I went to see the National Theatre Live recording of The Belle Sauvage which is the stage play adaptation of the Book of Dust Volume one, and it made me want to re-read volume two. I just love the whole world of Lyra and Pantalaimon as told in Philip Pullman’s books and I especially love this darker more serious chapter in the story (like I loved the first part of The Deathly Hallows).
There is lots of political and civil unrest all over the world (sound familiar?) and Lyra and Pantalaimon have separated – they are both on a quest to find each other again and sort out the reason for the rift between them. Travel is dangerous for both of them and they have many scary adventures.
The book ends on a cliff edge, and I’m frustrated that there is still no release date for the much awaited third and final book in the series.
I loved the first book in this series ‘The Stranger Times’ so I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the sequel, which I used my audible credit to buy as an audiobook.
Strangely I think I would have preferred to have had it as a kindle book, as there were a couple of aspects of listening to he audiobook that put me off. Firstly, and no fault to the recording, I think I wasn’t always paying enough attention to the book. Normally I do most of my book listening when out on a run, which is great because I’m fully immersed in the story with not much else occupying my mind since running is pretty mindless! Sadly, even though I’m finally fully better from Covid, since getting better I’ve had a really bad back (perhaps due to my three weeks lying on the sofa?) but anyway, I haven’t been able to run yet, so I’ve been listening about the house while doing other things and sometimes I’m distracted.
The other thing was the accents. The narrator is Irish (I love Irish narrators) and the book has many characters, all with different accents – various British and Irish regional accents as well as a couple of Afro-Caribbean and Rastafarian accents. The narrator does the accents really well – you can always tell who is speaking, and they certainly bring life and colour (no pun intended) to the reading. I’m just not sure if it’s appropriate for a white person to put on an accent of a black person – I honestly just don’t know. The fact is he was doing lots of accents, not just racial ones, and I don’t think anyone was being made fun of, but still it gave me pause.
Anyway, that aside, I think this was another great book from Ciamh McDonnell. Urban Fantasy (which I love), great characterisation, humour, pathos etc and a great set up for book three, which I now can’t wait for!
Somehow this year I missed Jodi Taylors Christmas Day short story release – I did look for it and thought for some reason she didn’t do one this year! Silly me. Found it now, and after the previous book I read: the beautiful but kind of harrowing ‘The Stranding’ a bit of light silliness and jollity was exactly what I needed. Thank you Jodi Taylor for lowering the tone in such a fun way as always!
Wow – I thought this book was just gorgeous. A young British woman finds herself on a beach in Australia on the brink of global disaster. She tries to save a beached blue whale in the pathetic but well meaning action of running back and forth from the sea scooping up small bag fulls of water to pour over it. A young man joins her and they watch the whale die. They both know that a nuclear bomb is due to hit near their location in a matter of hours, and they spend that time together, in the last minutes, when they see the missile in the distance they have the to idea to shelter inside the corpse of the blue whale.
The rest of the book hinges on that point – both going forwards and with flashbacks, but it is unlike any other post apocalyptic novel I have read. It is a story of life and love and family when everything else is stripped away (both metaphorically and literally).
As I write this review we are in the middle of the Russia invading Ukraine situation, with people talking about World War Three and Putin boasting about his nuclear readiness, and it all seems a little close to the bone. Now I just need to find a blue whale to hide inside(!)
I loved this book! I listened to the audiobook, and I really liked the New Zealand accent of the narrator. When I was sixteen my family had a year in California, and my best friend was the daughter of a family who moved there from New Zealand just after we arrived. I haven’t seen her since, and I have sadly lost touch even though I truly loved her the way teenage girls love their best friends.
Anyhoo, this book is set in New Zealand, and the main character (or really the brother of the main character, as a lot of the story is told from the point of view of the brother) has the ability to ‘read characters (or objects) out of books’. Which is to say that if he concentrates really hard when reading, his interpretation of something or someone he is reading about starts to exist as a real thing in the ‘real world’. In the world of the book, this is something that happens from time to time but very few people have to ability to do it at will. There is a quite funny thing that there are many manifestations of Darcy from Pride and Prejudice because many people have strong reactions to reading about him!
The brother who can do this is a Dickens scholar, so many of his manifestations are Dickens characters, although he also reads Conan Doyle, C.S. Lewis, Edgar Allan Poe, and Roald Dhal amongst others, and I had great fun recognising much loved characters from my reading past!
There is peril because some bad person has hatched a plot to take over the real world and replace it with a world only for book characters and the brothers and their bookish allies have to foil it.
I loved it so much that a bought another audiobook by H.G Parry, which I am currently slogging through and not loving (sorry) more to follow…
I love Sarah Painter’s Crow Investigations books – an urban fantasy series up there with Ben Aaronovitch’s novels in my opinion, so I gave these earlier books by her a go.
These are kind of urban fantasy, but much more cosy mystery/romance in feel. I thought the heroines were all obsessed with men and their bodies and thinking about sex all the time and that got quite annoying.
There was quite a lot that I did like – nice wise woman/witch wisdom – using herbs and superstition to help people with all kinds of problems from the mundane to the serious, and of course the women did have actual powers that they had to discover and come to terms with.
On the whole I would say I liked but didn’t love these two books.
Covid hit me really hard – there were three weeks when I could barely get up from the sofa and during that time I spent a lot of hours listening to audiobooks (and sewing a felt Christmas wreath for my daughter that I started over a year ago and never got around to finishing until now!)
This was another Irish narrator audiobook – I prefer Irish narrators as British audiobooks often have really posh narrators and that annoys me.
I’ve enjoyed other Catherine Ryan Howard books -whodunnit type novels set in contemporary Ireland and I enjoyed this one too.
The premise was that a woman who survived a vicious attack on her family as a child has written a memoir about it, and the man who killed her family and many others and was never captured is reading the book. We get chapters from his perspective, and then chapters from the memoir as he is reading them and then his response to what he reads. I thought the structure was clever and the tension ramped nicely. I found the ending satisfying too.
After listening to Nomadlands I wanted something light and fun (also because I was ill with Covid at the time and not concentrating super well) and this kids book was perfect. I’m a fan of Eoin Colfer of old – my favourite of his books (and one of my favourite books ever) is the less well known young adult novel The Wish List. I’ve enjoyed the Artemis Fowl books as well, and so I gave this off shoot about Artemis’s younger twin brothers a go.
As I hoped, it was fun – witty with sometimes irreverent humour and a nice Irish narrator. The twins are both ‘special’ in their own way, and their bond is sweet and uplifting and of course I love anything with magical folk involved.
From the title and the book cover design, I was expecting a sort of Urban Fantasy, Magical Realism type of book, but it really isn’t – it’s just a thriller. Saying that, I really enjoyed this book. The main character is a middle aged widowed Japanese woman who finds herself embroiled in a big criminal investigation spanning several countries.
She is badass – her ‘skill’ is in being unobtrusive and easily overlooked (yay – that’s my superpower – the forgettable Sarah Wray!) although as well as that she is brave and determined and clever.
The story is told part in flashbacks and part in present day and involves characters from England, Iceland, America and Japan. I was gripped, and also moved and a couple of times laughed out loud at funny moments. I may have read it thinking it would be something else, but I’m glad I did because it is a great book in its own right.
Wow – this book was really strange and I’m not quite sure what I made of it (and I have a high threshold for strangeness!).
The story is narrated from the point of view of a dog who is the ‘familiar’ to a dark and shady character and his group of animal friends and acquaintances who are also familiars to other ‘human’ (or near human) characters.
It pays homage to many horror classics and there’s a bit of fun to be had in spotting the horror literary characters.
I wasn’t always sure who were the ‘good guys’ and therefore who I should be rooting for and I was a bit confused overall at times about what was actually going on. Maybe just me being thick?
Sarah Wray Writer 