The Book Keeper (Unholy Island 2) – Sarah Painter – 27.03.24

I love Sarah Painter’s Crow Investigations books, so I was excited by this new series set on a remote island off the North East coast of England. While Crow Investigations in in the Urban Fantasy genre, this series is (I guess..) rural fantasy, in that it has magical realism/supernatural elements, set in a small town island community, giving it a more gentle slow pace befitting the setting. That is not to say that it’s boring, far from it. In this second book in the series, more Island lore is explored, as well as the developing relationship between the island’s two most recently arrived inhabitants. I enjoyed the read and am looking forward to the next book in the series.

The Heart Goes Last (Audiobook) – Margaret Atwood – 27.03.24

Margaret Atwood once again shows her storytelling genius in this darkly comic dystopian romp.

Stan and Charmaine are the ‘everyman’ couple who are forced to live in their car when the American economy takes a nose dive. They are tempted by a new scheme offering them a home and jobs in a enclosed society in return for being prison inmates every other month.

It all seems great to begin with, until they slowly come to understand that their situation is much more dangerous than they first assumed.

The setting is steeped in both retro nostalgia and menacing futuristic (or is it?) technology. I loved the mix of humour, pathos, tension and character development, and I liked the ending and found it satisfying. (I also like the narrators.)

Impossible Creatures – Katherine Rundell – 22.03.24

This young adult fantasy adventure feels like a classic, and I did enjoy reading it.

A young boy discovers he is the heir to a family responsibility to protect a portal to a magical world. He gets drawn in to an adventure with a girl from that world and they discover that they must face dangers to save both the magical world and the real world from terrible destruction.

The story is fun and exciting and manages to not be patronising. It had been compared with Tolkien and Pullman, and for me this book is far short of their works, but still good.

Monstrous Regiment – Terry Pratchett (Audiobook) – 22.03.24

I had so much fun in my younger days reading my way through the whole cannon of Terry Pratchett’s discworld novels – I own all of them in physical copies, but I’m seriously considering giving away all or most of my physical books, because I really don’t like the faff of actually having to hold a book and turn pages and have enough light to see by etc that comes with actual books, not to mention the fact that almost all the walls in all the rooms in my house are already lined with bookcases/shelves full of books. With this in mind, if any Pratchett discworld books come up in Audible or kindle sales I will snap them up with a view to having them all in digital form. (If I was rich I would just buy them all in a heartbeat!) So, that’s why I bought this on an Audible deal and had great enjoyment listening and reacquainting myself with Sir Terry’s wonderful wit and wisdom. Some slightly dated views but on the whole I think Terry Pratchett was way ahead of his time in terms of supporting all kinds of minority rights and embracing difference. This one covers war, empire, religion, feminism and equal rights for different magical species. Highly recommended.

The List of Suspicious Things – Jennie Godfrey – 18.03.24

This book is quite similar to ‘A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’ which I recently listened to, in that a child/teen protagonist becomes amateur sleuth to try to solve murders. I liked this one better for a few reasons, firstly, it was narrated by the wonderful Joanne Froggatt and I loved her skilful acting and her lovely Yorkshire accent. Secondly, this book is set in The north of England during the nineteen seventies and centres around the Yorkshire Ripper Killings. I grew up in the north of England, and although I was only young ( I was born in 1969) I remember well the hysteria that the Yorkshire Ripper evoked around that time.

It’s really a coming of age story, with the main character, Miv, becoming obsessed with solving the Yorkshire Ripper case but her investigations only leading to uncovering uncomfortable secrets from friends and family members that contribute to her maturing/loss of innocence.

I enjoyed the character development and the journey down memory lane in this interesting and well told story.

The Book of Doors – Gareth Brown – 18.03.24

What is not to love about a novel full of magical books, a shady underworld of book collectors, some good some middling and some very bad, lots of danger and adventures, some romance, some time travel and causal loops? Answer – there is nothing not to love, which is my convoluted way of saying – I loved it!

This is just my kind of book, like a cosy blanket and a cup of tea. May the world be full of such books.

Lost in Time (Audiobook) – A.G. Riddle, Narrator – John Skelley – 15.03.24

This was fun! A sci-fi thriller murder mystery with time travel! A scientist who was working on a device to transport matter (like star trek beam me up Scotty transporters) accidentally creates a device that sends things (or people) back in time to a prehistoric alternate version of our Earth. It is (somewhat unbelievably) monetised by selling it to governments who use it to banish dangerous criminals and, ironically when the very scientist is accused of murder he is sent back by his own machine.

His daughter then goes on an exciting quest to prove his innocence and work out what really happened involving time travel and nifty causal time loops.

I found it well written and very satisfying to read. I loved the ending and very much hope that more books are planned – I could see how it could become a nice series.

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (Audiobook) –Holly Jackson – 12.03.24

I started to listen to this book a while ago, and got really bored by it so paused it and listened to some other things. After A Thousand Ships, I went back to this and actually enjoyed it a bit more (maybe by comparison, because I didn’t really like A Thousand Ships?).

A teenaged schoolgirl under the pretence of writing a school project becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth about the case of a girl who went missing presumed dead from her school a few years previously.

I found it a little difficult to believe that she would go to such lengths as she did, endangering both her physical self and her straight A school track record to track down the truth of a case that only effected her tangentially.

Hmmm, there were twists and turns I guess, and some nice relationship building. I was a bit annoyed by the posh voice of the narrator (ironically, the character she narrates was at one point complaining about the posh voice of her sat nav!).

I didn’t fully foresee the ending and it did kind of make sense when it was revealed (although at that point I was just glad to have got through to the end so I could stop listening). Not for me, although a lot of other people seemed to really like it.

A Thousand Ships (Audiobook) – Natalie Haynes – 09.03.24 

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes - Audiobook - Audible.co.uk

A Couple of the girls in my book group raved about how much they loved this book, so when in was an audible deal of the day I snapped it up.

Hmmm, I wouldn’t rave about it myself. Just because it is really like a series of short stories, following different characters related by being women connected to the Trojan wars (and I’m not a fan of short stories).

It is a familiar tale of women being horribly mistreated by men but having their own unique resilience and strength. I did like the recurring chapters narrated by Penelope as an open letter to her husband Odysseus which were basically a (really quite witty) sarcastic rant about him being away for so long and leaving her to raise their son and live alone dealing with all the day to day stuff he left behind when off on his adventures.

I said to one of my friends at book group that maybe I didn’t like it so much also because the narrator wasn’t very good – not parsing sentences correctly (in my opinion) and often sounding quite bored by it all, not realising at the time that the book is actually narrated by the author!

A similar book, which I enjoyed more is Circe by Madeline Miller.

The Quantum Curators and the Great Deceiver – Eva St. John – 07.03.24

I really liked the first book in this series, where a nice academic historian (Julius) is confronted with crazy shenanigans when he gets mixed up with people from another parallel version of Earth who are hopping about taking artifacts to store in their museum.

The next books in the series see him now living in this parallel world and having adventures, but for me they lacked the ordinary person coming to terms with things not being the way he always believed them to be excitement. This book, the fifth in the series see’s Julius sent back to his own world and being given a mind wipe to forget it all, then getting caught up again, so in many ways it was a refreshing reset of the series and I enjoyed it.