I have three published novels and might write/publish more someday. Now I'm more of a reader – welcome!
For some reason, when I listened to The Sandman Act II it didn’t blow me away as much as Act I, but, for me at least, Act III was back to cracking form and I loved it!
I was gripped with the stories which were both exciting and emotionally deep, I loved the cast of fabulous actors who really brought the stories to life and I can’t wait for the next one (and I can’t wait for the next installment of the TV adaptations!!)
I enjoyed this magical book set in the eighteen hundreds. An author, Merritt Fernsby inherits a haunted house in a remote part of America, and forms a relationship with the woman from the society that preserves magical buildings as they try to work out who is haunting them, while at the same time a very bad man is after them both.
It was more cosy mystery then horror, although with some gentle horror elements and the inevitable romance between the two main leads was overall more sweet than annoying.
I’ll look out for more books from the series.
This is another audiobook that took me ages to finish, although this time it wasn’t my fault! My hubby and I listened to a Grady Hendrix short audiobook (Horrorstör) on a very strange and emotional road trip during lockdown to attend my mum’s funeral, and I managed to persuade him to listen to another on our next (less strange and emotional) road trip, which was this one. My hubby is not really into fiction and also he said listening made him sleepy while driving, or he missed bits when he was concentrating, etc etc, which meant, a year and a half later we still hadn’t finished listening to this book. So I told hubby that I would just finish the book without him, and so I did.
I’m a big Grady Hendrix fan (I’m very excited because I just discovered there’s a new novel coming out in January) and I did enjoy this one, but maybe not as much as some others… -(which could be because of the long hiatus?!).
Anyhoo, there were lots of fond digs at the horror genre tropes and interesting twists and turns and female empowerment, and I would recommend this book to fans of light hearted horror.
I’m still enjoying this urban fantasy series set in modern day London’s magical underworld.
Alex worries for his own apprentice, Luna, when several young trainee wizards start disappearing and things come to an exciting head at a magic dueling tournament in an old enchanted house in the countryside!
I have these books in my Amazon wish list and regularly check to see if they’re on offer, at which point I eagerly buy and read them.
I enjoyed The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, so when this was on sale at Audible I bought it. Well, it took me a very long time to finish it. I started it and got bored, so I listed to a couple of different audiobooks, then tried again, then got bored again, and left it, and finally decided to finish the experience on my holiday in Wales this September (I hate not finishing books).
The Ninth House (which I did enjoy) was an ‘urban fantasy’ in that it was set in the ‘real world’ but with a paranormal magical hidden society existing along side ‘real life’. Six of Crows, however, is more classic fantasy in that it is set in a completely made up world with all the classic fantasy tropes of a sort of medieval street urchin society with warring overlords and groups of people with different magic traits/abilities. I remember liking that sort of thing in my youth, but either I’ve grown out of that, or this just wasn’t an example of the genre that piqued my interest but I found it turgid and boring and annoying. There were several narrators, and one of them really annoyed me as well. Lol. Didn’t love it.
I won this book on a twitter competition and I remember entering because I thought it sounded just like the kind of book I enjoy. There was no obligation with the prize to write a review. (This is how I began my review which I posted on Amazon – I know from experience how valuable Amazon reviews are! The rest of the review is just copied and pasted below.)
The main character, Ada, has always had the ability to see dead people (not in a scary way – more like the relationship between Lydia Crow and her nerdy ghost flatmate in Sarah Painter’s Crow Investigations book series, or the ghosts in the TV comedy show Ghosts!). There are elements of history as there are ghosts from different time periods, as well as nods to Ben Aaronovitch’s brilliant Rivers of London series and C.K. McDonnell’s (also brilliant) Stranger Times books.
I read the book in a couple of days, and I liked it a lot. I hope this is the first in a series and I will look out for more books by this author.
I am still enjoying Richard Osman’s gentle and fun series. Imagine that the Scooby Doo team are British (mostly) old people and the Mystery Machine is a nice retirement village you will get a picture of these stories. They even have a dog now. With their links so the police service, and some of them being retired spies, as well as the strong moral code and general bonhomie the Thursday Murder team will always catch the bad guy and maybe give him or her a nice cup of tea while they wait for the police to arrive!
For me, the experience of a lot of this audiobook is a bit of a lucid-dream-like blur. My daughter got married in September, and My husband drove with me and one or our sons through the night down from Northern Ireland (where we live) to the very south of Ireland to get the ferry to the south of Wales were the wedding was being held. I wanted to stay awake during the drive because I somehow feel that will help hubby to stay awake and not kill us all (!). He doesn’t like listening to anything in the car (music or podcasts etc) so I listened to my audiobook on my earphones. I thought I was awake and listening, but thinking back things are a bit muddled. Hmmm. I think I will maybe listen again sometime!
After the Wedding we had a short holiday in the beautiful Welsh town of Tenby and I finished listening to the book on my morning (hilly but lovely) runs. I was halfway through a run when the book ended and the inevitable post book interview began. Oh no! I thought, I’ll have to listen to more awful bum kissing (both the author interviews after books one and two are all: I love you, no I love you, you’re the best author ever, no, you’re the best narrator ever, and so on…). I couldn’t be bothered switching to a new book mid run, but I was pleasantly surprised that the interviewer was Steph McGovern and she asked sensible and interesting questions instead of just oozing sycophancy. Yay!
The Bertie Project – Alexander McCall Smith -21.09.22
A Time of Love and Tartan – Alexander McCall Smith – 29.09.22
The Peppermint Tea Chronicles – Alexander McCall Smith – 02.10.22
So, I started reading The Peppermint Tea Chronicles on my kindle, but then realised that I hadn’t read at least one previous book in the series, and found I had three paperbacks from the series in my ‘to be read’ pile, starting with The Revolving Door of Life, so I stopped The Peppermint Tea Chronicles, to catch up. I was almost finished The Revolving Door of Life, when I remembered how it ended, so I must have read that one before!
Well, reading these four books in a row was fun, if a little repetitive (in fact A McC S seems to repeat the same anecdotes in more than one book) and occasionally confusing (Bertie’s friend Ranald Braveheart etc is sometimes at the same school and sometimes not…?) but on the whole I enjoyed the experience.
As is typical of the series, there is gentle storytelling and philosophising and lots of joy and positivity. I will keep reading these books (it was also fun because I had a trip to Edinburgh earlier in the year and so recognised some of the landmarks so lovingly referred to).
I really loved this book! I’ve read a few Stephen Kings, but this was very different – not horror (although there were some moments of gruesome violence), but, as the title proclaims, this is a fairy tale. The main character is a seventeen year old American boy, Charlie, who lost his mother to a road accident and whose father is struggling with alcoholism brought on by the grief.
Charlie goes out of his way to help an elderly man who had fallen and broken his leg, and ends up caring for the man’s aging dog. I found the relationship Charlie forms with the dog, and the anguish he feels as the dog’s health declines very moving and I could understand the motivation he felt when the man died and left him the key to a whole other world where a way to give the dog her youth back existed but also great dangers.
Charlie’s future adult self narrates the story, so we know he survives, but that doesn’t take away from the tension which is really more about his choices: whether he does the right thing or saves his own skin, and who or what he has to sacrifice along the way.
I was totally gripped by the plot, and very invested in all the characters. I found the book moving and engaging and I am in awe of Stephen King’s amazing storytelling ability.
I’m a big fan of the Cormoran Strike novels, and so I was very excited for this next installment. Hmmm. I think (as many other reviewers have said) that listening to this as an audiobook was probably not the best way to enjoy it. It is a book set largely in the online world, with many tweets and online forum chats, and the poor narrator had to read out all the hashtags and i.p. addresses and long handles etc that you (or at least I) would just let your eyes skim over if you were reading it. Listening to all those strings of letters and numbers and symbols was excruciating and made me begin to lose the will to live, and I found the book very hard to get into for that reason.
That aside, I mostly really liked it, although overall I’d say less than previous books in the series. I did enjoy more character development of Strike and Robin although the drawn out will-they-won’t-they is beginning to grate on my nerves a little. The narrator was fabulous, and I liked the unfolding of the plot. I kind of half guessed whodunnit quite early on, and was inwardly shouting at Strike and Robin for not seeing what I thought was obvious (I know hind sight is wonderful, and I wasn’t totally right in my workings out) also, I think it’s probably good psychology to let the reader work out some things ahead of the detectives, so we can feel clever.
Of course I will continue buying and reading/listening to the books in this series, and watching the TV adaptations and I read that J.K. Rawlings has a definite end point in mind so things will wrap up nicely eventually, which is good, but also sad because I don’t want it to end!
Sarah Wray Writer