July and August ended with a plea: “September needs to pull its finger out.” Apparently September was listening.
After managing just eight books across the previous two months, September produced ten. There was time travel, romance, satire, crime, Suffolk, Felixstowe and, for reasons that seemed perfectly sensible at the time, four consecutive books about possibly the most dysfunctional family in literary history. There was also a bit of time travel of my own as I went back to books I first read as a teenager, nearly forty years ago, and discovered that while V.C. Andrews hasn’t changed, I certainly have.
September also continued a slightly unexpected theme in my reading this year: local authors and familiar places. Three books ended up getting full reviews of their own, so I won’t repeat myself here. Nobody needs to read me talking about Felixstowe twice. Well, not on the same day anyway.
1987: A Year in the Life of Victoria Bloom – Jason Ayres
September began with another trip into Jason Ayres’ A Year in the Life series. I’ve been following these through the 1980s and this time we’ve reached 1987, with Victoria Bloom getting the opportunity to return forty years to the past and revisit her career at Vale Television, the smallest station on the ITV network.
Vale is broke, Victoria knows what television successes are coming in the future and therefore has the considerable advantage of being able to nick ideas that haven’t been invented yet. Unfortunately, knowing that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is a good idea is less useful when your television company can apparently only afford Who Wants to Win £500?
The series works because the time travel is really just the excuse. Each book drops somebody back into a particular year and then has enormous fun rummaging around in the culture of the period. This one is particularly suited to me because 1987 television is something I actually remember. There is something rather enjoyable about reading historical fiction where your first reaction is: Oi. That’s not history. I was there.
It was also a nice continuation of the series after 1986: A Year in the Life of Lucy Hart, which I read earlier this year. Different characters and a different story, but the same opportunity to revisit an era that is becoming alarmingly distant despite my brain insisting that 1987 was about fifteen years ago. It wasn’t. Let’s move on.
Our Perfect Storm – Carley Fortune
Next came Our Perfect Storm, and apparently I was briefly reading romance again. Frankie and George have been best friends since they were eight. Frankie is about to get married, George arrives for the wedding, everything looks wonderful and then the groom dumps her the following morning.
George’s solution is entirely sensible: Frankie should go on her honeymoon anyway. With him. To Tofino. Obviously nothing complicated could possibly happen.
The friendship between Frankie and George is really the heart of the book. This isn’t two strangers meeting on holiday and spending 400 pages deciding whether they fancy each other. They have decades of history, arguments, affection and things left unsaid between them before they even get on the plane. The trip therefore becomes as much about repairing that friendship as whatever else may be lurking underneath it.
Romance still isn’t the section of the bookshop where I’d naturally set up camp, but I seem to keep wandering into it occasionally and finding books I quite enjoy. Very inconvenient.
Come Up Screaming – Steffan Piper
Then came a book that was never going to get away with a couple of paragraphs in a monthly roundup. Come Up Screaming took me back to 1980s Felixstowe, but this time the nostalgia became rather more personal. There were streets I knew, a house I recognised and, slightly alarmingly, characters based on people I still know. At that point it stopped being merely a book review and turned into me rummaging around in my own childhood.
Read my full review of Come Up Screaming →
Flowers in the Attic – V.C. Andrews
And then I went back into the attic. This wasn’t my first encounter with the Dollangangers. I read the Flowers in the Attic books as a teenager, which means this was less about discovering the story and more about revisiting something from my reading past nearly forty years later.
I remembered the basic premise, obviously. Cathy, Chris, Carrie and Cory are hidden away in their wealthy grandparents’ enormous house while their mother attempts to regain her father’s favour and inheritance. Days become weeks, weeks become months and the children gradually realise that the adults responsible for looking after them may not have their best interests entirely at heart. That description may be understating things slightly.
What was interesting nearly forty years later was how differently I read it. As a teenager you’re much closer to Cathy and Chris, trapped upstairs and trying to understand what the adults are doing to them. Reading it now, there were rather more moments when I found myself wondering what the bloody hell is wrong with every adult in this family?
The claustrophobia still works, though. The attic, the locked rooms, the grandmother, the gradual erosion of hope and the children’s increasingly desperate attempts to understand what is happening remain horribly effective. So naturally, having revisited the first one, I did the sensible thing. I read the next three as well.
Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns & Seeds of Yesterday – V.C. Andrews
Four Dollanganger books in fifteen days. 1,698 pages. That escalated quickly.
Petals on the Wind takes the surviving children out into the world, but escaping the attic turns out not to be the same thing as escaping what happened there. Cathy in particular carries Foxworth Hall around with her long after leaving it. Then If There Be Thorns moves the story into another generation, before Seeds of Yesterday carries the family saga onwards again.
Taken together, they’re a fascinatingly bonkers reading experience. There is revenge, obsession, trauma, terrible parenting, inappropriate relationships, family secrets, people making catastrophic decisions and an apparently hereditary inability to look at what happened to the previous generation and think, perhaps we shouldn’t do that again.
I’m not sure teenage me appreciated quite how gloriously dysfunctional the whole saga becomes. 2026 me absolutely did.
But there was something genuinely enjoyable about going back. Books are peculiar little time capsules. You’re reading exactly the same words you read decades earlier, but the person reading them isn’t remotely the same. I remembered some scenes immediately, others had completely disappeared from my memory, and there were things that probably seemed terribly dramatic to teenage me that now produced a slightly different response. Mostly involving the words: Oh, for God’s sake.
Nearly forty years later, though, I still wanted to keep reading. That probably says more than anything else.
Holmhill Farm – J.D. Missen
Then we returned to Suffolk, and another book that escaped the confines of the monthly review. Julie Missen’s Holmhill Farm combined a modern crime story with the 1953 East Coast floods and Felixstowe history. That would already have been enough to get my attention. Then a Versey appeared.
Not an actual relative, I should stress. We checked. But when you’re reading a novel set around Felixstowe and your own relatively unusual surname suddenly appears on the page, concentrating on the actual plot becomes temporarily difficult.
Read my full review of Holmhill Farm →
The Decadents – M.C. Schmidt
After four generations of Dollanganger misery and a couple of trips around Suffolk, September took another turn with The Decadents. And it announces its intentions fairly quickly.
Phil Ochs is a successful businessman who desperately wants recognition as Outstanding Entrepreneur. Unfortunately, he discovers that he may lose the award to a company selling cosmetic testicular implants for neutered pets. Yes. Really.
If you’re going to write satire about status, money, ego and the increasingly ridiculous things people will buy, losing an entrepreneurial award to artificial dog testicles is certainly one way of establishing the tone.
Phil is not an especially easy man to love. He is obsessed with success, irritated by almost everybody and carries around an enormous chip about sharing his name with the rather more famous folk singer Phil Ochs. The humour is dark, sometimes very dark, and the book is quite happy to make its characters unpleasant while poking at consumerism, business culture, status and the strange things people do when being successful stops being enough and they also need everybody else to know they’re successful.
It was certainly a change from V.C. Andrews. Although, thinking about it, both involve dysfunctional people making terrible decisions. Perhaps my reading isn’t as varied as I think.
Mother Missing – Ruth Dugdall
And finally, another return. This time not to a book I’d read nearly forty years ago, but to a character I hadn’t seen for a very long time.
Ruth Dugdall’s Mother Missing is the fifth Cate Austin book and arrived eleven years after the fourth. So if anyone is wondering why it had been so long since I’d read a Cate Austin novel, I would like the record to show that this one isn’t my fault. It also strengthened my campaign for every returning book series to contain a short “Previously…” section. Eleven years is a long time to expect me to remember everybody.
Once I’d found my feet, though, Cate quickly felt familiar again. Better still, the story brought her back to Suffolk and gave me yet another locally connected book in a month already containing two of them. I’ve only just reviewed this one properly, so I’m not going to review the review.
Read my full review of Mother Missing →
September by the Numbers
Books read: 10
Pages read: 3,742
Average length: 374 pages
eBooks: 9
Paperbacks: 1
Books by Felixstowe/Suffolk-connected authors: 3
Dollanganger books read in fifteen days: 4
Pages spent with the Dollangangers: 1,698
Books first read nearly forty years ago and voluntarily returned to: 4
Times I regretted returning to the attic: Surprisingly few
“Previously…” chapters encountered: 0
“Previously…” chapters still demanded: All of them
Overall
Well, September certainly pulled its finger out. Ten books and 3,742 pages is rather more like it after the relative sloth of July and August, although four books belonging to the same family probably helped.
More interesting than the numbers was how much of September’s reading involved looking backwards. Jason Ayres took me back to 1987, Steffan Piper took me back to the Felixstowe of my childhood, V.C. Andrews took me back to books I first read as a teenager, and Julie Missen went considerably further and took me into Felixstowe’s history. Then Ruth Dugdall brought back Cate Austin after eleven years. That’s quite a lot of the past for one month.
There were new books and new characters too, of course, but the thing I’ll probably remember about September is discovering how much fun there can be in returning to something familiar. Sometimes the book hasn’t changed at all. You have. And sometimes you discover that nearly forty years later the Dollangangers are still completely bloody bonkers. Which is oddly reassuring.
Ten books. 3,742 pages. September redeemed itself. October? No pressure.