“Waiting On Wednesday” is a weekly meme that was originally created by Breaking the Spine.  Unfortunately Breaking the Spine are no longer hosting so I’m now linking my posts up to Wishful Endings Can’t Wait Wednesday. Don’t forget to stop over, link up and check out what books everyone else is waiting for.  If you want to take part, basically, every Wednesday, we highlight a book that we’re really looking forward to.  This week my book is : The Women of Troy by Pat Barker (I loved The Silence of the Girls by the same author.)

From the Booker Prize-winning Pat Barker, author of The Silence of the Girls (“An important, powerful, memorable book” –Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey), a retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of the women who endured it

Largely unnoticed by her captors, the one-time Trojan queen Briseis, formerly Achilles’ mistress, now belonging to his companion Alcimus, quietly takes in these developments. She forges alliances when she can, with Priam’s aged wife the defiant Hecuba and with the disgraced soothsayer Calchas, all the while shrewdly seeking her path to revenge.

Expected publication : June 2021

This meme was first created by Kathy over at Bermuda Onion Blog and has now been adopted by Elza Reads.

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme where you can share new words that you’ve encountered, or spotlight words you love.

No rules just enjoy and for further info check out Elza Reads.

I’ve not made a note of any particular words this week but instead I’m taking inspiration from the title of a recent book – A Murder of Crows by Anne Bishop.

This week I’m looking at collective nouns:

‘In linguistics, a collective noun is a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in everyday speech are not specific to one kind of thing, such as the word “group”, which can be applied to people or dogs or other things. ‘

A Murder of Crows originated in the fifteenth century during which time it became popular to give ‘poetic’ collective nouns for groups of animals and birds, for example a gaggle of geese or a pride of lions.  The noun was usually a reflection of the perceived qualities of the animal/bird, etc.  Crows were associated with death.  They are scavengers and so would often congregate at the site of death, such as battlefields, and so became known as harbingers or omens of death.  Crows were also, in folklore, believed to sit in judgement of other crows, gathering together to decide the fate for one that had committed wrongs.