#evening class

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“Evening Class” by Maeve Binchy

🎠 Human carousel 🎠 Insane strength and teamwork skills from some of our adult evening course members👏 Whether or not you’re signed up to a course this term you can still take part in our drop-in Fitness classes which run from Monday to Thursday, lunchtimes and evenings. Choose from Handstand Conditioning, Flexibility, Conditioning for Circus and Acro Fit (HIIT). Spaces still available for next week’s classes. nationalcircus.org.uk/fitness http://bit.ly/2I3TXX2

Last of the March reads (sorry, didn't make the deadline to post yesterday!). Fire by Katherine Neville Before there was Dan Brown, there was Katherine Neville, whose first book, The Eight out-Browned Brown in terms length and breadth of subject matter as well as darn good writing. The Eight is hard to peg. It had elements of historical fiction, fantasy, mystery, thriller, adventure and a heaping dose of esoterica, which ranged from chess, to alchemy, to Arabian formulas etc. It was also darned good fun, switching timelines from present-day (well, 80s) to the French Revolution, The Terror, Czarist Russia, pre- and post-enlightenment Europe, and many other places and historical periods. Its cast of characters include fictional characters as well as historical figures such as Talleyrand, Robespierre, Catherine The Great, the Bonapartes, Ben Franklin and a few other significant figures. The Eight centered on the mysterious Montglane Service, a bejeweled chess set reputedly given to Charlemagne by the Turks and was supposed to hold awesome power. It's been hidden in Montglane Abbey, deep in the French Pyrenees and unearthed during the French Revolution. The abbess feared that the set would fall into the wrong hands so she broke up the set and gave pieces of it to her nuns and novices who were commanded to flee the abbey as it was being sacked and hide the pieces. The story follows Mirreille, one of the novices, as she journeys to Paris to deliver her piece to one of the most powerful men in Paris, Talleyrand. But then, she learns more about the set, which contained a mystical alchemical formula that many people wanted to possess. Anyone who learns about the set, gets roped into The Game, with players trying to capture as many pieces as they can in order to decipher the formula. And that's only the "historical" part of it. What ties it all together is the present-day storyline in which heroine Cat Velis, a financial analyst gets recruited into The Game along with Lily Rad, a female chess grandmaster. The Fire takes place 30 years after the end of The Eight. We learn what happened to old characters and meet new ones. But still, the objective is the same: Get roped into a real-life Game of chess. Between the two, I liked The Eight better (isn't it obvious?). Liked it so much that my copy has become battered over the years from rereading. The Fire is also a pretty great read, but suffers from treading on the same territory as the first book. Still and all, I'm glad there was a second tale, which gives closure to the tale of the mysterious Montglane Service. Evening Class by Maeve Binchy I was handed several books by Maeve Binchy, which for various reasons I couldn't refuse to accept. For this reason, I wasn't really enthused to read the books, especially since the original owner said, they were light reading. Don't get me wrong, I love light reads. But I do require them to be well-written. My first Binchy book, Quentins, I wasn't too impressed with. I liked the premise, but didn't like how it was written so I wasn't too enthusiastic to read this book. Imagine my surprise when I actually enjoyed it! Devoured it in one day, in fact. Evening Class tells the story of a motley cast of characters who attend an evening Class to learn Italian. Each chapter is devoted to a character in the class. We get the backstory, how they ended up in the class and eventually how their lives become interconnected. It's an easy read. The structure actually feels like a TV show and we're it to become one, the scriptwriter and director won't need to change the way the story unfolds.