary creates her characters with much allure; she describes Dr. Thomas Grant:

There was nothing in his demeanor that would inspire suspicion, no distracting gestures or eccentric habits. One would expect neither heroic deeds nor crimes from him. He exuded composure, equanimity, an impartiality.

He vows never to medically treat the rich again and opens a tavern in Bermondsey to support himself. Whilst contentedly living the life of a self-confessed misanthrope, he saves the life of 10-year-old orphan Wynfield, whom he finds breaking into his cellar. After Dr. Grant treats his injuries Wynfield leads the local police and Dr. Grant to two-year-old Diana who is also an orphan. Not expecting the two-year-old to survive from her fragile condition through the night, Dr. Grant surpasses his own rather elevated expectations when she survives, albeit with a weak heart.

The stoic Dr. Grant houses the children as tenants. Wynfield grows up to be an affable young man of many talents. He entertains those around him with knife-throwing and dancing, but primarily works on the docks and contributing most of his wages to his landlord. Wynfield practically raises Diana, who works in the tavern for Dr. Grant and makes her romantic feelings for Wynfield abundantly clear. Their relationship is a complex one as the dividing line between love and hate is quite a fine one.

Wynfield goes from being a well-read misfit in society to the “King of Bermondsey,” and is revered by the local community for his entertaining skills, which include knife-throwing and stealing. A tragic event which results from his illegal activity makes him question what he has become and leads him to write and produce a play about his hero Cromwell. He casts Diana and his friends in this play and he showcases his anti-monarch ideals, which brings him to the attention of those who have a larger political agenda. Among these activists Wynfield discovers more about his origins.


What about these mysterious origins? Click here to see if the rest of the review gives any clues…

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Louise E. Rule Interviews Richard Abbott for The Review's Author Interview 

Richard Abbott is the author of Scenes From A Life, which was reviewed by Margaret Skea in March here at The Review Group. If you would like to read Margaret's review, please click the above link.

The product description on amazon.co.uk tells the reader that:

[M]akty-Rasut is a scribe in New Kingdom Egypt, fashioning tombs for the elite. He lives a comfortable but restless life, moving every few years further upstream along the river Nile. He is content to exercise his talent without examining his origins.

Then a series of vivid dreams, interpreted with the help of a senior priest, disrupts this pattern. To solve the riddle, he must go on a journey that will take him outside the Beloved Land and away from the life that he knows. His travels take him into the neighbouring province of Canaan, to a hill-country village called Kephrath, and to a way of life he has never considere[d].

About Richard Abbott (from amazon.co.uk)

Richard Abbott lives in London, England. He writes about the ancient Middle East - Egypt, Canaan and Israel - and has also contributed to the lively academic debate about these times. His first book, In a Milk and Honeyed Land, explores events in the Egyptian province of Canaan at the end of the Bronze Age, around 1200 BC. It follows the life, loves, and struggles of a priest in the small hill town of Kephrath. A second novel, Scenes from a Life, follows on from and is set around twenty years later than In a Milk and Honeyed Land. The short story "The Man in the Cistern" is set in the same location in the years between the two novels. The short story "The Lady of the Lions" is set in the same location but around one hundred and fifty years earlier. Triumphal Accounts in Hebrew and Egyptian is the ebook version of his PhD thesis which, for those who want the technical details, supplies academic underpinning for some of the ideas and plot themes followed up in fiction. When not writing words or computer code, he enjoys spending time with family, walking, and wildlife, ideally combining all three pursuits in the English Lake District. He works professionally in IT quality assurance, and also develops mobile and tablet apps with a focus on the ancient world. 

Hello, Richard, welcome to The Review's Author Interview, thank you for taking time out to answer some questions.

Thanks, Louise, for the invitation!

You have an obvious passion for the ancient Middle East. Could you tell our readers what drew you to that time, what was it that captivated you?

Originally I got intrigued by the chronology of the ancient world, and looked into both mainstream views and some of the more alternative ones. But as I started to read actual ancient sources, initially in translation and then more directly, I abandoned chronology in favour of literature, especially poetry and its various forms. It is so much more fascinating! Plus, of course, it gives much more direct insight into the minds of people in the ancient world, rather than just modern ideas of how best to create an exact timeline.

Once hooked by the language and literature, I narrowed in on the particular period in question since it was a time of flux. The Late Bronze Age had been a long period of stability, and in a very short span of time, perhaps fifty years or so, it completely collapsed. Religious freedom, international trade, and cultural interchange gave way to a narrow parochialism. the role of women shrank from a position of importance and respect to one which, in many places, amounted to simple ownership. Many reasons for this have been proposed, and none is entirely convincing, so it is an open field for the writer. My characters live in their world with customs and habits of thought built up in one age, having to adapt to a very different one.

In your first book, In a Milk and Honeyed Land, published in June 2012, you explore events in the Egyptian province of Canaan at the end of the Bronze Age, around 1200 BC. Even though it is a time that you have already researched, and on which you had written a PhD thesis, did you have to do a different type of research for your novel, for example, your characters, and their lives?

Yes indeed. The PhD focused mostly on the language and poetry of the time, so I was pretty comfortable with that. However, for the novels I needed to have a sense of what regular life was like - housing, food, journey times, vegetation, clothing and so on. I put a lot of thought into what village religion would be like - no large temple or priestly hierarchy, for example, and existing mainly to serve the daily struggles and delights of village life. I had a lot of fun thinking how the society might signal things like social or marital status through designs on the headscarves worn (I call these "kefs", which is an adaptation of modern Hebrew and Arabic words) - no gold wedding rings here! We do have a very modest amount of pictorial evidence for headscarves, but nothing to help us interpret the visual differences.

The novels also gave me the chance to speculate on things that are credible but unprovable. For example the society I write about in Kephrath is based around the idea that property passes from mother to daughter rather than father to son. A man moves into his wife's family home rather than the reverse. This did happen occasionally back then, but we don't know if it actually did in that particular place and time.

Jump on over to Louise's fab and extensive interview to see what other delights Abbott gifts us with!

You can also jump back in time to see last week's Wrap Up!

Babus Reviews: Wynfield's Kingdom by Marina Julia Neary

Wynfield's Kingdom by Marina Julia Neary is a dark historical novel set from 1830, Victorian England. Dr. Thomas Grant, a newly qualified young physician from Cambridge, is relieved of his position in the household of a nobleman; he also is relieved of his license to practice medicine.

Marina Julia Neary creates her characters with much allure; she describes Dr. Thomas Grant:

There was nothing in his demeanor that would inspire suspicion, no distracting gestures or eccentric habits. One would expect neither heroic deeds nor crimes from him. He exuded composure, equanimity, an impartiality.

He vows never to medically treat the rich again and opens a tavern in Bermondsey to support himself. Whilst contentedly living the life of a self-confessed misanthrope, he saves the life of 10-year-old orphan Wynfield, whom he finds breaking into his cellar. After Dr. Grant treats his injuries Wynfield leads the local police and Dr. Grant to two-year-old Diana who is also an orphan. Not expecting the two-year-old to survive from her fragile condition through the night, Dr. Grant surpasses his own rather elevated expectations when she survives, albeit with a weak heart.

The stoic Dr. Grant houses the children as tenants. Wynfield grows up to be an affable young man of many talents. He entertains those around him with knife-throwing and dancing, but primarily works on the docks and contributing most of his wages to his landlord. Wynfield practically raises Diana, who works in the tavern for Dr. Grant and makes her romantic feelings for Wynfield abundantly clear. Their relationship is a complex one as the dividing line between love and hate is quite a fine one.

Wynfield goes from being a well-read misfit in society to the “King of Bermondsey,” and is revered by the local community for his entertaining skills, which include knife-throwing and stealing. A tragic event which results from his illegal activity makes him question what he has become and leads him to write and produce a play about his hero Cromwell. He casts Diana and his friends in this play and he showcases his anti-monarch ideals, which brings him to the attention of those who have a larger political agenda. Among these activists Wynfield discovers more about his origins.

Wynfield's Kingdon is a very well written dark historical novel with a complex plot centering around Wynfield, Diana and Dr. Grant. All three are very strong, captivating and well-developed characters. The reader is taken backwards and forwards in time in order to tell the story without giving away too much of the plot at once, but the story weaves the romance between Wynfield and Diana beautifully with the historical and political climate. The Kindle version I read was littered with little grammar and typing mistakes like vile instead of vial, unfortunately, but the book still remained engaging. There are many central themes like romance, jealousy, mystery, murder, crime, poverty and politics within the novel and it reads very true to the period in which it is set.

The novel is suspenseful and has a Dickens-like feel to it. There are many twists and turns 75% of the way through the book. Neary captures not just the scene but also the emotions her characters experience very eloquently. This complex tale is very absorbing but well written enough to be put down and picked up. The more you read the more you are drawn in by the storyteller and the more you want to know about these characters and from where they come. The reader is transported away to the Victorian era with Neary's characters .

Her dialogue is witty and amusing:

'Why haven't I seen you in church, Dr Grant?' the vicar inquired once. 'That is because I haven't been going to church, Mr Barclay. Last time I attended a service I was twelve years old. That was almost forty years ago. Honestly, I can't say I have felt any desire to return.' 'Pardon my curiosity. Are you one of those secular humanists?' 'That would not be the most accurate description. In fact, humanists do like humanity. I am leaning more towards an agnostic sociopath, if you insist on a label. I am afraid that your Anglican sensibilities will find no sympathy under this roof. The boy with the scared face is a Puritan, as far as I know. And the glassy-eyed girl appears to be pagan. The Irish maid is Catholic, and the Swedish one is Lutheran. As you see we have quite a Babylon Tower here.'

From the depths of poverty and depravity Wynfield's Kingdom exhibits how the human spirit champions though the worst of conditions. A spell-binding first book in the Wynfield series.