Books With Themes - Psychometry
I have recently been selecting books with a theme, it hasn't been an intentional thing but I have really enjoyed the books with this theme.
Psychometry - divination of facts concerning an object or its owner through contact with or proximity to the object*
The first book that I borrowed from my local library was The House of Sorrowing Stars by Beth Cartwright. It was haunting and beautiful all at the same time. The book opens with a young Vivienne paddling by the water at her family home, The House of Sorrowing Stars. She finds a doll floating in the water and when she picks it up she can feel the pain and loss of the little girl who has lost her doll. She can picture when and where the girl has lost the doll. Fast forward serveral years and the girl has grown up into a young woman. Liddy helps her father makes marchpane which gets delivered far and wide. Vivienne comes across some of this marchpane and again using her psychometry she knows its the girl who lost the doll. She invites her to come to the House of Sorrowing Stars to hopefully mend some scars and unravel some secrets about the house. I really loved this book and would strongly recommend it to anyone who likes a little mystery and adventure.
The second book, The Little Shop of Found Things by Paula Brackston, I special ordered from a library in London just because I saw a friend had read it on GoodReads. I didn't realise that this book was going to be about psychometry until I started reading. The book focuses on the main character Xanthe, who has moved to Malborough with her mother Flora for a fresh start. They have bought an antiques shop and are on a deadline to freshen the place up and buy new stock to fill it. They go to an antiques auction at a local historical house. She is looking for an item that sings to her, and she finds it in a cabinet hidden away, its a chatelaine from the seventeenth century. She enters a bidding war spending a lot of their budget in order to get the object. Once she's back at the shop she discovers a 'garden shed' which is very old and round. The chatelaine is calling for her to enter the building, once inside Xanthe feels an dark presence, a ghost demanding that she goes back in time to save her daughter. The story follows Xanthe's journey to the past to save Alice from her fate. She travels back and fourth keeping the past a secret. In her travelling she finds her self and is able to set her flawed past behind her. I was happy to learn that this is the first book of a series and I will definitely seek out the other books.
The last book, The Echo of Old Books by Barbara Davis, I am still currently reading. I found it on Kindle for 99p and it is written in an unusual format so I thought I would give it a go. It centres around a rare book dealer Ashlyn Greer who can feel echos of the previous owners when she touches a book. A friend runs a vintage boutique and lets her know when books come in, she gets his call to come to check out a couple of boxes of books. There were a few books that were saleable but when she got to the bottom of the box she found a book that was very unusual, no author, just a title, Regretting Belle. This book sung to her and she had to have it. She took it back to her shop and started to read. It was written in a diary format, set in the 1940s when the main character meets a society girl at her engagement party in New York. The emotion is raw. Ashlyn needs to learn more about the characters as she has a feeling this about real events. She gets a call from her friend at the Boutique saying that he will drop off another book later that day. It turns out to be the diary from the female perspective, called Forever and Other Lies. Each book is written on the same timeline one by Hemi the other by Belle, telling how the events played out for themselves. It is like an argument written in book format. Its very intriguing. Ashlyn becomes obsessed by the characters, she finds the gentleman who dropped off the books at the Boutique and then they uncover that Belle is his Great Aunt. They gradually put names to other faces too by researching at the library. As I said I am only halfway through this book and I am really enjoying it. It is written in an unusual format jumping from Hemi to Belle and then to the 1980s to Ashlyn. I look forward to finishing it.
This is definitely a theme that I will actively look for in books going forward. All three books uses the gift of psychometry in different ways. Vivienne isn't the main character in The House of Sorrowing Stars but she and her gift are the linchpin to saving the future of the house. I look forward to seeing what other adventures Xanthe gets into in the rest of the series by Paula Brackston. I'm not sure if she will ever go back to the seventeenth century or if she will stay in the current day. I also look forward to finding out what really happened between Hemi and Belle in the Echo of Old Books. This could maybe be a series as Ashlyn has the gift and could maybe find other special and unusual books.
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