I’m still really enjoying this series, even if it is infantile in its toilet humour overload. In this instalment the new toy that every child wants, a plastic egg that hatches into one of a few collectable fluffy plushies, turns out to be a tool by evil entities to control children and do really bad stuff.
The gang have to figure out how to beat this creepy badness and save the world (again) and they do it with their usual style, humour and character developing journeys.
Again, I found the story clever and engaging and I enjoyed the ride.
This is a lovely stand alone young adult novel by Terry Pratchett. Set in an alternate Victorian era, a young girl who by a strange quirk of fate turns out to be the daughter of the new king of England (a pandemic wipes out so many people that all the hundred plus closer in the line of succession than him are removed) is travelling by ship in a region which suffers a devastating tsunami and is shipwrecked alone on an island. Meanwhile, a young boy who had left the island to carry out a lone rite of passage on a neighbouring island returns to find his home ruined and the people of his village all killed by the flood.
The book follows them as they try to rebuild their lives with the other waifs and strays that turn up. It has some humour, but lots of meaty difficult issues are tackled in really intelligent and thoughtful ways – racism, sexism, colonialism, culture, religion, childbirth, bereavement and human character from all extremes from very bad to very good. How the choices people make form who they become and the relationships they build.
I think it is an amazingly good book, and I really enjoyed reading it.
I think I enjoyed the second installment of the Dirk Gently series (once again expertly narrated by Stephen Mangan) even more than the first. The plot reminded me of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, or American Gods, with Norse Gods interacting with modern day humans and causing mayhem.
I have loved the other books I’ve read by Natasha Pulley, all of which have had a magical realism element in an historical fiction setting. When I saw the title of this book, I assumed it would be more of the same so I eagerly bought it.
Well, I was wrong in thinking this book has magical realism. In fact, had I read the synopsis of the plot if I didn’t know the author, I definitely wouldn’t have read this book, thinking it wouldn’t have been my cup of tea.
Set in the Soviet Union during the 1960s, the title Character, Valery K is an academic studying the effects of radiation on biology who had been imprisoned in the Siberian gulags for six years on trumped up charges.
He is unexpectedly removed from prison and sent to work with a team of scientists in an unknown town studying the effect of the nearby nuclear powerplant on the environment. He soon discovers there are deeper and more sinister things afoot, and others before him who had asked too many questions have wound up dead.
I really loved this book. I was totally gripped, I loved the characters. I loved Valery’s journey from barely surviving prisoner to respected colleague, to terrified secret keeper. I even loved all the historical detail. Fabulous book!
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.
Sarah Wray Writer 