I did not like this book. Recently I’ve read and enjoyed several books recommended by my daughter, Becca, and she recommended this one. I should have known it would not be my cup of tea – I rarely like this kind of best seller psychological thriller , although sometimes I do… I don’t know what it was about it which just really annoyed me – the unlikeable characters (even the ones I think we were supposed to like…) or the twist that has been done before (and better). Still, the book gets lots of positive reviews, so maybe it’s just something about me that I don’t get it.
(Also, I didn’t even realise that there were two different narrators, because to me at least they sounded the same, so that was lost on me!)
I very much enjoyed this latest installment of the Chronicles of St Mary’s – I was honestly gripped and as usually filled with all the feels – humour, pathos, romance, tension as well as the interesting thoughts raised by the idea of time travel. Yay!
(I just got sidetracked by reading a very enjoyable discussion on Good reads about who should be cast in the various roles if they made a tv or movie adaptation of the novels).
I love Sarah Painter’s Urban Fantasy series, Crow Investigations, so I was excited to read the first in her new Unholy Island Series. Like urban fantasy, this is set in the ‘real world’ but with magical and/or mythical elements, but the difference with this series is that instead of being set in a big city (often London for British books) this series is set on a tiny remote island which is magically warded from the outside world so visitors never stay more than two days and once off the island people forget all about it.
When a young man starts to camp on the island, and shows no signs of leaving and then dead bodies start appearing, the islanders must work together to find out what is going on and who they can trust.
The book had a slower (more rural!) feel and as well as the magical elements lots of character development and the murder mystery story kept me interested. I will eagerly await the next book in the series.
I had started this book a wee while ago, and then paused it to read the Silo trilogy, since I was excited about that because of watching the Silo TV show, and then finished this book after I’d read all three of the silo books, so my impression of it was probably not helped by the disjointed reading.
This is book eight in a series of twelve main books (I’m not sure if it ends at book twelve or if it is ongoing?) and I felt a bit meh about this one. There’s a lot of fighting which I don’t really enjoy and more going over of the same ground – dark mages are bad, light mages are often also bad, our protagonists seem to be constantly fighting for their lives and the will-they-won’t-they romance between Alex and Anna just goes on and on going nowhere. I’ve got this far, so I’ll stick with it, but I’m hoping for some joy or at least light relief to come back into the series.
Early on in this book I was struck (and a bit irritated) by how the plot seemed to borrow so much from two fabulous books that I have recently read: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, by Natasha Pulley and The Weather Woman by Sally Gardner. Like The Watchmaker of Filigree street, the protagonist was a gifted maker of clockwork models and automata, main characters had the gift of precognition, and were engaged in both diplomatic espionage and same sex romance. Like The Weather Woman, someone hid inside an automaton and played unbeatable games of chess. Of course, no story is ‘new’ and any writer is (hopefully) also a reader, and even on a subconscious level must be influenced by what they have read, and equally, could easily have come up with the same plot by chance. The similarities were so striking however, that I found myself wondering if the writer had read the same article which I once did that suggested the way to write a bestseller was to take an already successful book and re-write it changing one or two details like the setting or the gender of the main protagonist etc. Hmmm, I don’t know.
Anyway, that rant now over, I have to say that the book really grew on me and by the end of it I had to grudgingly admit that I had very much enjoyed it and found the ending satisfying. I liked both of the narrators too.
This is Barbara Kingsolver’s modern retelling of the Dickens’ Classic, David Copperfield. In my late teens/early twenties I went through a Dickens phase and some of them really stick in my mind (Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations) but I couldn’t remember if I’d read David Copperfield, and I certainly couldn’t remember the plot. So this book, as far as I was concerned was a coming of age tale set in America’s deep south and it wasn’t until I was almost finished the book and I read a synopsis of David Copperfield that I got how cleverly the names and characters reflected the original story but in a totally different setting.
The titular character, Demon, was born to a young drug addict mother (his dad was already dead before he was born) and had a rollercoaster of an early life – struggling mum, abusive step dad, several terrible sets of foster parents and colourful family connections. I guess the story shows how the effects of poverty on individuals and communities transcends time and geography. Apparently David Copperfield is semi-autobiographical, as Charles Dickens himself came from impoverished beginnings and ‘made good’. (I did go off Charles Dickens somewhat when I learned that he left his wife of many years who had borne him many children to shack up with a young actress, but ah well.)
Demon Copperhead audiobook reminded me of the Donna Tartt’s brilliant ‘The Little Friend’ which I also listened to on audiobook, and in both instances the narrator had a lovely soft southern states USA accent. I have to admit that my interest in the book dipped a bit in the middle, especially the section when Demon was an aspiring American football star – I’m almost always bored by sports references (!) but picked up again towards the end and on the whole I really enjoyed reading this.
Shift – Book 2 of 3: Silo Series – Hugh Howey – 02.07.23
Dust – Book 3 of 3: Silo Series – Hugh Howey – 05.07.23
I first read Wool ages ago, and found it a bit of a slog, so didn’t bother, at that time, to buy and read the remaining two books in the trilogy. But, then I watched the Apple TV adaptation and was completely gripped by it, so re-read the first book, then bought and read books two and three in quick succession!
Usually, tv or film adaptations are way worse than the book, but in this case, I guess I needed to get to know the characters in the tv show before I cared enough about them to want to read more of the books. I guess the books are a little slow moving, but the vision in my head of the show’s characters had me desperate to know what happened to them so I raced through the books and on the whole really enjoyed them.
This series is set in a dystopian future (not that distant!) where the last remnants of humanity live in huge underground silos which are self contained biosphere ecosystems (whatever – something like that!) because the air outside is extremely toxic. There are 50 silos, but the inhabitants of most of them think that they are the only one. What people know and talk about is very much controlled by a few people in positions of power, and anyone who becomes too inquisitive, or who starts to guess at the secrets that are being kept from them is executed by being sent outside to ‘clean’ which is to clean the camera lens which shows the silo’s inhabitants how dead the outside world is and how toxic, as they see the cleaner die even though they are given protective suits to wear.
The books raise interesting questions about people in power feeling that they have a duty to control the fate of the masses and how even fairly noble intentions can have terrible outcomes. Also how a small number (or even only one) person in a powerful position, can cause terrible misery to countless innocent people. The obvious example from history is Hitler, but I’m thinking of many politicians who play dice with the economy and social infrastructure like its a game of risk seemingly caring little for the horrible effects their actions have on the day to day lives of so many real people.
It’s hard for me to do this book justice with a review, because of a fault that I have which is that I don’t like narrators with very post English accents. I’ve looked up the narrator of this series: Marisa Calin and she was born in America, and yet she talks like a member of the royal family, or maybe someone who worked for the BBC 50 years ago. I know that there’s nothing wrong with being posh, and I’m sure lots of lovely people are but in my mind I associate it with colonialism and the class system and unearned privilege. The irony is that Marisa Calin is actually one of the best narrators I’ve heard in terms of putting meaning into the words and putting the emphasis on the right part of the sentence and all that – she’s also really good at giving the characters different regional accents! It’s clearly something I need to work on to get over my prejudice, but for me it was hard to see past the poshness and properly engage with the story. Which is a pity because this series is full of things I generally love in stories.
A sequel to The Lefthanded Booksellers of London, Susan is learning more about her status as the child of an ‘old one’ a sort of immortal mythical being or deity and is discovering how much she has inherited – learning about powers and trying to still be normal and not pulled over into the magical mythical side too much. She had to use her powers thought to rescue Merlin from an angry old one and then attracts the attention of this being who also has a semi-mortal child who she is trying to save from illness.
The book has nostalgia from the 80s which is the era when I was a teenager, as well as from the ancient ways from old mythology and an exciting rollicking plot and there was a lot about it that I really liked.
At first this seems like yet another book about a person on the autism spectrum getting things comically wrong by being too literal – the book begins with Sally Diamond putting her adoptive father’s dead body in a trash bag and into their homestead incinerator because he had made a (we assume joking) comment to her that she should do that when he dies and she had taken him literally.
There is a lot more to this story though. We learn with Sally that her adoptive parents (her ‘mum’ had died some time ago) had kept a lot from her about her life before she has lived with them and as these secrets begin to creep out and mysteries unfold some preconceptions are turned on their heads.
The book has a lot of food for thought – how our genetics and our early experiences shape who we become as adults (the old nature versus nurture debate) and how to help children and adults to cope with what has happened to them.
**SPOILER** Don’t read on if you don’t want to be spoiled.
I really enjoyed the book, right up until the end which was such a downer. I had loved that by being part of a community and seeing a therapist, Sally had begun to grow and develop in to a happier and more functional person, but then finding out that her adopted dad had not been the good guy she thought he was, and that her brother had become like their biological father had pushed her back to maybe worse than ever. I wanted there to be an epilogue where Sally had worked through everything again and was doing better. I know life doesn’t necessarily give happy endings, but I’m a sucker for happy endings in fiction all the same.
Still, it was a good read – another one recommended to me by my daughter Becca – thanks Bex!
This was another book recommended to me by my daughter, Becca. I do like sharing reading with others, I feel like each shared book links our interior worlds a tiny bit more and makes us a little closer to being kindred spirits.
So, The Silence Project is written as if it’s a true story (with faux citations of academic articles, newspaper articles and websites) from the point of view of a woman (Emilia) whose mother (Rachel) began a movement (or cult) when Emelia was 13 (in fact, on her 13th birthday). It began with Rachel just living in a tent on the edge of a piece of land that they ownned and stopping talking. It grew into a group of women committed to combating global problems though listening and not talking.
The ‘Event’ which is a pivotal point in the story (although referenced from the beginning so not really a spoiler) is Rachel, as well as thousands of other women around the world burning themselves alive in a bid to get people to listen.
Emilia is understandably scarred as well as angry by her mother’s behaviour and this comes across in her telling of the story.
I did enjoy the book on the whole, although I felt it dragged a bit in the middle, and the style of it, pretending to be a serious biography I felt made it feel a little dry at times.
Sarah Wray Writer 