A Case Of Indian Tea

2019 Reading Challenge: 12 books out of 52 (23%).

---

Hey readers, I've got some news on the book reading front for you, if you're interested in hearing about what I've recently been reading. 

I'm stuck into an amazing series called India Tea by Janet MacLeod Trotter. Its an incredible series about tea, but more than that. It looks at the lives of different women between the two World Wars, and how the tea plantations of India effected their lives. Back in the days of the British Raj on the Indian subcontinent, the British owned large tea plantations that would ship tea to both England and other parts of the British empire, as well as to other parts of the world. These books are, thus far, a beautiful read. Janet MacLeod Trotter is a very gifted writer. I've been captured by the sudden and totally unexpected plot twists that have happened thus far and I'm glad I've been able to buy all four books, so I don't have to worry about finding the money to buy the next instalment in the series. I've had the books for a while (the last one I book shortly after it was released on the Kindle Store).

The worst part of buying books, is that I've ended up reading an amazingly well written book only to discover that there are more books in the series. Often I've found, with Kindle, is that one book will be largely discounted (one book will cost about between £1.99 and 99p in the Amazon Kindle Store) but the rest of the books in the series aren't as cheap.Often the entire series will between £10 and £15, which is a decent price (considering that the hard copies will often cost at least £8.99 each), but when you're on a tight budget it can really hard to get a four book series, even for Kindle. I've taken to checking how much a book will cost and if its part of a series. If I can afford it, and it's not part of a series then I may buy it, otherwise I'll add it to my Kindle Wishlist, and wait until I can afford to buy the book, or in some cases, the entire series ends up on there.

There has been a few times when I've bought an entire series of books (often two or three book series) and ended up struggling so much with finish the first book so much that I never got further than that. The reason I often end up buying the rest of the series, if I can afford to at the time, is that I do plan to pick up the series again in the future. One such series I greatly struggled with is the Original Shannara Trilogy by Terry Brooks. The first book, The Sword of Shannara, reminded me too much of the Fellowship of the Ring, by JRR Tolkien, which ruined the whole book, as it was extremely predictable. I haven't gone anywhere near the second and third instalments, because I'm worried that these two books will be very similar to JRR Tolkien's books, The Two Towers and The Return of the King. I own both books and may return to them one day, if my curiosity drives me and I have the time to spare to sit and read them. 

---

Current Read

I just finished the second book of the India Tea series. It's called the Tea Planter's Bride, and is basically a continuation of the Tea Planter's Daughter, the first book in the series. It was a heartbreaking story of how the main protagonist, Sophie, was so desperate to return to India, without realising it, that she believed she was in love with a young man who was returning to India himself. Her cousin and best friend, Tilly, had married a man who lived and worked in India, so the two young women went to India together. Tilly to join her husband, before the birth of their unborn child, and Sophie, to join the man who she's basically asked to marry her. During the years after they'd arrived in India, a lot happens to both women. For Sophie, her marriage doesn't go the way she'd hoped. Her husband only married her because she'd almost thrown herself at him (towards the end of the book, you realise he's actually in love with someone else), but she's desperate to make it work. Tilly, on the other hand, seemed to fair better. Her husband, James, dotes on her, though he doesn't approve of her investigating what happened to Sophie's parents when Sophie was 6; the story was that they'd died of a fever, but the facts didn't add up. This is a beautiful story of how the women discover a lot about themselves and their past. For the last few chapters, I couldn't put it down and ended up staying awake for several hours after getting home from work.

I'm not going to write about The Girl From The Tea Garden (Book 3 of the India Tea series), because I've only just started it and I'm not going to ruin the story by reading any spoilers.

---

Continued Progress with My 2019 Reading Challenge

I'm currently ahead of schedule with my GoodReads Reading Challenge by two books. I'm hoping to keep it this way as I'm not sure what the rest of the year will hold with the amount of time I have to sit down and spend a few hours (at any one time) to read. I used to be able to do this a lot as teenager and young adult. So I'm reading whenever I can. If you want to help me with keeping on top of my reading challenge this year, feel free to buy me one of the books on my reading list (the link is http://amzn.eu/7GM9Xqc).