I have loved all the books by Gavrielle Zevin that I have read, especially Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and my son-in-law said this one was even better than that so I was excited when it came up as a kindle 99p deal. Well, I did very much enjoy reading this book, but I don’t necessarily agree with son-in-law that it was better than Tomorrow…
The story is based around a scandal where a young intern has an affair with an older married senator. Most of the story is narrated looking back from years later at the impact this event had on the women involved (the senator himself seemed to get off pretty much scot free) and is told in different voices – the mother of the intern, the wife of the senator, the daughter of the intern, the intern herself looking back, and with one thread telling the events as they happened to the young woman in the past.
It’s about people judging without having all the facts, and blaming (slut-shaming). I really liked all the female characters – they were fleshed out with sensitivity and empathy and I loved the humour of the writing as well. I was sorry when it ended and would have liked to know more about these women’s lives moving forward.
You may have noticed from the title that I gave up on this book at 35%. It’s not that I thought it was terrible, I’m sure it’s very well written if you like that sort of thing, and obviously many people do from all the good reviews, but I just found I wasn’t looking forward to getting back to it, and when I was reading it was a bit of a drag. I think that made up world types of sci-fi/fantasy just aren’t my bag – I love books based in the ‘real world’ but with sci-fi or magical realism type things going on.
In this world people are genetically modified to have certain strengths to enable them to fulfil a role in society (or if they’re rich, just to look better). Our hero is modified to have a ‘photographic’ or perfect memory, which helps him in his role as a sort of detective. He is investigating a murder which turns out to be one of a series where people die by having been fed seeds of a plant that grows out of them very quickly (!). There’s lots of world building and politics etc so if you like that you should give it a go. Not for me though.
I read a lot of magical realism/urban fantasy/modern fairy tale type books, so when flicking through my kindle unread books, and seeing this title (having forgotten buying it) I assumed it was something like that. It is not. This book is very much set in the ‘real world’ albeit in the slightly unusual reality of someone living with manic depression/bipolar disorder. It’s not the kind of book I usually read, and yet I was pretty gripped.
The main character, Abby (we meet Melody Black quite late in the book) is a freelance journalist and we follow her through her spiralling plunge into a manic episode and hard fought plough through the low that followed. As is often the case when I read on my kindle, I forget the name of the author, and was surprised and impressed to realise that the book was written by a man because I thought the female main character was very believable (apparently the author has experience with mental illness/manic episodes, so that explains why that aspect of the narrative was also very believable).
Now I want to read more by this author (since I belatedly realised it was the guy who wrote The Universe Versus Alex Woods, which I also really liked).
I love Matt Haig’s books so I was super excited for this to come out – I find with new books like this it’s actually cheaper to use my audible credit and get it as an audiobook than to buy a new kindle book, but in this case I loved the audible narrations so that’s no problem. Joanna Lumley really brought to life the main character, a widowed retired teacher in her early seventies who was existing rather than living until she inherited a house in Spain and went on an adventure. I often complain about ‘posh’ narrators, and Joanna Lumley is as posh as they come, but so good that I not only overlooked the ‘poshness’ but felt it was entirely apt in this case.
Like most Matt Haig books, this one is ultimately uplifting, but doesn’t shy away from real deep emotional issues, and personally, while I was listening to this book I was going through a sad time with my beloved pet dog – in the space of less than a month he went from healthy to blind, to cancer diagnosis, to dementia and then his death. I was heartbroken, I know he was just a dog, but I loved that wee mutt. So listening to a very emotional book that deals with love and loss among other things left me wailing out loud several times.
I loved that the main character, Grace Winters, was an older woman – I’m only 55 but I have poor hearing and quite bad inflammatory arthritis so I often feel that I’m over the hill and in-valid (my ‘jokey’ way of pronouncing invalid to show that I sometimes feel that my disabilities make me worthless – don’t worry, I’m not properly depressed, just a bit sorry for myself!), and that she had purpose and found joy when she had thought that those things were behind her.
There is magical realism – in the form of an under the sea organism of extra-terrestrial origin that can gift certain powers to people who swim/dive near it and whom it deems worthy or important. Grace is given an array of gifts including a deep kind of telepathy that not only hears the thoughts of other people, but knows them at a deep level and this leads to lots of philosophical talk of empathy and complexity of people and their motivations and basically being kinder and more understanding.
There is a ‘baddie’ and there is peril and excitement, which was okay, but for me I kind of liked the emotional relationship stuff better. Really good book over all though.
I’ve read a few quite heavy books recently, and this lovely novella by Ben Aaronovitch was just what I needed to re-orientate myself to a happier reading place. Abigale is a teenaged black girl in London who is learning about magic from Nightingale and The Folly, but strikes out on her own to solve a mystery of missing children and is helped by an army of talking foxes. I loved how she uses spatterings of young people (possibly specifically young black Londoners, I’m not sure) words and phrases and that Ben Aaronovitch gives humorous definitions of them in footnotes – I felt I was learning a new language. It’s a very enjoyable urban fantasy story.
There were lots of things which I loved about this book – I loved how the title character was called January because his mum messed up filling in his birth certificate and wrote his birth month where his name was supposed to go! I loved the little factoids about language and word origins from the character who was an expert in these things, and of course, I loved the wise enormous talking mammoths!
Set in a future where much of Earth is flooded due to climate change, it begins with January being the principal dancer in the Royal Ballet, the continuation of which is hanging by a thread in an increasingly less inhabitable London, until things get too bad and January becomes a refugee and is sent to a Chinese run Earth colony on Mars.
The Mars colony has by this time been going for several generations and the people living there have adapted both naturally and by genetic enhancements to the different environment, most notably, due to much lower gravity, they are taller, slighter and less strong than Earth born people.
What follows is a mix of a political type thriller and a love story and a whodunnit. ‘Earthstrongers’ the newly arrived refugees are feared due to being so much more physically strong than naturalised Martians and there is a lot of prejudice and racial hatred towards them. They are forced to wear literal cages to weaken them and to take low paid physical labour type jobs. Also, the Martians don’t use gender pronouns and have somehow genetically altered people so it’s not obvious which gender they are and it’s very rude to ask.
In a weird publicity stunt, January is asked to ‘marry’ (more of a job/contract than a romantic liaison) a senator and then there’s lots of political mystery and intrigue, not all of which I followed (possibly because I’m quite distracted at the moment because my beloved pet spaniel, Chester suddenly went blind and after several vet visits and tests turns out has end stage cancer) and he (January) is such a sweet well meaning person that he is torn between hating the politics that his new spouse stands for, but finding himself drawn to them as a person.
I did enjoy the book, mostly – I like Natasha Pulley’s writing style, and I loved January’s character, and the little bits of whimsy (like the aforementioned mammoths). I did get a bit confused, although like I said maybe that was on me and what I’m going through with Chester. Other reviewers have dissed the science and also the Chinese cultural elements, but I don’t know enough to have been bothered by those things.
Wow. This book is like the burst you get in your brain from eating too much wasabi. It is riveting, compelling, fascinating, beautiful, horrible, disturbing… I could go on but that would be boring, which is one thing this book isn’t.
Like peeking through fingers at some horrific news story or road traffic accident, you want to look away but can’t and the writer so skilfully teases out the list of terrible things that you are on the edge of your seat wanting to know how we got to where we are.
The story is narrated by Frank, a sixteen year old living with his father on a remote Scottish island owned by his family and connected to the mainland by a bridge. We learn early one that Frank is very disturbed. He describes dead pan how he dismembers animals to construct sort of pagan totem poles and the elaborate ways he has of killing them. He also admits to having murdered three children while he was younger, but not to worry as it was just a phase he went through.
It is a engrossing study of a damaged sociopathic/psychopathic mind and Frank is so matter of fact and self effacing that you can almost sympathise with him, but not really because he is totally abhorrent.
At the beginning of the book we learn that Frank’s older brother, Eric has escaped from the mental hospital where he was sent for (among other things) setting fire to people’s pet dogs. Frank’s father is not what you would call normal either, at best chronically OCD he clearly cares for Frank, but is not the ideal role model. Frank’s hippy mother abandoned him shortly after his birth. In the nature/nurture debate Franks was dealt a pretty shitty hand either way.
I’m not sure what I thought of the ending – certainly shocking, but perhaps a little rushed, and I felt like I had to do a lot of unpacking and thinking about it after the book ended, which perhaps is the point of a good book.
I do feel like I need to read something light and happy now though!
I was totally engrossed by this book, and had a couple of very late nights reading it on my kindle in bed!
The opening is similar to 28 days later (or indeed, The Day of The Triffids) in that the main character, Neffy, is one of the few survivors of a terrible pandemic. She had been a subject in a trial for a vaccine against the new virus and had been given the vaccine and the virus in an isolated room in the facility. After a week of being very unwell, she comes through and the whole world has changed. Along with the four other remaining/surviving members of the study she is trapped with dwindling food and water, afraid to go outside and with no internet or phone signals.
Much of the book is exploring Neffy’s backstory through the dual devices of letters she writes to an octopus she used to care for in her role as a marine biologist, and a machine created by one of the other survivors which (in the few people for whom it works) allows you to relive memories is a very vivid virtual reality type way.
There are themes of captivity and freedom and moral dilemmas from the ethics of studying octopuses in captivity, to donating an organ to save a family member, to sacrificing one person to save many etc.
I found the book deeply moving and thought provoking. The ending was a little abrupt, and I needed to unpack it, and look online at what other people thought before I could let the book go and move on, but I think ultimately the ending was optimistic, if vague enough to need your imagination to fill in the details.
This was my book group read for September 2024 and I have to say, wow, what a great book. We had a book group outing to No Alibis bookshop in Belfast and the staff were very helpful in suggesting several books for our next read, and this was one of them. A incredibly well-written debut novel – the prose is beautiful without being overwritten, and the three female lead characters are totally believable even thought the author is male.
Set in Donegal in 1994 leading up to the referendum on divorce (prior to which, divorce was illegal in Ireland and although couples could separate, the woman was left with few if any rights) the three female characters are all trapped by their relationships with very bad husbands as well as living under the judgemental scrutiny of small town gossips. I listened on an audiobook and loved the Irish narrator although it took me a while to work out who was who. The only nice male character was the priest (an ex-guard/police) which was refreshing since so many priests in literature are bad(!)
From the buzz on the book group WhatsApp, everyone seems to have enjoyed the book, and I’m looking forward to discussing it with the girls.
This book has hundreds of five star reviews on Amazon, and I find myself wondering if they were all written by Peter Oxley’s mates, because I did not find the book to be great at all.
Set in the squalid streets of 18 hundred’s London, two low level criminals decide to go straight by setting up a demon hunting agency (in this version of London Demons are real, as well as golems, magicians, ghosts etc). For me the first half of the book really dragged – I didn’t warm to the characters, I found the action a bit chaotic and while others describe the book as very funny, I wasn’t really picking up on any humour. Many of my favourite books are urban/steampunk fantasy so it was not the genre that upset me. I did quite like the character of the young upper class woman trapped in a marriage with a very bad man, and my interest grew as she took more of a roll.
It wasn’t awful, and it did grow on me to the point where I considered buying the second book in the series, but then I caught myself on.
Sarah Wray Writer 