3.5.
Set in the Spitalfields area of London, among the Silk weavers, in the 1760's. this is the story of Ester Thorel, wife if one of the Silk weaver masters and her maid Sara, who she has rescued from a brothel. Ester has dreams of becoming a silk weaver herself, but at this time, women are expected merely to keep house. There is competition from abroad and this leads to unrest between the weavers and their masters. All the characters seem to be falling in love with the wrong people leading to Sara and her Mistress getting caught up in the unrest.

The story is engaging and easy to read, but not one that will stay with me. A solid debut, however. I will look out for future books by the author.

***Many thanks to netgalley for a copy in exchage for an honest opinion***

An interesting read, set in late 18th century Spitalfields, Blackberry and Wild Rose, set among the Huguenot silk weavers, centres on two women,: Eleanor (wife of a silk master weaver and merchant) and Sara her maid,. I found the storyline about how 'Eleanor rescues Sara from life in a brothel a little unbelievable. I also found my willing suspension of disbelief stretched thin by Eleanor’s passionate affair with one of her husband’s employees. Women of standing led very circumscribed lives, and the doomed romance felt rather trite.
What saved the book for me was the wealth of detail about silk weaving, and the silk industry in general - particularly at this period, when it was facing disastrous levels of competition from cheaper textiles.
The book demonstrates the high level of research typical of the good historical novel, but at no time did I feel the information was being “told” rather than shown. The narrative threads are as carefully woven as the silk design which provides the title.
Although the story gets off to a slowish start, it repays perseverance.

A beautiful book about sumptuous silk at a very interesting time. I Was captivated by the tale of the whore and the lady, woven together in a silken tapestry. It is a satisfying tale full of historical details and teaming with the smells of 18th century London. And I loved that it was based on a real woman who made her mark in a man’s world.

MY REVIEW

Blackberry and Wild Rose is Sonia Velton's historical fiction debut and is based around the silk workers in 1860s Spitalfields in London.

It is told from the points of view of Sara and Esther and illustrates the hardship and poverty at the time.

It also covers the conflict between journeyman weavers and master weavers and the fact that women were unable to work in certain professions, including art. This is so beautifully written, an ethereal yet grounded tale of just what it must have been like to live and fight against the every day adversities of this age.

In my opinion, Sonia Velton has written a stunning and elegant tale which show the strengths of women who even when so downtrodden show such hope and determination to improve their lives, those of others and to follow a dream. Remarkable writing.

Sara Kemp has left her home in the country and arrived in London with a small amount of money and a contact address given to her by her mother. Sara is naive and easily falls victim to the madam of a local brothel where her money and virtue are taken and she is forced to work. Esther Torel has married into the close-knit Hugeneot society of Spitalfields which has led to problems for her husband. All Esther wants to do is translate the paintings she makes in silk patterns for her husband. Esther decides to help Sara but with rival calicos destroying the silk trade and unionisation by the workers, Spitalfields is a powder keg waiting to explode..In 18th Century London women has strictly delineated roles - wife and mother or whore - Sara is one and Esther is the other.
Having lived in Spitalfields many years ago I have a fondness for books set in the area. My old (rented!) room was in a house that was one of the Hugeneot weavers houses with an attic space for work. The problems for the silk trade in the mid-18th century form a backdrop to this novel and politically it is quite interesting. however I did find the main characters a little cliched, particularly Sara. She becomes a whore then a ladies' maid, the confidante of her mistress but then betrays the one person who has helped her. Esther is a little colourless, she wants to design silk but not much else. This book is promising rather than really engrossing.

I love historical fiction and was very much looking forward to starting this. The context of the silk weavers of London and the competition with French and Belgian silk; the banning of Indian calico cotton; the London setting- these were very interesting details to me. However it felt like nothing really happened (not true but that's how it felt!) and there were no sympathetic characters. Not a bad read. Just not a great one.

I started reading this and simply couldn't bear it. I'm afraid I didn't make it further than the first few pages. I'm an C18th historian, so should have known better than to try reading a book set in that period.

I remember my English teacher saying to me Blimey over 35 years ago "Don't judge a book by its cover" Well I did with this one! This cover on Blackberry and Wild Rose By Sonia Velton is just beautiful. This is Sonia's first book and it was Brilliant especially as I don't really read books in this gene. So I am glad I fell in love with this beautiful cover.
Blackberry and Wild Rose tells the story of a fictional household of master silk weavers living in eighteenth century Spitalfields and was beautifully written throughout.

Big Thank you to Netgalley and Quercus Books for the ARC. This will be an author I will look out for again and would recommend this book to read.

Review on Goodreads and Amazon UK.

First of all, just look at that cover – if that’s not gorgeous, I don’t know what is! Not going to lie, while the synopsis sounded interesting as well, I was most attracted to the cover art!

This is an historical novel centering around a silk weaving household in London, and this is not a setting I have encountered before. I knew very little about the industry and process of weaving, and it was very interesting not only to see the position of the family in society but also the actual skill and time involved in the weaving of silk.

Our two main characters and and narrators are not exactly likable. Both have very distinct ideas about themselves and their place in the world, and they clash a lot when those views don’t match. Esther feels she does God’s work by rescuing Sara, but it’s also feels very self-serving, and she doesn’t exactly live a blame-free life either – especially once she starts learning how to weave. She doesn’t conform to what society expects of her. Sara feels she is too good for a position as a maid, even a lady’s maid, but considering she was in a brothel before this, she seems ignorant of society if she thinks this won’t impair any future prospects. It feels very much as if she expects the world to conform to what she feels entitled to, and this can get very frustrating. So while the protagonists are from very different levels of society, they are also quite similar.

The pacing is very much slice-of-life, and quite slow-going until about half-way through the novel, when suddenly the story twists round and turns into something I didn’t expect, but appreciated. All in all I enjoyed this novel, it was a new and interesting world to step into with intriguing if not frustrating characters.

At another time, I might have enjoyed this more. But, reading it right off the back of The Binding, my standards for future reads were absurdly high. Add in that they’re both historical fiction and I really wanted something that lived up to the same level of The Binding.

WHEN Esther Thorel, the wife of a Huguenot silk-weaver, rescues Sara Kemp from a brothel she thinks she is doing God’s will. Sara is not convinced being a maid is better than being a whore, but the chance to escape her grasping ‘madam’ is too good to refuse.

Inside the Thorels’ tall house in Spitalfields, where the strange cadence of the looms fills the attic, the two women forge an uneasy relationship. The physical intimacies of washing and dressing belie the reality: Sara despises her mistress’s blindness to the hypocrisy of her household, while Esther is too wrapped up in her own secrets to see Sara as anything more than another charitable cause.

It is silk that has Esther so distracted. For years she has painted her own designs, dreaming that one day her husband will weave them into reality. When he laughs at her ambition, she strikes up a relationship with one of the journeyman weavers in her attic who teaches her to weave and unwittingly sets in motion events that will change the fate of the whole Thorel household.

I love when a novel takes something, like an industry you never hear about in fiction, such as silk weaving, and brings it alive. I loved the detail to the craft, the depth to the process, and I loved delving into this world that I knew nothing about.

Sarah and Esther are both great characters, not the usual meek ladies you see in historical fiction, but women who know what they want and who stand up to men in positions of power, men who can and do very easily abuse those positions, to go for what they want and what they believe in, and they were great characters to read. They were both well rounded and I loved their backstories, their similarities and differences.

So I loved the setting, and I rallied for the characters, and I enjoyed the plot, but unfortunately something about this book fell a bit flat for me. Maybe it was after reading such a special book that it just lacked something I can’t quite put my finger on. It just didn’t wow me in the same way other books have, I didn’t want to yell from the rooftops that everyone should read it. I still really enjoyed it, and can’t really find any faults except it lacked a certain spark. I still think it’s a credible debut and I’ll definitely be interested to see what else Sonia Velton writes in the future, but I was yearning for a magic spark

I found the characters in this book really hard to like which made the book a bit difficult to read & it took me a while to get through it. The overall story was better & the details of the era were interesting, but overall not a favourite of mine. I like to have a good strong likeable character to follow their story as such.

A delicious historical read!
This book is all about the relationship between two women, the. Mistress and her servant. It’s set in London in the second half of the 18th century and based around the Huguenots & the Silk industry, both I knew little about. The characters were intriguing but I found them hard to like as much as I wanted to. The book did however manage to bring the era to life especially from a female point of view and the drama kept me hooked.

"I was observing a transition, the strands of silk thread disappearing from the bobbins and becoming so woven together that they would be impossible to pick apart. And with every pass of the shuttle his life and mine intertwined."

Beautifully written historical fiction set among the Huguenot silk weavers of Spitalfields in 1760s London. Sara Kemp is sent to London by her mother but ends up being forced into working in a brothel. It isn't until Esther Thorel, the wife of a silk weaver, rescues her and gives her a job as a maid that their lives start to become curiously linked. Sara falls for a journeyman weaver who is intent on industrial unrest and protest against the silk weavers for better wages and conditions. At the same time, Esther secretly paints watercolour designs of the silk patterns she wants to weave but her husband will never let her. This could be set to change when a journeyman weaver begins using the looms in the attic of her house. I loved how the two women's stories were told and related to each other. A wonderful book!

What an enlightening insight into life in the 18th Century. Set amongst the weavers of the time it highlights the plight of a young girl arriving alone in Spitalfields and having the misfortune to be met, initially by someone who would shape the next years of her life; taking the innocence of youth from her in one night.
I was drawn into a world of the rich running their weaving empires and using other weavers to do their weaving and further their wealth.
This story has its sadness too both for our main character and the person who saved her from a life of drudgery; for this was the time of the gallows. How many innocent people must have met their death this way? Where there is death however, there will also be life and this cycle perpetuates for our heroine.
A truly fascinating look at life in the 18th Century.
I loved it.

Spitalfields, London in the eighteenth century. The air is alive with the noise of the looms as journeymen weavers set about their business. Loosely inspired by, and based upon, the life of Anna Maria Garthwaite, Blackberry and Wild Rose is an atmospheric novel that brings forth a time in history that I was quite unfamiliar with. A duel-narrative novel, it follow the lives of Sara Kemp and Esther Thorel as they become intertwined, and they strike up an unlikely and fraught friendship.

It is clear that, where her style of writing is concerned, Velton is a phenomenal author; she delivers a sumptuous and rich tale that immerses the reader into the world which she has weaved. However, Blackberry and Wild Rose was one that I wanted to love but simply didn’t. Underneath the evidence of thorough research, the novel falls victim to the cliches and tropes of its genre: star-crossed lovers, scheming women plotting against one another, and betrayal.

The plot soon became predictable, slow-paced until the second half before it snow-balled. Everything happened too rapidly in the second half, unevenly paced. Whilst the tension certainly existed in the first half of the book, that sense of inevitable and impending undoing, between months passing by in a paragraph and the feeling that nothing was truly happening, I got lost somewhere in there. Frankly, I’m still unsure how many years passed over the course of the novel and this detail irks me.

It was the small moments that saved this book for me: Velton's moving writing; the bittersweet, yet hopeful, ending; the moment Esther first creates her Blackberry and Wild Rose masterpiece on the point paper; the historical context and exploration of silk weaving; and the social commentary.

I read this as an unproofed e-ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publishers. It is a very good debut novel and evokes the times as well as we can from this distance in time. Extreme poverty, prostitution, extreme religion, patriarchal society and few if any women's rights. The silk weaving is literally the thread that binds this story together and I enjoyed the detail of the processes. Also the actions of the journeymen who were angry and upset over the changes in their employments. Cheap foreign imports are not a 20th/21st century phenomenon. Overall a very satisfying read and one I would recommend to lovers of good historical fiction.

As someone who has recently rediscovered her love for historical fiction, I’ve truly been spoilt lately. Sure, a nice gruesome murder or a bunch psychological games is fun to read about but there is something about being transported to ages long ago that totally captures my imagination.

Upon arriving in Spitalfields, Sara Kemp immediately lands herself in a whole heap of trouble. She is rescued by Esther Thorel, the wife of a prominent silk weaver, who offers Sara the position of being her maid. Not quite Sara’s dream job but definitely a step up from where she found herself. This marks the start of a rather uneasy relationship that will affect their lives.

I must say this didn’t at all turn out the way I expected it to and I was pleasantly surprised. Some of the silk weaving technicalities went completely over my head but as that wasn’t the be all and end all of the story, that didn’t really bother me. Because what matters far most is the divide between the upper and the lower classes and the battle a woman faces when she wants to do something men don’t think she’s meant for.

There’s a whole cast of extremely unlikeable characters. So much so that I’m hard pressed to decide which one I actually disliked the most. Yet, that too didn’t bother me because all the lies, deceit and betrayal made for one immersive story. And let’s not forget to mention the rich and vivid descriptions of 1860’s London that create the most wonderful atmosphere.

There is much to enjoy about this historical fiction novel and I went through a whole range of emotions, from anger to frustration to a touch of sadness at how unfair life can be. I learned quite a bit along the way too, which is always a bonus. Make sure to read the author’s notes, by the way. Blackberry & Wild Rose is a remarkable debut by Sonia Velton and I will most definitely be keeping my eye on her in future.

In a nutshell, our main character Sara Kemp arrives in London having been sent there by her mother to find her own way in life. Instantly on arrival she is 'conned by an old woman, drugged, and forced to work as a prostitute'. Luckily, a wealthy silk weaver's wife, Esther, manages to rescue her from this life, and she becomes the lady's maid.

As the pair's relationship develops we discover more about the Esther, and how she is unhappy in her life, and what her dreams are. When the lady of the house engages in a friendship with a weaver in the house events start to unfold that have dramatic consequences for everyone.

I did quite enjoy this book, it only took me a couple of days to get through which is quite unusual for me. I found I didn't really like any of the characters though, and I struggled a bit to see why Esther disliked Sara so much when she didn't really do anything wrong.

It was a good read certainly, I just didn't really take to anyone!

My thanks to Netgalley and Quercus Editions Ltd for an advance copy of this book.

When Esther Thorel, the wife of a Huguenot silk-weaver, rescues Sara Kemp from a brothel she thinks she is doing God’s will. Sara is not convinced being a maid is better than being a whore, but the chance to escape her grasping ‘madam’ is too good to refuse.

Inside the Thorel’s tall house in Spitalfields, where the strange cadence of the looms fills the attic, the two women forge an uneasy relationship.

It is silk that has Esther so distracted. For years she has painted her own designs, dreaming that one day her husband will weave them into reality. When he laughs at her ambition, she unwittingly sets in motion events that will change the fate of the whole Thorel household and set the scene for a devastating day of reckoning between her and Sara.

The price of a piece of silk may prove more than either is able to pay.

It’s a fascinating look into the silk industry and the conditions they had to work under. There are struggles and a real sense that we are getting an insight into the political and social movements of the time as well.

The London of this era comes alive with vivid, layered descriptions, of time and setting. The issues here are as complex and as tightly woven as the fabrics. What happens when you pull a thread…you’re never sure where it’s going to end, but what you get is a long and twisty tale with many curls of intrigue along the way.

This wove a spell for me in many ways. Beguiling.

My favourite kind of historical fiction is the kind where you learn something you didn’t know, and are inspired to find out more about the time and culture in which a book is set – and Blackberry and Wild Rose definitely left me interested in the history of silk!

Blackberry and Wild Rose is a book that explores the lives of two women, Sara and Esther, against the background of the silk-weavers of Spitalfields in the eighteenth-century. Sara, a former prostitute, becomes a maid for Esther, the wife of a wealthy silk merchant. There’s a really clever balance of the personal drama, as both women become inextricably caught up in each other, and the historical scene, which plays out around them and shapes their lives. The gorgeous writing draws you into these intensely emotional situations, but all the while there’s beautifully textured history being woven through everything.

I knew a little bit about the Huguenot weavers before going into this book, but I relished the way that the book made everything come alive – you could almost hear the clacking of the loom throughout the house, and feel the silence when it stopped. This is a London of opposites – of beautiful silks and crushing poverty, of high morals and grubby actions. It was fascinating to see the technical aspects of how to make the silk, and then to visit the weaver’s lodgings and see their poor standard of life. There’s masses of research behind this book, but it feels effortless.

The two main characters are really two sides of the same coin, and it’s fascinating to look at how much they resent each other, as well as need each other. Sara is “rescued” from a brothel by Esther, but she often finds the work that Esther gives her as a housemaid more demeaning than she found prostitution. Esther, on the other hand, thought she was doing a kindness for Sara that was fully in line with her Christian principles, but she comes to realise that Sara forces her to examine her own weaknesses. Having these two characters in a house together creates a claustrophobic and tense atmosphere that only needs the spark of the journeyman weavers to set the whole thing ablaze. The author excels at creating genteel but poisonous tension between characters, and the dual viewpoint means that it’s never easy to pick a side. It’s as if Esther and Sara are the warp and weft of a fabric – as the story grows, they become completely inextricable from each other.

This is a fascinating read that I found really powerful. I love seeing historical women’s stories brought to the fore, where you might previously only have learned facts, which tend to be based around men and men’s actions. Sara and Esther are two wonderfully faceted characters, and the silk aspect of the book is so interesting. If you like a deep historical read, then I definitely recommend this. Four out of five cats.

(I should mention: trigger warning for rape and other sexual abuse, and also extremely graphic depiction of a difficult birth. Let me know, as always, if you want to know which bits to watch out for.)