I’ve had a really bad back of late, which seems to be my autoimmune arthritis flaring up in my sacroiliac joint, and my physiotherapist suggested I take up swimming. So I joined a gym with a pool and found swimming length quite boring until I thought of listening to audiobooks in the pool.
This book was included with my Audible account, and is the first book I put onto my waterproof mp3 player to listen to while swimming.
It tells the story of Wavy, born to an addict/schizophrenic mother and abusive criminal father and the very deep friendship/love affair she forms with a man who sometimes works for her father. It’s a difficult listen at times, because the relationship is very inappropriate, and yet kind of pure and good against the setting of the other things going on in Wavy’s life.
I found it quite mesmerising, maybe because swimming is so mindless that all my attention went to listening, and I really rooted for Wavy and Kellen to be happy and prevail against all the obstacles set in their way.
This was my book group read for over the Summer, and I chose to listen to the audiobook. I’ll admit that it took me a wee while to get into the book, and the early chapters had me annoyed at how beautiful the main character, Elizabeth Zott had to be and thought her relationship with Calvin was just another rom com thing. I was wrong.
Elizabeth Zott is a beautiful, extremely intelligent, plain spoken (probably on the autism spectrum. although this is not blatantly spelled out) woman trying to be taken seriously as a scientist in 1960s America.
She faces huge obstacles from her work being mocked and also stolen by her less intelligent male colleagues to being shamed and judged when she is sexually abused with the attitude of ‘well, what do you expect if you insist on putting yourself in a man’s place’.
The story is told from different points of view, including sections narrated by the dog ‘Six-Thirty’ who would probably be the most intelligent dog ever in the history of dogs, but who is wise and very likable!
I ended up really liking the book – even going on really long walks just so I could enjoy listening to the audiobook as I went!
At times the characters were a little caricatured – the baddies were super bad and the goodies were super good, but I think that only added to the charm, or fairy tale aspects of the story, and in fact it seems that in real life some people really are ‘super bad’ or ‘super good’.
(As an interesting aside, my hubby and I were talking about this very thing recently – he thinks that the existence of really wicked people proves the existence of supernatural angelic and demonic forces, but I disagreed. My argument is that if behavioural traits exist on a normal bell curve, then you would expect outliers at either end (ie a few people who are really good or really bad). It’s like probability. If something happens a million times, then we shouldn’t be surprised by a really rare ‘million to one’ thing happening one of those times – it doesn’t mean it’s a miracle, it’s just chance.) Anyway – back to the book…
Even though what women faced in this book was extreme , and we’ve come a long way from there, the misogyny still resonates unfortunately in today’s world and Elizabeth’s character is very relatable. I also loved her neighbour, a strong older woman and I liked how they drew support from each other.
The story had sadness and joy and humour and I think it’s a great book (I liked the narrator too!).
This is the fourth in my summer of Claire North novels, and another doozy! Once again, Claire North takes an interesting sci-fi/magical realism what-if and builds a world around it. In Touch, there are people who left there own bodies at the moment of some traumatic death and ‘jumped’ into the body of someone else. Now all they need to do is touch someone to jump into them (although it seems that they are able to touch people without jumping – they have to touch and want to jump). There essence (soul? being?) is now effectively immortal because they can just keep jumping into new bodies.
As is usual with Claire North novels, this premise is explored with great intelligence and wisdom – all sides of the ethics and rights and wrongs of this jumping are explored. These people have to take over other bodies in order to live, but the bodies they inhabit have no memory of being controlled – so if it’s for a moment, they might think they just lost concentration, and if it’s for longer, they ‘wake up’ with amnesia for the time they were inhabited.
The act of taking a body is a violation, but necessary for life. Then there are practical issues – what if the body has an allergy or illness? If you spend their money is that theft? but then how can you have money without stealing? If you want to settle down, get married, have a family, you are doing all of that in someone else’s body – stealing their life.
The main character in Touch is being chased by someone trying to kill her/him , so there is an exciting thriller element (if you like that kind of thing – I usually don’t, but since it’s Claire North, I’ll go with it).
I really loved the first book in this series – what I mostly loved was the sweet quirky nature of the nerdy main character, and the wry humour. I have loved the series less as it’s gone along. This is book four, and I liked it okay, and I will probably buy the next one when it comes out, even thought I actually found this one a bit flat and a bit of a slog to get through.
I think this book must have been on sale at Audible, and when I saw it I bought it thinking of Susan Hill’s spooky ghost stories and not realising that this is actually the first in a series of police detective murder mystery books.
Well, just as well I didn’t realise this, as it might have put me off buying, and I would have missed a great listen. I was gripped by this audiobook – I felt drawn into the characters and intrigued by the case and I was genuinely shocked by one or two of the twists.
I’m looking out for the next in the series being on sale.
This is my third Claire North book, and one thing that I liked about it is how different it is from each of the other Claire Norths I’ve read. It’s a dystopian novel set in a not too distant future where capitalism has gone crazy and monetary value is given way more weight than human rights. The hero, Theo, works in an office assigning fees as punishments against crimes – to the rich, these fees are worth it and crimes, even murders are just transactions that they pay for with little thought. For the poor, the fines are so cripplingly expensive that many have to sell themselves to indentured servitude to pay them.
When Theo discovers he may be a father, and that his ‘daughter’ is enslaved he realises the devastating effect of his work on real people and sets out to rescue the child and even try to take down the system while he’s at it.
The writing style of this book is really interesting (some might say, ‘arty’). I have mixed feelings about it, because I did get a bit confused at times, (although everything came together and made sense to me by the end) but on the other hand I really liked it.
The characters’ thoughts and speech often trail out mid sentence, so where we are used to reading neat complete sentences, instead we get beginnings and snippets and jumbled phrases, and while this maybe takes more effort from the reader to parse and understand, is it not more true to life? I have often thought fiction is too neat – people make speeches or think profound essays that I don’t come out with off the top of my head, so why should they? So I think, well done, Claire North – good for you.
This is the second in my Claire North binge, and another great book. Similar in plot in many ways to Life after Life by Kate Atkinson, which I enjoyed reading, and I loved the TV adaptation of. In both novels, the main character is reborn every time they die to re-live the same life over again, with subtle (or not so subtle) changes. In the Kate Atkinson novel, the character doesn’t remember reliving other then a sense of foreboding causing her to avoid things that have killed her in the past, but Harry August remembers every instant of each of his growing number of lives. As is the style of Claire North, some ‘what-if’ magical realism possibility is explored in really thoughtful and interesting ways . It askes the questions: if this thing really happened to a real person how would it affect them? How would they live, what would they do? The questions are addressed and answered in ways that make sense, while still being gripping and moving – I can very much empathise with the character, and imagine myself in the role – what would I do?
I’m so happy I have discovered this writer and I’m getting so much joy from reading her books.
I enjoyed listening to these beautiful and lyrical, if dark and cautionary adult fairy tales read perfectly by the author, Joanne Harris. The stories stood alone but also interweaved into one narrative whole and were full of the fey folk mythology that I love, with some twists by Joanne Harris incorporating the insect world into the magical realms, and lots of wry and intelligent political commentary and allegory woven through. Loved it.
When I finished reading this book, I rattled off a string of superlatives in my head of how wonderful it was (since as always I’m super late in writing this up, I can’t remember the half of them) something like: beautiful, poetic, gripping, relatable, intelligent, thoughtful, devastating, fun, amazing… (and so on – you get the picture!).
The plot is similar to another book which I very much enjoyed, ‘The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue’. In both cases, the title character is forgettable. I don’t mean that the book is boring – far from it. The premise of the story is that people forget their encounters with Hope as soon as they stop seeing her. As a lifelong introvert, I have often thought this should be my superpower – but in fact it makes it impossible to have a job, or relationships, or rent or buy a house. Hope must become a criminal in order to live, and she’s good at it. Luckily she is able to have an internet presence and a lot of the plot of the book is based around the profiling and shaping of people by the internet companies. Typical of Claire North (I have become a massive Claire North fan in recent times!) the story is very thought provoking and deep and I loved it.
This book has thousands of great reviews and Amazon, which confounds me because I thought it was one of the worst written books I’ve ever read (or almost read – I gave up at 80% – you’d think having got that far I’d see it through, but no, it was so bad and not getting any better, I literally couldn’t take any more).
I don’t like writing bad reviews, because I know from experience as a writer that reading them can be upsetting, but since Andrew Cunningham has so many five stars and since such a tiny number of people read my reviews anyway, I think I can vent on here.
I thought the writing was clunky and unsubtle and the writing structure was boring and linear (ironic for a time travel book!). I didn’t like or care for any of the characters and giving up at 80% was just a relief.
Sarah Wray Writer 