Trying St Mary's Out...

Ok, this isn’t a review. Serious, this isn’t planning to be one, but you never know with me. 

I have vaguely been aware of Chronicles of St Mary for a while. The first always pops up on my Amazon “We Recommend” but have always stayed away because I’ve never warmed to the cover (look at Christmas Present's cover and you'll understand my hesitation). So, when the tenth book in the series - Hope for the Best - popped through my letterbox as an unsolicited surprise, I decided to discover if I could read this without reading the rest (as publishers sometimes send unsolicited books in series to bloggers so, if we want to read them, we need to backtrack. A lot). 

Plus, I wasn’t sure if this was going to be a series I was going to like… it felt a little out of my comfort zone and, while I do want to push myself, I wasn’t sure if this series was going to be a great place to start… 

So, when I saw these four short stories set with the same characters and same world (and they were free on Audible at time of writing!), I downloaded them and listened to them over the course of five days. 

So, in publication order, When A Child is Born is book 2.5, Roman Holiday is book 3.5, Christmas Present is book 4.5 and Ships and Stings and Wedding Rings is book 6.5. So, a mix throughout the series. 

Now, I’m not going to spoil too much about each short story but the idea of this series that Historians at St Mary’s can “investigate major historical events in contemporary time”. Never call it time travel - but yeah, I call it time travel. But there is a lot of humour in this series (which is great as I don’t read a lot of funny books so balance). 

I admit listening to these, I did feel ok listening to them without much info about previous novels (though this was called into question with Christmas Present and, up to a point, Ships and Stings and Wedding Rings). And I wasn’t a huge fan of When A Child is Born, the story that I was sold on was Roman Holiday. This was the one where I felt that everything fitted for me. This was the one I went “Ok, I kinda want to check this series out”. 

And now, of course, I have the first and the second novels on my kindle (thank you Headline for eProofs via NetGalley) and the tenth in physical form and I need to figure out when am going to read these. 

Like I said, this series feels a little outside my comfort zone and I think we all need to push ourselves every once in a while. We shall see if I like this push or not sometime in the future…