I always enjoy Frances Hardinge novels. This one is set in a world where everyone lives in an underground city with a well defined class system where the underclasses are exploited by the elite classes. In this world, people do not have the innate ability to form facial expressions and must learn a handful of ‘faces’ to use when they deem them appropriate. A child is found and adopted by a poor cheesemaker and she has no memory of her life before, but he makes her always cover her face. She believes it is because she it too ugly or disfigured (they have no mirrors) but discovers eventually that is it because her face constantly changes and reveals her thoughts (ie she had what we would consider a normal face).
This is a young adult novel, and the feisty female protagonist (the girl with the face like glass) must overcome trials and perils to discover her identity and right (at least some of) the wrongs of the worlds she finds herself in.
Like many Ishiguro novels, Klara and the Sun was a beautiful, but surreal and often confusing read. It is narrated by Klara, who is an ‘artificial friend’ or sentient robot person, beginning when she lived in the shop waiting to be bought, and then when she went to live with her new family to befriend their sickly daughter.
Klara is an unreliable narrator in that although she is intelligent and has a photographic memory, she is naïve in how she sees the world. As she is solar powered, she has a strange relationship with sunlight, and views the sun as a sentient benevolent deity.
The reader’s understanding of the world (or at least mine) slowly puts together the pieces of what’s going on, and it wasn’t really until I’d finished the book, and dwelt on it in my thoughts (and googled a bit!) that I felt I fully got a grasp on the story, and that’s where it kind of fell down in my estimation.
Spoiler Alert – don’t read on if you don’t want the ending to be spoiled.
So, when I finished the book, I still had questions – I like that everything is not overexplained, but can be ascertained, but I did have to look at other people’s summaries of the book before I felt I fully understood. But I just didn’t buy the basic premise. The book is set in a future (or alternate present) where genetic modifications can create much more intelligent children, but they are risky and often result in sickly children who are likely to die before reaching adulthood. This is why the artificial friends are used, to make siblings for children whose own siblings have died. Only the more wealthy families can afford the genetic modifications, creating an ‘underclass’ of children with lower intelligence.
I just didn’t believe that parents would choose intelligence over the health of their children. Even in a world where not getting the adaptations put your children in a lower ‘class’ I still don’t think parents would risk losing their children, or even putting them through sickness.
Still, it’s an interesting and thought provoking book – probably would be a good one for book groups to discuss.
I have read and loved many more ‘serious’ novels by Adam Roberts (Bête and The Real-Town Murders being among my all time favourite books) and I didn’t realise he had written several humorous parody type books. Since they were pretty cheap on kindle, I bought this and gave it a go.
Well, it started off being similar to Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, with the exception of Marley being not so much a ghost as a reanimated corpse and it got crazier from there.
With zombies, time travel and a sinister twist on a much loved character the book was lots of fun, and Scrooge, like in the original went on a spiritual journey.
My last read of 2022 was the annual delight which is the St Mary’s Christmas short story from Jodi Taylor. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without it! As usual it was rollicking good fun.
After reading these series by Jodi Taylor, I find myself saying ‘Fire Trucking this, and Fire Trucking that’ even though I never would say the ‘F’ word anyway so I don’t need a euphemism. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing – actually I do. It’s bad. lol.
Still on my end of year nostalgia kick, I read this book which was one of my childhood favourites. I don’t know what happened to my original copy, but I went ahead and bought a second hand paperback copy from an Amazon seller. I’m lazy about reading actual paperback books now, almost all my reading is done on my kindle and the effort of having to hold the book and turn pages and read with the light on (I love to read in bed just by the light of the kindle screen) is almost too much. I have actually found myself resting my finger on a word that I don’t know the meaning of because that’s how I get the definition on my kindle! (What am I like?!)
Any way, this book, translated from French and first published in 1931 (so it was already pretty old when I was a child) follows two brothers who stumble into an underground world where they are instantly separated into a ‘fatty’ and a ‘thinny’ and sent off the the segregated nations.
They end up as advisors to the leaders of the two nations who are going to war over their ideological differences (although the disingenuous reason is disagreement over the name of an island between their two nations).
It’s a book about the folly of war and the fresh perspective of the boys from a world where fatties and thinnies live together peacefully helps the nations to find peace.
I remember loving it as a child, although I suppose they wouldn’t get away with a book nowadays that classifies people by body shape even if the point is how wrong that is.
In the cosy time between Christmas and New Year I was treating myself to some old favourites: first Neverwhere, and then Dirk Gently. It’s so long since I read this book, that the audiobook at first seemed very chaotic and I wasn’t totally sure I was following what was going on, but it did all come together nicely, and I basked in the lovely, clever silliness of Douglas Adams surreal writing.
Sometimes you just have to cleanse your palate with an old favourite, and this lovely book by the great Neil Gaiman is just that.
Gaiman wrote the screenplay of the BBC series first (in the 1990s), and then the novel is an adaptation/companion to that. I love the series and re-watch it every couple of years and the same for the book.
Set in London below and with clever word plays (or real meanings) of many of the familiar London place names (whitefriars are actual monks, Knightsbridge is a scary bridge through the night, the angel Islington is an angel etc. ) a man from London Above (Richard Mayhew) is drawn into an adventure below when he stops and helps Door, a young woman on the run from two gloriously and humorously wicked thugs, Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar.
One of the first and best urban fantasies, this book fills me with warm, fuzzy, nostalgic, book love.
I remember that I bought this book (and its sequel) from Audible because I read an article about the greatest fantasy books of all time, and all the other books on the list were among my favourite ever reads. This book certainly has many great reviews on Amazon, but man, I really didn’t enjoy it.
The audiobook is loooong. 28 hours. And the time did the opposite of flying by.
I just went and looked again at the Amazon ratings, and apart from a few nay-sayers (with whom I totally agree) the fast majority of people rave about how gripping and amazing it is. I’m at a loss. I found the main character annoying. He was instantly good at everything in a totally un realistic way, and for the most part I found the writing boring and the story unengaging. Occasionally I found myself a bit interested, but mostly it just dragged on and on.
I’m slightly conflicted, because I’ve bought the second book, but I really can’t see me wanting to waste any more hours of my life listening to it.
I don’t read much pure fantasy these days, generally preferring Urban Fantasy or Magical realism books (or just literary fiction) but I do like Frances Hardinge books even though I would class them as pure classical fantasy.
In the world of this book, strange magical spider like creatures have ‘gifted’ humans with the ability to curse other humans if they have strong negative feelings towards them. These curses have devastating effects often physically changing the cursed person into an animal or even an inanimate object.
The book follows Kellen who has the rare gift of unravelling these curses and restoring the person to their human form, and Nettle one of the first people he restored from the bird form that she had been cursed in to.
Like other books by Frances Hardinge, the plot is complex and wide ranging exploring the politics and power structures of the world, but also very approachable with real and interesting characters who the reader can learn to love and root for.
This is a fun introduction to a new (to me) series in the Urban Fantasy genre. It is quite action packed, which would often put me off, but I still very much enjoyed reading this book. Set in a London where various factions of people with different magical abilities co-exist not necessarily peacefully, the book begins with a character having to fight for his/their life/lives (they confusingly sometimes refer to themselves in the singular and sometimes in the plural – the reason for this is eventually explained) without any memory initially of who they are and why they are in this situation.
I enjoyed it, and bought the second book in the series.
Sarah Wray Writer 